AI, Marketing, and Moving Families: Russ Macumber on Navigating Digital Trends and Life Transitions

What we focus on is profitable growth. So we're very aligned with our clients on CAC, on CPA, on what is actually driving bottom line as opposed to top line growth. And we work primarily with two types of clients. We have a retail e commerce brands. And then we have multi location brands at a national level.

All right, welcome to Hack to the Future with Kyle Roof. I am Kyle Roof and today we are joined by Russ Macumber, the Managing Director and Co Founder of Impressive USA. Russ, thanks for joining us.

Hey, Kyle. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

I'm excited about the talk today because it's something that's near and dear to my heart. We both made massive moves with our families. I moved my family from the U. S. to Thailand. You moved from Australia to the U. S. to Austin, Texas. And I guess the first question is, what were you thinking? Yeah. Why on earth would you do that?

Yeah, it's funny. People make international moves. I think, for their career and for business a bit more freely in, in their twenties. When you're in your thirties and your forties and you've got all these other humans that come attached to you at that point, it is a, there's a lot more people that are impacted by it. My wife and I always wanted to live overseas and in 2008 we were all set to move to Dubai and she had a job lined up and I didn't, but I was going to, find something when I got there. And then the GFC hit, she was working in commercial lending on the legal side. That, that whole move got, shot to pieces. And then we tried a couple of times after that. I think we looked at the UK and we looked at some other options, but it just never lined up. Then we had kids and we just went, okay, we'll just close that chapter that, the living overseas thing is probably not going to happen. Then when it, the opportunity came up where I saw potential in in the United States and in the client base we had here and that sort of thing. It just seemed like something that was, we had to take up to be honest.

Now when you're making a move of that magnitude there's a lot of uncertainties. You have it in your mind how. It could go, but there's certainly there's uncertainty and to some extent risk. How do you manage that? How do you weigh, especially from afar, sort of those pros and cons of what could be risky to like potential gain or reward?

I think this is a pretty, ignorance is bliss is probably a pretty key theme here because I thought I had a pretty good idea of, so I'm not a, I'm not a hugely detailed planner. I'm a, like a, here's a vision. Here's some big steps to get there and the rest I'll just back myself and I'll back the people around me to figure it out. Within those steps, I might've mapped out some things that I wasn't so sure on. How are we going to set up a bank account there? Social security. How do we get a rental? How do we do all these things? How do we get the kids in school? A bit of Google helps. And we had, some people on the ground over here, we could reach out to, but That list of unknowns just kept on getting bigger and bigger the longer we were here. So in terms of what was the original question, like how do you go about managing the risk? I think the risk of it and the uncertainty, yeah,

Just like there are

no risks

if you don't know them.

Totally. Like we were basically just weighing up like the adventure. And we were like that adventure is just way too juicy to let this unknown pile of, I don't know, stop us from chasing that dream. So I guess it was more just being fully aligned with Ange, my wife. And that was the thing, like when I first pitched it to her, we're thinking about maybe opening an office in the U. S. What do you reckon we move over there? And I'm not sure what the, I won't use expletives cause I don't know what the deal is, but she basically gave an, she basically an expletive, F yeah, and I was like, Oh wow. Okay. All right. We're really going to do this. Okay, cool. So having her fully on board, it doesn't happen if you're not fully a hundred percent excited by the prospect. We've got friends who've moved over here and you've got one party that's really excited. The other party that's being supportive. As opposed to excited very different situation you land in. And it also just, it impacts like your ability to integrate to get connected, your family's ability, your partner's ability. If you're both not equally excited by the prospect, I just can't see how. How it works. So it's, yeah, it's the balance of excitement versus risk.

You can also see that too in the, we've got weird jobs, and it's, you need somebody on board. Like I've got this crazy idea, I'm going to do this thing in this magic box and you're never, nobody's ever going to see it unless they, they look into this window and are you on board with that? And if you have a partner that's down with that, they might be down with the move as well.

