SPEAKER_01 0:00

It sounds like you did this proposal with AI, because there's a few things that I think you missed. But also, it's so far away from the way that you talked to me on the call, which I came out of feeling like you understood what was going on. We had a human connection, and then you sent me this proposal that just felt so, so very disconnected.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Hey, welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast. My name's Troy Dan. I'm your host here, and we're back. We haven't uh published an episode of the podcast for a while, and that's because we've been extremely frickin' busy and uh completely snowed in here, which is a good thing. Uh, however, we do have a new format to the podcast. Uh, not this week, but in the coming weeks, I will announce a slightly new format to the podcast and a new rhythm, a new cadence that we'll be publishing the podcast. And also, I want your feedback. So uh you can either send me an email, like legit, Troy at agencymaverics.com. It's my email. I read every email. There's no AI, there's no VA here, right? It's me reading every single email. So send me an email at Troy at agencymaverics.com. In the coming weeks, we're also going to launch a fan mail feature where you will be able to go to um the agencyhour.com and you'll be able to click a button and leave us a voice message with a question that I will answer uh on the podcast. And if there's anything specifically that you want to know, whether it's about AI, whether it's growing your agency, whether it's about high level or Victor or getting clients or employing staff or managing staff or cash flow or margins or recurring revenue or paid discovery, anything at all to do with your agency, uh, let me know. Send me an email, Troy at agencymatics.com. The reason I'm giving you my email address is because I know no one's gonna do it. And so if you do, chances are I'm gonna read the email and I'll read it out on uh the podcast and I'll answer your question. Today we have got a special guest. His name is Duncan Isaacson Loxton. It's a very long, hyphenated last name. He's based in shit, I think he's in Spain these days. He runs an agency called 65.io. They're a fractional CTO agency. So they look after your website, they look after your Google Workspace, your backups, your email deliverability, all the tech stuff in your business. They basically take care of your tech stuff so that you can just focus on what you do best. Uh and Duncan has been in Mavericks Club for, I think he's into his third year now. Um, and so we've got a great relationship. We've spent a lot of time working with him, and uh, he's agreed to come on and just chat about his business, some of the challenges that he's having, some of the wins that he's had. Uh, there's a big uh uh sort of a big lean on AI in this conversation. He had some has some thoughts about that. So it's a great conversation. Uh stay with us, and as I said, send us an email and keep your ears on wherever you get your podcast because we have a new format coming and a new cadence that I'll be talking about next week. So, right now, let's go meet Duncan Isaacson Loxton. Just we should just back up a little bit here, right? Um, what how do you describe what it is you do? We kind of just jumped in halfway through a conversation because I because you were on a roll and I just hit the record button. How do you describe what it is you do?

SPEAKER_01 3:09

But by the way, who are you? What are you doing here? My name's Duncan. Uh so I run a company called 6.5, um, and we are a fractional CTO. Uh, what that means is that rather than you dealing with your tech uh and you're in that place where you don't and and can't hire someone to run all of your technology and stuff for you, we can come in just like your accountant might, um, give give you some time each month to go over where things are at and help you then fine-tune those and move you forwards, right? Got it. So uh we call ourselves a fractional CTO and we have a system that we call the business operating system. And like I say, it's a journey that takes you from the day that you started your business, what tool set are you going to choose, how are you going to set that up, uh, and recognizing that there's uh a revenue to expense path in that as well, which is you don't need all of the things at WordGo. But as you progress down that journey, you have compliance obligations, you have privacy things, you have scale problems that you need to deal with. Um, and so that's about setting that foundation up, moving you into that operational phase, and then pushing you through into that kind of optimized phase where you can align it to this sort of AI adoption journey. You can think of it as I've just jumped onto Chat GPT and asked a quick question, got a very generic answer through to you know using something like Victor, which is Victor now understands my business and how I talk and all of my SIPs and my pricing and my products and my ideal client. And it can produce a draft email. It can even help me communicate with some of my clients, it can even help me execute some of what I do with my clients as well. So it's that kind of progressive curve and that journey. But you can't have something like Victor doing all of that cool shit for you in AI without having the foundation in place first. Because otherwise, all you're doing is you're accelerating mess. Yep. Does that make sense? Yep, totally. Uh who's your ideal client? So we mostly work with entrepreneurs uh and small business owners who are kind of one to 50 odd seats, uh, as in humans in the business, uh, who are you know going through that journey of, well, I started a business because I'm really good at this, and I want to spend my time doing that, but I don't yet have the revenue or um the uh capacity to hire someone full-time to look after this for me. And I want it to be out of my way. Right? Got it. And and that will be everything from your email, and we talked about your email deliverability scenario, for example, through to your website and your website speed, um, through to helping you set up AI systems so that you can go from the very generic Chat GPT to the cool, I've actually got something that that's reasonably useful, still with the human in a loop, and then maybe you know, sending them off to you, for example, to be able to take that package and and move that into something that could be automated. So that's that's kind of the yeah, the path.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Got it. Any specific industry that you're that you specialize in or that you do better in?

