Dobbin Buck is the Chief Revenue Officer and Co-owner of GetUWired, a full-service digital marketing agency specializing in web development, marketing automation, and creative content. Alongside his partners, he has expanded the team from a modest five to a roster of 50 diligent professionals. Through his journey, Dobbin has harnessed culture, leadership, business development, and operational efficiencies to carve a niche for the agency in the digital landscape. He brings a hands-on approach to strategy, technical competency, and narrative-based content.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [04:28] Dobbin Buck shares GetUWired’s holistic approach to web marketing services
- [07:01] Strategies for hiring and nurturing talent that align with core company values
- [13:17] GetUWired’s creative ways of maintaining employee engagement and team spirit
- [17:32] The importance of regular meetings for aligning teams with company objectives
- [19:34] Dobbin discusses how meeting his business partners led to the reinvention and ownership of GetUWired
- [21:39] The lessons learned from making tough decisions and the benefits of staying true to core values
- [27:07] The evolution of GetUWired’s service offerings
- [33:54] Insights into working with top influencers and providing tech solutions that scale
- [40:55] How personal tribulations can forge an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit
In this episode…
Have you ever wondered what it takes to scale a business from the ground up, especially when life throws you curveballs? The evolution of an agency is not just about the services offered, but also about the people behind the scenes and their shared values. But how do you navigate the ups and downs, ensuring your culture remains intact?
Marketing guru Dobbin Buck shares his incredible story of transformation from a dire personal low to becoming the co-owner of a thriving marketing agency. He says their success was through investment in a unique team structure and an in-house mentorship program, which has fostered a culture of growth, collaboration, and resilience. Dobbin’s journey underscores the power of resilience, redefining potential, business development, and the power of a strong community in the workplace.
In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Dobbin Buck, Co-owner and Chief Revenue Officer of GetUWired, about crafting superior client experiences and driving agency growth. Dobbin discusses GetUWired’s holistic approach to web marketing services, strategies for hiring and nurturing talent that align with core company values, business partnerships, and the evolution of GetUWired’s service offerings.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
- Melissa Allen on LinkedIn
- The Guitar Circle by Robert Fripp
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Related episode(s):
- “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “The 4 Day Week : How the Flexible Work Revolution Can Increase Productivity, Profitability And Well-Being With Andrew Barnes Of 4DayWeek.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Top Agency Series] Continuous Development & Growth-Driven Design With Travis McAshan, GLIDE Design” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
Quotable Moments:
- “A happy, healthy team makes for a happy, healthy company, which makes for happy, healthy clients.”
- “You can’t have a call to action and just have people go into an abyss — you need a system.”
- “The key to success is having a culture of training and mentorship within the company.”
- “You’re never too old to kick it into high gear and redefine your potential.”
- “Mistakes and failures don’t define you; they provide the leverage for growth.”
Action Steps:
- Create a strong company culture: Invest in your team with mentorship and continuing education programs that promote a happy, healthy, and productive work environment.
- Foster talent development: Implement a process for hiring potential and nurturing that talent internally rather than solely recruiting experienced outsiders.
- Maintain regular internal communication: Hold regular team meetings to keep everyone aligned and instill a sense of community and cohesion.
- Align with core values: Make decisions based on adherence to the company’s core values, ensuring goals are not compromised by misaligned interests.
- Diversify your reading: Broaden your horizons with non-business literature that can offer fresh perspectives applicable to business challenges.
Sponsor for this episode
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:15
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.
Jeremy Weisz 0:22
Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Dobbin Buck of Getuwired.com, and Dobbin before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. I have to talk about our mutual friend Ian Garlic. I did an episode with Ian. Obviously, he runs videocasestory.com and he helps people capture great client stories. I don’t know if you knew this Dobbin, but he comes from an entrepreneurial family, and one of the stories he told about his dad at live dolphins in a restaurant. Okay, now he’s in Orlando, which is just still weird, devil-eyed dolphins in a restaurant, but his dad’s restaurant was actually at Wisconsin at the time, which is really strange. So we brainstormed and got the kind of creative juices flowing on the type of things that his dad did, that he does. And so that was a really good episode.
Another one was with Andrew Barnes. You’ll like this one Dobbin, so Andrew Barnes started, he has fourdayweek.com. And he talked about the Four Day Week and how kind of the flexible work revolution can increase productivity, profitability and well-being. And Dobbin has shifted to that over the years to take Mondays off to do fly fishing and take care of himself. And that was really interesting, because it’s a bit counterintuitive, right, you think. And you even experienced this Dobbin, which is like, my five-day week is jam-packed. Now I’m taking away a day, and your partners are like, You sure about this, we’ll talk about it. Okay, but that was a really good episode. Travis McAshan, also founder and CEO of GLIDE Design, who I interviewed, also decided to go to a four-day week, and he talked about some of the things he was doing. So check those episodes out.
This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So Dobbin we’re kind of like the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host and the company so they create great content and great relationships, but 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’ve found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people in companies I most admire 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] plus, I like to introduce people to my guests, like, specifically, all companies who have a big software company that needs APIs or integrations should be calling Dobbin, which we’ll talk about and how he does that.
Dobbin Buck is a marketing agency owner, and with his partners, they grew their agency from a team of five to 50 over the past 20 years that they’ve been in business. Dobbin’s expertise is in a number of things, so we’ll see what we can touch on today, from culture to leadership to business development to operational efficiencies to just marketing strategy and everything in between. They’re actually really interesting. If you go online and check out their company, they literally have a backwoods office. It’s a really nice backwoods office, by the way in Georgia, and he’s obsessed with fly fishing. Dobbin, thanks for joining me.
