Using AI to 100X Your Leads and Sales After Losing It All With Scott Empringham

Intro: 00:00

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. 

Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. 

Well, my guest today is Scott Empringham. With over 20 years of marketing experience working with big brands like Ford, Home Depot, NASCAR, and McDonald’s, and seven years membership in Entrepreneurs Organization, Scott is a recognized global authority on AI powered marketing for OEMs, franchises, and SMEs. 

Once called the Billion Dollar Man because he helped one OEM sell more than $1 billion worth of vehicles on social media over 13 months. Scott is known for applied AI powered marketing that is getting and teaching results, where to start, what to do and how to get it done. Now Scott leads a workshop called 100X Your Leads and Sales AI Powered Marketing Masterclass. It’s a hands on, live working session that promises to be Spell binding and delivers massive value and fun. Attendees will leave the workshop with thousands of dollars worth of marketing materials customized for their business. 

A lot of attendees have referred to this session as mind blowing, high energy, and transformative, and Scott consistently scores a 6.8 out of seven again and again. 

Wow. You’ve got a lot of experience and interesting stuff to talk about, so let’s jump right in. I want to ask you, you describe in your story about how you lost everything and built it back stronger. Can you walk us through what happened and tell us a little bit more about that, what that felt like and what you did?

Scott Empringham: 02:35

Yeah, I’d be happy to. Thank you for having me. Best way to say it is when you introduce me as the Billion dollar man. I was in Las Vegas, and I’m accepting a couple of awards like the awards that everybody wanted at this automotive convention, this automotive trade show. These are the ones I won and I step out on stage.

They introduced me as $1 billion man like my agency was screaming, growing like crazy. We hit 12 million bucks. We’re growing. And it was a wonderful, wonderful time. In fact, one of my heroes, Grant Cardone, was in the front row, and that was somebody that I was teaching during one of my workshops. 

And it was probably about two weeks after that when the bottom fell out. Two of my largest clients had fired the agencies that I was actually working for. Two car companies fired the agencies, and like an awful game of musical chairs, I got caught holding the bag. I bought the media and I wasn’t getting paid. So it took about 3 or 4 weeks of that and I realized I was in big trouble. 

It was like exhaling all your oxygen is out and then getting your oxygen cut off. Within 30 days, I’d shut the business down. 20 years of growth, right? 20 years of growth. Shut the business down. 

Lost my money. Lost everything. Lost the clients. Was stuck holding the bag. And I had to liquidate everything. 

And it was game over. I talked to my bike, the guys in my business group. I said, is there a way out? Is there a way through? 80% of my revenue was tied up there, so it was game over. 

And that awful, awful June of 2018, I lost it all. And I was sitting under about a mountain of debt, about a million bucks in debt, personally signed a line of credit. And to top it all off, I was actually also going through a divorce and it was the bottom, bottom of the barrel family business, my identity really all shattered and lying on the ground and had to face starting over. And that was it felt. What did it feel like? 

 It felt like getting your stomach and your heart and everything all ripped out all at once and stomped on it. It was the most difficult time of my life for sure.

Rick Rappe: 04:41

Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing.

Scott Empringham: 04:43

I have to start off like that.

Rick Rappe: 04:46

Yeah. No, I have empathy for you. I can I’ve had a few situations in my career that were earth shattering. Yours sounds even worse, but I. I mean, how did you pivot from that and come back?

And what? What? Tell me more about where you went from there. Because this is the. This is your story of how you rebuilt and came back.

Scott Empringham: 05:09

Well, I think I wish I could say it was immediate. It took about 30 days for me to just figure out which way was up. But then one morning I decided I’m going to brush myself off. And I heard that one great speaker who talks about you want to start. You want to start changing the world.

Start by making your bed. Remember that general or colonel or whatever. You know what? That’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna go for a run on that run. 

While I was running, I started thinking to myself, wait a second. They call me the Billion Dollar Man. I’m the guy who gets leads. I can help drive leads like nobody else. In terms of the digital marketing social media space. 

