LAURA SOUTHERLY
0:19
Hello and welcome to a new year. We are so excited to welcome in 2026, and this is the AI Marketing Experts, and today, Jen is unable to, she’s spending some family time, so she’s off today, but we are excited to talk about kicking off 2026 in a strong manner. And of course we’re going to talk about what’s new with AI, how we can use it with our marketing. So let’s go ahead and kick it off with Chris. Why don’t you tell us, as you’ve been planning ahead, what are you doing a little bit different with your company, with your clients, and you would recommend to our listeners and our viewers how they can start their 2026 off very strong.
CHRIS HUNTER
0:59
Yeah, so if, if you’re not using AI at this point yet in your business, either for marketing, for planning, for strategic things, for day-to-day things, I highly suggest you just start somewhere. ChatGPT right now is still kind of the big one out there. A lot of people use that. Um, and that’s kind of what I’ve been, you know, recommending to anyone that I come across that is not quite using AI yet. Okay. Um, but I would say start with simple stuff, uh, in 2026 and let’s start and just kind of build upon that. You know, I was talking with someone over the holidays, uh, that had not actually implemented hardly anything in their business yet, was really um, really not literate at all on the AI front of things, even though he’s a very technical type person. Uh, and so I recommended— I was like, just, just start, you know.
CHRIS HUNTER
2:00
Uh, just, just start with small things and kind of build out from there. He said that he had used ChatGPT, but not for some of the— like, I, I told him some of the things that I was doing, and he was just floored, you know. Um, so On, on my front, on what we’re planning on doing for us and for our clients in, in 2026 is essentially adding more and more agentic type functionality into our clients’ businesses. And that’s really, that’s really the, the going to be the big wins, I think, for most roofing companies, um, out there and most small businesses out there is applying just a small chatbot, you know, just start there with the chatbot inside of your customer service workflows to help you out when you’re not able to get to anything like that. And then kind of branch out from there. Voice AI has gotten really, really big. I noticed in our voice over IP system that they’re offering it now. So I’m going to kind of dig into that.
CHRIS HUNTER
3:07
A little bit, uh, you know, through that. We use GoTo, and I noticed that I was digging in there over the holidays and, and, you know, for some admin type stuff, and I was like, oh, they’re offering AI and voice AI agents. You know, this is something I’ve been offering, you know, through GoHighLevel to my clients for the past year, but we’re going to start digging into GoTo and see, you know, is it any better. So, um, that’s a great recommendation.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
3:35
Yes, it is something that a lot of our viewers may already have in place, but to your point, taking the time to see what they’re offering and what is new through those services can really elevate and move their business forward without much downtime, if we want to say that. If you’re looking at and worried about having something brand new, just looking to see what your service providers have upgraded to could be a great entry point.
CHRIS HUNTER
4:03
Yeah.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
4:04
Brad, how about you? What are you looking forward to for the new year?
BRAD KILGORE
4:10
Well, I’m really excited to see my AI marketing expert friends because I think we took a week off for Christmas. It’s good to see you all, as Chris would say, all y’all. And yeah, so it’s a new year and, you know, I just reflect back on how many amazing things came through AI-wise in 2025. So looking at the new year, certainly some anticipation of some cool stuff. But just recently, I know that John was just talking offline a minute ago about some of these things, but I remember just like yesterday, I was talking to one of my assistants and she was saying, you know, I’m struggling with one of these AI tools to create images. And I’m like, I said, you know what, why don’t you just try Nano Banana, which is, you know, it’s a Gemini, it’s a Gemini Google tool. And I didn’t even tell her how to use it. I didn’t, I mean, she has general ideas how to do prompts or whatever.
BRAD KILGORE
5:09
She’s been doing it for a while. So she, she messaged me back in 5 or 10 minutes, says, oh my gosh, this is so much better. You know, what she was using, she was using Flux Pro or something that was, you know, maybe not the latest and greatest model. And she was just blown away at what it would create. So that just kind of ties in, in my mind, all the things that are happening on the Google side, the Gemini side. We’ve touched on many of these things in our past episodes, but looking at what some of these things will do, you know, whether it’s creating infographics using NotebookLM, again, a Google Gemini or Google tool, it’s all kind of the same ecosystem now. It’s all one and the same. But creating infographics, you know, creating tables and all these different things, reports.
