[Fully Managed] – Michael Gavin from Be Uniic Ep. 51 – Transcript

Michael’s Career

Shannon: So could you just start by telling us a little bit about yourself, how you got to this point in your career and everything that’s kind of led up to that. You can also share a fun fact if you’d like. I love fun facts. But you don’t have to share one if you have nothing fun to say, that’s also okay.

Michael: No, I don’t have much fun things to say, I’ll admit, but I do have a factor too. But yeah, so been working in the marketing space for five years. I initially went to school for pre-med. I hated it. Dropped out. And I got a bunch of like lead generation gigs with real estate agents, which is terrible because they’re hounding you and it’s difficult to dictate whether someone’s looking for a house or they’re looking to sell their house. It’s rough.

And so that kind of got me started with marketing as a whole. I eventually, I’ll be completely honest, I got lucky. There’s an agency down in Plymouth meeting, which is around Philadelphia, and the guy who was like the president of marketing there, he went to a college, which is local to me, called Wilkes University, and he was like, “oh, you live in Wilkes Bury.” And he was like, “I know like no one who lives in Wilkes Bury, but I went to school there.”

Shannon: Oh, that’s pretty cool. That’s so nice.

Michael: Yeah, and then he saw that I was working there. They, electrics group is a company. They do component manufacturing. It was really fun. The only thing is that it’s, you know, engineers don’t care about fancy graphics or anything. They just care if a product or a component works. And so it was really, I think it was the biggest learning curve for me because it’s like you kind of have the segment all these engineers down to like which component features do they like more? You know, what is the application process for these components?

And you have to speak to that. Your ad could be as visually compelling as you want it to be. The hook could be perfect on a video or anything like that, but if they click through to your site and they see that, you know, oh, it’s 12 millimeters instead of like 11, they won’t buy. They don’t care.

But after that, I ended up going to crowdfunding, company called New Columbia Capital down in DC and that’s where, that’s kind of what got me to the point where I’m at now. It helped me to enjoy the space of startups. You know, that was raising anywhere from pre-seed usually to Series A. And it was the full suite of everything, setting up financials, setting up the raise, getting the SEC requirements, yada, yada, yada.

It’s very tedious and stuff, but it’s good when you could see that a founder like succeeds in doing this fundraising. Because they’ve worked so hard to get, you know, recurring revenue, to get users, to get downloads, whatever it might be, to eventually raise money. And then it’s exciting to help them.

And with that, it took me to the Uniic, which now helps startups. I think the biggest sell point is that we help startups go from zero to one. They think they’re at like eight and they’ve been sold on getting to like 12 or 13. And that’s an issue because they’re not at eight and you can’t realistically sell them to get to 12 or 13. They just need to get to one first.

And so, yeah, that’s, we do it, it’s mainly organic channels for startups. Because SEO, social media, you know, directory integration and business and brand development is something important to them. Something that they may have neglected when just starting out. And we help with that and we still have carried over some of the crowdfunding efforts for mainly pre-seed companies. So, yeah.

Shannon: Well, that’s awesome. That seems like a very, it’s a long road, but a good transition from what you did before.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. It was smoother than some other people I’ve heard of, so I’m happy about that for sure.

From Pre-Med to Marketing

Shannon: I mean, starting at pre-med is definitely, I feel like I hear a lot of people that do not start in marketing and go into marketing. I think it’s more common than not that I speak to people that never had any experience in it or didn’t plan to go into it. And ended up really liking it. I think there’s so many different kinds of people that you can find in the marketing space, and I really like that.

Michael: Yeah, I think a lot of it just boils down to you kind of accept the fact that you, you are a type of way as a human, I guess is the best way to put it. And it’s like, oh, you know, I talk to people every day now I just have to talk to them through a computer, whether it be through like an ad headline, a video or something like that. And you’re kind of like, okay, I can make this work.

And you know, it’s also one, I would say it’s one of the more, I don’t wanna say lenient ’cause it’s not necessarily the term, but it is one of the more friendlier industries to where you can kind of learn as you go and you won’t be negatively impacted from it.

