The Founder Bottleneck: How to Scale with Systems, SEO & AI | Austin Willman

If you feel like your business can’t grow without you personally touching everything, this episode of Small Business Pivots is for you.

Michael D. Morrison sits down with Austin Willman — Partnerships Manager at Digital Web Solutions, founder of Willman Ventures, and host of E-Coffee with Experts — to talk about one of the biggest problems in small business: the founder becoming the bottleneck. Austin works in SEO, digital PR, visibility strategy, and now AEO, helping brands earn authority through placements and content that can be discovered in both traditional search and AI-driven search experiences. 

In this conversation, Austin shares what he learned working around high-level founder-led brands and why small business owners need to stop separating themselves from their company. His message is clear: your company is your brand, and the systems, language, and expectations inside your business all flow from you first.

Michael and Austin dig into:

• why founder-led businesses often get stuck between lead generation, sales, and delivery
• how to build simple SOPs and workflows without overwhelming yourself
• why shared language and clear expectations matter before you ever build complex systems
• how AI can help with documentation, prompting, brainstorming, research, and content creation
• where SEO is heading, how AEO fits in, and why founder content is becoming more important
• why narrow, consistent, depth-driven content wins over broad generic content

Austin also shares his own story — from small-town Ohio to Ohio State, then through coaching, consulting, Mindvalley, door-to-door solar, Cardone Ventures, Neil Patel’s orbit, and Digital Web Solutions — and explains how curiosity, proximity, and learning from world-class founders shaped the way he thinks about business today. 

If you are a business owner who knows you need better systems, clearer messaging, and stronger visibility online, this episode will help you think bigger and execute smarter.

What you’ll learn:

• Why the founder becomes the bottleneck in small businesses
• How to create SOPs without building a giant operations manual overnight
• Why company values and shared language come before better systems
• How to use AI as a coworker instead of just a chatbot
• What SEO and AEO mean for founder-led brands in 2026
• Why personal-brand content is becoming a serious business asset
• How to think about go-to-market strategy in a noisier digital world
• Why narrow focus and consistent content beat broad generic marketing

Transcript

Meet Austin Wilman

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business Pivots where we have guests from around the world that can help our listeners who are generally small business owners who are stuck trying to get to the next level. And we bring on guests from around the world that have gotten to that next level and kind of share some insights with us. But if you've listened to the podcast before, you know that no one can introduce their name or their business like the business owner. So, my friend, I let you have the floor to do that. Tell us just a little bit about you before we get started.

SPEAKER_00 0:29

Awesome. I appreciate that. Michael, my name is Austin Wilman. I'm a partnerships manager at Digital Web Solutions, also the founder of Wilman Ventures. And I'll get into the project that we're launching right now, which may be even relevant to you if you're listening and you're a founder-led brand or founder-led agency. My primary role is to help agencies and brands become more visible online through SEO and now AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. And we do that through working with household name publications like Forbes, Newsweek, Yahoo, MSN, and getting your brand featured by these household names. So that's my, you know, those are my two roles. I also host a podcast where I interview marketing leaders and agency founders from around the world. It's called eCoffee with experts. And I am approaching 100 episodes on that podcast. So, Michael, I'm excited to be here with you and share what's going on in my world. And I hope uh I hope the audience can find some valuable tactical takeaways today.

