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[Music] I'm feeling great. I'm feeling like we're making moves. Like shit's [ __ ] moving. Part of the reason for doing this blog is like I want to document the making of a platform, like an agency platform. When I had an agency and I was just starting out, I thought it was like the lamest thing ever. Like I remember being like, "Ah, do I really want to get stuck into this type of business or so many agencies?" I'm just going to document everything. Document everything

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that I learn, document the building of my team. And yeah, hopefully this will be a really cool piece for people to look back on. What I told everyone this year on my team is like, we're going to work really [ __ ] hard this year. It's going to be hard work, but it's also going to be really [ __ ] fun. So, for this vlog, I'm going to video, you know, we don't have an office. This is another thing that's really tough. We have no office, but what we do have is a lot of people in different places. This

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is Sa Paulo and Brazil. Then we're going to do Porto, New York, Dubai, Tulum, Pan, Vegas for Shop Talk, and Prosper. Basically, the whole year I'm going to take the vlog, you know, wherever I travel. So, that should be pretty [ __ ] fun. I think it's pretty much it. Where are you in the world, Lucas? I'm in Brazil right now. So, one of our investors, he's also on this trip with us. He He's like one of my best friends. So, we were like, "Okay, yeah, after Solo, we'll go to

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this beach town, Jerry Kara. We'll work from there. It'll be good vibes, like surf, like work." But after our New Year's, I was like, "Yo, I need to just focus and like grind. I don't know if I can go." And he he apparently was upset about that. So, I'm going to call on him. Come to S Paulo, man. What? Tomorrow we have a dinner. We're doing a dark room dinner. I'm in, bro. I mean, Max runs So, Max runs a tech He runs a tech platform called Unveil. They're a big partner of dark rooms.

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Where's Is Andre going to be playing? Andre, I'll talk to you later, bro. See you. I'll see you I'll see you tomorrow. Lucas, what's up, man? I'm liking the blonde hair. It's like a a changing from the near tomorrow. Uh I believe I arrive in S. Paulo around 9ish and then I can uh go over there for sure. Yeah. So, we'll have our session later on in the day. There's two things I'm trying to solve for. One is to grow dark room, we need a much larger recruiting muscle.

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You both feel this. That's why there's a lot of pressure on us being able to hit the recruiting target. I think that my future stage strategically for dark room is like the it's like a marketing service firm that can sell fractional resources. It can sell dedicated resources, agency scopes, dedicated BO scopes. It will take time for us to get there, but I see these happening like building towards the same thing. BO stands for business process outsourcing because we hire people in 12 locations

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and we have this global workforce like right now we sell fractional agency services. The way the markets moving is for people to want high quality marketing talent wherever they are in the world which is exactly what we do. So, we're making a concerted effort to basically offer our recruiting and staffing and people management services to brands directly. That's what I'm talking about right now. So, we're going to meet up with uh Eric, do a little morning workout. So, I've known Eric for since high school.

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We went to boarding school together. What's up, big boy? How you doing? I'm good, bro. You see how my my shit's in French? Yeah. Exposure. Exposure. You When's your When's your French lesson? It's at 10:30. Eric's been uh he's been taking French for how long now? Over 3 years. We got like a little 10-minute run in. And then we'll start lifting. We know Christopher Nolan's making the Odyssey. It's going to be sick. for shoulder press. Fly for arms. This

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is I I love this guy cuz he's just he's like a fitness instructor but also your friend. The fly form is uh it's looking a little weak, sir. It's 12 or 15. Eric was living with me and uh he lived with me for like maybe like 3 weeks and he would it was the funniest thing cuz like at night he would have have like a sugar craze and like he would order like six huge cookies from this place in New York called Chip City. He would have like four of them. It's like 2,000 calories. And then would wake up anxious

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in the morning. So he'd run like four miles. Here's the thing with dark room. We've literally tested like every [ __ ] channel, every marketing tactic. So now we just like kind of know what works. A lot of [ __ ] doesn't work. I think AI is going to be a really big driver. Affiliates like the content we're doing huge. LinkedIn huge. [Music] No, it's Yeah, you're right. Lucas is here. Just get ready. My parents thought they were being like unique and special and then I come here and every other

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person's name is Lucas. Hey, Lucas. What do you do at Dark Room? Oh, I'm a senior recruiter, so responsible for recruitment here. Um, I believe since I got in, we hired around 20 20 to 30 people. Reviewing candidates, it's pretty insane. Like what would you say? Like how many candidates do you interview on a weekly basis? I believe like in a busy week, maybe around 20 to 25 interviews. Last quarter we had 27,000 applicants for open roles to work at the company. That's a [ __ ] insane amount of

