Elizabeth Shea (00:43)
Hello everybody and welcome to Branching Out. Today we have a great guest in our office, Chris Mechanic. Hello Chris, how are you today?
Chris Mechanic (00:50)
Elizabeth, I'm doing great. How are you?
Elizabeth Shea (00:53)
I'm doing great. It's so good to see you. It's been many years since we actually hung out like this, but I've known you a long time. So appreciate the long time and such.
Chris Mechanic (01:00)
In real life, yeah, real life.
Elizabeth Shea (01:04)
Chris comes to us as the former CEO and co-founder of Web Mechanics.
one of the best digital agencies here in town. Not that I'm biased, but really good solid firm. And he just exited in 2024. So we're really excited to hear more about your story. And I appreciate you spending the time with us today.
Chris Mechanic (01:19)
Yeah.
100 % Elizabeth. You know, ⁓ I remember when we met, I don't know if you remember, but it was in our earliest days of Web Mechanics. We were probably, less than 10 people
Chris Mechanic (01:32)
And I said, Hey, look, you know, we're sort of new here. We need to make some intros and some connections and, can we be friends basically? And you were so gracious. You were just like, of course. And at that point you were very well established at, know, REQ and you knew everybody and stuff. and you actually sent us a couple of leads back in those days. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you for that.
Elizabeth Shea (01:40)
I'm sure I did. Yeah. You have a great reputation.
Chris Mechanic (01:58)
so I'm so happy to be here. What was your question? You want me to just give you the?
Elizabeth Shea (02:01)
Yeah, just tell us, just to start with your story.
Wanna hear how you got started, what went into your decision to sell at some point, you know, just tell us your story. Okay.
Chris Mechanic (02:09)
I'll tell you all about it. Well,
it all started in college when I had a buddy who had set up this website and was somehow making a hundred or two hundred dollars a day from people going to that website and clicking on ads.
So I've always been sort of entrepreneurial, you know, in nature. was kind of the kid who would buy boxes of candy and sell them individually at school type of thing, had a number of little hustles like that. as, as the.com days were really hitting full throttle and people were starting to make money, I became obsessed with it and I just dove in and I bought courses and everything and spent some money and ended up setting up this website, this like niche website about a random topic.
Elizabeth Shea (02:33)
No.
Chris Mechanic (02:53)
and started creating content and articles and was following this program and I remember checking the analytics, this was before Google Analytics even existed, so it was more like server log type analytics and I had published about 10 articles so far and to my amazement, there was 472 visits showing.
Elizabeth Shea (03:04)
Hmm.
Chris Mechanic (03:16)
from like, you know, 398 visitors and you could see where they're coming from, their geographies, you could see what they were typing into Google and which pages they were looking at and how long they were spending on each page and I was like, what? So that was my hope. I was like, dude, this is what I'm doing. And prior to that, I was sort of entrepreneurial but I wasn't by any means voted most likely to succeed. I was like average student.
Elizabeth Shea (03:30)
Yeah.
Chris Mechanic (03:44)
My first job out of school was selling mortgages before the South Bronx bubble burst.
Nobody really expected much of me, I guess. So I started this website, I became obsessed with it. I was working at T. Rowe Price, which is actually a good job. Like it's a good company, great benefits, everything. And I spontaneously quit one day because all I could do was think about this website and how I could grow it and...
I was working the night shift, which was like 12 to nine. So in the mornings I would be working on that website joyously and then painfully I would drive to work every day. So one day I just had enough and I just rage quit. I was still living with my dad at the time. So he's like, what, what did he's Persian. he's like.
Elizabeth Shea (04:23)
that's amazing.
Chris Mechanic (04:31)
What the heck are you thinking? You have a good job. You need to climb the corporate ladder, in the work, and you get promoted. And you become the vice president. You want to go off and do this website thing and just write articles all day? What are you thinking? Mortez's son is a doctor. He's only two years old and he's a doctor. He just bought a mansion, you know?
Elizabeth Shea (04:54)
Okay.
Okay,
gotta tell the story well.
