Real Talk w/Shack: Boundless Labs X Structured Social Merger

What we're about to get into is a little bit of the background as to what's currently going on with Structured. A best friend, now a business partner, Chase Diamond. He's going to give you a little bit of background because I think it's really important, especially with the growth that we've had, where we're currently sitting at Structured Studios, to give you a background of who's leading a lot of our retention efforts. Because as we had to grow up, you don't choose to go train a department you don't know about. You guys know I'm paid social, you guys know about growth in general. So I found, it just so happened my best friend was the best in retention. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you guys to Chase Diamond. Why Chase and I are here together is we merged back in March. His company, Balance Labs, grew very, very nicely over the last two years. And we felt we wanted to understand paid, not have to relearn email. For me, my expertise is on audience development through non-paid channels. So all the channels that you're great at, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are channels that I know nothing about. I've never run a Facebook ad, never run an Instagram ad, never done it. So all my stuff was kind of more hacky through cold email, right? Scraping Instagram, scraping Sound Cloud, scraping college directories. Jesus. So doing all these things and sending really high volume outbound emails. We're talking millions and tens of millions of emails with open rates even higher than clients get on often, right? We're getting 50, 60% open rates, 10, 15% click throughs on cold email. So I built this email travel series called The Discoverer from zero to half a million subscribers in 10 months through these channels. And I had a few other experiences with growing platforms to hundreds of thousands into millions. And Nick, as a great friend, was like, dude, this stuff is so cool, but you might end up in jail, right? Yeah, exactly. Take those, those skills are very, very valuable. Just like shift it. Yeah. And thankfully it's just before GDPR and some of these other things. So we were good. But I think you knew some of these things might be coming and certain things might be on the radar that might not land me in a nice place. It was a bit of a long term play to do what you're doing now. Way more longevity. So took a course, we worked together, got myself a few clients. And you know, fast forward two and a half, three years. It feels like I've been in the space for forever. Seriously. It was really apparent. Like you guys were clearly acquiring customers and you knew how to, you knew what you're doing, right? You understand the game. And it was just much easier to understand that side of the fence, all retention, text, email, and then like list building in general for our customers. Cause you're getting those questions. Like literally the amount of brands that we have, they're going, so who does your email? Or how do we, what do we do about the customers that you guys have been spending so much money to acquire? And at that point I was like, okay, we need to talk because you guys need our traffic. We need your retention. We need LTV together. So we're going to chase, we should potentially do this. So in February, March, kind of before everything went down, Chase and I met, obviously we have Jake and David, those are other partners. And we made the decision, we're going to grow. What is our three-year plan? What is our two-year plan? What is our one-year plan? And we both agreed that our vision for what structure it is fit into what you wanted to obviously you were about to have a child, but you have beautiful shade now. And as you're building and having to focus on the team, it's really difficult to focus on all the other amounts, especially when you follow. So I would love for you to, I personally, for my own learning, cause I know I get those questions all the time. Acquisition, merger, new home, new kid. Can you do, give me a little reflection. For me, it was kind of a two-year window of just nonstop between, you know, bought an apartment with my then girlfriend, then became engaged, then got married, then had a baby. So, and then bought a home while we were pregnant. So it was just this crazy, crazy rollercoaster and journey. All reflection aside, a really, really important part that really made the transition of Chase's team and my team coming together so cohesively was, was literally, if you remove yourself from the business, if you remove yourself from, from something that you've built and it crumbles, it's all the business, hard stuff, no business. But if you're able to build something, put the right people in charge, give the leadership that needs to be given to other people in your business that do it better than you, frankly, do it better than you, as they should, right? You're always hiring smarter than yourself. So if you don't have that business built and solely relying on yourself, pull out, see what happens for Monday, see what happens for that week and if it crumbles. The thought of that, right, in and of itself is so scary, right? Taking a step back for, for me prior to this baby and all this, I worked every single day, every single night, every single weekend, right? There's, there's no days off, there's no holidays. So, but now kind of removing myself and taking a step back, there's so many things that I've learned from, so many things I wish I did differently. I think the biggest learning, right, is after the fact, having to go back and create processes that have already been passed and handed off. It's too late then, right? Documenting everything you're doing from the beginning. Yeah, which is what we're going to do now from the financial side, from the SOP side, from the department specific SOP side, from the hiring side, from the processing, how to develop processes side, like we're all fully remote, we've always been remote, but there's a lot of companies right now that are going through, how do we build that process because we've been built to, to, to succeed in the same room where I can communicate with them. I know where he's at. There's a lot more trust that I'm having to feel in other people and giving them space. I think for us as leaders, it's allowed us to be a lot more empathetic and understanding, right? People are working from anywhere. Yeah, I mean, we have, we have multiple countries and we have across the states. We do our best to like, we send food, we love to send gift cards for food. That's probably been the biggest thing. It's like developing a small little section of our budget, right, far out keeping people happy because normally people do like something Friday, right? Yeah. And one of my favorite things that I can't think of any credit for is either you or Jake, I don't know who came up with it. Every single Monday we have our whole team on a call to share gratitude and one thing that you're working on. Okay. I can definitely speak to this full swipe from Common Thread. This was the first company I was able to work for that I learned real quick, fortuity and the ability to be confident enough to express to a group of people that you are working towards one specific goal with that gratuity is extremely important for the bonding, right? And we don't talk about anything. We don't talk about, um, no plans, no business. We have two questions. What are you grateful for and what are you hoping to get done this week? And that to me is, it sets you off, right? And we have everybody on that call to see everyone's faces. And it is kind of weird. Like before, if we're in a large group here, you might be like on your phone, you might be dozing off full attention to someone's, um, aspirations or just so like, I'm very grateful for my partner. I'm very grateful. Every single Monday. So the energy and just the appreciation is really contagious. So I think the, I think the biggest thing to reflect on, I think for us as a company now, it was balanced labs. It was structured, social structure dot agency. That's where we will be. And now we're building our ethos. So at the beginning we were having full buy-in. We got the next couple months to prepare for, for Q4, but we are going to build out the reason why we're doing what we're doing. We have email, we have text message, we have content creation, we have design, we have CRO, we have social, we have search. We have a lot of the boxes ticked and now it is unifying it under one hub, one home. So you guys should be looking out for a rebrand coming here very soon. Stay tuned. Thanks guys.