Episode 103 - Kaitlyn Study

Erik Martinez:Welcome to this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today we're talking about automating and operationalizing AI in your business, not the nuts and bolts of which buttons to click, but why this matters strategically and how it becomes a real competitive advantage.

Erik Martinez: To help us unpack that, I'm joined by Kaitlyn Study, entrepreneur and owner of South Street and Co. For the past year, Kaitlyn has automated 250 plus tasks across her business, and what I love about her story, it's not automation for automation's sake. It's a practical journey. Why she started, what worked, [00:01:00] what broke, what she learned, and where she's going next.

Erik Martinez: Kaitlyn, glad to have you on the show.

Kaitlyn Study: Thanks for having me.

Erik Martinez: I've been, looking forward to this conversation. Kaitlyn, and I have a friendship that goes back a few years. We're in a couple of groups together, and she's brilliant.

Kaitlyn Study: Aw, thanks.

Erik Martinez: So thanks for coming on. Kaitlyn, just to start us off, for anyone who doesn't know you tell us a little bit about, your background.

Kaitlyn Study: So I started the company 10 oh my gosh, in a few months. It's gonna be 11 years ago. Crazy. But, as of now, 10 years ago, and I started it as a side hustle. I worked for a local dermatology group and they hired me to do their marketing and at that time, they just had 10 offices, which was incredible, but really didn't have an online or a brand presence.

Kaitlyn Study: So in the first six months, I helped them redo their logo, slogan, colors, implemented a new website. I worked with another company at that point and then added in social media, SEO, and blogging for the first time. Over the two and a half years that I was there, I helped the [00:02:00] company double in size.

Kaitlyn Study: When I left, they had 17 offices in Central Florida and three out of state. Growing up, my parents had always been advocates of being an entrepreneur. And they were like, why don't you do your own thing? And I just felt like I reached a plateau there and started thinking about applying to other positions.

Kaitlyn Study: Nothing worked out. And then my mom introduced me to her hairdresser. Who was a friend from high school, she was like, I'm paying this company, I don't know what they're doing. I'm not getting any leads. And she was just kind of complaining to my mom. My mom was like, Kaitlyn's thinking about starting her own thing.

Kaitlyn Study: Why don't you talk to her? So, I signed her up. She was my first client. That was in February 2014. She referred me to other people and I built it up and started working mornings, nights, and weekends. It took me a little over a year to leave the full-time job. I was so nervous to put in my resignation.

Kaitlyn Study: I was like, well, he's either gonna fire me or at least let me work two weeks. But a third option happened that I didn't even consider, and he asked me if he could retain me through my new company. And he did that for the next year, which was pretty amazing.

Kaitlyn Study: It's [00:03:00] been 10 plus years now.

Erik Martinez: I love that story because it's similar to many founder stories. I felt like I needed to make a change, and try something new. And now, you're in this almost 11 years and you're starting something new again.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: So Let's talk a little bit about, what you're doing in your business with automation and AI and what started you down this path?

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah, so I'm laughing because I just remember six months in I was like, holy cow, I need to hire another person to help me. I'd never hired anyone before. that person stayed for like six weeks and they actually left to go to one of our clients.

Kaitlyn Study: I was like, wow. That was kind of like a punch in the gut. I was like, how can I clone myself without using math and science?

Kaitlyn Study: I had another really amazing person that I hired probably in like 2017, 2018, and she was gonna be my right hand person. It was great 'cause she would take notes for me, basically do all of these [00:04:00] things that we can you know, automate. It was amazing. Six weeks in, she got an offer from Universal Studios doing their social media and that was her dream job. And I was like, wow, I just got you to a point where I feel like there's like not an elephant sitting on my back anymore, and you can help me. And she was like, yeah, you know, I have to take this.

Kaitlyn Study: And I was happy for her, but I was like, what am I gonna do? A friend and colleague told me about Zapier, and she's like, oh, you should try automating a few things is Zapier. So I think my first automation or zap in the program was if a blog post goes live, then it goes as a draft in our social scheduling platform. It was just like a simple like two step. And I think I was probably on the free plan, back then. I started diving deeper into it and I was like, wow, this is something that I could like heads down, like hours pass by. I can just, create all of these things and what I want to happen.

