From Overwhelmed to Optimized: How Small Businesses Are Using AI to Scale with Katie Shive

In this episode, Ryan sits down with Katie Shive to break down what AI actually means for small business owners—not in theory, but in execution.

From building AI agents that act like personal assistants to creating scalable content systems, Katie shares how businesses can start leveraging AI today to save time, increase efficiency, and stay competitive.

They dive into:

•  What’s really coming in the next 18 months with AI 
•  How to use AI agents to automate daily tasks and decision-making 
•  Why most businesses are using AI wrong (and how to fix it) 
•  How to build a brand voice that doesn’t sound like “AI wrote it” 
•  The role of personal branding in a world with less trust and more automation 

This episode isn’t about replacing people—it’s about amplifying what great operators can do with the right systems.

If you’re a business owner trying to figure out where AI actually fits into your day-to-day… this is your playbook.

Follow Katie Shive on IG: https://www.instagram.com/heykatieshive/

Follow Ryan on IG: https://www.instagram.com/ryan.nylr/
Follow our Podcast on IG: https://www.instagram.com/built.to.grow.podcast/

Learn more about AvaHR and get a free trial of our ATS: www.avahr.com

Watch the live Interviews on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@avahrsoftware

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, I am excited to welcome another guest to our wonderful show, all about helping small business owners grow, find a playbook that builds their business in different ways from people, process, their product, and really understand what it takes to pull the levers that make a difference in your business. And today I've got another wonderful guest, Katie, and I'm going to jump right in with a question. Yeah. You are a guru on small business, AI, and the intersection of kind of efficiency at scale. Could you jump right in and tell us what can a small business expect over the next 18 months when it comes to AI?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

18 months feels like even a long runway because I feel like things are leaping and advancing so fast. So where we are today versus 18 months ago, I wouldn't have seen. But I would say big picture, we're going to see more agenc work, right? Kind of the first iteration of AI was people are using it for content creation and research and I mean a lot of different things. But we're really starting to see that loop going more toward building agents that are, you know, talking to each other, scheduling tasks, and more of that systems and kind of that automation. And, you know, just seeing from a small business standpoint, we're seeing people that are literally, you know, they didn't have the budgets to hire big agencies. And now they have the tools to be able to do these kinds of things with vibe coding and and some of the different chat features that we have. So I would say more agentic work and systems and automation is going to be really key.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

And for those that aren't familiar with like agentic AI, it's really just a matter of saying an agent. So instead of an employee, you can name an agent. I personally use an agentic agent that I've built for myself, and his name is Rex. And it's somebody I can I can text him via WhatsApp and I can say, hey Rex, I need you to build this outline, check my calendar for these conflicts. I can ask it to compose emails, scan my inbox and give me a summary of, you know, there's different tasks, and it's almost like a personal assistant that it's an agent, right? And I think you're spot on. I think that's gonna be the biggest move over the next 18 months with AI. I haven't had a guest like yourself that's super deep into AI yet. So I'm excited to get a little put on my nerdy hat with you for just a few minutes and we'll jam on some AI. You know, just in a conversation, I sat with some fellow business founders. Come, you know, they own each of them respectively has a company in the 20, 25 million a year in revenue range. And both of them sat there in my office and said, we don't think AI is gonna be super disruptive over the next 18 months. What do you say, Katie? What do you think?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

