Jonathan Baker

Liam Curley: Jonathan Baker co-founded Monday Night Brewing in 2011, then spent almost a decade building it into an award-winning Atlanta craft brewery. Today, Monday Night Brewing have tap rooms across four states and employ more than 200 people. But at the height of that success, he stepped away from the business to join his father David, who runs a seven-figure, one-person advisory firm in the creative services industry. David's a high-profile authority in the niche and up to that point had been working under the personal brand of David C. Baker.

When Jonathan joins David, it's not as an employee, he's coming in as an equal and has to build his own authority inside a niche where his father already owns the name Baker. That's an interesting challenge and one that I've not come across, at least not in an expertise-driven business. How does a son leverage his father's authority while simultaneously building his own public identity?

Chapter 1 — Monday Night Brewing

Jonathan grew up in Warsaw, Indiana until the age of 12 when he and his family moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He was an entrepreneurial kid. His father ran his own business, and as a child Jonathan noticed similarities between the two of them.

Jonathan Baker: I mean, there were certainly moments when I realised I had some similar traits. My brother and I would go out and make fishing poles to sell to neighbours and it was just string on a stick. And you know, I think that was a pretty unsuccessful business. And we also made homemade crayons once, which was us taking pieces of paper, colouring all over them and then rolling them up and then if you kind of rubbed it against another piece of paper, some wax would get rubbed off and we'd go up and down in a wheelbarrow and try to sell those to neighbours.

You know, we did the lemonade stand, we sold our own trading cards. I think the spirit of the entrepreneur was always cultivated in us, even through high school. I started a lawn mowing business with my best friend that was relatively successful, but, and all the equipment was actually, you know, my dad's and his dad's and we beat that stuff to hell. I mean, it was held together by duct tape at the end, but they still let us use it because we were learning lessons. Right.

Liam Curley: That entrepreneurial spirit didn't go away. But his first steps into adulthood do look somewhat conventional. He went to Emory University's Goizueta Business School in Atlanta, graduating in 2005 with a major in business and a minor in religion. So okay, maybe business with a religion minor isn't 100% conventional, but from there he took a job at a small marketing strategy consultancy based in Atlanta called Revolution Partners. It's 15 people working with Fortune 500 consumer brands.

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, we were a marketing consulting, marketing strategy consulting firm for large CPG companies. So Coke and Home Depot and Pfizer and Heineken. Consumer facing brands. We would come in and help them with product launches or brand positioning. A lot of consumer research and then kind of insights mining within that and then consensus building effectively. So we would do research, create PowerPoint decks, try to convince people that what we said was right.

Liam Curley: What was your role in all that?

Jonathan Baker: It was a small firm, there were 15 of us. So we'd get assigned a project and you know, we'd be one of three people on that project. So I do a little bit of everything. I would say my strength was really in the storytelling. Once we had the data, like crafting it into a story that could capture people and convey what we wanted to convey.

Liam Curley: A year into that role, Jonathan is relatively happy with the work, but it's not truly fulfilling. He's an entrepreneur at heart.

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, I, you know, I enjoyed aspects of the work certainly. I think it really came down to as a consultant, not having enough control over the decisions and getting frustrated with decisions that were being made or not made based on what I thought was really sound work. And you know, it just, it came from a place of control. Like I was a little bit more of a control freak than I thought going in and wanted to be able to build something tangible around that same.

Liam Curley: Time, 2006, Jonathan is suffering from clinical depression. He has no friends or network in Atlanta, so he decides to join a Bible study group. Here he is speaking on CreativeMornings Live.

Jonathan Baker: The reason I get into this Bible study, one of the guys in there, his wife, it was basically I was pity invited because she thought this is like my friend's friend and he doesn't have any friends and like you guys are cool so you need to invite him. And so it was a pity invite, but I was thankful nonetheless, and I didn't know that at the time.

Liam Curley: The Bible study group meets on Friday mornings at 6am. It's a group of men, mostly in their early 20s, talking about the kind of things you'd talk about in a Bible study group. But they decide they want to get to know each other better beyond their reflections on the Bible. And 6am on a Friday morning isn't the most social time to get to know a person. Two of the guys in the group, Jeff and Joel, had just been gifted home brewing kits. And beer brewing seemed like a fun thing to bond over, they all checked their calendars and everyone had Monday night free. So they decide, let's brew beer together on Monday nights. Over time, they fall in love with the brewing process and become great friends. The beer starts as drinkable, but it gets better and it gets better.

