Season 1 Finale: Systems-Building for Small Businesses Best Bits (Ep53)

Speaker A: The systems wise podcast.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the show. This is Systems Wise, a show about helping small businesses with limited resources to solve those sales, marketing and systems challenges that those resource constrained businesses like yours and mine will face. Every week I try and answer a question about how we as small businesses can get better at those key things that make a meaningful difference to the way that we run our business. And then this episode, this is a. Almost like a special edition episode. We're wrapping up season one of the Systems Wise podcast and I'm joined by producer Rob Rob Drummond, who has throughout this series been my first listener and prompter and guide to making this podcast as coherent as possible. Welcome to the show, Rob.

Speaker A: How do, Gareth? Is that the correct Yorkshire greeting?

Speaker B: That is exactly the right Yorkshire greeting for our listener.

Speaker A: I'm learning.

Speaker B: You are Indeed. So, Rob, 52, 53 episodes into systems wise, it's had two different names along the way. As the listener's about to hear, it's for season two. It's going to get a third different name.

Speaker A: I think you're going grey doing this than I am, to be honest.

Speaker B: Yeah. Chaotic, but also somewhat structured in terms of the way that we've talked through the systems challenges that small businesses have. What's been your big takeaway?

Speaker A: I would refer people to the forks in the road and thinking about being mindful of the forks in the road and, um, when they come up, because they are. I think what struck me about it was that every business will face those forks. So, um, that's the thing I would

Speaker B: point people towards, episode 24. I think it was around how every business faces this challenge at some point or another. Do they go down the hiring route or do they go down the systems route? Right. Why that one, Rob?

Speaker A: It struck me as true in all circumstances, um, regardless of where you are. And I think it's worth planning for those things, um, and thinking about how you might deal with them. And at some point, as you scale things up, like, you are going to need help, which I think the next step in what we're doing about hey, Pip and so on kind of makes sense. It's like, well, maybe that first employee isn't actually an employee. Maybe it's, maybe it's a tool. Um, but I think that is still a worthwhile thing to think about.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, very much so. Are there any other episodes that stand out for you that new listeners or existing listeners might go and have a look at?

Speaker A: Yeah, we spent quite, uh, a lot of time talking about landing pages, and that sticks in my Mind, because for me and my clients, because my background's a little bit in paid advertising, it's a deep frustration point that clients spend so long getting landing pages ready or think that they have to hire a web agency who charges them. I've seen web design agencies charge clients tremendous amounts of money for creating a landing page that isn't even right. It doesn't even have great content on it. It doesn't actually, it doesn't even, it doesn't even convert. It's like we could have had this in place in a bare bones format way, way faster. We could have been testing it, we could have been driving content to it, we could have been iterating it. We could be on like the fifth iteration by now. So it's a bit of a bone of frustration for me. And actually we've been kind of talking a little bit in the uh, episodes about how if you have an all in one tool, quite a lot of these tools can also do landing pages now. So maybe the technical barrier isn't where it was even just like how long ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago?

Speaker B: I agree. And it frustrates the heck out of me when I've got nothing against web designers, but when web designers, I have

Speaker A: a lot against web designers. Okay.

Speaker B: When web designers and web copywriters charge so much to businesses to create one off landing pages. And even looking as far back as episodes three and four where we talked about the different stages of your buyer's journey, we introduced the concept, didn't we? Of course. Tofu, mofu and bofu. Top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. I talk about those in the lemonade plan book a little bit as well. That was where we introduced the concept of the importance of the landing page, didn't we? And even though it's that far back and it was that early in the recording process, the number of people that will still go back to episodes three and four to build that understanding of what they should be doing more of in their landing pages still surprises me to this day. And yet it shouldn't do. And you're right, so many of these online softwares now have the ability built in for you to be able to create pages really simply, really quickly, really easily and test your message with what turns somebody that's first aware about that problem and about how you work with it into leads opted in through those landing pages. So I think that's, that's a good one. That's an important one to introduce into the mix. Any others just going to Add to

Speaker A: that that the right message to the right audience will always outperform the right design and you can always get the design right later. And it is just about speed. It's about if you got an idea for something you want to test, like you should be able to get version 0.1 of that landing page up, maybe using a template that is already available to you and perhaps even just a few hours maybe. So I think there's a speed element to this as well.