I would respectfully disagree. I mean, yeah, here's the thing: is AI gonna disrupt every single form of employment across the spectrum, especially in the 18 months? No. Is it gonna replace my lawyer? Is it gonna replace my doctor, my car mechanic? No. I think the biggest disruptors that we are seeing already and we'll just continue to see in mass are gonna be a lot of the workers, like, you know, people in the marketing space, people in accounting, people in, you know, technical business skills, those are being overhauled massively. You know, there's a lot of fear, right? There's a lot of like, oh my gosh, is AI coming to replace me? Is it going to replace some? Yes, it already is. However, is it gonna replace everybody? No, but to somebody listening that might be in marketing or accounting or, you know, HR, any of those types of fields, I would say, you know, as much as you can learn about AI now, get ahead of the curve. We're still very much in that early adoption stage. And so, you know, when I look at hiring for my company, like I'm literally onboarding somebody in two weeks. And like one of the biggest skills that I'm looking for is like, do you know how to use AI? I don't need you to be an expert, subject matter expert. And I don't need you to even be an AI expert. But do you have curiosity? Do you know how to like be curious and think and ask questions? So if you're dabbling in AI, wherever you start, that's way ahead of where I think most people are today, even.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

Yeah, agreed. You know, there's a lot of first movers in any new technology, right? They're your first implementers and they they're the early adopters. I mean, you think about the early adopters that adopted to iPhone versus how long it took my parents to get to the iPhone stage, right? Yeah, like there's always and those, and that was like, you know, a big change. Um, but uh AI, in my opinion, is the greatest disruptive advancement that we have ever seen as a society. Unquestionably. Unquestionably. And I think there's a lot of people that are still on the sidelines and not willing to admit that because they don't fully understand it. The more I dive deeper, the more intense this disruption feels to me.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Yeah, I think there's there tends to be an uncomfortableness around what you, you know, what we don't know. We don't know what we don't know. And so sometimes it's easier to kind of put your head in the sand and be like, oh, well, it's still right now, it's still in the early stage, and you know, the bigger tech companies, it's infiltrating. You know, case in point, my husband uh just the other day was going through a drive-thru and the, you know, taking his order, it was a robot on the other side, you know. And the only way I can tell from the voice, but you know, he kept playing with it to try to get it to fail. And he kept, instead of saying yes, like, you know, that that's correct, he kept doing some passive and finally a human came on. It is coming everywhere. And, you know, I think to your point, it's like if you have a curiosity about it, like AI isn't gonna go anywhere. It is infiltrated into our apps, into our email, into web browsers, like it is here way faster than I anticipated that it would come. Like the acceleration is very fast. That's why I say I don't know where we'll be in 18 months. We literally could have robots walking around. But I would just say, like, don't delay in trying to experiment. A lot of people are still, in my opinion, at least how I'm seeing it, when I ask, like, hey, show me how are you using AI and what tools are you using? A lot of people are still in that, like, why research it like Google? They're treating it like Google.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

It's a Google, yeah, it's Google search.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Well, Katie, this is what I do. I want to throw my show notes away. And I don't actually want to dive. I'm gonna go throw a curveball at you. Okay. Maybe I what I'd like to do on this show is let's brainstorm for a few minutes for those small business owners or leaders that are listening to this on ways they can implement AI, ways they can learn about it. And then I want to talk about how do you actually hire with AI in the sense of how do you know how to ask the right questions? That people are AI knowledgeable versus getting the wrong candidate that's like, oh yeah, I'm really good with AI. And it's them just asking, like, what's the weather next week? You know, they're very rudimentary uh skill level. But before we dive into all of that, because I think it's gonna be a really exciting show, would you mind sharing just a little bit of your background, your story, who is Katie? And so we can get our listeners on the same page here.

SPEAKER_00 7:26

I run a small business, it's Chaos Marketing. My background has been in marketing, copywriting, branding for a little over 15 years. Um, I have my master's degree in business administration. Um, and I spent almost the last nine years really in the mortgage space, the real estate mortgage space, not as an originator, but I ghostwrite and create content specifically for top producers in that industry. I spent so many years learning the technical skills, like how to be a good write ghostwriter and how to create content and put things together. And then, you know, AI came on board just a couple of years ago, and I very early like just jumped all in. I just had this natural curiosity of like, what is this and what can it really do? I think what sparked that curiosity for me is because I saw how many small business owners really struggle to create content. And nowadays, you really have to have a digital footprint, you have to have long form, short form content, it has to be good to keep attention. So I saw AI as a solution to the small business owner that doesn't have the budget to go create expensive agencies and outsource all of their different production. So that's kind of what jumped uh launched me into how can I figure out to use AI myself? How can I create tools? And then can I also help other small businesses learn how to build out a system specifically for content for themselves? So that's been what I've been doing the last like probably two and a half years. And I am a mom, I have two small kids. Um I live up in Calisbell, Montana. I'm pretty much anything nerdy that has to do with AI, marketing content, and small businesses is like my jam.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

