I’m Out of the Valley of Death

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week sha busy Jennifer Karen and Jackie Russo talk about how their businesses did this year and what they're planning for 2025 Jackie and Shawn have been surprised by a surge of new clients in December which they say never happens and Jennifer is excited because she's confident that in the first quarter she will finally exit the Valley of Death that transitional period growing company experience when the people and processes that made them successful stop working along the way the owners discussed the relative merits of promoting from within versus hiring from without how long it should take to onboard senior level hires whether it's better to error on the side of budgeting for too little growth or too much how they're training employees to use artificial intelligence and what Jennifer can do to stop spending so much time writing and pricing proposals even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges in fact that's the whole idea behind the 21 hats Community engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another business owner can offer if you're interested in learning more step one is to sign up for the Morning Report newsletter which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners so you don't have to go looking for it step two is to get on our slack Channel where you can ask questions get vendor recommendations and tap the wisdom of a very impressive crowd just search for the 21 hats Morning Report to sign up for a free trial joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Shan busy CEO of Kinesis which is based in Portland Oregon and works with small businesses on marketing culture and strategy Jennifer Karen CEO of SB Expos and events an events management business based near Baltimore and Jackie Russo CEO of of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana the episode is titled I'm out of the Valley of Death welcome Sean Jennifer and Jackie it's great to have you here in the past few weeks I've been asking everyone how their years have gone whether they've hit their numbers what they're thinking heading into next year I've already gotten to you Sean uh you told us you weren't exactly thrilled with your year but I have yet to hit Jennifer and Jackie uh Jennifer how about you how's your year ending up uh we are off our budgeted Revenue but not bad I had a really aggressive goal this year for Revenue was 25% growth so we hit 15% I can't say it's bad from a revenue standpoint I'm I'm not happy we didn't meet the budget but that's okay I'm more upset about my profitability and I know this is a a standard part is you grow a company you go through areas of it's like Feast of famine where you grow a lot and then you got to sort of come back and make sure all your processes are fine and so I've spent considerable amount of money on a higher level of management this year and I know it will pay off but it hit my profitability because of high compensation so the hope is that next year we get the revenue to catch up with the expenses did you hire more highlevel people than you expected to at the beginning of the year um the compensation was higher than I expected yes um salaries are inreasing quite a bit in the last couple years and so uh what I wanted to have I knew I needed for growth it just cost me more than I budgeted and expected I seem to recall you've been trying to sort of uplevel the team right so you're hiring more experienced people it's less of that like young and eager you know works really hard but not very experienced and so they're less expensive is that fair that's exactly right Sean and some of those I've identified that can get there under strong leadership and external training and some it's uh I just need outside help you want to give people a chance how long do you give them a chance for how much do you realize they need a chance if they have a strong leader under it and how much you just don't have time all the time to coach those young ambitious people and so you need a leader to help coach them to get to their level and and that's expensive we've also talked a lot about your hopes of getting stuff off of your plate so you can stop working those 12-hour days and six day weeks that you told us about when you first joined the podcast did you make progress there this year as well well I got a lot of stuff off my plate a lot but then more stuff got back on it it's like you can't get rid of this how'd that happen oh my goodness well you know when you're training leaders that takes a long time that I had not expected so you're getting external people at a higher level they may know the skill set but they need understand your company and I underestimated I think that's a question for all of us maybe is how long does it take to get someone onboarded into your company at a leadership level um is it 90 days it is 180 days is it really 9 months to a year um I'm spending a considerable amount of time coaching these leaders training these leaders having them understand expectations that part and then I have ramped up my marketing significantly which is fantastic it just means I'm doing a lot of proposals and I think we talked about this on an earlier podcast Sean and I did is that our proposals are really customized and they take a long time which is great I'm getting a lot of requests for proposals I'm just spending a lot more time that I did not expect to