Ep #140: Claude Code for Fractional CMOx

Transcript:

00:00:01 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.

00:00:33 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.

00:00:58 Casey: All right, well, let’s just chat. So I wanna give you like the big kind of overarching thought here, which is I think on February 5th, everything changed. And I’m kind of a technical person, I’m kind of a nerd, right? I like playing with stuff. I’ve always kind of been interested in coding and development. I’m no good at it, but I’ve always been interested in it. I’ve always kind of played in that. I’ve always had my own servers, whatever. And I have these ideas of what I think is possible. And I’ve got buddies that I’ve just kind of overstayed my welcome with on our text messages around like, “Hey, how do I do this? How would you do this thing with Cloudflare? Like, how can I set this stuff up?” And they’re like, “I don’t know, go get a book or something.”

00:01:38 Casey: So then when ChatGPT came out, I could go ask ChatGPT and that was helpful. That was certainly cool. But on a February 5th, Claude 4.6 came out and I think it’s fundamentally shifted what’s possible. I think it is the– to me, it’s the first model that is really exciting. And before that, like when, if anyone here was following Clawd bot or OpenClaw or MoltBot, I was there kind of early on and I was playing with it and I tried it and I was excited, but it didn’t feel like the utility was really there. And so I kind of let that go. And I’ve been like playing with everything as it came out, you know, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever. 

00:02:16 Casey: And I just feel like everything changed on Feb 5 when I got access to that Opus 4.6 model. And it is fundamentally different. And if you’re not abreast to it, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for you to be a more effective CMO. And I thought today I could just show you around a little bit if anyone here is feeling kind of trepidatious around it ‘cause it’s scary, ‘cause it’s command line stuff. Yeah, I just want to like– I have an idea of something I wanna start building and I thought we could dive into that. And then I’d love to field your questions and kind of help you out.

00:02:49 Casey: Because I think that there’s going to be a separation here. I’ve got a podcast, I just recorded on this. I think it’s like a separation season. There are the CMOs that are learning to use the AI tools and those that aren’t. Or those that are learning the AI tools to replace human labor, which is a thing, and then those that are using it to write emails and social media posts. There’s two different kinds of CMOs and someone could say, “Oh, I use AI all the time. It writes all of my LinkedIn posts.” That’s not what we’re talking about here. Like what I want to show you today is how I think we’re fundamentally changing the marketing department and I think there’s some good and bad to it.

00:03:27 Casey: Kind of the humanity in me wants there to always to be like a pipeline for young people to be able to get into a market and get better and grow and like have internships and entry level jobs. And I think that stuff’s kind of going away and that’s a little scary. But on the other side, as a CMO, we don’t have to have as many people on a team and we can deliver a bigger outcome for our clients, which can then give us more money for advertising to grow faster or for the client to retain more money so they can be more profitable immediately. I think those are really interesting opportunities that exist right now.

00:03:55 Casey: So I’d love to field questions here in a minute, but I thought I kind of prepared something and we’re gonna start from scratch on a really stupid idea that I came up with so that we could have some fun. So the first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna show you the prompt that I wrote in Notepad. And… here is… what it is. This is literally how I would do it on a project. And we’re just having some fun here. And I’ll make this a little bit bigger for you. I use Notepad just because I’d like to keep things simple. 

00:04:33 Casey: I need your help developing a PowerPoint for a conference for my new product, the Baby Guitar Training Academy. It’s a 12 week long training program that helps babies aged 12 to 18 months learn their first licks on the guitar. This is a joke product for April fools, but it should look absolutely real. The slide deck will be for a conference where I have a booth and a TV screen. The TV screen will show the slide deck on repeat. I want text slides and image slides interwoven, like one text, one image, one text, one image, et cetera. 

00:05:00 Casey: The text slides need to talk about the program, who it’s a great fit for, and why people need to invest in it today. Use lines like, if your baby can hold a bottle, they’re ready to hold a Stratocaster. Talk to the desires of the parent to be tiger moms that have the smartest, most capable children. Quote real studies about the values of learning music from a young age and being exposed to music. In addition, add an additional slide showcasing a bonus in-womb listening tracks or similar name for expecting parents to expose their children to music. State a price for this offer and add a bonus as a bonus stack at the price, but make it free. Example, normally $29.99, but at today’s conference, get the in-womb listening tracks absolutely free. 

00:05:40 Casey: For colors and branding, swipe from a reputable music theory or training program or a prestigious university like Harvard or Princeton. I have a folder called Pics that has photos of babies playing the guitar. Use them in the slide deck. Total slides is six to eight. If you don’t have enough photos, put a prompt in the slides where you want images that are missing that I can copy paste in the ChatGPT to render. Or render them yourself if you’re able to take some liberties here, but deliver me something world-class. Above all, make sure the PowerPoint is editable so I can change, copy around. 

00:06:11 Casey: It’s a dumb idea, but like think about how you can apply this for your client. And I wanna tell you, if a client was like, “We need this slide deck on a TV at the booth.” How am I gonna do it? Like this is a real problem that you might face. So let me show you how I do this. I am gonna share this. It’s gonna be a little messy as I kind of share everything. And you’re going to see my whole computer and I’m gonna go here and I’m just gonna go, I’m on Windows and I’m going to type in command CMD. Is everyone seeing this? This command prompt. Okay. So I made a folder here in the projects and I have it called, let me double check the name of it… baby guitar. 

00:07:02 Casey: So I made a folder on my computer and that folder is here. I have it in a projects folder and I have another one called baby guitar. With Claude Code, I can limit its access to a specific folder. I want you to understand something fundamental here, which is we’re going to be building files on my computer system and or like changing files, like building and changing actual files. This is different than ChatGPT spitting out text for you that you copy and do a Google Doc. This is actually building a full thing for me. 

00:07:34 Casey: So if you could come in to your projects folder and right click and make a new folder… you know, like I did and call it baby guitar. Now I’m here. I’m kind of in the same place in the command prompt. Looks a little scary. I’m going to invoke Claude. Usually I just hit this but for today… I’m gonna dangerously accept permissions. Oh, whoops. How do I do that? Claude… dangerously skip permissions. Said that wrong. Dangerously… skip permissions. Now it’s saying, “Hey, Claude’s going to open this. Is Claude cool to be able to read, edit, and execute files in this folder?” I say, “Yeah, that’s cool with me.”

00:08:19 Casey: All right, great. Now I’m in Claude. This looks a little scary, maybe. It’s the whole black and white. It feels like we’re… Angelina Jolie in the Hackers movie. Awesome movie by the way. So now let’s take a look at my prompt. I copy it to my clipboard. I come back here. I paste it. It pasted all 16 lines. I hit enter and we’re off to the races. Now I pay for Claude Code. So there’s like two – there’s three levels. There’s the $20 a month. There’s the a $100 and there’s a $200 a month. For me, I’ve just been playing with the $100 a month and I’ve been coding two hours a day, seven days a week since about February 6th or 7th. Saturdays and Sundays too. I work on this all the time. I’m always having fun. I’m always playing. I’m building a different idea, a project, whatever. So as we see– [inaudible].

