Alpha the Deal: Interview with Chris Mechanic

Elizabeth Shea sits down with Chris Mechanic, co-founder and former CEO of Web Mechanics, to share the story of building and exiting a successful digital agency. Chris reflects on his entrepreneurial beginnings, from an early online venture to launching Web Mechanics and growing it organically over 15 years. He discusses how an unexpected opportunity led to the sale of the business and offers candid insight into negotiating deal terms, navigating due diligence, and transitioning post-acquisition. Chris also shares lessons learned about founder identity, recognizing his personal strengths, and why he ultimately returned to the founder role launching a new AI-driven venture. This episode is for founders thinking about the full lifecycle from startup to exit and beyond.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Hello and welcome to Branching Out, a Tree Fork Strategies podcast. I'm Elizabeth Shea, the founder and CEO, and I created this show to help business owners navigate the ins and outs of an exit event. So each episode, I sit down with seasoned founders and CEOs who have successfully sold their companies through a strategic or financial transaction. Together we discuss what went into their decision to sell, what worked, what they would do differently, and the valuable lessons that they would like to pass along to founders with a sale on the horizon. Our goal is simple to provide a playbook that you can use as you approach your own sale with confidence and clarity, knowing that you're not alone in the process. This is Branching Out. Thank you for joining me. Hello, everybody, and welcome to Branching Out. Today we have a great guest in our office, Chris McCannick. Hello, Chris. How are you today?

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Elizabeth, I'm doing great. How are you?

SPEAKER_04 0:53

I'm doing great. It's so good to see you. It's been many years since uh we actually hung out like this, but I've known you a long time.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

So In real life. Yeah. In real life.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

And such, exactly. Chris comes to us um as the the former CEO and co-founder of Web Mechanics, one of the best digital agencies here in town. Not that I'm biased, but um really good, solid firm. And he just exited in 2024. So we're really excited to hear more about your story. And I appreciate you spending the time with us today.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

100%, Elizabeth. Do you know? Um, I remember when we met, I don't know if you remember, but it was in our earliest days of web mechanics. We were probably less than 10 people. And I said, hey, look, you know, we're sort of new here. We need to make some intros and some connections, and can we be friends, basically? And you were so gracious. You were just like, of course. And at that point, you were very well established at, you know, REQ and yeah you knew everybody and s and stuff. And you actually sent us a couple of leads back in the sure I did.

SPEAKER_04 1:53

Yeah. You have a very reputation.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Yeah. So thank you for that. So um, I'm so happy to be here. What was your question? You want me to just give you a question?

SPEAKER_04 2:02

Just tell you just to start with your story. Want to hear how you got started, what went into your decision to sell at some point. You know, just tell us your story.

SPEAKER_02 2:09

I'll tell you all about it. Well, it all started in college when I had a buddy who had set up this website and was somehow making $100 or $200 a day from people going to that website and clicking on ads. So I've always been sort of entrepreneurial, you know, in nature. I was kind of the kid who would buy boxes of candy and sell them individually at school, type of thing. Had a number of little hustles like that. So as the dot-com days were really hitting full throttle and people were starting to make money, I became obsessed with it. And I just dove in and I bought courses and everything and spent some money and ended up setting up this website, this like niche website about a random topic, and started creating content and articles and was following this program. And I remember checking the analytics. This was before Google Analytics even existed. So it was more like server log type analytics. And I had published about 10 articles so far, and to my amazement, there were 472 visits showing from like, you know, 398 visitors. And you could see where they're coming from, their geographies, you could see what they were typing into Google and which pages they were looking at and how long they were spending on each page. And I was like, what? So that was my I was like, dude, this is what I'm doing. And prior to that, I was sort of entrepreneurial, but I wasn't by any means voted most likely to succeed. I was like average student. My first job out of school was selling mortgages before the substrate bubble burst. Nobody really expected much of me, I guess. So I I started this website, I become obsessed with it. I was working at T Row Price, which is actually a good job. Like it's a good company, great benefits, everything. And I I spontaneously quit one day because all I can do was think about this website and how I could grow it. And I was working the night shift, which was like 12 to 9. So in the mornings I would I would we'd be working on that website joyously, and then painfully I would drive to work every day. So one day I just had enough and I just rage quit.

