So we talked about those ideas for like a whole day. And then right as we were like winding down, right as I was about to leave, he was like, There's one more idea. I was like, Alright, what is it? He's like, what if you joined E2M as the CEO? And I was like, Well, that's a big idea.

A few months ago, I did an episode of the Agency Our podcast where I spoke about the fact that Ugurus had been shut down by Digital Ocean, and that my friendly competitor, Brent Weaver, who had spent uh over 10 years building that legacy, was, you know, kind of out out in the wild and wasn't sure what he was gonna do with himself. And I made an episode, you know, congratulating Brent on his on his efforts and his achievements, and also my observations on how I think that was poorly handled by DigitalOcean at the time. Anyway, fast forward, Brent is now the CEO of E2N Solutions, who you all know by now is a very, very good partner of ours. They are a white label, WordPress design, development, SEO, content, ads, high-level AI agency. They have over 300 staff across India and the US. They serve a lot of our clients, they do a lot of work for our clients. And so it was time to get Brent on the Agency Hour podcast. Uh, so this is a fascinating episode where we talk about our journeys together as friendly competitors. We talk about what's happening at E2M. We do talk about Ugurus and the shutdown, and we unpack all of that. And so hang in there for the ride. This is a very personal episode uh with Brent, and we also talk a lot about the future of E2M and what they're doing with AI. And we've got a special coupon code if you want to attend their event in September in Colorado. It's joinvisdara.com. It's essentially an AI agency event. So if you're an agency and you want to learn how to use AI to future-proof your agency, then get to Denver, Colorado in at the end of September to Vistara. We have also have a coupon you can grab near here, which will get you a couple of hundred bucks off a ticket. So uh wherever you're watching this or listening to this, have a look in the show notes for the link. Without further ado, let's go and meet Brent Weaver. Ladies and gentlemen, uh, the security uh are gonna get fired here because they've somehow let Brent Weaver on the show. Uh Dude, welcome to the Agency Hour podcast.

What's going on? I feel like I'm I've like crossed a threshold. Um so very honored to be on your show, Troy.

Uh oh man, I'm honored to have you here. And for listen, for those that don't know, this this isn't our first rodeo, I don't think. I think you and I have done like we've certainly done webinars in the past, but for those that don't know, some people would, you know, would think of us as competitors for a long time because you started U Gurus around about the same time that I started WP Elevation and Brennan Dunn started W freelancing. We're all kind of pioneers in this space 150 years ago. And for a long time, we ran almost parallel businesses with coaching agencies, right? Yeah. Um uh so people might be going, well, how come Brent's on the agency hour podcast? What happened with Ugurus and what are you doing now? Yeah.

So, well, it's it's no more. Um, actually, I uh when we shut down or announced, I think you posted, maybe it was on the agency hour podcast. You posted this like great kind of recap of U gurus shutting down, and someone on my team like messaged it to me and said, like, oh, Troy's out there talking about the Ugarus shut up. And my first thought was like, I was like, uh, you know, and then I watched it and I was like, that's so damn good. It's like he like covered the story really well. He doesn't even he's not even on the inside, he knows he knows it all really well. So I think like I mean, uh the too long did not read version. Um, I did sell the business uh to Cloudways. Um, it was a strategic acquisition. I committed to staying on. I loved the vision that we had for what we're gonna do with agencies over the next five to 10 years. Um, it was gonna be a much bigger thing than just coaching and consulting. Uh, at the time, CloudWays was serving about 13,000 agencies, and so we thought, hey, if we can bring the magic of the community of you gurus and the coaching and the training and all the amazing content, and we can empower you know 13,000 agencies instead of you know three or four hundred, then that would be a really cool um kind of execution of our vision. Um nine months later, CloudWays got acquired by DigitalOcean, and so that whole plan um didn't completely get thrown out of the way out of the window immediately, but it did eventually kind of, you know, I think as as DigitalOcean infrastructure business, compute, AI showed up, uh, there was certainly a reshuffling of the priorities for DigitalOcean, and and they decided that you know, running a professional services business, which you know our community was at the end of the day, we're charging clients for coaching wasn't aligned with the overall business. And they made a decision to stop it. And I don't I don't know necessarily, Troy, if I would have made any different decision if I was the CEO of DigitalOcean and looking at my businesses and looking at my investment and seeing what AI was doing, um, I might have said, hey, let's get ruthlessly focused on, you know, the core thing, the main thing. Uh and so that was that was the outcome.

