Mergers and Acquisitions: A New Frontier | Jason Clark

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of the Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim speaks with Jason Clark of Via Studio about the evolution of his agency, the challenges of ownership, and the importance of building a saleable business. They discuss mergers and acquisitions, the balance between creativity and profitability, and the emotional aspects of money in business. Jason shares his insights on leadership, team dynamics, and the necessity of trust within organizations. The conversation also touches on the impact of technology and venture capital on the creative industry, as well as the lessons learned from personal experiences in business ownership.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• Building a business to be saleable is crucial.
• Profitability and EBITDA are key metrics for valuation.
• Creative professionals often prioritize great work over profitability.
• Mergers and acquisitions can provide new opportunities for growth.
• Trust within a team is essential for effective leadership.
• The emotional aspects of money can impact business decisions.
• Radical candor fosters open communication in teams.
• Planning for the next chapter in life is important for business owners.
• Technology is reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship.
• Learning from painful experiences is vital for growth.

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Are you ready to pay yourself more… yeah it’s called an S-Corp. ➡️
https://calendly.com/blouia/s-corp-evaluation

Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.548)
Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Creative, the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host, Christian Brim. Special shout out to our one listener in Bismarck, North Dakota. Thank you for listening. I've never been to North Dakota, been to South Dakota. it's my bird clock. I don't know. I'm assuming it's similar to South Dakota, but I don't know that. Anyway, thanks for listening. Joining me today.

is Jason Clark of Via Studio. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Clark (00:35.865)
Nice to meet you, Christian. It's great to be here.

Christian Brim (00:39.148)
Yeah, that bird clock. I got to work on the timing of it. It's a little slow, so it goes off after the top of the hour, but you know, it's comic interlude. So tell us tell us a little bit about via studio.

Jason Clark (00:49.824)
Yeah, that's OK.

Jason Clark (00:56.281)
Sure, the studio is started in 1996 as primarily a web design firm and I was not part of the company at that point. I actually bought into the company in 2003 and the web industry was growing and growing. It was a great place to be at the time. And when I joined and because of some of my background.

I quickly realized that a lot of the reasons that people were asking for websites and needed websites is because they didn't understand their brand and they were doing that brand work in tandem with website projects. So I think my leadership there, once I joined the company, helped us expand our services and separate out those things, brand strategy, brand identity.

essentially all the services that an agency can do. So web work is still a big part of what we do, but it is one of many offerings now, and it's a lot easier for me to separate those out and have those different conversations. So that was 1996, was 30 years ago. So it's been a lot of evolution in that time.

Christian Brim (02:16.482)
That's an impressive run. So did you subsequently buy out your partners or do you still have partners?

Jason Clark (02:26.169)
Yes, so I bought out my business partner. He was effectively ready to retire about near of eight years into our partnership. And then in 2003 I actually merged via slash sold it to a company called e resources. So now I you know I went from 50 % partner to 100 % owner to.

Christian Brim (02:38.787)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (02:54.155)
one of many stakeholders in e-resources. So that's, it's, you know, that's, I get to talk about mergers and acquisitions just as much as agency operations these days.

Christian Brim (03:07.776)
Okay, well that's a unique thread. We'll tug on that. So why did you partner with e-resources? What was the strategy behind that?

Jason Clark (03:21.402)
Um, one of bigger challenges to be honest, um, you know, work, owning an agency in Louisville, Kentucky. Uh, we've got great, um, a great foundation of clients here. Their spirits industry is huge. Healthcare is huge here. Um, lots of opportunity, but I had been doing it for 20 something years. Um, uh, the majority of that is a.

Christian Brim (04:01.784)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (06:46.821)
my goodness. I am sorry. Are you... Can you hear me? Okay. That has never happened before, so... Apologies.

Christian Brim (06:52.279)
Absolutely.

Christian Brim (06:57.614)
We have this statement, we call it the core curse, and it's around IT, and it's fascinating, it travels with us, like we'll go and do an offsite at a hotel or something, and the IT bug just follows us. So it's not you, it's us.

Jason Clark (07:10.888)
yeah.

Jason Clark (07:15.541)
You're a patient man, Christian, I appreciate that.

Christian Brim (07:19.298)
Well, you were explaining about e-resources and needing a new challenge. So let's pick up there.

