Episode 8 Transcript | Carol-Lyn Jardine of Wonderlic

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to By Subject, a silicon slopes brand and marketing podcast hosted by me, Peter Stevenson, partner at modern8. My co host today is Alysha Smith, managing partner and creative director at modern8 and agency. We’re joined today by Carol-Lyn Jardine, senior vice president of marketing at Wonderlic. Welcome.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

So glad to be here.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So my first question is tell us a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, how you got into marketing, where you went to college. Sort of the background of Carol-Lyn.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Okay. The background of Carol-Lyn. I grew up in Provo. I’m a provo girl. My family moved to Provo when I was young. We were historically farmers in southeast Idaho, but my dad passed away, and my mom decided to come to Provo to go to BYU. And she had a real desire for education and so kind of focused there as she raised five kids on her own after my dad’s death. So I grew up in Provo, graduated from Timview, went to BYU, and at BYU, I changed my major at least three, could be four times before. It’s kind of random, but I was a political science major at the time, and I saw a posting for a public information officer role, and all of a sudden I thought, oh, that sounds so much more interesting. And to be honest, I can’t even remember exactly why it caught my eye, but that led me into just exploring the public relations major, and so I went all in on public relations. I spent quite a bit of time at the Daily Universe. And this will get us to how I got into marketing. I was a student through the PR and comms program. I graduated from BYU. I had gone and worked a little bit in New York and then Come Back was actually part of a startup with my parents. We sold ATM machines, so we ran that business for a few years. And in the meantime, I was getting more interested in just technology in general. But I ended up taking a job after working at BYU. After I graduated, I worked at BYU as an advisor at the newspaper on the advertising side and got exposed to newspaper software. And it turns out there was a newspaper software company called DTI, which was Digital Technology International. And honestly, I think it was one of the first big kind of multinational software companies in Utah that a lot of people don’t know about. But we provided software for a lot of the biggest newspaper chains in the world. So we were looking at buying that software when I worked at BYU, and we went a different direction, but I got interested in it, and I called them up and said, hey, I think I’m interested in coming your way. I want to get into software. So I took a job at DTI, and that put me really in newspapers, which was so close to PR, but got me into tech.

Peter Stevenson

What was the role that you took on there?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Because I had this background in production and design for newspapers. I was doing kind of an implementation role where I would train everybody how to use the new software, help them figure out how to do their job in the software. So I did a lot of travel at that time and really got to see some of the most incredible newspapers that some of them are still holding on in the country. But at that point, I worked there for about three years doing that role. But newspapers were it was right at that time where newspapers were really struggling and kind of struggling to really transform digitally. I remember talking about the daily or sorry, about the desert news and how KSL was kind of their gateway to really thriving in that period of time. And they were one of the only examples of that in the country at the time where KSL had created classifieds and all of that online and were doing really well. That wasn’t true in most papers across the country. So I had been on site in erie, Pennsylvania, at a very struggling newspaper and thought, I don’t think this is where I want to be for the long haul. And I was introduced to somebody in my neighborhood who had a tech startup software company called link trust. Link trust is still in business. I think it’s in draper now. But at that time, we were one of the first affiliate marketing platforms where you could start a new affiliate program very ahead of its time, especially if you think about now, where affiliate programs are a huge part of influencer marketing. But I went there as director of marketing, so I’m still not sure why they hired me. You guys, I just jumped in. I had a big entrepreneurial spirit. I mean, you kind of hear that with the family businesses that my family had owned and run. And I was just excited and thought I could probably make a difference, and they let me. So I joined there as head of marketing and did that role for about three years. That was really my first opportunity in b to b marketing, where we were really selling solutions and software to other businesses who are trying to use that as the backbone of their operation.

Alysha Smith

I would love to hear what were a couple of successes that you had while you were there that made you feel like, yes, this is where I want to be. This is my path.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

There were two. I have always been very customer centric or customer focused, and so one of the things I recognized early on is that we needed to be listening to our customers, like maniacally listening. That industry was changing so fast, and it had a lot of really interesting kind of nuances to it that you wouldn’t just know unless you were really close to the customers and so we started a customer conference. None of our competitors were doing that. The customers weren’t necessarily used. They were sort of kind of mavericks in the industry at the time. If you think back that long ago in affiliate marketing, some of them had.