BRAD KILGORE
5:55
I use another one called GenSpark a lot, and literally I can go in there and just yesterday, day before, it was like, okay, can you help me with this report? Here’s the data, and then click and go. It created a very professional report. I had to do very little editing, if any. If I didn’t like it, if I don’t like exactly what it produced, like, okay, this looks really good, except can you just add this? Oh, by the way, I forgot 10 keywords. Can you add these? Boom, boom, boom, done. So that was pretty— it was really helpful and very time-saving, you know. And then there was another one, and I’m not a big coder. I mean, I know enough to be dangerous, but there was something else I was trying to do at probably about midnight last night.
BRAD KILGORE
6:41
A little bit of a workaholic, I’ll admit. But there was something I was trying to sort out, and I was like, okay, the code that I came up with is not integrating or iframing or embedding into this website correctly. So I took it over to, uh, GenSpark and started experimenting with it, and it gave me a few options of the code to try. And it said, but if that doesn’t work, what about doing this where you just create a button and then just have a link to the button. I was like, wait a minute, why didn’t I think of that? It literally gave me an idea that my tired brain didn’t think of even though I was trying to get some code. It really shortcutted it and gave me another real-life example that solved the problem.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
7:31
Very strong examples. To your point, in past episodes we have touched upon what the Google Notebook can do. And we’ve seen advances even over the last week and a half when we’ve taken the time off. But that’s what we’d recommend, is to look back on a previous episode to get an idea of how powerful that tool is. So Brad, thank you very much for those tips. I know that our business owners can run with that. And just a little side note, when you were saying you were struggling with something, we were struggling trying to get some of the games on and doing a, you know, signing up for one of the streaming I was having a difficult time because I kept switching it to a mobile view on my phone when we’re doing the authentication. Just pointed my phone to the TV and said, “Help me out,” and it was giving me some how-to steps on even how to fix the subscription issues.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
8:23
So again, to Chris’s point of start somewhere and to Brad’s point of how quickly different things can come to mind, AI is going to be able to help us out with these basic, basic things, and we’re going to learn to pull it up quicker than what we’ve done in the past. John, I know before we started, you had some great conversation starters on the Google Notebook LM. Could you elaborate a little bit more for our listeners and our viewers to tell about how you’re using Notebook or any of the other AI tools for 2026?
JOHN CLENDENNING
8:57
Yeah, so if you don’t mind me weaving a little tale, I got a bit of a story to go through because Christmas break is great to, you know, chat with family members, see what’s going on in their world. Hey, what’s up, Uncle John? Comes up a lot because they know I’m in business. My, my nephew Craig runs a multimillion-dollar landscaping company and he just bought another business and he and I just squirrel away in a corner and, and chat shop and stuff like that. So one of the things he came up with was emails were a big, a big issue for us. So I believe I agree with Chris. The— this is going to be the year of agents, agentic browsers, connectors, those MCPs we’ve been talking about. Again, the acronyms don’t mean anything, but things connect to things now with AI well. And I just— I, I was telling, uh, again, the nephew, um, I don’t do— don’t check your own emails.
JOHN CLENDENNING
9:48
He goes, oh my God, there’s so many coming in. And it’s now that it’s after Christmas, they’re all wanting their— you know, we’re up in the north, it’s all snowy, they’re all, all wanting to get on the, you know, pre-plan for the spring and get their, their projects in and their grass cutting ordered and all of those kinds of stuff. And just— and he goes, it’s just insane. And I’m going, it shouldn’t be because here I can come, you know, buy me a coffee, I’ll drive the 30 minutes and sit in your office for a day. We’re going to go through this because you can have, you know, whether it’s Comet Browser or any of these other tools, check your inbox for you, sift, sort, and screen and give you the ones that are actionable right now and even have it pre-planned. There is a time savings and a business savings that every business can put in place right now. And the Comet browser would be probably one of the easiest ones. Just, uh, you know, open up the agent, open up your inbox, and say go, give it some rules, and off you go.