Jason Clark (07:23.431)
eResources. Yes, sir.

Jason Clark (07:28.201)
Yeah, sure. so yeah, I, you know, been doing what I've been doing for a long time. I've managed to grow and evolve with the industry. It's been really a fun career. but you know, as you, you know, there's my team has been, there's lots of people on my team that have been with, with the company for 10 plus years now. And, you know, seeing them needing an area to grow into that type of thing. I wanted us to have a.

more national presence. We worked on that as an independent firm. And again, like I'm there, I truly believe there are people that are built for certain things. The CEO that I have e-resources, Dusty, you know, he's more of a mergers and acquisitions guy. He grows by that and he's been able to take his agency from, you know,

zero to $15 million in revenue. And again, that's not something that I, you know, at my advanced stage now, it's not something that I knew that I was not built for and didn't necessarily want to do that by myself.

Christian Brim (08:41.87)
So the arrangement is, is it a, like, is it a franchise network or what, like, what is the, what is the structure of this arrangement with eResources?

Jason Clark (08:56.525)
so the, the company resources has multiple divisions. there's an IT services, MSP division called IT on demand. There is a product offering that, that is for applications, online applications, like grant management and, scholarships and that type of thing called orchestrate. there is a property management help desk team. So lots of different divisions.

and again, dusty somebody that I'd known for a few years before this reached out, in a industry slack group and said, Hey, I'm looking for branding marketing company to kind of tack onto my offerings. part of my growth plan. And, you know, since I had known him, I pinged him. I'm said, Hey, let's talk. I had already entertained about three other,

purchase or merger conversations before that. So I was prepared for the conversation. I knew what my business was worth. So it took about a year from the initial conversation to us signing the papers and officially doing it.

Christian Brim (10:10.06)
Okay. So you, you became a partner in his company. You got ownership in his company or did he buy you out completely?

Jason Clark (10:15.871)
Correct, yes, it is a purchase. So I'm going through an earn out phase right now and that will end at some point and I will have been compensated for my business, but I will be an employee at that point.

Christian Brim (10:23.532)
Okay.

Christian Brim (10:32.59)
Perfect. Okay. I think that's important to understand because there's not a lot of experience here out there around selling your business. And I know I, the 28 years that I've been doing that, I've had a lot of conversations with businesses that have gotten to that point of selling and you you, most of them will only do that once. Right. So

Jason Clark (10:59.636)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (11:00.27)
you don't have experience to rely on. So I think it's important to get some idea of what's possible, what actually happens when, you know, I think the idea of a cash sale is what most people think, you know, when they exit their business, there's going to be a pile of money at the end.

Jason Clark (11:25.877)
Tiny pile.

Christian Brim (11:29.306)
Yes. And that's not usually the case, right? mean, most small businesses in the United States don't sell for an all cash offer. That's just not what the data shows.

Jason Clark (11:41.631)
is very rare, yes. And agencies themselves only get to the point of a sale. Like usually an agency closes when a founder either goes bankrupt or decides to close. If the metrics I've heard are 10 to 20 % of agencies actually get acquired or merge. So it's very small.

Christian Brim (11:53.389)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (12:02.862)
Yeah, and I think it's important not necessarily to plan for it, but at least think about it. Like I know when I was a younger entrepreneur, the end game, retirement, whatever you want to call it, was not on my radar, right? And it was so far in the future. It wasn't something I had to deal with, right? I had plenty to deal with on my plate that was current.

Jason Clark (12:21.097)
Right.

Christian Brim (12:32.999)
but one of the things that I have discovered is that it doesn't really matter when you sell or how you sell. It's important to build the business to be saleable, right? because you know, you don't know when the opportunities are going to come or what's going to happen in your life that you want to sell. Like, but if you, if you wait until you're ready to sell,

and you haven't built a business to be saleable, you're not going to be left with much.

Jason Clark (13:05.941)
Yep, absolutely. is, um, yeah, that's something I had to come to terms with, you know, if I guess if the sale, our sale happened in 2023, I probably started the process by just entertaining, you know, acquisition conversations probably as early as 2017, 2018. And, you know, the, the quality of the work rarely matters. The

team that you've built rarely matters. It is your profit and EBITDA that matters. you know, there's, there's always. Well, and there's, there is a, you know, there in work, you know, this is a podcast about creative so we can go there. You know, most creative people, their first, and this is me too, their first priority is doing great work. So.

