Jeremy Weisz 16:09
Yeah, and you were transparent with it too. You could have just made a decision. It sounded like your management style was kind of opening up to the team and problem solving as a team.
Carl Smith 16:21
That was it again. I never wanted to be in charge, and it wasn’t that I didn’t want the responsibility. It was more that nGen once got called the People’s Republic of nGen when I was in Bucharest at an event, and I really respected that in a way. It’s like not saying anything political. I thought letting everybody have some insight or some impact into their own direction, like you think Daniel Pink and drive right? It’s like, that’s what it was. They needed to have some autonomy. They needed to be getting better at their craft. They needed to know that they were being taken care of intrinsically and extrinsically, at which point they should have a say in what we do, because they’re the ones creating it.
Jeremy Weisz 17:11
You mentioned the layoff piece, but then on the flip side, you’ve done webinars, on the other side, which is the hiring, and people are scared to hire because they’re thinking of that Chase, when Chase left. So talk about what’s the conversation like around the hiring piece and being scared to hire, and the people’s thoughts on when or if on that topic.
Carl Smith 17:40
So this has been something I’ve played around with since the beginning, even when I was at the advertising agency. I was like, 24 and they were having a layoff, and I remember talking to Melanie, who’s the only boss I’ve ever had, and ruined me for all other bosses. She said, we need to figure out who we can let go. And I said, Can we just figure out who we need to keep? Because it feels like that’s a different question, and it wasn’t that I was that smart, it was that I was that naive. I didn’t know what it would do to the culture. But when you think about it now and the conversations that are happening in the community now, people are scared to hire because they’ve been through this roller coaster since the pandemic, we’re like, we’re having the best year ever.
We’re having the worst year ever. We’re back to the best year ever, and they don’t want that emotion, not to mention just the impact of all of the cost. And they’re tired, so because they’re so tired and they’re a dog that’s been kicked a lot, they’re nervous, like they see the treat, but they know that it comes with a cost. So I think that’s the real thing right now, is everybody’s kind of easing in. Plus it’s an election year, so everybody knows right around September, all of their clients are going to freeze up and wait to see what happens. But again, this is nothing I would have known pre Bureau, and something I hear all the time is people like, Man, I wish I had had this five years ago, if I could have had everybody help me. Like one of the things we do now is like a sales pulse survey. Every six weeks, we ask people two questions, are sales up steady or down? What are people buying?
And that’s it. It takes less than a minute to fill out. And this will be the second one that comes out next week, I think. But what we saw is like a third, a third and a third. And because of that, it is that uncertainty. The other part of it is like a lot of people are looking to outsource, which is not frowned upon the way it once was, right nearshoring offshoring amazing talent in Northern Europe, right? But then you get to this point where it’s like, well, I feel like I’ve lost some of the control, even though we’re distributed now, something about being distributed within a time zone feels better. So that’s it. And you can hire the best of the best when you go more of a contract basis, but then you lose some of the, I don’t want to say control as much as availability. So predictability, you lose some of that predictability, and that’s when you decide, really, I need to hire somebody.
Jeremy Weisz 20:33
It’s really visual when you say a dog that’s been kicked. I could really relate to that as an entrepreneur, and how are people figuring out? Is it the right time? Is it just taking a plunge? Are people looking at a certain formula that go okay? Because you never know, like we’ve seen oh, and you’ve seen over decades. There’s all these things that can happen. Hence the dog being kicked. But to get to Okay, we have to either make a decision or not. Is there something that people are considering or what are the factors they’re considering in that
Carl Smith 21:15
decision? Yeah. So again, there are some of the folks who, like, I never knew what utilization meant right until probably even four years ago, we started hanging out with Parallax, and they’ve done an amazing job with their professional services, automation stuff, and the people in the community love them, but they explain to me what utilization is. So there are people, what I find is owners who were previously developers are much more in tune with looking at different formulas. Owners who were on the creative side, like writers or designers, are much more gut feel like, Should I do this? Shouldn’t I do this? So and there’s no right answer.
Jeremy Weisz 21:57
The Parallax would say, look at your utilization of all across the board on the staff, and if someone’s at a certain amount of utilization, then you need to consider hiring something like that.
Carl Smith 22:10
And if your forecast is strong, like what’s coming in, how busy are they? Yeah, and so that’s exactly it. Others would again, with the craftspeople, sometimes it’s like the work I’m going to have to take on to survive this. I don’t like that work. So it’s not just numbers again, right?
Jeremy Weisz 22:31
This is Parallax here. Yeah, yeah. And what do they do?