JOHN CLENDENNING
10:39
Um, the other— the other little story is my sister’s planning a trip to the East Coast. She uses ChatGPT. She calls hers Fabio. It’s her health coach and her life coach and all this kind of stuff. I put her on, um, last Christmas onto ChatGPT. Everybody thought I was this crazy dude. Um, now they all use it, um, to some degree. Personally, she even pays the $20, which is for my sister Wow.
JOHN CLENDENNING
10:58
Um, she won’t hand me $20 for anything, but, um, but she’ll pay monthly for ChatGPT. And she’s going— she’s called me up there after Christmas and said, so we got all this stuff going on, but she was— she goes, do you know any app or AI app that can help me plan the trip better? And I said, I just typed back ChatGPT. And she goes, well, I did that, I got some ideas, but— and she goes, but I’m not really, you know, she goes, it’s kind of going a little bit rogue, I’m not really sure where to go. And I said, oh, I get to— I get to jump in now. Come on, let’s, let’s jump on the phone, let’s go. And I taught her about projects, I showed her how put it, move it over into projects, um, give it a map of the drive they want to go from where they are out to the East Coast, how many hours a day they want to drive within a 2-hour window where we can have a campground. Like, wrote a way better prompt for it, but in projects. And as you find things you’re interested in, bookmark them in the project.
JOHN CLENDENNING
11:47
Um, she goes, that’s insane. That’s like when she, she spent the next hour or two and she goes, we’ve got our entire trip planned, thanks, you know, bro, kind of idea. And, um, so yeah, we’re talking about NotebookLM you can do research like that in NotebookLM as well using the research tab if you don’t have any ideas, or you could load that stuff in. Um, NotebookLM now has the ability to press a, a button and turn any raw data or even a screen capture of a chart like, oh, the stock market’s going up, or the price of, I don’t know, pork bellies in Idaho, if that makes any sense. Laura, I have no idea. Anyways, it’s not beef, maybe it doesn’t, but And you can get it to turn it into a data table. How that, you know, data entry, data table. So you don’t need data entry people anymore.
JOHN CLENDENNING
12:32
Could you upload all your invoices if you’re one of these old school people that go, I don’t even have a database of customers yet? Okay, can we take them to Kenco’s and scan them all in as PDFs, put it into that, and say, can you build me the, the table that I can now import into a CRM? And now you don’t have a human being in the loop. Um, like, I mean, just, I— the ideas were like all, all week long like that. And then notebook LM, the one thing I said to my sister, I said, take all your stuff out of the project now, get it to create a summary for you. Here’s a prompt I would suggest. Let’s take that over to Notebook LM and let’s create an infographic just for you guys to hang on the fridge because it’s not till next summer. And now you, you know, from where you are to the East Coast and all the little stops, you know, with all these happy little cartoon characters and all that kind of stuff. And she’s done that now as well. It’s hanging on her fridge and she’s taken a picture and showed the entire family.
JOHN CLENDENNING
13:26
So yeah, fire hose of ideas, but holy crap, like that’s just a bunch.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
13:31
Absolutely, but there is so many nuggets in there that people can run with. And as small business owners, we know, or we hope that you’re listening to that, any of these and saying, okay, wait a minute, I may not be planning a trip, but how can I incorporate it into this? How can I organize my emails? What will that move me forward? How can I get my time back? So hopefully we’ve encouraged you to open up, and learn projects within ChatGPT. I know Chris has some Claude tips that he’ll share here in a moment, but there is a lot here that it’s not one size fits all. It’s what will move your business forward faster. And we really do want you to break some of these nuggets down and hear from you. Put it in the chat, make comments, and let us know what made the biggest difference as you Open up the office here, this first few days of the year seems to be that ice bucket of water splashing all of us in. Whoa, we do have a lot of emails coming in. Whoa, we’ve got a lot of activities in agriculture.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
14:32
There are a lot of key events coming up. And I know I’ll give a highlight here as to preparing to attend those. But first, Chris, do you want to give an overview of what Claude offered over the holidays? And I don’t know whether it’s still available or not, but something that interest— those that are interested in Claude might take note of.
