S2 / AL EP 64: Rachel Woods – When to Have A.I. Run Operations in Your Agency

Show Notes

DiviUp Agency: DiviUp helps you implement AI to scale your agency, without losing the personal touch. Rachel is a former Facebook data scientist turned entrepreneur who knows all too well how difficult scaling something that’s working can be.

🔗 Connect with Rachel Woods: https://diviupagency.com/

Episode Transcript

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:27:06

Hey, everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, agency transformation coach and founder of Niche and Control, author of the Agency Owners Guide to Freedom and the creator of leverage for growth. I’m the host of the leverage for growth podcast, and I know that in order for you to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within your mindset, skill set, and leadership style.

00:00:27:08 – 00:00:51:16

I am on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy, and money to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies at niche and control e-commerce assets.

00:00:51:18 – 00:01:22:00

That is niche in control economy. Case study. You’re now listening to leverage for growth. Hey everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche and Control and the creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency leverage episode. Today I am here with Rachel Woods, founder of Divvy Up Agency, an AI operations agency, on a mission to help you build your AI strategy, implementation, and training roadmap for your agency to ramp up and get ahead.

00:01:22:02 – 00:01:44:00

Thanks for coming to our show today, Rachel. Thanks so much for having me. I’m super excited for this. Me too. Let’s start off, and tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency. Yeah. So first of all, thanks for the intro. That’s great. Basically, what we do is we do AI operations, fully specialized in agencies.

00:01:44:00 – 00:02:15:04

So when I break that down for people, it’s all about internally how you operate. How can you use AI to unlock more scale and more efficiency? We don’t go into, like, the product building side of AI. And, and the reason we started the agency, actually, honestly, I’ve been in AI almost my entire career. I started out technically as a marketer, and then I learned, wow, if you can code and you can do all this AI stuff as a marketer, there’s just this whole world that opens up.

00:02:15:06 – 00:02:43:15

And so I worked at Facebook and, their AI research team for a bit. Kind of, you know, learning and and using a lot of the same technology that we’re experimenting with and using every day today. With ChatGPT and then I. Yeah, threw a couple hops and skips have ended up using AI across operations and a lot of my own businesses, a lot of my friends, businesses consulting with people.

00:02:43:17 – 00:03:09:08

And of course, then ChatGPT happened. Everybody got really, really into AI and wanted to understand how to integrate it into their businesses, like yesterday. And so we ended up doing a lot of work over the last year. Really kind of came to the place where we fell in love with agencies and the unique types of AI operations problems that they have.

00:03:09:10 – 00:03:42:03

And then the rest is history. Decided to officially, like, have an agency that does AI operations for agencies. We’re still pretty new. On the official agency, set up. But it’s been amazing. And, yeah, honestly, I think this the whole world is ahead of us right now. This is really cool because, even though you’ve had the agency for only a short period of time, it seems as though just based around your professional background, that everything’s kind of been leading up to this moment.

00:03:42:05 – 00:04:08:03

Yeah. How would you. Exactly. Would you agree? Yeah. And I think, that’s probably one of the most fun pieces we get to work with businesses is seeing how almost like the way I grew up in AI is now, like, the most relevant way that businesses are thinking about this. And then getting to take people on that journey so they can see the opportunities is, yeah, it’s definitely the dream job right now.

00:04:08:05 – 00:04:28:04

Very cool. And for anybody that’s listening right now that might not understand AI operations different from, like the marketing piece, and they might be the majority of the audience is like a marketing agency. Maybe your ideal client, right. But, can you talk a little bit? Just give us some fundamental of AI operations and kind of.

00:04:28:04 – 00:04:55:22

What does that mean? You know, more practically a little bit. Yeah. So, when we think about AI operations, it’s kind of like almost the next gen skill set and a lot of ways for internal operations. So a lot of times we’re still talking about things and clickup processes, SOPs. A lot of the stuff people might be familiar with and, the operations role or the operations, kinds of projects.

00:04:56:00 – 00:05:30:16

The coolest thing is that now we have this whole new, tool and then skill set of AI to be able to pull in to whatever operational processes you do. And the concept that I like to talk about a lot is when you add AI to a process, you can really start to think about what could this process be if we had unlimited time, like if our team didn’t have to be the one running the process and said, we get to design the process, but then AI is actually the one running it, and we’re kind of unlocking this like infinite scale type concept.

00:05:30:18 – 00:05:52:15

That ends up being a lot of AI operations, which is thinking about how can we pull those strengths and those opportunities of AI into the operating model or the day to day processes of a business? Cool. I know it’s really fun because I think, for those listening, like every time Jess and I talked, I just feel like we’re both mutual nerds on a lot of that stuff.

00:05:52:15 – 00:06:26:00

There’s just, so much because at the end of the day, like, I have a slide whenever I do a talk where, I put up a picture of the beach, and then I put the word unlimited time on top, and I’m like, this is the goal, right? Like, we all want to get to the place where we can still have the impact and have the, really the reach and build the business that we want, but that we’re not, like, stuck to having to do all the work or having even our team have to do all of the work that we’re able to, to really lean in and do the stuff that’s like uniquely,

00:06:26:02 – 00:06:50:02

you know, our gift or our team’s gift and all that create like creativity and strategy. And that’s literally what AI operations is all about, is how do you pull in AI so that that can be more of today’s reality. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of reminds me. First off the unlimited time concept is one that a lot of agencies try to figure out.

