A (47:40)
So with I mentioned earlier, the horizon builds that we're doing, every horizon build has assigned productivity metrics, like how much time did it save, how much money did generate? We have KPIs that we build. You guys know I like KPIs, so we get KPIs, that's that we build around each one of those things. So we are measuring productivity in a number of different ways. I think with the growth. This is an interesting one because it is sort of a creeper. It moves more slowly than just the productivity gains. But one example I'll give to you. So I mentioned that we record all our calls. We ask our clients, can we record these calls? And when they allow us to, we do. So we've got all these transcripts. And so my head of BD comes to me and says, like, hey, I've been talking to this prospect actually since October, and we've had a dozen conversations. I built a notebook LM that contains all the transcripts, contains what we talked about. And now here we are in January or February and they just asked for, we think we need to include analytics in the scope. And so everybody's been talking about this project. We've got pricing calculators, we've got scopes of work, we got all these things. And he basically said like, I need you to get up to speed on this. And so I was able to use all of the resources, the transcripts, what the client wanted. I did get on one call with the client and talk to them. And doctor asked my very specific questions. But immediately after that, Call. With having no prior knowledge, I was able to write a scope of work and my BD guy came back to me and he's like, holy shit, John, you nailed it. Like, I can't believe that you got that figured out in such a short amount, amount of time. And you barely even talked about it. Like he just gave me the resources, but I was able to plug in and use my tools to be able to say, what does the client need? How does that match up, match up with my products and services and then what can we offer them that's going to fit what I heard in our conversation. And so that for me was a growth moment where I could say like that really not only did it save me time, like I, it would have taken me months to get up to speed, but I was able to turn that around in like 24 hours and get something that was so spot on that the my bdd. I was like, that's amazing. And hopefully fingers crossed that, you know, the deal comes through. But it was just a good growth moment. That's, that's one example that I could, that can think of there. I think the other thing I'll just mention, you know, productivity is obviously where you want to go. The part of this as being analysts, there is a whole new discipline in, we call it geo, but it's AI search, right? So it's like, hey, we got all these models, people are asking questions, we're moving toward this zero click world where it used to be you ranked on a, on Google or Bing or wherever. Somebody saw your link at the top and they clicked you and they got a visit to your website. Now your brand is getting surfaced via these LLM models. They see your brand, you may or may not get cited and they're like, oh, okay, you know, this is, I'm narrowing my list down, I'm seeing these things, but I'm not even clicking through. And they'll just type in direct to get to that brand's website. And so for me, part of this being that curious analyst and I'm collecting all this data and writing prompts and developing prompt methodologies, I'm like finding wild stuff. Like one example was, hey, in Claude we see mentions, which is like your brand is mentioned and then citations, which is the link to whether it's a podcast episode or your resources, whatever it is. Like all of a sudden in Claude all the citations dropped off December 1st and I'm like, what happened? And just because I'm looking at all this data across all my clients, I was like, oh, Claude really did stop using citations at that point in time and just cut it off. And then the other example, I'm analyzing data, I'm trying to build a report for a client, and I see the data went back to December 15, 2025, and it was the week that ChatGPT announced they were going to start having ads in their free accounts, Right? So you won't have them on enterprise or paid accounts, but the free accounts, you're going to start getting served ads. And I actually looked at the data and I was like, what is going on here? I started to see the nature of the responses change to purchase intent driven responses. They were actually preceding the way that ChatGPT responses to same questions we were asking, like months ago, they were changing this dynamic and I saw all these changes in the responses and I was like, something's going on here. And I connected it to the fact that they just introduced ads. They are prepping, they have been prepping for like a month and a half to get ready for this. So I mentioned that because there is so much to learn about how these models operate. And it's kind of like going back to like search days when you're trying to understand the algorithm. Like, we've got this whole new field of who knows what the hell's going on within these models. It's up to us to. And if anybody tells you they do, like, I'm calling bullshit on that because all we can do right now is experiment, test things, try things and see what works. And honestly, like, in my 20 years in analytics, like, this is the most fun I've had because I'm learning new stuff, I'm playing with new tools, I getting to see all these things. And like, for me, that's growth. Like, I am growing as a professional because my toolkit's expanding. I'm learning all these new things I can tell clients, like, if I can surprise and delight a client by saying, like, look at something I found about you. And I'll just give you one example. My client said, hey, this blog post just popped over the summer. It started ramping up and ramping up. We get all this traffic to it. It's amazing. We're so stoked on this. And on the call with the client, this was like a regular status call. I looked up their prompts and their geo reporting and I found the URL that they had referenced. I said, wow, this is amazing. The last two weeks you guys have gotten 102 citations on this particular blog post, but yet all of those responses Nobody mentions you. You're never mentioned in this set. And the category was like risk management. They have become this authority on risk management that enterprises were citing, brands were citing, you know, Forbes was citing, all these people were citing. But their name never got associated with that because it just wasn't in there. And we developed a simple test. We're like, hey, just don't do it in a pitchy salesy way, but just insert your brand name into, you know, here's a description of what this is. And by the way, our products solve for this in your FAQs. I had a big FAQ section in the blog post. I said, hey, just enter your brand name as you know. When you're closing it out, say like, we do this and here's the product that delivers this. Within two days of that test, mention started showing up in AI overviews, which is one of the fastest to pick up on changes to websites. And I was like, boom, proof point right there. I got the first signal where I was like, that change that they made to their content pages produced a mention which had never been seen before out of like six months of testing. And so, you know, that was only like a couple days into the process. So when I can show a client like that. And then I did another analysis yesterday morning and I'm like, okay, signal strong. And it led me down this whole other rabbit hole of like understanding mentions and citations. And I learned about ghost citations, which I won't get into. But like, this is the fun stuff where it's like, we're curious analysts, we're trying to figure stuff out. And never before has there been this playground of like so much data, so much information that we can just dive into and show clients things they've never seen before. And that for me is, I think that's the growth that, you know, it's gratifying, it's fun, it's exciting and it's definitely keeping me going.