John Corcoran: 12:38
That’s fortunate. And you soon had people coming to you and asking if you could do for them what you’d done with social for the food manufacturing business. So this is, I assume like mid 2020 or something like that. You tell me a little bit about how you end up getting into that business.
Christine Westbury: 12:59
Yeah. Mid 2020 a few people started. One of them is also my sister who is an EO as well, who asked us to do her social media. And then it just spiraled from there and we I would I freelanced for essentially a year to two years, I think we started we took on our first full time employee a couple of years in where we would we would do social media for any kind of business, really, and we were being quite specific in that and that we didn’t do digital ads as well. We didn’t do websites.
We were very just social media only. And it started to evolve from there, and that we started to notice some trends in the types of businesses that we were working with, the types of businesses that we served really well. And we started to pivot from being working with any kind of person in social media to realizing they really wanted to work with service based businesses. And since then, we’ve refined our niche even further.
John Corcoran: 14:02
So, and it’s interesting that you chose service based businesses because you came from food manufacturing where there was a physical product, you can demonstrate it, you can create little user generated content, or you can create, you know, video tutorials and stuff like that. Tell me about that decision to go into helping service based businesses.
Christine Westbury: 14:26
One of the things that I noticed was that it was a relatively hard niche to work in, and that not every agency has the skill to be able to understand a complex service based business, particularly if you’re dealing in financial advisory or, you know, recruitment. There’s some real nuances and the ability to build trust, authority and create content in those niches. And so and also service based businesses are really consistent as opposed to product based businesses. You’re often that your client might say to you, oh my gosh, we’ve sold out of that product. Meanwhile, you’ve created all of this content and you can’t actually use it anymore.
So I have really wanted to build a very stable business. And so I’ve proactively looked for specialist niches that nobody necessarily sorry, I shouldn’t say nobody, but not a lot of people want to work in this potentially. And also businesses that are really stable, like recurring revenue businesses. Okay.
John Corcoran: 15:32
So then I believe it was November of 2022 or December of 2022 when ChatGPT came out and I remember reading about it on Twitter, I think within a few days because it just exploded so quickly. People started talking about it. Take me back to that period of time when that came out. Did you have a similar type of experience with it when you saw it, or did it take a couple of months before you realized the impact that this could have?
Christine Westbury: 16:01
I was probably slower, but within 1 or 2 months I had a ChatGPT account.
John Corcoran: 16:12
I remember. And by the way, in my defense, let me also say that when Covid hit, I was totally like, oh, this ain’t going to be any big deal. My wife likes stocking up, like food and stuff like that. She’s like, oh my God, this is going to be serious. And I was like, nah, it’ll be fine.
It won’t last very long. So I try to make up for it with ChatGPT, I guess.
Christine Westbury: 16:31
So you’re very, very on.
John Corcoran: 16:32
Then I was like, oh, this is gonna be this is gonna be big. This is gonna be big.
Christine Westbury: 16:37
Yeah. Well, I think it was Easter, so it would have been March April just after it had launched, and I was on a flight from Wellington to Brisbane, and it was the first time I’d had uninterrupted time to just play with ChatGPT. And I played for it, played with it for the whole time on that flight. So I think it’s 3 to 4 hours long. And I got off that flight just thinking, oh my gosh, I am completely brain fried.
I have just rewired my brain in a whole different way of working that I’d never even thought was possible. And this is going to completely change the way we do content creation and the way that we run our business.
John Corcoran: 17:23
Yeah, because it was going to make it easier to create content or what were you thinking at that point?
Christine Westbury: 17:31
Content to write. And in those early days we used to run what we call an AI incubator. So I came back to the office, and at the time, I had a team of content creators, and they were responsible for writing the social media content and scheduling it. And we put together an AI incubator where every week we would come and we would go write. What is the thing in our business that is taking the most time?
And let’s target that by finding a way to reduce it through ChatGPT or other tools. And we ended up creating a library of prompts. I’ve still got those prompts because this was back in like 3.0 days, right? So yeah, there’s.
John Corcoran: 18:21
So many tools have developed just in this way, I think a year and a half ago now. So a lot of tools have developed since then.
