Brian Forrester, Workshop Digital

Join us for Episode 10 of the Richmond Leadership Lab. In this episode, co-hosts Christian Mosier and Taylor Quinn engage in a candid, insight-packed conversation with Brian Forrester, the CEO & Co-Founder of Workshop Digital. This episode is a must-watch for leaders interested in scaling service businesses and building award-winning cultures. Episode Highlights: **Meet Brian Forrester: From Virginia’s Northern Neck to JMU to audio engineering in Los Angeles, Brian’s path back to Richmond reveals how creativity, timing, and curiosity pulled him into digital marketing—and eventually into launching his own firm. **From Solo Shop to Agency Merger: Hear how two independent agencies combined in 2015 to create Workshop Digital, why the new name mattered, and what it really takes to merge teams, systems, and cultures successfully. **Click-to-Close Growth (Not Just Leads): Brian unpacks Workshop Digital’s end-to-end approach—SEO, Paid Search/Social, Analytics, and CRO—and why optimizing conversions beats chasing “more leads” with low close rates. **Culture That Wins: Anonymous feedback loops, “clear the air” practice, paid volunteer time, and a 4-day workweek—the systems behind earning repeated “Best Places to Work” honors while keeping client outcomes strong. **Hiring & Leadership Lessons: The real cost of mis-hires, defining roles before filling them, and when founders should (and shouldn’t) replace themselves in key seats. **Community & RVA Advantage: Why Richmond punches above its weight—Brandcenter talent, The Martin Agency ecosystem, and peer groups like DigitalRVA and the Virginia Council of CEOs. **Advice to 2009 Brian: Trust your gut, seek mentors and peer councils, and take smart risks—without letting analysis paralysis kill momentum. Don't forget to subscribe, like, and share! Tune in for more enlightening discussions on leadership, entrepreneurship, and community empowerment. To learn more about Workshop Digital, visit ⁠https://www.workshopdigital.com⁠ https://www.workshopdigital.com/⁠ Connect with Brian on LinkedIn: ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbrianforrester/⁠⁠ https://www.workshopdigital.com/ Richmond Leadership Lab is Produced and Co-Hosted by: Taylor Quinn, CEO - Filmspire ⁠⁠https://www.filmspirevideo.com⁠⁠ https://www.filmspirevideo.com/ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-quinn-filmspire/⁠⁠ https://anchor.fm/s/ff0c9e28/podcast/⁠⁠https:/www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-quinn-filmspire/⁠⁠ Christian Mosier, President - BenX ⁠⁠https://benxconsulting.com⁠⁠ https://anchor.fm/s/ff0c9e28/podcast/⁠⁠https:/benxconsulting.com⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-mosier/⁠⁠ https://anchor.fm/s/ff0c9e28/podcast/⁠⁠https:/www.linkedin.com/in/christian-mosier/⁠⁠ To learn more about RLL visit our site: ⁠⁠https://www.richmondleadershiplab.com⁠⁠ https://anchor.fm/s/ff0c9e28/podcast/⁠⁠https:/www.richmondleadershiplab.com⁠⁠ This podcast was produced and recorded by Richmond Podcast Studio. Do you want to start a podcast but don't want to deal with the hassle of the tech? With Richmond Podcast Studio, you get your professional video podcast the same day you record. To learn more, visit ⁠https://www.richmondpodcaststudio.com https://www.richmondpodcaststudio.com/

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Richmond Leadership Lab, featuring business and nonprofit leaders across Richmond, Virginia. Produced and hosted by FilmSpire and Ben X.

• 0:12Speaker 03

  Welcome back to another episode of the Richmond Leadership Lab podcast. As always, I'm Taylor Quinn, CEO of FilmSpire. I'm always joined by my uh wonderful co host, uh Christian Moser with Ben X Consulting.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 0:28Speaker 03

  Great to be here. Number 10.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  You're on the double digit podcast episode.

• 0:33Speaker 03

  First double digit. Yeah, exactly.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Don't they say that like sixty percent of podcasts after five episodes are done?

• 0:38Speaker 03

  I think so. And 10 is sort of like a big benchmark to get through, I think. We digress, but we're here, of course, with Uh an amazing leader. We've had 10 we're nine great leaders. This is our tenth great leader for the Richmond Leadership Lab. Today we are speaking to my good friend. He is the CEO and co-founder of Workshop Digital. That's Brian Forester. Brian, thanks for coming.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Taylor, it's great to be here. And I'm honored to be number ten.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  It's a great number.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Jones.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Great number.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Brian, you uh you're a little bit familiar with this space, aren't you?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I am. I am. We uh we had an office upstairs. Uh two thousand eleven or twelve, we moved in upstairs. Um had a lot of growth here. Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful facility.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  It's super cool. We're downtown at Shaco Bottom. If you don't know, come check us out. It's a great space. Um

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Brian, let's let's jump in. You and I have known each other, I think, on and off for five plus years, I'd say at this point, kind of pre COVID. We're both kind of in the marketing space and things like that. So uh tell us if you could a little bit about um just real quick, workshop digital, we're s we'll circle back to you, but for people who don't know who workshop digital is, give us kind of the elevator pitch.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So Workshop Digital is a full service digital marketing agency. Um what does that mean? Great question. Different things to different people, right? For us, it means that we are fairly end-to-end, click-to-close digital marketing, right? So we're really big in on analytics, real heavy on analytics to prove value. So that's SEO, traditional SEO, GEO, which we can talk about later and get into if you want to. Generative engine optimization. So in the age of AI, how do you optimize to show up in ChatGPT or Grok or

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Perplexity? And then we have a paid team as well. So the paid team is everything from paid source, traditional, uh paid source shopping. programmatic, uh paid paid social channels, including Meta, you know, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, those sort of things as well. We layer analytics on top of all that. And then on top of that, we layer on um CRO, so conversion rate optimization. So how do we work smarter, not harder?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  You know, you can drive leads infinitely to the top of the funnel, but if we can broaden the bottom of the funnel, we can get more sales, right? So that's sort of once we've got uh good consistency in our lead flow, how do we get more of those folks to convert? So that's that's sort of our bread and butter.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Cool. That's awesome.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  So

• 3:13Speaker 02

  That's a whole different

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  sorry to cut you off. That's a whole different ball game. Leads versus clothes like closed business is just two t completely separate things.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I think um customers, clients are expecting more than leads these days, right? Everyone thinks they want leads until they've got hundreds of leads in those sales.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  So close oh yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Waste of time and energy. Yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, all that. So Brian, tell us, um, how long has Workshop Digital been around?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  We celebrated our ten year anniversary um in May. Yeah. In May. Um my co-founder and I started separate digital marketing agencies in 2007 and 2009. Uh we met in 2011 on Twitter,

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  ended up sharing an office space together downtown that uh predated this space here and uh decided to merge teams in 2015. So um it's been it's been a great ride thus far, and let me tell you, digital marketing looks just a little bit different than it did in 2009.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  2009. Wow.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Congrats on ten years.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  That is huge.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  So Brian, tell us like, um, how did you really kind of you just your you know background where you grew up and how did you get into digital marketing and things like that in that space?

