Meet John, a Growth Marketer at Tuff. John partners with Tuff clients to experiment, test, and drive growth across multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email, and others. When he’s not optimizing website conversion rates or launching influencer marketing campaigns, you will most likely find him on a bike or in his kitchen.

Below, he shares clever puns, what he’s learned from Buddhism and music, and common ecommerce pitfalls when transitioning from crowdfunding to setting up shop.

Can you tell me a bit about your 3-5 years before Tuff? What were you working on? 

I’ve worked primarily with early stage ecommerce startups. 

I worked with a parent company in Boulder called Eco Brands Group, which has a few consumer brands. They all use upcycled materials like old bicycle tubes or an old advertising banner to make their products. We were a small team so I was running all marketing channels and working with founders. This structure was not entirely different from an agency model, I think that’s kind of what drew me to Tuff.

Right before Tuff, I was with a company called Bullbird. They make travel accessories. That’s actually where I first learned about Tuff and met Ellen. Ellen pitched Tuff to be an acquisition agency and partner for Bullbird. I was working as Director of Marketing at the time. I was brought on to lead ecommerce marketing and get them off the ground and transition from their crowdfunding roots into a full on ecommerce brand. I was running paid acquisition, email marketing, customer service and pretty much anything that needed to be done for the brand. 

When the pandemic hit Bullbird’s products, for lack of better words, fell out of the sky. At the same time, I saw Tuff was hiring for a Growth Marketer and I reached out the same day. I remembered being impressed by the meeting I had with Tuff at Bullbird and how they talked to clients. I thought the interview process felt really genuine and natural as well. I feel happy to be at Tuff. 

What has the experience been like to go from in-house to Tuff, where you work with multiple clients?

Yeah, it’s definitely been different. I wear a lot of hats at Tuff but not all the hats. I am able to direct my energy more fully into paid acquisition and growth. I enjoy talking with founders and working with them, I’ve been doing this in some way for most of my career. I like learning about what they’re struggling with or where they’re stuck on growth and help them understand marketing on a deeper level. 

It’s been interesting shifting to building trust while remote, just over a video call. I’ve had to learn to bring a new comfort level and intentional focus on relationship building. I want the complicated pieces of growth marketing and metrics to feel accessible. And, I focus a lot on bringing the trust level up.

How do you build that trust?

Setting up a good foundation is really important, that’s something I’ve learned while at Tuff. The team stresses this a lot. I work to be able to quickly explain who we are, where we’re strong, and how that applies to their company. We try not to be jargon heavy, just really clear on the strategy we’re presenting. When we work internally as a team, we can slip into some jargon or just get excited and passionate about this work. With founders, I try to understand the depth of information they want. Founders are often thinking about a million things and formula for cost per sale is probably not top of mind all the time. So, I pay a lot of attention to how much information they want. 

I’ve always had a community oriented mindset. And, think about how my work impacts my immediate community. I think this has helped me learn how to talk to certain people and be a good partner for them, no matter where we’re coming from.

You’ve worked in ecommerce for a number of years now. What do you think first time ecommerce teams typically get wrong?

I think there can sometimes be an expectation of flipping on a switch and making everything sell as fast as possible. That’s often why people started their company in the first place. I think it’s great to have ambitious goals but you also have to answer the question of ‘how are we going to get there?’. How do we make our sales goals work over time? 

Would you ever start an ecommerce business? 

No, not at all. 

I don’t think I would want to run my own business of any kind. I like working on people’s projects with them which is why I think the agency world is so amazing. I’ve worked really close with a number of founders and we’re working day and night to get it to work and there’s a lot of risk involved. And that’s just not for me. 

How has it been working on a fully remote team for the first time?

My personality is on the more introverted side. At work, when I do talk to people it’s for smaller increments of time over video. Like 30-minutes to an hour. And, the calls are planned. So, my energy doesn’t feel as drained. Whereas in an office, you are more likely to have anyone pop into your office for small talk. Having a remote set up, there is more structure and I can plan my week for days with no meetings. 

What is it about your work that gets you fired up? 

Every day at Tuff, I’m blown away by how quickly the day goes. It’ll be two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m shocked. 

I really like client management, talking with clients, and understanding what’s important to them week to week. I also like with Tuff that even though I’m a Growth Marketer, I also handle a channel or two for each account. So I can get into the weeds, plan days where I don’t have any calls, and just focus on working on my accounts. I also like contributing to our blog. I started out my career in a content marketer role, running a blog for a company. Getting back to contributing to a blog has been fun, especially to be writing about stuff that I’m interested in. 

Being able to focus on growth marketing while having a bunch of different ways to play into Tuff’s success is really exciting for me. 

What do you like doing outside of work?

I spend a lot of time seeing films, listening to music, checking out libraries, and exploring Denver. I also like to get out a lot, I go mountain biking and camping pretty frequently.  

Do you ever find inspiration for work in these non-work activities?

I do! Recently, I was watching an NPR series where they talk to musicians about their process. 

They were talking to a hip hop producer named 9th Wonder and he was sharing that he does something called 30 by Thursday. Every week, he tries to make 30 new beats by Thursday and that’s his way to keep himself geared into his profession. He said it can be easy to just be like doodling with different sounds, get lost and not actually make music. 

I thought that was really interesting and starting thinking about how that could work for Tuff. What could that look like from a content production perspective? I shared this with the team in a meeting and it stuck. We created a content strategy into a 30 by Thursday type sprint. Our sprint is over a few months but we’re focused on writing a lot right now.

I enjoy figuring out where your outside life fits into your work life, I think that is pretty interesting. At Tuff, we make it a point to talk about what’s going on in our lives outside of when we’re sitting by the computer. And I think that makes the relationships a lot healthier. We learn a lot more about each other. 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post Tuff’s Growth Marketer, John, on Having a Community-Oriented Mindset appeared first on Tuff.