CHRIS HUNTER
14:52
Yeah, so it, it actually appeared inside of Claude itself, right? Um, and it was just this little note up at the top that said, uh, you know, Merry Christmas, uh, we’re giving you a gift of— in between, uh, the 25th through the 31st, right— double the amount of tokens Okay. And to me, that was great because I’ve been using Cloud Code quite a bit. And while Cloud Code eats up those tokens like there’s no tomorrow, okay, so much so that I’m, I’m highly contemplating going to the $200 a month level just to stop that behavior because I’ll be right in the middle of a flow of a coding flow, you know, building something out and it’s like, oh, we’re out of tokens. You know, and it really reminds me of the older days of ChatGPT, you know, and what a lot of people on the free account still, you know, kind of deal with. I’m on the $20 a month account, like the pro account. But what they did, it was a huge gift, you know, in between Christmas and New Year’s, essentially, that they doubled the amount of tokens they could use. Now, what I found, because I took advantage of it, I was like, okay, cool. And I told my family, hey, I’m going to be coding a lot, you know, during this break.
CHRIS HUNTER
16:14
So just so y’all know, when we’re watching, you know, whatever shows that we’re watching or football or whatever, I’m going to be coding, right? Because I’ve got to get this thing finished, at least as an MVP, uh, out before my employees get back to the office. Because I wanted an entire application that they can use right away. Okay. And essentially, it’s taking our entire marketing checklist and created a marketing audit out of that. And additionally, pulling in AI into it. And I’m using mainly Claude for that, but it’s also using OpenAI’s API. And it’s, it’s making sense of it all, right? Saying, okay, well, these are the, these are the checkbox marks, you know, checkboxes that you said yes or no on. But this is really where you need to focus, you know, for the next 30 days, 90 days.
CHRIS HUNTER
17:09
Okay. And just kind of build out a plan for that. My plan with that is for to use it internally for clients, but also we’re going to use it as a lead magnet, right, to, to our roofing audience to use so that they can do a self-assessment on their own marketing. Right. A lot of people just don’t understand how bad that their marketing actually is until someone like me comes along and says, hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, right? And but if we can have a tool that does that, even better. So long story short is that I took that entire time frame, you know, of what was that, 7 days in between those, those 2 holidays, and said, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna create this entire app out of that using Cloud Code. And I did it, okay? Um, it’s, it’s now almost in production. I’ve got a few kinks that I’ve got to work out, but now I’m dealing with token limits now and having to wait and all that kind of stuff again.
CHRIS HUNTER
18:07
So, um, and by the way, there is a workaround for that. It’s just I’m cheap and I don’t want to pay an extra $20 here and an extra $20 there and $50 and so forth.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
18:18
You’re frivolous, and you’re always looking out for our small business owners because again, this is also a time that we’re looking back at the subscriptions, on any kind of subscriptions, to see if they’re worth keeping on. And, and one reason why we mentioned that the tokens is that’s something to keep in mind. A lot of these throughout the year will offer special bonuses like that. So Chris was able to take advantage of it during the holidays. But look at the start of the new year, look at the different ways that if you’re referring someone, talking about them, putting an affiliate link out, there’s different ways to accumulate and keep your costs down as small business owners. So we hope that you keep your eyes open for anything that’s out there.
BRAD KILGORE
18:59
Um, frivolous, or did you mean he was frugal?
LAURA SOUTHERLY
19:03
Oh, Frugal. So sorry. Frugal is definitely the wrong word for that.
JOHN CLENDENNING
19:09
Wow.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
19:09
Yeah.
BRAD KILGORE
19:10
So that would— Well, I have a frugal offer for you. So if you do GenSpark, which I do, I was paying about $24 a month. And there is, I just checked, it’s still there. If you go to genspark.ai, you can pay annually, but it saves you about 40 or 50% overall. And you can always top up your credits, but It is insanely good because it uses all different models. And remember, at least for last year, I haven’t looked for this year, you can use their chat unlimited anyway.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
19:42
Very nice. Thank you for mentioning that. Yes, because we all like to be frugal. Definitely so. Definitely so. I know I mentioned about the agriculture becomes very busy January, February, March when it comes to any shows. And to Chris’s point, looking at how people may have marketed before before, after, and during some of these big shows, whether they are attending, presenting, just exhibiting, whatever they might be doing, is an investment of their marketing dollars, investment of their time. The thing that we’re doing is walking through our clients as to how, yes, you can use the comment browser, but if they’re a little intimidated about bringing down and utilizing another browser, using Gemini with the button appearing at the top.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
20:26
Again, I know we briefly covered this in other episodes. If you open up your social social media channels or a newsletter that you’re sending out or some marketing piece and just scroll all the way down and click Gemini and say, how can I do this? Or give me your overview, or, um, just have that conversation with Gemini. It will sharpen up those marketing materials that you are able to basically do a self-audit with that conversation. So I would recommend doing that. That would be one of our tips moving forward on 2026 is stop and look at what you did last year. If you’re a business that has had several years, take a look at your digital marketing, your footprint that you have out there, and ask, how can we be stronger? Because we know 2026 and this year’s moving forward, all of us moving to very few clicks or no clicks. So having that answer, sharpening your tools, having that information on your site within your marketing, that’s what the— any of the SEO, AEO, they’re looking for is how can they keep them within, which means no clicks.
