Season 22 | Ep 255 | From AI Experiments to Better Client Outcomes with Brent Weaver

Speaker A: Hey, agency owners. It's time for a new episode of the Agency Blueprint, the number one podcast for agency owners looking to build systems to simplify and gain reliable profit growth while also reducing stress and getting their personal life back. I'm your host, Robert Patton, international best selling author, agency scale partner and founder of Creative agency Success. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor and hit that subscribe button to make sure that you never miss an episode and help keep the show at the top of the charts so it can be found by more agency owners like you. And now for the show. Welcome to the show, Bernd.

Speaker B: Great to be here. Thanks Robert.

Speaker A: Personally, I think that you have an interesting position. Former agency mentor, now the CEO of E2M, the M wide legal partner for agencies. And you get to see things from a, uh, much different vantage point than I think a lot of people do and I think an important one when it comes to AI. And so what I'm curious, I want to start the conversation with is between your work at E2M M and what you see happening at Vistara and all the amazing speakers and everything, is that what you are agency owners really saying about AI right now? What do you think the like, general viewpoint of the opportunity now? Are they seeing the opportunity in the industry right now?

Speaker B: I mean, I think it's uh. To say it's the talk of the town would be, I think, a gross understatement. I think I. In the last year I've probably been to 15 agency conferences and AI, like we used to spend 50% of our time talking about marketing and sales. Uh, you know, that was like the bigger part of the conversation was like how to get more clients. And it's still there, but there's, there's like, it's become, I mean I've been doing this for a lot of years and the fact that, you know, we spend like 15% of our time now at agency events learning how to get clients and we spend 50% of our time talking about AI. Right. It's a really interesting paradigm shift because I don't think any technology has ever really done that. Um, and so I think there's, there's just, there's kind of two ends of the spectrum. I think there's, I think publicly my impression is everybody's talking about how AI is an opportunity. It's exciting, exciting. They feel reinvigorated, all this kind of stuff. But I do feel like privately and in some, you know, I've been to some kind of closed door sessions. Right. I think there's some real concern amongst agency owners, especially people that have been in the industry for 20, 30 years, have mature businesses that are doing millions of dollars in revenue. Um, they've got real concerns as to how AI is going to impact the future of our industry and their business. And the phrase I've heard people say is, you know, do I have the energy to reinvent my business again? Right. And that kind of implies if somebody's thinking about reinventing their business, they probably I, there's an implication there that their business is under some kind of threat or has to have some kind of big change. Um, so, so I think there's, there's a lot of excitement. I think there's also a lot of fear. Whether it's spoken fear or not.

Speaker C: I mean, I think the fear and change is always natural, right? I mean as a human being it's very natural to fear of what we don't really know. I mean there's obviously opportunity in AI, right? I mean that I think is, is kind of table stakes when you consider it. And I'm curious on uh, the piece of your view on the risk factor for an established business, at least from my viewpoint of it. And maybe I'm looking at it through rosy colored classes if you will. But the uh, viewpoint that I have is that the agency world, while we are looking at making some significant changes to some of the tooling it is tooling, right. I mean a very powerful tool mind you, but the base foundation of what an agency is, is distilling knowledge, expertise, detail, supporting clients through their journey of understanding how to, how to implement and how to achieve an outcome. The speed at which that happens now can happen potentially a whole lot faster. But the fundamentals of the industry remains the same. The know how the, the agency that's been around for 30 years actually is m more useful and has greater utility in the AR frontier because the junior people I think are the ones that should probably be more fearful than the senior ones.

