AI is an option, it’s not the option. It’s not that you have to use it—it’s a tool. But the reason why you can’t just prompt ChatGPT to write good enough copy, at least good enough for the kind of quality that we offer, is because of the way that the tool works. It’s a predictive tool.

One of the main best practices in copy is to avoid clichés, and basically ChatGPT is prone to writing cliché copy because, as I said, it’s learning its copywriting skills from the internet. The internet is full of average and clichés and things that you shouldn’t really write if you want to differentiate and cut through the noise and really grab the attention of your audience.

The best way to write great copy using AI is by being a great copywriter. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out.

No Bullshit Talks is a podcast for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs.

There’s too much bullshit out there, especially when it comes to business. This podcast aims to highlight what’s true and what’s not in the world of entrepreneurship, bringing you honest and raw conversations about the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship.

Each week, my guest will be a high-performing entrepreneur, sharing the ups and downs of their journey and helping you prepare for the road ahead, while providing you with actionable insights and absolute gems of knowledge.

Stay tuned as I introduce this week’s guest.

Konrad Sanders is the founder of The Creative Copywriter, a copywriting agency based in London. He runs the agency with his wife named Sam, who is the yin to his yang in business and in life.

Konrad is heavily invested in the world of AI, making sure that his agency stays ahead of the curve, ensuring that AI does not replace his agency’s skills.

I present to you this week’s guest, Konrad Sanders.

So, Konrad, welcome to No Bullshit Talks.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

Good. I feel like I really want to get into a lot of questions. I feel like you’re a bit controversial online as well, so I think we can have a no bullshit conversation.

Not as controversial, but I can be a bit, yeah.

As controversial as me?

As you? Not yet. Not as much. But I do like to go against the grain a little bit when needed.

Yeah, call the bullshit out.

Exactly.

So that’s why I feel like we’re going to have some good chats. But can you introduce yourself for those who don’t know you?

Sure. So, my name’s Konrad Sanders. I run an agency called The Creative Copywriter, and I’ll give you a little spiel. We blend the science of data-steered strategy and psychology with the art of creative copywriting, basically to help brands get their words right at every step of the customer journey.

How long did it take you to write that?

It took a while, yeah. Polished over the years, different versions of it.

Now, my question is, how many people hear that and be like, “Yeah, that sounds amazing,” or how many people does it just go over when they hear it?

I don’t know. I haven’t got the stats on that. I like to think that everyone thinks it’s amazing.

Yeah.

Because I’m curious from a copywriting perspective, how much words really matter. And obviously you’re like, words are everything, it’s your job, and I know they do matter. But the attention span of people these days, I just feel like they’re just not really listening to half the stuff you say.

And so you say all that, and it’s like the most chiseled thing. They don’t understand that you spent probably months creating this perfect little summary of what you guys do, and people are like, “Okay, so you do copy?”

Well, yeah. You know what, it is often an afterthought. So I think we as an agency have always been wrestling with the status quo, with the fact that a lot of marketers, because they speak English, if they did English language at school, think they can write copy and think that that’s okay.

So we’re kind of competing not just with other freelance copywriters, copywriting agencies, etc., but we’re competing with marketers just not using copywriting at all.

But something you mentioned there about spending two months in the boardroom writing this perfect, chiseled copy—yeah, it’s really important to remember that the reality is your target audience will spend two minutes, or even two seconds, reading it.

Yeah.

And we have this thing, a cognitive bias called the Curse of Knowledge, which is where we have all that pre-existing knowledge of who we are, what we do, who we serve, what our platform or product or service is all about. And it’s very hard to actually put yourself in the shoes of your target audience.

So, you know, you might spend two months thinking you’ve crafted this perfect copy, but then it doesn’t hit. It just, like you said, goes over their head.

So that’s why—and I’m not sure if I’m even answering the question here, I’m just diving right in, as I do—that’s why gathering data is really important.

Yeah.

And we’re big believers as an agency in data. So, data-informed strategy and strategy-informed copy.

So what data, though, comes in copy?

Good question.

I just feel like, you know—

Good question.

Well, data. So for us—this really cool thing, I think it’s cool because I’m a copywriting nerd—one of the things we try to glean when offering data… I keep going like this because we’ve got this thing called the TCC Co-System, which I show on compatibility calls, and it’s like research, strategy, and words.

So I talk our audience, or the prospects, through it.

And one thing I like to talk about is trying to understand your target prospects, right? Trying to get inside the mind of your target audience and understanding certain insights.

So usually on the B2B side, it’s these five areas, if I remember them. That will help.

Pains and triggers, that’s one.

Desired benefits, so the end goal.

Perceived barriers, so what kind of objections do they have to purchasing whatever you’re selling?

Comparison factors, so what three to five things are they doing to compare your offering with competitors?

And the buyer journey, so who and what do they trust during that buying cycle, right?

So what we aim to gather for our clients from their customers and prospects is those kind of five areas of buying insight. That’s the sort of data we gather.

So a lot of it is qualitative data, and the cool thing is that whether we’re doing it via surveys or by interviews or even like implicit data collection, like review mining, so just without actually getting them to take part, you can gather things from online reviews.

We aggregate what we call voice of customer data, so VOC data, and that’s the words and phrases that your target customers are using to describe all of those things I mentioned, like their pain points, their desires, their barriers, etc.

And that’s really, really powerful because if you gather voice of customer data, it could either be common words and phrases that are being used across the board. Again, you’ve done a survey and this one word keeps coming up.

Sometimes it’s just one person who has said something that is just so beautifully expressed and so emotive that, as a copywriter, we just go, “That’s going to be the landing page headline.”

Like, that’s come from the mouth of the sort of person we’re trying to persuade, and it’s so powerful. Yoink, let’s use it.

And we call that sticky voice of customer. It’s just so sticky and so powerful, let’s weave it in.

But there’s tons of evidence to show that if you work that voice of customer data into your messaging, into your copy, whether that’s on an ad, a landing page, an email, all across the customer journey, you’re likely to increase your conversion rates.

That’s a lot. Like, you’re just describing so much. Like, there’s data, there’s psychology, there’s everything that goes into what you’re creating. And then there are companies who will just go spend a tenner on like Upwork or Fiverr.com or whatever and get a professional copywriter who’s just typing out some crap in their bedroom.

And it’s just like they don’t realize the difference of how effective it is. Because how do you convince people? Because what you’ve just said is so much work. You’re not just going to sit down and bash out some website copy in the afternoon, which can be done, but obviously will only be a certain level of quality.

But you’re spending so much time researching their industry, their competitors, all the pain points of their customer, and actually delving into what the customer actually wants and why they buy from them, which is so important because at the end of the day, that’s the stuff that’s actually going to generate sales.

But the problem is, I think so many people are in such a rush to get stuff done quickly, and they don’t understand the impact that the copy on their website actually has on their sales. So how do you sit down and convince people that actually it’s worth doing all that stuff? Because it’s the same with everything these days. No one wants to plan, no one wants to do strategy, people just want to do, do, do.

So it’s like, how do you convince your customer that actually by sitting down and doing all of that work, all that prep that goes into it, is going to be worth it rather than just charging them for a few hours of actual copy?

I mean, well, yeah, great question. First of all, just by being ridiculously charming.

That helps.

And persuasive.

No, like the reality is we do very well through our own content marketing and SEO. It’s one of the things that differentiates us as an agency and has kind of put us in a good spot throughout our journey.

So a lot of companies come to us through inbound, right? So first of all, they know that they need copy and creative copy. We’re called The Creative Copywriter, so we know that the intent is there for them to spend some money on professional copywriting.

So there’s an advantage there. It’s not like going up to a company that doesn’t actually you know like think that the art and science of copywriting is worth spending money on, which there are many companies like that, sadly.

When they come to me, like I said, we’re very process-driven. So when they come to us, we start with a compatibility call to make sure we’re the right fit and vice versa, followed by a deliverables deep dive call.