SPEAKER_01 6:26

Or uh the the clients that we do better with are kind of our service uh consulting type businesses. Everything we do, certainly from a foundational point of view, is is very universal. And like I say, I'm I'm fairly convinced that almost every business can operate with three bits of technology. And when you're industry specific, very often there is like a tool that is built for your industry. So it's it's like a three to four. Um businesses like you, like us, who are in that kind of business consulting, you you you really need about three things. You get them set up right and you use them well and use the breadth of what they provide you, it can do so much for your business.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

How did you start? Like you started similar to me as a web designer, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Yeah, that's right. I mean, my my schooling and stuff, what I excelled in was computing, as whatever that course was called in those days. And, you know, we we were doing that right at the beginning of the internet age, and all stuff was exciting, and everyone was trying to figure out what you could do with the thing. And you know, we had AOL online and stuff like that, and bulletin boards and bits and pieces, and and you know, that basically became my world. So I I came from school out of that. My first job while I was in uni was at a web development agency, as it was in those days. Um, and that's kind of been the foundation, is basically my world is everything internet. Um, and of course, as we've gone through that time period, and like you, probably been in business for 20 or something more years now, lots changed, obviously. Some idiot invented this thing called AI and chucked that into the mix as well, just to confuse things. So there's a uh that that kind of journey has taken me from just websites to websites and email. And today we're now at a point where we're like helping a small business kind of of what you would have thought as an IT support company. Um, but I look at what we do as not just fixing the problem that's in front of you, but actually taking you through that journey of right, I'm my my business is growing like this. Your tech and stuff should be supporting you in that. And you shouldn't be spending time on that. That's not why you started a business. You started a business because you're amazing at the thing that you've learned. And so you you want to spend time doing that, right? And we're we're now at a point where if you get all of those things set up correctly and you have that foundation in place, you know, our framework and our journey that goes with you get you to a point where now you can actually make use of AI in in a really powerful manner to get rid of some of that judge drudgery work that took so much time that we all used to price our businesses around the hours that it took to actually now being able to produce just massive value.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Yeah. Yeah. And you and I have actually had this conversation. Full transparency. Uh I'm a client of yours and you're a client of mine. Um, I mean, I uh full transparency, you're in Mavericks Club. You've been there. How long you been in Mavericks Club now?

SPEAKER_01 9:32

A bit years, three, two and a bit years.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Um so that's a you know, kind of our, for want of a better term, our business mentorship for agencies. Um, and I was I remember talking to you, asking you some questions at some point, going, Why do I get an email every day from some idiot that tells me all my emails end up in spam and I need to fix my DKIM records? Like, I'm pretty smart and I know how to use Cloudflare and I reckon I fix this. And you're like, What why are you doing this? Like, uh, you know, this is what we do. You should just pay us to fix this, and then you should just get on with like doing podcasts and the YouTube videos. And I'm like, that's a very interesting point. And the I think the myth is that this will only take half an hour to fix this thing, right? Like to set up a, you know, I mean, I similar to you, ended up learning how to use computers and then building websites for people and then getting that dreaded question, oh, can you fix my email signature in Outlook? I did that once and then said no after that because it was such a nightmare. And so, but it's all those things that like this will only take half an hour to fix my website, and then it's 11 o'clock on a Tuesday night, and you can't unscramble the egg, right? And you've just created a mess. Why is it that you think this is the one of the one of the things I think that's worth exploring here is why do you like what's the opportunity cost? And why do you think particularly small business owners just a superhero and fix everything themselves? And I and I'm asking this for my own benefit more than anything.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Look, I I'm sure you've been there as well, right? You start a business and you, you know, you don't have any money at that point in time. You're setting something up that you're just you're gonna make it work, whatever the cost, right? And so uh that you are everything from the person that cleans the toilets through to the sales guy, through to, you know, the proposal writer and the SOP writer and the training of the things and the phone answerer. I mean, like the list of jobs for an entrepreneur who's starting a business is just it's phenomenal, right? And so you get into a place where you're like, well, I can do this and I will solve that problem just quick enough and enough to make it work right now, because you have a bajillion problems on your plate, and you're just trying to get through to a point where you can operate. And so I think that's kind of why it happens. And you know, there's so many businesses out there that still use like a free gmail.com account, uh, not knowing that whilst that solved your problem so that you can communicate and you've printed it on the side of your van, sorry, Trades, not knowing that you're giving your data away to Gmail. Like a free Gmail account um has very different privacy implications to you know uh a paid Google Workspace account or a paid Microsoft 365 account. But you don't necessarily know that, and you don't necessarily care at that point in time either. But those things just stay with you because it works. And and the it works is the cool problem solved, next problem.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

That's right. Get it off my desk, move on to the next problem. Until you've got four staff who all have, you know, um Aaron's plumbing 01 at gmail.com, Aaron's plumbing 04 because we couldn't get 02 at gmail.com.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

