Meet an Entrepreneur: Paul Crandall

After helping introduce Red Bull to North America and GoPro to the world, Paul Crandell has some ideas about what it takes for a company to succeed. Yes, you need a great product and a team of opinion leaders to lead the way, but to really excel, says Paul, you better get your priorities right. 

“A brand is like a human,” he says. “Some people are cool, others awkward, and some unclear on who they are. Being cool and having fun doesn’t mean a lack of accountability, but when you build a great company culture it exudes outward because the internal team loves what they do and what the brand stands for. So as a brand, it’s best to start with who you are and what your culture is like. That becomes your number one superpower because everyone will want to work there and everyone will love your brand. And internally, I don’t think anyone has ever come into a fun environment and just sat around and taken a paycheck. Those environments are inherently inspiring.”

It’s easy to say you want an inspiring culture, but Paul knows firsthand that it’s not easy to do in today’s business climate. After his winning and long-term stints at Red Bull—he was the 15th stateside employee at their North American headquarters and helped take the U.S. market from $5M to $2B—and GoPro ($60M to $1.3B and $8B market cap to IPO), he blew through five CMO jobs in eight years, largely because the CFOS and CEOs couldn’t understand that you need to build the culture first. Also a constant challenge with executive teams—content marketing done right takes time. 

“Not all but many executives of today seem to think everything is about short term ROI,” says Paul. “But Red Bull and GoPro were about the culture they wanted to live in. That’s so much more important than the quick returns on ad spends or immediate likes and clicks. The mindset was, we have to be relevant in the communities where we want to do business. That’s what real storytelling gets you: authenticity and trust. 

“Each of those companies I worked with over that eight year span had a honeymoon period. The executive teams told me that they agreed with the culture-first worldview in the interview process. And on the content marketing side I got a lot of ‘yes, yes, we will have events and storytelling and a budget.’ But then within three months it was, ‘Let’s go get a bunch of influencers on social media with lots of followers, or run ads only tied to sales. This made me want to vomit—sorry, but it was a gross way of thinking for the long term health of a brand.  

“Don’t get me wrong, paid ads and influencers with a lot of engagement and followers are important to the marketing cocktail. My issue with focusing on it too much, though, is that agencies and influencers just see you as a checkbook and their audiences do too. Consumers know it when everything is bought and paid for. It’s the non-transactional storytelling that truly makes a brand sticky. Doing cool shit with cool people and building trust is critical. I knew those brands wouldn’t last long without the authenticity. With your athletes and ambassadors—or Luminaries as we call them in my current enterprise—it has to be about finding people who believe in your brand and giving them the tools to tell your story.”

It’s not hyperbole to say Paul helped invent content marketing. What he accomplished at Red Bull and GoPro set the benchmark for how storytelling can put a growing company on a rocket’s trajectory. But he also knows how to get an executive team organized to succeed when growth happens. “Companies often start out with everyone doing everything, and that’s fine at first, but it’s not sustainable when growth kicks in. The most important lesson I learned at Red Bull and GoPro and beyond is that everyone needs to have a unique single-minded objective in pursuit of that bigger goal. Find out where everyone’s passion and expertise is, put them in their swim lanes, and go.”

In addition to the consulting work that Paul offers through 1 Degree Consulting—he’s a Hence Expert as well—he is a founder of Lumi, which is bringing mobile big screen entertainment to the masses, from parents showing the kids movies in the backyard, to digital murals, and beyond. To move the business forward, as he did with Red Bull and GoPro, he is building a team of believers he calls Luminaries tasked with producing storytelling that speaks to and learns from every conceivable customer demographic. “You start a business by putting a product out there, but then you have to turn your ears on and become shepherds for what customers want. That’s one of the many things our Luminaries offer us—constant feedback around needs.”