Dobbin Buck – GetUWired.com
Dobbin Buck is a rural entrepreneur that is obsessed with FlyFishing!
Dobbin’s career got its start in developing museums and interactive exhibits around the world for notable institutions like The U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, The Guggenhiem Museum, Disney’s Epcot Center, Universal Studios Florida, The Audubon Society, Kenneth Cole NYC, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Parks Service and countless other world class clientele.
Currently living in the Appalachian Mountains of Dahlonega, GA with his wife and two children, Dobbin is the Co-Owner of GetUWired Web Services a full service marketing agency of nearly 50 team members that operate out of their rural North Georgia Cabin based Headquarters.
GetUWired is an INC 5000 company that has been awarded Entrepreneur Magazines Top
Company Culture award for the last two years running, Georgia Trend Magazines 4th best company to work for in Georgia, Glass Doors Best Places to Work in 2019 Award (6th place) and have been our nations top reseller of Infusionsoft software and their partner of the year for three years running.
Dobbin and his partners have developed an incredible business culture that is fondly called CabinPunk which provides ongoing employee team building events, leadership training,
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Shoan 0:01
Hello, welcome to automationrehab podcast. My name is Shoan and I’m the founder and the voice of automation rehab and today we have Dobbin buck with get you wired.com on the line Dobbin, what’s up.
Dobbin Buck 0:15
Hey, Shoan, thanks for having me. Really glad to be here. Happy Tuesday to you.
I met an incredible woman 2:15
Yeah, that’s a great question. I spent most of my early professional career. I’m a veteran of the US Army, I was a soldier. And then after college, I was in the old GI Bill, I went to college after the army. And then I developed museums for close to a decade and a half. So that was my early professional career. Where I learned a lot of the I don’t know creative methodology and things that I use with me still still to this day, in the marketing agency. how I got into this thing was really that
I met an incredible woman while I was doing business in Atlanta. And she didn’t want to leave Georgia and her parents lived here in the backwoods of North Georgia. So for those of you that don’t know, get you wired, is located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, our headquarters looks like a big 6000 square foot cabin. And we basically operate out of the wilderness and we have a team of over 48 professionals that operate here out of the headquarters.
Well, it was like the Wild West. 8:37
And we, at every stage of the game, we always thought we knew what we were doing. Thank goodness, because if we even remotely understood what we didn’t know, at those times, we probably would have given up. So we had an over, over inflated sense of our own ability, which probably kept us floating through the question of will arrows. But you know, early on the hiring practices,
were just instinctual and not process based at best, hey, I like this guy, you know, or, hey, this, this woman is, you know, has a wonderful personality or, you know, sort of, you know, judgments that that weren’t really processed based in hiring. And we started hiring a lot of people, and we started an internship program with the local college. And fortunately, many of those people from those early days, or a handful of them anyway, are still here. But a lot of them didn’t make it. And the thing was, was that a little bit later down the road, we started taking our, our purpose, our mission and our core values real seriously. And we started hiring to them, and we develop practices. And to this day, we have 10 part hiring process, actually, it’s 11 part hiring process. Now, that takes close to 45 days for someone to make it through this, see whether or not they’re a good fit for the get you wired in the cabin. So early on, you know, it’s real expensive. For a small business. It’s expensive for a larger small business to, but to make the wrong hires, because you get emotionally invested in people, you invest in a lot of training, you pay for all their early mistakes when they become visible, and all sorts of things are going on. And so when you’re not clear and don’t have a specific and intentional process to bring people through, it can get real expensive, really fast. And I think the smartest thing that ever occurred was that the owners of the company were taken out of the hiring process all together. So this is done by our team. If someone is going to be as an example, reporting directly to one of the owners, then there will be at some point where we would have a conversation with them, of course, but for the most part, this 11 part hiring process goes on behind the scenes, and I see people show up and it’s like, Hey, how are you doing? You know? Yeah, so the scalability factor and lessons learned early on is to pay close attention to your practices of hiring, why you’re hiring, who you’re hiring. And if you haven’t developed what your you know, your vision, and especially your core values are, that’s something that’s real important. We live by them very seriously to this day.
QA methodology 13:07
in the infusion, soft echo system, this is back before, we’re just getting ready to move from what we call legacy into the campaign builder era. I’m of that system. And so I would draw mind maps, and he would translate my mind maps into old legacy, you know, sequences and different things like that. And then he and I were the original forefathers at our company of getting into the campaign builder. And I just, I worked really closely with him early on. And he developed some really incredible checklists and QA methodology that as I was working with him very early on, I recognized his thought process and is brilliant. And I knew from him from those first encounters, where he and I were working intimately together, that, you know, I had high hopes that he and I would be working together for a long time. And he’s here, and he’s a top senior developer and an incredible part of our culture. So we can tell by the way people operate, one of our core values at get you wired, is honor the role and respect the position. And I can say, for all the people that are truly here that as they’ve grown in position, and all, when they were more in a subordinate role, they were always very respectful. And always, you know, for smart people, you’re always going to be smarter than the person in charge, if you can temper that, and respect them for their position and move through that. And these people have been able to do that, you know, and out of brilliant patience, kindness, they’ve, you know, weathered the storm and, and we’re really honored to have them, they’re great people.