Peter Stevenson

Come from, what years was this? What years was this?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

You’re going to press me now? Probably 20 03 20 04 20 05 Cool. And that space had evolved from a lot of gaming was a big kind of source of people getting into this space. So they were kind of seen as, like, mavericks, right?

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And big companies who were trying to build software for them were not necessarily treating them like professionals. And we did. To us, they were the source of everything we were trying to do. So anyway, we started that customer conference and got really close to it wasn’t a big conference. It was gosh, I think we had maybe 20 customers that we brought in. We did it all at Sundance and just had a phenomenal close experience with our customers, really getting down into the nitty gritty of what they needed. So that was one. The other one, this was my first. I wouldn’t have called this field marketing at the time because I honestly didn’t know the labels, but we did a lot of our growth through trade shows, and there were only about three trade shows that were really applicable to us at the time. One was called Affiliate Summit, but we were a really small company. I was employee number eight. It grew to about 40 before I decided to move on. But we were tiny, and we were trying to look bigger than we were. But I had $5,000 as my trade show budget. So if you can imagine trying to go pull that off at the Hilton in New York or one of the big conference venues in Las Vegas, $5,000 just doesn’t go that far. So I knew I had to get really scrappy and creative to make the sort of impact that we wanted to at those shows. And again, being close to our customers, it was kind of an interesting mix because the shows were actually for our customers customer, but we knew that’s where all of our customers would be, so that’s where we wanted to be. And our customers, they wanted to go to the show, but they didn’t necessarily want to have a booth because they wanted to be free and be able to go and meet with people. But they were all looking for, like, where’s our home base during the show. So what I ended up doing is partnering with our customers, and I would charge them. I basically sublet the booth. Our first one was a ten by ten x 20 or maybe a ten x ten, something like that. No, I’m not thinking straight. Ten x 50. Sorry. Five booths down a row. And so I contracted for those five booths and then I got about 16 customers to sublet one little spot like little Kiosks, and we just provided them with a pop up banner and a stool and had their logo on it and every single banner had powered by LinkTrust at the top of the banner. And suddenly we had our best advocates in our booth at the biggest show of the industry. So we repeated that for several years. I think I worked there about six years. We probably did it four out of the six years and by the time I left we were in a 20 x 50 space with, I think 25 customers with us and that was our lead gen kind of activity for the entire year when we would do one of those shows. And it just drove a ton of business for us that’s so creative. It was, and in the end we ended up breaking even on every show. So that to me was a big win because I just never really had a lot of marketing budget, so we just had to be creative and scrappy.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, and who better to tout your praises than your own customers?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And that was really the thing that I think I learned there. If I look back on all of my marketing experiences, there’s always something that kind of sticks with you and from that company it was your customers are your best advocate. So much easier to close a deal if it’s a referral from a customer. They are the best ones who are positioned to say what the value and the benefit is that you bring. And so if you can get them doing that for you, it’s the holy grail. It’s not the easiest type of marketing by any means, but I would argue that it’s the most productive.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So you started out at Link Trust for about six years and then where did you move on to?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