I love it. Perfect. Well, let's jump right in. I'm gonna share a couple things that I think are effective and it would be hard for me to take away from my life now that use AI just to get people brainstorming and thinking about how you can start to integrate AI as a solution to your everyday issues. For me, there's a tremendous amount of YouTube videos on this. There is a tool called OpenClaw that allows you to essentially take an old computer or even your current computer and you can convert it into an agent that sits on your computer. So you can talk to it. It's got a chat feature, so you can just have this open dialogue with it. You can say, Hey, my name is Ryan. My background is software development. I've built four companies, and here's my history, so so that there's some understanding of each other. You can name it, you can give it a personality and say you're gonna be empathetic and supportive. Don't you dare talk back to me. You know, whatever you want to do, right? Yep. And and and it doesn't get its feelings hurt. That's what's amazing. And, you know, there's no sick days for for these for these devices, but that's called open claw. And there's there's a lot of resources on how to set up your own open claw. One thing that I do is I set daily tasks to my open claw agent. The first one being is by 6 a.m., I want it to go through all of my emails and it gives me a summary of the most important emails to the least important emails, and then it assigns a task in my clickup, which is my task management software, on my daily tasks that I need to get done. And then it's gonna review my existing clickup tasks and it's gonna prioritize those as well. So for me, it just gets me hyper focused on what I can do. Phase part two of that was I then taught it to preemptively draft replies to those important emails. So when I have the task and I click into my email, there's already a draft pre-written based on either a thread that it already read through and acknowledged, or it's a cold email and it's already kind of pre-drafted it because it knows about me, my experience, it knows my calendar, it I've I've fed it enough information. For me, I can't even tell you how many hours a week this is saved just by purely getting rid of all the cold emails, solicitor emails out of my inbox that I don't even have to have brain compute to think about. It's just gone. That alone has been, guys, I pay 20 bucks a month for Claude. Like it's for 20 bucks. That's a non-no-brainer. Anyway, that's my first. What about you, Katie? What are some must-haves with AI and even agentic AI?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

You stole the good ones. Um, sort of, yes. So I also have a custom open claw. Um, I will admit my husband is also a super techie nerd. And so he was the one that was like, we have to get you over to open claw. You know, one of the things I hear a lot, and I personally I feel it. So I'm like, if I'm in this full time feeling this, like other, you know, people that are not have to be feeling this. But you know, there's a new, there's a new app, there's a new tool that's that they're just popping up on, you know, just crazy, crazy pace. I've primarily been on the quad chat GPD Gemini bandwagon. So with him like saying we got to get you on open claw, I was like, oh my gosh, this feels so intimidating to create my own open claw and what have you. But like you're saying, it actually is is easier than I thought. And mine, you know, talks to Telegram. And, you know, I have I can text it also as well. But yeah, so I call it my morning brief, just like what you're talking about. It's like, okay, go through all of my emails, the same thing. I think mine's at 8 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. So maybe I should adjust it. But yeah, go through all of my emails. And again, it's just taking taking a of what a virtual assistant or a human assistant would do, some of those low-level tasks that just take a lot of mental bandwidth, it organizes that for you. For me, I also love looking at other content ideas. I don't have endless hours to go look at YouTube and stay abreast with all of the information. So building a custom assistant that will go out to YouTube and different places and search kind of keywords or concepts and then give me a document with what was new that day. And then it will even summarize hey, based on your podcast and based on your blog and all of your the things that we know about you, you could repurpose this into your audience. So it will suggest some of the content that I should create as well. And then I use that as kind of my launch board for that week's worth of content.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

