[Top Agency Series] Navigating the Digital Agency Universe With Carl Smith of Bureau of Digital

Carl Smith is the Owner of Bureau of Digital, a community made up of a diverse mix of digital professionals. Carl spent about 15 years in advertising before launching his first digital agency, nGen Works. He ran nGen Works for 12 years, constantly experimenting with different models of management and team structure. 

Toward the end of the run, Carl attended his first Bureau of Digital event and loved the concept of building a community in the web industry. A few years later, he closed his agency and took over the Bureau of Digital in 2016. He now spends every day connecting with digital professionals to give them the support they need.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:52] Carl Smith talks about Bureau of Digital and how it supports professionals across the digital landscape 
• [5:03] The pivotal insights Carl gained at the first digital event he attended
• [11:11] How digital agencies navigate the complexities of layoffs and maintain culture
• [17:40] Strategies for overcoming the fear of hiring in volatile markets 
• [24:31] Carl’s approach to managing a distributed team and building community
• [29:53] Tools and techniques for productivity and work-life balance
• [36:06] The evolution of hiring at Bureau of Digital
• [41:57] The essentials of running Bureau of Digital efficiently with a small team
• [46:57] How Bureau of Digital’s ambassador program empowers community contribution
• [57:37] Crucial lessons Carl learned while running his agency, nGen Works

In this episode…

Navigating the complexities of the digital agency space can be daunting. How would connecting with like-minded professionals change that experience? Have you ever considered the impact of peer support in the entrepreneurship world?

Carl Smith, a leading voice in the digital industry, uncovers the power of community in the digital agency landscape. He shares his experiences with nGen Works, highlighting lessons from trying unconventional management models to engaging with the first-ever digital event — lessons that carved the path for the Bureau of Digital. He also addresses the intricacies of agency finances, from facing potential layoffs to making strategic hiring decisions. Carl’s approach emphasizes the value of transparency, company culture, and the realization that every agency head has unique challenges.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Carl Smith, Owner of the Bureau of Digital, about fostering a supportive environment for digital professionals. Carl talks about the Bureau of Digital and how it helps professionals in the digital landscape, how digital agencies can navigate layoffs and maintain culture, strategies for overcoming the fear of hiring in volatile markets, and the essentials of running the Bureau of Digital efficiently with a small team.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Carl Smith on LinkedIn
• Bureau of Digital

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• Elissa Kathryn on TikTok
• Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me
• The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
• Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia MD
• The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

Related episode(s):

• “Carl Smith | Pivoting from Digital Agency to Building a Community of Digital Leaders” on the Smart Business Revolution Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Financial Tips To Thrive as a Creative Agency With Ryan Watson” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “The biggest thing I learned is I wasn’t alone — we were all innovating and making it up as we went.”
• “Good news travels at the same speed as bad news — transparency with context is vital.”
• “If you have an irrelevant strategy, you can scale without being present in every process.”
• “Clients don’t want to drive, they just want to know that you are.”
• “Some people just like to buy the most expensive thing — understand the value you offer and price accordingly.”

Action Steps:

1. Foster a community in your industry where professionals can openly share experiences and knowledge: This encourages a collaborative learning environment.
2. Prioritize transparency and communication with your team to maintain a strong culture: Honest communication builds trust and prepares the team to make informed decisions during layoffs or other difficult business periods.
3. Develop criteria for selecting clients who are genuinely invested in the project’s success: Working with “must-win” clients ensures they are active and committed partners in the project’s outcome.
4. Utilize productivity tools that fit your personal working style to stay organized and focused: Tools like Todoist or HubSpot can streamline your workflow and keep you aligned with your daily tasks and client relations.
5. Implement an ambassador program or similar initiatives to foster community contribution and engagement: Empowering members to take the lead on group activities and events enhances participation and builds a sense of ownership in the community.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsar.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Carl Smith of Bureau of Digital and Carl, before I formally introduce you, I like to shout out to some great episodes of the podcast. People should check out. Ryan Watson. Ryan Watson’s a partner at Upsourced Accounting, the firm they help creative companies evaluate financial progress. Actually, Jimmy from Outsourced Accounting introduced us. I mean, I already knew of you because John Corcoran, my business partner, had you on his podcast. He’s been a part of Bureau of Digital before too. So people can check that episode on Smart Business Revolution. So check out the one. Ryan Watson, it was a really good one. Also you were mentioning some of the amazing webinars you have at Bureau.

One of them being, should I stay, or should I go? I had Todd Taskey on the podcast, and he runs the Second Bite Podcast. He helps pair agencies with private equity and sell agencies. And sometimes he calls the second bite, because sometimes they make more on the second bite than they do on the first because of the whole model of private equity. So check that episode out. And we talked about the valuation of the agency space and landscape and selling and buying businesses. And we’ll talk about that on this one as well, and many more on inspired insider.com This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. And we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution.

