Operation Disneyland: How Disney Helped Me Grow and Scale

🎶 When you wish upon a star... 🎶 NOTHING HAPPENS!

But, when you bring Disney into your business, it's like having a key to the magic kingdom of growth and operational scale.

Not many entrepreneurs have the luxury of a having a Disney help you reach operational scale, but if there's one thing Disneys are good at it's making magic.

Yes, Brandon, my business partner is my Magic Button Maker and Chief Make It Happen Guy at Ad Zombies. He's the brain that make the machine work and without his expertise, my company wouldn't be where it is, nor where it's heading.

In this sit-down, Brandon and I had a chance to catch up on the last two years and talk about how things work, and didn't work too.

See, hear, or read our entire conversation:

Listen on the TYC Podcast here:

Read the conversation details here:

Brandon: Did. Do you know that, I jumped in and got involved. I think it's actually two years ago a couple of weeks from today.

Ken: I know. That's why we were having... I wanted to have this conversation a year ago because at that point it was about a year into this.

Brandon: Okay.

Ken: When this whole thing started, so let's, let's rewind. I am coming back from dinner in New York city dinner with Gary V. Gary says, dude, you're a creative guy. You need an operations person. You've got a bunch of people you know that can help you.

Brandon: It's funny how he knows that he knows that, right? He knows that because intuitively like everybody has who they need in their group of people that they know. They just don't ever like tap them in.

Ken: Well, think about it though. Like had he not said that, I wouldn't have even thought, Oh, I should reach out to Brandon. The Right. Cause it, it's just not something that, it's not in the back of my mind going, I don't think of you that way. Right. I don't think of Brandon and go, Oh, Brandon's the perfect guy to be my operational guy.

Brandon: Thanks.

Ken: No, but it wasn't meant as an insult. I see you differently. There's a relationship. I've known you for lots of years. Um, our history predates this. It predates your other business.

Brandon: Right.

Ken: So I think of you more as Brandon, a friend Brandon, someone who I've known for 20 years

Brandon: Yeah, maybe it's 20 years, something like that. Yeah.

Ken: And so it wasn't a thought. It wasn't because I didn't think of you that way. It was just, I wouldn't have connected those dots.

Brandon: Okay.

Ken: So anyway, have this dinner come back and, um, you're on my shortlist, but you are the person on my top of my shortlist.

Brandon: I'm Your number one.

Ken: You're my number one. But I had backups in case you said no.

Brandon: And okay, I'm okay with that.

Ken: And so, so we went to lunch. We had street tacos and margaritas.

Brandon: I remember in old town, Gilbert.

Ken: That's right. Downtown, old town, they call it. And um, and I kind of shared with you the game plan. Now for me, you and I had already talked about, you were helping me with some things as a friend going, Hey, here's what I would do. Here's what I would look at. And I know that when I sat down with you for lunch that day, it was kind of like a, Oh, I wasn't even thinking about this. You were trying to figure out who you could connect me with to help me.

Brandon: Yeah, I was kinda caught off guard. There was two things I remember I was caught off guard that you were asking me to be a part of this in a very different way than I had expected.

Ken: Right?

Brandon: Number one. But number two, I had, you told me several times what it was the business did and even after you told me, I had absolutely no idea what that actually meant. And I think I tried to tell you that, but you sort of did what you sometimes do, which is hear what I said, but kind of gloss over it and like, so you just told me again in the same exact way. And so I left there going, he wants me to be a part of something. I don't really even know what that is. I mean, I know what he wants me to do, but I don't know what the business does. And it took me, honestly, it took me a good month to really understand.

Ken: That's funny.

Brandon: The business that had zombies is, and I already said yes. So that's, that's the crazy thing.

Ken: It's funny to me is that you, I remember distinctly, and you said this, and I can almost quote you, you said, okay. So explain to me again how a business makes money selling $49 ads.

