Helping agencies become AI consulting powerhouses with Casey Meehan

Hey, before we get to the show, I just wanna remind you that we have created a private Facebook group just for you, our podcast listeners. There are almost 1500 agencies, agency owners, inside that Facebook group every day talking about what’s going on inside their shop, asking for resources, gut checking decisions, talking about everything from pricing to hiring, to biz dev. All kinds of things are happening there. We’re starting conversations. You guys are starting conversations. What I love about it is the community’s coming together and sharing resources, encouraging each other, and just sort of having a safe place to talk about what it’s like to own an agency. So all you have to do is head over to Facebook, search for a Build, a Better, Agency Podcast group, or Build, a Better, Agency Podcast.

And you’ll find the group. You have to answer three questions. If you don’t answer the questions, we can’t let you in. But they’re simple. It’s, do you own an agency or do you work at an agency? And if so, what’s the URL? What are you trying to get out of the group? And will you behave, basically? So come join us. If you haven’t been there for a while, come on back. If you haven’t joined, join into the conversation. I think you’re gonna find it really helpful. All right, let’s get to the show.

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan. Guess what? Yep, another episode of Build a Better Agency. Love coming and hanging out with you every week. I just love the time that we get to spend together learning, meeting cool people, or for me, reconnecting with cool people I already know and sharing them with you. And that’s certainly the case of this episode. It’s also the case of the Build a Better Agency Summit. So in a blink of an eye, it’s gonna be May. And we are gonna be gathering in Denver 350 or so, agency owners and leaders gathering together to learn from each other, to share experiences, to share support, to encourage, to celebrate. It’s gonna be awesome. It is every year so grateful that we can come together and spend a couple days together just deeply thinking about our business and looking for ways to be helpful to each other.

It’s just, it’s really a great experience and, and we love it, and we know that you love it too. And so with that said, guess what we need to, we need you to get your tickets. So head over to agency management institute.com and on the upper left corner, build a Better Agency Summit. And you can click on it and you can register. And I’m telling you the speaker lineup is off the charts This year. We are gonna talk about biz dev. We’re gonna talk about growing your existing clients. We have experts who are gonna talk about how we’re leaving money on the table with our pricing. We are gonna talk about AI and the best practices that agencies are deploying right now, as in May ’cause, of course right now.

Now, it’ll change by May. Right now, how are agencies growing their business and their client’s business using AI and machine learning? We’re gonna talk about what you need to do, the mistakes that agency owners make as they think about or begin to move towards selling their business. We’re gonna have some proprietary research that we’re gonna unveil at the conference. So it is, it is all kinds of good things to be talking about. We’re gonna talk about HR and how to build a, a strong team at a higher, better. How to keep the, your best talent, how to keep them engaged, even if you’re a small shop and you feel like you can’t offer them as many opportunities just off the charts conversations.

And you’re gonna be a part of every one of ’em. So we hope you’ll join us. So speaking of the summit, one of the speakers at the summit is my guest today. So Casey Mehan successfully owned an agency. It was a content agency for about 15 years. Super Niche did these amazing long form blog posts that were tied to research and data, and they just performed off the charts and he and his agency were crushing it. But Casey’s looking down the road and he’s seeing AI coming and machine learning. And this is back in like 20 17, 20 18. And he begins to start thinking about a pivot. And today what Casey is doing is he’s working with agencies to help them figure out how to harness the partner, the power of ai.

And so we’re gonna talk a little bit about his journey, how he came, went from being an agency owner to more of this consultancy model, some of the things that he’s doing with his agency clients right now with AI and what he thinks is coming down the road. So buckle in. This is gonna be a fascinating conversation, and I know he is gonna walk us through at least one very specific process that we can deploy right now with our agencies to create better content for ourselves and our clients, again, using the power of ai. So let’s welcome him to the show and get started. Casey, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, it’s absolutely my pleasure, Drew. Happy to be here.

So, you know, you, you’ve been a part of the AMI community for a while. You’ve been at a couple summits, you’ve been at some workshops, but you’ve made some changes in sort of the way your agency goes to market or the way you go to market. So give everybody a little bit of background on sort of what your agency was and then sort of kind of how you’ve pivoted today.

