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John Jantsch (00:01.651)

So what if the real opportunity with AI is not replacing human creativity but expanding it by turning entrepreneurs into better editors, directors, and decision makers? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jon Benson. He’s a copywriter, entrepreneur, and AI pioneer best known for creating the video sales letter, one of those terms that people just use like it’s been around forever.

A format that shapes modern digital marketing. is long centered on ethical persuasion and authentic connection. And more recently, he developed BNSN, an AI platform trained on high converting campaigns for small businesses. So John, welcome to the show.

Jon Benson (00:29.9)

Yeah.

Jon Benson (00:47.212)

Hey, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:49.585)

So let’s, I assume you have to do this a little bit of your time when you go on shows like this, but the term VSL, you know, is kind of entered the, the marketing vernacular. Talk to me a little bit about, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. That was probably 12, 15 years ago, really, when that kind of burst on the scene as an innovation. You want to talk a little bit about what that’s done to your trajectory, I suppose.

Jon Benson (00:55.202)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. yeah.

Jon Benson (01:02.04)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (01:16.216)

Yeah, believe it or not, it’s 20 years old this year. So 2006. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. It’s, mean, it was, it, yeah, everything changed that the, day that happened, the 30 days later, everything changed from my offer that I did it for, you know, we went from like struggling onto my second book that I wrote in, in fitness and then went to a million dollars.

John Jantsch (01:18.537)

20 years, okay.

Jon Benson (01:39.886)

a week and a month rather in traffic cost, you people buying that kind of money and going up to even higher than that. So it was crazy. And then, and then all of people started calling me and asking me to write VSLs for them. And I’m not, I wasn’t a copywriter. that’s not, never been my claim to fame until after this happened. And then I had to get good at writing copy. So that’s what happened.

John Jantsch (02:01.939)

That’s funny. So you said you had written a book about gym ownership? Is that what you said?

Jon Benson (02:10.663)

I’ve written six books in fitness, so weight loss, fitness, bodybuilding, yeah, so that whole thing has been a passion.

John Jantsch (02:12.947)

Fitness, fitness, okay. Okay, so are you one of those people that that was your passion and you just had to learn how to do marketing? And so this whole idea of studying persuasion and conversion and innovation, is that something that was really just picked up because you’re like, I better get good at that?

Jon Benson (02:24.748)

Yeah.

Jon Benson (02:34.478)

It was picked up specifically for copywriting, yes, but I studied persuasion in college. Actually, I was studying MLP in college. I was fascinated by how you can basically get people to listen to you and hear what you’re actually trying to communicate and motivate them to make changes based on things that you believe at least are good for them. So you’re not trying to manipulate them. You’re just trying to motivate them. And I was always into like, how can I motivate and connect with people deeper? So I studied the MLP back then, way back then.

John Jantsch (02:39.731)

Mm.

Jon Benson (03:03.22)

and mail order course from, from Bandler. And that got me into Tony Robbins and that led me into even deeper persuasion issues. And, and just was always really fascinated by it. And that led to me being into the advertising world. And that would, that led eventually to writing a book with it. Yeah. I actually would have the book thing came about because I’d always been passionate about, bodybuilding and fitness and things like that growing up and athlete. I was an athlete most of my life. And then

ended up sedentary and got ended up obese in my late 20s and early 30s. I had 50 inch waist and had a heart attack at 38. So I was like, it was like a train wreck of health. And that got me back into it. So that’s the Fit Over 40 book was written based on that, on turning that around. And then I interviewed a bunch of other people because I didn’t think I was enough for a book. So I did 52 people that did the same.

John Jantsch (03:55.283)

So I’m curious, this is a question, unfortunately, I feel like I’m asking almost every guest these days, but how has AI changed that element of copywriting for good or bad?

Jon Benson (04:00.942)

It’s

Jon Benson (04:08.494)

So my goal with AI and copywriting, I’ve been doing copywriting software since 2010. So this is going to date me a lot, but in AI, in early nascent AI in 2017 and working with early LLMs in 2019. So very, very, very early into this thing and trying to convince everybody, this was the thing that we wanted to do. And the reason why is because I was, I had these courses that I would teach people how to write VSOs and I knew how hard it was for me to learn all the copywriting in and outs and

and develop my own style, which I did. And I said, well, what, what if I could have software that would do it for them? And the average business owner doesn’t have time to do that. They just want the copy that converts. So I’ve seen it from 15 years away going, I know this is going to happen eventually. And so we decided that the software is pronounced Benson. That’s not my last name. It’s just my last name without the vowels. And, and yeah, yeah, but it’s, cool that you can spell it out. That’s all right. and so we did Benson originally, it was going to be called,

John Jantsch (04:56.529)

okay. Not BNSM like I butchered it, okay?

Jon Benson (05:06.35)

It was going to, because it was the first AI to actually write a long form VSL. And I was working with, with Jasper at the time they were called Jarvis, but I was the first guy in the copywriter to train anything on an LLM. And they ended up with a 62nd VSL out of all the training. I think, yeah, I think we can do this in a different way. And we ended up being, you know, having a 7,000 word VSL come out of our AI and it sounded like a real VSL.

John Jantsch (05:14.729)

Sure, yeah.

Jon Benson (05:32.663)

It didn’t sound like chat, GBT, it didn’t sound like Claude, it sounded like a real VSL. And so that was our claim to fame. And since then we just, of course got, we were very early into the agentic phase. So we’ve just gotten better and better at that. And so my goal was to replace myself. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to say, if I can, if I can use this to write a VSL, which I have, sells pages for my own stuff, which I have, then I know that it’s going to be good enough to, for prime time. And that was the, that was the goal to do. yeah.

John Jantsch (06:02.549)

So talk to, obviously we’ve got more to explore in AI, but talk to me a little bit about the VSL itself. mean, it has become very mainstream. I mean, you hear people talk about it, whether they know what it is or not. They talk about it as part of their funnel, you know, today. So is it overdone? I mean, is it over?

Jon Benson (06:06.094)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (06:10.316)

Mm. Yep.

yeah.

Jon Benson (06:21.806)

Yeah, every year I hear that I’ve heard that for 20 years. So it literally 20 years. So the first year I came out with it and said, Oh, it’s already and then Ryan Dias, who’s a good friend of mine made the mistake of saying when he came out and promoted his own little mini VSO course and he later gave me credit for which was really nice of him and everything. But he said, Oh, sales letters are dead. You’ll never do another sales. And I’m like, dude, I’ve never said that, you know, I think everything works if you let it and VSO is just happened to keep on working and they just ask, ask Agora.

John Jantsch (06:24.157)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Benson (06:51.022)

They work. I mean, yeah, they work. They work really well and now people are using BSLs in feed So you’ve got the meta ads that are basically short BSLs that use the same psychology Just compressed into five two to five minutes. So we’ve been doing that for 15 years as well So yeah, and then they go to a longer BSL So they they still work just as sales pages work just as webinars can work everything can work It just depends on what you’re wanting to sell and how you’re and how you approach it But the words are the consistent thing

So if the words aren’t there, if the words don’t reflect an actual human underneath it, people sense it a mile away, which was our goal with Benson was to create humanized AI. How do we do this? How do we create AI that doesn’t sound robotic? It doesn’t sound like, you know, chat GPT writing an email, it’s asking a rhetorical question. And the very first sentence, you know, this kind of really bad AI copy that we see all the time. How do we do this and actually sound like a real A-list copywriter? And that was, that’s been our focus for three and a half years now.

John Jantsch (07:20.456)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:48.413)

You know, initially the large innovation was that it was not a talking head on video. It was the words. Is that a key component of it?

Jon Benson (07:56.174)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (08:01.113)

You know, it depends on what you’re trying to sell. We have seen split tests with video beating words only, and we’ve seen words only beat video. It really depends on what it is. And what works today, a year from now, will be something you want to reverse. So for a while there was like my friend Craig who writes for Golden Hippo, and he’s done amazingly well building a billion dollar company from, he’s an amazing writer. But he was one of the first guys working with Gundry to do a lot of video.

on the front end of a VSL, but talking to him behind the scenes, so to say, we know that it’s still like a Google Doc and the words are everything. So he slaves over the words, man, getting the words just right. So all the video in the world is not gonna save you if your words suck. It just isn’t gonna happen. So the words are still the most important.

John Jantsch (08:46.077)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So one of the knocks on AI, of course, is it’s made it very easy for people to create really crappy content. you see it all the time now, right? It’s like volumes of really bad content. So why can’t people create better content? What’s the mistake they’re making? Is it simply just a matter of being lazy?

Jon Benson (08:54.831)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jon Benson (09:11.983)

No, it’s the matter of the LLMs or the in our case, it’s the agents not knowing you. And this is where it gets a little bit a little bit hairy for people, because there has to be an element of your personality that’s OK to be known. as the same thing would be true if you went and hired me as a copywriter. Like I would ask you if you had an offer and you wanted to whatever your offer would be. I would start asking you lots of questions that you probably don’t think is related to your offer.

John Jantsch (09:19.719)

Yeah, yeah,

Jon Benson (09:40.336)

Now I’m not talking about like when asking all these really intensive personal questions, but I want to know what your values are. I want to know where you stand. Who do you want to attract as customers? What are you against? What are you not just what the, what the product does? Cause the product or the offer, whatever it does, I that’s, that’s not that difficult. Um, what’s difficult is to make that story resonate with people that will automatically hear and go, Oh, that sounds like something that I can automatically relate to. And that’s what a really good copy. does. We don’t try to sell people that are

not interested or just completely need to go from a level one to a level five awareness, that’s really not what we wanna do. We wanna target people that are already there, because you got plenty of people like that, but if you write, if you go into a chat or clod or whatever and you say, write me an email or write me an ad or rep me a VSO, and they don’t know who you are, they don’t have a good feel of your words, feel of your personality, it’s gonna write stuff that’s schlocky, because it’s trained on the internet. So if you just think about this for a moment, and everyone listening to me will get this,

John Jantsch (10:35.294)

Yeah, yeah.

Jon Benson (10:39.043)

It’s like, can you imagine training anyone to do anything by telling them, go read the internet and get back to me tomorrow? That’s what we’ve done with LLMs, right? It’s like, well, that’s going to give you a lot of knowledge, but most of it sucks. mean, so most of what’s out there in copy is terrible. So it’s learning models have been terrible. So that’s why specialty AI is like ours and in our, in our industry, you have to have it to where the people that know what they’re doing actually trained individual.

John Jantsch (10:46.665)

Right.

Jon Benson (11:06.487)

in our cases, agents that use not one LLM, but a dozen, you know, can use as many as we need one model rather, but you know, doesn’t whatever models are we know are going to be the best ones for the right tasks. So that takes that. And then what we do is a little different. We ask people to go through an assessment to figure out what are their values? Where do they stand? Who are the people they want to attract? And how do they want their their words to appear? So we take care of the persuasion element, but also we see that with the words and phrases that

John Jantsch (11:14.739)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:25.885)

Mm.

Jon Benson (11:35.681)

are closer to who they are as a person. So it starts feeling more human. It’s important.

John Jantsch (11:40.457)

Yeah, it’s interesting. know as we’ve worked with clients, you know, a lot of them have a fairly large body of work of them talking about things, explaining their products, being who they are. And that element, you know, allows you to build that voice or that brand. But then there is a technical framework element to it as well, isn’t it?

Jon Benson (11:58.348)

yeah, totally. mean, if you go too far outside that framework, you’re going to lose a lot of the things that we already know work so well, persuasion wise. So the goal is not to try to convince somebody of something, it’s to compel them to take action on what they already hold valuable. So all you’re doing is aligning your offer with what they already hold to be valuable. And that’s the skill of copywriting. that’s something that AI is, I think, obviously I’m biased.

John Jantsch (12:05.639)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Benson (12:27.481)

So I’m gonna say we’re kind of the exception, but AI in general has gotten a little better at this. I’d like to think we’ve led some of the way in that, to getting to where there’s more of that human element involved.

John Jantsch (12:39.091)

So talk a little bit about that because there’s certainly a lot of people, creatives in particular, that have felt like they have this special sauce, this special talent to create that content, to create beauty, to create things. And maybe AI has kind of taken that. I mean, it’s eventually going to get good at doing video and graphics and things. So where is the human element, know, remain?

Jon Benson (12:57.314)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

So think of it as like, I look at it as the difference between using a hammer and using a jackhammer or something that’s a powered hammer, right? It’s a pneumonic hammer or whatever they call those automatic hammers. So you’ve got an automatic hammer and there’s a skill to hitting a nail with a hammer, right? The question is, as a carpenter, is that really what you want to be known for is I strike a nail head perfectly with a hammer every single time.

Or if you could have that done for you instantaneously with something that just tapped it in, what would you do with the time that you have left now? You would probably spend that doing the creative portion of things and like, I can do this, I can build this. And this is what the same thing is true of AI and copywriters. It’s like, we’re not trying to put people out of business. We’re giving them the ultimate power tools. So a lot of the grunt work, a lot of the research, a lot of the structure you don’t have to worry about. Then you can go in and finesse it.

and everything sounds so much better when you do that. We want people to do that. there’s still a knowledge factor that I think that copywriters need to have. And sure, some people do use tools like Vinson. They just don’t think about it. They click a few buttons and they go, because it works. But the copywriters, they want to put their signature on it. And this just gives you the ultimate way of doing that. It’s like hiring the best ghostwriter you can think of. So if I hired a copywriter to write something for me and they sent it back and I read it, went, wow, that’s just freaking fantastic.

Jon Benson (14:26.768)

then I could find these little bitty things in there that I only know or that I primarily know. And then I’m gonna go, oh, you I’m gonna change this over here. And then I might find a creative thing that he said or she said that I wouldn’t have thought of. And that now becomes a campaign. My mind goes, oh, wow, I didn’t think about that. I can turn this into a campaign. Well, that’s not AI, that’s me, right? So if the AI wrote it or a human wrote it, wouldn’t matter. And so that’s what we do that’s a little different because we coach people live once a week so that we can help inspire them to.

Use the words that are coming out and how can we use it to help market their business more effectively.

John Jantsch (15:01.011)

So I think one of the areas that obviously is a breakthrough is in testing. Obviously, any copywriter worth their salt is like, I think this is good, but let’s test it, right? And now we can test 200 versions for not much more time than it took us to create that one beautiful one. What do you think that that is going to ultimately do in terms of people’s effectiveness?

Jon Benson (15:07.088)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (15:15.087)

Right.

Jon Benson (15:26.992)

If people knew what the guys that are making hundreds of millions of dollars at this stuff do, if you knew the amount of testing that went into it, most people would just give up. would stop. I’ll give you an example. I have a good friend of mine that is the top of their industry on meta and they flew out to meet the actual real meta heads of ads because there’s the ones that they give people and there were ones that give these people.

You know, they give them $100,000 to spend just to play with just because we want to see what your new creative team can do. They will run 800 ads at a time in any given month. They’re running 800 versions of an ad. So there’s just no way to do that effectively without AI. that’s when they were the early adopters to this. Now they can run those kinds of things. And it’s like, they can figure out what works and guess what? One or two might scale or three. It’s, it’s, doesn’t matter how good the writers are.

It’s like some hook, some angle may work and that angle if it works can just skyrocket a business. So I think it’s one of the best things about AI is the ability to split test leads of a sales letter or VSL, the split test, obviously campaigns and then add campaigns and things like that. It’s very helpful.

John Jantsch (16:37.907)

So you’ve spent a lot of time building a reputation about ethical persuasion, but it’s not a very far leap to go to things that are maybe not that ethical, right? To go from just what you talked about as getting people to do something that they want to do or that’s good for them and they just, they need to hear it, to manipulation. So, and I feel like

Jon Benson (16:43.12)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (16:55.346)

yeah.

Jon Benson (17:01.796)

Right.

John Jantsch (17:07.503)

AI doesn’t really care in some cases. how do you, what are the guard rails that you really use to kind of stay within what, you you talked about beliefs, your beliefs.

Jon Benson (17:10.072)

Mm-mm. Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (17:20.24)

Yeah, well the guardrails I use that we actually that’s a technical term and we use specific guardrails in our agents that are that when somebody sets up Benson correctly, we use it’s called a buyer alignment profile that we have people go through. In fact, I’m going to give it to your listeners for free that could go through that and get their buyer alignment, which is a 15 page report of the words and phrases you should use and not use. And that exactly fits that bill of that sets up guardrails. It’s like use this because I value X, Y and Z. What do the words of I

value X, Y, and Z translate to in copywriting lingo? Because it doesn’t mean like if I value freedom, you don’t want to use like, hey, since you love freedom as much as I do, then you’re going to love so and so shoes. That doesn’t make any sense, right? And so it’s just too hamfisted and heavy handed and all that stuff. So what phrases do people that love freedom as a core value? What usage would they use and what would they never say? And it’s what they would never say that the Garbrills of that. So in other words, that prevents the

John Jantsch (17:58.441)

All right.

Jon Benson (18:16.913)

AI from going over the balcony, so to say, when it comes down to overly persuasive language.

John Jantsch (18:23.251)

So for some of the folks that you’ve worked with, you’ve probably started to catalog kind some of the biggest mistakes people are doing, making right now using AI. Where do you see people really need to make a shift to make AI more effective for them?

Jon Benson (18:40.579)

it’s it to stop thinking of AI as the answer and start thinking of it as a tool is a huge step in the right direction. Also to train whatever AI you’re using. Ours is built to be trained, so it’s copy paste kind of thing. But if you’re going to use Claude or chat GPT or whatever, you need to be able to train it with who you are, what your values are, how what words or phrases to use, what not to use. And you’ll find that the memory on this is pretty short. So.

unless you know what you’re doing and then we can get into things like instances of open claw and the clawed code and all that stuff. That’s very technical and most people don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. mean, our guys go down that rabbit hole because we’re kind of geeky when it comes to that. But most people want just the best answers that they can without having to become a software engineer. so to do that, yeah, it’s a lot of knowledge. It’s a lot of like time to say, here’s who I am.

John Jantsch (19:08.713)

Mm.

John Jantsch (19:15.774)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:29.822)

Jon Benson (19:33.774)

And here’s what I want you to do. Now, you can do that to a limited degree in chat and cloud and tools like that. You can do it to a huge degree in our tool because we built it to do that. And that’s super important to get the language patterns down. But also, and this is the last thing I’ll say, but this is true of copywriting in general. So when people used to hire me, because I don’t write copy anymore. I’m solely focused on Benson. when people used to hire me, it was very expensive. I was like.

the probably the most expensive guy in the world for like five or 10 years. And they’re certainly one of the most expensive guys in the world. And they would hire me and I would give them a first draft of something like usually a BSL or a sales letter. And they would say, this doesn’t sound like me. go, yeah, I know. It’s because you suck. Yeah, you don’t want to sound like yourself, man. You really don’t. it’s and it’s like, I, I mean, that in kind of a funny way. It’s like you’re the copy they were writing was just terrible.

And so they were trying to make their terrible copy kind of polish, you know, a poly put, put lipstick on a pig’s episode. So you can’t do that. You have to like be able to understand some basic persuasion and then work in. And this is what I didn’t do when I was a pro when I was writing early days of copywriting work in their values. I figured this out later in my career. It’s like, I can work in their value statements and figure out what the words are. But that was just tons of research. We’d charge like 15, 20 grand just to do the research to figure out like

John Jantsch (20:33.415)

Mm-hmm.

Jon Benson (20:58.491)

What are the words we should use and shouldn’t use and phrases and all that stuff. And unless somebody came along that was like an identical client, we’d have to do that all the time. Now it’s automatic, which is fantastic.

John Jantsch (21:06.473)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, John, I appreciate you dropping by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there someplace you mentioned that you had a gift you wanted to invite people? And obviously I’d love to know where they can find out more about Benson.

Jon Benson (21:15.471)

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. If you go to free buyer profile.com, that’s free buyer profile.com. You can take our buyer alignment profile, which will test to figure out your core values, help you figure them out. We use a lot of different standardized testing models in these questions. And in about 10 to 15 minutes, we’ll get you a report.

that you can use in your marketing that will tell you words and phrases that you should think about using and words and phrases you should definitely avoid. will give you all the NLP, all the magic sauce while still sounding like you and will also help elucidate what you already hold valuable and the people that

John Jantsch (21:53.481)

Great tool for training any AI tool, suspect, that you’re going to use. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you dropping by. It’s freebuyerprofile.com and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road,

Jon Benson (21:57.125)

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you, John. I appreciate the time.

Turn Client Relationships Into Revenue Growth

Turn Client Relationships Into Revenue Growth written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch sits down with Taylor McMaster, founder of Dot & Company, to unpack a commonly overlooked growth constraint in agencies: client account management. While most agencies obsess over lead generation and fulfillment, Taylor makes the case that long-term growth is driven by what happens after the sale.

The conversation explores how proactive communication, structured onboarding, and a culture of ownership can dramatically improve retention, increase client lifetime value, and unlock scalable growth. Taylor also shares insights on fractional account management, building acquisition-ready businesses, and how agencies can stay relevant in an AI-driven landscape.

Guest Bio

Taylor McMaster is the founder of Dot & Company, a specialized firm focused on helping digital marketing agencies improve client retention through better account management. Her company provides fractional account managers and builds systems for onboarding, communication, and client experience. Taylor also hosts the Happy Clients Podcast and has built Dot & Company into an acquisition-ready business, offering a unique perspective on specialization and scalable agency models.

Key Takeaways

1. Retention Is the Real Growth Lever

Most agencies focus heavily on acquiring clients but neglect the systems required to keep them. Strong account management directly impacts profitability and long-term growth.

2. Account Managers Are Growth Drivers, Not Just Support

The role goes beyond project coordination. Great account managers identify upsell opportunities, align services with evolving client goals, and actively contribute to revenue growth.

3. Proactive Communication Builds Trust

Silence creates doubt. Consistent, proactive communication ensures clients feel progress is being made and reinforces trust throughout the engagement.

4. Onboarding Sets the Tone for the Entire Relationship

A structured onboarding process is a key differentiator. How a client starts with you often determines retention, satisfaction, and perceived value.

5. Sales and Account Management Must Be Aligned

Misaligned expectations during the sales process create downstream issues. Involving account managers early ensures continuity and better client outcomes.

6. Delegation Requires Systems and Trust

Agency owners struggle to let go because processes live in their heads. Documented systems and gradual trust-building are essential for scaling beyond the founder.

7. Fractional Doesn’t Mean Disconnected

Fractional account managers can feel like full-time team members when integrated properly into culture, communication, and workflows.

8. Specialization Creates Competitive Advantage

Dot & Company’s success stems from focusing narrowly on account management, allowing them to build deep expertise and stand out in a crowded market.

9. Human Experience Is the Differentiator in the AI Era

As AI tools become more prevalent, clients will increasingly value human connection, strategic thinking, and consultative relationships.

10. Build a Business That Can Run Without You

A key factor in Dot & Company’s acquisition was Taylor removing herself from day-to-day operations, reducing risk and increasing business value.

Great Moments

00:01 – The Hidden Growth Constraint
John introduces the idea that account management—not lead generation—may be the real bottleneck in agency growth.

01:14 – The “Butt in the Seat” Mistake
Taylor explains why hiring an account manager without a strategy often fails.

02:44 – Account Managers as Revenue Drivers
Discussion on how account managers should actively identify upsell opportunities.

05:04 – The Power of Overcommunication
Taylor shares her philosophy on proactive communication and its impact on client perception.

07:18 – Why Onboarding Matters More Than You Think
John explains how structured onboarding drives long-term retention.

08:02 – Bringing Account Managers Into Sales
Avoiding the “handoff” problem by integrating delivery teams early.

10:27 – Letting Go as a Founder
How to build trust and transition client relationships away from the owner.

14:42 – AI vs Human Experience
Taylor explains why human connection will matter more—not less—in an AI-driven world.

16:22 – The Power of Specialization
Why Taylor chose a narrow focus and how it fueled growth.

21:06 – Building an Acquisition-Ready Business
Key factors that made Dot & Company attractive to buyers.

Memorable Quotes

“Account management really is part of the whole picture. It’s retaining your clients, keeping them around, and that directly affects your bottom line.”

“Every day that goes by without communication, clients think you’re doing nothing.”

“We don’t want clients to outgrow us—we want to grow with them.”

“People are going to crave the human experience more and more, but expect better results and efficiency.”

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.46)

What if the real growth constraint inside an agency is not lead generation or fulfillment, but the way client relationships are managed after the sale? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. My guest is Taylor McMaster, founder of Dot & Company, a business built around helping digital marketing agencies improve client retention through better client account management.

Rather than focusing on campaigns or delivery, Taylor specializes in the client facing side of agency growth, onboarding, communication, meetings, project flow, and account management systems. She also hosts the happy clients podcast and her experience building dot and company is a specialized acquisition ready business gives her a unique perspective on retention, specialization, and creating an agency model that can grow beyond the founder. So welcome Taylor. So, you know, as I read that,

Taylor (00:51.554)

Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (00:54.784)

We are talking about agencies here, but quite frankly, account management, there’s lot of types of businesses that have that function or should have that function. Is there something that you saw really convinced you that that was really a core growth issue and not what most people focus on getting more clients?