get off my plate it's just a lot more work which is great I do need to figure out how to get that off my plate for next year so how has this experience uh left you thinking about your budgeting for next year are you going to set ambitious goals again great question I have my CFO and my number two and I are meeting for the third draft of our budget it is not aggressive but it also looks terrible from a profit standpoint and so forecasting is really really difficult right it's really difficult and if you under forecast you possibly under resourced so you got to hire people but if you over forecast and you don't meet those expectations then what I don't I don't think anybody has the right answer so Lauren I am being very concertive this year I think our our goal is uh 15% growth uh but I need that because I brought in all these staff so if I meet it fantastic if I exceed it even wonderful if I don't meet it I got problems I love that you think 15% is very conservative oh really it's crazy high oh good yeah well especially since like now you're a larger company 15% on a half million doll company big deal 15% on a $5 million I don't know where you're at but on a $5 million company is a big deal like that's tremendously disruptive it's really difficult you're going to your profits going to take a huge hit your cash flow is going to take a huge hit I mean I I just kind of wonder if you're not using your prior experience to inform what your perception of is of the future Sean that's a really good point I had not thought of that at all is that percentages should probably go down as the company gets bigger totally I heard once um that if inflation is let's say 5 to 7% you got to take that off because it's just inflation so 15% with 5% inflation is really only 10% growth that assumes that your pricing is keeping up with it which is somewhat difficult but that's a really good point I I have to go back and think about that well and we're not in that type of inflationary environment right now so you know I think I saw the other day it was like 2.7% something like that so so that's the other thing that shifted too is yeah you're right we were in a heavily inflationary environment so your perception of what growth needed to be was probably informed by that as well I I'm kind of curious why if you're I mean you said you were slowing down growth but then when you said 15% I'm like what no wonder your profit sucks I mean how many people do you have to hire to uh handle 15% growth Jennifer well none I've hired them that's why my profitability is not great this year I hired them now so I can absorb that kind of growth next year with no additional headcount or maybe a part-time coordinator right but no significant headcount well that helps is your profitability not looking good in you're budgeting for next year for the same reason it disappointed you this year yeah the I think the profitability took a hit this year because I hired higher level leaders and from a compensation standpoint next year I need that Revenue to make I hired them for growth so it was done it was just more than I thought it was going to be but I need that growth that make sense uh it's taking a lot longer than I expected to get people onboarded it's not easy I think or or maybe I just underestimated it the learning curve of getting into a new company can be tremendous well the pro the problem you're having is I mean sorry to sound like a know- it all but I mean you've grown really fast so your business has changed significantly which means you probably haven't had time to put in place the processes and systems that make onboarding and acclimation efficient that's right so you're paying a penalty for that fast growth but I I don't know what the answer is to that I me I it just is kind of a natural phenomenon of fast growth means you don't have the systems which means people can't step in as quickly and you can't get them up up to speed as fast Sean you're exactly right you don't sound like a no- at all you sound like you know it I just suffered it maybe that's what we instead of a know it all it's suffered together the good part is I would say probably Q2 beginning of Q2 I will be out of the valley of death oh all right so You' be over five million yeah so that's a big one yeah that's a big deal for Ser Service Company that's a huge milestone and just knowing the the management level that's in there right that they can handle that uh these things are all off my plate that's great do you uh do you feel like you have the sales and marketing ecosystem to run at this point or do you feel like that's still I wouldn't call it a system it's there it's doing well it's not a system yet it's it's um underdeveloped as a as a process that's why proposals are taking me so long oh and it's on your plate right yeah I have two part-time people helping me I have a salesperson that does new business goes out and gets new business and I have a part-time marketing person but she hasn't well she just started so we will see but uh yeah that's why it's it's taking up a lot of my time that is a goal for next year by the end of next year to systematize that that it's off my plate Jennifer the way you said that it sounded to me like you were saying you will automatically exit the Valley of Death when you hit that 5 million mark no no no to me the valley death is less about Revenue it's more about management and things off my plate that's what I was going to ask right