SPEAKER_04 4:23

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

And I was still living with my dad at the time. So he's like, What? What the heck?

SPEAKER_00 4:29

He's Persian, so he's like, What the heck are you thinking? You have a good job, you need to climb the corporate ladder, put in the work, and you get promoted, and you become the vice president. You wanna go off and do this website thing and just write articles all day. What are you thinking? Mortez our son is a doctor. He's only two years older than you're a doctor. He just bought a mansion, you know.

SPEAKER_04 5:01

Okay, gotta tell the story well.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

And so I'm like, but but I'm I'm fixed. I'm like, sorry, dad, like I'm a grown-up, I'm doing what I want. But he's not happy. So I'm still living in his house, and during the day, I'm working, working, working on this website, self-doubt, left and right, because like, yeah, the traffic's growing, but I when I try to start monetizing it, it like wasn't gangbusters immediately. You know, it was very entrepreneurial. Like in the early days, there's that roller coaster. There's, you know, day one, you are depths of depression. Day two, you're like, hi, day three, you know, it was very much like that. And at night, I was working as a server at the Cheesecake Factory. And one night, uh, I get a table and it's a family, and the the dad, the guy, starts kind of taking an interest in me. He's like, Hey, what are you doing with your life? Like, what's your plan? And I just lit up like a light bulb.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

And I was like, oh, dude, I started a website. I'm writing articles, I figured out how to get free traffic from Google, I'm doing an email database, I'm selling other people's products as an affiliate, I'm working on my own product, like it's about to be gangbusters. It's so cool and fun.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

And he's like, Well, I own a digital agency called R2I here in town, and like we're looking for people like you, so come in for an interview. I was like, All right.

SPEAKER_04 6:21

R2I, remember them well.

SPEAKER_02 6:23

Yeah. It was Chris Jodniki. He turned me on. So he comes, I go to the agency, I interview with them. I guess they're impressed. They gave me a little task, a little assignment. I did it, they liked it. So they hired me. 20 bucks an hour. I was a contractor, 20 bucks an hour. So I was like, okay, cool, this is fine. Better than Cheesecake Factory, anyway, right? Right. So I go in there, and what I see is this energetic environment with all these young people doing exactly what I was doing, you know, building web pages and R2Y at that point was just building out their digital marketing offering. So I was their second digital marketing employee. It was me and this dude, Paige, who was kind of a mentor. But the very first day I went in there, I remember I opened up my laptop, I started working, I was looking around and I was, I it was fun. I was having fun. And I and it was at that moment I was like, I can do this. And we were talking to the clients, and the clients at that point, they were paying like six, seven, 10,000 bucks a month. And, you know, we knew that. And they were spending 30 grand a month, 50 grand a month. And I'm telling them these things and how the search engine algorithms work. So I'm like, okay, this is great. So I stayed at R2I for a year or two and really learned the agency business before getting the itch, of course, uh, and deciding to start web mechanics. And my thing was SEO. So, like, you know, there's a lot of different branches of digital marketing. Um, I'm an SEO guy. I that's where that's where I started anyway. So I set out and I said, you know, I'm gonna start a shop. All I need is like five clients that pay a thousand bucks a month each, and I'm making way more, you know, than 20 bucks an hour. And, you know, I can, I don't even have to work. If it's just five clients, I could work three days a week and that'd be great. So that's what I decided to do. And it just so happened that my cousin, who had kind of been my partner in crime throughout all of our uh adolescent hustles when I was selling candy bars or selling gold-plated jewelry or whatever, he had his own little side hustles too. We worked in college, we worked together at a startup. One of my buddies started this recruiting firm that we worked at a couple summers, and he was a tech guy. And so before I started the agency, when I had that website, when something would break or when I couldn't figure something out, he was my guy. I called him and he would help me fix it. So I told him about this idea, and I'm like, yo, I want you to start it with me. I want, you know, I want you to be an equity partner. And um, you know, I was thinking like maybe 20, 80, 20 or 70, 30, maybe kind of thing, since it was my idea and my brainchild. So he's like, yo, I'm all about it, but give me 50%, you know, let's be partners. And I thought about it for a little not even probably a minute, but I was just like, all right, cool, let's do it. So that turned out being a great decision because he was an amazing partner and still is actually a partner in in the new business as well. Perfect yin to my yang. Like I'm like a hundred ideas a minute, and like, ooh, wouldn't it be cool if? And he's like, How's it actually gonna work? How's it gonna break? What are the what are the pieces that you're missing? We started out just the two of us. Our goal now was to get 10 clients so that each of us could make five grand a month. And we did that within six months. One of our buddies was in the advertising space, he turned us on to a to the first few clients. We killed it for them. They told their friends about it, word just started spreading. And funny enough, so my new business, Mecca AI, focuses on contractors, home services. Funny enough, our very first like 10 clients in the earliest days of web mechanics, guess who they were?

