Balancing AI and Humanity in Modern Marketing Systems

About the Guest(s):

Grady Teske is the founder of Rising Tides and a seasoned fractional CMO with a solid seven-year track record in the tech industry. He specializes in building and scaling marketing systems and processes, focusing on sales, distribution, and leveraging AI for business growth. Before Rising Tides, Grady spent years establishing North American subsidiaries for multinational corporations, where he honed his skills in creating new business units within existing companies. Grady is deeply passionate about utilizing technology to maximize human interaction in business.

Episode Summary:

In this awesome episode of Talking Shizzle, Taylor Wilson welcomes Grady Teske, founder of Rising Tides, to explore the intricate balance between human interaction and AI in modern marketing and sales systems. Taylor and Grady discuss how businesses can effectively integrate AI to optimize their processes while maintaining the human touch essential for customer relationships. They delve into strategies for building systems that not only increase efficiency but also foster genuine connections with customers.

This episode is packed with insights on harnessing AI tools, creating customer-centric systems, and ensuring that technology serves to enhance—not replace—the human element in business interactions. Grady shares his perspective on how businesses can maximize humanity by focusing on listening, analyzing, and iterating systems. He emphasizes the importance of understanding customer needs through conversation and content that resonates on a personal level. Both experts contemplate the future of AI-driven marketing and what it means to stay authentic in an increasingly digital world.

Key Takeaways:

• The balance between AI and human interaction is critical; businesses should aim to maximize humanity in their systems.
• Effective systems for marketing and sales should prioritize conversation and customer alignment.
• AI can enhance processes by offering insights and structure, but human creativity remains irreplaceable.
• Overcomplicating systems can be a barrier; keeping systems simple and iterative is more effective.
• Building customer-centric systems requires a thoughtful approach to listening and customizing experiences.

Resources:

• Grady Teske on LinkedIn
• Rising Tides Website
• Weekly Invoice Newsletter

For a deeper understanding of integrating AI in your business strategy and building systems that not only perform well but also keep customer engagement high, listen to the full episode. Stay tuned for more enlightening discussions on Talking Shizzle, where the journey to business growth and systems optimization continues. Don't miss a beat; make sure to subscribe!

Reach out to us at Creative Shizzle🦉- We'd love to hear from you:

Website
LinkedIn
Instagram
Facebook
BlueSky

Email: hello@creativeshizzle.com

Transcript

0:00:03 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey, hey, all you lovely people out there. I know you’ve got a lot going on in your day and you have big dreams for your brand. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from entrepreneurs, leaders, change makers, and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Wilson, founder of Creative Shizzle, and I’m stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today.

0:00:33 Taylor Wilson: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you could grow your business or your cause. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com now let’s get into it and talk some shizzle. Hey. Hey, what’s up, Taylor here in the Talking Shizzle studio? I’m so super pumped about this conversation that I had with Grady Teske. He is the founder of Rising Tide. And we’re. We sat down and talked about systems and how to build systems for your business, for your marketing and for your sales.

0:01:11 Taylor Wilson: And Grady and I got into a pretty deep discussion on AI and how to think about AI and automation for your business and the balance between human and AI. So comment if you love this conversation, subscribe. And let’s get into the conversation with Grady. What’s up? What’s up, everyone? We are here on a new episode of Talking Shizzle, and Grady and I are wearing hats today.

0:01:36 Grady Teske: Colorful hats have to support my la. I no longer live in la, but I’ll always be part of la.

0:01:45 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, I kind of do. Like, I don’t live in Austin, Texas anymore, but, you know, like, I’ve got my. I’ve got my Austin vibes out. This is my out of office hat because I am recording right now. So it’s like, hey, don’t bother me recording. We’re doing a podcast. Yeah, this is the leave me alone hat. So, Grady Teske, you’re the founder of Rising Tides, and you and I met recently, I think, in the RB2B community.

0:02:14 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, we should talk more, which is one of the things I really like about online communities these days is how, like, you can legitimately make good friends in these things. So we were talking a little bit and I thought your story was interesting, wanted you to come on the show, and we’ve got a lot to get into today. But first off, just give us a rundown on who you are, what Rising Tides does, and, like, why you got into founder mode.

0:02:39 Grady Teske: Yeah, I think what’s really interesting is that when Taylor and I first met, I was like, wow, this is like somebody who’s working along the same mindset of mine in a, in a completely different direction where you’re more focused on content and the things around that, you know, I get really focused and interested in like systems and particularly the systems of distribution. I’ve been a fractional CMO in tech for about seven years now and before that I was building North American subsidiaries for multinationals, which is a total verbiage slander. But basically what I was, what was fun about it was working with existing businesses to create new small business units. And it gave me a lot of it gave me money to play with because they had existing products with revenue.

