Founder Story: Building the Most Innovative Agency

This is my first time doing the outdoor cam. And, uh, yeah, just over the Thanksgiving weekend, it's interesting because I wear this, um, this Oura Ring over here, and it tells me how stressed my body is. And interestingly enough, I spent most of the time just chilling. For 4 days or so and saw family and everything. But interestingly enough, I was stressed like 4 to 6 hours a day. And so maybe my body's stressed when I'm just relaxing. Maybe I get the most benefit from working, I guess. I'm walking to the office right now. Even though our team's remote first, which is something I want to talk about in a second, we have a— we got a little— we got a little WeWork here. Interestingly enough, the people that go into the office here are pushing me to go into the office. But it's not even like— I remember one day I said, hey, why don't we just work Friday from home? It's like, no, I'm still coming in tomorrow. I'm like, oh, okay. So, um, that's a sign that you've hired some good people when people are willing to work harder, work harder on their own without having to be pushed, right? You get to enjoy this little walk with me. Um, so anyway, that's that. And then speaking about the return to office thing, so I had a post last week on LinkedIn, has about 500,000 impressions on it right now, and, which is a good amount. And I just put harsh reality, most people are coming back into the office. Not 'cause I want them to come into the office, but, and not 'cause these people wanna go back into the office. Like, you think leadership actually wants people to go back into the office? Not the case, right? The reality is, if you're in the office, you're going to be more productive, right? And even the mid-20s people in this LA office, they're just like, yeah, there's just so much more you get done. And they're saying it, right? It's not like I'm forcing it on them. And so even though, you know, we're gonna be remote first, I still want to hire more people in LA being in office, but we're still gonna hire around the world. That's, that's our philosophy. But I just posted it. I triggered a lot of people. I remember someone messaged me. She messaged me like 5 or 6 paragraphs. I'm just like, look, you're entitled to your opinion, just go post it. She's like, you're not engaging with me, blah blah blah. And she just got more and more upset, and then she blocked me. Even though I said like 2 sentences to her. So, food for thought. And then I saw a post from Morning Brew saying that 70% of employers are looking for return to office, right?

You have Amazon doing it, you have Apple doing it.

They're like, oh, you know, well, they just want to use their office space. Well, might be true, but the reality is people are way more productive in the office than Why would they not? Why would they not just let people stay, right?

Working from home. Because reality is leadership.

Leadership would rather work from home too. I would rather work from home too. Like I love working in my my my shorts and just like doing whatever I want, right? But that's what it is. The pendulum swinging back towards. return to office. And I don't know, it's also really hard to build community too when you're not hanging out with your people. And when you build community, I believe you add in more retention. There's more of a, hey, we're in this together type of thing. And that's what it is. I guess it's probably helpful to talk about what's been working on the LinkedIn side because that post got 500,000 impressions and I had another post I put up about MrBeast's playbook, his philosophies, right? And he has a MrBeast handbook, it's called MrBeast Handbook Production Handbook, which you can Google for free.

It's 36 pages.

Guy wrote this in his mid-20s, right? Still in his mid-20s. And it's just his philosophy on how to work at his company. And I think everyone should write this, right? Everyone should have a— you know, for us at Single Grain, we have a— What's Single Grain? Standards of Excellence that we go through. And everyone's forced to read it, right? If you don't sign it, you can't stay. It basically just defines how we are as a company, what we expect, you know, how communication should work, how we expect people to show up on time. And it kind of reinforces our core values. And Yeah, I think if you don't have like a handbook for your company, and you don't define how things are done, then people are just gonna do it however they wanna do it, and then things kinda start to fall apart. So, I talked about that one, and that one got about, I think it's at 500,000 impressions as well right now, so, a million impressions last week. And then 2 weeks before that, I put up a post that got about 1,000 comments, talking about our ABM tool, Carrot. And Carrot's great because, It's a one-to-one personalized LinkedIn account-based marketing product, which is a handful. And so I'm walking into the mall right now, which is on the way to the office, and you'll get to see the office. Also, it's—

what else is there?

