Balancing Accountability and Humility within Leadership with Dobbin Buck

our project managers which I think are second and none I've never seen better project managers anywhere what they do on a daily basis baffles me welcome to the let's talk business podcast a project of the PEX group gain valuable actionable ideas from the world's top Business Leaders to help you take the next step in your business journey and now here is your host Manny Hoffman coming to you from the PEX headquarters in Brooklyn New York this is the podcast for No Nonsense advice to help you learn grow and lead today I'm so excited to welcome our guest my good friend dabin Buck dabin is the co-owner and chief Revenue officer at get you wired get you wired is an award-winning fullservice digital marketing agency close to 50 full-time team members located in North Georgia D frequently shares his knowledge of business scalability cultural development operational efficiencies business development and profitability when the ecosystem get you wired supports and endorses in our conversation dman shares his extraordinary Journey from military service to marketing Mastery he also reveals how his diverse background including his time in the US Army and building museums exhibits shaped his leadership approach he emphasized the necessary of a clear agenda and competive team and providing a gripped account of empowering middle management to Foster Innovation and growth he also discusses the balance between humility and accountability comparing those values with effective leadership practices without further Ado here is my interview with Davin [Music] Buck DB thank you so much for joining me on the let's business podcast thank you Manny uh couldn't think of anywhere I'd rather be today yeah you see you're you're so nice you know you start off your day with a positivity and this this is the man I always known okay so our list should go back many many many years we both were partners with a company called infusion soft now a company called keep obviously we'll get into some of the Automation and where the company has been going and the whole industry has been going throughout the years but I think we started off way way way back when automation wasn't even a space but for our listeners we'll talk about automation but we had other guests speak about automation as well the reason why I I have you on the show because you have built a nice size agency we've done some creative stuff so I would want to speak about your leadership style and the growth you know the growth mechanism that you've been working culture and so on and so forth so far listeners give them just a bird's eye view as far as what you did before get you wired and ultimately what get you wired is all about so before get you wired my really two career I would say maybe not careers but I was a soldier in the US Army uh for a period then I went to college I was four years in the US Army I went to college and then um out of college I got into the Museum trade so I built museums for nearly a decade leading up to right around the year 2000 and so a lot of different projects around the world and by building museums what I mean is all of the theming and um interiors and exhibitory and the things inside of a museum so I work for an exhibit house that's specialized in attractions and museums for many years and um with 911 happening a lot of the money seized up in museums and corporate sponsors and different things like that so I had to make a shift and in the period of that shift I slowly found myself moving through several different jobs but then finally into the world of marketing because I had been really deep in in understanding um early on web development for museums for attracting people to them and had contracted a lot of that type of work so when I came into the marketing industry I had a lot of skills and understanding coming into it early on that uh led to me being able to to get in and um play a role in a full service marketing agency and early on um get you wired which is the name of my company I was uh really focused on website design and SEO conversion and things like that and then slowly over the years we got into marketing Automation and a lot of advanced marketing principles that we uh are uh stewards of today but um get you wired started out as a a five person team as a matter of fact get you wired turned uh 22 years old as of April so officially it's 22 years old started out as a five person team now we have a 40 some odd person team I'm not exactly sure specifically how many um team members we have but it's 40 some team members and uh it's really been interesting journey and I've got to meet a lot of amazing people like yourself and I think that's been one of the greatest Gifts of this journey is the company I keep and the really cool people that I'm able to meet when I'm traveling and and you know doing business with and all of that beautiful beautiful so I want to dive into some some fundamentals because um I paid attention probably our listeners as well um you're you know you have an A agency you have a company you and you dabbled like and you had to think twice to see how many employees do we currently have which must be something that you have you know set up a system in growth as far as other people that are running day-to-day operations let me ask you a a very fundamental question especially in the agency and this is something people wrestle a lot with because in the creative agency you working with creative people creative people are are sometimes not a typical assembly line where you could say this is a wouse this is how you got to take over the boxes Pick and Pack and get in into a truck or whatever it is these are people that are using their brains most of the day how is leadership different how much had you have you had to learn leadership how to deal with the creative industry wow that's a a deep question Manny um I'm still learning and it's constantly changing it's constantly evolving and what creative thoughtful and talent individuals want in a