Chris Mechanic (05:03)
And so I'm like, but I'm fixed. I'm like, sorry, dad.
but he's not happy. So I'm still living in his house. And during the day, I'm working, working, working on this website, self doubt, left and right. Cause like, yeah, the traffic's growing. But when I try to start monetizing it, it like wasn't gangbusters immediately. know, it was, very entrepreneurial. Like in the early days, there's that roller coaster. There's, know, day one, you are.
depths of depression. Day two, you're like, hi. Day three, you know, it was very much like that. And at night I was working as a server at the Cheesecake Factory. And one night, I get a table and it's a family and that the...
dad, the guy, starts kind of taking an interest in me. He's like, hey, what are you doing with your life? Like, what's your plan? And I just lit up like a light bulb and I was like, oh dude, I started a website. I'm writing articles. I figured I had to get free traffic from Google. I'm doing an email database. I'm selling other people's products in an affiliate. I'm working on my own product. Like, this is about to be gangbusters. It's so cool and fun. And he's like, well, I own a digital agency called R2I here in town and like,
So come in for an interview. I was like, all right. Yeah, it was Chris Jotnicki. He turned me on. So he comes. I go to the agency. I interview with them. I guess they're impressed. They gave me a little task. Little assignment. did it. They liked it. So they hired me. 20 bucks an hour. I was a contractor. 20 bucks an hour. So I was like, OK, cool. This is fun. Better than Cheesecake Factory, anyway, right?
Elizabeth Shea (06:22)
or two, I remember them well.
Right?
Chris Mechanic (06:44)
So I go in there and what I see is this energetic environment with all these young people doing exactly what I was doing, know, building web pages and R2I at that point was just building out their digital marketing offering. So I was their second digital marketing employee. was me and this dude, Paige, who was kind of a mentor. But the very first day I went in there, I remember I opened up my laptop, I started working, I was looking around and I was...
It was fun. I was having fun and it was at that moment. I was like I can do this and we were talking to the clients and the clients at that point They were paying like six seven ten thousand bucks a month and you know We knew that and they were spending thirty grand a month fifty grand a month
Elizabeth Shea (07:16)
I'm
Chris Mechanic (07:30)
And I'm telling them these things and how the search engine algorithms work. So I'm like, OK, this is great. So I stayed at R2I for a year or two and really learned the agency business before getting the itch, of course, ⁓ and deciding to start web mechanics. And my thing was SEO. So there's a lot of different branches of digital marketing. I'm an SEO guy.
That's where I started anyway. So I set out and I said, I'm gonna start a shop. All I need is like five clients that pay a thousand bucks a month each. And I'm making way more than 20 bucks an hour. And I don't even have to work. If it's just five clients, I could work three days a week and that'd be great. what I decided to do. And it just so happened that my cousin, who had kind of been my partner in crime throughout all of our...
adolescent hustles, when I was selling candy bars or selling gold plated jewelry or whatever. He had his own little side hustles too. We worked in college. We worked together at a startup. One of my buddies started this recruiting firm that we worked at a couple summers and he was a tech guy, And so.
Elizabeth Shea (08:24)
No.
Chris Mechanic (08:40)
Before I started the agency, when I had that website, when something would break or when I couldn't figure something out, he was my guy. I called him and he would help me fix it. So I told him about this idea and I'm like, yo, I want you to start it with me. want you to be an equity partner. And I was thinking like maybe 20, 80, 20 or 70, 30 maybe kind of things. And so was my idea and my brainchild.
So he's like, yo, I'm all about it, but give me 50%. You know, let's be partners. And I thought about it for not even probably a minute, but I was just like, all right, cool, let's do it. So that turned out being a great decision because he was an amazing partner.
still is actually, he's a partner in the new business as well. Perfect yin to my yang, like I'm like a hundred ideas a minute and like, wouldn't it be cool if, and he's like, how's it actually gonna work? How's it gonna break? What are the pieces that you're missing? We started out just the two of us. Our goal now was to get 10 clients so that each of us could make five grand a month.
And we did that within six months. One of our buddies was in the advertising space. He turned us on to the first few clients. We killed it for them. They told their friends about it. Word just started spreading. And funny enough, so my new business, Mecca AI, focuses on contractors, home services. Funny enough, our very first like 10 clients in the earliest days of Web Mechanics, guess who they were?
