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John Jantsch (00:02.776)

So marketing output is way up everywhere, right? But results are kind of down. Phones are ringing less than they did two years ago. I wrote a book in the and 2010, and I think the answer to this challenge is sitting in that book that I wrote then. And I’ll explain why AI has made that book possibly more relevant than ever. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. I’m doing a solo show. let’s title this AI Just Made Referrals, Your Most Important Channel. So let’s dig in. So as I said at the outset, AI has made competent marketing cheap, passable marketing. Everyone can produce decent content, email ads, I mean, in an afternoon. Now, what nobody says is everybody’s working harder than they did before because they’re trying to manage the machine now. But

Fact of the matter is everybody jumped in, everybody sounds the same now. You know, buyers can tell you, can’t really tell who’s good or not good anymore. the way that they search now, they’re depending and relying on the AI engines to actually give them recommendations. ad costs are doing two things. Ads are doing two things. used to be a really reliable channel. Now ad costs are soaring and their effectiveness is way down. I mean, we

We certainly are seeing that with many of our clients and we’re seeing it ourselves. But I think the biggest thing is that buyer behavior has changed, and I think that that is going to really make a a really shift in marketing from, you know, I talked about many, many years ago I created the marketing hourglass. The idea being that, you know, most people focus on the front half or the top half of that, no like trust, try.

that that you know, getting the phone to ring, getting leads generated. And I’ve said for many, many years that it’s the back half of that. When somebody buys, when they repeat, when they refer, you know, those are the stages of the buyer journey that we really need to be focused on today. it’s hard to get chosen today, with a lot of what’s going on, you know, the noise, the just the fact that, you know, if if AI

John Jantsch (02:23.727)

it doesn’t include you in the short list, you know, somebody may never come to your website or check you out. And so, you know, getting chosen has become more difficult. But what that really means, I think, is instead of doubling down on getting chosen, maybe double down on retention, on repeat business with those ideal clients, and and certainly on a systematic approach to referrals. The top half of the hourglass, you know, the lead generation part has gotten really cheap, but it’s gotten less effective. So

Again, as I said, the second half of the hourglass has become probably the most important element. You know, I told you in the intro that a book that I wrote in 2010. Most people certainly, if you were gonna ask a lot of people that follow me at all, they would say, well, Dark Tape Marketing’s your best book, right, or your best-selling book, or certainly the one you’re known for. I mean, it’s frankly, it’s the name of this podcast, it’s the name of of you know my website, it’s the name of my business, quite frankly. So

But however, the book that I wrote in twenty ten, The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, is is actually in terms of pure numbers my best selling book. And a lot of people wouldn’t wouldn’t know that. But I think it really it still sells well today. and I think what that really is a testament to is it’s evergreen. The idea of of referrals is evergreen. it doesn’t take Twitter necessarily to get to a referral. And I think that that’s really

At the foundation of this, because a referral is the most trusted lead in most cases. It’s a lead that comes to you expecting to pay a premium or at least not price sensitive because somebody has told them, somebody they trust already, even if it was in a review of somebody they didn’t know, talked about the fact that you solved that problem. That was proof. You were just saying it in your marketing. Somebody else said it about you. And I think that that.

really leads people because in a lot of cases people aren’t that they’re not completely price sensitive, especially for, you know, trying to solve a big expensive problem, but they’re risk averse. And so it it it lowers the risk. And because of that, they’re willing to pay more. because let’s face it, I mean, going with the low price leader, you know, involves a lot of risk. If that’s the only

John Jantsch (04:44.303)

decision or or that’s the only data point that that you’re using. And so I think a lot of people are okay with paying more if they can actually feel that that risk of a total failure. and and it’s not just money. I mean it’s it’s time, it’s energy, it’s what we’ve invested. You know, we we get pitched every single day, as I’m sure many of you do as well, on services that want to generate leads for us. And you know, a lot of the pitches or a lot of the value

Proposition pitch is that, hey, we’ll generate 10 appointments and if they aren’t good, you don’t pay a thing. Well, it really kind of belies the fact that you put a ton of energy, you put a ton of your reputation, you know, into getting some sort of cold outreach thing going. And if it flops, okay, you didn’t pay the service to do it, but now you’ve lost opportunity, you’ve lost time, maybe you’ve sullied your reputation in the process. And I think that a lot of people.

Don’t really talk about those types of costs when you know people are really pitching you. So here are three ideas from the book that I think matter the most now. people are wired to refer. I have said this for many, many years. Now it’s not everyone, but certainly a lot of people, if they’ve had a great experience, if they have something unexpected has happened to them along the way, they will talk about it. And so that’s what I mean we’re wired.

refer there there certainly are those people out there that are connectors i mean that’s they get a lot of juice from that idea of of being able to induce people but i think the real thing is if somebody’s had an exceptional experience they they are wired to talk about it most businesses that are doing anything halfway decent are getting some amount of referrals it’s you know it’s unpredictable it’s accidental you know it’s hope that that they get those and so

what this book, what the book introduced is the the idea that you need to create a system around it. It needs to be intentional. You need to have processes in place that actually make sure that you are taking advantage of your referability. I mean, this is not about tricking people into referring you. You’ve got to do that first half. You’ve got to have a referral service, you have to be referable. but once you are, then you have to amplify that referrability.

John Jantsch (07:08.587)

And I think that I I, you know, that’s point number three. I kind of stepped on stepped on it. But I mean, I think that’s really the the key there is no amount of systems or processes or great copy, you know, are necessarily going to generate referrals if you’re not referable. And a lot of that referrability comes down to being able to communicate what it is that you do that would be of value.

to the person, like what’s in it for them in a lot of ways. That’s always going to be a consideration, even if what’s in it for them is they just want to help their friend out, or maybe they just want to help you out. But they’ve got to understand what that value exchange is going to be, is going to contain. This is a piece a lot of people miss. I mean they miss this in marketing in general. Your value proposition or what you are going to do when you are referred has to be easy for them to understand and therefore easy

For them to explain. You put those two comp those two things together. a system where you are actually asking for referrals and then a way to actually teach somebody why they should refer you and how they should refer you. and you really are very far along the path. Now, there are many other things that you can build into this. You can build timing, you know, like when to ask for referrals, you know, especially with customers. there’s always going to be kind of

moments of truth when you want to ask for them. You can build tools. You know, having web pages, they they don’t necessarily have to be open to the general public, but when somebody wants to refer you, just say, hey, send your friend to this page. Make it really easy for them as well. And I and you know I’m gonna I’m gonna finish this with a a few just kind of steps that I think everybody should take. But we actually I want to tell you you know I love customer refer

Referrals, but I think the real hidden opportunity that most people don’t tap is in partner referrals. So other businesses that have your same ideal client as a client or prospect are are really the richest sources for referrals. And the reason I say that is because a a good customer might know two or three people, two or three businesses they could refer you to.

John Jantsch (09:28.223)

strategic partner business might have a hundred that they could refer you to over time. And so I think that that is is reason enough to really focus on that channel. And I think most people when they think of referrals, they just go after their customers. And again, they know how brilliant you are. It’s an obvious channel, but the real goal is if you could do develop a system to go after businesses that could refer you as well. So

for one example, many of you know Mike McAllowitz, author of Profit First. he also has a network that’s called the Prosper Network, where he actually helps businesses turn their businesses around and grow them and you know apply a lot of the the things from his books to those businesses. Well he

has you know seen that in many cases a lot of their clients stumble because marketing. They don’t have a strategic approach to marketing. They’ve hired agencies or they’ve hired people to to do their marketing. And just because not everybody takes a strategic approach, it just feels like kind of tactic of the week. So Mike has started bringing businesses to us to actually do a strategic audit.

on their business, a marketing audit on their business, and then make recommendations that frankly have turned into fractional CFO or CMO engagements. I think we’re working with three businesses of his with there’s another advisor group out there business advisor group that is starting to send us businesses. So we formalized this. I mean frankly it came about because of the relationship.

that I have with Mike as as many things do, but we’ve now formalized this. So we actually have an offering. We have a web page for it. We’re actually out there pitching, you know, other like EOS implementers and profit first professionals and fractional CFOs because they really are running up against the fact that marketing is is a is is always going to be a hurdle in trying to help a business grow and expand or exit. And so we can help them patch that.

John Jantsch (11:34.772)

And I think that a lot of it has to do with our approach. we are not just coming to them as a typical agency. I mean, our approach is more closely aligned with their business advising because we always start with strategy. But again, that’s really just an example of a way that you can structure one of those that can can really turn into a in some cases, you know, a very steady stream of of referrals.

John Jantsch (12:05.751)

Another kind of twist on the whole AI environment that we’re in.

John Jantsch (12:12.337)

testimonials, case studies, referrals, reviews, you know, all of these things have always been very important from a social proof standpoint. But increasingly what you’re seeing is people are turning to even the the search engines, which are now very powered by AI, or they’re turning to an actual AI model. and they’re putting very long like criteria. Here’s what I’m looking for. Well

Guess where a lot of those AI models are driving or or deriving, you know, the recommendations? They’re not necessarily like in the old days where it was like, well, you have the most authority, you’ve done the best SEOs, and now you’re going to win. They’re actually diving deep into voice of customer, what customers are saying in reviews, what they’re saying on social media sites, what they’re saying in Reddit. and they’re using that to compile who those are. So some of those businesses aren’t necessarily.

the biggest or the been around the longest or have the most you know spend in in marketing, a lot of cases they’re the ones that have really done a good job mining and amplifying what it is that their customers are actually saying about them. So machines are talking to machines now to make a referral, if you want to look at it that way. And so a lot of the energy that you might spend on building assets around referrals, on amplifying your case studies, on getting video testimonials, those are actually going to be

AI referral assets as well. So

Here’s your homework. Ask three AI assistants who they’d recommend for your category and compare that to what your customers say. That’s really where some of the gap’s going to be. So

John Jantsch (13:57.271)

Track, here’s another good exercise for you. Track the last 10 customer sources, like where they came from. and really think in terms of, you know, in the experience of onboarding, in the experience of getting that customer going, are there are there trackable moments or talkable moments where you could actually say, this is a place where we should start asking for a referral, for example. And then start thinking about who are those strategic partners out there.

Some of whom you might actually be working with already in some cases, that you could really start thinking about a formal program. If you want to learn more about our advisor program, how we’ve structured structured it to work with advisors, business advisors, it’s just dtm.world slash B A, like business advisors. So DTM.world slash business advisors. So

That’s all I have for today. hopefully this gets you thinking a little harder about the idea of referrals and what referrals where the the role that they’re going to play and do play, I think in this AI era is going to become increasingly significant. and I think just I guess just go buy my book. That would be that would be the easiest, fastest one. But actually, if you want us to design a system for you, if you wanna if you are a business advisor.

and you’d like to learn how we could work with your clients, those are all things that we’d love to do. just send us an email. All right, take care.

John Jantsch (00:02.776)

So marketing output is way up everywhere, right? But results are kind of down. Phones are ringing less than they did two years ago. I wrote a book in the and 2010, and I think the answer to this challenge is sitting in that book that I wrote then. And I’ll explain why AI has made that book possibly more relevant than ever. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. I’m doing a solo show. let’s title this AI Just Made Referrals, Your Most Important Channel. So let’s dig in. So as I said at the outset, AI has made competent marketing cheap, passable marketing. Everyone can produce decent content, email ads, I mean, in an afternoon. Now, what nobody says is everybody’s working harder than they did before because they’re trying to manage the machine now. But

Fact of the matter is everybody jumped in, everybody sounds the same now. You know, buyers can tell you, can’t really tell who’s good or not good anymore. the way that they search now, they’re depending and relying on the AI engines to actually give them recommendations. ad costs are doing two things. Ads are doing two things. used to be a really reliable channel. Now ad costs are soaring and their effectiveness is way down. I mean, we

We certainly are seeing that with many of our clients and we’re seeing it ourselves. But I think the biggest thing is that buyer behavior has changed, and I think that that is going to really make a a really shift in marketing from, you know, I talked about many, many years ago I created the marketing hourglass. The idea being that, you know, most people focus on the front half or the top half of that, no like trust, try.

that that you know, getting the phone to ring, getting leads generated. And I’ve said for many, many years that it’s the back half of that. When somebody buys, when they repeat, when they refer, you know, those are the stages of the buyer journey that we really need to be focused on today. it’s hard to get chosen today, with a lot of what’s going on, you know, the noise, the just the fact that, you know, if if AI

John Jantsch (02:23.727)

it doesn’t include you in the short list, you know, somebody may never come to your website or check you out. And so, you know, getting chosen has become more difficult. But what that really means, I think, is instead of doubling down on getting chosen, maybe double down on retention, on repeat business with those ideal clients, and and certainly on a systematic approach to referrals. The top half of the hourglass, you know, the lead generation part has gotten really cheap, but it’s gotten less effective. So

Again, as I said, the second half of the hourglass has become probably the most important element. You know, I told you in the intro that a book that I wrote in 2010. Most people certainly, if you were gonna ask a lot of people that follow me at all, they would say, well, Dark Tape Marketing’s your best book, right, or your best-selling book, or certainly the one you’re known for. I mean, it’s frankly, it’s the name of this podcast, it’s the name of of you know my website, it’s the name of my business, quite frankly. So

But however, the book that I wrote in twenty ten, The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, is is actually in terms of pure numbers my best selling book. And a lot of people wouldn’t wouldn’t know that. But I think it really it still sells well today. and I think what that really is a testament to is it’s evergreen. The idea of of referrals is evergreen. it doesn’t take Twitter necessarily to get to a referral. And I think that that’s really

At the foundation of this, because a referral is the most trusted lead in most cases. It’s a lead that comes to you expecting to pay a premium or at least not price sensitive because somebody has told them, somebody they trust already, even if it was in a review of somebody they didn’t know, talked about the fact that you solved that problem. That was proof. You were just saying it in your marketing. Somebody else said it about you. And I think that that.

really leads people because in a lot of cases people aren’t that they’re not completely price sensitive, especially for, you know, trying to solve a big expensive problem, but they’re risk averse. And so it it it lowers the risk. And because of that, they’re willing to pay more. because let’s face it, I mean, going with the low price leader, you know, involves a lot of risk. If that’s the only

John Jantsch (04:44.303)

decision or or that’s the only data point that that you’re using. And so I think a lot of people are okay with paying more if they can actually feel that that risk of a total failure. and and it’s not just money. I mean it’s it’s time, it’s energy, it’s what we’ve invested. You know, we we get pitched every single day, as I’m sure many of you do as well, on services that want to generate leads for us. And you know, a lot of the pitches or a lot of the value

Proposition pitch is that, hey, we’ll generate 10 appointments and if they aren’t good, you don’t pay a thing. Well, it really kind of belies the fact that you put a ton of energy, you put a ton of your reputation, you know, into getting some sort of cold outreach thing going. And if it flops, okay, you didn’t pay the service to do it, but now you’ve lost opportunity, you’ve lost time, maybe you’ve sullied your reputation in the process. And I think that a lot of people.

Don’t really talk about those types of costs when you know people are really pitching you. So here are three ideas from the book that I think matter the most now. people are wired to refer. I have said this for many, many years. Now it’s not everyone, but certainly a lot of people, if they’ve had a great experience, if they have something unexpected has happened to them along the way, they will talk about it. And so that’s what I mean we’re wired.

refer there there certainly are those people out there that are connectors i mean that’s they get a lot of juice from that idea of of being able to induce people but i think the real thing is if somebody’s had an exceptional experience they they are wired to talk about it most businesses that are doing anything halfway decent are getting some amount of referrals it’s you know it’s unpredictable it’s accidental you know it’s hope that that they get those and so

what this book, what the book introduced is the the idea that you need to create a system around it. It needs to be intentional. You need to have processes in place that actually make sure that you are taking advantage of your referability. I mean, this is not about tricking people into referring you. You’ve got to do that first half. You’ve got to have a referral service, you have to be referable. but once you are, then you have to amplify that referrability.

John Jantsch (07:08.587)

And I think that I I, you know, that’s point number three. I kind of stepped on stepped on it. But I mean, I think that’s really the the key there is no amount of systems or processes or great copy, you know, are necessarily going to generate referrals if you’re not referable. And a lot of that referrability comes down to being able to communicate what it is that you do that would be of value.

to the person, like what’s in it for them in a lot of ways. That’s always going to be a consideration, even if what’s in it for them is they just want to help their friend out, or maybe they just want to help you out. But they’ve got to understand what that value exchange is going to be, is going to contain. This is a piece a lot of people miss. I mean they miss this in marketing in general. Your value proposition or what you are going to do when you are referred has to be easy for them to understand and therefore easy

For them to explain. You put those two comp those two things together. a system where you are actually asking for referrals and then a way to actually teach somebody why they should refer you and how they should refer you. and you really are very far along the path. Now, there are many other things that you can build into this. You can build timing, you know, like when to ask for referrals, you know, especially with customers. there’s always going to be kind of

moments of truth when you want to ask for them. You can build tools. You know, having web pages, they they don’t necessarily have to be open to the general public, but when somebody wants to refer you, just say, hey, send your friend to this page. Make it really easy for them as well. And I and you know I’m gonna I’m gonna finish this with a a few just kind of steps that I think everybody should take. But we actually I want to tell you you know I love customer refer

Referrals, but I think the real hidden opportunity that most people don’t tap is in partner referrals. So other businesses that have your same ideal client as a client or prospect are are really the richest sources for referrals. And the reason I say that is because a a good customer might know two or three people, two or three businesses they could refer you to.