Brandon: People pay you to just give them words. And the number of words oftentimes is very, very little. But what I also learned my brain is, is I'm a left-brain kind of guy, right? And my brain thought that the less words you're supplying someone, the less they pay. But it actually turns out now that I've learned about what the business is and does, and it's only taken me two years to get here. Um, probably less than that. Oftentimes the harder things for writers to write are the shorter, less words things. And so the dollars people pay have little to do with the, uh, the quantity of things they get back or the time and effort involved. Um, and, and there's a, you know, sometimes it's, there's a tremendous amount of time to understand, just like I didn't understand what I was, I'll be as does the writers have to understand who the client is, who their target customers are, the voice of their brand. There's a bunch of things that happen long before they ever make a single keystroke. That's a bunch of time and ultimately people are paying for time. Right?

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Um, that's, that's the commodity that we trade in. And um, yeah, so.

Ken: But when you came in, so, so I painted a picture and I, I think I painted a pretty decent picture of how things were organized or disorganized.

Brandon: The thing I remember the most is, is you had a big emphasis that you went over several times, which was this, we have to do X, Y, and Z before we even start. And none of those things had to do with researching the client. They were all like, I'm checking tasks off the list. It was an order came in, has this order been paid for? Like has the money actually gone to a Stripe or a PayPal account or whatever. Right?

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Um, and if, so, the client, the, what would tell you to start working first was somebody filled out a brief, but you have this brief now can you match it up with an order that was made, right? That matches the brief. So there's a brief for a product X, did they buy a product X and did we get paid for product X? Right? So it was in my brain like that's your big problem to solve. I probably got you in like day three on that. Right? It turns out there was a lot bigger problems to solve, but yeah. But there was a lot of emphasis on, on these three things.

Ken: And part of it is because I was trying to be the operational guy, which I am just not wired to do.

Brandon: I remember a Google sheet that actually I, I've, I've saved.

Ken: I feel like, do you, do you see how red I'm getting?

Brandon: Yeah.

Ken: Admitting this is so difficult for me because I was looking back at it now. It was funny.

Brandon: But the part that you're getting good at is the part that I'm horrible at. Like I'm the least creative guy we know combined. Right?

Ken: No, I think you're very creative in what you do.

Brandon: Sure. But not in, you know, in a way that most people would consider creative.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: So, um, so yeah, so I, I, I've, I've actually, I've, I've got from day one when, when I said yes and then the next day I think you made me a, an email address and shared with me the various Google sheets that you were using to keep track of things. And you had a color coding system for emails where...

Ken: I did.

Brandon: I don't even remember what colors meant, what…

Ken: I can tell you.

Brandon: But I have almost all of that stuff. It might be kind of fun. I wonder if we can like insert that into, uh, into this in some way. I don't know, maybe it doesn't make sense. I don't know. But, but I do remember the, the Google sheet.

Ken: Yeah. So green was payments cause green was money.

Brandon: Okay.

Ken: Yellow was order placed and then there was one other color. It was green, yellow and red. I forget now, I forget. It's been so long and it's been literally tens of thousands of orders ago. So like, yeah, like now I'm like looking back at that, I'm like, how the hell did we survive? But it was, see. So it started in the first few months. It was pretty easy because it was a system that I created for my broken right brain.

Brandon: So let me take some of the heavy lifting of people having to reconcile this stuff and let me make that so that you just focus on writing. And then really quickly I said, okay, we've got to get you out of, you should never be writing anymore. Right? We need to get you out of a space where you can actually run the business.

Ken: But that was hard for me to like to walk into, to be able to go, ah, wait a second. But I'm the, I'm a writer, I'm a good writer. I don't want to not write. And, but I also understood that, you know, one of the reasons that you were the top pick was that you have already built and scaled and operation, um, to massive success. And I'm like, okay, you learn from people who've done things that you are not good at and you surround yourself with people that are good at the things you suck at.

Brandon: Sure.

Ken: Well, you're good at those things and I suck at those things and I'm not going to pretend to ever like for me to spend any time trying to be better at them. Right. It's a waste.

Brandon: So I like the things that I'm not good at. I often say I could spend 20 hours a week, every week for 10 years, and I would get 2% better at the things I'm not good at.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Or I could go find somebody who's really good at those things already and equip them with tools and a process and let them run and there'll be better than I'll ever be.