Elizabeth Shea (09:56)
everyone.
⁓
Chris Mechanic (10:10)
you know, little men
Elizabeth Shea (10:11)
huh. These companies.
Chris Mechanic (10:12)
pop, you know, one to five million type home services. So that's where, those first two years is really where we got like a master's degree in home services, just the business as well as marketing. So we grew and somehow stumbled into a new niche, which was SaaS. So like software, a lot of B2B software. that became our new niche for a while.
And we still had some home services clients. Like we were doing a lot of work with Wynn donation, you know, probably like a quarter million bucks a month or so on ads that we were managing. So we had some some larger home services clients and some financial service clients. But generally it was a. Well, I should say there was an inflection point where we had hit our goal. We were probably doing 15 grand a month.
Elizabeth Shea (10:41)
Okay, okay.
Chris Mechanic (11:02)
And we were very busy working a lot and it was either, like, let's stop here and just like enjoy this or let's just keep, let's keep going. And we decided to keep going because it was, it was fun and there was a lot of money to be made. So we start hiring interns, interns turn into our first full timers, first full time turned into our first managers, and we really grew it very organically, very homegrown,
we grew a great business. Long story short, we had like a 23 % annual CAGR for 15 years.
Elizabeth Shea (11:35)
Wow.
I'd like to hear how you educated yourself into the process of actually exiting in 2024, which is what size company were you, how did you educate yourself, and to whom did you sell?
Chris Mechanic (11:51)
So we witnessed a lot of &A activity just in the course of clients being bought and sold really. we had some familiarity with how it worked and what multiples were and what earnouts are. Like we sort of knew the basics. We never sat down and said, we're ready to sell. Let's go to market.
It actually happened that we reached out to a broker because we wanted to buy a small analytics shop. So we wanted have like a little tuck in acquisition, maybe five to 10 people that were just really, really deep into statistical modeling and.
Elizabeth Shea (12:17)
Hmm.
sense.
Chris Mechanic (12:27)
predictive analytics to really upgrade our analytics jobs. as we're searching around with that broker, they're like, Hey, I know you're looking to buy, but there's somebody that is looking for, an agency just like yours and So we enter in a combo and it went kind of well, actually. we liked them as people and we started, talking a little bit. They came out and,
their CEO spent a day with us and They took us out to lunch and gave us the pro forma or like the short version of the offer. And we were like, okay, we get it, but it wasn't an exciting number really for us. And we kind of just went dark on them. we kind of just like disappeared for a little while and went dark on them because like I said, we weren't really on the market necessarily to sell.
Elizabeth Shea (12:55)
Sure, otherwise.
Chris Mechanic (13:13)
But at the same time, we had been in that business for a long time. It had grown. Like I was outside of my comfort zone the whole time, right? Like every single day was new frontier for me because my only experience before that was T. Rowe Prize in the Cheesecake Factory, you know?
Elizabeth Shea (13:22)
Mm-hmm, right.
Right.
Chris Mechanic (13:33)
So like
10 employees, like one employee was new, two employees was new, three employees, every single employee that we added was just like net new.
Elizabeth Shea (13:40)
grow and scale. It's a lot of work.
Chris Mechanic (13:44)
You know, as it happens with law of large numbers every single year, like it's easy to double digits, triple digits in the early years, but you do 10 million in revenue. It's like, you got to come back the next year and do that all over again. Plus some, right? So it just got harder and harder every year. the entire time I was outside of my comfort zone, I would say.
And we knew that we were going to sell it at some point. And we thought about the prospects and what we would want to do it. And also, there's been people that have told us things to the tune of, hey, if somebody wants to buy your business, talk to them. Always talk to them.
Elizabeth Shea (14:27)
Mm-hmm,
Chris Mechanic (14:28)
So we were entertaining the idea, but the number wasn't exciting. And so we kind of just like let it fizzle. But then a few months later, they reached back out and they were like, hey guys, like, let's just cut to the chase. What's your number? and we had a number, but we also had terms that we wanted. So we told them the number, and some of the key terms that we wouldn't budge on.
