#574: Jason Swenk: Own Your Business Before It Owns You!

Speaker A: You could be a $10 million agency and be completely miserable and unprofitable and working all the time like that doesn't sound right. I mean, it looks good on paper, but I rather be a million dollar agency working 20 hours a week. That I really enjoy life.

Speaker B: That is Jason Swank. And if his thoughts stung a little, well, I feel you because I've been there too, running my own agency now, you built your firm because you wanted to own your life. And you poured everything into building something real. But somewhere along the way, the business started owning you instead. Today, Jason is handing you the five stage roadmap he uses for agencies he guides to flip that equation for good. Hello, and welcome to the business of Story. I'm Park Howell. Now, Jason built a solid digital agency that served at and T hit Hitachi and LegalZoom pretty big clients, right? But today, today he is the founder of Agency Mastery, host of the Smart Agency Masterclass podcast, and author of Operator to Owner. He advises seven and eight figure agency founders on building businesses that scale without them. You'll learn the five identity stages every founder must move through, why chasing revenue quietly kills your freedom, and how to build a business that finally runs without you. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get after it. Okay, here's something that'll hit close to home. If you're running your own agency, or maybe you've got a small to medium sized business, or perhaps you're running a team inside a large enterprise. Now, I want you to think about this. You've built marketing ops, right? And sales ops, maybe even revenue ops. And these all govern the infrastructure for every critical function in your business. But here's the deal. Nobody, and I mean nobody, owns the story. So right now, your CMO is telling one version of your brand truth. Your head of sales is telling another, your delivery team a third. And every AI tool you're feeding content into is scaling all of those conflicting versions simultaneously at speed, at velocity. We call this brand narrative entropy. That's right, entropy. And it's quietly corroding every system you've worked so hard to build. That's why your business is owning you instead of you owning it. Now here's the thing. This isn't happening just inside your agency. It's happening inside every single one of your clients organizations too. Which means story ops. This is a term that we defined here at the Story Cycle Genie called story ops. Operationalizing your brand story across every department, every team, every internal and external channel so you have coherent, consistent brand storytelling across the board, nobody's doing it. And this is a tremendous opportunity for you to do it right now in your own business and for your customers. StoryOps installs one brand brain, one source of narrative truth that threads coherently through every everything your agency and your clients do. Faster work, healthier margins, and the kind of storytelling consistency that makes your clients say, hell, yeah. This is why I'm so pumped about our story cycle Genie. Because it is the world's first StoryOps platform. And the first step you can take right now is to find out exactly where your brand story is holding and where it's already falling apart, where you are suffering from brand narrative entropy. The brand story grader is absolutely free. It takes a minute and it gives you a precise picture of where your ops infrastructure is currently running blind without your brand story. Check it out. It'll give you a 14 point assessment. It'll give you a grade. It'll validate what you're doing well, reveal gaps, and inspire you with new ways to think about your brand story. To get your StoryOps methodology underway right now, check it out over at StoryCycleGenie. AI now let's get to Jason, and let's get you in control of your agency versus it owning you.

Speaker C: Hello, Jason. Welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hey, thanks for having me. Park.

Speaker C: Yeah, nice having you here. You are just down the road from me, down I40. Um, out in beautiful Colorado.

Speaker A: Yeah. In Durango, so not too far. Similar topography, too.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's your elevation there?

Speaker A: We're at 8,000.

Speaker C: Is the town itself at 8,000?

Speaker A: Uh, the town's at 6,500.

Speaker C: Okay. Yeah. And that's where we're at 6,600. But you must be up in the mountains then. A little bit.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're away from people.

Speaker C: I was watching one, uh, of your podcasts the other day, and you were up on a mountain with a buddy, and you got up there. Um, I think you call this, what, your Fridays?

Speaker A: Epic Fridays?

Speaker C: Your epic Fridays, where you don't work, you just go and do something epically.

Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. It really started off as, like, a test. Be like, did I really own this business or does the business own me? Like, can we go take Fridays off? And then a buddy and I, we were like, let's go do something epic. Like, let's go climb a big mountain or jump off a cliff or, you know, go mountain bike down 13,000ft or whatever it is. Like, do, like, bucket list items. Uh, just because, you know, too many people just work their whole life and Then when they get to a point where they can actually enjoy it, they're not able to. And so that's. We wanted to hit this thing early.

Speaker C: Well, I thought it was pretty cool. I thought it was a fun place to have a. An interview. And the fact that you admitted you didn't go all the way to the top because it was a little bit questionable. Questionable in one area. And you both said you wanted to live to hike another day, which is very smart.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, yeah, you know, sometimes, uh, you can't reach the mountain that particular time, but maybe in a month or two, we'll be able to go back and reach that peak. Yeah.

Speaker C: Ah. And have you. In another show I watched, you said that you really got your work week truncated down to working Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Monday. You keep open for yourself now. Thank you. And we'll sometimes take, you know, an important meeting that doesn't fit somewhere else, but pretty much leaving Monday up for yourself, and then Friday, of course, for your epic Fridays.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it took me a while to figure that out. And I think everybody's different, right? Um, and I related back to a story I heard about Charles Barkley when he got to the NBA, and he was kind of fat. He wasn't playing. And he went to one of his teammates and was like, hey, you know, I'm not playing. He's like, well. Cause you're fat and lazy.

Speaker C: Was that Moses Malone?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker C: Is that who he went to?

Speaker A: And he went to him, he said, why don't you go lose 10 pounds and then come back and see me? And so Charles would play a little bit better. And so he's like, okay, cool, lose another 10 pounds. And he did it, like five times. So he lost 50 pounds and played really well. Did it one more time, lost too much weight, didn't play as well. It was like, okay, you found your. Your fighting weight. And so that's kind of how I look at, ah, my week is. What is my fighting weight for my week. Because if I work more or have more meetings, you know, outside those times, I'm overwhelmed and I'm burned out. But if I work less, then I am kind, um, of bored. And so that, you know, working Tuesdays through Thursdays to having meetings now, my mind for business is always on. Right. That's the curse of being an entrepreneur. Um, sometimes I look at my friends that if they're in the airlines or whatever, they shut off the plane, they're checked out.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know that feeling. I ran my agency for 20 years up to 2016. And then really, um, pivoted over to the business of story, which, you know, building tirelessly. Um, that's a funny word, tirelessly, because it's exhausting. And went through Covid and all that. And then we built our home up here in Northern Arizona. And the first year, it was still crazy. Burning the midnight oil, just with the move. Making my starlink work, doing my virtual training, still building the business and that. I had an aha moment that first summer when I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna see if I can actually not work on Monday mornings and just have a, you know, just kind of get my feet underneath me, do some work Monday afternoon, then work hard Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And I don't know if you saw this, Jason, but coming out of COVID it seems like people started just not really showing up, you know, until Monday afternoon. And really weren't around at all on Friday for anything. And so I took that lead. And then Friday would come around, I would work a little bit in the morning and take the afternoon off to play golf and hike and do whatever, and it's worked pretty well. Although it's really hard to make that shift. How did you do it?

Speaker A: Well, it just got over time. I mean, everything I say, kind of everything big, like, uh, big shifts take little movements over time. So I think I maybe started with half a Friday off and then a full Friday or then maybe half a Monday and then a full Monday. Right. And just trying different things, but also being like, creating that as a rule. Like a rule like gravity, and you don't break it. Um, I think too many people set out a goal and then they go. They don't follow the rules, or their goals are set based on revenue rather than set on time. And I think that was the major shift for me, because if you set a goal on revenue, you'll break your time goal every time. And those rules. But if you set a goal based on, I, uh, only want to work Tuesdays through Thursdays, if that's your sweet spot, then you won't break it.

Speaker C: Yeah. So today we are going to explore this idea that you've written a lot about. And you direct your agencies who are in the Agency Mastery 360 program about the five stage evolution of every founder, that every founder finds himself or herself somewhere in that business. And I think for all you listeners out there, you don't have to be just an ad agency to take this advice. If you're a founder, you've built something great. Um, and as Jason says, it owns you versus you owning it. He's going to reveal what he has learned and what he teaches others about these steps. So where do we start? Step one or how did you first come up with this whole evolution theory?

