How To Use AI To Grow Your Business — Without Ever Putting People Second

Intro  0:00

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast, where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling, and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms, let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:30

Hello, I’m Heather Bennett, your host for the Growth + Exit podcast, the podcast featuring middle market owners and CEOs talking about founding, growing, scaling, and exiting their businesses on their own terms. Past guests include Allison Cummins, founder and CEO of Blue Outcomes, Philip de Souza, founder of Aurora and podcast host of Let’s Talk About (Secur) IT, and Scott Markman, the founder and president of Monogram Group. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned executives who help owners of privately held companies grow, de-risk, and exit their businesses successfully. Newport is a winner of the prestigious Inc. magazine Power Partner Awards, a list of elite B2B companies from across the globe. To see the entire list or learn more, go to inc.com/power-partner-awards To learn more about Newport, please visit us at Newport llc.com or of course, find us on LinkedIn. Before introducing today’s guest, I would like to thank the best-selling author and sales hall of famer D Fish, David J.P. Fisher, for introducing me to my guest. You can find him on LinkedIn. Today’s guest is Andy Crestodina. Andy is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media, one of the most well-respected web design and digital strategy firms in the country. Andy is a sought-after keynote speaker and a trusted voice in the worlds of AI, digital marketing, content strategy, and analytics. Andy has spent more than two decades helping founders and business leaders understand how to turn their digital presence into a true growth engine for the rest of, for founders navigating growth, differentiation, and the evolving digital landscape. Andy offers a grounded, practical perspective that’s rooted in real-world execution. For the rest of us, Andy is my go-to starting point for new and wonderful ways to use AI and tech to make work extraordinary. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Crestodina  2:47

Thank you for having me, Bennett. I was thrilled to get the invite. Glad to be here.

Heather Bennett  2:52

Awesome. So let’s get right to it. How did Orbit Media start? I want to hear the origin story directly from you.

Andy Crestodina  3:00

It’s very mundane, and kind of silly in hindsight. It was the late 90s, and I was an IT recruiter, and I found it a bit unsatisfying because I didn’t get to make stuff, like I was helping tech people change jobs, and they, they were building things, I was building nothing, and I wanted to be creative, I wanted to be able to point at something and say I did that, and the internet, of course, was an exciting space, and still is, and the problem for me was that I did not have any skills or experience or portfolio to get to do what I wanted to do, which was web design, and then in it became obvious that I could more easily create a company than find a job, so that’s what I did, or rather I joined a tiny company that had just started. My friend from high school and roommate from college, Barrett Lombardo, he and I, he had already started a firm, and I joined. There was another partner, and it was misalignment. It didn’t work out, so that lasted less than a year. And then we just shut that down, and Barrett and I restarted on our own, using the old name we had from our personal projects in the late 90s. And so Orbit Media Studios was reborn as a digital agency focused on websites, and I’ve been doing it ever since. That’s 25 years.

Heather Bennett  4:22

Wow, and, and I think what’s interesting about that is the way you started the story, talking about there wasn’t a job out there for you, so why not start a company? I kind of feel that is where we’re at in the world right now, for a lot of people who are, for, who are starting out with, you know, the lack of entry-level jobs. What, what do you, what do you think you would tell some of those students coming right out of school about the process, and because it is a very real option nowadays.

Andy Crestodina  4:56

Sure, yeah. Well, a lot of the anxiety is about. A labor market disruption because of AI, and my number one recommendation for learning how to live in a world with AI is to talk to AI. It is an incredible career counselor, and I find that a lot of the early career people I meet haven’t done this yet. Sit down and have at least a half hour conversation with your favorite model, AI, LLM, whatever, about your skills, your passion, your position in life, what you want to do, what you don’t want to do, the job market, industry trends, and it can do wonderful things to help you position yourself in this market, and if you tell it that you’re open to starting something new, I think that just expands your options. There are a lot of companies that see real risk in adding an FTE, obviously, that onboarding cost, the risk of it not working out, the total compensation compared to contractor, so you may find that there are some of the recommendations are just to just jump in anywhere you can and add value and just slowly create a story that positions you well for whatever’s next, as long as you’re meeting new people and learning new things, you should be well off, but yeah, if you’re, if your plan is for, you know, to immediately find a job that turns into a big career in exactly what you studied, that may not, that may be frustrating, but it’s not that hard, I don’t think, to at least, you know, get some experience in some context on some projects. I remember your story, Heather, and how, how it’s worked out so well for you, but yeah, there’s there’s a lot of hustle involved, and I think AI can be really helpful in guiding some of that.

