Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Taxi Driver to CEO: Surviving Setbacks & Scaling Fast with Brook Shephard

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From Taxi Driver to CEO: Surviving Setbacks & Scaling Fast with Brook Shephard · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:04
  I would drive a cab around at night in New York City.
• 0:07
  This is the early 2000s, and then I did that seven nights a week.
• 0:11
  Imagine that you've poured every ounce of your identity into your business.
• 0:16
  The sleepless nights, the relentless hustle, and the refusal to quit.
• 0:20
  You've swallowed your pride and driven a cab through New York City just to keep the lights on while launching your dream.
• 0:27
  Then, just as you finally take your first real vacation, you get the message that changes everything.
• 0:32
  Your largest client is gone, taking 70% of your revenue with them in a single heartbeat.
• 0:38
  Today's guest, Brooke Shepherd, CEO of Mason Interactive, lived that reality and found a way to build back stronger.
• 0:47
  We're discussing his transition from Wall street to the pavement of New York, exploring the practical steps he he took to scale a digital agency to over $30 million in revenue.
• 0:58
  The conversation moves past the overnight success myths to focus on the self awareness and strategy required to manage a team of 30, navigate industry shifts like AI and utilize acquisitions for growth.
• 1:13
  We'll look at how he maintained his resolve during those lean early years and what it actually takes to to stay in the game and scale when the stakes are at their highest.
• 1:23
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:28
  All right, Brooke shepherd, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:31
  Thanks for having me, Dave.
• 1:33
  Yeah, thank you for taking the time.
• 1:35
  So, Brooke, you are the CEO and the founder of Mason Interactive, which is a full service digital marketing agency.
• 1:44
  You've started that company and scaled it over the past 17 years and we'll get into all that.
• 1:49
  But prior to that, you had quite an interesting road to becoming an entrepreneur.
• 1:54
  If you could, for our audience, could you just talk about your, your backstory and then how you became an entrepreneur?
• 2:00
  Sure.
• 2:00
  Happily.
• 2:01
  I graduated from an Ivy league University in 1998 and worked on Wall street because that's what was expected of me and I did not enjoy it and I wasn't particularly good at it.
• 2:10
  And I had an arts degree and I ended up quit failing, quit failing, quit firing from that job and starting a career in marketing.
• 2:21
  And that was the thing I really liked.
• 2:22
  It was creative enough that my arts background played into it.
• 2:26
  It was businessy enough that I could wrap my head around it.
• 2:29
  And I had a few different stops along the way.
• 2:31
  I think the thing that people like to talk about, and I like to talk about it too, is the first time I went out on my own.
• 2:38
  Before Mason, I didn't have any clients, so I needed a way to make ends meet while I was looking for clients.
• 2:43
  When I was younger.
• 2:44
  Then I got a job driving a taxi cab in New York City before Uber, before cell phones, and before credit card payment processing.
• 2:52
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• 2:57
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• 2:59
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• 3:08
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• 3:16
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• 3:30
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• 3:34
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• 3:39
  At night in New York City.
• 3:41
  This is the early 2000s.
• 3:42
  And then I did that seven nights a week.
• 3:45
  And after about a couple of months, I had a few clients.
• 3:47
  So then I drove a cab six nights a week.
• 3:49
  And then I had a few more clients and I drove a cab, so on and so forth.
• 3:52
  So I drove a cab for a couple of years to make ends meet while I was building up my first business.
• 3:56
  And entrepreneurially, that business stalled at a place where I was making a good living.
• 4:02
  But it would go up and down.
• 4:03
  I would make $0 one month, I would make $10,000 the next month, I would make $300 the next month, I'd make $0 a month after that.
• 4:10
  And I had to realize that I lacked the skills to grow it after two or three years.
• 4:14
  And so that was my first sort of entrepreneurial shot, was doing that.
• 4:17
  And I had a fun time, but I lacked the ability to scale it.
• 4:20
  So I went and I got a job in Long island with an agency that was.
• 4:24
  I was lucky that they wanted me to.
• 4:25
  It was very entrepreneurial and entrepreneurially focused.
