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Masters of Search episode 6: ADS TO AI — 10X YOUR VALUE AS A MARKETER | Mike Rhodes | #6 cover art
EP 06·Nov 19, 2025

ADS TO AI — 10X YOUR VALUE AS A MARKETER | Mike Rhodes | #6

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Show notes

Mike Rhodes has become one of the most influential voices around PPC and AI. After building and selling four businesses, Mike has spent a lot of time building products like the famous PMAX Insights Script and teaching people how to do the same.

📌 Check out https://8020agent.com and https://adstoai.com

▶ Let's connect! 🔗 Niklas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklas-buschner/ Radyant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/radyant/ Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikerhodesideas

Transcript

Full conversation

via podigee
  • 00:00:00So welcome to a new episode of the Masters of Search Talks.
  • 00:00:03I'm super happy to introduce today's guest, Mike Rhodes, who has become one of the most influential voices around PPC and AI.
  • 00:00:13After building and selling for businesses, Mike has spent a lot of time, probably he will tell us today how much time, building products like the famous PMAX Insights Script, I think like in PPC.
  • 00:00:26everybody knows this or at least ninety percent of the people and teaching people how to do the same.
  • 00:00:33So Mike, can you give us a quick intro about your journey and especially your move from agency founder or a business builder to AI builder?
  • 00:00:43Yeah, yeah.
  • 00:00:44Yeah, I fell into Google ads by accident.
  • 00:00:48I went to a conference in two thousand and four and Perry Marshall was in Australia for the first time speaking.
  • 00:00:56Ripping into yahoo or overture as it was back then and talking about this new thing that he was starting to look at called Google ads.
  • 00:01:03and Yeah, well, yeah a quick twenty years later.
  • 00:01:08Here we are.
  • 00:01:08I ended up doing all of the training for Perry's group and writing the book on Google ads with Perry which I believe is the world's best-selling book on Google ads, but that was all Perry not me.
  • 00:01:19And then yeah built an agent fell into an agency by mistake too.
  • 00:01:22I took me sort of a year of helping people here and there and swapping advice for a case of beer or a round of golf.
  • 00:01:30And all these people kept saying, yeah, but mate, I don't care how it works.
  • 00:01:34I just need you to do it for me because apparently my MO is just.
  • 00:01:38I like to explain things and I like to teach people how it works.
  • 00:01:43So I fell into agency land and all of a sudden turned around and my kids were still both in primary school a couple of years ago.
  • 00:01:52And I just thought, you know what, like this I've always been very careful of my time.
  • 00:01:56I was never working seventy hour weeks.
  • 00:02:00Maybe right at the beginning before kids.
  • 00:02:03But I just thought, you know, this is a time I do not want to miss.
  • 00:02:06I know I'm never going to get this back.
  • 00:02:08It's time for someone else to take the baton and take this forward.
  • 00:02:12The plan was to basically do not too much.
  • 00:02:16And that lasted about three weeks.
  • 00:02:18And then I rediscovered how to code.
  • 00:02:22And it was right around the time that GPT-IV was coming out and growing.
  • 00:02:27And I just, yeah, the PMAX script, as you mentioned, just went gangbusters, which gave me a lot of leeway then to just explore.
  • 00:02:38And since then, I've been building tools.
  • 00:02:40I've always built tools for the PPC community.
  • 00:02:43going back to two thousand and eight, I think was the first one that I built.
  • 00:02:48I've always, as you said, I had to teach other people how to do what we did.
  • 00:02:52back in the agency world.
  • 00:02:54Again, starting in two thousand seven, two thousand eight, I've had various sort of membership groups and, you know, spoken at conferences and so on.
  • 00:03:02And I absolutely love it.
  • 00:03:04I love building stuff.
  • 00:03:06I'm not particularly good at managing people and stuff and things.
  • 00:03:11So like the running of a medium sized business, definitely not my forte.
  • 00:03:17I was.
  • 00:03:18I was definitely much happier once I had a sort of a proper general manager come in and she managed all of the day today and allowed me to travel more and speak on stages and so on.
  • 00:03:30But yeah, I just love building stuff and so now it's just such a wonderful time to be a builder because you can go from idea to impact in the course of a day really and then get an MVP out there and get feedback on it and see if it resonates.
  • 00:03:48And that's what I've really been doing most of the past two years.
  • 00:03:51Before we dive into more of the PPC, the AI, the building stuff, I can imagine that there are a lot of people in the audience also either from maybe a freelance background or maybe also agency owners, which I'd just like to take a very short moment.
  • 00:04:08to recap this journey when you were selling the business or when you were transitioning out of the business.
  • 00:04:14Can you just give us a little bit of an overview of things you were doing in the run-up of you going out of the business?
  • 00:04:23Were there certain key milestones you set for yourself that you have to achieve so the business is sellable in a way?
  • 00:04:31I'd like to hear a little bit of this process.
  • 00:04:38Yes, I suppose going back, gosh, more than twenty years, I was an EMIF consultant.
  • 00:04:44I paid Michael Gerber a very large sum of money a long time ago to become an EMIF consultant.
  • 00:04:49I'm not sure if you've even heard of or read the book, the EMIF.
  • 00:04:53It was the small business Bible, you know, twenty five years ago.
  • 00:04:57It was the thing and it was the thing that really helped my first business be a success.
  • 00:05:02And I didn't know there were these consultants.
  • 00:05:04I went off to the States.
  • 00:05:05I paid him a huge amount of money and trained and basically it's all about work on the business, not in the business.
  • 00:05:11That's essentially it, right?
  • 00:05:13So I've always been a fan of systems and processes that run the business and the people run the processes and the business is just a system of systems.
  • 00:05:23So the business was pretty systemized.
  • 00:05:26I mean, it's a professional service business, so it's always going to be a bit messy and especially in the industry that we're in.
  • 00:05:32There's a lot changing all the time.
  • 00:05:34It's not we used to joke.
  • 00:05:35You know, it's not like insurance where you could probably do the same thing that you were doing ten years ago.
  • 00:05:39You know, the half life of information in the PPC world is two years.
  • 00:05:44So I don't know that there were milestones as much.
  • 00:05:47I mean, getting a general manager, like I said, which was probably five years to selling, but it wasn't like I was like, oh, I'm going to sell in five years.
  • 00:05:54So I'll get a general manager now.
  • 00:05:57If you'd asked me then I would have said I'm never selling.
  • 00:06:01The way I pictured the business, imagine a big sheet of paper in front of you, like a three sheet of paper.
  • 00:06:06I've always said that it's easier to work out what you don't want to do than it is to work out what you do.
  • 00:06:12So you picture all the stuff that you do as this huge sheet of paper in front of you.
  • 00:06:16It's much easier to go, oh, I don't want to do that half of the page anymore.
  • 00:06:21Let's spend the next year getting rid of that half of the page.
  • 00:06:24Okay, now I'm down to a smaller piece of paper.
  • 00:06:26Now next year I want to get rid of that half of the paper and then this bit and then this bit and then this bit and you end up with just this little.
  • 00:06:33and that's where I was.
  • 00:06:34I was just doing the little bit that I felt I was quite good at and that I really liked doing but I don't know.
  • 00:06:42it was always a what I really struggled with.
  • 00:06:44I'm sure many people will relate to this but I always struggled when when a team member quit or when a client left I was supposed to be kind of removed from that you know.
  • 00:06:57A couple of layers away from that.
  • 00:07:00That's why you put in a proper general manager, you know, but I could just never quite remove my My brain and the feeling of that.
  • 00:07:08it always felt like a kick in the guts And I thought gosh if I if I'm still feeling like this now I'm always gonna care and it's always gonna hurt.
  • 00:07:20Yeah, I just like maybe maybe I should try something different after after seventeen years and yeah, I had a chat completely by chance, really.
  • 00:07:30I was actually considering maybe expanding and buying a creative agency.
  • 00:07:34Like there were a lot of different sort of options floating around.
  • 00:07:38And then I just, yeah, back to two kids in primary school.
  • 00:07:41Actually, I don't think I want to do that.
  • 00:07:44I really want to hang out with them and spend time with them.
  • 00:07:46We worked out back then that my daughter had a hundred and thirty four Monday mornings left in primary school.
  • 00:07:54And we've been counting those down.
  • 00:07:57We don't actually have a chart on the wall, but we both know roughly where we are on that list and we've got about fifty five to go at this point.
  • 00:08:03So, you know, it's been recounting that down.
  • 00:08:06I was just very, very aware of that number.
  • 00:08:09So, yeah, in terms of milestones, I mean, not really.
  • 00:08:11It was just had an amazing team.
  • 00:08:13That was the worst part, you know, being away from your team and missing those conversations and missing the problem solving part of it.
  • 00:08:21That was definitely the hardest part of dealing with it all.
  • 00:08:24But No, it's yeah dive into a new thing and don't look back.
  • 00:08:29Keep moving forward
  • 00:08:31Awesome.
  • 00:08:32I once saw this video of yours on LinkedIn where you were telling an analogy or a metaphor about playing table tennis.
  • 00:08:41You probably remember this.
  • 00:08:43maybe and after that question we will definitely move into the AI and the PMAX and the PPC stuff.
  • 00:08:48But maybe can you quickly share the story again with the audience because I think it's so.
  • 00:08:53it's so eye-opening.
  • 00:08:54Yeah, I like this one.
  • 00:08:55I wish I knew where this came from so I could give proper attribution.
  • 00:08:58It's definitely not mine, but you always feel like you have a lot coming at you, right?
  • 00:09:05And basically, I get your picture of that as you're playing table tennis and there's just constant.
  • 00:09:13There's a ball coming at you all the time and it's all you can do to just keep trying to pick up the bat and just keep smashing the ball back.
  • 00:09:21But no matter how much you do, it just keeps on coming at you.
  • 00:09:25And the idea of systemizing a business really and putting some automation in place and letting go a little bit and having other people do some stuff, it's all related.