You bet. So we were highly focused on long form thought leadership blog posts. We didn’t do any paid media, no real advertising, none of the channels there. I I, my background was in SEO and we, you know, many years ago, I guess 10 years ago or so, we saw the writing on the wall of SEO being, becoming very content focused. Right? So, you know, that was kind of my first pivot many years ago, going from technical SEO to really just focusing on writing and building up a stable of amazing writers who were really good at some very niche, B2B industries, niche software B2B industries.

So that was our focus for 10 years. And along that ride, I’ve, I’ve always been a little bit fascinated by technology. We worked in the software space and a lot of my friends have created software startups. So I had always dabbled in code and was specifically pretty enamored in AI since I was a kid. I was right, you know, ro robots were my thing. So in about 20 18, 20 19, I started kind of taking that a little bit more seriously, especially as those first GPS came out. There was things in the New Yorker around that time about how well they could write, thought this is a good time to kind of get into this, learn some Python skills, learn what the state of the industry is, began to really collaborate with some amazing machine learning experts who, who still are very helpful to me.

But, you know, we, we were really focused on, on software, you know, helping software companies grow. We did a lot of work with Salesforce. We worked with a couple different software companies that were early stage startups and helped them reach the unicorn stage. One of them became a double unicorn now worth more than 2 billion. But, you know, things changed dramatically at right. You know, November of last year. You know, my buddy called me and was like, Hey, have you tried this stuff out? And I, I was, you know, that week just, just, you know, ever since then, I guess I’ve been spending 20 or 30 hours just, I can’t sleep unless I, you know, I’m just always thinking about about that stuff.

So that’s kind of the, the quick jo version of the journey. I don’t know if I skipped anything or if any of that needs clarification.

Well, so as you were learning more about machine learning and AI and all of that, how were you viewing, how were you viewing your business, your clients, the work, what you were selling clients through that lens? Like how did, how did that begin to shift for you?

So, I knew the day would come when these bots would be able to write, you know, really good stuff. I could just see that trajectory. But I think it still surprised me once, you know, the capabilities came out at that, at that time, a, a year ago, November of, of 2022. I guess that was so, you know, for me it was, it was an interesting time. ’cause I, I kind of talked with my team who were primarily writers, not necessarily technical folks. And I, I kind of asked them, you know, this, this seems pretty important to me.

This seems like a big, a big change and, you know, who wants to go on that journey with me? And, and a few of them raised their hands and a few of them said, you know, just, we’re kind of silent. So, right. We’ve, we’ve pivoted.

I think you, I think you faced a lot of what a lot of agencies are facing, which is half the staff is excited about the new tools and the other staff is like, this is gonna take my job.

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and to be honest, I mean, the fear is there for me as well, and the fear and the, you know, in some ways it’s, it, it could be more that, you know, the more time you spend with it, you, you really, you start to realize, and once you start to get good, very good with it, you know, it’s, it, it, it, it can take surprising, you know, shapes, but I guess I was just, for me, it just felt like a no no brainer. Like it or not, it just felt like something that was happening, right. That I, I couldn’t look away from.

You’re, this is, this is a train that is gonna, is on the track, right?

Yeah. This, it’s, you know, hiding your eyes from it, pretending it’s not there. You know, that just didn’t work for me. So. Right. Yeah. So, so, so we’ve pivoted pretty, pretty dramatically over the course of This year, moving from, you know, supplying this, you know, running this team of writers and, and supplying our clients with thought leadership blog posts, and, you know, some bit of PR outreach around those blog posts to now moving more into consulting about best use cases for, for AI in, in marketing has been the last six months or so of, of what I’ve been focused on.

So how’s it changed the work? So have you stepped away from really serving clients in the way that, like are you still producing long form content for clients? Have you stepped away from that completely?

It’s pretty much wound down at this point. Yeah. Yeah. We’re still working on a couple of, working with a couple clients that we’ve just had very long standing relationships with, but we’re not taking on any new writing clients. We’re, I’m, I’m primarily focused on this consulting coaching model and the research part of it. So really just researching as much as I can experimenting with it, you know, every day is, has been what, what I’ve been spending my time on. And I, I, I kind of feel like, you know, I don’t think there’s a lot of agencies, there’s really hardly any that I’ve spoken to that were so focused just on the writing.

