How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

Dylan Wickliffe [00:00:00]:
They're predicting that there's gonna be a dramatic, like, a 25% decline in search engine traffic, which is crazy. And I didn't even think about how this impacts SEO and content and what we've been doing other than just being convenient. But I'm already starting to ask Jasper things that I used to would have asked.

Kenny Lange [00:00:23]:
Welcome to the how leaders think podcast, the show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host, Kenny Lang. And with me today is not one, but two brilliant guests from media Junction. The first is its founder and CEO, Trish Lassard. She is a fourth generation entrepreneur, so, like, it's in her blood. She couldn't do anything else. And she's on a mission to build a different kind of agency, one that's flexible and adaptable, which is excellent. She spends her day surrounded by incredibly smart people like Dylan, who architect digital solutions, optimize for humans and conversions, and they are best known for building amazing HubSpot websites that actually get results.

Kenny Lange [00:01:07]:
With her is Dylan Wickliffe, who is the vp of growth and an avid titans fan. I feel the need to put that in there. I'm almost surprised you didn't wear a jersey today. I thought you were about to, like, rip open as, like, a superman. Momentous.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:01:21]:
Gotta stay on brand.

Kenny Lange [00:01:23]:
You do. But he has helped the agency grow not just bigger, but also better, more, more healthy. Like, he's also a former HubSpot employee or hub spotter, so he's got the insides. Maybe we'll get that today. Welcome to the show, Trish and Dylan.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:01:41]:
Thanks a lot, man. Pumped to be here.

Trish Lessard [00:01:43]:
Thanks for having us.

Kenny Lange [00:01:44]:
Yeah, this is going to be exciting. As a lot of the listeners know, former HubSpot partner didn't do anything near as cool or amazing as media junction. So they were one of the big players when I got started and were often used in a lot of the partner training of, like, be more like them. I know they snuck in just everywhere that they could, Trish. But tell me, for the two of you, what has been on your collective mind so much?

Trish Lessard [00:02:09]:
I would just start with the economy, AI, the future, all kinds of stuff. So I think if AI isn't on your mind right now, I think it would be kind of crazy to not think about AI because it's everywhere. Everyone's talking about it.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:02:27]:
Right?

Kenny Lange [00:02:28]:
And we're only about a week out from OpenAI's last big announcement of GPT 40, which. That was crazy cool. I'm curious what the two of you are seeing in terms of the agency space as well as clients. Thinking about AI or not thinking about it, considering, as I said in your bio, you're working to optimize your solutions for humans, but AI is not going away. So how are you all thinking about the two of those things blending together and one not doing away with?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:03:02]:
We just did a whole podcast with HubSpot about this, or I guess that was more of a webinar. If you didn't catch that, definitely go check that. But there, there's a lot that goes into it, so it's not, I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's both. And, and for us, I think the way that we're kind of positioning AI, as far as content creation goes at least, is AI is accessible. It's out there for everybody. It kind of levels the playing field on what you can create right away. But ultimately your outputs are only as good as your inputs, so you still want to be great with prompting.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:03:32]:
I think AI gets you probably 80% of the way there, and I think the ones who finish, like, take you to that final 20% are going to be the ones that really separate great marketers from good marketers. Because anybody can create the generic content, anybody can do the copy and paste. But I think that last 20% is where agencies and content creators and marketers are really going to separate themselves from the pack. So that's kind of our positioning on it from a content standpoint. It's here to stay. Anybody who's still kind of a naysayer or a skeptic strongly encourage you to get off of that. I was a pretty early adopter, and I was maybe, like, naively optimistic about it right away, but I'm finding ways to use it in my everyday life. It's not just for clients.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:04:13]:
I make meal plans out of using AI platforms. I make workout plans. I try to incorporate it everywhere, anywhere where it makes sense, because I think just having those muscles being flexed regularly is going to allow me to just lead from the front. And that's really, that's my big thing with AI right now, is this is like your once in a lifetime opportunity to be early to something. Because I wasn't early to inbound marketing. I was right at the beginning of my tech career and it already been rolled out. I wasn't early to skipping ads and the DVR into PPC and the Google algorithm. Right.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:04:45]:
So for me, this is my first chance to really get to spearhead something from the very beginning. And I'm not going to miss the opportunity to be an early thought leader.