  • 00:09:36But you notice one day that down by your feet, there's a pile of bricks.
  • 00:09:41Oh, I've noticed those before.
  • 00:09:42That's handy.
  • 00:09:44The trick is that you have to bend down to pick up a brick to put it on the table to start building this wall at your end of the table.
  • 00:09:54The downside is when you bend down to pick up that brick, inevitably, a couple of balls go flying past you.
  • 00:09:59Shit, I missed one.
  • 00:10:01And that's you feeling like you literally dropped the ball on something.
  • 00:10:05You've missed something in the business.
  • 00:10:07Something has gone a little bit wrong.
  • 00:10:09No worries.
  • 00:10:09We'll repair that.
  • 00:10:10We'll fix that.
  • 00:10:12Now I've got to bend down and pick up another brick.
  • 00:10:14And if you keep on doing that, you keep picking up these bricks, you eventually build a wall such that the balls coming over the net bounce off the wall.
  • 00:10:23and go back and to begin with not very many bounce back.
  • 00:10:27but over time if you keep building the wall yes every time you pick up a brick you miss a couple but eventually you've got this whole wall there and all of the balls bounce back.
  • 00:10:35and now freedom.
  • 00:10:38you know freedom to do what it is that you want to do.
  • 00:10:41freedom to do the thing that you set out to do in the first place.
  • 00:10:45you know Gerber used to tell the story about the carpenter.
  • 00:10:48he loves carpentry.
  • 00:10:49he works with wood he loves the smell of the sawdust But now he's running a carpentry business and he hasn't touched a piece of wood in six months.
  • 00:10:57But he's wearing twelve different hats and he's hiring other carpenters and he's dealing with invoices and dealing with clients and But he's not doing carpentry.
  • 00:11:04He just wishes he could get back to the carpentry.
  • 00:11:07That was why he got into this in the first place and it's it's a similar sort of thing, right?
  • 00:11:11But you've just got to you've got to build the wall you've got to let other people Do the stuff that they're great at and you're probably not and be okay with missing a couple of balls going flying past.
  • 00:11:22yeah i'm no idea where it comes from but i love the picture that builds in your head.
  • 00:11:27maybe at some point in time we will find the person that originally came up with the story but yeah i found it so inspiring.
  • 00:11:33so now let's move over to a little bit more ppc and a. i related questions.
  • 00:11:38so your pmax script.
  • 00:11:40which we obviously have already introduced has become somewhat legendary.
  • 00:11:45I like the term you used.
  • 00:11:47It went gangbusters.
  • 00:11:48I have to use this too.
  • 00:11:51And like for me, I feel like all of the time, especially in startup world, people are talking about, yeah, the idea is one thing, but execution matters a lot.
  • 00:12:01But now we have this great new tools and obviously execution is still very important, but we have stuff where basically our imagination can become reality in a much shorter period of time.
  • 00:12:13So I just want to get a feeling of how did you come up with the idea for this product or for the script?
  • 00:12:20Oh, gosh, that's probably going back about three years.
  • 00:12:24It would have been a conversation with Stacey and Calvin and Brent and the wonderful team that I had back at WebSavvy back then.
  • 00:12:32And just really solving that problem.
  • 00:12:35So we worked out that you could work out how much of your total Pmax spend how much you were spending on shopping.
  • 00:12:42Because you could go into the product groups, but you couldn't just.
  • 00:12:47Export that and some it all up right because each line was repeated to maybe three times.
  • 00:12:52you couldn't even just some it all up and drop it in half.
  • 00:12:56If it was a very simple campaign set up you could just about eyeball it and go.
  • 00:13:01it's probably around about twenty three grand last month but.
  • 00:13:05It was a bit painful to do and a more complicated setup with more product groups.
  • 00:13:09It was just hard.
  • 00:13:12But we kind of lived with that and we eyeballed it and we moved on.
  • 00:13:15And then we worked out one day that, oh, actually, if you add the columns for the number of views and the CPV, you could multiply those together and you could work out how much money you're actually spending on YouTube.
  • 00:13:29But gosh, this is really testing my memory.
  • 00:13:33that worked for accounts that had a YouTube campaign running or had ever ran a YouTube campaign.
  • 00:13:40But if that campaign had never turned on any YouTube campaigns, those columns weren't available.
  • 00:13:46But they were with scripts.
  • 00:13:48And so we've sort of found this magic hack we thought of like, huh, well, let's save doing all of the maths for the product groups.
  • 00:13:55Let's let the script do that.
  • 00:13:57Let's let the script work out how much we're spending on video, because it doesn't matter if they've got a YouTube campaign or not, we can work that out.
  • 00:14:05And then whatever's left is search and display.
  • 00:14:07That was version one.
  • 00:14:09And then I ended up chatting to a wonderful bloke in Copenhagen.
  • 00:14:13I actually met him in speaking at Bologna, Gian Paolo's event, the wonderful Adworld Experience, one of the best events in Europe.
  • 00:14:25Antibias was there.
  • 00:14:27We had chatted maybe two and a half years ago and Tobias showed me how they had figured out how to Get a rough estimation of that display spent.
  • 00:14:36so now we could split apart display and Search.
  • 00:14:40I said, oh, can I build this into easy?
  • 00:14:42Of course you can like go for it's not my thing.
  • 00:14:44I just but he discovered that not me and so built that in gave away a free version of this two and a half ish years ago and still felt like it was a bit of special source for us as an agency to do the big version of this that we had and that bucketed products very similar to the labelizer script and product hero now do, but we had sort of our own janky version of that back then.
  • 00:15:14And when I sold the agency, I kept the IP for the script.
  • 00:15:19And so, you know, four weeks later, I was speaking in Italy at Giampaolo's event.
  • 00:15:24I thought, yeah, bugger it.
  • 00:15:26Why not?
  • 00:15:26Let's see if more people want this and are willing to pay a couple hundred bucks for it.
  • 00:15:31That's all.
  • 00:15:32And it went gangbusters.
  • 00:15:34So I quickly built a little site and started selling it through that.
  • 00:15:40Then built an MCC version because a lot of people like, yeah, this is great, but I have to do this for every single account.
  • 00:15:46And every time you keep changing the lemon script, which is all the time because I kept having new ideas and everybody kept telling me what else they wanted.
  • 00:15:53and hey could we build this in?
  • 00:15:54and could you add this and like yeah here's a new version.
  • 00:15:57oh great now i've got to update fifty accounts again.
  • 00:16:00um so i created the mcc version and sold that and um yeah it just went went ballistic.
  • 00:16:05it was great um but yeah it's it's the it's the community around it but i'll have like all these people it was back to those conversations that i missed from the web.
  • 00:16:13seven days now all of a sudden like i'm having conversations about Oh, how are you using this?
  • 00:16:18Oh, that's really cool.
  • 00:16:19That's really smart.
  • 00:16:19And what would you like me to add to this genius idea?
  • 00:16:23Hang on.
  • 00:16:23Let me just let me go and add that.
  • 00:16:25So that's how it sort of built and built and built and brought up to version eighty eight now.
  • 00:16:31So keeps on going.
  • 00:16:33It's a great story.
  • 00:16:34Now, if someone is listening and feels like, hey, I also want to get started with building automations, building scripts, or maybe even building agents, although.
  • 00:16:45Like there are different specialties to these different stages of automation, but what would you recommend someone that says, okay, Mike, I'm down.
  • 00:16:56Next weekend is all like exploration time.
  • 00:17:00How should you get started with building that stuff?
  • 00:17:05Start with a problem.
  • 00:17:07Start by thinking about what are all the tasks that I do.
  • 00:17:12Rather than trying to solve this for someone else, think about your own tasks that you do.
  • 00:17:18of those, which ones are sort of data related?
  • 00:17:21And is there anything in there that you're doing on a regular basis?
  • 00:17:24Let's say more than three or four times a month.
  • 00:17:26So maybe you're pulling the same data for your boss.
  • 00:17:29Maybe you're creating some sort of client report and they want to see that every week or every month.
  • 00:17:34But you've got a few clients and it's kind of the same report.
  • 00:17:36But you're doing this stuff repeatedly and you find yourself doing the same sort of things over and over again.
  • 00:17:43That's the sort of stuff that a script is perfect for, assuming that it's Google Ads data.
  • 00:17:48If it's some other type of data, you can need some other type of automation.
  • 00:17:54To answer that question, a year and a half ago, I would have said something completely different to what I'll say now.
  • 00:18:00Because what I'll say now is just turn on your favorite AI, chat, GPT, code, whatever, and just start having a conversation with it.
  • 00:18:10Here's this thing that I do.
  • 00:18:12And I get this data and it looks like this.
  • 00:18:14And I find myself doing this and this and this and all the time.
  • 00:18:18I've heard of this thing called Google ad scripts.
  • 00:18:20I've never created one.
  • 00:18:21I've used other people's never created one.
  • 00:18:23How could I do this?
  • 00:18:25What script could we create?
  • 00:18:27So rather than just diving into chat, you can say, I need a script that's going to pull this data and do this.
  • 00:18:32Maybe you don't know what you don't know yet.
  • 00:18:35So have a conversation with an AI first.
  • 00:18:37Be prompted by the AI.
  • 00:18:39Say, can you please ask me some questions so that you can figure out, dear AI, what it is that we need to build?
  • 00:18:46Great.
  • 00:18:47Now, can you build that for me, please?
  • 00:18:49Because guess what?
  • 00:18:49It's seen millions and millions of Google Ads scripts, and it's really quite good at getting it right.
  • 00:18:56Sometimes it'll get it wrong, but the wonderful thing about code, it's a bit like maths, right?
  • 00:19:00There is a right answer.
  • 00:19:02So you take the script, as you well know, and you go chuck it into Google Ads, and it either runs or it doesn't run.
  • 00:19:08And if it doesn't run, there's usually some sort of messy error thing down the bottom.
