Legacy Leadership Lessons with Greg Keating

Brent Peterson (00:02.47)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneurship. Today I have Greg Keating. He is with Hanger 12, the CEO. Greg, why don't you go ahead, do an introduction for yourself and tell us your day -to -day role, maybe one of your passions in life.

Greg Keating (00:18.962)
Yeah, thanks Brent. Absolutely happy to be here. Greg Keating, I'm the CEO of Hangar 12. We're a small independent CPG marketing agency. We focus a lot in digital and social media, retail media, retail activations at grocery stores, big box retailers. A lot of the clients and brands we work with are typically stuff you'd see on shelf as you're going about your weekly grocery shopping trips. But I'm lucky enough to be...

the third generation of my family that's had a chance to be a part of the company. So we have a little bit of a unique legacy there where we've actually been an incorporated entity for 50 years as of this past December. So we got to celebrate that milestone, but it's been quite a journey and a fun ride to work alongside my dad for the last six years or so, because he had that same opportunity to work with my grandpa when he first.

join the company. So it's been a really fun journey. I've immersed myself in the marketing world and it's been a wild ride. But I'm an avid tennis player, golfer, which I guess is kind of converted into pickleball in the last year with the craze that's sweeping the nation. But that's one thing that I'm looking forward to the warm weather.

Brent Peterson (01:41.894)
Yeah, it seems like everybody's doing pickleball nowadays and I've actually played pickleball and I think it's super fun. So I need to, you know, find some time to get into that as well. Greg, before we get started, I know that you have so graciously volunteered to be part of the free joke project. So all I'm going to do is tell you a joke. And all you have to do is say, should this joke be free or do you think someday we should charge for it? So here we go.

Greg Keating (01:51.442)
Definitely.

Greg Keating (02:07.538)
All right, let's do it.

Brent Peterson (02:09.366)
90 % of bald people still own a comb. They just can't part with it.

Greg Keating (02:16.37)
I have not heard that one before. I feel like that might fall into the free category.

Brent Peterson (02:24.71)
All right. Yeah. Well, you have a lot of hair. So I mean, that's, you know, it's a little unfair, right? And actually, I don't own a comb in full transparency. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm completely bald and I don't own a comb. All right, Greg. So let's get let's let's talk about let's talk about your business. You just recently took over as as as the owner now the from your family. And that's that's fantastic. Tell us about the journey and some of the.

Greg Keating (02:30.226)
I hope.

There you go, disclaimer.

Brent Peterson (02:54.118)
how you got where you're at.

Greg Keating (02:55.826)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I remember growing up, my dad commuting. So I grew up in the West suburbs of Chicago and I remember my dad commuting into the city every day because the office building at the time was two blocks west of the Sears tower. It was very much the kind of 2000s marketing agency vibe you might expect with the slide from the second floor to the first floor and a super fun environment. So for me, I got to

to see that at a young age and see what a sort of a fun dynamic work environment could look like. But as I got older, I kind of was not interested in the marketing space and really wasn't drawn or gravitated towards that. I saw how hard my dad worked. I saw how much energy and effort and stress that that took. And...

I kind of thought that wasn't for me based on seeing that firsthand. So I ended up studying supply chain management. That took me down this path of project management, data analytics. I spent time working for Coca -Cola and then Ecolab up here in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area. And that led to a lot of project management, a lot of just getting immersed in some of the

end -to -end connections across big business. And so what started as sort of this expertise in supply chain manufacturing evolved over time into, again, more of that kind of how do you tell a story with data? How do you communicate complex messages, complex ideas in a simple message to get stakeholder buy -in? All these things that served me really well is I made the decision to then transition back to

work with my dad because it was honestly just a conversation that came up over one Thanksgiving six years ago and seemed like a rare thing in this life to to have that and I was just based on what I had observed right for some of these big companies and even friends and colleagues and that type of thing so I knew it was kind of an opportunity that was too good to pass up to build that relationship with my dad in a new way.

