Racheal: All right, CEOs. I am so excited to share one of my favorite people in the world with you, Gabi Day. Welcome back, because you have been on Promote Yourself to CEO before. I'm so glad to have you back.

Gabi: Thank you for having me. Yeah, thank you for having my chatty self back.

Racheal: Well, some of you who have worked with us at The CEO Collective have heard about Gabi Day probably multiple times, and even met her when you have participated in the Collective yourself and attended a million CEO Retreats.

But I wanted to bring you back because something that happens occasionally is I have a client who works with me, they have all of this progress in their business, and I get to really see their genius at work. And what's amazing is you have this company, Bright Body, and your real genius isn't just in creating clean skincare.

Gabi: Mm-hmm.

Racheal: It's in the marketing of that brand. And because you were taking off so fast with your marketing, you launched a secondary business, and then I hired you to come work on the team with me to run ads, because you are so good at this.

Gabi: Thank you. This is the highest compliment, truly.

Racheal: Well, I wanna start there, because today I wanna talk about how we have been collaborating and using AI inside my business, inside your businesses, how it is impacting ads, how it's impacting marketing, all of those type of topics. But first I wanna give you a chance to share a little bit about how did you go from running this product-based business to launching a secondary business now? And what is it that you are really doing, and your goals with Hypema'am?

From Collecting Acorns to Teaching Other Founders

Gabi: Yeah. So I always had a little itch to do some kind of teaching, coaching, consulting. One of my top five in StrengthsFinder is developer. I'm a good mentor. And my 10th house is in Cancer, so if any of that means anything to anybody who's into the woo astrology, that means that part of my legacy that I leave behind, part of my career, should be nurturing and helping other people. That's what that means.

So I've always had that itch, but prior to working with you and really getting my ducks truly in a row, I was like, "I'm not there yet. I still need to collect my little acorns of knowledge, and when I feel that my stash of acorns is adequate, then I can go and share with other people how to build up their acorn stash."

So once I hit my first huge level-up with Bright Body and was like, "Oh."

Racheal: Yeah.

Gabi: "Oh." And I saw what was possible. At the same time as I was in The CEO Collective, I was also working with my own ads coach. Shout-out to Aashima Verma. My favorite ads and social media people are all Canadian, so she's up outside of Toronto, I think. She's wonderful.

And I felt like it was the first phase of that scene from A Beautiful Mind where all of the equations are going across, and I was like, "Whoa, everything's connected." I feel like my business frontal lobe hit 26. I'm 36 now, but do you know what I'm saying? I felt like, "Oh, I see how it all connects."

The clouds parted, the angels sang, and I thought, "Okay, now every time I'm on social media looking at what other people are putting out for people like me in terms of e-com, self-funded businesses, product-based businesses, just women who have a very specific point of view in whatever they're doing," I was just getting pissed off on the daily.

Like, what is this hot garbage? And any time I hear we all have the same 24 hours in a day, just violence in the mind. It makes me really mad. The more I had the itch to teach and the more I kept seeing bad advice, I thought, "Okay, I need to distill what I've learned in collecting my acorns and figure out how to teach other people, and empower other people in the same way."

So I knew I didn't wanna do a traditional agency format.

Racheal: Yeah.

Why Ads Alone Are Not the Whole Picture

Gabi: A, for capacity. B, it feels misaligned. My experience has been seeing the true return on my own skill set and not being dependent on someone else to be my business translator, as it were. It's like learning the theory and the frameworks from you, same from Aashima. Having a true understanding of textbook level knowledge but also being able to apply that, that's the secret sauce that I wanted to be able to teach people.

So that's what Hypema'am is. My signature offer is called Fairy Marketing Mother. It teaches people ads as a critical piece of the puzzle, but it looks at really the whole marketing picture, because too many agencies only look at ads, and the success of ads depends on 50-11 other variables that agencies don't tend to look at, and then they just kind of shrug at you.

Or they say, "You have an abandoned cart flow, right?" And then the founder says, "Yeah," but they never actually open it or look at it, or they never do an audit of your positioning, your voice, et cetera, et cetera. So I wanted to offer more of a comprehensive experience.

I've evolved it where now I am helping to make the creative. I do the strategy. I have a virtual assistant, Malen, that helps with the editing and putting together, but I take the lead on strategy and copy and things like that. But the goal is to basically plop my marketing and ads brain into my clients' brains and heads and business ethos or ecosystem, and then take the daily grind of having to keep up with making the ads off their plate.

Racheal: That's my favorite thing ever, that you were like, "I will do all the things," and I was like, "Yes!"

Gabi: Yes. So it's almost like when you learn to drive. You're in the driver's seat and then the driving instructor is in the passenger seat, and they have their own wheel, and they have their own pedals. And then eventually you don't need the driving instructor anymore, unless maybe you hire a chauffeur. If you're really wealthy.

That's the metaphor. I can always manage the creative for people, but I never, ever, ever want my clients to be in the dark or in the backseat or, God forbid, the trunk about the strategy behind the ads. If you as a founder do not understand your marketing strategy, you are doing your business a monumental disservice.

