An Agency Story

When Trauma Becomes Direction - RicketyRoo

• Russel Dubree / Blake Denman • Episode 162

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Company: RicketyRoo

Guest: Blake Denman

Year Started: 2009

Employees: 11-25

Some stories start with ambition, this one starts with a crash. In this episode, Blake Denman, founder of RicketyRoo, shares how a near-fatal accident and a long recovery reshaped his perspective on business, leadership, and life. 

Key Takeaways

  • How trauma can transform the way you lead and make decisions
  • The “User Guide” system RicketyRoo uses to strengthen remote culture
  • Why self-awareness and communication beat rigid policies 
  • The surprising role anxiety plays in focus and performance
  • How trust became the foundation of Blake’s agency environment

Want a more clarity and control for your agency in 2026? I have three coaching spots available. Let’s see if one is right for you. Visit AnAgencyStory.com and click “Let’s Talk.”

Russel:

Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where owners and experts share the real journey, the early struggles, the breakthrough moments, and everything in between. I'm your host Russel Dubree, former eight figure agency owner turned business coach, sold my agency and now helps agency leaders create their ideal business. Every agency has a story, and this is your front row seat. This is an agency story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Blake Denman with RicketyRoo with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Blake. Thanks for having me. Well, excited to be here, want to learn all kinds of things about your agency, but start us off. What does RicketyRoo do and who do you do it for?

Blake:

We primarily do local S-E-O-S-E-O and paid search marketing. We'll also build websites, and then our newest service that we're starting to offer more and more is what we call SXO search experience optimization mainly. Conversion optimization for organic and who we do it for. We work a fair amount in healthcare, legal, and home services.

Russel:

Great elevator pitch. Sounds like you've got that down and uh, we'll certainly learn a lot more about how you do that for the customers and the specific ones and all that good stuff. But let's go back and let's talk about Young Blake and what were his aspirations, goals, hopes, dreams, et cetera. And eventually we'll get to how that all turned into starting an agency.

Blake:

I started the company February of 2009 and it was a means to an end. I worked for a company that was, you know, a telemarketing company where they had 50 telemarketers dialing for dollars, selling local SEO. I worked in the production apartment. I got the job because I could type fast. I started there in January of 2007 and then left there February, 2009 to go out on my own just to freelance. But during that time working for them, I became a production manager. Phone up to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, got trained up in what was then called, their START program is for Google Ads, but agencies took that department over, which wasn't profitable within 90 days. It was very profitable and then I had no support. I was doing everything, so then went on my own. I mainly just wanted to focus on school, which I was researching as an EMT. I was gonna move to Arizona, go straight to paramedic school, and then become a paramedic firefighter like my grandfather was. And nine months in, so that was October 5th, 2009, I was riding a fixed gear road bike with no helmet, about 20 miles into a ride. Lost control. Went up and over the bars and landed on my head, ugh, and had a severe traumatic brain injury. Had a fractured skull bleed in my brain. I was in the chemical induced coma, which automatically made me a liability so I could actually never fulfill that career. And then kind of hobble along for a little bit, kind of drifting through life, and then met my now wife and realized like it'd be kind of cool if I didn't have to do all the work anymore. Wow. And then slowly started to kind of grow up from there.

Russel:

What a rough experience. At the time, your ideal career path and, uh, to recover from that. So, um, are you fine and well or has that caused lingering things in terms of having an injury like that? Couple months

Blake:

after the injury, I had some issues with like short-term memory loss. Then now kind of went away, had a pretty big personality shift, uh, which, you know, I like who I am. I don't really think there's any way of getting back to the way I used to be, but I still like to read up on new ways to try and improve brain health and constantly tinker and test and, you know, seek other modalities to improve.

Russel:

Well I'm sure it sounds like you've probably run down the path of expert. You can give us some great tips on how, um, injury or not, where we can all have better brain health. Which is a certainly an important thing to take care of. Take care of your brain. Yeah. So you started an agency, and I guess it was your previous career where you really felt like you had the skill of what you were bringing to the table, but yeah. How did you specifically decide, oh, this is exactly what I'm gonna do. This is gonna be my agency.