Ken: Yeah. And that's for me, that was a big thing like getting when I, when you first stepped in. And it was interesting because you came in, I had already signed a development deal with Redcliffe labs to build out the backend of, of Podio, which our system is built on our ad system, which is advertising delivery system.

Brandon: Thanks for telling me, I forgot.

Ken: I know. Just kidding. I'm just, I'm telling them.

Brandon: Oh, I thought we probably pretend like they're not even here.

Ken: Well, no, but someone's going to see or hear or watch at some point or maybe not.

Brandon: Or maybe not.

Ken: All two people. Um, but I had already, I had already contracted them and you on day two were like, I got this and you jumped in on the development call and started just running because I, it was so out of my comfort zone and he was asking questions.

Brandon: They were asking you to make decisions on how a process should be. And I'm like, this is kind of in my, wheelhouse, let me just jump in here.

Ken: Yeah. And so, so that took over, but, but let's, let's go back to, you know, I was color coding things.

Brandon: Yup.

Ken: When you came in, we at that point had done, I don't know, a few thousand ads. We were not, you know, we were still in the early, early stages of ad zombies. You know, the company started March 6, 2017

Brandon: And this was like October, I want to say end of October.

Ken: Right, right around the beginning of November of that same year. And so there was no operational scale, but you walked in and you took over and you inherited, even though it was a brief time. A mess.

Brandon: Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't as messy as I thought it was going to be. So I was expecting a bigger man. It wasn't that bad.

Ken: Okay.

Brandon: So we had a basic process in place within about a month and a half, right. To take the chaos and de-chaos-ify it.

Ken: Absolutely. When you look at that, how do you like, where do you begin? Like, because I looked at that and I said, okay, I'm going to give this to Brandon and he's going to take this thing over and make it better. And in my head I'm thinking, how the hell does he make it better? Cause I don't know how to make it better. Like where do you start with that? Because it was like...

Brandon: me personally, where do we start?

Ken: Yeah. Because to me when I look at it, it looks like spaghetti.

Brandon: Yeah. So, so for me, um, this is my only thing I'm good at is, is taking something that has a million parts and that can be complicated and that has a bunch to wrangle, right? And figure out how to break it into the smallest little bite-sized pieces and then tackle those pieces. And so, um, I, I generally kind of try to step back and look at, okay, at the end of the day, what are we kind of fundamentally trying to accomplish? And you'll hear me ask that question all the time. What if somebody says, let's, let's change this thing. I don't ever say, how do you want to, I always say when we're done changing it, what do you expect that outcome to be?

Ken: That's a GoTo. Brandon-ism in our leadership meetings is what are you trying to accomplish by changing? This helped me understand that because I know oftentimes I, I've learned and I've gotten better, I think over the last couple of years, I don't try to engineer the process anymore. I know we have a couple of people on our team, Megan's one that she, she likes to try to engineer and we're working on that.

Brandon: Yeah, so that normal, that's a normal human thing. I get it.

Ken: Don't engineer the process. Just give it to tell Brandon what the end result is that we're trying to accomplish.

Brandon: Right.

Ken: And then let him do the engineering side of it.

Brandon: I find myself doing that with lots of people. That's just, that's my GoTo is because I, I think people sometimes get caught up in, they think I want to affect some kind of change. Right. And then they set off on a course to do that, but quickly lose sight of the reason that they started in the first place. And then what happens when you, when you don't really clearly identify what we're trying to accomplish is that you end up getting somewhere, but it doesn't necessarily solve the problem you set out to solve. And sometimes it doesn't solve any problem, just creates a different way of doing something or creates three new problems and fixes one. So, so I, I try to keep that sort of in the back of my mind. So that's, that's sort of step one for me is really trying to understand what are we trying to do, right? And then I look at, okay, I, let's assume it's never going to be able to solve 100% of the problems. Let's try and go for 80% right? Let's, let's, let's get a version one working and not worry about it being perfect. Let's worry about it being a version one.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: And so then it's what's the most complicated, time-consuming thing that I feel like is one of the easier things that we can solve. Um, and let's get that knocked out and that's going to do two things. One, it's going to knock out a piece of the complication, but two, it's going to give us a momentum.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Because momentum I found is important for me and for a lot of people is being able to see the result of something you've done, fuels you to do the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing.

