Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:00.77)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. Today we're going be diving in headfirst in how a company called Duct Tape Marketing is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI agent for you.
eliminating hallucinations for good. Go to gpt-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration is going to take you to get it finished. Just isn't worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. Scheduled consultation today. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com.
Today I have with me Sarah Ney, who is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing. Since her start at Duct Tape Marketing in December of 2010, Sarah has consulted and advised over 1,000 small business owners on how to build, grow, and scale a profitable business. She has a passion for helping small business owners focus on their zone of genius and building a team and systems around them to support their growth goals. So excited to have you on the show today. How are you doing, Sarah?
Sara Nay (01:30.178)
I'm doing well. Thank you for having me. I think your pitch should say removing hallucinations and dashes for good.
Kyle James (01:36.514)
Hmm. I like that. I like that. I'm, know, I might, I might just have to edit that. Yeah. The next one I'm going to do it. think. Awesome. So, so give us it for those listening in, give us a little bit background about you, Sarah. Like how did you get into duct tape marketing and like, exactly do you, does your team do?
Sara Nay (01:41.273)
Sara Nay (01:52.185)
Of course. So Ductate Marketing as a Business has been around for about 30 years and our founder, John Jantz, started the business because he realized that in the small business space, marketing was really complicated. And so he developed basically what we call a small business marketing system that we now install in the businesses that we work with. So we've always been about making marketing simple and practical.
I started at the business about 15 years ago as an intern and I've played many different roles within the company from account manager, fractional CMO, COO. And most recently in December, I stepped into the CEO seat. We have two sides of our business. We work directly with small business clients as a fractional CMO, but we also certify marketing consultants, fractional CMOs, agencies in our approach as well. And we've been doing that for about 16 years.
Kyle James (02:41.262)
So going from an intern to the CEO, that's a story right there. How did you climb your way that fast? And what's the secret? it's not common, no?
Sara Nay (02:53.293)
Yeah, it's been 15 years. So wasn't like super fast getting here. But you know, just learning all the different roles and evolving and really having a growth mindset has been huge. I've always been naturally curious and wanting to learn and take on, you know, as much as I can and have been very driven over the years. So that's helped. But now that I'm in the CEO role seat, it's really been impactful that I've been in so many different roles in the company, because when I'm managing a fractional CMO on our team or someone that's running sales now,
Kyle James (02:56.11)
Yeah.
Sara Nay (03:21.753)
I've been in those roles and so I can relate to what they're going through and what they're dealing with and when they're getting close to burnout, because I've been there myself. And so it's made me a much better leader today because I understand what my team is working through in a lot of cases.
Kyle James (03:36.482)
Yeah, I've heard of some different companies having like when they first come on board, they have you start off as like, sorting the mail, as starting off and then going into like the warehouse and then making like, not obviously not like starting like from the grig literally clean the toilets, things like that, but just starting off, like seeing like all avenues of the business. think obviously it's paid off in the long run for you.
Sara Nay (03:44.232)
Yeah.
Sara Nay (03:57.783)
Yeah, and I do a lot of training for agency owners and fractional CMOS through our program as well. And so now when I'm able to train them, like I understand all the different roles that they're potentially hiring for in a lot of cases when they're scaling up their businesses. So it's given me a lot more insight to be able to walk in all of those shoes.
Kyle James (04:15.638)
Yeah, that's awesome. love that. So talk to me a little bit more about, you know, the AI here. So I know that duct tape marketing, you're using AI. Like why did you decide to, implement AI in the first place and what types of challenges were you trying to solve? Maybe both internally or even like externally with some of your, your clients that you were working with.
Sara Nay (04:35.895)
Yeah, it's interesting when you say challenges. I think when I first started thinking about AI, I thought opportunity. I was excited about the opportunity that it could bring to the marketing space because running a marketing agency for so long, there are a lot of challenges in that terms of profitability and scaling and always trading time for hours. And you always need specialists and people in all the seats. So there's a lot of challenges in that space. And so when I first saw AI, thought it
Kyle James (04:41.57)
Hmm.