Speaker A: Well, I had to look back at my career of how I started in the 90s designing websites and kind of falling into being a, A, uh, business owner with, with a team. Right. You know, I've always had side jobs kind of like you, like mowing yards or working on a bait boat or fishing boat and all those kind of things. You know, growing up selling golf balls back to golfers that can't fall, you know, find their balls because they should quit golf, right? Like, so I've always done those things, but I never really had a true business, right. Like something I had to declare on my taxes until, till this point. And I just started thinking about all the different identities that I went through, because that's what they are. And this even applies to people that just work for a business as you want to progress because every one of us wants to evolve to something better, to something more, right? So we have that significance and that growth and the contribution, uh, and all of that. And so I think back at, ah, when I started the business, I was an accidental agency owner. I knew how to do something cool. Someone offered me money and I was off to the races.

Speaker C: Well, let's talk about that for just a second, because you're not just a web designer. There are a lot of web designers. That's a commodity. Tell our audience about that first website you designed and why and how that launched you into becoming an accidental agency owner.

Speaker A: So I owe all my success to Justin Timberlake, But I don't know Justin Timberlake. One of my best friends look like Justin and so we would get into bars and everyone always would think he was Justin. So I was like, let me take this up a notch and I'm going to create a fake band, fake website called In Shit, making fun of NSync, but have him, um, as the feature. And then my three other friends and myself. And so it was In Shit and it got popular. It was on like a geocity website address, if people remember those. And people just started sharing it. And then people started asking me to design websites. And so I started off selling $500 websites to like, real estate agents, lawyers, boat marinas, you name it, I was off to the races.

Speaker C: So. And then how did your agency grow from there?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I had it for 12 years. Um, we grew it to over eight figures at over 100 people. Um, and then we were able. Fortunate enough to sell it. And then once I sold it, uh, I was kind of depressed because my whole identity was being the owner of the agency. Um, and so then I was lucky enough that my old competitors reached out and were like, how'd you beat us for LegalZoom or Hitachi or AT&T or some of these brands that we worked with? And we're like, oh, I did this. They're like, oh, that's cool. And I just started helping them out for free. And my wife's like, that should be your new career, because you're miserable right now. Like, you're just bored. And I was like, okay, let's go do that.

Speaker C: All right. So I want to still go back just a step. So you are this accidental agency owner, and you grew from this funny, fun website into this really quite large and impressive agency over the course of 12 years. Um, how did you do it if you didn't really have that clear focus of what you were doing? Maybe you did, but it sounded like it was, like, one accident into the next, into the next. You were good at what you did. So can you take us on that journey just a little, or. It's really more of an odyssey, I would say.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, just, um. This is how little I knew. Okay. My first client asked me to send him an invoice. I didn't know what an invoice was.

Speaker C: What.

Speaker A: And there was no Google.

Speaker C: Uh-huh.

Speaker A: Right. So, like, I just had to figure it out. But, you know, the thing was, is when I started, I had ignorance on my side. I had resourcefulness, creativeness. Like, I, uh, had all these things. I didn't. And I didn't have anything to protect, so it made me a very dangerous person. Right. And so I wasn't afraid of failing, because just, like, climbing that mountain, I was like, all right, well, if I climb up there, I can die, so let's kind of make a better decision. We'll come back. Um, and I was. You know, we would take risks and all that kind of stuff. So. But kind of this. The story, since you're into stories, is really. I didn't have anything else. I couldn't go work for anybody. I've been fired from every single job I've ever had. I wasn't a quitter. I had to have people fire me. I think you probably can probably relate on that. So there was really, like. I burned all my boats. All I could do is take the island. Uh, for that. So it made me a dangerous person for building the business. Now, it took me a while, right? So for many years, I was the operator, where I was doing everything and anything. So I was doing the sales, I was doing the operations, I was doing the creative, I was doing the development. Like, I was it. And I created the business because I wanted more freedom, but it was actually the opposite. It actually owned me. And so I got to a point, right? Like, I was like, man, I can't operate this thing anymore by myself. I need to hire people in order to do the sales, to do the marketing, to do the design, to do the development. So I started hiring people. And so right before I started hiring people, I was working like, 80 hours a week, and I was just burning the midnight oil. I was stressed. Uh, I didn't enjoy it, right, Because I was working so much. So I was like, I'm going to hire people, so I'm going to evolve to stage two of the manager. So what? Now? I was working 100 hours a week doing my job, managing people and doing their job, which doesn't sound much like, why would I hire people, Right?