Carl Smith 22:36
So they are basically they automate the back office, and they give you insights into how well your shop is running and what’s coming. So are you ready for the new work that’s coming in? Are you working optimally? And it’s amazing. David Annis and Tom O’Neill, the two founders, they joined the Bureau during the pandemic when they didn’t even have a company, because they wanted us to be around. So it’s like I got so much love for those guys. But I think that the thing when you start looking at it and deciding when to hire, the other part of it is conversations with other with your peers, and that’s what happens in the Bureau of Slack. We have, it’s almost like, back to Harry. It’s almost like a lot of secret chambers in there, because not everybody’s together, like, depending on the service you sell, or the size of your shop, or, there are some secret handshake channels that people say, hey, come over here. We’ve got a channel called venting, and that’s it.
Like when you see those people get together, they start talking through it, and people will get different perspectives, but at least now they know what’s worked and hasn’t worked for other folks. But what I was going to say this earlier, I hope I didn’t. I’m not repeating myself, but the one thing I’ve learned being a part of all these events, being a part of this community, is there is no answer that comes down from the mountain. Everybody is different. Everybody has different goals. They have different contexts they’re working within, and ultimately, they have to make a decision. I think what the Bureau does is just give them a broader expanse of information so they can see what did and didn’t work for other folks, as well as getting pointed to different resources or just different content that they can consume on their own.
Jeremy Weisz 24:31
Yeah, I guess I kind of visualize it like buffet a little bit, and you kind of try a little bit, and then you go back to the things that worked or you like, and then you just throw out the stuff that didn’t work or you didn’t like type of thing. So I want to get to the evolution of the services a little bit, because it started with that first event, and then you created a business out of it, essentially. But I want to go back to Melanie for a second, because I know she was a big influence on you. And, what made her a great boss? What were some of the characteristics, and I’m sure you have brought some of those into your own world.
Carl Smith 25:08
Yeah, you know, one of the things about Melanie was she was a siren. She just communicated so well. Now, there were things for me personally that I thought, why is she doing that? And I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know until I ran my own company. And when you run your own company and there’s nobody left to blame, you start understanding why somebody else did something. She was really great at making people feel inspired and making them feel like we can please the client and please ourselves. She used to always say, okay, the client’s happy. Let’s get to work, because we knew whatever we put out into the world was going to get us the next client. And she would say that too, these are not our clients, but they can get us to our clients, so let’s work really hard for them.
So she was just amazing at getting people’s energy up and inspiring them to do the best work they could, even if they weren’t motivated by the work itself. And that was one of the things I took away. She also was very in tune with the human side. And in my I guess mid-20s, when I was working there, I realized that they went through this process called high or what was called stop, it nothing. And we used to joke it should be called stop while there’s something left. But basically it was like a 360 review. Everybody in the company reviewed everybody, and I had the distinct pleasure of being considered the most valuable employee and the least valuable employee. I was the golden boy, and I was Carl spawn of Satan, and it was one of those things where I realized, even then, I’m treating people differently. And the reason was I would get so focused on my goal that if anybody came in to interrupt me, I would just say whatever I had to say to get them to go away. But the people that I was working with loved it, and I think because of talking with Melanie and watching Melanie, I realized I can’t just be brutal to folks who aren’t on my path.
I have to try to help them, or at least acknowledge them and share with them when I can help but that was like such a wakeup call, and without her, there’s no way I could have gone on to launch my own company and have any success.
Jeremy Weisz 27:42
You mentioned Carl, the interrupt me, right, and just being focused, which, I can be in that camp as well. But you had a webinar actually, that someone talked about the loss of time, of shifting attention. So obviously that time you were on to something, you knew what would happen with all these interruptions, even though maybe you weren’t perfectly cordial about it, however you handled it, but talk about what was that you know that webinar about, and some of the learnings from that.
Carl Smith 28:20
Yeah. Yeah. So this was an amazing webinar from SEER. And basically they went through and empowered one of their ops people to just do research by taking half the company and allowing them not to be in meetings that were like standing meetings, and the other half would attend all those meetings. And then they started looking at productivity. They started looking at who had to stay late, and different things of that nature. And then I think they also limited the number of different projects somebody might be on, or the number of different clients they might have to see. How did that impact it? And the results are the results we would expect. If you have less to do, you do a better job.
You get done faster. But the other side of it, not just meetings, but that idea of deep work, of being able to turn off all of the things, it is crazy how easy it is to get a hold of somebody, but if you get those two hour four hour blocks, you can get things done weeks earlier than if you’re constantly having to remember where you were go back in oh, did I write that? That’s not what I meant, but that was it. And it’s amazing to me, because when you see somebody who’s taken the time to actually implement that in their own company, it just makes you feel stupid if you don’t do it.
Jeremy Weisz 29:44
Are there any things that you do, whether it’s productivity, techniques or tools or software that you do use on a daily basis?