Have our all-hands meetings, have our planning meetings, and Mondays just, you know, for me, I try to set the tone with Mondays in terms of jamming all my meetings into Mondays. So that I can have more free space throughout the week. So yeah, but then other than that, this week we do have people flying in for our— we'll call it our annual planning, but we typically try to plan in 3-year cycles because we believe that in 1 year you can only get so much done, but in 3 years you're gonna get a lot done, right? And so we have a thing called the 3-HAG, which is a great book called The 3-HAG Way. It just talks about what are you gonna do for the next 12, the next 12 quarters, right? Every year is 4 quarters. What are you gonna do for the next 12 quarters? Who are you gonna hire? What numbers are you gonna hit? And that makes it, you know, tangible. It makes it exciting for people to follow. Because again, years go by so quickly. Like, this year just flew by. And this year's the fastest we've ever grown. And I wanna really capitalize on that momentum. I also don't wanna get run over. Right now, but I'm good. But yeah, we're arriving to the office right now. So here's the office. And I'll show you more as we, as we get inside. So we're gonna walk through the halls. And as you can see, this is a WeWork. Not bad for a company that's in bankruptcy right now. Oh, hi vlog! All right, just got done with the in-office day so far. Probably the biggest takeaway from today is we threw up this accidental LinkedIn It was regarding our account-based marketing software, which is called Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T, Karrot ABM. And I posted a screenshot, or most— more so a video of the product, and it showed the product demo in action. And from there, a lot of people started asking questions because we said, okay, hey, we have a tool that allows you to do LinkedIn ads at scale, personalized, and comment ABM. I love ABM, which is account-based marketing, if you want access. And then so far there's, I don't know, call it 100 comments or so and like 50 likes. And so the reach is growing on that post. But the point I'm trying to get at here is that somebody in the post had asked, or somebody in the comments had asked, hey, what's the software? And I hadn't revealed the software last time we posted this. Last time I posted this, it got like 500 likes and 1,000 comments. And but this time I revealed what the product was, and somebody found our URL and a bunch of people started signing up. I think we got like 40 or 50 signups so far. And of the 50 signups, we've already identified maybe 4 or 5 mid-market to enterprise-level companies. So that's like an unintentional way of getting users. And the thing for us now is we wanted to kind of be more methodical in terms of how we sign people up, and we wanted to control the growth, right? Control the speed of growth. Now we've kind of opened up the floodgates, and we have a bunch of people signing up, which forces us to act a lot faster, right? We can see where people are getting held up. We can see You know, having a fire under us is gonna help us move a lot faster, but there's also a trade-off here, right? Because the thing with growth is that it sucks up resources, it requires you to hire more people, requires you to move a lot faster. It does take resources away from your personal enjoyment, your personal life, right? And that's a trade-off that you're gonna have to make if you wanna grow faster. And so with Carrot, I mean, right now we'll take the little push behind our tush, I'll say, and should be good. I think the fact that, you know, earlier today we got a— it's like an agency that has like 1,000 to 5,000 people or so that reached out. And then there's another company with about 2,000 employees or so. There's another one that raised about $100 million. We're speaking to them on Wednesday. And so it's great. And so software side, that's good. But it also fits in well with the ad agency too. If people decide that they actually need services, there's a natural progression. Sometimes people don't know how to manage the software, they need managed services, right? And so I certainly don't look at us as just an agency. I look at it as As more tech-enabled services. And, uh, that allows us to, you know, if we were to try to sell or go to market in the future, we'd have a higher valuation. But I don't have any ambitions to sell. Um, I just want to keep playing this game, play it for a long time. And, uh, earlier today I revealed the memo to the company, the annual review that I wrote. And in the memo I talked about how, you know, this is the— this year we grew the fastest and I'm very proud of how far the team has come and how we're set up for the future. And it's just the beginning right now. And we play this game for another, you know, 2 or 3 decades, the company is going to become really big. Interestingly enough, we had an all-hands today and we do these little breakouts in the beginning of our all-hands and we do these icebreakers. And as I was waiting for our icebreaker questions to come in, I kind of just asked You know, the 4 people in the room, I said, hey, if money were no object, if you had unlimited money, what would you be doing with your life, right? And 2 people answered basically, you know, they'd basically chill, right? Move to San Diego or something and chill. Whereas my CTO and I, the answer was, I'd probably open a research lab and just keep building. And so, you decide how you want to answer those, but I would really encourage everyone To think through what it is that they want to do with their lives and not just give the base level answer. Because once you actually think about it, it's like you actually— once you've tried relaxing for a week or so or even like a couple days sitting on the beach, it gets freaking boring. And so then what actually matters? What matters is that you're doing something that you love, whether it's hanging out with your family or building products and services that you love. So So that's what I would say. But gonna go record the podcast now.