John Jantsch (09:28.223)

strategic partner business might have a hundred that they could refer you to over time. And so I think that that is is reason enough to really focus on that channel. And I think most people when they think of referrals, they just go after their customers. And again, they know how brilliant you are. It’s an obvious channel, but the real goal is if you could do develop a system to go after businesses that could refer you as well. So

for one example, many of you know Mike McAllowitz, author of Profit First. he also has a network that’s called the Prosper Network, where he actually helps businesses turn their businesses around and grow them and you know apply a lot of the the things from his books to those businesses. Well he

has you know seen that in many cases a lot of their clients stumble because marketing. They don’t have a strategic approach to marketing. They’ve hired agencies or they’ve hired people to to do their marketing. And just because not everybody takes a strategic approach, it just feels like kind of tactic of the week. So Mike has started bringing businesses to us to actually do a strategic audit.

on their business, a marketing audit on their business, and then make recommendations that frankly have turned into fractional CFO or CMO engagements. I think we’re working with three businesses of his with there’s another advisor group out there business advisor group that is starting to send us businesses. So we formalized this. I mean frankly it came about because of the relationship.

that I have with Mike as as many things do, but we’ve now formalized this. So we actually have an offering. We have a web page for it. We’re actually out there pitching, you know, other like EOS implementers and profit first professionals and fractional CFOs because they really are running up against the fact that marketing is is a is is always going to be a hurdle in trying to help a business grow and expand or exit. And so we can help them patch that.

John Jantsch (11:34.772)

And I think that a lot of it has to do with our approach. we are not just coming to them as a typical agency. I mean, our approach is more closely aligned with their business advising because we always start with strategy. But again, that’s really just an example of a way that you can structure one of those that can can really turn into a in some cases, you know, a very steady stream of of referrals.

John Jantsch (12:05.751)

Another kind of twist on the whole AI environment that we’re in.

John Jantsch (12:12.337)

testimonials, case studies, referrals, reviews, you know, all of these things have always been very important from a social proof standpoint. But increasingly what you’re seeing is people are turning to even the the search engines, which are now very powered by AI, or they’re turning to an actual AI model. and they’re putting very long like criteria. Here’s what I’m looking for. Well

Guess where a lot of those AI models are driving or or deriving, you know, the recommendations? They’re not necessarily like in the old days where it was like, well, you have the most authority, you’ve done the best SEOs, and now you’re going to win. They’re actually diving deep into voice of customer, what customers are saying in reviews, what they’re saying on social media sites, what they’re saying in Reddit. and they’re using that to compile who those are. So some of those businesses aren’t necessarily.

the biggest or the been around the longest or have the most you know spend in in marketing, a lot of cases they’re the ones that have really done a good job mining and amplifying what it is that their customers are actually saying about them. So machines are talking to machines now to make a referral, if you want to look at it that way. And so a lot of the energy that you might spend on building assets around referrals, on amplifying your case studies, on getting video testimonials, those are actually going to be

AI referral assets as well. So

Here’s your homework. Ask three AI assistants who they’d recommend for your category and compare that to what your customers say. That’s really where some of the gap’s going to be. So

John Jantsch (13:57.271)

Track, here’s another good exercise for you. Track the last 10 customer sources, like where they came from. and really think in terms of, you know, in the experience of onboarding, in the experience of getting that customer going, are there are there trackable moments or talkable moments where you could actually say, this is a place where we should start asking for a referral, for example. And then start thinking about who are those strategic partners out there.

Some of whom you might actually be working with already in some cases, that you could really start thinking about a formal program. If you want to learn more about our advisor program, how we’ve structured structured it to work with advisors, business advisors, it’s just dtm.world slash B A, like business advisors. So DTM.world slash business advisors. So

That’s all I have for today. hopefully this gets you thinking a little harder about the idea of referrals and what referrals where the the role that they’re going to play and do play, I think in this AI era is going to become increasingly significant. and I think just I guess just go buy my book. That would be that would be the easiest, fastest one. But actually, if you want us to design a system for you, if you wanna if you are a business advisor.

and you’d like to learn how we could work with your clients, those are all things that we’d love to do. just send us an email. All right, take care.

John Jantsch (00:02.776)

So marketing output is way up everywhere, right? But results are kind of down. Phones are ringing less than they did two years ago. I wrote a book in the and 2010, and I think the answer to this challenge is sitting in that book that I wrote then. And I’ll explain why AI has made that book possibly more relevant than ever. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. I’m doing a solo show. let’s title this AI Just Made Referrals, Your Most Important Channel. So let’s dig in. So as I said at the outset, AI has made competent marketing cheap, passable marketing. Everyone can produce decent content, email ads, I mean, in an afternoon. Now, what nobody says is everybody’s working harder than they did before because they’re trying to manage the machine now. But

Fact of the matter is everybody jumped in, everybody sounds the same now. You know, buyers can tell you, can’t really tell who’s good or not good anymore. the way that they search now, they’re depending and relying on the AI engines to actually give them recommendations. ad costs are doing two things. Ads are doing two things. used to be a really reliable channel. Now ad costs are soaring and their effectiveness is way down. I mean, we

We certainly are seeing that with many of our clients and we’re seeing it ourselves. But I think the biggest thing is that buyer behavior has changed, and I think that that is going to really make a a really shift in marketing from, you know, I talked about many, many years ago I created the marketing hourglass. The idea being that, you know, most people focus on the front half or the top half of that, no like trust, try.

that that you know, getting the phone to ring, getting leads generated. And I’ve said for many, many years that it’s the back half of that. When somebody buys, when they repeat, when they refer, you know, those are the stages of the buyer journey that we really need to be focused on today. it’s hard to get chosen today, with a lot of what’s going on, you know, the noise, the just the fact that, you know, if if AI

John Jantsch (02:23.727)

it doesn’t include you in the short list, you know, somebody may never come to your website or check you out. And so, you know, getting chosen has become more difficult. But what that really means, I think, is instead of doubling down on getting chosen, maybe double down on retention, on repeat business with those ideal clients, and and certainly on a systematic approach to referrals. The top half of the hourglass, you know, the lead generation part has gotten really cheap, but it’s gotten less effective. So

Again, as I said, the second half of the hourglass has become probably the most important element. You know, I told you in the intro that a book that I wrote in 2010. Most people certainly, if you were gonna ask a lot of people that follow me at all, they would say, well, Dark Tape Marketing’s your best book, right, or your best-selling book, or certainly the one you’re known for. I mean, it’s frankly, it’s the name of this podcast, it’s the name of of you know my website, it’s the name of my business, quite frankly. So

But however, the book that I wrote in twenty ten, The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, is is actually in terms of pure numbers my best selling book. And a lot of people wouldn’t wouldn’t know that. But I think it really it still sells well today. and I think what that really is a testament to is it’s evergreen. The idea of of referrals is evergreen. it doesn’t take Twitter necessarily to get to a referral. And I think that that’s really

At the foundation of this, because a referral is the most trusted lead in most cases. It’s a lead that comes to you expecting to pay a premium or at least not price sensitive because somebody has told them, somebody they trust already, even if it was in a review of somebody they didn’t know, talked about the fact that you solved that problem. That was proof. You were just saying it in your marketing. Somebody else said it about you. And I think that that.

really leads people because in a lot of cases people aren’t that they’re not completely price sensitive, especially for, you know, trying to solve a big expensive problem, but they’re risk averse. And so it it it lowers the risk. And because of that, they’re willing to pay more. because let’s face it, I mean, going with the low price leader, you know, involves a lot of risk. If that’s the only

John Jantsch (04:44.303)

decision or or that’s the only data point that that you’re using. And so I think a lot of people are okay with paying more if they can actually feel that that risk of a total failure. and and it’s not just money. I mean it’s it’s time, it’s energy, it’s what we’ve invested. You know, we we get pitched every single day, as I’m sure many of you do as well, on services that want to generate leads for us. And you know, a lot of the pitches or a lot of the value

Proposition pitch is that, hey, we’ll generate 10 appointments and if they aren’t good, you don’t pay a thing. Well, it really kind of belies the fact that you put a ton of energy, you put a ton of your reputation, you know, into getting some sort of cold outreach thing going. And if it flops, okay, you didn’t pay the service to do it, but now you’ve lost opportunity, you’ve lost time, maybe you’ve sullied your reputation in the process. And I think that a lot of people.

Don’t really talk about those types of costs when you know people are really pitching you. So here are three ideas from the book that I think matter the most now. people are wired to refer. I have said this for many, many years. Now it’s not everyone, but certainly a lot of people, if they’ve had a great experience, if they have something unexpected has happened to them along the way, they will talk about it. And so that’s what I mean we’re wired.

refer there there certainly are those people out there that are connectors i mean that’s they get a lot of juice from that idea of of being able to induce people but i think the real thing is if somebody’s had an exceptional experience they they are wired to talk about it most businesses that are doing anything halfway decent are getting some amount of referrals it’s you know it’s unpredictable it’s accidental you know it’s hope that that they get those and so

what this book, what the book introduced is the the idea that you need to create a system around it. It needs to be intentional. You need to have processes in place that actually make sure that you are taking advantage of your referability. I mean, this is not about tricking people into referring you. You’ve got to do that first half. You’ve got to have a referral service, you have to be referable. but once you are, then you have to amplify that referrability.

John Jantsch (07:08.587)

And I think that I I, you know, that’s point number three. I kind of stepped on stepped on it. But I mean, I think that’s really the the key there is no amount of systems or processes or great copy, you know, are necessarily going to generate referrals if you’re not referable. And a lot of that referrability comes down to being able to communicate what it is that you do that would be of value.

to the person, like what’s in it for them in a lot of ways. That’s always going to be a consideration, even if what’s in it for them is they just want to help their friend out, or maybe they just want to help you out. But they’ve got to understand what that value exchange is going to be, is going to contain. This is a piece a lot of people miss. I mean they miss this in marketing in general. Your value proposition or what you are going to do when you are referred has to be easy for them to understand and therefore easy

For them to explain. You put those two comp those two things together. a system where you are actually asking for referrals and then a way to actually teach somebody why they should refer you and how they should refer you. and you really are very far along the path. Now, there are many other things that you can build into this. You can build timing, you know, like when to ask for referrals, you know, especially with customers. there’s always going to be kind of

moments of truth when you want to ask for them. You can build tools. You know, having web pages, they they don’t necessarily have to be open to the general public, but when somebody wants to refer you, just say, hey, send your friend to this page. Make it really easy for them as well. And I and you know I’m gonna I’m gonna finish this with a a few just kind of steps that I think everybody should take. But we actually I want to tell you you know I love customer refer

Referrals, but I think the real hidden opportunity that most people don’t tap is in partner referrals. So other businesses that have your same ideal client as a client or prospect are are really the richest sources for referrals. And the reason I say that is because a a good customer might know two or three people, two or three businesses they could refer you to.

John Jantsch (09:28.223)

strategic partner business might have a hundred that they could refer you to over time. And so I think that that is is reason enough to really focus on that channel. And I think most people when they think of referrals, they just go after their customers. And again, they know how brilliant you are. It’s an obvious channel, but the real goal is if you could do develop a system to go after businesses that could refer you as well. So

for one example, many of you know Mike McAllowitz, author of Profit First. he also has a network that’s called the Prosper Network, where he actually helps businesses turn their businesses around and grow them and you know apply a lot of the the things from his books to those businesses. Well he

has you know seen that in many cases a lot of their clients stumble because marketing. They don’t have a strategic approach to marketing. They’ve hired agencies or they’ve hired people to to do their marketing. And just because not everybody takes a strategic approach, it just feels like kind of tactic of the week. So Mike has started bringing businesses to us to actually do a strategic audit.

on their business, a marketing audit on their business, and then make recommendations that frankly have turned into fractional CFO or CMO engagements. I think we’re working with three businesses of his with there’s another advisor group out there business advisor group that is starting to send us businesses. So we formalized this. I mean frankly it came about because of the relationship.

that I have with Mike as as many things do, but we’ve now formalized this. So we actually have an offering. We have a web page for it. We’re actually out there pitching, you know, other like EOS implementers and profit first professionals and fractional CFOs because they really are running up against the fact that marketing is is a is is always going to be a hurdle in trying to help a business grow and expand or exit. And so we can help them patch that.

John Jantsch (11:34.772)

And I think that a lot of it has to do with our approach. we are not just coming to them as a typical agency. I mean, our approach is more closely aligned with their business advising because we always start with strategy. But again, that’s really just an example of a way that you can structure one of those that can can really turn into a in some cases, you know, a very steady stream of of referrals.

John Jantsch (12:05.751)

Another kind of twist on the whole AI environment that we’re in.

John Jantsch (12:12.337)

testimonials, case studies, referrals, reviews, you know, all of these things have always been very important from a social proof standpoint. But increasingly what you’re seeing is people are turning to even the the search engines, which are now very powered by AI, or they’re turning to an actual AI model. and they’re putting very long like criteria. Here’s what I’m looking for. Well

Guess where a lot of those AI models are driving or or deriving, you know, the recommendations? They’re not necessarily like in the old days where it was like, well, you have the most authority, you’ve done the best SEOs, and now you’re going to win. They’re actually diving deep into voice of customer, what customers are saying in reviews, what they’re saying on social media sites, what they’re saying in Reddit. and they’re using that to compile who those are. So some of those businesses aren’t necessarily.

the biggest or the been around the longest or have the most you know spend in in marketing, a lot of cases they’re the ones that have really done a good job mining and amplifying what it is that their customers are actually saying about them. So machines are talking to machines now to make a referral, if you want to look at it that way. And so a lot of the energy that you might spend on building assets around referrals, on amplifying your case studies, on getting video testimonials, those are actually going to be

AI referral assets as well. So

Here’s your homework. Ask three AI assistants who they’d recommend for your category and compare that to what your customers say. That’s really where some of the gap’s going to be. So

John Jantsch (13:57.271)

Track, here’s another good exercise for you. Track the last 10 customer sources, like where they came from. and really think in terms of, you know, in the experience of onboarding, in the experience of getting that customer going, are there are there trackable moments or talkable moments where you could actually say, this is a place where we should start asking for a referral, for example. And then start thinking about who are those strategic partners out there.

Some of whom you might actually be working with already in some cases, that you could really start thinking about a formal program. If you want to learn more about our advisor program, how we’ve structured structured it to work with advisors, business advisors, it’s just dtm.world slash B A, like business advisors. So DTM.world slash business advisors. So

That’s all I have for today. hopefully this gets you thinking a little harder about the idea of referrals and what referrals where the the role that they’re going to play and do play, I think in this AI era is going to become increasingly significant. and I think just I guess just go buy my book. That would be that would be the easiest, fastest one. But actually, if you want us to design a system for you, if you wanna if you are a business advisor.

and you’d like to learn how we could work with your clients, those are all things that we’d love to do. just send us an email. All right, take care.

John Jantsch (00:02.776)

So marketing output is way up everywhere, right? But results are kind of down. Phones are ringing less than they did two years ago. I wrote a book in the and 2010, and I think the answer to this challenge is sitting in that book that I wrote then. And I’ll explain why AI has made that book possibly more relevant than ever. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. I’m doing a solo show. let’s title this AI Just Made Referrals, Your Most Important Channel. So let’s dig in. So as I said at the outset, AI has made competent marketing cheap, passable marketing. Everyone can produce decent content, email ads, I mean, in an afternoon. Now, what nobody says is everybody’s working harder than they did before because they’re trying to manage the machine now. But

Fact of the matter is everybody jumped in, everybody sounds the same now. You know, buyers can tell you, can’t really tell who’s good or not good anymore. the way that they search now, they’re depending and relying on the AI engines to actually give them recommendations. ad costs are doing two things. Ads are doing two things. used to be a really reliable channel. Now ad costs are soaring and their effectiveness is way down. I mean, we

We certainly are seeing that with many of our clients and we’re seeing it ourselves. But I think the biggest thing is that buyer behavior has changed, and I think that that is going to really make a a really shift in marketing from, you know, I talked about many, many years ago I created the marketing hourglass. The idea being that, you know, most people focus on the front half or the top half of that, no like trust, try.

that that you know, getting the phone to ring, getting leads generated. And I’ve said for many, many years that it’s the back half of that. When somebody buys, when they repeat, when they refer, you know, those are the stages of the buyer journey that we really need to be focused on today. it’s hard to get chosen today, with a lot of what’s going on, you know, the noise, the just the fact that, you know, if if AI

John Jantsch (02:23.727)

it doesn’t include you in the short list, you know, somebody may never come to your website or check you out. And so, you know, getting chosen has become more difficult. But what that really means, I think, is instead of doubling down on getting chosen, maybe double down on retention, on repeat business with those ideal clients, and and certainly on a systematic approach to referrals. The top half of the hourglass, you know, the lead generation part has gotten really cheap, but it’s gotten less effective. So

Again, as I said, the second half of the hourglass has become probably the most important element. You know, I told you in the intro that a book that I wrote in 2010. Most people certainly, if you were gonna ask a lot of people that follow me at all, they would say, well, Dark Tape Marketing’s your best book, right, or your best-selling book, or certainly the one you’re known for. I mean, it’s frankly, it’s the name of this podcast, it’s the name of of you know my website, it’s the name of my business, quite frankly. So

But however, the book that I wrote in twenty ten, The Referral Engine, Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, is is actually in terms of pure numbers my best selling book. And a lot of people wouldn’t wouldn’t know that. But I think it really it still sells well today. and I think what that really is a testament to is it’s evergreen. The idea of of referrals is evergreen. it doesn’t take Twitter necessarily to get to a referral. And I think that that’s really

At the foundation of this, because a referral is the most trusted lead in most cases. It’s a lead that comes to you expecting to pay a premium or at least not price sensitive because somebody has told them, somebody they trust already, even if it was in a review of somebody they didn’t know, talked about the fact that you solved that problem. That was proof. You were just saying it in your marketing. Somebody else said it about you. And I think that that.

really leads people because in a lot of cases people aren’t that they’re not completely price sensitive, especially for, you know, trying to solve a big expensive problem, but they’re risk averse. And so it it it lowers the risk. And because of that, they’re willing to pay more. because let’s face it, I mean, going with the low price leader, you know, involves a lot of risk. If that’s the only

John Jantsch (04:44.303)

decision or or that’s the only data point that that you’re using. And so I think a lot of people are okay with paying more if they can actually feel that that risk of a total failure. and and it’s not just money. I mean it’s it’s time, it’s energy, it’s what we’ve invested. You know, we we get pitched every single day, as I’m sure many of you do as well, on services that want to generate leads for us. And you know, a lot of the pitches or a lot of the value

Proposition pitch is that, hey, we’ll generate 10 appointments and if they aren’t good, you don’t pay a thing. Well, it really kind of belies the fact that you put a ton of energy, you put a ton of your reputation, you know, into getting some sort of cold outreach thing going. And if it flops, okay, you didn’t pay the service to do it, but now you’ve lost opportunity, you’ve lost time, maybe you’ve sullied your reputation in the process. And I think that a lot of people.

