May 25, 2026 – Lake House Digital Lauren Schafer and Adapt or Thrive Thomas Douglas

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM State. The

Jim Beach 0:06
show is too busy to have an introduction. Let’s go ahead and get started. First up today we have Lauren Shaffer. She has built an incredible digital media boutique marketing agency, and I can’t wait to share that story. And then Thomas Douglas is with us. He’s built an award-winning IT solutions provider, big show, great interviews. We’re gonna go and get started. You know, as we grow our businesses, a lot of times we don’t have certain skill sets, and we need to bring in people who have those skill sets. I was always horrible at marketing, finance, operations, HR. I was bad at everything. I had to bring in a lot of help, but maybe you need help with marketing. Our first guest today is going to help you with that. Please welcome Lauren Shafer to the show. She is the CEO of Lake House Digital. It is a fractional CMO company. They specialize in SEO, social strategy, LinkedIn training, which I haven’t talked about in a long time, and I definitely want to talk about that today. But she has one overall philosophy: they just don’t post and hope, they build strategy first, which I absolutely love. She’s calling in today from Cary, North Carolina, which is right next door to Raleigh, where my son lives. Lauren, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

Lauren Schafer 1:23
I’m doing great, Jim. Thanks so much for having me.

Jim Beach 1:25
So, does that mean that you’re not a beach person, that you would rather go to the lake? Is your vacation, or the lot of lakes up there by you too? Aren’t there?

Lauren Schafer 1:35
There are a lot of lakes, and I am definitely now where I do love a good walk on the beach, in my heart we are absolutely lake people. So, Hiko is our lake of choice in North Carolina.

Jim Beach 1:47
Hiko, I don’t know that lake.

Lauren Schafer 1:49
Yeah, it’s right on the North Carolina-Virginia border, so it’s beautiful. And the best part for us is it’s less than an hour and a half away, so it’s easy to get there for a quick, quick weekend trip.

Jim Beach 2:02
Raleigh has exploded in the last decade.

Lauren Schafer 2:06
It certainly has. It certainly has. I am a native of this area and lived here my whole life, other than a little stint in Northern California, but we are.. I am from Cary, and I went to State. I went to NC State in Raleigh, so I love the area that I get to live in.

Jim Beach 2:25
I had a daughter who graduated there, so great. I love NC State, beautiful, beautiful school.

Lauren Schafer 2:33
Yes,

Lauren Schafer 2:34
go Wilcox.

Jim Beach 2:35
Yes, why do so many people need help with marketing, in particular?

Lauren Schafer 2:42
That’s a a great question. I think a lot of people have really great concepts, whether they have a new technology, whether they have an advancement in healthcare, whether they have a new service, and they’re working B2C or B2B, they have a great concept, but what people a lot of times don’t have experience in is two things, it’s sharing the value to who their audience is, or who they want their audience to be, making sure there’s an actual value to them, and also being a really good storyteller, you can have the great values, and, and you can have a really good business concept, but if you can’t tell a story about how this is going to connect with the audience, and how it’s going to make their lives easier, or better, or better patient outcomes, whatever market they’re in, you really have got to be able to connect with people, and storytelling seems to be the way to do that,

Jim Beach 3:45
isn’t that? Shouldn’t that be one of the easiest things? I know what my history was, so I should be able to tell you the story of my history, and if I don’t have my own good story, I can be like Omadier at eBay and make it up. I want to sell my Pez collection. I think we pretty much universally acknowledged that that was a made-up story. He didn’t have a Pez collection, but that’s the story that we all hear. Isn’t that the easiest story? The first business I ever started, Lauren, the story was so easy because I knew it. I had born it. Why is that origin story difficult?

Lauren Schafer 4:25
People, you know, you can share facts, you can share the value and the details of something, but when you get to tell really great stories, you get an emotional connection with people, and that’s what they remember. They remember how your story made them feel, or if you’re telling a really good story, how they want to feel, and why your product is going to help them get to that point. So, anybody can tell their story. Some people don’t know how to connect it on an emotional level. Yeah, as well as showing what the value is, and that is a lot of times how we have to, and you have to meet people where they are. You have to tell the story in the channel where they’re going to be, where you’re going to be able to get their attention.

Jim Beach 5:13
Yes, very, very true. Again, my mind just jumped back to the first business I started back, you know, 18 years, 18,000 years ago, in the 90s, started a summer camp company, and we ran summer camps all over the world, including it there in Raleigh at NC State, and I was able, the camp was focused on unhappy kids, kids that weren’t happy yet, hadn’t found a cool in herself yet, and I was exactly that kid. So the story was so easy for me to tell emotionally, because I was that dorky kid that I was trying to serve, you know.

Lauren Schafer 5:52
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It was a computer summer camp, wasn’t it?

Jim Beach 5:56
That’s right. Yes. Thank you for researching that. Yes, and our slogan was, and you’re a mom, right?

Lauren Schafer 6:05
I am two college kids.

Jim Beach 6:06
Okay, so you know if your kid is an unhappy kid who doesn’t have a best friend, and you get me on the phone, and I tell you I didn’t have a best friend, but I figured out the secret sauce, and your kid is going to come home with a new best friend smiling for the first time in years. How much you gonna pay for that?