0:03:21 Grady Teske: And I was able to have a little bit of freedom to figure out how we build a new business unit in this market. And that’s kind of what I do now as the fractional side of me is I work with early stage companies and founders as they’re starting to scale their teams out, they’ve got a little bit of success and we start to think about like, how can we create systems and processes that take this further? What are the headcounts like to get there, how are we documenting and starting to create team culture and environment?

0:03:45 Grady Teske: So that’s what I do a lot as a CMO and over the past couple years as you do that, you work with agencies a lot. And one of the things that kind of kept burning me a little bit is that we utilize agencies to usually get to a result or to get us to a certain stage. And a lot of times that means that while it gets us the short term gain, we don’t always learn how to like take the value of that and build it out further. And I think that’s what Taylor’s doing with Creative Shoes I think is interesting as well. With rising tides now, we come in and we look at really common marketing departments like particularly outreach, email marketing and paid acquisition are the big ones that we work on.

0:04:26 Grady Teske: We come in under a service model and with our team of experts that have done this a lot for a lot of different industries, we go out and apply best practices to figure out what the unique system is that makes this work for this industry, for this client, for this product group. And then we kind of document it and we turn it into a process. Because we’re really big on using tech and AI and integration and over time our goal is to document all of that, help them hire in house and so they can get a fully formed department out of the work that we are doing together while we’re driving them the resources.

0:05:00 Grady Teske: So it’s an interesting take around building it. Certainly it’s a little bit harder to explain to founders because a lot of us just want the stage we’re in. But at the same time, if you’re building on the mindset that we’re going to make it, you always want to be building pieces that are scalable and growable. And particularly with founders that are building in the space where they’re getting outside investment, what we can do or really trying to target is how we can get you to the results you need to get the raise. But have a proven model that investors see, like, hey, with a low headcount, putting this amount of money in, we can get this sort of multiplier out. So it’s also very raised friendly.

0:05:38 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, well, that means a lot. So what I like about what you’re doing, you said something about like, you don’t. It’s hard to show the roi, but systems, having great systems is the foundation for great marketing. So like, you can do all the awesome creative thinking in the world, but if you don’t have great systems to get it out there and then report on it and know what’s ticking, what’s not ticking, like all of those things require, like the foundational stuff to be laid at the, at the beginning.

0:06:17 Taylor Wilson: I like that you’re kind of focusing your agency around that because it’s like you can’t get to great results if you don’t have a good foundation. And like the systems power the creative.

0:06:27 Grady Teske: Yeah. The real, I mean, the ideal scenario, and I’m always kind of chasing is, is if I have the opportunity to meet with a founder early enough as they’re starting to build their team out. Even from a marketing and sales perspective, the systems we put in place are ideally designed to capture that mentality of the founder going out and introducing the first 10 people before they have a product and then selling the first 100 customers. Because what we’re building, we’re looking to build out as much as possible, is systems of conversation.

0:06:56 Grady Teske: Conversations that are either aligning or qualifying who the right people are to work with your product. And then ideally, when you’ve got these conversations built up, if you create a culture of listening on top of that, which is just analytics, recording, documentation, all these things that we’re really, again, on a system side obsessed with those then can inform everything. One, we determine who is the right audience is a real clear thing. How do we segment that?

0:07:24 Grady Teske: We can also determine, hey, look, we’ve got this really good audience, we make an impact here, but we’re missing huge holes in here so it can inform new product creation. Right. And new solutions for them. Also on a content side, what we’re trying to do a lot is we do tend to help people build personal brands and working with creative agencies and internal resources by informing them. These are what people are telling us about your product. These are the common questions, they have the common objections.

0:07:52 Grady Teske: We’re recording all that in this automated system so then you can create content that takes the answers you have and, and provide it at scale. So ultimately what the goal of that, what I’m trying to prove my thesis around this is, is we can get really good at creating conversations around alignment and qualification that drive content, that build personal brand and authority so that you have to say less in conversations, making that whole process work faster. And the content has a scaling factor for you, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. Taylor. So again it’s as what’s I think really fun about this is having it start from a sort of agency model. We can come in and drive execution right away. So our goal is of course when people come out and they’re like I’m looking for a strategy. Our goal is no, let’s get out and have some sort of a conversation, an outreach campaign or an ad campaign running by this first week.

0:08:45 Grady Teske: So the second week we can have analytics and determine what’s really making sense for you. So within the first month you’re already seeing some results that are driving some return on investment back from there. Buy your business, you know, enough of a Runway to really fine tune it to turn it into a revenue positive sort of structure. So finding that mean conversation that converts a lot of people essentially for you.

0:09:09 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, and the thing about that I have found about systems is like they don’t even have to be that complicated. You just need some like they can be simple, they don’t have to be expensive. You just like you need something that’s consistent and I mean you can get super complicated. And we’ll talk a little bit about that as we get into like talking about automations and AI and things like that. But I think like the word system sounds boring and process it sounds boring. So people are like that’s for tomorrow, you know, but really like it’s not, it’s boring.