Heather Bennett  6:51

That’s awesome, good advice, always good advice from Andy. So let’s get back to Orban Media. What were those first, like, five, six years, like, as you were growing the business.

Andy Crestodina  7:04

Well, it was a time of intense disruption, because this was 2000 in 2001 So, we had.. I don’t need to go into it. You remember, everyone, every Gen X kid out there knows what happened then, but it was exactly what I just said. It was just a learning experience. It was a chance to get my, my, you know, hands dirty, building things and learning things, things that I wasn’t expecting I would learn. I thought I had to learn sort of the subject matter expertise, but a lot of what I was learning was how to collaborate, communicate well, project management, account management, sales, and of course marketing for our own farm, we started as an outsourced partner to agencies that didn’t have any of those skills in house, and because they couldn’t do animation or multimedia, which we called it at the time, or web development, or web design, or apps and game development, and CD-ROM stuff, it was early, we got, we found clients that had clients, so we, we knew that the targeting agency model was successful, but we were broke, and we were happy, and it was fun. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a great idea to try to prioritize maximizing your income early. That’s frustrating, right? It’s, but if you just prioritize learning and challenge and networking and development and polish your soft skills and growing your personal brand. That’s, I think, that’s really what I was doing. It might not have been a plan per se, but that’s those were the early years for sure.

Heather Bennett  8:39

Yeah, and that’s very common. It’s always an interesting financial situation. Those first few years, we’ll get to that, maybe a little bit later. And you talked about networking, we’re definitely going to get to that a little bit later. But talk about those first, we’ll say the first number of hires. When you’re that small, every hire is incredibly important, and it’s interesting with you coming from a recruiting background. What you know, what did you find while you were building the company person by person? What were you looking for? What made the difference on who was good for the for Orbit and who wasn’t?

Andy Crestodina  9:17

Well, the successful founder in the end takes off every hat, and the last one included. It’s common for the last hat that comes off to be like the sales, the sales hat, where they’re just they’re the growth engine and they hold on to that role dearly because they’re when you’re prioritizing growth and trying to close deals, it’s really hard to delegate that, so the early hires, not surprising, project management, programming, and development. We added a partner, that’s a long story, who is active in design, and so there was, but it really, I think that there’s, you know. Front of the house, in the back of the house, and then in a lot of firms it’s easier to hire for the back of the house, because you see it as lower risk. Front of the house people, you have to trust them to own relationships and be front client facing people, but you have to have strong processes that these people can work within. So, knowing your approach to account management, your approach to sales, your project management process, you really are easily able to delegate those things until those are at least somewhat documented, so that you can set standards and you can know if it worked or not, and staying close to it at first until you have trust, later you end up growing to the point where you have you hire managers of those people, and that’s the next level, and then you have directors for those managers, which is the next level. I eventually added a CEO, which is a bit unusual for a founder, but was a key growth lever for us. It wasn’t until that day that we had a sales team, and you just hopefully evolve until you focus on the things that really only you could do, or the very difficult to delegate, and that’s that’s the stage I’m at now, where it’s like the content marketing and the giving presentations at events and doing shows like this, Heather, so I’m mostly in like a marketing content organic lead gen thought leadership writing teaching speaking PR outward comms sort of role now, which I enjoy. It has you always have to get some energy from the job you’re doing that you haven’t yet taken off, but that too is something that you have to let go of, in the end, you know. Businesses are not nearly as valuable until they operate with, without heavy involvement from the founders.

Heather Bennett  11:51

I would agree with that, and that’s a very difficult step. You do a very unique situation, not a lot of founders hire a CEO, and how what were the deciding factors on who would be a good fellow C-suite member for you, and what were you looking for, like, what do you think helped you choose the right person in terms of their skills and abilities that you either didn’t want to do or didn’t necessarily have a strength in,

