In this episode, meet Tim Ringel, a serial entrepreneur and global CEO of next-generation international advertising group, Meet The People. With his wealth of knowledge and experience, Tim shares invaluable insights on what it takes to build and grow a successful business.
Tim's journey in building successful businesses began with a deep understanding of the advertising and marketing industry. He emphasizes the importance of having good people, a smart product, and the ability to sell that product. With expertise in advertising, marketing, digital, and traditional media, Tim's approach highlights the crucial role these elements play in driving business success.
Tim's philosophy revolves around integration and valuing people in business. He highlights the need to inject humanity and value into the mix, emphasizing that happy people create better products, leading to happier clients and long-term business success. Integration, in Tim's perspective, goes beyond mere efficiency and optimization. It's about creating a better result that fosters loyalty and longevity.
Conclusion:
By prioritizing people, integrating various aspects of business, and embracing continuous learning, entrepreneurs can create the foundations for sustainable success.
Website: meet-the-people.com
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Full Interview:
Transcription:
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Tim Ringel Teaser 00:00
Every company needs the same things. They need good people. They need a smart product or a good product. And they need to sell that product.
And once you understand advertising, marketing, digital, traditional, media, you can sell any product if you've really understood how the inner workings are. So I got exposed doing that journey of building agencies more and more to companies that needed help just to build their business.
Intro 00:26
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?
If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.
Gresham Harkless 00:54
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Tim Ringle. Tim, it's great to have you on the show.
Tim Ringel 01:02
Thank you for having me. I'm excited.
Gresham Harkless 01:04
Yes. I'm excited to have you on as well, too. You're doing so many awesome things. And of course, before I jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Tim so you can hear about some of those awesome things.
And Tim is a serial entrepreneur with the passion and drive to push past the status quo. His ambition, desire to make things work the way they're supposed to, has led him to the role of global CEO of the next generational international advertising group, Meet The People. A builder of multiple international agencies.
Tim is a seasoned global CEO and executive in the marketing space, having run a world-renowned Spring Studios and Reprise Digital, IPG media brands, digital global agency network.
With experience in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Pacific, Latin America and the United States. Tim has operationally managed ad businesses with more than 3000 staff and 68 offices around the globe. He's been a speaker at 250 plus industry events, including talks at the United Nations, Cannes Lions, Google. Facebook, and he is an active supporter of entrepreneurial associations and charities.
And can I just say that Tim is a wealth of knowledge and experience. I think you might have started your first digital agency at the age of 21. I thought I heard in an interview. He's also an investor is right. Venture capitalists for some brands that you might have heard of, like Airbnb, SpaceX and Spotify.
But I think one of the biggest things that really stuck out to me was we always in sight and sometimes forget about the human aspect of business and the human part of business, let alone life. And Tim knows all about that. I'm sure we're going to jump right into that.
And one other thing that I read from Tim this quote it is CEO World Biz was that he talked about how important integration and creating an agency was.
And he said, we need to get back to valuing people again and injecting a little bit of humanity to the mix. So Tim, excited to have you on the show, all the awesome things you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I Am CEO community?
Tim Ringel 02:56
Absolutely. Very excited, as I said. So, yeah, you actually covered me completely already.
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Gresham Harkless 03:01
So there we go. We can leave now, right? There we go. So no, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on, you started in that first digital business. So I wanted to hear a little bit more on what I call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.
Tim Ringel 03:15
Sounds good. Sounds good. Yeah, sure. So you're absolutely right. I started my first business actually when I was 20, but it was only really established as an entity when I was 21 and that was while I was in college in Europe and got super bored because I was like, I was studying economics and it was just terrible to sit in these tech sessions and learn about corporate structures.
It was just not what I was interested in. I was a coder by trade in terms of talk myself, assembler, C plus basic, all the stuff we learned that we were born in the 70s and 80s, like me. And I was more interested in building stuff. I was just more interested in building websites and trying stuff out.
Even before I established the first business my business partner and I, at the time, we actually tried multiple platforms, multiple platform ideas, and they all failed because we didn't know what we were doing. We had no capital. No idea what, what acquiring users meant all this kind of stuff, but we ended up establishing the first business was 21.
I sold it 12 years later was a digital agency that primarily grew on the back of the success of Google. And then later, obviously, Facebook and the other players in the market after I sold that business we did a reverse takeover of the business that bought my business doing the earn-out and that.
Ended up to be my second business and I inherited, I would say leadership control of the business when it was probably 370, 400 people. And after 4 years, it was 1000 people all across the community. And then I sold my equity in that business and moved over to the United States here to New York City, where I then joined into public group of companies one of the large holding companies in the advertising world 10 billion revenue, whatever.