Racheal: Absolutely. And this has been so fun for me just to watch this evolution, because you not only went through The CEO Collective and applied this all to Bright Body, then you went through the certification where we spent a year talking about applying all these frameworks into different use cases and different scenarios. So it's been really fun to see how, like you said, I plopped my brain into you a little bit, and now you're plopping your brain into your clients' businesses.

And it's been so awesome to work alongside of you the last year and a half, because when I came to you for ads, it was right in the season of I just didn't have capacity for a lot of things, taking care of Mom, and I knew that my business was gonna be in good hands.

Gabi: Oh, shucks.

Racheal: Well, you know my business so well, and I think that's kind of unusual just because you've been through everything I do at the deepest level that you could understand it. And that has made it so easy for me to just trust you and be like, "You've got this."

The Sea of Sameness, at Hyper-Speed

Racheal: But what I wanna talk about when it comes to your marketing strategy and what makes you stand out especially, you have such a way of just showing up 100,000% as yourself.

Gabi: A blessing and a curse.

Racheal: Even before you really got into the ads, you were making waves and getting a lot of traction simply by honing your voice and your point of view.

Gabi: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Racheal: And I think this is something that's missing right now from a lot of small businesses, and you can see it across pretty much every industry. There have been so many waves of trends and templates and swipe files where everybody's just copy-pasting their strategy into other people's businesses.

Gabi: Mm-hmm.

Racheal: And it makes everybody sound the same, and right now we're seeing that at hyper-speed with AI, because AI is just synthesizing what's out there, so it's gonna give you this Frankenstein monster of the average of everybody else trying to accomplish the same thing.

Gabi: Yep. 100%.

Racheal: One of the first things we started doing when both of us were building out AI was we were talking about, okay, how do we make sure we really, really dug into what is your voice? Who are you talking to? How are you different? So that's where I wanna kinda start today. How are you taking people that you're working with through this process?

Why the Liberal Arts Kid Wins

Gabi: Yeah, so first of all, I have to shout out Nicole. I do lots of shout-outs. I have to shout out Nicole Patton. Hopefully she's listening to this. I just wrote her a testimonial last night. She helped me see what AI could do.

I guess one of my gifts is that I am very good at fully digesting and metabolizing the frameworks, and then applying. And I think that that skill has served me well for being able to actually implement AI intelligently. And if you don't have a solid knowledge base, a solid preexisting strategy and understanding of the inner workings of your business and your clients' businesses, and a clear way to communicate that, AI will do nothing for you.

Racheal: Correct.

Gabi: I saw someone talking about this online, I think they were a marketing strategist, I can't remember, but there's this idea that, oh, we need to be pushing our kids into STEM. Now, don't get me wrong, I come from a family of academics, most of them in STEM. Hell yeah, we need people in STEM.

But I actually think that the people who can use AI the best have liberal arts, humanities, writing backgrounds, because we are stronger communicators, critical thinkers. We can read between the lines, get the inferences, things like that. So you've gotta build that muscle independently of it.

It's why I'm really happy to see what Mamdani did with New York City, where he put out a policy where there's gonna be no generative AI pre-K through eighth grade. This was just as of us recording this, this just happened yesterday. Because, again, you have to be able to think critically if you want your AI to think critically.

Racheal: Yeah. And you have to have a point of view. Otherwise you have a whole generation of kids who can't form a thought on their own without asking AI what they should think about something.

Gabi: Exactly.

The Hologram of Britney Spears and 48 Songs

Gabi: So that played to my advantage. But I met with Nicole basically offering to do a trade. I was like, "I can help you with your Google ads if you can help me with AI." And she was like, "Yeah, sure. Awesome."

She gave me the lay of the land, told me the difference with chats and projects, and chat versus Cowork, and artifacts, and scheduled tasks, and skills, connectors, capabilities.

Racheal: Yeah.

Gabi: Once I understood... again, if you feed me the theory, I will implement it. My top five strengths from StrengthsFinder, if y'all haven't taken StrengthsFinder, please go do it. It's really helpful and illuminating. Number one is achiever, no surprise. Number two is strategic. Number three is implementer. Number four is learner. Number five is developer.

So she gave me the lay of the land, I had another Beautiful Mind moment, and I joke that a hologram of Britney Spears emerged from the ether and said, "You better work, b*tch." Like, the possibilities are endless.

Racheal: And by the way, I get back from Italy, and you had been working. You were like, "Look at everything I just built in the month since we talked." And I was just like, "Whoa, I can't believe all of the things you put in place."

Gabi: It's because I hit a wall. And you're gonna laugh at me, but I'm gonna say this, so please hear that I'm saying this and I have self-awareness around this. One of my biggest weaknesses is that I conflate capability and capacity.

And the past year, two years, I have been so focused on growing both businesses so that I could take my husband out of teaching, get to the next level of everything. I'm very future-focused. Like, yes, I'm here, but I'm also there, and I'm here, and I'm there, and I'm constantly ping-ponging between.

But what that did is it made my brain a jumbled mess. And I have OCD, like the rumination style OCD, so it felt like there were 48 different songs playing in my head at all times that I needed to sing along to, or else I would forget the song, and then I can't sing it when I need to sing it.