Speaker B: I resonate with some of that. I also like, I think our best AI engineers and the people that we've seen be willing to reinvent processes. Um, have at least at our firm, have definitely tended to be younger, uh, less baggage. I think there's this, um, there's kind of people that kind of. Okay, well here's the process that I go through to like build a website, you know, and so they have this like process in their head and then that process has been created through dozens or hundreds of reps, right? And you kind of create these, these like you create these like divots, right? These like, these kind of like, right, this kind of muscle memory, this kind of like ruts, right? That like kind of become your tracks for how you execute something. And so I think what we see is like person that has experience, a veteran in the industry, they will look at AI as a tool to, to like accelerate and collapse their journey along those divots, right? They're kind of along those ruts, right? They're like, they, they're like, I'm, um, here at point A, I wanted to get to point B. Here's the route that I go. And AI is going to help me like get there faster, right? And the young people that have no experience are like, they're like, like the person that has, they have this like track. Like we're going to go down this track, right? And young person is like, there is no track, right? They're going to like teleport, right? They're just like, boom, right? And so they just kind of challenge the assumptions. Now. There's all sorts of risks and unintended conse. Consequences of that kind of approach. But I think we've seen some really great disruption from like kind of AI first agentic. I almost say agentic because I feel like AI is like one technology in the stack, right? You have like SaaS, you have like hosting, you have websites, you have UI, you have UX, you have database, you have all these things. And like LLMs are like a piece of it, right? And it's like. And so I think of it as like, we're building agents and AI is like a part of the thing kind of. It's like the, like the, the lifeblood that makes an agent possible, like ultimately possible. That last little cor. Cornerstone, right? They kind of. You fit the piece in and all of a sudden it comes alive. Like AI was that piece. And so I think building agents, there's, there's like young people, they think in agents first and they're like, rightfully. I think they're really lazy. They're like, why would I ever. Like, if you tell me how to do something, I'm just gonna put it in my agent. And they're like, it's like out of their mind immediately. They're like, I've just put it in my agent. Whenever you ask me for X, I'm gonna have. My agent's gonna do it. I don't have to think about this anymore, right? And so there's just a very different thinking. And so I do think some of the Established guard. You know, it's like, no, I mean the um, like somebody building websites, trying to explain that to like a print designer or something. Print designers, like, I don't know, how do you make the thing? How, how does something purchase something through a brochure, right? And you're like, how do you press a button? Like you're explaining buttons to people that like, don't understand that. So I don't know. I think there's, there's, there's definitely going to be some, some generational gaps, but I think seeing these young people come into our firm, I'm certainly not, I'm not worried about them.

Speaker C: Interesting. So you're saying, I mean, I think that the rigidity is kind of the thing that you're talking about that needs to be avoided, that there still needs to be reinvention. And I think that a piece of what you kind of did was maybe a little bit, call me old, which that's okay. I'm coming to terms with that a little bit myself. The thing that I'm curious about is what are you seeing from agencies engaging with clients from an AI opportunity or kind of this agentic, more M oriented agency? Where is there a meaningful amount of opportunity that you see agencies being able to take advantage of in the market right

Speaker B: now? Yeah, I mean, I think that like, I don't, I mean you can certainly lead with talking. I mean, I think there's. AI is a topic right now is, is a great door opener. It's a great conversation starter. I think asking clients like, hey, what are you using AI for? Do you have an AI strategy? Are you guys using AI tools? Like how does, how is AI fitting into your business? I think those are great conversation starters, but I think ultimately if you're going to have a conversation around value, you need to understand like what are the pains, the problems, challenges, frustrations, you know, and also what's the desired future state of the business, right? What are they trying to achieve or their goals, aspirations, wants, Right. Objectives. Uh, and so I feel like that, that overall conversation has relatively stayed the same and I think AI has helped us to. It's kind of opened up a whole new dimension of things that we could potentially do for clients. The blurring the lines between, like, do we install some established SaaS for this client to do lead management, qualification, customer service, um, do we just set up a contact form or do we have an agent, right? Like there's this whole new layer of, of tools, right? Almost, uh, adding a third or fourth or fifth dimension to like Digital solutions. And so I think that that's what I recommend people is like still focus on like the pains, the problems, just educate yourself on the tools so you have a whole new set of potential solutions. Um, and I think the agencies that are doing that, it's like they kind of went from this like whatever, like web design agency to like hey, we actually do, you know, maybe we do web and we do some AI solutions, but ultimately it's like what are these things going to do for the business? Is it going to help us grow revenue, it's going to help us to reduce costs, Is it going to help us to get more customers, grow the market share, you know, tying it back to that kind of stuff. And that's sort certainly hasn't changed. And I think the people that get too, they nerd out too much on AI and they have too much of it would be an AI conversation versus a problems conversation. I think they risk alienating customers, spending heaps of time on AI but not really growing their business, that kind of stuff. And I see that a lot. Right. It's like I ask the question of like, like has your business grown since 2023? Like have you seen, like if you're really using AI, well there should be this inflection point of revenue growing more than it has been the last 10 years or costs have collapsed more than they have the last years. If revenue and if the business still looks like it does three, four, five years ago. Like I don't think AI is doing anything for you, to be honest. I think it's, it's probably just burning calories.

