#018: Tommy Clark - How to Build a Profitable Social Content Engine in 2024

Delegation is a superpower. The ability to hire quality talent and train quality talent to do things that you did before, either as good as you or better, and to repeat that over and over to a point where you have a full operation doing something, I think is so impressive.

There's the things that you are genuinely A pluses at that come really, really naturally to you. What's really tricky is the things that you're like an A minus, that is technically not the best thing, and learning to hire for those, that's really the hardest thing. And so it's like handing off the things you're pretty good at but not amazing at is the hardest Tommy Clark is the founder and CEO of Compound, a social media agency focused on B2B executives and founders.

Previously, Tommy served as head of social at Triple Whale, one of the fastest growing e-commerce infrastructure companies in the broader Shopify ecosystem. In this episode, we cover his rapid social growth over the past 2 years, tactical playbooks for building a B2B social function, and his own turning pro journey while launching his agency. Welcome back. Today we have Tommy Clark. The founder of Clark Media, joining us today. What's up, Tommy?

What's up, guys?

Good to be here.

I got to start right at the beginning. Like, Tommy, I think, has had that turning pro moment more recently than like most people we've talked to on this podcast.

You're in the turn—

you're literally in it. So for context, Tommy just left a very good job to, to go off on his own and launch his own thing, and I think that's like It epitomizes everything we talk about, so I kind of want to just jump right into it. Tell us, you know, your, your mental model of how you actually decided to make the jump and what prompted you to do so.

Honestly, I don't think it was as much risk as it looks like from the outside. Um, it was probably more of a risk staying than leaving at that point because I got the job. It wasn't like I loved it, like probably the, the best job I could have gotten out of college. And crushed it. And then I started getting inbound from clients and other companies that wanted to have me run their social media on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I sort of accidentally built up this client roster. Like, I didn't intend to build an agency at first, and then it kind of just got to a point 6, 7 months in where I had my job and I also had this pretty significant roster of clients, and my time was literally capped. So at that point, I just— my two choices were either stay there and just kind of plateau and hang out or take the leap and see what happened. But at that point, like, it really wasn't as much of a risk.

What does it feel like day to day right now? Like, walk us through it. I mean, I'm sure you text both of us. Welcome to it.

First, welcome to it. Now you're living our reality.

One, welcome. And now two, literally day to day, what does that calendar look like?

The calendar right now, it's still very much a lot of client work. So for anyone that doesn't know, just to give some context, I run a social media agency for B2B companies. So, um, like companies like SmartTheme or Platter. I didn't know if the rebrand was like public or not yet.

By the time this launches, I've been on you to try to get it. You probably already have the new brand.

This is going live in 2024.

Yeah, basically. Uh, no, this is—

yeah, companies like Platter. I run their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. So both for the brand itself and founders depending on the client. And right now I'm still very much hands-on in the client work. I think a mistake a lot of— like we've talked about this— a mistake a lot of agency owners make is they start and then 2 weeks in they're like, how do I offload this? Or how do I, how do I hire someone to do this work? But I mean, I like the work that I do. I like social strategy or love social strategy, content creation. So I'm still very much in it. But now it's getting to that point where I've not mastered, but I'm very good at that skill. I'm not quite there as an operator yet, so I'm learning that. So my day-to-day is kind of context switching by the hour between like, gotta get this client thing done, but also gotta manage my team in the process of hiring. Still have my own newsletter that I write. So it's a lot of, it's all concentrated in one direction, but there's like a lot of moving pieces. And right now a lot of my focus is is starting to hire and get myself to be able to spend more time on like higher leverage stuff.

Have you gotten used to the just sheer volume of not just like client work in the day-to-day, but the volume and responsibility once you start your own thing?

It's hard.

And have a team and have customers and well-paying clients and customers.

Yeah.

Like it's a completely new reality versus when you were at Triple Whale, not even what, 4 months ago, 5 months ago or something?

Just about 4 months.

Yeah.

Honestly, that's probably the hardest part up until this point. That's what fluctuates the most for me, I think, on a day-to-day. Like, some day when you're on top of the world, you're like, this is the best, like, we're killing it. You close a handful of deals in succession, then you realize like, oh shoot, like, now I'm responsible for all this. And now thinking about hiring, I bring on my first full-time employee a week, like, next week. It's exciting and it's also like kind of terrifying.

