Ethan King is the Co-founder of Zeus’ Closet and Stuff4GREEKS, two custom apparel companies known for their creative designs and advanced embroidery for fraternities, sororities, and the entertainment industry. He is a TEDx speaker, global keynote presenter, former president of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) Atlanta chapter, and communications expert for EO US East. Ethan is recognized internationally for his leadership and innovation in business. He is also the author of ChatGPT to Double Your Business in 90 Days and a strong advocate for leveraging AI and automation to enhance productivity.”
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [3:02] How a business crisis inspired Ethan King to dive into marketing automation
- [5:31] Ethan’s early reaction to ChatGPT and its transformative capabilities
- [7:01] Building a custom GPT for EO chapter marketing and content generation
- [10:18] How Ethan tracks new AI tools and filters them for practical use
- [16:49] Techniques to overcome AI resistance in other companies’ teams
- [20:29] How AI can help businesses communicate in unique brand voices
- [22:38] The practical application of AI in everyday business operations
- [31:30] Why traditional SEO is changing and what businesses must do now
In this episode…
Hiring more staff isn’t always the answer when trying to scale your business. In today’s AI-powered world, the right tools and mindset can help double the output without expanding your payroll. But how can business owners shift from a traditional model to one fueled by automation and digital tools?
A creative entrepreneur turned AI strategist, Ethan King, shares how a legal battle led him to embrace automation — and how AI has since transformed his entire approach to business. Faced with the dilemma of either downsizing dramatically or finding innovative solutions, Ethan chose to invest in marketing automation. This decision not only salvaged his business but also doubled its revenue with fewer employees. Recognizing the power of AI, he began helping other companies integrate AI into their processes, leading to remarkable productivity gains. His expertise extends to building custom AI solutions, such as AI-driven marketing campaigns and digital avatars for business development.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Ethan King, Co-founder of Zeus’ Closet, about integrating AI into business operations. Ethan shares insights on brand-specific GPTs, digital assistants, and overcoming employee resistance while exploring tools like Claude, Perplexity, and Sora.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Ethan King: LinkedIn | Website | Email
- ChatGPT To Double Your Business In 90 Days: The Hands-On AI and Automation Guide to Explosive Growth in Today’s Economy by Ethan King
- Zeus’ Closet
- Stuff4GREEKS
- SimpleSuccess.ai
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “AI and automation go together like automation on steroids.”
- “If I can apply this to my custom apparel business, any entrepreneur can.”
- “Don’t be scared of AI. Be scared of not knowing how to use AI.”
- “The playing field is level — anyone can be a developer with the right AI tools.”
- “Soon, customers will prefer talking to AI because it’s helpful, friendly, and always available.”
Action Steps:
- Adopt an automation-first mindset: Begin evaluating recurring tasks in your business that could be replaced with AI tools. It’s the first step toward scaling sustainably without hiring more staff.
- Create custom GPTs for internal tasks: Tailoring AI to match your brand voice can significantly reduce time spent on content creation and improve consistency across communication.
- Educate and engage your team early: Introducing AI tools through workshops or third-party experts can ease resistance and empower your team with new skills.
- Use AI to expand your digital footprint: Focus on long-form content and video to improve your discoverability in AI-driven search results and stay relevant as traditional SEO evolves.
- Test new AI tools but apply filters: Don’t chase every new tool — only adopt what fits your business needs. Ethan King recommends tools he uses, like Perplexity for research and Claude for writing.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
Ok, today we’re talking about how to double your company’s productivity using AI without having to staff up your team and hire more employees. And my guest today is Ethan King. I’ve had him on before, and he’s going to tell you more about all of these concepts. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:18
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:34
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we talk to smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you look in the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes. Go check out those archives. And before we get into this interview, this episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that?
We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing. We are an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability, and full execution. In fact, we invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting. It’s our platform podcast Copilot.
And you know, Ethan, you know, one of the pleasures of my life has been having a tool to bring someone like yourself onto the show and talk about what you’re working on. And that’s what we’re going to be doing here today. I know that you are a fan of that and collaborating with different people out there, and so that’s what I really love about podcasting is being able to do that. So anyone else who’s interested in that, using the tool of podcasting in order to build great relationships with people in your life, go to our website, Rise25.com. Or you can email us at [email protected].
All right. And let me tell you about Ethan. First of all, he’s been on the show before. So you can check out the previous guests, where we dove into his background and the founding of his company, Zeus’ Closet and stuff4GREEKS. But we’re not going to get into that whole background now because he’s got a new focus and that is AI.
And he has known each other through entrepreneurs. Organizations have been very active in EO and kind of organically started helping other companies to utilize AI in a very effective way and ChatGPT as well, and even wrote a book called ChatGPT To Double Your Business In 90 Days. And Ethan’s great to have you back here on the show again. And let’s talk about how you got so passionate about AI. I know that you were actually in In Zeus’ Closet, had a lawsuit which ended up putting you in a bit of a hole, lots of legal fees, and you needed to invest in automation to be able to keep your marketing going for that business. That kind of was the beginning of your interest in operating more efficiently. So tell us a story about how you got into that.
Ethan King: 03:02
Yeah, that’s exactly right. First of all, thanks for having me back, John. It’s great to be here. And yes, over a decade ago, about 11 years ago, we were going through a nasty legal battle in our business. As you know, the road of entrepreneurship is not a smooth and easy one.