Speaker C: One of the things that I, I've been working on is, you know, this talk for how to have the conversation with clients in AI. One of the things that I was netting out to, and I'm curious on your take on it is what exactly and who is the partner that the reality of a senior led, expert oriented person that has 20, 30 years, a veteran in the industry, the amount of workflow logic that needs to be built into that AI infrastructure is lesser. So if you have a younger person that has less experience, it needs to be more thoughtful. There needs to be more workflow set. So it's thinking about who is that AI partner when it comes to agency value is how to be thinking about that conversation and allowing for a client to understand when are we needed? When can you be leveraging an AI, uh, agent that either we've developed for you or that you develop yourself and then when do you need to bring us into the fold? So that there is a, uh, know how on the client side to have the conversation and be able to have a conversation with the agency when they need you.

Speaker B: I think the value in like somebody that has experience is, you know, I'm not saying experience is not worth, you know, something, but I think it's going to be that consultative, like really understanding businesses, organizations seeing the types of things that they're looking for, being able to like teleport yourself into the mind of the customer. I think that I've had thousands of conversations with business owners of all types, especially in the agency space. Right. For you know, two decades. Somebody that's just getting into this industry might not speak that language fluently. Like they're willing to disrupt things, they're willing to blow up processes or they're just not even blowing up the process because they just, they aren't even, they're not even working in a world where that process ever existed. They just go to AI and they prompt it and they get a result and they keep prompting and reprompting until they get their desired result, which is just a very different workflow for building the thing. Uh, but I think deciding like what you're going to build, deciding um, what questions that you're going to ask, how to have that conversation with customers, I think that's something that I think experience goes a long way there and certainly agents aren't taking uh, that conversation anytime soon. So sitting down with a business owner that's been in an industry for 20 or 30 years, you know, having a conversation with a 22 year old that has just been nerding out on AI, like, you know, I think the quality of that conversation will be, will be radically different. That being said, Robert, I sold my first website when I was a 17 year old kid to I think a 50 year old business person. So I'm certainly very aware of the disruption that can come from young people. Um, you know, I think ultimately clients are going to care about like does this person, you know, can they solve my problem? Do I believe they're credible? Uh, they're credible enough that I actually it's believable that we'll achieve an outcome. Right? Or are they going to take my, you know, 5,000 doll and I'll never hear from them again? So. But I certainly think If I have 30 years experience, I can probably go in and I can do discovery much more effectively than a 22 year old kid. They might be looking for somebody to tell them like what they want, like just give me, just tell me what you want. Right. Versus somebody that can actually go in and really dig for like root cause, a root problem kind of analysis.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean I think actually your take on it is fairly aligned with what I was thinking. Right. It's just understanding who that thought partner needs to be for the uh, agent. It's also kind of a risk evaluation too of well, how is this being used? What does it actually mean? How much of my business continuity and future actually dependent upon this? What are the risk factors of that that allows for you to make a determination the business owner, not necessarily the agency, but advising the client of uh, how do you make a determination where AI plays a role in this workflow or in this output? I'm curious on the reality of how you're seeing the agencies really being able to sell AI services as well. So like as an example, let's say that you have an agency, a branding agency that is a call design agent that is able to be the kind of CBO oriented to make sure that all the output is within the brand guidelines and being able to actually sell that as an attack on or an add on to, to the artifacts that are being generated by the branding agency. And I'm seeing a lot of agencies really struggle to be able to communicate that in the, in the market. I'm curious to see why do you think that gap actually exists in the way that they're able to articulate it. They can talk about branded bread guides incredibly well, but this idea is so difficult for them.

