The Achieve Podcast - Jay Rutherford (The Virtual Wild)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner, and I'm excited to be your host today. We're excited to have Jay Rutherford, CEO and founder of The Virtual Wild, with us today. Jay, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me today.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit better, give us a quick backstory on your business. What do you do and how did it all get started?

Great. Yeah, so I started the company called The Virtual Wild, uh, 10 years ago. It was me, uh, and, and my— I like to joke, it's me and my dog sitting in my office saying, where do I want to take my career? I'd worked at a number of different ad agencies in Chicago and worked at different digital media facilities, companies in the past, and realized that there was a lot of interesting things coming around the corner when it comes to technology and, immersive storytelling tools. So VR was starting to come out at that time, augmented reality, all those different capabilities. And I realized that not a lot of people understood what that stuff meant and what impact it was gonna have on us. As a society. And so I took that opportunity and kind of jumped on the timing there to create my company called The Virtual Wild. And the name really refers back to how technology and storytelling and all the different tools that we're using is changing so much. It really feels like the Wild West. It feels like this unknown frontier to so many people. And I wanted to wrap my head around it as soon as possible so I could be a steward in order to help guide clients and companies through this ever-evolving, changing process. And so that's really where I am today. Now we've got about 15 full-time employees and a small army of independent contractors, and we work with, you know, manufacturing groups like Siemens and Husky Technologies and defense groups like Leidos and Lockheed Martin, kind of, you know, wide range of clients. And we build all sorts of immersive sales and marketing experiences that really help them to tell innovative stories through innovative technology and bring all that to life and make an impact on their end customers.

So, Jay, remind me, what year did you start?

Uh, 2015.

Okay, so 2015, been around about 11 years.

11 years. That's right.

From just yourself and your dog, now you got 15 employees.

Yeah.

And, and a business. So congratulations on, on that growth. And are you just in the Dallas area, or do you, do service nationwide?

Uh, we service worldwide now, actually. So just this last year, we went to, I think, uh, 7 or 8 different countries. Um, always in the past, we've been servicing all the domestic United States, uh, the territories, because our, our clients— a lot of the work we do these days is at trade shows or at corporate briefing centers. So we'll either be working with our clients at their headquarters in different facilities or we support them in whatever their trade show regimen is in their schedule, that, you know, and where they bring all of their, their assets to different trade shows. And that used to really just be a domestic effort, and now it's become an international effort. So more and more work that we're doing is really kind of spreading out across the world.

It sounds like a fun adventure.

It is. It is. We live vicariously through our clients, and that's one of the most fun and exciting things. There's never a dull day around here. And, you know, we really get a chance to wrap our heads around what our clients are doing. I like to joke that if anybody asks who the Virtual Wild is, that I say if Deloitte and Disney had a baby, that would be the Virtual Wild, because we become an extension of our clients' teams and we really want to become experts in what it is that they're doing and understand their challenges, objectives, really their entire business model so well that we can proactively present ideas that they might not have even considered on how they can make an impact to their end customers. And then we bring all that to life through wow factor audiovisual storytelling tools that are out there. And that's the, that's the Disney aspect of who we are.

And it sounds like you've won several awards around this as well. And yeah, yeah, what a fun creative experience too, right? You get to imagine new things, uh, bring them to life in trade shows, the corporate centers.

That's right.

Yeah, what a great experience. Let's talk about your sales, marketing, and outreach efforts a little bit. Where are you seeing traction? What's working for you and maybe what's not working?

Well, one of the challenges with the type of work that we do is that unless you have a visual aid to demonstrate what you're talking about, it's really hard for, for most people to wrap their heads around things. So, you know, I'll use virtual reality as an example. How can you describe to anybody what a virtual reality experience is like until you're actually wearing the headset and you've experienced it firsthand? But, Daphne, have you ever put on a VR headset before?

