The Real Reason Digital Agencies Don't Scale

2:03

excuse me. I'm sorry for the good one. Yeah, with

Nicholas Petroski2:06

a banger. So I wrote about this a little bit ago. Geez, four years ago, five years ago now. And at the time, there was a lot of publications, a lot of talking around scale your digital agency. Scale it to 10,000 people. Scale it fast, and all all of this kind of bravado talking about what you could do with an agency, and it pissed me off. Like I didn't, I really didn't like it because the people that I research, the people that I work with, the people that I 1000s of agency leaders that I've surveyed and talked to and consulted with over the years, the vast majority aren't there to build a rocket ship. They're not there to go and grow at breakneck speeds and do everything they can in the name of growth. They're there to build something reliable. Like they want to grow, but that's not the goal. That's not the end, you know, be all end all thing that they want to do. And so I saw all of this, and I was like, "You got to use the right terminology. Like if you're going to like say you're going to grow fast, like let's say you're going to grow fast. Scale comes from the software space. It comes from the operational leverage. The as you add revenue, you can keep on adding revenue over a fixed, relatively fixed cost basis. So your margins will go up as you get bigger, and that's what scale is. Growth is very different. Growth you can you can grow, and your margins can shrink. And in fact, that's what we find actually happens in the agency space. As you get bigger, you need more structure. You need more people. You need more. You you need a head of HR. You know you you need these unbillable people that have very real and very serious roles, and they do very important things. But they're not making you more dollars. They're not making you more profit. So we we find that as agencies grow, you know the really small agencies, zero to like tenish employees, they might have an average net margin of 19 20% Like that's that's pretty damn good. And then as you get bigger, that margin shrinks and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And by the time you're in that 50 plus employee range, you might only have high single digit margins on average for the industry,

Chris DuBois4:28

right?

Nicholas Petroski4:28

And so that's the that's the opposite of scale. Like that's that's a very traditional professional services business, and we can have a whole conversation about like, do you want to build something that scales? If you do, let's talk product, you know. Let's talk SaaS. Let's talk past that kind of thing, because that that's what that does. But if you use the wrong terminology, you start having conversations and bringing in strategy conversations around things that aren't gonna pan out. Like you, if you price to scale, if you make financial decisions when you're small, thinking that your margin's gonna. Expand as you grow, you're going to set yourself up for a tough time when you hit that 25 employee mark. This is going to be rough. So that's that's the like genesis of that where that came from and and the the idea in a real short kind of soundbite,

Chris DuBois5:15

right? I think the it's like scale sounds sexy, right? Like that. I think that's why a lot of people aim for it, but they've never actually defined it in a way that makes sense. I think actually right before this got a bunch of LinkedIn connections, and I thought it was weird that they were all agency coaches who were connecting with me, but they all had the same basically headline of "We help agencies scale. Oh, right, right, okay. We

Nicholas Petroski5:41

turn agencies into product companies,

Chris DuBois5:43

right? But yeah, we had when I was working at an agency, we had even there kind of we were working with SaaS and tech and stuff. So so scale was one of the words that we we were using a lot. But we kind of define it as like once you've achieved a certain level of consistency within the business, and then you can say, "All right, how do we now turn this into a vending machine of you know put $1 in, get two out? Now we can scale. Before that, before we have that reliability within the system, what are we doing? Right? We're not scaling anything.

Nicholas Petroski6:15

No, that makes sense. I think the the one thing the one thing that a lot of people don't realize when they're they're at a certain level in an agency is that the the structure that you have in place usually isn't the final structure. Like that's not that thing isn't static. So the people you have in place, the operating lines, the the who reports to who, the different investments in different portions of the business, that all shifts as you grow, and it kind of has to. And so, the idea that you can build it perfectly once, like this one single source of truth, this is the right way to do it, and then you can kind of go off and not have to think about that again, isn't exactly true. Like it'll take you to a certain point, and then shit'll just start breaking, and then you you you eventually get to this thing where you you put enough band aids on it, and you're like, all right, triage isn't working. We gotta we gotta rebuild this structure, and so that that growth period will take you to a certain spot, but you kind of gotta reassess when you get to the the breaking points.

