Carl Smith 1:59
Everybody did, don’t worry about it.
John Corcoran 2:00
It’s not around anymore. Anyways, he ran it for 12 years, constantly experimenting with different models of management and team structure. And towards the end of the run, he attended his first Bureau of Digital event, and fell madly in love with the concept of building a community in the web industry. So much so that a few years later, he closed that agency that he had to take over the Bureau in 2016. And he spends every day now connecting with digital professionals to give them the support that they need. So we’ll talk about what your digital is now. And before we get into that this episode is brought to you by Rise25 Media where we help businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. We specialize in b2b businesses with a high client lifetime value. To learn more go to rise25media.com, or you can also email us at [email protected].
All right, Carl, I already like you already based on how much cool stuff you have in your background, behind you and your office here. And because we also connected over a mutual love for where I live, which is Marin County, and you’ve got some friends in the area. But I want to ask you about whether you ran a digital agency, and now you run a community for people in the digital world. And I want people to understand or listen to this, those are two very different things, holy crap, building and maintaining a community is a hard thing, even if it’s relatively similar to what you did before. But let’s start with the digital digital agency. And you say that you experiment a lot with different management and ways of running. So what were some of the highs and lows of that experience?
Carl Smith 3:38
Well, I think the challenge was, I never wanted to be in charge of anything. And I didn’t, it wasn’t out of fear. It wasn’t even out of imposter syndrome. It was just, I came from 14 years in advertising. And I saw the people who were in charge of getting compensated really, really well. And I ended up being one of them. And then I saw the people who were creating all of the great quality work not getting compensated as well. And so what we wanted to do when we first started out was find a way to have time equity, and find a way for everyone to get compensated the same. In fact, some people call this the People’s Republic of engine, the way that we were trying to run it. And it didn’t work. It didn’t work. Let’s say the law didn’t work because I had one business partner who could create five amazing things in one day. I had one business partner who needed five days to create one amazing thing. And it’s just we’re created equal. But then as we grow up and all these things happen, we get different skill sets, some are marketable, some are not. So that was really challenging.
John Corcoran 4:44
Was there kind of hard feelings amongst different team members kind of looking at one another and thinking like I’m making the same amount as you are, but you’re taking too long or you know what I create is better than you.
Carl Smith 4:56
Not really, you know, that was the thing we were so tight. We’re you know, we did the thing that a lot of people do, we started a company with four friends that were really good friends. Obviously, there’s a lot of challenges with that when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion when you start just hiring your friends and people that, you know, as you get bigger, you end up being a whole bunch of white guys, which we did have that challenge for a while. I’m still a white guy, but we managed to, you know, right, diversify out. But what did happen, I would say is, once we got a new person in, we had a lot of rules that were really kind of silly, but I really stand by them. We had one we call the driver’s license rule, if you expose the company to any type of detriment. You basically got a strike. And if you ended up doing that three times in a 12 month period, you were gone. Right? So if you expose the company to a liability or anything like that, and we’d lost one of our original partners in the first six months, and he knew it, he came in, he was like, you know, I had it right in my hands. And I just blew it. And what were the sorts of things that rose to a level of what do you mean by that by detriment?
Carl Smith 6:07
So for example, we had a huge pitch with a client. I mean, figure we were four people. This client when we came out of the gate, while they say it was Chase, right? So I mean, what the hell, what are they gonna do to fire me now? So anyway, he had, he was working on a new business presentation that was going to be this usability research we’re gonna do is a few $100,000. And he screwed it up. He didn’t get it done. And so that morning, I had the time. Yeah, I had to go tap dance. So basically, I tried to use the presentation. It wasn’t usable, hadn’t improved. And so I just went in, and basically freestyled for about 40 minutes, I knew the content. I just didn’t have anything supporting. And when I got back, he just, he was like, I know. We also had, basically, we said that anyone who we hired, in two years, they would either be offered ownership or they would be fired. Because if you’re there for two years, yeah, you’re either really valuable or not. And the model was that we were all supposed to be equal. So again, it fell apart. And I would say that’s what I would say one of the lowlights for me was that, after all of the things I learned in advertising, I read that the company was a really well run company. And I thought I knew what I was doing. And I just realized that this utopian dream wasn’t really going to happen. And then my partners wanted out. So we figured all that out. And then I really kind of started over with a new team. And that got to the second model, which was flat ish. I called it lumpy. But the reality of that model was, the team got to choose the work. So we were able to invert it so that clients had to pitch us. And we had to accept if we felt we were the right fit for them or not the right team for them. Wow, that was a lot of fun.