And they had one big problem and that was, they didn't have a dedicated digital media agency, that could compete with the other large holding companies. The other holy goblins all had like strong clays with thousands of people. IPG didn't really have that. And that was where I came from.
So, they basically asked me if I can build it for them. And that's what I did. I started with probably 800 people that I inherited within the organization. And I left IPG three years later and we were 3, 000 people. So, I like to build businesses within the advertising agency space. Why? Because it's where my two half of the brains come together.
I'm Again, I'm a, in all honesty, I'm a college dropout, right? I never finished college because my business was already, I think, a million revenue after three years. And I talked to my parents, said guys, do you really want me to finish this or can I do whatever you want? And I said you know what, just do whatever you want.
And so I dropped out of college to then really pursue my own business that was in the time in Europe already partially successful. So long story short. I really wanted to bring these different brain halves together and the agents of one brain hub is the agency advertising industry that I had taught myself because when your engine where you're building platforms and websites, not very easy to make money, but the advertising industry to start an agency, you really just need yourself a laptop and time, right?
And that was really cheap because I had time. I had a laptop. And I myself, so it doesn't need any capex. You don't, you're not producing anything, but using your brain to make things happen and smarter. And when I started in digital media, you needed a credit card because you needed to buy new bread and you could do it as a bread.
So it was very easy to do that. The other part of my brain is really about the businesses, not as not related to the advertising industry, but if we're really honest. Every company needs the same things. They need good people. They need a smart product or a good product. And they need to sell that product.
And once you understand advertising, marketing, digital, traditional, media, you can sell any product if you've really understood how the inner workings are. So I got exposed doing that journey of building agencies more and more to companies that needed help just to build their business. And this is how I became an active business angel and data venture capital investor, because no matter if you were Spotify, Airbnb, you name it, Lyft, all they needed was users, right?
And on the platform. And how do you get that? You acquire it digitally. That's where the two halves come together. And when I came to New York, I promised myself after my three years in, IPG. That was lots of fun, but also very political and not necessarily super entrepreneurial.
I promised myself I wanted where two come together where the agency experience I have over five companies now, plus building five companies now, plus the whole venture capital. How do I help a business to be more successful rather than just buying them a billboard or, some digital apps?
So that's what we. What I do anyways, every day and meet the people is basically the framework, the infrastructure we're building to do that at scale.
Gresham Harkless 08:02
Nice. I absolutely love that.
Yeah, that it makes so much sense and being able to execute that and to do that. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, a little bit more, of course, about meet the people, what you're doing there, how you're creating a lack of a better term, better mousetrap that, other organizations can kind of implement.
Tim Ringel 08:19
It's all about the individual contributes on a daily basis to the success of the brand they work on. Sure. You can take all of that stuff. AI is going to help. Two, it's going to help machine learning helped a lot. In the past 10, 15 years, nevertheless, there's always a human being who gets the final touch, the final approval, the final king to the strategy that makes it different to all the other strategies out there.
But and again, my belief is that we're only going to achieve that if we have amazing people. And the only way to have amazing people is to be better to people because happy people create better product, better product creates happier clients, happier clients create more.
That's how it works.
Gresham Harkless 08:57
Nice. I absolutely love that. Taking care of your people. Cause your people end up being, your brand, they end up helping, so many other people. And a lot of what I even thought I read and correct me if I'm wrong.
You had this kind of perspective or kind of, a current way that people are running agencies, if they require another agency, it's more or less like you said, just saying, okay, we're just going to add on this service offering. We're going to add on that. But it's losing that aspect of kind of understanding how important that people are. And further that word that kind of came up for me as I was reading a lot about what you do.
What you do in your philosophy is around integration and really what that means and what that looks like, because I think so many times you're just like, okay, let's just add this page to our website. We provide this additional service, but actually integrating and having them have their own brand, but have that collective mission to help to support the clients is really what you're getting at it.
If I'm right, if I'm right or wrong.
Tim Ringel 09:47
So integration always sounds scary, right? Because when companies buy each other integration always means people lose jobs because integrations are usually done. Miss an efficiency lens. And of course, like in the end, we're building a company that has to give back value to shareholders.
Gresham Harkless 10:04
That makes sense.
And I imagine that's probably part of the secret sauce for yourself and the organization or combination of both the ability to create that DNA, that culture, that experience for people that are on the team and your clients as well, too.
And knowing that you know you're using, you're tapping into this superpower, that superpower, that superpower in order to come up with those solutions. I imagine that's probably does is part of like your secret sauce.
Tim Ringel 10:27
Correct. Correct. We're trying, but again, nothing is perfect, as I always said. And I talk a lot about my ambition of where I would like the company to be, but we are in an infant state, right?