Yeah. I mean, it makes, yeah, it's this great story about Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple and they had like 150 products in the market, right? And he took the top 100 people at Apple away for a retreat. And he's like, okay, you know, like first of all, the first thing he did was went to a whiteboard and he said, you know, he drew four squares. We got, you know, consumer and professional products, desktop and laptop. That's it. We got we have four products now, right? We have a desktop and a and a portable computer for consumers and professionals. And then he took the hundred people away and he said, right, you guys come up with all the ideas of how we're gonna, you know, revive Apple. And they came back with, you know, like hundreds of ideas after a two-day retreat, whatever it was. And then he put them all up. He said, Right, let's get the top 10, put them up on a whiteboard. So they put they voted, painstakingly put the top 10 ideas up on this whiteboard, and they were all so excited. And uh he walked up and just crossed out the bottom seven. He went, right, these top three initiatives, that's all we're doing, right? And so I get it. However, and I think I mentioned this on the um podcast that I did a recap of Ugurus because I was looking at it from the outside, and there were two things that uh that occurred to me. One is okay, well, what happens with all those agencies that no longer have a home, right? That's I think that's a I think I'm not sure I and I I don't I wasn't in the sausage factory, so I don't know, but I'm not from the outside, I d don't think DigitalOcean handled that very well. I think it was just like you're done, right? But the other thing was, which is why I'm glad we're having this conversation, is dude, that must have fucking hurt. That must have been like, uh you've spent years doing this thing. And for someone just to go, wow, it doesn't matter anymore and turn it off. How what what was the what have you had to do personally to go, okay, this is not a reflection on Brent Weaver, this is just shit happens, you know?

Yeah. You know, like a mentor of mine told me uh years ago, um, you know, it's it's not happening to you, it's happening to the business. Uh and so I think that like that mantra of just, you know, this isn't about me. This is about this this asset, right? Like if I had a car and and the car was getting like hailed on, or was it an accident or you know, something happened, right? Like, like the car obviously is is is being damaged or whatever, and assuming that I'm I'm like surviving safely like as a human being, which I did, right? Like I sit behind a laptop uh all day on an internet connection in a very safe place in in Colorado, right? So like there's no like physical harm to me as a human being, um, but obviously to the business itself, right? There was a it was a terminal kind of moment. Um, and I think just trying to separate myself. I think through the acquisition process, like I was over time, I was becoming more and more separated from the business. I think we had a really good brand with Ugarus. Um, while I was still very much like kind of the face of the company, I wasn't doing any of the service in the back end. The mentors were there. Um, we did kind of release all of our mentors from you know, non-competes. We kind of helped set up a couple of them to take some of the clients and and try to put them in a great position um post-sutdown. I don't think we had like an amazing amount of time with it, but I I kind of feel like I don't know if a longer transition would have been necessarily any easier or better. Um, you know, maybe 15 extra days or something to help plan some things better might have might have been a little bit easier, but there was certainly, you know, corporate deadlines, quarterly earnings reports, et cetera, that were driving some of the timelines. And um, you know, we had to kind of just live with that. But um overall, I mean, if I reflect back on the the three years with CloudWays and DigitalOcean, I mean, for our team, it was an extraordinary learning opportunity. I learned a ton. I got to work with, you know, literally billion-dollar company CEOs, like be in their meetings, have to present Ugarus as part of the weekly business review cadence. Um, I was mentored by several leaders that were running, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in in business. Um, and then, you know, I was meeting with them for hours every single week, and they were mentoring me and and and they were giving me projects and opportunities. And so, um, and also for our team, working for a publicly traded company that had insane benefits and stock and all that kind of stuff. So, like we all kind of reflected back, and and everybody that on the team that left UGARUS, you know, they're all doing these like crazy amazing things. You know, they've launched new businesses, they've got like dream jobs, like they've all gone and and they're doing very cool things. So I feel like overall, uh, it was it was a very positive experience, even though in the midst of it, it certainly it certainly sucked. Um I took a couple months where I just didn't I didn't really work. Uh Troy.