Kenny Lange [00:04:54]:
Yeah. Which I, again, I think you're spot on, is that these opportunities don't come along all that often. Trish, being that we were talking just before we hit record about the fact that you got started, you said when you were 27, you recently made a LinkedIn post about how long you've had the agency and you've been building businesses. So you've seen a lot of the shifts that have happened with regards to the blend of technology and business building. So I saw you nodding, as Dylan was saying, like, you don't get these opportunities often. But my understanding and exposure to media junction has always been early adoption. Usually trying to be on the forefront of something a little bit more complex, a little more cutting edge. Initially was the more like, data driven website design.

Kenny Lange [00:05:42]:
We all were early leaders and collaborators with Luke Summerfield. How are you thinking about AI with regards to how do we roll this in and make it accessible? Because a lot of people can understand it, but not a lot of people can take it and then translate that into a service someone can buy or something that becomes useful for those that maybe aren't as tech forward as someone like Dylan.

Trish Lessard [00:06:10]:
How I'd kind of describe right now would be like when I started the agency, okay, so the Internet was scary. Everybody was like, the Internet's gonna change everything, just like they're saying right now about AI. And people were afraid of the unknown. They were afraid the Internet was gonna take their jobs. They were afraid of all this. And I kind of leaned into it, and for me, it was an outlet, it was an opportunity to learn. And at the time, I was a mother of three when I started my agency, so I was pretty young, but I was a young mom, and so I didn't go to college. And so the Internet was an opportunity to level the playing field for just people to learn.

Trish Lessard [00:06:50]:
And so I think, looking at AI today, I'm thinking the same way about it. I think that AI is not new. I have it in my laundry. It tells me how much soap I should use or how much water I should use based on the soil level or whatever it's built in. It's everywhere. It's not going to replace humans, just like the Internet. I think it's going to give us opportunity, and I think that's the piece that I'm holding on to. I think as I talk to designers at my company, they're, you know, frustrated, and I be part of the change, be a part of the responsibility of AI.

Trish Lessard [00:07:26]:
Get involved. And so when we talk about AI, we talk about human led AI, and I think that's a different way of approaching it. When we're working with our clients, we're talking to them where a lot of them are. We have policy against that. Can't use AI. You're not going to be able to use a lot of tech in the future. If you're not going to. If you're going to have a policy against using AI, pretty much you're not going to be able to use technology in the future.

Trish Lessard [00:07:51]:
So I think people need to adopt AI policies. They need to be responsible. They need to be thinking about the information that they're dumping in and just be mindful. And so we're taking the approach that it's our responsibility to coach our customers, customers on the right way to use it.

Kenny Lange [00:08:07]:
Gotcha. So they. They don't need to. There's two ditches. One could be you go all in and you act. I think that there is a lot of talk around the responsible use of AI. I was even reading, I subscribed to an AI newsletter called Superhuman. I highly recommend it.

Kenny Lange [00:08:23]:
It's very good. But actually, HubSpot started advertising in it about a week or two ago, which was interesting. But they're talking about how OpenAI is putting together their own, like, essentially, like, responsibility team as they are starting to prepare for GPT five release. Right. And there's some nervousness around, like, if GPT four and four o can do all these things, what is five going to be capable of as we march towards AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which I'm not going to pretend to understand all those definitions. I will leave that to Paul Reitzer. He can answer all of that. I've listened to him speak, and I'm like, I'm not even sure I know how to tie my shoe after listening to Paul, but maybe AI could help me with that.

Kenny Lange [00:09:08]:
But the idea that there is a responsibility or a responsible approach to interacting with it is that you don't have to, like, lose your mind and put every personal piece of information and stuff into any of these chat systems, but you could start to leverage it to make a few things easier for you. Like you said, your washer and dryer will have something. Usually when I'm talking to people, I tell them it's like, do you ever use cruise control in your car? I was like, that's a form. Like, it's an automated process. It's a form of artificial intelligence. Like, my car has a little follow distance the adaptive thing, which might be the best thing since sliced bread because I didn't have to like keep letting off and on as I'm going 90 down the interstate. So hopefully there aren't any law enforcement listening to. But what is the thing most often you're encountering as y'all are doing media appearances or talking to potential clients or speaking on webinars? What do you see as the prevailing wisdom right now among businesses to adopt? Like there's, there's the sort of the ditches of go all in or I'm scared out of my mind and we should all get a plot of land and disconnect from the elect grid.