Chris DuBois7:20

No, 100% I have a one of my clients was a solopreneur when he started, and and was able to achieve like 70, 80% margins on everything. And then as right now, as he brings on team members, it keeps going down. But I think he's a little bit in that like panic mode of like, oh no, like the margins are shifting. But you're also making twice as much money as you were, so like it's balancing out, but it's it is a completely different system that has to be managed. So yeah, good doing. Going

Nicholas Petroski7:51

into it like eyes wide open too. So that's that's a big reason why we structure a lot of our playbooks and our research reports and and the content that we put out there with size brackets, because you you have to if you can what was a skate to where the puck's going. If you can know where that puck is going, and you can see the challenges and the things that someone twice your size is dealing with, that lets you architect your business in a way, your agency in a way that maybe can head off some of those challenges a little sooner, make them easier to deal with when you hit them.

Chris DuBois8:27

The so this is something I wanted to get into for today. You get to see like the actual data behind all the agencies. I think even you know myself as a coach, like I can say I see data based on you know looking at I've got I don't know 15 ish clients and I can but it still feels almost anecdotal where like I'm seeing such a small set of of data across these and I have influenced all of these clients in a certain way so I'm seeing really what I want to see for stuff but like you you get to see like the actual numbers for what's happening in a space, how how much is that? I guess like different from what you're hearing when people are talking about what agencies should be doing right now.

Nicholas Petroski9:12

It's funny because I would say so. I started this in in 2015, and if I think back then, the the advice was very different from what I was seeing in the data, and since then, it's converged a lot. Like, there's not a ton of like I used to like scroll through LinkedIn whenever I'd get bored or want to procrastinate, and I would see statements that would just be like, "This is blatantly wrong. Now it's it's very different. Like I don't know if the industry has matured. If the I mean, there's a lot of coaches that read our work. There's a lot of consultants that rely on our work, on our research. So maybe that's part of it, but. It seems like there's a lot less egregiously incongruent statements that are happening these days than there used to be. It lines up pretty well. I think there is a little bit of a lag in the the advice versus the data, and I think that that's part of the like. It's a hard industry to pin down. There's so many different ways to run a shop, and that was something that I came into this space ignorant of. So when I got in in 2015, I thought, okay, professional services-you have marketing, design, and dev, and they cannot be that different. And it turns out, after looking at 1000s of them, 10s of 1000s of them. At this point, they're very different. They're very unique, and every one of them has a challenge, and they're unique to that agency. And there are some threads that are common throughout, but most of it is like interpersonal challenges, which I think coaches are beautifully suited to handle because I I am not. I am not the the interpersonal guy. I am the data, the fact guy. The you know coming at it from that perspective.

Chris DuBois11:08

Yeah, I'm looking. So take something like niching. Like I think 10 years ago, you probably could get away with being a generalist agency.

Nicholas Petroski11:18

Oh yeah.

Chris DuBois11:19

Now everyone pretty much agrees you need to have some sort of specialization if you want to keep this going. But at what point does like and I guess we can use the the data as a if everyone now is niching, then that's not one of those things that's going to keep you alive. So like, what can we see within the data to kind of tell us where we should be going, even within that specialization realm, that's a

