Why Specialization Wins: Building a Creative Agency That Does Less and Earns More | Randall Hartman

Groundwrk founder Randall Hartman shares how he built a thriving creative agency by doing fewer things and doing them at a level most shops can't touch.

Topics Covered:

•       Why specialization beats the full-service agency model

•       How Groundwrk uses AI as a strategic tool, not a shortcut

•       The ethics of pricing, referrals, and growing a profitable creative business 

What does it take to build a creative agency that wins big-brand clients without a big-agency footprint? Randall Hartman didn't set out to reinvent the agency model, he just got tired of being busy and broke. After climbing the ranks at some of Denver's most respected shops, he launched Groundwrk with one clear mandate: specialize deeply, stay lean, and never grow a nonprofitable business.

Randall's philosophy starts before the first design file is ever opened. Every project kicks off with a stakeholder survey that goes well beyond asking clients what they think they do best. Groundwrk talks to internal teams, leadership, new hires, and, critically, the client's own customers. The result is a clear picture of what's making a brand stick, and where the gaps are hiding. It's a process that turns website projects into something much closer to brand audits.

On AI, Randall draws a sharp line between "lazy AI" and "strategic AI." Lazy AI is a quick prompt and a generic output. Strategic AI means uploading everything; call recordings, research docs, stakeholder feedback, so the tool becomes a genuine thinking partner. Groundwrk uses AI across copywriting, project management, business development, and even financial reporting. And they disclose it to clients. Transparency, Randall says, is just another part of the brand promise. 

The hardest lesson, and maybe the most honest, is on pricing and ethics. Randall openly wrestles with what it means to charge fairly, refer the right partners (not the highest-paying ones), and build something that nets money at the end of the month. He's a self-described Type 2 on the Enneagram, which means the instinct to please is always in tension with the instinct to protect the business. Watching him work through that tension out loud is one of the more refreshing things you'll hear on entrepreneurship.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•       Why saying no to digital marketing made Groundwrk more competitive, not less

•       How to use a stakeholder survey to uncover what's really making a brand sticky

•       What "lazy AI" vs. "strategic AI" looks like in a real creative workflow

"The answer is in specialization. You don't have time to learn it all. Be the expert. Obsess over it." — Randall Hartman

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

The answer isn't specialization. And I feel like it's always has been. And then it grew to this thing where like technology gets better and you can offer more services with AI or without AI. It's just easier to do a lot more services within our industry, but harder to do them on a higher level. And the advice is to specialize and focus because you don't have time to learn at all.

Chris Allen 0:25

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Studio. I'm your host, Chris Allen. And today we're joined by Randall Hartman, founder of Groundwork, a digital agency living at the intersection of technology and brand. Randall believes great design should do more than capture attention. It should build trust, create emotional connection, and drive real business outcomes. In this conversation, we explore how Randall built his thriving creative firm by staying specialized in a world chasing scale. Randall, welcome to the Entrepreneur Studio. Hey, good to talk to you. Yeah, absolutely. So you describe groundwork as living at the intersection of technology and brand. So what does that look like in practice when you're working with a client? And how do you bring those two elements together?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yeah. So brands live online now. And they have they have for what, 20 years now or so, but it's just getting more and more integrated online. And you know, listening to one of your past podcasts with Seth Goat, and he was saying how like, you know, it it is in how you answer your emails, how you answer your phone. And that's really like I was listening to, I was like, oh, that's exactly like, yeah, like where groundwork lives. It's just not, oh, a logo or your website that's on a template, and you could put any brand into this template and the website will work. That's like not how we operate. But we're um, you know, we we take a deep dive into our clients' brands and uh really create something that's unique to them that no one else can take. So um, and sometimes it's a website, sometimes it's branding, other times it's a video game that we uh have done. Um most recently we're doing one for a large financial firm where their mascot is running through different offices and it's really creating some really cool like team interaction all across the nation. Um, and uh so really we we like to just be able um, you know, we're we're proud to be able just to kind of implement the our clients' brands in different mediums, whether it's like I said, website or like print design, digital, yeah, whatever that might be.

Chris Allen 2:25

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think one of the things that's uh, you know, as a marketer, right? I always think about um, you know, when you have a brand, right? You have a brand system that typically that you want to use, but like you got to bring it to life somehow so that people can experience it, right? So how do you, how do you sort of think about um in those first conversations when you and the team are trying to figure out what you're gonna do to bring the brand to life, what are, what are some of the things that you guys, you know, do that maybe is different to try and understand what a company is really trying to do with their brand?

