The Art of Agency Acquisition: What Kyle Hunt Looks for in a Buyout

Tim Rowe:
be connected on Twitter, which has increasingly become my favorite B2B social platform. Don't tell LinkedIn because they'll definitely ban me for life. I'm excited to connect today with you specifically around agency life. It's, it's the core part of what you're focused on these days. And it's something as, as an audience of media sellers, media executives, So we're trying so hard to bridge the gap of how do we be better, better stewards and better partners to so many of the born on born online brands that are testing out of home and offline channels for the first time. So Kyle, thank you so much for being here.

Kyle Hunt: And thanks for having me, man. Really excited to be on here.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely. It's going to be a lot of fun in the lead up. We were talking about how you. One day quit your dream job of selling insurance and working for the man to start a lead gen agency. Maybe, uh, maybe take us back in time, take us back to Kyle Hunt. Working said dream job and making that, that leap that we've heard from so many other founders that, that big leap into the thing I really, really want to do.

Kyle Hunt: Maybe start us there. So I wouldn't say that working for the insurance company was my dream job, but I would say what I, what I did. at the insurance company was my dream job. Because I graduated from college in 2009. And then I worked for Aetna, which is a huge Fortune 100 health insurance company. And I was actually in a program for sales at UCF, University of Central Florida, and had this job. And the first thing that my manager told me when I was hired, he's like, here's the MX platinum, go spend as much as you can on these brokers and make them like you so that we can sell these products. So that was the dream job part of it because I had a limited budget.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah.

Tim Rowe: As a recent college grad, here's the Amex go crazy.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. And I worked very hard up to that point in school. I was like valedictorian in high school. I was always studying, always working. incredibly hard. So it felt very good to have some success right out of college back in 2008-2009, which was like a financial crisis, if you remember. It was so hard to even get a job, sure. It was incredibly difficult. And I interviewed at so many places to make sure that I had a job and that my mom wouldn't yell at me for being poor.

Tim Rowe: Moms are a good motivation like that. So you're at Aetna, you're racking up this AMX bill, just having a great time. Really? I mean, yes, it's, it's, it's Aetna, it's insurance. Aetna's awesome. Um, but that's a pretty cool job for like right out of college. I think that that is every, every college kid's dream is to like be out there wanting and dining clients and, and on a, really on a path for a great career. Right. As, as, as a part of a great company on the trajectory, but something said, Kyle, you're meant for, you're meant for more, you're meant for something else. And you left.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, there's agents that are, they're making half a million, $750,000 a year. So there's a huge income potential in insurance. It's kind of one of those industries that doesn't really like, you know, the companies make that much, but you don't know how much people make and salespeople make a lot of money. But it's one thing to make good money. It's also another thing to realize you're literally working for the man. Working for a really big insurance company, you're literally working for the man. And I always have an entrepreneurial streak and working for someone else for five years. I remember there was this one moment where I was sitting in my car in the garage. It's like 8.30. I was ready to go into work and I'm just hitting my head in the steering wheel. I'm like, why am I doing this? I'm making so much money for these guys. I should be doing this on my own and starting something else. So that's what I did.

Tim Rowe: And what was that first foray into marketing? What was the first kind of endeavor?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. So I had a friend who owned a finance company in Legion and he wanted to mentor me. So I came on board his company and we started a separate company. And we did lead gen, we ended up building a call center component to that too. Had about 25 employees at one point and then exited that business after about three years, which was an incredible learning opportunity and kind of set me on the path for online businesses that I'm on today.

