Welcome And Sponsor Note

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is the Empowering Healthy Business Podcast, and I'm your host, Cal Wilder. Each episode, we'll dive into topics important to folks who want to run businesses that are both nicely profitable, sustainable, and scalable, and who want to achieve balance in their lives and realize their potential inside and outside of work. The show is sponsored by SmartBooks, provider of bookkeeping and accounting for businesses. Let's get started. So

Why AI Keeps Coming Up

SPEAKER_00 0:26

one of the most common topics in these episodes is AI. And almost all my guests are grappling with it unless uh they're have the luxury of being in the creative brand development space and not have to do content creation or marketing operations. Um and so I know with a lot of uh software and technology decisions, you can either try to figure it out and do it yourself, or you can rent something that somebody else has already built. And so I'm really excited to have today's guest on the show. He is an SEO systems builder, an AI growth entrepreneur, and a digital infrastructure operator. He's built and scaled SaaS platforms focused on AI-powered automation and SEO workflows and other operational systems for agencies and small and mid-sized businesses. He's also launched other ventures spanning online real estate and crypto and digital business infrastructure in addition to marketing industry work. Um he's the co-founder of Helm and Willow. Zach Francis, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

What's up, Cal, yeah? Thanks so much for having me on. Appreciate it and uh great intro there and um excited to talk about it. And kind of like you'd said, a lot of people are um either kind of grappling with AI or they're diving headfirst. And we chose to go the kind of dive headfirst into it and learn how to harness it in the way that we want. So I'm excited to get into it with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Awesome. Well, uh, before we dig into the details, why don't you tell me a little bit more about the business and what's the single most powerful strategy that's driving success in your company these days?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah, for sure. Cool. Yeah. So

Referrals As A Growth Engine

SPEAKER_01 1:57

we just recently launched our newest AI business building platform that has an autonomous engine inside of it called Willow. That one, the kind of the biggest um powerful driving force right now behind it is definitely referrals and word of mouth. So we've been able to um not only orchestrate that a little bit, but also it's just naturally happening a lot more than we've ever had in some of our previous and past businesses. So referrals, word of mouth, as everybody knows, those are always the best kind of leads that you can get in the first place. The tricky struggle with that is that it's really hard to manufacture that at scale and get tons and tons of referrals in that sense. So we're kind of at that space where we're trying to uh build that in deeper into our system and software with you know, um, referrals, referral credits, referral usage, where the person giving the referral is either getting some sort of benefit, whether it's monetary or credits and so on. So, but uh, but definitely getting the referral engine going has been super helpful with us um at this earlier stage of launching um Willow. And on our previous and past businesses, referrals have been a pretty strong driving force as well. And so really honing in, figuring out, getting the details of hey, what's making people want to share it, how are we able to replicate this on a little bit faster and bigger scale to you know springboard you to where we want to go. That's definitely uh kind of been the most powerful factor right now that we've been seeing. So really excited about it.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Yeah, I would share that sentiment. I mean, smart books, uh, my day job business, doing bookkeeping and accounting, finance attacks for businesses. You know, we've grown that business through referrals as well. And we've, you know, we've tried a lot of different things with marketing and salespeople and everything. But at the end of the day, referrals and word of mouth has been the single most important uh driver of our growth. But like you said, it's uh it's hard to scale. It's hard to say I'm gonna double my investment in that and get double the number of referrals. It doesn't really scale that way. And we have less control over the kinds of uh referrals we get, you know, the the size, the industry, the location, what they're looking for. So the qualification can be harder to do with uh referrals as well. So they're great and incredibly valuable, and the close rate's usually pretty high, but you're right, hard to scale.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Yeah, yeah, definitely is hard to scale. And I was aiming to somebody the other day and they had a metric that they're tracking, and it was like I think it was called revenue per um revenue per hour spent or something along those lines. And they tracked it across the different lead types that they're getting. And um, and it was like, you know, paid ads, the revenue that they're getting per hour spent was like a much lower, and then organic traffic was a little bit higher, and then referrals was just substantially higher than anything else. So uh obviously, like we said, it's hard to scale referral, but if you can figure out how to harness it more and more, you generally are are gonna have more profit and you're gonna literally make more money per hour that you spend um, you know, operating your sales process there. So that was an interesting metric. And the guy was telling me that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

We also

Why SEO Trust Takes Time

SPEAKER_00 5:06

get a fair amount of kind of general inbound through SEO, but we've been doing this for 16 years, and that, you know, if we just started this business tomorrow, um, would take us a long time to get SEO credibility, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah, yeah. It definitely just takes time and organic compounding that trust and everything along those lines is what takes time, but it's also something that you can attain to. You can actually progress towards getting more and more of that trust, more and more of that traffic. It's just not overnight. But that's also what makes it so powerful is that in order to show up, in order to rank really high, people just have a natural, uh, you know, higher level of trust for it because it they have a general understanding that's taking time to get there. You don't just get to first page of you know first placement on Google overnight. So it has been, you know, taking time. Like you said, 16 years, you guys deserve to be ranking and showing up because you guys have been putting the time, putting in the expertise and building that trust for a long time. And so um, it just makes sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Cool. So

