From Real Estate to Creative Agency | Wil Seabrook's Journey

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Welcome to another episode of The Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Polk City, Florida. No idea where that is, but I'm sure you're enjoying the water somewhere, I hope. Uh, joining me today, Will Seabrook of Light Touch Media Group. Will, welcome to the show.

Hey, good to be here. Thanks for having me.

So let's start with the origin story of Light Touch. What— I like the name. Give us the origin story.

Yeah. Well, so I had a partner for 11 years and we got into creative work almost by accident. I was working for— this goes back to 2008 and the market crash that happened at the time. I was working for a property developer. Okay. And that whole, that thing went as far sideways as something could go. And I have a toddler at home and a wife sort of saying, it'd be cool if we got some grossness. Yeah. And so one of the other guys that had worked there had an idea to start an agency. And at the time there were dozens of social media sites competing for dominance, which is interesting to think about. MySpace was still the number one social media site, just to give kind of cultural context, right? Yes.

It's not that long back to the dark ages here, folks.

Exactly. Things happen quickly. And Facebook was still kind of just, just on the rise. And so we were doing things like setting up social media profiles and things for people. You could really dominate Google results if you set up a profile on every social media site at the time. You could just own the first 3 pages of Google for your business name, things like that. And we were doing things like white papers and sort of helping people. And we got into online video really by accident. It was a brand new thing, which is crazy to think about.

And YouTube didn't exist, just for clarification.

Yeah, that's exactly right. It was brand new, just sort of becoming part of the cultural consciousness. And broadband internet wasn't even ubiquitous the way that it was now. The first iPhone had just come out the year before, right? Very different landscape. And online video at the time was just terrible, just janky voiceover. It was like the bad PowerPoint with horrible music and a horrible voiceover, right? And we were maybe one of the first agencies in the US to start offering this at scale. And it was really a fascinating experience. We sort of said, maybe there's a market for this. And it was like fish just jumped in the boat. I mean, it was wild. And so I sort of snapped my fingers and we had hundreds of clients and projects and the wheels almost fell off the cart for sure. Delivery became a serious problem pretty much overnight. And I had to hire a bunch of young kids and orient them and get them to make online videos, which was a new skill set. Right? There wasn't like a blueprint or a roadmap for it. It wasn't like now where the consumer tools had caught up. We were just making it all up as we went along. And, and it was a fascinating time. And I did thousands of projects like that. And then it sort of evolved as the market matured and evolved. We matured with it and offered higher-end stuff, started doing TV commercials, things like that. And so after about 11 years, my partner and I, he had, this was maybe his third or even fourth business. It was my first business. I had been a musician up until that point, so I'd had bands and record deals and things.

And, and you still got married? Yeah, she was not expecting a steady paycheck is what I know.

She is, she is one of a kind. She's a filmmaker as well, so we're, we're artists together. Um, and so, uh, anyway, I, I, uh, we— I went from not knowing much of anything about traditional business and having sort of an opinion to having very strong opinions after a decade of doing it. And so we, we decided that he wanted to do one thing, I wanted to do something else. And so I started Light Touch about 6 years ago. And my concept was to help people with just the amount of help that they needed, not to be heavy-handed, in other words, just a light touch on every little sort of part of it, all the way from sales and marketing through the production process, et cetera. And we've gotten to work with some, you know, household name companies and done some big fun projects and all kinds of different work as well. So marketing, sales, PR, training, hiring, mostly video, mostly online, but some fun TV commercials as well. And now I'm focusing on small business. I made a conscious choice, and we could talk about that. But the market changed so much in the last 2 years that I decided to pivot again. And so I've been very, very busy doing that. I was getting a little complacent. And so this had me roll up my sleeves and dive in again. And it's actually been really fun and really interesting.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the story of business is you can start doing one thing and end up doing something entirely different, except that the cycles are shortening as far as iterating. You know, IBM, I don't— I think their origin story was they sold rifles to the US government in World War I or some shit like that.

I didn't know that.