Ken: It goes back to the, the thing that I learned from Jeff Bezos about being a day one company, right? You, you always want to have momentum. You always want to be in, in a, in a forward progression, right? And you want to make quick decisions.

Brandon: And of course correct.

Ken: Course correct, Right. Because, you know, and I had this conversation earlier with MJ, um, who was sitting exactly where you were sitting when I was working at my desk and we were talking about this and I said, there's no, there's no one thing that you can do that's going to destroy the company. Like you can make a mistake and it's okay to make a mistake and whereas...

Brandon: But doing nothing can destroy it.

Ken: Right. But doing nothing can, right? Because then you become complacent and you're, the thing falls apart. And so for me, I knew that like every time something changes for the better, I feel that, right? I, I internalize that. So it helps, it helps fuel me along, but I also know that as we grow, the things that fire me up that motivate me aren't necessarily like I'm not motivated by, Oh, we've made this much money as a business or where we've accomplished this milestone in terms of reach. I get excited when we put out a new ad that gets a lot of engagement.

Brandon: I saw a new ad this morning that I hadn't seen. And it, it's rare that I see one of our ads having not already sort of previewed it at some point I was a, uh, the, the dog with a tail.

Ken: Oh, we make wieners wag. It's a Wiener dog.

Brandon: Yes. And very funny.

Ken: Thank you.

Brandon: And it pushes the envelope of what it does. I think beyond getting attention, it shows clients that we know how to get things that might not necessarily look like they should be approved, approved. Um, we know how to write very, very carefully sometimes because there's not all of our clients, in fact, not most of our clients, but some of our clients have products and services that they're promoting that if they're not promoted in the right way, aren't gonna pass a terms of service, they're not going to, they're gonna violate policy. They're not going to be able to run.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: And oftentimes we have very creative ways of looking at things and being able to make that happen. Um, while still painting inside the lines.

Ken: And I can tell you the secret to that wine.

Brandon: Wine.

Ken: Okay. No. Well, no. Um, for me, I like to push the envelope and push the edge a little bit. I know that some of our team tends to stay a little more conservative. It really depends on the product or service that we're writing for. That will dictate how, how much and of course what the client writes in the brief that that brief is so critical to that. So I look at it as you inherited a mess, you are like, no, this is pretty normal. And you just started systemizing things and creating the processes that make this thing work. What, what was like your biggest surprise aha. Over the course of, and I know that, you know, we've not planned for this. I didn't sit down and go, here's our list of conversational questions for this sit down. But like is, are there a few things that have surprised you along the way or that have kind of caught you off guard? You go, yeah. Wow, I didn't think about that.

Brandon: There's, there's a bunch of things that sort of fit into that category. So, so one of the things that I'm still kind of surprised about is, is we offer a bunch of different types of writing services, and it's rare that we find somebody that's asking for something that we don't already have on the menu, but there's one product that sells more than pretty much everything else combined. And it's still kind of surprising to me that that one product stands out that much. Right. It's, it's, it's an odd thing to me that there's a single skew that is, sells more than everything else combined probably, and multiple times of that.

Ken: Right. Um, the F word.

Brandon: Yes, Facebook ads. Correct. Um, don't know why that surprises me, but I expected that there would be a more sort of, even amount of, first of all other platforms, but, you know, email sequences and landing page copy and webpage copy and letters and that kind of stuff.

Ken: Right. I Google ads, LinkedIn ads.

Brandon: I mean we even do some weird, like niche-y things like with Amazon and there they used to call it enhanced brand content. They should call it something else. Now they changed their name.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Um, whatever that is. Um, and a few other things that, that, you know, they're nichey and I'd get that those wouldn't be as popular short term rental listings, right? You're buying a BNB stuff. Right? Um, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a little strange to me. That's probably not what you're looking for as far as I know.