relationship is constantly shifting and evolving with the time over the last couple decades it's a lot different with hiring training supporting and motivating team members than now than than it was uh than it was early on so I would say the big change that has come is in as an owner as a leader in in a company is training up middle management to become optimizers so there's this thought process with business owners that this company's going to go nowhere unless I do it unless I have the vision unless I come up with the answers unless I move this train forward and when I look back in time I know that my current team members know more about agency and know more about how to successfully serve our clients than I did 10 15 years ago they're way more advanced than I used to be while I owned and ran the company so it would only make sense that these same people should be charged with moving the company forward and optimizing it I want to play a role in that of course the leadership team wants to play a role in it but we've called Upon Our middle management our upper leadership project managers different people within the company to improve the company and bring their creativity to it so ownership and a deeper understanding of what it takes to keep keep the company operational both creatively and financially has I think been a real motivator for people because ultimately at the end of the day we all want to be to some degree in charge of ourselves and in charge of our destiny and when we allow people that sort of Freedom or that sort of responsibility they feel as though and they truly do have a better hand in the future of the company that they've aligned themselves with and the safety of their families and the things the reasons why they're working in the first place that's a great answer let me ask you a followup um question is because you mentioned in in the answer um giving people the autonomy to be able to be part of the building process not just the followers but also being part of the suggestions and coming up with the ideas and how to move the business forward we hear a lot of times from leaders is that sometimes my vision gets diluted or all of a sudden I turn myself around it's not a company that actually wanted to build because other people are just taking it to what they feel is the destiny of the business and so on and so forth how do you make sure that there's synchronization between you as a leader and the middle management to make sure that you're constantly in sync of how the company needs to operate internally and externally well it's a regular cas Cadence of communication and feedback loop and approval processes from the leadership team so we have regular meetings scheduled to where we're going over our profitability our gross revenue all the the financial numbers and in those periods we're talking about uh potential ways to optimize our operational or creative processes all of it winds up coming back to a benefit of higher profitability because the more efficient you are in in any aspect of a company ideally you're going to see that in the in the numbers so we just communicate at a high level uh on a on a weekly basis some things are going on on a daily basis with our teams and it's really worked out over the last several years it's been a priority for the owners and leadership team of our company to instill this in in our leaders that are that are just beneath us on the or chart and we've been rewarded in so many ways it's just been amazing I like what you said before and I want to know I want to know if this is a deliberate word that you're using you mentioned that the middle management um is they are optimizers is this a word that you actually use internally just to keep them uh the mindset of your job is to constantly optimize it is the word that I use constantly as a matter of fact I'm sure people are tired of hearing it I'm I use it so much but that's what it is it's constantly optimizing we're we're always moving forward and there are practices of optimization that go from ownership all the way through the to coders or copywriters or any of the variety of skill sets it goes It goes all the way through the company and there's optimization being done on a singular human brais on a team basis on a channel basis and on a company basis I want to ask you a a personal question though um you're a very humble guy um every time I met with you um very humble willing to share what I hear a lot of a lot of leaders wrestling with is I'm too humble to be strict in my business I'm too humble to hold people accountable and they feel that humbleness as a leader is sometimes a sign of weakness they cannot get their way with their with their teams I know you have a very solid team and you work very strong with your team how do you overcome making sure that yes I'm a humble leader yet this is the non-negotiables so with humility what it suggests is that I don't have all the answers all the time I may have some answers but I don't have all the answers and I rely on other people to see the mission through and believe me I do the aspect of everything not going Loosey Goosey and being ineffective is that we have very specific metrics and goals in place that the team is acutely aware of so as a leadership team and on down people are held accountable for very specific goals on a daily weekly monthly quarterly and ual basis and that is clearly documented and spoke of so as long as those things those items are being honored then all the space between those is creativity and optimization and those items that we're holding people accountable they may they inevitably evolve over the course of the year they're changing but not abruptly they're changing in a logical manner but we have great clarity around our expectations and we take that very seriously and if someone is not living up to one of those expectations let's say it might be gross revenue coming into a certain Channel we know what our profitability is so that's important but we know that we need a certain amount of gross revenue in in there so it