yeah it's less Sean jumped in with Revenue it's it's not that it's it's more that I have leaders who are trained who can now start to implement standardization workflow and over supervised staff and then like I got payroll off my plate payroll is off my plate financial and admin stuff is off my plate I now meet the CFO and it's not lowle stuff it's highle conversations um the last thing off my plate that is day-to-day is the proposal writing once that's off my plate then to me I'm out of the valley if I were to look at your CRM and look by leads by Source what would be the percent that are coming through that are not from you or your network I would say um about 75% of our leads that turn into sales are from our Tech partner really okay oh it's a good Tech partner yeah so it's not me is that uh locked down could they go somewhere else could they get bought could they yeah Etc all of the above yes yeah but they're not feeding me leads out of the goodness of their heart it's because we're the only Services partner that works exclusively on their platform so because of that they don't want to give it to anybody else right now if other services that do what we do decide to exclusively work on their platform so it's less about the tech partner more about my competition or if somebody were to buy them that was a competitor to you yeah that would be bad that would be bad so you you sort of do have concentration risk within your marketing and sales ecosystem yeah yes do you have a plan to um offset that I do not so this was a calculated risk about oh I don't know 2019 so five years ago that um people that do what we do convention management trade shft sales work on multiple different event Tech platforms based on the clients and I said too complicated uh we're going to stick with one platform and we're going to become experts at it so if you ever use that platform we're the person to go to and it's worked out extraordinarily well so as long as that company grows we can grow but it leaves it's highrisk high reward High reward yeah right that's great strategy love it well as long as the risk and I I heard a um a phrase years ago that said Niche is Rich and so have you guys heard that right instead of trying to be everything to everyone if you become the best at a very small Niche uh it can be successful and I think of myself as a whale and a puddle in that small puddle I am the whale and I'd prefer to be a whale than a minnow and um to me the size of the body water is less important rather than the size that I am um so I think sometimes when you start a business when you're trying to do everything to everyone don't try to focus on a couple things or one thing that you do extraordinarily well and become the best at it and I think it it'll take a little bit longer maybe to pay off but when it does it does well how about you buy the tech platform how about they buy me okay hey Jennifer I wanted to ask you about one other aspect of what you told us which is you've been hiring highlevel employees and it's taken a little bit longer to get them up to speed part of that I assume is because they're coming from outside um it's not like they grew up in your business and you know that's something that owners talk about a lot when they have the choice to promote from within versus hiring from outside is it your goal to get to the point where you'll be promoting more from within that was my goal before and I promoted a lot from within and uh we had some missteps really great people just maybe didn't have the experience or um whether industry or managerial to be able to do it and we had someone uh about six months ago decide to take a step back and it's the right decision they were fantastic really great at one level but as the company grew didn't really have the skill set in couldn't couldn't ramp up fast enough but now as the number two position in that department they're going to do amazing because now we have somebody from the outside and so I gave that person room to breathe to develop those skills put them in a leadership training program and then brought in someone from the outside that's new so we'll see but so I think less I've been trying to promote from within and what I've learned is when you grow fast people cannot grow fast enough with you that you need um and I'm trying to strike the right balance from for gring from within but then getting people from the outside I don't know the right balance but I know when you grow fast it's really hard a Founder like myself and owner will work nights weekends get training listen to podcast do everything but your average employee may or may not be able to do that fast enough for you are you confident that you got the right people when you hired from outside at these senior levels no who's ever confident that's the hardest part is what is onboarding a higher level person mean versus you know a recent college graduate that's a different onboarding what are the things you have to do how long do you have to take to see certain results is it like I said the 3 month the 6 month the N9 month the coordinator you should be able to see in 90 days or is it vice versa the coordinator's going to take longer but the directors should be fast I don't really know and I'm trying to figure out whether I do know our hiring process is getting better we recently instituted an assessment we're doing uh Clifton assessments strength finders I think it's called have you heard of it Jackie