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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Carl Smith. Carl is the founder of the Bureau, a community for digital agency leaders focused on connection, support and operational excellence. He previously ran a successful agency with a radically autonomous model, and now helps shops modernize how they lead higher in scale. Carl's insights come from hundreds of deep conversations with owners just navigating this post AI, post pandemic world that we find ourselves in, I wanted to have Carl on because most agency owners are clinging to outdated models while the industry is just reshaping beneath them, and he is seeing what's working now. So in this episode, we discuss why agency complacency is the real threat in 2026
Carl Smith 1:47
Is it AI new? That's, I think, what everybody at home is expecting. Is it the economy also expecting that new? I think it's complacency. Ooh. I think it's apathy. I like this. So many of us are just exhausted.
Speaker 1 2:06
We've been trying an old playbook from 2019 for so long, and we can't quite realize it's not working. We've got that pandemic mindset in an AI world, and we're just waiting on the sidelines like something is going to suddenly click back into gear, and I don't think it's going to, I mean, I think we have to acknowledge the world has changed, and it's going to keep changing, and we can't just sit here waiting anymore.
Chris DuBois 2:30
Yeah, I can get fully behind that, just based on what I'm seeing with agencies like this year. Ones who are the ones who are killing it right now are the ones who are just they have the they're the highest agency individuals who are saying, this obviously isn't working. I'm just going to go try making my own path and testing like, I don't know what are you seeing?
Speaker 1 2:51
Yeah, no. It's the same thing that the shops that are doing really well. They're flexible. They all adapt. They're not set in their ways. The ones who are literally, it feels like it's a third, a third and a third. It's like a third are struggling. These are the ones fueling the M and A market going. I want out. You've got these, this group in the middle, who's doing okay, but they're not really trying as hard. Now, some of them are, but some of them are just like, Okay, I'm just gonna tread water here, and things will kick in, and I'll figure it out. That's the apathy part, that it's got me too. And then the third that's doing really well, they just went all in on the change. They spun up a new brand under their umbrella, even if it's not like they're not really a holding company, but they've got something new that has AI baked in, where so many of us have it bolted on. And I think that is the other thing they decided. I'm going to start from scratch on something new. I'll take everything that I've learned, I'll make sure that is key ingredients. But I'm showing up as something new because the world is new. And so I think that's a lot of what I'm seeing with with the shops that are doing well. They're also, they're shops that are doing really well. That may be a little more traditional, but they don't talk about it because they don't want to make people feel bad. Yeah? So I'm always, I'm always on these conversations. I'm like, if you're doing that, well, you need to let people know they need hope. Yeah?
Chris DuBois 4:21
Sharing that, that's an interesting insight, dude. I don't know. I haven't, haven't seen as many agencies that are just killing it like to the extreme where they would would feel like a little bit of shame, of like, Hey, I'm sorry, guys. Like, sorry that. I'm, you know, over here killing it while you guys are struggling. But I guess, what is it with the the old agency model that holding them back
Speaker 1 4:48
comfort they understand? They know, yeah, it's what served them so well. But they've still got that 2019 mentality and and some of them are stuck in the. Pandemic mentality of we've got to be careful. We can't rush this. Let's make sure we're taking care of everybody. The government just gave us a whole lot of money. We're going to be okay. That money's gone for a lot of folks, right? And so I think that's part of it. And I mean, face facts, most owners are older now, like I'm 58 a lot of people that I know are in their late 40s, early 50s. I was talking with Dan Englander not too long ago about how you don't see many young agency owners. You don't see many new founders. I don't think they think of themselves as shops. That's why we don't see them. But really, yeah, it's just this, this comfort of the way it was, and a little bit of fear of having to learn something new that feels daunting, and it does. I mean, honestly, right,
Chris DuBois 5:53
yeah, yeah. From what I'm noticing with the younger founders, it seems like they all want to stay as solo shops, instead of just be solopreneurs, and they'll find contractors to work with everything, which, like, in their defense, is a great model, given some of the changes that we're seeing. But I mean, even across, like some of the bigger agencies, I think I'm seeing them move to a lot more of a contractor based model. Are you seeing?