Tim Rowe: And that's, you know, your, your current focus is you've got a portfolio of brands, you've got agencies, you, you've really started to scale, not just an agency type of service, but scale brands, scale a portfolio of agencies. And we're going to, we're going to talk about some of those things specifically. We'd love to get your, you know, kind of instant gut react feedback on the What are those common mistakes, whether it's a D2C e-com agency or just any of the agencies that you're working with or that you're considering acquiring? What are like the three biggest mistakes that they make that prevent them from scaling and becoming an attractive acquisition target?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, great. So, so what are the common mistakes that agency owners or agencies themselves make? And there's like a thousand of them, but I'll maybe start with kind of like the top three then. Yeah. So the first one, and this is very fundamental. That's a fundamental problem that not only agencies have, but other brands as well. And that's that the agency owners have never even really talked to their customers to understand what their customers value. They've never had that conversation. They've never asked, what are the things that we need to do? What would have to be true today for you to give me a referral, right? They don't really understand true value from the customer's perspective. They just understand value from what they think is important. And I think, especially in the internet space, it's very easy to do that because you don't have to talk to people if you don't want. You can sit behind your keyboard and you can just build a business. But in reality, unless you're talking to your customers consistently and understanding them and providing them better value than the next guy that they're talking to, you're going to lose business very quickly and you're going to be churning business consistently. So number one is fundamentally not understanding customer value. The second one I would say is, especially in smaller agencies, that the agency owners are what we call the brilliant bottleneck. They're always stuck in fulfillment. They might have like an amazing team. They might not trust that team. And then they become the bottleneck for all the decisions and all the improvements that have to happen to scale the agency forward. So they end up wearing all the hats.

Tim Rowe: Becoming a dependency, really? Exactly. What was the term you used? Something, a bottleneck?

Kyle Hunt: A bottleneck, the brilliant bottleneck. The brilliant bottleneck.

Tim Rowe: I love that. The brilliant bottleneck where they are so, they're so involved in working in the business and they know where all of the deep tribal knowledge is buried and how it should look and feel that they themselves become the thing preventing the agency from actually scaling. That's really interesting. What's that?

Kyle Hunt: I got that from my mentor, Peter Lang. So I did not create that. But really this is like pure ego when you look at it because you have to be able to teach and you have to be able to trust your team. And it's incredibly difficult for most agency owners and most founders generally to have that trust and to know how to teach their team and what to teach them and how to get stuff off their plate without like abdicating responsibility.

Tim Rowe: That's huge. Teach and trust that, right? If you can't ignore it and you can't automate it, you got to learn how to delegate it. And that's a really, really important skillset to have, especially in that agency. Where, I mean, ultimately you're trying to get out of the business. You don't want to be the business. You want to create a team around you that does the thing and delivers on the promise and embodies the core values of the agency. And am I right? Is that a, that's really what you want is to get out of the business.

Kyle Hunt: It's 100% what you want, but it's incredibly difficult. And you're right, it's to a degree, because you always, as an agency owner, have to be coaching and mentoring your people, because your people are your greatest asset. And a lot of people say that, but they don't really mean it. It's like, you actually think your people are your greatest asset, because how you act will be much different if you believe that they are, and how much time and money that you put into them will be much different, depending upon if you truly believe that or not, too. Agencies are incredibly difficult to scale because you have to scale humans, you have to scale people. As opposed to an e-commerce brand or a direct consumer brand, all you have to do is buy more widgets. It's a very easy problem to solve. It's actually very complex if you're looking at logistics and cash flow. But compared to scaling people, much more difficult to scale people, in my opinion, than it is to scale cogs.

Tim Rowe: Okay. So let's, let's double click into that. It is a lot harder to scale people than it is to scale processes and workflows. So why are agencies so interesting to you as a business?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. Great question. So agencies are interesting because on average agencies will do 20 to 30% debt if you're a great agency. Okay. That is cash in the bank every single month. Pretty consistent. Some high months and low months, but very consistent. If you take a look at that from an asset perspective, that's an amazing asset. Now the exit multiples aren't very high because there's a lot of founder risk in most agencies until you get to multiple millions of dollars a year in EBITDA. But if you compare that to example, like an e-commerce brand, we've invested in a handful of e-commerce brands over the past couple of years, and we're waiting three, five, seven, however long it takes to make a multiple of return on that asset, not really generating cash. You acquire an agency asset. You're generating cash on the way up. You can use that cash to invest in other assets, right? Or to fund your lifestyle, do whatever you want. So from my perspective, I think that agencies are kind of the undervalued assets that most people should look to purchase, but they're kind of blindsided by the shiny objects of like SaaS, like in, you know, 10 times revenue multiples, e-commerce and scaling very quickly.

Tim Rowe: Sure. 60%, 80% margins. And I don't have to talk to anyone because they just, I just charged their credit card every month. And I've got this very hands-off business. It, you know, RIP Charlie Munger. It sounds like you're building the Berkshire Hathaway of advertising really.