The company is two years old. We make a lot of mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, but that's part of entrepreneurship as well. I always tell people like, don't, please don't get angry if something doesn't work out the way we anticipated it, but we're going to pivot. We're going to change. We're going to learn as long as we don't ignore.
Mistakes and as long as we don't ignore certain things that don't work and learn from them, we're going to do it better next time around. But that's exactly the ambition that we just talked about and how you and I described it that with integration from my perspective is not about. Efficiencies and, squeezing out the last dollar.
It's all about creating a better result because that better result is going to give you more loyalty from your customers, your talent, and ultimately that's going to build a business with longevity.
Gresham Harkless 11:18
Yeah, that makes so much sense. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
Tim Ringel 11:30
I'm actually super inefficient. I'm going to be, I'm always very honest and blunt.
I'm very inefficient because I strongly believe that nobody's good at everything. I'm really good at some things, but I'm really terrible at a lot of other things that I'm just, I don't care about. I mentioned this before in the conversation where things you care about, you're very close to, you're really good at, you're really a specialist and then other things.
That in your head somewhere further away, physically or mentally, you're just not going to be good at. So my CEO hack, of course, it doesn't work when you're a one man show or a small business, right? Because you have to do everything, but at a certain scale. I'm getting people who are much better in the things that the business needs than I could ever be.
But if you want to build at scale fast, you're going to have to trust other people and hire people who are much better at certain things than you could ever be and accept that, right? That's my hack. I always tell my team, listen, right now you're wasting your time because I know what you're really good at.
And you're trying to do something that you shouldn't be doing. So find someone who's better at it and then give that person the responsibility.
Gresham Harkless 12:37
Yeah. So what would you consider to be what I call a CEO nugget?A little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice. You might've already touched on this, but it's something you might tell somebody that's completely starting a business, getting started in building that. Or if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
Tim Ringel 12:51
It's also, it's always very philosophical, right? Because I have really seen a lot. Building five businesses in the last 26 years, having invested in probably 60 businesses directly and probably hundreds indirectly.
There's not, number one learning is there's not one path to success. There are a million different path to success, and very often, if something doesn't work, it has nothing, it has to do with.
The million variables that have to come together in the right moment in time that gonna make your business, your product that one meeting successful. I don't have a general hack, but to believe in yourself and keep standing up every morning and trying everybody who says it's going to, it's going to be easy.
It's a total liar and people don't talk about these things, right? Like when I started my first business was 21, that sounds amazing, right? We were probably a million dollars revenue after three years, but nobody talks about that. We didn't pay ourselves for two years, but paid our employees.
So, and I had to work aside a side job. I had another job where I was working in the nights to make sure that employees going to get paid. So that stuff is often being left out in these entrepreneurial success stories in general. So people work really hard to build things. And Whoever's not ready to work really hard is probably not going to be super successful or has to be super lucky.
Gresham Harkless 14:14
Yeah, absolutely. We are both, at that because that sacrificial part is huge. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.
We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Tim, what does being a CEO mean to you?
Tim Ringel 14:28
It means you are the spirit of the company. You're The one person that should, always show up, um, because you are, you're carrying the torch, right? And I talked about superpowers and how it's important to recognize what you're really good at, but in the end, if toilet paper runs out, yeah, I'm going to go to the deli and get toilet paper, that's how it works.
So you are everyone's assistant, while everybody's assisting you. And you're not on a pedestal in the end everybody looks at you for guidance, but in reality probably 90 percent of the time you don't even know what you're doing. So, being a CEO for me has always been very confusing because people loved.
To look up to you and Oh my God, he, he must have figured it out or she must have totally figured it out. And I always say honestly, I don't know how the company is going to look like in the next three months. So I'm not, financially, but it can be that we decide to launch a new product in two weeks that we don't know about today.
So as a CEO, you're always, the definition is you're always thinking you never stop caring and you're always, you always have that pressure. That people are going to look to you for a solution, even though you might not have one.
Gresham Harkless 15:38
Yeah, that, that makes so much sense. So, Tim, I truly appreciate that definition.
Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get on view, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.
Tim Ringel 15:55
Of course. Cool. If you want to reach me, you can reach me on LinkedIn, but you can also email me on Tim@meet-the-people.com. Reach out and connect and let's see, let's build something.
Gresham Harkless 16:05
Absolutely. I love it. To make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in this show notes as well, too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But Tim, again, appreciate all the awesome things you're doing, the work that you do as well, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
Tim Ringel 16:16
Thanks so much. Thanks for your time.
Outro 16:21
Thank you for listening to the I Am CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I Am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.
Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr.
Thank you for listening.
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