Defining Success As An Owner

SPEAKER_00 6:10

one more question before we dig into a little more of the nuts and bolts of your products. But um, you know, what are you really trying to accomplish through owning your business over the next few years? And if we sat down a few years from now to measure that success, what what what would ideally that look like?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yeah, I mean, I I've always just loved the journey of being an entrepreneur and just owning your own business. It's been uh it's been a fun 15 years of doing business, doing it's part of kind of life. It's almost like uh, you know, I probably find a little bit of identity and and whatnot and just kind of like going after it, chasing it. It's uh I've been I've heard it's kind of equated to being like a pirate. And like, you know, when people are signing up to be a pirate, it's like, yeah, there's a chance you're gonna like find treasure, but like most of the time, like you you're doing it for the adventure, you're doing it for like the the fun and and uh um chasing it. And there's gonna be some grueling tough days that are just miserable, and then there's also gonna be days that are just like you know, uh high, you know, mountaintop peaks that are just a lot of fun. So um definitely the journey of it's a big part of it. Um see I had a uh I had a J-O-B, a job for about uh I think it lasted six or seven weeks. It was just working at a pizza shop. That's when I was in uh high school, and um and I mean it was it was a good learning experience in certain ways and stuff, but just I it didn't kind of feel like that's uh it didn't feel like that's who I was and so on. And so um I did get the the pizza, the free pizza perks for like a year or something after that. So that was pretty awesome. But uh um, but yeah, so having a business and being able to have that flexibility, the freedom to be able to, you know, work really hard. I like equating it to kind of like um doing business like a lion. Like some days you're hunting down your prey and you're just going hard and you're just constantly just like going after it. And then other days you can take a little bit of time and you can just rest and and uh hang out with a family and do some other fun things as well. And so um it's uh it's uh somewhat a little bit more at your pace. And I'm pretty high, high pace, high caliber, and so constantly going after it. But then there's times you're just like, all right, gonna uh you know, clock out in a sense and actually enjoy life, enjoy right where I'm at. So um, yeah, a little bit of a combo of those. And I think as far as uh um identifying a metric that would mean success in the next five years, well, A still able to keep going at it, still paying the bills in that sense is uh is a big metric as far as an entrepreneur goes, and then seeing um seeing progress and scale with uh you know more users, more um actually being extremely impactful. So not just more users, but seeing our users actually scale their businesses and grow is uh is a big factor there. So yeah, I think that'd be what I would definitely equate a success for that.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

So awesome.

Building Helm And Willow

SPEAKER_00 9:05

So what uh so you know for the audience, uh this is not like a standard episode where I talk to a marketing agency owner about building their agency and serving clients. This uh Zach and his team have actually built a couple software products that are, you know, one of the big uh segments that uses these products is other marketing agencies. So he's really built things that are geared toward other agencies to help them take advantage of the opportunities of new AI technology. So, Zach, why don't you outline uh what your products are and what they do briefly?

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Yeah, for sure. Well, I'll bring it back to the to the start of the the journey of this part. So we got into AI in 2022, and it was specifically for automations in in the marketing space. We were trying to achieve marketing automations back in 2022. It was a little bit before his time, and also more specifically, it was before the user's time in a sense of there wasn't AI literacy. A lot of people were very, very hesitant, and probably rightly so because AI was not as smart back then. Um, but we had uh, you know, we we just had a struggle trying to sell AI marketing automation services because people didn't trust it yes. Um and so then kind of fast forward as the years kind of went on and and progressed, we got a little more specific in exactly what we're doing uh with marketing content and automations, and people felt a little more comfortable with that. And so we're able to actually achieve uh growing scaling the SaaS platform called Helm All Around Marketing Automations and helping small, medium-sized businesses and agencies set up automations to just allow the marketing to continue to compound. Like we were talking about, it just literally takes time to achieve organic traffic, whether that's SEO or AEO or Google Business Profile Growth and all of those different aspects, it just in social media as well, it just takes time. And a lot of business owners it falls into that quadrant of important but not urgent. And so so many business owners forget to ever push content and do it manually just because it takes time. And uh, you know, hiring an agency, some businesses are super down for that, some are not as um, you know, uh just wanting to jump on doing that. And so the SMBs would be able to, or maybe they just couldn't afford it. So the SMBs could uh have a lower priced manual DIY way to automate their content, but more specifically, the agencies were able to uh you know jump on to a system that kept end-to-end context, it kept all of their content in one specific place. They could map out calendars month ahead of uh whatever content they want to be pushing. It self-optimizes based on the results, and so the AI analyzes the um you know Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 and identifies where it can optimize for future growth and further success and so on. And as we're building that, users just wanted us to do more and more for them, and so that essentially turned into us building Willow, which is a AI business building platform. So it's a build-anything software. You can, you know, build websites or applications or software or internal systems or agent at workflows, really anything along those lines you can build with Willow. But the more important specific part that I am very passionate about is the ongoing systems of it. So you can just like how we had empowered our content, um uh our content engine for autonomous content continuously pushing out. We've done that same sort of thing with autonomous um systems inside of the business platforms, whether that's handling customer service or whether that's handling your sales or your content as well, or just continuing to build your product more and more and further as well, and then autonomously um being able to track your finances and uh you know identify any pricing and market research and all of those different aspects are really important and key. And right now we have some of the autonomous um engine in place. We're calling it the version one. And so you jump in there, it still is obviously gonna take manual setup, manual uh identification of exactly what you're wanting. But our vision for the future is growing more and more autonomous. Although we don't think businesses should ever be 110% autonomous because we think there's always gonna be a level of human involvement that's needed inside of businesses operating. And some businesses more than others, some can be more autonomous, but uh but that's really what we're we're optimizing for and building for. So for agencies, they can jump in and they can actually use uh Willow to build websites and handle workflows, create agentic programs that or agentic engines and um flows that just uh autonomously continue to work, but it's all kind of at the directive of the uh business owner or the operator there.

SPEAKER_00 14:05

So yeah. Cool. So Helm is still available too, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:09

Correct. Yep. Helm is still available.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Yeah, maybe uh we'll get to Willow. I did uh take the first steps of trying Willow myself this morning, but Helm Helm seems a little more tangible for the audience here since it's really focused on uh marketing automation and content creation, right? So maybe we can use an example um walk me through, say I'm uh I'm struggling a little bit to kind of figure out AI on my own, and I'm interested in trying out Helm to rent it from somebody who's already figured it out. So say I'm uh say I hypothetically happen to own an accounting and bookkeeping business like like I do. And uh my my target market is um owners of professional services firms with five to twenty employees across the US. And I want to use Helm to try to automate my outreach and engagement to nurturing of those people. Like, how would I go about using Helm in that kind of situation?

