Building Self-Running Agencies & Unlocking AI Coaching | Rob Da Costa on TJ Walker Success Podcast

I didn't start a business to deal with HR issues and finance issues and quality issues and client issues and personnel issues and all the rest of it. These are strategies that apply to every business, like have a plan, have a clear niche, build your team, get the systems and processes in place, put a succession plan in place. Those are the points that I'm covering in the book. My concerns is that in September 2022, no one had really heard of AI. No one had really heard of ChatGPT Foreign.

It's the dream. Have your own agency, your own marketing agency, clients coming to you all the time, work wherever you want, whenever you want, make tons of money. It's a dream that's peddled on the Internet all the time. And yet once people get into it, they find they've lost all control over time. They're on call 24 hours a day. It's not easier than working for some agency. It's actually 10 times harder. Our guest today is an expert on the world of the agency, marketing agencies, advertising, public relations, all aspects of marketing and he helps other agency owners. He's the author of the Self Running Agency and a master at all aspects of communication, including digital clones, which we'll talk about in a moment. It's my pleasure to bring to the show Rob DaCosta. Rob, how are you today?

Hey TJ. I am great and it's great to be here as well.

How did you get to the point where you realized in your journey that, you know, maybe you're working too hard, you somehow have to systemize things? How did you learn the principles that you espouse in the self running agency?

I think primarily by making all the mistakes. So back in the early 90s, I was decided to start my own agency. I was a marketing manager for a small company and I thought I could do better than the agencies we were trying to hire. So in my arrogant young youth, I left and started my own agency. And over the next 11 years, kind of almost by accident grew that business to 25 staff, making tons and tons of mistakes. And in the end I sold that business. And part of the reason I sold that business is kind of worn down from running it. We had this big open plan office and people came. I felt like I had that corner desk and people came to my desk with their wheelbarrows of crap every day and piled it up for me to deal with. And I sat there thinking, hey, this is not why I started a business. I didn't start a business to deal with HR issues and finance issues. And quality issues and client issues and personnel issues and all the rest of it. So I then left and retrained and became a coach or I sold the agency and I thought, okay, I need to share all the things that I did wrong and the things that I've learned to help people grow a business that they still love and grow a business that they can sort of systemize to the point where they get the flexibility and freedom that they always wanted when they started a business. I find that a lot of entrepreneurs, I'm sure you found the same thing. They start their business because they want flexibility and they want freedom, both financial freedom and time freedom.

How much freedom did you have with 25 employees and clients expecting you on call 24 hours a day? I'm assuming zero.

Yeah. And part of that is because the other thing that most entrepreneurs want is control and they don't want to let go of control. This is a big lesson I learned. And so flexibility and freedom goes out the window because they still crave control. Actually, what we need to do is let go of control, but putting the systems in place to be confident that things won't fall apart.

When we start, the book is the self running agency. Rob, you must have done something right to expand to 25 people. You had to have gotten some major accounts, a major corporate accounts, paying some big money. And yet the assumption everyone has is, oh, wow, you're rich and successful. You have 25. And a lot of people who are maybe advertising geniuses aren't necessarily good at managing a business, managing a people, managing cash flow. It's certainly possible to have 25 employees and be losing money every single month.

Yeah, absolutely.

How do you, how do you help people juggle that? Because growth for growth's sake isn't really a long term prescription for wealth or happiness.

No, absolutely, absolutely. And one, one of the first chapters in the book is all about creating a roadmap and your vision. Because the definition of success isn't growing 20 year on year necessarily. It could be a million things. And one thing I learned is, I mean, we kind of grew organically. We weren't, we never had a grand plan. It just happened. And you know, we were in, at the beginning that whole tech, worked in the tech sector in the beginning of that whole tech boom. But now I realize that actually when you have to have a roadmap, because you need to know where you're going and you need to make sure that you are really aligned from here with where you're going, both personally and professionally, and it isn't necessarily growing 20% year on year. Some people want a lifestyle business, some people don't want to employ people at all. So they want to outsource to freelancers or offshore work. And so their business that turns we turned over one and a half million pounds. There's their business that turns over one and a half million. Could be them and a bunch of freelancers, someone else's could be a small team of five or six. So I think it starts off by having some very honest soul searching conversations around what do you want? What do you really want?