00:06:50:04 – 00:07:11:17

And a lot of times they’ll go through different stages. And in previous episodes I’ve talked about different stages of like the proof of concept and, you know, hiring your first team member and starting to build systems and so forth. And, one of the things that I’m curious about is, not all agencies are ready for AI operations.

00:07:11:19 – 00:07:38:06

Especially in the unlimited time piece. And there’s probably some fundamental things that they have to have set up in order for them to be a good, a good potential person, not necessarily just for you, but also for doing what you’re talking about, the AI operations piece. Can you talk a little bit about those fundamentals? Like what what do they need in place in the agency to really take this concept and run with it?

00:07:38:08 – 00:07:58:10

So there’s a couple of things. And I’ll say it’s never too early to get started on this stuff, but there are definitely pieces that if you have in place, it becomes a lot easier or it’s more like, cool, let’s layer AI operations into what you’re doing versus having to like, set up operations and set up AI operations at the same time.

00:07:58:12 – 00:08:24:19

So some of those things that we see a lot is, you know, agencies, it’s really hard to build process and repeatability. Just in general and the services that you provide, like, it’s really, easy, especially when you’re a full service, agency or really, get to work with clients on a highly creative basis, like, it’s it’s hard to find that process in repeatability.

00:08:24:21 – 00:08:49:17

But if you do start setting that up, whether that’s, you know, you have specific services you offer that follow a roadmap or, we also see kind of like a hub and spoke model that some agency set up where they’re their hub or kind of the core of the account is still pretty messy, creative and fluid. But the different services that are executing those campaigns, those have more process.

00:08:49:19 – 00:09:20:12

That’s what you’re going to need to put in place in order to have AI operations be able to, like, plug in and be able to really start to scale that. It’s probably the biggest piece. The other piece, which I know, you think about a lot, is niche and having a niche because, if you are serving all different types of clients all the time, it can be really fun because you’re learning new things, but you’re not getting, again, that same, like, repeatability.

00:09:20:14 – 00:09:57:01

Or true kind of expertise about what does it take to deliver results for this type of client. And when you want to start delegating a lot of this work to AI, you’re going to need to codify that expertise. And so if you have you know, tons of different clients across tons of different niches, it’s going to be a lot harder to find that commonality to then, try so those into being two very big things that when you have that in place, it’s so much easier if so many more use cases, on the table that, that you can go after.

00:09:57:03 – 00:10:23:18

Yeah. And if we boiled everything that you just talked about as the fundamentals and we boiled it down into what’s called first principles thinking, or you just boil it down into its core principles. That and kind of you can build back up. It’s really in a business. The reason why having a really scalable offer is really important or, a narrow focus on target customers and so forth, is you’re just minimizing the variables in an equation.

00:10:23:20 – 00:10:49:14

And the less variables in the equation, the easier it is to scale and create predictability, repeatability and so forth. And I think that anybody that is trying to figure out how to make their business scale or use AI in the way that we’re describing, you have to just minimize different variables, variables in the offer, variables in the person, that type of person, the type of problem that you’re solving, and so forth.

00:10:49:14 – 00:11:21:23

And I think that once you do that fun and fundamental type of work, using AI, kind of just it’s like putting it to the exponential affinity, you know, like you talk about the unlimited time thing. So, yeah, there’s another, piece to this which becomes really important to that’s is different than how the world used to work, which is like, I describe it as if you used to spend time, developing expertise and then you would do projects with that expertise to hone it.

00:11:21:23 – 00:11:57:16

And then once you’ve codify that expertise, you would do the projects again and again and again and again. Or maybe your team would do the projects. Got it again. The difference now is we’re in a world where you can, like really create, develop and hone that expertise, but then teach it to AI, and then the AI goes and does that project again and again and again, and you can then spend your time reviewing the work that the AI is doing, figuring out where to improve either how you’ve taught the AI, or maybe even improving your expertise that you’re putting in.

00:11:57:18 – 00:12:18:18

And then also thinking about what’s the new expertise or the new, you know, service or deliverable or something that we want to add in here to create more value. And because again, I as doing the execution, you just have so much more time like almost like research and development time that you could be spending really creating that next level of expertise.

00:12:18:20 – 00:12:41:16

And that honestly is, like really an accumulating advantage that the agencies that are doing this are really starting to see things ramp up where it’s like, wow, we’re able to do so much more at a higher level and a higher quality because, again, they’re not like stuck always executing everything. So it’s really it’s really interesting.

