Content Marketing, AI and Why Your Story Is Your Best Business Asset | Sarah from Typeset

Cold Open

Sarah: I don't want to say it tanked, but we took a big hit.

Kane: For example, highest month ever, I think we spent 750k in 1 month just on Google Ads. Obviously, that is pretty ridiculous, but I think —

Sarah: These are not people that we want to work with.

Why Storytelling Matters More Than Most Business Owners Realize

Kane: Hey, I'm Kane Taylor Smith, the founder and CEO of Smart Fix and High Potential. This is Unlocking Business where we have real conversations around business, leadership, mindset, and personal growth. If you've been getting value from these conversations, please take a second to like, subscribe, and follow our channels. It helps us reach more people, bring on more guests, and share more stories. Now, let's get into this episode.

Today, we're joined by Sarah Mitchell from Typeset. Sarah, you have a background in software development, sales, writing, and content strategy, and now helping businesses communicate more clearly through content, storytelling, and marketing. Why does storytelling matter more than most people realize?

Sarah: I think — first of all, I haven't always been of that opinion that storytelling was important. I come from a business background, from a software background. It's very often cut and dried information. But, I think in the age of social media and the age of everybody's online now, we connect with stories, we remember stories. There's so much information out there. There's so much knowledge out there that what, as humans, we gravitate toward is the story, and I'm a huge proponent of it now because a story can help people remember things a lot easier than they can remember facts, figures, detail. And especially now with the way that the internet is just a glut of information, we can all get that. But, the stories are what connects us with our audience, which makes our businesses sound more human, which makes us feel like, "I really like those people," or, "I don't like those people." Stories bring out emotion, and I think whenever you can tap into your target audience's emotion, you're going to win. So, from a writing perspective, it's just way more enjoyable, and you get to add that creativity to it.

Kane: Mhm. Do you think that means then personal branding is becoming more important because of storytelling?

Sarah: I think personal branding has always been important. I think storytelling helps build that personal brand in a much more authentic way. I mean, my son is 22 and he listens to all kinds of things that are very different from me and he has very different interests. He's a complete rev head, so we hear stuff about cars 24/7 really at our house. But it's when he comes to the dinner table at night, it's the stories that he brings with me — if he wants to keep me engaged, he has to tell me in some kind of a story. But if he's talking to his dad — and this is where I usually get up from the dinner table — then it starts to be about parts and the mechanics of it. So —

Kane: And the specifications and numbers.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So I just think that depending on who you are and what you're looking for, that story is still where the connection is. So from a personal brand, the more that you can tell your story, you can relate to people through a story, the better off you're going to be.

Kane: So is it — do you think it's more of a buzzword at the moment than personal branding, cuz I've seen a lot about it sort of in the more recent years than previously?

Sarah: Yeah, I get really — in fact, I tried to move away from storytelling almost because it has become a buzzword. Everybody talks about storytelling and then they're cranking out this commodity-level content, which is a good word for it at that point. And it's like, well, where's the story in it? You can start it at "once upon a time," but for a good story in business writing, I want to see something that threads through the whole thing. I don't want to see the first paragraph of an analogy or a little something that happened to you and then you just switch right into vomiting all of your information at me.

AI Slop, ChatGPT vs Claude, and Why People Can't Tell the Difference

Kane: Mhm. So, did you — that sort of might lead into like AI slop, and I suppose there's a lot of that.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Which — what are your thoughts on AI? Is it good? Is it bad? Is it both?

Sarah: Yeah, it's both. So, I use AI every single day. I think it's got really great uses for some things. I think if you're relying on it to do something that you're — I'm struggling to find the word here, which is always irritating for writers — if you are just parking some part of your marketing or your business and relying totally on AI to do that for you, you're making a mistake. So, especially as business owners, we need to orchestrate what AI is doing for us and use it as a tool. But I see far too many people — and there's been recent — I saw Rand Fishkin just did a survey on LinkedIn and he's put out one of his little videos about this — people will ask something of AI or ask it to do something, and they'll take the very first thing that it spits out, and they'll publish it without any intervention, and I just think that's a huge mistake, cuz then —

Kane: You can tell, hey. LinkedIn these days is pretty bad for it, like —

Sarah: LinkedIn is —

Kane: You can't scroll without saying that's AI, that's AI.

Sarah: Yeah, and so is Facebook. I assume Instagram is too. I don't spend too much time on any of the meta stuff anymore, but the other interesting thing though is people think they can tell something is AI and it's not. People are really bad at identifying it.

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: So, there's been plenty of research with that, too, but there's some tricks to writing that writers have always used, and I think the em dash right now has been the flash point with the writers. People say, "Oh, there's an em dash, that was written by AI." Well, writers have been using em dashes for centuries, and that is actually why AI uses em dashes — because writers have used em dashes.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: So, sometimes you can tell, sometimes you can't. I think if you've used it responsibly and you've used it as an aid instead of doing the work for you, as an assistant, then yeah, why not? Especially for things like research, for synthesizing information, and I'll give you a great example. I had a brief to do a paper, and the paper was about 10 pages long, and it was an agency that briefed me on this, and they sent me like a hundred pages of stuff. And as a writer, it's impossible for me to — first of all, it's going to take me days to go through all that. Second of all, how am I supposed to take all of that information and then find something meaningful — but I can chunk that into Claude and say, "With all of these documents, give me the top five themes." Now I've got a place that I can start. And that's where it's really, really helpful, I think. I'm a writer, though. I like to write, so I don't want to give them that job.

Kane: Yeah, give them your job.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So, I heard a lot of people talking about Claude recently. Does that seem to be the best one for writing and content?

Sarah: Yeah, 100%. And I've used a lot of them. I started on ChatGPT and I just could never quite — it was never really a comfortable assistant for me. It felt always odd and I was getting odd answers, and it didn't flow for me. And then, when Claude came out, I started using that pretty early on, and it just clicked for me. And now I've got a paid subscription. I only use Claude. But I've got clients that use ChatGPT — they'll brief me, they'll run their stuff through ChatGPT and send me the chat brief. And to me, it's got a very distinctive style to it, and I don't think it's as fluent as Claude. So, I recommend Claude to everybody.

Kane: Yeah, okay. So, why do you think people can't sometimes tell the difference within an AI piece over a real one?

Sarah: Cuz it's getting better. And you can train it. You can say, "Don't give me em dashes, don't give me rhetorical questions, don't give me series of three." You can —

Kane: Sound like AI.

Sarah: Yeah, "don't sound like AI." And you can do that.

Are Humans Starting to Write Like AI?

Kane: So, I heard something the other day on a podcast that was talking about how AI is learning over time the way that it's now writing, and humans will then start to write the way that AI does. So, it's sort of like it has a reverse effect, where we will start using — like I actually use em dashes now, I've never used them before. But it just feels like natural to me, cuz we've used AI a lot.

Sarah: That's absolutely right. And I guess that's the risk, is that if we now start talking or writing like AI writes, then we've lost our originality. But you see that in a lot of ways. This is happening in the US with the way Trump speaks, which is so distinctive. So now a lot of people have started to speak like him and to use the kind of language patterns that he uses, both in their writing and their speech. So it's human nature, I think, to emulate something that you admire or that you think is successful. So it's going to happen, but what that prevents though is differentiation. So everybody starts to sound the same, and I've heard — I've said it myself — it's like we're in this great blanding of content. We've sawed off all the rough edges. Everything is very smooth. Everything is very professional. Everything is very same, same, same. And I want something as a reader that's going to stand out, that's going to make me think. The other thing I read yesterday, Kane, that I thought was fascinating, and this was in the New York Times, is that they've been analyzing research papers that have come in from students — I can't remember if it's high school or university level, I think it was university level — but they're saying the stuff that's generated by AI is less creative than the stuff that's generated by people that have not used AI. So everything from AI will be correct, and it'll be perfect, but there's not as much innovation in the ideas that are coming through, there's not as much creativity in the way things are being presented. And I think that's a big risk to business owners, because if you sound just like your competitor, and they sound just like their competitor, and you sound like the three people that are in the next local community, what's left? Well, what's left is your ability to stand out because you're not using AI.

Kane: I always remember from the workshop we done with you guys for the award submission, you were talking about — I can't remember what it was — things like those top-used phrases, like all the jargon list and those lists of just cut all that. So after that, we made heaps of changes within our business, like just say the thing, don't beat around the bush and all these things — just say the thing and just write that. You don't have to over explain everything, cuz I use that for everything now, hey.

Cutting the "Gobbledygook" and Jargon Monoxide From Your Copy

Sarah: The gobbledygook? Oh, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah. And I think, like, AI uses so much gobbledygook, and any AI agent or AI bot is always going to try to make you happy — so they are going to feed you something that they think you're going to like, and if you just accept it, then you're just going to get more and more of that, and quite frankly, the internet is full of awful writing, and it's just populating that. So I think if you can get rid of that gobbledygook, or the "jargon monoxide" — that's another term that I've heard for it — you're going to stand out simply because you don't have it.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: And the reader doesn't process that, right? When they're looking at it, they don't say, "Oh wow, look, there's no jargon in here." They're just going to read it, and they will find it easier to read. They're going to internalize the information in it more. They will not switch off as easily. So people skim much more than they read.

Kane: I'm a bad one for skimming, I probably skim too much.