Walk us through a typical example in the book. Let's say I am. I've had an agency for three years, but it's really just, let's say I live in London and I've got half a dozen clients and I'm making, let's say a quarter of a million dollars a year, which is not a lot of money in a place like London. I mean, you're not living in the fanciest penthouse with that. But I'm doing okay. But I find that I am, I'm doing it all myself. Maybe I use a few freelancers, but every single client is expecting my call, you know, me returning their call. And without realizing it, I'm working late at night, mornings, weekends, holidays. How is your book going to help me transition to ideally making more money and working less or at least making the same amount of money and not being on call 24 7?

Yeah, I think the first thing is to decide what you want to be, whether you want to be, have that kind of freelancer mindset, which is what you've just described your business as, or where you want to have that entrepreneurial growth mindset.

And actually let's assume for this scenario, scenario, I do want to be an entrepreneur, I do want to grow, but I, I want to have a life too.

Yeah, yeah. So we've got to put a bunch of things in place. First of all, we need to get super clear about who your niche or your niche is and who your ideal target customer is. And it can't be everybody. It can't be anyone that wants advertising or anyone that wants PR or, you know, so the more narrowed down the niche we can get, the more specialist you are. And the more specialist you are, the higher the fees you can charge. And then you can stop being a busy fool. It's funn. One of the very first blogs I ever wrote when I launched my business back in 2007 was entitled Being a Busy Fool. And it's still the Most searched term that I find that drives traffic to my website. So we don't want to be a busy fool. And what I mean by that is we don't want to be working all hours, you know, answering the phone because everyone wants you, and yet not earning very much money because let's face it, the business owner is always the last person in line to get paid, not the first person in line to get paid. So we need to put. We need to decide on your niche, we need to have a roadmap, and then we need to start putting the systems and processes in place so that you can delegate work and you can be confident that it's going to be delivered to a good level that represents your brand. And the clients will be happy to work with Jane and Fred and not just you.

Because for the purposes of our hypothetical, hypothetical, let's say it's luxury brands, things like purses and dresses. So big industry. And yet while they demanding clients who want to micromanage the look and feel of every print ad, of every TV ad, video ad, how do I, how do I really grow? Because I can't just tell the, the founder, you know, a very. I can't tell Stella McCarthy. Oh, you got to talk to my intern now, my freelancer in Indonesia. It's not going to work that way. Right.

I am really convinced that people buy processes. And if we can. I know that sounds very dry, but what I mean by that is if I can say to you, look, Stella, I can get you from here to here, and here's my proven way of doing it. And actually, I'm not the best person to take you through this. My creative director is the best person to work with you at the beginning. And then my account team are the best people to get the best price for your, for your ads. I'm there to kind of help set the strategy and oversee the quality. But I am not the best person. So I am really convinced that people by process. So when we are promoting what we do, we really want to promote that repeatable process because that gives people comfort that we can actually deliver the result that they're looking for. But if all I'm doing is promoting Rob da Costa, and then of course, the client is always going to want Rob da Costa on the account. And the minute someone else is working on it, they're going to feel not very important anymore, and they're going to feel like, well, we're not good. We're not big enough for you anymore, and they're going to leave. So it's about getting that positioning right at the beginning. It's about selling your brand and not just you. And it's a about identifying this process that you take clients through so that they are comfortable that you can get the result that you are promising and that they're looking for.

The book is the self running agency. Back to our hypothetical. So let's say it's the individual making 250,000 a year wanting to get bigger. How do they hire a creative director, especially if it's in a place like London or does it even need to be without taking their own salary down to almost zero?

Yeah, well the truth of it is TJ that the first people you hire, you're in that situation is not going to be a creative director. The first thing you need to do when you're looking at hiring staff is creating a bigger well of people that can do the work. If you sort of mean. So if you're, if your cup is this big, well then the first hire I need to do is get more people to make my cup bigger so that I can then focus on my superpower. And let's face it, the, the agency owner's superpower is always going to be winning new business and setting the strategy and being that figurehead. It isn't necessary. Yes, they might think they can deliver the work better than other people, but they're asking the wrong question there. They shouldn't be saying can, can. If I hire someone, will they do it as well as me? They need to be saying if I hire someone, can they do it well enough to keep the client happy. So the first person you're going to hire is not going to be a creative director. It's probably going to be an account exec, an account manager. And in places like London it's super tough. I mean I have this conversation all the either with people who are in a big city who struggle to hire or people who are out of the big city and struggle to hire. Because everyone wants to work in the big city. But you know, today is so different to what it was back in the 90s when I ran my agency. Because today staffing an agency could be made up in multiple ways. Remote workers, offshore workers, freelancers part time, full time. So there are many ways that an agency structure can look and they all have their pros and cons. I've always not been very convinced that you can build an agency just using freelancers. But I've had conversations with people who have done that. So it is completely possible. So they've kept their Cost base, really low. They hate the idea of employing people and all the legal stuff that goes with that. And so they want to use the freelance model to serve their clients.

