197: How We Grew 50% Without Hiring a Single Person – Pat Dillon – 8FE

What happens when you’ve built multiple companies, lost control, got burned by partners, and then finally get it right?

Patrick Dillon has done it all. He’s built several digital agencies, and even a janitorial company. He’s taken on investors, lost equity, made painful pivots, and come out the other side with a lean, wildly profitable agency. Today, his company, WISE Digital, is scaling steadily without the risk of it all collapsing from one bad client, partner, or decision.

In this episode, we break down how Pat used AI to scale without bloat, what really went wrong with his first three ventures, and why he’ll never niche down again. We also get into the recruiting system that saved him thousands of hours, the legal dispute ChatGPT helped him settle, and how to avoid toxic positivity while building something that actually lasts.

If you’re in agency life, you’ll feel this one.

Listen in and find out what it really takes to build a growth engine you actually want to run.

Inspiring Quotes

• “You could have the best website on the planet. If you don’t have your directories in order, you will not get full credit for being in business.” – Patrick Dillon 
• “Never have more than 5% of our revenue associated with one client.” – Patrick Dillon 
• “Growth is easy. But if you’re growing 10% on the top line, but also growing 10% in expenses because you’re adding 10% more team members for every 10% more clients, you’ll never get to where you want to be.” – Patrick Dillon 
• “I’ve never had to advertise. I don’t worry about growth. It comes naturally.” – Patrick Dillon 
• “Shit is going to go wrong. If you’re not ready for that, don’t start a business.” – Patrick Dillon

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:53 Undervalued marketing tactics 
• 00:04:24 Unusual AI use cases 
• 00:08:03 Patrick’s entrepreneurial journey 
• 00:18:38 Interacting with investors 
• 00:21:29 When to pull the plug 
• 00:27:57 Transition to WISE Digital 
• 00:37:43 Focusing on SMB 
• 00:40:02 Growing the business through AI 
• 00:51:57 SEO strategies and the impact of AI 
• 00:58:58 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 
• 01:01:21 Outro

Pat Dillon 0:00
I’ve never had to advertise. I don’t worry about growth. It comes naturally because growth is easy. But if you’re growing 10% top line, but you’re also growing 10% on expenses, because you’re bringing on 10% more team members for every 10% more clients, you’ll never get to where you want to get. I wanted to have above average margins for an agency. What I started putting together was a formula for how are we going to create more margin in the business? You’ve

Brad Weimert 0:22
transformed your existing company and grown it 50% without adding headcount in the last 18 months. Yeah. How do you do that? Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder at easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Pat Dillon, founder and CEO of wise digital partners, it’s good to see you, my friend. You too, buddy. So I’ve known you forever, and I’ve watched you go through multiple different businesses today, wise, definitely fits into the love it, good lifestyle, great business category, but I’ve seen you go through several others as well, from a company called deal current, through iterations of different marketing agencies. Fast forward to today, where you’ve got 30 full time team members, hundreds of clients. You’ve worked with both huge brand names and also now a ton of small businesses. All right? So far, yep, for sure. So as a starting point, you’ve worked with all these different companies. What is a really undervalued marketing tactic today that people aren’t taking advantage of big or small.

Pat Dillon 2:05
I would say it doesn’t matter the size your business, if you have a if you have a physical location, like you have an office, or you have a retail location, or you serve a local market, and you’re working from home, even the there is, there’s an undervalued place that people put on directory listings. Those are all the places online your business information appears. So we think of our, you know, Google Business Profile being, you know, the place online where our business information is, your name, your address, your phone number, your NAP data, right? Well, that’s one directory and for a chiropractic office, a dental office, a construction company, a digital marketing agency, a restoration company, accounting firm, really any any type of business that serves a local market in any general sense that could be a city, a state, a nation, you really need to have your business information consistent and accurate across a large number of directories, otherwise Google or chat, GPT, or any engine that people are trying to find your business through will think that you are not in business. You could have the best website on the planet. If you don’t have your directories in order, you will not get full credit for being in business.

Brad Weimert 3:20
How much does that matter for a non local company,

Pat Dillon 3:25
still a huge percentage, like even for our E commerce companies, for example, which have no footprint whatsoever, and sometimes are just drop shippers, it still, you know, makes a measurable impact when we do that directory cleanup, and it’s almost immediate. I was just talking to a a huge new mortgage client that we brought on in in LA greater area. I think, you know, they serve all of California and four other states. You know, they have an office, but their clients would never come into it. One of the first things that we do for any business when we bring them on the board is we immediately begin cleaning up and building more directories. And they got, like, a $15 million mortgage deal out of it last week. And like, we know for certain, that’s the only thing that we did, because we just kicked off the engagement. So you would not believe how much impact it can have. And it’s like one of the simplest things can do. You can do it on your own, if you need a software platform. You need to know how

Brad Weimert 4:24
love it. Well, I know that as we dig into this conversation, AI is going to be a huge through line, and there’s this whole story behind how you’ve transformed your existing company and grown it 50% without adding headcount in the last 18 months. Yeah, before we dive into that story, though, what is one of the most unusual use cases of AI that you’ve seen in the last 18 months that’s left a big impact that other people would be like, oh shit. I didn’t think you could use it that way, or that hasn’t