we just started it it was really insightful when we were interviewing for a position and we made them all take it and then we're like oh oh things that came out that made it better to ask in the second interview and so now we're going to implement it across the board how did you use it Jackie for new hires or okay okay new hes new hires um and we've looked at inag and strength finder with the two we like the best but I'll tell you positive intelligence is pretty good too okay and that's all about your sabur oh yeah yeah yeah fascinating insights I never heard of that one so I'm going to go take a look at that I'm finding that the first interview helps you weed out somebody but to get to the second or third this outside assessment is really helpful right I um you know we have this happy hungry humble Mantra and so the hungry to me is people who really want it and so we put them through the ringer three four rounds of talking to different people and then we give them a paid project that has become the biggest indicator and I mean pay like no question you're paid a full rate but it is fascinating to me the people that will submit their work and no followup how'd you like it what' you think what should I do differently because I intentionally wait a couple days and nothing Jackie how big is this project is this a 4H Hour project a four- week project we've got four or five different ones we give them real client work because we want to we don't want to game the system and we give them exactly how much Direction they would get if they were here so they'll figure out really quickly what it's like to work here and it should take about 10 hours I like that idea yeah at a high level right you're not going to give a college graduate that but or maybe you could just different but at a high level that's interesting everybody gets some kind of a test project okay okay yeah I agree with that and I also agree with pay you got to pay people um gotta pay I don't give them real work though I mean I I just I kind of disagree with that because I don't want there to be any I don't want there to be any resentment or thoughts like oh well you're just using work that you I just I just think yeah I don't want there to be any confusion so we do madeup projects but that see I I like the madeup project because then you have consistency like I give the same project to multiple people AC over time and then you can see like oh wow this person handled this this way this person did it differently this way I I like the consistency I was going to ask uh Jackie how do you think about the issue of promoting from within or hiring uh higher level people from outside we've gone through the ringer on this I mean we've had years where it was you know you became an intern and then you became a paid part-time employee and then you became a paid full-time employee and then you've never worked anywhere else but here so you have a very limited U appreciation all of the great benefits that you get you think it's like that everywhere and that's a challenge uh we have hirer what I would classify for easy jargon middle Managers from other places and they come with bad habit so we've been through the ringer there's there's pros and cons everywhere I think for us it's really come down to are you the right kind of person and so the uh doing the rounds of interviews which I'm the last one I'm not the first one I'm the very very last person they meet with I'm going to look at their resume and I'm going to give them a quick yes you can go through the process or no but uh once they're in the process they're going to meet with different departments they're going to do peer interviews and it's 15 minutes I mean we're not and nobody's driving over here it's zooms you know we're trying to keep it simple but I how frustrated are you going to get with the process that's going to be part of it and how well do you interact with different people and then the paid test project and then if you're the right fit great you're going to be here for a long time we've got employees that you know going on multiple double digit years and then now I feel like we've won and I just have to do everything possible to keep them happy in here Jackie I'm glad you said some of that as I I've had that problem too be like cultivate from an intern there's a shadow side to that and we had to part ways with an employee a couple years ago and she was delightful just a lovely person but man she had just stalled out in her Career Development and it was really frustrating because there was nothing for her to compare to like she just didn't really recognize what the opportunity was how you know kind of amazing it is to be able to like shape your career she didn't really know how to do that right and was just kind of like stuck and man that was a hard that was a hard lesson I I'm I like you I just we don't hire interns anymore they just don't do that I want people who've been somewhere else and have struggled in their career somewhere else I don't want to be the one to introduce them to that idea it's just too painful so I have a question for you what do you do when great people been with you for years but the technology has provided opportunity a how do you either reassign them retrain them or release them when you say the technology has provided opportunity that sounds like coded language for they haven't kept up or is it am I not what do you mean by that I'm I'm I'm a little bit