Lauren Schafer 6:24
That is priceless, right? It’s priceless. We want, we want the future of our kids to be bright, and we want it to be happy and safe and good, and all those things. But you’ve gone to the core of any parent, is my kid going to be okay? Are they going to be happy? Can they have, can they be independent and happy? And we want all those things that your camp answered that need that was unmet, right?

Jim Beach 6:53
Exactly, exactly. We were actually able to fulfill that promise as well. So that’s what made it so cool. So, if I don’t have that emotional story, are you know, kids in summer camps is easy to make emotional because they’re kids and their future, but if we’re selling Pepsi or dental services or something that’s not really emotional, I don’t want to get emotional, but think how horrible it’d be if your teeth fell out, how embarrassed, you know, I mean, I don’t want to get like that, the insurance salesman, think about your mother dead, you know, how do we do that when it’s not an emotionally inherent product,

Speaker 1 7:32
so there’s a lot of things that people have different just associations with, and one thing, let’s say, if we’re just selling dental services, right? Sometimes going to the dentist is not something you might get excited about. It’s one of those, you need to do it, you know, every six months, go have the cleaning, everything, but taking that time away from a busy work calendar, you know, it can sometimes be like, I’ll just push it out another couple weeks, so you have to make it, what’s the value there, right? And you have to make it about their smile and the first impression with other people, you know. If you’re selling teeth whitening, it’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not selling fear of if people, if you have a terrible smile, but it’s the way you make people feel when they meet you for the first time, and that smile, and we’re going to help maintain that smile for you for now, and in those pictures with your kids and your grandkids for years to come, they will remember your smile and do you have the best one, so you have to tie it in again with storytelling, you want that emotional trigger, and you have to do it sometimes when things are not exciting, right? You mentioned Pepsi, so I am a die-hard Diet Coke fan, for better or

Jim Beach 8:46
worse. A lot of people say a Pepsi fan, in case we would have to end the interview, so

Lauren Schafer 8:50
I am a die-hard, and of course we know that McDonald’s has the absolute best ever, but

Jim Beach 8:57
the best Diet Coke ever syrup in it, you know,

Lauren Schafer 9:01
they do, and they actually have it in metal containers instead of plastic, but, but the reels and the tick tocks, and everything you will see now around the people that are the most devoted Diet Coke drinkers, it talks about that crisp first sip, right? It’s how it makes us feel it’s that first thing of caffeine, if you’re not a coffee drinker in the morning, but it’s how that Diet Coke makes us feel, so you can turn something that’s just a soda into something that you’ve got diehard fans, and they love the way it tastes, they love the way that caffeine makes them feel, and that first crisp sip, so you have to put the emotion in there, and you have to paint the story for him.

Jim Beach 9:44
So, this is a true story. The kid who lives in Raleigh, when he was two or three years old, we were playing I Spy, and it was I Spy Something Yellow, and we were in a car with the family in there, and his answer was, my grand. Mother’s teeth. Oh gosh, my grandmother was in the car, his grandmother was in the car. So it was incredibly embarrassing to use that story as part of my pitch. You, the last thing you want to do is have this embarrassment.

Lauren Schafer 10:17
Absolutely, and can’t we all just sit there imagining if we were the driver, just, just like when you were younger, when, when it was our child that just said that and insulted the grandmother, and you just cringe because you can’t, you can’t undo it, and now they’re embarrassed about the way that their smile and their teeth look, you’re embarrassed because your child said something incredibly rude, but in a set at the time, so all those things, but you wrap those stories, those moments where we all feel like, oh gosh, they just said that, you know, we all like it catches our breath, and that’s what we have to do, and apply it to everyday products that may not seem that exciting or that emotional, but we can certainly tie in a story that makes it applicable to anybody, right? Anybody can imagine if your child said that, and what do you do in that moment, right? And how do you make sure it doesn’t happen again? So that is the beauty of storytelling, and it’s the beauty of marketing, is is showing value, but making people feel something in that moment.

Jim Beach 11:22
Yes, very well said. Let’s change topics. We’ll come back to this in a minute, but I want to talk about LinkedIn training and strategies, because I haven’t talked about LinkedIn on the show. I don’t remember the last time, it must be six months or a year ago. What are some of the things on LinkedIn that I can do to help my marketing efforts,