Alright, so quick summary of the day. We talked about the annual review that I did. That's one big piece of, that I sent to the entire team during an all-hands and we kind of went through it together. And the big thing I would say is, when it comes to building something big for the long term, let's say we're trying to, I guess it's helpful to put the mission out here, right? Where we're aiming for a billion in revenue.

Why?

'Cause it's fun, right? But that's the overall mission of me doing this series over here. How do we get to a billion in revenue, right? And so that's the journey of this show, so to speak, this vlog. And going back to the annual review, so I talked about this year, some of the highlights would be how this is the year that we grew the fastest, and this is the strongest team that we've ever had, and it's only going to get stronger. And there's just a lot of great things that are happening. I think just a couple years ago, man, you know, one of our service lines, we had 83% churn, which means we lost 83% of our customers on an annual basis, right? This year, it's 9% for that service. And that's a testament to the team, that's a testament to having— this is why it's important for you to focus on recruiting if you're gonna build a great company, 'cause everything's about people at the end of the day. And so I shared that with the team, we talked about some other wins through the year as well, but more than anything I said, hey guys, like, as long as we stay patient, as long as we stay engaged, and as long as we stay focused, we're gonna get everything that we deserve, and more. And, you know, conventional wisdom— conventional wisdom— conventional wisdom when you're in your 20s tells you that, oh, you should get results next year or the year after. You want results quickly. And the reality is, yes, you should act quickly with your actions and be impatient with them, but when it comes to long-term— when you think about outcomes, you should be extremely patient with your outcomes, right? When you think about the Warren Buffetts of the world, you think about The Charlie Mungers of the world. I actually have a Munger book over here that I paid a good chunk of money for. Let me see if I can actually pull it up over here. So this Munger book, by the way, which I highly recommend, it's called Worldly Wisdom. And Worldly Wisdom is, it's not super long, and it just, it has 3 of his best speeches in there, Charlie Munger's, and he was Warren Buffett's partner, right? And look, you know, he passed away at age 99. you know, last year. And Buffett is still alive. I think he's 97 or 98 right now, and he's still going. But these guys played the game until the very end, and it took a very long time for them to compound. And the magic of compounding is that it's— as long as you stay in the game for long enough, over decades, not just one decade, over a period of decades, you're going to get everything that you deserve, like I mentioned earlier. And that's why Warren Buffett, it wasn't until he was 50 years old or so that that's when he became a billionaire officially. That's the wisdom that's important to continue to distill to your team. Because one of my jobs as a leader of the company is to be the chief reminder officer. That means I need to repeat the same slogans over and over, the same values over and over. And one of the things that we do at the company, Single Grain, is we talk about our values all the time, right? Whenever we nominate someone, whenever we do shoutouts. So for example, Hey Neil, I saw you did something, when you helped with managing the paid media ads over Black Friday, over the weekend, that really helped us and that saved me time. And that's an example of being reliable and being improvement obsessed, right? And those are 2 of our core values. And so, it's also important when you think about writing these annual reviews, it's good for the team to understand what's going on in your head. They often wanna hear from you. And, you know, in the past, I was more of an absentee founder. I would disappear for periods of time. And, you know, what that led to was chaos because there wasn't someone to lead, there wasn't someone to guide. And leadership goes a long way. And it's— I put this in the annual review as well, but leadership— when people talk about founder mode, Founder mode really means that the founder, when they're involved, they're the ones that can really drive the pace. They're the ones that can really push initiatives forward, and they can move quickly. And it's something that most founders inherently know. You know, I heard recently from the Airbnb and the Discord CEO, separately, that they said, look, you know, all the conventional wisdom around hiring management and delegating and just letting them kind of figure things