What it takes to scale and sell an agency (+ tips on culture and ROWEs) | Agency Breakthrough Ep. 4

When you go into something, you know, an acquisition, oftentimes you go in looking at the numbers and looking at the financials to see if that makes sense. Experience, share. You come up the other side looking at the people. By far, the most important thing to start with is the culture. Is there alignment in the culture? You know, understand who the people are. Oftentimes within kind of the acquisition structure, you don't have a chance to talk to the team. And that's scary to me. I think you should try to do everything possible to. To understand who you're engaging with, the people you're buying. That is a very, very important point. And if you feel anything in your gut, that's just kind of saying, this doesn't feel right. Oh, my God. Listen to it.

Well, Gray, how are you doing today?

Excellent, Kuba. How are you, my fine, sir?

I'm doing better and better today. Yeah, rough start to the day, but now I'm feeling the energy. I just. I just love doing podcasts, man. It's true. Nothing. Yeah, it is true. I just. I really like doing this stuff.

It is. It is fun. It almost sounded like you said bitter and better today. And somebody's got a song, they say, don't be bitter, be better. I'm working on switching them letters. I forget what else comes from it. At some point, we'll have a rap battle on here.

I need to work on our pronunciation, I think, but I mean, better with an. With an e in there. I got it. Yeah.

You're happy, you know, you're not rejecting me already, I hope.

Speaking of better, Gray, do you realize that you have not yet realized your true potential?

I haven't realized it yet, but I bet you're about to explain this to me.

I was just thinking as I was having my morning coffee, I was like, wow. Gray does not know how it feels to have that boost, to have that energy. He gets so much done without it. Like, if you just got one cup, you know, imagine what you could do.

The bitters. Coffee. Coffee's a little bitter.

The joke here being, for those of you who don't know and, like, why would you. Gray famously does not drink coffee so caffeine free. Has anybody tried to convert you?

I mean, Andrew would have had. My co founder, Andrew Demski, would have had the best chance. He was a huge coffee fan. The entirety of the, whatever, 15 or 16 years that we've known each other, and we roomed together for three years in college, and he had a coffee, you know, like a mini coffee business out of Our dorm room between his. I don't think he sold just the beans, but whatever machine. You know, I don't even understand, like, I hear the words espresso and pour over and whatever else, and I don't even understand what is what. But he had a couple fancy machines that people came and bought coffee from for a while. He had the coffee club going on in college.

Okay. Wow. Yeah. And if that didn't convert you, it's going to be tough anyway. Great. Why are you. I like.

I like the smell. I just. I don't. I can't do the taste. I. And I probably could get used to the taste, but I intentionally don't want to get used to the taste because I don't want the caffeine.

Are you aware of cappuccino or lattes?

I am. I've had to restrain myself because I definitely have a sweet tooth, so I could. I could be in on that pretty quickly and to a dangerous extent.

Anyway. Great. Why are you excited for today's episode of Agency Breakthrough?

This is going to be awesome. We're having an old friend, Nicole Rose, on the podcast today. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that yet or not allowed to say that, Cuba, but it's. I'm sure it'll be in the show title, so you've probably already seen it by now as you're listening to this, but Nicole ran, started, and along with her husband Michael, ran this awesome agency called Mojo Media Labs. They were acquired a little over a year ago, but by Gravity Global. She's a managing partner at Gravity Global now, and she's got some unique things about her story that I'm really excited to dig through today. When I invited her on the podcast, I had like, four different ideas for different breakthrough moments, and so I'm excited to see what we actually dig into on the podcast. Speaking of digging, what have you dug up in your. In your research, AKA stalking, for Nicole?

It's a lot about abm, I have to say, so I do want to hear what Nicole has to say about that. I personally quite like ABM as a strategy. I've done some of it in the past, so I would love to hear from somebody who's gone really deep, deep, deep into that, particularly. There was one post from the Call about, like, building the list of targeted accounts. I would love to hear a little bit about that if we happen to touch upon it along the way, because that's the tricky part and I wanted to get some insights there.

I don't Know if you know this or not. You may have listened to this one, but Michael Rose, Nicole's husband slash business partner in Mojo Media Labs before the acquisition they were known for quite a while as a HubSpot shop and one of the better HubSpot agencies out there. And Michael took pride in never getting a single HubSpot certification. So he very intentionally was like, no, I'm not. My team is going to have to sink or swim but I'm going to spend my time working on some sometime in the business, sometime on the business, sometime working my way out of the business, which obviously they were able to do. He's now no longer involved in the day to day of kind of the acquired company but so it would be hilarious if Nicole comes on and she actually does not do anything with abm. But unfortunately I think we both know that's not the case. Thanks to our Internet sleuthing here and, and personal relationships.

Yeah, excited to find out either way. And I think she'll be joining us soon, right?