Christian Brim (13:38.766)
You're throwing around accounting terms, I love that.

Christian Brim (13:59.149)
Yes.

Jason Clark (14:00.309)
project after project for the longest time, we would do those projects for at a loss. You know, there are times when we built these big web applications and systems and, you know, took a, you know, crunching the numbers afterwards, like our hourly rate, we would have lost $200,000 on those projects, you know, and it's like, well, it had to be done right. It was like, well, the client's not, you know, and now my perspective has changed.

Christian Brim (14:07.384)
Hmm.

Jason Clark (14:27.281)
at this point in my career is, you know, if the client's not willing to pay for what it's worth, it's going to be really hard to justify building it for, you know, at that level. So.

Christian Brim (14:39.406)
Yeah, and I think there is this, as a creative, I think there's this desire to do the work whether you make the money or not, right? So I had a friend of mine and colleague and client, and he owns a marketing agency. And several years ago, he was...

Jason Clark (14:49.98)
Absolutely.

Christian Brim (15:07.746)
He was tech heavy. He was one of those unique agencies that was equally comfortable in the design creative elements and the technical dev side. And he had through his connections, Cardi B had come to him or Cardi B's agent had come to him and said, we want you to build this for us and our

Jason Clark (15:19.562)
Sure.

Christian Brim (15:37.954)
our, our fans. he said, okay. that's a million dollar project. Like you're talking about a heavy lift to do what you're talking about. And the agent came back and said, no, that's, that's not what we had in mind. So he didn't do it. Of course. But, but, but he priced it right. So that if he did do it, it was, it would be worth the time. But a funny thing happened along the way.

The story, the need that she had brought to the table, it just kind of sat and percolated in his brain. And he was like, you know, if she wants that, there's got to be other artists that want it. And she might not pay a million dollars for it. But if I could build an application that I could scale to various artists, right?

and rewrap it and resell it, then the economics make sense, right? And so he went off on this journey to start a separate company to develop this technology. And it's been good Lord, it's probably been six or seven years, various funding rounds. it damn near killed him, damn near bankrupt him. But it finally come to where

It actually is going to start making some money and proof that, but I say, I tell that story because it kind of shows that like sometimes the ideas aren't great for your business, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be something. And I think that's what we as entrepreneurs have to guard against is we're very intrigued with the possible.

Right? Like, and we see what's possible, but oftentimes we go down these rabbit trails of the possible, not really thinking about is it profitable? Like, can it actually be economically sound? Right?

Jason Clark (17:49.717)
Right, Yeah, that's, I mean, your story there is the story of the modern web. is, know, somebody had a good idea about something and somebody else probably figured out how to scale it on, a level that's big enough to sustain itself and make cash off of, right? That's content management systems, that's social media platforms, that's Shopify.

Christian Brim (18:13.656)
Shopify like right.

Jason Clark (18:15.855)
Etsy is a huge one, right? Like everyone wanted e-commerce and you know, you've got all these little crafts people that couldn't possibly spin up a $75,000 website to sell their craft. Somebody turned that into a platform called Etsy and now it is just jamming. and that's, but that's the difference between kind of a solo creative entrepreneur and somebody that thinks about things in terms of systems and scale. Like it's a difference. I think they're both creative.

But it's a different mindset. it's also, like you say, it's also the ability to fund it on a level that it gets built and the ability to stick with it and endure that pain because it might not. So, you know, we get startups that come to us all the time for web apps and branding and what have you. I'm like, you know, that's one of the first questions I ask is what does your funding look like? Because if you don't have investors and this is coming out of your

Christian Brim (18:46.487)
Yes.

Christian Brim (18:55.916)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (19:15.731)
retirement accounts or you know you think you're just going to pay for it as your day job paychecks come in. It's not enough anymore or it's very rare especially if you can't do it yourself and you're looking at agencies to do that for you.

Christian Brim (19:33.516)
Yeah, I think the tools that are available now, even versus five or six years ago, are amazing to be able to do things, quote, on your own. I think about a project that I had invested some internal development dollars on.