John Corcoran 8:07
And that only works. Of course, if you have enough demand, you have enough client incoming inquiries, clients working for you, which I assume you did, and in order for that to work. Yeah, definitely.
Carl Smith 8:17
And I’ll say the big thing is, do you know who Frank is? I don’t think so. Say Frank. So z was like, really popular. blogger. Back when blog was still a word that people used. And he pulled me aside, at one at one point, because he had some issues with the way I was doing stuff, and I would consider as a friend, but he’s a very high strung friend. Anyway, I’d watched this movie called The Dallas Steve. And it’s all about how to use the tenets of Taoism to get what you want. So one of the things is that humans retreat, and humans chase things that retreat from them, right. So that’s a great example if your dog gets out of the backyard, and you go to get the dog, if you chase the dog, the dog is going to run away. But if you look at the dog, and look stupid, and run away from the dog, it’s going to chase you, it can’t help itself and before it knows that it’s back in the backyard, and you close the gate, and everything’s done. I gotta try
John Corcoran 9:17
that with my kids, because they’re getting out all the time, probably would work,
Carl Smith 9:21
they will chase you. But the same thing with clients, if they ask you to pitch on something, and then you say, hey, look, I really appreciate that. That’s not the way we do it. Because what would happen is, let’s say that we go for it, and you say yes. And then I have to tell somebody, this is a project you’re going to work on. And then maybe they’re like, I’ve already got three projects, or I don’t like that project. So what we’re gonna ask is for you to tell us in just a few paragraphs, why you want us to be the team you work with. And then I’ll share that with the team. And if everybody gets excited about it, I’ll come back to you and we can talk about how to move forward. Well, when you pull back a little bit with the exception of Microsoft
Carl Smith 10:02
was like, we’re not playing. But everybody else, even Facebook, right? Like we got some really great big name clients, Epic Games who wanted to win. They didn’t want to get told no. And that was amazing. We grew extremely fast.
John Corcoran 10:21
Wait, wow. Wow. So that model, it seems like it works. So what did you lose a passion? Did you lose love for it at some point?
Carl Smith 10:31
And now I’m sorry, you just us. So we branded the model. We did a model of marketing. Right? So it’s like it was called the jellyfish model. And it was called the jellyfish model, because and this was Rachel gratitudes, one of the people on our team, a really, really smart businesswoman in Vancouver. She said, well call it she said, We’re like jellyfish. She goes, we’re transparent. We tell everybody everything. I mean, we had open books, if
John Corcoran 10:57
you get too close, we’re gonna sting. You know, the metaphor only goes so far, I guess.
