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Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!
Welcome to Essential Dynamics. I'm Derek Hudson, host of the Essential Dynamics podcast and creator of the Essential Dynamics Framework. In the podcast, we explore the concepts and application of essential dynamics through deep conversations with interesting people, and I'm thrilled today to be able to welcome Rocky Pedden to the podcast. Rocky, thanks for joining.
Rocky:Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate being here. Looking forward to it.
Derek:Rocky, what what is it about what we're doing here on Essential Dynamics that that made you interested in chatting with us?
Rocky:Yeah. I just think from a leadership perspective, I'm getting more insights from anybody who is going through this, especially in today's day and age with how fast and quickly things are changing and the impact that has on leadership. You know, I think team building, culture building, those types of things are not talked about enough, especially at the rate of change that employees are are feeling, you know, the world around them and their work adjusting and shifting. And so I think having this at front and center of, you know, every pivot that we're making as a company that other companies are going through, other people are dealing with, like, talking about that and making it normalized is just good as a whole for the industry. And if there's anything I can ever contribute to things, you know, from my own experiences, the things that I have gone through, then I wanna share those experiences, the good, the bad, the ugly so that, know, if it's good, people can, like, be like, oh, I can incorporate that.
Rocky:Or if it's the other side of the spectrum, they can, you know, know to avoid certain pitfalls that I have fallen into, which there are there are many of.
Derek:Okay. Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about the what led you to the venture that you're leading today? How's that?
Rocky:Yeah. It's it's really a case of more of who you know than what you know. That got me into what I'm doing now. And so my background has been in predominantly was in sales, And I worked at a a tech startup in Portland, Oregon, which is where I'm based with a guy named Alex Boyd. And we worked together for several years.
Rocky:And at some point, you know, he left the that company, but he and I stayed in touch. And we'd get beers together every month or so and just catch up, and he started his own thing called revenues in. And he would oftentimes kinda ask me my thoughts on certain aspects of his business. And after him doing that for a couple years, you know, he he eventually was like, hey. I really want you to come join this team and be a part of this, and so I did.
Rocky:And then over time, you know, he I moved into a operations role, and then kinda gradually, he just added more and more to my plate. Then when he wanted to really step away from the business and no longer be, you know, the the forward facing CEO, he was like, hey. I really want you to move into this role. And we had just we went through an acquisition around the same time, and so, you know, it was a kind of a natural progression into that into that workflow. So now here I am.
Rocky:I've been in this role now for, jeez, going on four years. And, yeah, I think that's that's kind of at the high level of it, yeah, I'll say.
Derek:Well, that's that's awesome. Now how many people are you responsible for? You've talked about your team a lot already.
Rocky:Yeah. So we've we've gone through some changes. And with the acquisition, we're now, like, a much larger team when we take into account all the other companies within that portfolio. And so, like, in that team, we have about 35. You You know, I'm not directly responsible for all of them, but, you know, I'm involved in all of those leadership conversations and how we manage that team.
Rocky:We use the the 90 framework, and, you know, it goes it it's going really well. It's been interesting experience, I'll say, going through that that acquisition process. And then now that we have these other portfolio companies that we're working with, how do we integrate not only from a, you know, deliverables and what we can actually achieve from a work perspective, but then also from the you know, like I was saying earlier, the cultural perspective and and how they do things, how they think about things. You know, I think that that's has a lot more opportunity to clash potentially and cause issues. And so it's it's actually been really refreshing because very fortunately, we kind of approach things from a leadership style in a very similar way, that that previous leadership team and then, you know, myself.
Derek:Well, that's great. And tell us about who revenue RevenueZen helps.
Rocky:We work primarily with b to b companies kind of across the spectrum, but we really most of our clients are in the SaaS technology world, fintech, health care, manufacturing too. So, like, those are those are the places where we're typically operating and and helping them achieve, you know, some level of growth across their various marketing channels. And then with this acquisition or or merger with these other portfolio companies, it's increased our breadth of options of what we can deliver. So not just the SEO, GEO content side of things, but now also web development, branding, those type developments as well. And they also have a lot of expertise.
Rocky:You know, Eastern Standard is the other comp one of the other companies in that portfolio, and they have a ton of expertise working in higher ed and large health care systems in particular. That's kind of their sweet spot. So, yeah, I think we need to niche down a little bit more, but it's always hard to do that. Like, you tell yourself that's a good idea, and then it's it's hard to actually follow through on that.