  • 00:19:11You don't even have to understand what that means.
  • 00:19:13You just copy the whole thing, chuck it back into your favorite AI and say, your script got this error.
  • 00:19:19Fix it for me, please.
  • 00:19:21And it does.
  • 00:19:22And you'd usually only have to go around that loop.
  • 00:19:24these days with the powerful AI that we have now, maybe two or three times.
  • 00:19:29And all of a sudden, you've got a working script that solves that problem.
  • 00:19:33Awesome.
  • 00:19:34Use the time you've saved by automating that thing.
  • 00:19:38If it was ten minutes a week, it doesn't matter.
  • 00:19:41Use that time you've saved to go build something else.
  • 00:19:43I have a little calculator on my website now that shows, like, if we only spent twenty minutes a week building some sort of automation, and even if it takes three weeks, it takes three lots of twenty minutes to build one automation that saves me twenty minutes.
  • 00:19:59So I'm going to spend an hour building the thing that's going to save me twenty minutes.
  • 00:20:04It just shows this exponential chart.
  • 00:20:05if you keep doing that week after week after week after week and then you plug in What's my time actually worth?
  • 00:20:13And you very very quickly find out that you can save or make thousands of dollars a year depending on how you value your time or Dozens and dozens of hours per year if you prefer to think in terms of time saved just by continually going all what next?
  • 00:20:31i'm just and once you get the bug for this it becomes quite addictive right?
  • 00:20:35because you just start seeing problems everywhere and i just love solving problems.
  • 00:20:40i love the the intellectual part of that.
  • 00:20:42i'm like how am i going to do this?
  • 00:20:44and then you just keep pushing the edge of that.
  • 00:20:47i'm like okay what are some more problems?
  • 00:20:50yeah not that oh that's.
  • 00:20:52that seems like a hard problem to crack.
  • 00:20:54how am i going to solve?
  • 00:20:56oh yeah okay let's just go attack that problem and it's just addictive.
  • 00:21:00like I said before going from idea to to impact so quickly is just so much fun.
  • 00:21:06and yeah you don't need to learn to code.
  • 00:21:08it helps to know a little bit about code but I think it's much much easier to learn that as you go and you don't have to.
  • 00:21:17there are plenty of people using scripts that have no idea about code.
  • 00:21:21that's totally fine.
  • 00:21:23but if you do want to sort of understand a bit about code it is infinitely better to start by trying to create something, even if it's like a little thirty line script that Claude writes for you and you use, and then you start asking Claude, like, what does this part of the script do?
  • 00:21:38And why did you do it this way?
  • 00:21:40And give me three other ways to do this part.
  • 00:21:44And you learn by doing rather than learning the way.
  • 00:21:46I learned the code a long, long time ago, which is like learning if statements and for loops and variables and all this.
  • 00:21:54It was so abstract.
  • 00:21:57Back then, learning from a textbook for six months before you could actually write any kind of workable code.
  • 00:22:02Now it's like, give me workable code and I'll follow along with you and learn as we go.
  • 00:22:07It's a much, much more interesting way to do it.
  • 00:22:10But of course, you don't have to learn to code if you don't want to.
  • 00:22:13But you just have to get the bug for solving problems.
  • 00:22:16Yeah, I also remember myself ten years ago Googling all the time and hanging out on stack overflow and always searching for the part of the code that would help me solve this Nitty gritty problem in the WordPress plugin or WordPress theme.
  • 00:22:32It was such a different time, but
  • 00:22:35it was so painful back then.
  • 00:22:36right because I remember when I was a kid type copying out computer programs from a magazine to create some computer game.
  • 00:22:45It's like eighteen pages of code.
  • 00:22:47Of course, yeah, one semicolon out of place.
  • 00:22:49Nothing's going to run.
  • 00:22:51I'm like, mom, you're a touch typist.
  • 00:22:53Could you just could you actually do like two, three pages and then go, I'm done.
  • 00:22:58Back to me.
  • 00:23:00But it was so painful to debug those things back then.
  • 00:23:04And you got these weird error messages and you didn't know what they meant.
  • 00:23:07And this is before you could get a stack overflow and actually look it up.
  • 00:23:10But Now, it's just so simple.
  • 00:23:12It's like, here's the error.
  • 00:23:14You know what that means.
  • 00:23:15And even if it doesn't get it right first time, do that enough loops, like I say, two, three, maybe four times, it's going to solve the problem and write working code.
  • 00:23:25And that's the wonderful thing.
  • 00:23:26That's why AI is so good at code, because there is this kind of binary it works or it doesn't.
  • 00:23:32We thought that AI would take years and years to write creative things like poems and songs.
  • 00:23:39Turns out to be quite good at that too because it's just language.
  • 00:23:42but running code and just does it work.
  • 00:23:44or doesn't it work?
  • 00:23:45great Give it the problem.
  • 00:23:47It just goes around around that loop until it solves the problem.
  • 00:23:49It's great.
  • 00:23:51now give us a little bit often Behind the scenes look into the text that you're using because I mean people I think see chat GPT Now releasing GPT five.
  • 00:24:03they have they.
  • 00:24:04Some people, I feel like it's still quite unknown, have used Claude, then there's Gemini, then there's whatever, all sorts of stuff.
  • 00:24:12So what are you
  • 00:24:16using?
  • 00:24:16What are you using?
  • 00:24:17Or what would you recommend?
  • 00:24:18Maybe even if you're using something that you feel like you wouldn't recommend for somebody that's just starting out.
  • 00:24:23So where would you start?
  • 00:24:24And maybe
  • 00:24:25someone was just starting out exactly.
  • 00:24:27I would not recommend the text that I'm using today, but that has evolved to this point.
  • 00:24:32But also, I see very much Google ad scripts as just the first step on that bridge of going from ads to AI, right?
  • 00:24:43That's the gateway drug to go, oh, this is possible.
  • 00:24:47And the bit that I think might be useful for your audience, the bit that kind of got me over that hump at the beginning was this realization that code can run in parallel.
  • 00:24:58So you take the time to.
  • 00:25:01You found that ten minute task and you sit there thinking, is it really worth?
  • 00:25:06Mike said it's going to take me an hour?
  • 00:25:07So it's probably going to take me two.
  • 00:25:09Is it really worth me spending two hours of messing around with something I do not understand to save ten minutes?
  • 00:25:16Let me just try it.
  • 00:25:17OK, it's going to take twelve weeks to pay back that ten minutes, right?
  • 00:25:21Because of lots of ten minutes.
  • 00:25:24But it was that realization that I've built that little ten minute thing and that little ten minute thing and that little ten minute thing and I don't have to sit there and wait for them all to run one after the other.
  • 00:25:36I can come in at nine o'clock on a Monday morning, hit the button, and by ten past nine, fifty of these things are all complete.
  • 00:25:43And I've just done a day's worth of work, and it's only ten past nine.
  • 00:25:46I haven't even had my second coffee yet.
  • 00:25:48Oh, my goodness.
  • 00:25:50This is quite fun.
  • 00:25:51And then, again, you re-invest that time, right?
  • 00:25:53So at the beginning, yeah, pick one.
  • 00:25:57I think it's very useful.
  • 00:25:59to be aware of a few tools.
  • 00:26:02It's kind of that T-shaped marketer type idea really, isn't it?
  • 00:26:05Of like being aware of lots of different tools, but probably going fairly deep into one because you get a bit of an intuition, you get a bit of a feeling for a particular model, which is why last week there was all this uproar about GPT-IV going away and GPT-V replacing it because people felt that they kind of, they understood GPT-IV that the way it Spoke to them.
  • 00:26:29It's sort of it had a personality if you like.
  • 00:26:31I know we tend to anthropomorphize things but It does feel like these things have a bit of a personality.
  • 00:26:36you get used to it You get used to the way of working with it And then when that disappears and a new thing comes along people just aren't very good with change usually right.
  • 00:26:45so Pick one.
  • 00:26:47Yeah, I agree the vast majority of people it's yeah most stats are made up on the spot But it's something like ninety five ninety ninety five percent of people using chat gbt.
  • 00:26:57at this point Claude is a very, very, very distant second or third.
  • 00:27:02And then, yeah, Google have their Gemini.
  • 00:27:04Gemini is really good at code.
  • 00:27:06And he would think, oh, it's Google ad scripts and Google Sheets.
  • 00:27:09So maybe I should use Gemini, but their interface, like the website where you go to use this thing is just horrendous.
  • 00:27:18I hate the Gemini website.
  • 00:27:20So I personally would use Claude.
  • 00:27:23I love the way Claude works, but also the Anthropic team are just.
  • 00:27:28They are shipping stuff like all the time.
  • 00:27:30So I now use a tool called Claude code.
  • 00:27:33I probably went from just writing code.
  • 00:27:38See, when you start, and you wouldn't do this today, but when you start, you start doing it all in the Google ads interface.
  • 00:27:43And it's a horrible place to try and edit code or see what's going on.
  • 00:27:47Definitely don't do that.
  • 00:27:48So today, if you were starting out, you'd probably start in chat GBT because you're probably listening to this and going, well, that's what I use.
  • 00:27:54So start there.
  • 00:27:56But if you're open to change, then have a go with claw.ai as well.
  • 00:28:02And you do that for a bit.
  • 00:28:03And then when you get to the point of, okay, I want a place to save all of these scripts that I'm downloading from LinkedIn and I'm making little changes too.
  • 00:28:13I just want to build up my own little library of these.
  • 00:28:16I don't just want to save them in an account.
  • 00:28:19What happens if I lose access to that account, right?
  • 00:28:21You might be saving those.
  • 00:28:22Don't save them as Google Docs.
  • 00:28:25That's when you sort of graduate to using a tool like cursor.
  • 00:28:28So that's sort of the next step on from just doing everything in a browser, like in a chat GBT.