That's so cool. Right. You know, most businesses don't survive that long, right? And the reality is that the market changes, the needs change, and therefore you have to change. I am fascinated by a couple of things you mentioned, just to pull some strings. What is it like, me never having been in this situation, what is it like being in a business where people are like knocking down your door? Like having— I would think most listeners and most business owners have the opposite problem where they're trying to find more work. That's usually not a case where the fish are jumping into the boat. So what was that like?

Yeah, well, to some degree, we didn't know any better. Well, that's not true. We started the business absolutely broke out of the ashes of this real estate venture. We were both employees, but the guy had promised a ton of things that did not happen. I got my family involved. It was a mess and my credit was wrecked. My— I couldn't borrow money and I just basically had to eat what I could kill. And I would work 70 hours a week for grocery money the first 6 months. Right, right. And it was an industry I didn't know anything about. So I was just diving headfirst, figuring it all out, Forrest Gump-ing my way through it, as I say, just from day one. And so that, that was quite intense. And so when this thing happened and it really hit, it was just in a sort of a sea of problems that you're solving as an entrepreneur. It was one box that just stayed checked for a good long while. And that part was really nice. I think that, I don't know if it's the nature of entrepreneurship or just my personality, but I tend to focus on the problem that is most urgent at any given time. To some degree, you're keeping plates spinning and the plate that's wobbling the most gets the most attention, right?

Right.

So this was, we were happy about it. No question. Uh, it was, I think the thing that I really enjoyed was frankly how cheap and easy it was. So we would send out an email and just get, it was basically, I think we were, we were doing almost exclusively email, direct email. We would pay for lists and we would send it out. And I think for every 100 emails we sent, we got a really good, strong quality lead. Which anybody who knows anything about email lead generation, that's pretty incredible. Like somebody we could close every 100.

Yeah, that was a sale, one sale out of 100. Yeah, no, I mean, sometimes you don't get 1% response rate at all, period.

Like, yeah. Yeah. So that part was, it was lovely, you know, and it also allowed for a very quick learning curve. And I think we adapted, we were smart enough to recognize the opportunity. It was kind of like setting a grenade off in the middle of our business. And so I essentially stopped everything else I was doing and started started a company within the company to address that need, which was fun for me, stressful.

So, so I'm going to paraphrase. I'm reading between the lines here. It was intentional, but this, the hitting that was accidental. Hey listeners, are you ready to turn your passion into profit? Then grab a copy of Profit First for Creatives. Click the link in the show notes to purchase a copy. And if you're not ready to make that full commitment, you can download a free copy of the first chapter. Check it out right now.

Yes, it was definitely a sort of a lucky break. And I mean, I remember distinctly having a worry maybe 2 years into this. Well, what are we going to do when everybody has their one explainer video? That clearly I'm not clairvoyant or a great predictor of future markets. But, but there was a real concern because it was kind of— that was the box people were checking. Well, okay, I've got my explainer video, got that now for my website, for maybe for YouTube. It was starting to gain some traction. But again, it wasn't anything like the market is now where it's, it's fully matured and everywhere you look, right? Video.

You could have backed up 10 years from that point and said The same thing about a website.

Totally.

Everybody's got to have a website, right?

Exactly right.

Do you see any similar opportunities currently? Like something that like everybody's clamoring for? Yeah.

Well, interestingly enough, I spent, especially at LightTouch, my agency that I've owned myself for the last 6 years, I purposefully went after only Fortune 500 companies and really Fortune 50. I mean, I think I've worked with 30% of the Fortune 50 or something on projects. So that was a very successful just business method. I found the work very interesting, et cetera. So it worked for me until it really didn't. And I really had to pivot.

We can go into that if you like, but yeah, no, I'd like to hear what that pivot looked like. What, what wasn't working with the—