From Small Town To Global Brands

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Absolutely. Well, congratulations on your 100th episode. Uh, for those of us that do podcasts, we know how challenging and exciting that is to try that milestone. So, congratulations. We'll talk more about that. But but let's uh I know a lot of our listeners, they really like to get to know our listeners because some people came from wealth, some people didn't. And so sometimes for these to be applicable and relatable, I kind of got to know their story first, right? So just catch us up a little bit to when you started adulting, kind of what your life was growing up, so we can get get a taste of you.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah, I love that. You're in Oklahoma City, correct, and I grew up in a small town in Ohio called Attica. There's under a thousand people in the town, it's actually considered a village. And actually, if you look on the Census Bureau's statistics, the population is declining. I was the first person in my graduating class of 77 people from Seneca East High School to move out of the town and go to college. I went to the Ohio State University and I started in the the summer quarter before they moved to semesters. I was in the Ohio State Marching Band, and that was partially the reason why I why I went down early. So from there, I have a psychology degree, and I my first venture into entrepreneurship was actually launching a uh it was kind of a coaching program for uh for adolescents to help them understand really who they are and what they want before they decide what to do with their life, aka invest money into college or start a job, only to get burnt out, have turnover, accrue massive uh student debt. So that project was actually launched back in a town similar smaller, not smaller than Attica, but similar to Attica's size. Um, and it was that was my first exit. I sold that business to a nonprofit and I was very happy about that. This was probably almost a decade ago now. From there, I moved to Malaysia to work with a tech slash marketing personal development company called Mind Valley. I cut my teeth on community management there. I moved to Istanbul, Turkey during the pandemic and stayed there for yeah, about six months doing coaching and business consulting. I moved back to the US to do door-to-door solar, where I was, yeah, working a commission only job selling door-to-door solar in, you know, the sunshine state of Arizona. Uh, I did that for three years, expanding my uh expanding my territory to Texas, South Carolina. And then I ended up in Northern California, where I was leading a team uh before I exited the industry, went to um an organization called Cardone Ventures doing small business consulting. And then through there, I managed a uh separately managed a community of agency founders for uh a marketer named Neil Patel. And that's what introduced me to digital web solutions. So that's where I'm at now. We are also launching a um uh founder community at the end of this month, and in tandem with that, Wilman Ventures, um, yeah, like I said at the top of the episode, helps founder-led agencies and brands produce more content and without uh putting something else on their plate. So that brings us up to speed.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Well, that's not a simple journey. And for our listeners that may not have heard of those organizations you talked about, those are high level. So Eric Edmead, I don't know. Yep, yeah, with Mind Valley. I actually follow him for speaking. Uh oh yeah, his his speaking talents. Uh Cardone is Grant Cardone, Neil Patel, SEO, master of the world, master in the world of SEO, you know, that kind of stuff. So these are big, big names. How did you get into those organizations? Because that that's not an easy task. They they require high level.

Proximity To Founders As A Career Strategy

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Yeah, yeah. And I can I can appreciate that you actually know who those people are because you know, in the in the business, in the marketing world, like you said, these are these are world leaders. And the way that Wilman Ventures came to existence is I saw with Mind Valley, with Cardone Ventures, with NP Digital, these are all massive, nine-figure, founder-led brands. And I was like, what the heck? Like, you know, we're talking about scalability, we're talking about processes, we're talking about workflows and all of that. I I think the I think the understanding for small business owners is they say, I am the bottleneck because I am the face of the business. And I get stuck in this, in this trap between business generation, lead generation, sales, and actually producing the deliverables or the, you know, the outcomes. And so they're stuck in this trap and they say, like, there's no way that I can create content. And, you know, I can't make time to create personal brand content because I'm busy doing these two things. And my challenge to you as the listener is to look at these brands and say, how did they do it? And the answer is they started with content. They started with, I mean, obviously they have a base-level foundation for what they do and how they execute, but they leaned into their primary asset, which is their own personality, their own personal brand. So I saw this amongst, you know, the companies that I worked for. And I said, in each one of these, I didn't go to have a 30-year career. Like I knew that the future of business is not going to be uh a 30-year career where employees stay, like my mom and my uh dad, my stepdad. The future of business is uh is different. We'll get into that in a separate topic. Um, but yeah, you asked how I got into those. It was really out of curiosity, and I wanted to go to each of these organizations to learn about the back-end systems, but also to get closer to the founder. So Tony Robbins, I'm a big fan. I've been to many of his events and it was actually on staff at several of them. Um, but Tony Robbins says that proximity is power, and I took it to heart. So that's what took me around the world and got me closer to these leaders.

Systems That Scale Founder-Led Teams

SPEAKER_01 8:31

That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, let's let's dive into systems because I know there's so many facets of the business that small business owners can get stuck in, but I know something that can basically be a huge return on investment is systems within an organization. You mentioned workflows and things at these big organizations. So let's just kind of start there with what do you see those looking like in the bigger organizations and how can a small business owner get started implementing that? Because you have to start somewhere. You can't just all of a sudden have a whole playbook of workflows and systems. So kind of give us your insights on that.