Nicholas Petroski11:44

good question. There's being a specialist has become table stakes. The last survey we did, it's something around 86 87% of the industry identifies as a specialist, either by services or by the industry that they serve, or or both. There's nuance to that, though, because there's degrees of specialization. There is positioning as a whole art and science in and of itself, and that's something where you can be, you can say you're a specialist, and you can be varying levels of good at that specialty, and so that's going to impact your performance and and what you can do with that. So there's there's a few layers to it, and I think the the overall takeaway is you you kind of have to keep reinventing, like putting a line in the sand, saying this is my specialty, and not moving past it, you're going to get rolled over in two to three years because the industry is moving very fast to get rid of that arbitrage. Like people will see it; it's obvious when someone's doing better, and it's pretty easy to dissect why and understand why. And so the that flows through the industry fairly quickly, and I think it's why you why you saw specialization become so powerful and niching become so powerful was because you're 100 right. 10 years ago, it was like inverted. I want to say it was like 20 or 30 percent that were actually identifying as specialists, and now that's swamped. So you you have these things that are that are table stakes. But again, it's it's how good you are at it, how niche down you are, how how what what sub segment of some industry that is like esoteric that you're a really good specialist in that nobody else knows about. What what value can you create there, and do you know more there, and can you you spot these pitfalls faster than another agency, and so that makes you more valuable to the client. There's a lot of questioning there, and there's a lot of having to redo that positioning process pretty regularly, especially with man, AI has like kicked this in the teeth. It was there were so many services that you could specialize in in 2021 22 that AI essentially, if you think about commoditization of services and and how they flow and they go from like super cutting edge all the way to full commodity. It pulled a bunch of them way faster towards commodity than anybody was expecting, and so it caught a lot of agencies off guard. That if you specialized in kind of brochure websites and maybe some generic blog posts, you were you were caught off guard because yeah you could implement that AI on your team you could get those efficiencies pretty quick on your team but the market itself stopped valuing that and that so all of a sudden you see all these companies going oh no we got to reposition we got to we got to find something new we got to we got to figure out what else is there that we can add value in and we got to move. That and so that's the that's the main story of the last say three years. It's really been a kind of a soul searching thing of like what are you going to do as an agency leader to make sure that you're in a position to to be able to provide value that's not going to get eaten in six months when the next clod model drops.

Chris DuBois15:19

Right. Yeah, and I got so many different thoughts now. Yeah, there

Nicholas Petroski15:23

was a one. This is great.

Chris DuBois15:24

This is awesome. The specific to like the AI thing. I think what's interesting is that it did commoditize a lot of things, but even the areas that it didn't necessarily commoditize because the the end clients have the perception that it is much easier for them to do it. Like some intern with AI can do this now. So even if they can't, so if they believe they can, you now have an uphill battle to be able to sell this. And so it's interesting how even even the stuff AI can't do, we now have to work harder to be able to sell it. Like it definitely at premium, it's going to be much harder.

Nicholas Petroski16:00

Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. Are you seeing any kind of like success paths with that? Is there a way to combat that?

Chris DuBois16:08

Yeah, I don't know if there's like a perfect way yet. I think I've had clients who they've had a lot of their clients come back and say like, can't you be doing this faster or cheaper, right, or like a higher quality because you have AI now, and I think what a lot of people still fail to realize is that the the Iron Triangle, right, like speed, quality, and price, like that's a constraint model, not an efficiency model, and so we can continuously get better at all of those things, but we can still only really focus on two at any given time because something has to give, and so yes, I could do this cheaper, but it means you're still going to be sacrificing some quality or sacrificing some speed, and so like it's coming up with that mix of like what positioning wise, what do I want to be known for? If we want to be known for speed, then I'm going all in on on the speed side versus you know the price or quality, and so with with my clients, is like let's figure out first how do we want to be seen on that. Then let's create the narrative for when someone does give us this question. You know, we we can explain to them why we're doing things the way we do. I think that's that's been working so far.