SPEAKER_05 10:10

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

You know, these companies home and pop, you know, one to five million type home services. So that's where those first two years is really where we got like a master's degree in home services, just the business as well as marketing. So we grew and somehow stumbled into a new niche, which was SaaS. So, like software, a lot of B2B software. So that became our new niche for a while. And we still had some home services clients. Like we were doing a lot of work with Window Nation, you know, probably spending like a quarter million bucks a month or so on ads that we were managing. So we had some some larger home services clients uh and some financial service clients, but generally it was a well, I should say there was an inflection point where we had hit our goal. We were probably doing 15 grand a month, and we were very busy working a lot. And it was either like, let's stop here and just like enjoy this, or let's just keep, let's keep going. And we decided to keep going because it was it was fun and there was a lot of money to be made. So we started hiring interns. Interns turn into our first full-timers, first full-timers turn into our first managers, and we really grew it very organically, very homegrown. We grew a great business. Long story short, we we had like a 23% annual Kager for 15 years.

SPEAKER_04 11:38

I'd like I'd like to hear how you educated yourself into the process of actually exiting in 2024, which is what you you know, what size company were you? How did you educate yourself, and to whom did you sell?

SPEAKER_02 11:51

So we witnessed a lot of MA activity, just a course of clients being bought and sold, really. We had some familiarity with how it worked and what multiples were and what earnouts are. Like we sort of knew the basics. We never sat down and said, we're ready to sell, let's go to market. It actually happened that we reached out to a broker because we wanted to buy a small analytics shop. So we won't we wanted to have like a little tuck-in acquisition, maybe five to 10 people that were just really, really deep into statistical modeling and predictive analytics to really upgrade our analytics jobs. As we're searching around with that broker, they're like, hey, I know you're looking to buy, but there's somebody that is looking for an agency just like yours. And so we entertained a combo and it went kind of well, actually. We liked them as people and we started talking a little bit. They came out and their CEO spent a day with us and they took us out to lunch and gave us a pro forma or like the short version of the offer.

SPEAKER_05 12:55

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

And we were like, okay, we get it, but it wasn't an exciting number really for us. And we kind of just went dark on them. We kind of just like disappeared for a little while and went dark on them because, like I said, we weren't really on the market necessarily to sell. But at the same time, we had been in that business for a long time. It had grown. Like I was outside of my comfort zone the whole time. Right.

SPEAKER_05 13:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

So like 10 employees, like one employee was new, two employees was new, three employees, every single employee that we added was just like network.

SPEAKER_04 13:40

Growing the scale. It's a lot of work.