Speaker B: Yeah, like, I mean I think if you're ultimately selling it, like I know what I pay for just basic access to chat or Claude. Our teams consume a lot of tokens and so our AI bill is actually, you know, for people that are heavy users, I think AI has a much different cost profile than somebody who's just using it conversationally for feedback on their brand or things like that. So I think the second you're like, hey, I'll build you a custom GPT or an agent you can go talk to about your brand. I mean I think that in some ways it could devalue like you as a consultant, it could devalue like your relationship with uh, that business. But certainly if they're building design designed assets, they're publishing content and copy and they want to run it through that agent. I mean I think being able to tell your client that hey, we're going to, you're going to get unlimited brand feedback from our agent named Blank. Right. And you can talk to that agent 24 7, you can have long conversations with it. You can throw out as many resources as you want and give you that real time feedback and it's going to probably save you 5k a month in brand strategy work. And you can bring us in for the toughest problems or to come in and review output. I mean, I think clients would probably be excited about that. That being, I think there's this underlying accountability problem with AI. Like why would I hire AI versus just build my brand inside of Claude? And I think there's certainly a good argument for building my brand. You know, doing a rebrand inside of Claude might, uh, cost me essentially $0, right? Cause I mean, maybe some token usage or whatever, but fundamentally it's like a $0 effort, right? It's gonna take me some time, but it's whether or not, like is that brand, if I actually execute what Claude tells me a hundred percent, will it get me the result that I want? And if it doesn't get me the result, who' for that do I call up anthropic and say, like, hey, that brand you built me, like, sucks, right? Like, we didn't get the growth that we thought we were going to get. Right. I don't think anybody's accountable for that. And so I think one thing that you're paying with when it comes to agencies and experts is, is you are, you're kind of paying, you're putting some skin in the game. They have a contract with you. They have an obligation to provide you a result. And I don't think there, there's really not much of an obligation from AI to provide you an accurate result or a result that's going to guarantee you any kind of performance whatsoever. You could have AI build you something. And it seemed, without an expert looking at it, assisting that thing that AI builds, it could, it could look 95% right. It could look 97% right. But if I said, in fact,

Speaker C: I'm sure it has,

Speaker B: yeah. If I said, hey, we're trying to get from Denver to New York City and we're going to put 96% of the fuel that we need to make that trip into the plane, you know, like we're going to put 96% of fuel into the plane from Denver, New York, right. Like, do you want to get on that plane with me? Probably not. Like, we're not going to end up in New York, right. Hopefully we'll just like land in a nearby airport. And I think that's where, if you have a business owner, right? And we get this all the time, like well, why don't I just build this with AI it's like, well, maybe you should. Right. But like if you're, if 95% is good enough for you, if 97% is good enough for you, like AI can be a great solution. If it doesn't end up working though, who, who are you going to hold accountable? You know, who's going to stay up till 2 o' clock in the morning, a B testing stuff and iterating and figuring things out? Right. Claude certainly isn't going to have any. There's not going to be any emotional connection or financial. So I think you have to as a business owner. Right. And this is a good pitch for agencies. It's like you're an expert in what you, you have experience, you're held accountable, you have skin in the game ultimately. Like those are things that AI is never going to have.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it's also that risk factor component that I was talking about earlier. I'm also curious on like the, the reality of the articulation of it as well. It's this, this confidence factor that I think a lot of agencies are not m really sure how to communicate. It's that, that fear component that you were talking about earlier. But what does that actually mean for my agency's future? An established agency that I've spent the last 30 years growing and now I'm making augmentation. I may be trying to go into, venture into this other area that I maybe even be excited about, but I'm not quite sure. I'm half fearful, half excited and not really confident about it. You know. So like, it's just like a weird hodgepodge of all sorts of human experience. I think.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you have to get like. I guess how we look at it at E2M is we can either disrupt or be disrupted. And I think the doing the disruption yourself maybe is an illusion of control that I prefer much more than the, than the being disrupted. Right. Uh, you know, I don't think even if you're the disruptor, I don't ultimately think we have, we have that level of. As humans, we don't have a lot of, there's a lot of luck involved and there's a lot of like other forces outside of what we can control. But I think if, uh, if you're like, look, I can either do the disrupting in my market or even to my own business, like I, I can, I can do that. And that's gonna, I'm gonna learn a lot. I might fail, but at least I'm gonna fail doing something that I believe in versus kind of waking up one day and realizing, you know, your business has been hollowed out by some factor that's, that's by AI replacing the services that you do. And then you're like, well, crap, what now? Right. Um, and certainly lots of people will disagree with me and somebody that has five years left in their business, they might think I'm just going to ride this out. And so maybe it's a good time for that business to sell or whatever. Um, but yeah, I think, I think that that's kind of how, how I we look at it at E2M is like we can disrupt or be disruptive.