Kenny Lange [00:10:23]:
But there's got to be more people that are in the middle that just feel uneducated or are you seeing something.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:10:30]:
Different regarding AI or just in general AI?

Kenny Lange [00:10:33]:
Like how do they approach it? Like they, like they might admit we don't know what we don't know, but we don't know where to get started. Like how are people thinking? Because there are those polars, but we all know that there's fewer people at the opposite ends of the spectrum like bleeding edge and people who are total laggards on this, but who are the people in the middle? What are they saying?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:10:57]:
I think a lot of people know that it's out there, but they don't know what platform to use, what baked into the software they're already using. AI tools has what agencies to work with, what freelancers to work with, how much to copy and paste versus how much to modify. As a human, I think there's just a lot that goes into this perfect little recipe cocktail of AI usage that a lot of people don't know what combination of these things makes the most sense for them. So I think working with someone who can help them navigate the tools to use because a lot of people are wanting like what's the one tool you recommend me use? And I'm like, I don't recommend one. Like I use three every day. Between chat, GPT, Jasper and HubSpot's built in AI, we have different use cases for all of them and there is a ton of overlap too, which makes it even more confusing because a lot of these things do the same things. But we have a client who just the words that we're looking for don't work in chat GPT, but they work very well in Jasper and we also have that relationship with Jasper to give them that kind of feedback so they can make their product more conducive to there's content use cases like that. But there's also times where it's like, I don't need this to be as perfect or as amazing.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:12:10]:
I'm just going to use what's baked into HubSpot because I'm already in here writing a blog anyway. So there's like, there's compliance to consider, there's voice and tone and branding to consider, there's efficiency and process to consider, but then there's also just like quality of final outputs to consider, which in some cases chat GPT does better and in some cases Jasper does better. And so, yeah, I think right now it's like not enough people are, and maybe that's not fair to say, but for those people in the middle that you're talking about who aren't on either polar, I would say like they're probably just not tinkering enough with it. They're not letting their curiosity get the best of them enough. Because I've done some awful things with AI where I'm like, this is terrible, like I'm not, I can't post this. It reads like a robot, like you got to be. And I do that. I saw, I write songs too.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:12:56]:
Like, you got to write a lot of bad songs before you write good songs. I think if you're in the middle where you're not on either end of the anti or pro AI spectrum, like you need to get your hands dirty, you need to be willing to create. It's going to take a while before AI is a convenience saver for you, but once it, once you kind of know how you want to use it and use it well, it's going to really fit in neatly into your systems, I would say.

Kenny Lange [00:13:21]:
Yeah, I love that. Trisha, is there anything you wanted to add?

Trish Lessard [00:13:24]:
No, I was. I think the thing that I keep kind of hearing from other people is they just don't really don't know what it is. They think the robots are coming. There's this intelligence from another world coming over and that they should fear it. It's an iteration of computing, if you think about it that way. It's here, so it's not necessarily the future. So it is here, I think use it, try it, don't be afraid of it. Like Dylan was saying, I think it's easy to listen to the news and all of these scary things.

Trish Lessard [00:13:58]:
I think use good judgment, just like you would on the Internet.

Kenny Lange [00:14:02]:
Right. I love what, what Dylan said about you should let your curiosity get the best of you, is get out there like test tools. I mean, there's free trials all over the place, because obviously, a lot of these platforms, like, like a Jasper or copy AI. Heck, canva came out with several things that I saw in a newsletter. They're. They're using the term magic, which is on brand for them, but about the design and copy and tone and voice and a lot of those things. And it's still early days, but the tinkering, the experimentation of figuring out, oh, that actually could be helpful, or that shortened my time, it got me 80% of the way there. Doesn't mean that you don't still need to be a talented designer or copywriter or marketer or what have you.