Sarah: Yeah, well we all do because there's too many things that we've got to do, but if something is really written in an original way, then you will slow down, or you will read every paragraph, or at least you'll keep skipping down the page as much as you can.

Kane: Yeah. Even skip past dot points now, cuz I used to usually always go to all the dot points, but when you do speak to Chat or something, it gives you the spiel, then it gives you the dot points, then it leaves all those spiel and dot points, and now I just skip to the bottom, what's this little summary at the very end, and then I have to go back and read the parts that I actually need to.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Yeah, it's fun. Reading backwards.

Sarah: I've done that too, that's an interesting observation, cuz I certainly do that as well, where you read the first, and there's that idea about when we read online, we use the F pattern — so if you look at heat maps for how people are reading when they're reading online, they will read the first two paragraphs and then they'll skip a little bit, and then they'll read a bit in the middle, and then they start to go straight down. So if you look at the heat map, it looks like an F.

Kane: Yeah, I get —

Sarah: And I know I do that, and I'll get to the end as if the information's not in that final paragraph, where do I skip back up? So.

What Typeset Does: From Blog Posts to Fractional Content Leadership

Kane: So what does Typeset do?

Sarah: It's interesting. So since AI, what we're doing is a little bit different, because we started in 2019. My business partner Dan Hatch is a former journalist, and we've worked together for a long time in content and in writing, and we worked together in an agency for a while. We started that business because we were just worn out by agency life. I wanted to spend, and he wanted to spend, more time on the tools — we're writers, and pretty soon you get to a position where you're managing a bunch of people and you're doing a bunch of BD and all kinds of stuff in the office, and the people that are doing the things that you enjoy doing, they're having the fun and you've just got the drudgery. So, we decided we wanted to have this business, and we were going to stick in our lane, which was writing, editing, and proofreading. So, Dan and I started that business. We've got a proofreader that we've worked with for a long time as well. And we wanted to just produce business content at a level of quality that journalists would use. Because I honestly believe that content that you're producing is an asset to your company if it's done properly. So, we went along swimmingly until 2023 when ChatGPT came out, and within 6 months our business — I don't want to say it tanked, but we took a big hit. That six — for 6 months was challenging, and then it shot back up again. And I think what happened is people adopted ChatGPT as a way to do their own marketing, to do their own writing. And I don't think — we just had people that told us that, people we've worked with for years, and then found out it really wasn't very good — you could do it, but there was a lot of slop out there. Then last financial year it had gotten better, and we had people that had been our customers since way before Typeset were just saying, "We're just going to produce our own content now and we'll use you guys for strategic things," because it had gotten better. And so, we've had to reposition the company into areas still within writing and within content that AI can't really do. So, Dan and I both are working as fractional leaders in that content space — head of content, or managing editors, so that's more like the thinking that goes in behind what your content and writing programs might look like. Awards — I've worked with Business News for a long time on the 40 Under 40 and on their WA Business Awards. If everybody uses Chat or Claude to do their award, you're not going to stand out. You might have a wonderful award, but it's a really specific skill that requires differentiation in every way.

Kane: That just reminds me, cuz when you guys helped with my award in that workshop, yes, you could put all the questions into ChatGPT, but you guys have to get out of me, or the person, our stories, or those things that you forget about — that was something that you went through in the workshop, is you need, like, what was the bad thing that happened, and those stories that you sort of need to draw out of the people, so it is their story.

Sarah: Yeah, it is a story, and I've worked as a judge on a couple different awards for a long time, and having sat on the other side of that table, and having a hundred awards that you're looking at, they really do all sound the same pretty soon. And if there's not a story in it, if they haven't been constructed properly, if it's full of gobbledygook, you've actually missed an opportunity to get more value into it.

Kane: Because of the word counts.

Sarah: Because of the word counts, and some of those are really brutal. So, we do a lot of work in that area, and that's, you know, sometimes your business shows you where your opportunities are. We wouldn't have gone into a business thinking awards are going to be a thing for us, but we've over time gained a reputation. People keep coming back to us, people refer us. Now we do awards for people all over the world, and part of that's because the marketing is working, between our socials and our newsletter and our website. When people Google, "I have an award" or "I need somebody to help with an award submission," we show up, and that's why we're doing awards for people in the US who we don't really have any contacts with, but they find us. And then the third thing we're doing is workshops — helping people with their messaging, helping people to write more effectively, helping people to write with empathy, helping people to understand how to differentiate themselves in writing, how to be that human in the loop. So, if you're going to use AI, fine, but how do you know if it's good or if it's not good? So, those three things: the fractional leadership, the awards, and the workshops. And we still do blog posts, and articles, case studies and white papers, but 2019 through 2023, our bread and butter was blog posts, and we would do dozens of them in a month. Now we might do one or two in a month.

Kane: Yeah, I get it.

Sarah: So, it made a huge impact, and lots of businesses like ours started shutting up — I mean, big businesses. I was surprised to hear that their business ended, that they went out of business because of the impact of AI, and I just thought, well, I'm not ready to let that happen. I've got more to say, so.

Kane: Yeah, I think they just — like you guys have done, you just got to adapt and figure out how to, cuz yeah, you still need the human touch in every point, almost. So, the workshops, are they online or are they in person?

In-Person Business Workshops on Writing and Messaging

Sarah: We — they're mostly in person and mostly at the business level. So we haven't quite figured out how to fill a workshop for the public. We've tried that a couple different times and you end up losing money because you have to rent a room, you have to do the catering, and you have to spend time marketing to get people in. There's a lot of people that are interested, but for people to actually pay and show up is a different story. So we tend to sell those more at the business level — we'll do teams.

Kane: So that's within one business you're going to be running it.

Sarah: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense, and sometimes they're really big businesses where there's multiple teams, and sometimes it's just a small business that says everybody in our business is writing, but we all come at it from a different angle, and we just want some advice on how to be better and how to get everybody on the same wavelength for writing. And my first writing course started when a customer said to me, "I'm spending all of my time editing everybody else's writing, and I've got this diverse group. I've got people that are close to retirement. I've got interns. I've got people that did writing courses or writing degrees. I've got people that have never done any writing." And they were a not-for-profit, so they're communicating with government a lot, and she's like, "We're all over the place, can you come in and help us get on the same page?" And she was also in the situation where she was arguing with people about what was right and what was not right — somebody that went to school in the '60s and their third grade teacher said, "This is the only way you can do it," and she's like, "But that's not true anymore." So a lot of times we will go into an organization and get everybody together, and it's just a professional development day, and it gets people talking — everybody writes, but everybody doesn't write the same way or have the same view on what writing should be.

Kane: Mhm.

Fractional Content Leadership vs Traditional Consulting

Kane: So how is that different to the fractional part then? So the fractional part is more of a longer term thing with you guys, like in their business?

Sarah: Yeah, well, not really. In fact, fractional for me is a very defined engagement with defined outcomes. So the workshops are more like we're doing skills transfer, basically. But the fractional stuff — I'll give you an example right now. I'm working with a customer in the UK, an SEO agency, funnily enough, who, because of the way that search is moving and because of AI, knew that they wanted to have a bigger discipline of content. So they've been looking for a head of content, and they couldn't find one, and the CEO or the general manager was doing that management part of it. And the marketing manager just said to me, "Would you be interested in coming in being our head of content?" Well, no, because I've got my own business. "Would you be interested in coming in as an interim?" Okay, I can do that while you find somebody. That started out as just an interim role, but when I came in, I could see things that they needed to be doing that they weren't doing. First of all, they'd had a revolt in their content team, almost all of their writers were leaving. So the first thing we had to do was build that writing team back up, put in processes, put in procedures, develop assets — like they didn't have any kind of way to go to market with content, they didn't have any kind of philosophy. So, it was going in and setting all of that up. And then I'm still doing it — right now what I'm doing is getting that internal capability built up. So, when I think of fractional work, that's what I'm looking at — going in and helping a company build the internal capability, and then I exit out, because I don't — you know, I think if you're there for a long time, it can get political, I don't want a full-time job, I like working in my own business. But I really like helping organizations build that capability and getting them set up and getting them on their way. And then I go to the next one. And I can do two or three of those fractional things at a time. Sometimes it's a 3-month gig, depending on what it is, sometimes it's a year, but I always think that with fractional you have to have a defined outcome of what you're working towards. Otherwise, you're just consulting. And I think the problem with consultants is that traditionally they like recurring work, they like to bill, but the output doesn't always match. You're paying somebody to be there all the time, but if you're not using that person all the time, then it's a cost. So I always want to make sure that I'm providing value.

Kane: Yeah, that's interesting. So, when you do have them, I assume you have set hours per week that you would work for them? Do you go into their office and do that, or is it all remote?

Sarah: It's — well, the one in the UK is remote because I'm in Perth and they're in Leeds. In fact, most everything that we do is remote now because it's just more convenient, but every single engagement is different as well. Some places it'll be 2 days a week, some places it'll be 15 hours a month, some places it'll be almost an order, like "we want four case studies in a month." So it just depends, or it'll be, "develop a content marketing strategy for us with all the editorial assets that go with it," like the editorial calendars and style guides and the tone of voice and all of that. And then when that's done, then it's over.

Kane: Yeah, okay. So, that's cool. So, it gives you a lot of variety, wouldn't it?

Sarah: Yeah, which I love, which I love.

Kane: Have you done any with the trades and services?

