Podcast Recap: Antonella Pisani Joins the Just Get Started Podcast With Brian Ondrako
The Just Get Started Podcast helps people navigate life. Host Brian Ondrako started this podcast hoping to inspire people on the cusp of getting started or needing insight and direction.
Here are the highlights from Antonella’s conversation with Brian Ondrako on starting a business, building it to run on its own, and the things you can do to keep your sanity along the way.
Table of Contents Show
Brian Ondrako: Welcome to another episode of the Just Get Started podcast. I'm your host, Brian Ondrako, and thanks again for being a part of this journey.
Today's guest is Antonella Pisani. She is the founder and CEO of Dallas-based Eyeful Media. It’s a digital marketing and consulting firm focused on performance marketing and digital strategy for mid-market companies.
Founded in 2017, the company has experienced exponential growth, fueled exclusively by word-of-mouth referrals.
As a result, Eyeful Media has ranked in the top 11% on the Inc. 5000 list for the past two years. It is one of the fastest-growing and privately-held companies in America.
They are ranked 17th in Dallas, 37th in Texas, and 38th overall in advertising and marketing firms. Eyeful Media is also ranked 13th on Adweek's list of Fastest Growing Agencies for 2022. It ranks fifth in the West and Southwest.
Eyeful Media is a member of the Dallas 100 for 2022. So, without further ado, let's welcome Antonella. Antonella, how are you today?
Antonella Pisani: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
Brian Ondrako: The stuff you guys have done is phenomenal. What comes into your head when the Inc. 5000 where you've ranked and the growth?
Antonella Pisani: It's still weird to hear. We're celebrating six years, so I think the way that it's come together, it's just complete disbelief. It's like, "Is he talking about us right now?” It's fun to see that.
The Early Days of Eyeful Media
Brian Ondrako: I want to discuss how you got here. Going back not only six years but even the years prior. Did you always want to start a business? Did you know what entrepreneurship was and that type of stuff back when you were younger?
Antonella Pisani: I did. I was always a little hustler. Not in a bad way, but my dad owned a jewelry store and so I grew up in my dad's store. Even into my teens, I remember figuring out that I wasn't into baseball, but I would buy baseball cards and resell them.
I would set up as a dealer at these shows and the moms loved me because they trusted me more than the older guys selling cards.
I always had that entrepreneurial drive. I also figured out how to compete. As I got older, it became more about wanting to work for myself and not necessarily answer to anyone else.
Starting In Corporate America
Brian Ondrako: You went into corporate America for a while, right?
Antonella Pisani: I started as a web designer and developer in '96. It was a work-study job. I started interning for TransWorld Snowboarding Magazine at 17. I always worked from a young age and then went to a web analytics firm, Gateway Computers.
I worked for ProFlowers, Guitar Center, JCPenney, and Fossil. ProFlowers was a startup, but it was a $125 million startup when I got there, and it was at $650 million when I left.
Brian Ondrako: Did you think going to corporate America was the right path?
Antonella Pisani: Coming out of school, I had a bunch of student loans, so, it just felt very natural to work for a company.
I learned a ton and always had side projects. I had websites on the side that I would tinker with. It wasn't until 10 years ago I started thinking, "OK,what comes next?" It's something I struggled with.
I had those side projects to feed that part of me.
Brian Ondrako: What were you doing? What were some of the projects? Anything fun?
Turning Side Hustles Into a Career
Antonella Pisani: I always had websites that would display advertising, but that's how I learned things like paid search. I was doing goto.com, which was before Google, which was before even Overture, where it was a penny a click.
I built websites for the university. I was able to take some of that content. I was like, "Hold on a second. Why don't I build a consumer-facing website?" It was generally in that space.
Brian Ondrako: The challenge folks have is struggling to do the side business. I don't know if they get burned out, but it's being able to push themselves to learn a new skill.
Antonella Pisani: I jokingly call my brain pinball on multi-ball, where there's always something going on. There's always some idea that I'm thinking about. I think that's part of it. I ask myself, “Is it hard to stick with it?” I think when you're starting your own thing, you're not getting that payoff immediately.
If you're going all in, you may be taking a big step backward financially and need to get to a place where you're comfortable doing that.
But, I think for me, with a lot of the projects, there were some starts and stops there, but with everything, you learn and have fun. To me, I wasn't doing it for the income specifically, it was something fun to do. If I happened to get some checks from advertising sales, that would be awesome.
What Was Your “Getting Started” Moment?
Brian Ondrako: I always like to talk about the “getting started” moment. When did you decide to leave corporate America?
Antonella Pisani: I had been doing turnarounds for a while. Guitar Center was a turnaround, JCPenney, Fossil. Frankly, I was just burnt out. I had been working a lot and had been in some tricky environments. Turnaround situations don't necessarily bring out the best in everyone.
