Jessica Chase, CEO and Co-Founder of GetAboveTheFold.com

Speaker A: In this episode of the Agentic Shift podcast, we talk to Jessica Chase, co founder of above the Fold, a programmatic advertising agency transitioning from journalism to marketing. Jessica emphasizes the importance of programmatic advertising for business growth. Chase shares her experiences at 1-800-contacts and rapping, highlighting her focus on creating efficient processes within her agency. She underscores the necessity of emotional and psychological well being for agency owners and the evolving landscape of marketing analytics amidst technological change. Enjoy the show.

Speaker B: All right, Jessica, thank you so much for joining us on the agentixift podcast.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah, great to talk to you. So you are the co founder of getabovethefold.com and I love being above the fold as a general principle of marketing. Why don't we start with just tell us a little about the business and and then your origin story how you decided to found this agency.

Speaker C: Sounds great. Yeah. And the reason for the name getabovethefold.comm is because I used to be a journalist and I thought about going into journalism and I was the editor in chief in high school as well as college. And I was like, for sure gonna be this journalist. It was like my destiny. But at the time, I think it was 2005, the journalism industry was just changing a lot and it was moving online. And oddly enough, a lot of the inventory on news sites now is programmatic inventory. But I had no idea that I would end up founding a programmatic agency later in life that helps all these publishers stay alive, largely news sites stay alive. But that's like my college story. I worked at 1, 800 contacts for a long time. I think it was eight years. I worked there during college and then I was a marketing administrative assistant. So I got to learn all areas of marketing, which I felt was a huge benefit to me in my marketing career. I was able to learn conversion rate optimization and work with developers and understand agile methodologies. And then Google was huge back then. So we used Google Google. And then we used, at the time it was an attribution tool called Omniture, which was an alternate to Google Analytics. So I got to learn that. And now they're Adobe. Obviously Adobe purchased them, but I even learned traditional media there. I learned how to buy Val Pack and magazine ads and traditional TV and 1, 800 contacts had a huge budget, so. So it was a fun place to learn advertising. But then I really got into the affiliate industry and I was the affiliate manager for 1, 800 contacts. They had 3,500 affiliates at the time and a lot of them were probably bots, now that I look back at it. But we had pretty sophisticated technology to make sure that we weren't running with any malware clients or software clients. And. But there were all. There was a lot of policing going on. There were those PPC affiliates that would outrank you on your branded terms. And I was constantly playing police officer of follower terms and conditions and things like that. But I really loved the affiliate industry. I thought it was fun. I just needed a little bit more of a challenge. So I decided to go over on the affiliate side and worked for a cashback company. So instead of being the client, I was now the affiliate, working with hundreds of advertisers, just negotiating cash back for their site. And then I just grew out of the affiliate world. I just felt I surely could have started an affiliate agency. I could have started an OPM agency, but I just felt like I wanted to learn a different type of marketing and I'm just that type of personality. I'm in Strengths Finder 2.0. I'm an achiever and I'm a learner. And so I was like, I gotta go learn something new. I saw the skill CEO of Rakuten, it was Mediaforge at the time. I saw him speak at, uh, the linkshare Affiliate Summit. And I just loved what he had to say. He was talking about Programmatic, he was talking about just full funnel advertising in terms of affiliate and paid search and Programmatic and how it all worked together and then how you should use a multi touch attribution tool to analyze your spend. And I was just really inspired by him. So I went up to him after the conference and said, do you have a job? And they interviewed me that day.

Speaker B: Um, he gave you an offer that day?