Carl Smith 29:53
It’s funny. I go up and down with tools. I was using Motion. Which is an AI calendar, like sorting app. But what I realized was I don’t want, even if I tell it to give me 20 minute breaks every hour, I don’t want that. I want to be flexible, and it’s going to tell me something’s late because I decided to do it tomorrow, and I don’t want to have to click three places to do that. So I’m a Todoist fan. I use Todoist I went away from it, and now I’m back to it. And the reason is I can just tell it I’m going to do that tomorrow, and it doesn’t care. It’s not going to yell at me. But the bigger thing for me is I really try not to start any important work until 11, so I’ll start my days normally with a longer run, like I went for a run this morning before the podcast. And I’ll normally listen to what depends on what I’m doing, like if I need to run slower, I’ll listen to a book.
If I just need to be able to think, I’ll listen to more instrumental type music, and if I just need to get some aggression out, then I’m gonna go with arena rock or just something ridiculous, and just, you know, like, and just some guilty pleasure, and just run my ass off. But what it does is, when I do sit down at 11, I find that I’m so focused, I’m so ready, like my brain has had a chance to process all the other crap. I only reply to email once a day. I know I’m hesitating to say that, because it’s really hard, because in our world, I see my goal is making sure people get the help they need, a far cry from the 24 year old who was like, get the fuck out of my office. And so sometimes that help comes in through email, sometimes it comes in through slack. But what I’ve realized over the past few weeks, actually, the first two months of this year were really hard because I had personal stuff going on and I wasn’t able to pay attention to my role like I wanted to.
And what I found was other people stepped up and helped them. And actually, this harks back, and I’ll find a little tangent here. But when I originally joined the Bureau, like I was an attendee initially, and then my company was doing pretty well, and I just started doing things, and they said, hey, do you want to join? Do you want to be a part of this? And I was like, yeah, I think so. And I was reading through an email that the Greggs had sent me. And my youngest daughter, Alyssa, came out, and she would have been 14 at the time, maybe a little bit younger even. Yeah, she would have been younger. She would have been 13. And she came out, and she asked me how I wanted to be remembered.
Jeremy Weisz 32:42
Pretty deep, that’s a pretty intense question.
Carl Smith 32:42
Very, she is an old soul. And I said, I just want to be remembered as somebody who’s successful and didn’t have to hurt anybody, right? I don’t want to have to do anything negative to someone in order to succeed. And then she said, well, how are you going to measure that? Now you think, why would a child 13 is not a child, but why would she say that? Well, we had built a store for Shopify with cat string because she thought it, the cost is low. Cats love it. We’ll make a killing. And friends at Shopify actually were going to demo the store and stuff, but she lost interest. But so I told her, I said, All right, well, how are you going to measure success? So she asked, how are you going to measure that? And I said, by the number of people, I help. And then she said, how does it scale? And I said, I don’t know. And then I found out, my wife might have put her up to it, because they were both in the kitchen.
Jeremy Weisz 33:42
She’s reading off index cards. It’s like, why is this not your handwriting?
Carl Smith 33:47
Then I went back, and I went back to the email with the Gregs, and I was like, I don’t have to help anybody. That’s how it scales. I just put people in a position to help each other. And the first two months of this year, I remembered that because I have to extract myself from the community and just be the conduit that gets everybody who they need. Because the other thing is, I’m gonna have to find a Dread Pirate, Roberts at some point, I can’t keep being the person who’s like guiding the ship, and the Bureau’s gonna go on.
It’s a self-sustaining entity. It’s shown that through the pandemic, it grew like membership grew over 1,000% in two and a half years. So for me, it’s like, I think that that’s the biggest thing is I just have to make sure that I am putting it in its best position to succeed, no matter who is deciding what programming is or all that stuff is superficial. It’s the conversations, it’s the support that happens in the slack, in the hallways, at the events, all that kind of stuff. Ooh, you got me worked up. You got me worked up.
Jeremy Weisz 34:57
Carl, I think I should have been interviewing your daughter. With questions like, how do you measure success, and how does it scale? What does she do now?
Carl Smith 35:05
She’s actually a TikTok influencer.
Jeremy Weisz 35:07
Okay.
Carl Smith 35:08
She’s got about 950,000 followers.
Jeremy Weisz 35:10
All right. Well, let’s check her out. What’s her TikTok? I don’t know if, if you call it a handle or whatever. I don’t know if you know it, but.
Carl Smith 35:17
It is Pedestrian Lesbian, and she is for work.
Jeremy Weisz 35:24
All right, I don’t know if I’m her demographic, but I’ll check it out.
Carl Smith 35:27
Yeah, she is a cosplayer, and she’s been taking a short break, but she’s close to signing a deal with Hulu right now, which could be pretty fun. Wow, yeah, you should. She’s a badass.
Jeremy Weisz 35:39
We’ll check her out. Thanks for sharing that you know. So from the evolution standpoint, running Bureau of Digital, it’s amazing to me how much you have going on with Bureau of Digital and how efficient the team is. So talk about the evolution of hiring to handle Bureau of Digital.