Dobbin Buck 3:59
Thanks for having me, Jeremy, it’s an honor to be here and excited to jam with you.
Jeremy Weisz 4:05
We’re going to talk about how you got into the agency life and even before that, developing museums and the dark points that led you here. But let’s just start off and tell people about GetUWired and what you do. And there is an audio version and a video version, so I’m gonna share my screen, and we’re gonna poke around GetUWired, but talk about what you do.
Dobbin Buck 4:28
Absolutely so GetUWired is a full-service web marketing agency, we specialize in development, marketing automation and creative content with our clients, we’re providing really a one-stop shop so a lot of influencers, different entities, different nonprofits, businesses, from small business to enterprise level endeavors are coming to us, and so we’re able to create design, create all their web properties, integrate complex systems that perhaps serve their leveraging and really provide them with a team that can lock arms with their vision and provide an outcome that is both enjoyable in regards to the journey they take with us, but also what we’re able to provide.
And we really hung our hats on the fact that we’re highly technically competent, so we have 15 full stack developers, so a lot of the SaaS companies that we’re partners with and leverage in our tech stacks have actually taken us on as vendors. So they’re our clients, and we’re doing integrations and development in the software systems that we actually use, which is a real honor, such as keep CRM system and Active Campaign, and number of others that we’re honored to work with on a regular basis, helping to expand the features and usability of their system. So it’s been a really fun and incredible journey.
Jeremy Weisz 6:20
So Dobbin, it’s hard to find developers, good developers. And the funny thing is, I remember listening to an interview with you talking there at one point, they were all in Georgia, probably North Georgia, right? So talk about your philosophy around that it was obviously important enough, it’s hard enough to find developers. Now, you’re like, I’m finding top developers, and they have to be in Georgia. So your philosophy around them being local, and even, I think, with Covid, you were a big proponent of just keeping the culture of the office going too.
Dobbin Buck 7:01
Absolutely. So I think where we may differentiate from other agencies is that a lot of my contemporaries are hiring developers. They’re hiring pre-developed talent, hired guns, and bringing people into the house that are theoretically immediately competent with whatever that they want to get into with our culture, what we have as a culture of mentorship. So we have younger developers coming out of college, maybe not even coming out of college. It is not a requirement to work for us to have a college degree, but they’re coming in with a desire some background, we have a skills test that we pass people through, but young developers can get in, and we start training them and fostering their craft to where we’re investing in them, and over in time, they’re becoming senior developers five, six years in. So we make an investment early on.
We do have projects and tasks that specifically can pertain to a newer developer, but we’re able to get them at an economy early on because we’re perhaps their first company to invest in them, or the second company. And we get that cultural stickiness, the senior developers are mentoring them. We’re guiding them on their career path within our company, and we just have an arsenal of amazing developers. I mean, some of these cats have been with me for 11 or 12 years. They came out of college single, they’re married now with three kids, own a house, and are like responsible adults. You should have seen them when they came in. And it’s just been an amazing journey. So that’s really the way that we’ve developed our talent is not so much soliciting people that have been at other agencies or things like that.
It’s really homegrown, and it’s served us well, and the key to it is having a culture of training and mentorship and a willingness to invest in these people, and when we have people beyond the early indoctrination phases of being a developer, we wind up arriving at a 70/30 rule, so 70% of a developer’s time needs to be billable, directly billable to whatever projects we’re working on, but we leave 30% of their time actually to the mentorship, ongoing training and cultural initiatives, to where they have really breathing room to grow as a professional in their craft and personally grow through some of the program that we have internally.
Jeremy Weisz 9:59
I feel like, as I studied for this interview and studied your company and you, that’s one of the major secret sauces that you have, which is the training piece, so you can develop the talent and leadership within and that’s a huge advantage. Talk about some of the things you do. And I know one of the things I mean having a mental health — I mean stuff that’s just outside the norm of what people are doing from a training perspective, I know you have the mental health coach, like, what are some of the things that you actually do for the company and the staff?
Dobbin Buck 10:37
So culturally, there’s ongoing, what we call continuing education, and employees sign up to be instructors, so they may be experts at nutrition or finance or meditation or different things that have helped them in their lives. So we pre plan this, and then we have scheduled training that people can selectively participate in in the company. So we have a lot of like personal development stuff that we offer to our team, because a happy healthy team makes for a happy healthy company, which makes for happy healthy clients right. Technically around the skill sets and crafts in the organization, we have regular programming and training on new methods of coding, new marketing strategies, new softwares.
We have our own interviews where we bring in top developers from software companies or CEOs to speak to our team, and they’re generally willing to do it because they’ll show up and you know, we’ll have 40-some people on the webinar, all eager beavers, wanting to absorb this stuff. So regularly, every week, there’s some sort of growth-oriented programming on top of our quarterly team-building events and parties, holiday parties and different things that we do to bring ourselves together physically, because we used to all work in this big headquarters to get you our cabin. And then at COVID, we did work from home. And then after COVID, nobody wanted to go back. So right now, we re-outfitted the headquarters into a Airbnb or a short-term rental that sleeps up to 20 people, so masterminds can come there.
Jeremy Weisz 12:34
Here we go. You’re looking at the screen. Here you go. Here is this? So people are gonna do a mastermind here?
Dobbin Buck 12:41
Yeah, we have masterminds, wedding parties, family reunions, all sorts of people rent the place. So it sleeps up to 20, and it has a beautiful, big fireplace inside, and a big couch area and entertainment systems and everything. So it’s for rent, and we use it ourselves, but when we aren’t using it, we keep it red to pretty solidly interesting.
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