yeah, well, essentially several, it was kind of a, it was a perfect storm and a slow motion car crash at the same time. So it took a long time. When you do well as a business, you can coast, you can You start gently going downhill for quite a long time before it becomes really a 4-alarm fire. And so I spent a long time sort of going like that, trying to fix it, trying to edge it back up, trying to edge it back up, spending months and months and months and tens and tens of thousands of dollars trying to correct it. And it just wouldn't correct. And what I was not acknowledging was the difference in the market. The market had gone from brand new in the time that I started in it 8,000 projects and nearly 15-ish years later, the market had completely matured and commoditized to the point where when I first started doing it, it was like, here's this fun new shiny toy, almost like the analogy of the first iPhone, right? And it would be like using the same business model saying, look, this phone is a web browser and you can take photos and send emails and it's a phone. If you did that for 15 years, people would be like, Yeah, it's called a smartphone. We get it. Right. Right. And so I kept using the same pitch, the same promotional tactics, targeting the same people with the same thing. 15 years later, they're like, yeah, we're good, bro. And there's like 8,000 other people doing the exact same thing. And most of them are cheaper at this point than you are. So, you know, what, what do you have that we haven't seen lately? Like last week, right? And so we, we just stopped getting responses and AI just set off a nuclear bomb in the middle of virtually every industry, but certainly in the creative industry. And, uh, the issue that we found is that the people that we work with, like a marketing director at a Fortune 500 company, they know that AI can't do everything, but their boss's boss does not know that yet. He's learning it.

Just do it on GPT. You don't need to hire them.

Just get AI to do it. We actually created a creative video which I could share with you if you're interested, but I'm sure it's humorous. Yeah, can't AI do that? And it was really the crux of what we were communicating is you cannot replace the human spirit. And that's what we found is that for repetitive tasks, for technical tasks, for things like that, it can be extremely helpful. Noise canceling in background, things like that, workflow automation, incredibly helpful. But when it really comes time to make a true creative decision and enhance the quality of a communication, you need not just a person, but you need someone with experience and expertise who's been there, who understands— and an artist, in my opinion, someone who has a creative flair and also understands the technical aspects of things. So there's a very long answer to a simple question, but the pivot was I'm going to stop being just a content creator where a large company comes in and hires me and says, we need a TV commercial or we need a training video or what have you. And I work on that I hand it over and they say, thank you very much. Now we're targeting small business owners, mainly medical practices, dentists, people like that. And we're doing everything for them. And I really enjoy that. These are my people. They're small business owners. They're about, I would say, especially with doctors of any kind who own their own practices, maybe 10% of them really are interested in marketing. They have some, some, uh, they enjoy the concept of maybe being an influencer, or they, they enjoy making videos. It's fun for them, right? Maybe 10%. 90% just want to help people. They just want to do what they went to school for. They, they want to do— be a great dentist, they want to be a great doctor. They're annoyed at all of this. They're overworked. They're, they're, they're stressed about— they didn't— most of them didn't go to business school of any kind. They went to—

doctors generally are very bad with Totally.

And then also, and the other thing I'm finding, which is very new to me, is they're all traumatized by people taking advantage of them. And, you know, when you go to a Fortune 500 marketing director, it's not their money. You come, I've done work for all of these household name companies. They see the work, they see the companies. They're like, all right, he passed their vetting process. Clearly the guy knows what he's doing. He's probably fine. Our pricing is in line. We don't give them any reason to be concerned. But with these guys, they're like, you're the fifth marketing company I've talked to. All four of the others took thousands and thousands of my dollars and did not perform, full stop. And then we're just like, oh, sorry, man. We tried.

We did the best we could.

So we had to work through all of that, all those objection handlings, which is pretty—

Yeah. Well, I mean, I kind of feel like I'm a prophet preaching this message because I keep saying it so much is that there's a lot of crackhead energy out there in the marketing world. And I mean that in the sense that it's, it's the marketing agencies are the crack dealers and the small businesses are the crack users. And there's this really dysfunctional thing going on where they're spending money They're getting high, but there's no long-term benefit to the company or the provider, right? I mean, I was shocked to learn, I went to a mastermind of agency owners earlier this year, and they're sitting around talking about their numbers, and a 50% churn each year was considered acceptable. And I'm like back here in the corner and I'm like, that sounds awful. Like, doesn't that mean you're doing something wrong if you only have a customer for 6 months? Like, and, but it's just kind of accepted, right? Like, well, this is just the industry standard. And I'm like, hmm. Yeah. Um, as you were talking about AI, you know, if you're talking about things that peop— everybody wants, like a website, uh, online video, uh, iPhone, everybody wants. Um, I don't know if there's a direct analogy, but AI seems to be the thing now that everybody's grappling with, like small business owners, right? Okay, so there's this AI out there, how do I use it? I'm wondering if a marketing agency could leverage that to say, we're gonna set up the AI to do your marketing for you, right?