Speaker C: And if you're wanting to be that sort of disruptor, if you will. Right. And you're not really an AI, uh, expert today. I don't know that they exist so much. I don't know. You're an expert in something that's been around for a short of a period of time, but being able to have a meaningful conversation about kind of the directionality and being able to explore a bit more with, you know, your first oriented prospects and being able to offer a new service. Offering what, what advice do you have for agencies trying to venture into this space and it's their first time offering something new.

Speaker B: Yeah, I tell people like uh, I don't, I don't have a crystal ball. I don't have like a silver, um, bullet. I think what we did at E2M M was we, we started to talk about what we were using AI for in our business. We started just publicly talking about it with no expectations. Just like our COO did a speec, an event that I was actually hosting when I was working at DigitalOcean. And I think that was in like November of 2024, in kind of first time that each M had publicly talked about AI. And then by March, you uh, know, a bunch of businesses, a bunch of agencies had reached out and said, hey, can you do that for us? And it was like, no, no, we're just doing this internally. Right. But enough people asked and then, you know, they were like, well hey, let's, we'll sell an AI plan for 20 hours of AI work for $1,000 a month. And it was, you know, we're a white label company. We were thinking about it as like selling expertise for hours or whatever. And in March of E2M signed its first thousand dollars a month AI client. And it was just to build some AI. I think they spent 90 hours a month on this 20 hour plan, right? Like, it was like wildly unprofitable. It was like, it was just like we were, they were. This is before I joined as CEO, but, but the team was spending, you know, 90, 100 hours easily just like trying to figure out like, what are, what do customers want, what's valuable to them? And kind of had these early adopter customers that were very, that had been around our ecosystem for a long time, very generous with their feedback. They had a high toler things maybe not being 100%. And we just kept getting the reps in and turned to 2, 3, 5. And then a year and a half later, it's almost a $2 million ARR. Business unit. Um, and so I think, you know, my advice to people is like, just like, you're not going to get it perfect. And so I think perfect can become that enemy of good. And I think finding clients that trust you, especially if you've been around 30 years, you probably have a list of 10, 15 clients that would trust you with their life. Right? Um, it's like going to those clients and being very open and transparent. Like, hey, we're experimenting with AI. Here's what we're doing with our business. If this is of interest to you, like, we'd love to solve some problems for you. Like, let's sit down in a room, I'll fly out to your business, I'll sit with you for a day, I'll just download what you guys are doing and I'll see if our team can come up with any kind of solutions for AI. And if it would be valuable to you, you guys can take a look at it. I think that's the process a lot of people are looking for. Lots of education around it. Like, I gotta figure out AI. I need to know, you know, you need to know like 5% more than your client. Um, and then if, if you know how to talk to them about problems, then you can always go find. Like, like I bring some of our team, like Mitesh, one of our head AI engineers. Like, I'll bring him on a call and be like, all right, dude, tell me. Like, show me. Here's, here's what the business told me. Like what? And he'll, he'll actually build out a solution. And so I think I'm, I'm, I know enough to be dangerous, but I certainly am not in there. Like, you know, I'm not spinning up Claude code and building apps myself. Right. Um, I'm. The team is doing that. Um, and so I think as long as you have a little bit more know and your, your average client, I think you can, you can certainly go and sell AI uh solutions to them.