Like, could you imagine me trying to do a surgery now because I haven’t learned a single thing in med school? I’d be, I’d be arrested, I’d be sued. But realistically, I could go with no marketing experience, look up a quick YouTube video, actually implement some of what I learned and just learn as I go. And I, you know, I’m not saying more times than not, I’d be successful, but I could be successful.

Shannon: Yeah. And they got all those free HubSpot certifications that you can take.

Michael: Those, I abuse those.

Shannon: Exactly. No, there’s a lot of places that you can kind of make yourself in marketing that is not trainable in other fields for sure. Like you would have to have extensive educational backgrounds for a lot of different things. Not saying, not selling anyone short for marketing. I think it’s just a field that is, you can adapt much easier, especially if you’re passionate about it.

And I definitely agree with that and I like seeing all of the different people in the space of marketing because it’s very interesting to see the paths of people like I started in political science, and I think that there’s so many different pieces of educational backgrounds that people can have, that they can take into marketing.

Michael: Yeah, like marketing is a lot of persuasion. A lot of psychology. I think that was like most of political science, which is a little concerning. But it works, it does work for marketing. It translates fairly well because a lot of politics is talking to people and convincing them of something that you believe in, and marketing is basically exactly that.

Shannon: And it’s cool. It’s just like a very fun, interesting transition. I love to see where all of that comes from and what people get inspiration from.

Michael: There’s another founder I know he runs an SEO agency, but he went to law school. So it’s like, that was one of the weirder ones to me. It’s like, okay, you went to be a lawyer and now you’re doing optimization of blogs and website content.

Shannon: Yeah, I mean SEO I feel like that might be less of a seamless transition. If he was in like your very typical marketing coordinator role. I feel like that would be a seamless transition from lawyer to marketing coordinator. That makes perfect sense to me.

Marketing Inspiration

So, wait on that topic then. Do you, I really like asking people this question because I think it’s kind of a fun way to figure out where they get inspiration from. What is an example, if you can think of something. I know sometimes this is hard to just pull outta your brain really fast. But what do you think is a marketing inspiration that you’ve received from a non-typical marketing space? So say it’s maybe not a marketing space at all, just something that you think has really helped you in marketing that was inspiration you got outside of marketing.

Michael: Man. One. Easy one. The Juujitsu community, they are louder than life, and I feel that has translated to a lot of successful marketing campaigns that we have. Even if you don’t have the perfect product yet, you’re still developing it. You know, even if your MVP isn’t even necessarily an MVP, let’s say, but you just have somebody who is constantly just out there. And somebody who’s just voicing whatever opinion they have, people just naturally flock to them.

And it’s like, same thing happens in jujitsu. Like I compete in Juujitsu, so this is why I follow this industry. But there are some people who just like talk the most crap and they lose continuously. And people are like, okay, you just keep getting beat. But you still talk a lot. And then the next day they’re on a reel, you know, promoting some affiliated like supplement brand or an affiliated clothing brand or something like that.

So I would say that’s probably more recently that I could think of, like one of the most, you know, if you could copy and paste a not specific strategy, it would definitely just be, it could be really any athletic space. I mean, just be louder than life, and even if it’s not complete or perfect, you’ll still get traction and you’ll still do well.

Shannon: Yeah, I think that actually is a really good point to make because of course, personalities in sports specifically will definitely receive more sponsorships, even if they’re not the best at what they do.

Michael: Yeah. Or you can just have, you know, really good hair.

Shannon: Yeah. And head and shoulders will be like, oh, please, you don’t have to use our product. Well, you just use your hair.

Michael: One of the biggest examples if like even in combat sports is like Conor McGregor. That dude hasn’t fought in like, what, four or five years, but continuously still getting brand deals, still continuously getting mentioned by Daniel White and it’s like, get rid of this guy. Get rid of him. But he’s another one like just louder than life and people flock to that. People like that. Even if you haven’t done anything in five years.