You’ve set me up for failure 21:03
Yeah, and we have all of this in our project management portal, it’s all scripted, it has a, we send out the emails automatically to tell them what their password to log in and, and do different things. So it’s all automated for sure. And, and the interesting thing about the skills test is, we don’t quite arm them with everything they need to be successful. And so we can tell right away when people come back and say, you’ve set me up for failure, you didn’t give me everything, you, you know, I needed for this and stuff like that. And what we understand being a marketing agency is, you know, I can ask you this question, how many times if your clients given you everything, you need to be successful with your relationship with them,
they never do ever, I gotta thank you. So thank you. And that’s not their fault. It’s just the way it right. So. So we purposely want people to go out and try and find the answers or creatively come up with their own solutions and things like that. So we know people that are like reactive to that they may not, they may not have the psychic ingenuity that is going to take to survive here in the agency and in the cabin, or the team yonder. Yeah, exactly. And that point forth, they speak to they go to have a in person interview with their department head. So if they’re a developer, they go to the department head of development, if they’re, you know, whatever department in the company, they would have an interview with that department head, once a department head clears them, then they have a final interview with the operations coordinator. It which is my wife, Elizabeth. And she really puts going through what we call the sort of the core values ringer, of figuring out, you know, what sort of person they are, what they’re made of, etc, etc. And this isn’t like a brutality test or anything, but it’s really diving deep, and dig deep to make sure that they’re the right fit, because there is, I can think of nothing worse to someone in their life, is to not properly test and question them, and then giving someone a job that you’re going to wind up having to take away from, that’s just cruel. So we want to honor everybody. And we honor people truly by turning them away from the cabin. once they’re done with that, then we have what’s called an employee lunch. Or if it’s an executive level person, which we don’t hire a lot of those. It might be a dinner with their spouse, but we get them in a social setting, and we get feedback from the team. Once that’s done, we do a background check through checker.
It’s a really cool vibe 28:38
Now, I haven’t run into that, you know, we have come here I’ve had first of all clients and people that just want to look at us like we’re a fishbowl, they want to see this thing. Yeah, we’ve had people come from Brazil, Beijing, London, all over the world, all over the United States. And, you know, we get a very warm reception. The vibe here is really cool. And the people that come in here and work, the vibe is always been has been really, really solid. I wouldn’t say it’s always been a love affair with every employee that’s been here, we’ve had some people quit. And we’ve certainly fired some people, things that weren’t a good fit. But generally the the reasons behind that aren’t about the overall vibe of the of the culture, it’s generally about some things that are real specific, as an example, you know, we’ve had people leave, because ultimately they can, if they want to sit in a cubicle in Midtown Atlanta, they can make you know, X amount more dollars, if they want to operate that way and live that way. And I’m not here to hold it against them. But, you know, there’s been a lot of different things. But you know, for the most part, it’s, it’s a really cool vibe, very well respected and then we try and live up to it.
I always bring a fly rod with me 41:03
I you know, there was all sorts of conjecture as to whether the culture would you know, approve or and all that stuff, but we did it and it’s been and it was the best decision that I think I’ve ever made professionally was to, you know, 10 years down the road, get you wired. Start you know, honoring myself with some three day weekends I take Mondays off my partner’s take Friday’s off and, and so I was able to go fly fishing with my fellow that and it helped propel me into the obsessed fly fishing machine that I am and you know, I’ve been all over the place This summer I went to believe me and my family rented a private island there. And I went fly fishing for bonefish and turn permit down there and had a great time with my family’s. So whenever I travel for business, I always bring a fly rod with me. And I try and figure out a way to go fishing. Like when I go to TMC and San Diego, I bring a fly rod with me and I got a guy down there. That’s awesome. And he hooks me up and I go out in the mornings before I come back to the event and all of that anyway, so I don’t really have that super big catch. Because you know what, john, it, I get so many super huge fish. I just can’t like I just can’t block a singular story from those. And for those of you that would like to see some of my incredible catches. I am on Instagram at Dobbin at the OBBIN. And all I posted on my Instagram is fly fishing pictures of the incredible beautiful trout that I’m honored to spend time with.
It’s always evolving 47:12
Yeah, if this stuff wasn’t documented, we’d be in poor shape, because there’s just so much that so much that goes into it a lot of training, a lot of documentation. And it’s always evolving. I mean, on a quarterly basis, our operational systems will call them are, there’s always changes, there’s always improvements, modifications. We’re never, we’re never remaining stagnant on that, mainly because we can’t because the more business to do you do, the longer you’re in, you know, new little pieces of pain, start weeding their way into the processes, and we have to, you know, to work through them. So there’s, we have regular rhythms that looking at, you know, we have weekly meetings, we have quarterly off site meetings for leaders, we have an annual out of country meeting, and we’re constantly practicing the rhythms of cultural improvement and operational improvement, our business.
