Episode 1: The Future of CMS, Open Source, and Agency Strategies in 2026

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Agency Intel, where we explore the evolving landscape of digital agencies, content management systems, and emerging AI tools. In this episode, hosts Roger and Robbie dive into the realities of open source dominance, CMS innovations, and practical advice for agencies navigating rapid technological change.

Key Topics:

1. The rising prominence of open source CMS at enterprise levels in 2026, as predicted by industry expert Matt Garrapey.
2. Insights from Matt on Drupal CMS 2.0, emphasizing AI integration, user-friendly prompting, and structured data benefits.
3. The importance of agencies positioning themselves as field experts and trusted guides amid AI and digital sovereignty challenges.
4. Practical strategies for local networking and face-to-face engagement to grow your agency’s presence.
5. A deep dive into AI tools like Whisper Flow for improving productivity through voice-to-text dictation and correction.
6. The shift in agency business models towards building practices around AI, content modeling, and UX customization.
7. The significance of fundamental content management fundamentals, even amid noisy AI trends.
8. The evolving role of agencies as creators, validators, and transformers in the AI-enabled digital ecosystem.
9. Personal self-care tips including exercise and travel hacks for agency leaders to avoid burnout.

Timestamps:

1. 00:00 - Welcome and podcast origins discussing agency tales
2. 02:11 - Guest introduction: Matt from CMS Critic previews Joomla Conference insights
3. 03:20 - The significance of open source in 2026, emerging trends
4. 06:12 - The story behind JDAY USA and the open source community
5. 08:00 - Matt’s journey from agency owner to CMS authority
6. 13:45 - How CMS platforms are integrating AI: winners and laggards
7. 17:00 - The evolution of content workflows with agents and AI models
8. 21:13 - Practical agency strategies for AI adoption and client guidance
9. 27:21 - Human judgment, opportunity, and agency evolution in AI era
10. 30:20 - Regulatory landscapes, geo-targeting, and agency advising
11. 33:50 - The importance of agency expertise in AI-driven content and experience design
12. 37:20 - Strategy tips: starting with strategy, fundamentals, and internal advocacy
13. 44:44 - Wrap-up, follow-up on Drupal 2.0, and future hot topics

Resources & Links:

1. CMS Critic
2. Drupal 2.0 Announcement Article
3. Joomla Conference 2024
4. Whisper Flow AI Tool
5. Netlify apps & AI tools
6. Greg Dunlop's Designing Content Authoring Experiences

Connect with Matt Garrapey:

1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter

Additional Notes:

1. Emphasis on the importance of local networking — start low-cost, build trust face-to-face.
2. The agency’s role as an innovator, guide, and technical partner in AI transformation.
3. Self-care tips for agency leaders – exercise, travel, and purposeful downtime.

Enjoy this first look into the future of CMS and agency strategies. Stay tuned for upcoming guests and deeper dives into AI, web development, and entrepreneurship.

Hey, Robbie.

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Hey Roger, how are you doing?

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I'm doing fantastic.

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Um, I hear that we have a podcast called agency Intel.

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Tell me about this.

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Yes.

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So, yeah, so you and I were speaking at a conference recently going like, hey, one, we

were talking about all the podcasts that we love.

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And then we were like, we should do a podcast.

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And then we're like, what should we do a podcast about?

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And actually, think.

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question.

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What should we do a podcast about?

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And that's when we realized that you have an agency.

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All I do is talk to agencies.

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So maybe we should do a podcast about agencies.

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sounded like a good idea at the time.

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And we've actually recorded something now.

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So I think we have a podcast.

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Hopefully it's not just one podcast.

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think I might've blacked out in the hour since we recorded this.

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What did we just record?

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Well, for our first podcast out of the gate here, we actually have an amazing guest that

we're going to talk to.

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We like to call these our sources or our informants, not guest, because we're out there

gathering intel for all these agencies.

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If we don't know it, we probably can find someone who knows it.

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Absolutely, absolutely.

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So

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we talked with Matt from CMS critic and I think it's a pretty darn interesting

conversation We tried to shoot for 20 to 30 minutes.

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We definitely blew that the doors off of that uh But what I really thought was interesting

with this conversation was just Matt's uh

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Huge breadth of knowledge.

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He's been at this game for a long time.

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We covered a lot of ground and I'm just really excited for people to take a listen to it

and see what they think.

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What do you say?

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Should we play it for him?

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I say, let's hop into the interview.

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welcome to the Agency Intel podcast.

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We're here with an amazing guest, Matt from CMS critic.

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Matt, how are you today?

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I'm great.

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Amazing man.

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That's a I'm already on a pedestal.

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So I got to live up to that.

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uh

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So we're really excited to have you on the show.

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you know, kind of the motif of the Agency Intel podcast is we're a little bit in the

secret agent world.

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So you're not a guest, you're actually a source and we're diving into, oh, maybe, oh,

actually, yes, that's right.

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We're doing signals intelligence with this one because CMS critic is the resource for all

things CMS on the internet.

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And so today we're gonna be looking at

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how you have your eyes on every sector of the digital perimeter and kind of diving into

where you're seeing things in the CMS world, how agencies are kind of responding to these

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things.

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And we'll get into a lot of questions on that.

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One thing that's really interesting though that I wanted to kind of dive into a little bit

or at least highlight on is you're going to be talking at the Joomla conference here

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coming up.

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Tell us a little bit about that.

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Yeah.

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You know, it's kind of been organic.

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J-Day USA is happening in Delray Beach the end of April.

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I see Robbie nodding.

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So, you know, it's obviously some visibility around that.

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And, you know, it's an interesting year because, you know, Juma just celebrated 20th, its

20th anniversary.

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Interestingly, Drupal just celebrated 25.

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So there's, you know, we're we're at a point in history where

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A lot of these platforms and communities have been around for a long time.

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And with AI and the discussions we're having around digital sovereignty, uh this really

feels like the year of open source.

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I think a lot of eyeballs, particularly at the enterprise level, are really reassessing oh

the impact and value that open source brings to uh the equation.

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And we've seen that kind of play out.

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I've talked to lot of uh enterprises and lot of organizations that are uh adopting more

open source.

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And if we're honest about

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But open source is up and down our stack already, right?

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using base Linux, we're using Kubernetes, all of these things are open source on some

level.

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uh And I think there's a great heritage there.

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And I think in the CMS world, uh that's just been further crystallized by uh some of the

challenges we've seen over the last two years, obviously, some in WordPress and kind of

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the evolution of how those organizations are establishing a better foothold around their

digital sovereignty.

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How do we secure the software supply chain?

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So to go full circle, I've been having these conversations with a lot of open source

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uh leadership from typo three I did their impact awards uh at the end of last year saw

some really great projects a lot of adoption of AI and been talking to you know a lot of

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leaders in agencies about uh their open source practice and uh That kind of led to this

great opportunity with the people are organizing Jada USA uh And I think this is really

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going to be the kind of the substance and topic of what I'm to talk about is how I'm

seeing this sort of

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kind of bubble up and surface that as governments and organizations really tune into how

digital sovereignty is such an important consideration that they're looking to open

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source.

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mean, the country of Switzerland is only dealing in open source when it comes to uh

building out any kind of application for a service that they have.

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So I think you see it, the evidence is there.