Shannon: No, I think that, that’s definitely a testament to marketers I think, that you can find success in just being a personality. People enjoy that. And I think that’s psychology as well. I think that plays into marketing really heavily because you do wanna listen to people that are more outspoken because it gives you almost this, it kind of puts up this front that they know more, but that’s not always true. It’s just that they are speaking louder than maybe someone else.

Michael: I think it’s also that it’s kind of like a mimic of certain people. Like to our point before, like marketing being an industry that, like if you just suctioned onto one marketing influencer, let’s say you’re in love with like Neil Patel. And if you just constantly, like his tweets, LinkedIn, post, whatever, you’re gonna learn something.

But another thing that is like, I think with these people who are like influencers, let’s say, or people who have great authority within a niche and industry, whatever it might be, I think it’s like a future of a reflection of someone themselves. So it’s like, once again, like Connor McGregor for example, it’s like I could be Joe Schmo, like on my couch, not actually train MMA or train any martial arts. Not even play football or soccer baseball, but I could watch Conor McGregor and I could be like, man, I want a Lamborghini yacht. I want to just talk crap all the time and not get backlash from it. I want to own my own whiskey brand.

So then it’s like every single thing he does, these people follow and it’s just because it’s like, oh, I wish I was that. For people starting in marketing when they do like cling onto these influencers, and I don’t know if you’ve ever had it, but like I’ve had it. It’s like you’ll be in a meeting and they’re always quoting somebody or they’re always saying like, oh, this person says this. One of the more bigger ones recently is like Alex Ozzi. They’re always like, oh, well Alex Ozzi says to do this. This is a framework. And it’s like you just want to be Alex Hermo. That’s kinda what it’s, you’ve been, not stalking, but like, you’ve just been hounding this guy’s social media so much that it’s like you’re trying to evolve into him, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that it could cloud some sort of judgment. It’s like you have 20 more years to get there realistically.

Shannon: I could start early, but yeah, no, I definitely think that’s an important point to make because people do admire people sometimes too much. I think that there are definitely just because someone is successful in a way that you envision yourself to be in the future or want to be in the future does not mean that there making good educational points online. I mean, but they’re still successful and a lot of people like to model themselves after that, and that might work and it might be at a detriment to them.

But I think that’s important transition into the marketing space because I think some things just work for some people and I think that a lot of people will use them as a model, but sometimes it might not work for them.

Michael: Yeah. And that’s, I think that’s kind of what marketing is as a whole. I think there are definitely certain frameworks that generally work for everyone, I think for sure. But there’s definitely certain things, like, for example, I run into a lot of marketing agencies that have this kind of no bullshit mentality. And they have, that’s kind of the language in which they use on their website and different things like that. And that’s going to, certain clients are going to flock to that certain type of person.

And, but meeting them and interviewing them, they are that certain type of person. They are exactly what they put up. But if there was someone that was maybe more timid and was not this type of personality that talks like that. And is that I wouldn’t recommend that they take up this persona to have a certain type of clients because they’re not going to work well with them.

Like these are people that are probably fed up with certain positions that they’ve been in. Maybe they’ve worked with agencies in the past that they didn’t feel were catering to their needs, and I don’t think that a smaller startup would maybe be really good at having that mentality off the bat and modeling themselves off of these agencies, because that’s not gonna work for them. They’re not that person.

Shannon: No.

Michael: You have to stick to your Uniic traits. Like I know at the Uniic, like right now we have, I have like one other person who, there’s like a lot more of the work. His name’s Daniel. Great dude, loves branding and content. And then we have two other interns. But like, when I first started, the only difference that I would do is like communication. Like majority of our clients get day-to-day communication. I think it’s like one of the big differences. They don’t get an end of month call and that’s it. And they don’t get an end of month report, that’s it. They get daily communication, text-based communication pretty much, and then like a biweekly or a monthly call if they want to, but.