Pat Dillon 4:51
occurred to me. So right now, I’m going through a legal dispute with a client and fun, yeah, it’s like the work. Yeah. I mean, luckily, you know, I’ve been in I’ve had digital marketing agencies, three different digital marketing agencies, served over 1000 clients over the last 12 years. I’ve never had to sue a client, and this is a situation where I think I might sue this client, because it was so egregious what they’ve done. They they stole all of our work. They denied any of it being done by us. It’s all provable. We’ve got 350 hours of proven work, you know, hundreds of emails and dozens of recorded calls, and it’s just, it’s, it’s complete nonsense. But, you know, I’ve got a pretty strong background in business legal. I’ve been around the block before. I started 15 companies. You know, I’m not too worried about my ability to handle the situation well, and I’ll rely on my attorneys, which are great attorneys that have been with me for 10 years when I need them. But I at the very beginning of the dispute, I put everything, all the historical work that we did, all the historical emails correspondence, all into a project, in into chat GBT, and said, I think, you know, we’ve got an issue with this client. Here’s all the context. Please read this over and, you know, I put it in deep research mode and let it go. And then I said, Okay, now here’s the email I got from the client. Let’s, let’s formulate a plan. I’ve worked with it all along the way, and it’s probably saved me $10,000 in legal fees, and is coming is helping me now get to a resolution with the client, which I think is not fair in my favor. I think I’m giving up when I would certainly win times 10 in an actual lawsuit, but it’s I’m in a place where, fine, I could just walk away and move on. It remembers more than any human can. You know now that it has all that information, I could go to my head of paid media who did 12 projects with them, my my project manager who’s worked on, you know, 55 projects, in one sense, and 145 projects in another sense. And I could go to my my head of accounts that’s worked with them, and all you know for five months. And if I put all four of us in a room chat, GPT still knows more than all of us do together, and it’s more accurate. And so we’re using it in a sense, for like, our training and learning wikis as well. So we put all of our Account Manager Training and Documentation and Q and A and, you know, even past recorded calls and stuff like that that we know our account managers were 100% accurate in that recording for that client, right? And we use that to say, Hey, you’re going to be an AI account manager trainer now only go off information that we give you. Don’t go and seek your own information because we haven’t vetted it. And now our new account managers can go get trained and ask questions with the AI solution, instead of bugging the head of paid media and the head of SEO and the head of design and all these expensive people who are busy doing their own things of that, yeah,

Brad Weimert 8:03
well, I want to get back to AI because I know that you’ve got huge use cases internally and externally with it, but I want to rewind the clock a little bit here. So, you know, I grew up with you in Cutco eons ago, and you were one of the first people from that era that jumped into entrepreneurship and starting their own company. You moved to San Diego, you started deal current, which was a daily deal website. This is a which, which didn’t shake out, I think, the way you wanted it to, but I think it’s a great story, because it’s really applicable to a lot of sort of trendy businesses that are moving today. Can you explain what deal current was and why you jumped into that?

Pat Dillon 8:48
Yeah, and, you know, make it more confusing. I came out here to start with another guy from Cutco too. Our first company was called cholera free. It was a crowdsourcing fashion company. Oh, right, right. I forgot about that. And then, you know, it was doing well, we were, you know, making our way into retail stores.

Brad Weimert 9:05
Yep, same thing, though, right? So, color free was also a print on demand website, yeah, so, or did it transform into that? It

Pat Dillon 9:12
transformed into that when we patented the software, yeah, it was a fashion brand. You know, we recruited designers around the world. They came onto our website, kind of like Threadless out of Chicago, but it went into a con when you submitted a design. It went into contesting software that we built that was a homepage for our website. But, you know, the economy crashed about a year into the business model, and we were just getting into Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters and all these big retailers, and, you know, the housing market crashed, right? So somebody reached out, an agency actually reached out on behalf of a client and said, Hey, we want to buy your your software. Our client wants it. And we found out the client was Sports Illustrated, so we said it’s not available. For Sale, but it’s available for licensing, which wasn’t true at all. We didn’t have a licensing solution, but we knew we could build it as quickly as it would take to get through the legal paperwork with Time Inc, which owns Sports Illustrated, right? So then we had a software product, and that was called artistic hub. And artistic hub found very fast success with media companies who wanted to drive more website traffic through an engaging contest living on our homepage, which we embedded into, you know, TV stations and radio stations and newspapers, well as as the economy was recovering from, you know, the worst recession since 1929 right? Oh wait, yeah. Oh 809. Yeah. Media companies were trying to combat this company, which had changed its name from the point to Groupon, and we knew, aha, this is how we’re going to help our media clients. Who were we found we could double the website traffic of a radio station, website that’s been around for 20 years in literally 30 days. And they came to us, and they’re like, Well, what do we do with all this traffic? You sell advertising, you dumb shit. But they did their advertising. Products were really terrible. It was like those, you know, screen peel overs and screen takeovers and all that annoying shit that you know today, like, don’t do that. He said, Well, this business is really innovative in a sense that, like, they don’t charge for advertising. They just charge when people take action on a deal or a coupon or whatever, right? So we launched what became deal current, and it was the first private level version of Groupon. And so over a period of about six years, we helped 800 media companies develop a competitive program to combat Groupon. Turned out to be about 80, sorry, about 20% of the daily deal market of publishers.

Brad Weimert 11:56
We had, for clarity, you said the first private label version of Groupon, but this was not Groupon being white labeled. This was a competitive platform. Exactly You were white labeling for people,

Pat Dillon 12:06
yeah. So like an SEO is the backbone of what, how we were getting our name out there. So when you type in daily deal software, our product would come up. So deal current was a white label daily deal software platform, mostly for media companies. A lot of entrepreneurs used it too to, like, create their own little Daily Deal program in Chattanooga or whatever. But you know, so it was a platform where a publisher could create their own Daily Deal program, published on their website. Do all the email, we do all the transactions. So all the transaction flowed through us, and then we cut, you know, the splits to the advertisers and the publisher and all that stuff. You know what? What we found in in that business model, what I found in particular was we ended up with about 50,000 small businesses as clients. They were going through the platform. I went out and developed national relationships with businesses like Omaha, stakes and Travelocity, and then it became a daily deal network, or an ad network. And so, you know, anybody could publish a deal into the platform, and then anybody could in the publishing ecosystem could pick up that deal and show it on their website. So even if you sold two deals, but the network sold 2000 deals, your your, you know, your site chose 2002 deals sold. So, you know, but it was a race to the bottom in fees, and I ended up hating my clients. The clients were publishers. During that period of time, America lost 75% of its publishers. That has real impact today, right? Like all the stuff we’re seeing with Jimmy Kimmel and all this stuff, well, we lost 75% of America’s voice independent voice independent publishers, radio stations and TV stations and newspapers that couldn’t figure out how to make the world their financial world work in today’s new model, in the digital era. And so, you know, we helped, you know, cobble some revenue together for them for a while, but we knew they were dead. And oftentimes it was like you could see that their business was failing, but they were trying to keep together for as long as they could. And that wasn’t a client I wanted to be hitched to, you know, I want to be with clients that are on a path to win.