Sara Nay (05:02.531)
thought of it as like, how can we save time? How can we be more productive? How can we do things to like assist with research and content production? And I still think about AI in that way, but it's absolutely evolved now to how can we use AI as a thought partner? How can we use AI to improve our strategy? How can we use AI to elevate our team so they can do things that humans still are superior in like creativity and thinking and communication and seeing big picture.
And so, you know, I really, saw AI initially as being more productive and it still is there, but really where I'm leaning into AI is it's elevating the humans on our team to be able to spend more time on their high value tasks and then use AI below them to take care of some of more of the in the weeds stuff that was really draining and time consuming before.
Kyle James (05:51.468)
Yeah. And like talking about that, like what is, is that, cause there's so many perspectives in AI, like what was that shift? Like, I mean, is it, was it like a, a mindset shift that was like, Hey, look, we're cause I've heard, I've heard different scenarios where it's like, Hey, look, let's take AI and let's have it as assistant. But I've heard other people say, Hey, take AI and help it off board a lot of your tasks and a lot of things you're doing. then put your time elsewhere for more, I guess, like human related tasks. Like, is that kind of the approach that was that you took initially or like.
How did that transition happen?
Sara Nay (06:22.609)
Yeah, I read a book, AI Driven Leader by Jeff Woods. It's a common book in the AI space now. But he talks about, you know, auditing your time and really at like writing down all the things that you're doing on a regular basis and identifying like what are improving in value, what's staying stable and what's decreasing in value.
and then really shifting your focus on how you can focus on that top like 20 % of things that are increasing in value because of AI. And so I think that's a really great process to go through as a team for leaders, but also everyone on your team, because going through that exercise, it helps you determine how to future proof your career essentially. So it helps you focus on like the things that are increasing in value because there's a lot of fear in the space right now of will my job be here?
later down the road, especially in marketing. But if you can identify where you are becoming more valuable as a human and really focus your efforts there, and then everything else on your list, how can you bring in AI to move faster on those things? I think that's a really positive exercise to go through. And really what you're thinking about is future proof. And so let's say your team goes through that exercise.
And some of their skills are like being better managers, because now they're managing AI or being better communicators. Like if you have identified that with your team, you can then put your energy and focus on helping them up level those skillsets as well. So they also are future proofing their careers.
Kyle James (07:45.74)
Yeah, I love that. I had a podcast a couple earlier this week. And one of the things that, my get the guest said was like, she was telling her entire team, like, Hey, I want you to try and. Replace your job with AI. everyone's like, what, why am going to do that? Like, why would I do that? It's crazy. And like, she's like, hold on. I'm not saying like, I'm not going to fire you. I'm not going to fire my team. Like relax. I just want you to try and have it automate as much as you possibly can. Because once we do that,
Sara Nay (08:00.915)
Thank
Kyle James (08:13.506)
Then we can put our time towards other things. And I was just like, Whoa, what a mindset shift that, that must be. And like, that sounds like is, is like using it for whatever benefit you're trying to accomplish for each business. not only that, but each department and where you can fine tune even further, but for you specifically, Sarah, like, what would you say is like, you know, from, since you've been implementing a lot of AI, like what types of like results have you been seeing so far? and maybe what's, what would you say is maybe worth noting to some of our audience?
Sara Nay (08:42.989)
Yeah, I mean, it really does come down to what are you trying to accomplish because the results will completely vary. And so what we do for clients and what we've done for years is we start with developing a business strategy.
marketing strategy and team strategy. So we're still doing that with clients. But the opportunity now with AI is it allows you to develop that stuff a lot faster on a deeper level. And so, you know, we're providing better strategic experiences for our clients because we're able to use AI to do a lot of the research faster that then elevates our team to spend more time actually thinking critically about what's being produced.
And so for me, like that's not a specific like ROI. These are the results we're getting necessarily, but I can see my team getting better results for clients at a quicker turnaround time than we've ever been able to do previously. Like deep research is an example in that. before in strategy, we have always done competitive research.
Kyle James (09:22.414)
Mm-hmm.