Using AI To Define Brand DNA

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah. So as a small business owner, if you're like most small businesses in the US, which uh comprises like, I don't know, 90 plus percent of small businesses in the US are are, you know, basically the founder or a founder plus up to three people, um, typically around 3 million or under. So if you're listening to this and that describes you, you are not alone. And typically the way that these businesses start and grow is the founder has uh a task or a deliverable that they're able to do. They have a skill and they start to deliver that. And they do it until you know they grow word of mouth, they produce great work because they are the center and they have control over everything. Eventually, the business grows to a point where they can no longer handle everything alone and they start hiring help to outsource uh a few of those tasks. The challenge is most founders aren't, let me rephrase that. Most founders are waiting until they're overwhelmed to start looking for help. And what happens is they add another task to their already overflowing plate. And the urgency of the offloading tends to skip the documentation. And you'll hear this like, oh, well, just hire for uh, you know, hire for there's a couple ways to do it, hire for talent or hire for skill, and then uh, you know, just make sure that they can uh you can deal with them, or you can hire for personality and then you can train the skill. But what I'm seeing working at these high-level organizations is expectation setting from the very beginning. So how you uh laying the foundation, some people call them like core values, operating principles, guiding principles, having something that describes you and how you work as an individual person translates to the rest of the brand. I think a lot of founders don't quite get that. They're they're seeing themselves and their brand separately because it's a it's a different LLC or an entity than their first and last name. But the reality is your business is a direct reflection of your own brain. So the first step I would say is having some sort of operating system in terms of values, what you're good at, how you approach problems, how you, you know, how you interact with customers, the language that you use. This is all like personal brand DNA. And creating some sort of a, I'll call it a company Wikipedia that has definitions for everything. You you have a certain language that you use with yourself. And the first time you bring on an employee or you're starting to bring on several new employees, you have to use the same language to communicate. Otherwise, there's going to be misinterpretations, and that creates a lot of friction. So before we even get into building out processes, the processes are built on shared language. And LLMs, large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, they can help with that. Um, uh an easy takeaway would be to go into one of these LLMs, even on a free plan, and say, hey, I'm looking to build out documentation for my business. I'm looking to define my personal brand, I'm looking to define uh my core values for my business. Help me define these by asking me questions one by one where I can give my extended answer, which you will then turn into a documentation, which is like an SOP that can be easily followed during the onboarding process. So I'll pause there, Michael, and get your thoughts and see if that's what you're seeing as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

I love just your little prompt on AI of ask it one question at a time. Because I know sometimes business owners get overwhelmed, they'll ask it something, and it just shoots out a whole novel and they get overwhelmed and they're like, well, that's not helping me at all. That just adds more to my plate. So exactly learning to use those tools properly. And I know that you're into AI and I'm into AI, but I'd love to hear your insights on how to use AI to be your asset.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

Yeah, to be your companion. So it is March 5th right now, and as of gosh, a couple days ago, it was all over the news that the US government is using AI in their, you know, in their government infrastructure. The AI that they were using is called anthropic, and their primary product is Claude. If you're not familiar with it, uh Claude is a competitor to Chat GPT, and there are you know, there's many different differences between these companies, but essentially what's happening is the US government was using Claude or Anthropic internally, and there were some issues with the US wanting to do specific things with AI, and Anthropic disagreed, and so the government was like, all right, we're not gonna use anthropic anymore. And now OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, stepped in uh and said, we're gonna do it. The reason I'm setting this context is because this caused a lot of public backlash. Uh, and many chat GPT users see this and say, oh, uh Anthropic is standing their ground. They're a much more ethically, you know, they're a much more ethical company. Uh, so a lot of people are moving from Chat GPT to Claude. And Claude just yesterday released an entire free course of how to use AI and how to use anthropic, how to use Claude, how to use Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Like all of these tools that are like revolutionizing the way that business operates are now free and very easy to go through. So that's the first thing I would do is I think it's uh I think it's anthropic.skilljar.com, I believe is the is the URL where you can go and learn those things, or you could just Google it.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

Very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

Yeah. Yeah. Um, the I guess the last thing I will say, or the first thing I will say on that, is learning how to prompt is is gonna serve you very well. Learning how to create a custom GPT or uh a project in Claude, uh, where you basically give the instructions to the AI of how it should interact with you, just like I mentioned in the in in the previous rant on this episode, uh, like giving instructions of how other people interact with you through your uh brand guidelines and your you know your values, same thing applies with the AI. You have to instruct it how to communicate with you. So that's the first thing I would do is figure out how to create your own custom GPT. That way it can be um you can work with it just like a, yeah, just like a coworker, and then understanding how to prompt to get the best responses. So that's the very first step.

