Jeremy Weisz 13:07
Talk about the team building and what things do you do, obviously, in person, things you also do virtually?
Dobbin Buck 13:17
Well for team building, when we’re doing them in person. There’s this thing we have that my partner Melissa, came up with called The Redneck Regatta. And so I don’t mean to be derogatory about Southern people with long beards and things, but we have some terminology that we have fun with. And so we go to a lake, and teams of groups of four or five employees spread out all get to grab a bag of materials and then out of those materials, they have to build a raft. And then when that raft is built, one of the people on that team, they enter it into a race. So they have to go out into a lake, around a certain obstacle, and then come back to the shore, and whoever wins is the winner. So there’s a lot of team building and building something that will actually float for the trip, and then what’s going to be more aerodynamic or functional to win it.
So we do a lot of things like that, where there’s a lot of fun, the failures, as in business, the failures are as celebrated as much as the victories. We’re always failing forward. We’re always learning from our mistakes. It’s part of our culture. So when we do it in team building, we can have a lot of laughs and we always walk away from it. Oh, I could have done this a little bit differently, or we could have designed this a little bit differently. So that’s one example. But we have scavenger hunts. We have all sorts of different things. Normally, in our fourth quarter team building event, we have a philanthropic thing to where we’ll go wrap gifts for a charity, buy gifts for kids and wrap them and deliver them to people that can get them in the right hands, all sorts of stuff like that.
So we have a lot of fun. Sometimes it’s whitewater rafting or inner tubing, or you name it. We’ve tried it. The most recent one, we went bowling. We went bowling and had a Mexican buffet, and then had laser tag competitions amongst our team. And it sounds pretty simple, but it’s just fun to get people together and have a good time.
Jeremy Weisz 15:56
It sounds fantastic to me. I love it. And by the way, yeah, I love the Jeff Foxworthy Blue Collar Comedy Tour. So I could totally dig. I feel like there should be a t-shirt. I don’t know if you made T-shirts for the Redneck Regatta, but there should be a t-shirt. So I love that.
Dobbin Buck 16:14
Well, interesting, quick side note on that the newspaper came when we were doing it the first time, and I wasn’t paying attention. Some guy was like interviewing, asking questions, and they brought a photographer out, and I’m not really paying attention. But my strategy with my boat is I’m going to wear a speedo, and nobody is going to want to catch up to me. As long as I can get ahead, nobody’s going to want to be near me. It’ll guarantee me a win. So, I’m out there in this Speedo, and the newspaper took a picture of it, and in the Gainesville times there was like a full color, like six inches high by four inches wide photo of me carrying this watercraft in a Speedo, and my kids found out about it, and it just destroyed them.
Jeremy Weisz 17:08
You were getting your phone was ringing off the hook. Your wife was jealous from all the people calling.
Dobbin Buck 17:15
I didn’t say it was pretty, okay.
Jeremy Weisz 17:19
I’m curious on the structure of the meetings. You grew from five to 50 people. What is the regular cadence of meetings look like for the team and leadership team?
Dobbin Buck 17:32
Well, that’s changed over the years, but currently, we put more emphasis on internal team. So generally, every morning there’s team meetings, team get-togethers, first thing in the morning for the project managers hold for their creatives, developers and team members make sure that they’re getting on track for that day. Culturally, the leadership team meets every week. So we meet every Wednesday and go through whatever it is at hand. Once a month we have a meeting that all the teams are presenting their KPIs. Mostly it’s financial. So our revenue, our profitability, our overall employee efficiencies or how much retraining percentages and all that stuff. We track a lot of things for tax benefits, so like retraining credits, different things like that.
So we keep tabs on that once a month, and we have a bigger quarterly off site that the leadership team does, and we do a big, multi-day annual, for leadership, we take our rhythms pretty seriously. And then internally with teams, they have daily meetings. Generally, we’ll have a bigger meeting on Fridays, and then we also have a company meeting once a month where we have different programming we make company announcements. And generally, I’ll have a special guest. Sometimes it’s a software company or an influencer or a friend of mine. Ian was on it recently talking about Video Case Stories. Perhaps Jeremy, you could join me on a company meeting the future. It’s a lot of fun.
Jeremy Weisz 19:23
Yeah, what about you mentioned obviously, of partners. How did you meet your partners?
