Ep 627: Why Nick Shackelford's Personal Brand Saved His Cash Flow | Agency Confidential Preview

0:00It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric. And today we've got a preview of my co-founder Jeff's new podcast, Agency Confidential. Today he sits down with Nick Shackelford, friend of the show. Jeff calls him the Coca-Cola of e-commerce. I call him the Drake of D2C. Either way, if you spent five minutes in this space, you know his face. And about halfway through, Nick dropped something that he's never talked about publicly, which was a story about what actually saved his cash flow through a rough month and why a decade of showing up online has turned into a new podcast. a lever almost nobody else has.

0:32They get into AI in the agency space, why Nick thinks the market's about to splinter back into specialists and a lot more. If you are building an agency, you've got to subscribe to Agency Confidential. There's actually a newsletter that we can link in the show notes below, but sit back and listen to the sweet tones of the Drake of D2C on Agency Confidential and on with the show. On Mediavine right now, there's three things that always has to happen and we deployed what we call the www framework. What had happened? Because what had happened, what are you doing? And because what you're doing today, what do you expect to happen next?

1:06The least important piece of media buying today is in-account adjustments being done. When you are intentional about what you're communicating against, a couple things start to happen. I don't think I've talked about this ever. This is important.

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2:00No scroll, no skip, no little square buried in a feed. Just your brand in front of someone who's paying attention on the biggest screen in their house. Sign up today at ParamountAdsManager.com. Get your brand on TV's biggest shows by tomorrow. Nick, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for joining us today. You've been in the space for a while. You've done a lot of stuff. You've got a couple of agencies, but you're also involved in a bunch of other businesses. Maybe we can just start just to get context. Can you lay the land of the businesses that you are involved with? Yeah. That's a kind of way of saying that I'm a dinosaur in the space.

2:35Which is weird to even say like I'm 35 and this is my 11th year of being in digital. Like I'd say digital because it always started with agency. Like we didn't know. Oh, actually it's funny. It was brand with fidget spinner, fidget spinner to agency and then multi-agency and then now it's kind of like brand and agency which i think i do think it's the future like guys and girls that have a skill set of like revenue generation acquisition or revenue preservation retention life cycle subscription that's like a very real skill like and if you are at our size where like i think thankfully i have a great team great leadership team like i don't have to be in accounts or i don't have to like touch or talk about anything but if i want to i can get in and be like seeing all the like this bird's eye view of what's happening so that's like my my weird intro but the overall is like we have a full service agency that's structured we have a pure tech slash creative agency at constant so it's a briefing tool but then there's humans on the back end but we also can use templates because i think that's the way the creative is going to go and then you have lucid which is more of a niche style agency that supports health and wellness, telemedicine, or specifically like cannabis.

3:49So it's like three agencies across the board with incredible operators. And the last, I would say two and a half years has been very brand focused. So it's like, I hope it's the natural progression that people have, but it is all digital, all paid media, all subscription, all retention all the time. And you've got Breeze and you've got Geek Out Events, right? Is that right? we do and we have commerce roundtable which is a yes batch of it so okay so let me when we say like this i have to be very clear on how i explain this stuff because people like the the most logical way for you to reply to me is like seems like a lot why are you doing it's like why would you do this like what one is more than enough any one of these things is a full-time experience thing.

4:34And I'm most effective at one to two. I'm really good. Like zero to one takes me a long time to launch something. So it's really difficult for me to get something up and off the ground. I'm just more of like, once the team I've put in place can run it, I know how to work with them, operate them and lead them accordingly. So I sit and play in the same role across every team, depending on the season that that business is going to be in. And so for Geek Out and for commerce roundtable an event business although it's very difficult it hits and it's in basically three month sprints you have the date it's going to be live you have speakers you have sponsors you have like fill the room and like that doesn't really change and the team is the same thing my ab is the same my planner is the same my day of is the same my ads are the same so that's pretty pocketed on the agency depending on the service that you're selling like you and we're far enough out of it where like the team is built out infrastructure.

5:32Like you're just basically firefighting or people management at this level. So I will say it's, although it is diverse in what it is that we're serving, there's routines and systems that are working across each of these that isn't needed for me to be in every single day, thankfully. Nice. We'll come back to that because I do want to understand kind of how you play in all of these businesses because, you know, I talked to a lot of agency leaders and a lot of them have these, you know, they're either the agency is only their only thing, or they've got all these little businesses. I mean, we have the same thing at Pilot House.

