How Kip Havel Pulled Off One of Staffing’s Biggest Brand Transformations - E2E: From Entry Level to Executive

Creating a Brand Promise and Fulfilling it with Purpose I often was focused on climb the ladder, next role, next role, next role. There's so much more in legacy building that you will learn as you get further in your career. It's not about climbing the ladder as much as it is creating this environment for others that they've been searching for. And that's what I think modern marketing is. How do you create a brand promise and then fulfill it with the reputation of every single person that works for your company and having them driven toward that mission? Speaker 2 Welcome to the E to E podcast, where we take you on a journey from entry level to executive. My name is Laith, and today I am joined by my former boss and my current colleague, Marlene Hendrickson, the Senior Director of Publishing and Marketing at ASA. How's it going, Marlene? Speaker 3 I'm great Laith, it's great to be on with you. This is my debut on the E to E podcast and I'm thrilled to be here with you and Kip. Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm super excited, Super excited. Today we're going to be diving into everybody's favorite topic, or at least my favorite topic, which is going to be marketing. I work full time as the assistant Marketing Manager for ASA. Marlene has built the marketing department at ASA and today we are joined by a marketing powerhouse. So get us started. Marlene, tell us a little bit about our guests today. Speaker 3 Yes, my pleasure. So today's guest is Kip Haville, the Chief Marketing Officer at Dexian and the marketing leader behind one of the largest rebrands the staffing industry has seen in years. I'm super excited about this. Kip brings decades of experience across PR, staffing and enterprise marketing with leadership roles at brands like Spirion, Aflac, Ronstadt and Cross Country. In 2021, he was at Dices during its merger with Signature Consultants, and in 2023, he led the joint rebrand that became Dexian, now one of the largest IT staffing firms in the industry, serving more than 200 Fortune 500 clients. Today, we're digging into what it actually takes to unify multiple legacy brands into one global identity with purpose. How you build a brand that lives beyond just a logo and why customer experience has become one of the most powerful brand promises in staffing. So with that, Kip, how are you feeling today? Speaker 1 I'm feeling great and I'm super excited to be here with both of you. We get to talk marketing, we get to talk about staffing, all my favorite things and purpose. So I'm really excited. Love to be with two other marketers and looking forward to a fun session. Speaker 3 Now you have, as we just said, an extensive marketing background, starting at two different PR firms before landing your first staffing job working in PR and marketing at Spherion. Discovering a Mission: My Unexpected Journey into Staffing Tell us about your introduction to the industry. This is always a fascinating question to ask anyone in staffing, but especially someone with your background. Speaker 1 You know, and great question. It was really interesting way I found my way in. Most of us kind of fall into staffing didn't really know what it was going to be like. And then you hit this point where you either love it or you hate it. And I was one of those people who immediately fell in love with a staffing business and the ability to impact people's lives and work with purpose. And so it all started when I was working at PR agencies and getting a lot of global experience, a lot of different client work I was doing. And I was presented with the opportunity to either move to New York or Tampa with the agency I was with. And oddly enough, the same day, a recruiter from Spherion called me looking for someone to work in the marketing department to do media relations going to help build that that function. And they had been, I'd been referred to them by someone. I never knew who it was, but they said they'd heard about me in the market and said, hey, we wanted to call you, see if there's an opportunity for you to come by and work with us. And so it was oddly enough on the same day where I needed to make decision if I was staying with my company and going to make a move either to Tampa or New York or stay home or my family was my roots were and take an opportunity to go in house. And so it can I it just started with that and then snowballed into a great opportunity with Spherion where I didn't know anything about the staffing industry at all. You know, I'd always been looking and working, you know, CPG or other services companies, but once I really looked at what the staffing and workforce solutions business was like, holy cow, there is so much that I can do in this business to help put more people to work, help more companies fulfill their goals, make big societal changes and do it at a company that was large like Spherion. We were global at the time and had a lot of opportunity for marketing growth and also personal growth. And the other thing I learned in the agency world, you really can't dig too deeply into your clients. You have a certain number of hours per month you can put into clients, you need to hit certain goals, etcetera. The nice thing in a business like staffing, but also just going in house is you can really learn the business, get to understand what is going to help drive more business and how you can really make an impact. And that's why when I got into Spherion, I never looked back and never thought about going into an agency again, except just like I love this. And I stayed there for eight years and was able to move up and ultimately run the marketing department. That's where I found my love for the staffing industry. And I realized as a marketer, it's so dynamic, but I also realized the same time marketing, the staffing industry was still pretty far behind where it needs to be. And, and we as marketers have an opportunity to really catapult ourselves now. And I think we need to we responsibility to do that. And that's, it's kind of what's fun in marketing. There's a lot of opportunity for us as marketers, but it's hard, not a lot of dollars hard to differentiate yourself. That's why experience becomes so important. But if you can do it, the opportunity is really there to make a big impact and have a great career. Speaker 3 First of all, there is still some mystery person out there right who recommended you to spherion and to this day you don't know who it is. Speaker 1 