So, Rob, now we can talk about anything we want. I am very excited to just kind of dive right in to your clone rather than talk to you. Why don't I let you have a metaphorical coffee break now and I'm going to just bring up your clone and talk to it for a minute and let's see what we can learn directly from your clone and save you some time and energy. So we're going to. Hit the start button. This is. If the format looks a little familiar to some of our audience, it is because you are on the Delphi AI platform, which is the same platform that I use when hosting my clone.

Hi, it's Rob's clone. How can I help?

Hi, Rob. Good to see you. Today, I'm wondering if you can tell me why you created a clone and how it helps you and your business and your clients.

Hey there.

Great question. The idea of creating a digital clone like me Ask Rob anything. Was born out of a desire to provide constant, reliable support to agency owners without the constraints of time and availability. Imagine having a coach who's always there, ready to offer guidance based on decades of experience in the agency world. That's what I aim to do. By leveraging AI, I can help you tackle challenges, brainstorm ideas, and refine strategies whenever you need it. This means agency owners can access tailored advice without waiting for a scheduled session. It's like having a seasoned coach in your back pocket ready to jump in and assist at any moment. For my business, it extends my reach and impact, allowing me to support more people than I could one on one. And for clients, it means more immediate, actionable insights that can drive their agency's growth. It's a win win, really. How do you see AI fitting into your own business strategy?

Rob? Very insightful. If you have a question for the digital Rob DaCosta, Rob DaCosta's clone, go ahead and post it in the comments right here and we will share those questions directly with the Digital Rob. And we're going to bring back the real Rob DaCosta in a moment as well. Rob, what are the questions? The most frequent questions your customers, clients and others ask, whoops, we went out of our our time limit there, so we're going to bring back the real Rob and I'll ask you that question. What are people using your clone for the most?

I think at the moment they are using it to ask specific questions around challenges they have. So it might be that they are looking at recruiting and they want some advice on writing a job description for someone and my clone will share that with them. It might be that they have a specific challenge with a client, often around over servicing or around pricing and they're going to get help there. So I see it at the moment as people asking specific questions about specific challenges. And that's not where I want it to be in the end. I want people to see it more like I'm scheduling a coaching session with Rob. I'm going to chat with him about what's going on. He's going to help me. But I just think, to be quite honest, tj, I think we are a little bit ahead tech wise with the marketplace. But smarter people than me have been saying that everyone is going to have a coach, an AI coach in the next year or so. So I think that will hopefully.

I hope so. I hope it's that quick.

You and I. Yeah.

Questions coming in. Hugo Nunes writes. Great discussion. I was wondering if the principles outlined in Rob's book also apply to other types of businesses like retail or engineering firms. And I guess I'll paraphrase and say, is this a little bit like the E. Myth Michael Gerber book, which I think talks about a lot of the same themes?

Yeah, I would say so. These are, these are strategies that apply to every business. Like have a plan, have a clear niche, build your team, get the systems and processes in place, put a succession plan in place. Those are the points that I'm covering in the book. Yes, they're specific to agencies because that's my background and I tell my story in the book to kind of bring it to life. But fundamentally they, they apply to any business and certainly they apply to any service based business. But like I say, they're principles that apply to all businesses really.

Back to your clone. I found a lot of things very impressive about it, but one thing especially intrigued me, it was the movement and the hand movement. Now I am immediate by profession. Most of what I've done traditionally in the last 40 years has been media training. So when I coach people how to appear their best, if they're going on the BBC or CNN or doing something live on Zoom or something like this, or even make a video, I stress, move your hands. You look scared stiff, nervous if you do this. So in my initial videos that I was using to train the very same system you're using, I was moving my hands. But what I noticed was when the person was talking. When the user was talking to me, and I'm doing this, my hands were moving and they're like, this is crazy. What, is he hand signaling someone else? And I don't know how you did it. I hope you can share that with our audience. But I tested. I tested earlier when I was talking. Your hands didn't move when you were talking. They did move in a way that I thought was completely consistent with what you were saying. That made you look supremely comfortable, confident, real conversational, and relaxed. I did five different versions to the point where, you know the company we use, so we got to charge you another thousand dollars if you want to do another version. How did you get it to do that?