It’s rough and rocky and we had to figure it out. I had a choice to either fight to keep our business or give up and file bankruptcy. And even though we dropped our staff count by a lot, by more than half, we chose to fight. And I had to do that in a creative way. So I decided to learn marketing automation.
Now, if you remember from my previous episode, I was an art major in college. I’m a creative dude, so I’m not a coder or a computer programmer, but I went through this three day workshop and learned how to automate all of my emails and drip campaigns and Sequences and it just blew my mind. I had no idea you could do that stuff. I had no idea that I could do it, and it was so easy. So I built all of these automations, and then we got into automating social media and just went kind of an automation first mindset in our entire business.
And at the end of the day, we not only saved our business, but we ended up doubling our revenue with about half the staff that we had when we went into the ordeal. So now I teach other companies. I didn’t teach this stuff for the longest because I thought I was behind the curve and that I was playing catch up. So I never thought about it until I was talking to some other EO members about it. I didn’t realize how advanced my strategies were.
And then when ChatGPT and all that stuff came out at the end of 2022, I immediately jumped on and saw how we could plug that into the processes and automations that we already had in place, because AI itself is really just another automation. If you think about it, AI and automation go together like.
John Corcoran: 05:01
Like automation on steroids. And were you like me? You know, I in I think it was December of 2022 or late November of 2022 when ChatGPT came out and I kind of I dabbled in some AI tools, kind of followed it a little bit, but had never been blown away by it and certainly didn’t see like a lot of application in our business. And then someone shared it on Twitter or something, and I started playing around with it, and it would just kind of blow me away immediately. Do you have an experience like that?
Ethan King: 05:31
Yeah, because I had dabbled around Jasper and things before ChatGPT came out and it all sounded very robotic. I was like, you know, I’m not going to use this. But then when ChatGPT came out and I realized it could do so much more, it just blew my mind. And really customizing it to sound like my own brand voice was the main thing that sold me on it. I’m like, oh, this thing is really, really smart and it can put so many things together that these other AI language tools can’t do.
John Corcoran: 06:05
Yeah. And so you had actually been when you came on my podcast, you’d been speaking about the topic of Wealth beyond money, which was the topic of your previous book, and then you ended up going to a conference, global leadership conference in South Africa, and you started sharing about these custom AI bots, GPTs that you’d created. Tell us about that.
Ethan King: 06:29
Yeah. So at that time, I was serving as the marketing chair for my EO chapter. Again, I’ve done it a few times, and these are volunteer roles for the benefit of your listeners. When we’re on the board in our EO chapters, these are completely volunteer roles. So I figured out the most efficient way to get the job done because.
John Corcoran: 06:50
Entrepreneurs get a bad rap. It seems sometimes that all we do is for money, but this was definitely one where you’re not getting paid anything. Or if you’re lucky, you’re getting some free Diet Cokes or something out of it.
Ethan King: 07:00
Yeah, right. So I figured out how to automate this thing so that basically all you have to do is put in the name of an event, the name of the speaker, maybe copy and paste the speaker’s bio and the date, and then just hit go. And this custom GPT will spit out all of the content: your social media content, your articles, your website, write up, your landing page copy for the event, and it’s tailored in a specific way. You know, I programmed some stuff in there like about NLP NeuroLinguistic Programming and Marketing psychology and starting with the benefit to the actual member in this copy sounds great. And it’s also in iOS voice because I went and sampled a ChatGPT sample from an iOS website.
So it sounds like it’s the official iOS brand voice, but it’s also a very appealing marketing copy and it’s all done for you in a split second. So I built that purely for myself, just.
John Corcoran: 07:59
So you didn’t have to spend a bunch of time pounding out this stuff yourself. Yeah, yeah.
Ethan King: 08:02
Let’s just let’s just get it done. And I shared it with my peers from around the globe at this event in South Africa. And it just blew people’s minds. And I started getting speaking requests and consultation requests from that. And one thing led to another, since I was already on the speaking circuit, and then at one, then some of the event planners that were booking me for my I talks, my AI workshops, because these are very intensive four hour AI workshops where people have laptops out, iPads out.
We’re actually doing the work right then and there. It’s not a lecture where you go home and do it later. So I was getting booked for a lot of these workshops, and some of the event planners started to say, hey, can you have a book on AI that we can buy to go with this? And I wasn’t planning on writing an AI book because I changed so fast. It’s like, how in the world will I write a book?
Right. But so many people asked for it. I said, you know what? I’m going to put the book out quickly. Of course, I have ChatGPT to help me write a book a lot faster now, but to do it in an authentic way.
And I actually teach in my book how to authentically write a book using ChatGPT to help you with being your ghostwriter with the chapters where it doesn’t sound robotic, but it’s truly your own actual stories in your own actual voice.
Ethan King: 09:24
That’s so meta. Yeah. Right. But yeah, we got the book out quickly. I took pre-orders first and sold a ton of pre-orders, and then that helped my feet to the fire. And we got the book out in August of last year.
And the way that I did it is if you purchase the book from my website, if you purchase the paperback or the e-book, you get a copy of the book either way for free. And then every time I update the book, it automatically goes to your inbox to just boom, right there. It says the latest version of ChatGPT will double your business in 90 days. So we’ve had several updates roll out. The most recent one was just now February of 25 as we’re recording this.