Speaker B: Just as a precursor for the conversation about where this is going. Over the weekend I start playing around with the idea in AI about creating landing page content for my new service, heyp. And I gave it a structure, in fact I just gave it a YouTube link of, you know, the 10 most important things you should include in a service business landing page. So I gave it that and it interpreted what was in there and it came back to me with a section by section version of my website homepage. And through my experience of doing that, that has now become on the plan of tools that I'm going to incorporate into heypip. The difference between that as a first version and what I might have done had I not had any marketing skills, I might have hired a web designer and copywriter to do that for me. At literally hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. It's just mind blowing. The difference, uh, in where we're at now versus where we were a year or so ago. Just while we're on the topic of the uh, the all in one CRM and it being, I think your, your best first hire. We talked about that, didn't we, in episode 22? And I'd worked it out that at £5 48 per day, bearing in mind as we record this in the UK, the minimum wage is more than double 5 pounds 48 even per hour, let alone per day. I think your all in one CRM is by far and away your best first hire. And episode 22 talks about uh, that process and why you should give consideration to an all in one CRM.

Speaker A: Um, viewing it as a first hire is actually quite compelling because if you were to hire someone, you would pay a lot of attention to how you trained them, how you onboarded them, make sure they had the right support. So yeah, so you're dealing with a platform instead, but you still give it that care of attention and you know how to get the most out of it and what it can do for you and have an idea of where it's going to fit in the business.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, completely agree Shifting tack a little bit to one of my other favorite uh, episodes and about how you show up in your market. The concept of niching your business is one that you don't have to, you don't have to go far online to, to look for people posting about how you should in inverted commas have a niche for your service or product. And we talked about that, didn't we in episode 25 and uh, the five questions to help decide how to niche. I was a bit reluctant to record that one Rob because of just how prevalent that is as a topic that's out in the market and I suppose almost a little bit self reflectively that I speak to small service based businesses. Seems like quite a broad spectrum of people that I work with. So I was, I was reluctant to record that one. Have you got anything to say about niching?

Speaker A: Well I also struggle with this and have in uh, theory a relatively broad niche. So I think it's a work in progress. But I think the risk is that you niche and you almost go into business in a way that is no longer reflects you. So if I was to be like the Google Ads guy for plumbers or something that's a business, I definitely could have done that. I probably would have earned more money by niching in that way but it wouldn't have brought me joy. So I think there's almost like conflicting forces here where yeah, you want a niche to be as relevant as possible to exactly the right person who needs your services but, but then you also want to operate a business that you love running. So I think it's actually a more complicated subject than people think.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I would say that I niche around a problem and the problem that I niche around is for those small service based businesses I help best those businesses that have longer sales pipelines where somebody doesn't decide or typically doesn't decide to work with you within the first few days or week that not necessarily that episode but this whole process has taught me so much more about my attitude to who uh, who I can help the most and why I like helping those people the most. So that was um, that was my takeaway from that one. Are there any other episodes that we should draw people's attention to, Rob?

Speaker A: Possibly the curse of expertise. I think it's maybe because I think that afflicts, I think that affects all of us. Well we know too much about the topic and maybe that's, maybe that's also a constant work in progress as well of keeping an eye on that. Because the trap is always that you start to produce and you fall into this trap where you know all about this. So then you, you start to market yourself more consistently. You start to, you create the cons, the consistent publishing schedule, but you kind of lose everyone in the process.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that one for the listener, uh, is episode 52, the Problem Solvers paradox, where we talked about this expertise trap that holds back so many small businesses, especially service businesses, where you have so many years of knowledge and insights about the problems that your audience faces. Cool. Some good episodes for people to check back on. Either go recap things that they've listened to before or listened to for the first time there. Rob.

Speaker A: I'd, uh, suggest as well just find, find the things that really strike you as problems that you need to address and think the things that resonate with you. Like this isn't an all, an all you can eat buffet. It's more of like a, an a la cartes. Like go and pick these. This is where you're at at the moment. Go and pick these episodes. Don't just take our word for it in terms of these are the ones that stood out to us. Um, so take a look through the full 52 episodes so far and think like, well, okay, so what pikes my interest and what should I listen to next? Don't try and listen to all 50, just go and listen to a few and put a few things into action.