• 4:28
  And they rewarded me and they valued me and I valued them, and I enjoyed working there.
• 4:32
  It was like an Internet marketing startup in the mid 2000s.
• 4:36
  And so that's how I started the journey was trying to see what I could do and trying to find a way to support myself while I was doing it.
• 4:42
  Okay, all right, Appreciate that.
• 4:44
  And a lot to just unpack there, too.
• 4:45
  And that first business, too, was that also like a marketing agency?
• 4:50
  I was doing SEO for industrial manufacturers and distributors.
• 4:54
  So my clients are people that sold bolts.
• 4:56
  I mean, I'm not joking.
• 4:57
  They sold bolts in Long island and Brooklyn and Queens, and they wanted people to buy more bolts or Wire brush or wood fabrication, things like that.
• 5:05
  It was SEO and web design for industrial manufacturers and distributors.
• 5:09
  Okay, all right.
• 5:10
  So you make the career pivot.
• 5:13
  You realize Wall Street's not for you.
• 5:15
  Marketing is your true passion.
• 5:17
  So you have a couple jobs and you decide to go out on your own.
• 5:20
  And you don't have any clients.
• 5:22
  You need to eat, so you start driving a cab.
• 5:26
  You said seven nights a week, right?
• 5:28
  So clearly, right.
• 5:29
  Hunger.
• 5:30
  You.
• 5:30
  You have the hunger and there's, there's no ego there.
• 5:33
  You're doing whatever you need to do to survive.
• 5:35
  And you have this dream to grow this business.
• 5:37
  And like you said, it's up and down.
• 5:40
  Good month.
• 5:41
  Terrible month.
• 5:42
  Good month.
• 5:43
  Terrible month.
• 5:44
  So when that, what, when that business finally, when you finally realized, like, to, to pull the plug on that, and then you went, you went and got a job, right?
• 5:54
  Because we see that happen with a lot of people and they kind of give up on entrepreneurship after the first failure.
• 6:00
  So many of the successful people we see out there have had multiple failures before they really had a company that wins.
• 6:05
  So what was the mindset like at that time when you kind of got knocked out on that first venture?
• 6:11
  Well, I don't know that I got knocked out as much as I.
• 6:14
  That it is true I got knocked out.
• 6:16
  But I always think of it as I was self aware enough to know that I needed more skills and I needed to develop my tools kit.
• 6:23
  I didn't know how to sell and operationalize.
• 6:26
  I didn't know how to put systems in place to do that.
• 6:28
  So.
• 6:29
  So you're right.
• 6:29
  It was, it was a failure.
• 6:30
  But I viewed it as like a learning experiment.
• 6:32
  You learn a lot.
• 6:33
  I find that I learn a lot more from failures generally than I do from successes.
• 6:37
  And so it was like really sort of like I had to look in the mirror and say I was the reason.
• 6:40
  This wasn't because it was just me.
• 6:42
  And like one freelancer, the reason it wasn't growing was, was, was me.
• 6:46
  But I was really lucky to find a company that valued entrepreneurship that hired me.
• 6:50
  And they had rules, they had an employee handbook, and I had to play along, but I was really l.
• 6:54
  To get a job at that company and work there.
• 6:56
  A company called Send Traffic.
• 6:58
  Okay, all right, so you, you leave the SEO business, you get a job, you're.
• 7:03
  You're there, and it's, it's a very entrepreneurial company that you enjoy working at.
• 7:08
  Were you already in your head thinking, okay, now I know what I need to learn.
• 7:12
  I'm going to work with here at this company and soak up this knowledge and skills.
• 7:16
  Were you already plotting out the next venture at that point?
• 7:19
  I was not plotting out the next venture.
• 7:21
  I really enjoyed that job.
• 7:24
  I felt financially fulfilled and they could have given me more money, but I got raises every year.
• 7:28
  Sometimes they were small, sometimes they weren't.
• 7:31
  My boss respected me, even if he didn't always agree with me.
• 7:33
  I was allowed to voice my opinion.
• 7:35
  I really liked that job.
• 7:37
  What happened was that company got sold.