This all escalates to a point where 11pm one Monday night, drinking their own beers on the front porch, they have an epiphany. What if we could turn this into a business? Here's Jonathan speaking on Mighty Roar.

Jonathan Baker: We look around, we're like thinking about all three of our skill sets. We have everything but brewing. Technically, we could start a business. And then I remember a conversation where we're like, okay, well, if we do this, who's going to be CEO? Because that's an awkward conversation with three equal partners. And it was silent for a while and I think it was either me or Joel was like, well, I think Jeff would be a good CEO. And then Jeff goes, oh, thank God. I really wanted to be CEO.

Liam Curley: With the thinking to take this more seriously, they start inviting more people to the garage brewing sessions. Jonathan starts a blog in this first year of home brewing, which in time becomes recognised as one of the top 20 beer blogs in the world. He uses that blog as a platform to start interviewing professional brewers and retailers who are selling beers. He's building his network and learning from other people who are doing what Jonathan and his partners want to do.

And the Monday Night Brewing starts to become more structured. Up to 50 people showing up to do A/B testing on the beers and then A/B testing on the labels too. This is all happening on evenings and weekends whilst he's doing the consulting job. Then, in 2011, five years after they brewed their first batch, the brewing becomes a real business. They have a business plan. They're raising money, printing beer labels and meeting with wholesale partners to figure out how they can get their beers out into the market. They name the business Monday Night Brewing. Do you remember the first beer you sold?

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, I do. It was a Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale. At our launch night, we had two places that we launched. One was a growler bar and one was a bar that's still, still there.

Liam Curley: What's a growler bar?

Jonathan Baker: It might be unique to the US. A growler would be like a big glass container and it's a way to serve draught beer to go. So you fill up the container and then cap it and seal it. So it's a way to try beers that aren't canned or bottled.

Liam Curley: They don't yet have their own brewing facilities. So they contract brew, which means renting excess capacity from a brewery in South Carolina, while the team at Monday Night Brewing focus on marketing, sales and operations back in Atlanta. This is the point. Jonathan makes a decision a few months after getting married. He's the first of the three partners to leave his day job. Not fully. He stays on part time at the consultancy, but the other half of his time now goes to the brewery.

Jonathan Baker: I was the first employee and then we hired a salesperson probably six months later. But it was not just the marketing I was doing. A lot of what we were spending time on was the sales side. So going out and sampling accounts and talking to our distributors and doing ride withs with them, and then there was the kind of accounting and legal piece that had to get done. So I screwed up our books for a few good years before we had someone with any actual experience doing it. And events, we had lots of sampling events as well, beer festivals, that type of thing. So very little on the, you know, traditional marketing side, aside from keeping our social media up to date. And we still blogged and emailed and all that. But there wasn't a ton of like ongoing brand work yet because we only had two beers at the time. What's a ride with, ride along, ride with. It's when the distributor is taking you on their route, basically that they do every week and you stop and meet all the folks that they usually interact with.

Liam Curley: Got it. So is the growth, the sales growth between 2011, 2013 through the distribution of getting the beer in bars or festivals or things like that?

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, exactly. It's in Georgia, you have to go through a distributor and so it all touched the distributor. They were a big part of that early growth.

Liam Curley: Jonathan and the team grow sales through distribution, getting the beers in bars and festivals. That's a big part of early growth from 2011 to 2013 until they're at a point where they have enough demand to open their own brewery. Does the way in which you increase revenue and sales change or is it always it still through events and distribution?

Jonathan Baker: It has changed quite a bit. And I would say, you know, we've kind of gone through phases. When we first launched, we were draught only, so we're only selling kegs, which meant aside from the few growler bars, we were selling to restaurants and bars. When we opened in 2013, we bought a bottling line and so we were able to start selling bottles. And that's just a different end consumer from a retail perspective. So grocery stores, package stores, they're called here bottle shops, that type of thing. And we started having events and being open in our tap room. So once we had a physical space, the hospitality piece started to come into play. So we'd rent out the brewery for weddings and birthday parties and corporate events. And at one point we switched to cans, I think. Yeah, I don't, I don't remember when that was exactly, but that was big for us in terms of shifting the revenue focus more towards package. And then we started opening other tap rooms. And that started in 2017 with our second tap room in Atlanta, and then 2020 with our third. And now we're up to six. So the revenue from tap rooms is, I think it's about half of our revenue right now with the remainder being distribution.

