Consultants and Fractional Executives Are Landing Lucrative Deals With This System

If you're a fractional executive or a consultant, the hardest part isn't doing the work. You already know that. It's getting consistent flow of the right clients. Today, Nicholas Tolson breaks down exactly how he built his practice from scratch, what's working on LinkedIn right now, and why the AI strategy that you share with your clients might actually be the thing that gets you hired over everything else. Let's get into it. Nicholas, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Raj. Really happy to be here.

I'm excited to be here too, because you're not just somebody new to this. You're a very experienced executive yourself. You've now gone out to the consulting route as a fractional executive in some cases, but a consultant in others. What prompted you to go from where you were to what you're doing now as a consultant?

Oh, look, I've been— every job that I've had, or like job, every position I've held has been either employee number one founder or the first person in that role. And so I'm really comfortable with new and uncharted territory. And when I, in about March of 2025, I looked around me and, and saw, okay, what's the opportunity here? And something that I've done a few times throughout my career with somebody with my background with tech and marketing, it took about 2 seconds to identify that AI was where to put my attentions. And that's really as simple as it was. And from there, of course, I'd been using AI for years before that, just dabbling in it like everyone does now. But that's when I realized that, okay, how can businesses use this and how can we make it a little bit more useful from a business and team perspective?

Now you've built Razo around what you call the sporadic usage problem. So one person on a team gets brilliant results from AI, other people get garbage from AI. And the worst part is that it's very hard to collaborate. How do you know? How can you tap into what the person who's getting brilliant results is actually getting back? And that's one of the challenges that you help companies address as part of the consulting work that you do to really enable AI to work for them in a positive way. So when you walk into a company, what's the first concrete thing that you see that tells you that a company's stuck there? And then what's the first thing you tell them to do?

Yeah. Where we are now, right? This is just where everyone is. And they tell me that. There's, you don't really have to look too hard these days. And it's like when I was, I was starting, I was employee number 1 at a marketing agency in 1998. Right. Everyone needed a website. It wasn't just, it wasn't, there was no, the sales process or the, the signals were pretty simple. Everyone needed one.

And yeah, we call those the good old days, right? And totally.

Yeah. It was scary in the same similar ways, but lots of opportunity. And then in 2007, 2008. Everyone needed help getting started on social media, right? Yeah. And so early on, the conversation started as, do I need a website or do I need to be on social media? And of course, those are, would be completely silly questions now, right? And we're at that point with AI, but things are just moving way faster. Mid-2025, people were still waking up to AI and asking, do I need AI in my business? Is this just a fad? Is it going to be the next NFCs? And now really starting the end of last year, it's an imperative and people are putting it as a strategic priority for themselves, for their companies in 2026, but no one knows where to start. And that's where I come in.

Okay. So now as an executive who goes in and helps companies figure this out, how do people find you?

I frankly, a lot of it is on LinkedIn. I do, I'm sporadic in it. I'll admit I don't have a good plan. I'm not necessarily the one to ask about that. And you're not alone.

There's actually marketing teams that are sporadic in it too. So you're not alone when you're doing it as a fractional person on your own.

Yeah. So cobblers own shoes. My website probably doesn't give an accurate portrayal of my services, but I use LinkedIn a lot. Lots of it at this point is word of mouth, right? You do good work for good people. I am starting to develop just naturally through that word of mouth, a little niche in the AEC world. So architecture, engineering, and consulting. And, and that's how I would recommend anyone starting out. Start with the warm leads, right? I have not sent the LinkedIn and the internet is filled with advice of send this many cold DMs on LinkedIn and do all these things and get AI SDR, which a whole nother topic. Um, but for someone like me who last year just starting out, there's nothing, there's no trust to base that on. And, and so you need to leverage the trust that you built up over your career. That's what I did. So I reached out, it was literally, it was relatives, brothers-in-law, right? And then business network people. But LinkedIn, I do a little bit of, again, sporadic writing on Substack. I'm in the process of moving that over to my website. So I own that destination a little bit better and the SEO and all the stuff you're very familiar with, but mostly it's word of mouth and then LinkedIn when I can.