Sarah: I've had actually quite a few trades, more like in the awards kind of stuff. Done some manufacturing — one of my long-term customers, they manufacture industrial conveyors for powder handling, based in Perth. I knew nothing about powder handling when I started, right? I'm an expert now, I can talk all day about powder handling and all the problems that come with it. We do a lot of work in technology because I've got a background in technology. We've done a lot — of course it's Perth, so you're doing a lot of stuff in mining engineering, that kind of stuff. A lot of recruiting, a lot of aged care.

From Enterprise Software Sales to Freelance Writing: Sarah's Career Story

Kane: So, how did you change from the software industry into content?

Sarah: So, it was really interesting. I had worked at this same company in the US as a developer for 10 years, and I was really getting burned out on technology. I had the aptitude, but I didn't necessarily have the passion. But what I really liked was the business parts of it. And I was contracting, so I had worked in a lot of different organizations where I'd go in for a project or two, or whatever. And I'd done a big project in the UK for IBM, and I felt like after that, am I going to go — I'm from Michigan, am I going to go back to Ford Motor Company and write test plans? How do you top working on a big project for IBM? And this guy convinced me to come in and work in a pre-sales, technical pre-sales role in the international team. So, I spent 2 years doing that. And then I was flying like 200,000 air miles a year cuz my territory was everything but North America, and I was living in Michigan, so I said, "I just need to be in the same place every night." And I knew the guy that was running our South African office. He'd just opened it, and he said, "Why don't you come down and sell? You can carry a quota, you can sell, you'll be in the same bed every night, it'll be great." So, I did that. And that was shortly after Mandela was elected, so this was like mid-90s. And I went in with these fantastic products that I'd used as a developer, that everybody in any kind of mainframe environment would use — they were like industry standard software. And when I got to Johannesburg they were being used all over illegally, because during apartheid nobody could sell in there, but things were going in through the distributors. So I had to go in and get all of those contracts normalized. They had to quit using stuff illegally and start using things on a legal contract. They had to get everything up to date because some of the software was really outdated. And that was kind of the mandate — go out and sell a bunch more software, get everybody organized. Great, I can do that. But what I did not take into consideration was that there was no brand awareness at all about the company. People didn't know the company name at all. They only knew the product names, and they didn't know the product names were attached to a company — they thought they were attached to the local distributor. So I went in with this selling model that was always relying on the brand. And now I've got all this material that doesn't mean anything to any of the people that I have to sell to. So what I did know though was how to use those products in a technical environment. So I started writing case studies and white papers based on my own experience. And that is what started to help me get deals. So it was just my personal knowledge, putting it onto paper. They were starting to get into the proposals — and these were multi-million dollar contracts. When you're going into a huge bank and you're selling something that they use every single day, we're talking anywhere between 2 million and 10 million deals. And I couldn't get a meeting. But when I said, "Look, here's a white paper, here's a case study, here's a cost justification, here's what the payback period will be," and I could write that all down, they were getting attached to proposals and stuff was getting through. At the end of that, I was pretty worn out with technology direct sales — a commission with big quotas just did me in, it really did me in, and I thought, I'm out. And that's when I started freelance writing.

Kane: So with the software then, is that like CRM systems?

Sarah: They were testing tools for enterprise programmers — things like how to detect ad ends, how to find errors in your data, how to run automated testing on large-scale applications, how to debug code. These were just things that people used every single day as a developer.

Kane: So, your case study would be like how you've used it for yourself. So, that's like the storytelling piece that then you can — they can read it, and that's how you can sell them the product.

Sarah: Yeah, and for somebody that's got a budget, they don't really care if it works or doesn't work in some respects — they do care if it works, but they don't care that people really like it, because there's going to be a competitor that does it as well, and if they can do it cheaper, then I'm going to take that. But if you can prove to them that it makes sense to use your product, and here's why, here's the business case why, then they'll accept that. So, that's what I knew I had to do — I had to make a business case because there was no brand awareness. So, that's when I really understood the value of brand as well. No brand awareness. I went from a company that had every other market in the world — you'd walk in, you could just get a meeting cuz you could say, "I'm from Compuware." I go to this place now where I'm living, and I —

Kane: You don't have the brand name.

Sarah: No brand name. I moved my whole life, I'm down there by myself, I don't know anybody when I get down there, and I just had to figure it out. And it was creating that content, that really high-value content that was quite strategic for the people, my sponsors that needed it, and the people that were making the decision on those major budgets needed it. And it's like, "Oh, this stuff works." So, there wasn't even a name called content marketing for it at the time. And there weren't blogs yet, because people weren't publishing online, websites were pretty rudimentary, but I was writing for local newspapers, I was writing articles, and journalists loved it, because they didn't put my name on it, they put their name on it, but they would publish exactly what I wrote, because that's one job done. So, yeah.

Kane: So, that's where it started for you freelancing, and it was for papers?

Sarah: Yeah, well, after I left technology, I thought I'd be writing case studies and white papers for technology companies and I did a lot of that. But I was also doing things that interested me — I was writing for travel magazines, I was writing for airport magazines, I was writing for kids magazines. I was really just doing things that appealed to me. And we'd moved around a lot — we left South Africa and went to France, and then we went to Malaysia, we came to Australia, and my husband decided to do a PhD — he's a chemical engineer, so his midlife crisis was, "I need to do a PhD," which is okay, better than a girlfriend really, or a sports car — which the sports car did end up coming into play as well.

Kane: What car?

Sarah: He got a Porsche.

Kane: 911?

Sarah: Yeah, he got a Boxster.

Kane: Okay, cool.

Sarah: But he started working part-time and studying part-time, and after a year of a part-time income, I thought, I've got to get more commercial with my business. So, I started a global copywriting business, which is still going — it's just a sole trader. And really then decided what had been a hobby now had to be a business, and I've got to go out and start setting goals for myself and earning money and bringing that in. But I didn't know, even though I'd worked all over the world, how hard it is in Perth to get started if you don't know anybody. And I didn't know anybody in Perth.

Kane: When was that? When did you start?

Sarah: 2008.

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Was that the early stages? When was social media coming around?

Early Social Media, the GFC, and Meeting Her Business Partner on Twitter

Sarah: Well, just — yeah, good timing, it was right about then. So in 2008 is when the smartphone came out. In 2008 people started to understand that they needed to have things like blogs. Twitter was a year old. I met my business partner on Twitter, actually. I met Dan on Twitter.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: And Twitter was how I got to know who people were in Perth. That's how I met Nick Hayes from Media Stable.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: They were like the early adopters, a lot of people in the creative industries. And there were a lot of writers and things like that. And initially I started connecting with writers, but then I figured out, well, the writers are not my audience — they're my competition. But I started to get referrals on Twitter from people that knew I was a writer, from things that they'd read. But the other thing that happened, to go back to my point about the smartphone, is I thought I would be still working in tech, but in 2008 everybody wanted blog posts, everybody wanted social media. I did so many social media trainings — "this is Twitter, this is what it is, this is what LinkedIn is, this is how you do it, this is what Facebook is." So really that starting with those workshops and that education just naturally happened because I wanted to get in front of people.

Kane: Would you say that was perfect timing? Lucky timing?

Sarah: Well, the GFC also started in October 2008 when I did, but —

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: But you know what happens when the economy's tough, your marketing is what's going to save you. That's all you can do if things are really tough — you have to keep showing up, you have to keep being out there.

Kane: That's actually a very good point, cuz that's what recently with us — it does every year, like March, April, sorry, April, May for us is such a bad time of year with school holidays, public holidays, it's always so quiet. So in previous years, marketing has been one of the first things — "okay, cool, let's just drop, let's just drop radio, let's just drop SEO for a couple months." But you are right, like, how can you drop the one thing that's going to bring in the work in the first place? It's a hard thing to balance as a business owner.

Content as a Business Asset vs Marketing as an Expense

Sarah: I think people look at it as an expense. So, they think, if the cash flow's not great or if the contracts aren't coming in, then we've got to cut our expenses. But, I always look at marketing, especially content, as an asset. Something that's really focused on your target audience, that's providing value in some way, some kind of information or some kind of story that they're looking for, will continue to drive traffic to your website or your personal brand for years after you've created it. It will continue to keep your Google search rankings high. And if you can do all of that in an organic way, then you can reduce your spend on paid, you can reduce your spend on technical SEO even. So, and I think the work I'm doing right now with the SEO agency in the UK is because they recognize that for SEO to work really well, you have to have content that supports that — it has to be anchored to something. So, I always say to people, a good content marketing strategy will help you move your marketing expense across that balance sheet, and it becomes an asset to your business. And you can tell what's really working and what is driving leads to you, what is building your personal profile.

Kane: Yeah, SEO has always been interesting for us. We've only actually started doing it in the last 12 months, or maybe 18 months, cuz it is hard to measure. We've always been so heavy on paid Google Ads — we spend so much money on that. So when we have spent on SEO, it's like, "Oh, we're going to — if we spend six grand a month," it's so hard to measure what comes in from that. And I know it takes time, it takes 6 months, 12 months, but we know if we put that money straight into Google Ads, we're going to get X amount of leads from that, we know what we're going to get, but SEO has always been hard. So recently we have stopped doing it through an agency again, because I'm like, how is AI going to actually affect this, and does the agency actually know how to work with AI over you? So confusing.