Sara Nay (09:38.509)
before our team would literally have to go and do all of the research manually and uncover all these things. And now they still go out manually and look at the competitors' websites for the research we're doing, but they pull a deep research report on the competitors as well. And so now we have like a 15, 20 page document with incredible insights that's pulled in 10 minutes, where it would have taken someone on my team for a really long time to do that on their own manually. And so I really think of,
Again, that's an example of how I believe that AI is elevating our team to free up space to spend more time on different things, ultimately.
Kyle James (10:15.758)
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think like the deep research is, is pretty, I remember the first time when like chat, she came out with their model for deep research. I remember which model is like Oh three mini or something like that or three. just seeing the way like it process where initially you saw like chat to be T and it was like three seconds. Here's your super long response. And then now it starts showing like this process of like, Hey, it's searching this, Hey, it's searching that. And it's like, yeah, it's taking a little bit longer, maybe like two or three minutes. But as you said, like Sarah, like you're getting this full on report.
Sara Nay (10:35.993)
Yeah, I love the process.
Kyle James (10:45.326)
20 page document that instead of spending three, four, five hours researching AI can generate it within really probably a couple of minutes, if not sooner, maybe in a couple of seconds, depending on how much data, you know what mean? So.
Sara Nay (10:58.292)
Yeah, we didn't like in the small business space, and you know, we work with a lot of small businesses, like they didn't have the budget for that level of research before. And now it just makes it so much more accessible and affordable to people, which I think is a really exciting opportunity in the small business space specifically, because now
Kyle James (11:05.271)
Hmm.
Sara Nay (11:15.149)
we have more access to data and research than we've ever had. And so it makes it a little bit easier to compete with some of the bigger names on some levels.
Kyle James (11:23.086)
Yeah, absolutely. So walking into this next couple of years, I mean, there's going to be a lot of change in AI. Everyone knows that, but what is some of the maybe duct tapes marketing of upcoming AI initiatives and where do you see AI playing maybe the kind of the biggest role in your operations next?
Sara Nay (11:38.201)
Of course, so I'm actually writing a book right now. It's hopefully going to be live coming out in September, August to September, but it's called Unchained Breaking Free from Broken Marketing Models. And essentially we've been an agency for 30 years where we've handled execution for clients. We're making a complete shift and we're developing what we call the anti-agency model in a sense where we're helping.
our clients, come in and we create an overall strategy, but then we're empowering their internal teams to handle marketing execution by creating that strategy, analyzing their team strengths, and then building the AI systems below them. So marketing departments and small businesses can handle AI execution when it comes to marketing, which I think is a really exciting opportunity. Cause again, in the small business space, a lot of people have relied on outsourced contractors, agencies.
solutions over the years and there's a lot of issues in that. I'm not saying that those people are bad because we've been an agency ourselves, but really the small business loses control of their marketing, which I would argue is one of the most important assets. And so I think the evolution of AI is allowing these small businesses to be able to do things that they couldn't do before, like ads optimization and content production and SEO and landing page creation and email copy.
So really our big initiative is empowering small businesses to take back control by using AI as one of their leverage points.
Kyle James (13:05.654)
Yeah. Can you repeat that book one more time? Just for those who didn't quite hear that. Maybe they tried to write it down as they were driving. I hope you're not driving while you're listening to this. Maybe you are. Sorry if you are, but what was the book name again?
Sara Nay (13:14.265)
I always drive and listen to stuff. you're my people if you are unchanged and breaking free from broken marketing models is the book.
Kyle James (13:24.896)
Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much, Sarah, as we wrap up today's call today, where can people learn a little bit more about you and maybe a little bit more about duct tape marketing?
Sara Nay (13:34.553)
Of course, so our website is just DucktapeMarketing.com and also I'm very active on LinkedIn. So again, my name is Sarah Ney. I would love to connect with you there.
Kyle James (13:43.054)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's great to have you on the show. And remember for those listening in, if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that the AI could cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with GPT trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now, have a great rest of your day, everybody. And looking forward to seeing you all in the next episode of AI Chronicles.
Sara Nay (14:08.231)
Thanks everyone.