Blake:

I worked with this, uh, it was like a business consultant or a coach, and. He kind of had me do like some, I guess what we call like a vivid vision planning, like what would my ideal kind of company be? And I really never set out to like, okay, I'm gonna have an agency and then wanna do all this. And it just kind of naturally progressed. And then once I saw the possibilities, the heart of it, like I really like helping people. It's one of the reasons why we still like to work with small to medium-sized businesses. We're getting more and more into enterprise type deals, but like helping people, like seeing the results we're able to bring for them and when they're actually able to hire people or take a vacation, you know, that makes me feel good. And for the agency itself, like my overarching goals, I'm trying to build the agency everybody in my industry wants to work at, so I kind of look at it. Like a professional sports team, I need to attract good talent. Once I get the good talent, I need to keep them happy. Compensation is a part of it, but it's not the end all be all. It's not a secret. It's all on our about page on our website. Like I just thought what would attract me to go work for a company? And that's

Russel:

just what we offer. There's no shortage of things that, that path, that endeavor, that focus has created. But. I wanna go back to what sounds like an interesting thing that you honestly don't hear too often is getting a coach or getting that kind of guidance extremely early on in the process. It sounds like, you know, most folks wait till they hit a wall or get stuck, so I'm just curious, how did you know to do something like that even before you got stuck?

Blake:

The first GI was working with, he didn't have any experience with. Digital agency, but he kind of like showed me the possibilities of like, oh, this is what a coach can actually do. And the coach I was working with up until the end of last year, he's one of my dearest friends now, uh, but he had successfully built, his agency, hired a CEO to take over, and then he just remains like on the board of directors. The company got fully acquired by a larger firm a year or two ago, so he had built something that I was wanting to build and had an exit. I don't really have, like, I'm starting to kind of think about potentially selling the next five or so years, but it's not like the actual like, oh, this is the only goal I have for the company. When I first saw him online, I thought he was full of crap. I just didn't buy into it. But then I started seeing his actual work and his work product and it was really good for like actual clients in the same space that I'm in. And then I was like, okay, this guy actually knows something.'cause like I had no idea. Like I had read Traction by Jocko Willink and the E-Myth and the only other experience I have with the agency, any agency stuff was working at a telemarketing company. I didn't wanna build a tall marketing company, so I figured Okay. I can see where

Russel:

that would be problematic. Yeah, just a little bit. Awesome. Well, great insight on your part. I mean, obviously I'm biased, but it's, you know, it's something I believe in the power of, and you know, always had to coach in my entrepreneurial endeavors. So yeah, thanks for sharing that experience. So let's get back to this track of, you know, you're trying to create this really ideal workplace company and how long it was into your journey chronologically actually, but you went remote before going remote was cool to do. So I assume that somewhat aligns with that thought process of what you shared with the trying to company you're trying to create. But how did you arrive at that decision and we'll dive even deeper into that process for you.

Blake:

Yeah, initially like my. Vision for the agency was, you know, having a downtown office. I live in Bend, Oregon, population of a hundred thousand people, you know, with ping pong tables and you know, just have like a really cool company vibe there. But the thing was, there wasn't a ton of talent or a lot of experience in, you know, living area with less like a, this was probably six or seven years ago. I was thinking about this a lot more and it's like, well. If we go remote, then that opens up a talent pool to the entire country and it won't have the massive expense of a big office in the future. Okay. It kind of makes sense.