I hear every now and then. Fractional executives and consultants wanting to get a ton of business. Now, just by the nature of being a consultant, you probably experience feast and famine, right? You get a bunch of business at one time, you're working, and then sometimes you just don't have the bandwidth to market. And so that's when stuff drops off and then you got to get back to that to get the money coming back in or the pipeline back in. And so it works very differently than, say, a B2B SaaS company that has to have constant pipeline being pulled in so that their sales teams have people to reach out to. And one thing that I noticed back in my consulting days was that I could not handle a whole bunch of business if a bunch of leads just showed up because I'd already be working and your time is your bandwidth. That, that's your product is your time and you're limited by that for your bandwidth. When you hear people say, oh, I really need to get a lot more business as a fractional executive. What would be your advice for them? Is it to go out and try to get a whole bunch of leads really quickly, or is there much more of a subtle way to do it so you keep the pot on simmer?

Yeah, that's the, that's the beauty of being a fractional person or someone like me that's a solo practitioner. You can, one client means a lot, right? Um, and so you don't, it's not about volume here, right? And I don't yet have a large team behind me, so. To your point, if I went out and I started sending cold outbound and did a, put a big system in place, it would, it's like that old FedEx Super Bowl commercial where the orders start coming in and everyone's excited and then they keep on coming in and people are like, oh crap, what are we gonna do now?

That's right.

And so, yeah, for me it's do good work and then let that, let it be organic, right? Fit in with the organic nature of it. And sure, there, there's, I'm not gonna give business and life advice, but yes, everyone's got a different threshold for risk and you're not gonna get in this if you don't have a little bit of appetite for that. But also, of course, you need a little bit of a backstop and it helps. Like me, I have a supportive partner, my wife, and you just have to learn how to roll with the punches. But you can also, you've gotta learn to ask those people. So it's not just, okay, do good work and hope that they recommend you. Make the ask. And sometimes that's hard for some people to do, but I've found that when you do good work and you develop those good client relationships, they want to recommend you because it reflects well on them if they can increase their own sort of social capital by recommending a good person, right? And if that person did good work for that company that they recommended, that company will come back to the original recommender and say, oh wow, yeah, like Nicholas or Raj or whoever it is, They did great work. Thank you very much. Right. Let's go out to lunch or grab a drink and I want to catch up so we can really be relationship building. That, that was sort of that ripple effect can really, it helps rising tide raises all boats, right?

I love that you said make the ask because I think especially I'm a technical person and I went to school with engineers and it's just, that is so far out of the comfort zone that many technical founders have or even fractional executives. So I know fractional CTO, they're periodically looking for work, but the ask is just such a struggle. It's a lot easier for fractional CRO. That's just part of what they do. It's inherent in their nature. So are you seeing some of the contents that you post on LinkedIn? And I love looking at what you say because it's really deep and thoughtful. It's not the random fluff that you see. And I know that just that depth alone creates some sort of impression in people's minds. When they look at you and they say, I need to check out this Nicholas guy, and they look you up on LinkedIn, they look at your profile. But then when they start reading your post, they'll see very informative instructional videos. They'll see deeply thought-out trends analysis, things that show that you're not just somebody who put up a shingle and said, hey, I'm open for business. You're the kind of person— just the stuff on your LinkedIn, it shows I want to work with that kind of person. So talk to me about that. I know you post sporadically, but how much time does it take you to produce some of this content? And we can go in types of content, videos, posts. Yeah.

So where I saw the biggest lift in terms of engagement was end of last year. Ironically, I stopped using AI at all to write my posts.

Which is really ironic, right? Because you teach people how to use AI in their business.