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: And you're kind of like, well, let me just go back to the 80 hours a week. Then I have to manage anybody. But what I realized was, in each of these stages that I'll go through with you, you have to go through all of them. There's no cheat code. Um, in order to evolve to a manager, you have to hire people. But the secret was, if I could go back and tell myself, I had to have clarity of where I was actually going. I didn't know where I wanted to take the agency. I didn't know who I wanted my clients to be. I didn't know what services we should actually do. Like, I was doing anything and everything that was coming to me. And then the other idea that I had in my head later on, I'm a really shitty manager. I'm still a shitty manager. And I think all of you listening that went through this, you're shitty managers as well. Uh, meaning it doesn't mean you don't hire people. You have to hire people that can manage themselves.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know that feeling. Because when I would bring in people to my agency, at first it's like, okay, it's great. We've got some extra bulk in here, some muscle in here to help me through it. And then I'd wake up m and go, oh, God. Now I got to spend a bunch of time thinking about, how do I manage this person? And make sure they're productive and whatever. And just like you said, you tend to go, uh, I'll just do it myself. And then they kind of flail around over there going like, dude, what do you want me to do? You know, Throw me a bone here.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it's just. And it's a cycle too, right? So, like, when you get to the manager stage, you're managing people, there's like this boomerang effect at every evolution that you go through on these identity shifts that we go through. And the boomerang kind of pulls you back. Right? So at that stage, I'm like, dude, it was just more fun to do it by myself. I didn't have to worry about these idiots working for me. And really, they weren't idiots. It was just I wasn't the right manager for them or I didn't give them direction.

Speaker C: We become the idiots.

Speaker A: I'm the idiot. Yeah, exactly. Right.

Speaker C: Like, uh.

Speaker A: I look back, there was a lot of people I got rid of or that quit because I was just not at the right place for. For being a leader. That I was like, man, that. That was a mistake. Like, I remember this one guy, Scott, that I hired as a salesperson. Great. Like, he was. He was everything we needed, but I just wasn't at that level at that time for him.

Speaker C: Yeah. So what's the next stake, then?

Speaker A: Uh, so the next one is architect. This is where you really start designing systems and a process for your team to be able to make decisions without you. So when you're the manager, all the decisions are coming through you. You're the bottleneck, and it gets overwhelming. And that's where you're working 100 hours a week and your team starts looking at you doing their job. So they're like, oh, I'm just waiting for Jason to go do it. But you're paying them and you're managing them badly, but. Right. And so the architect starts designing systems. So, like, one system would be like this. Um. When an employee would come to me with a problem, I would implement a, uh, 1, 3. 1. What's the problem? What are the three possible things you're thinking about doing and what's the one thing you recommend for us to do? You do that enough, they're going to be like, jason's using that Jedi mind shit on me. I need to go make my own decision. Like, this is what he's going to tell me. He's going to do that one. Three, one. So then they'll start doing their decision or a System could be as if you're going to hire a salesperson rather than saying, just go out and sell what you can. Like that's no sales system. And they're going to probably struggle. Be like, look, I want you to go after agency owners from this revenue, this revenue. You're not going to sell everything that we do. I want you to position and get meetings for a clarity call. This is a free 30 minute call. Right. And so they would shadow me on that call and then I would shadow them. Then they send the recording. Then once they pass that, then I'll move them to what are called our agency blueprint call.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: It's a paid call. Boom, boom, boom, do the same thing. So that's a system so they can follow it. Right. And then I'm also too, I'm giving them outcomes that I want, not tasks. So a manager is saying, go do this task or these tasks, follow this to the T. But that's how you did it. And their minds don't work like ours. I hope not. Right.