Set Expectations Early And Tight

SPEAKER_01 16:19

I love that. I love that. So something you mentioned about core values and your brand. I think what a lot of business owners don't realize if you don't establish that, you're bringing everyone else's brands, and that's where the chaos starts. So, like each each of us as employees, as team members, we've worked other places, and all we know is what we've experienced. So I'm bringing my experience, Lulu's bringing hers, you're bringing yours, and and there's no there's no DNA of the company, it doesn't really exist. You've got different things, and uh so what you mentioned was super important for people to understand and hear and go implement, do that first, because if you don't, you're gonna have chaos in the end.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yep. Yep. Expectation setting up front is massively important. And one of the other things that I've learned through through leading teams and in companies is a lot of people want they they need approval from the public. They need social approval. Like they don't want to be seen in a bad light, they don't want to be rude, they don't want to be mean, they need to be accepted. And it's this need for acceptance that typically makes relationships easy at the beginning and rocky later on. So if you can get over this need for acceptance when you're starting a business relationship, um, setting the standards and the expectations high and being quick to correct early on will help you relax the standards later on and allow more freedom. But what I found is keep the leash tight at the very beginning, both with AI and with new employees. Uh otherwise, think about it, it's much harder. Let's say you have kids, right? Uh, and they're into their teenage years, let's say they just appeared as a teenager into your life and you're their parent. Uh, imagine the day that they appear, you say, guys, there's no curfew. Uh, you know, do whatever you want, stay out as long as you want, have fun. And then after a week later, you find out they're coming home at 2 a.m., they're drunk, they're whatever, and you're like, all right, now we're gonna crack down and I'm gonna implement some rules. You have a 9 p.m. curfew every day, and you're not allowed to do this, and you're not allowed to do that. How difficult is it to implement that as opposed to saying, day one, you have a 9 p.m. curfew. If you're not here, there are consequences. And then after a week of them following that, you can relax and say, you know what, you've been really great. Now we can extend it to 10, 11, midnight, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

Like that's that's that's a great analogy.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

Yeah, that's how you have to think about it.

Simple SOPs That Anyone Can Follow

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Yeah. So going from the brand to systems, yeah. Let's uh poke on that for a minute because there's all kinds of books, all kinds of resources, courses that with different frameworks to use. How have you found a simple system to be built? Like, what are some guidelines that you would follow if you were starting a new business?

