Taking the road less traveled elicits a response for a reason — it presents a trail-blazing opportunity for adventure, the unexpected and a wholly unique experience.
When it comes to working in a competitive, fast-paced industry, having the courage to change course and take a new route is vital to remaining relevant, outwitting the competition and ultimately, succeeding.
For Andrew Rozas, managing partner at Relatable, that’s been a defining career trait. Instead of taking the expected path, he sought new opportunities. Rozas left behind a great job with Absolut Vodka in Stockholm to help build Relatable, an LA-based marketing company that makes it possible for major global brands to connect with influencers.
In its two years of existence, Relatable has grown rapidly. To learn more about their growth journey, we caught up with Rozas to find out how blazing an untraveled path continues to move the company forward.
What initially drew you to Relatable?
Before Relatable hired me, I hired them.
When I was at Absolut Vodka, I started looking for a better way to do influencer marketing than the approaches my PR and social media agencies were suggesting, which were based on soft KPIs and a lot of vanity.
When I met two of Relatable’s co-founders, Aron and Martin, the company had only just started, and they had no real case studies to point to, but they had a great idea that matched how I was thinking about influencer marketing.
The pitch then, as it remains today, was to help clients understand that influencer marketing is just like any other marketing platform, with clear marketing messages and KPIs. The only new thing about it is the content is created by highly creative independent contractors with massive social media reach, also known as “influencers.”
Describe your role. What do you do day to day?
Eighty percent of my day is focused on supporting the team — either listening in on sales calls and giving tips, helping out with strategy or creative on proposals, reviewing influencer briefs looking for optimization, building frameworks, creating new educational material for future onboarding, making coffee, etc.
Twenty percent of my day is working with my own clients — ensuring the campaigns are going smoothly and looking for new opportunities to help them out.
How has the company grown since you joined in 2017?
When I joined the company in July of 2017, I was the sixth employee. One year later, we were celebrating our 35th employee, joining in our new London office.
While there are inevitable changes that come from expanding so rapidly, the company culture has surprisingly not been affected too much. The founders have adjusted their workload to ensure just that. Similar to my own workload split, the founders spend about 80 percent of the time working with the various teams to make sure everything is going smoothly, offering tips, and keeping the company momentum alive — and the remaining 20 percent of their time is going toward maintaining our marquee clients, like Google.
It’s cliché to say that I left the corporate world for a small company because I wanted more agility and action in my day-to-day but I suppose there’s a good reason why people say it so often.”
Can you talk about your decision to leave a big company to join a rapidly-growing marketing tech agency? What has the experience been like since?
I recognize that it’s cliché to say that I left the corporate world for a small company because I wanted more agility and action in my day-to-day but I suppose there’s a good reason why people say it so often.
That said, one of the challenges of working at a young but growing company is that sometimes there are tools or frameworks that you think would help the team massively, but they just don’t exist yet. The flipside is that it gives the team the opportunity to shape those tools and frameworks based fully on our own input.
Tell us about the transition from Stockholm to LA. What’s it like to be part of a growing tech community?
Owning sunblock is definitely one of the big changes of moving from Stockholm to LA. In reality though, weather and city-size notwithstanding, the tech and marketing communities are quite similar in the two cities.
In both places, there is a massive amount of creativity that is being augmented with technology to produce some of the best marketing in the world. What’s great about these environments is that they encourage constant innovation to maintain relevance in the marketplace, as well as the opportunity to look at just the companies near you for inspiration on how to think differently about your own work.
Talk to us about the company culture. Is it built deliberately? Or do you and your team strive for something more organic?
The four co-founders have set a very clear company culture rooted in outside-of-the-box thinking. There are more and more new influencer marketing agencies reaching out to the same brands and agencies as we are each day. To think that we will fare better than them if we’re using the same business development or campaign approaches would be delusional — so we always include an edge to separate ourselves. This attitude then translates into the company culture because once you tell someone that there aren’t set rules to follow, a whole world of possibilities become available.
At Relatable, there’s a value placed on execution over strategy. What does this mean for the company and how do you think it has contributed to its current success?
The emphasis on execution over strategy can be easily misunderstood to assume that there is no strategy, which is not the case.
What we mean is that if someone has an idea, we don’t want the person to continuously think about how that idea fits into a big master plan. We want them to think about why this approach would work and then go forward and do it, rather than explaining it away until it never gets done.
This mentality is key to the success of Relatable because it allows us to stay innovative and drive progress from all parts of the company. This approach encourages us to take risks, which sometimes leads to not winning a pitch. Other times, however, it sets us completely apart.