Is Everyone Suddenly an "AI Expert"? And Why SEO Is Now "AI Search"

Sarah: Yeah, and I think that's a good question, because right now if you go out onto LinkedIn especially, it's probably the same on X — I haven't been on, I dropped off Twitter before it ever went over to X — but everybody's an AI expert right now. And it's like, yeah, I remember when you were the crypto expert, and before that you were the social media expert, and before that you were some other expert. So you get these groups of people that roam around, and there's this philosophy that if I'm 3 months ahead of everybody else, then I'm an expert and I can speak about it, which makes me really uncomfortable. But I think if you always go back to your basics, which is understanding who your audience is and what they're looking for, understanding how Google's working — and the people that are winning on AI are also winning on Google search, because as my buddies in the UK say, AI search is SEO. Ultimately, it's just another thing that you have to consider. So, that can be things like your blog post should be in 300-word blocks. Your headers should start with a question that people might be looking for in search. The way that you structure them is a little bit different, and you can go out and change your current content to make it more AI-friendly, but you don't ever throw out the work that you've already done.

Kane: That actually reminds me of a question I was going to ask you before. So, with you saying that having that content is an asset, and it can last years — if we've got a website now that's got heaps of blogs on there, but it's not specific to how AI works, can we just edit that content to try and update it so that AI can review it? Cuz I know you mentioned obviously having the question as a title, then I assume you've got to have the answer there because — I don't know, is it AEO or AJO or something?

Sarah: Whatever they're calling it, it's like the Old MacDonald, it's like the EIEIO, sometimes, yeah.

Kane: So, that's the long tail answer needs to be in there, because if someone's searching, "I want to find the cheapest electrician near me," your answer needs to have some form of solution.

How to Update Old Blog Content to Rank in AI Search

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And even for just a basic search, it's always great to go back in and refresh your content to keep it updated. And the other thing that people do — they keep content on their website that's not performing. If, after two or three years, it's not performing, just get rid of it. But go in and spend more time — I've got a big project going on with a customer right now where we're going back through five years of content and updating every one of those articles that are high performing to be attractive to AI. It might be, for example, the title might be something about cooking with avocados — that might be the headline, which is great for a Google search term. But for AI, somebody might say, "How do I cook with avocados?" So, we're just going in and changing that heading into a question, and then the first sentence or two after that will answer that question. And sometimes you don't really have to change much at all, but it just makes it — and then breaking things up into smaller chunks.

Kane: Why is that?

Sarah: Because AI will scan an article, and if it gets too far, they get confused. So, they want to see it really in small bite-size chunks. So, 300 words is about two paragraphs.

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: So, in some cases, all the content's still great, we're just adding more headings in.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: We're just "chunking it," as they call it now — that's one of the new terms, chunking it.

Kane: So, in theory, a blog article should only be 300 words, no more? There's no point?

Sarah: Oh, no, it can be 10,000 words, but you should have 300-word paragraphs between your headings.

Kane: Okay.

Sarah: And that's the other thing that's great — with Google, everything kind of had to be, to use the old newspaper term, "above the fold."

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: The higher up in the article your keywords were, the better. AI doesn't care — they can be at the very bottom. The other thing that people can do to make their current content more attractive to AI is to add FAQ sections on every single one of them. Just put an FAQ schema in there, and put three, four, five questions and answer that question. And you can just add something to what you've already got.

Kane: Why is that? Does AI look for FAQ? So it needs to be FAQ as the heading, like down at the bottom of the page, you've got FAQ, then you've got the questions?

Sarah: It doesn't have to be an FAQ section, but AI likes the questions.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: They like the questions. So, understand what questions your customers are asking and put those in there. The other thing is these things called "fanout queries" — so you don't want just five disparate questions, you want one question, and then, you know how people search on AI, because this is how we search — you might ask a question like, "How do I cook with avocados?" And then the next question might be, "Can I bake a whole avocado?" And then, "Do I have to cut the skin off the avocado before I bake it?" So it's like a cascading list of questions — that's what they like.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: Yeah. So, that's how you would do it. And by having an FAQ section, you can go in and just add that to the bottom without having to unpick everything before — you can leave everything else the same.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: And just add to it. And that just continues to increase the value of the content that you already have and keep that as an asset. Keep investing in the asset you've already got, instead of — I see people that throw stuff out and then just make new. How about just updating the stuff that you've got?

Kane: So, you mentioned before about the stuff that isn't performing well, just get rid of it?

Sarah: Yeah. If nobody's getting there, if nobody's looking at it, then Google rewards that kind of behavior — they're like, "You're keeping your website really tight, you're keeping it really clean." They don't like to crawl stuff that's just hanging out there doing nothing.

Duplicate Suburb Landing Pages and Content Cannibalization

Kane: We've got that issue at the moment with our High Potential website, for example — it's got loads of pages from the testing process, but we didn't remove them. That's actually a question for the Smartfix website at the moment. We tried to have landing pages for every service, for every suburb, and obviously when we made them, it wasn't fresh content for each page.

Sarah: Duplicate.

Kane: We used AI to try to not have duplicate, but obviously it's very close to duplicate. So, it has like cannibalized the website in a way. But for user experience, if someone searches "plumber in Mannington," their best experience is going to that landing page, but we're trying to figure out where we draw the line — do we just get rid of all those pages that aren't performing? What's the cutoff line? If someone isn't in one of those suburbs, what page do they go to? It is quite a hard one.

Sarah: It is, and I think that's why having a technical SEO expert is such a good idea, having somebody that you can ask.

Kane: So hard to find experts. Like I said before, everyone says they're an expert. What's your opinion? How do you find the expert?

How to Actually Vet an SEO or Marketing "Expert"

Sarah: Yeah, well, first of all, let's go out and look at what their personal brand is. Are they publishing? Are they actually putting things out there that people can comment on? Are they presenting at conferences and events? What are they publishing? So, if they say they're an expert on SEO and they've got nothing that I can find that they've written, then how do I know? Because it's a problem with SEO and technical stuff in general — it's not regulated. Anybody can say they're an SEO. I can say I'm an SEO. In fact, my Global Copywriting blog post was named one of the top SEO blog posts in like 2012, I think, by Search Engine Journal. And it's true, but 2012 SEO is way different than 2026 SEO, where 2012 SEO was just on-page optimization, like putting in links and headings and keywords. Now, you really need to understand how websites work, how Google works, how AI works. You need to understand how the back end of those things work. And that, to me, is a specialization. So, yeah, I look for people that are writing about it, for people that have won awards about it, for people that are speaking at conferences about it, because they're putting themselves on the line then.

Kane: Mhm. That's very interesting, cuz that goes back to the earlier personal branding scenario — that's probably one of the most important things then, cuz that person is putting themselves out there. Obviously then you can find them, like if they are on a podcast and then you come across that, and you obviously build that trust with them, hey.

Sarah: Yeah, and like this SEO agency that I'm working with in Leeds — Dan Taylor, who's their chief innovation officer, is an amazing guy, he understands SEO like nobody I've ever met before, and he is speaking all the time, he's developing his own tools, he's educating people, he just understands it really well. So, I trust him. If I have a question I'll go ask Dan, if you can ever find him, because he seems like he's always on a plane somewhere or he's got his head down, and I'll send him a Teams message and I get these answers back like, I know it's 2:30 in the morning for him, I'm like, "Dan, what are you doing?" He's like, "Oh, I'm in the middle of writing this tool to help our customers, blah blah blah." So, but their whole agency, they've got a practice of technical SEO, and they've been doing it for 11 years. That's the other thing — staying power. How long have they been in business? Who are their customers? Who are their references? Because we've lost a lot of business to SEO agencies for the reason that you said it earlier — I can turn those ads on and I immediately get leads. Where content marketing is more of a slow burn — you have to build that base of content, it has to have time to rank, people have to find it. So, it can take 6 months before a content marketing initiative really starts to return any value. Now, once it's gone, it's like a runaway train — it can still be returning value to you 10 years later. But, if you are in need of a certain number of leads this month, then it's the SEO people that you go with. And the SEO people will always sell against content people by saying, as soon as we turn this off, your leads are going to stop. But then the reverse of that is true too — if you've built that in a strategic way, your content assets, you can turn it off and you never have to spend money on any of that again.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: So, I have customers that say the groundwork that we laid 10 years ago — and I helped them write those strategies, I helped them build their content teams — they're off and running, they're laughing. But, it's a slow burn process, and you have to drip feed it, you have to keep at it all the time. You can't just do it and then forget about it.

What Percentage of Revenue Should You Spend on Marketing?

Kane: I'll ask a question none of you will know the answer to, cuz it might be more trade specific, but do you know what percentage you should be spending on marketing? Like percentage of your revenue?

Sarah: Yeah, I don't — it depends. It really depends on what your goals are and what your —

Kane: So, we've always been so heavy on Google Ads. For example, our highest month ever, I think we spent 750k in 1 month just on Google Ads. Obviously, that is pretty ridiculous, but I think over the course of the year it was about 30% of our revenue was just on marketing, and everyone was saying, "That's insane, that's insane."

Sarah: I would think so.

Kane: Probably was. So I just thought I'd ask.

Sarah: I mean, what's your return on investment on that?

