I had like a light bulb moment. And this was through some coaching and consultants that I'd hired. But it was like, you're not, I wasn't in the website business. I was in the get more customers business. And so I don't know how to do that. But I I can be curious. And so for me, it was less about needing to understand exactly how we were going to solve a problem and more or less get really clear on what that problem was.

G'day folks, Troy Dane here, and welcome to the Agency Hour podcast where we help agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, their communities, their families. This is the final episode of this podcast for 2025. It's been a couple of weeks. We've um been extremely busy and uh we just didn't get to the podcast over the last few weeks. So sorry for the gap in broadcasting. Uh this is the final episode today. My guest is Brent Weaver, who is the CEO of E2M, uh, who are a partner of ours. They're a white label development and um SEO and content agency and AI agency uh out of India and the US. Brent, of course, was also the founder of UGUs, uh, who was a friendly competitor of mine for a long time. Brent and I have a great relationship. He recently went to India as the CEO of E2M and met with all the staff, had a you know, uh company-wide picnic of about six or seven hundred people, um, met all the staff and spent a couple of weeks hanging out there. And so we talk a little bit about that journey. We also go right back and talk about how we started in this kind of coaching space, helping other agencies and why we do it. But before we dive in, I just want to give you a bit of an insight, a bit of a forecast into what's happening in 2026. AI is, by no over exaggeration, AI is completely disrupting the world right now. I have a lot of friends of mine who are in their late 50s, early 60s who just cannot get a job, right? They're being, they're they're applying for jobs that on paper look like that job is a five-person job, but it's not. It's a it's a 35 or a 42-year-old with a bunch of AI moving very quickly. And AI is completely disrupting everything and in and very much so disrupting our space, the digital marketing, the design, the creative design, the branding space. I've been personally uh experimenting with vibe coding over the last few weeks, and it is blowing my mind what you can do, how fast you can build something from scratch that is world-class and and production ready. Uh, it's incredible. Uh so here's my message to all of you listening to this as we go into 2026. Uh I believe if you uh fast forward and you take AI to its logical conclusion, which is it will be able to do anything that we can do by tapping a keyboard and moving a mouse, right? There are plugins and extensions and workflows and products now that allow you to go to Figma, use AI to design a beautiful website, um, import that directly into a vibe coding tool, code the back end of it, uh you know, it then then import that into WordPress and it will set it up as Elementor pages that you can then edit in Elementor, right? It's unbelievable. I mean, even Figma Make, you could probably just do this in Figma Make without using the vibe coding uh bit in the middle. Or you can just use vibe coding to design an amazing website and import that straight into WordPress without using uh Figma on the front end. It's what you can do in a couple of hours now used to take us days or weeks. I mean, that's just one example. Like anything that we do for ourselves or our clients, SEO, look at what the guys at Search Atlas are doing with AI. Social media, look at what the guys at Pressmaster.ai are doing with social media and thought leading content, right? Design, development, emails, content, copy, look at you know, research, look at what if you want to become an expert at something, look at what poppy AI are doing. You know, you just basically throw a whole bunch of YouTube videos and blog posts and content into a brain, and within a couple of minutes, you can become an expert at something. Well, here's where I think, and I've been saying this for a long time, is that the most valuable uh seat in this ecosystem is the person that sits between the client and the technology. It was true when WordPress came out. It was true when WordPress released custom post types, and it was true when page builders, when page builders happened, everyone shit their bed and thought, well, that's it, we're out of a job because now you can just log into WordPress News Elementor to build your own website. Of course it didn't happen. You became more valuable because there was more technology to help the client wrangle. So I believe your job is to sit with a client, ask them questions, work out what their problems are, and design a plan to help them solve those problems and achieve the goals that they want to achieve. And then use the technology to deliver that so that