Russel:

A lot of people went remote, kind of forced to during the pandemic in some ways, and just stayed there. Their status quo was. Unnaturally upset, but in this case you intentionally did it. But what were just some of the key elements of that process that you had to think about as you were going through that in a more natural way? It

Blake:

mainly has to do with like, well, I don't want the physical occasion of a really good person to be li the eliminating factor for them to come work for me. I think one of the hardest things. We have employees in, I think nine different states across the country, and each state is uniquely different in setting up withholding numbers. SUI and P-F-M-L-A, all different tax accounts and just to run payroll. They're all employees, or not independent contractors could hire out a PEO to take care of all that, but they're kind of pricey. So when we hire an employee, it's something I get to figure out. It was mainly just not wanting location to be, yeah, the end all, be all for talent.

Russel:

Speaking of which, I gotta go on a little tangent there of just this notion of PO we had like a very brief period where we had a PEO and I don't know, I need someone to out there to make a business case for me on why we would want to pay the prices and do a PEO. I can't find it. I don't know. You experienced it or you clearly looked at it, I guess you could say, are you that guy? Or do I need to find someone else to gimme that? That justification.

Blake:

I can't justify a P right now where I look at it and go, it's gonna cost how much per month and this is what the handle. And I look at it and go like, well, me setting up one state takes all, but you know, maybe a couple hours max total, then wait for confirmation in mail. Or via email. Some states are really easy to work with. Colorado is one of them, or there's one website and then within two minutes you have all of your numbers and your rates and boom, it's beautiful. But some states are much more difficult. You know, they send everything by paper mail, and then there's unit or division numbers that they don't tell you about. I don't know if we were maybe double the size we currently are, and I. Didn't have somebody that was running HR would probably make a case for pe for hiring a PEO company.

Russel:

Maybe then, I don't know, I'm still not convinced some admin help or some other ways that, uh, can make that a better experience. Anyway, that's just me. There we go. I'll get off that soapbox. Uh, but if there's someone out there listening that you know, can make a better case. I'm all ears. But if Russell's giving advice in day, I say, eh, I'm gonna shy away from those PEOs. All right. Well, so obviously a lot of mechanical aspects and administrative, et cetera to make this happen and pull it off, you know, going back to your giving your fundamental purpose of really wanting to create a great environment in a remote setting, what are just some top of mind ways where you've been able to create that great environment remotely?

Blake:

One thing which we actually rolled out. Must have been last year was everybody has a user guide. Like I have a user guide, it's called Blake's User Guide, what it's like working with me and it talks about communication styles, preferences, availability, where there was some feedback I received that, you know, there was somebody on the team that I hadn't spoken with in maybe six weeks. They thought I was upset with them, so they had to put clearly in my user guide. Like, if I haven't talked with you in some time and you're not like my direct report, like I'm not mad at you. I'm not even thinking about you. That means you're doing good work. And just had to kind of like set the cadence of like, Hey, here's what, like, it's something I'm always working on is like being a better communicator. That's been one of my limitations is, you know, constantly communicating with everybody on the team. But then setting like the standard, saying like, Hey, if I haven't talked to you in a little bit of time, I'm not mad at you. If I have something to bring to your attention, I'm gonna bring it to you right then and there instead of letting it fester and become a bigger problem than it should be.

Russel:

Okay. All right. I gotta know more. I mean, this sounds pretty cool, even I'll Beit a little bit nerdy, but hey, guess what? We're in a nerdy tech space, so that makes perfect sense. How are you creating these for someone that's, let's say new coming on board, uh, I'm just fascinated by this process. So when we have a new hire that's

Blake:

onboarding part of that through, we use Bamboo HR for like all of our onboarding. One of the things that we asked, the new hire to create is their own user guide and they get to see everybody else's user guides and there's a template that they then get to fill out for themselves. And some people on our team have, you know, they're just in Google Docs. Mine's very plain, black and white. Some people have added gifts, memes, colorful backgrounds, because that's how they wanted to show. That was super helpful. Other than that, like. With, you know, culture and that stuff. It's way more of like, I kind of set the initial tone, but then the rest of the team are the ones who have like constantly like evolved and changed it to match our overall

Russel:

side. Ah, that's the beauty of good culture. It sounds like a bad term. Bacteria in a dish and just grows and amongst itself, uh, a Petri dish. It's a scientific process. Yeah. Sounds like a really cool thing. You've let people make it through. Added some entertainment value. So I can see all the mechanics, how this works, you know, I guess I'm just curious in practicum, how often are people in the business using it, reverting to it, checking it out beyond just the creation of it?