0:09:44 Grady Teske: People think about it as a scale. It’s a scale or growth sort of thing. But like you said, I think in a lot of this is, I’m writing a book right now called Build Distribution and it’s, it’s literally about systems that create conversations out of Line. What a surprise, right? As I’m starting to work through the process of executing and writing it, I realize it’s less of a book about systems and a lot more about changing our mindsets as business owners on what we’re focusing on.

0:10:11 Grady Teske: Primarily around the idea that like if we think about under the traditional mindset of sales and marketing and growth, we have to define everything we do in terms of user growth, customer acquisition. These metrics that like really tend to like even when we have success in them, like revenue and high margin revenue, they’re shallower success than what you really ultimately find. But if we’re focused as business owners on the process and the enjoyment of creating a business, which is essentially just systems that align you close with customers anyways, one, you can get more satisfaction and it makes everything a lot simpler.

0:10:47 Grady Teske: You know, you think about everything you do and rather than just executing, you go to execute first. But rather than just assigning a metric to be like, oh well this has been a net positive or net negative, you can actually look at going with automation now helps us do this. Really such a high rate going, okay, how can I break that step down? What parts do I have to do? What parts is repeatable? What part can I turn into a video or a long form blog or something that can gain more scale that I can promote?

0:11:16 Grady Teske: So all those steps then mean that a real strong business is just a series of one to two to three step results. You know what I mean? That’s what it is as a team too. That’s again where we find a lot of value, is we just focus on those simple things and figuring out how to do each three steps right? And then overall building it into you a process that eventually it tackles retargeting, nurturing, optimizing from people that dropped off of calls and things like that, you know, and then going into product usage and onboarding and all the way through to end of life and things like that.

0:11:51 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so let’s get into the meat of things today. I want to talk about AI because everyone’s talking about AI and I’m curious, as we’re talking about systems and how to use AI in your systems, I want to know like what’s the right balance between like human interaction and AI as it comes into this topic of like automation and marketing. Automation and sales systems. Yeah, that’s a big thought. What that, that’s a big question.

0:12:22 Taylor Wilson: What are, what are some of your thoughts and what are you seeing work well, not work well.

0:12:26 Grady Teske: The first thing to think about in terms of AI systems and tech at all in relation to your business is, it’s number one, it’s a catalyst for you to make that more customizable for your customer, your product and your experience. So the direct answer is right away is we really have to do the work to figure out what that balance is in each scenario. Increasingly, I will say on a top level too, it’s significantly more than what you probably think it is today as we start to implement AI and SaaS tools and no code. So much AI is embedded in all of these things nowadays that you don’t even actually have to master AI to leverage AI heavily into what you do as a business.

0:13:10 Grady Teske: And there’s a real value in starting light if you use a mail provider like Instantly or Smart Lead, use their AI tools to figure out how to use it, because eventually you’ll be able to take that, customize it and more. In terms of building an agent out for yourself, you don’t have to learn how to build an agent today. You just need to look at the AI resources that all the tools you have are using and then figure out what works best for you.

0:13:33 Grady Teske: What we see a lot now is, first of all, we met in the RB2B community and I had the good fortune of interviewing Adam for my book and he had a quote that just really stopped me in the tracks. And he was like talking about his model of building out social presence and authority and what I call social selling. He said, my whole goal is to really focus on finding how I can maximize humanity in my content.

0:13:58 Grady Teske: And that really stuck with me because since then we’ve already been shifting the way that we do staffing and stuff with our clients and internally, because we’ve been seeing it mirrored too, that as we start to create more of a system and a structure and a workflow around something, the more we realize maximize humanity is what we’re ultimately trying to do in all of these. When we think about, again, building conversations, everybody wants to have a human to human conversation. Like that’s the optimal thing, right?

0:14:29 Grady Teske: You know?

0:14:30 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.

0:14:31 Grady Teske: So really we start to create, we use that as a guide how do we use technology? And we use either workflows, which is just linking a couple of steps together, or use a SAS tool to really pioneer it down so we can get to what are the right human points in this there. And content plays into this as well. And I think what we’re starting to see is that if you take something like email marketing for instance, as a generalized department, really when it comes down to it, we can boil where the human interaction comes down to probably the creative process around writing it and then the interaction, the reply stage, which is kind of what was normally an SDR role or sales development role of advancing to a call.

0:15:13 Grady Teske: Those are really good human interaction points that really are supposed to drive somebody to that final one, which is the conversion call. And as you scale a landing page, which you can then replace video from a human side, increasingly the more you experiment with it and the more you start to add in the AI, you’ll find out you need less humans, but the human part of it is more valuable. Now what we’re seeing in these human roles is they become like a, they become part sales, part presenter, part like very much heavily listener with high empathy because they’re capturing things that we can’t get from AI analytics or just standard metrics and then they’re using that information to be a manager of the system around them to optimize how everything’s performing, to constantly be changing it.

