Mike Nelson is co-founder of Four15 Digital, a performance marketing agency with offices in Long Beach and Walnut Creek, California. Mike tells us how he went from being a high school math teacher to an SEM expert, why he loves auditing potential clients’ accounts, why he values mindset diversity in this company, how COVID has made people more comfortable with agencies, and why he thinks client relationships would be better if clients that sometimes presented to agencies instead of vice versa.
Mike Nelson is co-founder of Four15 Digital, a performance marketing agency with offices in Long Beach and Walnut Creek, California. Mike tells us how he went from being a high school math teacher to an SEM expert, why he loves auditing potential clients’ accounts, why he values mindset diversity in this company, how COVID has made people more comfortable with agencies, and why he thinks client relationships would be better if clients that sometimes presented to agencies instead of vice versa.
Links
Purple Cow, a book by Seth Godin
David Rodnitzky (David) (00:02): In this episode of Agentic Shift, we talked to Mike Nelson, co-founder of Four15 Digital, a performance marketing agency with offices in Long Beach and Walnut Creek, California. Mike tells us how he went from being a high school math teacher to an SEM expert, why he loves auditing potential clients’ accounts, why he values mindset diversity in this company, how COVID has made people more comfortable with agencies, and why he thinks client relationships would be better if clients that sometimes presented to agencies instead of vice versa.
Mike, thanks for joining me today on Agentic Shift.
Mike Nelson(Mike) (00:37): Yeah. Happy to be here. Really excited to see what we talk.
David (00:40): Yeah. We're not going to talk about anything related to football since you're in LA, and I'm up in San Francisco.
Mike (00:46): It's a little too soon, a little too soon. You think I'm an LA fan, but I'm a San Francisco fan. So the Niners losing yesterday was pretty rough for me.
David (00:56): The good news is that this is going to go live like three months from now. And so we'll all have time to have healed from that. And maybe by talking about this, we're bringing up old wounds from people who are still fresh, but I actually don't care anyways. I'm a college football fan. I just try to have like water cooler talk and know who's playing football. So that was my water cooler talk for the day.
Mike (01:16): Appreciate it.
David (01:16): Yeah. So we've known each other for a long time, but for everyone else who doesn't know you, why don't you tell us your founder story? How did you end up founding Four15 Digital?
Mike (01:25): I'll go with the shortish version here. I was a math teacher down in Southern California, and I really wanted to be a math teacher. My whole life I really wanted to be a junior college professor and kind of lived that life and everything worked out. And then my wife at the time got into Berkeley up north. And I always said, Hey, if you get into Berkeley, we'll go up to Berkeley thinking that she would never, ever in a million years get into Berkeley. So she did. And when I moved up there, wasn't having any luck getting really a teaching job, and I found you. So I found at the time PPC ad buying, I think, you were still calling it then and PPC associates. I always tell people I was sort of your first employee that wasn't related to you, which is mostly true.
So I found you, and then you were just really looking for folks, math background, and I didn't have any idea what I was getting into. I actually thought we were doing SEO type of thing. So I thought you and I hit it off well and ended up working at your company there for four or five years, and then just moved on, wanted to be more technical in nature and got into product management. And I did that for about a year with a company in San Francisco.
And then after that, I was there for four or five years, and I really had the entrepreneurial spirit. To be frank, it's not like I wanted to start an agency. I just knew I could start an agency and be really profitable and replaced my income and probably beyond that. So really confident just following the roadmap that you created over there and spinning it a little bit, coming up with new things, but that's sort of the non-attractive founder story I'd say.
David (02:58): Well, I do remember interviewing you. I seem to recall at some point in the interview, you said, if I don't get this job, I'm going to have to do substitute high school math teaching. So please give the job. And I was like, well, yeah, I think I'm doing a good for Mike if I get him this job.
Mike (03:13): It was definitely a pity party.
David (03:19): I obviously made a good choice.
Mike (03:21): Yeah. I appreciate that.
David (03:21): I do remember talking to you all those years back. So obviously, you're doing something similar to what 3Q or PPC associates does, but what would you say is your elevator pitch when you're talking to a client? There are a lot of performance marketing agencies out there. So what is the Four15 Digital difference?
Mike (03:36): Yeah, it sounds weird, but my elevator pitch is to really get past the elevator pitch as much as we can. So I think we're often asked the elevator pitch. You have to do it as a founder, and we put a lot of stuff out there. We work harder. We're all in office, which I think is really unique nowadays. I think we talk a lot about that now that helps our team grow and upskill. And also from our perspective, better mental health and wellbeing and things like that.
So a lot of the things we say there are pretty similar to what other agencies say work harder, maybe a little bit more affordable in some instances, things like that. But our aim is like a lot of other agencies’ is really to get into the audit.
So audit or a growth plan, if we can get to that stage, just past the elevator pitch, we close with extremely high success rate. And the reason why I like to get into that is because the audit or growth plan, whatever it ends up being, it really shows our culture a lot better. We put a lot of time into those. We can talk specifically about the client, things like that. So in the elevator pitch, we really try to avoid any conversations about logos, other brands we've worked with, and then just have it be entirely based on that individual client or opportunity, and so far so good.
That said, a lot of our growth, and I'm sure you’ll get into this question later, has been based off of referrals and word of mouth and things like that. So as we head into 2022, we got to refine some of our internal marketing messaging and figure out how to close a lot more of these colder leads I'd say is one of the tasks that we have at hand.
David (05:08): So it's interesting that you don't talk about other clients similar to you, because honestly, someone once told me that the best way to sell anything is to say people like you have done the following. So it's like, if you're pitching Coke, you're like, when we worked with Pepsi, this is what worked for them. So you avoid that. Why is that?
Mike (05:24): We pretty much do avoid it. If we have a relevant experience, we'll say it in about as many words as you said it there. But I think that most people, we don't want to go out and tell your competitors’ trade secrets to you. I think that's kind of getting off on the wrong foot. We're trying to get a job where we have a lot of your proprietary information, and yes, we're signing NDAs and things like that, but we really try to establish, Hey, this is about our collective experience that we have at Four15 and catering it to you as an individual.
We even have clients that have multiple brands and it's still the same company. And we try to apply learnings from one brand to the other, and that's somewhat successful. But the surprising part is like even the variance, just from one brand to the other that's owned by the same company, you can't just straight out copy and paste those learnings.