No, I'll never know it's so. Speaker 3 Maybe now we'll know. Maybe someone out there listening? Speaker 1 That's crazy, please let me know. Speaker 3 Please come forward. Chip's got something for you. Please come forward because he owes his career and staffing to use like kind of so that the other thing that really excited me about what you said is how you could turn yourself over to the industry, right? Really get to know the industry, get to love the industry and understand it versus the agency work. I did agency work too. And you're right, it's exhausting. You know, I only have 7 hours for this and what's my, you know, return on investment and telling the bosses you spent one more hour than you should have. I mean, it's no way to live right when you're in a creative role. So tell me more about that journey. When you first came into the staffing industry, you said you loved it. Either you loved it or you hate it. Well, why did you love it? Why did you love it and what made you stay all these years? And then I want to get right into how that inspired your marketing genius. How Understanding Business Drives Effective Marketing Strategy It really has. It's inspired everything throughout my career. It's kind of, that was such a great place to start. My staffing career was in a place like Spirion because it was so varied, because we had a leadership team who was very mission driven, which I've been searching for that for a long time after. Because it's hard to find in business to find people who are very, very dedicated to driving change in a positive way. And I really, I found that it's very on and what I loved about it is I could really dig into the business and understand, OK, yes, I'm a marketer. I was APR person then, but I look at myself as a business person who practices marketing. So I wanted to dive into business. I wanted to go on ride along. So I wanted to listen to recruiting calls. I really wanted to understand all of it. And what I loved about it on kind of a simple level is you're impacting people's lives. You're putting someone in a job they really, really want that helps them boost their career. It helps them with their families and saving for the future, all the things they want to do. I love the idea of being able to walk out of a company at the end of the day, no matter how hard that day is, you know you're doing something good. And that has driven me probably forever in my career now. And thinking about it doesn't matter how tough it is because there's a mission and you're, if it's one person's life that you're impacting, you're doing something really good. And then imagine with the companies that you're helping staff or provide solutions for major, you know, in some cases, you know, societally changing impacts that they can have. And we're part of helping them do that. And so I love the ability to roll up my sleeves, understand the business and then look at how do you utilize marketing and PR to tell that story. And that's really what's driven me from from day one is I never could do that. The agency, like you said, it's all about billable hours and billable percentages. And I need to get these this many media hits or these ads done here. I could play the long game. That's Furion. You can look at what can we do years down the road? And we had a leadership team that allowed us to take some chances. And that's one of the things I think has been really important in my career. Yeah, smart, well thought out chances, you still have to take them. You can't play it too safe. And you also, I mean, we've seen the impacts in marketing, especially of going too far without having to research, without thinking about what's being grounded and driving more business and protecting your brand. But the beauty of it was we were able to take some chances there and create a brand that was relatable. And we we even poked fun at the staffing industry and ourselves in a nice way that made us more relatable. We actually, we made the industry's first. It was a branded comedy series on the web. This was a while back, so it was pretty early in the days of the web, but we made a show called the Temp Life and it was about it was kind of this concept about how temp staffing has a bad reputation sometimes for a reason. And we wanted to basically kind of poke fun at that. And also it was a little bit of like the office, but kind of an attempt idea and to push the message that, OK, we understand that sometimes temp work isn't the greatest, but because we understand that we're going to give you a better experience. So we can poke fun at ourselves. We can the things that all of us in the workplace understand and can laugh at. We wanted to get out in front of it and do something kind of different to humanize us in an industry that sometimes is kind of cold and treats people like numbers. So it was, it was a lot of fun that we could do it and do it on a shoestring like like a lot of us after the staff. Speaker 3 In the industry but it just live anywhere still. Speaker 1 If you search the temp life it is out there still. I never did get to make a cameo in it. I wish I would have but. Speaker 3 All right, well, I'm definitely looking up. We're going to we're going to post it and share it. And I think that's amazing. So as you said, you got to jump in with both feet, be part of the experience. How do you think that journey was part of your exponential growth in your marketing career towards senior leadership and big brands like Aflac and Ronstadt and cross country? Like what do you think set you up to lead such big brands? Bridging the Gap: Aflac's Brand Awareness to Product Understanding I mean, I guess part of my, I've looked at this and I thought about this a lot. There's sometimes these moments you have in your life. It's people call it luck. I mean, there's some luck, but it's also taking advantage of opportunities that you get And I always it's very on. I wanted to figure out how to outwork our competition, how to be bold, how to make a difference, again, all with purpose to help build the brand, not just to be outrageous. And so I was there and I was able to merge communications and thought leadership and marketing all into one function. And I see this in a lot of companies still. You have communications set over here, you might have sales enablement over here, and then you've got brand and marketing somewhere else. We were able to merge that Experian and that helped me to look at how do we actually have a 360 of, you know, surround sound of marketing around what the company does and how do we get more people to