That’s where I made my name, and I thought to myself, if I could do for myself now what I did for other companies, maybe I could, maybe I could turn this thing around. I got a little bit of hope, a little bit of excitement. I raced on home and I wrote down. I down. I scratched out a plan and it was like a ten step plan that I now call the Elite Marketing method. 

It starts with an ideal customer profile niching down designing core messages around that specific audience, designing lead magnets to draw them. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Ten step plan. And I got really excited. And I called my dad, who was alive at the time, and I said, dad, I know I don’t have an office, I don’t, I know I don’t have a business. 

I would love to come down and restart my business. He said, come on down. He had a bunch of offices at the time. I had a little bit of hope. I drive on down there. 

I walk into his office and I walked in. I said, hey dad, which office can I take? And he pointed and he said, right there. And it was a chair sitting between two filing cabinets in the back corner of his office. I said, you got to be kidding me. 

He goes and he goes, you want an office? You have no business. You have no, I’m not going to give you one of my offices. So no bullshit. He gives me a chair between two filing cabinets. 

I got soy sauce over here and a filing cabinet over here. When he would need something out of the filing cabinet, he’d have to grab it, and I’d have to duck, and he’d open it up. And I showed this picture of my workshops now, and my sister walked in and she burst out laughing. And I felt like this. I felt so small and so, like, defeated. 

But she took a picture and she was laughing. She took a picture of me and she goes, my, the mighty have fallen. I had this beautiful office in Newport Beach, 40 employees and everything, and it hit me and I said, you know what? Send me that picture. And she sent me that picture. 

And today in my workshops, I show that picture. I said, I’m going to post this online. And if you go to my Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, all that stuff, it’s all over there. I said, I’m going to post this online and today is going to mark a new day, and here’s what I’m going to do. I wrote this plan down. 

I’m going to publish everything. I’m going to publish this online right now, and I’m going to tell people I’m going to work for 90 days. Now I call it x 100. I need the extra ten days. I said, over the next 90 days I’m going to try to rebuild my business, maybe not to where it was before, but I’m going to show people that I can turn nothing into something in 90 days. 

I’m going to generate leads, I’m going to generate sales. My dad looked at me and goes, I wouldn’t post that. I mean, I wouldn’t post that you’re that’s your new office tag with dad. It just is what I’m going to do. I posted everything every single day. 

I posted every meeting, every book I was reading, everything I was doing, every move I was making. I documented and shared, documented and shared and I had plenty of time on my hands. So I shared the rationale why do I want to niche down? Who am I niching down to what core messages and offers am I going to make? What specific offers am I going to make? 

They’re going to solve pain points to draw this niche in. Test test test test test post post post. In 88 days I show this picture to in my workshops. In 88 days to the day I walked in and I paid off a half $1 million that was left on my line of credit in full to the branch manager. I have a check in my hand and I said, do you mind if I take a selfie? 

She said, I’d prefer you didn’t. And I said, yeah, and I snapped it. And you can see our heads kind of down. And I showed this in my workshops to this day, and I certainly didn’t build my business back to where it was. But what I did is I re-established momentum, I generated leads, I generated sales, and equally, if not more importantly, outside of proving it to everybody else. 

I proved it to myself that with this plan, I really could attract customers quickly into my system. And then with AI, I basically took this entire blueprint and I aid each of the steps. In other words, all the ideal customer profile, all the core messaging, all the niche work, all the lead magnets, I used AI to eliminate the cost, speed up the time, eliminate a marketing agency that I used to charge 20 grand to do all that stuff, eliminated the agency. And then I published that all, and I created a course and a coaching program. And I do these free workshops for, for businesses all over the world. 

And I’ll tell them, fire your agency, do it yourself and I’m going to show you how to do it yourself in these workshops. And then that just blew up and it just changed. It changed my life. And I can tell you this is in making those changes and pivoting miracles happen in my life. I’ve made a lot of personal changes in my life. 

I remarried my wife, got my family back together, rebuilt my business more profitable, and I’m having more fun than ever before. And now I’m traveling the world with my wife and my kids, and I feel like I got a new lease on life. So if it sounds like I drank a lot of coffee, I actually didn’t, but I am pretty fired up about it and I’m excited about what I’m doing now.

