What Happened After Brent Weaver Sold UGURUS? The Truth About Life Post-Exit | Ep #805

What Happened After Brent Weaver Sold UGURUS? The Truth About Life Post-Exit | Ep #805 Speaker 2: Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Brent Weaver. If you missed part one, pause this and hit play and go watch that first. Trust me, this is the backstory that makes the part even juicier. So, Brent just sold UGURUS and he's feeling good. He took a little time off with the family on this dude ranch. But when he got back, boom, acquisition number two. And in this episode, we're going to unpack what happened when your vision collides with corporate reality and how Brent handled the wind down of his company and why he's now diving back in with a new role. Plus, some real talk on AI, agency survival, and why humans still matter more than ever. Let's go ahead and get into it. Did you tell any of your team before? Speaker 1: No, no. I mean, I would say in my case, I did not know. I certainly had doubts, you know, is this the right thing? I mean, if I go back and look at my journal at that time and like see like my sporadic entries, right? There's so much doubt about, is this really going to happen? Is this really what I want? Is this going to create a business that I'm excited about? What's going to happen to the customers? What's going to be the reaction from the customers? What's going to be the reaction from the team? Are people going to leave? There's just all of that kind of stuff. I mean, selling a business is like, I think, in terms of a business event, a very emotional Like you kind of hit every end of the spectrum in terms of excitement and also like kind of fear and uncertainty, right? Speaker 2: Did any of your clients or team leave? Speaker 1: No, I pushed pretty hard to make sure that there was really great like retention incentives to keep people around. In some ways, I mean, we all had to learn how to deal with the corporate reality. I mean, with Cloudways, it's a little bit different. Cloudways was like Wild West, entrepreneurial, maverick kind of style of running a business. I think once digitalization, it was like the team went through the acquisition with Cloudways and then like 10 months later, we're like, hey, by the way, this is happening again, right? I think once we became more corporate, Some of the team members joined what they thought was a small and nimble company where they had a lot of voice. And then I think when it became bigger, we were a little bit more exposed to the corporate process stuff. But in both situations, nobody left and we just grew the team. From there, but they certainly were like, you know, I think the initial reaction for most teams is like, well, hey, how does this impact my job? Am I going to be made redundant? Am I going to what's in this for me? And I think we were able to really, you know, sweeten people's salary, benefits, stock options, things like that, which I think created a lot of motivation to stick around. Speaker 2: That's great. Speaker 1: Again, nobody. I mean, the biggest question was like, well, what's Brent going to do, right? And it was like, I think I told people, I'm staying here. I'm working on growing this. We want to 10X this business over the next five years. I'm going to be working on the business. We're obviously going to build more of a management and leadership structure, but I will still be around. I took a much less role in terms of direct client-facing. We started leaning on our mentors a lot more, but I also was more involved in the back office of the business. So I think People ask that question, well, hey, where's Brent? But at the same time, they could see that I wasn't leaving. And so I think there was initial like little blurb of People voicing their thoughts around it, but the reality was they stayed and there was continuity and no customers, to my knowledge, left because of the acquisition. Obviously, we have normal churn like any other business, people coming and going, but nobody was like, oh man, they're selling out now. I'm out of here. There was none of that. Speaker 2: You know, I've always told you this and I've told other people outside is like, thanks so much for what you've done for our industry. You know, there was only probably a handful of people that I respected in this industry. And there's probably what, thousands now, like, and it's even getting even crazier. Like we would send a lot of business your way and vice versa. It was a great mutual benefit. I don't think we ever looked at each other as competitors. I always looked at it as like, you guys got a little different style. We have a little different style, but we all wanted the same thing. Our whole North Star from the very beginning was always be a North Star that I wish I had because I didn't have anybody like UGURUS or what we had to kind of tap on and be like, My first client asked me for an invoice. I didn't even know what an invoice was. Speaker 1: One of our very first proposals, I mean, the only person that I could ask about how to write a proposal was I knew that one of my friend's dads was in business. I found it later in life, he did sales for a food distributor, right? If I had my brain today then and I knew what he did, there's no way I would ever ask that individual for help writing a website proposal. But he was the closest thing I knew to a business person. My dad's an engineer. He has no idea how to write a proposal. But I wrote this. There wasn't really Google at the time. There wasn't ChatGPT. There wasn't all these resources or whatever. And I remember it was like the only formatting I'd ever learned how to write was a five-paragraph essay in high school. And so, like, my proposal was literally like a five-paragraph essay about why you should hire me. And it talked about, like, my interests and my, you know, why I was trustworthy and like this. It was like... Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh. You used trustworthy in the proposal? Speaker 1: It wasn't even... It was so... It was so bad. Speaker 2: Do you have this proposal? Speaker 1: It is theoretically possible that it does exist somewhere like an archive, like a backup of a backup of a backup. I mean, this was probably in 1999. I was in high school and I was like, you know, getting these random referral on a floppy disk might be on a CD. It's probably burned on a CD somewhere. Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Speaker 1: But, you know, I mean, but nowadays, like I think about. You know, even for myself, as I think about what's next for me, I mean, the speed at which you can learn anything right now is incredible. It's almost overwhelming, right? We're now at the other end of the spectrum, which I think chat is incredibly powerful for helping to curate a learning experience for somebody based on like where you're at, because you can kind of express to it like, Hey, this is where I'm at right now with this thing kind of helped me along here. But I almost, we were talking about biking a lot earlier and I see like The kids today, the tricks they can learn at what age they learn them is so much sooner because they instantly have access to like how-to videos. They can see inspiration on Instagram. And I think back to my early BMX days, like, you know, we'd get a recorded VHS that we'd copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied from a friend who got it as a mail order subscription. And when that VHS was actually produced and recorded might have been four years before. So like we were learning the tricks today from like things that were done four years ago. Like that was the learning cycle of like professional does trick. And then four years later, I get a copy of it on VHS. Whereas nowadays, it's like somebody does a trick in Melbourne, Australia at some skate park within milliseconds. It's on Instagram and kids are consuming it. I think the same thing happens now with Whether it's agency growth, whether you're trying to launch an AI business, whether you're trying to launch a SaaS, right? I mean, just the speed in which you can do things and try things is so incredible. Speaker 2: So if you ever watch the RAD documentary, so everyone, RAD was this kind of, it flopped in the movie theaters. It was about BMX and freestyle riders in the 80s. And that's kind of how I grew up. Like, we would just watch this movie over and over and try to emulate all these tricks. But that's why I was teasing Brent. I was like, did you watch the Red Deck documentary yet? He's like, no, I'm too busy. I'm like, you're like, you're tired and you have no time. And so in the documentary, the cool thing that kind of ties this all together is there was only one person that barely could ride a BMX bike that could do the backflip. You know that famous backflip that he's trying to do in the movie? He wasn't even a professional or a factory rider. They brought him in. He was the only one that could do one backflip and land it. And you think you've got like Eddie Viola and all those famous riders, right? They couldn't do that. And then, you know, that movie came out and then obviously, you know, now people are doing three flips and throwing their bikes left and right, catching it, landing it, all kinds of crazy stuff. Speaker 1: You've got like R. Willey or whatever, Ryan Willey, who's, he's like a big stunt rider. And he has a, I mean, he lives in Australia and I mean, he has this, did you follow an Instagram? I mean, it must be this, this giant hill in his backyard that goes down, you know, he had it all cemented, you know, it's like this giant sidewalk that cement, you know, cemented all the way down this hill. And then to this, it must be a 20 foot tall launch ramp. Speaker 2: Launch into the water? Speaker 1: No, he launches. He has this, I mean, it must be 20 or 30 foot high, inflatable, massive, you know, and he goes and does all these, you know, at the big expos at the Coliseums and stuff, right? But he has this huge inflatable lander. I mean, it's massive, right? It's, I mean, maybe 30 feet high. I mean, it's huge, right? And so he does these huge airs triple, quadruple flips, letting the bike flip on its own while he's flying through like Superman. I mean, it's crazy, but he's landing in this giant air mattress or whatever. And I think he's got a couple of different ones, like one where it's just like he lands and it's like a stationary one where they start putting the plastic on the air mattress so he can kind of land smoothly as he starts to learn a trick. He starts to master it. They start to increase the landing until like at the actual stun events, right? He's landing on like a solid, a solid surface. But, you know, and I think a lot of that has come through technology, right? Like technology has enabled people to like, I see that and go, oh, I can build an inflatable air, you know, landing in my own backyard, right? Which would be a terrible idea. Speaker 2: You should definitely do that. I would definitely be driving up to Denver or flying up to Denver for that. Speaker 1: I think at that point, you know, just to enter the property, my wife's going to ask me to have people sign like a release form. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll sign it. In wrapping up, where do you think agencies are going now? Obviously, Mark Zuck at Meta is building tools, and I think all these other tools are building AI into their platforms to really kind of make the end user go directly to them. So where do you think agencies are actually going? Speaker 1: Well, I mean, look, I think anytime you have any sort of tool, you know, the people that nerd out on the tools, i.e. agency owners, right, are going to be able to use those tools to find a competitive advantage for the businesses and clients that they represent in the marketplace, right? And I think, you know, we've seen this with the web builders and the WordPresses, right? Like everybody thought like, oh, once you have WordPress, Businesses won't need agencies anymore. And of course, the reality is that spawned a whole industry of web pros and WordPress professionals because businesses were like, well, hey, if