thinking about me and and some conversations we've had lately but I'm specifically thinking about a client who has um a tech company and the the client the employees are delightful great awesome and really do an incredible job but the industry has changed and the way that the industry has changed the revenue is now coming from different departments and these people that's not their skill set right I mean I think you and I probably face a similar situation if you think about you and I probably made a bunch of money over the years like doing designing stuff right like clipping photos out of a background or you know at the time technically complex stuff that other people couldn't do and we've just seen that Arena become commoditized and you know I I have definitely had employees who just won't change with the times and that's so hard because like you're a good person you've done years of good work and I hate to say it but like that job is disappearing and we need to get you a new set of skills right and boy it is tough to some people don't know how to do that H it's really hard yeah I mean I had a really lovely young man who started out as a an intern became our web developer you know in-house guy and he was great and then I just saw the writing on the wall for our business I'm like I I need you to be able to meet with clients I need you to be actually actually guide them through the process and he was like I just want to sit behind my desk and code and so I had to like basically I found him a job elsewhere I like I literally called a friend and I was like do you need a great web developer I've got one right I've mentally I was like hey man this job is changing this is what I need you to do do you want to do that and he's like I don't want to do that like okay all right yeah I think that is a really hard real phenomenon it's a challenge and it's like what kind of company are we are we the kind of company that cuts people loose when I can't use them anymore are we the kind of company that values our people well isn't that business though Jackie I mean if you don't need them how long are you going to wait 3 months okay but you can't hold them for a year right oh yeah I can I could totally lose money for a year I mean I have but that is part of the challenge sure and I think part of it is emotional if you just look at straight numbers sure outside analyst can say get rid of that person get rid of this person whatever and when you see the emotion behind it it tells a different story whether that person was willing to work on a Sunday to get a project done or um for us the last minute was able to travel somewhere their their willingness to jump in and help you want to hold them as long as you can to to to more business comes but on the other hand sometimes skill sets change right and um that's the hardest thing for a business owner is the right Staffing at the right level and labor is not easily changed in and out right right oh yeah yeah for sure I mean that's the problem with our basically the work world I was thinking about this today somebody was making an argument on LinkedIn that you know oh employees are just like athletes you know they have stats and you need to measure those stats and if they're underperforming you need to get rid of them and I'm like dude no way it is so complex the interconnectivity between employees their communication skills soft skills there's a ton of stuff you cannot measure and that's the thing we've moved into a knowledge-based you know sort of world and which means like you have unique things you do in your company that are not easily found on the street which means you have to train people I just think it's really hard you know that's just how it's that's the way it is let me jump in here the the clock is ticking and I don't want Jackie to think she's getting off the hook Jackie how do how's your year ending up oh my gosh I you know I signed up to do these things because I was given a guarantee in writing there was no math and now there's math this is not my favorite thing I don't like the math Lauren as we've talked about in our founding members masterminds a monthly last year and this year were some really weird up and down years for me you we've had this kind of steady growth I look back at 206% 21 3% growth 22 43% growth 23 133% growth so it's been good and study and I knew eventually it was going to kind of top but I was shooting for 10 you know I thought solid 10% would be great and this year I started to think oh man we're not going to get there and all of a sudden in these last few weeks there's been we never get new clients in December and there are five who are asking to hire us and that never happens it's the same with us it's the same December's usually dead right Jackie like and the same it's like all of a sudden my pipeline's like full and it was dead over the summer dead dead dead dead dead d a dead yeah me too me too so my I December are kind of I get some but not the level of of requests for in in my pipeline right now I think there was just Universal paralysis for 2024 like just people were like I'll kick that down the road let's wait till the election's over blah blah blah just just totally not taking action it drove me crazy this year was just terrible for that Jackie what do you think changed for you do you have any idea well we've done some smarter things with processes uh we've gone back to some Basics we had a very good I think uh Discovery