In this live workshop presentation, Scott Empringham teaches members of the Entrepreneur Organization (EO) how to replace traditional marketing agencies with AI‑driven, do‑it‑yourself marketing. He shares his personal comeback story—losing a multi‑million‑dollar agency and rebuilding his business with AI—then walks the audience through a repeatable framework: (1) identify the ideal customer (ICP) and their core challenges, (2) craft a credibility statement, (3) add a guarantee word, (4) create a clear call‑to‑action. Using a curated set of about a dozen AI marketing tools and pre‑written prompts, participants generate ads, emails, blogs, websites, and video commercials in real time on their laptops, even when the venue loses power and they must rely on iPhones. Scott emphasizes the high cost of agency‑produced messaging ($5k‑$20k) versus the near‑instant, low‑cost output achievable with AI. He also highlights the supportive, vetted EO network that helped him recover personally and professionally. The workshop concludes with attendees seeing tangible marketing assets and a call to join future, deeper‑dive sessions.
Chapters
we're getting ready to go over to a workshop. I'm doing it for a group of business owners. They're members of Entrepreneur Organization, and they've asked me to come in for 2 hours to teach them a marketing framework, expose them to about a dozen AI marketing tools, and then actually give them an experience with all the prompts and all the tools and have them produce their marketing right there during the workshop. Been doing this, been really fortunate, been around the world a couple of times with my family teaching entrepreneurs just like this. And so this is going to be a smaller venue. It's going to be awesome. Going to be 2 hours jam-packed, and we're going to be rocking and rolling the whole time. These are business owners, no design experience, no development experience. What you'll see really is them just mind-blown as they create their ads, their emails, their blogs, their websites, their commercials for their business without any tech experience at all. What I'll usually do is I'll stand outside and talk to her and try to make her laugh while she's on her calls. That's the best. She's awesome. Today for me is a pretty exciting day because it wasn't that long ago I had this big agency. They called me the Billion Dollar Man. We're winning awards. I'm on stage in Vegas and everything's great. Agency hit $10, $11, $12 million. And a short time after that, I basically lost it all. Everything crumbled down. Two of my major clients lost their business and I lost mine. I had a big decision to make, which was, do I rebuild that same business on top of bad mud, a bad structure? Or do I reinvent it? AI came out and for me, everything changed. So my presentation today is a workshop I call Fire Your Agencies, Master AI, and Take Back Control. I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna show 'em that A, they don't need an agency, and B, they can actually do it themselves. And rather than me just talking about it, I say, flip open your laptops. Here's a link to some prompts. I'm gonna walk you through this process and you're gonna do it yourself. Then they walk out of there with all their content, their ads, their emails, blogs, commercials, everything. And it's a really, really cool experience. And that transforms not not only the way they look at marketing, but how they actually are executing marketing starting today. Oh, there it is. Hannah Haas.
Okay.
I always get to a venue a couple hours early. One side note, I'm in Mexico, Guadalajara, and getting ready for the venue there, 2 hours. It turns out a storm had gone through there, so we had no electricity, no air conditioning, no nothing. So we ended up using our iPhones to connect and do an entire workshop. That's why I'm here early. But you asked one of the questions of why I love to do this stuff. This guy was really in bad trouble and he needed help selling tickets. This is in 1999. He sold out the show with a handful of videos, a landing page, smart marketing, and being on the cutting edge of technology in AOL News Groups. That night he made a special announcement. He turned to me and said, "This is the guy that made it all happen with the marketing. That's the stuff that makes it freaking awesome." I was hooked. The group is called Entrepreneur Organization, and Entrepreneur Organization is a group of business owners, 30,000 people strong across the globe. And when you join EO, you're a member of an awesome group of business owners that all have a gross revenue of over $1 million a year. They're awesome people. Everybody's vetted. All it takes is one person to say, nope, I've done business with that man or that woman and they're not, they're not our cup of tea and they're out. You get vetted from a personal standpoint. Are you willing to be vulnerable? Are you willing to share your story? You know, really connect with people on a personal level, not just a business level. And are you there just to make money off of the other members? If the answer is yes to that question, you're out. So I'm here at EO. They've invited me to come do a 2-hour workshop here and it's the best business group I've ever joined. I've joined Founders, worked with Vistage and YPO, all these different groups. And I have to say EO is hands down my favorite group of business owners who are vulnerable, candid. They share, they're giving. You need a connection or hookup in Portugal, you drop a note in a WhatsApp channel and you got 10 people that say, I got you. You need something in Norway, you need something in Germany, you need something here in Orange County, they got you. I'm super excited to be a part of EO. I've been an EO member for now close to 9 years and it carried me when I lost my business and my marriage came apart. Who do you talk to when you lose your business? Who do you talk to when you're going through stuff like that? Best you find people that have been in your shoes and navigated that journey. And so I leaned into EO hard and found support, encouragement at times when I really needed it. And EO I credit with helping me turn around my business and getting back up on my feet and rebuilding everything. If it wasn't for EO, I'd be in a very different place. So I saw a quote last night, um, and it was little by little Little things can turn out to be a lot. And I think about how just a few short years ago I'd lost everything, and I'm on a school trip with my daughter in Sacramento, and my daughter wanted a sweatshirt, um, Gold Rush sweatshirt. I said no because I was afraid my credit card wasn't going to go through. And she goes, okay, well, how about a coffee mug? I was like, no, not a coffee mug either, afraid my credit card wouldn't go through. Jokingly, she goes, well, how about a pencil? I said, yeah, I'll get you a pencil. Take my card out, swipe it. Doesn't go through. Lady goes, sorry, sir, it didn't go through. I said, oh gosh, I'm embarrassed. Something must have happened at the office, or, you know, I was humiliated that like a $2 pencil didn't go through. Tried another card, that didn't work. I'm sitting here, and that was a few short years ago, and today I just got a text from one of my heroes who used to work with Tony Robbins. He wants to work with me. I'm here at the Hana House, just got back from Shanghai and Dallas and all these, all these amazing places all over the world. Take my family— Guadalajara, Shanghai, Canada, Mexico, Europe. And a few short years ago, I couldn't buy a freaking pencil. Just goes to show you, little by little, little things can turn out to be a lot. Good to see you. All right, brother. I call this workshop Fire Your Agency: Master AI, Take Back Control. If you catch one thing out of this workshop, this is it. When you identify your ideal customers and design your strategy first, and then go to content creation, distribution, everything freaking changes. Your agencies are not succeeding if you're using an agency, and oftentimes you're not using an agency and putting that strategy in place because how expensive is it? $5,000 for an ICP, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 for a core messaging platform. You'll have that in the next 5 minutes. You'll be blown away. Now here's the description. Charles Whitmore is a highly successful entrepreneur executive building or remodeling a luxury home in Coachella Valley, but finds the residential construction process chaotic, opaque, and frustrating. 8 out of 10 at least.
