Debra Zahay-Blatz Digital Marketing for Independent Solopreneurs: Data, Branding, and Organisational Learning

Debra Zahay-Blatz taught digital marketing for 25 years at St. Edwards University after 17 years in customer data management.

With a Kellogg School of Management MBA and a PhD in customer information management, Debra explains how solopreneurs build sustainable digital marketing strategy. 

The conversation covers 

• selecting channels based on where customers actually search rather than where you prefer to be, 
• why brand is a promise rather than a logo using William Arruda's framework, 
• Michael Porter's differentiation strategies applied to solo practice, 
• why organisational learning is the one competitive advantage that cannot be imitated, and 
• how AI is becoming table stakes where learning speed rather than tool access is the real differentiator. 

Debra also shares her three-priorities-per-day productivity approach and her Digital Marketing Management book, a framework for independent professionals making sense of a crowded digital landscape.

Wisepreneurs explores how women over 50 monetize expertise and build sustainable solopreneur practice.

As mentioned in this podcast

• Digital Marketing Management: A Handbook for the Current (or Future) CEO by Debra Zahay-Blatz
• Arriving Today by Christopher Mims
• The Emergent Approach to Strategy by Peter Compo https://emergentapproach.com/
• Works by William Arruda on personal branding https://williamarruda.com/

Connect with Dr Debra Zahay-Blatz

Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WIsqcQMAAAAJ&hl=en
St. Edwards University https://www.stedwards.edu/directory/employees/blatz-debra-z
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/drzahay/

Transcript

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Nigel Rawlins: Welcome Deborah to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Can you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Thank you, Nigel, for having me on the podcast. My name is Dr. Debra Zahay- Blatz. I'm a professor of marketing at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and I'm in the department of marketing operations and analytics. And I'm not an Austin, Texas native. I come from Chicago, Illinois originally.

Nigel Rawlins: That's wonderful. We met many, many years ago in San Diego at a digital marketing conference. And we kept in touch, and I've been keeping an eye on you over the years and finally with the podcast I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk to you about many of the things you've been doing. The writing, the books, and we'll come back to that, but I noticed that you have been quite a student. Can you tell us about some of the studies that you've undertaken? 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, I think a turning point in my life was I went to a really great college prep high school. in La Grange, Illinois. And I got a full scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis as an undergraduate. So I had an honor scholarship and a stipend. And that really was a turning point for me. So I was able to get my undergraduate education for free.

It's not like in some countries where they pay you to go, we have to pay for our own. So I was able to study as an undergrad my passions of literature and history. And I actually went abroad I went to the University of Sussex for a year and studied with a noted scholar there. And so I started out in the liberal arts field, but with an idea that I wanted to go into business.

So I took some business courses as well. And then I moved into the MBA program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And there I went to the best marketing school in the world and I studied information systems and finance, because I thought if I knew something about the computer I would always get a job and having come from that English background, that communication background, I actually found working with a computer quite easy because programming is a language also.

And I really took to the computer like a duck to water. That was, that was so easy for me. And that was where I made my career and I was a programmer and systems analyst. And eventually I was a support person for a division of Dun Bradstreet and we sold data and software to the investment community.

And so things just kind of took off from there. And in the meantime, I had started my law degree, and I stopped it after about a year and I went back at night while I was working in industry to finish my law degree. Also focusing in business planning. So always with that business emphasis. So those are my studies and then, you know the story.

Uh, so I did all this when I was quite young and I was working away. And I kept asking people, I'd go to industry conferences and I'd say, well, what is the relationship between customer information management and ultimate firm performance? And they'd say, Oh yeah, we know all that. We'll send you a study on that.

And they'd give me my business card and I give them their, you know, their business card. I give them mine. And they'd never send a study. There was nothing. And I kept having this burning question about wanting to know the relationship between customer information management and ultimate firm performance.