  • 00:28:34A tool like cursor is fantastic because you can save all of your files in different folders down the left hand side.
  • 00:28:40Your code is in the middle of the screen.
  • 00:28:42And then you've got this AI agent over on the right.
  • 00:28:45So instead of copying and pasting code between all these different screens, you've got everything you need in front of you.
  • 00:28:52And then eventually you'll get bored with cursors limitations.
  • 00:28:57And that's when you might use tool like Claude code, which I use inside of cursor, because I like the visual aspect of cursor and being able to see all of my files and see the code changing.
  • 00:29:07But Claude code is just the most powerful coding tool.
  • 00:29:11And it's kind of almost programmable.
  • 00:29:13It's hard to explain and we definitely don't need to go there.
  • 00:29:15But you can basically take huge big things that you do and automate them down to a word.
  • 00:29:22And so typing a series of a few words, you can do an amazing amount of work in a very, very short time.
  • 00:29:29It's just incredibly powerful.
  • 00:29:30It's what the Anthropic team use to build Cloud.
  • 00:29:33So, you know, they're quite good at it.
  • 00:29:36They've made it basically freely available.
  • 00:29:38And it's just an incredibly powerful tool.
  • 00:29:40But I wouldn't start there.
  • 00:29:41I would start in cloud.ai or chat.gbt.
  • 00:29:44Or if you really, really love Google, you might try and start in the Gemini app.
  • 00:29:49But it's just, it's a bit ugly, and it's just a bit.
  • 00:29:52Again, not very nice to use.
  • 00:29:55Probably you're right the session we have today is not enough to unpack all this and go as deep as you could.
  • 00:30:02or maybe we should also for the audience, but you already dropped.
  • 00:30:07You already dropped an important keyword which was from ads to AI Because you recently launched this membership program.
  • 00:30:15I think it's quite new or at least fairly new.
  • 00:30:19Yeah,
  • 00:30:19yeah, so actually For me, let's maybe talk a little bit about that because I feel like you have a vast amount of knowledge and you were already telling the audience that you like to teach people stuff, etc.
  • 00:30:33So I can imagine this being a really, really valuable program.
  • 00:30:37But what's the vision here?
  • 00:30:39What have people, what's to expect?
  • 00:30:42So I picture this journey from ads to AI.
  • 00:30:47I think that, I think a lot of businesses, a lot of agencies are going to be just fine.
  • 00:30:53But a lot of businesses are going to feel the squeeze of commoditization over the next two, three years.
  • 00:30:58I think that for many, just offering the services that they offer today, maybe ad management services, I don't think that will be enough in isolation.
  • 00:31:07I think there'll be pricing pressure on those services as businesses sort of start to say, well, isn't the whole thing automated?
  • 00:31:15You know, Pmax and all these things in meta, like, what do you actually do?
  • 00:31:20They'll be saying.
  • 00:31:21They still, they were already saying that.
  • 00:31:24So I see this sort of path to offering new services to the same clients.
  • 00:31:35I mean, fifteen, twenty years ago when I started, small businesses were crying out for somebody.
  • 00:31:40If you could spell AdWords back then, you got a client.
  • 00:31:43And it's kind of the same now.
  • 00:31:45All these small businesses, they kind of feel like, yeah, we know MetaAds, we can do that ourselves.
  • 00:31:50Thanks.
  • 00:31:51But this AI thing, They're confused, they're overwhelmed, they're short on time like never before.
  • 00:31:57They need help desperately.
  • 00:31:59So, agencies that are on the cutting edge here and you don't really need to be too far ahead of everybody else to be on that cutting edge right now have this huge advantage to solve those problems for the same clients they want to delight and surprise today.
  • 00:32:16but they're just going to have to transition their services a little bit.
  • 00:32:20They may still offer those ad services, but there's probably some adjacent services there teaching those small businesses how to get the most out of AI.
  • 00:32:28The question I hit all the time is, yeah, but where do I start?
  • 00:32:32And so I think for those agencies, they need to start on themselves.
  • 00:32:35You know, what Americans would call dogfooding.
  • 00:32:37You've got to be doing this to yourself and with your team and upskilling and lifting up your whole team.
  • 00:32:45completely changing probably how your agency approaches things.
  • 00:32:51And it's not just about efficiency.
  • 00:32:52It's not just about cramming more work into the same number of people, but it's definitely not about, oh, how can I replace all of these warm bodies with some cold hard code and save more money?
  • 00:33:03Mr.
  • 00:33:03Burns, it's not about that at all.
  • 00:33:05I don't want to work with those agencies.
  • 00:33:07But the agencies that are like, how do we take the amazing skills that we have in front of us?
  • 00:33:13and use these incredible tools like AI and automation to augment all of this to make these guys so much better at what they're capable of doing for our clients.
  • 00:33:25Do that to yourself first and then go provide those additional services, maybe extra products to those small businesses because I think those businesses, they're not stupid, they're going to be crying out for that.
  • 00:33:37And if you're going, no, we just do Google Ads Management because we're really, really good at it.
  • 00:33:42And they're going, yeah, thanks.
  • 00:33:43I'm going to jump over to this guy who can do all of this stuff and teach us how to use AI and completely revamp the way we do content and change how we do all of these things, build these little tools for us internally.
  • 00:33:55We used to spend twenty grand a year on this SAS tool.
  • 00:33:59And this agency over here just built us a little version of that in a weekend, exactly to our specs.
  • 00:34:06It's the same with the agency, right?
  • 00:34:08then have to, if you know how to do this stuff, you don't have to do kind of things to like, eighty, ninety percent of the way you want to do them because you're trying to fit your system into a tool, build your own tool.
  • 00:34:20And now you've got it doing it exactly the way that you want.
  • 00:34:24And you have the skills to keep changing that and evolving that.
  • 00:34:27And as your team keep coming up with great new ideas of how you can use it, that's a great idea.
  • 00:34:31Let's build that in.
  • 00:34:32I'll just spend half the weekend on that.
  • 00:34:34And now we've got an even better tool that everybody can use.
  • 00:34:37And so that for me is that journey.
  • 00:34:39I picture it as a bridge from ads to AI.
  • 00:34:42I think the scripts are just the first step on there.
  • 00:34:45Like I said, the gateway drug, that's the bit that makes you go, oh, wow, this is fun.
  • 00:34:50This is possible.
  • 00:34:51I save all of this time and I get to solve problems and build stuff.
  • 00:34:55It's figuring out who on your team might be you.
  • 00:35:00It might be somebody three levels down.
  • 00:35:02It might be somebody three levels up, but figure out who the people are.
  • 00:35:06in your agency, in your business, or if you're a freelancer, it's probably going to be you.
  • 00:35:12Figure out who those people are and invest in them.
  • 00:35:15I have this line I use on stage of five percent or a hundred percent.
  • 00:35:20So think about the amount of income, top line, not bottom line, top line number for last year and take five percent of that.
  • 00:35:28Or if you're a freelancer, think about your income for the last year, take five percent of that.
  • 00:35:33That is the amount I believe you need to be investing right now in your AI literacy, in your education, because if you don't, you're risking the hundred percent of that number.
  • 00:35:44You're risking being obsolete and being gone in two, three years.
  • 00:35:49So I think that's a pretty easy thing to weigh up, five percent or a hundred percent.
  • 00:35:53But I still see so, so many people just sort of head in the sand of like, no, it's all a fad.
  • 00:35:57I don't need to learn anything about this.
  • 00:36:00It'll all blow over.
  • 00:36:01I'm going to keep going the way I'm going because it's the way we've always done it.
  • 00:36:04I think those businesses are going to be in trouble.
  • 00:36:06I'm not interested in working with those, but the ones that are really interested in like, we know we don't know, but we really want to learn, that's micro.
  • 00:36:14I love working with those people.
  • 00:36:17And what can people expect from the program?
  • 00:36:19Like, how does it work?
  • 00:36:21Because I mean, I can imagine a lot of people thinking like, hey, this sounds really great, Mike.
  • 00:36:26Where can I join?
  • 00:36:28How much does it cost?
  • 00:36:29What does it include?
  • 00:36:30It costs about two bucks a day.
  • 00:36:32That will go up at some point.
  • 00:36:33So I love pricing that goes up into years.
  • 00:36:35So I had the first hundred people got it for five hundred euro a year.
  • 00:36:40Currently it's six fifty and it's about to go up to eight hundred for a year.
  • 00:36:44Or you can pay, I think it's about three hundred bucks a month.
  • 00:36:46So it's clearly aimed at people that want to be with me for a year because I want to massively over deliver on that year.
  • 00:36:53So I have weekly videos where I talk about tools.
  • 00:36:57and show off how I'm using various tools and how small businesses are using tools.
  • 00:37:01We have a monthly office hours Q&A webinar.
  • 00:37:05I just had one couple of nights ago.
  • 00:37:06It was fantastic where people can come in, ask questions, maybe show off a little thing, but just get unstuck.
  • 00:37:13And then I'm creating a new course every quarter as well.
  • 00:37:16So I drop my courses in there.
  • 00:37:19They get courses before anybody else.
  • 00:37:21They get the courses for free.
  • 00:37:23And those courses, yeah, maybe I go on and sell elsewhere.
  • 00:37:26redone recently my entire Scripts and Sheets Mastery course for twenty twenty five completely redid that.
  • 00:37:32Last week I just dropped a Claude code course showing how to use Claude code inside of cursor, which has proven to be quite popular in the past week and a half that it's been out.
  • 00:37:43I've got so, so many plans.
  • 00:37:45I'm in the process of creating a basically an AI literacy course.
  • 00:37:50not just for them, but for them to be able to use with their clients so that they can take it, white label it, pass that on to their client and say, here's a course that will teach you and your team in small business world how to use AI.
  • 00:38:03And they just get that for free.
  • 00:38:05They get the transcripts, they get the slides, they can tweak it and change it.
  • 00:38:08They can use my videos or they can rerecord their own.
