AI Can’t Fix Bad Marketing [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 165]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;24;07
Bob Ruffolo
If you're using AI to write your content, build your website, or cut your videos. It's a real chance. It's quietly making your marketing worse. Not because AD is bad, because most people had the keys before they ever define what good actually looks like. They can't know what good looks like if you don't. So today I brought in Big Data, who has coached over 500 businesses to lay out the order of operations, what you had to nail before you ever open up Claude or checkbook.

00;00;24;08 - 00;00;34;01
Bob Ruffolo
So when you finally do, it multiplies the results. Instead of flooding the world with more of what doesn't need garbage. Let's get into it.

00;00;34;03 - 00;00;52;21
Stephanie Baiocchi
You're listening to the Endless Customers podcast, brought to you by the team at impact. Endless customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. If you want to learn the principles of endless customers and how you can implement them in your business, pick up a copy of Endless Customers, a national bestseller wherever books are sold.

00;00;52;21 - 00;01;14;10
Stephanie Baiocchi
Ready to start implementing endless customers in your business? Talk to impact about how our coaching program can help you implement endless customers to success. And if you want to experience endless customers in person, don't miss our upcoming event! Endless customers lived in Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the seventh, 2026. Registration is now open. And now on to the show.

00;01;14;11 - 00;01;16;22
Stephanie Baiocchi
Here's your host, Bob Ruffolo.

00;01;16;24 - 00;01;36;29
Bob Ruffolo
And welcome back to the Endless Customers podcast. I am here today with one of my best friends in the whole world. Then to then welcome to the show. Great to be back, Bob. Now then, just for the audience who doesn't know you, and I'm be surprised if anyone does know who you are of our audience. How long have we known each other now?

00;01;37;01 - 00;01;56;12
Bob Ruffolo
Just over 15 years. Years. How long have we worked together? Just under 15 years. 15 years. So then has been part of impact since? Pretty much the very beginning. We've seen everything together, man. We've been up and down the road so many times, we sure of, and somehow we've remained really good friends through all of it. So funny story.

00;01;56;12 - 00;02;06;24
Bob Ruffolo
Before we get started, then quit once. Sure did want to tell that story. I was right after finishing up my Masters was.

00;02;06;26 - 00;02;08;20
Vin Gaeta
Done in Connecticut for what I thought.

00;02;08;20 - 00;02;11;28
Bob Ruffolo
And what year is this?

00;02;12;01 - 00;02;14;14
Vin Gaeta
2014? 2013?

00;02;14;15 - 00;02;15;14
Bob Ruffolo
Probably somewhere around. Yeah.

00;02;15;20 - 00;02;21;24
Vin Gaeta
And I was ready to head back home to Long Island. I gave you my notice and you looked me in the eyes and said, no.

00;02;21;27 - 00;02;26;17
Bob Ruffolo
Yep. That's a leadership lesson, everybody. Yes. No means no. No means no. No.

00;02;26;22 - 00;02;33;05
Vin Gaeta
You're out. How? You could give me a few more months and then work remote as long as you need to. And this is pre-COVID, before remote work was a thing.

00;02;33;06 - 00;02;51;15
Bob Ruffolo
And yes, way back in that day, I took that, ran with it. And here we are. It's been been a ride, and I don't want to go to off topic right at the beginning of the episode, but yeah, the company was so grassroots right then, you know, we were just building it. We brought seven of us or something like that, and we had one, one room that was our entire office.

00;02;51;18 - 00;03;06;25
Bob Ruffolo
You know, we had folding tables for desks. It was, you know, but we've we've been through everything together, man. And I am so grateful that you're on the team and that, you know, we get to do what we get to do together all the time. And, you know, that feeling is mutual. But we have a topic to get to today.

00;03;06;25 - 00;03;25;06
Bob Ruffolo
We sure do. And when planning this episode, then we know we want to have been on the episode. And Ben does incredible work with clients for many, many years. Anyone that's ever worked with Ben will rave about how much they love working with you. But you know, when we were playing a topic, I asked Vin. I was like, all right, what are we going to talk about?