Kyle Hunt: Oh, he's way above me, but I appreciate the compliment. That's the right track to be on. Yeah. I mean, look, acquiring great assets at scale is, I think, the path forward for people who would have skills in D2C, who have skills in agencies. Not just taking those skills in a single asset, but expanding them to multiple assets that you can grow yourself.

Tim Rowe: Makes a ton of sense. I've never heard anyone talk about it that way, but explained simply, it does make a lot of sense. Probably some listeners now who are thinking about, uh, thinking about their agencies a little bit differently. Flipping this on its head a bit, you, you also, you come from the brand perspective. You're a brand founder. You have multiple brands in the portfolio as well. Give me some insight on that. How do, how do you think of agency selection as a brand?

Kyle Hunt: So great question. Like how do you select the best agency for you? Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Rowe: Whether it's for your product or your vertical or like, or is that even a good way to pick an agency? Hey, they've worked with lots of brands like mine. They'd be good for me. Or maybe it's working with. Yeah. How do you, how do you think through that? What's the right process?

Kyle Hunt: I think that generally that's probably a good kind of mindset to be in, but I'll kind of walk you through like how I made the decision because I have family gifts co, which was, which is my main e-commerce brand still. that I'm the majority shareholder of. And back in 2020, I had to choose an agency. And I ended up choosing one called AdKings, who are really, really great, really young, hungry guys who helped to scale the business and then currently Weekend Digital, who I'm a partner in. And this is kind of a thought process that I went to. And maybe before I get into that, though, I think that if you're doing probably like $50,000 a month or less in revenue, I don't think you should hire an agency. I think you should spend some time. I think you should learn one platform and that platform should be Facebook. and you need to be moderately good at it. Because Facebook is 80% of most D2C brands revenue. It's a core competency of D2C and e-commerce. And if you don't learn Facebook early on, you're always going to struggle to find someone to manage your ads. You're going to struggle to find the right partner. And you're not going to know what's wrong because it's such a core function of your brand. And the corollary to that is like I did family gift codes, ads, until we were at half a million dollars a month in revenue. Wow. So I did our first, me personally, I ran all our ads.

Kyle Hunt: Wow.

Kyle Hunt: Hands on. And I'd never done ads before that. Right. So it's not incredibly difficult.

Tim Rowe: Figured it out. Right. So, so, and I think the, exactly. So you having no Facebook ad experience, scaled your own brand to a half million dollars a month in revenue, learning, teaching yourself along the way, not hiring an agency, none of that DIY yourself to a half million in revenue. Yes.

Kyle Hunt: And there's an incredible amount of failure. and all that, an incredible amount of learning and you have to be okay with that. But again, I'd never done ads before and we did pretty well. Now, after that, after you learn Facebook and maybe a little bit of Klaviyo or some sort of email, then I would try to look for the right partner who I think has consistently great content. And that content could be from paid ads. Maybe they have really great paid ads. where they have a great organic content, but they need to have some way to show you that they're the expert and that they work with your specific type of business. If they work with nine figure brands and you're a seven figure brand, there's probably going to be a disconnect there or vice versa. Or if they work with CPG brands, but you're not CPG, you're selling hot dogs, they're probably not going to be a good fit if they don't work in your vertical niche. It's CPG till you cook it.

Tim Rowe: So if you're a hot dog vendor, you are now a service company.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. Cars, right. So something that's very expensive or different. So you need to find someone that is an expert or appears to be an expert. And then you need to make sure that they actually are an expert because what happens in most agencies is the founder is the person who's selling you. The founder is also. Sometimes the person who's doing the work, but not always. And you need to make sure they have a good team. And the way that I do that is through interviews. So I created a top three list of agencies that I was very interested in working with. And then I interviewed one or two people on their client roster. I just asked them, Hey, would you be opposed to letting me talk to some of the brands? And you'll learn so much from those customer interviews. And of course, they're going to give you their best clients for sure. And they're going to tell them what to say. So you have to know that. A bit of a bias sample. There's going to be some bias for sure. But you can see the level of client that they're working with. Is this client similar to me or not? You get to ask them specifically about the agency team that they're working at, not just the salesperson, the founder that's been selling you. You get a much clearer picture of what you're being sold on and what you're actually going to get. What are the typical deliverables on a weekly basis or monthly basis? How soon do they get back to you in Slack? The important things that you want to understand as a founder, you probably are not going to get a real answer from the owner.