Kaitlyn Study: We had a VA that we used and she was [00:05:00] great and then had a few things at home changed so she could no longer support us. So we parted ways and we went through a couple other VAs and nothing really worked out. And I was like, you know what?

Kaitlyn Study: We were just like, we're training these people. They're not working out. We need another solution. These are things that we do every single month over and over. There has to be a way that I can automate them.

Kaitlyn Study: And some of them were a lot more complicated than those one or two or however many step Zaps. And I had gone to chat GPT and chat GPT can only take you so far 'cause like, oh well you have to do this. And I'm like, well. This doesn't match up with this. And it's like, oh, thanks for catching that.

Kaitlyn Study: I'm like, that's why I have you. You're supposed to catch that. So anyways, I tried to, get into automating as much as possible. And then was able to do it with the help of somebody that I found and he's on our team now and he's helping us. We surpassed 250 tasks that we've automated. Big ones, little ones, just things that the virtual assistant was helping us [00:06:00] do that are now completely automated for the company.

Erik Martinez: What was the impact of not automating some of those things within your business?

Kaitlyn Study: The impact would be I would have to hire probably a full-time, plus a part-time person just to help maintain and manage everything. And then of course that goes into profitability. But also the time that it saves. One thing is, if the automation makes a mistake, it's always my fault.

Kaitlyn Study: Human error like, somebody forgot to do this, another person didn't do that. There's like multiple things that could happen. If the automation doesn't work, I know that I did something wrong and didn't correctly portray what I was trying to get out of it.

Kaitlyn Study: So it's very, black and white. It's like you didn't do this, so this didn't work, or this didn't run because of X, Y, and Z, but then you get into the weeds of like, oh, okay, now you have all these filters, and now you have all of these things that you have to add in order to make it work how you want it to.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I'm going through a bit of that myself as I [00:07:00] start to implement more automations in my business. The trickiest part is figuring out where is the process gonna break? Because you either don't have the right set of information or you haven't thought through every permutation, which is totally not possible.

Kaitlyn Study: Mm-hmm.

Erik Martinez: I think it's really interesting that you said, Hey, if it breaks, I know I didn't do something.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: Whereas, you were talking about chat GPT can make mistakes and the AI is a little more human versus the automation, and yet sometimes, you bake AI into your automations.Tell us a little bit about that.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah. I'll give you an example. I think this is the best way. I'm a very visual person and do well with examples, so hopefully this helps other people. One automation we've created uses AI. We use it to create conditional logic and give us opinions of certain data. So, when somebody applies on our website, we have uploaded into [00:08:00] the chat GPT AI database, what a great resume looks like for each of the positions that we're hiring for.

Kaitlyn Study: And then based on the job description, the person's LinkedIn, the questions on the questionnaire and their resume, it rates them on a scale of A, B, C, or D. And we've tested it too, so we've put in good resumes versus not good resumes to make sure that the output is correct.

Kaitlyn Study: Because that's one thing too, is you can't just take AI at its word. You have to make sure that everything is tested and that it's accurate. That has helped significantly because I'm sure like a lot of companies, when we put a job posting on LinkedIn, we get like a hundred to 200 applicants, especially if you boost it and pay, the ton of money to get it out there in front of the people.

Kaitlyn Study: That you want it to be in front of your ideal candidates? We're a small company. there's no way I could go through over a hundred resumes. So in the past, what we've done is put A secret question at the end, like, what's your favorite ice cream flavor? Because we wanna make sure everyone reads through the full [00:09:00] job description and that's how we would weed people out.

Kaitlyn Study: If they didn't put in the is there anything else you want us to know about you category, what their favorite ice cream flavor was? We were looking for someone thorough, you didn't put this in so you're eliminated. But also that was manual input that we had to review.

Kaitlyn Study: So with this, we've enabled it to give us a rating scale. And not only that, but tell us why. So the AI comments, why it chose this person, and then we can determine from there. Looking at it whether we wanna move forward with an A, B, or C candidate. If it's a D, it's probably you know, somebody just doesn't have any experience and we're looking for two to three years of experience, so it's not a good fit.