Greg Keating (05:21.65)
and get the opportunity to work alongside him. So basically for the last five years, I've kind of been his understudy, seeing what works, what doesn't, trying to apply that in my own way. And that sort of culminated in him selling me the company this past January. And now he's playing golf more days a week than that, and I'm working hard.

Brent Peterson (05:46.086)
And so have you moved the whole company up to Chicago or you work remote or how does that work?

Greg Keating (05:51.41)
Yeah, that's a great point that I missed there is that we actually went fully remote in 2015. So my dad was kind of ahead of the curve there in terms of pre -COVID making that transition. So originally they had an office in Hillside, Illinois that moved downtown around 2000 and then fully remote in 2015. So we've been a remote organization since then. We've really kind of honed our processes to be.

built around that and to make that work for our people. But we're small, right? We're a very small shop. So we're close to a dozen full -time employees and we've got a number of part -time employees as well. So we kind of make sure that our people are very much bought into that setup prior to working for the company. But that has, we're still concentrated in the Midwest. So a lot of people in the Chicagoland area, but...

Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, kind of got a hub here in the Midwest.

Brent Peterson (06:55.718)
That's awesome. And so I have just a little bit on the on the work remote thing that that's like 2015 was kind of way before a lot of times people thought it would be successful. Was there some particular communications tools that you employed to make that work well for you?

Greg Keating (07:14.866)
Yeah, I mean, nothing cutting edge, I would say, right? It was, I think, more internal processes about how we use those tools ourselves and kind of built that standard. So it was the things that you're well familiar with now, right? Zoom for project management, we were using Basecamp at the time. Slack, those sort of things to just kind of have this ever present communication or this way to reach people that...

obviously you can't do to stand up and walk to the desk next door. And we still to this day utilize a lot of those same tools. I think that's shifted even more so to a lot of picking up the phone and calling people. Texting is now kind of a prevalent way in which we communicate even as colleagues. But then the willingness to hop on a video chat. I remember like working for Ecolab and it was like,

to turn your video on in the conference call because people were so used to audio conference calls and that was like a foreign concept. And now for our team, that's like second nature, right? The video has to be on when you're talking because that's how we stay connected.

Brent Peterson (08:30.278)
Yeah, I think that's I mean, such a great point that it's come such such a long ways on the video bit. Do you find that some of the some people that insist on it, but maybe they're just sitting in a meeting, not paying attention. Sometimes they detract from the meeting.

Greg Keating (08:49.266)
I've encountered that for sure. I've encountered that both on my side with employees in some cases and oftentimes with clients who are multitasking and have 50 things going on on their side. And maybe there's a particular, especially in pitches, maybe there's a particular stakeholder who isn't all that engaged or interested in what you're doing. I kind of treat that as a challenge for us to make sure whatever we're

presenting or speaking to or the purpose of that meeting is solid enough that we're capturing that engagement. And if we're not, you know, maybe that's a something we can refocus on to make sure that the right people are in the room or we're using the right tools or methods to engage those folks. But sometimes you definitely come across folks that maybe it would be better if their video was off, but I'd say that's getting more few and far between.

Brent Peterson (09:49.102)
Growing up in an entrepreneurial family, do you feel as though it made it easier for you to transition into the role of the CEO rather than if you had just not had that experience and then came from the corporate world into what you're doing?

Greg Keating (10:09.938)
I'd say yes, I think so. I mean, it's been really interesting because my dad and I work in distinctly different ways. We're similar. We've taken those personality tests. We're similar in a lot of ways and we're different in a few key ways. Something that's really interesting about his background is that he was like a parks and rec manager in Irvine, California before coming back to Chicago to get immersed in the marketing world. So,

For him, all that learning just kind of came on the fly as he was spending his days in the office and grinding and building the company. And so he's really just somebody who knows what works based on iteration and based on trial and error and reading people and understanding business context and all these different things that for me, just being able to watch him work in that way.

instilled that sort of mindset to say, okay, I can try different things here. And just because something fails doesn't mean it's the end of the world, right? That's how you figure out the right way to go in certain instances. But I also have the added benefit of a business background, a master's degree in MBA. And so I have some of the more kind of academic

theories that I can layer over the top and apply when looking at the business financially or operationally or otherwise that weren't available to him, right? Or he didn't have the time or opportunity to go do. So I think I kind of get the best of both worlds there in terms of the classical business education, but then seeing to your point, somebody with an entrepreneurial spirit.

kind of build it from the ground up so I can take lessons from both.