Christine Westbury: 18:29
Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 18:29
And we ended up building some other prompts and kind of like secret sauce stuff. So we were really training it on our way of working, so we were able to get something that would be so close to having been created by a human at that point, too, and it just needed a little bit of a tweak. But it was quite a bumpy ride through that time for my team. They were freaking out. I had a person on my team who was starting to refuse to use it.
Like, I didn’t want to know about it because I, as a content writer, I.
John Corcoran: 19:05
Because people were feeling threatened by it.
Christine Westbury: 19:08
Threatened by it. And also we ended up with a whole bunch of capacity. So we ended up having to kind of pivot on what we were going to do. We, you know, we had more capacity, so we needed more clients.
John Corcoran: 19:25
And why was that? Was it because there’s kind of like at the same time, a little bit of global economic slowdown. Was it because your competitors were starting to utilize this tool, and so you had to be competitive with what the content they were creating. What was it?
Christine Westbury: 19:45
It’s a really good question. I’m not sure I know the answer to that. I think it was a combination of things. If I look back, I think we were struggling because we were doing just a single product and solution, and then we became really, really efficient at doing that. And so we had a bigger team and we had people kind of starting to twiddle their thumbs a little bit.
So I had to make a decision on what we were going to do. You know, are we going to go and find more clients? Are we going? Do we need to restructure? Do we really need, you know, three people in content creation anymore.
John Corcoran: 20:26
When all of a sudden you can put in a prompt and boom, it shoots out, you know, a 4000 word essay.
Christine Westbury: 20:32
Or is that.
John Corcoran: 20:33
Four. Or 4000 tweets or whatever it is you want to get. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Christine Westbury: 20:36
And starting to look at what the skills we really needed in the business to, you know, is it you know, it’s probably more strategic as opposed to outputs. So.
John Corcoran: 20:46
And so what happened. What did you do next?
Christine Westbury: 20:49
Yeah. You can see there’s kind of a little bit of hesitance in this part because if I look back at that. So that would have been 2023 when we started. So they all left. My whole team left.
John Corcoran: 21:05
They all just up and left.
Christine Westbury: 21:07
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 21:08
They just were like, I don’t want to be a part of this.
Christine Westbury: 21:11
Yeah, I think it was just so and so. It was just such a big change and it was becoming quite repetitive. The work was becoming quite repetitive at that.
John Corcoran: 21:24
That kind of makes sense because instead of like, I mean, I was a writer in the beginning of my career and, you know, there was a there’s some creative gratification to sitting down with a keyboard and pounding it out and creating something versus like, if you put in a prompt, it kind of takes away a little bit of the magic and the fun of it. So was it that it was kind of like changing their job or they didn’t want to do that job?
Christine Westbury: 21:46
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t know, we don’t, you know, people’s situations change as well.
John Corcoran: 21:54
I imagine, you know, that. Was that a blessing in disguise or was it like, oh my gosh, how am I going to run my business now with everyone leaving?
Christine Westbury: 22:01
Yeah. So we went from a bigger team to just a handful and it became quite freaky, you know? Oh my gosh, is this all going to be on me? And it was at that point that I really decided that things needed to change, and that we needed to find a different way to generate sales. We needed to find a different way to run the business. We needed to find the right people for our team, because we now needed strategic minds and a more flexible workforce.
So it was yeah, it was quite a big pivot. And at the time I was also acknowledging that social media, because of the introduction of ChatGPT, was becoming a commoditized service. You know, anyone could pretty much do it. There was no magic to it. And what was going to make us different?
And how are we going to ride this opportunity that AI is presenting for us right now?
John Corcoran: 22:57
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 22:58
And so what do you do? You end up developing Blackjet autopilot, is that right?
Christine Westbury: 23:04
So that’s what it ended up being. At the time we didn’t really know that that’s what we were doing. So it would have been 12 months ago, I had just been on a trip to Peru. My dad is getting a lot of air time today with my dad. We’d just taken two weeks off the business and no emails, no nothing went away.
And I had employed a salesperson and a new account manager to start on my return. And because we had all this extra capacity and we were just going to go really hard on sales. What ended up happening was that the cold calling and the old ways of doing sales didn’t work.