And eventually I decided that I was going to have to make those studies myself. And I also became interested in teaching. So I was also teaching part time and applying then to PhD schools to get my doctorate. And I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to complete my doctorate. So yes, you have mentioned, uh, when we were talking about this podcast that I have a lot of education and I do, but in my mind it was always leading to this kind of ultimate goal of understanding data driven and analysis and the application of those techniques in a business setting.

Nigel Rawlins: okay. So why is that important?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Why is that important? Because when I was in marketing and it was, it was a lot of fun, but it was really hard to get answers to questions like who are our best customers. I remember getting printouts and getting a yellow highlighter and looking at the companies that spent the most money with us and saying, Hey, you know, they're all in the jewelry industry.

We are retail. We should target the retail industry. And these are things that you, you don't have to order the printout anymore from the data center in Des Moines. You can actually, go online and instantaneously develop good customer profiles. But we just didn't have the tools, to make these kind of decisions.

And I thought if we had the tools, we could make better decisions and ultimately make better offers and customized products for our customers and improve the situation for everybody.

Nigel Rawlins: Now that's an interesting point because, um, I used to work with a former Hewlett Packard marketing manager. Unfortunately, he's passed away since then. And we would go, I'd be the marketing services person, so my job was to get the marketing done, he'd be the strategy guy, and he'd be looking at that sort of data and he'd be saying to them, okay, can you kick out who your customers are?

And these are small businesses, but manufacturing businesses. And then he would get a huge spreadsheet and he'd say, these are your best customers, how often are you working with them and talking to them and things like that? Um, but you, you were saying that data wasn't even available.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, it was there, it just wasn't in a format that we could work with it. Like now we have the customer relationship management systems and marketing automation systems. I was checking the other day, there are over 11, 000 marketing technologies available. Well, we didn't have all that. It was, it was like hit or miss.

And, um, it was very difficult to do personalization and customization. We just didn't have the tools that we have now. So I like to think that I was part of a group of people that were doing research and working in practice and trying to get us to a point where we could provide this data again to have more value for our customers.

 I did not know that we were going to end up with having a computer in our hand that had a million times, uh, the power of the one that put the man on the moon in the 60s and that we would be also all consumed by these devices. I just wanted to help marketing managers and consumers.

Nigel Rawlins: You're a professor of marketing. Let's talk about marketing and digital marketing. How you would define each of those.

Even though I've been working in marketing services probably 25 years now, I still struggle to define what marketing is. So could you maybe give us a, a little bit of a primer, marketing, digital marketing, maybe strategy.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: You're very fortunate. I think the Zahay mind is quite simple. So, I like to boil things down to their essence. So, here at St. Edwards, we have sort of an agreed upon definition of marketing that we use in our classes. So, it's the process of delivering value to your customer. And then capturing value for the firm.

So it's all value based. So whatever the customer thinks and perceives is the value and is willing to pay a price premium for, they pay that money and then the firms capture that value for themselves in terms of profit, or it could be if you're a not for profit in terms of a donation.

So we really view marketing as a value based proposition. And then digital marketing is using any digital technology to facilitate that marketing process. So, it can be the web, email, search, social, any kind of digital technology. 

Nigel Rawlins: We've got social media everywhere. You've got websites, multiple ways of creating websites. I've actually had several people on talking about, say LinkedIn is the best way to get a presence out there. Coming up in future podcast issues. I've got a lady who's been in web development for 20 years. I've got a expert in copywriting who's based in Germany about copy on your website. And I've got a Sydney lady talking about SEO. Now the issue is how do you create a digital presence for yourself nowadays?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, that's a really good question, and again, I'm going to go back to basics. You need to look at your customers. So, we used to say, in the old days, you know, that you wanted to fish, fish where the fish are, so you'd try to be where your customer was. But I, I think you still need to be where your customer is and be on the marketing channels that they're using.

But you also need to think like a fish. So a lot of SEO, for example, is about customer intent. So what are people actually intending, you know, to do when they hop on and do that first search? And, and often purchase journeys today are very complicated. We might look at something online and then go visit the firm in person and then come back online.

