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The Wealth Marketing Podcast (The Wealth Horizon Podcast) examines the trends, marketing practices and growth approaches shaping wealth management firms today. Hosted by Rosemary Denney, founder and CEO of Wealth Matters Consulting, the show features guest conversations and examples from the field that help financial advisors, RIAs and family offices strengthen client relationships and talk about their work without overcomplicating it.
As advisor marketing and online presence continue to influence how firms are seen, The Wealth Marketing Podcast offers support for wealth management professionals who want to improve visibility, communicate with purpose and keep their firms focused on the goals that guide their work.
Rosemary 00:01
Welcome to the Wealth Marketing Podcast, where we explore the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities shaping the financial industry today. In each episode, we bring you insightful conversations with industry leaders, sharing practical, actionable strategies to help advisors deepen relationships and meet growth goals. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back to the Wealth Marketing Podcast. Every advisor I talk to is focused on the same goal: attracting more ultra-high net worth clients. But AI is changing the way they vet you. Today, I had the privilege of sitting down with Zak Ali. For the past several years, Zak ran the U.S. business at Finder, a global platform that helps millions of Americans make smarter decisions about their money. Zak was an early adopter of AI visibility. He restructured his teams, rethought where and how the brand was showing up, and became a go-to voice for marketers navigating the same shift, and now he's doing it for others. He recently launched Creative Advisor, an AI visibility firm, to help founders, executives, and companies meet growth goals through online search. I'm so excited to share this conversation with you. If you've been asking yourself if it's time to think about AI visibility. This conversation is for you. Welcome to the show, Zak. Thank you so much for joining me today. We are so glad to have you here. Every conversation I have touches on AI, and so I know that our people are going to be really excited to hear what you have to say. Before we get into it, I would love to hear your background. How you came into Finders U.S. business, what piqued your interest into AI, you know, what led you to want to start Creative Advisor? I'd love to hear your your story.
Speaker 1 01:57
Yeah, sure thing. So I actually co-founded a news company in 2015 with my best friend. Growing up, we were a few years out of high school. We had gotten some pretty decent tech jobs, and as anyone who rises too quickly in their career thinks, you know, we're smart enough to start our own business and you know take on the world. And so we both started a new media company called Rant Media, where we were going to tell the full story the the first time, and we weren't going to you know engage in clickbait or do any of the things that you kind of have to do to get visibility in news media. But through that time, we sort of I learned SEO and brand positioning and social and how to communicate to our audience, and so I was like, okay, I know how to do publishing. I know how to rank. Let me see if there's some jobs out there that play to that. And I found this financial comparison site called Finder. And then so I came to New York to build out their lending and insurance verticals. From there, spent about almost three years there doing that. Grew both those verticals. I think combined were well over a million dollars a year, and then I wanted to take another year off. It was like right when COVID was starting. I didn't want to go work for another company, but I wanted to start up again in something new. And at the same time, Frank, the global CEO, reached out at Finder and said, "Hey, come into the office. I want to chat. But eventually, I walked away with the head of growth title, where I was leading the marketing teams across paid and organic and PR.
Rosemary 03:26
And what year was that?
Speaker 1 03:27
That was in 2022, and then eventually just worked my way up to the general manager position, leading the entire U.S. And so that was kind of my story in a nutshell. It's my resume in a nutshell. But just through that time, I saw a lot of changes, which I'm sure we'll get into, as it relates to search and online visibility, experiencing sort of the golden age of SEO, and then seeing what it turned into, kind of gave me a lot of skills today that I want to, you know, basically employ in Creative Advisor for folks who don't necessarily have the battle scars of the past to really understand how the future is going to work.
Rosemary 04:01
Can you tell me a little bit about Creative Advisor?
Speaker 1 04:04
So I see a lot of people out there are trying to hack their way to visibility and ignoring the thing that they should have been doing the entire time. And I want to be able to help folks build real, sustainable online presence, online brand, and ultimately drive sales with that brand that won't be at the whim of an algorithm update or the latest hack. That's sort of where I feel I'm going to try and add the most value to folks. But it's a yeah, it's an online. It's it's a it's a firm based on helping founders, small businesses, large businesses get the visibility they need.