CHRIS HUNTER
21:37
So, John, I think we have more to say about that.
JOHN CLENDENNING
21:38
Yeah, we talked a little bit about sort of like the, the week that Chris did the year-end replanning. This— that last week I was able to get my master prompt finally completely done. So what that is, it’s something Chris talked about a while ago. We talked about— shared it, what, 5, 6 months ago? And it’s the whole story of your business. You, your business, your, um, your goals, your products, the names of everything. Like, um, it’s just, uh, and there’s a couple trainings online you can look up about how to create sort of like this master control document, a master prompt that you can take to any LLM. So to your point, Laura, um, you’ve got all this, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got, um, dealers, you know, coming up with, and, and ag people coming up with all the, the stuff that’s going to be happening over the next few months. So Loading in all of the possible opportunities into a conversation, like just, just go find a list of them, upload it in, um, to a chat, whether that’s ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you use, have a master prompt that’s built on your entire company that’s just a PDF document or a Google Doc you load in.
JOHN CLENDENNING
22:42
Now you’re having an intelligent conversation. You don’t have to use projects, you don’t have to go to the next level, but now you load that in, just hit the little plus, add it in. And based on that, your conversation is now much more framed around everything that, that you’re all about. And then you can say, hey, here’s what we did last year, here’s what some of my competitors did, here’s some things I’m thinking about. Again, and then go back to one of our other suggestions, put that all in, hit the big, um, that little lines with the little lines beside it, the final button on the end, and just start talking to your person, talking to your AI persona that, that’ll chat with you. Go for a walk, have a conversation about all the stuff you just loaded up, and just flesh your ideas out, right? And, and go from there. I went through all of that on sort of like my, my year-end personal development, you know, who I am, who do I want to be in 2026, who was I in 2025, how does it fit into my, my life, my spirituality, all of that kind of stuff. I went kind of crazy deep.
JOHN CLENDENNING
23:40
But when it all said and done, Came up with a list of like, that took hours. I just kind of did it and paused the TV watching the World Juniors hockey game and then had a little bit more comfort or turned the volume down, had a little bit more conversations and went back and forth. And when it was all said and done, we came up with a training, like just some of the things I want to work on, improve, and just the next level of personal development and what books that I need to get the PDFs of, which I did, loaded in. And created a personal training development course for myself, my own personal counselor, whatever you want for the business development stuff I want to put in place. I put it in a project, but it’s all built around all of what I just said was literally one thing. It was the master prompt, but it included my personality prompt and all kind of dovetailed together into, ah, I feel good about 2026. And if the company here— I know where the company wants to be by the end of 2026. I’m now going to make an infographic so we can hang it on the wall, put it, share it out for the team, and they can all look at it.
JOHN CLENDENNING
24:46
And it’ll be, you know, a little cute and funny in our colors. But now we also have a roadmap of just like my sister has a roadmap to get out to the East Coast. We now have a company roadmap of where we’re planning to take things that we can keep pointing back to on, on company meetings and stuff like that. So All of that was talking. I typed nothing, nothing for that entire week.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
25:08
That is exciting.
BRAD KILGORE
25:09
Yeah.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
25:10
Go ahead, Brad.
BRAD KILGORE
25:10
Oh, I think that just makes, that just picks what I’m thinking as well as far as talking and using your voice in the AI tools, I believe is really going to have a massive jump in 2026. I know for me, I’m already using the, What is it called? It’s called, uh, Whisper something. Which one?
