Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So we talked about those ideas for like a whole day.
And then right as we were like winding down, right as I was about to leave, he was like, there's one more idea. I was like, all right, what is it? He's like, what if you joined E2M as the CEO? I was like, well, that's a big idea.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: A few months ago, I did an episode of the Agency Hour podcast where I spoke about the fact that you gurus had been shut down by DigitalOcean and that my friendly competitor, Brent Weaver, who had spent over 10 years building that legacy, was, you know, kind of out, out, out in the wild. I wasn't sure what he was going to do with himself. And I made an episode, you know, congratulating Brent on his, on his efforts and his achievements and also my observations on how I think that was poorly handled by DigitalOcean at the time. Anyway, fast forward. Brent is now the CEO of E2M Solutions, who you all know by now is a very partner of ours. They are a white label WordPress, design development, SEO, content, ads, high level AI agency. They have over 300 staff across India and the US. They serve a lot of our clients, they do a lot of work for our clients. And so it was time to get Brent on the Agency Hour podcast.
So this is a fascinating episode where we talk about our journeys together as friendly competitors. We talk about what's happening at E2M. We do talk about you gurus and the shutdown and we unpack all of that and so hang in there for the ride. This is a very personal episode with Brent and we also talk a lot about the future of each member, what they're doing with AI. And we've got a special coupon code if you want to attend their event in September in Colorado. It's join vistara.com it's essentially an AI agency event. So if you're an agency, you want to learn how to use AI to future proof your agency.
Then get to Denver, Colorado in at the end of September to Vistara. We have also have a coupon you can grab near here which will get you a couple of hundred bucks off a ticket. So wherever you're watching this or listening to this, have a look in the show notes for the link. Without further ado, let's go and meet Brent Weaver.
Ladies and gentlemen. The security are going to get fired here because they've somehow let Brent Weaver on the show.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Dude.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast. What's going on?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: I feel like I've crossed a threshold so Very honored to be on your show, Troy.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Oh, man, I'm honored to have you here. And listen, for those that don't know, this isn't our first rodeo, I don't think. I think you and I have done like, we've certainly done webinars in the past, but for those that don't know, some people would, you know, would think of us as competitors for a long time. Because you started you gurus around about the same time that I started WP Elevation and Brennan Dunn started W Freelancing. We're all kind of pioneers in this space 150 years ago.
And for a long time we ran almost parallel businesses, coaching agencies. Right?
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: So people might be going, well, how come Brent's on the agency? Our podcast. What happened with you gurus and what are you doing now?
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Yeah, so. Well, it's. It's no more, actually.
I. When we shut down or announced, I think you post, maybe it was on the Agency Hour podcast. You posted this, like, great kind of recap of Ugurus shutting down. And someone on my team like, messaged it to me and said, like, oh, Troy's out there talking about the Ugurus. My first thought was like, I was like, you know, then I watched it and I was like, that's so damn good. It's like he like covered the story really well. He's not even on the inside. He knows it all really well. So I think, like, I mean, the too long did not read version, I did sell the business to Cloudways.
It was a strategic acquisition. I committed to staying on. I loved the vision that we had for we're going to do with agencies over the next five to 10 years. It was going to be a much bigger thing than just coaching and consulting. At the time, Cloudways was serving about 13,000 agencies. And so we thought, hey, if we can bring the magic of the community of you gurus and the coaching and the training and all of the amazing content, and we can empower, you know, 13,000 agencies instead of, you know, three or 400, that. That would be a really cool kind of execution of our vision.
Nine months later, Cloudways got acquired by DigitalOcean. And so that whole plan didn't completely get thrown out of the way, out of the window immediately, but it did eventually, kind of, you know, I think as DigitalOcean infrastructure, business, computer AI showed up, there was certainly a reshuffling of the priorities for DigitalOcean. And they decided that running a professional services business, which our community was at the end of the day, we're charging clients for coaching, wasn't aligned with the overall business and they made a decision to stop it. And I don't know necessarily, Troy, if I would have made any different decision if I was the CEO of DigitalOcean and looking at my businesses and looking at my investment and seeing what AI was doing, I might have said, hey, let's get ruthlessly focused on, you know, the core thing, the main thing. And so that was, that was the outcome.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it makes, you know, it's this great story about Steve Jobs. When he came back to Apple and they had like 150 products in the market, right? And he took the top 100 people at Apple away for a retreat and he's like, okay, you know, like, first of all, the first thing he did was went to a whiteboard and he said, you know, he drew four squares. We got, you know, consumer and professional products, desktop and laptop. That's it. We go, we have four products now, right? We have a desktop and a, and a portable computer for consumers and professionals. And then he took the hundred people away and he said, right, you guys come up with all the ideas of how we're going to, you know, revive Apple. And they came back with, you know, like hundreds of ideas after a two day retreat, or ever it was. And then he put them all up, he said, right, let's get the top 10, put them up on a whiteboard. So they put, they voted, painstakingly put the top 10 ideas up on this whiteboard and they were all so excited.
