S1|Ep64 Elite Entrepreneurship & AI: Scaling to 8 Figures Without Funding or a Sales Team

Forest Bronzan from the United States is here to share a powerful story of elite entrepreneurship in the AI era.

Forest reveals how he founded and scaled Email Aptitude—named the #1 fastest-growing CRM/Loyalty agency in the U.S. by Inc. 5000 and #2 Best Place to Work in California by Ad Age. He grew it from zero to 100 employees and 8-figure revenue, fast, without funding or a sales team.

After a strategic merger, he stepped into an even bigger game, helping grow the combined company to over 1,000 full-time employees—and exited once again.

Forest is now the Co-Founder & CEO of Jetset, and a board member at Digital Detox®, after over 15 years in e-commerce, building award-winning agencies and driving revenue growth for brands like Bombas, MVMT, Walmart, and more.

🔥 Key Topics Covered:

• Scaling without a sales team: what most founders miss
• System design & clarity vs. hustle culture
• Scaling from 300 to 1,000+ employees in 18 months
• How AI would change everything if he built again today
• Founders’ blind spots & high-leverage shortcuts in the AI era
• Real moments of truth in hypergrowth
• Advice for high-performing founders & agency leaders

This is a must-listen for entrepreneurs, AI-curious leaders, and agency builders looking to create extraordinary results with a lean, bold, and intelligent approach to scale.

🔗 Connect with Forest on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/forestbronzan/
🌏 https://jetset.io/

👉 Follow, rate, and share to help more visionary founders discover this conversation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 4:22 Forest's Journey to Agency Founder
• 6:17 Scaling Without Sales or Funding
• 14:47 Creating Award-Winning Company Culture
• 19:58 Navigating AI in Business Growth
• 28:36 Human-Centered Decision Making
• 35:45 Product First, Technology Second

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to Digital Transformation and AI for Humans with your host, emi. In this podcast, we delve into how technology intersects with leadership, innovation and, most importantly, the human spirit. Each episode features visionary leaders who understand that at the heart of success is the human touch nurturing a winning mindset, fostering emotional intelligence and building resilient teams. My fantastic guest today, forrest Bronson, from the United States, is here to share a powerful story of elite entrepreneurship with artificial intelligence. Forrest will reveal how he founded and scaled email aptitude and scaled email aptitude.

Speaker 1: 0:48

Named number one fastest growing CRM loyalty agency in the United States by Inc 5000 and number two best place to work in California by AdAge. He grew it from zero to 100 employees and eight-figure revenue fast without funding or a sales team. Figure revenue fast without funding or a sales team. After strategic measure, he stepped into an even bigger game, helping grow the combined company to over 1,000 full-time employees and exited once again. Forrest is now the co-founder and CEO of JetSet and a board member at Digital Detox, After over 15 years in e-commerce, building award-winning agencies and driving revenue growth for brands like Bombas, mvmt, walmart and more. Welcome, forrest. It's a great pleasure to see you here in this studio today.

Speaker 2: 1:44

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:46

Let's start the conversation and transform not just our technologies but our ways of thinking and living. If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, you can find more information in the description. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes. I would also love to invite you to get your copy of AI Leadership Compass Unlocking Business Growth and Innovation the definitive guide for leaders and business owners to adapt and thrive in the age of AI and digital transformation. Find the Amazon link in the description below Forrest. To start with, I would be happy to hear a few words about yourself, about your story, about your incredible journey.

Speaker 2: 2:30

Well, thanks for the kind words, thanks again for having me. Where to begin? I mean, should we go back to the email aptitude days and the start of that agency? We could go back even further before that. What would be helpful?

Speaker 1: 2:48

that what would be helpful? Let's take a step even further into the past, because I would like to know where from your passion comes and how you came into the digital world, sure, sure.