Liam Curley: And is a tap room essentially, like you've got your brewery there and a. And a kind of bar as well, or a pub, whatever you want to call it.

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, yeah. Tap room's a little bit of a catch all term, but it's a place where you can sample drink our beer. And most of them have a restaurant component, some of them have a production component, but they don't have to have all of that to be called a tap room.

Liam Curley: The business is a success. They're winning beer awards and sales are increasing. It's becoming a bigger operation. And naturally Jonathan's role starts to change. By 2017, the business is generating seven figures in revenue. There are 15 to 20 people working full time, Jonathan being one of them. And they open their second brewing facility two years later, 2019, there are double that number of employees and they start to plan a third brewery.

Jonathan Baker: We had a marketing team of I think four at that point. A designer, more of a kind of copywriter, and then a jack of all trades type person, plus me. And we were doing a lot of events, like hosting events, so, you know, a special beer launch event type thing. But we were, you know, it felt like we were kind of firing on all cylinders, kind of chugging along.

Liam Curley: Everything Jonathan had dreamed of building in the early home brewing days was coming true. He was co-founder of a wildly successful craft beer and events business. And he was heading up marketing and creative, the areas of the business that he was most interested in. And then he decided to leave.

Chapter 2 — The Menu of Projects

I've got a quote from you that says as the brewery grew, it got less and less fun for me. Why was it less fun?

Jonathan Baker: It was less fun because of the people side of it primarily. You know, there's politics in any business to some degree, but the larger a business gets, and I think the higher up you are, the more of your time and mental capacity you spend dealing with people. And, you know, it's, it's not doing the work anymore. It's enabling the people to do the work and equipping people to do the work. And I really missed the scrappy jack of all trades days where I was doing a little bit of everything and felt like I could see my immediate impact. This was a lot softer. And, you know, I'm, I'm an independent guy, so I want to have some control over how I'm spending my time. And my time was getting sucked up into more and more kind of weekly standing meetings. It just became a little bit more of a drag.

Liam Curley: Before we go any further on Jonathan's story, let me back up a bit and speak about his father, David C. Baker. This is relevant for what's about to happen next with Jonathan. David was the subject of the last episode in this podcast. He runs a successful advisory business launched in 1994, helping creative service firms with positioning, new business, staffing and other strategic decisions. Here he is speaking about the early days of running the business.

David C. Baker: So when I was working at home, I didn't have an office ever. And the kids were young, you know, they were, they were listening to me running the firm. In fact, we have these great pictures of the kids individually sitting on my shoulders while I'm on a phone with the client. And so they're picking all this up. And so entrepreneurship was very, very natural for them. And Jonathan showed signs of being an entrepreneur early and started, you know, a firm that now employs hundreds of people. So he was like, oh, okay, that's the entrepreneurship is real there. And I would kind of dream with my wife Julie. It's like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if he would join the firm? And he'd worked for a consulting firm, a high level consulting firm for years too, so he was really good at that. But it never. He's very independent, headstrong. I couldn't imagine he'd ever want to work in this firm, especially under my shadow. And I would hint about it, you know, and he showed zero interest in it.

Liam Curley: In a previous episode where I shared the story of how David C. Baker became an authority, I discussed the core pillars of his expertise in positioning and lead generation for creative service firms. I left out one pillar from his offering and it's one that's relevant to Jonathan's story. Mergers and acquisitions. Do you remember the first service you sold in relation to M&A?

David C. Baker: I think it was a partnership. So in M&A, there's basically two big categories. There's what's called conforming work, that's a buy or a sell side or negotiation or evaluation. And then there's what I call non-conforming work that's helping transition to an internal employee or putting a partnership together or splitting partners. I've got four of those happening right now. That's non-conforming. And I think it was, it would have been for sure. It would have been helping resolve a partnership dispute. Yeah. So non-conforming M&A.

Liam Curley: So an existing client or someone you already is in that situation in a.

David C. Baker: Non-conforming, they're already a client.

Liam Curley: Okay.