Brian Ondrako: What do you mean by turnaround?
Antonella Pisani: The business was struggling and I had to rebuild teams. I had to make it profitable and turn around a trend.
I've always loved to travel and loved photography and had gotten myself to a point where I was like, "You know what? I'm taking a year off." I think so many people talk about this idea of, "Oh, I'm going to take time off and travel." I had been fortunate enough to go to some pretty cool places, like Africa and a fair amount of Latin America. I just decided, "No, I'm going to go do this. I'm taking this year off to travel."
I was working on my website just to keep my brain sharp, but through kind of a sad turn, which ended up with a happy ending, I had a crazy year. Lost a friend, had a friend become paralyzed, and then my closest friend ended up diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.
I was like, "You know what? I'm not going back to corporate. I'm going to focus on being a best friend. That's my priority. I can stretch this out for a while." It was during that time a friend who is the CEO of an ad agency was like, "Hey, can you help him out?" I was like, "Yeah, I can do that and still be a good friend because I've got the flexibility." Fast-forward, he's fine, five years in remission. Memorial Sloan Kettering saved his bacon.
It wasn't this idea of, "I'm going to go start a company." It was, "I want flexibility. I want to work on something where I can be true to my values and do fun work." I missed being in marketing, in the sense that as you grow within a corporation, a lot of times your job is to be a leader, your job is to be a manager. A lot of times, it's your team doing the marketing and I miss that.
For me, it was, "Hey, I want to get back into that again. I miss it and I want that flexibility. Tired of political shenanigans." This whole thing started with that. It was one client and the rest is history. It's all been word-of-mouth and just treating clients well and letting them spread the word for us.
The Toughest Part of Start a Business
Brian Ondrako: What was the hardest part of starting the business? Is there one that you can remember that was challenging?
Antonella Pisani: I went into it with this idea of, "Hey, this is consulting and it's going to supplement what I'm doing with this website that I'm working on." It wasn't this like, "Oh, I'm starting an agency, I'm starting a business." I had never worked for an agency before, so I didn't know that was the hardest part. I knew, financially, it was going to be very different from going back to a corporate role at a VP or SVP level.
I think that was tricky initially, but I made some decisions. I went from an apartment with an awesome mountain view to a little bit simpler place and made some of those decisions that reduced expenses. One of the tougher pieces, in the beginning, was just making that trade-off.
Brian Ondrako: You said you weren't intending to start an agency, but it turned into that. At what point were you like, "Oh, crap. This is going a little faster than I anticipated?" How did you handle that?
Antonella Pisani: The first year or two were not complete chaos. One of the bigger inflection points was, "OK, I need to hire a full-time employee." That's a big jump because originally it was just me and then basically, what would happen is, I was doing digital strategy. I might say, "Hey, look, there's room for opportunity on your organic surge." The client would say, "OK, can you help me with that?" I'd go find a contractor to help.
When you're using contract labor, you're paying for their working hours. You don't have a ton of excess expenses there. I think it was that inflection point of, "OK, it's time to hire FTEs and start realizing that I am going to be paying for some other time that may not be billable." I would say it was about two, two-and-a-half years in, but all of a sudden, it was like, "What is happening here? This is crazy."
Brian Ondrako: Why did you decide to go that route? Because you could have kept the route of the freelancer contract-type role. Why, for you, was it important to bring the full-time employees in?
Antonella Pisani: It was predictability around resource availability. That was one of the biggest things, was just I didn't feel good saying, "OK, I'm going to go pitch some business and then I need to make sure that there's someone available to do the work." Just because of the quality of work that I wanted us to deliver. It reached this point where there was enough consistency, but also, just that scramble to make sure someone had time. "OK, are they going to do this at night? When are they going to be able to do it?"
That just got too chaotic and stressful. Then funny enough, part of it was I wanted to get off of the healthcare marketplace and I needed a second person to do that. For a small business, you needed at least two people. That was part of that first hire as well.
Relying on Remote Work For Your Business
Brian Ondrako: What was your thought process around the structure of the business? How did you come to that conclusion?
Antonella Pisani: I started by finding people either that I knew who had maybe worked for me, or else asking them who I could trust. It was much more important to me to focus on the quality of the individual than where they lived. Then that's just something that progressed.
I think we're up to 16 states and 20-something cities. Certainly adds an interesting element, but I think it was just prioritizing finding the right people instead of where they happen to be located.
Brian Ondrako: It seems like you just figured out, "This is easy enough. We're doing it with contractors, let's just do it full-time?"
Antonella Pisani: We were doing it with contractors, clients were in different cities, and so there was some benefit to having people in different time zones.