And he walked up and just crossed out the bottom seven.
He went, right, these top three initiatives, that's all we're doing, right? And so I get it, however, and I think I mentioned this on the podcast, that I did a recap of you gurus, because I was looking at it from the outside. There were two things that, that occurred to me. One is, okay, well, what happens with all those agencies that no longer have a home, right? That's. I think that's a, I think I'm not, I. And I, I don't, I wasn't in the sausage factory. So I don't know. But I'm not from the outside. I don't think DigitalOcean handled that very well. I think it was just like, you're done, right? But the other thing was, which is why I'm glad we're having this conversation is, dude, that must have fucking hurt. That must have been like, you've spent years doing this thing and for someone just to go, wow, it doesn't matter anymore and turn it off. How. What, what was the. What have you had to do personally to go, okay, this is not a reflection on Brent Weaver. This is just shit happens, you know?
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, like a mentor of mine told me years ago, you know, it's. It's not happening to you, it's happening to the business.
And so I think that, like that mantra of just, you know, this isn't about me, this is about this, this asset, right? Like, if I had a car and the car was getting like hailed on or was in an accident or, you know, something happened, right? Like, like the car obviously is, is, is being damaged or whatever. And assuming that I'm, I'm like, surviving safely, like as a human being, which I did, right? Like, I sit behind a laptop all day on Internet connection in a very safe place in, in Colorado, right? So, like, there's no like, physical harm to me as a human being, but obviously to the business itself, right? There was a. It was a terminal kind of moment and I think just trying to separate myself, I think through the acquisition process, like I was.
Over time, I was becoming more and more separated from the business. I think we had a really good brand with Ugurus. While I was still very much like, kind of the face of the company. I wasn't doing any of the service in the back end. The mentors were there.
We did kind of release all of our mentors from non competes. We kind of helped set up a couple of them to take some of the clients and try to put them in a great position post shutdown. I don't think we had like an amazing amount of time with it, but I kind of feel like, I don't know if a longer transition would have been necessarily any easier or better.
You know, maybe 15 extra days or something to help plan some things better. Might have. Might have been a little bit easier, but there was certainly, you know, corporate deadlines, quarterly earnings reports, et cetera that were driving some of the timelines and we had to kind of just live with that. But overall, I mean, if I reflect back on the three years with Cloudways and DigitalOcean, for our team, it was an extraordinary learning opportunity. I learned a ton. I got to work with literally billion dollar company CEOs, like, be in their meetings, have to present you gurus as part of the weekly business review cadence.
I was mentored by several leaders that were running hundreds of millions of dollars in business.
And then, you know, I was meeting with them for hours every single week, and they were mentoring Me and, and, and they were giving me, you know, projects and opportunities and so, and also for our team working for a publicly traded company that had insane benefits and stock and all that kind of stuff. So like, we all kind of reflected back and everybody that on the team that left Ugurus, you know, they're all doing these like crazy amazing things. You know, they've launched new businesses, they've got like dream jobs, like they've all gone and they're doing very cool things. So I feel like overall it was a very positive experience. Even though in the midst of.
Certainly sucked.
I took a couple months where I just didn't really work.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Troy, that was my next question. Like, how do you recalibrate after an event like that?
[00:10:15] Speaker A: I renovated a barn and built a half pipe.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: Which if you haven't seen, go and check out Brent's Facebook feed and makes, makes videos about the half pipe there and the, and the cycling. Right.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: We actually like, I mean this is crazy, but I had the same email address because it was like, it actually started from my agency in, I don't know, when we got on Google Apps it was like 2007 or something. And then that turned into Uguru's email address and had that, you know, all the way up till 2020, April of 2025, and then just like turned it off, you know. And so then I had, you know, I created my own kind of personal domain business. I had no emails. So I'd go out to the barn and work on this ramp and I'd go check my email and I'd be like, yep, still no email, you know, and it was, it was kind of refreshing for a bit. Um, obviously with my, my new career move, that's, that's not the case anymore. But it was, it was a nice break from, from the busy.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Did you, did you. I've had people, some of our coaches actually like are taking two weeks off with the family and they leave their laptop home and they've admitted that the first couple of days they're a bit shaky.
They're like, did you find it hard to, did you know what to do with yourself for the first week?
