Wes Towers did everything right, and the number still came back wrong.
His digital agency, Uplift 360, had been running for more than 20 years. Recurring revenue. Long-term clients, some nearly as old as the business itself. A defensible niche serving trades and construction companies. Every metric a valuer looks for was where it was supposed to be.
And the valuation came back discounted anyway. Not because of anything Wes had done. Because of what was coming. The rise of AI had put a cloud of uncertainty over his entire industry, and as the valuer told him plainly: people don’t buy uncertainty.
Think about what that moment actually is. A business can be operationally healthy and strategically impaired at the same time. The books measure the past; the valuation prices the future. Wes was holding a company that worked perfectly and was worth less every quarter he waited.
This episode of Unstoppable is about what he did next: how a founder read the difference between media noise and a real signal, found where his industry’s value was migrating, and rebuilt a two-decade-old business from the inside — ending up with his most profitable year ever while competitors around him struggle.
The Rusty Nail Problem
Wes had been hearing about AI disruption for years, the same way everyone has: through headlines. And he’d discounted it the way most operators do, for a defensible reason. Media sensationalizes; that’s what gets clicks. A digital agency owner who panicked at every “this changes everything” story would have pivoted himself to death a decade ago.
What moved him wasn’t louder noise. It was a different kind of source. A professional who had assessed his business thoroughly, with no stake in alarming him, reached the same conclusion the headlines had. Within days, Wes started the conversations that became the pivot.
He tells it through an old analogy: a dog sitting on a rusty nail on the porch. The dog doesn’t move, because the pain isn’t great enough yet. “I think I was sitting on a rusty nail,” he says, “but the pain was never great enough until the wake-up call.”
Two lessons hide in that story, and the second is more useful than the first.
The first is about signal filtering. You can’t respond to everything, so decide in advance which sources are allowed to move you. For Wes, media couldn’t; a disinterested professional assessment could. That’s not stubbornness. That’s a functioning filter.
The second is his own confession. Asked what he’d leave with the audience, he doesn’t talk about AI at all. He says he should have made the micro-changes earlier: involved his team sooner, overhauled the procedures sooner, rethought his client mix sooner. The nail was there for years. Complacency wasn’t costing him visibly, because everything was going well; that’s precisely what made it dangerous. Waiting for pain to force the decision is a strategy too, just the worst one available.
Values Don’t Drive Change. Pain Does. Values Steer It.
Here’s the detail that makes Wes’s pivot worth studying rather than just applauding.
The direction he pivoted toward wasn’t invented in the crisis. Going back through his own blog, he found a post from before COVID (2019, maybe early 2020) laying out a “human first” positioning for the business. He’d believed it for five years. And in five years, it had changed almost nothing, because everything was going well and there was no catalyst. It was an idea floated on a blog, not a strategy.
Then the valuation landed, the stakes rose, and the dormant value became the operating direction within days.
Most founders have a version of this: a conviction they’ve written down somewhere that their daily operations quietly ignore. The lesson isn’t that Wes was a hypocrite before and authentic after. It’s that values and catalysts do different jobs. Pain supplies the energy for change; values supply the direction. Without the catalyst, the value sits in a blog post. Without the value, the catalyst produces panic: a flailing pivot toward whatever’s trending. Wes had the direction pre-loaded, which is why his response to an industry-level threat took days to begin, not months.
Finding Where the Value Migrates
The strategic question underneath the pivot was brutally simple: for 20 years, clients paid Uplift 360 primarily for technical skill. Programming. Building websites that do-it-yourself platforms couldn’t match. What happens when AI can do a growing share of that?
Wes watched the answer arrive in his own pipeline. The small, one-person-business clients (never the best work, but steady gap-filler) have all but disappeared; they vibe-code a cheap version themselves, and that’s fine. What remains is fewer jobs, but bigger ones: higher stakes, more requirements, larger clients who still need humans because the cost of getting it wrong is real.
His read on where the value goes next is one of the sharpest framings in the episode. AI has flooded every decision with options. “A confused mind can’t make a decision when you’ve got a multitude of good choices. How do you find the great one?” Lean on AI alone and you’ll get good outcomes at low cost, and if that’s what you want, fine. But great outcomes still require judgment: someone who has done it before, standing in front of you, helping you choose.
