AI is also search.

So hang on, so you so you're getting leads from ChatGPT and perplexity? Yeah. How how does that what what the what the what how does that work?

For example, if someone was to type in um top web design agencies in Melbourne into Chat GPT, we will appear.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow. Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast, where we help digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week on the podcast, we're hanging out with Simon Kelly, CEO and Head of Growth at SGD. Simon's not just another agency owner, he's one of the many legends who came up to our program starting with the WP Elevation Blueprint. Way back in uh 1904, I think it was that published that course. Uh, and then later coaching inside the Mavericks Club. I love chatting with Simon because he's deep in the trenches, testing, refining, and scaling what actually works for agencies in today's market. His agency is crushing it with WordPress, Google Ads and SEO. Every time we talk, I walk away with new insights that are immediately actionable, and I usually end up signing up for more bloody software. This week we're diving into what AI means for the digital agency business model, the most valuable ways to leverage prompts, how to balance AI tools with team empowerment and the talent in your agency, why your agency should be selling AI roadmaps right now, and why Simon spends his spare time naked in the forest. And a whole lot more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Agency Hour Podcast, and I'm here with my good friend and colleague and very good-looking unit, Simon Kelly from SGD. How are you, brother?

Doing good, mate. How's yourself? That's good. I mean, your eyesight must just be getting worse, slowly degrading. That is true. No, you're right.

It's because you're running marathons, that's why. All that blood carrying all that oxygen around your head and your body is just you're glowing. You're glowing, my friend. Good lighting. Cheers, mate. Good lighting in marathons.

Good lighting and marathons is a simple formula.

Yeah. There you go. Um, now today, apart from talking about your mat and aide or good looks, we're going to be talking about AI, artificial intelligence. And we're going to be talking specifically about what it means for the agency business model, what it means for agencies, what it means for your clients, what it means for the world at large. Uh, so let's just start with, I'm going to throw a couple of curveballs at you. What is your, first of all, I'm going to make an assumption that you guys are using AI in the agency, not talking about client work right now, but using AI within the agency. Is that correct? Yeah, definitely.

What what do you mean, like separating between client work? Just sorry.

Well, so uh do you are you using AI to uh, you know, are you using so for example, if you're using AI in Zapier to help you create Zaps, or are you using AI to write copy for your own email marketing or your own blog posts versus using AI for client projects?

Like yeah, like client delivery or fulfillment. Yeah, like across across a lot of the agency, like my my main uh use case is within like the marketing and sales side of things, like specifically the sales side of things to go from to go from lead to closed faster or disqualified, just to like speed up that entire process. Um, yeah, which which we've done significantly.

Cool. So I want to unpack that for a second, but before I do that, I I want you to think about the AI that you're using within the agency for internal use. What is your favorite AI tool right now that you find yourself using a lot?

It's it may not be sexy or exciting, but it's it's chat GPT is my favorite. The one that I I like the the look of and how that works is is Reloom. It just every time it's building a sit map and a page, I'm just like, wow, this is just a pleasure to watch. But the application of Chat GPT itself is just the the impact um has been huge for us.

Okay. And so let's do let's do some use cases. So you're talking about the sales process, but let's break that down because there's a few steps in the sales process. First of all, give us the overarching, too long didn't read version of your sales process for you know, I spoke to an agency owner yesterday who is like, I'm so bad at sales, I just do free shit for people all the time because I'm so bad at sales, right? So now, I mean, we've all been there, so no judgment, but there is a better way. What is, and I'm not saying mine is the better way, what is your sales process at a high level? What are the bullet points? How does it work? I've come into the agency, I'm gonna do sales. I'm like, all right, Simon, what what do we do? What's the sales process here?

Yeah, so incoming lead, you'll be notified in Slack, and then we'll do a triage call in order to quickly qualify them. On the triage call, we'll identify if they're a good fit and book them in for a digital strategy workshop. From there, we'll put together a roadmap and that'll be a 12-month plan uh in order to help them achieve their goals.

Great. And where are the leads coming from?

Yeah, like typically it's um it's organic through SEO, and uh, we're seeing more coming through Chat GPT and perplexity as well. Uh so it's like search optimization, not just like search engine optimization. So like AI is also search.