LAURA SOUTHERLY
25:36
Whisper?
BRAD KILGORE
25:37
Whisper? Yeah, Whisper Flow. I don’t even remember what it’s called, but I use it every day, right? I had to pull it up. So it’s just a little thing at the bottom of my, uh, screen that I just click. I’m in email, if I’m in communication, if I’m on Facebook, it doesn’t matter. I just put my cursor there and then I talk it, right? And even if for some reason it doesn’t grab it into the right place, it’s still putting it into the app. I can just copy it and pop it in there as well. But that’s what I see happening is being able to talk and communicate with our computers, with our phones, with our cars, all these different things that we’ve touched on before is I really think it’s all going to really going to all change to voice. I mean, I control my house with my voice.
BRAD KILGORE
26:20
I control my computer. I would think before long, these little flashing mice, this one’s a wired one, but wired or wireless, I think before long, those are going to be a thing of the past as well because we’ll be able to somehow control with our voice and our brain, who knows how. But I think that it’s just a matter of time. It would be nice for my shoulder and my 20-year-old carpal tunnel issues, you know, to not have a mouse. But I just truly believe that everywhere we look, and if for some reason the LLM that you have doesn’t have a little microphone thing on there, again, you can use WhisperFlow or something like that to go ahead and just talk it in. Why type? Because I still hunt and peck. I still type like a 12-year-old. And so eventually I won’t have to do that anymore.
BRAD KILGORE
27:12
So I’m pretty stoked about what’s happening there because It continues to improve. And the quality or the rate, you know, just the quality of it, you know, what I say is what it does. And even when it’s hard words or something that’s unique to me, I know that they, you know, you do things even with it for coding. Chris could probably speak to that more of speaking what you want to do with coding. Pretty much anything and everything is going to go that direction, I believe.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
27:46
Very true. Go ahead.
CHRIS HUNTER
27:48
So, um, I was reading this morning, actually, this kind of dovetails right into that. Um, Gemini, right? Um, Google, uh, is working on Gemini, uh, AI glasses. Okay, so I— Google has gone all in on AI, as they should. Right? And for them to go to this level now, right? Because they’ve already got Android, they’ve already got Chrome, they’ve already— and in fact, I was just reading this a couple of days ago that Chromebook and Chrome itself are starting to merge, right? More, even more so, and Android itself. So there’s going to be a mix-match version somewhere down the road this year of all of those going together. Well, you throw in on top of that Gemini, right? And then, then you start thinking about, okay, well, people have, have Android watches, okay? Those are very common nowadays. Um, they have, uh, you know, it’s in their phone. Uh, in fact, even if you’ve got an Apple, uh, you can install Gemini and you can talk to it.
CHRIS HUNTER
28:55
Um, just like Siri, Google Home.
JOHN CLENDENNING
28:57
Just mine just got updated two weekends ago to the Gemini 3, so it’s now smart voice, we have a conversation, not me yelling going, could you just turn off the living room lights, please? I said it the right way, for gosh sakes. You know, anyways, so.
CHRIS HUNTER
29:12
Well, and, and, and what I’m wondering, right, with the, with the addition of, of the glasses, okay, um, with this whole ecosystem, and, and if you train Gemini on you, which you can, right, with your master prompt, you can add your master prompt in there. How powerful is that going to be? I mean, are we even going to need computers?
LAURA SOUTHERLY
29:36
And that’s what I was watching and listening to a few conversations and webinars regarding the elimination of screen time. So they understand, you know, how many, how much we want to be away from our screens, even though we seem to be having the TV on, a computer on our lap, and our phone in our hand. It may They are really working for that technology that we can’t have those conversations without having to look at the screen. So I think the glasses do get us one step closer to doing that. And again, thinking as business owners, what does that mean? How are people going to be searching? What questions are they going to be asking? Are we answering for those that are looking and seeking our services online?