Speaker 2: 2:53

So I think entrepreneurship's always been just ingrained in me. I was the kid with a network of lemonade stands in third grade and you know creating businesses in high school. In college, I had a video production company. We did a videography for dance recitals and high school graduations and sold I'm going to date myself now sold DVDs to parents that funded through college. After college, I ran CRM and Loyalty at an agency in San Diego, had a wonderful experience there and serendipitously met my now wife and left the dream job in San Diego. I was living with my best friend since kindergarten at Gaslamp. I was working my dream job with this amazing team, met the girl, left for the girl. She was starting grad school about an hour and a half north of where I was living and that really started building what would become email aptitude. I started consulting, started helping brands on everything from CRM, loyalty, organic paid search at the time and really found my love for loyalty and CRM and that ultimately ballooned and blossomed into the agency email aptitude.

Speaker 1: 4:07

It's so inspiring and it's always great to see people whose life is filled with love and so much passion to what you are doing, to the goals and dreams you are pursuing. You also redefine success in what you are doing so truly impressive. You scaled your agency to eight figures without raising a single dollar and without even building a sales team. That is almost unheard of. What bold decisions, systems or mindset shifts made that possible? And what did you deliberately reject that most founders obsess over?

Speaker 2: 4:48

Yeah, so keep in mind. I mean, when I started email aptitude, this was circa 2014 or so 13, 14, 12. It's a little blurry when it actually became official and at the time it wasn't as common for professional services to go raise private equity funding, or any funding for that matter. Most of the VC funding goes to tech, so it just wasn't even top of mind for us, and we also had I had a lot of friends that were raising really big rounds series A, series B and they were chasing margin. They were growing way too fast and they were making decisions that weren't right for the business because they had to appease investors and get to that next round and, intuitively, that didn't make sense for the brand that I wanted to build and how we were operating with clients. We wanted to grow a little slower at first. We wanted to be very organic. We wanted to be very organic. We wanted to make sure that we figured out our process and figured out our value add in a thoughtful way, versus if you raise a ton of funding early on, you're having to spend that money, you have to burn it, and so we just took a little bit different approach. It was very organic.

Speaker 2: 5:57

We started with a couple clients and then started with a couple tech partners. That would send us some leads and then eventually had case studies. After that, we would promote more at conferences. We never did one outbound sales call or sales email, but we would be heavy into press, case studies, speaking and really creating that environment for people to advocate for us. And we built this army of folks that just believed in our mission, what we were building, and would shout from the rooftop this is the agency you need to be with At the end of the day, and this is something I would preach to the crew every week on our all hands.

Speaker 2: 6:33

How we grow is by doing great work for clients. That leads to case studies. It leads to happy clients sharing with all of their friends, and that's really so. Our, our growth strategy from the start was just do an awesome job at a reasonable price. We had at the time, you know, a very niche focus. We were entirely focused on loyalty and CRM and you know most agencies weren't really doing email marketing, database marketing in a thoughtful way at the time and there weren't really I could probably name one or two single channel agencies. Now there's a bunch that were focused on what we were doing so, we had sort of the right place, right time, and then we just really doubled down into doing great work, building great team, building great relationships with clients and a lot of luck in between. We can't discount the factor of luck and happy to elaborate on that, but we're very grateful for how we scaled.

Speaker 1: 7:26

Absolutely. Could you mention just a few moments where you could feel that this is your lucky moment to move forward?

Speaker 2: 7:35

Where it felt like the business was really growing.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Yes.

Speaker 2: 7:40

Yeah, a couple. So at the time I was in Redlands, california, my wife was in grad school there and she got residency up in the Bay Area and we had all had plans to move to the Bay. Eventually, that juncture of moving to the Bay just and there isn't an exact science to this, but it just things started happening then, right, we had more connections, more networking events, more access to talent. That was really a game changer for the company. Stay outside of that would be landing some of our early big brands, and part of this comes into luck. But we launched with Bomba Socks a day after they aired on Shark Tank. So while we did a ton of great work for them and helped build that brand, we also had a tremendous amount of luck with the momentum and piggybacking off their story, and that led to a great case study, which then landed another big marquee brand and we started to continue moving up market. I think it was all of those, individually and collectively, that led to our success.

Speaker 2: 8:39

I would say another really important thing from the start, and kind of going back to before starting the agency, we happen to be really good at database and loyalty and CRM marketing. When I started something, though I wanted to create best places to work. You know, I just, we spend so much time with our fellow coworkers that you know life's too short to you know, be in a job that's miserable. So the services that we offered happened to be what we were good at, but the core genesis of it was, you know, we want to create a company. It could be almost anything that just people love working at, our partners and clients love working with, and it just happened to be loyalty CRM. So I think that was a really core point.