Nicholas Petroski17:16

Yeah,

Chris DuBois17:17

but I like that

Nicholas Petroski17:18

model. I mean, that's that's all. It's a pretty old like standard in the industry at this point, but I think it really it can help clients reframe like what reality looks like because there's so much of oh you can click a button and give me value now and it's like well no no actually no we can't yeah

Chris DuBois17:38

yeah what I what I do like about your your semi monolog was you almost gave a gave credibility to like the the exact approach I'm trying to take with positioning, which is that there is no more only in in the way we can be seen as a business. Like I can't say I am the only agency for these people because right AI can probably copy it. Our audience, or the well, competitors can just see what we're doing and very quickly copy exactly what we're doing. And so that only aspect is gone. And so the I think the better approach is actually to find a bunch of different ways you're different and then stack them because now it's like not only can you say, well, we also only work with roofing companies. It's like, yeah, but do you also offer this guarantee? And do you price this way? And do you have this? Because now, when we stack those, someone can't just come in and copy the entire business model. Right? It takes some time to actually do that. And I think that's where we're going to see a lot more defensibility with agencies moving forward, where it's like it's not just a that you have a niche and and you're really good at it. It's that you know you also are willing to bet all of these different things on it, and you are structurally different, or you know you have certain talent that no one else has. And so, do you think

Nicholas Petroski18:56

there's a there's a piece there where the like right now it's stupid easy to do a competitive analysis and to understand like what is out there that your competitors are doing. Before it was crazy hard because of the number of agencies, like the sheer competition out there was wild. Now you can spin up I don't know how many 1000s of agents you want and have them all go out and do it themselves. With that stacking capabilities, do you think there's an argument there for not putting them online? Like, is that is are we going away from the like put all your content out there, put everything out there, put the price on your website back to like gated pieces so that they can't be scraped.

Chris DuBois19:43

Yeah, it is an interesting one. I think it personally, I would say, I like I want to give as much information to the buyer as possible to make their life easier. We're trying to reduce the risk so that right they can do it. And so the things that I would want to. Make public are also going to be the things that would just like I guess innately be hard to copy. Yeah, right. Like you, like one of the levers that I I'll talk about is is relationships and like this ability. Like if I'm friends with Oprah and Tony Robbins and stuff, and I can just take your product. You hire me. I take your product. I put it in their hands, and now they can share it with everyone. Like that's some. Not a lot of people can just use that same play. So I want to talk about it a lot. I think if you, it would come down to like if you're just doing something for the sake of doing some. Like we price this way. Like here's this is it versus explaining why and giving under helping the buyer understand why you're priced that way and how it's a benefit to them, I think that's where it becomes much harder to copy. And so even if they can just scrape everything, the ability for them to to emulate that is going to be really hard. And so yeah, I could see that. Who knows?

Nicholas Petroski21:01

Like structural differences in how the agency is set up that prevent somebody from just copying polar. Like that makes sense for sure.

Chris DuBois21:09

Yeah, and that's why it's hard too. And and actually, you might have some data on this. Like I've seen a lot of advice, especially from like operations coaches, is like pods. You got to go to pod structures and just do this. But from what I've seen with my clients, like that's not going to necessarily benefit every agency to just be in a pod structure. Some of them operate very differently, and they they should lean into that. I guess data wise, have you seen anything in the structure of agencies and how that influences things?

Nicholas Petroski21:36

Yeah, I did. It's funny you mention that. I did a whole report, November ish, maybe December of last year, on the various operating models that you can select, and it's from like functional to hybrid to pod to I think there's like five others. Pod structure can work, but it it has to be aligned with your overall strategy and what you're selling. One thing that I see often in pod structures is that there the variance in output, so quality of output from one pod to another can be pretty high, and it's really tough to to kind of keep quality control like at a certain level with all of the pods, especially when you get bigger, and then you also have the huge issue of what happens when somebody leaves. So you you try to staff a pod effectively and efficiently, and by doing that, you're you're putting a lot of fragility into that specific pod. And so, like average turnover at an agency is like 20% over the last like three ish years. If your if your pods are like five people each, that's each pod losing a person, or one pod losing four people. Like that that's that's tough to backfill. And then all of a sudden you have oh well we'll have floaters so we'll have people that'll move from pod to pod, and that's great, but then you're you're creating a different structure. Like it's not, it's no longer really a pod. So it's it's data wise, it's it's not something where it's a panacea that works for everybody. It's really like let's look at the structure, let's figure out what the fragility points are, and let's architect the agency in a way where some kind of issue isn't going to crash the whole thing, or make your life as a leader or an agency owner super stressful because something happened that you didn't expect.