Elizabeth Shea (14:45)
Right, right, it's so important.
Chris Mechanic (14:54)
And they were like, okay, done. Let's do it. And then we were like, all right, I guess we're doing this.
Elizabeth Shea (15:00)
So
did you work with a broker during that time or was it just a direct deal?
Chris Mechanic (15:07)
No, by a very random stroke of
We got linked up with this dude, Daniel, Daniel Street, who was a godsend for us. He saved our asses in some key areas, and he got us an extra probably And he himself is a wealthy guy. He kind of just had a few consulting clients for fun. By the grace of God, I was introduced to him. And then...
He liked me, somehow. He liked something about me. He hooked us up.
Elizabeth Shea (15:40)
So I know Daniel Street. worked with us. He worked with our private equity firm that owned our EQ. ⁓ it's amazing. Yeah. What a small world. I did not know that story. There you go. ⁓
Chris Mechanic (15:46)
He's so cool. I love.
Yeah. So I don't know what your users or listeners might be able to take from that because it was just such a random stroke of luck. Maybe just call Daniel Street is the answer. But he also like, knows the agency space really well, which is part of the reason that he was so valuable to us.
Elizabeth Shea (16:02)
Right.
Yeah,
I think it is important to have an advisor, have a coach, have somebody that helps walk you through the process because it's an emotional process that you go through and an emotional decision. So can you talk about what it felt like afterwards then? Like fast forward to you've popped some champagne, you've made it happen. Did you stay around? Did you exit shortly thereafter? What was your plan to change?
Chris Mechanic (16:31)
The plan was
to stay. So we were all revved up, we were all juiced up. Our mantra was 20 % keggers, baby. We were hot and heavy, ready to go.
And they wanted me and so at Web Mechanics, my role had primarily morphed into like sales and marketing. I still did some account work. I was the shit guy on a few clients, but mostly I was doing sales and marketing. So they were like, perfect. You can be the chief revenue officer. So I'm like, OK, cool. Well, I don't know what the chief revenue officer even does. like I can I can pitch a deal, but like whatever. And they're like, you'll learn. It'll be great.
So we go in there and what I learned is that chief revenue officers do a lot of forecasting apparently and spreadsheet work and policy stuff and process stuff. And it was not my zone of genius. It was far from my zone of genius. I was like dying every day in that role. And I was just like, I was like, dude, ⁓
Elizabeth Shea (17:36)
I feel like I'm looking in the mirror. I went through the same thing. ⁓ That's great.
⁓
Chris Mechanic (17:42)
I'm a zero to one guy. That's what I learned
about myself. And once it comes time to do the scaling and those other types of activity and more structure and planning and things are required, I need to find somebody else to handle that part.
Elizabeth Shea (17:53)
you
Right.
Yep. It's so interesting. just did a podcast where the guy said he's not a zero to one guy. He's a one to 10 guy. So, you know, there's a reason out there for people of different, different skill sets and different desires and different.
Chris Mechanic (18:04)
Yeah.
And it's dangerous
when you get those two types of people together, you know?
Elizabeth Shea (18:13)
Right, right.
In a good way, probably, right? yes, absolutely. Yep. Right. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. No, we have a lot of clients that are adopting a system or a framework like that, which is very important also just to be prepared. So fast forward again, then. So from the standpoint of, you're starting a new business now. Tell me about that and what made you...
Chris Mechanic (18:16)
Yeah, are you familiar with EOS? Yeah, so it's like visionary and integrator. Like that's kind of the textbook.
Elizabeth Shea (18:38)
decide to exit that company. think I'm hearing you say that it was the CRO role wasn't really your baby and like time to move on, what did you.
Chris Mechanic (18:44)
Yeah. So they were,
yeah. So CRO, wasn't my baby. I let them know that and like, they were very gracious about it. And, know, as people, like I was joking that I'm going to throw everybody under the bus, but they've actually been really good and they have held up their end of the bargain. I did make sure that there was like zero earn out, So it was like, there's nothing vesting or anything like that.
Elizabeth Shea (19:10)
huh.
