The Achieve Podcast - Dave Maney (The Express Press Inc.)

Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Dave Maney, the founder and CEO of the Express Press Inc. You can find them at xp.news. Now, Dave, give us the backstory. How did you get into this space, and who are you guys currently serving?

Well, uh, the Expert Press is actually the fourth company that I founded. Um, the first one in 1992 was— first of all, I started my life after business school at, uh, the, at the San Francisco Chronicle, um, and had been a news guy before that working for both, uh, local papers before I went back to business school and actually an NBC affiliate in my hometown. And, and, and so when I went back to business school, I did so wanting to come back to the news business in my mind as a, as a, as an, you know, a manager and an executive. And, and I did that, went to the San Francisco Chronicle, ended up— Chronicle also had a cable television division and the CFO ended up leaving to start a fund to buy and acquire and operate newspapers and cable systems. We— I was gonna— I was the newspaper M&A guy.

Okay.

And, uh, and we ended up deciding newspapers were too expensive, believe it or not, given what's happened to the industry. And so we focused on cable television. I became a cable operator, uh, and then ended up founding my first company in, in the cable television business, in the technology end. Which was very lucky time and lucky place to be doing that. So that was very successful. Ended up after selling it, starting a middle market merchant banking firm. So really with one of my business school classmates and put down deep roots in financial services and in effect was also kind of the firm's CMO, you know, in charge of kind of building the brand and doing some rainmaking. And that really taught me a lot about about, you know, the, the marketing and the, the visibility and the brand building of professional services. Um, and, uh, and, and, uh, at the end, in between there, by the way, was a, a telecom startup that we killed in its infancy. So not everything, um, but the, the, the merchant banking firm, which I, I spent a decade at and then sold my interests, uh, back to my, my co-founder which today actually is part of Huntington Bank. So it's, it's ended up being merged very successfully. And, um, and, and actually the, the roots of our company were that I had gone back heavily into, uh, media commentary when the financial crisis hit in 2008, doing it as a kind of a thought leadership thing for the for the investment bank and ended up, I spent about 14 years doing economic commentary for Fox Business with Neil Cavuto most of the time and Fox News as well. And so, you know, done something like 300 appearances to discuss economic conditions and forecasts and everything else. And along the way, Got asked by what used to be a competitor in the investment banking business if I could help them figure out after I left, if I could help them figure out how to build an online presence and build their brand. And I thought it was an interesting assignment. And in effect, the Expert Press grew out of that, out of that, seeing what was going on there.

Wow, that is quite the journey and broad with a lot of those skills. Now, how big is the team in the organization currently?

So the team now has a software division in Canada, which helps build the platform. We've had a long journey. This company's journey was much more arduous than our previous ones, and it's really only kind of broken into its own over the last, you know, I'd say in the last 18 months, the first time I felt like we had kind of You know, the phenomenon I would describe is that, uh, you know, you could see a pretty audacious, um, opportunity at the start, which is that I, you know, as a guy who came out of the news business, I knew that the economics of the news business had been devastated and were going to get worse. I also knew that there was a huge need for experts and professional services firms and any knowledge-driven industry to be able to put what it knew on display, to be able to show what they know. I mean, I don't like the term thought leadership because most of it's been done so badly, but that's what the world calls it. That idea of, can I— let me demonstrate to you what I know. Let me show and put on display what I know. So that if it's relevant to you, you'll know I might be a good person to talk to. That phenomenon, you could tell, was, you know, it's very difficult, as you know, to display knowledge, to show competence, to show an understanding of your prospect's needs. And that I could see that there was a clear match between desperately shorthanded newsrooms and deeply experienced experts who could comment through their lens on everything that's going on in the world. You wanna talk about what's gone on in the, you know, the energy supply in the Iran war? Ask a guy who's an energy industry analyst or an energy industry attorney or the accounting firm for one of the major energy companies. Ask them because their perspective will be extremely well-informed and different than somebody that sits in the newsroom at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. You got to do a lot of things to keep them from polluting their commentary with, you know, self-promotion and commercial messages and all that kind of stuff. But if it's funneled and controlled and directed the right way, It is content that is more, in my opinion, insightful and more illustrative and much deeper and richer than what you can typically get from a journalist. That's what I saw as the opportunity.

Okay. I love that. Well said. Because yeah, the, the, the front lines, the expertise. Now, as you look at the business, what would you say is driving growth for you guys right now?