So everything is very nuanced and specific nowadays. And we just want to make sure we’re starting off on the right foot. Our goal is not to win business by saying, Hey, look, what we learned from your competitors. Our goal is look how smart we are. Look how well we can work together. Things like that. And hopefully that resonates. So when a client leaves us, which occasionally they do, we all make mistakes in life, they know that our sales tactics isn't going to take the relationship we just got out of and pitch it to somebody else. And we really don't do that.
I think whether or not you agree with it fully, I'm not sure, but I remember you kind of talking about Chinese walls, you would call them back in the day. And that's something that really stuck with me. And it's part of our morals and values here that we're really not trying to leak information on one client to the other.
David (06:56): Yeah. When a client would come to me and say, Hey, I see you're working with so and so. We want to do it in our space, we want to do the exact same thing as them. And so can you just take all those learnings and apply them to our account? My response would always be, you have to put yourself in their shoes and someday you're going to be the account that we've had for three years. And would you want me to turn around and take all the learnings that I've gotten from your account and give it to some upstart in your industry?
So I agree with you on that front. I guess the other side of it, though, is if you're working with a company, again, let's just say you're working with Coke or Pepsi or something like that, and there's certain regulatory things that just happen to be common in their industry and there's certain best practices, without giving away confidential information, you can still say, Hey, listen, you don't have to reinvent the wheel with me. I've worked in your space. So there's going to be some things that are just going to be a lot more seamless.
Mike (07:43): Absolutely our agency, we're not focusing on individual categories. we don't even do B2B versus B2C. It's just whoever we think we're a good fit with. But sometimes we get a competitive client and there's like a lot of temptation to download the search career report or something like that. But I think it's just really important to start off on the right foot, start off with integrity and things like that. And our hope is that our clients can sense that and they appreciate that. That's been our general approach to that sort thing.
David (08:11): I think that makes sense. I'm going to ask you about your audit, too, because I also love audits is you said you feel very confident when you get to the audit phase. Someone's going to see your audit and they're going to be like hire these guys. Without giving away proprietary audit methodology, why do you think your audits are so successful?
Mike (08:26): I think because they're not canned at all. And this brings the question of scalability, which is a very fair question. And I think we may need to change it as time goes on, but everything that I or we write on the audits is pretty much unique, which been the last three months where you've been recycling the intro slides. Even I would just constantly remake those because to me it was part of the zone or process of catering the pitch to that client, even things about Four15.
Sometimes I might want to talk about how we have strengths in the creative side, other times more on the analytical side, things like that. So my mentality walking into the audits is it’s going to take me a lot of time, but we're going to win the business in order for it to be that successful. It needs to bespoke, I guess is the word of the day, but fully based on them and not anybody else. And even though it’s not the most time efficient thing, I really enjoy it. It's also really fun for me as a founder to dive into new accounts and see how other people have done it.
And really, I don't ask a lot of questions in the audit either of the client. I think a lot of the questions I would ask are answered by the data and you get into the mindset of how somebody else is thinking based on how they've got stuff structured and stuff like that. So yeah, that's kind of what I would say about the audit and why we're pretty successful. But the downside is pretty much all the audits flow through me and things need to change there and they are starting to change.
David (09:47): We can definitely talk about that about scalability. I do think that, like you said, you put a lot of time in the audits and you have confidence that it's in the client's best interest to work with you. After they see the audit, if they don't work with you, then I guess the way I used to think about it was I'd come into pitches with swagger, and if the client didn't choose us, then I would say it's their loss, not our loss.
Mike (10:05): A very typical David perspective, which I basically agree with. I want it to be pretty clear and obvious what the best selections are. And then also we use it to some degree, I think a lesser degree, but still important is to do our own vetting. I don't want to get in a situation where during the pitch, which by the way, the pitch is mutual to me, I believe heavily in equality, they're telling us the story about their business strength and how they've grown and everything like that. And then you get into the account, and the numbers match. The numbers look really bad, spending as much as they seem to imply.
So part of the reason for doing the audit and spending time is like business vetting as well. We have a tremendously valuable resource in our team to have them waste their time on a relationship that isn't likely to go anywhere. That's foolish. I think our team really is our product, and unfortunately it's a scarce resource. So we have to be really careful on who we work with and who we don't. I think that as time goes on, we just get more and more selective in that area. I think it would be great if we disqualified 50, 60% of our opportunities. I think that would make the most business sense for us, frankly, unless we can come up with some way to create this SEM factory of amazing qualified account managers, which I think is less and less possible as time goes on because so much more about search to me is about intellect and not following a process, but understanding and processing the situation and coming up with more situational answers.
David (11:37): Yeah. It's become a more a strategy than process is what you're saying. That makes sense.
Mike (11:41): Yeah, absolutely.
David (11:43): And the way I think about that is I say that it used to be that search was like 80% process and 20% technology/strategy. And today, it's probably like 70% technology and 30% strategy, but the 30% strategy is the difference between a good account and a bad account because Google is leveling the playing field with the algorithm. So if you don't have really smart people on the strategy side, then there's no differentiation.
Mike (12:09): Yeah. I agree. And I think that's a whole other topic, but even back when I was working with you, there was all these folks who were like, Hey, you're going to lose your job to the algorithm. Ten years ago they were saying that, 12 years ago they were saying that. I personally feel like that's close to impossible in nowadays landscape. In fact, we have the opposite problem, I'd say, and it's a continuation of what we just said is, I don’t feel like I can just fully write process and then people can follow it and then that will work out. I think it's much more experiential strategic, again, looking for differences almost more so than looking for commonalities across accounts is what I would say. And it takes somebody that's really knowledgeable, I think, to do that. That's hard to document that type of thing.
David (12:56): Yep. I agree. You talked about being more selective with clients, and I guess I'm wondering is when you think about the early days of your business, was that one of the biggest challenges you had sort of being able to choose which clients to take on and if not, what were the challenges in the early days of the agency?
Mike (13:10): I think during the early days of the agency, we would have said the challenges were hiring and things like that. And it was a challenge. Four or five years later, we realized we wasted a lot of time on certain smaller deals and certain opportunities. So that's kind of the biggest challenge I'd say in the early days is my time, which is pretty valuable, it's scarce, just like everybody else's time. I was managing clients that had $3,000 or $4,000 or $5,000 or $6,000 a month retainers, which sounded great at the time, but I should have just spent that time recruiting and then having someone else manage that. And ultimately me, myself growing out the business development side of things.