SPEAKER_02 13:42

And um, you know, as it happens with the law of large numbers, every single year, like it's easy to post double digits, triple digits in the early years, but you do 10 million in revenue. It's like you gotta come back the next year and do that all over again, plus some, right? So it just got harder and harder every year. The entire time I was outside of my comfort zone, I would say. And we knew that we were gonna sell it at some point, and we thought about the the prospects and what we would want like to do it. And also, there's been people that have told us things to the tune of like, hey, if somebody wants to buy your business, like talk to them. Always talk to them, you know?

SPEAKER_05 14:27

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

So we were entertaining the idea, but the number wasn't exciting. And so we kind of just like let it fizzle. But then a few months later, they reached back out and they were like, hey guys, like let's just cut to the chase. What's your number? And we had a number, but we also had terms that we wanted.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

Right, right. So important.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

So we told them the number and some of the key terms that we wouldn't budge on, and they were like, Okay, done. Let's do it. And then and then we were like, all right, I guess we're doing this.

SPEAKER_04 15:02

So did you work with a broker during that time or did it was it just a direct deal?

SPEAKER_02 15:07

No, by a very random stroke of luck, we got linked up with this this dude Daniel, Daniel Street, who was a godsend for us. He saved our asses in some key areas and he got us an extra probably 12%. And he himself is a wealthy guy. Like he had he was kind of just had like a few consulting clients for fun. By the grace of God, I was introduced to him, and then he liked me somehow. So he liked something about me. Uh he hooked us up.

SPEAKER_04 15:41

Like he that's amazing. So I know Daniel Street's.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

He's so cool. I love that. I love that guy.

SPEAKER_04 15:48

What a small world. I did not know that story. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

Yeah. So I don't know what your users or listeners might be able to take from that because it was just such a random stroke of luck. Maybe just call Daniel Street as the answer. But he also likes he knows the agency space really well, that which is part of the reason that he was so valuable to us.

SPEAKER_04 16:09

Yeah, I think it is important to have an ad have an advisor, have a coach, have somebody that helps walk you through the process because it's an emotional process that you go through and an emotional decision. Um so can you talk about what it felt like afterwards then? Like fast forward to you've popped some champagne, you've made it happen. Did you stay around? Did you um exit shortly thereafter?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

What was your what was your plan that change? The plan was to stay. So we were all revved up, we were all juiced up. Our our mantra was 20% keger's baby. You know, we were we were hot and heavy, ready to go. Um, and they wanted me. And so at web mechanics, my role had primarily morphed into like sales and marketing. I still did some account work. I was the oh shit guy on a few clients, but mostly I was doing sales and marketing. So they were like, perfect, you can be the chief revenue officer. So I'm like, okay, cool. Well, I don't know what a chief revenue officer even does. Like, I can I can pitch a deal, but like, whatever. And they're like, you'll learn. It'll be great. So we go in there, and what I learned is that chief revenue officers do a lot of forecasting, apparently, and spreadsheet work and policy stuff and process stuff. And it was not my zone of genius. It was far from my zone of genius. I was like dying every day in that role, and I was just I feel like I'm looking in the mirror.

SPEAKER_04 17:37

I went through the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

I was like, dude, that's great. I'm a zero to one guy. That's what I learned about myself. And once it comes time to do the scaling and those other types of activity and more structure and planning and things are are required. I need to find somebody else to handle that part, you know.

SPEAKER_04 17:55

Right, right. Yep. So interesting. We just did a podcast um where the guy said he's not a zero-to-one guy, he's a one to ten guy. So there's a reason out there for people of different different skill sets and different desires.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

And it's dangerous when you get those two beat types of people together.

SPEAKER_04 18:12

Right, right. In a good way, probably, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Yeah. Are you familiar with EOS?

SPEAKER_04 18:17

Oh, yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 18:18

Yeah, so it's like visionary and integrator.

