Strategic Growth and Acquisition: Dean Dutro from Worth eCommerce

Welcome to the Agency Journey podcast, where we connect with agency leaders to uncover the hidden systems and processes that drive their success. Now let's dive into today's show.

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie, and this week I've got the pleasure of bringing on Dean Dutro from Worth E Commerce, recently acquired by SmartBug. We'll get into that whole story. Dean's of all podcasters. This will be a fun conversation. Dean, welcome to the podcast, man.

Hey, thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

I'm excited we've only gotten a chance to know each other here over the last year and a half or whatever it's been. But your agency story obviously goes back farther than that. I think I'll let you kind of figure out where you want to go. But you'd run an agency prior to Worth E Commerce, right? You and Ryan were both running independent things and then joined forces.

Yeah. So the actual even further back story is that I was working at this company called Aerotech and I was doing aviation sales and I was kind of selling to Boeing and these large aviation companies and traveling all over the Northwest, and it was a blast. And Ryan was working as a digital nomad doing UX design and had started a UX design agency.

And.

And he came and stayed with me for a month. And at the, like, the last day that he was there, he. He like, asked me if I wanted to go into business with him and. And. Cause he needed someone to help with sales.

Right.

Like, he was doing all the UX work and he was at a point where he just couldn't sell anymore, but he still wanted to grow. So he was super nervous to ask me. Cause I, like, I loved my job. It was a sick place to be. I was like 24, 25 and. And it was hard to say. It was hard to leave, but I knew I wanted to do it and I knew I wanted to start something and join him. So him and I actually started Gobi Savvy. And our goal was to travel the world, work with cool companies, meet cool people, make a ton of money, live at the beach. And we did that. We went to Asia, we went to Europe, we went to Australia, we traveled all over. And we did everything except for the make money part. And about a year in, we just kind of realized this isn't working. And whatever we were doing, it wasn't generating income. We ended up going into debt and both of us moved back to the States and lived with our grandparents. So at 26, I was living in my Grandparents house, kind of like what the heck do I do next? And what had happened is he had gotten into E commerce and really enjoyed doing e commerce work. So he started an e commerce company, still did some UX work on the side. And we had a client, their name is Koala Mattresses which is this the Casper of Australia at the time. And they asked us if we did email marketing because we're doing some UX and CRO work on their site. And I was like yeah, we do it. I'd never done it before, like, you know. And we charged them $900 which is ridiculously cheap amount for what we provided. But I took a week and I learned everything about and what worth does is we're an email and SMS marketing company for e commerce companies. This is kind of the origin story. But you know, I learned everything I could about copywriting, design, email marketing, picked a software and just went for it in the first automations or flows we set up for these guys, within weeks we're generating like 15, 20 grand a month. I was like, I think we could sell this. So I started instant email copy and Ryan would send me clients to fulfill email work on. And I also helped his company's e commerce company and just over time grew it and grew it in the Portland, Oregon area. And I changed my mindset from kind of being a consumer business where I was just going to these places to explore and, and not really give back to an idea of like how could I create a community? How could I create something where the core value is growth for ourselves and for our clients and that is still a core value of worth as we go. And while I was growing instant email copy, Ryan was doing his e commerce business. He had some success. Then he started competing with me and doing email marketing. I was like, I was like what the hell man? But there's so many clients. It was like neither of us could fulfill on the amount of clients that were coming in. And finally we met up in California for a week and we were like, why don't we just join forces, Take what you know, take what I know, combine our teams and we decided to do it. We spent two weeks in Bend, Oregon which is my hometown and came up with Worth E Commerce. We created a list of values that we wanted to live by and hire people by and types of clients we wanted to work with. Created a mission and that was a big turning point for us. Like having values and a mission I think attracted so many more people to join our team that I really believe that was a Huge part of our growth.

Yep. That's awesome story. What's the timeline there? And I had no idea that you were in aviation sales. Yeah, all that. What a cool story you guys started worth when you joined forces. When was that? 2019. 2018.

September of 2019. Okay, so two years ago, actually.

Yeah. That's crazy. Where were the two businesses at the time in terms of head count or basically headcount, client count? Whatever's the easier metric to.

