This week, Bill sat down with Koti Wright, Marketing Coordinator at Brechbuhler Scales and Instrument Calibration Solutions of Canton, Ohio. Koti brings a refreshingly raw perspective to B2B marketing, blending her grassroots content creation background with the rigorous branding needs of the industrial sector. From viral TikToks to factory tours, Koti shares how authenticity, culture, and a healthy amount of adaptability are breathing new life into the traditionally dry world of manufacturing marketing.
Whether you're a marketing director, small business owner, or simply navigating the jungle of B2B branding, this episode offers a candid look at what’s working—and what’s not—in today’s industrial marketing landscape.
Koti Wright is a passionate Marketing Coordinator who thrives on creativity, strategy, and building meaningful connections. At Brechbuhler and ICS, Koti manages marketing initiatives that strengthen brand visibility and customer trust. Whether it’s through digital campaigns or content creation, she loves bringing a company’s vision to life and making an impact.
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Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast, where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today I'm with Koti Wright, the marketing director and coordinator here at Brechbuhler Scales and ICS. Koti, how are you doing today?
Koti: I'm great. How are you?
Bill: Great. Well, Koti, thank you for joining us. And I know you've had a, just a wild ride here recently. There's a lot going on in here. There's a lot going on with ICS. So maybe tell us a little bit about your background. What brought you here and what got you excited about marketing and got you into this?
Koti: Okay, so I really was self-taught a lot with marketing. Started out in network marketing doing just like online companies. And that was probably about five years ago. And I built a team pretty large with about 80 to 100 people underneath me. So just really helping them grow their businesses, but also growing mine at the same time. And then when my son was probably about three, yeah, about 3 or 4. I took a step back from that. Just the burnout was real. It was just, you know, a pyramid-type MLM company. And but I still continued with the love for content building. And then Covid hit. TikTok was a thing. And I was like, okay, my son is four and he's, like, thriving. He loves, you know, being in front of the camera. I love being in front of the camera. And him and I would just make silly little videos. Well, then I had a couple videos go viral on TikTok. My son actually ended up getting one of them sold to the show Ridiculousness. So then, I don't know, I just kept growing on the whole social side of everything. So just my love for that just came very natural and just wanting to learn more. And I still do. Outside of my full time here with Brechbuhler and ICS, I help small businesses in my area with their, like Instagram Reels and, building their content to help them. And I was originally hired with ICS, as an office manager, assistant, admin. I don't really know what my title was. And then I was like, operations coordinator or something. When I was hired, I was four months pregnant. So went through, the basically just training at that point. Went on maternity leave came back and, and they were just kind of like, we're not sure what to do with you now. Like, you're back, you had your baby. And we just want to make sure, like, your thriving here too and I guess there was a meeting that I was not a part of where the other office administration. And our branch manager and Dennis. And something was sparked about me and marketing and how, like my TikTok following was up. And I guess they said they've never seen Dennis like, light up so much was because he had, like, this itch of wanting to build our marketing side here for Brechbuhler and ICS. Then I was brought into the loop. So that was June of last year. And, yeah, they brought it to me and said, what do you think of this? And I was like, let's go. Like, I'm ready, I love this, I thrive for this. And so now, as of I started with ICS marketing back in June, just kind of tapping into a little bit here and there and just kind of doing and playing around with stuff. And then officially for Brechbuhler in January of 25.
Bill: Well, congratulations.
Koti: Thank you. So it's been a little over a year since being with ICS and now Brechbuhler, but I feel like I've been in so many different roles and worn so many different hats. So. But it's been fun.
Bill: So I think this is something we can discover right right away in this, this conversation of what's missing is never miss a meeting because you never know what's going to happen when you miss a meeting. And then people are talking and then you come back, you're like, what did I get myself into? That's an old joke from a long time ago, right? Whoever misses the meeting is going to be responsible. So, this is something for the audience. Never miss a meeting because you don't know what's going to happen. Koti, that's really interesting that you come from where the grassroots side, which we're certainly seeing an upswell in the industry of those who haven't maybe been traditionally educated in marketing, haven't really been in that corporate side, but have an amazing acumen to be able to deliver from more of that, just like raw and more, I guess, like effective and conversion based. So, you know, when we think about the corporate side, it's it's safer. Take less risk, those type of things. But then whenever you are able to go viral. Sell one of your son's videos, those type of things, that's a whole other economy that occurs with the media. What have you learned as you've kind of seen those worlds come together, that grassroots, and then the corporate side? Because I, I'm sure that you're seeing you have to have some trade offs there. Like, it's not just you can't just go shoot TikToks at corporate and then that's okay. Right? There's there's some like, more, like even called boundaries.