It's fascinating. So I think everybody in the planet— one of my, one of our clients, in fact, is a private equity firm. We, we do, we do business with a lot of private equity firms who use that kind of knowledge display to either, um, drive their deal flow. Like, we are— hey, we are, we are experts in the logistics industry, or we're experts in the cybersecurity business, and So, you know, and we have a vision for the future. So if you're trying to grow your cybersecurity company or trying to sell it, you probably ought to talk to us first. That's their idea. One of those guys said, you know, I'm on 6 boards of directors. And he said at every one of the board meetings, we spend— every time we spend an hour and the first part of the first half of the hour is about how AI is, you know, the greatest thing ever to happen to our business. And the second part of the hour is how AI is an existential threat to the business. And I think that's like universally true, right? And, and, and, but I do think it's begun to play out, you know, for different kinds of businesses, like, oh yeah, that really is a huge threat, or, oh yeah, that really is. And so to answer your question, uh, my investors were really worried when, when, you know, the, the powerful large language models started to come out saying, oh well, it can write, don't you guys write? Which It's not exactly how we do it, but, and what has happened instead, and I saw this as a possibility at the time, didn't know if it was how it would play out, but, you know, the sea of AI slop and AI crap has made it very difficult to stand out and be authenticated. And large language models have things called authority frameworks, which is, how they in effect evaluate, hey, you asked me a specific question. How do I know if you say to me, I need a law firm that can handle employment law for a company that straddles the border with operations in Ontario, Canada, and, you know, Salt Lake City, Utah, um, the, you know, the way that, that AI models go and figure out how to list those is complex but tends to follow the, these same authority framework which we've actually researched and written about fairly extensively. And it is very hard to move that needle without editorially curated published work. So, you know, so, so effectively, if you're a, you know, significant regional accounting firm and you're trying to, you know, go beyond what everything you've been, if you want to move and be visible, you have to kind of build that sort of nationally published, editorially created track record. Because by the time you get down to the thing you posted on your LinkedIn account, AI, you know, AI stopped listening. It may find that if asked, it may find your specific post, but it's considering, you know, a world of 150 regional accounting firms. And so if you say to me, which regional accounting firm can help me with, you know, unusual cost spikes from caused by the Iran war, it's not finding your LinkedIn post in the reference. It's finding the piece that the guy from, you know, the big accounting firm based in Salt Lake City wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune or the piece that somebody wrote for the Wall Street Journal or for Barron's or for Fortune, et cetera. So that AI has turned out to be a huge kind of wind blowing us forward because there's this kind of panicked moment taking hold when, you know, the major law firm realizes that it's literally invisible in AI answers, or the significant accounting firm finds that its main rival in the sector has managed to kind of corral the entire sort of attention span of the large language models. And then it's kind of that moment of what do we do about it? And that's where we come in.

Yeah, the difference between SEO versus GEO is unreal. It's like, it's not about being a top 10 websites, it's being visible to the AI.

It's astonishing. We're, we're, we're soon will be headed to the, the legal industry's largest trade show for marketers. And for it, we've done a major research product or project on what we call the authority mirage, which is firms that may or may not be authoritative can show up very highly ranked if they've kind of done the right— they can't fake the knowledge, but they can ensure its kind of its availability and its distribution. That mirage works both ways in that there are major law firms who are across a wide range of subjects, do not show up in Answers. And as you know, there's no page 2, right? It's not, oh, well, let's go to, let's see the next set of answers. It's you're there or you're not, which actually has led us to our tagline for the company now is publish or vanish.

I love that. Publish or vanish. That's good. Now, with your team being based, or a big chunk of it, in Canada, how much is US US versus Canada. How many, how many people are on the team right now?

So it's a small team, it's a dozen people. And, and that, and that team is, you know, what we had a big software building effort, uh, you know, and kind of one of the, you know, one of those strange how the world works things, uh, thinking what we were creating was needed to be a SaaS product. And in effect, the The, how I would describe our company today is we are definitively a technology-enabled service. We took the platform that we built, you know, is most prominently used by our editors and our team to help produce this work efficiently and effectively for customers and display it to those customers. But, you know, where, at one point you imagined, oh, this, maybe this is a SaaS solution, a kind of a push-button phenomenon, that is something that was a major change to our kind of strategy that caused by AI. So what we've done is in effect turned the focus entirely the other way around, which is to say, what's the human part that's so critical for that publishing and what's the human part that can't be replicated. And then instead of trying to make software do it, which is actually what we started out to do in, in 2020, uh, instead it's completely the other way around, which is how do we wrap AI around the most critical human parts to enable— and, and the most critical function in our business actually is a human-to-human you know, kind of interview set that happens between our editors and, and their experts. And what we've done now is wrap AI support all the way around that so that it, it's time-saving, it's incredibly effective for both the expert and for us. It allows us to let them be— help them be vastly more prepared for their interview. It lets us get them exactly on the topic that they need to be to kind of fulfill this 12-part formula that we have to get them on the right topic. So it's been, uh, it's been a huge boon in every way and now has begun to kind of push us forward.

