Today we’d like to introduce you to Mike Lloyd.
Hi Mike, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started my first real business in 2010 when I decided to become a professional photographer. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was out of college and I just moved back from France and I knew I wanted to work for myself. So I started reading books and experimenting with marketing and sales and I learned how to attract clients and sell photos. I’ve always loved psychology and studying buyer behavior and it never felt like work. It was always just another fun puzzle to solve and I got to be artistic while doing it.
After a few years I started doing more commercial photography because there was good money doing corporate head shots and product photos. And in working with these companies, I learned that a lot of them did not have real marketing plans or a legitimate strategy around how they would use this media. That was something I was good at so I started doing marketing consulting for these companies. I learned that I could make more money doing this, with virtually no overhead, and it was another fun puzzle that I got to solve with every new client.
I launched a podcast and a YouTube channel for growing businesses that totaled about 600 episodes. I taught at conferences and wrote a book about photography and I loved the education side as much as running my own business. But after 15 years I was ready for something different. After battling with chronic fatigue and brain fog from long Covid, I decided I wanted to get into the Med Spa business because IV therapy was the first thing that helped me shake four years of brain fog.
I got introduced to an incredible woman named Kelly who had a history of marketing high-end spas, and we instantly became best friends. Instead of buying the med spa, I joined her marketing agency as a creative director and we have worked together for the past two years, evolving the business. Just like before, we started serving clients realizing that they needed more support than the one service they had hired us for. We were bringing in leads, but they didn’t have the fulfillment capabilities, operational systems, or the leadership to handle this new growth. So we strategically evolved again to become a growth firm, and rather than just provide marketing services, we offer fractional operations, and executive leadership support for growing companies. I really feel that for the first time I have a business that can provide a holistic breadth of support for these business owners. It’s a pretty incredible feeling.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Our path has been anything but smooth. One thing I can say about this journey is that both of us have an unshakable growth mindset, and look at every experience as a learning opportunity. I know it sounds pretty cliché, but we truly believe that you only lose when you quit. Every other obstacle is just an opportunity to grow.
One of the biggest obstacles I had in the photo studio was having to educate the marketplace on this very different experience compared to what the average consumer expects from a photo studio. Coming from a hospitality background it was natural for me to focus as much on the customer experience as it was on the product. And most cases the experience was the product. We’ve had a similar path with our growth firm because most people just assume we’re a marketing agency. The concept of a company that offers this variety of fractional support from people who have actually been in the trenches doing these things is pretty foreign to most business owners. But we look at it as just another fun challenge. And we have our proof of concept. We know it works. And we’re so excited every day to wake up and get started, it’s just a matter of creating this mindset shift for people who are in a very chaotic space and they’re looking for something familiar and comfortable.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
The Embedded Analyst provides fractional marketing, operations, and leadership support to help your business move from reactive growth to intentional, scalable progress. We’re not just another marketing agency using AI to create everything and recycling the same campaign for every client. Part of what makes us different is the amount of time and energy we put into really getting to know our clients and identify the gaps in their business that are actually slowing or stopping growth. We look at it like going to the doctor and having them write you a prescription before doing any test to figure out what is actually going wrong. That process is backward but so many agencies do it.
Our motto is “make it so good they never want to leave”. We apply this to how we treat our team and our clients. My business partner Kelly and I have very different backgrounds and our zones of genius complement each other. She loves spending days diving into the research to put together comprehensive strategies based on real market data. I come from a hospitality background and I love working with people so I can focus on powering everyone to be the best version of themselves. It’s a pretty incredible dynamic we have.
One other thing that sets us apart is that we operate in integrity. Everyone knows what it’s like to hire a marketing agency who makes big promises and never delivers. We’ve been on the receiving end of that before in our previous businesses and we are very adamant about never putting our clients through that. We also believe in maintaining a life outside of work. We show up every day ready to crush it and we give it our all. Then we encourage our team to clock out and go enjoy their time off without feeling guilty. Living a happy healthy life is so important and the last thing any of us want is a job that keeps us from our friends and family and the things that make us happy. Your career should allow you to live your dream lifestyle, not force you to sacrifice it for someone else’s gain. We’re pretty proud of our culture.
What we really want everyone to walk away with here is that there is another way. It’s literally impossible to scale without making sure that marketing, operations, and leadership are aligned. All 3 sectors must grow together or everything breaks. And fractional support is so much more effective, and cost efficient, than handing off the job to another company and letting them operate independently.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
We’re actually looking for the real problems that stall or stop growth rather than selling random tactics that are currently popular on TikTok or YouTube. We’ve taken everything we’ve learned in our decades of experience and built this firm on the principal that marketing, operations, and leadership must all be addressed in order for businesses to scale without constantly putting out fires. No team is truly siloed in a company, but almost all teams are treated as such. They work together whether or not the business owner acknowledges it. We bridge those three sectors an address all of the gaps we identify during our analysis. That’s where the name came from. We embed ourselves in a company and we do a ridiculously comprehensive analysis before we build the quarterly plan.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://theembeddedanalyst.com/
