Sheldon Zhai (00:00)
if you want to be good at marketing, you probably should understand quite well what you're marketing and who the audience is and understand the target audience. And I think it's pretty much impossible to do that in life sciences, unless you actually probably have a PhD or have studied and used the products and the services and the instruments, cetera.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:17)
Welcome to a new episode of the Science Marketer Podcast. Today I have the pleasure of welcoming Sheldon Zhai on the show.
Sheldon is the founder of Supreme Optimization, a full-service life sciences marketing agency, and I believe one of the fastest growing companies in this space. In this episode, Sheldon will walk me through the story of his company and share advice for other science marketers who are trying to grow their own agencies. Hi, Sheldon. Nice to have you on the show.
Sheldon Zhai (00:48)
Hi, thanks for inviting me on the show and of course, nice connecting with you again, because it's been like seven, seven, I don't know, five years, seven years since I saw you in person. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:59)
It's been a while. It's nice
to hear you. So yeah, we'll start with the first question, and we'll start from the beginning. What inspired you to start Supreme Optimization back in 2015?
Sheldon Zhai (01:12)
Well, to be honest, the thing that inspired me the most was that I wanted to make a little bit more money, right? I've always been entrepreneurial. So it's not like I had this genius idea of like, you like there's this big need that we've identified and it's like marketing, especially for, for companies in the life sciences or in the health sector, because, you know, there's not that many skilled marketers or the subject material is difficult. Truly it's because,
I was working pretty much as a busboy. In United States, busboy is like at a restaurant. cleaning, the servers make all the money and then I go take the plates from the table. I take it to the kitchen and I wash the dishes. So was doing this in Los Angeles and I was making like, I don't know, like $10 an hour, $8 an hour or something like this.
That's why just wanted to make some more money, but I also wanted to have a flexible job where it's not like a set office job. So that's kind of how it got started. Asked a few friends, friends and family, just, know, what are some different skills that, you know, I could learn that would be good. That was like a need and I could work pretty flexibly.
I worked in a lab before I did science. I worked in a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for four years. had a research fellowship as an undergraduate student. So I worked in a lab. did all the techniques. I bought all the products. I managed all the products in the lab. So I was familiar with most of the life science tools companies out there because we would order kits from Qiagen reagents from Thermo Fisher, Promega whatever.
So I kind of knew the space a little bit and then I was like, well, why don't I just try doing marketing? yeah, that's how I began. Yeah, so not like a huge inspirational, like I didn't have this smart idea. It just kind of happened. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:57)
Great, okay.
Yeah.
And you were not alone, right? You had a few partners from the beginning? Just you? Okay.
Sheldon Zhai (03:10)
No, it was just me from the beginning.
I was a one man show for pretty much until quite recently, past few years. Yeah. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (03:18)
Okay. And
how did you secure your first client? Because in this niche, know, it's especially like when you're maybe coming from the lab, it's not so easy. So what was your strategy?
Sheldon Zhai (03:31)
Your first clients, easiest way to do it, and it's still not easy, you have to go to your network, get referrals. I think this is probably the only way that has the highest success rate. And the reason is because no one's going to respond to you with cold emails and that type of stuff. So I always say, it's not just me saying this is kind of a known fact, that it's typically harder to go from zero to one.
Or let's say get your first 10 clients than the next 20 clients. Once you have your first 10 clients, you already have probably a system. You know what you're doing so you can grow it. But going from like zero to your first 10 clients, I mean, you better really tap into your network and get some referrals and try to close the deals and do a good job. That's all. So for me, I got some referrals, just a couple, one or two.
I charge a very small amount per month, delivered really good results. They introduced me to other people, asked if I could use them as a reference when I pitched other people and then built a website overnight pretty much. then, yeah, referral and then deliver good results and then get more referrals. That's probably the 80-20 there.
Joachim Eeckhout (04:47)
and what kind of services were you offering at the beginning.
Sheldon Zhai (04:51)
Just SEO digital marketing SEO services. Yeah. Yeah, and that was pretty easy to To measure success because you know, I was just like hey charge you $500 a month and My goal is so when someone does a Google search your website shows up for the keyword that someone searches for and then after a few months I was like, hey look, is your website. This is the keyword you told me To you know, you wanted to target and there you are
Joachim Eeckhout (04:53)
Thank you.