Blake:

I think when we initially launched them all, um, we asked everybody to kind of look through, and now I believe they're revisited on at least a quarterly basis. In Slack everyone's, or linked in their Slack profiles for easy access. Okay. All right,

Russel:

so I guess tons of people moving in and out revolving doors. Once you've created and sounds like get to know someone, essentially you've got some set increments where it's, you're gonna make sure to make it sort up to revisit it. But getting to know someone and having taken a look at it, it's easy to provide the context and it's not like you gotta pull it out every day, it sounds like, in that sense that. I know there's gotta be something else. Cool. You've done. So what else comes to mind and we'll, we'll go down that rabbit hole. Sure.

Blake:

I guess. Which ties into remote work and culture. Like there is no set like, oh, this is Monday through Friday, nine to five, right to four. Everybody on the team, they get to set their own schedules. That's the beauty. By remote work, I'm hiring adults, not children. I'm not their babysitter and like we trust them. We hired them into the role that they're getting paid to do. And so on a weekly basis, like the work is doled out and scheduled. And if. That person wants to crush all the work and work like, let's say a couple 12 hour days and then a 10 hour day to finish it out. They have that purview. And though there's been somewhat of a push for like a four day work week, and you know, that's been available here for the last six years and for, from what I've seen, especially through the pandemic, seeing fewer hours per day, but more days per week. But now, once the pandemic has ended. Seeing a little bit of a shift, especially certain times of the year, where, you know, giving them that flexibility and that trust to just do the work whenever they want to, um, gives them a lot more freedom. If they have a doctor's appointment or they need to go run errands, they simply update their Slack sa. They only have to ask for permission. It's like, oh, be right back. You know, gonna go run some errands, be back in an hour or two. We also do the same thing with like holidays. They're flexible. You know, if there's a holiday, like today's actually you and I are chatting on its election day. Election day is a paid holiday by the agency, and I know at least one person on the team is working today, but they're going to take Friday off, and I believe next Monday is a holiday too.

Russel:

Ah.

Blake:

They're gonna have a four day weekend instead of a three day'cause they get to flex the

Russel:

holiday almost like Lego blocks for your ideal schedule or whatever. And sounds like really in the direction of a, a more wait. You know, I know there's a lot of the terminology we can be used more fast and loose in terms of results only work environment. But it sounds like you've really manufactured in a way that the work is somewhat asynchronous and you actually do have the results only work environment.

Blake:

The other part of it too is, you know, happens to everybody, including myself. Like some days you wake up and like you just need a mental health day. Like you're something, you know, maybe your sleep wasn't good or just not feeling like you're not sick, but you're not feeling a hundred percent. They can simply update their status in Slack and say, Hey. Taking the day off, gonna get caught up over the weekend. Yeah. They don't have to use sick pay or PT O for it. Interesting. As long as the work gets done, they have that flexibility.

Russel:

So I get the premise of this, you know, very similar to our own ideals of we hired adults, we're gonna treat you like adults. We shared responsibility is you gotta act like adults. And like any system, there's guardrails and then, then there's people that you know. Not even intentionally, but because maybe there's a gap we haven't filled in there. They, they hit those guardrails. So what have you had to do just from an accountability perspective or just to make sure that guardrails stay in place and that this thing doesn't run off the rails, so to speak? We have a department

