Transcript
A (0:00)
Let me ask you something. When your team needs AI guidance, do they come to you? When leadership asks about AI strategy, is your opinion the one that matters? If you hesitated on either one of these questions, you're not alone. The AI revolution is creating a new hierarchy in marketing. Those who master AI are becoming indispensable. Those who don't are becoming replaceable. AI Business World Business positions you on the right side of this divide. Two focus days in Anaheim, California, April 29th and 30th, designed to transform you from quote, the person learning AI unquote into quote, the AI expert everyone depends on, unquote. Melanie Miller told us the AI teaching was mind blowing. You'll master workflows that deliver measurable roi, learn from practitioners already providing results, and and build a network of 1000 AI focused professionals. This is more than just learning new tools. It's about professional security, career advancement, becoming the person your organization can't afford to lose. Learn more@AI businessworld.live. get your tickets at a businessworld.live.
B (1:19)
welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.
A (1:31)
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to put AI to work. AI can look like you and AI can model your voice, but can't AI model your insights and your knowledge with the right training that can? In today's episode of the AI Explored Podcast, we'll explore how to train AI on your knowledge. My special guest is an AI educator who helps businesses develop AI enhanced marketing strategies. Her membership is called Click Engage Convert Academy and she runs AI Marketing Megaclass. Lauren Bartley, welcome to the show. How you doing today?
B (2:15)
I'm absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for inviting me on the show. This has been on a bucket list of mine forever. So I'm just so excited to be here.
A (2:22)
Well, I'm really excited what we're here to talk about today. Let's start with your journey. How did you get into AI?
B (2:27)
Well, I suppose it all kind of started back when I started my digital marketing agency back in 2011. And so I originally set that up around the time that social media was, you know, becoming a thing. And it was originally just to teach people how to use social media in their business. And I did that through courses, workshops, and had a conference at the time called Click Engage Convert. And that evolved into more of teaching all of the digital marketing strategies as things evolved. And I've always been one of those people that are evolving with the market, and I've always been passionate about teaching people how to do their own marketing because I really think there's so much power in being empowered in that way. But what actually happened is I had all this constant pressure from people who were saying, yeah, that's great, but could you just do it for me? And at some point in that journey, I kind of caved and became like an accidental agency owner that was offering the full suite of all the digital marketing things. And to be honest, I really didn't like it. And then what happened when Covid hit is that my workshops got shut down, my conference got shut down, and I pivoted my conference to become the Click Engage Convert Academy so that I could support businesses 365 days of the year, rather than just the two days of the conference. So that was a major positive. Another major positive was that we got this government funding to be able to give 8 hours of free digital marketing mentoring to any Victorian business that was impacted by Covid. And we had some of the worst shutdowns in the world. So that was awesome. So we were teaching businesses. There was lots of businesses that were coming online and needing the agency side of the business. And so I scaled really quickly to a team of about 20 staff members, and we were delivering the done few services. The mentoring, the training, it was absolutely nuts. But I was loving it. But I was a real bottleneck in my own business. And I remember saying back then, oh, God, I wish I could clone myself, but the tools kind of weren't around, but I definitely wanted to do it. So then what happened is when late 2022, that mentoring that was funded by the government just wound up, and then almost overnight, I had to reduce my team from a team of about 20 to almost 6. And I found myself back running a traditional agency model that I really didn't enjoy. Yes, I still had the Academy and I still loved it, but my capacity had shrunk, but these tools had become available to me that allowed me to increase my capacity, regardless of the fact that my team had shrunk. And I knew straight away that businesses needed to learn how to use these tools themselves so they could start doing this. And it also allowed me to kind of go, well, I don't really like the agency side of the business. I can kind of see that the agency model is going to be majorly disrupted by these tools. And so what I effectively did is I made a kind of courageous decision at the time and said, I'm stepping away from the agency, I'm just doubling down on teaching and teaching AI strategies in particular. And over the next 12 months, 12 months, I transitioned all of my staff out of the business. I made sure they had other jobs before they left and got rid of most of my clients and just went all in on the teaching side of things, the learning, and a lot of it came out of necessity for me as well. So I was kind of teaching as I was learning because I was now a solo operator basically. But I was still doing all the things. I was still running the academy, I was delivering the workshops, I was supporting the few clients that I retained and I couldn't do it all by myself. So I started to build up my own team. And that really started with cloning my knowledge. And that was a big thing for me. I was like, finally I can do this thing that I've wanted to do forever. And so I started capturing my knowledge, feeding into AI tools, building role specific positions in my business, and treating my team as what I was calling my AI dream team. And so my capacity improved, the quality of what I was putting out there improved, and then I started seeing massive results for the people in my academy that were using it as well. So off the back of that, I then launched the AI Marketing Mega class, which is a quarterly online immersion event that we do and we actually help businesses set up their own AI systems and teams as part of that. And somewhere along the line, I also launched an AI enhanced all in one sales and marketing platform called Lead Activator. And I did most of this myself because I built a team of custom GPTs, projects, automations, a little bit of dabbling in vibe coding on the side. I'm a massive AI tool junkie. I spend way too much on tools. But I am more than happy to do that because I see the positive return off the back of it. So what ended up happening? In August, about 12 months after I transitioned my last team member out of the business from the old agency model, I started hiring again. But I was only able to do that because I cloned my knowledge first and I built my AI team first. And I think that I'll be hiring more people. But the AI team and my physical team now work hand in hand. And interestingly, the person that I hired, her main role is to help set up the SOPs that I use to train my AI team. And then she kind of orchestrates my AI team to do A lot of the work.