Rosemary 04:41
I'd love to step back to Finder, and I want to hear from your perspective. You were there during such an interesting time, so you were there SEO days, and then pre AI, and then stepping right into the AI days as of late. I'd love to hear from your perspective. What that was like on the ground, how you managed that change, what changes you made, what was your approach, and what was your thinking along the way?
Speaker 1 05:07
It was a lot all at once. So it was again from 2015 to like 2019 was like the golden age of SEO. But then all of a sudden, again, the ZERP era ended. ChatGPT launched in late 2022, which was like the first real competitor, like actual credible threat to Google's search business. At the same time, Google launched the helpful content update, which was a pretty significant update that hurt a lot of publishers. And there was also this whole zero-click search environment that was also happening, where Google was launching more features that sort of dissuaded its users from actually clicking into websites. It was going to give you all the information right there on the front page, and so it was a it was a long grind. So first, there was the it was almost like all the stages of grief, like you know denial and all that, and so how do we win back our traffic? And you know trying to follow the guidance Google had set forth with the helpful content update, like oh make quality content for humans, and you know very obscure sort of advice that everyone was trying to interpret, like it was some sort of like you know Rosetta Stone or something, and no one was successful. And eventually, there was a big Google event where the folks at Google were essentially like, "Yeah, recovery is not really on the table, not in the way that you think it is. You're not going to get your 2019 traffic numbers back. And that was the realization moment for me when I realized, okay, we have to change the game. SEO is no longer going to be what it was for us, and it was what Finder really built its business on in the U.S. It was basically all organic search for a while, and so it was one of those moments where you had to really take a step back to find clarity. Was like before you know what SEO is, you instinctively know which link you're going to click when you land on that page. You instinctively know which title tag works for you, or what a piece of good content looks like. You're not thinking about all of these page elements and components and the puzzle that you're trying to put together. You're just as a user experiencing the internet and saying, "I like this and I don't like that. And ultimately, that is what made me realize like that is actually the business we're in-it's not all of these, you know, guides and influencers and strategies out there that people are trying to push on us. It's actually just who is our customer and how can we best reach them with everything that we sort of know about them. And that was the approach we took there, and which that meant ultimately was multi-surface. So we weren't just going to be a blog anymore. We were going to be on YouTube. We're going to be on social. We're going to have a newsletter. We were going to be across every platform, so that we would sort of play into that whole search everywhere optimization angle. And that's sort of been what helped us recover in a lot of ways. Was making sure that we yeah could be as found on many surfaces as possible. So Google had a really and ChatGPT and all the AIs had a really good sense of who we were and kind of content we created, and that actually did raise our visibility and it actually raised a lot of direct traffic, which is what everyone wants.
Rosemary 07:51
And tell me, at what point did you realize that your strategy, this sort of multi-channel posting everywhere, sort of strategy and being everywhere, at what point did you realize that that was leading to success with AI?
Speaker 1 08:03
So it was really when we started getting heavy into YouTube and noticing that our videos, like our Robinhood review video or our public review video or Webull, whatever brokerage platform, whatever brokerage heavy on YouTube, was showing up in search immediately and was actually influencing answers. So there's the AIO AI overview that Google puts out, and so we'd write something about Robinhood and say, "Oh, it's good for beginners. And next thing you know, on Google, it's saying Robinhood's good for beginners. We were almost witnessing in real time how like certain channels have a higher success rate of showing up just because there's easier, less competition, or what is it? But that was the moment for us.
Rosemary 08:39
So our listeners keep hearing all of these terms. They hear SEO and AEO and GEO. I would love to hear from your perspective where are we in the shift? Is SEO really gone, or is it just a little different? What's real and what's not?