Yeah.

Instant email copy. I think we had 10 employees.

Okay.

And it was like a hybrid of some employees, some contractors. He was still running Gobi savvy. And I think he had five or six.

Okay.

So maybe like 15 total people headcount wise.

Well, and that. That's. So then when you got. You guys just sold a couple months ago earlier here in 2021. So in under two years you go from that to what was headcount when you were acquired?

I think we're at 45.

When we were acquired, we tripled in two years. Which is crazy to. To have that kind of growth. Obviously you're buoyed by a couple different things. One, the market. I mean, here we go for quarter number five of the best agency growth in the last 10 years. Yeah, consecutively. Which is crazy. But that wasn't the story for the whole first half of your journey. And obviously Covid, we had no idea when Covid started it was going to turn out. Yeah, it's beneficial for the specific segment that we're in. And you guys are also buoyed by your inecom, which is doing super well. And your klaviyo has paid off that bet that you guys made to go in with them in a big time way too. But still, there's a lot of folks who are swimming in that pond who aren't growing that quickly. So it's a long way of saying that's what I want to understand, that's what I'll unpack and share is what did you guys get right? And what should agencies take away from that in terms of how you scaled so quickly?

Yeah.

And put it in perspective. We're at a new level and where we are now is I'm having to relearn everything.

Right.

And it's that kind of old philosophy of like, what worked for us now isn't working for us. And so we've since being acquired. We were acquired by a larger agency. There's different challenges, but to go from 15 to 50, it was pretty quick. And I think there's two parts to it. One is we had experience prior in the industry. It wasn't like we just started something and then caught this wave of E commerce boom and Covid and people working from home and all of that. We actually had prepped for it. So we were ready for the opportunity in a lot of ways. And it just became a matter of.

I would.

I would literally just write down on paper, I would. I would create an org chart, right? And I would. I would sketch it out and say, okay, if we gain, you know, 10 more clients, what does our company look like? If we gain 20 more, what does it look like? And how can we kind of scale that way? So it was almost like I have all these old sketches of Org charts of what it would look like. But we always led with the core values, always led with the growth and the mission, and we had to have different systems in place. So the other thing is I got mentorship. So I joined the Jason Swick Agency Mastermind and connected with people to put systems in place, allowed us to scale to where we are, including hiring systems, which is super important. Now I'm lucky because I'm a former recruiter, right? So my first job, doing aviation sales, before I was promoted there, I was recruiting and I would interview thousands of people for years, every year to get them into jobs. So I knew how to set up a recruiting pipeline. And a lot of people don't think about that, right. They think about the sales pipeline, which is very important. But you need an equal and strong recruiting pipeline, because if you optimize sales, you need to have people to fulfill on the work. We had this hybrid model of having employees and having contractors and whatnot. I now only do pretty much employees because the model works better at scale. And then contractors add up in costs over time and you start double paying for people doing different types of work. But ultimately it came down to being ready and then having a mentor and then charting out what growth could look like and tying that to our values. I think that was super important.

That's helpful. I have a couple specific questions off of that. One of the things that's impressed me or that I can take away looking at the outside from what you guys have done is that you have invested. We've got a lot of ties together. You run a podcast. We're both working with Jeremy Wise and The guys at Rise25 connected with Joey Gilke and Sales Driven Agency Todd Taske, who's been on the podcast recently. From a acquisition perspective, there's all these. You mentioned Jason. You guys have been, you Kind of brought. You were prepared and ready to go, which you mentioned. This isn't like a. It's a two year story for Worth eCommerce, but it's a six or seven year story or whatever it is for the actual kind of road here. Um, so that piece has impressed me and I guess that's my first question is where did that. I assume that's intentional, but sometimes this stuff's not intentional. It's just like, hey, that's the way that we know to go. But a lot of agency owners are super hesitant to invest in getting outside help. Is that something that you and Ryan have always been in lockstep on? Is that something that one of you pushes more than the other? What, what drives that decision to get outside help?

Yeah, I, I think, you know, if you go back to our core values is growth.

Right. So.

