David vs. Goliath: Leveraging AI to Compete with the Giants

Discover how financial advisors can harness the power of AI to automate content creation, amplify reach, and stand out in a crowded marketplace. This session reveals how even small firms can build a scalable, automated content engine that rivals the output of major financial brands—without the massive budget.

Transcription:
Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio for the authoritative record.

Scott Clarke (00:08):
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Today we are going to be talking about how AI can augment a small shop to be able to compete with all the giants out there. We're going to talk about the hows, the whys. We're going to be talking about the experience that our end clients, our customers have, and we're going to be talking about how we can use AI to augment our marketing as well. So a quick compliance disclaimer. I was the executive creative director at Advisors Excel, and so compliance is my natural born enemy. However, I do want to say this: anytime we're dealing with personally identifying information, we need to tread very carefully. Number one, to protect our clients, but also to protect ourselves as well. And so whereas we're going to be doing that with some of this data, make sure to check in with your own compliance and make sure that you're not running afoul of any rules there.

(01:03):
So Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said recently that he believes that in the next year, there will be a company staffed by a single human being that will be valued at over a billion dollars—a single person unicorn. And he believes that's possible because one individual can take AI and AI agents and surround himself or herself with them and create a system to create $1 billion of value. He believes that'll happen in the next year. Here's how. And this is the secret sauce. This is what he's talking about. Here's how he believes it's going to happen. And here's how we can use that secret sauce specifically in our firms, whether we're smaller shops or whether we are the bigger guys and we want to get ahead of the curve to make sure that we're not outpaced as well. So daisy chaining—who's ever heard that phrase, by the way?

(02:04):
Daisy chaining. So if you guys use old school technology here, we'll talk more about that in a minute. But daisy chaining AI, basically finding a way to connect AI and AI agents together and then build in automation before, during, and after. And when you get these different AI agents talking to each other and working together and getting the right stopgap measures in place, you can actually create value. Instead of just going into ChatGPT and saying, "Make me an agenda for this next meeting," or, "Make me a flyer like this," you can actually create a content engine; you can create an experience engine. So there is a clue on the screen here, but does anyone know whose garage this is? Steve Jobs. So this is back in the 1970s, you got a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and they started Apple Computer in this garage.

(03:02):
It was right at the beginning of the personal computing revolution. There was new technology that was making it possible for the democratization of computing. That was the vision that they had. All the big dogs and IBMs of the world didn't think much of it, and yet we know how this story ends. There was new technology that allowed two people in a garage to make history.

(03:30):
Again, some context clues here. Who knows whose garage this is? Sergei Brin. That's right. So this is where Google was founded. So now the 1990s, we had just experienced another technological revolution. And that, of course, was the advent of the internet, which by the way, Steve Jobs, after he left Apple or was ousted, started Next Computers, and the Worldwide Web was first developed on those Next computers. And so this one technological revolution fed into this other one, and now you have Google starting in the 1990s, and eventually these two companies have taken over almost every aspect of our lives and touched almost every aspect of our lives. What these two companies have in common is it was a small group of individuals who utilized new technology in ways that other people could not envision or were so convinced that it wasn't worth their time that they were able to outpace them.

(04:30):
It's not unlike stealing fire from the gods. That technology and those technological revolutions of personal computing, as well as of the internet itself, are dwarfed in comparison to what's happening right now with AI. A one-person billion-dollar company sometime in the next 12 months. And it's because of OpenAI. It's because of what Sam Altman and his team have been doing that has created this technological wave. Now, for those of you that are here, obviously I'm guessing everyone has utilized ChatGPT to some degree or another. There's a bunch of other GPTs and a bunch of other AI agents. Who's using what? Go ahead and yell it out for me.