Speaker 1 08:58
So, I would say we're we're the shift is not as uncertain as as it was when it was just beginning, where there was this idea that maybe you could go back to the way things were. It's very squarely in the AI is is here to stay, and those sort of answers are here to stay. So I'd say where it's more mature. It's still changing, but the way I look at it, and as I understand it, GEO is influencing the actual training data of what these LLMs know about you. So it's the stuff that they don't search the internet for to produce results. Whereas AEO is the the chat bot or the agent is searching the internet and finding results and then bringing you and then surfacing you. And I don't think that's going to change any time time soon. So where I would start if I was a someone just getting into it is I would just go into ChatGPT or I would go into Google and I would type in got my own brand, so Creative Advisor. Let's say, what does Creative Advisor do? And if that wasn't the answer I wanted, I knew where to focus or who runs Creative Advisor or you know so. You're typing in just actual questions about your brand. That'd be where I started, and I'd focus on building content and strategy around making sure that these chatbots know what I do, my entity, and how it works. Then I would go into my industry and say, "What are the best AI visibility firms, and who's who's showing up there? And you sort of just you're reverse engineering the results that you get when as it when you're typing as a user because you're you're showing I know what I want the brand to say about me or I know what it doesn't say about me and I'm going to work on it until it does say something about me. But as far as real versus hype, real brand management, reputation management, that stuff matters. I think people shouting brand matters are not just like saying it. It is a legitimate like thing to focus on search everywhere optimization, which means you can't really just win with one channel anymore. Like you can take one channel pretty far, but it's not going to be enough these days to drive the results you want the way that you know SEO could have been in the past. Founder and employee led sales. That's also super real. Having be the people who work at the business promote the business, become turn people into evangelists, spread the gospel about what you do and what you're working on. I think there's a massive trust signal there, and then I think unique data and insights and customer centric content is incredibly important on the hype side of things. Prompt tracking software. Before I take out the MX to pay for really expensive prompt tracking software, I would maybe put a pause on that and be the prompt tracking software yourself. Again, do those searches yourself. Start small with just how you would search for your own business. Schema markup it is important. Like I'll say, I'll say prompt tracking and team markup are like hype adjacent because they will help, but it's not the highest leverage thing for you to be working on or studying or tracking. And then brand mentions and links on irrelevant sites. It doesn't matter if you are like if you are I don't know a giant wealth firm and Pets.com mentions you. It's not going to move the needle for you. And then generating tons of AI content. That one is the most dangerous because you will see an initial spike, but three months time, again and again and again, we're seeing these sites collapse. Google's catching on. They're saying you're creating spam by just pushing out like hundreds of AI articles, and we're going to de rank you. And then it takes a bit of time to get back in the good graces after that. So I would definitely put the brakes on that strategy before you go too far with it, and make sure it's about the quality of the content versus the quantity.
Rosemary 12:24
That's really interesting because I've seen a lot out there about building resource libraries and the FAQs on every single page, and generate content through AI for AI and put it on a backlink so that you're maybe it's not part of your user experience, but it's part of the machine experience that the machines can read it and go from page to page. So you're saying that's not a sound strategy.
Speaker 1 12:46
It's not a sound strategy, and the success of that strategy is likely to be short-lived. It won't beat out a good podcast appearance, for example, or it won't beat out CNBC linking to your site, or or someone from your business showing up on CMS, NBC, or Bloomberg, or Fox Business, and saying something, and you being mentioned up in their roundup, that is going to move the needle 10x more than a giant resource library or properly marked up content. You still want the properly marked up content. You still want to have things like FAQs, but think about the quality of that visitor too. You know, I think one of the first things I thought about when the traffic went away was actually just determining what traffic was just vanity traffic and what traffic actually moved the needle. If you lost 50% of your traffic because you're no longer showing up for I don't know net worth calculator or something like that, and that never led to a sale, or like what is EBITDA, and that never led to a sale, and it never led to any brand sort of salience. Then it doesn't matter if you lost that traffic. But if you lost traffic to a term like wealth management New York, yes, you want that back because that's a very high intent customer. They're searching for wealth management in a specific state, and and you want to get that back and work towards getting that back.
Rosemary 14:02
I've heard you say a couple times that things are going back to the way they used to be. Can you just go into that a little bit further?