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Okay, well I'll try to make this brief. Um going all the way back to where I grew up. I grew up in a small town an hour and a half east of here on the northern neck of Virginia called lively Virginia.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Wow. Okay.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  It did not live up to uh to the name, but it was a great place to grow up, right? I grew up with access to the water, grew up um, you know, swimming and skiing and boat riding and fishing and camping and spending a lot of time outdoors, um, and just was surrounded by a a lot of other great people. So friends that I

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I'm really close with to this day, uh came out of this cool little magical corner of the world. So if you ever ever get a chance, I highly encourage you to get down there. Maybe, maybe not lively, but uh Irvington and some of the other places that you may have heard of where the tides in is. Um so I grew up in a really beautiful natural part of the state. Uh so Virginia born and raised. Uh and um after uh high school went to JMU um out in Harrisonburg and loved that. Love the mountains, love JMU, go Dukes, but um I'm a I'm a I I like being on the water.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I think I've got that in my soul. Um ended up, interestingly, I'll give you the really, really short version, but in ended up in Arizona at the Conservatory of Recording Arts after JMU. Got an audio engineering degree and went to Hollywood and um and worked in a studio similar to this for Clive Davis um recording. Um at that time mostly pop artists. So I got to meet uh some celebrities, got to hang out with some famous people, got to record some amazing music, um, and got to uh the realization that I'm an East Coast guy and I don't love Hollywood.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Um

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Give us an example.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  I've like the the music.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Someone that we recorded? Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So we recorded uh Justin Timberlake's um

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Oh cool.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  uh second album. Yeah, we recorded um Ruben Stutter did a lot of work for him. Um really the list goes on and on. Uh Jamie Foxx, we recorded um when he did Ray, he decided he wanted to be a musician, so he recorded some albums. Um so got a lot of exposure to a lot of talent. Um just didn't love the Hollywood lifestyle.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Beautiful place out there. Great place to visit, is what I say. Go see it. But um man, Richmond's a special place. So um growing up an hour and a half east of the city, my mother and her family uh were from Richmond, and so when my mom wanted us to have a cultured experience, she would take us to the city. Uh so I got to spend a lot of time in in Richmond as a child, and um it it became an obvious place for me to move back to, close enough to home but far enough away, um, so that I could um sort s start building my own career. Um

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So when I came back, I was lucky enough when I was in audio engineering, I was right at the convergence of the internet speed and technology getting to a place where uh and digital recording getting to a place where you could record fully digitally and then transmit it over the internet, which now it sounds like well, that's not really that big of a deal. But back in 2003 and four

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Like these really, you know, dense files that were really large at the time, um, gigabyte files, you know, weren't weren't transferable. So I saw that the internet was going to tr change the way everything that we did worked in business. And um so taking a step, zooming out a little bit, um, I started to focus on marketing because I knew that that was an area that was going to be ripe for disruption. Um so I think you know, a little lucky on the timing, just being born at the right time, and then maybe um a little lucky in in understanding that there was going to be an opportunity there um to leverage the internet to get in front of customers in a new way.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to remember that was the iPhone, first iPhone came out I think in oh seven.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  So this was several years before that. And of course that upended how we used the internet and disrupted everything in a pretty major way. So um

• 8:27Speaker 01

  yeah, worked for a consultancy here for a while, uh stood up a multi million dollar business for my boss at the time, um, and got a crash course in digital marketing. At the time I was young. And so my boss said, Well, you're young, build me a website. And so I figured it out and I built him a website and didn't use any of my formal formal training at all, right? You're young, figure out how to get customers to this website. And so I started researching this thing called PPC or pay-per-click advertising. I started researching SEO or search engine optimization. Um and started realizing

• 9:02Speaker 01

  there were a lot of people on the internet searching for these consulting services, and we were driving a lot of new business and a lot of leads by being um you know early adopters on on this platform.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  I was also doing all the sales. And so I was like, okay, I'm doing sales, I'm doing SEO, I'm doing PPC, I'm doing all the fulfillment. I'm doing a lot of the business, right? Naively, I thought, well, I'm doing a lot of the business, I can do this on my own. So in 2009, I I built um Dynamic Web Solutions, which was my first company, um, and started moonlighting nights and weekends, picking up local clients through friends and whatnot. Uh and that

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Way to do it.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  that's evolved to where we are today. Yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  The glory days.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Do you ever look back on those days and be like, man, that was something else?

• 9:48Speaker 01

  I do I you know distance from something I think changes your perception

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  quite a bit

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Who went to VMI? Right? A hundred percent.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  right

• 9:59Speaker 02

  I got some good buddies who went to VMI and they say it's like an illusion thing to where they're like, they go, it's great. Or sorry, they go and it's like really difficult, you know, very diff like tough thing to do, and then a couple years after graduation, they're like, oh, you know, okay. And then a couple more years, they're like, you know what?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  when you're on the other side of it looking back it's always like with fond memories and and yeah um it was a it was a lot of hard work.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Um again I think timing timing was a critical factor for me. Um right place, right time, and just perseverance was was critical, but it was a lot of fun.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I enjoy I really enjoyed it. I I enjoyed the um

• 10:37Speaker 01

  The novelty of it all, everything was new. You know, once I went from forming an LLC to getting tax help to finding customers that didn't compete with the consultancy that I was still working for, you know, and trying to make sure that I was um in compliance with any sort of non compete that that existed there. Everything was this brave new world, and I was I was um turned onto a lot of business books and um You know, shout out to the Richmond business community. I mean, obviously you you guys are a big part of it and this podcast is contributing to it in a meaningful way. But um this is a really great place for entrepreneurs to start a business. It's really a welcoming community. I found it to be um extremely welcoming, helpful. Uh

• 11:21Speaker 01

  embraced me with open arms and um I try to do the same thing now that you know we've had some some measure of success is to try to keep giving back.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Do you remember your first client?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I do. I do. I won't I won't drop their name, but it was a home builder client um who was also a neighbor of mine that lived a block away. Um friend of mine, trusted me um enough to give me money to do work.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  It's a whole different ordeal. It's an idea and then someone gives you money for it.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  It became real

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  real fast. Um and even more pressure because it's a friend, right? So you really want to knock the cover off the ball because it's a friend that's trusting you and you know that they've got a wife and kids and you want to make their business successful. Fortunately, I can say we did. We we did knock the cover off the ball and um drove a whole lot of revenue for that business, and that business led to their sister company becoming a client, and then the word starts to get out, you know, and um You know, a combination of friends and family referrals up front.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And just good old fashioned networking. Yeah. Get getting out and going to the different networking events that are out there that are free or affordable. Yeah. And shaking hands and meeting people.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Wow. Yeah.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  So it sounds like you kind of like led that classic entrepreneur story of like, I'm gonna start out and I'm doing everything by myself, I'm a one-man band or really small, and then you kind of expand and grow over time. How how big is Workshop Digital now? How many employees do you have?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  It's about 30 of us starting.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  How did you kind of grow from like, okay, I'm like a doer of all the things, I'm managing the PPC campaigns, I'm doing all that, to like learning how to delegate and kind of grow and scale over time. What was that like for you? When or what was that realization like I'm like, I can't do this all by myself anymore?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where to begin? That's that honestly, that's the hardest part.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Um, you know. A lot of people become business owners because they're good at their craft, a thing that they do, right? The hardest thing about growing a business is realizing that you have to distance yourself at some point from that stuff in order to scale, or you become the largest roadblock to your own growth and success.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  So, you know, I've got mixed emotions about that because every business book I've read, every business coach I've had, every executive leadership summit I've been to, the most common advice I hear is you've got to replace yourself in every role in order to grow and build a scalable, sustainable business. And that hasn't 100% been my experience. It's it's It can be true, but I think that you you know take that advice with a grain of salt. You know, I think you need to be really careful about what you try to outsource or hire in, especially if it's something that is you are so good at you were able to build a business around it. You know, I would my advice would be to hold on to that thing

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  and outsource every other thing or or hire in for everything else because there's a lot to running a business, right? There's administration, there's operations, there are finance, HR, sales. Whatever the service or uh product delivery is, is is a piece of that, right?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Um so if you're good at one of those elements, um hang on to it as long as you can because there's probably not many people that are gonna be able to do it as well as you, certainly not that care as much as you do since you own the business.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  The whole thing too is is outsourcing what you're not good at as well. And like what yeah. But but keeping the things that really move the needle forward.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  It's like what are like the two things or three things that that you do personally that really moves the needle forward? And it's like if it's not those two or three things. But it's also tough at the same time 'cause then you take out your net profit and you hire someone. It's a it's a whole ordeal. Whole ordeal.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And I think at some point, so you know, I'm in the service business, right? So At some point when we hired our sixth or seventh or tenth client, I could no longer facilitate all the sales conversations, all the networking events, and deliver and execute really high quality work for all of those accounts, right? Plus manage any vendor relationships I had. And so going from one to two.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  is a big jump uh for for for business owners, but it is a necessary one. So just understanding you know throughput, even if you are the best videographer or the best digital marketer out there, if that's the service, you're gonna have to find somebody else that's good at it at some point that wants to come work for you. And and you know that first hire is taking a chance on you too. And so I think that's an important that's an important thing to consider is, you know, if you're looking for a job, do you want to go to Capital One or to this company you've never heard of that's got one employee which is the owner and then your employee too. You know, like um but But we were able to find those people that, you know, that came that believed in what we were uh you know, our vision or my vision in the early days. Um

• 16:18Speaker 01

  and and they need a lot of training and support. But I think, you know, we can get into the the details if you want about how you do that. But I think um to your point, thinking through the impact on gross and or really net profitability as you start to hire is a big impact. Thinking on your customer relationships, if everyone knows Taylor and that's why they're working with FilmSpire and suddenly Taylor's not there. It's like,

• 16:49Speaker 01

  well, that's why I'm using FilmSpire, right?