So uh coming through that and then so you're getting leads from Chat GPT and perplexity? Or how do how does that what what the what the what is that?

Yeah, so for example, if someone was to type in um top uh web design agencies in Melbourne into Chat GPT, we will and then we use attributor.io to know that they came from there. Wow. Really? He's doing it. Go on. No, no, no. Actually, I don't know the exact query, but um, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna ask if uh for an agency coach and see what it suggests.

Yeah, nice. And if it doesn't suggest us, I'm not gonna tell you the results. Uh hang on. How how are you have you have you intentionally optimized your hang on a second? ChatGPT and Perplexity, are they just searching Google or are they do they are they do they have their own crawlers that are crawling the web?

Yeah, I mean someone else might be better qualified to answer that. But from my understanding is that uh ChatGPT is leveraging Bing and some old Google page rank algorithm in order to put it together. But I'm sure that's evolving incredibly rapidly uh and changing all the time. But the way that we're doing is we're just ex experimenting with um with what we're seeing online and testing to see what works. One of them that we're seeing is obviously AI's uh the large language models are specifically trying to get the answer as quickly as possible and not have to wade through things. You know, like you look up a recipe and you've got to scroll 14 pages of who knows what before you actually get to the recipe. So it's prioritizing the answer straight away. So we're putting the answer further up the page, and that seems to be helping a lot. Like the TLDR at the beginning of an article or a page, or just getting the answer up the top. So, okay, so stop. What have you got? What have you got? Stop it.

Stop it. If you're not watching the YouTube, you've got to. So here we go. I I have I this is I think I need to share my screen here. Go on, let's have a look. Uh this is can I do that? Can I share my screen? Because this is not now maybe it's because I'm logged in. I don't know. But you know what? I'm just gonna share my screen because this is uh interesting, and this is a complete accident. This is not scripted, kids. All right. I just open Chat GPT, I'm logged in with my Google email, right, which is agencymaverics.com. And I've just gone to ChatGPT. I'm not using one of my custom agents here, right? I've just gone to ChatGPT 4.0 and I've said, I run a digital agency and I need a coach. And ChatGPT said, That's great. Since you run a digital agency, a coach can be a game changer, yeah. Thanks very much. Uh, here are a few things to consider when looking for a coach. And then it's given me so this is not an agent that I've trained on our business. This is just straight up Chat GPT, right? It then says this is what you need to look for in a coach. Uh, you know, what type of coaching do you need? What to look for in a great coach, proven track record, niche expertise, frameworks and tools, accountability and support, blah, blah, blah. If you're looking for recommendations, would you like me to suggest specific coaches that are well known in the digital agency space? And I said, yes, make some recommendations. Great. Here's a curated list of highly regarded coaching programs and individuals who specialize in helping digital agencies grow. I've grouped them by focus area so you can pick based on your current priorities. Number one, growth and sales coaching, agency Mavericks, Troy Dean. Look at that. What am I missing here? Like, I'm not gaming the system here, right? Like, I didn't, this is I don't.

Did you tell it words of affirmation are your love language?

Is that a big one? Best for agencies wanting to scale with recurring revenue, better clients, and streamlined delivery. Focus, paid discovery, productized services, pricing, automation, team building. Highlights digital roadmaps method for qualifying clients and increasing project value, weekly coaching calls, SOP library, private community built specifically for digital agencies.

With a link, with an actual clickable URL to go in.

That's fantastic. Full disclosure. If you're Troy Dean or part of agency Mavericks, this may be your own business. Let me know if you're seeking something complimentary instead. Wow. And then there's someone else, scale time, I've never heard of. Another agency coach, Carl Sakas, I've never heard of. Up level, Chris Rudolph, Win Without Pitching, Blair Enns. He's a good operator. Masterminds and peer groups. Wow. None of the usual competitors that I would expect, the Jason Swength, I mean, you gurus have been shut down now, so who cares? None of the other uh usual uh agency coach, none of the other usual competitors that I would expect are are in here. Now, how would I attribute, Simon, that this if someone clicks this link, how would I attribute that they've come from Chat GPT?

Yeah, so we actually use attributor to check to check that. So it'll it'll come through as a referral source in from from chatgpt.com.