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Yeah,

Helm Walkthrough For SEO Content

SPEAKER_01 15:02

a good practical um situation there. So really you would jump into Helm and you would uh you know give it the context of your business. We want to make sure that we're writing content not only kind of from your your um perspective, but also based on and around your context. So that's really important is that the AI gets trained on who you are. That's pretty straightforward and simple. It'll actually scrape your site and it'll identify all of that, it'll pull a lot of that in, but manually optimizing that's important. And then from there, if you have a couple of keywords that you're specifically wanting to target, everybody generally has some sort of keyword. You can just toss it into the autonomous engine there. So you'd create an automation is what we call it. And uh that would then you'd set up the different specifics of the automation. It would you'd set up secondary keywords, the core keyword that you're trying to hit, um uh secondary topics or or um core topics that you're gonna want to talk through the lens of, whether it's like, hey, the best accounting firms in 2026, or like um, you know, tips and tricks for how to keep your books or uh time management when financially when doing your books and financials, those type of different aspects. You would want to have different angles that the content could talk through. And then from there you set up some of the other specifics like how many of these articles do you want to post a month, what days you want to post on, what images do you want to use? So do you want to use AI-generated images, or do you want to use images that you can upload into the brand assets? And either way, it intelligently identifies the image and it places them in the proper places. And then if you want to do like magic links, which would be what we call it magic links, it's internal and external linking. So do you want to link into internally to all of your other articles? And also, do you want to link to external third-party references, which these are all uh super specific um things that follow best practices with SEO content? And then you would get that automation going in live, and then it'll just put them on the calendar, and so uh put that content on the calendar, and it'll just keep every 30 days um updated. So let's say you did four a month on that specific automation. It would do four of those a month, and it'll keep four of them on the calendar as you're rolling forward. And our goal is to have multiple different automations, so maybe five to seven different article automations would be the key there. So that way you're you're able to target multiple different kind of uh aspects of your business.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Like maybe you're wanting one target of like um one of them could be tax and one of them could be like monthly bookkeeping or something, right? No apps.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yes, sir. Yeah, that's the the target. And then also sometimes it can be um whether it's location-based or it can be specific ICP-based, like maybe you're like have one specific content automation all-around bookkeeping for um home services or something along those lines, and then one that's all just based on contractors, or one that's based on um dentists, or whatever your core ICPs are at work, whatnot. So you can you can push out a ton of content consistently and uh cohesively through, and it also you know is all optimized with all the metadata, it has all the images, has internal external links, it has um you know content that's uh created and generated with AEO. So we call it AEO, like answer engine optimization, which is showing up in AI tools and AI overviews. So those are ways to really help um achieve creating content at at a consistent pace. So we're we're very much uh in line with white hat SEO and white hat content practices. We are very much against like black hat or gray hat, which is like uh either like uh pushing out content to manipulate the rankings, we're very much about wanting to answer questions or answer queries that people are actually searching so that you're specifically showing up for that. And we're not trying to actually manipulate the the rankings, which means consistency is key on that. You don't want to just be pushing out a hundred articles in one day and then nothing for a while, and then a hundred articles. It's if you can just post an article a day and just keep it flowing, going, that's uh a very strong cadence. And then beyond that, you can do the same sort of automations for Google Business Profile or for your social media accounts and so on. So there's a handful of different um you know uh places you can push the content and create different automations and get pretty in-depth. And it's also very user-friendly in the sense of if you just want to kind of or you can be very uh very granular setting it up and getting it rolling and going. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

All right. So if I'm an agency owner and I want to use this product, I'd just basically have different Helm accounts for each of my agency clients, and I'd set up the different uh content automations and campaigns for each of my clients within their own silos. Is that how it works?

SPEAKER_01 20:00

Yeah, so we actually have uh it's where an agency owner can have just one login account, but they can access multiple different accounts within side of their so multiple different businesses. And then there's user permission roles for the agency level, so for the organization and the workspace level, um, the agency owner can give access to um either uh to their employees, they can have their employees or contractors have you know full access or just limited access. And then you can also do business specific level access and permissions and roles, and so that way if you wanted to like give one of your customers access to the system or whatever along those lines, you can do that as well. So there's a handful kind of an array of different uh permissions and roles that you can allow for people to do and use. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

Cool.

Agency Accounts And Permissions

SPEAKER_00 20:48

So I'm sure you're biased since you uh built an own helm, but um you know I've worked with another from a couple of years back that was producing kind of weekly content using AI, but they send me the drafts for review, and I was always having to do a ton of editing. Um technology's gotten better over the last couple of years, but like how close to publication ready are is this content that Helm produces?

SPEAKER_01 21:14

It really depends on how picky uh the owners or the end user is or the agency is. So we have a handful of users who just push the content and they don't even look at it, like literally don't ever look at it. And we always tell people like, hey, like we would recommend reviewing it. And you know, you can jump in there and what I always tell people is like, hey, plan to spend 15 minutes reviewing all of next week's content. So you jump in there and you just review it all and um, you know, give it a quick once over, make sure if you're doing AI images, make sure those are good and make sure that the content's good to go. Most people aren't making very many changes at all, and very minimal changes. It's all able to change right there on screen, you know, on the platform. So you you can change make changes prior to pushing it, publishing it, and so on. Um there's multiple levels of like review that you can set the content to, but I think that is one of the big aspects of AI right now is that AI is getting to the to the level and point of being intelligent and smart enough to be able to create content that's on par with what majority of humans are writing. Um and what we found kind of across the board is that most of the time our users are actually uh when we look at their content before they jump on home, it's like very thin, it's not very good content, uh, or even before using other AI tools as well. Very thin, not great content, and their level of like uh their level of expectations for their own content that they're writing was like very, very low.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

Right. The expectations for AI seem to be higher than the expectations for humans, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yes, that's uh that's spot on. And so that's what we've kind of been finding is like a lot of people are like they expect the world out of AI, but when you go look at their past content, it was like, hey guys, like your past content was very you know cringe worthy in that sense. So as far as um you know that type of a setup and um application goes in that sense, well, we we still think that pushing the the bar and pushing the expectations, what we expect out of Helm and out of AI, what it can do, we're always constantly you know driving beyond what it currently is capable of doing in that sense. Like we want to be on the leading edge of like, hey, how do we create the best of the best? How do we harness the LLM in a specific way that allows the content to be next level and next level? And it's constantly as LLMs get smarter and smarter and smarter and push more and more out. Uh, it's that's kind of the the the race that we're running is how do we keep producing more better than what the frontier models are able to do, just talking to them. So that's uh yeah, that's really what we um find as kind of exciting and fun to push that forward. Yeah.