00:12:41:16 – 00:13:22:07

And I think like there’s we’re at the very early stages of how big of a transformation we’re about to see. Yeah. And some people this is like brand new for them, this whole AI thing and for you, and you’ve been doing it for years. It’s. Yeah. Which is I mean, I think, like, I always recommend people, there are people who’ve been in this industry for a really long time, like find them and like, I think, you can really quickly learn a lot of the fundamentals, and then be able to kind of follow along with some people that are trying to push ahead, and really, like, know where they’re going and

00:13:22:07 – 00:13:47:07

have that, yeah. There’s so many great people to be following out there to kind of get that competitive edge. If we were to look back on our conversation so far, and usually what I’ll do with people that have an agency a lot longer is, is talk about like one or 2 or 3 things that are kind of like standing out that they wish they would have known to save some time, energy or money.

00:13:47:09 – 00:14:07:02

But because the agency is a little bit earlier, I want to ask a similar but a little bit different question for people that are maybe, just starting off in AI or they’re just brand new to this whole, like, AI operations type of, you know, concept. What would you suggest they do aside from learning from other people?

00:14:07:02 – 00:14:25:00

Is there kind of like I guess we’ve talked a little bit about minimizing variables and things like that. But if you’re just to give somebody like a 1 or 2 step to kind of get them in the direction of AI operations, aside from working with you, obviously. But, you know, what would you suggest that I do?

00:14:25:02 – 00:14:58:22

Yeah. So, first, I don’t think you need to jump straight into AI operations. I think, getting AI familiar or just, really developing your AI literacy is a really important first step. In fact, a lot of clients that come to us have already been using ChatGPT pretty heavily across their team. And they had this kind of like we call almost like a productivity plateau where it’s like, you know, they’re really comfortable with the stuff, but they’re not like operationalizing it yet if you’re not in that first bucket yet.

00:14:59:00 – 00:15:20:17

I would definitely try to spend the time, as a team using ChatGPT for sharing prompts. And because you just want to get at least a base level of familiarity, and also excitement, like your team is going to need to be excited about that stuff for AI to really like land and you get the full value out of going after it.

00:15:20:19 – 00:15:42:15

The other thing that can be really helpful is setting up like an AI council. So like a group of leaders across, your team, and especially, a point person of that team to kind of be the one leading the charge on. Yeah. Let’s just get the whole company really familiar again with like, basic usage of ChatGPT.

00:15:42:17 – 00:16:13:13

And once you’ve hit that point, the other piece that, I would recommend doing is really, codifying those processes. You can do that without, even needing to jump into. I find them yet. But the term that we use as playbooks, if you can start building out playbooks for different services, different offers or even the supporting functions of an agency, the more that you have stuff playbooks out, again, it’s just going to be like an easier jumping off point to start having.

00:16:13:13 – 00:16:36:11

I start to do that playbook, instead of you needing to always do it. Yeah. Totally awesome. Rachel, if you do look forward and focus on, you know, what do you focus on for the next 1 to 3 years that you’re excited about? Obviously this agency and getting it expanded and so forth. But yeah. What are you excited about?

00:16:36:13 – 00:16:57:14

Honestly, we’re very much still at the early part of our journey and, I like, keep waking up every morning and I’m like, man, this is just like the dream job. Like, I feel like there’s this, intersection of a lot of, the favorite parts I’ve had in my career of getting to work super hands on with businesses, and make a pretty big impact.

00:16:57:14 – 00:17:20:13

Like, you know, it’s oftentimes looking at stuff that was taking days or even sometimes a month and taking that down to a couple of hours of the AI running and the team reviewing. So it’s just like really, really fun. But definitely over the next 1 to 3 years growing the team a lot. I really want whether people, work with us directly or just consume the content that we put out.

00:17:20:13 – 00:17:45:08

I really want to, help this whole industry see how, impactful and powerful thinking about your agency in this way can be. And so I would love for us to, Yeah. Just help lead the charge, help educate people, and then hopefully, there’s just so many AI first agencies that pop up and, or transform or develop over the next 1 or 3 years.

00:17:45:08 – 00:18:07:19

And we’d love to be a part, of those in any small or big way. Yeah. Sweet. All right. Cool. What was what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you? If they wanted to learn more about, your agency and, Yeah. So I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. As as Jesse, I love always seeing his content.

00:18:07:19 – 00:18:31:07

It’s so good. And, so that’s a great place to connect. Pretty responsive there. And then, we also have a website divvy up agency.com. So, has a little bit more context on, what we do and how to get in touch as well. Awesome. And for anybody that’s listening, we’ll include it in the, links to your Rachel and her agency in the show notes.

00:18:31:09 – 00:18:54:00

And, Rachel, I just want to say thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. And yeah, thanks for having me. It’s very fun. Agency owners, if you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and start working on the business, where you can free up your time, delegate work more effectively, price and position your services to find and get paid for what you’re worth, and have the team run the day to day.

00:18:54:01 – 00:19:12:07

Go to niche and control.com/case study now to learn more about leverage for growth, and also to book a free strategy session with us. We’ll look at your systems, determine exactly what you need to do in order for you to scale this year, and to create a strategic plan so that you can live the life of entrepreneurship you’ve always dreamed about.

00:19:12:09 – 00:19:27:23

Go to nicheincontrol.com/casestudy . Now.

(Transcript is autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate.)