To the tune of probably 75 grand, that was, and this is pre-LLMs, it was based on AI. It was on neural nets that were publicly available. And I could not get it over the hump to get it implemented, right? And I still think it's a brilliant idea. I still think it'll happen. I think we'll develop it for us internally. But now...

that $75,000 project, I could have done the same thing much quicker for maybe 20 % of the cost, right? So the tools are improving and I think that will help some people get past what they couldn't overcome in the past. Excuse me, but to your point, it still has to be foundationally sound.

Jason Clark (20:42.517)
Sure.

Christian Brim (21:00.494)
You know, I think one of the problems, because I've worked on a couple of deals personally where we were looking at fundraising and of course all the clients that I've had that have done it. There's something fundamentally screwed up about the VC model. I mean, it's not healthy. It doesn't work in a lot of ways.

and, I'm hoping that this technology shift will drive a change in that model because it's, it's not, it's not good. Most owners end up, you know, so diluted, they don't own anything and they're working for nothing.

Jason Clark (21:45.353)
Yeah, sure.

Right, yeah, there is the possibility that you get a new Craig from Craigslist that uses vibe coding and AI tools to build a product that makes millions and millions of dollars and makes that person, you know, helps that person grow a company that is, you know, sustainable and healthy. But that's this new era that we're going into. I don't think it could have been done without these new tools.

You know, my son is 17 years old and that's about the age that I started my career. And I tell him all the time. It's like, I can't like when I was 17, I could see what the next 20 years was because I understood the web. I had coded, I had designed, I had done all this stuff. And so it was easy to see e-commerce online payments, uh, all this stuff. So it's easy to kind of hop, hop in and ride that wave.

Christian Brim (22:16.781)
Mm-mm.

Jason Clark (22:44.882)
I'm not the person to ride that AI wave. I'm like, I want to see, I want to see what the, you know, 18 to 20 year olds are doing, you know, who, who the kids that are going to drop out of college because they have an idea and they, have the time and the energy they can put the late nights into it. Let's see what they're going to do. I'm not worried about the kids, you know, and we're not, we're not in the AI is taking everybody, everybody's jobs conversation, but I

Christian Brim (22:54.978)
Yeah.

Jason Clark (23:12.253)
truly believe that the kids are going to be okay.

Christian Brim (23:15.79)
Well, yes. and, and, you know, I remember an interview with, don't know, with one of the founders of PayPal, that when they started out, they had no background in finance or banking, right? And they, they had no, it wasn't even on the radar fraud was not even on the radar. And he, he made the comment that like looking backwards,

He said, if they'd known then what they know now, and he said, I wouldn't have started it. I, right. And so there's, there's this element that youthful people without experience bring to the table of the, don't know any better. And that's necessary.

Jason Clark (23:58.005)
Amen. Yeah. I have people all the time that come up to me and you know, I'm fairly well known in this region because I'm, you know, we've done some cool things and you know, I'll get somebody in their forties that are like, uh, you know, a little tipsy at the, at the ad fed event and it's like, I want to do what you did, man. And I'm like, I'm not the cynic in a room, but I honestly, like, if you've already got kids and you've, you're already that settled into, you know,

your way of life and your paycheck, might be, it might, that time may have passed for you. Just being realistic, right? I don't want to see somebody with a family and a mortgage. you know, I could, when I bought into this company, when I was, I guess I was 30, I could, I could go without a paycheck for six months because I didn't have kids. And, you know, I had the time to stay up till two in the morning to do the work.

Christian Brim (24:33.154)
Yeah, no, no, you're right.

Jason Clark (24:54.063)
And you know, would I do that today? Absolutely not.

Christian Brim (24:58.336)
No, no. And I know that for a fact about myself. I started my business when I was 27. I did have two young kids and a wife that stayed home with them. And like I borrowed money from the SBA to buy a franchise and start a business. And I'm like, I would never do that. Never take that amount of risk now. Right. Like, I don't know what the hell I was thinking. No idea.

Jason Clark (25:19.675)
You

Yeah. Yeah. Good man. Yeah. I filed bankruptcy when I was 26. and that taught me so much about money. And that was, you know, I honestly, think that this might be one of the things that helped me succeed in business and creative is I always refused to go into debt. Like we will lay people off before we tap, like tap that line of credit. We will not, you know, hire before

Christian Brim (25:27.81)
that.

Christian Brim (25:39.906)
Hmm

Christian Brim (25:44.3)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (25:49.571)
Yeah.