Yeah. It just wasn't— look, maybe that was a weakness in my own usage. And I, and one of the things that I teach is you, you discernment around where to use AI in your own work. And I'm not saying that AI can't be used to help with your writing and producing content. That's certainly not the case, right? That's one of the main use cases in the non-coding world. But I figured out that, you know what, the writing part was really, was A, I liked it, and B, really important to me from developing these ideas from like a germ of an idea to, okay, how does this turn into a system? Or something that's truly helpful. So I liked that struggle, right? For me, I didn't want content to be efficient. People aren't waking up and, I wanna read an efficient piece of content, right? They want it to be helpful. And so that was, for me, was one thing. And make it fully authentic from how I would say it, what I would say it, what I would want to hear and the type of information that I wanted. Then I did do some video and that seemed to really resonate. And again, I think there's an ironic or counterintuitive thing with AI, which is I think there's so much content out there. There's so much written content out there. And look, if you're on LinkedIn, you know, it's in— it's hellscape in some ways, right, with AI slop. And so with the video, you can't fake it, right? Actually, now you can, right? But you can deepfake it, and especially with Gemini Omni and all this stuff that's coming out. But it's real, and people know that this expertise is coming from me, not from an AI, not just from a simple prompt. And I put in the work to produce this content, but it's demo content. It's me sharing my screen, doing an actual thing that people can follow along with or do or translate to their work. And so I think that's an important piece of putting content out there. There, there's, everyone talks about, we know about authenticity and of course staying away from AI, bad AI phrasing and things like that, but A big part of it is showing that I put in the work to understand this and to know this content and to filter it through my knowledge and experience to make it relevant and understandable to you. And then people recognize that and will give you their attention, right? And I'm optimizing for people, not for the scrollers, not for the quick hit, not for the gimme the magic prompts and I'm optimizing for people that want to deeply engage and deeply think about how this technology can help their business.

No, when I, I was actually writing a post the other day about how I'm starting to see AI slop in videos now also. And what it is, people will go get AI to write something in 10 seconds and then they read it and record themselves saying it as if suddenly now people are gonna believe it and it's gonna be original and magical or something. And I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, what's really happened is I have now associated AI slop with your face. Oh yeah.

Even worse, right? Yeah.

Oh my God. Why would you do that? And people I used to respect, I'm unsubscribing. I'm no longer following because I'm like, wait a minute, have I only been following you because you've been creating regurgitated stuff? And especially as a consultant, a coach, a fractional executive, you've got to show your depth and you can't do that when You're just cranking out content for the sake of cranking out content, which I think the sporadic posting is perfectly fine because when you do post, it's something worth listening to. And LinkedIn's algorithm is bouncing all over the place. We don't even know where it's going to be next week.

Yeah.

So, so my hunch, my recommendation would be to continuously post really rich, valuable content.

Yeah.

Well, that's why I love that part of it.

That's actually one thing that I stopped doing too, is I stopped worrying about the algorithm. It was just like, okay, if I can post this week, great. If I can post 3 times, even better., but hey, if I get busy, I'm not worried about it. And yeah, I like to, I try to post in the morning because I have noticed and during the week, of course, that helps at least my content, but I don't worry about putting a hook in and all these fancy things. And then on the topic of things that hurt you and AI slop, as far as trust, people's trust in you, I think AI comments are one of the worst things. I think people, there's some people that like, oh, I would never write a, put a post out there using AI, put a post out, but then you see them, their AI comments, and that hurts your reputation just as much or more because more people are seeing those comments on other— you're expanding it out to other people's networks that are seeing this and you look at it and you're just like, that's— this is the, this is what you're putting out. This is the quality that you're going to put out there.