SPEAKER_04 18:20

I think that's kind of the tip. Exactly. Exactly. No, we have a lot of clients that are adopting a system or a framework like that, which is very important also, just to be prepared. So um fast forward again then. So from the standpoint of, you know, you're starting a new business now, tell me about that and what made you decide to exit that company. I think I'm hearing you say that it was the CRO role wasn't really your baby, and like time to move on.

SPEAKER_02 18:45

So they were um yeah, so CRO wasn't my baby. I let them know that and like they were very gracious about it. And you know, as people, like I was joking that I'm gonna throw everybody under the bus, but they've actually been really good and they have held up their end of the bargain. I did make sure that there was like zero earnout. So it was like there's nothing vesting or anything like that.

SPEAKER_05 19:09

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 19:10

Like I triple confirmed that um to the point of uh exhaustion, basically, with the lawyers. I was like, look, I can't. Like this is 48 pages, you know. Like, you are you sure?

SPEAKER_05 19:23

Right.

SPEAKER_02 19:23

But then I'm like, okay, I don't want to do the CRO role. And they're like, okay, well, what do you want to do? And I was like, I want to be the assassin squad. You know, I want you to point me at a client that's in trouble or at a thing that needs solving or at an issue and let me work on random prop projects. That didn't work either. And then they were like, hey, well, what about partnerships? You know, why don't you build out the partnership channel? So I was like, okay, cool. And I tried that for a little while, but my heart just really wasn't in it. They had a really strong executive team. There was a lot of horsepower in that room, I guess. And I wasn't really needed in nearly the way that I was needed before. And so I just had a frank, a candid conversation with them and just told them how I was feeling. And they're like, bro, do you, man. Like, if that's what you want to do. So that's what I did. And it wasn't weird. Like, we're still on fine terms. I still rep level. The new name is Level, so they folded web mechanics into level agency. I still rep them, you know, on a high-spending advertiser that needs an agency. I'm they're they're the only one on my list, right? And they do great work. I love it to death. And um, true to their word, also, they didn't fire a single person. They didn't lay off even like the back or even the front office people, even the HR people.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Not a single Is that one of your conditions? One of your terms Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:43

Yeah, it wasn't written in the contract, but we were very clear about it. And we just asked them, hey, do you plan on consolidating? You know, just tell us. Um, and we didn't. So I think I mean, they're good in my book.

SPEAKER_04 20:59

Yeah. So I think a lot of people focus on what's the enterprise value, what's the price, what's the number, and not necessarily on the terms. And I do think it's really important to consider those things. So do you mind sharing what some of those were that were really important to you, whether it was people or processes or client name, you know, the naming, it sounds like it changed. What was important to you?

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Well, I I mentioned the earnout. That was incredibly important. Other important things were we wanted to like cash certain people out. Like we wanted to share people that had been with us and had been critical for us. So we got them special deals. Oh, with the non-competes. So their noncompete is basically like you can't start another agency or work at an agency. But I am an owner in another agency. So we got carve outs for that, basically. Oh, yeah, there was escrow money as well as so I told them we we don't want to earn out because it was gonna be based on. On our book of business, the web mechanics book of business. And the plan was to integrate and be one. And so I didn't want it to be a scenario where I'm like, there's two clients that need help. One's a web mechanics client, one's not a web mechanics client. I want to help the web mechanics client. Like I didn't want to create that division.

SPEAKER_05 22:17

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

So I said, instead of doing that, let's instead call it a seller's note that is payable, you know, post-transaction, and the interest rates needed to be a certain level because interest rates were high at that point.

SPEAKER_05 22:32

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

Turned out to be a really nice decision in retrospect. Um so now I've got, you know, I've we've got that that's like compounding monthly.

SPEAKER_05 22:44

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

Um and then the the escrow money we just got back. That wasn't a term.

SPEAKER_04 22:52

No, but I mean those are those are important considerations because it doesn't always have to be an earnout. It's a very creative way to do it, to have seller financing. And you're still you're still promised that note. But um but it does give some flexibility to the buyer, but also a more of a guarantee for you. I I would like to talk about what you might have regretted. Did you have any regrets? Did you have anything that took you by surprise? Were you surprised at your role moving forward?

