#82: VIA’s Leeann Leahy on ESOPs, AI and building new agency capabilities

So with that structure, how does that impact how you think about your ability to invest, whether or not you want to, and I'm making this up, just double in size by buying someone else, or maybe there's some significant capital expenditure to alter what you're doing or just invest in new capabilities or massive expansion organically, whatever that is.

Does it impact you about that?

It ultimately gives us tremendous flexibility in that because once we're on the other side of the hockey stick and we're full ownership of the agency, we as an ESOP are not required to pay corporate taxes.

So we can hold a lot of cash in the business.

which means that if it's going to increase the overall shareholder value by being a tool or a company or a skill set that we don't have, we can make that acquisition and it enhances the share value overall by enhancing the valuation overall.

And so we'll have the reserves to do that really whenever we see it in the best interest of the employee base.

And is that something that you're planning out over a five or more year time horizon? Sounds like this would be a lot.

Absolutely.

What are your priorities? What are our priorities? Well, you know, we just...

The capital investment perspective.

Yeah.

You know, it changes so much.

If you had asked me that five years ago, I would have talked about some media tools.

We don't have media in-house, but that's why I was like, well, those are expensive investments.

And now the world has changed so much.

They're not expensive investments.

So, you know, we're like everyone, we're investing in a lot of AI right now and understanding how that's impacting our business and playing with lots of tools and building lots of proprietary things.

We have dabbled in consumer experience and as the consumer experience changes in the landscape of AI, I think that's really important.

We do have a lot of research tools that we're eyeing and thinking would be really beneficial because I think that Understanding even better how we can get to the heart of what's important to consumers is always at the core of what we do, right? And something happened.

We all went into COVID and we got locked in our houses and we looked at each other through screens.

And then we somehow as an industry thought like, oh, that's good.

I'm getting consumer information either by talking to someone over a screen or by doing AI simulated audiences, which are incredibly powerful and we absolutely use them.

But Really being observant, really connecting with people, really being kind of in their lives is much more powerful and it's all the stuff they don't tell you or show you in a screen.

That's what's most important and inspirational for our creative process.

So more tools that allow us to do that in a very real way as people change so rapidly because we are all changing so rapidly.