Chris Mechanic (19:10)
Like I triple confirmed that to the point of exhaustion basically with the lawyers. I was like, look, I can't. Like this is 48 pages. Are you sure?
Elizabeth Shea (19:23)
Right.
Chris Mechanic (19:24)
but then I'm like, okay, I don't want to do the CRO role. And they're like, okay, well, what do you want to do? And I was like, I want to be the assassin squad, you know, I want you to appoint me at a client that's in trouble, or at a thing that needs solving or at an issue and let me work on random projects.
That didn't work either. And then they were like, Hey, well, what about partnerships? You know, why don't you build out the partnership channel? So I was like, okay, cool. And I tried that for a little while, but my heart just really wasn't in it. They had a really strong executive team,
Elizabeth Shea (19:52)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Mechanic (19:54)
There was a lot of horsepower in that room, I guess. And so I wasn't really needed in nearly the way that I was needed before. And so I just had a candid conversation with them and just told them how I was feeling. And they're like, bro, do you?
Elizabeth Shea (19:57)
⁓
Chris Mechanic (20:09)
So that's what I did.
And it wasn't weird. Like we're still on fine terms. still rep level. The new name is level. So they folded web mechanics into level agency. I still rep them. You know, when high spending advertiser that needs an agency, I'm there. They're the only one on my list. Right. They do great work. I love it to death. And true to their word also, they didn't fire a single person. They didn't lay off even like the back or even the front office people, even the HR people, not
Elizabeth Shea (20:27)
Okay.
Chris Mechanic (20:39)
a
single one. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't written in the contract, but we were very clear about it. And we just asked them, Hey, do you plan on consolidating? You know, just tell us. ⁓ And we didn't. So I think I mean, they're good in my book.
Elizabeth Shea (20:39)
Was that one of your conditions? One of your terms?
Yeah.
So I think a lot of people focus on what's the enterprise value, what's the price, what's the number and not necessarily on the terms. And I do think it's really important to consider those things. do you mind sharing what some of those were that were really important to you, whether it was people or processes or clients or name, you know, the naming, sounds like it changed. What was important to you?
Chris Mechanic (21:17)
Yep.
Yeah.
Well, I mentioned the earn out. That was incredibly important.
other important things were, we wanted to like cash certain people out, like we wanted to share with people that had been with us and had been critical for us. So we got them special deals.
Elizabeth Shea (21:31)
video.
Chris Mechanic (21:37)
with the non-competes. So their non-compete is basically like you can't start another agency or work at an agency, but I am an owner in another agency. So we got carve outs for that basically. yeah, there was escrow money as well as
So I told them we don't want to earn out because.
because it was going to be based on our book of business, the web mechanics book of business. And the plan was to integrate and be one. And so I didn't want it to be a scenario where, I'm like, there's two clients that need help. One's a web mechanics client. One's not a web mechanics client. I want to help the web mechanics client. Like I didn't want to create that division. So I said, instead of doing that, let's instead call it a seller's note that
Elizabeth Shea (22:17)
Right, Yep.
Chris Mechanic (22:25)
is payable post transaction the interest to be a certain level because interest rates were high at that point, which turned out to be a really nice decision in retrospect. So now we've got that that's like compounding monthly. And then the
Elizabeth Shea (22:33)
Right, right.
huh.
Right, right.
Chris Mechanic (22:47)
The escrow money, we just got back, that wasn't a term.
Elizabeth Shea (22:53)
No, but I mean, those are important considerations because it doesn't always have to be an earn out. It's a very creative way to do it, to have seller financing. And you still promise that note, but it does give some flexibility to the buyer, but also more of a guarantee for you.
I would like to talk about what you might have regretted. Did you have any regrets? Did you have anything that took you by surprise? Were you surprised at your role moving forward?
Chris Mechanic (23:19)
the main regret that I have, I think, is the way that I exited. we call it pulling the fade. And we used to do that with clients sometimes, where if the client is used to talking with one account manager, say, and that account manager has to go on paternity leave or whatever.
will bring somebody else in and then this other one will naturally pull the fade, which means like, stop showing up to every call, show up to every other call for a little while, then like do every three ends, like pulling the fade sort of. So that's kind of the way that I exited but I wish that I would have had the courage to like do something a little bit more ceremoniously.