Speaker 2: 9:15

One of the really key, pivotal moment was when we hired our first HR manager, our only HR manager, and we did this at employee, I think, 28, 29. And usually brands will wait much longer for that Wait until they're 50, 60. I've rented to some companies with 150 employees and they don't have anyone in people ops yet, and that was a very deliberate decision because we knew that we were growing at a very fast clip and we needed to keep up with our hiring practices and with demand, and so we made that decision to bring on what many would argue is somewhat premature a full-time person in people ops and HR. And that individual, joey Owens Barham. He's phenomenal, he really helped us scale from 25 to 50, 50 to 100 employees in a thoughtful way, with the right infrastructure, and made everything happen in a really smart way. So I'm grateful for him taking a chance on us when we were smaller, and the rest is history.

Speaker 1: 10:10

This is so inspiring, and you just covered so many crucial topics Human centricity, customer centricity, the importance of tapping into the flow and being there where you are supposed to be, at the right moment with the right situation and, on top of that, just prioritizing what really matters. And it is not only about getting results but even more so about creating that environment where those you are working and co-creating this magic with are happy, are creative, where they can support each other and move forward in such a powerful and sustainable way. That's truly impressive. Most entrepreneurs rely heavily on aggressive sales to grow, but you scaled without one. How did you engineer demand and conversion at scale? And what would you say to those who think selling is the only way to grow?

Speaker 2: 11:21

So keep in mind I mean, we grew without an outbound sales team. Maybe we could have grown even stronger with an outbound sales team. So I'm not saying that that's the wrong way to do it. I think a lot of it was just in our dna. We weren't a pushy group, and you know, especially at the time, and still now, a lot of the brands that we worked with, they would complain about these over-aggressive SDRs and PDRs. You know, to a point we had some clients that got rid of their phone line because they had so many cold inbound calls, and we just we didn't want to be that group that was going to, you know, annoy the heck out of you. You know, without you know, building a relationship first, and our sales cycle too, we weren't inexpensive. We're, you know, a premium professional service. It's a deeper relationship, so it's not something that you know, at least at the time, was served right with an infrastructure of just going hard, aggressive, outbound. That said, that's just the way that we did it.

Speaker 2: 12:16

I'm sure there's been some phenomenal case studies of brands growing from zero to a thousand with a better sales infrastructure. How we did it, though and I touched on this earlier is yet kind of came back to the core doing great work that led to case studies, led to people talking. I'd say, from there we brought a phenomenal director of marketing that helped operationalize all that and get things into case studies, get things out to press, get us speaking at events. Whenever we spoke at an event, sometimes alongside a client and major brand, that was huge. So I think it's a combination of operationalizing the content and the approach that we had case studies, good work, good team, great model and then executing on that, and that was sort of the formula.

Speaker 2: 13:04

The only other kind of deliberate thing that we did is we had, you know, a handful of referral partners, folks that just loved what we were doing. In some cases we'd give them commission, other cases it would just be, you know this, reciprocal. You know we're helping each other out, donate to charity. You know it wasn't necessarily a monetary compensation, but we would create that relationship with folks that really believed in what we were building and saw the value that we were adding. And then they spoke from the rooftop.

Speaker 2: 13:31

So I'm just a big believer and we're kind of growing Jet Set in a similar way have a great product or service right, have systems around helping to make sure that your fans can evangelize that for you and scale from there. And certainly there's a place for outbound calling and emailing and all of that. And especially now with AI there's some phenomenal automations around it. I would caution brands from going too aggressive there without having the relationship mindset first and without having kind of core product and infrastructure first. You could have the best outbound sales team and the best outbound flows, but if your product sucks or your service sucks, that's not going to get you very far.