SPEAKER_02 23:18

The main regret that I have, I think, is the way that I exited. We call it pulling the fade. And we used to do that with clients sometimes, where if they if the client is used to talking with one account manager, say, and that account manager like has to go on paternity leave or whatever, we'll bring somebody else in, and then this other one will naturally pull the fade, which means like stop showing up to every call, show up to every other call for a little while, then like do every three and just like pull in the fade, sort of. So that's kind of the way that I exited, but I wish that I would have had the courage to like do something a little bit more ceremoniously. And I'm not sure that it was courage that I was lacking. It was more so that I didn't want to rock the boat, you know. I didn't want for people to wonder about what may or may not have happened. And so I I never announced in any public way that I was leaving. But what I did was basically just gradually let certain people know that uh that I had worked with closely and that were probably wondering, like, oh, where's Chris? So that's probably my main regret. The other regret, I do have one other regret. The whole thing happened quite quickly. It was like LOI to close probably in like four or five months.

SPEAKER_05 24:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah. So we were like real going really fast, doing a lot of things. And I I remember closing day, and we were all ready to sign off, and we didn't have any other issues. I was thinking about as a joke, and there's like nine people on the line, all the lawyers from every side, right? And they're like, okay, you know, reading all the language or whatever. Hey, do you guys testify, say yes to sign or whatever? And they give you a chance to ask questions or to object, right? So I was thinking about being like, no, I'm not ready to sign yet. We want another million. Just as a joke. And I saw I wish I would have done that. That would have been but even more so, I wish that I would have just asked, you know, because Daniel Street's like, I forget his exact words, he said it better. But he's like, you need to be the one that wants it less, right? And as you go through due diligence, you're gonna be so tired, you're gonna be so ready to go to the beach. He's basically saying, assume the entire time that this deal is going away and be okay with that.

SPEAKER_04 25:46

So that's very good advice, very good advice.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

And so we were real ballsy all throughout the negotiation. In terms of negotiating the terms, which I had forgotten earlier, we basically asked them for more at every step, even after they gave us their number. And we, you know, I'm not trying to brag because it was all Daniel Street, but we alphaed that negotiation hard and we could have gotten more. So I wish that we would have alphaed it harder. Because in retrospect, it's like they got a great deal. Because Web Mechanics was a was a great business. I mean, our clients were happy, super long retention times. We had like amazing rates of growing accounts. Our work always performed at a high level, so people wanted to spend more. So they got a great deal. I we should have asked for more. They probably would have given it to us.

SPEAKER_04 26:41

It's interesting how many people have said that, particularly because it wasn't a competitive process, you know. But hey, lesson learned.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

But and I I maintained that outlook, but I maintained it to the point where all the way up until the closing table, mentally I would tell myself, this can go away, and I and we're fine. We're printing money over here. Like, what's wrong with that?

SPEAKER_04 27:04

You made it happen. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_02 27:06

Thank you. Thank you. The best advice is just don't get married to the deal, especially as the due diligence process goes along further. Due diligence is a whole nother job. So it's like you work during the day on that and you work at night on that, and you just want it to be over. And I think that's where a lot of people get screwed because sometimes the PE firms, oh, you want to know what one of our deal breakers was? Is if they try to touch like any of the things that we've already agreed to, if they try to modify even one of them, and that's like a sign that they're gonna go back on their word, we're out. And me and my partner had a pact that was like, we mean it. Like we leaving, and we're not even gonna think about you again.

SPEAKER_04 27:55

Wow. Wow, that's very bold. That's great. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 27:59

Even if it's the day before close. And we repeated that back and forth to each other the whole time.