John Corcoran: 23:48
And you were still selling the old social media solution service.
Christine Westbury: 23:52
So selling the old social media service. And so we were trying to sell something which wasn’t unique in the market that anyone could do. And, you know, I’ve already told you a little bit about this. It was about November, December that year that I started to really think, what are we actually doing? Because nothing is unique to what we’re doing here and it’s not really working.
We went away on our annual strategy retreat as a company and we sat down and we really looked at it over a two, two day period and thought, what is going to make us unique? What is unique? What is unique? What is unique? What could we do to make us really stand out in a crowded market?
John Corcoran: 24:46
And what did you decide?
Christine Westbury: 24:49
So there’s some really big learnings from that strategy retreat. So this was December. We decided to do it the week before Christmas. Close in New Zealand. If you’re not familiar, New Zealand business shuts down for a really long time over that Christmas period.
So pretty much from mid-December through to the beginning of February, it’s summer holidays here.
John Corcoran: 25:10
Oh, that sounds awesome. Yeah. So it’s like summer for us because it’s warm in your area.
Christine Westbury: 25:16
It’s a warmer atmosphere. Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 25:18
The kids are off school and yeah. So I thought, oh, why don’t we do our annual strategy retreat then? Because we can do it as a bit of a decompression. And what we landed on in the strategy retreat was this idea of, hey, well, what if we could offer a service to our clients which has a guaranteed ROI or their money back? So that’s where we left it.
We left the strategy. That was.
John Corcoran: 25:48
It. That was it. That was it. That was like a phenomenal promise.
Christine Westbury: 25:53
Yeah. Okay. All right.
Christine Westbury: 25:54
Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 25:55
And so we all came back to work in January, February and kind of floated back and thought, oh my gosh, how are we going to pull this all together? Like, what does this actually look like? If we’re saying we’re going to do a guaranteed ROI on your marketing or your money back. Like, wow. And how were we going to do that with just selling social media?
Because it comes relatively hard to, you know, prove those results.
John Corcoran: 26:25
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 26:25
Because it takes time, right? You’re building credibility and, you know, content and it takes time and consistency and stuff like that. Let me just pause here. What’s your anxiety level at this moment in time? I mean, you’ve been through a couple of businesses at this point.
You’ve. Your father was an entrepreneur. You have entrepreneurs around you. Are you comfortable with this change, change, transition or are you kind of freaking out at this change, massive change in your business and people leaving massive change.
Christine Westbury: 26:55
And when we sat there, when I sat there and thought about a guaranteed ROI or your money back. My stomach was squirming. But with this excited nervous energy that this could finally be the offer that would make people take notice of us. So it was scary, nerve wracking, and I didn’t really know how we were going to do it.
John Corcoran: 27:27
You just knew it would involve AI somehow and some form. Some form of social.
Christine Westbury: 27:33
Some form of social.
John Corcoran: 27:35
Okay, so how did you figure that out then? How did you figure it out?
Christine Westbury: 27:37
How did we get there? Yeah. Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 27:40
So I remember there was a moment where I. We were struggling along with it. We hadn’t decided what the offer was going to be. We were struggling along with selling social media services. And I was really upset at that time because I was like, this is really hard going.
I was literally crying on the floor at the top of my stairs, and my husband came along and I just said, look, I think social media only is flawed as a service. You know, we’re getting all these leads, but we’re not really able to convert them. And it’s just proving to be really, really hard. And that was when we came to the you know, he said to me, well, hold on a second. Like what you’ve done in all this AI space You’ve built a sales and marketing machine that’s delivering leads for you, utilizing all of these tools.
And you know what? If you could package that up and turn that into something for your clients? And I was like, oh, wow, maybe we could be on to something here. And so that’s when we went full noise. We went, right, we’ve got we’re going to turn on our sales and marketing machine, utilizing all of our AI tools that we’ve got.
We are going to land this offer in terms of guaranteed ROI. So I started playing with those on the sales calls and trialing it, you know. Hey, hey, John, what if I told you that you could have a guaranteed ROI and all your money back and people started saying, oh my gosh, yes, that that actually would work for me really well. And so I was proving that was going to work. Meanwhile, we’re building the sales and marketing machine, which starts to deliver appointments in my calendar without having to make cold calls, without having to hustle, being able to be with my family, and working with the team.