Lauren Schafer 11:43
so there’s a lot of new things. Their algorithm, like all the other platforms, regularly changes, and it’s definitely incorporating some more AI elements in there. So, first and foremost, whether you have not used LinkedIn in years or whether you’re a regular user, is you got to make sure everything’s up to date, so if someone goes to connect with you over a job, or they’ve heard you on a podcast, or they’re just looking up people from high school, is is that picture current, you know, if your hair has changed drastically in the last 10 to 15 years, your, your weight, your look, anything like that, you need to look authentically like who you are now. You need to have your current job, all those things. One of the biggest things that we talk about is when you click to your own profile page, there’s that banner behind your profile page, it’s a long skinny rectangle, but that is great real estate, and it’s real estate that often gets ignored with people, so for me, when we, when I own Lake House Digital, mine has got our Lake House Digital, it’s my profile personally, but the background it’s saying exactly we do digital marketing, here’s my logo, so it’s connecting me with what I do, or I’ve seen other people, if they’re they might be a life coach, and they give a great quote in that space in the banner at the top. So that’s first and foremost, is use your real estate wealth, and and get everything current. The next thing is just posting regularly, and where you’re going to at with the goal of adding value to your audience, again, it’s not about look at me, look what I sell the best, this is why you should work with me, it’s more of the, hey, how are you doing, can I have you thought about this for your business, can this add value for you, have you? This is a new concept. This is new thought leadership. So, really, you got to shift from LinkedIn – used to be a lot about me, me, me, how can I get the next job, to it’s a lot about thought leadership now, and it’s adding value again to your audience. So, it’s posting. I always tell people, like, if you can post for a business, it needs to be twice a week, you know. If you’re an individual, at least once a week, but have your notifications turned on. You don’t have to live 24/7 on LinkedIn. I would love for you to, but most people don’t have time for that, so turn those notifications on. So, if someone is trying to get in touch, you don’t miss it, and you still seem like you are paying attention to everything, and wanting to be making new relationships out there, new connections. The biggest thing, though, with AI training, with LinkedIn training, is we’ve talked about the new algorithms outside of LinkedIn that LinkedIn is is filling, and that is from like both a search and an AI perspective. LinkedIn post probably a while back started getting indexed by Google, so that was great because you could show up in traditional Google organic search results just for getting some more visibility and. But in the last I’d say six months we’ve gotten to where the longer form content, where it used to be, you know, write a sentence or two, and then just keep scrolling, but the longer form, if you write multiple paragraphs as a post, those are getting cited by all of the LLMs, now Chat GPT is going to pick you up. It might be Gemini, it might be some of the other Claude, whatever your flavor of the day is for the AI engines that are out there, but they are using LinkedIn long form content to cite your company, so people are looking for something, a service like you have, and they’ve never heard of you. It’s going to connect the dots when you’re talking about a relevant subject that they are talking about, that they’re looking for, and you’re talking about. So, for from a search perspective, LinkedIn is really rising to the top.

Jim Beach 15:54
All right, and the long form is the key there. How long? 500 words, 1000 words.

Lauren Schafer 16:01
I think 500 is great. A year ago, if you told me to do 1000 word LinkedIn post, I would have cringed and said absolutely not. Nobody’s going to read it, but now it’s as much about the LLMs reading your content to cite you online as it is about the people that are going to look for thought leadership on LinkedIn, I think 500 words is perfect, but even if you can do, if you’re normally doing two or three sentences, now make it three to five paragraphs, you know, just start edging up that content, because it is going to feel kind of heavy at first to write that much more if you’re used to doing shorter form quick posts, but these are the ones that are going to get you more visibility.

Jim Beach 16:45
All right, there are, in my opinion, I’ve seen two LinkedIn profiles. One is based off of a resume, the other one is based off of, are you tired of having too much blah blah blah, I’m the guy in blah blah blah blah blah. And at the end of the profile, I don’t know a thing about you. I know a lot about what you say you can do and stuff, but I, I feel like I haven’t learned much about you, and it’s, you know, everyone says the marketing has to be about the recipient and should talk to the recipient, but Lincoln, I think it’s should be based on a resume first and foremost, what are your thoughts?

Lauren Schafer 17:23
So it absolutely should be where your resume shines. We go through this in our LinkedIn training, where we talk about specifically, you know, what do you put where, but that about section, your about section, if someone is interested enough, where they’ve clicked on you, whether it’s a mutual connection, a possible employer, your about section is where you need to brag on your professional accomplishments. This is where, if you are in, let’s say, a life science industry versus education versus you’re just in the service industry, any of those things. This is where you need to shine, and it is like a spoken resume. It’s still going to be underneath your history of I was at this job, and this was my title from X to X, and that’s great, but your about section should be so polished. It should be specifically with metrics, when you can, about this is where I took this company. I took it from maybe 40 leads a month to 600 leads a month in the first quarter we had them. You want to show people you’re showing off, which people are uncomfortable doing, but this is where I tell people you need to brag about yourself, even though it’s something that is normally not natural for a lot of people, is to brag, but this is a written place to show off your accomplishments, to get those keywords in there for search, and to show off really polished and a little bit of personality, so I always tell people one before AI was where it is now, I would have said have at least one or two trusted people read it that know you and make sure one there’s absolutely no typos, AI can take care of that now for you, but you really want it to sound human, you want it to sound not cut and paste that AI just did another resume, and for another sales manager, and you sound like everybody else out there, but really show off why you loved helping people, what the results were, and what you’re going to do in the future.

Jim Beach 19:37
All right, I, for my main picture, I decided to put a picture of my Lego minifigure. Lego made a minifigure of exactly me.

Lauren Schafer 19:52
Yes,

Jim Beach 19:53
and I put that there. What are your thoughts on that? It’s a silly little Lego thing, but looks exactly like me.

