Ep 252: AI Is a Toddler With Crayons: How to Rein It In and Put It to Work with Dan Kurtz

SHOWNOTES

You don’t expect a digital marketer to say this out loud: “Let’s call cold email what it is. It’s spam. It’s B2B spam.” But Dan Kurtz has spent twenty years learning exactly where the line sits between marketing that works and marketing that gets you deleted — and these days he’s building AI systems that let one person do the work of ten, without crossing it.

Dan started out getting mom-and-pop shops found online, scaled his skills across a 300-location national fitness franchise, and did stints inside Nielsen and Microsoft Bing before founding Miss Pepper AI, where he builds marketing automation and AI-driven sales systems for businesses.

We Also Talked About

• Why your Google Business Profile only ranks if your website mirrors it, with pages for every service and area you claim.
• How a modest press release can land a local business in Google’s AI answer boxes.
• What “black hat” actually means, and the irony Dan spotted at a major SEO conference.
• The permission gates that keep automated outreach on the right side of spam — and the law.
• Using AI as an “assembly line worker” instead of a creative that veers off the path.
• Why Dan starts every automation project with the most overworked employee in the building, stopwatch in hand.
• How to bring managers on board by showing them productivity, not problems.
• Who gets replaced and who gets promoted when AI arrives — the line-worker-to-plant-manager shift.
• Dan’s advice for employees: use AI to optimise your own work first, and become the use case.

Resources Mentioned

• Miss Pepper AI — misspepper.ai
• Dan Kurtz on LinkedIn
• Linchpin by Seth Godin (affiliate link)
• Pipedream (secure integration platform)

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

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Episode 252: AI Is a Toddler With Crayons: How to Rein It In and Put It to Work with Dan Kurtz

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] When Dan Kurtz gets brought in to help a company, he doesn’t start with the owner. He goes looking for the most overworked employee in the building, the one that’s about 10 seconds away from quitting, and he starts a stopwatch. Now, there’s a method behind that, and it says a lot about why so many automation projects fail before they start.

In this episode, we get into what small businesses are missing about getting found on Google and in those new AI answer boxes, why most cold email deserves the delete button and what the exceptions do differently, and an honest look at what the AI wave means for your job, who gets replaced, who gets promoted, and what makes the difference.

Now, Dan spent 20 years in digital marketing from mom-and-pop shops to Microsoft Bing, and now runs Miss Pepper.ai, where he builds systems that let one person do the work of 10.

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, [00:01:00] and if you need a flexible work from home option to grow the online side of your business, I help you do that so that you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I’ve got Dan Kurtz with me, and Dan Kurtz is into digital marketing. But he’s the founder of Miss Pepper.ai, which is an interesting thing all by itself. And he’s basically focused on using tools that can snap together into systems so that one person can do the work of 10 people. In the old days, as in before sort of AI tools really started to become much more mainstream.

And that’s not so that people lose their jobs. It’s so that it can free people up so that they can do more for your business, and your business can [00:02:00] actually be bigger without having to add much more to it. And I want to just start out by asking you, Dan… Well, first of all, thank you very much for being on the podcast.

Dan Kurtz: Of course. Absolutely.

Trudy Rankin: I just want to ask, what got you started in this area? Just tell us a little bit about your background story and how you got where you are.

Dan Kurtz: Sure. So graduated high school back in 2005, 2006, and was going to college at the time, graphic design, and that was the year that India and the Philippines came online.

Trudy Rankin: Ooh. Yes.

Dan Kurtz: So in my stupid little 18-year-old head, I had a moment of, “Oh, no, what do I do?” Now we’ve got three billion plus people online that are now doing the same thing that I’m now going to college for. What do I do? So lot of internal discussion with myself and asking friends, family, where should I go?

What should I do? Still early on, first semester, where should I be putting my efforts? So, sat down and thought about it for a bit. Went and picked up a book by Seth [00:03:00] Godin called Linchpin which is how to become indispensable to a company, and started rolling myself into marketing.

So tried to figure out, internet was still fairly new at that point. Broadband had just come on, five years earlier. Everybody was now getting access to the internet, and like, “Well, where’s this going?” Spent some time, looked on some online forums, and figured my way through it, and stumbled upon digital marketing and went, “This sounds cool.”

And 20 years later, here we are.

Trudy Rankin: So basically, as you slowly figured out what it was that you were interested in getting into, because, you know, it is a thing still to want to do something that you enjoy and that’s going to be beneficial. What was it about digital marketing that actually made you go, “Yep, this is for me”?