you can deliver it profitably and serve more clients. Right. So getting paid to pitch and close a new client is the future in 2026. Sit with a client, make sure they're a good fit, pitch them a digital roadmap, which is paid discovery, get paid to then make your recommendations and close that client into an ongoing recurring revenue growth plan package, use AI to deliver what you've promised and what's in the plan and scale your profit. You can probably double your profit or triple your profit without adding another team member, right? If you are not comfortable or prepared to sit with a client and ask them questions and come up with a plan to help them solve their problems or achieve their goals, then I don't know how much future we have left because the robots are going to do everything else, right? So my call to arms for all agency owners is embrace selling strategy first, get paid to close new clients, but don't try and become an AI agency. For the love of whatever deity you worship, do not try and become an AI agency. You're just bolting on AI tools, right? It's a race to the bottom. There are AI agencies everywhere, AI freelancers and solopreneurs everywhere, right? Selling an AI tool to a client, like that is just a race to the bottom. It's a very, very, very short life cycle of a business model, right? Use AI to deliver solutions, but be the one that comes up with the plan and get the client to buy into that plan and then use AI to execute that plan and make more profit in the process of doing that. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with making more profit because the more profit you make, the longer you'll be in business and the more clients you can help. So that is my call to alarms for everyone listening to this for 2026. Brent and I talk a little bit about this uh in the episode. So without further ado, let's now dive into the final episode of the Agency Our Podcast for 2026 with my good friend Brent Weaver. When I I first started out building websites, I used to run this. Um, I was a freelancer, right? It's working from home. I was uh I'd been through a really interesting journey in my personal life where I was kind of in a really bad crowd of people. I was partying a lot, I was completely directionless, right? And I started building websites. I was doing voiceovers and I knew a lot of people in the post-production industry in Melbourne, and they started kind of asking me to build websites for them. And then I started this thing called Freelancer Friday, where the third Friday of every month, I would catch up with all my freelancer mates and we'd have like after work drinks because we didn't have work colleagues. We're all working from home, we're all got cabin fever, we're all going batshit crazy, like wanting to talk to people. So I started this thing called Freelancer Friday. And this guy turns up one day, and he's a designer, and he starts kind of not not going to say aggressively, but like really enthusiastically pitching me that we should partner up and go into business. And he was using his own content management system thing at the time, which I've I've later discovered was business catalyst. And so, unbeknownst to me, on the other side of the planet, there was this guy called Brent Weaver, who was very much in the business catalyst world, right? That was right, and so I that I was very much in the WordPress world. We went all in and became out a business catalyst partner. Business catalyst, I believe, was started in Melbourne too. I I believe the product was started here in Melbourne. We used business catalysts to manage um quite a few campaigns, most notably uh this 16-year-old girl who sailed around the world on her own in a yacht from Australia called Jessica Watson. We managed her campaign while she was at sea. The day that she came back into Sydney Harbour, there were 250,000 people at Sydney Harbor to welcome her back. The site crashed. The Southeast Asian server of business catalyst crashed and brought thousands of websites down, right? I was just sitting there, like getting phone calls from her management, like abusing me, going, I forgot, I just can't do it. There's nothing I can do about this, right? And so round about this time, I decided to start teaching WordPress freelancers how to grow a pair and you know, put their big boy panties on and act like grown-ups and charge what they were worth and get their shit together. And at the same time, you were kind of doing a similar thing for the business catalyst world, right? So before we unpack this amazing trip that you've just had to India with E2M and while you're wearing a suit jacket, uh, before we unpack that, I want to go back to like at what point did Brent Weaver go, I reckon I've got something here I can offer the business catalyst community where I can help them level up. When when did that moment happen for you?