But on that compatibility call, I ask them a bunch of questions. I dig deep and I’ll always ask questions you know at let me look back, they’re often coming for copy, they’re often coming for the words part, right? But I start asking them, okay, do you have a content strategy? Have you got a brand strategy? If I asked you what’s your elevator pitch, your brand values, your brand voice?

You know, I ask them questions, and if they can answer yes, then okay, maybe they don’t need that strategic side of things.

I’ll also ask them, you know what about research? Have you done any customer research? Have you gathered any insights into your audience? What about competitors?

And generally, if they’re smart enough marketers, they will sort of see the value of the questions I’m asking because when you’re actually there and able to talk to someone and go, “Have you done a survey to ask your customers what they’re actually looking for, and how they describe their needs, and how do they describe their pain points?”

And the concept of voice-of-customer language, when you explain it, it’s fairly easy to grasp. It’s like, “Oh right, so you’re taking words that our audience are actually using and then serving it back to them. I can see how that would be powerful.”

So I tend to ask a whole bunch of questions. I’ll go into a specific 40 minutes of asking questions about their needs and digging around. And then I present our TCC system.

So I share my screen, got a little PowerPoint, and it kind of starts with revenue growth. That’s our end goal. I’m going to try and do it with my hands here.

Revenue growth.

And then I say, “We help our clients grow revenue. It’s not about having pretty words on the page. Every word, every sentence serves a purpose, and at the end of that it should really be about growing revenue.”

And then we help our clients grow revenue in three main ways: research, strategy, words. That pops up, and then I go into more and more detail about how we can help in each of those areas.

And I kind of caveat that with a sentence at the beginning saying, “Look, we’re not precious over what we offer. You don’t need to do everything I’m going to show you. We just want to make sure when it comes to the words, the copy, the content, that they’re going to work harder for you, that they’re going to uplift your conversion rates, that they’re going to beat the competition.”

So we believe that, as I said, research should inform strategy, strategy should inform words.

And I kind of open this lovely visual, beautiful thing, and it starts to kind of often get them thinking about where their gaps are.

And yeah, that’s pretty much how I do it on those kinds of calls. Otherwise, it’s coming on podcasts like this and just talking about copy in a deeper way than a lot of people understand it.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s it. I think because so many people do just think it’s words, and that’s the problem. They don’t get that actually so much goes into it.

And the use of one word, some people can just really misread that. And I really like some of your content about punctuation, grammar, and everything, and how you can completely misconstrue something.

But I think also, just from a perspective these days, you work with a whole range of different brands, right? You have some really, really big clients, and you’ve obviously got some smaller clients.

For example, I think most people who work or who watch this podcast, they are SMEs, right? And at the moment, we’re in a cost-of-living crisis right now. They don’t have a lot of money. Most people are struggling, no matter what they put on social media.

Most people are struggling right now.

And it’s like, how do they justify what do they say, how they do justify spending money on copy, even though actually doing all that research that you’ve done could massively increase their ROI and actually help convert sales?

But they need to be convinced that spending that money up front with you is a worthwhile investment.

Like, how would it work for small brands these days? Is it worth redoing all their copy on the website? And how would they do it? And would you be the right agency to do that with?

Yes. Come to us. Everyone should spend money on us.

The answer to that—no.

Look, it’s tough. It’s tough out there. I get it. We’re a small business also.

Right now, there’s lots of conversations around budget, not just with SMEs to be honest. The big brands that are kind of falling on our digital doorstep and our current clients, a lot of whom are big corporates, are finding it even harder to get budgets approved. Yeah.

The kind of like people who hold the purse strings are just tightening them because they don’t know what’s going on.

And sadly, marketing is one of the things that kind of suffers during an economic downturn, even though people like us, I’m sure, would understand and say that you should be investing in marketing because at some point you need to. You’re going to need leads and sales.

And also, there’s a lot of evidence to show that during an economic downturn, like in 2008, the companies that kept their content going, that kept marketing and didn’t just completely pull back on it, they came out on top at the end because there’s going to be a point at which they increased their share of voice and then increased their share of the market.

That doesn’t answer the question.

The question about budgets—look, how do you persuade people that copy is really important? Or how do marketers in SMEs persuade their CFOs, for example?

Conversion rates are a really important thing to look at, and we’re big believers in full funnel. We call it full-funnel word optimization, and we’ve got this thing called Flowfinder, which is like a customer journey mapping tool that we built.

Where you kind of take a step back and we draw out where the traffic’s coming from to a website, what you’re doing to turn that traffic into MQLs, what you’re doing to turn those MQLs into SQLs, what’s happening at the sales front, and what’s happening post-sale.

And you can turn that into a spreadsheet. We’ve got a spreadsheet version of it, and the reality is if you need to persuade the powers that be to invest in something, CFOs, etc., are often looking for numbers, right? They’re not as interested in the fluffy, ley say more creative side of marketing. They want to know, what’s this going to do?

And conversion rate optimization is such, I think, the lowest-hanging fruit in marketing and the most powerful thing you can do. The average conversion rate of a website is like 1 to 2%, which is very low, and copy is such a key ingredient in that because people land, they read something, and they either tune in or they tune off. It resonates or it doesn’t. It’s a yes or no.

And often it’s that six-second window you have, right? When they land, they’ve got 20 other tabs open and they’re like, “Why am I here. No, that’s not for me.” It’s a make-or-break moment.

And just by improving your copy, especially if you do A/B testing, that’s a very smart thing to do rather than just going, “Let’s improve our copy.” Go through a process of A/B testing your current copy against new, better copy, applying best practices, like our 13 lenses and things like that, and then you can prove the worth of it.

Or even you can project and go, “Look, if we’ve got a 1% conversion rate on our site, it’s not such a huge leap to double that.” But doubling that conversion rate could literally double the amount of sales you’re making at the end of it. It’s huge.

So I’d say a spreadsheet exercise can be a way to project the wins, the gains you can get from improving your copy.

And I talked about full funnel. Even micro gains at every step across that journey can compound and have this macro effect on your bottom line.

So even, let’s say, an agency like us came along and looked at Flowfinder, mapped out what you’re doing and what you’re not doing. Even if you’ve got a lot going on, content marketing, all the bits of content at every step of the funnel, even if we increased like you know improved your ad copy by 10%, like a tiny uplift, by making it better, and then improved the landing page copy by 10%, and then the email drip by 10%, and so on and so forth, that can have a huge effect on the bottom line.

Yeah.

That macro gain.

Yeah.

And like I said, it’s all about driving revenue. So there are definitely ways to talk about copy to the powers that be where you’re talking about numbers and ROI, because that’s what it’s about. It’s not just about creativity. The more fluffy things, differentiation and all of that, you need those things, but they’re a means to an end, and that end is driving those numbers and driving more revenue.

Yeah, I think you’ve just said so many brilliant things there, and actually it doesn’t even just relate to copy, it relates to anything in business, sales, and stuff like that.

And actually, I want to revisit some of the stuff you said because you know it so well. You went through it with a ton of jargon in there, which I’m going to break down, because I’m guessing some people won’t even know what MQLs and SQLs are and understand how to qualify leads, right? They don’t really understand all that sort of stuff.

So I want to talk about that because that’s relevant to what you’re trying to say too.

As you said, when you get the website, if your copy is so dialed in on your tone of voice, it should auto-qualify leads.

Take, for example, our website, our agency, or even No Bullshit Talks. I mean, we’re called No Bullshit Talks, for God’s sake. It’s going to automatically qualify leads because people aren’t going to want to be part of No Bullshit Talks if they don’t like that.

Exactly.

Our agency has been called the No Bullshit Agency.

Like you said, as soon as you land on that page, it says No Bullshit Agency. The majority of leads that drop into our inbox, like you said, are inbound. And again, I’m going to revisit that because I think it’s mad that so many agencies don’t focus on SEO.

And that’s and it’s just as you said like if all your leads come that it’s brilliant, so, ours come to us, and the majority of the first emails that we get in are like, “Love the tone of voice on your website. It’s so refreshing,” because it’s very different to how everyone else is.