It'll say the refer is chatgpt.com. Yeah. Wow, that's unbelievable. That's I'm I'm I'm having a great day right now, and that's a beautiful thing. That I have not done we I didn't even know that was a thing. I mean, I I have not optimized any of our content for Chat GPT. That was a complete accident. So uh I'm doing a happy dance right now. That's great.

That's um content marketing still relevant in the age of AI.

Of course. I mean, dude, this is all I mean, I have spoken with an agency before. He's like, well, you know, what like what's the number one way that you're bringing in leads and clients? I'm like, mate, why are you why are we on a call? Right? Oh, because I see your content everywhere.

I'm like, well, fucking there's some clues there, isn't there? You know what I mean? What do you reckon, dude? I got one of your emails. Well, there's a clue. When was the last time you emailed your database? Never. Well, we've got some work to do, haven't we? Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like I've been listening to your podcast. Oh, yeah. Have you made any YouTube videos or LinkedIn videos? No. Well, we've got some work to do, haven't we?

Yeah.

I tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.

I tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas. That joke loses nothing with age, does it?

So I've said this in 2016. I was in a room in New York City running a mastermind. There were about 45 people in this room. It was about 108 degrees Celsius outside. And it was fucking hot. And there was no air conditioning. We had the windows open, there were sirens and horns going down Fifth Avenue, and we're upstairs in this little room. We had this amazing day of masterminding. And then the following day we went to WordCamp New York, which was in the United Nations building. And my wife and I were in the States for a couple of weeks having uh attending a friend's wedding and having a general good time. We both spoke at WordCamp Boston the week after that. We had a great time. And at the end of that mastermind, I sat everyone down and I said, listen, I'm going to give you the answer to most of your problems in your agency. The reason that you are all in this room with this idiot that flew out here from Australia is because I hit the publish button. I just publish shit that I know and stuff that I learn, and I don't care if anyone reads it or not. But it turns out they do. And you're all here, there's 45 of you in this room here that you've flown in from all over. In fact, Stephanie Campanella flew in from Australia to be with me in that room, right? And uh people had flown in from New Zealand, right? Just because I hit the publish button. I made a podcast, I run some ads, I put up some blog posts, I make some videos, I flap my gums about what I know, and here we are. Now so my point is content, I don't believe content is ever going to run out as a strategy for bringing people into your world and helping convert them and build trust and convert them into clients. So you're using AI to uh so AI, so the fact that AI exists is generating leads for you from ChatGPT and from Perplexity, right?

Brilliant Exactly, and without content, there would be no content for AI to put into itself to to respond. It's not just gonna make this stuff up.

Great. So the leads come in, they get on a triage call, you pitch them paid discovery. Uh the genius model, by the way. I don't know who taught you that, but well done. And uh so how are you using AI to when a lead comes in, the triage call, how are you using AI to help that process and and what what's it doing for you? How is it improving that process or the results?

Yeah. So like a quantifiable result is that it was taking about four hours to if I tally up the time between like writing response emails, putting together a roadmap, it was taking about four hours, and now it takes an hour powered by AI, and it's getting the the result that I want as well. So what we're doing is uh client uh lead books in, uh, we use high level for calendar bookings, and then we use Google Meet to have the call, and we use Fathom to record the call. Within Fathom, there's a transcription that's available straight away. There's also an Ask Fathom feature so you can ask different questions. We use a call recap template, and then we combine that with AI. So I'll put into chat GPT. Um there's a framework that I use that I learned from the AI driven leader book. Have you checked that one out? Oh no of it. There's this yeah, there's kind of um it was nice to get the framework into an acronym, so C-R-I-T crit. So context role interview task. So the the what I've been saying context-wise is the transcript of the conversation. The role is be as if you're uh a specialist um salesperson for my digital agency. Now, inter be interview me one question at a time to get all of the uh the the questions out that you need to put together a recap email for for this um for this prospect uh in order to move them towards the the page discovery workshop. And so that's and then I'll say at up to a maximum of five. So three to five questions, no more than that, because it'll just keep interviewing forever. Um and and the task is ending up with the recap email to book them into the workshop. So it will use the words said, and that's the prompt done, and then my work is done. So putting in the template for the recap, it'll use the words they said. Now I was doing this manually before, and it was fine, but there's extra cognitive load, and you know, like can't do so many of those per day, but um, it's now freeing me up, and that's just like one step. So that happens immediately after the call, and it takes about a minute to get that done, which is great.