00:09:18 Casey: Do you have a question? No? I’m gonna mute you. It says, let me check what photos are available and then I’ll build this into the PowerPoint. And now it’s looking to, okay, it’s got the Python PowerPoint thing. So this is like how it’s gonna be able to build the PowerPoint file. It says the photos are perfect. It can understand photo content. Like it has the ability to review a photo and know what it is. I’ll go with the Harvard Crimson inspired color scheme for the prestigious look. Great? If when I invoked Claude, I didn’t dangerously skip permissions, it would ask me along the way for approval and for steps. 

00:10:00 A: So I have a question on that. So, I’m in media advertising, digital marketing, content creative—all of that. But big organizations, I would say, are a little bit slower to adopt this not because of the time saving, but because of the privacy concerns. So what are your thoughts on that?

00:10:29 Casey: I think privacy is a major concern. I think that the value of having a chief information officer, a CISO, a CTO—I think these things are critical. I think having a paper trail and being able to audit these things is important. I think in some ways rolling your own LLM on your machine with something like Ollama. Are you familiar with Ollama?

00:10:57 Guest: I’m not a tech person, but I was just at South by and I listened to a keynote of the chief tech from Uber on AI and it was really interesting. Just in terms of not my marketing speak of how I use AI, but like the true, like, tech view on it. So I was just curious and she was talking a lot about that. And I would say at Pruneau where I work and Coca-Cola where I used to work those that would, that’s what I foresee being like the biggest funnel to adoption of bigger marketing works [inaudible].

00:11:32 Casey: I wanna suggest that like– 

00:11:34 Guest: …being more, you know, open to using this quicker, just ‘cause there’s, you know, generally, you know, scrappier and quicker. I was just curious and if people are in other industries or, you just curious. 

00:11:46 Casey: Yeah. So, okay. So, big picture here: I think that there’s a way to use AI tools that doesn’t expose data outside. 

00:11:55 Guest: Hmm, I think that’s [inaudible], yeah.

00:11:57 Casey: That’s a big one. And if there is stuff related to data, running it with an open model– so Ollama installs software and then you can run through Docker, Olamma, and then have your model of choice in there. So you’re able to run it all locally. And when I say local, I mean, you could unplug the computer from the internet and just use the processing power on your computer exclusively. So if you’re like in the health space, if you have PII or financial data or health data or whatever, you can just run that through an AI model on a laptop. It won’t be as fast, It’ll probably not compute as well, but it can still give you a lot of that benefit. I think in this example right now nothing that we’re doing is… would be like something I would be concerned that could get out or like train the, you know, algorithms. 

00:12:52 Guest: Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause I deal a lot with brand strategies, right? And differentiation and so– me, right? For my part of the marketing work, it’s about, well, you know, we don’t want another, you know, we don’t want a competitor brand.

00:13:06 Casey: Yeah. I think that’s like a fair point. 

00:13:08 Guest: Like from a legal, larger corporate legal standpoint, not from my personal view. 

00:13:13 Casey: I think it’s a fair point for a Coca-Cola, but I don’t think it’s a fair point for a smaller brand. If there’s a data security issue, that’s it. That’s the thing. But right now I think there’s a game of speed. I think speed is incredibly important. And a lot of people are playing the game of like, “I’m scared,” and then they’re going slow. And I think that lesser companies take over their market share. 

00:13:37 Guest: I would agree with that. So I guess I’m here to balance my personal identification with corporate reality. 

00:13:45 Casey: Sure, yeah, it makes sense. And also, I don’t know if there’s anything stopping you from running this on your own and say, instead of saying Coca-Cola, say a company like Coca-Cola and having it build out all the stuff, then you will go in and do the edits. 

00:13:55 Guest: Yep. Yep. Yep.

00:13:57 Casey: Okay. So take a peek here, Claude Code. So check what photos were available.

00:14:02 Michael: Casey. It’s—Casey, we just had a large influx of people. Could you just give a quick—what you’re doing to catch everyone up?

00:14:07 Casey: Yeah, thank you, Michael. Hi, guys. Welcome in. We’re just playing, and I’ve got a really dumb prompt here to show you what’s possible with Claude Code. And we’re developing a PowerPoint for a conference for my product, the Baby Guitar Training Academy. And I gave it this prompt that I just wrote myself. It’s super goofy. “If your baby can hold a bottle, they’re ready to hold a Stratocaster.” I also provided a couple images that I had ChatGPT render, and I just copied and pasted this into Claude Code.

00:14:40 Casey: You can see this is my prompt I pasted in, and then we’re just seeing what happened. So it’s complete. We’re going to open up this file together and see what happened. It has the photos. It likes the photos. Now it’s building the deck out. It’s cleaning some stuff up. It looks like it added a filled rectangle shape. And then it did it. It fixed it by adding some opacity to it. Right. Red means it deleted something. Green means it added something. You don’t even have to care because all we care about is the outcome.

00:15:12 Casey: Now it says the deck is generated successfully. Let’s verify the output and check its file size. And what it has here is—we have a title slide, an image, “Why the First 18 Months Are Everything,” an image, text, image, yada, yada. Great. And these are the colors it pulled from Harvard based on my prompt. So it’s got a gold and a Harvard Crimson. Awesome. Let’s rip it and see what happens. Let’s open this thing up and see what our Baby Guitar Training Academy presentation looks like.

00:15:45 Casey: And you guys get to see these really stupid photos. Ah! Already. Strong. Gave us a URL. Pulls in the image. Now the image is… probably should be like that. These are some things I pulled on ChatGPT. “Real students, real results, real tiny hands.” Awesome. Quotes, cool. Looks like some kind of spacing issues maybe because of the quote mark. It’s kind of screwing that up. Okay, so that’s an issue. I just want to show you what I’m going to do with that.

00:16:20 Casey: So we’re to come back to Claude Code. I’m going to say, “On slide three, there are golden quote marks at the end of the quotes. These are too large and push the last row of text too far down, and the spacing of the quote lines is inconsistent. Fix it.” I’m going to close this. I’mma hit fix it, and it’s going to go fix it based on my plain language. So let’s look at the current code for slide three’s research citations. It’s using this Python script that it wrote to build everything. So we could take a peek at what that looks like.

00:17:13 Casey: So this is the whole script it made. This is what actually executes the creation of that PowerPoint, which is pretty awesome. And it’s doing something here around slide three. So it’s going to figure out what the problem is. Fixed. Now it’s done. This file just updated its time. So my time right now is 12:24. Its time is updated. We’re going to open it, and we’re gonna go to slide three, and they fixed it. That problem is fixed. That problem’s fixed a little, like probably around the same speed it would have taken me to fix it.

00:17:54 Casey: Now it’s lost that cool golden quote. So maybe we would want that added back. Like, look at this, these kids chicken picking. That’s a pretty good photo. And then as we move our way down. Okay, for me personally, I can’t build this slide. You gave me all day to make the slide, and I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the design sense to be able to do it. And it did it. So to go to the question of like, you know, “Is this ready for production?” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but you could go in here, and you can edit it.

00:18:28 Casey: Right, you can change the words that you want in it because it’s an editable PowerPoint. That’s a good one. That’s so good. Okay. And then this, so this is not right. So I would come back in here and say, “On slide seven,” let’s just hit, say the problem, “On slide seven, the in-womb listening tracks have, type like the text, kind of messed up. It’s overlaying other text and absolutely free-hangs off the bottom on white space. Redo this and make it look great.” That’s that. I’m going close the file, then let it do its thing.