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah. I mean, we we start every um every project with like, we call them like stakeholder input or stakeholder survey. So what you say to your client, or when you ask a client, like, all right, what is it that you do best? They're gonna tell you something really logical, right? They're like, oh, we have this product or this software or our service is best, blah, blah, blah. And then ultimately that client ends up going to another company, bringing us with them, and then they say they're the best at that company too, with this, they're doing the same thing. Right. So what we like to do is we talk to not only internal key stakeholders, such as like, you know, their C-suite or, you know, uh management level, or even all the way down. Some companies like in AEC, which would be um architecture engineering consultant or construction, really big on recruiting. So we'll talk to a bunch of new recruits and new people that came to uh, you know, came to that company from another one. And then we ask to talk to like our clients' clients and say, like, what is it about them? Like, what is it about company X that makes them sticky? What is it that they do best? What is it that they can do better? Um, and that helps us get this full picture of like, here's what the audience is saying. Then we do online research and see like what are they doing, you know, what what's the reputation like online? What are people saying about them? What about the products, the services, reviews, and then what are they saying uh internally? And then we put all that together as kind of like our our sounding board. And we it's nice because we get some you know data to reach back on. So if we're presenting an idea and then the you know, someone in the C-suite or so that's not part of the project, you know, love to have their say, which is great, they're paying the bills, they can. We could point back to the data. Yeah, here's what your clients are saying about you. And sometimes we'll get a lot of really interesting stuff. We're like, oh, when we ask what they can be doing better, they'll bring bring up a sales email that wasn't answered with before like two weeks. And so they're like, it will bring up little things like that that'll actually help help them kind of like fix the holes in their brand, if you were, the brand experience.

Chris Allen 4:48

That's awesome. So you're helping them clean up a lot, not just the website, but just you know, even how they operate. Because the reputation, right, is how you operate and how you deliver on your commitment.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Yeah, 100%. That's exactly right. Yeah, it's their it's your promise, I think, is what Seth said, right? Yeah. Um, and it isn't just you know, providing people with the services, how you go across it. And now, I don't know if you've, you know, CX is a big term in the industry, right? Customer experience, and there's customers experienced departments, you know, it they're like I have friends that do it. I have uh my wife is on a customer experience team in a large consulting firm. And it's the little things you would think uh that you that you wouldn't think are a big deal are a big deal to to these to these customers. Yeah, people going through the process, whether it's pots and pans or cancer, literally going through cancer treatment.

Chris Allen 5:37

Yeah. Well, um, you know, a website, uh, you know, I would say like your website's your best salesperson.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Yeah.

Chris Allen 5:44

So uh one of the things that I really like about what you guys are doing is uh it isn't just aesthetics and design, right? It has to actually, you know, the website's got to do something for your business. Yeah. So talk to us a little bit about like um, you know, some of the things you sort of uh believe or expect websites to do for companies.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Yeah. So I I I I hate best practices. Uh and while if you are creating templates and selling 500 templates a year, websites, right? You know what website template is, right? You go on Squarespace, you go to WordPress, you you go into that environment, and then you just put your logo and your branding in there. They're gonna follow best practices, you know, and whether that may be a call to action throughout the whole page, or it's like click here, click here, get with us today, or whatever. Um those are fine for like the masses, but when we get into each you know individual project, we start with a couple of things. We give the user credit. Um, we look at the demographics, all right, they're educated, not educated. Um that lets us know that kind of leads our design when we say like we don't outdesign our audience, right? So if we're working with a rheumatoid arthritis center in Colorado, which project we did, we know that their audiences are in pain, and they're just looking for you know appointments to get their infusions. They're not they're not caring about a cool drop-down navigation or a cool hover effect. Um, same with we're doing, we're working with um Jeffson County on their like um Section 8 housing. It's not called Section 8 anymore, it's called something else, but on that website, like we they don't care about a really cool web experience. They just need something quick that they can get the support that they need from the community. But when you go up to these larger ones, like whether it's Vale Resorts or Fathom Events or Tough Shed or um Tacos Tequila Whiskey here in town, like people want an experience and they want that. And we give them credit. They know how to use a site, they know how to scroll, they know what they're on the site for. They're not landing on, you know, some SaaS product and being like, what does this company do? Oh, I didn't know I needed this warehouse software for my 100,000 employees. You know what I mean? That's just not how people work. But data is it's hard to get that from the data, right? Because data is gonna be like, oh, people spend two per two seconds per se before they scroll. I'm like, sure, but you know, when you go onto Rivian site or something, you might spend a your experience is a little different there than as if you were gonna go to, you know, make a reservation at a restaurant. So yeah. Um, you know, so it is just starts with those kind of two things is who are we talking to, and then you know, where are where are the users at in their life? What education do they have? Are they used to looking at websites? What kind of cars do they drive? What's if they were celebrities, who would they be? And that helps us kind of like frame up this persona that we're talking to.

Chris Allen 8:30

Yeah, it's awesome. You guys uh need to be inspired, right, as creatives. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Yeah, and that's a big thing. We look at inspiration all over the world. We never look at our past projects ever. Like we there's there's other agencies in town who we're fans of nationally, internationally. Um, we reach out, we we submit our work to the same sites and help our try to help our industry grow. And you know, just recently one of the firms I really liked was looking at like copying our video games. And I'm like, I love that. Like we did something where another big agency is like, they're doing something cool. Let's let's see if we can do that.