So once Nicole gave me the lay of the land, I thought, "Oh, I can save my songs, basically." Everything that has been relying on my memory, everything that has been relying on a stray Google Doc here and there, a written SOP in this file versus that folder, all of that can be in a centralized location and properly connected to one another. So it's essentially like a mirror image of my mental maps.

Once she showed me the lay of the land, I was like, "Oh, I can stop playing 48 songs in my head at once. I can save the MP3s." I can save the MP3 somewhere else, and I can just play the song when I need to play it. And I can make connections that song A and song D are both in C major, whatever. I can see how things connect.

I joke that the inside of my brain, and it still does to an extent, for a long time looked like that Charlie Day meme, the murder board from Always Sunny. And now the mental chatter has been able to come down. There's daylight in my brain.

Becoming an Accidental Developer

Gabi: So as far as what it looked like to build out, I spent hours and hours and hours and hours talking out, using Wispr Flow, writing out, I'm a very fast typer, uploading any bit of resource content context about both of my brands, telling it to scrape my website, connecting my Shopify, connecting my Klaviyo so it could look through emails that I had sent.

I just basically brain dumped into skills, created skills, which then I converted into a plugin that's hosted through GitHub. Which, what does that mean? I don't even know. I became, like, an accidental developer.

Racheal: I don't even know what this means. I just did it.

Gabi: Yeah. I became an accidental developer. What I will say, in terms of do I need to be doing that, if you find that you're always... because I'm addicted to collecting the acorns, and I'm always like, "Ooh, that's a new caveat I should add. That's a new example. That's a new framework."

I found myself updating my skills, which were interconnected with so many other skills, so often, and when they're saved as skills you have to download a new zip file, re-upload it. It was too much. So if you find that you're frequently updating skills and frameworks, then it makes sense to do a plugin, which is what I did. If you're listening to this and you're like, "That's me," you can send me an email and I'm happy to help you.

Racheal: And also, if you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this is way over my head," that's okay.

Gabi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Racheal: There's so much that we both went through learning this. I know we both basically have spent the last six plus months doing this intensive deep dive into how to use AI, and both of us started with our businesses first, uploading everything we know so that we can train it and test it on our businesses.

Gabi: Yep.

Racheal: And then what I loved is then you started learning how to train it and test it on your clients' businesses, so that you can keep everything in one place. This has been one of the conversations we were having a lot, because before you had a product-based business where you're really just paying attention to your business and your team, not so much keeping everyone else's information together.

But as a service provider now, you have all these clients and you're trying to keep track of all of this information, their brand information, their voice information, all of the assets that they have. So one of the things you built that I also just finished building out was what you call your client cartridges. Can you tell me what that is?

What a Client Cartridge Actually Is

Gabi: Yeah, and sorry, because I could ramble and talk about it forever. But it is important to note that, like you said, I brain dumped my own businesses first, because it gave me greater clarity, and I highly recommend that. If you have a business where you're working with clients, do not start with them. I know it's tempting, but you really gotta clean your own side of the street first. Otherwise you're putting the cart before the horse.

Racheal: Correct.

Gabi: So client cartridges, I started off again with the theory, the framework. And so I brain dumped, literally Wispr Flow, I'm just blabbing. Here's how I typically onboard a client. Here's the questions that I normally ask. But also, I wish that I had this information earlier. I wonder how we can incorporate that. And then I end up doing this X, Y, and Z in this order, and then A, B, and C depend on Y being done, but D, E, and F depend on Z being done, et cetera.

I went into minute detail, but that's why my systems are so good. Even though I'm a science nerd and I taught myself cosmetic formulation and all that, I do have a humanities liberal arts background. And so I can give you an overly detailed explanation any day of the week.

And I just dumped in the frameworks first of, like, how do I work with a client? And then what are the different buckets of work that I support? So website conversion rate optimization, because if you're running ads, you're most likely taking them to your website. How do I look at a client's website and do a conversion rate optimization audit? Well, I did have some Loom recordings of doing those, uploaded that as context. Then I walked through the most common things that I see, talking into it. Included some examples, some screenshots.

Then, okay, we think about email marketing. How does it change for a thought leadership expertise style business like The CEO Collective versus an e-commerce business? How does that strategy change? What kind of automations do you need? What kind of segmentation, audiences do you need?

Okay, so we've got website, we've got email, and then I get into ads. And what underpins all of that, what I start with everyone, is market research, differentiation audit, and voice.

The Voice Exercise, and the One Man She Listens To

Gabi: So that was one of the things that I've started assigning to people. Ruben Hassid is an AI marketing educator. I don't tend to listen to men, so I'm a little embarrassed.

Racheal: We literally have an ad saying we don't listen to men anymore. But we're gonna tell you about one exercise from one man.

Gabi: I know. How embarrassing.

Racheal: But it's actually a great exercise, 'cause you made me do it.

Gabi: Yes. Yep. I ended up, at a certain point, I think at 65 questions it was just very repetitive, but that's because, again, liberal arts kid, I was giving so much detail and extra background on every single earlier question that at 65 questions we could be like, "All right. That's done."