Time Tracking To Pick What To Offload

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah, well, I I love that. And it's very top of mind for me because I I am launching a new project. It's called willmanic.ai, and that's the one that helps founders uh proliferate their personal brand and drive business results uh basically with an hour a week. Um so we can do that. So I'm building out all the processes for that. Um, and the first thing that I would say is understand what theory of mind is. If you don't know what it is, look it up. But essentially it's the understanding that you, the way you see the world, you have your own context and your context is not the same shared context as other people. And if you have a developed strong theory of mind, it will be more clear to you to understand that when I am doing something in the back of my mind, when I'm building processes, I have to understand that when I'm building something, somebody else who does not have my experience, my knowledge, my uh ideas will be reading this or going through or watching it. Uh, and I have to make everything very clear for them. Uh, a simple tool that has honestly, Michael, revolutionized the way I'm doing business right now. Um, and uh if you don't have it, like I can share my link. But it's called it's called WhisperFlow. All it is is simple voice to text. iPhone has it, you know, Apple has it. Um, but it's a little bit different. I mentioned this because when you're talking about building a workflow, just speaking it as if you're telling somebody what you do is the easiest way to start. Open up a Google Doc, open up Whisperflow, and just say, all right, I'm gonna walk you through how I do this and get that initial documentation and then pass it through Claude and say, can you put this into like an SOP format? It'll, you know, make it really pretty and nice, and and and that's like a simple way to do it. There's also other tools. Um oh gosh, what's that one? I'm thinking of WhisperFlow, but I just mentioned that. Um, I can't think of it right now. It is scribe, scribe how is what it's called. Basically, you're walking through a workflow, you're sharing your screen, and it's documenting every click, it's documenting every keystroke. Um, but the idea is to create SOPs like as you do the process. So thinking about that is like understanding, okay, where do I start? What are the content, like what do I need in terms of context? Is that like login information? Is that like specific creative assets? Uh, do I need a specific skill set or knowledge in order to complete this? So what's the context? And then at the end, uh, what are Like what does done look like? And then what do next steps after this process is completed, what do those look like? So the way I format my SOPs is a clear description of what the process is, um, a brief description of like the purpose of the process, who it's for, who uses it, what the cadence is of when it's being used. And then I document the process usually with like a Loom video where I share my screen. That's the first step. And then I'll have that like kind of SOP text process walking through the steps. Uh at the very end, next steps uh or what done looks like, and then the very last thing is next steps.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Did you have a plan? Do you put out a plan of frequency of like one a week, or you're just gonna get it done in a day? Because I know time is of the essence with most small business owners, and I I can already picture our listeners going, that sounds like so much work.

SPEAKER_00 23:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. Uh, I can I can totally resonate with that. Um, there's another tool that I think will help you understand what you need to offload and document first. And it's a simple time tracking tool. It's called timely.com, t-i-m-e-l-y.com. There are multiple time tracking tools. I've just found that this one is the most user-friendly. It runs in the background, it documents your entire um ecosystem on your computer, not just your, you know, your web-based platforms. Uh, but just using timely, setting it up uh and running it for a week, it will show you what websites you're on, how long you're on them, when you open up iMessage on your computer, uh, when you open up, you know, the notes section on your computer. Literally everything you do, document that in something like timely, and then you can go back through and be like, gosh, I didn't realize I spent four hours on Tuesday like doing this thing, and that's the place that you should start. And the way to think about it is like, what is my time worth to me on an hourly basis if I were to just calculate it, and then multiply that hourly rate by the uh, you know, the time, uh, whatever's taking up the most time in your business, and then say, ask the question, can I hire this out or can I build this for cheaper than my time? If the answer is yes, like find the biggest gap where your time is the most expensive and the task that you're doing can be outsourced for the least amount of money and start there. That's what I would say. But you you have to have some sort of baseline documentation of where you're spending your time.

What AI Can Do For You Now

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Absolutely. Those are great insights. Let's talk about AI a little bit more because you're creating another company with AI being kind of the core product. So where where do you see this going? I know if we had a crystal ball, that would be nice, but we don't. So, where do you how how do you see it being helpful today? And how do you see it being helpful in the future with you being in the space as often as you are? You can kind of see it more than we can.