Carl Smith 36:06
When I took over, there were two people, Brett Harned, who had been there from the beginning with the original idea. He was at Happy Cog, working with Greg boy, and then Lori Averyt, who has been with me for 26 years over four companies. So it was the three of us, and we sat down and said, what do we want to do? And I remember saying, All roads need to lead to membership. And then we didn’t do anything with membership, really, until the pandemic. So but, but it was one of those things where we were like, what can we do? What do we want to do? And then we started asking the community, what do you want? Like, what do you want to do? But as we went through, Brett had his own thing, so he was kind of part time. Lori and I were going full time.
And then slowly we hired, until we were a team about eight. We had one person who was doing more marketing. We had other people who were helping facilitate the events. It’s weird, if I go back and look at it, I’m not sure what all eight of us did. And then when the pandemic hit, and we ended up upside down, a quarter of a million dollars in deposits at venues that were saying they weren’t going to give them back, that you can have the events. It’s fine. COVID is not a thing. We’re not going to force majeure. No, no, no, we’re holding on to it. And then we had about $70,000 in ticket refunds we had to give. So I told the team. I was like, look, I got about five weeks of being able to pay you. Please don’t stay out of loyalty. If you have somewhere you can go, please go. That’s the healthiest thing you can do for everyone. And for the most part, everybody went. We had great people. They had places they could go, even during the pandemic, when things were so weird.
So it ended up being just me and Lori, and we kind of went. I told everybody, we’re going to go on life support, float through space, try to find a habitable planet. And at that point, people in the community just started doing stuff on their own. They actually contacted Slack. This is a pivotal change in the community. We had 1600 people in Slack. It was the free version. So every 10,000 messages, you would lose a message. So you would try to go back and find stuff and wouldn’t be there. And you knew you had that conversation. So somebody contacted slack and said, hey, we’re talking about work from home protocols. We’re talking about EIDL and PPP, we’re talking about all these things, and it keeps disappearing. Can you please turn on the paid version?
I still to this day, don’t know who called them, and they said, okay, and so they turned on, they said, we’ll give you two months of the paid version to help you get through this. And when they did that, over 800,000 messages suddenly became available, and people were searching and getting amazing information. And I remember going, we can never go back. We can never go back, but it was going to cost over $4,000 a month with 1,600 people. So that was when I was like, Okay, well, we’ve got to do this membership thing. David C Baker is part of the community and a good friend. And David contacted me and said, hey, I sense that you’re probably hurting. If you want to spend a few days together and can get to Nashville, I’m happy to work through this with you. So I went, and David was so gracious, and we worked together for about a day, and Blair ends, who’s a friend as well.
And I call you know, Blair was like, Well, if you’re doing membership, let’s do you know, we’ll have three levels. And that whole you know thing, and we figure all that out, and then we turn on membership, and it just starts selling. Now, what I didn’t know was until later, people in the community have been there for a long time, put out videos about what the Bureau meant to them, and so these videos started going not viral, but in our small world, they went viral. And so people started buying membership. We would have $15,000 membership days, we have $30,000 membership days, and I’m just sitting there going, what is happening? What is this? And then I told people that slack was going to be a membership perk.
Only one person got really angry, and I had a phone call and explained it, and they were like, oh, okay, I didn’t realize that was like, Yeah, we’re gonna have to pay for this eventually, and every person’s gonna cost a certain amount of money, and we got to do this. But, but the best part of that whole thing was, again, I saw that the community is going to run itself. It is going to save itself. And today, if you look at it from we had 79 members, like pre-pandemic, because I didn’t want membership to get in the way of somebody getting support. Our mission was to provide support to people who don’t have it working in the digital services. That was kind of it, right? And today we have over 1200 members. It’s terrifying. I don’t know who these people are, what they want from me, but I did tell somebody the other day. They said, What’s it like running the bureau?
I said, running is an interesting word. I say it’s kind of like being on the back of a Bronco bowl, and you just hold on to it and it’s kicking and it’s trying to throw you off. And occasionally it turns its head around and it makes eye contact, and it smiles, and it goes, I love you, and then it turns back around and just keeps beating the shit out of you, right? But the thing is that love makes it all worth it, and my life is great. It’s not like I’m staying up late at night trying to figure out how to do things. It’s just I fail so much in this little playground, but they don’t care. They’re just happy that somebody’s there trying to give them a better way to connect.
Jeremy Weisz 41:50
What do you consider when you say you fail so much? What are some of those things that stick out?
