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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what today's episode is really focusing at the intersection of so many important things for all of our business.
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Because I want to say that I'm talking to a marketer here today, but that's not the entire truth, because this is someone who also has a very deep understanding of branding.
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It's someone who has a very deep understanding of web development and user experiences.
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We're probably going to say that word 50 times here today.
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This is someone who has so much knowledge and works with some of the best brands in the world, brands that we've all heard of, brands that we all love.
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So I'm excited to tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Rolando Rojas.
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Rolando is the founder of Elliptic Marketing, which is a boutique marketing agency based in Miami that helps high-end brands provide elevated digital experiences to their customers.
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If you're sitting here thinking my business doesn't provide a digital experience, we're going to talk about what those are and how you can start to incorporate them in your business, in your onboarding flow, in your customer's experience with your business.
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Before leading Elliptic Marketing, rolando worked for iconic brands such as Christian Dior, swatch Group and Basecamp, which is a huge and important tech company that I know a lot of you listeners use in your businesses as well.
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He manages his company from South Florida, where he lives with his wife and his one-year-old son, and I want to tell you one thing that really stood out when we came across Rolando's business is the headline on his website says we're a development agency focused on marketing, and that's why I say that he plays at such an important intersection that impacts all of our businesses.
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We're all going to learn a lot today.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Rolando Rojas.
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Else, let's dive straight into my interview with Rolando Rojas.
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All right, rolando, I'm so excited to have you here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you for having me.
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Yes, you have done so many cool things in your career, both as an entrepreneur even before your entrepreneurial career began.
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So you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Rolando?
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How'd you start doing all these amazing things?
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So I'm originally from Venezuela.
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I moved here to the US when I was about 21 years old and something funny is that I didn't really want to do marketing when I was, you know, at university or when I was growing up.
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I wanted to be an engineer.
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Um, I like to thinker a lot with, um, anything digital.
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So I was a lot into web development, making applications, just engineering things.
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And my dad's an engineer and he is also a business owner.
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And one thing he told me was if you really like engineering, that should be your hobby.
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But really, what's going to help you go further in your career is to focus on business.
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So that's how I ended up in marketing.
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I thought what's the one thing I wouldn't want to delegate to someone else?
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And that was marketing.
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So that's what I went for and it turns out I ended up loving it and I hope I get to do it for the rest of my life.
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Yeah.
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I love that overview, especially because no-transcript really identified that niche for you.
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So one thing about luxury is that there is a big difference between you know the value that you pay for the product itself and the value that you pay for the experience.
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And we can think about cars, for example, the difference between getting a Toyota or BMW or a Lamborghini.
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The difference in price doesn't match with the difference in performance.
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So where is the rest of the value going?
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It's going into the experience of buying the car to having it, the details that go into the car, and it's just how the product makes you feel, more than how the product performs, and this translates into everything luxury.
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It translates into vacations, perfumes, watches and basically everything that you would consider luxury.
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It's about the experience.
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Yeah, rolando, I've done this for a long time, over a thousand episodes.
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I've never heard anyone articulate it as simply but as effectively as you just did, that the difference in price doesn't necessarily quantify the difference in performance.
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And you chalk that up to the difference in experience and feel.
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Give us some examples, because I do feel like very frequently in the business world we do use cars as the example because it's very easy.
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You know the old adage of well, my car takes me from A to B, whether it's a Lamborghini or a Toyota.
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That's true, but there's something more to it, and you talk about perfume, for example.
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What's that difference?
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Because a lot of people just think of a purchase as a transaction and they miss what encompasses that feeling.
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What are those things?
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Is it before the transaction?
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What encompasses that feeling?
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What are those things?
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Is it before the transaction?
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Is what happens after the transaction?
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Walk us through where those touch points are that you look at to build those luxury moments.
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Yeah, I can give you an example that always came to mind.
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So, years ago, I used to have a Mazda 3, so not a luxury car and my friend had a Mercedes I don't remember the model, but it was a nice car and I remember, every time I closed the door on his car it felt so nice, like the door would close perfectly and it would make like this really solid sound.
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And you know, my car had doors too and and they closed too, and they closed well, but it was the feeling that his car, uh, you know, had just, just with this thing, like the door would shut, and it was like a perfect sound, like a perfect fit.
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That is some of the things that you get with luxury.