(05:18):
Grok? Perplexity. Say it again. There we go. So Claude, Perplexity. So a lot of these more polished AIs that are consumer-ready, and again, here's the great thing. They can do some amazing things. And even with OpenAI, they're starting to build in triggers and timing, and there's a way to start making them smarter. However, integrated or siloed in a single system, you're not getting the full value, the full power out of those AI systems. So when Sam Altman talks about a $1 billion unicorn company with a single human individual, he does mean that those AIs will be connected together or automated together using an automation platform. So two of the most popular automation platforms out there are make.com, which is an Adobe product, and then Zapier. They allow you to no-code connect multiple different resources together to create automations that are scalable, repeatable, and smart.

(06:29):
We also have up here HubSpot and HighLevel, so two CRM systems that are specifically marketing-focused, and that also include the ability to kick off some automations. Here is the big get: if you don't have HubSpot or HighLevel, whatever CRM you're running, you can utilize Make and Zapier right now to build out a lot of the features and automations that HubSpot and HighLevel have. That's the big get right there. You don't need HubSpot or HighLevel. However, if you do have them, utilizing that as your home base and then building these deeper automations as triggered events, that's where you're going to see the biggest bang for your buck. So large firms currently have the market cornered in terms of experience, content, and marketing, but with the right AI tools and automations, that advantage can vanish overnight.

(07:30):
Here is the shift in mentality that all of us need to make in order to fully utilize these AI agents and these automations. And that is, instead of thinking about "how do I do this one time at 100%," it's "how can I do this every time at around 80 to 85%, but I never have to think about it ever again." If you think about in your own business, when you go and try to hire someone to duplicate you, you're never going to get 100%. The same thing is true about AI agents as well. You're never going to get 100% of what you want. That's just not the way that the world works. However, if you can get 80 to 85% of that same experience, but it's set and it's repeatable and you never have to think about it again, think about how much time that can free up for you.

(08:22):
So that's the mental shift. Instead of doing it really well once, how can we do it at a very solid level repeatedly by thinking in systems as opposed to individual moments? So how do we utilize AI for the client experience? If you think about in your own practices, what is that client experience? What is that customer journey? It starts before they ever come into your office in the various marketing funnels that you have. It happens when they visit your website, when they come into your office, when they Zoom in to meet with you virtually. It happens in every single touchpoint you have with them ever. That's the sum total of what a client experience is. And so really quick, you might want to ask yourself: what is my client's experience? Is it good? What if I ask them? Am I going to get that same answer back?

(09:20):
When we think about client experience, it's not so dissimilar from every other human relationship that we have. When you think about the relationships that matter most to you, these are relationships that are built on mutual trust, connection, care, and concern. Here's the challenge: when you're a smaller shop, you have the luxury to worry about a smaller number of people because the human brain can only retain a certain amount of information, unless you have some photographic memory. For the rest of us mere mortals, our brains tap out at a certain point. Now, in a larger firm, you've got all the CRM systems and many hands making light work there. And so you can get an edge there and you can create these really excellent experiences, but how do you take that manpower experience and leverage it into this much higher touch experience?

(10:16):
Well, it all comes down to this idea of the experience economy. As our economic system has developed from an agrarian society to an industrial economy to what we've been in most recently, which is a service-based economy—that's where our industry came out of. Where we're heading next, and the economy that we actually live in now, we've been somewhat sheltered by it specifically because of the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomer generation. But when you think about Peak 65 and the transition, that bridge generation between Boomers and Gen Xers, they're going to be expecting something different from us than the Baby Boomers have. They're going to be expecting what they've been experiencing everywhere else, which is ultimately an experience economy. And you know that an experience economy matters because I want you to think about the building that we're in right now.

(11:17):
Experience matters. There's a reason why we choose places like this to come have a conference. Experience matters when you have a couple who's invested a lot of money with you and the spouse dies and the other spouse maybe doesn't have a relationship with you or a connection with you. Their personal experience with you is nothing to write home about, so they immediately start looking for someone that they can trust. Their experience matters as well. And so as we look at how we can utilize AI to create the types of experiences to engender the type of trust that we experience in any other meaningful human relationship, that's where we can make sure that our clients are having the best possible experience they can. And again, doing it utilizing AI systems and automations.