This was last updated on November 8, 2023 with new links, information, and data on our current career framework and approach to career development. 

Tuff is committed to building a high-performing team focused on balancing individual and company growth. We have always believed it is important for the individuals at Tuff to grow alongside each other and our business. 

To support these behaviors, we created a career framework with 7 Levels, 2 Paths, and 3 Steps. By offering a clear vision of what the future holds for each individual within our framework, we ensure that no one is left uncertain about their path and how to contribute effectively. This transparency not only helps reduce pay disparities but also boosts employee retention, which is a pivotal aspect of our effort to establish an equitable compensation program and creating a place where people are inspired to do their best work. 

In this post, we’ll dive into the career framework and the steps we’ve taken to build ours at Tuff. 

Creating a Career Framework

Here are the steps we took to build ours:

1. Define our compensation philosophy 
2. List out your Company Roles
3. Create your Career Framework matrix
4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

Okay, now for the nitty-gritty. Here’s how to apply each step and what it looks like at Tuff:

1. Outline your compensation philosophy

A Compensation Philosophy is an explicit overview of a company’s views and decisions about total compensation. In job descriptions, you may have seen statements like “we pay 50th percentile” or “we don’t adjust pay based on location”. These are compensation decisions in action that are based on that company’s philosophy on pay.

The type of company and culture we’re building is a reflection of each individual that works at Tuff. As we grow and our team evolves, so will our practices and policies. Our Compensation Philosophy is a reflection of where we are today but it is living and breathing and we may make updates in the future. We strongly encourage team members to ask questions about our approach to compensation.

Having our Compensation Philosophy principles explicitly outlined and agreed upon keeps our Career Framework consistent and systematic while also giving the team a shared understanding of how compensation decisions are made. Our Compensation Philosophy is intended to ensure our compensation decisions are:

• Equitable among employees, positions, and locations
• Supportive of our core business objectives
• Competitive with our market
• Easily understood by every team member

There are two sets of clients at Tuff: the companies that we partner with and the employees of Tuff. For both of these groups, our goal is healthy and sustainable growth. In our approach to compensation, we borrow a lot of the same principles that have lead to growth with our clients.

We’re transparent

Since day 1, we’ve prioritized internal financial transparency. We give team members access to base salary data for every role at Tuff because it is important for everyone to understand their compensation options. 

We’re consistent

We have a standard Career Framework so each team has the same number of Levels and paths for growth. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a standardized base salary. This means we don’t adjust pay based on who negotiates and who doesn’t. We also don’t adjust salary based on location because team members provide equal value to Tuff no matter where they log in from.

We’re data-informed

Pay transparency reduces pay gaps and improves employee retention. We will always look to data to understand the practices for creating an equitable compensation program.

We balance company and individual growth 

We aim to collectively balance ownership for individual growth alongside company growth. We encourage individual growth through our Career Framework and its ties to base salary and 401k matching. We also offer compensation pinned to profit and revenue to empower everyone at Tuff to make decisions as if they are spending their own money—because they are.

2. List out your Company Roles

At Tuff there are two core roles on the team. At the highest level, they are:

Growth Marketer: Looks holistically at a client’s existing condition, finds the bottlenecks preventing them from achieving their goals, and corrects them with innovative improvements

Channel Specialist: Focuses exclusively on one platform or channel (i.e. PPC Specialist, SEO Strategist). They have a strong marketing foundation and specialize in one or two areas.

3. Create your Career Framework matrix

Once you have your company roles listed out, we have 11 at Tuff, the next step is to create a company-wide career progression chart. While we customize  the description for each of these roles, we always start from the same set of Levels and Steps for each role. 

Here’s the template we use for each role at Tuff:

7 Levels: There are 7 Levels in the Tuff Career Framework: L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6, L7. Using this Framework, every team at Tuff will have role specific definitions for each Level.

2 Paths: We offer 2 Career Paths: People Manager and Individual Contributor. This splits off at L4. We do this to offer flexibility on how you can grow at Tuff and to account for the mix of skillsets that make a strong team.

3 Steps: Within each Level there are three Steps: A,B,C. Steps are marked by the progression ring in your Level in Pando.

4. Define the Levels for each role and the Steps for your company

This is where we put the Company Roles and Career Framework matrix together, it’s where the magic happens! 

These are our org-wide Level definitions at Tuff. We have these to provide objective standards and calibration among Levels. 

Each role at Tuff then has its own set of competencies that further defines each Level. Those can be found in our career progression tool, Pando. 

We’ll share our competencies for a Senior Growth Marketer so you can see what that looks like in practice: 

How this connects to our compensation model

The types of compensation we offer are informed by our Compensation Philosophy and growth goals. At Tuff, we offer a matrix of compensation to balance short-term and long-term payouts as well as payouts based on individual growth and company growth.

Base salary is short-term, guaranteed pay based on individual growth. We offer standardized base salaries at Tuff. Using our Career Framework, every possible Level for every possible role at Tuff has a set base salary. As a team member grows and progresses through Levels, base salary increases.

Continue Reading

We’ve worked closely as a team to develop our Career Frameworks. It’s always a work in progress so please reach out if you have any feedback or questions.

While building our own version that works for Tuff, we’ve also leaned on some great existing resources. If you’re interested in learning more about Career Frameworks, here are some of our favorite reads:

• A career progression framework which works for everyone: how we fixed career progression at CharlieHR
• Continuing to Improve on Pay: Our Latest Changes to the Salary Formula and How Much it Costs
• How We Approach Employee Compensation

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post How We Created a Career Framework For Growth on a Performance-Based Marketing Team [Updated] appeared first on Tuff.