Jimmy Caudillo and the business of staying in business

Jimmy Caudillo offered a business rule that would struggle to sell a motivational poster. In April 2020, asked what a business needed to feel secure, he began with staying in business. There was no dazzling opening gambit. First, get the operation to even. Then consider what it can do next. For an executive working in marketing, it was a refreshingly plain place to start.

That answer gives us a useful entrance into Caudillo’s working life. The Murrieta, California, entrepreneur co-founded Think Creative with Shirley Bui in 2016. He is its president and CEO; she is its vice president and CFO. His background crosses automotive retail, marketing and software. The titles tell us where he has worked. The advice tells us something about the problems he considers worth solving.

“the number 1 rule in business is to stay in business.”

Jimmy Caudillo · April 2020

A business needs enough room to make another decision. That is the modest proposition underneath the grander language of growth. Read Caudillo through that lens and the agency, the technology interests and even the podcast questions begin to fit together. Each concerns what people can actually do after an intention has been announced.

First, make tomorrow possible

His April 13 answer laid out a sequence: stabilize the finances, automate some work and adapt the service to what clients now need. He also acknowledged that a smaller team could face more duties. The advice treated technology as part of an operating decision, alongside staffing and the offer to the customer.

Two days later, answering someone whose previous work was no longer available, Caudillo returned to the need for financial footing. He then suggested examining existing skills, finding a present demand for them and connecting with people willing to pay. If the match was missing, acquiring different skills belonged in the plan.

The scale of the proposed action is revealing. A person need not solve an entire career in one sitting. Small strategic moves can serve immediate needs while contributing to a longer effort. That is a practical reading of ambition: give it something specific to do this afternoon.

There is an appealing absence of ceremony here. Business advice can require an impressive vocabulary before it permits a useful action. Caudillo’s sequence is easier to carry into an ordinary working day. Establish the position. Identify the need. Make a move that improves the chances of making another.

The creative idea has a delivery address

Think Creative gives that concern with execution a physical form. The agency combines direct mail and digital advertising, with production extending from graphic design through printing, finishing and delivery. It is a business in which the creative proposal must eventually become something a customer receives.

There is a useful discipline in that. An attractive design still has to pass through production. Someone has to prepare the work, check the details and complete the delivery. The name Think Creative makes room for imagination; the service offering gives imagination an itinerary.

Caudillo’s co-founder partnership also deserves its place in the picture. A company carrying both creative and production responsibilities needs commercial decisions as well as creative ones. The publicly identified CEO and CFO roles put those responsibilities beside each other from the beginning of the agency’s story.

For a client, combining services brings the question of coordination into view. A campaign can involve several kinds of expertise before anyone sees an advertisement. The agency model offers one place to commission that work. Its usefulness rests on the connections between the tasks, where a good intention can otherwise become a delayed job.

What the dealership leaves in the work

Automotive retail is a recurring part of Caudillo’s professional background. His biographies place dealerships alongside marketing firms and software companies. That combination helps explain why a profile of an agency founder also leads into customer records, service relationships and the period after a vehicle changes hands.

Think Creative’s services include customer-list preparation and reporting through its ORBIS tool. Its advertised automotive lists can distinguish customers by such factors as warranty expiration, vehicle type or purchase category. These are specific commercial questions. A business has to decide which customer needs which invitation.

The distinction matters because attention has a recipient. An advertisement can be beautifully made and poorly timed. A customer list can contain plenty of records without offering a clear reason to contact the people in them. The work between those two problems is less picturesque than a campaign launch, but it gives the launch a purpose.

This is one way to read Caudillo’s movement across sectors: the setting changes while the need to connect information, action and customer response remains. That is an interpretation of the career’s shape. The concrete continuity is his involvement with businesses serving automotive customers and the marketing work around them.

Two conversations, a microphone and a question

In May 2020, Caudillo took a different route into working life. His podcast, Daily Mind Grind, is credited to Jimmy C. Its catalog contains two episodes, both about 56 minutes long. The title promises regular exertion; the surviving pair gives a compact introduction to his chosen subjects.

The opening episode, released May 1, was The Difference Between Embracing and Accepting. JT and Mateo joined him. Its description centers on how people receive change, and whether they approach it with willingness or merely accommodate it. It is a surprisingly precise distinction to spend a conversation on.

A manager may obtain agreement and still have work to do. People can understand a change without knowing how to carry it out. They can comply with a decision while remaining unsure about its consequences. The episode’s premise opens that territory without requiring the listener to mistake a title for an answer.

The second episode, Leaders Eat Last, followed on May 8. Its description asks about leadership styles, the language of hunger and the reasons JT and Mateo work hard for their company and boss. The subject moves from personal drive toward the relationship between the leader and the team.

Those are useful questions to put beside an entrepreneur’s biography. Growth can be described with company names and job titles. Leadership has to account for other people’s experience of the work. A conversation gives that experience more room than a line on a professional profile.

The boss described by someone else

Amy Riley’s public recommendation offers another angle. She describes Caudillo as willing to learn from people around him, pass that learning along and work alongside his team. Her account emphasizes energy and openness to change. It is a colleague’s assessment, with the particular perspective that implies.

It sits interestingly beside his public advice. The executive recommending automation also receives credit for personal involvement. There is a practical question in that pairing: which work should a system make easier, and where does the team still need the leader to participate? Every growing operation eventually has to answer it.

Riley’s description also makes learning sound social. An executive can gather useful ideas from the people doing the work and share them elsewhere in the organization. Knowledge moves through the team. The leader’s contribution includes noticing it and giving it another place to be useful.

The customer has already driven away

Caudillo’s professional activity includes sharing AVAS material about connected ownership and customer relationships beyond a vehicle sale. The emphasis is on maintaining a dealership’s relevance during ownership, including service and communication. The transaction becomes the beginning of a longer stretch of work.

There is a straightforward reason this subject belongs in his story. Automotive retail supplies a clear dividing line: the sale is completed, and the customer leaves. Everything afterward asks a different kind of question about usefulness. Why should the customer return? What communication would deserve attention? Which part of the experience can the business improve?

The technology can organize information and support contact. The commercial judgment still concerns the reason for that contact. Read alongside his earlier advice, this interest suggests a continuing concern with what follows the initial decision: the service after the promise, the next step after the plan.

Another generation gets a turn

Caudillo is also listed as marketing director on the M.A.L.H.Y. board. His community interests include youth sports, literacy and financial education. His AVAS biography describes mentoring emerging entrepreneurs. These commitments extend the audience for his business experience beyond the companies in which he works.

Teaching someone how to understand a financial choice operates on a different timetable from a campaign. Its usefulness can emerge much later. Mentoring has a similar quality: the person receiving the explanation gets to decide what to make of it. Experience becomes something another person can use.

Across these parts of his public life, Caudillo keeps returning to practical movement. Stabilize the business. Match a skill to a need. Consider how people respond to change. Keep a customer relationship useful. Help someone else acquire knowledge for a decision they have yet to face.

The attraction of his first rule is its lack of theatrical ambition. Staying in business leaves room for the harder, more interesting questions about what the business should do. Tomorrow arrives with another customer, another employee and another decision. There is plenty of ambition in being ready for them.