Ken: But, I think Facebook and that's a, that's a good conversation to have. I think Facebook today dominates because that, that landscape is so, and I don't want to say oversaturated, but it is heavily populated with people who have taken online marketing courses who are sub, you know, now agencies.

Brandon: They're driving results for businesses.

Ken: Right, And so that tends to be the, you know, the platform of the day of the moment. And that will shift over time as new platforms emerge as tick tock gains popularity as, um, as somebody figures out something they can do with Google ads or YouTube ads, suddenly the love of a platform will adjust. And as it adjusts, we'll adjust with it because we're already doing it for those.

Brandon: Right. I like it. We haven't had anybody interested in us writing for tick-tock yet, but the product is what we would call a video script, right? We already have that as a product. We call it Instagram stories. We call it a YouTube video ads. We call it video script. We call it the captioning. We call it a bunch of things, but it's all the same. Same brain.

Ken: Right, well, and it's funny to me that we have to call it these different things because people call them those different things.

Brandon: That's, I get that.

Ken: You know, but if you go into like a McDonald's, a quarter pounder with cheese, a quarter of how much cheese everywhere you go.

Brandon: But yeah, but you could argue that a burger is a burger and they have a quarter pounder with cheese in it.

Ken: And they have a cheeseburger and they have a D. you're absolutely right. And I was gonna I was going to go there. You followed it up perfectly. So, so we just have the, the various varieties of those flavors available in the way people call them. What else has been like one of those, wow, that's through me or...

Brandon: Uh, so I, I also early on kind of, I think part of it goes back to at that, that lunch, maybe it was late lunch, whatever it was, tacos and margaritas, where I couldn't wrap my head around that you could actually have a real business off of $49 ads. Right. I also had presupposed that there was like a, a ceiling to the business where you know that it'll be, something may be interesting, but I didn't imagine it could grow to the scale it's grown to. And even when we got to our w, you know, we'd set this big lofty goal of, of a, a monthly amount, you know, that, that that translated into an annual amount. That was a seven-figure thing. Right. That seemed like that's a really big stretch. And now that doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Right? Like that's...

Ken: Right. Well, looking back like it's funny, the other day I was, I was in one of our accounts, Stripe or PayPal, and I was like, wow, we've processed a lot of money through this account. And I was like, I was a little shocked and, but at the same time, I realized that this is a service that is desperately needed for anyone in really any business. Not, I wouldn't say, you know, I used to say marketing because we focused on marketing, but that's really not what we focus on. We help every business if they need words for their business, whatever that business is, funeral financial planner, everyone needs words, whether it's a landing page, an email, we write them.

Brandon: That's the other crazy thing is that not there. So as, as much as we've grown, there's still way more people that have no idea that they need what we do then there are people who have grasped that and so there is, there's still so much more potential there.

Ken: It's, it's funny

Brandon: When I felt this all was way more nichey than it turns out that it probably is.

Ken: It's way broader than I think you thought. You thought it was like, okay, you know, you've got this very, very tight vertical.

Brandon: And part of it was the name. I mean ad zombies implies that we create ads and other than Facebook where else then and even today there's not a ton of ads on other platforms in that traditional copy first sense.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Right. Um, so it's, it's weird. The name doesn't do us probably all the favors that could, but it's also not the worst thing ever. So you don't know.

Ken: No, And everybody likes our zombies and they know our zombies and we have a brand that has been built. Now, you know, it's funny, I was looking at our, um, total sidetrack. I was looking at our Facebook account the other day, which as we know lately has been, um, traumatic.

Brandon: Sometimes easy to look at and sometimes a little more difficult.

Ken: Yeah, yeah. We've, we've had, uh, what five shutdowns in five weeks from Facebook and it's just because of an algorithm issue, but we think we know what's causing it. I'm talking to Facebook's global marketing team and finally getting some answers and, and hopefully they can fix the problem. I'm not violating copy problems. Something in their algorithm is being triggered by some of our ads, which has never caused a trigger before. So they're fixing that. But when I look at the Facebook pixel data and realize that we've had 24 million events that like blows my mind.