Like we didn’t do anything else. Right,

Right. So

This hit us right square in the, yeah. In the superpower, I guess you might say. And in a way that was really good ’cause it was just a no brainer, you know, it was just like, I have to do this. Like, I’m not gonna all of a sudden decide to get really good at, you know, paid advertising, although, right.

Or designing logos or,

Exactly, yeah. I didn’t have those extra streams that we could kind of sh shuffle things around. It was like, one thing is ending and a new thing is beginning. So while it was a dramatic time, and, and you, you know, this very well, you’ve helped me through some of these very trying times. It, it was very clear, which I feel very lucky for, very grateful for that, that clarity. ’cause as, you know, it’s, those are, those are hard times to make decisions. There’s a lot of what ifs and a lot of sleepless nights as many agency owners can attest to. But, you know, you really help me come to that conclusion.

It’s like, okay, you know, you, you, you know, I think you told me at one point, you’ve been talking a lot about this stuff. Why don’t you just do it? And I said,

Okay.

That was really kind of the moment that I was like, all right, this is it. Let’s do it.

I, I do recall that coaching call, actually. Yeah. So, so you’re, so now you’re really the, you’re the student, the experimenter, the co-conspirator of experiments with other people. What’s the business model moving forward for you? So your old model was within your niche, you produced incredible research based long form articles that drove a ton of SEO value and traffic to your clients. That was, that was pre all of this. Correct. So now you’re in this phase of there’s so much to learn and, and grow. And I have the opportunity to experiment and coach as I continue to grow and learn.

Yeah. And what is the, so is that a stepping stone? Is that the new business model? Is there something after that that you, that you see on the horizon that you’ll shift to?

So yeah, it’s, it’s very fluid, but I’m really excited about, you know, you’ve told me, taught me a lot about the cornerstone approach and the cobblestone approach. And I feel like I have a little bit of runway now. So I’m focused heavily on building that, the cobblestone, casting that net. And I’m taking the, the approach of a YouTube channel. That’s how I get a lot of my information. And it’s just a format that I, that I think I understand, at least as a consumer, I’m still starting to understand it as a content producer.

So I feel like, you know, previously when I was trying to implement this, the cobblestone approach, I was doing it in the middle of running an agency and I was the one solely responsible for it. We weren’t big enough where I could just, you know, dedicate a team to creating our own stuff. So it was kind of hard for me to get some momentum there. So I’m, I’m taking a little bit of of time to try to get that right before I really go out with the more nano approach of trying to just, you know, close deals with folks and things like that. So the YouTube channel pointing to Patreon. So I create a, a video or two, or hopefully more each week.

Each one of those comes with a cheat sheet version that is in my Patreon for just a few bucks a month. Folks can get access to all of that. So I like the scalability of that. There’s also, that leads to the one-on-one coaching. There’s some options there as well. So that’s the, that’s the current model, which is sort of the, the baby, you know, MVP version of, of what I’m dreaming of, which, you know, I think, you know, could, could take a lot of different shapes as time goes on.

So what’s the dream? Is it to build, because you had an agency. Yeah. And now you basically, as you, as you moved away from doing the kind of work you were doing, I know you kind of shrunk down the team, you’re kind of fulfilling some last contracts, things like that, which Yeah, if I remember right, most of them wrap up around the end of the calendar year in 2023.

That’s correct. Yeah.

And so then the agency in essence goes away, right, right. Because you mostly at this point are staffing with contractors. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So is the model. So is the model right now is, okay, look, I’m, I’m going to learn teach, and I’m going to sell tools that tie with my teaching on a more individual basis. And are you envisioning spinning up an agency again to use these tools? Are you thinking you’re now gonna be more of a consultant to help other people figure out how to harness the power of AI and machine learning? What if I had to say to you, okay, I, and I know by the way, the answer really is, I don’t know yet.

That’s part of why I’m doing this. But if I said to you, you gotta, you gotta know today. What do you think it is? Where do you think it’s going?

So I think in the, IM in the immediate term, or intermediate term I should say, it’s going to that consulting model. Yeah. So, you know, building out a suite of, you know, 10 folks that I’m working with on a monthly basis to improve and automate their processes. I have a great one right now that I’m working with. I feel very grateful for. Their, their, their name is Health Launchpad. They’re an agency out of Austin, Texas. And we’ve, we’ve known each other for a long time. We’ve got a great relationship. They’re really been, been helpful for me to test drive this. So I’ve been fueling their team with automations. We’re going basically department by department each month. I focus on a department.