I have this new ability, I can do all these other crazy things. And then agencies come in and say, well, you can even do this stuff too. And then you've got people that are building custom tools for their clients using that stuff. And so I think if anything... And I watched that talk where Zuckerberg was talking about that. The business owner would come directly to them, and I think that will increase access to advertising for an effective advertising to a lot of businesses that maybe aren't advertising right now, or they hired an agency that didn't know what they were doing, or they hired an agency that just had too many clients or had too much work going on, and they weren't paying enough attention to that client. It will help, I think, more clients enter into advertising. Which I think will increase the amount of demand for agencies, right? Like agencies that are doing basic meta stuff. Their work will undoubtedly change, right? The cheese is going to move a little bit, but I think there will become more advanced stuff that they're going to be able to do with the tooling that Meta is coming out with. And so I think what will happen is you're going to have a lot more people entering advertising, advertising their businesses. And I think that's just going to increase the demand for agencies. When I look back at my agency and I think about the typical client that we had as an agency, I don't care how fancy of a tool that Meta is going to come out with. One of my longtime mentors, Noel, who owned a restaurant, he had a fifth grade education. He was an amazing chef. I think at the peak of his life, he owned, I think, four or five different restaurants. He's probably doing close to $10 million a year across all of those different restaurants combined. And there is no scenario in which Noel would ever, ever, I don't care how cool of a tool Zuckerberg is going to come out with, there is no scenario ever in the history of the world in which Noel would have been managing his own advertisement or his own website or his own social media, right? I mean, he maybe, I mean, he had a flip phone. Speaker 2: The drug dealer phone. Speaker 1: That was the phone, right? And I think that's the case actually with a lot of it, whether it's people doing waste management, people doing plumbing, electricians, general contracting. Not to say that they couldn't learn how to do it, but I just think that most business owners are smart enough to know that they should focus on... They should stick to their knitting. They should hire experts to do their stuff. And I don't see AI changing that anytime soon. Maybe when there's AGI, but I still have a hard time thinking that somebody like Noel, who's managing $10 million across his restaurants, would have just said to a voice agent, hey, here's my bank account number, go manage it. Maybe there's a scenario where that is possible, but I think he would still always have some type of human that he trusted in his business that would be doing this stuff. Speaker 2: Hi there, agency owners. 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So head over to e2msolutions.com slash smartagency to check out their transparent and their flexible pricing. Trust me, if you're ready to grow without burning out, e2m is the partner you've been looking for. That's e2msolutions.com slash smartagency. Go check them out and tell them Jason Swenk sent you. Human connection is everything and I think people want to understand or they want to know how something's made or works in order to go, yeah, I want to hire you to go do it because there are so many bad agencies out there. I've hired them. Oh my God, they are horrendous. We always hire outside of our community and that always makes the challenge because then I don't have kind of like I don't know where they've come from. I always felt like I was a good interviewer, but agencies are really good at selling. They're really good at marketing. And a lot of them struggle with delivery, like kind of going back to your results. And when I think of AI and a lot of this stuff, like they're going to be going out of business because they're not doing the right job. And people can put in stats, like for example, I took screenshots of our Facebook ads and the performance and put it into, we call Marketing Mark, our little marketing agent. And it goes, you should fire the agency. And it went over all these kinds of different things, like just screenshots. Or I took our YouTube channel and stats. I said, what should we look at? And they're like, hey, you know, predominantly you're going after this, blah, blah, blah. And it was amazing. In this world of all this data, all these softwares and tools and all these things that we have, they have so much data, like we're overwhelmed by it. But we, as human beings, I look at it, like I look at a spreadsheet and I go, holy shit, like, I don't know what I'm looking at. I want to throw up. I got a headache. I got a migraine. Let me run out the door. Let me go ride my bike. But then I put that into AI and the feedback it gives me, I'm like, holy cow, like, that's the power. But it takes a human to look at that right now in a year or two years, you know, the AGI stuff. And then I also look at, too, like when we had the 100-person agency three years ago, I could have created the same agency, over eight figures, with 50 people. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, without a doubt, if you're an agency right now and you're yourself and you're I'm one of the key team members and really agency-wide. Depending on when this episode airs, I'm currently in the process of joining an agency for my next thing. I think I could probably talk about that now. But what E2M, which I think is a big supporter of your agency, and I'm going to be joining their leadership team. Like company-wide, it can't just be like one person at a time, like working on AI. Everybody's like, we're trying to inject AI as a mindset into every, you know, horizontally across every function of the business. And I think if you're an agency right now and you're still like, kind of just keeping your head above water and you're not making time for this, I think you have to find like the evenings or weekends or you have to find time to like And today, I'm going to talk to you about how you can start working these tools into your everyday life to stay competitive. And I think it will help. Maybe AI for those agencies that are struggling to get results, just like you're using AI to analyze those ads. I mean, the fact that you're doing that, and the agency of record that's managing your ads is not doing that is alarming, right? And I think a lot of people think like, if they do that, it's like cheating or something or, hey, where's my value, right? But you kind of look at it, it's like, I always, I love hiring people that are smarter than me and better than me at a certain thing, whether it be sales or marketing or development. Like I like to be fired from jobs within my business. And I think if you have AI tools that can do the job as good or better than yourself or team members, you certainly should be like, You know, firing yourself in leveraging AI to do that, even though it's not like your work that's doing it, like ultimately you've got to fiduciary responsibility to your clients to get them amazing results. And so I think every agency should be taking all of their deliverables and at least gut checking them, you know, with AI. I use the tools responsibly when it comes to PII and confidential information and whether that means you need to figure out how to use the API for OpenAI versus just their front-end user interface, whether you need to use a tool like Weam, Weam.ai, where it brings all the different language models together and allows you to use those tools through the API layer where it's not storing that information. I mean, there's a lot of ways to do it, I think, in a smart way. But I think definitely the headlines there, right? AI is going to disrupt every industry. It doesn't matter what you're doing. I think I saw an interview with Jeff Bezos the other day that said, you know, he said like 96% Of his day is working on AI related stuff. And so if that's, and they, they're, they're not an AI company, they're not necessarily an AI company, but AI is obviously being infused in every aspect of their business from manufacturing and infrastructure to shipping and e-commerce and all that stuff. So I think if that's happening, it should be happening in every agency business. But I think there's still going to be lots of. I'm a founder and CEO of UGURUS, a small to medium businesses that they're not going to nerd out on AI all day, every day. And that's where the agencies have an opportunity. They can become experts. They can help their clients adopt these technologies and they can make a lot of money doing it. Speaker 2: Everyone wants to work with someone that has total AI in control, if you think about it, right? I've created many advisors in every facet of our business, from financial to marketing to creative. I even have an interview that goes live soon of one of our members. They grew to $30 million in revenue. They finally bought a company because he felt the confidence to buy a company and did it all over chat. He goes, what questions do I ask? How do I put the deal together? Should I actually put in all the numbers, all the stats? What should I look at? What should I be worried about? All this. He did everything in it, everything over ChatGPT. And it was a successful deal because one member bought the other member. And I was like, this is crazy. He was walking us through it. Speaker 1: It's weird because it's like having this really powerful assistant. And I've been chatting with some people about what this means for the coaching or consulting space and this and that. And it's super powerful. And the legal standpoint of like you're working on a contract, an agreement, super power. Contracts are literally like language. And these are large language models. I mean, there's a very great fit there. But then there's the accountability factor, which of course, you know, if you use chat for your contracts and the contract language exposes you to something, right? I mean, if you hire an attorney, right, there's an accountability component there. And if you hire a coach, right, there's still some accountability. Whereas if chat tells you to do something that doesn't work out, it's like, jump off this bridge. I'm going to go get that $20 a month back from OpenAI or whatever, right? I mean, there's really no accountability for bad advice, which is like, I think when it comes to business leadership, there's still this space of, I don't know if it's the soul of a human or the accountability of a human. There's an obligation from one person to another. Even if the advice is less good, if you're getting it from a person that you can hold accountable, there's definitely something to that. Chat's available 24-7. The transactional cost is pennies. So it's absolutely something that you should start there for everything and at least see like, hey, what does this give me? But at that point, you're taking accountability if it goes good or bad, right? So use with caution. Speaker 2: Well, cool. Well, Brent, this is a lot of fun. I think we do this. We'll definitely do this again, especially with you joining E2M. So I just want to thank you for all that you've done through UGURUS. Sorry to see that go, but can't wait to see what you create with E2M and Manish and Kishbu and all that amazing team. So thanks again for coming on the show. Man, that was a ride from bootstrapping UGURUS to selling it to watching it wind down, unfortunately, to jumping back in with E2M. Now, Brent's really been through it all. A huge thanks to him for showing up with his honesty, his depth, and some killer BMX analogies. If this conversation sparked some ideas or helped you think differently about your agency's future, share it with a friend, and don't forget to subscribe for more unfiltered agency truth bombs. That's it for today. Until next time, stay curious, stay bold, and always have a Swenk day.