Brandon: You know, people that have come in contact with the brand because of, or attached to Facebook in some way, shape or form.

Ken: So 24 million-pixel events. And when I think when we look at the total revenue, I think Facebook only makes up 4% of our total revenue, if I remember correctly.

Brandon: Yeah, that, that's where we spend a big chunk of ad budget. Right? But I think a lot of people learned about who we are, what we do there, and then at some point down the road need us and come in through a different source. So it probably doesn't get all the attribution credit it deserves.

Ken: Right but, but beyond 28 days, Facebook doesn't...

Brandon: Right.

Ken: They don't get our love.

Brandon: Trust me, I understand that. But my other business is, is a traditional brick and mortar kind of thing and it's a, a much like a dentist where you don't need us until you need us. And so the 28-day window is not even close to long enough.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: So anything I've tried to do, I have to just sort of feel like Facebook might be doing something for me because there's no way to measure that in that in their world because of the way they work. And that's not a bad on them. It's just, just a fact of that other business though.

Ken: Right? Yeah, no, the other business is definitely a need based like, Oh my God. It's like, you know, you don't think about a plumber until you have a toilet backing up and, and your toilet is full and your bathtub is full of like, Oh my God, help.

Brandon: And the guy spending ad budget or hoping you remember their jingle. I mean, that's, that's it. Yeah. Pretty much.

Ken: Um, if, if looking, looking at it today, things are systemized and we have processes that work, what if, if looking at our processes now, what would you change or what would you fix if you could re-engineer any of what we have?

Brandon: I have many times, um, so probably you don't even know this, but there's changes to the, the stable platform and systems that we have. There's changes to that constantly.

Ken: Okay.

Brandon: There was changes made last night. Uh, there were changes made this morning. There's always, I, I look at systems and process as a, a, it's never finished, right? It's,

Ken: It's beta version.

Brandon: No. It's not beta, but is, is Apple ever done with releasing updates to operating systems?

Ken: No.

Brandon: Because there's improvements, there's fixes, there's tweaks, there's enhancements, there's new features, there's new, there's always, and for me that's, I look at systems and processes the same way. Um, you can fix things to death. You can, uh, one of my favorite sayings is if it ain't broke, fix it. Till it is right. That's easy to do. But if you pay attention, there's almost always places where you can make something better, easier, have checks and balances, um, improve the experience, make it more consistent in some way, shape or form, make improvements. And so I've always got a laundry list of things that are, are someday, I know when I get time I'm going to, and lately there's been a lot less new implementation and, and fixing of problems. And so some of those laundry-list items, there's trying to get tackled. So...

Ken: So what things am I not seeing that I should?

Brandon: Things that hopefully you'll never see, if you don't notice. That's a good thing. Right?

Ken: Okay.

Brandon: I believe that, that, that my job right is to empower people, people on the team to be able to do their job with the least amount of effort possible so that they can focus all their time and effort on delivering awesome copy. And the more they're having to think about the steps it takes to get there and the process and the procedure, the more work I have to do to make those things go away. Because ultimately we have our writers or creatives and I don't want them thinking about process. I want them thinking about creative.

Ken: Right. We want them being creative, living in the space that they do their best work in everything.

Brandon: So everything I can take off their plates that is outside of that creative realm, within reason. I want to do that. Um, I just, I want to make the, the stuff that they need to be focused on, appear in front of them and come to them and make it really simple with what, what should I be doing next? What's important right now? And if, if, if I can create something that has them always knowing, I just finished this. What's important now? Right. Answer that question. What's important now? What's important now W.I.M. the acronym, right? Um, if that's obvious, then things are working right.

Ken: So about a year and a half ago, I was in the middle of writing my first book.

Brandon: Okay.

Ken: We had something happened or you had a life event occur up in Idaho.

Brandon: Oh yeah, for my, my side passion, yes.

Ken: And I freaked out because we were just getting ready to go on summer vacation. We were going, family was going to California and I got a phone call and that you were in a hospital at a level one trauma center. And I'm like, what.

Brandon: On the 4th of July, I recall very well. Well, at the time.

