Why Delegating AI Could Be the Fastest Way to Kill Your Agency with Brandon Na | Ep #801

Why Delegating AI Could Be the Fastest Way to Kill Your Agency with Brandon Na | Ep #801 Speaker 2: Hey, Brandon, welcome to the show. Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for having me. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us who you are and what you do. Speaker 1: Yeah. So my name is Brandon Na, and currently I have an agency called Seattle Organic SEO, but simultaneously I do a few other things. I work in venture capital. I also serve as an acting CMO for a company called Wayfair Journey. So I get my hands in a few different things. Awesome. Speaker 2: How'd you get started in the agency world? Are you an accidental agency owner? Speaker 1: A hundred percent. So in 2004, I had started a real estate practice. It was my first venture on my own after working at Amazon, Expedia and a company like I gobbled up by Google. And a friend convinced me that I would be good at sales, which I absolutely detest. And instead of selling, I thought, well, how can I get people to find me? And so that was my first foray into SEO, which is what our agency specializes in. And at the time, it was what, four years after Google had, you know, just went IPO and it was the early days of SEO. I didn't create the agency until about six years later, and that was because I didn't feel comfortable enough at my skill set, and then I had to actually leverage it in another company, which I helped grow about 1,400% in three years. It was an education company in South Korea. We went from how many? It was like three schools to 16, from 500 students to 7,000. I was number two in charge, but I was leveraging SEO. To replace a source of instructors because we needed instructors right and left. And so I fine-tuned my SEO skills and then I came back in 2010. And then funny enough, I just Googled Seattle SEO and then I reached out to the three top owners or they were agencies. The third guy who wasn't really an agency per se, who was there, Rob Hampton, I think was his name. He was getting out And we made an agreement where he'd teach me everything. And I just paid him a lot for it. And so that was my education into the SEO world. Within a month or two after launching Seattle Organic SEO, we were number one for all the Seattle SEO terms. Speaker 3: Fantastic. Speaker 2: Why did you, obviously you worked with Amazon and Expedia and some of the big brands. Why did you not want to continue working with them? Speaker 1: So unfortunately for me, I always exited those companies before I could really cash out. Like I was at Amazon when it was 12 bucks a share and we weren't even sure if we're going to survive. Bezos was also kind of an ass, I'll be honest. I mean, yes, he's very good at what he does, but he didn't pay us. This was in the early days. And so, you know, he said, you know, he he actually funny enough, I stood up to him in a company wide meeting and I asked him, so, Jeff, you got kids. I got kids. Why aren't you paying us more? And he just sort of laughing in this typical way. And then he said, I give you stock options. So shut up, basically. I just went silent because, you know, he had kind of made a mistake in what he said. And the second in charge of HR came up to me and said, we're really sorry. Speaker 3: We're really sorry. Speaker 1: But that was Bezos. And working inside of there, I saw Barton, actually, you know, the founder of Expedia on a podcast. And I remember being in meetings with him as well. It's funny how these companies, when they mature, how shitty they get. Yeah, 100%. Speaker 2: Because I probably listened to that same interview with the Expedia founder. And I think he went on to do Zillow and stuff like that. Speaker 1: Glassdoor. Exactly. Speaker 2: Yeah. And Glassdoor, which I kind of You know, like when I was listening to the interview, he's like, yeah, I wanted to mess with people, right? Like, cause CEOs really respect their reputation. And that'd be a great way to make them pay to take that shit down. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, he was he was not that dynamic in person. He actually every time I saw him talk, I was just kind of like, he's our leader. But I mean, at the same time, I mean, Barton's brilliant in a lot of ways. Right. So these guys, they're nerdy a lot of times. I don't know him 100 percent. I don't know Bezos 100 percent. But you'd be surprised at how Unimpressive they are. Sometimes it was timing. Sometimes it was, you know, their path. There's other elements. I could speak for days on why I think they succeeded. Speaker 2: Well, I think too, you know, even when I look back, you know, like if you went back to some of my first employees I had at my agency. I've learned so much over the past 25 or 30 years or however long I've been doing this thing. If you went back to them, they'd be like, oh, Jason was an ass. He didn't know what he was doing. Unknown Speaker: And I didn't. Speaker 2: We were trying to just figure it out. How do we survive? Speaker 1: 100%. Still doing it. Speaker 2: And just get to the next day. You look at ranchers. One of my favorite shows is Yellowstone. Unknown Speaker: You're a cowboy today. You don't act like the man from the stories I've heard. That's the thing about being a grandfather. I get to do all the things I wish I'd done with my children. Speaker 2: And they always say like, look, we're just trying to make it to the next season. That's it. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: We're not trying to go further. And I felt like in the early days, that's what I was trying to do. One of our team members on our exec team used to be ran apple.com. And he used to tell us all kinds of stories about jobs and like all the crazy things that he would do before all these movies and all the books came out. And I was like, man, I was like, but how do you build that company? You have to adapt. Like, I think the best leaders adapt so quickly. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: Because when I listened to the interview with the Expedia guy, I was like, man, this guy's awesome. How do I get to that level? Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: He was really refined and that kind of stuff. And I'm like, and then when I hear your story, and then I've heard that about Jeff Bezos as well. All right. What do you think's changed for them over the years? Speaker 1: They've obviously gone from intense to more relaxed because they got billions now, right? Barton, I think, pivoted into VC from what I saw, you know, and so a lot of them do move into venture capital. Bezos, I don't, I mean, Bezos seems to be all And I'm here to talk to you about how to get into Blue Origin, right? He's like sending his girlfriend up and Katy Perry and shit. But that's a really good question, because I've actually thought about that recently. I was like, what are these people who've conquered the world? Like, what do they do next? You know, they got plenty of years, even Obama, for example. Like, what do these guys do? And I can't say I know 100%, but they're the type that I would argue are going to continue to try to trailblaze in some way or another. But then again, I might be wrong because when I listened to that same interview that you're talking about with Barton, it sounded like he's just taking care of his health. He took care of his kids. Now he's just, you know, catching up on the news every morning. Speaker 2: Tim Ferriss, I think that's what I was listening. Speaker 1: It was, it was Tim Ferriss. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: I actually re-listened to it recently too, because again, it's always funny to hear their perspective on a podcast and then experiencing it in real life. Speaker 2: Now, I'm not even close. I don't have billions, so please, everybody listening, this is only going to be from my little perch. But when I sold the first agency, I had enough money where I didn't have to work anymore. So I retired for a number of different years. When I did that, I lost my sense of purpose. I lost my sense of worth, right? Because when you're operating at such a high stage for me at that point, right, like I had a lot of significance and a lot of growth. And I look at some of these leaders out there that we just mentioned, and I think they lose that purpose. Speaker 1: They do, right? Speaker 2: And they go, I need to go disrupt something else. I need to keep doing this. Versus going, when I think about it, they don't look at themselves as creative. They don't look at themselves as innovative. They look at themselves as the CEO of Amazon. And if I'm not the CEO of Amazon, I'm nothing. And that's how I looked at it when I sold the agency versus Now I look at it like, hey, I'm creative. I'm innovative. I can apply this to anything that I want. Do I want to go, you know, do a bunch of videos on Jeep videos or whatever it is, right? Like put that effort to there versus it's all about the money or they just love the recognition too, right? Like when that recognition goes away, maybe they lose some of their purpose. I don't know. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's ego involved. I mean, my story, you know, you made me think about how I became who I am. I was grilled to shit by my parents. Still am. You know, like my parents, I'm a Korean American who, you know, immigrated when I was three years old into the States. My parents didn't know better. You know, they had a middle school and a high school education. They didn't know how to freaking parent. So what they ended up doing is they, they literally, you know, they did the typical tiger parenting or whatever, you know, got me into college. I chose, funny enough, a school that didn't have as good of a reputation as the school I got into. I got into two good schools. But the one with the better reputation was bigger. So I was like, I'm not going to go to some school that, you know, has like 500 students in the freshman class. I'm going to go on where they take care of me. Well, that's a big fucking mistake, in my opinion. Like I was coddled. And for four years, I was living a life that was unrealistic. I mean, you know, they say USC is like the University of Spoiled Children. I went to kind of a version of that in the Puget Sound. It's actually called the University of Puget Sound. I kind of regret it. Sounds like what you did, you know, you went and basically made it happen and stuff. And now I don't know where, where you're at now, but sometimes you need kind of the rough conditions or, you know, you need literally hell to happen to you to become