Dan Kurtz: So the way that I’m wired is I like to make comparisons or analogies between things. So while my friends were spending their time going on Xbox or Halo or Call of Duty or whatever they were doing and getting the high score with their [00:04:00] friends, I was busy building my skills and cutting my teeth and working with local businesses, but my high score instead was a paycheck.

So for me it was, “Hey, I can do this thing that I really, really enjoy. I can help a bunch of people, and at the same time I can get paid to do something that I like. Let’s ditch the video games and let’s go do this.”

Trudy Rankin: That sounds like a really good idea to me, although there are some skills. So maybe, I don’t know, that we used to have discussions with our kids about what kind of skills you learnt from playing video games.

Not sure I bought their arguments, but still. There are a few, I guess. But okay, so you mentioned local. You started out helping local businesses market themselves?

Dan Kurtz: Yeah, so, some mom and pop shops, things like that. Just, “Hey, you don’t have a website yet. People are looking for you online.

Let’s get you hooked up.” Google Maps was still relatively new at the time so there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff going on there just yet. So we didn’t have Google business listings and all this other sort of stuff that we do now. You know, Yelp and, uh, MapQuest were still top of [00:05:00] the pack for a lot of things.

So started there just getting them a presence, making it easy for people to find them, stuff like that. Tried my hand at it and then went the other way with it and got into some of the black hat stuff. So into the gambling and some of the other fields that are out there because the payouts were great.

I was like, “Well, if I’m good at this, let me go try it at something that’s really, really hard.” And at the time, it was, you know, 20 years ago, we don’t have nearly the amount of hoops back then as we do now, but it was fairly easy to get stuff moving. So I was like, “Hey, this is great.” So kind of was playing with both of those, and then by around 2011, 2012, started working inside a national fitness franchise here in the States.

So then took that skill and then multiplied it across 300 locations.

Trudy Rankin: So, and I’m going to dig because I’m curious. You said you sort of picked up some black hat stuff, and when you say black hat, a lot of people go, “Ooh, black hat, that’s… No.” But what does that actually mean?

Dan Kurtz: [00:06:00] So in the security world, black hat is anything that’s going to get you in trouble.

In marketing or SEO, black hat is anything Google doesn’t agree with. Which is pretty much anything. So if you are sending emails to other people to get them to link to your site in exchange for linking to theirs, they consider that black hat because that’s against terms of service. There’s a whole…

Basically, their terms of service is like a mile and a half long, and it’s like all the stuff that actually moves the needle is the stuff they don’t want you to do. So meanwhile, they’ve got, folks out there that are saying, “Oh yeah, we’ll build links for you. We’ll buy links for you.” A lot of big SEO guys are, “Oh yeah, we play by Google’s terms of service.”

A couple years ago I went to, it was BrightonSEO. Their sister conference here in the States was in San Diego. It was like two years ago, and everybody on stage was jumping up and down and talking about white hat and how you should never purchase links, and you can’t do all these different things.

Meanwhile, the trade floor was filled with nothing but link vendors. [00:07:00] I was like, okay, there’s a huge disconnect here.

Trudy Rankin: That, that is a little bit ironic, I have to say. Because yeah, so that’s interesting. So it’s obviously something that businesses need to be aware of in terms of the terms of service, because you really don’t want to get, your site shut down or your ability to be able to reach other people sort of blockaded just because Google or other search engines decide that you’re not playing by the rules. But talk to me a little bit about what a small business should be thinking about when it comes to digital marketing and making sure that these days they do get found online.

Dan Kurtz: Yeah. So the big one that we’re seeing now, especially with the AI push, is a lot of times what people will do is the number one driver for a lot of them, or at least up until recently, has been Google Maps, Google Business listings, whatever they call it now. They’ve changed, like, names like 10 times over the years.

I think it’s now [00:08:00] Google Business Profile. But essentially the little map with the dots on it. But in order to affect that and to move that ranking, you have to mirror the things that you’re doing on the Google Business profile also on your website. So if you have all these services listed, then Google expects you to have pages for those same services.

If you say that you serve those areas, they expect to see pages on your website that tell them about those areas. So if you’re not doing any of that you’re missing the boat on a lot of things. Also things like the People Also Ask. It’s a little four question box that shows up on Google.

Stuff like that, where if you’re answering those questions, if you’re… Basically, because the only thing that a Google Business profile does is it reads your website, figures out what you have, and then it strips out all of the design and everything else and just puts that core information into a place where Google can grab it really quick.

That’s how most of their services are anyway, is just grabbing something that’s there and then pulling the essence information out of it so that they can go ahead and use [00:09:00] it. So doing things like that has been really important. Also getting cited has been important, especially for local businesses.