Sheldon Zhai (05:18)
And that's really valuable for companies. Many of the companies that I worked with, they were really small when I first started. I still work with them today. It's been over 10 years, but they all got acquired by really big companies because they grew. People found them. It works.
Joachim Eeckhout (05:19)
Mm-hmm.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the early days of building your agency?
Sheldon Zhai (05:38)
Yeah. And the early days, you know, there's challenges at every single phase of the growth and the challenges are everything, to be honest, when you're running your own business and you're building your own business, it's literally like you have a challenge on every single thing of like, you know, finding leads, finding customers. And then now you have to figure out how to do the finance and the operations. And then you have to figure out how to, you know, maintain a client relationship, deliver good work. And then you have to figure out how to scale. And then have to figure out.
Once again, it's like people, what is it? People, product and process. So like your product is whatever you're offering. People is like, you're not gonna be able to do everything yourself. That's not really a business. You're just a freelancer then. So if you wanna create a business, you have to have other people that are good at what they do. And you have to have a process for sustainable, reproducible and scalable results. So there's challenges in every single one of those things. So to answer your question, it's like,
Maybe the challenge is just like you're responsible to manage every single challenge every single thing part of the business So it's hard to say one specific one
It's just challenging to manage it all yourself, pretty much.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:41)
Yeah.
But I think that's a really key point because as you said, like maybe people who are just starting, are starting with kind of a freelancer mindset instead of an entrepreneur mindset. And it seems for you, was really like, you know, from the get-go, you wanted to build a scalable company more than just, you know, doing all the kind of services yourself, you know.
Sheldon Zhai (07:06)
Yeah, it took me a few years to do it. think there's a natural point if you're doing a very good job as a freelancer. Your demand starts to grow faster than your ability to deliver good results and your capacity. So then you have to start to tap into other people to help support you. I think that's a challenge for many people to make it from freelancer to a business.
building a business and an entrepreneur. Because many people can be an independent consultant. Few people can actually manage all the different logistics around actually building a business. If you bring on employees, you have to understand you suddenly are doing every single job at a company. You have to actually become pretty good, not just like average, but pretty good at every single job function at a company. If you want to do it, if you're bootstrapping it. Now, if you raise
a ton of money, maybe you can hire someone else. That's like an amazing HR person or major, amazing chief technology officer, right? But if you're bootstrapping a service-based company, it's very different. So yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (08:05)
Yeah. So, supreme optimization has grown very rapidly to become a leader today in life sciences marketing. Can you go back on like kind of the key milestones in this journey?
Sheldon Zhai (08:19)
Yeah, I think,
I think probably the first key milestone is deciding to go from freelancer to building a business. I was doing multiple other things at that time in my life. was in my early to mid twenties. So I wasn't really focused a hundred percent on building the business until maybe 2016 or maybe sometime even later. I was really just a freelancer. So the first big milestone is kind of what I was saying before is it's time now to build a business, right? Instead of being a freelancer.
You have to learn how to become an effective leader, a manager, have the vision to actually figure out where you want to go, how you're differentiated. have to, I mean, it's all the things people process and product and all those things. You have to start thinking about it all. So that was the first milestone. would say building a real team of full-time employees, not like a contractor network, but like a team of full-time employees.
And then the next few years, just, you know, those things, we made much more right decisions than wrong decisions. And we made them very quickly compared to other people. think that's something that is undervalued and underrated by a lot of people, but like your ability to make decisions extremely quick with a high, with a high success rate is a huge competitive advantage in any single business environment. I think that personally for me, I can make a decision.
that maybe someone else would take 10 times more time to make that decision. I can make it with probably substantially less data and for it still to be the right decision. And that allowed us to make many decisions extremely quickly, you know? And that allowed us to grow really quickly. So there was this growth period. then the first one, right, is like going into full trying to grow a company. Second is scaling the company. Third,
is taking on investment to grow the company to scale exponentially. And that started a few years ago. So those are probably three of the key phases of the company so far.