Speaker C: I mean I think the, the approach is right in being able to go to clients that you have a meaningful relationship with that have a lot of trust and then being open and honest of the fact that you are testing something out, you're trying something out. I mean I, for me I just, it's been such a fun journey being a uh, data nerd that I am and understanding the amount of the power that AI really has when you have the right data infrastructure around it. I remember my, I was um, laying on a couch on a Sunday afternoon which I then got an advertisement on coefficient and Google sheets. Being able to be connected and as you know an accountant and Excel spreadsheets are my jam frankly. And being able to connect it to Chad GBT now and I'm like I have to go like goodbye free time. I need to go play with it for as long as I possibly can. And I surfaced probably like six or seven hours later and went up to my husband. I'm like, I just, now I can do this and like I can do this over here. And like my mind was just going, feeling like I needed to run a mile,

Speaker B: like, like mild AI psychosis or something. Right? You're just like

Speaker C: yeah, 100%

Speaker B: yeah. I mean so, so you know, you experience that kind of AI magic and I mean I would love to. I wish I had more. I mean I'm very data oriented but I don't, I can't. Um, it's not in my, my person to like spend week researching something and going like super deep. I'm gonna, I love the summary. Like give me the summary. What's the problem? What, what's the solution? What's the benefit? Okay, cool. Like let's build a business around that. Like let's go. I think AI definitely gives. Um, yeah, if you're, if that you're that high fact finder, high follow through deep dive person that loves to build like, I mean AI is certainly like a uh, it's a great drug of choice right now

Speaker C: for sure. The thing that I would imagine a lot of people are quite concerned with venturing into offering a new offering was kind of the exact thing that you described this. Like we ended up working 90 hours on a 20 hour retainer that we ultimately had and effectively either over promising or just massively over delivering. And I mean I think that there's some component of your first sow, first scope of work that you are performing, right? The reality of the first time I rode a bike, I definitely fell loads of times and there's going to be lots of failures in that process. Any advice on mitigating that as much as possible so they don't just like lose their shorts in

Speaker B: it? I mean, I think I would increase your tolerance for pain. I think a lot people that have established businesses, they've gotten comfortable. I use this presentation, uh, this example of the. Who moved my cheese? Uh, I'm sure many of your listeners have read that book. Just this idea that we kind of find our cheese, we get comfortable, we put our running shoes up, right? We just, we build infrastructure. Maybe we get a little plump, right? Like, uh, put on some weight, right? And we kind of forget about those days where we actually had to like work hard for it. Uh, and I think when the cheese moves, it's like, oh, wait a minute, like, it takes some time to remember, like how many late nights or how many unprofitable projects like that we had to go through to get the lessons and the experience to build the systems and the processes that that had created the business that we have today. And, and so I think you have to kind of get back into that startup mentality and just be like, especially if you have, if you have like profit right now, you have a war chest. Like, just remove any expectations that what you're going to do with AI is going to be profitable at all for the first three, six 12 months. Like, I think just, it's like I could either innovate with my business and be around here for the next 10 or 15, 20 years, or I can pinch pennies on it and risk getting snuffed out. And um, and so that's kind of the mindset that we have is like, I've told my team like time and time again, like, go all in on customer experience and delivering, even if it in the short term looks like bad on the P and L for the AI division, like just go all out on delivery. We had to like, in a couple of situations where we've had to like credit people or whatever, you know, to extend things out because we didn't get as far as we wanted to. And we just, we've been very generous in that space because we, we know we're doing so much learning. And so I think when you don't like, like think about the toddler learning to walk, they're not running like cost benefit analysis on like their steps. You know, they're just like, I need to Walk, right? Like, I have this desire, like I know if I end up walking, like I'm going to, I'm going to have freedom. And like, we don't truly understand the upside of walking, right? But we just know it's going to be better than what we're doing today. And I think that's, you know, they're like, toddlers are willing to take falls hit their face, right? Just over and over and over and over again because like, they know it's going to give them freedom. And so I think that's how we look at like new products and new businesses. It's like just you have to be willing to go all in and make lots of, take lots of falls. And so I think when you take your matured business model of like revenue cogs, gross margin, you know, you take that existing business model and you apply that to a, uh, nascent, you know, it's like new kind of this fragile little fledgling thing, right? You're gonna, you're gonna kill it, right? I think that if you look at like Blockbuster and what they did with their streaming business, um, that's exactly what they did, right? They, they took an existing business model and they tried to invent this new thing and they tried to take existing systems and processes and apply it to this very delicate, fragile thing and they just, they snuffed it it out until they woke up one day and didn't have a business left.