00;03;25;07 - 00;03;47;08
Bob Ruffolo
And I was like, Vin, any of your clients do anything cool with AI? Obviously I want to know, like, you're doing anything cool with AI and you're like, Bob, my clients need to walk before they run. And I was like, that's our topic. So obviously everyone hears headlines. Everyone's like, oh, we should be doing this with AI, which is view to video, this thing on LinkedIn.

00;03;47;08 - 00;04;05;12
Bob Ruffolo
It's like all these possible things you could be doing, and HubSpot has got this new AI feature and that new AI feature, and it's like, cool. There's a lot of stuff we can do. You're like, I, as a coach who am responsible for making sure my clients are successful. I can't start with these things. Why?

00;04;05;15 - 00;04;26;26
Vin Gaeta
Because at the end of the day, we are bombarded every day with the new AI. This the new AI that. You got to go use Claude to code this. And we're bombarded with so many ways to go make life easier, better, faster, stronger. But so often in every part of life, you fall back to your weakest process, your weakest foundation.

00;04;26;26 - 00;04;42;16
Vin Gaeta
And if you're not setting that strong foundation out of the gate, my words you have no business going to see how AI can help augment, build, and improve your efficiencies because you don't know what good looks like out of the gate. So AI can't know what good looks like if you don't.

00;04;42;17 - 00;04;44;05
Bob Ruffolo
What does that mean?

00;04;44;07 - 00;05;11;18
Vin Gaeta
It means we really need to boil things down. And I love analogies. Anyone that's worked with me knows that I love analogies. You got to have your sea legs before you can sail the ship. You got to be able to create your foundation, build the the engine, do the the invisible work. I say that a lot. The invisible work of building the process, testing it, and then finding out how AI can augment, make it faster, make it better, make it stronger, make it easier for the human.

00;05;11;18 - 00;05;16;22
Vin Gaeta
But you got to start at the core level, getting the basics down. So.

00;05;16;22 - 00;05;33;28
Bob Ruffolo
So what might this look like in practice. Yeah. So and let's go through a few different areas of what we help clients with. We can talk about content. We talk about video. We could talk about building a tool for your website. Could talk about building your entire website. We can talk about your CRM. We could talk about let's go through all of these.

00;05;34;04 - 00;05;41;03
Bob Ruffolo
Let's start with like the written content. Yeah. What is having your sea legs with written content?

00;05;41;05 - 00;06;03;29
Vin Gaeta
I think knowing sea legs comes from making sure that we're having the right conversations around brand, around voice, around the edge that our content needs to take. No one stops the scroll if you don't have an edge, if you don't have something that makes you pay attention and it's easy to just ask AI, we're a roofing company. What should what should we talk about in our content?

00;06;03;29 - 00;06;07;21
Vin Gaeta
What are the things that our audiences care about? And you'll get decent answers.

00;06;07;28 - 00;06;10;00
Bob Ruffolo
You say, hey, go write those and you have articles.

00;06;10;02 - 00;06;31;25
Vin Gaeta
Yeah, and you could see some success. But does anyone care? Are you just adding more AI garbage out into the world? Because you didn't take the time to have some real conversations, you just started feeding it to the machine. So that is where I always challenge folks to start. How do we need to show up? What are we seeing in the marketplace that we disagree with?

00;06;32;00 - 00;06;42;27
Vin Gaeta
And when we're working with content managers, what are the most important things for you to understand out of the gate? So if AI feed you garbage, you know that it's garbage and you can take it.

00;06;42;28 - 00;07;10;19
Bob Ruffolo
That's the big thing right there. Yeah, because AI will show you whatever you ask for. And if you are unaware, you may say, okay, that's it's AI. I trust it's good, but it might not be good. Right? So, for example, I mean, obviously there could be factual issues, but when we're talking about the written content, we're talking about how do we actually create content that's going to build trust and move people through the buying process?

00;07;10;21 - 00;07;30;14
Bob Ruffolo
Those are fundamental things that you have to know when you're looking at content, is this going to do it or not do it. And if you don't know, you can't tell the AI that it's wrong. And we all have had experiences with AI where it's like, no, that's not right. And here's what you miss. And it goes, oh, you're right, let me change that for you.