better. And I believe, you know, I did suffer when I was a kid, but my mom in first grade took me to the river to kill us. She threatened me because I had stolen a marble. Unknown Speaker: She wanted to teach me a lesson. She dragged me down the river. Speaker 1: And so we're dying today. You know, third grade, she threatened me and said, you know, if you don't marry a Korean, she's going to kill herself. You know, like I had all this mental, you know, that she even these days, it's funny. She's like, no, I didn't say that. But that was my life. You know, it turned me into who I am now. Speaker 2: That makes the conversation with Jeff Bezos pretty easy. Speaker 1: Exactly. Exactly. So I don't know. I mean, I personally believe, you know, I might not be business today. But I do have the potential to become him now because I just finished taking care of my twins. One's a K-pop idol, another one's a computer AI engineer. The K-pop idol has now debuted. The engineer has, what do you call it, graduated from UCI. And so they're good, right? So now I have this ability with all this experience, including the agency, To go and do some really freaking cool things. And, you know, honestly, I feel like sometimes it's that environment. So you say a lot of people who run agencies probably listen to this podcast. I was just told by, you know, the CEO of the firm that I help as the CMO. He said, what do writers do when they can't figure something out? Let me ask you that question. What do writers do? Like they have a problem when they're writing. What's the solution? What do you think? Speaker 2: What do you think what they do now or what they did a couple years ago? Speaker 1: So let's say, for example, a screenwriter struggling with a problem when they're writing a movie for like a producer. How do they solve that problem? Speaker 2: I would say just keep writing, right? Speaker 1: Well, it's kind of a version of that. What he told me, which I thought was funny, is he said, make the problem bigger. Because then it makes you focus. It makes you focus to solve that problem. That blew me away because, I mean, it's true. Sometimes when you're in triage mode, you figure it out. But when you're comfortable, sometimes you don't have that pressure. Speaker 3: Hey, agency owners, if you're sticking with one platform for every project, you're probably stuck in a growth bottleneck. More clients means more hires, which adds noise and cuts into profits. To break the loop, you need a more flexible tool that doesn't stretch your resources. Now, Wix Studio is a smart addition to your agency's toolkit. Intuitive by design, your team can quickly master the platform and focus on the work that matters the most. Now, with robust native business solutions, Like booking, e-com, and events, you can take on any project at any scale without adding cost to third-party plugins. Plus, Wix Studio is a low-maintenance platform, meaning you can redirect client budget toward real growth initiatives. Think more value for your clients, steady income stream, and stronger relationships. Scale your agency at wixstudio.com. Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think to a lot of agencies look at it right now of going, they have people shooting at them at all different angles, whether it be self inflicted or, you know, the market tanking or AI or whatever it is, they're just so clouded by kind of the fog of war that they're not able to really kind of figure out what's that big one that I need to make bigger in order to solve that. When you start to get, like you said, get laser focused, you find that that problem and you make it even bigger. You're going to find a solution because you're going to test it out. It may take you 10 times. I was watching the Masters Tournament a couple of weeks ago and Rory McEvoy, he won it on the 16th try. Come on, man. That's awesome. Speaker 1: No, that's awesome. Seriously. I totally agree. Speaker 2: I do want to switch focus a little bit. I want to talk about, you've been in this SEO world for a long time. And I find myself and so many other people not even going to Google to do Google searches anymore. Speaker 1: No, I completely agree. A friend of mine, he has a startup. He finishes a computer science degree over at Duke and he now runs, I think it's a mental health startup, but he had posted on LinkedIn about a month or two months ago. I can't remember. He said, you know what? Google's not in my vision anymore. I don't, I don't, I don't use Google anymore. I just use AI. Right. And I kind of made fun of him a little bit because he's a friend. I said, Hey, That's what you think. You think that everybody's using AI because you're smart as fuck. I mean, this guy has an asteroid named after him. He's so brilliant. I could speak for hours about how great he is. I was thinking, no, you're just making an assumption because you're smarter, like you operate at a different level, right? But, you know, then fast forward five weeks, I'm like using AI every day, like for everything. And I would agree, like Google, but that's why Gemini just came out, in my opinion, is, you know, 2.5 rather. Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. I like that too. You know, I even look at, you know, I read a study that HubSpot blog traffic is down by 80%. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I can totally, totally see that. Well, there's a theory that I heard recently, which, you know, maybe some people have confirmed it, but Google's trying to figure out, like, what content is AI driven, right? So if they see that your website or your agency is constantly producing AI generated content and Google can figure it out, they might penalize you like in the old days. Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know. I just, when I go on the web to do search, I use like ChatGPT. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: Or even, even if I did go to Google, it's going to have the Google summary at the very top that's AI, you know, generated. And then I'm like, oh yeah, versus just clicking on a website. I don't know. It's just, it's fascinating to me that I mean, I started my agency before Google and then Google came out maybe two years later, three years later. I can't remember. Like we started in 99 and maybe Google was 03 or 04. And it was really interesting to see how that changed everything. And now, like with the change of AI and being able to create AI agents or Gemini has released their gems, I think it's called, which is really pretty sweet. It's a fascinating time that we live in. And I just hope everyone's leveraging all this. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. No, I mean, I feel like right now is an arms race because you have Manus, you have DeepSeek. You have Perplexity, you have Anthropx, Claude, you know, you have all these specialized AIs, you have people building their own AIs. It's crazy. I mean, like I just joined an AI agents group, funny enough, because I had talked about, well, you're probably familiar with X-Spaces, but, you know, I just went there to have a conversation with a few friends of mine that were doing an AI mastermind. But funny enough, X's Space wasn't working that day. So I connected with another friend and she happened to have this group of 120 people that, I mean, these are the geekiest, you know, the nerdiest people in the world, but they are so fucked up. Brilliant. Like they are just, and the stuff that they're talking about. So I feel so lucky that I got involved in this, but yeah, you need to, in my opinion, you need to coalesce because this stuff's coming at us really, really fast. Speaker 2: Well, that's awesome. Well, Brandon, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners listening in? Speaker 1: Well, I mean, if everyone's an agency owner out there, I would argue, you know, don't freak out too much about the AI, even though I just kind of talk about one way of, you know, preventing you from getting behind. But on the flip side, I do have to kind of warn you, you know, like, even though I'm saying don't worry, to be prepared, because it's sometimes two or three people against you. Like if a person or an agency has multiple agents literally operating simultaneously, Against your agency, which might be all human powered. Well, you might be behind. Speaker 2: So I know that's kind of a contradictory statement, but what I always tell everybody, especially in our community is AI is not going to replace you, the people that use it will. So constantly keep testing it out. Like we were talking about this in the mastermind last week, right? One of the big things is, is a lot of agency employees. The owner will be like, AI is going to be the next big thing. And then the owner will tell the employees, hey, go find out a use case that we can use this for to make the agency better. And a lot of the employees are like, I hate change. That's why I'm an employee. I don't want to, right? I don't want this to affect my job, but it will. And so they're like, oh, the owner is just going to try to find a replace me. And they look at this as threatening. So then You task your team to go do this. They don't do it because they're afraid they're going to lose their job. Now you as a whole company and an entity is behind the ball because you put it off. And so I look at it as you as an owner need to bring in people that love this technology. Like, and you'll know within your team, like if you have the supporting AI people, because they're already using it to do stuff. I've created so many AI agents to help us out, to write scripts, not just going to ChatGPT and going, create me this LinkedIn post like this, like deep training this on all the success stories, all of our branding guidelines, all the problems that our clients are having, like really training this thing deep in order to do this. That's one thing I just want to tell people. Don't just put it off to your team, your team that's already kind of going, Hey, Jason, check this out. That's the one, the task for the AI, right? Because they're already using it. They're already sporting it. They're going to be the biggest champions in AI because man, it can replace a lot of people very quickly, but you can get ahead of this. Speaker 1: Awesome. Speaker 2: Well, Brandon, thanks so much for coming on the show. Everyone. If you believe that you want to be in a room with other amazing people that are talking about things like this and brainstorming and seeing the things you're not able to see, we'd love for you guys to join our community. Make sure you go to agencymastery.io. And until next time, have a Swenk day.