Chris Allen 9:03

So that's awesome. Well, you know, that sounds to me right like uh, you know, you uh maybe have re done some rethinking of traditional models about how you run your business. Yeah. Right. So like what when you, you know, tell us a little bit about like uh sort of uh what happened before groundwork, real quick to help everybody understand how you were rethinking the traditional agency model.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah. Um, so you know, coming out of school, 2000, like five and a half years in school, took the party route, graduated Colorado State, didn't get a job, was working at a bar because I really wanted to be in a creative agency. You know, it was just like I there's I I don't know if there's still that allure, that kind of like, oh, an agency is cool. Um, but you know, back then there was. It was it was really hard to get into. Um, started with a free internship where I commute from Fort Collins to Denver um two or three days a week, finally got a job at $20,000 a year, uh, doing running accounts or, you know, being an account manager, kind of worked my way up there, left that shop for Zen Man, and that's really um where I got my big brand experience with like Remax, Frontier Airlines, Golf Tech, and you know, there's Grable, a few other ones. While I was there, I was director of business accounts, uh, director of business development, actually. So that's one thing where I don't understand how business owners start when they don't have that. I literally have sales and marketing background. Yeah, yeah. Like I like I feel for those engineers and writers or just idea folks that don't have that background to give business because mine has always been in the like business development side, but always with my hands in my clients' work, like working in the background with the team, and always like you know, I would sell this vision. I want to make sure that vision came to life. And then I went to a small shop uh called Bove, who they were also purchased, and uh they wanted to be like Zen Man and they like handed over the keys. They're like, you could rename it, you could do whatever you need with the staff. We just want to like get the kind of clients that you got at Zen Man. And I, you know, I was 30, 31, 32, and I was like, yeah, this is a great opportunity. And it was the hardest year of my life because the owners were great. They were like, what do we need to do? And we ended up going on EOS, you know, EOS on three offering citizens, and had some really, really tough conversations. They had three owners, and one owner ended up not being there anymore. And the the consultant was like, you need to let Randall be the CEO. And so that created some tension. And I'm just not, I'm a I'm a type two on the Enneagram, so I just want to please people. And I made enemies and I was polarizing, and it was just the worst, most unnatural year of my life, and uh started groundwork out of that. And uh with the goal of not offering digital marketing and uh not having a big bloated staff and a big office building where we were kind of a slave to our overhead. Just kind of saw everywhere I worked at throughout my career had this like busy but broke agency life where we're like really busy doing cool work, but like barely making the bills, which I like I just why grow a non-profitable business, I guess, is was my big uh thing, but uh or was my big issue with with those companies. But uh, you know, they're all great people and yeah, they you know they they're really proud of what we're building at groundwork and are like, you're doing it right, keep it going. And so they're like some of my biggest fans.

Chris Allen 12:17

Yeah. So like one of the things that I enjoyed that you talked about was the way that you sort of have flex staff, right? Where you've got, you know, the committed staff, and then you've got these other ways of, you know, getting creatives on specific projects to have flex staff. So tell us about like how your your agency operates maybe a little bit differently where you're not busy but broke.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Yeah. So, you know, I think that everything comes with cash flow, right? There are times we're busy about broke, and then we're like, okay, like this isn't what we wanted to build. What are we doing wrong? But yeah, our overhead's very simple. We have, you know, we work out of kind of like a we work here at downtown, and we have an office with myself and Alicia, who's our digital producer. Um, and that we're the only two on salary. And then we have about, you know, three to four nearly full-time uh designers and another two or three developers, and then some overseas that we work with. But the goal is to, you know, is to allow the creatives to work on projects that they want and not just shove them projects, you know, right? Where if you're a designer every day and you have, you know, a project manager scheduling out your calendar and you got to have a dental website to work on, followed by a movie theater brand, you know, like it just isn't, it's not conducive for their workflow. And and to get the produce the best work, they're just trying to hit a deadline. And so with us, we're just like, hey, you know, we have our core team that we stick to, but they all know they have to continually give us the best work and basically make my life easy where I'm not making a lot of edits, um, for them to keep coming back. And so I like to say they want the project, they don't need the project. Everybody on the project team says yes to it. And uh, you know, the client doesn't we operate just like our big shops that we came from. So, you know, we don't hide our model. Um, and it hasn't mattered to these big brands. At first I was kind of like, oh, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to tell anybody that we're like we're work with contractors. Yeah, yeah. But no, it never happens. No one's trying to steal them. If they do, I think they're maybe once or twice, and my team would reach out to me. I'm like, dude, make your money, like go right ahead. You know, it's a different product if it's not as part of our team. But like, I'm not like I'm never, I'm maybe too loose-with it to be honest. Like, I'm like, yeah, go right ahead. You can, you know, take what you learned here and make you know this other company better in in some way. So yeah, you know, it's it's a learning process. It like I still go through business school every day, and it's it's mostly cash flow management. Our job isn't it's funny. I mean, like in being an EO, you hear a lot of cash flow issues mostly due to like a lack of sales. But like our fractional CFOs, like, you don't have a sales problem. We just have profitability problem and cash flow problem because we're so project based. So, you know, it just you know, kind of create, you know, solve one problem just to create a couple more, but they're definitely not as bad as like, you know, being busy but broke.