David C. Baker: They trust me, I know both of them. So that it's just natural for them to say, hey, can you help us think through this? That's a core feature of service offering design, is that you, you shouldn't be listening to prospects, you should be listening to clients who want to trust you. They already trust you, they want you to do something else for them. And that's, that's definitely how the M&A side grew up for me.

Liam Curley: Why should you listen to clients as opposed to prospects?

David C. Baker: Because you don't have any history with prospects and they don't have any. You know, when they say, hey, will you do this? They're just kicking tyres. They may or they may not be serious and you don't have any history of whether they're going to stick with you. You don't want to build a new service offering design unless you're going to do it for a very long time and try to sell it to every one of your clients. So when you have an existing client who wants you to do something, that's a much better signal.

Liam Curley: Okay, got it. When that first non-conforming opportunity comes up, does that immediately, like, is it immediately spark an idea that there's a new service offering here around M&A, or does it take a few more like that?

David C. Baker: It took a few more. Yeah, yeah. And, and helping with, you know, resolve partnership disputes is a very different thing than really knowing what you're doing with valuations after doing hundreds and hundreds of them or doing a buy side, sell side search, which I never really mastered. Jonathan. Really? So yeah, it took probably a few of those to say, oh, there's something here I can't. And it would come from, okay, one client asked, whatever. You don't think too much about that. It's like, oh, okay, multiple clients keep asking for this thing. You know, like we don't have a succession plan. Can you help with that? And. And so there's drinking from a fire hose because it's not only is. It's a very different world, but it's like, you know, when you're providing legal testimony, being interviewed by opposing lawyers, or you're doing international work with all kinds of different tax laws, it's. There's a whole lot more to learn. And part of it too is you're. I get bored easily. And so that was a whole new area to master. And so it was really fun.

Liam Curley: And did opportunities. Do you just start getting a name for yourself or you're actively advertising or is it just people start. David. David Baker does that.

David C. Baker: Well, it was all from clients initially. And then when I started really putting it on the website and talking about it a lot and then eventually writing a book a couple years about it, then that work floods in. Like, we have a lot more M&A work than we have advisory work these days.

Liam Curley: This act of observing what clients really want from you, noticing patterns and then using that to inform services and insights that you produce, comes up with other authorities. I spoke about this in a previous episode with Carl Richards, who refers to it as noticing tailwind. Carl creates and publishes these really simple, smart visuals to explain financial concepts. He got an opportunity to write a column in the New York Times, publishing those sketches, and subsequently started selling the sketches in art exhibitions. And that entire direction came as a result of client feedback. Here's Carl sharing that story.

Carl Richards: I had somebody gives advice for a living say to me, hey, can I hang one of those on my wall? And I was like, yeah, what? Like, I was literally like, whatever. What are you talking. I don't even know what you're talking about. And he's like, would you sign it? And I was like, dude, come on. Like, just. It's a squiggle. Like, that's literally how I felt about it. I was like, what? And then I was like. He said to me, I'll give you. And I can't remember what the number was. Let's say I'll give you $100 for a signed one, or I can just print one hanging on my wall. And I was like, where's the pen? You know what I mean? It was like, well, of course. And again, another one of these things where I didn't have a plan.

Liam Curley: Then he starts getting requests to exhibit at art exhibitions.

Carl Richards: So then the art sale started to make a little bit. Like, I got asked to do a couple art shows that were just. Again, I was like, what are you talking about? Like, the first show was here in Park City at the start of Sundance. It was gonna be an eight week solo show with 50 pieces. That was the email. Would you ever consider doing a eight week solo show with 50 pieces? And I was like, I don't even know what a piece is. Like, I called my friend, I'm like, what's a piece? He came over and he's like. So we decided to do old weathered chalkboards, you know, like pragmatic, like weathered chalkboards, framed yellow pad pages, you know, napkin. We framed a bunch of napkins. It all sold out. And I was just like, what happened? Like, so, art show. I did one in London at the Mansion House, did one in Amsterdam, did one in California. So the art business started to grow, which I was just like, this is. I don't even understand. This is amazing. So I started leaning into that.

Liam Curley: Okay, let's get back to Jonathan. Around that time in 2019, when his role at Monday Night Brewing no longer feels like fun, he puts a post out on LinkedIn and I'll quote, I'm taking a little break from the brewery business starting in mid May. My goal is to gain some perspective on Monday Night Brewing, but I want to keep my mind engaged. If you hear of anyone looking for a marketing branding gun for hire for a couple of months in the May to July time frame, I'll be available and open to some consulting work. End quote. So you put that out. Is a conversation happening with your father around that time, before that post, after that post about working with him?