Speaker C: I mean, I also think the reality of it, the, the investments made in my life, the ones that have always produced the highest roi, the ones that I've invested in myself, I mean, there's loads of different investment vehicles and that's the approach that I view it really is where and how should I be investing into myself and into my own future? And I think that agencies should be kind of taking the same approach to it. Of. I mean, obviously don't make, don't risk your entire future on, on this endeavor, right? But you should be making some kind of investment into yourself and into your future. Having. Having been, uh, at Ah Vistara and leading one of the workshops during the last event, I'm curious to hear you had an opportunity to speak to loads more agencies, I imagine, than I did. I'm curious to hear what you saw as some of the strongest examples or patterns that you saw with agencies that are moving forward with AI in a bit more of an inventive way or some conversations that you had with agencies that just really stuck with you from the event back in.

Speaker B: I think, uh, one of the Talks, uh, Brian, Ryan Sakine, he uh, from Fox and Owl, like it was crazy just seeing like the, the dashboards that he had that run his SEO agency and like how they've identified that whole process. Just, it was like. And that's the work that like our team does. And I know they do it and I see it, but like hearing him talk about how it's changed his, like how he sells, it's changed how he positioned himself in the market, it changed, changes how he talks to his clients and what, how his team delivers. Like how they think about their own capacity to get clients results. Like, it kind of, it's just like change their whole business, right? And there's been very few things in my career where you can point to like one tech layer and be like, wow, this has actually influenced everything, every aspect of the business. And so I think that's, that's really inspiring to see agencies that are doing that really like reinventing the business. Um, I think one caution, right, is you see a business like that, you're like, wow, like you guys have this AI system that runs the whole thing. Thing or a lot of it, and then you try to replicate that. And I think that they started very iteratively. They started with one process. They kind of layered them on like Legos or something, you know, and they, and then we look at like the finished product, we're like, wow, this is. And so I think just looking at it and saying, okay, this inspires me to know what's possible. And then I just need to pick some place to start and then know, you know, maybe in a year AI will have truly touched or be influencing or leveraging every aspect of the business, which I think is exciting.

Speaker C: The toddler still is going to fall in the process of learning to walk,

