090: Building Teams and Breaking Silos: Marketing Leadership in the Dirt World with Dan Briscoe
In this episode, Danny welcomes Dan Briscoe, CMO at BuildWitt, for a candid and inspiring discussion on leadership, team dynamics, and marketing in the construction industry.
Dan shares stories from the Marine Corps to managing agencies, discusses his marketing philosophy, and breaks down how mentorship from icons like Jocko Willink and Marcus Sheridan shaped his approach.
His practical wisdom shines through the entire episode through inspiring stories of his experiences breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, encouraging contribution to marketing, and creating a culture of free-flowing ideas.
Key Points + Topics
[00:05] – Dan shares how a finance degree and a Marine Corps career laid the groundwork for his leadership style—rooted in discipline, data, and figuring things out fast.
[05:12] – He tells the story of his first marketing “aha” moment—building a travel brochure in college—and how the ability to measure impact hooked him for good.
[06:18] – Dan explains how mentorship is less about hierarchy and more about access—observing, asking questions, and learning from someone who’s been through the fire.
[07:04] – He shares how his marriage coach unexpectedly became a mentor—and how that experience shaped the way he leads teams with compassion and clarity.
[07:50] – Dan discusses working with Aaron Witt, BuildWitt’s CEO, and how he helped Aaron recognize the value of mentorship even while leading as a rising influencer.
[08:59] – The conversation turns to another one of Dan’s mentors, Jocko Willink—Dan talks about humility, influence, and the underrated leadership skill of quietly getting stuff done behind the scenes.
[10:08] – Dan opens up about a painful leadership misstep where ego got in the way, and how losing influence became the catalyst for changing how he shows up for his team.
[13:03] – He recounts the moment he brought in Marcus Sheridan for a training session—and how it rewired how the BuildWitt team thought about storytelling and clarity.
[13:41] – Marcus’ “They Ask, You Answer” philosophy became a north star for BuildWitt’s content and strategy, helping the team stay focused on real audience needs.
[14:56] – Dan explains how he shifted from leading a 25-person agency-style team to supporting a small, focused internal squad—lean, fast, and ego-free.
[15:36] – He outlines how stepping into a coaching role, rather than a top-down manager, helped his team grow and take true ownership of strategy.
[17:21] – After several years away from day-to-day marketing, Dan reflects on rejoining the CMO seat and how the landscape—and his mindset—had evolved.
[18:13] – Rediscovering his sweet spot, Dan talks about getting his hands dirty again with messaging, media strategy, and reconnecting with real customer stories.
[19:12] – He champions the power of small teams, explaining how fewer cooks in the kitchen means faster execution, stronger alignment, and better results.
[20:41] – Dan describes how everyone at BuildWitt—sales, ops, even engineers—gets a say in the marketing strategy, because the best insights don’t come from silos.
[22:14] – He walks through BuildWitt’s painful but necessary evolution from a bloated creative agency model to a nimble, marketing-led tech company.
[24:49] – Dan breaks down how Aaron Witt’s role as a charismatic CEO and influencer boosts brand credibility and drives top-of-funnel engagement like no ad can.
[26:24] – They talk strategy behind the scenes: how BuildWitt nurtures trust, not just traffic, and turns Aaron’s personal brand into a business development engine.
[27:16] – Dan shares why they’ve leaned into personal LinkedIn over branded social accounts—and how that’s led to deeper conversations and stronger connections.
[32:20] – A Slack comment about unlimited PTO goes viral. Dan reflects on how real, off-the-cuff moments on social media often outperform polished corporate content.
[33:36] – He closes by reflecting on what he loves about his role: staying small, moving fast, and working with a team that genuinely gives a damn.
Guest + Episode Links
Full Episode Transcript
Danny Gavin Host
00:05
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today, we will sit down with Dan Briscoe of BuildWitt, a company that works across sectors by focusing on innovative solutions that enhance how contractors attract, recruit, train and engage their teams. With a wealth of experience in various marketing roles across diverse industries, Dan brings invaluable insights into the intersection of marketing and operational excellence, having worked with a variety of different sized marketing teams, agencies and influencers. Let’s dive into his journey and explore how he’s making a meaningful impact in the dirt world. Today, we’re going to talk about building a team to include the right experts, the power of an influencer in the dirt world and career lessons learned. How are you, Dan?
Dan Briscoe Guest
01:13
I’m doing well. It’s good to talk to you. It’s been a while.