Dobbin Buck 19:34
How I met my partners was that early on in GetUWired? We were in that original five and we didn’t own the company, so we were working together. I had moved to the backwoods of North Georgia from Atlanta at the time with my wife, and she basically forced me to get a job. I wasn’t in a hurry to work up here and so she connected me with this little website shop that needed help with sales and business development. And I talked to the guy that owned it. He was like, well, I’d love to hire you, but I don’t think I can afford you. He looked at my resume with all the museums and different things like that. I said, listen, dude, I can’t afford to go home without a job, so how about you give me a job and we’ll figure out how to make some money together.
And he said, that sounds good to me. So we shook hands, and then, in a few years, myself and the senior developer and Melissa Allen, who was at the time, a project manager, the three of us gelled really well together, and we still gel after, 15, 16 years, the company’s 20 years old, and we bought out the company and moved forward from that point forth, and a lot of changes since then. We thought we were great back then, but I’m here to tell you we weren’t. It was small and scary times, and we’ve really been blessed with, I think, amazing company and great lifestyles for ourselves as a result of it.
Jeremy Weisz 21:23
Yeah, I think Dobbin at least I do. I learn the most from challenging times or mistakes. What are those that stick out for you in your agency journey?
Dobbin Buck 21:39
Well, the most glaring one is hiring the wrong people. So that, to me, is the most self-destructive, threatening element of any business is having the wrong people. Because you have the expense of hiring them, you have the expense of training them, you have the emotional expense of caring about them, and there’s just all sorts of equity that you’re pouring into individuals and when they aren’t in alignment with your mission, your purpose and core values, and there’s some sickness or disalignment, it affects the team, it affects the clients, it affects the profit, it affects the vision, it affects optimization.
So we learned pretty early on, and there was a period, I think, if I’m not mistaken, when we redefined our core values and decided to change the company. I let go seven or eight people in one day, many years ago, that’s how serious we took it and so that’s tough to do. Yeah, it’s really tough to do, because letting go of someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. You want to wish the best for them, and all it means is that there isn’t alignment with the vision of the company, and it’s not going to work. So somewhere else they could be super successful, just not here.
Jeremy Weisz 23:24
What was it? I’m gonna pull it up here. And from those seven people, was there any particular pattern of a specific, maybe core value, or maybe give an example, like here, we’re on your page here, you can see the getuwire.com, the core values, empower, respect, excellence, challenge, tribe, what was it?
Dobbin Buck 23:50
You’ll notice those spell out if you look down the side, erect, ERECT, so not intentionally, but I think it means that we, I tell people, that means that we’re standing tall, right? So, what were the…
Jeremy Weisz 24:12
That’s on the back of the Redneck regatta t-shirt?
Dobbin Buck 24:15
Yeah, yeah, it should be exactly, yeah. Exactly. I think it probably applies to what these individuals applies to everything here we empower and respect small business. It doesn’t mean we empower and respect small businesses when it’s convenient to us. It means anybody that we’re working with, we respect them if they’re difficult, if they’re argumentative, if they’re disrespectful, if I’m collecting revenue from them, and have decided to allow them to be a client, we empower and respect them till they’re no longer a client period. We honor the role and respect position that’s been changed now as we honor the role and respect the person. This applies throughout the company, throughout our team, respect your managers, respect your team, respect the leaders of the company, etc, and also we honor the role and respect the person.
When it comes to the client, we take pride and ownership of our work. That means we do our best, and we’re continuing to build our craft. We’re continuing to develop our craft to be the best that we can at what we provide our clients. We define and conquer every challenge. Definition is the Power Word here, we go to great pains with everybody they we work with as a client or internally at our company, before we do anything, we define what we’re going to be doing, what our objectives are and how we’re going to get there in very specific terms. When we have that done, we can conquer that challenge before there’s definition. It makes it more difficult to effectively conquer anything. And then tribe. We help small business, we blank together is the core value.
And so there’s a bunch of funny little things here. But everything we do, we do together. We learn together. We celebrate our successes. We learn from our failures together. We have team-building events together. We break bread together. And it’s a team effort.