Brad Weimert 14:25
So for clarity, the term publisher is a sticky one, because in different places in business, it means something different. Yeah, so in this context, and you talked about agencies, I think as well, but in this context, what does publisher mean?

Pat Dillon 14:41
Audience owners. So like a TV station, a newspaper, a radio station, they own audience. They’re publishing content for that audience to listen to, to watch or to read, and

Brad Weimert 14:52
in this case, specifically legacy. And so when we talk about legacy media, we’re talking about small local news states. All local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers, etc,

Pat Dillon 15:04
well, you know, yeah, but also on the big scale as well. So we were as a daily deal operator for NBC Universal, the owner operated markets, so like New York and, you know, Atlanta and San Diego, and there was, like 10, oh no markets,

Brad Weimert 15:18
but those still exist, whereas a lot of the other publishers, in this case might not, because they couldn’t exactly so when you said 75% collapsed, I wanted to outline the notion of like TV and radio in particular, yep, because those ones disappeared, the the smaller NBC locals, ABC locals are still around, right?

Pat Dillon 15:39
Well, yeah, so a lot of the smaller affiliates are just gone or got gobbled up, then shut down and stuff like that, yeah.

Brad Weimert 15:44
So I just wanted to clarify that. But okay, so as that happened, you saw the publisher market eroding, and 75% of that market disappeared because that media outlet didn’t make sense with the new model today, or they didn’t translate into the new model Well, today,

Pat Dillon 16:01
yeah, it was, essentially, they just didn’t know how to sell to today’s advertiser, right? Because today’s advertiser, at the time, was starting to gravitate towards, you know, paying for a click, right? So, paying for them to come on their website. Well, if you think about, like, driving down the road and you see that billboard, you’re sort of paying for, like, every car that drives by, right? I just want to pay for the guy or gal who’s driving by who actually needs a personal injury lawyer right now. And you can’t do that with traditional media, and that was the problem with their model and and so, you know, paid search and paid social, but then Groupon, you know, like you’re paying for the person to actually come in, even though they’re coming in at a disk. In at a discount, wouldn’t have to pay to get that in their hand. Essentially, you know, only when they transact. And I’m willing to do that because I’m acquiring a new customer. And you could work out the math and figure out a way to really make it work. Now, a lot of advertisers weren’t sophisticated enough, and we provided training to the publishers to be able to sort of fix that. But, you know, I think in the end, the point is, like we ended up with 50,000 small business clients. And I worked out into the agreement with with the major publishers like NBC and Clear Channel and all these guys, that if we wanted to provide products or services that you didn’t provide, we can sell them directly to your advertiser. So NBC brings me, you know, a local chiropractor, and that local chiropractor needs a website or SEO. I could go sell it to them, and I could call them and say, Hey, you just, you know, cash a check last week. Go check out the name on it. That’s my name. I sign that I’m NBC partner. And they’ve, you know, they’ve told me, you know, they’ve asked me to give you a call and see if you need help on your website or SEO, those types of things. So there was, like, an easy bridge, yeah, it was, like, an easy way to launch a digital agency. So that was, like, post digital, you know, we had 40 clients in the first month, and I think we signed like a total of about eight or 900 clients in a couple years, franchise the business nationwide. And I really, I think, like, fell back in love with my roots of, like, small business owners. My dad was a small business owner in accounting firm. My mom owned a graphic design firm. And, you know, I think my team, my partner, everybody involved with wise today really appreciates working with small and mid sized business owners, because, you know, when we make an impact, we create 50% growth, or double your growth for a couple years in a row. Like we get invited to your weddings and barn bat mitzvahs and birthdays and like, we’re part of the family now,

Brad Weimert 18:38
and you don’t talk wise, but the but the transition from all these things, right? So starting with a clothing line that rolls into deal current that transitions into light post you had friends and family round to fund this initially, right? So as you’re going through this, one of the things that is interesting to me as a bootstrap entrepreneur entirely, is anytime you bring on money, you have some sense of, if you have any conscience, you have some sense of obligation to your investors, right? How did the transition between those things look, feel and work to the investors? So like, you know, you gave this fluid path of the logical retrospective narrative. But in the moment, with deal current, all your investors are like, wait, what’s going on? Right, right. How is that interaction with the investors?

Pat Dillon 19:32
Yeah, you know, that’s where, you know, in the end, the investors in the first business never made their money back. There is some, you know, something to be said about I have, kind of, in a way, paid back quite a few of them, just personally, you know, or as a as a benefit of the future businesses that have, you know, engaged in and stuff like that, like help their business, that type of thing. We probably did what I would never do again, which. Was we kept the investors on the cap table from the first business as it integrated into the second into the third, and we ended up with this really messy cap table where deal current, which had now raised, you know, true institutional capital from, you know, a family office and angel group and true VCs. They’re looking at our cap table, and I had like 60 little investors, and they’re like, What the fuck is this? And you know that that I would never do again, because what we should have just done is said, hey, there was risk involved here. It didn’t work. We’re really sorry about it. We tried our best, but we have to shut this business down and and in hindsight, I would have done that, but as like a new entrepreneur who’s raising money from your grandpa and your best friends from college and your brother and your mom and your dad, like I just my partner Jimmy, and I didn’t have the heart to say that we lost all your money. We tried. But you know, the reality was, no one could have predicted the fall of 2007 2008 and some, some did, and they made a lot of money, but most people didn’t see that very few. So I think what we really should have done was taken an honest stance and said, Hey, we got to shut this thing down. Instead, we kept it alive and kept iterating. And you know, in a lot of ways, I think that destroyed my life for quite a long period of time, because I was like trying to make this thing work that was clearly not working.

Brad Weimert 21:29
In retrospect, how do you know when to pull the plug?