And, you know, before we make that final decision. So I think it just really focuses on, uh, figuring out what channels your customers are in. And I, uh, I know you've got access to links for my book, listeners should probably go look at that Handbook for current and future CEOs, digital marketing management, because, the things I've just talked about are in that book, the definition of digital marketing and marketing.

And then there's a whole framework in there for figuring out what channels your customer are on and where you should be. So that would be a good place to start.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, that'd be great. I will put that in the show notes and I will track down where to get that. So that's recently published that one?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Uh, yeah, I, well, I updated it a few years ago. So it's in the second edition. 

Nigel Rawlins: A big company is going to have a marketing department and sales department, but once you become your own self employed person, it's basically you, unless you can afford to hire people to do that.

The difficulty I see, and some of the challenges that some of my clients have, is it's a very crowded market out there. And, to stand out using a website, you've got to do a lot of work. And then if you're doing social media marketing to try and attract that attention. What's a good way to approach all that?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, my first course that I ever taught was at a local community college. I don't know if you have those in Australia. That's like, if you're not going to go to a four year school, you might go there and then transfer. And I taught in their Entrepreneurial Hub and it was called 'What Makes My Business Unique'.

And I think that material, I could go and teach that today. It was a three session class. And we went through the whole exercise. And we looked at what makes my business unique? What do I do that's different from the competitor? How can I distinguish myself in the marketplace? And in fact, that research that I did in customer information management, indicated that the companies who are highly differentiated and communicate that well, actually, that was more important than managing customer information well. I recently spoke to some entrepreneurs at Measure Camp in Austin, and I got to this point in my talk and I said, and strategy trumps data. Every time. They were just amazed at this, but it's true. You've got to go back to basics, get that strategy in there, and then I think everything falls into place.

It's not easy, you're right, it's so competitive today. It is very competitive, and you have to, uh, you have to really know what you're doing. But I think once you figure that out, you know, like I think for myself, for my social media strategy, who am I really trying to reach? You know, it's a couple of different people.

I'm trying to reach people who might want to hire my students. I'm also trying to establish myself as a thought leader in digital marketing. And so where should I be? I should be on LinkedIn. And so that's my primary social media network. And as a small business person myself, I know that I can't be on every network.

So I, I focus my efforts on LinkedIn. I also do a little bit on what is now called X. And there are some, there are also some professional associations, groups that I'm on that are on Facebook. And so those are really the three places where I'm at professionally. And so you, I think you really have to, like I said, figure out where the fish are and be there if we're talking about social media.

I highly recommend this little book because this is the approach that I take, and there's questions at the end of it that can kind of help, help work you through. So, knowing who you are, who your customers are, then you go through the whole process, and you design the web page essentially, and work from there.

Nigel Rawlins: Mm. That's fantastic. You mentioned the word strategy. So, we have marketing, we have a business. How does strategy form around that to give you an idea of what you actually should be doing?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well again, I go back to, I'm kind of like back to basics Gal like I said I'm pretty simple. So, what I've done in my research is I've looked at the work of Michael Porter, so you can either be the low cost provider, which is very difficult, or you can be highly differentiated, or you can try to do both.

And it actually turned out in my research that the both strategy, which includes differentiation, was the most effective. So, those are really the basic strategic decisions that you can make. And it's all from the point of view of the consumer. So of course you go back and ask the customer, how would I, what did they think about your product? How did they think about you? 

Nigel Rawlins: There's quite a lot of thinking involved in running a business. And I think after all these years, and I've now been looking at strategy again, and there's a chap called Peter Compo, who will be a guest at some point, who just wrote a book on The emergent approach to strategy, and it's quite fascinating.

He's come out of industry and he's written this fabulous book on strategies. I've read it once, on my Kindle and I had to buy the book to work my way through. And he talks about having a strategy rule and it's quite terrifying in a way that if you've got a strategy, you should stick to it and be very disciplined about it.