But it basically walks you through, like, what are your beliefs on your industry? What are your hottest takes? How do you speak? So I obviously teach and speak in a lot of... I'm a metaphor girly, so that's a big part of it. I have a lot of millennialisms, and because I'm chronically online I use some Gen Z-isms as well, even though I'm thoroughly a millennial.

I have a sense of humor. I have a little bite. I don't really care if I offend people. I'm just gonna be myself, and I'm pretty spicy. So it walked me through not just saying those things, but literally showing it through the answers to the questions that he asked.

So I have my clients do the voice exercise. I have them look through reviews. I have them do market research to get information on most common buyer types, objection types, buying triggers by avatar, because it will be different. We basically collect and organize as much data as possible, including forcing people to get more data through market research, which everyone is like, "Do I have to?" And I say, "Yes."

A Prompt Will Only Get You So Far

Racheal: And that's one of the first things you and I started sharing back and forth. As I was building some of these things internally, I was like, "Oh my God, here's this differentiation prompt that I just plugged in and then kept tweaking until it was giving me what I needed." And then I shared it with you, and you plugged it in and started tweaking it too. And then we did the same thing with some voice prompts.

Gabi: Yep.

Racheal: And I wanna say too, I think the thing that both of us have found with our own experiments here is a prompt will only get you so far if you're trying to plug and play it. You really do have to tweak it to work for your business and make sure it makes sense.

And you have to give it as much context as possible, because a lot of the prompts out there are only going to... like, for example, there's a differentiation prompt that we've both used. And if you're not giving it any clear information about your business or your niche, I had to run this multiple times 'cause it kept putting me against businesses, and I'm like, "That's not what my clients are looking at. They're not looking at me versus this organization over here. Here's what I'm hearing from them as the actual people they've worked with other than me."

Gabi: You have to be ready to fight a little bit with AI.

Racheal: You have to be ready to push back with it. And that's something I think a lot of people are missing. They're using a prompt. They're not editing it. They're not giving it any information about their business, and they're not pushing back and going, "Actually, I think this one's a little off."

I had to run through the differentiation one a couple times. The voice of customer, if you have a great prompt for voice of customer research but you're not putting your customers' actual voices in it...

Gabi: Words. Yep.

Racheal: ...then great, you're gonna get what's scraped off of Reddit and comments and Substacks, which is all useful if you have nothing to work from, 'cause at least you're getting some baseline.

Gabi: Yeah.

Racheal: But when you start adding in things like your own call transcripts, the intake forms from all your clients, everything that they have actually told you in their words, suddenly the result gets so much sharper and more useful.

99% of People Are Using It Wrong

Gabi: Truly. And that's where, if you're just taking... honestly, a prompt by itself, if you don't have any skills, if you don't have any brand architecture, and not just memory, I truly think that people's business context should be saved as a skill. If you don't have that in your business yet, that's your first assignment if you wanna use AI intelligently.

Because, and you and I were talking about this before we hit record, there's a lot of black and white thinking, I mean, in general, hello, but also on AI, where everyone's like, "Oh, it's slop," and blah, blah, blah. It's because in my opinion, 99% of people are using AI wrong. I know that's super high, but it's because everybody's just trading a prompt. And it's f*cking stupid.

Racheal: It's the same as the templates that are super popular, right? For so long, I think a lot of people selling marketing have been selling like, "Here's 25 ready-to-use Canva posts to share on Instagram." Well, yeah, when everybody's sharing the same exact stuff, it's all gonna start to sound the same.

And that's when... you know, one thing we both built into our differentiation audits is the sea of sameness and the swap test. And this is really important, because AI is only gonna go out there and pull in the average of what it's finding. So if the headline on your website can also be found on 10 other people's websites, guess what? You don't stand out. You have no point of view.

Gabi: Yep. And everyone thinks it's not possible to use AI and to stand out, and to them I say, "You're using it wrong." If you know how to use it well, and again, give a liberal arts kid a prompt and give a liberal arts kid context, you will put your stank on everything. If your stank is not coming through in the output, it doesn't have enough context.

I heard, I think a month ago, from some white man on the internet on TikTok, where he was like, "Oh, you know, you should really be deleting all of your skills and redoing them every six months." And at first I was like, "Huh?" And I listened to the rest of what he said, and basically the answer was, "Oh, as the models improve, you can give it less context."

No you cannot, Chad. That is the worst advice.

Racheal: Yeah.

Gabi: It's the same way that I look critically at every single output. Unless it's super technical and it's walking me through how to deploy an app update through Vercel, and I have no idea what that means without it, I ask Nicole to pressure test it. But anything else, if it's a framework, if it's a concept, if it's copy, if it's a content brief, no, I'm being critical as hell.

And if you don't have your own critical thinking, no, you should not be using it. You need to hone your skills. You need to put your rock through the tumbler and get it nice and shiny before you then put it on display. You gotta feed it good sh*t.

Racheal: You gotta give it your point of view and your opinions, and I think that's something that is really missing from a lot of people, and it's what you challenged me to do with that series of questions. You said literally, "I need Spicy Rach," in order to make sure that your ads perform.

And we're seeing the difference. The ads that are taking off are the spicier take, right? They're the ones that are more likely to stop the scroll and get people paying attention, because it's my point of view. They're different. It's a strong opinion. It's a disruptor. It's not a combination of what everyone else out there says.