JOHN CLENDENNING
30:21
Yeah. SEO, like it doesn’t exist anymore. Search everywhere optimization. But, um, I feel bad. We, you know, again, we’re in the agency world. We had a client who decided to go with a local, um, gal in their, um, in their Chamber of Commerce. We only added $150,000— $147,398, um, $147,398 to be exact in revenue last year, not that I’m bitter, um, and, um, for our small, um, monthly fee, and decided, you know, he wants to go with the local gal that’s at the chamber, um, to do the marketing. But we had done about $10,000 to $15,000 worth of upgrades for AI to their website over the course of the year included because we know the direction it’s heading and it’s carpet cleaners.
JOHN CLENDENNING
31:07
They’re not gonna, who’s got $10,000 to $15,000 for a couple, like a 1, 2, 3 truck operation to upgrade that. But that’s what they’re charging enterprise clients and stuff like that because you do have to get into the AI recommendations. You have to be the brand. So it’s now brand that gets mentioned. This isn’t just a fuzzy, oh, I hope that’s good. I hope I get mentioned. No. Do you have people talking about you out online? Are you forcing that? Are you marketing your reputation and your stories? Are you telling happy customer stories? Are you coding your website properly? Anybody can go in and build a website now with AI in, you know, in, you know, in any of the tools or whatever.
JOHN CLENDENNING
31:51
You get like, there’s Lindy tools and stuff like that. There’s now even GoDaddy can— oh, we’ll build your website. Yeah, that’s nice, but is it, is it embedded and encoded and deep and answering the questions that AI is asking? Is it— is there, is there a strategy that’s being updated multiple times a week? Like Chris and I talk about, like, it’s no longer one blog post a week. It’s like, how do we take a blog post and syndicate it 35 times and do this? Because AI needs to pick that up to be able to be the new Google Maps, which is happening, the new AI overview, and all of that kind of thing. So So yeah, more so I was kind of like, you know, we’re all marketers, we’re worried, oh my gosh, if people can just make this happen for themselves, for their businesses to rank and do all, all of this, then why would they ever need an agency? The truth is, good friend of ours, Don Franklin, who works in this world really deep, he’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s the strategy is, is constantly changing, constantly evolving, and more important than ever. And if you’ve got a small business owner that’s keeping up and learning that, that’s great. They should open an agency, not the business. They shouldn’t be a carpet cleaner anymore.
JOHN CLENDENNING
32:57
If they learn that, they are no longer focusing on what they should focus on, which is getting off screen time, out in the world, Laura, like you said, and meeting customers and meeting businesses and referral partners and shaking hands and kissing babies and, and becoming the brand in the marketplace so that offline and online, you’re recommended everywhere. As 2026 will be the watershed year that changes everything. By, by this time next year, can’t even imagine what this podcast is going to sound like, like what we’re going to be talking about, what happened in 2026, because it’s right. All of that is just a, is a tsunami coming at us right now.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
33:35
It is. And I think that’s one reason why we do strive to talk about several topics every time we get together, because we bring different reality checks and what we’re seeing out there, what’s working for each of us. All of us, including Jen of course, are in different fields, so we know that our personas may vary slightly. There may be a lot of common traits, but yet there’s a lot of things that work better in Brad’s world that may not work as well as mine or Chris’s. And John and Jen may have some really things that move them forward. But as small business owners, you’re right, we We know it’s all working or coming to us really, really fast. And I think that if you’re listening today and you’re thinking, this sounds so overwhelming, we’ll back all the way up to what Chris said. Start, just start.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
34:27
Find something that you can gravitate. This is— that interests me. So whether it be a training, something that you pull together that your team can learn use AI to pull something together, make it an infographic. You know, you’ve got a training manual or at least a start page on doing one simple task. Think about what the tips that Brad provided where you can gravitate to those and say, “Wait a minute, that can move my business forward.” Chris, again, if you think, wow, the coding that Chris talked about, I have an idea, I want to talk through it, maybe consider buying Whisper or an audio thing that you can talk it into because sometimes We, because we’ve been in it so long, we put up our own walls because we think it’s got to be done in this fashion. And those that have not had to code or walk through bringing an idea out, they can talk it through very well and be pleasantly surprised as to what AI can build for them.
BRAD KILGORE
35:28
That’s exactly right. I’ve got a quick nugget that kind of ties into what was just shared. And I’m going to steal this right from John. And essentially, if you think about it, John just did a webinar. And one big thing in that webinar was people are not so much searching anymore, they’re asking. Right. And so a tip for you as a business owner is, okay, if your customers are now talking to their devices, however that is, and they’re asking questions. A good tip for you would be to use one of these AI tools, LLMs, to create a blog post or social post.
