Ep #139: Separation Season

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m going to talk about the season that we’re in as fractional CMOs, and kind of what’s going on right now that you should be focusing on as a fractional CMO. This is a pretty important lesson and I want you to hear it from me. Let’s get into it.

00:00:16 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up, and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. 

00:00:48 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high-paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:12 Casey: All right. Welcome back. Let me just give it to you. What season are we in right now? We’re in separation season. We’re in separation season and I was just done with the boardroom crew yesterday, and kind of the palpable feeling is just like significant excitement around AI and then on the other side, some anxiety, a little bit of fear. And I want to be clear… at some level, I have a podium here, right? And I like, I see that, right? Like you’re listening to me talk. I record an episode, you listen, right? So I don’t want to do something that manipulates you. 

00:01:47 Casey: But I think that fear is an okay response to this stuff, to what’s happening with AI. Like a little bit of fear, like it’s a little crazy. It’s a little messed up. It’s like a couple people are going to be able to replace a lot of other labor. And I think it’s significant. I think it’s a big deal. And I think that you need to have a level of reverence around what’s happening right now. And I want to give you some specifics because it’s separation season. And macho man, Randy Savage says, “The cream rises to the top,” right? The cream of the crop.That’s who I want you to be so that during the separation season, you can continue to have a great book of business and get paid even more because you’re capitalizing on the technology that’s ahead of you or that’s available to you.

00:02:36 Casey: So I think AI is big. I’ve kind of been trepidatious with AI and everything changed for me on February 5th, when Opus 4.6 came out. And when I talked to the CTOs at CTOx, they said, “Yeah, but like, we’ve been playing with this stuff since like December of 2025.” Okay. They’re early adopters. They got it, whatever, 60 days before I did. But now I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I’ve seen what’s possible. And it’s big. This is big. If you’re not tapped into what’s happening with AI right now, someone with less experience than you is going to be, and they’re going to go dominate. They’re going to go do a great job.

00:03:19 Casey: So what am I seeing? I’m going to give you outside of the marketing space. So lawyers, let’s talk about the process of e-discovery. So if you’re in a case and it’s a big lawsuit from an individual to a company. And during that – the individual wants their legal team to gain access to all related information from communication relating to something. So all the text messages and emails and all of that kind of stuff inside of a company that relate to something that, you know, may have caused harm to this person.

00:04:08 Casey: The pulling of all of that information is called discovery. And discovery looks like… they used to look like boxes of pages that one law team would hand over to the opposing team and say, “Here’s what you asked for.” But now, as you can imagine, it’s not just like boxes, it’s also like hard drives and files and SMS. And in those SMS is a bunch of metadata. And it’s just like, it’s heavy, right?

00:04:34 Casey: So if you had to classify all that data, that’s e-discovery, electronic discovery. If you had to classify all that stuff and have it searchable, you kind of put it in your own little ecosystem that is indexed. And then you can search it and be like, “Who talked about this chemical,” “Who talked about–”, “What did this person say to that person,” and you can start querying that stuff. So that’s been happening forever. Discovery has been happening in law forever. I’m no law expert, but that’s not a new thing. 

00:05:01 Casey: E-discovery is obviously the kind of the next level of it because it’s electronic and communication is electronic, but think about how long it would take to pull all of the data and then to review the data as a law firm. You were just given all of this data. It’s the opposing team might give you extra stuff. So it’s kind of a needle in a haystack. It’s like, “We gave you the needle but – and we gave you a bunch of other stuff and kind of sort through it.”

00:05:32 Casey: So what do you do? You hire paralegals, they hire more junior folks at the law firm that bill a lower rate, like a thousand or $1,500 an hour or something. And they go spend 500 hours combing through the data to find the relevant information and then they summarize that. And that time is probably calculated in months. You know how long that could take. That’s a process like that. That’s a well-established process. 

00:06:02 Casey: Large companies kind of know what to expect to pay for e-discovery. They know what to pay for all of these paralegals doing all of this work. It’s just kind of like a known thing. It’s known labor. Well, there’s law firms that have adopted large language models that are just crushing that. What could take two months they can do in two days. Literally started today and 48 hours later, they get everything back. They get a brief of the current status. They get a list of potential witnesses, the types of questions to ask them, the risk profile, good, better, best of these different things.