00;07;30;14 - 00;07;50;29
Bob Ruffolo
And then it's like, still not right. Do it again. That's right. And it's like okay, sorry about that. Right. We've all had those experiences. But the reason why we're able to do that is because we have judgment, we've got experience, we've got expertise. And without that you're going to have garbage. And that's where you spend your time with clients.

00;07;50;29 - 00;07;52;22
Bob Ruffolo
Is building that first.

00;07;52;25 - 00;08;15;14
Vin Gaeta
Yeah. Building what good looks like. And that's not to say that we don't start clients using AI out of the gate. Right. There's there's baby steps to get your sea legs. You can use it for outlining, for helping make sure that you have the right SEO and signals going into it from an optimization standpoint, but it should never replace the foundations of what good content can look like.

00;08;15;14 - 00;08;39;08
Vin Gaeta
Making sure that you're talking to your subject matter experts internally because you, for all intents and purposes, could, out of the box, create a custom GPT or a cloud skill that feels like an expert. Yeah, but you have the experience in-house, and those folks have stories and passionate responses that AI will never get. And that's that's creating a workflow that you start your foundation.

00;08;39;08 - 00;08;55;01
Vin Gaeta
You understand the players on the field for your your business, and then you start building a processes around that to help augment, to get more out of it. Yeah. Where it's not just plain vanilla stuff, it's got that edge. It's got this the the stake in the ground that is uniquely your business.

00;08;55;03 - 00;09;12;26
Bob Ruffolo
You know, another, another idea or thing that came to me is, again, trying to think about writing articles where we can if we don't have. And this is so basic, if we don't have fundamentals, we could be creating risk in our business. And the example I'm thinking of is all right, so we have AI write an article. We go to Google.

00;09;12;26 - 00;09;30;24
Bob Ruffolo
We find an image we put in the article say I want you to put this in the the article. And AI is like okay, here it is. But what AI is not telling you is like, no, you do that. You might be having copyright issues and you might have a letter showing up your office saying that you. Oh.

00;09;30;26 - 00;09;49;29
Bob Ruffolo
Shutterstock $1,500 if you don't and you have to pay and you have to pay this by the end of the week, right? So again, that's like the education experience, the expertise. And honestly for me that's experience. Right. Because we made that mistake times before. And those letters showed up because when I was young and dumb and we were starting a blog, we did that.

00;09;49;29 - 00;10;14;22
Bob Ruffolo
But I learned through that. So now I know when I'm instructing, I'm doing things the right way because I just know better. And for many companies, when they're building marketing, teams are hiring younger people that don't have these lived experience. They don't have this knowledge and they can depend on I know a is great when you know the right questions to ask and you're like, hey, how can I have better scheme on this page?

00;10;14;22 - 00;10;32;09
Bob Ruffolo
Or how can I make this page more accessible? Or how can I do this? It'll give you great information and then you might say, you know, be smart enough in another training that you sure you do is now how do I take that to the next level? And I'll take that next level. Right. But in the first pass you make a lot of mistakes.

00;10;32;12 - 00;10;57;03
Vin Gaeta
The schema piece is it resonates with me because as I was optimizing a client's site for schema, this was as recent as a few months ago. It still screwed it up. I'm a developer by background, right? That's where I started. It didn't wrap things in a script tag. So for the non-technical, geeky folks, for the code to actually work in the the header of your website, you have to have the schema wrapped in a script tag.

00;10;57;06 - 00;11;14;20
Vin Gaeta
And GPT gave me everything I asked for for the schema, but it didn't wrap it in a script tag. If I didn't catch that, it would have went live, it wouldn't have been validated, and it would have been additional time to go actually make it work. Instead, I was able to catch that the human did the thing that the AI couldn't do.

00;11;14;22 - 00;11;35;19
Bob Ruffolo
Now talk to me about saying the written word. You mentioned schema, but what are some other skills that you see that the folks that you're working with, they need to be trained on this to actually get the most out of AI or anything else that you feel like your team. I know your team does more of the content training, but you're overseeing it.