Oh, I. Well, first of all, thank you for the compliments. I wish I could share some insightful strategy that you can implement, but I don't know, Chance. I think naturally I am very gestural. But of course, when they. Everybody knows, and when they tell you how to upload the video, they are kind of telling you not to do that because I guess, like you said, it will be unnatural. I guess I just recorded it and I did it a little bit when I was talking. And somehow the AI has interpreted that to work quite well. I've noticed, and I'm sure you've seen this because I know you've looked at a lot of the other clones that are available on Delphi, that some of them look quite good and some of them look very stilted and upright because they almost didn't move, and they look robotic. And so I'm glad mine doesn't do that. I think the. The other thing that I've learned is that if I was going to record mine again, I probably need to be more animated in my intonation, because the clone somehow dims that down, doesn't it? And it makes it a bit more.

Well, that's the audio. I mean, you can redo audio recordings anytime you want. It's not tied to the video.

No, but. Yeah, but the way that. Yeah, that's true, I guess. But I also hope that the tech that. That is working in the background is going to keep improving so that the, you know, the video. Our videos improve as well. But I can't say I've got something clever to tell you about how I managed to do that.

Okay. Our guest today is Rob DaCosta, internationally renowned expert on marketing helping agencies run their business more effectively, and the proud owner of one of the very first fully interactive digital video clones in the world, which I do Want to, I do want to share with people again. They can, they can go here and try it out anytime. Now, the best URL for that is to go to DACostacoaching.

No, just go to ask. Ask.dacostacoaching.co.uk so ask.d a c o S T A.

Okay. And we posted, we posted all those links in the show notes and the description as well. So a lot of good stuff here. Now I'm noticing that you have a button that says call again, which the video or chat. Have you hidden the audio only version?

No. If you go back, I guess if you click on the left arrow on the top left of your screen, you should be able to go, no, no, no. Down, down, down, down, down, down.

Thatcher.

Yeah, you should be. Yeah, you should get.

There we go. Okay. And it may be that when I took Grab the URL, I messed it up. But in general, I've used it a couple of times and I know why the video stopped. It does seem really very lifelike and conversational. The audio is good, the video's good. I really have to pick your brain as a marketing expert. It's a challenge for you and for me. How do we market these things? So it goes beyond a mere curiosity. Now I'm getting, I would say, two dozen people a day into my clone. You may be getting more. And I can tell they seem to really get a lot out of it. The video ones where they're, they're saying, hey, tj, I'm lacking confidence. I've got a big job interview. Can you help me? We're going through it, we're practicing. It's giving feedback. They seem to really get value from it. But I'm not seeing people want to come and rehearse before every speech or every interview or come and get daily tips on personal development. What do you think it's going to take for people to really value these digital coaching clones in the same way people already value going to a therapist or a personal trainer or an executive coach, which people do all those things on a weekly basis, sometimes a daily basis?

Yeah. Such a good question. I wish I knew that answer as well, because I suspect, like me, you're kind of wanting to shake people and say, hey, this is such a fantastic resource and a fantastic piece of technology. Go and use it. I see this as a way of democratizing coaching because it makes it available to everybody who couldn't necessarily afford to hire your services or my services. But I'm having some of the same troubles and the biggest success I've had with my clone so far is to integrate it into my coaching program. So I have a group coaching program. I've created an AI version of it. So instead of having live calls with me, every lesson or every module has the coach embedded in with specific questions that they can ask the coach about those lessons. And I found success there. And the second piece of success I've slowly starting to get is the idea, and I guess this works well, it should work for you as well, is selling a site license to people. So I have a client that I'm doing some training with next week around account management skills and they are going to make, I'm very excited about this, they're going to make my coach clone available to their 60 staff. So that means that after the training everyone can carry on having conversations about the training and all get consistent advice. Because we all know that with training there's a notoriously poor implementation rate. Like someone will learn something, but they go back to their desk, they get busy and nothing happens. So now I'm saying, well, actually you can carry on having conversations with your coach or AI coach and you can get, you can dig into the topics we covered in more detail or you can be reminded of it. But selling it on its own, I haven't been that successful with. But selling it, you know, like $20, well, I'm impressed.