Not that a million dollars really means anything in this day and age 54:36
That’s a good one. I think that would be pretty awesome. You know, and not that a million dollars really means anything in this day and age, but you get the spirit of what I’m saying? Yeah. You know, I think that that would be really cool. These people, you know, the thing about it is these people that we’re honored to have work with. Statistically, they put more time and life’s blood into our vision and our companies, then they do into their families, their personal pursuits, their children, their loved ones, if you look at the actual time, and you take out the sleep, and you take out the time on the toilet, and the time doing this, and the time doing that, and what they’re left with, you’ll see that there is more intentional time of their lives being given to their workplace, then what they give to the things that are actually more important than the workplace. And as business owners, if we always keep this in mind, life is short. Life is short. And when we think that because we’re paying someone X amount of dollars that they need to reciprocate, and give us our money’s worth. We always need the tethers that and remember, they’re really giving us a lot more than the money that we’re giving them. Because you know what time can’t be replaced. Time is time is priceless. And adult humans are forced to give up so much of their lives and their life blood to earn a living. You know, it’s amazing, you know, I want to know who the sick individual was, that came up with this formula of a five day workweek. And to two days off, you know, that we all live by like, like, evil person back, when when did this occur, you know, that they came up with this formula that we should work five days, and get two days off, I sort of think we should work two days and get five days off or something, you know, let’s, let’s embrace that. Now, I know we got to get work done, we need to make money and all of that we have to work in the structure that, you know, we have to operate in. But anyway, always remember that, you know, if you’re a business owner, that’s the one thing that I would reach out is you know, when, when someone’s having a hard time when something’s going on with an individual, just think about how much they’re really giving you they’re probably giving you their entire lives.
They’re going from the six digits, the high six digits, they’re going up to the seven digits 57:35
At all times, you know, to be with the ones we love, you know, and to be able to do the simple things in life like fly fishing. Yeah. So this has been a great, you know, it’s, it’s, you’ve talked a lot and, and I like that, because sometimes I have to talk and talk and talk and talk to get the other. But you really piled on the cool, you brought a lot of great information about the culture, the scalability, and this systems, especially the, the the systems, and that 11 step process, I think that’s really going to help a lot of the listeners and again, the people that listen to this podcast, their real businesses making real money, you know, it’s a life coach is not going to listen to this, they’re not going to get it. But there are those businesses that are right on the verge, like at the elite stage, where they’re going from the six digits, the high six digits, they’re going up to the seven digits, and they need to know what what steps do I need to take what are some of the challenges, I’m going to have, you know, what are some of the heartbreaks and, and all of that, you know, and you’ve shared that all really a heartfelt podcast, I really want to thank you for showing up and being here.
Dobbin Buck 58:44
Thank you for the invite,
Shoan 58:45
Teach us soon how you do your referral thing on another podcast.
Dobbin Buck 58:48
Okay, I’d love to come back, man. It’s a real honor to be here. I’ve always appreciated you. You’re always have a great vibe to Yeah, you know, you and I bump into each other probably once or twice a year air out in the world. And, and, you know, I’m really touched and honored that you would invite me. Thank you. Sure, so our website at www dot get you wired? That’s g et the letter U wired.com. is a great gateway into our company. Ultimately, there is a free one hour consultation that you can sign up for on the homepage. That puts you into one of my henchmen David can Jonas or john Crocker both incredible men, incredible consultants to help guide people if somebody went to speak with me directly. That’s still the channel to go through and just request the one of those guys and tell them why you want to connect with me and they’re that generally a very easy thing to do. And, you know, through the website, through social media, if you want to connect with me, I’m on Facebook Dobbin, Buck, I’m the only dog and buck VOB bi NBUCK in the free world so I’m easy to find on mad. I already mentioned for incredible trout pictures at Dobbin on Instagram. See the glory of the trout there. And anyway, we love to hear from people and I love questions, any questions on our culture or the way that we operate this company? You know, I’m always about sharing that information. So feel free to reach out.
Shoan 1:00:51
Okay, Dobbin. Well thanks for showing up. So again, that’s Dobbin buck. It’s get you wired the letter you get you wired.com and especially listen if you want to make your day today and just really have a good time. Just go to Instagram and look at at Dobbin DO bB IN you’ll see a big trout and I’ll make you feel really good. Now these crowds are treated with respect and they are catch and release. So if you’re an animal activist, this is ok. This is just looking at one of the planet’s most beautiful creatures and just experiencing it and all its glory, courtesy of Dobbin, but so I want to thank you for showing that Dobbin.
Dobbin Buck 1:01:29
All right. Thank you sounds okay. Talk to you soon.
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