[00:11:30] Speaker A: I mean, I did a lot of like, so we did a year ago we moved to homestead kind of land.
It requires a lot of energy. It can require as much energy as you have, as much free time as you have to put into it. There's always something.
And so I think I just kind of started like picking up stuff around here and weirdly like, the more I was off the more I would kind of fill my time. Like, opportunity just kind of shows up. Like when you're not. You're not listening for stuff, like, you just don't see. See the things. You know, like all of a sudden I was like, checking the emails from my kids, teachers, you know, like, they said these, these giant diaries every week of, you know, 1500 words of, of what's going on in the classroom. And I'm just. I'm like, archive.
And so I started reading those and before I knew it, I'm volunteering in their classes and showing up for a Junior Achievement business day and going on class field trips and whatever. So after about three weeks, it was like I could start seeing my calendar was kind of filling up again, not with bad stuff. It was stuff that I had kind of ignored or wasn't paying much attention to.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: And then at what point did you.
Two parts of this question. At what point did you feel like you were ready to do something?
And then at what point did the conversation with E2M start?
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Yeah, so I, I mean, I knew, like, officially, I knew like January 15 that it was getting shut down.
Like, I was technically fired at like 8am and then I had not fired. That's not the right term.
Reduced in force or something like that. Right.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: I was, I was made redundant in Australia.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: Made redundant. Right. So there was, you know, and there was a nice, you know, separation agreement and whatever. But. So at 8am that was me. And then starting at 8:15, every 15 minutes, I had to do the same to everybody on my team. So it was like I had 15 minutes to process and then show up as like a servant leader with our team and deliver some hard professional news that it doesn't happen every day for people. And you have people that take it really well, and by the next day they're already moving on to the next thing. And you have some people that say very mean things and don't take it very well in the short term, but everybody's fine now.
But that was.
That was kind of difficult. So I knew.
I actually approached E2M, who I'm now CEO of. I approached them and said they were a big sponsor of Ugurus. And I was like, hey, you know that big annual sponsorship you guys just paid for? And we spent, you know, weeks and weeks, like, figuring out how to make it amazing for you. Well, can't deliver on that. Oh, why? Well, because we're getting shut down. So Manish, actually, from a business standpoint, you know, we had to let him know earlier Than like, the general public and kind of work through winding down a contract with them. And so, you know, he said, well, you know, that stinks, but I'm going to be in the US In a couple of weeks. Why don't you fly out to Arizona and let's spend a day together? And so went out there, and this is probably by March, and we went through a few different business ideas. He was like, well, I'll pitch you on this or this. It was like, the first thing was, like, a company that they were going to acquire. Like, maybe I'd come in and be CEO of that business and help kind of run it for a couple of years. One was to take the fractional AI services that they were launching and spin that off as its own business and go be CEO of that. So we talked about those ideas for, like, a whole day. And then right as we were, like, winding down, right as I was about to leave, he was like, there's one more idea. I was like, all right, what is it? You know, he's like, what if you joined E2M as the CEO? And I was like, well, that's a big idea. Like, we have five minutes to talk about that. Like, you know, I'm interested. So he flew back out to Denver, like, the next day. Like, he caught a red eye from. I think he actually flew from Arizona to Miami and then, like, landed in Miami, turned around and flew to Denver.
Anyways, we spent a day together and, you know, planned out, like, what that might look like. And it started getting exciting. And I don't think it didn't finalize until, like, the last week of May. So from March to May, there was kind of this background thread of the E2M opportunity. And there was two or three other things that I was thinking about, but I think at times I wasn't thinking about any of them very seriously. It'd be kind of like, I'm off this week. And then maybe a week or two would go by and I'd have a meeting with E2M about something. So it was.
I don't think I didn't. Originally, I kind of thought, okay, I'm going to take a year.
I was like. I sat down with my wife. I'm like, all right, sabbatical for a year, not working. And I think she was half exhilarated and half terrified of, like, me around all the time and, you know, just.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Without any half pipe every day.
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Like, okay, so you're gonna build a half pipe and you're gonna. So.
But you Know it. I think it worked out really well. I got a good reset. I think I'm definitely somebody that enjoys work, enjoy having that purpose and that, that focus. And, you know, maybe after E2M, maybe I'll take that year off. I don't know, maybe It'll be like three months instead of two.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: E2M are what, 300, 330 staff now?
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: So.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Yeah. So primarily in, in India, but we've got about six or seven folks now in the U.S. yeah.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: And so you come in to that organization. How does.
A couple of questions. How does Manish transfer authority to you as the CEO?
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: And how do you earn the respect and the trust of 330 people who are like, well, who the fuck are you? Right.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Like, you know what I mean?