meeting to proposal to presentation system that we developed over the early years that was real personalized um much like Jennifer we spent a lot of time really making it top-notch and we got into a position for those those years of growth growth growth we had a crazy quantity of discovery meetings we some months would have 30 40 50 discovery meetings in a month because it wasn't my leads anymore we were getting all these outside because we're like Hey we're gonna work on an inbound campaign we're going to do more outbound marketing we're gonna pull them in from all these places because to your point Sean I didn't want all the business to be because of my network we needed to have a real system so we put a system in place the system worked it changed our closing numbers a lot but also they weren't the quality went down didn't it yeah but we also were able to here our three biggest clients came from that and so so we had to trade off some personalization so this year we're like okay reassess and we went back to lower quantity higher quality of lead and we felt like the reflection then was going to be a a more personalized uh proposal and so we had to make some modifications to get back into that but now all of a sudden the yeses are coming quicker did you change your pricing oh as you happen to know Lauren I love when you ask questions you know the answer too um we did you have to tell everybody that jeffie oh no I'm throwing you under the bus buddy this whole show is scripted anybody was listening we we planned this all out um no I didn't know he was gonna ask that but he did just hear the answer to it yesterday so that would takes it but laugh thanks a lot Jackie oh Lauren you're not getting away from it man Miss Lauren too late yep so yes Lauren we did change our prices coming out of 19 when I did Goldman Sachs 10,000 um new business from January to May of 20 you know so the end of the teens we went through a lot of change no more Project work period it's all got to be strategic brand plans the implementation of those plans that was awesome that made my heart happy that's been the best thing we ever did for our business in Goldman Sachs realized oh we're not charging nearly enough and so that that education and the time that Co provided me gave me a lot of time uh to really do the research to figure out what those numbers should be and so we were at a good place over the years more people were interested the prices went up more people were interested the prices went up we wanted to have bigger companies the prices went up well I had to do some assessment this year because we've gotten more efficient with a lot of things things aren't taking as long as they used to we're smarter better faster and I'm doing a lot of research on the psychology around numbers and understanding how I love round numbers but buyers don't love round numbers and I need to do some work on adjusting that so we did a lot on pricing psychology um referenced a lot of research from Nick Kenda uh was a great podcast not any greater than 21 hats of course but in addition to 21 hats called nudge and he was a guest on it and he's got this great book on um marketing and psychology and pricing and stuff anyway all of that to say we didn't just change the value but we also changed the uh presentation and um digits of the numbers and it's been yes yes yes yes in a row it's crazy so how is this affecting your uh planning for next year I want more of it please always more are you budgeting for more we are uh we we're staffed for more we've got capacity and we've got OB full-time employees and then we've got some uh independent contractors because they like that life but they're practically you know in with us I mean they they do work for other people we're following all the rules they're not really employees in case the IRS is listening but uh but they they want more and they're asking for more and so we'll have more to give them do you ever slow down Jackie absolutely not there's not enough time time is too short I'm only gonna be here a little bit longer and I want to make the most of it now somebody the other day asked they're like okay if we took away the coffee how would that affect you I said no if I started to drink coffee how would it affect me I only drink water wow just water no alcohol no soda no coffee no tea just water wow Jennifer I wanted to go back to something that uh you raised in our emails um before this session you raised the issue of training employees to use uh AI what's going on with you that made that uh an issue you wanted to talk about now I've realized that you know a couple people that are Tech curious are going to use it but I have to be the leader of of training everybody to least understand and how to start it the week of Thanksgiving is always kind of quiet for us so the Tuesday before Thanksgiving we did a three hour AI training basically and it wasn't training that's not I think it was called AI Innovation fun and what we did is we had someone do a like a 20 minute presentation of slides like what is AI the different types of ones out there here's some ideas blah blah blah um and it was really cool cuz she did all these slides just to get you know everybody from the 22-year- old recent college graduate to the 60-year-old that's been with us just thinking that assuming they're starting from zero right so some basic overview chat GPT versus perplexity versus Claude versus um what grammarly does on