Speaker C: They interviewed me that day, yes. So the person that was hiring actually had been at the conference with him and she was like, yeah, let's do an interview today. And yeah, long story short, I ended up working for Rakuten, which is a multi. It's a, uh, national marketing agency based out of Japan and they have offices in the UK and Brazil and Australia, as well as four offices across the US in New York, Chicago, California and Salt Lake City. And I was just able to learn a lot about programmatic advertising there. And I already knew about affiliate. I already knew about paid search, but I learned also a lot about multi touch attribution. And so it was just fun. And I really started loving programmatic advertising. I love the fact that programmatic advertising is probably. I like that it's not easy Like, I love a challenge because it's more upper and mid funnel, but I also love that it actually helps clients grow their business more than they think. And I just didn't love even. This was 10 years ago. I noticed that people were putting way too much money at the bottom of the funnel in Google. And I just recognized just the conflict of interest with Google and how they built an attribution platform around themselves with Google Analytics. And I just wanted to fight the good fight in a sense regarding helping marketers be smarter than that and not put all of their ad spend in one bucket and diversify their ad spend for better growth. That's ultimately why getabovethefold.com exists, is just really focusing on programmatic advertising and helping clients understand why it's important to have awareness. Awareness as well as just clicks, because you can't get clicks without awareness.

Speaker B: So a couple things that you said that, uh, struck a chord with me. First of all, you said you were, you went to journalism initially and that's why you need probably get above the fold. And for those people who are under, I don't know if it's 25 or 35, the reason it's called above the fold is because there used to be something called a newspaper that you opens and it was tabloid style. And so the, all the content that was on the top of the page was called above the fold. And then when you opened up the newsletter, the bottom part of it was below the fold. Obviously the above the fold is the most, where they put the most important headlines and I guess advertisements. So I just need to explain that for the youth who are listening saying, why is, what does above the fold have to do with journalism? The second thing I'll say is as an agency, you tend to remember the great success stories for your clients, but you also can ruminate over the less successful client experiences. And in my case, we had 1, 800 contacts as a client for probably less than a year. And I put, I put one of my top account managers on it and I just think he didn't do a good job and we lost the account. And so I still feel some sort of guilt for not being successful with 100 contacts.

Speaker C: They're a tough client. So I wouldn't be too hard on yourself. They do expect a lot. I worked with a lot of different agencies and different partnerships at, uh, 1, 800 contacts. I was there for eight years. Yeah, they really expect a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that's fair. And I think that's probably partly true. But honestly, I think we also just dropped the ball. And so that's one of those things in the agency world we talk about preventable losses and unpreventable losses. And this was a preventable loss, unfortunately. Anyways. But I guess the other thing I was going to ask you was. So you said you love Programmatic and you've done so many other different areas of digital marketing or value, Valpak, even offline marketing. So I have a phrase that I sometimes use with people which I say the three horsemen of the attribution apocalypse are branded keywords, coupon, affiliate sites and retargeting. So from the perspective of the programmatic world, I've always been skeptical of Programmatic because I know that retargeting works. But the question is, what about all those other billions of ad impressions that aren't retargeting? Do you have confidence that it actually drives value to customers because it feels like it's been the ugly stepchild of the industry for many years?

Speaker C: Yeah, we have hundreds of case studies of how it's helped clients with growth. And so I wouldn't be in this business if it wasn't actually helping people grow. I think it is. Did you say the three horsemen?

Speaker B: Yeah, three horsemen of the attribution apocalypse

Speaker C: and maybe explain that a little bit. Are you saying that those are the three key touch points for growth in your opinion?

Speaker B: No, the opposite. What I'm saying is that if you, that if this 10 years ago there weren't a lot of great measurement tools, but if you actually put it, if you actually bought an attribution tool, you would find that the three areas that you gave way too much credit for in your advertising was brand keywords, coupon, affiliates and retargeting.