You can sell it as a, as an add on to an existing client and giving them rights to use it on their, their website. So that sounds exciting. And let me ask you, how do you sell that? Because in my own experience of I've traditionally sold day long public speaking workshops, media training workshops and you know, over the years it's gone from, you know, a thousand dollars a day 25 years ago to now, you know, 10, $20,000 a day. So I found I really can focus on this live experience. I can charge more and more, but traditionally when I have extra stuff, I can't sell it even a penny. I mean, I remember when I first got into online training in 1998, which was way too soon. But even 10 years ago when people were using online training, clients who would gladly fly me first class pay a very high daily rate, I'd say, hey, everything we did here can be available to all of your employees all over the world for, you know, $1,000 a month license or $100 a month, $9, it didn't matter. I was not able to sell that as a different service. And I certainly, I haven't really tried selling the Clone as a separate standalone service. So give us any tips you have.

Yeah, well, I tell you what, convincing.

People of the value.

So this is how it worked for me. So I, I was doing some briefing with this client about the training and I said, at the end of the training, I'm going to get everybody to share their three key learnings. I'm going to get everybody to share three things they're going to do differently based on the training. And I'm getting. Going to get them to answer the question of what will you do to sustain those two points? So what will you do to sustain those three learnings and what will you do to sustain the three changes that you're going to make? And that led me next to say, look, training is notoriously bad at being implemented when people get back to their desk. But, you know, I've got this Coach clone that's trained exactly on the content that I'm going to be delivering. And that means that your team can carry on having conversations about the training with my coach clone and they can get further advice. They can be reminded of frameworks that I've taught in the training. And I think it just so happened that at the time, the agency owner was really looking into AI for their agency as a whole, and, and so was very interested in this. So he said, can you demo it? And then that's led to this idea of saying, great, we're going to give everyone access. Now, of course, you're not, you're not charging $10,000 a month, as lovely as that would be, for access to that. But, you know, If I'm making $1,000 a month off of it, I'll be happy because it will cover its cost. And the key thing, as I'm sure you're finding, is I'm just going to learn a lot about how people are interacting with the clone and the kind of questions they're asking and making sure that the answers the clone is as close to the answer as I would give. And just using it to train, to train the clone even more. So I can't say that this is a trend yet, because this has only happened once. But I feel like selling the Coach clone on the back of something else or integrated into something else seems to be an easier sell than selling it on its own.

That's essentially what I'm doing. What I do is I give away access to the clone to anyone who's taken one of my online courses. Right now I have about 10 million total enrollments in my online courses. So I'm giving it away because I'm just trying to plant seeds in people's brains to let them even know this thing is. Is available and is. Is a thing.

Yeah. And that's the answer. That's the answer to your question, you know, sadly, is like, how do we get people to use this Is we got to educate the market. And I always think it's dangerous for people like you and I to try and educate the market because we're. Well, for me, for sure. I don't want to be rude to you, but I'm just a teeny minnow in the scene. It's hard to be that person that educates the market I want.

Well, everyone always says, oh, you want to be first, first to market? Well, not really. Most people who are first to market have gone bankrupt. That's why Facebook was the 12th major company to get venture capital funding for social media. You know, numbers 1 through 11 all went out of business. So there is such a thing as being too early. And I was way too early with online training. I started in 1998 and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for years. I mean, I didn't make any money on it for 15 years. So as excited as I am about these video clones, I'm really hoping it doesn't take 15 years.

I think it will take someone else coming along, one of the big players who's really going to invest in this from an AI perspective to get it out to the market. I think that's what will happen. I also think that people are going to get used to using AI coaches in other places like health and fitness and, you know, mental health. I think that will take off perhaps quicker, and once that happens, it will then spread to what we're doing. But I'm banging the drum like you are, tj. I'm banging the drum every day saying, this is what. This is the future. And if you're not investing in this now, you're going to get left behind. And.

Well, let's hold that thought one minute. Let's test your drum banging capabilities right now. So we're going to go to the part of the show that I like to do with all of our guests is it's your time. Pitch away. I'm not going to ask you questions. This is your chance to promote your clone, to promote your book, to promote your coaching services. Anything you want. The field is going to be completely yours for the next 90 seconds to two minutes, starting now.