And so I’m kind of going around in stories here, but I had to have this trust from my team. I remember it was about February, I came in, I said to my team, I said, we’re going to sell this, we’re going to sell this. I don’t quite know what this is, but we’re going to sell it and it’s going to have a guaranteed ROI or your money back. And by the way, we’re going to do it with no ad spend. And so they all looked at me and said, oh my gosh, Christine, you’re crazy.
How are you going to do a guaranteed ROI? Do you understand the implications of this? And you don’t even know what it is that you’re selling.
John Corcoran: 30:07
And the hard part also about that is you’re depending on the clients that you’re serving, being good at what they do. Right? Because in order for I assume you’re not doing the actual selling for them a traditional lead gen, you’re kind of delivering the leads to them, but they got to be good at closing the leads as well, or else they don’t close the leads, they don’t get ROI and they demand their money back. And it’s really not your fault.
Christine Westbury: 30:34
So we have started to solve that problem a little bit in terms of what is that business, what does that business need ahead of the sales call to increase conversion? What data do they need to be seeing through live dashboards to be able to see that they’re getting a return on their investment? What is each client? How many more people are coming into the funnel? So yeah, there’s that piece of it.
And also there has to be a bit like our story. There has to be something unique or there has to be a strong position for us, our clients that we work with to be able to go with, go to market with a compelling offer, utilizing us as their essentially fractional CMO doing their marketing for them.
John Corcoran: 31:23
Yeah. And how at what point did you figure out that what you’ve evolved this into was working and you feel or are you even at that point yet? Like, do you feel confident in it now? Do you feel like you know or do you feel like this is going to. It’s always going to be a state of flux, like maybe the new normal, maybe it is evolution and revision and altering what you know what your offer looks like.
Christine Westbury: 31:53
Feeling very clear in the methodology and what it’s delivering and how we’re doing that, but acknowledging that we will need to be keeping an eye out and keeping at the forefront of technology as it evolves. To give you a little bit more of an insight, what Blackjet autopilot consists of is outreach. So a 1 to 1 conversation with decision makers of the ideal target audience that you want to work with. So we’ll proactively go and tap the shoulders of the people that our clients want to work with. If for some reason they don’t become an appointment at that time, we will then move them into nurturing.
So through email marketing, other AI tools, we’re also exploring more ways that we can do the nurturing part. And underpinned by a social media presence, which is really important for trust and authority and looking alive. It’s wild to me the amount of businesses that aren’t on social media, and you go and check them out and they haven’t posted in four months time, so you wonder whether they’re still alive or even doing business. And so those three parts of the core of the Blackjet autopilot philosophy, we do all of the delivery for our clients. They only have to turn up for an hour a month, and we do it all underpinned by dashboards and data.
So for each of those parts of the system and for overall ROI, we’re able to say, well, one deal. So for example, in an insurance commercial, a commercial insurance business, one client might be worth $50,000 to them in the first year. Yeah, but the return on investment is they’re going to stay with them for four years. So it’s actually a $200,000 client.
John Corcoran: 33:45
Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 33:46
If we’re able to say, well, we were able to, you know, we only have to generate one, two of those over a 12 month period for you to get a, you know, decent ROI on your investment with us. Then it becomes a bit of a no brainer. So.
John Corcoran: 34:03
And how long do you ask for them to commit to it? Like you do, you require them to work with you for like three months, six months, a year to make sure that you have enough, you know, time to get them those leads, get them those deals that see the return for them.
Christine Westbury: 34:22
Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 34:23
It’s a commitment over a 12 month period because it is a compounding aspect. Yeah. We’re building all of these assets for the business and talking about financial advisors. Again, you know, a financial advisor would look at their book of clients and see that every book of every head in that book has a dollar value that’s returning back for them, that’s returning back for them in the same way that blackjet autopilot, you put $1 into the investment over a 12 month period and you get four, ten, 20 back. It compounds over time.