Like, that's exactly what we're doing. We're basically solving—

Well, you're brilliant.

Well, I like, on a good day, I have my days. I have my moments. Yeah, when we work our way backward, I call it the cup of coffee. Drill. So, what you envision, and I think this is so important as any sort of entrepreneur, anybody who sells a product or service, especially with services because with a product, you have— in that case, it's a coffee mug or something, right? It's pretty standard. This is what it is, right? But, especially with services, it's like, "Okay. Well, what is the finished— call it a valuable final product, right? What is the final product here that has exchange value? Means someone's willing to pay me money for it." word, right? And so in this case, it's a steaming hot cup of delicious coffee. It could be a latte, cappuccino, whatever floats your boat, right? And, and what you do is you articulate that perfectly because it's very different, right? It's like, like making cappuccino is different than black coffee or whatever, or espresso, right? It's a very different process, different machine, different everything, right? Right. You have to start with where you're going to end up. Then you just take it one step. What's the step right before that?, right? So in this case, you would need a mug to put it in. You would need the steaming hot, whatever pot, whatever container of coffee. You'd need whatever you're going to add into it, sugar, cream, et cetera, right? And a foamer if you need to foam it. So these are the steps right before you're putting it together. Okay, well, what do you need before that? Well, you need beans, right? Coffee beans, grinder, are they pre-ground, et cetera. And you work your way, you work your way from the cup of coffee all the way back to where you are right this minute. And the beauty of working it backward is that you're not going to miss anything if you're just logical about it and just observing what's needed. You're not going to skip out on vital steps. Whereas if you're just sort of an entrepreneur saying, well, I really want to do this thing, but I don't know exactly what it is. I don't know where I'm going to end up. It's like trying to set your map, your GPS, and you don't know the address or the coordinates. You're only ever going to have so much success doing that because you don't know exactly where you're going. But if you start with the destination, it's as simple as working your way back step by step. Step by step. That's always been very successful for me. So when we made this pivot, I said, I'm going to help these guys solve their real-world problems because they don't care about marketing solutions or the greatest, latest and greatest widget or whatever it is that I'm selling. They don't care about AI. They care about what AI can do for their business. And what these guys care about in my experience is new qualified patient leads in the door predictably, scalably, affordably. That's it. They just want new patients. So every single thing that we do is designed to facilitate new patients. And we're using advertising, we're using social content, we're using AI. We built AI agents, text and voice, and we're building these landing pages. We're driving traffic to those landing pages. And 24 hours a day, they can, somebody can text, they can, well, I have this thing, or I've been told Invisalign won't work for me. Right. Actually, here it will. And we program the answers. So it's like the doctor is there on call and you only have to program it once and they get it right. And the AI is smart enough now that it actually really does a genuinely great job. And you can get on a phone call and I'm very transparent. This is important to me because we've probably, you've had calls with AI and you may or may not have known that it was AI.

I've had lots of voicemails. I haven't had to talk to anybody yet.

Yeah. Well, they're getting so good now that it can take a moment. Like, this is AI, actually. No, no.

Well, I only know it's AI because I keep blocking the numbers and they keep rolling to a new number. And the voice, like the messaging, and it just, you can tell, like it sounds real, but it just doesn't feel real.

Yeah. But if you know you're talking to a robot to begin with, then you're pretty impressed with the robot. And it's answering questions. And yeah, and it's— and so that part's been— it's been really fun and interesting. And I went from being the kind of business owner who was apprehensive about AI, stressed, frustrated, feeling like this thing has come in and ruined my game, that I had— I had a really good thing going and this thing came in and shot at all the pieces, to being the person now who can take advantage of this. And I'm eager to learn and I'm discovering new things every day and I've really shifted my viewpoint. I had to make a very conscious decision. I said, this is a tsunami that is coming. It's coming for everybody and you can protest it. You got— I have friends, agency owners, other people, I'll see them online. This isn't okay and they shouldn't do this. And I'm like, guys, the train has left the station.

It literally is. Shouting into the wind. Yeah. And shaking your fist at the sun.