That's right. And this problem is is kind of amplified today. So we're we're dealing with a client at the moment who uh has quite a few. Um, two of the staff have signed up for chat GPT with their own personal email addresses, and they're taking, and it's a personal chat GPT account, so they're also separate, and they're taking business data and putting it into that personal Chat GPT account.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Right? So there's a few problems with that, is is that data is now being exfiltrated from the business. And you as the business owner are responsible for that content and for the keeping of it. And you know, imagine how you would feel, and you probably have done at some point in the in the past, that you've discovered your email address and probably your your physical address was in a data leak somewhere, right? In a data dump and it got sold. And it's not a pleasant thing to know, especially when uh I think just in the past few days, there's been uh you know, data leaks out of all sorts of places. And I think Medicare in Australia is one.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yep, right? That's right.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

Yeah, you know, nobody wants, as a business owner, you do not want to be on the end of that phone call. Like someone says, hey, you're my my stuff has been leaked. So, you know, the the temptation to kind of go and sign up for the latest, shiny, latest and greatest and just again solve the problem, I get it. Um, but there's got to be some discipline around that for multiple reasons.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Yeah. Well, if you think, I mean, I remember being at uh WordCamp Europe in I want to say 2013, maybe. Before we had kids, so 2014, 2015, in um Leiden in Amsterdam, right in the Netherlands, right? Like in about an hour south of of um of Amsterdam. I think it was there. It might have been one of the WordCamps in the US. Anyway, I was hanging out with the the WooThemes team back then, before Woo Themes got bought, before Automatic bought them just for WooCommerce, basically. Woo themes was probably one of the biggest WordPress companies in the ecosystem, right? At that point, they had like 35 full-time employees, which was mind-blowing for a theme company at that point in time, right? It was like, holy shit, how did you get there? And they were, they had just been hacked. They had just had a data breach and they had everyone's, all their customers' credit cards on file in a database somewhere because they were processing payments. They weren't using a Stripe or a third-party processor. I mean, this was this was this is in the dark ages of the internet, right? And I remember talking to the the founders who were absolutely devastated that a decision that they'd made un unwittingly, like they thought they were doing the right thing, but a decision that they'd made meant that hundreds or thousands of their customers' credit cards had been uh had been compromised. And they had no, like it's like, you know, uh hindsight's 2020 vision, right? Um, but I think the entrepreneurs' mindset is to start something to go, you know, like a bullet a gate, just get through the next problem and and just get traction and get moving and do the next thing without really thinking through the implications. And I think AI is has just like anything, like AI amplifies everything. And I think AI is amplifying those choices. I had a friend of mine worked at a big hospital here in Melbourne that will remain nameless, a big hospital that does multi-million dollar a year contracts for the government. And they got an RFP from the government. And my friend was working there, she worked there for three weeks. She resigned after three weeks, and this was one of the reasons. Her supervisor just gave the contract to Chat GPT. And my friend's like, you realize you've just breached the agreement of that contract. If we do get that contract, you've just breached the terms of it because you're not allowed to give it to AI. Oh, it'll be fine. It'll be fine, she says.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Not to mention that, you know, the data might be sensitive and it's not going to stay in Australia and disappear in other places. There's just so many things.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

So many things. So I've had conversations with people in the agencies in the past that sell accessibility, right? That's a hard sell because nobody appreciates accessibility until you're in court getting sued. This happens more in the States than here in Australia, but it's it's happening a lot in the States. Getting sued because someone wants to use your website and they can't and they've got a bug up their arse about something, and they go to a lawyer, and the lawyer's got a class action, and all of a sudden you're in court defending the fact that, you know, the contrast on your buttons is too low and people can't see it with a screen reader or whatever the thing is, right? And I'm not, I don't, I'm not trying to be disrespectful. I'm just saying, like, there's no way in hell you would know that that problem is coming until it arrives on your desk. And now all of a sudden you've got a big problem. So how do you, and I feel, I feel like talking about like Google Drive backups or like, you know, some of the services that that you're in the business of selling, how do you communicate what it is you do that is isn't is less carrot, sorry, is less stick, more carrot, right? Like nobody wants to pay for a backup. Do you know what I mean? Until they lose their data. And then it's too late.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Yeah, I mean that's fair. It it does feel more like uh alarmist protectionism sometimes, right? Um, but all of those things uh kind of come together into a sensible package. And it I I relate this again to sort of your business journey, right? When you start, you've just got a couple clients, you know, you you can get by. Stuff happens without you know too much drama, right? Yep. Um you add people, you add more customers, um, the value of your jobs go up, the stakes get higher as well.

SPEAKER_03 18:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

And so the sort of using the at gmail.com thing is quite a good example because at some point someone goes, I might not deal with you. That's just a free account. It doesn't look like you care for yourself. Right. So if you don't care for yourself, why should I trust you with my money and care and that I'm gonna get the right outcome from it?