Carl Smith 11:01
No, no, actually, though. If it did get too disruptive, like we would just say, okay, we’re out. So that is kind of a sting, right? Yeah. They’re totally adaptable. They live in the coldest oceans, they live in the warmest waters. They’ve been on the planet forever. And the thing that’s the best about him though, is jellyfish. Let people know this, they show up to clean up the ocean. Like if there’s a whole lot of bacteria, there’s a whole lot of plankton, there’s a whole lot of something growing that shouldn’t be there, jellyfish will grow to the size of the job. And as soon as they’re done cleaning it up, and they go away. Now they die. We didn’t want that, right, but they just kind of went away. And so we were like, okay, so we need to be able to grow to the size of a project, and then retract back so that we’re never carrying a ton of overhead. So it’s basically we had three tiers. It was the core team, which were the engineers, a secondary layer, which was the fringe engineers. And then the third layer, which was what we call the army of awesome. And those were people we hadn’t worked with, but we knew who they were. So they were kind of our talent pipeline. But what ended up happening was, I took nine months off. So it was working so well. And during that time, I actually went to my first bureau event. So this is kind of an interesting dovetail here. But the one thing that wasn’t accounted for was when you tell people no more than you tell people. Yes. And eventually, people say you’re hard to work with. Right? People don’t like that. We had a K through 12, here in Jacksonville called the bowl school. And it’s one of the most prestigious schools. What I think it was maybe three Olympics ago, they finished 17th. As a country, if you looked at the students who had gone through the bowls, school, and swimming and track and all these different things, right? We got hired by them to make them seem friendlier. And it was the same thing that happened to us that they were going through and it said, Look, how many people do you accept? And they will accept roughly 27% of applicants. And I was like, Alright, for every 10 people that apply seven of them hate you. I can make you look like a summer camp and bright colors and friendly people hanging by the river. But that’s not going to make them not hate you. So if what you’re worried about is that, that you’re not friendly, or, you know, you, you don’t need to worry about that you’ve got every governor for that for the history of the state since their kids here. It’s like people went in the difference with us as nobody kept their hand on new business, which it should have been my role. So sorry, I didn’t fall out of love with it. As much as I fell in love with freedom, man, I was like, I was learning to cook and I was running. And I was doing all these things. So truly what happened was we just didn’t keep putting gas in the tank until it got to a point that they got small. And then we had one client that was way too big. So it’s that historical, you know, don’t have just one major client.
John Corcoran 14:03
That’s a problem too. Right? Right. Yeah. So you attended a Bureau of Digital event and explained how you became captivated and decided, Okay, I want to be a part of this.
Carl Smith 14:15
Yeah. So it happened in 2012. And I had gotten an email from these two guys both named Greg, Greg hoy, and Greg story. They each ran a company called Happy Cog, which were actually independently owned. The founder of Hey guys
John Corcoran 14:32
named Greg, they both have the same company independently. And
Carl Smith 14:36
that’s weird. Jeffrey Zeldman, founded Happy Cog. And Jeffrey’s element is considered the father of web standards. Happy Cog created a lot of the things about the way the web works today. responsive web design with Ethan Marcotte was developed at Happy Cog. The concept of digital project management would happen with Happy Cog web standards. So all of these types of things. Well, Jeffrey, kind of late. Since the name to both of them, and they each had a footprint, they decided to get together and join because it was very confusing. Right when they had like a Ben and Jerry’s was a client of theirs. And Ben and Jerry’s didn’t understand who this Austin shop was called Happy Cog. And the shop in Philly, called Happy Cog. And so they decided to join forces. And as a result, they realized that neither of them really understood business. And one had been a musician and the other had been a really good artist. And they decided to invite people to a meeting in Portland, Oregon at the Kennedy School, people who they thought were doing great things online that seemed to understand business and digital web, right, like building the web. So I got an email from them, asking me if I would come out and meet with 25 other owners, and talk about what was going on. And they were the principal. I mean, it was like getting called to the principal’s office when I had books that reference them on the shelf. And so I kind of replied back, why me? And like, I didn’t know any of the other people they were inviting. They didn’t share that. And they replied back that they’ve been reading about our business model. We had like a two page spread in dotnet magazine, you know, things. And they wrote and they said, We want to know if you’re smart, or you’re foolish yet. And I replied, I would like to know this as well. I’ll be there I’ll see in Portland. So that was the first bureau event, it wasn’t called the Bureau. But 25 people got together. Some really, in our world, some really influential people, Christina Halverson, who ran brain traffic out of Minnesota, out of Minneapolis, she coined the term content strategy. So like that, that’s her, her area of expertise. Kelly gotoh, who had been one of the originators of web processes and how that works. So I’m sitting there like, holy shit, you know, it’s these people know what they’re doing. And then you find out that somebody is on the verge of bankruptcy. Somebody else just had a major layoff and you’re like, oh, wow, I’m actually okay. I’m like, you know, yeah, I’m not charging enough. I found that out. And everybody else was having retention issues. And I evidently was running a summer camp because nobody wanted to leave. So you find these things out, but um, but people who you barely knew like my friend Gabe Levine, who’s there and Morin. He was there and he made a video. Are we allowed to cuss?