Blake:

level sync once a week, and we look at what happened last week. Um, our task manage system is clickup and. Everything gets tracked, and if there are deliverables that were knocked down in the previous week, usually they're marked with some type of roadblock. Either it's a client roadblock or it's an internal roadblock where the SME that was tasked to do the deliverable was missing a key piece of information. It's rare, it's rarely, if ever, that the person is just lazy. Just didn't do it. Which kind of goes back to our onboarding process. I think it's typically 60, 90 days total. Like for either they're a pass or fail. We haven't failed anybody at the end of 90 days when, you know, during those first 60, 90 days we're looking for, okay, here's the KPIs we're looking at, and if there's anything that's. On the border, that gets course corrected very quickly, and at the end of nine days it's like, okay, did they meet all KPIs? And we're good to go. But if there are issues, you know, life happens. Everyone goes through things that are outside of our control. Life happens. And usually when stuff like that happens, we'll. Simply started with like just simple communication. If it continues to escalate, then it could turn into like a written warning or it could turn into a pip. Yeah. Which we haven't had to do a PIP in probably a year and a half or so.

Russel:

So. What I'm hearing there and what I like and I talk to a lot of folks about this, is start with very narrow guardrails almost, and use a, I'll say a trust but verify approach in terms of, you know, helping someone learn the system versus sometimes I think the tendency we can hire someone and we leave the guardrails wide open and then it's a lot harder for the employee perspective and your perspective to then narrow them after mistakes are made again. So it helps kind of. Almost like a training wheels, training path or bumpers on a, uh, bowling alley. Uh, maybe think of it that, that you eventually lift or move away all the time once everyone's confident that we understand the system and how it works. Mm-hmm. Alright. We'll shift gears here for a minute and you know, I know it's a very big topic across all things agency, but maybe it's especially interesting as it relates to search and we talk about ai. I know that's been a focus for you in, in terms of your business. What's your perspective there And we'll, we'll dig deeper from there.

Blake:

I

Russel:

think

Blake:

it's a useful tool, but it's not like, uh, more of like being able to. Speed up, make things more efficient, but it's not like I've yet to find a use case where it can replace an actual human. Really helpful with day analysis, identifying insights, speeding up communication via automations and stuff like that. We tinkered initially with like seeing if it could help on the content writing side. The amount of post editing from our content team, it just, there was no time savings. It can be helpful in gathering data to, and research. Yeah. To be used. Yeah. But we still have our content team write all of the content for clients and internally

Russel:

still more of a, and I think this is the way a lot of folks are finding, and we're coming down from the apocalyptic approach of. You know what this means and everything like that, but more of a brainstorming helper tool than a outright creation tool. One of the things that is interesting, and you know, I only know enough to be dangerous in this space, but is the idea, right? We're starting to see Google searches leveraging ai, which is giving us some answers without actually going to a website or seeing actual results, and Google's clearly been playing around this notion for a while. How do you see that impacting the work you do in terms of search and SEO?

Blake:

With the types of clients that we work with, it can affect a little bit, but not tremendously where, you know, if you're looking for entering winter, if you wake up one morning and your furnace is broken, you wanna find somebody to come out and repair your heater. You don't want AI to tell you how you can fix it yourself. Yeah, yeah. Or even try like looking through and be like, oh, here's some results. Usually people are gonna scroll and look at maps or organic or even use, uh, Google's local service ads. You know, if our clientele were more on focus on just getting lots of traffic because they sold ads on that traffic, which would affect, you know, lots of. Top and maybe mid-level information. Uh, I could see that dramatically impacting revenue for websites like that, you know, including publishers. But it's kinda reminds me of, uh, Google Glass just a little bit, or when, you know, Alexa and these smart devices were taking off and it's like, oh, Alexa is gonna destroy SEO. And voice search is gonna destroy SEO. It's the end all be all, and then it's hasn't really made any significant dent. I think it's gonna take a lot longer for a full integration where, you know, maybe Gen Z or Gen Alpha are way more comfortable with the results that these AI overviews are producing. On a fair amount of my searches, I'll rely on AI reviews for information. But if I'm making an actual decision. I'm not letting it dictate who I should use or consider.