Don’t really talk about those types of costs when you know people are really pitching you. So here are three ideas from the book that I think matter the most now. people are wired to refer. I have said this for many, many years. Now it’s not everyone, but certainly a lot of people, if they’ve had a great experience, if they have something unexpected has happened to them along the way, they will talk about it. And so that’s what I mean we’re wired.

refer there there certainly are those people out there that are connectors i mean that’s they get a lot of juice from that idea of of being able to induce people but i think the real thing is if somebody’s had an exceptional experience they they are wired to talk about it most businesses that are doing anything halfway decent are getting some amount of referrals it’s you know it’s unpredictable it’s accidental you know it’s hope that that they get those and so

what this book, what the book introduced is the the idea that you need to create a system around it. It needs to be intentional. You need to have processes in place that actually make sure that you are taking advantage of your referability. I mean, this is not about tricking people into referring you. You’ve got to do that first half. You’ve got to have a referral service, you have to be referable. but once you are, then you have to amplify that referrability.

John Jantsch (07:08.587)

And I think that I I, you know, that’s point number three. I kind of stepped on stepped on it. But I mean, I think that’s really the the key there is no amount of systems or processes or great copy, you know, are necessarily going to generate referrals if you’re not referable. And a lot of that referrability comes down to being able to communicate what it is that you do that would be of value.

to the person, like what’s in it for them in a lot of ways. That’s always going to be a consideration, even if what’s in it for them is they just want to help their friend out, or maybe they just want to help you out. But they’ve got to understand what that value exchange is going to be, is going to contain. This is a piece a lot of people miss. I mean they miss this in marketing in general. Your value proposition or what you are going to do when you are referred has to be easy for them to understand and therefore easy

For them to explain. You put those two comp those two things together. a system where you are actually asking for referrals and then a way to actually teach somebody why they should refer you and how they should refer you. and you really are very far along the path. Now, there are many other things that you can build into this. You can build timing, you know, like when to ask for referrals, you know, especially with customers. there’s always going to be kind of

moments of truth when you want to ask for them. You can build tools. You know, having web pages, they they don’t necessarily have to be open to the general public, but when somebody wants to refer you, just say, hey, send your friend to this page. Make it really easy for them as well. And I and you know I’m gonna I’m gonna finish this with a a few just kind of steps that I think everybody should take. But we actually I want to tell you you know I love customer refer

Referrals, but I think the real hidden opportunity that most people don’t tap is in partner referrals. So other businesses that have your same ideal client as a client or prospect are are really the richest sources for referrals. And the reason I say that is because a a good customer might know two or three people, two or three businesses they could refer you to.

John Jantsch (09:28.223)

strategic partner business might have a hundred that they could refer you to over time. And so I think that that is is reason enough to really focus on that channel. And I think most people when they think of referrals, they just go after their customers. And again, they know how brilliant you are. It’s an obvious channel, but the real goal is if you could do develop a system to go after businesses that could refer you as well. So

for one example, many of you know Mike McAllowitz, author of Profit First. he also has a network that’s called the Prosper Network, where he actually helps businesses turn their businesses around and grow them and you know apply a lot of the the things from his books to those businesses. Well he

has you know seen that in many cases a lot of their clients stumble because marketing. They don’t have a strategic approach to marketing. They’ve hired agencies or they’ve hired people to to do their marketing. And just because not everybody takes a strategic approach, it just feels like kind of tactic of the week. So Mike has started bringing businesses to us to actually do a strategic audit.

on their business, a marketing audit on their business, and then make recommendations that frankly have turned into fractional CFO or CMO engagements. I think we’re working with three businesses of his with there’s another advisor group out there business advisor group that is starting to send us businesses. So we formalized this. I mean frankly it came about because of the relationship.

that I have with Mike as as many things do, but we’ve now formalized this. So we actually have an offering. We have a web page for it. We’re actually out there pitching, you know, other like EOS implementers and profit first professionals and fractional CFOs because they really are running up against the fact that marketing is is a is is always going to be a hurdle in trying to help a business grow and expand or exit. And so we can help them patch that.

John Jantsch (11:34.772)

And I think that a lot of it has to do with our approach. we are not just coming to them as a typical agency. I mean, our approach is more closely aligned with their business advising because we always start with strategy. But again, that’s really just an example of a way that you can structure one of those that can can really turn into a in some cases, you know, a very steady stream of of referrals.

John Jantsch (12:05.751)

Another kind of twist on the whole AI environment that we’re in.

John Jantsch (12:12.337)

testimonials, case studies, referrals, reviews, you know, all of these things have always been very important from a social proof standpoint. But increasingly what you’re seeing is people are turning to even the the search engines, which are now very powered by AI, or they’re turning to an actual AI model. and they’re putting very long like criteria. Here’s what I’m looking for. Well

Guess where a lot of those AI models are driving or or deriving, you know, the recommendations? They’re not necessarily like in the old days where it was like, well, you have the most authority, you’ve done the best SEOs, and now you’re going to win. They’re actually diving deep into voice of customer, what customers are saying in reviews, what they’re saying on social media sites, what they’re saying in Reddit. and they’re using that to compile who those are. So some of those businesses aren’t necessarily.

the biggest or the been around the longest or have the most you know spend in in marketing, a lot of cases they’re the ones that have really done a good job mining and amplifying what it is that their customers are actually saying about them. So machines are talking to machines now to make a referral, if you want to look at it that way. And so a lot of the energy that you might spend on building assets around referrals, on amplifying your case studies, on getting video testimonials, those are actually going to be

AI referral assets as well. So

Here’s your homework. Ask three AI assistants who they’d recommend for your category and compare that to what your customers say. That’s really where some of the gap’s going to be. So

John Jantsch (13:57.271)

Track, here’s another good exercise for you. Track the last 10 customer sources, like where they came from. and really think in terms of, you know, in the experience of onboarding, in the experience of getting that customer going, are there are there trackable moments or talkable moments where you could actually say, this is a place where we should start asking for a referral, for example. And then start thinking about who are those strategic partners out there.

Some of whom you might actually be working with already in some cases, that you could really start thinking about a formal program. If you want to learn more about our advisor program, how we’ve structured structured it to work with advisors, business advisors, it’s just dtm.world slash B A, like business advisors. So DTM.world slash business advisors. So

That’s all I have for today. hopefully this gets you thinking a little harder about the idea of referrals and what referrals where the the role that they’re going to play and do play, I think in this AI era is going to become increasingly significant. and I think just I guess just go buy my book. That would be that would be the easiest, fastest one. But actually, if you want us to design a system for you, if you wanna if you are a business advisor.

and you’d like to learn how we could work with your clients, those are all things that we’d love to do. just send us an email. All right, take care.

John Jantsch (00:01.768)

So what if being the CEO of your own agency is the trap that most founders mistake for the finish line? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jason Swank. He’s the founder of Agency Mastery, host of the Smart Agency Masterclass Podcast and author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Operator to Owner. He’s built and sold his own digital agency after working with brands like AT &T, Hitachi, and LegalZoom.

And today he advises seven and eight figure agency founders on building businesses that run without them. Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Swenk (00:37.918)

Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (00:40.484)

So you built and sold your own agency before any of really the consulting work that you do now. When did you kind of come to the realization that maybe, and maybe this didn’t occur for you, the agency owned you more than you owned it. Did you ever have that moment?

Jason Swenk (00:59.394)

yeah. A bunch of times. mean, I can’t even count that many times. So the one that I remember that is the whole purpose behind, you know, writing the book was I kept coming home every night and I was just completely exhausted, miserable. We were probably at that time, I think around 2 million in top line revenue. So we weren’t small, but we weren’t, we weren’t big either.

John Jantsch (01:25.372)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Jason Swenk (01:27.32)

but everything was on my shoulders. And my wife said, why don’t you go get a job and shut it down? And so I took a job interview with NASCAR and they asked me two questions, not to race, I would have taken that job, but they said, what do you want to do every day? And what do you never want to do again? And those two questions changed everything for me.

John Jantsch (01:53.0)

So.

I think a lot of people wrestle with the first one. I don’t think enough people wrestle with the second part of that. so they stay stuck in the second one, which keeps them from doing the first one, right? mean, so go ahead, yeah. Well, I was gonna ask a question about the book at least and your work, you’ve identified these five stages that you need to climb through. You wanna unpack that?

Jason Swenk (02:12.76)

Well, they… Go on.

John Jantsch (02:25.508)

a little bit, you don’t have to do every stage what it means, but just kind of give us the framework.

Jason Swenk (02:27.843)

Go.

Yep. So as founders, we all start off as operators where we’re doing everything. Okay. So then what happens is we’re having fun and we concentrate on sales and then operations takes a hit. And then we focus on operations and then sales takes a hit. And this, it’s, it’s this roller coaster ride. And then what happens is we go, we want to grow and I don’t want to be doing everything. So what you start to do and you’re working 80 hours a week as an operator, right? If not more.

John Jantsch (02:59.398)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (03:00.984)

And we’ve all done it and we all have to go through all these roles, right? And so then you transition to a manager. But the problem is we suck at managing people. We are horrible at managing people. And so we hire the wrong people. We don’t have systems for them. So now we’re stuck doing the same amount of work that we were doing before, plus managing them, plus probably even doing their work. So now we’re paying them.

John Jantsch (03:12.676)

Yeah.

Jason Swenk (03:28.886)

and doing more work. It doesn’t make any sense. Have you gone through that?

John Jantsch (03:32.892)

Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely. mean, I, you know, like many of folks you’ve worked with over the years had, did everything myself. I was a one person shop. I’ve been doing this 30 years now. So I did finally figure it out. And, you know, we have a CEO. I, you know, I’m the chief innovation officer, which is code for I can do anything I want. And so, but it took a long time to get there. And it took a lot of, a lot of, you know, I think the hardest part was,

I like doing the work that an agency does. I’m pretty good at it and I enjoy it. And in a lot of ways, even when it is no longer profitable for that person to do that work, that’s the hardest part of giving it up is it’s not even so much like I don’t trust other people. It’s like, what about me? What am I going to do?

Jason Swenk (04:24.618)

So that’s what I call the rubber band effect. And I’ve gone through it too, right? So when I sold my first agency, I only reached the fourth level, which is CEO. But when I reached that level, and I’ll talk about the other levels too in a second, but when I reached that level, I only had to work like 20 hours a week. And so mentally going from 80 hours a week to 40 hours a week to 20 hours a week, and I would go into a creative meeting. No Jay, I’m good.

John Jantsch (04:26.887)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:38.524)

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (04:53.922)

go into marketing me, no, we’re good. And I was like, they don’t need me anymore. So what do we need to do? We need to get in there and mess stuff up so we feel important again. And it’s, and the whole book is really about, it’s not about who you need to hire, it’s about who you need to become and the identity shift that you go through because look, we all go through it and some go through it faster than others. But if I can like, when I was writing this book,

John Jantsch (04:55.377)

You

Jason Swenk (05:21.484)

It was really kind of like writing it to my sons if they ever wanted to go into business. Like, here’s all the stuff that you’re going to be going through. Just know, like, if I’m not here, here’s what you need to do.

John Jantsch (05:25.576)

Mmm.

John Jantsch (05:32.936)

Yeah. You know, you mentioned this identity thing and we, you know, we work with a lot of agencies as well. On top of having our own agency, we have a network, you know, similar to some of the work I think you do with agency owners. And what we’re finding is right now they’re going through not just a sort of an existential identity crisis right now because of what’s going on with AI and

the changing attitudes of the buyer and what their expectations are. I so I think a lot of, I don’t know if they all have the answers, but certainly a lot of agencies right now are asking some pretty hard questions like what business are we really in? And I think that’s really got to add to this kind of owner doubt or owner dependency, doesn’t it?

Jason Swenk (06:20.738)

Well, the thing that I realized and what everybody else needs to realize is this. So when you get to the different level and you want to stay there, you have to realize that the agency needs you for something different now. It doesn’t need you for what you used to do. And so when you can get to the CEO stage where you’re steering the ship and you’re protecting culture, you’re investing in the things, right? And building better leaders, that’s your main goal as a CEO.

John Jantsch (06:47.485)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Swenk (06:49.646)

I’ll give you a story that will explain this like that. The other day, we were trying to make our podcast more efficient using AI and creating some AI agents. so Stacey and I jumped on a call on a Zoom and I started building it in front of her. I basically did it where it does everything. And then I realized, go, if I build this all for her, she is getting robbed.

John Jantsch (07:00.538)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (07:08.605)

Thanks.

Jason Swenk (07:18.656)

And just because I’m experimenting with AI or if we’re using, you know, for our sales team, we’ll use AI agents and all that kind of stuff. I need to train them. So I literally hit delete right in front of her. said, I want to, I want to show you it’s possible. Now I want you to go do it. And it’s the mentality that I’ve always thought about is I can give fish to my team or I can teach them to fish. And that’s what we need to do.

John Jantsch (07:29.893)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:43.58)

Well, and I think, and I think really when it comes to AI particularly, that’s the skill they need to have because otherwise they’re just gonna get replaced. I mean, they’re not going to have a purpose, I think. And so I think that’s great. I do wanna go back to the stages, a little bit of progression because each one has its own challenge to get out of, right? But I will say that for me, when it finally felt like it was a possibility,

was when I finally had somebody who could actually sell and land the big client, you know, that wasn’t asking for me anymore. And it was really until that happened, I didn’t feel like I could be free of, you know, running the business.

Jason Swenk (08:29.358)

Yeah. So that’s when you get to a place where it’s the third stage, an architect, we, where you design a system, but a lot of agencies have you seen where businesses, what they’ll do is they have no clue. They, they know how to program and do something really cool, right? Like I’m an accidental agency owner. I designed a website, making fun of one of my friends called in shit and it looked like in sync. And I was off to the races. So I didn’t even know what the invoice was. I didn’t know all this stuff in 99 when I created it.

John Jantsch (08:34.834)

Yes.

John Jantsch (08:45.704)

This is

John Jantsch (08:50.92)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Swenk (08:59.18)

had to figure it out. And so we were reacting to it. And so what a lot of people do is they hire a salesperson with no systems, no agenda, no outcome. It’s like going to chat GBT and say, create me a website and all you do is get garbage, right? You give it no context, no system. And so when I was able to give them context and D I’m curious what you think on this. when you hired your salesperson,

John Jantsch (09:12.456)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (09:17.416)

Okay.

Jason Swenk (09:28.918)

It probably took you a while to hire a salesperson that did with me. And I tried to think back, why was that? Why was I the best salesperson? was because I knew all the stories.

John Jantsch (09:40.454)

Yeah, right, right, right, Yeah, and.

Jason Swenk (09:43.138)

All I had to do is share the stories in the system. Voila.

John Jantsch (09:47.91)

Yeah. Well, and frankly, accidentally, that’s what I did. I, was a long time employee, you know, who was doing the work, you know, who was really good at serving the client who then, you know, knew all the stories and was able to, and hung around long enough, was able to really, you know, the fact it was kind of humorous, you know, I’d listened in on the calls and I was like, you heard me say that one time, didn’t you? You know, and it was just,

you know, almost like playing back what I, you know, the kind of the anecdotes that I had done, but she also had her own stories. And I think, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s really hard to hire that person that’s been so-called classically trained as a salesperson, you know, and expect them to be very productive. And, you know, you probably get these pitches. mean, we get them all the time of, you know, people wanting to come and generate leads for us and wanting to, you know, close deals for us. And it’s like, I wouldn’t want the leads you would generate, but it’s.

Jason Swenk (10:41.838)

No, no, not at all. Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:43.368)

But it’s like an epidemic. must be the most lucrative business going right now is generating agency leads, because there’s sure a lot of people pitching me on it.

Jason Swenk (10:55.47)

There was a certain individual that would be nameless that had a course that taught all these people how to travel the world and do it. And it’s the same pitch over and over again.

John Jantsch (11:05.736)

So, I know a lot of business owners, and this is not just agencies, I this is just business owners in general, is have kind of this, I’m going to call it a false assumption, that if they’re not doing the work, if they’re not hanging on to and checking the work and, you know, there every moment, that it’s not going to be done as well as they could do it. How do you get people passed up? Because obviously that’s a constraint that is going to keep you from going anywhere.

Jason Swenk (11:34.799)

So you have to kind of throw your team into the deep end without floaties. And I was telling our group of our community last week when I was speaking to them, I said, you got to be okay with fender benders, but avoid the train wrecks where you have to let them know where we’re going. What do you expect from them? I always people that report to me, they can manage themself.

John Jantsch (11:38.982)

Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:53.032)

Yeah.

Jason Swenk (12:04.195)

That’s the key. And I have systems in place to allow them to make decisions without coming to me because when you’re the operator or the manager, you’re the bottleneck. And especially with AI, AI enhances everything. So now you have even more work, which you would think you wouldn’t. But if you don’t create these decision layers and these systems in place and you create that as an architect,

John Jantsch (12:05.64)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:23.29)

Isn’t that funny?

Jason Swenk (12:32.921)

The other thing too about all these roles, Like, obviously we have architect CEO and then owner, which everybody thinks they’re the owner of the agency, but really come on, the agency owns your ass.