So I left Link Trust and I had moved into an operations role at Link Trust. I’m about halfway through my time, I was still leading marketing, but I took on a broader range of responsibilities and then I wanted to get back into a focus on marketing after lots of talking about data centers and servers and things that were not as exciting to me. So I had a field marketing role at another small startup called Needle. I don’t think Needle is around, but it was a really interesting product, especially for the time, also ahead of its time. It was a live chat software that hooked up companies customers so their best advocates with shoppers on their website at the same time. And the founder of that was Morgan Lynch, who had had a couple of other successful exits in tech. I’m not sure where Morgan is today, but it was a really innovative company and I was there for almost a year, really great experience, but I got recruited by workfront to come and start their customer marketing practice.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, cool.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And it was just like too big of an offer to turn down and so I kind of jumped ship left. A lot of some of my favorite people I’ve met were at Needle in my career, but I jumped over to workfront and had the opportunity to establish customer marketing there. Workfront was at a place where they had grown amazingly well over I don’t remember how long they had been in business at that time. I wasn’t like employee 608 if I remember my onboarding packet correctly, but they had done a great job of acquiring customers. But we’re kind of in that spot where suddenly retention was not as easy as it had maybe been up to that point. And they were looking at the health of their SaaS metrics saying, oh, we probably need to really focus on our retention rate. Time to start putting an effort there. And so I was so lucky to be able to form up that team. I was there for about three and a half years and we did some really, I would say, foundational things that set work run up for eventually a successful exit to Adobe, which was establish the customer community. The customer community there was amazing and that came from my team. We also introduced account based marketing. So at that point it was with an effort to grow our top revenue clients into larger revenue clients. So I partnered with the gross sales team at workfront to establish account based marketing. And then that concept kind of rolled out through the Net new site as well and our team got to partner on that. We also set up customer user groups. We did a lot of connected voice of the customer programs with customer success. But what was really interesting were that was the impact that that customer marketing program had on sales. So references and customer advocacy were a huge component to what we established there. So very exciting time. I would say that period of time was not only very exciting from what we accomplished on the marketing front, but it was also where I think I grew up as a leader. So workfront was phenomenal for investing in kind of high potential talent. And I had some really great experiences with mentors and champions and just learning about myself and the type of leader that I wanted to be. And I think that really set me up for kind of my next several roles and kind of getting me to a place now where I’m responsible for all of marketing.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I’d love to dig into some of those champions of you. This is four or five years, six years into your marketing journey. Did you have any champions or mentors early on that kind of helped you in those early years of trying to understand what marketing was?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Yeah, going back way before my software career, a name that a lot of people in Utah will recognize. I had the great opportunity to work for Culinary Crafts, which is one of the kind of biggest catering companies in Utah, and I work directly for Mary Kraft. So if anybody’s familiar with Mary, I think Mary is the one who really taught me so many things about how to position your product, how to have great customer relationships, and how to kind of always be selling. I kind of got that exposure when I was 16, working with Mary in her office and through her event sales and all kinds of interesting things for several years. So she always sticks out in my mind as kind of an early forming mentor and really thinking about how to run a business. And then when I got more into the marketing discipline, I was really lucky to have met a marketing leader named Amy Heidersbach. When I was at Needle, she was head of marketing there. She’s got a PayPal. Visa Capital One. She’s been all around, had a great career, and I’ve actually worked for her a few times now, post my workfront days, but she’s a chief marketing officer. And Amy taught me so much about being a whole brained marketer. What does that mean? Yeah, good question.

Peter Stevenson

As a half brain person, I’d like to hear what the whole brain thing is.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Well, I think that most of us have an inclination, right? We’re either more on the creative side naturally, or more on kind of the analytical side naturally. And I think I am more on the analytical side by nature, although I wouldn’t call myself like a spreadsheet wizard. I think I’m just more on the kind of logic and analytical perspective. But with marketing, you’ve got to appeal to emotions and you’ve got to appeal to people’s what makes them take action. And that takes the creative side, right? It takes the visuals and the language that actually resonate with people, and that doesn’t always show up in the numbers. So when you’re a whole brain marketer, I think that that’s what Amy means by that is you’re looking at not only the numbers, but also kind of what the emotions and the feelings are that you’re evoking in your audience. You’re looking at what’s going to resonate best with your target personas, but you’ve got to do that from a place of analytical rigor. And I learned that from Amy. And then when I was at workfront again, lots of great mentors in my time there. Laura Butler was our chief people officer at workfront, and I had an opportunity at workfront to establish the Women’s ESG. I think it’s the acronym, but Women of Workfront. And that was the first focused group of employees working on diversity and inclusion at workfront was Women of Workfront. And I had kind of gotten it moving in a grassroots way just as Laura was hired. And I remember sitting down with her, and she started showing me the framework for an ESG employee. Can’t remember what the S stands for. Something. Group ESG. Anyway, Laura showed me the framework for the ESG, and she just blew my mind open with what the possibilities that this group could accomplish. I had looked at Women of Workfront as a way to just get the women of workfront together and be like, hey, there’s things that we need to kind of think about and talk about and raise awareness around. Laura was like, you got to think bigger. What do you guys think of the parental leave policy? And that was honestly one of our big wins in the first little bit of women of workfront was we looked at the parental leave policy and it wasn’t great. And most of that was because workfront hadn’t had a lot of women working at workfront until kind of my class of women came through and it had started to change. But there were legacy things hanging around, like when they went to unlimited PTO, having not really considered what maternity leave looked like on unlimited PTO. So Women of Workprint did a great job of being able to be the voice of not just parental leave, but a lot of things related to being women in the workforce and helping enable women to show up in a way that they could be advocates for their careers. So it was a really exciting time. But Laura helped me see a bigger vision for that. And I think she was a wonderful role model and mentor in it because she didn’t step in and do it for me. She just helped me see a bigger vision and then coached me along the way. And that was a really fantastic experience for me. So I think marketing perspective, I’d say amy Heidersbach. And then from a leader perspective laura Butler I think Laura is still in the silicone Slopes. I think she’s at Entrada now.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, that’s interesting how the best people seem to stay.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