Tim Rowe: It's such a great point. And it kind of ties back to The number one thing, holding agency owners back from scaling, asking more questions, right? It's the same thing that's holding. I think it's maybe something that we all just need to overcome is, is doing that. It's a little bit more of that old fashioned manual work. It's not sexy. It's there's not an app for it. There's not a, a SAS tool that I can have do it for me. It's a little bit of good old fashioned roll up your sleeves and figure it out. Like talk to humans.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah.

Kyle Hunt: Um, and again, incredibly difficult for most founders to do, especially behind the TVs, their audio screen or kind of zoom. Like you, you have to be able to talk to customers in real life or, or on, on calls like this.

Tim Rowe: Um, yeah, that is interesting. And the last three years have definitely changed the way that we interact and has maybe desensitized us to the importance of exactly this human to human communication.

Kyle Hunt: Dude, what? 100%. Um, like I don't know the last time that I've gone out personally myself to get groceries. Like it's been years, right? Cause COVID I'm like, Oh, someone's going to do that for me. So the amount of personal interaction that we're getting is like substantially decreasing and more of it's becoming online. Um, if, if people even want to have that online and then they're just having less of it generally.

Tim Rowe: Wow. That's really great point. Like from our, not even just from our professional lives. Yeah. I couldn't tell you the last time I called to order a pizza. I don't know, like the day before I downloaded Slice, that was the last time I called to order a pizza. I don't even call to order pizza and I would just walk in and it's there and I take it and I leave, right? That's a really good point.

Kyle Hunt: And you don't even talk, zero human interaction, right? None. You don't talk to them because they leave at your front door. None.

Tim Rowe: Wow, that's a really, really great point. So getting back to basics, really. talking to people, so the referral check, talking to the founders, what else? What other, what other tips would you give brands when they're going through that vetting of an agency to make sure it's going to fit?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. So, so what are the red flags probably would be a good way to kind of start. So number one, if you ask for reference and they don't give you a reference, red flag, red flag, red flag, number one. If. And this one's gonna be probably controversial, but I think if they haven't owned brands before, or they don't currently own brands, I also think that's a red flag. Now, there's an argument there of shiny object syndrome, which we could talk about for sure. But I think in order to really understand brands at scale, like scaling a seven-figure, multi-figure brand, you have to be a brand owner. You have to really understand cash flow, you have to understand inventory, you have to understand contribution margins. And there's definitely some agencies out there that are that are understanding that better and bringing it to the market. But really, unless you've owned a brand yourself, you're going to solve problems differently, or you're not going to know the real problems that the brand has as an agency owner.

Tim Rowe: Right. So no references, they don't own brands themselves. Give us one more, one more red flag that should leave us running for the hills.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. If you only talk to a salesperson through the sales process or only the founder through the sales process, you should be talking to a couple of people on that team. The founder is always going to be the best salesperson for the agency. And again, they're probably not going to be involved. In fact, you don't want them involved on your account because they need to be doing CEO things on a daily basis. But most agency founders will do sales and then you won't talk to anyone else. And you're probably going to be handed to a junior. So one of the things that I really like about Weekend is that we have Tom, who's our CEO as our main salesperson, but we also have Grayson, who's our head of growth, who is a lot on the operations side and ultimately determines projections for all the brands we're working with and how to scale them. He's on the interview, the sales process as well. So he comes in, performs an audit, and then he's like the CMO for the brands once they're on, once they signed in, they're on the operations side.

Tim Rowe: And it sounds like too, not just looking at it from a, Hey, let's do marketing. Cause marketing's warm and fuzzy. No, like let's grow revenue strategically and tactically because I'm so intimately involved with your business, with your numbers, that the marketing is actually going to be a by-product of the business.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, exactly. So I think a function that a lot of agencies miss is that they're really good at one service. So they're good at like K-media and they're good at email maybe, and maybe they're good at something else, but they don't really have the piece that connects all of these things together, which in my mind is projections. It's We're going to hit this revenue dollar amount. What do each of these service lines or each of these functions need to do from a revenue basis in order to hit our ultimate goal, right? There's no one who's kind of piecing all that together. And that's typically a CMO in most organizations. But that's like small organizations don't have that person. So the agency needs to have that person. So Grayson is that person for us. He mentors all the media buyers. They build out six to 12 month projections for all the brands we're working with. And then we know, Hey, this is where we want to be in the next six to 12 months. Here's KPIs and targets for each of these different service lines, email, Facebook, Google, CRO, whatever that is that we need to hit in order to hit these. And the whole team is then aligned on Archery North.