Taylor (01:14.616)

Yeah, I would say in the beginning of starting Dot and Company, it was mainly a pain point for the agency owners that I knew. They were all working so hard on building their marketing funnels and getting leads on their calendar and closing those leads, but they didn’t have the time or energy to think about keeping those clients around. And they knew in their heart that they needed somebody to do this job.

but they almost approached it as more of a butt in the seat. They were like, I just need to hire an account manager and then my days will be free and I won’t have to talk to clients ever again. But they didn’t realize that account management really is part of the whole picture. It’s retaining your clients, keeping them around and in turn, that really affects your bottom line. yeah.

John Jantsch (02:02.612)

Yeah. And you know, there’s another element to that too. I think it’s easy to focus on retention, but like we retain our clients forever. mean, my longest running client is 22 years. And so we’ve been through a lot together. But we keep our clients for years. But where we sometimes struggle is our model is pretty much retainer based. So it’s like, what can you afford to pay me for the rest of your life?

Taylor (02:13.229)

Wow.

Taylor (02:16.526)

Mmm.

Taylor (02:29.87)

Yeah

John Jantsch (02:30.048)

But then we find out like three or four years later, we’re like, well, we need to actually charge more. And so how can client management, account managers, you know, actually be put in sort of the role of selling?

Taylor (02:44.642)

Yeah, yeah. Upselling is a huge part of our role. And the way I always look at it is as an account manager, I am responsible for the whole client experience. And so that is not just onboarding a client and managing their project. It’s making sure I’m doing the best that I can for that client, because at the end of the day, I’m responsible for that relationship and keeping them around. And keeping them around means giving them the best outcome.

and making sure that we’re helping them hit their business goals. And oftentimes when we as agency owners are working with a client, those business needs evolve and there’s always something that is changing or we need to layer on top of something. And my job as the account manager is to be looking for those things or finding these opportunities that I can continue to help my client evolve. And we want to be a part of that. We don’t want this client to outgrow us. We want to grow with that client. So that’s a huge part of our role and responsibility.

John Jantsch (03:41.44)

That’s almost a culture point, isn’t it? I mean, because I think a lot of people are like, well, that’s not my job. My job is to make sure that this stuff goes out the door. so it really has to be that, that almost need, I mean, that not almost, that needs to be part of the job description, doesn’t it?

Taylor (03:46.56)

Absolutely.

Taylor (03:56.717)

Yes, it does. And I think you see this all the time, John, I’m sure, is in our industry, I find people are so siloed in their roles and they put a box around themselves. like, well, that’s not my job. I’m not doing that. But what I have always, how I’ve always worked is I’m just a person who wants to get my fingers into everything. And I want to help with sales and I want to help with operations and all this stuff. the way we’ve kind of packaged up our account manager,

expectations within the role is that you need to want to help the other teams and help the business grow or else that’s why are you here, right?

John Jantsch (04:36.596)

You mentioned the word expectations and I was going to bring that up. feel like anytime we’ve lost a client over the years, it’s really been a mismatch in expectations. Our clients, we’ve basically said, look, the next 90 days, we’re going to be doing strategy or whatever it is. And the client’s like two weeks in, they’re like, how come the phone’s not ringing? How do you actually work on managing communication, expectations, trust throughout the process?

Taylor (04:55.395)

Mm-hmm.

Taylor (05:04.502)

Yeah. You know, it’s, I wish I had a SOP for this, but really it’s, my methodology is over communication, proactive communication. And to me, proactive communication is not just, hey, we’re doing strategy for the next 90 days and then hoping that the client understands that. It is every day over communicating and making sure that we are on the same page over and over and over and over again.

John Jantsch (05:14.058)

Right. Right.

Taylor (05:31.565)

because that client doesn’t know anything generally about what in the world you’re doing. And even though you have sold them on this story of the outcomes that you’re going to get them, they don’t understand how we go from here to actually hitting those goals for my business. So we need to consistently reset expectations every day, whether we feel like we need to or not. So my methodology has always been,

we need to be proactively communicating with our clients. the biggest thing I see, and I see this even when I’m working with other businesses, is every day that goes by that I’m not communicated with, I think they’re doing absolutely nothing, right? Like we’re human beings, that’s just how we work. And so if you’re not constantly proactively updating them, reiterating the next steps, reiterating the expectations, that client thinks,

John Jantsch (06:16.702)

Right. Yeah.

Taylor (06:29.08)

Well, I just wasted another 10 grand.

John Jantsch (06:31.328)

Yeah, absolutely. So I will tell you, we have a very formalized onboarding process. We have a very different process in that one of the first things, most of the people we work with are our owners, founders, and we dig into their business objectives before we ever start talking about marketing. And one of things we’ve discovered early on, I mean, to me, it just made sense. It was logical. But one of the things we discovered very early on is most people don’t do that. And having a formalized, structured

onboarding process is even a unique experience for a lot of folks. And what I’ve discovered is that’s one of the secrets to our long-term retention is how a client starts with you is certainly going to determine a ton about how long they stay with you, what the relationship looks like, whether you become an advisor or a vendor.

Taylor (07:18.99)

Yeah, and I think that starts in the sales process too. know, we sometimes, you know, we’ll struggle when working with agencies when their sales team is not setting the right expectations and we’re not getting the information that we need to kind of pull that over the line. So what I love to do as an account manager is working directly with the sales team so that I understand what this client needs and wants right from the beginning so that

John Jantsch (07:21.596)

It does, 100%.

Taylor (07:47.157)

When I then take them on under my wing and I’m managing this relationship, I know the backstory and I’m not trying to catch up or just take their word on it. I want to know everything. So getting an account manager involved in that sales process is super helpful.

John Jantsch (07:53.119)

Yes.

John Jantsch (08:02.57)

Well, I tell you one of the things we learned a lot of time too, because when I started my agency and I’ve written a couple of books that were very popular, some people would be attracted to us, but they were really attracted to me. And so naturally I would close them and go, by the way, have you met Taylor? And one of the things that we discovered early on is bringing those folks that are going to work with them in, like you said, in that sales process, they don’t feel like they’re handed off anymore. They were like,

Taylor (08:13.23)

Mm-hmm.

Taylor (08:30.324)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

John Jantsch (08:31.11)

mean I get the team, you know, as opposed to, now I get the B team. And boy, it made such a huge difference.

Taylor (08:35.65)

Yes.

So John, I’m curious, when your account managers came into the sales process, were they on every sales call or how did you structure that?

John Jantsch (08:46.976)

Fortunately, most of our leads are inbound just because we’ve been around so long and a lot of stuff’s out there. So we close, especially for strategy, most of the time in one call. so consequently, try to get those folks involved. I mean, it may be a second call, like now we’re going to have a call for discovery as when we’ll bring that and we’ll definitely make sure that everybody’s going to be involved.

is there so that they see what they’re getting. And then we will also, you know, our first step always starts with something we call strategy first. So it’s a very scripted, structured process and deliverable. And we actually have everybody on the team deliver a part of that to the client. And so they get a kind of a full blown experience, you know, within the first 30 days of everybody they’re going to work with.

Taylor (09:37.75)

Awesome. That’s really cool.

John Jantsch (09:40.221)

On that same topic, we actually have a network of over a hundred agencies that we work with and train and have licensed our methodology. And one of the struggles they quite often have is as they start to grow, it’s like, I want to add account manager. But then they really have trouble letting go. It’s like, okay, I hired an account manager or maybe even a lead consultant.

let’s call them that. And yet that they still micromanage every element. And it’s really, really tough. I hate to answer for you, but I have a feeling I know what your answer is going to be. How do people get to the point where they can feel like, okay, the client’s getting the experience I would give them?

Taylor (10:27.916)

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s totally valid to feel that way as an entrepreneur, a business owner. get it. You know, we’ve all gone through that where we have to pass over relationships because it’s the only way that we can grow and scale a business, right? It’s to not be on every Slack message and every Zoom call. But I think the biggest thing is obviously hiring the right people. That’s just a no brainer. You know, you have to have the right people, but trust comes over time.

John Jantsch (10:34.868)

Right.

Taylor (10:56.596)

And it’s not something that you have to rush into. And it’s not something that has a 30 day expiry. You have to be at a client calls within 30 days. You can build that trust over time. Maybe it’s a six month runway and the account manager comes in and they shadow and then they take over a little bit and a little bit more until clients go to them first instead of you and clients realize that.

know, Betty’s getting back to them way faster. And even though you’re still there and still in the background or maybe still on the strategy, Betty can still be there and do a great job. And so once you start to build that trust, then you get to a point where you’re like, I shouldn’t be here. I should not be in the account manager seat because Betty’s doing a way better job. And then you can then go focus on more important things. But until you get to that pivot point where you’re…

John Jantsch (11:29.024)

Yeah.

Taylor (11:46.809)

you’re feeling really good about that account manager, for a lot of agency owners, you don’t have to run away yet. You don’t have to close your eyes and hope for the best. It can be a gradual thing. And so I think when you’re thinking about hiring for an account manager, stop thinking about it as just a butt in the seat and stop thinking about somebody just replacing you, because nobody’s going to replace you, but somebody can come in and support you and support your clients to give them a really great experience.

John Jantsch (12:04.777)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:09.13)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:15.616)

Well, and the other thing I would add to that certainly and why this is such a challenge for most of the agencies we work with is because they’ve actually never created a process. It’s all here and it’s all got and it’s like, how can you get, expect somebody else to replicate that? You can’t. And it’s a ton of work to get from here to wherever you put it. But the payoff is huge. I don’t do any sales calls. I don’t do any client work.

Taylor (12:27.15)

Yeah.

Taylor (12:37.056)

Absolutely. Yep.

John Jantsch (12:44.956)

in our business. And I spend an inordinate amount of time innovating our processes is what I do. Part of these because I like it, but it is the most valuable work I can do. But it’s tough to magically snap your fingers and get there. But that should be the goal, I think, for most of us.

Taylor (12:53.486)

Mmm.

Taylor (12:59.905)

Absolutely.

Taylor (13:08.044)

Yeah, and I think it depends on what your goals are, right? Whenever I’m chatting with agency owners, like, I need an account manager because I want to get out of the day at day to day, but really they don’t. Like they actually don’t want to, right? So, you know, a lot of the time it’s understanding where you want your business to

John Jantsch (13:12.168)

Yeah, yes.

John Jantsch (13:20.126)

Yeah,

John Jantsch (13:27.252)

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think that’s, that’s probably the challenge too. Cause you know, the founders are really bad at, you know, once they get to a point where like, I really kind of like to get in there and mess with WordPress and, you know, cause I really enjoy doing it, but it, mean, it’s the lowest payoff work you could possibly do. Right. But, but it’s so fun, you know? And so that’s, that’s a real challenge a lot of times.

Taylor (13:47.278)

But it’s so fun.

John Jantsch (13:56.576)

How do you create, especially in today’s world? I was meeting with a group of agencies in our network today and they were complaining a little bit about the fact that their work clients were actually taking their work and running it through chat GPT and saying, you know, is this good? Is this valid? You know, where are the mistakes in this? And I think that we’re increasingly going to face that, right? Because everybody’s advertising, you know, replace your agency for free.

you know, with all these AI tools. So how do we actually rise above that and, and not only create like this high touch experience, but really become this trusted advisor and, really not be seen as that vendor.

Taylor (14:42.156)

Yeah, I mean, it’s we’re we’re in it right now, right? We’re we’re in the blender trying to figure out how things are going to shake out. I think the biggest thing that I see, especially coming from the account management side of things, people are going to crave this human experience more and more and more, but they’re going to expect efficiency. They’re going to expect more for their money. They’re going to expect better results.

John Jantsch (14:45.738)

Yeah.

Taylor (15:10.326)

So I think even though we see all this noise about AI replacing my agency, I think that’s not going to happen. I think it’s just changing our expectations when we work with clients. And so I think the value is still there. I think we just need to shift to more really consultative, making sure that clients feel heard, they feel understood, and that we’re a partner versus just somebody running their ads. And I think the…

the expectations of our clients are going to continue to evolve in the sense where they’re going to demand us to take it all off their plate. Like what business owner wants to stay on ChatGBT all day, trying to figure out marketing, even if it’s through ChatGBT. They don’t have the time or energy or expertise to do that. So it’s just really making sure that they understand the value of what you’re doing.

John Jantsch (15:54.112)

They don’t at all. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:05.024)

And trust me, we don’t want a client that wants to be on chat GPT all day. So what led you to kind of choose, I mean, you’re in the agency space, but in kind of a narrow lane in the agency space, what made you decide to go there instead of the broader kind of agency?

Taylor (16:08.499)

No, we do not. No, we do not.

Taylor (16:22.924)

Yeah, really kind of boring, but it was just what I loved. I loved account management and I didn’t love what I thought running an agency previously because I started running my own small agency and then pivoted into just doing account management. I think as that started, I started to realize that there was this blue ocean. There was this huge need in our industry for great account managers and done differently because we are fractional account managers.

John Jantsch (16:43.178)

Hmm.

Taylor (16:52.674)

what everyone else is doing in the industry is hiring full-time people. And so we were just doing things differently. And so as the business started to grow, I realized there was this, yeah, this huge opportunity to specialize and to create something really awesome and to be known for that. Being a general agency, just couldn’t, I couldn’t get excited about it. So yeah, it just kind of took off. And once I saw some traction and we started to get the demand,

John Jantsch (16:55.988)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:14.992)

A.S.

Taylor (17:22.786)

We just really went all in on the processes. Like you said, John, it was like where I spent all my time was like operationalizing everything from hiring to training to onboarding, offboarding, sales, everything was systematized and it paid off. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:37.566)

Yeah. So, so talk to me a little bit about the fractional approach. We, we have gone both ways. mean, we, we actually provide fractional CMO services and we teach people how to do that. sometimes the disconnect is, you know, there, there’s a lot of like, yeah, fractional, can save money. It’ll be, you know, I don’t need a full-time person, but you know, a lot of ways they still want a full-time person, right? They still want you in all their silly meetings, that, that, they have. So you do have to, obviously that’s one of the

beauties of having a scope and a methodology. like, here’s what I do. Here’s what you get as opposed to what do need, right? But on the fractional account managers, do you find that there’s a challenge in somebody being there fractionally or maybe doing a couple clients is really not going to be as motivated to be a team player, to want to do all the sort team building that really helps an agency. How do you kind of straddle that?

you know, that divide, especially since we’re all distributed these days.

Taylor (18:37.836)

Yeah. Yeah. I would say the, when I started the business, was an, I was the account manager at DOT. So naturally I got to choose how I wanted it to look and feel. And for me, for me to be motivated working inside of these agencies, I needed to be a part of the team and a part of the culture. So early on I was going to the team events. I was flying in for the weekend. was doing the team calls and the cocktail hour and

John Jantsch (19:07.124)

Yes.

Taylor (19:07.502)

That really made me feel like a part of the team and it made me stick around for a really long time working in these agencies. And so as soon as we started to hire account managers and duplicate this model, we made sure that that was the expectation. We want these account managers to feel like a full-time team member. We want them in your Slack, in everything as if you hired them full-time. We want them to feel like that, not just for you, but for our account managers as well. want them to feel a part of the team.

we approached it very much so like, yes, we’re fractional, but it feels full time because that’s how I think it should be. Sure.

John Jantsch (19:45.504)

Okay, I’m going to throw you a softball. Are you a sports analogy person? Okay, but you get it, right? It’s a bigger ball than a little ball. It’s easier to hit, okay? So I can hire somebody for $20 an hour in the Philippines. Why don’t I just do that?

Taylor (19:51.043)

I’m not, but I’ll take it. Yeah.

Taylor (20:07.628)

Yeah, you definitely can. But the majority of the agencies we work with are looking for specialists. They’re looking for people who they don’t have to manage, they don’t have to train, they don’t have to worry if they know what they’re doing. They want somebody ready to go. So essentially they need somebody to parachute in and save all their problems, fix the processes, keep their clients happy, and continue to grow and scale from there. So

John Jantsch (20:10.528)

You

Taylor (20:36.012)

We really approach ourselves as specialists. This is the last time you’re ever gonna have to go and look for an account management solution because you’re covered when you work with us.

John Jantsch (20:47.69)

So I’m curious, your business was acquired fairly recently. Looking back, is there a part of your company that you think made it more attractive? mean, revenue is always going to be a piece of it, but was there anything that you think made it more attractive to a buyer than the typical business?

Taylor (21:06.286)

A big piece was that I was removed from the day-to-day operations. Yeah, that was definitely attractive from a risk perspective too. You know, they didn’t have to worry. Exactly, there you go. And then the second thing was specialized. So, you know, they were buying something that was very specific and had a very specific scope process, everything like

John Jantsch (21:09.908)

Yeah, sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:17.79)

Like any dummy can run this business now, right?

John Jantsch (21:33.633)

And you’re still involved in the business, though. Yeah, that was just part of the deal.

Taylor (21:37.078)

I am, I’m not involved. Yeah, I didn’t have to stay on to be honest. It wasn’t a requirement. I’m not involved in any of the operations. So you won’t see me on a team call unless it’s like high level. I’m more so a consultant strategist, you know, and I really wanna stay around and see.

John Jantsch (21:43.32)

okay.

John Jantsch (21:49.61)

Awesome. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

Taylor (22:02.388)

see the growth in DOT and also E2M, the company who bought us. I absolutely love them, what they’re doing. So yeah, I’m excited to be a part of kind of this bigger picture now. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:11.186)

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work?

Taylor (22:18.848)

Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn all the time. So feel free to add me on LinkedIn and connect or check out our website dot and company dot co.

John Jantsch (22:27.88)

Awesome. again, I appreciate you taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Taylor (22:34.093)

We will. Thanks, John.

Breaking Ground: How to Build a Thriving Practice Without Feeling “Salesy”

Breaking Ground: How to Build a Thriving Practice Without Feeling “Salesy” written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Episode Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Deborah Farone, founder of Farone Advisors and author of Breaking Ground: How Successful Women Lawyers Build Thriving Practices.

The conversation explores why traditional approaches to business development often fail—especially in professional services—and how authenticity, relationships, and strategic positioning can lead to sustainable success.

Deborah Farone shares insights from her work with top-performing professionals and highlights how business development is less about selling and more about building trust, creating meaningful connections, and developing a niche. While her research focuses on women in law, the lessons apply broadly to consultants, agency owners, and service-based professionals.

Guest Bio

Deborah Farone is the founder of Farone Advisors and a leading expert in legal business development and marketing. She has held senior business development roles at major law firms and has spent her career helping professionals grow their practices through strategic relationship-building.

Her book, Breaking Ground, draws on interviews with successful women lawyers around the world to uncover practical strategies for building a thriving, authentic practice.

Key Takeaways

1. Business Development Isn’t About “Selling”

Most professionals resist sales because it feels inauthentic. The most successful practitioners focus on helping, supporting, and providing value rather than asking for business directly.

2. Relationships Are the Foundation of Growth

Strong networks—not just direct prospects—drive opportunities. Often, the people who refer or connect you matter more than immediate buyers.

3. Authenticity Outperforms Scripts

There is no one-size-fits-all approach. The best strategy is one aligned with your personality and interests, making it sustainable and repeatable.

4. Trust Is Built on Three Core Elements

Expertise
Authenticity
Empathy

These elements consistently show up in successful business development strategies.

5. You Don’t Have to Be Outgoing to Succeed

Introverts can excel by choosing methods that feel natural—like small meetings, coffee chats, or shared-interest activities.

6. Start Small and Build Confidence

Business development is a skill that improves over time. Begin with low-pressure conversations and gradually expand your comfort zone.

7. Your Network Is Bigger Than You Think

Connections from school, early jobs, and indirect relationships often become valuable sources of opportunity later in your career.

8. Develop a Clear Niche

Success comes from identifying the intersection of:

What you enjoy
What you’re good at
What the market values

Then going deep to become known for that expertise.

9. Strategy Before Tactics

Many professionals jump into tactics (events, speaking, outreach) before defining their positioning. Clear strategy must come first.

10. Firms Must Train Early

Waiting until professionals reach senior levels to develop business skills is too late. Early training builds habits and networks that compound over time.

Great Moments (Timestamps)

00:02 – The Real Barrier to Growth
Why outdated rules—not lack of talent—hold professionals back.

01:08 – Why Deborah Farone Wrote This Book
The gap in role models and business development training.

02:15 – Why Professionals Resist Sales
Reframing sales as helping rather than pitching.

03:36 – The Power of Relationships and Networks
Why your broader network is more valuable than you think.

05:28 – Authenticity as a Competitive Advantage
Why personalized approaches outperform standardized methods.

06:02 – Creative Ways to Build Client Relationships
Examples of professionals using personal interests to connect with clients.

08:13 – How Introverts Can Succeed in Business Development
Practical ways to start small and build confidence.

10:00 – The Leadership Gap in Law Firms
Why lack of representation impacts growth and mentorship.

11:53 – The Three Elements of Trust
Expertise, authenticity, and empathy as core drivers.

13:15 – Why Niche Matters
The importance of strategic positioning before tactics.

13:56 – Where Firms Get It Wrong
The cost of delaying business development training.

17:04 – Internal Networking Matters First
Building relationships inside your organization as a foundation.

Memorable Quotes

“The most successful professionals don’t ask for business—they show how they can help.”

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to business development. You have to find what works for you.”

Resources & Links

Deborah Farone website: DeborahFarone.com
Book: Breaking Ground: How Successful Women Lawyers Build Thriving Practices
LinkedIn: Deborah Breitman-Farone

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:02.104)

What if the real barrier to building a thriving practice is not just talent or expertise, but the outdated rules we’ve accepted about how business development is supposed to work. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Deborah Farone. She’s a founder of Farone Advisors and a longtime leader in legal business development and marketing. She previously held senior business development roles at major law firms and her new book.

Deborah Farone (00:13.368)

Thank you.

Deborah Farone (00:30.586)

you

John Jantsch (00:30.84)

breaking ground how successful women lawyers build thriving practices. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Welcome, Debra.

Deborah Farone (00:36.858)

Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (00:40.398)

So for listeners, we’re not going to talk about legal stuff. We’re not going to necessarily. I think a lot of the things that I was going to share today will apply to anybody, particularly in professional services, because really the business development is very, very similar. So you’ve spent many years, I suspect, helping firms think about business development. This book focuses specifically on women. Is there a gap that you saw that you think made this book necessary?

Deborah Farone (00:44.852)

Thank

Deborah Farone (01:08.794)

There was, you know, I think that most lawyers and most professionals develop business in very similar ways, but I felt that there were some women out there who either didn’t have the role models because there are fewer women at the top of the organizations and law firms, or they didn’t know how to have the skills to develop business. So that’s why I really wanted to help them. But in doing the book, I realized that so much of what I was learning was applicable.

John Jantsch (01:15.746)

Right.

Deborah Farone (01:37.7)

to anyone who wanted to develop business. It’s just my sample set happened to be women.

John Jantsch (01:43.214)

Yeah. So I think many people suffer from this, regardless of the industry, but certainly in professional services, I think it is more so. that people, don’t even like the term sales, right? I mean, it feels salesy. It’s all the bad things they associate with what they see it. But you certainly talk about, and I know that this is a thread running through the book, that it doesn’t have to feel salesy. Why do you think so many…

Business professionals, sales professionals really resist this.

Deborah Farone (02:15.674)

think most of them went to school to learn a profession, whether it was to learn to be an accountant or a consultant. No one ever said you were going to have to go into sales. So it sounds like all of a sudden they have to have this new way of thinking. I really don’t think that’s the case. In fact, most of the successful people that I’ve worked with, whether they’re consultants or lawyers, don’t find themselves asking for the business. They never really say, can I have that business from you? They very often

John Jantsch (02:19.608)

Yeah, you’re right.

Deborah Farone (02:44.492)

let people know what they’ve done. They offer to help. They use words like, I support you? But they’re not in sales mode. I think they really do want to help these potential clients. And so that comes through. And I believe you need to be more authentic than you do a salesperson when you’re trying to build a practice.

John Jantsch (03:08.238)

Well, think there’s a lot of things that certainly I’ve learned in selling professional services. That idea of give value, provide value, provide support, and eventually that business will come around. But when you tell that person that is just getting started out there and they’re like, that’s great. I’m all for the long game and for investing, but I need to eat. So how do you kind of thread that?

Deborah Farone (03:36.206)

think it’s important to have relationships and I really try to get young professionals to concentrate on that. And even if they don’t have a big budget in a firm, get your senior people to come and train the younger ones. Give them the war stories of how you’ve won clients or how you’ve met people that have developed business. think that that’s very important. And I think even for people that are still in school to start thinking about your network and your network isn’t just

John Jantsch (03:50.21)

Yeah.