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  So you feel some of that too. Um so yeah, I mean that's been my experience is that you really want to be careful with those early hires because they're representing your personal brand, which is you know at this point probably has more equity than your actual brand and logo do.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  So true.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  But it's so fun, right? Like you 'cause very few people are are entrepreneurs. A lot of people like either like stumble upon leadership roles or grow towards certain, you know, CFO, CEO, COO roles. And the the entrepreneur route is is a whole different route. But it's it's also riveting. Like you said, like the novelty of it is is really cool.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a um You know, you have to jump from the nest sort of scenario. And if you're working in a company and working your way up the ladder, it's not the same kind of life or death feeling, right? You're you're sort of groomed to be a CEO internally if you if you work your way up the ranks. Not to say that it's not hard to do. There's a very, very few people obviously make it um into those sort of C suite positions in these big corporations or even mid sized companies. It's hard to do. Um it is a totally different thing. To abandon the security blanket of a nine to five with a steady paycheck and a good benefits package and go build something from scratch.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It is a trustful, but there's no one there to really catch you. Somehow you gotta catch yourself, right? Yeah, yeah. And so I think the stakes are higher, um, but the rewards are way bigger too.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  I I I think I would I would I would rather have done nothing uh other than what I've done to get to where I am today. I think it's it's definitely the thing I'm most proud of. Uh it's my proudest accomplishment is building uh what is now a workshop.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  So what was it like then for you to um you and your co founder merged what year again was that you said?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Twenty fifteen.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  twenty fifteen. So what made you What did that conversation look like? Like what drove you to decide, yeah, let's join forces, let's do this thing together.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you were what six years in at that point?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I was six years in. And my uh my co-founder was uh eight years in.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Gotcha. Hadn't you had a couple employees at that time or was it just

• 19:01Speaker 01

  At that time I had uh about fifteen employees.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Oh okay.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we had gone through some uh some some big growth

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  upstairs at the Energy Studios office in

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Chaco Bottom, Richmond, Virginia.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Uh so you know it it was it was a classic romance. I got down on one knee and proposed to Andrew and You know, he was he was a little reluctant, but since I put him on the spot, he said yes, and we've been we've been happily together ever since. It was a nice ring.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  You spent a lot.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Um you know, it was funny. So Andrew and I um met through Twitter in twenty eleven. Uh we were introduced through a common friend. Andrew was looking for someone to uh send some SEO work to uh because he was focused on the paid search side of things, and I was at the time focused on the SEO organic search side of things. And um so we met at a Panera as one did back then. Uh after a a DM uh in in through Twitter and um back in the in the days when Twitter wasn't a cesspool of human garbage, but um we'll save that for a different podcast. Uh and had a great conversation, immediately hit it off, and I was like, you know, I'm looking for office space. If you happen to know of anything, he said, funny you say that.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Uh me and this other guy are getting ready to sign a lease downtown Chaco Bottom. Um and I was like, I'm in. I don't I don't even need to see it. I'm in. Let's say we we uh we worked in an office together early on. Three guys, three businesses, um, no employees, just three of us. Um, and we were competitive. And I think it was like this was pre-coworking space, but it felt like a co-working space, right? Where we were fueling each other's competitive drive. We were um, you know, we were trying to land similar clients, we were celebrating wins with gong rings and um playing a ton of nerf basketball. I mean, we got

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  A very good nerf basketball back then.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  We could take any like we could hit any shot with our eyes closed. Like off we call it triple bank, we could hit it. So we had a lot more free time.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, we brought a hoop. Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Oh nice! All right, let's go, let's roll it out. Turn the cameras off real

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  so we had long story short, we had known each other and worked together quite a bit and um had a great relationship and and he he moved his team as he started to hire um out closer to his house. He was closer out to Innsbruck. I moved into this space right here, uh upstairs and in your year. Um and the other guy stayed in the space. And Andrew and I stayed in touch. We had what we called co founder beers or founder beers back then. Um and we would brag a little bit. Hey, I just got this logo, or I'm working with them, or oh, did you pitch that one? I wanted, you know, a little bit of humble brag, a little bit of uh competition, but in a friendly way.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Um and I was like, man, we're pitching the same work, you do this, I do this. Like we were we even shared some of the same accounts, right? So he would provide half the services I would provide the other, including my first service, my first client that I mentioned earlier to you, the home builder. I had introduced him to Andrew and he had hired Andrew. So we were sitting in on client meetings together, we were like, it just it just kind of feels right. Um we had talked about it earlier in maybe 2012, 2013, the timing wasn't right, and then in 2014, uh, over a founder's beer, we were I was like, you know, what do you think about it this time? And he was like, timing feels good. At the time he was probably five employees and I was about fifteen. Um so um yeah we we we we hired Fahrenheit, um a local consulting group. Uh they were a big help for us. Um

• 22:36Speaker 01

  you know, shout out to those guys over there. Rich was uh really instrumental in in connecting us with the right people and they helped facilitate the conversations in a sort of non biased as a facilitator, non biased way. Uh worked with Kiter, uh the CPA firm here in town. Uh they helped facilitate some of that. And uh Williams Mullen on the legal side to help draw up the contract. So I worked with all local All local firms, you know, a lot of love for uh the Richmond companies here. All three of those companies do fantastic work and have been an asset for us along the way and came to terms at work for everyone. And so yeah, twenty fi 2015 um

• 23:12Speaker 01

  we decided to make it official in May. We merged the t the teams um covertly early because they had all found out through the grapevine. Um and then made the big public announcement uh in May and did a signing day. So we had like jer a jersey and did like the the the pen like it was signing on to the sports team. For uh Workshop Digital, yeah. And that was done that was done right here in this building. So yeah,

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Was that a new name?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  yeah, so workshop digital was a new name. Yep. So the idea of workshop digital, um, Andrew and I came up with that. Uh you know, we were thinking about um how we handcraft solutions in an otherwise kind of cold and and you know, ones and zeros digital world.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Um our families both have building carpentry backgrounds, and we grew up with workshops in our backyards where we saw our parents as makers making things, and we really like that approach of like, you know, we're not carrying on the maker tradition with physical tools, but we're doing it through our high touch, high relationship, you know, customized strategies for our clients in a way that feels, you know, I hate the word bespoke now because it's been so played out, but I feel like

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Custom.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  In a way that's really yeah, in a in a way that um we felt like differentiated us from other uh other businesses that were really all about those sort of online systems exclusively. How can we automate everything and make it as sort of cold and conveyor belt as possible? Everything that we do for our clients is totally custom. Yeah.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Hmm. That's awesome.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I could imagine like a lot of people who are have businesses or CEOs are thinking about merging and what that looks like and the process for what that could go like was that I'm sure was it exciting? Was it also stressful? What was that kind of like for you on your end?