Jason Clark (25:52.041)
we're ready and we've got the work to hire. You know, it was painful, but I'm glad it happened because I'm, I still don't believe in dead.

Christian Brim (26:02.658)
Well, I think the only lessons that are worthwhile and certainly the only ones that stick are painful. mean, that's the truth. You don't learn anything by being successful. You don't. And I will tell you that in my experience, success can cover up lot of problems. Right? So, you know, if you're profitable, you can get by not fixing the things that you need to fix because it doesn't, you know, you don't need to.

Jason Clark (26:09.289)
Yeah.

Jason Clark (26:14.61)
Amen.

Christian Brim (26:32.494)
But when you're on the ropes, you figure out what those problems are and you fix them. yeah. And I think with money, my experience with working with thousands of entrepreneurs and my own journey, there's a lot of baggage around money that people bring to the table. And it usually comes from

You know what other people have in beliefs that other people have instilled in them, right?

Jason Clark (27:07.901)
It is way too emotional. Amen.

Christian Brim (27:10.954)
Yeah, and most of those beliefs are not true, right? They just have been put upon us by somebody else. And I'll give you my favorite example that I use with creatives all the time, or any business owner, is this axiom, this belief that you have to work hard to make money. And I'm like, well, okay, that may be true in certain circumstances, but is it always true?

Jason Clark (27:15.903)
Correct.

Christian Brim (27:39.116)
Like I know lots of people that work hard that don't make money. And I know some people that don't work at all and make money. Like, so how do you, how do you rectify that? And then I take it a step further. I said like, okay, so that belief you believe that like I have to work hard to make money. What does that do to you? Well, one thing it does to you is that it limits your income potential because if you get really good and skilled at something,

Jason Clark (27:39.146)
Yeah, that's.

Christian Brim (28:08.918)
and it doesn't take you as much time and it's not as much effort. Does that mean that you should charge less? Right? Because that's what you're saying. You have to work hard to make more money. So like if you don't work hard, does that mean you charge less? And then their wheels start spinning and they're like, okay. I yeah, but those beliefs drive our actions, right? And and and a lot of times those beliefs are not even conscious. They're just running a program below the surface, right?

Jason Clark (28:15.285)
Correct.

Christian Brim (28:38.144)
And we don't realize that they're affecting our decisions.

Jason Clark (28:42.422)
Yeah, that's wisdom right there. As I have kind of journeyed like...

Like learning how to lead is a journey. And that is, you know, I see a lot of people that think that they are leaders because they keep themselves too busy. I have to be the one to talk to the client. I have to be the one that is directing this project. I have to be the one and they are, you know, they're the ones again at our age, they're the ones that are having the mental health challenges and the physical health challenges and the ulcers. And it's like, I don't.

Christian Brim (28:58.064)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (29:24.979)
Like you've got a competent team that works for you. They don't need you to tell them what to do all the time. Like you should be, and I truly believe this, that the leaders of an organization should be the least busy people in that organization because that is, that means that they're doing their job well, right? Like you, and it's not to say you're, absolutely. And it's not to say that you're out on the golf course or out on a boat somewhere.

Christian Brim (29:43.106)
Right.

and the team is doing their job well, right?

Jason Clark (29:52.149)
It is saying that you are available and you have the mental bandwidth to jump in and help people solve problems and to mentor people and to develop thought leadership. know, like you need that space once you achieve a certain level in your career. So if you're just the one that's just constantly digging and digging and digging, you know, you're not, you know, you're also depriving yourself of a personal spiritual journey with business.

Christian Brim (30:20.366)
Very well said. mean, listeners, if you get anything from this interview, listen to that and I'll repeat it. I'll rephrase it. If you're...

responsible for doing anything and you have this belief that you have to be involved in everything and you know, it could be an extension of that. You have to work hard. Like if you believe that you have to work hard to make money, how is it that you could ever get to the point that Jason's talking about where you're not busy, right? You couldn't because your belief is that you got to be busy. And I've experienced it myself. Like it's hard to make that transition.

to not being busy because it feels right, right? Like it feels like that's what you're, yeah.