Jeremy Weisz 26:24
Yeah, thanks for sharing that because I think, really hearing how you think through the core values is important, at least important for me, to learn and understand. And you make decisions off those core values, which even making hard decisions, which is letting people go. I want to run through, you know, the evolution of the services and also kind of evolution is the types of clients you’ve worked with. So if you were to take me kind of fast forward through your company from the services side, sounds like initially it was websites, right. Fast forward me through some of the things and how the services offerings evolved.
Dobbin Buck 27:07
Started out really in websites, web development, and then pretty early on, The company keep which used to be Infusionsoft. We got Infusionsoft for ourselves to do our own marketing automation so email drip campaigns back in, I mean, this is like 2008 Okay, so I got Infusionsoft in 2008 and all of a sudden I started getting results from it. I was like, you got to be kidding me, we’re getting sales appointments and all of this sort of thing. And it was just revolutionary. It’s commonplace now, but back then, it was like, holy moly. And so I was like, you know what? Everybody that we sell a website to, we need to sell Infusionsoft to too. Like you can’t have a call to action and just have people go into an abyss or to an email that gets lost somewhere, like you need a system.
So we started developing the systems, and then we grew from there. And so there’s a lot of marketing automation, full-bodied CRM solutions out there, keep has been the longest-term relationship I’ve had with a software company, and I really appreciate the company from the leadership down into the product itself. And so out of that, then everybody wants to integrate things with their website and with their CRM solution. So we had developers, so it’s like, hey, we can make custom API integrations. This is before Zapier and other things were commonplace back then. So we were integrating systems to get all the data into one place, connecting websites.
Pretty soon we got into developing membership sites and learning portals for influencers, some of the old guard, back in the early days of that, there’s some of our partners right there.
Jeremy Weisz 29:09
There’s those keep there’s that campaign, there’s Zapier. And I saw there was an interview with you and the Memberium founder too, out there. Yeah, like I mentioned these others, yeah.
Dobbin Buck 29:21
Yeah, so, and this is a very small list of our partners, but we just began expanding our expertise into a variety of different SaaS ecosystems, establishing our presence and how adept we were at their systems and leveraging them in our tech stacks and our strategies for our clients, and we really grew our agency, I would say, for the most part, through business development with SaaS ecosystems, and then out of that, clients represent people. We got into the influencer space pretty early because we were effective at developing funnels and marketing automation and all of that pretty early on.
Jeremy Weisz 30:15
I mean, you make these services stickier, ultimately, right? I mean, like, so for instance, like Memberium, maybe like, hey, these people need some help, and you have these partnerships built up with these companies, and you’re helping these customers really use these software or systems to its full effect.
Dobbin Buck 30:35
Absolutely, absolutely. And this is a little bit dated, so other systems, like HubSpot, we’re working with a lot. There’s Copper CRM is another one that’s pretty interesting that we’re working with. So the sort of the centralized point of a lot of these strategy is the CRM and the marketing automation solution. And then on the creative side, the website development and creative content. And of course, content is king in regards, none of this works without powerful content and thoughtful story-based content and the real strategy around it.
Jeremy Weisz 31:09
And Dobbin what’s interesting too is you’re serving this ecosystem, but some of these companies actually became your clients too, like themselves, like Active Campaign and Keep what kind of things did you do with like Active Campaign and some of these other software companies?
Dobbin Buck 31:29
Sure, like Active Campaign, Keep Webflow, Zapier partners of SaaS companies. But ultimately, what’s happening with SaaS companies, especially now, is that their internal product teams are busy on their product roadmaps, updating stuff, trying to bring out new features as quickly as possible, and so their developers are really tied to some serious timelines that they’re trying to make releases, and they can’t keep up with the integrations out there. So because we’re intimately familiar with the systems, the strategies, how the end users are going to be leveraging integrations and stuff, many of these companies have hired us to build the internal integrations out to other systems.
So as an example, with Keep, we developed their public Zapier integration. So if you go to Zapier, you want to leverage zaps to interconnect Keep with different softwares or different strategies. Ultimately, you’re using something that we’ve created, and we continually maintain that, put new features into it, ongoing working with that. So with Active Campaign, working on integrating ActiveCampaign with other softwares that they think will be beneficial to their audiences. So a lot of these companies wind up hiring us as an auxiliary development team that takes some of the weight of that stuff off of their own internal team, because they’re, like I said, they’re busy on their own product roadmap.