SPEAKER_03 19:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

So there's, I think there's a there's definitely an image thing there uh as part of this. And it's and it is a self-care, it's a protection of the effort that you and I go into to build our business, right? Um and and your your credit card story, like I've been on the other end of that as a supplier with one of my customers, and I got hauled in to the office of Visa and MasterCard and got a grilling. And I'm like, hang on a second, I got nothing to do with this. This is, you know, it's their company and their product. And they're like, yeah, but you know, you uh are currently involved in that process, and so you have to answer for this as well. So I come at this from a very personal perspective as well. And like you say, some of this stuff gets born out of experience. I cannot tell you the number of people that we go that we get coming to us and saying, look, you know, I had this Google Sheet uh and it was there three months ago and now I can't find it. You know? And if you don't know, Google Drive gives you about a 30-day window. So if you delete something, it goes into the trash and you empty the trash. There is about a 30-day window that you can go find it and get it back. But after that, it's gone gone.

SPEAKER_03 20:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

And that's the reason why backup is important because that will survive for whatever that retention period is. And generally we recommend at least a year.

unknown 20:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Uh and that who knows what that sheet could have contained, right? It could have been client information, it could have been your sales data, it could have been something cash flow for the next year.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

Could have been cash flow.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

I mean, employment contracts sit for 30 days. There is an argument to say that it's not something you use every day, and therefore, sure, maybe it's not the most important thing on the planet. But, you know, you you might work with a client for a period of time, you finish that engagement, three months later you come back to them and say, hey, we've got this new cool thing. Let's make a sale. We can reuse, oh crap. Whoops. You can't reuse that. Where's it gone? Shit.

SPEAKER_02 21:12

Yeah. Well, the the other thing that I've been learning since I've been using AI, you know, I'm all in on Victor, right? I'm using Victor a lot in Slack to do, you know, it's like a virtual workforce, right? I feel like I've got another five or six employees working with me. It's I I mean, it's not perfect. It's it has problems, right? I mean, I think they have fundamental, I actually think there are some fundamental problems with their business model that they're gonna have to fix if they're really gonna scale. That's a whole other conversation for another time. But one thing I've learned is that um in Slack, you know, we have Slack Connect channels. So we have people that come in from external organizations, we have a Slack channel that they can see in their Slack and we can see in our Slack and blah, blah, blah. Any data, any data that I share in that Slack Connect channel, I have to be conscious of the fact that so if you and I've got a Slack Connect channel, for example, and you add one of your employees to that. Slack connect channel, and then that employee turns out in three weeks' time they're a bit dodgy and you remove them. They've had access to everything in that Slack channel for that three weeks, including any API keys or passwords we may have shared. And I'm sorry, but if anyone's listening to this podcast and you're saying, oh, well, I've never shared an API key or a password in a Slack channel, bullshit. We all have. And what I've learned, what I've learned now is like I'm super vigilant about that stuff now, right? Like I I only share things in a direct message with Victor because no one else has access to that conversation with Victor. And I put most stuff in Doppler these days. I've discovered Doppler, which is kind of like one password for AI agents, right? It's like it's amazing. Um, but also think about Google Drive. If you, if you most people will just give someone, you know, let's share the Google, let's share this Google Doc with someone or this Google Sheet with someone. How often do you actually think about the permissions that you're giving that person? Are you giving them view permissions, comment position uh permissions, edit permissions? Are they the owner of that Google Sheet? Could they inadvertently delete that Google Sheet from your Google Drive, right? And so I think there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do as entrepreneurs where we're moving fast, we just need to get the thing done, and we're not necessarily thinking about the implications of what we're about to do, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Yeah. And offboarding and onboarding of people is a is a huge thing, right? And it's something that we do. So your your question about I had no idea. Right. Your question about is this just sort of protection stuff? It's not. We we do the practical bits for you as well. And and offboarding an employee is a really big one. Um not just because they could have gone and signed up for a thing that you have no idea about, right? But this is where you've got to have a few policies in place for your team and your employees and some operating, I mean, you can call them policies, you can call them operational principles, right? Which is, you know, we have Google Workspace, right? Uh that is your email address, and you use that email address for everything that you log into or the login with Google button, right? You never use your own personal email address. Um, you don't go and sign up for a uh a product or a thing to get a job done if there's something in Google Workspace that already does it. Now you just touched on Slack, for example. Um lots of people use Slack. Uh we espouse the use of Google Chat, right? Um, one of the reasons for that is everything is then in the same bucket, right? There's less for you to need to back up, there's less for you to need to security audit, there's less for you to onboard people to when they join because they get it instantly. You don't then have to go to Slack and create another account for them. Um and there's less for them to offboard, right? So when they finish that with you, you just turn off their one account with their email and their Google um sign in, and all of the things they've used that sign in with Google button all collapses all at that same time. Now, there's still a bit more to do than that. You've got to decide where you migrate the data, if somebody else is going to inherit that, if you're going to redirect their emails to other places. Those are the things we do for you. You just fill out form, tell us if this person is being superseded, where you need the data, et cetera, and we will do all that work for you. Um, but that this is this is kind of where I'm talking about our our journey that goes with your business, which is your foundations is that first layer, which is what are your core, what are your core tool sets going to be? And I think most businesses can get away with three. You don't really need much more than that. Once you've got that foundation in place, there's some policy that needs to go with that or operational principles. And once you've got those in place, then you can go into like, well, we need some operational stuff that that kind of wraps around that. How do we use those tools to then govern the daily movement of data in the business so that people can actually get stuff done? And they're not sat there searching for you know something in Google that helps them solve that problem that's right in front of them today.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