And I'm thinking, well, I keep reading this and I keep reading that and I'm on social media and I'm doing that. And I'm thinking, I'm not very disciplined after all these years. And that's the danger of say a person who's working for themselves as against a company.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: So, I would say, Nigel, again, I'm really simple. I've been doing the same thing for a number of years. So, I, I teach digital marketing, I research digital marketing, and I teach other professors how to teach digital marketing. I write books on digital marketing. That's what I do. Okay. That's my brand. And I am now known for, guess what?

Digital marketing. So I, I tend to agree with that. I think you need to keep it simple and have one message, uh, you know, a very strong message. It's really, it's worked for me personally. And, uh, I think, uh, I see that what you're talking about. I see that with a lot of big companies. I see that they don't have their own clear message.

I'm in a group, CMOs. It's called Cosimo Coffee Talk. It's a chief marketing officers get together every Friday and talk. And last week, or two weeks ago, uh, one of the women was talking about how they did their rebranding and they, uh, basically indoctrinated everybody in the company to tell this single story, including the sales people.

And then they knew they were successful as a chief marketing officer when they went to the board meeting and they heard the president or CEO or somebody parroting back this, this, uh, positioning statement that they were really successful in having this single vision of what they did.

Nigel Rawlins: And that I think is the secret of a business. It's just being 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: consistent.

So it sounds like Mr. Campo has a right idea as well.

Nigel Rawlins: Yes, I'm fascinated by him. And interestingly, he is a jazz musician as well. So, something about music and arts does something and that's why I thought it was interesting that you did literature too. It seems to inform people in business and they get a different perspective about how things work.

I guess the human side of it. Now you mentioned the word branding, rebranding, Can you talk a little bit about that now? The big thing out there at the moment is personal branding, but companies brand themselves. Most of my clients have been with me for many, many years.

I haven't had any new clients for a while. So I look after clients who've been with me for about 15 years. They wanted to rebrand their website and that horrified me because I'm thinking it's working really well. You're getting lots and lots of visitors. You're getting lots and lots of bookings. And they were young, they weren't trained in marketing and it terrified me.

I thought, no, I'm going to get rid of this client because I don't want to do this. 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Hmm. 

Nigel Rawlins: But they went along with me and I explained to them, branding is a bit more than pictures and logos. So can you talk about branding? And then we'll talk about personal branding.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Sure, actually, I have to say I picked this up years ago from William Arruda. He does talk about personal branding. And he very simply, again, says a brand is a promise. So what do you expect when you interact with that brand? I often use the example of McDonald's hamburgers. What do you expect? You expect that you're going to get it quickly and it's going to be hot.

Okay, did you ever have one when it wasn't hot? It doesn't taste very good, right? So that's their promise. You're going to get, you know, get it quickly. It's going to be hot. It's probably not going to be a salad. They haven't done very well with that. It's been mostly the sandwiches and things that go with that.

So that's their brand promise. I would use that principle in personal branding as well. What is, what is your promise? You know, what are you going to get when you come to Nigel?

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, I think that is a perfect explanation. Now, going back to when I was working with the former Hewlett Packard chap, we worked with an indoor children's playground once and this massive thing had lots and lots of children coming there. It was one of those indoor playgrounds with slides and big tunnels and things.

When we started working with them, we started the owner out on the street and walked him towards his entrance, noticing the rubbish on the pavement, the weeds, the dirty windows. Then we took him in and showed him the top of his equipment that had a layer of dust on it. And the one I just mentioned where I thought they wanted to redo their website, which we have done. And, I said, when I turn up for a meal, it's a big club. I'm standing at the entrance, I've booked a seat, but nobody comes up to me and I'm wondering which table I'm on. That's the sort of thing that they don't get. And that is branding, isn't it? It's not just the pretty colours and, and the logos.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, yeah, we add in services marketing, we add process and people and other things to the four P's. So, absolutely.

Nigel Rawlins: Tell us about the four Ps before we go on so people understand.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: We know the four P's. I'm sure most of your listeners do. Product, price, promotion, and place. And so you have to develop your product. You know how you're going to distribute it. What you're going to charge for it. And then, promotion. So when I teach my principles of marketing class, most of my undergraduates think that marketing is just promotion and advertising. And we actually do that last in the class. And we go through a number of other things. I mentioned people and processes, but we've all found out supply chain was part of marketing during the COVID lockdown period, didn't we?