Kaitlyn Study: But then we can review the candidates and see which ones we wanna move forward with.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic use case. I dread going through the pile of resumes that you get because even if it's pretty obvious when you open the resume, like, I'm not gonna keep. That still takes a few [00:10:00] minutes of time to go through everyone. And when you get hundreds and hundreds of candidates, and you wanna put your time in interviewing the candidates who are really good fits.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: One of the things that I'm seeing is that AI isn't perfect and automation isn't perfect. It is today a competitive advantage. And so I think the, question for you is, what did you see first as the biggest advantage? Was it just, Hey, I got rid of a mundane task and now I have time to do something else?

Erik Martinez: Or was it some other element, like speed or quality? what was it that, you started to see as you were going through this process?

Kaitlyn Study: I saw that the details weren't getting missed. And that's what I really love about automation. We time track as an agency to make sure that we're profitable and to know if we need to talk to a client about an increased strategy. So, when you look at time tracking, [00:11:00] typically you look at the end of the month. Well,there's nothing you can do at the end of the month. It's too late. One thing that has helped with details is setting up an automation where if we reach, 90% capacity for a specific project, it'll send a slack message to the entire team and our dedicated time tracking channel.

Kaitlyn Study: Our protocol is for anyone at the company, to reply within three hours if it's relevant to them on Slack. Especially in the time tracking channel to let the other people know who are working on that account, Hey, this took a little bit longer. And then we can say, okay, well I was gonna get a head start on this project. Should I wait until next month? And that is like, chef's kiss gold right there. I mean, can you imagine somebody being like, oh, I was going to get a head start on this project, but it looks like all the hours were used up for X, Y, and Z in this department.

Kaitlyn Study: Should I wait? Yeah, the answer is yes. You should wait because we've already used up all the hours. But if we didn't [00:12:00] have that automation, we couldn't have known that we were coming up to the end of the hours bucket that we have allocated for that client.

Erik Martinez: And I think that is a common issue whether you are, the agency or even on the client side. I remember sitting on the client side working on projects, working on a marketing plan or working on an analysis. And even though many clients don't budget the time the way agencies do, you still have a budget of time.

Erik Martinez: Everybody has a budget of time in their workday.

Erik Martinez: You know, whether that's eight hours, four hours, depending on, how they work And so, I think what you're bringing here is, you're finding ways to, one, identify how you're using your time. Two, you're finding ways to free up some time that you can, apply in other ways.

Erik Martinez: And three, you're also managing your time so that you're getting the most important things done that [00:13:00] are on your to-do list. Is that a fair characterization or am I missing something?

Kaitlyn Study: No, that's really fair. And I think it's also peace of mind knowing that the little things are getting done automatically and you go back and spot check them. Like another example is. We used to automatically update our lead sheet to keep track of our sales process, and now we've automated that as well.

Kaitlyn Study: Now we have real time data that every Monday we say, oh hey, last week's initial calls X amount, so we can see where we are on track. And that automatically gets updated on a spreadsheet. So I think it's a little bit of, peace of mind knowing that things are working at 5:00 AM, 1:00 AM, midnight, whatever the time may be to get done so that you can focus on higher level task and thinking of different ideas of other things that you can automate as well.

Erik Martinez: What was the one surprise automation that you built, like, oh, I'm [00:14:00] just trying to solve this problem, but it solves something bigger?

Kaitlyn Study: One of the things I am trying to do right now is make an SEO agent based on data from competitors' websites. It was a team member's suggestion that we could potentially sell it to people who couldn't afford our agency prices, but wanted a robust SEO agent that could give them feedback. Something more than chat GPT 'cause it has access to the entire internet and sometimes that's overwhelming and can steer you all over the place. I thought that was a good suggestion. So we've been playing with that. We have four phases that we wanna build out for it.