Deborah Farone (04:05.486)

the people that you go to class with. It’s who you met at your summer jobs, right? It’s the people in your first job who work in ancillary positions. They might not be a consultant if you’re a consultant or an accountant if you’re an accountant, but they’re the people that you’ve met. And those folks become part of your network. And I think we’re seeing with sales what we often see with job hunting that those contacts that end up hiring us are not necessarily that

first degree circle of people we know, but very often it’s the people that they know. So it’s important to have a large diverse network of contacts out there.

John Jantsch (04:46.424)

Yeah, I tell, I wrote a book on referrals actually. And I always tell people, you know, not everybody’s your prospect, but everybody knows your prospect. You know, at least one of them, right? Yeah. So you did a lot of conversations, had a lot of interviews, focused on a lot of successful women rainmakers. Did you see that there are patterns that show up that are maybe different in how men and women build trust, visibility, and opportunity?

Deborah Farone (04:49.338)

Thanks.

Deborah Farone (04:55.29)

It’s true.

John Jantsch (05:16.684)

A follow-up question you can answer, is one better at it? Are those different approaches serve one? So let’s go back to the first question, since I butchered that. What patterns did you see showing up in particularly how women build trust, visibility, and opportunity?

Deborah Farone (05:24.346)

You

Deborah Farone (05:28.058)

Thank you.

Well, I wasn’t so much studying men versus women as I was just looking at this group of women, but I do find that they like relationship building, that that’s something that comes naturally to them. And what I did find that is maybe true with men as well is that you need to be authentic in your marketing approach and how you develop business, that there is not a one size fits all. Not everyone fits into one of four categories.

John Jantsch (05:36.238)

Right, right.

Deborah Farone (06:02.52)

I think we all find our own way of doing it based on our personality, what works for us. And so people like Susan, I and D Baker McKenzie, who I spoke to for the book, loves exercise. She loves being outdoors. And so she invites her clients and her colleagues and contacts whenever they’re in town to go with her on a hike. That’s not going to work for everyone. But she doesn’t like this idea of having the formal cocktail party and inviting people she knows. So.

John Jantsch (06:17.998)

Mm-hmm.

Deborah Farone (06:31.393)

I think it’s a matter of finding what works for you because that’s going to be what you want to repeat. And also that’s what your clients are going to see that you enjoy. And clients can tell if you’re taking them golfing, but you really don’t like golf.

John Jantsch (06:45.506)

Yeah. So I think that you just hit on really the secret is finding what works for you and being yourself rather than looking at like, this is how everybody in our industry does it, or this is how everybody in our firm does it. You really will be more successful doing something that works for you, which is probably going to be something that you also enjoy. Would that be, yeah.

Deborah Farone (07:06.903)

Yes, and I try with the people that I know and I’m sure you do too. You know, want to really get to know them and figure out what are their proclivities? You what are they like? I worked with someone who was a classical musician and she loves the opera. And so she lives in Milan and what she does is she takes her clients and their spouses and families to see a short opera and then for a wonderful dinner.

because she enjoys it and they can tell they know that when she’s taking them that they’re having a good time and so is she. And so I think that that’s really important is figuring out what it is that you enjoy. What’s the best way for you to develop business and it might not be the same way as the person next door.

John Jantsch (07:35.927)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (07:53.358)

So what do you say to that client maybe that you’re working with that, you know, I think a lot of people think in terms of to be successful business development, you have to be that outgoing, charismatic, you know, networking, you know, kind of person. What do you tell that person who’s like, that’s just not me? You know, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. You know, how am I going to succeed?

Deborah Farone (08:09.688)

Yeah.

Deborah Farone (08:13.923)

Right, think, know, well, first of all, I tell people don’t take giant leaps, take baby steps. And that’s the best thing to do so that if you’re not used to talking about yourself and your practice, do it with a family member, you know, then do it with a colleague, then do it with an associate at your firm, and then eventually you can do it with the client. So I think, you know, Jeff Klein, who’s a well-known lawyer in New York said marketing is muscle. And I think it’s true, you get better and better at it.

John Jantsch (08:19.362)

Nice.

John Jantsch (08:25.368)

me.

John Jantsch (08:40.952)

Yes.

Deborah Farone (08:42.393)

But I also don’t think that you need to be out having lunch every day with people if that’s not your thing. You know, I love coffee. I mean, I love any kind of coffee, right? So I love meeting people for coffee. It’s perfect. I don’t have to think about what I’m eating. I don’t have to think about any variables. I’m happy at a Starbucks or a fancy hotel for coffee. And that’s what I love. You know, so I do coffee meetings.

John Jantsch (08:53.016)

Thank

Deborah Farone (09:09.677)

But other people find their ways. And I think you have to do what feels authentic to you.

John Jantsch (09:16.91)

So what, and maybe you don’t keep track of this kind of thing, circling back a little bit to the gender aspect of your work, what’s the percentage of women in leadership in the legal industry, you think?

Deborah Farone (09:31.129)

It’s very low. mean, we have less than I think 30 % or maybe around 30 % that are actually partners. And if you look at the American Lawyer 100, the top firms, fewer than 25 % are being led by women. And so you have a real issue with diversity on all levels, and even fewer are women or people of color. And so it’s a real issue when you talk about looking for role models.

John Jantsch (09:32.547)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:00.588)

Yeah.

Deborah Farone (10:00.91)

I think professionals, particularly lawyers, like to look at role models because they’re interested in precedent. They want to know what has the other person done that’s been successful. And if they don’t see people who look like them in those roles, it’s a lot harder to figure out how they’re going to get there.

John Jantsch (10:09.614)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:18.734)

Do you feel like that system, if you will, still quietly works against women then? When it comes to business development, mean, particularly.

Deborah Farone (10:26.033)

I do. Yeah, I think women and minorities have a tougher time because there are not those role models. I think there are other issues at play like unconscious bias. But, you know, my focus really is on business development. And I feel that, you know, if we can teach people how to develop business, whether they’re in the professions or even if they’re in something like advertising.

If you have the ability to sell yourself and to develop business, it gives you so much more ability to write your own script and to do what you want because you’re going to have more advantages as far as rising within an organization if you’re a business developer that we’ve seen. And you can also kind of develop the clients that you want to develop and develop the practice that appeals to you. And that’s great. That gives you a sense of independence that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

John Jantsch (11:08.491)

Yes, yes.

Deborah Farone (11:21.483)

So that’s really what I want to encourage people to do.

John Jantsch (11:24.846)

You can probably take that on the road to another firm as well as within your own firm.

Deborah Farone (11:27.449)

You can. Absolutely. It allows you freedom. It’s a type of currency, isn’t it? You know, that you have that capability.

John Jantsch (11:34.892)

Yeah. Yeah.

So we’ve been talking about applying this to law, but for consultants, agency owners, other experts, what do you think your book could teach them about building practice around relationships rather than self-promotion?

Deborah Farone (11:53.405)

well, I think the authenticity issue is very big. Also trust, I cover how you build trust. And it seems to be three elements. It’s expertise, it’s the authenticity piece, and it’s empathy. And I go into a lot of detail about that because I think being yourself amongst your clients is not something we’re trained to do necessarily. But I try to show people examples of folks who have done that.

and why they’ve been successful. And clients want to work with people who are believable, who come across as humans. I told you when we got on the call that I might have a coughing attack. I don’t pretend to be perfect. And I think people like people more when they are themselves and they admit that they’re fallible. And so there are lots of different things for other professionals, I think, to learn from these lessons.

And the other really is to develop a niche. think developing a niche is so vital regardless of what you’re doing in the world because figuring out what you really enjoy and then figuring out if you think of it as a Venn diagram, what makes economic sense or sense for the firm that you’re with. Finding where those overlap is just a vital part of being able to market yourself.

John Jantsch (12:54.679)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (13:15.662)

And then going very good and deep and becoming an expert at that thing, right?

Deborah Farone (13:20.632)

Right, absolutely. But I think we all have a tendency to jump into the tactics before we do the strategy. And I really would recommend that people think about the strategy and how they want to be known and what they want to do before they take an immediate jump into giving lots of speaking engagements or marketing themselves.

John Jantsch (13:27.779)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:40.15)

Yeah. So most professional service firms expect partners to grow the practice. So where do you see the firms themselves getting it wrong in terms of not really equipping those, you know, just saying, go out there and do it.

Deborah Farone (13:56.131)

Yeah, I think they need to train people. I think training has to start when someone is very young in business. I think you can train an older person. You can teach them new tricks. But what happens is, and we see this in so many professions, if you’re not training them when they’re associates or when they just start, not only are they losing whatever seven or eight years of building good habits about business development and marketing and relationship building,

But they’re losing those contacts that they could have made. So they’ve not been trained, they don’t have the contacts. All of sudden you make them partner and you say, okay, it’s time, go develop business. And it’s much harder at that point.

John Jantsch (14:37.998)

All right.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. So is there anything in the interviews that you did, particularly with the women, that kind of challenged some of your own assumptions about business development, even about leadership?

Deborah Farone (14:57.728)

think finding that there were cultural differences, there were more cultural differences than I thought there would be around the world. So I spoke with women in Botswana. I spoke with women in Milan and Paris and Asia. And there are differences that I think I just see generally as a difference with culture, whether it’s men or women. But in parts of Asia, you would never be direct and say, I want to do

Business with you I want to work with you unless if you really do know someone very well and the same is true with even portions of Italy and Europe. You know London is more like America as far as you can be a little bit more direct. But Latin America is also different and that they want to take time and get to know you and so I think the cultural differences were were really interesting I was aware that there might be some but.

John Jantsch (15:49.006)

Mm-hmm.

Deborah Farone (15:55.657)

the ones that I heard about just reinforced how important it is, especially if you’re going to another country, that there are to be cultural differences. And even if you’re going to another firm, another company that you’re trying to sell, you have to just be very empathetic and really understand the culture of that company. So that was reinforced.

John Jantsch (16:19.864)

So if, and I’m sure you’ve been brought in from time to time to work with somebody who’s really good at what they do, sort of hesitant to put themselves out there. Do you always, I mean, is there a first step that you say, well, just do this, it won’t kill you, this’ll get you started?

Deborah Farone (16:35.352)

I think so much of it is getting to know someone because everyone’s going to have their quirks. And so while I do work for large companies and large firms, I will take on about eight coaching clients a year. And I really need to start with getting to know what they do, what they love, what they hate about work, all of those things. And then we can figure out where they want to go. But I really do believe that that’s strategic.

John Jantsch (16:39.726)

Yeah.

Deborah Farone (17:04.344)

part has to come before they start selling themselves. And very often the selling themselves part starts with how they sell themselves internally at their company. Are they making the right contacts? And are they helping other people? And are they creating a good reputation for themselves? Those things matter so much and they’re so easy to overlook.

John Jantsch (17:15.278)

That’s a point,

John Jantsch (17:30.722)

Yeah, that’s interesting point. I’m sure that when people, especially young associates inside of professional service firm, especially a larger firm, part of the job is start your networking here, right? mean, go meet these partners or go ask somebody how they got to where they got and find a mentor maybe even. that’s all part of that’s business development, frankly, isn’t it?

Deborah Farone (17:54.648)

It is and you know I spoke I guess maybe two or three weeks ago at Columbia Law School and I said to the law students it’s really important that you know everyone in this room because one of you is going to be the next Sam Altman or one of you might be the head of an architecture firm or a law firm you just don’t know and so it really needs to start at that level it needs to kind of

John Jantsch (18:00.92)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:07.276)

Yeah.

Deborah Farone (18:21.451)

reach people who are still trying to figure out what they want to do. Develop a network, think about who is in your network, and make sure that you’re empathetic to what they’re going through.

John Jantsch (18:28.781)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:33.294)

It’s funny, when I started my business some 30 years ago, all my first clients were people I went to high school and college with. So, all right, you wrote Breaking Ground. What do you hope firms and individuals, professionals will do differently as a result of reading?

Deborah Farone (18:40.573)

I’m not surprised. That’s great.

Deborah Farone (18:51.029)

I think one, start training people early. Don’t wait until they become a partner at their firm. And also realize that everyone develops business in a different way and can develop business in a different way. So have room for people to do it authentically. Give them a budget, give them some guardrails of what they can and can’t do if you need to, but allow them to find a way to develop business that’s right for them.

So I think those are two things that I would start with.

John Jantsch (19:24.014)

Well, Deborah, I appreciate you saying that by the DuckTait marketing podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to find out more about breaking ground and certainly to connect with you?

Deborah Farone (19:25.833)

It’s particularly.

Deborah Farone (19:32.865)

Absolutely. Well, breaking ground, they can easily order through Amazon or through my website. There’s some links for discount codes and things like that. And my website is deborahferrone.com. And most of the time I live on LinkedIn. I guess if you can say, where do you live as far as social media, I’m on LinkedIn at Deborah Breitman-Ferrone.

John Jantsch (19:50.19)

Great.

John Jantsch (19:55.694)

Again, I appreciate you stop by and maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Deborah Farone (20:01.053)

John, thank you so much. It was fun speaking with you.

The Money Habit: Why Financial Stress Isn’t About Math

The Money Habit: Why Financial Stress Isn’t About Math written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Episode Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch sits down with bestselling author Mike Michalowicz to discuss his latest book, The Money Habit: The Worry-Free Way to Financial Independence.

While Mike’s previous work (Profit First) revolutionized how entrepreneurs manage business finances, this conversation shifts focus to personal money management—and why so many people still feel anxious about money despite earning more.

Mike reveals that financial stress isn’t primarily about income or math—it’s about behavior, habits, and lack of control. He introduces a system rooted in behavioral psychology that helps individuals take authority over their money without relying on strict discipline or deprivation.

The discussion explores the connection between business and personal finances, the flaws of traditional budgeting, and how simple structural changes—like separating money by purpose—can create clarity, reduce anxiety, and build long-term financial independence.

Guest Bio

Mike Michalowicz is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and financial systems expert dedicated to helping business owners and individuals gain control over their finances.

He is the author of multiple influential books including Profit First, Clockwork, Fix This Next, and All In. His work has been adopted by over a million businesses worldwide.

Through his latest book, The Money Habit, Mike expands his methodology into personal finance, focusing on behavioral systems that reduce financial stress and create sustainable wealth habits.

Key Takeaways

1. Financial Stress Is Behavioral, Not Mathematical

Most people assume more income will solve financial problems. Mike argues the opposite—financial stability comes from gaining control over money first, then increasing income.

2. More Money Doesn’t Fix Poor Money Habits

Without systems in place, both businesses and households can “leech” from each other, leading to financial instability even when income is high.

3. Discipline Often Backfires

Strict budgeting and deprivation can lead to two outcomes:

Rebellion (overspending)
Scarcity mindset (hoarding money without enjoying it)

4. Systems Beat Willpower

Instead of changing behavior, Mike advocates for “behavioral intercepts”—systems that guide natural behavior toward better outcomes.

5. Your Bank Account Is Your Most-Used Financial Tool

Rather than relying on apps or spreadsheets, Mike suggests structuring multiple bank accounts to reflect spending categories, making financial awareness automatic.

6. Real-Time Budgeting Creates Immediate Awareness

When money is separated into purpose-driven accounts, every purchase reflects instantly, helping people make better decisions in real time.

7. Start Small to Build Confidence

Begin with one account tied to your biggest financial worry (e.g., rent, groceries, retirement), then expand gradually.

8. Clarity Reduces Financial Anxiety

Financial stress often comes from uncertainty. Clear allocation of money creates confidence and reduces emotional strain.

9. Entrepreneurs Must Manage Both Business and Personal Finances

Success in business doesn’t guarantee personal financial health—and neglecting one can undermine the other.

10. “If in Doubt, Add an Account”

Creating a dedicated account for a specific concern (like emergency funds or runway) can immediately reduce stress and improve decision-making.

Great Moments (Timestamps)

00:01 – The Real Cause of Financial Anxiety
Mike challenges the idea that money stress is about math, pointing instead to habits and behavior.

01:24 – When Business Success Hurts Personal Finances
How profitable businesses can still fail due to poor personal money management.

02:45 – Generational Money Trauma
Why many people develop unhealthy relationships with money early in life.

03:54 – Financial Worry as a “Part-Time Job”
The hidden cost of constantly thinking about money.

04:29 – Why This Book Is Different from Profit First
Key differences between managing business vs. personal finances.

06:46 – Why Discipline and Budgeting Fail
The psychological pitfalls of deprivation-based financial systems.

08:54 – The Power of Habit-Based Systems
How structured systems outperform willpower.

10:32 – Why Traditional Budgeting Doesn’t Work
Introducing the concept of real-time budgeting through bank accounts.

13:27 – Start with One Account
A simple entry point to building the money habit.

16:20 – Systems Make You “Good with Money”
Why success isn’t about skill—it’s about structure.

18:54 – “If in Doubt, Add an Account”
A practical mantra for reducing financial uncertainty.

Memorable Quotes

“The solution to financial struggle is not more money—it’s authority and control over money.”

“I’ve never been good with money. I’ve found systems that are good with money.”

Resources & Links

Mike Michalowicz website: MikeMotorbike.com
Money Habit banking resources: MoneyHabitBank.com
Money Habit mentors: MoneyHabitMentors.com

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.39)

So what if the reason smart entrepreneurs still feel anxious about money has less to do with math and more to do with the habits quietly running their lives? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Michalowicz. He’s a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and long time champion for helping business owners take back control of their time, money, and energy. He’s the author of many books, Profit First, Clockwork,

fix this next all in, but today we’re gonna talk about his latest, the money habit, the worry-free way to financial independence. So Mike, welcome back to the show.

Mike Michalowicz (00:41.31)

John is amazing. You know, we’ve known each other, I think, 17 years. We’re almost approaching 20 years of knowing each other. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah.

John Jantsch (00:47.586)

Wow, dang. I got sneakers older than that though. That’s nothing.

Mike Michalowicz (00:53.29)

Those Chuck E. T’s that you wear. I love those things.

John Jantsch (00:55.854)

So, all right, you’re back with another book about money. The Profit First book is pretty much legendary. mean, you’ve sold six gazillion and have lots of people practicing that. And you brought that to a lot of entrepreneurs. But why are you going back to the well on a more personal book now to help individuals? And I’m assuming there’s a lot of cross-ups.

Mike Michalowicz (01:24.618)

There’s a lot crossover and it originally started off with helping the entrepreneur, but there’s another larger community that it’s now serving and I’m focusing on or paying more attention to. But the entrepreneur, I found John is some folks deployed profit first or in some other ways move their business forward so that the business was highly profitable. But their lifestyle started gobbling away at the business and they weren’t managing the numbers at home. And therefore, the home leached off the business.

And I also saw the reverse. I’ve seen some people prepare for retirement, future, and then they start an entrepreneurial endeavor and it doesn’t do well. It struggles and leeches off the home and both collapse. So I had the awareness like, if you’re not nailing numbers at both sides, the business and the home front, you’re screwed. And then I realized this was the biggest aha. I got a call from a business owner that was doing profit first.

And he said his employees are coming to him asking for raises, seeing if they can get in advance. And he goes, I want to accommodate that. By a certain point, the business will no longer be sustainable. They need help managing their money because most people believe that the solution to financial struggle is more money. And the reality is the solution of financial struggle is authority and control over money. And then more money helps, but you need to assert that control first. And that’s why I the book.

John Jantsch (02:45.794)

Yeah, and it’s interesting, but I mean, you even in the subtitle, have worry free. mean, so there’s stress and behavior issues. people grow up with real, you know, I grew up not wealthy at all, lower middle class. I have nine siblings and so money was always an issue. so I kept, you know, my parents really struggled to spend any money because it was like, we got to buy milk or we’re going to do this.

And so I think a lot of people like that kind of grow up almost with a unhealthy relationship with money. I mean, it’s like the last thing they want to even talk about.

Mike Michalowicz (03:25.706)

There’s no question there’s generational financial trauma and we are programmed. There was an article that broke from USA Today. I think it was in August of 2025 that really shocked me awake and it said financial worry has become a part time job. And it went on to explain that for the typical American that we are worrying about some kind of financial consequence for hours a day on average.

John Jantsch (03:29.475)

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (03:54.618)

And that’s devastating because it eats away at us, not just emotionally, but physically. mostly, yeah, you’re distracted at work. So your productivity declines. It becomes to some degree a vicious cycle. So what we have to do is we have to learn to make not make do with what we got. We have to assert control over what we’ve currently got first. And then we start building from there.

John Jantsch (04:01.09)

Yeah, you don’t sleep. mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:21.654)

Would it be safe to just call the money habit basically profit first for personal finances or am I missing something?

Mike Michalowicz (04:29.49)

I was missing something actually, because originally that’s what I wanted to call it. was profit first personal. And then I realized this is a radically different book. So when I started interviewing people, the biggest difference is that the majority of income earners or not entrepreneurs have a predictable income or no income. So you’re humming along and maybe get a little raises over time incrementally. And then someone else can turn off the switch and all of a it stops and you start up again.

John Jantsch (04:32.577)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (04:55.698)

an entrepreneur’s trajectory is much more volatile up and down. You have a banner year and you’re walking on water and then you have a devastating period after that. Prop first was designed to work for volatility. The money habit is designed to work with potential predict more predictability, but also understanding that the climb won’t be as fast and hopefully the decline won’t be as fast either as entrepreneurs expect. So I had to integrate that.

and how to work with different income levels. The average American earns $50,000 a year. So this book is designed to work on the average or serve the average income earner and people can earn more and people can earn less. And why designed is as your income changes, we need to change ratios for what we’re addressing. If you own less than the average earner in the US,

You’re going to focus more on the essentials of living food shelter. If you are earning more than the average, you may be able to orient more toward future dreams, some aspirational things you have.

But the other thing is a lot of people come in with different mindsets. Some people are recovering from debt. Other people are preparing for future events. Classically was retirement, but now it could be just activating funds like taking the family on a two year sabbatical. That that is like a mini retirement before you officially retire. And there’s other goals. So I call these seasons. And so the book speaks to.

John Jantsch (06:14.147)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:19.084)

Hmm.

Mike Michalowicz (06:20.744)

tiered income levels, more predictable income levels, but what to do when you lose your income. And it speaks to the season that you are in currently. And that’s not in profit first.

John Jantsch (06:32.78)

So there are other mentors books out there, Dave Ramsey comes to mind and it’s like, pay off your debt. Don’t get a latte, just have discipline. mean, are you essentially saying that but just in a nicer way?

Mike Michalowicz (06:40.958)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (06:46.57)

No, I first let me start by saying Dave Ramsey’s work has been personally transformative for me. I love it. Yet this is not a translation of that or an expansion of it. It’s a different perspective. For most people, discipline becomes a form of one of two things will trigger retaliation. So depravation discipline becomes deprivation. Deprivation becomes retaliation.

It’s classic in diets, like don’t eat anything with sugar and we don’t until it’s all you think about, right? And you retaliate. The other scenario, which is far less frequent is the Scrooge mentality. When you go into deprivation, there’s a certain point that says that your identity shifts enough you say, I will never spend money. Then why are you earning money? And so there’s people who have accumulated a lot of money and it’s all about the fear of losing that money. So they live like paupers. So I found deprivation works for very few.

John Jantsch (07:14.584)

Yeah, that’s all you can think about.

John Jantsch (07:36.046)

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (07:40.712)

So this system is nothing like, in this case, Dave Ramsey system. What it does is it’s based upon what I call behavioral intercepts. Commitment devices is the technical term in behavioral psychology. Understand your current natural path of behavior instead of trying to change how you behave, deprivation, these external spreadsheets or apps or whatever. Instead, look at what you’re naturally doing and put commitment devices in that pathway that assure that you will get what you want. And the beautiful part is

You don’t need to change yourself. Just keep doing what you’re doing with a system that directs the outcome that you desire.

John Jantsch (08:16.974)

So in Profit First, to be one of the things that you introduced that, you know, I hate to like go, well, duh. But for a lot of people, you know, everybody goes like, pay yourself first, have, you know, put away for taxes. I mean, everybody gets that, but you created the bucket or envelope system for that, which was basically just what they should be doing, but you kind of enabled it and put it in front of them. And all of a it was like, no, it became a habit. Is that…

Mike Michalowicz (08:28.018)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (08:39.39)

Correct.

John Jantsch (08:45.134)

The same thing that you’re talking about in a lot of ways that that that it’s habits It’s not like I’m never gonna spend this it’s I’m gonna have a set of habits that are gonna serve my objective

Mike Michalowicz (08:54.984)

Yeah, so I’ve deployed established systems. In fact, the envelope system goes back to biblical times. It’s in actually all the religious, significant religious books and manuals. Tithing is a concept or prepaying and allocating for an intention before you quote benefit from it. And other systems like pay yourself first. That’s the same idea is reserving money for an intention first. The envelope system is carving money up.

What I did was I modernized it by realizing the path that most people follow. So it’s funny. I just did a presentation to a large group and I surveyed the audience. said, what’s the most common money app today? And I heard rocket money because it’s advertised so aggressively. heard, it’s spreadsheet. I heard why NAB you need a budget, which is a great system.