Speaker B: I'm sure for their. There are 16 agents that they have that are like in their current stack that are like being used day to day with their team. I'm sure there's 35 agents that are like in the trash can, right? And there's probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars that they had to like light on fire, uh, to get there. And I think that's. I personally find that kind of stuff exciting and fun to make those bets. But, uh, certainly it can be painful in the moment to be like, wow, we just spent three months on a thing that we ended up not being able to automate and it's kind of a waste of time and should we stop doing AI Right. I think if I would also look at like businesses, like what happened with E Commerce? I mean, I think certainly at an individual business level, there's lots of businesses that tried to go online and sell online and failed. And you have big companies like, you know, Amazon that obviously have done it really well. Um, Walmart got in eventually. They, they strategically waited. That's another thing to, to think about is like, if you are going to wait, you can strategically wait. You could make a conscious decision about that. You could build some, a paradigm for how, you know how long you're going to wait, what, what needs to be true in the marketplace before you're going to jump in. And once that, once you hit that, you need to jump in and go all in and go hard. Like, they spent billions of dollars acquiring companies and building up their own tech stack, but they waited until they watched lots and lots of businesses. They knew they weren't going to get the first mover advantage. So they waited, they watched lots of people fail and then they said, okay, when we're ready, we're going to go all in. Uh, and so I think there's a strategy to that as well. But I think what's a bad strategy is waiting. Not knowing. You know, you're waiting because of fear and you don't know why you're waiting and you don't know what you're waiting for. I, uh, think that's, that's definitely a recipe for, for, you know, future pain.

Speaker C: I also think that from a, uh, if you're going to take the waiting game and maybe this is just the Excel brain person that I am, but I would also say from a reality, uh, perspective of like, what would the foundation and what items would I need to get in place so that I can leverage it more meaningfully in the future. Right. I'm sure that there was lots of inner workings that were going on to make sure that they could take advantage and leap on it at that point when they did. You know, one of the things that I'm, I imagine is really meaningfully true and with the community that you've built around Vistara, I just think is really cool to be able create opportunity, inspiration and having been able to experience the agency community that you and E2M have built. Do you mind sharing a little bit about Vistara, what the mission is of it and how people can learn a little bit more about the next Vistara that you've got coming up next year?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, we believe Vistara is the AI conference for agencies. I think we have to uh, have to survive this like transformation, disruption, I think we need to see other people and what they're doing. We need to learn from them. We need to have like, support networks. I think taking a big risk and bet in your business, it takes some guts, but it also takes like, seeing other people. Like, we're social creatures. We have to see other people do it. We have to talk to them, we have to break bread with them. And I think we just bring people together to create that environment. Uh, and so we want agencies to feel supported. When AI first hit, we looked at that as a white label agency and we were like, this could disrupt agencies fundamentally. And for our business, our business depends on agencies being around for many, many years. Uh, and so we were like, well, we need to make sure that agencies thrive in this next era of digital. And so we thought event was a great way to do that because it brings people together, it helps people learn, but it also helps people give, get the confidence that they need to make changes. And so we took a bet and we kind of did. Our first event had, I don't know, a hundred agencies there. And then this last spring we had about 250 agencies. And it looks like we're going to have probably over 500 in, uh, in San Diego in, in February. So it's great to see that it's been well received and I think we've delivered on that. I think we've inspired people, educated them, and also helped them to kind of feel less, less afraid, more optimistic.

Speaker C: It's awesome. I mean, I really enjoyed the event. I think you guys do throw, uh, um, an m awesome event. And it's just such an awesome community as well. Um, at least I found very welcoming and I really enjoyed myself.

Speaker B: It's a good excuse. Go party. It's a good excuse to hang out. Well, it's in, it's in February in San Diego. I live in Colorado. In February, it's going to be zero degrees and snowy and icy. And I'm going to be very excited to go to San Diego in February for sure.

Speaker C: I might have to jump back myself as well. You know, having just moved to Edinburgh from San Diego, I think I'm at that point in February. I'm going to need to be back there myself as well.

Speaker B: I promise. We didn't wait till you move to do an event in your hometown. But, uh, yeah, you'll be our local tour guide, Robert.

Speaker C: I'll make sure to include show notes, everybody, so you can go and check out the event and, um, join us in San Diego. Awesome,

Speaker A: everyone. Thank you so much. For listening in today. With all of the shifts in the industry, it is easy to feel overwhelmed or unsure of your next move. So I'm not here to try to sell you anything. I just want to give back and guide you through the uncertainty. Whether you're navigating new trends or just need some clarity, we're here to listen and offer advice. Head to creativeagencysuccess.com chat to book a free 15 minute chat with an agency mentor who can provide you with a fresh perspective. Let's figure out the best steps for your agency's growth together.