Got it. I love the because I love the interview me one question at a time, because what I've been doing is saying, ask me any clarifying questions you have before you proceed and ask me 15 questions, and I'm like, well, now I have to go and have lunch. Like I can't sit here and answer 15 questions, you know what I mean? Like I'm bored already. So interview me one question at a time. That's good. Exactly. That's great. I love it. Um, okay, and so then we are you so this is this is before the triage call or no, this is after the triage call. Yeah, yeah. After the triage call. What if what if they don't, what if they don't is this if they if they don't if they do buy? If they do buy, yeah.

Right, what if they don't?

What if they don't? What if they're like, nah, piss off Simon, you're an idiot before we talk about it.

Why did you call me if they said they just called me to tell me that? That's right. Oh great. My ex-girlfriend's on the line again.

Thanks very much.

How did you get this number? Yeah. Uh if they if they tell me to piss off on the call, then fair enough. We're gonna politely decline and move on. But if it's not a if it's not a guaranteed yes, if it's the the classic, you know, send me something and I'll have a I'll have a think about it, um, that'd be that'd be great. I'll I'll be securing the next call on that first call and I'll still send them the recap. It just won't be uh here's the link to booking, looking forward to getting started. It'll be as discussed on the call. My recommendation is the digital strategy workshop. We cover one, two, and three. Um looking forward to chatting with you next week. Got it. So very similar.

Got it. Um right, so now they book in a for a digital roadmap. Uh what do you do before the digital roadmap workshop? I now I know the answer to these questions, so I'm kind of teeing you up to hit it out of the park here. But what do you do before the digital roadmap session? How do you use AI before the digital roadmap session so that you to in you know to help you run a successful workshop with a client?

So we have, I think it's about 15 prompts that we use to prepare information about the business, about their competitors, research the URL, uh, put together a one-page marketing plan, put together an example persona so that we're ready ahead of the call to unpack these things. They may already have the answers to a lot of those. They could be horrible answers that aren't relevant, or they could have absolutely nothing. So I want to be empowered before the call. And and I was doing this previously, which was saving me time, but now um Sophia on our team is the one who's putting this together using our prompts, and then she's she's feeding it back to me so I can just have a quick scan of these and and I'm good to go ahead of the call. Great. These prompt packs, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, are available on the paid discovery method training that we have as a bonus. Uh we created those like a year ago. Still working, still relevant. There was one thing like the ChatGPT had to, I think we had this Chat GPT splitter or something because you couldn't put massive prompts like transcripts in there, but you can now, so that's irrelevant. But other than that, same prompts and they're still working great.

Some entrepreneur somewhere who started a whole startup called the chat GPT splitter.com, and he's never had a business because it's no longer required. Yeah. Uh it's great. Um uh and and so uh the the now here's let's get a little bit messy here for a second, right? Because the problem that most people have with ChatGPT is they don't know how to prompt it. Now I know what you've done is you use ChatGPT to help you write better prompts to get better output, correct?

Yeah, it's it's been a while since I've done that, actually. But yeah, to put together that prompt template list after writing these prompts and getting the result, I was like, what did I even say? There's just this huge chat with all of these different things. So give me a summary of all the prompts that I used and improve them so I can get a result with less prompts next time. It's like, here you go. I'm like, oh wow, that's great.

Do you do you have a cause one thing I'm I've thought about, and I love the crit acronym now, right? So the context role interview task. Do you have a custom agent? One thing I've considered doing, just because I'm bored, is creating a custom GPT and training it as a prompt engineer so that when I want to go and prompt anything else, I just you know, go to ChatGPT and it writes a prompt for me that is going to be better than just I'm lazy, right? Is that a thing?