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Because they say it's like marriage, so I guess that's why you said proposing.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. It it is. Um With maybe even more consequences, right? There's a lot on the line when you merge with someone. Um and you've we've all heard the horror stories, right? Yeah, I think more often than not statistically, they don't work out and they end badly. Um and so we've been, Andrew and I've been very um fortunate in in in that we um we don't fight, you know, we don't uh we don't yell and scream at each other. Um we call it like we see it and we have honest conversations. We disagree, but we disagree like gentlemen politely. Um We don't let our emotions get the better of us, and we we understand the sort of

• 25:47Speaker 01

  long long-term view of what we're trying to achieve here and try to keep that in perspective as we're dealing with in the weeds day to day um topics that come up in our leadership meetings. And that's been key. That's been a key recipe. And we know like we have a thing like clear the air. Um and before we have our we do our quarterly pulse together where we get out of the weeds as because we're wearing hats, actual we have job descriptions, and we're W 2 employees, but we're also owners, right?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  So as owners, we like to step back once a quarter or more and talk about the business, looking up um at it from on high instead of sort of down in the weeds with our sleeves rolled up, which is where we spend a lot of our time. Um and and we start those meetings with clear of the air. Anything that I said that

• 26:35Speaker 01

  you know upsets you recently or anything I've done that could have handled better. And it's just a safe place for us to discuss those things, right? And and it's and

• 26:45Speaker 02

  I like that. Clear the air.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, clear the air and an i it's something that they do in the uh Virginia Council of CEOs as well. Um and it's it's a valuable process if it's done well, right? A clear the air can't dur turn into a um a fight because you try to clear the air and then the person you're clearing the air with gets defensive. Right, right. Like that that's not how it works, right? You have to be willing to accept the feedback, hear it, um and just say thank you for saying that. And leave it at that, right? Um it's not about trying to justify it's that person's POV and it's their prerogative to clear the air with you. And if if you give it that safe space to live, it's can be pretty magical, honestly. Like I feel like in our political landscape right now we kind of need some of that.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Just think about that. When you said that I said are you gonna run for politics?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  No, uh

• 27:37Speaker 02

  We need some more of that. Especially with all like the ads that are coming now.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I uh fun fact, I was part of a uh I I was on the town council on the planning commission for a small town uh that we moved to during COVID. So back in my hometown in Irvington, my wife and I had a house there and moved there full time, and I got involved in politics for a short stint there. And my quality of life degraded pretty rapidly. Um I felt like you know, like i i it's a meat grinder. Um it's a meat grinder out there. But I think, you know, in general, um making space to hear other people,

• 28:13Speaker 01

  it's a good general practice that could help us all. You know, just stop talking, start listening.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  How do you guys do that with employees?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Same thing.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Oh man. Um

• 28:25Speaker 01

  I think one of the One of the things that leaders can do that can create the biggest impact is listen.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Um too often there's this feeling that as a leader you sp you're supposed to have every answer already, you know, in your back pocket and ready to to uh deliver when the question is presented to you. And we all know that's not true, right? Like a lot of times we're again, like as an entrepreneur, you've jumped off the cliff. You don't really know what you're gonna get into. Hopefully the parachute wings or the wings work, right? But you're gonna encounter new stuff um every day. And um Your team, as you grow, is often way closer

• 29:03Speaker 01

  to the stuff that you're trying to solve, right? And so it's it's silly to think that you're going to have all the answers, or that you should just because your title is CEO, CEO, or co founder, or whatever. Um, just because you're in a position of power doesn't mean you need to have all the answers. And so listening to our team has made us a better company.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Building a better agency is sort of our purpose, our mission, our mission.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  We want to challenge the sort of negative

• 29:38Speaker 01

  stigma around agency life. It's like you work 80 hours a week, they burn you up, they chew you out, they never listen to you. They're always on to the next one. We've taken the opposite approach on that. And we're trying to challenge a lot of the like business norms or paradigms that are out there that you're reading all these business tomes. A lot of them are dusty. And there is a better way to do it. And it often does start with listening. It doesn't mean you have to take action. It doesn't mean you that they're right, but they certainly have a voice and they should be able to use it and they should be able to use it in a safe environment where there's no um fear of repercussions, right? As soon as um

• 30:17Speaker 01

  an employee shares something and receives a a negative response, whether it's you get you yell at them or you shut it down, you say, Well, that's a dumb idea. Onto the yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  If you if it

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Why would we ever do that?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Right. Stupid. If you do that, they're not going to share ideas anymore. Right? And you've turned them off, right? They're no longer going to be advocates for your brand. They're no longer going to give you 110%, right? They're they're going to tune out. And they're probably eventually going to go look for somewhere else to work.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  And so we listen, we've got a lot of mechanisms for listening at workshop too. So

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Because

• 30:50Speaker 01

  let's say you want to say something, but you don't want to say it directly to an owner or someone else. Maybe it applies to one of us. We have a purely anonymous online feedback mechanism where we have no idea who sent it. There's no IP tracking, there's no nothing. Totally anonymous. You submit it. We have no idea who sent it. But we still read it. Yeah. We still acknowledge it, right? And if we can take action on it, we will. And we've learned a lot through that mechanism. People are scared to do that because what is everyone going to say? It's like, what are they going to say, right? Like, don't you want to know what they're going to say?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  they're saying it anyway.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Say it anyway.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  It's not like they're just not saying anything and then all of a sudden.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  100%.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  They're saying it anyway.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  They're saying it anyway, and they're probably saying it to each other, and that can be poisoning the well over time, right? So giving everyone an outlet is huge. We also have a core values survey. We send that out every quarter. How's the company doing on our core values? Right? Um we have them we survey them and they survey us on core values, right? So there's more of a how are we aligned on these sort of things or not?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Um we have uh peer to peer and manager to um team member feedback mechanisms as well. So we're trying to keep all these channels open.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  So that

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  if you've got to air a grievance or if you've got a great idea that you're sitting on, there's a way for you to surface that in a meaningful way.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  We'll be right back after this short message.

• 32:16Speaker 02

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• 32:38Speaker 03

  Your story is powerful, but is it reaching the right audience? At FilmSpire, we create compelling videos and provide marketing strategies to make sure they drive real results. From crafting your message to amplifying it, we help you connect with your audience like never before. Ready to inspire? Let's tell your story. And now back to the show. You've been and all this makes so much sense now for why you guys have been like awarded like Virginia's best places to work, outside, you know, is it outside magazine like best places to work too as well? Like what are some of these other things you feel like you are doing that are helping to create this culture we're It's a great place to work and people want to work.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, thanks for acknowledging those awards. That's probably some of the stuff that we're most proud of.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  One award for

• 33:34Speaker 01

  We just won best PPC agency in the country, yeah. Uh Search Awards, which is sort of our Grammys, which is a big deal. So we're really, really excited about that.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  We have won uh outside best places uh seven or eight times. We won Virginia uh best places to work seven or eight times um over the years. Um we forgot to submit.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Decade, that's a pretty good hit.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well we forgot to we didn't submit it right uh when we first started, which we should have, and then we forgot to submit it one year. I think it was COVID or something where we were just scrambling to figure out like how are we going to run this business now that COVID's here.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And we forgot to submit it, but we've had a pretty good track record, other than that. I think it was one year that we legitimately submitted and didn't win it. But we do have a good track record there, right? And so there's no way to game that system. You can't pay for results, right? It's an anonymous survey conducted by a third party around the culture of the company, and the survey is really uh extensive. Um read those survey questions. There are a lot of clues in there about how to build a bit a good company or a great company or a best places to work company, right? Like

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  the things that they're asking about. are the things that you should be focusing on, right? So we um the feedback mechanisms, right? The psychologically, physically safe work culture, you know, in a hybrid remote world, critically important, right? Um we uh during COVID started experimenting with something that was way out of the box, which was a four day work week. This was an idea that we had been um discussing internally and then one of our um employees has surf had surfaced it as well and they were and we were like we couldn't tell them right away. Well we're actually already talking about this but

• 35:16Speaker 01

  You know, I think a lot of employers would be like, screw you, man. Four-day work week. What are you talking about? You know, like get back to work. It's a five-day work week. If you're lucky, it's not a six-day work week. Right. We took a different look at it and we're like, you know, um, let's look at the data. So we looked at our uh email usage in and out. Uh so we have Google we use the Google the G Suite product uh uh suite so we can go look at Gmail utilization, not on an employee level, but aggregate level. We looked at calendar data. How many meetings with clients do we have or internally on Friday? We looked at data in and out, download upload from our Google Drive, which is where we store all of our client documents. We looked at Basecamp utilization, which is our project management platform. It was the slowest day of the week by far.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  We polled some clients. Clients were like, dude, you guys rock. As long as you can continue to deliver, what if there's an emergency? So we built an emergency email, an emergency solution that automatically routed all the managers so that we can respond quickly on a Friday if we needed to. We we we did our homework. We worked with a company, an international company that wrote the book on the four day work week and got some mentorship from them. And we rolled it out. That's thinking way outside the box on building a better workplace culture, right? Three day week at every weekend, plus three days of paid vacation, right? Um we heard from some of our uh employees that were going out on uh maternity and paternity leave that the short term disability uh that we offer is great, but it's not the same as their full comp, right? And so we took a hard sixty percent, you know.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  We looked we looked hard at that and we were like, can we do better? We can't. And so we're gonna fully comp you, we're gonna not use that benefit, and we're gonna take it out of our own uh out of our you know revenue, and we're gonna fully fund it for twelve weeks for for anyone, you know, that's um um you know, take a maternity or paternity leave. So um that was feedback that we got from a team that felt empowered to give us feedback that most people would be terrified like hey, give us more time off. pay more during our maternity and paternity leave while we're not contributing to the company at all. Right. We l we we looked at that a little differently than I think most companies would. Right. We also pay people to volunteer, right? We're we are