Chris Allen 15:03

Yeah, you're like, I need the recurring revenue uh to support my massive project work.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Yeah, yeah. Like recurring revenue is in our in you would just you would make a guess like, oh, probably SEO or digital marketing, but it's like, no, like we we don't do that. We work with partners and we we refer that work out, but we do web maintenance, and that's kind of our our lifeline. Um that's you know, it's not sexy, it's web maintenance at 250 a month up to 1500 a month. There's the different things you get, but like there's clients I haven't talked to in years, and like that is they're getting a good service. Our dev team is taking care of their their their site every quarter, um, some every month. They're getting a good good product, a good service for 250, which is important to me. And like it's so cheap that they're just like, why would we ever kill that? And so yeah, times that by 30, you know, we net of you know, you know, 14K or so. It's not huge revenue for us yet, but it's growing and organically. And that's gonna be the kind of engine that we'll be able to do whatever we want with once it covers overhead.

Chris Allen 16:05

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, uh growth wise, you started, I I liked the some of the conversation we had around ethics and the ethics of growth. You have a pretty distinct point of view on what's sort of okay for you growth wise and what's maybe not okay for you growth wise. So talk to us a little bit about like that conversation and unpack how you think about growth and how you do sort of the uh ethically uh, or maybe the ethical approach to growing.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Yeah. You know, I think it's and again, like I said, like what's the point of growing a nonprofitable business? And that just literally is something I said to my team like last year, right? Or like, oh, that's another, you gotta write that down and remember that. Um, but like, you know, when I say that to other entrepreneurs, like, yeah, for sure, like it doesn't matter your bottom line, or it doesn't matter your gross income, right? What are you netting at the end of the day? What are you bringing home? And um, you know, I've talked to companies, you know, a couple guys that are, you know, speakers, right? And they pull home half a mil a year, but their their revenue is, you know, 600. And so they're can't, they don't qualify for organizations like EO. And I'm like, that's but that's who we should have in there. Yeah. There's folks that are like killing it. And now he may might need to like step out of the business and like still make the income if he wants to grow, because if he's not speaking, he's not making money. And so there's something EO could help him with. But like at 600 with, he's making way more money than a lot of people. Yeah. This is something I still think about every day. And I think about it all the time, right? Like, if you came to us and you're like, yeah, Randall, we have you know, we have 50k for a site, and I'm like, great, here's a $50,000 proposal. Like that to me, something sits off about that. Like, client would be running, well, is it worth $50K? Like, can you show me how it's broken out? And like, yeah, I could show you how it was broken out, but all those numbers I could just put in there. You know what I mean? I could show you exactly where it is, but it's that's easy to do. Um when it's like, well, I don't need 50k, I need 35k or 40k, and we can use 10k for content development with a third party. Um, that's where I get in ethics ethics, right? Where I'm like, all right, ultimately we're worth what our clients are willing to pay us, and that's sometimes 15,000 for a restaurant or 300,000 for a a school down in Parker, everywhere in between. Yeah. And and so, and some of the scopes are very similar. And how do you, you know, I I think sometimes I'm very much like, well, we did the same scope for 100 grand and we did the same scope for 30 grand. Um, granted, it might have been a different team, different process, and honestly, it took longer to do this corporate site because the corporate red tape and the hoops that we have to vote approvers, yeah, a year and a half or you know, 15-page site. And then you have this small business, and you know, that is the same size site, but they don't have 100, so we're gonna do it 3540, you know, and and it's just kind of that where it's like, where do we make our profit? If you come to us for 50, should I fill it up 350 and try to even if it costs us 25 and make 25 a grand a pure profit? Or what I have been doing is been like, no, we don't need all 50. You're a small site, we'll take 40, we'll take 35, and let's invest this other in other marketing in order to help our site get exposure or help the site have better assets and things like that, where it's literally pumped out so much of our budgets just to partners uh without making a dime on that. And it's hit it's hit our it's hit our profitability pretty bad over the last couple of years. Of that's my big thing this year is working on profitability because it's uh it's been enough to support myself and an employee, but you know, that's someone called it a uh lifestyle brand. And I was like, what does that mean? You know, and I was like, I looked it up, I was like, I don't want a lifestyle brand, that's not what I'm trying to build. So yeah, it is a constant struggle. It's like, how much should we charge? Um ultimately I think people say, whatever people will pay you. But I'm like, yeah, but what if it's not best for them? And uh maybe that's my type two of the Enneagram coming out of being like, you know, oh I'm being too too much of a snowflake or being too soft, but yeah, we're not I don't have I'm also not on the other side of like, yeah, I'm just gonna be a business cap straight up capitalist and get as much money out of my clients as I can. Yeah. They they feel that, you know, and we have clients that come back to me from working, you know, in 2000, you know, 15 at another agency that's well come back and be like, hey, like I moved to a different company, will you help us out here? Yeah, like it it's it's reputational, but at what point do you start to, you know, I don't know, it's even hard to say it, but when do you start making more money for yourself?