BRAD KILGORE
36:12
I would recommend blog posts, but make sure you put a fair amount of FAQs in there, frequently asked questions, of what your customers may be asking. And if you don’t know what they’re asking, before you even create your blog post, do some research with AI. And say, what are the top 5 questions when it comes to oil changes for repair shops? Or whatever it is. And so once you, once you know what the questions are, I don’t know, you know, you could probably do one a week, you know, of the different services you offer. What are the questions you’re, you’re, what are the big questions that your customers are asking? And then integrate that information into a blog post or a webpage. Or whatever it is. And if you don’t handle that, maybe your, your agency does that helps you with your website. But having these types of things on your website where there’s FAQs and different things, those are going to start showing up in the searches and AI overview and everywhere else.
BRAD KILGORE
37:09
So utilize that. That’s, that’s a simple thing that you could do, uh, to get started because like I said, John mentioned it, we’re mentioning it in our And our 2026 webinar is the same thing. People aren’t just searching anymore. They’re asking.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
37:25
They very much are. So I’m going to ask this team of AI marketing experts, what other words of wisdom, what should we leave our listeners and our viewers with so that they know that their 2026 is going to start off strong? Do we have any last words of motivation?
CHRIS HUNTER
37:45
Yeah, I would say for me, um, start, right? If you haven’t, and if you have started, you know, just keep sharpening that sword and going down the path of exploring, right? Because that’s essentially where we’re at at this point in time, is that we are exploring all of these tools and figuring them out and how we can use them in our businesses. I would highly encourage you to download Comet, right, which is a Perplexity, um, browser. Like, just, just search Comet, um, inside of Google if you want to, right? Uh, you can, by the way, still use Google inside of Comet, you know, and not just solely use Perplexity. But I would suggest that you use that if you’re browsing a lot like we are. It’s going to tell you your behaviors over time, and it’s going to you’re going to be able to ask the assistant, based off of my browser experience, how can you help me do what I do more efficiently? And if you, you ask that periodically, eventually you’re going to be able to automate a whole bunch of your own time and free you up to think, you know, and do your job and be with people, you know. And ultimately, that’s what we all want, is as As entrepreneurs, we want freedom, right, to either do the things that we want to do in our business or freedom to spend time with our friends and family.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
39:13
Absolutely. Brad?
BRAD KILGORE
39:18
I think I covered it on my last little run as far as people aren’t just searching, they’re asking.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
39:26
Very good. John?
JOHN CLENDENNING
39:29
I’m gonna— yeah, I’m gonna take the next step from what Chris said and what Brad said there. But, um, I suggest like use AI as your thought partner. So do that talking into it, the master prompt, or tell it all about your business, figure that out. And just, you know, if you’re, if you’re trying to figure out a marketing angle like you mentioned, or new service packages or spring offers or You know, should I go to this home and garden show? Well, you know, if I do, what do I need to— like, just load it up and have it as your, your thought partner, um, and just start using it that way. And you’ll be amazed at how much that starts becoming your go-to if you don’t do that already.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
40:16
Very strong, very strong. I think that I’m going to just circle back around and say, as small business owners take time to celebrate what you did last year. I know we’re already focused forward, focused forward, which is great. But if we don’t take time to say we did well last year and we move forward on— if it was AI, great. If it was something else, take time to just congratulate yourself and, you know, soak it in. And then that energizes or provides you that energy to move forward stronger. And it also kind of gives you that insight that when you’re talking to your thought partner, when you’re planning out what you’re going to be doing, when you’re mapping out those next few steps, you feel like you’ve got really strong footing. You’ve got that foundation to move you forward, to give you what you need for a successful new year.
LAURA SOUTHERLY
41:05
So I think that wraps our episode for today as we celebrate the start of a new year. So again, congratulations on what you accomplished. We ask you to subscribe. Go ahead and hit the bell, you know, click the links, share down below, um, your thoughts, your questions, so that we can answer those as well. But share this out with other people that are in your industry that are looking for some tips for small business owners, because together we can move forward faster. So until our next episode, thank you for joining us.