Joachim Eeckhout (10:13)
Yeah.
So yeah, we'll come back on this exponential growth just after. So maybe one of the question that maybe is related to this early development, you decided from the beginning to have, think mostly PhD level scientists working in your team, right? Like going to...
find scientists who are becoming marketers. Yeah, can you just explain a bit like what was the vision behind it and maybe the impact on your company?
Sheldon Zhai (10:47)
Hmm.
Sure. Well, I think just objectively, if you want to be good at marketing, you probably should understand quite well what you're marketing and who the audience is and understand the target audience. And I think it's pretty much impossible to do that unless you in this space in life sciences, unless you actually probably have a PhD or have studied and used the products and the services and the instruments, cetera.
that we're marketing. If you take the best, literally probably like let's say you have one of the top world media buyers at Google ads, but they don't understand the subject matter, there's like a very low chance that they're gonna be successful. And we see it all the time. And that's why our agency has displaced so many of the largest and best other generalist digital marketing agencies that are very reputable. But when we go into the accounts,
Like it's a disaster. mean, like they're just wasting the client's money period. End of story. So, so that's why it's important to have PhDs because they actually can understand and be like, well, this is actually a keyword that is not relevant at all. it's to what this company is selling. or this is a keyword that doesn't have any revenue or purchasing intent. or imagine when you're doing messaging and positioning for a company, how can you do messaging and positioning for a company if you don't even understand?
Joachim Eeckhout (11:42)
Hmm.
Sheldon Zhai (12:03)
truly what the problem that these companies are solving for their target audience, whether it's a researcher or someone else. I don't know how it's possible. So for us, naturally, we double down on building out a full team of scientific marketers, and you just get better results.
Joachim Eeckhout (12:12)
Yeah.
Great. So as you said in 2023, a the private equity fund Trinity Hunt Partners took a major stake in your business. Yeah. Can you explain what led to this decision basically?
Sheldon Zhai (12:33)
Yeah, for sure. Pretty much, I was sitting on this huge opportunity. I felt like compared to competitors, our reputation was just far better. I think we've done so many NPS score surveys. We send NPS scores to everyone, the clients that have left us that we don't work with anymore, because I want objective, real feedback. I'm not sending NPS scores to just our best, most happy clients.
So the point is when we do those things, we have amazing NPS scores like industry leading. So like nine out of 10. When employees work at Supreme Optimization, I mean, I literally think we have so few employees that quit or leave. We've never had a layoff. We have so few employees that leave or quit. And we have so few clients that leave in turn. I mean, I think we must be in the top like
probably one percentile of all agencies. So to me, it meant that there's a big opportunity to scale that further because we're doing something correct within the company when it comes to people, product and process, right? And those things are very hard to replicate. So for us, we have such a strong foundation that it made a lot of sense to expand our footprint. And I knew there was a huge opportunity because
we turn down more deals than we can take on all the time. There are so many clients that were just like, hey, like, I don't know if it fit for you because X, Y, Z. We've had wait lists, plenty of wait lists in the past couple of years just because we didn't want to sacrifice the quality for quantity. However, you know, I think, and also there's other sectors, verticals within the life sciences is huge. know, life sciences, many of our life science clients, they also target
you know, it's completely different vertical within digital health and health IT and the healthcare space. You know, we have pharma, biotech, bio pharma, you know, it's such a big spectrum that we want to expand what we did really well to those other verticals as well in a bigger way. There was also services. We never wanted to be an agency that we said that we could do everything. So I said from the start, you know, our focus area is performance, digital marketing, meaning like
leads, we can generate leads for you and do great digital marketing. And that's how you measure. That's how we measure success is like, are we moving the needle? Are we generating leads for a company? and there was certain things like PR that we didn't do. I didn't know anything about PR, PR and comms, like awareness type marketing. And I know it's important. I certainly do. but the thing is clients would ask us for that and we would just turn it down. So we had turned down lots of business. and I didn't want to build it in-house because if you build it in-house,
you're just going to be a not that good at it to be honest. Maybe you'll become good one day, you know, many, many years. So why not just join forces with some of the best agencies that are in the life sciences and the health space that focus on specifically those services that we're not good at and we'll probably never be good at. And it's mutually synergistic because we are better and probably will always be better at the things around performance, digital marketing and technology.