  • 00:38:11I just, yeah, I just, I love over delivering on value.
  • 00:38:15I hate feeling ripped off.
  • 00:38:16And so I'm obsessed with over delivering on value.
  • 00:38:20Yeah, build the agent stuff.
  • 00:38:21So I've done a few.
  • 00:38:22build the agent courses or that stuff will be in adds to AI in the nearest future by the end of the year.
  • 00:38:29That'll be the next course that I do in Q four.
  • 00:38:32And then loads and loads of plans for more stuff.
  • 00:38:35Yeah, couple of bucks a day, basically.
  • 00:38:39I think it sounds really good.
  • 00:38:40So I think we'll just drop the link to the landing page in the description of the video below so everybody can can check it out.
  • 00:38:47Yeah, adds to AI.com.
  • 00:38:49Pretty easy.
  • 00:38:50I found the shortest domain I could.
  • 00:38:52It doesn't really matter if you type in from ads to AI, TO, or the number two, I've got them all.
  • 00:38:57I like buying domains.
  • 00:38:59Really, really great.
  • 00:39:02You already mentioned built the agent and I also saw you doing this in-person workshop in, I think it was in Amsterdam, right?
  • 00:39:09Yeah.
  • 00:39:10Yeah.
  • 00:39:11So now we were talking about scripts, we were talking about Writing code, we're talking about cloud code, automations, agents, all that stuff.
  • 00:39:21Can you give us a little bit of your perspective and your mindset around the differentiation, for example, between automation, general automation, maybe also automated workflows and then agents?
  • 00:39:36Right.
  • 00:39:37Yeah, I think, so firstly, the definition of agents has changed a lot over the past one month.
  • 00:39:44There was a quote I had once, technology.
  • 00:39:46Technology is the stuff that doesn't work yet.
  • 00:39:48You know, it's the stuff that's just out of reach.
  • 00:39:51And so the definition of an agent, twelve months ago, today we look at that and go, yeah, of course it can do that.
  • 00:39:58But an agent should be the thing that does this.
  • 00:40:00It's the thing that's just over the hill, just out of reach.
  • 00:40:03I think that, well, when I first got into AI, I'll put it this way, when I first sort of went deep into AI about seven, eight years ago, I came away thinking, you know what, most businesses don't need AI at all.
  • 00:40:17They really need automation.
  • 00:40:19I wrote this whole business plan out for like an automation agency and then realized I didn't want to do that because automation kind of bores me.
  • 00:40:27And there were lots of those.
  • 00:40:29There's a great guy here in Australia, a good mate who's built the automation agency.
  • 00:40:33That's literally the name of his business.
  • 00:40:35And it's really good.
  • 00:40:36And it does really good stuff.
  • 00:40:37So we just would send people his way.
  • 00:40:41Where am I going with that?
  • 00:40:42Automation, I think, is the place to start because most of the time that will solve the problem.
  • 00:40:50You don't need the latest shiny object.
  • 00:40:53You don't need to be like sending a whole bunch of stuff off to a large language model to get a response in text back.
  • 00:41:01Actually, you kind of need something that works every single time in exactly the same way and just looking for those opportunities, looking for things we can go automate is a really good place to start.
  • 00:41:13Really easy way to do that, by the way, if someone's listening.
  • 00:41:17Next time, first of all, think about the tasks that you do and think about those that maybe you do fairly often and don't require huge amounts of human judgment.
  • 00:41:29So you can sort of plot all your tasks out on that scale of really frequent to infrequent and loads of judgment to not very much judgment.
  • 00:41:36Find that quadrant on that little chart.
  • 00:41:39Stuff I'm doing three, four times a month at least.
  • 00:41:41not massive amounts of judgment.
  • 00:41:43Think about all the tasks in that quadrant and then record yourself, turn on Loom and record yourself doing that task and just talk your way through it.
  • 00:41:53Maybe it takes you twenty percent longer than it usually would be, just talk out loud as you're going through.
  • 00:41:57When you get to the end, Loom will not only create the transcription of that for you, there's a button next to that transcription that turns that into an SOP or standard operating procedure.
  • 00:42:09Then you take that SOP, Over to chat GPT five and you turn on thinking mode up at the top and you say here's a task that I do all the time.
  • 00:42:18Can you see any opportunity?
  • 00:42:20To help automate any of this or are there any steps that we could eliminate or are there any steps?
  • 00:42:24You think I'm missing but basically how can you help me?
  • 00:42:28Automate this task and it'll give you a bunch of ideas.
  • 00:42:31some of them will be made up and wrong Yes, but most of the time a lot of it will be right and if it's Google ad space stuff you might even Nudge it in the right direction say like are there any ways to use Google ads scripts to help with any of this stuff?
  • 00:42:44or Google apps scripts, which is a very close cousin?
  • 00:42:48But if you're working with spreadsheets a lot, you definitely want to look into apps scripts.
  • 00:42:51They're incredible.
  • 00:42:52They're powerful.
  • 00:42:54So you start there.
  • 00:42:56Hey, you mentioned AI workflow.
  • 00:42:57I think most things in AI world right now are workflows rather than truly autonomous agents.
  • 00:43:05There's lots of arguments in the AI world about what actually is an agent and how autonomous is it and how agendic is it.
  • 00:43:11I really don't think that matters too much.
  • 00:43:13What matters is does it solve problems for you, for your business?
  • 00:43:17And we've all seen those flowcharts on LinkedIn and drop the thing down below in the comments to get the thing that gives you all that rubbish.
  • 00:43:27Those flowcharts, something like a make or a zappier or Today's flavor of the month is N-Eight-N, which I know you know very well.
  • 00:43:36Maybe one or two of the boxes on that big flowchart are large language models and AI doing its thing.
  • 00:43:43So you get to that step and you take all of that information to that point and you send it off to Claude and it comes back with some text.
  • 00:43:49You go, great, thanks for that.
  • 00:43:51And then you use the output from Claude as the input for the next step.
  • 00:43:55So you just, oh, okay.
  • 00:43:57So that's the bit where a human maybe made some sort of decision about something, and that was the point where we had to go, is it more this or more that?
  • 00:44:05Is this email really urgent or can it wait till tomorrow?
  • 00:44:09If it's really urgent, then do this step next.
  • 00:44:12Otherwise, let's go off on this other trail.
  • 00:44:16Or is this customer review really positive, really negative?
  • 00:44:19Do we need to respond to this urgently or not?
  • 00:44:22Do we need to thank them?
  • 00:44:23Do we need to send them a gift?
  • 00:44:25So I think thinking about it in those terms, that's exactly the right phrase that you used of an AI workflow.
  • 00:44:32So it's just an automation workflow.
  • 00:44:33But some of those steps might be AI.
  • 00:44:37But I think they get conflated.
  • 00:44:39And I think that what a lot of people call AI is really just automation.
  • 00:44:44And that's totally fine.
  • 00:44:46And more people should be using a lot, lot more automation.
  • 00:44:51I've heard some horrendous stats.
  • 00:44:53recently about just the average number of SaaS tools that a small business uses.
  • 00:45:00Apparently, it's on fifty on average, and they're copying data from a sheet into zero to create some invoice, and then they're copying something from Gmail into Asana, and they're copying from here, and it's just all copying and pasting stuff.
  • 00:45:15If you find yourself copying and pasting, or if you find yourself saying things like, To do that, we go over to this spreadsheet and we look over here to look for those little phrases being used around the office or by your workmates or by your clients.
  • 00:45:32That's a really good automation opportunity because if you're going over to there to get some information and then going over to there to get some information, then maybe you stay being the human in the loop there, synthesizing all of this together.
  • 00:45:45Maybe we don't try and use an AI for that yet.
  • 00:45:48It's worth trying.
  • 00:45:50But please, please, it's twenty twenty five.
  • 00:45:54Please don't be like going and fetching all of this data bit by bit by hand every time you do that task.
  • 00:46:00Have everything brought to you in the format that you want so that it's always there at the ready whenever you need it.
  • 00:46:09And then, sure, keep making the decision yourself for now, but also in parallel, be testing that, you know, be testing.
  • 00:46:18Can we use an AI to make this decision that I make at this point before we bounce over to the next step in the automation?
  • 00:46:25Let's run it in parallel.
  • 00:46:25I'll make the decision ten times.
  • 00:46:27Let's get the AI to do it ten times and let's compare results.
  • 00:46:30And when we get to the point that the AI is kind of like nine out of ten, good.
  • 00:46:34Maybe that's something else that we can get off our plate and we reinvest that time into working on the next bit and on it goes.
  • 00:46:40I
  • 00:46:42remember so well like eight years ago I was working as a student at a big internet company in Germany and I felt like okay I want to.
  • 00:46:49so besides all freelance work I was already doing I wanted to get an idea about how actual business and internet business works and remember this colleague and I liked him a lot.
  • 00:47:01but I always felt like when I was looking at his screen he was literally copying.
  • 00:47:06impressions and click data from one Excel sheet to the other Excel sheet, which was then connected to a PowerPoint slide deck, which was then manually presented to a client and sent out.
  • 00:47:18This is exactly even at that point.
  • 00:47:22AI for me was not a thing back then.
  • 00:47:25So eight years ago, I was like, Hey, this can't be the case.
  • 00:47:30And then when I, for example, stumbled upon Zapier and felt like, Oh, cool, you can exactly what you were telling just right now, you can connect these tools and send data over there and there.
  • 00:47:43And I feel like a lot of people just have to train this muscle more, right?
  • 00:47:46This sensitivity for
  • 00:47:51it's been.
  • 00:47:52Yeah, for me, it was kind of a boring thing.
  • 00:47:54I could work out how to do at this point.
  • 00:47:56But I think for a lot of people up until now, it's been very hard to do that.
  • 00:48:00You've obviously got the brain for it, right?
  • 00:48:02You see it and you go, oh, I can see what the pieces of that are.