• 7:40
  It was a public company and then it went private through reverse merger and they fired all the top five people and I was like number four, number three, depending on how you want to look at it.
• 7:50
  So I enjoyed that job and I was going to be there and my wife, I think, was pregnant with our first and only kid and.
• 7:56
  And I got fired.
• 7:57
  And so I.
• 7:58
  What I decided then was, well, I don't want to work at another agency.
• 8:01
  I've already worked at an agency.
• 8:03
  Like, I don't.
• 8:03
  I know how to do that.
• 8:04
  Let me go and work, do something else.
• 8:06
  And so I joined a tech startup and I did not like that job at all.
• 8:11
  I kept quitting that job and they kept asking me to come back.
• 8:13
  But I was at that tech startup for like a year and a half as my first and only kid was born and I left that.
• 8:19
  And that's when I decided to really become an entrepreneur, was when I had been let go from that job as a failure because I'd gotten rid of all the top people.
• 8:29
  And I pivoted from saying I worked at a small agency and it was fun, I liked it, but they fired us.
• 8:35
  Then I went to a tech company where I did not enjoy it.
• 8:38
  Well, what else am I going to do?
• 8:39
  I guess I know how to do an agency.
• 8:41
  And so my wife, God bless her, said, all right, you can start this company.
• 8:44
  And at that point, I had already driven the cab and started the small company that couldn't take off.
• 8:48
  I'd worked at another company that went public, sent traffic.
• 8:50
  I worked at a tech startup and learned agile development.
• 8:53
  So now I had these tools under my.
• 8:56
  These tools in my toolkit that enabled me to be a little more forward thinking about how I would do it again the next time through.
• 9:02
  By the way, I was like 32 years old.
• 9:04
  I had boundless energy and did not sleep for four years.
• 9:07
  But that was the sort of.
• 9:08
  The arc of.
• 9:08
  It was like, all right, now I know.
• 9:10
  Now I've done this in a bunch of different.
• 9:11
  A big company, a small company, a little company.
• 9:14
  Now I know how to go out and do it.
• 9:15
  And that's how they, that's the arc I think of it really.
• 9:17
  Okay, all right.
• 9:18
  So then you get to the point where you realize you're ready.
• 9:21
  You've had these other experiences.
• 9:23
  You don't want to go back to an agency.
• 9:25
  You didn't like the tech startup, you're ready to do it on your own.
• 9:28
  So what, what was the next step?
• 9:29
  And like, how did you get started?
• 9:32
  The truth is that I had people that had followed me around and like me, my old company.
• 9:38
  And at this point it'd been like three years since I was at Send Traffic again.
• 9:42
  The company really liked and they just closed up shop.
• 9:45
  Send Traffic, they closed their agency doors basically.
• 9:48
  And there's two ways of looking at that, but they closed the doors and some of the people that used to work there or I used to work with there called me up and said, hey, I don't know what
• 9:57
  you're doing now.
• 9:58
  This is 17, 18 years ago, but I don't know what you're doing now, Brooke, but can you service our account the way you used to when you work at Send Traffic?
• 10:05
  And I was aggressive about getting those clients too.
• 10:08
  But like, it wasn't, I wasn't in violation of a non compete.
• 10:12
  I wasn't taking business away from friends.
• 10:13
  Like they just closed up and decided they were going to pivot as an agency, leaving those clients around.
• 10:18
  So that was the step.
• 10:19
  And then, and then crucially, crucially, I could not have done this first without my wife.
• 10:24
  And the second thing is I have two mostly silent business partners.
• 10:27
  Hi, Craig and Greg.
• 10:28
  And they invested in my company, which I'd already formed.
• 10:32
  They said, oh, you're going to do that?
• 10:33
  Cool.
• 10:34
  They invested in the company by giving me office space and staff at their company, sort of like an incubator.
• 10:39
  So for the first couple of years of Mason, there were no employees and I didn't have one of their employees.
• 10:45
  But if I needed graphic design, I could get one of their graphic designers for a few hours a week.
• 10:49
  And if I needed programming, I could get one of their programmers.
• 10:52
  Right?
• 10:52
  So they incubated me in their offices out in Long island at their.