Yeah, got it. Um I right in saying that you would use Google Meet and not Zoom.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Yeah.

unknown 26:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

So that's just like an example of like, don't use Zoom because Google has Google Meet built into it, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Precisely. Right. I mean, there are there are some niche edge cases where Zoom does stuff that Google Meet doesn't, right? Yeah, like webinars and yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

Got it. You can, yeah, that's what you're doing. You can actually. Yeah, but you can do a webinar with Google Meet. I learned that the other day, actually.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

You can, and and there's and there's, you know, there's there's plans and there's cost and there's balance to all of that stuff as well. But fundamentally, I would then come back to it and say, cool, if you're going to do webinars, use Zoom just for webinars, right? Keep everything else in Google Meet. You'll get your recordings um dropped into Google Drive. You've got your native transcripts that are done by Gemini. Um again, that file gets dropped into your Google Drive. You can write a small script to help sort them out by customer, for example. Yeah. And you, you know, if you if you bring in Zoom, not only have you got an external tool, but then you're probably going to engage something else that bridges that gap between them as well.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Like Fathom.

SPEAKER_03 27:17

Or yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Fathom or whatever it might be, right? Or Zapier or something to help sort them and put them into Google Drive. So all of a sudden you've gone from one ecosystem that's quite easy to manage to probably four to solve the same problem.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

Yep. Yep. What percentage of your clients are Google Workspace versus Microsoft Teams? I uh you can't believe I just used that word on the podcast, but anyway.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

I genuinely can't remember the last time I I was on Microsoft Teams with someone.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

That is a horrible product. I've got one client that I'm installing Victor for. I'm setting up Victor in an agency here in Melbourne and they use Microsoft Teams. I'm not going to name them, although they wouldn't mind if I did because we joke about it all the time. Now my joke with Microsoft Teams is you have to do everything twice. You have to log in twice, you have to message someone twice. Like the thing just doesn't work. It's freaking horrible. Um, but it's are you mainly a Google Workspace uh shop or do you support Microsoft uh Outlook as well or Microsoft 365?

SPEAKER_01 28:14

So our clients uh rate, you don't have to, it's not our way or the highway, right? Got it. So your WordPress, for example, your your website, for example, might be on WordPress, it might be on Wix. That's cool. There's reasons for choosing each.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

No problem there. Yep. If you've already, if you're already in Microsoft 365, we don't directly support the things that come up in the Microsoft world, but we will make sure that it is correctly configured to send your emails and that they land in the inbox. Okay. Yep, and there's a Google that might work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

That's right, exactly. Now we're a Google partner, so we can answer all the questions about everything in the Google ecosystem. Um, but if you've got Microsoft 365 and you're happy with it and you don't want to move, that's cool. It works, right?

SPEAKER_02 28:58

If someone comes to you and they're like, I don't know which way to go or a brand new startup, you're going to suggest they go Google Workspace, I'm imagining.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

There have been times where I have had a discussion with people and gone, yeah, Gmail's not for you. And that's because they've perhaps come from a corporate environment and Outlook is the only thing they've used for 20 years. There is genuinely a dissonance between Outlook users and Gmail users, right? There is. And so if if people have come from that background, my question is have you got an at gmail.com that you use personally? Yes, you do. Okay, quit, sweet. We're we're Google Workspace. Yeah. Because that I have come across people that are just like, I can't deal with Gmail.

SPEAKER_02 29:34

Yeah. Which is fair enough. Yeah. Now, we should also highlight here that um it it's interesting. What I find interesting about you guys with because most of our clients are agencies, right? They're like they're like web design or SEO or marketing agencies. Describe you guys as a Martech agency. Because you guys still do marketing, right? You still do, you still you're still building websites these days.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Right. And I so there's there's two sides to that.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:05

Right? Yeah. We we are not a marketing agency.

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Right. Uh, just in the same way that a marketing agency is not a web developer, generally speaking. Okay. I I I put websites into one of three buckets. You get your techies, you get your builders, and you get your designers.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Okay. And and this is a, in my view, one of the fundamental problems with the way technology gets presented. So it and this is the same with Google Workspace, it's the same with Microsoft. You can go on the website, you can click a button, put a credit card in, and you have an account. Yeah. Right? And generally speaking, as far as Microsoft and Google is concerned, that's their job done. They've got you, right? Yeah, that's right. There's still a whole bunch of stuff that you have to do to connect your business to it, you know, by the domain name, get the setup right, as we've talked about, email deliverability and DKIM and DMARC. They don't tell you anything about that.

