Jonathan Andrews talks to Matthew Besch, Energy Vertical Marketing Manager at Sensus, about why not being afraid to ‘take a leap’ has led him to the senior levels of marketing
Matthew Besch would be the first to say that he has had one of the “craziest career journeys”.
From working as a graduate PR assistant for the American Football team, the Denver Broncos in 1998 and 1999 when they won the Superbowl, to captaining boats off the Florida Keys, and then running his own boutique advertising agency, he admits he has been fortunate but that also in each position he has had to work hard from the bottom up.
From journalist to PR
Because he enjoyed the writing process, he studied a degree in PR and journalism where he started working as an intern for American Football Quarterly, a small start-up publication.
“I got to rub elbows with people that I never should have had that opportunity to do so,” he says. “And to take part in that kind of position, for a 22-year-old kid, was unreal. It was fantastic.”
As a sports fan he then took a masters in sports administration and combined this with his PR and journalism background to work at the Denver Broncos.
“I thought the two would be a good fit,” he explains. “I had an assistantship at the Denver Broncos and I was fortunate because thousands of people would apply and this is before online applications. Something in my typed-up printed letter resonated with my boss at the time.”
It also brought one of his first career learning points. Most of us usually find out at some point that a dream job is not all it is cracked up to be. While he loved the promotions side of the job, most of his time was spent turning down media requests and saying ‘no’ to people.
“You weren’t trying to promote the Broncos as much as you were trying to manage the promotion of them,” he says. “Working in the sports and PR worlds you’re working a lot of hours for not a lot of pay. It’s a struggle and there are 100s of people behind you wanting your job.”
Learning lessons
It didn’t sit well with him and where he wanted his life to be so out of the blue he moved to the Florida Keys to work on sailing boats.
He started at the bottom by cleaning boats and worked his way up to becoming a mate, and after a couple of years was promoted to captain.
“Then I started working on bigger boats and that’s the kind of trajectory I took for roughly seven years,” he says. “The last four of which I worked as captain on large schooners.”
All was not smooth sailing. When first learning how to captain a ship, the owner took him out on a 65-foot schooner, and asked him to try a few ‘touch and goes’ to practise docking.
“The owner of the ship is sitting behind me and I pull up to the dock and ram it and put a six-foot gash along the side of it,” he explains. “My stomach sank, and I explained to him I was so sorry but asked him why he didn’t tell me to turn. He said, ‘Well this is how you’re going to learn and next time you won’t do it’.”
The valuable lesson was further ingrained as he worked over several days to fix the six-foot gash.
“The important point of letting someone fail has helped me tremendously not only in my work but also raising my kids,” he adds. “You learn from those failures and you become better because of it.”
After Florida, he followed his future wife to North Carolina where she was enrolled in grad school. He realised he wasn’t going to make the same amount of money captaining a boat as in the Florida Keys. An area of North Carolina without a lot of industry, Besch knew he had to find his own way.
Not wanting to work in hospitality, with his PR background he saw an opportunity and opened his own boutique advertising agency.
“At the time the area had a tourist community and they didn’t have any real advertising or PR help,” he says. “I had seen some things that had worked in the Florida Keys and I thought it would work in North Carolina so I borrowed a lot of those ideas and brought them up the coast.”
He also became a publisher of a successful local restaurant magazine but sold off and closed both the agency and magazine in 2013.
“The writing was on the wall for print publications at that time,” he says. “So it was time to get out.”
Not being afraid to leap into something new, Besch took up his first marketing job in a large organisation. In 2015 he joined ARCO, a growing cash automation company.
“I was hired at the point where I was reporting directly to the president,” he explains. “At the time there were roughly 60 employees but in the span of four years that increased to 600. I was fortunate in that I got to start off and build my own marketing team.”
Besch recalls it was a bizarre yet unreal learning experience that couldn’t be replicated. He was given the opportunity to make the most of the opportunity and from joining as a content strategist became marketing director in little over a year.
Although now he is vertical marketing manager at Sensus, he says the financial sector is very similar to utilities. Both are quite heavily regulated and both have companies varying in size from investor-owned to the smaller cooperatives and municipalities.
He likens his new role as vertical marketing manager as one leg of a three-legged stool, or a triumvirate, where “power” is shared among marketing and communications, product marketing and then vertical marketing.
“I look at industry trends, where things are going and work with product management to see if something needs to be addressed within products,” he says. “I’m also the conduit between marketing communications and how to turn the technical speak into something a lay person can understand.”
He identifies areas of the market where they aren’t hitting to the extent they should and addresses that with marketing and communications to build campaigns together.
The best marketing channel for Besch is still anywhere he can get in front of someone but still admires the possibility of programmatic advertising and says his spend on LinkedIn is well worth it. While not an account-based marketing house there are still elements that the company uses and are looking to be more targeted in their approach.
He adds that because sustainability is at the heart of Sensus, and the greater Xylem organisation, this gives him a better product to market to utilities.
But he is candid in that, for his sector, measuring is still the silver bullet.
“Rather cynically, sometimes marketers can put blinders on and skew numbers to their advantage because a campaign might not be successful,” he explains. “But in my mind the proof is in the pudding.”
The challenge with utilities is that there is a long buying cycle.
“You don’t put an ad out and the next day they buy our solution,” he says. “It could be nine months or two or three years before you see the results. That is the biggest challenge.”
A well journeyed career path has taught him one important lesson: to take a risk.
“Don’t be afraid to take chances, give it shot,” he advises. “Be original, and that’s been my career to this point. Give it a shot and it won’t always work out but more often than not there is a positive result to take from it.”