6:04We've got a media company, we've got events, we've got a product company, we've got all these different things. And it's always, you see so many people trying to figure out what their level of involvement should be. But we'll come back to that. I want to go back to the beginning. Structured was the first agency. Is that right? It was, yeah. How did Structured come about? It was a full circle, beautiful moment because we started fidgetly with Jake, who is my current partner on Structured and Constant. And I was actually a senior strategist at Comet Threat Collective, one of our good friends, Taylor Holliday.

6:39And I'm Orange County based. He's Orange County based. And I worked for Taylor for about two years and we got to this place and he has this, this program was called TYMD, like tell me your dream. And one of my dreams was like, I want to be an agency owner. And obviously beforehand I was like, Hey, like just make be a partner it's super simple you can make me an agency i was like dude we can we can handle this today maybe we could do this right now and and he goes like look dude at this time the many years ago like this point's eight eight and a half years ago like i left common thread yeah almost nine years ago i left common thread and i basically said hey i want to do this and i can't do this unless i have your blessing because i'm directly going to compete with you and and like i did a great job for them.

7:20We made a lot of money. Their team was incredible. The who's who of people and brands were at that firm. And when I told him, he was obviously not stoked. And he was like, hey, I love you. And I support you as a man to man. And if this is so heavy on your heart, go do it. And so I announced that I will be leaving and I'll be starting Structured at the time, which at the time was just Structured Social. And it was my consultancy, taking people that were not fit for the agency at the time. And so we jumped out and I gave Jake a call and I go, hey, buddy, I don't have a job, but like we can do this, let's go.

7:54And I remember I called him and I called another friend, Colin McGuire. Colin was like, you sure you want to do this? I was like, I'm not, but I know how to run ads. I like, I knew how to media buy. So like, let's go. And that was the, that was it. And was Jake in from day one? Day one. Jake was actually, Jake didn't know media buying. So he was having to run side clients that were way too small for common. Like back in, I was eight years ago, this is when you were able to sell like retainer plus performance deals, right? Yeah. People still do it today, but it's not as easy to sell like ROAS. Totally.

8:27Pay me more. But back then it was easy. But if you had a small, if you have a small account, like it doesn't make sense for a big agency. So Jake would basically take a couple of the clients that didn't fit common. And so as soon as I told him, I was like, hey, like let's go. And this is, and you probably remember this, remember Facebook ad buyers and ad leaks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you obviously know a good friend of our mutual friend, Eric Dick. He and I met way back when he was about sharing content. So deal flow would come from Facebook groups. Execution would be me, an incredible Filipino named Ariel and Jake.

9:00And that was the initial burn. That was the team. I love it. You knew this. Early on, you didn't have to do a lot of new things. You could just basically stay in the ad accounts immediately. Yeah, it was a different game. I mean, that's where we got our start too. We were affiliates. I mean, we had our own little media buying crew and we'd just arbitrage all day on meta ads. And it was wild. I mean, lots of ups and downs. That's why we ended up starting an agency because we were just like, wow, this business is only worth as much as our last campaign. But man, it was a fun time in the late teens of the 2000s.

9:37It was an amazing time in meta for sure. so what did you it was the three of you guys being the practitioners effectively what was the moment when it went from you know three people media buying effectively to a company like what did that what did those early days look like what did that transition look like it took it took us a full year because we were not we were pretty intentional with like the speed at which we were wanting to grow and the benefit that i have here is i've been i've been sharing about my journey and I've been talking about what I do for quite some time. And so we had interest already.

10:08And so as soon as I was able to be on my own and I felt respectful enough to not be grabbing or taking, the biggest requirement was like, if I'm leaving Common Thread, I need it to be quiet enough to not ruffle existing clientele team there because it's out of respect. And you can't poach for at least a year. You can't touch a brand. You can't touch a person, any of that stuff. So I wanted to honor that and not make sure anything happened. and so we were basically collecting brands here and there and I would say it took us about a full year for Jake, John, Ariel, Jake, another Jake. So we had a Jake Little, John Hagen, Jake and Ariel.