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people. Yeah, that that's insane. And that's something that we're really working to get better like to decrease interviews per hire so we can well decrease time to hire as well. So it's be more efficient and simple. Hi, my name is Andre. Uh I am the CEO of a company called Casabloui, which is a luxury wellness brand uh specializing in uh hot tubs, cold plunges, saunas, and a few other stuff. Are you having difficulty running a business remotely? I would say there is there are some

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things that are difficult about it. Right. I think that running an e-commerce business remotely is innately um easier than agency for sure. It is for sure. I would say the hardest thing is managing the people, not managing the business, which is any challenge if you're going to go remote and have people like you just need to figure out communication, accountability, team management. But honestly, I think that's just a that's a that's a challenge for every business owner. If you're starting

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today, as a manager, you kind of want to build an organization where people feel comfortable leaving and and and you you're kind of like happy for them because you you played a role in that, but at the same time, it's like kind of like this this slight ego boost when they come back because you know that you created something that people enjoy working in, right? That's like my hope with this business. It's like you feel like it's good on your resume. that you learned a lot and you're like proud of

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it. If you come back, I'm like [ __ ] ecstatic. [Music] Miguel, nice job, man. I want to give you some props. Like work that's coming out of the team. Like it's it's looking really good. Give him some negative feedback though, too, cuz we can't have too many compliments on this team. Yeah. No, that's all you get for this quarter. Don't expect anything else. Negativity from here on out. No, I'm serious, though. Great job. Let's just talk about the objectives for today's call. like

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why are we meeting? We're going to start doing this a lot more like quarterly at least like having a discussion around how hiring strategy is changing. But what I really want to do is lay the foundation for just some of these strategic moves that we're making across recruiting. Have we looked at Colombia at all? We have not looked at all. We've never posted a role in Colombia and we've never hired anyone in Colombia. Uh I do my hope here guys is that this stuff becomes just part of our workflow

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and the data aggregation process is super easy and we can look at this HR dashboard and see how things are changing and make decisions together. That's my hope. The markets we're going to focus on are Portugal, Sand, South Africa, Mexico, and let's take a look at Colombia. the things we really just need to focus on. All this process stuff we're going to get down like I it's it's all new, but I I feel confident we're going to get there and like in pretty short order. In 30 days, like we're

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going to be humming. It's very clear we need more resourcing. We're going to the next hire is really critical. I want someone who's matches both of your your intensity. Both of you guys are killers. Like we need someone that's a cultural match and then rounds out the team too. like provides more expertise that we don't have like in Western Europe. I think at the dinner you should use your Brazilian outfits. The colorful ones. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. This is super special for me. I'm going to pass around this

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mic because we are recently recording a blog for all of our marketing content which I'm really excited about. Hi, I'm Andre. I'm uh I'm the founder of Casabloui which is a luxury wellness brand in the US. Nice to meet you guys. I'm Lucas Anawan, senior recruiter in dark room. Glad to meet you all in person right now. Um, I'm gonna interview pretty much all of you. Fun fact about me. Wow, I dye my hair. I'm Max. I'm the founder and CEO of Unveiled. Uh, great to see some familiar

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faces here, new faces, old faces. It's always a pleasure coming to dark room events. And I hate cream cheese. Hello everyone. My name's uh, Eric Mackin. I am director of business development and partnerships at a payment processing company called Propeller. I've known Lucas since we were 14. So, if he's ever giving you guys a problem, feel free to reach out to me and I will have a conversation with him. I'm Fora. I'm a bisdev associate here at Dark Room. I work directly with Lucas and James and I

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assist with all the sales and internal marketing uh operations. Hey guys, I'm Lucas. I'm excited to be here. I'm a senior designer. I'm Eric. I'm a senior designer at Dark Room. I uh joined the team in November and a fun fact about me is that I already met the pope. I'm Eduardo. I'm paid media specialist at dark room. I'm complete. I completed one year now in December. I'm really happy about this milestone. I'm also a Lucas. My name is Lucas Dy. I'm a senior

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designer at Dark Room. I was actually the second one. I was after the CEO. So that's important. Hello, I'm another Lucas. I'm the associate creative director at Dark Room. I joined like two months ago and it's been a pleasure. It's also a pleasure to be here. Hi everyone, I'm Thomas. No, Lucas. I'm from here from S. Paulo. I work at Dark Room since April of 2024. The man behind the camera. Exactly. Hi everyone. Um I'm Hel. I'm the lead video editor at Dark Room. I've been in Dark Room for about

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two years. I actually have uh six fingers on my left foot. No, that's a lie. Actually, that's another fact about me. Yeah, I just lie sometimes. What was your impression of that dinner the other night? Good energy, good people, no opinions. This is my revenue. We're not scroll away from that. Lots of zeros as we can see here. The dinner was great. You gave a great, you know, introduction. Yeah, we're we're moving hotels tomorrow. We're going to Soho House. The end of an era. Vlog one. Vlog

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one.