Brent Peterson (12:05.494)
As you looked at your dad and your grandpa, were they workaholics? Would they be described as working solid all the time and you would see them as working very hard or were they the opposite of getting it done and then taking a lot of time off?

Greg Keating (12:25.906)
I would say early on more of the former. I remember looking back at that and particularly because my dad was making a brutal hour plus commute each way every day from the west suburbs of Chicago into the heart of downtown. And he's somebody who won't leave until the job is done. And so that level of commitment to delivering a good product or service to the client or to internal.

colleagues is something I admire and also something I'm wary of in terms of kind of seeing the level of stress and burnout that that can cause. Now, I'll say this for him is that in the last, even the last five years, the transition and some of the shifts he's made as he starts thinking about stuff like succession planning and how he wants to spend his time and what his identity is has been really inspiring to see because he is just

somebody who goes 100 % on whatever he's focused on. And for a long time that was work and still is to some degree, but now he's finding other pursuits, other avenues of being a grandparent and getting into weightlifting and focusing on his health and wellness and these things that have just been outlets for him. So I think he's figuring out some of that balance now as opposed to.

What's so easy for anybody with an entrepreneur spirit, right, is to just pump 100 % of that into your workflow.

Brent Peterson (14:02.102)
Thinking about some of the reasons or thinking about how you got introduced to EO, Entrepreneurs' Organization, what was it that kind of drew you to it and what are some of the expectations you have for being an EO now?

Greg Keating (14:18.418)
Yeah, so it was kind of an offhand comment that was made to me, sort of a referral about looking into this as a way to get connected locally to like -minded people and have a peer group or a group of individuals to really connect with who you understand and who understand you at a base level that a lot of other people don't because of some of the things we've already talked about in terms of.

how you spend your time, what eats away at your brain when you're just kind of sitting around thinking about different things. So for me, the opportunity to learn and focus on personal growth and business growth simultaneously with like -minded individuals was enough to pique my interest. And then kind of looking through the forum set up and how EO is structured in such a way that.

It's not just a check the box thing, kind of come in, talk about your business here, best practices and dip out, right? It's meeting people where they're at, having vulnerable conversations, having honest conversations about the good and the bad and the hardship of being an entrepreneur and having some of those outlets to understand from other people who've either been there before or going through it alongside you. What are...

ways that I can better manage this or understand it and be a better leader. And so that all was super attractive to me because that's a lot of the mindset I try to adopt in leadership and just being a lifelong learner. So that was for sure what drew me in.

Brent Peterson (16:06.502)
You did mention, you know, getting into best practice for business or something like that. Was it a thought that EO might be like a balance between business, family, personal? Was that a draw or is that something new that you're just learning?

Greg Keating (16:25.33)
That was a draw. That was a draw. I that was something I think I read. And then in talking to Riley, I think it's who I got introduced to, and he was kind of talking to me about his forum group and how deeply personal it was to him. And as we were talking, one of his forum members was like giving him a ring on the phone, like in the middle of workday. And it was just kind of this cool organic moment of like,

Oh, those are like real relationships where those people are reaching out to you if they have a question, business, personal or otherwise to lean on. And I think, you know, I had that kind of surface level draw and then sort of hearing from him and seeing in real time, like what that looks like was super appealing.

Brent Peterson (17:17.51)
If you're thinking in a year what you would like to get out of entrepreneurs organization, what would that be?