And then when they jump on a call, it’s usually with me, and they’re like, “Oh my God, you match the tone of voice,” because it is no bullshit . It’s just straight-up fun.

So I’d love to talk about that because you mentioned MQLs, SQLs, and CRO, and obviously they’re all related to each other.

Again, we talked about people giving up marketing budgets, but as you said, that’s not a good strategy even in times of need. Why would you give up your marketing budget? Because you always need a pipeline.

And that’s it and I think there are a lot of SMEs out there who don’t even know what a pipeline is. I was at a dinner the other day and found that no one knew what a pipeline was or what a cash flow forecast was. They didn’t know how to budget.

I was like, “How do you know when you’re going to run out of money?”

“I don’t know. I just run out and the bank account won’t it?”

I was like, it’s just crazy that people are doing business this way now.

But it’s because of how the market’s changed with entrepreneurship. You can just start a business like this. You’ve got tools out there, templates, everything. You’ve got ChatGPT, which obviously we’ll cover later, to write your copy, one-click websites, Canva. You’ve got all these tools to, on the surface of it, look like you’ve got an amazing website, look like you’ve got great copy, look like you’ve got a good social media presence, but none of it actually converts.

And this is what the problem is.

So I want to take a step back a little bit just to talk about sales because even though technically you’re not in sales, you very much are.

Your job is basically glorified sales. That is what you are. Your words are helping people with sales, so you’re very much excellent at sales even though you don’t have that title.

That’s what you do.

And so I want to talk about that because I think every person who’s watching this or listening to this would probably love to have more sales right now. I’m pretty sure everyone would, right?

Me too.

Exactly, exactly.

So I know that it’s a tough time out there, so I’m just thinking from a small business perspective, what can we all do to try and maximize this pipeline?

And we’ve obviously talked about the SQLs and MQLs. Can we go back and talk about that funnel? Also mention TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU again. Can we go back a little bit and break that down? What does this big funnel look like in terms of the steps? Also, what does the pipeline look like and the stages?

And how does a small business go about it? Because even if you are good with this, even if you’ve got a great CRM and you’re on it all the time, there’s still room for improvement, right?

And I just want to talk about how we can improve our pipeline, but also how can we use copy to help improve each step of the funnel.

Yeah, lots to dive into.

No, I’m ready. I’m here for it.

I’m here for it.

I think it’s interesting just to distinguish between almost two core offerings that we offer as an agency. There’s the content marketing piece and the strategy around that, and then there’s copywriting, which is the actual words that you use in all of those bits.

And it’s good because you’re asking me about both, right?

And I think I started banging on about more of the full funnel, which is sort of that content strategy. So I’ll start with that, and then I’ll talk about how important copy is and maybe some tips on how to improve your copy in each of these areas to make sales in the end and revenue.

Exactly. I definitely think we should start with strategy because that’s what you should be starting with, and then people skip that.

Let’s take the TCC Co-System, right? Well, we start with research first. I kind of covered that right.

A simple way to do research and gather data is talk to your customers, right? Literally jump on calls and try to understand what were their pain points before becoming a customer. That’s what you really want to understand.

A lot of surveys are focused around, “What do you think of the brand? Give me a testimonial.” That’s important too, but the really important area, especially in the B2B world to delve into, when it comes to getting inside the mind of your target audience, is what went on in their minds during that sales cycle.

Like, what was the initial thing that triggered them to go, in my case, “You know what? We need a copywriting agency. We need content strategy.”

Something changed, right? That’s the trigger or the pain point. There was a pain point that was keeping them up, like, “Damn it, we’re not making enough sales. We need to find a copywriting agency.”

Sorry, I’m looping back to research if that’s alright. I’m just going to do it.

So you start with that research. Even literally jumping on calls. We call that a buyer interview, we would do it and we’d transcribe it and pull quotes out.

But the main thing is you talk to some customers and maybe some prospects who you didn’t even win because they didn’t convert. They must have had such high barriers that you didn’t manage to convert them, so they’re even more interesting and useful to talk to.

So talk to a few customers and prospects. Understand their pain points, desired benefits, and you know the barriers. Even if they converted, what went on in their head? Why were they thinking, you know what I don’t want to “I’m not sure about NOBS,” or “I’m not sure about The Creative Copywriter”? Right.

They would’ve had objections, so try to understand them. Again, do it in a call, transcribe it. That’s gathering customer research.

You mentioned competitor analysis. That’s something we also do. Look at your competitors your key competitors and reverse engineer what they’re putting out there.

What’s their value proposition? What makes them unique? How are they talking? What’s their tone of voice? What are their values? What’s their sort of story and narrative?

You can even build a table and fill it out. That’s your research piece, and that feeds into your content strategy.

I won’t talk about brand strategy because there are too many things. Let’s talk about content strategy.

This is where the idea of full funnel comes in.

And if you were to twist my arm and say, “Konrad, why does content marketing exist?” I would simply say because most people aren’t ready to buy yet.

That’s a really key thing to remember.

On average, about 97% of your target audience, in all industries, obviously with some variation, are not ready to buy.

That’s really important because most companies think, “Sales messages. Sell, sell, sell, sell, sell.”

But remember I said average website conversion rates are one to two percent at the best the top end of that spectrum you might get ten percent, or even in some e-commerce sites maximum maximum maximum is fifteen percent conversion rate.

Even if they had a perfect offer, perfect copy, perfect design, and perfect UX, they’re still not going to convert more than fifteen percent let say because most people on the site are information gathering. They’re not ready to buy.

And then other than information gatherers you’ve got people out there who are unaware so they’re unaware of the problem they’re not totally feeling the pain point, they’re blissfully unaware.

Then you’ve got problem-aware prospects who are like, “My site’s not converting.”

That’s all they know. Like I’ve got a shitty conversation rate so they’ll type into Google, “How do I solve my conversion issue?” They won’t search for “copywriting agency” because they don’t know we can solve it.

That’s where content marketing comes in.

The whole reason for content marketing is because most people aren’t ready to buy yet.

So we create value-driven content on social media, blogs even if you have one, YouTube videos, repurposed content. It’s educational. It’s positioning you as a thought leader.

And it’s catching people like that 97% of people who aren’t ready to buy yet and getting them into a funnel.

That’s where the full funnel idea comes from.

Imagine they find you on social. You’re building followers.

This podcast is a perfect example.

Exactly.

We’ve just started our own podcast called Funnel Visionaries. Real talk on perfecting the customer journey.

Now I’m plugging it.

Exactly.

You’re catching people when they’re unaware or problem-aware. You’re educating them.

Ideally, they subscribe. That’s where a lead magnet comes in.

A lead magnet tends to be a gated piece of content. An ebook, a white paper, or something more exciting.

We’ve developed something which is it’s not quite out but it might be when this when people watch this we’ve build a bot called Landy GXA. It’s a landing page gap analysis bot.

Instead of saying, “Here’s an ebook,” it’s interactive. You put any URL in and get feedback based on our 13 lenses on what’s missing.

That’s really good.

But the only way they get that is by giving us their name and email address.

Then they become a marketing qualified lead, or an MQL.

Why do you want a name and email address? Because they’re not just a number, they’re not just a stat right so you can start email marketing to them.

And email marketing, done well, is still really good.

This is I’ve been banging about this for ages and our agency so technically , we’ve been focusing on a lot of websites, but we’ve been doing so much content marketing for the last God knows how long, right. We want to focus more on email because like it’s still git 42% ROI is nuts on email marketing and what did you get on social like you said you reach like 2% of a social media reach half the time. And the shelf life of a social media post is nothing whereas people it sits in people’s
inboxes. It’s crazy.

Exactly.

And it’s because email isn’t sexy email right. You don’t get the instant dopamine effect that you get from going viral.

People don’t like it as much, but email is so much better. And you own that email address. They’ve given you permission.So that you can use it.

Social media belongs to the platforms. You don’t own that audience.