(12:11):
The more hands you have, the more brains you have, the more hearts you have, the better the experience you can create. However, there is a limiting principle. No one's ever going to care about your business as much as you. And when you start adding too many human beings in the pile together without the right systems in place, you're going to be tripping over each other. And so even if you aren't a larger firm, there are some limiting factors there at play. What's really great about AI is once you build the systems the right way, they're infinitely scalable.

(12:46):
So what is the case now? Let's talk about creating automated experiences. There is a service out there called Scribe where you can go and take your handwriting, put in samples of it, and scan it in. They will take your handwriting and they will use the equivalent of an auto-pen to write out handwritten cards on your behalf. What's really cool is they have a feature built in where no two letters are ever drawn exactly the same. They build in some variation into the auto-pen so it looks more naturalistic. What's interesting is that this company and other companies like it have a backend, an API that you can connect into utilizing make.com or utilizing Zapier. And so you can connect this service with a complex set of automations. So let's say, for instance, it's your client's birthday. On a date predetermined previous to that, there will be a trigger from your CRM—or if you have that customer data inside your automation or inside an Excel spreadsheet—there will be a trigger that will go to the Make or Zapier automation, which will then have an AI pull from your CRM all of the notes of everything that's been going on with this client for a predetermined amount of time.

(14:17):
And then utilizing a GPT that you've trained in your voice, custom write a card for them, which you can set up in a queue and read before it goes, or you can just have it fully automated and headless. That will get sent to Scribe and that custom-written letter will be written in your own hand and automatically sent off. But what's interesting for a smaller firm is being able to have those nice little touches or reminders about RMDs or other things. What's really fascinating here is you can, using that same basic seed, spawn off a complex series of tasks using data from your CRM that you might not be using and actually have a really huge impact on your clients.

(15:20):
For those clients you have that do lose a loved one—a son, a dog, their spouse—this is something that you can then include in this automation and every year on that anniversary, send them a card, send them flowers and make it automatic where you don't ever have to think about it again. Now, I would caution you here: for each individual person and firm, you're going to look at what your definition of authenticity is and what your definition of connection is. For some, this might fit within it; for others, it might not. So the thing I would tell you is find out how much of this you can automate and where you want to be involved in this process to make sure that it's happening in the way that you want. You also want to audit this process at least quarterly to make sure that you're not continuing to send flowers or cards to people that have passed on, et cetera.

(16:12):
But this is one of those things where you can add these nice human touches, these nice connections. And by the way, in that automation, also have it alert you directly so that you can reach out to them on that day. All of a sudden, all these things are happening behind the scenes. You don't ever have to think about it. You're just notified of what to do and when and who to reach out to. And you can continue that client relationship at scale with as many clients as possible.

(16:40):
So for instance, you're having a client review coming up. Several days before that, automate a reminder, automate an AI poll and a review of their investments, have all the data from your CRM summarized and sent to you so that you don't have to go find any of this—it's brought to you. We're going to talk about automating content systems here in just a second—how you can take that same data and develop content or products with it that you can then utilize in those review processes. This is something that we've done at Sound Income Group. We put together an automation that scours the internet for what we think are—we have an aggregated RSS feed that pulls in the biggest news in finance and the stock market, things that we believe our advisors are going to be potentially asked about, and then it goes through a series of different GPTs trained to do different things and one hands off to the other.

(17:52):
And so what we get is a weekly recap of, "Hey, here are what the top stories are. Here's some little tidbits about that." So number one, if you get asked about it, you have this ready to go. And number two, it's keeping you up to date on financial information. You're not having to go out there and search for it; you're curating it and bringing it to you. When you think about the amount of content that's out there right now, being responsible for following the right people and getting the right information, if you create the right system to curate that and bring it to you, it'll make you so much more powerful. You'll be able to talk through these things with your clients, and then with the same aggregated feed and data set, you can also create content that is customer- or client-facing.