Andy Crestodina  12:27

no, it’s a fun question, because it’s the same answer as the earlier question about networking into a job from the other direction, so Todd is was a client and knew us from that perspective, and then we got to know each other, and thought, well, maybe he could help us with some issues we’re having, and came on as sort of a contractor, and then saw much more possible value, and he became kind of an advisor. In the meantime, he, he was ready to, he was looking for something new anyway, and it was a realization where it’s like, yeah, Todd’s actually here like two days a week now, and when he’s not here, those are bad days. So maybe we, you know, let’s, let’s ask Todd if he’d be interested in being part of the company. There was a lot of trust. It wasn’t a, there wasn’t like a strong employment agreement. We knew that the long-term plan was for Todd to be an equity partner, and we all proceeded under that understanding, and it, and it worked out great. So, it was a gradual process. It wasn’t like an executive search process. I don’t think it could have been, but after he got on board, he reorganized the company. He put in a lot of processes, a lot of accountability, a lot of maturity, just related to things like finances, and we went from two to we’re now at nine and a half million in revenue, and I attribute a lot of that growth to Todd. Prior to that, I was just spending all day in meetings and all night writing proposals, and it was not sustainable.

Heather Bennett  14:04

Okay, so let’s let’s talk about the financials. At which point did you say, “Hey, I think we have a company here, this could be something, as opposed to it’s a startup, we’re just scrapping by trying to get as many proposals out. Like, what was the point where you were like, wow, I think we really have something here.

Andy Crestodina  14:23

Well, mine is not an example of starting with a business plan to scale and grow. It, it was an organic growth approach, as, as you heard, I, it was just a passion for the category, so there are much better ways to jump into a new venture that, and anybody who’s gone down the venture capital route knows this, they have to get all their numbers lined up, and their value prop, and their USPs, and their ICPs, but that, but what we did here was really just, hey, this is work. We’re very busy, we need to add someone, added someone. Okay, now we have a higher cost structure, we need to sell more, and it just grew organically, reputation and brand grew, while process and maturity grew with client results grew. So it was really at that, that, that sort of tipping point, where you know there’s no way this could, we have to either, you know, just this is, we’re suffering, this is painful. At 2 million in revenue, with one person responsible for all the account management, marketing, and sales, everyone is in the kitchen, and it’s one person running around like crazy in the front of the house, you know, so it was a, it was just, you know, partly loyalty to the team. It all sounds weird to say it, but just, let’s, let’s keep taking care of everyone. Let’s keep this team together. You know, it wasn’t really like a financial goal, it was more of a honoring the culture and the people we have, and that story continues. There’s people that have been here for 20 years, lots of them. It’s our average tenure is eight years, and despite all the current disruptions, our goal remains to take good care of our people, because they take care of our clients. So, it was weird story, I know, but not really like a, like a strong business plan or structure, or you know, milestones. It was just.. it’s been a long story of organic growth and slow growth, right? The 29 and a half million in 25 years.. that’s not.. no, the phone’s not ringing off the hook with, like, hey, you’re on a rocket ship. Do you want to, you know, do you want to partner with us? We’re just the slow and steady wins the race, and we’re still growing. It’s going well,

Heather Bennett  16:52

and having met a number of Orbit Media employees there, there is that strong and wonderful sense of culture there, which you like. I said, even meeting them the first time, you feel that right away, which makes a difference. So, what are some.. we’ve already talked about some of, like, the major turning points and those big decisions. What does the future of Orbit Media look like?

Andy Crestodina  17:19

Well, if you just stay laser focused on client results, then you’re looking at two things: the total outcome, like, did you like net new sales opportunities through lead generation? We build high-performing B2B lead generation websites for mid-sized firms. A lot of websites don’t generate any, you know, they’re like brochures, they don’t generate any leads, or the clients have no idea, they don’t have analytics, they’re not showing up in search, they’re not converting their current visitors into leads, so the obsession with that drives us more toward using modern tools, AI can do incredible research and insights into what the visitors really need, what are our best answers for those? How can, how can the site better emulate an amazing sales call with the top sales rep? It’s kind of the huge part of the the job, and how can we help clients become visible, and in fact get recommended by AI? This is a huge anxiety and huge opportunity for mid-sized firms, so if to do that we have to adopt these tools and do so at a pace faster and better than our competitors, which for me is a blast. I love that I do wild things. I could tell you all like that we’re doing incredible things with AI that lead to huge insights and great client results, and as long as that holds up well, and the sales closing rates are strong, then I’m not that concerned about team retention. I think some entrepreneurs look at AI as an opportunity to push margins by laying people off, not a conversation we’ve ever had here, nor will we have, so but I do think that because these, these methods also drive efficiency, I don’t want to have a lot of unused capacity here. So we’re going to grow the top line by growing the bottom line for clients, and thereby keep the team fully utilized, even if the way that we do things shrinks, you know, the first three weeks of a project into one week, which is actually starting to happen,

Heather Bennett  19:32

that then that’s amazing, there, especially when you have like a standard product or service that you offer, and you’ve done the same for years and years, being able to shorten that time to give value to clients is, I think, very exciting. So, let’s talk about.. I do want to get into talking about AI, but first, What are some of your proudest moments as the CMO of or. It or maybe, for since you are such a well-known keynote speaker in that realm.