Jason Clark (31:16.213)
Will and busy is like we need a different word for busy, right? Like because I love, you know, I spent.

two complete days in the last two weeks just working in HubSpot. Like I was in the zone. I wasn't busy. I was just doing something that I knew needed to be done. I had a thought in my brain that I needed to get out there and I needed to get to be useful to other people when it was time. And I don't call that busy. That is my happy place. That's just being in the zone. Busy is...

all the administrative things that make someone feel important because they're talking to the CEO and they have to talk to these employees. That's the busy thing that is the, I think that is the death by a thousand cuts. You'll kill your soul, you will kill your motivation in this industry. So let's define busy as well.

Christian Brim (32:19.904)
Yeah, no, I'll help you. I'll help you along. In my book, I talk about the Pareto principle. Most people know it as the 80-20 rule. And it's this fractal paradigm that you see when it comes to human behavior. And it shows up everywhere. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it's fractal, meaning that it's a...

fractal is a mathematical term, but what it means is a pattern that repeats. You see it in crystals and a lot in nature, But what that means is 20 % of your efforts result in 80 % of your outcomes, right? But then you take it a step further and 1 % of your efforts produce half of your results, right?

Jason Clark (33:15.603)
focus there.

Christian Brim (33:17.974)
Right. And it goes on from that point, but that doesn't, that, that doesn't matter. What, what I, we put, I put to my leadership team this year is like, okay, you need to get real clear on that 1%. What is it that you do that you can repeat or maybe it's something new that you need to do in the next 30 days. Cause if you do the math, it's roughly one hour a month. It's actually, you know, 1%.

Most people work more than 100 hours in a month, but like real work, it's close enough, right? So what's that one hour that you can do that's going to produce 50 % of your results? And focus on that and get clear on it because, as my team, some of my team members, was, was, it was uber clear to them. Some of them had to sit and digest it for a little bit. And it took them about a week to come back and say, okay, now I know.

Jason Clark (33:52.905)
Yeah, right?

Christian Brim (34:16.014)
what that is, right? But how much more powerful is it to work on that 1 % or 20 % than it is to get lost in the 80 % that's not productive? And I'll tell you that I believe that there is some percentage, it might be 20 % on the tail end, that is actually counterproductive, that actually moves you away from your goals, right?

Jason Clark (34:17.139)
Right, yeah.

Jason Clark (34:39.382)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, they're there. And it's really hard for somebody to do this without some type of coaching or training. Like it's, I think it's, it's just too easy to get involved in your.

Christian Brim (34:51.352)
Hmm.

Jason Clark (35:02.673)
It's just too easy to get involved in your own day to day and not see those things that produce value, right? Like it's just, you know, if you've got a mentor or a coach or a group of professional friends, like there's all kinds of resources there. But if you don't actually listen to someone else,

That journey of self-awareness is not going to develop very well. That's, and that's something I would have never said as a cocky early thirties person, right? I thought I knew it all. And now I'm like, you know, I've got lots of networks and people to lean on to help me like, okay, like, I think this is my superpower lately. What do you think? And they're like, Nope, that's just making everybody pissed off. Don't do that anymore. So.

Christian Brim (35:53.216)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (35:58.784)
Yeah. Yeah. And, I remember earlier this year, I was in my mastermind and I came up and, know, I had the hot seat and I gave my presentation and one of my peers, he said, when you said what you said, my stomach actually turned. Like he had a visceral reaction. Like that is a bad, that is a bad idea. Christian don't do that. Right. And, and you have to have the humility to hear that.

Jason Clark (36:17.141)
Yeah, how dare you!

Christian Brim (36:28.79)
Right? Like, and he was a hundred percent right. Like I, I, I'm glad that he said what he said because I was going down the wrong trail. but you can get lost in your own mind, right? It's real hard to unpack and get clarity if you don't involve others. it's real hard.

Jason Clark (36:35.391)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (36:52.147)
I really love and you know, we're since we work in the creative field, it's easy to see this like fragile egos and you know, people that are really tough to talk candidly to. I absolutely love TV shows where people are tethered to each other in some way that they can't untether and they just give each other the business all the time. Like I dream about a working situation like that.

Christian Brim (36:59.744)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (37:06.53)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (37:18.445)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (37:22.089)
Give it to me, man. I've got thick skin. Like nothing that you can say professionally is going to hurt my feelings. And honestly, I've told everybody I've ever hired this. It's like, you will never get in trouble for telling me your, your truth. If you believe something, tell it to me. And I just, man, it just, drives me crazy when there's, you know, there's a thing and you're not allowed to talk about the thing. So everybody just talks around the thing.