I spend some time with them figuring out what their process is, and then utilizing as much AI to help, you know, each individual person on their team become, you know, AI infused, I guess. So that’s working great. So the immediate future I see growing that from, from the one or two that I have now to about 10 or so. And then beyond that, I envision, you know, in a perfect world, thinking of it as more of a media company, more of a company where we’re just putting out

A subscription model.

Yeah. You know, content Marketing Institute, you know? Right. That model is just so beautiful. And I know you, you work with Joe, you’ve known him for a long time, and being able to meet him at some of the events was really pretty inspiring. So, you know, kind of that, that similar playbook, there’s also these new custom GPTs that just rolled out where you can build your own custom bots, custom versions of chat GPT and monetize those. So that’s an avenue that I’m exploring, creating those, monetizing those training people, you know, with what I learn on how I’m, I’m monetizing those, that’s like the app store, right.

Will be launched later. The, you know, pretty soon there at Open ai. So those are some of the, the avenues that I’m exploring candidly. Yeah.

So when you think about the work you’ve done with the agency clients, you already have, give us a couple examples, both of sort of some internal, not client facing. ’cause I think everyone thinks of AI as like, oh, it can write client copy and oh, it can, you know, we can go into, you know, mid journey and create some designs. And so talk to us a little bit about how you’re using AI for the not client product or deliverable side. What are some of the ways you’re using AI just to make an agency work better? And then we’ll get to the client side.

Sure. So I love it as a decision making tool. Hmm. I’ve developed a process that I call the team of experts process that I, I, I really love because when you first start with, I’m talking about chat, GPT in particular GPT-4, the paid version. Yeah. Yeah. There’s other models that I use on a daily basis, but that still is for me, the gold standard. Especially when it comes to decision making writing. There’s some that may be better than, than chat GPT, but one of the, one of the techniques I use is I ask it whatever problem I’m trying to solve, maybe it’s, let’s just say a finance problem.

I say, you know, who are the top, you know, finance experts who might be, you know, suitable to this problem. And then, and then you have to kind of nudge it and say, please mention individuals. And it’ll mention a few individuals that it happens to know a whole lot about. So then I say, Hey, can you play the role of x individual top of the list? And, and then I ask it, you know, my questions and using it at that team of experts model, you can get quickly to some very nuanced information that is o often hard to, to, to cajole out of it if you don’t do that. ’cause you’ll often get these very generic, you know, things and you have to keep kind of plugging away at it before you get to the good stuff.

But using that team of experts for decision making has been been wonderful.

And are you helping them automate processes as well? I mean, is there, is, are there tools in play even at the beta level that are help? So for example, you know, we’ve been doing these, these webinars where different agency owners come on and, and talk about how they’re using tools and, and one of the, one of the agency owners, Corina Key from Key Media was talking about how she’s using some tools like to automate some of their HR functions and things like that. So are you digging into that sort of process side as well?

I would love to. The client I’m working with right now is really focused on tying it all back to billable work. Yeah. So a lot of it has been the client facing stuff that, that’s coming to mind. You know, currently we’ve done a lot around, you know, content creation. And there’s an example of that I can run with, run through with you. We’ve done sales enablement. So walking, you know, building a process. So a part of their team, they do a lot of a, they work directly with sales teams. So not only do they do the marketing, but they’ll go in and consult on these quarterly business reviews and help salespeople or help sales managers figure out ways that their sales folks can perform better.

So we built out a whole process where these salespeople can create bespoke content for, for their, for an individual prospect that they’re working on in a very specific part of the sales cycle, dealing with a very specific objection and pulling in third party research around that objection, coming up with multiple different angles that they can approach that objection. And creating not only, not only blog posts, you know, it could take the shape of an email list, it could take the shape of a just a custom blog post. So I’m calling this Just in Time Content, where it’s for that one person. You hear all about how AI is built for, you know, personalization of everything, right?