Speaker 1 20:00
So one, I’m a huge Lego fan. My daughter used to work for Lego. So, first and foremost, I’m a huge Lego fan. If you want to show off that part of your personality, I would recommend putting that in your banner instead. Show off the personality that you like Lego, it’s playful, it’s different, it might be something you’re passionate about, but that would be something in your banner, and maybe with your logo or a tagline that’s going to show off that part of the personality. I believe that your profile picture needs to be a current picture of you. So, let’s say that Jim, you and I were going to meet for coffee next week, and so what do I do ahead of time? I’m looking at what you do, what your history has been, maybe who we have in common on your LinkedIn, but I’m also going, what’s he going to look like, so I can find him when I walk into Starbucks, and if I see a Lego guy, I’m really not going to know who I’m meeting, or if I see someone, let’s say, if it’s a picture from like 15 years ago, and maybe it’s a male that had longer brown hair, and now they are aged a little bit with shorter gray hair. I’m not even going to recognize them, and instantly there’s a little bit of trust that is off in my perception. So, for your example, I’d love the Lego more in the banner, but to actually have a profile picture that’s current,

Jim Beach 21:22
I have a current picture in the banner wearing the exact same clothes that the Lego figure is wearing.

Lauren Schafer 21:28
Okay, well, then I think you get, I think you get points for both, for creativity there.

Jim Beach 21:34
Yeah, my banner has all sorts of taglines in it, it has a URL in it, and then some of the awards I’ve won, and then a picture of me on stage on a big stage, so

Lauren Schafer 21:43
I love

Lauren Schafer 21:44
it.

Lauren Schafer 21:44
Good. Well, I think

Jim Beach 21:47
really have a mini figure of me out of Lego.

Lauren Schafer 21:51
Do I think you actually do? I would have to figure out how much of a Lego fan you are if you’re a die-hard Lego

Jim Beach 21:59
to

Lauren Schafer 22:00
be okay. So then I’m gonna say you probably don’t have one. I’m gonna say you don’t have one, but I can do wrong.

Jim Beach 22:04
Work there, how hard would it be to get a mini figure that looks exactly like you? You can get it pretty close, Lego, to make that happen, don’t you?

Lauren Schafer 22:15
Well, you could get fairly close, right? You could get the hair color, you could get a facial expression that is smiling, or maybe are you a sarcastic or a laughing guy?

Jim Beach 22:25
Close, Lauren.

Lauren Schafer 22:27
There’s some custom things out there. They are actually outside of the Lego brand, where people can customize them now. So, oh yeah, there’s there’s amazing stuff out there, and amazing what you can find on things like Etsy.

Jim Beach 22:41
Okay, I’ll have to look into that. I made it with AI. It’s an AI image,

Lauren Schafer 22:46
nice, very nice.

Jim Beach 22:47
Loaded my picture and said make this into a Lego minifigure. So, anyway, how’d you get the agency started? You’re about six years old, it looks like. Talk to me about birthing the business.

Lauren Schafer 23:02
Yes, so I was traditionally, as I said earlier, I went to NC State marketing degree early on. That was before Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, any of that existed, or the concept of search engine optimization. So a lot of the things in my career I had been self-taught, I’d worked for larger companies, I’d worked for startup companies, I’d worked for some private companies, public companies, done a little bit of everything, even stayed home for a couple years when my kids were really little, and then I’d gone back to work, and we were doing more marketing things, I’d been working for the downtown that I lived in, was doing a lot of work for that, then went to a larger company where we really started doing more with search and I realized that I was self-taught, so I was one of those people. During the pandemic, I quit my job and I went to Northwestern and did one of their executive programs for digital marketing, and from that I said I wanted to go ahead and really dig in deeper. I already knew I wanted to do my own agency and had dabbled in it, but this one I was like, I don’t want to be self-taught, I want to have the latest and greatest learnings that are out there. So, my husband and I are both marketing by background and both like to be very creative. We had a lake house that we spent a lot of time during the shutdown, and so on our dock we kept saying, you know, what do we want an agency to be? What should we name it? What’s what things do we love, and you know, there’s so many different names for marketing things that are out there. A lot of times, if it’s a name like my last name, it’s hard to spell, so we knew the best principles. We’re like, it’s got to be something we love. The lake, check that it’s got to be a place that inspires creativity for us. Being outside on the water inspired creativity, and it was easy to spell, so that’s kind of how it came about. Easy to spell is huge, you know, it’s really, it’s a really big deal,

Jim Beach 24:59
but.

Lauren Schafer 25:00
Anyway,

Jim Beach 25:00
prompt the question, are you a beach person or a lake person? Doesn’t it automatically draw people into your personality?

Lauren Schafer 25:08
It does. It does, and it automatically says, “Tell me about the lake, or they go, they have stories from their childhood, they’re going to their grandparents’ house at a lake, or their favorite camp memory that was out of late, so it admitted it’s a nice connector to start conversations with people, and it happens to be something that we just love.