Speaker 1 14:11
I think they are going back to the way they used to be in the early internet, where anyone could go on and write a really killer blog and get visibility. I think it matters for for you to think about the user again, and I think a lot of people like to throw around the term AI slop, but a lot of the internet was slop before AI. If I'm being perfectly honest, a lot of it was same samey. A lot of it was just copying what other people were doing and like coming up to the line of plagiarism. So that's it's a new buzzword to say AI slop, but the internet was filled with a lot of slop before, and I think actually think that's what the helpful content update that Google released in 2022 was about. Was that everyone was doing the same structures and covering the same points and not really adding something new to the collective? And I think that is where the alpha lives now. Is what can you include in what you're doing that is going to add. It's additive. That's something new for the models to train themselves on. That's something new for the customer to learn or to experience. It's the quality of your content is going to make all the difference in the world, and I think that's that's what the models are going to reward. That's what's going to give you the user metrics that Google rewards, like people staying on your page long enough, people clicking on your stuff, and not bouncing right back to Google immediately or or immediately exiting out. So yeah, I would say quality is going to be at the forefront again. These growth at all costs, hack the system mentality that needs to die.
Rosemary 15:30
And I would love to hear. You've said before that you think this change is good for the industry. Why do you think that?
Speaker 1 15:37
So I think it's long term good for the industry. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of pain in the immediate with with where did my traffic go? But because you are going to have to fight to win your customer now, and when people are in that mode, they they launch incredibly innovative, creative things. They find new ways to reach you to add value to you, and it forces the entire industry to figure out ways to add value. I mean, Finder, for example, you know, we were a comparison site that just did comparison, but then we had to offer you know something a bit more, right? So we had we launched this Finder Rewards program where we actually gave money back from the CPAs we were making off our partners back to the user and rewarding them for using our site, and it was a way to just add one more thing that let us stand out from the competition. And we won because we were getting more customers. Our partners won because they were getting more qualified customers because you had to do certain actions to get the reward. And the customer won because they were getting money for taking out a product like that. You couldn't do that anywhere else. And so it was one of those instances where, oh, I'm seeing how these new this new technology is actually forcing people to to put the customer first again, and and I think that's just the way to be.
Rosemary 16:49
Something I hear from advisors constantly is that their personal posts get a lot more engagement than the firm's page, and they wonder why that happens. Instead of the interest being in the company, they're interested more in them as a person. And I think you kind of touched on it before, but I'd love to hear what you see going on there, and and and how a firm should think about its firm brand versus its Teams brand the individuals brands themselves, right?
Speaker 1 17:25
So the two are becoming more intrinsically linked. I would say so. Like the age of the faceless brand is is truly on its way out. People want social proof that you can deliver on what you offer, and there's no better social proof than an actual person telling you about their experience, I think, yeah, there is this entire ecosystem of of brands that are so connected to their founders, like it's and employees, and I actually think that's again better. It's like dog fooding, right? There's that phrase in business that you got to be willing to eat your own dog food because that's how you know it's trustworthy, and so I think that that plays a large part. Like, I wouldn't want to use a firm that doesn't use their own product. Like, why is it? Why wouldn't you use your own thing? You know?
Rosemary 18:09
Yeah, there's a phrase in our industry that it's common for a firm to claim that we eat our own cooking, right?
Speaker 1 18:15
Yeah, right.
Rosemary 18:17
They're in it with the clients,
Speaker 1 18:19
right?
Rosemary 18:21
You have told a story before about a bird flying down a chimney, and I'd love to hear that story and tell me what firms should take away from that.