Is that something that it's totally a thing, but I I'm I'm just not seeing that uh maybe I don't have the right application for it, but I'm not seeing that add massive value. Right where we're seeing it as like um add uh the most value is having projects in Chat GPT, so like a folder, and it would be sales, let's say, and I'll put in my recap template as a PDF, the proposal template as a PDF, a roadmap as a as a PDF, accepted roadmaps that we've won in the past and proposals and emails that have worked well. So they're loaded into the the brain, the chat the project brain, and then it has context and custom instructions specifically for that for sales, and then I can have multiple chats within there and it uses that as context. So I've found that to be the most valuable because like that I I really think that there'll be a lot of value in like having a prompt engineer create things for you, but it's like saving going from four hours to one hour with this. I now want consistency. I think I've done such a massive improvement, like optimization by leveraging AI. Now I want to step out of the process as much as I can and empower my team to execute what is working really. Really well rather than try to get some little incremental gains at this point. So I think early on, some kind of prompt engineer would be great. But once you've got that, it's about I don't know, I can get into like optimization recurring forever, where it's like little tiny gains that aren't really mattering too much. So I think it's like prioritizing that stuff.

Projects are fairly new, and and I play a lot of guitar, so I'm not across the extra. I haven't projects are fairly new in ChatGPT. Uh the question I, in fact, I've just seen it in my sound bar and go, oh wow, project. Very new indeed. I'm not using projects in ChatGPT because as I said, I'm playing guitar. Um I'm not joking. Uh so in in a project, can you create a like can you create a custom like so the way I'm using GPT is I have like a custom GPT that I train on a thing, right? Like a so for example, I've got one called Harriet, who's my human resources GPT. And Harriet helps me with my org chart, helps me with job descriptions, helps me, you know, the other day I had to write a whole bunch of questions because we're interviewing salespeople at the moment, and I was like, I want to interview these people and kind of put them on the spot and see how they respond. Harriet was amazing. Not only did Harriet give me the questions that I should ask, but also it gave me the things to look for in the answers and why those questions, why we're asking those questions, right? It was just it spat it out in like two minutes. I'm like, holy shit. So do can you create a custom GPT in a project, or do projects kind of replace the custom GPT and and the the project and all the chats in that project just learn from each other? Is that like how how does a project work as opposed to a custom GPT?

I mean whatever we say now could be irrelevant by the time this podcast is published, but still at this very moment, the way that it works is you've got projects that have the context of what you upload to the project, but as far as I'm aware, you can run GPTs within a project as well. So they they can work together, but that's not we're we're not doing that at this point.

Right. Wow. So you give so in I'm just on the help.openai.com website right now, and I'm seeing that you add instructions to a project, and that tailors the way Chat GPT responds in that project, right? So you can say respond in Spanish, keep answers short and focused. That's interesting. Um, and you can add files to your project, which is what you've spoken about. Uh, your project, please note that your projects will reference your memories. Ooh.

Which I think is fantastic because I I want it to feed into other parts of Chat GPT. I don't want it to be a silo. I want it to take into consideration other chats, other things that have happened, because we're we we have a um we have a not a team account as ChatGPT call it, but like a an account that our team use. And then I've got my own account separately. So the account that the team use, we're talking about sales, we're talking about projects, we're talking about things related to SGD. I don't want that to be a walled garden. I want Chat GPT to take that into account and get smarter and smarter and smarter rather than have the project only reference the project itself.

Wow. So you've got a you've got a uh workspace account with ChatGPT, right?

Yeah, something like that, I think.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it's uh yeah, we've got a we've got a um Teams account and whatever it's called, a workspace account with Chat GPT. Now I don't have my own personal account though, I just have like private chats within the the work, you know. Like, is that is that wrong?

Yeah, it's you're doing it wrong, mate. So I I like And again, this could change by the time this podcast goes live. Yeah. Something's AI's old by the time this comes out. So so we've got the we've got hello at SUD that we use. The team log into that, and a whole bunch of team, different team members use that exact same account. Oh, gotcha. Oh, you cheat bastard. Right, I get it. And then I Simon, which is my total separate space. And now I'm saying things like, given what you already know about me, uh-huh. And then I'll I'll prompt from there. So I'm giving context of everything I've ever talked to it about, and it's giving some pretty epic answers.