Um, so congrats.

What was that?

I said congrats.

Thank you.

That's a huge milestone.

Thank you. That's weird though, like it's moving so quick that you move past those milestones.

My one advice to you is— and I feel like you would actually be able to do it, I'm about to say, better than most because you actually like write content and do these things. But like force yourself to take those moments to actually internalize the little wins because you're going to wake up in 12 months from now.

Yeah.

And you're gonna be like, oh, I just hired like my 15th employee. And like, it's a big deal that you hired a full-time employee. You were working for another business 4 months Yeah, yeah.

But TL;DR, moving really quick, a lot of exciting stuff, but very much getting used to— I think that, like you said, the pace and the volume is what takes the most getting used to. Because like when you're in a job, if you get kind of like— I don't want to use the term burnt out, but you get to that point where you're like, you're putting your foot on the gas and like nothing's happening. You can't just like be like, oh, I'm going to take 3 days off. That just doesn't work.

How have you— again, I'm not saying like you've learned to manage mindset yet and ups and downs, but what are a couple outlets or frameworks that help you manage those ups and downs?

Yeah, well, outlets, just stuff outside of the business. Like, I'm training for a marathon right now. I don't know if that's the best way to recover from running a business.

It's what I did. It works.

By running a business, just run away from the business with two feet in a heartbeat.

Literally. But that— cross the finish line. That, that helps a lot. And just fitness in general is a passion of mine. So having that in place, that's one boundary that I kind of have is if I ever notice that start to slide overextend, like I'm good with pushing for like a couple days at a time, like miss a couple workouts here and there. But if I notice that start to slide consistently, something has to adjust. So that's one outlet. And then just in terms of mindset, It's just getting the reps in. Like, there's really no way around it. I'm sure I'll come up with some frameworks as I go, but right now I'm kind of just like learning on the fly.

How have you shifted your perspective on prioritization when you were an employee versus now a business owner?

That's also one of the things that is challenging depending on the, depending on the day, because like as an employee you have like a very specific project you're working on and you take pride your work and you want it to be top tier. And I apply that same thinking with my clients. But there's some times where you have 4 or 5 different accounts. There's one account that is just objectively higher priority. So you kind of have to let one small fire burn a little bit. I'm still learning to allow that to happen. Like, that's what messes with me probably the most on the day to day. More so than the volume of stuff. Like, I can deal with the work pretty easily, I find. It's like the mental state of knowing that there's something that you can do on this account or this task or this process you can dial in, but literally not having the time or the resources to do it like at this moment and having to be okay with just letting that be. Yeah. So still, still working on that. Some days are better than others. But honestly, I think being around people like you guys and other people that are like building things and have their own businesses and are a few steps ahead, that's been the biggest help because I can look, I can like text you and be like, yo dude, I'm freaking out.

Like, what do I do? Daily texts. And you're just like, dude, funny you say that. 6 months ago to the day, I was dealing with the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that by far has been the biggest help.

Just having people there that you— for sure.

Yeah, especially as a— so I mean, the thing that both of you have done that I haven't ever done that I respect both of you for is being a solo founder. Like, that is— that takes a level of crazy to do, I think, that like 99% of even entrepreneurs can't handle. Because it's very different when you are bouncing ideas off yourself versus bouncing off idea—

that's one of the reasons why I'm excited to get my first employee on. Like, not that they're, they're not a co-founder, but it's still like another person.

No, but what's so interesting about that is the impact that they will have in terms of your ability to like communicate with them and feel like you have someone else in the room will be so helpful. Yeah, but at the same token, because you were able to get to this point on your own, like when you think about it from a monetary implication perspective, like your upside will be substantially more because you were able to get through, you know, the, the bad part of getting to here. But you're going to have someone along with you to help you now build the journey, like build along the way of the journey, which is super impressive because most people can't make it through those first, call it 6 months as a solo founder, and then they never get to see the light of day.