That's a good question. We had um we had some success like selling selling BC. Um, I think BC had a community. I think it was the first time that I actually kind of joined a community or felt like I was a part of something. I think if we look back to early, like early webs, it's hard to imagine a world without social media and without all of these, you know, apps that connect people like instantly and these like business masterminds and these cool conferences and things like that. I mean, there obviously were some conferences back then, but I don't think the whole internet marketing space had really um blossomed that much. And so yeah, BC was like the first community that we kind of like started to like answer questions on a forum. And then, you know, I think I reached out to some business catalyst partners that were like there was maybe like a directory or Adobe had like put me in touch with them. And so I think my idea was like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna record content of me interviewing some other BC partners. And like one of my very first interviews I ever did, Troy, was this with his partner, uh Jonathan Hinshaw, up in Fort Collins. And I asked him, like, I cold emailed him, and I was like, hey, I want to record a video of us talking about business catalyst, which I I mean in hindsight is just like one of the nerdiest things to like cold open with, right? He drives all the way down to Denver. We like set up a camera in this like really noisy restaurant, and I I put lapel mics on us. I didn't have your production background.

Neither did I back then. I didn't have any, I didn't have anything back then either.

We record this whole interview just a meandering hour-long conversation. I get back to the office, I like look at the video. I don't even have my like his audio or my one of the audio tracks didn't exist, like I just it just didn't even connect. So I I don't know if there was like a moment or a series of moments. I mean, I think I had a um a flip cam that I somebody had given me, and so I I put that up on a tripod and I put it against uh I pointed at me on a whiteboard and I recorded a video that was like how to how to I don't remember the exact title, but it was something along the lines of we were seeing WordPress a lot in our in our pitches, and we were selling business catalyst, and so I recorded a video that was like you know, how to sell business catalyst versus WordPress or something like that. And it was this video was atrocious, it was awful, it was like it was like worse than the worst worst video I could ever imagine, right? It was so bad, but like the content was good, if you will, right? Like, I think what I was saying, like nobody else was really saying there was no like there was no face of the business catalyst community. Um, Bardia and Adam Broadway, like they were very much focused on the software, they weren't out there as like they were they were trying to sign on BC partners, but none of they weren't like influencers, they weren't recording videos of themselves, they weren't like publishing very much content, they just built a great product, right? Um, and so I kind of started recording these like terrible videos in an absolute vacuum. It was like people they watched, you know, and and I think just like anything, you you do something and you get a positive, you get a positive response on that. Like people started calling us up, and I started getting clients like or potential clients from Australia, like out of you know, out of nowhere, like BC partners in Australia were like, hey, we have this really tough business catalyst problem. We're stuck on something. Like, can you guys help us out? And so then we started getting these calls, and then and it was like, Oh, okay, this is like working, and then we launched a blog called BCgurus.com. That's right. We first put it on our agency website. We started to tell people like how to sell business catalysts, right? And like, you know, obviously our end business model clients were like, what the heck is this? Like that they didn't, it wasn't good messaging offer alignment there, and so I wanted to continue doing that. And my business partner was like, stop putting this stuff on our agency website, like it's not relevant, it's not relevant. So I was like, Well, give me a give me a site where I can like talk about this stuff. So they they spun up BC Gurus, and and that was really that was really it was a blog for a year, yeah. Um, we built an email list, we had no product. Um, we just we just published content and had people sign up for our proposal, and then we we did a Jeff Walker style like to the book product launch, $99 a month for all of my sales videos, which were yeah, a sum of four. I had four sales videos, Troy, that I sold for $99.

I remember. I remember that launch. I remember the sales page, I remember that launch because I was architecting Jeff Walker style launches here when we launched WP Elevation around about the same time. Brennan Dunn was doing W freelancing. Yeah, I remember, I remember that. They were they were the good old days. And so Bardia, so Adobe then bought Business Catalyst and and and then basically shelved it, right? Like they like after a few years.

It was like there was, you know, I mean, they I got really tight with Adobe. Um when we launched that site, that offer, uh, I don't know if it was our first launch or our second launch. So we had like BC gurus. I don't know. I mean, I I don't even think you could, I don't know if you could get away with this anymore. Like it was a little bit of cultural appropriation. Like I had a I dressed up, I had like a kimono on. I was like, you know, do you wanna? I'm gonna open my kimono and show you what's inside. I got on a video if you do that now. If you do that now, you'd get canceled. I was in Palo Alto or wherever the Adobe office is, and I played this video in front of like all the BC partners and the Adobe execs, like Brent in a kimono, like opening up. And when I opened up, the website flew out, right? It was like bright light, and then you know, I don't think you could. They loved it, they thought it was the best thing ever, right? This was this was many years ago, right? But Adobe that that put us like I had V the VPs of Adobe, like some of them were coming up to me after that video, and they were so excited about business catalysts because you know, it's just it was the community was good, it was like really, you know, a lot of people were really tight and stuff, but um it was it was a lot of fun, man. But I think that you know, I mean, in business, right? You have these acquisitions that happen, and uh, you know, I know all about that now, but I know, right?