Speaker 2: 14:13

So true, you also write about that, but it is so impressive how you managed the whole business growth story and how long did it take from zero to the first exit so the early days when, when I moved to redlands while my wife was in grad school, I was consulting then, so I don't, I don't really consider that the start of the agency. It was a few years later um, it's a little blurry when we actually officially started, you know, with our first employee let's call it 2011 and then we exited in 2018, so seven years or so. So it wasn't this overnight success. The first couple years were pretty slow growth and then it was very rapid and, to give you perspective, our fastest growth period was while we were in diligence on exit and in 90 days we went from like 65 to 95 employees. It was just every day it seemed like we were onboarding a couple folks. So it was. I could send you a graph, but it was slow to start fast ramp and then exceptional growth towards the end.

Speaker 1: 15:25

That is also really important to highlight, because you know many of those who could come to the success results. They might give up somewhere in the middle because it takes longer than expected. But your story is exactly the proof that it might take time in the beginning, but then it speeds up and the trend starts looking completely different. You are getting where you were planning to get in a much faster way.

Speaker 2: 15:58

So you brought up an interesting point in terms of the ability to work through some of those slow periods and bumps in the road. That kind of came down to the law of timing for me and huge luck there. When I started the agency I didn't have children, very little expenses and responsibility. My wife, once she was done with residency, was earning good living and so I had the flexibility to ride that out and not pay myself for several years and go through that. If I was starting something at a different stage of life, it'd be a different story completely. You might not have that five-year runway to weather the storm.

Speaker 2: 16:37

I'd say another point that we're happy to unpack I didn't have a co-founder. I had phenomenal early stage employees, phenomenal advisors, but I didn't have a co-founder. That's a very lonely road, jet said. I have a co-founder, which I'm very grateful for. It's just a different experience. But with email aptitude there was certainly some lonely periods where you're the only one making decisions and collaborating. It's very different collaborating with an advisor or a senior employee than someone that has significant stake in the game, and so that's retrospectively. You know that that was one thing that probably could have done even better if I had had a co-founder that complimented my skill set. We probably could have done even more damage, but it worked out. We got lucky, and now with Jet Set, we're approaching it slightly different and now, with Jet Set, we're approaching it slightly different.

Speaker 1: 17:33

You never know, but your story and your results just prove that you've done it on your own and you were strong enough to take the company and your employees through the storms and hit the point where everybody could feel that they're so proud of being a part of your team.

Speaker 2: 17:50

So I think it is truly amazing I appreciate that, yeah, and I'd say that the biggest accomplishment we had outside of you know, having some phenomenal growth stories for the company, for clients, getting acquired was achieving that best place to work list, and a lot of brands do that just to you know, have the PR and have, you know, another trophy on the shelf. But for us that meant something. You know, we from the start, like I mentioned, we wanted to create this environment that people loved working at, even at scale, at a hundred employees, I think we had 1% employee attrition.

Speaker 2: 18:26

So I mean everyone stayed like, yeah, there was a couple that left and a couple that weren't good fits. We got it wrong in the hiring process. But achieving that best place to work by adage. I remember just being up that night, refreshing, waiting for it to come, and I finally fell asleep and my wife woke me up at whatever four in the morning, seven Eastern, and you know we'd made number two in California, top 15 or 18 in the country, and that was extremely rewarding.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Amazing it sounds absolutely amazing, Forrest, after your exit, you were part of scaling the merged company from 300 to 1,000 people in 18 months. What were the high leverage moves behind that hyper growth and how do you scale humans, culture and systems that fast without chaos?

Speaker 2: 19:16

I didn't say there wasn't chaos certainly chaos. So we were acquired and it was a really interesting experience. That's the first time I had gone through that as a founder and we were absorbed into a much larger organization that had more established infrastructure, great sales team, phenomenal leadership, and that growth came. I think there was a couple acquisitions in that 18 months. So part of that whatever it was 300 to 1,000 employees was via acquisitions, almost through organic growth. This would have been 2018 to 2020, give or take, and yeah, it was a wild experience. I was involved early on, eventually transitioned to an advisor role and then, once they sold again, this would have been December 2020, I phased out completely. So I'm grateful for that experience, grateful for the opportunity to have kind of been along for the ride and learn from some of the folks that were leading the charge on that growth.

Speaker 1: 20:16

Your last agency didn't use artificial intelligence, but now you are building in a landscape shaped by AI. What made you shift your perspective on AI? And if you were to build that company again today, how would AI be baked in from day one?