Danny Gavin Host
01:16
It has been. So I want to paint a picture for the audience. So here’s Danny Gavin. He just broke his arm on a ski trip in Colorado and he has to speak at this conference in Las Vegas and it was a pretty big deal for him and it was a marketing Sherpa conference. Actually, it was around 2015, 2016. So I remember walking to the room, I’m wearing this fancy suit and I’ve got this thing for my arm and there there’s this really good-looking family in the front row, this handsome guy on the, on the, you know, standing on the stage practicing what he’s talking about, and I’m like man, this is so cool, like what a cool guy like his family’s here, he’s there and then, you know, later on I actually heard his presentation and it was really, really exciting. So that guy was Dan, and so I’ve been inspired by Dan for a very long time and it’s really really cool having you here today.
Dan Briscoe Guest
02:05
Yeah, no, I mean that was a fun trip. We put that together at the last minute, brought my family out, I got to know you at the event and then realized you know we live 20 miles apart, so that was kind of fun. And then I’ve been following your career, I’ve worked with you and the team in the past, so it’s been fun.
Danny Gavin Host
02:23
It’s cool how we live in such a small world. So, Dan, tell me, where did you go to school and what did you study?
Dan Briscoe Guest
02:28
Well, that was a long time ago. I went to Texas A&M and I studied finance, not having really a clue why I just like numbers. I don’t think I’ve ever done it. I’m not particularly good at finance, but that’s what I did. I’m not particularly good at finance, but that’s what I did. I was in the Corps of Cadets, really studied the military, and went into the Marine Corps after college. So that was that, and just kind of goofing off was really my primary occupation in college Cool, and then later on you got an MBA from Auburn.
02:56
Yeah, I didn’t get the best grades. I was a good student in high school. Didn’t make really good grades in college, Thought I’d stay in the military forever. Then I started to realize hey, I like the business world. I got into recruiting and realized I probably would transition out. I should go back and unlike college I didn’t really like. I loved my MBA classes. It was night school, it was Auburn at Montgomery and I loved it and so picked up education there. I really liked everything about recruiting in the business and it was a little bit of sales and marketing and all that combined and so our station had some good leaders that came in. We went from kind of last in the nation to first in the nation and so that gave me a bug of what you could do if you really turn things around. So kind of took that into the business world.
Danny Gavin Host
03:43
That’s really cool and just because I know family is so important to you. So what point did you meet your wife in all of this?
Dan Briscoe Guest
03:48
So I met her last couple of years in college. We got married about the last year in college and we had our first daughter right as we left. So I got commissioned. We both graduated the same day, handed off the baby one to the other as we walked across the stage and took off for the Marine Corps, but started our family young and then just kept going. So I had five kids fairly quickly. Number five and six grandkids are on the way. So family has always been a very important, big part of our lives.
Danny Gavin Host
04:16
And I imagine sort of that experience of having to like to leave after having your kid. I’m sure that that had its difficulties, but it also strengthened the bond between you and your wife and your family.
Dan Briscoe Guest
04:26
Yeah, we enjoyed the Marine Corps but it was tough. I think the last 15 months I was in a field unit before you kind of go do your alternate jobs. I was gone for 13 of those 15 months, so it’s tough on her and that was probably ultimately why we got out. We really enjoyed it, stayed six years but got out to have a bit more family life, had a career in healthcare, moving up in sales and marketing roles, and then switched over into construction, trying to travel a little bit less, and that’s how I wound up here in Houston and finally diving into the construction side.
Danny Gavin Host
05:00
So going back to school I know it’s a long time ago Were there any experiences you can think about back then that kind of made you who you are today when you think about being the CMO and how you’re working?
Dan Briscoe Guest
05:12
I enjoyed a marketing class. I remember that in my undergrad and kind of building out a big marketing brochure for Sandals Resorts of all things. So it’s kind of I don’t know why I remember that. So I remember enjoying that. I liked my marketing classes, mba. I really enjoyed just learning business statistics, forecasting, trying to figure out those sorts of things and was able to apply those in Marine Corps recruiting and so just kind of got hooked on building a business and numbers. I found that in marketing I used to sit with Google Analytics up and just watch things. So it’s kind of addicting. You can almost go too far down but I really enjoy trying things and seeing what happens, kind of immediate results and then sharing that with other people. Hey, this video you did or this LinkedIn post you did, here’s the impact and what it’s doing back on our website and ultimately a lead and just understanding how things work. That’s what I got in education. That’s what it’s been fun in marketing to understand.
Danny Gavin Host
06:17
So Dan, how would you define a mentor?