And I just like, yeah. And it's, you know, it's called radical candor now, but it used to just be called tough love. It's like, I love you. I love where we are, but also this thing right here is fucked up and we need to fix it. And I'm just, I dream about those situations when you've got people that trust each other enough to be able to be that candid.

Christian Brim (37:52.234)
huh. The proverbial elephant in the room.

Christian Brim (38:07.266)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Brim (38:17.368)
We're a hundred percent agree with you. We're huge fans of Patrick Alincione and his books. The foundational, the seminal one that I think every business leader should read is the five dysfunctions of a team. yeah, and you can just Google it and look at the image and get what you need. You don't have to read the book. It's a good book. It's anecdotal. It's stories. It's not like your normal business books. It's quick read.

Jason Clark (38:33.405)
Right, yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Christian Brim (38:47.522)
But the foundation of teamwork is trust, right? And what you're talking about, that radical candor or tough love, is only possible when there is trust. Because for a long time, I was the type of leader that no one wanted to have those conversations with. They didn't trust my response, right? And they were right to, because I don't know how I would have accepted it. But to me,

Jason Clark (39:07.573)
Sure, yeah, yeah.

Christian Brim (39:14.744)
trust in an organization and a team is the, because you could define trust a lot of different ways, but in the context of teamwork, it's, can tell you something that you don't want to hear without fear of negative consequences, right? And once you have that, it's amazing what doors open, but you have to start and be willing to

Jason Clark (39:31.153)
Amen. Yes. Yes.

Jason Clark (39:39.423)
Right?

Christian Brim (39:44.012)
give that trust to them to they can say it, right? Like I...

Jason Clark (39:46.857)
Yeah, well, you have to be willing to be wrong as well, right? Like I'm going to say, and this is one of the things I think about a lot with thought leadership and, you know, people that actually move society forward is you is give me something to disagree with, right? Like my, don't really like I listen to a lot of podcasts and a lot of, you know, business kind of things. And there's nobody in that spectrum that I agree with 100%.

Christian Brim (39:50.382)
100 %

Jason Clark (40:15.539)
And I love it. Like, I think a good leader is going to throw something out there and say, chew on that. You might not like it. I might actually be telling you that because I, I might not actually believe the thing I just said. I just wanted to start a conversation. And I, I like, I just think as again, as, leaders, that's something that is that you have to do and you have to stir the pot up and you have to get people to talk and to like, you know, nothing good comes out of.

No friction.

Christian Brim (40:46.69)
No, absolutely not. want to, wrapping this up, I want to go back to something you mentioned at the beginning about like you had reached your limit and that's why you pursued this merger with e-resources. I'm curious like what that conversation with yourself was like. Like what...

How did you come to the like, okay, I'm at my limit or you recognized your limit and you're like, I, I'm not interested in going further on my own. Like what, was that conversation like?

Jason Clark (41:29.301)
Sure.

Jason Clark (41:33.929)
Being involved in enough conversations with agency owners around the world, honestly,

It was very, I guess not enough people had planned their exit. Like, what are you, like, what's, what are you going to do? You know? And I've seen people just here in my town that, that are in their sixties or early seventies. And, you know, I, again, I don't like to be cynical, but I, my old age, I'm getting a little cynicism is creeping in, but like, I see people going through the,

going through the same steps and like, not because they believe it anymore, but because they have to. They haven't planned that next chapter of their life. So to be completely honest with you, I didn't expect it to happen so soon. I was just in the mindset of like, I need to know what my next chapter in life is because I don't.

Christian Brim (42:22.478)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (42:27.565)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (42:37.091)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Clark (42:38.558)
I don't want to die trying to sell the next website project. That's just so, that sounds so boring. You know, I love the work. I love what we do, but once you kind of, you know, once you kind of work yourself up in, in organizations like that leadership and that's like sales bit becomes a requirement. And, so yeah, I just like.

Christian Brim (42:42.583)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (42:47.713)
I get it. Yeah.

Jason Clark (43:03.187)
Okay, what could be next? I proved that I could own an agency and run it and win all these awards and do all this wonderful work, what do wanna do next? And so part of figuring that out is not being tethered to payroll and to clients and to the project management system. And I'm just pretty darn excited about what that might be.

