Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Growth, Marketing, and AI with Scott Christiansen, CEO of ROOT3 Growth Marketing 2-10-25
Mon, 10 Feb 2025
In this episode, Scott Christiansen, Founder & CEO of Root3 Growth Marketing, joins Scott Becker to discuss building and scaling businesses in the middle market, the power of strategic marketing, and the evolving role of AI in branding and amplification.
Chapter 1: Who is Scott Christiansen and what does ROOT3 Growth Marketing do?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We come to you daily with brilliant speakers, interviews from the business community, the private equity community. Today, we're thrilled to be joined by Scott Christensen. Scott started his own firm now a long time ago, and I feel like I've known Scott now for 20 to 30 years. He's been involved in sort of growth marketing.
He founded a firm called Root3, and he's just done an amazing job of building that firm out and really helping clients amplify and grow what they're trying to do. We're going to talk to Scott today about sort of founding the firm, about himself, about trends he's watching, where he's most focused, and a lot more.
Scott, can you take a moment and tell us a little bit about what you folks do and about yourself?
Chapter 2: How does ROOT3 help businesses in the middle market?
Sure. Thanks, Scott. I appreciate you having me on. For better or for worse, Scott, like you, I love the middle market. Love the chaos of the middle market. Built a firm around helping organizations from emerging stages through the middle market grow, attract investment, reach that next stage of growth, find a great exit. That's That's the environment that we love operating in.
And, you know, Route 3 was created to be the firm that you can go to if you're a high growth business, executing a high growth strategy for fractional services or for companies that just aren't at the size yet that it makes sense to have a full marketing department to be an entire outsourced fractional marketing department.
Thank you. And one of the things I've seen over the years is amazingly how closely connected you stay with your clients and who you work with.
Chapter 3: What is the importance of client relationships in marketing?
It doesn't seem to be highly leveraged in terms of technology and resources and who you know, but it strikes me when I watch you that you and your top leadership stay very closely connected to the entrepreneurs, the founders, the mid-market companies that you work with. Is that by design, that level of intimacy and close connection with your customers?
Talk a bit about the business strategy and how you work with that.
Yeah, no, actually, thanks for noticing that. It is something we're very proud of that companies stay with us for a long time, even as they take on investment and have more options. Even after like a huge exit, we often stay with the company even after maybe the founder leaves.
And we consider that the highest compliment that that we're able to scale with those businesses and provide value at all those steps. And frankly, Scott, I don't like trying to find new business all the time. So it's very helpful when people stick around.
A hundred percent. And talk about is marketing evolves, implication evolves. Leaders try and get in front of their audiences. Talk about how that's changing what you're doing and maybe how artificial intelligence also started to play into that.
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Chapter 4: How is marketing evolving with AI?
Great. I think I want to break that down into two different questions. One is like the chaos out there of trying to find something that works for you to distribute your message because it is crowded out there. And the way I think about it is that I'm actually happy. It's so crowded.
It's like when my wife and I started our family, when we had one kid, we focused on one kid, two kids, we kind of divided and conquered three. We embrace the chaos because you just can't do it. That's kind of how I see the market out there right now. There's so much out there. You just embrace the chaos. And really where that leads you is back to yourself.
The only way to effectively communicate is to understand that you market to a very small number of people, very likely in the business to business area. You're responsible for coming up with that content. that's gonna move the needle on your own. You can kind of ignore all the chaos and just focus in on yourself.
That's the biggest trend we're seeing, Scott, is that our clients are leaning into their own data and leaning into their own thought leadership and saying, I got something to say that's gonna move the needle to my 10,000 potential decision makers in the world. And we help them develop that. And then there's a strategic distribution from there.
So one is that everyone has their own owned media channels now that they should be building. That's your website. That's your LinkedIn. And people are leaning into LinkedIn for those kinds of strategies. And then the second part is podcasts like yours. We want a niche podcast. media product, which has been your specialty throughout your career. And that's what works.
So, you know, one of our clients is Craig Costelli, Caber Hill Advisors, who, you know, he developed a survey of private equity that led to some really nice insights for 2025. And then so we distributed it through his own channels. And then we looked for a really good niche media product that could get us in front of private equity and business owners, which led us back to you.
And that's been a terrific investment. It's been a great tactic for growth. It's led to great conversations. And we're doing all of this in a very crowded market.
See, and I love that, and there's so much of that that I love, that this concept that we constantly work on, this developing a concept, you know, and I often do two big types of speeches a year. One is a speech on business trends and building businesses. One is a speech on healthcare trends.
And rather than trying to keep on redoing that speech that we'll edit and pivot and adjust, the idea is then to amplify that in front of the audiences who ought to be in front of it in as many ways as possible. And I sort of love that concept. So talk a little bit about the next concept and maybe a couple other clients that you work closely with. I recently saw a post about a couple –
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Chapter 5: What strategies are effective for content distribution?
And then they looked at everything that impacts growth and came up with real time, fairly real time data that those business leaders in that community can use to predict growth, to make decisions. And it doesn't exist anywhere else.