Speaker C: Oh yeah, for sure. I totally agree with that. And the reason for that is there's. And if there. You're not the only one that's skeptical. Skeptical? Let's be honest, everybody's skeptical of Programmatic because it's hard to measure. Oftentimes it's a first touch point or a middle touch point. And in Google Analytics it's largely non existent because Google a lot of times sees the programmatic DSPs as competitors. And so I guarantee you they've built tech within Google Analytics to make Programmatic look terrible. And marketers, for the last 20 years, I think this year I've noticed more people saying Google Analytics probably is something that I shouldn't be going off of a hundred percent, which is encouraging. But for the last 20 years, marketers have said this is my bible. This is where I'm, um. And same with their CFOs. They've said, if it's not showing in Google Analytics, then I don't care about it. Which is really dangerous for growth because we have an example this year where we worked with a marketing mix modeling company and a B2B dental software company where when we actually put the data in the platform and we look at it, they were overspending way too much. On Google Branded, they were putting $120,000 or so into Google and 15 in programmatic. And then the CPA on Google was $1,500 when you look at all touch points. But for programmatic it was 15. So when they reallocated their spend and they said, okay, let's take even $20,000 away from paid search and put it into Programmatic and really go with what the data is telling us here, they had the best quarter they've ever had. And so I don't think, I think it's dangerous to use Google Analytics because it's really a conflict of interest. Google really did build a platform around itself to make itself look really good. And for 20 years it's been working and advertisers have just been putting more and more spend in there. And I think in the last year with cookies depreciating, I know cookies are not fully going away, but they're depreciating. And these identifiers that we use to track people are becoming less and less. And so I think marketers are like, I need to find another reporting platform to spot check against this Google data and make sure that my strategy is headed in the right direction for growth.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's the having Google, uh, manage your AdWords accounts or manage your analytics. Having, like having the IRS file your taxes for you.

Speaker C: Exactly, yeah. Uh, dangerous thing.

Speaker B: Dangerous. But I will say that, like, the beauty of Google, right, is that there is intent behind a search. Someone types in best Salt Lake City mortgage rates. And you happen to sell mortgages in Salt Lake City, you feel pretty confident that you're going to have conversion. The, the challenge with Programmatic is, I guess sometimes you have intent signals, but, uh, a lot of times it feels like you're just basing your ad based on demographics and psychographics. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the amount of data that's available today has expanded significantly since I was looking at Programmatic.

Speaker C: I think you're making a great point in the sense that you do need to have Google as part of your strategy, whether it's a solid, organic strategy or a solid, uh, paid strategy. You need to make sure that you're showing up well on your branded keywords from a paid perspective or an SEO perspective if you're running Programmatic. So I listened to your last podcast with John Morris, I believe his name was, and he talked about making sure that every agency has a solid icp. Right. And so for a programmatic agency, our ICP is somebody that already has a solid SEO strategy or, or they have a paid strategy that's working well for them. Because we don't recommend that you layer programmatic on unless those things are happening. Because let's say that I serve a bunch of TV ads, smart TV ads, on connected TVs. They're going, they need a place to go search for it like you're saying. And if you're not there, then that is going to go to a competitor. And so that's the number one question we ask, is do you have this strategy in place? And sometimes they don't have to do paid. If they've spent years and years really making sure that their SEO strategy is solid, they don't have to do paid anymore. And we've had really great use cases where we've layered Programmatic on with a solid SEO strategy. And we've seen really great growth for clients, but they at least need to make sure that they're showing up for their branded keywords.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. You're selling me a little bit on this programmatic stuff. So I give you credit for having a cogent explanation that probably didn't exist 15 years ago.

Speaker C: And it's come a long way also in the sense that like the Trade Desk, for example, is a demand side platform. They're the best of the best demand side platform there is. And we have a seat on the Trade Desk. They have now come out with a, uh, publisher's and sellers top 500 list where they've vetted the, uh, publishers that the content is running on. For example, the New York Times, the New York Post. Right. They have a list of the top 500 best converting sites with their new release of Coke that they're really focused on high quality inventory. Right. But I think there's issues with quality across Google and the Trade Desk and every single platform there is. But there's a lot of innovation happening with making sure that clients are on reputable sites.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay. So I guess one other question changing topics a little bit is you mentioned that you had worked at 1, 800 contacts for eight years. You worked at Rakuten, you Worked at a couple other companies that I'm not forgetting. But, uh, I guess what, first of all, what was your decision making process to start an agency? Why did you decide after being client side to start an agency? And then the second question is, what was the. What surprised you about the agency side?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think I'll go back to that John Morris podcast again. He talked about improving.