00;11;35;24 - 00;11;46;02
Bob Ruffolo
What are some other things like they have to have this knowledge to get the most out of their written content, and they will never get that if they don't know it. And then AI, it's not going to work.

00;11;46;04 - 00;12;04;14
Vin Gaeta
There's a this might sound wrong and I'm sorry for anyone. The audience. There has to be a common sense thing, right? Because the the human, the content manager is going to know the depth and breadth of your content catalog. And yeah, you could feed that to AI and train it to, to crawl your website and create agents to help with that.

00;12;04;19 - 00;12;17;10
Vin Gaeta
But at the end of the day, you know what the right buyer journey is. So you know what links should be linked to in your content. You know where your calls to action should be guiding someone to. And could you train a bot to do it? Absolutely.

00;12;17;14 - 00;12;27;18
Bob Ruffolo
You have to teach the company to think about the buyer's journey first, right? To map that, even to ask AI to say, hey, we need to get our buyer journey right first before we start writing content. Right?

00;12;27;22 - 00;12;46;24
Vin Gaeta
That's the foundational stuff. Because if you don't know what the end zone for your article is, what the one thing the user should do after that AI could give you the wrong next step. AI is likely going to shove it down into raise your hand and talk to sales when the next step might be go take this quiz.

00;12;46;25 - 00;12;54;15
Vin Gaeta
Go read this guide. Go read this other article. In all AI wants to do is please you as the operator of the AI.

00;12;54;15 - 00;13;09;03
Bob Ruffolo
Yes, and I will always try to please you because as soon as you don't like the reactions game from I, you're like, I don't want to use it anymore. And that's not good for their business model. So it's always going to try to make you like it and want to use it more, and it's going to try to please you.

00;13;09;05 - 00;13;32;09
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah, it's a good point. You know, as we as I asked that question, I thought of one, two. It's important for AOL again, if a company is creating articles and I just had the blog or create articles, they never even really heard the term ayo or just thinking that way. They might not format their articles with questions as headers, right?

00;13;32;10 - 00;13;59;00
Bob Ruffolo
If you really want to get more visibility today, it's not the old game of of SEO anymore where you just keyword stuff and write lots of content and all that. Today it's it's much more about Ayo and it's more small snippets with a question header and maybe even FAQs in the articles. Again, that something has to be taught so that you want either no, no to ask AI to do that and then to make sure that that's actually getting done.

00;13;59;04 - 00;14;01;23
Bob Ruffolo
And again, we're still unwritten articles. We haven't done a video yet.

00;14;01;27 - 00;14;10;12
Vin Gaeta
And to that point there's someone out there saying, but yeah, you can train it to do that. You absolutely can. I'm not saying that you can't, but I would.

00;14;10;12 - 00;14;12;28
Bob Ruffolo
Want training it if you know the training. Exactly. You're not.

00;14;12;28 - 00;14;34;01
Vin Gaeta
Going to go do that. And who's going to be the person to say, yeah, these five articles were great, but these last two were absolute garbage. You asked really weirdly worded questions. In my experience, the more we lean on AI, it's like anything you can start getting a little bit lax in the best practices. You start hitting a stride in the gym.

00;14;34;01 - 00;14;56;05
Vin Gaeta
Maybe you take a couple extra days off because you're hitting your goals. You can really start not being as as diligent in the best practices that you know to be true. Because you didn't set the right foundation, you didn't make sure that you had that critical skill to call out anything else that's incorrect in what you're getting.

00;14;56;07 - 00;15;23;03
Bob Ruffolo
Video is an interesting one, because there's a ton of tools out to help you with AI and video. And Gemini just released Omni, at least a new edition of it, so no shortage of that. But again, what are you teaching your clients around video that if they didn't know these things and had that foundation, that their video program would not actually drive customers?

00;15;23;06 - 00;15;44;17
Vin Gaeta
A lot of it is things that y'all have already heard from other episodes in the podcast, right? How do we show up and get that question, question preview promise so that we're actually pulling folks in to the the content and not losing folks. Right. You got to hook them in. You got to stop the scroll. So AI is an awesome augment to the process.