Speaker C: Uh, right.

Speaker A: So like if you can just say, you know, and same thing with AI right now, like a lot of people are going to AI going, here's a task versus try this, give it an outcome and see what it comes back with.

Speaker C: Yeah. So then what follows after architect CEO?

Speaker A: So even though a lot of people have this title, they're not the CEO. Uh, so what a CEO is, is building the leadership team. Right. So like I look at it in like five or six roles. You're setting the vision to the team and you're communicating it to the team often so they can make decisions. You're coaching and mentoring your leadership team or your architects.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: So they can build the systems for people to make decisions and follow and that kind of stuff. And you're only coaching them, you're not coaching the whole team. Right. There's a lot of times agency owners will come to me and be like, I have 10 to 20 people. Which is no man's land if you're in that space. Right. 10 to 20 people, you're that manager, you're not an architect. Right. And you'd be like, I could never get 50 people or more people because then, um, it's just I have no, there's only 24 hours in a day and I'm only sleeping one. But like, and when I sold my agency, I was only at the CEO level and not all the levels you have. You don't have to go through all of them if you only want to make it to the architect. My goal is to get everybody out of operator and manager, if you like the architect. Like, in my business now, I'm constantly back and forth between CEO and architect. And I like that. I like building those operating systems and AI and that kind of stuff. I enjoy that. Um, but I'm also not building something to sell anymore. I've already done that. Um, so the other roles on the CEO is, um, um, being the face of the organization, allocating capital and steering the ship. Where is the ship actually going? And then understanding the key financials. And so when you get to the CEO stage, you're working like 20 hours a week, and that's where it really hits you in the mind, and you start screwing up stuff. So, like, I would go to a marketing meeting and they'd be like, nah, Jay, I'm good. I'd go to a creative meeting. Nah, uh, we're good. I go on like, fuck, the agency doesn't need me anymore. And then I would actually start self sabotaging the agency where it would need me and throwing in wrenches where wrenches don't need to be. So I felt needed, but then I had to, and I was depressed. And everyone will go through that and everyone listening. That's not at that level yet. You'll be like, oh, I will not be depressed. Yes, you will. It just matters on how long you'll stay there. Um, because you've built your whole career doing all the work, and you think you need to be the hardest worker and the work all around the clock. And that's not true. The business doesn't need you for that anymore. Yeah.

Speaker C: So I've got operator, manager, architect, CEO. Which one did I miss?

Speaker A: Owner is the last one.

Speaker C: The last one. Okay.

Speaker A: Uh, owner's the last one. So this is where you're basically on a board of advisors. Maybe you're the chairman. Right. The business can operate without you. You're not needed, but you have to be accessible. So maybe they have an issue that they want to bring up to you, like your CEO. All right, perfect. But it really doesn't need you. Uh, one of the examples I use in the Operator to Owner book is Tony Robbins. He has a thousand companies. You can only be an owner of several companies. You cannot be a CEO of a bunch of companies. I've only seen it done well once. Elon Musk. I don't think he's human.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Um, how do you do that? Like Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX like crazy.

Speaker C: So say, okay, you're an agency owner. Right now, or an owner of any company at this point, because it can really relate to every possible industry. And, you know, you're that operator, you're that individual, then you're working your ass off. You founded it, We've all been there as founders. And then you hire a few people and you're managing them and you're kind of learning by the seat of your pants, unless you've got a coach there that's coaching you all the way along, which I think most don't at that level, and then moving up to architects. So my question for you, Jason, is what do you recommend people who find themselves in operator, manager, and maybe moving into architect realm, um, do to teach themselves, to guide themselves how to do this?