00:19:26 Casey: So this is how you can iterate on stuff. And, you know, I would question, like, is this—are you going to be able to get something ready for production that you could hand off to the team and say, “We’re done”? Maybe. Maybe with a PowerPoint you could. I mean, for me, it’s better than a PowerPoint I could make. Some of you are going to rather use a Beautiful.ai or Canva. Maybe Canva’s got that AI stuff. I haven’t played with it. But this is something that you could do and just ask it questions. So, while it’s doing this, we’ll check that slide seven and see how it looks. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Like, what comes up for you about what’s possible? Or any questions about how to use this?

00:20:11 Guest 2: I am curious, why are you going in the code directly, as opposed to dashboard Cloud Code and letting it go into terminal for you?

00:20:22 Casey: ‘Cause I haven’t set it up, and I feel cooler using the terminal window.

00:20:26 Guest 2: Terminal does look a lot cooler. I do give kudos there.

00:20:30 Casey: That’s it. That’s the only reason. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t fully understand Cloud Cowork. And I don’t feel like I need to.

00:20:40 Guest 3: What I was a little bit concerned about is, like, I love how all this can do it, and similar to the prior lady, but in a little bit different, I’m more concerned about this thing having access to data that’s on my machine or hacking into my banking information and things like that. Like, should I put this on a separate machine that only runs the agentic stuff, or is it okay to mix it in with what I’m doing?

00:21:13 Casey: Yeah, good question. So, my take on this is, have you heard of OpenClaw? Have you heard of Open OpenClaw?

00:21:20 Guest 3: Mm-hmm.

00:21:21 Casey: Yeah. So, OpenClaw is like the Wild West. You don’t want that on your computer. It doesn’t have the same level of permissions security. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble there. I have that, I installed it on, like, a… I have an Intel NUC, it’s in the basement. I can remote desktop and do it and play with it and that kind of stuff. So that keeps it safe. I have it on a different network. So I have a unified network system. I have a different network for, like, my IoT devices. And I put that one on the same one. That kind of keeps me safe from that stuff.

00:21:56 Casey: So, that’s what I would say if you were using something like OpenClaw. But with Claude Code, you know, what Claude is going to be doing, their relationship here is going to be to limit to directories and permissions. So, at the start here, I said “dangerously skip permissions.” But had I not said that, all along the way, it’s going to ask me for permission each step of the way. And that multi-step permission, it’s like good and bad. At some level, you’re Homer Simpson with that bird that just hits the Y button over and over again.

00:22:30 Casey: And you’re just like, “Whatever, I’m just going to hit the button, and you guys are going to do your thing.” And maybe it breaks something, deletes something, who knows. So, you have to kind of keep up with it. But in this way, I felt safe because this is a folder that had nothing in it besides the baby photos that I got from ChatGPT, and that was it. And I only gave it access. As you can see here, I changed the directory into the baby guitar folder, and then I ran Claude within it.

00:22:57 Guest 3: Got it. Okay. I think I was, like, lumping all of those things into one, like, you know, Claude Code, OpenClaw, Moltbot. Like, all of that. I was kind of lumping that into one, I think.

00:23:11 Casey: Yeah. And I think that Claude is going to create the most, for lack of a better term, secure way to do things. Right, like, they’re secure, but Claude is gonna do something that’s gonna be—Claude is gonna do it for the enterprise. And then Clawdbot is gonna, or OpenClaw, is just gonna do whatever they wanna do. They’re gonna develop whatever, and it’s gonna be a little more fast and loose. And if you’re willing to take the dangers of it, you can play with that. But there’s a lot of belief that Claude will be creating their own OpenClaw variation that just has better security protection.

00:23:52 Guest 3: Got it.

00:23:53 Casey: So, security is important for sure, and having backups. I want to say one thing while I’m in here: we have this folder just to show you in real time. I have this folder of the four kids that came from ChatGPT, and I would say, “In the slash pics folder, rename the photos based on their contents, be descriptive.” Now watch in real time as these photo names get updated. To me, this is magical.

00:24:28 Guest 3: Yeah. So, it’s like title tags for the pictures, like, you know, landscaping in New York, and you’d change the names and upload it to Google Places, Google My Business.

00:24:41 Casey: That’s it, man. That’s it. And so now we have this “baby rock star leather jacket Stratocaster stage.” That’s a good name. Very descriptive. And now I’m going to say, “Now rebuild the PowerPoint into a HTML page that I could upload to my server.” So, it’s running through some stuff. I don’t know what it’s running through right now. I guess they’re just changing the names of it in the PowerPoint. Oh, ’cause it’s referencing those. That makes sense. PowerPoint’s open, so it doesn’t like that. I’d have to close my PowerPoint.

00:25:26 Casey: And try again, then rebuild the PowerPoint to an HTML page. So it says this: “still locked, please close the file.” Okay, makes sense. So now it’s editing all the slides, and now it’s going to build this into an HTML version. And we get a full functioning website that you can upload to a server. And say, how do I upload to a server, in case you’ve never done that before? Okay. Just tell Claude that you want to do it and ask it what to do. I use DigitalOcean, and I can provision a server in like two minutes. Costs me maybe four bucks a month to run it on the cheapest version, six bucks a month.

00:26:09 Casey: And then I say to it, “What do you need?” It says, “Give me the API key. Then give me this kind of functionality, or, you know, provision these permissions,” and I do that. I gave it the API key, and it uploads everything for me. So right now, we go back into Baby Guitar, and we see we just have the PowerPoint and then the deck build. And shortly, we’ll see a new file that gets added here, which is an HTML file, which will be a full website.

00:26:45 Casey: How do you think you would install Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics on it? You just say, “Here’s my Google Analytics account ID. Install Analytics.” Done. All this stuff that you’ve always wanted to do, you can do quickly now, if you just know what you want. What else is coming up for you all? We’re getting a bunch of anything in here in the chat, Michael.

00:27:14 Krystle: So, what would you say, like, I get this is super efficient in terms of building a deck from scratch. What if you were just using an existing deck and just looking for visual edits? How would you compare this to ChatGPT or other tools?

00:27:38 Casey: In the game of compare Claude to ChatGPT, I say choose a platform and get married to it. Choose one of the big ones to get married to it. And listen, I’m on Claude Code, and I’ve got a buddy, Bill, who’s a chief technology officer, super smart guy. He was on Claude Code. He told me about it early on, and I didn’t really get it. So, then I finally got on it. I’ve been spending a lot of time. He’s like, “Oh, I’ve moved on. I’m in Codex from ChatGPT.” I’m not going to move on.

00:28:07 Casey: He’s in the world of moving on because he needs to be on the bleeding edge. I’m not. So, it kind of doesn’t matter to me. I can stay here. Let’s just open this real quick. Look at our website. Oh, it’s like a slide though. And then what’s going to happen? It runs that through and then it goes to the next thing. So, it’s treating the website like a slide deck. That’s not what I want. So, I’m going come back to Claude and say, “You are treating the website like a slide deck. Make it just one long page with all content visible immediately by scrolling down lazy load to increase page load speed.”

00:28:53 Casey: So, plain language stuff. And this will get built in a second. Did I answer your question? Sorry to interrupt you. Who was just asking that question? Was it Krystle? 