SPEAKER_05 28:06

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

So that was good. The other thing that was good, and I remembered what I was gonna say, is that in addition to Daniel Street, the other thing that gave us balls of steel in those negotiations was that our pipeline was surging, our closed business numbers were on fire, and we engineered that with a surge. We called it a surge. We did not reveal to the entire company that we were selling. And it wasn't even the only reason that we did the surge. We were also kind of plateauing a little bit and we needed some energy. But the surge was this initiative where we activated and enabled the whole company to work on the most critically important goals of the company. So we said, here are the six goals on a spreadsheet in the column. The column headers were the goals, and they knew they were all like add MRR, add project revenue, whatever. It was just the business goals. And then along the left were all the different job roles and titles. So if you're an account manager, here you can do your account manager if you're this. And the cells were filled up with ideas of useful things that you can do with that skill set to contribute to that goal. So it's like, hey, account managers, guess what? You got a LinkedIn profile, don't you? Cool. You can send reach out messages to people that you know and generate leads. You can comment on Geico CEO's thing and see if you can get a meeting with Geico, you know, like why not? So they're like, oh, I've never thought of that. And that's not their fault because we never asked them to think about that, right? So we did a surge and we put a carrot and a stick on it, which we didn't usually do carrot and stick type incentives, but we put a big carrot out and we said, let's hit this. And we met like the the core group of like basically directors and up, which was you know, a third of the company, maybe. We would meet every Friday for the surge meeting. We would talk about awesome shit that we're doing, new shit that we need to do, prioritize it, and we were just smashing. It was working. We were on fire.

SPEAKER_04 30:21

That's that's awesome. That's awesome. And it worked.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

It worked, it worked like a charm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:29

That's excellent. So this has been very fascinating. Great story. Can you tell me what you're doing now? Because I know you've just launched a new business, right? I thought you said that before your birthday you were gonna you're gonna be done. I did. I did say that.

SPEAKER_02 30:44

Yeah, I'm I'm very excited about this new business. And it's it's interesting how it happened. So one of my last assignments before I left the agency, I was working with a large financial services client that was doing an enterprise-wide voice AI implementation. So voice AI is more or less having like Chat GPT on the phone where you fed Chat GPT, you know, the role that they're supposed to play, how how they're supposed to respond in certain scenarios, and you you more or less train it. So this was what, over a year ago. And the tech at that point was very good. I remember right when I saw it, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. Everybody's gonna want this. It's gonna be the new website. How nobody had a website, and then suddenly everybody has a website. Like that is this. So I became fascinated with that. And and I never lost that idea. Then when I left the agency, my plan was to retire more or less. Like I was gonna spend more time with friends and family, I was gonna travel the world, I was gonna get in the best shape of my life, I was gonna find new passions and hobbies and spend a lot of time reading and just slow down. Well, that lasted a good month or so. And before I knew it, I was not doing those things. I was playing on AI all day. I was buying a hundred and some domain, I went on a domain buying spree. I wasn't working out. I was staying up all night and sleeping all day and drinking probably more than I should. Like it wasn't good. And so I was like, okay, well, let's let's do something else. But this entire time, I had I had voice AI in the back of my head. So I started talking with uh who are now with the two who are now my partners, and we're just like kicking the idea around, you know, thinking about it. And then come September of this year, we decided, let's do it. It's LLC time, let's do it. So we're doing voice AI and we're focusing on contractors specifically. So home services, plumbers, roofers, remodelers, and it is going gangbusters. Uh that's great. We just launched officially, we were in stealth mode for a few months. We picked up five beta clients in stealth mode where we basically said, yo, let us try this for you. And if it works, you give us referrals and case studies and so on. So five out of five of those clients were skeptical and difficult to convince to let us try it. And now five out of five of those clients will never know a world without voice AI. They are hooked. They are hooked. These are contractors, right? Like they can barely send me a calendar invite, but they are all up in their client portal, listening to all the calls, looking at all the transcripts, and basically becoming prompt engineers. They're like, oh, if it's if it's an existing customer, we don't need their uh address. So like let's pull that out of 6B.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