may be a sales situation that we're that we're looking at it may be a um cycling work type of situation to where we're not moving the clients through the process quick enough to have effective uh recurring billing that sort of things so instead of saying oh you didn't do this right or oh you're fa in your mission it's how can we get in there lock arms to straighten this out now fortunately it isn't big differences that we're having to go through it's it's very fine valleys that we're oh we're seeing this go down because we're paying attention to things on at such a Cadence that we can start to see something slide and we pay close attention to our data our over overall employee efficiencies down to IND individual employees all sorts of things that we're looking at so not a lot slips by us to where we get into emergency mode in regards to this stuff so in answer to your question people know what they have to do and I haven't had to get aggravated or you know get really deeply frustrated because generally the people that are charged with such things are already way ahead of me oh wow yeah they they say that you know once upon a time a CEO of a company knew everything every you know every part of the company that if they would be locked in a room they could do themselves today with you know we involved so much the last 10 15 years speak to a CEO without let's say speak about it or cyber security they might have a Fortune 50 company Fortune 500 company they might make it a millions of dollar decision on cyber security but they don't know it they've not gone through the ropes there and same is now with automation or creativity as you mentioned this you know the market is going so fast so many creative ideas and stuff that sometimes the CEO has to believe in their people and and in some of the information that they that that they share and they come up with absolutely I couldn't agree more with that and I'll be the first person to say that I understand at a high level and I'm very comfortable with that what's going on in the company I'm very comfortable with my understanding of the marketing and the technologies that we use but once you get into the nitty-gritty of it I fall out like I am not I don't have a technical understanding of everything that we do and then as an example our project managers which I I think are second to none I've I've never seen better project managers anywhere what they do on a daily basis baffles me I could never do I'm I'm I don't I'm not built to be able to do what they do effectively I would be a basket case they handle so much work so many people do it effectively and give the people that charged with our employees a great feeling of being supported and then likewise on the other side of the spectrum give our client base that same great feeling that they have a true partner that cares about them they they're right on that fulcrum of those two worlds and they do it so effectively um I'm just amazed daily at what they're able to do wow and I'll get you wir has been uh earned mult multiple um you know Awards related to culture company culture I think um you were the like awarded fourth best company to work work in Georgia and other other Awards I know that this is you know from the conversations we had in the past that this was a priority for the company from the get-go I know it's you know get you is known for the cabin even the office space I guess my question to you is how important is culture to you and and the follow-up question to that would be that especially now when you know the econom is not at its peak and you see a lot of companies having to shuffle their budgeting from one thing to the other and you could see a lot of companies cutting down on stuff that are let's call it fall into the bucket of culture because they don't see a clear Roi on okay those activities or those incentives or whatever it is what can you share how important culture is to you and how much do you contribute the success of get you wired to the culture youve been able to build great questions culture is extremely important to get you wired and I really think it it early on was maybe going back 12 13 years when we really started focusing on our culture has been one of the things that has drawn people to us you mentioned the cabin during Co everybody started working from home and when we passed through Co nobody wanted to come back even to the cabin even to the cabin uh because some people are driving an hour some people a half an hour each way they have families all that sort of thing and so we wound up turning the cabin into an Airbnb so it sleeps up to 20 people and we keep it rented out all the time like it's been a great investment for us to turn the cabin into a vacation rental for small events small groups family reunions weddings that sort of thing and then if we want to use the cabin for one of our own events it's there for us we can block out the time but we aren't working out of the cabin anymore now it's all remote all remote it's all remote and that poses its own cultural uh issues because we used to be all together and we were seeing each other every day and closely knit physically and so we've really had to up our game around how individual teams work and work amongst themselves and communicate with themselves to replace that connectivity so morning meetings and mentorship programs and different things we have within the company gives that human connection and and we still get together in person quarterly team building events we're getting ready to have another one on August 23rd we're going to a camp up in the woods and we're going to be doing all sorts of team building events that u a company that we hired uh has figured out for us and then we're breaking into teams and doing some sort of Geocaching finding Hidden Treasures in the woods and things like that so we're doing that on a quarterly basis we have our annual December holiday um party that we have and then we have some optional get togethers that occur throughout the year so we really PID close attention to that but