John Jantsch (09:40.302)

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (09:45.226)

I okay, I said, what do you log into most to manage your money? And the response was my bank. said, your bank then is your app. The most used app in the world is our bank account. And for many people in that room, they were logging in daily or multiple times a day to see how much money you have.

John Jantsch (09:55.266)

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (10:04.456)

So what I did was I said, okay, there’s established systems out there that work, but why aren’t we all using them? Because we know they work because they don’t, we don’t stumble over them. They’re not forced down our gullet. So that’s I realized this needs to be done at the bank level. And that’s why it’s there.

John Jantsch (10:19.662)

So you mentioned the word budget in talking about one of the apps, but you, you, you kind of take it to task a little bit, right? I mean, that as, as far as why budgeting failed for the traditional person.

Mike Michalowicz (10:32.947)

Yeah, yeah.

This is the money habit is a real time budget. So when you spend a dollar from an account, so let me just kind of set the stage. We understand we have multiple accounts at our bank and ultimately you can get very specific, but you could have more generic ones like my essentials needs my my lattes out or whatever people like to talk about. And that’s the wants. These are the mean luxuries and so forth. But you can be very specific. My wife and I have a mortgage account, for example, and we allocate money to that account every day.

John Jantsch (11:00.578)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (11:04.584)

Well, what happens is it’s a real time budget. So when I log into my bank account, if the money is there, I know exactly how much is there. Once the money gets transferred over to pay my mortgage or I go out and have that latte or whatever it is, I only use debit cards. I will see that money instantly withdrawn and next time I log in, I know what’s truly available. So it’s living with you at a real time. I do want to add one little asterisk. I say I only use debit cards. I only use debit cards linked to those accounts.

I do still use credit cards. think credit cards can be a valuable tool when managed right. So I’m not rejecting.

John Jantsch (11:32.44)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:39.086)

Yeah, those airline points. mean, I love them. All right. So, talk a little bit about that idea. You hinted at it, but first people don’t know the idea of separating money by purpose. know, instead of, so you are literally talking about, instead of like, here’s my checking account, it’s here’s my aid accounts that are separated by purpose and I’m making allocations, which probably freaks some banks out. I mean, it’s hard to open an account in some banks.

Mike Michalowicz (11:41.438)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:08.302)

So I know you’ve also developed some banking relationships too.

Mike Michalowicz (12:12.828)

I do. And we have a website called money habit bank calm. So you can find a

banks that support this. There’s one bank in particular that’s really aggressive. It’s called Dream First. And when I say aggressive, they’re actively supporting this and love it. And they focus on personal finances. But if you go to moneyhabitbank.com, that’s the site. Yeah, some banks will resist it. Here’s the irony is when people use Profit First, and this is a derivative of Profit First, it’s not total.

Totally new. Prefers, we have over 1.1 million deployments of it. So we have a lot of case studies under our belt. Money habit is now starting to get some serious momentum. have, we think about 10,000 books in circulation. It’s kind of hard to measure, but so the deployments are coming in, actually the emails are coming in actively of what we ask people, when did you set it up? us, tell me. And what we’re finding is,

Some banks say, why are you saying all these accounts when you do in person, but when you’re online, that friction’s gone away. You just click and you click and you click and click. And it’s surprising how many banks, particularly regional small banks, will do no fee, no balance necessary accounts. So do it online. You won’t experience that.

John Jantsch (13:14.51)

That’s true.

Mike Michalowicz (13:27.114)

But I also suggest you start off slow. think setting up eight accounts or five or ten, whatever you want, is a little overwhelming. You can actually start the money habit with just one account. And I call it the worry or wonder account. And it’s real simple. Whatever is the most frequent financial concern that you have for some people, it’s like

Can I cover the rent or the mortgage for other people’s like, Hey, can I pay groceries today? Can I afford that? And for some people, and it seems pretty common is retirement. Like do I have enough money to retire? Whatever is the thing that comes to you most frequently or the first thing that pops your mind, set that account. And let’s just for easy sake, say it’s mortgage. And let’s just say is $4,000 a month, which ironically is pretty close to my darn mortgage, but it’s 4,000 bucks and say I get paid once a week.

John Jantsch (13:50.007)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (14:06.862)

You

Mike Michalowicz (14:10.758)

Every week I’m going to allocate $1,000 to the mortgage account to assure I cover the nut. Now what’s interesting is that starts alleviating some of worry because I’m always worried if I can pay the mortgage. Now I know with confidence, but the magic isn’t there. The magic’s in the remainder because what you start seeing is, I only have XYZ available for the rest of my lifestyle. It starts bringing subconscious kind of

John Jantsch (14:29.827)

Yeah, right.

Mike Michalowicz (14:34.94)

reaction to conscious consideration. And that’s the goal of the money habit. And that’s where financial independence happens. When you assert authority and control over money as opposed to it having control over you.

John Jantsch (14:45.912)

So we’ve kind of touched on this, but how do you begin repairing people’s, you know, that have kind of this guilt and this fear and avoidance over money? Do you feel like just equipping them with this tools enough or is that going to take some deeper work?

Mike Michalowicz (15:03.742)

Yeah, for me, my wife and I took some deeper work, we came from very different perspectives. She grew up in absolute abject poverty. I grew up in middle middle middle class to upper middle class. So the whole perception was radically different. And it would cause

frustration and arguments between us. What happened was I asserted the control over money and my wife would then ask me, hey, Mike, can I go out with my friends or do I this available? And I either say yes or no, almost like a parent child relationship. The beauty of the system is it’s just numbers, man, they’re in front of you, you face it and you have to consider it. So when you do this by yourself, or you do it with a partner, which many people do, it gives you absolute clarity and you start teeming against it or with it.

The other thing is to start slow because if you come from a money trauma situation, it’s quite appropriate to be very skeptical if this is going to work. So just start with that one account. See how it serves you. See the emotions it brings about with the awareness it brings about. Then try another account and then another account. But it’s so interesting with this absolute clarity. I often find out that people are very capable because of the system. The last thing I want to share on the subject is I was at this event

And someone’s like, yeah, it was like 700 people in the room. There’s one guy, he grabs a microphone and goes, yeah. He goes, really interesting system. He goes like, you’re already good with money because I suck with money. I’m not good with money. This isn’t going to work for me. I said, hold on. In that question, you said something that’s not true. I’m not good with money. I’ve never been good with money. I found systems that are really good with money. And so I’m perceived to be good with money, but it’s because of the system. So it’s very capable of working with people that aren’t good with money. That’s not the goal.

John Jantsch (16:29.613)

Ha!

John Jantsch (16:48.91)

I’m going to allow you to be very self-serving with this question. If somebody’s got profit first, heck, maybe they’re even a quasi-practitioner, do they need this book too to apply to their personal situation?

Mike Michalowicz (16:55.422)

Can you borrow a few bucks you won’t borrow $1,000.

Mike Michalowicz (17:11.338)

The big question is maybe, or the answer is maybe I should say, I’m surprised how many people struggle to translate profit first to another application because a lot of us just want to follow the script. And if you’re the type of person, and most of us are, I’m that type of person, I want to the prescription, then the money habit will help you because it addresses the nuances of lifestyle and income in a home, which is different than a business.

At the same time is some people have translated this on their own. That’s actually how this kind of came about. I got a call from an entrepreneur who said, hey, I’m doing this in my house and it’s working for me, but my employees are struggling. Can you help my employees? And that’s when I realized I needed to adjust the book a little bit. for in John, in your case to support me, get the book. Just get the book.

John Jantsch (18:00.11)

That’s really all I wanted you to say, So, all right, for the business owner listening right now, feels very profitable on paper, but maybe anxious in real life because that’s a little bit of what you’re describing. And maybe that’s just the common state for entrepreneurs, right? You’re always like, when’s the shoe going to drop? You know, no matter how good it’s going, right? Or how well it’s going. So, where should they start?

Mike Michalowicz (18:03.37)

You

Mike Michalowicz (18:22.376)

Yeah, my god. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:29.031)

Because probably the first step is like, how do we relieve some of that anxiety? So where should they start?

Mike Michalowicz (18:36.535)

with their business? Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:38.092)

Yeah, or really with this concept and you know, this week, like, you know, I’ve got this like anxiety in my business. Or, I mean, I feel pretty good about my business. It’s going pretty well, but I’ve got this anxiety on the other side of my life. Where should I start?

Mike Michalowicz (18:41.086)

This concept, yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (18:49.257)

Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (18:54.844)

One of my colleagues, name’s Erin Moser, said something great. We had an event and we’re on stage and someone asked a similar question and she said, she looked around, she goes, if in doubt, add an account. And that’s become like a mantra. And when there’s concern about something, create an account that addresses that concern. For many business owners that don’t have profit first in their business or they’re not using the money habit at their home,

John Jantsch (19:06.986)

funny.

Mike Michalowicz (19:19.812)

it’s runway is the biggest concern. Like I don’t know if the other shoe is going to drop and what to do. So in that case, we often set up a profit account to ensure they’re profitable. We also set up an account we call it the vault and the vault is a reserve to cover expenses for your business. Should the other shoe drop for an extended period of time months. So in our case, it’s a year. That’s how vaulty I am. We’ve ensured that our salary for every employee is covered for one year in a specific account. and the other shoe has dropped.

So, it was so interesting is when the shoe drops for us, there was a lawsuit that was ridiculous and cause off guard. there was a slowdown in business. You know, there’s all these things that happen when those things happen, without having some kind of cushion or runway, we become highly reactive. That’s where people do desperate things. But since we had that, we were able to move through those steps very methodically and recover to an amplitude.

John Jantsch (20:10.734)

Sure.

John Jantsch (20:18.207)

I’m curious, in some of your other work you have created a licensing or a network of folks that are practitioners of what the book preaches. Is that in the works for this on a personal level?

Mike Michalowicz (20:29.898)

It is it is money habit mentors and we have 40 certified mentors already. so money habit mentors dot coms, the website is actually part of our profit first professionals because these these programs, the money habit and profit first run so in parallel. That’s the umbrella organization managing it.

John Jantsch (20:42.563)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:48.118)

Nice. Awesome. Well, Mike, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Is there any place in particular you invite people to learn more about the money habit and connect with you?

Mike Michalowicz (20:56.168)

Yeah, if you if you want to learn about the book and learn about me, it’s Mike motorbike dot com. No one gets public. How low it’s got to be clear motorbike like the motorcycle. Some people confuse it with some other stuff. But Mike motorbike dot com. All the resources, the books, even pictures of me and you together at events are on that site.

John Jantsch (21:12.972)

No way. Awesome. Mike again, it’s always great to catch up with you and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Mike Michalowicz (21:19.839)

That would be good. Thanks, John.

The Business Case for Play at Work

The Business Case for Play at Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the full episode:

Overview

What if play isn’t a distraction from meaningful work, but the very thing that makes it better? In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, host John Jantsch sits down with entrepreneur and Refinery29 co-founder Piera Gelardi to explore how a playful mindset can unlock creativity, strengthen relationships, and drive innovation in business and life.

Drawing from her new book The Playful Way, Gelardi explains why play is not something we earn after work, but a powerful tool that enhances how we work. From neuroscience insights to real-world business applications, this conversation reframes play as a strategic advantage rather than a frivolous activity.

Guest Bio

Piera Gelardi is an entrepreneur, speaker, and co-founder of Refinery29, a global media company focused on modern women’s lives across fashion, wellness, and culture. She helped grow the company from a small startup into a global brand with over $100M in revenue and 500+ employees. Gelardi is also the author of The Playful Way, where she explores how play can transform creativity, leadership, and resilience.

Key Takeaways

Play is a Performance Enhancer, Not a Reward
Play isn’t something you earn after work. It is a mindset that improves creativity, problem solving, and relationships while you work.
Play Deprivation Has Real Consequences
A lack of play leads to reduced resilience, limited perspective, and decreased intrinsic motivation, making work feel rigid and uninspiring.
Play Unlocks Innovation Through Divergent Thinking
A playful mindset allows people to explore multiple possibilities instead of defaulting to safe, repetitive solutions.
There Are Multiple “Play Personalities”
Play is not just humor or goofiness. It includes curiosity, imagination, movement, and visionary thinking, each valuable in different contexts.
The Playful Way vs. The Pressured Way
Pressured means rigid, outcome focused, and driven by fear of failure.
Playful means open, experimental, resilient, and idea generating.
Small Moments of Play Beat Forced Fun
Integrating play into everyday work, not one off activities, builds authentic culture and engagement.
Experimentation is Play in Action
Reframing initiatives as experiments lowers risk perception and encourages innovation, which is key to marketing and growth.
Leadership Sets the Tone for Play
Leaders must model vulnerability and playfulness to create psychological safety for teams.

Great Moments (Timestamps)

00:01 – The Big Idea
Why play might be the missing ingredient in meaningful work and creativity.
01:30 – A Playful Upbringing
How Gelardi’s early life shaped her belief that play and productivity can coexist.
02:54 – The Science of Play
Research on play deprivation and how play rewires the brain for growth and resilience.
04:32 – The Misconception of Play at Work
Why play gets dismissed and how different forms of play show up in business.
06:57 – Innovation Through Play
How a playful mindset leads to breakthrough ideas instead of recycled thinking.
09:32 – Practical Play Exercises
Simple tools like shake breaks and curiosity questions to unlock team creativity.
12:28 – The Refinery29 Story
From startup blog to global media brand and how experimentation fueled growth.
14:14 – Avoiding Forced Fun Culture
Why play must be integrated into daily work, not treated as a gimmick.
16:56 – Play in Marketing
How experimentation and low risk testing led to the viral success of 29 Rooms.
19:50 – Reconnecting With Play as Adults
Why we lose playfulness and how to rediscover it through small actions.

Memorable Quotes

“Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It is what makes seriousness bearable.”

“When we think of something as an experiment, it stops feeling so high stakes, and that is when creativity opens up.”

“Playfulness creates the most innovative ideas, the best relationships, and the resilience to work through problems.”

Where to Learn More

Book: The Playful Way available at major booksellers
Website: pieragelardi.com
Instagram and Substack: @pieraluisa

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.184)

What if the very thing most adults dismiss as frivolous is actually the key to better ideas, deeper connection and more resilient work? Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Piera Ghilardi. You know, I’m going to do that over again because I practiced that and I got it wrong. So yeah, Ghilardi, like gelato or something.

Piera Gelardi (00:23.822)

It’s like hair gel, it’s gel already. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, like gelato, exactly.

John Jantsch (00:31.636)

Yeah. Okay. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Piera Jalardi. She’s an entrepreneur, speaker and co-founder of Refinery29, whose new book, The Playful Way, argues that play is not a distraction from meaningful work and life, but a practical mindset that can help us navigate creativity, change, relationships, and even adversity.

with more curiosity and possibilities. So, Piero, welcome to the show.

Piera Gelardi (01:03.886)

Thanks for having me. Let’s play.

John Jantsch (01:05.546)

So I’m sure one of the first questions that you get asked all the time is, because so many of us, especially people of my generation, it’s like, you didn’t get to play it till you got your homework done. And so how, or when for you, I should actually ask it that way. Cause you argue that it’s not something that we earn, that it’s actually something that enhances how we work. When did that become true for you?

Piera Gelardi (01:30.776)

So I was fortunate to grow up in a really playful family and to have parents who were playful while they navigated growing businesses, having families, dealing with illness and loss. And so I got to see how playfulness could, and the curiosity and creativity that comes with playfulness could actually weave into every aspect of our life. So playfulness was something that was sort of baked into me. But then of course, like most adults, I rubbed up against

know, teachers that wanted me to do things a certain, you know, straight line way, wanted me to, to, you know, sit still and go from point A to point B. I went into workplaces that also expected a certain degree of seriousness and, you know, seriousness in terms of rigidity. And so I did definitely rubbed up against places that, you know, told me that play and playfulness was something frivolous with something that we do, you know, after our homework is done, after our hard work is done.

But what I found in my life and in my work was that integrating play created the best results. It created the most innovative ideas, the best relationships, and the most resilience for me to work through the problems that came up.

John Jantsch (02:44.028)

Is, I believe you a hundred percent and totally agree with it. Is there any research that you’ve done or that you’ve studied that kind of backs this up scientifically as well?

Piera Gelardi (02:54.466)

Yeah, there’s a lot of research about the power of play. also there’s research about play deprivation, which is something that I experienced in a period of work where I was trying to present in a serious way. So I packed up my playfulness and tried to kind of show up in a way that was zipped up in my serious suit, basically. And

Play deprivation leads to us being less resilient, having less of a solutions minded attitude, having less of a big perspective on what there is in life. And so we end up not having that intrinsic motivation that helps us to drive us forward, that helps us to feel, to find joy and excitement in our day to day, to find connection with each other. There’s also a lot of science also around like the neuroscience of.

sort of that playful experimental mindset and how when we try something new, you know, these neural pathways are reshaping our brain. So when we’re in that play state, we’re in a much more open-minded experimental framework where we can actually learn and grow versus getting really stuck and being set back by failure, which is when we’re in that perfectionistic, serious mindset, we’re trying to control the outcome. We’re trying to, you know,

get it exactly right, we tend to be less open-minded, we tend to not be able to deal with the change, the uncertainty, the setbacks in the same sort of pliable, resilient way that we can when we’re in that playful mindset.

John Jantsch (04:32.893)

So, I think a lot of business owners, we’ve come a long way, I think a lot of business owners get the idea of doing creative exercises, kind of opens up dialogue and different things. But when you use the word play, do you sometimes get pushback because people have a bias about, that’s goofing around, that’s not serious, that’s not who we are? mean, so does the word play itself actually cause some issues for you?

Piera Gelardi (04:57.676)

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of anti-play sentiment because we sort of associate play with one mode of play, but there’s a lot of ways to be playful. So we sort of think of, and in the book I have these eight archetypes of play. So I think the one that people most associate with play is the joyful gesture, right? That’s like the class clown. That’s the one that, you know, making things light, that’s bringing humor.

John Jantsch (05:00.661)

Yeah.

Piera Gelardi (05:22.594)

And that person actually can be so powerful in diffusing tension and helping to relieve stress and helping us to laugh so that we can actually get to a solution faster. But they’re definitely the one that people feel is, I think it’s the most controversial in the workplace. And though they really are powerful and there’s also a lot of research about the power of humor in problem solving, in stress relief.

in relationship building. But there’s so but there’s that’s only one way of being playful, right? That being humorous, being light, there’s, you know, curiosity is a huge element of play. So there’s the curious question that someone that asks a lot of questions that’s intellectually going down these rabbit holes, and they’re really powerful to have in the workplace, because they help you to think differently by introducing, you know, introducing questions and new ways of thinking.

There is the visionary dreamer. That’s the person that is, you know, we might think of them as having their head in the clouds, right? They’re often the negative side as they’re seen as the dreamer, the unrealistic one, but they’re also the one that’s looking beyond what is immediately in front of us. They’re not trying to just replicate the same thing over and over again. They’re really opening up possibility in new ways. So there are lot of different ways to be playful. And so I think

One thing that I’m trying to do is educate people about these different modes of play so that we can understand how to value them and how to bring them into the workplace in different ways.

John Jantsch (06:57.184)

So I imagine a lot of people, one of the use cases a lot of people probably can relate to is the idea of team building. You there’s nothing sort of, you let your guard down, you’re vulnerable, you do something that’s not you necessarily, you don’t think it’s you and team building. But talk to me a little bit about innovation because I’m guessing that that’s a place where this really shines as well because, know, innovation takes meaning.

You can’t fail. can’t make a mistake. And you know, I think that that’s probably inherent in some play, isn’t it?

Piera Gelardi (07:32.172)

Yeah. So I think of it sort of, there’s the pressured way and there’s the playful way. And the pressured way is when we’re trying to control the outcome. We are rigid. We might feel like tight in our body. and that is often like when we’re really zipped up tight in our serious suit and we’re very, very afraid of failure. the playful way is when we have that curiosity to us, when we’re looking at a problem from multiple different angles.

John Jantsch (07:36.746)

Mm-hmm.

Piera Gelardi (08:01.218)

we’re floating unexpected ideas. And it allows us to really find these innovative ways to move forward. And so, yeah, play is the, mean, the most effective brands and companies integrate some sort of play into what they do. The companies that are the most innovative know that that’s how you create experiences that people feel. That’s how you go outside of the cookie cutter idea.

Often when we go in that pressured way, we’re just replicating past, you know, past success or replic or copying other people’s formats. We’re not creating something new. And when you think about a kid, right, like they’re looking at a cardboard box and they’re seeing that it can be a pirate ship. can be, you know, it can be a spaceship. It’s a closet. It’s all these different things. And that’s divergent thinking. And of course that’s, you know, we might not think that’s a very practical example in the workplace, but

If you’re looking at a problem, you want someone that can think about all the different ways you could go about it. And so what play does is it opens up our minds to that divergent thinking. And that’s where the big solutions, the big unlocks come from.

John Jantsch (09:12.118)

So I imagine, I’m just guessing, that you have a series of exercises that you could bring to people and say, OK, for the next 10 minutes, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. Can you showcase a couple of things that you find to be really effective at getting people to do whatever behavior it is the company’s trying to support?

Piera Gelardi (09:32.662)

Yeah. So a couple of really simple ones, you know, that I, I did a lot at Refinery29 were, one is actually a physical shake break. which, you know, can be controversial in the workplace because people feel really self-conscious and, know, it can be hard to get people to move, but honestly, I found it to be so effective because so often you’re going into a meeting, right? And you’re holding onto whatever frustrating conversation you had, or you’re still thinking about.

you know, how you’re going to deal with the thing on your to-do list. Also, there can be a power dynamic, like often when people were coming into my office, have a meeting with me, you know, I’m the boss, they’re feeling, you know, nervous about like, are they going to say the right thing? And so as the leader, I think it’s really important to be the one that’s making a fool of yourself to a certain extent, you know, doesn’t have to be huge, but you, yeah, you need to be vulnerable. You need to be the one that shows that it’s okay to play.

John Jantsch (10:25.398)

Lead by example.

Piera Gelardi (10:33.541)

because that’s the only way to get people to do it. I would, when people would come into my office, I would say, okay, we’re gonna do a 30 second shake break. I would do this improv exercise called crazy eights where you shake, you count down from eight, like shaking your one arm, the other arm, one arm, one leg, the other leg. And what would happen is, know, it was like I’m…

I’m being silly, so then everyone else is following suit. And at the end, no one’s cool. No one is serious. And we all kind of have let our guard down. It evens the playing field. It opens us up. It allows us to create a certain space where ideas can flow a little bit more easily. I’m also a big fan of just simple curiosity questions. So these can be, you know, these can be.

really silly and just unexpected or they can you know, they can be on topic but introducing questions that force people to You know think in a new way I think is a really simple and sort of low stakes way to bring play in Another one is imagination. So a question I loved to float to my team was what would what would need to be true for this to happen?

Because so often we’re sort of stuck on a problem. We’re stuck on the old ways of doing things. We’re stuck on the obstacles. So sometimes, yeah, why it won’t work. So sometimes asking a question like that, like what would need to be true in order for us to do this is a great way to open up that possibility, that possibility thinking.

John Jantsch (11:58.186)

Yeah, right. Why it won’t work.

John Jantsch (12:17.12)

Talk to me a little bit about Refinery29. I know the book is kind of drawn from some of your experiences there, but talk a little bit about what Refinery29 does.

Piera Gelardi (12:28.194)

Yeah, so Refinery29 is a global media company focused on 360 degrees of a woman’s life. So everything from health and wellness to beauty, fashion. we started as a, we basically essentially started as a blog and we grew into a company that was doing experience, these huge experiential events across the US and internationally doing video film.

John Jantsch (12:39.99)

Mmm.

Piera Gelardi (12:56.942)

all kinds of different media outlets. So yeah, it started, you know, it started, I started it when I was 24 and it was this small niche thing and it grew into a company that had a hundred million dollars in revenue and 500 employees globally.

John Jantsch (13:00.67)

And so.

John Jantsch (13:15.274)

So did some of the work that shows up in the book, did it come from those experiences and from how you kept those playful and energetic?

Piera Gelardi (13:25.612)

Yeah, so the book is full of stories from a lot of different moments in my life. But some of the ones are from my time at Refinery29, the problems that we solved and the innovation that we unlocked through bringing play into the workplace.

John Jantsch (13:44.032)

So I’m sure there’s a fine line. mean, people may listen to this, read the book and go, you’re right, we need to bring more play in. How do you make it part of the culture and not a gimmick? We’ve all seen that. The CEO goes off to a conference and listens to a workshop and the next thing you know, for five minutes we’re doing this now. So how do you bring it in as something?

that has value, that’s not forced, that’s not gimmicky, not performative.