• 10:56
  Another company they had.
• 10:57
  And then, and then it took off.
• 10:58
  And that was good because they had a suite of relationships and people they knew they could refer us to people that did affiliate marketing but not paid search, people that didn't do SEO.
• 11:06
  And so there was some gaps we could fill.
• 11:08
  The world was smaller then, but yeah, they back me in it.
• 11:12
  Basically.
• 11:12
  They're still my business partners today.
• 11:14
  Okay.
• 11:15
  All right.
• 11:15
  So you make the decision that you're really going to do this.
• 11:18
  You have some beginner's luck with the old clients reaching out because they need help and that agency basically left them out, out in the cold.
• 11:25
  So that's great.
• 11:26
  And then you have these two friends that know you, believe in you, and they're basically investing and allowing you to utilize their resources to really get, get started and get off the ground with, without that, that overhead.
• 11:40
  So talk about, you know, you have all these things lining up to talk about the process of really getting off the ground and scaling.
• 11:48
  Like you said, you didn't sleep for four years.
• 11:50
  Like, talk more about what it's like in the beginning of your own startup and really trying to make it successful.
• 11:58
  Well, I think one of the things is when I did my first thing with Yankee Rose before I went to send traffic, when I was driving the cab, I, I still needed money and so I drove the cab.
• 12:07
  Right.
• 12:08
  By the time I started Mason, I was married and my, my wife was very supportive and we had an apartment we can afford.
• 12:14
  So I didn't make, I might have slept the first couple of years.
• 12:16
  I didn't make a dollar the first year.
• 12:18
  Right.
• 12:18
  Like literally the first year I was just, just growing the business, putting every penny back into it, hiring new staff as soon as we got a client.
• 12:26
  And I did all the sales and all the operations and all of the, and all of the, everything really.
• 12:32
  One of the things that I, that I think about a lot though is some of the people that were the very first Mason employees.
• 12:38
  Let me rephrase that.
• 12:39
  A person I admire a lot talks about how as their business grows, your, the aperture through which you view the business changes.
• 12:46
  It doesn't grow or shrink, it changes.
• 12:48
  Right.
• 12:49
  It's useful to think of a camera analogy taking a snapshot of things and so the people that were super valuable when we were a four person company that I could not have done it without, like Ann Chen, if
• 12:58
  you're out there listening, so talk to her.
• 12:59
  She was so valuable.
• 13:02
  Those people maybe weren't the right people once we were 10 people.
• 13:05
  Right.
• 13:05
  Because the system need to get more complicated and more rigorous and more written down.
• 13:10
  When you're 10, when you're three people in a room, you can just all huddle together and do it right.
• 13:15
  When you're 10 people, there needs to be more process.
• 13:17
  I did not take a vacation for the first two or three years is absolutely true.
• 13:20
  I might have slept a little bit.
• 13:21
  No money for the first year, no vacation for three years.
• 13:24
  And then just through hard work and dogged determination and watching the financials and doing good work for clients and being lucky because of where we were in time and space, getting more and more clients and always putting money
• 13:34
  back into the business and saying like, is this the year I'm going to take a salary or is this the year I'm going to put it back into the business and try to grow it again?
• 13:41
  It was just, just dogged.
• 13:43
  Left foot, right foot in front of the other.
• 13:44
  Determination.
• 13:46
  Okay.
• 13:47
  Was there ever a point in time where something happened where you considered like quitting or giving up all the time.
• 13:54
  When a woman named Betty who used to work with us was super valuable and great.
• 13:58
  She now runs all digital marketing for Electronic Arts in California.
• 14:01
  She quit.
• 14:02
  That was like a huge.
• 14:03
  Oh God.
• 14:04
  No one's irreplaceable, not even myself, but like, oh God, what are we going to do?
• 14:07
  Or the time.
• 14:08
  My biggest client, who was a school, fired me on the first vacation I ever took since I started the business.
• 14:14
  My wife and I were driving to Cape Cod for a family event and halfway there I got a text message from this client.
• 14:19
  It was like 70% of our revenue saying, hey, just FYI, we're going to take this in a different direction effective Monday.