  • 00:48:04I can see how they fit together.
  • 00:48:06And tools like that, like NA-TEN, there's a bit of a lift there.
  • 00:48:10And a lot of people don't want to spend the ten, twenty hours to learn that up to a decent level.
  • 00:48:15It's the same with Photoshop, right?
  • 00:48:17You've got to tip in the time to learn how to use the tool.
  • 00:48:20The wonderful thing is now, So many of those tools just run on code in the background, right?
  • 00:48:26So Claude can create, or Chatcha BT if you want to use it, or Gemini, bless you, can create that JSON file or that code that builds all of those little boxes on the screen that tells you how to automate the thing.
  • 00:48:39Maybe you need to go in and tweak it a little bit.
  • 00:48:41You still need to know how to use the tool, but it's never been easier and it's going to keep getting easier and easier.
  • 00:48:49So I think it's about like finding the way to solve the problem that you enjoy.
  • 00:48:54I just love solving the problem.
  • 00:48:56I like the intellectual challenge of that.
  • 00:48:58I like seeing people's face light up and when they get the bug and it's like,
  • 00:49:02can we
  • 00:49:04really we can do that?
  • 00:49:05Oh my God, that's so cool.
  • 00:49:07And that's that's why I did build the agent.
  • 00:49:09because it was just like sheets were getting a little bit.
  • 00:49:12And straining, you know, like the UI of Sheets, having to do it cell by cell, I would come up with a new version of the PMAX script.
  • 00:49:19And that was the easy bit.
  • 00:49:21And then I'd spend like three days fiddling around in the sheet, getting all the formulas in the perfect place.
  • 00:49:26That's why I kind of moved to doing stuff inside of an app.
  • 00:49:30And I needed to build the app first before I ran a program called build the agent, before I tried to teach that.
  • 00:49:36And it's just, oh, it's just so much fun, like having a slider.
  • 00:49:42I've
  • 00:49:43got a minute.
  • 00:49:43I can give you an example for your listeners.
  • 00:49:46If you go to AT-twenty-agent.com, you do not have to sign up for an account.
  • 00:49:49Accounts are free, but you don't have to sign up.
  • 00:49:51I've put loads of dummy data in there so that you can play with the tool just to experience what it's like.
  • 00:49:57So go to AT-twenty-agent.com, and then you can use the sample data.
  • 00:50:01You go up to the top and you find the keyword page.
  • 00:50:03I think it's under Analyze Account.
  • 00:50:04There's a few pages on there now, and there's a Keywords page, and it shows you a tree.
  • 00:50:10of keywords.
  • 00:50:11It's just a really intuitive way of thinking about campaigns that branch out into ad groups that branch out into keywords.
  • 00:50:20And as you move the slider for cost or impressions, you move the slider up and it shows you only keywords that have spent more than ten dollars last month.
  • 00:50:28Move the slider up.
  • 00:50:29Let's just show only the keywords that have spent more than fifty, more than a hundred, more than five hundred.
  • 00:50:33And so it's a really intuitive way to say, what are the most important keywords in my account?
  • 00:50:38Now, yes, you can go into Google Ads and you can set a filter there, but it just feels a bit more cold and impersonal.
  • 00:50:44I love the UI and constantly trying different ways of displaying data and turning it into useful information.
  • 00:50:52And then, yeah, you can try hacking AI over the top of that and turn useful information into insight, into actionable insight.
  • 00:51:00We're kind of right on the border.
  • 00:51:03to finally answer your earlier question about agents.
  • 00:51:05We're kind of right on the border between insights and action.
  • 00:51:09I think when we're really in agent mode, maybe next year is actually the year of agents, we'll be trusting the agents to then take those actions and do much more of the stuff for us.
  • 00:51:21But right now we're at the point where the AI can help us surface those insights and sort of solve the blank page problem and give us an eighty percent good enough, hence the name, eighty twenty agent, give us an eighty percent good enough insight.
  • 00:51:35But then it's kind of still on us at that point to go.
  • 00:51:38actually let me let me bring my human brain to bear on that and Synthesize it with some other data and think about that and then I'll go take the action.
  • 00:51:47for now I'm not at the point where I'm ready to trust The agent to do everything from where to go, but I'm sure yeah, I'm sure that that's gonna come.
  • 00:51:59I think the keyword tree example is so cool.
  • 00:52:01I also obviously tried the AT-Twenty agent.
  • 00:52:04So I can just recommend everybody signing up for an account and connecting there or one of their own Google Ads accounts or a client Google Ads account.
  • 00:52:12I did it and I found it really useful.
  • 00:52:15I think this is something that I just want to do a plus one for the data visualization part because I think a lot of people still feel like they have to just Tussles through these spreadsheets etc.
  • 00:52:27and uncover stuff whereas.
  • 00:52:31Well done data visualization can help you see stuff that is just impossible to see from just like campaign campaign campaign.
  • 00:52:40some cost some conversions really hard especially if you take in a dimension of time like developments over time.
  • 00:52:47so if you think about like okay hey my campaigns went down the last month why did it happen.
  • 00:52:54Probably there's something that happened either to the keywords, to the ads, maybe something like in a particular week and like trying to track those changes down and then revert it or come up with optimizations.
  • 00:53:07I think this is where people confuse their job.
  • 00:53:10They think their job is to hunt down this stuff, whereas the job is to actually uncover this and then come up with ideas to solve it.
  • 00:53:19Or what's your take on that?
  • 00:53:20Do you find this a reasonable
  • 00:53:21approach?
  • 00:53:22I love that.
  • 00:53:23I thought of it in those terms.
  • 00:53:26It's adjacent to one of those things I was saying before about.
  • 00:53:29you shouldn't have to go get the data from there.
  • 00:53:32I want the data brought to me.
  • 00:53:34I want those insights presented to me in such a way that I'm going to get it straight away and then we get to action and then we get to what clients really want, which is how is the business going to change?
  • 00:53:46What's going to happen to my profit?
  • 00:53:48when you do all that stuff.
  • 00:53:49They don't want to report with a whole bunch of insights.
  • 00:53:51They definitely don't want a dashboard with a whole bunch of data.
  • 00:53:53What they really want isn't just the list of actions, but what they really want is like, what's going to happen to my business?
  • 00:54:00How much more profit is this business going to do?
  • 00:54:02How many more people are we going to be able to serve?
  • 00:54:04How many more people am I going to be able to hire when I grow this business?
  • 00:54:08That's what they care about.
  • 00:54:09And yet, you know, Avinash, who was Google's digital evangelist, I think was his title for many, many years at Google.
  • 00:54:16He's left Google now.
  • 00:54:17wonderful guy.
  • 00:54:18If you ever get a chance to see him speak, please do.
  • 00:54:20He's a wonderful, wonderful speaker.
  • 00:54:22He talks about the data vomit.
  • 00:54:25All these agencies are just vomiting data over their clients.
  • 00:54:28Clients don't want that.
  • 00:54:29What they want is expected business outcome.
  • 00:54:31What's going to happen when we do all of these things?
  • 00:54:35But yes, it's very, very similar.
  • 00:54:37Like, have it brought to me make the getting of the insight way easier and way faster so that you can, as you said, then go do something about it, make the change, run the experiment.
  • 00:54:50I think most agencies would be greatly served trying to outdo the number of experiments that they ran last month.
  • 00:54:59That should be the leaderboard of like, no, we run a hundred and thirty six experiments.
  • 00:55:04That's the thing I think that clients want to hear too.
  • 00:55:06Like we have a a system for running experiments, a system for always trying new creative, trying new things.
  • 00:55:13Sam Tomlinson talks about this a lot in his wonderful Sunday newsletter, like the velocity that you can test new creative at is going to be one of the key things that matters, not?
  • 00:55:26do you have a really good way of looking at engrams?
  • 00:55:30That helps, but it's about speed, really, and we're all under pressure to be more efficient.
  • 00:55:38That's what I love helping people with.
  • 00:55:41We will get to the point where like, okay, so then everybody's using the same tools and everybody's thirty percent more efficient than they were last year.
  • 00:55:48Yeah, true.
  • 00:55:49That becomes a new baseline and then you just have to keep on going to the next bit.
  • 00:55:54I mean, this is the bit I don't like saying, but it's true.
  • 00:55:56This is the slowest it's ever going to be.
  • 00:56:00It only gets faster from here.
  • 00:56:01Sorry, this is the slowest the world's going to be for the rest of your life.
  • 00:56:05But it's also, this is the worst AI we're going to have.
  • 00:56:08And yes, I'm completely red-gilled on the AI, but I honestly believe if it never got better from here, we would spend the next five years putting in place the AI that we have available today, because businesses tend to move slowly.
  • 00:56:21It's incredibly powerful.
  • 00:56:23It's stupid too, and it does weird stuff, and it hallucinates.
  • 00:56:26I get all of that.
  • 00:56:27It's not all singing or dancing, brilliant at everything.
  • 00:56:31But your job, if you're still listening to me drone on an hour later, your job listening to this is to figure out what it can help with and what it's not good for.
  • 00:56:40And you do that by playing with it, by experimenting, by testing it out.
  • 00:56:43Go spend ten, twenty hours with it.
  • 00:56:46Every single thing that you do throughout the week, every task that you do, you're like, hmm, how could AI help me with this?
  • 00:56:54I wonder.
  • 00:56:54And if you're really unsure, turn on voice mode and chat GPT, go for a walk and have a chat with it.
  • 00:57:00Ask it, explain what you do, and ask it where it thinks there might be ways to automate, ways that AI can help.
  • 00:57:08I love chatting to the... So I use the chat GBT mode on the phone for a conversation.
  • 00:57:15I use Claude mostly for code, but I love that chat GBT app.
  • 00:57:21It's quite amazing to listen to.
  • 00:57:23My kids love talking to it as well.
  • 00:57:24It's quite bizarre.