Getting Content Closer To Publishable

SPEAKER_00 24:07

So whether we're using Helm or any other, you know, content-assisted tool, you know, most of these agency owners are nervous about the quality, like we've been talking about and how close to publication ready the output is. So, what are some tips and tricks that you could share for helping AI produce content that is as close if to publication ready, if not fully publication ready?

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Good question. So the one of the like the first thing that I would go back to is making sure that your business context is proper and correct and right, and you spent enough time identifying your you know business, um uh giving it the context of who you are, your business, and then also identifying your exact persona, so primary and secondary persona of who you're trying to speak to. And then uh so essentially kind of training the LOM just a little bit more than um than some people would. I would spend a little more time training it because up front that's gonna help. And then setting a wide uh a wide array of content type. Like if you just give it one automation and you're like, hey, I want you to talk about this every single day, you're gonna have a lot more uh repeat content and so on. So that's where we recommend having multiple automations that are targeting a pretty wide array of different um aspects there. And then having like a really good workflow is what I'm really passionate about. I'm super like systems oriented, whether it's like in my household of like how we operate things and making sure that you know we do things this way and that way. Like and ask my wife, she knows that I'm very much uh a systems person where I love, you know, um, I love working with the system because that helps things flow a lot smoother. And um so being able to have uh, you know, whether it's review, a really solid way that you are constantly reviewing content, whether it's multi-team members that are doing that, or a specific way where you're able to review the content ahead of time and making sure that the the review is part of the process. But not only that, also having like a good organizational workflow in the sense of like where is where are your articles living? How do you get them onto the site? How do you make sure that the updates are actually properly reflected on your the site or your end user's website and so on? And you know, too many times we've seen people still using like a Google Drive folder of all of the articles, and it's like, yeah, but there's so much data and information that you're missing from just you know raw documents living in a folder, like what day was it posted? What if you need to make edits, like all these different aspects, and how like how do you make sure that everybody has the right flow of which article is next and so on without manually making any sort of mistakes? Like if you're just you know changing the title where it's like draft, and it's like, oh, once it's published, you change you remove the draft out of the title, like that's just going to make things more complicated, and that's more of a manual aspect and task and so on. So if you're not using some sort of tool to help you manage your organization level and content, it can get messy very fast. So that's one aspect of um using a tool that uh is very helpful. And then specifically for review and optimization, I think that's where um I mean, across the board you'll find that there's a good level and amount of uh SEO people who are uh and organic content people who are very uh kind of cohesive, but there's also everybody has their own way they like doing things. Everybody has their own most important aspects of SEO and content and and whatnot. And so um, you know, each marketing agency seems to focus on it differently. Each actual end SEO person likes to do it a little bit differently, and so kind of identifying that and when you're doing your review, just making sure that you're double checking that and um and optimizing it there. So that's probably where I'd say um most people are pretty comfortable with uh how um uh intelligent AI is now, but I think it's more harnessing it, making sure that you're in control of it. Like let's say you are a working in more of a regulated space, you're gonna obviously want to have way more um way more review on anything that's regulated and talked about because AI can still hallucinate and so on as well, or you pull data from the the past in that sense, even though we've done our very best like harnessing that, it's still a possibility. So making sure that that's um uh you know a something that you're focusing on and and you know identifying those key things for your end specific user and making sure that you're um kind of reviewing it through that lens, I think is important. And then also it really depends on the agency's um uh expectations for AI. Like are you expecting it to um you know, are you expecting it to be literally uh a chief editor of some amazing, you know, uh, you know, magazine or something where it just does everything for you, or are you expecting it to where it's like, hey, this does 90% of the work, I just put in the last 10% and we're good to good to publish. I think that's a big kind of differentiator of like what people are expecting out of it too. And so um, yeah, I think the the big thing that people uh kind of maybe overlook in AI right now is how do you get AI to actually create something that is um beyond just slightly kind of regurgitating content over and over and over again. And I think that's really where people uh if you can harness that and get it to not just regurgitate content over and over and over, that's really where the power of an autonomous engine comes in and allows you to consistently push more and more content as you're going forward without having to without having to, you know, just feel like you're talking about the same subjects over and over.

SPEAKER_00 30:09

So with Helm and other tools, I assume these days when you do your review and editing, you have a way to provide feedback to the agent so they can learn from your reviews and edits and do better the next time.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Yeah, so there's uh ways to have it um optimized in that sense. There are certain ways that you can train the LLM to make it do that, and then other ways, um certain things, it's you know, it depends on the exact uh exact SEO person or exact content person what they're looking for. Sometimes it'll just be a manual process of whatever specifically they're trying to achieve and do. But yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Awesome. So let's move on to Zillow, unless there's anything else you want to talk about regarding Helm.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, no, I think uh I think we covered it pretty well. I think um, you know, marketing agencies, I would I'll just recommend uh you know using some sort of tool, it'll help you achieve 90% of the work, if not more, and you know, or gonna keep everything organized.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

So definitely recommend checking something out and uh what one more question um on Helm specifically. So I know um CRM, some agencies manage kind of marketing-oriented CRMs like high level for clients, manage campaigns. So with Helm specifically, if we're using Helm to create a bunch of content and schedule and everything, is there a way to get that activity linked back to the contacts within high level or other CRMs?