John Corcoran 17:34
Sorry, or what the heck?
Carl Smith 17:36
So he’s, there’s a video on YouTube called fuck you pay me? Okay. Okay. And this was a video by Mike Montero and Gabe Levine that was all about how Christ
John Corcoran 17:45
seen this video actually.
Carl Smith 17:47
Yeah, yeah. So okay, who is the lawyer my friend I was telling you about, huh? And Gabe looked at me in this. Basically this horseshoe type table setup in this room and he goes, You keep using the term perma Lancer. He goes, “ Do you know what the IRS will do to you? If they find out about this? And I’m like, no. And he goes, I’ll buy you a beer later. So we’re having a beer. And he’s turned sideways, not looking at me. And I was like, Oh my god, do you want plausible deniability? Is that what’s happening here? Just to answer some questions. So the thing was at the beginning of that, we were all kind of nervous. And at the end, we didn’t want it to be over. And like I said, some of my best friends today are from that first meeting, that first gathering in 2012. So yeah, it um, it ended up being that we were going to get together a year later, we made it seven months, and we decided to get together and Palm Springs, and the Bureau just grew from there.
John Corcoran 18:47
Yeah. And so at what point did you approach the everyone about you taking it over?
Carl Smith 18:55
Well, so that that was an interesting origin story as well. I am, like I said, I’d taken nine months off, I was probably about six months into the nine months off at this point.
John Corcoran 19:06
Yeah. And what was motivated that, by the way, just needed a break or what?
Carl Smith 19:09
Well, what actually motivated it was, we had a house fire. So we had a house fire, and for about two weeks, I could not focus on the company. And it was the best two weeks in the history of the company. So I realized I was the problem. Everybody was coming to me, nobody would make decisions. And originally it was like, I just had this theory or irrelevant strategy, that if I could make myself irrelevant, and everybody else stand up, then we can have a self sustaining organization. And I could go off and do other things. So that was truly how that happened.
John Corcoran 19:50
And then once we got a great way to sell it to the team, by the way, okay, here’s what’s gonna happen, guys. I’m gonna take nine months off. The reason is you’re going to do better without me go
Carl Smith 20:00
So here’s what you do. It was a three point, it was a three point approach to everything a three step approach. If somebody comes to me, hey, we’ve got this problem with the client. They’re upset about the invoice. So what should we do? And I would say, I will, you’re pretty close to this, how do you think we should handle it? Well, honestly, you know, we had a few meetings we shouldn’t have, there were a few things we committed to we didn’t know how to do, I feel like we should give them maybe like a 10% break. But then there’s other stuff that they added. So I would say we should put all that together and just sit down and meet with them. Alright, we’ll put that together, sit down and meet with them, come back and tell me how it went. And we can see what we do from here. In the past, I would have jumped in. But now what I’m doing is just asking what they think we should do, and telling them to do it, and then telling them to come back to me. And within a couple of months, they stopped coming back. And they started actually just doing it themselves. And I think I was talking to a friend about it. You know, you think about the security of a big oak tree, and how it just supports everything and all this. But as soon as it’s gone in the sunlight comes in. It’s like everything else can grow. And I think that was the challenge. I thought that I was doing everyone that’s great service because I was there and I was going to handle these things. The reality was, I was screwing everything up. Because not just the bottleneck. But one way of thinking,
John Corcoran 21:19
right, I had no diversity of thought and the way that things were being handled. So how did you then step back? without, you know, having it devolve into chaos? Did you put certain other things in there? Or did it evolve into chaos?