when you know when people think about culture they're thinking about maybe I don't mean to generalize but the pingpong table in the room or you know some sort of cool the uh fireman's pole that goes from the Second Story down to the first story of a place or all the cool stuff like Google or Apple you know has in their facilities but what I've come to learn about culture is that it's not really about all the little fun little extras that a company throws in there it's really about the depth of the relationship in the teams and I spoke at an event a few months ago and I have a a part of my slide deck is about um Elizabeth's recipes for successful team management Elizabeth is my wife she's the COO of the company and I had finished this deck and I asked her a few questions as and she started rambling off all these things she does to instill culture across the agency pods the teams we have project managers developers and creatives each dedicated under different project managers in our agency and she started unleashing this like Bountiful wisdom that I was only partially aware of and so I just copied her and added it to my deck and it's really about leave no person behind when one person has a problem we all have a problem we stop what we're doing we rally around them and we don't let them go into that deep dark lonely place that says you know I'm in big trouble here and I'm alone nobody feels alone we work together we instill that and when we make mistakes as individuals or as teams we break down those failures mistakes things that might be construed as a error and we understand it and we improve on it and I would say that it's our failures our small failures throughout the years that have allowed us to learn and to grow into what we are today John Maxwell talks a lot about failing forward and has has that broken down as far as one would want to go into that but I completely agree with it and so when you have a team in a culture that doesn't lay blame on individuals when they're falling short but rallies around them and then looks at those as an opportunity to improve you've really got something and that's back to optimization when that's done on a hour toour daily basis it can change a company and it keeps people engaged and it keeps people feeling like they're part of something amazing this is um very powerful I want to go back to um because you mentioned uh and this is something that I did not know that you went fully remote um and this is something our own company has been wrestling and I think there's hundreds of other companies that have been wrestling as well you know we are not remote but we are like there's a a lot of employees that are hybrid since Co it I always say that that it's a totally different style of of of of building a business and culture has to be done totally differently if it's a in-person company or if it's a remote company my question is was that an easy transition for get you wired did you really focus on okay how do we going to replicate our existing culture and then come up with programs like is that a ongoing challenge that the company's having or you feel that you figure it out at this point it's there great question because I had a lot of fear around it myself we were previously before Co we were doing some hybrid experimentation to where people would come in certain days of the week and and certain roles were remote the creatives were allowed to stay home so design and copywriting they were allowed to work from home uh because they tend to work better in their own Zone they tend to be looser and more free and more creative for whatever reason I can understand that so we were already had systems in place to communicate and care for and make sure for employees and make sure that things were were going well so when we did wind up going fully remote really all of the operational procedures were in place the only thing that needed to be adjusted was how do we fill the void on the cultural end and I've already describe some of the things that that we've done but it has not been a difficult transition for us as a matter of fact I would say things are running more efficiently and effectively remotely than they were when we were all together in the headquarters the cabin tell me about that like what are you using for the like the central hub for communication to make sure everybody's up to is up to speed on everything well we're using Google workspace for our internal Communications everything is on Google now and we have in the past used every different system that you could for internal uh systems we were using Discord prior to going to um Google mainly because a lot of these systems you're paying per seat and then when you get up to 40 some employees it gets real expensive really quick so we're a small business but we have to be conscious of software costs and all of that sort of thing so Discord was very inexpensive and we figured out how to wire our company and that I know a lot of teams use slack and there's a variety of different different options and we use slack every day many of our clients community Comm unicate with us through slack so it's not like we're slack free but internally we're using Google all over the place and um our video meetings are through Google meet and we're having you know regular cadences of of internal meetings with team members so technology hasn't been difficult as a matter of fact technology is so much easier today than it ever was um it's really about mitigating cost and deciding you know how much you want to spend here how much you want to spend there you know same thing with culture you mentioned earlier a lot of companies are starting to slide on culture because of the inherent cost and the how it impacts profitability because ultimately hey you can just throw away culture and your profitability will shoot up by you know four points or something whatever you know whatever you were originally putting into it but the thing about it is is cool cultural stuff like the events the get togethers if you're creative it doesn't have to be