Derek:I've had the experience of having a very high revenue concentration with one customer. And I was the CFO at the time, and our board said, we don't like this. You have a higher concentration of revenue with one customer. If something goes wrong with them, you're in trouble. And I agreed with them, but I I couldn't turn away orders from our customer.
Rocky:Right.
Derek:Because we were being built into to their product development cycle, and they needed us to supply everything that they needed because we were we were it. And so once you get once you get into something, it's and and you make customer relationships. It's hard to say to a customer, well, know, it's not you, it's me. And and, of course, when when your delivery system and your cost base are built around a particular revenue stream, it's hard to walk away from that.
Rocky:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. It's we keep on getting you know, we all get leads in, obviously, from from our own.
Rocky:We drink our own Kool Aid with with respect to, you know, content and SEO and and all that. Yeah. Whenever we get leads that aren't quite the right like, the perfect ICP, you know, it's hard to say no to those people because we have case studies on helping companies very similar to theirs. And so, yeah, it's it's been an interesting conversation with the leadership team across the board on, like, how we approach that moving into well, gosh, we're already almost at the end of '26, but as we move progress through '26 and and look ahead to to '27.
Derek:So you you said at the beginning that you hoped that people could learn from your your victories and from your mistakes. And you also you also talked about one one of your product lines is, GEO. And what have you learned about that? Because I'll bet most of my listeners don't know what GEO is, and they're thinking of National Geographic right now. So can you help us?
Derek:Because I think this may we we may learn some business principles because you're I think you're kinda leading edge on this stuff.
Rocky:Yeah. So GEO refers to it stands for generative engine optimization. And if we think about, like, the best way to define it, it's essentially doing SEO work for LLMs, thinking like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, anywhere where you're interfacing with an AI tool and you're asking questions that's, you know, called a query inside that that language models. But, you know, our goal that we have with our clients is from a visibility standpoint in Google, whenever somebody goes to Google, there are certain keywords that we want them to rank for. And whenever people type those keywords in, we work with our clients to move them up those keyword rankings.
Rocky:The same principle applies when people are asking questions inside of these tools that they are they're in the wheelhouse of. We want them again to be referenced not only as the I guess, part of the answer itself that the query pulls in, but then also, if possible, as, like, an actual citation that the the large that the language model is actually pulling from to create that response. So, ideally, both of those areas is where we can land our clients, but, you know, just being involved in the conversation is, you know, step one and and super important. So we've been doing this work now for, you know, like, AI was an avalanche last year and it, like, really tumbled marketing around, and people were freaking out over various aspects of, you know, not you know, AI was eating into sessions and impressions on their site. Traffic was going down.
Rocky:And there's a lot of concern around a lot of marketers. Ultimately, what we found was that it it wasn't really that it was being replaced with GEO. It's just that GEO and LLMs became part of the search experience that most people were engaging with, and they ended up doing both. But I foresee a future where, you know, everything that we do becomes hyper personalized to each of us, And I think we'll probably be working out of, you know, something like a Claude co work or something along those lines of an AI tool that we really make our own. And I think at some point in the future, I don't I don't know how how often people will open up a Google web browser in Chrome and use that as their their search point.
Rocky:We'll see. But, yeah, that's kind of at a high level, that's that's what we do, but I love talking about this stuff. I'm happy to kinda dive in deeper.
Derek:Well, our last probably four of our last six podcast episodes, we were talking about AI. And you just said something that I think is remarkable that most people don't appreciate. And that is you can easily foresee a future where the first reaction is not to go to your browser, go into Google, and type the two or three keywords that you're looking for. Yeah. And that's been our experience with the web for, like, twenty years now, I think.
Rocky:And that's going away. I think so. And I think even like, I have gotten personally this like, last week was the first week I did this, but I'm pretty much dictating everything that I'm doing now. So I have an app on my computer. I just double click two buttons on my keyboard and I just talk.
Rocky:And wherever my cursor is, it just puts in the words. And if I forget to click it, it has a dashboard of its own where it'll record that paragraph or whatever of me talking, and I just input that. And the other day, I was essentially flipping between three different tabs of different AI tools, and I was just dictating and updating each individual tab with the project, whatever I was working on. And I had, you know, three or four different AI agents working on different things simultaneously. And so, yeah, I think the future and I think this will probably be spearheaded.