When the Average of the Internet Is Fine, and When It Is Not

Gabi: Yep, especially for marketing purposes. Like, if you're thinking of, what's best practice for reducing shipping error rates in e-com? Yeah, you can safely pull from the average of the internet. And any time I'm doing research like that where it's kind of a cut-and-dry thing, I always say give me the link to the source, and I wanna verify the source before I trust this.

If you're trying to use AI for marketing and you don't have a marketing strategy, if you don't have your Attract, Engage, Nurture, Invite, Delight, if you don't understand what makes your customers buy, what makes them hesitate, how do they buy, are they an amiable, an analytical, an assertive buyer, if you don't have that information and understanding, you gotta get that first. That's what you feed it. And that's the beauty of it, now the stank comes through.

The stank is on everything. Racheal's stank is on everything. Gabi's stank is on everything. And it's very clear. I mean, in the Bright Body world, if I see one more brand saying that they're clean, science-backed, and sustainable, I'm gonna punch somebody.

Racheal: It smells exactly the same. It doesn't pass the swap test.

Gabi: Yep. So it's leaning into... and if you don't know what makes you unique, AI isn't really gonna help you. It's gonna help tell you what's not swappable, but again, you have to start with it.

I think the black and white thinking people think that most people who use AI are using it to outsource their critical thinking.

Racheal: Yeah.

Gabi: But the actual intelligent way is to pressure test your critical thinking, and then basically be a mirror for your own mental maps. Like I wrote in a testimonial for Nicole, prior to working with her, I was at the mercy of Claude's frameworks. I was Claude's btch. And now that I've done all of this background work and months and hours worth of brain dumping, Claude is my btch.

For lack of a better way of describing it, that's the simple way. You gotta flip the script, because if you're not giving it context and your stank and your point of view, and the same thing for your clients, you are Claude's b*tch. So how do you do that? You gotta flip that script and give it as much detail as humanly possible, no matter what Chad on the internet says about how the models are improving and it doesn't need context. Ignore. That's stupid.

There Is No Magical Easy Button

Racheal: Well, yeah, ignore absolutely, and this is where foundation is always gonna come first. I think a lot of people are treating AI right now like it's some sort of magical easy button. And that's like, for a long time it was, "I'm just gonna hire a magical unicorn assistant, and they're gonna know how to do absolutely everything, and I'm not gonna have to teach them anything, and the first draft is gonna be perfect."

Gabi: Yeah. No.

Racheal: That doesn't exist. That never has existed. You have to still train and teach that person. And then we went from hiring teams to templates and everything being literally just plug and play.

You have to be willing to take some time and think about, critically, each and every part of this process before you ask AI to be able to think like you. And that's what you really want it to do, is not think like the average of everyone on the internet. You want to teach it how you think.

I've actually, in uploading so many conversations I've had with clients and coaching calls, I actually have a skill now that's like, "Here's Racheal's way of thinking through strategy," so that it understands how I think when I'm asking it about a client scenario that I'm running. And that's foundation. You can't skip that.

Gabi: Yep. There's a lot of alarming research about, well, A, there's a massive environmental impact. Another thing we said before we hit record, these companies need to be taxed. They need to be regulated. I will be first in line. Absolutely.

Even as a very sophisticated user, I really give many shits about the planet. And honestly, they're actually overbuilding data centers right now because of the tax incentives and as a way to inflate their initial stock value when they launch. I have a blog on my website if anybody's interested in reading the full breakdown, lots of sources. It took me a whole day to write 'cause I was like, "I have a lot to think about this."

But there's concerning research that people are losing their ability to think critically. That's an indictment of AI, but more specifically, it's an indictment of thinking of AI as a magic pill.

Racheal: Yes. I agree.

The Swamp Before the Meadow

Gabi: Because actually it's helped me think more critically. As a liberal arts kid, giving it all the context, sometimes if I'm about to make a strategic move I'm like, "Okay, use the frameworks and blah, blah, blah, Gabi voice, Gabi reasoning, and here's the situation. Here's what I'm thinking. If you were me, how would you challenge this or not?"

And sometimes it'll catch me where it's like, "Actually, this says that you would think about it this way," and I'm like, "You're right. I was magical thinking." And then sometimes I'm like, "No, you're wrong. I'm right. Real me is right."

But if you use it well, it should be a mirror for your own mental maps. It should never substitute your own critical thinking, and the only way that you sharpen it is with your critical thinking.

And I think, and you know this generally in business, everybody wants a magic bullet.

Racheal: Everybody.

Gabi: Everybody wants the one thing that's gonna revolutionize their business, so they sign up for a $47 AI template course that walks you through making one meeting review skill, and then you're like, "Why is my life not revolutionized?" Baby girl, it's because you haven't done 98% of the work. That is a drop in the bucket, and the bucket has a hole at the bottom.

Racheal: Correct.

Gabi: There is no magic bullet. And if you really want to use it intelligently, because mental load is a thing, overwhelm is a thing, brain fog is a thing with POTS and EDS, but also I know that it's a bigger thing with perimenopause. Whatever is going on in your life, if you're listening to this podcast, mental load is a thing, personally and professionally.