Because some goods were very difficult to get and got backed up. So definitely supply chain is critical.

Nigel Rawlins: I live about 20 kilometres out of a large regional country city in Australia. I get onto Amazon when I've got a problem with my tech and I buy something, it can be delivered the next day. And if I've got a problem with that thing that I bought, I can take it to the local post office.

And they send it back. They have got an amazing process. So, they're killing probably other companies that don't get it. Like sometimes we'll order something online and you don't hear anything and you wonder, well, when am I going to get it? It's crazy, but that's all part of branding as well, isn't it?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Yeah, I teach in my class. I don't know if you've read this book Arriving Today, his name is Christopher Mims. I just looked up the name of the author. So it's called Arriving Today. You can actually go on and see a little video summary of the whole book, which is quite nice. But he talks about, he traces a little USB drive from when the silica sand is mined in the United States to when it goes over to Asia.

And then it gets made into a USB and then it comes back to San Francisco and gets offloaded at the dock and then sent back to the Midwest. And all the whole process of that and how complicated it is. And then it gives students a better appreciation of what happened during the pandemic. That why the goods were stockpiled and weren't coming in because it's a very complicated process today.

And that is all part of marketing, so when consumers don't get their product, they're not complaining about the supply chain and they're not understanding it. They just want their product. They look at the company.

Nigel Rawlins: That's another point that I remember . We were working with a government provider and trying to explain to them the steps that were involved in what they were actually doing. And we had to get a great big table and we had to physically write down on a card each of the steps and get them to run through it because they didn't understand.

I guess it's a supply chain issue. Of all the little things that they had to do, none of them really understood. Because they weren't trained in any marketing or strategy. We actually did quite a bit of work and we were so successful, we were banned from working with that government department. We were put on the banned list because we made, they were so successful, I don't know whether this is a government department thing, but the funding went to Canberra, which is our capital, and then they allocated out. But if this organisation was successful, they got money from the central office.

And we made them so successful, they were actually making a lot of money. The central department did not like that because obviously, I don't know what the whole focus of this, but maybe that's a government thing. That the money goes to the central thing, they spend it on their own things, they don't spend it on the outcomes that are expected.

And I had an incident like that once when I worked with a local council. It was a health initiative for a small country town, so it was an isolated country town. They wanted to get the kids eating much more healthy and lose a bit of what we call girth. And they wanted to spend it on meetings and seminars.

And I said, Oh, why don't we just work with the primary schools and do little booklets and get the kids. And we had a world first outcome of a reduction girth. Now the local Deakin University studied it and it worked, but. Had they done their own thing, they would have gone off spending the money on seminars and things like that and no outcome would have happened.

And that's the biggest danger of this stuff. Now tell me about your book on marketing.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: It's really meant for short form MBA classes and as an airplane book. So, I've got a little bit on AI and some reason trends in here, but you just go through the book, you answer the questions, and, uh, so the first thing you do is you create a new language. A strategic digital marketing objective, so you work on your strategy, and that then flows through your web and web design, your search engine strategy, your social media, etc.

And I, like I said, I have questions to ask and answer, uh, that'll help work you through it.

Because I think it's an organizing framework, I think a lot of people get confused.

Nigel Rawlins: I think you just mentioned the magic word an organizing framework, because that's what Peter Compo says. It's a framework. And within that framework is your strategic rule that you have to follow. Now, I have to discipline myself. I really do. I'll have to tie myself down and I had to say it. I'm 68 and I'm still trying to discipline myself to, to be focused.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: But yeah, I think a lot of the people, based on the questions you're asking, I think perhaps many of the people listening would at least benefit from going through the book and answering some of the questions.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's the point, for example, if you've retired or you've come out of business and you want to work for yourself, you've had enough working for a business, and hopefully you're in a good position where you maybe own your own house or you're financially stable, that rather than just trying to reinvent the wheel, you follow a framework like this to lock in what you're going to do and then just do it.