Pat Dillon 21:38
Yeah, I don’t know. That’s how much grit Do you have? You know, that’s an individual question for every person, right? And and what I found out is, I have a lot of grit, like, I’ll just keep trying and to make to make it work, but at some point, you know, when it’s destroying your your sleep and it’s destroying your health and it’s destroying your habits and it’s destroying your ability to, you know, go to that friend’s wedding that you want to go to or those types of things. I think that’s, that’s what it’s time to just throw in the towel and say, this is not working. Let’s try something different and start fresh, because that, that’s, you know, I think my biggest regret was, like, why did we try and make it work for an extra 234, years when it was so clearly not going to work. And to be fair, I put a lot of pressure on my business partner to shut it down. And you know, if you, if you, if you’re positive and smart people, something’s always going to happen that’s going to make it look like, Oh, this is, this is going to work, right? You said it in a previous podcast. Listen to recently toxic positivity.

Brad Weimert 22:48
And that was us. Love that. Yeah, that phrase.

Pat Dillon 22:51
We were like, you know, in our mid 20s, and we’re like, we can, we can conquer anything. It was like, all balls and no brains, and we’ll just get we’ll just keep getting there. So, like, we met, I think my partner and I met four or five times over a couple weeks to shut down the business, and then all sudden, we got this call from Sports Illustrated, we’re like, no, it’s gonna work. Look. And they never fucking paid anything, you know, like they, they ended up, we ended up paying them to get it going. So

Brad Weimert 23:23
you got roped in by the allure of the brand, and that drove so it was sort of a tail wagging the dog situation. Well,

Pat Dillon 23:31
I think, you know, I have a lot of friends that have started big SAS companies and big companies of all sorts. You know, where you do kind of pay for that first marquee client. And you know, the fact that we had Sports Illustrated as our first client in that business helped us then go out and get, I think, about a third of the NFL teams. We brought in Warner Brother records as a client. We started working with the artists under their label. We we we got Disney, we got a couple really big clients. So you know the fact that we could say, hey, who else works with you while Sports Illustrated was our first client, and they’re still and they’re still with us, by the way, so you know that that did really help?

Brad Weimert 24:14
Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, I think that that’s a there’s no question, I think that. And actually, I probably heard this or learned this from you through that era, is, if you’re willing to work for a major client for free or at a heavy discount, as a case study, you get this crazy borrowed credibility from doing that. Nobody else knows the economics of the situation. They just know that Sports Illustrated is a client of

Pat Dillon 24:38
yours, exactly. Yeah. So it was worth it in that sense.

Brad Weimert 24:41
Would you do it again that way?

Pat Dillon 24:45
You know, I would. I wouldn’t do again a business where I’m so hamstrung to any client or any industry, like even in the digital marketing agency. A lot of people say, Oh, niche down. Work with one industry. I think that’s a terrible way to develop a business like this. Because, you know, like, we were really, really strong, for example, in mortgage and then the interest rates went to hell during covid and the mortgage market died. 80% of mortgage companies went out of business in 12 months. So I think you don’t want to you need diversification. And I think when you’re working with big brands, you know, there’s like, a lot of agencies or insurance companies or accounting firms or law firms that work with a bunch of big clients, and it’s like, well, what happens when that key client goes away? So like, when I started wise, I sat down with my team because this was kind of like my third go around. I know we’re kind of, like, moving around, but I said we will never have more than 5% of our revenue associated with one client, because I don’t ever want to be in a place where, like, if that client left, I’d have to lay off people. I just I don’t want that for I don’t want that stress for myself, and I don’t want my team to ever have to think about that worry.

Brad Weimert 26:04
So, so that concept, I think, surface level, makes tons of sense. Practically, like when you talk about, you know, where the rubber meets the road. How do you do that? Do you when a client starts growing? Like, in my head, when a client starts growing, I’m like, oh shit, I’m gonna go get a bunch of other small little clients, or a bunch of other clients to diverse. Clients to diversify. But in practice, is that how it works? Or do you actually throttle the big client? We don’t really try

Pat Dillon 26:29
to throttle the big client, and we want to keep those big clients around for a long time. And historically, we have, we, you know, we have some clients that have been with us now for 10 years, because they’ve kind of like, just followed me along from agency to agency, and they’ll never leave me. But you know, so, for example, we got, like, years ago, we got our first $10,000 month client. That was like, three times what all the other clients were paying on average. And it looked like, Wow, these guys are really going to grow too. They ended up growing from, you know, 10 grand a month to 25 grand a month. So I said, Okay, well, you know, I thought about it like you and me, from a sales background, from cut go, most of our friends, right? Like, let’s just go out and get 10 more, $10,000 month clients, and then we don’t have an issue, yeah, then we have another 100 clients that I’ll pay three or five grand a month, right? So that’s what, that’s what we’ve been doing, is we just if, if we see a client getting big, we go out and get a bunch more big clients.

Brad Weimert 27:25
Got it, get it. Get into aggressive sales mode. Adjust your time structure, how you’re doing things, and say, we need more focus on sales right

Pat Dillon 27:32
now. Yeah. And for me, like practically, I have a team that does the work. I’m not responsible for deliverables. I’m generally not on client calls. I don’t participate in that. So if, like, I now, I have the benefit of, like, being able to go lay at the pool every afternoon and swim and having a nice life and all that stuff. But if a client gets really big, then I know it’s time to go to work for a little while to replace what could happen if things go wrong. Well,

Brad Weimert 27:57
let’s talk about that transition. So late post digital, also marketing agency. The transition to wise, you had a parting of ways with a business partner. What was the transition to wise like? And how are you? How did you approach wise differently than light post both agencies? What’s the difference? And how did you think about it with this go around?

Pat Dillon 28:18
There was I was a tip, a difficult time. And I think you remember, I had a partner who wasn’t doing well, personally and mentally, was not in a good place, and was dealing with some addiction issues, and ended up leaving light post

Unknown Speaker 28:37
in A very abrupt fashion, in a very scary way.