The difference is that instead of just me boasting some, like falsified, oh, well I’ll grow your sales by 700000% and stuff like that because, you know, or like, I’m gonna create a click funnel for your company that just generates so many leads. It’s like, I don’t need to do that if I just have like one small thing which I could play to, which is Uniic. So no, definitely I don’t, yeah. Take up another persona. You’re fighting an uphill battle.

Shannon: Yeah. You’re selling yourself short. Because I think that also shows that you don’t have confidence in your own skills as how you can do them yourself.

Michael: Yeah. That’s also, that’s a testament to people who are heavily worried about competitors. Whereas if you’re just doing what you’re doing well, you don’t really have to worry about competitors site. I’m sure that, you know, if maybe your prices are significantly lower than competitors. Maybe you’re, maybe you should look at them to be inspired to maybe raise your prices because you’re doing just as much as they are. And maybe that’s like the only thing that I think is important to maybe monitor.

But other than that, I think that’s something that’s common in the agency space too, is people looking at things similar to them and comparing themselves. But I think that if you are confident in what you do, then you don’t really have to worry about that as much.

Shannon: Yeah, that’s true.

Michael: Yeah, that’s like be Uniic is you’re gonna find your Uniic tricks that you’re good at.

Communication and Client Retention

Shannon: There you go. So do you think that these aspects of communication that you mentioned, do you think that this is something that you personally believe contributes to a higher client retention rate?

Michael: Yes. And, but there’s negative pitfalls to that as well. Like, yes, it does work with retention because like if something goes off rails, at least like it’s day-to-day communication, you could pinpoint where it may have gone off rail. It’s like a, like we at Be Uniic, for example, do running notes, which are updated weekly, but it’s a culmination of like day-to-day updates that’s exchanged internally.

So like if we were to see that organic traffic, for example, has decreased by 10% or something, like we could pinpoint and say like, maybe it’s a topic, maybe it’s, you know, just the time of year in which people aren’t necessarily worried about blogs or whatever it might be. Specifically now, I mean like November and December holiday months, like people are gonna look at pads more than they would’ve blog or, you know, the best top 10 list of goals or whatever it might be.

So like we could pinpoint where that happens. Also, I think client’s a little more confident in just kind of letting you run with it when you have, you know, day-to-day communication. However, as I mentioned, like there’s a drawback to it all. So, like one of the drawbacks is that people get comfortable doing weekly meetings and then out of a month you have three unproductive meetings. You have one productive meeting. That’s what happens.

You also have this like, there’s a no boundary type of feel. And then I think, and like, this isn’t to say anything negative about clients or anything like that, but I do think that they, they develop some sort of like, they develop a persona, which is kind of like, I’m just trying to get my money’s worth. But so it’s like they’ll ask for two meetings in a week.

While you’re also doing these, this work for them, you’re also growing their company and stuff like that. And to them, it might just be viewed as, I’m trying to get my money’s worth, whatever it might be. But then on our end, it’s kind of like, dude, like I can’t get anything done when I have to do work for seven other clients I’m meeting with. Six or seven other clients and then I’m gonna meet with you two times a week. Like I just can’t get anything done.

So now like what we’re doing is we are trying to transition more into like, yeah, you’ll get daily text communication ’cause email and stuff like that. That’s just kind of, that’s natural I think. But we are shifting to more like biweekly to monthly calls, because I don’t think that that sacrifices any of our communications. I mean. If you get text communication, then you hop on a biweekly call, you already know what’s gonna be spoken about. There’s nothing new in, and it’ll go from an hour long to like 15 minutes, which is a lot more productive anyway.

So I would say that’s a pitfall though, is people get comfortable with it and then at one point or another they end up taking some sort of advantage of it to where they’re just like, I need a, I need to call every week. I’m gonna call you waste an hour, and there’s nothing from it. But I would say it does help with the retention and it just gives a client more confidence in what you’re doing. They tend to ask less questions and it’s kind of like a shoot first, ask later mentality, which I think is beneficial because then you have no hiccups of like a QA process or anything like that.

Shannon: This kind of reminds me of an overbearing mother relationship.