• 37:32Speaker 01

  ingrained in this Richmond culture and we feel like we have a corporate responsibility to give back to the community that we're part of. We're lucky to be in this community and we want to find ways to give back. There's a ton going on in the nonprofit space. Amazing work happening.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  what you guys done recently volunteer wise.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  We uh so uh we're we're we work with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation a lot. I'm on the Virginia Virginia Advisory Council there. Uh we've been long term so uh long term supporters of uh Fetch a cure um which is a nonprofit that built one of the only oncology suites for pets in the state they were pioneers in that regard. We've been working with them forever. We work with um uh Habitat for Humanity, building houses

• 38:16Speaker 01

  That's been amazing. And we're t we're talking to a lot of other nonprofits about ways to extend it. So if there are people in the nonprofit space that are listening to this, please reach out. We're always growing our uh involvement. There are others on the list that I'm forgetting to sort of in the moment on the spot, but uh we've got a hold of some on our website that we work with. And you know, we look for a combination of uh dollars donated, right, which do have real impact. But really time donating, when you look at the nonprofit space, they're really hurting for two things it's dollars and time, right? And the time is where you can really have a lot of impact. So

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  we we found that, and this was through uh trial and error, that uh, you know, we were like, look, you know, we want everyone to volunteer. Let's lead by example. So we started with hey, Andrew and I are going out and volunteering, we're sharing back the images, we're like, hey, we'd encourage you to come do the same thing. Um, Shalom Farms, that's another one that we've done a lot of work with. Um You know, hey, we're gonna go out here and clean up some garden beds. Come out and check it out. Hey, we're gonna go build this house with habitat. Hey, we're gonna go clean the bay day, we're gonna go clean the James. Everything that we tried, and there was a thing called Helping Hands RVA that I think it's gotten absorbed by something else now, but it's still around where they would do these giant volunteer effort days. And we would have one or two people. Man, we just can't get traction on this thing. Let's let's let's pay everyone for it.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Uh so it's volunteer, like paid time to volunteer. We still weren't getting as much volunteer time as we wanted to. Then we were like Let's hand off gamifying it or growing it to the team. So we built a community committee that's entirely team-led, no managers or owners allowed. And they have taken it to heights we would have never imagined.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Um volunteerism is way up, right? And uh our community impact is way up, and our community impact ex extends to the seven or eight states that we that we operate in. So our team is now distributed. We've got a local team here that's about a third of the company. Two-thirds or another state. So that impact has now had a bigger ripple effect than ever. Uh

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Wow, that's cool.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  and and and the key was getting us out of the way. Imagine that.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Are you guys still operating on the four day

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  work week?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  We're still operating on the four day. Yeah, we've been operating on the four day for uh I think about two years now.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  And are you all also I know you're you guys have an office in um Scots Edition. You guys also have hybrid remote employees, or kind of what does that look like? Like what is

• 40:51Speaker 01

  We do.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  what did the transition look like during COVID and then back to work and all that kind of stuff?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. COVID was a bomb that just blew everything up, you know. Um pre-COVID March twelfth, uh twenty twenty twenty, we're a hundred percent in office. We had moved down into Shaco Bottom into a big big space down there in the Turning Basin building and had seven thousand square feet. Um we had just signed a ten year lease on ten thousand square feet up here in uh Scotts in a brand new build that we had hired uh uh you know uh architects and builders and had built it all out and Um, you know, there's a there's a business picture somewhere that you can surface of me and Andrew proudly standing in front of this new construction building that you know naively uh we thought we'd be in uh as we expanded our team. Um

• 41:41Speaker 01

  March 13 is when uh the governor shut down everything and our whole world changed pretty much overnight. And so um, you know, some good came out of that. You know, we we were able to hire the best talent across the country without having to relocate people here, or you know, if if folks weren't willing to relocate, we were just passing up talent because we wanted everyone to be local.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  But we had to figure out how to run a business um in three different time zones pretty quickly, which was challenging. So we now have employees in in all three of the continental um United States uh time zones. Um we had to figure out how to get computers and you know, you know, uh all of the uh accessories

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Two of them.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  to them

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  and back from them if they left, or

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  was it even worth it to get it back from them? Um we had to build you know, how do you how do you set up you know hybrid meetings, had all that stuff we had to figure out sort of on the fly, as did everyone else. That's sort of old news now. But we did we did so pretty quickly. We evolved every single element of our business to work in a hybrid role. And I think it's been a net positive.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  You know, the the historians will be able to look back with a broader perspective on sort of like VMI grads 10 years out, right? They'll be able to look back and say, you know,

• 43:00Speaker 02

  That was yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  yeah, wow.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  That was that was really that was enriching.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  It was

• 43:07Speaker 02

  That was, wasn't it? That happened.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the ripple effects are still

• 43:11Speaker 02

  That that happened.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  still incoming, right? I feel like you know that was like a tsunami wave where there were a bunch of other waves that are still hitting the shore that were a lesser degree. Um

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  but we never really fully utilized that big ten thousand square foot space. We downsized to the space that we're in now, which is about four thousand square feet.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Um and we've got a team now that's in yeah, seven or eight different states.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  So talk to me about the evolution of Brian.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Uh

• 43:40Speaker 02

  So obviously starting companies is one skill set. Having a couple employees is another skill set. Right. Having 10 employees is another. And then obviously as you know keep growing, it changes.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  How have you been able to evolve and adapt? Because even like in my own personal limited experience, like who I was three years ago is obviously vastly different business wise than today, and for a lot of reasons. But how do you go from the next stage to the next stage? And just keep on keeping on.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Man. Probably write a book about that.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  It's um perseverance is key, right? But I think in terms of like how I've evolved, um I've looked for help. And I think that would be my key point of advice is as you grow, um, find a coach, find a mentor, find a business owner like me that's willing to sit down and talk to you about what you're going through and share insights. Um Jordan Organization like the Virginia Council of CEOs or similar, I would say that's been that's been seminal for me.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Are you still in there?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  I am still in there. Yeah. Yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Uh

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Scott McRoberts. Yeah, you're welcome, Scott. There's your free plug.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  One later.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Okay, good. Is it sponsored by Virginia Council of CEOs or something?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Last question.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Okay, all right, well good. Um well that was an unsolicited sponsor uh uh sp uh uh or uh referral recommendation. It has been great for me, honestly, um, in a lot of ways, being surrounded by other CEOs. It can be really lonely. When you go from one employee to ten employee, it can feel really lonely because suddenly you've got ten direct reports, which is a lot for one manager, by the way, and you're probably still doing one or two or three jobs. Right?

• 45:21Speaker 02

  yeah. I

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Um, it is a very lonely place, and I was feeling that pretty pretty pretty big time. Like I remember right, like fifteen or sixteen employees. I was sort of at a breaking point where I was like, I need help, I need support, I need mentorship, I have um some critical decisions about the business that I need to make and I don't feel confident. about those um decisions solo, right? And and a lot's weighing in the balances because it's not just me anymore. It's not just me and one other person anymore. It's 17 of us that are all relying on this company to pay for our lifestyle, right? Pay for everything that we've got. So the the pressure ratchet is up ratchet's up um as you grow because the responsibility is not just there for yourself. It's certainly there for your team.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  And so your business acumen has to ratchet up as well. You've got to step up your game. I'm a avid reader. I've got an entire library of business books that I've read that have been that have been really helpful.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  But I think outside mentorship, everyone uses the tired analogy of like, you know, even Tiger Woods when he was in his prime at a golf coach.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  saw that on LinkedIn the other day and I said you actually didn't for a while. Right.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, yeah. He needs one now, right? He needs a life coach.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  But you know, I uh I all that to say

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Everyone at the top of their game, most everyone at the top of their game, has someone helping push them

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  to continue to grow, right? That continual growth is how you become a better leader in a bigger company. Because if you try to stay with the same fixed mindset or the same mindset, if it isn't fixed, that you had when you were solo,

• 47:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  things are the wheels are going to come off the bus pretty quick, right? The skill sets, the understanding, like reading a PL, understanding a balance sheet.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Right. Understanding how to leverage.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Statement of cash flows.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Those are things you might not know legitimately at a certain stage of the business.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  There you go, yes. Especially if you start off young too. You know, startups and business young.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  You know, I'm like

• 47:30Speaker 03

  film spar

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Mortgage out of the company.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  there you go, you know. When I started when I was like twenty six, like I don't know what QuickBooks is or what a PL is or anything like that. So it's very true. Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  You know, entrepreneurs and business owners shouldn't be ashamed of that. There's a lot of re there are a lot of resources out there in all of those different categories. I think a good business coach can be a powerful resource, right? You're gonna run into stuff like what do I do if two of my employees start dating?