Speaker 1 18:31
So, a bird flew down our chimney and it was stuck. And at first, we were terrified because we were like, "Oh my gosh, there's something in our house. Is it like a? No one thinks it's a cute bird. When you hear the the noises that we heard, we thought it was like a raccoon or something like that. And so we finally realized, okay, we need to call somebody. Like it's stuck. We don't. We have no idea if we're getting this thing out. It's it's not going to be able to fly out. We don't even know what it is. And so we looked up like animal control, and they wouldn't help us because it wasn't a dire situation, so we went online looking for people who like specialized in removing wildlife from I guess your property or your your your chimneys, and we went to a few sites, and the first one looked fantastic, really well designed site, no reviews, nothing about it like made sense. We were just like we don't know if they're real. We called the number, we got an AI bot like replying to us, and we're like, okay, not them. We went to another site, which again, really well designed. It was the future of animal removal. You know, it was this whole thing, and she's like, okay, again, nothing online about them. They have a great website, and they say they're on the BBB accredited, and all this stuff. Again, couldn't trust them. And we found this one website that looked like it hadn't been updated from the not since the '90s, and bunch of Google reviews, bunch of reviews on other sites, a lot of anecdotes on the site itself, and they're all saying, "Oh, I love Mike. You know, I don't know, I can't remember if that was his actual name, but everyone's personally calling out the employee that they that came to their house and helped them with their problem. And I was like, "Yeah, we're gonna use. We're obviously gonna use this one that said." Copyright 1999 still in the footer. You know, it's they're they're the folks who came and they came in, they got it out, and they were gone. And it was like one of those experiences. You can't be real experiences. Like trust is not just a visual thing. It's something you feel. It's when other people can speak to your quality that that really sort of seals the deal.
Rosemary 20:23
I want to pivot into something that people are asking me about a lot, and that is paid advertising. So you know, before AI, we were in an era when it got to where you can't even get on Google's first page, unless you're a paid advertiser, the people who show up the most are people who are paying the most money for the most placement. They're the most competitive for all the keywords and for all the search terms. And I've heard, I've heard AI is the great equalizer, right? I'd love for you to tell me whether, first of all, whether or not Google Ads are are dead, are they dead? Where are we with advertising, and are we about to enter into a brand new era?
Speaker 1 21:11
So Google Ads might be dead for some. It's if you are a site that is pushing someone else's product, you're going to have a hard time competing against the brands, and the reason I say that is because AI search has taken over, you know, destroyed everyone's traffic for for better or worse. I mean, for worse in the immediate, that caused a flood of people to go into paid advertising, and when everyone goes in, it's it's inflationary, right? It pushes up the cost. People are willing to bid more, and folks get priced out of being able to compete in Google Ads anymore. And so, when you're priced out of being able to compete in Google Ads, in order to compete in them again, you need to raise your price. So now prices are going up, and it becomes this. This is an example where competition and scarcity leads to increases in costs, not decreases, which happens other times. So ads, Google Ads isn't dead, but it has to just be one part of your journey now, and it has to be the economics need to make sense. And so it used to be an obvious choice. Oh yeah, we're going to do Google Ads. Now it's no longer such an obvious choice. You know, the the economics might say, yeah, let's do Google Ads, and that's a great way to drive results. But if you're not making margin on that, is it worth your time? You know, probably not for most businesses. And so, instead of that, you probably have to go into Facebook and organic, you know, founder employee led sort of strategies and podcasting and newsletters, and you have to go into all these other services because it's no longer the obvious choice. And I also think you need to track the journeys across those services as well. A lot of people have are struggling right now to circulate the value of SEO to their CEOs to their executive team because it's no longer a channel where you can draw a clear connection to ROI anymore. It's now sort of connective tissue. It is assisted conversions is sort of the role organic is playing now, which is like showing up in search and showing getting these brand mentions and visibility-it is a multiplier. So you definitely need to do it. You need to pursue it, but you have to say, "Look, someone saw me on Facebook, and then they saw. Then because they saw me on Facebook, they didn't click my ad, but they or they did click my ad, but they didn't convert. But then they searched me on Google the next day, and that's how they found me. And so you sort of see, okay, well now we have to share some of that attribution with someone with Facebook and some of Google. They used to call this, you know, one the most popular attribution for a while was called last click attribution, which was just whoever, whatever the last channel was that they clicked on, that gets the credit for the sale. But that's now become an incredibly shallow way to look at marketing because you can no longer it just disregards a lot of the touch points that played a role in actually converting that that sale, and then if you decide those touch points don't matter, you won't invest in them, and you'll lose the things that actually got you that sale in the first place.