(18:42):
You can make this as headless as you want, meaning you can automate it and not ever touch it, or you can add the right compliance steps so it's sent to your compliance team or internal content team. You can even automate it so that it will send you an email and you can just respond to that email, which will then connect back into the complex Make or Zapier automation setup. It will read those instructions from the email and do to that content what you want it to do.

(19:17):
Here's an example of what this automation looks like in our firm. There's an RSS feed sent to the text aggregator tool. We're utilizing Grok here. We have used Claude, we have used Perplexity, and we use ChatGPT quite a bit. Grok creates a chat completion and then it creates a JSON chat completion onto the text aggregator again, then to the text parser that's going to cut that all down. And then finally, it formats it, puts it in an email and sends it on. It can be sent to us and then we can respond to approve or delete this section and we're off to the races. This can be sent to all of our internal advisors, or we can also have this so that it creates an HTML email and we can send it out to clients once that information has been more closely looked at and compliance-approved.

(20:20):
When I think about all the things that we have to do in our firms to stay on top of what's happening in the news and with AI, creating these content systems that bring us bite-sized content is key. If you think about the number of email distribution lists you've signed up for and then never actually look at because you've signed up for too many of them, one of the things you can do is set up a Make automation like this to pull those specific emails from those specific addresses and give you a bite-sized, readable thing where you only have to look at one thing every day.

(21:09):
So let's talk about content. You could have this content system running daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also set it up where when there's breaking news, your RSS feed is watching for the volume of news about it across different feeds and then saying, "Once it reaches past the threshold, we need to act quickly and create some content around this." It will take a look at all of those news stories. It will then get passed over to a GPT that you've trained to write a good marketing hook, and that will be the title of your white paper. From there, based on the aggregation of all this other information, you can then create a summary and specific talking points and have it write out a whole white paper so that you have that ready to go for your clients.

(22:16):
It can do this in a matter of seconds. Once you have the hook, the summary, and the talking points happening in sequence, they're all sent to Canva where you have a predetermined template for what these papers will look like. By the way, you've trained your GPT to constrain the title to a certain number of characters and your image GPT to a certain pixel size. All these other predetermined areas have the right character length and information. You can have it assemble a white paper in seconds when big breaking news happens. As soon as it does that, immediately send it to your internal content team and compliance to get that feedback.

(23:13):
Instead of going to your creative team and saying, "Hey, we need something really fast," and hearing, "Well, we've got 30 other things we're working on," you have the thing that's ready to go right then. It's sent to compliance and approved in a matter of minutes or hours as opposed to days. No one had to miss dinner with their kids or stay until late making this happen. Because of the work you did beforehand, you've got this great template that can be reused again and again. Again, it's not just about doing it well once; it's about thinking in systems.

(24:06):
Because if you solve that problem, then anytime there's breaking news, you have content that you can send out. You can post this on your socials, send it out via email, or print them up.

(24:18):
So let's talk about how we can automate content creation. We've talked about how to create these Make or Zapier automations. Again, if you do have a CRM that has these more advanced marketing automations, that's where you want to start first and then build these other automations on top of it. You need to pick and centralize what your platform is for where your automations start. Then this is a game of garbage in, garbage out. You need to create a content system that aggregates and centralizes information, and then parses it in all the ways that you need it. Once you've got the really good information that you know is good to go—which you can do automated or manually—you can type into the system and say, "Hey, I want you to create a content series based on this specific thing." Once you've got the centralized platform, you can start generating and creating that automated system.

(25:41):
The experience economy is all about personalization. The really tricky thing is personalization at scale, but when you build the content system right with that personal identifying information and a summary of where that client is from the CRM, you can start to personalize content and white papers to them that you never could do with a regular content or creative team.