00:29:07 Krystle: Oh, the last question about ChatGPT, that was me. Yeah. 

00:29:11 Casey: Any other questions about it or you feel kind of clear on that?

00:29:15 Krystle: No, I feel clear on that. Honestly, I have been personally playing around with ChatGPT with just the $20 version. Again, just for like my personal AI edification, I haven’t played around with Claude too much, but I feel like people are using it a lot. So, that’s why I jumped on this call ‘cause I’ve definitely heard about it and I was interested in learning more. So, I was just curious on the differences and then, I mean, I feel like in terms of marketing stack and marketing org, I think it’s going to be a combination of tools and or whatever tool, you’re at an enterprise company, they choose to go with. 

00:29:54 Casey: Yeah. Like what you’re permitted to use?

00:29:56 Krystle: Correct. I think a lot of people are also using Microsoft’s one. 

00:30:03 Casey: Copilot? 

00:30:04 Krystle: But at—Copilot…yeah, sorry. I couldn’t think of the name off the top of my head all of a sudden, but I think that there is criticism to Copilot. But if they fix it, it is already tied to Office. So, I could see enterprise brands just using it or white labeling something as well. So, I’m just trying to stay educated on the space like you.

00:30:28 Casey: Sure. Yeah, makes sense. I think at the end of the day, it’s about playing and there’s the tools that you’re not going to be able to use, maybe because of like the corporate job or whatever. But if you’re a Fractional CMO and you’re serving clients, it’s about you bringing in innovation. I think the best way to do that is just play-

00:30:43 Krystle: Agree. Totally see the value there where there’s not limitations. I think he’s the best tool. The best cheapest, fastest tool, right? Whatever that may be. 

00:30:52 Casey: Yeah, and to me, it’s not cheapest. That’s not what I’m solving for. I’m solving for like, what can I make work without being the smartest version of me? 

00:31:03 Krystle: Yep. No, no, no. Yeah, I get it. I’m just thinking from the perspective of a corporation and how they’re balancing non-working spend with working spend. 

00:31:13 Casey: Yep. Yeah, makes sense. I want to share real quick. The HTML page is complete and it has a scroll on it. I mean, that’s a pretty good website I mean, is this the kind of website that someone would have paid a lot of money for from an agency before? You know? 

00:31:38 Krystle: Yeah. 

00:31:39 Casey: Yeah, I think so. 

00:31:41 Krystle: Agencies are in trouble overall. It’s not a good time to be in a creative agency. 

00:31:47 Casey: Absolutely they are. I think a lot of people are in trouble. I think that’s why we have to move to the top. I mean, that’s why I’m so committed on this Fractional CMO thing. It’s like, this is where we have to be. If we’re not Fractional CMOs, then and I saw a meme, it was like, “Me asking my boss for a raise and him thinking about replacing all labor with AI.” You know, I think a lot is going to shift. So, us, being able to come in and play and build stuff out, I think is critical. 

00:32:17 Krystle: I would agree with that.

00:32:18 Casey: I think right here, though, one thing I noticed is I’m missing is like there is no call to action order form. 

00:32:24 Krystle: Yeah, I mean, I think that AI is going to shrink the orgs, but I still think there’s going to need to be human oversight. No matter what you can’t, at least not yet. Hopefully not ever for us, but…

00:32:38 Casey: Yeah, well, I think there’s going to be, you know, the arc is that we’re moving towards a single person that builds a company that has a billion dollar valuation. It’s the [inaudible] that’s coming and what does that mean? You know, that there’s going to be a lot of companies that are going to try that stuff. They’re going to shed labor as much as possible, have the fewest people. All strap in with AI tools and they’re just going to—[inaudible] yeah. I think it’s going to change things. Yeah. [inaudible] Go ahead, Kaitlin.

00:33:11 Kaitlin: And save this question if you want to just sidestep, but I am curious on your perspective on dashboarding and automations. So, I’ve been playing a lot with not necessarily like surface stuff like this, which is amazing for just shipping right away, but then the things that start to connect with a backend database or, you know, an API connection to Google Analytics, whatever. Have you shipped things all the way to the finish line and where did you see the biggest kind of gap in knowledge or like hump that you needed to get over? 

00:33:45 Casey: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, actually. Thanks for asking a really nerdy question. I love this stuff. If you guys have like faces, could you get on video? I’d love to see it. Otherwise, it’s just me and Kaitlin hanging out in the voice of Krystle. Thanks, Steph. Thanks. Hey, Daniel. Hello, Revenue Productions. Nice to see your face. It’s interesting that that name could fit on your birth certificate. Okay, so as far as dashboarding is concerned, Kaitlin, I think this is an important question. 

00:34:12 Casey: So, the first thing is the data has to get ingested somewhere, and then you have to be able to do something with the data. So, I work on a project and we have a developer who’s brought everything in and gave me access to data through MotherDuck. I’d never touched MotherDuck before. So, that’s his kind of repository of data. And I said to him, “Hey, dude. Will you give me read only access to MotherDuck?” Like I didn’t even say MotherDuck. I said, “Will you give me read access to your database? I just need read access.” He’s like, “What are you going to do with that?” I was like, “I don’t know. Let me play. Just let me play.” 

00:34:48 Casey: And I worked with Claude and came up with some ideas and it was able to pull in the data. Could I take that all the way to the final place? So, for me, think of it like it was a dashboard—on the dashboard, there’s a picker list of companies, let’s say I could click a company and it would show me data in like the dashboards that I want to see. I could make a kind of a single version of that and an HTML page and have it locally, but to put that on the website, to put security around it, you know, to host it on a domain, to have an audit trail, all that stuff. 

00:35:23 Casey: Like I kind of got poking at it. It’s like, okay, that’s clerk.com maybe for authentication. And then I’m going to have to like, just give Claude full access to develop this stuff. Yeah, I can do it, but it does feel a little bit like, like a toddler trying to build a skyscraper, you know, like I’m not the right person, but I could get 90% of the way there and hand it to someone and be like, “This is it.” And they’re like “Okay, cool. Give me a week,” and then they can build it.

00:35:52 Casey: So, I think for that, that’s kind of tough to do the whole thing soup to nuts. At CMOx, we’ve started doing a lot of this, which is we have internal processes that are repetitive. That should be automations and not agents. Y’all should know the difference what’s automation versus an agent. And automation is if this happens that an agent is look over these things and make a decision based on the data, like an agent thinks an automation does. An automation fails predictably. I didn’t have access, I couldn’t run, whatever. Like it fails predictably. An agent fails in a novel way. 

00:36:32 Casey: So, we want to have automations that are specific things like, “Grab this data, put it here. Grab that data, put it there. Transcribe it to this, upload it here.” Those are individual automations that an agent can sit on top of and manage. And that agent can then look for the failures of the automations. So, people talk about like the magic of AI running a business or something. And I think of it as these individual steps that someone does and you just replace that with an automation. And then you kind of have a manager that sits on top of it for like, let’s say two weeks, a month. And they watch all the stuff and come up with all the permutations of what could go wrong. And then their kind of day-to-day work gets offloaded to an agent. You can then manage those automations. Does that make sense? 

00:37:22 Kaitlin: Yeah, definitely. Have you successfully deployed a time-based trigger for automations that does not rely on you? Is that like relevance or what do you use?