It was harder pre-COVID, with some of the early hires having never worked from home because that was new. That was a challenge early on before people knew their rhythm and had a dedicated office in their homes or a dedicated desk. It (working from home)became easier as people got trained during the pandemic.
Brian Ondrako: How do you communicate with your staff?
Antonella Pisani: There's a monthly all-hands that's just a call or a video. We'll occasionally fly people in so that they can meet in person. That's been important. We use a platform called 15Five for performance and that's integrated with Slack.
I would say the very first time I did a Start, Stop, Continue survey as the team grew, the overwhelming request was, "Please, dear god, get us Slack."
We had been using just GChat or Gmail and everyone was dissatisfied with that solution and making investments like that. There's a lot of interaction, I mean, we're on video, it's on, but the primary means, the all-hands is an important part of things. But yeah, I think I flew 13 people in, in April, out to Dallas.
What Would You Have Done Differently?
Brian Ondrako: Knowing what you do today, going back six years, what do you optimize for today?
Antonella Pisani: I jokingly said my brain's pinball on multi-ball, and so I don't need documents in an organized place. I can dump everything into a single Google Drive folder and just search for it.
But, realizing most people aren't built like that. It took us a couple of years before I said, "Let's organize things so that new hires can find them easily. Let's put in project management." I would say one of the ones we still struggle with is excellent capacity management. Make sure we understand who has the bandwidth, and how much bandwidth, and predict when we need new hires.
About a year ago, we switched to using a service to do that whenever we'd have a new hire. That came way too late. I should have done that starting with the very first one.
Operational things have never been my strong suit. Whenever I'd go into a new job, like when I went to Fossil, one of my first hires said, "I need an awesome head of e-comm operations." I'm just not built that way and so, surrounding myself with people who helped up our game was important.
From Marketer To Leadership
Brian Ondrako: You mentioned earlier that you love the marketing side. Then you went into more leadership roles. Now, six years in, do you get your hands dirty and still do some of the marketing stuff? Do you enjoy that or are you on the operations side?
Antonella Pisani: I've always been very trusting in my team and learned how to delegate, I would say skills that I probably learned at ProFlowers.
I struggled with it in one of my corporate jobs, where I didn't feel like I had an A+ team. But whenever I've been able to handpick my team and hire the people that I wanted, I've always been very comfortable delegating. That part of it hasn't bothered me as much.
My job is now leading an organization and I've got great marketers. I get involved, I would say, more with our strategy projects than ongoing paid search or ongoing SEO, things like that.
I like to listen in. We have a monthly call. We get the paid search folks and the SEO folks together. They're all just sharing learnings and what's happening in the industry. I love listening in on that, but I've got to let them run their business.
What they need me to do is to push the things that will get us to the next level. It's a hard thing to navigate, but I pick my projects. I'm involved with a couple of nonprofit organizations. That's where I get to be a marketer.
When You Realize You’ve Made It
Brian Ondrako: Yeah, I guess that's always the struggle. If you're the practitioner, if you're in there and then you have to do something else.
Antonella Pisani: If I'm doing that, I'm not building a healthy organization that can run on its own. I took what I would say was my first real vacation in July. I left the country for two weeks and my right hand, he's like, "Don't take your laptop. You don't need it." I didn't take it and I didn't need it.
Brian Ondrako: The business was still there when you got back, right?
Antonella Pisani: The business was still there. I think that was one of the weirdest things. It was before that trip, but maybe I'd taken a few days off and this weird realization that's like, "Oh my god, this is a living, breathing thing. It runs when I'm not around to watch it. It's running. We're managing the business for clients." The team closed a cool account while I was on vacation. I never even saw the RFP or anything.
I think it's those moments when you realize that this thing you've built is off and running and you're there to help get it to the next level. Support your team. Inspire them, but they don't need you in the weeds. I'm here as a sounding board if they have questions. Certainly trying to, if I do jump on a biz dev call or something like that, understand the marketing challenges so that I can help the team if we win the account. But yeah, it's a big transition from that operator role, where you're the ultimate expert, and then having to let that go.
Brian Ondrako: You talked about taking a vacation, but is there anything you do to stay sane when things get crazy?
Antonella Pisani: I walk for an hour to two hours a day. I get up and have breakfast. I have an enormous dog and we'll usually go 45 minutes to an hour in the morning. I keep a weird schedule, I almost think I keep Mountain Time, even though I live in Central because I usually won't get to my desk until about 9:30, but that gives me an hour to clear my head and listen to music. Sometimes I listen to a podcast. It's when I consume a lot of leadership audiobooks and things like that. Then I'll cap the day with an hour as well.
Because I have people in every time zone, I may go for a walk at 4:30. It's only 2:30 West Coast and then I'm available a little later to wrap up with the folks on the West Coast. But that practice has helped me a lot. When I was in corporate, I was good about walking half an hour before work because I think it's nice to have something like that before you start your day. It's a much better way to start the day, versus running frantically and ending up at your desk.