Tim Rowe: We heard a little bit about kind of that ascension of, of e-comm marketing of you got to master Facebook first and then probably some sort of email component from there. Maybe walk us through, can you just take us further through that hierarchy? I'd love to, I'd love to get in this next kind of section here, your perspective on media. media mix, how do offline channels, how do you think that they harmonize with digital tactics? We'd love to just kind of get your sense on, on media in general. It's obviously a specific use case we're talking about here, but what do you think that Ascension is? And then maybe we can, we can evolve into like, what's your overall take on, on the right kind of mix.

Kyle Hunt: All right. Uh, well, considering who is on this podcast, this is going to be very controversial that I'm about to say, but I think for, for most. DTC founders that have a fast growing business. I think, um, I think retail is shiny objects that I don't think you should be doing. I think it's a distraction. Um, so I think getting really good at one thing, which is going to be paid ads through probably Facebook. It might be Tik TOK, but probably Facebook. Doing that thing really, really well and then mastering it and then moving on to something else is the way that you really succeed at anything really, but specifically at BBC. And if you're doing Facebook, Google, email, retail, billboards, and you're doing $2 million a year, it makes no sense because you're a master of none, right? So I don't think until you're like five, six, $7 million a year in revenue, you even look at other things outside of Facebook and Google because you just need to be focused on being really, really good at those things. That's not even including the whole attribution problem that we have, right? It's funny because we were talking earlier, it's like DTC brands, we complain about attribution. It's like, oh, the attribution's off. But it's like, we have maybe four or five channels we're looking at on a consistent basis. When you're talking, like you're talking bus signs, billboards, all these things that like maybe you have a phone number for attribution, like how do you attribute that revenue? I don't know. That's incredibly difficult. So doing Facebook or one sort of paid media platform really, really well until you're like multiple seven figures, I think is the smart move.

Tim Rowe: I think that makes a ton of sense. Just hearing that feedback, I think from yourself, someone who's been in the pit, in the trenches, doing this, acquiring these types of companies. Focus, focus, focus, stop. The shiny, shiny object syndrome is a real thing and it's fun. It's, it's, it's that balance of curiosity and understanding where the puck's going and what kind of be looking for next down the field. But also staying present right here, right now, because we can't worry about the future unless we master now.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. And it's, you know, I think shiny object syndrome is the number one killer of great entrepreneurs because it pushes your focus to multiple places. And you can't focus on the one thing that really matters, which is like scaling the asset that you're working on and then ultimately exiting it. Right. Cause it's an asset and that's the whole goal at the end of the day.

Tim Rowe: We just got through Black Friday, Cyber Monday is like wrapping up or closing the books on that. What did you see this year that was maybe different than years past? Like what are the initial kind of key takeaways from Black Friday, Cyber Monday as we close out that weekend?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. So our biggest takeaway is this year we did a very good job of preparing in advance for it. There is an obscene amount more of creative that you need, of email that you need, of everything that you need when Black Friday, Saturday, Monday hits, and even Christmas season hits for brands that do a lot of Christmas revenue. So this year we started to plan in June for all these things. Last year it was an October plan and that was a very bad decision and everything was last minute and there was a lot of rework and it was chaos essentially. So this year we did a lot A lot better job planning. And that was a people problem. We just had the wrong person in the planning seat back then. And I got the right person in the planning seat. But I think that was the biggest takeaway is like with, with good plans, yes, you might need to iterate later, but like having everything level and the company prior to Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, instead of this giant. Run up that happens traditionally with e-commerce brands or agencies. That was our biggest learning. It's not even like a huge learning, but it's the most important one.