Jonathan Baker: Well, if, if I'm remembering correctly, I think that was related to a sabbatical I was taking. And so it was kind of a three month or a two month deal that I was trying to solve for. And there were no conversations at that time with my father. But there was another period when I was stepping back to kind of half time at the brewery and had other time to fill. And yeah, I think my father approached me and said, you know, there's a lot of value you could add to the business. And gave me, I think it was between five and 10 different areas. Like, are any of these of interest? Right. And some of them are short term projects, some are longer term. And I think that's how the conversation started was more like, here's a menu of things or any of them interesting to you?

Liam Curley: So when you say projects, is it like, as opposed to him saying, there's this area of the business or this area the business, is it him saying, I'm working on this project. I'm working on this project. I'm on this project. Do you want any of these projects?

Jonathan Baker: You know, it's. I'm working on all these clients and there's a subset of clients that I could use your help with on the research side. Or if you want to learn how to do valuations, I can teach you how to do that. But also internally, process wise, like, we need help with our billing system and our project management system and our contracts and, you know, kind of regular business type stuff. So there was, I would say, a pretty broad smattering of options.

Liam Curley: Something else to add here. Jonathan had gone through a failed M&A experience at the brewery. They weren't actively trying to sell the company, but around 2018, they were approached by a large strategic acquirer. In Jonathan's words, it's the kind of conversation you don't say no to. But it inched along for over a year and ultimately didn't lead anywhere. The experience had piqued his interest in the category.

Jonathan Baker: I think my assumption about the M&A process was that it was going to be a little bit more transactional than it was or a lot more transactional than it was. You know, there's only so many things to agree on and there's a spreadsheet and everyone checks off on it and then you're off to the races. What I found was it was a lot more of a rat's nest. I think it gets compared to buying a home many times. But it's very unlike buying a home because you're buying something that someone has made from scratch and has put themselves into and is still actively working in. And you've got different types of buyers looking to buy things for different reasons. And so those deal structures look really different. Right. There's a lot more creativity in deal structure. I think what I saw going through that process is there's a lot more art to M&A than I had expected. And that was a really fun challenge to try to navigate.

Liam Curley: All right, so it's an unorganised jumble. There's creativity to it, it's not transaction. And the kind of messiness is of interest to you. And I'm guessing maybe it feels like it's a problem that you could work on.

Jonathan Baker: A problem I can work on. I think I also empathised with other business owners as a business owner and that it's a pretty lonely process, like there's only so many people you can talk to about the sale of your business that would actually understand and it would have been nice to have more folks kind of in my corner as sounding boards, folks to help keep me sane. And so, you know, a lot of my job now is I feel like kind of business therapy in a way. I mean, it turns into personal therapy sometimes, but the ability to help folks who are similar to me in that particular way of being an entrepreneur is. Is gratifying.

Liam Curley: Jonathan starts on the menu of projects David has put in front of him. Some short term, some longer. M&A is on the list.

Jonathan Baker: And it is completely uninteresting.

Liam Curley: He'd been through the failed deal at the brewery, but going through an M&A process and advising someone else through one are completely different things. He doesn't know the marketing services industry either. He doesn't know how a creative firm sells. But what changes his perception of is the work itself. The more time he spends inside it, the more he sees a gap. M&A advisors in the space tend to be the finance pro.

Jonathan Baker: I started seeing value in what I could bring to the table as well, because it was a little bit different. It was, you know, had a little bit more personality to it, could kind of meet them where they were as creatives, but also explain this kind of complex process that they probably won't go through more than once in their life.

Liam Curley: A year and a half into working on these projects, M&A becomes the focus.

Jonathan Baker: I don't think it was a light switch, but there were a series of clients that I was able to help on the M&A front in ways that I think my father realised, like he wouldn't have been able to service those clients in the same way. He didn't have the patience for it. He didn't have the, you know, kind of mental wherewithal to go and create a new process for something. And so as I was trying to solve for a particular client, I started seeing patterns and putting process in place and it actually started clicking and I realised, oh, this is actually getting more scalable. And as it becomes more scalable, it becomes more fun because the parts I like are the parts that I end up focusing on. And so let me give this a go.