0:16:01 Grady Teske: So I think from a creative background you’ll probably agree there’s definitely, I think long term limitations of as what AI and processing power in general can do as far as replacing our creativity. And that’s the baseline guide here too. You know, you’ll know when there’s not enough humanity in a funnel because it’s not performing well because it’s too generalized and we’re just coming across as like really not interactive, non specific.

0:16:30 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, yeah, I like maximize humanity a lot. I think that’s a good way to frame it. I came up with a hashtag for us this week called the Keeping it Real.

0:16:41 Grady Teske: Oh yeah, sure.

0:16:43 Taylor Wilson: I think we’re going to be like march into that mantra because I agree that you can go overboard and I think there’s going to be a course correction. I think when new hot technologies come out and things happen and everyone’s minds are blown, like we shift way over sometimes. And I think it’s like you see these companies like, you know, laying off tons of salespeople because AI is going to do everything and it’s like, well like people don’t want to buy things from robots.

0:17:16 Taylor Wilson: Just doesn’t especially like if you’re selling B2B and like software and enterprise solutions or anything like that, like that just doesn’t work. You need that human touch, that interaction and that’s what I think we’ll see people coming back to for us. I mean in terms of creative, I think it’s, it’s definitely a big, big blend. I don’t think that AI is there for us when it comes to like the like design and video creation and things like that. There’s elements of AI that you can use that are certainly helpful, I think for content creation and content writing. It’s way further along.

0:17:55 Taylor Wilson: And so like we’re leaning into that. But still always like, it’s not like you just like write copy paste. Like when you do that, it doesn’t. That’s when you miss the mark and people are like, why would you send me that email?

0:18:10 Grady Teske: Would you see. Let me ask you this. You have this background on this and I was just. I did my newsletter today, so this is again, this is something I’m playing with too. So like when I, when I go to write out a piece of content now what I did today was I used a transcript tool to read off some of my calls and I look for some similarities in there that I could go for on a content side. Then I wrote basically two paragraphs from that thing that I was downloaded, which was again all my thoughts. But I pulled it out of some other conversations.

0:18:40 Grady Teske: Yeah, it’s together. Then I put it into a secondary AI agent which restructured based off of what, like we were training an agent on newsletter structure. So I use it for packaging a lot and then rewrote off of that and then ran it through another AI agent that’s trained on my voice particularly to filter it back through to make it. Because I make things more complicated. Right.

0:19:05 Taylor Wilson: Well, you just, you like big words.

0:19:08 Grady Teske: I’m a system builder. I have to. Right. So no. Is that a balance you’re seeing that kind of works out? This is kind of where I’m following a couple of models and it helps guide the creative process. But really it’s around research and structure more than it is like the creativity aspect of it.

0:19:27 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, yeah, I, I’m finding I don’t use just one model either that I will. I’ll give you an example of something I did. So I drove to a conference last year and it was like I drove from Boone to Atlanta. So it was a good five hour drive. I had a lot of time to listen to audiobooks and think. And that’s when like my mind gets going. And it’s good because I had a lot of time to think, think about stuff that I wanted to take back to my team, especially being at this conference.

0:19:52 Taylor Wilson: And so on the drive home I just opened up. I had a lot of things like I was kind of, you know, spinning on. So I just opened up ChatGPT and talked into it for a While and then asked ChatGPT to like make sense of it and like put it into a structured format and then create a. Help create an outline for a presentation that I could then put into. So I used ChatGPT for a lot of that.

0:20:25 Grady Teske: Yeah.

0:20:25 Taylor Wilson: So again, like you said, like, it’s all my thinking, but I’m using the tool so I don’t have to. 1 remember this later. I’m driving so I can. I can just talk and then I don’t have to type it all up later. And then what I did was I found this AI presentation builder. I wanted to test out how you could take something from a Word doc and turn it into a presentation. I first put it in Canva because we mostly use Canva, but Canva was like, this is too long.

0:20:55 Taylor Wilson: It was lengthy. It was lengthy. But then I went and used. What was it? Slide something. I’ll put it in the show notes. It was pretty cool. And it took a Word doc and completely put it into a full presentation deck, all AI. So again, like, different platform, different model. So I’m finding that even with my writing, sometimes I’ll jot it out in one, but then I’ll go, fine tune it in another. Yeah, you know, like jot it out maybe in chatgpt and then fine tune it and see what Claude does with it. Because packaging matters too.

0:21:28 Grady Teske: Right. I think that’s the other thing that we do with, with I use a lot is like repackage content for different formats. And again, there. One of the things that I haven’t seen these come out, but I’m sure there’s going to be a rapper soon is like, you know, we just started my newsletter one. I just signed it up for a ton of newsletters. Yeah, tell me, tell me what these look like, how does it convert? And I keep feeding it different newsletters of people that I like and.