I’m really surprised at how many people are still obsessed with social media versus email as a marketing tool.

I think they both have their place, right?

But email is more personal. It’s in their inbox. You’ve got their name. They’ve opted in, because we want to be GDPR compliant.

If you create a really valuable newsletter at your lead magnet, maybe they came from social, read one of your blogs, and then a popup offers them a valuable newsletter maybe they get to use our bot at the same time.

Now they become a Marketing Qualified Lead.

And a lot of things in marketing get a bad reputation because people do them badly. We all get spammed a lot, but we get spammed everywhere, right?

Email still works really, really well, especially if they’ve opted in.

And that’s when you can nurture them.

Yes.

And you can segment them.

You can get smart with what they’ve opted into, what boxes they’ve ticked, what buyer type they are, and start building triggered email drips.

We’ve got a methodology where it’s roughly 75% value and 25% sales.

The temperature starts warming up because by that point they’ve seen your posts, read articles, downloaded content, and we know more about them as well.

Maybe they’ve downloaded something about brand strategy, so we send emails related to brand strategy.

We’ll tell stories, weave case studies in, and eventually add calls to action to warm them up into becoming a sales qualified lead.

I’ll say one more thing because I think marketers often talk about these three things: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU.

I’m laughing because of the ridiculous jargon.

Top of Funnel. Middle of Funnel. Bottom of Funnel.

TOFU is grabbing attention.

MOFU is nurturing and warming people up.

BOFU is convincing and converting.

But there’s another area I think marketers completely miss, and we coined the term.

We call it AFOFU.

After Funnel.

That’s after they become a customer.

People forget about this.

Oh my God, people forget it.

Again, it’s the dopamine thing.

They just want to focus on getting that hit of winning a new client. As soon as they’ve signed a client, they’ve won the client, they’re like, “Okay, that’s done. Let’s move on to another shiny new client.”

But actually, keeping that client, nurturing them, and making sure they’re happy as a client is so much more valuable and also way more cost-effective.

I don’t know, you probably know the stats on this as well, but isn’t it two and a half or twenty-five times more expensive to try and win a new client than it is to retain one? It’s something wild like that.

But people still don’t do it because it’s kind of more fun winning a client. It’s like, “Oh, we won this new client,” whereas retaining a client doesn’t have the same effect.

So AFOFU, I hear first.

Yeah, AFOFU.

Like you said, I think it’s partly because the goalposts often are not in the right place. This is the same for big corporates again, not just SMEs. Often it gets worse the bigger the company gets.

We work with SaaS scaleups and then global companies that are one billion-plus in revenue. Things get so siloed at that stage. Demand gen, lead gen, SEO, sales, they’re all separate.

That’s why we tried to go, “Hold up. Let’s do Flowfinder. Let’s just look at where the customers are coming from and then what you’re doing to sell the next step in the journey.”

I don’t want to just look at demand gen. Great, but let’s flip it around and think about the customer journey and not what we are doing not marketing activities.

If you go back to that North Star I mentioned, which is revenue growth rather than lead count, because often marketing teams have KPIs around generating X amount of leads every month. I’d say that’s the wrong thing to focus on.

If we’re focusing on revenue, then everyone, marketing and sales, should work together and look at how much traffic you’re getting, conversion rates, which I said can be multiple steps because of content marketing, and the third main metric, this is like boiling it down into simple term is customer lifetime value.

Because you want more people walking up and down outside your shop, then you want nice design and copy in the window to get them in and then to the counter to buy.

But ideally, you want them to spend more money and keep coming back.

Maximizing customer lifetime value is something marketers often feel isn’t their remit. They’re like, “That’s not me. We need new leads.”

But the problem is they might be getting dud leads through if they’re just focusing on lead count and saying, “That’s it, my job’s done.”

They might be getting the wrong leads who aren’t converting, so lower conversion rate over here and then sales are over there for some reason. And maybe the people who do convert aren’t spending much money.

The reality is you want the right leads coming through who do convert, and when they convert, they’re the best kind of clients. They spend lots of money and they refer.

That’s the thing in the AFOFU stage. It’s not just about upselling and cross-selling. It’s about turning them into brand advocates and referrers.

We work with HiBob, who are big in the HR tech world, and they’ve got their own version of the AFOFU side of things. They’ve got community groups for current clients where they do peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and run events for them.

They’ve got this whole loyalty and advocacy ecosystem, and it’s organic because clients talk about them, move to new companies, and bring them with them.

It’s a part of the funnel that I think is really important to talk about and remember.

I think that’s where more brands are now using ambassadors and things like that, right? Influencers, affiliates, and all sort of this stuff comes in.

I recently did a talk on brand partnerships and how to win them, and everyone was talking about that.

But I was saying there’s a difference between real brand loyalty and that transactional nature. Lots of affiliates just stick a link up, but they’re not truly advocates of the brand.

Like you said, lots of your customers swear by your services and aren’t doing it for any kickback. They’re doing it because they genuinely believe in your brand.

That’s what you want.

Obviously, if you do have schemes where there are rewards, communities, and things like that, that’s great, but I think you genuinely have to make people feel special.

I don’t think it can be so transactional. Here’s a 20% off code, boom.

If you get invited to insider parties or exclusive experiences, any brand that makes you feel special, you would recommend them, wouldn’t you?

It’s a little bit selfish. Everyone’s selfish in some way. If they make you feel good about yourself, you’re probably going to recommend them.

Think about all your favorite brands. They’re the ones that make you feel really good about yourself.

It’s like who would you recommend to this this and this like you’d recommend like take this place that I’m in right now. I sing their praises.

Swanky place.

Yeah, but I love it. I tell every single person this club is the best club in London. I’m not even joking.

They don’t ask me to say that. I just absolutely love them because every time I come here, like I said, it’s swanky, it’s nice, the staff are lovely, and the quality is great.

I don’t get kickbacks or whatever. I just love it.

When you get treated really well, they look after their members. That’s what I keep saying about members clubs and one reason I started No Bullshit Talks.

I believe members clubs should be all about the members, not just sales.

Most clubs focus on sales, sales, sales. They’re very much top of funnel.

But as soon as people become members, done. There’s no AFOFU.

I think that’s where brand loyalty comes from. The brands that actually look after their people and make them feel special.

Yeah.

And back to the copy question, which was part two of that question.

Words essentially can help at every step of that journey. That’s our pitch.

We can help plan the journey, map it out, look at what you’re doing, and identify the gaps with our Flowfinder tool.

At the end of the day, you need words at every part of that journey. There’s no stage where there’s just an image or a design without words.

And words can be bad or really, really good.

Even just improving bits here and there, whether it’s an ad on social or something at the top of the funnel, matters.

And again, if that copy has been driven from audience insights and understanding their real pain points, not just me as a marketer thinking I know what’s going to work, that’s where the magic is.

What do they say? Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

Too many marketers make assumptions about what messaging is going to work.

I’ve got an idea about what kind of messaging will work in an ad, whether it’s a billboard ad or a pay-per-click ad in social.

The problem is that marketer is a sample size of one. They’re usually not the target audience.

Even if you’ve got ten marketers, that’s still a sample size of ten.

I’m not saying marketers can’t have great ideas, because often they do. But ideally, it’s driven from the first point in our TCC system, which is understanding the audience and what’s going on in their minds so that you can just resonates more.

Because it’s competitive everywhere. Like in social everyone’s fighting for attention.

On LinkedIn, for example and it’s just like so many people just shouting, how do you cut through.

How do you cut through that noise?

It’s by, for us, it’s by marrying the science with the art, which was my spiel earlier.

The science is being data-led, having frameworks, ticking all those boxes. We’ve got something called the 13 lenses.

I probably don’t have time to talk about all of them, but with the creativity as well, the creativity and the differentiation.

You want to do everything you can at each stage, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, and after funnel, to retain people, turn them into referrers, and maximize customer lifetime value.

So copy helps across the entire journey.

So I want to talk to you about AI.

Okay.