Speaker 1 6:16
Yeah, definitely seeing that. There's a comfort in that as well, but there's also a flexibility. I used to have a model we called the jellyfish model, and we had a core team. It ended up the core team ended up being 12, but we had about 80 contractors, and we would anybody on the core team could pull from the contractor pool to put together a team for projects. And normally we'd have one or two people on a core team who would be on a project, and that worked really well because we didn't have layoffs. We didn't have and when you look at the market volatility right now, I think that's a big reason why people are moving that way. Is just the pain for a culture. When you you rip people out, and then you flood people in, and there's no, it's a it's whiplash. You can't get around it, right?
Chris DuBois 7:05
So I'm curious now with that jellyfish model. So were you see you might have two people from the core team on it was like, account manager, project manager, and then they just go pick their team, like, kind of run your own business. How? How are you anyone?
Speaker 1 7:18
It could be a developer. It could be a designer. So what we did, and it worked really well until it didn't. So if anybody decides they want to try this, contact me, and I'll show you where all of the little trip wires are that will blow you to hell. But what we did was clients had to pitch us, so we inverted that whole sales process. And when a client would call or prospect, I would say, hey, I really appreciate that you want us to pitch on this, but we don't pitch. What we do is respond. So if you think we're a fit, give me three paragraphs that's all take 10 minutes. Three paragraphs why you want us to pitch, and then I'll share it with my team. And if anybody raises their hand that they're interested, they will be allowed to put a proposal together for you. But if they don't, why would you want to work with us? Why would you want to work with any agency that tells their people they have to work on something? They drop folders, they put these emails, and now they're frustrated, and you're going to get shitty work, but if you hire us, it's because we said yes, and that means the team's gonna work nights, they're gonna work weekends, they're gonna do what they want, because they committed to you. It was a great sales pitch. It was the only time it didn't work was we already had Facebook as a client. We were like one of seven agencies, which is fun to say, but they weren't going to drink our hippie juice. Neither was Microsoft. We lost Microsoft pretty quick. They wanted us to build this whole internal system for their team. And when I explained they had to pitch us, they were like, yeah, right, pal,
Chris DuBois 9:00
yeah, that's a fascinating model, though, because I think it even it empowers your team on a level that I think most teams will never see. We're giving you this power. Let go.
Speaker 1 9:10
Yeah, and we interestingly when, when we started with that model, we had three designers and two developers and some other folks. We were around 12 people. By the end of that model, we were close to 50 working at a time, still with only 12 that were on the core team. But one of the things we would do is, anytime somebody on the team saw somebody they thought should be with us, then I would reach out to them, and I would say, hey, we don't have any opportunity right now. That's why I'm reaching out. I want to understand what it is you love. What do you want to create? What kind of availability Do you have? And if you're interested, I'd love for you to meet with the team so you talk to the people you're going to be working with. If that sounds like a fit, we put you on a spreadsheet once a month. We reach out. We see how your. And you know how busy you are. And then if something does show up, we just reach out and let you know. And so we had, we call them the army of awesome. This just group that we had not worked with yet. And if an opportunity came up and we reached out to them, it was like a reason for celebration. So it was a lot of positivity, and also a lot of unique minds that were coming in.
Chris DuBois 10:23
Yeah, I love this concept like this. The first time I'm hearing something like it, and I'm just thinking through current clients who, like, Who could we have this put in play? How did you handle, like, the sales process for it then, so, like, they do their pitch, your team member says, I'm in. How do you actually scope this out and run the project?
Speaker 1 10:43
Yeah, so we work time and materials, and sadly, I do think time and materials is finally going to go to bed, but it worked great. And one of the things we learned early on was, and again, this isn't exactly cut and paste to today, but clients need to be comfortable confident. They need to trust you when your time and materials. So one of the things we would do is anytime we wrote off hours for any reason, we would leave it on the invoices, written off with a reason why. And we had this one client who was a billionaire, and he just wanted to play and make something cool. It was a lot of fun, till it wasn't. And he he would the very first invoice that we got or that we were sending him, there was about $4,000 for this two hour meeting with so many people in it, because we weren't sure what tools we should use. Should we build something from scratch, or should we do a third party tool? And so I just put on the first invoice, $5,000 no charge, unnecessary meeting. Got a phone call. What is the unnecessary meeting? He said, Well, we weren't sure the best way to approach this, and we should have been normally with time and materials. I would tell clients if we wouldn't do this without the project, that is billable, if we would do it anyway, like learn a new technology, we're not going to charge you for that. So in this case, I told them I was like, we should have known better, and we didn't, and we wasted a lot of time, but it shouldn't be, you shouldn't pay for that. And so at that point, they pretty much quit keeping tabs. But you do have to be honest. I mean, you can't just, you know, decide one day, Hey, okay, they're they're asleep. Let's get them right.