Speaker 2: 20:38

Lots to talk about there. So, yeah, again, like we sold in mid-2018, mid-2018. So this was, you know, while we were using, you know, using some machine learning, technical operational elements. It wasn't kind of AI how we think about it today.

Speaker 2: 20:53

I think a mistake a lot of brands and agencies and companies make right now is they're trying to rely too heavily on AI and just turn everything over. And I've heard some horror stories. If you get, yes, like we could use it in a thoughtful way to increase efficiency, to have, you know, some operational excellence, but we're not quite there where we could just turn over the entire company and the entire org to AI without sacrificing somewhere, right? So, yeah, I mean, we're, we're seeing so as an agency jet set. You know, we're a growth and performance and and creative agency.

Speaker 2: 21:26

We offer gen ai services where we're doing commercial grade full service, uh and I'm not saying this as a plug, but just for context and where we're doing, uh, you know, full scale photo shoots and video production using gen ai. So we're using ai as a service in our agency and for scaling the agency. Yeah, it's different elements some operational elements on finance, on content review that have certainly made things more efficient for us as we scale. In some cases we have fewer headcount because we're able to use some really efficient AI, but we're trying to do it in a really mindful and thoughtful way. We recognize that some of the companies that I think are failing aren't connecting that human connection side that's so critical, and so we're taking a human first approach in everything we do. So, whether it's with internal ops or with services that we're offering our client, human comes first.

Speaker 1: 22:22

Ai and tech is a way to augment and help enhance that first, ai and tech is a way to augment and help enhance that. You can't imagine how happy I am when I hear this from you, because it is so important, and I also see the stories where that priority is somehow completely lost behind technologies. Completely lost behind technologies and unfortunately it's not going to drive long-term results and help growing sustainably, because in the end of the day, it is important to keep humans front and center, and you are doing it totally right and you are also a role model for many entrepreneurs today in that sense that you are sharing your experiences and you are paving the way to the right distribution between different ingredients of the business growth so that they create that balance so that they create that balance.

Speaker 2: 23:26

That's very generous of you. I'd say we're in sort of uncharted territory right now with AI and I have a lot of founder friends that are using it much more heavy than we are. And perhaps we're wrong, maybe we need to be leaning on it more, and so we're just taking an approach where it's day by day. I mean, if you were to ask me a month ago, there were things that weren't possible that are possible today. So it's a day by day evaluation on where does this add value internally with the team, where does that add value for our clients and how do we kind of compartmentalize that approach in a way that we feel a lot of integrity around that approach in a way that we feel a lot of integrity around Sounds great.

Speaker 1: 24:08

Elite entrepreneurs today are navigating a whole new game with AI, exactly as you just mentioned. What do they need to completely rethink about? How they structure, grow and lead companies in this new era?

Speaker 2: 24:24

Yes, I think in terms of leading the company, they still need to go back to the roots of you know, we need to build phenomenal culture. We need to build phenomenal product or service and we need to take care of our customers and put them on a pedestal. That never changes, no matter how much technological advances we have or how much AI is making our lives better or enhancing we could put that debate aside you still need great team, great culture, great product and great relationships. Now, can AI make that more efficient? In some ways? For sure, absolutely. Can we have operational excellence in a way that's more streamlined than it was five years ago? In a way that's more streamlined than it was five years ago? For sure. And if that saves some time off of other tasks and affords you more time to put on tasks that are going to be value generating, fantastic, let's do that. But don't lose sight of those core pillars product, team and relationship. Otherwise, all the AI in the world and all the tech in the world is not going to have much value.

Speaker 1: 25:29

I love this. Where do most founders waste time and energy, and how can AI, when combined with real clarity, help cut the noise and massively accelerate results?

Speaker 2: 25:43

That's a big question. So I think the first part of that really depends on the founder where they spend too much time. And it's a common exercise for CEOs and founders to do that mapping and that arithmetic of where am I actually putting my hours and is that the most best use of my time? Right, I like to think and there was a great article that was in Harvard no-transcript things. And then what are the things that almost anyone else can do better than I can, and I shouldn't spend any time on those things, right? So I think a trap that a lot of founders fall into is they try to do everything, whether it's micromanaging, or they feel that they're just so superior at every task when they should be thinking what are the things that only I can do? Double down on that, and what are the things that I could have someone else do better than me?