compared to the other companies. that suddenly you have this great ability to actually serve the client needs better because the client doesn't want to go to like 30 different agencies, but actually be specialized at the same time, right? Still have specialized the services. So those are some of the reasons, but I mean, really to summarize it, I just think there was tremendous growth potential, which we've seen that's turned out to be correct.
the growth potential was driven based off the fact that I thought we could just do a better job than the competition out there. And so far, that's also seemed to be very true.
Joachim Eeckhout (16:11)
Yeah. So it was voluntary from you to look for an investment partner or was it also kind of happening at the same time?
Sheldon Zhai (16:19)
No, it's totally voluntary. I looked for it because I want someone to help me scale. We brought on an amazing CEO to the company. I brought on people that, that honestly have just been amazing. So smart, so talented, so hardworking, and have done it before. They have experience, right? I could have tried to scale this company to like, you know, a few hundred million in revenue myself. But the truth is, there's people that have done that and they have a good success record of it. And they've
So why not have some people that are very experienced to help guide that so you have the highest chance for success? And you're not going to do that typically as a independent bootstrapped company. You do require investment. That's the truth, to attract that type of people and to negotiate that type of stuff and to recruit those types of people. So that's the fact.
Joachim Eeckhout (17:06)
Okay. So in the past two years, if I'm correct, you acquired six agencies. Can you share a few examples of maybe, know, which agencies, you don't need to do the six, but just to give us an idea of like what type of agencies they are and why you acquired them.
Sheldon Zhai (17:18)
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, I can talk about one of the latest ones. We acquired Amendola.
There are many agencies out there say that they do everything right. But every agency truly knows that there's a few things that they do very well. And I'll say for many of the agencies out there today, many of them start with as PR and comms agencies, and then they expand and add on other services out there. That's the case with many of our competitors as well. So like, for example, company had PR and comms and they're like, well, people really ask for digital marketing. So we have to like hire someone or
you know, do something to create digital marketing departments and advertising. Oh, if you want websites, you know, we should add that on or we should outsource it, you know, that type of stuff. But my main point is typically every agency does truly have a strength. And for Amendola, that strength is they are world class at PR. They truly are world class at PR and comms. And I would say specifically they're extremely good in the digital health.
digital health, health IT sector, they're amazing. We have a of clients at Supreme Optimization that are in that space. And they've asked us if we can refer someone that does PR, whatever. don't really, I didn't really have any, I don't want to refer a company that I don't know, that I don't know the quality of their services, you know? So we've always just not really referred anyone. Just say, sorry, we don't know. But Amendola now does a great job at that.
So I feel very confident to refer them because we did all the diligence. looked at all the, we talked to the customers, we did the surveys, we looked at all the diligence. mean, I don't think people that, I think people probably know when you go through investment, you do a lot of diligence in the company to make sure that this company is like who they say they are and if they're actually good at what they do and what did their customers say, right? So now we feel confident to refer that type of business and then we collaborate on the backend of our company where it were fully integrated.
so that we can work together and we can support on some of the things that Amendola doesn't do. For example, that might be lead generation with like digital marketing or building websites or world-class at those things. So, you you can see that's one relationship, but that applies to all the other, you know, agencies that join the Supreme Group. It's these synergies that end up being very beneficial win-wins for everyone involved.
Joachim Eeckhout (19:37)
And what lessons have you learned from integrating these agencies into your own business?
Sheldon Zhai (19:41)
I don't think we've learned too many lessons yet. I think we have lots of experience on the team that have been through integrations. mean, integrations are hard to do it correct. But luckily, I don't think we've made many mistakes.
All I'll say is integrating just requires people to think a lot and hopefully have experience to do it because a lot of companies do integrations very poorly. And that's why you see things go wrong. Employees unhappy, clients unhappy. So being sensitive to those things matters.