Chris DuBois23:32

Right? Yeah, I didn't even think about the quality gap between bods. Yeah, it's

Nicholas Petroski23:39

it's tough to manage because you you they'll have I've seen it where they'll have like a centralized QC thing, but that adds another step. That adds another delay. That adds another point of failure. Like it's it adds as much good as it does bad, and that's kind of sucks.

Chris DuBois23:57

Yeah. Over the past few years, has there been like a data point that's come up that you've been actually like actually surprised from?

Nicholas Petroski24:07

Yeah, yeah, there is margins. The industry has been under pressure from a revenue standpoint since like 2022. It has been rough. I think the last two or three years have been some of the lowest that we've tracked in 10. When that happens, I would have expected to see a bigger hit to margins. I would have like if you lose 20% of your revenue in a year, and you're built and you're you're structured in a way where you have employees that are made to operate at 20% higher revenue, and now that's gone. I would have expected more hit to like what your net margin comes out at, and it really hasn't. It's trended down slightly, but nowhere near the degree that revenue has taken a hit. And I think that the industry has shifted a little. Bit structurally in the way that we staff delivery and the way that we staff our operating expense line employees to the to a much more flexible contractor heavy model, and that's protected margins a little bit. We're seeing a lot more fractional talent in the in the operating expense space, so a fractional CFO, fractional CMO, fractional ops leaders, project managers, those kind of things, and then on the delivery side, the percent of contractor usage has gone through the roof to the point where I'm seeing companies that have you know five years ago, six years ago, they would have had 300 employees. Now they're down to 100 full-time employees and 200 contractors.

Chris DuBois25:48

Right,

Nicholas Petroski25:49

and it's just it's wildly different model. You used to be trading margin for that, right? Like your contractors were way more expensive than a full-time employee. They're not anymore. It's numbers have kind of coalesced a little

Chris DuBois26:05

bit. Well, so I wonder if that's also just because the contractors then can can feel like they're running their own business and they put a higher value, I guess, on the freedom of being able to do what they want, and so they're willing to accept lower pay, so that benefits the agencies, or if there's something else at play there,

Nicholas Petroski26:23

yeah. There's you've you're getting an influx of contractors from the tech layoffs that have happened over the last five years, so you have a lot of talent that ran ads inside of Meta and Google and the others. They're now some of them are now operating in a contracting or freelance capacity for agency. So you've had an influx there. You've had a lot of corporate downsizing. So you've had a lot of in-house teams that have shrunk. They're doing more with less, and so the people that that have left those places, they're

Chris DuBois27:00

now in a spot where they, some of them need to freelance. Like sometimes the the the space that they were in, that they were a specialist in, the the jobs just aren't there. The hiring picture has sucked for a while, and so you have these like few different forces coming together that make it make it more usable for an agency to say, okay, it's no longer a huge trade-off for this, like the flexibility. When you when your revenue jumps around that much in such a short time period, you value flexibility a lot more, so that trade-off becomes easy to make. Yeah, and I also wonder if there's like some sort of like homeostasis or equilibrium, right? Where like like yeah, revenue drop, but we were able to maintain margins just because like the the industry kind of shifted, and if that's just how will naturally we'll always be here. Will it be in this zone, or if we like, do we need a Roger Banister moment, right? Someone to just have a completely new way of doing things that just shows everyone what's possible, and that becomes the new shift. Now everybody can actually improve their margins. Yeah,