Piera Gelardi (14:14.99)

Yeah, that’s so critical. think so often companies when they want to integrate play, they sort of do that forced fun. The moment that employees feel is forced fun, right? And it’s a one-off thing. In the book, I really talk about how play is something, you we think of play as sort of this time out or this thing that we do as a reward for hard work, but play is the most effective when it is integrated into the day-to-day in small moments. So I think…

One is understanding the different modes of play and starting to understand within your team what the different archetypes of play that people are so that you can really leverage those and you can understand, you know, what is going to light those, light those people up. you know, a curious questor who’s, who’s following those intellectual threads and curiosity is going to be, you know, going to light up from something really different from a mover and shaker that’s more someone who finds

who finds play in their physical body through movement. So there’s very different modes of play. So I think the first thing is understanding within the team, what are the different play strengths that people have? What are the powers of play that you have that you’re working with? The next is to, I do this thing called plork, which is how do we fuse play and work in small moments? So that can be really small. can be, you know,

John Jantsch (15:15.595)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:35.722)

Mm.

Piera Gelardi (15:41.55)

introducing a curiosity question at the beginning of a meeting. can be renaming meeting invites with something that’s a little bit more whimsical. So it doesn’t feel like an anxiety attack when you see your calendar. It’s these little moments that you commit to and you brainstorm as a team. So you think about, okay, once you understand these powers of play that the team has, how can you integrate those day to day in small ways?

John Jantsch (15:52.352)

Right.

Thank

Piera Gelardi (16:11.554)

what are those play plus work moments that become part of the culture so that you are really integrating it and finding those moments of connection, creativity, curiosity in the day to day versus just putting a play bandaid on like at that one offset.

John Jantsch (16:29.352)

Right. Yeah. It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of people having play personalities, but it sounds like that’s a bit what you’re describing. So we’ve talked mostly about internal team and culture. How could people use this in a marketing sense? So in other words, be more playful in their public, you know, what they’re putting out there to be perceived as, you know, a fun and playful company.

Piera Gelardi (16:34.861)

Yeah.

Piera Gelardi (16:56.002)

Yeah, I think in terms of bringing it into a marketing context, it’s really about how can we do something different? How can we bring an experimental mindset to how we market? I tend to find that when we think of things as an experiment, and again, there’s this neuroscience around this, but when we think of something as an experiment, we open up a lot more possibility and we stop.

John Jantsch (17:09.206)

Mm-hmm.

Piera Gelardi (17:24.13)

having it stops feeling so high stakes that we can’t fail that we can’t try new things. So I think one thing is, you know, thinking about what are the experiments that we want to run here? What’s something that would be interesting to try? You know, can we try it in a can we try it in a small way? And then build off of that. That was something we did a lot of refinery. We were constantly experimenting. So we’d say

You know, for example, we did this huge experiential event called 29 rooms that went to seven cities, hundreds of thousands of people came through. but it started from just one event where we said, you know, we’re noticing this behavior of how people are using Instagram. And so why don’t we do, why don’t we do something in our photo studio at the office where we invite photographers to come in, we give them all kinds of props, access to models and access to clothes and let them, you know,

express their creativity and tag us. And so that was the experiment, was just doing that. So it was a very low stakes, low cost experiment. And we saw this huge Instagram sharing that came from this one office event. And so then we said, okay, do we do that again and make it a little bit bigger? So then we did it in partnership with.

museum in New York, we brought in a fashion brand to provide the looks and we tried it again and we again saw this huge like exponential return from it. And then, you know, then it was like the next piece, okay, like let’s pop up an event. It was a smaller scale event. Again, saw huge success. And so that was when we decided to take the gamble and put on this huge, this huge event where we brought in brands, celebrities, you know, it was like, and that that became something that was

huge, we were hugely known for and that became really copied. was on every, you know, every brand was referencing it and trying to replicate the 29 rooms, you know, effect. So, but it came from that experimental mindset of saying, okay, what if we tried this and what’s the smallest, what’s the smallest way we can try it within our resources to see if this has legs.

John Jantsch (19:18.901)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (19:31.638)

All right, now that you’ve written the book and it’s, upon when people are listening to this, it’s going to be out there for public consumption. Is there anything that you hope, especially adults, relearn about themselves by considering this topic?

Piera Gelardi (19:50.306)

Yeah, I think in adulthood, through the course of having the strict teacher that tells you to sit still, having the boss that shuts down your humorous aside, there’s through feeling the weight of responsibility and thinking that play is antithetical to being the responsible adult. There’s all these moments where we start to shut down our playfulness. And as a result, we lose that curiosity.

we lose that resilience and we lose the flexibility that play brings into our lives. And that makes us lose touch with ourselves really. It makes us like lose touch with our true essence. when we think about our relationships too, right? Like what are the things that you remember the most about your friends, your family? It’s often these inside jokes, these silly moments, these playful pieces.

And so when we start to become that very serious adult, we start to shut down what really makes us authentic, what makes us connect authentically and what makes us come alive. So, you know, in adulthood, starting to reconnect with that playful spirit, you know, even just in small ways, I tell people, go back to the lost and found. Like think about your childhood and what made you lose track of the hours, what completely immersed you.

and see if there’s something in there that you want to re-explore. So, you know, maybe it was dancing when you were a kid and you want to like think about going to a dance class again, or maybe it was beach combing and you were just like, loved looking at, you know, looking for sea glass on the beach. You know, is there, do you want to go for a walk in your neighborhood and see if you can, you know, turn it into a wonder wander and find, you know, these moments of delight. So re-engaging, like starting in small ways, but just.

being open to the fact that playfulness is going to unlock a lot of richness and joy and aliveness in your life. So it’s really worthwhile to pursue it. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It’s what makes seriousness bearable. It’s what makes you find joy in the day to day and the mundane.

John Jantsch (22:09.178)

Well, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work? Find out where they can pick up a copy of the book.

Piera Gelardi (22:19.522)

Yeah, so they can pick up the book, The Playful Way. It’s at all major booksellers starting April 7th. And you can find me on Instagram and Stub Stack at Pierrealuisa and my website, pieragillardi.com.

John Jantsch (22:33.878)

Awesome. Well, again, Pierre, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’re running into you one of these days out there on the road.

Piera Gelardi (22:38.646)

Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for playing.

What Most Businesses Get Wrong About Marketing

What Most Businesses Get Wrong About Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the full episode:

Episode Overview

In this solo episode, John Jantsch revisits a core principle he has championed for years:
strategy must come before tactics. Despite the explosion of marketing channels, tools,
and now AI, most businesses are not lacking activity. They are lacking clarity.

John breaks down why inconsistent messaging, misaligned teams, and scattered priorities
are symptoms of a missing strategic foundation. He shares insights from working with
hundreds of businesses that achieved significant growth only after narrowing their focus,
defining their ideal customer, and building a systemized marketing approach.

He also introduces a new evolution of his “Strategy First” methodology, a compressed,
high-impact one-day strategic experience designed to align teams, clarify positioning,
and create a practical 90-day roadmap for growth.

Guest Bio

John Jantsch is a marketing strategist, speaker, and bestselling author
of multiple books including Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine,
and Marketing Rebellion. He is the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing system,
which has been licensed by over 400 agencies worldwide. Jantsch is widely recognized for
his practical, systems-based approach to small business marketing and his emphasis on
strategy before tactics.

Key Takeaways

1. Activity Is Not the Problem, Clarity Is

Most businesses are overwhelmed with marketing options but lack a clear strategy.
More effort without direction leads to wasted time and inconsistent results.

2. Strategy Enables You to Do Less, Better

A strong strategic foundation helps eliminate unnecessary tactics and focus only on
what drives meaningful growth.

3. Ideal Customer Definition Is Critical

Growth accelerates when businesses clearly define who they serve and, just as importantly,
who they do not serve.

4. Lack of Strategy Leads to Misalignment

Teams, vendors, and departments often operate in silos, creating inefficiencies and
diluted messaging.

5. Differentiation Comes From Strategic Clarity

Without a clear strategy, businesses struggle to communicate what makes them unique
and why customers should choose them.

6. AI Has Increased Complexity, Not Reduced It

While AI promises efficiency, many businesses are working harder trying to manage
new tools without a guiding strategy.

7. Strategy Creates Internal Alignment and Reduces Stress

Clarity around direction and priorities brings relief to business owners and helps
teams operate more cohesively.

8. A Compressed Strategy Process Can Be More Effective

Condensing strategy into a focused, one-day experience eliminates delays, overthinking,
and miscommunication.

9. Shared Experience Drives Better Execution

Bringing the entire team into the strategy process ensures alignment, shared language,
and stronger buy-in.

10. A 90-Day Roadmap Turns Strategy Into Action

Effective strategy is not theoretical. It results in a clear, actionable plan for the
immediate future.

Great Moments (Timestamps)

00:01 – Introduction to a Solo Strategy Discussion
01:00 – The Core Problem: Too Much Activity, Not Enough Clarity
02:20 – The Hidden Cost of Misalignment
03:00 – Real Results From Strategy-First Businesses
03:40 – The Myth of “Everyone Is My Customer”
04:40 – The Traditional Strategy Process (30-45 Days)
06:00 – Introducing Strategy First in One Day
07:05 – The Power of Team Alignment in One Room
08:00 – What the One-Day Strategy Experience Includes
09:00 – Immediate Benefits: Clarity, Alignment, and Focus
10:00 – Who This Is For (and Who It’s Not)
10:45 – The Real Growth Problem: Lack of Shared Strategy
11:00 – Call to Action: Explore Strategy First

Memorable Quotes

“Nobody’s short on marketing activity. The real challenge is they’re short on clarity.”

“If your growth feels messy, the problem usually isn’t effort. It’s the absence of a shared strategy.”

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.582)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and another solo show. I’m just going to ramble at you for a bit. Again, I’d love to hear your feedback. I get feedback from lot of folks that they enjoy these shows where I just kind of share some things that I have in mind. I’m just going to start off with no shocker here. I’m going to talk about strategy.

Talk about strategy before tactics. I’m going to talk about marketing as a system. These are things that if you’ve been listening for, I don’t know, even a couple of weeks, but let alone a couple of years, you have heard me say repeatedly something I’ve written about in pretty much every one of my books. And it’s a challenge or a problem that I haven’t cracked yet. I haven’t gotten the entire world, even the marketing world, to really come fully on board. But I will tell you this.

I’ve worked with hundreds now of business owners and I have seen the impact when they will step back and look at their business from a strategic point of view and certainly their marketing from a strategic point of view and really proceed to develop the tactics that they are going to develop around that strategy first. Nobody’s short on marketing activity. I mean, there’s more to do from a marketing standpoint. There seems to be.

more every day, that we can get into more channels, more platforms, more tactics that we can get into every day. So that’s not really the challenge. The real challenge is that they’re short on the clarity that actually might let them do less. Right. I mean, they’re doing a lot of things. Maybe you’re doing a lot of things that feel like marketing or under the heading of marketing. but those things don’t always connect. so.

My experience is there’s a great deal of inconsistent messaging, shifting priorities, right? It’s like, well, let’s try this this month. Teams, vendors, not allowed, not aligned, I’m sorry. I’ve come into a lot of organizations. have five, six people, there are five, six companies even doing stuff, but they’re not actually even coordinating with each other, which I certainly find rather difficult to imagine. Money gets wasted, time gets wasted. You burn your people out.

John Jantsch (02:20.718)

Let’s face it, the promise of AI is it was supposed to automate all this stuff. And I keep talking to people to say they’re working harder because they’re now trying to figure out all this new stuff. so growth gets really harder to do when we’re really just, it’s like we’re running on the hamster wheel. I’ve said I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses over the years and I have many, many examples of case studies where we have doubled, tripled quad.

quadrupled. We’d work with them for years and we’ve double tripled, quadrupled their business. But it really started with a pretty significant change. We did strategy first. We helped them identify who was an ideal client, who is an ideal client for the business. And maybe more importantly, who’s not. Because most businesses are content to say, hey, I do X service, X product, and anybody who has money is my ideal client. And not only is that

inaccurate, it’s really costing a lot of growth because we are accepting or chasing the wrong clients. We’re not actually being very narrow in our messaging to say, here’s who we can help and here’s the value we deliver to help those folks. So it really creates a lot of lost opportunity, even if you feel like, well, you we got a client out of it. It wasn’t the right client or it was a not a profitable engagement. Certainly that happens all the time.

Probably the biggest thing that I find from no strategy is there’s no real point of differentiation. There’s no message that clearly communicates to somebody. Here’s what we do and we do it better than anyone else. In fact, we’ve got proof that we do that thing better than anyone else that ever thought about. And when you get that, when you clarify that message, says, here’s who we’re for. And your ideal client reads that message and says,

Finally, you’re talking about me, aren’t you? As I said, this is something that we have done for many, many years. It’s not new. I mean, it’s continued to evolve, but it’s continued to be something that we’ve licensed now to well over 400 agencies and consultancies who also get the power of this systemized approach that we’ve been able to create to develop strategy. But today I want to tell you about a new way that we are going to deliver it. And this may have some

John Jantsch (04:40.174)

some appeal. the past, ideally it took 30 to 45 days, quite frankly, to do this because we do a lot of in-depth research. We actually interview your clients as part of it and really then develop the messaging, develop the ICP, develop the customer journey, develop the priorities that are going to be really the next 90 days worth of work to kind of restructure the foundation and really get the business

pointed in the right direction. while businesses that understand the idea of investing in strategy sometimes would grumble about 30 to 45 days, it’s like, why can’t we do it now? But once they were through the process, there’s no question the value that they received and they gush about the value they received. They gush about, it’s not just, I mean, in 30 to 45 days of doing strategy first, all of sudden the phone’s not ringing.

off the hook now with new business, but all of a the team has some clarity. Certainly the founder and the owner has some clarity about, here’s why things haven’t been working. Here’s why we’re spinning our wheels. Here’s how we have to actually get very clear about who we serve and who we don’t serve. that frankly, just having that has a tremendous amount of value.

frankly relieves a ton of stress for the business owner. But what we decided is, or asked ourself or challenged ourselves is, how can we do that faster? How could we actually deliver strategy first in a day? That is something that I’m introducing today. That is something we’re going to lean in very heavily because I believe there are some distinct advantages to actually compressing

that time. have the ability, let’s face it, we have the ability with a lot of the AI tools that we’ve mastered to actually do the research, to actually do the analysis in a way that allows us to do this in a much faster timeframe. But here’s probably the biggest, I think, advantage to doing this. Quite often we would do this over a series of meetings that were required. Two weeks maybe would go between those meetings and quite often

John Jantsch (07:05.646)

It would really just be the founder. But imagine if we could come into your business, especially if you have a team, and we could bring everybody that you thought needed to be in that room, in that room for an entire focused day. Now we will certainly do a lot of work on the front end. We’re not just going to show up and say, tell me about your business. We are going to do a lot of

work on the front end, the research that we can do on your industry and on your specific business and what we see out there that you’ve been doing in marketing already. But then we are going to spend a very focused day with you and your team creating what I would say is as much an experience as it is a strategic.

exercise or strategic engagement. This is not a workshop, this is not consulting. This is actually with your team building the components that we know will really kind of launch your business or launch your marketing in a much more effective way. So as I said, we do tons of prep ahead of time to get the context. And then we need all of your key decision makers or frankly, people that are doing stuff on behalf of your business in the name of marketing.

to be in the room, people that you wanna level up, people that you wanna actually experience as a group, what it’s like or what it means to develop marketing strategy and to have the discussion around that. frankly, it’s going to be as much a learning experience for them as it will be a deliverable for the business itself. So we’re gonna identify where there’s friction, we’re gonna identify

the business objectives that you need to go, we’re going to define that ideal customer and customer journey. We’re going to tighten your positioning. We’re going to actually create and sharpen messaging and really set the priorities for the next quarter or next two quarters as a big part of this. thing, some of the other advantages of have the output in this fashion in one focused day is that yes, you’re going to get a clear strategic foundation. You’re going to actually understand your business

John Jantsch (09:19.384)

probably better than you ever have. You’re going to have a shared language. Some of the tools that we’re going to give you and in part during this are going to be tools that you’ll now be able to continue to work with with your team. And it won’t just be, you went off to another thing and read a book and brought it back to the business. Everybody’s going to be on the same page. And you’re going to have a roadmap, a very practical roadmap in the short term for the next 90 days. And I think that this focus

The lack of delay, the lack of overthinking, mean, getting people aligned, I think it’s going to have tremendous value. Now, this won’t be for everybody. Ideally, is strategy in this fashion actually works better for a business in a one to $25 million range, for example. I mean, you’ve got traction, but you’ve also got growing complexity. And so it’s time to professionalize your marketing in a way.

You know, the ad hoc marketing is just not going to really cut it anymore. Maybe you’ve already started to feel that. And you’ve got teams or people or even outside vendors that really need more alignment instead of more activity necessarily.

If your growth feels messy, the problem may not be effort. Usually isn’t actually effort. In fact, you’re probably working harder than ever. It’s the absence of a shared strategy inside the business. And that’s really what Strategy First was completely designed to solve. And Strategy First today, I believe solves that in a very unique kind of shared experience way. So.

If you want to learn more about this, if this kind of lights you up a little bit, we have a page. You can go read all about the very specifics. It’s just dtm.world slash one day, all one word, one day. DTM is like duct tape marketing. So it’s dtm.world slash one day. Love to come to your business, learn about how we can build this for you and really kind of have your marketing take off, not.

John Jantsch (11:29.986)

just this quarter, but really in a one day experience. So take care. Thanks for tuning in and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Why Growth Stalls After Early Success

Why Growth Stalls After Early Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

In this solo episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch explores why capable, experienced founders repeatedly hit the same growth ceiling. He unpacks the hidden leadership patterns, behaviors, and internal bottlenecks that stall progress even when strong strategies are in place.

Episode Overview

John Jantsch takes a deeper look at one of the biggest reasons businesses stop growing: the founder becomes the bottleneck. While many organizations invest in strategy, tactics, and better marketing systems, real transformation often fails to stick because the founder’s mindset and leadership habits have not evolved.

In response, John introduces a new facilitated experience called Founder’s Day, designed to help business owners identify the assumptions, fears, and recurring behaviors that are limiting growth. This episode is a call for honest reflection and leadership change as the true starting point for organizational transformation.

About John Jantsch

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker, and bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing, The Referral Engine, Duct Tape Selling, and Marketing Rebellion. He is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing and creator of the Marketing Operating System, helping small businesses and agencies build practical, effective strategies for long-term growth.

Key Takeaways

Strategy alone is not enough.Even the best marketing strategy can stall if the founder’s leadership style and decision-making patterns remain unchanged.
Founders are often the bottleneck.Overinvolvement, inconsistent delegation, and unclear accountability can keep teams from taking ownership.
Growth ceilings are often self-created.Businesses frequently plateau because founders repeat the same patterns that helped them succeed early on.
What got you here will not get you there.Reaching the next level of growth requires a different mindset, different leadership behaviors, and new systems.
Founder’s Day is built for transformation.This new facilitated workshop helps founders surface the internal constraints holding back the business.
Business goals must come first.Before building a strategy, companies need clarity on what the organization actually wants to achieve.
The future of agencies is transformation.Agencies and consultants that move beyond selling tactics and start delivering transformation will stay more relevant.
AI cannot replace a real system.AI can support execution, but it cannot replace a strategic framework like a marketing operating system.

Great Moments

00:01 – John introduces the episode and asks why smart businesses keep hitting the same ceiling
01:00 – Why better strategy alone does not always create better results
02:11 – The signs that a founder may be the bottleneck
03:00 – The cost of poor alignment and stalled execution
04:00 – Introduction to Founder’s Day
05:00 – Why business goals must guide marketing strategy
06:00 – The role of self-awareness, reflection, and vulnerability
07:00 – Why what got you here will not get you there
08:10 – Building a personal change plan for leadership growth
09:00 – Announcement of the Future Proofing Your Marketing Agency event
10:00 – Selling transformation instead of tactics
10:30 – Why AI will not replace strategic systems
11:00 – How to register for the free event

Quotes

The strategy, no matter how good it is, gets undermined if the founder doesn’t change.

In many cases, we have to move the founder out of the way of growth.

What got you here won’t get you there.

If all you’re doing is delivering value using AI tools, you’re going to be replaced by that very tool.

Real transformation starts with the founder, not the tactics.

Save your Free Seat

Register for the free three-day experience, Future Proofing Your Marketing Agency, running from March 31 through April 2.

Visit: dtm.world/future

Day 1: Founder’s Day experience
Day 2: Selling transformation
Day 3: Marketing Operating System introduction

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01.058)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m going to do a solo show today. That’s right, just me, no guess. I want to talk about some things that…

You know, I can say that it’s been brewing recently, but you know, in hindsight, when I look back, it’s probably something that I’ve recognized over 20 years or so. And here’s the question I’m going to start with. Why do smart businesses, smart business owners keep hitting the same ceiling? That’s what I want to talk about today. I feel very qualified to talk about this because I’m a founder. I’ve experienced some of the same things I’m going to talk about today. And I think that that

Quite frankly, it’s helped me recognize why this is happening. So we work with a lot of founder led businesses and what we’ve typically found is they don’t have a very well developed strategy. I mean, we’ve built almost our entire practice on the idea of strategy before tactics and many of the clients come to us for a strategy first type of engagement. And while in every case,

They are helped. have better thoughts. They have better priorities. They have better tactics. One of the things that I’ve found is that even as the business grows, many times they come up against the same hurdle time and time again. A lot of it’s because the founders patterns have stayed the same. How they view the business, how they view delegating, how they view growth.

their fears. These are some of the things that I think really end up holding a business back so that it ultimately can’t necessarily change, even though we’ve installed a better marketing approach in many cases. what I’ve seen, here’s some of the things I’ve seen. Tell me if any of these apply to you. The founder is still very involved in every, or at least many decisions. The team,

John Jantsch (02:11.946)

if they’ve assembled one, kind of waits around for like, what do we do next rather than owning things? Delegation, while it’s a good idea, every quarter I’m going to really commit to it, never really sticks. There’s not a lot of accountability or it’s fuzzy as far as who’s going to do what. And so it’s like the business keeps circling around the same issues time and time again. So

I’m wondering, are you feeling that bottleneck? Do any of these symptoms or ideas sound familiar to you? And what’s it costing? I guess that’s the next question too. I know that when we have worked with a client, in some cases, when we can’t get past this issue, the strategy, no matter how good it is, it really stalls or gets undermined at least. Alignment that.

that hopefully sometimes comes out of this strategy engagement falls. People get hesitant. Growth certainly slows as well. what’s the solution? Well, one of the things that we have added, and we’re going to do it as a standalone, frankly, but certainly as part of or the front end of any strategy engagement that we do, is to add an element that we’re calling the Founder’s Day.

The idea behind this is to have a very intense guided, facilitated workshop, if you will, with the founder of the business before we ever start talking about their ideal client and their core message. Because I think real change, of course, has to start with that founder. And really before the business can transform, mean, a lot of times we have to teach them what it is that we’re going to install, but then also how we’re going to reinforce it.

Here’s what it is. It’s a structured, facilitated experience focused on the founder’s change. It’s not therapy, although maybe sometimes. It’s not really coaching or certainly not coaching theater that you sometimes see out there. It’s not a strategy session. It’s a process designed to really surface the patterns, the assumptions, the behaviors really that are actually limiting and holding back growth. the goal

John Jantsch (04:39.15)

to that day or to that session or that element, it’s not really just insight. mean, it’s to create a shift that can support the real organizational change that is going to come from us installing strategy first, installing a marketing operating system. So.

It’s going to begin with business goals. Again, that’s another thing I think is I’ve learned the hard way, but I think it’s sort of odd that a lot of marketing folks get hired to do marketing plans, to do marketing strategy, to do marketing tactics. And there really hasn’t been much discussion, if at all, about what the goals of the organization are, what the goals of the business are. And we really need to tie those two things together. So we’re going to start there, really get very clear on what the company wants.

before we start talking about how the founder is going to change in order to get there. And then of course how marketing is going to eventually support that. So.

John Jantsch (05:45.516)

we’re going to move, I think we’re going to ask you to make some honest reflection to help move you out of the way of growth. I know that sounds really harsh and I can say it again. I think I could say it because frankly, I’ve lived it myself. In many cases, we have to really change the behaviors that have been in the way and have been quite frankly become part of the culture. And the only way you can change them is to recognize that they exist. So we’re gonna walk you through

facilitate a day, frankly, of helping you understand what those, not only what the goals for the business are, we’re going to start there, but then we’re going to actually talk about what are the constraints, what’s holding you back, what has held you back. And it’s going to, in many cases, going to take some vulnerabilities, some brutal honesty. I know that, you know, when I’m sort of challenged on being the issue, being the problem, you know, it’s really

human nature to actually respond in a way that is defensive. And I think that we all know if you’ve been doing this at any time at all, I mean, that obviously is not helpful for the business itself. So, and what’s so amazing is what got you here is that you have the desire, you have the smarts, you have the really the drive to build that business.

But what we’ve discovered, especially when a business has grown to a certain level, one to $20 million, I mean, clearly something is going right. But what we have found is that that’s where they kind of bump up against the ceiling of sorts. And it’s that kind of old cliche of what got you here won’t get you there, won’t get you to the next level. So understanding what the next level is, and then also understanding, or at least having a guided

facilitation around, you know, why some of these patterns keep happening, what’s going to change, how are going to commit to change too? It’s not really supposed to be just a nice day, you know, where everybody sits around and talks about their feelings. It is going to be a day where you tie what you want to do to how you’re going to lead and to really come up with a personal change plan for how you’re going to lead.