Dan Briscoe Guest
06:18
To me, a mentor is somebody that’s kind of been there, done that, that’s 10, 20 years ahead of you, has a bunch of experience and is willing to share those. You know there’s the saying that a smart person learns from their mistakes and a wise person learns from other people’s mistakes. So I butchered that. But I really like mentors. We use a lot of mentors in our company now. Just, I could probably get really smart on this topic in the next year, or I could just reach out to this person and leverage their expertise. A lot of times they’re willing to help, which is the funny part. A lot of times you can pay them, but it’s a fraction of the cost of what you would have to build on your own. And so I love mentors from that, both informal, formal.
07:04
I’ve had them in my personal life. I’ve helped mentor people when I joined HSS. One of the smart things they did was assign you a mentor and went to lunch and kind of learned the ropes of how to succeed in the company. Even at the executive level that I was. They gave me a good mentor. So I think it applies everywhere. I mean, I’ve got a mentor now that’s a marriage coach. He can kind of dig in and see issues and help that. Hey, I’m learning all this stuff but it would take me a couple of years and 10 books where I can just ask really good questions and they can ask really good questions. You can just move faster.
Danny Gavin Host
07:42
So I love how you have this philosophy, both for your personal life and for work. Like it’s so cool, right, Like it doesn’t have to be. Just hey, let’s reach out to people at work but at home, and vice versa.
Dan Briscoe Guest
07:50
So Aaron Witts, our founder of our company where I am, and he, you know, he had a half billion impressions on social media, reached a ton of people, but nobody to engage with. And so I said, why don’t you know? Let’s find you somebody that’s kind of been there, done that, that has built some really big personal brands and that just somebody you can bounce off. Obviously you’re doing well like you get it better than 99% of the population. But you know, even the world’s best tennis player typically has a coach. They’re usually better than them, but they have a mentor and a coach. And so we’ve looked across the company and said who’s your mentor? Who are you bouncing ideas off of? You don’t always have to hire more people on the team. Sometimes these mentors and coaches can really help. So I don’t do a lot of things. Well, that’s been one area I kind of looked at. That’s how I wound up at Marketing Sherpa and just finding people like you. It’s just that I’ve been able to find smart people and learn from them, stay friends, and it’s been helpful.
Danny Gavin Host
08:51
So let’s dive into two of your most influential mentors. One is Jocko Willink and Marcus Sheridan. I’d love to talk more about them and why they’re inspirational to you.
Dan Briscoe Guest
08:59
Yes, Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL. Most people have seen him. There’s some that haven’t been taught. The first book was Extreme Ownership. It’s just leadership. I was in the Marine Corps. I thought I learned leadership. I was taught good leadership, but sometimes the application wasn’t as good. Just lessons learned from him. We’ve used him at some of our conferences now. I’ve heard him speak a hundred times. I learn something every time. I do.
09:28
You know, just, even he started with kind of the joint command there in Ramadi and how he walked in and he’s got. You know he’s a Navy SEAL. He looks very, you know, he looks impressive and intimidating and he has a black belt in jiu-jitsu. Like he could. He could wrestle anybody there. But he went in with a very humble approach and did some things that most military guys hate. Like, oh, we have to do these after-action reports after every operation. Well, nobody likes paperwork. It’s like what do you mean? This is life and death. I don’t have time for paperwork. But he just had a very humble approach and said this is probably necessary. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it really well. That earned him a lot of friends and influence.
10:08
And so, as I looked through one of my last jobs. I’m like okay, I argued a lot with the leaders and I thought I was right and justified and they were dumb and then realized all I did was cost me my influence with them, and sometimes it’s a bit of a play in the game. Sometimes you don’t have the context to know why they’re making the decisions, and so just get a big dose of humility, keep your influence. Just learning a little bit more advanced tips on leadership from him, it makes sense. Now, as I’ve been a leader at a company, I kind of also see it as okay, sometimes I’m screwing up and I need people to give me a little grace.
10:49
Sometimes I’m making decisions that are really good, but people don’t have context and they can’t see it, and so I get to see it from the other perspective and then I can look back on my own career and like, oh man, I should have taken a whole different approach to that. So I think he’s one that I’ve really learned leadership from. I’ve seen him talk about current events and his take on whether it’s politics or some incidents that happened. I think he has a really kind of refreshing take. He’s not very political, but just the way he approaches himself, and it’s almost always pointed back to what can I do, what can I control, what could I have done differently, and a huge dosage of humility. And then his team is like that. I’ve worked with his team in Echelon Front. They all are fantastic leaders. They’re a great group to work with.