Chris DuBois 12:33
So okay, talking about this model like, we definitely deviated from the like, no, no. It's all good for next year, but, well, I think it's important, because people are going to have to start shifting their models and understand like that is not a normal model which you were just running. How did you even go through like the thinking, what inspired it? So that you were willing to take the risk and try something new to see what came from it.
Speaker 1 12:59
The first thing was, we had reached a level of awareness that we had more work coming in than we could do. And I started asking the team anyway, which of these five projects would you be most interested in? So without the client being involved, I was sort of doing it and just wanting to, you know, proper care and feeding of my team. Give them enough things that they love. What was interesting, Chris was we actually, I found that we were actually three agencies. We were one that was crazy about healthy products and organic foods. We were one that just loved anything with huge databases. We did a lot of fantasy sports stuff, right? And then we had one that was just strictly UX. They just wanted to design stuff, but they never wanted to have anything play with the other aspects of it. So that was really interesting. But one thing I started to say was, when we started, we were just, you know, maybe four designers, a couple of developers by the end of it, yeah, we were like 40 developers and two designers, and it was just like we got so big into that big data part, when that was just the hotness today, I'm sure it would have been AI instead of big data. But because they got to choose, I started to know what to go after, because I knew where their love was, what they wanted to do.
Chris DuBois 14:24
Yeah, that's great. And if you want to keep your team actually interested in, like, fully engaged in their
Speaker 1 14:28
work, that's Yeah. Give them autonomy. It's Dan Pink, autonomy, mastery, purpose.
Chris DuBois 14:33
Yeah, you know, no that. I mean, I going back to my military days like that was when I could just tell my, my soldiers, what the the mission was, and let them run with it. We almost always had better results than, like, someone sitting there trying to tell them, tell them everything, and then, yeah, same thing in the agency I was running. It's like, hey, this year,
Speaker 1 14:52
they have voice, right? They feel they have a little bit of control and what's going to happen. And that makes people happy. Yeah.
Chris DuBois 15:00
100% especially when they come in and say, Well, what would you do here? You say, I don't know. What do you think? And then they give you a thing. You're like, exactly, yeah, go try that. That sounds great. And then they get the results.
Speaker 1 15:09
I wrote this post a while ago called My irrelevancy strategy, and it wasn't on purpose. It just happened. But this gets done really bad. The house fire was not on purpose, so we had a house fire. And I literally, I'm driving home, I've got a client on the call. As I'm driving, I come up to my house and I see it's on fire. And so I say, Hey, I got to go. My house is on fire. And they go, what does that mean? I mean it means my house is on fire, so I couldn't work for about three weeks because of all the things that were happening, you know, with insurance, with contractors, with all this kind of stuff, I got I got home and I got the fire out, which the fire department said was a mistake. I should have let it burn, because they said, Oh man, there's so much reason we got so much investigation to do now, but what I learned was there was a three step process to get the team to run itself, because that was the other part. We were extremely I would say we were lumpy. We weren't flat. There are people you go to for certain things, and they sort of had that domain. But what I realized was when somebody came to me and said, Hey, this is going on. The first thing I would say is, okay, what do you think we should do? And then they would say what they thought they should do. And if I didn't agree with it, I would say, okay, play that out for me. How does that work? If the client chooses a, how does it work? If the client chooses B, and then they would start to think about it, they go, Oh, actually, you know, maybe that's not a great idea, because if they don't like it, then we're kind of on the hook, right? That's exactly it. Now, if they had said, No, I think it's a good idea, I would have let them go, because they need to learn from pain, and as long as it wasn't going to hurt the rest of the team or really nail us financially. And I don't know if you know Mike Montero from Yule, but Mike is like, if you ever saw the fuck you pay me video with he asked me once, why would you let a junior person risk the brand you've built. And I said, Because I'm not worried about a brand, I'm worried about a team, and I want that team to be smart, and I want them to learn, and I want them to learn from experience, not because I told them, because if you tell somebody something, then they're gonna say, oh, yeah, he made me do that. But if you let them learn, they're gonna be like, that was a mistake, right? Yeah.