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uh And at the same time, just dealing with the of the regulatory challenges that have been

surfacing as well.

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So maybe a long-winded way for me to get to why this happened with Joomla, but I'm excited

about it.

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I think it's great that we're putting more emphasis and more eyeballs on what's happening

with open source.

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Absolutely.

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yeah, Matt, so I was actually one of the founders of JDAY USA.

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It's a very good conference.

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We did that coming out of pandemic.

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It's like I used to be involved with JDAY Texas before that.

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And then a lot of us that were doing the JDAY, we were just like, hey, we need to combine

after.

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pandemic, right?

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I mean, was just, none of us could sustain on our own.

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And so that's why we combined it into the USA event.

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And I'm so glad that they're still doing it.

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I still get notifications.

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So yes, I saw it was coming up.

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Unfortunately, I have a work conflict, so I won't be able to be there.

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But I am so glad to see that they're still moving forward.

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And so you're going to talk about open source there.

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I'm just telling you, it be very well received at a Joomla conference.

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Yeah, yeah.

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it's interesting.

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I'm not going to tell you anything you don't know, but oftentimes, you people will ask,

where's Joomla?

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Like, where's Joomla today?

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And it's helpful, right?

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I think, you know, when I talked to type three, type 03 agencies, when I was in Frankfurt

last summer at our CMS summit event, there was a good contingent of type 03 agencies

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there.

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Many of them, as Roger would say, came over for our CMS kickoff as well.

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And having that representation in the room of bringing together the different communities,

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is something unique that we're doing.

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In fact, later this year in October, we'll be holding what we're calling Open Source CMS

Conference.

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And it's an opportunity to bring everyone to the table and really talk about the trends,

the challenges, and like I said, the opportunities that I think are surfacing for open

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source.

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So yeah, really excited.

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And that's great that you were involved with uh building the beachhead here in the US, but

it is a global phenomenon to like so many of these communities are.

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Absolutely.

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em And so I'm kind of interested, how did you get into your role that you are with CMS

Critic?

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How did it evolve that you got involved here?

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Yeah, how much time do we have?

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This is a big one.

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Ha ha ha ha.

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I'll give you the as a bridged version as possible.

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And then I'll kind of talk about, know, how my wife probably referred to WordPress as my

mistress for a period of time.

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But I started, so I came out of the agency business.

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I owned a digital agency for about 17 years.

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And I worked on a lot of really big transformation projects, everything from, you know,

sort of broader brand positioning all the way through the big technology considerations.

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at a time when content management systems were really in their infancy.

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Everything was big enterprise.

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It was a web sphere.

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It was SAP.

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uh I was working almost exclusively in Silicon Valley for an agency that I was a part

owner of.

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uh And we basically dealt in that channel, in that corridor of uh startups, all the way up

to the of the divisional level of the IBMs, Microsofts.

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uh And then, I'd say more niche types of technologies, but very well established players

in things like the

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video streaming video technology field.

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So I had this really crazy, well-rounded experience dealing with the mechanics of owning

an agency, which, you know, for basically the entire history of agencies in our uh

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contemporary culture has been challenging, right?

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We've been through a number of different, uh we'll call it, we'll call them economic

crucibles, where we've had to sort of navigate through recessions.

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uh That's been really hard, I think as an agency

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or kind of understanding where to squeeze money out of rocks and how to effectively bring

value to the table.

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And through the evolution of the internet and kind of the rise of more digital in

everything that we're doing day to day, I was there for the ride.

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And interestingly, I would say it was not quite a side hustle, but I was doing some

consulting for people kind of making the exit from uh like almost an enterprise or

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commercial leadership role into professional consulting.

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me up and say, you know, we work together at XYZ company.

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I'm leaving to start my own gig.

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I really need a website.

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So I'd spend nights and weekends making these cool little WordPress websites.

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And after a while, had like hundreds of these things.

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My partner and I would just hammer these things out and we got really good at it.

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um And I came to really love how the elegance of WordPress would enable me to feel like I

was in control of things.

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um And that, that translated into just like a mold.

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experience, I'll call it a dalliance with WordPress as sort of a go-to.

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And at the same time, I was working uh in my day-to-day with big platforms like HubSpot,

you know, that were demanding a lot of uh big enterprise types of considerations.

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Along with that, kind of along the trail, when I was consulting with IBM, I was doing a

lot of work on the cybersecurity practice at GTS.

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So I learned a lot about really complex subjects and how to

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write and run content operations in a big organization.

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They had their own homegrown CMS internally and everything had to run through that and it

was cumbersome.

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uh And there were lots of more efficient tools that I saw out there.

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And many times my customers would come to me and ask, hey, what are good recommendations

that you can make for tools to accomplish XYZ?

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And that was everything from marketing automation all the way through the bigger CMS types

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And then I had the good fortune after selling my agency in 2016, 2017 to work on the

product side.

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So what you see today as CMSCritic.com is actually run on a fully React Native CMS.

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Now prior to that, it was run on WordPress.

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It was run on Ghost, which is a blogging platform.

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So it's kind of gone through this evolution.

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I started doing, in earnest, the CMS critic, call it Chief Critic, Chief

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editor role around 2017-2018.

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And I had inherited it from a guy named Mike Johnston who started it uh in 2008.

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So I had this really rich domain authority and history of tracking everything that was

happening in the market.

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uh given my cross-section with all this experience, and of course we hit COVID and there

were some challenging times, but also opportunities for us to embrace what was happening

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from a digital transformation perspective.

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uh

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And that kind of led us into this just...

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crazy ride of uh people coming to us, wanting to tell their stories, share their vision.

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And that's where we're at today is we really consider ourselves to be the domain authority

for content management.

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uh We pay attention to all corners of it.

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As Roger said, it's a big job.

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But I love the people aspect of it over products.

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I think products are what we deal in, but people, really represent the heart of what we

do.

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So having these conversations, doing this kind of work or talking to the communities,

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I'm on the ground at events talking to agencies, talking to customers.

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That's the work I really love.

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And I think that's what helps illustrate and demonstrate to buyers where they can place

their trust in their vets.

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Awesome.

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It's always interesting to talk to you because you're involved in so much more of the CMS

world than I am.

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Like I'm very WordPress focused.

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and so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, AI is a huge component in

everything of everything right now.

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But at the conference a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how people are actually

implementing it and into their workflows.

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And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on

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which CMSs you feel are maybe catching this wave and which ones are maybe either playing

catch up or just totally missing out on.

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Yeah, so this is, uh you put me on the spot here.

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uh I'm not gonna pick winners.

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uh I think, uh you know, to be as objective as possible, I will say that the, everyone is

doing it, right?

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And has, I think, been doing it on some order of magnitude.

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uh Robbie, you've probably seen this too, that, you know, regardless of where you're at in

the market, uh you may be a small niche player, uh SMB focused.

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uh The large enterprises were the first, like,

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I think I talked to Dean Barker optimistically at the end of 22 and 23, and they were

adding an image generator, which was making really awful pictures.

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But it was novel.

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like Reid Hoffman, you just embrace the crudeness, you try things, and you throw it up

against the wall.

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And I've known Alex Asperger, the CEO there for a while now, and we've had some great

conversations along the way about the evolution.

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You can find the articles on the site.

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And I think the...

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The thing that I've seen consistently is that platforms have been trying to find their

footing around it.