Rocky:You know, it's already been spearheaded by, you know, I think Claude Coark was kind of the first one to do this for the average person. But I think Google is going to come in with, like, something similar within Gemini so that the experience isn't far off from opening a Chrome tab, but it will just be this different interface that's powered with AI through Gemini, and then you can essentially build your own terminal for you, like, to hyper personalized to you, Derek, and and something totally different as hyper personalized to me. And to change it around, it's just ask an AI agent to move things, but and we'll have these various feeds from whatever things interest you, whatever things you read on a daily basis, whatever YouTube channels you subscribe to, you know, etcetera.
Derek:So I really Rocky Rocky, I really appreciate that you're on the the the leading edge of this, and there are things that I haven't been thinking about. But I gotta tell you that I'm not excited about a world where more stuff can come at me even if if it's curated. Like, I'm I'm trying to get away from that, but not actually lose the connection because I'm very interested in a lot of topics. I do read a lot, but I I'm wary of the algorithm. I'm also wary of anything that keeps me looking at things longer than I should or or things that you know, I I I I'm easily distracted, and so I can go down a rabbit hole pretty fast.
Derek:So let's get let's put this back to to business. And let's think about an organization that needs to get access to its customers. And you're talking about the opportunity to when they are in some kind of a a chat with a generative AI or maybe some other interface, they're learning about the business that I'm trying to sell them. This example is trying to sell them. What do people need to think about that they're not thinking about in terms of getting access to the LLMs so that they they pop up in these conversations or that their products or concepts pop up?
Rocky:Yeah. I think the and the more things change, the more they stay the same is is a good axiom to kind of live by in this world right now as it relates to AI and marketing. Because what we find is the clients of ours that are doing really well and they're showing up in these GEO props and they're part of the conversation are the clients who are doing just, like, old school solid marketing, content marketing in particular. They understand who they are extremely well. They have a really strong, you know, verbal brand identity.
Rocky:They and they understand their ICP really well as well. So They can
Derek:you you've said that twice. Can you can you unpack that for us? Ice ICP?
Rocky:Yeah. So their ideal client profile. Like, they understand exactly who their perfect customers are. They've built out various personas that they have sold to time and time again, whether that's and they get as specific as they can with it. You know, let's say, a director of marketing or a VP of marketing in this age range that care about these things, they're trying to sell or they're communicating with their CFO about these types of budget parameters.
Rocky:This typically is their budget. Seeing like, get as detailed as they possibly can about it. And then when they're creating their content, they're writing that content for those people. And so what they might actually do is create more content calendars because their each content calendar or topic they're going after, are writing from the perspective of all of their ICPs instead of just one. And so, you know, content, think, is still core to how you'd be successful in these LLM environments, and the people who really understand themselves and their customers, and they're answering the actual questions that their customers are asking.
Rocky:And so I think that's, like, a core concept differential between traditional SEO content, which was oftentimes optimized for people to convert. Right? They were they want them to land on a page and then book a call or learn more or whatever the call to action was. Like, that's what they were trying to accomplish. That can still be the end goal, but now think of these LLMs almost like a gatekeeper.
Rocky:And the way that you show up inside of their tools is by actually answering the direct question or as close to you as you can get to what your your prospects are asking inside of GPT. Or, you know, I might use GPT kind of holistically for all LLMs, but, yeah, that's the way that that the those brands are winning. Like, the brands that we see winning the most are the brands doing that. And then they're layering in there's a couple new, I would say, you know, quote, unquote, new nuances that people can do technically on their site to improve their authority and chances of those LLMs picking up their content. And as examples, you know, for your audience, like, to give them a checklist, think of, like, the site is you have all these traditional SEO elements.
Rocky:So title tags, h ones, h two, meta descriptions. Those are really important on the back end of the site. And, essentially, what they're doing is they're telling the robots that are crawling through the Internet, whether those are Google bots or LLM bots, what the site is about without it having to parse through all of your content. It's giving it a map of what your site is. And then now you have these other aspects of content of schema markup is another example.