John Jantsch (12:38.268)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:42.6)

Yeah, 2 % of the time you’re the owner.

Jason Swenk (12:46.147)

That’s right. You start an agency to leave the nine to five to start a 24 by seven. Like, doesn’t make any sense.

John Jantsch (12:55.762)

Yeah, yeah. I can’t remember. think it was, you’re probably familiar with Michael Gerber’s work on the E-Myth, but I think I remember hearing him say one time that, you know, I went into business so I could be free, know, free to work any eight hours a week I choose. That’s really kind of what it is.

Jason Swenk (13:13.903)

That’s right. Well, well, in my goal, and we always used to, mean, you’ve been in the agency world a while. And so I was on the tech side for a long time. We always used to tell people joking around that we have support 24 seven, 24 days out of the month, seven months out of the year. And so that’s, that’s the goal to work, right?

John Jantsch (13:34.536)

Absolutely.

I’m curious where you land because I get this question all the time. You know, lot of people that are starting a consulting or fractional CMO practice and they’re like, I need to niche. I just haven’t figured out what my niche is. I’m curious where you land on there. My view is it’s really hard to pick a niche unless you’ve got like deep history in it or experience in it. And like, what if you pick the wrong one? You know, because you’ve been told you have to pick one. I’m curious where you are.

Jason Swenk (14:08.271)

So I had a member, man, we were screaming at him for years and years to pick a niche, okay? They picked a niche and they picked conferences. I was like, man, that’s great. Like conferences spend a ton of money. The issue was six months prior or six months later, COVID happened.

John Jantsch (14:31.688)

Yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (14:34.595)

Right? So he had to pivot and he pivoted to cybersecurity and now crushes it. Now, so here’s my deal on picking a niche though. I do believe that you need to pick one, but it takes people a long time because like you said, how do I know which to pick? I treat it like a Vegas buffet. If you’ve ever been to Vegas and the buffets, right? Like you got, you try it out everything.

John Jantsch (14:39.037)

Mm.

John Jantsch (14:55.954)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (15:00.131)

And then you’re like, man, I really like these crab legs. I don’t like the prime rib over here. And then like, anytime you go back, you’re like crushing those crab legs, if you’re anything like me. And so the question that I always tell people in picking a niche is not who do you work with the most clients or who are the most profitable ones? I always say, if you had to be paid on performance only, who would you do it for and what would you do for them?

John Jantsch (15:11.464)

You

John Jantsch (15:27.112)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (15:29.913)

So now you’re setting yourself up for success and then you can start understanding the client’s biggest challenges, their struggles. But here’s the key, you don’t have to fire all your other clients. You can take on work outside of it. You’re just marketing to that niche. That’s my stand on it.

John Jantsch (15:43.496)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think mine’s very, very similar to that. I always tell people, it find you, you know, as opposed to the one I have a problem with is the people that have been told you have to pick a niche. So they just go out there and say, well, here’s where I think I could. Yeah. You know, and, and three months later they have to start over again because they’ve got everything set up for dentists and they hate dentists now. So it really, you know, I think we’re, we’re in sync on that.

Jason Swenk (15:57.199)

drama.

John Jantsch (16:11.514)

All right, so once a founder has made it all the way to owner, what’s their week look like now? Day to day.

Jason Swenk (16:19.725)

You can do anything you want. The business does not depend on you. All you have to do is be accessible to the leadership team for when they have things that may come up, they wanna bounce off you. So like one of the example I use in the book is Tony Robbins. He is an owner of a thousand companies. He cannot, even if he owned five companies, he could not be the CEO of five companies, right? Then you’re dividing.

John Jantsch (16:44.252)

Right.

All right.

Jason Swenk (16:49.579)

it’s just not fair or even an architect or whatever it is. And most people don’t reach the owner realm other than stocks. Like I was able to reach that when we started another agency, but, that was great. And they would just come to me like I was on the board. Okay, cool. Like here’s what, what I would do, but it’s not fulfilling. So you got to make sure you do other stuff. Like when, when I sold my agency for the first time, I was really depressed because I sold my baby.

John Jantsch (16:57.042)

Yes.

Jason Swenk (17:18.191)

I didn’t have any sense of purpose. actually went to a Tony Robbins event, walked on that stupid fire, all that kind of stuff. He saved me. No, just kidding. like, I didn’t have a sense of purpose because my identity was being an agency owner versus being creative, innovative, all the other things that I could contribute to other things.

John Jantsch (17:22.088)

Nice.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (17:34.012)

me

John Jantsch (17:38.748)

All right.

I’m curious, is there one thing that you held on to too long? And I guess the flip side of that is what changed when you finally were able to let go of it.

Jason Swenk (17:52.643)

So I held onto sales for too long. And then I even competed with my sales team, which is unfair because like, like I’m going to give away a good lead. Right. And, and I was always a competitive person, right? Like I paid, you know, tennis through college. So I was, I will crush anybody. Right. Like it was just that that’s my mentality. And so I held onto that too long.

John Jantsch (17:55.206)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.848)

Yeah.

Jason Swenk (18:20.465)

You know, I was, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:20.518)

That’s, that’s, I did the exact same thing, probably, but also it is hard, think a lot of times, especially, mean, you, you’re a public figure. I’ve written books that have sold well. And so people come to us and I mean, my close rates like 99%, you know, because, because I’m just like, you want sure. I don’t know how we do anything here, but you’re talking to me.

Jason Swenk (18:45.903)

We’re not selling them, right? They’ve already sold.

John Jantsch (18:50.16)

Right. And so it is, you do kind of get a rush of that and it’s hard to, hard to let go of that. So I was probably in that same boat.

Jason Swenk (18:57.263)

And I just had to realize I had to put my effort into building a better team and really coaching them, not managing them. Going back to what I was saying before is like, how can I build a better leader where they can build better systems and become the architect? And even these five roles that I described, it could be an employee right now. It could be anybody. And so it’s just, we all need to evolve.

John Jantsch (19:02.876)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (19:20.486)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Swenk (19:25.709)

especially now more than before, more than ever. If you’re not evolving, you’re not doing anything.

John Jantsch (19:28.968)

You cannot sit still. No. Yep. All right. So for the agency owner listening, I know they’re playing out there that are listening to the show and the business depends on them too much. They know that. What’s one move they can make in the next 30 days to really kind of start this climate of yours.

Jason Swenk (19:46.969)

Well, it depends on what role they’re at. So let’s say they’re at the operator. Well, they need to figure out who do they, what role do you need to get away from that you’re not good at? So if I’m really good at sales, I need to hire a project manager, but I need a project manager that can manage themselves. Right? And just be honest with them, say, look, I suck at process. I need you to be able to create this. Now, if they’re at a manager,

John Jantsch (19:57.414)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Swenk (20:14.543)

It goes back to like, you need to evolve to an architect. So you need to start removing being the bottleneck. And how do I build a system or a layer of systems so people can make better decisions without coming to me? Right? That’s really it. Then if you’re an architect, how do you start building people that can architect the systems that you’re already building? And then if you’re a CEO, you know, and that’s one thing I want to tell everybody.

Some people may only want to reach architect and that’s perfectly fine. You don’t have to go all the way up to the top. And wherever you’re at now is just the starting point. And just to enjoy the journey, when I look back at the first agency, some of the stuff that I was like, I can’t wait to get rid of this. Those were the things I remember the most. Burning the midnight oil with the team and creating the sites and programming this and all that kind of stuff. That was really cool looking back.

John Jantsch (21:04.067)

If you

Jason Swenk (21:12.941)

Now you can’t maintain that for a long time, but it was pretty.

John Jantsch (21:16.321)

Yeah. Well, Jason, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you, learn about operator to owner, and find out more about your work?

Jason Swenk (21:27.619)

Yeah, yeah, if you go to operator2onerevolution.com, you can get a link to get the book as well as there’s a diagnostics, diagnostic, if I can say that right, that will tell you what stage you’re at. Because a lot of people think they’re at a different stage and they’ll implement different strategies and then it won’t work. So make sure you go to operator2onerevolution.com and you can check it out, it’s free.

John Jantsch (21:55.024)

Well again, appreciate you taking a few moments and maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there in western Colorado.

Jason Swenk (22:01.571)

I hope so.

John Jantsch (22:03.292)

Awesome.

John Jantsch (00:01.891)

So, what happens to a business when the entry-level work that trained your people gets absorbed by AI? Today’s guest has been thinking about that maybe harder and longer than most. And his answer is possibly uncomfortable. The traditional path from junior to senior breaks, and most organizations have no plan for what replaces it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Paul Roetzer. He is a former, or I’m sorry, he’s the founder, not former, and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched the Marketing AI conference, MACON, co-hosts the Artificial Intelligence Show, and has delivered more than 200 keynotes for AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government. I think after Chat GPT launched,

Even though Paul was on that the trail, that certainly opened up many, many doors for him. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Roetzer (01:03.192)

China, it’s always good to be with you and to catch up. It’s it doesn’t happen often enough.

John Jantsch (01:05.783)

Yeah. You you I think your first appearance was when PR twenty twenty, maybe bookwise was that was the name of the book, right?

Paul Roetzer (01:16.492)

the kind of the agency was PR twenty twenty. That was the agency I sold back in two thousand twenty one. And then we had, I don’t know, the a marketing agency blueprint and the marketing performance blueprint. It could have been one of those that we were on for.

John Jantsch (01:27.171)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s dive into the AI Institute. you built it really to help marketers understand AI. and then it just kind of blew up, right? I mean, it was an idea that then, you know. So so what it made clear that you needed to build that, which at the time was kind of outside of the marketing realm.

Paul Roetzer (01:38.018)

Yeah. Seven and a half years later.

Paul Roetzer (01:52.406)

Yeah. So the I I I’ll give the quick origin story. So actually it goes back to the PR twenty twenty days. In two thousand and eleven, I wrote the marketing agency blueprints. That was my first book. And at the time we were a few years into being HubSpot’s first partner and kind of at the forefront of marketing technology and social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and all of those things. and that was the year IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. And I became obsessed with understanding how that technology worked. And then

John Jantsch (02:16.226)

Mm.

Paul Roetzer (02:21.997)

Could it actually be applied? That same idea of it was basically a prediction engine. Take data in, you understand the language behind it, and then you make predictions about what comes next. And so I started working on this concept of what I was calling a marketing intelligence engine. And this is back in 2012 and 13. And the premise was: if we could use Watson-like technology to predict what to do next, what net next best action, next strategy, how to spend our marketing dollars, then we could build.

An entirely new way of doing marketing. And so that was the original hypothesis. And I shared that idea in my 2014 book. And then that was like out of the 50,000 word manuscript, it was like a thousand words. And the book was not about AI otherwise. And that was all anybody wanted me to talk about. And so fast forward to 2016, and we were like, Well, what do we do with this? Like I’m really intrigued by it. I’m convinced it’s gonna change marketing and business in the world, but like I don’t really know what’s possible.

So we created the Marketing Institute to research it ourselves and then tell the story of AI, like what was real, what was happening. And so yeah, we created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And and then, like I always half joke, like we survived long enough financially for ChatGPT to show up. I sold my agency in 2021, focused exclusively then on AI and the institute and eventually SmarterX. raised a seed round of funding that kind of got me through the the really lean years and

Chat GPT came and all of a sudden the interest in AI exploded.

John Jantsch (03:53.699)

So I’ve been through I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through several of these game changing technologies that came along. And there seems to be this curve. You know, there’s the early adopters, of course, and you know, and then there’s the overhypers, you know, and then there’s the like, my god, I guess it’s not going away. We better figure it out. And and then there’s just kind of like, now it’s plumbing. we don’t even call it anything anymore.

Do you see AI having a similar path even if it’s f faster and and more disruptive?

Paul Roetzer (04:27.637)

I did. so my belief was actually by 2020 we wouldn’t have to call it AI anymore. I just thought it was gonna be like marketing and software and stuff. So I what I’ve always said was I overestimated how quickly everyone else was gonna figure this out and the impact it would have, like in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, like true transformation it was gonna cause to the economy and businesses and things like that.

John Jantsch (04:32.842)

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:44.236)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (04:53.047)

So I have always sort of had this feeling that, like, well, maybe we shouldn’t even call it an AI institute or AI technology or whatever. We shouldn’t differentiate in that way. But I’ve now become convinced that we have a we have a very extended runway ahead of us where being AI matters, like being AI forward matters. Like it’s a differentiator within organizations to say that you’re AI forward, that you understand the technology, you use the technology.

John Jantsch (04:59.517)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:12.406)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (05:18.319)

and then as a business, I think it’s becoming fundamental for leaders of businesses to be able to think of themselves as an AI forward organization that they’re looking at ways to infuse it into people, processes, technology. And so I don’t know, it’s like I I thought we would be past it by now. And I I honestly I feel like we’re just in the first innings still.

John Jantsch (05:37.154)

Yeah. Yeah. Think about how many defunct social media marketing agencies, you know, are out there, for example, right? and and I think your your idea that, we don’t wanna it’s great that that’s the thing now, but we don’t want to go down that to where it just becomes, you know, business consulting or something. But you know, I think one of the major differences is AI’s impacting

Paul Roetzer (05:44.449)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:02.301)

every area of a business. I mean, you know, the finance people are using it, the operations people are using it. I mean, obviously the marketing people are using it. And think that’s probably a significant I mean, there are many others, but but would you say that that’s maybe in some ways why it’s you’ve got this long runway is because, you know, it’s basically gonna impact everything.

Paul Roetzer (06:23.499)

Yeah, I I’ve I said years ago that I believed that AI was going to become the underlying operating system to businesses and society, that it was it was literally going to be woven into every aspect of what organizations do, their people, their processes, their their technology. And then within society, it was gonna become the epicenter of the economy. It was gonna basically be the driver of growth. And that’s all starting to happen. And so I do think that.

John Jantsch (06:31.543)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.871)

I was gonna say they’re definitely there are definitely people suggesting that that’s where we are, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (06:52.041)

Yes, it’s like you the like if if we stopped building data centers right now and if the five technology companies that are spending north of eighty to a hundred billion a year on AI infrastructure stopped doing it, the economy would crumble. Like if we whether people realize it or not, we have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. And so I yeah, I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology. Social media is a tool. Like

John Jantsch (07:07.576)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (07:19.297)

This is this is on on par with like the invention of computers and electricity and like it it yeah, so that’s what that’s what’s different.

John Jantsch (07:19.649)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:24.611)

Cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a rising bubble of people that are anti AI. you know, you you see the marketing positioning of, you know, no AI was used in the creation of this. Do you think that is simply a trend or do you think that that will

Paul Roetzer (07:46.51)

I think it’s going to grow significantly. I think it’s gonna be stoked by interest groups that want it to grow. And then I think it’ll naturally grow because people’s lives and communities are gonna be impacted in negative ways. So I always like the the closest thing I can equate to to try and make it tangible for people is, you know, if we go back to 1994, 1995, the internet’s like becoming a a real thing in society. And at that moment, we said, you know what?

There’s gonna be this thing called the dark web, where these like horrible people do horrible things and it’s gonna cause like online bullying and like you’re gonna have all these downstream super negative things that happen. But we go back and say, but would we still build the internet? Yeah, like a hundred times out of a hundred, you would probably still build the internet because it has changed society in a bunch of profoundly like positive ways. And I think AI is gonna be the exact same thing. There’s going to be absolutely

Negative things that happen as a result of it, whether it’s building of data centers in communities that don’t want them, job loss and displacement, whatever. Like those things are gonna happen. They’re a byproduct of it. But if all goes well, it’s also gonna transform health and create growth engines and opportunities we’ve never had before and solve mysteries in the universe. Like it’s gonna do all these things too. So it’s totally natural that there’s just there’s pushback because it’s starting to affect people’s lives. And we

you know, wherever your role in this is, you have to be empathetic to that. Like it’s and that’s my problem with a lot of like the Silicon Valley mentality is accelerate at all costs and like forget if if there’s risks and fears, like throw those aside. I’m not in that boat. I feel like we have to embrace the fact that not everyone loves this and it isn’t all just abundance and amazing things. There’s actually a bunch of things we have to deal with as a society as a result of this.

John Jantsch (09:32.652)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.391)

And you know, another issue that I think is I mean, I think there were some unforeseen things that came out of other technologies. But I it feels like even if you ask the smartest people in the world who are making this stuff, they don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And I think that there’s there’s an element of that that I think people some regulation needs to be in order to like not get too far out in front of something they can’t stop.

Paul Roetzer (10:09.227)

Yeah, there’s growing like so recently Demis Asabas posted online about the need for regulation and experts ending a framework. He’s the the co-founder CEO of Google DeepMind. Anthropic has made proposals around regulation frameworks. Sam Altman has called for regulation on Capitol Hill. Like they all claim to want it in different forms, but the regulation can be done where it actually has the negative effect on society. So there’s this like.

Very fine line that I am not the expert in by any means about how to do regulation well. there are very few people that are building the technology who who don’t think that there needs to be some protections and guardrails in place, that we don’t have to stop and say this is gonna have a serious impact. We should be thinking more deeply about it. The challenge has been the leaders of these labs, they’re so focused on just building the technology and competing with each other and competing with China and other countries. They’re

John Jantsch (11:04.524)

Trying to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (11:05.525)

Yeah, they don’t sit around and think about the writers who are going to lose their jobs. Like it’s just not and they live in a bubble where it’s like they’re all just technologists and engineers and like they’re all going to have jobs for the foreseeable future because they’re all growing and hiring more of those people, but they don’t think about the average knowledge worker and the impact it’s going to have. So they’re hiring economists and philosophers and like they’re trying to now consider it, but for a long time, they were just heads down, accelerated at all costs.

John Jantsch (11:33.706)

Yeah. Well and I and I think unfortunately when it comes to regulation, you know, you think about the government bodies that are going to decide they need to regulate this. I mean, they can’t even line a swimming pool. You know, so the idea that sorry, that was a cheap one, but the but the idea that they’re gonna actually you know, regulate an industry like this, you know, is pr probably kind of frightening.