10:49He was, he was literally a 2.0. And these guys are like, they're just a bunch of dudes. They're Missouri based and we flew them out to LA. We had a home in LA and we kind of like hacker house did it and i moved into more like client facing it was like you media bought and you talk to client and then it turned into like actually we have more clients than we actually have and i just need to be talking to client you guys need to do the media buying so it went like nick went front of the house he went back to the house because i felt most comfortable explaining to people what was being done so it took us a full year to start building infrastructure full year to start building process and full year to know like who we could actually be good at winning for.

11:29And we were, we lived in this drop shipping, uh, general store niche. Yeah. What did the first foray into structure and process look like a lot, a lot of, I mean, God, we've been through it. I feel like we're always trying to like reinvent our structure and process at pilot house. It's always a bit of a, you know, you get to another level, you're like, fuck, I got to redo it again. And how did you guys, how was that foray from just like hacker house mentality to this thing actually running like a real agency? Maybe it's not contrarian, but I have, we're going through this. Literally, we're all going through this right now with like the adoption of how much AI needs to be in workflow.

12:04So I think I can apply what was then and put it now just because that is eight years ago, but I know what I'm feeling like right now with the team. Like I really do. And it's like very, I think it's probably a similar process we went to back there. Structured, and I'm just going to stick on the media buying side, because obviously we have a bunch of other services that we sell. But on Mediavine right now, there's three things that always has to happen. And we deployed what we call the WWW framework. And it was familiar with the internet. And so WWW framework stands like, what had happened? Because what had happened, what are you doing?

12:35And because what you're doing today, what do you expect to happen next? So these are the three questions that you have to answer. And those are overarching so that you can make sure that the client is informed and the brand is progressing. And so people that have done this really well are guys like yourself who have like clear, here's how we're testing. Here's what the performance looks like. Is that a dashboard? Is that just a daily report? Is that an automated feed that comes into the account? Is that the weekly call? Like whatever that is. at the time, like it didn't need to be anything other than like, Hey, I'm going to talk to you every week and I'm going to give you updates on a daily basis.

13:09Oh, by the way, send me assets to upload into the account. So it was way more free flowing in terms of like structure, but it was very clear on like, this is when we give you your update. This is what the etiquette of the Slack communication, like it's basically called Slack a kit. And, and this is how, and when your performance is going to be updated. But now what I'm dealing with and thinking about is when I get the team, what's the least important piece of media buying in this space? I would say the least important piece of media buying today is in account adjustments being done. Back then it was like big, like I did these bid adjustments, I did these things.

13:44Now it's like, what learnings and creative did you launch? And what is the learnings and feedback that we needed at the client to tell them to give us more of the things we need or the creative team to give us more of what they need? So I think what we're learning now with how many different dashboards we need from a performance standpoint, how many different, uh, less campaign structure and more like offer iteration and pages we need to develop. So the communication right now has to be more strategic forward. Whereas previously, did you just report on what you did? And they were like, that's more than enough.

14:14Cause I, I, I, the brand owner can't do what you're doing. And they were paying for the work getting done and it's changing because the work getting done is getting done by AI all of a sudden. So there's a lot more, not all of it, but a ton of it, And it's a completely different world moving into the responsibility of, I think, all agencies is moving up to bigger and bigger picture and the overall success of the brand versus just run this meta account. So develop this with me. I've been thinking, I've been sitting this. I'm glad I was able to see you on this today because this is something that's very in my head right now.

14:50You get a report from your client, your brand. Your team sends you a report. Or you know to some degree that there is a 5%, 10%, 15%, 50 % creation done with AI. What is your feeling back to this? What is your response back to this? I want people to use AI. But I actually wrote a newsletter for agency or a group about this. AI is an input, not an output. It's a thinking tool. It's a creation tool. but at this point I want to see people using that as the base layer and adjusting and adapting and digging through it and challenging it and having it challenge them as a way to get a better output the thing that we had a talk with everyone internally a couple weeks ago about this because you know there's a certain subset of people that will ask a question get this big ass report and just blindly send it over and they're like here you go and they don't know what the fuck it says They don't know what's in there.

15:53I think it's a big risk for agencies. We're getting this with, you know, we get a ton of this with clients coming in on a few different levels. You know, we'll get an RFP request. And the RFP is obviously just slop. They haven't thought it through. And at the same time, you know, we get certain clients that, you know, they're trying to do their best, but they'll, Claude or ChatGPT is giving just direct feedback on the ads, you know, for approval. And it's not well thought out stuff. It's just like, it's just, it's nitpicking whatever. And so I think as society, we got to watch that we don't use it, at least at this stage.