Like, I mean, exactly. Yeah. Like you're gonna get sunburned. And so I just decided this is a tsunami that's coming. I'm either going to get crushed by it, which is what was starting to happen, or I'm going to learn to surf this thing and I'm going to ride this wave the way that I did the first wave of online video. Yes, I sort of went back to that successful action. And since I made that decision, everything has changed for me. I got back, I got, I got my hands dirty again. I've been working my butt off. I slept like 10 hours last night. I never do that. I hit a wall about every 2 months. My wife jokes I have an on-off switch. And I just crashed like 8 o'clock last night and just barely could barely get off the couch to get to bed. And because I've been working so hard, but I'm also really having fun. It's really interesting. And I'm back in entrepreneur mode, in student mode. Like, this is all fascinating and interesting. Look at everything that's happening. So it's like the Industrial Revolution. You know, you look back on it over 100 years later with perspective. But can you imagine the first 5 to 10 years of it? Imagine being the farmer whose 3 sons leave to go to the city and daughters. Everyone just leaves, right? You've had a family farm for generations and all of a sudden all your kids are just leaving. I don't want to live like this anymore. I'm going to go to the city. I'm going to try my fortune. I'm going to get this job. And then they end up working at a horrible factory, you know, getting pollution and all this stuff on, you know, black lung. Yeah, totally.

Exactly. Well, you know, it's interesting you said that because 10 years ago or so, I did a deep dive on AI. Maybe it was about 8 years ago, before LLMs. This is just me trying to be Bill Gates and read everything I could about a subject. Actually, that was the inspiration. He's not been an inspiration much in my life, but that was his inspiration to me. It was, you know, get all you can on a subject and go off and read on it. And one of the books I read was about the Industrial Revolution, because just like you said, I mean, I made the connection that like, this is similar. And what I was looking for was what didn't change. Right, right. Because some things didn't change, certain aspects of human behavior persist. But, and there's not a clear way to predict like what those changes are going to look like, right? Right. Especially when you're in the middle of it. But you can even go back to the advent of the internet and how initially I see a lot of similarities to where we are to the late '90s, where the internet is there, everybody's pouring money into it. And everybody's buzzing about it, but no one's— not no one, but few people have figured out actually how to make money with it, right? But what that led to is to over-speculation and the dot-com burst. And I think we're going to have a similar AI bubble here where it pops. And then you're going to see the people come in and make real money with it because that's what is going to happen. The technology will prevail. It will persist and it will succeed and people are going to figure out how to make a lot of money with it. But to your point, if you're just going to stand there and scream at it, you've got the wrong attitude because you can't stop it.

Well, and I think there's never been more of a golden age to be an entrepreneur than now because you've got almost somebody you can bounce ideas off of. There's this wealth of information and knowledge and you still have to make judgment calls. They're still hallucinating. You can't, you can't just take it all at face value. But I say to my 19-year-old son all the time, and anybody else who will listen, that prompting is the number one thing they should be teaching young people now more than ever before. And I liken it to being an executive. An executive's job is to get other people to do work and to do work well and not be unhappy about it. They may not love it. It may not be like the greatest job in the world, depending on what they're doing, but you want people to enjoy their work enough that they want to keep showing up and doing it and being a good team member and things like that. And prompting is the same thing in my experience with AI. If you give it a great, I mean, a genuinely fantastic prompt, typically AI is going to give you back some very helpful, useful information. If you give it a mediocre to poor prompt, it's going to give you bad results, sometimes catastrophically bad. And so just learning, it's almost like anybody who's willing to who have an entrepreneurial viewpoint or an executive viewpoint has a better chance of succeeding and just more opportunity. And it's just kind of this, this wide open Wild West sort of landscape that we haven't had in a long time, really, probably since the turn of the millennium.

Right.

Right. And now it's coming around again. And I think that if you embrace it and you make a game out of it, then, then you can do really well. You just can't take it all so deathly seriously because it's going to feel very serious if take it all super seriously, but if you have fun with it, there's just kind of infinite opportunity in front of people.