Yeah, that was my next question. Like, what how did you how do you how do you recalibrate after an event like that?

Um I renovated a barn and built a half pipe.

I was which if you haven't seen, go and check out Brent's Facebook feed and it makes makes videos about the half pipe there and the and the cycling. Right.

We actually like, I mean, this is crazy, but I had the same email address because it was like it actually started for my agency in I don't know when we got on Google Apps, it was like 2007 or something, and then that turned into Uguru's email address and had that, you know, all the way up till 2020 April of 2025, and then just like turned it off, you know. And so then I had, you know, I created my own kind of personal domain business. I had no emails. I got so I'd go out to the bar and work on this ramp and I'd go check my email and I'd be like, yep, still no email, you know, and it was uh it was kind of refreshing for a bit. Um obviously with my my new career move, that's that's not the case anymore, but it was it was a nice break from from the busy.

Did you did you I've had people some of our coaches actually would like, oh, taking two weeks off with a family and they leave their laptop home. And they've admitted that the first couple of days they're a bit shaky. But like, did you did you find it hard to like did you know what to do with yourself for the first week?

Um I mean, I did a lot of like so we did a year ago we moved to a homestead kind of land. It requires a lot of energy. It can require as much energy as you have, as much free time as you have to put into it. There's always something. Uh and so I think I just kind of started like picking up stuff around here. And and weirdly, like the more I was off, the more I would kind of fill my time. Like opportunity just kind of shows up. Like when you're not you're not listening for stuff, like you just don't see see the things, you know. Like all of a sudden I was like checking the emails from my kids' teachers, you know, like they send these these giant diaries every week of you know, 1500 words of of what's going on in the classroom. And I'm just I'm like archive, archive, right? And so I started reading those, and you know, before I knew it, I'm like volunteering in their classes and showing up for like a junior achievement business day and going on like class field trips and you know, whatever. So after like about three weeks, it was like I could start seeing my calendar was kind of filling up again. Not with like bad stuff, it was just it was like stuff that I I kind of ignored or wasn't paying much attention to.

And then uh at what point did you two parts of this question? At what point did you feel like you were ready to do something? And then at what point did the conversation with E2M start?