What we’re seeing for solving the AI gap right now is press releases. The reason why I recommend it to a lot of local businesses is you can get decent press releases anywhere from, you know, 100 bucks and up. But just by doing that, you wind up getting the cleanest possible links that you possibly can to your website.

You get a bunch of news links, and you get 4 or 500 sites worth of news links. So you can be selective with the type of anchor text you want to use with the links that you create, right? So if you put one or two, because most press services I think allow two to three max. But you put two decent ones in there, have an SEO help you with it, and just push it out, and then you’ll start getting found for that term.

You’ll start getting found for that locale because now you have 500 sites all talking about that same thing. So now you wind up showing up in that little AI featured box at the top, too, which is where a lot of stuff is winding up anyway [00:10:00] for local.

Trudy Rankin: And that’s kind of interesting. That’s very interesting.

And I’ve got some specific questions I would like to follow up with for that, but then the next question I’d like to ask is you started working for this big organization, and obviously you were… now you’re not just working with local organizations, you’re working with branches or arms across the country.

Where did you go from there?

Dan Kurtz: So did that for a bit, and then decided to change up a little bit. So I left there and I started doing some contract work actually. So I wound up working in Nielsen’s DMA office, their digital marketing something or other. It’s been a while. But I was working there for a bit seeing how they integrate their data into digital or how they were making the bridge the gap to digital at the time.

So they were working with large companies who had streaming apps, let’s say. And again I’ll say what I can, but, you know, I don’t want to violate anything. So they were streaming a bunch of things, and they were using their data, and they were [00:11:00] putting a pixel into the app to actually record when people were seeing ads and how it would show up, and then whatever that streaming service was, it would give them an idea of who’s watching based off of all the data that Nielsen’s had for 100-plus years. So started there, did that for a stint briefly, and then went to go work over at Microsoft Bing as a contractor there and was working in their service department.

So working and learning the insides of a multi-billion dollar ad platform and what it looks like to run something like that, which was cool. You know, doing all the SEO and website stuff, and now we’re getting into the, at this point it was like 2013, 2014, so now big data’s starting to come online.

I was like, “This is really cool.” So started playing in that, playing with those pieces. Later on started doing identity resolution which is another fancy way of saying I have a large list of everybody in the US, and I can see what they’re doing. But we use it for advertising purposes. So basically, if somebody says, you know, “I’m looking for chocolate ice cream,” I can see [00:12:00] everybody on the list who’s looking for chocolate ice cream and then send them a coupon to go get chocolate ice cream.

That’s the extent of it.

Trudy Rankin: Which of course my eyebrows are going straight up because at that time, period of time, I was working as a CIO or the head of the business technology part of an organization. And that was, you know, that whole discussion, debate, concern, whatever around personal information was just starting to really, really take off right then.

And it’s fascinating to me that that’s been around for forever, that whole discussion, debate. But even back then they had quite an ability to be able to pinpoint where the focus should be, but it… I guess my question is, not every business or organization can hook into that data.

To me, you know, that seems like one of those great big massive services that you pay a lot of money to plug into to [00:13:00] be able to scrape that data and use it. Is that correct? How do organizations access that kind of data these days?

Dan Kurtz: So there are a few larger organizations here in the States.

There are data co-ops that you can either join or buy into or what have you, in order to get access to that data. I’ve been working with several people who since like 2017, 2018, we’ve been building that data independently. So it started off as a LinkedIn B2B scrape, figuring out who worked where on LinkedIn, and then working our way down the columns and getting personal stuff.

So for a while, depending on the data person we were working with to augment our data source to be as good as possible, there was a point maybe 2018, 2019, where we could even tell you the year, make, model, and VIN on the car that person had most recently purchased. Some of the privacy stuff obviously came into play when that started going out because auto sales.

So a lot of that stuff couldn’t get used. But we’re primarily using it for B2B right now. And actually we’re building a [00:14:00] sales operating system specifically around that data. So if somebody was doing B2B and they wanted to, let’s say, get a list of a certain type of company they work with, let’s say it’s SaaS companies, and they want to talk to a CIO maybe, and they want to do a free tech audit or something like that, we would have it where we find everybody who currently matches that criteria and then is in market for it, because we get browsing data on those people, so we know what sites they’ve visited, and we just queue them up in the system.

And then that system will start sending out… First it’ll send out paid ads just to get in front of the person for a while. Then once we’ve hit a certain level of saturation there, it’ll do cold email. We’ll start messaging them there, ask them for an appointment, and then from there the AI fully takes over, and we’ll go ahead and start messaging back and forth as if it was an appointment setter and get that person onto a calendar.

