Ep 023 – Carl Smith, Bureau of Digital

Featuring: Carl Smith, Bureau of Digital

In this episode, Carl shares his passion for people who run shops and create things and how he shifted from employee to running his own shop to now running Bureau of Digital, the greatest community of agency leaders. The biggest takeaways of this episode are some of the gems on how Carl ran nGen, his dev shop, but Carl also shares how hindsight really was 20/20 in understanding what he saw after opening nGen and some of the decisions his previous boss had made. He talks about how his agency model led to rapid growth by having clients pitch them and having the team choose the work they wanted to do and the type of clients they wanted to work with. Finally, Carl talks about the value of community in the agency space and how agency leaders should embrace their peers and not cut them off as competition.

A theater major who decided to act like he understood business, Carl spent 14 years in advertising before launching his digital agency, nGen Works, in 2003.

nGen ran for 12 years, constantly experimenting with different models of management and team structure, including the Jellyfish Model which was flat before flat was cool.

Towards the end of nGen’s run, Carl attended the very first Bureau event and fell madly in love with the concept of building community in the web industry. So much so that a few years later he closed nGen to take over the Bureau in 2016. Now Carl spends every day connecting digital professionals to give them the support they need.

Connect with Carl on the Bureau of Digital website.