And if you really want to figure out how to get AI to help you with that, it's actually gonna be harder at first, because you're gonna have to explain the why of everything that you think. You can't just say, "This is how I think." You have to, in detail, explain why, and almost ask yourself why three to five times before AI can replicate that thinking.

So it's almost more overwhelming at first, and then as long as you go in with that expectation that you're gonna go through the swamp to arrive at the beautiful meadow, you're gonna be just fine.

Racheal: Well, and it's gonna be that way whether you use AI or not, because if you're growing a business and you plan to hire a team to do things for you, you still have to do this level of foundational work to build out those systems, to document everything, to create brand guidelines, to create voice guidelines.

There's no workaround for doing the foundational work, and if you're trying to find someone else's guidelines to plug into your business, it's never gonna work for you the way it worked for them. That's why anything that's like, "Here's my 100% proven system, just plug it into your business," you still have to tweak and customize it in order to truly make it work for you.

Three Buckets of Work

Racheal: But what I love about this, I think as we've both been doing this now so intensely over the last six months, is, like you said at the beginning, it starts to free up your brain space for a lot more higher level strategic thinking. And that's what it should be doing, right?

Your role, I think about it like three buckets. There's things that AI can do on its own without us once we train it really well.

Gabi: Mm-hmm.

Racheal: There's things we should be doing as humans, especially humans running high-trust businesses. And then there's things we can do together.

Gabi: Yep, 100%.

Racheal: And the things that we need to be putting our time into as the business owner is that strategic level thinking. It is the higher level thinking, the forward-looking thinking. It's bringing that perspective and that point of view and your values and everything that only you can bring to the table.

And you can train AI to do certain things on its own. Like now I know we both have it running reports and pulling in data and running analysis. It can do that on its own once we've taught it how to do it the way we want it done.

Gabi: Yep.

Racheal: There's still gonna be that overlap where you still have to keep training it and keep working with it and keep massaging it until it truly gets to where you want it to go.

Gabi: Yeah. It's like tenderizing the beef, you know? The beef can always be more tender. I mean, eventually you'll shred it, but the idea is you gotta let that marinate. You gotta tenderize it, and you gotta marinate it, and you gotta cook it low and slow in your little green egg smoker. It's a process.

The reason why, when I said earlier, if you're making skills and you're updating all the time, turn it into a plugin, it's because I'm massaging. Since I've launched the plugin and then my app, which I can talk about shortly, I probably commit, which is a developer term 'cause I'm an accidental developer, I probably commit 30 to 40 changes, updates, additional examples to my frameworks on a daily basis.

Because that's how much I'm like, "Oh, there's another example." Again, I'm an acorn collector as far as knowledge, examples, context. I'm like, "Ooh, that's smart," if it unlocks something in my own brain about helping me look at a problem from a different way. Or, "Ooh, that's a great way to explain something to a client." Or, "I like that metaphor that I used in the moment." Or, "Oh, this challenged my thinking. Let me review how the rest of this... can it incorporate that somehow?"

Any time that happens, I'm making an update, because it needs to reflect my own mental map in order for it to actually be useful to me.

Where Nuance Lives

Racheal: And that's taking the frameworks that you're teaching it, where usually when we have a framework, it's kind of like, "Here's what it is. Here's the how to use, how not to use," which starts to be very black and white, right?

Gabi: Yeah.

Racheal: Then you gotta layer on the nuance. Then you gotta give it more context, then you need to layer on all the different examples and the what-if, then-that.

Gabi: Oh God, yeah.

Racheal: And that takes a lot more time. That's the thing that makes humans so unique, is that 20 years into a career, there's a level of experience you have that AI is not gonna be able to replicate, because it hasn't been through all those what-if-this, then-that scenarios. It hasn't been through all the different tricky situations you've been through, unless you happen to tell it that this is something it should know. And that's not out there. The internet is not full of context and nuance at that level.

So this is the thing that we're trying to really drive home, everyone listening to this. This is not a plug and play. This is not a magic button. It is a tool that is unlocking so much for small business owners that previously... I mean, you would've had to build a massive team in order to be able to do all the things at the rate and scale that you're doing, in order to be able to tackle creative and implementation at the rate that you're doing.

From a business capacity lens, this is a huge unlock that previously, instead of being you plugging into Claude, would've been hiring a bigger team. And now we can build the infrastructure on AI and then train the team to use it, which then is only gonna amplify things even more.

Gabi: Exactly. So I switched from an individual to a team plan so that Malen, so that Jimmy, my husband, who's handling operations, so that Steph, who's currently doing production but will move into marketing, if they ever question what's the strategy we're doing this quarter, what's the blah, blah, blah, they don't need to ask me.

So if I'm doing pickup or running an errand or going to the gym or whatever, at an appointment, they don't need me for that. It's, go ask Claudy boy. And I also have trained him to say, when in doubt, it will tell the team, "This is what I think, but ask Gabi to confirm."