You've been through, I mean, this is not this you that that was kind of you watched that from the sidelines, and it wasn't even my business. And then so BC Gurus then became you gurus, and we know what what happened there. We're not gonna revisit that history. We've had a whole podcast episode around that. Um interestingly, my business partner said the same thing to me. I was kind of blogging and making videos about proposal templates and you know, spreadsheets and like how to hire staff in the Philippines and how to manage WordPress maintenance plans using managed WP. And I was sharing all that content, and my business partner was like, dude, what are you doing? Like, you you're like some internet marketing spammer dude, right? And uh that was the first, like, was a fork in the road where I was like, you know, we we we are doomed. We are not destined to be business partners for very long. And um, we gradually parted ways uh and wish him all the best. He's you know still in the game, I think, doing web stuff. Um uh so but I, you know, I wonder, like, if I was a legitimate business advisor, like I put my 52-year-old business coach hat on now, and I would say, Brent, what are you doing? Like, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. Like, are you an agency or are you gonna teach agencies? Like, what is it? Like, the messaging is confusing, right? And as you said, it was fun. I totally like the reason that I pivoted, the reason that I eventually got out of running an agency and got into doing what I'm doing now, like, frankly, is because the gratitude that I got from other agency owners and freelancers when I was helping them far outweighed the gratitude I was getting from these grumpy clients that were just punching me in the face all day because they weren't happy with you know their life and they were blaming me, right? And also the leverage, like I could publish a piece of content and impact hundreds of people, whereas I would slave away and we'd build a website and you'd help one business, right? And so that for me, that was just um I was drawn to that, that I wanted to help more people, and that gratitude was like a drug for me, which is you know why I'm still doing it 15 years later.

Um you just reminded me we had a at our office back when we had like an Ugurus was in person, we had a a thank you wall. And it was like all the emails we would like frame them and put them up on the wall, and it got to the point where we just put up like a big billboard or uh not a billboard, but a cork board or whatever, and and we would just like pin them because we like ran out of room for the frames and stuff, but we would just pin them up on the wall, um, and we'd just get all these like thank you emails. And I think the whole time that I ran my agency, um, you know, we we probably could have built a wall of like, you know, claw hands that are upset, or you know, it's just like it it was it was I think that gratitude, you know, I think um when when you're really when you're coaching, right? There's a there's just an opportunity for like life transformation. Whereas if you're building uh a website for a nonprofit that helps, you know, organize uh school board meetings, you know, it's super useful. And you might get like a thank you, like a hey, thanks, this is great, right? Um, but you know, you're not gonna get, I think at one point I got uh one of the the the gratitudes that I got was this like I don't know, four or five or six-page letter from a guy who was taught, you know, told me his whole life story and how we kind of played a part in this. And I think that was one of the reasons where we said, and and it's it's interesting because you look back on it and you see these chapters, you know, and there's a very clear, like in my mind, there's these very clear like chapter, you know, markers and beginnings and ends. But I think when you're living it, it's it's very fluid. And and I think, okay, yeah, well, I got this gratitude, I sold my agency, I started this business, right? But it was actually this very like fluid thing. We didn't really know what we were like. There were decisions that were being made. I don't know if there was one big decision or lots of little decisions that kind of took us those directions. But then, you know, one day you kind of wake up and you're like, oh, now I'm actually doing this business 100%, and I'm not doing that business anymore. But that trajectory took 18 months to kind of figure out, right?