Kenny Lange [00:14:49]:
But maybe this could help you fine tune. I know for myself, even though I do my own marketing, I'm a company of one. But just even thinking about my own brand and how I'm helping people, I've been able to plug a bunch of things in and say, hey, I'm using these tools. I'm doing these things. Can you help me synthesize this? And it helped me get to where I probably would have gotten eventually, but it helped me get there much faster because it gave me new ideas to think about instead of sitting here staring at the wall, watching paint dry, hoping that a blinding flash of inspiration would hit me. I'm curious, do you see a difference between how the general public is thinking about this versus maybe some of the high level leaders that you talk to on your clients or that reach out to you or connect with you in your other, like, leadership circles?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:15:36]:
Not really. I mean, in my opinion, it's pretty optimistic all around. I think the kind of the higher level leaders that I follow on this topic are extremely technical engineers like Dharmesha, for example. He knows this. He knows the tool inside and out, and he knows how to apply the tool. And he's a world class developer as well. So somebody like him can build tools using chat GPT's API for even cooler, more practical use cases. So I think it's more about the people in that middle part of the spectrum that you're referring to.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:16:10]:
It's you have the super anti skeptic naysayers. You have the Dharmesh types who know it extremely well and can apply it everywhere and turn light bulbs on in my head to be like, wow, I got to get on this all right now. It's like, there's just so much unknown for the general public. This is, it's a brand new way of computing. It's a brand new way of gathering information, and it's such a huge deal. I mean, Gartner made this prediction at the beginning of this year. You may have heard about that. They're predicting that there's going to be a dramatic, like a 25% decline in search engine traffic, which is crazy.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:16:44]:
And I didn't even think about how this impacts SEO and content and what we've been doing other than just being convenient. But I'm already starting to ask Jasper things that I used to would have asked Google and I didn't even like, I didn't even correlate those two things. But it's like they're saying that AI and machine learning is going to become at least a bigger part of people gathering information. I don't know. That doesn't really answer the question. I think the general public has this kind of curious groundhog coming out for the season attitude about it, kind of peeking their head out. I think the people at the top, the innovators, are very optimistic. There's always going to be some of the naysayers and the purists who say, I write all this content myself, I do all my own research and that's why I charge $2,000 for blogs.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:17:30]:
So I think there's always going to be the spectrum, but I think it's just that unknown period and like how this is going to impact the way that we do the rest of our work is where kind of the question marks are of. Yeah, go ahead.

Kenny Lange [00:17:44]:
Yeah. Because it seems like a lot of the application early on, not just for y'all's world, but things I'm observing have applied to a lot of like marketing, sales and those sorts of areas. I'll be curious to see how it creeps into other arenas. I do want to hit on what you were saying about the change in search traffic. I wasn't aware of that report, but that certainly makes sense. As a matter of fact, even just this week I noticed I one, I do go to chat GPT for some questions now instead, but Google is rolling out the AI response where it's aggregating stuff from the first page as they're trying to get Gemini rolled out. More and more I think I get an ad like every other day inside of my Google workspace. So thank you Google for that.

Kenny Lange [00:18:28]:
Don't you want to try it? Don't you? Don't you want to? I was like, no, just roll it into my cost. I'm not paying anymore. But I am curious, how are you all utilizing it in your leadership positions? You mentioned you're up in the mid twenties in terms of headcount and so you're not, neither one of you are in the day to day delivery of services. How do you see AI assisting you in your positions of leadership and leading people and helping them do their best work?