Carl Smith 41:57
I’m gonna say one, and anybody listening will be like, No, it’s amazing, is it? But Bureau circle, so we had people really wanted us to do an EO or a Vistage type offering, but to do that and have an actual coach, and we have, like Steve Guberman, has been an amazing support. He’s part of the community, and he runs masterminds and does all that stuff, but we wanted to include it in the cost of membership. So when you’ve got 1200 people and you’re trying to find eight to 10 to be in a group together and have it be self-running, that’s a challenge, and you can only launch so many out of the gate. We ended up launching three total before I was like, this isn’t really adding value. And so now you’ve got all these other people who are like, but I thought I was going to get in one
Jeremy Weisz 42:50
Something they were striving to do.
Carl Smith 42:52
Yeah, and then I couldn’t find enough people for them and their space. And so that, to me, felt kind of like a failure. Integrating AI into Slack like we had it going really well, and then a couple of members, and they rightfully so, said this violates the Bureau of you’re not supposed to share things outside of the context of the people who had the conversation and open AI is saying that they’re using this for training purposes. So Gabe Levine, who was there at the first Bureau meeting, and one of my good friends is also our lawyer. And we looked at the end user license agreement, we looked at all the stuff, and according to open AI, they weren’t using it, but then people said they were. So I had to stop that, and I’ve been struggling to find a way to do recaps, because the number one reason people leave the bureau is there’s too much, and they feel like they are not taking advantage.
And I’m like, damn it, we should do less, so that’s also part of that context of, okay, we’re throwing stuff up against the wall. Not everything’s going to stick. And I learned this running my company, the absolute worst thing you can do is be marginally successful. If you are great at what you do and you make a killing and people love it, that’s awesome. If it sucked out of the gate and nobody paid attention, that’s great actually. It’s when you have, like, we launched a product that had a few 1000 people using it, and then we said, this isn’t enough. We had a few 1000 people mad at us because they really loved it, and so I feel that way with the Bureau too, it’s like I have to be more careful about what I’m going to share, trying to put on in person events, and then having to do them online because not enough people bought tickets. So things like that are what I consider. It’s not necessarily a failure, but that’s how it feels.
Jeremy Weisz 44:40
Yeah, it’s really interesting that you say that I had someone on Justin Goff, who’s head of the company sold it just a top direct response market copywriter. That’s exactly what he said is when something’s marginally successful, that’s the killer. Because you keep doing it, as opposed to, it’s obviously a clear line, if it’s like it didn’t work or it just blew it out of the water. So yeah, thanks for that reminder on that one.
Carl Smith 45:10
But let me go back for just a second, because you were asking, how can we run so efficiently? The other thing Dale Bertrand, who runs a shop called Fire and Spark. This is the other thing most search firms now AI firms, and the reason why is because they were really good at math. They understood algorithms. They understood how to get that stuff to do stuff. He came to me, he said he wanted to have a call, and I thought he wanted to talk about search. He wanted to talk about an ambassador program. So we have Bureau ambassadors, and we’re actually just now, like I mentioned, the first two months were a little shaky for me. We’re just now kind of getting our new batch of ambassadors together. And so sometimes they run a club, like a book club, sometimes they just host events. I we were at a point where I was supposed to host everything, and it got I couldn’t do it. So now we aren’t able to do the things we want.
So now they host events. They might have. We had a 11 business group, which was, if you’re working with your significant other, right, if you’re in business and in life together like that’s certain challenges. So those ambassadors, we have about 18 of them, and this year is the first year that we have senior ambassadors. So Chris Manley and Maura Miller are two people who’ve been with the community for a while, and they are going to kind of be, I guess, like coaches on the field just to help get things done. And it’s so funny because the initial meeting is going to be next Wednesday, and I can’t make it. And they were like, well, yeah, that’s the point. We’re still gonna have it. I’m like, okay, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 46:49
How did you structure the ambassador program? These are, obviously, they’re all members of Bureau of Digital.
Carl Smith 46:57
Yeah. And I would say I structured it very poorly. So basically, I just said, Do y’all want to do something? And they said yes. And I said, do it. So I’ll also say that we have a group right now that’s rebranding. This was Laura Boyer, who runs a shop called Black Bean out of Vancouver. And Laura contacted me six months after being in the community, and said, hey, the Women’s Leadership Group is kind of crappy. Can I start, like a one night a month, we get together. I was like, Yeah, sure. And she was like, I want to call it the Bad Bitches Wine Night. Is that okay? And I was like, I am not going to tell you what you can or cannot call your group. And so they did. And now she has 100 people in that group, and they drop the Wine Night because, some people have challenges.
I’m actually, I don’t have — I’m soberish. But it’s one of those things where, you know, they get together and they just talk, and in that channel, like, I’m an honorary bad bitch, so I get to be in there. But it’s one of those things where in that channel, you hear those conversations, and it’s just heart wrenching to see what they’re doing. She wasn’t an official ambassador, but she is now, so that’s what they do. We have one that runs a lunch club. So if people want to get together and just meet different members, it’s kind of a little serendipity thing to throw them around, but now they have a little bit more support, so when they have questions and stuff, they don’t have to wait for a long time.