[00:17:36] Speaker B: I barely listen to Manish, let alone this new guy. Right.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: How do you.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: What?
Because I've been through this. Right. I hired a CEO, ran the business, didn't work out, and a lot of lessons there.
And one of the big mistakes I made was not transferring enough authority, but also hiring, promoting someone based on availability, not ability. Someone who in hindsight, I don't think was the right person to lead a team. Right. And so how, how have you, what have you done tactically? I mean, obviously you have a name in the space. You were known to E2M. A lot of those people would have already known who you were. But what have you done tactically to actually earn the trust of the troops?
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Yep. So, I mean, fortunately, you know, Manish was building a business where the customers are in the United States, and his team was mostly in India. And he, the, the thing that I think he did differently than a lot of white label companies that are operating overseas, whether it's Eastern Europe or the Philippines or India is, or, you know, or Pakistan, is that he actually, he lived in the United States and he came, not only lived in San Diego for a long time, but he also was, you know, he'd stay here for months at a time to go to conferences and to speak and to build relationships.
And so because of that, he really had to create a leadership team in India that could operate without his constant oversight. And so there was an established leadership team that had an insane amount of autonomy and authority to run their business units. And Manish has a very high bar for what excellence is. And so he had, I think, over many years, kind of built and mentored that team to really be very autonomous in how they operated things.
So in a weird way, when I stepped in and started kind of bringing Some corporate governance methodologies of like weekly one on ones, weekly business reviews, you know, kind of a documentation focused culture, data driven culture. Right. It was almost like refreshing for the leadership team. Like I was like, oh, what do you usually cover with your one on ones with Manish? And you know, one of the heads of delivery was like, I don't really have one on ones with Manish. So he's like, this is a breath of fresh air. I get to meet with you every week, I get to speak my mind and all that stuff. So I think in a way I was able to provide an immediate service to the leadership team that maybe was, was missing.
And again, not missing from like a negative way. I think it created a really great culture of like self starters and self managers.
But I think, I think that was able to, you know, the team was able to feel really supported very quickly, even though we have, you know, almost 12 hours or over 12 hours separating us.
So just bring us some of that.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: That's a hard time zone. Like 12 hour separation is a hard time zone. Like, are you up early or are they up late or what's going on?
[00:20:31] Speaker A: A little bit of both. I'd say we kind of both. You know, like, I kind of start my day MMA desk around 5am Mountain time, which means I'm getting up at 4, 4:30 kind of getting, getting to my desk at that time. And then they were already staying up till about noon mountain just to support the US clients generally. And some of the leadership teams certainly, when needed, will stay up much later than that. But that gives us like a pretty good chunk of the day where we're kind of hanging out together.
Like we just launched our AI for Agencies event called Vistara. And I mean there was several team members that clearly stayed up like all night to work on launching that, because just launching something, it always takes an extra 30 minutes and an hour and 30 minutes. Right.
And so I think there's a little bit of a culture around leadership where they will kind of go late into the night. I mean, I'll have calls with manish going into 3pm, 4pm my time and I'm like, okay, you need to go to bed.
I'm burned out from work and you need to go to bed because I've been working 12 or 30 hours and you've certainly been putting in more hours than that.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: So yeah, Manish has been on our podcast and at our live, our online live event several times where it's 3am for him.
He's like, yeah, I just got a Few hours sleep, and now I'm up. And, you know, his work ethic and commitment is second to none. I've never experienced anything like it. He's just so freaking passionate and so determined and works so hard, which is. Which is a real credit to him. And obviously, the culture at E2M is good when you come in. And so it must be tempting for you to come in and go, well, because I'd be like, I'm gonna fucking wave some Troy Dean magic here. Right.
But really, like, that could be disruptive and damaging to everyone. So how do you temper that desire to kind of, you know, wave the Brent Weaver flag and then also just kind of fit into what's already working?
[00:22:28] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's, like, I think the. One of the messages that I made to the team, like, really early on, like, this is not a situation where you're bringing in a new CEO and, like, a turnaround company where you have, like, a big problem that you're trying to solve, and, like, the business is heading in the wrong direction.
The business is actually growing and thriving. And that was, like, my biggest concern was, you know, coming in and just not screwing it up. Right. Like, don't break anything that's already working.
And so, you know, spending a lot of time listening, a lot of time kind of just distilling down, like, what I'm hearing from people and thinking about how to put that into more of a documented strategy. So a lot of the stuff that, you know, weirdly, I mean, E2M has grown, supporting over 350 agencies. I mean, 17,000 billable hours a month.
It's an incredible amount of work. I mean, we launched more websites in a day than my old agency did in, you know, sometimes a month or two. Right.