So that is, so again, I started entertaining offers and having this conversation and trying to work on the, business side of the business as far as profit and EBITDA and everything. And, know, again, this offer came to be honest, it probably came a couple years earlier than I thought it would. but it was a good enough to say, okay, like I can, you know, after this is done, I could probably retweet tired completely, or I can.

move on to whatever that next chapter is going to be. And that's exciting.

Christian Brim (44:05.262)
Yeah, I love that that you arrived at that. think a lot of business owners, especially men, their identity is wrapped up in the business, right? And so the absence of the business is an absence of self. And like, there really is no understanding beyond that. what is there to do without the business, right?

Jason Clark (44:17.533)
Yes, yes

Jason Clark (44:34.686)
I had two very, very distinct responses when I announced on LinkedIn and my social medias and everything that I had, you know, I had sold the business. The first one is, are you okay? What's wrong? And the second was, my God, that's amazing. I didn't know you could do that. How do I do that? Like I had conversations with at least four different agency owners. Like, how did you do that? What did you do? Who'd you talk to? You know?

Christian Brim (44:51.03)
Right. Right.

Jason Clark (45:03.869)
And again, there's the identity piece that people are like, Jason is via studio. So if you're leaving that, what, you know, exactly. And I'm like, I'll be fine. And then the other is the people that are, you know, kind of burnt out on what they're doing. And like, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I guess in the grand spectrum of business owners, I'm not that old. So being able to say,

Christian Brim (45:11.374)
Who's Jason?

Christian Brim (45:16.46)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (45:21.313)
Yes.

Jason Clark (45:30.665)
You know, I have an exit in my early 50s is like, my God, that's amazing. Well done. Help me do that.

Christian Brim (45:39.32)
Yeah, yes. I think not having that mindset of building a business that's saleable and not focusing on the profitability of the business, because to your point, that's what drives buyers. mean, that's it. That's what drives valuation. It's not your work product. It's not your team. There may be some strategic buyers that might

by you for those reasons, but usually not, right? If you don't and you're in a business where it's service driven, whatever it is, it could be accounting, it could be website development, it doesn't matter, you end up creating just a glorified job. Exactly. And...

Jason Clark (46:10.676)
Right?

Jason Clark (46:29.683)
Yeah, you're just a freelancer with employees and administrative overhead. Yeah.

Christian Brim (46:36.234)
at some point you're going to go to grow to hate it. like, like those four agency owners that are like, how do I, how do I, how the fuck do I get out of this? Like you figured it out. How do we get out of this box?

Jason Clark (46:48.405)
Yes, and I, you know, again, like I don't, I'm not here to gloat, but there is a certain amount of freedom now that is like, you know, I could take a gap year pretty soon when my earnouts done. I'm probably going to do that. Sounds great.

Christian Brim (47:04.962)
Yeah. Yeah. But, but if, if, if your identity is so wrapped up in what you do and the business, the idea of a gap year is terrifying. Like what would I do? Right. That's exactly right. Right. Like, and, I see all kinds of business owners reach that stage of like, they actually,

Won't sell their business because they don't know what they're going to do with themselves. They don't know why they're going to fill their time and

Jason Clark (47:39.029)
Right. Yeah. And I'm just like, I am so excited for that next chapter. like, I keeps, it keeps me burning the flame here during the day as I'm working through this.

Christian Brim (47:55.712)
I love that for you. Well, congratulations. How do people find out more about VIA Studio?

Jason Clark (47:58.217)
Thank you, Fran.

Sure, you can go to viastudio.com easily enough. And you can find me on LinkedIn, just at C Jason Clark, the letter C. And Charles, yes sir. It's a, I think it's like a, for some reason my family, all the men go by their middle names and I don't know who started that and it's just the thing we do. But yeah, and there is, we've got a new.

Christian Brim (48:13.228)
Is that Charlie Charles?

Jason Clark (48:28.627)
rebrand that'll be launching at the beginning of the year for the parent company that I'm really excited about. so that'll be another round of awesome work that gets out into the world. So yeah.

Christian Brim (48:40.174)
But listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a message. I don't know why you wouldn't like what Jason said, but shoot us a suggestion and we'll try and replace Jason. Until then, ta ta for now.