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Like you, you get to go to the next level with with these details.
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Um, in perfumes, uh, you have the story that goes behind the perfume.
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So this wasn't just, uh, you know, a person trying to come up with something to sell.
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It usually comes with a rich backstory.
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Some of the best brands have their own fields of flowers and they have experts that are cultivating it and they are using it for the raw product of the perfume, and they have people that design the bottle in very special ways and it really comes with the whole experience of buying the product.
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It's different.
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It enriches the value that you get from the product.
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Yeah, even hearing you talk about this.
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What it's really bringing me back to is the value that you get from the product.
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Yeah, even hearing you talk about this.
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What it's really bringing me back to is the first time I finally signed up for a credit card that had a high annual fee.
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It was almost $1,000 in annual fees and I thought what's all the hype about?
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What's this going to look like?
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And, rolando, even from the second, I got the box that the card was delivered.
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It felt like a presentation.
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I felt like a presentation.
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I felt like I was joining this exclusive club for this credit card, and that showed me really what that high-end experience is like.
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So I've got to ask you, while we've got you here today, we all want to learn about how we can incorporate that into our businesses.
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And I want to ask you specifically about the digital side of the world, because you create these experiences even online, even from someone just landing on a business website.
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How do we translate these experiences into a digital format?
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So we do a lot of events.
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So I feel that that's going to be a good example here.
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So some of our clients do events at points of sale.
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So you may have been to like a Macy's or a Sephora and you see a brand having an event for a launch of a new product or something like that.
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We try to get the experience to start weeks before the customer actually goes to the event.
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So usually something that the brand tries to do is to build an audience of people that are going to go to the event well before the event starts, so they may have a database of previous customers.
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So a lot of what we do is we create invitations online that we send, maybe via email, sms or WhatsApp if it's in Latin America.
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Then we direct people into a website where they can learn about what they're going to see at the store, the new products that the brand is going to launch, what can they expect to get as an experience.
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And once people sign up, we usually continue the process of sending you know.
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We send a confirmation, we send a reminder, we ask people to check in before the event, we send them directions, we confirm, like their time and date, and after the event we send them directions, we confirm their time and date and after the event we also send follow-ups.
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For example, these are the products that you saw.
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We thank people for coming and we just try to keep the experience going.
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And something that helps me think about this process is something I learned from my marketing classes that you are the happiest about an experience right before you go through the experience and later on as you are remembering it.
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So if you think, let's think about going on vacation, you're planning your vacation now and you're thinking of all these great things that you're going to do with your family or with your friends and you're hyping yourself up all the time before the vacation.
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Then you go through the vacation, say, the day before, probably your hype level is at nine.
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You're super excited, you know you're going to hop in the plane, everything is going to go great.
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Then, as you go to the vacation and you're experiencing real things, sometimes you know you have to get into the plane and maybe that's not a great experience.
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Maybe you have to catch a cab, maybe the hotel is a little bit late.
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So your level of you know hype goes from a nine to like a seven, and then it's probably pretty, you know, steady, throughout the experience and you eventually you know you finish your vacation, you go back home, but then a year later when you are remembering it, you are remembering the best parts of the vacation.
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So your hype level goes all the way like nine or ten again.
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So really, the moments that you experience the vacation or the event at its highest is right before and after the event.
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So this is where we come in before and after the event.
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So this is where we come in.
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We're trying to make sure that the before of the event is as better as it could be getting people excited, getting people hyped, getting people prepared.
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So we minimize, let's say, the negative things about the event and once it finishes, we want to remind people of really the best parts of what the experience.
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So we want to make sure that both ends of the event are as great or even better than the event itself.
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Yeah, I love that perspective because Rolando really shows the fact that you brought it to.
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That vacation example is something that we can all relate to, and I think that that shows how much you think like the people on the receiving end of these experiences are, which obviously is very important.
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Even in marketing, we always hear, oh, have your customer avatar in mind and write all of your copy to that.
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So I want to ask you this, just as someone who knows all about the various talents and skills that you've got everything that I found online about you is so polished, it's so clean, it's so well done, and, with that in mind, I think to myself well, rolando is really good at web development, for example.
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He's really great at websites, but you've also talked about email marketing and all the reminders that you put into there, and he's really good at copying.
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He's really good at understanding the customer journey, not just the experience, but all the steps along the way.