Michael: Yeah. And it’s like exactly that. I just think it just made me think of going to college and having to like train my mom to not hear from me every single day. And it’s, that’s like one of the struggles now because it’s like in my position, like where I’m at, like I don’t hold this, I do day-to-day work at Be Uniic, but I don’t hold the same position that I did a year ago to where I’m like drowned in day-to-day work.

I manage meetings and then I’m trying to do business development as well, but like, I think given my schedule, like I wake up like five in the morning, and realistically this is on a perfect day. I could wake up at five in the morning. I could get done with work by like noon. Then if I wanted to, I could take noon to like three to do all of that business development, outreach, et cetera, stuff like that.

But considering that, you know, we still have these random calls and everything like that, that pops up. It’s like five to 12 gets extended to like five to 3:00 PM by 3:00 PM I’m exhausted because I just spent 10 hours doing whatever the heck I’m doing. So it’s like, that’s why we’re trying to transition because like if I could just take my focus and not do meetings, not do that much like backend work and just focus on business development. I feel we’d be in a lot better space.

Like we’d have, you know, like our pipeline would be a lot more filled than it is, or, you know, we’d have a client list which is greater than it is. Meaning too, like that we can manage and, you know, build on new clients and stuff like that, which we can. It’s just like you’re kind of in this purgatory spot of like, okay, like what do I do? So. That’s why we’re transitioning.

Shannon: It definitely is like that, you know, overbearing mom, I’ve always been told that it’s like emotional support, like that’s all you’re doing. You’re providing emotional support for people. They just want the reassurance that everything’s still going well.

Michael: Well, yeah, but they wanna hear it from you because it feels better and you can’t, you can’t necessarily be like upset about it because you understand like there’s an empathetic side of it. It’s like I’m paying like, oh, I’m paying money to these people. Well, one I’ve really never met in real life. I’ve met them on Zoom. Yes, I’m seeing growth, but at the same time too, I’m not a marketer. I don’t understand the growth. And then like three back to the money thing, it’s like I’m paying them monthly to do this.

So it’s like, once again, it like, they fall into this mindset of like, oh, I’m just trying to get my money’s worth. And then you end up having, you know, people get burnout, people get like overbearing mother syndrome or whatever you call it.

Shannon: Yeah, no, it’s good that you recognize this problem and are able to adjust for it though, because it does seem like this could lead to really bad burnout. And I think that that’s a lot of trouble that people have in agencies, specifically, especially marketing, because like your job is never really done. Because you can always be doing stuff.

And I talk to social media marketers specifically about this problem because I always wonder how they balance themselves from being consumed by media constantly because I don’t have to be consumed by media constantly, personally, in my job, but I can imagine, but I still have trouble with being consumed by it anyway. And I’m just imagining people who need it for inspiration and to monitor it, to see the trends and different things like that, how they manage it.

And I think that it’s very important to be able to have that kind of segue when you’re feeling that you’re doing too much or that it’s kind of overwhelming and it’s good that you were able to recognize that because that’s important for not only your health, but also your client’s health too, kind of because you know, in maybe a month and you’re still doing this and now you’re, you’re a little antsy and your meetings because you’re like, I could be doing something else.

Michael: I think that like a lot of people have a hesitancy to it because it’s like you have to explain to them that like, no offense, but we don’t have to be on these calls all the time. I know it’s very uncomfortable to have the conversation to transition to.

Shannon: Yeah. So that’s, I, well, I admire that because I think that it’s very hard for people to recognize those problems. So I think that even though it might be a tougher transition for people who are used to it, my overbearing mother was not happy to know that I wasn’t going to call her every day and that so that she would know I’m alive, but she had to trust that I was alive. And I was, and it’s a very similar dynamic and I think that’s very funny.

But yeah, it’s hard to explain. But I think that also if you, of course narrating it in a way of I will be doing more work for you without having to do these meetings, I think that that’s, you know, it’s better, save time. I think that they will, you know, be happy about that, hopefully.