Cause the, the danger of, I guess, a person working on their own is if you're working on client work, you're not really working on that business stuff. And then you're trying to fit in a bit of social media and, writing a blog article and stuff like that. So there's two parts. You're actually running a business, but you're actually doing the work in the business. That's if you're working on your own.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Of course, yeah, that's always a challenge, isn't it? 

Nigel Rawlins: So how would you organize yourself to, to do the work on your business and at the same time to do your client work? Is there some sort of way of looking at that?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, you know, I go back, when I was working for Dun Bradstreet in, in client support and I wanted to get into sales and marketing. I knew that I had to sell applications so that I could get promoted into sales. And so, I had to do my work. And then I had to sell these applications. So I, I put all my clients on a, uh, in a spreadsheet, and I had them on a rotating schedule that I would call them every so often.

So that was like 40 percent of my time that I was taking care of my current clients. And then I organized my 60 percent of my time so I could sell applications so I could get noticed and get promoted. I think those kinds of organizational skills have helped me through my entire career.

And I always tell students that as well, uh, you have to do the job before you get the job. My students, and then my recent grads that are trying to move their way up the ladder. You have to demonstrate to people that you can do that job, so you have to be doing a couple different things at once.

And so what worked for me is just sort of allocating different times. The other thing that I do personally is, uh, I come in every day and I think, what are the three most important things I want to accomplish today? And then if I can get one of them done, I am really happy, because you know how many distractions we get, particularly now with all the emails and social media.

But I, I've always kind of operated on that principle. What, what are the three top things I'm working on? Um, If I can get all three done great, but if I can just do that one, uh, then I know I've made, I've made a contribution. I've done something today.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, I think you're rather unique in all the studies that you've done, so you're obviously a very organised person anyway, uh, mentally. Alright, well that's an interesting point you're making there. A couple of things like, for example, you're saying you've got grad students who are going out. Now, I look on Twitter and I see these young people who probably haven't had a lot of experience coming across as gurus.

And I'm thinking, are we expecting too much of our young people? Have they got the experience? If they're leaving university, should they go out and work for several years?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: I really think it depends on the person because at St. Edward's here, we have a very entrepreneurial environment and we have a lot of students that start businesses right out of the university. We just finished an marketing entrepreneurship competition over the weekend. And then we have one recent grad that went right out and got venture funding and started her own company.

We have a lot of students like that. We have some that need a little, you know, a little more nurturing. Personally myself, I think it is good, before you start your own company to get some experience in a larger company, to get the big picture, see all the different functions and how things fit together.

But I really think it depends on the person. It is very easy to get well known for one narrow thing, particularly today with technology, but that can be a danger when you, you know, after that narrow thing is no longer the thing of the moment, you know, how, how are you going to manage your career?

And if you have a big, that big picture and understand how business fits together, I think you're better positioned.

Nigel Rawlins: That's something I'm noticing is that there's a new, say, technology that comes out and everybody jumps on it and then it fizzles out and a new one comes out and, they're left behind. They become an ambassador for a technology that's sort of surpassed. And I guess that's happening with AI at the moment.

One of the things that you have been looking at, I think in some of your studies is organizational learning and how companies stay innovative. A lot of stuff we're talking about applies to a big company, but coming back again to the person who's working on their own as a professional, do the two tie in with each other?

 I mean, In a large organization, they have organizational learning to try and keep them innovative and keeping up with technology. And the same thing happens to the small person in this small business.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: think so. I think, uh, study after study, uh, that I've done and others have shown that organizational learning is The ability to learn may be the only thing that cannot be imitated. So we say that, you know, I talked briefly about strategy in Porter, but there's other schools of thought that I follow. Um, and one of them is the learning organization.

So we know that competitive advantage comes from things that can't be imitated. So we try to figure out what makes us unique and what do we have that's unique that really can't be imitated. And, and it has been shown, as I said, time and time again, that learning is the most difficult thing to imitate.