Niche Content, AEO, And Consistency

Willmanic AI And Fast Validation

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Yeah, definitely. Um, the first thing I'll say is I don't think most people are aware of of what AI is capable of today. Uh, most people think of AI and they think of Chat GPT, which is just a text platform. It's a glorified chat bot to most people. Um but there are AI systems that are literally anything that you're doing, it can do. Like there's very, very few uh tasks that humans can do that AI cannot. Let's just set that context. Um, and this is right now. This is Q1 2026. Um, and the way that machine learning and artificial intelligence works is it is not a uh it's not an incremental growth. It's exponential growth. And even within the last two months, three months, we start to understand what exponential growth looks like. There are now entire companies being built by one founder and a system of AIs. Um, so the most useful thing that I see AI being used for right now is uh research, competitive research, finding opportunities. Um, if you can figure out how to, again, with Anthropic's um skilljar course, you can figure out how to use plugins into Claude, like your data sources, your spreadsheets, your Google Drive, your CRM, uh, your you know, Stripe where you accept payments, and you can ask it to do research and find gaps and find opportunities in your current business that if you plugged those holes, you would immediately see a boost in margins. So that's the first thing. Uh, it can be used for research, it can be used for content creation. You know, I work in the SEO, AEO space. Um, the Google algorithm and the large language models are still looking at written content as the primary source for their for their retrieval. YouTube content is also included in that because uh, you know, just like this podcast, all it is is words. And spoken words are translated into a transcript. Uh, a couple years ago, Google purchased YouTube, and now Google indexes YouTube videos. So anything that's spoken on video is pulled by Google, which is then sourced. Um it's used as a source for for LLMs like ChatGPT. So content is the second thing, and optimized content is is really where we're at. So uh yeah, research, content creation, and then I would say just like brainstorming of like looking for opportunities, you know. As they as the founder, I heard this on a podcast the other day, and it really resonated with me. He said, as the CEO of your company, many people think that their job is to run operations, essentially. They're in charge of uh driving revenue and they're in charge of the quality control of their deliverables. While, yes, that is true, it's about 50% of the CEO's job. The other 50% should be spent promoting the business. How do you promote? Use AI to help you ideate, use AI to uh help you uh create content. There are many different tools and platforms that can help you cut video, distribute, take uh podcast recordings, take the transcript, and and just create omnipresent uh or omnichannel, uh omnichannel meaning like every every channel you can think of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever. There are tools that can help you do that. That's what willmanic.ai does. Uh, it helps you proliferate your brand so you can do the 50% of being a CEO, which is promoting the business. Um, so that's where I see it right now. And in the future, the way that I see work or the way that I think work is going to go is it's going to be based on partnerships. Instead of saying, okay, this is, you know, primarily my business, and I have uh a hundred employees, those will still exist. But I think what we'll see more and more of is the decentralization of tasks, basically. You will focus on what you love to do and what you get absolutely manic about, thus, willmanic.ai. What you're absolutely manic about, you will be able to focus on that. And everything you're not manic about, you will be able to partner with somebody else who is manic about that. And, you know, business owners will have their hands in six different projects at a time, but they're providing a similar service to all these other projects who are focused on other things. And it's this kind of like interesting space where you don't have to do everything as a business right now. You can just do one thing really well that you're absolutely passionate about and that you love, and then partner with everybody else. And the reason I think see this happening is because one, it's so easy uh to now offload things or create agents that can that can help you with the things that you don't want to do. The agents can help you deepen your skills and deepen your expertise and enhance the quality of your output exponentially. And when we're talking about content and finding the right audience, the algorithms look for consistency and depth of content. So if you're a business owner and you're talking about uh and you're talking about, you know, business in general, it's going to become harder and harder to find the right audience, as opposed to saying, like, I help small business owners, let's say in Oklahoma City, uh, who are founder led and have under 10 people on their team. I help them create uh processes with by using my, you know, um B O S, you know, my boss uh methodology. And here's what it is, that content is going to find the right audience uh much easier. And and LinkedIn algorithm, Instagram algorithm, LLMs, they reward consistency, depth, and narrow focus rather than they rather than rewarding a broad focus.

SPEAKER_01 31:53

Very interesting. Well, you've got a company you've scaled. So let's talk about the companies you're a part of and how they can help others.