AI and at the end of it it was really funny cuz I didn't know she did this the slide then said this entire presentation and slide deck was created by AI so it was really cool and then we broke up into small groups so then for the next hour each department we had a leader and they just played so my sales team pulled up chaput and they just had different things that they were playing with so we just allowed them to be you know have fun with it so they had to take a picture of their desk and put it in and say please organize my desk right they did just fun cute things um and then they went to work then we came back and each department did a presentation of what they did so it was fun to see what other people would do and then we had a brainstorming session we did quizzes and we went back and so I'm trying to get everybody up to speed on what does it mean how can you use it just start playing Just create it who knows it's kind of crap in some ways and other ways it's amazing just put anything in there put it on your phone and talk to it they were all very excited about having the opportunity to play at work on something that they were all very interested in and so I'm going to do this probably once a quarter so we can start adding AI into our our workflow I don't know how yet besides writing and the writing of AI sounds like AI so how to change the tone or whatever but if I don't do this I feel like I'm almost a little too late I found a great use of AI writing actually um I got an email from my it vendor uh and they they have a person on their team who is just terrible at communication shocking and uh he always writes in this tone that's like condescending and it just grats me you know it's sort of like well as we told you before blah blah blah blah blah it's like oh man that is just really bad and so anyway rather than get pissed off about it uh I fed his message into Ai and I said um rewrite this in a tone that's more friendly and team oriented and it did a pretty good job on the first pass and I was like well do this but less or more of this and by the time AI was done with it it was a good email I was like oh my gosh I don't know how to tell my IT company but they need to use this tool they need you know it takes coaching right it needs somebody they'll need a human to like review it because the person who's doing the bad communication doesn't have the self-awareness right sure man it was a really good application of AI I the before and after was profound um so anyway if you got bad communicators um you can use AI to improve their writing yeah I I mean I agree there's so many possibilities between analysis between image creation between slide creation the possibilities are endless I just need to get my team moving that way right do you think Sean everybody on your staff does that with chat or whatever AI you used yeah we you know the good thing I I have a couple people on my team who have been pushing the exploration forward um and there are some people who like clearly have very little interest in it and then there are others who are really fascinated by it but they've made it part of their you know kind of ongoing discussion because it's disruptive it's incredibly disruptive especially in the marketing world oh yeah totally um I mean I'm glad that I've been moving away from transactional marketing for years yes it's just all those like crappy blog posts that many agencies were paid to write why would you pay an agency to write a crappy blog post anymore you know like if you're gonna write a crappy blog post if it's do it so uh yeah I just I think it's really important that every business figure out how it's affecting their organization like literally I I have a client that came to us and they said uh this is our marketing plan and I took a look at it I was like wow that's really standard and then I went over to a I was like hey write me a marketing plan for XYZ type of business and like it spit out basically the marketing plan they had built as human beings yeah and because it wasn't very remarkable right and so I think that's a big part of the puzzle is is you as an owner are going to have to focus on things that are really high value and hard to create because copying other people isn't going to do it anymore Jennifer I was thinking about it when you were talking about how much time writing proposals is taking you and and I'm wondering if Sean or Jackie have uh used AI for proposals I do I do I have two suggestions that make it very helpful we use a AI recorder in our Zoom meetings we happen to use read AI but there's plenty of them OT or whatever and we take that transcript and drop it into Ai and tell it what we want to accomplish with the proposal and that first draft is probably 75% right wow does that include pricing though sure my biggest thing is pricing that's what's taking by far the longest the descriptions um and I think it's just because it's so customized what we're doing I don't know I have to figure out a way that's a 2025 goal to make it less custom or or faster somehow I have to do it I mean you could feed it all your past proposals with pricing and then you could build basically your own learning model model that would understand oh when these key words are used it means pricing more oriented this way I mean I think that's your I think that's your path to solving some of that well I look forward to accomplishing that because it's a it's a big time suck and I know it