Yeah. And we're not like building a product. We work, we sell marketing services. We sell. Something which is not always easy to explain to people. And also when you do move overseas, especially when you're moving like both of us did to such completely different time zones, what's going to happen for a long period of time is really weird hours, really long days, because you're communicating with people across the other side of the world and there's just no getting around it. So on top of working tirelessly, through business hours, you're also working really early mornings and late into the night for a while, just while the economy. Settling into the time zone and getting a client base and a team in your actual new time zone.

In addition to that, how do you feel about balancing the needs of your family with the needs of growing the business? Did you struggle with that at all? Were there issues that you had there with I obviously have to support my family in this massive move, but I also need to grow the business or this move was, is a bust. Like it's if the family fails, it's a bust. If the business fails, also bust, like, how do you balance, how do you balance those two things?

So I've got to say it's, there's no silver bullet. I haven't nailed it yet. And I'm, it's consciously front, it's constantly front of mind. Frankly am I, we've got four kids, right? So finding time and for us, the big thing is have we had one on one time with each child? Like literally it's okay, get to the end of the week. How much one on one time did I get with Kobe? Yeah. With Harvey, with Ciela. I didn't get that in this week. I think I have to prioritise that early this week. And I'm literally blocking it out of my calendar to walk her home from school one day. It sounds like a small thing, but when you've got four kids all fighting for attention the one on one time is crucial. But then if we rewind back to like, how did, at the start, trying to, Figure out how to prioritise and how to make sure that the family gets what they need and the business gets what it needs. The family's always going to come first 100%. So if that means the business suffers a little bit because I'm going to be at a soccer game or I'm going to be at something, then that's just the reality. Until I get the business to a point where I can be it's not probably going to grow as quick. There are only tiny differences, but my family's always going to come first. But one thing which did surprise us when we got here, like, when we got here, COVID impacted our getting here for a start. So we had an extra 18 months of researching, reading podcasts around how to adapt kids to an international move. So resilience and emotional stability and all those different things. And, you're going to get picked on and things are going to be different and you're going to say words differently, but, eventually, these are just the things to get used to, but then we get here and within a week, they've got Aussie accents in a Texan school. Like they're the coolest kids in school and they're into sports. They're really social. They're on playdates and in sports teams and stuff within a week, they were fine. Ange and I didn't read one book for ourselves around settling in or any of that sort of stuff. It took us a lot longer to settle than it did them to be frank.

You know, I only have one child. I have one son and. When you have one child, essentially, that's just extra carry on luggage. I, there was, that's just an extra buddy that's coming to a meal. There's not, there isn't a lot extra, four is an amazing amount of people to move. And it's exponential when it's not, when you add an additional child, I think, to the amount of effort. Did you feel, Was there any effect to the family dynamic? I know that a lot of people talked about how brave we were for making the move and that things were going to be so different that it might affect our family dynamic. Did you feel that things changed in the family? Did you get closer? Do you think you got more distant? Were there issues that way? Because I think a lot of people think that they couldn't make the move because things would just change so much within their known family unions.

Yeah, so we probably had a, we just got within a window where it was a bit, I wouldn't say, it was a tiny bit easier. So if our kids were, so when we made the move, we had a a four year old or almost four. Yeah. So four, eight and 10. So the four, eight and 10. So they weren't as fully like. With their friends and their network at home, like that made really close connections, but it wasn't like you can't tear me away from my friends. They weren't at that zone. So we had a nice window. So that, that worked in our favor moving, doing that kind of move with teenagers. I can't imagine even as old as my kids are now, I can't imagine how much tougher it would be to go. Hey guys, we're going back home. We're going back to Australia. So that's, but definitely brought us closer. It had to, because we get here, they don't know anyone as much as they're making friends at school and stuff. The friendships are still. Fairly shallow. They're friends at school. There's a little play date here and there, but they're spending a lot more time at home. Plus they were littler, so they were home more. Were doing a lot of just seeing the U S seeing Texas. We went to New York to Boston. We were combining business and family trips to make the most of it. Yeah, in terms of that dynamic, I think it, it has to make you closer. I would hopefully make it closer. I hope so. Yeah.