Greg Keating (17:26.29)
I would say I want to be an active participant. So I know obviously the forums are a huge piece of it, but I also throughout my life feel like I have done a poor job of taking advantage of the resources available to me at organizations that I've been a part of. So I went to the University of Illinois down in Champaign -Urbana, massive Big Ten school, tons of opportunity to...

participate in student organizations and all these different connections. And I kind of found my group of people that I enjoyed and loved and hanged out and hung out with for my four years. And that was great. It was a great experience. I learned a ton, but there's, there was just a massive amount of opportunity there to get plugged in that I did not even pay attention to or take advantage of. And so already,

going through some of the EO initiation and seeing the amount of events, resources available and opportunities to go to speaking engagements and learn from, I think one coming up is like a sort of like a Buddhist mindset and re -centering and that type of thing. And it's like, I would never otherwise listen to that individual, right? Or go take advantage of that opportunity. So for me, it's, I want to get immersed.

holistically, not just, I mean, I definitely want to get obviously involved in the forum and build those relationships, but I want to really take advantage of those resources available across the wider EO connection to really learn more.

Brent Peterson (19:09.894)
That's awesome. Greg, we have a few minutes left. What do you see for your own business this year? Do you have any predictions that you want to throw out there?

Greg Keating (19:20.882)
Yeah, we're already. It's fun. I get to spend a lot of time with my employees, re centering a little bit on our agency positioning now because it is kind of an inflection point in the business and with me taking over and how we want to talk about ourselves and brand ourselves, take a little bit of our own medicine on the brand marketing side that I think oftentimes gets.

ignored because you're so caught up in the day to day, right? The execution, the delivering for clients. And so already this first month, we've spent a lot of time asking the question of who are we and how do we better communicate that across our website, across our business pitches, even just in how we talk about ourselves. So we're already focusing a lot on that kind of messaging and being the small scale powerhouse where

We get the opportunity to work with some of these mid -market or bigger CPG brand companies who oftentimes are working with large agencies and there's drawbacks to that. There's great benefits, but oftentimes there's drawbacks in terms of the level of individual that gets assigned to their account or the FaceTime they get with director level roles. And for us, it's like everybody on my team is client facing and it's a lot of...

director level interfacing. It's people on my team who've worked across huge brands, both here and prior to coming here, that are able to deliver that expertise to clients firsthand. And we think like brand managers. So we try to maintain that level of personal service and connectivity to our clients that I think sometimes can get lost in the shuffle with.

some of those bigger transactions or more transactional relationships with bigger agencies. So I'm looking forward to leaning into that, doing some more rebranding around that.

Brent Peterson (21:25.854)
Greg, as we as I close out the podcast, I gave everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Greg Keating (21:32.018)
I jumped the gun there, Brent. I was already plugging the agency before you asked. Sorry, keep going.

Brent Peterson (21:39.654)
No, no, go ahead. Hangar 12, tell us, tell us your ideal client.

Greg Keating (21:46.706)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think historically, my dad, especially being in the Chicagoland area, worked with a lot of those huge CPG clients that I'm sure you're familiar with, Kraft Heinz, Sara Lee, ConAgra, some of these bigger companies that were based in the Chicago Metro because they would be on site often, right? And visiting with the client and that type of thing. And now we're much more national. We're much bigger.

But that also means that we are kind of shifting or scaling back for some of those blue chip relationships and focusing more on those mid market CPG companies, right? It might be someone in the 10 to 100 or 200 million in revenue annually who they employ five or less people on their marketing team, right? So they're really leaning into their agency.

to be an extension of that team and to give them capabilities and strategy and expertise that they'd otherwise have to hire or bring in additional overhead to take advantage of. So we try to find that right fit. We focus on quality. We're usually not working with more than five to six clients at a time because I don't want to necessarily be like hyper -growth from the standpoint of just.

adding clients, I think quality over quantity makes sense for us in that space to say, how do we maintain that relationship? How do we maintain that level of service that's our calling card and still deliver good results?

Brent Peterson (23:26.374)
Perfect. Greg Keating is the CEO of Hangar 12. Greg, thank you so much for being here today.

Greg Keating (23:33.17)
Awesome, appreciate it Brent.