• 48:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Like that kind of stuff starts to happen, right? Um, you know, in in

• 48:05Speaker 02

  What do you do?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean ask HR. That's what I do. Um revise your employee manual, your HR manual, right? Just make sure you've got that cover. And there's there's resources for that. But like you don't need an HR manual, we call it our shop manual at Workshop, but you don't need one when it's just one employee.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Oh no. No.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, like you just tell someone, hey, this is the way it is, and like you learn as you go, but like the complexity of the business changes pretty significantly from like one employee to ten.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  And that of course happens again, ten to twenty is when you really start getting into sort of management tier infrastructure, and then twenty to thirty is where you start bringing in VP or above level infrastructure, so that's senior leadership tier to help guide vision and and execute on strategy. So um those are pretty monumental, and of course we haven't gotten there yet, but at fifty at a hundred, you know, um those are pretty big milestones where certainly if you're operating you can't operate like a twenty person business.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  At 50 or 100.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Right. No.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  The wheels will come off the bus. So find someone who's already been there. And again, whether it's the V the VA CEOs or someone else, find someone that's already been there.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  What uh what hats Would you say that you wear today like in the business?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I'm wearing a few. So uh I'm I'm still a business development manager, leader, BDM. Um I handle a sixty percent, seventy percent of our sales have got someone under me now. That was that was an area that I tried to outsource uh and failed. Um

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I I tried to bring in at the 30 plus level, I tried to bring out bring in a an outside resource from another uh competitive agency that's way bigger than us, thinking this person's gonna have a lot of experience, and that what that didn't work out. Um so that was an example of uh outsource everything you do in order to grow and scale your company. It's like, well, I was really good at sales.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  And I shouldn't have outsourced that until I was confident that I had the right person in the right seat. So I'd say that's that's a seat. So I'm also our uh VP of growth, so I manage our marketing team at our BD team, so we have marketing manager and some and some additional resources under underneath of that department that support our internal marketing efforts. Uh I also oversee our HR right now. Um that was another that was another one where we um made a mishire. Um so I can talk for, you know, I know we're almost at uh an hour already, but I can talk for an hour just on the mistakes I've made easily.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Uh so staffing is a big is a big part of it. But I would say I'm CEO by uh title on LinkedIn. But I also do m most of our sales today. That's going to change in the near future. I've got a great sales team member under me that's taken more and more work on. And I also oversee our our broad strategic vision and execution um at the company wide level.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So you mentioned,

• 51:01Speaker 03

  you know, mistakes or things like that. Is there a particular mistake that sticks out that was like lesson learned the hard way that's helped shape you as a leader now today.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  I I think I would go back to um

• 51:15Speaker 01

  making sure you know or making sure I knew what role I needed to replace and what skills I needed in that role.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  To effectively replace myself in a role before doing it, if that makes any sense. You know, I um

• 51:33Speaker 01

  you get it business owners as they start to grow the company get a little excited about the idea of like, oh, I'm gonna get out of some of these seats. I'm into I'm wearing too many hats, you know. I'm gonna take one of these off my plate. I can't wait. I'm gonna have so much more time with my wife, my kids, everything else.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  That can be really alluring, right? You're like, man, yeah, that's gonna be awesome.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Really, if it's a key role within the position, whether it be a senior HR leader, a senior, you know, we had a basically a COO, a VP of operations leader, and a and a senior sales leader, all three of those were m great people, wrong right person, wrong seat,

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  weren't the right seat, and and we didn't do enough of a work of work up front. You know, I always look at you know, point of thumb, not a finger, right? We should have done more. And that was my greatest mistake, I think, is like it really didn't.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Have the right interview questions set up. I could have also reached out to an executive staffing company for some support with these really critical external roles. But

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  I was like, man, they're gonna charge me 20% on these hires.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  These are six-figure roles. I'm gonna save some money.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Cheap at what expense, right? I mean it costs us, it cost us honestly millions of dollars. Um these mishires did and these mistakes. And so when I look at you know, the monetary impact is a real thing. It's hard to understate losing millions of dollars because you made mishires, right? We've done that. Um and we've licked our wounds from those hires. But

• 53:01Speaker 01

  You know, I think the other part of it, the bigger part of it is just how it sets back your execution of your vision, right? When you get the wrong person in there, um, they might not only not fulfill your your expectations for the role, but they might start executing over here to the left when you really wanted them to execute over here to the right or down the center. And so to go in and clean that up and to rebuild it to get those departments functioning as you had envisioned in in your overall strategy can take. Months to years. You know, we're at 16 plus months on some of the course correction that we've had to do. Whereas we could have been 16 months into the future

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  executing on the original vision. So I think I can't underscore enough how critical it is to make sure that any external hire that's going to be in a management or senior leadership role has got to be vetted.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Really carefully. Do not rush to fill those positions no matter how stressed you are because you've got a lot of hats on at the moment and you're like, oh, what hat am I even wearing right now?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like

• 54:05Speaker 01

  slow your roll, tap the brakes,

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  do your due diligence. Even if it takes a year to fill a critical role, that's not too long. If you know that you've done your homework and you've got somebody that's going to come in there and step up. Part of that also means you've got to really make sure you've got the role defined.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  You gotta have the role.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  You've got to have the role defined. If you've been doing the job, but you've never really defined the job.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  It's all in your head, you know, yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  That per you're setting that person that you hired up to fail. And so that's why I say we always point a thumb, not a finger. You know, those three individuals are we're we're lovely people, they're not with us anymore. Um but I have to look in the mirror and say, we could have done better, you know, and and matched up the role with someone that was more qualified for specifically what we needed, and we would have been in a in a different place today. So those are painful uh lessons to learn as a as a business leader. Um but those are sometimes the most valuable as well.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Well, just even auditing your company and then your time too. And just figuring out what do we really need. I made a a mistake hiring early on just because I was like, oh yeah, this this would be good, right? Like we had this. That person lasted three months. But uh

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  It just was just the wrong role. It was my fault. And so it took a lot of reflection on that side too.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Well, and let's be clear sometimes it's the wrong person.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Oh

• 55:25Speaker 01

  You know, like

• 55:26Speaker 02

  hundred percent.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  We we we look at our bag average, you know, with with hiring, like are they still with us in three years? Um and we feel like we do pretty well. And there's I don't know that there's an industry benchmark on like recruiting quality, but we have a rock star recruiter on our team, and even he, you know, it's taken him a while to learn our business so that he can find the right roles across a wide variety of different skill sets that we might be hiring for.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Um so You know, to hire a full-time recruiter is a big deal, right? It means you anticipate consistent growth. You're going to need to hire people a lot to get that person to where they can find quality recruits, especially during the COVID era, which was, you know, the great resignation era.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Um unemployment is the lowest it's been in 50, 60 years. People had choice. People were working remote. People were working multiple jobs at the same time. And you know, there was a lot of sketchy stuff going on. It was a very, very challenging time as an employer to find talented people that actually were going to show up and do what they said they were. So hats off to the recruiters that are out there. I know uh they've all been hustling hardcore. Um It is a undervalued and critically important role. A great recruiter is worth their money times a thousand. You know, I mean, because they really do make or break the company. Like bad bad hires will absolutely cripple your growth.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  That's a great point.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  I know. Great point.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  One of my favorite questions to ask Brian, every guest is if you could sit right here and instead of it being Christian, it was Brian from two thousand nine. What what are, you know, don't you know two or three pieces of advice that you would give that guy, you know, in two thousand nine.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  And