And I'm like, wow, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

I'm like watching their digital transformation happen. So it's absolutely gangbusters. Uh, we just launched on LinkedIn to great fanfare. I'm incredibly grateful. Uh, there's a demo up there of our flagship agent called Nighthawk, and Nighthawk is an after hours agent, which when you close up shop, that's when Nighthawk starts working and basically answers every single phone call. Contractors on average, about 30% of call volume comes after 4 30 p.m. A lot of them close at 4 30. So their advertising on Google and Facebook or whatever, 24 hours a day. They're generating calls. And right when you install Nighthawk, you start turning phone calls into booked job or booked meetings. And it's just this found money. I call it lost and found money.

SPEAKER_04 34:48

That's really cool. What a what a cool concept. Well, congratulations.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:54

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:54

Let me um let me just plug a couple of other agents. So we got 11 of them in total that each do different jobs. So Nighthawk is nighttime. We have Speedy, who's on speed to lead. So right when somebody fills out your form, Speedy gets pinged and he'll make that call to that person within 10 seconds, which is very important. Like as the seconds tick by, the chances of getting somebody on the phone drop off of a cliff. We got flow. Flow does daytime answering, but only kicks on for overflow calls. So basically, when all your operators are busy, you can hit flow. Then we got Phoenix for outbound. We have five-star for five-star Google Reviews. We've got who else? Oh, knock knock is field marketing. So when canvassers set appointments and they need to confirm at the home office, knock knock will like be that home office. So it's so fun and so exciting. And I thought at first that people were only going to be interested in like the lead gen and marketing focused ones like Nighthawk and Speedy. But all of these new agents that we came up with were ideas for like clients asked us for that.

SPEAKER_05 36:10

Oh, great.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

I was amazed to see that. And also amazed, I thought that custom that clients would say, we want AI so that we can have fewer people in our call center, but they're not saying that at all. They're saying we want AI so that we don't have to hire more. Right. So they want to arm, they want to bolt AI onto their team to increase each person's capacity by 10 times as opposed to adding one linear incremental person. So it's the biggest no-brainer investment that I've ever seen in my life. Well, that's great. 20 years of this. And um it just like SEO was like nobody really is kind of underground right now. Most people are like, what's WISA? And you show it to them, and people are think it's magic, you know. So this is the time the getting is the best, right? It's just gonna become more comp competitive and let lower and lower price from here. But I like the one-to-one service model. We're gonna get disrupted at some point. It's just like when and how. But I think there's always gonna be, especially in contracting, there's always gonna be that company that doesn't want to build it themselves. They just want somebody else to do it for them and they'll pay it and pay well and get good work. And so that's what I'm betting on. That's amazing. I'm having a bull.

SPEAKER_04 37:37

Oh, good for you. Well, it's good to see you so happy. So welcome back from retirement.

SPEAKER_02 37:42

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 37:43

Into a working gig again.

SPEAKER_02 37:44

Yeah, I'm so happy to be uh reconnecting with you here and stay in touch.

SPEAKER_04 37:50

This is great. Well, thank you so much. How can people get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_02 37:53

Oh, I almost forgot. So the website is gomecha.com. Mecca is spelled like mechanism, M-E-C-H-A. So it's gomecha.ai. Sorry, I said.com.

SPEAKER_04 38:07

So you have the whole mechanic, mechanics, I love it. That's great. Great branding.

SPEAKER_02 38:13

Yeah, go mechanically. Yeah, thank you. But uh, I want you to do this too. So from that homepage, you'll see a green blob that uh says call Jill. That's our AI B D R or C S R. Call her. She is the what she does.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

Yeah, you'll see why you'll see why they call her the goat. Okay, the goat. Oh, thank you so much, Chris. This is wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

Thank you, Elizabeth. Let's be in touch. Talk soon.

SPEAKER_04 38:42

Yes. Bye.