Yeah, totally. At some point, you massively leveled up your production too, because I remember watching you guru's videos when you were in the you had the office, right? In in was it Denver? You had the the in-person office. And dude, and I remember you did a launch. I think I you you Skyped me in on one of your launches at one point, and I did a guest spot, and it was like was like a TV station. It was like the production. Do you miss, do you miss that machine? Do you miss that kind of I'm asking selfishly because I I've we've kind of scaled back production, right? And I miss it. I miss being a part of a machine. Like I, you know, I think my happy place is like walking on set behind a news desk, right? And just having like people everywhere and just talking, having these conversations, but on a much bigger stage. Yeah. Um, I watch some podcasts like, you know, I watch the Joe Rogan show. I don't really pay too much attention to the content, but I watch it from a production point of view. I watch Tom Bailey at uh whatever his thing is called. I see the production value of those guys. I'm like, I watch the diary of a CEO and I'm like, oh, I crave those. You know, th those product do you miss that world or are you now that you're like CEO and running a team of 400 people, has has your has has the have the gears shifted? Is this like a new chapter for you?

I mean, right where I am now, like definitely, um, I do have uh a kind of a romantic like memory of many of those years. I think the the creativity and the collaboration when you have both the like the set and the equipment, like you have the stuff, but then you also have I think the team and the interplay between like you know, between those people and and when you can kind of put that host and subject matter hat on and live in that a hundred percent. I think that it creates uh a lot of opportunity for like creativity and for these like unexpected kind of moments where you um uh it it's hard to create that when you're uh by yourself in a home office streaming on a on a podcast or whatever, right? Um and I I think that's you know, certainly I think we had a lot of fun. Um, I think if I looked at our investment in production value, as we started to lower that, um we did see our revenue go up dramatically. So I think I think one of the questions I was hanging out with like Dan Martel in um uh we were at this like camp uh for entrepreneurs. And you know, he was like, Well, like what? Because because we were like building our own custom platform and we were like we had the whole set and all this, and he was like, Well, what do your customers like pay you for? And I was like, Do they want another button? Do they want like better lighting, or do they want like this like transformation? And and I do think there's there's a relationship between like you know, the quality and the like it has to be entertaining and people have to be willing to actually watch it. And if it's total, you know, garbage, it's it's not gonna get watched, then you don't get the transformation. And there's certainly like a a relationship, but that conversation, I was like, man, we need to like focus more on that transformation and and growing the business or marketing more sales. And I mean, for us, it that shift in focus helped the business be more healthy. But then I look at people like Chris Doe, who does, you know, has continued to invest in like the channel and doing the YouTube and doing the high-end production content and really like putting his energy into that social content. That's like, well, he I bet his revenue he continued to invest in that, and I bet his revenue grew too, right? But I think for us, you know, there was just some these small iterative decisions of like choosing to focus more on like coaching and managing our mentor team, then creating like that next like cool video. Um, that seemed to work for us, but it was it was fun. I mean, I certainly would do it again, maybe in its own way. Um I have been trying to like use the the word leverage earlier, and I think I'm trying as a CEO to build a company that has a legacy, and you know, with Manish and with the E2M team. And I think, you know, whether you know I hope to be involved in the business for a very, very long time, but I also don't want E2M to be like beholden to my likeness and image. And so I'm certainly playing the role of spokesperson and promoter and evangelist, but I also want to see our team, you know, step up into that role as well. So like we've really worked with like Kushbu a lot on getting her on more stages. And you know, Vishall, our head of digital marketing, he just was on a stage out in, I know he was with you guys in Bali, he was just out in San Diego, you know, at agency Freedom Live. And you know, it's like we're constantly thinking about okay, how do we get our Kevin, our head of contents, going to be doing an event with the Bureau of Digital like next month, right? So like I'm just trying to think how do I create this like you know team of influencers uh and leaders within the E2M team. So I I do certainly I I enjoy that kind of stuff though.