• 57:16Speaker 01

  you know, uh it's funny, what I what I might do is Ask the guy from 2009 to give this guy advice. I I feel like I know it's counterintuitive, but I feel like um the naive optimism of an entrepreneur who has just jumped out of the nest is incredible.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Like a teradized

• 57:39Speaker 01

  The old man that's flown several loops around the mountainside and been battered by all the weather that's jaded and everything else. Um you start to lose a little bit of that, right? So I'm I'm looking for that. I'm always looking for that hungry. I love I I love hanging out with entrepreneurs. Like I you know, I look back at like old me that was doing stuff back then and I think, you know, that was smart. Um I I would say to like people that are um just getting started or wherever they are on their entrepreneurial journey is like, you know, trust your gut isn't bad advice. You know, you can also gut check your instincts with uh council CEOs or a uh mentor or you know, or whatever. Um

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Business coach. You know, having those people around and being able to gut check your ideas is certainly good. But you know, don't be afraid to take risks. Um one thing that has happened as as we've gotten larger is um you be uh for us we've become more risk adverse. And when you're younger,

• 58:40Speaker 02

  more people and more like you have more, you know, expenses of course and payroll and you know.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  I think that's why companies lose their edge. Honestly, I think they become more concerned about risk, right? And certainly risk management is a critical element of strategic business leadership.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  In no matter what business you're in.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  But when entrepreneurs are hungry and they're like, I'm rolling the dice, you know, um, they're willing to take bigger risks, and those bigger risks can often pay pay out, you know, bigger rewards as well.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  And if you start to move too cautiously and if you start to overthink everything to the point where you've analyzed it for three or four or five years, the opportunity's probably passed you by, right? Um

• 59:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, i I don't mean to say go out and rush at every single idea you have, because that is actually a a potential negative that entrepreneurs have is you got we we have like check

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Tiny object.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  we have ten uh we have ten ideas a day. You know, and we all we think they're the best idea ever, right? Which is why it's important to validate that. You know, Andrew has been a great checks and bounces for me because I'm the idea guy and then he'll be like, Well that's you know

• 59:48Speaker 02

  More the system.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  we thought about like have someone to bounce it off of. But um yeah, I think I would I would look back at 2009 me and be like Do what you're doing.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, do what you're doing. Um, you know, don't

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  don't listen to the people that are telling you that you can't do it.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Because I will tell you, like, my own parents were telling me you can't do it. Like those those are the people that I thought surely I could get a vote of confidence from them.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  You know? But they're they're they

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  That's funny.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  they both had jobs their whole life. They didn't you know they didn't and mm you know my dad got bit by the entrepreneurial bug once and he got burned and he was like you know. So

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  If I had listened to them, I'd be behind a desk somewhere right now doing something that I didn't want to do, right? Um This is what I was born to do, and I'm good at it, and I enjoy doing it.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  And I I think it's critical to not listen to the haters, even if they're I have friends too. I went I you know I went and hang out with my friends and I'm like, I'm getting ready to launch this business. They were like, pfft,

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  what? Okay. What makes you think you can do that, right?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  And then the imposter syndrome can set in, and you think, well, what does make me think I can do that? Maybe it's gonna fail. Yeah. Take the risk. There's always another desk job waiting for you.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And don't listen to the people that are telling you you can't do it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Because they're doing they are scared because they haven't done it. Right? And that's going to be true once you're successful, too. Those same people are still going to be haters. They're going to be out there. But now they're going to be like, wow, congratulations. I saw you were Virginia's best places to work. Now they're like, yeah, all right. But they didn't, yeah, they weren't they weren't your cheerleader when you were in the trenches slogging along, right? And so I think. When you find the like minded people, so if you join a peer group or if you just go to networking events and meet other CEOs and get on podcasts like this or go grab you know beers or coffees or whatever, founder beers

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  You need to reintroduce that. You still do it?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we still do it.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Alright, there you go. Alright, city.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  We still do it. Yeah. I mean, and if you don't drink founders' coffees, whatever.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  But it's um get together with people um that are like minded.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  And you'll be surprised what you can achieve, right? If you're around people with limited mindsets or that are gonna shoot down every idea you have, you're gonna end up with limited outcomes.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  But if you're with people that have big ideas and have unlimited visions of what is possible, you're gonna see the same thing.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I love that. I love that. Brian, you I'm gonna bug you to figure out when you're gonna start it up again, but you were help organize this great group of CEOs who are other marketing agencies and things like that. And like for me that was huge. Like I like I you know again when you start a business young you're typically always the youngest CEO in the room and things like that. So me being in a group with like all these other people like the Hodges partnership or you know um dotted line or whoever, you know, all the other agencies in town I'm like just like drilling questions, drilling questions because it's just so valuable for that. So it's just great to get other CEOs together and just sh spitball and you know share ideas and things like that. Yeah there's a lot of just gold that comes from that. Plus Going back to the isolation thing, yeah. You don't feel like a

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  your man on an island basically.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Times ten because of COVID, because you're maybe at home.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Right? So unless you're in a co working space, which I also recommend co working spaces is a great way to get out there.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Meet people, shake hands. Your next customer could be sitting right there next to you. Um we'll get that we'll get that started back up.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  That's one of those things that like I'm wearing a lot of hats.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  You are, yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  And which is not an excuse, right? But that's the excuse we make. And so I'm like, oh, if I get this off my plate,

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  I can fire this back up. But you're right, that was super valuable. And wow, what a talented community we've got

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  on the marketing side, on the creative side, on the brand side, PR side here in Richmond. We're we're really lucky.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that early on. I'm glad you brought that up. What is up with Richmond? And there are so many creative agencies, marketing agencies that are between like ten and a hundred employees. Like there's so many of them in Richmond.

• 1:03:50Speaker 03

  You just throw a rock and you'll hit one

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Do you think it's because of just like the the scene today? You think it's because of um

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Martin.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Martin? Do you think it's like

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I think the Martin Agency and VCU's Brand Center.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  so that forget of

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Shout out to Brand Center. Um, VCU Brand Center um turns out a lot of talent that starts their career over at the Martin Agency. You know, we we are very lucky to have the Martin Agency um headquartered here in town. And they've been a powerhouse for decades, right? And what happens is a lot of folks do their time there and then go out and and do their own thing.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  So I know a lot of uh business owners, like the guys, uh Dustin and Justin from Familiar Creatures, they're they're awesome. They're doing great work on the creative side, and that they came out of the Martin show. Yeah. I know. I the Ustins, D and J. Yeah, they're great guys. Um, so there and there's a lot of a lot of folks like that, right, that came out came out of there. Um, you know, I think uh Ron Carey and the guy the folks from Tilt, I think a lot of those folks are are are ex um Martin agency folks. So they're there that's a big part of it. Um Andrew, my co founder, he's an ex Martin guy. Uh so there's that. I think the other thing that's true though is

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  for as small of a city as Richmond is, you know, like Metro, we're talking one five, one two, one five. You know, um that's Metro, so that's a big circle around, not just Delphi. Right. That's going out there away.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Um, we're a small town, but we've got a lot of Fortune 500s. You know, uh we've got a lot of big businesses that have big marketing needs, and um they're able to shop homegrown, which is pretty cool as well. And so I think those those big businesses and then all of the um you know the Thousands, tens of thousands of other businesses that are trying to grow around here are able to tap into the deep well of creative resources that we've got here in Richmond. And

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  you know, be remiss if we didn't give a shout out to the in-your-ear folks too. I mean, on the on the musicals, audio recording side, they've been a cornerstone of the creative um movement here in town. And they've been a uh a gathering place for creatives forever, too, right? And so Shot Go Sessions is the thing that they host. And um, you know, Carlos has has been a um Very active member of this community. And I think that's one of the other things about Richmond. It is a we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps type of community. We support each other. And I think you don't get that everywhere else. Like in I was in LA, as I mentioned earlier.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  There's none of that. It is, I will stab you in the back to take from you