SPEAKER_01 31:30

I don't know if it would uh like you know target back to contact. You mean more specifically like how they the contact entered your Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 31:40

Maybe um yeah, I guess um I'll get this straight in my head here. I'm not a marketing guy. Um let's say you you publish some posts and then that people click on those posts and then they visit your website. So you want to attribute the website traffic or you attribute the the contact us form completions, the call to action activities to the particular pieces of content that Helm produced.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Yeah, so most of the time it's gonna be through just general uh traffic and traffic analysis of like, hey, how many people got on this uh webpage, how many people got on that webpage. Um, and specifically, the way that you would attribute it to a specific contact would have to be through like a um like a contact form submission, like maybe on your blog pages you have uh you know a contact form and it can tie it back to each. That would be more on the website building side of things and how you're tagging and tracking people specifically. Um, I it's not gonna be a super clear way across the board to just view like, hey, this was a because your traffic isn't giving you like specific email addresses of who's you know specifically tracker, you know, um accessing each page. Uh and so it won't be quite as um, it's not like you can just look at your traffic and be like, oh, this guy came exactly through this route and so on through here super easily because Google kind of doesn't love the aspect of like uh you know creeping or tracing people that granularly. Um there's certain ways that you can do it, and probably ways that are legal, but there's also probably other ways that start getting into the gray zone or whatever. But um, but uh but yeah, so uh yeah, using you oh, that was what I was gonna say is content. What we found across the board is that uh we I like to look at it as kind of like a pyramid. Our the goal of additional SEO content isn't always that that specific page is what shows up inside the Google rankings and so on. What we found is that having more content and more keywords actually drives your primary pages up higher and further. So your home pages and uh service pages and um the other more specific uh pages that you're trying to actually get people on in the first place are actually what's surfacing higher and higher, higher, the more content that you have. The more the website's domain authority goes up, the more uh keywords the website has, the more that those keywords on those very important primary pages are actually being weighted even heavier and heavier. And so there's occasionally a times where we'll be like, hey, this article just like popped off and got so much traffic and it was super great. But more more often than not, what we're seeing is that uh the other pages are actually what's getting more and more traffic, and we're basically kind of pushing it up further and further from the ground. It's kind of like you know, adding a layer to the the pyramid uh underneath the top layer. So you're like shifting it up higher and higher and higher. So which is actually the better aspect of uh you know content and organic traffic because I'd way rather have somebody land on a service page than land on uh you know blog article type of uh of a setup there. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

Cool. All right. Well, moving

Willow And End To End Context

SPEAKER_00 34:57

on to Zillow. Um, I'm interested in understanding the focus there and uh the different use cases for it. I I did go on there this morning and very briefly started having it build a little app for me, and it just seemed like you know, it could do, you know, just about anything I asked for. So I didn't really know how to approach it or what the best use cases were for Zillow. So give us a little context into you know what Zillow can do and where you see it potentially adding the most value for other businesses.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

For sure, for sure. Well, good stuff, and then uh just uh clarify it's it's Willow, but I've definitely made Oh Willow, Willow, yeah, sorry. Definitely made that same mistake of calling it Zillow too. So uh like my mom calling me my brother's name or something. Um but uh but yeah, so Willow is specifically a uh it our goal for is to have end-to-end context of a business so that you can have agent dick workflows and autonomous engines that are actually flowing and operating based off whole context of the business rather than uh siloed and isolated. Going back to the whole um aspect of Helm that I was saying, the best content that you can create is content that has full context of your business. So uh that's the same sort of thing with the best customer service, the best sales, the best uh you know, financial review, all of those types of uh activities are much more impactful if it has full end-to-end context of the business. And so with Willow, you can jump on there and you can actually um build whatever it is. You can build a website or a software or an internal system or pro uh agentic programs and automations. And that is actually um uh that's kind of what I would consider like the building blocks of what you're doing. So, you know, having a website, it gives you full context there and so on. But then specifically you can have the automation of continuous content that's being pushed on there, or you can have the automation of uh you know lead generation that you're trying to fill your funnel that's driving people to the website, and it has end-to-end context to actually identify, hey, this is a better conversion path, so let's uh optimize this here or let's change this there, and so on. So it actually has end-to-end context to be able to do that. It is kind of along those lines, like you're saying, it is it can be very open-ended in the sense of what it can do, and so that sometimes can um can be a uh, you know, uh it can almost be like there's so many options, so many things you can do with it. It can be overwhelming for people and so on. But I think if you have a pretty clear idea of like, hey, I wanted to achieve this or I want to do that, um, or if you have an existing business and you're just wanting to migrate it onto the new platform, then that sort of a thing works really smoothly and well because you can you can kind of drive the train. And that's where I was saying like AI can definitely have uh bring a lot to the table, but having that human knowledge of human understanding of like this is my vision, this is where I want to go with it, and AI can help you kind of crack that a little bit, but taking it forward and really driving the train in that sense can be uh really powerful. Um and and yeah, so you can you can jump in there and you can build pretty much whatever it is that you're looking to build and you want, um, and then it you can set up automations to market it or automations to you know run the customer service and so on, which helps with uh with buying back time and allowing the owner to really focus on the areas that they are more passionate about and they actually are better at and not kind of getting tied up in the minutia of running a business and and whatnot.

AI Customer Service With Guardrails

SPEAKER_01 38:36

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

So Wellow is designed to actually interact directly with customers if you wanted to.

SPEAKER_01 38:41

Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, it can it can interact with them.

SPEAKER_00 38:44

That makes, you know, so that's makes me very nervous. I mean, I know Big Fortune 500 company's been doing it for a long time now, at least a few years, um, which is a long time. Um but I've been playing around a little bit with open cloud personally, and so powerful, but it scares the heck out of me the idea of actually letting some system talk directly to my clients. Uh I don't know what exactly it's gonna say and how's it gonna represent my business and my brand. So, like, how do you get your arms around or how do you like guardrail this so that it doesn't embarrass you and it it actually helps you?