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Where is the real value?

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And some were earlier to it, know, case in point, like Content Stack in my earliest

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composable DXP, which is already something that was kind of a novel concept in the

pantheon of DXPs, which there's an argument that, you know, DXP actually isn't a product.

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It's just an assembly of different components.

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and they're uh prefabbed for you, so to speak, with not adjacent integrations, but

purpose-built integrations.

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uh And analysts have kind of chimed in that it is a category, but at the core of it is

still CMS.

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still content management is kind of the authority within the stack.

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But I think that effort to try to find footing uh for content stack was closely associated

to their very uh robust at that time.

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uh

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uh what we'll call like an early agent system for being able to execute things and

automate things.

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uh They had this product called Launch that made it very easy for you to spin up things

inside of a preset hosted environment, uh which again kind of evolved them from being just

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a headless CMS into something more.

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And that made it maybe a little bit more difficult to categorize them, but what really

matters at the end of the day is what can the customer do with it?

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And they were always clear about that.

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uh So I saw the early work of, think Christine,

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was the person on their team that was kind of heading up the, the initiative with AI.

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And I saw how they were using it in workflows, you know, this development of brand kits of

components and elements that would instead of it, just generating content, which I think a

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lot of, um, is a sacred garden, so to speak, or a sacred wall around the generation or

creation part of what we do, uh, as practitioners, they understood that and heard that

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from their users.

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And I think there was this, they walked this, this really great line of how do we enrich

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the tool so it's able to solve some of these tasks, you know, the burdensome things that

content creators don't want to worry about uh while enriching the content itself with

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things like the guardrails for, you know, brand specific uh text formatting, things like

that.

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So I saw those things start to enter the equation in 2023.

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Other platforms started doing it.

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You know, I saw Akwae starting to do it.

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I saw other tools starting to embrace that.

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And if you kind of fast forward, if you look at 24 is kind of the year of reckoning around

composability that many of the headless players, which, you know, they were starting to

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wake up to this too at that time, you know, that AI was going to be important, but they

needed to solve this problem with visual editing first.

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So, you know, getting marketers to feel like their product, their platform serve them as

well.

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So there was this movement through 24 and then into 25 as ChatGPT and

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and the rest of the models out there in the ecosystem.

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became good enough to handle jobs for a few seconds that produced decent results, really

good summaries.

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And then could be applied to the mechanisms of AI could be applied to things like

workflows.

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That's about the time that agents really started to enter the equation.

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And I'd say end of 24 into 25, attending the mock alliances conference, they call it the

composable conference.

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I saw the really early frameworks of how an agentic system was gonna play out.

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So when I look at today, 25 into 26, I think we're really at this tipping point last year

of agents being things that are performant, that are reliable, they can actually deliver.

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At the same time, only 5 % of enterprises actually have agentic systems that are in

production.

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So it's a very small number.

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There's a lot of room for growth.

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And I've been working with a company called CleanLab oh to kind of take their data, kind

of cross-reference it with what I'm hearing in CMS.

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And you know, they're going to

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be challenges we're going to hit a wall with way agents can actually perform and what

they, what kinds of jobs they can handle.

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Um, but I would say tools like optimize, these, an example have purposefully abstracted

Opal, which is their AI sort of their AI system, um, which started as an assistant has

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evolved into something much more.

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And they've removed it from sort of the core considerations within the system so that it

can kind of live above it and enable agencies as

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example to build their own uh Opal based agent systems or task agents to uh utilize with

their customers, right?

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So they see an opportunity and this is from Kevin Lee, their product, VPO product.

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uh They see a world where agencies are able to take Opal.

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and build out a business practice on it.

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And I think this gets to the core of the real challenge for an opportunity for agencies in

26 is how do we work with these vendors that have great authority, right, that have great

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trust, many of them are FedRAMPed, HIPAA compliant, they do things that I would say the

SMB focused platforms are gonna struggle with.

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Okay.

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going to remain in market and they're going to have a strong business case to make around

that.

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But if they can provide an on-ramp for agencies to be able to harness those tools and be

creative and build a practice around it, know, again, Optimizedly has, you know, what they

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call a geo-ready CMS.

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Sitecore has Sitecore AI, which is sort of four component elements that allow a lot of

customization around how you use AI.

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There's some really great thinking.

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thing I'll say before I hand it back to you is uh in all of this right I've mentioned a

few brands by name but in all of this there are great

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really awesome examples of how uh maybe small niche players are innovating and doing

interesting things.

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So it's important to pay attention to what's out there.

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But I think the considerations for the buyer uh are going to, the biggest challenge is

going to be how do I see the forest through the trees in this?

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How do I cut through the noise and the confusion?

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And that's really what I think we're all trying to do.

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In fact, I just talked to Matt Reed on your team and one of the

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things we talked about was the challenge of understanding, particularly in WordPress, how

do we evolve this ecosystem in light of AI?

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How are we helping them to embrace concepts like geo?

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It's really hard, right?

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Because it's now additional work that they have to take on to understand and decrypt all

of this.

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that's why we have sources like, not just CMS Critic, but other sources out in the

marketplace that hopefully provide the guidance and help to kind of cut through that.

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So on CMS Critic, you're covering both SAS and uh open source CMS, is correct?

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pretty much everything's SaaS, uh but there are still traditional platforms that are

straddling.

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And in fact, I'd even say, Robbie, this push, like F5 Networks was talking about how

people are spinning up data centers on their own now, right?

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So this whole idea of maybe having your server back in your closet somewhere, which back

in Rackspace days, I mean, that's how we lived, right?

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We had to get on servers, we had to use Chef to update scripts manually.

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That's a lost art form.

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we're gonna have to do all that stuff again, but I think we're gonna go back to having a

hybrid model of owning our data for training purposes for our own LLMs, but also that

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digital sovereignty piece.

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So I think, yeah, we try to pay attention to everything commercially, oh what's happening

out there with the bigger proprietary platforms.

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But yeah, I think open source is...

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I mean, look, even those big platforms are using Linux and Kubernetes and whatnot.

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there's some blend of open or some editor component or something that's open source as

well.

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Yeah, open source is integrated pretty well at this point.

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I think it's just kind of that head-end product, the CMS itself or the SAS CMS itself or

the, you know, what I'm saying, this that end product, excuse me, that we're seeing where

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some is open source and some is not.

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And what you were talking about earlier where they're packaging in their AI tools, but

they're kind of almost making it, I'll call it modular, add on to a lot of their tools

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with these AI tools.

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Do you think that that is

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because it's easier to work that way?

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Do you think it's so that they'll be able to monetize separately or so that they would be

able to possibly sell out that piece?

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Because as we know, every time we get those little players in the AI space that are like

kind of starting to take off, they get bought.

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And so do you think that's part of the intention with keeping their AI tools as its own

little entity as it were?

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It's tough to say.

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think it's, um there may be some of that calculus in the equation.

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I think it's also kind of hedging bets.

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And one thing I really like about our CMS kickoff event this year is that we really

focused on fundamentals.

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You know, I have an article coming out hopefully this weekend that kind of wraps up uh

what I saw.

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And I think at a 50,000 foot level, I felt like there was more.

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attention being paid to content modeling, to ontology, to things that actually impact the

day-to-day work of content operations teams.

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And AI is important to them, right?