Carl Smith 21:37
So it went well, it got back to this concept of rules, right, that there would be rules to guide everything. And a lot of transparency and a lot of context. When people get transparency without context. That’s total chaos. So if you tell somebody we’ve got $300,000 in the bank, they’re like, we’re going to Vegas, right? But if you say we have one and a half payrolls in the bank, or we have one month, one month of expenses in the bank, and it’s the same number, right? And suddenly that context changes they made, you know, if they are 300,000, they’re like, why are we taking this frickin restaurant? It’s a mom and pop restaurant, why are we doing this work? versus Yeah, give me all those you got. Right, because and I used to tell him this all the time, the only thing people hate worse than unchallenging work, is not getting paid. So, so occasionally, we’re gonna have to front load with some of this work that feels a little meticulous, just so that we can have the revenue to go get the clients that we want.
John Corcoran 22:41
So on the topic of transparency, this is an interesting one for a lot of different agency owners, company owners, how transparent Are you with your team? Are you an advocate of transparency with context?
Carl Smith 22:56
Yeah, I mean, all the way down to salary. I mean,
John Corcoran 22:58
that was founded, sharing whatever else is, salaries are?
Carl Smith 23:01
Yeah, we had, we had a salary band for each discipline that basically showed within $5,000, what everybody was making. Wow. But what was amazing was when somebody new came on, I was able to say, okay, so you’re a front end developer, you’ve got this amount of experience, you’re in this focus area that we want, everybody in this space is making about 75 to $80,000 a year. So if that’s enough for you, then we can find a way to work you in. And at that point, the team that they were going to work with, they knew both what they were making with the content strategists and what the project manager was making. And that was all based on what the market was saying was the relevant rates, it got difficult when you go to a distributed team, and we became distributed right around 2009. Because then you’ve got a cost of living. Yeah, we had somebody moved from Jacksonville, which is like a point seven, eight, you know, so we’re, like, 20%, cheaper than most of the country or when that and they moved out to Seattle? What do you get? Right, you get pumped? Right, right. Don’t right. It’s like and you don’t and that’s why you don’t even negotiate based on point of origin.
John Corcoran 24:16
Yeah, or vice versa. So I’ve got a couple of relatives who work for some big tech companies that you’ve heard of here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they were saying that their company implemented a new policy where if anyone moves out of the bay area to a less expensive part of the country, they don’t get to keep their same salary. It actually does. It bumps down to what’s appropriate for that area.
Carl Smith 24:39
We’ll see and that becomes the challenge and I think a lot of a lot of companies now that have gone remote. I’ve heard that maybe 25% will go back and this is just based on bureau research, not anything outside 25% of our shops will go back and completely located 50% are looking at a hybrid model of located distributed and then 25% roughly staying distributed. So yeah, it’s gonna be interesting. When those things start to happen. We’ve got a workshop coming up next year on it just on everything about remote people operations. Yeah, yeah.
John Corcoran 25:15
I’m sure that’s a big topic of discussion. All right. So I think we kind of glazed over the part about how you took over Bureau of Digital.