00:06:39 Casey: They can get something very comprehensive. And you say, “Well, that makes sense. Maybe ’cause I understand ChatGPT.” It’s like, cool. But there’s another level beyond ChatGPT. ChatGPT is kind of like the consumer-grade. We’re talking about a more industrial-grade, commercial-grade solution here. That’s bespoke, that’s made exactly for this. And it can manage long-term memory, and just remember stuff and just does, it just does a better job. So these things exist now. 

0:07:06 Casey: That quite literally means that the role of becoming a partnered lawyer, where you have to go through a process of past the bar, paralegal, whatever the steps are, I don’t even know them, but we’re going to see that a lot of those roles are just going to get kind of wiped out. And you’re going to have fewer people managing much more outcome to the point where someone in my life who was a lawyer said to me, “You know, maybe the writing is on the wall that I should shift to be a contingency lawyer.”  That means that they take on cases on contingency, which is, you don’t pay anything unless we win.

00:07:49 Casey: So you have a slip and fall, they interview you with a process. They take an hour of an intake. Then they get their discovery and then they itemize it with their LLM and they know, and they file it. And they’re very confident in their abilities because the cost for all of that work was near zero dollars. Maybe it was a hundred dollars, maybe it was a thousand dollars in compute, but they can just have that and then fight on your behalf.  And if they win, which they would know the likelihood of winning, based on a lot of different things with the data would suggest to them, they could take that on as a contingency.

00:06:27 Casey: That’s different. That’s different than where we’ve been. This is not AI writing social media posts. Although when I think most companies think of how they use AI, they say, I’m going to write social media posts. That’s not it. Right? Sure, that’s part of it. But that’s not how we use this thing. It’s like having a knife and saying, “I’m going to use it to pick my teeth”. It’s like, “You can, but that’s not the utility of it.”

00:08:56 Casey: So the law field is changing. How is your industry going to change? ‘Cause someone’s gonna come in and they’re gonna revolutionize it. They’re gonna absolutely revolutionize it. I was reflecting. My mom’s in town and we were driving around today and we saw snap on tool truck. And I was reminiscing about snap on and the idea around snap ons. How many young mechanics get locked into a multi-year, five-figure, commitment on tools in a toolbox, probably a lot. And snap-on is kind of the blame. They came out with maybe superior tools, but they came up with a way to leverage that into a sales process.

00:09:38 Casey: So they’ve kind of destabilized that market a bit by creating a profit center by going direct to the person instead of the person going to Sears and going to the craftsman aisle and shopping and buying stuff. It’s just different. So that’s another mental model. How do you take that and apply that idea to your clients? What’s gonna change with AI? How is something going to change here? How is something that has existed forever going to fundamentally change? How is an upstart gonna come in and just drive change? You know, I’m sure Sears and Craftsmen didn’t see the snap-on tool guy changing their business, but I bet it’s done a lot to really destabilize things so much so that – how many Sears are left in the country? Three.

00:10:23 Casey: So you need to be – there’s a bit of like I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t have a better name for it. There’s a bit of a spectator kind of position that we get in like, “Ooh, someone tell me about AI. Tell me how it’s going to destabilize my industry.” It’s like, “No, you figure it out, dude.” You’re listening to this podcast? You gotta figure out what’s coming. Like who’s gonna come and eat your lunch. That’s the question for you right now. And how are they going to do it? How are they going to do it faster? How are they going to do it better? How are you going to get a better work product for less money and in less time? How are they going to do it?

00:11:02 Casey: If you’re a technical person, you’re probably already noodling around with something like Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex. And listen, I don’t care what you use. I think sometimes Claude’s gonna be better. And then a couple months later, ChatGPT is gonna be better. And then a couple months later, Manus is gonna be better. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think you need to be in the jumping around and choosing what’s best right now game. It’s kind of a silly game that exists in kind of every hobby, every sport. It’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna wear Hoka’s. No, I’m gonna wear Nike’s. No, I’m gonna wear Converse,” whatever.

00:11:32 Casey: People jump around because they don’t just commit. It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you don’t have that much of an edge. The edge really isn’t in how you’re thinking and you’re gonna need AI to apply it. Like for me, I’ve been going nuts on Claude Code and my buddy, who’s a great CTO, he’s like, “Oh, yeah. I’ve kind of leaned out of Claude Code and I’m back on the ChatGPT Codex.” And he’s like, “I think it’s superior.” Cool. I’m not gonna unplug what I’m doing and go to ChatGPT Codex. No way. Like it’s the marginal gains that I’m going to get are not worth like the export import. Even if it takes me one hour, I just don’t want to do it. That’s not the utility. 