Rosemary 23:50
Well, in wealth management, you know the sales cycle is like long. I mean, it can take. There was a rule of thumb years ago, I think, that it takes seven touch points before you make a decision, and I heard a recent statistic that someone will see content for seven months from you before taking an action. So it's just kind of over and over and over situation. You really you don't really know what the one thing was, but you're touching these people and this across these many different channels for six months or more with the content strategy before they decide to take an action.
Speaker 1 24:23
Yeah, there has to be a sustained effort to make things work, and those longer sales cycles they compound if you can stick it out and see how it all comes together. Yeah.
Rosemary 24:33
So I'd love to talk a little bit more tactical. So content strategy pre AI and now post AI, we have already talked about you know those resource libraries and like AI generated content not being you know super successful and maybe being a little detrimental. Can you tell me like what is um for a wealth advisor you know typical like a really successful content strategy? What does that look like now? I think.
Speaker 1 25:00
It's one that prioritizes again the customer and is on multiple channels. And so, before you could really just focus on one channel and knock that out. Like, look, I'm just going to be the best I can be at TikTok or Facebook or or Google search. But now it's I need to also be on YouTube and I also need to be having my blog. I need all these things to feed into each other and need them to all link together. What folks used to call this is the content waterfall, which is you do one big piece of content, and then that content can get spliced into smaller pieces of content. But it's like one central premise you're trying to hit, and that trickles into everything. It could be a long-form YouTube video that you then cut into many shorts that cover up different topics you talked in that YouTube video, or a podcast, same thing. You cut the segments into their own pieces of content, and each of those segments probably get a write up. And then before you know it, one interaction, you know, the Rosemary's Act podcast becomes 10 pieces of content, right? And and you can move on to the next one. But I think that's the way to look at it. It's that's one of the more sustainable ways to do it as well. It would be incredibly hard to have a separate YouTube strategy and a separate blog strategy and a separate news strategy that wasn't cohesive or didn't feed a growth loop.
Rosemary 26:06
How do PR and earned media factor into AI visibility?
Speaker 1 26:10
A lot. I mean, PR is incredibly important. In one of I'd said recently that there are two types of SEOs: there are technical SEOs and there are SEOs who don't realize their job is PR. And I definitely think PR is one of the most important things to learn right now. It's it's about visibility, it's about your reputation, it's about what people know about you and insights. That's the unique data stuff that we were talking about earlier. That is, you ran a poll or you looked at someone else's data and found a really interesting insight no one's covering yet, and you're sharing the word about that, and now all of a sudden you've contributed to the conversation in your industry in a way that builds your reputation, builds your brand, makes you trustworthy-all the things that eventually lead to sales.
Rosemary 26:51
We've talked a lot about different types of content. We've mentioned podcasting, commentaries. We've talked a little, and and and there are many forms of content out there. Are there specific types of content that AI likes more than others?
Speaker 1 27:05
So there is a readability component to it. The easier it is for you to read your content, the better. Like if your content's fully generated by like JavaScript, for example, which is really hard for these machines to understand or learn or pick up on, that is probably not going to be great. But if it like you use the basics, right? The header hierarchy, you know, so you have your H ones, your titles, and your H twos for the section headers. That's gonna make it very easy for them to parse what the content is about and what each section's about. You have an author by lines. You know that there's a human behind the the work that's that's work that it was, or or you know how it was produced. Yeah, clean HTML, clean Markdown. That's the stuff that's gonna be easiest for AI to read. the The way that AI search works is they do something called query fan out, which is they actually do a bunch of different searches and then they produce your answer. So, and and based on what it knows about you, so there's personalization. So, say I'm on ChatGPT and it knows I live in New York, and I type in what are the best personal loans, and it might search best personal loans, best personal loans New York, best personal loans, good credit, best person, and it's going to do a bunch of different searches. It's going to pull from the sites it finds credible, and then it's going to give me that one cohesive answer that that feels very well rounded.
Rosemary 28:16
Many, many, many of our advisors are not technical experts. I'm curious, from your perspective, what is like the bare minimum a wealth advisory should be doing right now?