Speaker 2: 26:59

And once I made that realization at my last agency, there were certain areas that I was the bottleneck. I wasn't. I was bringing bottleneck. I wasn't, I was bringing on team that was way smarter than I was and way more efficient at certain tasks. Great, you do that. And then I'm going to focus on my lane. What, uh, what my secret sauce is. Then it was, then it was game over. Now where AI plays into that If you do that same exercise and you identify the areas that you're less efficient, you're less strong at, let's see, okay, the options are we hire for that, we delegate with the team, or are there some technologies that we could use to make some of those processes more efficient? So we could go down the laundry list, whether it's, you know, accounting or content review or systems or automations but it kind of really depends on the entrepreneur and on that founder and what weak spots are to then fill in the gaps.

Speaker 1: 27:50

So true, and you are very humble. It is definitely important to have that quality when you are running business into the future, but, at the same time, your way of prioritizing and having clarity about what really matters, what is what in the bigger picture, that is truly important. Scaling to over 1,000 people in 18 months comes with make or break moments. So, forrest, I just wonder what were the real moments of truth during the journey and what processes or solutions helped holding the vision, culture and alignment together under pressure.

Speaker 2: 28:38

Yes, I could probably better speak to that going zero to 120 or so, the 300 to a thousand. I was a piece of the puzzle, a small piece, but uh, I had more hands on autonomy on the zero to one, 100 and change. So, yeah, I mean there were lots of kind of key moments there again, bringing on joey as our first hr manager, making a decision to invest in certain events and doubling down on experiences and relationship building. Those were key. I think.

Speaker 2: 29:07

One thing that we did somewhat differently and again kind of going back to understanding what a founder is really great at, what are some of their superpowers. One of mine is with hiring, and I just have a and I want to be clear, I am not great at so many things with operating the business. One thing I'm phenomenal at is hiring and having the sixth sense on people, and so I was in every single interview up to exit, personally interviewing with the team and at that point, you know, once we were past 30 or 40, it was a, it was a process, there was screening interviews and team interviews, but at some point in that hiring process I, I, I touched it and I was involved and helped make that final gut decision and that led us to having the employee retention that we had and the best places to work. And I I can't pinpoint it, but it's just I love it. I love connecting with people, asking the right questions and really seeing are they going to be not only kind of good at the job we're hiring for, but are they going to be a good I hate to use the word culture fit it's a little cliche now but are they? Are they going to be a good relationship alignment with our clients and and with our other team members?

Speaker 2: 30:26

And so that's something I think that you know, going from you know zero to a hundred was important is is putting the time into that, and I think some founders, they they skip that process for whatever reason. They either feel their time is better used elsewhere or they're they're too big to sit in on an interview for employee number 73 for a coordinator role, and maybe that's the right decision for them. Maybe their superpower isn't hiring and they don't have that eq to make those decisions. But I'd venture a guess that most founders have a pretty good gauge of who's going to be the right fit and they should stick around longer in the hiring process if it were up to me and we hadn't sold and we continued to scale to 500. I probably would have continued to do that as much as I could, as it was efficient to be involved in that process.

Speaker 1: 31:08

You just mentioned the gut feeling, so I've got such a curiosity around how important in your world intuition is versus knowledge and logical evaluation. How do you use those two parts the one which is very logical and very predictable and based on data and facts and everything what is accepted in the business world officially, versus something what is actually there but we're not used to mention it as an important part of the successful outcomes?

Speaker 2: 32:04

only one potential answer. Right, it's we're purchasing this CapEx equipment. One scenario leads to X financial output, one is another, you know, so it's. It's a very simple answer.