0:21:55 Grady Teske: But I’m focused entirely on the structure of it. And we tried to do the same with video, but it was so much data that I couldn’t. It wasn’t cost effective to use it at all, to break it down. But I was, you know, my thought process on that is eventually we’ll get there is that, you know, there’s probably something with. Tell me, like actually analyze what the shade of lighting in the room that people are using on high conversion videos, how. What is their time between paragraphs or think, you know what I mean, there’s all these small spaces or these things that you can identify that will help things fit. And I think as long as we continue to remain in an algorithm driven society, using models to identify packaging is going to be a huge value, but it can never really approach what’s again, I think at the end of the day there’ll never be a point somebody uses AI quite a bit where it could actually take away from the fact that we just want to be people being with other people and then another person solves a problem for us. There’s something magical that happens that makes it that much more special and endear.

0:23:01 Grady Teske: And so yeah, I think is what we’re actually kind of seeing is again we’re kind of pioneering a model around leveraging again standard processes that everybody knows that works around paid acquisition and outreach and email is basically driving communications to help us inform, to help build a lot of micro founder brands that create authority around it. That the reason for that is partnering with people like you then that can do the content side of stuff.

0:23:29 Grady Teske: So that when the founders then and when the team members actually get into the conversation at those maximum optimized human interactions, it’s enough about them is known and said and shared already through the thing that’s been generated through their work, through the content that’s driven that they can come in empty and spend the time on the call with the other person. I’m using Tony Robbins as a guy.

0:23:51 Grady Teske: Like, can I get to a point where Tony Robbins has done enough coursework that when you actually go to his shows and you meet with them, he lets you kind of go through how it applies to your situation and you just feel like he did so much, but all he really did was follow Dale Carnegie and just sat and listened. That’s the model. I think that as we move forward, more and more companies are going to be, I think built around is how to maximize that humanity. Adam’s onto something there.

0:24:15 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, yeah, he’s great at it. I’ve been following him maybe a year or so now, but really have learned a ton from following that guy.

0:24:28 Grady Teske: He’s natural.

0:24:29 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.

0:24:30 Grady Teske: But it does.

0:24:30 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.

0:24:31 Grady Teske: Having met him, there’s a lot of work around coming natural. So I’m just.

0:24:35 Taylor Wilson: Oh yeah, I’m sure.

0:24:37 Grady Teske: Yeah.

0:24:37 Taylor Wilson: Okay. So okay, let’s talk about, let’s dig a little deeper in this because I’m curious about and I’m having some conversations with people about AI video for like talking heads. So. And again, I think this kind of fits into like what can you automate, what can you streamline in your systems and your processes and marketing and sales. And now we have these AI avatars where like Grady you could have an avatar.

0:25:06 Taylor Wilson: You could just write blogs and scripts and have your avatar make your videos. So like you show up looking the same fly guy with the hat on every day and you don’t worry about if you’re having a bad hair day or if you’re sick or whatever, you can like constantly put out videos. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about that, hurting that maximize humanity, you know, things talking about. A lot of people are on the flip side saying like, yeah, but it’s so like efficient. Like you can put out so much more video content. And I’m like, but it’s not you.

0:25:42 Taylor Wilson: So I’m curious what you think about this. I’m asking this question of a lot of other marketing leaders right now because I’m like, I haven’t done it and I’ve been not so sure about it.

0:25:52 Grady Teske: So I’ve worked on scaling out video both in a short form and long. Now I’m much more focused on long form. And I’ll say this, if you’re trying to do it as a value add to a business or really trying to build if there’s things you care about and you want to convey long form video is the way that to look at it, what’s long form? It’s like three to five minutes, not really long form anymore. Faceless channels are significantly easier to scale than, you know, entertainer being on all the time, like good quality apping for a lot of reasons and mainly what you mentioned, but I think like also faceless channels.

0:26:28 Grady Teske: Let me, let me end around this conversation once and go look at what’s happened on X over the last couple of years when X was known as Twitter was, was famous to be the conversation of the Internet, right? It was always about that short conversation. People created content and to do really well on Twitter, you had to create content that would pull other people into ad, right? So it was always about like, you know, hooking and things like that and basically openers.

0:26:55 Grady Teske: Increasingly as the algorithm shifted to follow primarily TikTok and follow more of an entertainment value. Elon famously said at the beginning of this year that they’re working on reducing regrettable time on platform, which is like a really wild metric. They read between the lines. It’s like we just want people hooked in on a serotonin boost of what TikTok is. TikTok is perfected. Like the quick move on to the next thing and get through it.

0:27:19 Grady Teske: So what’s done though is what’s happened out of that is I can tell you as a buildable business resource. They completely destroyed one of the greatest marketplaces of Internet, particularly in working in tech because it became so much easier to create content. The amount of content rose up and you can see it reflected in the standardized, essentially the Wikipedia of content where people are just taking a Wikipedia page, breaking it down over and over and over again and that’s what’s reflecting.