John Jantsch (08:10.988)

that we believe is the thing that’s going to kind of unleash you going to the next level. Now there are many elements, obviously, in the execution, in strategy first, in installing the marketing operating system. But what we’ve discovered is this is the key to really unlocking a true transformation in the business and making it stick. Many of us have experienced temporary experiences, temporary transformations.

The key to this is really, this is what’s going to make it stick. So this is something that we have just introduced and we’re gonna start offering as a standalone product, if you will, or experience. However, I’ve got an opportunity for you to experience it free of charge. March 31st through April 2nd, we are going to hold an event that we are calling Future Proofing, your how to future proof your marketing agency. It is targeting.

agencies and consultants in this particular case, because that’s a market that we serve. And so we are going to offer three days. The first day is going to be this founder day. I’m going to walk people through it. You’re going to go away with a workbook. You’re going to go away with lots of questions. It’s going to be a group setting. So it’s certainly not going to be the intimate one-on-one session that that might and probably needs to happen. But we want people to experience this is part of duct tape marketing.

This is part of our marketing system now. The second day, and what we’re going to do is one hour a day. We’re going to give you homework. We’re going to give you workbooks. You’re going to really, we’re calling it a working experience. It’s not a workshop. It’s not a webinar. So day two is going to be thinking in terms of how do we move from selling tactics to selling transformation, to delivering transformation for our clients? Because I think that is

the future. That is how we’re going to future proof our business. And then day three, we are actually going to introduce attendees to something we call the marketing operating system. It is in my estimation, it is the way that you can make yourself really impervious to what’s going on with AI. It is something that AI can’t replicate and you are going to be in the driver’s seat with it. I’m not suggesting we’re not going to use AI.

John Jantsch (10:32.878)

going to use AI in all the ways that it is meant to be used and all the ways that are practical and all the ways that deliver value. But if all you’re doing is delivering value using AI tools, well, you’re going to be replaced by that very tool. But if you actually have a framework and a system that we call the marketing operating system, AI can’t produce that. Now it can help you deliver it, but you are going to make future proof your practice. So three days.

I will, we will certainly be promoting this in other ways. But if you’re interested, want to go sign up for free? It is dtm.world slash future. That’s dtm like duct tape marketing dot world slash future. And I believe it could be one of the most eyeopening experiences that you can have, particularly if you’re one of those people out there thinking, am I going to get replaced by AI?

Is the agency world changing? Do I need a new model? I think we’re going to introduce you to some ideas that might answer some of those questions for you. So last time, March 31st through April 2nd, three days in a row, hour a day, plus you’re going to get homework and workbooks, dtm.world slash future. And if nothing else, I think the experience of going through the founder day of asking some deeper questions than maybe what do need to do today?

might be well worth the time invested. So that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Get the exclusive resource here

The Hidden Tax Savings in Your Business

The Hidden Tax Savings in Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode

Episode Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews
Peter Holtz, founder of Peter Holtz CPA and a former Big Four accountant and
multi-company CFO. Peter explains why most business owners are unknowingly overpaying taxes
and how proactive tax planning can legally reduce tax liability—sometimes by tens or even
hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Peter breaks down the difference between traditional tax compliance and strategic tax
planning, sharing why the majority of tax preparers simply fill out forms rather than
actively looking for opportunities to save their clients money. He discusses common tax
strategies that many businesses miss, including the Augusta Rule, employing children in the
business, maximizing depreciation, and properly structuring entities.

The conversation also explores the mindset many entrepreneurs have around profit, the
importance of building tax strategy into business planning, and how a CFO-level financial
perspective can help business owners make smarter long-term decisions.

If you’re a business owner who only talks to your CPA at tax time, this episode reveals why
that approach could be costing you significantly—and how to fix it.

Guest Bio

Peter Holtz is a CPA and former CFO who helps business owners keep more of
what they earn through proactive tax strategy. He has built and advised multi-8-figure
companies, leads an Inc. 5000 and IPA Top 500 accounting
firm, and is known for reframing taxes as a long-term wealth decision rather than a
once-a-year task.

With decades of experience in tax accounting and CFO advisory, Peter specializes in helping
entrepreneurs legally reduce their tax burden through year-round tax planning and strategic
financial guidance.

Key Takeaways

1. Most CPAs Focus Only on Compliance

While over 1.2 million professionals are licensed to prepare taxes in the U.S.,
only about 1,100 are certified tax planners. Most accountants simply enter
numbers into forms rather than actively looking for tax-saving opportunities.

2. Waiting Until Tax Season Costs Businesses Money

Tax strategy should happen throughout the year. Many tax-saving moves—such as purchases,
depreciation strategies, or entity structuring—must be implemented before December 31
to affect that year’s taxes.

3. Business Owners Miss Common Tax Strategies

Peter frequently sees entrepreneurs miss legal deductions and strategies like:

Home office reimbursements
The Augusta Rule (renting your home to your business)
Employing children in the business
Proper asset depreciation
Correct entity structuring

These missed opportunities can add up to significant tax overpayments.

4. Shifting Expenses from After-Tax to Pre-Tax Is Powerful

One of the most effective strategies is converting personal expenses into legitimate business
expenses when appropriate. The more expenses you can move from after-tax dollars to
pre-tax dollars, the more you reduce taxable income.

5. Profit Must Be Treated as a Priority

Many entrepreneurs only aim to “pay the bills,” rather than intentionally building profit
into their business model. Peter emphasizes the importance of planning for profit, retirement,
healthcare, and future financial goals as part of the business structure.

6. Financial Strategy Requires Asking Better Questions

A great tax advisor doesn’t just prepare returns—they ask deeper questions about your
business, goals, assets, and family situation to uncover opportunities most accountants miss.

Great Moments From the Episode

00:02 — Introduction to Peter Holtz
John introduces Peter Holtz and his background as a Big Four accountant and founder of a rapidly growing CPA firm.
01:05 — The Cost of Waiting Until Tax Season
Peter explains how delaying tax planning until March can cost businesses tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
02:05 — Why Most CPAs Don’t Do Tax Strategy
Peter breaks down the difference between compliance accountants and certified tax planners.
03:26 — How the Tax Code Incentivizes Economic Activity
Discussion on how government tax policies encourage investments like real estate and infrastructure.
06:51 — The Most Common Tax Savings Business Owners Miss
Peter highlights overlooked strategies including the Augusta Rule, home office reimbursements, and paying children through the business.
11:09 — Diagnosing Tax Problems vs Cash Flow Problems
Peter explains how reviewing tax returns and balance sheets quickly reveals missed opportunities.
12:27 — When Businesses Need CFO-Level Thinking
The conversation shifts to financial strategy and how CFO insights help business owners make smarter growth decisions.
14:55 — The Misunderstood Relationship With Profit
John and Peter discuss why many entrepreneurs treat profit incorrectly and how that mindset hurts long-term success.
20:12 — How Far Should Businesses Push Tax Strategy?
Peter shares a real example of pushing tax law boundaries legally and successfully defending it with documentation.
24:14 — Where to Learn More
Peter shares resources and a free tax strategy session available for business owners.

Memorable Quotes

“If you’re not planning your taxes year-round, you’re almost certainly paying more than you need to.”

“The more you can shift expenses from after-tax dollars to pre-tax dollars, the more money you keep.”

“Most accountants focus on putting numbers into boxes. Strategic tax planning starts with asking the right questions.”

Resources & Links

Website:
peterholtzcpa.com

Exclusive Resource for Duct Tape Marketing Listeners:
Tax Strategy Playbook & Tax Audit – A self-assessment and strategy review designed to help business owners identify gaps in their current tax approach and determine whether their structure is aligned with how their business is growing.

Connect with Peter Holtz

Instagram: @peterholtzcpa
Facebook: Peter Holtz CPA
X (Twitter): @peterholtzcpa
LinkedIn: Peter Holtz CPA

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:02.075)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Peter Holtz. He’s a former Big Four accountant and multi-company CFO turned founder of Peter Holtz CPA, a fast growing firm recognized on the 2025 Inc and 5,000 at number 3075 and named to…

The top 25 IPA, top 500 with decades of experience in tax accounting and CFO advisory. He helps business owners legally reduce their tax burden through proactive year round planning. So Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Holtz (00:38.318)

Thank you very much. You got it exactly right.

John Jantsch (00:40.635)

Yeah. So we are recording this. People may be listening to this at other times of the year, but we’re recording this right around the March 15th deadline for a lot of businesses to file taxes. So it kind of leads me to teeing up this question is, what’s the real cost in waiting till now to think about or have this tax conversation?

Peter Holtz (01:05.29)

It could be like tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. if you, you know, the problem is you got to structure yourself and make sure you take, all your write-offs in place before year end, most of the time, right? So that December 31st timeframe is very, very important. And what’s critical about what we do and what business owners should be doing is they should be like planning their taxes year round. They should be having quarterly meetings with their tax preparers, tax advisors, whatever.

and really tax strategists. we recommend is a solid tax strategy to make sure that of where they are, where they’re going, how much money they’re going to make, what they need to set aside, and everything else that they need to.

John Jantsch (01:46.747)

So, particularly folks that they have an accountant or a CPA that really kind of just does their compliance with tax reporting, where do you see companies like that leaking the most money? And I guess the follow-up question is, why isn’t there a CPA telling them?

Peter Holtz (02:05.294)

Well, that’s one of the biggest problems in the industry, right? And there are 1.2 million people in the United States license, prepare taxes with the IRS. And only about 1100 of us are certified tax planners. it’s an additional education you can get if you’re really interested in helping your business clients. It’s not that difficult to do, but it teaches you some of the more…

basic and more advanced tax planning techniques to really reduce taxes. And when you think about it, it’s basically 99.993 % of that 1.2 million are basically compliance guys. They put the numbers in boxes. Sometimes they don’t even think about the numbers they put in the boxes. Like I’ve seen businesses with no assets. Like I’ve seen a gas station tax return filed with no assets. And I’m like, how do you not have any assets?

John Jantsch (03:01.115)

You

Peter Holtz (03:01.58)

Like you take everything out with your hands and pour the gas and the, mean, it’s just impossible. So, and that’s really a shame. think it, I think the industry to a certain extent has been more compliance oriented in terms of putting the numbers in the boxes and do it. That’s it. And they’ve not thought about really what can I do to save the client’s money? And there’s a lot, there’s a lot of stuff that the tax code lets them do in terms of depreciation, bonus depreciation.

John Jantsch (03:03.919)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (03:26.53)

You know, the Augusta rule, paying your kids, how to structure things, should you be a C-Corp, S-Corp, LLC, those are all really important questions.

John Jantsch (03:34.223)

Well, and I want to come back to the, I do want you to address where you commonly see companies leaking, you know, places, but I want to follow up on what you said about the CPAs. Is there also an element of the industry that is sort of risk averse? And even if something’s in the tax code, it might get looked at harder than that. I mean, I’ve heard that from accountants. It’s like, we probably don’t want to do this, even though it’s in the tax code and it’s legal.

It’s going to get your return looked at. mean, is there, is there sort of an overarching attitude that leans towards that?

Peter Holtz (04:09.134)

There is, there’s a lot of real conservatism when it comes to that. you know, I don’t know what to say about it, but it’s wrong. mean, it really, if it’s in, you know, Congress writes the tax code. And last year we had the big, beautiful bill, for example, that allows you, they do it so that people will do certain things so that the economy gets better. You know.

John Jantsch (04:19.375)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (04:36.398)

You know, you think about just think about depreciating, depreciating real estate, the long term real estate appreciates every year at 4%. Right over the long term 4%. But yet we can write it off. We can depreciate it. Right. It is the only appreciating asset we can depreciate. And the reason the government does that is because they want places for people to live because a civilian population that’s living inside is much happier than when it’s living outside and they want people to work.

They grow the economy by offering these tax rules to incentivize investment, and incentivize certain things. Low income housing credits, solar tax credits that we had and a lot of were eliminated. The electric vehicle tax credit that we put in place. All of these things were so important to the changes that the government wants to make in economy in leveraging really the entire economy.

to try to move in the direction that they wanna move. And a lot of it’s built into the tax cut.

John Jantsch (05:37.527)

So the tax code is what? Upward 700, 800 pages? Nine to 10,000. Okay. So how does somebody like you keep up on the fact that it may change, I mean, change dramatically this year?

Peter Holtz (05:41.998)

No, like minor 10,000 pages. Minor 10,000 pages.

Peter Holtz (05:51.221)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what we do is we it’s continuing professional education. We make sure we understand and focus on on on the things we need to focus on for our business owners. We just continue to study, study, study. Right. And I think what’s interesting is I think now we know with AI and so forth, it’s going to allow us to leverage to study even more. Right. And to get into the nitty gritty and really expand our range of services and help people save even more money.

things like, you know, more exotic things like certain types of trust, property trust, revocable trust, irrevocable trust, all those other things, I think are gonna become more and more important as we continue to grow and increase complexity.

John Jantsch (06:35.557)

So, let me loop back to what are maybe less three or four of the most common things that you see all the time. You’ve mentioned assets a couple of times, so depreciation is probably one of them. But what are some of the things that you just see time and time again?

Peter Holtz (06:45.826)

Right. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (06:51.852)

I see people that don’t reimburse themselves for home office. I see people that don’t take the Augusta rule, which is ability to rent out your personal residence 14 days a year to your business and create tax-free income. I see people not paying their kids. I’ve heard other CPAs saying, that’s a red flag. Well, nonsense, OK? The tax law was established that any child above age seven can work in your business. You can pay them a fair amount.

for the work that you’re doing and you’re gonna have to do payroll or create the time records and give them a job to actually do it. But to them, to a child, if you pay them $15,000 a year and they’re monitoring your social media, maybe they’re helping you with whatever, to them it’s at their standard deduction. So it’s essentially tax-free income. yeah, exactly. I see people. Yeah, I see people.

John Jantsch (07:43.919)

Yeah, and you were going to give it to them anyway. Because they needed the money, so they were going to get it one way or another,

Peter Holtz (07:51.694)

I see people spending money on their kids, sports, their music lessons, their schooling, whatever it is. And these people are using after-tax money instead of pre-tax money. The more you can shift from after-tax to pre-tax, the more money you save. And if you use all the rules properly, if you’re a business owner, let’s say you’re making $150,000 a year in a business, which is okay, right? But you’ve worked your business, you’ve made yourself a decent profit.

John Jantsch (07:57.221)

Right.

Peter Holtz (08:20.633)

probably you can turn close to $100,000 of that $150,000 into tax-free money. If you use every, and you properly manage and control your business, you’re gonna have your home office be, I mean, I see, every time I see a contractor, right? You know their primary storage facility for a contractor is a garage.

John Jantsch (08:42.299)

The garage.

Peter Holtz (08:43.183)

Right? Every single contractors garage is full of stuff. And it’s funny when I talk to clients who are contractors and the husband and wife is there, it’s like I always mention that. Oh, was like, oh yeah, for sure. Or I’ll have guys that deliberately, maybe they have a bigger piece of property and build a barn on their backyard in the backyard to store their equipment, their trucks, their extra materials, whatever. And they never write it off because nobody asked. This is really where it gets in my profession. Really, really is a problem.

John Jantsch (08:47.227)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (09:12.705)

is people don’t ask questions. Like every time I start talking to somebody I’m asking, know, what’s your business like? What are you actually doing? How do you do it? Where do you work? Are you working out of your home? You know, are you paying your kids or whatever? How many of this? How many? And it’s like you would be, I literally have people who are still, they have their parents living with them, supporting them, and the parents are helping in the business and they’re giving their parents money and supporting them.

they’re not taking it out, but even though the parents are doing stuff to help them. it is, know, trying to think of everything is about asking. It’s not about the answers, it’s about asking the right question.

John Jantsch (09:53.603)

Right, right, right. So I should hold, I actually have my office in my home. So you just gave me a hint. should hold a retreat once a year for 15 days and lease or rent the home to my business.

Peter Holtz (10:04.099)

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (10:12.119)

Absolutely. Well, you know what? Quite honestly, I have I have an attorney in the Northeast that’s a client of mine that does major events and the and like he’s got a very large place, a very large house, and he does major catering events out of his house for clients that are business building. And if he would go to a Hilton or Four Seasons or a large hotel, you know, the Augusta rule still applies. It’s what you

what you would pay for an equivalent space outside. sometimes we’re taking very large, you know, imagine 12 events at $20,000 an event, a tax free income, because it’s like, and a lot of, man, you know, there’s a lot of people that can benefit by that.

John Jantsch (10:52.379)

Sure, Yeah. Yeah.

You

John Jantsch (11:01.563)

So when you first sit down with a business owner, are there some pretty telltale signs that they’ve probably got a tax problem versus a cashflow problem?

Peter Holtz (11:09.805)

Yes, absolutely. Well, what we do is we, when we sit down with the business owner, get your last two years tax returns, business and personal, we study them. We understand exactly what we see on the tax returns. Then we kind of go back and we ask them questions about what we see for the business and everything else like that. And there are some telltale signs. I made that point about the gas station with no assets, right? Or it’s like, hey, you know, you’re, and it’s always the balance sheet that you can really find a lot of mistakes. Like they may, you know,

John Jantsch (11:31.055)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (11:39.182)

We know they may use this type of business where they may use credit cards, but yet there’s no credit card liability for what they’ve already spent money on. Lots and lots of stuff that we can see in the numbers that just look weird compared to other businesses, other people in the same industry. So those telltale signs are really, all in the numbers. And I’ll have people come to me and start talking to me and say, and I’m like, I got to look at your numbers. And once you start,

John Jantsch (11:56.303)

Mmm.

Peter Holtz (12:08.655)

I mean, I’ve been doing this for near 40 years, right? So once you start looking at a business and you kind of know what to expect in terms of margins and everything else like that, and in terms of bottom line, and when it’s not there, you’re going to figure out why.

John Jantsch (12:23.867)

So you also offer CFO services on a virtual base. Is there a point at which a small business needs that level of thinking, or is it like day one?

Peter Holtz (12:27.011)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (12:38.093)

I mean, to a certain extent, you need some financial acumen, certainly from day one. Certain elements of the tax code from a business owner are really, really tricky. Probably the trickiest one is sales tax, right? And every state has auditors that go out there that try to find additional money. Everybody tries to find additional money for their people. And the sales tax can be really, really tough.

John Jantsch (12:59.547)

shoot every city.

Peter Holtz (13:08.119)

that’s a regular tax start hard enough, but, you know, Yeah, but really as a business gets bigger and really they’re thinking about growing really they’re thinking about, you know, what they’re going to do next. Should I buy this next vehicle? Should I buy my competitor? Should I get a building? Should I do, you know, what’s going to be the long-term impact to me, not only from a tax receptor, but also financial perspective is really, really important.

Can I afford to do this? What does my business look like? How is my marketing paying off for me? You know what I mean? And just all the different questions that you want to ask as a business owner, having another person who knows numbers, right? Because here’s the thing, most business owners understand what they do, right? They know how to fix a car. They know how to pump gas. They know how to do a restaurant. They know how to do catering. They know how to do construction, whatever it is that they know how to do it,

John Jantsch (13:55.407)

Yeah, right.

Peter Holtz (14:05.486)

But when it comes to the numbers and the compliance and the, you know, how are my numbers going to fall in the next couple of years? Studying that is really, really important. Having just another set of eyes to say, hey man, you know what? I think I want to buy my building. And I’m like, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the, what’s, what’s your current rent for your building? Right? Okay. Whatever. was 10, $4,000 a month. If you buy the building, how much is your loan payment going to be?

$3,000. Well, that’s an easy one, right? Because you’re buying a building, you’re getting depreciation, you get the write-offs or whatever. Looking at those breakeven, even understanding breakeven and what you have to do and what your margins are can really, really, I mean, can be night and day for a business owner.

John Jantsch (14:36.392)

Right.

John Jantsch (14:45.189)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:55.973)

Talk to me a little bit about the mindset that you see. know I’ve worked with thousands. I’ve done this 30 years too. I’ve worked with thousands of businesses and profit seems to be a really misunderstood and often maligned word. The relationship that businesses have with profit really seems screwed up. How do you help fix that?

Peter Holtz (15:15.68)

I think you have a very, very good point. And I think it relates to, I think that mindset relates to the fact that when most people get, if they start their own business, most people get started in business and they come with the attitude of, know, I just need to make, I just need to pay my bills. I just need to pay my bills. So they’re kind of going along, working their butts off, trying to get to this level. Then they start paying their bills and they level off, right? Then they don’t say, wait a minute, I should make this building pay for my retirement.

John Jantsch (15:18.491)

Thank you.

Peter Holtz (15:45.585)

I should make this business pay for my retirement, make this business put money away for my healthcare, put money away from the college education. And what I’ll see is that people go along and suddenly they got a kid that’s got to go to college and they need find another 30 grand a year. They step it up. So why not step it up and push it all along the way and factor in your retirement, factor in your medical, factor in your kids’ care.

factor in everything as part of your utilities for your business. And you rarely see people factoring in a savings plan into their business operations. And that is really the-

John Jantsch (16:18.607)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:27.387)

Sure. Well, we talked about it before we jumped on recorded here. You know, we’re both fans of Mike McCallowitz’s work, Profit First. And I think as simple as that idea was, it really did, you know, the idea of actually instead of paying all the bills and going, I hope there’s some leftover, it was really more of just what you said. It’s like, no, this is a bill, profit’s a bill. You pay it first.

Peter Holtz (16:34.542)

Yep.

Peter Holtz (16:55.563)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (16:57.392)

There does tend to be a real kind of, we’ll work to the level of what’s left, right?

Peter Holtz (17:04.172)

Exactly. it’s not, there’s nothing bad about that. It’s just people’s understand, you know, they know what they know. You know what I mean? And that’s one of the things I like about Profit First and what Mike has done is that he’s educated people on, got to pay yourself first, man. That’s what you’re in business to do. Right? A lot of people love the freedom and being in their own business. They love not being their own boss. But it can, if they don’t take care of themselves, it can be…

You know, a heavy, heavy load. remember once I met a pool contractor that was in his sixties and he spent his life, good 20, 30 years building pools for rich people in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. And he ended up broke because he never watched his numbers and he never took care of it. And it was like, it was sad. You know what I mean? I would see pictures of the works of art that he built and, you know, it, I never want to see in my clients go down that

John Jantsch (17:44.539)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04.709)

So if you were advising people, whether they call you or anybody they’re working with currently, what are a handful of questions that they, regardless of the relationship they have with their tax advisor, they should be saying, hey, wait a minute, ask me about these four things to get better sort of strategic picture rather than just like add up the numbers and fill out the forms.

Peter Holtz (18:29.487)

Yeah, I think you want your tax person or your business advisor or accountant basically to ask you questions like, tell me about your business plan. What do you think you want to do? Are you going to grow? Are you going to stabilize? You’re going to sell? What are you thinking about doing in the next three to five years? I think you want them to ask them about your…

family and your personal life and who you support and everything else like that so they can maximize their your deductions. I think they want to get in they want to get into your business and talk to you a little bit about how they’re planning to grow their business. Okay. And I think they want to you want them to ask you questions about this is an interesting way. What have you paid for outside the business that you may be using in your business?

I will run into plenty of times where it’s like, you know, I bought this pickup truck and I never really put it in the business, even though I use it for the business. It’s finding those misplaced assets. You know what I mean? And it’s really what you want is somebody that’s going to ask a lot of questions. And really get it out of spending not only your business life and your personal life and where you spend your money.

John Jantsch (19:43.067)

All right.

John Jantsch (19:49.861)

So this is a tricky question, the only tricky question I’m gonna ask you. How far do you think people should push it? So there’s some things that’s like, that’s kind of gray or I mean, it’s in the code, but you really would have to document every second you did that or so. I mean, how far do you just kind of say, let’s take advantage of what they’re giving us without killing ourselves?

Peter Holtz (19:53.242)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (20:12.847)

Yeah. You know, I think,

You know, the line is tax law, right? I think you want to go up to that line. Okay. In all cases, right? I’ll give you a good example. have an airline pilot that once wanted to claim to be a real estate professional, yet he was getting a very substantial W-2 from the airline business. Well, upon further research, airline pilots can only fly 20 hours a week. And when this guy was on layover or waiting to fly, he was doing his real estate portfolio.

He had multiple properties. He was managing contractors. He was collecting rents. was doing this. So we got him declared a real estate professional, even though under full-time W-2. And it worked. And now he can take all the depreciation from his real estate against his W-2. And it was pushing the limit because the IRS came back. And they said to us, this guy’s got a six-figure W-2. What are you guys crazy? And it’s like,

John Jantsch (20:46.715)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (21:13.563)

Federal law says he can only fly 20 hours a week. It’s a part-time job. And we were able to prove that he was working 25 hours a week on his real estate portfolio.