Elizabeth Shea (23:42)
Right, right, sure.
Chris Mechanic (23:58)
And I'm not sure that it was courage that I was lacking. It was more so that I didn't want to rock the boat, you know, I didn't want for people to wonder
about what may or may not have happened. And so I never announced in any public way that I was leaving. But what I did was basically just gradually let certain people know.
and then we're probably wondering like, where's Chris? So that's probably my main regret. The other regret, I do have one other regret. the whole thing happened quite quickly. was like LOI to close probably in like four or five months.
Elizabeth Shea (24:37)
Wow.
Chris Mechanic (24:38)
so we were like real going really fast, doing a lot of things and I remember closing day and we were all ready to sign off and we didn't have any other issues I was thinking about as a joke and there's like nine people on the line, all the lawyers from every side, right? And they're like, okay, you know, reading all the language or whatever. Hey, do you guys testify? Say yes to sign or.
and they give you a chance to ask questions or to object, right? So I was thinking about being like, no, I'm not ready to sign yet. We want another million.
just as a joke. And so I wish I would have done that. That would have been... But even more so, I wish that I would have just asked, you know, because
Daniel Street's like, I forget his exact words. He said it better, but he's like, you need to be the one that wants it less. Right. And as you go through due diligence, you're going to be so tired. You're going to be so, ready to go to the beach. he's basically saying, assume the entire time.
that this deal is going away and be okay with that. So that, right. And so we were real ballsy all throughout the negotiation. in terms of negotiating the terms, which I had forgotten earlier. We basically asked them for more at every step, even after they gave us their number and,
we, you know, I'm not trying to brag because it was all Daniel Street, but we alpha that negotiation hard and we could have gotten more. So I wish, I wish that we would have outfitted.
Elizabeth Shea (26:14)
Mmm. Yeah.
Chris Mechanic (26:17)
Because in
retrospect, it's like they got a great deal. Cause Web Mechanics was a great business. mean, our clients were happy, super long retention times. We had like amazing rates of growing accounts. Our work always performed at a high level. So people wanted to spend more. So they got a great deal. We should have asked for more. They probably would have given it to us.
Elizabeth Shea (26:42)
It's interesting how many people have said that Particularly because it wasn't a competitive process. hey, lesson learned. But you're still happy.
Chris Mechanic (26:49)
But, and
I maintain that outlook.
but I maintained it to the point where all the way up until the closing table, mentally I would tell myself, this can go away and we're fine. We're printing money over here. Like what's wrong with that?
Elizabeth Shea (27:01)
Right. think it's something crazy
like you made it happen. Congratulations.
Chris Mechanic (27:07)
Thank you,
thank you.
the best
advice is just don't get married to the deal. especially as the due diligence process goes along further. Due diligence is a whole nother job. So it's like you work during the day on that and you work at night on that and you just want it to be over. And I think that's where a lot of people get screwed because sometimes the PE firms, you want to know what one of our deal
was is if they try to like any of the things that we've already agreed to if they try to modify even one of them and that's like a sign that they're gonna go back on their word we're out and me and my partner had a pact that was like we mean it like we leaving and we you're not even gonna think about you again
Elizabeth Shea (27:51)
Is that?
Wow, wow, that's very bold. That's great, that's great.
Chris Mechanic (28:00)
even
if it's the day before close. And we repeated that back and forth to each other the whole time. So that was good. The other thing that was good, and I remembered what I was going to say, is that in addition to Daniel Street, the other thing that gave us balls of steel in those negotiations was that our pipeline was surging, our closed business numbers on fire.
Elizabeth Shea (28:03)
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Chris Mechanic (28:26)
and we engineered that with a surge. We called it a surge. We did not reveal to the entire company that we were selling. And it wasn't even the only reason that we did the surge. We were also kind of plateauing a little bit and we needed some energy. But the surge was this initiative where we activated and enabled the whole company to work on the most critically important goals of the company.