That's 10 out of 10. What you paid for, I get it, Gary.
I'm literally watching all my money fall apart. And I fired them, by the way. Yeah.
I haven't hired anybody else since.
The name of my presentation is Fire Your Agency.
Second time I've gone through this with you. This is night and day, lights out, 1,000 times better.
Yeah, buddy. Why I gave you the real stuff. I was in, uh, maybe it was Southeast Virginia. There was a guy, he goes, oh my God, they added one word, which is guaranteed. I offer guarantees. I never thought to use that in my messaging. That one freaking word I never thought to use, and I offer guarantee. I just don't tell anybody. And that's literally it. You're in a position now where you can copy and paste into Google Flow, VO3, one at a time, compress it, drop it into CapCut, and you got a commercial.
It's fantastic. It helps clarify for me kind of the vision overall of certain things and sparks a lot of other thoughts.
But the input's slightly different, the outputs would be slightly different, but for sure the format's the same.
I think the other thing too is that we have a lot of these thoughts and ideas. I know a lot of this stuff because I've been living it for 20-some years. But I have a certain way of relating to it and to hear it and see it more objectively is a significant impact.
We don't have much time left. So here's what we're gonna do. You're gonna say, are you a— and just identify your ideal customer— struggling with a couple of main challenges that your ideal customer has just in plain English. I am, and I believe people want to do business with people that believe something, that stand for something. There's your credibility statement. And I'd like to invite you to take action, use that framework and watch how easy this is. And I want to actually ask you to do something else.
Are you a buyer, director of procurement, or supply chain specialist struggling with getting material on time, accurately, and for the right price? Hi, my name is Garrett Futrell. I'm the CEO of Industrial Threaded Products. Been in this business for the last 46 years. I've been at the helm for 15 and worked for the company for the last 23 years, and I'd like to invite you to give us that next opportunity that you have come across your desk.
So that was it. That's literally the framework. You see how tight that is? When you like start off with who the ideal customer— so many times we start what we're interested when really nobody gives a shit. That's one of the takeaways. It's about them. It's about them. It's about them. Connect with their challenges.
I was my company's biggest roadblock to having a successful marketing program. And these prompts kind of changed my perspective significantly.
You know, I think probably the best part of that was when one of the attendees actually said, hey, I've gone through this once before, but this was lights out, you know, 10 times, 20 times, or 100 times better than the other one. And he really liked the other one, but I thought it was really cool to hear that, that he liked the other one or this one even better. That was awesome to hear. One member was saying he spent $80,000 spent $80,000 on all this marketing and it was just garbage. Ideal persona wasn't quite right. The core messaging wasn't right. It didn't net him any business. And he's like, in 15 minutes with the prompts, the prompt stacks and our framework that we're using just transformed everything. And so that was a great experience when I think some of the experts were like, do you like it? No, I effing love it. Some of those, some of those reactions are just, just gold. Well, there's two limiting beliefs that I think we have to overcome. Number one is people will come into our workshops with a preconception. Well, I already know AI. And, you know, it doesn't really do what I need it to do, you know, and I kind of know everything. Uh, the second limiting belief is I'm not gonna be able to do this. It's too hard. And I, I, I need a team to do this. With the workshops, the way we set it up is they actually do the work. They do hands-on demos. And there's two things we just blow through. Number one is, I thought I knew AI, but I didn't know it like this. And the second one is, I just built a commercial. I just built an app. I just built a website. I just built all my stuff. I could do this, or at least I know my team could do this even better. So you got an inside look at one of the workshops that we do. If it sparked an interest, if you're like, hey, that's a pretty cool framework, or I saw some of the tools, I've got an access to some of the prompts, or the prompts made sense to you and you want to take it to the next level, grab a spot in our workshop. Go on that link below in the description, jump into one of our workshops and let me train you personally. I'll walk you through the framework personally. I'll walk you through the prompts. And you could walk out of that workshop, that live workshop with us, with all of your ads, emails, blogs, a commercial for your business, all that done for you, customized for your business. Grab a spot in our workshop today.