What better value proposition can you come up with for business owners and municipalities that could potentially be your client that you've actually developed the data that's going to help them grow?
And really understand what they're doing and so forth. And then a place like Fifth Third can put the resources into that to do that well. Talk about that. Because you work with both Fifth Third is by no means a small client. That's a serious, serious company. You also work with companies that are smaller. And at the same time, they all have to be really intelligent and be able to message well.
How do you distinctly develop that? the thought pieces for someone like Fifth Third who could afford one level of thought pieces versus someone like XYZ or Scott Becker who doesn't want to spend that much money on a thought piece. How does that work? How do you think about that thing?
Well, so going back to Caber Hill Advisors and Craig, that was something that they could do pretty easily internally. So that's one level. What's something you can do pretty easily internally with your own database of private equity and put out a poll? Now let's go to Stradwar Associates. They are the largest consulting firm for rural and community health.
they have a front row seat to what are the challenges. One of the things that they realized that there was no real ability to benchmark physician compensation in rural environments. So they didn't just do it on their own. They could have, that would have been a Herculean lift, but they came and they went to associations for partners.
So the NRHA and then the state offices of rural health, NOSOR, came together to put together this data that's actually changing the paradigm for rural hospitals and community hospitals and how they hire and how they compensate physicians. What does Stroudwater want the market to think about them?
They want them to think that they are preeminent in the space and they are the leader in understanding and helping rural communities access healthcare and rural and community hospitals thrive. And I think that they did just that. They demonstrated just that.
Thank you. No, I've seen those three examples and I love them. Take a moment, Scott. I'm going to take you back to the AI question for a moment. And I know I'm giving you the headache of giving you two questions at once. I'm going to use this one to stick to one. Tell us about AI in the world of marketing, branding, amplifying.
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Chapter 6: What is Fifth Third Bank's initiative and its significance?
But your point is so well taken though. There's something you said that I think ties in so well that you still have to start with a strategy and relationships and then figure out how to use AI as a tool versus the other way around. Is that a fair assessment?
It is absolutely AI for us right now. And this is in this period of time, what it's doing is it's making us just operate more efficiently. I sent out a Slack to my team before I did this interview. And I'm like, I'm just curious, how do you use AI every day? And there's so many niche tools that are coming out that they're using.
I didn't even recognize half of them, but they are all plugged into these platforms that we use. And so I think my point is, I think in three years, AI is going to completely have shifted how we work. And if you have a lead right now, it's just going to continue to grow and grow and grow and grow. But right now, you're right. It's just tools.
You still have to be able to do all the marketing tactics well. You have to develop a great strategy. And that stuff's not going away. AI is not going to do that.
yet no yeah no no i think that's right it's the 2x versus 10x the 2x is we still got to figure out how to use it the 10x it'll tell us how to use it what is is uh you know it's a point but fascinating scott what are you most focused on and excited about this year where are you most focused and excited
I'm waiting to get excited for this year. Right now, I think we're all waiting for this indication that everything's gonna move forward. I feel like we've been sitting in a period where things haven't been moving at the speed we want them to for a while. I think we're gonna get there this year.
And really what I'm working on with clients is making sure in this time before the absolute chaos of high growth hits, what are we doing to shore things up? And how are we planning so that when we do high growth, that we have a good communication strategy in place for our team and for the market?
So when we're busy growing, we don't forget to tell them what it means and why they should be excited about it. What are we doing to make sure that the brand, as we grow the business, that the brand can keep up and the brand's big enough for the business? Are we looking ahead at what growth is going to look like in 2025 and beyond and saying, is our brand big enough?
And getting ahead of problems, because when you're moving at 100 miles an hour, it's really hard to go back and look at these things.
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Chapter 7: How do thought pieces differ for various clients?
Talk a little bit about what advice you would give to founders, leaders in this market today.
Scott, even though I told you I love the middle market and it's filled with chaos, growth can look like chaos a lot. And I love that. I hate not planning for predictable chaos. Let's take everything that's predictable and come up with a plan around it so we can deal with the real chaos.
Drama, when it comes up, things that we can't control, everything that we can control around growth, implementing technology, getting your sales and marketing data connected, especially for PE roll-up strategies who went from one office to eight offices, from two services to 10 services. If we can get that stuff under control, that's potential drama in the future that we can eliminate.
And so that's really what we're focusing on right now. And I'm excited for 2025. I think that this year is going to be the year that we've been waiting for. And I'm excited to work with companies through this high growth phase.
Scott, just fantastic. Again, Scott Christensen. Scott, is your title CEO? Is that the right title? I know that you lead everything. I didn't know if you call yourself CEO.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what it is in the bank documents, but I'm the guy that answers the phone and wants to talk to any business owner that has some problems.
So again, for me, a great pleasure to visit with Scott Christensen, Root3 CEO, known him for a long time, as good a person as they come, a constant builder, a constant amplifier for others. If you need help, reach Scott Christensen, Root3, just a fantastic person, fantastic team. Scott, thank you for joining us today on the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thanks, Scott.
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