expensive it just requires some thoughtfulness some care and taking the time to figure out you know how to do things within an economy that will be meaningful for your people yeah just um um actually driving in today to the office I I listened to an episode on Starbucks and Howard SCH spoke about how much from the get-go they invested in their people and in different programs he said his average um um their 2x employee retention versus the industry standard so talk about people leaving earlier and retraining and so on and so forth thinking about savings you know you know if you're looking at from a p&l perspective sometimes if you invest properly on the culture um ultimately you have people sticking around longer liking it referring other companies other people to come join the company and so on so forth I want to spend a couple of minutes and I think this I wouldn't do justice for my audience if I wouldn't um speaking on on on how you set up your agency because one of the biggest challenges in Creative agencies is the scalability part and I know we have talked in person many times about it you have a concept called the pods and that's how you structure your clients could you share some of it publicly like how the structure works in order to make sure that it's up for scale sure absolutely with the pods or teams what they are is really they're each their own individual agency so they have everything that they need within them to be able to serve our customer base whether they're influencers or Enterprise level industry or whoever we're happen to be working with at the time under each project manager they have a team of coders and creatives and strategists and admin type implementation people that are able to serve those customers so they work as individual teams but they work closely together it's a very it's a strange hybrid they aren't like Islands the we have three such pods right now and they the project managers work very closely together and communicate well with one another and then we also share Talent from one pod now to the other so everything is timed on a on a availability a whiteboard that's a piece of software that we developed for ourselves to where we can see you know who is dedicated to what project across the entire company and so we're able to share and leverage Talent across teams but it's done in a very organized manner whereas early on it was really it this is this pod this is this pod this is this pod and their sort of islands we've really pulled them together and I give credit to my wife Elizabeth and our senior project manager uh Desiree um have gone to just a lot of effort to figure out the formula for that it's been serving us well but it is a great way to segment relationships and also team members because we have once again culturally we have morning team meetings each team each channel has its own morning get togethers to make sure they're starting off the day properly and normally there's one big meeting during the week normally on Fridays it's sort of a finish up the week make make sure everything is is clear type of Rhythm so uh the pods have continued to be a thing but they're a little bit more Blended and this goes back to the Mystique of how they do things that I don't get they it works it works for them it's organized but that's the magic of what those project managers do got it so walk me through so let's say a client um inquiries on the website about using get you wired for this you know for a project or services and then they will be assigned to a team based on the scope of work or based on availability like what would be the first uh defining factor of of which pod is getting that interestingly enough we have a specific team that now Scopes so when we're scoping projects um we get paid to scope projects so we charge for scoping with the people that we're working with and I would say in 90% of the cases there are situations where I decide I'm going to let's just scope this out but we go to Great pains to clearly document and scope what we're getting into we do that for reasons one the clients can see that we put a great deal of intention creativity and effort in understanding what they want accomplished secondly when we go from the what we'll call the sales engineering or Blueprinting scoping period and hand it off to a project manager they have a very clear path to success for that client and they can go back and speak to the um engineer that scoped or the strategist that scoped so it's not like oh here you go good luck it but they have a blueprint that they can work from that they can assign their timelines their tasks and most of that is really done in the scoping process to begin with so we understand what level of um labor is going to be needed what the what the time frames on it are what our expectations of the clients are everything that you would normally imagine and so in deciding that we hand it to a project manager and then that project manager becomes the primary contact for that relationship there are exceptions to the rule that there are certain relationships that I'm the highlevel Contracting manager and relationship owner of certain relationships but more often than not they it's their relationship and that's been going great so I like it so basically it comes in it gets scoped out by the team and that that that then it gets um passed on to a team for execution but the PE the team that's scoped it out will always be there to support uh the team to make sure that that they delivering according to the expectations of the client absolutely obviously I need to I need to ask you a question when the next time you're going fishing that's a great question um maybe this weekend see it's summer here in in Georgia and so I have fishing 20 feet from me right here so I live on a river and there's trout that that live here and so it's very easy to get out and fly fish at my house but in the summer the water temperature gets above 70 so I catch an release trout here and so it's unhealthy to catch them or they'll die so even if I catch and release them at