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What are those places that your mind goes, especially when I think about the website?
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Is it?
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What is it a combination of?
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Because I know it's many things that we all take for granted, because we see the finished product.
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But is it the copy?
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Is it the visuals?
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Is it the flow?
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How do you even go about thinking about a website and making sure all of the ingredients are in the right place and in the right proportions?
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Something I like to do is stick to the basics.
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When, if you go to the world before, digital marketing was a thing and you see the kind of the kinds of signs that a store would have on its storefront, it was very simple, like you know, cleaners grocery store it was very simple, like you know, cleaners grocery store it was very simple.
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It, the design, just said what the store was offering, and I think we have really gone too far away from that.
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And sometimes you want to put really fancy copy on things and really, when someone is visiting your site, the first thing that they want to know is what do you do?
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What do you sell?
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So when you were mentioning that example of the copy that we have right on our website, like, we're a web development agency that focuses on marketing, I think it's a variation of that.
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You know that's what we do.
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We want to distill it into as few, fewer words as possible, and it's really difficult.
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We change that line every few months and you know I'm never happy with it.
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I'm always trying to improve it and I'm always trying to make it simpler.
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So really, the copy is very important and this is also something that I was lucky enough to learn from really experienced people like Jason Freed from Basecamp.
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He has a very good eye to write very short and simple copy, so that's something that I took, and every time I have to write copy, I use very simple language, very short sentences and just go straight to the point.
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There's always space and time to go into details, but you don't want to shove those details into people's faces, especially at the beginning.
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You just want to tell them what you do, why they should pick you, and then, if they want to go into the details, they can.
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Yeah, rolando, hearing that it's really cool getting some real life insights from Basecamp, for example, where you've done a lot of awesome work.
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I'd love for you to take us behind the scenes, just knowing that you've worked with such incredible brands Christian, dior, swatch Group.
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Obviously, basecamp you gave us one example about that short punchy, effective copy.
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What are some of those things that you took away from those experiences?
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I have been very lucky to have very good bosses throughout my career.
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So when I was in Christian Dior, I One of my bosses.
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His name was Luis.
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He was the way.
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If you could think that Christian Dior was a person I mean not the actual Christian Dior, but a person in today, he would be it Very elegant guy, very educated, and he taught me a lot about the experiences, like simple things like when you book a meeting, you know make sure everyone has it in their calendar, make sure everyone knows where it is, make sure that you keep the meeting on track and make sure that you give everyone a summary when you're done.
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Even though this is not something that is related to the business, it's related to the experience that you give your internal customers and I apply everything that he taught me in life.
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If we are inviting people over, I make sure that everyone knows all the details, where they're supposed to park, what we're going to do, so the experience really starts well before they get here.
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That was a really big thing when I work at Longines.
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Also one of my bosses in Switzerland, his name is Charles and he taught me something that was also very important, not as much related to the industry and luxury, but just to be really firm about your beliefs.
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And sometimes, if you feel strongly about something, you should fight for it, even if there's a risk for you.
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Um, that's what separates you from the rest being able to, you know, stand up for your ideas.
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And you know, sometimes you have to pound the table, as he would say, and say, no, this is what we're gonna do, and usually that comes with a risk.
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What if you mess up?
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What if you're wrong?
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You know, but what if you're right?
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And if you're right, you become part of that select group of people that others will say they know what they're doing.
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Yeah, and from Basecamp, you know, I was lucky enough to work with Jason Freed and with DHH, and they also have this idea that simple is better, that you really shouldn't overcomplicate things, that small teams are better, and all of those I believe are true, and I have used them in my professional life and they have really made me a better marketer professional life and they have really made me a better marketer.
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Yeah, rolando, it's so cool hearing all of these experiences, because you've picked up the good stuff all along the way, and what I'm really hearing as the common thread across all of those experiences high standards of excellence.
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Even to that small example of you saying, make sure everyone has the meetings on their calendar.
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That's just holding yourself to a high standard of excellence along with your teams, and it sounds like Basecamp very much had those small, intimate teams where you all did that for each other.
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That's awesome, and what I really like about every entrepreneur's story is that you get to take these awesome experiences from your professional career but also do things in your own way.
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And with Elliptic, obviously, you have built a company that reflects those positive things you picked up from your professional career, but also ingredients that are innate in you and in part of your personality, part of your upbringing.
