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Meet Chip Rosales and James Loomstein of Rogue Marketing

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Today, we’d like to introduce you to Chip Rosales and James Loomstein.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Chip and James. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Chip’s story:
My career story has its beginnings in corporate America. I started out wanting to be THE evening news anchor (back when that was a thing) but found my start in a communications consulting company. I was young, wanted to try new things but this company consulted on medical plans and creativity and new were taboo. So, I went to EDS, now HP Enterprise Services, and spent seven years there. In a short span of time, I rose from a communications specialist to a marketing director in a Fortune 500 company.

The company had a system of how things were to be done, but I got a reputation for asking why and being an exception. The services and service lines I worked with had great success, and truth be told I owe that to a few key people, who staked their reputations on shielding me by letting me push boundaries, do things others weren’t doing and asking forgiveness later. At review time it was the same thing: “You’ve done a great job, results are good but you don’t play by the rules. You go rogue.”

When I was just barely 30, I was recruited to be a CMO of a mid-sized global hospitality brand that makes its money pennies at a time to the tune of $350M each year. It was an opportunity to call all the shots, try new things and stand out. Things were going well – then 2008 hits. My team and I – with a large part of the company – were shown the door and we had to find out what’s next. I’m in my early 30’s, thinking I’m really hot and what company wouldn’t want me?? Except no one did. It was a hard time for me because I went from thinking how important and how critical and how valuable I was to months of rejections and silence. Which got me thinking – did I really know anything at all… did the skills I have even matter… was what I knew important?

As I’m contemplating getting a job at the local Home Depot to pay the bills, I get a call from a fellow dad I knew inviting me to a breakfast meeting he was having with a client he was working with as part of a side hustle. I tried to say no, but he insisted that he had taken him as far as he could and that he thought I could help. That breakfast meeting became a most of the day meeting where I helped him crystallize a vision, brand approach and hone his story. We probably talked about his logo and identity at some point, but we really talked about the value he provided, how he was going to acquire customers and turn them into true believers and building a system that could scale.

We were talking business and marketing… and the beginnings of a future agency were born. As I was thinking about who I was and the message I wanted to convey to the world with a new company, I considered who I was. I was a guy who asked WHY a lot (before it was even a cool Simon Sinek thing). I was a guy that was good with going outside the rules to create results. I was a guy who could APPLY ideas from other areas in a new, innovative way for the business. I didn’t want to be better, I wanted to be different. I went all the way back to my corporate EDS days for the inspiration. When the corporate leadership called me rogue it wasn’t a compliment… it was supposed to be a motivator to get me in lockstep and stay in line. But it was those very qualities that got me noticed and earned the business lines I marketed success. In 2009, I officially invited businesses to GO ROGUE with me.

James’ Story: Being discarded from an organization has a way of sticking with you. Who I am and the message I live out daily is a reflection of my experience in the corporate world and working for the big-name agencies. That’s because it was there I learned that you can’t just do a good job, you have to have a specific something you’re great at… that you’re only valuable if you’re doing something that’s valued.

I left the corporate world and set out to complete an MBA at Southern Methodist University in 2003. During my first semester, I looked around and saw incredibly smart people with dynamic backgrounds across all phases of marketing. I realized that we all would be graduating in less than two years with similar degrees and would be competing for the same jobs. But more importantly, I realized that they had the better chance of landing one. After all, they all had a previous pedigree of marketing experience and the master’s degree.

So I spent the next 18 months gathering real-world marketing experience. I launched a solo consulting business and connected with the SMU community. Almost a year later, someone took a shot on me at a large private advertising agency. I worked as an intern on the strategy team.

I graduated SMU and landed a Business Analyst position within Omnicom at Agency.com. And I made the expected circuit: bouncing from Dallas to NY to Chicago to San Francisco. I worked on pitch teams and new clients providing consumer insights, industry trends, and competitive intelligence.

During the mid-2000s, the advertising agency landscape changed. More than sharing a well-crafted opinion, the focus shifted to doing and delivering results. I doubled down on skills and went deep into Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Facebook, and SEO. I developed my skill and created a company based on tactical design and execution called Digital Space Consulting.

The agency was successful and built a growing client roster. But there’s a ceiling you ultimately hit as a solopreneur and freelance digital marketing consultant. After years of partnering with Rogue Marketing in an independent capacity, I merged Digital Space Consulting with Rogue in 2016. Today, our agency takes its message to growing organizations that are looking to achieve big outcomes, but it doesn’t stop there. As a lifelong learner, I also teach future MBA students the real-world lessons I’ve learned and continue to learn each day. My hope is that students will value having an instructor who is a practicing academic (“pracademic”) who can translate the constantly changing, rules, theories and frameworks into real-world scenarios that they’ll soon be able to practically solve.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Getting a W2 job would be way easier. Building our agency structure like most other successful agencies have done would be easier. Fitting into preconceived expectations would probably have made the road smoother. So why deliberately take the hard road? Someone’s said “there’s less traffic on it” and we can vouch for that.