Pat Dillon 28:42
And the board brought me in to turn around things, you know, immediately brought me in as interim CEO, kind of brought me back into the business, because I left after you actually left the business. I was already running a janitorial company and doing another thing as well. And so I had developed as a, as a, like a licensee of light post 70% of the company’s book of business, so I basically own three quarters of the company’s revenue. So the board brought,

Brad Weimert 29:11
we got to back out here. So tell me light post structure. How did you end up with that structure? What was light post overall structure? So

Pat Dillon 29:18
deal currently, sold the company, and when we sold the company, we kept light post digital, which was an agency that developed as a division of deal current. So it was a digital marketing agency that had a small number of products and services, like we did websites and we did SEO, and we did Facebook ads or something like that. And we built the company up as a licensee model, so agents could go out and get trained to sell light, post digital products and services in whatever market they were in nationwide. So we ended up with about 12 licensed agents, you know, Miami, New York, LA. I was in San Diego. I went to my partner and my investors, and I said, the guy. Guys, if this thing’s going to work, somebody needs to go out and be the poster child of how to do this, right, how to develop a referral network and get clients in a local market. And I’m like, nobody’s going to do that better than me. I’m going to go do that. So I’m firing myself as president of the company, and I’m going to become what we called a digital director of light post. And I went out and started developing, you know, a book of business. And over time, I developed the majority of the company’s book under my own licensee arrangement. So technically, I was getting a, you know, like an earning or a commission off of all the accounts that I brought on board. Funny, there was, there was only one month in four years where the other 11 licensed agents sold more than me combined. And I was on vacation in Europe for six weeks that during that month, and it was actually closed. So, you know, I I developed a really good relationship with all these clients. I brought them all in. There was a lot in San Diego and elsewhere. And I when I got brought back in and I saw what a mess my partner had made of the business, I came to the investors, and I go, guys, I don’t I don’t like this is going to take a lot of work. There was a lot of promises that were made to clients that cannot be fulfilled unethically, and there’s just no way to get it done. So they started looking for a merger opportunity. I didn’t know that they knew. I didn’t think that they knew what they were doing and would find an appropriate, you know, merger company. So I went out and found one on my own too. They ended up going with theirs. I told them it was going to fail. It failed in 24 hours. So they gave me back the business on a napkin for $1 and a rev share, and I went forward with a merger. Unfortunately, you know that that really did not work out. That guy ended up being kind of a crook, and I took back the business after about nine months and rebranded it wise digital. So on day one, I had 50 clients and my my team of four core people who are like a strategist, my top SEO guy, my top ad guy. But during that merger period, I met my now CTO, my head of design, ended up getting, like, a lot better training there, and a lead developer, so those people all came over as well. And you know, by the end of that first year, I think we had a really good core team of about eight, and we got it up to about 6070, clients. And you know, we’re sort of off to the races, and from there we saw, you know, more than 50% growth for five years. And you know, so we knew, we knew what we were doing, I knew what we’re doing. The team knew what they were doing. And I think we were good at at this thing, at light post, which was like traffic, SEO and ads. The merger company was better at websites, which was, I thought, the piece that we were missing as well. So when we got together, we combined, and we were now pretty great at everything. So when, when wise started, we had a better foundation for the services that we offered.

Brad Weimert 33:19
The C Why didn’t that merger work. What happened there? The guy

Pat Dillon 33:22
running that company was a crook? Oh yeah,

Brad Weimert 33:27
funny word, 1920 who says crook,

Pat Dillon 33:30
stealing from his clients, stealing from his employees, just really unethical practices. Had a huge, you know, personal flow, like all that just, it’s awful.

Brad Weimert 33:39
That’s delightful. So did that dissolve entirely? Yeah, that business failed.

Pat Dillon 33:46
That business failed left. That business was left alone, but it ended up failing.

Brad Weimert 33:50
Yeah, got it. And so why is brand new, but you pulled a bunch of staff from the previous ventures? Well,

Pat Dillon 33:56
they came on their own, yeah? And my team left with me because I brought them in. They left with me. And the clients that were still still there, they he had lost a lot of clients, or they lost a lot of clients, and the ones that stuck around stuck around because of my personal relationships. But, you know, we started, I think the point was, we started with a really good base, a foundation of revenue, a great team. I didn’t have to take a salary, you know, for a long time, and I got to reinvest in the right in the right ways, in the right places, with the right team and resources and all that stuff and get started, you know, finally, with a business that I owned, I controlled, I didn’t have any investors. I didn’t have any partners calling the shots, you know, I always wanted to, you know, set up full health and medical and dental benefits and all that stuff. I wanted a 401, K I wanted profit sharing. I got to do all that right from the start.

Brad Weimert 34:51
So from from the outside, if you look at this path, from again, clothing to deal current to light post bunch. Of investors, the cap table is kind of a mess. You’re rolling money from one to another. You’ve got different people involved, wise, is a fresh start and but what you just said was, I didn’t need to take a salary, et cetera, in the gap that I think we missed there, because if you just look at this, it’s sort of like things are collapsing along the way and getting a bunch of learning lessons. But along the way there, it sounds like you invested in some other businesses. You said you had a janitorial company, what allowed you to start wise from scratch and not have to worry about money as much. At that

Pat Dillon 35:34
point I was, I was doing some other things on the side. I had, you know, when I, when I became, like, a licensed agent of light post. I was making a lot of money and and so I was investing in the stock market. I was investing in a couple other just like, you know, regular retail investments. I started a janitorial company with a with a partner who owned another janitorial company, but we wanted to do it in a different market that was starting to make money. And, you know, I had a ton in savings as well. So when all, when, you know, sort of shit hit the fan with this merger, I had already been working and preparing to launch this thing the right way, you know, and, and, you know, one of the key things that I, that I did with the team on day one is I said, Hey, if we’re going to do this, I want to do it right. Here’s, here’s the rules for how we’re going to do this, you know, I, I can’t be responsible personally for any client deliverable. I have to be out and go, go and create growth. I’m going to go get clients. You guys figure out how to get the work done. You know that there’s somebody that our rules around, like, no client will ever represent more than 5% of revenue, that type of thing. There’s a lot of things that we’re going to say no to, you know, so that we don’t bring in problem clients, that bring down teams and agencies and all that stuff. But, you know, I just, I was in a place financially where I didn’t, I didn’t need to take a salary, which I think is where every business owner should be realistically, mentally when they start. And then you shouldn’t think about taking a salary for probably the first two years. If you can’t do that, you probably shouldn’t start a business, because shit is going to go wrong. The economy is going to collapse. The administration is going to do something dumb to this, that, you know, there’s, there’s all sorts of things, like, I’m starting a whiskey brand right now, and, you know, tariffs have made our costs in Ireland go up 20 to 25% like, within months. So, you know, we have to make adjustments now. But, you know, luckily, I don’t need to make money from that, you know. So I was in a good spot, is the point? Yeah, I