Dave Ramsey's done that really well. He's got you know personalities in the business. I mean, he's you know, revenue is off the charts and and the the the cash that they have to invest in production and in personalities is immense, but he's done that really well, and he's kind of you know, the whole thing is now Ramsey Enterprise or Ramsey Solutions, it's the Ramsey show. He's kind of taking his first name off the badge and off the sticker a lot of the time. Um, and it is something that, you know, and I see your videos in my feed, uh Brent from E2M, and I'm I'm you know, watching and I I you know I have a it's for for me as well, it's like I don't want to be it's you know, it's easy to build a business around your personal brand, right? Chris Doe's done it, Gary V's done it. They have a they're they're a different business model, right? They just want to be as famous as possible because you know, Chris will get a hundred grand from a brand to just talk about their brand for a few months, right? As a sponsorship deal. And so that's a whole different play. Um, I'm not sure how in the weeds they are with their clients actually helping them do the thing, right? Same with Gary. Like I'm sure he's not actually managing accounts at Vana Media, right? So it's a very different play. Uh, and also, you know, they're they're they're they're so famous now that there's no, they have no leverage, right? If they don't turn up and and if Chris Doe doesn't turn up and beat Chris Doe, well then no one else can step into that space, right? Neil Patel's talked about this a lot where he wishes that he didn't build a personal brand, that he was he wishes if he started again that he was faceless and that he actually built a company. But it takes longer. It's easier to build a personal brand because it's easier to connect with someone and we just turn up and make videos and that's content and we inspire people and we help people. And um, you know, we become kind of like internet famous celebrities in a niche, right? So anyway, the the segue, the kind of the reason I wanted to unpack this is because I saw the video or some of the video of you going to India and meeting the E2M team. So I just want to talk about the lead up to that. Like, how are you feeling about meeting, first of all, meeting so many people at once and be and feeling that responsibility of such a big team in a country you'd never been to, a culture that was, you know, completely different to what you're used to? What was it, what did it feel like going into that? And and also a lot of those people would have been familiar with you because uh you're Brent Weaver, right? You've published a lot of content on the internet. It's not like you're this anonymous CEO coming that they've never met or that they're not aware of. How how did you hold that uh you know that that kind of because I what the videos that I saw and the images I saw, you had an and you had an a sense of curiosity about you, right? It it wasn't like what I my interpretation was I was and I I remember looking at the the images in the video quite a lot, going, wow, it's not like Brent's kind of swanned in there and gone, I've got all the answers, and I'm here to save you, and I'm your fearless leader, right? You went in with an incredible sense of humility and curiosity, ready to learn.

And I want to know how intentional that was, or if you were just completely overwhelmed and you were like, Someone else that uh Mike Tyson says, like everybody's got a plan until they can punch in the face, right? Yeah, yeah.

Um, you know, I had like so um were you just a rabbit in the headlots, or were you like curious?