Yeah, just about to jump in and we'll, we'll kick things off. There she is. Nicole, welcome to Agency Breakthrough. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks. Glad to be here.

Excited to have you in. And I would like to start by just painting a little bit of the picture of kind of your day to day now and then we'll go into some of the story and how we wound up here. But role today managing partner at Gravity Global. Can you give us a quick kind of snapshot of the agency and your role today?

Yeah, happy to. So Gravity Global is a global agency serving clients in the B2B and complex market space. We're now over 500 team members, 14 offices and a couple different continents and we're, and we're growing. We've had the opportunity to work with some amazing brands and that is only going to continue in the future. We're actually fun fact, the most awarded B2B agency in the world. So that's kind of cool. But my everyday job is I lead what we call our ABM account based marketing practice area. So the way that our agency is set up is that we're, we're customer first but we have, we truly are full service because we've got deep capabilities in different practice areas based on, you know, kind of what, what the client needs. So my job is to make sure that we are building out, staying innovative in the area of ABM and making sure that we're able to provide those excellent services to our clients.

So let's give a little bit of the backstory here in terms of how you wound up at Gravity Global. Can you tell us that story kind of in a nutshell? And I'd be curious if you brought ABM to Gravity Global.

So here I'll do in a quick nutshell, because there's a lot to cover kind of before that, but we were acquired, so I was owner with my husband, Mike Rose of Mojo Media Labs for about a decade, and we were acquired in May of 2022. And, yes, we brought ABM to Gravity Global. In fact, that was the most appealing kind of aspect to our agency. In addition, the culture and great processes and things of that nature that. That we had. So that's it in a nutshell.

Yeah, that's awesome. And so that backstory, if we peel that back for just a second, and then I want to talk through some. Some of these breakthroughs, but to give folks a sense of your history, you and Mike started or started building this agency with an exit in mind. And I talked to Mike not that long ago. He was saying, I think 2013 was like, hey, the moment of here's our vision to exit. At some point, you became really well known in the HubSpot ecosystem. Have a bunch of different pieces there, but where did you stumble across abm? And is there anything else we should know about? Kind of the backdrop of Mojo Media Labs pre acquisition?

Yes, quick story on that. When, you know, the finding the date of, you know, of cleaning for exit down the line, this is really how it happened. Mike came home really energized by meeting, you know, with a group of entrepreneurs and business owners, and they had. They had put it out there that you need to pick your day and your, you know, in your year. You need to pick the day it's going to happen. So back in 2013, it looked a lot different than, you know, than today. So when he came home and he said, okay, we need to pick a day, and I suggest it is this day, which is May 13th of 2023, which the reason for that is May 13th is his birthday, which he thought would be really cool. But in addition, our. Our youngest child would be graduating from high school in May of 2023. And so, you know, the thought process, it was, hey, we could, you know, maybe look and plan for the future, and he could spend the summer with his, you know, with his son. But also then, you know, maybe our life looks different than it does today with this transition. So when he told me, you know, this and he was very excited about it, I went, okay, sure, let's have a glass of wine. I was definitely always more the skeptic, you know, just. But I love the fact that he put the vision out there and. And it's amazing when it. When you put things out there, how it actually kind of comes to be. So we actually sold on May 13th of 2022. So just one year earlier to the day, that was completely by chance. The timeline just kind of worked out that way, but kind of nuts in that way.

So I'm curious, can you tell us anything about how that moment felt? Because I'm imagining it must have been very emotional. Like, how was that?

It was a very, very, very significant moment for us, for sure. The reality of just having that happen is it's hard to describe. It's elation, but at the same time, disbelief. And then, quite frankly, the process leading up to that is so difficult that, you know, it's kind of like exhaustion and like, oh, thank goodness we were able to make it to the finish line. So it's been just such an incredible experience for us. Hands down, day one of, of the acquisition, and this was planned. Mike stepped away from the business and. And I stayed on. So I am super excited. Now I'm in a whole new, you know, phase of evolution where it comes to, you know, agency life and an agency world. And it's. It's pretty amazing to now have the opportunity to just see things on a whole different kind of, you know, trajectory and path and just to have this global scale and meet so many, you know, amazing smart people. But the parts that I would love to talk about is how we got to that point, because, yes, that is very exciting to have happen. But as I reflect on, you know, as I reflect on the journey over, you know, the course, genuinely, of 10 years, the name of your podcast, Breakthrough, really, really, like, hits home with me because the reality is how we got to where we are today was a series of breakthroughs along the way. And how did we break through some of those things? And, you know, really, the. The short answer to that is it was a bunch of what I call courageous decisions. Let me classify courageous. Okay? That means you're scared to death, but you do it anyway, right? So it. There have been many, many courageous decisions that we made along the way, and those have made all the difference in the world. And I being on this podcast, it got me a chance to kind of reflect back on, you know, what some of those are. So hopefully we'll have a chance to kind of touch upon some of those. Some of those milestones. Because, you know what. What we've achieved is achievable for anyone who would like to, you know, get to that point in your journey. And I just think the most important thing is to. To know that living outside the comfort zone and taking risks and, you know, not having, you know, all your ducks in a row before, you know, take that next leap is. Is just part of the journey. And to us, that was an exciting part of, you know, entrepreneurship and the journey. Scary a lot of the times, but man alive, we just would not have made it even remotely as far, I mean, just not at all, if we would have stayed in our comfort zone, you know, for. For too long. And the reality is, over the course of many years, you have to do this a lot. It's not just, like, one breakthrough you have. You have to have multiple, like, every, you know, one to two years. It's making sure that you've, you know, that you're. That you're reinventing, that you are pushing the boundaries, that you're doing things that are very uncomfortable, that, you know, that get you to those breakthrough points.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Nicole, you're making a job. You're really easy, right? Because from a storytelling perspective, we had this, you know, it's a typical case of we had this flash forward, you know, to the end point. And by all means, that's what we want to explore here. And I'm really happy to hear that you had this opportunity to think about these courageous decisions. So take us through them. Like, what did it take? Because I imagine a lot of our listeners are thinking, I wish I could get to that point, you know, that point of acquisition, exiting the business, living the good life afterwards. At least that's kind of how it's envisioned. So what did it take?

Yeah, obviously, you guys are agency life. You know, what. You know intimately what it's like. Gray, I do remember how long we've gone back, but it's. It's been a long time. Maybe even close to a decade.

Uh, yeah, close to that. I don't remember if we met at the mountain in 2014, but I think that I looked this up when I was talking to Mike not too long ago, and I think the first time that we were on a call together was, like, early 2015. So. Yeah, eight. Eight years or so.

Yeah. Yeah, amazing. So the. The. The. The first courageous decision was. Was going all in on HubSpot and inbound, and that was in 2012. And that doesn't sound that long ago. But back in 2012, HubSpot was just a little baby. It was, it was very unproven. But we fell in love with HubSpot right away. It was like, wow, if you can put data analytics, you know, and just that to marketing, how cool is that? So we bought into the vision. And another reason we bought in was we just really, really loved the culture at HubSpot. And we as an agency, you know, as agency owners, we strive to have a culture that was like that. So not gonna lie, we completely ripped off. I'm sure a lot of people did their culture code, you know, document. Do you remember that, Greg?

Yeah.

They put it out there for the world. And I think it was, to this day, I think it's actually the most downloaded thing on the HubSpot website. But anyway, we just, we fell in love with the vision, what they were looking to do. And when I say we jumped all in, like, we jumped all in. It was like, okay, what we were doing previous in our agency, we're not doing that anymore. Now. I will preface this by saying there, there was another company at the time that, that I was running called Marketing Candy and it was a print promotional product agency. And so I will say that the cash flow from that agency allowed us to take some, you know, riskier moves faster, just, you know, kind of rip the band aid off, stop doing some of that work and then, you know, going all in. By the way, we sold that business in 2016, so had some experience there. That was the first thing and that was invigorating to now, you know, have like a really clear, you know, path and why. And for, for four years that was our intense focus. And then it was really ABM that came next. And the reality is that the vast majority of the clients that we were working with were B2B clients. And we heard about this little company called Terminus that was coming on the scene. For those of you who don't know, Terminus was one of the, one of the first behind demand based platforms, ABM platforms that came onto the market. And this guy named Sangram, who started as CMO of Marketo and then he became founder of Terminus was behind it. He was a really, really cool guy. And Mike said, I really want to meet this guy. Like there's just something intriguing about this. And for us it was like how ABM just kind of makes sense for B2B because it just made sense to us. It just seemed like a smarter way to go. So, you know, we didn't think long and hard about it. Mike actually was the one, he jumped the plane he jumped on a plane. He just told Sangram he wanted to meet him, and Sangram said, sure. Not knowing. He actually, we were in Dallas, he was in Atlanta. So he had no idea that Mike jumped a plane to just fly out to Atlanta just to say hi. And so, you know, basically, we. You know, the message to Sandgram was, we love what you're doing. We want to be on this ABM train. We want to be your first agency partner. And Sandgram said, well, we don't have an agency partner, but more than happy to have you be the first. We don't have an agency partner program, I should say, but more than happy to have you be the first. So that. That was really, you know, the start of it. And again, we, you know, we jumped in with both feet, quite frankly, just like all of us starting anything new, we didn't know what we were doing. That's the reality of it. We were early adopters, and, you know, we had many hard lessons that we learned in the early years, but, man, it wasn't worth it, right? I mean, so to. To go through, it was hard to learn something new. We learned new technology, we started pitching new services, had to kind of, you know, reorchestrate how we served clients, because now we are doing inbound, but also abm, which some people call kind of a double funnel, you know, type of thing. But we just. We were dead set on, like, this is kind of the future of B2B is ABM. And, you know, quite frankly, also, you know, we thought, you know, HubSpot inbound is awesome, and we believe in HubSpot, but, boy, that's putting all of our eggs in, you know, in this one basket. And that is a little, you know, scary. And so, you know, this was a great way for us to diversify as well. But that. That was a. That was a game changer. And we have. We have. We have pushed on ABM for, well, I mean, now seven years, which is a really, really long time in the ABM world. Like, a really long time.

So what I'm hearing about these first two decisions, first one being inbound, second being abm, two similar stories of you went all in. And in one case, you said all in, even despite not having all of the information is probably an understatement. So what that brings to my mind is that you must have gone through a change management challenge there. So how did you manage both of these changes, and what did you learn along the way of how to do change management? When you go all in, when you Change everything. How does that work?

Well, so what we always told people who were joining up with our agency is the only constant is change. And so you just need to feel super, super comfortable with that. And that's not just change for change, but it's evolution. And we have to be continually, if we are out there standing still, you know, and in the road, instead of, instead of motoring forward, we're gonn get run over. And so it was always our mindset to make sure that we were staying innovative. So there was, there's always like a change management mindset, if you will. I mean, that's just ingrained. So it wasn't just massive changes like, you know, this time. And this time we were always iterating, always improving, always changing. There are some points along the way to where we did some massive change. And actually Gray was part of one of, one of those with a, with Zenpilot, which we'll talk about as well. But just be comfortable with it. I see way too many agencies stay comfortable and they stay in their lane and you know, it's, it's just. Let's just focus on the next client to the next piece of work. And there's just so, so much more opportunity out there if you're willing to just take more risk and expand a hundred percent.

Nicole, I wanted to ask about. So you've bet on some platforms and actually as a funny side note, so our hub ID with guava box back in the day was one nine one. And then I don't know if we're allowed to say the rest of the numbers not, but three more numbers start certain with zero. Do you remember what, what was the hub ID for? You guys?

We must have been 161.

We beat. We beat you.

You were earlier in 2012. So we. Yeah, we probably signed up July of 2012 or something. So you must have been, you actually must have been pretty early because I'm sure hub IDs were not growing at the same rate at that point that they are now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. And I don't know, there were like 300 ish partners at that point.

Oh my God. I mean, I remember, you know, sitting in the same room with, you know, with the founders of HubSpot and there's like 30 agency partners in the room. And it's like, you know, Dharmesh is painting the vision and everything else and you're like, oh my God, I'm in a room with Dharmesh. Right. And so all of that was, was Very amazing.

Yeah.

The next breakthrough is very, is very personal for me. So we've talked about, you know, just from a standpoint of kind of services and evolution and, you know, your business and all that, but there's a lot more to it. So we, we, we decided, okay, this organic growth is, is good. I mean, it's certainly, you know, a great strategy, but we don't want to have to just rely on organic growth. And so we decided, let's see if we can maybe look at acquiring other agencies. Keep in mind, zero experience with this. We had no idea what we were doing, except we had this vision that we wanted to be able to try to grow through non organic means. So truth be told, we had the first acquisition. Won't name the agency, but we acquired a small agency in Chicago. What year was this? This was in 28. No, 20. 2017. 2018. Somewhere in that time frame. And it was awful. So we went through, we went through with it. Let's just. I always say when things, you know, when things go bad, that's just your path to learning, right? It's like you try, you fall in your face, you learn something, you get up, you do better, and then, you know, you can, you know, improve tuition. So that one, we, that one was not a great outcome. Not super proud about it. But the interesting thing was not only did we learn a lot of lessons, but we put out some kind of press around it saying, hey, we just, you know, made this acquisition. We were really excited about it, which I had an agency owner who I knew pretty well contact me then proactively and, and said, I had no idea that you were looking to acquire. Would you be interested in my agency? And I was like, what? So again, that never would have happened if we would not have, you know, taken a step forward, given it a try. Regardless of what the outcome is, it opened up the door to the next acquisition, which was, which was an agency in Indianapolis called SpinWeb. And that acquisition happened. We finalized that in, in 2018. And I have to tell you, truth be told, you know, obviously it's, it's Mike and I's business. It's our, it's our only source of income. We have four children. Right. There's a lot of risk anyway when you own an agency. And this, you know, this deal was the biggest thing that we had ever looked to do, you know, from a, from a personal perspective. And we needed to put our, you know, our, we needed to put ourselves on the line for this, right? So quite a bit of risk and I remember sitting down and talking to Mike and, you know, I remember saying to him, this is either going to be the best decision that we ever make or it's going to be the worst. My gut is telling me it's going to be the best. Let's do it. And we did it. And it was really, really, really scary, but super exciting. And that was a huge transformation for our agency, was that acquisition. It brought on different skill set that we didn't have. But also what was really interesting is the people who were at that agency were, were, were leaders at heart. And so many of them were. And so, you know, within that, we, we have almost a hundred percent retention from that acquisition. And that was in, in 2018 to this day. So there's, there was only one person of the entire team who has gone elsewhere, and we have great relationship with them. So it's just been, it, it's, it's been amazing. They, they really helped to be that next evolution. And anyway, so we did a few other kind of small acquisitions, but that was, that was a scary time. And I would encourage, you know, agency owners to be very open to those conversations and, you know, and obviously vet them well, vet them better than we did our first, you know, time. I'm happy to share experience with any agency owner, by the way, on this particular topic, but that was a game changer for us.

So I've got a handful of different questions off of that, but could we stay on the acquisitions front for a second?

Yeah, of course.

You've been through this on both ends of it now. You've made multiple acquisitions, you've been acquired. If I'm an agency owner looking at making an acquisition, what are the couple things that we can learn from, from your tuition money and we can fast track our, our learning curve.

Yeah. Well, okay, number one, when you go into something, you know, an acquisition, oftentimes you go in looking at the numbers and looking at the financials to see if it makes sense. Experience, share. You come up the other side looking at the people. And so by far, the most important thing to start with is the culture. Is there alignment in the culture? Understand who the people are. Oftentimes within kind of the acquisition structure, you don't have a chance to talk to the team. And that's scary to me. I think you should try to do everything possible to, to understand who you are, you know, who, who you're engaging with. The folks from spinweb always say, you bought me the people you're buying. It's a joke internally, but that is a very, very important point. And if you feel anything in your gut, that's just kind of saying, this doesn't feel right. Oh, my God, listen to it, right? Because this is a big step. And I don't know what the percentage is, but there is a large percentage of acquisitions that actually do not go well. Some of them go very poorly. And that's a really important point. We. We actually made a third acquisition after SpinWeb, and we felt great about Spin. We. SpinWeb. And there was all of a sudden another agency, you know, that looked very similar on paper. Actually, their financials were even better than, you know, than the acquisition we were looking at for. And we thought, oh, this is. This is great. It was about the same number of team members. But we just. We didn't. We didn't stop to take the time enough with that, because we felt we were kind of coming off of a high, like, we've got this down. And we came out, you know, we. We came out looking at the people, and it was a bad scenario. It was a very bad scenario. It was basically the opposite, you know, what we had experienced before. So just make sure that you're, you know, that you're having all the right conversations, ask the hard questions, you know, up front, and at the very least, making sure that you have access at the right point to talk to leaders in the organization that you're going to, you know, be acquiring. I'm a big proponent of transparency, personally. We've always run our agency with transparency, so, you know, as. As much information you can grab as possible. Clients, you know, health of clients, things of that nature. There's certain indicators that you can. That you can take a look at, but at the end of the day, just listen to your gut. I didn't. And in that. That third acquisition, I felt it in my gut. I'm like, there's some things that were they that I knew it was there, but I just pushed it aside and they were, all right, go slowly. It's okay. It doesn't have to be a fast process. Take your time. Get to know the people.

Nicole, I do want to get to the rest of the story and the rest of the courageous decisions, but just if I could get one quick thing out of you before we proceed. You're mentioning having these conversations, and, you know, sometimes, you know, if you do manage to meet with a team, you don't have a lot of time with them. It seems like the questions are the key. You're talking about asking the hard questions, which are the questions that have served you the best in these kinds of conversations.

Oh, man, that's a good one. I think I need to think about that a little bit. But, but I guess in the vein of it, be creative with them, like, ask things such as, you know, what. What is the thing that, you know, I might be surprised at the boast, you know, or what am I going to be the most excited about? It's start just, I think once you start asking questions based on the responses, you'll kind of know where to, where to kind of go with it. I mean, there's. There's basic questions that you always need to ask, right. About clients and longevity of team members, things of that nature. If you start recognizing, for example, that, you know, you've had quite a few people maybe turn over the years, really dive into, to, you know, why that is, ask the questions around, around their culture. What, you know, what, what rituals, you know, do they have? How do they handle hard situations? And, you know, another big thing too, is understanding. Understanding that the owner who is looking to sell, what is their actual. Why are they doing it? Because that's actually really, really, really important why they're doing it. And you'll know whether you believe it or not, because you're going to hear an answer that, that will just be like the answer you want to hear, but it's not necessarily always the truth. So just kind of pick up on that. You kind of have to be a little bit, you know, kind of part detective. But things. Ax things just a bunch of different ways until you feel comfortable that you've, you know, that you've dived into it, you know.

Okay. Yeah, thanks for expanding on that. Okay. And I think I could ask like 15 more questions about this maybe, and then create another 15. But let's get to the rest of the story if people want to get to that point where we started. Right.

Yeah, happy to. So do you want me to talk about maybe some other kind of breakthroughs?

I feel like we didn't have all of the courageous decisions just yet. So let's kind of, let's try and get through the whole.

Absolutely. As Gray knows from knowing us for a long time, we put culture before anything else, and we initiated rituals within our agency that were unusual to say the least and sometimes a little scary and risky. So the two in particular that come to mind are open book management, which is way more than sharing numbers and, you know, financial transparency. It is involving the team to make decisions in the, the business from a revenue and expenses standpoint. And literally sharing everything and having them be a part of, you know, of what the outcome is. And that was courageous because we all know as agency owners, like, sometimes the numbers don't look that great. Sometimes we go through tough times. And I was like, almighty, is everyone going to just like, run if we have a few bad months and they're like, I'm out of here. And what I learned through that is it's actually completely the opposite. When people understand what the situation is and we're all clear on what the objectives are and where the pain points are, I have found that if you have the right people on the team, they come together to help you to figure out how to solve those things. So now all of a sudden it was like, you know, whereas the owners, you know, had to just be like, you have to figure it all out and problem solve. Now all of a sudden we had this entire team who sought everything. And quite frankly, you know, numbers are just stories about people. So it's like, you know, whether it was a revenue problem, why, you know, are clients churning? Why is, you know, why are some of these things? So it was. It became very easy for people to understand what was going on, and they helped us to make decisions and have to this day, but it was still scary. And then the second one was this concept called ro, that's Results Only work environment. This actually came from her acquisition of SpinWeb. The whole team there had been RO for many, many years. And that was of the utmost importance to make sure that we continue that. So basically what it is on a nutshell is you can work anywhere, anytime, anyhow you want. You know, as long as you are meeting the results, there's no, you know, it's. It's not about your time. It's, you know, not about any of these other things. And so as, as agency owners, kind of scary, right? It's like, well, how do I, you know, how do I hold people accountable? What do I do? I mean, you literally have to just kind of let go now. There is more to it than that. And we have, you know, clear accountabilities and as that's where the results come from. But to still to saying to everybody, okay, we're ro. And we actually gave them homework assignments at that point. And one of them was like, you know, walk out early at 3pm and go meet your, you know, go meet your children at the bus and spend the afternoon with them and do something. And it was uncomfortable for everyone at first. They're like, what? Or it's like Come in late and don't explain yourself. You know, you don't have to like, we're just living our life like you, we're gonna treat you like an adult, so just act like one. You know, make the decisions that are going to be good decisions and good decisions for the business, but work around, you know, your life and that, that, that, that's a game changer. I'm a huge proponent of it to this day. We, we still work that way and actually we've brought a lot of that into gravity, which is really, really exciting. Um, so from a culture perspective, we even kind of put it out there, you know, in terms of taking risks and that paid off. Um, another thing we did that was actually kind of scary because it was going to cost money and it was an investment, was building our own sales and marketing department within our small agency. And all of a sudden now we have headcount that is 100% dedicated to our own, you know, revenue generation, if you will. From a business development standpoint, we had three people on that team, three full time people. And that was a game changer to be able to have because you, anyone who's in an agency knows, you know, oftentimes we don't do our own stuff because we're too busy servicing clients and that's just unacceptable. We decided that is unacceptable. We have to be great at what we're doing and you walk the walk. And what we learned through many times trying is that when we try to use people who are on client work, client work always ends up going first. So if we get really, really busy all of a sudden, guess what drops off? Our own marketing. So we made that decision and that really helped us from, you know, from a, from a revenue perspective and consistency and growth, which, you know, then made us even more interesting for, you know, someone who was looking to acquire. So it's huge. And then last, I will say from, from a, you know, from, from this perspective is truly, and I'm not bringing this up just because you're having me on this podcast, but we engaged Zen Pilot as, as Gray knows and went all, you know, we went all in to ClickUp. And the reason was, and we, we transformed our operations because of it internally and it was all stemming around, you know, some issues that we were having. And I finally just said, enough's enough. We are doing something about this one way or the other. We are making big change and we're going to hire someone who's going to help us to do that. And that, that is a game Changer to this day that that was back in, I don't know, gray. Was that 20?

21? 21, I think 21, yeah.

To this day, the team loves our process. Truth be told, sometimes I'm like, you guys are too process oriented now. Stop it. Like get out. I threatened the other day I was going to take ClickUp away for a week and they are all like, no. So I mean it's working really, really well. But that was a game changer for us. So those are some of like the key points kind of along the way. And then last I'll just end on was really just being open minded for what is our, what's next. So our, our why at the point we went to, you know, to, to look for potential people to acquire us was we, it had to fit three things. One, it had to be great for our clients. And we were at the point to where we were getting some bigger clients coming aboard. And really we were doing ABM and we, there weren't many options. There still aren't many options for agencies who really focus on abm. So we were getting these really exciting clients. We couldn't expand very much within those clients and they kept coming to us saying, hey, can you do xx next? And the reality is we couldn't. And so we didn't want to promise those things that we really couldn't deliver on. So we needed it to be good for our clients, we needed it to be good for our people. We have built an amazing culture. Love our people. And in my experience, the only way to really keep good people is to allow them the opportunity to, to grow in advance in their career. Right. And to give them those opportunities. And when you're not growing that fast, it's hard to have enough opportunities for growth. So it needed to be great for our team from a growth perspective and it obviously needed to be good for, you know, for Mike and I. And we were very open minded. The how we even started looking was actually kind of by accident. We met someone and we were intrigued and we were like, okay, well let's see what happens. And so we kind of put ourselves out on the marketplace really ahead of time. We were like proactively looking to do that and it was a blessing. We had no idea what we were going to come across, but we were just open minded to the possibilities. And every time we would talk to someone potential, we'd run it through these three things all. @ the core, the culture had to match and the people had to match. Like that was, you know, important.

Those Are all awesome, awesome lessons. Thanks for walking us through it. I've got, and I know that we're running tight on time, so I'll, I'll try and keep these as short as I can. I've got like a thousand questions to ask. One specifically is around tools. You've bet. You bet big on HubSpot early on worked out. You bet big on Terminus, like super early the first, and that's worked out super well for you. Your team bet pretty early on ClickUp. I mean, there's a bunch of examples here. Is there anything you attribute that to or is there a thought process maybe? It's not necessarily like, it could just be, hey, we're lucky in these areas and we've got a whole trash box of tools that we tried and didn't work out. But is there any evaluation process or how have you found and selected platforms to partner with?

My dad always said growing up, I'd rather be lucky than good. And, and so, I mean, come on, part of, part of it was luck as well. HubSpot for sure. I mean, you know, we bought into the vision but in terms of like tools to take for example, ClickUp, I, I truthfully am of the mindset. There's a perfect technology or product. It's more, much more so around how you use it. So it's like, okay, how can we really, you know, ensure that our processes and our operations and everything else is maximizing the value that we're getting from this? So when I'm evaluating kind of tools or when we're evaluating tools, obviously we need to make sure it checks some, you know, some, some really key kind of boxes. Like for us, we worked in an agile manner, not in a water, you know, waterfall. And we needed to make sure that the, you know, that our project management, you know, part of ClickUp, obviously we use for project management accommodated those types of things. Also, you know, we were looking for something that could give more insights and kind of bring a lot of data and information into one place that we could just be smarter about running our, our business and didn't have to go look in five different places. So it was like, you know, we knew it's like we had. We paint the vision first of what we, of what we need before we ever even start looking at tools. It's like these are the things that we're trying to solve for. Right? This is what I'm trying to solve for. Sometimes you don't get to solve all those things with, you know, the technology that you bring on. Maybe it's unrealistic, but our goal is always to try to, you know, tick off as many of those boxes as possible and then, you know, put the work into to make sure that you get it up and running smart. I'm a big believer of bringing the experts in to help guide you to do that. We've done other things like bring on EOS traction and you know, we, we bit the bullet and we hired someone to guide us through the process. Worth every single penny. You know, same, same with Zenpilot. So that's just a really smart move. Too many people try to DYI this kind of stuff and it's just you don't get the same results.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was great. Getting into your mind about how to make these decisions and also the element of luck. I expect we're going to hear this more than once on this podcast. So we're about to wrap up here, unfortunately, because we're almost out of time. If I gave you 30, 60 extra seconds to share, you know, another or like a final piece of advice to the agency operators listening, is there anything else that we didn't touch upon or maybe something that you wanted to reiterate before we wrap up?

One thing that I've always gotten a lot of value from is community and you know, just making sure that, you know, making sure that I do see a lot of agency owners who kind of keep to themselves, right. And especially since many will work remotely or from home and it's very easy to kind of get insane. Your bubble one community that, that I, I love and really had a lot of impact in particular, you know, kind of in the early days was Digital Mastermind group and it was, it. It's still around. Happy to make introductions but it's basically a community of, you know, digital agency owners and there's a, you know, yearly event that goes on. Very active kind of slack community and just agency owners looking to help other agency owners and it's, you know, but community is, is so important. Like there are people I'll follow or books I'll read. But to be able to have a community of people who are, you know, who are. Who have similar situation, you know, challenges you and everything else and to be able to have the mind share that comes out of that, man, it is so amazing. Some of the problems you can solve so much faster. So look for the communities. There's so many of them all over the place. Probably not, you know, very difficult to find. If you're having a difficult time finding it, post something on LinkedIn or, you know, or a Facebook group that is and say, hey, what communities might be out here? There's a lot of them. And so I highly encourage that.

Amazing. Yeah. Well, I'm really glad I asked that question because that was something extra and I think a lot of the listeners are going to get a lot of value from that. Thank you for this and for the whole story and for everything you said and for the nice words. The time really flew by with this episode. So thank you so much for finding the time to be on the show here today. Nicole.

Wonderful, wonderful. It was wonderful to be here and I'm very active on LinkedIn. If anyone would like to connect with me, it's Nicole Rose. Nicole with a K. And I love meeting new people, I love making new friends and I really love helping. So if there's anything that I can do to, you know, assist just with the experience I've had, I'm happy to do so. So let me look me up and connect with me on LinkedIn.

I don't think I've sent you an invite yet, so I'll be sure to catch up on that.

I'll look for that. Great.

Okay. Awesome. Right? Thank you. Thank you so much, Nicole.

Really appreciate it.

So we just finished the interview, the agency breakthrough episode with Nicole Rose. Great. How was it for you? What did you like about it?

I mean, it's always good to talk to Nicole. I'm, I've known the Rose dynamic duo here for a while and what I appreciated was Nicole spent the, she did the legwork to kind of write down some of these key moments in the journey and that, that made the conversation really. You know what's fun is when you know someone, you've seen it sometimes you've seen some of these moments from the outside, but you kind of get to sit there and I feel like I didn't, I had a whole bunch of questions I could have asked but didn't, but, but you kind of get to celebrate with them like going through this, this really incredible journey. This is, this has been a life changing experience. Like this is the cool breakthrough is that the breakthrough's not like, hey, the agency did well and whatever else, but this has had a massive impact on the quality of life for, for their family and the, the legacy that they're going to leave and just the, the people who they've impacted and the way that they've invested in culture and I mean impacted like my thinking about our business and stuff. So it's really cool to see and.

Learn from, to Me, it was like, sometimes you run one of these episodes and you feel like some kind of message comes at exactly the right time for you, because this was one of those for me.

What message?

Across Nicole's story. You know me, I like to ask the how questions, you know, what steps did you take, what questions did you ask, etc. And I did ask some of these questions. I wanted to ask a lot more, of course. But there was this one thread combining all of those courageous decisions that Nicole was talking about. And my notes just say three words. One is gut, and then the rest is all in. Listen to your gut and go all in. And then you fall in your face. But you learn. This is a mindset that I'm trying to cultivate more and more. And because I can see, you know, talking with more and more with owners, entrepreneurs also, like yourself, you know, I can see this is the mindset that gets people really, really far. You have to take the big risks. And listening to the gut. You know, she mentioned it more than once, more than twice. I'm really taking that away from this. I can see that as she's reminiscing of it, you know, it was really difficult and stressful and scary. But the reward, I mean, it was palpable in this episode. How big the reward is and how awesome it feels like, I want that. You. I really want that.

Yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate hearing that from her. Sometimes when we look back at her story and we talk about how crazy something was, it also seems scarier knowing what we know. Like, I look back at starting our. Our agency Guava Box, and just think, like, what were we thinking at the time? That that's crazy. And it's more scary on paper now than it was emotionally to me at the time. I knew it was a big step at the time, but, you know, you just didn't know what you don't know at the time. So my. And I only bring that up to say, whatever decisions you're facing, the principle that you just said, you know, that sticks out to me all the time, is usually the harder thing, the scarier thing. Like, that's commonly. You should look at that as the number one option. That's probably what you need to go do. The conversation you're afraid to have is probably the conversation that you need to go have. Yeah, the. The action that you're afraid. Most afraid to take is likely the action that you need to go take. But I just bring that up to say, regardless of kind of how big or small something may feel right now, still push through that friction. It may not feel like this is the most inspiring big mission in the world. This is the craziest leap to take. It may feel like, hey, I get the sense that we just need to push harder in this direction around this one thing or that service line. It wouldn't kill us to cut it. I just get the gut feel that we probably just need to trim that service line and let it go. That to some of you will feel like a crazy large step and to others will feel like a relatively small thing. And so the encouragement is just step up and make the decision and roll with it.

Yeah. And that was such a clear thread throughout this episode that, I mean, unless you had more to tell here, I would love to leave the listeners on that note. No, listen to your gut and do the hard thing and do the scary thing. I mean, you just listened to Nicole sharing all about kind of the reward from that. So she's the best. I think a story like that gives you a lot of reason to do the scary things.

Yep, that's it. Well, that's awesome. That's a wrap for Agency Breakthrough. Thanks for sticking with us today. We'll chat with you next time.

Loved having you here today. See you in the next one, Sam.