Carl Smith 25:22
so after six months, I was a little bored. And you probably know a lot of people like this. You’ve got people who are disruptors. And then people who are builders, and I, my brain was just going and I just had to try something. So I thought, Okay, I know a whole lot of people who are doing this kind of work, we’re getting a bunch of leads that we can’t use, I know a lot of people are getting leads they can’t use. So I’m just going to come up with the lead distribution network. And I’m just going to find a way to shop that I truly trust, and get the work over there. And then we’ll find a way for the house to take 10% or something, you know, do a little Vegas action there. So I was looking at that. And I got a call from the Greggs and they asked for you to do a video call. And so they said, Hey, we heard you doing the lead distribution network. I was like, yeah, it’s gonna be fine. I go, yeah, we’re gonna do it. Awesome. Have fun. And are they good? No, we, we don’t want you to do one. I was like, Oh, you know, I’ll tell you what I tell my kids. It’s nice to want stuff. But why? Why wouldn’t I want to do it? And why don’t you just do it over here? Why don’t you come be a partner and, and we’ll work on everything together. And that, and it was great. I mean, we had a great relationship. So we could be a little snarky, and nobody got upset. But yes, then I joined. I started bringing and at the time, everything was in Basecamp. And Jason Fried is actually part of the community. He’s been to some of the events. Anytime I mentioned Slack, I know I’d probably even like it here, he’s got something set up, I’ll get an email, what about Basecamp. So we were going to go ahead and start looking at new events, we were thinking about being the AI GA, or digital, we had all these different ideas. But community was the thing that really started resonating for me because it was keeping in touch with everybody and finding a way to do that. So that it wasn’t just once every two months, five months, nine months, that’s not the way that problems work. Like we wanted somebody to be there all the time. And so, that kind of became my passion. While they were looking at you know, education was part of it. Getting a concept of documentation that everybody could use, you know, like standardizing things. And then for me, it was about the community side over the course of about two years, both of them went on to do something else. And I took care of the baby. So I took over the business. Yeah, Greg story went on to hire close to 2000 designers at IBM, if you ever heard that story that when they decided to become designer focused, he did that. And then Greg Hoy went back and built Happy Cog backup, and then sold it. So, that was what he decided he wanted to do. So yeah, it was great. Those are those guys a ton.
John Corcoran 28:12
Take me to modern day. So we’re recording this in November of 2020. We’re about eight, nine months, whatever, into this global pandemic. And oh, you know, you know that the Bureau of Digital did a lot of events. So what was life like heading into the pandemic? And how did it affect you?
Carl Smith 28:33
heading into the pandemic, we were poised for our best year ever. I’m sure a lot of people have played that card. But damn it, it is true. John, we were. So I had actually taken out a half million dollar loan with some good friends at a very nice bank. And we had a videographer who was coming to the events, we were going to finally formalize stuff and get out there. Membership has been something we’ve done for a few years, and we were really gonna go hard on it this time and get it going. And things were selling and people were excited and
John Corcoran 29:12
our membership is the dues paying members is what paid the bill. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Okay.
Carl Smith 29:18
So, anyway, we went through February, we had our big event in New Orleans, which is owner summit, where we have a couple 100 owners of digital shops get together. We just had an amazing tour, you know, we do all these things. Everybody’s so happy, everything’s great. You didn’t notice at the beginning of Mardi Gras, people seem to use people who have some sort of crud going around. And then in March, we had our biz dev camp. And at the end, I started getting questions from people about well, where are people coming in from? Okay, and I had somebody who didn’t want to attend because some people were coming in from Seattle. So you start to realize, okay, this real thing is going to happen. The week after that. event, our revenue literally dropped 95%. Wow, we used to have, like a good week would be $30,000 in sales. We had great weeks that were more than that some weeks that were a little bit less, but it literally dropped down to nothing. And Vince started to go backwards as people asked for refunds. And he had $114,000, in deposits with hotels and other venues. That was just sitting there. And we needed that money so that we could get the refunds back because you’ve ever been in the event space. Yeah, I have always been stealing from the future. Yeah. It’s Indiana Jones and that boulder chasing you is trying, and the only way you can go faster is to sell the future. So yes, so that just everything just froze.