Danny Gavin Host
11:36
You can tell they not only talk the talk but they walk the walk, and so that’s been a fun one that context points out that you bring just a lot of people not knowing the context and therefore it’s easy to judge. I feel like that. When I was on the inside of BuildWit a couple of years back, when we were working together, it seemed to me that you and Aaron in general were very much into giving people context and trying to be as transparent as possible. So do you think that comes from that? It feels like that’s one of the core values that you guys kind of hold.
Dan Briscoe Guest
12:04
Yeah, you know, when we started, Aaron was 22 or 23 and he read a lot and I think Jocko and Extreme Ownership was one of them. He’ll say it’s one of the three books that really he reads three books pretty much a week now or every few weeks, but that’s one that kind of influenced him early on. It did me as well, and so we’ve tried to embrace those. It’s not always easy, but I do think I left wanting to create a company that was very transparent. Aaron already wanted to be like that and so we matched up on some of those things. I used to, you know, follow SEO Moz, I know you know, and Rand Fishkin, and Transparency was one of his tag feeds, you know, if you remember, back in the day that was, I was. It was always cool kind of listening to how he was transparent about that company, and so I brought those desires to build with. Although Aaron really led them, I just supported them but we matched up well on those.
Danny Gavin Host
13:03
Let’s talk about.
Dan Briscoe Guest
13:03
Marcus Sheridan a bit as well. You know, you and I could talk to marketing mentors for a couple of days. Marcus is one of those. That’s just kind of tried and true and his methods are very simple. He wrote the book they Ask you Answer. You know, had the second version and I think he had the third version come out in April with endless customers.
13:23
But just a good guy, very simple. But he helped me at the last company, at HSS, and I saw him speak a number of times. Then we created our own leadership platform. We hired him to do some content with Jocko. It was funny that those are the first two. He crushed it.
13:41
We’ve stayed friends, kind of like you and I have, and kind of expanded our relationship and so just very impressed. He came and did some training for us in January and I’m pretty sure it was new for him, but it was communication training training, but they bought sales training. But we brought our executive team in, we brought our head of people, we brought in some different groups and he taught everybody. It was probably the best day of training I’ve had in my life and so it’s so good. He’s really masterful at conveying simple concepts and so he’s become a good friend trying to help bring his teaching to the dirt world, so got him in on some different things. So, yeah, those are the two. I think the difference between them is they just keep the concepts pretty simple and they just apply in so many situations, whether it’s personal life or the communication techniques I learned helped me with my family and things. So it’s just simple concepts executed well.
Danny Gavin Host
14:45
So you’ve shared that you wouldn’t really consider yourself a mentor in the formal sense of the word, but you do coach within your organization. Can you speak to the coaching relationship you have with the three other people on your marketing team?
Dan Briscoe Guest
14:56
This is a very different marketing team. I didn’t create it. I kind of had every role at BuildWit. I kept firing myself as we found smarter people to do it. I kind of had every role at BuildWit. I kept firing myself as we found smarter people to do it, but spent the last few years as president really helping with marketing a little bit. But now we had a very different organization and it was doing a lot of things I didn’t quite understand and so, as I would go in and listen, I didn’t quite get it and so I just kind of stayed out and listened. We’ve rebuilt the team. They’re very, very smart. Not that the old team’s smart, it’s just I kind of recognize this group and recognize what we’re doing. We’ve simplified.
15:36
It was tough doing marketing for a company that’s making money six different ways and from a service base to a product base to an influencer, so it was a tough base from a product base to an influencer. So it was. It was a tough thing for the past teams to do. Now, as we’ve become very simple, these three marketers really get it. They’re smarter than I am in almost all their areas, whether it’s, you know, brand and design to copywriting and hubspot and automation stuff. So I do help mentor. I just have more experience than all of them in sales and so just, hey, how will this apply? How will this work with the sales team? And then how do we? We really simplify. Is everything needed? You know there’s a ton of acronyms and marketing that we throw around. Are all those essential? I’ve never been in a company where cash flow is so important and vital. Like you know, are we going to make payroll this month, type of approach, and we’ve been there for a couple of years. We had investors and you know we invested their money. So we were burning cash. We’re going to be profitable this year, but we’re right on the edge. But every dollar matters and so everything we do in marketing matters when before, much larger companies had the. I just had to ask for things, we would experiment and things would pay off long-term. But it wasn’t like, hey, I need this thing to work to make payroll next month. That can help you really prioritize things. Okay, we want to do this thing in marketing. It’s going to be really good, but we can do that in three months. Let’s do this thing that’s going to drive revenue next month, but no, if we sacrifice the long term like we’ll never build. So it’s just been trying to help them prioritize and see what’s going to be most helpful and then learning from them.