And so it's really an incredible amount of work. But a lot of the.
You know, I think. I think Manish had had, in a brilliant way, but he had led the vision of the company very much on, like, just sharing that verbally, repetitively with the team. But there wasn't, like, a documented, like, EOS style. Here's our strategy on a page. Here are our core values. Here's our mission, our vision. Here are our numbers for this quarter and that quarter. And so a lot of that, for me was just saying, okay, what are we doing? First step is just let's put it all on paper and agree that this is the right things to be doing. And so I think I was like, I don't want to mess anything up, but I would like to at least kind of document and start to create transparency within the company of good prioritization. So I'd say in the last, I mean we're. I'm in week nine, we've already done an incredible amount of new initiatives. We've doubled down on our fractional AI services.
We've launched our first in person event that's kind of a combination of agency community as well as a lot of our customers at E2M themed around how to help agencies build the agency of the future powered by AI.
We've gotten on, you know, probably been on a handful of industry podcasts. I've. We've initiated sponsorships with a couple of additional agency communities. So I've attended my first event as you know, an E2M team member which was, which was weird. I was at, I mean I'm sure you know Josh Nelson of Seven Figure Agency, but I was in his like big ballroom and one of our former customers was like recognized as like a top, you know, revenue agency at his event. And you know, Josh was like, hey, I'd love to take credit for this one, but this one's actually for Brent in the room. Right. So it was kind of, it was like fun, you know, just to play a different role in an agency community, see it from a different angle.
[00:25:23] Speaker B: We're gonna, by the way, we're gonna put the links to the Vistara event. I just want to give a plug for this.
You know, we. Kushboo was in San Diego.
I don't even know when it was. Like was it late 2024 maybe might have even been 2023, I can't remember. But anyway gave an absolute blistering presentation on AI agents. I want to say it was 2024, but I could be wrong and blew my mind. And everyone in the room and Khushboo has really been heading up the AI initiatives at E2M. So you guys are running an event, Denver, Colorado, which is your hometown, September 28 to 30.
So three days this year. It's coming up. It's soon, right? It's in a couple of months.
We're gonna put a link in. Where are the show notes? Wherever you listen to this are right.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: If you.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: And we're also gonna put a discount code specifically to exclusively to us. Maverick200 I think is the discount code so you can get 200 bucks off if you.
I firmly believe AI is no longer an option. Right. It's like it's if the horse has bolted. If you're not using AI to improve efficiencies. Do launch initiatives that you otherwise wouldn't be able to launch. AI is not. I don't even think it's the future. I think it's now.
And Khushboo and the team at E2M are very well positioned, not only because they've been doing this in their own business, but they've been doing it with and for agencies so they know what's working and what's not.
Get to Vistara 9-28-30 in Colorado. Hang out for three days with a bunch of other agencies. Talk. I learn, I go back with a blueprint on how you can adopt AI. And then if you need help with it, the team at E2M will be able to help you with capacity. So we'll put a link to the event in the show notes and also the Maverick 200 code. Use that code and get a couple hundred bucks off the ticket and go. It's, it'll, you know, just hanging out in a room with other agencies is, is transformative in and of itself. Right? Because what happens is we've seen this happen so many events is that you spend two or three days with other agency owners and you come away going, I'm not crazy. There are other people who are doing the same thing that I'm doing. And it's a massive validation and a reminder. But also you end up with a notebook, hopefully full of tactical things that you can go back and employ in your agency that will help move a needle. But also you've got a whole bunch of new friends that can help you and can support you and you stay in contact with them. So strongly, strongly recommend you get along with that event. Who, what's the lineup? Is it just E2M speakers? What's happening at the event, Brent?
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah, so we've got quite a few people from our core team. Just in terms of the Khushboo will be giving a keynote. Ranik Patel, who actually is one of the owners of E2M. He was the owner of Unlimited WP. They got acquired. Now he actually is the CEO of an AI platform called Weem AI.
And so I don't know if I've ever met anybody that, you know, can explain AI like grassroots up at the level he can for agency owners. He gave an amazing keynote for our folks in, in India.
I got to watch that. So we're going to fly him out for, for Vistara and then we've got a handful of other folks that are non E2M. I don't know if you know Andy Crestedina. We Just closed him today officially. So that's one of our speakers that we're going to be announcing soon. And we've got probably another four or five that were just that close to being able to officially announce. So it'll be kind of a mix about half core E2M team, including myself, and then four or five industry folks around AI. And we're also going to be having some of our like, kind of customers or communities, agencies that are doing really cool things with AI that aren't like traveling the speaker circuit, but they have like something that's like a really cool AI integration or automation. So we're going to be creating some space for agencies to kind of showcase some stuff that they're doing. And sometimes I find that those things are a little bit more approachable than some of the people that are like super hardcore. Like they have the N8N automations that are, you know, like they've got 4,000 nodes and they're like, look, I've automated my entire agency, right? So some of that stuff, it's like fun to watch but.