Okay. Well, okay. So my retirement isn't too far in the distant future and As I was starting to plan my retirement, I was thinking, how can I harness 30 years of agency knowledge into a way that will create a legacy for me? And of course, lots of people write their books and that becomes the legacy. But I was thinking, how can it be something else? And at the same time, I'm a bit of a techie nerd. So that led me down the path of looking at AI and AI coaches. And I was explaining to TJ earlier that I'm on the third platform now that I've used since I've developed my coach. But it's been a fantastic way of creating a knowledge base of my knowledge and something that can live on beyond me, but also can scale much wider. I would love to retire but still be making some sales because people are still buying my content or my coach or my courses, and they're all supported by my coach clone. So that's sort of why I led that. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were saying, hey, Rob, you should go and start helping other people create their coaches. Because I'm sure TJ agrees with me that every course creator, every coach, every consultant should be looking at having a coach that can support their content. And I think If I were 20 years younger, I probably would kind of pivot my business and start focusing on that a little bit more. But I do believe that everyone will have their own coach. I think it's super exciting. One of the reasons why I did this is because I typically work with the SME size marketing agencies and those agencies that only have one or two staff or at the beginning of their journey. Well, they usually can't afford to hire a coach at 3, 5, $10,000 per session or per month. So there must be some other way of helping them besides watching YouTube videos. And that's where the coach, the AI coach clone comes in. And this idea of democratizing coaching so that it becomes available to everyone is something that is really exciting. And I love some of the new tech that's coming out. I'm very excited when our coaches can become a bit more proactive. At the moment, they're quite passive. In other words, someone has a conversation with the coach and it answers the question. Well, I'm looking forward to the point where my coach can say, hey, tj, you spoke to me on Monday about your goals for the week. Well, it's Wednesday now. How are you getting on? Let's dig into this one and let's carry on that conversation. And we're pretty close to that happening. And I think when that happens, it will really change the way I think at the moment the challenge is that people are sort of seeing coach conversations and clone conversations a bit like they were taught with ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. And so part of our challenge is to differentiate the coach clone from that kind of thing. And you know, that's something that you and I are both trying to tackle. But yeah, so for me, starting the coach was a way of kind of creating a legacy for me and that will live on beyond me and certainly beyond my retirement as well.

You said a number of things that really jumped out at me. One of them is why in the world would you want to retire if you're enjoying this, having fun and can pick and choose your clients? You seem like a young guy. I think you're younger than I am.

I'm going to be, I turn 60 at the weekend.

You're young, you're a child. I'm going to be 62 next month. But much to my wife's relief, I always tell her, and I mean it, I don't plan on ever retiring.

I, I have, yeah, I, I have a game. So in the spirit of everything I talk about in the book, I have a succession plan. And so I just want to, to live that succession plan. So we just purchased a home in South Africa. So we're fortunate enough to spend our winters out there. We are going to go traveling for a year in a couple of years time because that's something that neither of us did when we were younger. And I also have a personal YouTube channel that I am growing which is documenting my travels. And so that's sort of, yeah, where I want to be. And it's not that I don't love what I do anymore because I think you know as well, tj, when you're self employed, there is no concept of retiring on Friday and putting your feet up on Monday like some people do in a corporate job. So for me, my retirement looks like cutting. I've cutting my days down to three days, to two days, to maybe one day a week.

But, but if you're a question though, now I'm intrigued. If you're starting a YouTube channel and it starts to get growth, how do you turn off that entrepreneurial mindset you have?

Let me just tell you, I did.

This and it's got this audience. If I do a little more of that, it'll grow. And before you know it, you might be doing something you love completely, but you might have a near full time job.

So let me tell you Something really exciting. So we are YouTube channel. We just hit 3,000 subscribers, which is a tiny little number, but it's all about travel. And I thought, why don't I create a coach clone connected to my YouTube channel that can give people almost like a travel agent, that can give people advice on the travels of things that we're doing. And so that's a project for when I retire to start creating our travel agent clone so that all our YouTube followers will actually get access to this clone as well. Because there's nothing like that at the moment in the travel sector. So I do think I'm swapping one thing for another. I also think that I won't be quite giving this up. I'm just kind of changing.

So you're not just gonna be sitting around and I would say, wheel of Fortune. I'm being too culturally.

Well, no, I know, I know. And I couldn't watch daytime TV and, you know, sleep in late and all the rest of it. So. No, but I just want to have a bit more time to focus on this.

Walk us. Walk us through your vision of the next phase of cloning. Because I, you and I are pretty much alignment that. Part of the problem right now is it's too much like chat GPT, where you ask a question, you ask a question, you get an answer. Whereas if someone hires you to come to their. Their agency for two days, you're not just sitting there saying any questions. You're guiding them through a path so that by the end of those two days, they have a whole strategy, they have concepts that they've got to do, lists that you've taken them on a journey.