John Jantsch (21:23.109)

Yeah, well, that’s a great one too, because you had the backing of that. You know, it wasn’t him just saying, I only work 20 hours a week. was literally like, I can’t.

Peter Holtz (21:31.396)

Yeah, exactly. you know, the other great news, he was an airline pilot and you know, airline pilots are fastidious about keeping records. So he was very, very, he had all the contemporaneous records that we could possibly need. And the IRS was like, well, we got nothing. Right. So sometimes it’s worth the challenge when you think, and once you, once you get through that challenge in one year, he’s, he’s, he’s been able to do this now for five, six, seven years.

John Jantsch (21:38.491)

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

John Jantsch (21:48.027)

Yeah

Peter Holtz (21:58.694)

which has been amazing. So I think you want to take it to the tax law. I don’t think you want to break the tax law. I think everybody needs to understand where the Internal Revenue Service is right now too. They’re in a mess. It is a, I would say, unqualified disaster, the Internal Revenue Service. Their staff has been cut 25%. They’re on, and these are not my opinions, these are facts.

John Jantsch (22:10.074)

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (22:26.329)

when they, and you can chat GBT this stuff or whatever from their announcements, when the government is shut down, half their operation is shut down. They’ve actually told people, when you file, you need to have your refund direct deposited, otherwise you’ll wait another six to eight weeks to get a paper check, because they’re not processing paper. And they’re letting their automated systems run, but they’re not processing the paper that would feed into the automated system.

52 % of the letters that are being sent by the IRS are incorrect. It’s probably much higher now because of the current situations. I mean, there’s nothing the people in the IRS can really do about it because we’ve had conversations we’ve never had with the Internal Revenue Service before where it’s like, hey, we need to talk to a revenue officer to help this client take care of a balanced past due and to work out a payment plan. And the IRS will tell us, well, there’s nobody available.

John Jantsch (22:59.803)

You

Peter Holtz (23:23.665)

So it is, that’s one of the things you want to factor in, in terms of what you decide what to do and understanding that the Internal Revenue Service is not the efficient organization. I won’t, I’m not even gonna say it that way. It’s not as good as used to be and it never was the efficient organization. I mean, COVID, during COVID there, so much stuff disappeared. So many things disappeared. Paper that was filed and it was just a nightmare.

John Jantsch (23:40.482)

Right?

John Jantsch (23:54.299)

Hmm.

Peter Holtz (23:54.405)

I mean, millions upon millions of documents at once.

John Jantsch (23:58.533)

Well, I’m fearful we’re going to go down a rabbit hole here that we won’t be able to recover from. So Peter, where would you invite people? I appreciate you stopping by. Where would you invite people to learn more about the work that you do and connect with you?

Peter Holtz (24:03.493)

We definitely could if we want to.

Peter Holtz (24:14.039)

at go.peterholtz.com.

John Jantsch (24:22.765)

Awesome. Backslash Ducktape, because he’s going to have all kinds of freebies for you there if you go there, right?

Peter Holtz (24:27.791)

Yeah, we got some goodies in there. have self-assessment PDF we have in there. We also offer a free tax strategy meeting with our team. And it’s not really anything to do with the IRS, but we can definitely take a look at that tax strategies you currently have in play and look at the last couple of years tax returns and see what we can do to help you out.

John Jantsch (24:46.127)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Peter. Thanks.

Peter Holtz (24:51.398)

Sounds good. Thanks, John. Great meeting you.

Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time

Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Episode:

Episode Overview

Voice agents are rapidly evolving from novelty tools into core revenue infrastructure. Instead of functioning as glorified talking FAQs, today’s AI voice systems can serve as qualifiers, schedulers, concierges, onboarding guides, retention reps, and upsell assistants.

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Ryan Mrha, founder of Yodify, a platform that enables creators and brands to stay personal at scale through AI-powered voice and text agents trained on their content libraries.

Mrha explains why purpose-built voice agents outperform generic AI tools, how multi-layered LLM orchestration reduces hallucinations, and where businesses can safely begin experimenting with voice AI. The conversation explores the future of buyer behavior, the role of AI in modern sales processes, ethical transparency considerations, and practical implementation strategies for agencies and creators alike.

If you’re curious about where voice AI fits in your marketing, sales, or customer experience strategy, this episode delivers both vision and practical guidance.

About Ryan Mrha

Ryan Mrha is the founder of Yodify, a platform that helps creators and brands maintain personal engagement at scale. Yodify allows followers to call or text an AI agent that speaks in the creator’s own voice, grounded in their existing content library.

By combining voice cloning, multi-layer LLM orchestration, and structured prompt engineering, Mrha focuses on building purpose-driven AI agents that feel authentic, aligned with brand voice, and capable of performing specific business roles.

He is also involved in launching Methodiq, a platform focused on AI-powered facilitation experiences.

Key Takeaways

1. Voice Agents Are Moving from Novelty to Revenue Infrastructure

Businesses should stop thinking of voice AI as a talking FAQ and start treating it as a role within the organization, such as a business development rep, onboarding assistant, or scheduler.

2. Generic AI Tools Deliver Poor Results Without Role Design

Simply uploading a knowledge base and prompting “act like John” produces inconsistent outcomes. Effective voice agents require:

Defined job descriptions
Multiple orchestrated LLM layers
Targeted prompts for specific states or roles
Structured knowledge access

3. Multi-LLM Architecture Reduces Hallucinations

Instead of relying on a single large prompt, Yodify breaks tasks into targeted LLM calls, such as orchestration, action execution, and response generation. This improves accuracy and reduces hallucination risk.

4. Buyer Behavior Is Changing

Modern buyers prefer to:

Conduct independent research
Avoid early-stage sales conversations
Engage only when close to making a decision

Voice agents can provide 24/7 answers without hard selling, aligning perfectly with this shift in buyer psychology.

5. Transparency May Become a Competitive Advantage

There is still tension around whether users feel “duped” when speaking to AI. However, proactively positioning a voice agent as an “AI advisor” may enhance trust and acceptance.

6. Start Small with Clear Use Cases

The best way to implement voice AI is through a focused, low-risk pilot:

A receptionist agent
Appointment scheduling
A simple qualification call flow
A basic single-prompt LLM test

Start narrow. Prove ROI. Then expand.

7. Voice AI Is Especially Valuable for Creators

As creators scale, personal interaction becomes impossible. Voice agents allow fans to text or call an AI trained on the creator’s content, maintaining connection while scaling engagement.

Great Moments from the Episode

00:03 Voice Agents as Revenue Infrastructure
John frames the shift from novelty AI to functional, role-based AI agents.
01:12 What a Voice Agent Actually Is
Ryan explains how voice agents combine LLM responses with text-to-speech tools.
02:23 Why “Just Upload Everything” Fails
Discussion on why dumping a content library into an LLM produces poor results without structured orchestration.
03:42 Role-Based AI vs Emotional AI
Clarifying that effective agents are built around business roles such as sales, support, and concierge, not emotional states.
07:11 AI in the Modern Buyer’s Journey
Exploring how voice agents can replace early-stage sales calls.
10:18 Do Customers Feel Duped?
The ethical and experiential implications of AI transparency.
12:08 Building a Purpose-Built Agent
Ryan outlines how projects begin with small, focused use cases.
13:30 The AI Receptionist Use Case
Why simple use cases like scheduling can deliver immediate value.
18:54 Safe Pilot for a Marketing Agency
How agencies can test AI voice agents without major risk.

Memorable Quotes

“Voice agents are moving from novelty to revenue infrastructure.” John Jantsch
“If you’re very specific about what you want the LLM to do, you’re going to get much better results. It can’t do too much at once.” Ryan Mrha
“People don’t want to be sold. They just want to ask their questions.” Ryan Mrha
“There’s no point in building something your customers don’t want.” Ryan Mrha

Resources & Links

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:03.032)

So voice agents are moving from novelty to revenue infrastructure. And if that’s is if you stop treating them like talking FAQs and start treating them like a role, maybe qualifiers, scheduler, concierge, onboarding guide, retention rep, upsell assistant. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Mrha. He is a founder of Yodify. Yodify helps creators and brands stay personal at scale by letting them, letting followers call and text an AI that speaks in the creator’s own voice grounded in their content library. So Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Mrha (00:47.59)

Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:48.686)

Did I say, you know, I asked you how to pronounce your last name, but then did I pronounce your O-T-L-F-Y right? Okay. Awesome. So we’re talking about voice AI. So let’s, let’s kind of set the table. There’s a lot, you know, there’s IVRs, there’s LLMs are, you know, participating chat bots. mean, so, so what’s a voice agent?

Ryan Mrha (00:53.748)

Yes, it is Yodify.

Ryan Mrha (01:12.166)

Yeah, so a voice agent, or mean, most agents are just interacting with an LLM. A voice agent is essentially just an LLM that knows it’s supposed to respond in a way that’s like naturally speaking. And then you use another tool to have it actually read that text out loud as it’s coming. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:18.37)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (01:36.366)

So typically, like if I had a library, if I wanted somebody to be able to answer questions about my business or my service, I would just give it everything I could. And then hope when somebody asked a question, it would access the right thing in giving a response. I is that as simple as it comes?

Ryan Mrha (01:52.634)

Yeah, I mean, essentially that’s what it is. So you want to build a knowledge base, but there’s kind of two components to it. So one is, let’s say all of the episodes that you’ve ever done, and we could take all that text and we could feed that to the LLM that it could use for context. But the other piece is that we also have to make the agent feel like you and act like you in different points that you interact.

John Jantsch (02:11.98)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (02:23.566)

So you mean literally you, like it would sound like they were talking to John Jance. Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (02:27.83)

well, yeah. So, we do also clone the voice. So we could take a lot of your audio and use that to clone your voice. But the thing that we’ve been finding is that a lot of people will say, here’s a prompt, Hey, you’re an LLM be John Jance and here’s all of his episodes. And they’re typically getting pretty poor results with that because you, as say a podcast host, you have a lot of different states.

John Jantsch (02:32.814)

Okay. Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (02:55.37)

Sometimes you may be, I don’t know, explaining something and sometimes you may be asking a question or pushing back on something. And so what we try to do is we try to have a few different LLMs that an agent can call on and can be different versions of you and have different access to pieces of knowledge that you may need at a certain time. So that way it sounds like you, it feels like you, it responds like you.

John Jantsch (03:25.376)

And would it be as simple to say, you know, when I hear you describe that, I’m like, this is when John’s feeling kind of sad and this is when John’s having a good, really good day and happy, or is it really more, this is John in his sales hat and this is John in his customer service hat.

Ryan Mrha (03:32.592)

Yeah

Ryan Mrha (03:42.032)

Yeah, exactly. It’s, going to be the latter. and that’s what’s going to make it feel like you’re actually speaking to a person compared to, you know, just the LLM, because what a lot of people are used to is, speaking with LLM, like over a chat window, you know, chat, GBT or something like that. And that hides a lot of the sort of mistakes, but when you start talking with it, you realize, you know, Very quickly. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:43.256)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:08.706)

Yeah, Yeah, it butchers my name, you know, for example. But, but yeah, and I think so where do you think we are in the world today? Are, you know, at one point, you know, people were like, I hate those things or gosh, I’m talking to a robot and you know, that, but I’ve, get the sense that now as more and more, well, first off, as the technology has gotten better, but as more and more people have had good experiences.

Ryan Mrha (04:13.681)

Mine as well.

John Jantsch (04:37.612)

Do feel like the acceptance to where it’s like, I know I’m talking to AI and I don’t care.

Ryan Mrha (04:43.299)

Yeah, think people, I mean, I really think like 2026, 2027 are going to be the years of like real voice agents. think people have been interacting in these chat functions for a while now, and they’re going to want to start having a more real experience. And kind of like I was describing how we build these agents, it’s going to have to be a little bit more tailored to the experience that the user is looking for. I guess where we’re at in it,

John Jantsch (04:50.392)

Yes.

Ryan Mrha (05:12.291)

I think we’re still actually quite early. A lot of people are not even using any voice agent, for example.

John Jantsch (05:24.28)

So one of the things that I think I picked this up from off of your website, you talk about a voice agent that critically thinks. How is that happening? I mean, again, when I hear that, hear like, you know, they’re actually making decisions. know, they’re not just accessing stuff and predicting what you want to hear.

Ryan Mrha (05:34.874)

Yeah, so.

Ryan Mrha (05:47.377)

Yeah, so without giving away too much of the secret sauce, we use like multiple levels of LLMs, right? And within those, there’s different instructions. Like one may just be orchestrating and another one may be doing an action. Another one may be calling a a different LLM to give it a response. So we break up all of those tasks to be, so that way each

LLM call is like very targeted. and that’s kind of, that’s kind of the mistake that we’re seeing a lot of businesses, like fall into right now is they buy a cool AI tool. It looks great in the demo. And then they, they get their hands on and they’re like, this isn’t working for me. It’s because they’re using like a very general package and the way the LLMs work is like, if you were very specific on what you want, you’re going to get much better results, but it can’t do too much at once.

John Jantsch (06:44.686)

Sure. Yeah, you can’t just brain dump the entire organization’s knowledge base in there and hope it finds what you’re looking for. So I’m curious about this because I have, you know, the way people are buying today is really changing, right? I mean, they’re doing a lot more research. They don’t want to do a sales call. I mean, they want to get all the way to almost to the point of deciding and then have like a consultation, you know? And so…

Ryan Mrha (06:51.524)

Unfortunately, yeah. Right.

Ryan Mrha (07:09.873)

Definitely.

John Jantsch (07:11.634)

I have a theory that AI agents are going to play a role in that because where people will actually offer them, not ready to talk to a human, talk to the AI voice agent, they can answer all your questions and they’re not going to hard sell you. mean, they’re not going to… Do you feel like there’s a point in the buyer’s journey where that’s actually going to be seen as a value add as opposed to a convenience?

Ryan Mrha (07:19.858)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (07:35.155)

I love that you brought this up because we were actually planning on doing this. Yeah. You know, just like when you go to a website now and you, you know, a little chat thing comes up and it’s like, Hey, maybe I can answer a few questions. Yeah. The technology is there to be like, you know, take it that much further. And the reality, especially like in software and technology, a lot of the sales and procurement process is just about making sure that you get the legal documents passed back and forth.

John Jantsch (07:38.339)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:03.79)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (08:04.666)

I think that we’re going to see a lot more of those roles focus on that piece and then the answering questions and explaining the product. People don’t want to be sold. They just want to ask their questions. They want to get to experience it. So in some ways, AI is kind of perfect for that.

John Jantsch (08:23.532)

Yeah. And, and they can hang up, right? I mean, it’s like, I’m not getting the answer. I went, I’m just going to hang up. You know, it’s like, I’m not going to be rude to a person maybe, but you know, this, this is, can just hang up on this. So.

Ryan Mrha (08:28.069)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (08:35.45)

And on top of that, you can do that at three in the morning as well. Right. Like you don’t have to be waiting for that, that call next week and they’re busy or we got to go to this conference and you know, it’s instant.

John Jantsch (08:38.112)

Yeah, right,

John Jantsch (08:45.806)

So let’s talk that through. Let’s, I think you also use the term purpose built. Let’s, let’s walk through the framework of giving a voice agent a job description. And then, and then maybe let’s explore what the limitations are. So let’s, let’s go with a typical kind of business development agent. Somebody buys a low cost product on your website and you want to upsell them to the higher cost. You know, can a voice agent reach out or is that really more of a, we’re going to train that person to be able to.

answer anybody’s questions that they might have about what’s next.

Ryan Mrha (09:20.476)

So there’s full tools available already that have this like full, we’ve experimented a lot with one of them for building some of our agents, just because the functionality that they come with where they can already call, they can lead the conversation. They’ll have sort of what you can, like if you can imagine like a timeline and then along that timeline, you have different prompts. And when the agent…

John Jantsch (09:36.173)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (09:46.535)

gets to a certain criteria, it meets that, it goes to the next prompt. And so these tools are very cool. You can have a conversation with it and feel like you’re speaking with a person and you can get very advanced with it. can remember your names or your ticket number or things and reuse them later and go update the database when it’s done. And on top of that, you can use it a thousand times at the same second instead of

John Jantsch (09:50.86)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:05.389)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (10:15.666)

just like an individual.

John Jantsch (10:18.158)

So do, do, you, are we at a point where some people are feeling duped? Like, you know, where it’s like, thought I was talking to a human and even if they got the result they wanted, it still felt, you know, they still felt sort of deceived.

Ryan Mrha (10:36.506)

I was on a call the other day and I was trying to ask the person, like, are you a AI agent? And I think they felt offended if they, because maybe they weren’t, but I’m still not convinced they weren’t, you know, because, but there’s, certain tells that, you know, if you speak with these all the time, you’re like, okay, there’s a delay here. And, the accent is changing a little bit and things like that. so yeah, I think people.

John Jantsch (10:42.798)

reasons.

John Jantsch (10:48.641)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:59.469)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (11:03.984)

I think people don’t want to feel that they’re talking to an agent yet, but I do think that’s going to change.

John Jantsch (11:09.762)

Well, and do you think we’re at a point where, and I’m not saying disclose it,

because it’s an ethical thing, but just to disclose it because people want to, it’s a transparent thing. It’s like, Hey, talk to our AI advisor. They’re, you know, they have all the answers for you. So, I mean, it’s like right up front, even though it feels like a conversation, I know it’s not. I mean, you think we’re, that’s the, that’s kind of the crossroads right now.

Ryan Mrha (11:30.492)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (11:34.897)

I don’t know. I’m one of those people that, you know, do like, do you want to share your data? And I’m like, yes, take all my data and customize my experience and things like that. but I could imagine there’s a lot of people who want to be very private. yeah, I think that’s going to be a hurdle that we have to, we have to face. And it is going to be a deciding factor, like, how people decide to do business with certain companies, you know, it should at least be on the website.

John Jantsch (11:40.974)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:59.148)

Yeah,

I forgot to tell you when we booked this interview, I do need your social security number.

Ryan Mrha (12:06.642)

No problem.

John Jantsch (12:08.91)

Okay. Now, so, so to walk me through, if I came to you said, Ryan, need this, um, business development agent. Um, like what’s how, how’s the process go? What do you need from me? What, you know, how do we put guardrails on it? I mean, what, what’s the pro how’s the process work?

Ryan Mrha (12:25.872)

Yeah, so we’re always going to start with like a single small use case and try to like nail that down and then kind of build things on top of it. We’re also going to just try to like, like for me, it’s very big about matching to a brand in brand voice and making sure that it’s consistent with the experience you want your users to have. We build a lot more agents that are in the

John Jantsch (12:44.27)

Hmm.

Ryan Mrha (12:53.776)

Like we have a big one for facilitation. So maybe it’s not trying to sell you something, but you still want it to experience like a full facilitator. So what that looks like is breaking down what makes a good facilitator and then building all those different pieces, putting them together, matching it to your brand and letting you use it in your company.

John Jantsch (13:09.591)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:20.952)

Do let’s just go with a really, really basic receptionist. mean, is that a, is that a use for this or is that to almost too basic?

Ryan Mrha (13:30.489)

No, I think, I think basic is good. yeah, you, could definitely, you can have a, an agent receive a call quickly, book an appointment with you. kind of like what you talked about or asked about, are people going to feel kind of duped by it? I think there’s a lot of scenarios where people are actually going to appreciate it more. And maybe, maybe it takes some time to get there, but I mean, if you can offer me a product at a lower cost and because I speak to AI agent and like.

John Jantsch (13:47.522)

This is

John Jantsch (13:51.671)

Sure. Sure.

Ryan Mrha (14:00.476)

great, you

John Jantsch (14:01.474)

Well, and I think for a lot of routine things that people want to do, I know personally, things like, you know, once a year I go get contacts, you know, and I just want to be able to go on there and schedule an appointment. I don’t want to call somebody to do that. And so I think there are a lot of things like that, that are going to be AI enabled that, you know, that people are going to actually want and appreciate. Because as you said, it’s three o’clock in the morning. I want to do that. Right.

Ryan Mrha (14:10.875)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (14:14.193)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (14:23.762)

Definitely.

Ryan Mrha (14:28.25)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It did change the game. And it can also be a hybrid approach where, you know, yeah, I hit zero if you want to speak to that person, but.

John Jantsch (14:39.468)

I know one of the fears that people sometimes have is that, you know, the AI agents going to hallucinate, it’s going to be wrong. It’s going to actually say something that is maybe counter to the brand. How do you, you know, are there, there’s probably some instances where you should never use this. It would be one thing, but, but, but how do you also put the guardrails on?

Ryan Mrha (15:03.91)

Yeah, so we do put guardrails in the prompts, but I’m a big fan of the Gemini models because of that, even though maybe they’re a little bit less fun or something like to talk to, they definitely hallucinate less. So that’s probably the biggest step you can take. But it’s also just about being specific. If you give the agent the right context of what it’s trying to do, then it doesn’t have to go fill in the blanks itself. So a lot of it

John Jantsch (15:14.316)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (15:33.82)

comes out in testing, we’ll find, okay, why did it come up with that? And then we’ll go back, we’ll revisit the prompts and find out, we maybe overemphasize this or didn’t give it clarity on what to do here. One thing you can also do is just, give it like a document in your knowledge base, kind of where it can find things. If it doesn’t find something, here’s some ways you can respond.

John Jantsch (15:50.604)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:57.198)

So if you’re using Gemini, then could you put a lot of these sources in like a notebook LL or something or, and then be able to tap it that that make that be its library.

Ryan Mrha (16:08.338)

Connect directly to notebook. I have not tried that. I do love notebook. Do you use it a lot?

John Jantsch (16:11.651)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:14.968)

Yeah. Well, Jim and I, yeah, Jim and I does connect directly to notebook as a source. now, yeah, yeah. So it’s, I’ve been shortcutting training because I’ll build the notebook LMS with 300 documents in it. And then, you know, just be able to say, source these three. so it kind of gives you, it’s a, it’s a good best of both worlds. your model is voice and phone number, right? Voice and phone call.

Ryan Mrha (16:21.039)

okay. Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (16:42.318)

Yes, so the Yodify model is phone. We can text it. We can also deploy it within the web app, just like the service we’re using here.

John Jantsch (16:56.27)

But there is no avatar. There’s no video component to it. It’s just voice. Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (16:59.538)

No, the way we see it is that a lot of people are going to want to be able to have conversations with their creator, the creators that they follow. So, you know, maybe when you were a bit of a smaller creator, you could interact with all of the different fans and everything and respond to every comment. And then as you get bigger, it becomes more and more difficult. But that doesn’t mean people still don’t want to communicate. we can do that with sort of

John Jantsch (17:14.113)

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Mrha (17:26.95)

them being able to just text you directly and have conversations and, I’m going through this. What’s your take on it? And yeah, it’s not the real thing, but it is, you know, still valuable for a lot of people.

John Jantsch (17:38.83)

So where do you feel like you fit in the category? Is 11 Labs a competitor or are they just tangentially related? mean, where do you fit in the category? Yeah, okay.

Ryan Mrha (17:53.587)

We use 11 Labs. yeah, they provide voices. They do a lot of great stuff. We combine the different pieces, the different tools that these producers are making and try to bring them to market. I think there’s a lot of cool tools out there, but people haven’t…

John Jantsch (18:01.197)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (18:20.316)

figured out really like great use cases that are going to enhance people’s lives. So we’re trying to, you know, meet them there.

John Jantsch (18:22.796)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:26.446)

Yeah. Yeah. I kind of laugh at some of the tools are like, well, okay, it’s cool. can do that, but like, why, you know, where, how, you know, would you use that? So, so if somebody’s listening and they’re like, Hey, I want to, I want to try this out like next month. Um, what’s the, let me give you a concrete example. I have a marketing agency, so you can use that as the example. Um, what would be the smallest kind of safest experiment that you think a marketing agency could.

Ryan Mrha (18:34.69)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ryan Mrha (18:43.378)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:54.84)

could do that would still provide ROI, either in marketing or for their clients or just even in efficiencies in the business.

Ryan Mrha (19:04.301)

you mean sort of to prototype themselves?

John Jantsch (19:06.22)

Yeah, yeah, to kind of give it a test, like a pilot.

Ryan Mrha (19:10.458)

Yeah, I would say, I mean, chat GPT has these, I think they’re called GPTs. I think that’s a nice way to test something. Yeah. I think that’s a nice way to sort of test. can upload a few files and like talk with it be like, is this interesting for us? Definitely have a few customers try it because there’s no point in building something that your customers don’t want. And then, yeah, if you’re getting a lot of good reactions, then you can, you know, engage us or we can point you in the right direction to.

John Jantsch (19:17.634)

Yeah, custom GPTs, yeah. Right.

Ryan Mrha (19:40.262)

to somebody that would.

John Jantsch (19:41.176)

Well, I guess I asking specifically about Yodelfine. Like if somebody wanted to do a pilot, came to you and said, we heard the show and we want to do a pilot, but we want to start really small. Is there a place that you would say, hey, this is a small, safe experiment that I think you’ll get some value from?