So the agency’s center of gravity is shifting from execution to consulting. Not abandoning the technical work; repositioning around the part machines erode last. When your moat is draining, the move isn’t to defend the moat. It’s to find where the value is migrating and get there early. That requires loosening your grip on what your business has always been, which is harder than it sounds; an identity held too long is a strategic liability, for companies as much as for people.
Interestingly, the shift splits the company in two directions at once. His technical team is going deeper into AI and tooling; Wes is going the opposite way, toward rooms, relationships, and human connection. He doesn’t resolve that tension, and doesn’t try to. Both things are true, and different roles carry different ends of it. That’s what a real transition looks like from inside: not a clean new strategy, but a managed tension.
The Dial, Not the Switch
Wes has watched peers handle the same disruption badly in two opposite ways, and his taxonomy of failure is worth keeping.
The first group pushed into AI too hard, too early. They dropped what made them valuable and rebuilt around tools that weren’t ready, shipping clunky outputs that eroded 20 years of trust. Wes saw it up close: a long-term client wanted chatbots built, and he turned the work away. He knew the software everyone would recommend, and he knew it couldn’t deliver the refined result this client valued. The client hired someone else, and it became, in Wes’s words, a real nightmare — the platforms kept steering the build back toward their own preferred patterns, taking the project right when the client wanted to go left.
Sit that decision next to the alternative. Taking the job was easy revenue from a relationship with two decades of trust behind it. Declining it protected the thing the revenue depended on. Knowing what you won’t sell yet is as much a part of an AI strategy as knowing what you will.
The second group is dialing in too little. They’re not using AI where it already works, which means their output per hour (and therefore their pricing) is drifting away from competitors who are. That gap only widens.
The conclusion Wes lands on: it was never a binary. “It’s not a question of you go AI or you don’t. You’ve got to be dialed into both and get that balance right for the specific time we’re in right now, which might change tomorrow.” A dial, not a switch, and a dial that needs constant re-checking. Both failure modes come from treating a calibration problem as a conversion decision.
Let the Team Build the Path
For 20 years, Wes built the systems himself. He started alone, designed every procedure, and delegated pieces as the team grew. The way things ran was the way he thought was best.
The pivot was the first time he brought his team in at a higher level, and his verdict on the delay is blunt: “I felt really foolish that I didn’t invite the team into speaking to those earlier… what I thought was best wasn’t necessarily so.”
The overhaul itself was unglamorous and effective. His lead developer, closest to the friction, had the most input on which steps were clunky or slow. They kept the same project management software but ripped every step apart. Fewer steps, same client output, higher consistency, because a process with too many steps invites people to skim, and skimming is where quality dies. More isn’t better; calibrated is better. Some of the gains had nothing to do with AI at all. Wes estimates the split at roughly 60/40: AI opened doors, but a large share of the improvement had been available for years, waiting for someone to look.
The software stack decisions ran on a longer clock. Between two good options, they chose the one with more substance behind it (better backed, more likely to survive). Because the quiet catastrophe in a tech-dependent business is building on a SaaS product that vanishes overnight, taking your workflows and data with it. Durability beat features; the long game beat the short cycle.
And the experiments stayed small on purpose. They tested AI design tools, found the outputs weren’t up to standard, and shelved them with a calendar entry to re-test in January. Nothing flawed ever surfaced to a client. Jana names the principle on the show, borrowing from Jim Collins: fire bullets before cannonballs. Cheap, low-risk tests before major commitments. Wes’s version cost some subscription fees and some time, which he refuses to call waste: “Sometimes you invest a whole lot and find it’s not the right path. That’s not a bad investment.”
But the deeper reason to involve the team wasn’t better process design. It was ownership. Any change threatens some people; some people resist all change, even improvement. Wes’s answer was to have the team create the new path rather than receive it. “They actually created the new path to a large degree. So they’re invested in it.” You cannot force a team down a road and expect them to maintain it. You can invite them to build the road, and then maintenance takes care of itself.