Yeah, I think when approaching AI, I think you look at it exactly as how you've looked at it is, how can I use it to solve a problem? Right? And you can even use AI to help you figure out how to solve the problem. But the two things that I think that are critical in using AI is one, judgment, which That's a very broad term. And a lot of judgment comes with experience, with wisdom, with understanding whether what the output makes sense, whether it lines up with what you're wanting, right? So that's judgment to me. And also context, like, you know, a medical AI may be able to take all of your imaging and all of your symptoms, all your blood work, all of that, and give you a diagnosis that's accurate, right? Like, most likely it's this, most likely it's this, and these are the outliers. Okay, what the hell do you do with that information, right? That's the context, right? You know, the AI doesn't understand your family situation, your personal history, like your goals, your desires, like what, you know, and, and, and And that's one of the best books I read during that time was a book called Prediction Machines. And it was not written by computer scientists. It was written by economists. And they talked about what the age of AI was going to look like as predictions became cheaper next to zero. And it was judgment and context. Was going to be the in-demand. Because all of these, all of these answers are going to be out there for you. But do you know how to use them? Do you have the wisdom, the experience to interpret the results? And the other thing was being able to understand, which you spoke to, the machine's limitations, like the machine's blind spots, and being able to work with the machine to get the results that you want. And, you know, that book's probably 10 years old, and, and I think it was, uh, prescient. I mean, like, yeah, that's exactly what, what you see. Um, but also in dealing with AI, you have to have, uh, the, the ability to, uh, think rationally. And, uh, that is, is a skill that's lost a lot in our education and in our society. Like just the, the be able, you know, going back just like the Socratic method, like, do you know how to think? Do you know how to reason? And I think you're exactly right telling people that that's what they need to learn.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I feel extremely fortunate to be of the generation. I'm basically Gen X. I think I was born in 1976. And so, yeah. And I think we really had the best of both worlds. Like the internet became really public. I had my first internet connection the summer after I graduated high school. So it was available here and there, but it became widely available and it was dial-up and slow as molasses.

You had to load AOL before you could, you know.

Oh yeah. It was not, it wasn't remotely what it is now. And so we had the experience as kids of just going on, there were no cell phones and things like that. And so we just went out and we're out socializing out in the world, you know, getting our knees skinned up and breaking bones and just having an interesting life experience. And not to say that people don't have that now, but I think it's incredibly, it is very hard to compete with the little screen. I mean, the little screen is designed, built from the ground up to keep you glued to it every moment. It's, it's like the Pixar movie Wall-E. I don't know if you ever saw that.

I didn't. I know the movie, but I didn't see it.

It's so worth seeing. It's really just as an adult, it's a charming movie anyway, but it's, it's a, I don't know that they meant it exactly as a warning, but it was, um, again, prescient in terms of what it was, what we're all sort of turning into. Right. And there's, I don't remember his name, but there's, um, there's a photographer and he's, he, he takes, uh, portraits of people, uh, in certain settings and then he digitally removes the phone. Phones from them. So you just see people interacting or not interacting as they're in close proximity with each other. And you'll just sort of see a hand there, but you don't see the phone. And it's really eerie and interesting. And so I'm very grateful. And I also think that it's sort of the pendulum is maybe going to swing back in the sense of people who are— life experience is going to matter again. More than I feel like it has in the last 10 years. I think we sort of did this social experiment where young people, to their credit, had tools and the ability to communicate and gain attention and gain an audience in a way that they never did before. And they really did. And I think people started more than ever sort of listening to young people, like, okay, they're the future, they have it all figured out, they're going to sort of tell us how the world is. And I think people maybe my age and a little bit older were like, well, Okay, hang on. Like, I get it. You guys definitely have some really great stuff to say, but like, we're not total morons either. Like, we've been through some stuff that you guys haven't been through yet. And I think that the, I think there's maybe a pendulum swing coming in that regard as well, as you were saying that life experience, expertise, perspective is going to matter again in a way it almost like it went out of fashion for a minute. And now everyone's like, all right, you know, It'd be cool to have somebody who knows what they're doing. I know from my own experience that having lived a bit of life, it feels good. It feels good to know what I'm talking about. It feels good to go to somebody and say, okay, I'm not just making this up. I know this because I've done this thousands of times. Because someone will say, yeah, but this is wrong. And I'm like, no, it's not. And here's why. And I've seen it over and over. And I tried it that way. I tried it that way 100 times and it didn't work 100 times, but this works. And here's why. And that, in my experience, comes with trial and error and doing it the right way a bunch and doing it the wrong way a bunch. And that it takes time to get there, you know.

