How a 20-Year Agency Is Surviving AI | Wes Towers

Mickey Anderson (0:30)

What it's doing inside and outside of businesses, and how we can approach it with our own style, our own unique flavor, and staying true to our own company and our values as well. Today, I am so grateful to have Wes Towers with me, founder of Uplift 360, who's gonna share the insides of building a marketing agency, specifically in websites, and what he's building, what he's facing, and what he's predicting in the future. Welcome, Wes, thank you for joining me.

Wes Towers (0:59)

My pleasure, it's fantastic to be on the show with you today.

Mickey Anderson (1:01)

I want to kick it off with the big headline today. We're seeing AI websites, vibe coding, the tools are getting better and faster on the day-to-day, and businesses today are really challenged with, do I do it myself? Do I hire someone else? Do I find a hybrid? And you're facing this in your own unique way as a website agency. And I'd love to get a sense of where you stand in this crazy field of AI, and what you're doing inside your business to really combat this AI commoditization.

Wes Towers (1:32)

Yeah, it's really amazing time to be alive. I mean, it's terrifying and exciting. It's kind of like a roller coaster ride, and we're all getting the exhilaration, but also the terror. And I suppose it depends on who you're listening to at the time. I mean, even last night, I was speaking to another agency owner, and they said that WordPress websites are dead. And I thought that was really interesting because that's not been my experience. So I think there's just all these shifts, and they're affecting different people at different times. And part of it might be around your mindset. Part of it might be around your niche. There might be just so many different factors at play for any one agency. You know, they're all nuanced and different, and have different flavors and skill sets and all of that. And more than one thing can be true at once. I think we're living in that time where the tech is so exciting, that also the humanization of brands is rising to the top as well. So you got these polar opposites that are pulling.

The truth is in the tension, I think. The tension between two truths is an exciting tightrope to walk, and that's what I'm attempting to do right now.

Mickey Anderson (2:42)

We all are looking for this black or white answer, yes to AI, no to AI. But I really like the idea of there being more possibilities and more options than just one. So when you're looking at your own business and the implications of AI and the conversation you had with that other marketing agency owner, what are you really focused on right now in your business as all of this new technology is coming out so rapidly?

Wes Towers (3:09)

Yeah, so it was very first, when the rise of AI maybe four years ago, whenever it became realized that it was going to impact everybody in every business, and certainly anyone sitting behind a computer screen, that would be the first people to be impacted. And certainly designing websites and search engine optimization and all of those things was obvious that that was going to be disruption. So I really leaned upon my team for the very first time, which sounds so foolish to have brilliant minds around me, but never really drawing upon their insights and so on for standard operating procedures.

Because it started as a micro business, it started as me. And so everything was built around what I thought was the best. And so, you know, the business is over 20 years old. And so what I set up as the foundations, whilst they were functional and working and everything was flourishing, it became obvious to me that no one person has all the answers because I simply can't keep on top of everything. I mean, today, we've got a bunch of opportunities and choices. And, you know, there's that, you know, decision fatigue that everyone experiences because there's so many great options. How do you choose the very best option? Well, for me, it meant that I had to lean upon my team. Well, I felt the best opportunity was to lean upon my team because they're all geeking out on the same stuff as well. And so we reworked our standard operating procedures quite significantly, took a fair bit of work, but that work pays off in the long run. There's so much time savings from a technical standpoint.

But we've also, that's freed me up to do the things that I love, which is the human side, which is kind of the polar opposite of systemizing everything so greatly. So, relying upon the team to bring new insights and ideas because things will shift and change, and even the service offering. So we've done search engine optimization for 20 years, to rank websites as highly as we can for as many phrases as we possibly can in Google. But then all of a sudden, AI shifts everything. Well, not everything, but it shifts the way in which we research topics. If we're looking for a service or a product, we'll probably research it in different ways, or at least even if we're still going to Google, we're going to search in different ways. So we're not going to search service and location, like Plumber Melbourne, for example. We work with a lot of trades and construction businesses. So they're the kinds of things. Typically, people would historically search for. People still do that. But now we realize everyone kind of has a sense that AI understands context and language, and so they'll search for sentences, answers. They're looking for answers to questions and conversing backward and forward. So it changes the dynamic, and even the way in which we measure the success. We used to be able to measure where you're ranked for a particular phrase and how many clicks you're getting. So the traffic, and you could see, you could show beautiful reports. Now, all of a sudden, the answers are on platform. They're in Google, they're on ChatGPT, wherever else brands are being mentioned as well. So a massive shift for us, and it's something we've got to navigate. So I've really focused in, from my perspective within the business, is to focus on the human element, because it's one key ingredient that only I can bring as the founder. And we're a small business, a founder-led business.