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But, you know, even in my conversations with Greg Dunlop, who wrote this great book last

year called Designing Content Authoring Experiences, we actually had him on a podcast

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episode.

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you know, he, he used to work for the Seattle Times and he wrote this book that reminded

us about all the things that are important in a CMS experience.

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You know, how do you make it the best possible

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experience for an editor to do his or her job.

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And the crazy thing is that at the end I said, okay, well, how do you see AI transforming

all of this?

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And he's like, you I'm not really paying attention to AI.

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It's just, it's very noisy.

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And he knew that that was a bit of a loaded thing to say, but at the same time, it's like,

you know, we're not even paying attention to these fundamentals.

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We're over here.

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you know, putting our eyes on this shiny thing and is it actually improving the quality of

what editors do on a day to day basis?

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And I thought that was so smart that he was able to say that this look, what let's get

this right.

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And if AI can help us do that, like solve accessibility problems, I see, um, and I, I

allude to this in a couple of articles, Domo just came out with a, a, a really great tool

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called app catalyst, which is

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a way to build apps with prompts, right?

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Inside their tool.

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Now there are basically dashboards that, you know, leverage the Domo data components.

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But what I'm seeing is this, is UX as being kind of the last mile, right?

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And this is what Greg was talking about.

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He's like, how do you make the editing experience, the flow experience better for people,

for humans?

323

And I think for CMSs to differentiate in a, you know, vanilla sea of sameness,

324

focusing on the ability to craft or curate that experience for users where it's dynamic,

you can focus on certain things, you can perhaps in the future craft custom app dashboards

325

or components or elements that help you do your job better.

326

I think that's the key.

327

And uh Nicole France, who used to be at Contentful and Constellation, uh she's an analyst,

she at one of our conferences the year before,

328

talked about how.

329

uh

330

Adaptability and usability were the key.

331

Can these platforms that we're using right now, and WordPress being one of them, can any

of these platforms really achieve that?

332

Can they enable adaptability for users?

333

Can the user have more of a voice in being able to alter the fabric of their UX so they

can do their job better?

334

And I think this speaks to specialization.

335

If you have a very specific market focus, will be great to have a workflow that is

designed around

336

academic experiences or designed around, uh you know, finance, or if you have a retail

digital commerce workload, being able to kind of conjure that, that customization is going

337

to be a really powerful thing.

338

I'm now starting to see the signs of that happening in the perimeter.

339

And now I expect that we'll see more control over, over UX.

340

In fact, I know of platforms I can't quite talk about right now, but some that are, that

are doing this, that are beginning to experiment with this.

341

So it's an exciting time.

342

It's scary.

343

at the same time, right?

344

uh But I think if what I found very encouraging at this year's event, uh the kickoff two

weeks ago is that.

345

We're not talking so much about AI displacement like we did last year.

346

I think people are feeling, I say this as Amazon just laid off 16,000 people.

347

But the right sizing is going to continue uh and there's nothing we can do about that.

348

But I don't think that the skill, the up-skilling that we've seen with people, the

limitations we run into with AI and the need for human judgment in all of this, right?

349

That it is going to come down to making us better.

350

equipped to do our job.

351

It's not going to get us to a four day work week.

352

I think that's the fallacy of all of this is that it's just creating more complexity.

353

But I do see us shifting the conversation into opportunity instead of kind of, you know,

dragged down into the pit of hell that, know, AI is going to replace my job.

354

Maybe someday, but I think we're a long way off from that.

355

Excellent.

356

Excellent insight, Matt, as always, you know, Carly Santi had a presentation talking about

where she kind of surveyed a bunch of agencies at the talk and there was still a lot of

357

tension.

358

There was still a lot of angst and uncertainty and existential dread, if you will.

359

You know, it's called the Agency Intel Podcast.

360

What would you tell an agency who is trying to navigate this in 2026 to

361

you know, what should they be focused on and what can they kind of just let go by the

wayside at this point?

362

Let me, I'm not gonna get into let go yet.

363

Let me, let me, while I'll have the back of my brain working on that while the front is,

goes into some of the things I've actually talked to agencies about.

364

When I was at Storyblocks JoyConf, it was their first big conference held in Amsterdam in

October.

365

And, you know, again, 2025 was a mixed bag as Carla pointed out in her data.

366

I talked to a lot of European agencies at that event

367

and kind of cross-referenced it with what I'd heard in Montreal and also in Frankfurt over

the summer at our CMS Summit event.

368

And uh from type 03, dealing with uh as a community, dealing with some of the compliance

challenges that are happening in Europe, which by the way are being softened.

369

They're being retooled a little bit because there was a lot of uh animus and a lot of

concern about uh Europe being as competitive from a technology perspective.

370

So we're seeing a little bit of softening around those requirements and that's gonna

create a reprieve.

371

But I don't want us to dissuade from the fact that we have good

372

good motion around creating policy.

373

And if governments decide that, you know, they're representing the people and they decide

that this is a good policy around digital sovereignty, uh I think that finding a balance

374

in there where technology can coexist with that and support the goals of, you know,

protecting people's data, giving them the choice to be able you know, dealing with cookies

375

and things like that, I think that's all healthy.

376

So I think that what I was hearing from agencies across that spectrum from summer to fall

uh was like loud and

377

clear that they were seeing opportunities with their customers to make sense of where to

invest their dollars around things like uh GEO.

378

And I know I say GEO, I said GEO at the event, I'm gonna stick with it.

379

I'm gonna get goaded into saying GEO, but it just doesn't come naturally.

380

Yeah, because we don't say CEO, right?

381

We say SEO.

382

Right, so I'm not doing it.

383

I'm gonna die on the film.

384

But I think that building practices around...

385

these areas where an agency is not just executing, but they are the of the

prognosticators, the people who are reading the tea leaves, they're the outside resource

386

that I think enterprises can rely on for guidance.

387

And the fact that they have distributed better over the last couple of years, being sort

of multi CMS representative instead of having maybe a single platform they build on, gives

388

them the opportunity to see how different tools work in different

389

use cases, I think the tools got more competitive with their partner programs as a result.

390

And I think that's better for agencies to kind of place their bets there.

391

But I think out of all of it, they get the benefit of uh being able to learn from the

field, go to their customers and help them uh engineer better solutions to increase that

392

AI visibility, right?

393

To address the challenge of, how are we going to show up in the answer engines?

394

And then I think the more they can stay on the

395

edge with say, you know, a site core optimise, the obviously being at the top of the

market.

396

they're doing a lot to enrich their partner communities around things like, you know, how

chat GPT is going to monetize, how they're going to enable web-like experiences inside the

397

answer engines, introducing carousels for products, things like that.

398

Um, these platforms are working on solutions that are going to enable brands to do this.

399

Agencies are on the front line of being able to unpack how they can enable them.

400

And again, the business model is going to change, right?

401

And this is, I heard this back at Opticon the year before actually, you know, there was a

lot of pressure.

402

think I talked to Horizontal and a few other agencies that were, you know, really

challenged by the, you know, how do we, it was, was a Hero Digital.

403

There's an article on CMS critic.

404

How do we, how do we unpack all the tools that are coming from the Opti as an example,

from their ecosystem?

405

You need an agency.

406

agency to do that, right?

407

You may have an internal practice with a few people on your team, but odds are they're

spread thin running these programs, running these campaigns.