So this is taking that into the sales process. Now, it’s so easy to whip up a, a very good blog article if you know what you’re doing. These salespeople, or maybe it’s the SDR role, the assistant, or maybe this is the future role of the marketer to just, just where is the, where’s the, where’s your deal stuck? What are, what are right? Why do you think it’s stuck? And pull in research, create a, create a blog post or an email drip campaign, or even a custom podcast or even a video presentation. Now there’s some, there’s some tools where you can send them a complete video presentation around a very specific sticking point in their sales process.

And so, like the video is, is AI generated and you’re picking an avatar and you’re picking a voice. And yeah, we have some agencies doing some really cool things with that.

Yeah, there’s that. And there’s a tool called cap cut, which will just with one prompt create the entire thing. You know, I, I like to, I like to, to do the copy. I think this is one of the big problems with, there’s a lot of these different tools out there that try to create the entire presentation right from one go. But I think if you can create the copy, spend some time on the copy, go through, right, you know, the research there, then you submit that copy the fi you know, perfectly the way you want it to, this cap cut right plugin. And it just does the voiceover and it does the visuals. And you can pop that over to your client and at least for the short term, get a little bit of, there’s a novelty effect to it, I think.

Right. A wow factor. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I have a ton of million questions, but let’s, we’re gonna take a break and then when we come back, I know that you’ve developed a process that kind of takes what you used to do this long form content that’s really based in and baked in fact, or research, and you’ve sort of a ifi it, if you will. So I want you to kind of actually walk us through an example of the kind of processes you’re building by taking us through that. But first, let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and, and get that done. Hey, just wanna take a quick minute and tell you about a resource that we have on the website that I don’t talk about as often as I should. So it’s an exercise called My Future Self. And the reason why you would do this exercise is if you are in planning mode.

And this is really for you as either an agency owner or an agency leader. But you really wanna think about what your future looks like, not the agency’s future, your future. I find so many agency owners struggle with how they are spending their days and is it fulfilling and is this what they wanna do? You know, in five years that we created an exercise, and I, I will tell you a, a very brief story, but I first did a version of this exercise probably 15 years ago, and it basically walks you through some thinking and you have to do some journaling around what your future self looks like. And you have to sort of give yourself into it.

You have to really suspend like the reality and talk about what it is today. But I’m telling you when I did it, how it was different from my current moment in my life was pretty dramatic. And I was working with a coach at the time and I said, this is great and this is the life I want, but it doesn’t look like my life now. And we talked about just sort of being open to the possibility of transitioning in some of those directions. And I will tell you, for the last 10 years, I have been living that life, the life that I created in this exercise. So it can be very powerful and very eye-opening. And I’m not a woo woo kind of guy. But once I understood what I wanted as opportunities presented themselves, I just took advantage of them in different ways than I would’ve had I not done this exercise.

So head over to the am I website and go to agency management institute.com/my future self. And you can read more about it. There’s an intro, a video intro where I tell you all about it and then some questions. It’s $197. If you don’t like it or you don’t want, you don’t end up doing it, happy to give you your money back. But I’m telling you, it can be really transformative if you give yourself into the exercise and really do it with an open heart. So just wanted to tell you it was there. Hopefully it’ll be helpful for some of you. Okay, let’s get back to the show. All right. We are back with Casey Me and we’re talking about really the pivot he’s done with his agency now, how he’s moved into consulting with agencies as he very candidly admits he’s still learning it.

And honest to God, I think we’re all gonna be still learning this forever. ’cause I don’t care if he learned it on Tuesday, it’s all different by Thursday, but

Exactly.

But anyway, we were talking about sort of the ways that Casey’s serving agencies and also sort of learning and, and creating sort of a new thought leadership position. I mean, this really is the sell with authority model, right? I’m gonna be a subject matter expert and that’s gonna attract right fit clients to me. And so yeah, as you can imagine, listeners, I am all about Casey’s model. So let’s talk about the process that you developed to create long form thought leadership blog posts with citations.

Awesome.

Walk us through that process.

You bet. And this gets at two of the biggest hangups that people have with AI is that it’s thin content, which is absolutely true. If you just say, write me a blog post about X, it’s gonna generate something subpar generic,

Right? Yeah.

And then the second big problem are the hallucinations. So sometimes it’ll say stuff that you don’t know where it got that information. If it’s accurate, there’s a significant chance that it’s made up completely. Right?