Michael: Yeah, and that will be a better transition. Yeah, to that. I mean, yeah, you are like one, I get 30 to an hour minutes, like 30 minutes to 16 minutes back to my day, which could be spent working on your stuff. Also, I don’t have to prep for any of these calls. I could just kind of like spew off an email update if I really wanted to. So it’s a win-win.

Shannon: Yeah, and that’s very easy. We actually, for the podcast, we originally I did a lot more discovery calls. To explain, obviously the podcast, but explaining the podcast is very easy to do and usually discovery calls for maximum 10 minutes. But some people have a lot more questions, so I’m just, they’d be like 30 minutes. And I processed after many months of doing that, that I could just send all of this information in an email.

And so I stopped offering discovery calls unless someone was really, really wanted to get on the phone with me, which is also fine. I understand that. But it’s a similar thing of like, you can explain certain things much easier and put a lot more time towards other important things by managing your time in a different way. Yeah. Sending an email takes not that long, but talking to someone takes a lot of time, depending on what you’re talking about.

Michael: But yeah, they go off on tangents. That’s the issue.

Shannon: Yeah, I kinda like tangents, but it depends on if, you know, I’m like, oh, I really need to do this. Okay, so complete different transition. I wanted to ask, so, okay. Something that I do always notice this about different people’s websites is, AI is mentioned on your website, which I think some people avoid and some people don’t avoid in mentioning. I think everyone uses it at this point.

Michael: They should.

AI Powered Workflows

Shannon: Yeah. Because it’s very helpful. I was wondering how you use it in your work, because you specifically, discussed marketing services being AI powered. And yeah, I was wondering in which ways that you do it?

Michael: Yeah, so, majority of it is like workflow per client. Like for example, any AI tool that you can use to schedule content, help like ease the streamline of like meta tags, keyword research, internal links, back links, et cetera, stuff like that. All of those like manually are super tedious.

And I cannot imagine now sitting down and trying to figure out a meta title that is less than 60 characters and has the company’s name at the end of it, and thinking about putting it down per blog post that we do. And like mind you, the blog posts range from one a week to two a week. So it’s like hypothetically, like you have to do, you know, 16 blogs or, 8 to 16, kind of like meditecks for one client, if that’s the case. And it gets terrible. It’s nauseating.

But another thing that we’re working on is more so of like a, it, it’s kind of like a proprietary tech, but we have two like main competitors, which would be like Moz Bar, and then there’s also another one. I just forget the name, but it’s not going to be directly associated with Buni, but it’s called Ami, SEO, AMI Friend in French, which you’ll understand the connection. It’s because all it’s going to be is some sort of Chrome extension that if you are on a Google Doc word document, your website’s, CMS, whatever it might be, it’ll do all of the stuff that we do now with ai.

But it’s just in one holistic approach. So like meta tags filled out, meta description filled out keywords. You’ll get like 10 options. You could pick them. It’ll provide sources and links for you to kind of like base off of whatever you’re doing. And it’s all based off of a title and an introduction paragraph, so it’s able to provide all of that for you.

Right there you’ll get trends which assist, like you could source those trends dimension into your blog. And then eventually we want to build out some sort of, well, it would probably be an API to like midjourney or something, but something to where we can do like featured image suggestions based on a title or whatever it might be.

And all it would be is a content marketer’s best friend, somebody who like, it’s an AI that could just build out all this stuff and all you have to focus on is building content. Reason being AI is not a replacement. I think that’s kind of the hesitancy people have with like mentioning AI is they think like oh, I’m just gonna go spend X amount of dollars per month and I’m gonna just get all AI work. Like I know some people on our end think that, but it’s not true.

Like blogs could be drafted by ai, but they have to be rewritten by human. You have to fact check ai. You have to implement emotional intelligence into an AI and, and to get the content generated by them.

So that’s kind of like the overall goal is like, don’t look at it as a replacement, it’s just supplementing whatever we’re doing. So if like somebody were to use that tool, that obvious EL tool, it’s like you could just purely focus on writing. You don’t have to focus on any of the other stuff that you usually associate with the writing. No keyword, no meta tags, no featured images, no internal links, no back links, anything like that. It’s just kind of all done for you.