So being able to learn about your customer, that's where information comes in and cycle it back and then bring, bring it out the other end and have a better offering or better communication with them. with your customers critical. So being able to get, store, move, and use information throughout the company.

So I think that can apply to a big company or a small company, that kind of thing.

Nigel Rawlins: So the focus there is on getting better at working with the particular customers that you've chosen to work with. Cedric Chin writes for Common Cog and he talks about creating a moat. That you're so good that you have a moat around you that nobody can attack you for that or come close to you.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: That's a great analogy.

Nigel Rawlins: Does it matter what age you are?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: For starting a business?

Nigel Rawlins: Oh yeah. Starting a business or continuing to learn

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, I would say as a professor, you're, continuing to learn. You can do that your whole life. yeah, I don't think education is ever wasted. And I think it keeps your mind active.

Nigel Rawlins: All right. Well, let's talk about you a little bit more. You mentioned before we started this podcast, you're going to retire. 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I'll be retiring soon from teaching. It will be 25 years. I think this is actually my 25th year of full time teaching. And before that I was 17 years in industry. So I was able to apply my industry knowledge to my, uh, academic studies and my teaching. And I'm kind of ready for the next phase.

My mother needs our help and, uh, we're going to move out to where she is. And so I'm sort of ready for the next phase.

Nigel Rawlins: So what are some of the things you're planning to do professionally? 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, after we move out and get settled and help my mom and all that. So I'm actually going to get certified in business mediation and I'm going to use my law background. That's the plan. Uh, so I'll be starting my own, my own business again. So I have a, I have a consulting business, but I'm interested in using my skills to help businesses solve problems.

And I like the mediation idea because it's well suited to a more flexible schedule where you don't have to be on the client's site all the time. I can just schedule that I'll work on this mediation one or two days a week and have the rest of the time to spend with my husband and my family and things like that.

Nigel Rawlins: and that's the ideal of being an autonomous person, that you can make some choices and, and just choose, well, choose your client, I suppose, in many ways, and who you want to work with. Okay. Let's go back to some of your books. Were you going to write another book? Was that something you were going to do? 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: The back and I also thought in my quote unquote retirement from teaching that I would continue writing, so, uh, I always wanted to write a data book, and, data management has changed in many ways, but in many ways it's the same. We did a lot of work studying customer information management, the role of data quality and how important it is.

And I was just on a webinar the other day and they were saying that about a third of all customer data managers think is suspect. So if you have bad data, bad data in, bad data out. So, I think a book that could put clarity to that and explain how to manage customer information well is important.

We're also looking forward to incorporating some of the artificial intelligence techniques. I think they can really help clean up data. I always use examples in my classes. I'm Debra Zahay Blatz. I was Debra Zahay. I got married 15 years ago, and still I'm getting mail to my maiden name.

And sometimes they get confused and they call my husband Doctor Zayhay. You know. And sometimes they call me Mrs. Edward. So, we still have a lot of these data programs, the mail merge, uh, purge programs still don't have the algorithms right. And so, I think there's a lot of opportunity to write a book about managing customer information well.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, Debra, how are you finding AI, coming into the university with your students and in your work?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, my work, as you know, has been studying customer information management. And the bottom line is that it turns out it's just table stakes. Eventually, everybody knows how to do this. And the same is true of any technology. So right now there's some people that are using AI really well, and they are a little bit ahead of the game.

But this is just another technology that everybody is going to use. And again, learning is going to be the source of competitive advantage. So how well are you learning how to use this? So I'm seeing in my classes, I'm using it in, In my classes, I'm using it in exercises and, uh, I'm asking students, at this stage, tell me how you used it.

What did you learn? What was good? What was bad? Uh, so I think it's definitely a tool. I believe that there's a lot of hype right now. We're kind of in the Gartner hype cycle. Um, it'll level off and everybody will be using it. Of course, you know, it's a game changer. It's a disruptive technology. But, It's not the tool that provides competitive advantage, right?

It's how it's used. That's what the learning organization says.