Speaker B: That's good guidance. We started off, didn't we, talking about the eight processes of Lemonade and then bookended uh, the season with the launch of the book. For me, those first, what would it be, eight or ten episodes where we explored the core concepts of Lemonade, which is leads through to endorsements. That was really insightful for me as the first time that I'd opened this. Not really a book of secrets, is it? Because sales and marketing processes are the same around the world. Lemonade is my take on the important sales and marketing processes and delivery processes in any business. But for me, articulating it and sharing my stories and insights in those different areas for the first time with a wider audience rather than private one to one clients. It revealed that, uh, there's actually quite a lot of complexity to explaining those eight things in one place. Right.

Speaker A: There's so many sales and systems people where uh, there's actually not that much underneath the surface. And I think what this does is it realizes, I think what I like about this show and what you're doing is that you're very committed to saying actually it's not Three simple steps. It is the eight processes. It's. We're not going to dub it down. So in thinking about the Lemonade plan structure, something that's really stuck with me is the changing of the order in terms of how you think about the eight letters of Lemonade. And we started off talking about the L and leads and how most people are generating one lead a day to keep the doctor away. Whereas actually what we're now encouraging people to do is to start with endorsements and work back and start with the end in mind. And I just thought that's worth going, going over again for anyone who's kind of missed that.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So in our first few episodes we, we took all eight processors in the buyer's journey, didn't we? We talked through, from leads, through education meetings, offers, new clients, add on services, delivery and endorsements. And it's the, it mirrored the exact process that your clients or customers or patients would go down when they work with you. But actually one of the learning parts for me in terms of articulating all of this, and it's one of the reflection points and it's, it went into the book, is that actually when you are implementing these systems in your business, you really have to think about it a different way. And you know when you see, you know when you see something once and it looks different and then you can't help but seeing that same thing again. Like when we were kids and you'd be driving on a family holiday down the motorway and you had to look out for the, the yellow car, and then you just kept seeing them time and time again after you'd seen that first one. What my big realization was around lemonade. And it's something that, until I started vocalizing it to, uh, a wider audience, I'd never really processed it this way in terms of the way that I operate with my clients. But actually, unless you've got a really clear view on what you want that final outcome to be with them, in other words, what do you want to deliver that gets you that really positive word of mouth review or referral from them at the end, you don't really have a means to structure your sales and specifically your marketing processes before it. And now to come back to the yellow car example. Now all I see online when I'm looking at people's posts or I'm looking at their content that they're putting out there, those businesses that have got it the wrong way around and haven't really figured out what they're delivering and how they deliver it and what their offer looks like. They're almost fishing in a pond where they've got no clue about how to fish. And that sounds particularly harsh. But you see, you'll see this now that I've said it on the podcast. When you, when you scroll through your LinkedIn or your Facebook business style feedback and you're looking at people's posts who are out there supposedly marketing their business now, look at those posts or those emails with a different lens and think through what's the meaning of that person's post. Is there a logical step that they're creating in that reader's mind that makes them connect with them and their business and their service and what they deliver and the outcomes that they want to get from it? My most successful clients have always been those businesses who were already very good at delivering that service that got talked about or weren't that far off being in a situation where customer service, for want of a better phrase, was absolutely core to what they did. And they came to me needing a solution to add more leads or add more sales into that mix because they'd already cracked that equation of what they were delivering. And by picking through what worked for those clients and then re articulating it in the order, uh, that made them successful, that became the route to being able to explain Lemonade so much better. And, um, without the podcast, I probably wouldn't have discovered that my daughter's obsessed with yellow cars.

Speaker A: I can't go at it at any long con car journey without a discussion about yellow cars.

Speaker B: So you see them all over the place.

Speaker A: I've seen them all over the place now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But, um, I think it's, it's a, it's a fair comment when you. There's a lot of people making noise in their marketing and it's like, well, where is that going? And have they started with the end in mind? Are they clear on the end, or is there just not a lot of substance behind it?