Rick Rappe: 10:19

Well, congratulations. That’s quite a story. I mean, I want to dig into the, the, the emotional aspect of that for just a second. I mean, how did you find the the grit to keep pushing forward in the heat of that battle?

Scott Empringham: 10:39

I think two of the biggest things in retrospect, I look back on it as number one as I took full ownership of it. I was at the time when I was losing my business. I blamed it on my wife because if she wasn’t doing X, Y, and Z, then I wouldn’t be doing A, B, and C. I blamed it on my business partner. I blamed it on my clients.

I blamed it on my employees. I had these employees that would come in their pajamas and it was both. Could be true. They came into their pajamas at 9:00 and they would leave at 430. And I was just miserable with the culture that I had. 

The culture that I created was this entitled sense of culture. And I know lots of businesses around the country, particularly here in the US, can identify with this, this, this, this culture of, well, what latte do we have? Like, I wish they cared more as much about the clients as they do about the lattes and the and the soy milk and what we had in the kitchen. So I complained about my employees. I complained about my business partner. 

But one thing, when I lost everything, I really didn’t have a choice. I needed to. I needed to look the guy at the mirror and take full ownership of where I was, because nobody was coming to help me. And that was number one. So I took full ownership. 

I read a book called by by David Goggins called Can’t Hurt Me, and he has this mirror exercise in chapter 1 or 2. Hit me between the eyes. I’ll never forget. He describes the idea of when is the last time you as a man, if you’re a man, is a person stood up, walked to the mirror and looked yourself dead in the eyes and ask yourself, are you happy with who you are and who you’re becoming? Do your habits, your daily habits, your daily behaviors, what you’re spending your time on? 

Are you really you proud of yourself? And I was doing a lot of stupid things. I was drinking, I was taking sleeping pills to try and get through. I was doing a lot of really dumb things, and that hit me. I mean, I started crying, man. 

I was like, I the truth. I mean, the real truth is I was so disappointed in who I was and who I was becoming. It was the truth was inescapable, I said. So I made some changes and the biggest change I made, and I promise I won’t. I’m not going to use this as a soapbox at all. 

But I made a personal decision to to get baptized and change one very fundamental thing, because I started to rebuild the business. But the real thing I was worried about and concerned me is I kept feeling a tap on the shoulder. And I know it’s not a businessy thing, but it ended up being the most important business decision I ever made, was I kept getting this tap on the shoulder and I called my buddy and one day I was praying. And I was never a religious person at all. And I was just a tap man. 

And I just called my friend. I said, I want to be baptized. And he called me and he and he said, after all these, because he’s he’s been a part of a church and stuff. And I made that change. And that fundamentally changed my view of my place in the world, my place as a servant rather than somebody that was going to get that changed my relationship with my kids. 

It changed my relationship with my wife. It changed my relationship. How I approach business, it just changed everything. And then miracles started to happen. So those those two fundamental things I think were pretty important.

Rick Rappe: 13:34

Wow. Wow. That’s an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. That’s really, really awesome.

What were three of the concrete actions you took in those 88 days that really got you that momentum and, and restarted your business and everything?

Scott Empringham: 13:50

It’s a great question. There’s three there’s three things I’ll tell you is, number one, I decided to take imperfect action people. And now I’ve had the privilege of literally coaching thousands and thousands of businesses all over the world, from Europe to Mexico to Canada, US, all over two types of business people. One, people will take imperfect action and adjust along the way. The other people think about it, think about it, think about it, think about it.

They lose. They lose because they’re thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it. And the people that are take taking imperfect action have already iterated and improved 20 times before this poor guy even gets it off the dime. So I decided to take imperfect action. When I posted that picture of myself sitting between two filing cabinets, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t prepared, I didn’t have the plan. 

All perfect. Yeah, but I decided I was going to take massive action. I was going to start today and it was not going to be perfect, but I was going to get better. And I made a commitment every day to do something, to move in the direction of my dreams no matter what, and improve along the way. So that was number one. 