Joachim Eeckhout (20:11)
And it seems you're also keeping some ways of independence, like the brands you acquire, they stay an independent brand for now,
Sheldon Zhai (20:19)
Yeah, for sure. Autonomy is really important. I'd say some of these things are just business principles, like one on one. It's like, you you want some degree where your vision is all the same, but you also want to emphasize autonomy so people can make decisions on their own. As long as you're aligned on the bigger vision, then you really want people to, you don't want to add too much bureaucracy to everything, right? That's how you're going to get, like, you're going to regress to like some.
not very good average company, right? So you want the companies to make decisions that keep the companies great at what they do. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (20:53)
Can you share any details about the types of agencies you're looking to acquire next? Because I guess there are certainly more acquisitions.
Sheldon Zhai (21:01)
Yeah, I think,
There's a number of companies just all within the life sciences and healthcare sector that are agencies that are interesting. I think some of it just comes down to size. Is the company big enough? And when the company is big enough, typically that also shows that the company is sustainable, meaning they've been around a long time. Their clients are happy. So that means that they have to have good people. They have to have good processes and they have to
have good product services. So at a certain size, it's hard to acquire. Once again, earlier, I made a distinction between, OK, if you're a freelancer without any of those things, you're not really a business. You're really just a freelancer. So we're looking for businesses, ideally, that have built out their processes and their teams and have proven that they deliver.
But the other thing is just culture. Honestly, culture is the most important thing. We pass on a lot of different acquisitions because the culture just isn't a match. And if the culture is not a match, then it's going to be hard to be successful, I think. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:03)
Can you describe a bit your culture in your company?
Sheldon Zhai (22:07)
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, I have a whole culture handbook. And I spent a lot of time writing this. You know, it's one of the things that that I anticipated as we grew, that it would be important to focus on. I created a full culture handbook with examples. You know, I think a lot of companies out there, they say like, we have these 10 principles. And like they say, this, that, that, you know, every corporate company just says the same thing. You know, so what I did is
The truth is for the culture of a company, don't write the culture and then the culture becomes that. Your company already has a culture. So for me, and that was intentional, the culture that we had, for me, I wrote out what those key components of our culture are and I gave real examples. I changed the names and stuff, but real examples of people within the company that have
Joachim Eeckhout (22:55)
Mm-hmm.
Sheldon Zhai (22:57)
shown and like done this thing in the culture. And I feel like that's a lot more meaningful so people can understand that this is actually the real culture within the company. And these are examples that illustrate and demonstrate that culture. But I would say one of the biggest ones for sure is meritocracy. We just want to find the best people, whether they're from within or externally. we
We just want the best people that are the best at what they do to be making the decisions at the company. It seems so simple, but that's really the truth. It's like if you want to be a world-class company, you need to have world-class leaders. And when you don't have meritocracy at your company, that's when politics begins.
because people are gonna be like, well, why is that person in that position? They're not that good. If someone's not good, typically everyone knows. I mean, people can tell. People are not stupid. So you're like, why did that person get promoted? But if you have all people that, the people that get promoted are purely because they are amazing at what they do, it's very motivating because you know that it doesn't matter who you are, where you live, where you're from, what your background is, but if you truly are the best person at that job.
like you deserve to be promoted and you deserve to be in that position to be making more decisions and being more of a leader. And I don't think a lot of companies, I don't know, I just think it's the most important thing. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (24:24)
Yeah. And it's a positive feedback loop because if you have people who are experts at what they do, they provide good service for the clients and then the clients are happy. So basically, I see what you mean.
Sheldon Zhai (24:35)
Yeah, meritocracy
is important and also, you know, cutting out toxicity. If someone is toxic, those toxic things within a company can spread very quickly. So you have to have a very strong sense of, like, have to, there's always a lot of difficult decisions, you know, and you have to have a pretty strong moral compass, but also sense of like, you know, not postponing difficult decisions. I forgot who said this, I think it might.
Oh, actually, I think I watched an interview from the CEO of
Is it AMD? I think it's AMD. Anyways, someone said, she was like, you want people where when there's problems, you want people that run towards problems because they want to solve those problems, right? And you want them to be competent to solve the problems. know.