Jim Beach 25:30
I like it, but

Lauren Schafer 25:31
yeah, out of that, I’d worked at an agency, and one of the first agencies I was at, it was supposed to be about 10 hours a week, and by the second week I was working more than 40 hours on just that account, so it got, we started early, and it got put to the side just a little bit, so even though we started it back during Covid, it really didn’t launch officially, like me 100% doing this full time until 23 so at that point I’d seen the good and the bad from other agencies where a lot of people were not being transparent or not accountable, and, and just my, my two things that I really love is SEO and LinkedIn, and so those two things I was like, we were, we were outsourcing a lot of work at agencies, and the quality was not there, and so I was like, I think I can try and do this better, and so that’s when I said, I’m 100% going to be, I’d rather be the vendor in this case, and really get to stay in the weeds, do what we love, and do it really well, so that’s that’s kind of how the agency came about, and the other part that was missing, which is huge for startup companies, is we really felt like people have to have analytics to make better decisions in their businesses, they have to understand the value of every dollar that they spend in marketing, is is it in the right place, and do we know how to measure it? Are we measuring the ROI from different things? So the first thing we did from our very first client is we made sure we were offering dashboards, so even if we were just doing your social media, we’ll pull in all of your marketing channels, so that it holds our feet to the fire. We want to make sure we’re being accountable and transparent and just really strategic for our clients, so you know if they’re bb and they’re trying things that are on TikTok, it might not be getting a lot of traction, but if they understand the best days and times to post on LinkedIn and the best types of strategy to be posting about on LinkedIn, we knew that that would move the needle for them, so we wanted the analytics and the strategy to be core to everything that we did.

Jim Beach 27:51
I love it, Lauren. We’ve run out of time. I am afraid that went really fast. How do we find out more? Get in touch with you and get invited to the lake house.

Lauren Schafer 27:59
Yeah, so so our website is the V lakehouse.com so T H E Lake house.com I’m on LinkedIn as Lauren Miller Schaefer, and we will have a page up for your listeners, and it’s just going to have a recording of this, but it’s also going to have a free download that is going to be the top 10 mistakes we see on LinkedIn, so feel free to go on and grab that free download, and and we’d love to talk to any startups that are thinking about marketing and just have a great conversation.

Jim Beach 28:35
Fantastic, Lauren, thank you so very, very much for being with us. Great job, love it, and thanks a lot. We’d love to have you back.

Lauren Schafer 28:42
Thanks so much. Have a great day.

Jim Beach 28:43
You too. Right back. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce another great entrepreneur. Please welcome Thomas Douglas to the show. He goes by Tom. He is a keynote speaker and the founder of J Mark Business. It is an IT support and IT services business based out of Missouri. He is also a best-selling author of the book Adapt or die: how to create innovation, solve people puzzles, and win in business. He is also very successful. His company has been on the Inc 5000 list nine times in a row, nine years in a row. He speaks on servants and service leadership, and also culture and the importance of creating a great culture at your business, and he’s working on a new book called Adapt to Thrive, the sequel to his first book, which is five star rated with 35 star reviews. Very impressive. Tom, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Thomas Douglas 29:56
I’m great, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Jim Beach 29:58
It is our. Pleasure. I didn’t mention that you have an incredible newsletter that comes out every Sunday called Success Starts Sunday. Why do you believe that? Why is Sunday important for an entrepreneur?

Thomas Douglas 30:11
Well, I believe it’s a quiet day, a time to reset, focus on the most important things for the week. For me, I use that time to not only prioritize for the week, but get my mind right, so I have some extra time to be alone with myself, be quiet, take the time to spend in the moment, rather than having to spend all my energy dealing with people and problems and solutions, and thinking about the daily grind on Sundays, I take some extra time to meditate and really focus on the week ahead, the month ahead, and what it means to win the week.

Jim Beach 30:50
I love it. I wholeheartedly agree. I am upset at myself if I go into the week needing to do production. I think that production is supposed to happen on the weekends, and I try to get all my production for the next week done on Sunday. So, I wholeheartedly agree. What kind of stuff are we going to find in the newsletter?

Thomas Douglas 31:11
I talk about everything from AI to leadership to positive mindsets. I deal with a lot of the things that are currently going on in the week, and in helping people to navigate through it, AI can be so overwhelming and confusing. We’re spending a lot of time coaching our clients through it in our communities through it, so it’s a way for me to share what I’ve learned in the week or in recent days as it relates to not only AI, but how that’s changed, transforming the workplace. We know that AI is going to reshape everything, and you know what it means to be a leader who not only leads people but also understands leading agents and managing agents and securing agents, and what then, and how to control the propagation of AI within an environment where you know we’ve had shadow it for years, and now one of the more challenging things that business leaders are dealing with is shadow AI, where there’s not a consistent strategy and plan for AI within a business, because it just kind of pops up, and people are using either free or, you know, low-priced accounts, and there’s major security challenges with that, and so a lot of guidance around how to navigate through the next decade.

Jim Beach 32:33
What is Shadow AI?

Thomas Douglas 32:36
It’s where people take on their own projects and initiatives instead of doing the or utilizing the company systems and policies around AI, they go off and do other things. So a simple example might be somebody takes a little switch and plugs it into their office, so that they can hook up multiple devices in their office, rather than going through the standard process, and in then the IT department finds out that there’s this extra switch, and it’s causing problems on the network, because you know it could own that, and they get loops in them, and then they have extra rogue devices on the network that aren’t supposed to be there, and that creates security problems, and so it’s another example, might be somebody subscribed, has a credit company credit card, and they subscribe to a piece of software where they’re keeping confidential information or proprietary information, and it, the IT department and the security controls lose control of that information, and what’s going on, and so shadow IT is is the fact that it exists without the purview of people that that are professionals and know what they’re doing and are doing it within, you know, company policies and guidelines.