apply for us? How do we get more clients to recognize what we do and see us as true thought leaders and workforce advisors instead of just get a job order and fill a job order, which is what so many staffing companies have the reputation of doing. So I was able to kind of fuse all these elements together with a very supportive leadership team to holistically look at how we can market more effectively in the industry. And so I think I was able to make a little bit of a name for myself that way. Also, I learned a heck of a lot. I really knew that business and LED with business first. I won't speak marketing ease or you know, those slogans and things like that. You talk about how that can truly have an impact on revenue, on gross profit, on the reputation of the company, all those things that really matter. And funny thing happened, you know, I get calls for a job here and there and I took an interview with a major retailer up in the Northeast and I'm Florida, I love Florida, I've been here for most of my life. So it was an interesting opportunity, but it was it was one I was very interested in because it was a unique business. Met the CMO, met the CEO, ultimately didn't take the job, but the CMO and I really hit it off, made a connection there. And six months later when he went down to Aflac and was hired in an all new management team, he made that call to me. And to go to a company like Aflac with a brand icon, the way the way it is, the duck, everyone knows it and an opportunity was really interesting. The opportunity the duck was nice and it had 97% brand awareness, which is amazing. Everyone in the US knew that duck. But your understanding and consideration the brand was so low. Interested me in that opportunity is most people just rubber stamp their benefits every year, kind of like, you know, I'm just going to do what I do and I'm not really sure how this works and am I protected? I don't know until something happens. And what I love about Aflac is their products really work and I got to see it on a regular basis. So it allowed me to take what I loved, like the mission driven aspect of Spherion and putting people to work. You can translate that into a business that had a huge name, a lot of marketing dollars, but you had so many people who weren't taking advantage of something they actually needed. And I really believe in these products. And that was an interesting idea to go there and kind of continue my marketing experience. And I remember going in the CEO's office at Spherion and he basically said you'd be a fool not to take this job. And I'd kept in touch with him, saw him actually a couple of years ago. It's nice in this staffing industry is it's pretty small and that's where relationships really matter. But I, I felt a sense of pride that we have such a good working relationship and he was looking out for me, not as much the company to say you have to go take this, like, what are you still doing here? Go on and take that job. And so it was a great opportunity to get outside the staff industry, but still remain in a mission driven business at a very good company that's very well respected. And we did a lot of great things there with sports, sponsorships, you name it. We were looking at doing it at Aflac to be able to spread the message about how those types of products help people save their homes, right, save their families. But it was, and I'm not trying to overplay it, we really got to see it on daily basis and we'd look at the calls that came in to our call center and look at, you know, the types of claims we're getting and how it really helped people. And that was my mission there. So spent almost seven years there, loved it, got to do so many different things. But then like we've talked about a lot today with connections and opportunity at Ronstadt came up, which had acquired Spherion years earlier and to go back and to really help shape marketing for Ronstadt in North America and staffing was calling my name once again. And I just remember thinking to myself and like, I love this business. I've got to go back and I'm glad I did. I mean, I love insurance too, but it felt like a homecoming almost to go back into staffing and with the parts of Spherion that were still part of Ronstadt, it was kind of a it was a nice career moment to go back in the industry, having learned so much on an even bigger stage at Aflac and be able to take that and apply it to where I was going next. Translating Brand: Human Forward and Global Staffing Challenges Before we dive in and keep going a little bit down the path of your career production and before we get into the the Dexian rebrand, I want to know coming into Aflac, as you mentioned, Aflac has world class brand recognition. Everybody knew Afflac, everybody knew that one word slogan. Everybody was seeing everywhere when I was a child growing up that that duck was everywhere. However, like you said, it's a massive problem where yes, the brand awareness is there, but what actually is the, the overall awareness of the product? I feel like that's a, a massive problem where in today's world of virality, maybe a brand is able to get their, their brand in front of people. But how do you take it a step further? And how did Aflac, at least your time at Aflac, how did you in the marketing team bring that level of awareness beyond just the, the Aflac duck and, and, and the actual marketing of your products? Once you had that, that your foot in the door per SE with the consumers. Speaker 1 It's a great question because the duck and we have AI mean we had so many fuzzy little ducks. You've probably seen them. That gets you in the door. And the way Aflac's products are sold is sold primarily through the workplace. So you have to get that business owner to say, I want to offer this to my employees at no cost, the business owner. So that is a cost that the employees pay. It's really relatively inexpensive for the coverage. So we focus a lot on B2B and health insurance broker marketing so we can get the product offered in more workplaces. And we did a lot of work around thought leadership because people know us from the Duck. They didn't often take Affleck as seriously as they should. So it was a real focus on thought leadership to talk to business owners about how unprotected their employees were if they did something like broke a leg. And we created something called the Aflac cost calculator. This is not the easiest thing I've done in my career, probably one of the hardest. But we would look, we looked at government data for costs of things like heart attack, broken