16:27Like it's amazing. I use it constantly. Our teams use it constantly. If you're not using it, I think you're behind. But it's again, it's the input to get to the answer. It's not the answer itself is the way I see it right now. What are your thoughts? When I'm receiving a document that has been AI'd, my visceral reaction is why am I spending human time reading machine output and it kills me it kills me dude because i don't want i don't want my reaction to be this way and i want my team to continue to adopt it as they are as you're explaining about your team because the the what i will appreciate is like people can be long in what they say and mean very little and if you have the way the way that you use your tool, your machine, whatever it is, like it has to be able to like pull the synthesis out of it and be very direct, like in bullet points and then give contextual information needed if the person wants it.

17:30And what I hate is like sometimes the output will be so fleshed out that you're like, what did I just read? I just wasted time. This was no value of me. And that's the part that I'm like trying to get over is I think it's good at fleshing out ideas and concepts unnecessarily too long. And you have to work through that with your AI bot. You have to work through how you want their reaction to be. And so when clients send it over, I expect it to be slop. I expect us to take it and then put it into, how do you say this, like a synthesis to make it shorter so I can pull the specificness out of it. But yeah, I'm of the camp that says we in our industry have to adopt and utilize this.

18:12The value is not necessarily in the work that we're doing, but it's in the direction that we're providing. 100 couldn't agree more i think that i don't want to say it's a it's a it's a bullshit machine because it's not a bullshit machine but i've got i've got a little uh i built a little media buying uh slack bot his name is gary i made gary and blanche blanche the creative strategist and gary is the media buyer and i did this for d2c our media company just as like a test bet i just want to like see how far i can push it what it will do what i won't do and it's funny i keep uh you know gary will go and give me just the most verbose answer known to man and it's just like gary what ads worked and it's like it's just gary fix it and it's just it's there's a natural inclination of the ai's just to do that and i think that's the thing if people use it for that they use it as the output and it gives you this giant verbose thing and it gives you kind of the bullshit and they haven't thought about it it drives me crazy as well it's wild and it is that that is the death of thinking.

19:12And I think that's where we have a problem. I think there's a lot of value. Again, like one of my favorite ways to use AI is I, I go for runs all the time and I'll just sit there and I'll put it on chat mode and I'll talk through an issue while I'm running. I look like a fucking psychopath running through a park, just talking, but it, it works. It works well. And it's not that it's the only thinking partner. It's just, it's this way to, I, I solve things by talking them through with people. So for me, it's a great way, but it's not like, hey, just make this document, send it over to Eric and call it a day.

19:43Because that's where you just get into garbage. On that, what do you see as the, like you guys are obviously implementing AI in a bunch of different ways, I'm sure. What does that look like internally? How are you doing this in a way? How do you structure the team and how do you structure your implementation of AI so that it's not chaos? That's something we've been struggling with. So we're more advanced on the email side than we would be on the paid media side. I would say we're a really strong retention team with legacy and respect in the paid media side. But I would say you would know us more for retention lifecycle and pages than you would know us for paid media, which is a little bit different because it was the inverse once upon a time.

20:28The workflows for AI for retention are more, it might say, robust than the workflows or execution would be on the paid media side. You can get a good enough reporting analysis and creative analysis that does take human synthesis on the paid media side specifically. So in terms of we do pull into Claude on the MCP for ad analysis. And so we do have like an ad analyzer. The difficult thing for me, and I have a call with the HQ team, because we're fully remote. Everybody has their own machine set up in a very unique way. And I am not in the luxury of buying and paying for the largest cloud instance for everybody to use for them to do it their own way.

21:13And so what we're struggling with right now, candidly, is it's not a per project, per client situation because you're having to attach NCP and upload NCP to each other. And then there's a lot of data segregation that's needed to make sure that it's not pulling in past instances or past memory that is going to misinform output. So on paid media, I don't think I can speak directly to this, but on the retention side specifically, actually I'll future cast on what we're going to do for paid media. I think that would be a little bit more helpful for people. The briefing, auditing, and intake of brands getting up and running has never been easier to get quicker on this because you're able to pull the website, pull reviews, pull best performing from like a foreplay API pull or even HR if you had to.