Jim Beach 33:51
All right, that can be a horrible situation. Agents, I just want to define this word to the best of my ability, and correct me if I’m wrong. AI creates things called agents, which we would otherwise call a computer program that does something for your business, updates a database or something, you know, whatever you need, and I read an article over the weekend that a small business created an agent and the agent was designed to clean the database, and the agent decided that the best way to do that was to delete the entire database. Tom is, of course, anyone’s nightmare. Did I define agents acceptably, and tell me about the risk that that company experienced?

Thomas Douglas 34:41
Yeah, the agents are you did a good job of explaining agents. I mean, generally speaking, they, they provide a specific process, a specific function within a business, and you know, agents, rather than them being very broad, like you think about Chad GPT or Claude, or. One of the, you know, Gemini, one of the big frontier models that are kind of generalists, if you will, an agent, generally speaking, is designed to do a specific purpose within an organization, i.e. clean a database, and there are lots of problems with people setting up agents without them actually knowing all the good, the bad, and the ugly, if you will, as it relates to those, and how to put the right guardrails in place, so the situation that you’re talking about, where the agent decided to delete the database, they obviously didn’t have the right controls around the agent, didn’t have the right instructions around the agents, and didn’t have the right backup strategy associated with that, because my understanding from that story, if it’s the same one I heard, was the agent also deleted all the backups, and so they ended up with no database, so there’s out of business. Yeah, I mean, so you, you definitely need to know what you’re doing. It’s really easy for people to cowboy AI in today’s world, and you can vibe code, and you can do all the things to create some incredible outcomes, but there still needs to be good governance and guidance around that, and AI, like everything in it, can be more complicated than we think, especially, you know, AI is is more deceptive than a lot of other technologies, because it seems very simple, because you ask a question, you get an answer, and so anyone can use it, but at the same time, with the right, without the right frameworks and procedures in place, then it can backfire on you in a big hurry.

Jim Beach 36:33
Yes, so AI, for those of you who don’t know, it’s just a prompt, it’s just sitting there waiting for you to do something, Tom. So I typed in, write an agent for me that if I hit F scrapes the current window for email addresses and names, and then puts them into this database, and I, it made it work. I was so proud of myself. I don’t have a clue how to put any guardrails into that, so how would I? I mean, you have to write in English what the agent does, and then the AI takes that English and turns it into a computer program. How do I tell it? Guard rails, by the way, don’t delete anything.

Thomas Douglas 37:16
Well, part of what you just described is exactly what you do. I mean, you can tell it not to, but the challenge with AI is, even though you tell it not to do something, it still might do it. It kind of happens, it has a mind of its own, based on its own pattern recognitions and the algorithms that are built in the backside of it. It calls, and there’s a potential for it to ignore instructions, so from a guardrails perspective, one of the best ways to handle that is to give it not direct access to a system, but to give it access to a tool, and then you control the access from the tool itself, and you do that by saying that the tool only has write access, not delete access, and therefore the language model doesn’t do something that you don’t intend for it to do, because it only has access to the tool and not direct access to the data itself.

Jim Beach 38:11
Yes, agents scare me now, and so I’ve decided to back up and say I’m going to use AI. I just don’t know that I’m ready for an agent yet, so I think

Thomas Douglas 38:23
there is

Jim Beach 38:24
a land. Does that sound reasonable?

Thomas Douglas 38:26
I mean, it is. I would encourage you to keep exploring and playing, but just make sure that you’re doing it in a way where you know if it, if it shares all of your information some way that you’re not going to be upset about it, or if it deletes everything, you know, as you’re experimenting and learning the guardrails, and you’re learning the processes, and how you give it access to a tool, you need to spend the time with it to develop the muscle, if you will, associated with the work, because it’s going to be important for every business to utilize agents in the future to be competitive, and to make sure that they’re building a culture where people can provide the highest value. What you are going to see an interesting change over the next several years, where the low level work, what they all call mundane work that people do, is going to be harder to find humans willing to do it, because they have opportunities to go provide higher value work that pays better, and and they’re going to jump at those opportunities. So, businesses that don’t invest in AI are not only going to have challenges being competitive because their cost structures are going to be different, but they’re going to have problems finding good, talented people to do the work that they want done. And so, investing in these technologies and learning is great, getting help and getting professional support to help build tools and agents, or even do an assessment after you build something to make sure that it’s built well. There’s, there’s, there’s a lot, not enough, but there’s a lot of AI professionals in the world that know how to do things well, and so if you want to build something and then have. Going to give it a look, make sure that it’s done right. There’s there’s an emerging market around that.

Jim Beach 40:06
All right, I’ll hire you to do it, because it scares me right now, Tom.

Thomas Douglas 40:09
It’s a little overwhelming, so that’s that’s part of what I write about on Sundays, and try to share that knowledge with folks.

Jim Beach 40:17
I have a guest coming up later this week, I think it’s a Harvard professor who has done a two or three year study, their conclusion 96% of AI projects fail. What are your thoughts on that?

Thomas Douglas 40:33
Well, I would, you know, I’m not going to argue the data, I would

Jim Beach 40:39
believe.