And frankly, I think that's one of the reasons why your business was so successful is you did manage a couple accounts in the early days. But my view of you is this is the guy who would come into work. He'd go into his office, he'd come out at lunch, say hi, and then he'd go back to his office. And really your KPI was like, do you have meetings from 9:00 to 5:00? . And if so, how many of those are client pitches? And I felt like you were constantly looking for the next best client. Even if we didn't have bandwidth, you were like, okay, I got to get a better client in and maybe we can get rid of some of these worst ones. So I thought you did amazing.
David (14:24): There are no bad clients, Mike, but there are clients that aren't a good fit for an agency.
Mike (14:28): Sure. Yeah. Less profitable ones or what have you, but yeah, I'd say that's where a lot of, kind of looking back, the pain was, just me spending way too much time on account management, not enough time on upskilling the team we did have and then not enough time on getting bigger, better clients.
David (14:45): It's interesting. I think every agency goes through a similar process. When I started out, I was charging a minimum fee of $500 a month. I had a one-person immigration attorney in Baltimore and just all sorts of random clients everywhere. And you just take what you can to just keep the lights on.
One thing that I find interesting is there is a huge dead zone under, call it, $5,000 a month of fees, basically. Very few agencies that have scaled will take anyone under 5,000 hours a month. It's just really hard to make those accounts profitable because I always say every client believes they're the most important client and they deserve to believe that. And so if you're charging $2,000 a month, they expect if they call you, they want you on the phone in 15 minutes, and you just can't do it at that level.
Mike (15:37): Exactly. To be upfront with you, I don't think you nor could really make that type of business work where you're charging these low fees and the reason why, and we say this all the time and people are trying to pay less than our minimums, we only have one gear, and it's a hundred percent. I just can't bring it to myself to do anything less than that and I can't train my team that way.
So when you talk about the SMB market, I don't know if I would be the best person to head up an SMB business, defining that as fees 4k to 5k. And interestingly enough, Four15, our minimum fee right now is 8k. And as a KPI, we've always tried to increase that as time has gone on. And we have, and it frankly probably should be 10k or 11k or 12k now. But we are toying with the idea of an SMB business as well, recognizing that it is a completely different business and having different leadership there, but you really need to do that.
I think you need to hire somebody who is more focused on the growth of your agency business and probably putting the client's business a little bit secondary. Maybe they're a little bit more salesman-like. They're using words like upselling and stuff like that. A lot of that is not even in my vocabulary, so we're kind of approaching this tentatively and we got to make sure that if we do head into that type of business in 2022, we do it with the right leadership in place. And frankly, it's very much a test and maybe one that won't work out because it's hard to make those small fees really work.
David (17:05): I think few to any agencies have actually cracked that nut of the 3,000 or 4,000 a month client. So if you figure it out and provide good service along the way, that's a win for you and a win for the clients.
Mike (17:17): Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I think KlientBoost is an example of an agency. I'm not sure if you know them, but they're based in LA. I feel like they maybe fit that mold, but they're very public about their data, how they're growing and things like that. And I look at their numbers, and I'm like, wow, you don't have that more revenue than I do, but you sure as heck have way more employees than I do, like multiples more. So they're like the best that I found with my limited knowledge. But when I think about their financials, I'm like, oh, this is a pretty unappealing part of the market.
I think that part of the market, frankly, is probably best served by a consultant. But a lot of consultants, they are tomorrow's kind of agency. I think you started off as a consultant, right? There wasn't this concept of let's start an agency. It was just, Hey, how do I work for myself? So I think that's the difficulty of it. And if I would have had strong mentorship in that area telling me, don't spend so much time managing this 4k client, I think I’d probably be in a better spot today, although we're in a really, really good spot today, which I appreciate.
David (18:22): Yeah. I often tell people when someone comes to me and says, well, I have a $10,000 a month budget. What can I do? And I tell them, the best thing you can do is find some guy or gal who has worked at a great agency and has just left and set up shop for themselves. And they will take your account on for $2,500 a month, and they will give you all the knowledge that they learned at that great agency and work with you for a couple years until they become a great agency themselves, at which point you’ll have the conversation where they say, well, I'm sorry. You're under my minimums. That's really the only way to find someone who's great. And your story is indicative of that. You started out taking clients for $2,000 to $3,000 a month and you have a lot of experience. And if someone got to you at that moment in time when you were accepting $3,000-fee clients, they got a great value.
Mike (19:09): Yeah. I don't know how it happened, but two of the first three clients we had were unicorns or they ended up being unicorns. So that was pretty crazy. So it really wasn't even about their ability to pay higher fees. It was just where we were at and where they were at. And luckily we were able to scale the programs and retain those clients for many years. One of the two we still actually have five years later.
I think as an entrepreneur or somebody who's getting into this space, you need to evolve and see your weaknesses and stuff like that. And I think most agencies, I have no idea if this is true, but to me, most agencies are started by one or two people. It's not a five founders or seven founders and they're not getting strong mentorship from other agency owners most of the time. So you have to be very self-aware in order to keep your business growing always up into the right. And there's going to be a bunch of different versions and shades to it as time goes on.
And again, to just complement you more, I think you were successful because you rolled with those punches. You were always really focused on signing more clients, but also adding on new services, upskilling the team. I'm sure your profitability certain years was really low, other years was really high, things like that, and it was a bunch of different phases.
David (20:28): My early days were pretty much driven by paranoia. I was always paranoid that if the company wasn't successful, I have to go get a job working for someone else. And that was my biggest fear. So the reason I was constantly trying to hire people and offer new categories and all that stuff was I just wanted to have enough cushion so that if we had a couple bad months, I still had a job as founder.
Mike (20:48): Yeah. And I think a lot of people have that paranoia, but your answer was maybe bring on more employees. I think most people's answer is I got to dig in and I got to hold some of the revenue. So yeah, that was my view of it and I definitely appreciate the mentality you’re got there.
David (21:05): Yeah. So one of the things you talked about is the scalability and your ability to- I guess, you're handling most of the audits you said. So how do you feel about that? Do you have plans to make yourself more scalable?