Oh, and I've also seen people are using bots and LinkedIn supposedly cracking down on bots or they're hiring someone else to go out and post. These innocuous generic comments on other people's posts, and it really makes the executive look bad. Yeah, there was a post recently that was so clearly AI written and somebody pointed it out. It was written by the COO of— let's just say it was a Fortune 100 company. I don't want to name the name. It was a big company and you could look at it and it was just so obvious AI slop because it had all the telltale signs. Of being written by AI without any deep thought inside it. And so let's get into a little bit more of how you can use AI, because that's one of the things that you provide advice to people on. It's something that both you and I are very passionate about. My product Make Media actually does a lot of this stuff, but not writing just from, hey, write me a post on this. The way I've found to have AI work really is you absolutely must start with a human first.. And you can use AI as a tool and to extract the expertise that you have as a consultant. It's all done through questions. And so I found that if we could actually ask or get AI to ask really deep questions that are based in research, that are rooted in your background, as well as the things that you're passionate about. And I don't just mean technologically, if you're a CTO or if you're a chief revenue officer about how you could increase 30% revenue. What I'm talking about are things that are important to you, like causes maybe that you support. It could be just other things that make you up. Maybe, maybe you had a family event recently and you wanted to share it. I know my daughter just graduated from college and I posted a note. She was up there in front of Radio City Music Hall and I talked about how all of the speakers at the commencement addresses were talking about storytelling and, and how when one person mentioned the word AI, the students started booing. And so it was interesting to connect what's going on in the world today with an event that happened in my life. And that's something that's so unique. Nobody could replicate— AI could never have written such a post, but it could help me extract what I was thinking. And so can you describe what you're seeing as ways companies can start to use AI in a very productive way without creating slop and without just spinning cycles.

Yeah. I think the first thing that, that I go to is that everyone thinks AI needs to be used to produce a thing, right? To create a post or write a website or write an email or to just produce content. And to your point, the, the, some of the most useful applications of AI are to just help you, the human, produce that output, right? So they're to ask those questions, help you analyze your own thoughts, identify gaps in data. So you're almost using the AI to reverse engineer things so that you can then go and do the deliverable, right? Or create the deliverable. I think AI started in code, and that's a, that's an easier thing to do in my opinion than most other knowledge work, cuz you can test code. Right? It's automated. Does it work or not? And of course there's a level of quality to the code and how it's written and all that stuff that I'm not going to get into. It's been decades since someone has paid me to write code, but I think the, in the knowledge work side, you need to think of it not just as, okay, can this write this thing for me? Can it produce this thing for me? It's to your point, how can it help me think about the things in my business, right? Or the product that I'm doing or the problem that I'm trying to solve. And help it use it as a, as a sounding board. And everyone talks about using it as a thought partner. And that's how I, how, that's how I define that. Right. I think.

Yeah. I, I, cause I see a lot of companies, large and small, actually large companies even more where they will buy a corporate enterprise license to Copilot, for example, because they're using Microsoft suite. And then they've spent millions of dollars on this. And the message is everybody start using AI. Yeah. And everybody just looks up and I'm saying, okay, and what does that exactly mean? Oh, I'll have it draft my email for me, or maybe I'll help it design a, like a PowerPoint slide deck. And it comes out looking, oh, this isn't the way I design or write or anything. And then they get discouraged and they stop using it. So when you hear someone say to their team, hey, let's use AI more, it's gonna make us more productive. You've argued, you, you've argued that just that approach completely fails. How should somebody really look at it? What should it, what should an executive be doing to make sure that the teams are successful?

Yeah, so look, a year and a half ago in, in that time range, it was frankly not bad advice to say, just use AI and that's how you can get better and that's how you can use it. And, but the tools have progressed, right? There's more features, there's more advanced capabilities, and also the process, processes and techniques that people like me and others have developed around how to use these have become more advanced and progressed. And there's many, there's many ideas about how to do that. So it really helps to have someone guide you at this point. You need some training or some processes around integrating this into people's work. And so if you want to use, let the, let the early people like me who did the hard work and you who did the trial and error and went through the trenches so you can learn from our mistakes, right?