22:02and you're able to like pull in what's working without even needing to get into the account beforehand. So you can come prepared to what happens. Then it'll also give you like roadmap of like easiest wins, fastest wins, first 30 days, second 30 days, third 30 days. And so we're able to come to these calls before really getting access to accounts to be like, hey, like, let's see if we can validate this, do a deeper analysis. But like, here's how we think we would go about it. I think that's huge, huge value add. That's, there's no reason why that can't happen. And that same methodology instead of future guessing is what we're doing on the retention side specifically.

22:34Because as long as we can get cloud integrated and as long as we can have our automated reports running from a flow, campaign, performance, offer, that is way more structured. Because then I'm going to be able to pull a full audit, full areas of operations and full focal point on pop-up, campaign flow, or even just like segmentation. Yeah. That from an intake, dude, is so valuable. that used to take a lot of human capital to do audits. Yeah. Yeah. We find the same thing. The last thing I'll say, like I do think there's a little bit more chaos. I will say my leaders in each department are tasked and owned with this and I don't have a good balance.

23:11And like, I feel like I'm grinding them into the ground to learn and help them build. But then they're also still like, do I still got to do all the other QC? Yeah. Well, are you, so like to go a little bit deeper on that, are you, you know, one thing we've looked at is we've been calling it an AI czar. Just hiring someone whose job it is to sit at the top of the org, and they're not in charge, but their job is to manage AI implementation. So it's basically centralized versus decentralized. That's what we're trying to figure out. And then there's heavily decentralized, which is down to the individual person.

23:46There's kind of semi-decentralized, which is the head of the department. Or there's fully centralized, which is someone at the top. It's not that innovation comes from them. It's that someone has to wrangle, where are these things hosted? How do we make sure that this isn't repeating something that someone else built over here? That's what we're trying to figure out right now. That's why we're talking with the headquarters team. So this guy named Jacob on Twitter, everybody is running their own machine. Yes, we own the machine, but everyone's running their own structure and communication and plugging or unplugging NCPs or API connectors.

24:22And it's sloppy. It is sloppy. So there is a shared agent infrastructure layer, they call like the harness, like the harness is not built correctly for us just yet. And so everybody is essentially sharing what they're doing on a department basis. And so in what I'm hoping that we can get done, and obviously, like, I don't know when this will come live. And I'm hopeful of what we're going through right now from a potential merger acquisition transaction situation. we're the whoever we're in conversations with has this infrastructure and layer and so like we offer a very nice bolt-on to what they already are doing and so from an owner standpoint like do i invest heavily into an infrastructure build-up when i don't know if it's going to be a a worthwhile endeavor because someone's going to come in strip it redo it or add into it and it's i'm i'm a little bit holding the investment but i'm not throttling the innovation from whoever wants to get it.

25:17And so it's so hard for me to go deep on it like that because I'm like, I see it. I'm literally on the sideline watching it and having conversations with the guys like yourself there. I'm like, dude, that's brilliant. I think that's so nice that you built that because it needs to be done. Like if you are in this game right now, we, I'll change, I'll try to change this. We haven't had pushback or fear of a human capital, human employees saying like, I am fearful of losing my job because of this. We have not seen that. We have not felt that. we have not people aren't talking about that if anything people are like cool i can have my life back yeah yeah we we have a similar when when i remember when chat gpt came out i was i was definitely uh i mean not too early but excited and excitable so i put a big post in slack i'm like hey whoever has the best idea how we can implement this blah blah blah and it was just you know people were like you know at the time you know clog code didn't exist and people were coming with these crazy ideas that weren't even remotely implementable and i was okay shit i'm i'm coming too early to this.

26:16And at that time, we definitely had people being like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to slow our roll and say, I stuff, what's happening? What is it now? Once people get their hands on it, which everyone does to some extent, you know, whether it is even just, you know, asking questions to chat to BT, we've seen it. I couldn't agree more with that. It's a reversal in people's opinion of it because it is like, oh shit, I don't have to do this menial, like copy paste this 47 seven times to do whatever, or, um, you know, I've, I've got a thinking partner on everything and it is, it is, it's a really cool, cool and scary time I would say for, for, for people, but it's, but it's, it's interesting for sure.