Speaker A: Well, the thing is, is the first part is understanding which stage that your identity is at. Because a lot of times people think they're at, they'll be like, oh, well, my title, CEO, I'm at that stage. And then they implement strategies that are for that stage, but they're not at it, so it's irrelevant. It doesn't do it. Um, you know, we do have an assessment that you can do to really kind of truly figure that out. If you go to operator to ownerevolution.com, there's an assessment on there, it's free. You can check that out. Um, but know where you're at. So if you're at the operator stage or a manager stage, the biggest thing that you can do is build the business around you and figure out this one exercise I say in the book is get a sheet of paper out 8 and a half by 11, take your fist, put it on it, draw a circle around it just for the size of the circle, right? Just give you that visual storytelling.

Speaker C: There you go.

Speaker A: Then for 30 minutes, spend all your time figuring out all the stuff you don't ever want to do again that you don't like that you're not good at. Write that outside the circle. Okay, so that could. That for me, that was project management, account management, sales, pretty much everything in agency. All right, So I wrote all that stuff down, and then after the 30 minutes, figure out what are the things that give you energy? Uh, what are those? Like, I like coaching people, right? Like, I like, um, working on big ideas. Whatever it is, it's going to be a lot smaller list. It won't take you as long because you just did the process of elimination. Then what you need to know, that's kind of why I brought up we're all crappy managers, is you need to figure out who do you need to hire based on your weakness and all the things that you don't ever want to do, and make sure that they can manage themselves and then just give them a direction where they're going. Like, one of the examples that I use in the operator owner book is, um, let's say you're sailing from New York to London over the Atlantic, and you're driving the boat. You, after about 10 hours, you're tired, and you tell your team, which you haven't told them where you're going. Problem. If the boat changes course, come get me. I gotta go take a nap. Oh, they're waking you up every second. If you just told them we're going to London, that is 2,40. That way, if it goes to 2,42, turn it back to 2,4,0. It's just very simple stuff that we skip that we don't do.

Speaker C: How often did you find yourself in that role of just assuming your people knew what you were thinking and where you were headed?

Speaker A: All the time? Right. We have a thousand things in our head going on at any moment. Uh, like, we're thinking of four steps ahead versus sometimes just going back to the basics. Like, you know, in our mastermind, we have some really big agencies, but they forgot the basics a lot of times. And you could just. Like I played college or college, um, tennis, and I remember I was playing, um, a match, losing to a guy that there should be no way he should have been on the court with me. I was losing to him, and my coach was like, just go back to the basics. Just watch the ball. Take your racket back early. Watch the ball. That's it. Don't worry, like, uh, how. How you're slicing it or topspin. Take your racket back, watch the ball. That's it. It's very simple.

Speaker C: The basic blocking and tackling of tennis or running an ad agency. I do that on the golf course. I love golf. I'm not terrific at it by any.

Speaker A: Did I sell you a bunch of golf balls when I was younger?

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Well, probably. And you probably said, dude, you got to give this sport up. But here, five bucks for a sleeve of balls. Um, but it's the same thing. I started losing. I'm all over the place. Start off strong, and then start blowing up in the middle. Then, oh, Jesus. Just go back to the basics. Slow everything down, shorten everything up, and just relax a little bit. But, yeah, you're in the fog of war. When you're running an agency or any company for that matter. And you can lose the sight of basics. You can lose sight of shore very, very quickly. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I found sometimes too, you know, and this helps me too, running the Mastermind. A lot of times or most of the time, I will give advice to a member on something and then I'll think to my head and be like, am I still doing that? And then I'll call my team up and like, hey, you remember that Frank the Tank moment idea that I told Member X? Like, hey, we're not doing that anymore. We need to start doing that again.

Speaker C: You sound like my father used to sound, do as I say, not as I do. Exactly.

Speaker A: We're always chasing the new thing and that. And that's an issue. Right.

Speaker C: Um, uh, how long have you been running Agency Mastery? And how many agencies do you have as a part of your community?

Speaker A: I've been doing it since 2014 when I started the podcast. And we've helped thousands of members over the years. Um, really kind of transitioned from whatever identity that they're at to where they need to be because the evolution of these identities I just described are not based on revenue. And that's what everybody's chasing. Uh, but you could be a $10 million agency and be completely miserable and unprofitable and working all the time. That doesn't sound right. I mean, it looks good on paper, but I rather be a million dollar agency working 20 hours a week. That I really enjoy life. Right. Like that's personally me. Um, versus just getting the accolades of, oh, I have thousands of employees and that kind of stuff.