Russel:

Yeah, so just another helper and then even perhaps, right, it maybe if it's even better at the end of the day that people that are moving beyond just whatever the AI recommendation is that they're actually clicking looking for to, as you said, make a decision. So it's giving more clear intent, I guess you could say, behind digital actions. All right. Before we hit the record button, we had a very interesting conversation about this next question. So I'm gonna give us a little more space to dive into. What, I can't wait for your answer in this, so I'm just gonna ask the question. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made? I think it,

Blake:

you can make an argument that's both. I like to read a lot and I like to read a lot about neuroscience and attachment theory and. Lots of other things like that, I have a theory, which, you know, I know a fair number of agency owners and friendly with most of'em, and there's a, a test you can take and it's called ACEs and acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences. It was developed by Kaiser Permanente some years ago. Understand the correlation of childhood experiences to. Cancer and disease later in life. And it showed, like if you score, I believe, a four or higher on this test, the instances of like mental health disorder, substance use disorder, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorder, like diseases, it just skyrockets and it takes a certain type of person to be able to handle the chaos that usually happens within an agency. You know, there, you know, it's ebbs and flows, right? There's. Peaks and valleys, however you wanna phrase it. But typically, most of the people I've asked that have taken that test, honestly they score at least a three. And me personally, like when my back is up against the wall, or it's a very high intense pressure environment, I'm calm, cool and collected, and I'm focused and dialed in. And I remember this was probably. Four or five years ago, I was talking to my wife about this, saying, you know, if I could replicate this feeling via like a pill, I would probably take two every single day. And I was explaining the feeling and she looks at me, the wilder and goes, that's anxiety. And I look at go. I like anxiety when I feel super alive and just like engaged and but hyper-focused. People that don't really have a background of having adverse childhood experiences, they might not like being in an environment like that, right? It's like we were talking culture earlier, right? It's like the environment that young child is raised in, you know, kind of sets the tone of what types of experiences or things you can and can't handle in the future as an adult.

Russel:

All right. I am so intrigued. I'm going to go take this test and two main thoughts come to mind is one, most scientific analysis brought to this question in the history that I've asked, and I appreciate that. And I have talked to a number of folks as well, and I started knowing a pattern, um, just by asking the very question of, you know, hearing a lot of folks that were agency owners. Yes. That also had adverse child experiences from as extreme as, uh, uh, parent dying or not being there to many other things. And um, it's fascinating to always hear the science of something you've observed in that sense. And so it is just the idea of maybe what you shared there is, right, if you had some adverse experience, you might have had to learn some type of numbing behavior or something like that that makes you an emotional. I think of this a little bit in my own case of that. I too want a little more anxiety at times because I understand Right. Some anxiety driven people, uh, that is what motivates you to get 20, 30, 40, a hundred percent more done in a time period. And so little anxiety is never bad.

Blake:

Yeah. It's more of like, okay, well, is that really healthy to constantly seek high anxiety environments? Just so you can perform. And I've actually used Claude. That's probably one of my favorite AI tools. I share personal stuff all the time.'cause it to me it's just information and there's no emotion attached to it. Like I've manufactured those things within my company to create that environment that I wanted so that way I could perform. Which, you know, it works, but. I've wanted to like, okay, what's a healthier way of approaching this? And the first recommendation that Claude gave me, which I don't know if I could actually do, was take a certain amount of profit from the agency, put into a separate account and whatever the goal is, if you do not hit that goal within the timeframe, you donate that money to a charity you do not like. You know, donate money to charity, you know, it's great. But if it's a charity you don't like, whether it's through ethics or it's a, you know, just a money grab that is, I don't even think I could do that.

Russel:

Yeah.

Blake:

But recommend some other ways where it was like, oh, you know, one of the examples was find a high profile type clients offer skin the game, which could lead to, you know. More publicity for the agency. It had some pretty good ideas where it's more of a healthy way of using this type of stress or anxiety to perform without having a constant need for my back is up against the wall and if I don't do this, then you know, not gonna be able run payroll or I'm not gonna be able to pay bills, stuff like that.