Koti: Yeah. For sure. So especially with the corporate side, you have to stick with branding. You don't want to just use any color. Like, I'm not going to put something out for Brechbuhler or even ICS and it be, you know, green and black, or I'm going to make sure I'm sticking to the colors and also making sure our content is serving not only our employees and our culture, but our customers, and they're getting something out of it. I mean, marketing is to bring people's attention and to get people with us, right? We're not just going to throw anything out there because then that's not building any trust.
Bill: No. That's great. When I think that one of the things you just hit on there is brand. We have to be authentic. We have to be organic. But certainly if we're putting something out for a company, we want it to be on brand so that there is some association for that brand awareness long term. So now that's that's an interesting, way to look at that marriage or that convergence of that grassroots and corporate. As you've looked at, kind of bringing those two worlds together, what have you seen that's worked really well or what do you see that's missing? Or what do you see that, like you tried and it was a total disaster. Like, you know, we get real here. We had we we bare our souls for what works and what doesn’t.
Koti: Yeah. So I feel like the B2B marketing is very dry. Marketing, I think especially now in today's world, it being 2025, personality is huge. Being organic is huge. People want to see real, raw. Like don't be afraid to be yourself. Be relatable. And I feel like too if, I mean, if you're just putting something out there that's not really you, but then you go meet this customer in person, they're going to be like, wait a minute, who am I, you know, like, who am I talking to? Because you're one way online, but you're another way in person. So still keeping it professional, but also having fun and relatable.
Bill: No. That's great, I love that. What do you think the most significant challenge you see like corporate teams facing today in marketing? Like what do you see as a challenge every day? Maybe the, if someone, if you were counseling a friend who is thinking of getting into this, what is something maybe that you've realized here, even just in six months to a year, that was way different than you expected it to be?
Koti: I think just the knowledge of it's goes so much deeper than just the outside looking in. There's so much more to it than just putting a post up or getting some marketing materials out, or putting a logo on a T-shirt. Marketing, especially now with the digital side, there's so much to it and there's so many different ways you can go about it. Like, I can have one idea spark in my head, but then it can be produced so many different ways, whether it's a blog post or a Reel or a video or a podcast or, an event like you can use one idea and spin it multiple ways.
Bill: Well and I think one of the things we're seeing, that is, it continues to be a, a challenge for marketers is this strategic approach, right? So that's a problem. Like, what's the best strategy? Two, content, like, we can repurpose the same idea a million ways. And that's before we get to the thumbnails. That's before we get to the headlines. Like I mean there's so many variations. We need to test. Right. And then when we find those things, what have you found as far as you know, Brechbuhler and ICS are very, very technical products. Very, there's a lot of science, engineering. There's a lot of, intellectual horsepower behind these brands. Have you found that to be somewhat of a challenge to come up to speed on a lot of the technical? Because I've been working with Brechbuhler now for, I think, seven years, and I still learn something new every time I'm here. I know later we're going to tour Engineered Solutions today and and kind of get a feel for that. But do you, do you find that it's a constant learning in this manufacturing space?
Koti: For me personally, yes. Just because before, you know, joining ICS, originally I was in health care. So I was doing the admin side of, you know, insurance and billing and scheduling and prescriptions like nothing in this world of scales and calibration. So that's probably then for me personally, like the biggest hurdle, and it does change so rapidly with just new things coming out, new product lines, new vendors, and just making sure the information is correct. I'm very thankful that I have Dennis and Derrick to kind of lean on. And then also our techs at ICS are great. They're never, you know, like, leave me alone. I feel like they really enjoy helping ensure their input. And same with the Brechbuhler side. Since I've been doing visits with, going out to branches, they've all been really knowledgeable, helpful and willing just to put their helping hand in wherever they can or wherever I need it.