But once again, that's a meritocracy and I think that's the most important thing. I think that's the only way you can really run the company if you want to actually deliver great results for your customers and retain your employees.
Joachim Eeckhout (25:33)
So you are now head of AI and technology at Supreme. As you said, you hired a new CEO. What role does AI play in your approach to marketing?
Sheldon Zhai (25:44)
So we're going to have a pretty big release at end of this month.
AI will probably be one of the biggest changes for us as a company, not just for us as a company, but obviously you can see lots of other agencies going through this, but AI's ability to...
to add so much value and efficiency to what we do for clients and how we analyze our own data and how we analyze clients' is really a game changer. The thing is when people talk about AI, you have to get very specific because AI can be so many different things, right? AI is like, I mean, there's endless applications of AI.
there's truly endless applications. So it's really, how do you find the right applications that are going to make the biggest impact for your customers or for your business? And then making sure that you properly execute upon those. It's kind of like people say like ideas are diamond dozen or I can't remember exactly the quote, but it's like, you know, it's easy to come up with ideas. Like we have a billion ideas, but you have a finite amount of time and resources. So you have to be very good at saying, no, it's like 99%.
of all the AI ideas to just do the 1 % of the AI ideas very, very well. So we're going to be releasing some really big tools. And as part of our Supreme Intelligence platform in the coming weeks, we'll be releasing our actual announcement to the world will be in a couple of weeks. I'm super excited about. But it's really due to
many years actually in the making. We started working on many of these things around AI before Chat GPT became popular. And that type of foundation is going to be actually the biggest factor in our success because a lot of companies, they want to do AI, but they literally have a terrible data pipeline. It's a mess.
Everyone wants to talk about AI, but really what powers AI that's differentiated is your data, clean, sanitized data that you feed into AI. And that actually makes the biggest impact. But I don't think most companies have that. And that's something that we've been spending years on, years and millions of dollars on over the last couple of years to build that out. I think...
I think it would be a pretty big change. Also, we've built it in-house. It's not like we went out and hired someone or acquired another company to try to plug it in. I think that way can work too, potentially, but building it in-house is a lot better because our whole team knows the challenges that our customers have that are preventing them from having better results. So from all that internal research,
And from all of our internal experience, we were able to build something from the ground up and make sure we have the right data and the right tools within our AI platform to be able to make the biggest impact for our customer. Anyways, I'm being kind of vague because we have a big release in a couple of weeks. We have a whole launch, a website and everything. So I think everyone will see that. yeah, it's going to be a pretty big game changer. I think...
Joachim Eeckhout (28:32)
Yeah.
Sheldon Zhai (28:38)
I'm really curious to see how other agencies approach this, you because lots of agencies, they're all just going to say they do AI and they put AI on their website. And, you know, I know for a fact that like 99 % of that is like, it's, you know, they're just saying it. So, so yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (28:54)
It's just a chat GPT account they have maybe.
Sheldon Zhai (28:57)
Yeah, yeah exactly.
Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:01)
Okay, so yeah, I'm looking forward to this announcement as well. What's your vision for Supreme Optimization in the next five years?
Sheldon Zhai (29:09)
Next five years, the next 50 years, I think we just want to be the best marketing agency. And I think that's measured really by, your employees quit the company constantly? Do you have lots of turnover and layoffs all the time? And do your customers always leave you and you who, it's the turn and burn, meaning you hire you, you acquire new business, you make false promises, and then they leave you after one year and you move on to the next.
Those are specifically like metrics that we're going to look at. So that's kind of how I define like the best meeting, like are the employees super happy and are the customers super happy? Are we accomplishing their goals and we're delivering upon their expectations? And if we're doing both of those things consistently, then I think we have a pretty good company and we want to be a great company. so yeah, I think we'll, I think we'll be around for a very long time.
But, but yeah, it's hard work, gotta, you know.
keep it together with the culture. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (30:07)
Yeah. So if you could give one advice to someone who is starting a live science marketing agency, maybe a freelancer who is thinking about making it like a scalable business, what would be this advice?
Sheldon Zhai (30:21)
I think you...