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  culture there.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Claw your way to the top. You know, you don't want to work until 3 a.m. There's seven people standing outside that want your job right now. That's that kind of mentality. Way more cooperative and collaborative here. Like you mentioned, we've got a group of digital marketing, branding, videography, PR folks that we get together to talk shop, and we're sharing, you know, how's your business doing? How are you driving leads? What's working, what's not working, can we collaborate? Can we partner? We're sending each other referrals, right? We're driving, we're helping each other's businesses grow. We overlap sometimes, right? So there it would be easy to say, well, we compete on this one thing, so I'm not going to let you in.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  We host a uh I'll do a quick plug for Digital RVA. We host a nonprofit group uh for marketers, right? It's not just digital, but it is more of a digital focus because a lot of stuff is digital these days called Digital RVA. We host it, it's free. Um and it's drinks, it's food. Um we've got one coming up next Thursday uh with Tim Tallioferro from Arrow. He's gonna be speaking about top down versus bottom up funnels. A quick plug for that. It's just a great way for marketers to meet.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Right, we get people from VCU brand center all the way up to seasoned uh marketing execs of of Fortune five hundred brands

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  um that come to these meetings. So it's a great cross section of the marketing community. I highly encourage people to come out to that. It's free, and if you like beer or wine, or water,

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  Or

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  we got covered.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  yeah, or people, yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  It's good networking stuff like that. So um Why Richmond? Richmond is one of the best cities in this country. And I don't I'm not saying that just because I live here. I've been to other cities. This city punches way above its weight, and I'm a little nervous even putting it out there because I don't want the word to get out there too much. I feel like right now it's kind of at this point where it's almost getting too big.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  But man, is it a great place to live and work? And if you're an entrepreneur, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better place to work. I think Virginia was actually like rated one of the best business communities

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Entrepreneur.

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  in SNBC or something like

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  multiple years in a row. It's a fact. Like you're not going to get better support. You get support from the government, too. Like the local governments and everything have all sorts of economic development programs to help support local uh businesses and help them grow. So great community to work in. And I will um in my uh plug for Richmond there.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  Favorite uh favorite restaurant?

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  Ooh. Well, I would probably go with the cliche Stella's answer. Um

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  I was just there last week.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  I love it. It's timeless. Um

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  The the vibe in there.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  the Javas family

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  It's so good. Food's obviously there are good. Right and the wine's good.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  100%. The Jabas family's got it going. That's the

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  driving there is killing. And it's timeless like it's

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Family. Yeah.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  They haven't really had to update it and it's still epic. Food's great. You know, you get these family sized portions. But I would I would throw out a little bit of a curveball now because I've got a new emerging favorite, and it's a tiny little hole in the wall called Celidora. Have you been there yet? It's a natural wine shop, it's in the fan on Lombardy. And uh if you blink, you'll miss it. It's I think four or five tables. Some of the best food in Richmond is coming out of a kitchen that's smaller, I'm not kidding you, than this uh podcast booth.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely incredible spot. The wine is amazing. Super friendly staff, amazing food. Okay. Call ahead, obviously, because they got four tables. If you just walk in,

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  you're not gonna get one.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  For a long time.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  For a lot of but if you call it like they have cancellations and stuff. We've been pretty lucky about snagging one last minute because my wife and I are like notoriously bad at making reservations, even though unfortunately Richmond is a city where you need reservations.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, some restaurants. Yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. But no, Saladora. Highly, highly, highly recommend.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  I'd check that out.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 03

  Keep that in mind.

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd love that.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  Man. Dude,

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Cover a lot.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  this has been great.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been great.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  I uh we always asked uh a couple last questions.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  So we're gonna we're gonna do full circle to the volunteering and and the nonprofit space. So as a thank you for being uh guests on the show, we we make a small donation to whatever nonprofit that you want us to.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Shout out whoever you want.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Shout out

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Hold on. I gotta I've got a I've got a new one that just popped up on my radar.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  there we go.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  I believe it's called Music Orchard, but let me just verify that 'cause I don't want to get it wrong on the podcast. Yeah. Yes, Music Orchard,

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Richmond. Um they are a non profit whose goal is to get musical instruments into the hands of kids that otherwise would not have access to

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Oh cool.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  musical instruments and then provide them with education and training. It's music is very near and dear to my heart. I came from a musical family. I pursued a career there because I thought that was where I could make

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  My passion for music overlap with actually making money. Um and uh

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  I mean these days.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard, right? Um so I just automatically gravitated to to that when when they reached out, and so I think they're doing some really great stuff. Um they've got some events coming up. You can go check out their website and and and and go see um some of these kids performing.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Um it's it's pretty powerful stuff what they're doing. Yeah.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  And they're small and they need support, so get out there and support 'em.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. I'm glad you guys do that. That's super cool.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  We love doing that.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  That's a good part of it. Yeah.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  And then the uh the last question, which obviously you're already involved in, Scott, ad uh advasios.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  And we talked a little bit about it, like the leadership and and um you know the lone like loneliness at the top, but but it the Virginia Council of CEOs asks as a CEO, it can be lonely at the top. How do you deal with that loneliness? Like join the council actually.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Um

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  you've got to find an outlet for sharing how you're feeling. Um not just on dealing with these business challenges, but it impacts your whole life, right? Um there is no work life balance. Um it's work, it's life.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Life includes work. Sometimes and not work sometimes, right? But um I think work-life balance is a challenging concept to try to grasp, right? It's it's about managing how you're feeling, managing your emotions, it's about looking for support, looking for resources, um, looking for help, right? Because it does get lonely at the top. No one, even your spouse and and he or she or they are going to be closest to it.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  But even they don't fully get it.

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Unless they also own a business, which my wife does.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  So she's there. Oh, we're on the island together. Um, but uh

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  So you guys drink so much wine.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It helps. Uh but the the the VA CEOs, the Vice CEOs, Virginia Council of CEOs has been a great resource for me. And I and I think, you know, this is not um not a a plug because they're a paid endorser. It's it's coming from the heart. I mean, they do provide a great opportunity for complete and total safety. You know, cone of silence, level safety to share what's really going on in your business with other people who are almost certainly going through the same stuff. You know, you only feel alone when you feel like you're the only person going through it. Right? As soon as you get it out there into the world and you realize other people are going through this stuff too,

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  that sense of loneliness goes away and a sense of camaraderie replaces it, right? And so for me, the council has always been that, right? It's and it's not just here's my work stuff, it's here's my personal stuff, right? Because being a CEO. No joke, like well, can cause physical ailments, right? Like you can get stressed to the point where physical stuff starts happening, right? If you especially if you're holding it in and you're all alone, right? Um we all go through that.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  I have a great low back in case anyone's banned up.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  No problem.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, you sit at a desk for 18 hours a day. Um but yeah, I think you know, like it it is a great place, and it's also a great place just to go have fun. You know, it's not all serious stuff, too. It's also a place to go celebrate your wins because sometimes when you're smashing it, all right, and you're like, we just had an amazing profitability month.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  You want to share that with someone, who do you share that with, right? Like you can be isolated on the good times too, where like this is epic. Or you might have an opportunity to acquire a business or be acquired by a business, right? Like who are you going to share that with? Right? Like

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  that peer group is clutch. So even if the VA CEOs isn't for you, find a network of common uh people with common interests, you know, preferably without a competitive overlap.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Because if there's a competitive overlap, you're not going to want to share the details.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Right? And I think that's key. There has to be and and the in the with the council, they make sure there's no competitive overlap. And if someone new comes into the group, everyone else had in the group has to give it a thumbs up first. Yep, they don't over overlap with me. It's not about directly growing your business, although I've done that as a byproduct of being in the council too.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  But it is really about finding a network of people for all of the different business needs that you might have.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. I like that.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  Love that. Um Brian, how can people get in touch with you or Workshop Digital? Let us know how people can reach out.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  They can email me at Brian at workshopdigital.com or they can visit us at workshopdigital.com or They could hit me up on LinkedIn.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Hmm. Or Twitter.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Or yeah, formally formerly Twitter. Yeah, my my profile's still there. Uh my last tweet was probably two thousand fifteen or sixteen.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. You got what you needed.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  Fun fact Twitter was a client of ours. Um

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  for many, many years until Elon bought it.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  There you go. Thanks, Elon.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Innovation.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Oh no. Um Brian, this has been awesome. Thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it. It's been a great conversation, man.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you.