Your face drops.

You’re like, “Oh…”

God, I’m trying to catch myself.

Because I hate a lot to do with AI. I obviously think it’s fantastic, and the way that everything’s moving is terrifying but brilliant, right? We can get so much more done.

My gripe, which I’m sure is yours, is that now every man and their dog thinks they can create copy, they can be a graphic designer, they can make websites or whatever because AI has one tool that creates it. Click a button and suddenly something’s been generated with no quality control.

I feel like copy has been hit the hardest.

I have friends who are copywriters, and they’ve been bouncing from job to job over the last few years because they just can’t get jobs. In-house copywriters are being sacked off for ChatGPT.

It’s tough, right?

And I know there are always these quotes out there saying AI won’t replace your jobs, but a person with AI skills will, and all this sort of stuff.

But I want to talk about how AI has affected copywriting, how you guys use it to your advantage, because you’re going to need to otherwise you’re going to be left behind.

And ChatGPT has gotten smarter. Don’t get me wrong. You can train it, and actually some of the stuff it spits out is semi-decent.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t do all of that stuff you’ve already talked about. It doesn’t do the research or strategy pieces either.

So it can do the words, but it doesn’t do the first two sections, right?

Exactly.

Maybe to an extent, but it’s not very good.

Talk to me about your feelings about ChatGPT these days, copy producers, and the state of copywriting in the world of ChatGPT.

I think the best way to answer that question is to share our journey when it comes to AI.

First thing to say is that as an agency, we’ve very much embraced the AI revolution, or the Gen AI revolution, from an early stage.

Even prior to ChatGPT coming along and blowing up the internet and all the fearmongering around the death of copywriting and the end of the world, so prior to that you know GPT technology was already there for a couple of years.

There were certain tools using GPT such as Copy.ai and Jasper, formerly Jarvis, which was formerly Conversion.ai. Initially.

As an agency, we’re quite methodical. We like to plan ahead and future-proof the agency.

We had our collective finger on the pulse of large language model development for that reason. We’d already tested some of those tools and understood that they were okay, but they couldn’t create the kind of quality that we offer as an agency.

Then ChatGPT came along and blew up the internet and woke the world up to how advanced AI technology is.

OpenAI did two very smart things.

First, it was free, which is why it went completely viral.

But also I think in terms of the application the fact that it’s so far reaching and broad. I think that’s something that’s very very unique. One of the things that has really propelled open AI to like the front of this race because prior to that, there were tools that used the technology but within a very specific application.

Like for social media.

Yeah. Exactly.

For doing that specific thing here’s the input here’s a question answer that that’s the input.

Whereas ChatGPT is this much more human-like chatbot that goes back and forth, and the sky’s the limit in terms of use cases.

Anyway what it did when it launched, it really lit a fire under us as an agency to accelerate our embracement of the technology and our stance on it and our perspective on it.

I mean that well the perspective kind of things I went on podcasts like this. I was quite vocal, and still am, on LinkedIn about the strengths and limitations of AI and how to use it and not use it.

Our stance is that its collaborative the now and future of copywriting, at least for I don’t know how many years until there’s AGI when they enslaves the human race, which we won’t talk about right now, our start is that it is to get the best result it’s collaboration between AI and humans.

What we did was launch very quickly an agency-wide use case testing project.

Very structured. Very thorough.

We broke down all our services we offer, buyer interviews, brand DNA workshops, content strategy workshops, homepage copy, writing a blog posts, everything in between.

We put it all into spreadsheets different tabs and we broke them each down into several into different steps that it takes to kind of deliver that piece of work.

Then we created a scoring matrix based on how likely we thought AI could speed up or improve that particular step, and also how much we disliked that particular step.

And I think that’s a really important thing to remember is likability.

Because in the end of the day I’ve got an agency of very talented team members, and there’s no point argumenting a process to speed it up by 20% if that particular task is the reason they love being a copywriter. Right?

Because AI is an option. It’s not the option.

It’s not that you have to use it. It’s a tool.

It’s automation is very sophisticated automation.

We’ve been automating tasks since the Industrial Revolution and especially over the last thirty years.

Generative AI is just a much more sophisticated way of automating certain task which they call task encroachment so it is encroaching on a newer tasks that we perhaps thought technology couldn’t.

So we ran this big use case testing project.

The whole team involved. There was a bit of change management that we had to sort of think about, because I think and I maybe rushed it a bit too fast without really helping the team understand why we were embracing AI and naturally there was fear there. Right? There was natural fears from copywriters going well hang on what
“Are you replacing us? Are we just going to churn out AI copy?”

We had to sort of educate the team and go no this is what we believe in, we believe it’s a collaboration, we believe that what we need to be doing in this age is
embracing the technology and understanding how we can use it in a right way and how not to use it.

A year later, we basically like we really understood the strengths and limitations.

I’ll pause there and I’ll talk about what some of those are because
I think that’s really important.

I think the reality is yes, lots of marketers and non-marketers are just churning out content and copy just with AI a simple prompt and the problem with that is that and the reason why we don’t use it just to write a you know write the copy for our clients if it was good enough, we’d have pivoted as an agency at the end of the day.

I’m a businessman and that’s what we would have done I wouldn’t have just said no we must stick to the old ways.

If it could compete with human copywriters, then we’d be using it in that way.

But the reason why you can’t just prompt ChatGPT to write good enough copy at least good enough for the kind of quality that we offer is
because the way the tool works is predictive.

Now, I’m going to describe this in simple terms because I’m not like you know an AI developer. So, anyone listening might be like what’s he talking about but simplistically the way it works is that it chooses the next word based on like how likely it is that the next word would be in the sentence. So kind of like based on your prompt and also what it’s learned from which is billion of billions of data points out there.

You see this on predictive text in your phone right and you see it on your phone.

Exactly like predictive text on your phone. So it’s predictive it’s based on kind of how likely that word is going to come with some variability that variability is needed in order to make it seem more human and to give different results all the time even if it was a even if it most likely it would just give everyone exactly the same content.

So there’s variability in there but the reason why I’m saying all this is because CHATGPT has learned its copywriting skills from the internet. right. Billions of day at point out there on the internet is mostly average and at best.

At best.

And crappy copy.

Exactly.

Because of the reasons we said before marketers being lazy, etc..

One of the main sort of practices in copy is to avoid clichés. Clichés don’t work because people just go “I’ve read that before” you know.

Basically ChatGPT is prone to writing clichés copy because of the reasons. As I said it’s prone, it learned its copywriting skills from the internet, and the internet is full of average and cliches and things you shouldn’t write if you want to differentiate cut through the noise and really grab the attention of your audience.

So, it’s prone to writing cliche copy and that’s why you can see in LinkedIn. Mostly you can see when someone’s just prompted and they created it.

It’s kind of vague.

Often doesn’t really say much.

There’s no authenticity or personal anecdotes and actual true experience.

There are other things like too many emojis and like clichéd phrases. Which again we tried to avoid.

So, it’s a shortcut and lazy marketers will use it and are using it. But like I said at the beginning
lazy marketers were already not using copywriters and they were writing themselves so we were always kind of against that lazy marketer in a sense I say lazy but also marketers who just maybe you’re not lazy that’s probably let me pull that back.

Marketers who don’t understand the importance and power of like really good copy and the effect of really good copy and don’t know what they’re looking for so someone wrote this comment one of my LinkedIn post a year ago and I can’t remember who it is so I kind of stolen the quote for myself and I apologize to this person but they said “the best way to write great copy using AI is by being a great copywriter otherwise , garbage in, garbage out.”

Yes.

That’s the main point is.

It’s the same when it comes to design.

The reality is it’s a tool it’s very sophisticated, it’s definitely approaching on certain tasks but it has strengths and limitations.

You need to understand where those strengths and limitations are and if you’re using it you need to know what the output should be otherwise you’re not going to get a great copy.

That’s how I feel about Canva.

Yeah.