Ken: Yeah, at the time, you didn't recall much at the time. Um, and so what happened was you were in a car accident, you were taken to level one trauma center

Brandon: And up to a second one.

Ken: Oh yeah, That was your goal yet. First you were taken to a smaller hospital and then they were like, ah, no trauma center.

Brandon: Yeah.

Ken: And you were moved to a trauma center, airlifted or driven?

Brandon: Driven through, it was a very comfortable ambulance.

Ken: Right.

Brandon: Well, I'm kidding.

Ken: How do you even remember any of that.

Brandon: I had broken ribs and a punctured lung and...

Ken: You were a mess.

Brandon: And things bleeding and yeah, it was, it was, it was not fun.

Ken: And so, and I, so we went to California and I'm like, Oh my gosh, honey, I'm not on vacation. I, I've gotta be operations again, which is terrible for me. It's terrible.

Brandon: It's better than nothing.

Ken: Right. But I realized that, Oh my gosh, we've got to have like redundancies and, and manuals and like, because we, and you document things as you do it, but we didn't have,

Brandon: Not to the extent that it needed to because I was in a run fast

Ken: And break things mode.

Brandon: Yeah. Let's, let's, let's try to get it. But, but probably, hopefully, what you also recognized is that um, being in that what I like to call the quarterback seat was probably substantially easier than it had been prior even though we were doing probably 10 times the volume at that point. So there was enough tools and things in place to make that manageable even for a guy who maybe it isn't your go-to talent. So that's the other thing I try to make sure is that there, there are guys who are the, the magic button makers, the, the tool builders, the, the system drivers, right. That fall in love with themselves and try to make it something that requires them to be a part of. And they do that for job security. They do that for a lot of reasons. I tried to do the opposite when the thing's working properly, it shouldn't require me and it should be able to be operated by just about any way and yeah, and it should be able to, something happens to me. You should be able to find somebody that can look at what's there and decode the mess, and figure out, okay, here's how this is working. I can fix that or change that or tweak that. And so part of strategically why we jumped on that platform and embraced it, the Podio platform, um, is it has a huge developer network. You have a relationship with somebody is something happened to me and I was gone tomorrow. Um, there's other people that can reverse engineer.

Ken: I would be really sad.

Brandon: Yeah. But, but, but, but the business will go on right there. There are people that can pick that ball up and run with it. And so, but it's not some weird thing.

Ken: It hit me at that moment though, how critical, uh, a good operations person is. Because when things like that happen, you go, Oh my God, how does the business function? Right? Because you had built all of these systems and processes and made them work. And, and I'm sitting here going, I don't know how any of this stuff works. And I felt a little bit lost at that moment. It was...

Brandon: Okay.

Ken: It was a little scary because we didn't have, we have a better infrastructure today.

Brandon: Today we've got more people in place that are just operationally focused. We've got everything really well documented.

Ken: Right? There's no, like everybody knows how everything works.

Brandon: Right.

Ken: Everybody who needs to know the writers don't need but, but the operational side, yes. People who need to know stuff, know stuff. And it's even weird to me that right now one of them is on vacation.

Brandon: Aren't two of them on vacation?

Ken: Two of them are on vacation. Right. And, Everything's fine.

Brandon: Yeah.

Ken: And that, that's a really hard, because you know, I'm a control freak.

Brandon: Right.

Ken: It's real. Like, I have a hard time letting go of stuff like that, but...

Brandon: But we have half dozen people that are well equipped to handle most anything that comes up.

Ken: And, and I've gotten way better. I've gotten way better at just breathing and just letting people do what they do. And, and it was interesting, um, I think it was last week, whatever it was, some night last week, you and I were texting and you were like, Hey God, I'm going to jump on a call. And, and it, it felt like we hadn't talked in a couple of weeks, which is not accurate, but it was just that things were running smoothly.

Brandon: Right.

Ken: And so we didn't have, like, there wasn't a need for this constant communication every day of like, Hey, we need to do this, we need to do that.

Brandon: And I think we'd both been traveling a bunch. And so our, our sort of standing weekly meeting didn't happen for several weeks in a row and we'd had a couple of chatty kind of conversations, but nothing that was like a quality, let's spend some time talking about where things are at.