17:21
Marketing changes all the time, so you know, I was really out of it for three or four years. There was no AI. Back when I was, you know, just a few years ago, there wasn’t. So that’s completely changed. There’s, you know, there’s new tools that are available. Content strategy has, you know, a bit of a different take. Seo is different and it’s constantly evolving. So I have to try and forget what I knew and keep up, and you know. So I’m back now trying to learn, but some things never change. Like the best copywriting books are from the 20s, you know, like 1920s, and so those concepts were. I can’t help mentor you.
Danny Gavin Host
18:00
So shifting from president to CMO now, like does that excite you, because obviously a lot of your background is in marketing. So like, getting back to this, is there sort of like a rebirth, is it like a new excitement, or is it just like moving on to the next thing?
Dan Briscoe Guest
18:13
No, even our new CEO said man, the spark is back and it’s. I didn’t really know. I think it was just this. I was learning to be president. You know, I think another few years I would have had it kind of mastered. I’d be really good. Our new CEO has tons of experience and so just having him in there and able to move faster, he’s kind of, you know, like slipping on a good pair of work boots that you’ve kind of broken in. It’s been the same for marketing for me. So I’m back where I’ve had some success. I know what I’m doing. I’ve got a really smart team. I’ve got a ton of things going well for us. Like I’ve never had an influencer that reaches as many people or a big event that drives. So I’m playing poker with a loaded hand. It’s a lot of fun, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to learn and experiment with, and so I think I’m a new person.
Danny Gavin Host
19:03
Very exciting and I’m excited for you. That is really really cool. So how do you foster collaboration among team members with different areas of expertise to ensure a cohesive marketing strategy?
Dan Briscoe Guest
19:12
I think that’s probably another strength of just getting the marketing team to collaborate with each other and share and share in the wins and not get into silos. We can’t have silos on a four person team. So I, you know, I think we’ve learned it was one of the HubSpot engineers said the perfect size team is one that can share a pizza, and so I think we almost have that. We can move so fast. You know Agile we’ve done that in the past and standups and stuff but with four people you don’t have to have as many systems to collaborate. You can just move faster and do things.
19:47
The real thing I’ve worked on is everybody contributes to marketing Like everybody’s in sales in a company and everybody contributes to marketing. We all consume marketing and so we have ideas about it. Sometimes I’ve been on teams where it’s like, hey, nobody else knows what they’re doing, stay out of our yard. Like we’re going to do this, we’ll let you in later on, and in some ways we’ve operated like that, sometimes for good reason. Our CEO, you know, he reaches tons of people and he has ideas about how we should reach people. We’ve had some difficulties but we’ve kind of broken down those silos. I’ve always tried to break down the silo between sales and marketing, having more of a sales background, so I went into marketing to sit in on sales demos and sales training and sales to give input, but here at BuildWet it’s.
20:41
You know, how do we, how do we collaborate with CS, how do we collaborate with the product team and the product managers and where they’re going, how do we add value? Really dropping the ego. Have some humility. If somebody has a good idea about marketing, I don’t care where it is. Like, let’s listen to it, share credit. Hey, they helped us do this. We got to make the call, so we can’t have 50 people waiting on clouds. You know everybody to agree, but, but we can get a lot of feedback from other people and so just breaking down silos, letting everybody win when marketing wins hey, this drove leads and we put deal wins and leads and things right into slack channel so everybody can celebrate when we we get some of those things. I want to do even more with dashboards and showing where MQLs are and that’s where you know what pieces of content drove what and who helps. So I think all that dropping the ego, you know being collaborative, I think that’s key.
Danny Gavin Host
21:36
Yeah, and I think also key is you basically practice what you preach right. So you’re someone who says I may not be the biggest expert, but I am someone who’s got a lot of experience and I have a lot of foresight.
Dan Briscoe Guest
21:46
So you’re open to hearing other people and I imagine that just by leading in that way, people are going to pick up from that perspective, as well, and the team I have now, the team that I get to work with they’re naturally there, so it’s not like I had to really mentor them. They don’t have a lot of ego, they’re very collaborative and in some cases we kind of search till we found the right group, and so yeah, and I think that’s a good point for people.