It’s great.

Peter Stevenson

So you go from workfront, and I think when we were talking before we started recording that after workfront is when you kind of move to working for companies outside of the state. So tell me about the transition from being an in office employee to being a remote employee, kind of before the whole world decided to be that.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Well, I kind of took a secured route to that. I went from workfront. So at workfront again, I was working on customer marketing. And workfront was very geared towards marketing leaders that we were selling to marketing leaders. And one of the personas we always came up against or not against, but worked with, were Marketing Ops leaders. And I was also working with Marketing Ops leaders trying to get programs that were facilitated by software out into the world. And I wanted to understand that role more and I wanted to understand what they dealt with more because it seemed like such a linchpin to success in marketing. And I had the opportunity to do a lot related to marketing ops at workfront, but not ever really work in it. And I had gotten a call from Amy Heidersbach again. She had left Needle and had been at a few different places between there and when we spoke, but she had landed at a company in Chicago called Career Builder. Career Builder is, like, a long time. Most people know it as a job word from the 2000s, but it’s now in HR Tech. And Amy was headed to be the CMO of Career Builder to do kind of a brand transformation, but they also were looking to really blow out or build up their B two B marketing practice. So she called and said, hey, if you could do any job in marketing, what would you want to do? It’s a huge opportunity for me. And I said, I kind of want to do ops. And so she hired me as the VP of Marketing Ops at Career Builder. It was my first opportunity to manage a huge marketing budget we had. It was around probably 63 to 70 million in annual spend. That was much bigger than what we worked with at workfront. We did a lot of advertising to consumers because of the B to C side of that business. So I got to be exposed to television, all of the out of home kind of media buying side of things, and then got to help establish their B two B marketing practice and really acted as kind of a chief of staff to her. So back to your question of working outside of Utah. In that time, I knew I didn’t want to leave Utah. My family is here. My roots are here. I like waking up and seeing the mountains. Luckily for me, career builder supported that. So I actually commuted every week to Chicago during the time I was a Career Builder. That’s a lot for anybody who’s done the weekly flights. So by the time Amy actually moved on from a Career Builder and went to a company based in California called Alteryx, which is a data and analytics platform, and as she left, she reached out to me and was like, I really loved what you did for me, career Builder. As head of Marketing Ops, would you be interested in coming to Altrix? So I did, but I was over the weekly flight thing. So when she went to Alteryx and I decided to follow along a year later, it was more of a work from home situation. So I was on the road probably two weeks a month there, but more working from my house. And I think I learned a few things between then and when the pandemic hit, which is about six months into my time at Alteryx, which was you got to have a home office working from the kitchen counter just did not work for very long after that point. When we were all on Zoom for 90 hours a week trying to keep track of stuff. So I think that was kind of how that transition I immediately started setting up a room that was dedicated to work and that’s what kept me sane, I think, during the and then I got a dog that helped.