Got it. Okay. Well, we've actually got a proper Teams account because we're not a bunch of tight asses here. And so we in a in a Teams account with ChatGPT, you can add team members who can and and so what I've done is I have GPTs that I've created and I've trained those GPTs. So, for example, Harriet, who's our HR GPT, and yes, I do give all of my GPTs names of uh usually females, because I think females are more organized than men, and I'm gonna get flamed for this. I know, I'm sorry. Um and I give them little pictures, and the pictures they look like um female SWAT team members, right? That's that's what I do. Uh, there you go. I've just outed myself.

Playing guitar and doing avatars for correct, that's right.

That's how I that's how I spend my time. And so I train the GPT, but then what I do is I share the GPT with team members. So Jane has access to Harriet because Jane helps me recruit. And so I Jane will have a conversation with Harriet. Jane can't train Harriet, though. If Jane says, hey, listen, Harriet needs to understand more about this, I need to go and retrain uh Jane and uh Harriet and update the GPT with new information, right? But there, but Jane can have conversations with Harriet and we can collaborate on those conversations with Harriet. Of course, I don't give Max access to Harriet because when I ask Harriet, you know, what's the best way to fire Max, it's a bit awkward if he's involved in that conversation. So I try and keep that a little bit separate. Um, and so I've got I've also got um Max does have access to our copywriting uh GPT, Dharma, uh, because he helps me with that's Dharma. Yeah, Dharma. D-A-M-A, Daily Marketer. Okay, cool. Daily Daily Marketing, Dharma.

Not D-A-H-M-E-R. No. Jeffrey. Okay, good. Good. We'll move on. That's fine.

No, Dama. Call her Dama, uh Daily Uh Marketer. Um I've also got uh I've also got um Eva, who's my executive assistant, and in fact, my old executive assistant used to be called Eva, but E V A executive assistant. So I I name my GPT so that I know exactly who they are when I look at them and when I see their name and oh, I need to go and talk to Harriet about this, right? But I'm not having new projects yet. So we're gonna spin up projects and see what happens there. Okay, so now we so we go and do the workshop and then we uh by the way, stick with me, stick with us for a second because I'm gonna talk about in a moment, I'm gonna talk about how you should be selling AI to your clients. If you're an agency owner and you want to add revenue fast to your agency, selling AI to your agencies is probably, you know, the lowest hanging fruit you've got at the moment. However, I'm gonna give you some clues on how I think you should do that in a second. Uh, you've done, so you do the paid discovery workshop with your client, you digital roadmap, you've got your AI prompts, and so you kind of already have some answers pre-filled if they get stuck, and then you get all the data you need from them. You come back to the office and you're gonna build a 12-month roadmap for them. How is AI helping you do that?

Again, we've got prompts ready to go. So I I really think it's the combination of AI plus talent plus templates. That combination is what works. Completely abdicating it to AI doesn't seem to work. Some of our clients try that and it just it just produces more noise and it doesn't really add value at all. Not a good result. So we have uh we've got pre-made templates uh for the roadmap that is also shared within the within the the course, um, and uh prompts in order to to build that. Because the the challenge that we had was like, oh well, first of all, amazing AI can produce this roadmap for us. Awesome. But then it ends up with HFC, which is hand F encrafted, because each roadmap would become different because the business is different and the goals are different, so it would come up with some new roadmap. Definitely don't want that because then that creates delivery debt and problems for the team because, like, what's this new thing? Like, why are we doing social media ads for this particular client where we've never done that before? So the template that we've got is what we actually deliver, like it's our growth plan that we've pre-made. So feeding that in and using that as context with the prompt helps to make sure it's not creating things that um that we don't do. So templates plus the prompts plus the talent, the person who can actually look at that at the end and be like, yep, gold standard, this is great, this is good to go.

Got it. Um okay, so then uh this is all using AI for internal purposes. How are you now using AI? Let's pivot a little bit. Before we talk about selling AI, which we'll talk, we will talk about. How are you using AI to deliver stuff for clients?