Speaker B: Yep. I think the word that summarizes it is clarity. Are you really clear with the outcomes that you want for your business? And that has a number of different components to it, but when we think about it from a sales and marketing perspective, what do you want your client or patient to be sharing about your service with the rest of the world and thinking about the final E of Lemonade? The endorsement step is so critical. If you've not done that already, and then working backwards to work through how you deliver a service that gets them in that state of mind to share the word positively about you and then going back from there what your offer then looks like. I see. So, so, so many small businesses struggle with that. And as a result of that, the noise that they're then putting out into the world with posts that uh, are relatively meaningless or unstructured or don't really give a perspective of the difference that they make to their clients or patients is way too high. And if we've done nothing else with publishing the Lemonade Plan book and having this podcast where getting people to think about their systems and getting wise about their systems, people, um, that's probably the biggest takeaway for me.

Speaker A: And if you were starting off with leads, a lead is actually an expense and not an asset. It doesn't pay you. At that point, you've got to invest time or money in generating those leads. So if they're not converting through to endorsements and profit either, profitable client engagements and presumably then happy testimonials who refer you to other people. If referrals are part of your model or endorsements that you can then put on your website, if leads aren't converting through to those outcomes, it's just that, it's just another expense. It's just more marketing that isn't working or a vanity metric of giving you a bigger email list. So what?

Speaker B: Yep. For those people who haven't read the Lemonade Plan book, I start the book with talking about there are two successful outcomes that you need to bear in mind in your business. One is a lagging indicator of success. It's basically are you making a profit on the activities that you're undertaking. But in combination with that, you also need a leading indicator of future success, that you're getting systematic endorsements for the work that you do. Because without people being positive about the outcomes that they've had with you and sharing that with the world, you're not going to be in a position where you've got long term security for those profits that you've achieved in the short term.

Speaker A: Um, the 5Ps in terms of systems implementation, I was wondering actually if any of the 5Ps stand out to you now in hindsight as being particularly a good starting point for people to go back and focus on.

Speaker B: Yeah, so my five Ps in systems implementation were people, processors, platforms, passwords, which was ridiculously popular as a topic, and um, products.

Speaker A: Just another day a client was trying to send me a password and couldn't find the password and I was like, mate, you need to go listen to Gareth's podcast. So it's so common is the Point passwords and security.

Speaker B: Who knew how popular it could be?

Speaker A: Rob I was like, surely everyone uses a password management system is like, oh no, oh no, people don't.

Speaker B: People, people don't.

Speaker A: People don't.

Speaker B: Uh. And it's it that led us down that pathway of talking about the concept of digital spaghetti and the confusing picture, the unnecessarily confusing picture that most small business owners, most solopreneurs face when they log on to, to their laptop. They, you know, having to have let's, let's be kind here, five or six tabs that are open to manage the sales and marketing in your business. But let's be realistic. It's probably more like 10 or 12 services, software services that you're using in order to do those kind of things. It's just way too chaotic. You came into business to serve clients and patients. You didn't come into business to be a slave to monthly subscription fees for software products that you barely use and don't really have a coherent consistency with one another. Um, and that it only exacerbates the whole password confusion and password chaos type scenario that we face in systems implementation, didn't we?

Speaker A: I think it stems from lack of clarity as well, where then you just keep on adding more tech or something else comes along and someone, you know, suggests some of the thing to add on and you don't fully consider how it might integrate with everything else that you've got going on or whether actually what are your current tools could maybe do, uh, that potentially.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Bright shiny object syndrome.

Speaker A: Yeah. So then we, we've been talking about content and marketing and I think actually one of the episodes that also sticks with me is the one where you talked about planning contents over a full year. And I've been thinking about this quite a lot because I am, um, I'm obviously involved in this space and I try to get, I try to get my clients to kind of produce something great every, every two weeks. But I think there's a personality type of person that will do better just blocking off one or two days and going, right, I'm going to, I'm going to try to sort out all of my content for a year. And, um, you know, the plan might change. It's not that any of this is set in stone, as it were, but I think for many listeners it might actually be a good thing to say, okay, I'm going to set aside next Tuesday. I'm going to use Gareth's framework of saying, okay, this is. These are all of the pieces that I'm going to need. And it just gives you something to work to. It gives you like a framework to build on. Because without the framework you're just kind of like building this massive sandcastle that could just blow away.