SPEAKER_01 39:19

Yeah, I know that's that's a super good question there in that sense. And um, I think it would be kind of a a threefold um a three-fold answer. The great part is you can have escalation, um, parts where basically let's say a chat is going sideways or the person just asks for a representative or anything along those lines, you can have it escalate up to a real human. So it doesn't always have to be that. You also don't have to choose to implement AI talking with customers at all. Like you you can choose to avoid that 100% if you want. It's um completely up to your discretion if you want to use it that way or not. Um I think going back to like I was saying, back in 2022 when we're trying to sell automations, marketing automations for AI, and that was more just kind of on the content and um you know email marketing side of things as well, people were super hesitant about it back then. And that's because people didn't trust AI, they didn't they didn't really even wrap their heads around it back then, and so being able to have it do certain things that they're just not uh fully trusting of it. So I think as time goes on, people will have a better uh level of trust for AI, which is going to help um help people just be more willing, not only business owners to be more willing to do it, but also uh the end user is gonna be more okay. As time goes on, they'll be more and more okay with talking to an AI receptionist or whoever it is in the other end, because people are just gonna get more and more comfortable with talking to Chat GPT or to uh Claude or whatever it is, people are getting more and more comfortable with it. And as they get more comfortable with that, they're gonna be more comfortable with talking to a specific AI receptionist at a specific company. And um with the understanding and and knowledge of like, hey, this thing may not be giving a hundred percent accurate information, but it's the same sort of thing with human receptionists. I've talked to many human receptionists that tell me one thing and I call back later or whatever, I deal with it later. I've been dealing with um waste management, they're very big. And man, I feel like I've been hitting my head against the wall, and it's been humans the entire time. I've actually thought to myself multiple times, I literally wish this was an AI system that I could just talk to. I think I could I could get further with AI and certain things. So um, so yeah, it is definitely something that just needs to build people's trust over time. And then um I think that there is that is a true uh you know aspect of being cautious with where you allow AI to sit as far as in between you and your customers. So some people are gonna be like, hey, I'm 100% like let's send it, let's just go after it and use all AI. And other people are gonna be much more uh conservative with it, not want people to not want AI to touch it. I mean, we've had everything from people saying, like, hey, I would never have AI talk to my customers, to people specifically saying, I want you to create a live video call chatbot that when somebody jumps on my screen, an AI avatar is in my bottom right corner, and they're just literally talking to the customer as if it's like a FaceTime or just like what we're doing right here. I'm like, wow, that's that's like going deep into like letting AI like take over in this sense. So it's uh you get the full gamut, and you know, as far as that person, that business owner's users, they may they they're some of the users may be turned off by that, and that's a a choice that that business owner is willing to make because he also thinks that other users he'll be able to provide better value for that as well. And so um, it's kind of, I guess, in a sense, narrowing down your specific uh ICP and who you're wanting. So it's kind of almost two levels for us. Like we have the level of needing to build the trust for the business owner to be willing to use it, but then also the business owner has to be willing to help his customers or her customers build trust um with AI as well. So it's uh it's a complicated um aspect there, but I think it's only going to become more and more uh you know common. So yeah, it's funny.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Ten years ago, before AI was real, um, we had people pretending they had AI, but it's really humans pretending to be bots. And now people are some people on the aggressive end have um, you know, bots pretending to be humans, like the inverse of that. And then somebody like me, who's a little more costless, might say, Well, I really wanna I really see the benefit of integrating AI directly with customers. I'm nervous about you know pretending it's human. Maybe I should just, you know, present it as an AI agent so my customers know it's AI. It's still going to be very good. Frankly, it is probably going to be better than entry-level human receptionists and agents, because we've all had that experience. You mentioned waste management. Uh, you know, you call these companies and you deal with, you know, a very low-level person who's inconsistent, doesn't have access to a lot of information, is not definitely not an expert. It takes a long time. Uh, it's a pain in the neck, nobody really likes to do it. So I'm probably much rather like if I'm a business owner, I'd probably much rather have my customers deal with a bot where they can get their information and answer very quickly and have the option to escalate it to a human if they're not able to get what they need, right? Something like that kind of makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's spot on. And that is a funny kind of uh juxtaposition there where 10 years ago they're, you know, pretending that there is AI but it's humans, and now it's AI pretending that it's trying to be human. By being upfront and honest and um not trying to hide the fact that it's AI, I think it's fine. And and you know, across the board, my personal thought and opinion is that it does help businesses be more economically uh streamlined, which can help them A, provide a better service for the customer at the end of the day, and B also provide a cheaper service, which is uh very beneficial for especially SMBs and agencies who are trying to scale and grow and whatnot. And um, but it's funny, I think didn't QuickBooks, wasn't QuickBooks one of the ones that was pretending to be AI? And it was like, hey, we'll uh we'll use AI to identify your, you know, upload a picture of your receipt and we'll use AI to identify um and classify it or whatever. Um, and like 10 years ago or something, but it was actually people overseas who were like when they're awake, they're doing it. So sometimes it would happen really fast, and sometimes it would take like 24 hours or whatever, but it was like humans on the other end. I don't know. I I heard that.

SPEAKER_00 45:52

Yeah, I'm not familiar with QuickBooks specifically. They're

QuickBooks Limits And Automation Reality

SPEAKER_00 45:55

kind of you know big behemoth black box. You never really know what's going on behind the scenes. But I know some of my competitors who were advertising, you know, AI automated bookkeeping, you know, 10 years ago. Um they were they had you know big operations in the Philippines or India doing the work and pretending to be bots. So that's kind of what I'm aware of.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

That's so funny, yeah. And um uh uh what what uh accounting software do you generally um encourage people?