If people can just write down all the tasks they do throughout the week, to me, that's the quickest way to know what AI can and can't do. Yep. Because you can take that list and ask AI, what of these tasks can you handle for me with a greater than 90% certainty that it can be done correctly and accurately. One of the other things that I have found, and this is probably one of the lowest hanging fruit things that someone can do, is to use a pre-built agency support with either open AI. So uh ChatGPT has their own browser that you can use, but also Claude, which is becoming the new buzz, yeah. The new thing, yeah. It's the new thing. But for 20 bucks, like gosh, I should be getting commissions on this because I'm gonna sell it. But 20 bucks a month, you can sign into Claude and you open up Chrome and it has a an extension, a browser extension. And hopefully most of you listening to this know what a browser extension is. But browser extension, all you do is you log into Claude and you open up that browser extension and then ask it anything, and it will read the page that you're on on your browser and it will do functions for you. And I'll give a quick example that just happened yesterday. Client was emailing in and asking for two years of sales receipts. They're getting an audit internally, their internal controller lost all their receipts and needed it really quickly. And I jumped in and I started going one by one by one to export it as a PDF, export as a PDF. And in my mind, I was like, oh my gosh, this is taking longer than I want because A, I don't have enough attention span to process that many downloads. So I opened up the Chrome extension and I simply said, I need you to export all of these. And it goes, Oh, on this screen, I can see that there's a shortcut option. Let me go ahead and do a mass export from, and I didn't know that feature even existed. And boom, within a matter of 20 seconds, it had already exported the PDF with every single sales receipt for for 24 months. And I emailed it over to the client. Again, not a huge task, but it saved me, it saved me valuable time in that moment in the day where I had other things to get done. Yeah. So Claud Chrome extension is of great value just to keep it there to ask to do tasks in your browser alongside you.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Well, and you can even notify your browser. So, like, depending on the the extent of the tasks that you're asking for, like you can ask it to do a certain task, and then you know, it will say, like, notify me when it's complete, right? So that's really great, is that it will notify you. But I mean, there's even things that you can do, like if you want to do a competitor um profile or an analysis. So, I mean, that's an agent that I've looked at building is like go out at you know once a week and go scan, you know, these different verticals. These are some competitors that I might have, but maybe I don't even know all of them. And then go scan, you know, their content and their website, and it will give you like a summary every single week. So I like the browser because I can be looking on one's part and doing it, but it's really like you're just asking AI to do the work alongside that you're already doing, and it saves you so much time.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

That's right. Katie, your background is in marketing, and I think it would be a shame for us not to steal a little bit of that brain knowledge that you have in there. So let's jam on like marketing with AI. What are some of the tips you might share to some of these small businesses out there on how they can use AI as part of their marketing? I've got a few ideas and some things we're doing as well that I'm happy to dive in and share. But yeah, what do you think? What are some ways that you could use AI to help you with marketing?