Brad Weimert 37:43
love that. I think that’s super helpful context for people. Okay, so fresh start restarting wise. You’ve got some team from before. So you know that you’ve got the capacity to deliver product. You also come with a book of business, a group of clients, but you’ve gone through this agency model before. Why did you decide to specifically focus on SMB at this point?

Pat Dillon 38:06
You know, I think back again to the types of clients that we we like to serve, you know, supporting Time Inc, or Sports Illustrated, or the Dallas Cowboys, or, you know, these, kind of clients that we had in the past. You’re just a number, you’re a cog, you’re replaceable when you do really well for a couple of years for that business, and it’s a fortune 5000 or 500 company, all of a sudden that marketing manager gets replaced, and that the new person comes on with all of their existing relationships, and they want to shake things up, right? They want to prove their value or their worth, so they fire all the existing relationships and then bring in their own buddies. I didn’t want to be in that place. We’ve been there before. And you know when you’re when you’re working with a small business that’s doing 3 million a year or 5 million a year, and you help them grow to 10 million or 20 million a year, they come back to you. They start the next business with you. They invite you to things that you know, show that they really appreciate what you’ve done for them. And you find that even though there’s a lot of terrible things about working with small businesses, like emotion and financial instability and changing direction and all this stuff, right? I think you still end up with a with a neater and more fulfilling relationship when things go well. And fortunately for us, you know 80, 80% of the time things go really well. I love

Brad Weimert 39:39
that. If you’re enjoying this episode. Make sure you make it to beyond a million.com and check out the newsletter. It is a lightweight way to get the best tips, tricks and strategies from all the guests we’ve ever had, so all the big names you know, and some of the people you’ve never heard of, but have killer, killer things to teach you. Go to beyond a million.com and subscribe. To the newsletter. You’re not going to be disappointed. Okay, so bring me to bring me to present day. We were texting yesterday, and one of the things, and I mentioned this at the onset of our conversation here, but one of the things that has been a big focus for you in the last 18 months, and I think a lot of the world, though, they’ve applied it very differently, is the application of AI. So in the last 18 months, you’ve heavily implemented AI in your business to get 50% growth with no additional headcount. What are the what are the pillars of AI application inside of your business? Today, as of we’ll call it October of 25 Yep, we

Pat Dillon 40:39
were already doing a lot of advanced SEO techniques going back to 2021 2022 so I think the large language models as they were getting, as they were like, basically digesting everything on the internet, right, like chat GPT was being trained on information for years prior to launch, launched in, I think, November 22 so we were already kind of ahead of the curve and and I knew right away, like, how impactful this platform and this type of technology was going to be in in marketing, like in getting more clients, but it became, and we were already using lots of AI solutions, like from years and years ago. I mean Grammarly, for example, you know, in the copy department, or things like that. But once we started playing around with chat, GBT and later on, you know, the other solutions, Gemini, perplexity, whatnot, we saw also the efficiencies that created the business. So what I started sort of putting together was a formula for, how are we going to create more margin in the business? Because growth is easy, like getting more clients and just, you know, getting more businesses is sort of like cake walk to guys like you and me, but a lot of our friends, I should say, too. But you know, if you, if you, if you’re growing 10% top line, but you’re also growing 10% on expenses because you’re bringing on 10% more team members for every 10% more clients. Well, you’ll never get to where you want to get right and and I wanted to have above average margins for an agency, you know, to prepare for an eventual exit, you know, in five or 10 years or whatever, and just to have a better life and be able to, you know, test more things and invest in more places and all that stuff. So, you know, I think Part one was putting together a plan for improving operational efficiency. And there is a bunch of things that we did there, you know, first, first thing that we did, and this was probably like middle of 23 so about six months after chat GPD launched, we put together an AI Task Force. And at the time we probably had about, I don’t know, actually a little bit more people that we have today, full time us. But we, we looked at our, let’s say, 20 on staff in the US, and there was clearly about four or five people that were much more inclined to using AI to better, you know, their workflow and their department and stuff like that. So we grabbed a couple of those people and said, Okay, you’re on a task force now to help drive the direction of how we’re going to use AI responsibly in the business and and, and those were people that we met with pretty regularly, like weekly or monthly, as we started formulating the rest, which I think the next one was developing budgets for every department to use and to test AI solutions, to figure out what you know solutions were right for copy or SEO or design, or that type of thing. Then we launched a company wide AI contest. And that was actually the beginning, I think, of this year. And, you know, the idea there was to bring together all everybody in the company with their very best ideas for, like, what AI, you know, did for them in a given month, like, at the beginning of the call we were talking about this, like with the legal dispute, but, you know, somebody came up with a solution for, you know, prototyping, designing and creating a website in a matter of hours, where it took us 16 weeks before, and it wasn’t great, but it was good. Could that help us shave off two or three weeks of a typical build? Could it shave off 30 or 40 hours that we could pass on some savings to the client? Could it help us find blinders for some of our strategies next, I think we came out with a public facing AI statement. So you know how we use AI in our business responsibly, how we don’t use it just to write all the copy for a website? Look like plagiarism is at first, but you know the AI models are actually it’s you. It’s becoming a little bit more clear that you can do some of that stuff and do it responsibly and get good rankings and all that stuff. And that stuff’s changing. So it’s we had to make the AI statement flexible enough to be our Constitution for the future. Right then, recruiting, all of our recruiting now involved questions around, how do you use AI in your daily life, in your work life. How familiar are you with X, Y and Z platforms, all that type of stuff. What’s crazy is we’ve had, I think, seven hires this year. We’ve had 9000 applicants for those seven hires. So now we use AI in the recruiting process. So we actually have an AI platform. We’ve gone through several now that publishes the job. Post, accepts all academic candidate applications and resumes. It itself actually goes out and schedules the first interview, conducts all of them simultaneously. So like in two or three days, it’ll conduct two or 300 interviews for a position. And then

Brad Weimert 46:00
what does that look like when you say it conducts the interview? What’s the mechanism?