Mike (21:16): Yeah. I haven't said, but I actually have a business partner, Borja. So we’ve got to get on the same page, and I'll tell you, as it relates to headcount and things like that, I'm much more aggressive of than he is. I would love to have 30 or 40 or 50 employees by now versus he's kind of more profit mindset. So that's one of the things that's really exciting about this year is kind of growing out the headcount. And then, yeah, I would love to take some of my top team members and have them go into position of doing the audits themselves. I think that a lot of our team, three to eight years into it, they get a bit burned out just by account management. Account management is constantly every single week coming to have new strategies to the table for your client versus being somebody who audits is great. They listen to you so much more intently because they're not paying you yet. They feel like-
David (22:08): They don't know if it's true or false, whether it works or not.
Mike (22:11): They have no idea. So the challenge of the audit is putting together this great story but making sure it's a realistic story and working through that process and training the team members to be aggressive but still authentic and come up with real numbers is one of the skillsets that yeah, I do want to train up my senior folks and have them take over the audits. And like I said, they really want to do it, too. They want to always put themselves in new roles, which by the way, is another challenge of having an agency. I feel like just when somebody's mastered being an optimization manager, which is their entry level role, or somebody's mastered being an account manager, they're like, all right. What's next? So the growth of the agency always have to outpace the growth of the individual team members. Otherwise they'll probably go in-house or something like that.
David (22:57): So are you just going to rely on a couple senior people to take on the auditing and other stuff? What's your scale plan? You said you want to go from 15 to 30 people. So how do you scale that?
Mike (23:09): To me, I don't think it's all that different from where we're at now. I do think it's just taken some of these senior people and having them take over audits. So kind of assuming my role and then assuming the role of thought leadership and really acquiring new clients. I think even though it's not going to work that well for the account level, account management level, for the optimization, which again is the entry level role, optimization manager, we also need to do a bunch more process documentation.
So it seems absurd to me and it's really something that I wish I would have done earlier, but you know, with you, we were documenting process in maybe year one, maybe one and a half. I'm in year five now and just haven't done it because been so busy with other things. And also the landscape is pretty dynamic. So that's really the rough plan is take the folks we have here and keep upskilling them promote, from within, and then also hire a bunch of optimization managers and even interns.
And for anybody listening, this might be a surprise, but it was a shock to me, in this landscape, you can absolutely hire hourly employees. Like I was shocked. I was like nobody's going to want to work for $17 an hour without experience. But we're finding tons of people are happy to do that. They're just coming from college or whatever, and we can absolutely do three-, four-, five-month trials with folks, which is basically no money out of pocket for us at 15 bucks an hour and see if they can roll over to become this, was it $57,000 a year employee in California.
So that's been a big breakthrough for us. I think there's a lot of kind of prepping the team, like letting the team know, like, Hey, not everybody's going to make it through. And this is part of our culture and our vision and stuff like that. But that's been a huge success for us is just bringing on people. We call them internships, but really it's just like an hourly full-time role and seeing how they do for three or four months.
David (24:56): And you are still insisting that people come into the office every day in Long Beach. Is that right?
Mike (25:01): I think when you're first three or four months, irrespective of role, it'd be great if you were in the office full time. So that's where we really get to know each other more on a personal level, start developing those relationships and stuff like that. We were a hundred percent in office prior to COVID, and then during the start of COVID, we were a hundred percent remote just like everybody. And that worked out fine, no problem. But then we started hiring other people that hadn't been with us in the office. And even if I've known them before, their feedback was like, it's really hard to compete with the people that know each other on an intimate level. They're trying to do these things on Slack. They're trying to do these Zoom happy hours, and it was fine, but it's really difficult to mash the relationship building that you could do in person.
So that's our perspective. We'd love to get to know you in person as long as you're fully vaccinated and all that stuff. That's strongly our perspective for really all levels. From there, go move to Hawaii, go do whatever you need to do. Once you're on the team and in the club, we'll do whatever we can to keep you and retain you and grow you as an individual employee.
We deviate from that rule. Sometimes we've hired folks again, fully remote. It’s just we don't have any success stories there. And I know a lot of agencies do, but for us it just hasn't worked out. And I think we need to be honest with the data, and we've kind of changed our HR policies to match our experiences. And just a small thing. We have two offices as well. Not everybody's in Long Beach. So it's Long Beach or Walnut Creek is basically the two locations that we've got.
David (26:37): Okay. I did not know you had a Walnut Creek office. Cool.
Mike (26:41): Yeah. You don't go to Walnut Creek very often, huh?
David (26:45): No. But a friend of mine has been the mayor of Walnut Creek for the last two years. So I contributed, I think, 175 hours to his campaign. So I feel like I have a lot of leverage in Walnut Creek.
David (26:56): I could get you shut down if you're not careful. That’s what I’m saying.
Mike (27:01): Yeah. That's our perspective on in office versus remote. I know it's different for nowadays, but again, I go back to the lessons that I thought we learned together you and I, and this is really not PC of me, but we were in office for the most part. You had several offices. I think you got up to eight or nine offices at some point. And then you also had some remote folks in and my recollection and memory of that was those remote folks really had a difficult time being part of our cultural fabric. And when I would talk to them, I just didn't think they were as happy as the folks that we had next to us. And I was remote. You remember I was remote for the first six months or so that I worked with you and it wasn't good for me. It really wasn't.
It wasn’t until you forced my hand and said, Hey, everybody's got to be in office where my career really accelerated. I started growing as an adult and a person. And it wasn't that we sat around for five hours a day and had training. It was just being around the team and going to lunch and getting coached from Sean and you and Will and all those people be. I just felt like my trajectory of growth and learning and happiness was three, four, five times more than it was being on my own. And I'm a self-starter. I've always learned stuff on my own. So if I feel that way about my own kind of ability to grow, that's why we think what we think about in-office versus remote.
David (28:21): Yeah, I have three points of view on this. The first one is I think it depends on if you're an introvert or an extrovert. If you're an introvert, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you're trying to get work done and someone comes up and taps you on the shoulder and says, Hey, what did you think of that game yesterday? And it's like, you just got me out of my zone. I'll not be able to get back on track for another hour. If you're an extrovert, then you need that moment of going into the break room and drinking a kombucha with someone and talking to them. That's number one.
I think the second thing is I generally think that more senior people can handle remote because they know the job and they know what to do, and they know how to handle themselves on phone calls and whatnot. They don't need as much training. An entry level person, you’re right. Having someone start thousand miles away and try to train them via Zoom, very challenging.