leg, whatever it might be, and try to aggregate what those costs might look like because people think their health insurance covers those things for them. So we were able to put in 30 seconds or less, here's what you might be facing even if you have major medical coverage, here's what you might be facing for out of pocket costs as a consumer. And then if you layered on these Aflac products on top of it, this is how it reduces your exposure. And so we really try to contextualize a topic that people don't want to think about. So it was two things. One, more employers offering Aflac to their employees and giving us the opportunity to speak to them. And then 2, making it very simple for people to understand exactly what their exposure was if God forbid, and this could be a minor accident, could be something more major. I want people to be armed with information so they know what they're choosing. Even they didn't choose Aflac. Please have coverage so you are covered and you don't put you or your family at risk. So it goes back to that mission driven idea of how do we get more people to buy products that protect them on something they don't want to focus on because most people don't want to think about something bad like that happening to them, especially with health insurance. I mean, we did a survey, I think it was 80% of people rubber stamped their benefits from whatever they had last year. That was rubber stamped from the year before, the year before, the year before, not looking at what their needs are. So we wanted to provide that role of more of an advisor, even if it's for major medical or anything else. We just want people to understand and understand, you know, they, they felt like the duck was a way in and it was a very relatable brand. Then we can educate and do more to help them buy the products. And we had to work with a lot of businesses and brokers. We had to overcome some perceptions of the brand with them, so I spent a lot of my time focused there. In addition to keeping the duck relevant. We had sponsorships with NASCAR, we had sponsorships with the Grammys and a lot of different sponsorships that tapped into the interests of people who were buying our products. We knew music was a big thing, so that's why we we wanted the duck to walk the red carpet of the Grammys. We did the takeover of one of the evening shows and had the duck on there, and we'd have nine different ducks all lined up to help do different things. But so instead of having advertising on one of the night shows, actually they produced comical advertising for the duck. It was kind of a fun thing to keep the duck relevant while you're pushing the message on the other side of getting in front of them. So relevant to the duck was important to keep it as part of pop culture. But then getting more serious, where I think the company just hadn't been as much before as getting more serious about the actual issues people face and how these products can help them was my getting focused there. Speaker 3 Yeah, what I'm hearing from that and, and thank you for that. What I'm hearing is big bold ideas, right, as you just said, not just buying ad space on the on, you know, an evening show and presenting the proof, like you said about your calculator actually letting people see what they have or don't have. As you said, kind of the proof is in the pudding thing, right? How do you translate that? To say Ronstadt cross country, how did that work in the staffing industry for you? Humanizing the Industry: Global Branding and Relationship Building Yeah. I mean, it's a, it was a big shift coming back to the staffing industry. You know, marketing dollars aren't nearly as large brand recognition. I mean, as we, the brand recognition can sometimes be high with some of these companies. But I've done a lot of research with workers, with companies and and what workers told us is there's very little perceived differentiation between staffing companies and most of their perspectives on them. It was pretty poor because they feel if they don't get a call back or they're treated, you know, not like a person, like a number. And so I thought about, OK, how do we take everything that I will just learned at Aflac and be able to bring that to humanizing more of it was really what a now that I think about, it's kind of what we started as spherion. I was able to, you know, do a lot at Aflac to continue that idea and then bring it back to Ronstadt and ultimately the the destination of where I landed. I think it was for me the pinnacle of my career to be able to really change the face of an industry. And that's what I want to do here. And we, you know, we talk about our, our noble purpose. Now I'm skipping head a little bit, but it, I think it fits your question. The noble purpose of Dexian is we're in the business for good and all of us are in the business for different reasons. So everyone in our company wakes up every day for something a little bit different. And all of those stories of why we're in the business ladder up to who we are at deficien. And for me, I want to change the face of an industry to say some companies deserve a bad reputation in every industry and certainly in staffing, we want to be the beacon, the guide, guiding light, so to speak, to help people with their careers and to help companies understand the best ways that they can achieve their goals. So that's kind of weird coming here. Fast forward from Ronstadt and, and cross country coming here, we're actually gave the opportunity to finally build something that I personally believe in and I think this industry needs and research showed us the people really wanted it. So at Ronstadt, you know, we, we did a global rebrand, obviously not with the name, but we, we pushed the idea of human forward that we built in Atlanta together and then spread that out across the world to try to humanize the industry. It's about taking the human aspect of this business and pushing forward and driving through change with it. So that's what we were able to do worldwide at Ronstadt and, and a great company. They're hard in 39 countries. So we had a lot of regional differences as we rolled out that brand refresh, which was a lot of fun to learn. Wow. Speaker 3 And then took it. Is that something you didn't really have to do before, Right? I mean, right, as far as all the different audiences. Tell me a little bit about that. I'm a little fascinated by that. I mean, talk about hard already. Now let's do it 39 times differently. Speaker 1 It was a long project, as you can imagine. They've been working