Speaker 2: 32:10

I would say that most decisions, though, it's a combination where there's there's data you're looking at, there's insights you're looking at, but at the end of the day, it comes down to that intuition and you don't always get it right. I got it wrong many, many times, but I think, trusting that, that gut instinct, is helpful. So if you're only leading on gut, that's probably not good either, right, you're just you're going to be blindly leading the ship. But I think some of the best decision makers that I've met, some of of my mentors, they have this perfect blend of and I aspire to do this every day of, you know, combining available information, whether that's data or feedback or any other feedback loops, with their intuition and uh, and combining those and it's not a perfect science and with hiring decisions. I was very fortunate, I was very good at having that intuition of just reading into someone's soul and knowing if they're going to be a good fit. Didn't always get it right, but more often than not we got it right.

Speaker 2: 33:11

Other decisions, you know, it's a much more methodical approach. I would say. You know, on the topic of decision-making and this is sort of a weakness and a strength with bigger decisions, sometimes I'm I'm slow on decision making. I take I take more time than I probably should um to get a higher up at, and many entrepreneurs and even you know academics would argue that's not the best approach. It's better to make more rapid decisions with more failures, and that's going to lead to a greater outcome and that's that's something on my personal journey. I've worked on making faster decisions, even if they're not the correct ones. But my nature is I'm a little bit more deliberate and take a little bit more time, for better or for worse. So in some cases that's a detriment because we've blown by six decisions that could have been made and we could have moved on, and in some cases it's a benefit because I've probably bat slightly higher.

Speaker 1: 34:04

I so appreciate you sharing your approach, because I'm a huge believer that it is the only right way of running anything in this world by combining intuition and logical approach. So I also saw so many successful entrepreneurs and leaders from all over the world and they were using both the typical model and they were also using their gut feeling. On top of that, and when it was saying no, there was no force in the world which would push them into the logically correct and good looking moves forward. So it is very important and I appreciate that you shared your way of seeing it and using it in your life and business.

Speaker 2: 35:01

It's an interesting phenomenon, though, that as you get more experience, you get better at gut decisions. You know, think of a ceo that's in his or her 50s, that have already run multiple companies and seen the pitfalls. They're going to have just a their own, built ai, if you have a learning module, and they're going to make better decisions versus that first time founder. They just don't have the, the reference point yet to have some of that intuition. So, um, with experience comes better gut reactions, I'd imagine totally.

Speaker 1: 35:33

I totally agree and it's interesting that I myself use exactly the same definition that we are like AI and the bigger database we can get access to, the better we get. So it is exactly that point. I love our today's conversation and I would love to continue it for so much longer, but to get the final and most exciting piece of information for ambitious founders and agency leaders ready to level up what is your raw, unfiltered advice for building a company that wins big, lasts long and thrives in the AI era?

Speaker 2: 36:23

A lot to unpack there. I would say again, it all comes down to product and service, and this has been an age-old academic preach you can't out-market a bad product. And so, yes, founders out there that are looking at every angle to leverage AI to enhance their business and to make things scale faster and to grow revenue Fantastic, let's do that. But make sure that you have the right product or service and make sure that you don't neglect nurturing that and evolving that, because, at the end of the day, we could have the best sales team, whether it's tech or human. We could have the best sales team, whether it's tech or human. We could have the the best marketing team, tech or human. But it's really hard to have long-term sustainability on a bad product, if not impossible. So focus on that connection with your customers and focus on building just the absolute best service or product, whatever it is you are selling, and then, from there, layer on the tools to make sure that it's as efficient as possible internally, as profitable as possible, etc.

Speaker 1: 37:29

That is wisdom. Thank you so much, forrest, for sharing your experience, your journey and your invaluable insights with us today, and I'm sure that at least some of our listeners and viewers will find how to apply everything of what we've been discussing today in some way in their practice in order to hopefully avoid certain underwater stones and come down to their wished results much faster, in a less painful way. So I truly appreciate our conversation. Thank you so much for being here today.

Speaker 2: 38:11

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 38:13

Thank you for joining us on Digital Transformation and AI for Humans. I'm Amy and it was enriching to share this time with you. Remember, the core of any transformation lies in our human nature how we think, feel and connect with others. It is about enhancing our emotional intelligence, embracing a winning mindset and leading with empathy and insight. Subscribe and stay tuned for more episodes where we uncover the latest trends in digital business and explore the human side of technology and leadership. Until next time, keep nurturing your mind, fostering your connections and leading with heart.