Chris Allen 20:38

Yeah, when and when is the you know, sort of the value and you know, uh of what you're delivering versus what people are saying, when is it enough?

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I it just you know, some agencies will start at 100,000 for the same work, other agencies will start at 25k. And it just is yeah, they're in it for clients because they're like, you I have this proposal for 60K and I have this one for 35K. Like, can you tell me the difference? Yeah, like no, you can't.

Chris Allen 21:06

You're like, it's complicated. Yeah. Well, the thing that I thought was really cool is um, you know, you guys are like really focused on web design, and there's all the surround sound of the things for, you know, building content, you know, um uh all of the sort of um, you know, driving the um people being able to find the site, right? You got organic search and ads, and there's all this other marketing stuff, right? Yeah. Um, but one of the things that I like that you talked about ethics is you're like, uh, okay, well, if we're gonna focus on this thing and we want to keep a good relationship, do we need to recommend other partners? And what does that really mean when one partner is paying us more, right, for the same thing, but this other partner is gonna be a better choice. How are you making those decisions? That's one of the things that I think ethically was really cool to hear you talk about.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

It just happened two weekends ago and probably, yeah, I mean it was. Why it was so fresh. You know, we recommended a photographer to go down. He's in Tulsa this morning doing photo shoots of a C-suite for a publicly traded company. And, you know, I gave him the bid. I was like, I'm not making any money on this at all. Right. It was 15K for the photographer to go down there for a night, fly down there, do all the headshots, do all the touch-ups. Like that's pretty, you know, that's pretty standard for the industry. It's not high, it's not super low. And so the, but the client, which I appreciate, was very upfront. He's like, I'm I we love your agency. We're excited working with you, but we're feeling like you're a little slighted, kind of like I'm pushing this 15K photo shoot. And I was like, that's totally fair. I get it. But it felt really good to be say, to say, like, I don't get one dime off of this. You know what I mean? Like, there's nothing coming to me for this. I looked in Tulsa, which I did for photographers, and I didn't really like any that I saw. And we were up against a deadline, like you're having this event next week. And so, and they were totally cool. They were like, that's a great answer. Go right ahead, let's do it. That's what it's like. Okay. But there's power to that and to not accepting referral fees. Now, I think, you know, I have friends in referral networks and I have um colleagues, and you know, I've been asked to be part of them where people, SEO companies, typically would be like, hey, if you refer all your business to us, like we'll give you 20% of their monthly income. I would just can't do that. Like, and I again, I'm not trying to be a, you know, you know, a prince, you know, or like we're so good. It's just, it just makes me have to go to bed at the end of the night.

Chris Allen 23:32

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

And if the clients knew, how would they act? And so that's that's my big thing. What would the clients think? And that's always like my um kind of what guides me is like, all right, like, would you appreciate if I only gave you recommendations based off of who pays me the most or based off of who is best fit for you? And uh so that's what we do. It's based off best fit. And um, that came from my very first boss at the very first agency I worked at. And she was like, We just said we don't accept referral fees. And I was just young at that age and you know, right out of college, and I was just like, okay, we don't accept referral fees. And that's literally gone with me everywhere. Yeah. Um, is I will not sign any sort of mutual or like some sort of like agreement. Yeah, some partner agreement. Yeah. So we get to say, hey, here's three people we trust. You talk to them, you get to know them, here's what questions you should ask them, and you pick the partner. And sometimes it's none of them, and they go with somebody else, and we're like, totally cool. And we just make more friends.

Chris Allen 24:30

Yeah. I love that. One of the other things about uh, you know, this world is uh AI. Yeah. And there's a a way to, you know, build websites and it just literally is Cloud Code or some other, you know, UI engine, you know, out there. So how are you guys using AI in your business?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

It's every day. I think the big thing is it's it's very daunting, right? It's so big. Like, oh yeah, we use AI. It's like and what? You know, like in blog writings and email writing, or what do they manage your calendars or uh in in in what? And it is so broad. And so we made the, you know, and this is me personally, like I made the mistake of paying some of our team to just sit and tinker, you know, like, hey, like just show us how we should use AI because I'm running the business, I don't have time to go through and do this myself. And then so the creative team would come back with a million ideas of how we can use it for the creative team same with development team. And you know, they're doing their own research and implementing in their own work, and now project management as well. Um, and then I focus on like strategy and the research side of things. Um at first it was just a tangled mess of just a crap ton of like subscriptions, you know, and like do this for this and use this for this. And um, but once once I kind of like once we narrowed it down, I was like, all right, designer, you focus on fixing this one problem, right? Like, what is it that takes a lot of time out of your day? Oh, it's creating the style guide after the site's done. Well, let's focus on getting that AI to do that. And same with PMs, it's like, hey, like it's very annoying to do like calendars when our clients have seven clients and they'd be on the call. Like, how can AI help you with that? Um, and then I use it for a lot of copywriting um strategy. And usually basically I just talk to it. You know, I upload all our clients' information, all the phone calls, all the research that we do, um, any documentation that they have or research they have. I have it do its own online research. And that way I'm talking to a project in Claude that has all the information and it every like, hey, what did Chris say about having a team component? And we're like, uh, Chris hated the idea, but Doug loved the idea or whatever.