temperatures above 70° within 30 minutes they'll be Belly Up from lactic acid and different things that that occur in their body so I don't fish as much in the summer unless I'm heading to the beach or I'm traveling somewhere but I was just up in Detroit a couple weeks ago and went out on um on a boat up there and caught a nice uh northern pike on the fly to everyone's amazement and uh and set it free so that's uh you know I'm always fishing or I'm always thinking about fishing anyway the other thing I'm I'm doing all the time the big you know as far as caring for myself is um I'm reading every day I read probably depending on how big the book or whatever I read a book about once a week or finish a book every week or every other week um and also uh daily meditation I feel that for maintaining my sanity as a b business owner and keeping my mind clear and calm and not filled with all the intellectual noise that my brain can generate if I calm it twice a day it really keeps me on an even Kel and keeps me more focused in intentional beautiful beautiful uh where could people find out more about you about the company get you w what is the best contact infa well www.g G the letter UWI d.com is our main website and I'm rebuilding it right now so within a month or so you should see a new website appearing on a personal note if people want to see me in um all my fly fish Glory I am dobin do obb n on Instagram so there's a lot of uh fly fishing pictures and um things there and I'm very easy to get ah hold of if anybody has any questions about um our culture or how I run things I'm very open to um sharing that information I'm dobin buck and I'm the only dobin buck that I know of in the world so I'm real easy to find on social media or um uh just look me up on Google and you'll be able to find me in about three minutes beautiful for the links resources as mentioned this EP check out the show notes at www.ps group.com podcast and for our listeners that are listening to this via audio we re redid our website recently a couple of months ago now if you go to PSG group.com podcast you could see the video version you could see the audio version you could do the transcript you could see the Practical pointers all the links to to to the that was mentioned in this episode so a lot of good resources on every episode so if you have not checked out our website um please do so at p.com podcast let's close with a four rapid fire questions are you ready oh boy here we go okay number one is the easy one a book that changed your life a book that changed my life um this last year a book that I've given a lot of credit to and I'm going to give it to again is um Rick Ruben's new book about creativity forget the exact name of it but it it it opened up a lot of thought processes for me and I've been really captivated by him and his thought process not really what people consider a business book but it had a big impact on me over the last year of the way I look at things number two a piece of advice that you got that you'll never forget don't take yourself so seriously is a real good piece of advice um I take what I do seriously and I'm intentional with the things that I do but keep you know keeping myself right sized and really trying to be as peaceful and still as possible throughout this journey has been one of the greatest gifts I've received beautiful number three anything you wish you could go back and do differently no nothing because every terrible thing that I've gone through every mistake that I've made has led me to where I am today and I wouldn't want to risk not having the valuable people and the things that I have in my life today I wouldn't change a thing you know beautiful and last and final question what's still on your bucket list to achieve two months in Japan pan fly fishing meditating and absorbing the Japanese culture is a real bucket list item uh for me that I am planning out and I'm very excited about within the next two years Dum thank you so much for joining us I know your time is valuable that is why in the name of our listeners will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been a blast thank you so much vennie always a pleasure appreciate [Music] you that's my conversation with dob and buck my takeaway from this one number one effective leadership requires balancing humility and accountability leaders should recognize that they don't have all the answers and must rely their team's experience while maintaining clear metrics and goals to ensure everyone stays aligned and productive number two transitioning to a fully remote work environment can be challenging but man man in with enhanced communication strategies will help regular morning meetings mentorship programs and team building events can help maintain a strong company culture even when working remotely number three regular and transparent communication is key to synchronizing vision and operations within a company weekly and daily meetings to discuss goals performance and potential optimization help keep everyone on the same page and moving towards common objective and number four deep relationships would in teams are fundamental to thriving company culture investing in team building activities and event forces connectivity and collaboration crucial for cohesive and motivated Workforce last number five Training empowering middle management to become optimizers within the company is critical that will help you make sure that you're optimizing your team's performance and at the same time improving your bottom line and that's a wrap for today's episode of the let's look business podcast I hope you enjoyed the Practical non-nonsense advice that our guest shared if you found value and listening I would be so grateful if you could share the episode with your friends and if you could give the show a five star rating on Apple podcast or wherever platform you listen subscribe to the show and get notified every time we publish a new episode The let talk business podcast is a Pex group original production until next time make it a great day he