Liam Curley: What parts do you like?

Jonathan Baker: I like the kind of chess game that is negotiation and really the. The strategy around going to market. So how do you go to market? How do you position yourself? You know, it's kind of a micro positioning in a way, figuring out with a seller what the best type of buyer will be for them. Often we have kind of a theory or a thesis going in, but that changes as they start to have conversations with different types of buyers. And it's really fascinating to see the tenor of those conversations change and to find a good fit when, you know, if you'd asked them at the beginning of the process, they would have said, heck, no.

Liam Curley: By 2023, the pair are thinking about a rebrand. The intention is for Jonathan to own the M&A side of the business outright. And it'd be hard to do that working under the personal brand of David C. Baker. For the record, David had actually started his advisory brand under the name Recourses, then rebranded to David C. Baker. He said that he had no idea Jonathan would be joining him at the time, and if he had, he'd have picked a different name. In 2023, the business rebrands from David C. Baker to Punctuation. As David told me, that was after.

David C. Baker: Jonathan came in motivated 100% by the fact that he's already running most of the firm. And when I'm gone, Punctuation will continue, and he'll be doing it. He'll be owning it, everything.

Liam Curley: Yeah, they land on Punctuation as a new brand name and identity. It's short and represents an empty vessel they can fill with meaning. So they buy the dot com domain for $10,000. But let's not kid ourselves at the point where they make this brand change. From the market's perspective, Punctuation still equals David C. Baker, not David and Jonathan Baker. David has spent three decades becoming the person creative service firm owners turn to when they want to sell. Jonathan, at this point, is still new to the niche. David shared with me his perspective on the challenges faced by Jonathan in building his own presence within the brand.

David C. Baker: If anything, there's a disadvantage, because I think people just assume, oh, nepotism, whatever. You know, you hear, like, Ian and Noah Eagle, the announcers for the NFL or for multiple sports, or you hear the Simms, the two Simms, and the father, Chris, what's his name, and his son. And.

Liam Curley: And.

David C. Baker: And you kind of like, you automatically go to, oh, well, somebody hasn't earned this. And so I'd say, no. It's actually a disadvantage that you have to overcome. And I. I tell people all the time, it's like, Jonathan's a better entrepreneur than I am. He's been way more successful than I have. But how do you know that? Like, how do you. How do people know that? They just assume, I think that. Oh, well, just a son.

Chapter 3 — Scaling the Operation

Liam Curley: So we've got this interesting challenge. David is a fully established authority in the niche, Jonathan isn't at this point, he's an unknown. He's experienced and building the brewing business was and is valuable to the perspective and energy that he would bring to M&A advisory. But for creative service firms, there isn't really an obvious connection as to why he is the guy to help guide them through the M&A. How would Punctuation go about leveraging David's platform to help Jonathan build his own profile, but do it in a way that Jonathan would have his own identity? I asked David whether he and Jonathan had a plan for this.

David C. Baker: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. He's working on revising one of my books, but I would like my name to drop off it entirely. I'd like it to be his book. It's a topic that he's much better at than I am. That's in the very early stages, so I don't know if that'll happen. It's a book on managing people. He has gotten his own speaking engagements as part of the brewery, and in fact, he's written quite a few articles for us for Punctuation, and they've been very well received. He has a very specific plan to appear on lots of podcasts and he has maybe 20 of them. I would guess I will frequently if somebody asked me to speak or be on a podcast, and if it's related to M&A, I will always hand that off to him and he does a better job than I would do. So that's the plan. Yeah.

Liam Curley: Did you do anything at the very beginning to help him, like get opportunities to speak or go on podcasts or other, other than give him space on punctuation.com to write? Was there anything else that you did? And when I say you, I mean you as a business, as an individual.

David C. Baker: Well, we did hire a podcast booking agency to find appearances for him and they did a good job. And then the only other thing I did was when somebody asked me, I would just hand it over to him and let him manage it.

Liam Curley: You know, the podcast circuit is a pretty common way to get exposure. So I asked Jonathan whether the podcast actually had an impact.

Jonathan Baker: I would say I haven't noticed as much as I would like from podcasts. What I have noticed is doing webinars and having a stance and doing some speaking as well. So I've been doing more speaking for groups. That has had certainly a larger impact.

Liam Curley: The webinars, your Punctuation webinars, both.