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So I'd love to hear some of that comparison and contrasting of how have you enabled Elliptic to represent all of those things that are deeply embedded into you and the way that you want your company to show up in the world.
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You know it's funny, I never thought I would have an agency and the story of how this came up was that when I was working at one of these companies.
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You know large brands.
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Usually they have multiple agencies, just because there's many fields where you can't have experts everywhere, so you hire a bunch of agencies.
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And I remember early in my career I was in charge of sending marketing emails for one of these big brands.
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And just because logistics can be a little bit difficult, sometimes we had to schedule emails, like marketing emails, very close to the delivery date.
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So sometimes I would only have like a couple of days in advance, one day in advance, and I had this agency and they knew, knew this was a thing.
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But many times I would ask them hey, can you send this today?
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You know it's 10 am, can you send it by five today?
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We'll try to do things quickly.
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And many times they they wouldn't reply or they would reply and you know there would be errors in the copy or or something happened and the email wouldn't go out in time.
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And at the end of the day, you know, I couldn't just say to my boss you know, the agency, it's the agency's fault, right, it was my responsibility.
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When something was late, it was on me.
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So this agency was making me look bad, and this is something that I remembered.
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It's not only about the business, it's about the employee and the person just talking to the agency.
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You're making the business look bad, but you're also making them personally look bad.
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You're affecting their livelihood and as I moved on through my career, I kept encountering these agencies that they would just not work well.
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You would have a lot of account managers coming in and coming out and they wouldn't know your business.
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You would have large teams that apparently they would try to put together to work on something for you, and the experiences were never good and basically, just one day I thought if the bar is this low and I don't want to make it sound bad, but if the bar was this low, I can probably make it better.
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And in their defense, providing good service it's difficult everywhere.
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It's not only for agencies.
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You know it's difficult to provide good service in a restaurant or in a hotel.
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You need to train people and you need to get everyone in the same page about how they should treat a customer.
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So, but this was my main thing when I started Elliptic Marketing I wanted to provide a good agency.
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I wanted to provide a good agency.
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I wanted to provide a good experience.
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I wanted to always bring solutions.
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Never bring a problem without having one or two solutions to propose.
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And you know, make sure to be always responsive.
00:23:27.208 --> 00:23:35.888
And even the experience was always first, even more important than the final product.
00:23:35.888 --> 00:23:45.311
Of course, you want a final product to be very refined and of high quality, but the experience that we gave to the customer was our number one priority and it still is.
00:23:46.361 --> 00:24:19.127
Yeah, Rolando, I really appreciate how you called out I want to reiterate that for listeners about the bar being low, because it can sound harsh if we're saying that here on the air, but the truth is is that in today's world, especially with AI and modern technologies replacing and really providing different ways of doing things caring, that human element so many of the ingredients that we've seen here from you today in our conversation these are the things that set that higher bar, those things it's never been a lower bar with regards to people who are willing to go that extra mile.
00:24:19.127 --> 00:24:23.211
And so if you're willing to do that listeners, this speaks to all of you.
00:24:23.211 --> 00:24:25.519
It's not just Rolando who has this unfair advantage.
00:24:25.519 --> 00:24:33.730
If you're willing to care more than the average agency, than the average enterprise level company, there's a huge chance for you to succeed.
00:24:33.730 --> 00:24:40.973
And, Rolando, I love the fact that this has embedded itself into the way that you operate as an agency, and so I want to ask you this question.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:46.573
I don't always ask our guests this question, but just knowing that you have an immigrant story.
00:24:46.573 --> 00:24:58.945
I'm the son of an immigrant mom, and so I've always argued that there's something about that immigrant mindset that plants those entrepreneurial seeds into our minds, that it's in our DNA, and it definitely sounds like you have that in your family as well.
00:24:58.945 --> 00:25:06.001
How has that factored into the way that you view work, the way that you view possibilities, the way that you view starting your own business?
00:25:06.001 --> 00:25:23.866
I'd love to hear how that journey has played into your mindset and your DNA perhaps being from another country always gave me two points of view about everything.
00:25:23.906 --> 00:25:35.651
There's many things that I came to learn about the American market and the American way of doing things that they were clearly superior to how things are done in other countries.
00:25:35.651 --> 00:25:53.541
But sometimes there are also good alternatives that we don't consider here, and one of the things about working with luxury companies many of them are European is that that mindset always comes into play.