Danny Gavin Host
22:14
Just in general, build what’s been around now for a good couple of years and it’s. You know, every organization goes through changes and sometimes you realize, like you know, the person who’s in the spot might not be the right one and we have to find someone else and move to the next thing. So it’s a process and it takes time. So it’s people and what we do. You know we didn’t really mention this yet, but you know, recently BuildWit, you know they had a very big division that they sold off right, and that’s a big change as well. So well, so it’s cool how, like you’re constantly, you know, iterating the process and seeing what to do, because I think that that’s how you find success. You know, these days, most people they’re like, okay, you know, you get there, you know I graduate and suddenly now I’ve got this crazy company right. But no, you gotta. Sometimes it takes a little bit of discovery.
Dan Briscoe Guest
22:56
Yeah, and you know, sometimes it was just we were trying to figure out our direction as a company, and so we built a creative agency that worked really well and it was great for our company, and then realized, hey, we’re kind of both outgrowing each other and it’s hard to do both well. And so we spun that off and did that. We built a really big internal marketing team, you know, and I hired a good friend, somebody I’d worked with in the past, and said you know, build a team that will build a rocket ship like we have. We have tons of investment, we’re going to go here, and and he, so he did exactly that and so and that was about you were part of this and then realized, hey, we’re not going as quite as fast as we thought and we were burning way too much cash and it wasn’t a really good business model and the market kind of shifted, investment dollars dried up and this is going to. You know, it wasn’t like we were failing, but it’s going to take us a year or two more to really grind it out. We’re kind of pioneering an approach for our industry and so it would have been smarter to do a different business model.
24:00
So we had to make changes and we had a 25-person internal team and a whole 25-person creative agency and they didn’t necessarily overlap or get along that well, and so we had to kind of figure out, hey, where are we going to go? So we made a bunch of iterations, now winding up with no creative agency; they’re spun off on their own in a four-person internal team. You can kind of imagine some of the changes. And it was painful. It wasn’t much failure of the people, it’s just failure of here’s the right direction we need to go. But now we have product market fit, we’ve gotten profitable, we’ve done some really good things in the past that are going to help us in the future. We’re at a good point. We’re hopefully straight up from here.
Danny Gavin Host
24:49
So let’s take a little time to talk about influencing in this space and your experience working alongside your former CEO. Now he’s the founder, Aaron Witt. So how is working alongside Aaron, who’s a prominent influencer for those who don’t know in the dirt world? How has that shaped the culture and direction? I guess BuildWit in general, but marketing more specifically?
Dan Briscoe Guest
25:03
Yeah, I’m really spoiled. I don’t know that I could ever go to a company without a founder. That’s a big influencer. It makes every conversation a warm conversation. It’s so helpful and in fact, it’s one of the reasons why he stepped down as CEO. He was a very good CEO, but his superpower is in reaching our industry. He’s in Japan right now. You know, a company paid him to come out to shoot photography and he’ll have vlogs and things that are interesting to our industry from Japan because people don’t get to see it.
25:39
But I kind of recognized the value early on and got along with them really well as we were leading the company. We actually got along too well. I should have pushed back or I should have been smart enough to push back in some areas. He should have been smart enough to push back on me. We tried a bunch of things that maybe didn’t work out. So when we added on to the senior leadership team and got some different perspectives, we started to make even smarter decisions. That was helpful. But he and I have had a good partnership building this from the beginning.
26:10
As he steps more into this, he hates the word influencer, but anyway, we know what he does. He goes around and tells stories and lots of people follow him. But collaborating between him and marketing is going to be a lot of fun. Stories and lots of people follow him, but collaborating between him and marketing is going to be a lot of fun. And so how do we?
26:24
It’s very top of the funnel and it’s building trust for our company and our brand, but we want to be very careful of how we move some of those people down the funnel so that we don’t alienate his brand and do the wrong things. He doesn’t like to take a lot of corporate dollars and doesn’t like to take a lot of corporate dollars and doesn’t like to do a lot of selling. He’s actually very good at selling, but wants to do more storytelling than that. So it’s just collaborating with him, leveraging him as an important channel. It’s not our only channel, but it’s a very important one. We didn’t always treat it as important in the past, and so he and I are collaborating very well.
Danny Gavin Host
27:05
So, along the same lines, you recently posed a question on LinkedIn: what’s more important: the company’s social accounts or our personal ones? For our listeners, could you expand on your answer to this?
Dan Briscoe Guest
27:16
We started a creative agency early on and Aaron was Aaron when he started and people paid him to shoot photos and then post those on their social accounts. And when it was five companies he could actually do it pretty well. He would travel to each one of them almost every month. He got to know all the senior leaders. He was on most of their projects, he could follow them over time and then he was good on social media so he could do it. As we started to grow, he actually hated doing people’s social media because it wasn’t done well and so you know he’s not there, he couldn’t see it. And so as BuildWit started to grow and expand I mean early on, Aaron did all the BuildWit social media. But as he got busier and you know, we started to do our own channels and he hated our social media because it was just that it didn’t have the right voice. It was people, not from the industry.
