[dropcap sid=”dropcap-1427475340″]A[/dropcap]lex Lirtsman, founding partner and chief strategist of Ready Set Rocket, has led innovation and digital strategy for global brands and nonprofits. His past and current client list includes the ACLU, Ann Taylor, Better Homes & Gardens, Deutsche Bank, Diesel, FastCompany, Freshpair, Johnson & Johnson, J.P. Morgan Chase, Live Nation, Michael Kors, Perfumania, New York Life, the NBA, Tanger Outlets, and Univision.
When Lirtsman began his Baruch MBA degree, he was in the financial services industry earning a six-figure salary. Over the course of his MBA program, he realized he needed to risk a change. So he left his first field to pursue what was for him a more challenging, more creative endeavor in digital marketing. Lirtsman began his current professional journey as a $10-per-hour intern at Freshpair, Inc., a small but growing e-commerce company.
It’s an amazing story: Lirtsman’s career trajectory has given him insights for professionals at all stages of their careers, especially in relation to the key business area of digital marketing.
Want to learn more? Great, because Lirtsman not only shares his expertise with high-level Ready Set Rocket clients but has a passion for education and mentoring and happily offers in-the-trenches advice to his fellow Baruchians.
Q: What do individuals—professionals outside the field—need to know about digital marketing?
A: People in other fields—that includes CMOs and SVPs of brand marketing, corporate communication, products and engineering—need to understand the role that digital marketing plays in acquiring, retaining, and growing the lifetime value of their consumers. It’s not required that they know how to make that happen, but it is critical to understand the basics of how digital marketing impacts their brand, industry, and role.
Q: What does every business, big and small, need to know about digital marketing?
A. You can’t go about business as usual or treat offline and digital marketing separately. If you are marketing your brand, make sure you are doing it through a cohesive lens.
Q: How do you and Ready Set Rocket stay up-to-date in a field that’s constantly changing?
A. When we’re working with our clients, we’re looking at trends and where their customer journey is headed at least two years—sometimes five—in advance. We want to position clients to be successful in the short term and find opportunities for long-term growth.
This also means that we spend a lot of time future casting. It’s a lot of research, but our job is to determine ways that innovation will impact our clients so we can get them ahead of the trends.
We get paid to dream; I’m pretty lucky in that regard.
Q: What challenges have you and Ready Set Rocket faced in the digital marketing environment?
A. Recruitment is a huge challenge and a critical factor for our business to succeed.
Our ability to scale is strongly impacted by our ability to recruit. Because we are, to a greater degree, rooted in the consultancy and strategic mindset, we only succeed if we hire the most exceptional people.
And we’re in a competitive space where we’re recruiting people who are also being recruited by startups that are flush with cash and give away equity. The way that Ready Set Rocket succeeds comes down to culture and making sure people enjoy the work that they’re doing and the people they are doing it with. There’s absolutely no room to float.
Q: What’s the key to hiring amazing people?
A. Intern or full-time employee, we look for drive and passion.
For interns, it’s important to find people who can grow on their own and ask the right questions at the right time. They need to be self-starters. We look for folks we can mentor, not manage and certainly not micromanage.
As for full-timers, we look for the best of the best. We have to ensure that they will be absolutely brilliant and amazing to work with for everyone in the company.
Q: Are Baruch students among those you recruit?
A. We recruit out of all of the major universities in New York City, and I would say that Baruch students are the most hardworking, both as interns and as employees. They’re willing to invest in their careers. They don’t expect anything to be handed to them.
Q: How successful are universities in preparing professionals in the field of digital marketing? Are students learning more at college or out in the world?
A. Universities as a whole are struggling to produce great digital marketing talent. Academia has not kept pace with innovation in digital. This is why General Assembly, Miami Ad School, decoded, and a handful of other players are capitalizing on this vast demand for digital talent.
The challenge is that you have to live and breathe this content to teach it. Textbooks are obsolete by the time they hit the press. Practitioners at the peak of their careers need to teach these classes.
Right now, students are learning more about these advances in the real world or investing in further education in digitally focused programs.
Q: What curricular changes do you propose?
A: There needs to be a commingling of digital, traditional marketing, and branding courses. Teaching digital as a separate course silos out those other components. Consumer behavior is completely omnichannel, so digital needs to be integrated into every course offering.
Students coming out of universities today don’t have enough exposure to digital marketing, strategy, and omnichannel connectivity—what’s happening in real life.
Q: We’ve discussed students, interns, and the general business owner/practitioner. But you’ve also been called upon to give advice to mid-level, mid-career professionals eager to join the C-suite. What do you say to them?
A: First, understand your weaknesses. That’s one thing that’s really hard to talk about. Knowing what you are not good at is as important as knowing what you are good at.
Second, whether you’re the chief strategy officer, chief marketing officer, chief digital officer, or chief operations officer, understanding the metrics behind every decision is a critical component to make it to the next level. That means really diving in and knowing your key performance indicators (e.g., the cost to acquire a customer, the lifetime value of a customer). Constantly refining and optimizing against KPIs [key performance indicators] is really the key.
And lastly, listening. As we go through our evolution from an employee, to a manager, to a department leader, to a director, a VP, an SVP, we do a lot of delegation. And delegation almost seems as if it will require more talking than listening. But that’s not the case. As professionals rise higher in an organization, they work with experts who are incredibly knowledgeable, and they become advisors versus the executors. Along the way, there needs to be a transition from talking to listening.
Going from manager to leader is a skill that no one teaches us in school because we’re not trained to be leaders. We’re trained to be managers. We’re managing our own tasks and time, and we’re managing employees under us. As we make it to the C-suite, we need to transition from being that manager to being the leader.
[box sid=”box-1421876598″]About Alex Lirtsman
For more than 15 years, Alex Lirtsman has led innovation and digital strategy for global brands and nonprofits. As founding partner and chief strategist of Ready Set Rocket (RSR), Lirtsman oversees the teams that fuel innovation and digital strategies for such brands as the ACLU, Ann Taylor, Deutsche Bank, JPMorganChase, Michael Kors, NBA, and Univision. Prior to RSR, Alex’s roles included director of e-commerce at Freshpair and CMO of digital agency Purple, Rock, Scissors.
The alumnus is also an adjunct and guest lecturer in the Master’s Program in Strategic Communication at Columbia University and the MBA Program in marketing at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business.[/box]