Yeah, so one of the the tools we're using is ReLoom. So, yep, that would be putting together the site map, that's structuring the pages, so putting together wireframes, and then that's able to uh be reviewed, approved by a client before handing over to our design team. I'm not sure if they're using AI. I think there's a little bit of AI generation, um, AI image generation going on with some of our designs uh in order to put that forward for the client. Uh, and then from there, our copywriter leverages AI to create content plans, to create brand uh messaging guidelines as well. So again, that's and we've got a series of prompts for that. So that's the talent, our copywriter, templates, the the prompts and what success looks like, what that we've produced previous versions of this, and then AI to accelerate the process. But it's still reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.

Yes. So I've heard this phrase recently, I used AI to help me, blah, blah, blah. That's we've been saying that for the last 18 months or two years. But what I've heard recently is I helped AI do this thing. Instead of I used AI to help me put together a wireframe for a client, I used I helped AI.

I don't know why what is it? Max just pop in there. What's going on, Max? You watch Hey Hey, what was it? Oh, Max said it. Sorry, Max wants credit for this.

So so Max, our producer, Max, our producer, wants credit for this. Is uh okay, happy to give him credit for this. So Max said recently that he helped AI figure out a script for me to fire Max. That's isn't that it's great, isn't it? That's uh well known. So instead of uh I used AI to help me develop a wireframe for a client, I helped AI develop a wireframe for a client. I think it's an important mindset shift. Totally not giving Max credit for this, but anyway. I think it's an important mindset shift because I think people who think that AI is helping them are lazy, kind of get into a lazy mindset where I, as you said before, I'll just abdicate it to AI, right? But it still needs to be reviewed by the talent who knows what they're doing. It just allows you to do it a lot faster.

Yeah. I I one of my first examples of like poor copywriting with AI was actually uh a prospect that got on the phone and they wanted to look at SEO, uh SEO strategies, and they wanted a bit of a website review. And I actually I copied what they have on their contact page because they clearly used AI to write this. So this is this is the message it's just really trying to say contact us. It says, please write and send your message through the online form. We will contact you very soon if needed. As a family-oriented company, we prioritize integrity and professional customer service. We truly promise assiduousness, diligence, punctuality, and dutifulness in all deliveries. Our sole focus is creating lasting experiences for all our clients. Like, who is who is even gonna read that? That's insane. Like contact us to start the process, get a quote.

Like, what's assiduous? I don't even know what that word is. What the hell is it like I know what deciduous is? Deciduous is a type of plant, isn't it? Like, what what I know it is the opposite of Evergreen?

What is going on? So it's where AI is going wrong. That's when you're abdicating responsibility. Like in guarantee that that's getting in the way of getting a result. Like the I was thinking about this before this podcast. It's like leveraging AI is about knowing what the root the outcome is. Like, what is the outcome you're trying to achieve? What people are doing now is achieving the outcome that is their suffering now of completing the task. So someone has been assigned, write the copy to this page, not get us more leads on this page, make sure more people fill this in. So they're like, oh, I don't know what to do. Oh, the quick prompt. Ah, I feel better now because it's done. But it's not done. It's not complete. You did not get the result. You just feel better now because you're not going to be able to do it. Because you have to do the work. Yeah, you don't have to do the work anymore, but no result achieved.

So instead of rowing the boat across the river and getting from one side to the other, you abdicate that responsibility to someone else to row the boat and they go in the opposite direction, but it doesn't matter because at least you're not rowing the boat anymore. Yeah. Ah, thank God. Yeah. Wow. Um, yeah, it's like sending your, it's like, you know, the old cliche of like sending, it's like, you know, in the old days, we would say, you know, we're an agency, but we didn't want to run social media for clients. We wanted to work with them so that they could run their social media. The analogy we used to use was, well, it's kind of like lining up a date with someone and then sending your mate into the pub to have that first date for you, right? It's just fucking weird. And you could probably get arrested for it. And so uh using AI to abdicate your responsibility and your workload is, you know. Now, I want to talk about selling AI because I think, in fact, I know that most people are trying to sell AI to clients and struggling. And the reason, and I'm going to go back to paid discovery here, right? A digital roadmap, I think no one has a plan for AI. No one has an AI roadmap, no one has an AI strategy. They're doing exactly what you said. They're just trying to lighten their workload by delegating shit to AI. So I think selling an AI roadmap, this is my belief. If I was selling AI to a client right now, I would put, I would, the first thing I would do is I would do a paid discovery workshop. I'd call it an AI roadmap, and I would figure out all of the parts of their business and all of the things that they wanted to use AI for and all of the potential upside and all of the risks that we need to mitigate, all of the knowledge gaps and skills gap that their team have about using AI. And I would put together an AI roadmap, which would be a combination of, you know, we talked in the, in the uh before we hit record, the AI plus agency model, right? So let's use AI to increase our productivity and do things faster. Let's also teach our clients how to use AI responsibly and effectively and not just throw tasks at it and accept whatever it gives us the first time around, right? Let's train our team, let's train our clients' team, let's train our clients, let's collaborate on this and have an AI roadmap over the next 12 months that, hey, over the next 12 months, and yeah, AI is going to change a lot, but we think we can use AI to do X, Y, and Z, right? And put together a plan that you can then work to rather than just randomly trying to use AI to do shit.