00;15;44;17 - 00;16;07;08
Vin Gaeta
And yes, there's definitely things where you could use AI to help edit and control, control things, color, optimize things, color. Correct. But again, if you don't have the eye for it, you're not going to know if it actually is going to hit the mark and resonate with the audience. If you haven't built that foundational skill, if you haven't, put the processes in place to make sure that those things are going to be correct.

00;16;07;09 - 00;16;24;28
Bob Ruffolo
So you can produce a script for you and it might seem fine, but if you really know what a great script for a high performing marketing video that actually moves people through the buying process is supposed to look like and do, you're going to see if you just ask a producer, scripts can be wrong 99% of the time, right?

00;16;24;29 - 00;16;45;28
Bob Ruffolo
Maybe more. And that's what you're building. Is that muscle there? And the other thing I would think about with video, to which I know you guys do an amazing job of, is actually getting a video program started in a company. It's getting people over that fear of saying, listen, we're going to stick with the written word. And, you know, people want to be in camera and we don't know how to do it.

00;16;46;01 - 00;17;08;03
Bob Ruffolo
It's it's it's overwhelming. It's shocking. Okay. Well, you know, we're living in a video world and if we're not producing video and YouTube is probably the most important channel for every business to be a producing content on, and that's where a coach like you comes in. It's like we would say we're going to walk before we run. No, we're gonna get in front of the camera, going to be comfortable.

00;17;08;03 - 00;17;23;29
Bob Ruffolo
We're going to have somebody here knows how to use the camera and all the equipment, and we're going to be they're going to be able to capture the footage and the footage and produce YouTube videos, and then we're gonna teach them how to do really good YouTube videos. You can use AI for tips, and then and then it's actually getting done.

00;17;24;06 - 00;17;27;13
Bob Ruffolo
That's the power of a coach. And that's the walking I think you're talking about before running.

00;17;27;15 - 00;17;47;08
Vin Gaeta
Yeah. At the end of the day, no one I'm broad strokes this statement. No one showed up into most of the roles that we talk about planning to be. Video first, no one got into sales to get in front of a video camera. I say that to almost every company that we coach because there's an element of getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

00;17;47;10 - 00;17;52;08
Vin Gaeta
I've been doing video for ten years. I still don't love being in front of a camera. It's just not normal.

00;17;52;08 - 00;17;52;21
Bob Ruffolo
It's so.

00;17;52;21 - 00;18;16;16
Vin Gaeta
Good today because I can put on the face, and that's how the the human in the process has to show up, right? The best videographers are also directors and producers and can get the best out of the human on the other side. And yeah, the AI can help with scripting, the AI can help with the editing and all those parts, but the human has to be able to control the robot in that situation and get the most out of the other side of the camera.

00;18;16;17 - 00;18;39;16
Bob Ruffolo
And does the company know that, hey, actually, the make a high performing video culture around here, that we can actually have a YouTube channel that has 100,000 scribes and transform the business and all that type of stuff. All it takes is having a role that somebody owns video inside the company, and when we have that, then everything falls into place and then let that person be so AI powered.

00;18;39;19 - 00;19;05;18
Bob Ruffolo
That person still has to have the foundations. Absolutely. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Let's talk about coding. Let's talk about like building tools that can be software. It can be apps, could be self-service tools. It could be all that type of stuff. Again, is there fundamentals that that we have to think about before we just start going to Claude and say building something?

00;19;05;20 - 00;19;27;14
Vin Gaeta
This is an interesting one for me. And I have thoughts on both sides of the table here. Vibe coding enables us to get proofs of concept and powerful things built very quickly. We've been working on one for a while now, right? And it lets you get things that could be an expensive endeavor out and into the wild to test, prove the model and see if it's working.

00;19;27;16 - 00;19;50;17
Vin Gaeta
Yeah. And some of those tools can be viable MVP's version ones. We were just talking about this a little bit before, but the future state might be we need to actually custom build this thing with the right infrastructure for the long haul to make sure that there's no there's no technical debt that your business could be inheriting where AI knows a lot of good things.