  • 00:57:26What do you know about Mike's daughter, Frankie?
  • 00:57:31I did it too.
  • 00:57:32I had a walk in the park and just was talking like half an hour to chat about some, I don't know, random problem or challenge in the business.
  • 00:57:44And I felt like it's just also help structuring your thoughts.
  • 00:57:48And I think there's just this key insight.
  • 00:57:51It goes back to an article that a German, I don't know if it was a philosophist or like doesn't matter, but Heinrich von Kleist is his name and he wrote this article about the, I don't know the English term, but basically the idea is that while talking, you have to structure your thoughts in a way, if you talk to another person, you have to structure your thoughts in a way that the other person can understand what you're saying.
  • 00:58:18And if you do this, and it also applies to public speakers, for example, you have this, you have this this wild idea about where you want to go with your thought.
  • 00:58:28But like on the go, you have this energy of just your thoughts, structuring like the unstructured thoughts in your head, structuring around this, this really cohesive message.
  • 00:58:39And this, this thing, I just, I can't stress this enough.
  • 00:58:43If you have a complex problem in your head and you feel like, Hey, this stresses me out.
  • 00:58:47It's like so confusing.
  • 00:58:48Talk to someone, talk to a person that at least generally gets the context.
  • 00:58:54What is this?
  • 00:58:55Okay, you have to tell me what this is in a second.
  • 00:58:57or talk to AI.
  • 00:58:58It goes, it also helps.
  • 00:58:59There
  • 00:59:00is a concept in computer science called rubber ducking.
  • 00:59:04The idea being that you have this object on your desk and many people have an actual rubber duck on my desk.
  • 00:59:09I really should have a rubber duck sitting here for this example, but I have this little three D printed metal thing.
  • 00:59:14I've had it for years and years.
  • 00:59:15It's one of those kind of shapes that you can't make, but it's been three D printed.
  • 00:59:19And I just have it here and I sort of sit with it.
  • 00:59:21It's not that I talked to this, but.
  • 00:59:23Yeah, you're dead right.
  • 00:59:24talking out loud helps.
  • 00:59:26the idea with the rubber duck is you explain your problem to the rubber duck and the act of talking out loud and explaining it.
  • 00:59:33So it's like fifty eighty percent of most of the problem.
  • 00:59:37Is a rubber duck that talks back.
  • 00:59:40And it can ask you questions and yes, it can be a bit sycophantic sometimes and it can blow smoke up your ass as we would say in Australia, but you can also prompt it and say I want you to play devil's advocate.
  • 00:59:50I want you to push back on me.
  • 00:59:51I want you to think critically about this.
  • 00:59:53Don't just say no to everything, but think critically about this.
  • 00:59:56And maybe poke me a little bit where my argument is weak or you can use it to role play.
  • 01:00:02If you're going for a job interview, you can use it or if you're interviewing someone, you can say like, what are they likely to say?
  • 01:00:08And what are my questions?
  • 01:00:10What were a bunch of good questions for this particular candidate?
  • 01:00:13Not like, give me five questions that I'll ask everybody.
  • 01:00:17Here's the CV.
  • 01:00:18is their work history.
  • 01:00:19Here's everything you know about our business and the role and the PD and the job description.
  • 01:00:24And what should I be asking this specific person as wonderful for stuff like that?
  • 01:00:31It's so personalized and tailored.
  • 01:00:34And yeah, having a chat to it to get clear around your thoughts, I think it's one of the most underrated uses of AI.
  • 01:00:41I'm just in the process.
  • 01:00:42I'm trying to build this new app just this week.
  • 01:00:45just been playing with a bit.
  • 01:00:46So I've no idea when this comes out and if it will be ready on time.
  • 01:00:50But I'm going to keep going with it even though it's doing my head in as a way to show people the power of just adding that little bit more context of telling the AI a little bit more about yourself, about your business or about the products that you sell or the services that you offer and just how much better the response can be if you take the time up front, that upfront investment to educate the AI.
  • 01:01:16It's the old, what's the saying?
  • 01:01:17I don't remember who it was.
  • 01:01:20A Lincoln or Benjamin Franklin or somebody, if I had six hours to drop down the tree, I spend the first four hours sharpening my axe.
  • 01:01:27It's that upfront investment.
  • 01:01:29I get that nobody has the time to do that.
  • 01:01:31But oh my God, if you do, the payoff is massive.
  • 01:01:36Yeah, we also use this concept at our business that in also for our clients that we call a super prompt and it's exactly What you were just emphasizing.
  • 01:01:45so we have this document where we just say Hey, this is the business.
  • 01:01:49This is the target group.
  • 01:01:50These are key demographics.
  • 01:01:51These are the products, these are the services.
  • 01:01:54These are the core objections that people have about the service.
  • 01:01:57This is how this differentiates.
  • 01:01:59And this is like it, depending on the client, it ranges from a thousand five hundred words to something like three, three K words.
  • 01:02:07So there might also be like text examples in there.
  • 01:02:11Yes.
  • 01:02:11And the quality of the output that you get out, especially like.
  • 01:02:15Yeah, around strategic thinking, it's already great.
  • 01:02:18But especially if you write like content, for example, if you work with landing pages and all that stuff, like it's just, it's a night and day difference.
  • 01:02:27Yeah, you mentioned the strategy, right?
  • 01:02:30AI has basically read the entire internet.
  • 01:02:32So it's seen every slide deck that McKinsey and Bain and BCG and every consulting firm has ever put out online.
  • 01:02:38It's read all of that.
  • 01:02:39As you say, it is a genius management consultant, but If you don't tell it about you, about your business, about the stuff that you do, you're just going to get bland average answers because it's just predicting the next token.
  • 01:02:53That's all it is.
  • 01:02:53It's just a big bag of words and it's just pulling words out the scrabble bag and it's just predicting the next word.
  • 01:02:59But the more context you give it, the more information about all of that stuff around you, then that helps sort of ground it.
  • 01:03:07It helps move it away from that.
  • 01:03:09That average has this really strong gravitational pull, that average.
  • 01:03:13push it away from that center and push it out to the edges by explaining all of that information that you're talking about and drag it away from the boring average center.
  • 01:03:24That's where the gold is.
  • 01:03:25That's where the really interesting answers are, where it can be the best management consultant in the world.
  • 01:03:30But on your specific business, on that particular problem at that moment in time for that person, it's incredible.
  • 01:03:37But again, it's an upfront investment.
  • 01:03:39It's a bit of a heavy lift.
  • 01:03:40So I'm building this tool to sort of say, like, here's some dummy data again.
  • 01:03:45Play with it.
  • 01:03:46See what's possible with and without this context.
  • 01:03:48This is the answer you get without.
  • 01:03:49This is the answer you get with.
  • 01:03:51Try it with different models.
  • 01:03:52See which one works best for you.
  • 01:03:54Now, bit by bit, add your information to that because nobody wants to sit down and write a three thousand word document in one go.
  • 01:04:03But you can add that bit by bit.
  • 01:04:05Oh, okay.
  • 01:04:05Now I can see the benefit of doing that.
  • 01:04:08I'm willing to do the next little bit.
  • 01:04:10And yeah, I use a tool, WhisperFlow.
  • 01:04:12That's part of my tech stack that you were asking about before.
  • 01:04:14I love WhisperFlow.
  • 01:04:16Roads.ai, if you want my affiliate link.
  • 01:04:19It's a wonderful tool to just hold a button down and you just talk.
  • 01:04:24And you can get so much more nuance out that way.
  • 01:04:27Yeah, it's four times faster than typing, even if you're a good typer.
  • 01:04:30I'm pretty fast, but.
  • 01:04:32i can just ramble a bit.
  • 01:04:34as you've noticed today i tend to go on tangents and i tend to ramble a bit but just just doing that for three four five minutes gives the ai so much more to play with than just.
  • 01:04:45i'm got this problem and i'm typing it out and i'm going to stop as soon as i can because i'm typing and i'm not very good at typing and go.
  • 01:04:53if you just ramble for three minutes and just talk to your computer gives it so much more to play with and the answer will be so much better.
  • 01:05:00i'm so glad we got to that bit that you remind me about that because it's just it is night and day.
  • 01:05:05I totally agree.
  • 01:05:06And people need to experience that.
  • 01:05:08They need to see that and go, Oh my God, really?
  • 01:05:11I did not know.
  • 01:05:12I thought it just wrote Dr.
  • 01:05:13Sue's poems.
  • 01:05:13I didn't know it could do that.
  • 01:05:15Holy shit.
  • 01:05:16Okay, I mean, what else can it do?
  • 01:05:18And that's the best question you want to get to like, what else can it do?
  • 01:05:21Not where do I start?
  • 01:05:23Just start by playing.
  • 01:05:25Yeah.
  • 01:05:25couldn't agree more with that.
  • 01:05:27So now to be respectful of your time and wrapping our obviously very insightful, very great conversation up a little bit, you already mentioned speed and velocity.
  • 01:05:39And a big struggle I hear from either friends or colleagues and also other business owners is The the speed of change in the AI world.
  • 01:05:50so there's all the time a new model coming a new feature release.
  • 01:05:54then there are people obviously on LinkedIn and you have so you have the The confidence to say yeah, yeah, this is an N&A workflow and it Yeah, it's rubbish.
  • 01:06:05I go past that, but I feel a lot of people have a fear of missing out.
  • 01:06:09They feel like maybe I should get that.
  • 01:06:12So how do you handle this or what's like your mindset around all this news and information that's just coming at you?
  • 01:06:22It's a really good question.
  • 01:06:26Answer it this way.
  • 01:06:27Um, so I love books.
  • 01:06:30I've got a thousand books over there.
  • 01:06:32I've read eighty percent of it.
  • 01:06:35Um, We tend to read stuff or even watch a YouTube video Just in case it's just in case learning.
  • 01:06:43We'll read this book.
  • 01:06:44It's come out.