Yeah.

And that's been my frustration as well with. With my clone is someone. If someone comes to me and says, I want to be more confident when I speak, whether large audiences or small audiences, my clone will give good information. But if they were hiring me as a coach or a trainer, I would get them on a dozen times in a day. Then I might call them and say, well, okay, you've got a presentation on Thursday. Are you ready to rehearse? Now, ideally, my clone would email and say, send me the video of your rehearsal, you knucklehead. In a polite way. It would be. And it may be a text. My clone would be able to hear me say, okay, tj, my pitch is at noon on Thursday. My clone would be able to. To send a text at 2pm Thursday and say, hey, DJ, how did your presentation go? What was the reaction? When we get to that level now, I Think there's real value because that's part of what people. Why people pay sometimes 500 a session for a personal trainer. They already know that, you know, if they lift a certain amount of weight or they're on the treadmill, that's good for them. They want that trainer to say, hey, why aren't you here at 7am I'm holding you accountable. So it's something I've given a lot of thought to and I'm sure you have as well. How do you foresee rolling it out in your own particular niche? Well, if all of a sudden your clone could do anything and could be, I guess the phrase is intermodal, where it could hear you say something, could communicate back by text, it could initiate an email once a week, how do you anticipate this rolling out?

Well, I think it's interesting because I think if you had asked, let's be honest about the, some of the deficiencies, if you just asked that question to my clone exactly how you asked it, I think at the moment it's not clever enough to take the whole thing that you said, understand the, the intent of that question and answer it in a full way. I think what it would have done is latched onto the last part of what you said and answered it. And so I think one of the things that the clones need to do better is listening to the whole conversation and understanding the intent of the whole conversation. I think at the moment I'm finding, especially when the text based things that people aren't asking good questions. And again, the clones need to get better at coming back and saying, hey, come on, hang on a second, let's dig into that a bit more. I think when our, and I believe this is coming fairly soon. So it will be really exciting for both of us, when our clones can be more proactive rather than passive in their response, then that will be really good. So the points you made about automatically checking in with you maybe integrating into a lot more apps. So for example, it could integrate into Outlook and at the end of a conversation it could automatically put the next coaching session in your diary. I think integrating into all of the workflow tools like project management tools that, that people use will be really good. And again, that can't be very far away. So I think the proactivity piece of it is the key bit. The other thing that I haven't quite nailed yet, but on the previous platform I nailed this is teaching training the clone to follow my frameworks. So if someone said so at the moment, if you came to my client you said, can you help me with my vision? It's going to go great. Here we go. Here's a template. Tj, download this and let me work through it with you. But actually what I want it to do is be a bit cleverer than that and actually ask the right questions that would almost fill in the template and then give them the completed template. So I think when that stuff gets better, I think it's interesting. I'm doing a presentation next week and one of my final question is to ask my clone what do you think the world will look like in two years with AI clones? And it does a pretty good job at answering that. So in a way we should probably bring my clone in to ask the question. But yeah, so I just believe this interaction interactivity will be much better and it will integrate more easily with everything and it will just kind of infer more from the points that you.

I mean, I hope so. I mean, for example, in addition to communication skills courses, I have personal development courses as well. One of them is on sleep. So I give people some advice that they could get in any book, for example, which is turn off your cell phone and all screens an hour before you go to bed. So nothing particularly brilliant about that, but it would be infinitely more valuable, I think, if I get you to admit, okay, when do you actually want to fall asleep? So that if you say 9:45. At 8:45 you get a text with my face saying, hey, why are you seeing this? You're already messing up your sleep. Power off your phone right now. Something like that would be very powerful.

I don't think we're that far away from that. I think fundamentally having a really good app based version of our clone would be good. I know you can kind of create that sort of. But actually having one that does ping up on your phone and you know your face is there saying, hey, it's time to turn. Turn off your phone now would be good. I don't. I hope we're not very far away from that because I think you and I are both banking on that technology being here fairly soon, because I think it takes it.

Well, I'm hoping. I really have no idea. Again, my own experience with. I'm both pessimistic and optimistic. I'm pessimistic in the sense that I started online training in 1998 and people were already familiar with. I mean, in the 70s you could take a course by watching a TV show on public TV that was educational. You could do audio, audio courses from people Like Anthony Robbins in the 80s 90s. So people were already used to the concept of a video course. They would get them on VHS, DVD. And it still took 15 years before I really stopped losing money. And it took probably 18 years before I made a lot of money. Money with online courses that. But that was built on something people are already familiar with. Nobody's really familiar with the concept of an interactive Iowa video coach.