Paul Roetzer (11:55.586)

Well, yeah, and they don’t understand the technology and where it’s going. Like the idea originally a couple of years ago is to limit it based on how much compute was needed to train a model. Well, that’s laughable amounts of compute these days. Like and then they just find ways around it. So every time they try and find a way to regulate it, it generally is a a very narrow minded way of thinking about it that would eventually be obsolete within like a year or two.

John Jantsch (12:19.158)

So let’s talk about eight pillars of business AI transformation. That’s something that you have written about. hopefully you remember writing about that. I’ll I’ll I’ll name them for you vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, and performance. the key thing, whether you want to check any of those boxes, is you said no companies ever passed this test yet. where do companies break down in terms of any of those elements when it comes to transformation at an organization?

Paul Roetzer (12:49.419)

Yeah, so this a relatively new concept that I shared. It’s part of a larger transformation system that I’m developing. And it’s like the first piece to it because we talk to a lot of companies of all sizes, small, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. And everybody’s trying to figure out like what does it actually look like? We throw out this term transformation, but like no one really has quantified how do we actually do that. And what we’ve seen time and time again is, especially in larger enterprises, but it happens in small businesses too.

Just treat it as this technology problem. Like, we just gotta go get some Chad GPT licenses and give them to people. And like then we’re gonna get all these amazing benefits of AI. What app, yeah, and they throw it into the technology pool to do. What needs to happen, and the fundamental flaw that we see is a lack of situational awareness and vision from leadership. And so, my like, if I boil this down to one simple thing, the CEO has to drive the transformation. Like

John Jantsch (13:21.226)

Yeah. And the CTO’s in charge of it. Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (13:43.316)

It has to be so important to the organization that the CEO has embedded him or herself in the deep understanding of the moment, of what the technology is capable of, of the impact it’s going to have on their organizational structure, their people, their products, their markets. And if the C-suite doesn’t have that, then you are not going to see a complete transformation within an organization. So vision and strategy from the leadership on down.

Is what’s fundamental. What’s driving most of the innovation and transformation in companies so far is actually bottom up, where people are just like bringing their own devices to work or getting their own personal accounts and just like doing their own thing. And then sometimes that turns into a collective of people doing their own thing. And then maybe a department’s like, let’s form around this and let’s get a marketing AI council or something. But what often lacks is that top leadership that truly understands this needs to be one of like

John Jantsch (14:19.222)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (14:41.089)

The three biggest priorities we are working on as an organization.

John Jantsch (14:44.428)

Well, and I think you hit on a really thing the thing I see all the time is that they’re treating it like tools, like, here’s a new laptop. you know, as opposed to the fact that this is probably you probably need to rethink your entire organization. You probably need to think what it is, rethink it what it is you actually do. and that might be a little bigger question, you know, about do you even have the right people? you know, do you have, you know, is the structure make any sense anymore? I mean, there’s just

You know, a lot of people like you and I sit around and talk about this stuff, and I think a lot of fifteen person business businesses are saying, Yeah, okay, tell us. I mean, it’s one thing to say you need to rethink your organization. Okay, but like what’s the roadmap for that? I mean, how does somebody, you know, w when you talk about those pillars, are there two or three that they ought to be addressing before they ever like sign up for a subscription? Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (15:34.87)

Yeah, so I mean, literacy is the fundamental thing. So it it’s number six on my list, but it does it’s actually probably number one overall because the even the C suite needs AI literacy. They need the knowledge and the understanding and the belief system around AI and its impact before they can prioritize it strategically within a business. So developing understanding of AI capabilities, the comp comprehension of like what it is and what it’s capable of, and then the competency to use the tools in an intelligent way.

John Jantsch (15:44.972)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:02.199)

That like you know when to go in and ask ChatGPT for help and and then you know what good looks like. So AI literacy is actually the foundation of all the other components. And then if you do that in individually and you go through the organization and say, okay, we’re gonna raise the skill level of everyone, the understanding of AI and the ability to work with it, then you can you can move the organization forward more, not only efficiency with higher efficiency and productivity, but drive actual innovation and growth as a result of it. And then as a small business, you can start to think.

Wow, like for 20 people, we could be performing at the level of 50 people. I was actually having this conversation today with our director of operations, who she and I used to work at my agency together. And we were laughing. I said, Could you imagine if we had these tools back when we owned an agency? Like it like 90% of what we did for clients, AI is capable of doing now. And so, like, like the perfect example we gave was we used to like give.

John Jantsch (16:49.301)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:59.443)

Monthly performance reports to clients by the 15th of the following month. So you’d wrap the month up, you’d organize the data, you’d put it into the thing, you’d do the analysis, you would create the PowerPoint, you’d schedule the meeting, and by the middle of the month, you were talking about what happened the previous month. We now at SmarterX, our COO runs those things in real time. So like at any moment, she has it connected to the data.

John Jantsch (17:04.514)

Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (17:27.585)

She can tell the narrative of what is happening across all of our KPIs. And boom, here’s the update in Zoom. Stuff that we used to spend dozens of hours creating on a 15 day lag, we now do in real time. And so when you apply that across entire businesses, all different departments, you start to realize how different we can run companies today.

John Jantsch (17:49.535)

One thing that and and I said it in my beginning kind of question was that also trained a lot of people, right? A lot of the people that did that work learned a lot about marketing by doing that work, and they’re now missing that. how do we fill that gap?

Paul Roetzer (17:57.495)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (18:05.547)

I don’t know. it is the focus of my Make Con 2026 keynote. So the name of the keynote is The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice. And my basic hypothesis is that we have to redefine entry-level work because the tactical things that all of us did to become experts, to know what good looks like, to have judgment and taste, and to be able to work with these amazing tools in a responsible way.

We can do it because we did the data-driven repetitive work all those years and learned right from wrong and good from bad and things like that. And then we edited other people’s work. And it’s like if you remove all of that work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge? And so I don’t know the answer, but my current theory is that it looks something like an apprenticeship.

That organizations will have an increased revenue per employee number in as a benefit of AI. So you use AI to run a more efficient business, thereby generating more revenue per employee. But rather than putting that straight to the bottom line, you reinvest a portion of that increased revenue and profit back into developing entry-level talent through an apprenticeship program where they don’t have a direct impact on revenue. They’re actually an expense item for the first maybe two to three years of their career. And so

John Jantsch (19:02.304)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (19:31.81)

That’s a theory, but then you actually have to operationalize well, okay, if if that actually is a viable idea, how do we do it? How do we train them? How do we use these tools to advance their learning so they still come out after two or three years with not only the level we had after two or three years, but maybe like 2x that. So we actually accelerate their learning, their taste, their judgment, their capabilities by leveraging AI technology to train them in new ways. And I have yet to meet a single leader.

Of any company of any size that has solved for

John Jantsch (20:05.558)

Yeah, that’s really interesting too, because I mean I I see it every day. It’s like right now some of the entry level people can’t recognize when AI is just hallucinating and saying stupid stuff. and and or just off brand, you know, even. and I think a lot of that comes from, you know, the fact that you can sit around and look at something and and immediately, you know, know the course correct.

but that just comes from experience. And I think I think that’s a really brilliant idea, the idea of of apprentice. but again, you also mentioned expense. and I think that’s what’s gonna make it hard for people. But the you know, companies that invest like that, you know, long term, we’ve seen it time and time again, win. so I think that yeah, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (20:52.833)

Yeah, you have to play the long game for sure. And a lot of companies aren’t gonna have that benefit. Like I’ve always said, if you’re publicly traded, venture capital backed or private equity owned, you’re f you’re fighting an uphill battle to follow that kind of model, to play the long game and not just take the near term benefits of cost reduction.

John Jantsch (21:10.134)

Are are we past the period when, you know, there was a lot of noise about like I’m I’ve gonna be able to reduce my staff to, you know, a third of what I have. Are we past people realizing that because they’re actually working harder now than they ever were?

Paul Roetzer (21:24.853)

No, I I don’t think we’re any I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of people realizing that they can reduce their staff. Like, so my my basic premise here is I I do think that AI is gonna drive a lot of innovation, a lot of new businesses, a lot of growth and jobs through entrepreneurship and and creation. But when I talk with leaders at enterprises who are under these very near-term

financial requirements to run the company where you have to either be growing or if you’re not growing fast enough, you have to be cutting expenses to still maintain the profit margins that are required. In those businesses, it’s really hard to sit there and say if you’ve had 15 marketers for the last 10 years, that you still need 15 marketers. Because we if if you train someone properly, like a a manager director level can do a lot of the entry-level work and where you maybe just don’t.

need that entry level higher you were gonna make this year. And so in companies that aren’t growing, I think it’s very hard to make an argument that they will maintain or increase their staffing levels. I I think companies that are growing less than 10% will be under tremendous pressure in the very near future. Once their CEOs realize what’s possible, I think they’re gonna be a lot enough pressure to reduce their staff.

John Jantsch (22:41.131)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:44.748)

Talk to me a little bit about MACON. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, but once you spend our last minute or so together talking about Makeon and inviting people I think you said you even had a special discount code for me.

Paul Roetzer (22:57.187)

yeah. So Mekon, this is our seventh year. It’s hard to believe. I I was I posted something recently about how crazy it actually seems in retrospect. We started this conference in 2019, three years before ChatGPT. We were running an AI conference for marketers. sometimes I struggle to think like, what were we teaching at that point? But it was a lot of like, here’s what it could become, here’s how to find use cases, here’s companies that are building, you know, like.

John Jantsch (23:06.946)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (23:22.729)

Email subject line writing tools and predictive modeling for ad spend and things like that’s what we were focused on back in those days. So it’s become something much larger. That first year we had 300 attendees from 12 countries. This year will be well over 2,000. I know I think we had 19 countries already represented last time I saw it. and we we basically break it into applied AI and strategic AI. So now there’s like two fundamental tracks: track for leaders that are thinking more big picture about the impact on the organization.

John Jantsch (23:24.929)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (23:51.618)

And applied AI is all about use cases, technologies, things like that, where you go in and then we have build sessions and workshops. So it’s an incredibly immersive environment. It’s a great community of other AI forward marketers and business leaders. So if you’re trying to find your people, try and find that community of other people who are thinking and trying to work toward like a human centered approach to this, that’s what Make On is all about. So yeah, you can go to makeon.ai, it’s A I C O N.ai, it’s in Cleveland.

October thirteenth to the fifteenth, and then duct tape one fifty is the promo code for saving a hundred and fifty bucks.

John Jantsch (24:24.492)

So two T’s in there, so D U D U C T T A P E. Yes, okay. Awesome. Duct tape one fifty gets you hundred and fifty dollars off, I’m guessing.

Paul Roetzer (24:28.481)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (24:34.209)

That’s I’m guessing too. Looks like looks like that that would be what the one fifty would be in my mind. So if not, we’re gonna make it so.

John Jantsch (24:40.546)

Awesome. What yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, that idea of literacy, you know, if you’re if you’re finding yourself behind, what a great place to pick up that component and and actually do some hands-on work as well. Well, Paul, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully it won’t be that long. we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Roetzer (25:04.205)

All right, John, it’s great to see you.

John Jantsch (25:05.907)

Dude.

John Jantsch (00:01.891)

So, what happens to a business when the entry-level work that trained your people gets absorbed by AI? Today’s guest has been thinking about that maybe harder and longer than most. And his answer is possibly uncomfortable. The traditional path from junior to senior breaks, and most organizations have no plan for what replaces it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Paul Roetzer. He is a former, or I’m sorry, he’s the founder, not former, and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence. He launched the Marketing AI conference, MACON, co-hosts the Artificial Intelligence Show, and has delivered more than 200 keynotes for AI for organizations including Google, LinkedIn, and the US government. I think after Chat GPT launched,

Even though Paul was on that the trail, that certainly opened up many, many doors for him. So Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Roetzer (01:03.192)

China, it’s always good to be with you and to catch up. It’s it doesn’t happen often enough.

John Jantsch (01:05.783)

Yeah. You you I think your first appearance was when PR twenty twenty, maybe bookwise was that was the name of the book, right?

Paul Roetzer (01:16.492)

the kind of the agency was PR twenty twenty. That was the agency I sold back in two thousand twenty one. And then we had, I don’t know, the a marketing agency blueprint and the marketing performance blueprint. It could have been one of those that we were on for.

John Jantsch (01:27.171)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s dive into the AI Institute. you built it really to help marketers understand AI. and then it just kind of blew up, right? I mean, it was an idea that then, you know. So so what it made clear that you needed to build that, which at the time was kind of outside of the marketing realm.

Paul Roetzer (01:38.018)

Yeah. Seven and a half years later.

Paul Roetzer (01:52.406)

Yeah. So the I I I’ll give the quick origin story. So actually it goes back to the PR twenty twenty days. In two thousand and eleven, I wrote the marketing agency blueprints. That was my first book. And at the time we were a few years into being HubSpot’s first partner and kind of at the forefront of marketing technology and social media and inbound marketing and content marketing and all of those things. and that was the year IBM Watson won on Jeopardy. And I became obsessed with understanding how that technology worked. And then

John Jantsch (02:16.226)

Mm.

Paul Roetzer (02:21.997)

Could it actually be applied? That same idea of it was basically a prediction engine. Take data in, you understand the language behind it, and then you make predictions about what comes next. And so I started working on this concept of what I was calling a marketing intelligence engine. And this is back in 2012 and 13. And the premise was: if we could use Watson-like technology to predict what to do next, what net next best action, next strategy, how to spend our marketing dollars, then we could build.

An entirely new way of doing marketing. And so that was the original hypothesis. And I shared that idea in my 2014 book. And then that was like out of the 50,000 word manuscript, it was like a thousand words. And the book was not about AI otherwise. And that was all anybody wanted me to talk about. And so fast forward to 2016, and we were like, Well, what do we do with this? Like I’m really intrigued by it. I’m convinced it’s gonna change marketing and business in the world, but like I don’t really know what’s possible.

So we created the Marketing Institute to research it ourselves and then tell the story of AI, like what was real, what was happening. And so yeah, we created the Marketing Institute in 2016. And and then, like I always half joke, like we survived long enough financially for ChatGPT to show up. I sold my agency in 2021, focused exclusively then on AI and the institute and eventually SmarterX. raised a seed round of funding that kind of got me through the the really lean years and

Chat GPT came and all of a sudden the interest in AI exploded.

John Jantsch (03:53.699)

So I’ve been through I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve been through several of these game changing technologies that came along. And there seems to be this curve. You know, there’s the early adopters, of course, and you know, and then there’s the overhypers, you know, and then there’s the like, my god, I guess it’s not going away. We better figure it out. And and then there’s just kind of like, now it’s plumbing. we don’t even call it anything anymore.

Do you see AI having a similar path even if it’s f faster and and more disruptive?

Paul Roetzer (04:27.637)

I did. so my belief was actually by 2020 we wouldn’t have to call it AI anymore. I just thought it was gonna be like marketing and software and stuff. So I what I’ve always said was I overestimated how quickly everyone else was gonna figure this out and the impact it would have, like in the near term, but then I underestimated the long-term, like true transformation it was gonna cause to the economy and businesses and things like that.

John Jantsch (04:32.842)

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:44.236)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (04:53.047)

So I have always sort of had this feeling that, like, well, maybe we shouldn’t even call it an AI institute or AI technology or whatever. We shouldn’t differentiate in that way. But I’ve now become convinced that we have a we have a very extended runway ahead of us where being AI matters, like being AI forward matters. Like it’s a differentiator within organizations to say that you’re AI forward, that you understand the technology, you use the technology.

John Jantsch (04:59.517)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:12.406)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (05:18.319)

and then as a business, I think it’s becoming fundamental for leaders of businesses to be able to think of themselves as an AI forward organization that they’re looking at ways to infuse it into people, processes, technology. And so I don’t know, it’s like I I thought we would be past it by now. And I I honestly I feel like we’re just in the first innings still.

John Jantsch (05:37.154)

Yeah. Yeah. Think about how many defunct social media marketing agencies, you know, are out there, for example, right? and and I think your your idea that, we don’t wanna it’s great that that’s the thing now, but we don’t want to go down that to where it just becomes, you know, business consulting or something. But you know, I think one of the major differences is AI’s impacting

Paul Roetzer (05:44.449)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:02.301)

every area of a business. I mean, you know, the finance people are using it, the operations people are using it. I mean, obviously the marketing people are using it. And think that’s probably a significant I mean, there are many others, but but would you say that that’s maybe in some ways why it’s you’ve got this long runway is because, you know, it’s basically gonna impact everything.

Paul Roetzer (06:23.499)

Yeah, I I’ve I said years ago that I believed that AI was going to become the underlying operating system to businesses and society, that it was it was literally going to be woven into every aspect of what organizations do, their people, their processes, their their technology. And then within society, it was gonna become the epicenter of the economy. It was gonna basically be the driver of growth. And that’s all starting to happen. And so I do think that.

John Jantsch (06:31.543)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:46.871)

I was gonna say they’re definitely there are definitely people suggesting that that’s where we are, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (06:52.041)

Yes, it’s like you the like if if we stopped building data centers right now and if the five technology companies that are spending north of eighty to a hundred billion a year on AI infrastructure stopped doing it, the economy would crumble. Like if we whether people realize it or not, we have become an AI driven economy for better or for worse. And so I yeah, I think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s a general purpose technology. Social media is a tool. Like

John Jantsch (07:07.576)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (07:19.297)

This is this is on on par with like the invention of computers and electricity and like it it yeah, so that’s what that’s what’s different.

