Suzanne Darmory built a branding agency over seven years serving personal brands and small businesses in the Northeast. She uses AI to automate routine work like call recaps and follow-ups, but warns that agencies need to act as orchestrators of these tools to preserve strategic creativity and avoid displacing human designers.
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Hello everybody, Michael Falato here from Full Throttle, Falato Leads, GTM Full Throttle, and the show Full Throttle Leaders. We have Suzanne from The Agency. She is a good friend of mine and she, she just started her agency, what, how long ago? 2 months.
It's 7 years now, but it does feel like just started.
Yeah, just started 7 years ago. 7 good years, right?
7 amazing years. No itches here.
So when, um, when did you— when, when and what— I mean, why did you start this agency 7 years ago? What kind of made you go say, I'm gonna do my own shingle?
So it's been interesting. I rose up on the advertising side and made it C-suite, New York and London, and then I moved over brand side during the pandemic. Which is when I started my own agency thinking, okay, I have all these tools under my belt. I have the advertising side, the marketing side, I have the data, the strategy, digital, social, you name it, everything under my belt, both agency side and brand side. So I thought it was a really good time to take all of those tools, move it under, um, one unit and create the agency.
And tell me, like, what's your ideal customer profile for For the agency, we have 2 different streams of clients.
One is we help people turn into brands, which is a very critical thing in today's day and age because we all need to be our own brand, especially when we're selling something. So we have everything from artists to— at one point we had rappers. We have lawyers, we have you name it, any kind of person, real estate agents. anyone who wants to turn into the brand. So that's half of what we do. And the other half is we help small to medium businesses in the Fairfield, Connecticut area turn into bigger brands and become more of a world-class brand. So we work with everybody. Um, it's not just Fairfield, it's also Westchester, Rockland.
Yeah.
Uh, but we really, I love helping small to medium businesses in our area and beyond become bigger and more well-established.
What's something that's looming in AI for you with your clients that you're helping them kind of decipher?
I mean, AI is the hot topic, right? Everyone wants to talk about it. Everyone wants to be involved, but everyone's a little bit nervous about what it can do. We integrate AI and we do it in ways that we're very transparent. Obviously, with the new laws coming through, especially in New York recently, saying that you need to say when you use AI. in any material. So we're transparent about it, but we help it less in the process and more in the sort of day-to-day, just the functioning, right? It's the things that take the mundane out of the day-to-day work life, but we keep the magic of what we have in the strategy and how we launch our clients. So, you know, we're fully transparent with them as far as that's concerned.
What's a tip or tactic or tool Or strategy that you've learned in the last 6 months? Or like, man, that was a bad idea and I wanna let Michael's listeners figure it out. Like, so they don't have to do it with me. Or you're like, this was amazing tool, I love it, let me tell you all about it.
I would say tool-wise, um, we— I've pretty much used the same tools for a long time. But life-wise, I think one of the tips would be Obviously, hearing so much, going to so many conferences and being in so many events speaking, hearing all about the 2 sides of the fence of the AI. And I appreciate that that is now. I mean, it was digital back in the day when I started in digital in the '90s. And now it's AI. What I am looking for and what I— the tip and trick I would love is what's after AI? Like, what are we going to do next and how do we prepare for that? So, While everybody is grasping what's happening right now and figuring that out, I'm wondering what's next. Where are we gonna go after this?
Yeah, I, I think if you look at like how our roles in as agency owners, we both, they have, you know, we, we were agencies, different things, is that we, we are the orchestrators, the product managers, the thought, the think tanks. And you could have AI, but you, if you, you gotta know how to direct it.
Just like, correct.
It's like, it's basically like an intern that does things fast. So you gotta—
Right.
Yeah.
It's like mentoring, right? So when you mentor someone, you create that relationship, that sort of one-to-one. And that's what AI can do. What scares me and what scares a lot of people in my industry is how many different disciplines is it going to replace? I mean, obviously, the storyboard artists are pretty much gone, the editors are streamlined, like, there are, you know, photography is being replaced. Music is being replaced. We can create whatever we want. But I think at the end of the day, so there's that looming fear. But at the end of the day, creating and training— everybody needs to create and train their own agent, right, to help become almost your personal assistant or your second voice, your, you know, digital twin, for lack of better words. I know you have a digital twin that you work with, but—
Yeah.
You know, it's sort of, so that's, and while we are all embracing, I'm all like, you know, again, if you have the key, what we should be looking for next, I'd love to know that.
Yep. I really love AI for me is recapping some of these calls that I could do and, hey, what should I do? What did I miss? Right. And can you help me write the follow-up? 'Cause that's one thing I didn't never like doing is like putting together my thoughts. I mean, it would take me an hour or 2 and I'm like, this does it in 2 seconds and it does it in their voice.
So it does, and it does. My favorite is that I'm such a, like, a task— I love accomplishing things. Like, it's a project-oriented side of me that, like, you, when you do your task, I'm like, thank you for laying that out. I know what I need to do next. It's awesome.
How do people, uh, get a hold of you? What's the best way to get a hold of you and use your agency or find out more about you?
Absolutely. Uh, connect with me on LinkedIn, email me. I think you have my email address, it's being shared. Uh, love to chat, love to meet new people, love to help, um, sit in strategy sessions and you know, just sort of help clients, help them sort of find what their pain point is and fix it. And, you know, that is— that comes from a one-to-one relationship with an agency and a client.