SPEAKER_03 31:01

No.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

Right? It's a problem that will come up at some point. So uh yeah, so from our point of view, I mean Martex kind of, yes, right. Um, we put ourselves in the place where we say, look, um, we won't necessarily help you with your SEO, right? It's quite a specialized skill set. Um, you still probably want someone who to help you know deal with your ICP and figure out who your clients are and what your messaging should be. But we will support those people that you bring into your business with a well-built, well-structured, technically, you know, readable by AI and Google and stuff, fast website underneath it. Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:41

Got it. But the ongoing services of like producing content for clients, doing SEO, running ads, all that kind of stuff, that's not your wheelhouse.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

It's an interesting one that we've been talking about, right? So uh the rise of AI is producing this uh thought concept, I think, especially in entrepreneurs' heads, which is oh, I now don't have to hire someone to go and do that, and I can do it myself, right? I mean, generating emails and marketing and blog posts and imagery now is something that is on the surface really easy to do. You can go to AI, you can say, I want to write a blog post about this, and 20 minutes later, there you go, you've got a blog post, right?

SPEAKER_03 32:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Um, the problem with that is that there's no expertise or context and stuff that's gone into it. And now, in where are we, September of 2026, Google is starting to realize that the engine is just feeding itself with crap. So if you're if you're just copying and pasting what AI is and making it a blog post and go, that sounds amazing. Does it actually sound like you? Uh so we are in a place where we're kind of like, well, we could help people uh set up some AI systems to be able to do some of that. Uh probably much like you're doing with Victor, right? You're you're you're getting the IP out of the the business and you're setting A up in a uh a much more contextually relevant way to help generate some of that content. I would I would wager that what you're not doing is then just simply posting it. You are making that sure there's a human in the loop that's reviewing it, you're getting sign of from the client, then you know, revisions happen, it goes live. So we are in the business of helping you make sure that those kind of systems are in place, right? Making sure that the quality is there. I would not purport to be someone who's good at marketing. Our marketing is utter crap because we're in that position where we've not engaged someone to help us get that message you know better and deal with it. And that's where I think this gap between uh capability and AI still exists. There's always going to be space for the expert, the person who is innovating, the person who's thinking about it with critical thinking. Yeah. Because AI doesn't know what's happening today yet.

SPEAKER_02 34:04

Yep, that's right. And I think it's like AI for me is like the invention of the power tool, right? Like when the power tool came along, every dad thought he was a trade all of a sudden and bought all the power tools and started drilling holes in the walls at home. And when the picture falls off the wall in the hallway, you realize that I've never been taught to find where the stud is. I just drilled a hole in the plaster and hung a uh a picture on a nail and it fell out because the plaster can't support the weight of the picture. Um AI is like the power drill, right? But the trade who's who's done this before and has put a few holes in walls, he knows to find a stud first, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:39

And I'll I'll give you an example. We have a uh literally got a support tick, I think, yesterday or the day before from a client going, Look, I've found this particular problem on our website. I went to Chat GPT, it gave me this snippet of code, I put it into the code snippet editor plugin on the website, and it didn't work. And I did exactly that. I went, oh my God. You you know that you already pay us to do those things for you, right? You don't need to go do that yourself.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a policy about I have a policy that uh people send me people send me 30-page documents written by AI that are their all their thinking, all their thinking on the business, right? And then they want me to, you know, help them implement this stuff. And so I have a policy now that if anyone sends me a long document that's clearly written by AI, my response to them is a 350-page response written by Claude that they have to read word for word before our engagement continues. And what I'm trying to do there is I'm trying to say, look, just because you can doesn't mean you should. Stop doing that, because a 30-page document on your thinking about the business is might be useful if you're doing a, you know, strategic offsite once a year with your team, but it's not useful for me. One, I haven't got time to read it. Two, I'm just going to give it to AI and give me the summary. And three, what do you want me to actually do as a result of this? Because while I appreciate your thinking, I care more about what the goal is and what our strategy is to get there and what the next series of tactics are that we need to deploy to try and get there. I don't really care about you thinking that much as much as I would, I probably should, or I should at least pretend I do, just to be nice. I actually don't. I care about my own thinking about my own business more than I care about your thinking in your business. Are you finding that you're getting people sending you like AI mock-ups of a website or or AI drafts of things that they want to right? And I'm hearing this a lot. What's your most agencies are struggling to, not just agencies, most service providers are struggling to put boundaries around here. What's your policy on this?

