June 2025 Podcast Round-Up

Resting Pitch Face in June was all about big questions and even bigger answers. We had an open talk about managing business finances, the old strategy vs. tactics debate (and why marketers are insistent on continuing to chase tactics), and, of course, we couldn’t miss out on an episode about how AI is changing marketing. 

Whether you’re leading a team, running a business, or just trying to make smarter decisions in the chaos that is modern marketing, these episodes were packed with insights that actually give you something to go ahead and use. Here are some key takeaways from our June episodes.

On this episode, our CEO, Lee Fuller, was joined by our CFO, Chris Ayres, to unpack the often overlooked, but crucial, financial side of running a successful business. Chris has a lot of experience advising a wide range of companies and shares some essential insights for entrepreneurs, marketing leaders, and agency owners.

Some business owners or entrepreneurs don’t prioritise bringing someone into the business who really understands the numbers, and then all the stress comes in. Getting someone in straight away means that you can focus on building your business, not scrambling to understand compliance in one go. It’ll save you from trying to juggle multiple things at once, making mistakes, and probably a financial disaster. 

This doesn’t have to be a CFO when you first start, but it’s recommended you get someone financially minded to keep an eye on things like bookkeeping, tax, and compliance to keep you on the right track.

The problem with forecasting, especially when starting out and gaining revenue, is that it’s not linear and can often feel like a guessing game. You might think you’ll hit 20K per month, but it’s never a guarantee. That’s why getting your overheads and budgets fixed from day one gives you a more solid foundation to build on, without adding to your list of unknowns. 

Top tip: Don’t jump in too fast and chase the big wins before locking in your overheads.

Chris told us that the reason for most failed businesses within the first two years is down to budgeting or bad forecasting, so be realistic.

Of course, profit is important.

When it comes to how often you should be  tracking budget, there’s no right answer, but there are definitely favourable ones. Chris said monthly AT A MINIMUM. 

Profit is what keeps your business in the game and gives you cash to plan and react when things change. If you’re not watching it, you won’t spot the decline and won’t be able to act in time. You want to be able to react fast to these changes to be able to keep your business in the game.

If you don’t have 3-4 months of operating costs in your bank, then you’re not ready. Growth is all about hiring ahead of time, and this costs extra money, which means extra risks. If you lose a big client or supplier, or prices go up for your products, and you haven’t had the foresight to consider this or money to mitigate the issue, then it’s game over. 

From this, you’ll know when you’re ready. The longer you’re in business, the easier it is to see what’s coming, because you’ve built data. You’ve got experience with how your pipeline is, and you have patterns to back it up. You’re taking the guesswork out of what you do, with patterns, trends, and cashflow insight. 

Data-led finance like this makes hiring less of a risky concept. But you need to be patient to have that data to back up your decisions. 

Lee and Dan explored one of the biggest traps in modern marketing: the obsession with tactics at the expense of strategy. Marketers seem to be getting lost in execution without a roadmap towards what they want to achieve, and strategic thinking sounds like more of a buzzword than a practice at this rate.

Strategists are always looking at the ‘why’ behind their marketing, understanding their brand, audience, and purpose, with this kind of thinking being a non-negotiable when it comes to the vast amount of touchpoints that your brand can connect with its audience. While tacticians have certain skills, they might fall short on experience or the ability to think strategically (which is something that can be learned!)

Buying decisions aren’t just transactional like performance marketing. People don’t always buy your product the first time they see an ad: they might ask their friends about it, look up reviews, see if there’s a cheaper price elsewhere, or have the intention and then forget for a week. 

You want people to remember your brand when they decide to purchase, and that isn’t the kind of thing you can track on a spreadsheet. Don’t put all your focus on short-term wins and forget about building long-term value. 

Tactics feel more comfortable, they give you instant gratification, and something to show for the work you’re putting in. Strategy, on the other hand, is harder to define, and you can’t always prove it’s working right away. If you’re clinging to that instant gratification with vanity metrics, you aren’t building what matters.

We ended the month with Polly and Lee discussing all things AI. Off the back of our M/AI games initiative to encourage the team to begin thinking AI first, they explore how AI is genuinely transforming marketing, beyond the buzzwords and hype. New tools are popping up daily, and with everyone scrambling to figure out what they should be doing, marketers are at the point where they need to adapt smartly or get left behind.

Digital Marketing has never been slow, but with AI, it’s become turbo. Everything is changing, from the tools we use and the way our teams are structured, to how we think. This isn’t just changing our output, but how we are viewing our infrastructure, processes, and people in business. There’s an immense pressure to keep up, and it can feel overwhelming, but the main thing is learning how AI is going to help you get things done.

When AI first came about, it was easy to shake it off, because it wasn’t performing well enough to replicate the jobs we could do at the same level, if not better. But year after year, the gap has been closing, and now, it IS as good, if not better in some cases. Not at being you, but at speeding up those boring bits that slow you down. 

Instead of worrying about if you’re going to be replaced, instead consider:

• What can I do now that I couldn’t before?
• How can I use this to raise the ceiling on my creativity, my insight, my strategy?

Compounding AI with your own expertise is the best way to go. It’s not your replacement, but it’s a competitive advantage.

We did the M/AI Games at Flaunt, which was an initiative created in-house to get people thinking AI-first, but in a way that felt safe, fun, and separate from their day-to-day work, so experimenting with it didn’t have as much pressure attached to it. There were prizes up for grabs, including an extra day off, meta glasses, lunch wherever the winner wanted, and vouchers to learn something new. 

People could interact with the games as much or as little as they wanted, although new ideas that showed innovation, learning, cross-department collaboration, and efficiency were encouraged!

This is just a handful of insights that we covered in our June podcast episodes, and there’s plenty more where they came from over on our YouTube and Spotify (whichever suits you). 

See you next month for more insights from our next episodes.