Ken: And right. So, and, but it's nice when things are, are running smoothly because you can actually step back and get a big picture look and say, okay, what do we need to bolster up? What do we need to work on next? Right? What new we can go play with it.

Brandon: I like to go and do new things.

Ken: Right, So we want to, we want to exercise our brains a little bit in other spaces. So, and that's what we were able to do now. So, um, I'm just really grateful of that, that Gary had the insight to, to say, Hey, you need to find this person and you already know who this person is. Um, I'm grateful that you said yes when we had lunch.

Brandon: The funny thing about Gary is oftentimes he, he, he's, he's a guy that has a lot more wisdom than you expect at first glance. Right? But oftentimes he's telling you something that you've sort of inherently already know and he's got a unique way to empower you to feel like you have permission to do this thing that you sort of know you should be doing anyway.

Ken: Right, right. Well you've now met him a couple of times. So you, you know, I think at first you were like, why are you paying attention to this guy?

Brandon: Like I was aware of him only because, so in, in my other business, Ken, my other business partner, um, had brought him up years ago when he was doing in the early days with the, with the, the, it was before empathy but it will yeah.

Ken: Oh, Wine library

Brandon: Wine Library, and was trying to figure out the secret sauce of Gary and how he got all these followers and how he was not just getting followers. Cause at the end of the day, that's not important. It's what you do with that. Right? He was, he was using social to drive business and, and Ken, his big focus in everything he does is trying to figure out how to, how to get attention and eyeballs on the business. And so he was trying to reverse engineer what Gary was doing to figure out how to, how do I do some of that? Right. So I knew who Gary was through that context. Um, obviously understand a lot more about who he is now. Uh, but that's, so I knew of him, but in a different, I didn't understand that he had done all the things that he's done to this point now.

Ken: Yeah. He, you know, he's a, an incredibly insightful guy. Very smart guy. And, uh, and I know the first couple of times you're like, you're listening to this guy who has no connection to the business, but I think now you get an idea of who he is and why I listened to him. He's, he's built an incredible business and he knows what the hell he's doing.

Brandon: And regardless of all that, if you get something out of it and it helps you feel empowered to jumpstart shit and get moving, then right. Where's the harm in that.

Ken: And, or spark the next idea. Right. You know, you and I had been talking for a while about doing some, some other things that come off of this. You know, one of the, one of the things that has naturally come from the development of, of ad zombies is a lot of businesses are like, Hey, how did you, how did you grow your business so fast and how did you do this and could I pick your brain on this? And so suddenly an offshoot of that is consulting. And so we're talking with companies of different sizes and scales all over the country that are having us work with them. And so it's, it's, it's interesting how one business which started by accident in a spare bedroom in my house has grown to what it is. And I'm just glad you're a part of it cause it's fun.

Brandon: I'm glad to be here. It is fun, I'm having a good time.

Ken: Anyway and I'm sorry you didn't drink with me today because I have plenty of wine I had left before I came here and find him full and be that way.

Brandon: Maybe Um, the next time.

Ken: Anything you, anything you want to see for us for 2020, or like what if you're looking, if you're looking into the future, what do you want to see us do? Change, grow and evolve into,

Brandon: Now you put me on the spot.

Ken: Damn right.

Brandon: This is the area that I'm not strong in is, that that forward-looking, I, I'm more focused on what can I do to, to, to make the things that we have better. And when the new things come along, I can get sparked up real quick on ideas on how to enhance them, make them better, improve them, but the, uh, so I, I don't know how to answer that very well.

Ken: Okay. Well, and I can't tell you how to fix things that break, so we're in a good place to work well together. Yeah. Um, thanks for dropping in today. I know you, you made time to come over to this office. We strategically located this office like a mile.

Brandon: It's probably less than a mile.

Ken: Less than a mile from your other headquarters. So we, we are just a quick three-minute car ride in either direction

Brandon: And two traffic lights.

Ken: We are two traffic lights away from one another. So anyway, you rock. Thanks man. Later.