Peter Stevenson

Congratulations on staying sane.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

But then after that period of time alteryx, I was there quite a bit, most of it during the pandemic. So that was kind of my work from home experience with everybody else. But since then I’ve moved companies a couple of times and I’ve been able to maintain that work from home, travel into the office occasionally or when I want to get the team together kind of a thing. And I feel like I’ve got a good handle on that. One of the reasons that I loved staying close to Utah is that I love my network here. So it’s actually been really fun to maintain those close connections and learn from my network. Even though I’m not working in Utah based company anymore, the people who I’ve worked with over the years here and their generosity and willingness to listen to me bounce ideas off of them or call them up and ask them for a reference on an agency or something like that has been just priceless.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, I know when I put out a call to get people who I didn’t know to be on this podcast, your name came up three or four times, so there were a few people who reached out and said, yeah, and I’m sure those are just people from your network who have stuck around here.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Yeah, and I think it goes back to some of the special companies that get built in Utah. There is a difference now that I’ve been out working outside of Utah for several years and I’ve worked at great companies, nothing to take away from the companies I’ve been at outside of Utah, but there is a difference to the culture and the companies here. And I think that there’s a real teamwork environment here that’s just a little bit different flavor. So I think back to especially workfront Link Trust was a little bit like this for me. They’re kind of just some of my closest friends now that I made when I worked there. And in fact, I just went to lunch last week with the person who established sales enablement at workfront named Stacy Justice. She’s awesome. Probably another person who’s a great job on the podcast, but great. Stacy has also been working at outside of Utah companies since she left workfront. And we were talking about just that group of people that was amazing and how we both tap into that network so often for advice, for lunch, for just many things.

Peter Stevenson

Can you try and put into words what it is that you’re sort of saying about the difference between the companies that you have known here and the companies out? What is it that makes us special here.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

I was thinking about that in the car on my way up here today because I was thinking that’s probably going to come up and there’s a couple of things that I would put to it. Number one, so many of the companies here are bootstrapped and so it kind of is an all hands on deck sort of everybody’s in it together feeling when you get into a public company, it doesn’t feel that way anymore. And I don’t know if public companies I haven’t worked for a company that’s been public in Utah, so maybe it’s different if it’s public. But there’s also a real sense I felt less hierarchy at Utah based companies. Even though there is hierarchy, I felt less hierarchy in Utah based companies. No matter what my title was, I felt pretty close. Like I remember having one on ones with Josie or sorry, with Alex Schumann who was CEO of Workfront when we had 1100, 200 employees and feeling like I had access. I had his ear. In a lot of ways I have been fortunate that I have been in higher level roles in the companies I’ve worked at outside of Utah. So I’ve had access. But I’ve had people describe to me the feeling that they feel very removed from leadership in those businesses. So I think that might be a part of it, is just kind of that we’re all in it together feeling. That is potentially part of being bootstrapped. And also the companies I’ve been in here have all been very focused on not running through a ton of capital. Right? So they’re bootstrappy, but then once they get investment, it’s not like the crazy amounts of investment that some Silicon Valley companies get or in other industries that they’re leaning on. So it’s kind of a fiscal responsibility kind of lens that I’d have to really unpack that. But I think that it does force different conversations inside of the business which maybe makes people work closer together.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Alysha Smith

I’d love to hear now that you’ve been working outside of Utah and have had your experience from Utah and the teamwork, what have you done to kind of make some change in that way with your companies that you’re in now with teamwork and leadership and taking everything that you’ve learned and experience and applying it?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Oh, that’s a great question. Yeah, there’s a few things that because a lot of my outside of Utah experience came during the pandemic. I think some of this is about being remote, some of it’s about being outside of Utah, some of it’s about just thinking about leadership in 2023 and how that looks different than the way we thought about it in 2018. And so much of that is employees are asking different things of employers now. Companies are asking different things of employees. But one of the biggest threads that I’m thinking about is we talked about the future of work for like. 15 years. Like it was this far off thing.