It’s the same thing with design because I’ve been saying this again, Canva it’s been around for years and is absolutely fantastic tool but back when it first came out pre-chatgpt and everything I hated it it was like my most loaded tool because all these clients came to me same way they probably come to you now and well I could just plug that chatgpt and it’s I don’t need to pay you for it I could just do that in canva that’s what they say, and I don’t need to pay you to do graphic design work. I’m like, you don’t have any branding foundational knowledge at all. You’re just basically taking templates and changing pictures, and it looks awful. There’s no consistency of quality, tone, anything. There’s no element of branding. But they would do this, and they could turn out loads of stuff, and they felt like graphic designers. It was really interesting.

But you know, you can create amazing stuff on Canva, and Canva is a fantastic tool. Even now at our agency, good designers have been using Canva. I’ve been using Canva myself for certain things. It’s actually quicker than using Adobe, but it would look great if I do it because I have how many years of foundational knowledge of graphic design. I can put it in there.

Like you said, to make good copy from ChatGPT, be a good copywriter. To make great designs on Canva, be a good designer in the first place. It’s not the tool. It’s actually the human getting the knowledge, the experience, the expertise, the eye.

Yeah, it’s so true.

My dad was a graphic designer and an illustrator, right? He used to draw logos by hand, literally, and then draw a large logo, scan it in, and downsize it. He was a successful graphic designer. Then home computers came along and the Photoshop suite, Macs, and he had a Mac, but he was just terrible with technology. He was slow to the uptake. He wasn’t interested and just wasn’t naturally good with technology.

So he pivoted. He just couldn’t keep up. But the reality was, you know, that was a tool. It’s not that anyone can be a graphic designer because they’ve got Photoshop. You still need the eye, the experience, and understand what you’re aiming to achieve.

And it’s the same with using ChatGPT to create copy and content that is good enough. Again, back to the point, good enough to convert, good enough to actually cut through the noise, good enough to grip people’s attention, good enough to use the psychology needed to influence them.

There’s so much that goes into it, from research, strategy, and competitor analysis to cognitive biases. ChatGPT doesn’t include all of that. It usually just gets the go-to cliché stuff.

However, as you said, a copywriter using ChatGPT or other tools in the right way, I think, is the future.

So this now, I’ll go back to my story.

Where we got to this year was, you know, we almost partnered. We talked to AI21 Labs, so they have their own large language model. We almost kind of partnered with them. We said, do we build our own? There’s Writer, which is a tool that’s again, they’ve got their own LLM and is very much focused on business writing. So again, we thought, oh maybe we become like a reseller and a partner, much like the HubSpot agencies back in the day.

And during this journey, one of the things we wrestled with was the pace of change, which is really interesting because you kind of think we need to jump on this wave, but then you don’t want to invest loads of time, money and resources if suddenly another tool surpasses that one and that’s no longer the most powerful one.

Look what happened to the metaverse.

Invested in billions.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, so luckily I’ve got Nitsan as a life and business partner and she’s very good at planning these things and kind of prioritizing and making us go at the right speed. And she’s very good at making us go fast but also being smart about those decisions.

What we ended up doing was basically ChatGPT. We felt was actually the best tool because of its flexibility and because they then allowed you to build GPTs, right. So we’ve got ChatGPT Teams. We ended up building a growing, and still building, a growing family of bots or assistants. They’re not really bots. They’re a growing family of GPT assistants. They’ve each got their own name, profile pic, personality, tone of voice and most importantly they serve a different function within the agency.

I’ll give you some examples. So we’ve built a bot, or not really a bot, Echo. It’s called Echo. He helps with that voice of customer language aggregating that I mentioned. So we used to do that kind of manually and now he’s very good at review mining, whipping through all these reviews or survey data, pulling out the customer voice of customer language, pulling it into a table. We’ve trained him to do a certain task much like an employee.

We’ve got Lensy who’s been trained on our 13 lenses framework. She will score our copy and content and see if we’ve missed anything before we send it over to a client.

You still need a human in the loop. That’s really important with Lensy, with Echo, with all of them. And that’s because of the fact that they are by nature hallucinatory. They hallucinate and it comes back to that variability thing. Generative AI hallucinates. It’s kind of better for softer things rather than hard data, but it’s still allowing us to speed up and augment quite a lot of different tasks and things, especially the bits we don’t like, like doing a handover.

So, you know, I’m in charge of the biz dev side of things, getting the client in, and then my colleague Becky and I have to create a really thorough handover to give to the client services team. That’s sort of administrative, but you have to think. It’s like, right, from emails pull the right information in, and now we just pop the transcripts in.

And then we’ve got Handy. We built Handy last week, literally. Handy. He’s carrying a little briefing sheet and he’s got big hands. They’re all like Pixar-style by the way. And he fills out the table for us and then we just look through and spot the gaps and fill in the gaps. So again, it halves the amount of time it takes to do that task, which is brilliant because it means we can focus on other things, more creative things.

So yeah, I think it’s supplementary or complementary tools at the moment rather than a replacing tool. It’s not replacing, but again there are still lots of people using it, I’d say not quite in the right way and sort of replacing copywriters or trying to.

And naturally freelancers, I’m sure, it’s made it difficult for a lot of freelancers, especially newbies getting into the industry where maybe the content they’re creating they would charge less for and perhaps the companies that they’d be working for can get quality, sort of similar standard with ChatGPT.

Well I think that’s it. I think that pushes them to work on their positioning and their offering because if they are producing something that AI can compete with, they’re not producing enough.

And like you’ve said, you’ve got all of this stuff. I’m still doing it. I’ve been totally sold on this model because I think there’s so much there that you guys offer that only humans can. And also when people hire an expert, they’re not hiring what you can do, they’re hiring your years of expertise and knowledge and opinions and being able to point things out and notice things that engines can’t do.

I think the problem is with a lot of freelance copywriters that they only write words. That’s it. They’ll be like, oh right, I’ll write a blog post for 100 quid or whatever. You train the GPT enough times, you can actually do that. And like you said, you’ve trained your own and there are companies out there as well who are selling these bots as a thing. I’m not even going to mention their name because they’re awful and they’re just reselling them and they’re making a load of money from it. But essentially the same thing, the same GPTs that they’ve created for different roles. It’s like, oh you’ve got a social media manager, you’ve got a little copywriter.

And I do find it fascinating that you’ve done that yourself. Just out of curiosity, how long has it taken you to create each bot?

So we actually had a training session last week with Nitsan who was basically the bot trainer within the company. This week she trained all of us on how to build our own bots and we all built a bot within this hour-and-a-half session.

Oh so it only took you an hour and a half each?

Yeah, but we built, well that was, it took half an hour within an hour and a half because first she was like this is what to do, what not to do. However, we specifically chose bots that would be quite easy to build. It was more for training purposes and two were very valuable. That’s how we built Handy.

Then there were some of the team members who made funny ones. One was called Concuss and it’s just the bot that takes the piss out of me.

Nice.

Yeah, whatever they want, it just roasts me.

A bot that roasts Konrad. That’s put me in my place.

Yeah, but it was, you know, I was really…

And then we’ve got a bot, I wish I could remember her name, that basically gives anyone a drag name. So we have a little formula. You tell the bot about the person, the team member, give them some information and then she’ll create a drag name for you.

But it was really fun because we were split into teams and there were four of us and two kind of made valuable ones that served a certain business function and two made creative ones. But I’m really happy that we did the creative ones because there’s excitement there. It shows that like, look, this is the future. Let’s get used to it.

And back to your point about the value proposition of individuals and future-proofing their careers, one thing that we did in this journey and are continuing to do is with our in-house writers. I believe all of them now run brand DNA strategy sessions. Previously it was more like strategists and copywriters. We’re pushing our copywriters to be more strategic as well, to be strategic copywriters, just because we think with the improvement, it is improving, right, we believe that will kind of future-proof their careers.

If they’re more of this journey rather than just that bit, right, research, putting it all together and then using AI where the strengths are, using it for its strengths, then that will be better for them and better for us as an agency.