  • 01:06:45We've heard good things about it.
  • 01:06:46Just in case maybe one day six months from now two years from now I've got a problem where I can use some of that information and apply it.
  • 01:06:53Yay feel better about that problem And I think we're moving to that world of more just in time knowledge.
  • 01:07:01so That's certainly what I do with YouTube now.
  • 01:07:04I'm not just watching video other than all the sports highlights and stuff that I watch there.
  • 01:07:08It's mostly like I've got this particular problem right now.
  • 01:07:11I'm trying to figure out this new thing and I can watch something that solves that problem right now.
  • 01:07:17And so my use of books has changed dramatically over the past two years.
  • 01:07:22And so to turn that around to answer the really good question, I would say like, focus on the problems.
  • 01:07:28Don't don't get caught.
  • 01:07:30in the headlights and looking at all of the shiny objects and thinking that you need every single one and you need to type checklist into LinkedIn fifteen times a day to get all of those things sent to you maybe.
  • 01:07:42Instead just go like what is the problem I need to solve in the business?
  • 01:07:46right now?
  • 01:07:47I picture businesses like a pipe and there's always a thin point in the pipe.
  • 01:07:52somewhere might be over here and it's fat pipe over here and it goes thin again.
  • 01:07:56it's fat over here.
  • 01:07:57there is no point making a fat part of the pipe.
  • 01:08:00even fatter.
  • 01:08:01there's no point taking this part of the business and making this part better if there's a really.
  • 01:08:06In part of the part is the theory of constraints.
  • 01:08:08it's the bottleneck in the business.
  • 01:08:10you have to identify the bottleneck in the business and work on that.
  • 01:08:14there is no point working on other parts of the business.
  • 01:08:17you could have three times the leads coming in but if you have one person calling people back it ain't gonna matter.
  • 01:08:24you need to work on the bottleneck first.
  • 01:08:26so then okay what specifically can I do right now.
  • 01:08:31To work on the bottleneck?
  • 01:08:32and yeah, okay I suppose I'm at the point now where I am Consuming a lot of AI stuff because I'm fascinated by it and I want to stay on the cutting edge and I have a community of people now to serve and I feel that sort of part of my job is to And I've always loved this.
  • 01:08:48I've always loved running four or five hills out into the future and then coming back and not just Reporting on it never been really interested in that but like showing what's possible and building stuff to say like this and making it really useful and really practical and then running off again into the future.
  • 01:09:04I kind of live my life six months in the future, four or five hills that way.
  • 01:09:08And then every now and again, pop back into the real world and go like, oh, look at what I can do.
  • 01:09:12It's amazing.
  • 01:09:13I just love that.
  • 01:09:14So I like consuming a lot of stuff, but I get it.
  • 01:09:17You're wearing twelve hats.
  • 01:09:18You're running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
  • 01:09:22It's like you're super, super busy running a business.
  • 01:09:24Where the hell do you start?
  • 01:09:26Pick the bottleneck and Exactly what you were saying before.
  • 01:09:30Talk it through.
  • 01:09:32Have a chat.
  • 01:09:32It may feel ridiculous the first time you do this, because why am I talking to a computerized voice?
  • 01:09:38that's just a big bag of words, apparently.
  • 01:09:40It doesn't actually think.
  • 01:09:41It doesn't really know.
  • 01:09:43And yet it's actually really, really good at that.
  • 01:09:46So talk the problem through and like, give me always.
  • 01:09:50I have this thing of one for one.
  • 01:09:52Here's my one problem.
  • 01:09:53Give me four.
  • 01:09:55possible ways.
  • 01:09:56make them as different as possible as diverse as possible to be four different ways that we might be able to solve this problem.
  • 01:10:02you're not saying like tell me how to do it and i'll follow what the a i says.
  • 01:10:05Thank you for different ways that i might be able to explore to maybe try and solve this problem and then give me your one recommendation.
  • 01:10:12so one four one.
  • 01:10:15Pick a couple of bottlenecks and try that and then go okay shit let's do it.
  • 01:10:20Let's try and solve this problem.
  • 01:10:22Let's ask AI for help.
  • 01:10:24There's probably some automation in there to free up some time.
  • 01:10:27And also, if you listen to this, it's not just you.
  • 01:10:30Lean on your team.
  • 01:10:31I think it's absolutely an all hands on deck moment for most businesses.
  • 01:10:37It's got to come from the top.
  • 01:10:38It's got to be like, this is important.
  • 01:10:40And yes, we are going to fund this.
  • 01:10:42We are going to give you the resources to do this again, back to five percent or a hundred percent.
  • 01:10:47You need to invest in teams right now.
  • 01:10:50But also those people on the front lines of people dealing with customers all day.
  • 01:10:54those are the people that are going to have the best ideas how to implement this.
  • 01:10:58They're all using these tools anyway boss sorry to tell you they're just not telling you about it because they're worried that you're going to tell them off or you're gonna fire them.
  • 01:11:06All they're going to end up creating the system that replaces them.
  • 01:11:10the word about that the word that the breaking some a i policy and maybe they shouldn't have pasted all of that client data in and it's against some policy that your lawyer wrote for you and.
  • 01:11:20So they're worried, but they are using it in their jobs already.
  • 01:11:23They're just not telling you about it.
  • 01:11:25I think you're going to get the whole business together and say, right, we are taking this seriously.
  • 01:11:29We are investing in to start with just basic literacy.
  • 01:11:34We just don't need to just be on the same page and then let's invest in, right?
  • 01:11:37Who's going to be that sort of like the advanced team?
  • 01:11:41Who's going to run one or two hills into the future with me as a business?
  • 01:11:44But it has to come from the top.
  • 01:11:46There has to be a vision of where we're running to.
  • 01:11:49We're not just rushing off in different directions over different hills.
  • 01:11:52it's like here's the mountain we're going to climb.
  • 01:11:54this is what the business is going to be like two or three years from now if we all go.
  • 01:11:59do this now.
  • 01:12:00I need a few like scouts to come with me one or two hills into the future.
  • 01:12:06who's going to come with me from base camp up to camp one and help build the trail for everybody else that's going to follow along behind?
  • 01:12:13like this is the view from the mountain top.
  • 01:12:16But now let's focus on just getting from here to here.
  • 01:12:18Let's just get to camp one.
  • 01:12:20And then let's go build that path and then bring everybody else up to camp one.
  • 01:12:24Okay.
  • 01:12:24This is the new version of the business.
  • 01:12:26Okay.
  • 01:12:27Take a moment.
  • 01:12:27Let's have a big party.
  • 01:12:29Right.
  • 01:12:29Scouts, you come with me.
  • 01:12:31Now we're going to build the path up to camp two and we're going to keep on and it just keeps on going and going and going.
  • 01:12:37But yeah, I get it.
  • 01:12:38Most, particularly small business owners who are doing twelve different jobs.
  • 01:12:44It is utterly overwhelming.
  • 01:12:45They don't have a spare minute, plus they're trying to be super parents, plus they're trying to be friends, plus they're trying to do everything else.
  • 01:12:52It is really hard.
  • 01:12:53So just don't get distracted by the shiny object.
  • 01:12:57Focus.
  • 01:12:57And focus stands for follow one course until successful.
  • 01:13:00That's what focus stands for.
  • 01:13:02Follow one course until successful.
  • 01:13:04Figure out that thing, that bottleneck.
  • 01:13:06Fix that bit, get that part of the pipe wider, and then find the next bottleneck.
  • 01:13:12and don't get distracted and just keep on going.
  • 01:13:14The game is just staying in the ring.
  • 01:13:17You will get knocked down.
  • 01:13:18The whole game is getting back up again and staying in the bloody ring.
  • 01:13:21My mentor told me that once.
  • 01:13:23He said there are many, many days where you just want to quit and walk outside the ring and just go, I'm done.
  • 01:13:27No, get back up and you stay in the bloody ring.
  • 01:13:32Mike, I can't tell you this has been such an enlightening and insightful session.
  • 01:13:36So actually I want... So everybody that has listened until now, I can actually recommend you just listen to the whole thing again, because there has been so much to unpack.
  • 01:13:47So actually this metaphor or this image of going like two, three hills into the future, I will... If you ask my team, we will hear this a lot now.
  • 01:14:00I've got a whole document.
  • 01:14:01I've written around that.
  • 01:14:02Happy to send it to you.
  • 01:14:03Link in the show notes, whatever you want to do.
  • 01:14:05Yes, that's how I picture it.
  • 01:14:07I'll send it to you.
  • 01:14:08Let's
  • 01:14:08do it.
  • 01:14:09So, Mike, thanks so much for this insightful session.
  • 01:14:14It has been a blast.
  • 01:14:17Everybody that wants to follow you, see more of the stuff you're doing.
  • 01:14:23Try some of the tools that you're doing.
  • 01:14:25What's best to follow you, where to find your stuff?
  • 01:14:28I'll
  • 01:14:30make it easy for you.
  • 01:14:31Nine characters, eighty twenty agent.
  • 01:14:34So eight zero two zero agent dot com.
  • 01:14:37Um, all the courses are there.
  • 01:14:38The link to the ads to AI community is there.
  • 01:14:41That's the best place to find me.
  • 01:14:43I don't really do social media.
  • 01:14:44I'm on LinkedIn a bit, but I don't do anything else.
  • 01:14:47But yeah, eighty twenty agent dot com.
  • 01:14:49Everything's there.
  • 01:14:51Awesome.
  • 01:14:52Mike, thanks so much.
  • 01:14:53And, uh, yeah, everybody else.
  • 01:14:56Go explore, try to use some of the concepts and some of the ideas and some of the thought starters that Mike has given us today and just go try it out today or tomorrow.
  • 01:15:08Thanks very much, man.
  • 01:15:08Appreciate it.
  • 01:15:10Thanks for having me.
  • 01:15:10It's been great fun.
  • 01:15:11Thanks so much.