on it for a while. When I joined Ronstadt, then I got TAPS because of my bigger brand experience and found an agency I'd partnered with in the past in Atlanta. To come up with something that you get Human forward on its own is hard. You know, people don't exactly understand what it means. And we were able to contextualize that and and it kind of stops people. So there, there there's interest built from Human Forward then to try to explain what that means. And then the beauty of Ronstadt is they had very good marketing teams. You know, they're headquartered in the Netherlands. Obviously, US was a large presence. So we partnered very much with them and then partnered with the country leaders and not just marketing leaders, but country leaders to help them understand how this was going to help promote their business and also promote, you know, people have a view of Bronstad in different countries, but I think they had 150 different brands, which is very difficult to market and people had a perception of those brands and some of them competed against each other, etcetera. We were able to try to really put everything under the umbrella of Ronstadt and the fact that they offer a wide range of services no matter what your career needs are or what your workforce solutions needs are. So it was helping internally. It was the biggest push 1st and that's always your biggest audience I think in these. And it wasn't a full rebrand, but it was a brand refresh. We really pushed it internally and then looked at how does the creative work in Japan versus how it might work in the Philippines or Germany etcetera. That was a ton of learning and something I really. Speaker 3 Like any surprises like it's. Speaker 1 Between. Speaker 3 Countries or maybe something you didn't expect. Speaker 1 Well, words matter, I can tell you that. And translations really can get you an urban. Speaker 3 Dictionary English is not my first language, so I think I can roll it a little. Speaker 1 Yeah. And so we had to be very careful. Instead of just pushing something from the monolithic corporate tower, it was working with the the regions to understand what's going to fly here and what type of imagery will really work. You know, you see, you've seen it before where companies, they have one country that's the leader and they're just pushing everything out and thinks, you know, the kind of think everything looks, talks and acts the same. It's so not the case. So a lot of interesting regional differences and, you know, culturally in Japan was interesting and just how you can't. And it was the same thing we learned with the duck because the duck is in Japan as well. Affleck has a majority of its business there. What works in the US and kind of, you know, how the duck was can be kind of comedic and funny, does not fly in Japan. It's a very different duck that you see there. So really I've got to take a little bit of that learning to understand I have. Speaker 3 To look now. Speaker 1 Oh yeah, the the ads in Japan are super fun to watch. Speaker 3 Wow. And how about the human forward aspect you said in in some of these? Speaker 1 Yeah, It was just contextualizing it differently for the cultures to help them understand and the different businesses, you know, that were growing in the region because you had certain countries that had, you know, different types of businesses were growing more maybe manufacturing. The logistics wasn't as big in Korea as it might have been somewhere else. So it's really looking at how you hand this off, you give the brand assets that we've created with some flexibility to hand it off to the different countries or regions to make it their own because you can't just have this one-size-fits-all. So that was a tremendously interesting time, complicated and a lot of relationship management too, of understanding what's really going to work and what might not and how do you shift and pivot and don't do it too quickly. That's really what we learned at Dexy into You don't need to force this artificially. Speaker 3 Yeah, that's fascinating. I have a lot of questions about that too. But you've said the word relationship or relationships a couple of Times Now since we started chatting and it seems to me that in staffing that's a big deal, right? Because the product is human and your relationship with clients is a very trust based relationship. How does that translate into your work as a marketer that those relationships and you still talk to friends as fury on or we see it at staffing world when everyone gets together and hugs and high fives and so great to see you. I mean, it's completely different. I mean, when I did my agency work, I would go to different shows. It's not like that. Unifying Brands: The Strategic Merger Leading to Dexian It's so true. And I think it's, it's funny, I mean, one of the people, the person who hired me at Spherion, I still work with her today. She went out, created her own consultancy and I've worked with her every place I've been since. And that is so unique. But it's also that one of the most rewarding things as I look at my career, what's so rewarding is working with people who have the same mindset as you and you can work with them in all these different destinations. And that's made my career, to be honest. I mean, working with some of these people who I trust and I rely on and they're some of the best in the business and I can bring them in. When I came into to signature and dices and you kind of have a ready made group of people, you know what they can do and then you can just go to work. So the relationships in marketing really, really matter, especially within the business. Do the people in the business understand what you're trying to do and that they understand that you understand their business? If you're a marketer and sales leaders don't believe you understand their business, you're suck. And so that was always number one, make sure I understand the business and it's different everywhere else. It's not it's Signature and Dices. It's not the same issues that it was at Ronstadt or Spherion. So it's really kind of learning from the past, but not letting that cloud your your vision. I think what was interesting, so I joined Signature before the Dices acquisition or merger acquisition and smallest company I'd ever worked for, not public, only really private company I ever worked for. But it was funny, a connection when I was across country called me up and things are great there. We've done a rebrand. We consolidated 27 brands into one. And he called me up in his way and he said, Hey, how's, how