• 14:27
  Not like not abiding by the contract in any way.
• 14:30
  Yeah, there's a lot of events like that that happen over time where I actually think that's one of the biggest differences between, between entrepreneurs that are successful and not is like just the.
• 14:39
  But it would have been very normal for me to give up at that point and say, you know what I want to do is go get a job.
• 14:44
  And I don't know why I didn't.
• 14:45
  So okay, wow.
• 14:47
  So that like let's, let's key on that too because again, right.
• 14:51
  That, that's almost like, that's like a cruel joke from the universe to where you're at, you're taking your family vacation, you're driving there and you get a text from your biggest client that's 70% of your business and say
• 15:03
  we're done immediately and they're basically breaking the contract.
• 15:06
  And like you said it'd be very normal to give up right at that point.
• 15:09
  So why didn't you?
• 15:12
  I don't know.
• 15:13
  I think, I really don't know.
• 15:14
  I think at that point I had four or five years under my belt.
• 15:17
  I also think I had to be self aware enough to realize.
• 15:21
  So the first Wall street job and then I worked at Newsmax, Chris Ruddy's company out of Florida, that's part of the MAGA world.
• 15:29
  And I didn't do well there.
• 15:31
  And I, and then I worked at CBS Market Watch and I didn't do well there.
• 15:35
  And, and, and when I was at Send Traffic or it was entrepreneurial, I did do well.
• 15:39
  When I went to the tech startup, I didn't do well.
• 15:42
  At some point I had to realize, like, I wasn't really good at having a boss, right?
• 15:47
  Like, like the track record was pretty clear, right?
• 15:49
  Like I was not successful at working for others.
• 15:53
  Right.
• 15:53
  There was, there were, there were many data points that suggested that.
• 15:56
  And I think at this point in my career, I might be.
• 15:57
  I think if this all fell apart tomorrow, knock on wood, I could probably get a CMO job or the head of marketing at a college, something like that, the sort of things we work with here at Mason.
• 16:05
  But, but, but at that point I just, I had a long track record of not doing well with the boss.
• 16:11
  And so I decided that I would just keep plugging ahead.
• 16:14
  And again, very supportive family and wife who are like, cool, keep going for it.
• 16:18
  So how did you, how did you recover from that, too?
• 16:21
  Where 70% of your revenue basically disappears overnight slowly.
• 16:26
  Pipeline is king.
• 16:27
  If you have a good sales pipeline, it can cure a lot of ills.
• 16:31
  You can.
• 16:31
  If you don't have a good sales pipeline, you have to take every crummy deal that comes your way.
• 16:35
  And I've been there.
• 16:36
  If you don't have a good sales pipeline, you worry at night.
• 16:39
  And by the way, I still wake up every morning, the first thing I think about is work.
• 16:43
  And before I go to bed at night, the last thing I think about is work.
• 16:45
  Like, it's all I think about most of the time.
• 16:48
  But if you have a good sales pipeline and you know it's coming down the pike, it allows you to be a little more free about things.
• 16:55
  So at that point, I knew that we had leads coming in, right?
• 16:58
  And I, and I knew that if the worst case scenario was I had to reset the business by three years, well, I was already taking the salary at that point.
• 17:03
  It wasn't great, but it wasn't nothing and I still had the ability to do it.
• 17:07
  It didn't seem like if, if, if I'd lost 70% of the revenue and there was no hope to get out of it, and I didn't know that I had other prospects knocking on the door, then I probably would
• 17:17
  have pivoted and said, maybe it's time to go Back to driving a cab or open a bar or go work in marketing somewhere.
• 17:22
  But I think.
• 17:22
  I think the fact that I had a sales pipeline that was working is what really made me feel like, all right, cool.
• 17:28
  It's going to be a setback of two or three years, but we can live with it.
• 17:32
  Okay.
• 17:32
  All right.
• 17:33
  And as you mentioned earlier too, I think we're talking off camera.
• 17:38
  So now you've grown this to 35 employees and you're over 30 million in revenue, is that right?
• 17:45
  We are, we are.
• 17:46
  And the 30, 35 employees between Brooklyn, where I am in Charlotte, we have a Charlotte office.