(26:21):
And then you can also build in subsystems to analyze everything you're doing and error correct. You can use that same content seed to create blog material for SEO, but you can also put it through a trained GPT to "de-AI" all of your content so it doesn't sound like it was written by an AI. When Google scanners go over it, they're not flagging it every single time as AI content. It's not perfect, but you'll be able to get better SEO out of that. Though here's the secret: if you've been on your iPhone recently and you Googled anything, the first half of the page on Google isn't SEO anymore.

(27:13):
The first half of the page on Google is an AI summary. Those AI summaries are built on two specific things:

(27:23):
Number one, press releases; number two, Google reviews. So if you go into Google and say, "Who's the best financial advisor in my area?" it's not looking at the SEO data you've spent all this time trying to aggregate. You've been fighting with the algorithm to try to get a couple steps higher, but Google is looking at press releases, which you can automate with this content system. And ultimately, it's about Google reviews. Google is fully cannibalizing its SEO business right now in how their AI is responding about who the best financial advisors are in a given area.

(28:23):
Whether you start with HubSpot, HighLevel, or any other CRM, you've got all your client data in there and can then start to automate using Make or Zapier. That same content aggregator can create an automation that will create blog posts, social content, and work with Canva using your predetermined templates to make this happen. You can utilize different types of AI for different things and daisy chain them all together. Perplexity is great for deeper research. With custom GPT agents, you can take all the content you've written over the years and say, "Hey, learn how I write, learn how I speak." You can train it to speak as if it's your company.

(29:37):
And so you're ensuring that consistent experience across all marketing touchpoints.

(29:44):
I'm going to be honest with you: AI-generated imagery is close. It's not fully there, but when you see over the last year or two how far it's come and how much it's being accepted in our everyday experience with computers, we're getting there. When you split out and create headlines, summaries, and bullet points constrained to specific lengths and then have it assembled and automated in Canva, that's when you're going to get the best bang for your buck.

(30:32):
The same thing that creates your social posts can create your blog posts, white papers, personalized emails, and even text your clients this information. Again, talk to compliance and make sure you've got 10 years' worth of records on it. But once you have that content generator and set up the system in the right way, it can do anything that you want it to do. You can create a weekly or monthly newsletter.

(31:11):
You can even clone yourself. The human-content-generated internet—it might be a little early to say that it's dead, but the amount of AI-generated content you're already viewing is more than you would think. I've always prided myself on having a decent handle on what's real and what's not, but there's stuff coming out right now that I can't differentiate. Synthesia is pretty good; they're not perfect yet, but for taking that same content seed and creating social posts, SEO-driven posts, texts, and personalized emails, you can also have it write a podcast or radio script and actually duplicate your face, facial expressions, and voice.

(32:35):
You can have that automatically uploaded to TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook as well. The amount of content that is going to be developed over the next several years means we have to find our niches and be creating content so people are constantly engaging with us. Finding time to do all of this is pretty daunting. The key determining factor to being successful in content creation is not how good you are at it—it's consistency. If you consistently put content out, you will find people interested in listening to it. Utilizing systems like this, you can begin to create or supplement content and have it write out or say anything that you want.

(33:38):
You can take all your notes and writings over all these years and have it generate ideas of things that you would say.

(33:49):
The principles of this map to every single marketing funnel we have: seminars, in-person events, website, digital, radio, TV, all the way down to our in-office experience. If you want to do more business, you need to have wider and more marketing funnels and stop the leaks so you have more throughput. When you think about what AI can do in terms of content—let's say a white paper is automatically created because of a government shutdown. You built that system once to be repeated every single time you need it. You can also have a landing page created via another AI.

(34:46):
It takes a look at the branding of the white paper and the image you created, utilizes those same pieces, and creates a landing page that's automatically connected to HubSpot or HighLevel. That ability to spawn full digital marketing systems without having to think about it is how you widen that marketing funnel. That's how a one-person or several-person shop can compete with a team of a hundred.