So, ’cause somebody else on the internet made it up at some point in time.

Yeah. Or even the AI itself made it up. ’cause it sounded, you know, that’s just how they were. They work these days. So this is a process that I’ve loved and the, and the folks I’ve been working with have, have enjoyed it. It’s the number one video currently on my, on my YouTube channel. And it starts with a transcript. So figuring out where are you gonna get some good source material, oftentimes this might be a, an interview you could do with a subject matter expert on your client’s side, or it could be a, you can pull it from a YouTube video, whether that’s your YouTube video or somebody else’s YouTube video. Obviously you wanna cite any resources there that you’re quoting.

There’s a, if you are looking to pull a transcript off of YouTube, there is a plugin for ChatGPT called Vox Script. It’s a free plugin. In fact, all the tools I’m gonna talk about today are, are completely free with the exception of chat, GPT itself, that paid version, I highly recommend there’s a lot of people, including some folks you know, that, that think they’re taking AI seriously. But you gotta pay that $20 a month, it’s, it’s light years better than the free version. That’s

The only, and it’s, and it’s not $3,000 a month, it’s $20 a month.

$20 a month, yeah. Right? Yeah. So it’s like pony out pe Yeah. People think they’re taking AI seriously, but they’re not doing that. It’s like saying, yeah, I like to work out as long as I can do it from the couch

Or something. Right, right. With a bag of chips, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So, so basically you wanna find a transcript, and it can be a very long transcript. I’ve put in, we’re going to use a tool called Anthropics Claw. So I don’t know if you’ve, if, if you’re familiar with that, I imagine a handful, many people are, many people may not be familiar with that. That is probably the leading competitor to open AI’s Chat, GPT. And a lot of people like it better. It was apparently trained on writing essays, whereas chat GPT is, was a little bit more trained on code. So I think of chat GPT as being a little bit more of a better at decision making, maybe logic better.

But the Anthropics, Claude, I think is a better writer. And I start to think of these as my different interns, right? That I wanna extend in tasks to. So anyway, you’ve got the transcript using either that Vox script or maybe it’s from Otter AI or whatever you’re using to transcribe your calls, just the dirty transcript, 2030 pages, copy and paste that into Andros Claude and ask it just to create an initial draft. Or you might want to say, you know, what is this transcript about? Give me a few ideas of, of good blog posts, ideas that might come from this. And it’ll give you a few ideas and you can pick which one of those feel like the best and say, Hey, can, can you create an initial draft based on this?

And it does a, a great job creating that initial draft, but it will, you know, include a lot of different things in there that you may or may not, you know, that may be questionable. So from there, you take that draft into perplexity, perplexity, ai, another free tool that I think is the best way to connect the AI to the internet. There’s a lot of different ways to get the AI to search the internet, but none as far as I have found outperform this perplexity ai. So I take the draft of the blog, post the entire thing, copy that right into perplexity, and I ask it, Hey, please fact check the following blog article and include links to any data cited.

And it comes back and it’ll say, Hey, I found these things, these things I couldn’t find. You take that everything that it returns, pull it back into Anthropics Claw. So Perplexity is sort of your research intern and, and

Like your librarian,

Yeah. Andro is your writer. So you pull that all of the research that it’s done, drop that back into, into the Anthropics clause, and you say, Hey, please adjust this draft using the following citations and omit any data points that are not cited specifically here. Here’s the research. And you drop that research from perplexity in there and boom, it will recreate that draft with the citations in there. And you’ve got a beautiful thought leadership blog post with citations. You may, what I like to do is actually a second round of research. So while you’re still in Anthropics, Claude, and it’s created that new draft, you ask it what other research would make this even more impactful?

And it says, well, it’d be great if we had some information about X, Y, Z. Copy that back into perplexity. Hey, can you find X, Y, z? It goes out, it can find some of it, some of it it can’t. And you kind of repeat that process again where you take the research from perplexity back into Anthropics Claude and say, Hey, please update this. Make sure all the citations follow through and you’ve got a, a great blog post now that is just jam packed with really helpful third party citations, which makes, you know, makes these, you know, really resonate with, with various audiences. That it’s not just coming from your brain or from, you know, your opinion, but it’s coming from, you know, experts and, and research that they’re, they’re linked to and cited to.