Trish Lessard [00:19:04]:
As a CEO, I'm looking for efficiency. I'm looking for ways to help our team be more efficient. We're using it for notes and meetings and one on ones and tasks and there's just so much that we're using it for SOPs documentation. There's a lot of different things that we're using to help kind of that stuff that we didn't necessarily love having to do. So we're using Jasper a lot.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:19:34]:
I mean, I would say yes to answer your question, like as leaders here, are we incorporating it? The answer is yes. Our knee jerk reaction anytime we need anything done is to start in Jasper, whether it's we just created video guidelines for the way our team creates video, we need to standardize the way that we create content across 13 different states. Now that's hard. And we're not doing in person trainings. I can't help you make your background look better. I'm not with you. I can't control your lighting, I can't control your audio. So we used AI as the starting point for us to create our branded video guidelines now.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:20:06]:
So we have things like that and I'm doing like a marketing strategy for the video portion of our marketing play and I'm going to start with Jasper there. Same with sales plan, marketing plan. Even today when I was prepping for this call, just what is like the current landscape of leadership look like? You can ask AI questions like that and it can even enhance your prompt a little bit. But there's a lot of topics it talks about vision and strategy, team development, communication, innovation, culture and values, performance, management, customer focus, financial health, personal development, social responsibility. Right? So like, I could have created that list, I could have curated it, I could have taken the time to think about it. But I have ten topics with three sub bullets now to at least get my brain turning. So I'll never use that list in a blog. I'm not even reading it for today's conversation.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:20:54]:
I just kind of got curious. I'm not creating a deck with it, but I have access to really quick, fairly reliable conversation starters at least. So as a leader here, I can start, I can use some of these buckets, I can use some of these bullets. So for me it's like, yeah, I'm incorporating it everywhere and I use it to different like levels sometimes. So when I'm creating our actual marketing plan or our 2024 growth plan, I didn't really use AI for that. I already kind of had the layout I was going for. I knew what I wanted, I had our data, I had our numbers. When it comes to video guidelines, I could have taken the time to and I say I, it was actually Ryan who did these but we could have taken the time to go through them one by one.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:21:35]:
Go slowly but give us a really good launch pad to get something really great spun out very quickly. We're also Jasper partners so just want to be an advocate of, want to be our own best case study too. So you'll see our HubSpot website looks great, our HubSpot portal looks great. Our Jasper is widely used and adopted internally so anything that we believe in platform wise, like we're going to try to be our own best case studies. So I mean I begged to have a seat in Jasper whenever we signed up as a partner because I know I'm not on the services team but I use it probably more than them.

Kenny Lange [00:22:05]:
So you're not competitive at all are you?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:22:08]:
Yeah, no, I just want to win.

Kenny Lange [00:22:12]:
All I do is win. So the, I love those applications especially I'm thinking about like process documentation and creation. Unless you are like an engineer or somebody weird or I don't know, maybe you've been drinking but you don't typically love process documentation and creation. It's like I just need you. Like I watch out what I did, now go and do likewise. But that can't always work and especially with a remote team, 13 states like that can be very difficult to get everybody on the same page, literally speaking. So I think that's a great quick win. I would be curious, Dylan, if you could speak to the sales side of things just practically since I see a lot of your posts.

Kenny Lange [00:22:57]:
You have a great take on selling like a human, right? That may even be in your LinkedIn bio.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:23:03]:
I own the domain. Yeah.

Kenny Lange [00:23:05]:
Oh my goodness. There you go. Right? And then it can be yours for the low price of $2 million.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:23:13]:
Yep, but I'll settle for like 800 grand.

Kenny Lange [00:23:16]:
I will take a small brokerage fee for using the show for that. But for those people who like you still gotta sell today, you still gotta sell human to human, whether you're b, two b or b to c. How is it helping you perform your responsibilities as a salesperson but still keep you grounded and connected in the shared humanity with the person on the other side of the call?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:23:43]:
I'm not using it maybe as widely as other salespeople are when it comes to like email copy. I'm very short, sweet to the point. By the time I could prompt AI I could have already written my follow up email. So for, it would be very hard to make my emails more efficient than they are now. Cuz for me it's like, yo, Kenny, you can sign. That's, that's my email.

Trish Lessard [00:24:04]:
No it can't with him.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:24:06]:
Hey, I'm about to sign a deal probably while we're on this call. And for the last two weeks our follow up has just been office gifts back and forth. There, there's a gif of Jim Halpert just sitting at his desk like, and that's exactly, and they know what I'm asking, are you gonna sign? And their response was Stanley sitting grumpy saying, still waiting to, waiting for the board. So I mean that, that's my style. So it'd be hard to make my emails more efficient.