Jonathan Baker: It's probably about half and half on.

Liam Curley: That point about podcasts. That's something I'm keeping my eye on because I've heard this elsewhere. I remember picking up something from April Dunford, an authority herself on positioning in tech. She made the point that when she was executing a book launch, she went on around 300 podcasts to promote that book. I think this was over the course of around 18 months. Here she is speaking on the Emma Stratton show.

April Dunford: Like some podcasts I do, and I get a lot of calls afterwards. People say, oh, I heard you on so and so's podcast. And then, you know, the next 10 I do. I get zero calls. Like zero, nothing, you know, and then you get one that people are talking about.

Liam Curley: I think borrowing audiences by going on the right podcast is a great strategy, but going on hundreds of them where only a dozen or so move the needle is an inefficient one. The attention isn't evenly distributed. A handful of podcasts in any niche have most of the listeners and most of the engagement. The rest, the long tail, have very few of either. So maybe the smart move isn't volume. Maybe it's figuring out which dozen actually matter and putting all your energy into appearing on those dozen podcasts. Now, the counter argument to that is that it's hard to tell what's going to have the impact until after you go on the episode. Also, you see this with other brands in other markets. There may be this benefit of suddenly appearing everywhere all the time that would have some impact. That's hard to measure on building recognition as a leading figure in your field. But I don't know how true that really is. To the extent that it's worth this trade-off of going on hundreds of podcasts. And I'm going to be looking for examples to develop an informed opinion in future episodes about the extent to which podcast guest appearances in high volume is the smart move.

Okay, back to Jonathan. He's getting success with webinars and speaking. And those opportunities, I think are coming because they're launching webinars to their own audience of 13 and a half thousand creative service leaders who are subscribed to the Punctuation newsletter. And there are also opportunities that David can connect Jonathan with when inbound requests come to speak on M&A.

Jonathan Baker: I've become a lot more active in new business, I think, you know, I'm the primary new business guy for M&A at this point. And we have a lot more process in place, but also confidence in the delivery itself. So our valuation, for instance, I think that's the single item that we sell the most of and we're always iterating that model and so it looks different every year in little ways trying to make it closer and closer to reflecting the actual market and also closer and closer to being a tool that is kind of reusable and useful to an agency owner who might not be used to looking at spreadsheets all day.

Liam Curley: How do you personally approach new business now with the M&A as a new business development?

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, so I take a lot of those calls. I will say one of the amazing things about working with my father is that he has built up this incredible inbound engine over the past 25 plus years. And so a lot of the leads we get are based on all the work that he has done over the years, coming in through his podcast, through our newsletter, through our website, our SEO paid ads. And then it's really just comes down to me to have those conversations and close the business. I would say at this point it's still over half of the folks that reach out to us have heard of us, but it's becoming more common for folks to reach out who have not and are just stumbling in based on some of the content that they find along the Internet somewhere.

Liam Curley: What we see here is the impact today of good quality insight on M&A historically published by David over consecutive years. It's not only that the content nurtures subscribers through the weekly email, but it's also pulling inbound opportunities from people who are discovering the content for the first time on Google and now AI. When they discover Punctuation for the first time, they then have a conversation with Jonathan and they encounter processes, services and data that are unrivalled. And the reason they're unrivalled is because of this tight positioning that David developed in the first place, which I spoke about in the previous episode on David C. Baker.

Jonathan has taken that positioning and built upon it further. Part of that is access to primary data upon which Jonathan and David developed their insights.

Jonathan Baker: Yeah, so I think one thing that makes us unique is we only work in the marketing services space and I think uniquely with firms under 5 million in EBITDA. And so we have a really strong data set because of all the consulting work that we've done over the years into what those firms look like on the inside. So we kind of combine that benchmarking knowledge with market-driven valuation knowledge to deliver some, I think, really interesting and helpful guidance onto how buyers see sellers as a kind of framework for how does this help you focus over the next three years as you're getting ready to sell, for example, you have that.

Liam Curley: Data set and benchmarking and in another firm doesn't have that. What can you give that only you can give because you have that benchmark data on.

Jonathan Baker: I think a certainty would be one thing. We have seen the same thing happen.

David C. Baker: Right.