408

A CMP is a very complicated thing to implement and manage.

409

Having an agency that can support your implementation, that understands the intricacies

and has sort of a feed on what the vendor is doing, and they're able to kind of help you

410

predict that.

411

I think being as close to, from the partner community perspective, as close to their kind

of their horizon,

412

is a really great way to enrich your agency and prepare for the future.

413

And then the last thing is, again, Opal is just one example, but there are other ways.

414

We saw over the last couple of years the rise of accelerators, where agencies were kind of

almost getting into the product business, right?

415

How do we rapidly deploy and build out solutions for Adobe, as an example?

416

I think the pivot is now in the direction of how can an agency better embrace the AI

frontier so that they're able to position

417

themselves as not just being the consultant, but also to execute uh around some of these

newer techniques and strategies.

418

So having your team be as smart as possible, uh investing in them to get the skills and

the training, and then knowing that AI literacy is an ongoing thing, right?

419

It's not something, certainly not one and done.

420

You're going to have to do it frequently, maybe even almost daily.

421

But I think that's the future for agencies.

422

There's still a great place and a great opportunity for them to build new practices.

423

this.

424

And Matt, I will say, I'll put on my agency hat, I've had an agency for 24 years.

425

And I will say that is 100 % correct.

426

And any agency that's been in business for a while, digital agency, website agency, media

agency, whatever they want to call themselves, if they've been in business for a long

427

time, they've had to pivot many times anyway, as we know, as technology.

428

I mean, when I started my agency 24 years ago, we were doing flash and action scripting.

429

You know, obviously we're not doing that now, right?

430

So, you know, and so as things change, CMS's came out and became more acceptable to use

for clients and things like that.

431

And, and I, I feel like you're right.

432

We are kind of agents, agencies are the, we're, we're the agents out there for our clients

that we're finding out what is, what, what should they be using?

433

You know, and I will say,

434

even if you don't want to do it as an agency, it's going to start to happen.

435

I will be in meetings all the time with my clients and I'll mention something that I did

with an AI tool and they're like, wait, what did you do?

436

could you do that for our business too?

437

I mean, so use it to practice what you preach, right?

438

So I say, use those tools, keep your people educated, educate yourself and do try to stay

on top of things because if your clients see you using it, they will trust you to help

439

them use it too.

440

It's a great point.

441

Dogfooding your own stuff so that they can see it in action is a great way to kind of

demonstrate the sort of bleeding edge stuff that maybe you don't have customers that have

442

invested in yet.

443

And then I think, you know, if you look at AI 1 to Z, Bill Rogers, who was at our event as

well, he just, you know, started Ektron way back in the day, became part of Episerver and,

444

you know, his great story about how now it's part of Optimizer, right?

445

So there's still some workloads that run on Ektron.

446

But I think, you know, his startup,

447

up is solving a problem around, how do you, how do you sort of define uh the way an AI

assistant chat assistant can be hyper focused on uh website content so that can make that,

448

that move much easier.

449

But, you know, the way I approach AI as a practitioner.

450

I'm to put that hat on kind of separate out, you know, I did a, a, a last July, a

hackathon out in San Francisco that was sponsored by AWS.

451

And it was about enterprise.

452

agents in MCP and so I try to stay very close to what's happening in from a technology

perspective but the way I approach it is that the the app should be the last stop right

453

shouldn't be the first thing that you buy

454

Hmm.

455

of AI, need to understand from the AI literacy piece is so important.

456

We need to understand what it is that we're building, uh the impact it's going to have.

457

We so frequently hook stuff up without thinking about the consequences.

458

This is why so many people have had to pull down chat bots because of, yeah, sure, prompt

engineering and things that we know about.

459

But there are things happening behind the scenes that are even scarier, you know, from a

security perspective.

460

So I think we start the journey with the

461

plan strategy.

462

Uh, and of course the pressure here is, well, everyone else is doing it.

463

Can I just slap a chat bot on my site and we've, we've got AI and that's the wrong way to

think about AI.

464

It's not a tool, right?

465

It's, is a technology.

466

It is a, it's not a feature of your product.

467

is something that's enriching your product, but if that's all you've got, that's not, you

don't have value.

468

So I think you start the journey with understanding, um, going through that process of

mapping and planning, and then you have to have internal advocates, right?

469

which is again, think an opportunity for agencies to come in, work with their customers to

be those advocates, train them, get them up to speed, be the help desk service, Help desk

470

service contracts are still going to be a thing.

471

And the last stop should be.

472

Create an app, right?

473

Build an app now based on that solid foundation.

474

And if we slowed down enough to do these things the right way, we would have better

stories to tell.

475

But um again, Reid Hoffman would say, embrace the crudeness.

476

You gotta go to market now and try things.

477

And as long as it doesn't end up with uh a $50,000 AWS bill you didn't expect or a

security breach that gets all over the newspaper, then sure, have at it.

478

uh

479

things like blue-green deployments, good production strategies to make sure that we can

test things properly.

480

And guess what?

481

This is all the domain of agencies, right?

482

Having those kinds of really smart strategies, if you guys invest in that, you're gonna

bring tremendous value to your enterprise customers.

483

awesome.

484

Wow.

485

Wow.

486

That was a lot.

487

uh Matt, this has been great.

488

Thank you so much.

489

We're definitely at where we want to be on this.

490

In terms of, we've mentioned the website, CMS critic a few times.

491

We want to see people going there and catching all of your field reports.

492

When can we expect to see something from the Joomla conference and where else can people

follow you on the line?

493

Yeah, well, LinkedIn's a great place to get me.

494

It's just Matt Garrapey, very easy to find.

495

I think I'm the only one.

496

I might be the only one.

497

I have that advantage.

498

And what it also means, I don't have a lot of redundancy, but we do have a team and we're

at a lot of events.

499

I think you and I talked the other day about Meetups as being a place.

500

We like to show up at Meetups.

501

We want to have our fingers in the pulse in the open source community as well.

502

Doing things like award shows.

503

uh is just an opportunity for me to see the innovation that's happening.

504

uh And so I'm definitely making the round circuits.

505

Obviously, Yanis and I, Yanis Boy from Boy & Company have been partnering for a long time

on the big events that we're doing.

506

And it's great that you were able to come to that as well.

507

uh But CMScritic.com is a place to kind of get the story, the narrative.

508

We don't do it like other platforms.

509

We really try to dig into and understand what the leaders of companies are focused on.

510

uh what CTOs, CIOs are thinking about, what is the roadmap?

511

uh And we believe that the storytelling is such an important part of it.

512

So we like to be the town square for a lot of the sort of vision hunting.

513

uh then I think, uh so yeah, JDA USA is coming up.

514

We'll have a couple of mock alliance conferences this year.

515

I'm also on the board at the mock alliance, the executive advisory board.

516

uh So I'll be there, I think in October and then yeah,

517

just a bunch of vendor events that'll be happening this year as well.

518

So very busy, but it's exciting.

519

Cool.

520

And I'm going to ask for one more little nugget of information from you.

521

And that is you, when we were speaking before this, you mentioned you talked to Dries in

the Drupal world last week.

522

And so maybe give us a few little things that we should look for in the Drupal world this

year.