SPEAKER_00 17:58

I always start at the foundations, right? This probably isn't the big sexy answer, maybe that you're looking for. But I talk with a lot of people and when I ask them, okay, well, what are you doing for marketing currently and what is working or what is not? And they quickly jump to, you know, here's the content that I'm creating. But when I pull away some of those pieces, you know, their messaging is typically really disjointed and kind of fragmented all over the place. So what I see a lot of people skip is that foundational work. Like if I go look at any of your social media accounts or subscribe to your email or even look on your website, can I quickly understand what is your value proposition? What is your story? Who are you? Why are you doing this work? What value do you bring? And so when it comes to AI and wanting to use AI as like a, you know, maybe a copywriter, for example, a lot of people will just jump into, you know, any of the platforms and say, help me create a content strategy or help me write an email or whatever the task is. But what they haven't done is actually trained their AI tool to sound like them. Now, the more you use it, obviously the better it gets trained. But Ryan, if I if you were to hire me for your to be a ghostwriter or a copywriter for Ava HR, before I create a single piece of content or build a strategy for you, I would need to know like, who are you? What, you know, what audiences do you serve? What are your different offerings and what is your price point? And how do you go, you know, direct to consumer or you B2B? Like, I'd really try to get really clear on who you are as a company and who you are as a founder. And then what I would do is I build out a brand book. Now, anybody listening, you could do this in your, you know, yourself. Like go into your AI tool and say, hey, I want to build a training module or a training guide that basically creates a digital double of my company, right? So ask me clarifying questions. I always like to start with that. Ask me clarifying questions so that we can help build this out. So what I do on a technical level is I'm looking at like the brand foundations. I'm looking at your audiences, I'm looking at your story. Um, what's your mission, your vision, your value prop. And then the other part is I'm looking at your voice because, you know, I don't know about you, Ryan, but when I look on LinkedIn or some of these social media platforms, I'm like, man, that just sounds like Chat GPT threw up all over the page. Like people don't have, like they lose their voice or their brand voice because we don't know how to use AI in the best way as a writing tool. By feeding it a training document, which I call the brand book, that helps your AI now have a single source of truth to say, when you create a brand or when you create any piece of content, filter it through here and make sure it's in my voice, speaking to my audience, keeping in mind my, you know, all of my elements. That's really kind of what started my journey into that. Uh, again, going back to supporting small businesses, it's expensive to hire a marketing agency that does content full time. Like you're gonna have somebody that just does your email, then you're gonna have somebody that just does paid ads, then you're gonna have somebody that just does social media and like it's really siloed really quick. But if you can think in how can I use AI to help kind of leverage that, build your brand foundational piece as a training guide. Now you could go into your AI tools and like you're suggesting, create an AI employee that does those different things and is trained to perform exceptionally well.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

Yeah, it's a fantastic use. I think a lot of people miss the power of brand and consistency of brand. And so they'll use AI just to ask it to do tasks, write this article, write this. And the AI is just gonna do it, but it's gonna forget the importance of consistency and the call to action. And the why behind the content. Whereas if you're building off of that with the saying, first you build the you build the foundation, the tool, build my brand voice, build my brand kit, now create that in a markdown format that I can retain and use that as a base for all of my tasks. That is a very powerful thing. I love that a lot. You know, one thing we found is just throwing up content over and over and over and over again is not going to help with SEO. And I know that's anti-what everyone thinks right now in SEO, but it's not. It's the depth, it's quality, and it's original voice. And a lot of the, you know, getting referred in AI, meaning, you know, somebody's out there looking for applicant tracking system for small businesses that works really well for plumbers. So, you know, something very specific to them. It's essentially a Google search. And so you're trying to get content to rank within the Google search. And so one of the greatest ways that you can do that is having, to your point, is brand voice original thought, original content in with really deep siloed content as opposed to high quantity of surface level content that anyone and everyone can do.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Yeah. And so are you familiar with the term GEO? Have you heard that? Yeah. Yeah. So generative engine optimization and then answer engine optimization. So, you know, when you think of content, exactly what you're talking about, like, you know, um HR, uh, what do you call it? Like a systems tracking, like an application tracking system for plumbers. Like that's super, super niche. Okay, well, if that's what you do, then create content that speaks to that niche, but create content that goes really deep in that. AI loves to match answers with questions. So when you're starting to look at blog posts and different types of content, and you know, your H1, H2 headers are in the form of a question, that's because your LLM crawlers are looking for the answer or the, yeah, the answer that is gonna best pair that question. So when it comes to, you know, to pairing that, uh, your AI tools, they don't want to be wrong, just like humans don't want to give the right answer the wrong answer. So they're looking for content that has, you know, some of those key words, but outside of just keywords, because it's more than that, it's wanting to make sure that there's uh, you know, that you have credibility. Do you consistently talk about this subject? Do you talk about it across multiple platforms? And do you have credibility to be even talking about that? It'd be completely off-brand for me to be talking about plumbing because I've never done anything plumbing in a day in my life. That would like throw the algorithm off completely. But because I talk consistently about AI strategies and marketing and the mortgage space, now I have tons of blogs and podcasts and you know, LinkedIn newsletters and stuff spread all over. So it looks at my my knowledge graph and says, Oh, we think Katie probably does know something about mortgage marketing because I've done it, you know, really deep, like you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