Chris DuBois 17:41
Yeah. Two things on that. The, I think it was a Tim Ferris thing. He might have got it from someone else, but the idea of, like, letting your team make, like, a $50 decision, like, if this is if you screw this up, and it cost us more than $50 you should talk to someone. But then, after a certain amount of time, it's like they get their confidence, and now they're making $500 decisions, and then it keeps going up 5000 and like, when you imagine your team making $50,000 decisions, except for a lot of agency owners, that's hard to like, fathom, but yeah, imagine what your team would be like if, if they could just operate and you trusted them at that level, like you would like, it'd be awesome.
Speaker 1 18:19
I will say we walked into one really bad decision that got made. And I am not upset with anybody if you see this, but after underperforming, they decided to raise rates. And I was like, I was like, you should just fire them. Just fire them. It's like, now you've created all of this tension and pain, and plus, they've called me now, because the one thing that happens when you have a model like that and everybody is in charge, there's still only one person that can get sued, yep, still only one throat that can truly be choked. And so that was something I learned at the end, while I was trying to ration supplies so I could keep us all in this lifeboat, we were being circled by these party yachts, and they were all trying to get my people on them, because they had great people, and I couldn't go to one because I was chained to the damn boat, right? So I think that that's the thing. It's like, you have to realize that while your team may even love you, there's certain situations where they have better opportunities, and you don't want them to stay out of loyalty, because it just hurts everyone. That was just a little bit of pain I wanted to throw out there for you.
Chris DuBois 19:29
Yeah, the something that I'm realizing kind of more and more with every passing day now, it seems like the only thing that's going to be able to like, serve as your a true competitive advantage is your team like the culture that you have established, because we've reached a state of like, techno parity, where, like, I can create a tool using AI to copy my competitors, right? I can, I can find a model that's very similar to my competitors. I can even take your. Ideas and use them as my own. So what is it that actually separates us and like, it's really hard for someone to copy your team's culture, especially when you're like, the leader who's willing to say, like, hey, there is a great opportunity over there for you. You should take that and knowing that your team is going to be fine and they're going to keep operating at like, a high level, people can't just copy that, like, I've been in so many organizations, like they can't.
Speaker 1 20:24
Yeah, no, I think the other part of it is, and I think this is where agencies are evolving to or will we are going to get smaller, right? I really believe this, because I think there's just two things. One, we have to have really deep domain knowledge, because for the short term, AI is going to make a lot of mistakes, and if you don't have that deep domain knowledge, you're not going to catch it right. And I think that's why clients are going to start hiring us, the deep domain knowledge and the external voice, they are smart. Clients are smarter than ever, and we need to realize that the age of the savvy client is upon us, and they will know the tools, and they will know the opportunities, and they will know the things because they're using the same chat bots that we are, right? They're in chat GBT or Claude or whatever they're using, but they don't know if they should do something. They only know if they can do it, and so they need us from the outside, because they never trust their internal team. They're not going to give them the ability to learn. They're not going to educate them. They're not going to let them keep up. So they're going to come to us, and then we're going to have to engage with them, I think, not in our traditional transactional mode, even as much as we have for years, decades, said we want to partner with clients. I don't think we ever did. I don't think we ever wanted that. We wanted a project and paid and we're out, unless you got more, then we'll come back. But I think we need to get to a point where we're truly partnering now, and what that looks like to me is it's about shared KPIs. It's about if a client drops the ball, the agency shouldn't be punished. If the agency drops the ball, the client shouldn't be punished. We should have shared dashboards, and it shouldn't be project. It should be engagements, right? Let's keep working together until we reach these indicators that we have done a good job, and then we just partner with other shops that have deep domain knowledge we need that we don't have. So we think there's an ebb and flow to it. Now I'm really excited about it. If we don't blow up the planet, I think some cool shit could happen.
Chris DuBois 22:32
Yeah, and that's so I've been doing a lot of like, thinking just around the challenges that come from, like, service based marketing, where a lot of people market, they try marketing their agency like it's a SaaS tool or something. But there's, there's so many variables, but one of those is the this inseparability that we have with the client. Like, if you have a client who doesn't give great feedback, or they're always slow on getting you that feedback, or, like, tons of different they change your mind a lot. Like, it actually affects the results that you can get. As an agency, you're completely tied to this, and so having those shared KPIs, the ability to say, like, hey, look, this is how you're actually contributing to this. We need you to do this. And it actually holds water. It's not the client saying, Well, I'm paying you, so I'm going to do this. You figure it out exactly. It's, it's, no, we're actually on the same page here.