out and letting them drive the vision, it doesn't feel right. And there's a reason it doesn't feel right. It's because your experience is telling you, or your gut feeling is telling you, that you should be the one that's involved. You should be the one that's driving the vision, 'cause you have the most context, right? And so, all this hokey-pokey about, you know, a couple years ago, people would just tweet, oh yeah, you know, you just start a holding company, and you go hire operators and let them do their thing. It's not that easy, 'cause if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it, right? And so, those are just a couple lessons from today, and just today was reinforced, The direction that we're moving in, right? If you find something that's working, I think about our software right now, Karat ABM, ABM meaning account-based marketing. That's moving in the right direction because we've been consistent with it. And we built something that there's a significant need for. And when I think about the account-based marketing companies that are out there like DemandSense, or Demandbase I should say, is it Demandbase or DemandSense? One of those. And SixSense. Yeah, Demandbase and SixSense, there you go. And both of those are doing over 9 figures a year in revenue, right? And I think we certainly have that opportunity, but the focus is on the agency first and foremost with Single Grain, right? How do we build the most innovative company that drives customers at the end of the day? And that's a great mission. That's a mission that we'll never accomplish, and that's an aspirational mission that we can continue to get closer to every single day. And, you know, that's what it is. Why am I even documenting this? By the way, here's the other lesson that we can work on, that we can talk about before we close out here. Why even document this stuff? It's because, you know, Elon has this tweet, Elon Musk, right? And there's this joke a couple weeks ago saying, you are the media now, you are the media now. The reality is, you can't trust traditional media anymore. You just look at this past election, you know, 90% was favored towards one candidate, and then 87% was negative coverage for the other candidate, right? In a world that we live in today where it's hard to find trustworthy information, you know, if you're learning on your own, you should be putting out information for the world, right? And then there's people that will grow to know, like, and trust you. And when you have the democratization— it's a hard word to say— democratization of media, you know, as of now, you've got YouTube, you've got X, you've got TikTok, you've got Instagram, you have all these channels, right? If you do a good enough job, you're gonna go viral, right? You're gonna get a lot of reach at the end of the day. And I've certainly experienced that in the last couple of, last 12+ months, I would say, around 12 to 18 months or so. So we've had, you know, Shorts that would get, you know, 7, 8 million views or so, long-form videos that would get 600,000 views or so. And that's great, right? I think we're very much getting started. But there's a lot more for us to do. There's a lot more to optimize. This year we averaged about 6 million views per month on socials, including Shorts as well. Hopefully we can get that to 20, 30 million a month, maybe even more than that. But, you know, the reason I'm doing this is hopefully to— one, it's to share my learnings, and it gives me something else to do as well. And hopefully this helps some other people as we continue on this journey, right, to a billion in revenue. Now we're not talking valuation, billion in revenue, right? Like, that's just gonna be really cool. And building this agency of the future where I believe we're gonna have a much higher talent density, meaning that a much higher density of A players, right? Sure, you might still have B and C players, but I think the days of having D and F players, those are gonna go away because the advent of AI is going to help lift everyone up. And so, I'm excited, I'm optimistic. I think making these videos holds me accountable as well. Um, knowing that I need to go out there and tell good stories, right? And, uh, hopefully my storytelling gets better over time. That's another reason why I'm doing this as well. So that is it. And yeah, catch you in the next vlog.

All right, so here's the deal. I hope you enjoyed this vlog episode. This is called Founder Story. And if you want me to continue to post these vlogs to this channel, type in a comment, say this channel, or if you want it to move over to the new channel, type in new channel, right?

That way I can know whether we should just separate it or just continue to serve it here, right?

That's all that needs to happen, and we'll see you later.