Russel:

Yeah, I mean, I would say it's not weird if it works, but, uh, I get that that would be a fascinating exercise to go through. Well. Wonderful insight. Appreciate you sharing that. Uh, so there you go folks. If you're sitting at home, go find this ACEs test, test it out, and could give you some anxiety about your future health as well, it sounds like, um, based upon this study. Yeah. I

Blake:

mean, it's not like, oh, well, like when I took ITM a six, not saying that to like Bri or anything, but like that's just what my number is. Yeah. But I'm also not my number where those things can be addressed and dealt with. You know, that. Down the rabbit hole of like therapy. And I've done EMDR for stuff like this. I've done hypnotherapy, which is quite frankly amazing for very early childhood stuff. But EMDR is awesome for like adolescent up until adulthood for like traumatic events or experiences. But for like early childhood stuff, EMDR, it's like single percentage points of success rates because tapping that deep into the subconscious mind. It's just really hard to deal with the MDR, but hypnotherapy gets you there very easily. Hmm. Learned all that from reading the book. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vander Koch.

Russel:

Always love a good book. Recommendation.

Blake:

Trigger warning, like, you know, it can be triggering to some people because he talks about traumatic events that happen to patients and stuff. So, you know, tread lightly if you're prone

Russel:

to stuff like that. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for that disclaimer. Alright, well if people wanna know more about RicketyRoo, where can they go?

Blake:

Our website is rickety ru.com. It's R-I-C-K-E-T-Y-R-O-O. Connect with me. On Twitter, well, x my handle is Blake Denman LinkedIn, Blake Denman.

Russel:

Well, it's always gonna be Twitter in my book, but, uh, yeah. And then this one in particular, I gotta know what's the story behind the name? We, I don't think we ever got to that, uh,

Blake:

completely random. When that tele market company I worked at, they had received venture funding. But they were hemorrhaging cash, so they did a fair amount of layoffs and they laid off a whole bunch of my friends. I was protected because I was running their paid search department, so we're all hanging out my friend's condo that night and I just kind of threw it out there like, we're the ones who do all work, why don't we start our own company? They thought it was a great idea, so we were trying to come up with a name in the name Rickety Root. Popped in my head, so I threw it out there. They all liked it, so I bought the domain name that night and then six months later, when I went out on my own, needed a company name. People liked the name. They thought it was fun and cute, and it has tells you nothing about what we actually do. I've been running ever since.

Russel:

Not weird if it works and that definitely is memorable. Alright, well wonderful story today and thank you so much Blake, for taking the time to share it from cool examples of how you've made a, a great environment of user guides to really breaking down the science of whether or not entrepreneurs are born or made. Really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us. Oh, no problem. Happy to. Wonderful. Thanks for having me. Most welcome. Thanks for being on. Thank you for listening to an agency story podcast where every story helps you write your own, subscribe, share, and join us again for more real stories, lessons learned, and breakthroughs ahead. What's next? You'll want to visit an agency story.com/podcast and follow us on Instagram at an agency story for the latest updates.

Blake:

One of the first WordPress websites I built, so this would've been 2010. The client's website was pure HTML, and it was on just a GoDaddy basic hosting plan. And so I built it on my local machine and it looked great, and then I was doing a migration that evening and I had never set up. Databases or anything like that. So I was following this like guy that I found through Google and I put everything up there and hit a critical error and troubleshooted for about 45 minutes and it was like close to midnight. And so then decided, okay, well I'm just gonna rebuild the entire website tonight and hope I finish it before the client wakes up tomorrow morning. And finished and got the new site launched. Live is probably like five 30 or 6:00 AM.

Russel:

Wow. Speaking of anxiety, you created some there?

Blake:

Yeah, not intentionally. I wanted to sleep, but you know, had to get some Red Bulls and just power through. All right. Power, commitment. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing that.