• 17:52
  And about two years ago, we did an acquisition of a small agency in Los Angeles.
• 17:56
  So now we have a presence in Los Angeles that was really fun to do an acquisition.
• 17:59
  Never done that before.
• 18:01
  We're looking at doing another acquisition, hopefully in London.
• 18:04
  But I learned a lot from doing those, and those are really.
• 18:06
  That was really a lot of fun to do the acquisition.
• 18:08
  Yeah.
• 18:09
  Okay.
• 18:09
  Was there like a particular inflection point too, because you said you had this adversity about four or five years in where you really had to reset and come back slowly from losing much of your revenue.
• 18:20
  Was there an inflection point where things really started to take off for you?
• 18:24
  Yeah, Covid.
• 18:27
  And I think a lot of things went wrong there.
• 18:29
  But I think there's a lot of agencies that started during COVID that had a false sense of security.
• 18:36
  And without being political about it, lower interest rates seem to have.
• 18:42
  Look, a lot of people got fired in 2020, early 2020.
• 18:47
  We in fact lost about a third of our business.
• 18:49
  Again, like within two weeks of early 2020.
• 18:52
  There was a two week period there between March and April.
• 18:54
  We lost like 30 or 40% of our business.
• 18:57
  But a lot of people lost their jobs then.
• 18:59
  And a lot of people did.
• 19:00
  Started a new company and did a startup and they had low interest rates, they could borrow easily and venture capital and private equity money was lending freely because of those interest rate positioned with a surplus of staff.
• 19:12
  Because we lost a bunch of business, we didn't really fire a lot of people to be able to take advantage of.
• 19:17
  Like all of a sudden it was just.
• 19:18
  People were just knocking on the doors left and right saying, I've got a new startup that sells beauty products.
• 19:22
  I've got a new startup that sells the skincare line.
• 19:26
  Really, it was like 20, late 2020 is when we really took off in a serious way.
• 19:32
  Okay, all right.
• 19:33
  So what initially looks really bad, like you said, when, when it first hit you lose 30, 40% of your business.
• 19:39
  Right.
• 19:40
  People are cutting back.
• 19:41
  No one knows what on.
• 19:43
  People are scared.
• 19:44
  But then as it develops, there's all these new companies, these new startups that need marketing help and you really capitalized on that in terms of securing those, those customers and using that to scale.
• 19:56
  Is that what happened?
• 19:57
  Yeah, yeah, we had, we'd had and still have a really good book of clients.
• 20:01
  So if you do, if you're, if you're a, if you're a bag company, like a, like a women's purse company or a bag company in New York City, you're going, we're going to be on your short list of
• 20:10
  people to talk to.
• 20:10
  You might not hire us.
• 20:11
  You might do it internally.
• 20:12
  You might hire one of my competition, like our case studies are such that you're going to call us.
• 20:17
  And so when people were for that specific vertical and maybe for skincare too, and for some schools, for some professional certifications, but so people were just looking us up and saying, oh, I see, you did good work with
• 20:29
  so and so company.
• 20:30
  Can you do it for us?
• 20:31
  And we can't always do it for everyone.
• 20:33
  It takes two.
• 20:33
  We can't do it if the client's no good and the client, I don't think can always do it without us.
• 20:37
  But yeah, we were just really positioned to take advantage of the fact that there was a lot of new startups going on because we walked into that with clients that we already had for four or five years at
• 20:46
  that point that were really well positioned and could speak well for us.
• 20:49
  We had good case studies.
• 20:50
  Case studies are the best.
• 20:52
  Okay, all right.
• 20:54
  And so, so for the audience too.
• 20:56
  Just.
• 20:56
  I know you, you had mentioned this off camera too, but so you're a full service digital marketing agency and you, you're the only one that you know of that's basically independent and not owned by private equity.
• 21:08
  And the only one I know of, it's full service.
• 21:10
  There might be others out there, you might know them.
• 21:13
  There's.
• 21:13
  There are people that are bigger than us and started after us and have had a lot of success.
• 21:18
  Most of Those companies are 49% owned by private equity.
