How Much Does Drive Impact Your Career? Tinuiti’s Abbey Klaassen Explains It To A Teenager

I had one of my favorite Explain It To A Teenager conversations this year with Abbey Klaassen, the CEO of marketing agency Tinuiti.

In the short conversation, I learned all about Tinuiti, what it’s like to be a CEO, what mentorship means and how much drive can impact your career.

Rio Damata (RD): What's your name and what do you do?

Abbey Klaassen (AK): I'm Abbey Klaassen and I'm the CEO of Tinuiti, which means that I basically need to make sure the right people are working on the right things, that we're always moving forward, and we're not getting too complacent.

RD: What is Tinuiti?

AK: Tinuiti is a media agency. And the simplest way I can think to explain it is we help our clients spend their advertising money. If you have a lemonade stand, let's say, we help determine who are the people most likely to buy the lemonade. And then we figure out where you put the signs to help them find the lemonade. And then at the end, we help you try to figure out, okay, how much money did you make on that?

RD: Do you handle the whole advertising process for companies?

AK: We help find the audiences. We figure out where the audiences need to be reached and in what channels and we buy the media and then we work with partners often who will create the content that goes in those places.

RD: And then you put it in places and see how it acts?

AK: We put it in places. We constantly look at how it is doing in terms of people seeing it and responding and making adjustments. So much of media these days is digital, so we can make adjustments in real time. It's not like in the past where you put up a billboard and you'd end up with it up for three months. So that's what we do. And then we continually look at how it is performing. And at the end of it, we're able to tell our clients, this is the value you have generated in terms of your business, thanks to your advertising.

RD: You say you're the CEO. What does that entail at this type of company?

AK: We're a pretty big company. We're about 1,200 people all over the country. And we also have people in Mexico and the UK. And so my job has to be how do we set kind of a set of priorities in the company that everything ladders up to so that people aren't running around doing their own things, that we're very focused and we're moving toward the same goal.

RD: How do you value mentorship?

AK: I think mentorship is one of the biggest career accelerants that you can have. And finding a great mentor is a very special thing. I think it's less about going up to somebody and saying, hey, will you be my mentor but more looking at the people in your life who you think are really smart, asking them good questions, watching how they work, and then maybe saying to them, ‘Hey, can I have 20 minutes? I'd just love to learn a little bit more about you, what you do, and how you approach things.’

RD: As a CEO, if you're at the top, how do you approach mentorship? How does it show up for you?

AK: For me, I have mentors in my own life. I have mentors who've helped me get to where I am today, and I have mentors who I consult in my job today. I also have people who hopefully see me as a mentor. I try to take time for that. And then I have mentors who sometimes are younger than me, sometimes are less experienced than me, but they bring different perspectives to the table. 

RD: So mentorship is all about just getting different perspectives and bringing them together for ultimate wisdom? 

AK: That’s right. Mentorship is about developing your own point of view and your own wisdom, but you're taking inputs from other people. And sometimes they're coaching mentors, and sometimes they're more just perspective mentors.

RD: What advice would you give to teenagers who might want to either hold the position that you do one day or work in the type of company that you do?

AK: I think seek to understand things that you don't know and don't be afraid of the hard things. 

Somebody once told me to run to the fires because where there's a lot of fire, there's great opportunity. And the other thing somebody once told me was always be the first to arrive and the last to leave. That was the era where we all went to offices every single day. But I think the mentality holds true. Be hungry. Be disciplined. And be there. If you're a basketball player, they say hang around the hoop and you'll get some rebounds, right?