00:12:10 Casey: So don’t get into this game of chasing, what’s the next tool? What’s the right tool? It’s OpenClaw. I should be on OpenClaw, which fun. I was there when it was Clawdbot. I was there when it was Moltbot. I think that that’s a fun tool to play with, but that’s not the solution. That’s like talking about the shoes that you’re doing and not coming up with strategy behind it. I want you to have strategy and I want you to guess where things are going. And this is the work that you have to do. This is the work that we talk about in CMOx. 

00:12:41 Casey: Where’s your industry going? What’s going to change? What kind of clients do you want to work with? ‘Cause some of them are gonna be out of business soon because they’re just gonna get eaten by someone who does it better. A lot of it’s product-based, but some of it could be marketing-based. You gotta know where it’s going. And this is where you have to become the expert, and you have to interrogate the market. And you just have to know, you have to know, you have to know. No one’s gonna come and tell you, come to a call with me and I’ll have like a – we can do a Q&A and I’m like, I’ll kind of grill you on stuff and share my thoughts. Yes. But at the end of the day, you have to know what’s gonna shift. You gotta know in your market. 

00:13:15 Casey: Some of you are just not committed to a niche or you’re committed, but you’re kind of a cheater, right? You’re like, I’m in this niche, but I’ll also work on all these other niches at the same time and not really become great in one. I want you to be great in one. I want you to be known as the person who’s the number one in that space. If you do that, you’re gonna dominate. You have an opportunity to really kind of establish yourself strongly. But so many people are just scared of, you know, this whole idea of decide they have to decide to decide it has, the root of it is –cide, which means to kill off like genocide. They don’t want to kill off other options. They want to keep their doors, the options open.

00:13:57 Casey: It’s weak, man. It’s weak. I just, I think of when I committed with my wife, I was like, “This is the one.” When I committed, everything changed, she became the one too. If you know what I mean? Right? It wasn’t that she was perfect. It was that we were committed to figuring it out. That’s the difference. That’s your niche. You like, “Oh, which one’s better, this one or that one?” And maybe if you’re really in between two, then having my help to kind of choose one shirt, that could maybe be good for you, but it’s not that one’s gonna be terrible. Maybe one is slightly better, or you have a better advantage at one, or one’s moving in the market a little differently or whatever. It’s not like there’s any real bad niche out there. Save for a couple, but generally speaking, there really aren’t bad niches. There are people, businesses that are going to fail in this future. 

00:14:52 Casey: You know, I love this guy’s YouTube videos. His name is Wranglestar. If you watch it, you’re laughing, and if you don’t, maybe you won’t understand it. But he’s this guy out in the Northwest and he’s a former forestry guy, like a forestry service guy. He would go wildland fires and stuff. And he always talks about the coming struggle. And I think it’s kind of funny and tongue in cheek is as we talk about the coming struggle, the coming struggle.

00:15:24 Casey: Honestly, though, there’s a coming struggle when it comes to AI eating businesses alive, and you gotta get competent, and you got to be around people that are doing it, and you got to be strong, and you got to know what matters here. And I’m kicking myself. ‘Cause what is this? My third episode in a row that I’m talking about AI? But I don’t feel like – I feel like if I didn’t do it, I would be doing you a disservice because you wouldn’t think it was that serious. And you would think that it was like a flash in the pan. Listen, I haven’t been hard on AI. I’ve used ChatGPT for, since it came out, years ago, I was an early adopter of it. I’ve paid for it forever. I’ve had Claude, but really everything’s changed in the last… for me, I don’t know if it was a short month, five weeks since February 5th, everything has changed for me.

00:16:13 Casey: The way that I can come up with an idea and see it come to fruition and have good software built, it’s wild. And you need to know how to use this. You need to know how to do it so that you can weaponize your intelligence and your ideas and get them done faster. And that’s the goal. The goal isn’t for you to – listen, you can’t deliver the same work to your clients. You gonna have to deliver more, more outcomes, right? You don’t have to do more labor. It’s not like you have to put more hours in, but your hours will need to yield more outcomes. And there are plenty of people that are gonna be left in the dust on this one.

00:16:49 Casey:  And there’s some old businesses, old models that are gonna be fine. If you’re in a standard manufacturing, traditional manufacturing, things aren’t gonna move so fast. And maybe you can live out your career without really adopting AI or adopting it in a very light way. And then some of you are in the SaaS space, what is SaaS now? SaaS is fast fashion. It’s just like shows up today and it’s gone tomorrow.