Speaker 1 23:23
Oh, man, I had more conversations with clients where I would say, Do you want to win or do you want to be right? Because if you want to be right, then we can just finish up and get out of here. Yeah, we're not. We're not in the habit of just making people happy because they got their way. But if you want to make more money or improve your service offering or whatever, then let's work together. And you know, sometimes they would say, I want to be right. One of the worst was, I won't even say, I won't say the name, but they sell cookies every year. I'll just say that they were the worst client ever, ever, because they just wanted to be right, and they didn't care about getting better. So that was, that was always one of the things we had when we brought a new client in. We had two categories, checklist clients, and must win clients. A checklist client is somebody came, is somebody who comes to us and their boss told them they need to do this, a must win client. If this project doesn't work, we're going under, you know, and those must win clients, they don't go dark. They never, they never really push back. They want to know everything you think. So there's so many nuanced things to this, but, but, yeah, it's I miss it.
Chris DuBois 24:39
I wonder if there's a badge for that.
Unknown Speaker 24:45
There you go, the nasty SAS badge.
Chris DuBois 24:53
So one of the things that I've also been thinking about, I'm hearing a lot of stories of people who are using AI when they go to the doctor and they're. Like they're not only spot checking the doctor, but they're, they're going in and being more informed to the doctor. But I'm curious how, When's that going to completely come over to the agency space, where I think it's here in a pitch, and they say, well, actually, we think this because, you know, chat GPD said it.
Speaker 1 25:17
Well, what about this tool? Oh, I don't know that tool. Oh, it came out last week, right? So I'll give you a couple of examples here that I think it's already in mainstream America, although it's only some of us that are kind of leading in terms of implementing AI. So I had the starter on my car was messed up, and I cranked it up. I could only get to this one mechanic that I knew. It was like a Pep Boys. It was a Pep Boys, and the starter was going to be $800 and installation was gonna be like $200 so they hand me the estimate. I snap a shot of it with chat GPT, and he goes, What are you doing? I said, I'm just double checking some things. And I just the prompt was, tell me everything I need to know about this estimate and how I can save money. It told me there was an Auto Zone right next door, and the part was $400 and that Pep Boys would install a part that I bought from a third party. So I just asked the guy. I said, Hey, if I buy the part next door, y'all will install it. He goes, Yeah. It was just like, good call. So I saved 400 bucks, and at that point I was going to ask all the time, I had a heart thing, right? I'm in the hospital. I'm totally fine now, no meds, no restrictions, whatever, but I had intermittent atrial flutter. So I typed this into chat. It's telling me about it. I'm telling it to show its work. And there was a medical journal article about this condition two weeks ago. It was published. The cardiologist walks in and I'm like, don't be that asshole. Don't be the guy that tells him, well, actually, according to the New England Journal of Medicine, right? But every time they brought in medicine for me, they knew the drill. They hand it to me. I snap a photo. Chat tells me all about it, and then my health regimen I have in chat, GPT, all of my blood work. I put all of my runs in there, all of my health supplements, everything. It makes mistakes, but I know enough that it's beneficial. If I didn't, it'd be totally different, but, but this is the rise of the savvy client. It's the rise of the savvy customer. We're all going to be smarter if we just take the time, right?
Chris DuBois 27:29
No, that's our fridge. Was on the fridge, and just not it was either freezing everything or everything would start thawing very fast, right? And so I called a guy to come out and just talking. He's like, All right, just so, you know, it's, you know, 150 bucks just to go. 50 bucks just to go out there. And so I went online. I found, like, got the the, why am I dropping this word? The documentation for this fridge. Just pulled it up, the owner's manual. There you go. Pulled it up, found out it's probably the control panel. Found one for like, 20 bucks online and then use chat. Gave me the instruction. How do you set this up, like, to the point of, like, wear gloves for this part, because you your static electricity might actually short and and I insult like, so for 20 bucks, I fixed this, this thing that the guy would have charged me 150 to come out, plus probably an up charge on the actual control panel. But it's able to do that with nothing. Same thing with fixing or was it the thermostat? My wife couldn't figure it out. We tried everything, and I ran the manual through it, and it's like, oh, put a take a lemon and rub it on the battery things, because there's probably some corrosion. Like, okay, so I did that, and it works fine. Now I would have had to pay someone to do all this, but so they wouldn't have used a lemon. No, they would have replaced the entire thing, the entire system.