Speaker C: Yeah. What do you see happening and what do you tell your agencies? With, of course, the advent of artificial intelligence, which seems like it's identity theft on, um, so many levels. Writers feel like, I'm a writer, damn it. No bot can outright me and you know, a designer. I'm a designer, damn it. And you know, even the strategists, uh, they, they feel like they fear their identity being stolen by AI. Where I don't feel like that that's happening. How do you approach that?

Speaker A: I look at it as evolution and the think back. So when I was a young punk kid, when I was 22, when I started the agency in 99, traditionally there was always traditional agencies and regular admin. Admin. Right. But there was never a digital strategist or a webmaster. Yes. Webmasters or web developer. Web designer.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, there was graphic designers, there was a printing press, all that kind of stuff. And so a lot of those traditional agencies that are not around anymore when the digital marketing started really happening, the Internet didn't kill them, hesitation did. And they had something to protect. That goes back to what I was saying in the very beginning. I had nothing to protect. I had nothing. So I was excited about it. And about 20% of the people are really excited about AI that own agencies. Other 80% are scared of it, but. And literally I said this on top of a mountain with my buddy maybe six months ago. I was like. Because I started seeing what you could do. Like, I've built so many websites for agency mastery from our events that we do with agency experience or whatever it is. Uh, even the book website was built by AI in like 10 minutes. These are sites I would have built for 40,000 or more, but there had to still be a director. And when I started really kind of looking at the shift, the evolution. Yeah, if you keep doing the things that you keep doing, you're done without a question. But AI won't kill you. The hesitation will. And so when I started kind of diving deep into AI and building my, like, really understanding it and really kind of creating an operating system around it and using it, then I'm like, wow, like I shifted from the 80% to the 20% of really excited. The roles are changing and you have to evolve your role. Roles that we've never even thought about are going to be here. But if you're just a web design agency designing websites. Yeah, if you don't evolve, goodbye, you're toast. But there always will need to be someone in the middle. That's what agencies are, if you think about it, they're middlemen. Someone needed to sell ads. So we went to an ad agency, um, the newspaper went to an ad agency to find the people. Same thing as car dealers. Between manufacturers there's middlemen. Right, which, who knows if that goes away with Tesla. But yeah, that's the whole point is evolution. You have to keep constantly getting better and better and thinking about switching. And if you don't, I'm sorry, you're replaceable.

Speaker C: Well understand how the tool works. And artificial intelligence is really nothing but a tool. It's a very amazing one. And when I get people, it's usually writers that I hear from that are whining about AI and I'm never ever going to touch AI. It's robbing us of our soul and all this bullshit. What about Photoshop? You know, I mean, Photoshop made excellent photographers out of most of us, providing you can show up and you have an eye to frame an image and you capture it. The whole F8 and be there concept. And then you might get it back home. And maybe it's a little bit overexposed, underexposed. Maybe it's just a little bit out of focus. Uh, maybe the cropping isn't quite right. What do you do? You go into Photoshop and you manually clean it up, and then you've got a beautiful picture. That's just a given. Well, now you can go to ChatGPT, give it that picture. I've just been doing it as I've been going through photos of my parents. And I said, okay, this one's really out of focus. Clean it up. Give it a 1950s 35 millimeter, um, effect to it and a little bit of depth of field and it does it and it comes back. It's like, that is freaking awesome. But it couldn't do it on its own. It needed me. It needed my picture, it needed my instruction. But I could never have cleaned up that photo as well in Photoshop. So what's the difference, you know?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you need a director. I mean, shoot. I mean, go back. I remember taking pictures with the disposable or a regular camera, and then you have to drop the film off. You never knew how good the shot was.