00:17:14 Casey: I’ve been nerding out with a Claude Code and currently on my computer, I’ve got five or six Claude Code windows up. And when I’m not working, I’m playing with Claude Code or hanging with my family. And I’ve put in probably two hours a day for the last five weeks or so. And the way that I’m thinking now is so different. I feel like my view on things, on reality, on how things work, how to be pragmatic, how to be clear is useful. So many people are bad at describing a problem. Therefore they’re bad at devising a solution.

00:17:55 Casey: So one of the benefits that you get when you play on this coding stuff, and I don’t think you have to do it for profit. You can do it for fun. You can do it as a project. You know, people say how to use Claude Code to get started or Co-work, have it organize your desktop icons. Easy. Go do that project. Like Casey, what do I do? What’s my first thing to make money with Claude Code or Claude Co-work? It’s like, just organize your desktop. It’s fine. That’s it. Go learn how to use it. Go play with it.

00:18:22 Casey: What is it for you? For me, I had like an outstanding thing where my animals are insured and I had a cat with struvite crystals and she had a bladder blockage and I had to take her in kind of for an emergency visit and then x-rays and then surgery and then x-rays and a follow-up plan and all that stuff. And I knew I could get a reimbursement. That would be pretty healthy from my insurance company, but man, I just didn’t… it’s just like, what a pain… I requested from my vet, all of the medical records, but I didn’t want to go through them. It’s just like, “How long would that take me?” Take me like an hour at least. I gotta Google a bunch of stuff to see what the qualifying claims are. And then I have to add it up to see if I’m getting screwed or not by the insurance company and all that stuff.

00:19:06 Casey: I dumped all of them into a folder and I ran ClaudecCode against it. And I told her what I was looking for and I did an expert job and I submitted the claim and my claim got accepted at a hundred percent of what I submitted and accepted. It’s amazing and the joke for me is it was a 6-month and 10-minute job, literal 6-month and 10-minute, 10 minutes to put all the files, the PDFs in a folder, run Claude, tell it what I was doing, walk away, come back, it’s done, and then copy and paste some stuff into the claim sheet. That’s different. And that’s different than what ChatGPT could have done for me. It moved the files around, it renamed them, it did everything that it needed to do that I would have done. They did it better and faster. So you gotta play, you got to get in there. You gotta play. 

00:19:54 Casey: I think that the season that we’re in a separation season where the cream will rise to the top and the best CMOs, which are not the most experienced CMOs, but it’s the CMOs that are playing the game the most effectively. The game being how to leverage the tool that’s in front of them. That CMO is going to succeed in a different way. They’re going to be seen as someone who’s interesting and engaging and the business owner wants to work with them because they’re like, “I finally have someone who’s coming in with  novel ideas and they’re coming in with AI stuff”. Other people are like, “Yeah, I use AI, I use ChatGPT stuff all the time. In Canva, I have AI design stuff for me.” It’s like, “That’s not this. That’s just not what we’re talking about”. Like, “Oh, yeah. I use the AI voice thing. And sometimes I have it review my whatever.” No, no way. I’m talking about something much deeper, much bigger, much more like infrastructure. 

00:20:51 Casey: Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton of ways that you can take it, and I don’t want to tell you what they are because that’s not helpful. I want you to tell me what the problem is that you need to solve with AI. That’s where you got to go. So what’s your meditation? What’s your, ‘I’m going for a walk. What do I think about thing? All right. ‘Cause you take thinking time. A little clarity break, right? Like they say in EOS. 

00:21:10 Casey: What do you do? What do you think about? You think about where’s my market going? How’s it going to shift? If someone is coming in and they were well capitalized, brand new and AI-focused, how are they going to beat an incumbent at their own game? How do you then take that idea and take it to a client and say, “Let’s go work on this together.” You go take it to a strong company and say, “Let’s make you even stronger. Let’s fortify you. Let’s dig a moat around this business so that you can scale to an exit or you can just make a bunch of money and I can ride along with you.” That’s what we want to do. There’s significant uncertainty that’s happening in your job is to bring certainty. 