523

Okay, so for starters, you can go to CMScredit.com and one of the last articles we

published was an interview that I did with Dries about Drupal CMS 2.0, which is basically

524

the biggest thing that they've done since, uh well, maybe in 25 years.

525

uh I think there have been a lot of milestones along the way, but uh this big shift is

really embracing AI and bringing a lot more of, we'll call it the kind of marketer

526

centricity to the way that Drupal is going to appeal, I think, to the future of the

development

527

It's still going to be the go-to for developers who want to get their hands dirty.

528

There's been a perception, I think, of Drupal being hard.

529

In fact, the article is called hard hardly.

530

Here's why Drupal CMS 2.0 is changing the game.

531

And the way that it's approaching building now is more from that vibe coding perspective

of can I conjure a page with prompts?

532

Obviously the role of development and being able to get into code is so important for

being able to enable

533

apps that have production worthiness.

534

This is something Matt Billman at Netlify and I have talked about frequently.

535

He's actually going to be on with me here very soon.

536

uh And that whole part of the journey, we still need really smart developers to help make

sure things are performant and they're going to be OK when they're alive in the wild.

537

uh But making it easier to prototype, making it faster to build out web pages and

customize aspects of it, uh the tooling is now there in Drupal.

538

So I think that's a kind of a

539

signal what they're telegraphing for the rest of the open source world is, hey, we're

turning a corner where it's going to be more dynamic.

540

You know, the, the expectations of the CMS user are evolving to be inclusive in these

communities of that type of user, that marketer who is low code, no code, and AI is

541

becoming a real strength in all of that.

542

And the last thing I'll say is because Drupal has been hard, right?

543

For some people, because it's been so structured.

544

It's now using that heritage of structure where it's, you know, had the strong content

modeling, strong uh structure data approach.

545

uh That's now serving its ability to better enhance the AI output, right?

546

So for the GEO oh and AEO uh focus that organizations have, this is going to benefit that.

547

So I think there's a lot of exciting things coming.

548

uh And I expect to see that innovation.

549

This is going to light a fire under every community.

550

now.

551

They'll see Drupal doing it.

552

Everyone's going to jump on board with evolving their platforms.

553

And I don't know, I'm super excited to see what happens now that we've seen this big

change.

554

Yeah, that's interesting.

555

I didn't even think about you're right that this the structure data behind that is going

to make it so much easier.

556

It's like it makes me cry when I think about we could have had XML out there so much more

and it just never would take off.

557

But boy, wouldn't it be nice today with AI that if we had XML websites out there

everywhere, but anyway.

558

but now everybody's like doing markdown.

559

So it's like this weird cycle of things, you know, we're back to it's like, we're back to

the old stuff.

560

And I don't know, wake up tomorrow and people using flashing it, you know, it would shock

me because it's kind of like retro, you know, it's, I don't know, flash sites are cool.

561

They were very cool.

562

They were awesome.

563

I loved them.

564

Maybe we could go back to frames and we'll have our menu on the side frame and we'll have

them.

565

ah

566

my.

567

that.

568

You and me are gonna work on that.

569

Awesome.

570

All right.

571

Thank you so much, Matt.

572

We really appreciate it.

573

We will have to have you back on the show at some point.

574

Thank you so much.

575

It's been awesome guys.

576

Thank you so much.

577

Appreciate it.

578

Awesome.

579

Okay.

580

So Roger, that was an amazing call talk that we just had.

581

mean, who we, but let's debrief this for our agencies out there listening.

582

Yes.

583

For the agents listening, first of all, I hope that your brain hasn't completely melted

out of your ears.

584

There was a lot that we covered there and I, know, there was, there's a lot of things to

pick apart.

585

Robbie, I'm really interested to hear your thoughts about how much Matt was saying that

586

He's even seeing it at the enterprise level.

587

What's your take there as a long time open source advocate?

588

I was going to say, which, you know, that just made my little open source heart very happy

to hear that.

589

um And I hope that Matt is true with his predictions because that would be amazing.

590

And I will say, being someone who has been in the open source world for 24 years here or

better, yeah, I kind of agree that things are, I mean, I work with a lot of, uh you know,

591

government agencies or high level corporations.

592

and they do incorporate open source already.

593

And there has been even more talks of more tools that they want us to build for them using

open source.

594

So, you know, he's onto something, I think.

595

And so I hope, like I said, at the end of the year, we look at this and go like, yeah,

boy, he predicted that one.

596

Absolutely.

597

Drupal CMS 2.0 was mentioned because that's recently come out.

598

um I have not dug into this at all, but from what I understand is it's focused on

marketers.

599

It's got prompting built right into it.

600

Have you played around with this at all?

601

Have you dug into this?

602

I haven't got to play around with it.

603

I watched some of the presentations that they did on it and it looked pretty cool.

604

And I will say, so, know, like if you looked at kind of your top three open source CMSs,

right?

605

We've got WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, right?

606

I mean, that's kind of been the top three for a long time.

607

We have a lot of others that are doing great, but as far as percentage wise, those are

still our top three open source ones.

608

um

609

And with that being said, Drupal was always known to be the one that was the most

flexible, but also the most difficult, particularly for the end user.

610

And that's partly because they have such a structured data back end.

611

So you can't just have these wild, big open editors.

612

You've got fields and things like that.

613

So it's more structured on the back end, which is, it sounds like coming to be a good

thing for them for AI, which is great.

614

um But what I was going to say is if they can use the AI tools to make this where it is

easier.

615

So as an end user, I can go in there and go, I need to make a change on this page.

616

And I'm basically just prompting an AI agent to do that work for me.

617

And so it will be interesting to see.

618

We are definitely going to have to try and get a Drupal person on here on the show this

year.

619

Absolutely.

620

Maybe we'll get Dries himself.

621

I ran into him a couple of years ago.

622

I got to say really down to earth, really nice guy.

623

So if anybody's got any connections, let us know.

624

Um, you know, another thing that was talked about was G E O or G O we're still not sure.

625

Cause we don't say CEO, right?

626

We say SEO.

627

So what are we going to call this AI generated slop, uh, overviews?

628

I don't know.

629

you know, I did a lot of SEO work when I had my agency going, uh, of course this was like

16 years ago when all you had to do was put a YouTube video up and you were immediately

630

number one for whatever keywords you put on that.

631

Things have changed a lot since then.

632

And it's really interesting to see, hear Matt's thoughts about how the enterprise is

approaching this and how agencies are trying to talk with their clients about all of this.

633

I thought what was really fascinating though to kind of start trying to, you know, tie a

bow on this debrief ah was Matt's thoughts about how agencies are really the arbiters of

634

all of this change that's happening.

635

And that's what the clients hire an agency to do, right?

636

To give them agency to handle stuff that they don't have time to deal with.

637

The client needs to make widgets and sell them.

638

They need the agency to help them market that and figure out how to interface into the

digital world.

639

Uh, two last things to kind of throw in here.

640

Um, there's, there's dog fooding and then the human layer.

641

Um, so on the dog fooding perspective, you know, we're all using these AI tools in

different ways in our own workflows.

642

It seems like it's just, you know, and it's kind of what we were just talking about there

is, you know, the, agencies are asking us about how to use these tools.

643

we just need to start using them and then we can tell them, hey, either we can help you or

not help you.

644

So I feel like the dog fooding part is pretty self-explanatory there.