Thomas Douglas 40:40
Yeah, I would agree with that, and I would also want to define what is an AI project. I mean, because if it’s somebody tinkering and playing and learning and it fails, I mean that isn’t, you know, it quote unquote fails. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a failure if the skills of the individual are leveling up so that they have the ability to use it properly on future projects, if, if they’re measuring it as a, you know, a company-wide initiative that has a return on investment, where they can rely on the agents to do the work. I suspect that real strategy, you know, led by professionals that know what they’re doing, it seems really, really high to me. The cowboy style,

Jim Beach 41:24
she had big businesses more than small businesses, so most of her data came from the Fortune 500 which, again, interesting means that there were professionals involved, you know, paid a lot of money, and they still failed. So, I can’t wait to interview her. I’ll make sure to send you the link, Tom, so you can listen to it. I love your comments on the Navy. You serve for four years. Thank you very much for your service in the Navy. You write that it was a gift in your life, and that you were able to learn so much. I just love that attitude, and it led directly to J Mark. Tell us the birthing story of the company, 25 years old now. Amazing accomplishment. Congratulations. Tell us, getting out of the Navy and moving into J Mark Stories.

Thomas Douglas 42:15
Yeah, it was a gift, and in for a multitude of reasons, both in leadership and understanding what to do, and more importantly, understanding not what not to do in leadership and in company processes, for that matter. My I had the great fortune to have an incredible Navy chief who encouraged me to actually get out of the Navy. He saw the entrepreneurial spirit, if you will, and said, Tom, there’s a lot of people that can do what you do in the Navy, and you need to get out and run a business, and you’ll make a greater GDP impact on our country by doing that than you’ll ever make in the Navy, and I didn’t know what the heck he was talking about, I was young and crazy and full of, you know, vinegar and all the things, and so I came out of the Navy, started working at J Mark as a level one engineer, and it was a company that was growing, but didn’t have a lot of structure and processes. The founder was an incredible gentleman by the name of James Montgomery. He founded it as J J Mark because he used to sign his name J M J R for James Montgomery Junior. People called that the J Mark, and that’s how he created, or that’s what he called the company when he created it. And James was doing a lot of things and had some bad people around him, made some bad choices, the company got into a little bit of financial troubles, and he decided that he just wanted to exit the business, and after a couple of years, he asked me if I just wanted to buy it, so myself and my dad and some other partners went in, bought the company, recapitalized it, downsized it to six people, and then we’ve been on a growth trajectory ever since we’re about 140 people now, and wow, we’re going strong.

Jim Beach 44:06
That is so impressive.

Thomas Douglas 44:09
It’s been a great journey. We’ve, I think, the most important lesson that I’ve learned is, is make sure that you’ve got the team around you that is that understands the servant heart, that is the people you want to spend a lot of time with, you want to solve big problems with, and when you have that commitment, you have each other’s back, you can do about anything, because you know when people come together to solve big problems, that you know anything is possible, and I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by incredible people for my whole time here at J Mark.

Jim Beach 44:40
Very well said. Congratulations, that is a great story. How do you win the Inc awards? Do you set out to do that? I mean, that measures growth. Is growth do you sit around and say we’re going to grow 30% this year, and here’s how

Thomas Douglas 44:58
well we used to do it. That way, when we were smaller, we had very ambitious growth goals, and so, yeah, we, this is how many accounts we needed to win each year in order to drive the revenue outcomes that we wanted, and so we built a sales team that went out and helped us hunt and find the right resources, we were fortunate because we were early to the managed services space, so the flat fee services, and in a lot of our competitors in the market, we’re still doing things hourly and by project, and those kinds of billing relationships that turn fairly frustrating and

Jim Beach 45:38
unpredictable, for sure,

Thomas Douglas 45:40
exactly, and so we, when we flipped the model to where it was a flat fee, and the better we made the network run, the fewer the tickets came in, then it was a win-win for everyone involved, and that that transition really helped us to accelerate our growth, so a lot of it was just really understanding the market and and listening to our customers and making sure that we had a product that people wanted, and so when we had that, then we would develop these really aggressive growth goals and go to market. Nowadays, we still definitely create plans and budgets, but growing 30% when you’re at our size, you know, we’re over 30 million in annual revenue, you know that gets harder and harder and harder, so we don’t want to grow too aggressively and break the culture and the quality of our services. So we’re a little bit more focused in our growth right now. We’re in the 10 to 15% range.

Jim Beach 46:32
Do you target particular industries?

Thomas Douglas 46:36
We do. Regulated industries are an area that we focus quite a bit on so banking, community banks, financial services, law firms, CPA firms, organizations like that. Healthcare is another big in, yep, absolutely. Spend a lot of time in those in those industries. We also have a team that’s focused on the hospitality industry, so we help hotel management companies develop a strategy to run technology through all of their properties, their hotels around the country. So, we support about 150 hotels around the country now, and those work out really well for

Jim Beach 47:14
us. Your publicist said that I get 20 free nights in the hotels. Are those the hotels that I got my free nights? That’s right. Send me a list of those, so I can choose. Okay,

Thomas Douglas 47:26
we’ll definitely do it.

Jim Beach 47:28
All right. Congratulations on the new book, Adapt to Thrive. I know it’s about five areas, five principles you need to be successful in life. Can you go ahead and share us some of those pillars?

Thomas Douglas 47:40
Yeah, absolutely. So, I believe that there’s five things that every business needs to get right in the next decade. I’m a big believer in ITRS methodology or ITRS forecasts that we’re going to have a major economic issue in the early 2030s It’s economics. Yeah, they have forecasted for about three or

Jim Beach 48:01
four, what’s the R,

Thomas Douglas 48:04
you know,

Jim Beach 48:06
talking about, or death, or yes. Okay, I don’t know that company. So, what are they saying?