(35:23):
If all of these things are automated, you don't have to think about it. Now, again, it does need to go through that compliance step, but you've got to widen the funnel. Your CRM is the quarterback. If you have Redtail, you will need to create some more connections between that and your automation software like Zapier or Make. But if you do have a CRM with those marketing automations, that's where you've got all your client information and you're triggering off all these other automations. All of that work happens while you're sleeping.

(36:18):
It's constantly happening in the background. Once you build it that one time, it will repeat every single time. And that's how, when you surround yourself with these AI agents daisy-chained together, you can really start creating the amount of content and personal experience that's going to be a game-changer.

(36:44):
One thing that I haven't talked about yet—and this is a personal decision—is that if someone has opted into your marketing, AI agents can respond almost immediately. We know about digital marketing: you need to respond as quickly as possible. If you have a phone number, you need to be dialing that number almost immediately to start building a relationship based on trust. There are AI agents out there right now that can immediately do outbound calls. You can't do it to cold call, but as soon as they're captured into your marketing system where they've opted in, there are AI agents that can do appointment setting with a higher level of precision than most human beings.

(37:47):
Again, it's not perfect, but I know of an apartment complex that went from 36% to 97% of calls leading to an apartment actually filled. Because when someone reaches out, they've expressed interest, and the quicker we can act on that moment of intention and build mutual trust, the better. These systems that can feel impersonal can actually feel very personal to the person experiencing them.

(38:30):
All of these systems are great. Ultimately, you need to have a clear marketing activity or call to action you want them to engage in. I would tell you that should be your website so you can capture the right information and have leads pre-qualify themselves. Daisy-chaining AI systems and agents is the way Sam Altman was talking about how there will be a one-person, $1 billion company sometime in the next year or several years. The potential is there. What all of us need to do is look at things differently. There were a lot of companies scared about the personal computing revolution or the internet, saying, "What are people going to do with computers?" or "Are people really going to buy things on the internet?"

(40:09):
Well, it's not a passing fad, and AI is not a passing fad either. When you can connect these different AI agents together and get them connected into your CRM, that's when really magical things can happen. So this is all fine and good, but how do you make it real? Number one: you can learn it yourself. The great thing about AI is you can have it create a custom learning plan for you. The challenging thing, of course, is that most of us don't have the amount of time necessary. So maybe there's someone else in your business who can learn how to do these things.

(40:59):
Number two: find a marketing company that you can partner with.

(41:05):
Number three: there are a bunch of solopreneurs doing this very thing for companies across every industry right now. With HighLevel, you can go download blueprints and custom ones built online. You can buy the core of these automation systems and then tweak them for your specific business. On Make or Zapier, there are a bunch of Zaps already built out for you. You don't have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to think in systems and make that cognitive shift to say, "What's a system I can build that will take this problem off my plate forever?" Any one of these options is fine, but the key thing is you have to take it seriously.

(42:10):
There is a coming day where the larger shops with many hands making light work will find that human limitation to be a liability. When people figure out how to do this, you're going to see a big shift in our industry between the people who figured it out and the people who didn't. The business is going to flow to the people who figure it out. AI agents and systems are just going to become more interconnected. The more we can do today to figure out that experience we want our clients to have and how to utilize these systems to be more nimble, some incredible things are going to happen in your business.

(43:07):
The first billion-dollar one-person company is coming. There are people right now, young kids, thinking about how they could do it differently. They don't need a big shop; they can automate everything necessary. There's someone in a garage right now figuring this out and they're going to change the way everything happens. So the question is: is that going to be you or the people on your team? Because it's going to happen. David can become Goliath. When you think about the personal computing revolution, the internet revolution, and the experience economy, there's nothing like what's happening right now.

(44:12):
It's incredible how many of these systems can be sophisticated and create the content and experiences right now that are going to change your client's experience and make them want to stay clients forever. Thank you guys very much.