John Corcoran 30:56
Well, and. And so so then it was people on, you know, stopping? And then at any point, did it turn around? Did people start joining again? Because as you know, there’s been a lot of different communities where they’ve experienced a lot of people who are then looking for help, especially in the digital space. Yeah,
Carl Smith 31:14
crazy. So what happened was, first of all, I asked, we had a good 70 $80,000 and refund requests. And I just asked everybody, I said, if you need this money, I’ll send it to you right away, if you don’t need it right away. And you can let me give you a credit. This is exactly where we are right now we’re stuck between these hotels and you know, trying to figure out what we’re going to do to maintain the team. And we had a couple of people who said we need the money. And we sent it to him right away. Like I told the team, I said, if I have to use my personal credit cards or send my personal cash, everybody’s getting their money back, because this is the type of stuff that lasts with you for your life, like how you treat people in this moment. And then I told the team we got about, we got about five weeks before, we’re not a team anymore. So what we did was we looked over the history, the eight years of events at all of the research of speakers. And any speaker who had actually any speaker who had rated a four or five out of five, or four or higher on their talks, we reached out to him immediately and said, What do you have in the way of a webinar? What do you have in the way this so we within about two weeks had planned 40 events for the rest of the year, all digital and virtual events, digital workshops and put everything else on. And that was also because we owed our other partners, MailChimp and vision. They put a lot into us for that year, and I needed them to see that they were gonna get the value out that we were gonna keep giving them this great opportunity to connect with the people they wanted to be with. It turned.
John Corcoran 32:52
Yeah, it did. It did. And now where do you see the business going? As we look to the future, as you look to 2021?
Carl Smith 32:58
Yeah, so where we are now, unfortunately, we did go from a team of eight to a team of two. But we were able to clean up so much stuff. And you know, I mentioned it before there was this big ball of debt. So much smaller balls. Now, actually, all of this, even though the amount of money revenue coming in isn’t as much we don’t owe anybody when it comes in. And membership has actually tripled in terms of annual recurring revenue. Wow, it tripled. Yeah, it went from roughly $70,000 at the end of 2019, to just over 200,000 right now. Wow. And that has saved us. We had some people in the community that put out videos about what the Bureau meant to them. And that went out I think there were about a dozen of them total. And when that went out, people started upgrading and doing other things so and joining so that
John Corcoran 33:52
that saved our ass, but the team is still smaller. So is it that you don’t have as many revenue sources from events, is that required to rethink the way you monetize the business?
Carl Smith 34:03
That’s definitely it. Now, for 2021. We have got a few wild cards for the third quarter fourth quarter. If the vaccine is readily available in May, what we’ve heard from our community is two months after the vaccines are ready, they would be willing to come out to an event. A lot of our events are smaller, 30 people or less. The biggest events are like 303 50. So if that happens, we’re gonna look at doing a hybrid in person online event. And the big change for us, which I’m excited about is instead of going to a big venue and trying to bring the streaming technology there, we’re going to go to a television station that has a great theater. There’s one in Philly, which we had an event at before. There’s some great spaces up in Brooklyn, where basically we’re going to go to the streaming technology and have an in person event of 50 people instead of you know 300 right
John Corcoran 34:59
now As far as the members of the community now these are members of the community, they’re not running little local cafes that are shutting down there in the digital world. Right. So what is their experience of this pandemic been like? And also what is what have you observed in terms of the community helping one another because there’s been a lot of amazing gas, firing stories of different communities, all kinds of different communities. I’m active in eo San Francisco here, and just watching people come together, helping one another has been really inspirational.
Carl Smith 35:28
And you know, and EO is what a lot of people kind of compare the Bureau to were like, EO for digital, right? Like if you were just digital shops. So what we’ve seen is across the board, a lot of it depended on what sectors they were working with. So if you were in higher ed, if you were in government, if you were in eecom, if these were your spaces, if you were in healthcare, then you skyrocketed, you got so much work, you didn’t know how you’re gonna get it done. On the other hand, if you were in tourism, if you were an entertainment, if you were in transportation, if you were in hospitality, you tanked. Yeah, if you were a generalist, kind of doing a little bit of everything you were okay. But for the most part, the PPP money, help people, the ADL stuff help people, we were lucky that we were able to throw together one of our first events was all about how to apply for the PPP loan. Right? So we were able to get together really quickly. And then we have a channel in Slack. So we have about 500 people in the Slack community. And one of those channels is called collaboration. And so you’ll see like, just today, somebody was in there saying, Do we have anybody in here who is an expert on eecom conversion, like raising up conversion rates, and somebody reached out and said, Hey, I worked with this shop, and they’re really great. And then somebody pulled somebody from that shop into the conversation. But I would say we’ve seen two things. One is people partnering like they normally would like that. And another is somebody saying, Hey, I have an amazingly talented bench of developers over here. And I can’t keep them busy. Is anybody overloaded? They could really use somebody who’s you know, a specialist in Java or specialist in Drupal or whatever. And then you’ll see somebody come in and say, You know what, I can grab a couple of them, I got some work. So that’s another thing that people have been lifting each other up.