And then my third thing about remote is I think if someone's remote, they have an obligation to be extra available to their team. And the example I'll give is when I first started, I had a remote person in India that worked for me who was someone I'd worked with in the past. So I knew her. And one day I Skyped her—it actually was Yahoo messenger, that was how old this was—and I said, Hey, you got this report for me. And I got an auto response back that said, I'm on vacation. And I was like [crosstalk]. She was fired two days later. That's my opinion on remote.
The other thing I'll say, too, is this whole COVID thing has created such a remote revolution that now a lot of people just feel like they're entitled to remote no matter what, which sometimes makes sense and sometimes doesn't.
Mike (29:51): I would say the majority of folks, they want to work remote. That's our goal once you've spent 90 days or so working with a team and you’re a great member of it, by all means, be remote. We’re actually transitioning some of our team members over to that. They're very excited, but on the other hand, and this was a surprise to me is a lot of the people that were hiring, one of our unique things about us is we are in office. And I would say 80% of people do want to be remote but 20% are like, I really want to be in office. And you are pretty much one of the only companies who is in office. So we sign that person. They work with us and it's great. I disagree with you a little bit about introvert versus extrovert because everybody in my company, I would say, except for maybe like one or two people is an introvert, but they all want to be around each other. It's just this quiet time that we have.
David (30:46): That sounds like a quiet extrovert.
Mike (30:49): Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I was trying to say like, I'm like an aggressive extrovert or introvert, excuse me. Like somebody taps me on the shoulder, and I don't want to talk to them. I'll tell them like, leave me the hell alone. But most people aren't like that. So at the end of the day, whether it's clients or team members, I think a sign of maturation is knowing what your ICP is, who's going to work with you, and who's not. You can't figure that out unless you've gone through a few years of trial and error, but as we're entering year five at Four15, we're just trying to be more selective. And I think honestly, even with some current employees, they may not like the mission statement that we've evolved into. And if they need to find employment elsewhere, then good for them. We'll continue to support them in whatever that next step is. But as your agency grows and stuff like that, I think you need to be a little bit more segmented and just know who's going to work out and who's not.
David (31:40): I will just say that in the early days of PPC Associates, I think I gave everyone on the team a Myers Briggs test, probably including you. And they basically all came back exactly the same as my Myers Briggs profile, which was some combination of introvert. I think it was INTJ or something.
Mike (31:56): Yeah. I was an INTJ. I probably still am.
David (32:00): So inadvertently, I actually just hired people like me, but I actually had this idea, which I never did. And anyone's welcome to steal it, which was to give your account managers Myers Briggs tests, and then to give every new client contact a Myers Briggs test, and then match up account managers with clients based on the compatible Myers Briggs.
Mike (32:19): Absolutely. I think that's a great tip. We don't do necessarily Myers Briggs, but there's a lot of discussion about, Hey, this is a good client for Mike or this is not a good client for Mike or this is good for Steven or not. It's pretty clear. I think when you're maybe smaller, it's probably okay to have everybody be an INTJ, but as you keep growing and you get a bunch of different clients, you're like, I really need some diversity. I need some diversity in my account management team. And that's really how I think about diversity is not so much sexual orientation or gender or anything like that. That's axiomatic.
When we talk about diversity here, we're talking about diversity of mindset. Some people are more salesy than others. Some people have backgrounds of family was wealthy. Other people are more blue collar, and that's the type of diversity that we're trying to achieve heading into the 2022, 2023. And we'll see how that works out, but trying to just avoid the superficial diversity and then really have what I think is a deeper richer diversity which is that of personality and things like that.
David (33:23): That makes a lot of sense. I recall many years ago we had a new client and I put a guy on it who was pretty introverted, razor sharp guy, but just very introverted. And the client called me up two weeks later and said, you know what, we're just not gelling with this account manager. We don't know what to do. So I had this choice. I'm like, well, do I double down and say, this is the guy for you, or do I switch it? So I switched it to another guy who was much more extroverted, and we still have that client 10 years later.
Mike (33:48): And it's difficult as the founder to do that because you're sometimes making a switch versus what you thought was like the best. I think that's another thing that we're getting very comfortable with is just really not making any decisions based off of what leadership feels is the best thing to do, but really doing our absolute best to figure out what is good according to the client because there's a pretty decent chance it's not going to match what I would say.
And in your story, you just said, David, you're really lucky that that client even gave you that phone call because a of times, they'd be like, I don't like this person. We're just going to go back and find another vendor in-house or things like that. So you probably did a really good job of forming that relationship with him in the beginning, and then having them be comfortable to come with you.
David (34:33): I don't know how good a job I did of actually forming a relationship or not. But I think to your point, what's interesting is like, there are some clients who really believe in open and transparent communication and just come right out and say- I've been listening to this book on negotiation, and they're talking about how people have conflict avoidance. And they said like, there are some marriages where there's never a single fight and yet the couple still gets divorced because they just never bring anything to the table.
And so in this case, this client was just like, they were not afraid of conflict, not in a bad way, but they were just like, listen, this isn't working. What do you want to do about it? Another type of client could have trotted along for another two months and then just pulled the plug and said, yeah, it's not working. We're terminating, without even telling us the reason why. So I actually give the client more credit than anything else in that scenario.
Mike (35:16): Yeah. And I think that's something Borja, my business partner has really brought to the account management team and done a great job. And it's frustrating at first, but I'm like, Hey, Borja, we just set this new record for this client. And then his response is always the same. It's like, do they agree? And to me, as a math person, I'm like, what do you mean do they agree? It's numbers. I don't need their opinion. But he’s right. Like you absolutely need to know that they also feel that it's a record. They recognize it’s a record. It was the right KPIs.
And even if you go through an exercise of goal setting and whatnot, they're going to try to weasel their way out of it. They're going to try to change the KPIs to some degree on you. So what he's brought to our account management philosophy is really just having the client talk more and be open with their feelings and confirm that records indeed are records and things like that. And we really do our best to carry that over to the team members. And I would say it's been more successful with the clients and team members despite the fact that we feel like we have really great relation, I mean true friendships with all of our team members. They just are constantly nervous to give you this feedback as the founder of a company where they're happy, where they're unhappy.
So it definitely creates a fair number of meetings where we're just sitting here and not waiting for you to talk, you introverted person who doesn't want to talk. Like how can we make this better for you? So we're all getting better in that area, but it's really important part of our culture where we kind of as long as you're comfortable with it, like in whatever way you're comfortable, like we need your feedback as a team member. So some of that is the anonymous surveys and things like that, but it's also trying to really get it on the coffee breaks and the one-on-ones and stuff like that.