So we said,
Here are the six goals on a spreadsheet in the column. The column headers were the goals. And they knew they were all like, add MRR.
just business goals, and then along the left were all the different job roles and titles. So if you're an account manager, here you can do your account manager, if you're this. And the cells were filled up with ideas of useful things that you can do with that skill set to contribute to that goal. So it's like, hey, account managers, guess what? You got a LinkedIn profile, don't you? Cool, you can send reach out messages to people that you know and generate leads.
you can comment on Geico CEO's thing and see if you can get a meeting with Geico, you know, like why not? So they're like, I've never thought of that. And that's not their fault because we never asked them to think about that. Right. So we did a surge and we put a carrot and a stick on it, which we didn't usually do carrot and stick type incentives, but we put a big carrot out.
Elizabeth Shea (29:41)
⁓
Great.
Chris Mechanic (29:57)
and we said, let's hit this. And we met the core group of basically directors and up, which was a third of the company maybe. We would meet every Friday for the surge meeting. We would talk about awesome shit that we're doing, new shit that we need to do, prioritize it, and we were just smashing. It was working. We were on fire.
Elizabeth Shea (30:21)
Mm, that's awesome. That's awesome. And it worked. like. Mm-hmm. That's excellent. So this has been very fascinating. Great story. Can you tell me what you're doing now? Because I know you've just launched a new business, right? I thought you said that before your birthday, you were going to be done.
Chris Mechanic (30:24)
Yeah, so it worked. It worked like a charm. Yeah.
I did. I did say that. yeah, I'm very excited about this new business. And it's interesting how it happened. So one of my last assignments before I left the agency, I was working with a large financial services client that was doing an enterprise wide voice AI implementation. So voice AI is more or less having like chat GPT on the phone.
where you fed chat GPT the role that they're supposed to play, how they're supposed to respond in certain scenarios, and you more or less train it. So.
This was what, over a year ago. And the tech at that point was very good. I remember right when I saw it, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. Everybody's gonna want this. it's gonna be the new website. Nobody had a website and then suddenly everybody has a website. Like, is this? So I became fascinated with that and I never lost that idea. Then when I left the agency,
Elizabeth Shea (31:37)
Right.
Chris Mechanic (31:48)
plan was to retire more or less. Like was gonna spend more time with friends and family. I was gonna travel the world. I was gonna get in the best shape of my life. I was gonna find new passions and hobbies and spend a lot of time reading and just slow down,
Well, that lasted a good month or so. And before I knew it, I was not doing those things. I was playing on AI all day. was buying a hundred and some domain. I went on a domain buying spree. I wasn't working out. I was staying up all night and sleeping all day and drinking probably more than I should. Like it wasn't good.
And so I was like, okay, well, let's do something else. But this entire time, I had voice AI in the back of my head.
So I started talking with who are now with the two who are now my partners and we're just like kicking the idea around, you know, thinking about it. And then come September of this year, we decided let's do it. It's LLC time. Let's do it. So we're doing voice AI and we're focusing on contractors specifically. So home services, plumbers, roofers, remodelers, and it is going gangbusters. ⁓
Elizabeth Shea (33:00)
That's great.
Chris Mechanic (33:01)
We just launched officially, we were in stealth mode for a few months. We picked up five beta clients in stealth mode where we basically said, yo, let us try this for you and if it works, you give us referrals and case studies and so on. So five out of five of those clients were skeptical and difficult to convince to let us try it. And now five out of five of those clients will never know a word.
without voice AI, they are hooked. They are hooked. These are contractors, right? Like they can barely send me a calendar invite, but they are all up in their client portal, listening to all the calls, looking at all the transcripts and basically becoming prompt engineers. They're like, ⁓ if it's an existing customer, we don't need their ⁓ address. So like, let's pull that out of 6B. And I'm like,
Elizabeth Shea (33:35)
Right.
Okay.
Wow,
that's amazing. that's great.
Chris Mechanic (33:58)
like watching their digital transformation
happen. So it's absolutely gangbusters. We just launched on LinkedIn to great fanfare. I'm incredibly grateful. There's a demo up there of our flagship agent called Nighthawk. And Nighthawk is an after hours agent, which when you close up shop, that's when Nighthawk starts working and basically answers every single phone call.