0:27:50 Grady Teske: So it removed a lot of. For people that are like using it as a thought processing or a conversation platform and pulled that out of there. And to me what I see all that going, honestly is it’s kind of the. I’ll use even another, an example. I think we’re at the stage of social media and content at that level at the same stage that we were at with network television in the 90s. And what I mean by that is late night reality TV and long form ads have taken over everything.

0:28:21 Grady Teske: All of the networks are now just giving this really soft, valueless content that’s retaining people’s eyes for a little bit. But a lot of the like real deep, hard hitting media has moved completely off of there and on the different platforms and people are following it. And I think it’s just also a part of the reality too that like now we’ve been, this might not have been the answer you’re looking for, but now we’re at a stage where Facebook and social feeds have been around for over a decade plus naturally I think that that experience is kind of on its way out.

0:28:52 Grady Teske: So to the people, I think to me the people that are building in that space and really anchoring on it right now, I actually think that there’s lots of short term wins in it, but long term it’s just like paid acquisition. It’s just a rising cost. You’re going to have to do it at a higher volume to have it make sense and you’re going to get significantly less impact every time you do it. So yeah, I mean that’s again, that was probably totally under round. But does it align with what you’re seeing? You do a lot more content than I do.

0:29:21 Taylor Wilson: So yeah, yeah, I mean I think, I don’t know, it’s like, it’s funny sometimes I see that when we turn the volume up it doesn’t necessarily mean the impact goes up. Yeah, it’s almost like you can become too noisy. And I’ve been thinking a lot more lately about. And sometimes when we turn the volume down we see engagement impressions either stay about the same or even sometimes grow. And I think it’s because sometimes you can just Put so much out there that it, it’s hard for people to see all your stuff and care about all your stuff all the time.

0:30:00 Taylor Wilson: They’re scrolling, scrolling. And it’s almost like, okay, I’ve seen this guy enough, you know, Like I, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced. I do. And so when you think about. Yeah, and so when you think about that like quality versus quantity and like, sure, the AI video avatars can give you quantity and it can be high quality. I’m sure, like some of them look really good. Although I notice like people’s eyes are up a lot. Like their eyebrows are always up until sign. I was watching one this morning and I was like, I watched a side by side where it was like normal, like real guy, avatar guy. And I was like, oh. Like I was like, what’s the difference? And then I was like, his eyebrows are raised like he’s excited like the whole time.

0:30:46 Taylor Wilson: So it’s kind of weird and inauthentic looking. And I don’t know that that’s necessarily doing a lot.

0:30:52 Grady Teske: Yeah, sorry. Sorry to catch you up. I think there’s something too like you’re saying. So I’ve also played around with community marketing a lot. I’m a big fan of community marketing because I have a real traditional B2B background and all verticals have communities built in and they just have different experiences. Right. And one of the things that I’ve learned a lot and keeps getting reinforced is that like if you really want to build out good authority through content and build out even like a system or a funnel or something that drives into creating a value around you.

0:31:22 Grady Teske: Overexposure is a real problem. It’s a significant problem. You have to be really careful to curate a micro celebrity status and to bring in to create impediments or to bring in like handlers and different things that make it seem, seem like you have to cultivate the environment around it. So again there I think to your point, where could it potentially be useful? I mean, I have a hard time as somebody who uses AI a lot thinking about that because I think we’ve got a really long documented history of using AI agents within call centers and things like that and nobody appreciating the value of that. So really, even in direct personal experiences, it’s a net negative to put people in contact with that too long. And even no matter how human the experience can come, we’re not dumb.

0:32:13 Grady Teske: Just like I watched an AI video of an AI agent talking on a call the other day. And then realizing it was talking to a parrot and then completely changing the thing. It’s like we’re a lot like processing systems AI. We’re going to catch on to things and adjust based off the scenario. So it’s a delicate dance. But at the bottom, my. I guess my two guiding points are always this. Number one, can I use it to help me document, listen, and research better A hundred percent all over the board. And I don’t think there’s like I’m. There’s no way that I’m even getting close to brushing up at how much it can help you there.

0:32:50 Grady Teske: And the flip side of it is, obviously I talked a lot about systems and they use big words. But the reality of it is, is it’s so easy now to connect things together. Now AI is the processing power that helps us do it. But the reality is all software is clickable. It’s compostable. They’re small puzzle pieces. And with AI, you can make it really easy to put these pieces together to turn anything into what I’m calling a system.

0:33:16 Grady Teske: And then if you’re really interested in fun with it or have a good time with it, then you start figuring out how to use the AI to learn on top of what it’s doing and inform back and improve that way. And that’s a real simple model that anybody can do that I think provides value to whatever you’re doing ultimately. One of my favorite quotes is the Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

0:33:40 Grady Teske: Our whole job in life, I think, is to get us as many shots as possible and when we see them, to take them. And so AI is bound to help us do that.