So for me, I love to read, I love to learn, I love to hear people talk, I love all that kind of stuff. And I find it super helpful to put in perspective from an ROI standpoint. The Jason Swank mastermind was great because there were other agencies in there and a lot of those agencies became referral partners. So maybe I'm paying X amount per month and spending 10 to $20,000 a year on mentorship. But from that mentorship and that group of people, we probably closed 10 clients, which is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. We got a podcast started, which is also probably worth equal amounts. It's like a $20,000 investment has turned into a 10x20x return because of the relationships that were built, the systems that we're able to put in place, referrals that we got, marketing that we got like, that is the best ROI I've ever seen. Maybe bitcoin could beat it if you invested two years ago. But that was my biggest investment, was going down that road. And then you talk about Joey Gilke building out a sales system for us. That was a major investment. I won't say how much, but it was basically near six figures. And that has generated millions of dollars of revenue, that system. And so, you know, when you make these. But I've also made decisions that didn't pan out.

Right.

Like I've hired lead gen agencies that, you know, we paid and they still haven't delivered. It's been like a year. You know, we've paid marketing agencies, so we've made mistakes, but when they pay out, they pay out large. So it seems like right when did.

This also kind of surprised me because when we got a chance to Work with you guys and got in touch.

I didn't mention you guys either. Apologies.

Well, we're in that failed bucket. ClickUp. Failed ClickUp Consultants in the in.

No, no, we, we use ClickUp on the regular.

But, but Ryan was leading growth. But you're actually the one who comes from the sales background. So did you guys. How did you guys get to that point? Did you flip flop roles?

Yeah, actually. That's really interesting. So when I. I'm good at enterprise sales.

Right.

And that takes time and energy and a completely different system.

Right.

And the sales cycles back when I was selling enterprise could be six months to two years. The sales cycle in our space is like 20 to 30 days. And I wasn't as good at that as I was with the other types of sales. I like taking a prospect or a client to a dinner and flying out to see them and that kind of stuff that doesn't work in this space. So Ryan actually moved into the sales marketing and he's essentially like the VP of growth. I moved into more the CEO operations and getting the team aligned because it turns out I'm really good at recruiting.

Right.

And he's really good at connecting with a lot of these business owners. So you're totally right. And that's a great catch. Like we completely flip flopped once we knew like our actual skill sets and what we like doing.

Yeah, that's, that's really. It's interesting to see people and then from that, like hear that story that you come from the sales background, I could definitely see that. Not that Ryan's not a relationship builder as well, but there's different types of relationship builders. Some people like the new and kind of like constantly new. And there's other people who are boring, like me who's like, I like having long term relationships and going deep with people and like the meeting 100 people at a party and having two minutes of conversation, that's not very invigorating for me. It's just kind of draining. But I'd love to talk to a smaller group of people and know them over a period of time. And that obviously is really effective in long term dressrout in sales and if you're in a very transactional relationship.

Yeah.

The other thing that I realized too is there's salespeople that are better than me as the owner.

Right? Yeah.

And a prime example is, you know, this month actually like my salespeople, we've got four salespeople and they're selling a product that I used to sell for fifteen hundred Dollars for, like, twelve grand.

Yeah.

It's literally. It's the same thing right now. We're much better at what we do because we've. We've grown a lot, but it's essentially the same deliverables. Um, and. And I would. I don't think I would have ever, ever been able to sell it for that. You know, my skills aren't there. Um, I helped create the scope and operationally how to deliver and strategy, but they went out and sold it, and that was like. When they did that, I was like, this is like, I should have hired salespeople five years ago.

That's awesome. Well, let's fast forward then, to the decision to sell. I assume you and Rye. I mean, what. Just back to the Even being open to it. And I don't actually know the backstory yet, which I'm excited to have this conversation. I don't know who reached out to who first, whether Todd was engaged by Ryan to start hunting and found you guys, or how that connection originally got made, but was that you and Ryan had already talked about, hey, we're open.

To.

Selling off and hopefully having a second bike down the road, or how did that evolve?

