Brittany Dwyer is all about connection and collaboration. They’re core principles that drove Disco!, the Arch Grants-backed events-focused company she founded during the pandemic, to profitability.
Dwyer is now bringing that same attitude to her new role as the CEO of the Bucket List Companies, which she moved into as part of that company’s recent acquisition of Disco!. One of the first things she says she’s focused on is unifying the various business verticals and assets that fall under the Bucket List umbrella: Sauce Magazine, STL Bucket List, the social media agency Bucket List Creative, a podcast and studio, and now Disco!.
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“Looking holistically across the brands and not treating them as separate, but treating them as one whole [entity of] how people consume St. Louis and how people want to know the businesses here and find the cool things to do,” Dwyer says. “What I’ve done the most over the past five years is build community and relationships and connect the dots for people, which I want to continue doing.”
The acquisition of Disco! came together a few years after Dwyer and Bucket List founder Lucas Farrell started collaborating. Disco! helps corporate businesses execute meaningful experiences for their employees, with Farrell and Dwyer working together on what they called HeyLou, which helps local apartment complexes build community through resident meetup options and unique perks.
She recalls Farrell casually referencing what would happen “when you come on as CEO,” which she played off as a joke.
“They were like, ‘No. We’re serious. We’ve been working together and we’re ready to take a more serious look at our growth plan and our strategy,’” Dwyer says. The move made sense to her too, she says, as a way to go “further, faster,” especially since Disco! was receiving requests to perform the functions of a media agency like Bucket List.
She did not disclose the terms of the deal, saying only it’s a mix of cash, the CEO title, and equity stakes in the different businesses. Dwyer is clear that she sees her move into the CEO role of the Bucket List Companies as a way to grow what its founder, Farrell, has built, one that complements his leadership.
“It speaks to him as a founder and someone who lives and cares about St. Louis—having the foresight [to] bring someone in that can take this further,” she says.
And she says it’s a welcome change to transition from working for herself with a few contractors to leading a team of 16 full-time staff, with whom she can commiserate during challenging moments and celebrate wins.
“I didn’t have to answer to anybody, which is honestly the biggest thing that speaks to me,” Dwyer says. “But it does get lonely, and I felt I would do myself a disservice by not doing this. There’s so much more that we can do together and build together.”
For Bucket List, Dywer comes to the company as an accomplished entrepreneur and operator with a rolodex of corporate clients and a curated list of over 400 locally based experiences.
She’s working out the puzzle of how to fold what she built with Disco! into Bucket Lists, such as having her corporate clients utilize the podcast studio or integrating its bookable experiences into a section of the Sauce website.
“We don’t know exactly how that’s going to look, but we know that we have a large audience on Sauce that are looking for those things for groups and teams,” she says.
Dwyer is also applying her technology background to building systems and tools to better streamline and organize the content that’s already being produced by Bucket List’s various properties. One of her visions is building a searchable database on the STL Bucket List website.
“Taking our media and making sure that doesn’t get lost in a post that does really well [on a social media platform], and someone can’t easily then go seek and find that if they’re moving here [or] living here,” Dwyer explains. “It’s marrying those things together and thinking about the way technology supports you creating a life here.”
In that vein, she says Bucket List, across its properties, already reaches millions of people each month, most of whom are local to the region. That puts strong growth potential on the audience beyond St. Louis, Dwyer says.
“We have a very hyperlocal audience, but it’s important to look at who’s the next audience,” she says. “There are a lot of people coming to visit St. Louis, and, like, we do such a good job telling the story. That’s another iteration for us, thinking about tourism and how we’re serving that market too.”
In a broader sense, Dwyer sees Bucket List as a company that highlights local establishments and the businesses that support them through compelling storytelling and experiences. She describes it as being the nucleus between corporate entities, local businesses, the clients they represent, and civic organizations.
“People want a reason to come to a business and a feeling when they take that away,” she says. “If you’re doing marketing right, that’s what makes it special is something memorable and lasting, and finding a way to bridge the physical and digital gaps.”