I so agree with that because Malcolm Gladwell's thing is what, 10,000 hours before you're really proficient at something. And I'm not saying you don't, you need 10,000 hours of practice with AI to really know what to do with it, but—

Not many people have that.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's very few.

I don't even know who would have that, right? Maybe the people that work at Anthropic perhaps, but otherwise, and maybe not even then, because that's a lot of hours.

Yeah.

But your, your point is so well made here because you've already put in the the 200, 300 hours of hammering on AI to get it to do certain things and react in certain ways. And then through that process, you and I have also discovered that there are ways you can approach using AI that really gets you farther way faster. And so a lot of people could just literally, if they had a 1-hour conversation with somebody like you or me, they would learn so much more. In fact, I taught my daughter, who is a filmmaker, how to do vibe coding in about an hour. And she built several apps and was able to then go on job interviews talking about AI. And she kept advancing and she landed a great job. But it was because she was using it in ways where other kids would be booing AI. She's, no, let me show you what you can actually do. And so sometimes just that extra help makes a big difference. And you draw a hard line between a prompt and a workflow. So walk me through what a fully figured out tool or process could look like. So this could be the triggers, the inputs, a process, success criteria. And if you've got an example, I'd love to hear how you would walk someone through a use case with AI.

Yeah. So it, it starts with knowing what you want to do. So I think lots of this, people tend to jump in and they just want to write a prompt, right? And so they jump in and I think what you'll find these days, if you talk to people like me and other advanced users, so to speak, you find that we're doing a lot of either pre-planning before we're even in AI, right? We're taking notes, we're collecting documents and in a folder and things like that. Or we're doing what we talked about before, which is letting AI interrogate us to determine what the real motivation is and what the real strategy is and what's the real goal. So the first thing is just what's the goal? What do you want to do? And then it's about establishing and recording what are the inputs? So what's going to change every time you use this workflow? And then what are the— and what's the output? So what does good look like? Whether it's an actual document or a strategy or just some thinking, what do you want that What do you want that to look like? And having examples of that is good. But then there's also the knowledge, and this is the thing that doesn't change. And so you, you want to, there's some baseline stuff, right? You want to know about your company, right? And that, that, that doesn't change what your services are, your history, who you are as a person and things like that. And so I actually have, when I, when clients work for me, I have two things that help them work through this. So one is an AI workflow opportunity worksheet. And that is something that helps people examine their own role and examine their own job to identify where do, where does AI make sense to insert it, right? So it's what takes too much time, what's tedious, right? What do you avoid every week? What do you have to do every week that you avoid or you hate? Things like that. What do you do? What work do you work, do the same way every time? So there's lots of, especially in marketing and sales, there's lots of reporting and things. Client status updates, uh, business reviews, data analysis, all that stuff. And then you can evaluate those, right? Do you do those things at least weekly? Are, do you, if you, could you write all of the things down about this and give it to someone else? And could they do that, right? Could another human do it? And if yes, then that's probably a good candidate for AI. And so things like that. And then once you've identified the, what you want to do, then you add the how do you do it? And so that gets to what we were just talking about. So the purpose, what are we doing? Why did we do this? What are the inputs? What are the assets and knowledge? What's the output format? How do we know it's good?

Things like that. Now, every executive that's brought into a company, whether it's fractional consulting, if you're an executive being tapped, you have to talk about strategy. They're not going to hire you as an executive at high rates to just do implementation that maybe a junior-level person could just do, follow orders and so on. So you have to come with something strategic to the table. And as that executive, if you're not including AI as part of what you bring to the table, you're probably missing out on an opportunity. But you might also not get a deal because people are looking for how do I implement AI. And so you're talking about some of the ways to do that right now. When you see companies wasting money on AI, where do you see that going? What are they doing that they shouldn't be doing right now?

I think it's probably give, just giving their people AI chatbots without any proper training or building or any thought about building systems and processes around it.

Yeah.