Number two was as I looked at my plan, I decided to niche down. And I know everybody talks about niche down, niche down, niche down. Well, for me this wasn’t a theory anymore. Most businesses can say, here’s my ideal customer profile businesses between 35 and 65 and this and this small businesses. Well that’s not a that’s not an ideal customer. 

That’s a that’s a massive group of people. I decided to look at what demographic was I going to look at, what geography was I going to look at? What need was I going to look at? Just turns out that it was just prior to the end of the year. And I thought to myself, It’s August. 

Going into it’s like July or August going into towards the end of the year. And I decided my offer, my lead magnet, my niche was going to be small business owners in Orange County that knew of me because I was in Orange County. I was a member of EO and I decided, forget the theory. I want to talk to people today and tomorrow in the next week. That could potentially pay me. 

The third thing is I was going to offer massive value. I was going to give, give, give, give, give like give like crazy. Give everything I possibly could. I ran into a guy named David Meltzer, David Meltzer, awesome chance meeting and chatting with him. I’m telling him I lost everything and he’s telling me his story and he goes, he goes, can I give you a piece of advice? 

I said, I need it, and because because I just started and and and he goes, here’s my formula. I might screw it up. But he said something that’s like, my formula is 120 or 110. I said, what is that 100. What is 110? 

He goes every where I go, every meeting I go to, every phone call I have with every single person. My goal is to give them $100 worth of value as a metaphor. And then I’m going to ask humbly, but with certainty that I deserve it for $10 of value back. Maybe it’s just an introduction. Maybe it’s just a would you take a follow up phone call? 

Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. But out of such certainty that I gave so much value, I’m going to not feel ashamed or too small or whatever to ask for that $10 of value. I swear to you, that day I was going to a meeting. I was on the board of Orange County Orange County Board. I decided every person I was going to try to add value, I’d say, what business are you in? 

I’d say you want a good marketing idea where you’d be. And I said, well, let’s film one right now. And I would just I would bust out my camera. I was giving massive value. And then somebody said, you should do a workshop on like social media. 

And they said, how much do you charge? I said, I’ll do it free. I’ll give massive value. And Keith, one of the guys who’s a president, he overheard me. He goes, you’ll do a free workshop. 

I said, yeah, when? And he said, how about like in two weeks? And because our guy dropped out, I said, I’ll be ready. I worked my tail off to do a free workshop. I put together a little social media course at the end. 

At the end of that, I gave away everything I could. I had a workshop where everybody was working on their ICP and their core messaging, and I helped them with it. I coached them, it was like this massive value thing where people walked away with their game plan. At the end, I said, if I can, I’d love to share with you how you could continue this. I have a 30 day roadmap. 

It’s a course. It’s very inexpensive. Everybody bought it. And then there’s two people in the other group that said, would you come speak to? I think it was like Seattle or it was Hawaii and it was a virtual ones because Covid was just hitting and and I did a bunch of virtual workshops and I did them for free in the beginning. 

And, and I just I can’t do all of them for free. But massive value, imperfect action, imperfect. Committed. Daily action. Niche down. 

Niche down. Niche down niche down to finding some group that you could absolutely crush and own. And then third is what was it? Offer massive value and it’s irresistible. People are like, well, how, how could how could I help you now.

Rick Rappe: 18:38

Scott, can you tell me a little bit more about lead magnets and what you mentioned about lead magnets earlier?

Scott Empringham: 18:43

Yeah. This is this is one of my favorite, favorite subjects. And I’ll frame it up two ways. Number one, lead magnets are designed to solve an acute need for a very specific niche. And I’ll come back to that in a second.

The second thing is there’s cold and there’s warm lead magnets. And I’ll explain the difference. Mastering these two things can transform. A business can double, triple, quadruple the amount of leads and sales that you have very, very quickly. The first mistake most people make in addressing the first thing is they come up with a lead magnet. 

That is just a gimmicky BS thing and nobody needs a gimmicky BS thing. We all have too many of those. If you can get clear on your ideal customer and then niche down and I mean down uncomfortably Comfortably narrow. Specific example is how I did it. When I needed I needed leads and sales. 

It wasn’t a hypothetical, it was I have a half $1 million in debt. I’ve got car payments, mortgage payments. I’ve got all these different payments. Do I have to make money tomorrow? I got clear on a geography that I niched down to. 