Pat Dillon 46:04
It actually reaches out to the candidate, the AI, the AI agent itself reaches out to the candidate, schedules a time to talk, conducts an AI interview with a fake person. Right then it based on customer parameters. It puts them into a spreadsheet with a recording and scores them on the likelihood of success in that position, and then helps us weed down, you know, three, 400 we’ve had, we’ve had, like 900 applicants for some positions. So it’ll, it’ll like weed that all down to something that we can actually work with. So maybe it gets it down to 40 candidates, where we can really quickly go through and listen to the recordings at like top speed. And, you know, we’re playing with the platform based back and forth a lot, and we’ve gone through, I think this is the third platform we’ve used, like this. I mean, there’s like, funny stuff that happened at the beginning where, like, the AI agent just like, stops talking the candidates, like, what’s going on? Is it over, you know? So it was like, it’s getting to a point where it’s indispensable for us, because we have so many, you know, being on the Inc 5000 list a couple years in a row, and all the five star reviews across Glassdoor and Google and everything else, and the amount of information we have out there on our YouTube channel, and it just, there’s a lot of interest in working here. It’s overwhelming. We’d have after we we would have to have a team of like, three to five full time in the HR department to handle the volume of people that want to work here now. So that’s that’s another area where it’s just made a big difference.

Brad Weimert 47:41
Well, I want to dig into the mechanics of that particular thing, but first I want to highlight the kind of the process here. And one of the big steps was an AI Task Force to see what we could do. And you mentioned a contest to try to figure out the best practical applications of AI. When you say there was a contest, were you incentivizing that for the whole staff? How much time was allocated to it? How did you actually structure that? Structure that internally?

Pat Dillon 48:04
So, yeah, big cash prizes. Everybody in the other team, including managers myself, my business partner, did not participate. Our CTO. But I can’t remember the cash prizes. Where they were. They were like, sizable enough. We’re like, this is interesting. And anybody can submit, I think, one to two ideas of something that they incorporated into their role or their department, using AI, they had to show the problem, the solution and the impact, and then it went into a leadership vote. So all the ideas came back into a spreadsheet. And, you know, we decided one of the winners, I think, was the project manager, actually, who brought to the table this new solution that helps, sort of very quickly, map out a sitemap, a workflow strategy designed for a website, and we have actually been testing that as a way to maybe spin up great websites faster.

Brad Weimert 49:13
What? What are the other strategic or tactical elements that you’ve changed with wise in the last 18 months to get you to accelerate growth and maintain profit?

Pat Dillon 49:23
Yeah, so account managers were able to handle a certain book of business, right? Maybe that’s number of accounts or amount of revenue, or that type of thing, and it seemed like they’re always kind of capping out Well, part of that’s just like the amount of time they have. So when a client asks a really complicated question that involves multiple disciplines, like SEO, website, CRO, paid media. Well, they would have to go to all these different team members to get those answers and then compile. They’d wait for those answers, right? Then they compile those answers. Then they’d write an email to the client, and the client would wait. Days for, you know, an important but complicated question, the answer to, and now they can use AI to get it done in 20 minutes. Because, you know, they can put in really great prompts that are vetted by the department and disciplines and and that’s really helped. I mean, it’s cut down sometimes, you know, it would take three hours to answer a question, which in most cases, we probably don’t get paid for that time, because, sure, we can’t pay, we can’t charge a client for three hours to answer a question that they think is simple. And so, you know, that’s helped in a big way, just be making certain, you know, roles and departments more more efficient and more profitable. On the flip side, revenue. So we’ve been pushing forward the envelope and having AI platforms suggest us more to the types of clients, industries, products and services that we offer. And so, you know, a lot of what we were doing on the SEO front really fed well into the large language models. So when chat GPT launched, we were already getting suggested. But you know, in 2023 is when we started seeing our first deals that we know, because we asked the prospective client, where’d you find us? And they would say Gemini or chat GBT or whatever, and we started signing those first deals in 23 well, by 24 by last year, by like early last year, probably 30 or 40% of our pipeline was due to people who found us on AI solutions this year. You know, two of our largest contracts in the history of the company are people that found us on chat, G, P, T, and so, you know, we’re using AI to improve the bottom line, but also very much improve the top line too.

Brad Weimert 51:57
What are the so your life has been driven by SEO over the course of decades, how? What are the tenants of SEO that have changed to both show up in the search engines and also the AI engines?

Pat Dillon 52:12
You know, it all comes down, I think, to content, but the way you structure content and the way you submit content has really changed. Three or four years ago, you could, you could put together a local website for a chiropractor, a dentist or whatever, and you could have, you know, I don’t know, let’s go back five years. You could have a website that’s like 1520 pages, where every page has 500 words, and you’ve got a proper site now for all the services are broken out correctly on their own pages, and you’ve got a hub page and this and that. Then you set up directories, and you get some good reviews, and you start ranking really well. Can’t do that anymore today. You know, each page maybe has to have 1000 to 1500 words. It has to have, you know, perfect metadata. It has to have structured data and schema markup. And you know, you’ve got to, you’ve got to go well beyond the basics on directory set up, and you’ve got to have a really consistent program for getting reviews and having really recent, high quality reviews constantly coming in. And it’s just like the the baseline of what you need to do is so much higher. But when it comes down to like, what’s always been there, it’s always been having great content, it’s just like, What does great content look like today is different, and it’s going to continue changing. And the be everywhere thing, of course, is really important. You can’t, you can’t ignore social media, even though I don’t feel like, for a lot of businesses, it’s ever going to get an ROI, you know, like it’s, it’s just something we have to do to look alive. But you know, having, having a really well built out Glass Door program, right? That’s important for recruiting, and recruiting helps, you know, serve up continuing growth. And so you can’t ignore certain platforms or disciplines today like you could maybe five years ago.