But yeah, I think so. My word of advice to freelancers is definitely just learn the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT and other tools for yourself.

One thing we found was that it’s actually quite personal. So while we created this big spreadsheet with all of our services broken down into steps and the scoring matrix for agency-wide processes, one thing we found was that actually often it came down to the individual preferences of each person and each writer.

You know, I sometimes struggle when coming up with analogies and I know that’s important, or a quick metaphor, so I’ll use ChatGPT to kind of give me a few ideas and then use it as a sparring partner. For other writers that might be the easiest thing, it just comes to them. But then maybe they want help with wrapping a post up or something.

So I just encourage everyone to use it as much as possible because that is the future.

Do you know what I love about all the things you’ve just been talking about this whole episode? It’s made me just think how, and I’ve interviewed a lot of entrepreneurs and I speak to entrepreneurs on a daily basis and how they run their company, and what I notice about your team and what you guys do is you invest a lot of time and energy into a bigger picture, which I don’t see many people doing.

You’re very much long-term vision thinkers, which is the right thing for business, but so many companies don’t do it. So what you’ve been talking about is you’ve been thinking, okay AI could be a threat, but actually you’ve dedicated hours and hours between your team to create your own bots, study it, do case studies, like really, really investigate how it could work to your benefit.

So you’re investing that time upfront, which most people say I don’t have the time for, that’s non-billable hours. But then you’re shaving off hours and hours and hours in the future because it’s a longer-term vision. Or things like creating your 13 lenses, creating different playbooks, creating your own IP. You’ve got all of those things which would have taken weeks, months, ages to come up with these things, but now you’ve got this powerful tool that will help accelerate everything in the future.

But most businesses don’t do that. They’re only thinking short-term. They’re only thinking how can we cook the shortcut, how can we win a quick client today, and they don’t think about the longer term. Like how have you guys done that? Because that’s not that common. Like I said, I rarely see it, but it’s so the right thing to do. It’s that delayed gratification which is so hard for everything. It’s like why people would find it difficult to go on diets and go to the gym because they don’t see an instant result, but they slim down. Like how have you guys managed to do that?

We’re just the best, what can I say?

Naturally, just born that way.

No, um, I don’t know, it’s a big question. There’s definitely, look, I got lucky that Nitsan, my partner in life and crime, joined the agency in 2017. We’ve got different brains but they really complement each other because I’m, you know if you know the EOS system or any, I’m the visionary, she’s the integrator very much so, like couldn’t be more like that.

And so I’d argue that if she hadn’t joined I’d probably have all of these ideas and then they’re not integrated, they’re not implemented. But I’m brilliant. I mean, she’s really led on the AI side of things, but you know the frameworks, the 13 lenses, we’ve got Flow Finder, we’ve got Vocalizer, that’s the kind of stuff I come up with usually when I’m on a long plane journey and I’m not on the internet. I’m like PowerPoint, oh this, you know, come up with it.

But then I think the way that it actually manifests and integrates into the business in a way that’s not just the loose idea that a visionary has and is jotted down on Evernote somewhere is because, and I think this is our main differentiator as an agency, is because of process. And not just process itself, but a commitment to continually perfecting processes.

So we read *Gemba Kaizen* years ago, which I won’t go into too deep, but it’s basically the Japanese business management philosophy which after the Second World War Toyota kind of implemented when they were trying to catch up with Ford and see what was going on.

I am going to go into it, why not? What was Ford not doing right? What can we learn from them?

They observed Ford and they saw these conveyor belts where people would stand there and they weren’t infused and they’re watching the clock, and someone would attach the wheel and screw it on and then it would move along.

And what would happen is there would be a mistake, an error, right, but the whole car would get built and they’d send it all the way back to get fixed. Super inefficient.

And the whole idea of Gemba Kaizen is this pursuit of perfection. And the manager in the factory would walk down into the Kaizen and put red tape on any mistakes, any mess, any error.

Anyway, long story short, we took some elements of that and some elements from EOS and we built it into a business management system for us.

And the one thing that really sticks out, we have this thing called an oopsy thread. So in our Slack channel, what it is, is whenever there’s a hiccup, an error, something not quite right, like, oh that client was confused by that question in our discovery sheet, we pop it in there in the oopsy thread.

Never if it’s pointing at someone, that’s not the idea. We’re pointing fingers at the process. So we won’t say, oh this person fucked up, obviously not. It’s more like this was misunderstood, this didn’t quite work.

And then every two weeks we have our Level 10 meeting, which is an EOS thing. Then we do the usual EOS stuff, but we basically have a table where we look at each of those oopsies.

What was the root of the oopsy? How can we preempt it for next time? And then how can we work it into a process, into our system of processes, which is hand-built, and who’s going to take care of it? So two weeks later it’s fixed.

If it’s too long, if it’s something bigger, it goes into our rocks, so it’s a quarterly thing.

And the reason why I went off on a tangent about that is because I think that system allows us to do all these things. You know, like ah there’s an issue with this or that, it’s like oh maybe there could be a methodology for that, let’s build it.

And then right, that’s too big to be done in two weeks, it goes into a rock, I’ll take that on as my rock.

So it’s like you’re catching everything and your commitment to continuously improving. You can never be perfect, but if you try to be perfect and have a system for perfecting things or getting as close to it as possible, you can really thrive as a business.

And the other thing, last point on that, is that I think that goes hand in hand with culture.

Because lots of agencies and companies say we’ve got brilliant culture, you know, we’ve got a ping pong table or whatever, it’s fun, we drink beers on a Friday. But I know that they have bad work-life balance because we work with other agencies and they’re messaging us at midnight, etc.

But because we’ve got such good processes and we point fingers at the process, it fosters a good work-life balance and culture because it allows people to not overwork because it’s very, very process-driven.

So I’m not sure how I went down that rabbit hole, but I think hopefully that answers your question.

No, but I really like it. I like everything you’re saying. I really like about that. And I think that we follow EOS, as you know, and I really, really rate the system.

I’m going to put the links to *Traction* and everything in the show notes. I think it’s such a good, especially if you’re a business who’s starting out, definitely read it just as a little base to have.

And even just being able to have your values and just know where you stand. Even if you’re a small business, having those little bits of process in place, like you said, weekly meetings, nipping the problems in the bud very quickly so you’re not letting them drag on.

I really like the People Analyzer tool, for example, and you can see how you’re getting on and it’s great.

I think like you said, if there’s problems, if you have good foundations in terms of a system…

then you can kind of work it back to it because you know what the baseline is.

So I do think that’s really important. And I think that integrative role is so necessary. Like I’m a massive Visionary and like a lot of the time things just won’t get done because I’m just like my God let’s do this let’s do this and then the next day I’ll have another yeah then have another ten ideas and nothing ever gets done because I don’t have that integrator in my team yet and I think it’s such a powerful role and like you said you’ve gotten it sorted for that and I really wish I had that so you know is any integrator out there you think come speak to me because I desperately need one.

And that’s what is you know and I just want to touch on that at the end because I feel like you two are such a great team and like like you said you’re super lucky but she’s also your partner like you said in life and you know that can’t be easy because I know full well what it’s like running a business and it is your life and then how do you separate separate because you said that other agencies having bad work life balance. I think agency world is bad for that but how do on Earth do you guys as a couple in life but as co-business owners actually have a work life balance?

How do you separate that because like you know I know that I’m sitting there like you know 11:30 at night just before I’m going to bed oh got to do this gotta remember to do this and imagine you’re doing that and I next oh have you done this paperwork or whatever like how do you separate that?

Well yeah good question and also like looping back to my point about work life balance our team have a great work life balance. I’d say that mine mine mine historically hasn’t been great. It’s a lot better than it was years ago. I think I had more stamina years ago. Now I complain if it’s just going over a few hours but you know I’m more I’m tired but um but yeah you know as a business owner it is harder even you’ve got great you know we look after our teams it is harder to create that line between you know work and life and yes um working with your partner has pros and cons naturally.