Speaker B: He's brilliant, John.

Speaker C: So, you know, good to know that podcast. And I understand why you brought him on twice. But it's the improving processes thing really spurred me to start my own thing because I've worked at places where the processes aren't clear or they're confusing. And maybe I've been the person that's training everybody on everything and there just hasn't been the best training processes or things could have been run more efficiently. And so I think, I mean, that's probably one of the main reasons people start their own things. They're like, I can do this better. I think it's an egotistical thing to say because once you get into it, you're like, oh my gosh, there's a lot going on here and there's a lot of processes to refresh and renew and keep fresh and. But that's ultimately why I decided to start my own agency is just that I was doing a really good job of being an intrapreneur and I was like, I feel like I can do this on my own.

Speaker B: And has it been, and has it been as expected or were there different bumps in the road? You didn't anticipate what has been, the, what's been different about what you expected when you started.

Speaker C: I think that you can always go into something thinking everything's blue skies. But I think it took a minute to just first of all get all the processes in place. I knew how important that was. And so for me, being a perfectionist, I was like, okay, I gotta make sure that I've got my T's crossed and my I's dotted before I really start going all in on this. And I feel like that's honestly what has set us up for success, is just making sure that we have all these processes in place so that when I have to delegate them to someone else, that they are usable. And then I can't do everything right. And I think a lot of agency owners are doing everything and that gets you to a really bad place, mentally bad place, physically, even spiritually, emotionally, all those things. And so I think I didn't anticipate how much work would be on me, from accounting to billing to HR to legal to all of those different things. I really did not anticipate that. And it's a lot to handle. But I think what's helped me is going back to the John Morris podcast again is making sure that we have, um, clear accountabilities for every single person, clear process processes for every single person, revisiting that stuff every month or quarter to say, did we set too hard of goals? And then if we did, maybe pushing back a little bit. But maybe we didn't set, uh, ambitious enough goals and then pushing them out further. And things that have helped me are just getting organized in that way with accountabilities and helping me even understand when to hire next, just based on where I'm maxed out the most.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting because I find that most agency founders. You described yourself as an intrapreneur when you were at your companies. I find most founders are entrepreneurial and very excited about the strategy and the innovation and the breaking things more so than they are about the process. And I find that professional services companies that don't have consistent process, number one is they're not as efficient, obviously. But the other thing is there's no consistency in terms of the results you get from one account manager to another. So has process been a key part of your sort of DNA, or did you maybe learn the hard way when starting the agency that you needed more process?

Speaker C: I think it's already been part of my DNA, but I think you don't really understand it till you live it as well. And so I was a very process oriented person before I was, when I first started it, I am now. But there's always another process you can do, right? There's always, you can always get better. For example, I had a really tough time with sales in the last year and I just could not figure out how to hold people accountable in the right way and what processes I needed from a sales perspective. And that's not even one of the things that I mentioned before. Right. I mentioned accounting, billing, hr, all those things. And then you also have to do sales. And so I ended up really going all in on making sure that my processes are very defined on sales this year. That's one of our main goals. This year. We actually hired a consultant on Sandler. I'm personally taking all the trainings and creating all the processes myself because I felt that it was a really big pitfall for us last year. So I think there's always room to evolve, even if you're an extremely perfectionist type person that has processes in place. And also the world is evolving. My technology changes every single day, so I have to create a new process for it every single day. So that's just who we have to be as entrepreneurs, is just adaptable and always changing and always growing and always making our processes better.

Speaker B: So that raises the uh, I guess obligatory question in this modern era, which is how is AI impacting? You said all the technology is changing. How is the AI impacting? Buying media, creating creative and then managing your team?