Incorporate roles, there’s often a lot of activity but not a lot of action. It’s difficult to see how your contributions make a difference. Most agencies bring in the big guns to sell the deal and pass it off to the kids just out of college. Most companies we meet are not fans of agencies as a result.

So we spend our time casting a vision of knowing a business outcome you are looking to achieve and daily driving results in a positive trajectory toward those goals. We are just as invested in our clients’ businesses truly acting as though they are our own ventures. We only hire senior people. Sometimes that means they’ve been doing this a long time but more often, it means that these people are respected and known in their fields and constantly getting better at them. People like that are more expensive but our model has proven that we have a unique ability to partner with clients and achieve the big outcomes they need to succeed in their business.

The most recent obstacles we face though have to do with indecision and patience. Checklist marketing and pumping out deliverables is a much easier way to operate. But activity does not necessarily get the intended action. And the problems clients are working their way out of didn’t start 60 days ago, yet the expectation is that significant success will take place almost immediately. Patience is a virtue most organizations don’t have. But we’ve been able to show that patience is often rewarded with success when we’re given that extra time. More than one client was ready to throw in the towel, changed their mind, and are now raving Rogue fans as a result. The next obstacle is indecision. Rogue isn’t necessarily losing to other agencies. They aren’t telling a better story or putting something up that Rogue can’t deliver on…we lose new business to companies deciding to do nothing. This means that we have to double down on our targeting looking for clients where achieving the goal is critical.

When we would talk to other marketing and business leaders about Rogue and discuss our outcomes-based philosophy, our beliefs in experimentation, our staffing model and that we’re really about being business consultants that can execute marketing expertise, the feedback’s unanimous – “we’re pursuing a really hard model that probably won’t work.” Fast forward to early 2018, we’re having great conversations that have the potential to significantly scale the business we’re doing. The Rogue vision was never setting out to be a large agency servicing hundreds of clients at a time. It was to solve problems, affect change and go deep. To be deeply valued (loved) by a few.

It’s our perspective that it’s better to be loved than just liked. And based on the conversations we have, our experience is that most agencies aren’t even liked.

Rogue Marketing – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Rogue is for revenue-accountable business leaders:
Who want: to achieve a business-altering (not incremental) outcome (move into a new market, steal
market share, reach different demographics, introduce technological innovation).

And Value: focused attention, senior-level efficiency, avoiding the unexpected surprises, looking for
different, integrated approaches

But struggle with: turning all the things (tactics) they’ve tried into a valuable, methodical strategy that can affect
radical momentum

Rogue builds brands, amplifies channels and minimizes risk. We’re not for people that are looking for an agency to simply execute tactics and cross things off their to-do list. We’re not just arms and legs to pump out quantity marketing materials. We are for people who are accountable to the business for delivering revenue. The same people who have a great idea and a demonstrated reason for moving in a particular direction…and although they’ve tried a lot on their own, have worked with their own teams, and even engaged with an agency or consultancy, have been unable to close the gap as quickly as they need to.

A private equity-backed business that wants to make a significant turnaround, build a system, show scale and promise to a future buyer is an ideal fit for Rogue. We’ve found that the people we serve best are people who have had careers at the types of places we did. They had the big job with the teams of people to do things and consultants that could be consulted when the opportunity arose… then they moved to a greater position at a smaller company and they look around for the people they expect to find only to discover they’re not there.

They might like to work with the big consulting company or the well-known agency, but they either can no longer afford it, or they realize that their business isn’t big enough to garner their attention. Rogue’s leaders would be working at those places if we were looking for a W2 job. We are the people they’re looking for, we just carry a business card with the name Rogue on it.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Chip: Being a CMO at such a young age gave me such pride. Winning an agency of the year award a few years back was pretty great… Each time we get the chance to compete for that next level up of client is incredible…

Chip & James: But our proudest moments come when we get to welcome a prospective client or new hire into our offices – the company that we’ve built and shaped to be what it is. And that feeling is amplified when a new hire we’re recruiting says “yes.” It’s a proud moment when someone takes the leap and buys into your vision. BUT THE BEST PART is a year or two later when you hear them talking, or they tell you directly, just how happy they are to be doing work that matters to the people they serve. How they get asked to bring their talents somewhere else, but they’ve been those “other places” and they don’t want to give up what they’ve built for themselves here. That feeling is hard to beat.

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