Thomas Douglas 48:12
Okay, so it’s economics is the name of the company, and they have been an economic benchmarking and forecasting organization for over 20 years. Okay, they have a 97% accuracy rate in predicting the future of the economic conditions, and they do it by vertical, and they do it at a national scale and a global scale. Actually, Brian, their CEO, I guess he recently retired, he started talking about a an economic depression that is likely to hit in the early 2030s and so they have been forecasting for the last several years that late 29 is going to be the economy is going to slow down, and that there’s going to be at a minimum a recession and maximum a depression that impacts the world, and it will be kind of a slow depression, not a crash like 1929 or something, when people think about those kinds of things, but you know, high unemployment rates, then a lot of economic pressures, a lot of challenges associated with business growth, and they focus on the five horsemen, and you can search it, are five horsemen, and you’ll find the five areas that they believe are likely to cause it, but a lot of it has to do with the national debt, healthcare costs, and in the shifts in the workforce, in terms of the number of people retiring, and the number of people coming into the workforce, and being able to produce enough to support the entitlement programs, which also go insolvent in the 2030s and so all of those things lead to some major challenges for us, and so number one in my book that every business needs to be prepared for is economic resiliency, and so it is, you know, building cash, diversifying your book of business, making sure that you’re making the right margin. Is in the business that you’re managing your costs really well, and we know that wage pressure is going to be an issue for the next few years, and so we need to get all those things under control and just really manage the business of business, if you will, managing the accounting side of it. Number two is leadership. We know that there’s a lot of great leaders that are leaving and retiring as the baby boomers step away from the workforce, and we are not building enough experienced managers at the middle level that can step into senior roles. If you look at the data, your average middle manager says that they are overwhelmed, they are under skilled, and they don’t have enough time to meet with their team as it is, and we’re expecting to manage more people than ever before, and so those ratios don’t work. So, we got to invest in leadership to make sure we’ve got the right people at the head of our businesses. Number three is culture, and obviously I talk a lot about culture. I’m a huge believer in making sure that every business gets that right, that people feel a sense of belonging and feel appreciated. They take pride in their work that helps you to navigate through hard times. You know, when you’ve got a bad culture, everything is a leadership problem, but when you have a good culture, then leaders can say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem, and people surround the leader and say, ‘How can I help? And that’s really what we’re going to need in the next decade. Number four is adaptability, so as the market shifts and AI shifts, and all the technology changes that are coming. Every business needs to understand that market conditions and pricing, and how you think about going to market with agents and things like that, are going to be very critical. And then number five is AI and automation, and making sure that you have a strategy for those things. So those are the five pillars that are in adapt to thrive that I’m looking forward to sharing later this year,

Jim Beach 51:47
and so I love those. How do you focus on culture? I mean, is it ping pong tables and foosballs? What makes the culture there positive?

Thomas Douglas 51:57
Yeah, the culture is about trust, and trust comes from relationships, and relationships take time.

Jim Beach 52:06
140 employees, you know them all by name.

Thomas Douglas 52:10
I know most of them by name. We’ve got some newer folks in the organization, so I’m still catching up just a little bit, but I need everybody that comes in the organization. I like to sit down with folks and hear them out right now. I’m actually doing culture interviews. Some people call them skip a level meetings, but mine are a little bit different in that there’s no supervisor in the room, and I meet with everybody on the team, and we just talk about everything that’s going well culturally, that’s not going well, operational challenges, and things like that. And you know what we, we know about running a really good business is operational challenges and roadblocks become cultural problems, because people get frustrated, and then they’re, they become short with one another, and all those things. So, you have to, you have to get operational challenges out of the way, so that people can do good work, and so, you know, a lot of what we spend time doing is giving back, is sharing and making sure that we have an incentive plan in our organization that shares the success of the company with those that make it happen, and we were very open about our financials and how we’re doing, so everybody understands. We call it the J Mark dollar, so of every J Mark dollar, how much are we spending on people, how much are we spending on insurance and benefits, and all of those components. How much will be submitted on general expenses, on sales expenses? And then, how much, how many pennies every dollar do we get to keep? And we go over that as a team every quarter, so that there’s no mystification around the dollars and cents of the business. You know, one of my big things is that when, when people, in the absence of facts, people make things up, and so, yeah, there you go, that’s, but you know, AI is trained on people, and so the fundamentals are all the same.

Jim Beach 53:57
I love it. Very well said, Tom. I’m really impressed with what you’ve done, six to 140 employees, all of the awards fantastic. You’ve just done it all very, very well. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. That went fast. How do we find out more about you? Get in touch with J Mark and get that hotel list.

Thomas Douglas 54:17
Yeah, J mark.com J M A R k.com is the website for our managed services organization, and if you’re interested in the books or the Success Start Sunday, you can go to that website, that is Adapt or die.com

Jim Beach 54:33
All right, fantastic. I’m going to sign up myself, Tom. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Great job.

Thomas Douglas 54:39
Hey, thanks very much, I appreciate it. Take care.

Jim Beach 54:41
We are out of time for today, but you know what that means. That means we’ll be back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars. Bye now.