Wow, I love that, the way you're utilizing that and the way you worded that. It's, it's, it's supporting the human element all around. Like, you can't replace that human feature. So looking back for you personally, what turning points, positive or negative, have molded the way you think about running organization?

Uh, you know, it's always the, the butt kicking you take that kind of, you know, most, most shapes it. Um, I think when you've been through, you know, two successful startups and one, uh, one that, that wasn't, at least on the, you know, by any normal measure, um, it It helps sustain you when stuff isn't going right. It definitely helps kind of level you out. But, you know, this one, this one is the most— this is the most sort of game-changing thing I've done. And it is the most paradigm shifting and therefore unquestionably the hardest. Like, you know, and I think any normal person would have given up a long time ago. Uh, and so the things that have been, you know, the things that have been the, the, the, the huge turning points were, uh, the first one was it was at its beginning a very manual, sort of craft-driven, you know, thing where you could see the, you could see the opportunity, you could see the match, but you had to kind of use people to kind of force the, you know, the thing to work. It was expensive, it was, it was uneven, and it had a high churn problem. That led me— and you could see some really interesting patterns emerging. Okay, so patterns of, of the way the content flowed, patterns of the way you assign topics, patterns of the way that, you know, publishers like to get their things, all of those kind of things. So you could begin to say, well, these are some really interesting data hierarchies at work here. And then there's, you know, clearly some structured workflows that could be improved and cleaned up and made much less analog. In effect, that led to, you know, the raising of additional capital and the software era. That led to, um, uh, that, you know, we could not be where we are had we not done all of that building because we systematized the creation of expert news content. So where it had always just been, oh, let's hire a ghostwriter and they'll sit down with you, you know, and tell them what you think you might like to talk about this week. That is like 180 degrees from how it works for us. And that, that systemization would not have been possible were we not trying to drive the process to a software platform. So having that then allowed us to kind of, you know, get into the AI car and, and take off.

That makes sense. Now when it comes to your messaging and outreach and marketing systems, what's been working well and where are you still filling the gaps or frustrations?

Oh, there's all— it's, it is by far our, you know, weakest functionality, like without question. And it's, and it's not Just, you know, he— and I'm sure you can appreciate this as a professional marketer— just because you are visionary, or just because you are— and look, right here as we sit here today, you want to know who knows more about the effective creation of news-driven, news-published thought leadership, like, in the entire world? I do. I've spent 13 years cracking a very difficult set of problems in it. And you know what that does for your marketing? Nothing. If you, you know, if you just being that guy doesn't mean anything without showing you're that guy. And, and that's one thing. And the— and then the ability to effectively kind of and mechanically carry it out. Is another. And I would say we have— we are only now just beginning to kind of to do that. So, you know, uh, no, this is, this is no mystery at all. But spending what our, our platform, our process, our deliverables— we've done, you know, more than 3,000 national news pieces on behalf of customers. It's a body of work that no, no PR firm, no, no advertising agency, nobody nowhere has ever created. Yeah. And it doesn't matter because it doesn't matter unless you can kind of, in effect, you know, build that marketing apparatus.

That makes sense. It doesn't matter if nobody knows about it.

Right.

That's right. And so now, Dave, when you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