And this was a big part of what my agency did. So then we would publish these types of things and then we would reach out to all of the people that we’ve cited and say, Hey, just so you know, we’ve published this fe please feel free to link back to it to share it on social

Media. I was just gonna say, you’ve got all of these links now, these third party subject matter links in the citations that even if you didn’t reach out, a lot of them are gonna notice, are gonna be notified that they were linked to come back and see your article. So what a great way to invite implicitly or explicitly other subject matter experts to point to your content.

Yeah, yeah. That was, that was the crux of what our agency would do. All of our long form blog posts were very journalistic by nature and had these citations and then we did that little bit of PR around each article, just letting those folks know and encouraging them gently to, to cite it and, and potentially link to it. And those turned into great relationships. Those turned into affiliate relationships, you know, on my client’s be halves and a lot of interesting, you know, strategic partnerships. We had one blog post that turned into its own conference from a group of experts that we hand selected, and then they all like, it blew up, went viral on LinkedIn and they said they all met each other through that post and then they created their own little meetup conference out of it, which was pretty cool.

That’s crazy. So I’m curious if, so you’ve got this article now, it’s got all the citations, and then how are, are, are your clients then still sort of old school Publishing that on their blog or pushing it out on social? Or are you using tools to publish and promote it?

So I guess we’re, I, I’ve, I’ve really kind of my, my my agency that I had run for so long is still operating the way that it always had. Sure. We, you know, we’re, we’re down to just a handful of clients and those are, that’s still all human written copy. I just didn’t, I didn’t mess with that process. Right. The clients had been with us for so long. I just, I just kinda let let that alone. I had, you know, relationships with great writers and Sure. Yeah. So that’s, that’s doing its thing. And on the, on the consulting side that I’m doing now is I’m working just, this would be an example of one, you know, coaching session that I did with, with my client is just coming up with these processes to automate and accelerate the work that their different experts are doing.

And getting back to your question about internal, using AI for internal usage, right? This is something I I would love to work on with someone is I’m a huge fan of traction as I know you, you are. Yep. Yep. And I think that Traction is a great blueprint for how to embed AI into every single aspect of your business. Just going through all of the different steps, you know, starting with the, you know, the accountability chart. Yeah. There’s, I have a lot of thoughts about how to use AI to analyze that accountability chart and then each, the account the things that people are accountable for. Yeah. And how do we, how do we use AI for each one of those things. And I think it’s a great way to holistically embed AI into your organization rather than just, oh, it can do this and just kind of randomly reactively, right?

Do, you know, kind of go in here or there, you know, I think that’s, that may be a great approach to embed it. And then the rocks obviously make a lot of sense of how you implement those different things. You can’t do it all at once, but if you do, if you implement one or two of these things each quarter, you know, you can really accelerate stuff quickly.

Yeah. It’s fascinating. So I still have a million more questions, but we, but we need to wrap up. So tell folks what you, what do you think is coming next? Like you’re, you’re out ahead of a lot of agency owners in terms of looking at the horizon, what you are studying, what you’re learning about. If you’re an agency owner who has just dipped their toe in this, maybe they’re doing a little chat GPT or they’re doing a little midjourney, where should they be paying attention? And then I wanna make sure that we give them all of your information and your YouTube channel, so we get that. Sure. But

Yeah, the, on November 6th, OpenAI held its first dev day. Yeah. And a lot of my friends and I were bracing for what they were gonna, you know, when they make announcements, it historically has been something to pay attention to, let’s say. Right? And this was absolutely no exception to that rule. There was a lot of things announced, but the thing I’m most excited about are these custom GPTs, which I think I I mentioned earlier on in the conversation. Yeah. So tell

Us a little more about that.

So these are ways to customize their, their core model and potentially sell it on their store. That will be coming very soon. Much like the, much like the app store,

Right?

So, you know, I’ve just started playing around with creating these and it’s unbelievable, you know, there’s a bot in there that helps you build the bot, right? Asks you what do you want this thing to do? And it starts doing it and, and you can plug it into different knowledge bases so you can upload massive documents. I don’t think that works very well yet. If anybody’s experimenting with that, you know, vector embedded databases, you know, if you’re frustrated with it, you’re not alone. Let me just say that.

Right.

But these custom GPTs I think are gonna play a massive role in, in the future of all of this. And this was something I was kind of seeing coming. There’s another, there’s another company called Character AI that doesn’t get quite as much noise as, as OpenAI does, but they’re building these very customized bots to do very specific things. And I think that is gonna play a role for, for, for a, a long time. And I think it’s interesting thinking about the, the agency model and potentially restructuring the relationships you have with your team, with your different experts and help kind of working with them to infuse what they’re good at into these bots and then making sure they get a cut of that for the, for the rest of time that, that, that they’re compensated for that.

’cause really you’re, you know, what, what, what would be ideal is you’re sort of digitizing their brain and their expertise. And the only way that that would be fair is if they were to profit from that indefinitely, not just the time spent on it, you know, wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be ethical, I don’t think. So that’s kind of where my head’s at. I don’t know if that was clear

Or not. The whole new world.

It’s,

It’s fascinating. So if people want to find your YouTube channel, wanna connect with you, wanna learn alongside you, what’s the best way for them to do all of that?

The YouTube channel is called Blazing Zebra.

Of course. Of course it is.

Yeah. And that’s where I’m posting all of my re you know, all of my research or most of it, I guess some of that’s a little bit more watered down than the, the client stuff that I’m doing. Sure. So that leads to my Patreon where there’s coaching in there and LinkedIn. I’m typically on, I typically check LinkedIn once at least a couple times a week. I may not check it every day yet, but those are probably the best places to, to catch up with me about this stuff.

Okay. So we’ll put links to all of that stuff in the show notes so you guys can get ahold of Casey and, and have conversations with him. This has been fascinating, but, so you and I can talk offline, but I, I’ll we’ll have you come back in a little bit because you know, you’re freaking learning something new every day, so we’ll have plenty of things to talk about.

Yeah, I would love to. Absolutely. Yeah. The a MI community is close to my heart, so the more I can share, the better.

Yeah. This is, this is awesome. So thank you for being here and for sharing your expertise and it’s fun to walk alongside you with this. We’ve, we’ve worked together and known each other a long time, so it’s been fun to watch your journey, so I appreciate you sharing it with us today.

Ah, absolutely. Drew, the pleasure is all mine.

Alright guys, so I, I’m sure your brain is just like pressing against your skull right now as you’re trying to take all of this in. And, you know, I, I think, I think we have two choices and it’s sort of what Casey and I were talking about earlier. Like, you can either embrace this and say this is like a renaissance opportunity for us to change how we, how we show up for clients, how we help clients, how we make money, how we add value. Or you can freak out and say, this is changing everything and you know, the, the sky is falling and my agency isn’t gonna exist anymore and yada yada. There’s no reason why we, we are the, we, we are the industry that is best poised to wrap our heads around these tools and figure out how to bring them to market in a way that really benefits our clients and our business.

And so I want you to get excited about this. I want you to, to feel like you have a lot to learn, but you also can teach and use it and make money while you’re learning, which is kind of awesome. So get excited about it. Check out Casey’s YouTube channel, check out all the things he’s doing, play around with the tools that he was talking about, doing that long form. I’m totally gonna do that. I’m gonna take some of our research and do that, but begin to experiment, begin to play, and begin to dream about what’s possible. ’cause I think the sky is the limit and we get to set the limits.

So, so let’s do that together and keep learning together. All right, big shout out and thank you of course to our friends at White. Label IQ, as you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of this podcast and the Build a Better Agency Summit coming up in May of 24 in Denver for the first time, by the way. So, so you’ll, if you’re at the summit, by all means, please stop by and thank them for all they do to help us bring good content and great guests like Casey to you. But in the meantime, head over to White Label IQ dot com slash AAMI to learn more about how they serve agencies with white Label, design Dev and PPC. And you can partner alongside them and they’ve got some free hours on your first project.

Good, good People Born out of an agency, out of an AAMI agency. So I’ve known these folks for 20 some years. So good human beings. Smart human beings who really do want to come alongside your agency and be your partner. So check them out. And as you might suspect, I kind of like doing this, so I’m coming back next week. I’ll have another guest. I hope you’re coming back too. So I will talk to you then. Thanks so much for listening.

That’s all for this episode of AAMIs Build a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to midsize agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.