• 21:20
  And that, and that changes the way they have to talk to clients and it helps them in some ways too.
• 21:24
  We're completely independent and we're offering the full suite of services.
• 21:27
  About three years ago, we decided to pivot into Creative because Creative was going to.
• 21:32
  It was clear that Creative was going to be king in Meta and Google Advertising.
• 21:36
  And I'm super pleased to say that we were just nominated for our first Clio Award on the creative side.
• 21:43
  So creative is where we're doubling down creative, which is driving success for our advertising clients and our media clients and our meta clients and our Google clients.
• 21:51
  So yeah, we're full service search, social, programmatic email, SEO with generative engine optimizations, affiliate marketing creative.
• 21:59
  And I'm probably forgetting something.
• 22:00
  Yeah.
• 22:01
  Okay.
• 22:02
  All right.
• 22:02
  And we've seen, of course, over the last few years the rise of AI.
• 22:07
  How is that impacting your industry specifically?
• 22:11
  I'm not competing with AI, I'm competing with other agencies that are using AI.
• 22:15
  And so the easy answer is yes, it makes us able to do more creative more quickly.
• 22:20
  It enables us to save on post production costs, it enables us to save on ideation of things.
• 22:26
  But there's an interesting article in the Economist a while ago about how the expected profitability boost from AI unless you sell chips or data centers, hasn't really happened.
• 22:36
  And the way I think about it is like part of our sales cycle is referrals.
• 22:40
  Part of its advertising, part of its word of mouth, part of its RFPs.
• 22:43
  We do RFPs, we can do 10 times the RFPs now than we could three years ago before ChatGPT.
• 22:52
  Right.
• 22:52
  But we don't get a competitive advantage from that because so can every other agency.
• 22:56
  Right.
• 22:57
  Like, we're not the only ones with chat GPT.
• 22:58
  So the fact that we can now produce and respond to RFPs, we used to do three a year, now we do 30 a year.
• 23:04
  That's the real number.
• 23:05
  So does, so does our competition.
• 23:07
  And so it's just leveled up.
• 23:09
  It just ratcheted up.
• 23:10
  The speed of which everything happens is my main thought about it.
• 23:14
  And it saves some cost too.
• 23:16
  It is cheaper to produce a commercial now than it used to be, but it's just ratcheted up the intensity and the pace of everything.
• 23:22
  I think mostly.
• 23:24
  Okay.
• 23:24
  All right.
• 23:25
  And Brooke, given everything you've been through, not only in your career, but particularly as an entrepreneur and where you're positioned right now, after 17 years and building this agency successful successfully, what would you say has been the best
• 23:39
  part of your journey?
• 23:43
  The best part of my journey is the fact that I'm able to work with people that I really respect, both on the client side and internally.
• 23:51
  And I get to.
• 23:51
  And I grow too.
• 23:53
  But, but working with people and watching them grow from this was their first real job and now they've been here for 16 years and they have a staff of 15 people.
• 24:01
  You know, that that's, that's very gratifying or, or being able to say that I've worked with a client who a school that started and they had no students and now they're a six university group with thousands and thousands
• 24:12
  of students.
• 24:13
  That, that is, that's very gratifying.
• 24:15
  Or to work with a startup that sells suiting, men's suiting and to.
• 24:20
  And to take their direct.
• 24:21
  Be part of taking their direct to consumer brand from from zero to $10 million in revenue.
• 24:27
  That sort of growth trajectory both with the client side and internally is like super gratifying and really makes it all worth it.
• 24:34
  Okay.
• 24:35
  All right.
• 24:35
  And Brooke, if people are hearing this and they need marketing assistance and they want to learn more about what you do and get in touch, what's the best way people can find you online?
• 24:44
  You can find me in LinkedIn, Brooke shepherd, or you can go to Mason Interactive, our website.
• 24:48
  Mason Interactive.
• 24:49
  Any form on there, I will get a copy of.
• 24:52
  Okay.
• 24:52
  All right.
• 24:53
  We will link all that in the show.
• 24:54
  Notes for everyone.
• 24:56
  All right, Brooke, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 25:02
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 25:03
  Thank you.