So the way to think about this, I think, is previous technologies replaced earlier similar technologies, right? So Computers replaced typewriters and calculators. Email replaced fax, and if you go way back, interoffice mail. And, and so people have some way to understand how to use those, what they're for, how they can integrate them in their job. AI is more of a general purpose technology, so it's hard for people to get around, especially if you haven't used it a lot, how it's hard for people to get their head around how it can help them. What it can do for their job, how to apply it in their job. And because it's, it requires a different mindset. And so that's where I see people, it's just like they treat it, and this is common, right? This is not something, this is not a unique idea, but they treat it like a normal, like an IT project and like a software rollout where it's like, okay, here's this tool. We're going to give you 1 hour of training on how to use just the literal tool. And the tools themselves are AI, as we all know, that's some part of why they're so popular, I think. They're super easy to use, right? It's just a chatbot and you talk to it. But if to really use it on a team-wide scale and how do you translate your work? And really it's a mindset, right? And so it's, you start getting into organizational change. How do you communicate with these things? And these are words that you don't use with Excel, right? You don't think about, you don't have to teach people how to communicate with Excel. That's just, that's learning formulas and that's relatively easy. And so, yeah, it's that just, it's another tool. And so here's the tool, here's an hour of training, or sometimes not even that, because they think, oh, it's just so easy, we don't need to train people. And so it just goes nowhere because people are like, I don't know how to use it. Or they got, since they weren't trained in how to communicate and how to think about how this can help their actual role, they use it in a novice way or an incomplete way. And they get poor results and then that turns them off and they say, oh, this is a toy. It won't work for my particular work. Right. It might work for you. It might work for coding, but it doesn't work for me because I do X, Y, or Z. Yeah.

Right. I think to your point, the right now, that to me is a signal that someone may not fully understand what you can actually do with it or how. Yeah. And that's the guidance that they need.

But I love that you said the word cheating, right? A couple of years ago, right? A couple of years ago, it was ridiculous how, in some cases, how bad it was, especially with the Canonical examples are the how many Rs are in strawberry, right? And it says, whatever, 2. And image generation, people with 7 fingers on each hand. But we're, if that was the, you need to update your priors if that's what you think AI is.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's moved and it's moved so fast. I know that one of the things that a lot of people were talking about and it bothers me to no end when I see things like this and that is Hey, don't put any em dashes because that's a dead giveaway. Yeah, I have been using em dashes since college.

Yeah.

And I remember writing a post and this was one of my most popular posts is that I'm a good writer because of my English teachers in 11th grade and 12th grade. And they really pushed me. They were such hard graders. They pushed me to keep thinking. And I do use em dashes and I intentionally used them in that post at the very end. I said, And I used two of them in this post. You can go back and count them if you want. And so following what you see online as what someone's calling a trend, do this, don't do that, I think is really selling someone short. And so let me go into this area here. You did say something that I think it's— there are two words that almost every fractional executive should be using in their communications, and those are organizational change. Because a CEO will bring you in or a board will bring a fractional CEO in sometimes for organizational change. That's why you would hire somebody. And so let's say you were going into a 25, 50-person company. They gave you one quarter. What's the single highest leverage thing that you would have them build first? And what do you think would be measurably different in those 90 days?

So I'm gonna take a step up. So an organizational change, I don't have any certifications or anything like this. It's just from 30 years of trenches experience in building companies.

Which is way better than a certification, I think.