are things going? How's your career? And he's like, you know what, I don't really care how your career is going. You're going to meet someone who's going to change your life. I'm like, OK, And he said it's the CEO of Signature. He lives in Boca, down the street from you, and you're going to have dinner with him and you'll call me back and tell me how it went. And that started six months of going to dinner with the CEO of Signature, talking about philosophy on life and how they started this company basically trying to do things differently than every other staffing company. And everyone told them as they got bigger and bigger, oh, you can't do it this way anymore, things like that. And they said, no, we are going to do it the right way. And their motto was do no harm. And when I really learned about this company and they were trying to get bigger and bigger and bigger and they wanted to hire CMO, I thought, why not take a chance to do something with people who really live this every single day. And I, so I took the plunge. I said, you know what, I'm going to try this gut was telling me this is the right way to go. And six weeks later, COVID hit and I got to see exactly what that leadership style was in action. We didn't lay anybody off. We didn't cut budgets. We were actually looking at how we could help our clients during that time and I was blown away. Like I'd never been working in a company that was truly mission driven like this and loved every second of it because I'm like, this is this is a place we can we can work with. Wow. Speaker 3 That's an amazing story. Speaker 1 It was such a cool place to be, especially because COVID comes, you don't know what's going to happen. And then the owner of Signature met up with the owner of Dices, who had a very similar philosophy, similar size companies. They had a nice business model that complemented ours and they thought really would make sense to join forces to create a much larger company for financial protection, for access to different service models, things of that nature. And they were very well alive. So when the companies came together, no senior leadership left. They merged the companies and we basically were able to build a super company out of this. It's so unique. I've been through so many acquisitions and you see what happens. We all know what happens. This was the opposite here and so the leadership team stayed intact. We took the best of both business models and created kind of the Super company from it. It wasn't one company acquired the other, it was we are going to figure out how to do this together and build our cultures the right way. Speaker 3 That's amazing. And so Dexian was born. Speaker 1 It was and we didn't, we didn't hurry. The first thing we did, we went out and we spoke to our customers. And so I had a third party go and speak to 55 of our largest customers, hour long sessions to understand what they liked about both companies, what they would think was missing if one left and where the opportunity really was in the industry. And that became the foundation of our business strategy, which to me as a marketer, we we set out to create a case study. Look, we want this to be a Harvard Business School case study in how to merge companies and do it the right way. And that was our philosophy from the beginning. And so the brand was an output of all of it because we needed to merge, You know, we basically operated AS2 separate brands while we combined the back office for the first period of time. We didn't want to put any revenue at risk. So we said to ourselves, OK, and this was my number one thing, put no revenue at risk and then #2 look for logical growth opportunities and then figure out where the brand fits within that. And so we spent a period of time, I mean, I might have been up to 12 to 18 months figuring this out and letting the cultures come together and have shared experiences. Because this is probably the most important thing, having a president's club where they come together, having business things really come together. It's no longer US versus them. It's saying we're having these experiences together, Co selling. So it's not dices versus signature. It's now we're, we, we want something together. So we, we waited to this point to where people were actually saying we're looking for the next thing. And that's when we launched XC and we did it all through research and we tested this along the way so much. And it's, you know, this is about being bold and taking chances. From Concept to Reality: Launching the Dexian Brand Experience The easy route would have been to use signature dices or call it, you know, sig sys. That's not what the market wanted. And so we really, we LED with what the market was looking for, what was missing in the market. And then the most agonizing part of any rebrand is how do you choose a name that can be utilized in 30 countries? You can buy the URL, it stands for something and it doesn't mean something terrible in Urban Dictionary. So that was my most anxiety producing point of the entire exercise was how are we going to find this name? So we went through 300 names, tested, got down to about 5 finally, but we tested a lot of them and we wanted to name it. That's something. So what I love about Dexian is it it means Dexterity. So that's the Dex of course. And then Ian is typically associated with physician, clinician, mathematician, someone with skill and expertise. So that was the idea behind the name Dexian. And then we wanted to create a brand icon with the X as you can see it, which is the coming together of technology, business people, companies. So that was kind of the inspiration behind this. And I could, they could go for hours about color choices, about how you position the brand, things for photography and everything else. But we thought through every single aspect of it and then launched it at President's Club to our top performers and they had no idea it was coming. And so the mood changed 30 minutes before we launched. We had a whole, you know, scenario around the launch of the brand. And then when people went back to their rooms, all of the decor in the hotel was changed to the X. They had swag in their rooms. And the rest of the event was very Dexing focused, culminating with a massive drone show kind of taking the old logos and turning them into the X. And we had 600 brand ambassadors at that moment that can go back to their offices and tell them what they saw there. So it was, it was an incredibly labor intensive project, but I, I have to say our leadership, I kept