And it definitely piques the imagination. But you also feel like, oh my gosh, I'm left in the dust, like this guy's going to come and take my job.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Join. Vistara.com is the link for that, the event and As I said, Maverick 200 is the code to get a couple hundred bucks off. What, what, what are you most excited about over the next 90 days apart from the event? What are you most excited about at e2m? And the flip side of this question is what are you most frustrated by at the moment?
[00:30:11] Speaker A: Well, gosh, those are good questions I'd say most excited about. I mean, certainly internally we talk about AI kind of in two major threads. One is our AI services team, which has grown from a couple of team members kind of messing around and doing R and D internally. We gave Kushboo and some others, you know, prior to me coming on board, kind of a blank check and just said, hey, spend as much time as you want on AI. And Kushboo went super deep and built a whole bunch of integrations and automations for our internal agency to see, like, can we actually add value?
Starting in February, we opened that up as a service. And so, you know, from our first client in February to now, we're supporting, I think 23 agencies on a fractional AI basis. That means that we have a team member, either a halftime or full time team member that's integrated with the agency, that's helping them to accelerate AI in their business. And that team is just like learning so much. There's just so much new creation and exploration with those agencies. So I have to say, the internal memos and briefs that I get to read about the fractional AI team, I tend to probably spend too much time reading about those just because it's very exciting to see what the team's building.
But also in terms of the other thread on AI is how we're leveraging AI's internal tooling. So we started a series called AI First Saturdays. And actually our third one's coming up here in, in August, this Saturday. So every first Saturday, the entire E2M team comes into work. I know it sounds like torture or something, but we view this as kind of a little bit of an all hands emergency of everybody needs to upskill. And so the company's investing by bringing speakers in, investing in tools, giving people a lot of freedom to explore AI tools and also do some AI mentorship. And so the, this Saturday is the third one and the first one was like an exploratory, like, let's think about what we could do with AI. The second one was kind of a hackathon build day and this one's actually going to be a little bit of like a demo day. So we're going to actually see what everybody internally in the company has built using AI. And so that's probably the other thing that's really exciting is just seeing how AI is impacting, you know, WordPress design and build, all the different CMSs that we use, how AI is impacting digital marketing services like SEO and ppc, how it's impacting content development. And so the company internally, everything that we're doing, it's better. QA is better.
Time and billable hours are more efficient. And so it's really fun to just see some of the cool stuff that the team's building.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: Just looking at your pricing for a fractional AI consultant. I just want to give people a little bit of context, right?
Full time AI strategist is 3,600amonth.
You could, you can't hire an AI strategist in the US for less than probably 2 or 300 grand a year, right? Like, this is nuts. I mean if people, if, if I threaten to start an agency every day because you, dude, can you imagine me and you like back in the day with all the technology that's available to us now, if we started our agencies now, but we were like 20 years younger, like we would have just absolutely crushed it because One, I mean the labor force that's available to us now all over the world wasn't really around 20 years ago, right? The AI that is available to us now, like even something like Reloom for doing sitemaps and wireframes for. I mean, my wife's a psychologist. I'm launching a website for her soon. I'm building a website for the first time in a long time and it's horrible. I don't want to get back into that business, right, Because I don't know what I'm doing. Like, I'm out of it, I'm out of the weeds. But I'm using a bit of AI to go, oh my God, this is like within an hour we have a wireframe, we have a whole bunch of copy written stuff would have taken two weeks back in the day with approvals from clients. And so if, if you've got an AI consultant in your agency that's helping you become more efficient, one, you're just going to make more profit in your agency because you're going to be able to do things more efficiently. But then you can leverage that AI specialist and you can charge, you can build AI stuff for your clients, right? This is, I mean I'm not, this is not me just giving a plug to E2M. This is like genuinely I've built a business here recommending things I know that work that are going to help agency owners make more money and become more profitable. And this is just another one of those opportunities that I think agency owners need to take very seriously. My question for you is what's the capacity, like how, how, what's the capacity for you guys to grow the AI consulting part of E2M? And because it's changing so quickly, right, how much are you, are you kind of investing back into R and D to make sure that you're staying ahead? Because you know, obviously you want to be able to service the agencies that you've got. So like, what is, what does that roadmap look like to grow that part of the business?