David (36:51): Someone had a really good observation. I think it was doing reference checks for people. They said, you asked someone like, well, what do you think of this person? Of course, their reference says, oh, they're great. They're wonderful. I love them. What a great person. And then you say, well, if there's just one thing that maybe they could do better, just one little thing, what would it be? And it just gets people to sort of, okay, well, you know what? They are terrible with talking to clients. You just have to prod them beyond just accepting the standard pat answer.
And then the other thing I'll just say, which I think is so interesting because you are literally a math teacher. So you're as much of a quant and a data driven guy as they come in the digital marketing world, but the truth is the majority of people who get into digital marketing are lovers of quant. You have to be, or else you're in the wrong profession. And people who listen to this podcast have heard me say this many times, but one of my adages is a great relationship and bad results is better than a bad relationship and great results.
We had a client a couple years ago where in the first six months, we increased their annual revenue by $50 million. And then the CEO called me up and said, yeah, we're bringing this in-house. I was like, what?
Mike (37:57): It makes sense to me, but there was either through the direct point of contact in that situation or somebody higher up there was just a disconnect on probably what they thought was important. I've had a couple clients, not many, but a couple who vehemently believe that there is no value in any work related to targeting like buying keywords or anything. None of it matters. All that matters is creative. And I'm like, haven't we just proven that with you. You have the math guy in your account. We grew the account 150% in the last six months, and they still just won't have it. They'll just say, Nope, creative is the thing that matters.
So I think there is a, I'm kind of talking myself into this here, but knowing your ICP is really important. I'm a quant person and I want to work with quant people. I think that that's important. But also as the business owner, it also shows me where Four15 is weak. We are weak on the creative side. And in the past, we said that was like a badge of courage. Like a lot of it is math, it's zeros and ones, all the stuff that you and I used to say, but some clients, 30% or whatever, really think it's on the creative side. So you know what I got to do as the founder of the company? I got to go hire that creative person because that's 30% of my business, and that's going to be difficult for me to evaluate that person because I don't have that background. But that's what we're going to be doing.
And talking about diversity of experiences, when I worked with you, we had these pods. I was the math person and Ron was another math person. You had Laura who was really like a people person, more like that. And then you had another woman who was a creative, more creative mindset, creative leadership. And there was some friction amongst these different pods. But you as the founder, it didn't matter because you had all of these different people available to you. And I'm sure to some degree, you were assigning out clients based off of who the leader of that was. I thought it was a great example of having good diversity and it helped out a lot.
David (39:51): I guess the flip side of that is you could just make the argument like this is what we're good at, and this is what we're going to build the business on. So you could also just say to that client that's the creative, I only care about creative. I don't care about metrics. Well, we're not a good fit for you then. Go work for someone on Madison Avenue who is going to win an award at Cannes for the creative and never show you a Google analytics screenshot in your relationship.
Mike (40:16): Absolutely. So check with me on six months and six months on that. I think it's a function of how confident is my ability to acquire new clients that meet my ICP perfectly. So I'm not super confident yet. I think we're just starting to put ourselves out there and really try scaling. So we're kind of flexing a little bit on the ICP by bringing in somebody who's more creative oriented, but could be a year from now. We say it didn't work out. Not in our DNA at all. We just got to get better at the sales and acquisition side. So we'll see.
Again, we've never had a problem with sales and bringing on new clients. It's always been a shortage of employees. So this is new for us. We're going to give it a try and see how it goes this year, basically.
David (40:55): On the sales front, most of your business is word of mouth and referrals or something else?
Mike (41:01): I'd say it's 100%. I don't even know what other categories. We're not doing any thought leadership. I haven't been on a podcast for a while.
David (41:11): This podcast is going to change everything.
Mike (41:13): For sure. I expect at least what 10 clients, you said?
David (41:17): A day for the next year.
Mike (41:19): So yeah, we haven't run any ads. We haven't been to conferences. It's just been a 100% word of mouth and referrals. Now, there is like first circle referral, Hey, I've known you for a long time, David. Let’s you and I work together. And then there's the people that you kind of send over to me and then this person sends over. So I don't know them yet, but there's kind of a commonality there, and that's pretty obvious, but we do find absolutely there's a different level of intensity with the pitch and rigor that we need to approach the folks that we don’t know as well. I’d still say that’s it basically, a referral.
David (41:52): I find that about 95% plus of new agencies and frankly really almost all agencies up to a certain scale get all of their business from word to mouth and referrals. And I used to brag to people. I used to say, well, I've grown my business 100% a year, and I've never hired a single person in marketing or I've never done any advertising. And I used to think I must be doing something so amazing. Look how great I am, but it turns out that that's pretty much the way every agency scales. And until you get to a certain size when you can show up an adage or something, marketing doesn't really matter. So I'm not surprised to hear that.
Mike (42:27): I definitely agree with you. I just don't know what your perspective on when does that say marketing doesn't matter. When does that change? I look at your site and your services. It's head and shoulders above mine. I'm pretty confident, with all due respect, that the services are equal of quality or things like that, but you definitely have a pizzazz or optics that we don't have. So at what point do we change that?
And I've stopped asking myself that question. I just said, I don't care. We're just going to go into the optics side of it, and maybe it will be a waste of time and effort, but it's just time to have a site and all of the marketing collateral and have somebody on payroll that is in charge of marketing even if it's we don't give any feedback. So that's my perspective on it.
David (43:12): I really like the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And he talks about this notion of driving through the countryside. The first time you see a cow, you're like, oh cool, it's a cow. And then like the 10th time you see a cow, you're like, oh, another cow. And the only thing to get your attention after that would be a purple cow, which you've never seen before.
I think so much marketing that agencies do is the cow and not the purple cow. It's like, here are 10 great banner ads that we've seen. And it's like, yeah, I've seen this post a thousand times. And so the agencies that really stand out, and I give PPC Associates/3Q some credit for this is when you put out content that no one has ever seen before. So we put out like the alpha beta account structure guide, and people are like, whoa, this is actually valuable. I think that's the one way that agencies can their business, if they actually try to create something that is so amazing that people are signing up to read it.
Mike (44:02): And I think from my perspective, what you did then was very progressive. We would make all of this content, and we would put our hearts and souls into it, and we would document. And they're just like, I publish it, give it away for free. I’m like what, are you crazy? Other people are talking about secret sauce and all this stuff, and you are just very much like let's be transparent. Who cares? It was the David Rodnitzky swagger that not a lot of other people just [crosstalk] because you have great hair. That's why.