SPEAKER_00 46:21

Um we're very QuickBooks-centric. You know, we work with clients primarily in the US where QuickBooks has 90% or whatever market share in the small and mid-sized business space. So always tell tell clients look, you your general electric software is probably not gonna be the competitive advantage for your business. So focus your creative energy someplace else and use the standard thing that any any bookkeeper uh knows how to use and uh integrates with more third-party systems than anything else.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're they're uh pretty good. I mean, I've always done QuickBooks and I've been tempted to try some of the other ones, but I just haven't been, I mean, the learning curve alone, I feel like, is what kind of keeps me from jumping onto other quick, you know, other um bookkeeping software or whatever. But yeah, I know uh I know AI has probably been pretty impactful as far as accounting and so on goes, to where you guys can use more of your expertise and identify, you know, exactly how things are going and making sure that things are right and proper without having to constantly get into like every bit of the minutiae of every single transaction or something. But uh I could be wrong.

SPEAKER_00 47:28

Yeah, we're definitely definitely trying to use it as much as possible. There's you know, interesting, there's certain components of QuickBooks that still are not as efficient as they could be, that still require somebody to log in and manually do things to get bank and credit card transactions coded properly. Or you can like turn on automation, but you know there's gonna be a lot of mistakes. So you'd rather you'd rather just quickly eyeball it before it posts than have everything post, and then you have to go in and find that needle on a haystack after it's already posted. So different different philosophies there. But um, and then with third-party APIs, you know, we we do a lot of that. We have our own practice management system that integrates with QuickBooks via API. Um, and we try to do a lot with that, but there are certain parts of the API that are not that are closed, that are not accessible in QuickBooks, like the bank and credit card feeds being the main one that I'd love to have access to for, you know, if for no other reason, just kind of quality control. So in real time, we can look and see are we up to date with processing the bank and credit card feeds for clients? Yes or no? Um we have anything that's more than like 48 hours old that we haven't touched yet, things like that. Uh we can't really do that right now. So I'm hoping Intuit opens it up, but I feel like they're also just um you know, trying to avoid, you know, trying to they want people to continue to log in and use QuickBooks and not turn it over to third parties. Like they just announced the um an integration with Claude a few weeks ago, I think. Um but it's kind of a one-way, from what I understand, it's kind of a one-way push of certain data at the summary report level, not the individual transaction level. So I think we'll have to see what the uh what the API strategy of Intuit is over the next couple of years.

SPEAKER_01 49:13

Yeah, yeah. I think that'll be probably one of the more interesting ones to watch because um there's obviously gonna be competitors that like creep up and and if a competitor like really embraces AI and like solve like cracks the code and solves that problem for people, then I think it'll uh it'll take a lot of that market share from um QuickBooks. And so they they probably kind of have to play that uh play that sign line of not not uh you know opening up too much to where anybody and everybody can just like you know uh it's almost open source at that point in time, but um, you know, kind of ride that signed line in that sense. So it'll be interesting to see what they do.

SPEAKER_00 49:52

But you know, it's summertime, approaching summertime, and that's when uh QuickBooks raises its prices every year. So we just got an email. I gotta read it to my inbox about the annual price increase. But like QuickBooks keeps charging more and more, and you'd think it wouldn't need to do that, but I guess it can, so it does.

SPEAKER_01 50:11

Yeah, yeah, that's the that's the challenge. I know I hate I hate what they're uh price increases. Like I'm always like, man, we spend so much money on that, but it's uh sometimes I mean it's definitely worth it. It's one of those things like uh but the tough part is that it's not necessarily like making us more money in that sense, it's just making life easier, but um yeah, yeah, it's good though. Um lots of crazy cool uses for AI as far as how things are going and everything, and um definitely you know having a an um accounting agency like you guys being able to handle a lot of the back end side of things where like marketing agencies don't have to even think about that. Like I can see how powerful that can be for people.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

So yeah, we love working with marketing agencies, you know, they're they're creative, pleasant, nice people, um, but they don't have to deal with uh the accounting and the bookkeeping. So they're happy to have us take care of it for them.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

Yeah, that's a good way to go for sure, for sure. Yeah, I I've always actually um enjoyed writing the books. I I think my biggest challenge is doing it consist- I'm like my goal is to get it done by the 10th of every single month, and it just doesn't happen most of the time. And I'm like, uh like I wish I could consistently just do it because I actually like it, and I feel like it tells you such a good like story. It was maybe uh the underrated term, but like it tells the it shows you the picture of like how things are doing and like how your business is doing, if you need more sales or whatever, any sort of aspect like that. It it's like such so clear if you like understand it and you get it. And if you get the reports in time, then you actually are able to make intelligent decisions based on that. So um, I think that's one of the biggest benefits of it. And I also I kind of find it as fun and whatever to just like see the the picture basically. It's almost like doing a puzzle, like as you're like doing the counting, like you know, putting things in places and whatever it's like, all right, like we'll looking for the the end picture is like pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

So we layer on a financial performance metrics scorecard on top of the financial statements every month for clients to really try to make that story more clear. Because sometimes it's hard to look at an income statement and a balance sheet and a cash flow statement and interpret it and figure out what the story is and look over the right periods of time and see how things are trending over time. So we try to paint that picture, tell write that book, tell that story, whatever you call it, uh whatever analogy you use. We try to try to present that to clients every month so they can really understand what the story is that their books should be telling them.

SPEAKER_01 52:39

That's cool. That's cool. And then is the uh the scorecard and like the scoring of it, is it based on like their industry standard? Is it based on how their business has historically done? Is it based on like how do you generally like uh what are the benchmarks that you basically are scoring against?

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Yeah, I mean, we can do general benchmarks uh based on the industry, but we really try to customize it more toward the client business owner's financial objectives because some clients are in that growth phase where they don't care about optimizing profit margins, but they want to really focus on the metrics for revenue growth and cost of customer acquisition and you know, averages, um, lifetime value of the client. They might not be that profitable now, but they're adding more clients at a very good return on investment rate. Um, and as long as they can keep cash flow positive, life is good, and then they'll get to a certain scope and then size, and then they'll start to try to optimize profit margins and we'll start to care a lot more about labor-loaded current margin, labor value multiple, you know, overhead as a percentage of revenue. Some of the more, more the metrics that matter to more mature companies start to become very important when they start to really drive profitability and and cash flow and trying to put distributions in the pockets and retirement plans of the owners. So it really kind of depends. You know, we can certainly come up with general benchmarks based on industries and our client base, but we we try to make it more meaningful to the individual business owner. Cool.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's uh I can see how impactful that could be. I love that.