Speaker C: Exactly. I went through a 120kodak carousels of my father's 35 millimeter slides that started in 1951 and pretty much ended around when he got Alzheimer's in 2000. What was it, 15. And he has them all categorized. He did all the heavy lifting, but I went through it. And maybe 5% of those photos are worth keeping because they're out of focus or weird. But in other cases, he had some really amazing shots that were just a little bit out of focus. Put them into AI, clean them up, and now we've got these memories that I could never have done on my own.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I mean, since. Since the dawn of time. People with better technology will win. That's all this is.

Speaker C: It's beautiful.

Speaker A: It's just. It just, you know, from the Ice Age to the Stone Age to Bronze Age to now, like, it's just use technology. And here's the. I think here's really the. There's two unlocks to AI, and I've already kind of said one is tell AI the outcome that you want. The other part, where most owners or the founders are developing their little AI agents and their little team and they're experimenting with AI, that's all great. And then your. I basically look at it this way. You are going fishing and you keep giving fish to your team, they're never going to learn. They're just going to eat the fish. Kind of the manager route.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: Like, I'll just do your job. But if you teach them how to create the AI agent, that's the real unlock. Right. And to show them they are not going to be replaced, this is. Will enhance your job. And the biggest thing where to start off with all of this, you have to figure out what your biggest bottleneck is for your role. And same thing with your team's role. And then show you start using AI for that. Start there. And then you're going to be like, oh, my gosh. And look, AI is not a competitive advantage. It's actually a requirement now. So if you're not using it, you're just losing. And look, it changes every week. It probably just changed five minutes ago. Uh, from what we're talking about.

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, we. And I don't know that you've had a chance to look at it. Uh, sent you over the brand assessment and narrative strategy that we created using our, uh, story cycle Genie. Did you have a chance to look at it at all?

Speaker A: Briefly. I thought it was pretty spot on, so I liked it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And the idea there is it's built by agency principals for agency professionals that they can plug it in immediately, Jason. And you know, they've got over three dozen experts working for them, just like you were saying. I wrote down that bottleneck. Well, this is the genie bottle that releases that bottleneck because you could apply it to your brand immediately. You can apply it to that next pitch coming up. Run their brand through it, show up with a narrative strategy saying here, baseline, that we can start on tomorrow if you hire us today. I mean, there's so much you can do with it. And you don't have to mess with generic AI at all.

Speaker A: Yep, exactly.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's the goal. So. Well, thank you for being here. Where can people learn more about you?

Speaker A: Yeah, so a couple places, uh, you can go to jason swank.com that's s W E N K. Or I guess you can just go to swank.coms w-e n k.com that will have a link to the mastermind to the book. Um, but, uh, the book's out, so you guys go check it out. It's on audible. I recorded it. Not some AI.

Speaker C: Uh, on that.

Speaker A: And you can get a hardcover, uh, one of that as well. And there's no fluff. Like, I don't like books that tell a Lot of fluff. Like, it just, here's where you're at. Here's what you need to go do. Here's go do it.

Speaker C: That's awesome. You always close your show by saying, have a swank day. What do you mean by that?

Speaker A: Have a great day. I mean, it's just I try to live every day to the max, you know, because I look at it, I heard something many years ago from, like, an old timer. He was like, you know, yesterday is. Is history. Today is a gift, tomorrow is a mystery. And so I always try to do as best as I can. And if I don't and like, I can't have my best day every day, but if, if I slack off at all at the end of the day, I. I do, like, I'm like, uh, I could have put a little bit more effort into that.

Speaker C: Well, then I'm going to go out and have a swank afternoon. Thank you so much for being here, man.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this episode. And if you liked what you heard, jump over to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your shows and give me a rating and review because it helps us get found in the world out there. Because I have been so busy for the past 12 years finding story artists for you from around the world to help inspire you with new ways to think about telling story. And I've got another one for you coming up this Monday. His name is Ryan Cohn and he is the founder of the energy nonprofit out of London called Point One. Ryan has a remarkable brand story all based around this singular narrative. Almost nothing changes everything. I'm m going to show you how you can bring this same kind of simplicity to your own brand story. And until then, remember that the most potent story you'll ever tell is a story you tell yourself. So make that one epic. Thanks so much for listening.