Like the first week we worked together we were just fighting the whole time first first couple of weeks.

Yeah well she when she joined she was like why is it so chaotic. I said babe that’s just agency life but the reality was there was like a slither of truth in what I was saying but it was also because I didn’t have an integrator and I was like process yeah no processes going around putting out fires right being good at putting out fires but not preempting them with like really good process.

So that’s one again I got very lucky because as a small business an integrator a good integrator is it’s not a cheap sort of role to hire for like someone you can trust to be senior leader. Nitsan is my wife and she joined and then she was a project manager first and then quickly like realized right she grew to being managing director. I’m CEO and it just really worked.

So first of all in terms of how we work together I think at a certain point after the first few months we sort of understood our lanes and we kind of around that time I’d say or a year in we read Get a Grip right. We learned about the EOS system. We were like oh both of us should be here we’re both needed we’re both important right I’m the Visionary or the integrator so we kind of learned about that and how to again stick to our lanes have our areas of responsibility. We’ve got like veto power over certain things so you know I’m branding marketing sales and we’ll naturally clash a bit and argue and not in front of the team but have like good conversations in front of the team and we kind of know who’s in charge of what so that’s really good.

In terms of work life balance we yeah it’s always been a struggle to like not talk about work all the time because that’s our life. It’s like our team members are like our family right we don’t have kids they’re like our family. We’ve made rules in the past about not talking about work at certain points but then we made a rule of no let’s just not talk about negative things because sometimes you want to you know like I guess regular couples will talk about work as a huge part of your life so they’ll vent or they’ll talk about exciting things but the thing is like when you start talking about something that’s good it can quickly unravel into like maybe a negative part of work.

So I don’t know if I have the answer for it other than yeah try to put boundaries in place which we’ve done and we’re better at but that goes up and down depending on you know like the economy and how tough things are or how great things are.

So but I think we work really really well together and I’m not sure you know like there is a bit of a it is difficult with work life balance but we complement each other for sure and like I definitely couldn’t have got this far with the agency without her yeah and vice versa so I got lucky.

We’re still working great together hopefully our team think we’re good leaders. We never let any like personal things spill over so we’re very professional. Sometimes work things spill into our personal lives but we don’t let it go the other way.

Yeah.

So yeah.

I guess the only thing I would ask around that though is for couples who maybe want to start business together because I feel like entrepreneurship is really getting big there like almost everyone wants to start their own thing whether it’s a side hustle create a product together or anything.

Like I said you don’t have the answers per se but if you had to start again like right now a new business you know Creative Copywriter’s gone and you’re starting something new like would you and Nitsan go into business again together? Like would you think that is a good perfect compliment or could you just be like nah done?

Yeah I think so I think so. I think we’re a really good team and I think that you know let’s say further down the line in the future or in a hypothetical situation if we didn’t have the Creative Copywriter I think like I would know now that I would lean on Nitsan for certain things whereas at the beginning I didn’t. I was a bit of a like you know Billy big bollocks thinking like I know everything you know starting out entrepreneur.

I was spreading myself way too thin when I was starting TCC. There was a time when I was a co-founder of four other businesses with other people just because you know shiny objects and people like oh do you want to do this do you want to do that and I’ve got ADHD which I didn’t know at the time. I was just like yeah and I didn’t know about time. Time is a weird concept for me like how you actually allocate it be realistic with it.

And so I really know especially after being aware of ADHD and I’ve got a coach as well and I really understand myself a lot more now. So I know where my weaknesses are and I know how to kind of get into a place where I’m really playing to my strengths requires integration yeah and whether that’s with Nitsan or with like somebody else my coach or other people I know that if I were to start a new business um yeah I’d seek that support from the beginning.

And so if you know back I guess any mistakes that I made or would I change anything if I was starting TCC or the Creative Copywriter over again it would be to bring Nitsan or a Nitsan in earlier but I didn’t understand that at the time. You don’t know what you don’t know right.

Yeah yeah I think the same. I think that’s exactly what I need right now and I know that I’m very similar right. I want to do a million things and I’ve always felt like I can do a million things. I’m actually trying to do a million things and I don’t have any time which is really silly but I also love doing all those things. I’m just taking on stuff I don’t want to do. It’s just I do have passions everywhere but if I had an integrator I’d be so much happier.

I think it’s understanding your strengths and your weaknesses and finding people that complement you but you only learn this the hard way right so it’s tough.

I think it’s also important when you are sort of like us entrepreneurial whether you’ve got ADHD or not it is important to follow those passions right because while I don’t think the Creative Copywriter would have got to where we are now without Nitsan she admits that she would never have started a business and taken that risk and gone for that right.

So you need the person that’s the risk taker that’s hungry that follows that passion because that passion drives you to break boundaries and do certain things. Right now we’ve got loads of structure because of the processes which is really important for me but I also need that space for following those passions.

And even like I think I’ve said to you before or even on LinkedIn or both Saturday right which is a day when I’m not supposed to be working and I don’t have structure I don’t have meetings in place that’s when all my ideas just come in like a flurry in the morning and I allow that. It’s like my ADHD brain just without being confined within the walls of the structure but cool stuff comes up. There’s a load of crap I’ve got like thousands of Evernote notes some that I’ll never revisit of just like ideas but then there are things that just come into my brain which like right that’s the kind of creativity that makes me who I am and also sometimes is just brilliant and I’ll write it and we’ll then address it.

And then I’ll go into the right meeting have the right conversation with the right people and then a project manager or Nitsan will go okay let’s make this a rock yeah or like that’s a harebrained idea we don’t have time for that come on let’s shut it down you know.

But I allow that. It’s good to have that space and I know with your retreats right having that space to just let those ideas come and to work you know kind of on the business not in it and that’s really really crucial as well for people like us.

Yeah and that’s exactly why I created that retreat because I do feel like that. I feel like as a Founder we don’t feel we can justify doing a whole week of wellness only but actually we do want to still work on our business so actually having the combo of actually we are working on a business but actually have that space.

And I think that like you said on Saturday all the ideas are coming to your head because you’re relaxed and you don’t have to do all these things. For me it’s downstairs in the spa in the infinity pool and I’m just like obviously not got my phone and I’m just lying there and suddenly I’m like oh my God great idea great idea great idea and it just comes to me.

And I think that you need that and like you said you need someone to kind of help you with that. Mine is also walking the dog as well. I’ve started doing so probably is a bit crazy some people look at me funny but on the phone I leave voice notes to myself not on WhatsApp. I’ve seen people do that but I just create like a voice recording and I talk through my thoughts and it really sounds mental but it just talks me through my ideas. I’m like oh I could do this I could do this and actually saying them out loud almost helps you process some of the thoughts and then I digest them myself later while I’m actually in a different place and I’m focusing give them to someone else.

And again like you know I think an integrator I need a Nitsan in my life to be able to be like that’s stupid.

No but it’s great that you know recording things is the first step. Like when I got Evernote years ago because I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I think I need to write down and I’ve got Evernote there.

But you know what going full circle looping back to copy a little copywriting tip is to actually read your copy out loud because you’re experiencing it in a different way. You know you write your copy you reread it too many times and kind of lose sight of you know what’s missing and what’s not. If you read it out loud you can kind of get the flow and understand the flow and yeah so I just thought we could go full circle.

Exactly and you’re reading it also from the customer’s viewpoint because they’re reading it and I love that.

Oh I love that we just ended on a great actual copywriting tip as well so thank you.

And also I plugged your retreat.

Oh you did my retreat thank you. You should have done it before the retreat but it’s okay we’ll do it for the next one.

Okay yeah it’s right the next one we’ll come back soon.

So thank you but yeah that was honestly such a good episode. I feel like I learned loads. I’m definitely going to have to break down a lot of that stuff and put in the show notes because I think there’s a lot. So I’ll link to all your different things like I said the 13 lenses which we didn’t cover but people can go have a gander on your website and stuff like that.

But thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Enjoyed it.

Enjoyed myself thanks.

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