Jeremy Weisz 48:27
I’m curious, Carl, you said you really talked and sat down with David and Blair to talk about the membership piece. I’m just going to bring up the website for a second, because what’s included in pricing is tough to I think for me it’s tough to figure out, like, what’s the right art and science? So I’m wondering when you were talking them, and now we’re looking at it. Now, if you’re looking at this point in time, it could have changed. So don’t hold to this, but you could check it out on bureauofdigial.com and there’s a membership page, but, um, there’s a connect level as this point in time, a lead level and a partner level. Talk through some of the conversation with Blair and David, and how you came to some of these and how you decided on the price point as well.
Carl Smith 49:19
Yeah. So this was in 2020 and these were the levels in 2020. Now before that, there was a learn, a Connect and a lead, and the Learn level was no longer going to be effective because it wouldn’t pay for Slack, and to not be in Slack actually felt like not being a member. So it was a challenge. The learn level used to mean you got the events at a discounter for free. S Connect is really the main level. And until 2023 or 2023 it was $49 a month. And 499, a year. And with the Connect level, you get slack. You get all the online events, all the webinars, at no cost. You get discounts on the workshops, discounts on the in person stuff, but it’s an individual membership. If you go with the lead, you actually get a discount, because you get six people in there, kind of for the cost of five and I think that’s right, I’m not great at math theater major.
And I told myself I wasn’t going to say that anymore about, self-deprecating theater majors are awesome, but you get everything. It’s just for more people. And the other thing about that is it’s for your entire team, so only six people get into Slack, but your entire team actually gets the discounts and the free online events and that sort of thing. And then at the lead level, if you want to add somebody else that comes at $100/year discount. So that’s the other part. We have lead members who actually have 12 or 13 people in there, and it really makes sense for them. The partner level is people who really want to be known in the community. And I don’t put a lot of description there, because it’s different for every person. For example, if navigate the journey is one of our partner levels.
Jeremy Weisz 51:19
Here’s some of the partners, I’m assuming, right? This is, yeah.
Carl Smith 51:22
Yeah. So a great example is, Upsourced, right? So Upsourced is actually one of our partners, and anytime they have content that they want to share, we share it across the network, anytime somebody asks for help when it comes to advertising, when it comes to accounting in terms of digital services, we point them to Upsourced. So it’s one of those things where also not everybody that has to be a partner, even though that money is really lucrative, not everybody that asks actually gets accepted. So that’s the other part of it. But the other thing is, I’ll reach out to them when we’re getting ready to do something say in the newsletter, and I’ll be like, hey, do you have an article that would be good for this? Because I want to do some pull quotes, or I want to draw stuff out, and so that the partner level, they’re not necessarily in it to get business.
Some of them, for example, Leslie Camacho, who’s an EOS coach. Leslie did it because he was getting so much work from the Bureau that he felt like it was giving back, right? So that’s another thing. It is an ecosystem. There are people. If somebody accepts you and your service, and then shares it in the community. It’s almost like a spark that lights a fire. By the same token, if you do a little bit of harm, they may also act. They may say, hey, you know what? That sucked. And my thing, I tell everybody, as long as people have a reason to say what they say, they’re not being offensive and they’re not hurting someone or betraying somebody’s trust, I’m going to let it stand, because it’s not my job to make sure it’s Wine and Roses. It’s my job to make sure it’s valuable and real.
Jeremy Weisz 51:24
So it started off, if we look at it back to your first event, it was like, almost like a free event. I mean, someone was paying for it. The Gregs were paying for it at the time. And then it became more events, and then online events, and then actually a community where there’s events online, virtual and kind of an online Slack community where people can network, and then there’s ambassadors that kind of create other events virtual or in person as well. And it started off from free to whatever it was for event and virtual event to $49 a month to $89 a month, and then on up. I’m curious, because this comes up a lot in the agency conversations. When you raise the pricing, yep, you grandfather people in, or do you raise them? And because this happens with all agencies like they have these grandfathered in legacy clients, and seven years later they’re still paying the same how do they raise them? Or do they not raise them? So I’m curious on how you handled that particular situation.
Carl Smith 54:35
So I told everybody, as we got close to 2023 that I was not going to raise their membership, and the reason was they were the ones that got us here, and they had created this robust community where we had all this information, so it wasn’t fair for somebody new coming in to get it at the same price they had, because they were part of building it. Yeah, so that’s why we were increasing the cost. And the cost was increased based on surveying the current community and some conversations that I had, and I’ll never forget, somebody said, I pay this much for AIGA, or I pay this much for Vistage, or I pay this much for whatever. I get more value out of the community here, so I would gladly pay more. So that was a big part of it. And I will, I’ll be honest, I told Blair.