Ryan Mrha (19:50.15)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (19:59.729)

Yeah. So what we would do is we would probably do like a single prompt LLM. So very, very basic, which is basically what I told you we don’t do, but it’s, kind of the starting thing that you can play around with. We’d have like a single prompt. We’d upload a few of your, your files. And then we would let you call it and be like, you know, maybe we do like a very quick and dirty, like voice clone and we’ll say like, okay, is this interesting for you? Maybe show it to a few your customers, get some feedback. And then.

John Jantsch (20:07.982)

Yeah.

Ryan Mrha (20:28.454)

Yeah, we have different ways we can price it. We like to be an additional revenue stream for creators. But yeah, it could be an ad agency. We can build all kinds of agents. But for our creators, we try to be an additional revenue stream. So maybe they already have a paid tier, and they can incorporate it in there and add $0.02 on or something like that.

John Jantsch (20:50.99)

Gotcha. Okay. Well, again, appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you learn more about YOLOFi?

Ryan Mrha (21:00.57)

Yeah, so LinkedIn is my main social media. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Ryan Murha. Yeah, we have yotify.com. And then that’s actually a brand that belongs to another bigger project, Methodic, which is actually going to be launching here, the beta version. So if you’re interested in checking out AI facilitation, would be awesome to get some beta users.

John Jantsch (21:24.366)

Awesome again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Ryan Mrha (21:30.685)

Sounds great, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (21:32.066)

Thanks, Russ.

Upskilling Your Team for What’s Next

Upskilling Your Team for What’s Next written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Rob Levin, serial
entrepreneur, chairman and co-founder of Work Better Now, and author of
The New Talent Playbook: The Ultimate Guide for Building Your Dream Team.

With over 30 years of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses solve persistent
talent challenges, Rob shares why the traditional hiring “playbook” no longer works. He
explains how the pandemic, generational shifts, remote work, and artificial intelligence
have fundamentally changed the talent landscape.

The conversation explores the hidden talent crisis facing SMBs, why culture is more critical
than ever, how to rethink KPIs in a remote-first world, and what it really means to become
an AI-first organization. If you’re still managing talent like it’s 2016, this episode offers
a roadmap for building a future-ready team.

Guest Bio: Rob Levin

Rob Levin is a serial entrepreneur and business growth expert with more than three decades
of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses thrive. He is the chairman and co-founder
of Work Better Now, a company that empowers U.S.-based SMBs to access highly skilled remote
professionals, particularly from Latin America, to overcome hiring bottlenecks and build
high-performing teams.

Rob is the author of The New Talent Playbook: The Ultimate Guide for Building Your Dream Team,
where he outlines a modern approach to talent strategy in an era defined by remote work,
rapid technological change, and AI disruption.

Key Takeaways

1. The Talent Crisis Is Really a Talent Shift

Despite headlines about layoffs, many small and mid-sized businesses still struggle to fill
critical roles. The skills needed to succeed in large enterprises often do not translate to
the owner-minded, adaptable talent required in SMBs.

2. The Old Hiring Playbook Is Obsolete

Many business owners are still operating as if it’s 2016. Power dynamics have shifted, top
performers have more leverage, and younger generations prioritize culture and meaning at work
more than previous generations.

3. Culture Is a Strategic Advantage

A clearly defined set of core values is the foundation of a strong culture—especially in remote
and hybrid environments. Companies should hire and fire based on core values and intentionally
build a culture that embraces change.

4. Remote Teams Require Structure and Over-Communication

In a remote environment, clarity and communication must be intentional. Weekly meetings,
consistent updates, and well-defined KPIs are essential to maintaining alignment and accountability.

5. KPIs Benefit Employees as Much as Employers

Well-designed KPIs are not just management tools—they give employees clarity on expectations and
what it means to “win” in their role. A lack of KPIs often signals unclear leadership rather than
poor employee performance.

6. Upskilling Is a Competitive Imperative

As technology and AI reshape roles, companies must identify the new capabilities they need and
aggressively invest in training. Affordable and high-quality education is widely available, and
businesses should leverage it.

7. Business Owners Must Lead the AI Shift

Before expecting teams to use AI effectively, business owners must gain hands-on experience
themselves. Understanding AI’s capabilities firsthand enables leaders to redesign workflows,
not just automate existing tasks.

8. Move from Doing the Work to Managing AI

The future of many roles will involve managing, refining, and validating AI output rather than
executing routine tasks. Organizations must help employees transition from task execution to AI
supervision and optimization.

9. Become AI-First, Not AI-Improved

Rather than using AI to enhance existing workflows, companies should rethink processes from the
ground up with AI doing much of the heavy lifting. This mindset shift can dramatically improve
productivity and scalability.

10. Global Talent Expands Your Competitive Edge

Expanding your hiring reach beyond local markets—across the U.S., Latin America, and beyond—opens
access to skilled professionals and helps solve persistent hiring bottlenecks.

Great Moments from the Episode

00:03 – Introduction to Rob Levin and The New Talent Playbook
01:14 – Why the talent market has fundamentally changed since the pandemic
02:15 – From “They’re lucky to have a job” to employee leverage
04:11 – Why layoffs don’t solve the SMB talent shortage
06:02 – Understanding the hidden talent crisis
08:27 – Identifying new capabilities and upskilling your team
10:53 – Why business owners must take hands-on AI training
11:56 – Becoming an AI-first organization
13:20 – Why culture matters more than ever
14:23 – Managing culture in remote and fractional teams
16:41 – Why KPIs are more for employees than employers
18:26 – Using AI as a thought partner for performance measurement
19:45 – What Rob would update in the AI chapter today
21:28 – Addressing employee fears about AI replacing jobs
22:42 – Where to find The New Talent Playbook and connect with Rob

Quotes

“There’s such a long list of changes, but the biggest one is that the old talent playbook just doesn’t work anymore.”

“KPIs are actually more for the employee than the employer. They give clarity on what winning looks like.”

“Don’t just use AI to improve a workflow. Redesign the workflow so AI is doing the heavy lifting.”

“You’re only scratching the surface of what AI can do for your company if you’re not using it as a thought partner.”

Resources Mentioned

The New Talent Playbook: The Ultimate Guide for Building Your Dream Team by Rob Levin
Work Better Now – Nearshore talent solutions for SMBs
National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) hiring trend surveys

Connect with Rob Levin

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:03.266)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rob Levin. He’s a serial entrepreneur and business growth expert with more than 30 years of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses thrive by solving their most persistent talent challenges. He’s the chairman and co-founder of Work Better Now, a company that empowers US-based SMBs to access highly skilled remote professionals, particularly.

from Latin America to overcome hiring bottlenecks and build teams that drive growth and innovation. But today we’re going to focus on his newest book, the new talent playbook, the ultimate guide for building your dream team. So Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Levin (00:46.516)

Thanks, John. Great to see you.

John Jantsch (00:48.632)

So.

You were before we even got started, you were talking about the speed of change and that’s really what’s going to be my first question. I mean, you’ve worked with, I’ve worked with small businesses for decades. in your view, what’s changed the most about hiring in the last, I was going to say five years, but I I could say five months, I guess. And what, what prompted you to write the new talent, playbook?

Rob Levin (01:14.184)

Yeah, and I’m going to if it’s okay, John, I want to go beyond hiring. I just want to talk about talent in general. And a ton has changed. And in fact, what the reason the reason I wrote the book is I still I saw how the talent market changed. And I can talk a little bit about that. But I also saw how business owners were still

John Jantsch (01:18.638)

See you soon.

Rob Levin (01:35.142)

running the same talent playbooks, if you will, as if it was 2016. And a lot really changed in the pandemic. So let’s talk about what’s changed. There’s such a long list. I’ll mention a few things. Number one, younger, let’s put it this way. And now it’s arguable whether this happens every generation or so or not. But younger generations in the workforce, at least I’m hearing this from business owners like myself, Gen Xers.

baby boomers, the younger generations of the workforce work differently than the older ones do. And I think a lot of business owners are having trouble understanding that. The biggest change perhaps out of all of them, and I have so many of them, but the one I think to focus in on is…

It’s and you wouldn’t know this from reading the headlines, but it’s there’s I used to call it a talent crisis. In fact, in the book, I call it a talent crisis. I’m not calling it a talent shift where it’s really hard for small and mid-sized businesses to find the talent that they need. And this cascades to the point where it also means that they may be holding on to employees that are not the right people for them to grow going going forward. And and one way to think about

how people’s mindsets have not yet changed is you and I are old enough to remember when you used to hear bosses say something like, they’re lucky to have a job, right? And there’s still people with a similar type mentality and that has totally changed. A lot of the power, if you will, and I don’t really like to look at it that way, but it’s a way that people understand has shifted the employee side, particularly those top performers that we all want in our business.

John Jantsch (03:07.862)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (03:20.32)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:26.638)

You know, it’s interesting you met at the outset of that. You mentioned the idea that, you know, probably every generation thinks this and I, and I, I suspect there’s some truth to that, but it feels like the gap’s bigger now because it’s, it feels like a bigger shift. Again, I’ve only been through one generation, so to speak. Uh, but it feels like it is, um, you know, talk to me a little bit about the fact that I like, I’m talking to a lot of people, uh, uh, a lot of my peers, a lot of your peers, you know, have kids getting out of college. Um, and.

They’re saying, you know, it’s terrible out there. The job market’s, you know, absolute disaster out there, you know, for people coming out of college. And yet, you you just referenced the idea that the leverage is actually kind of with the job seeker. So how do you kind of balance that?

Rob Levin (04:11.624)

That’s a great, great question. I have two kids in college and I’m worried about their job prospects. I’m actually telling them to start their own businesses. So if you look at the headlines, the headlines are mass layoffs, right? True. The headlines are AI is going to take jobs away, which I believe is true. And it may even start, it may start to be happening right now. That said,

John Jantsch (04:20.7)

I’m

Rob Levin (04:39.634)

You know, in a business, when you’re running your own business, you don’t have an HR department, you don’t have a training department, or most companies don’t have a training department. What are you dealing with? You need people that have experience, that have an owner’s mentality, you need that in a small business, you don’t get that, you know, somebody working in a large business rarely has that, you don’t necessarily need that skill set. In fact, you probably don’t want that skill set in a larger business.

And you need somebody you you meet need somebody with at least some experience Those people are hard to find and the thing also thing to remember is like well, you know, you might say well All of these layoffs are happening So these people are now available the skill sets that you need to thrive in a large business are not necessarily the same skill sets That are needed in a small or mid-sized business and the data backs this up You’re probably familiar with NFIB National Federation and it’s been around forever. They do they do a survey or poll. I think it’s

John Jantsch (05:31.79)

Sure.

Rob Levin (05:36.682)

every month. And you’ll routinely see, I think it’s about a third of small and mid-sized businesses cannot fill roles.

John Jantsch (05:45.198)

Thanks

John Jantsch (05:48.504)

So one of the things you talk a lot about and you mentioned it a couple of times, I wonder if you could kind of lay out this idea of the hidden talent crisis that you’ve really been speaking so much about.

Rob Levin (06:02.418)

Yeah, it’s pretty much what we’re talking about. It’s just really hard to find great talent, at least within the US, and we could talk about.

One of the chapters of book is about, you know, expanding your reach, not only expanding it so that you can hire people remotely throughout the U.S. or maybe throughout North America, but also Latin America, even even Asia. So you have that and a lot of companies also where they’re struggling is the other thing that’s changing beyond talent is everything else in business, right? So technology is driving so much change. A.I. is, of course, a great example. I don’t have to tell you marketing has changed how much in the past five years.

John Jantsch (06:34.638)

Yeah, yeah.

Rob Levin (06:43.408)

compared to the past 20 or 30 years, right? And what does this mean for small and mid-sized businesses? It means that they need new capabilities. And their current employees, if they…

John Jantsch (06:45.102)

Sure. Yep.

Rob Levin (06:54.79)

Hopefully there’s an opportunity to upskill them, which is a big part that I think I dedicate about half of a chapter to upskilling your current employees to bring in those new capabilities in your company. if your people are not upskillable, if you will, then you have a serious problem on your hands, especially if it’s hard to hire the people that have those capabilities that you need to bring into your company.

John Jantsch (07:10.894)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:20.558)

Yeah, so there’s a couple of things to unpack there. I would suggest, you know, a lot of people talking about all these jobs going away. In one hand, they are, but I think what they’re doing is they’re shifting to a new set of, you know, capabilities that somebody needs to have. So yeah, some of the routine stuff that you just needed somebody that, you know, that could put in the hours to do the tasks, those are certainly are going to be things that AI does pretty well. And those jobs are going to go away, but

by the same sense, this idea then of who’s making decisions about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s the right decision, what’s not, what’s on brand, what’s not. I I think those people are going to remain humans, but they might either need to be different humans than you have today, or as you said, upskill. So how do you take somebody that you hired essentially to do tasks, because that’s how you saw the role, who now really needs to do something that

you didn’t hire them for, they may be capable of doing, but you didn’t hire them for that. I mean, how do you make that assessment, but then also how do you make that leap?

Rob Levin (08:27.24)

Yeah, so let’s do this in a general sense and then we can drill down to AI because I think AI is very specific.

situation, although AI probably has a lot to do with the new capabilities that a lot of companies, need. So the first thing to do is identify the new capability you need in your company. So, you know, I’m talking to Mr. Marketing here. So, you know, the marketing capabilities have are, are, changing. And the first thing you have to do is recognize, well, what is it that you need? And then the question is, is, you know, do I have somebody on the marketing team that is up skillable? Do they have the.

Do they have the desire to learn something new? Do they have that ability? Do they have the ability to not only learn it, but then bring that capability internal? And here’s the good news about all of this is that

the training, you if it’s a new capability, you’re have to look external for training, which is totally fine. In fact, companies should get really aggressive about this because there’s so much good training out there. Much of it is low cost, if not free. You know, for example, on the marketing side, HubSpot, all of the major CRM and marketing platforms are all offering training, teaching you exactly what needs to be done. Because a lot of this a lot of the changes in marketing, of course, are technology based. So again, identifying what you know, what is

John Jantsch (09:27.224)

Yes.

Rob Levin (09:46.146)

it that I need and then finding the person in your company, giving them the time to do it, obviously paying for any fees that might be there and having an understanding with that person that look, I’m going to invest in the training for you. This is good for you and your career. I do expect that you bring those capabilities in and then when they do that, be prepared to give them a promotion and the raise that they’re probably looking for. Everybody wins. talking about AI, AI in

particular, my personal opinion on this, having done this myself, is that I think every business owner needs to go through a hands on AI course first, you need to really understand what the capabilities of AI are. Before you can start to look at people on your team. All right, I need you to, you know, pick up this AI capability, let’s say with marketing or with operations or, etc. I think the owner needs to have some level of understanding

And in my opinion is that you need to do some hands-on AI training yourself first. I think everybody needs to do that.

John Jantsch (10:53.646)

Well, I think in a lot of ways, what’s holding some people back is it’s going to require, I think, a total mindset shift. You know, there are definitely people who are looking at AI and just saying, oh, we can do that task that used to be done by this person faster, you know, as opposed to like restructure how they even think about their organization. And so I think, I think in some cases, you know, instead of diving into how does this tool work, it’s more how do I structure my entire organization, you know, for a new reality.

Rob Levin (11:23.698)

Right, and that’s why I think.

that the owners AI training that they should go through has to be hands on because then you’ll actually start to see what the when you actually start to build something with AI, a light bulb will go will probably go off in your head and you’ll see what what what AI is capable of. And then we’re using the term at work better now. We’re using the term AI first. We’re now which which what that means is not to use AI to improve an existing workflow. But let’s have let’s have that workflow totally

John Jantsch (11:29.934)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:36.13)

Right.

John Jantsch (11:47.726)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rob Levin (11:56.304)

redesign where AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And of course, that’s going to come with a lot of retraining of our team to go from doing the work to managing the AI agent or what bot or whatever you want to call it that’s going to be doing the work. you know, there’s another fundamental thing that really should happen.

before all of this. And this is a big part of how the talent game has changed a lot over the past 10 years with an emphasis on the past few. So culture in your group that has always been important, it is by far more important than ever. It is so important today. And why is that? Well, number one, I just give you a few data, not data points, but sound bites for this. Number one, the younger generations, and there are, there’s plenty of good workers

John Jantsch (12:30.051)

Yes.

Rob Levin (12:47.082)

those younger generations. Culture matters a lot to them. Culture, meaning, right? So that alone should wake everybody up and say, hey, this isn’t something maybe I focused on in the past, but I’m gonna start focusing on it now. And I dedicate a whole chapter in the book on it.

But also, not only just having a healthy culture, but let’s have a culture of accepting change and figuring out how to harness change as opposed to, you know, kind of push it off to the side, which a lot of people are still doing.

John Jantsch (13:20.366)

So there’s a couple issues I was going to bring culture up. So perfect segue. There’s a couple of things that I know are dear and dear, dear and dear to you because it really impacts the business work better now structure. So when you mentioned culture, you know, a lot of organizations, small businesses today, you know, this used to just be, you know, a foreign thing, but today have fractional just about everything. They bring in contractors to do certain jobs.

Certainly Work Better Now’s entire business model is placing employees who are remote. So how do you manage culture? It’s obviously one way to do it in an organization where everybody’s there, they’re all in the seats, you have the company lunches. I mean, you do a lot of the things that can build some of that. How do you manage that when you have part-time people, you have remote people, you have…

you folks that are from different cultures, you know, for example, as Work Better Now really supports them. I’m curious if you ever get any pushback from that, you know, that very thing.

Rob Levin (14:23.604)

We used to get a little bit, it’s going away rapidly. So in terms of our experience, but what I will also tell you is that in my opinion, and this has worked for us, it worked better now, in my opinion, the starting point is defining your core values, right? So in other words, your core values are essentially like, what do want our culture to be?

John Jantsch (14:40.334)

All right.

Rob Levin (14:45.364)

So for example, some of ours is we put our talent first, we believe in excellence, and so on and so forth. And we recognize on those, we hire based on them. When we have to fire, we fire based on those. So there’s a little bit of clarity there, starting with those core values. Then the next thing you do in a remote environment, and by the way, it doesn’t matter whether somebody’s in three states over or the next continent over, remote’s remote, is we over-communicate.

We over communicate. we have a weekly staff meeting that we have. We have teams. have updates on teams. We reiterate anything that’s important on email. It’s really, really important to over communicate. Then I’ll also add that KPIs in a remote environment, KPIs are important period, but KPIs for every job and several KPIs when possible for every single role in the company is extremely

important because at least now you have something you can measure people on. And then also, this is one that I only talk a little bit about it in the book, but it’s been coming up in conversations a lot more lately, is something as simple as clarity.

You know, I was talking with a business owner last week. can’t remember what the role was that they were discussing in their company. It was actually in my, in one of my CEO peer groups. And I said, you know, the way you’re talking about this, I don’t think you made it very clear. And this is a very polished business owner. I don’t think you made it very clear what your expectations were. And then I don’t think you had the proper check-ins to make sure that this person was on track. So when people are in the same office.

It’s a little easier, right? There’s the water cooler. You just kind of roll your chair back and say, hey, how are we doing with this project? In a remote environment, you need a little bit more structure. That’s also where the communications come into play.

John Jantsch (16:41.72)

Yeah. You you mentioned that KPIs and I think a lot of people don’t realize that those are a two way street as well. You know, I mean, lot of business owners are like, I’m giving you these so that, you know, I know if you’re on track measuring you, but I’ve talked to a lot of employees. They’re like, thank God you gave me these. I have, so I know what I’m supposed to do here. I know how to win. Because I think a lot of times it’s just like, do the work and you know, hope everybody’s happy. And so I think that,

Rob Levin (17:01.748)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (17:11.22)

we sometimes probably underestimate those KPIs are as much for that employee as they are for us.

Rob Levin (17:17.492)

think they’re actually more for the employee. And if anything, when I see a company that doesn’t have KPIs, more often than not, what has happened is that the employer or the manager, whomever it is who has the responsibility of overseeing somebody, has not really figured it out themselves what’s important in its role. So how can you have clarity?

John Jantsch (17:20.13)

More? agree.

John Jantsch (17:36.812)

Right? Right. Right. Yeah.

Rob Levin (17:41.172)

you know, when you yourself don’t know. And it’s not okay to say, I know it when I see it, because it doesn’t work when you’re on the receiving end.

John Jantsch (17:47.438)

Yeah. You know, and one of the beauties of AI quite frankly is that you can go to a chat GPT or whatever tool, you know, even if it hasn’t been trained that much and you can actually ask it what here’s our goal. You here’s what we’re trying to do. What should we be measuring? I mean, instead of trying to sit around and go, okay, I need to write all these job descriptions and KPIs or whatnot, you know, just, just have a conversation with these tools and, and it, you know, it,

may not be tuned 100 % to you because it’s kind of doing the average of what the world does out there, but it may be a great way to start rather than you just saying, don’t know where to start.

Rob Levin (18:26.514)

Yeah. You know, I, what, what, one of the things that frustrates me even pre AI, but certainly now in this AI world is when somebody’s like, well, I’m going to do it this way, as opposed to actually trying to research the best practice, which pre AI you can do based on an internet search now with AI, right. it’s, it’s inexcusable to not have tapped into this wealth of knowledge, right.

John Jantsch (18:42.914)

Sure.

John Jantsch (18:51.554)

Benchmark your industry no matter what the size your business is, right? Yeah, exactly.

Rob Levin (18:54.098)

Yeah. And by the way, you know, yes, absolutely, you should be doing this and for every role and that’ll help you come up with the KPIs and projects and even qualitative ways to assess people and communicate what the role is all about. But let’s also be clear, John, and you and I know this and I hope everybody’s understanding this. You’re only scratching the surface about what with what AI can do for your company by using it as a thought partner, which is what we’re talking about.

John Jantsch (19:21.966)

Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what have you learned since you wrote the book and since you’ve been out there talking to people about the book? I asked that question specifically or maybe because I’ve written books and I just always know that like I’ll have conversations or I’ll go on speaking and somebody will say something to me. I’ll go, dang, I wish I would have put that in the book. That’s great. I’m curious if you had any of those a-ha’s.

Rob Levin (19:45.78)

Well, it’s slightly different. The biggest aha I have is what we were just talking about. the AI chapter of my book was written a little over a year ago. you know, now what’s in there still applies, which what I said a little over a year ago was experiment and encourage everybody to experiment. By now, yeah, you have to do that, by the way, you should do that. Now it’s take a course and figure out.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have in your business and how can AI help you with those challenges, not only as a thought partner, but actually in doing the work? then you have to start to think about…

And if I was writing the book today, this is what would be in it regarding AI is how do you get your team to go from doing the work to managing the AI, refining it, checking the results? Because AI is not going to get it perfect all the time, but it’s going to do a great job in a lot less time. And again, we’re only scratching the surface on what the capabilities are.

John Jantsch (20:52.152)

Well, it’s interesting. mean, you could, you could really point to that as maybe the major mind shift that the companies need to have is to start encouraging employees to, to do just what you said. How can you get AI to do this work? Especially a lot of the routine kind of stuff. But I’m sure you’re hearing from people that are, you know, the employee is like, yeah, work myself out of a job. Great. So I do see that fear, you know, is that a lot of companies are just going into people and saying,

figure out how to use AI to do your job. And I think the implied issue with that is like, then I won’t have a job.

Rob Levin (21:28.884)

Right. Which, which, you know, I guess it’s on us employers to, to manage that. And I can tell you what we’re doing at Work Better Now, which is we’re telling everybody, look, this is the direction we’re going in. We’re going to provide the training and then it’s on the employee really to pick up the ball and to do it. And we told everybody we are not, we have no plans on any layoffs. We are expanding, we’re growing. And with AI, we just hopefully are not going to have to add.

John Jantsch (21:35.939)

Yeah.

Rob Levin (21:58.46)

a lot of headcount, right? And yet, you know, we’ll we should see improved outcomes. And I think this is an opportunity for all of our employees, because we are going to work, I guess you can say kind of like pioneering, you know, company or space in our size. And, you know, we we’re making it very clear, like, look, as long as you figure this out, again, we’re providing the training, you know, your your job is safe. In fact, your job is going to be more important

John Jantsch (22:12.812)

Yes.

Rob Levin (22:28.374)

than ever.

John Jantsch (22:29.944)

Yes, be more productive. Well, Robert, I appreciate you taking the moment to stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast, anywhere you want to invite people to find out more, to connect with you, of course, but then also find out more about your work and find out more about your writing.

Rob Levin (22:42.472)

Yeah, you can just search for New Talent Playbook if you want to pick up a copy of the book or New Talent Playbook Substack or podcast. Just Google that in and it’ll pop right up. And of course, if you are looking for offshore talent, near shore talent in our case, that’s WorkBetterNow.com.

John Jantsch (22:59.286)

Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully you’ve dug out of that snowstorm in New York.

Rob Levin (23:04.936)

Yeah, thanks, John, and great to see you. Thanks for having me on show.