00;19;50;17 - 00;20;09;23
Vin Gaeta
But if we don't know what the goal of the tool is, we don't know. Ultimately what the give get is. If someone's going to take five minutes to fill out this tool, what are we giving them out of that? And then the last piece that is the foundation for any sort of vibe coding in my mind. How does that data get into our system and into our humans hands?

00;20;09;26 - 00;20;30;07
Vin Gaeta
Yeah, because the only broad strokes in this statement, the only reason to build the tool is to enable the buyer to have a better experience, which also means we should be able to collect data to improve once they raise their hand at zero moment of truth. The experience for the sales process, right? It's that it's that one two punch.

00;20;30;08 - 00;20;34;26
Vin Gaeta
We improve the marketing side and that enables us to improve the sales side.

00;20;34;28 - 00;20;53;08
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah. And I think the other real big value of having a coach working with you on this type of stuff too, is especially someone like you that's worked with so many businesses. You probably worked with 500 businesses since you've been here. You've seen so many different things. You've seen, you know, you've seen what's worked. We've seen what hasn't.

00;20;53;08 - 00;21;10;03
Bob Ruffolo
Different industries, different tactics, all the type of stuff. You seen how things have changed. You know, when you go to a company and it's like, we want to build this tool for our website. You just like your 3 or 4 steps always ahead of them and you're helping them one get there faster, but to not make mistakes.

00;21;10;04 - 00;21;30;08
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah. And one of the mistakes I very, very much worry about is security. You know, it's so easy for you to go to AI and say, hey build me this tool. And if you don't know anything about the back end of it, you don't even know to ask about the back end of it. You're just like, wow, look what it did.

00;21;30;08 - 00;21;48;14
Bob Ruffolo
Just built me this tool. How do I put this on my website? It tells you it's like copy paste. It's on my website now. And to your point, like is it all wired and plumbed up. So it's going to pass everything through. But does that mean anyone you know if you say, how do I get this? And it just tells you that you know how to connect in the most basic way?

00;21;48;15 - 00;22;01;14
Bob Ruffolo
Are you creating vulnerabilities to your entire company and CRM, your website? Take your whole website down, put it, you know, put viruses on your all your customers computers. Give your company a black eye. Like, do you know if you're even putting yourself in that position right now or not?

00;22;01;14 - 00;22;27;12
Vin Gaeta
So the security, the ability, the way that the code base is, again, it goes down to the foundations, the understanding. And I am not saying that everyone that's listening needs to go take coding courses. You should likely know the basics, but it reminds me of an article that I was actually reading a few weeks ago where someone had spent weeks building this really robust tool with AI, and every time that they got a version done, they went back and had AI layer on top of it.

00;22;27;14 - 00;22;48;02
Vin Gaeta
And then they got it to the point where they proved the concept. The model was ready, they handed it to a human developer and the person was like, what did you just give me? I have to rebuild all of this because AI doesn't think that way and I think it's in. How can I get the fastest potential solution for you, no matter what garbage I'm going to create in the back end?

00;22;48;09 - 00;23;09;03
Vin Gaeta
And that is some of the stuff that the vibe coding piece I love. I want to get myself out of a job from a developer standpoint, but you need to know how it's going to affect the decisions three, 4 or 5 years down the road. So you're not having to rebuild stuff that was done very quickly for all the right reasons.

00;23;09;06 - 00;23;36;10
Vin Gaeta
So as you look at it, it really does start with having the right plan. If you're going to go vibe code something, what is the end zone that you're looking for and what is the the V1? If we get to this, it shows that we can spark a better conversation because they took four minutes to fill out a quick tool, and maybe we don't get it or capture any information, but it enables you to say, all right, if you're thinking about putting a hand dryer in your bathroom, here's the variables you need to consider.

00;23;36;10 - 00;23;54;28
Vin Gaeta
If you're going to get rid of the paper towel. The dispensers that are also in that restroom. Awesome. We can go like 15 yards down the field in that conversation. And maybe the step two is you put in all the variables for your your facility, and now it spits you out an eye report. Yeah, that one's probably gated because there's a bigger value to that.