I think well, so so I'll tell you so I I I got to the hotel at probably like 4 a.m. Manish was gonna be there, so you know I just traveled like 38 hours, and you know, I mean, just just getting to India um, you know, was was it was a journey, and then you know, you're getting picked up by uh, you know, Manish, our their partner Ronic, and our uh head of uh our CFO Soham and uh Dax and and uh VJ, our CTO, you know, they're they're all up at 4 a.m. to come pick me up, right? It's not like just it's not like somebody woke up and was like, oh, I'm here to get, you know, like I just imagine if I went to pick up a friend at 4 a.m. at to from the airport, I'd be like, dude, you owe me like I'm here for you. But yeah, yeah. Actually, no, I would have just I would have gotten him an Uber or just said, hey, Uber, yeah, I'll leave the front door unlocked for you, right? Like that would be, but they were like there in and I think that's a little bit of the culture of uh of of India. But I get to my hotel room and there's a there's a there's a bag, you know, on the table or whatever, and it says, like, you know, um, kind of, you know, where where wear this, right? It was like, you know, it was like here's here's a gift from us. It's it's called a kirta, and it was a little bit of an explanation, but it was like, you know, this is this is like for your first day on the job here in India. And I was like, you know, I didn't know it didn't say it just said each of them team. I I like text Manish, I'm like, hey, there's like a I I have like a suit to wear on first day. Like, am I supposed to was this for really day one, or was that like a metaphor day one? Like, you know, and he was like, No, yes, like that's definitely um it's day one. I'm like, all right, you know, here we here we go, right? Um, and then we we he picks me up, we pull around the corner of the office, and he was like, Oh, there might be some people out, you know, there to welcome you. And we pull around the corner, and there was a lot of people. And so it's like in my head, I was like, we're gonna sneak in the back door of the office, you know, I'll have some time to warm up. Maybe we'll have some people, you know. And it was like from that moment, it was like, okay, we're going like, and I think just the the phrase in my head was like, just be all in, be be present, you know, be and I think there was there definitely was this like sometimes I felt like I was um like a guest with a tour guide, like somebody was bringing me through this experience that I really had very little autonomy over. Like I didn't know, like, I mean, I could probably have gotten to the office myself, but like I didn't know what restaurants to go to and and what different like venues we were gonna be heading to. And we did this big company picnic. Like I couldn't have found my way to and from these places on my own. So I was certainly like leaning on people a lot to just know, like, hey, where are we going next? What's next? What's next? Kind of thing. And so I think it was sometimes I had to like consciously be like, oh yeah, I remember like you're the like you're the leader, like you have to turn on the leadership thing now. And then sometimes I had to like kind of turn it off and just be kind of the passenger. Um, but uh, but yeah, it was it was all on for um for for pretty much two weeks. I mean, it was like eight in the morning. I'd show up at the office. We probably wouldn't get I'd get back to the hotel at two o'clock in the morning. Um that was like one comment. I think the you you've done events, you know, and and you probably have like a switch that you like turn on for the event. You probably collapse after the event is done. 100% it's exhausting. During the event, you can be like 100% on for everybody, like just from morning to night. And so I think doing events, doing lots of like long webinars and and long, you know, doing that kind of stuff on a routine basis, I think helps me from an endurance point just to be like up with people, be focused, be present. And then after, like when I was done, man, I got on the plane and it was just like lights out.

Yep. Yep. What did you you talked a little bit about this uh in the video that you made, but what was like the one thing that you learned in terms of managing a team that big and keeping them aligned? And how can because you know, a lot of these frameworks, I'm kind of teeing you up here to sort of repeat what you said in in the video, but a lot of the frameworks that you use at that scale, I've I know a lot of agencies and even myself in a smaller business have tried those frameworks and they just they they just they're just not applicable, right? So what is the one thing that you can impart to the listeners to say, well, this works at this scale, but I but it also works at a smaller scale. There might just be some nuance in it. Like, how do you keep that many people moving in the same direction? Yeah.