I think the thing that I've slowly realized, especially bringing on Claire, who's our head of ops, essentially co-founder in all but title, and she only joined a few months ago. And once you hit that phase, I mean, you know this with your co-founder, but— or your founding team. There's the things that you are genuinely A pluses at that come really, really naturally to you. And then the really tricky things, like I have a full-time VA, Echo, who's in the Philippines and fantastic. I know Echo. And you do know Echo, he's on email threads. And whether it's Echo or the team that we brought together at Verbatim, who's incredibly talented, it was fairly easy early on within the first 6 months to a year. It was like, okay, I clearly want to go delegate the things that I'm like genuinely C or D at. That I don't have the patience for. I'm just not a natural at, right? But what's really tricky is the things that you're like an A-, like an A at, but is technically not the best thing. And learning to hire for those, that's really the hardest thing. Even now, still dealing with that. If like I have these conversations with Claire all the time where I realize I'm like, I can do that. She's way better at me than that, but I'm actually pretty good. And so it's like handing off the things you're pretty good at, but not amazing at is the hardest thing.

Every day that goes by that I continue to operate the business— businesses that I'm operating, I continue to think that delegation is a superpower. Like, the ability to hire quality talent and train quality talent to do things that you did before, either as good as you or better, and to repeat that over and over to a point where you have a full operation doing something, I think is so impressive. And I'm so envious of founders who've built like an A-list roster of, of employees because I just— it's something that I struggle with internally and maybe it's kind of like an imposter syndrome mental block thing, but it's for the longest time I've always looked across the table. I'm like, how did they get so many A-players around their table? Like, how do I do that?

The best inspiration I've had is Andrew Wilkinson, who started Metalab, which became Tiny, which is now holding company. And MetaLab was just an agency. I think it was a design agency or something. I'm sure you guys have listened to his podcast and stuff. And the best analogy was about essentially running a cafe, that your job as a founder is to set the menu and to set the standards and the speed of delivery and the people, the servers and the cooks and everything. But after a certain point, you're actually degrading quality when you're taking orders at the front and then going to bake the cake in the back and then go serve it to the customer. And then go have them pay for it at the different register. You can't do all those things, but continuing to set like the pace and the quality is something you can do. And that's what I'm curious. I mean, you're in it right now of like, as you're bringing on a team, how are you thinking through, yes, delegation, but your job is still excellent quality every single time.

It's a fantastic question.

Did that just stress you out a little?

He's like, Adrian, that was the problem I was about to deal with after this episode.

That's a good question. I think the answer that comes to me immediately is just extending my time horizon. Like, things have happened so quickly. It feels like in the past 4 months, I've been in this for 5, 6 years, but in like content and social. But since officially launching the agency, it hasn't been long.

And being a founder, time multiplies way faster than being an employee. Mm-hmm.

I feel like I've aged like 10 years in the past 4 months. But it hasn't been that long. So I think I'm definitely rushing it a little bit, which is not a bad thing because it's good to have that urgency. But I think it's led to me potentially like taking on too many clients at once and realizing, oh shoot, like I can still service them, but now I'm overextended. I don't have as much time to build that processes and build out the, the sort of playbook so that I can get someone else in to fulfill on the social post and the community management and all the things that are in my head that I haven't quite been able to articulate. Um, so for me, I think it's just slowing down, bringing on that first full-time hire, getting him up to speed, doing that a couple of times, and then deciding like, okay, how do I want to grow this? Do I want to get more clients? Do I want to go deeper with the clients that I have currently? Um, but I think I've sort of made it through that first period of, of quick growth. And now it's like, how do we stabilize this and get it to a point where in theory I could step away from the business for like at least 2, 3 days and like stuff is fine.

One piece of advice I can give you, take it or leave it, just from a learning with myself, is that if you always prioritize the quality of your service or your product and not overextending yourself early on at the expense of your reputation, the opportunities will always be there and they're only going to compound. So like, it's very easy for you in this situation, we're like riding this momentum and all of a sudden you have 15 people who want to be your client, but like, you know that you can only take on 10, whatever the number is. I'm just giving you numbers, but you decide to take 12 on instead because it was here and you, you were scared of turning away a lot of money, whatever it will be. You have to recognize and trust that like, if you do good work, a year from now you're not going to be back further, like from where you are. If you do good work, you're going to have even more people who want to work with you. So I think having the maturity and the patience to know that like you're on the right path and every time you overextend yourself, it's at the expense of your reputation or potential clients. You'll start to like reel it in a little bit and be okay with not maximizing what my total revenue could have been this month. It's a learning that I had, at least.