Yeah. So I I mean I knew like officially I knew like January 15 um that it was getting shut down. Um like I was technically fired at like 8 a.m. And then I had not fired, that's not the right term, but uh reduced in force. Um uh something like that, right? I was I was made redundant. Well, we in Australia we didn't know. So there was, you know, and there was a nice you know separation agreement and and whatever. But so at 8 a.m. that was me, and then starting at 8 15, every 15 minutes I had to do the same to everybody on my team. So it was like I had 15 minutes to process and then show up as like a you know a servant leader with our team and and you know deliver you know some hard professional news that they you know it doesn't happen every day for people, and you know, you have people that take it really well, and by the next day they're already moving on to the next thing, and you have some people that you know say very mean things and don't take it very well in the short term, but everybody's fine now. Um but that was that was kind of difficult. So I knew um I actually approached you know E2M, uh who I'm now CEO of. I approached them and said they were a big sponsor of U-Garus. And I was like, hey, you know, that big annual sponsorship you guys just paid for, and we spent you know weeks and weeks like figuring out how to make it amazing for you. Well, can't deliver on that. Oh, why? Well, because we're getting shut down. So Manish actually, from a business standpoint, you know, we had to let him know earlier than like the general public and kind of work through winding down a contract with them. And so, you know, he said, Well, you know, that stinks, but I'm gonna be in the US in a couple weeks. Why don't you fly out to Arizona and let's spend a day together? And so went out there and um this was probably by March, and uh we uh went through a few different business ideas. He was like, Well, I'll pitch you on this or this. It was like the first thing was like a company that they were gonna gonna acquire. Like maybe I'd could come in and be CEO of that business and help kind of run it for a couple of years. One was to take the fractional AI services that they were launching and spin that off as its own business and go be CEO of that. So we talked about those ideas for like a whole day, and then right as we were like winding down, right as I was about to leave, he was like, There's one more idea. I was like, All right, what is it? You know, he's like, What if you joined E2M as the CEO? And I was like, Well, that's a big idea. Like, we have five minutes to talk about that. Like, you know, I'm interested. So he flew back out to Denver like the next day. Like he caught a red eye from uh I think he actually flew from Arizona to Miami and then like landed in Miami, turned around and flew to Denver. Um, anyways, we spent a day together and you know planned out like what that might look like, and um and it started getting exciting. And I don't think it didn't finalize until like the last week of May. So from March to May, there was kind of this background thread of you know the E2M opportunity, and there was two or three other things that I was thinking about. But I I think at times I wasn't thinking about any of them very seriously. It'd be kind of like I'm off this week, and then maybe a week or two would go by and I'd have a meeting with E2M about something. So it was um, I don't think I didn't originally I kind of thought, okay, I'm gonna take a year. I was like, you know, I sat down with my wife, I'm like, all right, sabbatical for a year, not working. And I think she was half exhilarated and half terrified of like me around all the time and you know, just without anything to do. Yeah, right. Like, okay, so you're gonna build a half pipe, and you're gonna so um but you know it I think it worked out really well. I got a good reset. Uh, I think I'm definitely somebody that enjoys work, um, enjoy having that purpose and that that focus. And you know, maybe after E2M, maybe I'll take that year off. I don't know. Maybe it'll be like three months instead of two.

E2M are what 300 330 staff now? Yeah, so yeah, so primarily in in India, but we've got about six or seven folks now in the US. Yeah, and so you come in uh to that organization.

How does uh a couple of questions? How does Manish transfer authority to you as the CEO? Yeah, and how do you earn the respect and the trust of 330 people who are like, well, who the fuck are you, right? Like, you know what I mean? Like I I I barely listen to Manish, let alone this new guy, right? How do you what what I I get the qu I mean because I've been through this, right? I I hired a CEO, ran the business, didn't work out, uh, and a lot of lessons there. But and one of the big mistakes I made was uh not transferring enough authority, but also hiring, promoting someone based on availability, not ability, someone who I in hindsight I don't think was the right person to lead a team, right? And so how how have you what have you done tactically? I mean, obviously you have a name in the space, you were known to E2M, a lot of those people would have already known who you were, but what have you done tactically to actually earn the trust of the troops?

Yeah. So, I mean, fortunately, you know, Manish was building a business where the customers are in the United States and his team was mostly in India. And he, the the thing that I think he did differently than a lot of white label companies um that are operating overseas, whether it's Eastern Europe or uh the Philippines or India um is or you know, or Pakistan, is that he actually he lived in the United States and he came not only lived in San Diego for a long time, but he also was, you know, he'd stay here for months at a time to go to conferences and to speak and to build relationships. Uh, and so because of that, he really had to create a leadership team in India that could operate without his constant oversight. And so there was an established leadership team that had an insane amount of autonomy and authority to run their business units. And uh Manish has a very high bar for what excellence is, and you know, so he had, I think, over many years kind of built and mentored that team to really be very autonomous uh in how they operated things. So, in a weird way, when I stepped in and started kind of bringing some corporate governance methodologies of like weekly one-on-ones, uh weekly business reviews, um, you know, a kind of a documentation-focused culture, uh, data-driven culture, right? It was almost like refreshing for the leadership team. Like, I was like, Oh, what do you usually cover with your one-on-ones with Manish? And you know, one of the heads of delivery was like, Well, I don't really have one-on-ones with Manish. So he's like, This is a breath of fresh air. I get to, I get to meet with you every week, I get to speak my mind and all that stuff. So I think in in a way, um, I was able to provide an immediate service to the leadership team that um maybe was was missing. Um, and and again, not missing from like a negative way. I think it created a really great culture of like self-starters and self-managers. Um, but I think I think that was able to, you know, the team was able to feel really supported very quickly, even though we have um, you know, almost 12 hours or over 12 hours separating us. Um so just bringing some of that.