Andy Crestodina  20:08

Well, I was at an event yesterday in Austin, Texas, and the.. it was sort of funny. They made like some of the ticket holders, they used it as like an incentive, like you get to have breakfast with me, and so I had breakfast with people who I know it sounds hilarious to me. Actually, you and I hang out all the time, and some people like make it a thing. People sometimes say to me, Andy, when you publish, we have a meeting about your article, or Andy, your articles became a huge part of our training for our team, or Andy, your the book you wrote is required reading. I had to read it as part of my onboarding. Those are moments when I know that I’m adding some value to the world, and it’s, it’s truly, I feel I do feel honored when, when I get that feedback, but also, really, the thing I’m most proud of is just that our, our average team tenure is eight years, like I said, and that this people who just to watch the growth of, I could name them, it’s not necessary, but the people who started with us like 20 plus years ago, and now they have kids, you know, and like we’ve like they work that I almost feel like we were all kids back then, and to see the professional and personal growth of the orbiters is the the one thing that is by far the greatest outcome of this business. I think

Heather Bennett  21:40

I love hearing that. Like I said, the culture is very strong and a real something that most, I think, business owners should aspire to have that type of relationship with the people who work for them. And since you mentioned it, you are making a huge impact. The book, of course, is Content Chemistry, and I completely agree, it should be required reading for everyone in business, even if they’re not in marketing. They should all be required to read it, and yeah, your LinkedIn posts are quite good, to say the least. So, let’s talk about marketing. What does the future of marketing look like, AI or not AI, because there are many ways to market that don’t involve AI, but most of them do. But yeah,

Andy Crestodina  22:28

well, if you separate marketing into two main goals, attract and convert, or I often joke, like the cheese and the mouse trap, then AI creates disruption slash opportunity, I see them as the same thing as a new channel, because bb buyers are having long conversations with AI about who’s the best fit for for their partner, so it changes that for sure. It paid ads don’t really change much, it had mostly undisrupted by AI, at least pay per click, paid social may be very disrupted more for b brands. There are huge opportunities, though, on the mousetrap side, because if converting visitors into sales opportunities is a function of empathy and knowing why they would and wouldn’t take action, what questions must they have answered, what objections must they have addressed. What is our strongest evidence and proof points to support our answers? What cognitive biases would trigger this visitor to taking action on this visit? What persuasion copywriting would align best with their psychology? Super interesting, and AI makes that much, much more fun now, because you can generate using AI, depending on the quality of your inputs, determines the quality of your outputs. We could talk about that, but you can make now synthetic members of target audiences a persona, and when you have a persona that you trust and is sufficiently detailed, something that’s very comprehensive, that truly does list the questions people ask during sales calls, and the your best answers. You can use that persona to audit the buyer journey and their experience on the pages, and even things like your email nurture sequences, then the insights it gives you, you can use to improve that experience of your future prospect to better align with them in the moment, and the difference is huge, like it’s very, because most websites just kind of say what, like this is our tagline, and this is what we want to talk about, and this is, you know, we love us, and we’re number one. Doesn’t really land for your typical visitor, but when the page flows like this is their number one concern, it aligns with what sent them on this journey. This is their, their, this is who else is involved, and how your offer aligns. With the, there are other decision makers on their buying committee. These are the objections that must be handled. Here’s your proof points that align with the objectives, like it is possible now to create experiences that even if traffic goes down, the percentage of visitors who land and are the best fit prospects are more likely to act. You can grow a business through better lead gen without more traffic. A lot of the traffic we used to have five and 10 years ago is not high-quality traffic anyway, but we care deeply about the key pages on which the visitors deciding whether or not to take action and aligning all the page block and the visual hierarchy and the messaging with that buyer, it is an incredible time to do, to do conversion copywriting, or to do digital marketing more broadly.