You're exactly right, is consistency of that brand voice. I guess that's we're gonna keep talking about that because that's so important. But I think it's also important to have a personal brand. And I know that you're a big advocate of building a personal brand. What are some things that entrepreneurs can do right now to kind of stand out from the competition by leveraging a personal brand? How do how do they start? Where should we start to build our personal brand?

SPEAKER_00 25:43

There is such a lack of trust. Like nowadays, we kind of have that natural propensity to be less trusting than more trusting. So, you know, people are more likely to follow a personal brand, a human in a story, than we are to follow a corporate or a business brand, right? For leaders, especially small business leaders, you absolutely should have a personal brand because what's gonna happen is, you know, Ryan, when I go Google Ava HR, what's the first thing? I'm like going and looking at who is Ryan? I want to know who are you and what is your story? Not because that just qualifies you per se, but like, I want to do business. That's the beauty of a small business. We do business with people. I'm not trying to do business with Microsoft or Nike. Like, I want a human behind that. So, you know, I love it when I see personal brands because I'm like, oh, they're married, they have kids, they probably understand, you know, X, Y, and Z, or where, you know, where's their location? And then it just allows you to also get really nerdy on topics that you love talking about. But by doing your personal brand, you start building a following and a community that's concentrated around what you're building, and that will naturally like create attention back to the company that you have because people are following you first. But when you're on your stories or in your emails talking about it, then you're gonna be obviously you're kind of one of the same with your corporate brand.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

You know, I recently read that book, uh, Founder Brand. Um gosh, and I'm forgetting the author's name.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

I'm the worst at author's names. Don't ask me the author name. I'm like, yeah, I've I know the book, but can't name the book.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

I know. And and I was just joking with my wife. I could tell you literally everything about someone, but uh except their name. That's just the one thing that goes first in my in my brain. Yes. But one of the takeaways that I took away from this book, founder brand, and I'm gonna come up with a name here in just a minute, is the importance for authentic transparency and not always trying to be the perfect celebrity Hollywood red carpet-only type experience, right? Yep. But hear me out on this. The question I'm trying to get to is this at what point do you do that to a fault? You know what I mean? Like, does it disrupt disrupt trust if you almost go like, man, that guy's pretty reckless. Yeah, you know, when he showed too much of the behind the scenes. Yeah, like at what point do you want to be fully transparent versus also like that might hurt the person brand a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 28:20

I mean, I try to find that balance. I I don't I don't have like a here's the the magic formula. I know you're gonna hear some people that are like the 80-20 posting and what have you. My whole goal is if you look at any of my content, whether that's social media or email or a video or my website, my whole goal is I want you to have a really good sense of who I am from looking at that. So that when we hop on a Zoom, like a compliment that you could give me is like, you're exactly who I see in all of these other platforms because I am consistent whether or not I'm talking to you live on a call or I'm posting about it in a story or I'm writing about it. I want that voice, that expression, the things that I share. If we hop on a call, I'm probably gonna tell you, yeah, I didn't sleep last night, my kid was sick, and I was up four times. Like that's just part of my life. Is that pertinent so much to the business side of what we're talking about? No, but it builds conversation and then we get into business, right? So yeah, I think when it comes to your content, there are some people that are like, I'm really private. I don't share any of that online. That's okay. Like, what can you share? Maybe like I'm for one, I don't love posting my kids' faces online anymore. Okay, great. You don't need to do that. But do you have a hobby? Are you involved at church? Do you do sports? Like, what part of your life can we see or can you talk about? Because if I just go to your page and all you talk about is plumbing, I'm gonna be really interested when I have a crack in my pipe and I need you. But every other part, I'm probably gonna get really bored following you because that's all you talk about. So rather than being a one-dimensional person, you know, you only talk about your business, be a human with your goal to have human conversations, but make it so obvious what you do and who you do it with that when people are like, oh, I need a plumber, I really like following Joe, oh, he does plumbing. Right? So there's like consistency on your message and who you are as a person. That I think is what makes brands more personal brands more attractive to follow.