John Jantsch (07:19.649)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:24.611)

Cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a rising bubble of people that are anti AI. you know, you you see the marketing positioning of, you know, no AI was used in the creation of this. Do you think that is simply a trend or do you think that that will

Paul Roetzer (07:46.51)

I think it’s going to grow significantly. I think it’s gonna be stoked by interest groups that want it to grow. And then I think it’ll naturally grow because people’s lives and communities are gonna be impacted in negative ways. So I always like the the closest thing I can equate to to try and make it tangible for people is, you know, if we go back to 1994, 1995, the internet’s like becoming a a real thing in society. And at that moment, we said, you know what?

There’s gonna be this thing called the dark web, where these like horrible people do horrible things and it’s gonna cause like online bullying and like you’re gonna have all these downstream super negative things that happen. But we go back and say, but would we still build the internet? Yeah, like a hundred times out of a hundred, you would probably still build the internet because it has changed society in a bunch of profoundly like positive ways. And I think AI is gonna be the exact same thing. There’s going to be absolutely

Negative things that happen as a result of it, whether it’s building of data centers in communities that don’t want them, job loss and displacement, whatever. Like those things are gonna happen. They’re a byproduct of it. But if all goes well, it’s also gonna transform health and create growth engines and opportunities we’ve never had before and solve mysteries in the universe. Like it’s gonna do all these things too. So it’s totally natural that there’s just there’s pushback because it’s starting to affect people’s lives. And we

you know, wherever your role in this is, you have to be empathetic to that. Like it’s and that’s my problem with a lot of like the Silicon Valley mentality is accelerate at all costs and like forget if if there’s risks and fears, like throw those aside. I’m not in that boat. I feel like we have to embrace the fact that not everyone loves this and it isn’t all just abundance and amazing things. There’s actually a bunch of things we have to deal with as a society as a result of this.

John Jantsch (09:32.652)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.391)

And you know, another issue that I think is I mean, I think there were some unforeseen things that came out of other technologies. But I it feels like even if you ask the smartest people in the world who are making this stuff, they don’t really know where it’s gonna go. And I think that there’s there’s an element of that that I think people some regulation needs to be in order to like not get too far out in front of something they can’t stop.

Paul Roetzer (10:09.227)

Yeah, there’s growing like so recently Demis Asabas posted online about the need for regulation and experts ending a framework. He’s the the co-founder CEO of Google DeepMind. Anthropic has made proposals around regulation frameworks. Sam Altman has called for regulation on Capitol Hill. Like they all claim to want it in different forms, but the regulation can be done where it actually has the negative effect on society. So there’s this like.

Very fine line that I am not the expert in by any means about how to do regulation well. there are very few people that are building the technology who who don’t think that there needs to be some protections and guardrails in place, that we don’t have to stop and say this is gonna have a serious impact. We should be thinking more deeply about it. The challenge has been the leaders of these labs, they’re so focused on just building the technology and competing with each other and competing with China and other countries. They’re

John Jantsch (11:04.524)

Trying to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (11:05.525)

Yeah, they don’t sit around and think about the writers who are going to lose their jobs. Like it’s just not and they live in a bubble where it’s like they’re all just technologists and engineers and like they’re all going to have jobs for the foreseeable future because they’re all growing and hiring more of those people, but they don’t think about the average knowledge worker and the impact it’s going to have. So they’re hiring economists and philosophers and like they’re trying to now consider it, but for a long time, they were just heads down, accelerated at all costs.

John Jantsch (11:33.706)

Yeah. Well and I and I think unfortunately when it comes to regulation, you know, you think about the government bodies that are going to decide they need to regulate this. I mean, they can’t even line a swimming pool. You know, so the idea that sorry, that was a cheap one, but the but the idea that they’re gonna actually you know, regulate an industry like this, you know, is pr probably kind of frightening.

Paul Roetzer (11:55.586)

Well, yeah, and they don’t understand the technology and where it’s going. Like the idea originally a couple of years ago is to limit it based on how much compute was needed to train a model. Well, that’s laughable amounts of compute these days. Like and then they just find ways around it. So every time they try and find a way to regulate it, it generally is a a very narrow minded way of thinking about it that would eventually be obsolete within like a year or two.

John Jantsch (12:19.158)

So let’s talk about eight pillars of business AI transformation. That’s something that you have written about. hopefully you remember writing about that. I’ll I’ll I’ll name them for you vision, strategy, data, technology, governance, literacy, people, and performance. the key thing, whether you want to check any of those boxes, is you said no companies ever passed this test yet. where do companies break down in terms of any of those elements when it comes to transformation at an organization?

Paul Roetzer (12:49.419)

Yeah, so this a relatively new concept that I shared. It’s part of a larger transformation system that I’m developing. And it’s like the first piece to it because we talk to a lot of companies of all sizes, small, mid-sized businesses, large enterprises. And everybody’s trying to figure out like what does it actually look like? We throw out this term transformation, but like no one really has quantified how do we actually do that. And what we’ve seen time and time again is, especially in larger enterprises, but it happens in small businesses too.

Just treat it as this technology problem. Like, we just gotta go get some Chad GPT licenses and give them to people. And like then we’re gonna get all these amazing benefits of AI. What app, yeah, and they throw it into the technology pool to do. What needs to happen, and the fundamental flaw that we see is a lack of situational awareness and vision from leadership. And so, my like, if I boil this down to one simple thing, the CEO has to drive the transformation. Like

John Jantsch (13:21.226)

Yeah. And the CTO’s in charge of it. Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (13:43.316)

It has to be so important to the organization that the CEO has embedded him or herself in the deep understanding of the moment, of what the technology is capable of, of the impact it’s going to have on their organizational structure, their people, their products, their markets. And if the C-suite doesn’t have that, then you are not going to see a complete transformation within an organization. So vision and strategy from the leadership on down.

Is what’s fundamental. What’s driving most of the innovation and transformation in companies so far is actually bottom up, where people are just like bringing their own devices to work or getting their own personal accounts and just like doing their own thing. And then sometimes that turns into a collective of people doing their own thing. And then maybe a department’s like, let’s form around this and let’s get a marketing AI council or something. But what often lacks is that top leadership that truly understands this needs to be one of like

John Jantsch (14:19.222)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (14:41.089)

The three biggest priorities we are working on as an organization.

John Jantsch (14:44.428)

Well, and I think you hit on a really thing the thing I see all the time is that they’re treating it like tools, like, here’s a new laptop. you know, as opposed to the fact that this is probably you probably need to rethink your entire organization. You probably need to think what it is, rethink it what it is you actually do. and that might be a little bigger question, you know, about do you even have the right people? you know, do you have, you know, is the structure make any sense anymore? I mean, there’s just

You know, a lot of people like you and I sit around and talk about this stuff, and I think a lot of fifteen person business businesses are saying, Yeah, okay, tell us. I mean, it’s one thing to say you need to rethink your organization. Okay, but like what’s the roadmap for that? I mean, how does somebody, you know, w when you talk about those pillars, are there two or three that they ought to be addressing before they ever like sign up for a subscription? Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (15:34.87)

Yeah, so I mean, literacy is the fundamental thing. So it it’s number six on my list, but it does it’s actually probably number one overall because the even the C suite needs AI literacy. They need the knowledge and the understanding and the belief system around AI and its impact before they can prioritize it strategically within a business. So developing understanding of AI capabilities, the comp comprehension of like what it is and what it’s capable of, and then the competency to use the tools in an intelligent way.

John Jantsch (15:44.972)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:02.199)

That like you know when to go in and ask ChatGPT for help and and then you know what good looks like. So AI literacy is actually the foundation of all the other components. And then if you do that in individually and you go through the organization and say, okay, we’re gonna raise the skill level of everyone, the understanding of AI and the ability to work with it, then you can you can move the organization forward more, not only efficiency with higher efficiency and productivity, but drive actual innovation and growth as a result of it. And then as a small business, you can start to think.

Wow, like for 20 people, we could be performing at the level of 50 people. I was actually having this conversation today with our director of operations, who she and I used to work at my agency together. And we were laughing. I said, Could you imagine if we had these tools back when we owned an agency? Like it like 90% of what we did for clients, AI is capable of doing now. And so, like, like the perfect example we gave was we used to like give.

John Jantsch (16:49.301)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (16:59.443)

Monthly performance reports to clients by the 15th of the following month. So you’d wrap the month up, you’d organize the data, you’d put it into the thing, you’d do the analysis, you would create the PowerPoint, you’d schedule the meeting, and by the middle of the month, you were talking about what happened the previous month. We now at SmarterX, our COO runs those things in real time. So like at any moment, she has it connected to the data.

John Jantsch (17:04.514)

Yeah. Right.

Paul Roetzer (17:27.585)

She can tell the narrative of what is happening across all of our KPIs. And boom, here’s the update in Zoom. Stuff that we used to spend dozens of hours creating on a 15 day lag, we now do in real time. And so when you apply that across entire businesses, all different departments, you start to realize how different we can run companies today.

John Jantsch (17:49.535)

One thing that and and I said it in my beginning kind of question was that also trained a lot of people, right? A lot of the people that did that work learned a lot about marketing by doing that work, and they’re now missing that. how do we fill that gap?

Paul Roetzer (17:57.495)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (18:05.547)

I don’t know. it is the focus of my Make Con 2026 keynote. So the name of the keynote is The Architect, the Orchestrator, and the Apprentice. And my basic hypothesis is that we have to redefine entry-level work because the tactical things that all of us did to become experts, to know what good looks like, to have judgment and taste, and to be able to work with these amazing tools in a responsible way.

We can do it because we did the data-driven repetitive work all those years and learned right from wrong and good from bad and things like that. And then we edited other people’s work. And it’s like if you remove all of that work from the first three to five years of our careers, how do we get to become the experts we all became and have that domain expertise and institutional knowledge? And so I don’t know the answer, but my current theory is that it looks something like an apprenticeship.

That organizations will have an increased revenue per employee number in as a benefit of AI. So you use AI to run a more efficient business, thereby generating more revenue per employee. But rather than putting that straight to the bottom line, you reinvest a portion of that increased revenue and profit back into developing entry-level talent through an apprenticeship program where they don’t have a direct impact on revenue. They’re actually an expense item for the first maybe two to three years of their career. And so

John Jantsch (19:02.304)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (19:31.81)

That’s a theory, but then you actually have to operationalize well, okay, if if that actually is a viable idea, how do we do it? How do we train them? How do we use these tools to advance their learning so they still come out after two or three years with not only the level we had after two or three years, but maybe like 2x that. So we actually accelerate their learning, their taste, their judgment, their capabilities by leveraging AI technology to train them in new ways. And I have yet to meet a single leader.

Of any company of any size that has solved for

John Jantsch (20:05.558)

Yeah, that’s really interesting too, because I mean I I see it every day. It’s like right now some of the entry level people can’t recognize when AI is just hallucinating and saying stupid stuff. and and or just off brand, you know, even. and I think a lot of that comes from, you know, the fact that you can sit around and look at something and and immediately, you know, know the course correct.

but that just comes from experience. And I think I think that’s a really brilliant idea, the idea of of apprentice. but again, you also mentioned expense. and I think that’s what’s gonna make it hard for people. But the you know, companies that invest like that, you know, long term, we’ve seen it time and time again, win. so I think that yeah, yeah.

Paul Roetzer (20:52.833)

Yeah, you have to play the long game for sure. And a lot of companies aren’t gonna have that benefit. Like I’ve always said, if you’re publicly traded, venture capital backed or private equity owned, you’re f you’re fighting an uphill battle to follow that kind of model, to play the long game and not just take the near term benefits of cost reduction.

John Jantsch (21:10.134)

Are are we past the period when, you know, there was a lot of noise about like I’m I’ve gonna be able to reduce my staff to, you know, a third of what I have. Are we past people realizing that because they’re actually working harder now than they ever were?

Paul Roetzer (21:24.853)

No, I I don’t think we’re any I don’t even think we’ve scratched the surface of people realizing that they can reduce their staff. Like, so my my basic premise here is I I do think that AI is gonna drive a lot of innovation, a lot of new businesses, a lot of growth and jobs through entrepreneurship and and creation. But when I talk with leaders at enterprises who are under these very near-term

financial requirements to run the company where you have to either be growing or if you’re not growing fast enough, you have to be cutting expenses to still maintain the profit margins that are required. In those businesses, it’s really hard to sit there and say if you’ve had 15 marketers for the last 10 years, that you still need 15 marketers. Because we if if you train someone properly, like a a manager director level can do a lot of the entry-level work and where you maybe just don’t.

need that entry level higher you were gonna make this year. And so in companies that aren’t growing, I think it’s very hard to make an argument that they will maintain or increase their staffing levels. I I think companies that are growing less than 10% will be under tremendous pressure in the very near future. Once their CEOs realize what’s possible, I think they’re gonna be a lot enough pressure to reduce their staff.

John Jantsch (22:41.131)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (22:44.748)

Talk to me a little bit about MACON. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, but once you spend our last minute or so together talking about Makeon and inviting people I think you said you even had a special discount code for me.

Paul Roetzer (22:57.187)

yeah. So Mekon, this is our seventh year. It’s hard to believe. I I was I posted something recently about how crazy it actually seems in retrospect. We started this conference in 2019, three years before ChatGPT. We were running an AI conference for marketers. sometimes I struggle to think like, what were we teaching at that point? But it was a lot of like, here’s what it could become, here’s how to find use cases, here’s companies that are building, you know, like.

John Jantsch (23:06.946)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Roetzer (23:22.729)

Email subject line writing tools and predictive modeling for ad spend and things like that’s what we were focused on back in those days. So it’s become something much larger. That first year we had 300 attendees from 12 countries. This year will be well over 2,000. I know I think we had 19 countries already represented last time I saw it. and we we basically break it into applied AI and strategic AI. So now there’s like two fundamental tracks: track for leaders that are thinking more big picture about the impact on the organization.

John Jantsch (23:24.929)

Yeah.

Paul Roetzer (23:51.618)

And applied AI is all about use cases, technologies, things like that, where you go in and then we have build sessions and workshops. So it’s an incredibly immersive environment. It’s a great community of other AI forward marketers and business leaders. So if you’re trying to find your people, try and find that community of other people who are thinking and trying to work toward like a human centered approach to this, that’s what Make On is all about. So yeah, you can go to makeon.ai, it’s A I C O N.ai, it’s in Cleveland.

October thirteenth to the fifteenth, and then duct tape one fifty is the promo code for saving a hundred and fifty bucks.

John Jantsch (24:24.492)

So two T’s in there, so D U D U C T T A P E. Yes, okay. Awesome. Duct tape one fifty gets you hundred and fifty dollars off, I’m guessing.

Paul Roetzer (24:28.481)

Yes.

Paul Roetzer (24:34.209)

That’s I’m guessing too. Looks like looks like that that would be what the one fifty would be in my mind. So if not, we’re gonna make it so.

John Jantsch (24:40.546)

Awesome. What yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, you know, that idea of literacy, you know, if you’re if you’re finding yourself behind, what a great place to pick up that component and and actually do some hands-on work as well. Well, Paul, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully it won’t be that long. we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Paul Roetzer (25:04.205)

All right, John, it’s great to see you.

John Jantsch (25:05.907)

Dude.

John Jantsch (00:01.55)

So what if the real risk for small business owners right now is hiding behind professional polish as a brand, while AI research decides which firms it trusts enough to recommend. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Megan Hargroder. She is the founder and CEO of Legends Legal Marketing, an agency that works exclusively with solo and small law firms.

She started in 2011 in a New Orleans studio apartment with four clients paying $500 a month and niched your way all the way down to lawyers and never looked back again. We’re going to talk about her new book, Trust Is The Strategy. So, Megan, welcome to the show. So let’s start with niching. Well, maybe we need to start with how you say it. Because you hear all kinds. Exactly.

Megan (00:45.785)

Thank you, John.

Megan (00:53.987)

That’s Prince on the Rack.

John Jantsch (00:59.438)

You know, there’s a lot of pundits out there certainly saying you’ve got to do it. And then there’s others and I have a view probably slightly towards the other because I’ve seen a lot of people say, I think law firms would be awesome. I’m going to like go to that vertical. And then they work with two law firms and they realize maybe that’s not who they want to work with. Just this example, obviously that doesn’t apply to you, but then they have to start over again. So I’m curious.

Talk a little bit about the math of niching in your case and like what made you go that route, but then also what changed in your agency.

Megan (01:37.621)

It truly just really deep diving into the 80-20 rule and looking at my clients and seeing like, where was my least effort for my biggest profit? And then I layered on top of that, where am I feeling the most successful? And for me, that’s where my feeling I can be the most successful for my clients. And when I started, no one was doing a good job at law firm marketing. Fine Law was the only company on the market. And so

John Jantsch (01:42.862)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:02.988)

Yeah.

Megan (02:07.169)

just doing an okay job meant that you were already ahead of the game. So I liked the idea of being able to definitively guarantee success, whereas other types of, I think people think it’s more fun to work with like a boutique or a restaurant, you know, or I had a national candy brand at one point.

John Jantsch (02:10.478)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Megan (02:29.965)

I guess it’s how you define fun. For me, fun is that I’m not working on the weekends or on the evenings and that I’m not doing an endless display of branding that someone’s just unhappy with no matter what, right? Lawyers are not that picky. They care about one thing and one thing only, our client’s calling me. And so once I felt like I cracked the code on that, I just went all in with lawyers and never looked back.

John Jantsch (02:35.074)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:42.754)

All right.

John Jantsch (02:57.454)

See, and that’s the approach I tell people too. In a lot of ways, you didn’t just go pick a niche, the niche found you, right? Because you had been working in it, you decided, hey, I can get a lot of results for I can provide a lot of value. It’s another way of saying that for these folks and I enjoy doing it. So that to me is the proper way to do it. I just, I see a lot of people really just kind of go, where’s the opportunity as opposed to what you experienced. So.

Megan (03:23.151)

Yeah, and I see my clients do that too with when they’re choosing their niche for law, they’ll be like, where’s the, think this is the best opportunity. Then they’ll go all in and they’ll be like, I actually really hate doing criminal defense or I really hate, you know, expungements or whatever the thing is. So I do agree with you. It’s better to start general and try a whole bunch of things and then just pick your path going from there.