28:14
There were several times where he shut it down and so we’ve kind of realized, you know, I’ve followed mentors, some of those like you have, like Abhinash Kaushik at Google, who said, hey, organic social is really tough for a company to do, you’d be better off doing paid social and individual accounts and things like that. So I’ve kind of followed mentors like that. I had that feeling, but I’ve also seen it. We’ve worked with a number of our clients and we had to do their company accounts because they just absolutely said we’re going to pay you to do it and it was boring. And then when the few where the CEO would post it would, they would get much, much more engagement and it was much better. And so, and then watching Aaron, I’ve been able to have a front row seat watching Aaron post and our company posts and the engagement. And just so you know, I just made the statement that personal accounts are much more important. They have much higher engagement.
29:15
It’s not that you don’t need to have a company social account. There’s some good use cases. There’s some that have done it very well. It’s very different. If you could only do one, I would do personal accounts. Like we probably have 10 of the 50 people at BuildWet posting pretty routinely. Those 10 people get a lot more engagement than the main channels. So I even want to grow that to 20 to 30 people posting routinely. And then we’ll also do our corporate accounts. We’ll do some very different things with our corporate accounts.
Danny Gavin Host
29:49
And I want everyone to know that Dan is very humble because he is a pretty good poster himself. The content that he puts out does get good reach and in general has really good engagement.
Dan Briscoe Guest
29:58
So I didn’t do a lot of that before Buildba. And then you know, obviously I’m following Aaron and learning and Aaron teaches social media to executives. So I’ve heard his class maybe 10 times and it’s been just fun. I’ve followed other good people like you and Marcus and others that post, and so just trying to get my thoughts out cohesive and try to be succinct in different areas and then realizing, hey, I’m preaching for this post and it got 1,500 views. And then I write about chickens and it gets 30,500 views. And then I write about chickens and it gets 30,000 or 100,000.
30:34
I’m like so there’s again, you have business things that you wanna do, but what people are interested in and how to be interesting and helpful and there’s ways to be helpful that aren’t preaching and so just learning. That has been a good experience, but I’d say the best thing is that what Aaron teaches is just consistency. Just give it a try. The more I post every day, the more I learn and the better I get at it. So it’s been fun and then that helps the rest of everything I do at the company. It’s like oh, I know this is going to be boring because I’ve posted about that for 20 times. It had zero engagement and people just didn’t care.
Danny Gavin Host
31:14
I mean, I often speak to people and like, what do I post about? Oh my gosh, what do I do? What I do, and I think Dan is a good example of someone who ‘s just like him, like what he’s going through in life. It usually ties into business, but it doesn’t always, and it’s cool. Like I am, I am and it’s cool. I’m a huge fan, dan, of your posts because I just think it’s yeah, it’s just so real but it’s so insightful. You’re not afraid to talk about some things that I know, like myself. I don’t know if I would mention that, so it also gives me strength to be a little bit more open. So it’s cool. I definitely want to give you kudos and people should follow you.
Dan Briscoe Guest
31:49
No, I appreciate that. I learned from Aaron. He was transparent, he suffers from anxiety and has counseling, but he shared that and we ran out of money one time at 11 o’clock at night and he couldn’t get a rental car and he posted about that. Or he flipped a skid steer and he posted about that, or he flipped a skid steer, and so I was able to watch him and learn and see how much it endeared people to him because he shared some of these things.
32:20
And so you don’t want to always go out sharing all your dirty laundry, but just being real. And so, yeah, they kid, now On Slack they’ll post something new and they’ll wait, wait, wait, wait. Dan, you’re not allowed to post this like it’s uh, they’re they, uh, I think I have uh people. They kind of joke that as soon as they release something I’ll have it on linkedin later that day. But I do try. One of the things I learned early on is that I’m not that interesting of a person. I have some chickens and a property. Put that in a lot of kids. So occasionally I do that. But the behind the scenes of our company is what was my most engaging. One of the posts that blew up is just hey, we have unlimited PTO. I didn’t have anything to post that day and I just saw a message and I’m like, okay, boom, I took like 10 seconds. We have an unlimited PTO and it has like half a million views.
Danny Gavin Host
33:13
And
Dan Briscoe Guest
33:13
I’m like a holy cow. It’s just the fun workings of a startup, given that behind the scenes is kind of fun and I’m, you know, I’m front and center to that, so I can share it.