So all of a sudden we’re actually building out, rather than our clients feeling like they’re just throwing money at marketing, they’re actually investing in a compounding asset that is building them wealth.
John Corcoran: 35:09
Oh, I like the way you describe that. That’s great. I’m curious. What is it like? Has it what has it been like describing this or explaining this to your clients, particularly the AI piece of it?
Because, you know, there’s different levels of awareness of, of and different levels of urgency among businesses out there. So as you talk to businesses, as you explain, this kind of new model that involves social media, involves outreach, involves lead generation, kind of involves different pieces. What is it like as you talk to people? Do they understand? Do they get it?
Does it require a higher level of explanation and education than your previous offers required?
Christine Westbury: 35:57
Typically, the right type of person to work with us gets it right, so I don’t have to explain it as much. They’ll just say, oh, cool, a compounding asset that generates, you know, $1 in, four out. Sign me up. Like this, I don’t even need to worry about the ins and outs. I have had other conversations.
I have had conversations where people have said, I’m really interested in this AI part. Where are you using AI in the system? And I think sometimes we all forget that we’re all using AI all day, every day. It’s, you know, the algorithms on social media are using AI. And so we are utilizing you know, I also forget the number of AI tools and things that we’re using. I mean, you just have to look at our subscription base on our PNL, and you can see how many AI tools we’re playing with at the moment.
But yeah. Have I answered your question around the AI piece?
John Corcoran: 37:07
Yeah, I think I think there’s just different levels of understanding right now and appreciation of how disruptive really AI is already and will be. And it’s interesting because, you know, it’s still like sometimes like, I don’t know, someone on Facebook that I’m friends with will post and say, like, I don’t care about AI. I think it’s a waste of time. Haven’t checked it out. And then like a bunch of people will respond saying the exact same thing and I’m like, oh wow, there’s a lot of people that are not paying attention to this.
And then other times, you know, this is probably just kind of reinforcing based on who you’re connected with. But other times someone else will post something and it seems like everyone’s paying attention to it. So it’s different levels of awareness, I guess, in terms of people embracing this new revolutionary technology.
Christine Westbury: 37:58
And I see it just as a tool, obviously. And some of the things that we’re playing with right now is if you go to my LinkedIn, I have got an AI avatar. We haven’t spent a lot of time on her. Christine the AI avatar. She’s pretty raw around the edges.
Her accent is some mix between British and Australian, but my mannerisms are pretty close. One of the things that we’re looking to implement into my business is how can we send out, you know, if you’re if you and I are having a sales call.
John Corcoran: 38:31
You know.
Christine Westbury: 38:32
You have a meeting with Christine, the AI avatar. So it might be something like, hey, John, Christine, Christine’s avatar. I’m really looking forward to our call on Wednesday next week. Before our call, I’ll just be wanting to understand a few more things, yada yada yada. And so all of a sudden, you know, the avatar has gone out and added so much value to our clients.
And it means that when you and I do get on a call, human to human, we can really do the human work and the high value work as opposed to, you know, those things that just, you know.
John Corcoran: 39:07
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 39:08
And it might get to the point where our AI or our avatar and the other, you know, our clients, prospective clients, avatar kind of get together and talk to one another and explain information. You know, because, you know.
Christine Westbury: 39:23
Without a doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John Corcoran: 39:26
I mean, like, here in San Francisco, we’ve got self-driving cars all over the place now. We’ve got these Waymo cars and everything. And it’s crazy because it’s become very normal. And one of the things that’s persuasive to me about that technology is that imagine a car that can have the collective memory of every other car on the road and see every different example out there and then be, you know, have that in our mind, like, compared to us humans who we’re driving along and we’ve just got our own personal experiences, you know, and we don’t we got our own reactions based on, you know, our human frailties. Right.
And so to me, that’s exciting that we can have a car that can have that, all that kind of knowledge. Well, the same thing could be the case with our AI too. You know where where all that collective knowledge about our company, our services, our offerings, the the benefits, you know, all that addressing, all the common objections that you get, all that could go into an A, an avatar that could be used for either prospecting or AI even, you know, I see it, it could be for strategy client services work to in the future, which is, you know, it seems crazy now, but at some point in the future it will become normal.