Yeah. And I think in marketing, it's really important because some of those fundamental human conditions and behaviors don't change or the motivations don't change. Right. And so you, you can't— people are not levers. You can't flip the switch and know that they're going to do exactly that. They're predictably unpredictable. But that's where the judgment comes in. It's like, yeah, I think that people are going to react this way, but I'm not 100% sure. But my experience tells me, based upon these things, that, yeah. I'm going to pivot a minute and ask you about the dissolution of your partnership, because that's also fascinating to me. What, what did you guys disagree about that, that caused that separation?

It's funny because it was not an amicable parting. So it was a nasty divorce, which I wasn't expecting. And in hindsight, now that it's been many years and I'm fully moved beyond it, I have a more generous view of it. And I have a more generous view of him because part of what was happening is in our old partnership, he was the CEO. I was the chief creative. I was sort of a COO. Part of the friction is that I was kind of all over the place all the time.

As most creators are.

Yeah. And once I became a CEO, I was able to view so many situations, similar situations in hindsight where it's like, okay, now I get where he was coming from. I see why he made that decision. We were always very different people. He was very sort of conservative, Joe Business, very good looking guy, always really well put together. I was always the guy in the t-shirt. Shirt out there, making, you know, a hat on backwards, getting sweaty, getting the shot or whatever, right? And so just personality-wise, there was just, I think, fundamental friction in that regard. But I think again, we sort of, we started where he had a lot of business experience, relatively speaking for his age, you know, I think it was his third or fourth business. And I had very, very little. And so I was just looking to him for guidance on on all the fundamentals, all the basics. And then over the course of an 11-year partnership, we sort of reached much more parity where, where, and I built our creative vision. I built our video company from the ground up. I hired every single person. I worked out all the policies and procedures, et cetera. I did our first 300 videos. I wrote the scripts. I did the voiceover. I'm not a voiceover guy, but just, it was just simpler and faster and easier and cheaper to do it. And it worked. And so, um, and so I, I took it all very, very personally. And what I should have said at the time, I should have shaken his hand and said, you know what, this is an amazing opportunity. I really appreciate you. I've learned a lot. I think it's just, I think we're both going to be happier if I go my own way. And instead I took my ball and I went home and I made him totally wrong for it. Uh, got into a tiff with him and then we ended up hiring lawyers and, you know, he, and he really, He made it very, very challenging for me. And even that, in hindsight, he was just— he was a business guy. He was like, you want to throw down? Okay, I'll do that. I'll pull every lever I have in front of me. And he outsmarted me. And I ended up virtually giving away 50% of a lucrative business for the opportunity to start over. I didn't have to sign a non-compete. There was— I mean, there was a little bit of that. I couldn't directly go after our current client, Foster, but otherwise I kind of had free, free range to do what I wanted to do. And that was more important to me. I had more faith in my own ability to go forward and make it go. Um, instead of trying—

how much do you think you left on the table there?

Easily hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, yeah, if not half a million, maybe more. Um, and that was fine. Uh, it was— I had enough to— I had a soft landing and I had a good 6 months where I didn't have to make a penny if I didn't want to. I could hire the new people that I hired, a sales guy, hired a marketing guy day one, uh, and then was just working it all out for myself kind of newly. And what took me 6 years to build the first time, it took me 6 months to rebuild it. And I got to keep all the stuff I liked, but I got to get rid of, because I was starting over, I could get rid of anything that had been bugging me, but it was just so institutionally, it's like trying to steer the Titanic. It's hard. You know, you can't pivot on a dime, but when it's brand new, it's all hypothetical. You can do whatever you want. So that part was fun as well.

Yeah. My business lawyer and personal friend, he and I knew each other since grade school. He said business partnerships are like marriage without the sex. Exactly.

There's no sacred sex.