Strictly that's a that that's a hard time zone. Like 12 hour separation is a hard time zone. Like, are you up early or are they up late or what what's going on?

A little bit of both. I'd say we we kind of both, you know, like I I kind of start my day and on my desk around 5 a.m. mountain time, which means I'm getting up at 4 or 4:30, kind of getting getting to my desk at that time. And then they were already staying up till about noon mountain, just to support the US clients generally. And and some of the leadership teams certainly, when needed, will stay up much later than that. Um, but that gives us like a pretty good chunk of the day where we're kind of hanging out together. Uh, like we just launched our our AI for agencies event called Vistara. And I mean, there was several team members that clearly stayed up like all night to work on launching that, because just you know, launching something, it always takes an extra 30 minutes and an hour and 30 minutes, right? And and um, and so I think there's a little bit of a culture around leadership where they they will kind of go late into the night. I mean, I'll have calls with Manish going into 3 p.m., 4 p.m. my time, and I'm like, okay, you need to go to bed. Um, I'm burned out from work, and you need to go fast because I've been working 12 or 13 hours, and you've certainly been putting in more hours than that.

So um Manish has been on our c our podcast and and at our live, our online live events several times where it's 3 a.m. for him. He's like, Yeah, I just got a few hours' sleep and now I'm up. And you know, he his work ethic and commitment is second to none. I've never experienced anything like it. He's just so freaking passionate and so determined and works so hard. Um, which is a which is a real credit to him and uh and obviously the culture at E2M w is good when you come in and so it must be tempting for you to come in and go well you because I don't know I'd be like I'm like I'm gonna fucking wave some troy dean magic here right and but but really like that could that could be disruptive and damaging to everyone. So how do you temper that that desire to kind of you know wave the Brent Weaver flag and and and then also just kind of fit into what's already working.

Yeah and and that's like I think the one of the messages that I made to the team like really early on like this is not a a situation where you're bringing in a new CEO and like a turnaround company where you have like a big problem that you're trying to solve and like the business is heading in the wrong direction. It the business is actually growing and thriving and and that was like my biggest concern was you know coming in and just not screwing it up. Right. Like don't don't break anything that's already working. And so you know spending a lot of time listening a lot of time kind of kind of just distilling down like what I'm hearing from people and and thinking about how to put that into you know more of a documented strategy. So a lot of the stuff that uh you know weirdly I mean E2M has grown supporting over 350 agencies I mean 17,000 billable hours a month uh it's it's an incredible amount of work. I mean we launched more websites in a day than my old agency did in you know sometimes a month or two, right? And so it's really an incredible amount of work but a lot of the you know I think I think Manish had had in a brilliant way, but he led the vision of the company very much on like just sharing that verbally repetitively with the team but there wasn't like a documented like EOS style here's our strategy on a page here are our our core values here's our mission our vision here are our numbers for this quarter and that quarter and so a lot of that for me was just saying okay what are what are we doing? First step is just let's put it all on paper and agree that this is the right things to be doing you know and so I think you know it was like I don't want to mess anything up but I would like to at least kind of document and start to create transparency within the company of of good prioritization. So I'd say in the last I mean we're I'm in week nine um we've already done an incredible amount of new initiatives we've doubled down on our fractional AI services we've launched uh our first in-person event that's kind of a combination of agency community as well as a lot of our customers at E2M themed around how to help agencies build the agency of the future powered by AI.