645

As far as the human layer and helping your own people maybe figure out how to be using

these tools and keep your own people motivated, um how are you guys approaching that uh

646

inside of your agency?

647

em And we're small.

648

And so I think some agencies may do it a little differently, but we are more of, you know,

learning individually what we're interested in.

649

Myself, I also listen to podcasts.

650

You and I started talking podcast, you know, and because I listen to a lot of AI podcasts,

I get a lot of AI newsletters just trying to keep up.

651

It's like drinking from a fire hose, though, trying to keep up with the data and all of

the new tools that are coming out.

652

And so tools like podcast newsletters, I find those very valuable because they kind of

condense down the material for me.

653

And then I can go, oh, that one really sounds interesting.

654

Now let me dig my teeth into that one.

655

And so that's kind of how.

656

I've been training myself and then again, our people on the team, they're, they're like,

Hey, Robbie, there's this course.

657

I think it might help me.

658

I'm like, great, let's, let's try

659

And so, you know, just digging into whatever tools you're using anyway, try to learn new

ones every week because it's weekly.

660

You can learn new things and then pick the ones that you really think are valuable and dig

into those.

661

And then those will be the ones that you'll wind up recommending to peers and clients.

662

Wow, that was a heck of a debrief right there.

663

I hope people are still with us.

664

We've still got a couple more segments coming up.

665

ah I think, should we wrap this debrief?

666

I think we are a wrap on this one.

667

All right, see you in the next segment.

668

All right, team, this has been a heck of a first episode.

669

I want to welcome you to a segment that we're calling Roger That.

670

No surprise, I'm your guest, I'm your host for this one.

671

And the whole point of this segment is really kind of to talk maybe about a business

aspect of running your agency and thinking through things.

672

And I think, you know, we just had a really great conversation with Matt talking about AI.

673

uh, agentic workflows, G E O or G O, however we're going to call that.

674

And so for this segment, I really wanted to switch things up a little bit and talk about

field operations.

675

And I, know, what we're seeing since COVID and especially since the rise of AI is there's

been a real push for in-person interactions.

676

I'm witnessing this.

677

I'm going to events, seeing people I haven't seen in years, which is always great.

678

But then I'm also meeting a lot of new people and something that consistently comes up

again and again is how much people are valuing these in-person meetings now.

679

And again, there's a combination of we're sitting behind our screens all day long, even if

we're on zoom calls, we're still behind the screen.

680

And then now we're talking to these AI agents and they're giving us heaps of praise,

sycophants are, you know, just giving us what we want to hear all the time.

681

And

682

Instead we're really craving this face-to-face human interaction and so my biggest

suggestion in this Roger that is that we all need to be getting away from our screens We

683

need to be getting out and meeting each other again and from a business perspective This

is gonna be how you grow your business.

684

This is how you're gonna find new business.

685

You're gonna make connections there's a saying your network is your net worth and I really

do believe in that

686

That's how I find jobs.

687

That's how I found clients.

688

It's how I find friends.

689

It's how I met my wife.

690

I went out and I went to a bar and there she was and and now we've been married for 15

years coming up in March.

691

So that's very exciting.

692

So I wanted to give some tips here and kind of talk through this a little bit.

693

I want us to focus on getting back into handshakes and actually meeting people face to

face.

694

And so we want to look at from a couple of things.

695

And the first thing I want to talk about is cost.

696

You can go and spend a ton of money flying across the country, across the globe, going to

some big fancy thousand dollar a ticket event and not get any business.

697

And now you're in the hole, right?

698

Not only have you just spent a bunch of money, but you spend a bunch of time away from

working.

699

So my advice is to start local.

700

Go to meetup.com, find some local events that are happening right down the street.

701

Go to a happy hour, go to a luncheon, go to

702

you know, some very low level event that you can easily get to.

703

And you can just start networking and start meeting people and talking about what's going

on, find out how people are using AI and things will start happening from that.

704

And getting business from those is just as good as getting business from some really fancy

national event.

705

So make sure you're doing some math, make sure you're looking at your costs, keep your

costs low.

706

start practicing networking on the cheap, get good at it, and then start spending money on

that first class ticket and heading out and going to these events.

707

Start doing some local reconnaissance, looking for these events.

708

There's different types of events everywhere.

709

Karaoke, maybe not the best for business networking, but who knows?

710

You might find people, there's a lot of WordPressers that love to karaoke.

711

So if you're looking for a WordPress developer, who knows, they might be there.

712

But more specifically, there's WordPress meetups.

713

Go to those to meet people that are either building with WordPress or have questions about

their WordPress website.

714

That's an easy win.

715

You can at least just give them some free advice, but they might end up hiring you.

716

So look through all of that.

717

Okay, so now we want to talk about not everybody's great at networking.

718

I get that.

719

Believe it or not, I am not a naturally extroverted person.

720

I am very happy to stay home and sit on the couch and watch YouTube and hang out with my

dogs.

721

It takes effort for me to go out and do these networking events.

722

It can be very awkward for me sometimes.

723

I have spent years getting over that by just doing it, by just jumping into the pool with

both feet first and taking that plunge and seeing what happens.

724

And guess what?

725

Not every time that I go up and talk to somebody, do they want to talk to me?

726

And not every time that I go up and talk to somebody, do they become a customer?

727

I'm okay with that.

728

You have to understand that the first goal of networking is simply meeting people as

people.

729

Then you take it from there.

730

If you can get along and have a conversation together, then that might lead to a business

relationship.

731

You never know.

732

but you have to first start with just connecting with people.

733

So start simple, go to these local events, say hi to people, make it a simple goal.

734

I'm gonna talk to five people that I've never talked to today.

735

Checklist, just get that done.

736

Start with small, simple goals and learn to enjoy networking.

737

So that's what I've got for you, Roger, that for today.

738

Get out there, get into the field.

739

meet some people, make some handshakes, make some connections, and grow your business.

740

Hi, this is a segment called Robbie's Radar.

741

And the idea is pretty simple.

742

I'm constantly testing tools, platforms, apps, workflows, basically anything that has

promised to make my work life faster or smarter, or just maybe a little less chaotic.

743

Because some of the tools that I've tried out have been flops, but some of them absolute

gold.

744

So Robbie's Radar is where I'm gonna share the tech that's actually made it into my

day-to-day work.

745

No sponsored fluff, no, yeah, I tried that once.

746

These are tools that I'm actively using and that I think that other agency owners and

creators might also find beneficial.

747

And since this is the first episode, I wanted to start with a tool that has already

changed how I work almost every single day, really.

748

Let's talk about Whisper Flow.

749

It's an AI tool and I've been using this one pretty regularly now, mainly on my desktop,

but I also have the mobile app installed.

750

And now honestly, I think both are useful at different times.

751

um

752

So at a high level, whisper is a dictation tool, right?

753

But calling it just transcription really does not do whisper justice.

754

This thing doesn't just write down what you say, it fixes what you say.

755

So as I'm talking, it's correcting grammar, it's adding punctuation, it's cleaning up

things, and even making smart adjustments on the fly.

756

You know these moments where you're halfway through a sentence and your brain just kind of

changes direction.

757

Yeah, well, whisper handles that like a rock star.

758

And so, yes, you can even whisper into the mic so as not to disturb people around you.

759

And it still hears you perfectly.