Zach’s Entrepreneur Origin Story

SPEAKER_00 54:08

So uh I know we're coming to the end of the hour here, Zach, but I want to understand your story, your personal story a little bit more. Um, so if we go back to the days of little Zach, did you uh think or know you'd be an owner of a business one day and the the kind of business that you have now?

SPEAKER_01 54:24

Yeah, that's uh that's a fun question. So as a kid, I definitely was always very like uh kind of business-minded in that sense, very a lot more on the kind of the real estate construction side of things. My dad was a builder, and so I pretty much grew up on job sites ever since I was in diapers, swinging hammers, um, and uh along with my brother. So my brother, we're um just a year and a half apart. We do everything together. He's my co-founder in all of my businesses too. But we've always just been kind of drawn to the journey of running your own business and um and you know doing things differently than other people in a sense, or you know, than just getting a job in that sense. So uh running a business was kind of always in the cards at some level, some aspect. I did not as much expect it to be online or software. I was always drawn to software, but uh I didn't expect it to be there since I was a little kid in that sense. Um and then we went on a nine-month sailing trip from San Diego to Austria. We hit all the islands in the South Pacific when I was in high school, dropped out of kind of dropped out of high school early, but actually was taking college classes at night to be able to get all the extra credits that I needed to be able to go on the sailing trip. And that uh that really opened my eyes to being able to see like the world is just like so amazing. We have such a beautiful world that we live in, so wonderful, and um, there's so many different ways to live life and so many different people who are like doing things and um and like you can chase a paycheck or you can chase like more of a journey of what you're what you're going for. And so definitely went more for uh chasing the the journey of what it is. And like I've said, there's been highs, high highs and low lows where it's uh part of the you know part of the struggle as we're going forward and and whatnot. But um, but yeah, it's been since then I I definitely knew that kind of doing something more uh substandard than just getting a job and getting a paycheck was gonna be kind of in the cards and always been frugal. So there's times of feast and famine as far as uh finances go, and that's kind of how I've you know grown up since the kid and whatever. So um definitely had the the vision of um owning and operating and running businesses uh from an early age. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

What uh was there any particular point in time when you said I'm gonna really embrace and do something with AI?

SPEAKER_01 56:51

But see, yeah, probably in uh 2020 when we started doing the marketing automations in that sense, that was when we started like diving into it and learning a ton more about it. Um it was, you know, just a little bit before it kind of became like a a publicly you know recognized thing in that sense. And so we're doing some of the deeper research on AI and machine learning and all of that. It was just kind of starting to change from calling it machine learning in a lot of uh uh spaces to AI in that sense. And um, that was really the aspect. And one of the reasons for that was kind of um earlier in our career we had a tiny house manufacturing company where we had 50 employees and it was like a big operation working too many hours, and I didn't love having that many employees, especially like a little bit uh on the rougher end of contractors. It's a little bit harder, especially when they're all like 10 plus years older than I was. And so it was definitely like a um a time where I learned a lot and I was able to be stretched and grown in a lot of ways. And I enjoyed some parts of it as well. But uh, after uh we exited out of that, we me and my brother are like, let's let's plan on not having employees again in the future, and so finding ways to optimize our our processes and everything we're doing. Since then, we've had a handful of employees and we still have them, and we're looking to grow as we go forward, and we've loved it. Um uh so we're not uh anti-employee in that sense, but we're more of like, hey, let's be let's let's keep our overhead low. Like overhead is such a burden in so many ways if you don't have a a solid, consistent way to support it. And so, you know, being able to scale at a proper growth rate is super important to us. And so using AI to optimize and streamline as much as we possibly can with that human oversight is really what we find as super exciting and really fun. And so that's kind of when we decided like, all right, Lee, let's let's uh sink our teeth into AI and like really figure out how to harness it and not rely a hundred percent on it, but um, you know, do as much of a heavy lifting with it as we can. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 59:05

Well, awesome. Well, thank

Where To Find Helm And Willow

SPEAKER_00 59:07

you so much, Zach, for sharing your story and getting into some of the details about how you know you're harnessing AI for yourself and allowing agencies to harness AI for their clients. Um, if folks want to uh check out Helm or Willow or connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

SPEAKER_01 59:23

Yeah, so you can check out our um our personal website at francisbrothers.com or you can find me on um you know LinkedIn or Twitter um through just searching my name is at Francis. And Willow, the website is Willow.ai, and then Helm is Helmhq.ai. So those are a couple different websites and uh places that you can find what we're up to and uh yeah, keep keep in touch and whatever. I love connecting with people on um LinkedIn or wherever, so definitely you know, feel free to shoot me a connection request on there and happy uh accept that and all that good stuff. So we love getting to hear other people's stories too and helping, you know, just figure out how to make their business more optimized and streamlined with better systems and so on. So that's uh really one of my favorite things, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:11

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Zach. I really appreciate your time. And uh for those listening, um, I'm sure we all learned something today. So it'd be great to kind of share this podcast, let uh let your peers in the industry know that it exists. We're all in this together. So uh let's spread the word if you've enjoyed the episode. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:30

Yeah, Cal, thanks so much for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. It's it's been uh a good fun time chatting and whatnot. So I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

Cool. This has been another exciting episode of the Marketing Agency Power Hour. We'll see you all next time. Another episode in the books. Thank you so much for tuning in. For show notes and more, visit empoweringhealthy business.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me, or possibly engage smartbooks to help with your business, you can reach me at cal C A L at Empowering Healthy Business dot com or message me on LinkedIn where I am easy to find. Until next time, this is Empowering Healthy Business, the podcast for business owners, signing off.