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Uh I think everybody needs to be exploring what AI can do for you in your business. Right. I think there's a journey here as well that everyone goes through. So you start on ChatGPT, you ask a question, you think, that's amazing, I've got a great answer, right? And you like write a blog post and so forth. Then you discover that you need to put some context into it, because actually it's just giving you the same, you can ask it the same question as I would, and we get mostly the same answer until you start adding context, right? Um so I fully encourage people to go and explore what AI can do for you in your business. Um, you've got a bunch of things that you need to bear in mind when you do that. And I think that, like I said earlier, the the expert, the human expert, is is not going to disappear. It just changes the way that we all engage, right? My my kind of strap line, if you go and watch any of our videos or our podcast, et cetera, is we take away your tech hell so you can focus on your genius zone. I don't sit there in zero every day reconciling invoices and trying to figure out what the tax man needs from me and producing my financial reports because it's not good use of my time because I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I hire an accountant for that. Yeah. Right? They are qualified, they've done the time at school, they keep up to date with everything that's changing in the world, and they tell me when I need to know something. Okay. Yep. Same engagement, right? Now, AI produces this disconnect where I which I think is actually in a way really good for entrepreneurs because we've talked about on your business journey, you might not have the cash yet, right? Well, AI is a great way of helping you solve problems and creating some things that you either would have taken you so much longer to do, right? Or you may not know enough about yet or have the cash flow yet to engage that expert to help you. So, like I say, I encourage the use of people experimenting and trying this stuff. Recognize your own limits and where your area of expertise lies. Um, and yeah, if you send me a uh 30-page document, if it's something that I've asked for because we need it, because we're doing something with you, the way that we've actually been doing it is this is going, here's a list of questions. Either pop open something and screen record it and just talk through it naturally and we get the transcript from it, or let's come and have this conversation. Because I think the other thing we're seeing is the temptation to have AI automate and do you know as many of the things as possible is going to mean that we're going to lose that human connection, which is so very important for building trust and probably making the relationship work in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 39:49

Yeah, 100%. When you and I jumped on Riverside to do this episode, uh, you had a audio problem, you couldn't hear me, I could hear you. And then so you rebooted, you came back in, and uh we and then I we could hear each other. And then I was still faffing about finishing up some paperwork, and and then you were kind of like you leaned in and you were kind of like, So how so hey, how you going? Like, you know, how are you? What's going on in your world? I thought you were talking to someone else. I thought you were talking to someone else in in the room, right? And I was like, Are you talking to me, dude? And you were like, Yeah, man, let's skip the niceties. Like, how are you? And I was like, oh fuck, that's nice. Actually, like, as a business owner, right? And maybe this is why you ask, because no one asks you how you are as a business owner. No, right? And I think that's testament to the fact, I think that's testament to our relationship because we've known each other for a long time, right? And we've hung out on calls like this for you know quite a few times, and we've had ag we've had robust debates about things. You've taught me a bunch of shit that I didn't know, right? Hopefully I've added some value to your business. Absolutely. There's no, you can't replicate that, right? That is two human beings butting heads, arms around each other, helping each other, helping each other navigate, you know, navigate tricky situations and celebrate each other's wins. You can't replicate that with any kind of technology. And so I think AI might be poised to do more of the computer work for us, which frees us up, hopefully, to do more of this kind of relationship building. But I think the other thing, I think the other thing that people don't realize is that our job as agency owners, consultants, whatever you want to call us, our job more than ever now, and I've been saying this since, you know, it was since you could design a website in Photoshop and have it automatically spit out the HTML. I remember when like Figma was a thing and all the every web developer in the world is going, oh, we're we're out of a job now because you know you do it in Figma and it's already produced the HTML. I'm like, yes, but what you're forgetting is you still need to know what to put on the page. And so I think our job now with AI is to help our clients. AI might be able to do a bunch of stuff, but it's still our job to figure out what we should do next.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:11

And I don't think AI is great at that without the years of ex I've tried a bunch of shit in this business, as you have, that didn't work. If I listened to every idea that AI gave me, I'll be like, well, fuck, I've done that and it didn't work, and I don't think it's going to work this time around. So I've got the battle scars to say no to that, right? It's our job to help to figure out what to do next and to help our clients figure out what to do next.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