Yeah. I could see some fracturing though, like three out of four on board, but one is drifting away or something like that.

We did actually, that's so funny you say that because we did have probably three of the four more on board and it was our youngest who you'd think would be the easiest, more malleable. But he, for the first few months, he kept on saying, when are we moving home? When I miss this. I miss that. I don't like it here. But funnily enough, then we found, it's so funny, the things that you don't, They, the kids got here and they're at an age where they get into school around a lot of other kids their age. At four years old, we're trying to find a daycare center that has kids his age that are going to be going to the same school. It actually wasn't as easy for him. And we went, we cycled through three different daycare pre K centers until we found one that he loved and he found friends and all of a sudden it changed. And that took probably took almost six, eight months until we found. That place was really hard for him. He just at these, also where we are, like, it's not so easy to just pop your kid into a pre K centre like it is a school. They're just going to take them to school. The pre K centre is no, we're full. Oh, we've got enough that age. Oh, we've got a waiting list of six months. So trying to just get him slotted in somewhere with other kids his age that he got along with, that he was also going to be going to school with, that was an unexpected barrier to us settling, that's for sure.

Were there any other challenges that you really just didn't anticipate? Were there things maybe visa issues getting acclimated to this, that, or the other kind of issues or anything that like you didn't think about?

Tons, like so much so that I've now so as an Australian landing here there wasn't that close knit and Australian business community or just community where people can just give you the hacks of. You don't go to, to get your driver's, here's the best example I can give you. It took me like five months to get my driver's license because I was going to the driver's license center, I was booking online for the driver's license center, it was taking six weeks to get a booking. I'd get in there. I'd have exactly what the website said to take in and they'd say, Oh no, the website's out of date. You actually need this. Rebook. It's another six weeks. It's another six weeks. It took me so long. And eventually I found out that there's a department of transport down the road for me that you can go to on a Wednesday morning before they open and just wait outside and get in if one of the interviews cancel. You don't, no one knows this stuff. You can't Google it. It's not in forums. Texans know it because they've been brought up here. So there was a number of things like that. Social security, getting a rental with no rental history here. No, we had zero. We were what they call ghosts. We've, we land here as fully grown people with a full life and a credit history in another country. Zero counts for zero here. A rental, getting any kind of finance, all those things were a huge challenge. And then interestingly, like from a business perspective, there was some challenges in terms of setting up the business account and a few other things, but it was easier to integrate from a business perspective because I don't know, business is business and people are quite like dealing with new people and opening relationships and creating good, relationships. Good campaigns and the like. So the more of the challenges happen on the personal side. But I was like hugely lucky that Ange was so all in on this, that she just, she joined the PTA. She became vice president of the parent teachers association within being here for six months. She became president of the booster club for the gymnastics. She just went, how do I excel, I'm not going to wait two, three years to make friends here. I'm just going to force my way in via community involvement and everyone's going to know me. And then, oh, and then, that'll just make all of our lives here so much better. And it was, she got, if she, if we need to go down to Randall's to the local supermarket, if we're both sitting there, who's going to go we're watching something. We've got to get back quick. It better be me. Cause I can get in and out in 10 minutes. She's going to be down there for an hour because she's going to bump into the whole neighborhood.

That's a great problem though. That's the problem you want. I guess from what I'm hearing though so the kids plug in to school, right? And then your partner, she's plugging into PTA and those kind of things. Were you able to plug in socially? Was that a challenge for you? Were you able to make friends?