I got clear to a membership that they were assigned to, and then I got clear on a need. I looked at the timing. It was towards the end of the year, and I knew I could create a marketing plan lead magnet for the following year. So what I said, and I forget what I called it, but it was like Jumpstart 2020 or whatever. It was Jumpstart 2020 and let me build your marketing plan for free. 

A complete digital marketing and social media roadmap that you can implement in your business starting immediately. And I will go through this process and here’s my process. Check check check. Absolutely free. I made everybody in Orange County aware that I was doing that. 

I, I messaged members of my group and they’re like, are you going to charge us? I’m like, no, I’ll come into your business. I’ll do it for free. They’re like, are you kidding me? I will do it. 

But I could, but. And then the thing, I put a limit on it, I could do it for about ten businesses. So if you’re really serious, I will do it for you. And it was a no BS thing that my ass was on the line. They knew it was going to be value. 

A couple people were skeptical, but most were like, you’ll really do this? Yes, lead magnet niche down, find an acute need and marry those two up with that niche and you can find it. And I by the way, I’ve got a prompt if you’re wondering where to start. I’ve got a prompt. I’ll make it available to you. 

There’s a link to it. I’ll send you that link. If you’re clear on your ICP and your niche, you can copy and paste that into ChatGPT. It’ll give you 15 custom designed lead magnets that solve that specific problem for your niche. It’s crazy good. 

That’s number one. Number two is this is this is absolutely key. Now it was oh gosh. Oh. Cold and warm.

Rick Rappe: 21:16

Right.

Scott Empringham: 21:16

A cold lead magnet. What’s the difference between a cold and a warm lead magnet. There’s cold audiences. There’s warm audiences, there’s hot audiences. Every business has it.

One of my favorite authors, Chet Holmes, he wrote a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine. He talks about if if RPM, if Rick was standing in front of a stadium full of 30,000 people that could use direct mail, that really could, one way or the other, there’s going to be three types of audiences. 3% are looking for a direct mail person right now. They’re in market for they’re ready to go. It’s probably about 50% or 40% that are considering direct mail, email, a number of solutions. 

But they’re warm. They’re they’re moving down towards that. There’s cold. They have a problem. They they don’t have any sales. 

They don’t have any connections with their customers. And they just know that it sucks. But they haven’t started looking for that.

Rick Rappe: 22:11

Yeah.

Scott Empringham: 22:11

A cold lead magnet would be would be addressing that specific mindset. Mindset. No new leads coming in. Don’t know where to start. Don’t know what to do.

Here’s three things you can do to decide which plan might be right for you. Which which solution might be right for you? Here’s a checklist a leak checklist. You know something that addresses that challenge. A warm one would be thinking about direct mail, email search, and social. 

Here’s five things you didn’t know about direct mail. Or here’s a side by side comparison. Let me send it to you. Or let me create this one thing on our website that could be a quiz to find out which solution is right for you. Maybe meta is right for you. 

Maybe YouTube is right for you. Take the quiz and find out.

Rick Rappe: 22:52

The early stage. The early stage cold lead needs to be convinced that, oh, there’s a solution to my problem. This might be it. They start looking into that, but then the people that are more considering direct mail, for example, they might be more interested on how do I use direct mail? How do I how do I do it?

What are what are the levers I need to pull to make it happen? So you got that.

Scott Empringham: 23:14

Exactly. And then. And then what if what if it’s the end of the year and everybody’s really focused on how do I crush the end of the year, how do I take advantage of cyber this or end of year this, or then then you can even tie in that messaging. Now you got some really, really strong that’s going to appeal to double, triple or quadruple the size of the market that if you didn’t have that little unique niche angle on it. So I found just over in my career that’s been hammered into my brain, that’s the that’s the game changer for every business that’s considering that’s struggling with talking to more of their ideal customers.

Oftentimes the answer lies in compelling, irresistible offers. Alex Ramsey talks about it. We’ve broken it down to three prompts. Step one, two, and three. That gives you amazing results and can just dial you in.