John Corcoran 37:23
That’s cool. All right. We’re running a little short on time. So two quick questions to wrap things up. First looking at, you know, a big fan of gratitude. So looking around at your peers, contemporaries or members of your community, who out there, do you admire? Do you respect who’s doing interesting things, innovative things in your field?
Carl Smith 37:42
You know, it’s, it’s such a great question. And I think, you know, what I’m gonna say, I’m gonna mention Rob Haar. Rob runs a shop called Sparkbox. He’s one of my good friends. So it’s kind of a homer pick. But the thing is, he gives of himself all the time, he actually has calls slated out every week for people that he’s met with him that he wants to keep in touch with, and he wants to know how they’re doing. Anytime I get a call from somebody who doesn’t know what to do. Normally, Rob will get in touch with them, and he’ll help him out. So just from a real time perspective, he’s amazing. And then he also gives all of his information away, he’s running one of the most, one of the tightest ships operationally that we’ve ever seen. And he gives all of that information away to try to help the community. So yeah, I get so much love and respect for that guy.
John Corcoran 38:39
It’s always great when there’s someone in a community like that person who’s always responding to everyone’s posts, you know, you love people like that. Alright, and then the last question is, let’s pretend we’re at an awards banquet, much like the Oscars or the Emmys, and you Carl are receiving an award for Lifetime Achievement or anything you done up until this point. And you know, in addition to family and friends, who else do we bank? Who are the mentors, the coaches, the peers, who are the people along the way, moved from childhood, maybe from I don’t know, college, you know, who are the people that you would acknowledge for everything that’s gotten you where you are today?
Carl Smith 39:11
Yeah, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go with Melanie Husk. Melanie was one of the principals of the advertising agency I worked at, that’s where I interned. And she put up with me and taught me like, I remember going in there and the first thing she asked me was, what do you want to do? And I said, I just want to be indispensable. And she goes, Okay. What about copywriting? And I was like, Yeah, okay.
John Corcoran 39:39
So 14 years, a great internet launch. Let’s go.
Carl Smith 39:45
But what was amazing was when I was leaving, she looked at me and she goes, you’re a son of a bitch. I’m like what she goes, You became indispensable. And it took 14 years but the thing I’ll say about melon We had lunch A few months after I’d started my own company. And I apologized to her. I said, Look, I held you to this level, I didn’t understand things you were doing. And she goes, you know, I’ve got to worry about my personal life. And in my work life, she was like, you know, there’s so many different things and said, Yeah, I’m learning that she goes, here’s what you’re going to realize. When you’re in charge. There’s nobody left to blame. And that stuck with me for the rest of my career.
John Corcoran 40:28
That’s a great lesson. Carl, this has been a pleasure. Where can people go to learn more about you and the Bureau of Digital?
Carl Smith 40:35
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, come to LinkedIn, just type in Carl Smith Bureau, and look up the Bureau of Digital if you need to, I have a history of companies with weird spelling names. Or you can go to bureauofdigital.com and you’ll find out a lot about what we’re working on. The 2021 schedule is going to be released in a couple of weeks. That’s what we’re knee deep in right now. So that’ll be a lot of fun. But yeah, and then just Carl Smith on Twitter if you want to see me rant and rave about the current state of the world.
John Corcoran 41:03
I’m definitely calling. Hey, Carl. Thanks so much.
Carl Smith 41:06
Thank you, John. I truly appreciate it.
Outro 41:09
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.