John Jantsch (03:34.83)

Right? Right?

John Jantsch (03:46.382)

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I started in, the, uh, kind the initial question to open the show, talking about this idea of, you know, polish, you know, being, um, you know, something. And in fact, you, you actually tell lawyers the riskiest thing they can do right now is to keep playing it safe. Um, and I completely agree with you, you know, the human element is, is more important than ever. Um, however, I’ve also worked with a lot of attorneys over the year and

polish is like a big part of their mask. So how do you kind of balance that?

Megan (04:20.364)

Well, you use the right word. Polish is part of the mask that they wear, right? And it’s not just for clients, it’s for their peers. Lawyers are very concerned what their peers think of them. And so what you end up getting is polished and professional, which I’m going to use quotation marks around, because all that that actually translates to is generic content, generic messaging. So.

John Jantsch (04:24.715)

Yeah

Megan (04:44.3)

So it’s not resonating with anyone, right? Maybe it’s not turning anyone off or offending anyone, but it’s also not making anyone love you. And that happens a lot on your website homepage, but like the big spot that I see it be really problematic for lawyers is their biographies. And so they’ll have this really safe, I call it a professional obituary that lists their accomplishments, where they went to law school, all the things that people don’t actually care about.

John Jantsch (05:01.614)

You

John Jantsch (05:07.278)

You

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (05:13.538)

when they hire lawyers.

John Jantsch (05:15.95)

Yeah, the, um, I, something I used to do when I first got started at trying to make this point, uh, regardless of the type of business. So let’s say it was a remodeling contractor. I would just go find 10 remodeling contractor websites, copy the first thing that I saw on their website. And then I’d show it to the client and say, first off, do you know who any of these people are? And by the way, you’re on here too. Do know who you are? And it was so easy for them to go, Oh crap, we’re all saying the same thing, which is sort of nothing.

Megan (05:45.103)

And that’s the whole thing. If you’re not saying anything. And so a lot of like what I try to push my clients to do is, well, first of all, you want to build authority. They love that. Everyone’s on board with building authority. We’ve got our awards. We’ve got our badges. We’ve got our testimonials. Great. We’re on board with that. But the next part is that you have to build a component of empathy with.

John Jantsch (05:46.69)

Yeah.

Megan (06:09.484)

these people who don’t know you, right? If you’re hiring a lawyer, you have a problem that you need a professional to solve for you. You don’t know this person, you don’t trust, people don’t trust lawyers. Building trust online is like the hardest thing you can do. So you have to give people something. You have to let them know you understand their problem. And you also have to share something about yourself so that they feel like, this is a human, again, that I can connect with.

John Jantsch (06:20.739)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:37.09)

So trust is in actually in the title of the book. Do you, I don’t think anybody would argue that that’s an important ingredient. The harder part is defined like how do you build that? You know, you can’t just write, trust me, you know, on your website, right? So how do you get people to start saying, these are the things that build trust.

Megan (06:58.626)

think telling a story first and foremost. So using your website to tell someone a story and your homepage should actually not be your story. It should be their story. Right? So if I’m facing chapter seven bankruptcy, what am I going through right now? That’s the story that the homepage should say and I should be able to see myself in there if I’m a client. And then the biography telling the story of the actual attorney. Why are you doing this? You know, aside from money? What made you pick

John Jantsch (07:11.178)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Megan (07:28.206)

Chapter seven bankruptcy as your niche that you want to help people through. How can I trust you to do this? And so there’s elements within the story where you want to show examples of how you’ve solved the problem before outlining people you’ve helped outlining, you know, using a story within story component and then maybe even your own story. So like we have criminal defense lawyers who at one point in their lives had found themselves on the wrong side of the law, right? And

It’s really hard to get people to open up about that when they’re trying to look super polished and professional. But guess what? Those are the stories that get them clients. And once they actually take the leap of like putting that vulnerability out there, people call and they say, I’m hiring you because you, don’t feel like you’re going to judge me because you were in my shoes once before.

John Jantsch (07:57.56)

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (08:08.301)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:17.612)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would guess that in some cases you can have quick wins, but you know, the trust game is also a long-term game. So how do you get people on board with that who are saying, hey, Megan, make the phone.

Megan (08:34.616)

Well, the phone will ring through other methods as well. You’ve got your search strategy, your paid search strategy, you’ve got your LLM strategy, and then you can do organic and paid search work. So that’s the component. But the foundation has to be there. The website itself has to build trust, or you’re paying for traffic to go there, and it’s not doing anything. And really, the big hurdle for newer

John Jantsch (08:35.704)

BLEH

Gosh.

John Jantsch (08:48.216)

Yeah.

Megan (09:01.858)

businesses is building up those reviews because nothing builds trust like reviews and not just any review, not just a five star review, not just highly recommend did a great job because LLMs are reading reviews, but they’re reading them. They’re not just quantifying the five stars. They’re reading them and they’re seeing the keywords used within that. And they’re seeing, this is a detailed.

John Jantsch (09:05.016)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:17.954)

Yeah.

Megan (09:28.974)

example of a problem that was solved by this person and that’s the same problem this person is talking to me about so I’m gonna match them with that so the actual skipping ahead the actual like quality of the Google reviews is the biggest thing that we work with our clients to build up and it’s not easy right especially in in cases with like criminal defense where clients don’t want to leave a review about

John Jantsch (09:45.56)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:51.522)

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan (09:57.219)

how you helped them get out of their DUI. So that’s, to me, the hardest part is building substantial reviews. It’s doable, but it’s difficult. The organic SEO is a waiting game and the paid search is a fast game.

John Jantsch (10:13.51)

yeah, you know, probably the first hurdle you’re experiencing is a lot of lawyers don’t want to ask for reviews, right? I mean, it’s like, no, we did what they pay this for. You know, that should be enough. Right. I mean, so, so that’s probably the first hurdle. you know, it’s interesting. You mentioned that about Google reviews. We have been doing it for years, but AI let’s face it has made it easier, you know, to take seven, 800 reviews, dump them into a tool to analyze them. And all of a sudden, you know, the, the, the, law, the lawyer is saying, you know, we have.

X amount of credentials or whatever they say. And the reviews repeatedly say, know what? They call us back immediately. Right. And that’s like the message. And it is amazing that when, as a marketer, when I can show a client that says, this is not me making this up. You know, this is your actual customers talking. You know, it’s a much easier sell.

Megan (11:05.07)

And the LLMs are making that faster, right? So people aren’t having to go through all of those reviews. And some people will still go to the Google reviews and go through all of them themselves. But that really is one of the biggest definers of trust for any local business really is gonna see that as their biggest definition of trust is going to be their actual online reviews. And Google reviews are the most important. I know people…

John Jantsch (11:13.408)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:20.718)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah it is.

John Jantsch (11:32.782)

Three.

Megan (11:33.431)

is on Facebook, people still use Yelp. So those things are still factors and get pulled in. know the Amazon Alexa, for example, is connecting Yelp. yes. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, so so those are still really important too. And I feel like Yelp gets overlooked a lot because Google is still going to be your most valuable. So if you could only get one review, you get it on Google.

John Jantsch (11:43.262)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, and Microsoft uses BitFerBing. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:54.722)

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (12:00.291)

but then if you can layer in that second tier where you ask someone, hey, can you please also just copy paste this on the Yelp page? Here’s the link and make it really, really easy for them to duplicate that in another spot, then you’re really winning.

John Jantsch (12:00.643)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:15.35)

So where we stand today, this will change certainly, but people still have a very, or I think have a higher level trust, whether they should or not, of those three AI recommendations than they do or did of all the ads and everything else that showed up on the homepage. So what are you doing or how are you helping your law firms get recommended directly in that space that is right now, at least, very highly trusted?

Megan (12:44.271)

Okay, well, the biggest way that we’re doing it is a secret, but I’ll tell you some other ways that are not secrets. Because everyone’s trying to crack this code right now, right? And there’s not definitive things. Eventually there will be a little bit more information, like when Google does its algorithm changes and we can do all this, but there’s not that transparency yet with LLM. So we’re kind of all trying little things to see what works. But.

John Jantsch (12:51.288)

Okay.

Sure. Right, right.

Megan (13:13.045)

I would say for law firms specifically, the more niche your website and your content, the better because people are asking specifically, people are not just saying, I need a lawyer, right? They’re saying, I need a lawyer who does this, right? And we’re not seeing the same success with, for example, the high volume, like personal injury lawyers, right?

John Jantsch (13:26.67)

They’re explaining their entire situation, right? Yeah. Right, right.

John Jantsch (13:39.584)

Mm-hmm.

Megan (13:40.815)

because most solo and small firms have been priced out of that bracket already. And so the authority has been built up. I think we’ll start to see a little bit of a shift there away from the larger firms as far as recommendations. But things like divorce, child custody, bankruptcy, expungements, DUIs, those types of things.

John Jantsch (13:46.414)

Yeah. Yeah.

Megan (14:09.684)

If you go in really, really specific and you’re hyper-targeting and those are the articles you’re publishing, and then you’re also posting the social media content, it’s looking at LinkedIn, it’s looking at… One tip I would say too is using videos on LinkedIn. Videos on LinkedIn is playing really nicely into LLM recommendations is one thing that we’ve noticed. So I would say building as a business, building your authority.

John Jantsch (14:34.702)

Hmm.

Megan (14:39.394)

through LinkedIn is really good. Most people overlook that as a marketing tool because they think of it more like a B2B kind of thing. And a lot of lawyers are targeting people, but the LLMs are paying attention to what you post on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch (14:55.426)

So you’ve worked with a lot of firms over 15 years. Some have been very successful. I’m sure some have not seen the light and grown the way they’d like to. What would you say, what are some of the core differences of those firms that make steady progress versus ones that just kind of either plateau or burn out?

Megan (15:14.434)

The ones that are the most successful are the ones that stay the course with starting niche and then building. The places we’ve seen problems happen and where we’ve seen things tank out is when someone starts in one place and they wanna make a strong pivot. So we built up a really successful traffic ticket lawyer, for example. And then he decided, let’s add on criminal defense. Okay, that’s relevant, we can add that on.

John Jantsch (15:20.312)

Yes.

Megan (15:43.012)

And then he decided, let’s change the whole website and turn it into personal injury and let’s remove all of these practice areas. And I was like, your search will tank, right? You are the go-to guy for these things already. You can’t play this PI ball game that everyone has already invested so much in right now without paid search, just organically. And he’s like, I don’t care. Like make the switch. It’s going to work out.

John Jantsch (15:48.29)

No.

Yeah, yeah.

Megan (16:13.229)

And then three months later, he’s like, why are my numbers down? And I’m like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me right now? This is not gonna work out between us. I think we need to break up. So that’s kind of the example of just like, I always tell people if you’re gonna hire marketers, make sure you hire marketers you trust and then trust them, right? Because at the end of the day, like my job is to make your goals a reality and to hit your bottom.

John Jantsch (16:31.714)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Megan (16:40.783)

So I’m not steering you in a direction away from making money. That’s not beneficial towards me. So when you get to a place where you’re not trusting your marketing team and you’re fighting against them, that’s a sign that things are gonna probably break down pretty soon.

John Jantsch (16:55.47)

Yeah. You know, I can’t tell you how many business owners that I’ve worked with over the years that I’ve had to tell them, you know, the problem’s not your marketing issue. And believe it or not, some of them know it and some of them actually appreciate that message. And so they’re like, what do do about that? it’s, yeah, exactly. So if.

Megan (17:03.919)

Mm-hmm.

Megan (17:14.113)

Yeah, it takes a third party often to hop in there and be like, bro, listen.

John Jantsch (17:24.064)

If somebody’s listening right now, small firm runs a small business. Maybe they’re not going to write a book this year, but what’s a couple of things that they could do that you think they could see kind of immediate process progress if they did it once a week, know, twice a week, whatever. What are some activities you’ve seen that have really compounded?

Megan (17:47.248)

I would say once a week, go online and claim a profile on some kind of directory. Hit the big ones first, get AVO, get your super lawyers, all those kinds of things, Better Business Bureau, anywhere online that lists professionals, make sure you have a profile and fill it out completely. And if you do that once a week, you will see impact from it. That would be my top.

John Jantsch (17:51.182)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:13.938)

I’ll give you my top one that I tell a lot of business owners is go out and get on other people’s podcasts. Quite frankly, because, you know, talk about trust signals and great links and great SEO and great content that you can share and cut up and do things with. I think it’s, to me, it’s the perfect, it’s really the perfect sort of marketing tactic that a lot of people can do pretty easily in a lot of cases.

Megan (18:36.035)

And it takes pushing though. Like I’m doing this right now because my PR person, Paige has set me up on all of these podcasts. Cause she’s like, you have to do it. Like even as a marketer, I’m like, I don’t do I, do I really? But again, now, now I’m flooding the internet when you Google my name, there’s all of this content now. So she was right. So I think that’s a really good tip too.

John Jantsch (18:38.412)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:45.976)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:49.94)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:55.67)

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, you know, the, thing that I tell people all the time is it’s an amazing backlink. mean, I, you know, I have a very high authority backlink that you’re going to get, but also I’m very incentivized to promote this show. and so that’s the other thing, you know, a lot of guest posts and things, they just get buried in things, but you most podcasts hosts are promoting their shows. So, I tell people all the time, just go out and do it. There’s so many ways that you can reuse that content too.

Megan (19:24.131)

Yep.

John Jantsch (19:25.262)

All right. So Megan, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Can you give me your best news anchor voice?

Megan (19:37.827)

to close it out.

John Jantsch (19:37.934)

to close this out and to tell people where they can find out more about your work and maybe pick up your book.

Megan (19:47.085)

Okay, well, reporting live from Duct Tape Podcast, this is Megan Hargirter with Legends Legal Marketing. You can find me at legendslegalmarketing.com. You can also shoot me an email at meganatlegendslegalmarketing.com. If you wanna chat or if you wanna copy of my book, I’ll just mail you one. Send me an email.

John Jantsch (20:06.72)

Awesome. I didn’t tell you guys, the, as a past career for Megan that I read in her bio. So I had to set her up there again. I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Megan (20:14.767)

you

Megan (20:20.942)

Absolutely. Thank you, John.

John Jantsch (00:02.118)

So, what if every AI tool your business just adopted is quietly making customers trust you less? Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance, and my guest today is Doug Dibert Jr. He’s the founder and CEO of Magnif Mag. I I bet you a lot of people struggle with that. Magnify. Well, he’ll he’ll straighten me out.

A white label video platform that helps marketing agencies and businesses add video to AI chat, email automation, and reputation marketing systems. So Doug, welcome to the show.

Doug (00:36.632)

Thanks so much. Yeah. No, no. It’s we’re we’re we’re we’re we’re marketers and salespeople. We’re not, you know, English majors, right? So

John Jantsch (00:43.91)

All right. So so tell everybody everybody listening how to actually pronounce it.

Doug (00:51.148)

Magnify, yep, yep, you got it. Yep, magnify, M-A-G-N-F-I, yeah. Well, it w I I I originally started it. I was gonna buy M-A-G-N-I-F-I, but somebody else owned it and they wanted five grand for the letter I. And when you’re a startup, right, I mean every dollar counts. So I was like, well, just take off the I, no big deal.

John Jantsch (00:53.484)

it says magnify, okay. Okay, all right. I was

John Jantsch (01:02.95)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I tell you the other issue I ran into. I I so wanted to pronounce your name like the cartoon. I was trying to put an L L in there, you know. I I so wanted to do that as Dilbert, but that’s okay, gosh. I should I should we start my intro over again? I just butchered everything. All right, so yeah, there you go. All right, well now.

Doug (01:17.704)

Yeah, I get that too.

Doug (01:22.882)

Yeah, yeah, I I get that too. It’s it’s actually diapers, but long eye.

It’s it’s perfect and it’s imperfection. There we go.

John Jantsch (01:39.364)

Now we have a reason to talk about it. So that’s a you know, that’s a marketing win. so you started as a video production company agency, and my guess is that most of your clients saw what you were doing or you sold what you were doing as content production. I I think that’s probably a true statement, right? how does Magnify actually look at video content differently?

Doug (01:40.97)

Yeah, there you go.

Doug (01:47.575)

I did, yeah.

Doug (01:56.63)

You got it. Yeah.

Right true.

Doug (02:06.734)

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So how we look at content differently, I mean, this is it’s a little bit of a metamorphosis, right? And a a lot of the metamorphosis for us really has been driven by the advancement of AI in a lot of communication. So video for a long time has been seen as just content. You know, social media, you gotta make video content, you gotta make those expert tip videos, you gotta do this, you gotta do that, which is all true.

John Jantsch (02:13.317)

Right.

John Jantsch (02:23.226)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (02:34.306)

But now it’s it’s even more important because it’s a part of humanizing business communication and AI driven communication now. That’s it’s it’s like the pivot has just happened not even that long ago. It’s it’s it’s definitely very interesting pivot, even for us.

John Jantsch (02:52.634)

Yeah. Well well, and I think the biggest change is what you’re suggesting, and certainly what I’ve seen, is that there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of gaps in where people are using it, video. Certainly, I mean, I I guess we could start with talking about, you know, how video differs from from word, written word content and maybe go there, you know, like why is video so powerful as a medium period?

Doug (03:11.405)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (03:18.008)

You got it. Well, it’s it’s it’s definitely more powerful than just text on a screen because you see let’s like right right now, we’re doing a video podcast, right? You’re hearing my voice, you’re hear you’re hearing my tonality, you’re you’re seeing my hands move. I’m a big hand talker. So you’re seeing my eyes get big with excitement, right? And then obviously you’re laughing. So just it we read so much nonverbal communication than we do.

John Jantsch (03:38.565)

Yeah.