Rick Rappe: 24:05

Well, those prompts sound really valuable and you said you might be willing to share them 100%. Are you willing to share them with our audience as well?

Scott Empringham: 24:13

That’s 100% free.

Rick Rappe: 24:16

Yeah, Okay.

Scott Empringham: 24:17

It’s a three pronged attack. Absolutely. I’ll make it available to you.

Rick Rappe: 24:20

Those will be in the show notes, and everybody can go there and check it out. I’m certainly going to use them and see what I can come up with. That sounds exciting. Yeah. Well, what kinds of clients are you working with today?

Tell me more about that. I think you said you worked with over a thousand companies or something like that.

Scott Empringham: 24:39

We’re. I’ve trained now well over a thousand businesses all over the world, from Asia to Canada to US to Mexico, Europe with AI powered marketing solutions. So we we go out and we help them stand up. We help them design their strategy, we help them set up all, create all their content, distribute all their content, and scale it up. We basically our pitch is buyer agency, not right for everybody, but for a vast majority of people, they can fire their agency and do it themselves.

They get one virtual assistant, one virtual assistant. Get our coaching program and our course. Train your virtual assistant. You got basically the power of 5 or 6 people all in one, and it’s a game changer. I’ve had more people say to me, I was getting charged ten, 15, $20,000 a month. 

I got a VA wonderful person in the Philippines, South Africa, wherever they took your course during your coaching program, now they’re doing my email, they’re doing my LinkedIn well. They’re doing my meta, they’re doing my ad buying, they’re doing my content. I went from two posts a week to now they’re doing five posts every single week, rain or shine. They’re doing the work of five, six, seven people. And it’s it’s it’s AI, it’s coaching. 

 It’s training. So that’s been a ball.

Rick Rappe: 25:55

Does your program work really well? Does it work equally as well for B2C companies as it does for B2B companies, or is it tailored better to one or the other?

Scott Empringham: 26:04

It’s both. Both. We have a smattering of B2B. We have about half B2B, half B2C. It’s really a marketing.

If you could picture four pillars. There’s the strategy, there’s the content creation, the content distribution and the scaling. And it’s marketing 101. But it’s a it’s a strong marketing program that then allows you to customize the AI tools you need and point the direction you want, whether it’s B2B or B2C. And it culminates with literally in the in the center of the program is is a 90 day roadmap that you plug in after you’ve loaded your information, and it gives you literally a 90 day ramp up. 

And all you have to say is B2B or B2C. And I created it. So you fill in the blanks just like the old school Mad Libs back in the day.

Rick Rappe: 26:50

Okay.

Scott Empringham: 26:50

Any business can just fill in a couple blanks. There’s these beautiful prompts and frameworks you don’t have to worry about 90% of it. You fill in a couple of blanks, copy paste, go copy. And it’s a prompt stacks kind of program. And you do one step at a time.

And before you know it, you’re pushing out content and lead magnets. And we even have like one of my favorite examples is he’s a speaking coach in Portugal. He’s on a program. He stands up his strategy, he’s creating lead magnets. And one of his lead magnets, the ChatGPT said, was a speaking style survey on his website. 

But it wanted him to create an app. And business people, politicians, bank presidents, like these big, big people who are doing a lot of press conferences and things. He helps them as a speaking coach, and he designed this thing and he said, would it be cool if you could get a score, a speaking effectiveness score and see where your gaps were and all this stuff? And it said, well, you need an app. So he’s talking to this app developer and the guy’s going to charge like 15 grand, 90 days and blah blah blah blah, lovable.dev comes out lovable.dev. 

We immediately jump on it, we buy it and all of our trainers are on it. I said, dude, come to, he’s in Portugal. Come to our Wednesday Live group coaching call. Let’s demo this with you. You’re going to have an app by the end of our 40 minute course, 40 minute live group call. 

He’s like, he goes in, we teach it to him in 40 minutes. He’s got a full blown app. No design skills, no development skills, no nothing skills. He’s just a business owner like you and me. He builds an app, he gets a link, he puts it on his website. 