Yeah. So Ryan and I, again, going, like, going back to growth. Most of our decisions are based off that that value is like, how can we get to the next level? So there's a couple items in there. One, I wanted to learn about the mergers and acquisition market, right? So I wanted to learn what it was all about because I kept hearing these stories of a competitor of mine got sold and another person, I was like, what is this? Like, how do you actually do that? That'd be really cool to learn. So I reached out to Todd, who's a referral from Jason, and he was like, hey, man, you guys are probably too early, but, like, we can just see what's out there and see who's interested. And that was, like, a year long process.

Right.

And so we engaged pretty early with the idea of, like, if we wanted to sell out the opportunity, would we have everything in place to be able to do so? And if not, then at least I get to learn how successful companies operate from a financial perspective.

Right.

From a legal perspective, and, like, put themselves in a position to either grow or repurchase. So my mindset was like, either way, I'm going to either learn how to scale or be acquired. And we talked with various companies that weren't a good fit either. We were too small, they were too enterprise. They weren't in the same marketplace. Et cetera. And then we met SmartBug and instantly hit it off. There's a connection. Their senior team had a lot more experience than my team. And for me, I was ready to get to a new place in my own career. I've got a mastermind in mentors, but I was looking for what's next personally, professionally, how do I go from 50 people to 500 people? And I don't have a clear path of how to do that. And I feel like the SmartBook team has a pretty clear path of how to do it and has experience. And realistically, I'm 31. I sold when I was 30, so to me, it was just a career move in some ways. And it also worked out because we're a sister company.

Right.

So we got to keep the name. And how SmartBug grew was very similar. So they went through HubSpot and we're going through Klaviyo. They do B2B, we do B2C.

Right.

So the model is almost the same. It's just a different market. And so we're learning a lot from them. That's what I wanted. And I wanted also to provide opportunities for my team where we just specialize in two things, basically, to be able to have opportunities to cross pollinate skill sets because we want to potentially expand services, et cetera. But that was sort of the thinking behind that. I don't know if that answered the question.

Yeah, that's helpful. And Ryan, it's been a couple years since we had him on the podcast, and I should only say positive things about people on this podcast. But Ryan has an interesting. I have a ton of respect for Ryan.

Which. Ryan?

Ryan Malone. Sorry, yeah. Yep. CEO at SmartBug or the founder of SmartBug originally. Yeah, I shouldn't. Shouldn't say Ryan.

Okay.

Ryan, he has a kind of distinct view on the market. He's not a kind of someone who's just following the beaten path entirely. He's got his own. He's got strongly held convictions about how to build an agency, which I have a ton of respect for. And he also, when he feels like he has some secret sauce, some of that leaks back out into the world, and some of that he keeps close to the vest. And I've run into folks who don't appreciate that about him, which totally, totally fair. And I actually think it's kind of baller of him. So I've always had a lot of respect for Ryan and the way that he's built stuff and been real intentional about structuring A remote team before. That was the cool thing and the normal thing to do.

Yeah, that was another piece was I love that they had intentionally built it that way and we built that way at first and then I kind of went hybrid and now we're going fully back to that. And yeah, to build a culture like they have remotely is very tough. And so I'm excited to keep learning from them.

But I guess from the outside looking at that, what's the big one plus one makes three. Go back to the free HubSpot. But HubSpot tried to co opt that phrase for a while because you guys, I mean, very similar models, like they've been in the HubSpot ecosystem. We were in HubSpot ecosystem with them for a while. You guys are in the Klaviyo ecosystem. But you're talking about you guys are B to C. They're B to B. What's the overlap there? Like, are you guys pulling Klaviyo into smart bug clients? And how many of those clients? Does that make sense? How does that. How do those add up with different audiences and different service types? Obviously different service types make a lot of sense, but often see those go together with similar audiences. And we're layering on more email marketing for this. So how do you guys. What is that value prop and the alignment there?

That's a good question. We're fleshing out some of it. They recognize that they needed to be in the E commerce space and so they saw this as an opportunity to take what they knew, apply it to another agency and leverage it to grow faster.

Makes sense.

And they were turning away e commerce leads because they didn't have someone to fulfill on it. And we often turn away B2B leads because we don't have the expertise. So there's some sort of crossover. But the other key piece is Klaviyo is going more enterprise in a lot of ways. So they see that coming down the pipeline. And what's interesting is that a lot of people from HubSpot left and have gone to Klaviyo.