Peter Stevenson

Right.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And the pandemic actually showed us that the future of work is now.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, so true.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And as we bring in more technology to enable our jobs, as we have these hybrid or fully remote working environments, the most important thing to me that I am doing regularly is trying to really make sure that I have personal connection. So carve out time to have conversations that don’t have an ROI attached to it, but instead have a relationship attached to it, making sure that in my team meetings, we take a few minutes just to actually ask how everybody is doing and how did your move go? How was your kids piano recital? Just to make sure that we’re actually getting that human connection. Because actually, one of my friends that I saw over the weekend who heather Hearst, who leads marketing for Canopy heather said something really interesting at dinner the other night. She goes, in this virtual world, it’s all business. We get into Zoom meetings and it’s straight into business. And so we’re not having those kind of natural, pressure release conversations that happened around the water cooler unless we really create it. And so I would say that’s one big thing that I’m working to do. The other thing that coming back to the culture issue, I really strive to make sure that people, whether they’re on my team or they’re on teams that interact with my team, that they feel like they have a voice, that they feel like they have a place where they can say, hey, I don’t agree. Right. So often, I’m sure other people identify that with this, you’re either the person sitting in the room or you know what’s happening in the room, but there’s people sitting in the back row who are like, this is the worst idea that has ever come up in the history of ideas, but they’re not saying anything. And so it’s really incumbent on the leader, I believe, to make sure that you’re creating an environment where somebody actually will voice that concern, because oftentimes they’re seeing something that group think is creating or somebody just hasn’t thought of all of the stumbling blocks that might be ahead of us. Or people get enthusiastic about an exciting idea and don’t want to hear any negative words. But creating space for the detraction is sometimes where your sources of innovation are going to come from, because when you sit there and think, how am I going to solve a problem? That’s when you really get some creative thinking. So there’s a lot of ways that I do that as far as creating that space, but oftentimes it takes not doing it in that meeting, right. Especially virtually. You can’t tell, right, you’re not sitting there with you got a lot of body language and half the time half the cameras are off. So for me, I kind of really try and get to know the personalities of the people on my team. No surprise. I work for an assessment company, so I love having the assessments on my team and understanding what the kind of typical way that they show up in different situations so that I can be aware and then have follow up conversations. It’s very normal for me. A meeting ends, I immediately reach out to three people who are in the meeting, be like, hey, how did that go for you? What did you learn? What were you thinking that you didn’t say? What are you excited about? Just really making sure to have more follow up. So it takes a lot of calendar management structure. Yeah. One of the things I miss from working at bigger companies is admin support. Right now, I’m at a smaller company and we don’t have that. So I have to be very proactive about calendar management and giving myself time to do it, but just making sure that I have those one to one connections that are not scheduled. Right.

Alysha Smith

Love that.

Peter Stevenson

I do want to get into who you’re working for now. I think they’re an interesting company and an interesting story. So you moved over to Wonderlick about eight months ago?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Actually, less so. I’ve been there almost five. Almost five.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so what brought you there and who are they? There’s probably a lot of people listening who don’t know who they are. Tell us what it is that the product is and what you’re doing over there.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Okay, well, first of all, everybody always asks me, where do you work? And I say, wonderlic. And they say, what?

Peter Stevenson

Wonder what?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Wonder what? So there’s kind of two camps. Either you’ve never heard of Wonderlich or you have heard of us. And maybe you heard of us because we used to have a partnership with the NFL. Wonderlick is actually the last name of the founder. So it’s a German last name. That’s where it comes from. But about 85 years ago, the founder of Wonderlic recognized a need for a short form cognitive test, or IQ test. At the time. At that point in time, there were IQ tests being delivered, but they were taking hours and hours and hours to take. And then you needed a scientist, like a psychiatrist or psychologist to go and review the assessment to be able to kind of make a determination of how bright or how much capability a person had. And at this time, this guy was like, mr. Wonderlick was like, there’s got to be an easier way to do that. And so he created the first short form IQ test, and it was twelve minutes long, about 50 questions. And Wonderlick, it kind of was like his and his wife’s basement business where they just created these tests and they packaged them up in their basement and shipped them off. Right. That’s the way the business ran for many years in the 90s. Our current chairman is his name is Charlie Wonderlick. He actually saw more opportunity for the business, and so he talk about a fun marketing story. He is a finance guy, but when he got involved in the business, he’s like, I feel like we could really tap into this. So he did a direct mail campaign and sold a lot of Wonderlike tests. But that kind of was the first period of real growth for the business. And then again, we’ve had a long partnership with the army has used us. Lots of big corporations have used us for that cognitive testing. The NFL has, in certain times, used us for testing in the combine. Wonderlick no wonderland.