Rocky:It's kind of the same idea, and most websites have basic schema. And a schema will just say, like, oh, this is a website. But there's other, like, specific schema that you can deploy across your site that tells it that's like, oh, this is a website, and it's a blog post, and it has FAQs on it. And so, again, what it's doing is it's painting a better picture for the LLM about what you do, who you do it for, why you do it, etcetera, without having to go through your content. So, technically, there's those things.
Rocky:And within the content itself, there's certain things that you can do to improve it. At top of the content, add a key takeaway section, like TLDR section. This means, like, a quick brief paragraph on, like, what this content is about. There's one thing that we know that LLMs do is they will they will take most of the content that they're using in their answer to put back into their LLM. They get gather from the top half of the content.
Rocky:It total sense. It's cheaper. Right? Doesn't it if they don't have to crawl as long, granted we're talking about milliseconds here, but it's multiplying milliseconds times billions of web pages that turns into a lot of resources. And so, like, some key takeaways here, like, have that paragraph.
Rocky:Don't bury the lead deep into your content. Like, get to the point. Use your h twos and h threes to ask questions that they're that they are also asking in the LLMs, and then answer them, like, really directly very quickly in the preceding or the following paragraph. And then each piece of content now, instead of there being a section on your website, like an FAQ page, each piece of content can now have its own miniature FAQ section that's related to the content itself. And so whatever you're talking about, there should be three or four FAQs that you can pull out of that, and you can put those at the bottom of the content.
Rocky:And, again, it's giving you that opportunity to answer the very specific questions that people are putting into the prompts inside of their LLMs, and it's kind of throwing that signal to the LLM. Like, hey. I'm answering this question directly. I have authority, and it increases your likelihood for being involved in that conversation. So I realized I kinda just, like
Derek:Yeah. You did. You Rocky. And I took notes, and I'm gonna play them back to you a little bit. Yeah.
Derek:Because I think this is I think this is really good stuff. And in Essential Dynamics, what we're trying to do is help people see the work they do as a system and to get outside of the work that they do, particularly if you're a leader, and and say, how do we create value? How does it move through the system? What limits it? What what propels it?
Derek:And you're talking about for an overall organization, you'll you're talking about part of their system, which is the part of the system, the marketing part where we get the customers, or you make contact with the customers. But you said some things that are really important and fundamental in my mind. So let's just see if I'm getting this right. The first thing is you have to be really clear who your customers are. And of the customers you have and want to have, who the ideal customers are.
Derek:And you would have criteria for that. And and you would be able to know from experience and maybe from aspiration. This is the kind of thing we see in a good customer. That's what we're looking for. So you understand that.
Derek:Then you talked about personas. So let's take one of those let's take our ideal customer and then just kinda boil that down to an organization or a person that we could have an experience with. And we want them to buy from us. And then I think I mean, there's other things you said, but one of the really important is you have to figure out what their questions are. And then not only not only answer the question, but ideally pose the question so that the the bot can find both the question and the answer so that when a customer is in a chat session or doing Google search and asks the question that can get matched to your content.
Derek:And this is a thing. I've I had some previous conversations with some excellent marketing people. A lot of people, you know, professionals in particular, people who are who are really interested in the content or the answers or providing the service. They're like, well, I don't wanna be one of those pushy salespeople. And what we're talking about here is we're trying to find people who have legit questions about how to solve a problem that we can solve.
Derek:Whatever whatever your client or whatever company is trying to get into the market, they have an answer to that question. And so if we're if we're kind of going from the from the, you know, the poll from the customer, customers are spending time online trying to get answers to their questions. And you're talking about a system where you identify ones that are asking the right questions for your business, getting really, really clear on what they need and then making your website really, really clear so that it can be found perhaps by someone who clicks a link or more likely these days by an LLM that's crawling through and indexing all of this stuff and so that it's easier to find. And then the last part of it, when you start talking about h one and h two, and I think I know what that means. That's like header one and header two Yep.
Derek:In your HTML. So what you're saying is have your website organized and put the path that you want the customer to follow, in a way that's easy to find with, summaries at the top of a page, with headings, and then, questions under the headings. You said disperse your FAQ into topic areas so that we're just trying to get laser focused on finding the the path to answer the customer's question. Is that did I get that right? Am I paying attention?