He now has an app that’s collecting leads. And he can send a direct mail, like a DM to a LinkedIn contact, say, hey, take a take, take, take this survey and find out which which score you are and it’ll give you a roadmap. All that was done. My daughter and my son heard that 12 and 16. They both have built apps.

Rick Rappe: 28:50

Wow.

Scott Empringham: 28:50

It’s a it’s a game changer.

Rick Rappe: 28:52

Yeah. You’ve really leaned into the power of AI, which is awesome. I a lot of what we talk about on this podcast is, you know what, what’s coming with AI and how should we be using AI? It certainly is. It’s always a conversation topic for sure.

Where do you see it going from here? I mean, you’re obviously leveraging it to accelerate a lot of really interesting parts of the marketing process. And where do you see AI kind of leading us over the next five years?

Scott Empringham: 29:19

You know, that’s a that’s a great question. I’m going to be super, super candid. I have no idea. I have no idea. I, I really don’t because like, there’s people way smarter than me.

And I go to these conferences and I’m always on the panel and I’m the applied AI guy for right now. And then there’s people. There’s guys and gals that are really out there on the frontier looking forward. And I honestly don’t know. I mean, I haven’t got a clue. 

Here’s what I do know. If I had a traditional marketing agency using traditional marketing approaches. And not leaning into AI, then I would, I would be, I would be, I would be very scared. Like, yeah, after talking to you, I know that you’re using AI to power the smarts behind your direct mail campaigns. It’s a fundamentally powerful tool. 

Direct mail is an enormously powerful tool, and when you’re coupling it with AI brains, it’s going to make it that work that much harder, get that much better, return on investment, get that much more targeted and nuanced so there’s less waste when people are buying direct mail like you’ve already got it. But I, I run into agencies today that are going, gosh darn it, you know, people don’t get it. I mean, I do things, but like it reminds me of the day. It reminds me of. Years ago, I read Wall Street Journal. 

The CEO of the CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner. Michael Eisner, apparently walked into the cartoonist, got him all together in whatever year it was, put a computer on the desk, and he said, ladies and gentlemen, cartoonists, I love you. You’re wonderful people. You’re the best at what you do. And if you don’t adopt and start using this new tool here. 

You will be out of a job by the end of the year. And it was like January or February. And then you had three types of cartoonists, he said. Cartoonists one I’m a purist. I will never adopt that thing. 

Got it? They’re gone. The ones in the middle kind of dragged their feet. Probably can’t do it as good. Half of them were gone, and probably most of them. 

The people that said, I’m curious about this new tool and maybe I could take what I know about art and maybe I maybe, maybe I do know art. I’m a freaking genius when it comes to art. Maybe as a cartoonist, maybe I could take that and use this new tool to create even more beautiful art. They had jobs, the other ones didn’t. And so I see agencies all the time that are like the Group one and group two like, oh, this dang AI. 

Yeah, they’re in trouble.

Rick Rappe: 31:47

Yeah. And it’s it’s evolving so quickly that you just have to be studying and learning the newest cutting edge tools and trying new things and experimenting and keep, keep evolving. It’s it’s just a time of rapid change in our in our professional careers. So I make my staff study AI and learn new AI skills, and I told them the exact same thing. I’m like, if you aren’t studying AI and working on AI, you’re missing the boat because the future is going to be powered by AI.

There’s no doubt about it.

Scott Empringham: 32:21

So 100%. And to that, I’ll just say this is that’s why I’ve got the X100 behind me. One of our core programs is 100 day Accelerated course where you get the course, you get daily WhatsApp, so you’re in a daily WhatsApp with the other 150 parts of our. We have an elite group called the elite AI Marketing Team. And there’s 150, 175 members in that group.

You have daily WhatsApp access to all of them and my entire agency tech, meta, Google, email, AI, creative content production, video editing. You have my entire teams in there, so you have direct access to an entire agency, plus the other members weekly live group calls. I’ve got four people on my team that are just buying things. They’re like the the 007 kind of guys that are bringing new techs or whatever the guy is. Q I got four Q’s bringing new tools. 

So every week we say, here’s an app of the week, here’s how you use it, here’s how you apply it. Here’s here’s what you can do with it. So it’s so hard to do the research. So my four people will do the research. We test it on things and then bring it to them. 