Kaitlyn Study: Honestly, the hiring bot, that's one that we're gonna look at replicating and selling, because if it helps us this much, I can't imagine how it could help other companies who are much bigger than us, who have multiple positions open at the same time, who, have dedicated people to go through hundreds of resumes every single day or every single week.[00:15:00]

Kaitlyn Study: So I thinkthat's come out of this that I didn't expect. I just did this because it was a necessity. I didn't know how I was gonna survive without it. So it's cool to see how it's evolved over the years and how AI's been able to impact it to take it to the next level for a lot of the automations that built.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I find myself going down, a rabbit hole when I'm playing with these tools. A couple weeks ago, we record client meetings, we record internal meetings. I record the podcasts. I've got all this data. And I remember a couple weeks ago, somebody asking a question. How do you turn all that messy data and use it? And I'm like, AI is the way I do it. But the first step was getting all the data into a place I could use it, right? Because I have recordings that go back a long time and I started doing the math on it.

Erik Martinez: I'm like, oh my gosh, if I manually move all these transcripts, it's gonna take me [00:16:00] 40 hours or more to do. I actually took the time and built using Google Cloud platform and Google App Script. Didn't know anything about it other than some things a friend had shown me. And in a day, I built the tool I got all the transcripts moved over where I want, and I built a zap to do the ones that I'm doing now.

Erik Martinez: But this was to get all the history. It was a big one-time job and I saved well over 30 hours doing it. And that amount of time that I invested was even going down a couple rabbit holes. So the question for you is, how do you keep yourself from going down the rabbit hole?

Kaitlyn Study: I do go down the rabbit holes mostly on TikTok because I get so much inspiration from other people. Not just TikTok, but also social media. I like that TikTok is short form. So I can get to the point quickly and go to the next one.

Kaitlyn Study: But I have learned so much actually going down the rabbit holes, like through specific automations I'm looking [00:17:00] for. But, I've learned the hard way that, I'm not really in the day to day and my team is. I was creating these automations and my team was like this is only saving us 30 minutes a month.

Kaitlyn Study: And I was like, oh, stab to the heart, because I thought it was such a good idea.

Kaitlyn Study: So now I talk to them. If it's something relating to content or specifically accounts or client services, I'll say, Hey, this is my idea. What are your thoughts? Could this help you? Because the other thing with automations and AI is you have to get in the mindset of using them. You have to think, okay, I do this over and over, but you don't think that you just do it.

Kaitlyn Study: You have a task list, like I have an Asana list that's never ending, and I'm just like, check it off, check it off. You have to push pause. And say, Hey, I do this over and over. Is there a way that I can automate this? And if it's something that you do daily, multiple times a week, monthly, like our time tracking is [00:18:00] done monthly, but it took us so long to do it.

Kaitlyn Study: It took a virtual assistant four or five hours a month, and that's a large amount of time, especially if they're not working for us full time. So to me, that was worth it. And then everything is accurate in there. I think that's kind of a rabbit hole that I did go down, that I was like, whoa, I need to ask more questions before I start thinking that these are really great ideas.

Kaitlyn Study: And then we spend 8 hours or 10 hours building this automation and testing it and then it saves us 30 minutes a month. That's not gonna equal out until over a year.

Erik Martinez: Right. So, you've basically added a discovery process. I have an idea now. I'm seeking feedback and information and maybe a little research to say, will this actually accomplish the savings or the benefit that I am hoping to achieve with that particular automation? I think that's really smart.

Erik Martinez: I was reading a book. I just finished a couple weeks ago, called The One Thing. And I don't know if you've read it or not, the thing that struck [00:19:00] me, and I haven't been super great at this over the years, is how they framed just really getting super crystal clear on what it is you want to do.

Kaitlyn Study: Mmmhmm.

Erik Martinez: And I considered that discovery process that's a messy part where you're trying to clarify and figure out, oh, this is where I'm going. This is how I can get there and this is the value it'll create. So I think that's a really important lesson.

Kaitlyn Study: One of the trends we see is more and more automation. Some are AI enabled, some will not be. But I think there's this notion and you just hit the nail on the head with your previous comment. This only saved me 30 minutes a month. Was the juice worth the squeeze?

Erik Martinez: I feel like we're about to go through this cycle where everybody wants to automate everything. Whether that is to save on labor, save on time, whatever it is. If you're the CFO, you want to save on labor and time. If you're the CMO, you want to use that time [00:20:00] to grow and build better marketing programs, right?

