75: Mike Rizzo: Building resilient Marketing Ops through community

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of chatting with Mike Rizzo, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who’s done as much for the marketing Ops community.

• He got his start in marketing at California-based tech startups and eventually worked in b2b SaaS where he got his hands dirty in several martech tools
• In 2017, he founded MO Pros, a Slack channel dedicated to connecting with Marketing Operations Professionals
• Mike also took a short turn in the agency world where he was Director of Marketing Strategy for Client Accounts at Human, Orange County’s full-service Inbound Marketing Agency 
• He then returned in-house and boomeranged back to one of his earliest startups to lead Community and Loyalty programs
• He’s also the co-host of Ops Cast by MO Pros, a podcast for Marketing Ops Pros by Marketing Ops Pros
• Last year, Mike double down on the community he started and launched MarketingOps.com taking a community-led approach to building career resources that are purpose-built for MO Pros
• Today, his community counts more than 4,000 martech professionals and is one of the few communities I frequent on a daily basis

Mike, excited to have you on, not sure why it’s taken this long to chat with you.

MO Pros
Recently you shared that you don’t take any payroll from MarketingOps(.)com despite all the costs and time you pour into this venture. I was kind of shocked by this honestly. This isn’t just a podcast that you’re spending a few hours on every week. I imagine quite a bit more work and a lot more tech. 

Can you shine a light on everything that is MO Pros these days and is the revenue you are generating from it just re-invested into the community and paying your costs? What’s stopping you from going all-in on this project?

"No Bullsh*t Demo" program
I think one of the things that sets your community apart from both a user but also a sponsor/brand perspective is your "No Bullsh*t Demo" program. I’ve sat in on a few of these and for martech companies selling to marketers, this is one of the best ways to reach your ICP.

Walk us through how you got this idea and if you’re seeing this more in other communities?

MOPS-APALOOZA
https://marketingops.com/mopsapalooza23/
You’ve got a big conference coming up in Nov later this year featuring big name speakers like Scott Brinker (Chiefmartec) and Juan Mendoza (TMW). I’d love to hear the story behind creating an in person event and how you went about it and getting big name speakers?

I’ll give you the floor to pitch the conference to the audience. Why is this going to be different from other events we’ve been to? You know those events that cost a pretty penny only to get disappointed by talks and come back to your company with little insights and a few new business cards.

What’s a certified marketing ops pro?
Recently you ranted about take-home assignments in interview rounds and asked the community how we might find ways to prove the skills we have in MOps AHEAD of our next interview.

You got a lot of interesting comments on your post. One thing I was surprised that no one commented about is how wildly different the role of MOps is at a startup as a 1 person MOPs team doing everything under the sun vs. at a big 50+ MOps team at a massive enterprise company. I’ve seen this first hand. Different skills and different types of humans… maybe there’s a cert for startup/smb/enterprise marketing ops pro

Based on the feedback you got, what’s your current thoughts on this, what’s a certified marketing ops pro?

AI not replacing any marketers any time soon
We can’t get through a podcast these days without talking about something that’s on everyone’s minds, even if some of us have muted all those AI tech bros on Twitter…

I don’t think you’d describe yourself as an AI critic or detractor but you’ve said in a few places that you don’t think AI will be replacing any marketing jobs any time soon.

I think the key thing here is that you’re using the term “anytime soon” haha… that could be 3 months like it could be 5 years so you’re saving yourself from potential ridicule by not giving a fixed definition on your time horizon.

But maybe we can spend a bit of time here because this is something we don’t totally agree on.

AI not replacing community-focused roles
In our 4 part series on AI, we had a deep dive into how to prepare and future proof your career, potentially exploring new areas of marketing that will be less likely to be impacted. One of those is community-focused roles, which you obviously know a thing or two about.

What advice would you have for listeners who don’t have any or little experience with community and events to get some experience and potentially explore this area of speciality?

Immersive, personalized events of the future
We’re big sci-fi fans here on the podcast and love thinking about the speculative future. What are some of the areas that excite you the most about the future of community-led marketing?

One that’s thrown around a lot – and likely only going to get even crazier with Apple’s Vision Pro announcement –  is VR and metaverse applications, curious what your thoughts are on: Immersive, personalized events. A future that involves more gamification and VR activations.

Starting a fractional business
Jon to free form this one – curiosity is a good theme – adventure – I’m very curious about how you choose what you go - what lessons you wish you could bring back to yourself 5-10 years ago…

Last question
Mike – you’re a founder and CEO, a podcaster, a community moderator, a community-led freelancer, a speaker, a conference organizer, a husband and father of two, a football fanatic… you have a lot going on… One question we ask all our guests is how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you’re working on while staying happy?

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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with Midjourney