Meet Sam Adcock, Co-founder

Tell us about your role at The Ortus Club.

I am mainly in charge of outreach processes, campaigns, analytics, data, and operations in general. I come from an engineering background, and I am constantly thinking of new ways of improving our work, developing processes to achieve our goals, and setting up the steps and rules everyone should follow.

We ‘test things’ out a lot at Ortus, and there’s no better way to test out a new idea than having the entire company give it a big push for a period of time. If an idea is meant to fail, I want to find out quickly so we can all move on.

There are also new tools coming out every day, especially in outreach and lead generation, so I am all about giving them a try as quickly as possible, as soon as they come out. If they don’t work, I put them in the bin and move on. If a new update comes out, I test it again… and so on.

I’ve embraced failure as a normal part of my days; it allows us to learn and move on to other things. This allows us to experience and explore our choices, learn from there, and make new processes and tools to guide us further along. As they say: it’s not always about your fall, but it’s always about how you get up.

My passion for paving new ways of learning and innovation are what I presume are some of the most challenging parts of working with me, but they’re what keep me motivated and bring us closer to our goal.

How did Ortus start? What inspired you to create Ortus?

I used to work in the conference industry, selling sponsorship packages to large firms for brand exposure and tickets to individuals. My days were filled with outreach and sales calls. The main feedback from sponsors was, “Is my target audience there?” or “Can you set up lead generation activities?” They sought more than just branding, exposure, and speaking opportunities; they wanted actual business.

Afterwards, I transitioned to corporate documentaries, interviewing C-level executives for a video series. When I was fired, I decided to pursue our Ortus Club idea independently.

I felt a bit misunderstood at previous jobs so I created the opportunity to try something on my own. Jess and I started, then hired Catherine, Mara, Jamie, and Yoko. The rest is history.

What’s the most challenging part of running a business?

The most challenging part of running a business, at least for me, has been ensuring that everyone in the team is always given enough context for decisions and directions.

Entrepreneurs often move quickly, making decisions that the rest of the team needs to keep up with. Effective communication is crucial. Everyone needs to be informed, but it’s difficult to prevent information from getting lost. Misalignment can happen quickly if even one person is confused.

What are the biggest mistakes businesses make when planning events for lead generation?

Overfocusing on extremely specific leads. I think marketers were told over and over to focus on their target audiences, which has turned marketing into essentially SDRs (Sales Development Representatives). Although there’s nothing more powerful than sales and marketing being intertwined and aligned, overfocusing on very specific sets of leads takes away the magic created by an event.

I see some businesses hyper-focused on specific job titles (understandably so because they know those are the budget holders), but there’s a whole power of influence around those budget holders that should not be overlooked. Essentially, people around the CTOs matter as much as the CTO. An event with a VP of Tech of the target company is not “useless networking.”

What sets you apart from other marketing agency founders when it comes to building relationships with clients?

For better or worse, we still run the company like we did in our early days. We know what it’s like to work with a first-time client, someone who trusts you.

Our first clients ‘took a chance’ on us and trusted us with our vision, our dream, with something not many had tested before with knowledge-sharing events. That’s where we got our company value of ‘always deliver’. We had no choice but to deliver. We couldn’t possibly disappoint clients who had taken the chance on us.

We still do that today in many ways. Our clients are everything, and we constantly want to learn from them. We run our own series of regular roundtables to taste our own medicine, and we realise that there’s nothing that gives us more insights than a roundtable event. We learn so much from our clients and implement their suggestions the very next day with everyone on our team. I think that’s what’s been setting us apart throughout the years.

‘Our clients are everything, and we constantly want to learn from them’.

How can businesses ensure their events provide value not just for attendees but also for their own goals?

It all starts with having a clearly defined goal. Our priority is to ensure everyone in the room leaves with something tangible in their hands as they leave. We make it a point to ask everyone what their expectations are, why they’re attending the event, and what they hope to achieve from our efforts. We then make sure those expectations are defined before anything even begins, and we try to please everyone in the room.

For our clients, the kickoff meeting is extremely important to us. It sets the tone of the entire engagement. But we’re very familiar with things changing and have become very fast at adapting, changing gear, and changing direction.