[00:35:05] Speaker A: I mean, I think, you know, kind of pulling back the curtain a little bit, I think the, like the halftime and the part time plans that we currently have on the website are a little bit misleading because the amount of time that actually goes into each of those, those plans at this stage of the game is actually more than that because it's not just necessarily one person, but there's kind of a little bit of a team that gets embedded in each of our agency clients. And part of that is Just our insecurity of not wanting to underdeliver. We want to over deliver with everything related to AI right now. And there is a reality that there's a lot of learning that's happening right now. So that's one piece that we've said, look, we're willing to go the extra mile, like hardcore, while this is a relatively new service, to make sure that we get this right with every single one of the clients that we bring on with the AI services. So there's kind of the AI strategist team member that's working with agencies and then there's some backend implementers, trainees and things like that that are also supplementing that team member so that they can kind of over deliver for our clients.
And the reality is there's a lot of learning going on for us. There's a lot of learning going on for the agencies. So a lot of agency owners will come into the fractional program and they'll be like, ah, I want you to, you know, build a, be a sales agent or something, right? And it's like this very complex interpersonal role. And of course, a lot of agencies don't have maybe the amount of process documentation that we'd love to see. It's like, okay, show us your proposal. And you're like, oh, wow, they're all different, you know, like, hey, how do you guys price your projects? And the agency owner would be like, well, I kind of think about it a little bit and I dropped the Magic 8 ball and I, you know, and we're like, okay, cool, like that's not ready for AI. So.
So like a lot of times we go into the agency, they kind of have these expectations of what, you know, that we're going to flip a light switch and AI is just going to appear in their business and it's going to just quadruple their revenue. And so the reality has been there's this kind of process optimization stage of we have to go in and look at, you know, what actual processes exist, what are the processes? And then we start to go through and just say what could benefit from AI?
And then also a risk factor of is this something that we've done before? Is this something that there's refined tooling around?
Are the tools likely to change? Right? And so we just kind of build a matrix out of that and say, here's the priority, here's what we think we should be working on the next three to six months and then we get to work. And there's a lot of things that the agency owners sometimes want that. We say, we'd recommend kind of holding off on this or get these things done first and then let's wait on this stuff over here. So there's, there's certainly a little bit of discipline that comes with it.
[00:37:38] Speaker B: You know, it's interesting because you and I have been talking about paid discovery for years to agencies, right? And the what, what I notice here is that, you know, I sign up to the E2 infractional AI thing. The first thing I'm doing is I'm going through an AI assessment, discovery and blueprint, right? So basically we're doing paid discovery there to lay out the plan, lay out the roadmap, so to make sure we're working on the right things at the right time and we're not just getting distracted by what we could do with AI, which actually isn't going to be meaningful to the business. So props to you there for, for, for adopting them.
[00:38:09] Speaker A: You know, if you even look at like our, our, like the team has like an agency playbook that the agency fills in. And as somebody who's ran a coaching business for, you know, 10 plus years, you know, I look at the playbook and I'm like, oh, this is like the SOP playbook that we would, you know, we would just have the actual processes filled in with example processes or whatever. But, you know, I think that's been kind of a prereq. The agencies that have been the best with AI are you usually the ones that are very much more like process centric. They've got really dialed in processes. They actually use their processes. And so those, those teams, we can go in and say, okay, this thing over here, you've got great documentation on. We can load that into an LLM. We can automate things with nnn. We can kind of do some process mapping and consulting and create some kind of AI magic where there's a task that maybe you would never have asked a human to do it, but you're like, hey, why not go look at the top 100 competitors of a client's, you know, website and build a comprehensive brief around that in five seconds or whatever. One minute where you never asked a VA to do that or something. So there's some things like that that we can come in and implement that clients are like, holy crap, that's amazing.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
How do you manage the temptation to just start coaching agencies that come to E2M? I imagine that must be very difficult for you to go, I just got to put my, my CEO hat back on and not get too in the weeds with them because, you know, you've been doing this a long time and you've seen it.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: All, right.
Yeah. I mean, fortunately, as I kind of mentioned earlier, I really got myself out of like Coach Brent seat.
I think that was a rock on my VTO for, you know, like many, many quarters, like, get Brent out of coach. Right. Like, and there was all these projects and attempts and we had to come at it from like 50 different angles. And I don't think I got a hundred percent out. By the time you grew. I still had a few private clients and stuff, but there's, there's been a handful of agencies that, you know, I'll talk to. They're interested in E2M services or they're a current client. We did this like CEO campaign where he emailed all of our clients a link to my scheduler and I did get a lot of bookings. And I think there was like this secret desire from some people to be like, hey, I just need help. Right. And so, I mean I'm, I'm happy to help where I can, but I can, you know, I clearly know that's, that's not my, you know, it's not my business anymore. But you know, I'm happy to talk to people about, you know, niching or I mean, anything that we do to help an agency will certainly, if it grows their business and they're using a 2M that's going to grow E2. But fortunately I'm not pushing, you know, 20 minute coaching calls out to our list just yet. So hopefully it doesn't come to that.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Yeah, we didn't close the loop. What are you most frustrated by?