I think that's 10 out of 10 advice, and I think it's also a lesson. It's one of the few lessons that you really do have to learn, and you have to fuck up, and you have to make those mistakes for sure, because it's exactly right. But we both made the mistakes of like—

and that's why I'm telling you on month 4, like, it's— dude, there's like the, the best word to use for is, out of pocket as it is, is like horny. You're so horny just to like do everything because you just started this business and all these people want to work with you and you're a yes man. And once you settle in, you're like, whoa, like, Tommy, I need to— you look yourself in the mirror like, I need to take a breath for a second. Yeah, more people are going to be here your relationships compound. You have people like us. When you do right by us, we're going to send you 5, and those 5 are going to send you 5. And like, I'm starting to feel that now for my company. I would say now for the first time ever, where I feel like that compounding effect is starting to become really real. Introductions, opportunities that I would never even fathom with certain people that I'm on calls with right now. And I think it's because I've just been able to trust in the process and understand that, like, if you do the right thing and you put in the work and you prioritize and you stay consistent, You're not really going to go backwards unless you're just missing the mark on something completely. Yeah.

Who do you look up to or admire and what they're building? And I'm down to talk about George Heaton if you want.

This guy Adrian is building this company called Verbatim. I'm down to just talk about Rep.

I mean, that's definitely one. I mean, as a comparable agency model like you, like, you're probably—

nailed it! I knew that was the answer.

I mean, it's the obvious one where it's like similar target audience.

He's like, I'm gonna throw a softball in the air and just let him Let him hype me up in 2 seconds. I really needed this.

How's your week going?

All right, so I'm gonna rephrase this question. Please. Who's a business owner that you look up to that's not sitting in this living room right now and why?

We just planted the answer in my head. Um, definitely George Heaton from Represent, someone I look at and it's like he's killing it. That's another example though, like they've been in business for 10, 11 years. Like it's been a minute and like just now in the past 2-ish years they really started to hit that like rapid growth. Um, I just like the content he puts out. Their clothes is dope. I copped probably way too much, wearing it right now. Yeah. Um, but they're definitely— and he also has that like sort of like health and fitness side too, which I appreciate.

Um, I think who else? What about you? Also, I want to open that question up to you as well.

Who do I look up to or admire? Yeah. God, I can't stop thinking about it. George. Um, David Ogilvy, by far. Oh, I think if you haven't read his books, I think you need to read them.

What stands out?

Um, his commitment every single day, sometimes being too much of a hardass on his team, but his unwavering commitment over long time horizons to excellent quality. And apparently he was an absolute jackass of a boss. But it's the same thing if you like watch the MJ documentary, like that great line of like, was I a tyrant? Probably. But I wanted to win and I wanted them to win too. And so if you can create an organization where it's not just you winning at an exit, but everyone wins, then you can find the right people and then push them to a standard of excellence every single day. But all that comes down to whether— this is why I really respect like your commitment to athletics and you too. I think this is why I like hanging out with you guys. Like having those non-negotiables and that environment allows you to show up every day with energy and with pace and commit to excellence every single day. And without that, you know, if you show up a little tired, a little hungover, all of a sudden things start to slip and then you start to lower that. So definitely Ogilvy. I'm trying to blank. What about operators like right now or creators? Operators?

I like what Sharma's doing. Nick, tell me more. I think the way he's doing content and his agency at the same time, it kind of has multiple things going on, um, is really interesting. Um, obviously has his newsletter. I also have a newsletter. So it's like, again, a lot of parallels. So like a lot— I spend a lot of time like looking at people that are sort of doing things similar to what I'm doing. Like, I don't— I haven't spent a ton of time reading or studying like the, the greats like Ogilvy or, or like business people that have like these, the books written about them and whatnot. It's like, I'd rather, I'd rather look at the people who are a few steps ahead and it's like, okay, I'm here right now. I'm trying to figure this shit out. Like, who can I look at that has pretty much done this? And what's the, like, what did they do that I can take and use to get to that next step?