Danny Gavin Host
33:23
So that’s the kind of stuff I’ve learned. So, moving from more like a marketing agency now to doing marketing for a company, what do you think you’re going to miss about the agency sort of model and coming over here?
Dan Briscoe Guest
33:36
Not a lot. Agencies are tough. I mean, you know it, you’ve been doing it and I will say I had a lot of good friends and get to work with a lot of companies and really help solve some issues and see them go. But it’s tough though. You know you do a really good job with a company for two years and you develop this deep friendship and then they kind of look at you and you come back with the third year proposal and they’re like I don’t really need this anymore. And you’re like, yeah, you really don’t. Like you know it doesn’t really fit and so you kind of have to.
34:12
You know a lot of good service companies. The last thing you do is work yourself out of a job if you do such a good job, and so that part I didn’t really miss. I’d rather with, like the Dirt World Summit, people can come back every year. We can kind of have this relationship. So a lot of good things. It’s hard work, it’s not always high margin and people are always complaining about the price but you’re like you don’t have any idea what really goes into this, whereas software it’s much higher margin. You can do the work once. You can sell it multiple times. It’s a little bit easier and so I enjoy being at it, but I much prefer being an internal marketing team, kind of helping build a company.
Danny Gavin Host
34:54
Yeah, you’re not sad to wave goodbye.
Dan Briscoe Guest
34:56
But, that being said, I’m also a big buyer of agencies. Now, like I don’t want to, I can grow back to a 25-person team. I’d rather keep a four-person team that really knows what they’re doing, that we communicate well and we just outsource a few things to other people. We can be smart about it.
Danny Gavin Host
35:16
I know Rand Fishkin right now with his company. He’s really big into leveraging agencies but also having a small team, so I know it’s definitely popular Cool. So let’s go to our lightning round Love to talk about. So number one books Any interesting books that you’ve read recently that you want to share.
Dan Briscoe Guest
35:35
I’m at this point where I’ve had probably like 20 books referred to me and I’ve bought them all and so I have a whole thing. There’s one I did a pre-read. Dan Heath has a book called Reset. So I had never heard of Dan Heath. He’s on about his sixth book. He actually did a podcast on all six books but Reset kind of brought it all together for him and it’s probably my top five business book just on.
36:02
Hey, you’ve got a complex problem. How do you go about solving it? Getting unstuck, how to move resources, getting unstuck, how to move resources. So I couldn’t recommend it enough. It’s one that I keep on my desk and kind of bookmark, refer to others and even just simple concepts. So Dan Heath just came out a few weeks ago. I’ve had it for four months because we were going to hire him as a speaker, so they sent me a pre-read. But the book Reset I highly recommend. I’ve got Jesse Coles. He’s coming in as a keynote speaker, so Savannah Bananas. And how do we generate a lot of interest in marketing, Not just the lead gen and the funnel and that, but how do we create a ton of interest in our industry and fun. We have Lighten Up as one of our values. So I really want to dig into that whole side, like how can we be more fun, more entertaining and let that be our marketing?
Danny Gavin Host
36:59
so I’m trying to get better at that yeah, I think that was such a smart connection that you made. Like the founder of savannah bananas, bring him into the dirt world, like that was. That was really really smart. It’s a cool favorite place to visit or where you’ve been in the past that you really really liked.
Dan Briscoe Guest
37:13
I went to high school in Northern Arkansas and so we took a family vacation up there. So two big lakes, we have a, we rent a house right on the lake with a boat and we wait till school goes back in in late August, and so we’re the only ones on the lake, but it’s a, it’s magic. And so we’re the only ones on the light, but it’s uh, it’s magic. I don’t want to tell anybody where it is, but uh. But no, it’s northern Arkansas, around the mountain home area, and it’s , uh, really our favorite place on the earth. I love it.
Danny Gavin Host
37:41
So, Dan, where can listeners learn more about you and bill it?
Dan Briscoe Guest
37:44
bill, it’s just bill wetcom, so it’s been old. In the wittcom, aaron Wett is the founder and really the big follower does all the content. It’s very, very interesting. I only post on LinkedIn. I’m not very good at Instagram and don’t have X or anything, but I do post almost every day on LinkedIn. I like to engage with people there. So just Dan Briscoe on LinkedIn is how you can reach me personally or any lead that comes through the website I see. So it’s pretty easy to get in touch with me, or just dan at billwittcom.
Danny Gavin Host
38:18
Well, dan, thank you so much for being a guest on the Digital Marketing Mentor. It’s really special to have you here today and thank you, listeners, for tuning into the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor. We’ll speak with you next time.