Speaker B: Yeah, that episode was episode 28, wasn't it? And I talked through some key numbers to bear in mind when you're thinking about planning your content. Those numbers were 1 4, 12, 52 and 104. And just to break those down, the 1 is obviously the annual plan. The 4 is how the year splits up into four quarters and having core themes around those quarters. Then 12 is having a monthly pillar content theme where you're addressing something that's really key in your service or the problems that your audience experiences. 52 obviously being the, the number of weeks in the year and taking then of our monthly pillar content, uh, breaking that down into four, four or five different ways across the, across the month and having content around that and then the 104 is just simply a reminder that, uh, you probably just need to post on socials with two good posts every week and you're sorted. So 1 4, 12, 52 and 104. And if you want to see that in a downloadable guide, just go to the episode notes for episode 28 and you'll be able to see that. But that was, that was another example, wasn't it Rob? Where we're in an audio environment here or a visual environment if you're watching it on YouTube, where under normal circumstances on a podcast, you can't explain that kind of thing because it's not visual, it's not relatable. And whilst these concepts might be just obvious to you or I who are working on this in our own business or working with clients to do this, being able to explain that to a wider audience who don't have access to sales and marketing expertise on a regular basis just helps people to just sort of soak that up and think about how they can do that on their own in their own business, doesn't it?

Speaker A: I think a lot of content creation is leaning towards audio, visual. And it depresses me to say, uh, that as a writer. But that seems to be the way that things are going and I think for m. Most people it's easier to talk through something than it is to go off and write about it. I also wanted to ask you what goal you see AI playing in this, in this one year plan and how can, how can you use that to assist you without becoming, without it becoming another tool that you don't know how to use that. You can't remember the password to.

Speaker B: And I'll talk through that. But just to reflect on what you said about being a writer who shares their message via audio, uh, for me that was a strange mix as well. And I always thought that I enjoyed most sitting down at my keyboard and writing. But because I was so busy with clients or there was always something that stopped me from devoting my best time and work to the written word. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a journalist all the way through school. But this, this shift from the written word to having a multimedia style presence for your business and not having to have expensive studios or expensive setups to do so has been one of the big marketing shifts, hasn't it, in the last. What would it be really, the last five to ten years?

Speaker A: And it's, it's not even that you're not doing the writing, it's just the mode of production. Like it's much easier to take a video and create a podcast and create the written assets out of it than it is to take the written assets and then convert that into multimedia environments.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important to reflect on that by way of answering then what your question was around the role of AI in all of that. If we'd have started this podcast even two or three years ago, we wouldn't have had the tools that have been available to us to be able to repurpose and reuse and make more of the content that's that we've covered.

Speaker A: I used to correct my own transcripts. I'm astounded now that I did that. But that's what that was the best way of doing it.

Speaker B: It's insane. Do you remember services? Was it Rev?

Speaker A: Rev? I used to use Rev. Yeah.