00;23;55;03 - 00;24;15;27
Vin Gaeta
But you started with V1. You got AI to help you and you knew going into it what success looked like. I oftentimes here folks just say I'm going to go vibe code and see where I get to. And that terrifies my soul because you're inviting all those vulnerabilities, all those technical debt things that can pop up without the right plan, without getting your sea legs before you sail that ship.

00;24;16;00 - 00;24;42;22
Bob Ruffolo
Exactly, exactly. Now, this has been great. And I think I think what we're talking about can can cascade everything. Other element of what we talk about with endless customers. But then like without making this episode too long, what is like the big overarching thing you want companies thinking about? Okay, so we can just go and do this with the AI, or we can start really learning the principles, and Haas may come in and help us make sure we're not making mistakes.

00;24;42;23 - 00;24;47;04
Bob Ruffolo
Like, what's the biggest takeaway that you would want the audience to take away from this?

00;24;47;05 - 00;24;57;17
Vin Gaeta
We need to focus on what the end end is, what the end goal is, so that you can make sure you're setting the right foundation, know what good should look like, and create the processes.

00;24;57;17 - 00;25;00;27
Bob Ruffolo
And output and good from a system and operations. Absolutely.

00;25;00;28 - 00;25;16;16
Vin Gaeta
Yeah. And then make sure that you've documented those things. We fall to the weakest link in the process chain. And if you don't have that process documented of what good looks like, what the guardrails are, I don't think you have any business going to look at how AI can augment and update your process without doing that due diligence.

00;25;16;16 - 00;25;35;10
Vin Gaeta
First, I'll go back to the workout example. You have to have the right form. Otherwise you're going to hurt yourself in the long run. Yeah, you can go crank out a bunch of bench presses with a heavy weight, but if your form is wrong, you're going to pull your shoulder out and Terrell ligament. Don't do that. Make sure you have the right stuff set up in the beginning.

00;25;35;13 - 00;25;54;11
Bob Ruffolo
Well, you know, again, I hope you guys are seeing from this episode, there's a clear reason why those of you that read the book Endless Customers, you know that we have the endless customer journey and we track with the endless customer scorecard. And we have so many clients now that have gone through that entire journey and different orders somewhat, but they get through that entire journey.

00;25;54;15 - 00;26;13;15
Bob Ruffolo
And I would say many of them, if not most of them in this organization you've worked with in some level or some part, you've you've had such a contribution to so many businesses because you just see these things so well, and that's just the credit to who you are as a coach and how you see things. And that's our mission here is to bring a thousand businesses.

00;26;13;15 - 00;26;35;18
Bob Ruffolo
That's our that's our mission. Our short term mission is bring a thousand businesses through that journey to the other side where they have endless customers. You've helped so many businesses get through that journey. So we're grateful for that. And it shows when you talk about how you're looking at these things, that's why people get through there. And we're going to make this a little bit of a shorter episode because it's Friday afternoon and I really want to go have a beer with my buddy.

00;26;35;21 - 00;26;48;21
Bob Ruffolo
You don't know, there's a brewery right next door to us, so we're going to try to go sneak over there a little bit early. So don't tell anybody. But if you are watching this all the way to the end. Go ahead and leave a comment either on LinkedIn or YouTube and just a little beer emoji. So I know you watch it all the way through.

00;26;48;22 - 00;27;01;09
Bob Ruffolo
We'll know what it means when we see it. So then thank you so much for for joining the episode. And if people want to work with you, they think that you can help them. The best way I think is just go through our website, go.

00;27;01;09 - 00;27;10;28
Vin Gaeta
Through the website, find me on LinkedIn and we'd love to start a conversation. See how we can help you set the right foundation so you can hit your stride with AI as we look to that next level. Excellent.

00;27;10;29 - 00;27;18;20
Bob Ruffolo
You're the man, Ben. Thank you, thank you. All right, let's spend another episode of the Endless Customers podcast. Until next time. We'll see you at the next episode.

00;27;18;22 - 00;27;24;29
Stephanie Baiocchi
If you liked this episode, please take a minute to leave us a review. Thanks for checking out the Endless Customers podcast.