We've gotten on you know I've probably been on a handful of industry podcasts I've we've initiated sponsorships with um a couple of additional agency communities so I've attended my first event as uh you know an E2M team member um which was which was weird I was at I mean I'm sure you know Josh Nelson of of Seven Figure Agency but I was in uh his like big ballroom and one of our former customers was like recognized as like a top uh you know revenue agency at his event and you know Josh was like hey I I'd love to take credit for this one but this one's actually for Brent in the room right uh so it was kind of it was like fun you know um just to to play a different role in in the in an agency community see it from a different angle um uh we're gonna by the way we're gonna put the links to uh the Vistara event I just want to give a plug for this um you know we had Kushbu was in San Diego uh I don't even know when it was like was it late 2024 maybe might have even been 2023 I can't remember but anyway gave an absolute blistering presentation on AI agents I th I want to say it was 2024 but I could be wrong um and uh blew my mind and everyone in the room and Kushbu has really been heading up the AI initiatives at E2M so you guys are running an event uh Denver Colorado which is your hometown September 28 to 30 uh so three days this year it's coming up it's soon right it's in a couple of months um we're gonna put a link uh in uh wherever the show notes wherever you listen to this are right if you and we're also gonna put a discount code specifically to exclusively to us Maverick 200 I think is the discount code so you can get 200 bucks off um if you I firmly believe AI is no longer an option right it's like it it's it if the the horse has bolted if you're not using AI to improve efficiencies do do launch initiatives that you otherwise wouldn't be able to launch AI is not I don't even think it's the future I think it's now um and Cushbu and the team at E2M are very well positioned not only because they've been doing this in their own business but that they've been doing it with and for agencies. So they know what's working and what's not uh get to Vistara September 2830 in Colorado hang out for three days with a bunch of other agencies talk AI learn AI go back with a blueprint on how you can adopt AI and then if you need help with it the team at E2M will be able to help you with capacity. So we'll put a link to the event in the show notes and also the Maverick 200 code use that code and get a couple hundred bucks off the ticket and go. It's it'll, you know, just hanging out in a room with other agencies is is transformative in and of itself, right? Because what happens is we've seen this happen so many events is that you spend two or three days with other agency owners and you come away going, I'm not crazy. There are other people who are doing the same thing that I'm doing and it's a massive validation and a reminder but also you end up with a a notebook hopefully full of tactical things that you can go back and employ in your agency that will help uh move a needle but also you've got a whole bunch of new friends that can help you and can support you and you stay in contact with them. So strongly strongly recommend you get along with that event. Who what what's the lineup?

Is it just e2m speakers what's what's happening at the event Brian um yeah so we've got um quite a few people from our core team just in terms of the um kushbo will be giving a keynote uh Ronic Quittel who actually is one of the owners uh of e2m he was the owner of unlimited WP they got acquired um now he actually is the CEO of an AI platform called ween.ai uh and so I I don't know if I've ever met anybody that you know can explain AI like grassroots up at the level he can for agency owners he he gave an amazing keynote for our folks in uh in India um I got to watch that so we're gonna fly him out um for for Vistara and then we've got a handful of other folks that are non-E2M. Uh I don't know if you know Andy Crestedina we just uh closed him today officially so that's one of our our speakers that we're gonna be announcing soon and we've got probably another four or five that um were just that close to being able to officially announce it'll be kind of a mix about half core E2M team including myself and then four or five in uh industry folks around uh AI. Um and we're also gonna be having some of our like kind of customers or communities agencies that are doing really cool things with AI that aren't like traveling the speaker circuit but they have like something that's like a really cool AI integration or automation. So we're gonna be creating some space for agencies to kind of showcase some stuff that they're doing. And and sometimes I find that those things are a little bit more approachable than some of the people that are like super hardcore like they have the N8N automations that are you know like they've got 4,000 nodes and they're like look I've automated my entire agency right so some of that stuff it's like fun to watch but um and it definitely piques the imagination but you also feel like oh my gosh I'm left in the dust like this guy's gonna come and take my job.