Speaker C: Yeah, I haven't noticed it really impact programmatic specifically a ton yet other than there's a lot more tools out there to build creative quicker. Facebook just came out with an article, I think it was like five days ago. And they said that they're basically going to take over the agency space and

Speaker B: they're Zuckerberg, specifically Zuckerberg.

Speaker C: And he basically said, I'm going to make it so that creative is going to be iterative and infinite.

Speaker B: Infinite or something?

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, infinite for each individual. And I'm just like, I'll believe it when I see it. I don't think it's coming tomorrow, but I do think that obviously the guy's very smart. I just rewatched the social network and I was just like, I don't, I wouldn't put it past the dude. But I also think, yes, as agencies, we're going to either have to use the tools that he builds or we're going to have to build tools to compete with that. And I found John Morris talking about whether you should innovate or not interesting because I'm just like, does anyone want to dare to innovate right now or is everything going to be obsolete in six months because technology is just moving so fast right now.

Speaker B: The good news, I guess you could say, is Google and Facebook don't share data with each other. And like you said, Google Analytics is designed to promote, uh, a certain narrative. And so there's a role for someone in the middle to just piece all this together. And especially if you combine it with first party data, maybe there's a moat there for agencies. It does feel like if all you're doing is creating creative and bidding, that doesn't seem like a long term strategy for agencies. But there's some other stuff in there that could be.

Speaker C: Oh, for sure. I think there's so much room for innovation in marketing right now. I think it's at that time when Google came out and built the search engines is what I feel. I feel like AI is in that realm where it's like we're completely in a new world of new startups going that are going to come out of this. And even with Google's antitrust issues with the UK recently, I think they're going to be more held accountable to a lot of different things which is going to open the market for other people to innovate.

Speaker B: What do you think is going to happen with AI and Google Search? I know this isn't your main, your core focus, but just curious to get your take on that. How like how does Google monetize AI?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's so interesting because I was at a panel discussion last week where there was another agency just like really analyzing how many no click searches are we having right now? How many AI searches are actually happening right now? They said it was only 1%. That was a month ago. I feel like it's probably higher now, let's be honest. And I think it's just how much of a percentage is it going to increase month after month? And none of us know right now, but because there's not that click element that Google Analytics has been so reliant on for 20 years. I just think it's interesting to say, is Google Analytics not even going to be able to track any of this? I've lived in that world for 10 years being in programmatic, no click based activity. Right. Somebody views a TV ad on a smart TV ad and unless somebody scans a QR code there's no attribution for it. And so I've already lived in that world. And so I feel like I would be able to help companies to say there's no qlik attributions now and the goal is to use a marketing mix modeling company at this point and just make sure that you're analyzing unique users as well as the inputs into your CRM as well as the qualified inputs into your CRM as well as impressions and clicks across every single platform that you're running on. And so I think that the days of just relying on Google Analytics Last click data are gone.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think you reminded me of what the founder of Media Math, which doesn't exist anymore, I don't think. But they said it was we're switching from Mad Men to Math Men. That's their expression.

Speaker C: Exactly. No, I love that. I think that's a great quote.

Speaker B: Yeah. I will say also that I have encountered through my history huge spenders who rely exclusively on last Click. And in one case there's a company that was probably spending 150 million a year. And I said why do you rely on last click? Because that's what finance relies on and we have finance does. Like really? That doesn't seem like a good argument for this. But that's what people do.

Speaker C: I think it's because CFOs feel comfortable in the platform and they have an answer. Right. If you think about mathematicians and analytical people, they want things to be very black and white. And so if they have a platform that's telling them black and white information, they just assume that it's right. But it's also a very dangerous thing, especially right now when there's a lot of no click attributions and I see a lot of attribution platforms out here like triple Whale and Hieros and there's a million attribution platforms that I think even HubSpot, they only track click based activity and at least it's not last click. Right? Google Analytics tracks last click but these other platforms only track click and view based data is a large part of the advertising journey. Especially now that a lot of people are watching ads on smart TVs. That represents a lot of marketing inventory and that is not a click based activity.