So Carl, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company, so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, and, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should, if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Carl Smith. He spent 14 years in advertising before launching his digital agency nGen Works in 2003. I don’t know age, Carl or anything, but nGen ran for 12 years, building to over 40 team members, constantly experimenting with the different models of management and team structure. We’ll talk about some of the learnings there, and including what he calls the jellyfish model. I don’t know if you came up with that or not, but which is flat before flat was cool. And towards the end of nGen’s run, Carl actually attended the very first digital event, which is now Bureau of Digital, and actually fell in love with the concept of building community in this web industry. And a few years later, he actually closed nGen to take over the Bureau in 2016 he spends every day now connecting digital professionals to give them the support they need. You can check them out at bureauofdigital.com. Carl, thanks for joining me.

Carl Smith 3:32 

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Jeremy Weisz 3:34 

So just start us off with the Bureau of Digital and what you do. And if you are listening to the audio version, there is a video version. And I am actually going to share my screen, and we will poke around the site here. So talk about Bureau. What are some of the things you do?

Carl Smith 3:52 

You know, the main thing we do is just try to help people find the support they need. So if you’re an owner, operator, project manager, Creative Director, in house, design lead strategist, which is a weird junk drawer of a category, people have questions. Most of us didn’t go to school for what we did. So what we do is we put people together and help them figure out a way forward.

Jeremy Weisz 4:18 

Definitely didn’t go to school, but we did, yeah, right. I know you didn’t. I was a biochemistry major, so definitely that didn’t prepare me for this. But I want to go back and we’ll talk about some of the evolution and some of the interesting things, because you have your finger on the pulse a lot of these things, digital agency wise, talk about the insights of the first meeting event you went to, and you have a special like Harry Potter, like book that you even have. So if you hold it up there, if you open it like, literally, the spirits of digital will come out. What did you learn at that first event, or some of the insights.

Carl Smith 5:03 

So we got invited to go there by about 24 people who were going to this event. And we were invited by these two guys named Greg, Greg Hoy and Greg Story, who both ran a company called Happy Cog. But they were different companies. They both licensed the name separately, and they realized they didn’t know how to run their companies together, and that led them to realize they didn’t know how to run them independently either. So they reached out to about 22 of us who they thought were doing the most innovative stuff. When they sent me an email, I knew who they were, but I was shocked they knew who I was, and so I replied to their email inviting me with two words, why me? And they replied back because our employees have seen you speak. We’ve been following your blog, and you’re either really, really smart or you’re totally full of shit. And they said they wanted to know which and I replied, I would like to know as well. I will be there.

So when I got there, the imposter syndrome of sitting there. Kelly Goto was there. She wrote the book Web Redesign Workflow That Works. Christina Halverson was there, who had come up with the content strategy term. Jeffrey Zeldman, the father of web standards, was there. They’re all these people, and I’m sitting there going, why am I here? But one of the first things I realized was that nobody in that room really knew what they were doing. We were all just making it up. You can call it innovative, but it’s making shit up, and that’s what they were doing. And people that I thought were just crushing it were barely holding on. People that I looked at and thought, I can’t believe they’re in business, were actually crushing it. And that moment I realized I’m doing fine, like I was always pretty much alone. I never wanted to be in charge.

I never wanted to run anything. But by default of being the oldest person and being the person who said and didn’t have the skills I couldn’t design or code or do any of that stuff, I was a pretty good writer, and I presented well, so I kind of ended up in charge accidentally. But the other things that I learned from being there was that, this stuff is hard, and it doesn’t mean we’re bad at what we do. It means that it’s a lot of innovative stuff with different people, and because of that, it’s going to be challenging. I met some of my best friends at that event to this day, Gabe Levine, who, if you ever saw the Fuck You, Pay Me video. I’m not sure if we’re allowed to cuss, but that’s the name of the video. Yeah, with Mike Montero. And that was the other thing you start realizing, okay, I am running a business.

I have a service that people need, and they pay money for it. I shouldn’t act like it’s a privilege for me to work with them, and I shouldn’t expect them to think it’s a privilege to work with me, although I was pretty arrogant in my early 30s, because I think it was a shield to block my fear and my scared little self, but that was another thing. It’s like we’re in business, and we should act like we’re in business, and we should have real contracts and we should enforce them. These were all things that were foreign to me, believe it or not, and I think to a lot of people in the web at that time. So yeah, the biggest thing, I think, walking away from that event was that I wasn’t alone. If I learned one thing, it was that there were other people trying to do what I was trying to do, and I could learn from them.

Jeremy Weisz 8:50 

What was the original idea behind that? It wasn’t meant to be a business. It was just meant to get a group together to talk shop and help each other.

Carl Smith 9:02 

Yeah, so the Greggs, as they’re known in Bureau, the Gregs, basically said, if y’all will get yourself to the Kennedy School in Portland, Oregon, we’ll pay for everything else. And they saw it, I think, as kind of a research opportunity where they could find out what these other people they saw doing stuff. What they knew right now there was, I knew Aaron Mintley, who was there. He ran Electric Pulp, and they were doing a lot of work with Guy Kawasaki. So he was kind of an elevated kind of guy for me and a friend. I mean, he never presented himself as being above anybody else or anything. But I remember I was with him and with Kelly Goto, and we joked that Jeffrey Zeldman was in there, and when we all got in there, it was going to be like a Batman movie, and he was going to show up on a screen and laugh, and the doors would lock, and they were just going to flood us with gas and kill us all, and all the competitors would be gone, right?