Brad Weimert 54:09
So from an SEO perspective, you talk about sort of the schema and the structure and the site map of the pages. And the key thing that I heard that was different was moving from, you know, limited content on a page to more 500 words to 1000 Yep. Structurally, you know, I look at our traffic, and in the last year, we’ve had probably a 40% decrease in traffic from SEO, and it’s all moved over to the AI engines, yep. What are the mechanisms that get you into the AI engine that are the same or different than what shows up on search, because AI, for example, chat GPT is going to suggest three things, and Google is going to give you 50 links, even though nobody clicks on the latter, 45 Yeah.

Pat Dillon 54:58
I mean, what you know, what’s in. Interesting is, there’s an SEO conference going across the street. I was, I jumped into a talk yesterday just because I wanted to take a break from work. And, you know, they were talking about something that we’ve been talking about internally for maybe a year or two, is just the length of content on a page. And that’s where it’s like, tough for you know, the agency client relationship is, let’s take a client like a we’re really big in the accounting space, so tons and tons of accounting firms and everything related to accounting, like M and A activity and wealth planning and stuff. So let’s say we built a website four years ago for an accounting firm, and let’s say we went a little bit over the the average, and we did 750 words per page. And let’s say we did everything right from an SEO standpoint four years ago. Well today, because, you know, let’s say 40% of people now have switched from using Google and only use chat, GPT and Gemini. I am that case. I don’t really use Google anymore, probably 19 out of 20 searches. I’m going to chat GPT for first. And you know what large language models is looking at? They’re looking at the entire page. They don’t really care about the design and the layout and the and some of the basic metadata. They don’t they don’t care about that stuff. They care about the words on the page. And so if, let’s say you started an accounting site last year incorporating all the new rules that we know about large language models, and compare that to the client who was created four years ago before large language models, well, this one’s probably going to rank if you consider everything else constant, right? Like both firms have good directories set up, both firms are getting lots of reviews, all of those other signals outside of, you know, just the website, right? So that’s where it makes it a strain on the agency relationship. Is your agency might be coming to you and saying, Hey, listen, we got to change a lot of structure on the pages of your website. Yeah, the one that we built you four years ago, because today is different, and I think there’s a lot of clients are like, Nah, I don’t understand. They’re just trying to sell me more stuff. No, it’s not at all that we’re trying to keep you ahead of the curve. And unfortunately, what happens is, you know, a lot of times a client just points to the agency is, well, they’re not working anymore. No, they’re trying to actively help you, but you have to kind of look at it like a rebuild, almost, in a lot of ways. And if you’re not doing that in your business every two or three years, you’re really doing yourself a disservice. I mean, we have clients that we brought on board with their existing website that haven’t let us work on or build a new website for six, seven years. That’s crazy. Like, would you let your sales person go out and sell the same for six or seven years without any retraining, no way in hell. So I business owners need to be a little bit more realistic about how often they’re taking a really comprehensive look at doing, doing over what they’ve got set up. What you’re experiencing is, I think, not unique in that you’re seeing a lot of traffic or not drop it, and you’re seeing it come from and there’s a switching. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can get both. You just have to, like, make sure you’re reinvesting that same percentage back every year in your business from a marketing standpoint, and then it’s it’s dollars just get allocated differently. That’s where I think we’re really good with clients, is we really focus on developing a continual growing ROI, let us be in charge of how the money’s deployed.

Brad Weimert 58:58
So you’ve gone through a bunch of different iterations. I love the application of this stuff today from an AI perspective, what advice do you have for a brand new entrepreneur starting

Pat Dillon 59:08
out today? Get serious about your brand and get serious about you know how digital is incorporated into developing the brand, because that’s the thing that will pay off more than almost anything else you can do in your business. For me, you know, the ROI that we’ve had from our own digital marketing efforts for wise digital has paid off more than anything I’ve ever done, and in my career as an investor, you know, I think there’s a lot of digital agencies, for example, who are like, wow, I’m competing against I’m competing against all these other digital agencies. Well, do you really have that little faith in what you do that you don’t think you can do well at digital marketing, for a digital marketing firm, and we just started out very different. I said, you know, when I when I launched the business in 2019 I said to my team, I want to be the largest SEO client of the firm on day one. So next year we’re going to double that sow, and the next year we doubled it again, and we did that for a couple years in a row. And I’ve never had to advertise. I don’t, I don’t worry about gross. It comes naturally. And I think if a business owner just understands it’s going to work, and find the right partner, one that understands your business and you like working with, like, that’s all really important. But, you know, double down, like, really, really jump in and don’t, don’t look back. Because I think too many times business owners are like, well, if it will try it and see if it works for a year, if clients say that to us for like this is we’re not going to invest in this relationship.

Brad Weimert 1:00:43
I got to go. I get it Pat. I wish you were here in person. I’d love to get more time in better questions, but I also am at time here. So what? Why don’t why don’t we do this? Why don’t you tell us where what your ideal market is, and where people can find out more about you and about wise.

Pat Dillon 1:01:02
Yeah, you know, we work with a lot of different types of companies, but professional services and home services are the ones we have the highest success rate. Like, you know, we never lose accounting firms or law firms. We never lose plumbing companies or restoration companies. Go to our website, wise digital partners.com, if you want to book a meeting with me, meet with pat.com Nice.

Brad Weimert 1:01:21
Meet with pat.com I love it, awesome, man. I appreciate you carving out time. You too, buddy. Thank you. All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad weimert. I am also the founder of easy pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience, people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us [email protected] forward slash b, a, m, again, that’s epd.com forward slash BAM.