Tim Rowe: It's, you know, it is the same. Generally it's the same Friday and the same Monday. It's going to be in that same calendar week every year. We know it's going to be there. Uh, yeah. Getting started earlier. Definitely sounds promising. How about from like a, just from a pure CAC standpoint, what are you seeing in terms of CPM trends? Is the performance there is the market there. I've seen kind of a mixed bag of if this was a good or a bad year, it seems like it was. You know, so there were winners and there were losers and there was a whole bunch of carnage in the middle.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, so Man, I haven't really been in an ad account in like years. It sounds so bad to say. So I just see the reports. You see the bottom line, really the most important thing. I do. Obviously costs are going up everywhere. Costs are going up in fulfillment. Costs are going up on ad platforms. They're going up everywhere. So we've done our best really from a creative perspective to try to get as many creative out as we can during the year so that we know exactly what we're going to be, like what are our big winners from a creative perspective? What are our big winners from an offer perspective? And CPMs go up as you get closer to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then they go down as you get closer to Christmas, except for brands like mine, which is all literally like 80% of our revenue is done in something like 25 days between Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. Wow. Yeah. That's, that's a fun business.

Tim Rowe: That seems like a stressful business. It's you can't even play small ball. Like no, we're swinging for home runs and they're grand slams and we need to at least drive in like two runs per swing. That's, that's, that's big leagues.

Kyle Hunt: They're all big swings. But that's honestly where most brands should start is very, very big swings. Swings of offer, swings of pricing, swings of creative testing, all these landing pages, pre-sale pages, all these things that are the bigger levers. Those are the things that you should be testing on a more consistent basis than the color of your add to cart button, which is where most people start.

Tim Rowe: So, so give us an example of that. Maybe, maybe one that you've deployed yourself or one that you think a brand would be well-served to try. Give us an example of like, what does a big swing look like instead of yeah. Changing my add to cart color.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. So, um, we have a brand that, um, my business partner, Tom owns called IAB. Um, stands for I'm becoming, it's like a women's activewear brand. Okay. And last year, the brand. It had historically done around eight figures between Amazon and between DTC. And Tom started the agency, typical shiny object syndrome, didn't care so much about the brand. He's selling like women's activewear, basically like booty shorts. So not that exciting for a guy, to be honest. And he saw more opportunity elsewhere. So the brand was doing something like $3 million a year. It dropped $7 million because he wasn't focusing on it. But what we did is we changed the offer. to just BOGO. Very simple offer, buy one, get one free. And we did something like we moved from $300,000 a month to something like $600,000 or $700,000 a month, just by that one simple change of switching offer. And it's that impactful. It completely changed the trajectory of everything. Now, that's a pretty big offer. So you have to make sure that the margins work and you have to understand shipping and how that's going to be impacted. And you have to make sure that your accounting all those discounts into the ad target, the ROAS target that you have. So there's a lot of technical things you need to do to make sure that that works or else it will blow up in your face and you'll go really, really bad. But something as simple as that can literally change the trajectory of an entire company.

Tim Rowe: Changing the offer, changing the way that we price and package. It's right. It's not, it's not the, what it's the who, right. Getting back to like simple ideas of we don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water, chase the new shiny thing. Like, no, what we got is good and it's working. We could just make it work better.

Kyle Hunt: Exactly. Yeah. Um, God, Alex Ramos, he, everybody knows the guy, like incredibly talented, but he's got the thing where it's like, you can do more of the stuff you're doing, or you can do kind of like new stuff. And most people tend to gravitate to new stuff. When in reality, if you just do more of what you're currently doing, you're going to have a better results because you're just pouring gas on the fire versus like trying to go start Tinder, Tinder, start a new fire, whatever that is.

Tim Rowe: Right. It can be kind of big growth. Gets boring event, right? Like once you figure out the thing, you got product market fit and you got all the economics figured out, like. We don't need to change it. Let's just go faster. Let's get bigger. We don't need to reinvent anything. It's all working. More of the stuff that works, right? More of the stuff that not the shiny objects, no more shiny focus. Talk to humans, no shiny objects. Kyle for the agencies that are maybe listening, that, that maybe they would be a, an appealing acquisition target for you. For an agency owner that's listening and thinking about exiting, what are the things as you're thinking about acquiring, what are the things that you're looking for in a perfect acquisition target?

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, great question. So we're looking for really amazing agencies that are in the one to $5 million a year revenue range that are located in the US that have a great culture and team that we can just apply what we learned at Weekend, what we learned through scaling our own brands and agencies and apply that to their agency. So anything, and that's a pretty detailed ICP for the acquisition space, but like DTC, USA, one to $5 million a year revenue, great people. And we are open to minority as well as majority acquisitions. We prefer majority 60 to 80% acquisitions so that you can stay on and take a second bite of the apple, so to speak. But we're open to all those conversations.