Speaker B: A dollar per minute for somebody to transcribe your video or your audio content. And now this tool that we're using, Riverside, but you could be using descript or any number of different, uh, podcast recording tools will do that for you with a fairly high degree of accuracy. I still have a bit of an issue around spellings being in US English and there not being settings to be able to change that by default. But by and large, 98, 99% of a transcript that comes out from your recording is really accurate. And of course what you can then do with that and where you can take that further by plugging it Into Claude or ChatGPT or various other AI tools, you can then get those tools to then re. Summarize what you've got. Now, that's not to say that you should then immediately publish that online as a blog post or what have you, but the thing that it does give you is an amazing first draft version of something that you can then restructure into different ways, whether it's a blog post on your website or a series of social media posts that are around the content that you've covered on the video or podcast. And that's just in podcasting. The role of AI and the changes that AI is bringing into small business are just mind blowing. And if I may, one of the things that you'll see in season two of the podcast, because this whole momentum is, and this shift is happening so rapidly and, and there's been such a wave of change in this area. Season two of the podcast will be a lot more around combining the concepts that we've talked about in season one, but also the doable actions. At the moment, I'm developing a tool called hey Pipe. And it's an AI tool that will basically bring all of my experience in terms of working with clients to find the problems that they have that they, that their clients have that they can solve and how they turn that into content and copy and materials and sales resources that can bring in people who are, uh, have those problems into being interested in their service, into being leads, into being educated leads through to being valid sales prospects. And the role of AI in all of that, from taking that very core of those problems that you solve and understanding those problems that you solve more accurately, and then building out from that, uh, in a series of steps with AI that learns about your business and learns about your target market and learns about the way that you talk about things and therefore develops and adopts your voice in your materials. That's something that's coming down the pipeline in my business. And that wouldn't have existed even just a year ago. It was only just over a year or so ago that Chat, GPT and Claude really started coming to the market in a, in a big way. And what I've seen, and, uh, I don't know if you'd reflect on this as well, Rob. Over the last, it's really six to nine months, small business owners dabbling with those tools largely quite unsuccessfully or being quite frustrated with the outcomes that come from those tools. And that for me is the most interesting and most challenging problem that small business owners now face. And it, for me, it feels like the next big digital divide that's coming for small businesses. And that's where I want to help people address that.

Speaker A: It's. To me, it's a tool in the toolbox, and it's a tool that's getting better all the time, but you still need to know how to use it. You can't just swing it a few nails and hope it's going to do magical things. I think as well, perhaps as the first principle. The first principle is to let machines do what machines do best and then focus as the human on what humans do best, which is creation, wisdom, judgments, introspection. I think you're always going to be better at those things than computer is. But anything that can be computational, then I think it's worth leaning into these things.

Speaker B: Well, interesting. I think I'm seeing a shift away from humans being better at the creation side into AI being there. Uh, from what I've seen, and we'll see that in season two of the podcast and various other different ways, but you'll see AI being a vehicle to helping you and your business.

Speaker A: I look forward to it. I mean, my current status is that AI copies rather than creates, but let's explore it.

Speaker B: So I would say it's drawing influence from different things rather than just copying outright. We copy structures, we copy rhythms, we copy things that work, um, and we're influenced by those in the creation of thing of what we do. I would say AI. And maybe it's just my use of AI has got to the point whereby I am now more confident in AI's ability to understand what the world is doing in marketing and sales and what best practices are. I hate that phrase, but stick with me. What best practices are and what has worked for others in order to be able to roll that into its outcomes for you as the user of it, and with the best will in the world. Even the world's leading copywriters don't have the time, the resources or the knowledge or the energy to be able to pull those different influences in the same way that AI can. So using your term, they're able to copy that and make it their own version or your own version of that. I would say that AI to small businesses now is able to do that more effectively as a first version than any copywriter, uh, that's out there in the marketplace now. I genuinely think that our, uh, knowledge and our understanding of how to get the most out of AI has got

Speaker A: to that level, and copywriting should be accessible. There's this thing where the best copywriters charge thousands of pounds or dollars to even just fire up the computer, and maybe that's A thing of the past, perhaps that doesn't need to be the case.

Speaker B: And then there's this other thing as well, is that people don't have the time and the resources to be able to do this, even if they were amazing at it. We only have so much time to be able to do. Yeah, exactly. So the service that I'm developing at the minute, hey Pip. And it's hey Pip AI if you want to uh, register your interest in, in finding out more and seeing the journey as it goes through. Pip came out of a naming piece where after writing Lemonade Plan, the book, I asked people, because I wanted to then be able to apply the learnings of Lemonade Plan in any business setting. I asked people on LinkedIn what I should name my AI employee tool. And it was a variety of different lemon or citrusy flavored themes. And for listeners outside of the uk, a PIP in a lemon is what you might call a lemon seed. We call it a pip in the uk. And so the name Pip, or pippa, uh, came out from that learning process as the most popular name for my AI employee. And the thing that I'm going through at the moment is this systems structuring of getting the right ordering of events in place and the right ordering of content and insight and knowledge about you and your market and your, uh, your customers problems and your competition for Pip the AI to be able to make recommendations to you and be able to create first versions of copy for you that cover all the bases that you need in those eight lemonade sales and marketing processes. So that's something that you'll be able to see shortly down the line from me.