Jeremy Weisz 33:13
I want to talk about what you do with influencers, but I will say I want a tagline on your website somewhere like, we will build you a public Zapier integration. There’s a company, a software company, that I was thinking of using, and they don’t have this, and I can’t use it like it’s not unusable for me, because they don’t have a Zapier integration, right? And so I’m not technical enough, so I’m gonna have to send them your way. But if they did, I would definitely consider being a customer and probably pay them lots of money every year. So it’s a huge need for these companies, if they don’t have one. Talk about what you do with influencers.
Dobbin Buck 33:54
Sure, with influencers, we’re leveraging all of our technical and creative abilities. So I’ve been honored to work with household names for well over a decade, some of my favorite authors, New York Times, best-selling authors and amazing people. And so generally, what we’re doing is we’re technically helping with, it could be with their book launches, with their membership portals, their masterminds, their own ecosystems. They may have products that they’re selling from stage, all sorts of different things. So the technology around the systems that they’re selling, we’re developing a lot and helping them to make a scalable product that is easy to parlay to their audience, that won’t churn and will provide them with a great service or a great product. We’re doing all sorts of things.
So once again, we’re really a one stop shop, where a lot of times the influencers will need to go to three or four different agencies to effectively get all of these services. We’re really able to do it under one roof with one caveat that a few years ago, I stopped doing paid ad management. It was getting a little bit crazy for me, because some of my clients are doing, like, quarter of a million dollar a month Facebook ad spends and different things like that. And it just got really scary to be responsible for. It seemed like the good way to lose a client was to be on the hook for that stuff. And so I have friends that are better at that than me, and that’s what they do, and they do it well.
So I partner with other agencies around into the Ad Management, ad spend and some of the ad creatives, and then we really focus on the funnel and all the systems beyond that. So we’ve made some great partnerships, and I think it’s better for our clients, because you can’t be a master of everything, and particularly that discipline. Not to speak poorly of agency or anything, but they’re few and far between the agencies that really know how to do it, and it’s a smoke and mirror show out there that a lot of people aren’t getting their ROI on investment for that.
Jeremy Weisz 36:37
It’s a tough decision, especially to stop doing something when your clients are demanding of you. It takes discipline. And I was talking to agency owner the other day and this very topic, and that was my thought, they’re thinking of integrating it into their company and doing it. I’m thinking it’s a whole another skill set and a whole another set of issues, problems, processes, systems. So sounds like you kind of just tested it out and then went back to just specializing in what you wanted to do. You mentioned books. I’d love to hear some of your favorite resources and some of your favorite books, whether leadership business.
Dobbin Buck 37:24
Well, I read at least a book a week, sometimes two. So I’m reading in the morning. I’m reading in the evening. I always have within reach, a Kindle that doesn’t get alerts, or anything like an iPad or other things I can read in the darkness not alert my wife. So I’m constantly reading. I’ve read The Canon of Business Development books and how to grow a company and all of that sort of thing. So, you can only imagine, I’ve read everything in the last 15 years, but what I will draw attention to is, and what I’m reading now is I’m reading non-business books, and I find it really interesting to draw parallels and new ways of thinking about business. And I’m reading a book right now that is called The Guitar Circle by Robert Fripp.
Robert Fripp was the leader in guitarist of progressive rock band called King Crimson, and he, in later years, developed what was called a guitar circle, so a very disciplined circle of musicians that would live and work together to be able to create these amazingly complex compositions. And there is a philosophy of how they operate, how they treat their instrument, how they posture, how they work as a team, all this stuff I could go on. It’s a master class in itself of how his methodology for a guitar circle applies to business. So I’ve just been fascinated with his genius in this book, and the parallels I’m finding with it in the business world. And another recent book that Ian sent me in the mail, and I read it, and I was just like, oh, man, I just love this book. I would love to meet this guy is Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act. I know it’s very popular. It’s in all the bookstores and everything, but, I mean, I absorbed that book in about a day.
I was so captivated by it, and then I got it on Audible, because he reads it himself and listened to it again. And that really stimulated a lot of thought around my own personal creativity, my blockages for my own writing, for things that I’m doing in business. It really was interesting and enjoyable, and I highly recommend it. So those probably aren’t standard recommendations from somebody, but I like going sort of outside of the how many times can I read John Maxwell who I love?
Jeremy Weisz 40:20
Thanks for sharing that I love Outside The Box. I have some audible credit, so I’ll have to check out the Rick Rubin one. I’ve heard good things. It gives you, these books give perspective, right? And where you are today is because of all the life experiences. And so I know we mentioned the very beginning, there were some dark points that kind of brought you, and it added to who you are as a person and your perspective. Talk about some of those times and how they affected you.
Dobbin Buck 40:55
Sure. Well, a real short version is that my early career, I was in the military. I was in the army for four years, and I used the army college fund to pay for my college. And then for over a decade, I developed museums. So I worked for an exhibit house, and we built museums and built things at attractions like Disney and Epcot Center and really cool work. And so I was a critical team member. Worked out of Orlando and New York City, and just had amazing projects in US Astronaut Hall of Fame. I got to meet all the living Apollo and Gemini astronauts and Walter Cronkite the opening day, all sorts of cool stuff, a couple different projects at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Audubon Society, numerous science centers and museums. I think I have like 30 museum projects under my belt. And so I was in New York City, and things got a little crazy.
I was working on a project for the museum of sex, and they were just getting started on that. And so I was helping them in early development of it, because I had credentials like from the Statue of Liberty and Smithsonian and those sorts of projects. So I was working with them, and they let the museum was empty. It was over by Madison Square Park. And so they let me live in the top floor of the museum, because it wasn’t developed yet. And I just fell into a real bad time with drugs and alcohol and crazy behaviors and everything. And I went from being a really successful individual in high demand, to a person that you would go to the other side of the street to avoid on the sidewalk. I lost everything, and I was penniless and homeless, and I wound up in a hospital with my family wanted nothing to do with me. No friends left and I was in bad physical condition and all, and I came out of that, and there was a pivotal moment where I was like, I’m willing to do anything to have a decent, healthy life, and I’m eager to take that path, but if that path isn’t for me, let’s just be done with this now.
Sort of a Let’s go, or no moment, and as fate would have it, some people came into my life that were very helpful and were able to help lift me up and carry me for a couple years and I was a barista at a coffee shop, a stock boy at a variety store, making minimum wage, my brain wasn’t working anymore. I’d been pretty smart and done some amazing things, but I was fried, and so coming out of that, all I did was learn how to meditate, how to eat right, how to exercise, how to take care of myself, not worry about getting rich, just worry about what I’m doing today and surviving and not causing more destruction. And I left all my contacts out of my old business connections and everything. I never went back to them. I was net new, and I went forward and I started over again, and I met my wife, and we wound up back here in the backwoods of North Georgia, and I got a job at a little website shop, and then we built an agency, and now I have a wife and two amazing kids and live on a river that has amazing trout, where I can go fly fishing and I hang out back here, work from home and travel around the world to exotic locations, fly fishing and hanging out with cool people.
And it hasn’t been a bad deal, but, yeah. The dark days. I was 36 by the way, so some people think, I can’t start over. I didn’t have my first kid till I was 40. I didn’t get into the company that I own now until I was in my early 40s. Like it’s not too late to kick it in the high gear, and I tell you what, I’m 58 now, but I’ve got more stuff ahead of me that I haven’t done yet, new endeavors, new exciting risks ahead of me in this life. So you feel stuck in what you’re doing. Believe me, I’m not that capable or special. I surround myself with great people, and I play my role, and I have a decent life as a result of it in marketing and the world of agency and a lot of these software ecosystems, and people like you, Jeremy, have supported that and allowed us to grow and help a lot of clients and also feed a lot of families on my team. So, yeah, interesting.
Jeremy Weisz 46:15
Dobbin, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing your stories and lessons, and it’s really Thank God you came out of it and you had support, and you touched so many customers lives and the families around you with the staff, and it’s kind of worse to live by. I love what you said about worry about what I’m doing today, and that can apply no matter where we’re at in our lives. So thanks for sharing that everyone check out getuwired.com to learn more, and we’ll see everyone next time. Dobbin, thanks so much.
Dobbin Buck 46:48
Thank you, Jeremy.