I think you have to, it depends on where you're starting, right? It's like if you have clients or not.
But I think you have to, the hardest part is probably.
It's probably learning how to hire, actually. There's a really good book called Who? It's about hiring. I think maybe that's the most important advice is just read the book Who? It teaches you how to hire, what to look for, because most people, if you've never hired before, there's a very high chance that you don't know how important it is and how hard it is to find the right people.
And if you don't do that correctly, that's kind of you've You're you're you're already sailing the ship in the wrong direction, you know So so that's going to be the most important feedback read that book Yeah Yeah, it's a lot of work. I mean you're gonna have to I I spent probably I did probably 80 hour weeks for a decade of my life, know, So it's a priority. It's a priority in your life, you know, I took calls at three in the morning four in the morning Five them. It didn't matter. Yeah worth all day
Joachim Eeckhout (31:13)
Yeah.
Sheldon Zhai (31:18)
every day. So that's what it takes. I don't think that you might need to do that. It depends on where you're starting. I started pretty much with nothing, like at zero. And I didn't even have other contacts. I didn't work at another company before where I could bring clients or whatever, that type of stuff. I didn't have any experience. I had zero business experience, actually, like formal business experience. I never worked at another job.
So for me, you know, I had to learn everything but But I also say that sometimes maybe that's a good thing so, you know Because the truth is also most companies out there don't do a great job at
lots of the things, you know, like, so you don't want to be, you don't want to be like, negatively influenced perhaps by past experiences. To think that that like, that's what good looks like. And I think it was actually a big benefit for myself and many of the early other team members, like we just figured it out based off of what logically made the most sense about how a business should be run. And as a result, I think we're, well, I think
Joachim Eeckhout (31:53)
Mm-hmm.
Sheldon Zhai (32:17)
for sure were much better run of a company than competitors. So yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (32:21)
Is there any other book you recommend?
Sheldon Zhai (32:23)
Yeah, another good book is Win Without Pitching. Win Without Pitching is great because it tells you how to sell without really selling. And it's very short, actually. so there's two books, right? There's Who, so you learn how to hire so that you can do a great job to actually deliver on what you're selling, and you should learn how to sell. So Win Without Pitching helps you to do that.
It's all about consultative selling and that type of stuff. It's especially important for agents. It's especially geared towards creatives and agencies and that type. It's a great book. It's really fantastic. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (32:57)
Thanks.
That brings us to the end of today's episode. Sheldon, thanks a lot for joining me and sharing your insights.
Sheldon Zhai (33:04)
Yeah, sure, for sure. And you know, like if anyone is interested or has other questions, I think you can, you know, just post our website, give my, you know, our information, they can email us, us on LinkedIn. You can add me personally on LinkedIn. You can send me messages and stuff like that. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty, I try to be very helpful, even if like, you know, whoever doesn't have any intention on working with us, you know, at least I'll try my best to give something of value.
to whoever asks. yeah, that's it. out our website if you're interested.
Joachim Eeckhout (33:37)
And I also recommend people to follow you on LinkedIn because you share a lot of posts with data and we don't see it often enough. So I think that's really important.
Sheldon Zhai (33:48)
Yeah, I think a lot of people like say a lot of stuff on LinkedIn and like a lot of it's not data bats. Like the data that we're sharing, it's all real. Like that's, that's also very important that you actually have real data. And, and that's part of actually, you know, what we've done with our Supreme Intelligence platform is actually have like a source of reliable data. we spent years just sanitizing, cleaning data, making sure that data architecture is correct. Like that is like the part that everyone, like everyone thinks AI is like the sexy part, right? Like.
Joachim Eeckhout (33:53)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Sheldon Zhai (34:16)
Literally, people don't realize how important the data pipeline and the cleanliness of the data is. And that's the hard part. It is so hard. But when you get the data correct and it's clean, it's really like you feel like you finally can take advantage of all of it. It's really impactful. So yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (34:34)
Yeah, thanks a lot. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss any updates. And for even more content on science marketing and communication, be sure to sign up for my newsletter at thesciencemarketer.com. Thanks for listening and see you next time.