0:33:49 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, that’s a good way to look at it. Okay. I’ve got a couple of other things I want to get into, so let’s talk about building customer centric systems. So we’ve talked about systems being the foundation. We’ve talked about how to think a little bit about AI in the business around systems. What about building systems that work for customers? Because it’s like we could build a system that internally is great for us, but if it’s not great for the customers and who cares?

0:34:21 Grady Teske: Yeah, kind of.

0:34:22 Taylor Wilson: Right?

0:34:23 Grady Teske: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have two guiding principles on. This is like really experimental, I think, right now. And to be honest, this is where I think it gets to the increasing. I don’t like to use the word personalization because personalization has been so overdone, especially in marketing. It’s customization of the experience. And one of my guiding points on it is like, if we can use technology to drive us an assistant and people like being part of a process. People been purchasing cars one way, they hate it for years, but like they still do it because they know what’s happening, you know, and they’re guided along that thing.

0:34:59 Grady Teske: How do we take something like that and make it all lighter? Like the experience lighter, you know, and that’s driving it into like. Well, if we’re running it out and we’ve got like, if we’re, I think about user journey mapping quite a bit, which if the audience isn’t from familiar, is like sitting down and identifying all the stages that a user or a customer goes through, working with you before and after.

0:35:23 Grady Teske: So I use that as a guideline. And then we start to fall underneath it. I start to look. We’re like, okay, we’ve got a funnel or a system here, we’ve got one here, we’ve got it in here. And then before I keep going on, I’m always to build more of these workflows around each stage. I start to go back in and think about like, well, how do we lighten the load of this to make it faster? What are the key steps that come through it?

0:35:43 Grady Teske: So this is one way that we’re doing it. What do I mean by lightning? Again, it’s really custom. It can be a lot of things. It’s like, how do we shorten the amount of contacts between a call or how do we take the value of a call using something like short form video sharing back and forth to get that sort of feel, to bring the humanity in. Even basic things like audio notes are having a return to usefulness. I use them as a business owner all the time. I send my team customers audio notes all the time because transcription’s gotten so good off of it.

0:36:17 Grady Teske: So it’s one how do we lighten the load? And then the other aspect of it is again, the whole design of creating a system. I think in my, my guiding light is this idea of like customer aligned companies or customer serving companies. And so like as much as possible, all of those customer touch points have to be using the dale Carnegie model, 80 to 90% about them and very little about me, you know.

0:36:43 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.

0:36:44 Grady Teske: And that’s where we can. That’s where you can use not just AI, but also technology and content are two really big drivers as a whole to really do that. So when, even if you’re not there on a call, if somebody’s through a funnel, it can be entirely about them. And you can set up ways to listen to what’s happening and pay attention so that when you do come onto it like we’re informed and we were very much reflecting what they’ve been telling us.

0:37:11 Grady Teske: Those are, those are my guiding principles. And I know it’s kind of vague, but it’s, the reality of it is, is that I think we’re very much on the edge of the evolution and it’s hard to put down a thought and say like this is what it’s going to be because like I said with social media I almost think in like 18 months to three years it’s going to be a whole different environment.

0:37:30 Taylor Wilson: So what do you think it’s going to evolve to? Like, do you have predictions?

0:37:35 Grady Teske: Oh, I think in general it’s a prompt based society. Everything’s coming to the user. I think like, you know, we never really got rid of print mail and postcards. We still, people still do telephone calls, billboards are really successful. Email, cold outreach, paid acquisition is going to be, continue to be successful. But where things are going to go is just like with search engine optimization. I’m hearing a lot about LLM LEO optimization now Today somebody asked me like well what do I think that looks like? And I’m like, I have a really hard time like we’re still building around traditional search research but I’m trying to, if we’re, if we’re writing or creating for LEO LLM optimization, I just try to put it in a conversational sort of a vibe, you know.

0:38:21 Taylor Wilson: Yeah.

0:38:22 Grady Teske: Sense there is that as people use AI to search more and have bring the Internet to them, we’re going to start to see what Google was doing over the last 10 years. If it’s just backlink having bad content for the purchase of spamming the Google ranking, it just downgrades it. So what do I think AI agents are going to learn to recognize for us humanity and value. That’s where I’m trying to play around with. And again we don’t know the results yet because there’s still a very small percentage of the population that’s doing it.

0:38:54 Grady Teske: But what I do see is younger audiences are prompting things more, they’re coding more, you know, they’re using, they’re building things by putting things together. And not even like builders and creative people, just the average people are starting to do this more. And so it tends me to believe that it’s all self directed and it’s about like you know, trying to put out your value in a conversational way. That creates authority that, like, when somebody’s looking for it, you’ll get returned as a result. No. No. Is that it? Yeah. In that prompt model. Is that a good answer?

0:39:27 Taylor Wilson: I like it. I like it. It’s. It’s. We don’t know. We don’t know. But I like that you’re thinking about how it’s going to be more associated around the Internet, like people bringing the Internet to them.