SPEAKER_01 30:25

Do you recommend small businesses do it as their self, build the personal brand that way, or they're building the the company brand, but they're telling it through their personal story? Does that make sense? That question.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

And I get that question a lot. And I think I would answer that, that I think it does depend on you know the business that you're building and what some of your goals are. For me, I am my brand, right? Like I am a strategist and a consultant. So you go to, you know, hey Katie Shive, which is my Instagram handle, uh like that is my brand. I don't have a KS marketing Instagram account. Some of that is just I'm a one-person show. So it's a lot for me to like think about managing multiple accounts. But, you know, if you have a service-based, if I am like a daycare provider or the plumber or, you know, whatever, I probably would have it separate depending on the business, but be talking about it. I mean, loan officers, for example, I'm like, nobody wants to follow a loan officer. Like, that's the most boring content to follow. Like you're buying a house maybe once every 10 years. I don't want to follow you. But if you're adding layers of value where you're talking about how to use equity to invest in your 401k, or you know, now you're talking about money and you're talking about habits and how do I teach my children to talk about money? Again, that can get interesting.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Yeah, absolutely. Dave Gerhart is the author of that book, founder brand, and I really enjoyed this book. It's not, it's not a very long book. Yeah. And the audiobook, in my opinion, is as is an amazing way to enjoy that content. What I did, and I'll just tell a funny personal story is I was I had a layover and my flight got canceled, and it ended up being like a four-hour layover in Austin, Texas.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

The worst.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

And if anyone's been to that airport, it's actually one of my favorite airports, pretty cool. Great barbecue, by the way, in the airport. But there's not a lot to do. It's kind of a smaller airport. So what I did is I put on my AirPods and I talked to my AI, and I walked up and down for several hours and I told it my life story. Like, here's a little bit about me. And then I said, I want you to take all of these principles of everything you've learned about me and put it in a format that aligns with the founder brand book that uh Gerhardt put together. And then I want a task list of what are the first steps I need to do to start building my personal brand. And it was unbelievable how well it personalized. Hey, make sure you tell the story about being on Shark Tank in this, but don't lean too heavy in it because people are sick of that. They that it, you know, it did a good job at just balancing my story to align with paint. And here was my favorite thing it helps me identify the common enemy. And I think a lot of people miss that in building a personal brand is what is the common enemy that you are solving for that your clients have? And then you become that expert at tackling that common enemy over and over and over again. For us at Ava HR, it's I'm getting bad candidates from Indeed, and it's super expensive. So, although Indeed is a wonderful partner, and we absolutely love Indeed, when you sponsor jobs there as a small business, sometimes you're getting you're getting a little more than what you can chew, kind of a thing. And so we tell that story over and over again. And anyway, I just found that that's a great way to build your personal brand, is going back to our AI conversation full loop here is tell it your story, align it with a framework, and then start with something.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Well, and that's I mean, gosh, I wish every person I talk to thought like you and was you, because it would we'd be in a totally different conversation. But that's what I do on a one-to-one level is I help people build out their brand foundations because most people don't know even what questions to ask, right? Right. So, like you did a multiple hour or however long it was, voice dump. So that's kind of what I do is I interview founders, I ask them for 90 minutes, 5,000 questions from all over about their business, who they are. Like I'm just like, let's have a conversation, but I'm distracting them to try to get them to answer certain things. Then I take that pure transcript, I run it through over a hundred different prompts, and then I build them out like a 150-page brand book, and I'm profiling all kinds of things. Wow. But now what you have to your point that you just talked about is it's a brand document. The beauty of doing something like that is now your platform agnostic. I can feed that to Claude, Chat GPT, or Gemini. And now, no matter what AI tool I use, even if it's open claw, it's all filtering through the same single source of truth because it's it's your whole brand story. And the second of that is uh you can hand it now if you have a VA, if you have an assistant, if you outsource work and they're gonna do content for you. Now it's like, great, I don't want to spend three hours telling you my life story. I've already done that, and here is the document, and now you have everything that you need to go ghostwrite for me because I have filtered through and it's generative, meaning it's your own words. It's not like here's what I think you should be saying. A lot of brands are almost schizophrenic because they're like they're a chameleon. They're trying to be what they think their audience wants them to be. It's like, no, let's figure out who you are by telling it and then build the brand foundation, like you're saying, from the inside out.