Yeah, and then when we went in and sat down, I was like, oh, shit, should we share? Shouldn’t we share? But that’s the other thing that, to this day, we still do at the beginning of every event, we take an oath. Now it’s called the Bureau of at the time, there wasn’t anything like that, and it basically says, I promise not to share anything that a reasonable person would deem sensitive or confidential. So it’s kind of a verbal non-disclosure agreement. And right after that, we went into a talk about layoffs, because a few people were gonna have to have a layoff, and they didn’t know how to do it. So it was group therapy, but the original intention was just to get together and share and try to lift each all of us up, right?

Jeremy Weisz 10:48 

Let’s talk about some of those topics that people have shared and insights, layoffs is one you mentioned. You have a couple of different webinars that are popular. Talk about, what time you lose with shifting attention. You know, being scared to hire, should I stay, or should I go? What has been talked about in the room about the layoff piece?

Carl Smith 11:11 

So the layoff piece, I think the biggest issue is most of us. So this is an interesting thing when you look at web shops versus digital agencies. And I saw this shift happen around 2012. Before 2012 we were just kind of craftspeople who saw a new medium and thought it would be kind of fun. And then a popular origin story is somebody was in a band, and the band needed a website, so they built the website. And then another band needed one, so they called them, and then before long, they were making money building websites, and they quit the band like this is something you hear a lot. So when people get in that room, those of us that were more of the craftspeople are very culture focused. We weren’t very business focused. So a layoff we saw as a personal failure. We never thought about market conditions or shit like that. We were just like, I suck, and I can’t employ these people. I can’t give them what they need.

After 2012 you see a lot of people coming into the industry who aren’t a digital agency. We didn’t like the term agency because we left advertising agencies and we didn’t want to be beholden to a client. We wanted to be beholden to the work, but after 2012 and this isn’t universally true, but a lot of people who came out were more business savvy and business focused, and they would see metrics that said we’re going to have to have a layoff, and they would plan for it, whereas we were still under this illusion that the people we work with are family, which I think is a very dangerous thing to believe, although I believed it for a long time, because if it was true, I would have fired my brother a long time ago, and he’d be out of my family. I’m not allowed to do that. In my company, I can’t support everybody when things change. So I think when it comes to layoffs, the big challenge is always, how do we do it gracefully? And one of the things that I learned in that very first event was from Nancy Lyons, who’s at Clockwork.

And Nancy said, when we were doing these discussions, good news needs to travel at the same speed as bad news, and bad news has to travel at the same speed as good news, because it’s just news. And when you share things and you have transparency with folks, so they can see what’s going on with the financials, where they can see what’s going on with what a lot of us in the bureau would call the weather report, right then they’re not surprised, and they understand. So I think that that was a lot of it was just nothing should ever be a surprise to somebody. The other thing that I learned the hard way was that transparency without context is terrifying. So if I tell the team we’ve got $400,000 in the bank, they’re like, life is great, and we’re going to Vegas for the, you know, retreat, and we’re getting all these things, but if I tell them we have two and a half months of expenses in the bank, which could very much be the exact same number, they’re like, well, maybe we should take that little mom and pop restaurant down the street. After all, I know it’s not what our goals are, but it’ll at least keep us going. So that was a big part of it.

Jeremy Weisz 14:23 

Had to use that line with John, Carl, because if he had money in the bank, he wants to spend it. And I’m like, No, that’s a couple months of expenses so well, John, if you’re listening, that’s all I’m going to tell you.

Carl Smith 14:39 

There you go, and I’m going to let him know. Anyway, when I was running nGen, if we had more money at the end of the month, in the beginning, I thought we were crushing it. I never realized there would be expenses to show up later. I just didn’t pay attention, right? I was so focused on trying to do the work. But the one time I almost had a layoff, I had two friends that we had kind of agreed, if either of us was in trouble, we’d shoot up a flare. One was intermittently at electric pulp, and the other was Marty ring line at a shop called include and we had lost a project with Chase. We were about eight people, and this was a $250,000 usability project. And they said they were going to put it on hold, and I called them, and I was like, on hold or it’s never coming back, and they said it’s never coming back.

So I called the team. I said, Hey, we just lost this, and I don’t know that I can pay everybody. The only person that should probably be let go is me, but I checked with the lawyer, and it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just fire myself and y’all keep rolling. So we got to figure out what to do, and the team all agreed to take a cut until we got through it, because they didn’t think anybody should have to be let go. We ended up winning Epic Games, like a week later, and everything was fine, but I saw at that moment that by being honest with them the whole time and sharing with them that they wanted to keep going. But I think that only works when you’re small. I think when you get bigger, people expect more.

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