And then monthly people that are part of our elite group, we have a monthly one on one call with me and my team, and we have a monthly deep dive and go, okay, where’s your bottlenecks? What’s the next big hurdle for you? And they go, you know, I have a presentation coming up and I just don’t know how to do this. I’m like, okay, do this, do this. And sometimes my team will jump in and we’ll build it for them. 

We’ll go, here’s gamma. Let’s do this. Boom. Done.

Rick Rappe: 33:45

Yeah. You bring it I mean that’s a really good point. You I think in this time with things changing so rapidly, being a part of coaching programs and masterminds and groups and all that is is just more important than ever, it can accelerate your learning curve so much over trying to figure it all out on your own. I mean, that’s just become almost impossible these days.

Scott Empringham: 34:06

Yeah. And I always thought kind of these masterminds were bogus. I thought, like, I don’t know how good it is, but we blurred the lines between a mastermind and a coaching thing to a do it for you sometimes. One of the gentlemen that came in, he’d gone set up his strategy, and on his monthly call, we had an opportunity. He goes, you know what I really need to do is I need to do a full blown makeover on my LinkedIn.

I mean, I need to change my header graphic. I need to change the About Us section. I really want my pinned post to be more reflective of the core messaging I created. And oh, and I need to do a couple of these other things. I said I got my whole team on here. 

Do you want us to just do it for you? And you can watch us and we’ll teach you. We’ll record this. We’ll send you the recording. He’s like, Holy shit. 

Yeah, go. And he had his VA on there. And the VA was like, yes, please. Like this freaking rock and roll. Let’s do it. 

So I was like, step number one, boom, boom, boom. And it felt like something out of the future because we showed him live us creating not only a total full blown spot on makeover for his LinkedIn account header graphic sliding headers that showed the different niches, his about Us section, his the pinned post. Then we also did 30 days of content rotating between contrarian content, light bulb moment content, curiosity driven content, and trending content. Like these four types of content. We teach all educational, totally dialed in with stuff, gave him a library, and like when we’re done, we’re sweating and we’re like, what did you think? 

He’s like, oh shit, that’s not coaching. I don’t know what the hell that was, but that was awesome. I was like, I think we just created a new way to do these hours. If they want coaching, we’ll give them coaching. But if they’re like, totally stuck on something, like that was not even possible. 

 Yeah. Could you imagine? I mean, just couldn’t do it. But now it’s like, that’s the coolest thing. And I know I’ve been talking too much, but the last thing is that’s the coolest thing with AI. 

It’s totally redefining what’s possible in a meeting.

Rick Rappe: 35:59

Yeah.

Scott Empringham: 35:59

You know what I mean? Like it’s nuts.

Rick Rappe: 36:02

Yeah. And there’s so much that you can do so quickly. I mean, you used to have to go think about it for a week and then get a team of creative people to work on it. And, oh, my God, for another week and then, you know, review it. And I lost my notes another week.

Or whatever. And now you can just be like, let’s do it and crank it out. And it’s good because it gives you a starting point. And it might not be perfect, but these days, like you said, it’s important to just have a bias towards action. Test it, refine it, improve it.

Keep iterating. Keep learning and keep moving forward. So it’s all great advice Scott I really that’s it. I’m super interested in your course and your all of this stuff is I keep signing up for more and more things.

Scott Empringham: 36:43

Because of these.

Rick Rappe: 36:44

Podcast episodes, but hey, well, this has been super interesting and educational and I really appreciate your time, Scott. If people want to get ahold of you. How would they get ahold of you?

Scott Empringham: 36:56

Best thing to do is scottempringham.com. If you want to check out. If you want to go for a free live webinar and just get a training, you can do that if you want to book me to keynote.scottempringham.com there’s a link for that if you want to get our courses, our coaching program, it’s on scottempringham.com.

And of course I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram as @scottbempringham, but those would be the best ways.

Rick Rappe: 37:20

Well awesome. Thanks for your time today and I will let you go. Thanks.

Scott Empringham: 37:24

My pleasure brother. Thank you.

Outro: 37:26

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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