The Funnel Is Dead. The Flywheel Isn’t.
The pivot also forced Wes to rethink what his agency sells advice about: marketing itself. His diagnosis of what AI has done to the traditional playbook is the most quotable stretch of the episode.
The linear funnel (lead magnet, email sequence, whittle them down to a customer) is breaking, for two compounding reasons. Nobody needs the free ebook anymore; the same information is a few clicks or one AI conversation away. And nobody wants to pay for it with their privacy; the email address costs more, in perceived terms, than the download is worth. Wes doesn’t mourn it: the old model, he admits, always felt “like trying to trick someone into your world and eventually conning them into buying something.”
What replaces it is messier and, he argues, better. People now enter your world from every direction: social, events, trade shows, a chat with an AI assistant that recommended you without your knowledge. You can’t track it precisely anymore; it’s closer to old-school broadcast than to the dashboard-driven attribution marketers spent two decades perfecting. So the model becomes cyclical instead of linear. A flywheel, where the end customer isn’t the end at all; they’re the beginning. Your best client, turned raving fan, is the most effective marketing asset you own, because the referral and the word-of-mouth recommendation are the channels trust hasn’t abandoned.
Which loops back to the first principle. In a market flooded with AI-generated everything, trust erodes and authenticity appreciates. The easiest way to humanize a business is to put a human face on it, and Wes now pushes founder-led businesses hard toward leveraging the founder’s own personality and presence. Humans first isn’t a slogan on his blog anymore. It’s the architecture: how the team was brought through the change, how clients are treated as partners rather than pipeline, and what the agency now advises everyone else to do.
The Inverse of the Industry
The outcome, roughly a year in: Uplift 360 had its most profitable year in two decades, while businesses Wes knows personally in the same industry are struggling — “the exact inverse and opposite,” as he puts it, of what he can see around him.
There’s no magic in the mechanics. The overhauled processes removed Wes as the bottleneck; less of his time is consumed by project inputs. That freed time goes to the human-first work: getting in front of people, showing up at industry events he used to miss because he was stuck in the weeds. “Profit always follows value,” he says, and value only grows two ways: serve more people, or serve people at a higher level. Uplift 360 chose the second. Fewer, bigger clients, served more consultatively, at a higher level of value.
One more cautionary tale rounds out the picture. Wes watched a client company, beloved by its customers and glowing with reviews, sell to a national brand that managed the transition horribly. The numbers presumably made sense; the people were ignored. The reviews collapsed, the service collapsed, and that part of the business is no longer operational. Same lesson, terminal version: transitions don’t fail on strategy. They fail on people: the team you didn’t bring along, the customers you alienated on the way to somewhere better.
Move Before the Pain Makes You
Strip the AI specifics away and Wes’s story is a sequence any operator can run.
Decide which signals are allowed to move you, so that when a credible one arrives, you act in days rather than quarters. Keep your values written down and warm, because when the catalyst comes, direction you’ve already chosen is speed. Ask where the value in your industry is migrating, not how to defend where it used to live. Treat new technology as a dial to calibrate, not a switch to flip, and re-calibrate on a schedule. Let the people closest to the friction redesign the work, and let the team build the path so they’ll want to walk it. Fire bullets before cannonballs. And manage every human in the blast radius, because that’s where transitions actually die.
Above all: don’t wait for the rusty nail to hurt enough. Wes got a wake-up call generous enough to arrive while his business was still strong. Most don’t. The micro-improvements you’re deferring because everything is going well are the pivot you won’t have to make later under pressure.
Complacency drives irrelevance. Keep growing, keep changing, and get off the nail before the pain makes the decision for you.
Stay unstoppable.
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Unstoppable is a decision intelligence podcast for leaders who refuse to settle. Hosted by Jana. New episodes weekly.
Key Takeaways
A healthy business can be a depreciating one. Every operational metric at Uplift 360 was solid; the valuation was discounted anyway because AI put the industry’s future in doubt. The books measure the past. The market prices uncertainty, and people don’t buy uncertainty.