Chris Allen 26:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Um, and so you know, we use it every single day. I we just had a conversation before this about how we um, you know, can implement it even more so, but it is uh it's it's just it's huge. Uh, you know, there's just so much, there's it's hard to find out where to start, especially if you're a small business. But it's it's kind of cool in a way where we'll help you use it. You know, if you ask the right questions and you have the patience for it, like it'll help you use it. And if you're a small business, it could help you have it connected to QuickBooks. And I was like, hey, QuickBooks, like what is our average, you know, like um client collections in the last six months? You know, it could give me that answer, really. Um, are we profitable? And I'll look through everything and be like, you know, I think recently I asked it and it gave us a grade. It's like you're a D plus. I was like, well, that's that's cool. You know, that's that's comfortable. Good to know. Yeah. And like, what can I do to be better? Or like what would you recommend? And it was just pointing out all these areas. Yeah, that's good. So not just creative, right? Because, you know, the design side, it doesn't have taste yet. It can help you. And we feel more like sympathy for like the entry level folks, co design developers and designers, because to get to that level is very easy at the moment. It's the refinement, the tweaking is the management, and leading that AI on strategy, on aesthetics, you know, and because it will just revert back to best practices for any of them. Exactly. Uh so you wanted to kind of like push push the boundaries a little bit, and it really just comes down to prompt. You know, I have like a four-page client prompt that I enter in for every uh new client that we get. Um, but I mean this I could literally just keep going on this because there it goes down every little crevice of the company. There is some way that we could implement AI. It's just focusing on one at a time, getting that one checked off first before moving on to another one. Otherwise, you'll just have a ton of just goop, like AI gooped sitting there and not usable.

Chris Allen 28:32

Yeah. Well, the other thing that you did uh is you're you're disclosing when you're using AI, right, to the customer.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Yeah.

Chris Allen 28:39

I thought I thought that was really great where you're like, hey, here's where we are using, here's where we're not, here's where we're using it to make us better.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

Yes. Yeah. It it's not we call it lazy AI versus strategic AI. Lazy AI is, you know, hey, write a tagline for this company. And it'll do it. It'll just give you, it'll do its best. But uh, you know, strategic AI is like, here's all the information about this company. Here's a video of their founder talking about the origins of the company. Yeah, give me five sample headlines or taglines. I like option two, but it's missing this. Like, let's make it more confident, let's make it more bold, uh, let's make it shorter, longer, let's make it a sentence, let's, you know what I mean? Let's make it four words or whatever. And uh, so it just makes it better. It doesn't even necessarily make us quicker because like it's still taking us around the same amount of time to do these projects. It's just the output is better, clients are happier, and the projects are going quicker. So I guess overall the projects go quicker because the clients have less to get feedback on where they're like, this is great, this is really good, keep going. But for us internally, it's still about the same amount of time because we're still like instead of using Figma and moving pixels, we're typing in a in Claude. Yeah. We're trying to figure something out in Claude.

Chris Allen 29:52

But that's it's it's a a great way uh of using AI. I I think the the thing that was, I I would say 10 years ago, right? You know, you when you think about a website versus what it is today, what do you think, you know, websites should be doing in the age of AI? What do you think should be happening right today? And what do you think it should be happening in a year? What what's sort of the future in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 30:21