00:37:35 Casey: Well, I mean, there’s a couple ways to do it. If you want to start it locally, if you’re using Windows, there’s the Windows task scheduler. On Linux based machines, they have a cron function, cron like ChronOS like time. So, it can just trigger something at like 8 a.m. every day or something like that. You can also do triggers based on when data goes in somewhere. So make.com and n8n, both have the ability to trigger a workflow when a Google Sheet row gets updated. 

00:38:04 Casey: You can also do schedule based stuff. You can also do like a little script on the server that runs every morning at 8 a.m. So, a bunch of different ways to do it. But like that, that thinking—I want you to know, Kaitlin, like the answer doesn’t matter. What I care about is the question. ‘Cause you’re thinking, “How do I run this every day at a certain time? Oh, cool. Well, you can figure that out.” But the CMO doesn’t need to know the difference between a chron function and a windows task scheduler function in—right? They just need to know that this is what I want and I can ask Claude to do it or whatever the AI tool is. 

00:38:39: [crosstalk]

00:38:42 Casey: One second, Jimmy. What about, Krystle? 

00:38:44 Krystle: Gemini.

00:38:46 Casey: Yeah. I don’t, I don’t touch it. I pay for it and I don’t touch it and I’m sure it’s cool. I don’t know. I don’t have any experience with Gemini or Copilot or MaintainX.

00:38:56 Krystle: Okay. Gotcha. 

00:38:57 Casey: Yeah. ‘Cause I was out for a walk today and I was talking with ChatGPT and I hated it. And like half of my conversation was like, “You are terrible. Is there something I can do to make you better?” And they’re like, “No.” So, I’ve kind of abandoned ChatGPT for most things. Yeah. Jimmy, what’d you got? 

00:39:18 Jimmy: Yeah. Hey Casey, I was wondering, like for a CMO client and putting together, so would we try and build an employee to assist it or would we build a suite of task-based things? So, like one employee may handle four or five different tasks. If you’re thinking about a person, we make four or five different agents to kind of take the place of this person? 

00:39:51 Casey: Yeah, I think that’s a likely outcome. I think that there’s like a whole conversation to be out here around like, is this something we want to do to replace people with agents and automation? And that’s a whole kind of philosophical kind of discussion, but let’s just play it out as a maximalist for a moment. Yeah. The work that someone does at the company, they do one of two things. They innovate something new or they do something they’ve done before. And if they’ve done it before, probably it’s possible to replace that labor. And if it’s new and innovative, that’s probably where you want a human to start. Probably, but also I just showed you a brand new slide deck that I had done for me by automation or by AI.

00:40:31 Casey: So, I would… the first thing that I would look at, Jimmy, is what is the repetitive stuff that we can just replace? And that’s not even AI, that’s just automation. I worked with a team and there was someone at the team who was spending eight hours a week copying and pasting between two different CRMs that had a marketing CRM and a sales CRM that didn’t talk. I said, well, “We should get an integration there.” So, we spent a bunch of money and time and we saved that person eight hours a week of work, which was a really useful thing. You know, what happens after that? You know, how far do you take that? It’s kind of up to you. Does that make sense? 

00:41:05 Jimmy: Yes, and I’m just envisioning like, you know, when I help somebody hire a team, hire less, and have them running a suite of tools rather than, you know, so many people. 

00:41:19 Casey: Yeah. I think one thing, Jimmy, that happens is—I’m a tinkerer. I play, like I said, I’ve been on Claude Code for two hours a day since about February 6th or seven days a week and I’m not there yet or like building out these people. I’m still doing things the first time, right? I think it’s coming. We’ll have people. It’s kind of one of our things in CMOx for the month of March is to replace some labor with automation so that the labor can work on more intelligent stuff. But I don’t think you get there overnight. I think you gotta like— one of the big things I teach inside the CMOx accelerator is not what to do, but how to think.

00:41:59 Casey: That’s the thing that’s most important to me. ‘Cause if you know how to think about this stuff, you’re not going to get sold, you know, some snake oil that tells you that it’s going to be the agent that you’re missing. It’s like, you’re not missing an agent. You have labor that’s not getting done or it’s getting done inefficiently and you can replace that. And that’s like a day of your work to get that person replaced in all that work for the rest of their life, rest of the life of the business. So, that’s how I look at it. What’s like, the incremental stuff that we can do to free up the brain capacity of the company so that we can get more done.

00:42:33 Jimmy: I mean, I was thinking that the conversation should be geared towards how do we best serve our clients and what tools are we going to use to make everything that a client wants come true? Because that’s the way we get paid as fractional CMOs. And that’s where I concentrate all my effort in. 

00:42:56 Casey: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, love that. Yeah. And, you know, there’s a way to like, I like using it for first drafts. Years ago, I went to a copywriting event with Brian Kurtz. It was called Titans of Direct Response and all these great copywriters were on stage. It was like my first conference I ever went to. I just sold some consulting package and I parlayed all the money I made right into that conference. And when I was there, David Deutsch, I asked him on stage, when he was on stage, I said, how do you get all this information about the client?

00:43:29 Casey: And he’s like, it’s hard. You got to go like to the office with a cardboard box and fill it up with all the info. It’s like, that’s the hardest thing. It’s like writing the copy is not as hard once you have all the data, all the background. And I think about that and like now I can pull all that data, all that background and I could pull it in a sloppy way. I can give it a 50 page document and only 10 of the pages are relevant, but it can find those 10 relevant pages quickly and summarize it for me. So I find that’s really helpful for short-cutting the time it takes to create something of quality.

00:44:02 Casey: There’s some questions here in the chat, like, you know, what about Lovable? Like Lovable is cool. I think Lovable is going to get beat up by Claude Code. Maybe Lovable has got some stuff that’s great about it and you want to use it by all means use it. I wouldn’t stop you from using it. But I think Claude is going to try to eat everyone alive. I think ChatGPT is too. So all of these kind of one-off tools that exist will lose their utility when it’s all in a really solid all in one. 

00:44:30 Casey: We’re seeing that… it was reported that Opus 4.6 was the first model from Claude that used its former model to code itself. So we’re now at the point of AI using AI to increase its performance. So anything that Lovable has, you would think that Claude could replicate quickly. So use the tools that you’re comfortable with. But I also think that this is going to be that kind of oligarchy of AI. It’s just going to be a few very big companies that are going to just own a majority of the capability. 

00:45:06 Casey: And I want to share just how we do this at the CMOS accelerator. It’s like this stuff is fun and it is dangerous because some of you are going to chase the shiny of it and build stuff and have fun. And it’s going to come at the cost of winning clients and serving your clients and keeping your clients and increasing your rates and becoming notable. That’s the problem. So I think AI is awesome and I’m happy to share everything that I’m doing with it. But that’s not the same thing as choosing a niche, committing to it, and then being the best at it. That’s where I really think you have to focus as a CMO. 

00:45:38 Casey: So if you’re like, like to noodle on the technology stuff, cool, me too. I built an app as of today, we’re at 6,200 downloads. Which is pretty crazy. Just a free app that I rolled out. I’ve made $1,407 in donations out of it. Just as a fun project. It’s fun, I’m spending time on it. But like…That doesn’t help me win clients. Doesn’t like no AI tool is going to help you really win a client. Maybe it’ll help you with your outreach a little bit, but if it doesn’t help you with like your positioning and how you talk to people and how you push them through a sales process and all that, it’s just not going to work for you. 