Yeah totally uh joinvistara.com is the link for that uh the event and as I said Maverick 200 is the uh code to get a couple hundred bucks off what what what are you most excited about over the next 90 days apart from the event what are you most excited about at E2M and the flip side of this question is what are you most frustrated by at the moment?

Um well gosh those are good questions um I'd say most excited about I mean certainly internally we talk about AI kind of in two major threads. One is our AI services team which has grown from a couple of team members kind of messing around and doing RD internally. We gave Kushboo and some others you know prior to me coming on board kind of a blank check and just said hey spend as much time as you want on AI and Kushbu went super deep and built a whole bunch of integrations and automations for our internal agency to see like can we actually add value? Starting in February, we opened that up as a service and so you know from our first client in February to now we're supporting I think 23 agencies on a fractional AI basis. So that means that we have a team member you've been a either a halftime or full-time team member that's integrated with the agency that's helping them to accelerate AI in their business. And that team is just like learning like so much. There's just so much new creation and exploration with those agencies. So I have to say the the internal memos and briefs that I get to read about the fractional AI team uh I tend to probably spend too much time uh reading about those just because it's very exciting to see what the team's building um but also in terms of uh the other the other threat on AI is how we're leveraging AI's internal tooling so we started a a series called AI first saturdays and actually our third one's coming up uh here in um in August this this Saturday so every first Saturday the entire E2M team comes into work I know it sounds uh you know like torture or something but we've we view this as kind of a a little bit of an all hands emergency of everybody needs to upskill and so the company's investing by bringing speakers in investing in tools giving people like a lot of freedom to explore AI tools and also do some AI mentorship. And so um the this Saturday is the the third one and the the first one was like an exploratory like let's think about what we could do with AI. The second one was kind of a hackathon build day and this one's actually going to be a little bit of like a demo day. So we're gonna actually see what everybody internally in the company has built using AI. And so that's probably the other thing that's really exciting is just seeing how AI is impacting you know WordPress design and build um all the different CMSs that we use how AI is impacting digital marketing services like SEO and PPC how it's impacting uh content development and so the the company internally you know everything that we're doing is it's better QA is better time time and billable hours are are more efficient uh and so it's really fun to just see some of the cool stuff that the team's building I'm just looking at your pricing for a fractional AI consultant I just want to give people a little bit of context right a full-time AI strategist is 3600 a month you could you can't hire an AI strategist in the US for less than probably two or three hundred grand a year right like this is nuts.

I mean if people if if I I threaten to start an agency every day because you dude can you imagine me and you like back in the day with all the technology that's available to us now if we started our agencies now but we were like 20 years younger like we would have just absolutely crushed it because yeah the one I mean the the labor force that's available to us now all over the world wasn't really around 20 years ago right the AI that was available to us now like even something like ReLUM for doing site maps and wireframes for I mean I'm my wife's a psychologist I'm launching a website for her soon. I'm building a website for the first time in a long time and it's horrible. I don't want to get back into that business right because I don't know what I'm doing. Like I'm out of it I'm I'm out of the weeds but I'm using a bit of AI and I go oh my God this is like within an hour we have a wireframe we have a whole bunch of copy written stuff would have taken two weeks back in the day with approvals from clients and so if if you've got an AI consultant in your agency that's helping you become more efficient one you're just gonna make more profit in your agency because you're gonna be able to do things more efficiently but then you can leverage that AI specialist and you can charge, you can build AI stuff for your clients right this is I mean I'm not this is not me just giving a plug to E2M. This is like genuinely I've built a business here recommending things I know that work that are going to help agency owners make more money and become more profitable. And this is just another one of those opportunities that I think agency owners need to take very seriously my question for you is what's the cap like how how what's the capacity for you guys to grow the AI consulting part of E2M and because it's changing so quickly right how much are you are you kind of investing back into RD to make sure that you're staying ahead because you know obviously you want to be able to service the agencies that you've got so like what is the what does that roadmap look like to grow that part of the business?