I think it's a really, I think it's a really interesting point. I'm trying to, I'm blanking on where I heard this or where I read this, but it was something around the idea of like talking to people who have like made it already is like not as helpful as you might think because it's so unrelatable to like where you are on your—

or they go the route of like they made it and now they're preaching balance. Yeah, yeah. But it's like, look, every—

I think everyone here would, would take the opportunity to like sit down with Elon Musk for 5 minutes and just like hear how that guy works. But like when I think about what, what is the next thing I need to do in my business or in my life to make like an incremental step, like he's not the guy who's going to be able to give me the answer. You know what I'm saying? Like, you need to— I love the way you frame that where you're looking at people who are a few steps ahead of you, not people who are like on a different planet than you, because you— yeah, sure, we can take like the higher, the larger like lessons from that. But when I think about the lens of incremental improvement and 1% every day, you're not going to get that, in my opinion, from like the people who've already made it. It's the people that are like a little bit ahead of you who help you understand that it's possible to get to where they are. And like, here are the little tweaks I should be making along the way. Yeah, I think that's right.

Someone else also came to mind, uh, Danny Miranda. Oh yeah, that dude's a machine. Yeah, love him. I just like the pace of execution. Um, I've been really—

I don't think I've ever met someone more— like, I've, I've— he lives in Austin, so I see him pretty often, and that dude's just like— I, I haven't met anyone more—

do you know Zach Pogrom? Yeah. Oh, we talked about that. Yeah. Yeah, Zach. I know Zach's good friends with Danny Miranda. I was talking to Zach about Danny the other day.

Yeah, he's great. What, what don't people see? So like if someone just came into your audience who started following you, I mean, I didn't even know you that long ago. Um, when I first saw you, I was like, oh cool, like doing this creator stuff, building a bunch of social followings. You're at Triple Whale, but I knew you had some other clients on the side, and I knew you wanted to build a bunch of big stuff. And to do that, even now, like, I think you do a good job about pulling back the curtain But being friends with you and texting all the time, what I know that you actually do is wake up early and rip work all day, probably stressed out a lot of the time, and then work out and like go to sleep. And so I think that's something that's not talked about enough. And so not just like what's your day to day, but what are the hard parts that you're like, hey, this is sometimes like just a lot of work?

So I think there's, there's two things. Generally, it's not even that it's hard. It's, it honestly gets boring. Especially as a solo founder, it's like the path is pretty clear. So for example, looking at you, it's like I see where you're at a few steps ahead. I'm here, you're here. Here are the steps that I need to take to kind of follow a similar trajectory. It's not that complicated. Not that it's easy. It's hard as fuck. But like, it's not that complex. It just gets sometimes very just monotonous day to day. Doing the same thing over and over and over again, especially when the volume of work leads to a place where you're not doing much else outside of it. So it's just the same sort of monotonous task day in and day out with not much of an outlet. That's, that's one of the harder parts in this phase that I'm in right now. And then just by nature of the work that I do, it's, it's very creative and creative work isn't always something that you can brute force. Like if you're doing cold outbound or cold calling or or something that doesn't require as much creativity to do well, you can sort of just kind of grit and bear it and grind it out and, and do that. Still not easy, but it's, it's pretty straightforward. With creating content, if you had a creative wall, like, I don't care how disciplined you are or how motivated you are, if you're staring at a blank screen and you don't know what you're going to write about, you have 10 pieces of client content that are due tonight or tomorrow morning, that's when shit gets really stressful because then there's literally nothing you can do. And not nothing you can do, you figure it out, but that's just not a great place to be.

Do you have any sort of outlets to spark creativity when you feel like you get into a lull?

In the immediate sense, just going outside for a walk, going outside for a walk, going for a run, like just stepping away. Um, thankfully, like, I live in Austin, so I have a pretty good, like, social circle of again, people that are in a similar position, also building things, also very like-minded. So I have a lot of people in my life that understand like what we all do. So that makes it easier. But just getting up, stepping away and knowing that like, even though sometimes in the stages that I'm at right now, it feels like I don't have time, I'm still running my own thing. I can go and take the rest of the day off and it's fine. Nothing's gonna really happen. So if it gets to that point where I'm just exhausted and nothing's happening, just get up, go for a walk, go figure out something else to do, and then come back the next day. Um, and when it gets to a point where I'm like really— like where I was texting you, like, what was it, last week? I was just like— Friday? Yeah, I was, I was dead.