Speaker 1 28:49
So, yes, just real quick on that, especially with the service manuals. We had a client service manuals.com and this guy had scanned something like 18,000 service manuals so that any tech that was out that needed an answer, he could go there. The guy was making millions on this thing, and I just wonder what he's doing now,
Chris DuBois 29:13
hopefully he turned that into a GPT. Well, there you go, right.
Speaker 1 29:17
That would be super smart, but for me, I don't go to any help desk. I don't look for any eye button on something. Now I go to chat first, I say, make sure this information is current with the current iteration of the product. And they say, How do I do this? It helps me in HubSpot. It helps me in stripe. It helps me price. And I think that's one of the benefits of AI is making other products easier to use?
Chris DuBois 29:43
Yeah, no, definitely I have, I have no coding experience to the point where, when running an agency, we had created some software for building websites on HubSpot faster, and our team would actually give me the tools to have it pass the Chris test, and if. It passed and anyone could use it, and it was good. I've created a bunch of like extensions for myself, just like using App Scripts so that, like I've added in chat, GPT into like Google Docs, so that does amazing stuff with no real experience. And so this now brings up the question, how many clients are going to come in and just assume that, because you can do these things with AI, they'll say, Well, I've got an intern, I've got AI. Why do I need your agency? And like, and that's where we get into the need for expertise still, and the smaller, deep, specialized teams. But like, how do we respond to that question?
Speaker 1 30:41
Well, I mean, honestly, I tell them good luck. I mean, that's what I would say. I would just be like, Hey, I appreciate what you're saying. If AI was an employee, as you're about to make it, you're going to fire it on day one, then you're either going to call us or somebody else, and please don't be too embarrassed to call us because we did the same stuff for a long time, try, maybe you'll get lucky, but more than likely you're going to get a lot of positive vibes, and you're gonna be like, this is working, and then it's just not, and you're not going to know why. And the reason is like, I'm a pretty good writer, AI makes me a really good writer, and not so much in the sense that it changes my structure or my tone, but that it helps me know the arguments against what I'm saying, so I can prepare for them. And if I don't have an answer, I just remove whatever I said, because obviously I didn't believe it enough. I just kind of spit it out, right? It'll make a coder who's good, great. It'll make a great one, phenomenal. It'll make somebody with no coding experience passable. So I think that's the challenge. They don't realize that without that expertise, without somebody like Gordon Ramsay at the pass, you put that out in the world, you've got a lot of liability, you know, depending on what it is. So so for me, I wouldn't fight them on it. Because I would just say, You know what, go try that, and then if it doesn't work, please come back and then call in two weeks and just say, How's it going? We used to do that all the time with projects that we lost. I would always call. I would know when the deadline was from when we were pitching and or when they were pitching us in the end. But what I would know is I would call them a few weeks before I say, Hey, I just want to check in. Are you on schedule? Everything's going well, and we're never on schedule. Come on. We're all the same. We all try, but we can't get there. And they would be like, No. And then I would let them vent their frustrations. And sometimes we would get them on the bounce back, you know, and, and I think it's the same thing. Now, it's not another agency that took them, it's AI, and there's gonna be a lot of bounce back once they realize,
Chris DuBois 32:51
yeah, wondering how long it's gonna
Speaker 1 32:54
suddenly AI is better and it doesn't bounce back. But that's why I think we need to lean in, and we need to be the people who are at the front of that wave. As long as it goes.
Chris DuBois 33:06
There were, yeah, I think the real challenge too, is a lot of the tools right now are not they make big promises and then they fail to deliver on it. But the people who are like because AI is this like grandiose idea, the people who don't necessarily have that expertise will think like, oh, yeah, this tool is definitely going to help us, because they can't separate. They don't have enough pattern matching within this like, skill set to be able to know, is this great? Like, there's one tool. I can't remember what the name of it was, but everybody was raving about it, and so I went to try it out, and it's supposed to be this, like, full service marketing, right? You put in your brand, you put in your thoughts, and it'll create whatever assets you need. And it was some of the worst marketing that I've ever seen. Like I I couldn't do anything with it, like, I wouldn't have even edited to make it better, because it was that bad.