Kenny Lange [00:24:31]:
At least I haven't gotten the did I stutter? Gif? Because then you pushed it too far.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:24:36]:
Oh crap. Yeah, no, I even complimented them. I was like, hey, it's cool you are using gifs. But as far as AI goes, there's another tool called fathom, fathom video that quite literally I didn't have to hire a coordinator or a personal assistant because of fathom. And that is a really resounding testimony to that platform. But fathom helps me take really great notes, helps me get really quick recaps when I'm a couple days past a call and it's time to type a follow up or time to type a proposal, even those notes are better than the notes I could have taken by myself. And they're integrated with Zoom, they're integrated with HubSpot and fathom's crazy. Fathom.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:25:16]:
I will say, kenny, I'll have a proposal to you by Wednesday afternoon. I'll talk to you then and fathom will, will hear that, create a task for me in HubSpot that's due Wednesday afternoon sometime to say, send Kenny proposal. Now. It's not perfect. It also hears me say like, yeah, I'll send you some security documentation one day, blah blah. It's going to hear all these other things and I'm kind of just saying conversationally, it's going to create a bunch of tasks for them too. I do have to sift out some of the junk a little bit, but I live and die by the HubSpot CRM. So fathom has been an amazing tool there.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:25:48]:
And then I do. A lot of times when I am creating assets like sales collateral or Dex or one pagers and sometimes my more thorough emails that are not just office gifts. A lot of times I do run that content through an AI platform, usually Jasper, just like gut check me like hey, make this a little bit shorter or add a little bit more of my brand voice to this. Orlando, take this email but write me a better one. And the goal of this email is to be for someone to reply to this email and let me know if they're still interested or whatever. If you're really creative with your prompting, you can do a lot. So on the marketing side, I'm using it a lot on the front end of the work to be done. On the sales side I'm using it a lot for the back end of the work to be done and it's just working well for me.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:26:34]:
There's definitely an opportunity for me to do more with it in sales, but as a salesperson we're a little slower to adopt change. But my marketing brain is loving it. My sales brain is just like, yeah, are you better than me? I don't think you're better than me yet.

Kenny Lange [00:26:49]:
We're back to competition.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:26:50]:
Exactly. Yeah.

Kenny Lange [00:26:51]:
You versus irobot. Trish, obviously you're not in the day to day sales or marketing or any of those pieces. And it sounded like a lot of what you're doing is evaluating. Using that, like you were saying earlier is use wisdom, use discernment, how you're incorporating, because any of your decisions obviously affect the lives of 20 plus people and how they work. When you write an email, when you're communicating with people, when you're doing things, it's a little less like, I'm just trying to move things forward. You're evaluating it. There's a lot more about relationship building. How is your experience differing, if at all, from what Dylan just described and how it's helping him be more efficient and effective and getting people to take action well.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:27:37]:
And as we know, email is the best way to reach Trish. That's what I'll start with is Trish is a great emailer.

Trish Lessard [00:27:42]:
I use Grammarly and I use sentiment because I come across sometimes, well, most of the time, not kind, too short and to the point. Yes. So I love Grammarly and I've been using it for a long time. For me, it's sentiment gut checking if it's the right message to send, how somebody would receive it sometimes kind of can help deliver messages. I think maybe some of the other powerful CEO's in the world maybe should have done that at 03:00 when they've sent messages. I guess communication would be a great way to how you're going to deliver that message. Sometimes in email.

Kenny Lange [00:28:27]:
Gotcha. It sounds like it's helping you come across in the way that you intend, right? I've been accused on more than one occasion of the same thing coming across as very. When I write, I'm a lot more direct to the point. I do have a confident style of communication, even verbally, but it can sometimes even more so. Like the sentiment analysis from Grammarly. Cause I use it too. And I am competitive on that. Cause I get like you used.

Kenny Lange [00:28:57]:
You use more words than 94% of people. And I was like, who the hell are those 6%? But confident is my number one and I have to look and go, I do want to be confident, but I don't want to come across as unkind. I was like, I don't mean it this way, but you lose so much when it's written that you have to. You feel like you might be tap dancing, so why not have the AI do the tap dancing for you? Yeah, exactly. But you found that's helped you build and maintain key relationships that you're looking to have just because it can help you modify that so you don't send out the wrong thing.

Trish Lessard [00:29:31]:
Yeah, I would say sometimes people write with emotion. You may be in a hurry and it may come across to somebody, some just not the way that you want it to come across. I lean on it the most.

Kenny Lange [00:29:46]:
I think you've given lots of practical advice lots of different ways. If I had to summarize, a lot of it would be like, stay curious, practice your prompts. I do think prompt engineering, if you want to make a fancy word for it, I think is going to become one of those skills that people put on resumes. If people still use resumes, I'm just like, look at my LinkedIn. But I'm unemployable. So maybe don't take employment advice from me. Being able to craft really good prompts, I go back to something within interviewing or my work now in coaching is if you want better answers, ask better questions. So maybe you're not getting.