Rocky:Yeah. No. Yeah. I I yeah. I would say a plus.
Rocky:Exactly. And I think I think there's some, like, key elements in here, you know, when we're talking about, like, the content itself, like, make make your customer the hero of that content. Like like, because you're solving for their problem, this shouldn't be this is kind of a hard, I think, concept to actually execute on, but, like, writing the content through their lens where when one of your personas or your ICPs lands on on a page on your site, the goal outcome that you should have is for them to say to themselves either consciously or subconsciously, I belong here. This content was written for me. This is answering exactly the questions that I was talking with Derek at the water cooler last week about and or on a Zoom call with whoever.
Rocky:Like, that is the goal of the content is when someone lands on that page, the first thing they see, the first thing they read, they're like, oh, I'm in the right spot. This is exactly what I was looking for. And, also, that it's you know, to give a a counterpoint example, at the end of last year, I was looking at motorcycles. My son, like, and I just like, we watched a documentary about a guy who went on an adventure backpacking and camping with his motorcycle across Europe. And so I did this Google search.
Rocky:I was like, motorcycles for new riders in 2025. And the first link I clicked, it started telling me what a motorcycle is. Started defining, oh, a motorcycle is a two wheeled vehicle that's operated with a gas engine. And I was like, no. No.
Rocky:No. No. No. No. And it was such a great example of what not to do with your content because it and and also, I think it was a great example of showing where the Google algorithm was failing us as consumers because that that being served that piece of content lowered my confidence in Google because it was giving me something that did not align with the intent of my search.
Rocky:And so where I think AI is really pushing us, these LLMs are pushing us, is into this environment that is highly curated. It understands who you are. And, like, you and I right now, we could go do the exact same Google search. We could both go look for motorcycles, and it's gonna give us two different answers. Now it might pull from a lot of the same data, a lot of the same sites, but it's gonna present that to us in most likely a unique way based on ways that we use our individual Chat Chat Chat instances, for example.
Rocky:And so I think that the most important thing to take away from this is make your customer your ideal fit customer, like, part of how you think about your content and how you solve their problems. Like, that's just the number one thing that we can do.
Derek:Hey, Rocky. I really appreciate that summary. You're generous with the a plus. It's gonna bring my average up. I gotta tell you.
Derek:I I think we should I think we should end this one here because you've you've dropped the keys right there at the end. And I do wanna highlight, though, that it wasn't too long ago that Christian Hansen was on my podcast, and and he said that we need to make our customer the hero as well. And so that is a fantastic I think it's a fantastic leap for someone who doesn't wanna be a pushy salesperson to say, you are not this is we are helping people get to where they wanna be. However that is, there there there's a gap in the customer's experience that they need to fill, and we're helping them take charge and do it themselves, however that however you wanna describe that.
Rocky:Yeah. And I I would say, like, your website should do, like, 80% of the sales for you. Right? They're coming to your website, and their answers or the questions that they have, the vast majority of them should be answered in a easy to find way on your website, whether that's, like, what your solution does, how it would help them, what problems it solves to what the cost is. You know, I think people really value transparency these days, in particular, on websites as as it relates to pricing in in particular.
Rocky:But, yeah, the website should do the heavy lifting for you. Then as a salesperson, you know, there's nothing wrong with saying I even I have been changing my language around this. But, again, saying things like, you should do it this way. You know, people people like to know, they like to like, they kind of like to be told, like, how to do the thing. They come to you.
Rocky:They come to your website because you're the expert on the thing. And so if you say, well, you could do it this way or that way, like, that is confusing for people. So saying, like, yeah, do it this way. You should you should think about it in this way. And there might be other systems that think about it in a different way, and that's okay.
Rocky:But if you have a proven track record, you have this experience, this expertise, lean into that and share it with your prospects so that they can be more successful in their own world. So that's that's kind of my my big takeaway maybe would be that.
Derek:Oh, I I really appreciate it, Rocky. Again, I learned so much. Rocky, how can people find you?
Rocky:Best place is LinkedIn. I am there's only one Rocky Pedden, I think, out there. That's the best place to to connect with me.
Derek:Rocky, thanks so much for for joining me today. We'll have you back soon. I really appreciate the things that I've learned, and I I am gonna, put the a plus on my fridge. And until next time, everyone, consider your quest.