Yeah in EO entrepreneur organization, so that was quite good 'cause I was an entrepreneur's organization in Melbourne, in Australia. And then I joined it here. So I was able to, from a business perspective, find some business friends, colleagues, but none of them lived in this area. It took me and I work I'm a workaholic. And as I mentioned, when we're here, I'm working all sorts of hours. So friends weren't. A big priority for me for probably the first year. I just, like we mentioned before, if I don't get this business going, we're outta here. So I'm like I'm all in on the business. But then I just, through some evangels, frankly, through some evangels like networking through the area, I managed to find another dad who we are into the same stuff. He's like a he's got tattoos and he's into punk music. And I was like, oh, what are you, what? We just, we got along. And then there's an Aussie guy around the corner who's one of my best mates here as well. So it took me a bit longer, honestly. And even now, like my kids, they've only just started to realize, this sounds funny, but they're Dad, in Australia, you knew everyone, you had so many friends, but how come you don't have any friends here? And I'm like, Oh, I've got Shan, I've got Bill, but outside of that, because it's a different focus here, like I do, I have got a small handful of friends here now. But it definitely took me longer and it probably wasn't as big a priority as I could have made it. But I just, I don't see how I could have at the same time as trying to keep the business to a level that keeps us here.

Do you think maybe in a way it was that beneficial, like while once you have the family humming, and move it in the right direction that gives you a focus on the business that maybe you didn't have. If you're at like, do you think that might have contributed to the success? Like you're able to head down and get the work done.

Totally. I think a hundred percent. I think that's a really good point. If I don't have to worry about Ange settling and about the kids, feeling lonely and about all those different things. And I think most blokes are, this is going to sound cold, but most blokes probably go a year or two without having to be super connected to their friends. We've all got friends who you don't see for a year or two because they just head down in the business. I've got a bunch of mates back home. We don't see him for a couple of years and, Oh, Hez, what have you been up to? I set up this construction business. I've got, Oh, that's great. And you can reconnect and you're fine. It's just I don't know. Maybe we're not, maybe I'm not as relationship driven. Like I can, I can for short periods of time do that. And that definitely helped focus on the business, get some early wins on the board, get some quick growth. And. Which then helps solidify the family being here and go, okay, cool, this is long term. Okay, we can do things like buy a home and those sorts of things.

Being able to go from just the move to buying a a home is a tremendous, that's a tremendous accomplishment. That's fantastic. That's gotta be, that's gotta tick the box. Okay, we did the right thing. Like, all right we're moving and moving in the right direction. One thing that, that I experienced. I've made a couple of moves overseas in my life and one thing that I've noticed when you do it is that when you arrive, you have no obligations to anyone. And in your previous life, on Mondays we have to do this and on Tuesdays we have to do that. And on Saturdays we're always doing this. And it's an interesting experience when you have a completely clean slate. It's like freedom. It's an amazing feeling. It's like a white of just. There's no social expectation, you know, nobody really knows who you are. Nobody's expecting you to do this, that, or the other. You can almost reinvent yourself in a way. You can reinvent your family in a way. You can focus on this, that, or the other.

That's just such an interesting point. I'm sorry. Like the whole reinvent yourself. Like I changed schools a bunch when I was growing up. We moved half a dozen times and I changed schools and I had that same. I started at a new school. It took me a couple of changes where I'm like, nobody has any idea who I am, what I like, what I do. And it was just little things. And I'm like, and I'm actually starting to get really good at sport. And the old school, I start when I started there, I was uncoordinated. And by the end I was good, but I was still the kid who wasn't that good here. I can be the sports guy. Okay, cool. You know what I mean? Like that. Yeah. And you're right. Like it's, you get a chance to re invent. That's a great, that's a great That's a really interesting insight. Cheers.

Were you able to take any of there's this idea of adventure, there's this idea of bringing the family together, there's the clean slate do you think any of that directly impacted maybe your mindset? Or like your approach to how you were opening this office and getting things rolling. Did he, did any of that impact? Or was it, or do you think they're two separate things?