Speaker B: It's funny because I had this theory that I haven't revealed to anyone. So everyone on this podcast is hearing it for the first time. But my theory was there used to be something called paid inclusion back 25 years ago which was where you would pay money to have your listing show up in the organic results. So you could have lists of 10 organic results and two of them were paid and they might say in small print paid. But I'm thinking that maybe what Google's going to end up doing is like when there's a search and it's got an AI answer, a uh, no click answer. Google is going to make the allow for advertisers to be basically pay for the footnotes. So in essence say if you pay us money we will show you in the, as a, as ah, the footnote in the organ in the AI result that we show up. So it's just a way of pushing back the pushing, pushing into a click based economy. Even though this is like currently like you said, no click industry.

Speaker C: I don't know but that's not traditional AI doing that. But I could see there being paid AI listings. But I think AI right now is very organic. It's very much I'm perusing the Internet and I'm giving you the best answer versus the biased answer which is this is the paid answer.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Maybe it will be with the paid results, it will be 95% as good as without the results. But it's a way for Google to monetize and they figure, hey, this is better than what anyone else has.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the monetization of AI will be very interesting and I think we're living in a very transparent world in the meantime.

Speaker B: Yeah, the glory. It's the cloud of the glory days where you can use a lot of AI tools for free and the results aren't biased. And ah, of course, we all know that capitalism will always drive outcomes that are maybe suboptimal to the consumer, but optimal to the companies that want to make a lot of money.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: My cynical approach. What's. So what advice would you give to someone who's thinking about starting an agency now? Especially a lot of people are. I think a lot of agency founders are like you and me. They work on the client side, they jump into the agency world. You know, what, what's. There's someone who's had the same experience you've had, 10 years experience, client side, maybe thinking about starting an agency. What would you say to them?

Speaker C: I would say, listen to podcasts like this and read the book Grit. Make sure you have a lot of grit.

Speaker B: I've got a Grit T shirt on. People can't see it.

Speaker A: No way.

Speaker B: It's another. It's not about the book, but it does, uh, I do have a shirt that says grid on it right now.

Speaker C: Every agency owner should have a shirt that says grid on it. You have to have grit. You have to make sure that you're going in understanding it's going to be a lot of work. Because I think a lot of, even entrepreneurs in general think, oh my gosh, I'm going to own my own company. I'm going to have so much time, freedom, and I'm going to hire all these people to do the jobs for me and it's going to be wonderful. And, and it's, it doesn't end up being like that. It's tough. And the owner, everything falls back on the owner. At the end of the day, if a client's upset and it needs to be escalated, it comes to us. If there's a billing issue, an HR issue, a legal issue, a sales issue, and if your sales team isn't, you know, selling, that comes back on the owner. And so I can't tell you in the five years since I've owned this company when I've gone on a vacation and actually taken the entire vacation and not Worked. It's very much like a, uh. Maybe it's more flexible on some days, but also it's hard to take a vacation because you just never know what's going to go on in the agency world. I feel like ad spends have shifted so much over the last 10 years. I felt November and December used to be these huge times, and it's gotten.

Speaker B: Now it's like September is the start of the Q4 season.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And moved to other months. And the economy and the political climate and everything just has been so different. And that affects budgets, it affects marketing, it affects owning agencies. And you have to be somebody that is very versatile, that has a very thick skin, and that can handle adversity as well as challenge, as well as. Obviously, there's a lot of good times, right? And you have to focus on the good times and celebrate the good times, but you also have to have a brave face when things might not be going great.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: It was a long answer, but m.

Speaker B: No, uh, you're right. My wife used to joke that half the time I'd come home and I'd be like, this is great. We closed this great client. We're gonna rock. We're gonna have a great quarter. And then the next day, I'd come home, we lost this client. I want to quit. I want to sell the company. It's like, it's hard not to take everything personally because in a way, you have to because it's your business. But it does create highs and lows, downs.