Heather Bennett  25:51

I completely agree. I think a lot about marketing is that conversation and being able to see, like, which page did they start on, and then where did they go, and I know you’re really good at using heat maps to demonstrate where people are spending the most time on a page, but, but really it’s a conversation you’re trying to have this conversation with the person leading them through the website, so towards a call to action, which is really just a beautiful way to describe how marketing can be efficient at gaining leads, so small to middle market businesses, business owners do not have a ton of money to spend on marketing. Where should they be investing their time, effort, and money now to help their businesses

Andy Crestodina  26:43

well, if you don’t have a predictable pipeline of new sales opportunities, and that is the mean, the question is like, what’s the most important thing today? If that’s the most important thing today, is to create new sales opportunities, which is common, then your next question is, what is my best lever to pull to improve that new sales opportunities? I have a bias here, because we’re totally focused on web. There’s other channels for growing businesses, but web is kind of special, because probably right now, as you speak, as each listener listens to this conversation, there are people, potential prospects sitting on their homepage right now, sitting on their key service pages right now, and scanning for their answer and not finding it. So, just by, if all the things you can do, in let’s just take in digital, for sure, right, take out all the other offline networking, I don’t know, brand building, many other things, but for that visitor that’s on your page today, to what extent does that page satisfy their information needs, align with their fears and hopes and concerns, present you as a differentiated strong option, my friend Tally Wolf said this recently. Trust is the perceived likelihood that making this decision won’t embarrass you. They’re afraid your visitor is afraid of making the wrong choice and looking bad to their peers, right? That’s the prime mover for humanity. That’s why people make decisions in life, mostly. Right? Esteem, there’s lots of research on this. So, the page needs to do quite a bit of heavy lifting to bring them past that level of confidence, where they’ll click a call to action. There’s 1000 little tricks. I mean, most calls to action are terrible, and the verb it uses is just generic and vague. They don’t trigger urgency, they don’t, they don’t, they don’t use loss aversion, they don’t highlight the cost of not making a decision. There’s a million things, but that’s absolutely where I would start, because there’s people on those pages right now, and if you make an improvement, it’s a durable improvement, that improvement to that page will still be there a year and maybe two years from now. Fix the mouse trap before you try to make more cheese. People are constantly trying to increase traffic without even looking at the conversion rate, the percentage who become a lead. You don’t need to be an analytics expert to look up your conversion rate. So know that number, make those changes, improve those pages, and then check the number again. That’s called conversion optimization, and it’s an opportunity for virtually every business I’ve ever met.

Heather Bennett  29:29

Yeah, and that sounds manageable, because it’s such a specific area to focus on, which again, you’re dealing with small middle markets, they don’t have a lot of time to worry about this, think about it, or money to put at, to throw at it to solve the problem. So that’s great advice. It

Andy Crestodina  29:46

doesn’t cost money, it’s like you could do it now. I could do it right now for anybody, like you could do it. I mean, the right way to do it is often to overhaul the whole platform and fix the whole website, but no, you. Change any part of any page right now before your next meeting. I don’t know, it’s totally accessible.

Heather Bennett  30:07

Excellent. So we talked a little bit earlier about the importance of networking and in-person events. Where do you.. I mean, it’s been like the last six years have been very interesting in that realm, because you know we had COVID, and that took away that option, and then it came back, and it needed to be reborn in a different way. Where do you see the value coming from in-person events and networking?

Andy Crestodina  30:34

Well, I don’t think you and I would be having this conversation if that weren’t the thing. It’s.. it’s a. I don’t know how to better connect with humans than face to face. I think it, you, it makes the interaction, it makes that person more memorable. It invites the chance for serendipity and just spontaneous interaction. You get much more in-depth conversations. You, you also learn about all the other little things about your, you know, you discover things about their life that overlap with yours, and you feel connection, much stronger connections. Live events, when they’re done well, have lots of opportunities to add this chaos and randomness and connection for people, chaos in a positive way. Networking is only so structured, right? Like, just you’re hanging out, but I have always believed in that. The meetup, where I often see you, has happened monthly for 10 years, with despite the pause in there. I have my own. I had a monthly event in this room, where I’m sitting now, back when it was a big conference room called Wine and Web, and hundreds of people made new friendships in that. We did that for, I think, 12 years. I have an annual conference I’ve also done for 12 years that we had just two weeks ago, and it was a blast, and the feedback is great. And we invited lots of clients and friends and prospects, and it’s good, good biz dev, but I don’t know, I think it’s especially now in the era of AI, it is a such a highly differentiated format, I think it should be part of almost any, any, any serious b brand with a prospect making a high consideration decision, like it’s a big choice, multiple decision makers, long sales cycle, get something in there, a happy hour, a meet up, you know, a mini conference, you know, an in-person mastermind group, something like that. I think I have people know this, you can meet me every week at 4o’clock at the at the tasting room up the block, so that to me will always be special, and it really benefits people over the long way. They just get short, sharp messages, they get better at communicating, they, and they have, you know, lifetime friendships.