0:39:40 Grady Teske: Yeah, I just keep thinking like at. In every stage too. It’s always technology. And before technology, all of it was designing to get ways to get people together faster. And again, so that’s how I just think about, like, what are the. When. When you want to be in a scenario and you have something that’s getting solved, what do you want the other side to kind of be like? And then I’m like, that’s. So nowadays I think we know that, like, you can just be like that. And if you continue to be like that consistency consistently, I think you’re going to end up winning out.

0:40:13 Grady Teske: You’re going to be. Rather than building an audience on social and turning it on, which is kind of a defeating process in some cases now, like, you’ll be able to create a way for people to come to you when they’re ready.

0:40:24 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Oh, I like that.

0:40:26 Grady Teske: It’s an interesting idea.

0:40:28 Taylor Wilson: No, I’m kidding. No. Yeah. No, I didn’t say that. No, I like that a lot. Grady, if there’s like one thing you would tell someone who’s like, starting from the ground up, building a system at their company for marketing and sales, and they’re like, I don’t even know where to get started. What’s your like, you know, hey, this is what I should have known a long time ago when approaching this problem.

0:40:58 Grady Teske: In a sense, like, really all it takes to do, all you really need to focus on is doing the same thing that you started off loving, which is introducing yourself in the product to 10 people and then thinking about what happened in that. And that helped you define and create the product. Right. So it’s this simple model of execute, analyze and iterate. If you allow those three things to guide the process of building your team and what a system means. And again, this isn’t something complicated.

0:41:23 Grady Teske: It’s just documenting what you’re doing and putting these things together. This is the process of building a successful business. It’ll help demystify you where the next steps are. And as long as you can do that and build a culture around it too, it’s also Going to keep your business very close to the customer, which will help guide you as the founder to get that around the bend vision that’s going to help you stay ahead of it and seem like you really know.

0:41:47 Grady Teske: So really my keynote to founders in general is this, is that like whatever we’re doing, we’re overcomplicating it. Just really make it simple. Try to find ways to continually meet more people, expose what you’re doing to more people, and build content and systems in place that allow you to just sit there, listen and connect. That’s the steps to grow a strong business and most importantly, will make you feel really good about what you’re doing and happy about the process of your business.

0:42:15 Grady Teske: So at least it works for me.

0:42:19 Taylor Wilson: No, I like that. I like execute, analyze, iterate. I don’t use those exact words, but I think really similarly about it. Even if executing at the beginning in terms of a system is like shared Google Docs, as light as possible. Like stop. Yeah, start. I mean start, not stop, just start doing it.

0:42:38 Grady Teske: Start. You know, Reid Hoffman has a great quote. If you’re not embarrassed about the product, you’re talking about it too late. But really, like there’s a second side of that too. The less you have to say about the product, the more the other customer, the person on the other side, can tell you what the product is, what it needs to be for them, and who you need to be for them. So let people allow you to define yourself around what they want out of you.

0:42:59 Grady Teske: It becomes really simple then.

0:43:01 Taylor Wilson: I love it. I love it. Hey, Grady, this has been fun talking shizzle with you. So if people want to find you, get in touch online, sign up for your newsletter, all those good things. What’s the best way? Where should they find you?

0:43:14 Grady Teske: So I’m on every platform, but primarily on LinkedIn. But you can find me on all of them at gradyteskia using my full name. My newsletter is really built around what I’m learning with the systems we’re putting in place and how it’s changing them a lot now. It’s like headcount and AI because. Because that’s what we’re finding really fast. That’s the weekly invoice dot com. Excuse me, weekly invoice dot com. And if you’re interested in seeing what we do as a company again, what we do as a business is we try to get in, do it as human contractors to try to figure out best practice and as soon as we start to see results, allow it to inform the next steps for you, as well as building a system and documenting how this works so that overall you’re getting not only the results in the identity from your business, you’re also gaining a system that will continue to grow and keep you close to the customers. And that’s at risingtides IO in general, if you can find me on any of those places, as if you couldn’t tell, I love conversation.

0:44:10 Grady Teske: Everything that I do is influenced by what people are telling me. So share with me what you see, what’s interesting about this, and I’d love to have a chance to learn how I can apply what I know to the magic that you’re doing. That’s. That’s what I love about my job in life. So.

0:44:24 Taylor Wilson: And good hats.

0:44:25 Grady Teske: Yes, always good hats.

0:44:28 Taylor Wilson: Well, hey, I hope this was helpful to you. If you are building a business or iterating your business or marketing department and you’re thinking about your systems, definitely reach out to Grady. He’s been great to get to know. And until next time, go get all that good shizzle done. Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode.

0:45:00 Taylor Wilson: We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking Shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good juicy business growth Shizzle that you’d like to hear about.

0:45:27 Taylor Wilson: Be sure to get in touch with us and follow along at creativeshizzle.com or shoot us an email at hello @ creativeshizzle.com now until next time, we hope you go get your big SHIZZLE done.