Kane: It's hard to — yeah, we don't really have — we have some data for some campaigns specifically, but we've done some radio, we've done obviously a lot of Google Ads, we have done some SEO over the last 12 months, flyers.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Print media flyer drops has been one of our highest return-on-investment things we've ever done. And I think it's because a lot of people don't really do it anymore. I know obviously real estate does, but not really other trades. And because we had so many trades on there, like up to 15 at one point, there's obviously a high chance that that homeowner's going to need something done. So I think that's why — I think it was 4.1 return on investment compared to other things. I think air con for us in peak season was maybe like 3.5, so it was significantly —

Sarah: Yeah, and I mean, I think the big mistake marketers make is that they don't keep track of that data — they're not keeping track of their analytics, they're not calculating what that return on investment is. And I get it, right, you're running a business, you've got lots of other things to do.

Kane: Especially in trades where you're not that way inclined for the technical side or the data, but we know we have pretty good data compared to a lot of trades businesses, but probably nowhere near what we could have — with the proper CRM, it would have saved us probably millions if we had accurate data.

Vanity Metrics vs Real Conversions: The Value of a Subscriber List

Sarah: Yeah. And I think the flip side of that is we've got so much data — it's knowing what data is the right data. And I'll tell you, this is a great example — so we lose business to content agencies or to SEO agencies, but we also win business because of SEO agencies, where people on several occasions have come to me and said, "Every month we meet with our agency, every month the reports show everything is on the up, and yet I'm not converting any more business." So, I think it's an easy thing to show, like, impressions. Well, so what?

Kane: Right, going to show you impressions.

Sarah: Yeah, so what? What does that mean effectively to my business? How many of those things convert? So, I'm always interested in the conversions and understanding what is a conversion. A conversion is not — like with content, you're not going to write a blog post or an article or landing page and sell something, but you might get somebody — and this is where I think the real value for content is — you may get somebody to subscribe to your newsletter. And now that subscriber has given you permission to market to them directly, and that doesn't cost you anything unless you're hiring writers or something, but even that it's a much lower cost. So, building that subscriber database is the most valuable thing that any business owner can do, because you own that.

Kane: And I was going to say, I've heard that recently — that's your owned audience, whereas your social media following, obviously you can lose them.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think the goal — Google and all of those social media platforms change the algorithm and they change your business.

Kane: Yeah.

Sarah: Right? But with a subscriber list, they never do. So email subscriber list is the second most valuable kind of marketing asset you can have, but the most valuable is having people's names and addresses — being able to post something to their house. That level of trust that they've given you, that they've given you their phone number and their home address. But you may never have to do that.

Kane: So, would — give me an example of that. So, is that like someone like us as a trades business, how's that different to like a newsletter? As in like you've been to their house before, is that what you mean?

Sarah: Maybe you've been to their house before, and you've got that in their database, but they said, "Yes, please send me mail to my house."

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: "I'm happy that you know where I live, I'm happy that you know how to call me." So, definitely if you've been to their house, I'm hoping that you're keeping that database really tight.

Kane: I've never thought about that. So I wonder if we could do that — do an email instead — cuz email for us doesn't seem to get the best responses, but maybe we can send physical letters. That could be a point of difference.

Why a Handwritten Letter Gets Opened Almost Every Time

Sarah: Well, absolutely. And I'll tell you what, if you send anybody a handwritten letter, there's almost a 100% guarantee they're going to open it.

Kane: Handwritten?

Sarah: Handwritten, yeah. If you get an envelope in the mail and it's got a handwritten address on it, don't you open it?

Kane: Oh, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: 100%.

Sarah: You could hire a bunch of interns to just address them and you could put a flyer inside. But you said flyers already work, so —

Kane: Yeah, so we do bulk flyer drops, so we use delivery companies that will go out and do the letterbox drops. Obviously in Perth there's not — from the data that we found, I could go, "Let's do like a million every month," but there's obviously not really enough houses to do that kind of quantity.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So we just have to stagger it and do it over time and change our messaging each time.

Sarah: Yeah. And I like that because we've done work with trades at our own — as I told you before we started, we're doing a renovation, we're in the middle of a renovation, and when you need your gutters fixed and all of a sudden the guy — I said to my husband, "Do they just drive by and look at all the houses with terrible gutters and put it in?" Or is this just serendipity that it just happened to come when I needed it? You've got it in your hand, that's going to save me a Google search.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: I think with Google sometimes the people you find are the people that have the best marketing, not the people that are the best tradesmen. But now somebody's invested in that. And I think that's the part too that I think people don't think about, especially with content — if you look at content marketing, it's when you've got that high-value content plus your distribution. That could be email, that could be your flyers, that could be how you get things to people that you know about. And then the amplification, which is your SEO piece, that's getting things to people that don't know about you and that you don't know about — and that's PR as well. But when you've got those three parts working together — the content plus the distribution plus the amplification — your marketing costs are going to go down, and you're going to have more of a long-term asset. But a lot of people go straight to the amplification, because advertising and PR have been really successful for a long time. So, sometimes that's just the option that "I've got the money but I don't have the time to invest in all the rest of it."

What PR Actually Means for a Trade Business Today

Kane: Can you explain PR for a dummy?

Sarah: Public relations. So, public relations generally has been helping businesses get into the media — get in front of the newspaper, get in front of the radio, or get in front of TV. And that PR model has always been one that requires long-term relationships. There's a lot of power behind it. So, good PR agents have good relationships with all of the media, and then they have their clients, and they're kind of been like the gatekeepers for media. So, social media broke that entirely. And that's why so many people loved it, because now I can go to market, I can go out and have my own Instagram page and I can tell everybody everything that I want to. I don't need to have PR. I can contact journalists directly on Twitter or X, or I can pitch on LinkedIn to somebody. I can build my own personal networks and have that and circumvent that. So PR is a struggling kind of business right now because so many people have gone around and done their own. And then you get people like — I know you're working with Nick Hayes at Media Stable — his whole model is, let's just connect the media directly with the experts, because the media doesn't particularly like having that gatekeeper there either.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: So let's just get the journalists — who are doing more and more of their own work now, because news operations are shrinking to nothing, the newspaper rooms used to have hundreds of people, now they might have dozens — they just want to get directly to the expert. And once you have the relationship with the journalist, if it's radio, print, or TV, then they're going to remember you, and then you hold that relationship, not somebody in the middle that you're paying money to every month.

Kane: So do you think it's still important then, PR in general?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah, I do think it's important. I think it's important for people to represent their business. But I think the thing that people have to remember is what kind of media are you doing, and is your audience there? A lot of people like to get on the morning news programs, if it's the Today show or Sunrise or whatever it is, that's great. But are the people you're trying to sell to watching Sunrise? Because a lot of people aren't anymore. Are they watching YouTube, and should you be investing your money there? So, I think PR is important, especially if you've got your messaging right, but it's just so fragmented now. It's harder than ever.

Kane: I suppose best is just have a combination of as much as possible. YouTube, social media, some PR.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: I suppose the PR thing, I think that's important, cuz it gives you that authority. Like if you are on the radio or on the news and you're talking about either your story or a specific topic, it just shows that you are that trusted person in the industry.

Sarah: Yeah, and you're getting somebody at a different time. They're not necessarily Googling you, but now they've heard you, you made a lot of sense, they relate to you, and they're going to either write down your name or remember your name — I'll remember where I heard it, and then I'll go out later and think, "Who was that guy who was talking about plumbing on Sunrise or on the ABC or whatever?" And I'll just go out to the platform and find the clip.

Kane: Mhm. I suppose then that will lead into, like, if they're on other platforms, then you might search their name and they're like, "Oh, he's been on that as well."

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: He's on that podcast or something.

Sarah: As long as it's — I mean, I think PR people will say, "Any news is good news," but even bad news is good news. But I think for business owners, we don't want to be associated with bad news.

Kane: Is that true? Any — what is it, "any publicity is —"

Sarah: Good publicity.

Kane: I don't know.

Sarah: Yeah. No, I don't think so. I mean, depending on what your business is, you want to always be in a good light. And I think most business owners want to really have a desire to help people, or else we wouldn't be in business.

Kane: I feel like a lot of trades businesses, people don't want to show themselves. They're sort of hiding behind the business. Do you think that's true?

Sarah: Yeah, could be. Could be. My son's a tradie — he's an automotive mechanic, working in the shop, family-owned business. And this guy's got such a great business, but he doesn't do any marketing. And when you meet him in person, he's such an engaging guy, and it's like, "You should be out there doing media." And he's like, "I can't be bothered." Because he just wants to be on the tools, and his business is doing fine, and it's doing what he wants it to do. So the answer is no for him, but if you wanted to scale, if you wanted to expand into another region, then I'd say crank up your marketing.

Kane: That is true, I suppose it depends what you actually want to do.

Sarah: Yeah. And people say, "Oh, do I have to do all of these social media?" No. At one time I was on all of them, now I'm only on LinkedIn, because that's where my audience is, that's where I get the most return on my investment, that's where I'm not being driven crazy by the toxicity that a lot of these platforms have turned into now.

Kane: That is true. It's something that we've been talking about a lot — do we just go on all just in case? But it can take so much focus away from maybe the one or two platforms that do work for you.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: But yeah, I suppose for someone like us, we don't really know what works yet. For Hyper — for High Potential specifically, I think we just try all and then maybe call back and focus on a couple in particular.

Sarah: I always recommend that people experiment. And I think with AI, it's like just get out there and use it, experiment, see what is working for you, figure it out. It might not be anything, but time and again we've seen with technology that early adopters reap the biggest rewards.