Erik Martinez: So, depending on where you sit. The objective of how you use that information. But I think there's this romantic notion that AI and automation will solve everything. I don't think that's true, but you've implemented way more automations than I have. Is that true? And if it's not. What are some of the things that people need to think about When you automate, these are the things that you need to consider as you're going in.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah, the answer is no. just like in the example I gave of saving 30 minutes a month. It was very insignificant. We put so much human time into creating that one thing that it was like, okay, this isn't really a savings. it was a stab to the heart.

Kaitlyn Study: 'Cause I was like, oh, this is such a good idea. I was so pumped about it and my team was like. Yeah. this isn't really a big deal for us. And I was [00:21:00] like, dang. So, I think the things that people need to think about are I'm gonna go back to the resume example. I feel like you have to have human element in it, and it can solve time upfront, but you have to set up time in the beginning, like day zero to create this thing. And then when it starts running, you have to test it and test it and test it. There's also a human element. We don't tell someone, no thank you via email automatically. We do that personally, because I don't wanna tell someone automatically, no thank you.

Kaitlyn Study: If they're actually a good fit and the AI made a mistake. So,I think also AI and automation is in this like, shiny new object. Everything is coming out. I mean, you and I talked about like everything that you've been doing with it and, Chat GPT and Gemini.

Kaitlyn Study: And it's just crazy. It's moving at super speed. There are also some things that AI and automations can't do yet that I would love for it to do. An [00:22:00] example is LinkedIn, but it's against LinkedIn's policies to have anything, connected to it.

Kaitlyn Study: I have trouble managing my LinkedIn. I'm kind of scared to go on there 'cause I haven't been on in many months because I have other things to do. I think there is this, shiny new object syndrome, but starting slow testing and asking your team, Hey, is this actually going to help?

Kaitlyn Study: Is a good place and Getting into that mindset of seeing, Hey, is this going to actually help us?

Erik Martinez: Which is a great segue into the next question. If you were working with somebody small business owner, a team leader, who's using AI, they're getting the benefit. They see it, right? Oh, this is so cool. I'm using it every day, which is a phrase I hear a lot, but they haven't operationalized it.

Erik Martinez: You're operationalizing the things that you're doing, you're systematizing them. What would you think they should start with in the first 30 days? [00:23:00] How do they go through and just start with one thing?

Kaitlyn Study: The first thing they need to do is audit what they do every single day. Either time track, like agencies do, or write it down in 15 minute increments. When I hired a business coach, he had me do that and we time tracked through a program called Toggle. I was floored at the amount of time I spent at this in-person networking group.

Kaitlyn Study: It was an hour and a half lunch, 30 minutes there, 30 minutes back. That's a ton of time. We looked at how much of my sales came from that. I think it was like 40% of my time was spent at this in-person networking meeting. And 1.5% of my sales came from it.

Kaitlyn Study: And I was like, whoa! Okay, this is not worth my time anymore. I had been a part of the group for, four years. I made great friendships, but it was like, okay, you have to choose now, because I was so stressed out because I didn't have enough time to do everything on my list and I was falling behind on things.

Kaitlyn Study: So, I think auditing your [00:24:00] time is a huge thing. That can help you get into the mindset of, okay, this is how I can automate these tasks, or these are things that I do over and over. I think the other thing too is starting small, you don't need a whole robust system to review your resumes.

Kaitlyn Study: All you need right now is. Have the form linked to a spreadsheet or have a form linked to your applicant tracking system or your project management. We just put ours in Asana 'cause that's where everything is for us. I think I'm this way too. I'm kind of like go big or go home.

Kaitlyn Study: I don't think about the middle ground. I have to tell other people you're not gonna start with this huge, robust automation. Just start with two steps. How can I get this blog post into my social media and then review it manually? Something like that.

Kaitlyn Study: So I think auditing time and then knowing that you can start small and grow. The other thing too is I get so much inspiration from other people. And that helps me. An example that I'm still mind blown about is [00:25:00] that. In the program high level, you can leave call less voicemails, meaning that it doesn't call someone's phone, it just leaves them a voicemail I record it.