760

For example, I might click into a Slack message to a team member and then hit the function

key to activate my whisper on the desktop.

761

And then I just start talking.

762

So let's just say that this time I'm going to say into the mic.

763

Okay, that sounds good.

764

Let's meet at...

765

about that at 2 p.m.

766

No, make that 3 p.m.

767

And then we can sort out the next steps to actually take the site live.

768

Actually, no, instead of take site live, say set the launch schedule.

769

So now that sounded like a hot mess, right?

770

But from that rambling, Whisper Flow will type out capital, okay, comma.

771

That sounds good, period.

772

Let's meet about that at 3 p.m., comma.

773

And then we can sort out next steps to launch the launch schedule, to set the launch

schedule.

774

period.

775

Now, it not only punctuated and capitalized and did all those lovely things, spelled

everything properly, but then it also made those adjustments that I would have had to

776

backspace, backspace, type again, backspace, type again.

777

And it just did it.

778

And it corrected it by my voice commands.

779

So for me, this is huge.

780

I am someone who thinks faster than I type by far.

781

I form ideas out loud.

782

I'll verbally brain up an email or a post or a script or a proposal.

783

text message and a whole lot of slack messages.

784

And Whisper turns that chaos into clean readable text, just like magic.

785

So instead of staring at a cursor, I just talk.

786

And when I stop, the text is already polished enough to use or at least very close.

787

You probably will still have to touch it a little bit.

788

But that alone, just getting to that point has saved me hours every week.

789

And this is one of those tools that quietly upgrades your workflow.

790

don't even notice it at first, and it's till you stop using it and then everything feels

slower.

791

As a matter of fact, it tells you what your words per minute that you're typing, typing

with this, and mine usually average anywhere from 175 to 200 words per minute.

792

No way I could ever type that fast.

793

I'm just not that fast of a typist.

794

So if you're curious about Whisper, I highly recommend you check it out.

795

And yes, there's a free version.

796

So you can kick the tires and you can see how it fits in, how you work.

797

And uh you know, if there's any other tools that you swear by and you want me to test

those out, please send them my way.

798

I would love to learn about the tools that you're using out there and anything that make

my day faster is great.

799

So this has been Robbie's Radar and I've got more Intel coming soon.

800

That was a big episode.

801

That was, it was.

802

I mean, but we have one now in the can.

803

Love it.

804

That's true.

805

segment, a little segment we like to call R &R.

806

And it doesn't just mean Roger and Robbie in this one.

807

We really do mean R and R.

808

We think that this is a very important part of running an agency, working for an agency.

809

mean, this is important for everyone, obviously, but I find a lot of agency owners out

there, especially because you're hustling, you're just working, you're trying to get

810

everything done.

811

And what you don't do or take care of is yourself.

812

And that's very important.

813

So.

814

And I think especially in this world now where we're working from home, uh, we've always

got our phones with us.

815

We've got our watches with us.

816

Like the notifications are always happening.

817

It's absolutely critical that we're taking time away from the screens and we're taking

care of ourselves.

818

And you know, I personally, one of the big things that I do is exercise.

819

Uh, I have to exercise first thing in the morning.

820

If I don't do that.

821

Uh, the day's just not right for me.

822

Um, and so, you know, I've got a routine where I get up pretty early and immediately I'm

in the gym.

823

I'm lucky enough to have been able to set up my own personal gym.

824

I know everybody does not have that, um, luxury, uh, but I would recommend try to, if

you've got some space in your house or your wherever you live, set up a little room so you

825

can just quickly and easily get a little workout in.

826

And if you don't have that.

827

That's what gyms are for.

828

Love them or hate them, but you really do need to take care of yourself physically.

829

ah so, Robbie, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on mentally, how do you take care of

yourself?

830

Well, so, and yes, I should be exercising more, Roger.

831

So maybe you'll inspire me to get back on my exercise routine.

832

Cause we all know we feel better while we're doing it, right?

833

But then it's so easy to start working and be busy and be like, well, I can't today.

834

I'll do it tomorrow.

835

And I don't.

836

um The other, the other thing that I do try to do that's my mental break, I feel like is I

travel so much for work.

837

Cause we do video production.

838

I speak at conferences.

839

mean, you too, you travel a lot.

840

And so what I try to do because

841

when you travel that much, then you're like, I don't want to go take vacations, right?

842

I don't want to go travel again for my vacation.

843

I want to stay at home with my dog and watch TV.

844

But so what I've tried to do over and I've done this probably the last decade, I guess, is

I know I'm probably not going to make it back to some of the places that I go.

845

So I'm like, you know what?

846

I will put an extra day or two on the trip beginning or end.

847

like to do at the end.

848

So I'm kind of done with whatever it was I went to go do.

849

And I can just really relax.

850

Like actually this robe came from, I went to a spa resort up in uh Canada after I spoke at

a conference in Rochester, New York.

851

And I was like, you know what, we're going to stay two extra days, drive from Rochester,

go up, see some of the Great Lakes, go up and see Niagara Falls.

852

I'd never seen it.

853

And just go and hang out and get a massage or actually there we got in Springs, the hot

Springs, you know?

854

And it just, it was just a way to end that work trip in a very relaxing way.

855

Now I come home and I'm like, I feel much better, right?

856

But I've been able to see places that I might not ever make it to.

857

Some of them might not be the place, you know, you may be at a conference in a weird place

and you're kind of like, well, I would have never picked coming here.

858

But I guarantee you, you can probably find something that's kind of cool or fun to do in

those cities.

859

And so if you tack on one day, it's really not gonna change much in your whole work

structure.

860

And it gives you some relaxation.

861

Absolutely.

862

And I think, you know, something to add onto that is at the beginning of a trip, like if

you're going to a conference somewhere, I have done this time and time again, where I have

863

a whole like week or multiple day conference and I wait until the last day to go out and

explore where I've been for the whole week, only to realize two blocks away from my hotel

864

was the ocean or, know, just something like astounding like that.

865

So that first day that you get into a location, take an hour, walk outside of your hotel

and at least just go around a couple of blocks, see what restaurants are in the area, see

866

if there's a gym or a yoga studio right down the block that you could easily pop into

during the week.

867

But just take that time and, you know, unpack after, you know, flying all that time if you

flew somewhere.

868

and let yourself get comfortable in the place that you're in.

869

And you'll have that for the rest of the week so that if it does get stressful for

whatever reason, you know, the conference shouldn't be stressful, but maybe you've got

870

some work stuff happening.

871

You can go and take a 20 minute walk and you know exactly where to go right away.

872

So, you know, taking a deep breath, slowing down, getting out there and walking.

873

So that's about what I've got for this R &R, Robbie.

874

Is there anything else that you have?

875

I've got many more things to talk about, but we'll do those in other R &Rs.

876

Cool.

877

this has been a wrap for our first Agency Intel episode number one.

878

Thank you, Matt Garrape of CMS Critic for being an amazing guest.

879

Thank you, Robbie Adair for, I'm not gonna say you did everything, but holy moly, you've

done so much to get this going.

880

I'm really excited about future episodes.

881

This has been a lot of fun.

882

I hope everybody's been really enjoying it.

883

Me too, me too.

884

And I'm looking forward to our next episode.

885

We've also got another special guest coming up.

886

So you'll see that in the next episode though.

887

Thanks.

888

Awesome.