shouldn't be but that's that's for next year Jackie you've told us in the past that you've looked over almost all of your processes uh for ways that AI can improve them have you actually trained your employees to use AI we have and we've made it a a team sport everybody has to train somebody else and so you know Maria went and learned how to do this one thing and then taught the rest of us and uh Kennedy and Morgan learned how to do something and taught the rest of us I learned how to do something and taught the rest Michael's learned and that's how we've kind of divided up the challenge of incorporating it so it's not resting on any one person and so Jennifer I feel your pain I feel like you know a lot of times I have to put them on my back and carry them to the new land but I'm like I'm not doing that anymore everybody's going to learn this stuff because it is our future and the people who don't know how to use it are the ones who don't have a future I totally agree with that Jackie everybody's got to learn it and you have to you know start off slow start to feel comfortable with it and then try to be creative of what's possible um I met someone at a conference about a month ago he has it on his phone and he talks to it and asks he uses it for advice of how to talk to his 13-year-old teenage daughter that's amazing it is he so on the way home he'll say to Chad GPT okay my daughter has this issue please tell me how best to approach her blah blah blah and it spits out answers to him I was like what yeah never occurred to me to use it like on a personal like therapy basis but my creative director is having conversations with it you know he's basically like trying out ideas has anybody ever done this or what's the what what could work in this Arena like it's just sort of like a a riffing tool you know almost like musicians riff with each other and it's pretty interesting um that that conversation piece is pretty cool I feel like it's a brainstorm partner yeah I used it so I was uh in Poland recently um for a site visit and then saw some family and I asked it to find me places to buy ingredients for a Thanksgiving dinner it was the week before Thanksgiving and it created an entire menu all the recipes and the and the locations and the stores of where to find and it even said you will not find a whole turkey anywhere in Poland you're just going to have to buy a turkey breast oh my gosh wow and you know what it didn't have is the stupid recipe sites and all their popup ass that's right that's right not yet at least not yet Sean Jackie you mentioned brainstorming can you give us a sense of what kind of brainstorming is that you know marketing plans for a client or is that about strategy for your business what have you done all the above look at this p&l statement and tell me where I need to make changes in our books uh look at this budget and tell me where we may be off because again you know I hate math I love the brainstorming piece of it because there's no judgment I feel like I can bounce different ideas off of it I'm not going to take what it says and just use it out right but it gives me a really great starting place to help coales my thoughts are you doing this on chat GPT typically yes yeah I mean I do play around with some of the others you and I've talked a lot about scribe which is one of my favorites grammarly obviously is one I love that QuickBooks is starting to bring in AI so it'll just automatically scan invoices now really oh have you not played with that I have not let it change your life okay if you have the digital version of it whether they emailed it to you or you scanned it and saved it on your desktop however you got it I don't care you open QuickBooks and you go to Bill and you can upload from desktop or upload from computer it will bring it in and if they already exist as a vendor it will match match match match and all you have to do is approve you know what so I use bill.com in addition tobook it does that yep I knew yeah bill.com does why I canceled my bill.com subscription because QuickBooks now does it oh all right all right I got to look cuz bill.com is not cheap no it is not good idea okay see there's going to be so many profitable now there there we go there's so many things that we are not even scratching the surface on that I I'm really excited about me too my thanks to Shan busy Jennifer Karen and Jackie Russo thanks so much for sharing [Music] guys one thing before you go everything we do at 21 hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us all learn together if you get something out of listening to these podcast episodes consider joining the conversation you can do that by joining the 21 hats sounding board a slack Channel where you can tap the wisdom of a very smart crowd or by becoming a founding member and joining our monthly Zoom Forum where you can be part of conversations much like the ones we have on the podcast you can sign up for both by subscribing to the morning report if you have any questions you you can email me at Lauren 21h hats.com and if you get something out of this podcast or out of the morning report please tell a friend tell an enemy tell every business owner you know your word of mouth owner to owner will always be the most effective way to build this community for all of us thank you it means a lot this episode was produced by another entrepreneur Jess ston founder of blank word Productions thanks for listening everyone [Music]