00:46:12 Casey: So for a lot of you, need to work on getting your first client or your next client or your next highest price client, increase your rate from maybe five grand a month to seven or from 10 to 12 to 15 to more, whatever. That’s really where you should focus and We’ve got a killer group of folks in the accelerator. We’ve got a woman who shared yesterday that she is just shy of 50,000 a month as a fractional CMO. And she’s playing with all the AI tools and I think she’s pretty busy, but she’s busy because she’s innovating at the same time. We’ve got other folks that are, you know, in the forties and thirties and then other folks that are coming in without any clients working on winning their first one. 

00:46:49 Casey: So I’ve trained over 480 marketers to be fractional CMOs. And just what we’re talking about now with code and AI and the projects and ideas of it, I think it’s really exciting. But to me, it really does come after. It’s the dessert that you get after you eat all your meat. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat? It’s kind of the vibe with AI coding. If anyone here is a Pink Floyd fan. So if you want my help, this is like what we do. can go to, I’ll just put the cmox.co/call.

00:47:22 Casey: You just click there and book a call in with my team. You’ll talk to Justin. He’s super cool. He lives just outside of New York city and he’ll ask you some questions. And if he feels like we can help you, then you’ll talk to John or Melissa and they’ll ask you some questions and you can ask them questions. So pretty chill. But that’s what we’re doing. I’d love to see you come in if you’re ready to be a fractional. And if you have any other questions about Claude, we can stick on for another couple of minutes or whatever. Happy to answer them. Who else has a question-

00:47:47 Krystle: I have a question about fractional CMO?

00:47:48 Casey: Yeah, please.

00:47:49 Krystle: What level of seniority do you think people usually pivot? Like, [crosstalk] at a major out that company. But do you think people typically are CMOs before or their VPs or what are you seeing?

00:48:06 Casey: So I’m going to tell you about a couple of different people. So we’ve got a woman who is the former CMO of Ancestry.com, another woman who is the former CMO of Salesforce.com. Yeah. woman, former VP marketing, former VP of branding creative at ButcherBox, big names. And then we’ve got… I can think of a guy who has just been at an agency for years and they’re very different. These women who are CMOs – sorry, stop that from ringing.

00:48:40 Casey: These women that are CMOs are awesome and very talented, but they’ve also been kind of at the 30,000 foot view as a CMO. And then you’ve got the other person who is like in an agency and they’re just buried deep in client work and they know how Google Tag Manager works and they can build stuff and they know how to write ads. They know how to launch things. They’re like, they’re very tactical, but they’ve never done the strategy. So you have only strategy and like only labor. And then how did these people both get to the same outcome?

00:49:07 Casey: They do it because they’re committed to it and they’re going to go look at their ah weaknesses and they’re going to go just improve them. So that’s what happens inside the accelerator. So is there a rule that you have to be a certain level of experience before you can be a fractional CMO? No, you just declare it. And in a weird way, I hate this term, fake it till you make it. But if you’re going to be the best version, just go do the things that the best person would do. Like the best fractional CMO in your industry, just go do the stuff that that person would do. And before long you’ll be the best because you did all the things that were required to be the best. Does that make sense?

00:49:45 Krystle: Yep. It makes sense. Just curious. Like I said, I’ve seen a lot of rise in it, but I’ve seen it more with folks that I know in my industry that have had their career have become the CMO and now they’re kind of at a different phase in life and they’re doing it.

00:50:01 Casey: Yeah. And I mean, the problem with that, Krystle, like while you’re absolutely right in those people, at some level, deserve it. There’s other people that are savvy that were never given the opportunity. Or for me, I was at an agency for years and like, I took the CMO title, but didn’t come with a pay increase, you know? And like, I think they would have been happy calling me the director of marketing, whatever. Like I never would have had that title. But I just stepped into the role and then I was like, Oh, shit. If I’m going to step into this role, I gotta be the kind of guy who can do the thing. So I had to learn and do the thing. Yep. So if you’re committed to it, think it’s possible.

00:50:37 Krystle: Okay, Thank you.

00:50:38 Steph: Okay. I want to kind of just build off of that a little bit because Krystle, I think it’s a really fair question comes up a lot for me personally around, you know, right to play, especially if you’ve been in middle management and like you’ve had to be the bridge between the older generations and the younger ones who are like the doer growth hacker. So I get your point, Casey, around like there’s some of those doers who have the right functional skills. But then I worry about positioning right to play getting that first client. And then the other thing, which I was going to ask you for your point of view on is more, if you don’t even have the functional resources, like your network of agency creatives, all those kind of people to actually be able to deliver the end product that you deem quality enough to be able to offer CMO services. So another barrier there.

00:51:25 Casey: Yeah, great. And let me just tackle these. The first one is you go get your first client. You go get them and listen, you’re going to get them at any price. That’s what I encourage. I don’t care what they pay you. I don’t care if they pay you a hundred bucks a month, because it’s going to put you over the barrier of having done it before. And once you’ve done it, like I just held a workshop two days ago, we did four hours for building your quarterly plan for your client. You show up with me and you build out that quarterly plan. Even if you don’t have a client, you make believe a dream client and you build out the quarterly plan. You’re going to be the kind of person who gets it inside their body. Like, you know, what you’re going to do is the CMO and that level of confidence that you take to somebody like they would love to talk to you. There’s a couple of reasons they’re going to want to work with you, Steph, even though you’ve never done it before. Here’s one reason, because you’re in front of them and no one else is.

00:52:14 Steph: It’s a good enough reason. And I guess I can get behind barrier number one. It’s barrier number two that I think the combination of having both of those is where I have inertia.

00:52:23 Casey: Okay, yeah. So that’s getting the right talent on board?

00:52:27 Steph: Yeah, like having the right network of resources because when you work, like, I don’t know, maybe somebody was saying they worked at Coca-Cola, you know, once you’ve had a certain caliber of like brand identity work that you’re used to working with, it’s that combination of like wanting to growth hack, but also wanting quality. And if you don’t have the right network and the right combination to optimize a good price point, kind of like creates inertia. And I don’t know if anybody else struggles with that, but–

00:52:53 Krstyle: Yeah, I wonder about that too because I’ve been in the industry for 18 years. I worked at all the major media agencies. I’ve worked on big accounts and now I work on the brand side. And when you say numbers like the numbers you just said, if I could command that price, then that’s probably, you know, with a steady client base, then that is a compelling financial reason to explore it. But like I also worry like, I have a right to play in that space yet or am I 5 to 10 years off from having a right to play in that space?

00:53:25 Casey: Okay. There’s a lot for us to discuss right now. 5 to 10 years off. No, no. Where there’s going to be like computers in people’s brains. It’s going to be a different role in 5 to 10 years. I think if you don’t do it now, I don’t think that you can support yourself and your family in the role because I think we’re going to see a mass shedding of talent. And I think that there is a call right now of like, if you’re a human that’s willing to step into this, you got to go now.