Right, Right.

So there's this. There's a ton of overlap in many different ways in terms of like, hey, like we run a Facebook ad agency, you guys do email and sms. Let's refer. It's not that distinct. It's more like, hey, we know this model works and let's take these guys who have the same model and boost them up in a market that's rising.

Right.

And I think everyone knows E commerce is blowing up and has been since 2015, but really started taking off like, you know, during COVID and I. I still think we're just at the tip of the iceberg. It's now, it's now just getting easy to. To sell stuff online. You know, like this year it's much easier than it ever has been, but. So I don't know if that answers the question, but yeah, well, I think.

That'S helpful in terms of, hey, here's some of the easier ways to value, obviously. I mean you see value in some of these deals where we get to pair up the back. The backend operations. There's some value created there, which I don't know how much you guys may not have integrated that many things on the back end at this point. Have you done a lot of kind of pulling together hiring or stuff? Or does that say separate because it's a sister brand?

Yeah, I mean we've done some minor stuff, like some HR stuff, some accounting stuff, which is nice cause it kind of takes the pressure off. I was in the books all the time trying to figure out our accounting and now there's a CFO that we get to kind of lean on, which is super helpful. It was a pain at first because I had to reorganize our entire books and collect every invoice for two years to get it over. But once that's done, it's done. I know recruiting wise, there'll be some integrations because our HR guy is a solid recruiter and you might as well lower costs and find good talent in different ways. Sales, we're learning different sales strategies from them to sell enterprise, learning how to roll out new services better.

Right.

So like their full service, how do they go about it, how do they test it? Things like that. So there's so, so just minor integrations but add up over time, you know.

Right.

Right now hiring is the biggest problem companies face. So having two companies targeting different, different types of, of skills but like great people is really helpful.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense that what was the going through that process? I mean there's all kinds of things that people going through an acquisition seem to struggle with. Whether it's on the front end of the deal, with all the due diligence and learning that there's in or out or like figuring out how deals get structured from a comp perspective and then on the back end dealing with true ups and who gets owned what revenue and all that kind of stuff. Is there one piece of that you mentioned, kind of the digging back through invoices?

Um, yeah, yeah, due diligence sucks. Like, it's not fun at all. And we, we were lucky that we were relatively organized, but it wasn't like, no one's ready for it. I don't, I don't think I've ever heard anyone be like, yeah, I was totally ready. Like, no, you weren't. I'm sure much larger companies probably have some things dialed in and, you know, during the deal, even up to like last week, I didn't know if it was going to go through because everyone had deal fatigue, right? Everyone was sick and tired of looking at the numbers, looking at these contracts, looking at invoices, looking at, like, everyone was sick of it, you know, And I remember talking to my girlfriend, I was like, I don't know if this is going to go through. Like, and it was like the Friday before signing and they got pushed a week and I was like, yep, probably not going to go through. And so that was super stressful. And I feel like I took my off the ball for a few months. Like, I could tell the business suffered a little bit. And then post sale, it was kind of that, like, like, like post grad blues or post vacation blues. Like, you're just kind of. Did I make the right decision? I was, I was amped up, but also like. And there's a lot that's. That could change one thing. Going from cash accounting to GAAP accounting, right? And you know, you're talking about true ups and stuff. So there's, you know, revenue that I thought would go into our pockets that actually went to the company. Because of the way GAAP accounting works, you have revenue isn't counted until the work is fulfilled. So all that gets pushed. So you actually end up sometimes having to write a check to the company that purchased you for that weird period of revenue, that stuff. But I was advised, Todd kind of told me, like, hey, this is a possibility. This could happen. You're on cash accounting. When you move to gaap, things can change and. But it all will hopefully equal out. There's little things, like we weren't truing up PTO in our P and L, and when you get acquired, you typically will figure out a percentage and you have to pay that out. So I wasn't expecting that kind of stuff. So there's these little things that kind of like ding you, but keeping your eye on the bigger picture is what's important.

That's a good way of putting it. There's enough of that stuff that it starts to get really annoying.

Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like at Least in the folks who I've seen go through this process and their friends I've seen kind of run through that. It can be easy. Everybody takes their eye off the ball. I don't think I've talked to anybody who has not felt like, hey, the company definitely suffered. And also for a lot of people, there's stress associated with. I have this huge, exciting news that I'm excited about, and I can't share this with all kinds of.

Living a double life to me.

Yeah, right. And that's. I mean, you probably have to be a psychopath for that not to take a toll on you some degree.

And then the other thing I would say, like, if people do get acquired, I think at least this happened for us. We were all gung ho about like, we're going to change stuff up, like, we're going to change our processes, our systems, we're going to make it better. And we had this whole spreadsheet of stuff and action items. It was too much.

Right.

You don't realize how hard it is to change a system, you know, and so we. We finally had to, like, have a conversation and say, hey, like, we need to go back to our core focus and competency because all this other stuff, it's. It's not moving the needle forward and it's. It's too much at once. So I would like, if you get acquired, everyone's going to want to improve things, fix things. Like 2080 it. And I made that mistake of not holding to that kind of philosophy, which is something I hold dear. But now we're in a good place, I think.

Right. That makes sense. Well, so a couple of things here then. As we're on the tail end of the acquisition. You guys have made it through. You're a smart bug company now. Still running worth E commerce in terms of vision. The stuff that you're looking forward to and excited about right now, obviously you mentioned hiring. Everyone's struggling to hire. What are the hardest roles or what are the concurrent roles that you guys are looking to fill?

Just looking for good marketers in the space. I think during COVID for example, we hired a lot of green people and we had to basically train from scratch, which is good and bad. It's good in the sense that they develop skills and you can hire cheaper and faster. It's bad in the sense that they can get poached sometimes and you become like the training ground for other agencies, which is not a good thing either. But I think that for people who are hiring, if you can hire Remote. You're going to get a lot more applicants.

Right, right.

Like to be honest, we, our trouble is we get too many applicants and sifting through it, right. We'll get 100, 200 applicants and. Cause it's remote and we pay well and you know, we lead with our vision and values. We don't even talk about the job until later on in the post.

Right.

We talk about the company, the culture, the values and that attracts a lot more people, I think.

Right.

But you know, we're always looking for great marketers and I try to tell my team like you're not a copywriter, like you're a marketer, you're not a designer, you're a marketer. And you just have this other skill set in some ways. And some people like that, some people.

Don'T, but that makes sense. I've got a couple other quick hitters here. You guys see much seasonality? I know you're a retainer driven business. Yeah, I would imagine. I mean you go to Worthy Commerce right now and there's the countdown timer at the top which is really smart. Counted Black Friday. Are you ready? Yeah, I would assume. I mean like we have this all the time before is our biggest quarter because everyone, like I've been fighting this struggle all year long. I'm not going to go into next year with the same thing. It's going to take me two or three months to fix this. I'll go work with Zenpilot and streamliner up. Do you guys see the same thing? Is it run up to holidays?

It's kind of interesting. So because we're vertical in E commerce, we serve different industries within E commerce. So different industries are seasonal.

Right.

So a lot of people experience like Q1 seasonality in various companies. We don't because we have a lot of nutrition companies.

Right.

And everybody's buying nutrition products.

Right. You know what I mean?

What we do see a boost in is just upsell revenue.

Right.

So we'll still get the same number of clients. We on average close about the same amount of clients throughout the year, which is really, really nice. And then just during Q4, that's when we're like, hey, clients like you need to implement this. You need this, you need this. It's going to cost this. And here's your potential roi. So we see a lot more upsell revenue and we'll stop taking clients at some point so we can deliver. But I wouldn't say it's like an influx of new clients again, it's just an influx of Scope that we need to sell.

That makes sense. And one other thing I wanted to mention is you've been running the Relationship Commerce podcast for a while now, and you mentioned you tied that back to Jason, which I wasn't familiar with. So how did the podcast come about and what's that experience been like?