Nigel Rawlins: Now that's interesting because these are young people. I mean, I had to say it when I was a young person, we didn't even have mobile phones. And so what do you think this generation is going to be like in 20 years time?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Oh my goodness, I don't know. In a way, I feel like I was lucky that I grew up without this technology, that I got to do a lot of reading and exploring and playing outside. I find, quite often they're quite dependent on the device. Most professors say that the students can't memorize things because they're used to just looking it up, So I, uh, I find that distressing because I hope when I'm older and I need an operation that I'm not in the operating room and the doctor is asking the nurse to pull up a YouTube video to perform my procedure. So, yeah, so I think, I, I don't know what's going to happen now. It could, it could flip.

A lot of people are finding that they're, they're benefiting from spending time away from the phone. I was reading the other day, people are still buying paper books and enjoying that time with a physical book. So, it could go the other way as well, to less time with technology.

Nigel Rawlins: I've made a decision that I'm not going to buy any more fiction Kindle books. I'm going to use the local library and book online and go and get a physical book to read in bed at night rather than the digital one. but yeah, I think that's a big issue. I noticed with the strategy book, the Peter Compo book I was talking about, I used the Kindle.

I highlighted it, it sends it off to Readwise, sends it into my Roam Research, which is a relational database, which I can pull information out of. I couldn't remember anything and I couldn't go back. So I had to buy the book and I'm now up to 103 notes on cards. I put a simple thing just to get my head around this stuff.

And I had to realize that's the only way I'm going to learn some of this stuff. But I have hundreds of books here and I can see your bookcase with hundreds of books. We're probably a generation that's going to be different in that regard.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Well, you know, the research shows a couple of things. One, if you write it down, you remember it. So, you see my little, I have my notebook here. The viewers can't see it, but I take notes in every meeting. I write things down. And I have hundreds of little notebooks on the shelf that I have never looked at.

Because I wrote it down, I remembered it. And people come to me and say, what happened in that meeting? Because I was the one taking notes, so yeah, and I have gone into face to face classes and on the first day of class given everybody a dollar notebook that I bought in the dollar store, you know, to take notes and then I review their notes, because that does aid comprehension.

The other thing the research shows is that we actually read more slowly online. And so if you're thinking you are understanding it better on a book book, you probably are. And I'm doing something now, I have a Kindle book, but my husband had the book book, the physical copy.

So, I read it on the Kindle, then I'll go back and read it in the physical book in the evening before I go to sleep. So, I'm kind of trying that.

Nigel Rawlins: I do think that's something we're going to have to come to terms with. It might be for the older people, the physical book. They're going to have a very different level of knowledge compared to somebody who's looking at the YouTube video or trying to learn that very quickly.

I agree. Now, Deborah, is there anything else you'd like to talk about?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Nigel, this has been so fascinating. We've had a broad ranging discussion here. I would just say that, entrepreneurs can benefit from the things we've been talking about, digital marketing, customer information management. They just need to be really smart about it.

They need to focus, as we've been talking about, focus their strategy, focus their efforts.

Nigel Rawlins: That'd be great. Well, Debra, how would you like people to find out about you or even connect with you?

Debra Zahay-Blatz: LinkedIn is probably the best way.

Nigel Rawlins: I'll put that in the show notes. I'll also put in your website

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Yes. The website needs work. The shoemaker's children have no shoes. So I was just looking at it the other day. it's gotta be updated for my next phase of life.

But LinkedIn is probably the best way to get in touch with me. I enjoy that very much.

I am able to keep track of my former students as well.

 I do some blogging in association with some of these textbooks and I'll be posting that as well.

Nigel Rawlins: That'd be great. 

Debra Zahay-Blatz: People don't find me for digital marketing strategy through the website. They find me through LinkedIn or a personal connection. So I have very little incentive to fix up the website, except it's kind of embarrassing that I think it should be better looking.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, thank you, Deborah, for being a part of the Wisepreneurs podcast. It's been a fascinating conversation and I very much appreciate you making the time.

Thank you.

Debra Zahay-Blatz: Thank you, Nigel. It's been very interesting for me as well. Thanks for having me on.