Let me just say this, that's a new thing. But let's just say this to help maybe alleviate yours on my concerns is that in September 2022 no one had really heard of AI, no one had really heard of Chat GBT. And then suddenly in November 2022 this CH thing came around and look at where we are now. I think the biggest.

Well, that's why, that's exactly why I am optimistic because Facebook took five years to get 100 million users and AI and ChatGPT took two months. Yeah, so that's what. Everything seems to be happening much, much faster.

I think there's a big. I think there's a race. I think the biggest risk is the, is the platform providers that they get beaten by someone who comes out with something much better. I mean there must be so many AI startups that. And gone by the wayside so quickly because suddenly OpenAI or anthropic or meta or whoever has come out and beaten to what they were trying to do much quicker. So it could well be that one of these big platforms decides that this idea of cloning and creating your own knowledge bases, which you can already do in other ways, is something they want to invest in and that just makes the race much faster. And so I think like Delphi have to be developing quickly here otherwise they're going to get left behind. And obviously you and I are putting our eggs in that basket at the moment. But having been on three platforms, but.

I'm always looking for other baskets too.

Me too. And actually having moved from one platform to Delphi, it wasn't hugely painful for me because I'd learned so much about training the knowledge base on the other platform and I was actually able to export all of that knowledge and pretty much import it into Delphi. So it wasn't a huge.

It's a skill set, it is transferable. I mean, that way, you know, I was doing online training and it was, I was creating audio files and using pseudo real streaming and you know, things that no one, I barely remember it all companies that either don't exist or in. Are in completely different fields now.

Yeah. We, just, as a side note, makes you laugh. We're. We've been doing a bit of decluttering in the house. And I was going through my office the other day and I found a folder full of. There's this coach called Taki Moore, an Australian guy. I don't even know him. But anyway, I subscribed back in the 90s to his training, and it consisted every month of getting a paper workbook with a CD at the back of it. And I just found all of these I haven't looked at for years and thought, yep, that's how it. That's how it all used to be. So I'm hopeful that it's moving at such a fast pace. I'm hopeful that the technology will move fast enough and that, you know, we. We'll get what we want. Because I think these RAI clones will become truly useful when they become more proactive. And I think that's the issue. Yes, you can send that broadcast. Yes, of course you can integrate your email marketing and send people messages that way. But that isn't the same as what you just described. And what we want is. I mean, here's.

You know, people say, why are you excited about it? And I look across the whole span of my career, I did my first trainings 40 years ago, 1984. And so much of what I did then is the same as what I do now when I'm working in person with a president, a CEO, politician, a celebrity, where I get them on camera, record them either doing an interview or speech. We look at it, we figure out, what do we like, what do we not like? We do another one, we make it a little better. We do another one, we make it a little better. So by the end of the day, they've gotten on camera a dozen times. They've gone from here to typically here. They've either gone from average to great or awful to really, really, really good. So they see the transformation. It's completely interactive. I'm not giving them any speech. I'm not giving them a PowerPoint. It's completely 100% focused on them. Very interactive. I'm driving it. I'm forcing them to practice. I don't say, do you want to do a practice speech? I just turned the camera on. Say speak. So they really have no choice in it, but that's what they wanted, and they always get tremendous improvement and they value it, and they're happy to pay whatever I've charged them, which these days is a lot. So that's one model. So it's highly effective. Effective. The downside is 99.9% of the world can't afford it. It's not scalable for me. I gotta fly to them, they gotta fly to me. It eliminates the vast almost the entire world. That's the downside. Then I went to the model of online training, video training that's scalable. I've got 10 million course enrollments around the world so it's scalable. People can do it anytime, anywhere there. It's very inexpensive so that reaches the whole world. It's great for my bottom line as well. Sounds great. The problem is it doesn't have the interactivity. They got to listen to my what I want to lecture on for lecture 23 they don't get to talk about now they can make a video and submit it and I critique it but virtually nobody does. So it's a passive experience. It's linear, it's one to many. It's non personalized so that the event so huge, huge, huge disadvantages to that model and yet the advantages are scalable and price and anywhere. So now I come to the clone and in my world, in my mind I got this is the best of both worlds because it's got the interactivity of the thing that I know.