Then at night, it's a small thing, but I think it's just a mentality, it's like, no matter how dead tired I am, I'll reflect on, "Hey, what were some good things that happened today?" Then just being grateful for health and things like that.
Even on the toughest day, there are always a couple of things. It could be a text from a friend. It could be, "Hey, it was sunny out and I got to walk in shorts instead of a winter coat." Just those little things. It's ending the day in a positive light, no matter what happened that day.
Brian Ondrako: You mentioned books. Do you have any recommendations?
Reading During Your Spare Time
Antonella Pisani: Yeah, the one that I tend to recommend to everyone is The “Go-Giver.”
Antonella Pisani: It’s a lot of why we've grown, how we've grown. It is on those principles of just trying to create value and be that connector. I think it's very much who I am. I loved that one. I just finished the “Trillion Dollar Coach,” which was excellent.
“Good to Great,” if you haven't read that. “What You Do Is Who You Are,” that's another cool one.
I liked the “Trillion Dollar Coach.” It's a lot of leadership lessons on everything from active listening. It's just the way that it's woven together. It's an easy read.
For me, part of being a leader is continuing to push myself. I use one of the two walks to listen, learn, and expand my skills.
Brian Ondrako: I don't know if you know David Goggins. He's had two books, “Can't Hurt Me” and “Never Finished.” I've listened to him on audiobooks, but mostly I read. It's my way to wind down.
You have got to figure out what you like. If you're, "Hey, I'm going on walks, I want to do it this way." Well, then do that. Figure out what's best for yourself and make those decisions.
Antonella Pisani: People struggle if they don't want to read. I will always listen to part of an audiobook to see if I like the narrator because that can make or break it.
Before I started doing that, I'd get five minutes into a book and say, "I can't listen to this person." So, I would abandon it. I read on my Kindle almost every night, but that's winding down. I don't want to be in bed thinking about leadership lessons before I sleep.
Another good one is “Bet on Talent,” which I think was someone from Chick-fil-A.
Finding The Inspiration To Succeed
Brian Ondrako: Let’s end on this: if someone is getting started today, Is there any encouragement, a first nudge, or a first step? It could be a quote, could be a book to read, or you would share as an encouragement to get them started.
Antonella Pisani: The “Go-Giver” is great. I've always loved Emerson's definition of success. That's been a guide for me. Success is leaving the world a bit better.
I'd encourage you to go out and look at it. I've got a pen that I had engraved on it, "Leave it better." It was everything you touch, trying to make it a little bit better. I love that quote.
I think some of it was just thinking some people have fear and that doubt. Just stop and think, "OK, what is the worst-case scenario? What could go wrong?" It's like, "So, does going wrong just mean, 'Hey, I've got to go back to a regular job in two months'. That's the worst-case scenario."
Everyone starts in a different spot, but sometimes realizing what failure looks like may not be that big of a deal and you have to take a step forward. It's the cheesy, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Right? Try to break it down into steps.
Brian Ondrako: Yeah, well, even for your business, you can't get six years if you didn't have Day 1. You have to have that first day and then get to the second and slowly but surely. You make decisions each day, and you figure them out. You don't know everything from Day 1.
Antonella Pisani: There's a tremendous amount of imposter syndrome everywhere. Everyone still gets it. There was something I read about, if you're struggling with that, compare yourself to the average person, not the people just around you. You're going to realize if it's something that, could be e-commerce or whatever it is that you want to work on. Just try not to get trapped in that. It's OK if you don't have all the answers.
I still remember it was a little bit over six years ago, sitting in a cafe building my first proposal. I didn't know what the heck I was doing.
It was a 30-page proposal, but it was that kind of go-giver concept of, "Hey, I'm going to show a ton of information, just to show that I know what I'm doing." Try to create value and try building that person's confidence to say, "Oh yeah, there's a lot of stuff that's wrong."
People think they must keep information close to the vest to feel smart or create value. That does not build trust. So, don't be afraid to give some of your knowledge away, because it gets you started a little bit. Yeah, it's a bunch of things, not just one.
Brian Ondrako: It provides guideposts as people think about their journey. Where can folks say hello to you? Where can they check out the company?
Antonella Pisani: LinkedIn, it's Antonella Pisani. I've been trying to share some information. Then for the company, it's eyefulmedia.com.
Writing About Business Culture
Brian Ondrako: What type of writing are you doing?
Antonella Pisani: I'm passionate about business culture and purpose-led organizations and values. I have written a fair amount on building remote cultures, purpose-led businesses, and some e-com best practices.
Brian Ondrako: Antonella, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing the journey.
Antonella Pisani: It's been fun reminiscing a little bit, too, about the old days. Thank you.