And the nuance is honestly where I live in my positioning for Bright Body. It's a lot of how I approach ads as well. It's a really critical part of my positioning for both businesses, is the nuance, and so that has played to my advantage when developing these systems. I refuse to build something that can't hold the nuance at least somewhat on a first draft level.

Hologram Gabi, and the App Named After Her Grandmother

Racheal: Gabi, we could continue going on about this forever, and we often do in our regular ongoing calls.

Gabi: Yes. Do you want me to give a quick overview of the app that I built before we close it out?

Racheal: I want you to tell them what you built, because you gave me access to this, and I'm like, oh Lord, Gabi has unleashed Gabi. I don't know if the world is ready for this.

Gabi: Yeah. So one of the things I told Nicole, once she gave me the lay of the land, was, okay, big picture, big pie in the sky goal, is once I get my brain mental maps in Claude through the plugin, through the skills...

I know from clients that a pain point is it's 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, they're in their ad account, they shouldn't be, but they're in there anyway, and they're panicking about one metric and they think they need to burn everything down. So they email me, and I have a 48-hour response time 'cause I'm a human with other responsibilities, and then they're panicking those whole 48 hours waiting for me to respond back.

There's also the issue of I give clients homework. I'm like, "Okay, you need to write a welcome sequence. Based on your market research, here's what email one should be, email two, three, et cetera. I want it to have such and such a voice." I give them a general skeleton idea of what each email should be, but it's up to them to implement it.

And because people struggle with prioritizing things, life happens, an emergency happens that they have to turn their attention to, 75% of the time I come back and I'm like, "Hey client, did we do our homework?" And the answer is, "Oops."

So I said to Nicole, "I would love to basically build hologram me on people's shoulders that can help when they're troubleshooting any issue, ads, email, website, looking at a heat map, what's wrong, help them troubleshoot in the moment, help them pressure test against the strategy that we have developed together." 'Cause that's another client pain point, that sometimes they'll just veer off in a whole other direction, and I'm like, "Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, hey, back here. Look here, shiny. Right here."

Something that can help keep them on track, that can help troubleshoot and pressure test assumptions, and can help them implement when I give them homework. And Nicole was like, "Well, I can't build the knowledge part, but I can build the software, the implementation behind it."

So that's when I was like, all right, the plugins that I'm making for my own brands are one thing, and then I basically have what's called a bundle skill for the app that I named after my grandma and my great-aunt, so her name is Maria Luisa.

And every day it rebuilds bundles. It pushes them through the updates. So any update to my frameworks, any of those daily 30 to 40 updates, they're getting pushed through to the app. But most importantly, everyone has private, password-protected access to my frameworks combined with their business cartridge, which is also updated on a daily if not weekly basis.

So it's like a business textbook.

Racheal: It's a Gabi business textbook for your business.

Gabi: Written for your business that you can talk to.

Racheal: Correct.

Gabi: And I'm so excited. I think I need to build a guidebook basically walking people through, like, I want you to ask these three questions just so that you can see what it's capable of, 'cause there's a lot of shtty resources and apps out there, and not to toot my own horn, but it's really fcking good.

Racheal: It is really good, 'cause I've been playing with it to the point where I am also building a similar thing for my clients. Same. I have so many people who go through the Collective, and they're putting the frameworks into their businesses, but then they're getting stuck on one thing.

Gabi: Yep.

Racheal: And I'm like, "Okay, here's how this works. I have the knowledge base already. I'm building out those client cartridges." And so my goal will be that they can go to it and be like, "I need a pre-consultation education sequence," and it pulls what is that, here's my business, and then brr.

Gabi: Yep, and it's a first draft. And I always tell people, you can't take it wholesale. You need to edit. You need to really make sure your stank is on it. Push back.

But it's built using the bundles, the client cartridges, and then Claude API, which does not... any information in there is not used to train the model. So everyone's IP is protected. And when you have a team plan, your IP is automatically protected. If you are still on an individual plan, you can go into your settings and change it so that your information is not being used to train models, so I always recommend that.

I'm also going to be using it to build... I have a lot of people that will do the Fairy Marketing Mother, but then I have a growing amount of people who wanna do a VIP day. And then they want my help ongoing, but they don't have the budget or the need for me to also handle the creative, which is why my rates have gone up, because managing the creative is a whole other beast.

So I'm gonna be offering Maria Luisa as an ongoing offer after a VIP day so that, again, it's the closest that you can get to me in an app form. And then it stays updated with my frameworks on a weekly basis. You can actually go in there and request an update to your cartridge. You can also give feedback within the app where it's like, "Hey, I actually changed this thing. Can you change my cartridge?" Or, "I have a question about this framework," and then I'm able to incorporate that into everything. So there's feedback loops and continuous improvement built into it.

And Nicole has said that basically I'm her A+ Claude student. At one point I came to a meeting with her and I was like, "I've been testing the bundles using Terminal on my Mac." And she just goes, "When did you become a developer?" And I was like, "I don't know."

Racheal: Like, I don't know. It just happened. Claude told me how to do it, so I did it.

Gabi: Yeah, that's exactly it. I was like, "How would I go about testing this? I want to make sure the reasoning is sound," blah, blah, blah. And it was like, "Open up Terminal." And I was like, "I don't know what this is, and it looks scary, but I'm gonna do it." And I did.