Christine Westbury: 40:35
I don’t think we’re that far off. The things that I’m seeing playing with right now, I can guarantee that if we had this conversation in 12 months time, we’d probably have done it in three.
John Corcoran: 40:46
Yeah, yeah.
Christine Westbury: 40:47
Moving that fast right now and it’s crazy and it’s scary. One of the things that also came to mind, you know, when you’re talking about self-driving cars, we don’t have that here in New Zealand yet.
John Corcoran: 41:02
Soon enough they’ll be there soon. Yeah.
Christine Westbury: 41:05
Is the concept of an autopilot business. You know you’re talking about an autopilot car. The car is driving itself. I’m on a bit of a mission to create an autopilot business for Blackjet Social for my business, but also, how can I help other businesses have an autopilot business utilizing AI? So at the moment we’re fixing cells.
At the moment we’re solving that problem in sales and marketing, but also in my business, we’ve got really strong meeting rhythms and cadence and data and dashboards and systems and processes. So utilizing really high quality, high performing teams underpinned by technology and everything, you know, were where we’re quite close to this like autopilot business.
John Corcoran: 41:59
Yeah. No, I think it’s true. I mean, I saw some statistics a while back about the biggest, like the largest company in the world. And like, I forget, it was like the 1960s or 70s or something like that. Had some massive number of employees call it like 2 million employees or something like that.
And flash forward to today, like the Goggles and Metas of the world have like, I forget exactly how many, but call it 60,000 employees or like 100,000 employees, and it’s massively fewer. Right. And that’s because of a lot of software and technology and computing power and all that kind of stuff. And but we’re going to see that on a small basis, too, for smaller companies where a, you know, quote unquote small company, you know, maybe in 2020 or 2017 would have had 20 employees or 40 employees. It could very well, in the near future, have two employees or three employees and generate the same amount of revenue.
And that’s a little bit crazy. You know, I actually see that as a positive because I think those people will be freed up. Maybe they’ll start their own company, Maybe there’ll be 15 other companies that have 2 or 3 employees, and they all, rather than having to work on one particular thing all day long, like a, you know, assembly line worker, they will actually get to, you know, use these different tools and work on a lot of different things and get a lot of fulfillment out of that. So to me, that’s really exciting about the world that we’re living in right now.
Christine Westbury: 43:26
And that point of fulfillment, you know, why do we do this? Why do entrepreneurs, CEOs or even people, you know? Why do we all go to work? You know, really, this should be that level of fulfillment at the end of it, because what’s the point?
John Corcoran: 43:43
Right, right. Absolutely. Christine, this has been really interesting. Thank you for being transparent and open and honest and sharing your journey. And I think there’s going to be a lot of companies just like yours that are going to be going through this sort of disruption, and it’s really cool and inspiring how you’ve embraced the change and worked your way through it.
And so I love, love you sharing that story. I’d love to wrap up with my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of gratitude. I’m a big fan of giving my guests the opportunity to shout out any peers, any contemporaries, maybe mentors who’ve been there with you in the journey and who would you want to acknowledge?
Christine Westbury: 44:27
Yeah, I wanted to acknowledge my husband, Mike. We’ve been on this journey together for, you know, 16 years, married now 15, 16 years married and as a business owner himself. And we’ve got our own bits and pieces outside of these businesses that we run and our family. I know that we wanted to kind of step away from maybe just talking about being grateful for my family, but real gratitude to my husband, Mike, for lifting me up, being there through the times and together. We’ve completely changed our trajectory over the last week and it’s a really exciting time.
John Corcoran: 45:08
Yeah. Really cool. Christine, thank you so much. Where can people go to learn more about Blackjet social and Blackjet automation or auto autopilot?
Christine Westbury: 45:17
Blackjet. Autopilot. So Blackjetautopilot.com or Blackjetsocial.com and I’d love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn, so feel free to reach out there.
But thank you so much for having me, John. It’s really exciting to have just shared how much things have changed over the last 6 to 12 months, and I’m excited to for, yeah, to see what’s to come. And thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
John Corcoran: 45:43
Absolutely. Thank you.
Outro: 45:47
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.