No, I think it definitely did. Like even though I like to think of myself as very compartmentalized, like I'm here with you right now, I'm a hundred percent present. I have to be, I can't multitask. So I would like to think that they're in different worlds, but the reality is I don't know why I'm holding nose. The reality is, they have to impact, they have to impact each other. And if I think about how this kind of adventurous, let's move a family overseas and start something from scratch, it impacted the business. I know in the last six or seven years, I've, from a business perspective, there was a shift in me. I don't know, I don't know what prompted it. Actually, I probably know what prompted it. It was probably like, I was a massive, I was an alcoholic. I stopped drinking. Stuff changed. I started to achieve things. I started to achieve things. And then went, Oh, wow, I can actually do bigger stuff than I thought. I removed this kind of ceiling of what I thought I could do. And now over the last six, seven years, you start going, Oh why couldn't we work with that big brand? Let's hit them up. I actually, Oh, I know someone who works with that person. I'm just going to try. Oh, I'll see if I can get a speaking gig in front of these people. So I started to shift in that way. And then coming here, the evolution of that is just realizing that I've accomplished quite a bit, pretty good at what I do. There's on the speaking side specifically, like we got here and I was able to pick up speaking gigs in New York and LA and Chicago. I was like, Oh, okay, I'm not just a, I'm not just a, I don't want to sound however this sounds, but I felt like I might've just been a big fish in a small pond in Australia and I thought I'd get to America and I'll know, maybe you just, bide your time for a while. But I literally got here and started traveling and speaking and picking up pretty good brands fairly quickly. And I think part of that, just putting myself out there for those. Would have been around. If you can move your family halfway across the world and do, why can't you just, why can't you contact that conference organizer and send them a showreel and put yourself out there? What's the worst that can happen?

Love that. For those that don't know, Impressive USA, could you give us the 30 second elevator of what you guys do?

Yeah, for sure. So we We are basically an SEO and paid media agency. We work with B2C brands. What we focus on is profitable growth. So we're very aligned with our clients on, on CAC, on CPA, on what is actually driving bottom line as opposed to top line growth. And we work primarily with two types of clients. We have a retail e commerce brands and then we have multi location brands at a national level. On the multi location side, we've got Dine Brands. They own Applebee's and IHOP and Fuzzy's Tacos. They're a client of ours. We do some national stuff for them. From a retail perspective Impressive as an agency has worked with Mattel, Rolex and really big brands. Here we work with Corksicle and Top Fitness, a big sort of fitness brand and a range of others. Mid market is the area we do our best work in. We've got a couple of enterprise clients. Dine's obviously an enterprise client, but yeah, we do it all in house. I think we do, we're winning a bunch of awards since we got here. That's been a big aim, a big goal for us. Once we started setting up campaigns here, we're like, okay, cool. Is this going to be the one that puts us, puts a big spotlight on us. So that's been really pleasing.

Have you been the driver behind that expansion that you've been doing is up in where your focus has been at?

Yeah. Yeah. So especially early on here, like it was myself and I just hired one person that had a team back home. As we've grown, especially for the first couple of years, like I'm literally like the epicenter of everything from driving strategy, tactical ideas, quality control on copy on all sorts of things through the new business growth, through to client management as we've grown, we've got we've got 17 staff, a mix of contractors and full time. Now I've got other people who are owning lanes and I'm just more on the QA piece and the strategy overview. And then I'm out trying to get more speaking gigs and acquire new logos and build bigger relationships with partners and that sort of thing. That's, How we can take that next big step of growth is having a team in place that are really owning their lanes. I've been really, we've had some not so good hires and some really good hires and I've got a couple of staff specifically have been with me for most of the three years I've been here and they've been really positive for us.

I like the that line, acquiring logos.

That's a sales guy in me. I've been in sales and marketing for 25 years and that's yeah.

That's fantastic. That's great. Would you would you say the market between when you're in the, in Australia, in that market, at the U S market, are there. Noted differences, would you say, or would you say it's mostly translatable?