Will ChatGPT's Paid Ads Compete With Google?

Kane: That just reminds me, actually — I was going to mention earlier we were talking about Google Ads and AI overview and stuff — you saying that ChatGPT has now got paid ads?

Sarah: Of course it does. Yeah, they're all going to have it.

Kane: It went live I think yesterday or today in Australia.

Sarah: They're all going to have it.

Kane: How's it going to affect Google? They've never had a competitor in the paid ads space really.

Sarah: Not really. I mean Facebook, and LinkedIn, the socials have given them a run for their money, but AI has fundamentally changed how people search for information. So, there's a perception that everybody's now using AI to do the search, which is not true — the majority of people are still using Google, but the people that use AI, who are not the majority of people on the planet, prefer to do their searching in AI. So, it's going to become a bigger and bigger piece, and I think OpenAI, who started out as a not-for-profit, and Sam Altman said it was going to be this thing for good — and this is why he and Musk have been in court, because Musk is infuriated that they've moved it from a not-for-profit to a for-profit model. And I think the only reason he's furious is probably because he doesn't have as big a cut as he thought he should have had if he knew it was going to be a commercial enterprise. But as these companies get more and more commercial and grow, more people will be doing their searching inside of the AI agents, and Google's going to lose. And I don't think Google's necessarily been such a great player either, because they will say, "Our goal is to deliver the best search results for our customers by rewarding high-quality, high-value content." Okay, well, I'll go out there and do that, I've been doing that for 20 years, that's great. But then somebody like you can come and pay them to rank above me with my keyword, and you can do it just like that. So, now people are frustrated because I'm not seeing the unpaid search results first — I'm seeing a page of paid search results, or all these different kinds of ads, and if I scroll down then maybe I'll see this stuff.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: But people don't scroll either. I remember we used to say you have to be on the first three pages of a Google search result. Nobody goes to page two anymore.

Kane: I don't [laughter] know if I've ever gone to page two.

Sarah: Yeah. So, I think Google in some ways has shot themselves in the foot by trying to be all things to all people, where AI has had two years of a no-ad environment. So, we've all gravitated towards that, we love that. But if ChatGPT is doing it with OpenAI, then Anthropic's going to be doing it with Claude, and Perplexity, and Musk'll be doing it with Grok, and it'll be a matter of time.

Kane: It depends on which platform you choose to use.

Sarah: Yeah. Just like YouTube — it's a variety.

Kane: Yeah.

Cross-Checking Content Between Different AI Models

Sarah: Yeah, and a tip that I've got, and this is from Dan, my business partner — he uses ChatGPT, he likes ChatGPT, he uses it a lot more than me. And one thing that you can do, if you are creating content with an AI, whichever AI you're using, then take that result and feed it into a different AI and say, "What's good or what's bad, or what should I change, does it sound like AI?" So, when we were repositioning our business and coming up with messaging, I said to Dan, "Look, I've been using Claude, and this is where I've landed." And then he took that and put it right into ChatGPT, and ChatGPT said, "Yes, no, maybe, this is better." And so, it accelerated our discussion in how we're repositioning our company, but we had like two advisors that had, maybe, competing interests, I don't know — neither one of them knew we were doing it together.

Kane: So they obviously don't know that they know that it's been communicated [laughter] across somehow.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh, I think we're quite honest about it — Dan would send me stuff and I'll put it into Claude and say, "This is what ChatGPT is telling my business partner, what do you think?" And for the most part, they're pretty close, but both of them obviously had to find something they could agree on.

Kane: [laughter] That is clever, hey.

Turning the Tables

Kane: I should turn the table.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Is there anything you want to speak about we haven't spoken about so far?

Sarah: Yeah, I think — I'm always curious. So, I'm sitting in my office and I'm writing most of the time, I work from home. Writing can be a really lonely profession, and that's something that I like about it, but one of the things that I'm always interested in with potential customers is, what is it that you find frustrating about working with service providers?

Kane: Like tradies or —

Sarah: Tradies, or as a business owner — where are you finding the friction that you wish didn't — what would you change, I guess.

When Should You Fire a Difficult Client? Kane's Story of the Consultant Who Tried to Quit

Kane: To be honest with us, you made a good point earlier about marketing and SEO, and like every month they'll come to you with a proposal or what's happened this month, and it's always like a 2% increase here or — so, for us, we've used a lot of agencies, and it's always been like that, and for someone like me as a tradie that doesn't have that expertise, I'm like, I've no idea what you're showing me. This is good, this is good, this is good up here to there. I'm like, we've had no more leads. Like, you used literally exactly what you said, bang on. That's always been an issue for us, especially with SEO — that's why we've never really done it, is cuz the amount of times I've heard, "Yep, 6 to 12 months you got to do it." And I'm like, I know it is a bit of a sales pitch in a way, cuz it's obviously recurring for them, but it is also true. But then if we use that money for Google Ads, I know what we can get. But now it hurts us, because you mentioned before as well about it's a slow burn — for example, we stopped paid ads for plumbing specifically maybe 8 to 12 months ago, and we still get 40 to 50 leads a week, which is for us that's amazing, but electrical we might get 80 a week, and that's inclusive of 30k a week Google spend. So, I'm like, oh my gosh, imagine if we did SEO from day one for electrical and air con, how many leads would we get a week, could we have no Google spend? So, it's sort of like we shot ourselves in the foot in a way.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: But yeah, it's probably just like the explanations from services to us, or to me as a tradie — I think people try and bamboozle you sometimes if they're trying to sell you their product or services.

Sarah: Yeah, so that's really interesting to me, and I'll be the first to admit that our marketing could be much better than it is. We rely on word of mouth, and that's a really comfortable spot to be in — there's nothing better than somebody saying, "Go talk to them because they've really helped us out." But then when we're looking at ramping up, so many times we're trying to put out information that we think is valuable, but the question is always, is this landing? Is somebody else going to pick this up and believe it? What do you think is the best forum, or the best way for somebody to reach a tradesman, for example? Because you guys are busy, and I can always see where there's room for improvement, but how do you get that mindset, or how do you get that share of —

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: — of mindset there?

Kane: Like how they're thinking, kind of thing.

Sarah: Yeah, how are you thinking, or how do I even get your attention? I mean, we're all inundated with marketing. What makes you stop and think, "Oh yeah, maybe this is something that would work for me"?

Kane: We always look for referrals. Referrals for me, when I'm looking for things now, it's always a referral first. Then sometimes I won't even get multiple quotes, I'll just go with that person cuz I know that person's recommended them. But I think that comes back to, if someone does do a Google search, "electrician near me," we're hoping to pop up as a paid ad cuz we're used to it, but we also want to pop up as SEO organically as well, cuz they've seen us there. They might have heard us on the radio, might have heard me on the radio as part of my personal branding attempt.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So I've heard that, or I've seen him, or I'll do a search on Smart Fix specifically. Then they might see my name there cuz I might have that authority — I might be a trades and services expert. So they might have to see us like four or five times before they actually go ahead and use us for anything.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: It's probably more like trades — trades is hard because if you use us once, you might not need us again for like a year or two years. So it's —

Sarah: Especially if you do your job.

Kane: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Sarah: Fixed all the problems.

Kane: So it's hard to get recurring repeat work off of one person. So we do need a high quantity of inbound leads, new leads, and existing when possible. But I suppose for High Potential, which is the business coaching for tradies, that's a different business model, which is recurring, like it should be — it's like a monthly membership, there's like a three-monthly stint, so in theory — again, I've not got this far yet — but in theory it should be significantly cheaper advertising, cuz we don't need as many people, because they are recurring.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: But then to get those people in, you need to have the content on there. Like no one is going to come to me now with nothing online.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So for us, we have to do as much as we can. We've just started doing social media. Obviously the podcast is sort of part of it — it's sort of to try and build that authority, have those conversations.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: And obviously I have started doing some of the PR stuff — we've done a few radio interviews. But yeah, it's just trying to put yourself out there. Obviously the 40 Under 40.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Hopefully that helps.

Do Business Owners Actually Pay Attention to Paid Ads?

Sarah: Yeah. What kind of marketing do you respond to though? I'll give you an example. I bet I get a dozen emails a day from people, first of all, trying to sell me writing services. Well, dude, I'm a writer — what you're basically saying is you're competing with me. I never even open those emails. And I think about all of the time that somebody has wasted. Now, a lot of it's AI — you can tell it's AI — but it's like, you don't understand your audience, you don't understand what you're pitching. I know you're trying to get my attention. So what kind of marketing do you respond to, or tradies in general, do you think respond to?

Kane: Yeah, I don't read emails either. I don't — I'll read some newsletters that I have gone out and specifically subscribed to. What comes to mind is just, like, paid ads.

Sarah: Paid ads.

Kane: Like if I do a search and there's paid ads there, I'll look at reviews. Reviews are important to me. I'll look at their review rating. I know they're paying a lot of money to be there as well. So, sometimes I will do a bit of a scroll, but my only concern with the SEO people just below — are they still active? Because this could be SEO from 2, 3, 4 years ago. And I know, like, for us, I could say I know who our competitors are, or people who are always there. Like, I know they've been there for such a long time, so I'm like, "Ooh, are they actually going to be available?" But I know paid ads are, cuz I know if I call them and they don't answer their phone, I know they've paid a lot of money for that. So, in theory, they should be all over their marketing, they should be all over their customer service, cuz they're paying top dollar to be in that position.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: But also, that's going to come at a cost.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So, for me, it's more about convenience. If I want something done at my house, I do a search, there'll be two or three there, I'll look at reviews. If I've heard them before, I'll call them. They should answer, cuz they're paying to be there. But I know I'll probably pay a premium for that service as well.