Bill: No. That's great. I think when you look at the culture you guys have here at Brechbuhler that I know, the Brechbuhler family and all of the leadership here has worked really hard to cultivate. You're going to have a help-first mentality from. And I think that's one of the principles in the American Grit and in that, mission vision, values statement. So, yeah, you have a great team here. They can help. And I think this is where we see some of the challenges in like you said earlier, B2B, especially in social media, is very dry. But then we also have very, very technical information. So we've had clients come to us and say, hey, we want to be more fresh. We want to be more exciting, more cutting-edge, more funny, and then we produce content they’re like, yeah, we can’t do that. So like, I think there's a balance between how we approach the market and making sure that that end user audience is able to ingest the right information because we can't be surface level whenever we're marketing very niche audiences with technical information. So I think we're really seeing, I'm projecting that 2025 through 27, we're going to see more and more humor, more and more innovation and organic content developed. However, very few companies are pushing the boundaries and especially in the like, what I'm going to call the heavy industrial manufacturing. They’re always slower to adopt. So there's, it'll be interesting to watch who goes for it and who doesn't. I'm still trying to get, a Gen Z cut done on Dednis and Derrick. I think that would be hilarious, but we'll see. I owe Dennis for some things, so we'll see how that comes together. And if we distribute it, we'll just we might not have jobs the next day here, but hey, whatever. It would be worth the laugh, right?
50 Marketing break
Bill: Whenever you look at, the future of, like, working on marketing initiatives, what do you think are the biggest challenges coming forward? In B2B marketing here over the next six, 12, 18 months?
Koti: I think just sticking and staying up to date with trends, there's different, you know, everything changes weekly with marketing. Whether that be like hashtags, hashtags used to be a huge thing versus now they're kind of falling off. So just making sure that I'm aware of what's working, what's not working, and being proactive and staying in communication with also what I need from everyone else. That's the biggest thing, especially with how rapidly ICS is growing. And Brechbuhler also, I know since the marketing everything kind of started on the digital side, it's whatever we're doing is working. So discontinued that and yeah, just stay up to date with everything. Make sure we're staying, you know, just communicating.
Bill: No, that's I think that's the right attitude because the rate of change has been aggressive, I would say, for the past ten, 12 years. And it is only going to accelerate because the two letter, monster that is like the elephant in the room, which is AI, I've been doing a number of presentations, out and about for different organizations, and it's all anybody wants to talk about. What's AI going to do? And certainly if I had my crystal ball, I would be able to, you know, figure that out. And probably be retired by now because I would know and we'd sort that out. But I think we're all struggling with it. We're all trying to figure out what's on the bleeding edge and what's applicable today, what we can integrate and scale and leverage, and what we have to wait, like what we have to wait on so it matures and is, more readily available for us. So, yeah, I think, if you're going to and I think this could maybe be a tip for anybody who's thinking of getting in this industry, if you want the same day over and over again, do not get into marketing. Because every day something new pops up. You know, we'll get someone sent me a Slack the other day, like, Hey, did you see the most recent update from such and such? I was like the 9 a.m., the 9:05 or the 9:07 change? Like, which one? So, like, you just have to, like, don't be surprised, it's happening. You just got to deal with it. So and certainly social media, I mean, when we think about like more of the DTC social media, those are entering more of a mature phase. There's a lot of activity. LinkedIn feels like it's almost 5 to 7 years behind because we're just seeing video become more prevalent. The the user behaviors on LinkedIn for professionals are certainly different than they are on X or on Meta or on TikTok, certainly different than TikTok, hopefully. We're we're not, doing all that, but I guess I'm scheduled to dance on a table or do something crazy in a couple weeks so I get my TikTok views up. We'll see what the, I'm looking at the team here to see what they're saying. But you know, so I think, yeah, staying, up on the changes, is so, so very important. When you think about, your early career in health care and then these other, areas, the, the, multi-level marketing, what of those, experiences do you really feel prepared you, for what you're doing today?
Koti: I wouldn't say so much health care because. But the network marketing. So I'm actually still involved in that. So even when I'm not at work doing marketing, I'm at home doing marketing, and I honestly just love it. But I think that being involved in the network marketing aspect personally, I just have it's forced me to learn, like how to work things like Canva, CapCut, I use ElevenLabs for things and just like different programs are working out there to simplify it. Because I am still, you know, a mom and a wife, and I have an eight-year-old in sports, so I can't just be at home just doing marketing. Like, I can't spend my whole life doing that work and at home. So just being able to simplify it, has really, I think, made it easier on the career side, for Brechbuhler and ICS, because we can be more proactive and be more time efficient.