Speaker 1 28:28
At a bare minimum, it's it's who's being as very simple as you want. So, if you're a wealth advisory firm and you know who what type of customer you want and what what their net worth range lives in, what happens if you you know type in wealth management firm for eight figure family or you know whatever it is and what shows up, what comes up, what do you see, and then just taking your own observe you know own observations and and creating strategy around that and figuring out how to talk to that person, where do they live, and what do they do, and what do they like? Are they these people that wear Lululemon, or are they people that were you know getting in as many of those details as you possibly can comes from just talking to people. It doesn't come from any sort of technical expertise or anything like that. It's can you type on a keyboard, get a result, and then talk to people who you think match that that profile? What events do they go to? What clubs do they they frequent? You know, how do you get in front of the people that would be your customers, and I think those conversations are beautiful places to find inspiration to create content.
Rosemary 29:28
There are some advisors that we work with who are sort of in a wait and see position, and there are some advisors who are tripping all over themselves to get as quick as they can up to speed, really trying to rush to configure their websites and create the content and do all the things. Can you tell me what what is the one thing an advisor could do now, and what are the consequences of waiting?
Speaker 1 29:54
I think the consequences of waiting is giving your competitors an edge. I think people who. Know that this is something they should be caring about, but don't know where to start. My advice would just be to start small. Any movement is good movement. It gives you back a little bit of information, and that little bit of information covers the next step and the next step, and it kind of goes on that. And you know, five years from now, they might think, "Man, I'm happy I took that first step because now I have all of this knowledge, this historical knowledge that makes me be able to say things like what's hype, what's real, and what's not, because they've tried it and they had that experience, and and that's really what gives you an edge.
Rosemary 30:30
Looking ahead over the next coming months and the next few years, how do you see the competitive landscape evolving? And for a firm who wants to set itself up now versus in the future, what should they be building, and what do you think will not change with the technology moving the way that it is?
Speaker 1 30:49
I think they need to be building their presence, so their employees. Like a lot of people view posting on LinkedIn or posting on Twitter or whatever as extra work, but it's actually just work now. And I think there needs to be that sort of cultural shift of your your employees are your best evangelists. They can speak to your product the best, and people want to hear from them. There's a lot of anxiety around posting online and feeling like it doesn't matter, but it does. And again, it's through that sustained thing. You know, I see there's people I follow who I'm not in the market for their service now, but I know that when I am, I'm thinking of them, and that's sort of the name of the game. It's that long sales cycle you were discussing earlier, and so I would yeah I would think about that. I think about visibility. What is your brand reputation? What do the chatbots know about you? What does ChatGPT think you do, and does it know you exist? I would focus on that because it matters today, but it's always mattered that the word out about you is the correct one or the one that your brand is after.
Rosemary 31:40
Good point. Just to wrap this up, I would love to hear from you. You're starting a brand new chapter with Creative Advisor. What are you the most excited about?
Speaker 1 31:51
I'm so excited to be in it again, and like, and by that I mean, once you've tasted entrepreneurship, it's really hard to go back and like being in charge of your own destiny, right, and and and being accountable to your own results and the way it stretches your brain because you're involved in so many aspects of the business and it scratches you know the technical side and the creative side, but also the ability to add value in a way that sort of feels like an extension of myself is is really what I'm excited about. I have all this experience with SEO and brand and visibility and positioning and being able to take that off someone's plate in a way that makes their life feel just a little bit easier probably is what's going to fill my cup the most because I wish I had that for me when I was just starting out and so there's always that pay it forward sort of mentality you have to have with us and I think the best businesses are mission led at the end of the day like you I really was a, I still am a massive Apple fan, and what they, how they feel about you know their products and design, and caring about the stuff that no one in a million years would even think to care about, it comes through, and I think I'm excited to to launch a mission led business that really is about adding value.
Rosemary 32:58
Well, Zak, thank you so much for being on this podcast, I've really enjoyed our conversation, and I think there's so much for all of us to learn. We're all just sort of learning, and I think it's really exciting.
Speaker 1 33:09
Thank you so much. This has just been a blast.