Jonathan Baker: I mean, there's cycles in the industry and the industry changes, but the way that firms are managed has been relatively stable. And looking at the inside of a firm and saying that this is a healthy firm for these reasons or this is an unhealthy firm for these reasons, and these are the things that you need to monitor to fix it would be something that is unique to us. On the M&A side, up.

Liam Curley: To this year, Punctuation was doing approximately $1.7 million per year, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. Just over half that revenue was an equal split between advisory on positioning and lead generation and then the M&A service side of the business. But that split is now heavily weighted towards M&A, around 75%. And business as a whole is on course to do its biggest numbers ever. I asked Jonathan what he thought was behind the growth.

Jonathan Baker: I mean, I think the big thing is really just a focus, particularly on the search side of things. So we always did M&A, but it was a little bit more relational network based. And when I came in, I put a lot more process behind the way that we approach searches. And we also started to focus our content more on M&A as well. So it was an intentional shift to try to align the business more with my strengths and interest as it grew. Because, you know, my father won't be doing this for forever. And so we're trying to future proof it, if you will.

Liam Curley: Yeah, yeah, of course. What's the process around search that you've got now that you didn't have before?

Jonathan Baker: Well, any, any of it really.

Liam Curley: But we have a, we have a people come in. Yeah, yeah, I'm looking for something.

Jonathan Baker: That's what, that's what it was. Yeah. And I, you know, I know generally a few people who are buyers, so I'll reach out to them. But now we have a pretty large database of buyers and they're all coded by the type of shops they're looking for and the size they're looking for and what they do. And we have a process, discrete process that we run our clients through. So yeah, it'd be all of it.

Liam Curley: So you're proactively going, you're building a database of buyers and then being more proactive about approaching them when the right agency is for sale.

Jonathan Baker: That's right, yeah.

Liam Curley: When I set out to create this episode, it was with the view to try and understand how David and Jonathan came up with a plan for David to take the 30 years of authority that he'd built and syphon it off to Jonathan in a way where Jonathan would have his own identity. I don't think that's actually what's happening here. And to be clear, what I'm about to share is my interpretation. It's me looking back at what's happened, what I think the strategy was and the direction I think they're moving in.

When Jonathan enters the business, he recognises the opportunity pretty quickly. It's not for him personally to immediately and quickly build a reputation as the authority on M&A for creative service firms, because David already has that reputation that he had built over decades. He didn't set out to replace the brand asset his father had built. The opportunity he saw was to build processes to scale the operation. These were areas of the business that were underdeveloped. In doing so, Jonathan's building a more robust business with potential to scale. And simultaneously, he's personally developing legitimate expertise in M&A for creative service firms. He doesn't have pressure to build an inbound engine because David has already done that.

What Jonathan's doing is leveraging everything that David built. The name, the foundational M&A expertise, the authority and the exposure. The buyer database didn't exist before him. The valuation model is iterated by him every year, and he's synthesising David's proprietary data into frameworks sellers can use.

David published his first book on the M&A side of the business, Selling Your Professional Service Firm, in 2024. Jonathan had already been working at Punctuation for a few years by then, so that was clearly a considered decision, that the book would come from David, not Jonathan at this point, because I don't think the Punctuation rebrand is really about Jonathan. I think it's about scaling beyond one person. That's what he did with Monday Night Brewing, built a brand bigger than any one of the individual founders.

Jonathan's building the business in the background, and I say background. That's not to suggest he isn't building his authority. He's out there delivering webinars, writing articles and appearing on podcasts. But it's not the pace and volume that David was doing so when he built the advisory side of the business, because that's not what the business needs from Jonathan right now.

But he is becoming the expert on M&A for creative service firms, recognising patterns that others aren't and building processes and systems that are uniquely his own. I suspect over the next five years we'll see Jonathan increase his personal publishing cadence and exposure and in doing so Punctuation, not David C. Baker, become recognised as the preeminent brand in M&A for creative service firms led by Jonathan Baker who would be recognised as the undisputed authority in the niche.

Thank you for listening. This podcast was produced by Jamie Slevin, edited by Magnus Kramers and researched, written and narrated by me, Liam Curley. I help experts develop the positioning frameworks and insights that differentiate them from everyone else in their field and I've created a free email series called the 10 Patterns of Disruptive Wisdom. In my research of undisputed authorities, these are the consistent behavioural patterns I noticed among those who rise to the top. To get the email series head to liamcurley.co.uk. Link is in the description.