It's uh what I think what uh makes our websites and our work uh special, and I've heard this from clients and and colleagues and developers, is actually the copywriting. And so, and that's where it's like kind of odd that it's the easiest job to take, really, is copywriting with AI. Um for most, you know, for most uses in the business world, like small business world. Now, if you need a copywriter on big campaign work, you know, someone to see oversee that and create that copy with whether it's AI or not. But like that's an expense. Um so like having really intentional headline. We know people don't like to read. We don't know they don't, you know, they're not gonna sit there and read a paragraph about you, but what they will see is headlines and they don't even read them, but they comprehend them as they go down the site, right? Nice and bold, they're quick, they're short, they're clean, um, they're intentional, they're branded. Um, it we say it like, you know, you you show confidence, you don't tell confidence. And so the sites are getting, you know, the work's getting simpler when it comes to copywriting, and it's where it's getting super complex is in the development side of things. Um, you know, the people are still using websites, you know, they are AI is trying, they're not there yet. We'll be one of the first to use it, right? Like we're not gonna like, it's not like my mom's gonna come out and like, oh, I made this for my quilt shop. Like, that isn't how that this is gonna work. It's gonna be us taking it and being like, great, we got it to a point now where we can sell it. Um, it's still so far away from from that. Uh so far. We'll see. Um, because like a year, maybe that is possible. But I think more so if you're walking down the street wearing meta glasses or something and you have, you know, augmented reality, like, how are you gonna scroll to click on, you know, where's that sign come from? You know, like and it's like, oh, you could get this sign here, here, here, here, and I'm not gonna be like using my hands in mid-air, you know, probably using my pupils and being able to navigate a website or any sort of digital product with your eyes or facial movements, that's gonna, you know, that's gonna change everything. Is there gonna be hover effects with your eyes? Yeah. There's no hover effects on a phone, you know? So like that's what keeps me up is like, all right, what's it gonna be when like, you know, folks are maybe you got your B2B brands that are still at their computers, you know, and maybe they're safe. But what about you're walking down, you see a store, and you can literally just like look at it. There's a product, oh, it's on sale, click in the cart, I'll get home. You know, like that's the more those B2C experiences too. Like, how are they going to make everything so easy? Like everything is so easy for us. You think, you know, growing up with a pager and you know, like now we have our our phones that have more technology than the Apollo missions to the moon. So it's who knows what a year will bring, but I know that it's gonna be going down this augmented reality track. And how are we gonna um, you know, how are we gonna conform to that or get in line with that? You know, that's something that we're you know, we talk about and developers stress about it.

Chris Allen 33:32

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. I mean, because like, you know, there's a infrastructure that has to change. You know the thing that I think is most likely to happen with AI is like these sort of legacy industries, right? Like uh, we were just talking to a real estate developer, uh uh a builder. And it's like he's not even thinking about AI, right? You've got all of these other industries, like you're on the leading edge because you're like, dude, I gotta, I mean, websites are kind of like a thing that's evolving. People being able to interact with our business is gonna evolve. So you're sort of way up in this sort of like early adopter kind of thing. And and it's what I think is gonna happen is the sort of chasm between industries that have been able to move at the pace of AI and industries that can't that haven't even figured out how to implement it yet. And these our experiences as consumers are gonna be spread across that.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

And they're gonna hire the kids out of school or whomever that knows how to use the technology in a way that they need, right? Yeah. Like, you know, think about like a developer creating a you know multifamily living, right? It was like, do you need a key anymore? Like, let's get rid of passcodes and keys. Like everyone's tired of keeping track of both.

Chris Allen 34:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

And it it's considered, you know, it's it's almost like luxury now to not carry keys because it's on your phone, like you get in your car, your condo, or whatever. But like AI, we'll be able just to pick up on whoever's coming. Oh, yeah, this is Chris, he's in Unit 201 or whatever. Like, there's just so much like that's gonna be right there for those, those kind of buildings. Um, advertising will change as you're walking through the building or whatever that is, you know. Um, it'll be like, oh, you he's visited GameStop, it's GameStop the last 10 times, like, you know, here's a 10% off coupon or whatever. Yeah. So yeah, like in we work with some construction companies that are like of a large scale. And one of my one of the new ones, they're doing something really cool, is they are they activated their thousand employees and have a contest going. And they're like, at the end of a certain amount of time, whoever brings them the best, like, the best idea, like thought through and um ready to implement idea, how to implement AI into their company will receive a cash prize. And so they're paying for their engineers and their employees to tinker on the internet, which I think is super cool because in the right now you're seeing all these things on the news where people that watch using AI to watch people's clicks to make sure or to see if AI could take over their jobs when this company is actually activating their, you know, Gen Z and Millennials and Gen X to like bring them ideas of how it can be better in their day-to-day lives, which I think was I think that's so we're gonna put that on our site. It's like, here's that AI kind of philosophy for a hundred-year-old construction company. Um, that's part of their brand now, is is kind of that innovation that you don't see a lot with their competitors at all, or they don't like to advertise it, but you know, our client will.

Chris Allen 36:29

Yeah. I I think it's uh uh probably one of the I I don't know if anything that's moved faster in changing. Like, I mean, you think about like last year, yeah, right. A AI was sort of like, yeah, people were chatting with cheat Chat GPT, right? And we were first starting to hear about it. And all of these changes have happened that have been so, so fast. I mean, if you think about it, it's like Chat GPT, people are like, well, well, now I'm using Claude for these other things. And there's all of these, and and you think about the displacement that's going on where Claude, like you would see all the stocks. I mean, these people's stocks are just plummeting from all of this displacement that's happening. And I think it's actually gonna go faster and faster. And so I it's really wild to me to see something because I mean, you remember Google, like that was really cool, like being able to find stuff. Yeah, right. But it wasn't moving at this pace.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