SPEAKER_01 36:17

So much healthier, right? This is just exhausting for those people that just like they just feel like they got to say whatever their audience wants them to say, as opposed to getting clientele that are probably gonna align deeper, stronger, become better referral framework and flywheel effect. Yep. If they're aligned with who you really are. So great, great idea. That's a fantastic service you offer.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

Yeah, yeah. Well, for anybody listening, I would definitely say, I mean, one, if if you're interested, we can we can chat, but do what uh do what Ryan is saying. Like, do you use Whisperflow? Have you used Whisperflow?

SPEAKER_01 36:53

I don't. I've heard of it. I haven't used Whisper.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

And so a lot of times, most of my content. Here's what I do every week, you guys. I'm on two podcasts. I do an email, a blog, a LinkedIn newsletter, two podcasts and a YouTube video. That's a lot of content to do and to produce for a single person. You guys, I don't have an assistant right now. Like I'm hiring somebody, but I have been a one-person show with two small kids at home. So what I do is I will in the car, because I spend so much time in the car, is I turn on my AI in voice mode and I brain dump, hey, I just had a client call and this was the objection that they had. Here's how I walked them through that. And they actually ended up, you know, converting, and now we're working together, blah, blah, blah. I just like, what's the story? Because we all have pain points. People want to see themselves fitting inside the story, which is the solution that you offer, right? That's the common enemy. So I voice dump that. And then, you know, a day or two later, when I go back to my desktop and I have some time, then I will tell my AI assistants, go write a blog, go write this, all of these pieces of content. But I fed it the brain knowledge. So it's based off of my idea. I'm not repurposing and knocking it off from the person down the street. It's my original thought. So that's how I do my content is I do one core, one core idea, and then I repurpose it on multiple pieces, but activate your voice talk, talk to your AI while you're driving, while you're at the gym, while you're on a walk. Most of my content all comes while I'm in motion. And then I piece it together when I get back to my computer.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

It's scary. It's scary.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

I think that's what's so weird. It's like I'm talking to a non-human, it just feels sci-fi-ish and it's got all the feelings. But Katie, you've been an absolute wonderful guest. Thank you so much for taking some time with us to talk through some AI brainstorming. You mentioned your Instagram handle, hey Katie Shive. But any other ways people can follow you and get in touch with you if they want to take advantage of some of those services you offer.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Yeah, so my website is katyshive.com. And then I'm also really active on LinkedIn. Um, you can just Google or Linkin search my name. And then I do do a weekly podcast called AI after hours. And that's like one AI specific tip. Um, I try to keep it under 10 minutes once a week. So if you want to learn AI after hours, because most of us are learning after hours, that's kind of the concept. But yeah, go to my website, katyshibe.com, and you can pretty much find everything you need there.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much, Katie. Have a wonderful day, and I really again appreciate you coming on.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

Yeah, thanks for having me.