Big differences. When I came here, so impressive, the Australian branch so I was head of sales with that business. We do B2B, B2C, e commerce, professional services, a range of different things, a big focus on retail e commerce, but really a big range. And in terms of the service suite, the Australian agency is everything performance, UX, UI, CRO, loyalty, CRM, through to SEO, paid media, data and analytics, kind of anything around acquisition and retention. I came and then we had a tagline performance marketing for performance. No, performance marketing for growth obsessed brands, right? So we're impressive. That's what we do. And I came here with that same kind of value prop. And I was talking to businesses here and they're like, you do what for who? That's a pretty broad array of services for a really broad array of businesses. But I just need this and I need to know you do this for me. So we had to really write it in and now we only focus on SEO and paid media. It's what I know best. And. We only work with B2C brands so B2B, that sort of stuff, it's just, we're just not as good at it, to be frank. I refer the work elsewhere to people who I know are better at it. My team are really good at getting inside a consumer mindset, a consumer buying mindset. That's the work we do. That's been the biggest difference. Just the kind of niching down and niching down on services and on customers. Yeah, that's been the biggest shift. And then another big difference between Australia and here is the sales cycle. Like here, the sales cycle is so much quicker, which I love. Like I move at a pretty quick pace. It was interesting when I was doing research on competitors here from Australia I was doing, I've created some fake emails, had some mates with e commerce businesses and I just went through a sales process with, half a dozen different agencies over here I considered similar and all of them tried to, and this is just part of it and I probably part of what I was giving out as well, they basically tried to close me on the first call. They sent me an agreement. It was very, let's move this forward. In Australia you can't push that fast. It's much more. Rapport, then discovery, then I'm going to go away and I'm going to come back and then I'm going to ask you if it's okay to send you an agreement. I remember the first time I saw an agreement come through with a proposal and I was like, holy cow. That's in my mind. I was like, holy cow, that's forward. And now I'm like, that's just efficient. It doesn't make sense. It's all there. If you like it, sign it.

We also add our TNCs to all of them too.

Totally. Exactly. Yeah, it's all there.

You're seeing the pitch. Here's the proposal you're signing and also you agreeing to the TNCs.

Exactly. Exactly. And it's so much more efficient. So I do quite like that.

I guess one kind of final question would be, do you think anybody could do it? Do you think anybody can pack up their family and make the move that you did, especially in light of, The massive business responsibilities you have, the children issues you've got going on. Do you think anybody should, can do that? Or do you think it's a select few?

Anybody that can, if you come back to what I mentioned around like weighing the excitement versus the risk, anybody Who can have the excitement outweigh the risk, both themselves and their partner. I think that's crucial. So if you can get excited by it, keep plowing forward despite the risk and your partner is equally excited, then I think, yes, it's doable. Does that mean anybody can do it? No, cause some partners don't want to move or some partners would be supportive, but not excited. So there's probably just a small section, but that's a mix of things. I don't necessarily think it's all in the individual founder. Like it's. If we're talking about a family move, like you and I have done, it has to be a, it has to be a team decision.

It does. I think your idea on excitement is correct too, because you're going to have bad days. You're going to have, you're going to have days where things just aren't going to go well. And you still have to have that excitement behind the the whole thing, or otherwise, if the slightest bit of doubt creeps in, or the slightest bit of dissatisfaction is there, That's going to compound if you still don't have that excitement.

A hundred percent. And I think that's where I having a sales background, my wife always laughs. She's just every time I get off like a discovery call with a client, I'm excited. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. She's Russ, you get, they're all the most amazing. You're so excited after every single one, but you have to be, and I think that really feeds into the ability to do something like this is to be able to keep that excitement. Because there are down times. We've had some months early in the piece where I'm literally calling clients to try to accelerate payment because it's payday and I need to pay my staff. And I'm like I don't have enough money in the bank. How am I going to make this work? So to be able to push through those days you need to be able to hold onto some of that excitement for sure.

Absolutely. Russ, thanks so much. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

Probably easiest on LinkedIn. So just look for Russ Macumber on LinkedIn. I'm fairly active on there in terms of posting and the like. Easy to catch me there or you can just check out our site, impressivedigital.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much Russ. This was fantastic. And thanks everyone for listening to Hack to the Future. We'll talk to you next time. Thank you so much.

Thanks Kyle.