Bill: Excellent. No finding those tools and those, systems or processes, SOPs that will make you more effective, no matter what the reason. You know, whatever's motivating that efficiency is always the right answer. And, you know, that's interesting. I think, the way you're approaching things makes a ton of sense because it's more of that grassroots. And there's certainly a need for that grassroots influx into industrial. If you can think back over the last six months of something you've done, that the results shocked you. I've seen a number of, your video posts and you're like, your walkaround tours at some of the facilities. Was there anything there that you did that, like, really stood out or went really well or like totally bombed? Because, like, you know, sometimes we'll work on something like crazy and it'll get like 20 views and then we have something that's completely off the cuff, I think not the most intelligent production we've ever done. And it skyrockets. Right. Like that's just the the beauty of the algorithms. Is there anything recently you've done that you feel fits into either of those buckets?
Koti: I think for the Brechbuhler side, since visiting the branches and trying to do the, just more like real raw or organic type where I'm just kind of casually like, hey, we're out here in Cincinnati today visiting the guys, let's go see what they're up to. I think those people like to see, because it's not only the professional side, but it shows you who we are behind the doors. We're not always just technical people with, you know, our, like, our vision dead set on what we're there to do. We do build relationships still. We do still have a good time. And I mean, they're they're human. So, like, they're not just here to be, like, robotic and work every day. And so I think just showing that side of who our techs are in who Brechbuhler brings in as a company, it holds a lot of power to who Brechbuhler is and ICS, because it all comes down to culture now.
Bill: That’s great. I think when we look at the Brechbuhler marketing and ICS and we think about American Grit and we think about the culture over strategy kind of approach. That certainly is one of the, strengths of this company in the market. And I think, the other thing is not only is it great for recruitment, retention and and building that culture, but like you said, customers want to do business with people that they can relate to. And that certainly sets your your organization apart from competitors in the marketplace. Not that competitors have bad people per se. But if they're not communicating that brand, there's a gap in the market as to what that story is. And customers, vendors, partners, potential applicants will fill that gap with a story. And if you're not driving that story, if you're not controlling that narrative, the variability on that story out there in the market will be wild and inconsistent over time. So I think you guys have done a great job that we've we've certainly been very pleased to partner with Brechbuhler and ICS on those initiatives and have really seen, the marketing program advance, amazingly, especially over the past, 5 to 7 years with a lot of initiatives that have, we believe, have gone fairly well. And they keep having us back. So I guess that's some indication. I know Dennis does normally complain when he sees me that he has to see me. So that's like my team's doing a great job. Dennis doesn't, like, see me, but that's okay. We'll we'll work through that in like, professional couples counseling or whatever they call that, for, colleagues. But, well no, Koti, this has just been, a great time to sit down, get to know you a little bit better, and chat through. Are there any other, any piece of guidance you would give a colleague, who starts in a position like yours and like what you wish you would have known six months ago, eight months ago, that you could share with them any type of golden nugget or, warning, for someone who's thinking about getting into the industry or anything like that?
Koti: Yeah, honestly, I would just say, give yourself grace. You're not going to figure it all out overnight. You're not going to get it right the first time. It's, for me, it's been test and trial. So just know it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay to learn from it. Not everything you put off there is going to be a hit. But then, you know, once you start planting those seeds and building the growing, people will start watching. So, yeah, just give yourself grace and learn that you can use any resources you have. Be very involved with for me, both sides, you know, ICS and Brechbuhler. And yeah, you'll figure it out. I mean, it's one of those things where, like we said, it's changing rapidly. Marketing is never going to be the same. So I think if you just have your rhythm and you figure out what's working best for you and the company you're working for and helping with the marketing, it will all work out.
Bill: Koti I think that's a great perspective. And I think one of the things that has changed, probably in the past ten years is we have a new generation of marketers who has more of that grassroots experience. And more of that fail is the first attempt in learning, progress over perfection. Whereas if you think back 15, 20 years, we were always worried about, oh, it has to be perfect before it goes out because the distribution is singular. There's that one moment where it is exposed to the market and then maybe, then maybe never seen again. We're now like, okay, we throw out a LinkedIn post at 9, okay, it didn't go well, throw another one out at one. And so like, there's so many iterations that we can do a better job and improve on as we move forward. So I love that approach. And I think the the testing, we try to test, AB test everything, message variations, visuals, whatever we can because we have to find out what's going to work. And the the difference between success and failure is often not what we think it is, especially when we're dealing with the algorithms. So you've got to find out what's going to work. So I love that. And I think that's a great attitude that's going to serve you very, very well in your career. And yeah. Just thank you for taking the time to sit down today. Really appreciate it. I know you were absolutely looking forward to this, but you've done amazing. You've done amazing. So, we really appreciate that.
Koti: Thank you.
Bill: Thank you. Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing like share, subscribe. Have a great day.