I was like, I think this partner level is kind of out of reach. And then we sold four in the first month. I remember I called him back. I was like, what’s happening? And he was like, some people just like to buy the most expensive thing. And I was like, damn it. I learned a long time ago, especially because I’m a time and materials guy, and Blair obviously isn’t, but he’s a kinder, gentler Blair now, and I’m a more open individual as well. But again, there’s no one path to success, right? Everybody’s got different things that they’re doing. But yeah, I am glad that I listened, because he was absolutely right.
Jeremy Weisz 56:13
Yeah, I mean, and part of it too, Carl, is that people are getting huge, tremendous value out of it, and so they want to, like you said that one person like this is so valuable for me, I want to uplevel what I’m doing and, you know, my involvement. So it’s just a way for them to do that on a different level. I you know, we have to talk a little about some of the learnings of nGen, because there’s so many, but maybe just pull out a few of those biggest ones. But I do want to point out this is the video I think you were talking about, which is that people can check out. Mike Montero, Fuck You Pay Me from Creative Mornings, and so people can check that out. I didn’t realize it’s gonna be 38 minutes, but that’s great. I’m looking forward to checking this out.
Carl Smith 57:01
The best part is he’s got a call and response where it’s like when a client does something that goes and gets a contract, Michael go, Fuck You, and the audience goes, Pay Me. And it’s one of the happiest moments, like I haven’t watched it in a while. And also, Gabe had hair in this video, which he shaved it now. So those are the two things I love.
Jeremy Weisz 57:23
All right, so I’ll check this one out. And then I think this is, I think this is this your daughter’s channel. People can check that out. Pedestrian Lesbian, right here on TikTok. So, so nGen.
Carl Smith 57:37
Yeah, quite a few things I learned. Actually, I happen to have this right here, so I’m just gonna share this. This was our first promotion. We give good web with a phone number. We did a photo shoot. We actually shot that at a urinal. I won’t read the bucket copy. I would say, Don’t do this. We sent out about 5,000 of these to corporations.
Jeremy Weisz 58:05
Why at the urinal? I’m curious.
Carl Smith 58:08
Oh, because that’s where you would find that somebody had said they give good web We got one coffee.
Jeremy Weisz 58:15
Phone number there. I’m getting it. Okay.
Carl Smith 58:18
We got one call and they said, Never do that again. But I would say, from nGen, yeah, we positioned ourselves as the best and we weren’t. And we didn’t fake it till we made it kind of thing. Well, I guess we did. We just got good, but we also only did what we knew how to do. We were great at original animation. We were a flash shop, and I apologize to nobody. It was glorious. We did original soundtracks. We did all of this kind of custom content. That was great. But some of the things I learned were, if you act like you belong there. People treat you like you belong there. Our first client was Chase and they just saw the work that we were doing and the way that we handled ourselves. We didn’t have a business plan. We instead, we just had kind of a list of rules. One of them was, no matter how big the coffers get, we won’t build Valhalla.
I’d come from a place that had a conference table that cost $40,000 to ship from Italy to ship. I have no idea what the table itself costs, and I was just like, when we start, we’re not gonna do that. We also had some simple rules, like, when the phone rings, we’ll answer it. We’ll be nice, honest and nice are not opposite. You can be nice and tell the truth, and we’ll make good commitments and keep them. Those were like the three reasons we were successful. We responded to people when they contacted us. We always had a smile, even if we had bad news, and we do what we said we were going to do. And I think one of the biggest ones was a lot of people like Bash clients. You have to realize you’re the person that let them in the door, if you don’t know why you let them in the door, if they changed, and every client changes, we put together after our 100th project, we put together kind of a playbook for clients that explained where things normally go off the rails, ways to keep things on track and on budget.
And what we realized after 100 projects was there’s only one constant, it’s us. Why are we driving them to do what it is they’re doing? And I finally realized, because we weren’t communicating in the way they needed us to. Clients don’t want to drive. They just want to know you are right. They have their day job. This project showed up. But the other really big one, I would say, is there are two types of clients that we came up against. Now, we had a good cash foundation. If you have good cash, you can make good decisions if you don’t, you still make good decisions, just different ones. We learned not to take checklist clients. If somebody showed up because their boss told them this needed to get done, that person was going to disappear. That person was going to get pulled into something else. They did not have decision making authority. They were going to give you bad input. They just wanted you to go away and do the thing, and then when you showed up, they were like, that’s not what we wanted.
We wanted must win clients. Checklist, clients, bad, must win clients, good. Must win clients are the ones that are going to lose their job if this fails, their business will go under if this is not successful. So examples of that are not necessarily startups, but maybe like a company that’s three years in. We wanted a company that knew who they were, and they’d maybe gone through a growth spurt, and what used to work doesn’t work anymore. We wanted a client that knew that they suddenly had new competition, and they didn’t know how to address it, because those clients will answer the phone night or day. They will be there in a heartbeat, and they will give you answers, and they will listen to you because they know you know more than they do about what you’re doing. We used to do this thing called the level set at the beginning of each kickoff meeting, where I would start it, and I would say, My name is Carl.