Kaitlyn Study: So it's, it's me, it's my voice. I recorded an MP three, and this is part of our sales follow up process. On day three or something, it's like I can't say their name 'cause I can't insert dynamic data of course into a recording. But, it's like, Hey, I noticed that you reach out. We're really looking forward to working with you, blah, blah, blah.

Kaitlyn Study: I learned that from somebody on TikTok who posted a video like two years ago. I never knew that you could put this into an automation and have a follow up, be a personal voicemail from the owner of the company. But it's an actual person.

Kaitlyn Study: So I think you asked for one thing, but that's three things in one.

Erik Martinez: No, I think that's okay. And I think that's how these things start. if you start small, you can start thinking through the possibilities of all the other things. you can make them as complex or as simple as you want.

Erik Martinez: I know when [00:26:00] I am working through these things, I'm a big prototyper, I'll build my automation manually, step by step, I build this the next part of the process, and iterate through them to figure out if I'm gonna get the output. It takes me a little bit more time upfront, but I've done the testing and validation to get as close as I can without exceeding the 80/20 rule,

Erik Martinez: Because I know there are gonna be situations that come up, especially when you're working with AI, right? if we're just working with spreadsheet data and rows and columns, that's easy. That's pretty deterministic, right? when you're dealing with AI responses, you're gonna get a different answer every single time. Are those answers moving you in the right direction. And I love something you said earlier, which was, hey, we score, I translate that into create a rubric. I use the AI to score everything.

Erik Martinez: Tell me and do the same thing that you did. that's [00:27:00] a small thing. But then I will prototype it before I build the automation because I want to understand that the process I just built works at the end.

Erik Martinez: It takes a little bit more time, but I feel like that juice is worth the squeeze. I'm curious, if somebody's really serious about operationalizing AI and automating pieces of their business that makes sense to automate. What is the big mindset shift they have to make?

Erik Martinez: I think you mentioned one earlier, which is you just have to open your mindset of possibilities and use the tools, but what is the other big thing in your mind?

Kaitlyn Study: I think it's looking at what you do as a company over and over. I do think the biggest thing is shifting your mindset to think, okay, I don't need a human to do this. I maybe need a human to review it, but maybe an automation or AI can complete it and then send it to me for approval.

Erik Martinez: [00:28:00] It's auditing your time. It's seeing, if there are a lot of errors if, the team is always forgetting to do this, or if I didn't send like this invoice on time, or, whatever the case may be.

Kaitlyn Study: If you always are having issues with a certain part of the business, maybe that can be a signal for you to automate it.

Erik Martinez: I think that's great. In fact, I, just published a article about that specific topic. Looking for the ambiguity. Looking for the places you have higher rates, or it's just frustrating to do.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah, I think friction is the perfect word.

Erik Martinez: Friction is like for the things I do where I'm like, oh my God, I dread it, so I just put it off. And it still needs to get done.

Kaitlyn Study: I know

Erik Martinez: And so if I could automate that or have somebody help me automate that, then that friction point becomes, maybe it's still there, but it's not as high.

Erik Martinez: It allows me to focus and not stress about those little things. I had, a [00:29:00] conversation with a gentleman a few months ago on the podcast. His name is David Lacomb. He's brilliant, CMO, incredibly insightful. One of the things he said is I never focus on incrementality. In the context of the conversation we were talking about money.

Erik Martinez: He said, I look at money as a tool to accomplish bigger purposes. He's always striving for the moonshot. And I think, one of the traps that lies in this conversation, you and I are talking about taking little things and solving those problems. Some people might say, but Erik, I really want the moonshot.

Erik Martinez: The reality is. How many years did it take us to get to the moon?

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: From the time we announced the initiative to the time we actually landed somebody on the moon? How many years went by? How many years did it take Amazon to go from just selling books to being one of the largest retailers on the planet?

Kaitlyn Study: How many years does it take to do those [00:30:00] things? The moonshot is the idea that objective at the end. For you, knowing you a little bit better than the audience does,Your main objective was to free up time so you could do other things in your life. Spend more time with your daughter, spend more time thinking and strategizing and making things better.

Erik Martinez: I think that's the moonshot, right? But now we have to take that moonshot and say, okay, well there's a lot of little steps and there's time. We're not trying to land the person on the moon in one day. We know it's gonna take some time to get there, and we're just taking steps there.