Um, in these, you know, this last kind of major AI wave has done two things last, and this is really in the last 6 months. Number one, it has suddenly— the, the AI slop problem became evident, and so it was suddenly like, oh shit, like, excuse me, we can't, we can't simply You know, I thought, well, I was, I'm the marketing guy. I thought for content we were just gonna be able to turn this machine on and turn out stuff. And it's like, you can, and so can everybody else on the planet. So therefore, you know, before the term AI slop was coined, I had termed a, I had created an internal phrase for our editors called the crap line. And I said, effectively, anything that AI can create is now below the crap line. And we have to create stuff. You can think of it as the waterline above on a pyramid, right? Where it's like everything below that, who cares? That's table stakes. Everything above it is what's gonna move the needle. And we had begun to already sort of say we can only assign pieces and work that is above that crap line. And sure enough, then, you know, sort of a year later, the world figured out the AI slop notion. And had this big kind of allergic reaction to that. So, you know, I would say that right now our, our ability to keep— to constantly, every time, keep people creating stuff that is, you know, um, meaningful to their audience and that is original and comes with, for us, with a publication guarantee— like, we literally, you know, guarantee the publication of the work we create, or we simply do a make-good. And our, our publication rate is about 99.6%. So effectively, what is that? That's 4 times out of 100. So 1 in 400 times, 1 in 200, yeah, roughly 1 in 400 times we have a piece that doesn't publish. But that's how good the process and the information and the data we have and the distribution channels have become. But, but it don't— but that only works because it's not that slop.

That's beautiful. And, and the AI slop is a real, a real thing. So Dave, if you look back at your journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you, and what do you wish you understood sooner?

Um, I think it's really— I, I think that if I look back on the, on the, the companies that I had that succeeded I had a partner in each who was really good at the things that I am not really good at. And I think that this company was, you know, what was delayed, part of it, part of its delay. I keep thinking that the delays will ultimately make me feel lucky for their existence because I think, I think we could have built a company that would have been wiped out by AI if we We built it the wrong way. But I guess I would say that nonetheless, having, you know, that kind of partner from the beginning would have made a big difference. I think that the, you know, the heroic entrepreneur who can do everything is— they exist, but there's not many of them. And I have this funny feeling that the ones who are doing something that is, you know, visionary— and I, I, you know, look, if we fall down and fail to, to, you know, thrive, it, it won't mean— it was still— it's, it's a very powerful vision that we have. And so, you know, striving to do something that really does change— like, my vision of the world is is, you know, news gathering as a function. No journalists as interpreters, 'cause I think by and large, the ones that do aren't very good at it. Using experts everywhere for every, you know, a rich supply of editorially curated, carefully directed commentary and insight from real experts that help kind of explain the moving parts of the world around us that are relevant to somebody. But not in a, I've gotta go look for it, or I'm gonna go into that sea of crap that is LinkedIn to try to find the one gem piece. Instead, just sort of being able to look to more traditional channels or publications that are alive with expert insight and commentary. That's what, you know, that's what I'm after. Doing that takes a long time. Doing that takes multiple skill sets. Um, and I wish I had had those on board earlier.

Yeah, wow. And I love the value you're bringing with that because AI is just compounding. There's just so much more and more to filter through, more to like, okay, where's the quality versus the quantity?

Yeah.

And if what you're saying is, you know what, if it's not quality, we don't publish it.

Hey, we might get to a point, you know, I, I, I'm a, I am a practitioner in the world of AI. I am a very curious mind. I have written about those authority frameworks extensively for Ad Age and Adweek and Inc. and, you know, Kiplinger. I've written all of this work about authority frameworks. And so I'm not an— I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I'm an understander and a pretty good communicator about it. And so I know what the, you know, the hypesters, where they believe it'll go and say it's already at. And I think I believe them. And so, you know, we may find that ultimately we don't need human expertise in nearly as many categories as we did. But it seems to me to the extent that we still need it, it's gonna become really, really economically powerful and important, right? Like by definition, AI becomes table stakes for everybody. It gets easier and easier to use for specific applications for everybody, which means that whoever commands it from the top, you know, commands more and more value, but still has to find a way to competitively differentiate themselves from the other guy or the other woman driving the other big AI stack. And I think that's always gonna take, you know, real skill in the differentiation.

Wow. So Dave, last question. If you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?

For us, it's an easy answer and I'm not a paid shill for your, practice Taylor Baker Baker, but it's, it's lead generation. We have developed, you know, the best— it's the only platform to do what we do. We're the only people with that track record. We, we don't miss on sales presentations, and, and we— no one ever says, I don't believe it, that's not usual, that you don't understand my problems. Uh, it means we've had to shift and begin shifting into a strong lead generation mode because, you know, if— when we find them, we kill them.

That's awesome. So for those who want to reach out, again, XP.News, LinkedIn. Where else can they find you? Any other places you want to send them?

Those are the important places, and, uh, they can find more after that.

Okay. And thank you for coming on, and thank you to our sponsors of today's episode: Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses, And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you want your story, your expertise to shine, reach out to Dave and the team. They can help you polish things up and help you demonstrate your expertise in your area of field. So reach out to Dave and the team, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.