Heather Bennett  32:57

Exactly, so valuable, so valuable, and since you do speak at a lot of events and run a lot of events, success very successfully. What, what makes a live event successful? Because you know, you and I both go to a lot of events and conferences throughout the year, some of them are well done, and some of them not so much. So, what do you think are the some of the key ways that event planners, or people you know, business owners who are planning these events, can make them successful?

Andy Crestodina  33:32

Yeah, this also sort of echoes our first conversation about job seekers. If you’re running an event, you are, you don’t want to take risks on the quality of your presenters. Therefore, you’re going to prioritize people that you know to be good speakers. You saw them speak, you, they’ve been doing this a long time, they know their topic. So, events struggle to speakers struggle to break in, because people like us, who organize these things, are trying to curate a fantastic day or set of days, and you can do that more reliably if you know that these are the pros, like I’m honored to say I’m friends with some of the greatest speakers in digital, like really amazing style and substance, and it’s so that’s your job, first of all, I don’t really worry about them having a name or being known to my audience, because you know some people try to book speakers that they think will attract, you know, sell tickets for them. Those, the people who do that very well, get paid well, and they’re expensive. Also, some events, I think, fall down because they did look for brands, and they want to get anybody from that big brand. I just want that logo on the event page, but those, you know, it’s like a sponsor speaker, they just aren’t necessarily good teachers. So, past that, okay? You’ve got your set of, you know, these are probably the people that I would love to have join and present to teach. Then you have to program. I meant such that the style and substance is balanced, where the people who are sort of inspirational and keynote are at the beginning and end, and that the people who are maybe more tactical and practical are, you know, spaced out properly in the middle, lots of lots of time in between for people to network and make new friends, they’re past that, I think that the single channel event, the single track event is winning. You just have one day, one room, one group, everyone’s always together instead of breakouts. It’s not until you get to like a 500 person event where you need to do lots of, maybe consider breakouts, but yeah, there’s it’s kind of expensive if you do a bigger event, people will complain about food if it’s not good. A lot of event venues are are uncharming, which is a downside. Swag, do you do swag or not? You know, but I think that there’s a simple version of a live event that’s a one day, one track event, that’s what we do, that can be very successful without a lot of fancy planning or big budgets. It’s working for

Heather Bennett  36:11

1. I would agree. That’s interesting to see that trend occur. I’m seeing a lot more of those, like one day or one afternoon type events, book-ended by networking lunches and happy hours and whatnot, which is good, so you know I love to hear about who your mentors are and what the best advice you’ve gotten from them.

Andy Crestodina  36:38

Wow, well, in the subject matter areas, there are people that I’ve met that I have learned so, so much from. I just can’t stop thinking about the things that they’ve shared over the years. I’ll give you an example. I’m a content marketer. Joe Polizzi, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, said many years ago, you should just focus on two channels, don’t try to do everything, do two formats, two channels, and just don’t, don’t get distracted. Try to be one of the best in those formats. So, for me, that’s articles like this LinkedIn newsletter. It’s also on our blog, and presentations. So I just talked to someone who said, ‘Love your videos, and I like, ‘I don’t really do that. I’m not that serious about making videos, but that’s nice. You love them. I have two formats, and I’m sticking with those. So, Joe is kind of a mentor to me. That’s one of 11 things I’ve learned from Joe. John Jantz, I saw yesterday. He was also the closing keynote at my conference. He’s Duct Tape Marketing. That man has built the business he wants, like he works with his daughters, he does a lot of fly fishing, catches a lot of baseball games. 30 plus years, he has, he’s just always been aligned with his values and his vision for his life. It wasn’t growth for its own sake or exits. He just, in John’s new model, is when he sells marketing services to to a brand, he starts by talking to the founders of that brand to see if they’ll block the work from being great or driving outcomes. Like John, that’s brilliant. Like, you’re going right at it. What’s the saying? For every 1000 people swatting at leaves, one is striking at the root. John doesn’t want to deal with it with a brand that that has founders that aren’t aligned, that John, that’s crazy, that’s amazing. I love you right now. So it’s these people, I don’t know a lot of people don’t know them, but they, they think differently. Stop doing stuff, Joe would say, or go deeper, John would say, and then past that, there’s just lots of other people, clients, you know, really anyone I meet as a potential teacher, and I learn stuff every day.