Sarah: So, you do pay attention to paid ads as a consumer?

Kane: Yeah.

Sarah: As a business owner, that's so interesting to me, because everybody I talk to says nobody pays attention to paid ads, nobody clicks on those links. But my take has always been they must, because otherwise nobody would buy them, right? If they don't work, then that's not true, because obviously they work, or people wouldn't be doing it.

Kane: Mhm. It's expensive. It's very expensive.

The Value of Personal Brand and Product Endorsement (Diary of a CEO, Daniel Priestley)

Sarah: Yeah. What do you think about — we were talking about personal brand — what do you think is the value of a personal brand? Is that something that influences you when you're making purchasing decisions?

Kane: It definitely does now. The first time I've heard about this was from Diary of a CEO, when Steven Bartlett — sorry, when Daniel Priestley — was on there for the first time, he was talking about it. And obviously he's a personal brand for his business, which they do business coaching and book magic and all these different businesses, and it's a very clever way that he goes around it. So this only sort of come to me after watching that, and then I'll be like, well, Steven Bartlett, he is his own personal brand, and you start looking at other people, like Joe Rogan and everyone else, they are their own personal brand, and anything they talk about is like a product to sell. They'll have their branded drinks there, their supplements that they'll do, and I've bought stuff before. I've seen them talk about a product and I'm like, "I'm going to try that."

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: So anything that they say, I'm like, I will probably give that a go.

Sarah: So that product endorsement from someone that you trust is important?

Kane: Definitely.

Sarah: See, I'm like that with books. I'm a sucker — somebody's written a book, and especially if it's somebody that I like or that I've listened to their podcast, I'll buy it every time.

Kane: That's huge. So almost everyone that goes on Diary of a CEO, almost every person has written a book.

Sarah: It's kind of like the new hot ticket to something. You can get a lot of PR with a book. Anybody that's tried to write a book though knows how hard that is.

Kane: I can imagine.

How to Turn Your Blog Posts Into a Book

Sarah: So that is — but I also know people, and I think this is an opportunity for tradespeople too. If you're an expert in an area and you're creating really good content on your website, if it's a blog or landing page, but primarily blog — if you're writing articles that address a problem that you're seeing with your customers all the time — I've seen people take those blog posts and that becomes the book.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: So they plan that out so that every article is like a chapter, and they almost look at it like they've outlined their whole book, and then in a year they will have a whole book, and they'll take those things that are already free online and package them up, get them edited, and then publish that book.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: Yeah, and then they make that into a podcast, and I think that's where there's a lot of value if you can repurpose the stuff that you've got. I think too many businesses will say, "I've written that blog post, that's done," and now it's gone to the side, where you could — I've written this case study, I've had this white paper commissioned — you can break that thing up —

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: — and you can make multiple blog posts, you can put LinkedIn posts, you can put Instagram posts, you can continue to use that. And then, if it's still evergreen content, 6 months from now, bring it back out again, because the people that saw it the first time are almost certainly not going to be the people that see it the second time, because of the way the algorithms work. You just assume, even on your newsletter, you can repeat topics because as your subscriber list grows — and a really good newsletter will have 10% of people open it — that means 90% of the people didn't open it, but maybe 6 months from now with a different heading —

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: — a different subject line, somebody else will read it. So I think we look at content as too much like a treadmill you can't get off, when what you really should be doing is looking at this as an asset — how many different ways can I use it? How many different ways can I squeeze value out of it, or what do I need to do to ensure that it continues to keep driving value to my business? And if that means updating headings, or putting an FAQ in it, that's really — cuz it's expensive, content is expensive, it takes time, and you either have to take your own time and it takes you out of the business, or you have to spend money to get somebody else to do it.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: And a lot of it's like our tools — you're always going to keep those in good shape, but the content, not necessarily — we're going to let that get old and wither and die, so.

Kane: I've been watching a lot of, I don't know if you've seen it, Matt Gray on YouTube — he talks a lot about the content waterfall you can do, like one big article or a podcast, and then you can break that up into like 27 different pieces, and then you can reuse it.

Turning a Podcast Transcript Into SEO-Friendly Written Content

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the podcast is a great example of how — and I hope you'll do this — is you take the transcript from the podcast and you publish that on your website, because there are some people that will never watch a video or listen to the audio, but they will read it. And the other thing about podcast, it's such an intimate medium, and people really love it, it's super sticky, so I think you're really smart to do that. But the audio doesn't get into the Google searches or the AI searches, but if you transcribe it, there's all these AI things — we use something called Rev, rev.com. You just put the audio in there, and it chunks out the whole transcript.

Kane: Almost like an article kind of thing.

Sarah: Yeah, and then it's an article.

Kane: Yeah, right.

Sarah: And I think the smart way to do it is just to put it right in your podcast — you've got your show notes, or here's who was on, here's what we talked about, and then you say, here's the transcript, the full transcript, and that's content that you can —

Kane: Write that down, Riley.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: [laughter]

Sarah: Yeah, rev.com. And as somebody that likes to skim, sometimes I can't sit still and listen to a whole podcast, but if I know you're talking about something I'm interested in, I will search that and I'll find exactly what I want. So, that's another way to boost the content — full SEO, word paragraphs chunked with titles.

Kane: [laughter] Yeah, we have been told that it does listen — it uses the words as the transcript without having it physically written down. I don't know, again, that's what we heard. So, like if we have the YouTube link on the website page, it will crawl that audio, but it doesn't render it as easily as text though.

Sarah: Text is easy, yeah, so easy. So, we interview people a lot — that's a really great skill to have, which I'm sure you're discovering, being able to sit down and talk to people and answer questions. A lot of the content that we're doing is that interview kind of thing where we've got subject matter experts in our business — "Can you come in and interview them and write up an article?" Yep, we can do that. So, AI can't do that yet. AI can't interview a person.

Kane: Would you record the interviews?

Sarah: Well, we always record the interview, and it used to be that we would transcribe them ourselves, which takes a long time, but now we're using rev.com, and we put the audio interview in there, and the AI is so good now that it's almost word-for-word perfect. And we get it back and they charge something like 2 cents a minute. So, if you've got a 30-minute interview, it's pennies, and you've got this transcript. And that's a really great way to help improve your SEO as well. But then the other thing too is you can start to look for themes through it — maybe you want to do a post on newsletter marketing, and you can go and look at every single podcast where there was a discussion about newsletter marketing, and pull out those quotes, and now you've got a compilation. So, that's just another way to slice and dice it.

Kane: Yeah, like a history, it's almost —

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: All your history put together, obviously with — you can essentially put that into like a Claude project. Is it Claude projects in Claude, or —

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Kane: — or something? Cuz I use ChatGPT and it's a project in there, then you can have all your —

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: — information.

Sarah: Yeah. Yes, I didn't even think about that. You could just put it all in the Claude project and say, pull out all the information about where we talked about paid ads.

Kane: So, what I've been doing is when it goes on YouTube, I'll paste the YouTube link into it, and I'm like, "Can you help me? Give me some feedback on how I went with this podcast?" And it'll obviously — I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does give me some very good pointers.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: How to train me.

Sarah: Yeah, that's fantastic. There's so many different ways that you can use it, and I think we're just at the very beginning of understanding how it can be useful. But I think for me, the thing about AI is that you have to be the one that's orchestrating it. To me it's just like a really good intern, but you still have to be the boss of it.

Kane: Proof everything.

Sarah: Yeah. Proof everything, and don't accept everything they say as truth, but if you can drive it to help you, you don't need a virtual assistant. You can get AI to do almost everything for you now, and that's where it's really valuable, I think.

Do You Still Need to Hire an SEO Company?

Kane: So, do you think trades businesses like ours still need to use an SEO company?

Sarah: Well, I think in the beginning probably yes, if you're just getting started, but if you have got the nerve for the long-term slow burn method of marketing with content, then within 6 months you'll start to see some results, but within 12 to 18 months you'll have your own earned media platform that you've grown yourself, and you can get away from that dependence on it.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: So, but you have to be committed to high-value original content, distributing it through the newsletters or through letterbox drops or however you do that, and then amplifying it. You have to have those three pieces working together. And the amplification then is not paid SEO — it's making sure that your stuff is optimized, you're using the right keywords, you're keeping the stuff fresh and up to date.

Kane: And you think that piece there, cuz that's obviously a good point — do you think AI is good enough to tell you what you need in those points, or do you think that's where you need the expert technical SEO person that can make those decisions?

Sarah: No, I think AI is definitely good enough to assess the content. I think where you need a good technical SEO person is on your website and in the back end, making sure your tags and taxonomy is set up properly, making sure your navigation is right, making sure your user experience is right. And that's where SEO is a really effective spend, but that shouldn't be, "Open your wallet and spend $700 or $5,000 to get leads." That should just be making sure that your website, which is also an asset, is operating at peak — just like one of your vehicles, you're going to get that thing tuned up all the time. So we have a guy who did our website, who's also a developer as well as a designer, and about once a year, we just have him go through it all, and now we've got cyber insurance because some of our customers are asking for that, and the cyber insurance company is going through our website and saying, "Here's all the faults, and if you don't fix them, you either pay them more or they won't reinsure you." So, that's even made us more persistent in making sure that the back end of our website is up to date.