Speaker C: There's a lot of. It's a lot of a roller coaster. But one thing that I've loved about the Sandler sales training is that they are really good about, like, head trash. And as an agency owner, you need to make sure that you're getting rid of your head trash every day. And I looked up on chat GPT, I said, how do I get rid of head trash?

Speaker B: What is head trash? I never heard that. Just bad thoughts or what is it?

Speaker C: Yeah, so it's like what you said where you maybe lost a client and you were like, oh, I'm going to sell this tomorrow. Like, I'm just going to give up. Uh, or it's starting the day with this attitude of, okay, I've had five really bad sales calls, and my day is going to be like that. That's trash, right? You got to get that out of your head. And you got to focus on. You have to have a positive mental attitude if you're going into your day for your employees and for your clients and for Your sales, your potential sales that you might make that day. And the likelihood of going in with a positive mental attitude and being successful is way higher than if you go in with head trash. And so chatgpt said, if you want to get rid of head trash every day, then you should meditate and you should. So I've personally been meditating for. I think I'm on 120 day streak right now.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: Congratulations and thank you. I have, I've maybe had a five day streak before this. So I'm like, I don't know what it is, but it's really been helping me not wake up with anxiety. Right. Because I think as a business owner, any business, any, any um, entrepreneurial journey, it doesn't have to be agency owner. But I was getting in this habit of waking up with just a lot of anxiety and just being like, what does the day have for me today? Because being an agency owner is so complex and you really don't know what the day is going to have for you each day.

Speaker B: How many minutes a day do you meditate?

Speaker C: So I've been doing 40 minutes a day. I've been doing 20 minutes, 20 minute each and just finding different. So I really love Oprah and Deepak meditations. They're great. But I've also just found like a lot of I am affirmations as well as just like ones that are really positive, focused on, let's for 20 minutes maybe focus on a goal that you have for yourself and really visualizing it in a positive way. And my anxiety has gone down dramatically even just since I've implemented the manifestation aspect. And so I do believe that I think the agency owners need to get rid of the head trash because it can consume you. I've been in periods where I've just felt so sick to my stomach and it's. I would say for people who want to start an agency, just, just be prepared for days like that. Right? There's going to be good days, but not every day is easy. You have to be very resilient.

Speaker B: I never heard the term head trash, but I'm going to use that and I'm. You've inspired me to get back into the meditation. I will say there's a cool app that I've been playing around with called Luminate, which is flickering light therapy, which is like a form of. It's a weird form of meditation where they use your phone's flashlight to flicker light into your eyes and it creates a relaxing. Pretty, pretty trippy.

Speaker C: I love that. I also recently did a float spa for the.

Speaker B: Oh yeah.

Speaker C: Have you ever tried that?

Speaker B: I did, yeah. It's weird.

Speaker C: I was very tripped out by it, but honestly, I felt like I have not been that relaxed ever in my life. Like I just the way that it takes the weight off of you.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Is amazing. There's no way to even explain it.

Speaker B: Yeah. There's so many interesting modalities that are coming out these days. Sounds like we have a separate podcast that we can record around how to relax, meditation, light therapy. We did saunas.

Speaker C: There's a bunch of stuff I do infrared sauna as well. And I think agency owners need to take care of their mental health. And I think that is something I would tell a new agency owner is make sure that you are taking care of your mental health because it can take a toll on you.

Speaker B: For sure. It is a. It's. As a leader in general, you have to accept blame and delegate credit and can be a challenge.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Jessica, this is great. Thank you so much for your time. I'm glad we went off a tangent at the end, which I think was really cool. But congrats on the success of the business and I really appreciate you coming on today.

Speaker C: Thank you. And thank you for having me. It's been a lovely conversation.

Speaker B: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for listening to the Agentix Shift podcast. Agentix Shift is hosted, produced, edited and

Speaker A: photoshopped like David Rutinsky.

Speaker B: If you need help growing or selling

Speaker A: marketing agency, contact us at hello@davidreckenick.uh com.

Speaker B: Sam.