Heather Bennett  38:53

It’s awesome. What are a few of the daily or weekly rituals that you have that you think have helped you be so successful with Orbit.

Andy Crestodina  39:04

Well, Heather, you and I both have kids, so I wake up early. I prioritize that I will never short change time with them. So my daily schedule is in a weird place right now, because I will sacrifice sleep to be 100% work and 100% with with with the kids, I guess that adds up to 200% Sounds weird, but I don’t know. It wasn’t until they were like seven or eight years old that they ever even saw me working. It’s like if I’m home it’s like pillow fights and you know, reading. So I wake up early in the morning, I often stay up late at night. On weekends, I’m very dedicated to creating the next article. I don’t mostly do my content during the weekday, so those are rituals. I really think that it comes down to creating habits, because that makes the role. Required willpower for activity much lower, so I just will always, you know, Saturday mornings I’m doing AI research. I have for years, that’s usually two and a half hours, and I, I practice staying in deep work mode. If you’ve read that book, and I’ve gotten to where I can do like up to four hours, almost, without, without losing focus. Also, relevant, what I don’t do. I don’t use Instagram or TikTok or Facebook. I’ve deleted those. I encourage everyone to delete those. They’re distractions. Make your phone as boring as possible. The more boring your phone, the more productive you’ll be. And then just, just, whatever you’re working on, just make sure that it’s, it aligns well with your strategic goals for that quarter, like, what are you trying to do here? It’s not, it’s not like, I, you know, these are the things I need to do, it’s like these are the things I need to do, because these are the ones that will, that align best with the levers that take us to the, you know, solve our biggest problems or get to the next, the next stage in the business.

Heather Bennett  41:10

That’s excellent, great, great perspective, as always. I have one last question, and before I ask it, I want to point people to your website@orbitmedia.com Of course, I would encourage everyone to go on LinkedIn and just follow Andy and read his posts, because they are so useful, so helpful in so many ways. What it would.. So, the last question, and this is usually I ask, like, what lesson did you learn while building your company to share with other CEOs, but I’m going to just change it up. What is one thing that business owners of small to middle market businesses can do with AI this week to make their business stronger?

Andy Crestodina  41:54

Well, I’m going to go back to that idea of building a persona. The prompts are on my blog. You could do it without the prompts. Have a half hour conversation with Claude or Chat GPT about your target audience. Give it any information that would help. Sometimes sales call transcripts are an incredible input, and just have it build for you in an insightful markdown file or PDF or Word doc. Markdown files are lighter and easier on the environment, and work hard on it, and look closely at it, and make sure. And once you have that, you have a synthetic web of your target audience that you can use to audit anything: your sales playbooks, your home page, your all of your emails, your content calendar, your content strategy. It really is a.. if businesses don’t grow, if there’s a mismatch between the offer and the market, you know, the buy it has to align, right? So that I think is the most useful thing I’ve done with AI is to create personas and talk to them, show them things, ask them stuff. The little changes can make a big difference, but never again will you publish anything that’s misaligned with your audience. If you have an extra step in your workflow where you check it all against your AI-generated persona,

Heather Bennett  43:20

that’s excellent, and I love that it’s something that’s very doable. Like this week, I love leaving people with something to do this week. I’ve been talking with Andy Crestodina, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media. Andy, thank you so much. I knew this would be incredibly interesting and fun and helpful, and I, so many more questions, I may have to have you back on. So, thank you.

Andy Crestodina  43:45

Thank you, Heather. This was great. Anytime,

Outro 43:54

thank you for listening to the Growth + Exit podcast, sponsored by Newport, a unique national business advisory firm. If you enjoy this show, be sure to share, like, and subscribe for future episodes.