Absolutely. The, you know, the the the flesh and blood component, I think, is is more important. I think it's really important to think about AI as a tool. You know, 20 years ago, the internet was new, right? The internet is just normal now. Like you don't even notice that it's there, right? We're doing this, we're on literally the other side of the world from each other. Right. It's a tool that we are now using and it's just normal. And AI is currently in that uh, you know, adoption, you know, innovation curve. It's all shiny and new and it's moving like lightning fast. So it's really easy to kind of get lost around. Um but what what like I said, we were talking about here, what we're already seeing is that there's kind of the overuse of AI, which is damaging. And I'll actually I've got a kind of example here. One of the first uh proposals that I wrote using AI uh was kind of eight websites all in for one customer. Okay. We had our discovery call, we talked through some stuff, we got to know a bit of what we needed to know, and uh the plan was to uh you know, for us to go and do some research and then come back, have another call, and then do the proposal. Okay. Through that, I was like far out. I mean, in the old days, eight websites to do the technical audit on, um to go and see. Where all the plugins were at, where the hosting's at, where your domains are at, just you know, the whole nine yards. Eight sites on a couple days of work. Okay. With AI and a kind of well-designed process, 20 minutes, half an hour, and it will get all of the information that you need very, very quickly. Okay. So and I think that's a really good illustration of how AI can help you in your business, right? It changes the value. Rather than it being a time-based conversation, it's now a you're getting the value from up here and the what next and the strategy rather than the drudge work that traditionally would take loads of time. So great, we've got the research, right? Um, we've got the conversation that we've had and the transcript from that. Uh let's start to kind of meld those two things together with our you know, rate card essentially. Like what do we do? How do we do it for people, etc.? Okay. Proposal. Uh a couple hours later. Right. Now uh we don't what our policy is. If you generate it with AI, you read it, you tweak it, you make it your own, you send it. Okay. Nothing gets sent by AI automatically. So, same thing. Read through the proposal, and I was probably knackered or not feeling all that great. I missed some of the uh, you know, the dramatic pros that AI tends to put into things, the the over egging of stuff, right? Um, we have a fairly good voice profile that does a bunch of checking for those things and tries to make it more natural, you know, sounding for us and the way that we would write. The feedback that I got from the client. So, number one, amazing. So, so very grateful. I actually got some feedback was it sounds like you did this proposal with AI, um, because there's a few things that I think you missed. Um, but also it's so far away from the way that you talked to me on the call, which I came out of feeling like you understood what was going on. We had a human connection, and then you sent me this proposal that just felt so, so very disconnected. And I was like, oh shit. And read it back and was like, yeah, actually, fair cop, you know what, screw that up massively. Um, and it's just blown that trust away. So all of that effort that's gone in to build that trust from the human connection, you know, that one document. And to be fair, it was 13 odd pages because there was eight websites to go through. There's just there was going to be volume, um, just didn't land, it didn't work, and we lost a job because of it. And you know, that now for me is it's one of those battle scars you're talking about. You try stuff, you fail at it, and you improve it. Um, so you know, take that, learn from it. Um but it's a very real problem.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

Hey, I dude, we've been here for 45 minutes, and I feel like we've been here for five minutes. I mean, this is like I just love getting inside of the business and exploring what's happening and hearing from business owners like in the coalface, what's actually happening in this world. You, if people are listening to this and they want to reach out, how can they get in touch with you? And also, I'm imagining that agencies are probably a pretty good referral partnership for you. Because I know there's a bunch of agencies who are who build websites and do marketing, and then like once that's done, they're like, well, you know, I can't help you, all that other stuff. So, how do people reach out and say hi and connect with you?

SPEAKER_01 47:16

Yeah, best place is to jump onto the website, sixfive.io, and uh you can watch a little video of me saying hi and telling you what we do. Um, and there's a booking link on there if you want to um jump in, have 15 minutes, have a conversation, find out more about what we do, tell me your problems, uh, and I will tell you either that's way outside of our wheelhouse and it's not what we do. Or, like you said earlier, if if you're a Microsoft house and you know you don't want to move to Google, we know people we can put you in touch with Microsoft Land as well. Um, but always very, very happy to have a chat and sanity check stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn, fairly distinctive surname, so makes it easy.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

Yes, Duncan, Isaacs, and Lox and I'll put the links to everything in the show notes. And the reason that your agency is called Six Five is because you are actually six foot five, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 48:03

Might shrink as I get older, but that's that's the option, aren't we?

SPEAKER_02 48:06

All hey, this has been uh a super interesting chat. Uh thank you for your time and um and yeah, and thanks for being a part of our ecosystem. Uh love working with you guys. Um and also, you know, that one thing uh we so we help you guys out with some Victor stuff. And one thing that you've really I really appreciate, there's a couple of clients that we've got that really push back on me and help me push things to, you know, a little bit outside the box. And so I just want to say publicly thank you for continuing to push me to be a better product person, a better service provider, a better thinker, a better marketer. Because a lot of clients just go, oh yeah, okay, that's great, you know. But there's a few of you that go, actually, that's good, but it could be better if it did this. I'm like, great, I appreciate the feedback. So thanks for that. Um, and I'm sure anyone who connects with you will appreciate your candor and your and just how straight up you are. I've always appreciated that about you. So thanks for being a part of the community.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

Thanks, Right. And appreciate you having us on. Um, always good to have a chat. I agree. It's uh it's always interesting. Feels like we should do this more often.

SPEAKER_02 49:08

Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast or watching if you're watching this video. And again, thanks to Duncan for being a part of it. Uh again, shoot me an email at Troy at agencymaverics.com. Let me know what you want to hear on the podcast. Uh, in the coming weeks, uh, you'll be able to go to theagencyhour.com. In fact, I think that's live now, thagencyhour.com. You can go there and get all of the episodes of our podcast. Um, I think there's a new playlist coming on YouTube as well, which is just all of the old episodes. Uh I think we're up to 175 episodes now of the agency hour. So every episode is in that playlist on YouTube. It should be live by the time that you're listening or watching this. Um, and as I said, in the coming weeks, we will have a fan mail button at theagenthour.com where you'll be able to uh leave us a voice message and we'll play it on the show. Ask us any question and we'll answer those questions. Uh I'll answer those questions on the show. I look forward to hanging out with you again next week on the Agents Tower. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.