Kane: Is that because — is our login, is that where the cyber thing comes in? Your customers log in to your website?

Sarah: No, we don't do any kind of e-commerce or anything, but there are — we have a newsletter, so we have people's email addresses come through it, and the cyber insurance will say, "You've got an old piece of software that needs to be updated, you're using an old WordPress, there's some code that has been put in there that is now a threat," and it seems like they can find something new every time we fix something — a little bit like Whac-A-Mole.

Kane: There's always something to be fixed.

Sarah: Yeah. At least we know that it's being constantly updated, and we just have somebody that we can call and say, "We need help, can you do this for us?" So, we don't have a monthly SEO spend or a monthly website spend, but I've got somebody that I trust that I can call to get things tuned up if we need it.

The Biggest Lessons Sarah Has Learned in Business: Get Experts In Early

Kane: Cool. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned in your journey so far?

Sarah: There's no shortcuts, for sure. I think it's worth doing things right, it's worth working with experts. So, for example, when I started Typeset, the first person I called was a brand strategist, because I said, I need to make sure that the brand is well thought out before we go to market. They helped with the visual identity, for sure, but they also helped with things like registering our IP, making recommendations about how the website should be laid out — all these kinds of things that, if we had — when I started Global Copywriting, I did the first one myself, and then somebody called me up and said, "I can do a logo for you." They did the website that they wanted to do because they wanted a certain kind of style in their portfolio — it wasn't what I wanted. And then I had another website done and another logo done. So, there was three rebrandings. But with Typeset, there's been no rebrandings, cuz I started with somebody and got that advice in the beginning. And while it was more expensive in the beginning, it was a lot less expensive in the long run than having this logo change, logo change.

Kane: It's the same with us with Smartfix. We've had changes through there. We've probably had four or five websites. But with High Potential now, we haven't rebranded once — need the logo slightly, but —

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: I think you learn, like the second time or third time that you do that, you definitely learn, hey.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think the other thing too is they can think through the whole thing — what is it going to look like for a tradie, for example, when it's on the side of a truck? What's it going to look like when it's on a stand at an event? How does it all fit together? And I'm not a visual person, these things are hard for me to understand. There's a Supreme Court Justice that, when talking about pornography, said, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." And I feel that way about design and good design and good branding — I don't know how to describe it, I don't know how to do it, but when I see a good one, I can tell it's a good one.

Kane: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: So that comes from having that professional viewpoint.

Kane: Down to have — using experts.

Sarah: Yeah. So we do that, and probably like any small business, we've been guilty of doing things on our own that maybe we shouldn't have done. And we advise our customers all the time, "Don't try to do your own — for example, don't try to do your own award, because we can do it for you much quicker and probably a lot cheaper in the time it's going to take you out of the office." But then we would turn around and do something that somebody else would say to us — "Don't try to build your own website, you guys aren't website experts."

Kane: Yeah.

Sarah: But I think that comes with experience, too. Sometimes you have to try it yourself first to realize that you don't know what you're doing.

Kane: Yeah, I know that is true. Some things are definitely unteachable lessons, that's a phrase that's come up recently. And if you were to start your own business again, obviously sometimes people can't afford to get those experts in at the start, so they have to do some things themselves, but as long as they're willing to change, level up, build that new website — like, we've probably had our fifth or sixth website now, we've probably spent hundreds of thousands over the time.

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: Cuz in theory if we built the right one at the start, it would have been perfect, but we wouldn't have been able to afford it at the start.

Finding Your Ideal Customer Persona and Why Niching Down Matters

Sarah: Yeah. And I think the other thing is just, don't try to be all things to all people. Find out who that target audience is and find out the thing that's the most important to them, and then do that. And that's how we ended up being only on LinkedIn.

Kane: And you were talking about like your ideal customer persona, hey, like your ICP?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So, who is that person? Who is it that we're actually selling to? Not the people that like us, not the people that are going to blow sunshine up our skirts when a newsletter goes out, but who's the person that's going to say, "I want to work with them." And I find for us, probably the most effective thing we do from a marketing standpoint is public speaking or public appearances.

Kane: Yeah, okay.

Sarah: So, that's how I knew you, right? You came to a workshop that I did. I find the way that I'm most effective is getting on my feet and talking to people about what I know.

Kane: So, that brings another question we haven't spoken about, which is niching in. Like for example, Smartfix — we grew, we had electrical, air con, then we had plumbing, then we added on carpentry, painting, and I feel like we sort of got a bit lost, and that's how we did sort of lose a lot of money and we scaled back since, but I do think that having a niche is so important, instead of — you got, like you said about the branding, it'd be quite easy for you guys to tack on branding as an arm of your business, then tack on maybe SEO cuz you're doing the content, but I think people get a bit lost when they start trying to go too broad.

Sarah: Yeah, and I think when I worked at the agency, they did everything — they started in video and then they brought me in because they wanted to move into a full-blown content agency. And then pretty soon we're doing paid ads, and it didn't matter what — this is what really drives me nuts — it didn't matter what the prospective customer asked for, they would say, "Yes, can you do — yep." And then they'd say, "We'll go figure it out." But that's not the way to build a reputation. I think sometimes saying no is the smartest thing that you can do, and give a referral to somebody that you know does it better. And even with writing, it's horses for courses — not all writers write everything really well.

Kane: Mhm.

Sarah: Dan and I know what we do, and we know things that we don't do or never want to do. Like those direct mail letters — they do my head in, I'm not that good at it, but I know somebody that is. So we'll just say no to that. And this was my frustration with working in an agency too — for every bad deal that we take on, that means we're too busy to take a potentially good deal.

Kane: You could have missed an opportunity —

Sarah: To miss an opportunity, and I think small business owners are afraid to say no because they're not sure what's going to come next.

Kane: 100%. We have done that so many times — saying yes to things and then we'll make it work.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think at this point in my career, I know it's better to say no to something that you're not comfortable with, unless you go in and say, "Look, this is an area that we want to move into, and we're willing to work with you, and we'll give you a deal if you understand this is something that is new to us." But the other thing that's really been interesting to me working with Dan is he's a better judge of when customers are out of line. He'll say to me, "I don't really like how they're talking to you about this." And having the ability to say, "These are not people that we want to work with." The business is good, and we got rid of our very first customer, and it broke our heart, and it took a while for us to do it — it was somebody that we had worked with for years before we started Typeset, but they had changed personnel and had a manager in that was just being unrealistic and really abusive. And in that case, Dan was kind of in the middle of that, and I just said, we don't work with people like this. And we called the CEO and said, "Look, this is what's happening, and we understand you've made a change in your business, but if this is how you want to run your business, then we're not going to be your supplier anymore." And he called us twice more cuz he didn't want us to quit, but we just can't do this. This is causing too much drama in our own lives.

Kane: Yeah, we've had that once. It's actually a Google consultant at the moment — when we moved to him, we had a staff member that was causing issues, and he was his direct contact within us, and he tried to fire us. I was like, "I've never heard of this in my life." He reached out to me and said, "Yeah, I'm not working — I can't work with this guy anymore."

Sarah: Yeah.

Kane: And at that point, we already sort of knew that he was going to move on from the business anyway, so we were going to move him on anyway. He was like, "Can you stay with us, please?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll work with you guys, cuz I like the way you operate, but I'm not working with him." I thought that was interesting — you got to say no, cuz he works for us, why would he want to deal with someone he doesn't get along with when he could just go and get another client?

Sarah: Yeah, and I think when you're especially small, like we are, every client is really important to us. And I couldn't tell you how many clients we have — probably two dozen, but they're not two dozen every week that we're working with. If you've got one person that's taking up 10, 20% of your week, and it's a miserable situation, and they're really questioning what you're doing, especially if they're not qualified — like, in this particular case, this guy was saying, "Oh, I gave that article that you wrote to my mother and had her edit it, and she — " well, his mother was like a grade six English teacher. Well, this isn't a grade six assignment, this is marketing copy that you're trying to attract a very certain specific person to, and we've targeted directly at that. But he was like, "And she said that nobody should pay a copywriter that much money." It's like, okay, well.

Kane: Don't then. [laughter]

Sarah: Yeah, so for years that we'd worked with these people, and they were on a good rate because they'd been with us for so long, he was trying to renegotiate a contract based on what his mother thought. And it's like, yeah.

Kane: Yeah, no.

Sarah: We've got too many data points that we know what we're doing, and we're not going to — and in that case, the GM said, "Sorry, but this is my marketing manager." And interesting to me, that marketing manager didn't last 6 months, and he's moved on to something else. So.

Kane: And they lost you guys.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So.

Closing

Kane: Mhm. Where can people find and follow you?

Sarah: I'm on LinkedIn, Sarah Mitchell on LinkedIn, and typesetcontent.com would be a good place.

Kane: Cool. Thanks for coming on the show.

Sarah: Yeah, thank you. It's been really interesting, I really enjoyed it.

Kane: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Unlocking Business. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please take a second to like, subscribe, and follow our channels. It really helps us to bring on more guests and have great conversations. If you'd like to connect with today's guest, the details are in the description below. I'm Kane Taylor Smith. I'll see you on the next one.