Peter Stevenson

I definitely remember that.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Yeah. And one of the reasons that I was enticed by Wonderlic when I heard their story is I am fascinated by businesses that have the ability to transform. One of the saddest things to me in just the last maybe 15 years of business is watching huge companies that were a big part of our lives just disappear. Like Kodak. Right. And when you think about companies that have been disrupted and whether or not they have the ability to transform, that’s just something I’ve been really fascinated. And maybe this comes from my experience working in newspaper software all the way at the beginning of my career, but it’s like, there is a way to transform, and how can you do that? And I kind of was like, I’m ready for a transformation business. And so when they approached me about this role, I started really understanding what they’re trying to do. And what Wonderlick is doing right now is fascinating. So we have this history of being a great provider of cognitive ability tests, but over the last five years, we’ve adapted and changed the way we’re looking at the science now to bring in much more comprehensive methodologies. So now Wonderlick offers an assessment for prehire in selection, where we combine cognitive ability, motivators, and personality for a true whole person approach to assessment. So instead of just how bright is this person? It’s more about what is their cognitive ability, how do they typically show up, and what are they motivated by? And on top of that, we have a proprietary part of our product that allows us to do that in a very job specific way. So a lot of people are doing I mean, I remember at my last company, the assessment tool we had, they were like, hey, when you hire, go in and to pick what motivators or what personality things you want to look for. And I’m like I know. I’m like, gosh, I have to really think about that. And as a hiring manager, when you have so many things on your plate trying to be the one to like, I’m not an I O psychologist, like, right, help me here. Right. So what Wonderlick did is they took millions and millions of data points across all of the different job aggregation sites and said, we can use AI machine learning to actually make these assessments job specific to the actual role. So I take the test, you guys say, this is the role she’s applying for, and then you get my test in relation to that role. So then we can then look at candidates and say, for the role you’re hiring, you maybe don’t need somebody who scores the very highest that they possibly could on cognitive. You actually need somebody who’s at the right level for this role and also has the right Motivators and the right personality. So it’s really interesting. And we’re doing the same thing with employee development and bringing that same science in an even more advanced way on the development side.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

I think a lot of this comes back to that adaptability conversation. Not only am I super interested in how companies are transforming, I’m really interested in how people can be adaptive. We’re at a place and time in the world where things are changing so fast. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but Collins Dictionary defined a new word last year called perma crisis.

Peter Stevenson

I saw that, yes.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And when I thought about how does that impact people, we are inside of these companies who are trying to adapt to huge seismic change in multiple multifaceted changes. Right?

Peter Stevenson

Yeah.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

And we’re having to try and keep up with that, and our jobs are changing. Anybody done a chat GPT search in the last two weeks? And it’s like blowing your mind, right? Like, suddenly AI and machine learning are there. Employers are asking different things of us. We want to work remotely or hybrid. All of these things are converging. And the real question to me is, what can we do to help employees be adaptable? So when I saw the Wonderlic Solution, that’s what got me excited. And I’m very excited to be part of not only seeing if we can transform an 85 year old brand that has all kinds of different things, like the NFL or the army or all these things attached to it, into a very modern approach to helping workers be able to adapt to what the next 25 years are going to bring to us. And we’re seeing it. It’s exciting.

Peter Stevenson

So you’ve only been there for five months or so, but what is working for you there maybe also what did they hope to accomplish by hiring you? You talked earlier about Amy specifically hiring you for specific things. She wanted you to do this. What did they see in you that they wanted you to come and perform and what’s working?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Yeah, I think that if you asked them why they hired me, I think that a couple of things that they would tell you. Number one, they were looking for an operator, and I have a lot of operational experience. So instead of being potentially a CMO who’s really only focused on brand, I’ve had the opportunity to really be down in the trenches in pretty much every aspect of marketing. And so the brand component was really important. But even more than that, Wonderlick is in a position where their entire growth engine is predicated on paid search right now. And if anybody is running business off paid search lately, that’s not really a winning proposition. Right. So the big business challenge that was handed to me at the beginning was let’s transform this into a modern marketing engine. And so I’m very far down that path, actually. I would say I’m really impressed with the team and their ability to kind of take new ideas and start to shift. But we are in the middle of bringing integrated campaigns into our mix of really starting to work on tying together awareness into campaigning, like to demand campaigning. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest changes marketers need to make today, like yesterday, is we shouldn’t be doing awareness and demand in Silos. They have to come together because the way buyers buy, especially in B, two B, has changed dramatically in the last three years. Buyers want to self educate, they want to have their own experience with you before they ever talk to anybody at your business. And in the past, we would deploy SDRs and go do tons of dialing and try and get somebody on the phone. When’s the last time you picked up your phone when you didn’t know the number? Right? So that’s a big component for us, is really shifting our thinking to say, how do we show up in the conversations where our community is. There’s a lot of thinking on that. I just was doing a deep dive on TikTok the other day. There’s a lot of Wonderlit content on TikTok actually, but it’s mostly from the job seeker side talking about how to do better on the test. But there’s a lot of opportunities and ways for us to join the conversation where our buyers are and help to establish some thought leadership and brand awareness in those areas. And I believe that needs to be tied directly to our campaigning motion. So that’s my main focus right now.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Alysha Smith