Elizabeth Shea (34:17)
cool.
Chris Mechanic (34:24)
Contractors on average about 30 % of call volume comes after 4 30 p.m. A lot of those at 4 30 so They're advertising on Google and Facebook or whatever 24 hours a day They're generating calls and right when you install Nighthawk you start turning phone calls into booked job booked meetings And it's just this found money. I call it lost and found money
Elizabeth Shea (34:31)
Hmm.
That's really cool. What a cool concept. Well, congratulations. Wow.
Chris Mechanic (34:54)
Yeah, let
⁓ me just plug a couple of other agents. So we got 11 of
total that each do different jobs. So Nighthawk is nighttime. We have Speedy who's on speed to lead. So right when somebody fills out your form, Speedy gets pinged and he'll make that call to that person within 10 seconds, which is very important. Like as the seconds tick by, the chances of getting somebody on the phone drop off of a cliff.
We got Flow, Flow does daytime answering, but only kicks on for overflow calls. So basically, when all your operators are busy, you can hit Flow. Then we got Phoenix for outbound. We have Five Star for...
five-star Google reviews. We've got, who else? Knock Knock is field marketing, so when canvassers set appointments and they need to confirm at the home office, Knock Knock will like be that home office.
Elizabeth Shea (35:41)
Hmm? Hmm?
Hmm.
Chris Mechanic (35:55)
So it's so fun and so exciting. And I thought at first that people were only going to be interested in like the lead gen and marketing focused ones like Nighthawk and Speedy. But all of these new agents that we came up with were ideas from like clients asked us for them. ⁓ I was amazed to see that.
Elizabeth Shea (36:11)
wow. That's great. Yeah.
Chris Mechanic (36:15)
and also amazed, thought that, because that clients would say, we want AI so that we can have fewer people in our call center, but they're not saying that at all.
They're saying we want AI so that we don't have to hire more. Right. So they want arm. They want to bolt AI onto their team to increase each person's capacity by 10 times as opposed to adding one linear incremental person. So it's the biggest no brainer investment that I've ever seen in my life. In 20 years of this and ⁓
Elizabeth Shea (36:28)
Right, right.
that's great.
Chris Mechanic (36:52)
It just like SEO was like nobody really is kind of underground right now. Most people are like, what's voice AI? And you show it to them and people are think it's magic, you know? So this is the time the getting is the best, right? It's just going to become more more competitive.
Elizabeth Shea (37:06)
Right, right.
Chris Mechanic (37:11)
from here but I like the one-to-one service model we're gonna get disrupted at some point it's just like when and how but I think there's always gonna be especially in contracting there's always gonna be that company that doesn't want to build it themselves they just want somebody else to do it for them and they'll pay it and pay well and get good work and so that's what I'm betting on.
Elizabeth Shea (37:19)
Very true.
That's amazing.
Chris Mechanic (37:36)
I must be having a ball.
Elizabeth Shea (37:38)
Oh, good for you. Well, it's good to see you so happy. So welcome back from retirement into a working gig again.
Chris Mechanic (37:42)
Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, I'm so happy to be ⁓ reconnecting with you here and stay in touch.
Elizabeth Shea (37:51)
This
is great. Well, thank you so much. How can people get ahold of you?
Chris Mechanic (37:54)
I almost forgot. So the website is gomecha.com. Mecha is spelled like mechanism, M-E-C-H-A. So it's gomecha.ai. Sorry, I said dot com. Go.
Elizabeth Shea (38:08)
So you have the whole
mechanic, mechanics, I love it. That's great. Great branding. Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Mechanic (38:11)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, gomag.ai. And yeah, thank
you. But I want you to do this too. So from that home page, you'll see a green blob that says, call Jill. That's our AI BDR or CSR. Call her. She is the. Yeah, you'll see why they'll see why they call her the goat.
Elizabeth Shea (38:28)
Okay.
Let's see what she does. I will do that. All right. OK,
the goat. ⁓ thank you so much, Chris. This was wonderful. you. OK.
Chris Mechanic (38:40)
Thank you, Elizabeth. Let's be in touch. Talk soon. Bye.