Right. And so he generally says no, you shouldn't have business partnerships. However, I think that dynamic that you described, where I'm just going to loosely describe as left brain, right brain, and that's probably not a correct label, but the creative divergent and the convergent analytical, you know, that's where the magic happens in business because you have to have both. Sometimes that is found in one person. But the magic is if you can find that yin to your yang and do it. But it's hard. It's very hard to find. It's hard to find the sum because it is marriage. You're talking about, okay, do you have similar values? And who's in charge when those values don't align? Like, it's real hard to do that with a 50-50.

Like—

Agreed.

Yeah, every— you just articulated perfectly the— all the different sort of friction points, the things that worked well, that didn't. And I'll say that one of the sort of great joys in my professional life, now that I'm on the other side of it and I'm building this new business model, it was my unwillingness to— on a gradient scale, it wasn't perfectly totally unwilling, but it was just not willing enough to develop the other side, the analytical side, this sort of just Vulcan viewpoint of a CEO, I did it very reluctantly.

That's not logical, Will.

Exactly. I was so reluctant to do it. And also still kind of in the back of my head saying, yeah, that's when he was such a jerk when he did that thing. I'm not going to be a jerk like him. I'm going to be way better than he is.

But the reality is, is the divergent creative is needed because a lot of times the vision doesn't make sense, right? I think of Will and Walt Disney, right? Walt and— no, what the hell was his brother's name? Walt? His brother, I can't remember. He came in— I think it's Will. Anyway, Walt comes in and they're building Orlando Disney World, and he said, I want a train to go through the hotel. And his brother looked at him and said, that's ridiculous. We've already created the plans. We've got permits. What you're talking would cost millions of dollars. He goes, I don't care. Figure it out. What happened? There's a train running through the hotel, right? And so sometimes that creative gets beat down to say, no, you don't make sense. But it's not that it doesn't make sense. It's that it's, when you're talking about the intangible, when you're talking about the vision, it's sometimes hard to describe, right?

Yeah. And it's, it doesn't always have to make sense in the sense of artists create the future. In my experience, the analogy I give is the original Star Trek episode, the series, the short run, it's 2 or 3 years. I think it was on TV. They had video conferencing calls and the equivalent of cell phones. And all of this was 100% pure science fiction at the time.

Right.

But now it's become— look at what we're doing right now. Reality. Yeah, exactly.

Talking to the computer, talking— they talk to the computer all the time. And what is that now? AI, right?

So artists, artists envision future realities and then engineers and folks whose job it is to figure out how to mechanically make it work or the concept. Concept car. You see it in an auto show, you're like, good Lord, that's beautiful. And then, you know, 5 years later, you see the actual model on the road. You're like, eh, it's fine. And they just couldn't fit all the wires and plumbing in there in the same shape, right? It just didn't work for a million engineering reasons. But I was able to develop that aspect of my personality. It was honestly, it felt sort of like the final test for me as an entrepreneur. Can I wear both hats equally well? And put the right hat on. Well enough, right. Yeah. And that's kind of been where things have landed in the last 6 months as I've been on this new venture targeting smaller businesses. And it's been very satisfying. You know, I think you have to stay hungry and you have to be a student of life and business forever. And as you said, the cycle of change is happening now faster and faster and faster. And so it's just vitally important to never rest on your laurels. Enjoy your successes. Right? Take a vacation, spend time with your family.

Don't—

you got to turn it off. You got to breathe as well. But don't get complacent. That was my— if I am a cautionary tale to anybody, it's don't get too happy with yourself because just the moment you think it's just going to be like this forever, you're absolutely kidding yourself. That's not how the market works.

Nope. It's the statement of if you're not disrupting your business, someone else will. Exactly. And that's exactly what capitalism does. Yeah. Well, I could go on forever. I was already thinking of additional things, but our time is over. How do people find you if they want to learn more about LightTouch?

Yeah, I do love helping people. I love helping businesses, obviously, but entrepreneurs as well. I will talk your head off with free advice if somebody wants it. But if you go to expertcreativehelp.com, that will forward to our website and that's that's the easiest way to get on. There's a contact form and I'll get that.

So perfect. Listeners will have those links in that link in the show note. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you heard, shoot us a message and let us know what you'd like to hear and we'll replace Will. Until then, ta-ta for now.