So yeah. I think to summarize how we’re using it is just as a supplement to whatever. We’re kinda, it’s like giving, I don’t know, it’s like giving a construction worker a new hammer. Like that’s kind of what it ends up being.

Shannon: No, I definitely resonate with that, and I feel the same way about how AI is helpful. I think that it’s more of an assistive tool than anything else, and I agree that it’s not, at the point, I don’t think that it’ll be happening for a really long time of replacing anyone. I just think that it does exactly what you said, the tedious things that would like aren’t really worth your time.

Michael: Yeah.

Shannon: Like you can always, and you can always modify those things. That’s the best part is you can have them do the initial thing, but you have to check their work, obviously, to make sure that everything’s correct, especially if you’re using it for copywriting, and you need that human to be able to check that and be able to make it perfect. And I think that it’s really helpful to have it as assistive because you don’t have to spend time doing these things anymore.

That it, it’s a similar to, you know books and computers. We can look things up without having to go into an encyclopedia now. And that’s wonderful. And obviously there were people for a very long time, probably, there’s probably still some old people that are like, you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s, you’re not, you’re not your brain power. You’re using brain as much. I don’t know.

Michael: Yeah.

Shannon: But I think that’s a very similar mentality about people who are hesitant about ai. I always wonder if people are more hesitant about using it or mentioning it on their website, because of the weird mentality around it in specific spaces. But I don’t think that it’s negative or positive necessarily. ’cause I think there’s definitely a lot of people in the agency space that are very excited about AI and like to utilize it as much as possible.

And then I think there’s also, there’s definitely people that aren’t, but I don’t know if it’s at a detriment to people anymore because of how accepted it has been in this space at this point in time.

Michael: I think, I think like for us it’s more so of like a transparency thing. I think to loop back to like the meetings as well is like if you use AI correctly, it’s literally how could I streamline and make everything more efficient to provide more for a client?

If you use AI correctly, it’s literally how could I streamline and make everything more efficient to provide more for a client? Like that’s all it ends up being. Mm-hmm. Um, but like the transparency side of things I think is important too. Like if I, like if you think about it, if you didn’t know what AI was and somebody returns to you, like keyword research, all fixes on your website, site maps and all this other stuff, like in SEO terms, it’s like you would think.

You know, how’d you do it so fast? And then if I were to just go like, oh, well we have an intern who just works really fast, like, yeah, okay. BS like mm-hmm. You use an AI tool. That’s what it is. So that’s why we have no issue mentioning that like majority of what we use is ai. Like you, it’s also like to just keep competitive.

Like, I mean, it’s difficult to, like, it was difficult before to just write blogs, purely writing them meaning like. You know, you had to think about the introduction, the second paragraph, third paragraph, fourth, fifth, and you follow the framework that you were given in elementary school. You know, introduction, body conclusion, what it is.

You have to source all of these pieces of data that supplement whatever your claims are. And you know, you have to, again, build out meta title, build out meta descriptions and stuff like that. It’s just now, it’s a waste of time. There’s no reason that anybody should do it manually. It makes no sense. Just hop on the train.

I mean, who. No, I definitely agree and I like that you are, uh, thinking about it in a transparency way because I certainly agree that, you know, whatever processes that you’re doing should be conveyed to your clients. Um, and that is definitely a big part of it, especially when you’re using it as a tool and, you know, um.

It is a testament to knowing that your work is still going to be good because you are checking it and you are making sure that everything is not just ai and that it’s as a human element as well, that’s making sure that everything is actually, uh, factual and successful. But yeah, so unfortunately I have to cut short, um, because we’re a little over time.

Shannon: But I really do appreciate this chat and I think that, uh, this was a lovely conversation. I think I learned a lot. That’s always my goal for the podcast, so thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for everyone listening or watching. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to hear more stories and learn more things like I get to do every time on this podcast.