Well, I would love to hear if you have just one maybe takeaway or marketing hot tip that you’d like to share with our audience.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

I do. I think there’s so many places where you can learn how to be a better marketer. But I think one of the things I have to offer today, which is maybe a unique perspective, is how to navigate your career right now. I get asked this a lot and I’ve put a lot of thinking into it and I think that you need to be really intentional about making sure you always have champions. There’s so many times where I have people reach out to me and say, hey, I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I’m not getting promoted. I feel like I’m hitting all of my metrics. I’m performing, but I just keep getting passed over. And generally the problem is people do not have internal champions. And so I would say think about where you’re sitting in your business, who you’re interacting with on a day to day basis. For a marketer, you need a champion in sales. Make sure that sales knows who you are. And I don’t care what type of marketer you are, make sure you have a champion in sales. If you’re a customer marketer, make sure you have champions in customer success. You want to be that person who, when somebody says, oh, did you hear what marketing is doing, that your name comes up. That’s really important. On top of that, make sure you have mentors, but make sure that your mentors are aligned with kind of maybe two different areas. One, where you want to go, and two, where you’re at right now. My phone or friend Rolodex is like, my most valuable thing, and I use it all the time when there are questions I’m trying to answer about what I’m solving for today. There’s like, ten people who I am texting on a regular basis just to get their take, and those are friends that I’ve cultivated in other organizations that you want to be networking with outside of your peer thought group internally, but those are kind of the peers on what you’re doing right now. And then always be looking for a mentor who’s at least two or three steps ahead in their career from where you are today so that they can help be those eyes and ears on what you look like from a different perspective. Love that.

Alysha Smith

Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

And the final question is my favorite. And tell us where people should eat around here. Where are your favorite places to go? Eat, drink, go to coffee shops. Where are the third places that you love?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Okay, well, I’m a provo girl, and that’s where I spend practically all my time. So let me tell you the hot places you do not want to sleep on.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

I’m excited about this block restaurant on University Avenue has the best Sunday brunch.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, really?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

A new restaurant they have open on Sunday. Okay. I think they have Saturday brunch too. Unless, of course, you’re going to go to Sundance for brunch. So those two good options. Orum let’s give a shout out to orum Pizzeria 712. Never been disappointed with a meal at Pizzeria 712, let alone in fact, I.

Peter Stevenson

Worked there in the kitchen for a while.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Did you? Okay.

Alysha Smith

He’s taking credit for that compliment.

Peter Stevenson

I have no credit to be given.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

It’s still going and still strong. And just for, like, fast casual, I like waffle. Love. They’re doing some fun stuff.

Peter Stevenson

Oh, really? Do they still have that place on the diagonal down the hill? Is that their main location down there?

Carol-Lyn Jardine

It’s kind of like on the provo Worm Hill. Yeah, it’s in like an old gas.

Peter Stevenson

Station there’s that burrito place still next to it.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

I don’t think the burrito place next.

Alysha Smith

To it anymore in the gas station.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

It might have something next to it.

Peter Stevenson

I don’t remember that’s the Waffle love you’re talking about.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Well, they have a new one in Riverwoods. I used to go to the one on the diagonal, but the river woods is closer to my house.

Peter Stevenson

That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here and we really appreciate it and we’ll see you around.

Carol-Lyn Jardine

Thank you.

Alysha Smith

Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

By Subject is a production of modernate agency and Silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and Producer is Dave Mecham video production by Connor Mitchell development production by Eric Dahl production management by Shelby Sandlin original music composed by Josh Johnson website design signed by modern8 please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.