00:53:49 Casey: And yeah, Krystle, like you got a lot to learn before you’re going to be the person that can command the top dollar. Sure. But you go get one client. We’ve got a woman in the accelerator, her name’s Lisa and she sold her first client at a huge discount. Cause I think her confidence was really low and I asked her about it. And she was like, I don’t know. I might go back and get a corporate job. I was like, just stick it out. Get one client and let’s have the conversation a month into that client deal. She’s like, I’m making more than 50 % of what I made as a full time. And I’m working less than 25 % of what I worked. And I will never go back. And that’s at a discounted rate. And I said, “what would you charge the next client?” And she was like “20% more” hands down. She kicks herself for not charging more. It’s a good lesson. And you have to go learn that lesson. So that’s important. The second thing though, Steph, to go back to you, where do you find the talent?

00:54:42 Krystle: I’m sorry. I have to jump. Thank you so much.

00:54:44 Casey: …where do find the talent? You go find it. Like it is a buyer’s market today. People are getting laid off like nuts. So there’s talent, easy to find. I love Upwork for a lot of talent, but I’ve got like an agency that I love to work with. And you just build it. You just ask for, uh you know, in boardroom, we have texts flying around all the time of saying like, I need someone who can do this thing. One of our CMOs has about a million dollars, maybe it’s 700 grand to rebrand his company, his client’s company. And he’s like, okay, I got a lot of money and I got to do this right.

00:55:16 Casey: So he’s using some AI to help, but he really wants to go with like branding folks and he’s bringing in like a proper agency for it. And I think that agency might’ve been suggested by somebody else. So the problems come up when they come up. I don’t have every solution, but I have the ability to solve it because I just go ask people, you know? I can ask in the accelerator ah or I can go to the open market, like Upwork. There’s a ton of people that are available for work. There is no limit to the labor. That’s for sure.

00:55:45 Steph: It’s not the limit to the labor finding. It’s like the… the opportunity cost of the time to do that. And then the risk of messing it up once or twice when you get started with the first creatives or two, you know?

00:55:57 Casey: Yeah. So maybe you have to have a more premium price that you’re paying for someone because they’ve done it before and they have a track record for it. Yeah, I get it. There’s risk that’s involved. But I want you to remember that as the fractional CMO, your role is to be the CMO and not to be the agency owner. You’re not subcontracting any labor here. You are acting as the CMO of the company, which is to go bring people in and do the work and the company pays for it. It’s not like you take your rate and you give it to the people that did the labor.

00:56:29 Casey: Yeah. So, I get it. But I think it is all resolvable. I just want to make sure that you’re not in the place of like, because I can’t solve every problem. I can’t get started. Because you seem like the kind of person that would figure it out… And isn’t that what someone’s paying for? Your experience, your taste, your discernment, and then I’ll get this shit done. Just give me a day or two. Yeah. Then you’re worth it.

00:56:58 Steph: Thanks for the pep talk.

00:56:59 Casey: Yeah. mean, there’s a lot of– [inaudible]

00:57:00 Steph: [inaudible] stealing the limelight now. Anybody else? 

00:57:03 Casey: I think a lot of people suffer from this same feeling. Which is like, I have to know everything before I get started. And the thing that people hire you for is your ingenuity, your experience, but also just like Steph’s going to do it. What is it in the five, the five big behaviors, behavior traits? What is it?…

00:57:21 Steph: The big five, like conscientiousness.

00:57:23 Casey: Conscious. Yeah. You’re very conscientious. That’s the word. Yep. Right. Yeah. You’re going to stick to it. 

00:57:29 Steph: Yeah, it’s more for me. And I don’t know about other people. It’s more like the opportunity cost and the limit of time. Like when you have the family, when you have other things, it’s just the getting started part and going through that learning curve. So, maybe that’s what your accelerator does. Maybe that’s where I’ll book a call and get a better understanding. But it’s that jumpstart so that you’re not wasting, you know, because you look at your time is like, oh, how much am I worth in an hour? And what does that mean for my family? Okay. Now I’m going to spend a month trying to figure this out for a tiny client with crap quality work to get started. You know, it’s kind of just like, what’s that optimal starting point? What’s the right strategy? 

00:58:04 Casey: So, it’s someone that has the capacity to pay you well. I mean, first client I worked with, I kind of took all of their marketing budget when they paid me. It’s tough. Like it was nice because I got paid well, but it was tough because I was limited on what I could do. Fast forward like two years later, I’ve got a company that’s paying me 50% more than I’d ever charged. And I rolled in with eight people in the marketing team, full-time US based employees added four more who were spending $20,000 a day on ads. 

00:58:31 Casey: So, like that… You could go there, you know, like you don’t have to earn your way up. This is another thing that a lot of people come in with this belief of… A lot of women too. They think like, I have to earn my way of like, I got to do it for free. And then I got it for two grand a month and then five grand a month and then 10 grand a month. But if you’ve got the experience and you can identify big enough problems, just jump in, just jump in at 10.

00:58:52 Casey: Like you’ll find a client that can pay you at 10, $10,000 a month for six months of work minimum with a renewal term in there. And then like, if they can pay you that and you’re not taking all their money, then you can get stuff done. Like if they’re paying you 10,000 a month for 10 hours a week, and you’ve got a $20,000 a month marketing budget, you can probably get some cool stuff done. You don’t have to find the cheapest people possible.

00:59:18 Steph: All right. Very cool. 

00:59:19 Casey: Yeah. A lot of companies too, Steph, are solving for time and not for cost. So, we’re doing a company that did real estate investing, and it was during COVID. It was commercial real estate investing. It was during like the high times [corsstalk] cheap COVID money from the government and they were like; this is going to dry up. Go hard, go hard right now. Every day, go hard. It was fun. And then it dried up and the business slowed down. And, you know, after two years I stepped away. But like that’s a cool place to be. We don’t always have to work with broke clients. 

00:59:53 Steph: Yeah. I hear it [inaudible]. Thank you so much for this.

00:59:56 Casey: Yeah. You’re welcome. All right. Anyone have any other questions around this? or on Claude or how to be a fractional CMO or what the CMO colorator is? Why my background looks so cool? I don’t know if anyone’s noticed it’s upgraded. 

01:00:10 Andrew: Hey, Casey, I got a question. 

01:00:13 Casey: What’s up, Andrew? 

01:00:14 Andrew: Hey. Can you explain the business in a box side of things for the program and like… When you get your first client… Feeling comfortable from that side of things to be able to fulfil from that CMO standpoint and the strategy standpoint.

01:00:37 Casey: I don’t understand the question. Like give me the exact pointed problem you want to solve.

01:00:43 Andrew: Yeah. Like when you get a first client, how does that business in a box 

help you to fill like right away for them?

01:00:53 Casey: Sure. So, the way that we do it is like, what are you doing the first 30 days with the client? We’ve got a full toolbox of what to do in the first 30 days. 14 or 16 tools and a full process. So, it’s like you sell the client. You send them the outside of the questionnaire that asks them all the questions about their business. You’re paid upfront for it. And then you have 30 days to develop a marketing strategy. 

01:01:14 Casey: We have a full process on that. Do training on it, everything from a scorecard to the functional marketing systems map to, you know, all these other pieces and that gets delivered along the way. There are fast cash campaigns that you can do in the first 30 days to just to kind of jostle some cash free from the business. Usually, it’s like the low hanging fruit that you can do once or twice, and that can justify your fee early on. And then you spend the next two months, let’s say, because it’s a quarter. You’re gonna spend the next two months just getting the work done. You’re building the team. After you present the plan, you got to get that work done. 