David (44:28): More stupidity or stupidity. Yeah. I love it when someone comes to and says, we have a proprietary algorithm. I'm like all right, show me the algorithm. Seriously, I'm not going to build it myself if you let me sit down for an hour and look at it. Well, it's a secret. It's like, there's no proprietary algorithm. Come on.
Mike (44:43): It's all ridiculous. I think you took, at least at that time and probably now, a lot of effort in it. You would put all of your team members and all of your clients on the website. It was just like, don't care if it looks good or bad, this individual month. That's what it's going to be. It was just radical transparency. And I'm talking about something 14 years ago, David. I still feel like there's a lot room for transparency as an agency. I would never sell somebody off of an agency service because I think my service is better than an in-house service.
If it wasn't, I'd want to change it, but I definitely think there should be an open and honest and transparent conversation about the pros and cons of it and that stuff. It’s also so much easier to just be open, honest, transparent, because you don’t have to remember what you said or you didn't say.
So that would be a word of advice that I feel like I learned from you. That was my interpretation, some of the stuff you did, and I think it's still very true today. It's just radical transparency, and that's the only option that you can have to be successful.
David (45:47): Yeah. I always liked putting team members on this site and it got a little bit unwielding at some point when you get to a certain scale. And of course the other downside is that it basically gives recruiters a company directory of who they want to recruit.
Mike (45:58): Fair enough. I think there's a time in the place for everything, but I just love that the mentality of the transparency. That's the default rather than the opposite, being exceptional.
David (46:10): I will say having done a lot of these podcasts, most great performance agencies, people that I talk to on this, they are transparent and they really care about client results. And so there are some challenges, especially when you get to some of these small business agencies where it's a boiler room, and there's some challenges at the very large size where the agency has to hit maybe a quarterly profit number, and they just bill people like crazy. But in the middle where both of us are, I think most agencies actually genuinely care and they genuinely want to provide great results for clients, which is encouraging.
Mike (46:42): Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree. And I know you surround yourself with agencies like that. So it makes sense to me that that's how most of them are. I think that's absolutely the path. It's been pretty much proven as far as my understanding of the landscape goes that it's better to do it that way.
David (46:57): I think so. You mentioned in-housing. I just want to get your take on it. What do you think about in housing?
Mike (47:02): We love all our clients. Honestly, we don't talk about them negatively or anything, but I feel like my service is better than an in-house service. Again, if I didn't feel that way, how can I have any level of confidence on what we're pitching? So I think a lot of the things about in-house are true now as they have been often, maybe always, you can tell me more, but they get caught up in a lot of meetings. There's a lot of red tape. There's a lot of politicking, there's lack of access to real training, real resources. There's a lot of I don't know what I don't know. If you're the one SEM person who's working in-house, how are you going to learn? How are you going to upskill? You're going to have to be completely dependent on yourself, most likely your boss or your boss's boss doesn't know anything about SEM.
So it's just like a difficult environment. You end up talking to Google reps or something to try to upskill or reading some of these blogs which you write and I write, and there's truth to the blogs, but they're not the whole story. There's a lot more.
I think the word of the day is probably hybrid. To be honest, I think the best possible solution is some sort of hybrid solution between in-house and agency. And that really just is the typical in-house agency relationship. We always have a point of contact that's in-house who’s in charge of making sure that we're working hard and staying up. So that is a hybrid solution.
You've got an in-house representative and you've got an agency representative or representatives and they're working together for the best possible outcome. The thing I always hear about what's the downside of agency, I think it's maybe a little bit more expensive, but Series A and beyond, like they don't really care usually about 5 grand one way or the other or even 10 or 15 or 20 grand. It’s not about that.
I think the biggest issue is just lack of transparency. Is the agency working on this, which it's a very interesting landscape because now every business owner's going to say the same thing about every team member they have. What's my team member doing, and they're getting used to not knowing that. So I think that's a really positive trend for agencies is this whole remote shift because agencies are remote relative to their clients.
So I feel really optimistic about agencies continuing to win market share relative to the in-house solution. And then we just have to do a good job or a better job of making sure that our clients know, yeah, we're really working on your stuff. And I think we prove that every day through the weekly meetings. I have almost never had a client present to me. Every single week, we have to present to them. We have to bring new things to the table. We have to prove our worth.
I love hiring, although I don't do it as much as I can because of transparency. I love hiring agencies. They work super hard to retain my business, and it's very clear, versus the team members we have. They also work super hard, but there's a lot of extra things that we have to deal with our in-house team, their mental health, their wellbeing, they need time off, all this sort of stuff, which we do it happily. But the point here is that agencies are never going to atrophy. They're always fighting for their lives. And that's a great thing about agencies.
David (50:08): I had never thought about that concept of maybe every couple of weeks, the client should present to the agency on a weekly call. Here's what we did this week to support you. You asked us to get this tracking code installed. We got it installed. And we sent this report to the VP of Marketing to make sure that she saw what you were doing and here's her response. And here's what we're going to do to follow up on it. That would be amazing.
Mike (50:29): It's just an equitable relationship. And isn't that what we all claim to want to have is equitable relationships. David, if you and I have a one-on-one, and I'm your employee, you better give me some content sometimes. And I better give you some content sometimes. And that's the same relationship that I think most in-house people feel of their agency. Like I'm their manager, I'm their boss, but I've never had a manager or boss that presented to me as infrequently as a client. It almost never happens.
David (50:57): I'm going to bring that back to my team.
Mike (50:59): Think about the in-house SEM manager and they are going to their weekly one-on-one. Are they bringing a presentation? Probably not. They’re probably just showing up. They might have some notes, but it's such a lower intensity when you're in-house versus agency versus agency and in-house relationships.
David (51:16): Yeah, absolutely. Well, I always say that if you're in-house, you learn a ton about the industry and the business. So if you're selling wooden shoes, you know that, whatever, July is Dutch festival month where you're going to sell a lot of wooden shoes, and you may not know that as an agency. But as an agency, you know so much about the channels because you're looking at so many different accounts, you'll know that, oh, in July overall our CPC declines by 20% because people are at the beach. So therefore we should plan ahead and we should increase the budget, whatever. So that's where the hybrid approach can really be valuable.