Speaker 1 33:55
We're in that, we're in that mining for gold, gold rush phase, right? We've seen it with so many other things and with AI, there's so many people just whipping up a company trying to get it marginally successful for acquisition. And there are a lot of large companies that don't pay attention, or don't know any better, or see a twinkle of some opportunity, and then they acquire them, and that just feeds the whole cycle. But there are a lot of people that are, again, they're just grabbing handfuls of dirt hoping for gold, and occasionally they get a little nugget, and they just keep going, right? One out of five is that the rule? One out of five of these to be good, right?
Chris DuBois 34:34
Yeah, it's definitely, definitely changing the game. So I guess if you had to take like 8020 following the Pareto Principle. What would you tell agencies to focus on going into 2026?
Speaker 1 34:50
I would really say, find that narrow domain, that thing that your team is engaged. In that they care about, right? Like for us, we found out it was the the organic foods, and it was the fantasy sports and it was the building the best UX you could it just happened that way, right? But I would say, find out what you are the best at, and then just focus tight, super tight, hyper, specialized, be the best at this, even if your whole potential universe of clients is a few 100, right? And don't just, you know, it's funny, a friend of mine through the organic food stuff, he used to say that when a lot of time when people go organic, they throw all the old food out. And he always tells them, don't do that. Eat what you eat once you bought right? And so I don't think clients should immediately cut off different industries they're a part of, or anything like that. But I think you need to start making that shift. If you focus on higher ed, start focusing on higher ed fundraising in India, right? Like, like, get down to this hyper specialized and then partner with other folks when you have those other needs, but if you can come in and say, This is what we do, clients are going to have a lot more confidence. I really believe that. I think there's a specialist, generalist battle that the current environment makes really interesting, because now pandemic being hopefully passed, we saw that depending on the industries you were in, you could really thrive or almost go out of business, or go out of business, right? Like if you were in healthcare, if you were in government, if you were in higher ed, the pandemic was pretty good to you, you know, but if you were in hospitality or travel or entertainment, not so good. I think that's kind of already gone past. But I do think there are just, there are a lot of ripe areas, if you can just get hyper specialized, yeah.
Chris DuBois 37:00
James, all right, so as we wind this down, I got two more questions for you, okay, the first being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Speaker 1 37:10
Oh, man, you know, I get in trouble for this one, but I still think it's really important. It's the starfish and the spider. It is basically the idea of decentralized teams and leaderless organizations. I think organizations need leaders, but the idea is, like with a starfish, it doesn't have a head, and if you cut it in half, it grows into two starfish. Or with a spider, you cut the head off the spider dies. So the idea is, don't put all of your chips on one human right. Make sure the whole team can operate as a leader, so that that book, it doesn't hold up that great. Some of the case studies in there, but they talk about how Napster went out because there was a leader, and they were able to sue him and close it down. But Limewire was just a community, right? And they couldn't shut it down no matter how hard they tried, right?
Chris DuBois 38:13
That's interesting. All right, check that one out the and going back a step, because I lied, I got another question for you, just what's next for the Bureau? What's next for the Bureau? What do you got coming up here?
Speaker 1 38:26
Oh man, 2026 is going to be super fun and interesting. You know, right now, we're recording this right in October, and air travel is questionable. We'll see where it is in December. A lot of our external like our non American members and attendees aren't coming in, so we are moving to a regional meetup. We've had real success with local meetups where we'll get 2040, sometimes 60 folks with these we're shooting for hundreds. We want to everybody within a five hour drive. We want to be able to get them there. We got five cities that we're focused on that should hit about 70% of the bigger community. So, so that's the thing. We're trying to meet people where they're comfortable, because we got to get together in person. Yeah, that's when the magic we're social beings. We need to be together. So I think that's the most success. Exciting thing for me right now, is trying to be innovative in giving people the opportunity to get the support they need.
Chris DuBois 39:30
Yeah, awesome. All right. Now, the actual last question, Where can people find you?
Speaker 1 39:36
You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Carl W Smith, very, very boring. Or you can find me at bureau of digital. I did it. I went to the old brand. Oh, my God. Oh my god, the bureau dot community. You can find me there as well. But really, LinkedIn is probably the best. It's easiest place to find me just search Carl W Smith and the Bureau awesome.
Chris DuBois 40:00
Well, Carl, Thanks for Thanks for joining. This was a pleasure. I'm glad. I feel like we waited a little too long to make this happen.
Speaker 1 40:05
No worries, Chris, this is a lot of fun, man. This was a lot of fun.
Chris DuBois 40:09
All right. Well, we'll get another one on the books. That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai