Mastering AI Automation For Your Agency with Julian Goldie

Danyel McLellan [00:00:01]:
It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run— traditional, digital, media buying, web dev, PR, or brand— whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build a Better Agency podcast, presented by White Label IQ, will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention, and profitability. Bringing his 25+ years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:
Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute, back again with another episode of Build a Better Agency. We are going to keep the AI conversation going, which I suspect we will do for some time. So my guest today is an agency owner who kind of saw the writing on the wall a few years ago and realized that AI was going to change his business, much like many of you have recognized that AI is going to change your agency’s business. And he did something interesting about it. And so we’re going to learn more about that as we chat with him. But before we do that, of course, you know, I want to say thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of this podcast, have been for a really long time. One of the things I think that’s easy to make the assumption about them— so White Label IQ comes alongside agencies and they are their partner, kind of their white label partner for design, dev, and paid media. But I think a lot of people assume that they’re just a WordPress shop and absolutely WordPress is kind of core to their work, but they’ve got depth on their bench to jump into all kinds of legacy platforms. So one of the ways they really can help an agency out is when an agency inherits a client and the client comes in with some older system. White Label can help you kind of peel back the onion on that system. And you don’t want to be the ones that are saying to your clients, sorry, we don’t know how to do that, or we don’t— haven’t seen that in years. Now with White Label, you can say, absolutely, we’re on it. So they’ve built teams with lots of different and deep specializations in all kinds of sort of out-of-date systems. They’ve got the right expert on tap for you, so you don’t have to scramble to try and find a freelancer that you’ve never met from Adam. These guys already have the muscle to do that heavy lifting for you, and they’re somebody that you know and you can trust. And because they focus only on design, dev, and paid media, they’re always looking at these problems through the same lens as agencies that we are. And honestly, when it’s— when it comes down to it, it means you don’t have to walk away from opportunities because you have a partner who can help you crack the code of an old system. So head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami to learn more about them. To get some free hours if you’ve never worked with them before, and to say thank you to them for sponsoring the podcast. All right, so now I want to tell you a little bit more about our guest. Our guest, uh, his name is Julian Goldie. Uh, some of you may be familiar with his work as he pivoted. He still owns an agency, still runs it. He just runs it very differently than he used to, and I think you’re going to find his story fascinating. So with that, let’s welcome him to the show. Julian, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Julian Goldie [00:03:20]:
Thanks for having me.

Drew McLellan [00:03:22]:
So tell everybody a little bit about you, your background, and how you came to develop this expertise.

Julian Goldie [00:03:28]:
Yeah, so for me, I mean, I was running an SEO agency, and when ChatGPT came along about 3 years ago, it was basically at the point where we’re like, right, okay, well, we run an SEO agency. The way people are searching, the way people are getting information now is, is totally different, to the point where it’s almost a threat to Google. You know, back then a lot of people were saying, well, people stop using Google and, and Google isn’t that useful anymore compared to ChatGPT in, in the way that we find information. So I was like, well, number one, I need to learn this technology pretty fast. And number two, I might not have a business anymore, you know, if, if SEO really does change in the way that we’re talking about. And so for me, I was like, right, okay, number one priority that I can do here is like just spend, you know, 3 or 4 hours a day really learning and mastering AI and then documenting the whole process along the way. And so You know, since then I’ve spent thousands of hours learning and sharing, uh, everything that I’ve gained from AI and all the automation systems that I’ve gathered.

Drew McLellan [00:04:25]:
So do you think that what’s happening today will make— eventually will make Google irrelevant? Now that you’ve been doing this for a while, what’s your viewpoint on that now?

Julian Goldie [00:04:35]:
Well, I mean, back then, you know, this, uh, Google was probably way behind all these other AI companies and and the technology that they had was really, really poor back then. I don’t know if you remember Google Bard. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Yeah. And so, you know, since then AI has developed to the point where like Google is probably the leading AI company in the world, and, and not just across, you know, creating blog content or, or AI inside a search engine, but also if you look at video, they are— 3 is a powerful tool. You’ve got, um, for example, tools like NotebookLM, Google Opal, which is a great AI agent. And so like I really do think that Google have kind of reframed it to the point where they’re now like the leader and it’s helped their business rather than hurt it. And I think as well, if you look at their stock price as well, it’s just increasing exponentially, which is absolutely wild. And so I think Google are in the best position they’ve ever been.

Drew McLellan [00:05:29]:
Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? So, you know, a lot of the people listening, busy working in the business, feeling a lot of pressure because like you as an agency owner, they’re looking at their agency and saying, I know this is going to change my agency. I’m not sure how or when or why, but it feels like it’s coming. Up behind me at a rapid clip and I need to wrap my arms around it and figure out how to actually leverage it, much like a Google where instead of being behind, I’m leading the curve. And so what advice in general— I know we’ll get into some specifics, but in general, what advice do you have for agency owners today to not get behind?

Julian Goldie [00:06:08]:
Yeah, so I mean, like, I would, I would try and learn this stuff if you can and try and really implement it inside your business. I mean, If you’re not experimenting with AI, you are behind, like, undeniably. And so, like, you really want to test, okay, number one, how can I use these tools and which ones are useful, which ones aren’t? But then also, how can I integrate this inside my business? And, you know, to give you an example, like, we’ve 3x’d our revenue since ChatGPT came out 3 years ago. And, and so, like, it was a huge threat, and I saw some SEO agencies actually go under that were very, very big at that time, to the point now where we do 3x the revenue, but we have the same amount of people. And the only way that we can do that is because we’ve scaled with AI automation first and, and use that as like the sort of point of origin for growing our business.

Drew McLellan [00:06:51]:
So I know, I know you believe that the automations are sort of the magic sauce for business owners and leaders, that we have to understand how to leverage AI to automate parts of our business. So talk a little bit more about— because I think like you and I were saying before we hit record, A lot of agencies are using it to help them create content, to research prospects, things like that, but they’re not really impacting the operational side of their business.

Julian Goldie [00:07:18]:
Yeah, so the way that I would look at it is like, right, okay, what tasks am I or my team working on? And then what are the highest points of leverage that would have the biggest impact if we automate them? So, so some examples for my agency, for example, if we look at the operation side, we do a lot of outreach. So we’re as an SEO agency, we have to reach out to, to thousands of websites every week, build backlinks for our clients. And, and all that is, is just reaching out to other websites and saying, hey, would you link to our client too, right? And so that, that was a very manual task before because we had to find the email addresses, we had to write the emails themselves, chase all these websites up on the follow-up, and then also negotiate all the link building that we were doing and, and all the websites we were reaching out to. In our emails. And so like, huge operation. Uh, our cost per backlink back then was something like $80 per backlink, something like that, right? And so like, the margins were pretty tight.

Drew McLellan [00:08:16]:
Yeah, right.

Julian Goldie [00:08:17]:
Yeah, that could be quite dangerous. And so what we actually did is, is if we actually, um, started using a tool called PitchBox, which automates all those operations I was talking about before. So the inbox management, the writing of emails, and the outreach of emails as well. To the point now where we actually dropped the average cost per link from like $80 to $33, which increased our margin and had a huge impact on operations. And so we could scale with less people, um, and do the same volume. And so like, I would look at, okay, where am I spending the most time in my business? And then how can I automate that one thing? Because it’s like, as you know, Drew, right, there’s millions of things that you could automate in your business, but not that many of them will have a huge impact. And so it’s just really being aware and having self-awareness of what you and your team are working on.

Drew McLellan [00:09:06]:
So if somebody’s listening and they’re like, I don’t even know how to ask myself that question or how to explore that, how, how would you help them start to identify places where they could enjoy that economy of scale?

Julian Goldie [00:09:22]:
So I take this to an extreme. And I don’t recommend it for everyone. I think it will drive most people crazy, but you can do this for a week or two and it will have a huge impact on you, how you spend your time, and also what you automate. So what you can do is you can just set a timer, record all the tasks that you work on, and then just make it in a simple spreadsheet. Okay, record the task, how much time you spent on it, how much money it makes you. And from there you get a lot of self-awareness of what you’re working on. And literally, you might think you’re going to do that for 2 weeks, but within 2 or 3 days you’re like, ah, this is what I’m spending all my time on, this is what I need to automate. And so that will build the self-awareness for you. And then I would rinse and repeat that for all the management team that you have inside your business and just go all the way down the trail. So like, you start with yourself, then you’re going to time order your team, then you’re going to time order the, the admin and the virtual assistants you have working underneath your team. And so from there you can go like top-down approach and you start with the highest impact stuff and work your way down.

Drew McLellan [00:10:22]:
So let’s say, let’s say you’ve identified some tasks that you’re like, oh my gosh, I spend way more time than I thought I did on this task. And to your point, it doesn’t actually generate a lot of revenue, but it could, or the margin is small, but if I could do volume at it, it could be significant for me. How do you begin to explore the tools? So there’s a bazillion AI tools out there. So how do you, as a, as a non-technical person, who’s doing this kind of on the side, like, you know, I’ve got an hour today to explore this. How do I start to think about what tools will be the best? Like, how do I find the pitch box of my solution, right?

Julian Goldie [00:11:04]:
Yeah. I mean, I would just use YouTube. I think that’s the easiest and simplest solution, and usually that’s the best. So like, if you, for example, you’re like, right, okay, well, I need to automate videos. I’m spending 4 hours a day creating videos, marketing my agency. It’s like, right, okay, well, just go to YouTube, search AI avatar videos, and let’s say you got an hour. You can watch 3 videos about that topic within an hour, and then you’ll get a very good feel for, okay, these tools are really cool. And I wouldn’t try and like use all of them because there’s a million tools that you could use. It’s gonna get super expensive with subscriptions and also the time that you invest if you keep switching. And so I’ll just pick one and then master it. And as long as you’re happy with that and the quality that, um, comes with it, then you can simplify it as much as that.

Drew McLellan [00:11:47]:
So right now it’s kind of the wild, wild west of tools. And every day you turn around, there’s 1,200 new tools that are out there. What do you think, given how much time you’ve spent in the space, how do you think that’s gonna play out? So, so let’s say I pick a tool today and, and, and I’m creating videos with this tool. Let’s say it sticks around for 6 months or a year. Do you think at that point there, all the video tools are gonna sort of self-consolidate and there’s, going to be 3 or 4 and that’s going to be it, or do you think it’s going to stay as broad as it is today?

Julian Goldie [00:12:20]:
I think it’s like getting slimmer and slimmer in terms of the tools you actually need. So like the, the variety of tools you could have are always increasing. I mean, just in general for automation or for agencies, there’s a new tool coming out every day. But I think like in terms of the ones that actually make a difference and you actually need within your business, I think that’s funneling down. And one of the things we’ve seen is like, if you look at, for example, ChatGPT, back in the day you would use these like AI SEO tool writers, for example, and they were like a, like a nice UI for the actual API from ChatGPT or the actual API from Claude, for example. And so like now what we see is every time there’s a new update from ChatGPT or a new update from Claude, that kind of eliminates the need for an AI tool. And I’ll give you a couple of examples recently. So for example, like number one, we, our agency, we’re an SEO agency, but we don’t use any blog writing tools, we’ll go straight to Claude and create the content because we don’t need to, to pay for these tools and we don’t need a middleman. And the same for, for example, like video. Now, you know, you don’t necessarily need to use any, um, specialized tools. You can just go straight to Google and go to, to Veo 3, which is already inside Google. So I think what you’re going to see is like every time there’s a new update within these tools like ChatGPT or Claude, it wipes out the need for another SaaS tool, and that’s just gonna, um, centralize more and more.

Drew McLellan [00:13:41]:
So in terms of tech stacks, as an agency thinks about sort of, again, to your point, how many tools do I have, how many subscriptions do I need, all of that, how do you recommend that we approach building out a tech stack? Do you sort of have to pick a team? Like, you’re like, I’m team Google, or I’m team somebody else, yeah, and then you just sort of stay inside that team?

Julian Goldie [00:14:04]:
Yeah, I would simplify as much as you can because like the, the other thing as an agency owner is like your margins are usually pretty tight. Like you look at most agencies and, you know, their margin might be between 10 and 30%. So if you build up tons of subscriptions, that’s going to cost you a lot of money in profit. And so what I recommend is like you just focus on, on the core ones that you absolutely need and then go from there. And then I would try and make evergreen systems around them. So for example, like we create a lot of AI Avatar clones videos of me on YouTube. And we’re using the same tech stack we were a year ago. And I have no plan to change that. The reason for that is like, once you master a tool, you, you just learn all the tricks in the book around that particular tool. It’s kind of like having a CRM where you’re locked in and you just focus on getting better and better at using that one single tool.

Drew McLellan [00:14:52]:
Are you tool agnostic or are you, uh, I’m on team so-and-so?

Julian Goldie [00:14:57]:
I’m open to— I mean, I mean, like, for me as a YouTuber in the AI space, it’s like I have to try all the main tools that come out pretty much every single day. I’ll do a new livestream, so I’m very, very open to trying new things. And then if I see something, you know, once a month I might see something that’s really like, wow, we need to start using that right now. And then I’m, I’m open to trying a new thing, but I try and simplify as much as I can simply because, like, you know, running the agency is chaos, right? It’s, it’s an assault almost. You got, you got clients, you’ve got team members, at a certain stage, all your problems are human-related as well. And so, like, if you can streamline the use of tools as much as you can, you’re going to give yourself a much easier life, and you can just focus on what actually matters most, which is, you know, keeping clients and making them spend more, right?

Drew McLellan [00:15:42]:
I know you think that most organizations kind of deploy AI incorrectly. So what are we doing wrong, and what should we be doing instead?

Julian Goldie [00:15:51]:
Yeah, so I mean, one, one of the biggest problems that I see with agencies is that they don’t quality control enough when it comes to content. And typically most of their systems in general, right? Like, whether it’s a sales call, whether it’s a customer conversation, you always want to be quality controlling these and taking like random samples and checking them. Whether that’s you, whether that’s your team— I would recommend you once a week because you have the highest standards in the company as an owner. And so like, if things aren’t up to your level, you’re going to quickly see that within minutes. And so I think quality control is the most important thing you can do here. Like, you can scale content, you can create as much volume as you want, you can publish as much as you want, or you can You can automate all your client emails if you want to, but you have to make sure that you’re keeping that quality and standard high. Because if you’re not paying attention, your team won’t.

Drew McLellan [00:16:36]:
Right. Now, until your client notices, then everybody has to pay attention.

Julian Goldie [00:16:40]:
Well, that’s the thing. If you— right. If, if you don’t quality control it, your client will, and that’s a problem.

Drew McLellan [00:16:45]:
Yeah. Right. I know you think that there is sort of a 3-tool AI stack that we should all have inside our shop. What are those 3 tools and why those 3?

Julian Goldie [00:16:55]:
Yeah, so I mean, number one, like, I highly recommend Claude. Claude is, is fantastic for writing like sentient content, and whether that’s, you know, on the marketing side, for example, posting on X to get clients, or for example, uh, creating scripts for YouTube videos, that sort of thing, to market your business. Claude is very good— great— is great at writing content. It’s very human and sentient. For actually creating content itself, you know, whether that’s AI avatar videos, for example, I’d recommend HeyGen. With 11Labs. That’s a great tech stack to use. And then also for automated workflows, you know, I’d recommend Zapier. Zapier is amazing because it links all your tools together. So let’s say, for example, as an agency, we have HighLevel as our CRM, but then we’ve also got Gmail for writing the emails, and we’ve got a ton of spreadsheets in the back end that are collecting data and updating spreadsheets and that sort of thing. Well, Zapier is kind of like the, the duct tape, the glue that sticks them all all together and keeps them communicating with each other. So I think with those 3 tools, you can’t go wrong as an agency.

Drew McLellan [00:17:57]:
When you think about workflow automations, it feels like that’s the, the whole kind of connecting tools together and getting them to do entire systems or processes. That feels to me like that’s where most agencies have so far not really dipped their toe in the water. So when you think about sort of agency operations, so nothing client-facing, but just agency operations, what has been the 2 or 3 most effective automations you’ve built just in terms of running the business side of the business better?

Julian Goldie [00:18:32]:
Great question. I mean, one of the best things that we do is, for example, on the sales side of things, right? So, so it’s not client-facing. The backend team see this on the sales side. As soon as a new sales call gets booked in, we have an automation from our CRM over to Discord, and our team can, can quickly get onto that lead as soon as possible. And so like, the speed of lead— the speed to lead is higher, which means that we can reach out to clients faster, which means that we get more sales and, and we keep clients longer as well. So that’s one of the most powerful automations. And then we use that across all our business. So for example, if like an account manager gets a new call booked into their calendar Well, that comes up as a notification inside Discord as well, so that management can see that we’re booking in calls with all our clients as well. That’s been one of the best things. PitchBox, total game changer, because that’s more on the back end and that’s automated a lot of things. And then I would say using, using Zapier to just automate a lot of the, the clicking button tasks, you know. So for example, like, okay, you can take the outputs from Claude or ChatGPT, and you can plug that into a spreadsheet and into your CRM. But why are you doing that manually? Like, that’s just clicking a button and you can get Zapier to do all that for you.

Drew McLellan [00:19:49]:
I want to talk about building, uh, AI apps and, and some of that sort of stuff. But let’s take a break first and then talk about sort of where you think that’s going and again, how that can serve us as agency owners, but also how we can use that to serve our clients. So We’ll take a quick break and then we’ll be right back. All right. We’re taking a quick pause. And while we’re on this pause, I want to answer a question that comes up all the time in my conversations with agency owners. I’m often asked who we trust when agencies are thinking about building long-term remote teams, especially when they want to do it properly and avoid costly hiring mistakes. And more and more, our answer has been Noel at JobRack. I’ve heard consistently good feedback from AMI agencies who’ve hired him and his team. I’ve seen the quality of the relationships are building, the longevity of the folks that they are placing on AMI agency teams. And after having him speak at the summit, I know he really understands agency hiring, not just recruitment. So because of that, we have partnered with JobRack and they’re a paid sponsor of the podcast. If you are even considering a hire this year and you want to think through it properly, Noel and his team have put together a really solid hiring playbook. You can find it at jobrack.com/ami. One more time, jobrack.com/ami. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. Uh, and you can see the whole schedule at agencymanagementinstitute.com on the navigation, head to how we help. Scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver, uh, and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody, no matter what it is that you’re struggling with— people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back and we are talking all things AI. So right before the break, I was saying building AI apps and building tools, that sounds daunting as heck to, I think, the listeners because they’re not technical people. They don’t know how to connect the HighLevel to the Zapier, to the this, to the that. So the idea of building a whole app or a whole workflow seems really daunting. So talk to us a little bit about how hard is it really and where would we start?

Julian Goldie [00:22:28]:
I mean, it is pretty challenging, right? Like, if you’re building the app, it’s not just the creation of it and the functionality of it, but also allowing people to log in and all the security aspects of that, right? Like, some people have got in serious trouble for that this year. So I think the best way that I’ve seen to use AI for apps is to create like these mini apps. Where it’s just like a one-page landing page, and you can simplify things as much as you can. So for example, like, if I’m doing a livestream, I have a tool that I built with AI Studio. And literally all you do is you go inside AI Studio— it’s actually free to use— type in exactly what you want. So the idea itself, for example, find me livestream topics for the livestreams that I do based on the latest AI news today. And then it will actually build out a prototype of the app, and it would just be a very, very simple one-page landing page. And I think that’s a great way to do it because you don’t have to worry about security, you don’t have to worry about doing anything too complex, and you can have something that’s actually functional within 20 or 30 minutes. So I’d recommend going with something like that. You can again use the, the build feature, and then you can plug in different stuff into it. So you can just click a button and that will add, for example, like nano banana, which is an image generation feature inside your tool. Or you could say, right, use Google search data to search the web and find me new topics. That works really, really well. And the other thing that I would say here is like, if you’re using ChatGPT or you’re using Claude, these tools have a memory. They can remember what you talk about, what you’re working on, and the recent tasks you’ve automated with them recently. And so if you say to them, okay, based on what you know about me and based on what I’ve worked on recently, give me some app ideas that would be like one-page landing pages, it will give you a bunch of ideas so you can quickly automate inside AI Studio. That’s a nice way to do it without without even having to think about what you have to automate.

Drew McLellan [00:24:16]:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that we’re missing is the ability to have it tell us what to do. Like, we’re thinking it’s a tool, we have to tell what it should do, but I think what we’re not good at yet is letting the tool tell us what to do.

Julian Goldie [00:24:31]:
Yeah, it’s like a case of training your brain, right? Because I think like there’s so many ways that we could use ChatGPT or Claude, but we just don’t know yet. Like, we don’t understand, we’re not trained our brain in that way. And so I think like the more you use these tools, the more you join the dots and connect the dots together in terms of like, oh, I could use it this way or that way, etc.

Drew McLellan [00:24:50]:
So in terms of actually making money at any of this, so this all sounds great, but at the end of the day, like you said, our job is to win clients, keep clients, and make more money from those clients. So talk a little bit about some of the— what some of the things you’ve built in AI in your agency that have generated revenue for you?

Julian Goldie [00:25:13]:
Yeah, so I mean, for example, if we just take YouTube, I was previously spending 4 hours a day creating YouTube videos to market my agency to get more clients. Having seen that, I was like, right, okay, let’s just try creating AI avatar videos and see if they take off. Since implementing that, number one, I save 120 hours a month because it’s 4 hours a day, but number two just as a side benefit from the ads revenue, we make $300 a day. So we make an extra $10,000 a year in profit just from creating AI avatar videos. And it also brings in clients. So I get paid to bring clients to my business. So that’s one of the best ways. Another thing that we actually did was we created a new community on Skool to bring in potential clients to us. So we started selling AI automation as a service. We’re like, right, if we just get low-ticket clients into our community that pay maybe, you know, $40 a month, $50 a month, then we get a way that we get paid, um, to, to generate new leads. And so we create this AI profit boarding community that generates sales every day. It’s growing from like $0 to $87,000, um, a month this year. And the craziest thing about this is all the copy on the sales page most of the training inside the community, most of the responses inside the community, and even the video sales letter on the sales page was generated with AI. And so we’ve created like this amazing community that, that makes us an extra million dollars a year in profit, and we did it with AI. And so that was a total game changer because now we have an acquisition funnel that actually pays us to get clients rather than us paying for us, um, you know, us paying Facebook to get clients, for example.

Drew McLellan [00:26:56]:
Yeah. So clients are paying you to pitch them on becoming a client?

Julian Goldie [00:27:00]:
Yeah. I mean, obviously, like, we don’t just straight pitch them. Like, we, we focus on— you’re just

Drew McLellan [00:27:04]:
giving them value and then some— a subset of them raise their hand and say, I need more than what the community will give me, so I’m ready to buy it.

Julian Goldie [00:27:12]:
Yeah, 100%. And also one of the biggest and most powerful things about this is like, as an agency, you wanna be seen as a leader. Like, you’re holding your client. By the hand and sort of taking them down the road, showing them exactly what to do. It’s like if you’re the leader of a community with 1,800 people, one of the biggest AI communities in the world, well, clients are automatically going to see you as an expert. And it’s so subtle, but it makes a huge difference to your status.

Drew McLellan [00:27:37]:
Yeah, right. As agencies are exploring this, you, you mentioned some folks have gotten into trouble in the last year or so. What are the guardrails that you think we should be mindful of as we start deploying these tools? What are— what do you believe the best practices are in terms of disclosure, in terms of, you know, talking to clients about it before we use it, after we use it? So how do you handle all of that?

Julian Goldie [00:28:06]:
Having a human in the loop is usually the best way to do it. So for example, like before we publish any YouTube videos, we’ll check through them and just make sure, okay, Are we only stating the facts and telling the truth? So that’s one of the best ways, just checking the content before you publish it. The same with emails. Like, we’ll automate client emails, um, when they come in, but we’re not going to send them straight away. So we’re not just going to blast a response with AI. Like, we’ll just draft the email inside the inbox, and then, you know, the account manager will go in, check the, the reply to the client, and just make sure, okay, does this make sense, before we send it. But it will take that time that they normally spend answering their inbox from like an hour a day down to 10 minutes a day. Because of that sort of automation, right? And then, you know, on a foundational level, one of the best things you can do, I think, is like training your team to pay attention. So if you, if you have that, that mindset of like, okay, AI is an amazing tool, but we’ve got a quality control everything before we publish, and we’ve got to keep the standards really high, then if you have that mindset, it will trickle down to the rest of your team, and you’ll lead by example, which means that one of your values becomes, um, make sure everything it is the best it can be, even if you’re using AI.

Drew McLellan [00:29:14]:
Okay. Where can an agency get off track here? Like, this feels like it is also a rabbit hole that I could spend the next 8 hours every day playing around with this stuff. So how do you— before your expertise became AI, you were really just thinking about it as an SEO agency owner, sort of what were the guardrails you had to sort of make sure that you stayed on a path that actually was serving your agency well?

Julian Goldie [00:29:46]:
Yeah, so I think again, it’s like figuring out, okay, this is a task that makes me money, so this is a task that I need to automate next. And so like, you know, you can play around with shiny objects all day, you, you can mess around with new tools, you can get distracted very easily, but if you do that, you’re going to waste hundreds of hours per month, you know, doing that stuff. So I would recommend that instead you focus on, okay, what’s the one task that I need to automate this week? And let’s make sure we do it in like 2 hours or less. Give yourself a time limit. If you give yourself a constraint, typically, you know, using the Parkinson rule, like, you can be able to complete tasks within the certain amount of time you allocate to it. So I would say, right, okay, we’ve got limited resources, we’ve got limited time, we’ve got this one task that we need to automate. Let’s just focus on that, tick it off, boom, all right, on to the next one. And then also, like, cut out the noise, you know. Like, if you were— if you were watching my YouTube channel every day and you’re watching every single video, you’d be watching videos all day instead of actually implementing. And so, like, the way that I like to look at it is, okay, am I creating more than I’m consuming? Am I setting up more systems than I’m learning about? And, and if you have that high ratio of, like, implement to learn, then you’re gonna get much better, uh, results in a short amount of time. It’s gonna be much more productive.

Drew McLellan [00:31:01]:
So one of the places that agency owners spend a lot of time is on the financial side of their business— billing clients, checking bills, making sure subscriptions are intact, all of that. Have you, have you automated a lot of that side of your business?

Julian Goldie [00:31:15]:
Not that much, to be honest. Yeah, I mean, like, when it comes to finances, we, we still have like a manual invoicer that will— I mean, like, you know, we get most of our clients on subscriptions, so they get charged automatically. But for actually making sure that nothing is missed or you know, if there’s some bounced payments, we’re going to make sure that we have a person in, in the loop for that, and, and they’re just doing it manually. So I don’t tend to mess around with that too much. And the same, you know, even on tracking our cash flow, like, we have a manual spreadsheet where we track the inputs and the outputs, but we used AI to design how the template should be, because then, like, typically AI is very good at being logical and saying, right, okay, you should format it like this, and this is how you should solve the problem. But for tracking the finances themselves, I wouldn’t like to, to mess around with that too much. Like, it’s, it’s too dangerous.

Drew McLellan [00:32:05]:
I, I find it fascinating, given your subject matter expertise, I find it fascinating that the one place you don’t let AI play very much is with your money.

Julian Goldie [00:32:15]:
Yeah, I think you have to be so careful with that, right? It’s like, you know, AI can hallucinate, it can go off track. I just wouldn’t like to take the risk. But you know, it, it, it is about levels of risk. It’s like, okay, well, you know, on the risk level, if you start playing around with subscriptions or you start messing around with, um, with your profits using AI, that’s going to be a huge risk. That’s a 10 out of 10 risk. But if it’s something like, okay, you put out one video that if it’s not very good, nobody’s going to see it anyway, that’s like a 1 out of 10 risk. You don’t need to worry about it. The other thing I would say here is like on the decision-making side of things, that’s where ChatGPT is actually very good in financial. So for example, if you’re like, okay, well, you know, these are all my expenses, this is how much we’re making, this is our profit, etc., or like, here’s our LTV to CAC ratio, which is a really good formula for agencies, then those sort of things ChatGPT can give you great advice on, and you can kind of use it as a consultant. There’s nothing— advice Yeah.

Drew McLellan [00:33:17]:
What are you working on right now? What is the next problem you’re trying to solve with AI right now that you’re playing with?

Julian Goldie [00:33:23]:
Next one that I’m trying to build really is like, for me, I kind of see volume as the, the limiter to growing our business and get more clients, right? So for example, if we just get more traffic to our funnels, then we get more clients booking in sales calls, which means that we’re going to grow our business because we get more sales as a result. And so one of the things that I’m putting together is like a— I call it the 1000x project. Which is like, how much inputs can I jam into the system to get more traffic, more customers, and more sales calls from the system? And so for me, it’s like each day I’m, I’m planning out, okay, more and more inputs. For example, like posting on Reddit, or for example, like 5x in the output of, uh, of the number of tweets we put into the system. And so like just working through those, creating little mini systems for each of our virtual assistants to use so that we can market our business more and get more traffic. So for example, one of my to-dos today is to create a prompt for posting on Reddit so that every time we publish a video and we publish it across like 5 different platforms, we also start publishing on, on Reddit too. And that just, you know, maybe, um, increases our reach by like 10 to 20%.

Drew McLellan [00:34:32]:
So for you, is a lot of AI just about— it’s really about multiplication, right? It’s, it’s about I did something once and now I need to multiply its power or its impact without having to manually, as you say, like post it on 12 different social channels or do whatever. Is that— do you think that’s at the end of the day? And you were talking about, you know, reaching out to websites to get backlinks. Again, it’s about multiplication, right? I write the email once, but now I’m able to find more resources, send the email to more resources, respond to those resources. So for you, is it really mostly a volume play?

Julian Goldie [00:35:12]:
Yeah, I, I tend to find like if you’ve already got a system that’s working, you could go after new channels or you could go and try and do something better, but typically they take a lot more effort and the, the returns are lower, right? Sometimes you, you start something new and you’re less likely to, to make it work, whereas if you just focus on more— so for example, more videos, more content, or, or more outreach emails for backlinks— then you tend to get a higher return with less risk and it’s more likely to work. So it’s like, okay, well, if I do 2 videos a day, we get X amount of sales calls. Well, what happens if we do 4 sales calls— uh, 4, 4 videos a day? We may get like 50% more, more sales calls. The way I see it, it’s just, it’s kind of leverage. It’s like, based on what I put into the system, how much do I get out, right? And if we can stack more that we get out, then we’re winning.

Drew McLellan [00:36:00]:
So we started talking about the top of the hour, we started talking about sort of SEO, and you were an SEO shop And, you know, really your interest in AI was triggered by, oh crap, this is going to impact my business. So now as you look at SEO and, and as agencies look at SEO for themselves and their clients, and obviously the hot topic for all clients these days are if somebody searches on an AI tool, would I show up? So it’s, it’s, you know, sort of the whole new sort of chapter of SEO. How do you see SEO and AI working together in sort of a plug and play framework for being more findable and for traffic?

Julian Goldie [00:36:42]:
Yeah, so I think, you know, you’ve got the traditional fundamentals of, of SEO, right? So keywords, what people are typing into search engines to find you. Then you’ve got the content itself, which is what people consume when they actually do find you. Then you got the backlinks, which boost your authority. The thing that I’ve found is like keywords and content, very easy to automate with AI. You know, you can create as much blog content as you want, you can find as many keywords as you want. The biggest issue that most people have is still building those backlinks, because even when you reach out to clients, even when you’re, um, you’re chasing up websites to link to your clients, the, the biggest issue is like you still got some human element that’s less scalable. And so that seems to be the biggest differentiator. If you look at what’s ranking inside AI search engines, typically links have the biggest sort of leverage. Like, it’s like You know, the, the more authority you have, the more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more likely you are to, to rank inside these AI search engines. And then the final thing that I would say that’s quite new here is like, because we were talking about leverage and how you can, for example, like create one blog post, or you can have one topic idea for a blog post and then publish that across 15 different channels. This means that you’ve got more opportunities to rank. So if you were, for example, like ranking once with your website on the first page of Google, ranking your clients once, well now you can rank like 5 or 6 times on the first page of Google and really dominate the page. So that’s something that, that we do a lot now. And then also, the more content you create across multiple platforms like this, not only do you get more links on the first page of Google, but also the AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, they’ve got more data to work with. So they see, okay, these guys are mentioned like 15 different times as the best protein powder supplier, and so like they’re more likely to be seen as an expert. And then the final thing I would say is like, if you look at these AI search engines, they tend to rank video more and more, and video ranks really, really quickly. And so like, if you can create more content with AI and video, then you’ve got a much higher chance of ranking too.

Drew McLellan [00:38:44]:
So you’ve got a large audience of agency owners and they’re, they’re leaning in and they’re listening. What do you want to make sure they take away from our conversation today?

Julian Goldie [00:38:55]:
So I, I mean, like, number one, if you can just find one task that you can automate each week that would save you time and grow your business and get you more clients, you’re already winning. You already ahead of 99% of people. And so that’s what I try and do, and that way you keep things simple and time efficient. So if you can just implement that one thing, I think you’ll get a lot of value from this podcast for sure.

Drew McLellan [00:39:15]:
Yeah. And, and how do they turn that around in terms of being this— I was telling you, you know, we do research every year, and, uh, the topic of the research this year, we spoke to clients who hire agencies, and we were asking them how they felt about AI, how they were using AI, how they thought their agencies were using AI. And at the end of the day, what came out of that research was we, the brand, are sort of hamstrung in terms of how much we can experiment with AI. Legal’s not very flexible about us doing it, but we know we need it inside our organizations. So our agencies are going to have to bring it to us and they’re going to have to kind of be the sherpa that guides us into the world of AI. So knowing that, how would you suggest to an agency that they begin to approach being a guide or a, a leader in their client’s eyes around AI?

Julian Goldie [00:40:12]:
So if you can just document the way you’re— that you are using AI within your agency, then clients will automatically see you as an expert because you’re already one step ahead of them. So like, if, if clients see, okay, well, you know, I loved how Drew implemented AI avatar videos into his business, or I loved how he documented the fact that he automated all of his, um, account management emails with AI, then you’re automatically seen as an expert. I think the best way to do it is like show, not tell, right? As if you can show what you’re doing, whether that’s for a video, for a webinar, for a Facebook ad, for a Twitter thread, then you’re automatically seen as a, the thought leader.

Drew McLellan [00:40:52]:
I like it. This has been fascinating. I know we’re just scratching the surface. We could probably talk for another couple hours, but, uh, I am super grateful that you took the time to, to hang with us today and share your experience as an agency owner and, uh, and as a leader in this space. If folks want to follow your channel, learn about your community, reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?

Julian Goldie [00:41:16]:
Yeah. So if you, if you check out JulianGoldie.com, you can book in a free SEO strategy session. Or if you go to the AIProfitBoardroom.com, you can check out our community that helps you learn how to automate this stuff.

Drew McLellan [00:41:28]:
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time. You know, it’s very early in the part of the world that you’re in, so I appreciate you getting up and being with us this morning. Thank you.

Julian Goldie [00:41:37]:
Thanks so much.

Drew McLellan [00:41:38]:
You bet. All right, guys. So lots of homework, uh, in this. So I think you start where Julian suggested, just start doing your— some time tracking. You know, I think you should be doing timesheets every day anyway, but look at your timesheets and pay attention to where are the biggest time sucks for you, and especially around repetitive tasks. Where are you spending a lot of your time that if you could do it faster, better, deeper, more, whatever that may be, that there is an ROI to you of that. And the ROI might be revenue. The ROI might be time. To spend on more important tasks, whatever it may be, but identify one of those and then figure out how to build a workflow or an automation around that. That’s where you start. And then even if you cannot get to one automation a week, which I’m sure for some of you, you’re like, whoa, that sounds like a lot. At least if— try two a month, just shoot for one every two weeks. And then I think as you start to do it and you realize, oh, this isn’t as hard as I thought it was, or, oh, I now know the tools to do it. 2 things are gonna happen. Number 1, it’s not gonna be as daunting and you’re gonna do it faster. But number 2, you’re gonna start identifying more and more things that you can automate and you’re gonna start like seeing them all over the place and going, oh, I could, I could automate that or I could build a workflow around that. So I think it’s gonna be kind of like a snowball going down the mountain. It’s just gonna get bigger and faster as you go, but it cannot start if you don’t get to the top of the mountain. And start the snowball down. So that’s your homework for today is do the time tracking, pick one thing and experiment with automating it. That’s, that’s just task number one. And I would love to hear what— where you landed and what you automated. I’d love to hear a little bit about that experiment. So shoot me an email about it. Before I let you go, two quick things. Thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. Whitelabeliq.com/ami will get you some free hours with them. And number two, super grateful that you keep coming back and listening. We’ve been doing this together for a really long time, and I know that I get to walk your dog with you, and I’m on the subway with you, and, and I’m golfing with Eric, and I’m walking Rosemary’s dog with her. I love that we get to hang out together every week because that means I get to have great conversations like this conversation I had with Julian. So Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you will too.

Julian Goldie [00:44:00]:
All right.

Drew McLellan [00:44:01]:
Have a great week. Talk to you soon. Come back next week for another episode designed to help you build a stronger, more stable, and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development opportunities at agencymanagementinstitute.com. [MUSIC]