Doug (03:46.242)

Verbal and we actually in science shows we learn more. So the businesses that are are adding video now to a simple email communication are are standing out in a huge way and closing deals faster. We worked with some sales teams that were super reluctant, like, I don’t want to take the time to record a video. I’m busy. I just want to fire off a quick, you know, email and then send it off. You know, keep the that sales prospecting thing going. But the businesses that actually levered it early on.

John Jantsch (03:47.205)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:08.677)

Yeah.

Doug (04:16.574)

actually close the deals faster because video is a fantastic conduit for no like and trust in a in a digital first world.

John Jantsch (04:23.898)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I think all communication is a form of persuasion. you know, we’re trying to persuade somebody to do something, you know, even if it’s just right back to me. and so I I think video scores very high on trust, and trust is certainly one of the biggest elements of persuasion, as you as you just mentioned. W I I read in the beginning of this some stats that that actually I think you you have shared. Seventy nine percent of Americans prefer human

Doug (04:30.754)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (04:45.75)

You got it.

John Jantsch (04:53.868)

Over AI agent and customer service, 86 say human interaction still matters to brain experience. I’m wondering if those numbers are skewed because so many people are doing it poorly. you know, so some of the automation, the really particularly the early automation was was more frustrating than helpful in a lot of cases. And they just found themselves like human, human, human, you know, pushing whatever button to get to that. And and do you think that that some of those numbers are there because

Doug (05:03.672)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (05:11.061)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (05:15.98)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:21.594)

People are doing it poorly. I know that I’ve had good experiences with AI chat and I I’m like, Great, that was the way I wanted to go because it I got the result. That’s really all we’re after, right? Yeah.

Doug (05:32.322)

Yeah, you got it. Yep, right to the end result. Yep.

John Jantsch (05:36.048)

So so how does I guess the second part of that, an actual question, you know, how you know, how is somebody using video in all these like customer experience and onboarding and you know, all the things that they think about that they don’t think about in a lot of cases after the sale?

Doug (05:54.03)

Correct. Yeah. Well, so after the sale, super important. So especially after the sale, letting them know that a real human being is actually behind the business is vitally important. So when they get that first welcome email, adding a simple video to it, even if this is generic, even in the chat bot, right? We’re seeing a a nice uptick in people adding video replies just to a chat bot. Because even after the sale, even for Magnify, when somebody comes in and white labels a platform,

John Jantsch (06:06.01)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (06:20.602)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (06:23.0)

They’ll come and they’ll still hit our chat bot up and just ask questions. So we just we deliver video answers to that. So adding video to that. So and then even social media. People businesses don’t think after somebody is sold, like their social media is just for attracting customers. Your social media is also for continuing to sell to your current customers, because if they bought from you, they’re probably liking your social media.

John Jantsch (06:26.693)

Yeah.

Doug (06:48.278)

So continuing to educate and nurture and onboard that customer into how to maximize out your product or your service that you have.

John Jantsch (06:57.914)

So so so give me a little give me a little bit on the technical details. When you say video in your chat replies, that’s really a a a bot that is replying in video form. I mean that’s not actually pre-recorded videos. A lot of people used to do that. but but you’re actually saying no, it’s gonna respond to the exact question it was asked based on a knowledge base.

Doug (06:58.186)

Even after the sale.

Doug (07:09.73)

You got it.

Doug (07:19.138)

Yeah, based on the knowledge base and delivering of a pre-recorded video. You got it. So that way I’ve seen the the bots out there that have like the automated like AI avatar and it looks really weird like the headljerk and then I’ll give you that text response answer. But these are pre-recorded video responses that are delivered by the AI at the right place at the right time.

John Jantsch (07:33.422)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:40.643)

Okay.

Doug (07:44.46)

So business can still we tell me this all the time, automate as much as you can, but when it’s appropriate, add in that video that that human layered response versus just a a talking bot. So what the bot is figuring out where the appropriate response is to add that video video reply.

John Jantsch (08:04.57)

So one of the things I think we talked about was at reputation management. you know, there are a lot of industries that have been on the, you know, getting reviews game for many, many years, home service industries, restaurants, spas, you know, that kind of thing. But it’s I think almost every business has now realized how important it is. how can you use kind of one what I call one-to-one video in referral generation, or not necessary referral, reviews like a Google review.

Doug (08:14.626)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Doug (08:31.586)

Yeah, review capture. Yeah. So a lot of softwares out there I know for reputation management. After somebody leaves a four or a five star or an NPS score leaves like a nine or a ten, now you could with with our platform, that’s how we work beautifully with those platforms. Is that if they do click those, you can automate either a gay, you know, click here and tell us your story, record a quick video testimonial about your experience. And hey, as a thank you for your time, you know, for for telling us your story, we’ll

Well send you 10% off the next visit, right? So that’s a perfect opportunity to create micro influencers out of those people who are leaving those those five stars or four stars and those nine and tens on the on an MPS score. So then it becomes a content generation engine.

John Jantsch (09:17.348)

Yeah. So so so again, just to clarify that, you’re not necessarily saying use it you know, a lot of people do things where they did a service and they want to send a video out to the person saying, Hey, review us. But you’re actually you’re actually advocating more for once somebody does review you to actually then ha use it as an engagement tool.

Doug (09:36.738)

Yeah, it’s actually both. Yeah, yeah. So it yep, you you could utilize it both ways. Like we we have users on our platform that’ll use our video email tool. So it’ll actually route them to a video message of the owner saying, Hey, like I’m Bob the from from Bob’s Burgers, right? Hey, I’m so glad you had a great time at at our place. If you feel so inclined and you want to tell us your story about how much you loved your burger, what was your favorite burger? Just click the link below and record your story for us. And next time you come in, you know, burgers on me, just for taking the time.

John Jantsch (09:38.479)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (10:06.566)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (10:06.732)

So we’ve seen it both ways. You got it.

John Jantsch (10:10.244)

many years I have actually advocated small business owners, you know how you you fill out a form, whether it’s request a quote or just contact us or whatever the form is, and and it always drove me crazy. You’d press that button, send, and you weren’t even I mean there was no confirmation, there was nothing. You’re like, I don’t know, did they get it? You know, or not, right? And I’d always was big on getting business owners to record a video, send them to a page that basically says, Hey, we got it, you know

Doug (10:11.51)

Yeah, okay. Yeah, small.

Doug (10:16.814)

Mm-hmm.

Doug (10:27.554)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (10:36.674)

Our best agent is on it, they’re gonna get back to you. Me and and the people that did that, it was funny how often we’d get comments because it it was it’s it’s now pretty regular, but it was unique almost so that you know, people would comment on something so goofy and so simple.

Doug (10:39.436)

Yeah.

Doug (10:51.406)

Well what’s what’s what’s funny is you were ahead of the game, John. And because what you were what what you were doing is you were humanizing the experience. Instead of shooting a simple e or even a even an email, just like you said, sometimes you get nothing back, but usually you get that automated little text like, We’ve got your thing, let’s let me be in touch with you, blah, blah, blah. But now, looks like you said, recording, I mean, taking three minutes or less to record a video, throw that in your auto response, and then

John Jantsch (10:56.921)

Yes.

John Jantsch (11:07.045)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (11:20.162)

Having that video pop up? You were ahead of the game, man.

John Jantsch (11:23.79)

Yeah, well and and the fact that everybody the pandemic actually sped this up because everybody that everybody had to go out and get a camera and everybody got on video and everybody was used to now they had all these tools to actually do that recorded before. I mean when I started doing it, we had to bring a crew into the office. It was much harder. So

Doug (11:27.566)

yeah. Yeah. Video.

Doug (11:38.83)

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I remember even even before the like just trying to get something out of Zoom call before all that was was super hard to do. Now it’s like we gotta walk across the street. well to Zoom.

John Jantsch (11:47.47)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So I think I read somewhere you do something called Thank You Thursday. you pick a random client e each week and send a personal video email. it’s so funny. Again, going back to old practices because I’ve been doing this a long time. I had a habit of of every Friday I would call three or four clients, literally with like, hey, I was just let’s see how you doing. And I can’t tell you how often somebody said, you know, I was just about

Doug (12:00.706)

Yeah.

Doug (12:14.926)

There you go.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:21.414)

call you, we need to do XYZ. I mean, it was unbelievable. So I made it a habit. So tell me about your thank you Thursday.

Doug (12:22.19)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you Thursday came well from you know from video email, right? ‘Cause like we talk about you should use video email, should do that. It’s kinda like practicing what you preach. So every Thursday, well, ’cause it rhymes, it kinda helps you remember it. yeah, thank you Thursday. You just pick a random customer and record a video and just say, Hey, how’s the su how it’s going on? Hope you’re doing fantastic and hope you’re enjoying the platform. You know, hope the family’s doing good. Just want to record a video to say, Hey, thank you. I appreciate you because I would not be here if you if we if we weren’t working together. So I just want to say thank you.

John Jantsch (12:38.469)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (12:56.474)

And less than twenty-four hours, if not maybe five to ten minutes later, you would get a response back saying, That was really cool. Thank you so much. And and a little what you just said, John, will happen. They’ll be yeah, well I thinking about adding X this Y XYZ thing on it. I’m glad you reached out. Let’s get this thing going. So it’s I mean, your your your current customer base is is the best base to re to sell additional products and services to because they already know, like, and trust you.

John Jantsch (13:21.412)

Yeah. Have you have you have you quantified or or or gotten even any kind of feedback from clients who’ve maybe adopted that practice to say this is what this has meant over the last six months?

Doug (13:34.466)

Yeah, mean l l literally what I just still what when I kind of explained that concept to our to our agencies and stuff like that that white label us even businesses, literally the same response is like, my gosh, this is so easy, so simple, especially from C suite people, like messaging out their their team members. Hey, I want to record your quick video or record a quick video and just say, Hey, you know, hey, you know, Bill. Just want to record your quick video, just let you know I think you’re doing a fantastic job. Thank you so much for working here.

John Jantsch (13:38.766)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.601)

Yeah.

Doug (14:01.56)

Especially if they’re talent they want to keep. People just wanna feel appreciated. So that C suite executive that was using our platform did that. He’s like, my gosh, like this is I’m gonna do this all the time now. Just record video, just say thank you to my team members who are doing a fantastic job.

John Jantsch (14:04.976)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:16.928)

th a lot of people have been, and any number of people have been using tools like Loom to do kind of similar one to one video and you know, you you just click a button and record. I I I know, you know, we initially our initial use case for using Loom was when we were trying to explain, say to a web designer, like, fix this thing right here, you know, and it was just a lot easier, right, to communicate that. How does your platform differ from a you know, a tool like that which can be free?

Doug (14:23.256)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Doug (14:35.372)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (14:45.58)

Yeah, yeah, no, Loom’s a fantastic platform. Yeah. So we we have the we just like you said, we have the we have the same kind of capabilities inside of Magnify, right? But the cool part about what what Magnify is is we’ve built in not just a a screen recording tool, but we have the ability to capture video testimonials, produce simple branded video clips, make little story videos which takes three video clips and produces them into one video, and then literally add video to any marketing communication that you have, whether you have an AI chat bot.

John Jantsch (14:51.718)

Ha ha ha.

Doug (15:14.942)

you have SMS marketing, add videos to that. So we’re kind like the the all-encompassing video powerhouse. And that stemmed when I was running my video marketing agency. It stemmed from what other digital marketers and what businesses were actually asking for on a consistent basis. So when you’re running a video production company, you’d get those nice big client contracts, right? Where you’re making 10,000-ish dollars a video. But

Magnify was birthed out of, well crap. Like I gotta make more I gotta I gotta figure out a recurring revenue model instead of always always hunting and killing that next thing. So that’s where it was kind of birthed from was the the tools, the five tools we have were birthed from what businesses use or and should be using on a regular basis. And then what makes us unique with the video communication tools is the video content creation tools. We produce it for you. So there’s no video editing needed.

John Jantsch (15:49.966)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:01.456)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:09.658)

Yeah, yeah.

Doug (16:09.74)

So art it adds your your logo and music and captions and call to action all by itself.

John Jantsch (16:15.856)

Well in and that ten thousand dollar video, you know, AI is cutting into that budget pretty pretty significantly too, I think.

Doug (16:22.582)

yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that. Well, it’s ’cause we we actually just through probably about a good year and a half, like obviously we’re we’re on we’d like to think we’re on the cutting edge of of video. And AI video being one of those. We we’ve seen it go from like the really terrible to where it’s at now and we’ve we have studied it and just started offering like cinematic style AI videos where it looks

Where it could replace a five million dollar budget video. We just did one for a multi location automotive repair shop. And they wanted like, they came to us, they wanted like a Mad Max style thing video built around a air freshener. Their big thing was like this cool air freshener that you that you hang on their their their the the mirror gives them 15% fifteen dollars off their next oil change.

John Jantsch (16:51.534)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm.

John Jantsch (17:10.67)

Mm.

Doug (17:19.81)

Gets it back of the door. they wanted a story built all around that. So we went, we we were like, okay, yeah, we’ll give you like a one that’s like around a minute and a half. But like once we got into it, we’re like, we made us like a two minute 30 30 second, like full movie trailer. I mean, complete with scenes. I mean, if you were to pay a crew your minimal five million dollars, and it turned out amazing, they dropped it on their social media.

And within two weeks got over seven thousand plays. And immediately we’re like, we want to do more. So we’re actually doing one that’s a a gone in sixty seconds theme mixed with back to the future. So that’s sort of getting ready to drop here pro pretty quick.

John Jantsch (17:50.256)

Yes.

John Jantsch (17:56.088)

yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I mean you imagine you imagine like, you know, two actual live trucks or something driving down the road, you know, in a Mad Max style. I mean, I would take f twenty people back in the day, right? All the people holding boom mics and and the three, four different videos on, you know, on trucks. I mean, crazy. So,

Doug (18:02.102)

It’s awesome.

Doug (18:12.366)

Yeah. It’s like my God.

Doug (18:21.85)

somebody who studied filmmaking in college, if I had this at my fingertips back in the day, like I mean, literally, like your the your imagination is only the limit. It’s so it’s crazy.

John Jantsch (18:24.411)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.696)

Yeah, yeah. All right, so I’m a two person shop and I don’t have time for video. What’s the least amount I could get away with?

Doug (18:42.712)

The least am I gonna get away with, right? That well, that’s what the Magnify platform was built for, number one. But number, but number two, bust out that phone in your pocket and just record some content for the love. Because I I always love when people you’re on screen, it’s been this is a great analogy I tell all people who are considering it. You ever been scrolling on social media and you stop and you see some guy’s video, you’re like, that guy’s an idiot. Like, I know more than that person.

John Jantsch (18:43.78)

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (19:08.602)

Yeah. Yeah.

Doug (19:10.968)

Well, that person took the time to record a video. Well, you have no excuse. Start recording that content. Put it on social media, especially if you’re on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is so hot right now for video content. If they if you’re a LinkedIn person and you’re watching this, make video content on LinkedIn to position yourself as a thought leader as an expert. There’s never been a better time to do it on LinkedIn, for sure. Hands down.

John Jantsch (19:14.277)

Yes.

John Jantsch (19:21.296)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:34.596)

Although my soap speech, stop recording the videos in your car with you driving. I hate those, okay?

Doug (19:40.544)

Yeah. Listen, I’ve been guilty of those. ‘Cause like sometimes you’ll get that thought that pops in your head and like I wanna get it out before I forget. But I hear you. I hear you.

John Jantsch (19:52.778)

So so so so you’re positioning your program though or your platform as white label for agencies. so tell me a little bit about I don’t know the first ninety days of implementation for an agency, what’s that look like?

Doug (20:01.954)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Doug (20:08.3)

Yeah, so first that’s the most important, right? The first ninety days. So the first ninety days when agency signs up, they they typically have a customer that they’re already like have asked for either video testimonials or they want to add video to an email marketing plan. And so that’s when they typically will find us, right? So but we tell agents all the time, yes, it’s exciting that you have a customer, right? And how our platform works is they pay that the the flat rate and then they get thirty they get thirty seats, thirty seats to give out to as many customers as you got it.

John Jantsch (20:23.675)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:33.284)

Hm. Wow. so those could each be a client could have a seat. I’ll get you, okay.

Doug (20:38.38)

Yeah, so you can give video testimonial capture, video email, branded video clips for your customer and add a layered in video service that works with your existing stack, your reputation marketing, your social media plan, your website design. But we tell them first 90 days, if you make sure you get yourself an optimized YouTube channel for your own agency. And because you agencies

John Jantsch (20:50.638)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (20:59.61)

Yeah.

Doug (21:04.477)

love the idea of having an optimized YouTube channel for their business because one, it helps out tremendously with SEO, right? I mean, and John, you’d be surprised how many agencies don’t know that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. And when we tell them that they’re like, what? Really? Yes, it is. So yeah, it’s a great way to sell your client into creating content. So the first thing is getting them to create content. Get a video testimonial from one of their happy customers.

John Jantsch (21:10.99)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:16.902)

Sure. Yeah. Has been for a long time. Yeah.

Doug (21:32.472)

But it’s implementing it in with their own tech stack, right? So when they approach a business and they go, Hey, check out what we’re doing here. This will work better. This will make work amazing for your business. The business goes, Well, heck yeah, that’s awesome. I want that too. And it’s an easy add on. And most agencies are charging between two hundred and fifty bucks to seven hundred fifty seven hundred and fifty dollars a month in recurring revenue. Right out the gate. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:53.772)

Right. Per se per seat. Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you stopping by, taking a few moments on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some where you’d invite people to learn more about w how they can try out Magnify?

Doug (22:11.02)

Yeah, we well obviously you can just go to magnify dot com, A G N F I dot com. And then always hit me and hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m super active on LinkedIn. Just for just search Doug Doug Dybert J R on LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty much probably way too often, but you could f we could find me on there too. So

John Jantsch (22:29.318)

Well I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Doug.

Doug (22:34.072)

Perfect, John. Thanks for having me.