I will be keeping a high vantage point over the whole project, and I have worked on 381 web projects. And then it would go to Lori, and should be, my name is Lori. I’m air cover, so I will take your questions and your calls, but I will protect the team so that they’re allowed to keep working, so that we can stay on budget and on schedule. And I’ve worked on 72 web projects, and so everybody on our team would do that and say the number of projects they’d worked on. Then when it came to the client, it would be like, my name is Michael, I will be your day to day contact, and I’ve worked on two web projects, one with my son, and you would just go, okay, so you know your business, and we know the web right? And that changed everything when we got that done. So there’s your rapid-fire answers.
Jeremy Weisz 1:03:15
I love that, Carl. I have one last question. And first of all, I just want to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey, the lessons so many there, and check out bureau of digital.com to learn more. But the last question is, just some of your favorite resources. It could be software tools. It could be a book that you love, a business book, some of your favorite resources. Because I’m sure you hear a lot thrown around in the agency world of what they’re always asking, What do you use for this CRM, what do you use for this project management? So some of the on your list of favorite tools and resources?
Carl Smith 1:03:58
Yeah, I’m gonna start by saying the Daily Stoic like I start my mornings with that. I just started that maybe a month ago, and I start with the oldest first. I always have done that so I can see how it evolves. But there’s something great about having somebody and I, I read some stuff on Seneca and Marcus Aurelius before, but having somebody just apply it to modern day, like you make this connection, and it gives me this moment at the beginning of the day, just to realize that it’s all so much bigger than whatever I’ve got to get done today, like it’s all going to be fine. So I think that one’s really important to me. There’s a book I love that’s not, I don’t know that it translates as well today, but it’s called The Starfish and The Spider. And what I love about it is whether it’s about centralized versus decentralized teams or not. That’s not even right, but basically leaderless organizations, and the idea is, if you’re a spider and your head gets cut off, the organization dies. If you’re a starfish and you get cut in half, you grow into two new starfish.
And for me, running a community, and when I ran nGen, and we were trying to get a community type feel, the way that the jellyfish model ran, that meant that I didn’t have to be there again. I had an irrelevant strategy, so starfish and the spider kind of helped me understand more about how not to be there. There are parts of it right now that just don’t translate to today, but I still love it. Yeah, and then I actually, a book that I love right now is called Outlive which is not really a business book, but I think it’s, it’s such a self-care book that it helps you with everything else that you’re doing. In terms of tools, again, Todoist. I mean, I just love it for myself, personally, and I am starting to appreciate HubSpot. It took a while. It’s a bit of a learning curve. And the reason I love it, though, is because we’ve had almost 20,000 people come through Bureau events, former members, just different people in what we would call the bureau verse, right, the bigger community, and with HubSpot, when somebody emails me, I can quickly see not only how I know them, but where did I see them last? What did they attend? What are the things they seem engaged with?
So then when I respond to them, it’s more real, or it’s, I hate the word, genuine and authentic. We bastardized all these terms. So I’m just going to go with more real. We’ll just go with that. And obviously slack too. Yeah, I hate them. I mean, I got to be honest, they changed the pricing when sales first bought them, and I know the team that worked on the design and all that stuff, Andrew and the team that worked on the original slack, and I love those guys, but they changed it. They changed the meaning of active user, which increased the cost almost 30% and then they increased the price. We pay $75,000 a year for slack, but it’s the most valuable thing for the community, so I love it for them personally. Well, I won’t say that in case there’s a legal thing that happens later.
Jeremy Weisz 1:07:33
Are there other alternatives people are considering with slack that you know of because I’m sure you’re not the only one. I mean, people have experienced this, and I’m not sure what are other options people are looking into?
Carl Smith 1:07:45
So in terms of communities, it would be Circles. In terms of other software that’s similar, it would be Discord. But I surveyed the community, and you would have thought pitchforks and torches were coming. And the reason is, and I’ve talked to people who’ve
Jeremy Weisz 1:08:03
People are used to it already.
Carl Smith 1:08:05
Well, and it’s where they are, right? If you think about location, location, location that is Slack, community organizers that I’ve talked to who have moved away from it have seen a loss of about 30% of their community doesn’t make the transition. So it is the devil that I love.
Jeremy Weisz 1:08:27
Maybe we should all buy Salesforce stock. If it basically, that’s what you’re telling me from this we don’t give stock tips here, but Carl, thank you so much, so many lessons, so many amazing resources. Everyone, check out bureauofdigital.com to learn more and Carl, appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks everyone.
Carl Smith 1:08:48
Thank you so much. This was fun. Thanks, everybody.