Um, he's like, dude, just text me. Also, he's like, do you need anything else because I'm going offline for the rest of the weekend? I was like, no dude, you're good. Uh, no, you said something that I want to go back to though, because I've been thinking about it for the last 2 minutes and I think it's really interesting. I think monotony is actually like a very good thing, and I think a lot of successful people can withstand monotonous behavior. Think about anything you're good at. You do it over and over and over and you flex the muscle and you just repeat and repeat until you become one of the best at it. I think that holds true across the board, like for my business, for your business, for yours, like You're very good at running a process. I'm like, let's get a case study. Let's take that information. How do we extract that into social content? Like you were doing the same thing over and over and refining it and tweaking it. And now it's like, you know, you're starting to see exponential results because of that. But fundamentally, if you really think about it, all the best businesses in the world were monotonous in one way or another until they nailed the thing before they were able to move on. Yeah. So I think that means you're on the right— you're on the right path. If you're feeling— you feel like you're doing monotonous work.

Agree. I think, I think social and content more broadly, honestly, I think your business too, like shipping velocity, I think in especially agency or consultative work is so often forgotten because you're like, okay, I built some, honestly, just a process, right? Like creating content, shipping it. It's a workflow. It's not a product, but if you want to call it a product, it's like, okay, I built X product that delivers, you know, potential ROI, hopefully more than I'm charging for. And I think with agency work, a lot of the time people are like, oh, I built this thing. But like social platforms change. Like Threads launched. I don't know if it'll still be around. Yeah.

What's the latest on Threads? I haven't gone on in like a week.

I think daily active or daily active users dropped by— I'm going to butcher the stats.

85%. It was the last stat I saw was 40.

I don't know where it's at now, but it significantly dropped off. Who would have thought? No one could have seen that one coming, but it's not dead, but it's definitely not going to kill Twitter now. Over a year, 2-year, 3-year time horizon, I don't know. Couldn't tell you. Things change very quickly, but I'm not— I'm still focused on Twitter, LinkedIn with all of my clients.

Why is LinkedIn getting increasingly interesting, especially for B2B owners?

What do you mean by interesting?

That could go as in different ways. Interesting as a distribution and acquisition channel. Like a year, even I feel like 6 months, a year ago, people were still shitting on it.

I'm going to substitute the word interesting with opportunistic. Okay. Yeah.

So for a while, LinkedIn had just insane organic reach. Like if you were on LinkedIn posting consistently, like even I missed the wave where if I was on it maybe a year, year and a half earlier, I have a friend that rode that wave and built a media company off the back of it. Justin Welsh. No, Daniel, Daniel Murray, Marketing Millennials, another Workweek newsletter. But he's crushing it and he built that off of LinkedIn and he kind of got in during that wave of organic reach. So that was the original reason. Reach is still good, engagement is still good over there, but it's very much like every other social platform. You have this like initial wave of they want people on the platform, everyone floods over, and then it kind of stabilizes. But still, why it's so interesting for B2B companies is that's where decision makers hang out and people are in the state of mind where they want to consume industry-related content over there. Whereas if someone's scrolling, even Twitter, Twitter's still very relevant for these companies. And I, a lot of my clients are on Twitter cuz there's like these niche pockets that are like D2C Twitter or, um, FinTwit or real estate Twitter, whatever. But broad— more broadly speaking, Twitter is still very much an entertainment platform. Most of your friends, or most of your, like, acquaintances that you knew, like, in high school or whatever, or most people are going on there to just scroll and laugh and be entertained. Same thing with Instagram. They're not going on there to learn. LinkedIn, I think, is the one social platform where a significant percentage of the users go on to actually learn or get work-related content, so it's easier to sell them and get leads. And also if you're sliding in the DMs on LinkedIn, hopefully it's for work reasons or business reasons. You never know, but it's just, it's a much more straightforward path to like get in front of a prospect or a customer.

Yeah. Why Austin versus New York? I know we've talked about this, but I don't think we've actually gone deep on it. Yeah. Well, Literally.

Um, did you almost move here?

No, I'm planting the seed.