Mike (51:48): Yeah. Perfect. I think that's absolutely the role of our in-house counterpart is to be a subject matter expert. I sometimes say particularly for enterprise B2B, I'm just like, I'm not going to be a subject matter expert on this thing. It's not worth our time. You already are. So let's work together on it. So I think that's a really important role of the in-house point of contact. I think a really important role of the in-house point of contact, too, is understanding and navigating through those politics.
So agencies like yourself, you might be doing landing page CRO, SEO, SEM, you're pretty much the be all end all, but for Four15, we're like 40, 50% of the puzzle at max. So if we need a new landing page or something like that, most of the time, Four15 isn't responsible for that. So we're telling our client counterpart like, look, you're going to have to get this for us. You're going to have to navigate your internal red tape and we need this to get the job done.
So there's good in-house points of contact and then there's bad ones. I'd say the good ones are the ones who can get you what you need as the agency. They're good at navigating the politics. And thirdly, they're making an effort to give you the critical updates on the business, the happenings. They're not just saying, Hey, Four15’s meeting is at 3:00 p.m. At 2:58, I'm going to start thinking about it. And then at 3:00 p.m., the meeting's going to go. They do put some prep work in at least. And that's the ideal client we have. And honestly, I usually find those points of contact are also extremely empathetic. So that's our most successful relationship I'd say.
David (53:16): Yeah, I agree. It's a partnership. What are you worried about? Or what are you excited about in future of agencies?
Mike (53:21): I think what I'm excited about I've already answered. It's just people are more open to remote. So I think that includes more open to agency because they don't feel like, Hey, I have to monitor all my team member 24/7, 365. You pretty much got to get used to remote employees as a founder of an e-commerce company or what have you.
I think what worries me about agencies is the same thing that's been worrying me for a long time is a general overarching narrative. Putting people in buckets, all agencies are like this, or all people are like this. That's just very toxic conversation to have versus evaluating individual agencies and people for who they are. So that's kind of what would worry me most about agencies is there's just general halo of negativity. So most people aren't open to it. I feel like they have to go in-house or the goal is always to go in-house.
I don't think that that's the case at all. And again, we do have an in-house development team, but for big projects, I will never have an in-house development team. I use other agencies for that because that is their DNA. That's what they're great at. They're used to it. They're always pushing the narrative. I'm not capable of pushing the narrative for a really complicated development project. So I think an agency fits in amazingly well. And if somebody quits the next week, I got somebody else, which is great. I never have to worry about it. Don't have to worry about anything, just pay the bill. It's pretty great to work with a good agency basically.
David (54:46): There was a public opinion poll that I saw a couple years ago that ranked agencies, law firms, and I think politicians as the three parts of society. And I'm just kind of scratching my head to try to figure out why that's the case. Because as I said, I've talked to a bunch of people on this podcast, and to a fault, every single person gets into the agency world because they want to help people, whether that's clients or team members. And frankly, you would have to be a major masochist to get into this space and not like helping people. How is that even possible? I could see how you might be a litigator and take people and just want to win, win, win. Then that would make people dislike you. But I don't understand why agencies have such a bad rap.
Mike (55:29): I think it's just lack of transparency. And again, that reputation was built pre-COVID where most people were working in office. And as a founder of that e-commerce company, I can just look and I can see my team and they're working, and I'm therefore more empathetic. I can't see what the agency's doing. So we put cameras around us. We livestream it to our clients, and that's our answer. No. [laughs] I think this is my theory on it, and we need to come up with ways to ease that.
I think you probably had some rules, and I could be misremembering, but you were like, Hey, you're not going to join the client's Slack. That's ridiculous. But to me, an in-house person, they have to be on Slack so we have to be on Slack. We use your Basecamp, we use your Jira. Our goal is to take all of the potential complaints that you have about agencies, and I just don't want to deal with them. So what's the list, client. Okay. Here's these seven things. Those seven things are solved. Can we start the relationship now?
So we're trying to be really competitive with the in-house team and transparency, accessibility, operations, things like that. It is difficult. And the downside is our team can very quickly be overwhelmed by that. So we have to make sure that that's not the case and we're ahead of hiring and stuff like that. So it's easier said than done.
David (56:45): So my last question is what advice would you give to someone who is starting an agency today?
Mike (56:50): I think definitely be true to yourself. I think that that sounds silly, but the market is very large. A lot of people are going to really like it, and you're going to be able to retain clients for a long time, and honestly that's not a sign of you being successful. That's absolutely what you should be doing, being true to yourself, finding clients, keeping them for a very long time. I would say, what else? Definitely try to build up a team, if that's your ambition, as soon as you can. Start investing in your own business as soon as you can, as soon as you're comfortable. You've got to pay for your house and your food and everything like that. But I would say be aggressive in building out your team members.
Again, there's, I don't know, thousands of agencies that are as big, if not bigger than Four15, and we live amazing lives, but we would've never been able to do that unless we were willing to hire. And there's other solutions, too. Particularly with everything going in remote, how remote is remote? Like does it make sense now to hire somebody in the Philippines versus before you were a little bit more afraid about optics and things like that? Does it make sense to outsource to Idaho as I think you like to say versus San Francisco, Ohio, whatever it is.
I think those are the two things, and they're all really high level. I also just believe in experiencing it and being open-minded and being very self-critical and just growing your business for the way that's best for you. So I’m generally being super self-aware. I think it’s incredibly important for an agency owner. I think if you're making an iPhone or something, it's probably better to be a super stubborn founder. But as an agency owner, I think you have to be very selfless and put your own feelings aside a lot more commonly.
David (58:31): I don't think Steve jobs would have lasted as an agency owner, just to be clear. Having to listen to other people all day long, I think he would have gone crazy.
Mike (58:38): Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
David (58:40): Well, Mike, this is great. I appreciate you taking the time, a really interesting conversation, and it was good to talk about the yesteryear, early days of both of our careers, and I'm sad for the students that you're not a math teacher anymore, but I'm glad for you that you found your calling.
Mike (58:55): Yeah. I'm really happy with how it worked out and feel very grateful just be in this industry. And I think that's another thing that I want to do with Four15 is just introduce more people to this industry. It's a great place to be.
David (59:06): Pay it forward. All right. Thanks, Mike.
Mike (59:08): Thank you.
David (59:11): A new episode of Agentic Shift drops every Wednesday. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or visit agenticshift.com to see the latest episode.