No. What platforms to use is a whole nother question, too, right? It's like, oh, hey, I think we were talking earlier about Chat GPT being quicker for copywriting and imagery, but cloud being good for research and Gemini being good for keyword research, whatever that may be. So not only is it like moving so fast, but it's by by the time you finally figured out how to use one, there's like another one. Or there's like, you know, or the methods that you're learning are already too old. So it's very overwhelming. Yeah. And that's why you said that you have to break it down into like bite-sized chunks, is like solve one problem at a time with what you do. Don't focus on do everything in my job. Focus on like little bite-sized chunks. But no, to your point, like, was it like all birds, the shoe company? Right? You're like, they went from they're just like, we're not selling shoes anymore or clothes. We are an AI data center or whatever. Like, and their stock went up like 600%. It's insane. Then what you were describing, I think, right, is like the AI bubble that everyone's talking about. Yep. You know, I don't know. There's I maybe it's just, you know, being, you know, born in night 87 and seeing like the 08 crash and all these people talking about everything. What's now it's like the more they talk about it, the feels like the less it happens. I don't know what that would bring for us. Like, you know, middle class, I don't have a ton of money in stock, so it's not gonna like crush me. I don't think. I don't know. Yeah, uh, but like what does an AI bubble mean? Or is it where it's not a bubble? Everything else is just gonna be popping and going into and making this bigger bubble, you know, everything around it. So yeah, I just it is uh it's overwhelming. But the key is bite-sized chunks, because yeah, it is yeah, you don't know where to start.

Chris Allen 39:03

I like that you're like, it's huge. And it's like, you know, everybody's like, okay, was it huge as in like it's a big deal, or is it huge as in it's a bunch to consume? And it's like kind of both.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah, I think it there's things, you know, throughout my career that like fads came up. They're like, oh, this is the new social media platform, this is the new tool for this. Skype died, right? Yep, like Skype was huge, or like Zoom wasn't a thing until like COVID. You know, like for us at least, I did my whole career over the phone selling creative. Like, that's crazy. Now I could show them and talk them through, and like Zoom created, you know, it just blew up out of that. And so, like, yeah, there's these industries all around it that are just gonna like not leech, but you know, just be supported by this AI bubble. And uh, you know, those are the ones where I'm always like, oh, what when clients come to us, they have really cool ideas, folks for apps, and like this is a really cool idea, but then they you go down this whole thing, they just want to set it and forget it and be rich. Yep.

Chris Allen 40:07

Well, we've talked about a lot of stuff. Um, I got one last question for you. You know, for the entrepreneur who wants to move away from the do everything for everyone model and take groundworks example of building something more specialized, what's a step that they can take to move towards that shift?

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Sometimes it always isn't like the answer to this isn't always like the most profitable answer. But we we push specialists and not generalists. And I can't speak for all industries. This is all I've ever done. But these big projects that we've won with big companies, they praise us on that. Like, we're not after, you know, to be like, you know, these companies, these other agencies are like, hey, Chris, what do you what would you do with 20% more leads coming to your website? Like, how would you do if those converted higher or whatever? You know, like that's not how we operate. And the answer isn't specialization. I feel like it's always has been. And then it grew to this thing where like technology gets better and you can offer more services with AI or without AI. It's just easier to do a lot more services within our industry, but harder to do them on a higher level. And the advice is to specialize and focus because you don't have time to learn it all. I not to go back to bite-sized chunks, but it is. You know, it's being the expert at it, obsessing over it. Like my Instagram feed is design and development and and different and be and be fans of the industry, like we are. We are we have Slack channels where everyone puts in creative inspiration, talks about cool things other agencies are doing, never in like uh an envious way, although I say that and I think of that that scene from American Psycho where he holds up that business card and he's like, it's bone white. Yeah, like I do get that sometimes where I'm like, man, this agency is producing such good work. But it's because we're curious, and that's one of our core values is you know, be curious because ask the questions, ask the right questions to the right tools. And that's weird to say ask the right questions to the right tools, but that's literally what it is. Like ask, learn how to use these tools in order to make yourself better at your specific craft. And I think people are starting to see through the full service idea. Um, so anyways, that's like yeah, what I would say is to specialize, uh, become a specialist and not a generalist.

Chris Allen 42:24

I love it, man. Well, I wish you guys nothing but the best. It's awesome to see the cool work that you've got going throughout town. And thank you, you know. Um, I I think it's awesome. One, I love that you're a frameworks guy, right? You're talking about EOS and right, and you're doing Enneagram and all these things to understand each other, understand yourself. It's pretty awesome to see, you know, what it is and what you're contributing to the community.

SPEAKER_01 42:45

Thanks, man. Appreciate that. Yeah, this is uh, you know, or we're good at what we're good at. And like I said, specializing, we suck at finance, we suck at business models. We, you know what I mean? Leadership is always a thing. But yeah, there's so many good tools in Denver and online and to um kind of give in and be like, I don't know certain areas and to work on those.

Chris Allen 43:04

Yeah. It's good, man. Well, thanks for coming in.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

Yeah. Thanks, Race. Absolutely.

Narrator 43:10

Thank you for listening to the Entrepreneurs Studio Podcast. Check the show notes for resources and links from today's episode and follow us on Instagram at the entrepreneurs.studio. See you next time.