00:25:53.541 --> 00:25:59.253
You know there's a European way of doing things and Europeans do very well with luxury.
00:25:59.253 --> 00:26:28.457
Sometimes you have to adapt those ideas to the American market, so you have to learn how to mix those two points of view together, and you know, just having been born in a different country and being able to see these two different points of view in daily life for many years, it just helps you assimilate that when it's in a business setting.
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:36.067
Yeah, that's a really important perspective, and I'm even picturing just your geographic region, you know, living in Miami and especially.
00:26:36.067 --> 00:26:43.519
Just go to Brickell and you'll feel like you're seeing some of the most high end luxury brands in the world and the way their storefronts are positioned.
00:26:43.519 --> 00:26:47.290
And I love the fact that you called out even the European cultural differences.
00:26:47.290 --> 00:26:52.211
You just have such this melting pot, rolando, that you get to pick up all of these experiences.
00:26:52.211 --> 00:26:54.003
What are some of those differences?
00:26:54.003 --> 00:27:01.443
Because even hearing you say that out loud it makes me realize how much we don't necessarily consider here in the United States how different our market is.
00:27:01.443 --> 00:27:04.131
We're used to having a million different options.
00:27:04.131 --> 00:27:07.993
I mean, amazon has certainly changed the game for us as consumers as well.
00:27:07.993 --> 00:27:12.329
We can access most brands and have it the same day in most American cities.
00:27:12.329 --> 00:27:22.106
So what are some of those differences in markets that you see that we can glean and maybe pick up some of the advantages of the way that Europeans do things or South American countries do things?
00:27:23.500 --> 00:27:29.670
I think American companies are the best in the world in terms of efficiency and logistics.
00:27:29.670 --> 00:27:48.707
So whenever we had to do an event or whenever we just had to get products from A to B, doing it in the US, you felt that we had an advantage.
00:27:48.707 --> 00:28:05.997
I don't want to say better, but just different way of viewing things in terms of work culture, and this is not universal, but just in my experience.
00:28:05.997 --> 00:28:30.422
Like you know, sometimes we, if we had a business launch in Europe, we would try to take a little bit of time to have coffee, leave work aside for a little bit, try to build a more personal experience and then get back to business when in the US.
00:28:30.422 --> 00:28:40.484
I feel like we're trying to be very efficient about our time and if we only have two hours here and I travel for this, let's make sure that we spend as much time as we can talking about business and, you know, making things better.
00:28:40.484 --> 00:28:50.965
But I think the let's say the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
00:28:52.728 --> 00:28:58.955
Having a good relationship with someone is very important with your co-workers, with clients.
00:28:58.955 --> 00:29:03.795
You probably have heard like people make business with people that they like.
00:29:03.795 --> 00:29:09.811
So not necessarily people that provide the best value or, you know, the best product, but people that they like.
00:29:09.811 --> 00:29:22.789
So you know, bringing that from Europe and from Latin America, where we're trying to be maybe a little bit more personable and not focus as much on efficiency, it's good.
00:29:22.789 --> 00:29:31.368
And then, once you have that business in your hand and you can use all the American efficiency and the way of doing business, it's a great mix.
00:29:31.368 --> 00:29:37.867
I would say we have an advantage being in the US.
00:29:37.867 --> 00:29:49.964
It's just, you know, having that mindset of efficiency and of growing business is just very powerful and I think that's what makes this a great country to do business in.
00:29:50.767 --> 00:29:51.910
Yeah, really well said.
00:29:51.910 --> 00:29:56.166
I love the fact that you called out the truth is almost always somewhere in the middle.
00:29:56.166 --> 00:30:01.763
It's really blending all of those things and to me, as someone who comes from an immigrant family, that's what I view it's.
00:30:01.763 --> 00:30:08.849
It truly is that blending, that meshing of all these different experiences, perspectives that you've shared with us here today, rolando.
00:30:08.849 --> 00:30:21.407
So I want to squeeze two more questions, and I knew we'd be short on time because there's so many different topics that you can talk about, but anytime I have someone from the marketing world on and you obviously also come from the development side of the world, but also working with luxury brands.
00:30:21.407 --> 00:30:26.688
It's such an important intersection and, of course, ai is impacting all of those industries.