Tim Rowe: You know, and, and that's, I think is interesting too. Maybe you've reached a point where you are fatigued or bored with the business. This can feel like starting over again without the shiny object syndrome while still being able to focus on your core confidence. The thing that you've spent so much time building. I would imagine that it could feel like. new blood, I'm born again. What, what are, what are the experiences generally of an age? I don't know. I've never sold an agency. Like what is the experience generally of an agency owner after they exit? Like, is it depressed and they really wander off to the woods and we don't see them or like what, what is generally the experience of a founder that exits?

Kyle Hunt: So that, that's a really good question. I think agency, like everyone experiences like this, this, um, different emotions coming in together at such an incredible pace differently. Some people might act one way or the other. The reality of the situation for most agency owners is though, when you exit that business, you have golden handcuffs. Because the acquirer is still going to require you to be around because you don't have systems and processes, because you're not tracking the right metrics, because you don't have the defined ICP, because you're doing the sales, because you're doing fulfillment, because you're doing all these things, right? So it's very difficult for most agency owners, unless you're like an eight-figure agency owner who doesn't have a personal brand, which is like a unicorn, to actually truly exit the business because you are the business in most cases, right? An e-commerce brand? Sure. exit out, whatever, no big deal. But typically the founder of the agency is the driving force behind the decisions, even if they're not actively involved in fulfillment. So I'd say a tempered expectation of that exit, but there's going to have to eventually be someone who replaces that person who is just as good or better than that person. So maybe start looking for that person now if you're thinking about exiting so you can offer them as a solution.

Tim Rowe: Love that, right? Find your, fire yourself. Work on those processes, stop working in the business, start working on the business so that you can enjoy all of that hard work when eventually the time is appropriate for you to, to, to step away from the business. Is that? Yeah, exactly.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah, I was talking to an Amazon agency right before this and they'd already exited a couple of businesses, really intelligent owners doing a couple hundred thousand dollars per month. And the owner's like, I'm there. He's like, I'm basically the investor in this. I go to meetings once a week and I look at numbers and that's my involvement in the agency. I'm like, awesome. That's a really sellable agency. He's like, you brought in a CEO that does everything. And this isn't typically what happens. Typically agencies crash and burn when this happens, but they've been able to do it really well. Like that's an agency that's exitable where that guy, like he could exit tomorrow and. No, he can go cause he's already got the team in place, but most agencies aren't really structured that way.

Tim Rowe: Start thinking about those things today. We're going to avoid shiny object syndrome, but we're going to think about the future and skating to the puck. We're going to stop working in the business and start working on the business. We're going to focus, focus, focus, and we're going to talk to human beings.

Kyle Hunt: That's all you need to know, man.

Tim Rowe: And give referrals, give those references. Otherwise you're sketchy. You're absolutely a sketch ball. If you want to tell me who else you work with and why, when, and where I can call them. Kyle, this has been incredible. I think that we've got a lot here for folks to go on as we head into 2024. Where are you most active? We, we used Latin long in the real world, uh, to, to, to let people know where we are. What are your Latin long? Where are you most active? Give folks the socials and every place.

Kyle Hunt: Yeah. You can find me on Twitter at hunt Kyle, and you can also just find me on LinkedIn at Kyle hunt as well. Kylie hunts. Um, either one of those, I am pretty active on both of them. And I just started a YouTube channel. I don't want to brag, but I have 30 subscribers. Let's go.

Tim Rowe: You're on your way to the plaque. Listen, I've got a YouTube channel about a podcast about billboards and somehow I got to 500 subs. My son thinks I'm a YouTuber basically at this point. He's like, my dad's got a big deal. He's got a half a thousand subscribers. You'll get there. You're going to be there. Blow right by me. Kyle, this has been incredible. We'll link to all of the social handles so that folks can continue to follow you and your work, get in touch if, if they're so inclined. I can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you, man.

Kyle Hunt: And I have an, I have an offer as well. If you're an agency owner and you're in the one to $5 million a year range and you're looking to exit DM me on LinkedIn or Instagram or YouTube and I'll do a free 21 point audit of your business to tell you what you should fix before you're looking to exit.

Tim Rowe: How good is that? That's why you stay to the end kids. If you found this to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit as always. Make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow. See y'all next time.