them involved all the way making a business case for why we need to do XYZ 123 and we were able to do it. And really with the idea of this purpose of being in the business for good, which is really stuck with people. And that this idea that everything you do, every phone call, everyone on one, every client engagement, it echoes far beyond what you can see today and has a massive impact not just today, but tomorrow. And that's where we go back to connections. Those connections you make, you never know when they're going to come back for you. Sometimes with the spherion thing, you don't even know who they are, but they matter. And the the last piece of this is where you tie customer experience in because if you could have a great brand, you can put your name on the side of the stadium. But if you are not fulfilling what people are looking for and meeting their most basic needs and communicating them and making them feel like human beings, you're lost. You're just like the rest of everybody else. So Signature Dices had very good CX programs. We merged it and now I run our customer experience and we have world class NPS scores. I couldn't be more proud of that. We're trying to fulfill this brand promise that we created every single day. And that's what I think modern marketing is. I mean, they're the basics of marketing, but it's how do you create a brand promise and then fulfill it with the reputation of every single person that works for your company and having them driven toward that mission of who you are, who you want to be every day, and how every interaction really matters to everybody. You're dealing with more than you think. Speaker 3 I love the story about the brand and the drone and and I mean talk about spectacular, right? And I think that also communicates this is really important and we're really passionate about it. And everything you've said has had that passion behind it. And I've also heard you say that this is something that you can personally identify with, whether it's staffing or the rebrand. Did you learn anything by mistake or any unexpected things pop up and how did you deal with them? Because the ending is amazing, but was there any bumper yield or sidetrack? Speaker 1 You know, it's, it's a great question. I think the bumps were the with the names because we got pretty far down the road with some of them that we liked. But then you, you do some crazy late night search and you're like, Oh my goodness, no way. Or it doesn't translate in certain countries. I think the other big lesson learned in this is I've been at companies where you have ACEO send an e-mail out to people asking what color or what logo they like. We carefully controlled it with a group of executives on a steering committee. So we had a steering committee and we had supporting committees as well because, you know, everything has a change across the brand. So it's touching paychecks, it's touching offices, you know, everything you can imagine it's touching. So we had a very strong and tight knit steering committee that helped facilitate the process. So we didn't leave much to chance in that because I'd learned in other times where if you let too many people give opinions on colors or names or anything else, we're sunk. We grounded everything in research and kept that group small and, and worked with them very closely to make sure they were aligned with where we were going. That's probably, it wasn't necessarily a road bump, but it was a road bump in the past. As I learned this time that we were able to move through this pretty smoothly as a result. Because otherwise you will get your cells tied up into a situation where, you know, people might not understand all the complexities of what you're doing. And this is a complex business. And so that was where, you know, I think our, our rigor around testing and being very thorough and what we did is, is probably the key to success on this because I've done it in the past where you might try to cut corners or you move it too quickly. Like if our, if our internal people weren't ready for this, it would have sunk and we might not have chosen the same name. I mean, if I were to try to do six months after the integration, which a lot of companies try to do, who knows what we would have ended up with? So the beauty was being able to say we need a proper amount of time and we need to launch it at the right time when people are accepting of it and then fulfill it in the marketplace. The scariest thing for me is you launch a brand that promises this and your team delivers something very, very different. Well, it's all for not. And so the backside of this of making sure people are delivering the promise is just as important as the design of the brand, the X and the launch in the pop and circumstance, right? Because we you can do a lot of reputation and harm that you cannot recover from if you're going against what the brand promise is. So I think the learning from this is it must be holistic and you must manage this every day. It is never done. Speaker 3 Well, that's fantastic. It's never done right. I think that's that rings true for a lot of things in the marketing world. Delivering on the Brand: Dexian's Promise to Talent and Clients Now you've talked about brand promise. If I am talent engaging with your company, if I am a perspective client engaging with your company, what do you tell me about your brand promise? What is it that I need to learn quickly to say yes, I'm in? Speaker 1 Yeah, because I mean, if you think about a consultant, they've got a lot of different opportunities, especially in a good job market. And what's different about us and one things I loved about the company even when I got here was we have a consultant care team dedicated to the needs of our consultants outside of a recruiter or account manager that they can talk to anytime and we'll work to solve any challenge they have. That was unique to me at least from the staffing companies I've been at, that we would dedicate an entire team that's not in sales or not in recruiting. They sit separately as a CX team to be able to solve the needs of our individuals. We also we redeploy north of 30% of all of them right into another assignment. And I know and other companies I've been at, if we hit 10% redeployment, we would be clapping and patting ourselves in the back. We don't think 30% is good enough. So we're really trying to take every individual that works for us in that period of time where they are knowing their assignments ending. Putting them into a program that is helping them find another job as