Nicholas Petroski28:05

maybe. Like historically, it's pricing has has always been under pressure. Like the thing that you're good at today will be under pricing pressure in a year from now. It's always kind of been like that, and so the the way that agencies have evolved and stayed on top of that is by new technologies coming out or new capabilities that they could spend time learning that an in house team couldn't. They got really good and could get an ROI out of it, and then they can price that above what the older commodity services could could do. So with that said, I think you could-I don't-I don't know what the future looks like, but I think you could envision new technologies coming on the scene that make it easier for businesses to make money, that agencies can provide and commercialize, that they can then charge higher rates for. When you can charge higher rates and you're more financially and economically sound, that makes it more interesting to hire full-time talent because you like again. There's a quality control issue. There's also a transient issue, so you you have these things with contractors that aren't. It's not perfect. It's not a great model. It is for right now, and so I think you're going to see pressure when that new tech comes out, or when that new capability comes out, to to hold the talent internally that is good at that new thing, so that it pulls away from your competitors too, and then you can we can walk in and say, hey, I'm rolling in with a team of 10 deep in building frontier models for blah blah blah, like that's a that's something you could charge for,

Chris DuBois29:44

right? How much are you like? Just based on everything you just said, how much are you seeing Martech kind of influencing the direction of agencies?

Nicholas Petroski29:59

I don't want to be like political in my answer, but not much. You know, like I don't want to be like like we work with a lot of Martech firms. A lot of Martech firms come to us to understand the agency space, to understand how to work with them. A lot of them do come to us because they they don't know the industry very well. They know pieces of it. They may have somebody who was an agency leader or who was in an agency on their team, but they see a pretty small sliver, and so they'll come to us to understand the space. And it's less of an it's less of their decisions influencing how agencies operate or grow, and it's more of them wanting to be a partner in that growth. Them wanting to be seen and and operate like they're like they're building out features. Like their their product roadmap helps the agency in a way. Like their partner program helps the agency actually grow rather than just being like a reseller, so you you have these these things where they're they're very interested in being a helpful partner, or a lot of them are, but the actual influence that they have over the agency, not as much as that kind of tech commoditization curve or the demand by clients; those two things are really pushing it, and they're they're not one and the same, but they're related.

Chris DuBois31:27

Yeah. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I think so. I spent a previous agency was a HubSpot partner. I I know a lot of people within that community, and it seems like every time HubSpot has a new push, it's like all of the agencies in that space shift to like now we're doing rev ops and like whatever the new thing is, but it's really the agencies that don't have like a strong foothold in their own like area of expertise that are following that path, anyways. But then simultaneously, a lot of them are even they're only in that ecosystem to potentially try getting leads from it, and in work with Partner Hub, we we had done some some research and coined the term the the starving sibling syndrome, where it's like you you only have so much food at the table, and the more siblings you got, everybody's going to be taking that food, and so now it's like like okay, well sorry, as this ecosystem grows, you actually lose more of the benefit of that, and and yeah, I mean that's so.

Nicholas Petroski32:29

Well, that's why they're tiered, right? Right,

Chris DuBois32:31

and the the bigger partners are going to get the fun stuff. So yeah, exactly.

Nicholas Petroski32:34

Yeah, if you're not pushing like hundreds of 1000s of dollars through their platform every year, you're not in consideration for the big stuff,

Chris DuBois32:42

right? Yeah. Okay. So, based on all of the data that you look at, what is the the one thing that you would recommend every agency be doing right now in order to stay ahead as they move into next year?

Nicholas Petroski33:01

I'm gonna split it by. I'm gonna give you two answers.

Chris DuBois33:05

Approved.

Nicholas Petroski33:07

Thanks. The first answer is is get your fundamentals solid. The the blocking and tackling of running an agency. If you can get that down and you can really do well, you don't have to do fancy payment plant tiers. You don't have to do certain pricing methods that are that are require crazy spreadsheets. Like, do the basics, do good work, and you will you will already be growing faster and earning more money than the average agency in the industry. If you're already doing that, if you're already at that spot where you've got the basics down and you're moving into more advanced stuff, setting aside time for frontline employees to experiment with AI in their day-to-day stuff, it doesn't have to be stuff that they push to production. It doesn't have to be stuff that they ever that a client ever sees. Having that space for them to experiment at the edges, at the very periphery of where you work, that's where you get a lot of interesting stuff. That's where that that and they they shouldn't all be doing the same thing, right? Like they should be doing their own experiments that they're their own interest in, and this is not extracurricular stuff. This is company time that you are allocating for them to experiment. It doesn't have to be a lot, but it does have to happen, and that that's one of those things where once you're once you're advanced enough to where revenue is relatively repeatable, relatively reliable. Your margins aren't drifting all over the place. Projects aren't falling off, and you have to fight fires every two seconds. When you're at that stable spot, that experimentation is what's going to let you unlock that that kind of ROI piece, that capability piece that you can. That is new and novel and useful to a client that you can charge more for. That's where that comes from. So those are the two the two things that I would recommend.

Chris DuBois35:11

Awesome, I can support both of those. Look at that, I love it. So last two questions for you. The first one being, what book would you recommend every agency owner should read?

Nicholas Petroski35:23

That's a good one. The Name of the Wind by Peter Rolfus. It's a fantasy book, and the only reason I'm recommending it is because one, it's fantastically written. Two, it's part of a three-part series that he didn't finish, and he probably won't finish. So I need other people to experience my pain of not having book three come out ever, and book two be kind of garbage. So if if more people can be mad at him about that, maybe we'll get some movement on.

Chris DuBois35:53

Yeah, drum up some. I think there was a t here is a wager on whether Rothfus or Martin will finish their series first, and they're each of them is holding off to see if the other one will die or whatever. Right? Yeah, the fiction has come up quite a few times on the podcast, actually, for people recommending like stop reading business books, go like get ideas from reading these other books, like open open your mind.

Nicholas Petroski36:21

You'll be in a forest for an hour or two. Just chill out.

Chris DuBois36:24

No, it's great. I'm an English major, and so like I okay, yeah, I read.

Nicholas Petroski36:29

What's what's your book? What's your book recommendation?

Chris DuBois36:32

Ah, so oh man, really depends. Fiction wise, 100 Years of Solitude is one of my go-to favorites. Probably my most gifted fiction book, and actually, you just remind me of Czech now because they turned it into a TV series. It's by like some Spanish production company. The first season was awesome. Like it really follows the book, but I don't know if they're when that next one comes out. It's

Nicholas Petroski36:58

brutal how they do that. Yeah, it's not fair,

Chris DuBois37:01

but uh, but yeah, I would do that. I also Theo of Golden was a really good uh one I listened to recently, and then obviously the Dungeon Crawler Carl books.

Nicholas Petroski37:11

Everybody's into that now, and so everybody's into that now. Thinking everything,

Chris DuBois37:16

yeah. Then nonfiction wise, the the The experience economy was one of the most like, I guess, revolutionary books for my thinking in the past couple years, and then essentialism is probably my most gifted nonfiction. So yeah,

Nicholas Petroski37:34

I love it. You got a book club?

Chris DuBois37:36

I should. We have one in in the community that I need to spend a little more time giving attention to, but but yeah. Last question for you is where where can people find you?

Nicholas Petroski37:49

prometheanresearch.com might be hard to spell, so I don't know if there's show notes or something. But yeah,

Chris DuBois37:54

get them in there.

Nicholas Petroski37:55

Find it LinkedIn. I post there every now and then. I'm not good at it, but you can usually reach me there. Other than that, hiking around the Midwest somewhere in a wood shop; those are the spots.

Chris DuBois38:10

All good places. Yep. Yeah, and we'll get the your recent growth guide. Oh hell yeah! Put in there as well for everybody to check out.

Nicholas Petroski38:18

That'd be awesome. Yeah, we we spent a lot of time on that. That was one that we've been working on for years, and pulling all that data together and all the all the recommendations together was a lift. Yeah, I think it turned out awesome.

Chris DuBois38:31

But all right, well, Nick, thanks for thanks for joining.

Nicholas Petroski38:35

Absolutely, thanks for having me. This was this is awesome. Feels good to just kind of chat.