Speaker A: And as someone who is a copywriter, I will say it's much easier to rewrite something than it is to create something from scratch.

Speaker B: And that's a really interesting chain of thought. Rob, just say a little bit more about that.

Speaker A: The hardest thing to do is to start with the blank word documents. And I think when we go out to write Spot, it's actually easier writing for clients. But when you go out and write for your own stuff because you get in your own head and you overthink it and you're too close to it and you lack any degree of perspective, there's all of these million things that you could say, so you lack conviction in actually what needs to go in it. Whereas if you've got somebody that's, that's taken a feel for both the market and what you have to say and has come up with based on the, based on the Lemonade plan structure. You know, these, this, this is what we might put in as, as a starting point with these hooks leading to this particular, you know, offer. Let's say you might look at that and go, well, even if it's, even if it's a 30% of the way there, you might, you might use that as an editing starting point to say, you know, perhaps, perhaps if it's 30% of the way there, you probably like re prompt it to say actually maybe a bit less of this and a bit more of this. But, but if you can get it then to say 70% of the way there, then actually it becomes much. Most people find it easier to edit than they do some writing.

Speaker B: You made a really interesting comment about how AI is accelerating the way that you can go from blank page to having something that's meaningful. And whether it's 30% or even 70% the version that you will end up using, it's easier to be an editor of an existing draft than it is to start from that blank page. It made me think when you said that about how content and about that creation process is all about the momentum, right? And it's exactly the same. We talked about cars earlier. It's easier and it uses less fuel and less resources to keep a car moving than it does to go from stopped into one or two miles per hour. What would you say about that, Rob?

Speaker A: Once you're in a regular rhythm, I think it's actually a lot easier. It's harder to get into that rhythm in the first place. In some ways it's easier though, because it's like you're excited about starting the podcast or starting whatever it is. So uh, maybe you kind of spend more time on it and stick at it more. But then I think if you've got this kind of weekly or fortnightly workflow if you like, hopefully this workflow shouldn't take up all too much of your time. Like, I don't think you should be working on content in evenings and weekends and, and whatnot. It should just be stuff that you can do in the day and make um, sensible use of these, these tools, like without overly relying on them and overly just churning out more AI rubbish. Because that isn't what we're trying to do. We're trying to, we're trying to produce stuff that still is an accurate reflection of your, you and your experience and your story and your voice. Um, but yeah, it's noticeable as well that when people stop, it's actually much harder to get going again. It's like getting the freight train going and then the freight train stops and then you try to start it again and it's just harder to get back in that rhythm. So I think if you do get into like a fortnightly schedule or a weekly schedule, I know this podcast goes out weekly, but I think that actually a lot of my other clients are doing fortnightly schedules just because it allows a bit of space alongside doing everything else that they have to do in the business. Assuming that marketing isn't. Isn't their full time thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think if I'm honest, having the weekly schedule for this, and I think if I remember rightly, you advised me to do it on a bi weekly schedule. But I think if I'm honest and I look back at what has worked and what hasn't worked around the podcast, I don't think I allowed enough time to breathe between podcast episodes. And if you go to my website, you'll see that the blog posts around them are relatively patchy. They're not as consistent as what I talk about on the podcast. And that's purely down to the fact that the time and the resources that I had in the week, by and large, went around recording those episodes. So that's something that had I had my time again, I'd go back and I would reflect on. But you don't know what, you don't know when you start out and as you, as, as you joke with me, when we first started this journey, and I think we had a plan for something like the first 20 episodes, you always knew that it would go much further beyond that. I was worried about how we would even fill 10 episodes, let alone 20. And I don't even, I still don't think we've even scratched the surface of it. Um, but the, the lesson that I have learned from this, and you'll see improvements in season two, is that when you share your insights, when you share your pillar content online with your audience, you not only need to give it room to breathe, but you need to make the most of the things that you create.

Speaker A: Squeeze more juice from the lemon.

Speaker B: Uh, why didn't I say that, Rob? That sounds like the kind of dad joke way that I would explain anything. No, that's sort of my takeaway. One of the big learnings from recording this is that I should have given it more room to breathe each episode and share more of those insights that came from the episode in different formats.