I mean I think you know kind of pulling back the the curtain a little bit I think the like the halftime and the part-time plans that we currently have on the website are a little bit misleading because the amount of time that actually goes into each of those plans at this stage of the game is actually more than that because it's not just necessarily one person, but there's kind of a a little bit of a team that gets embedded in each of our agency clients and and part of that is just our you know insecurity of not wanting to under deliver. We want to overdeliver with everything related to AI right now. And and there is a reality that there's a lot of learning that's happening right now. So that's that's one piece that we've said look we're willing to go the extra mile like hardcore while this is a a relatively new service to make sure that we we get this right with every single one of the clients that we bring on with the AI services. So there's kind of the AI strategist team member that's working with agencies and then there's some backend implementers trainees and things like that that are also supplementing that team member so that they can kind of over deliver for our clients. And the reality is a lot of there's a lot of learning going on for us. There's a lot of learning going on for the agencies. So a lot of agency owners will come into the fractional program and they'll be like ah I want you to you know build a be a sales agent or something right and there's like this very complex interpersonal role and of course a lot of agencies don't have maybe the amount of process documentation that we'd love to see. It's like okay show us your proposal and you're like oh wow they're all different you know like um hey how do you guys price your projects and the agency owner will be like well I kind of think about it a little bit and I drop the magic eight ball and I you know and we're like okay cool like that's not ready for AI. So so like a lot of times we go into the agency, they kind of have these expectations of what you know that we're gonna like flip a light switch and AI is just going to appear in their business and it's gonna just you know quadruple their revenue. And so the reality has been there's this kind of process optimization stage of we have to go in and look at you know what actual processes exist um what what are the processes and then we start to go through and just say what could we what could benefit from AI and then also a risk factor of is this something that we've done before is this something that there's refined tooling around are the tools likely to change right and so we just kind of build a matrix out of that and say here's the priority here's what we think we should be working on in the next three to six months and then we get to work. And there's a lot of things that the agency owners sometimes want that we say we'd recommend kind of holding off on this or get these things done first and then let's wait on this stuff over here. So there's there's certainly a little bit of discipline that comes with it.

Um you know you know it's interesting because you and I have been talking about paid discovery for years two agencies, right? And uh the the what what I notice here is that you know I sign up to uh the E2 infractional AI thing the first thing I'm doing is I'm going through an AI assessment discovery and blueprint right so basically we're doing paid discovery there to lay out the plan, lay out the roadmap so to make sure we're working on the right things at the right time and we're not just getting distracted by what we could do with AI which actually isn't going to be meaningful to the business.

So props to you there for for um for adopting the you know if you even look at like our our uh like the team has like an agency playbook that the agency fills in and as somebody who's run a coaching business for you know 10 plus years you know I look at the playbook and I'm like oh this is like the SOP playbook that we would have you know we would just have the actual processes filled in with example processes or whatever but you know I think that's been kind of a prereq the agencies that have been the best with AI are usually the ones that are very much more like process centric. They've got really dialed in processes they actually use their processes. And so those those teams we can go in and say okay this thing over here you've got great documentation on we can load that into an LLM we can automate things with NNN we can kind of do some process mapping and consulting and create some kind of AI magic where there's a task that maybe you would never have asked a human to do it but you're like hey why not go look at the top 100 competitors of a client's you know website and build a comprehensive brief around that in you know five seconds or whatever or one minute um where you never asked a VA to do that or something right so there's some things like that that we can come in and implement that clients are like holy crap that was that's amazing.