Racheal: It looks intimidating, and there you go.

Timelines Are Collapsing

Racheal: Well, and same. And I think this is one of the things, if anyone takes anything away from this conversation, I hope it's that there is so much potential with AI to not only work in your business and amplify your business, but then these are tools you can amplify to other people's businesses.

And as you heard with Gabi, one of the things I'm excited about, and I said this in the very first episode of this series, is this is an opportunity where now timelines are collapsing for people. It's going to accelerate growth for small businesses. It's giving more access to things that a lot of people didn't have the resources, they didn't have the time, or the energy, or the money to get access to.

And so Gabi being able to offer this thing that she's developed using AI is now gonna support clients at a much more accessible, affordable rate.

Gabi: Yep.

Racheal: Which is a huge win for the clients. It's ongoing revenue and offering value to those clients.

Gabi: Tremendous value, yeah.

Racheal: Which is a win for you. And this is how I'm thinking in the world of values driven businesses that put humans first, that want to make an impact. These are the things we can be thinking about, right?

I'm not interested in becoming a billionaire. F*ck those people. I wouldn't say no to a few million dollars so that I can retire someday. But I think this is an opportunity where all of us that are mission driven, we're gonna be able to amplify that mission even when we physically can't be there. That to me is very exciting.

Moral Qualms, Data Centers, and Regulation

Gabi: 100%. And I had a lot of moral qualms, and I still do have moral qualms about it. Like I said, regulation, the tax... when I went down the rabbit hole of understanding why are they building so many data centers, we hear the headline, more data centers, and they're using the water, and we see about how it's impacting water quality for local communities around the country, and it's horrible.

And also they're overbuilding. They actually don't have the demand to support this, and why are they doing this is because of the way corporate tax structure and tax law exists. And I don't think billionaires should exist. I have a lot of mixed feelings.

I use Claude, A, because it's the best, and because their ethics are the best, and they are also advocating for regulation. So I highly recommend... don't use ChatGPT, please. It's not nearly as good. It does not nearly have the same functionality. Highly recommend Claude. It's the one that most businesses are using, big, small, medium, et cetera.

Racheal: Yeah.

Gabi: It's the same thing that I tell people who are like, "Well, I don't wanna give Mark Zuckerberg money." And I'm like, "Oh yeah, f*ck that guy." I don't like that I'm...

Racheal: Us either.

Gabi: And it's a tool. You are using it subversively. It's how you use it. People on the internet think, "Oh, AI is just making shitty flyers for your local pop-up market, and it's making generic copy." No, honey. I don't do that. Malen does all my graphic design, all my video editing.

In fact, I am even more protective over what should be only handled by humans or co-created. I'm very picky, and that's another thing I wrote in Nicole's testimonial. I was so skeptical when I was just using chat functionality. I'm like, "I don't know if this can really..."

Racheal: Do what you want.

Gabi: ...do what I want, based on my high standards. But I have not had to lower my standards. I have not wanted or needed to lay anyone off. If anything, it's given us all more mental space, especially as I'm preparing for this next stage of growth in both businesses. And it helps us do the things that require more humanness, the most humanness. It's helped us do it better, because there's less mental load just jangling around in your brain.

Where to Find Gabi

Racheal: I love that, and that's a perfect place to kind of wrap. I know we gave everyone a lot to think about in this episode.

I wanna say if you are loving Gabi's vibe, you need to follow her in general, because both brands, you do such a good job. I would say you're always a marketer to watch because of how authentically you show up. You're just 1000% you all the time.

Gabi: Yes, for better or worse.

Racheal: Your hot takes. I live for that. And if people are interested in learning more about marketing from you, how can they get in touch?

Gabi: Yeah, so I'm building out. I'm going through a bit of a level up with my Hypema'am branding, so if you go right now, my Instagram might not be perfect, but you can follow it, Hypema'am, H-Y-P-E-M-A-A-M, on Instagram, and I believe it's the same on TikTok.

And then you can email me, Gabi, G-A-B-I, at hypemaam.com. All things marketing, ads, holistic strategy, and making your business work hard so you don't have to work as hard.

Racheal: I love that. Thank you so much, Gabi, for jumping on with me.

Gabi: Thank you for having me, Rach. Always a pleasure.

Racheal: Well, that is a wrap on Human First: AI for High-Trust Businesses, the series here on Promote Yourself to CEO. I hope you've enjoyed this journey through thinking through AI, how it can apply to relationship-driven, high-trust businesses like ours, and just thinking a little bit more critically, being more discerning about how we're going to apply AI and basically any major tool to our business.

It's a huge opportunity, and it definitely comes with downsides. I'm not ever going to negate or diminish that. But I see it as such a massive shift in the way that women and the way that disadvantaged folks are gonna be able to show up and truly make an impact and make a difference.

So I'd love to hear from you. If this series resonated, if there's something that made you think a little bit, if there's something that you took and implemented, make sure you head over to my Instagram, @racheal.cook, and let me know your two cents. Let me know what you took away, and what else you would like me to cover here on the podcast.

I cannot wait to hear from you. All right. New series coming at you next month. I look forward to seeing you then.