Speaker A: You could think of an episode as actually being like an asset rather than an episode, and very few of your episodes or assets are gonna, are gonna completely go out of date. The idea of an episode means kind of creates this idea that only the newest episode has value because of the way that telly has conditioned us and that isn't the way that we should be thinking. So there's probably a lot of value in your older assets that you're, that you've forgotten about or don't think they're relevant anymore. And especially with using AI to kind of critique them and pull out certain things and give you that 70% starting point, I think there's probably a lot of gold in the archive. What's going, uh, in the next season then, Gareth? What can we look forward to?

Speaker B: Well, first of all, I know we joke about it the whole time. We almost have a race, don't we, of which of us can have the most domain name registrations in the course of a year and dare I say, rebrands of the business. I've stopped calling it a rebrand of the business.

Speaker A: I'm a reformed character guy, if I don't know what you're on about.

Speaker B: How long have you had your latest domain for up?

Speaker A: Oh, it's under a year.

Speaker B: So, yeah, I actually hold fewer, uh, domain name registrations now than I ever have done in the past. Um, so that's a good sign. But yeah, off the back of Lemonade Plan, uh, and the book launch, I wanted to then go down this pathway of. It's all very well being able to read about the problems that you need to address in your business via a book. And I think Lemonade Plan, from the feedback that I've had and the reviews so far on Amazon, seems to be doing that reasonably well. I've been pretty happy with how people have engaged with it, but the step that I wanted to take next is to make the concepts that are in Lemonade Plan and the wider sales and marketing challenges that are out there for businesses, I want to make that super relevant for every single business owner that reads that book or engages with that topic in some way. And so, hey, Pip, AI is going to be the, uh, artificial intelligence driven service that will guide you through, helping you to understand and articulate better your client's problems first and foremost. But then understand what your target market thinks of those challenges. So what are they saying in reviews for your competitors? What are they saying in your reviews? How can we bring back broad themes from those and build up a knowledge base and an understanding of what those problems are, uh, that your market has, and then how do we relate those into creating your own Lemonade plan, working with the end in mind, the endorsements that you want to receive and how you deliver that and what your offer, uh, shapes up to be. Hey, Pip is all about helping you to put in place those eight steps of Lemonade. You might have some of them absolutely nailed, in which case you'll just dive into the steps that you need to look at. And so the next season of this podcast will be combined with you being able to use the AI tools so it become a lot more interactive and will combine with a lot more live events, online, office hours type calls where you can come and you can bring some of the challenges that you face onto those calls and we can interact a whole lot more. So there are three big things that are happening post launch of the book the AI Tool. We're rebranding the podcast to Zest for Business, following that citrusy theme around the book and we'll be having a lot more live content, interactive content where you can come on and you can interact. And the podcast will, will draw from some of those themes. Either, uh, draw from existing themes that people have and people come to those office hours calls and bring, or it'll be leading that conversation around some of those topics in Lemonade and around, uh, business and marketing in general. So stay tuned for that. That should launch in around May 2025 time.

Speaker A: I shall have a think about some good citrus analogies for next time.

Speaker B: Believe me, AI has helped with so many different citrusy type analogies so far that even my depths of dad jokes couldn't even compete with the the number of citrus analogies that are on the cutting room floor far exceeds the number that have made it out there into the into the world so far. So we've got plenty of those to come.

Speaker A: Watch this space.

Speaker B: Watch this space indeed. Thanks for listening to season one of the Systems Wise podcast. Thanks to you, Rob, for being my guide throughout this whole process and for pushing me to do it in the first place. Season two under this new banner, Zest for Business will take things on a whole different way. If you valued the podcast until now, I'd really, really appreciate it if you left a review. Wherever you're listening to the show, that means a great deal. And if you haven't yet bought a copy of the book Lemonade Plan, I'd encourage you to go to lemonadeplan.com book to go and buy a copy of that and start down your own journey of implementing the Lemonade Plan systems framework in your business and improving the way that you're able to move people towards leaving those positive endorsements for your business. And with that, thanks for listening.

Speaker A: The Systems Wise Podcast.