Filter signals by source, not volume. Years of media noise moved Wes nothing; one disinterested professional assessment moved him within days. Decide in advance which sources are allowed to trigger action.
Pain drives change; values steer it. “Human first” sat dormant in a 2019 blog post until the valuation raised the stakes. Pre-chosen direction is why his pivot started in days instead of months; the catalyst supplied energy, the value supplied the heading.
Chase the value migration, not the moat. As AI erodes technical execution, value moves toward judgment: helping clients find the great option among many good ones. Reposition around what machines erode last.
AI adoption is a dial, not a switch. Going too hard ships clunky work that burns decades of trust; going too soft loses the output-per-hour race. Calibrate for right now, and re-calibrate often, including knowing what you won’t sell yet.
Let the team build the path. The people closest to the friction redesigned the processes, which made them invested in the outcome. Fewer steps, same output, no bottleneck; and a transition the team owns instead of endures.
Transitions fail on people. The team you didn’t involve, the clients you alienated, the acquired company that ignored its customers into collapse. Manage every human in the blast radius.
About Our Guest
Wes Towers is the founder of Uplift 360, an Australian digital agency that has served trades and construction businesses for more than 20 years with websites, SEO, and marketing. When AI began eroding the technical moat his agency was built on, Wes led a company-wide pivot: overhauling two decades of operating procedures with his team, recalibrating how far to lean into AI tooling, and repositioning the business around human-first, consultative marketing strategy. The result was Uplift 360’s most profitable year to date. He now helps founder-led businesses humanize their brands and navigate marketing in an AI-saturated landscape.
Connect with Wes: Uplift360.com.au (you can book a strategy call with Wes directly from the homepage)
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Wes Towers? Wes Towers is the founder of Uplift 360, a digital agency based in Australia that has specialized in websites, SEO, and marketing for trades and construction businesses for over 20 years. He’s known for pivoting the agency toward human-first, consultative marketing as AI began disrupting the traditional value of technical web development.
How do you know when your business actually needs to pivot? Separate noise from credible signal. Media coverage of disruption is engineered for attention and moved Wes to do nothing for years. What triggered his pivot was a disinterested professional (a business valuer with full access to his numbers) independently confirming the threat: strong metrics, discounted value, purely because of industry uncertainty. Corroborating signals from your own pipeline matter too; Wes watched his small-client segment disappear to DIY AI tools while remaining demand shifted upmarket. When a credible source and your own data agree, act in days, not quarters.
How much should a business lean into AI? Treat it as a dial, not a switch, and expect to re-calibrate constantly. Companies that pushed all-in early shipped clunky, tool-constrained work that eroded hard-won client trust; companies that ignored AI are losing the output-per-hour and pricing race. The balance point is specific to your industry and to right now, and it moves. Test tools cheaply (Wes trialed AI design tools, found them short of his quality bar, and shelved them with a scheduled re-test), never ship below your standard, and use AI where it already works.
Where does value migrate when AI erodes technical skills? Toward judgment. AI multiplies options and floods buyers with good-enough choices, and a confused mind can’t choose among a multitude of good options. The durable value is expertise that helps clients find the great option: consultative guidance, experience, and human relationships. For Uplift 360, that meant shifting from selling execution (websites) toward selling insight (strategy and advice), while the technical team went deeper into AI tooling to stay efficient on delivery.
How do you change a business without losing your team? Give them authorship. Wes’s pivot was the first time in 20 years he invited his team to redesign the standard operating procedures, with his lead developer (the person closest to the friction) carrying the most input. People resist change that’s imposed and maintain change they created. The same principle extends outward: transition without alienating long-term clients by keeping outputs consistent while the philosophy evolves, because losing a customer you spent years earning is the most expensive way to fund a pivot.
Is the traditional sales funnel dead? The linear version is breaking. AI answers replaced the lead-magnet ebook, and privacy-conscious buyers won’t trade an email address for information they can get in one chat. Wes’s replacement model is cyclical: a flywheel where people enter your world from every direction (social, events, referrals, untrackable AI recommendations) and the customer is the beginning, not the end. A client turned raving fan is your most effective marketing asset, because word of mouth is the channel trust hasn’t abandoned.