I mean, I think like each it's almost like each department and to some level each like squad, you know, and each uh like PM that manages a team of developers that eats how many they're almost like I mean if I think back to an agency that like my first agency, we were like 14 to 20 people, you know, and so we have our WordPress business units like 1030, 140 people. So okay, well the project managers for that might be like about 20 people, right? So it's like okay, we can like we can kind of chunk that down to like this is almost like a 20-person business, right? Like this this business unit, this this group needs to have you know clarity of of vision and mission. They need to understand like what are the the KPIs that are gonna kind of move the needle. They need to understand how the company core values like are relevant for them. They need to be clear on what are the three to five things that they can accomplish over the next, you know, three to four months. Um, and they need they need to feel heard, right? So I think just one of the things we try to do while I was there was really like chunk down. I couldn't meet with everybody, but like the the functions that had the most like customer interaction, like our account management, our project management teams arguably are like the nexus for what E2M does. Um, you know, our account managers keep clients happy, our technical project managers deliver the work through our you know, developers and content writers and designers and all that kind of stuff. And so that that group of people was incredibly important to like get right. So just listening to them, listening to their feedback. And um, fortunately, one of the things that I was able to offer while I was there was a lot of the kind of agency owner mindset, right? Like our team, a lot of them in India, you know, have not been to the US. They haven't sat inside of an agency, they work with them every day, they message back and forth. They may or may not know why, like an agency owner or agency team member doesn't get back to them, you know, right away, or they might take three or four days to get back to them, or they might not understand why there's only like this hurry up and wait. And then there's these urgent, like, you know, oh my gosh, it's Friday. We need to deliver that thing to the client. Oh my God, we forgot to get back to the developer, right? Now all of a sudden everything's an emergency, right? Um, and so I think they experience a lot of that stuff on their end, like both good and bad. Like our clients are extraordinarily gracious and they're so kind and appreciative. But then sometimes, right, there's certainly those situations where they're under pressure. And so our team sometimes doesn't, might not really know like the day in the life, right? And so I think one of the things that I was able to do just was sit down with them and say, like, like, let me walk you through the worldview, the mindset of an agency that's you know, hanging out in San Diego, California, or Austin, Texas, or, you know, Denver, Colorado. Like, let me help you see what their world looks like. And I think, you know, that's kind of that, you know, uh, like I one of the things I wanted our team, I wanted them to leave my trip experience with like a feeling. I wanted them to be feel inspired, feel motivated, feel aligned around the e2m mission. And so, yeah, we got into some of the tactical things, but like with every interaction, I just thought, okay, we I need to like keep the energy up, keep them excited about the e2m mission. Um, and I think I did a pretty good job about that um over the course of the trip.

I want to just switch gears a little bit and talk about um AI. Are the are your team are they nervous about AI or are they uh excited about it? Are they embracing it? Are they resisting it? What, what, what I mean, I know you guys are doing the the dedicated AI stuff, but I'm just talking about like developers. Like are they all vibe coding? Like what's what are they using, you know, design, AI design tools? Like, how is AI impacting them and how are they feeling about it? How's it impacting the culture within the within the team?

I mean, are we using AI? Yes, um, experimenting a lot. I think that there's, you know, everybody's always under pressure to deliver like for clients quickly. And so I think there's that like natural, like kind of back and forth like tug between, well, I have a way to do this thing that gets the client a result that I know and understand how to do because it's how I've always done it. Um, and and then somebody's telling me, like, hey, go use AI because it's gonna help you do this faster. But then, of course, learning how to do it that new way is gonna be a big investment of time. And I may or may not be successful with that in the short term, which means then I have to turn around and still do the task the way that I knew how to do it before. And so I think it's been certainly um, I think I've I've talked to this about this with a lot of agencies where it's hard to slow down and maybe have, you know, be like, all right, well, maybe I'm gonna deliver less work for a week and we're gonna do like a vibe coding sprint. Um, and so those are things that at a leadership level, we had to create some breathing room. Like we've done, I think three or four vibe coding sprints this quarter where we'll basically take a team and we'll say, okay, we want you to do this work as if, you know, do this work with vibe coding tools in parallel with another team that's just doing the task as is. And then we kind of compare like, are they able to successfully complete the work with a vibe coding tool to the same level that we would deliver without it, right? And so it's like having to have that foresight and kind of risk-taking ability to say, okay, we're willing to invest in a team to just do vibe coding to see if they can achieve the same results. And then if they can, we can kind of teach those tools and those methods into the rest of the team. Uh, and so I think like, I mean, our team is highly utilized. I think AI has helped us to deliver uh more efficient billable hours. So instead of completing work in 40 hours, it's 30 hours, right? Um, which so far hasn't had a really big negative drag on the business because we have had we've been able to add more clients and more total billable work to the business. But um certainly if we weren't good at keeping clients and growing clients, that could have a negative effect on the business, right? If we're if we're a billable hours-based company and we're doing more work in less time, right? That that would have an impact. But so far, we we look at that as like a retention and a value thing. Like if we can deliver the same project in half the time, we think agencies are gonna stay with us and do more work with us. So that's been our mindset overall, and so far it's been okay.