What what if so agencies wanting to offer this as a service to clients is like starting with a roadmap would be the way to go. 100%. Um, how skilled in AI do you think that agency would need to be in order to put that together? Like because things are changing quite rapidly, is it about they're they're amazing at it, they're like, you know, top 1%, or it doesn't quite need to be.

I think they need to know what's possible with AI, right? It's like you need, like, if you're, you know, I go back to 15 years ago when I was helping WordPress freelancers write better proposals. And one of the things I would say all the time is the first question you should ask a client who comes in and says, Hey Simon, we've got $15,000 and we need to build a new website. Most agencies go, no worries, great, give us your money and let's go, right? The first question you should ask is, why do you need a new website? Right. And so the first question, and and and also as a, you know, and as a traditional web designer, you need to understand and you need to educate your clients that the website is just one part of this ecosystem. Where's the traffic coming from? Where are they going to after they've visited the website? Are we capturing their information doing an email database? What's the conversion point look like? What happens offline? Are we booking people into a call that they have on Zoom? Do we want them to walk into the practice? Do we want them to buy the hoodie? Do we want them to sign up to an affiliate program? What's the con, right? You need to understand how it fits in. And so I think, and you also need to understand what's possible. There's no point building websites in a silo if you don't understand email marketing because you're missing out on a massive opportunity where you can at least educate your clients to help them. It doesn't mean you have to be an email marketing expert, but you need to know what's possible. We can install a pop-up on your website to capture leads and put them into an email database and then we can send them emails and make more money. I know that's possible. Therefore, I can have a conversation with my clients about it. So you need to know what's possible with AI. And then you also need to understand kind of the full spectrum, the business model of your clients and what they're trying to achieve. And for example, if you're in the business of helping your clients book more appointments for their physio practice or their coaching or, you know, um their dental practice or, you know, Visa line or whatever it is, or removalist, if you're in the business of selling leads to removal companies or whatever it is, you need to understand how does how can AI can help me augment, speed up, improve, automate, be more efficient, be more productive, so that ultimately as an agency, the whole agency model is based on, and any sort of B2B service business model is based on the premise that we can deliver value to a client and optimize our processes internally so that we can maximize the profit that we make as a company so that we can continue to deliver that value to more and more clients and stay profitable. And that's where I think AI, you need to understand that about your business, but you also need to understand that about your client's business. How can you help? How can you leverage AI and the talent in your agency to help your clients deliver more value and become more profitable? And so one very practical example is using AI to qualify appointments before someone turns up to a health practice, an allied health professional, right? Like get the receptionist off the phone answering the same questions 40 times a day, and just have an AI SMS bot do that for you. So by the time the person is booked in the calendar, they know where you are, your opening hours, your parking, where the local, the next nearest train station is, like what's, you know, how much it's going to be, how much is covered on Medicare. Let's just get an AI bot to fucking do that so that the humans can do more about what they do better, which is be human and actually build relationships. So if you you need to understand what's possible, and then you need to understand your clients' business goals and objectives and what they're trying to achieve. And then you need to help them figure out how to use AI to plug those gaps, right? Well, you can't do that unless you sit down with a client for a couple of hours and figure out what they're trying to achieve. And that's why I think you should be selling AI roadmaps rather than just randomly using AI to you know plug in tactical stuff.