00:21:48 Casey: So I teach inside of the CMOx Accelerator, how to view this stuff and actually how to apply it. Did a call with a member. I’m like installing Claude Code and work around it, kind of tactical stuff like that, but also the big picture of what are you building? Why are you building it? What’s gonna actually change? That’s where you wanna be. You wanna be the innovator in the space. And if you are, you’re gonna do well, you will separate from the rest. And what’s going to happen to the other folks? They’re going to fight over the same bullshit jobs with companies that aren’t eager to grow, that aren’t moving quickly.  And it’s going to be crowded and they’re going to get a thousand applications in one business day for a job that they post. And there’s no way you’re going to get hired for that job. It’s just too much competition. It’s just not likely to happen.

00:22:37 Casey: So what am I encouraging you to do to be the best in your industry, to be the number one, to just commit to it, quit sitting on the sidelines, stand up and say, “Goddamnit, I’m gonna be the person. I’m going to be the number one person in my industry,” and then go be that person. It’s kind of a fake it till you make it. I kind of hate to say that, but hear me out. If you commit to being the best person and then you do what the best person would do, and you read the books and you meet the people and you network in the ways and you go to the events and you become the CMO and you charge high rates and you do all these things before you know it, you are the best. 

00:23:14 Casey: You’re not gonna be the best just by grinding and doing more work at your full-time job or with your agency or keeping… I have to get three more consulting clients before I can finally be a fractional CMO. None of that stuff. You just have to commit, I’m gonna be the best. And then you get on the road to be the best, and the destination might take you a year to get to, but you can do it and you can be the best and you can put your flag down and say, “I’m number one and no one can mess with me here.” And then you can charge high rates and deliver incredibly high outcomes to people and they would love to work with you. And then they give you word of mouth and they recommend you to other people, yada, yada, yada. 

00:23:46 Casey: That’s a real business, but it all starts with your declaration to yourself that you’re doing this thing. You’re free. You’re going to go do it. You’re going to do it right. I’d love to help you. I love this stuff. I mean, I’ve been tinkering hard. I developed an application and I’ve got over 4,000 downloads on it in the last month since I released it in the last month, 4,000 total strangers have downloaded it. And I’ve done zero paid marketing. It’s in a hobby. It’s not related to CMO stuff, but it’s like, I want to develop software for me. And I shared it with other people and it’s blown up. I got a voice message from a guy today in Texas telling me how much he loves it. So cool. It’s like, what a fun thing to do. 

00:24:26 Casey: I share that with you because I’m in it and I’m tinkering and I’m playing and I’m around other people inside CMOx Accelerator, specifically boardroom that are tinkering and playing. There’s like a level two. I don’t want you to tinker and play when you get started as becoming a fractional CMO because become the fractional CMO, just do the work, declare that you’re gonna do it, know what you’re selling, who you’re selling it to. Let me help you get a list of people to reach out to. Let me coach you on it. Let me coach you on the sales process. Let me give you the exact contract that I use, the agreement that I use. All of that stuff. So you’re off to the races, but then you have to become the person who is innovative and bringing new innovation. 

00:25:03 Casey: So that’s what we’re doing. The CMOs, we get together in late March to plan Q2 outcomes for their biggest client. They sit with me all afternoon. We’re together for four hours. I send them a workbook and we work through their quarterly plan for their client. And I tell them how to think, and we’ve got a big part of it all about AI and how they’re going to use AI in this next quarter. You know, what’s the one thing they’re going to implement that sets the stage for them to have a stronger Q3, Q4. How are they going to add to that in Q3? How are they going to add to that in Q4? How are they going to become the C-suite that cleaves into the business and starts driving growth with AI? That’s what we’re talking about here.

00:25:42 Casey: So if you want my help, I’d love to help you go to cmox.com/call and just book a call. It’s pretty simple. Cmox.com/call, book a call with my team and we’ll see if we can help you. We’ll share what it looks like. It’s pretty chill. You know, I’ve got some folks in there that are heavy hitters, Fortune 500 CMOs, former Fortune 500 CMOs, all the way down to like ragtag marketers who have worked inside of businesses, and they’re smart, they’re capable, but they’ve never sold anything, but they can deliver.

00:26:11 Casey: So some people are learning sales. Some people are learning service, but everyone has room kind of an attract, convert, and serve the three pillars. They have room to grow in all of those. And we just start with the one that they’re the weakest in, generally sales, and then help them go from there. And we’ve just been having a ton of fun. Some boardroom members just renewed for their next year. It was so exciting. I mean, we’re talking about people who are committed to this that have big numbers on their wall that they’re going to hit this year. And they know that they have to do that by leveraging AI. So if you want my help, book a call, cmox.com/call, and I’ll catch you later. See you. Bye.

00:26:43 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.