01:01:43 Casey: So, you have a whole process on how to do that. And then after that you roll into a quarterly cadence with me where you do a quarterly plan. So, we did a quarterly plan two days ago, which was the 17th on St. Patty’s and everyone’s now meeting with their client next week to deliver that quarterly plan and finalize it with them. And then come April 1st, they’re off to the races and like, it is super low stress.

01:02:05 Casey: I’ll tell you that the stress for the CMO, like your energy is highest at the end of the quarter and the start of the quarter. And then it’s like a sine wave and then it drops down. The middle of the quarter, you’re not working a lot because everyone’s doing all the work. Everything’s on track. You’re good. As you get towards the end of the quarter, you’re pushing everyone to finish strong. You play in the next quarter. You get that all milestone and then off to the races again. So, that kind of undulating cadence is really helpful for the CMO.

01:02:34 Casey: And then when your labor is low for your clients, that’s when we focus on your business. So, I wouldn’t tell anyone right now that has clients to go get a new client right now but wait like four weeks. And then let’s have the conversation. We do a big training all on that every quarter. We call it accelerate your business. And it’s about what’s your new price, who are you going after? How are you going after them? We send a big workbook, all sorts of stuff and spend time together with that. And then every two weeks thereafter, we check in with the CMO to make sure that they’re on track.

01:03:07 Andrew: And then in terms of like, say, it’s a specific issue, whether it’s… what the creative strategy or the offer or anything like that, do you have specific frameworks that you guys…?

01:03:19 Casey: Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, the offer is pretty, it’s pretty binary. There’s really only two ways that you can work with one of our CMOs. Like if you were a business owner, you can only work with them in two ways. It’s either like a half day consult at the front end or it’s engaged. Simple. And those are programmatic things that they do. It’s going to be a little different for each client. And sometimes, you know, Andrew, you might have some magic. You might be a design guy. So, on top of all the stuff that I think you should do, maybe you’d throw on some like branding review stuff, you know, like that kind of stuff. Maybe you’ve got some, some magic that you do. Some folks are like really, really deep in SEO or something, and they’re going to throw that magic in.

01:03:53 Casey: But generally speaking, it’s one of two things that someone can hire you for. And we have a programmatic way to do all of those things. That’s like based on like worksheets and you meeting with the client and having cadence for the calls and everything.

01:04:07 Andrew: Cool.

01:04:08 Casey: Yeah. And do you know EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System?

01:04:11 Andrew: I’ve heard of it. Yeah. Yeah.

01:04:13 Casey: So, this methodology folds really well into EOS. I think EOS is lacking when it comes to the marketing department. Like, as you can imagine, what do you need to do to a sales team each quarter for quarterly planning? Sell more, get this much in sales. Each person hears your quota. In marketing, it’s like, okay, this is the quota from sales and therefore, these are all the marketing campaigns we have to do. And they got to build a website, and we got to do a rebrand, then we’re gonna hire these people. Marketing is just like a much busier category or department.

01:04:43 Casey: So, that’s what I think is really unique here is that we treat it differently. We come up with all the different projects to work on and campaigns and things that actually move the needle against a scorecard and that gets delivered to the client. And then they commit to it. And that way, if you’re working with a client, that’s like always kind of questioned stuff. They always tried to like, push back; give you like, new ideas every week or whatever. You say, hey, we locked him in for the quarter, dude. Like I’ll put this on the docket for the next quarter. And that puts you into a place of a lot of calm when you work with your clients.

01:05:13 Andrew: Awesome. Yeah, thanks for breaking that down.

01:05:15 Casey: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Also, if you want to talk more about it, just book a call with the team and we’ll share all that stuff and kind of show you some examples too, if you want.

01:05:23 Andrew: For sure. Cool. 

01:05:25 Casey: There’s a question here. Do you commit time minimum for your retainer versus outcome? Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah, so I think that there’s coverage that the client’s looking for. It also depends on your industry, the industry of your client. I like working in the franchise space. So, there’s a little bit of coverage I need to provide. I need to be around a little bit. So, I do state some hours, but they’re not committed and they’re not tracked. And that’s helpful. We have other folks that are paid a base fee plus upside. That’s also another option for you. We’ve got some folks that are making… more than their monthly. You know, if they would charge 10,000 on their monthly, they’re making more than their monthly on the upside on top of their monthly. It’s pretty killer.

01:06:08 Casey: Someone says, I work with HVAC, stuck at 10 million that wants to scale. It’s more about empowering the marketing staff rather than replacing them. Yeah, sure. Like giving the marketing staff more tools to use with AI and things like that. And yeah, yeah. I don’t think we need to like lose people in marketing departments. I do think we’re going to lose people though.  Rick says, do you fulfill services at all or just give advice and strategy? So, I’m the strategist and leader, Rick. That’s the big thing. There are three things in marketing strategy, leadership, and implementation.

01:06:36 Casey: Strategy and leadership is where I want to be. Implementation, I can get someone else or something else to do. I do not want to do implementation. That said, we did – if you were here for the start, we did the slide deck. I would do a slide deck for a client quickly because it’s probably faster for me to like to generate it like I just did. And it is to assign it to somebody else and wait a couple of days and you know, all that. I would say that I’m wrestling with what I think the right level is for it. 

01:07:03 Casey: And I think where I’m settling is if it’s faster for me to have AI deliver the MVP that I can get back to the team to move us through the outcomes faster, I think I’m going to do that. If I have to go talk to Andrew and spend an hour with him to tell him what I want and kind of like hold his hand, versus 20 minutes with an AI and give that to Andrew and be like, here, dude, finish this. I think the latter is probably better for the business. And then teach people the prompts I use so they can do it without me.

01:07:31 Casey: Richie said, how do you solve scope creep to not picking up the client’s dry cleaning? Yeah, good question. I just say, hey, that’s not really in the scope of what we’re doing. I think for a lot of folks, they live in a world where they’re supplicating to their clients. They’re worried. They don’t have a pipeline. We have one client and you don’t have a pipeline. You’re probably going to act a little bit like you’ll take out; you’ll take anything that they throw at you. But if you have a pipeline and you’re like a somebody that people want to work with, you’re going to show up and you’re going to perform and do the thing that you’re paid to do. And then you’re not going to do the other stuff. So, I think that’s the biggest thing is like having the boundary that is like a real good, reasonable boundary.

01:08:11 Casey: We’re filling up for April inside the accelerator. So, we closed the doors early each month on folks that come in. So, if you guys are interested, just book on a call and see it’s like no pressure. We’ll just see if we think you’ve got what it takes. And then you can ask us questions and everything. I also, I’m going to be hosting a workshop next week. I’ll send an email about it today. So, it’ll be a hundred-dollar workshop for you to get your first client from your network. So, it’s 100 bucks. We spent a couple hours together and it’s all about you doing outreach to your network during the workshop.

01:08:40 Casey: It sound like homework, just like show up, do it with me. If you’re working a full-time job, take two hours off, and you’ll get pretty far on creating all the conversations you need and knowing what you’re selling. And then hopefully that wins you your first sale. So, booking a call with my team or be on the lookout today for that workshop. And I’d love to see you guys on it. Any last questions before we go? No? Alright, thank you all for being here.

01:09:06 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. Alright, go get them!