[00:40:53] Speaker A: I was wondering if you'd come back to that. I was like, I'm certainly not going to volunteer that.
I think like, you know, I mean the, like on a physical level, I mean, the time, you know, gap is certainly a reality.
I was going to go to India like the first two weeks, you know, to kind of like put, put my feet on the ground in the office and kind of be around the team. We made a strategic decision to kind of push that off partly because it was like 110 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 plus Celsius. It was very hot, very muggy, not the right time of year to go to India.
And so I think there's, there's a piece of the relationship that's like incomplete in terms of being there, like getting to talk to people, break bread with people and stuff like that. So that's, that's probably one piece that I feel like is just still missing. I'm going to be going over in November. We've got like the trip planned out. We're going to do a huge company retreat, do a family dinner where literally everybody in the company and their families are going to come out to a really big dinner. I mean, there's people in India, they've got big families. Right. We've got, you know, team members that, you know, nine or 10 people in their households. Right. Like very kind of multi generational families is very, very common. So it's going to be a big dinner.
So very excited about that and also just to kind of feel more connection with the India culture.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Dude. I'm so happy for you. I mean, you know, I say this, I said this on the previous episode. I'll say it again here to you publicly. You are one of the very few people that has held me accountable and inspired me to get better because you were a friendly competitor for so long and I was like, well, I'm, you know, like, I have to get my together and keep going because otherwise Brent's going to take over the world and that I wasn't going to let that happen. So thank you for constantly being there to, you know, like a, like, like a speed car in a speed race is like just, you know, keeping me, keeping me going and, and, and setting a target and setting a, a goal for me to try and reach. And so that's definitely been an inspiration for me and there have been times where I've, you know, looked at the competitive landscape and gone. You know, I'm just a dinosaur, man. Like, who gives a anymore? I'm too old. I should just get out of the game.
And so you're one of those people that's been there for so long. That's just. This just kept me motivated and kept me inspired and seeing everything that you're doing.
So, yeah, props and massive respect for your journey and very proud of what you've achieved and now that you're at E2M and each of them have been a great partner of ours for several years now and so looking forward to keeping that relationship going.
Can't wait to hear about Vistara and yeah, just can't wait to keep the conversation going and have you back, maybe get you back here in a few months and see how you're traveling as CEO.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: Yeah, man, I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to attending one of, one of your events. I, I have to say I'm, I'm, I've always been impressed with what you've put forward and, and you know, first of all, thank you for that, you know, sentiment. And, you know, I'd say likewise in terms of, I always thought of you as a, you know, I, I don't know how many times whether it's content you were putting out or a launch. I'm like, why isn't, you know, this part of our business as good as Troy's or whatever? Right. So, yeah, definitely continue to, to raise the bar in a lot of ways. And I know a lot of RU gurus, customers, at least some, you know, kind of surfing in both communities, which was, which was cool, right? It's cool that people would do that and we'd certainly send people your way when we could. And I'm excited to attend one of your events. I feel like that'll be the, the real threshold crossing when I get to. Yeah.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: In real life. Yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks for being on the agency, Brent Weaver. Appreciate you and everything you're doing for the agency community. And yeah, looking forward to seeing how it rolls out and keeping in touch.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Thanks for it.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to the agency podcast and a massive shout out. And thanks to Brent Weaver for coming on and being so open and vulnerable and personal about his story and what happened with your gurus and DigitalOcean and his journey into E2M. I'm super excited to see what's going to happen there with him at the helm. And again, if you are, you know, in an agency and you're anywhere near Colorado end of September or you can get there, get over to the Vistara event. Join Vistara.com is the URL to check out the event and Maverick 200 Maverick and then the number 200 is the code that will get you 200 off a ticket. Now it's a small event, so once tickets are gone, they're gone. I would suggest that you use that code and get your tickets as soon as possible. I don't get a commission, by the way. I don't get any affiliate commission or anything for you going to that event. I just know it will be a life changing event for you so you should get along and that's why I'm recommending it.
Super excited to have Brent on the podcast. Thanks for listening. Share this with anyone you know who will benefit from it. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes and shoot us an email. SupportAgencyMavericks.com if you have any feedback on what we can do here on the show or what you'd like to hear more of, I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work. And remember, the real name for a hashtag is an octothorpe.