I have. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So you can probably speak to that from first-person experience that it really is so eye-opening and it's difficult to describe otherwise. So I'd say that's one of the challenges that we have is that, and then also just the name and who we are, this evolution of technology, things are changing so often that we really need to have a lot of visual aids to support what we do. So most of our growth has been through word of mouth. We build a project here, people see it, and it really grows into new opportunities. We don't have a lot of traditional kind of cold outbound sales funnel channel type stuff set up. And so we don't have a lot of kind of that traditional approach of, hey, let's just blast this out to a million people and see what comes back. We have a much more organic, working with big companies like defense contractors that have, you know, large organizations and individual budgets and individual opportunities there that we kind of get in and start working with. And we really spread our capabilities out across the group. And then one turns into another and into another. And then now we've got this vertical, you know, impact on a specific market. That's really where we've been most successful in the past. We're starting now. We're actually going to a trade show in Tampa this next week called Exhibitor Live. And it's kind of like the the Trade Show Experts trade show, and we're going to be showing off a lot of the things that we do there and meeting with a lot of different channel partners. And we're starting to really expand on the opportunities of working with other groups and seeing how we can team up to take on bigger, bigger challenges and obstacles in the industry. But that's where we've seen the most success so far, is the vertical growth in specific markets that we know, you know, really use trade shows and use the corporate briefing centers to make an impact on their clients. And also in these channel partnership opportunities that I mentioned.

So really, once they experience kind of what you've done, they've seen it and they're like, oh, I want that.

That's right.

As well.

Yep, absolutely.

So, Jay, there's a lot of buzz around AI and automation right now. Where have you found ways to use AI in your business?

Yeah, a number of different ways. So generative AI content that is coming up constantly. I'd say one of the first things there is that we can produce content, concept art that helps to visualize some really high-level rough ideas in a fraction of the time. Before, we used to have to outsource that to independent contractors that could help with different things or, you know, pull our full-time team into that. And it might take days or weeks to really put these concepts together. Now we can visualize high-level opportunities that we want to, you know, help present to our clients in just a matter of of hours. So that's been huge. Others, you know, of course ChatGPT and copywriting, and then AI agents are another huge thing. So any type of automation that helps us to really pull together a number of different tools and create automations through those different tools, that's been a huge impact for us as well.

As you try to scale, what are some of the constraints that keep showing up? Where do you keep kind of bumping into those?

Um, that we've got a specific kind of winning formula on how we show off our, our concepts and we really make an impact with our clients. And I think that it's the training of specific individuals on our team. We want to make sure that whenever anybody joins our team, that they are able to really adopt our processes that have become very successful. So I think, you know, that's always a challenge to scale, just making sure everybody kind of does it the Virtual Loud way versus a way that they've seen, you know, seen done at different places they come from. But, you know, the other challenge is just that we've got— we really have a lot of demand for our work. And so it's just a matter of kind of scaling up with people to meet that challenge, but also trying to balance that out with trying to use as much automation as possible so we don't add too much to our overhead because we're independently funded. I'm, I'm relatively, uh, you know, fiscally conservative, and I want to make sure that we're not grow— you know, growing too fast, too quick. But, uh, I'd say those are some of our growth challenges so far. But every year we've had pretty significant growth year, year over year. Um, track record's working well so far.

Jay, what are you most excited about? Look at the next stage of growth. What, what are you excited about in the future?

Yeah, I think, you know, AI opportunities are tremendous. Um, I think, you know, really what I'm most excited about is probably a lot of the stuff that I don't know that's out there. I like to reference the story Who Moved My Cheese. Some people love it, some people hate it, but, you know, the story of Who Moved My Cheese is about this, uh, this fictional kind of like mouse in a maze, and every day there's, there's there's a technician that's bringing a piece of cheese and putting in the same part of that maze every day, and that mouse gets so used to it, it's just kind of rinse, repeat. Well, one day that technician moves where that cheese is placed in the maze, and so it's up to the mouse to figure out, hey, where are they going to go and how are they going to find that? And I'd say that for us, that really describes who we are every day that we're in the office. It feels like we're always finding new opportunities, We're having to pivot constantly and we're really having to adapt on a regular basis. And that can be really challenging at times, but it's also very exciting at times because it means that we're always staying agile and we're always on our toes and really, we're really anticipating change on a regular basis. And I think that's what every company really needs to do as much as possible these days with the advent of AI. AI is so disruptive, um, that it's, it's innovative growth but in an almost you know, challenging and destructive way for some people, right? Lots of, lots of jobs might go away. Lots of challenges might come as a result of it. But I think what's most exciting is to think, hey, how are we going to continue to look at that like a tool and really bring that into our capabilities and figure out how to scale up and grow that much faster as a result of that being mainstream?

Let's look backwards for a minute. Your journey over the last 10, 11 years since you started the company. Let's talk about some of the wins and maybe some mistakes. What, what lessons stand out to you?

What lessons stand out to me? Um, gosh, I mean, there's— that's such a wide-ranging, uh, conversation. Many lessons stand out to me just as far as, you know, things that have gone well, things that have been challenging, um, you know, finding recurring models, uh, revenue and pricing models that have really benefited us and allowed us to be grow. I think one of the lessons that's really been great is to find some type of organization or market that has kind of a regular cadence of revenue spend associated with that. So say, for instance, for us, it's been trade shows. Everybody that goes to trade shows, large groups that go to trade shows, they've got a marketing budget already set for that. They're going to spend money. And so that's already kind of set in stone. That's been really impactful for us to be a part of that as opposed to just doing more traditional marketing, web marketing, because it's like, okay, let's launch something in spring. Maybe let's just push it back to fall. Right. There's not really anything that's driving that to happen in any regular cadence. And so I think that being a part of the trade show world has really helped us because it's the structure that guides our clients towards accomplishing goals in a very set period of time. So, you know, that's, that's been a big, big lesson for us, I'd say.

So really getting to the recurring revenue. So you have to keep closing new deals all the time, getting more out of the existing clients.

That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, you know, the more recurring revenue models that you can set up, so it's not just shooting from the hip, having to close bespoke things all the time, that's always helpful in the, uh, The ad world, the kind of service-based world, that can be challenging at times. You know, you could certainly set up buckets of hours that you chip away against, and, and there's a number of different ways to kind of work on that. But that, that's always a challenge, is just to figure out what's right for any entrepreneur to set up that, that steady revenue flow as much as possible but not stifle innovation at the same time.

So Jay, you mentioned, uh, obviously The Virtual Wild is kind of your main company, uh, Prior to the, the podcast starting, you also mentioned something else that's really interesting that you're working on. Why don't you tell us a little bit about this other project that you have going?

Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, um, the, the main company that, that I've started, I'm a CEO of, called The Virtual Wild, and we build all sorts of innovative sales and marketing experiences. But we realize that a lot of the trade show groups that we work with don't know, don't have the information at hand in order to quantify the ROI behind them spending money on trade show work. So even though lots of times they'll set annual budgets, they won't know exactly what the value of all that effort is. And so we've actually started up another platform called WildView, and the website is wildview.ai. And what we have is we've got a computer-based, computer vision-based tool that we can set up at any trade show. And that allows us to anonymously, anonymously record unique patrons that come and interact with our client's booth and understand the engagement times and understand the impact that specific work that's set up in the booth is having on our client's audience. And then generate a report back that we deliver to our clients to say, look, you know, the thing that we built here is doing this. It's driving this many numbers and this many unique unique engagements. And over here it's doing this because right now at trade shows you'll have badge scanning, but it's all so random and so anonymous it doesn't really lead to any actionable results. And so we're trying to change that. And what I love so much about WildView is that it really complements the work we do at the Virtual Wild and vice versa. And so if anybody's looking to help solve that challenge of understanding the ROI and the spend, justifying the spend at their trade show presence, That's one of the things we're focused on.

Last question for you. What advice would you give to other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey as you?

I would say, you know, in addition to some of the things I've seen, I've said so far, just to, you know, be patient, be agile, you know, really tap into some of those, those markets that already have revenue flowing behind them, of course. You know, I think that there's so many ways you can be successful these days that it's just up to everybody to figure out how to, how to adapt and, you know, bring whatever, whatever it is that they do to the marketplace. So I think that the advice I would give one person would be different from somebody else. That's maybe the challenging part to that question. But, you know, there's lots of lessons I've learned. It just takes time, you know, spending time in the trenches to kind of figure out all the nuances of how to make your own business work.

Well, Jay, thank you for sharing your story and insights with us today. Really appreciated the conversation. For those listening, if you want to learn more about The Virtual Wild and what— and Jay's company, you can visit thevirtualwild.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow our show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.