quick as possible so they can transition, stay with us. We're introducing alumni rewards and new program even this year to try to keep them sticky because if we know they're great, we know they're like working with us. We want to deploy them again quickly and not have them wonder what's happening. So I guess one example on the the consultant side, on the client side, we've set up a client Advisory Board on this kind of extension of the voice of the customer work that I've done. And we also are working on a lot of things to help them understand the modern staffing model. So it's taking the relationship from getting a job order to fill in a job order now to here is what is happening in the marketplace. There are a lot of regulation changes, deglobalization, all of this. Where do you get talent pools from and how do you deploy them? And how do you when do you use onshore resources versus offshore? But it's really trying to pivot to an idea of workforce consultation versus just get job order, fill job order and everyone's happy. Less transactional, companies need less transactional. And companies were telling us during Voice the Customer, they're saying if someone can do this, you will clearly outpace your competition in this because no one is giving us the guidance that we really think that we need, especially and rapidly changing times, which we're all in right now. Speaker 3 And do you think that as part of your brand promise is helping fuel your growth as much it is retaining your talent and clients? Speaker 1 I think it is. I mean, I think what we're seeing and hearing from the voice of the customer work work that we have. We also have a consultant panel that we talk to every month and we go to them before we roll out changes to see how it will land you retain that way. But referrals are a huge, I mean they're so important for any staffing company. We track it. We get a huge number of referrals. So on the consultant side, why if, if someone was having a great experience here, why wouldn't they tell their friends, hey, you got to you got to call Dexy or you've got to call whatever company is that's offering that experience. So it's a retention tool, but it's also a growth tool, especially when you know, so many companies are saying, OK, I might use you for staffing, but what about the solutions work or, you know, I have an ERP transition that I need to manage. I didn't even think of you for that. And that's why I want to get in front of them with the message of we're not just staffing, we're holistically talent and technology solutions. That's why we changed our moniker for it is a, it's much more broad than what they might think of us. And most companies we talked to during voice, the customer knew us one way or another and had no idea that we did the other work. So that was the clear path for us to say we've got to explain the breadth of services and contextualize why it's important to them and educate them. Be that partner that's actually feeding them information. Even 1 doesn't directly benefit you and. Speaker 3 What is marketing's role in that? Speaker 1 Well, we do a lot of thought leadership work. So I'm driving a program on the modern workforce model. So I really get into the details of these different models and we're not, we're not just glitter and glue. I think I've been fighting this my whole career in marketing and I'm sure both of you have too. You really can play a very strategic role in the development and approach that we take to consultation of clients and then helping our people get ready to go do that alongside our training departments and our sales enablement departments, etcetera. But there's a lot we can drive and kind of be on the leading edge of and bring the rest of the organization with us. Speaker 3 Fantastic Leith, do you have anything you'd like to add? Speaker 2 Yeah. Network, Build Legacy: Final Advice for Aspiring Marketers So we are coming up right at about time. So we have one question that we do ask all of our guests that I would love to hear from you if there is anything you could tell your insurable self share to college looking for that job, pre first job at that PR house. What would you tell yourself? Speaker 1 Great question. It's something I tell myself still, it's, it's two things. One, network, network, network. You really never know. It's benefited my career, benefited me in my career, but I know I couldn't do more and connect other people. I mean, what I didn't realize earlier in my career was how important it is to connect other people and create an environment that you want to be in and don't settle for that. I often was focused on, I think like we all were, climb the ladder, next role, next role, next role. There's so much more in legacy building that you will learn as you get further in your career. And that I've learned now that it's, it's not about climbing the ladder as much as it is creating this environment for others that they've been searching for. Not really. So that's my goal now. I want to create an environment at Dexian, which was the environment I wish I could have worked out when I was fresh out of college. And I want everyone else to have that opportunity. So it's kind of, I was too narrowly focused as, as a newbie, just trying to make my way, didn't network enough and certainly didn't think about the larger impact of everything that we do and what it means. And that's what's cool about now is I can create that even just in our marketing department, create an environment that people can do their best work and be themselves and bring themselves to work. That's the most rewarding thing to me now. So I didn't think about any of that stuff when I was, you know, fresh out of college. I was just trying to make sure I get to work on time and pitch the media and do the things I needed to do and wasn't thinking broadly enough. Speaker 3 Wow, that's great advice, I love that. Speaker 2 Yeah, me too. Well, thank you so much, Kev, for joining us. It was great. Yeah, of course. It was great speaking with you. It was great hearing your advice and it was great hearing your journey. I feel like a lot of marketers can learn from the incredible job that that you and Dexian did. I hope that we could see the success continue because like you said, it never stops. The marketing never stops. So I'm excited to see where you take it in the future. You can TuneIn to the ET Podcast on the first and third Tuesday of every month. Thank you again to our amazing guest Kip, and we will see you next time on the ET Podcast. Speaker 1 Thank you all for having me.