Erik Martinez: Before we close out the conversation. What last piece of advice would you like to leave the audience with?

Kaitlyn Study: I think one of the things that we didn't talk about were programs that people can use. So I'm very familiar with Zapier and then we've gotten into N8N. And then I know you and I have talked about make.com as well. So there are a lot of options. Somebody [00:31:00] told me that Google is building out kind of an automation

Erik Martinez: yeah, they are.

Kaitlyn Study: I don't remember what the name of it is. I think everything that I can do within Google, I've already, or I can do also within Zapier, which I'm more familiar with, but I just wanted to share those programs.

Kaitlyn Study: I think a lot with AI is like, oh, everybody's gonna get replaced with AI. I don't think that is true. I think that AI can allow humans to do more higher level things, but it's not going to replace everyone. So you have to get your team's buy-in as well when you start going down this path 'cause it's gonna be a big, scary thing and people are gonna think, oh, is this going to replace me? Is this gonna prevent me from getting the promotion? So you have to sit down with them and get their buy-in as well, because this is gonna be something new.

Kaitlyn Study: But it's also going to be really incredible because think about it, if you can take off. tasks, like 10 hours a week from [00:32:00] your CMO or your CFO because you've automated it, but you trust and verify everything that the automation is doing 'cause you review the reports that it's creating.

Kaitlyn Study: That is pretty incredible because then they can focus on higher level things. I think that's huge piece of it and a lot of people are. getting more into that now, AI is something that we've been using for a few years but in the beginning everybody was scared of it.

Kaitlyn Study: But if you're thinking about implementing AI or automation for the first time, you need to have that heart to heart conversation. the goal is not to replace people. It's to have you do better, higher level work that you're really great at, and to have the nuanced, repetitive tasks taken care of.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I kind of look at it in terms of evolution and revolution. You hear these stories in the media like this CEO came out and said, yes, we are laying off 20% of our workforce because of AI. They might have been doing that anyways.

Erik Martinez:

Erik Martinez: Evolution is really, trying to figure out [00:33:00] how to use these tools free up some time, and then use that capacity in a new way. And I think the most innovative companies and the most persistent companies will do that. And the companies who resist that concept I honestly believe that they'll struggle because if you just operationalize everything. You are losing some of the spark of creativity that I think only us humans can provide.

Kaitlyn Study: Yeah, That's the perfect example of where AI and automation can come in because you let talented people do higher level thought processes, have more time to get projects done because these things are being automated behind the scenes. Even your accounts team, if they don't have to send a recap email after every client meeting or download the notes and upload it into a folder. Even simple things like that, that's saving them probably 30 minutes per client meeting per month. That's huge. Then they can focus on, updating the team saying, Hey, this is what's going on with the client. It [00:34:00] gives them more brain space to focus on things instead of getting, caught in the weeds with some of the little things that you can automate.

Erik Martinez: I think that's totally true, and it's true not just for, account managers and agencies. It's true for every single kind of business.

Erik Martinez: You can free up some time to use more creative thinking to solve your biggest business challenges. Is there ROI there? Yes. Are you gonna be able to calculate it easily? I don't think so. I think it's a gray area.

Kaitlyn Study: I think so too.

Erik Martinez: If you start this process, you'll see the benefits in a year.

Erik Martinez: You'll see happier people, right? better outcomes for your clients or for your business. I think all those things are true.

Erik Martinez: Well Kaitlyn, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way to connect?

Kaitlyn Study: So you can go to our website at southstreetmarketing.com, and then my personal email is Kaitlyn@southstreetmarketing.com. We're getting ready to roll out some of [00:35:00] these new offerings, so I'm excited about that. But even, for consulting, coaching, whatever that may be for automation. So that's how you can reach us.

Erik Martinez: Awesome. And that's Kaitlyn with a k. We'll put everything in the show notes. Thanks for coming on and sharing your story. What you have done is absolutely amazing and, I think sharing that knowledge with the universe is a wonderful thing. Thank you.

Kaitlyn Study: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Erik Martinez: That's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you very much for listening in and have a fantastic day.

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