And fighting my way through all the change that assaults you when you're trying to grow a business. So the first key thing is it's gotta be top-down and bottom-up, right? When I talk to people, it's gonna fail if I'm not talking to the CEO. Basically, in this, besides becoming CEO or founder, but then that's got to be translated into bottom-up enablement. So to directly answer your question, it would probably be training and helping people do all the things like figure out how to communicate with it, how to, what are these tools, how do these tools work, and then how to give them help and applying it to their roles, right? Because especially where we are now with AI, there's some reticence out there, right? Sometimes fear, sometimes stigma. And, but if you show peep someone and if you are not show them, but if you give them the opportunity to build something for themselves in their role that saves them an hour, right? Something that they do every single week or every single day and it saves, even if it just saves them 15 minutes, there's no one, especially in small companies that I work with, that says, I got plenty of time in my day, right? I don't— bring it on. I've got— I need more work and I don't need more time. And so if you have those people that are reticent and are maybe like your blockers in this effort, showing them, giving them that direct experience and how this can help you do one of the mundane tasks or a regular task, how it can save them time, that is massive. And so it's— and to tack on, I think really the first thing that I would do from a, like, you start with the CEO and that they need to understand what the real problem is and getting a, to enable for, to help the CEO do the top, do the bottom-up approach. You need to know what's going on in the company. And sometimes the CEO doesn't because people don't often tell the CEO or other senior leaders what they really think. And an AI, a survey around AI is really important to guide that change and that enablement program and make it successful.

I think that's great. And as we start to close out here, I've got a rapid-fire round of questions for you. Are you ready, Nicholas? We're going to go right at it. Real quick responses. Okay. So ChatGPT, Claude, which is the one that you use for your daily work?

Claude.

Why?

So here's my answer to this. The, the, this will not be rapid-fire, but we'll see. I'll make it as quick as possible. So the model companies, the labs will continue to leapfrog one another, right? This month Claude will be better at this. Next month ChatGPT will be better at that, Gemini, all this stuff. What I look at from a business perspective is the trajectory of a company. So right now and for the foreseeable future, I have more confidence that Anthropic will put out features that are relevant to me and my clients as businesses.

And they seem to be putting out features so fast that they're causing other companies' stock prices to plummet. I know when they came out with Claude Design, Figma dropped a lot that day. So let's see what keeps happening.

Great.

All right. What's the most overhyped AI capability right now?

At least in the work that I do with my companies, it's not necessarily overhyped, but it's just not used as much as people give it attention to, is image generation. I just don't see a lot of people using it, maybe because it's easy to identify. Creative teams are not also reticent to use it from that perspective. That's sort of like image generation is like using AI to just write something from whole cloth for you, and creative teams are not gonna be good with that. But it was really interesting to me, the recent announcement from Martin Scorsese, and he was getting involved in an AI company, but he was very specific in that the AI, he was using AI in his filmmaking process for storyboarding to make that process faster, but not the actual storytelling itself.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really important because storytelling really is such a human thing. It's what connects us as people. From the beginning of humanity. Next one, which one wins, a magic prompt or a boring habit?

Oh, boring habit every single time. Uh, collecting and twice on Sunday, as they say, every single day, twice on Sunday. Yeah. A boring habit is like of writing things down or recording your meetings. You're making sure you're putting things in text files, recording your company knowledge and that those, some of those soft things that are just in your head, your executive's head. Or the IC's heads so that you can put that into AI and have it know you at a deeper level than any prompt will ever give you. It also leads to this, these sorts of things lead to more consistent results, correct results, and just more, more comprehensive knowledge about your business and more effective AI outputs.

All right. And with that, Nicholas, thank you so much for joining me today on Executive Signal. If anyone listening would like to reach out to Nicholas, he is available on LinkedIn, very approachable, and you can find him at Nicholas Tolson. And you just do a quick search. I think you're probably gonna be the top person that pops up on LinkedIn, right?

Yeah, I've come up, I have, I have too many names. So, but yeah, J Nicholas Tolson, you might have to find me there. But razzohq.com, razzohq.com will also lead you to me.

Excellent. Thanks so much for a very enlightening conversation. And I hope if you're an ex, if you're a fractional executive, If you're a coach, if you're a consultant, you picked up a few tips on how to actually get your brand out there so that you start to build up a lot of influence and you never go through that feast or famine cycle for too long. See you next time.

Thanks, Raj.