Kenny Lange [00:30:24]:
You think AI sucks because ultimately your questions suck. And that's okay. You got to start somewhere. Everybody was terrible at something. I'm pretty sure the first website ever built was God awful trish, you could probably say the same. I don't know, maybe you were just born, like, building beautiful websites and I just painted them with your mind. But the but stay curious, create great prompts and then experiment with and use discernment on like, when do you need to use a tool? When does it make sense to integrate it? Like, you don't have to use everything, but maybe don't go the other direction and use absolutely nothing for fear that it's going to replace you. Actually could make you far more valuable or give you more free time, which is ultimately what all this technology over the last several decades was supposed to do.

Kenny Lange [00:31:12]:
Maybe we can lower our anxiety levels a little bit and not backfill it. More work and more anxiety. But if someone wanted to take their very first step because they have a lot of options, you've given lots of advice and we'll have some links in the show notes. But if somebody was wanting to take their first step with little to no money, what would you tell them to.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:31:33]:
Do with AI specifically? I'd probably go try the free version of chat GPT or hop on a free trial with Jasper.

Trish Lessard [00:31:43]:
I'm going to go away from AI for a minute and just go old school listening. Bring your team together. Retrospectives are super powerful and I would say listening to your team ideas, trying something different would be probably what I would say. Or old school SWAT. Do a sWot analysis with your team. Super, super easy to do, and that you just learn so much about your company.

Kenny Lange [00:32:10]:
Absolutely. And for anybody listening who doesn't happen to know, SWOT is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And there's like a bajillion free resources on the Internet, on the interwebs. Maybe go to chat GPT and ask it what it is and design an exercise for you. In your experience with retrospectives, are there a couple of key questions that you'd recommend somebody to kickstart them?

Trish Lessard [00:32:35]:
We do three. So it's what did we do? Didn't go well, and what can we do to improve the next time? So those are just the three questions.

Kenny Lange [00:32:44]:
I love those questions. I've used those in areas where I wasn't even doing a retrospective. And it's they're deceptively powerful and they cost you nothing other than listening to the end of this fantastic episode. If I don't mind saying so myself. If somebody wanted to know more about either of you or media junction, where would you send them?

Dylan Wickliffe [00:33:06]:
Mediajunction.com for us and LinkedIn for me.

Trish Lessard [00:33:10]:
I would say LinkedIn. Don't send me an email.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:33:14]:
Yeah, don't you can she actually far.

Kenny Lange [00:33:18]:
Prefers like a post like sent with horse and rider. And if it can be sent in triplicate. That would also be excellent. No, both of them are excellent follows on LinkedIn. Trish is very diligent to document the process that she's going through. She's very transparent, which I appreciate. And it's super helpful for those of us who are trying to build their own thing, that maybe they can learn some lessons. And Dylan's always got snazzy stuff.

Kenny Lange [00:33:44]:
He's got a fun tone, or at least his AI does. I don't know if he does.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:33:48]:
Very rarely using AI on LinkedIn right now.

Kenny Lange [00:33:51]:
Yeah, I'm experimenting with it. I mean, it's a mixed bag.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:33:54]:
So many emojis for me, too many.

Kenny Lange [00:33:58]:
I try to sprinkle just a couple just to make it pop. Make my bullet points pop. Yep, that's what I get. The one, two, three in there. Maybe put the brain emoji. That's always a fun one.

Dylan Wickliffe [00:34:07]:
Love it.

Kenny Lange [00:34:07]:
But we will link all of these things and more in the show notes. So if anybody's interested in learning more about either of you or what media junction is up to, or maybe what they could offer their organization, then they can reach. But to the rest of you who are listening, we appreciate your time and your attention. If you got any benefit value from this episode or any others, number one, I'm grateful that you listen. I know you have many options when flying, and I thank you for flying how leaders think. But if you would like to help somebody else for absolutely free, like share rate review, it is a free and easy and quick way to help your fellow leader along their journey. Gets eyeballs on it and might be the thing that cracks their opportunity wide open for them. But until next time, change the way you think and change the way you leave.

Kenny Lange [00:34:55]:
We'll see our.