He's, he's working on it. So as are several other people. So it's probably going to happen at some point. But Austin was because Triple Whale had an office there. I grew up in LA. I graduated from Cal Poly. Where in LA? Burbank. I didn't know that. So I grew up there. I graduated from Cal Poly. So like in San Luis Obispo, moved back to LA for a few months and then got the Triple Whale job. And Raba, the CMO at the time, told me, you can either stay in LA or move up to Austin. We have an office out here. Out here. I had spent the entirety of COVID at my parents' place. Like, I love my parents to death, but I was ready to get out and decided to go to Austin. Spent the— I'm still there, but was there for Triple Whale. Now that I'm not with them anymore, I'm kind of free to do whatever. My rationale for Austin right now is it's a dope city. A lot of really cool people have a really solid group there, and it's like the cost is low enough to where I can pretty much just go travel when I want to or have the flexibility to, like, come here for the weekend. Or I spent a few weeks in Spain in May and work from over there, like having the ability to do that. And now more immediately as I'm growing the business and thinking about hiring, it's also nice to have that flexibility of like, okay, I don't have to worry about super high taxes or higher cost of living. I can funnel that into the business for now. Yep. Um, but I could be convinced to come to New York. I think it's probably gonna happen at some point. I'm gonna do it. I'll do it at least for— I'm definitely like 100% gonna do it for a month or two, like an Airbnb and come out here.

But, um, we'll, we'll see what happens. Isn't New York banned from Airbnb?

No, there's still some Airbnb or like Sonder, one of those.

Oh no, you can find, you can find things. I was just—

yeah, I think a lot of, uh, I'm also intrigued about Austin living-wise too, and there's a lot of other cities I want to live in. I think a lot of folks are like, if I move to New York, you better not move to Austin. I'm not moving to—

that would be hilarious. But you forget that Adrian doesn't make these decisions anymore. There's someone else in his life who does.

So that's what happens when you have a girlfriend. You got to make decisions as a partnership.

No, I respect it. I'm just saying it's not— it's not— you can't relate, but it's not as easy as Adrian waking up tomorrow and be like, peace, I'm going to Austin. It's, let me talk to my girlfriend.

All right, last point of closure, which we haven't talked about yet, is Do you see a clear, like, where is Clark Media in 5 years, if that's still the name of the company? Yeah. Um, not even how you're getting there, but just like, how do you see this evolving over time?

That's a good question. I go back and forth. Like, some days I'm like, I want to scale it and I'll grow it and I want it to be this huge thing. Some days I am like, I want to be a freelancer again. So it just, it fluctuates back and forth. I honestly couldn't tell you what it looks like in 5 years. I think the most honest answer is I want to build a pretty lean team and scale to low, mid-seven figures. I think it's very reasonable and then figure it out from there. Like, that's the, that's what, that's what the plan is in my head. When I get there, I might realize like, oh shoot, this is the path from here to the next step is actually something I want to do. or vice versa. But that's kind of where my head is at. Then I also have the newsletter and the content play, which that's a whole different thing. Um, and honestly, I love content creation. So like, that's where like my mind goes a lot of the time.

Tommy's one of my content advisors. That's where you're getting energy from.

Yeah. Um, that and working with the right clients.

So I have one more question actually before we wrap up here. How does your job evolve with the evolution of AI?

I'll be honest, I haven't thought too deeply about this because I've been so deep in it right now. But I think at least in the short term, I'm not worried at all. Um, both from the copywriting perspective, but also from managing brand accounts. Like, you— AI doesn't understand platform culture and like the nuances of like each individual like sub-community. Like, you have to be a degenerate on Twitter and LinkedIn to like understand at that level. So I'm not super concerned about that. Um, but I do, I have started to play around with use cases for like speeding up the process of writing a post or drafting a post or taking a podcast and a podcast transcript and condensing it into a summary, which then can turn into a post. So like playing around with different—

can't wait to give you some episodes for that.

It's gonna make my life so much easier. Like you guys really need to Drop this already, please. Um, but that's how I'm thinking about it. I'm not concerned about it. That could change, but right now at worst, nothing comes of it. At best, it gives me, um, some new tools to use and to also increase capacity of my team. Um, so yeah, that's where, that's where I'm at.

That's awesome. I know this was a shorter one, but we appreciate you jumping on. Uh, you want to look at the camera, let everyone know where they could find you on social. Yeah.

So if you guys want to follow me, I'm @tclarkmedia on Twitter and just look up Tommy Clark on LinkedIn. You'll see like this bright yellow profile picture. Branding, baby. Hard to miss. So follow me there. And then I also have a newsletter called Social Files. You'll find the links to that at both of my social profiles. And we're at capacity right now with Clark Media. But if you're interested in me handling your social media presence, if you're a B2B company, hit me up and let's talk. Oh yeah.

Thanks for coming on, man. Yes, sir. Appreciate you guys. Thanks, Tom.