Yeah. So you mentioned Rise25. We work with them too. Jeremy and John are awesome. And it came about because we were trying to find new ways to market, to get leads and to find prospects. And I love talking to people and hearing people's stories and whatnot. So I think we're almost at 100 episodes, which is. Which is awesome. And I like longer form. I like 45 minutes to an hour. And sometimes people come on the show and they turn into clients. Sometimes they've turned into repeat guests. There's always a connection you can make. So it's been a great roi. And then I just always feel like I learned something new.

Right.

It's like every E commerce business person or software has a little something, like you mentioned before, like a secret sauce, and oftentimes they'll give you a little bit of it, and then we can take that and use that for our other clients.

Right.

It's like we're in that position of learning and knowledge at scale to help our clients grow even faster, which is cool.

I don't know at what point I discovered the podcast, but it was close to when you had. I'm blanking on his last name, Randall from Dugout mugs.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm a huge baseball nerd.

So.

I was like, oh, this is perfect. But anyways, it's awesome to see you podcasting using that tool, and it's an awesome relationship builder and a great opportunity to. I think you mentioned personal development. That's obviously something. Or professional development. That's a big priority to do. There's no better way than podcasting. Getting to find interesting folks and kind of dig through their story.

Yeah.

And people are willing to share a lot. So that's an awesome tool.

And I like personally finding what I call the hidden entrepreneurs, the people out there that maybe aren't on Forbes, maybe aren't on Inc 5000, but they're still have 10, 20, 30, 40 employees. And they're growing a business. And it's more real conversations. Some of the ones I've had where they're larger businesses. It's always a script. It's always the same. Like, I've had some, like, pretty large companies, and I just, like, stopped because I was like, it's like, I've heard this on five other podcasts, right.

I feel like there's a mix there of some people who do a ton of speaking. Authors are usually pretty good on podcasts because they had to think about this stuff and deal with it. And like Seth Godin, for all the talks he's done, he'll always be interesting to me. But you're right. 80% of the same 80, 20 rule, like, 80% of the time, you're going to get the same story that you've heard everywhere else. And so, yeah, I think there's an element there of I take pride in kind of finding the people who aren't featured on agency podcasts. How can we. You're an exception because you, you are on a bunch of different podcasts. But how can we find the people who aren't out there and dig into that story then? I was hit and miss. Sometimes those people have great stories, but it's not told in a super interesting way. And that's. That's fine too.

I want to make sure I give you guys a shout out too, because you guys help build our operating system, like, basically from scratch. And we use ClickUp every day. We use it for everything. We're building scopes and time tracking, and that was a phenomenal investment. And basically any new person that comes in can go into the system that you guys helped build. And it's step by step. They know what to do now. They don't always follow it.

Right.

Not everyone always follows the system, but at least it's there and people can find it. And it's been a training tool, a project management tool, time tracking tool, ideas tool to use for our social media stuff or podcast stuff. You guys did tremendous work there. So I give you a shout out.

I appreciate it. And a lot of the credit for that project. I mean, we consistently see this. We've got a system. PM and Ops is such a core function that a lot of that knowledge has to get centralized in house at some point in time. So it makes a ton of sense to work with somebody from the outside who's done this a ton of times to come in and build it initially, but someone's got to run it. And Derek Harvey leading it on your end, but kind of your whole leadership team diving in and jumping through the good and the bad and just running through it all. There's a big difference in how quickly agencies benefit from it. When there's that rock star internally versus kind of they don't have the same infrastructure and a lot of times it's not necessarily that the person who's leading it internally isn't talented, but they're also not enabled or empowered by the leadership team to make a lot of decisions that they need to make to move things forward. So you guys kind of top to bottom, did a really nice job through that project and implementation, and it's been cool to see you continue to grow and scale using ClickUp and continue to improve. Dean, this has been super fun. I appreciate you coming on and being willing to share. Worthecommerce.com is the website we mentioned, SmartBug in the podcast. Is there anywhere else we should point people to follow you or connect with you?

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. It's just Dean Dutro, if you search me, and I get a lot of interesting stories on there and there's a lot of cool people to connect with there, but that's where I'm most active.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you being able to come on, be so generous with what you know, what you've learned. Thanks for your time, Dean.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to the Agency Journey podcast. Visit agencyjourneyinsiders.com to join the podcast community and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.