Designing Go‑To‑Market Experiences

SPEAKER_00 32:03

Yeah, I love that. Uh, so I'm a part of a couple different projects right now. One is Digital Web Solutions, which I am the partnerships manager of North America. DWS uh is what this business is called. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, white label link building um SEO services. The there's over 400 people on the team. So operations and processes are very important to keep all of those people in line uh and and working at the same level. Um what I'm what I'm you know creating now is is using AI. So just to give you some context here, uh Wilman Ventures has been around for three years, I guess. Um, and the newest project, Willmanic AI, uh, basically came from an idea that I had last week. And this week I have three clients. Wow. That is a speed at which I'm able to move. And I like I have a, you know, there's a there's a AI system behind it that I was able to build by myself without even including the rest of my team. I was able to build it by myself, uh, just using Claude, um, you know, Claude Code and a couple other deployment tools. Um, but it just comes down to like when we're thinking of scale, what I've learned through my, I guess, decade of business and business consulting and things like that is uh you will likely have an idea or something that you want to roll out or something that you're again manic or excited about, but it doesn't matter until it's validated. So talking with people, experiencing like understanding what their challenges are, understanding what their you know pain points are, that's where that's where I've started now. I have realized this content creation thing for founders is a very big pain point. Um and so I'm able to easily create that. Uh, and the the way that I'm doing it is a way where I don't necessarily need to be involved in the process all that much. Um, the intention for Will Manic AI is to scale it to a point where uh where we can have obviously validated, we can have a client base, we can have customers, and then the plan is to exit that and sell it to a larger agency. Um, something interesting that I want to bring up, Michael, is the there's a couple things. Lifetime value of a client is becoming more and more important. Um, speed to revenue is becoming more and more and more important, and um pretty much, you know, go-to-market strategy. Uh, and where my head is at right now, what I'm the most excited about is go-to-market experience. Uh, so most businesses, when they're rolling out a, you know, a new product line or they're rolling out a new idea or even launching a new business, they typically like you need a way to present your offer to the world and bring people into your business. Now, the way most people do this would be like a lead magnet or some sort of entry-level offer where they exchange some sort of value for a name and an email address. People get into that, they get a small piece of value, and then they get put in this like holding pattern nurture cycle. And then eventually, when the time is right, they will engage further. Um, that is fine. But the way that I'm thinking of go-to-market experiences is delivering the most amount of value that I can up front so that they like the user almost feels guilty that they haven't paid for anything yet. Craziness. Um, so for example, I'll just walk through willmanic.ai. Our go-to-market strategy is uh we are reaching out to founder-led brands like founders and saying, hey, we can get you on multiple uh podcasts. This will help increase your authority. And then once they do that, we have a um, this is where the AI part comes in. It's kind of like an onboarding experience where they fill out their, you know, just some very brief information and the AI brings back an entire brand DNA, everything I talked about with like the guiding principles, the core values, the brand voice, um, who your audience is, the ICP, it brings back all of that in one session. And then um moving forward, it basically creates content for them. Like let's say it's five pieces of written LinkedIn content that is AEO, it's uh Answer Engine optimized that they can copy and paste literally within the same browser session. So, like that sort of a go-to-market experience where they're like, holy crap, I just I said yes to a cold email, and now I'm booked on a podcast next week, and I have a whole week's worth of AEO LinkedIn content without paying anything. Imagine the value that a user gets from this experience uh and the trust that that builds in a completely noisy marketplace. So, this is the way that I'm thinking about uh go-to-market strategy and acquiring new customers is to create this exhilarating experience that over-delivers on value and just builds trust right away. Like that's how people are opening their wallets for me.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

I know you've wet the ears of many and they want to know more. How can someone follow you directly to learn more about what you know?

How To Connect And Get Help

SPEAKER_00 37:37

Yeah, I love that. Thank you for the question. I'm active on LinkedIn. You can also, it's Austin Willman. Uh company website is willman.ventures slash home. And um if you're interested in that founder-led kind of brand content and things like that, um, you can check out willmanic.ai and you know go through the process and see if it's a good fit for you. Uh, if you're if you do, if you are looking for like SEO and AEO help, um, you know, for your for your business, then that is digitalwebsolutions.com. And um yeah, you can you can email me at Austin at digitalwebsolutions.com.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

Fantastic. Will I end with one question? It's kind of a broad question. So if you were in front of a group of business owners, different sizes, different industries, what's one thing that is applicable for them? It could be a book you've read, some insights, one last tip, forethought. Uh what would you say to these people?

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yeah, I think it's what I said at the at the top of the show, which is your company is your brand. Like you, like I think people try and separate it too much and they say, That's my company over there, but it's not. Like the the name, the foundation, the processes, everything about your company is you. And if you are not embracing that as a founder, like you're leaving opportunity on the table. So that and the second thing I'd recommend is there's a book called The Machine Layer. If you want to know everything about AI uh as it's happening right now, the machine layer is absolutely the best book to learn.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Fantastic. Well, you've been a blessing to many. Appreciate you taking the time to share your insights, and I wish you continued success.

SPEAKER_00 39:41

Thank you, Michael. You as well. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 39:45

Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, Boss. Our business is growing yours. Boss offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at business ownership simplified.com. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at Michael at michaeldmorsen.com. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.