So the entire front end of what businesses are supposed to be doing in 2026, you know, doing outreach, doing branding, being omnipresent, all that stuff, we’re [00:15:00] building it into a dashboard that essentially allows you within a few button clicks to go ahead and automate the front end acquisition piece

Trudy Rankin: That’s kind of interesting.

Obviously, I get all kinds of emails, and I’ve had a few emails that promote services like that, and cold emails of course. And I look at them, and my first initial gut reaction, and it’s still probably my initial reaction, is to just hit the delete button because it sounds really, really black hat and spammy.

How do you get around that?

Dan Kurtz: So it’s a matter of balance, right? So there’s the amount of data that somebody who’s cold emailing you, you expect them to know, and then there’s all the stuff that’s the unknown unknowns, what you don’t expect them to know. Like if you’re working in a certain company, or let’s take a step back for a second.

So let’s say I send a cold email and somebody goes and they click to my website. So they make that click. I can then have it where there’s a pixel sitting on the site that figures out who that person was, and [00:16:00] then from there it’ll send them a message so it’s not really cold. It’ll say, “Hey, Trudy, saw you were on page XYZ on the website.

Did you have any additional questions about that product, or are you looking for something else?” And it looks like it’s coming from customer support, so it’s less of a, “Oh my God, they’re sending me cold email,” more of a, “Okay. Well, first off, where’d you get my information? Who are you?” And it’s a different conversation because you’re catching them on the offhand.

They’re coming off the website, so it’s different. But we’re trying to do it so that it’s proactively and reactively everywhere. So the paid ads, if somebody messages you on social media, cold email, basically anywhere that we can put the data to be omnipresent, we’re funneling all of those channels into one dashboard

Trudy Rankin: Okay.

So, talk to me a little bit more. So you went and found out and learned all about the massive banks and there’s all this massive amounts of data, and kind of where did you go from there?

Dan Kurtz: So that’s kind of where I’ve been for a little bit. So that’s [00:17:00] kind of one of the functions that I’m building into Miss Pepper right now along with all the other stuff that we do.

So doing the outreach, doing SEO, now the AI optimization stuff, going back to web design because AI has made that infinitely easier, so that combined with our previous skills, now the sites are just showing up. So that makes life easy. And then we’re building, uh, some thought leadership platforms that we’re working on right now.

So helping executives who are busy actually be interviewed, kind of like we’re doing now, but by an AI, so that they can go ahead and write social posts about what’s currently going on in their industry. So it’s going, scraping news, having an audible conversation like this, and then going ahead and posting it on their social channels on their behalf.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. It’s fascinating. Because I know that half of the people listening are going to go, “Oh my goodness that’s, you know, that’s the end of the world.” And the other half are going to be going, “That is the most exciting thing I’ve heard since I heard about, you know, sliced bread or whatever.”

So I’m just curious. I want to be really clear to make sure I [00:18:00] understand. You’re saying we, and you’ve got this, that you’ve founded this thing called Miss Pepper.ai. Is that, that’s your thing, and is that you and a team, or do you do that plus work for another organization?

Dan Kurtz: So that is my main shtick. That’s where I spend a lot of my time. The we most of the time when I’m talking about stuff is the royal we. So, like, for building the sales OS, I have partners that were not in the same company, but they work with me on aggregating the data and kind of getting those last couple pieces buttoned up.

So there are other companies that I’ll go ahead and work with, but it’s not in any direct relationship capacity. Just like I’m building the software, they have parts of the data that I’m missing, so we’re like, “Hey, why don’t we just both handshake integrate, and then we’ll just go to market together?”

And that winds up working a lot of times better than trying to develop it yourself.

Trudy Rankin: So that’s interesting to me. So I mean, obviously one of the older models that’s been around for a long time has been businesses [00:19:00] that you know, set up websites, do all the social media stuff, and they bring in the leads, and then they don’t use the leads themselves.

They sell them to other businesses.

Dan Kurtz: Mm-hmm.

Trudy Rankin: Is that kind of the same thing or is this different? Is it like a step up past?

Dan Kurtz: Yeah. So this is essentially the same thing that I would do as a marketing agency. So let’s say you hired me for lead generation. So everything up to the point of you having the sales conversation, we are automating that process for the business.

So we’re just building a dashboard that allows them to connect whatever they’re currently using. So it could be HubSpot, Zoho, whatever, go high level directly to the system, and then based through whatever information you give it, it’s on a learning loop. So every time it completes a phone call, every time it does a conversation back and forth, it learns all the ins and outs and everything that you can provide to it ahead of time.

So it gets tighter and faster and basically it’s a dual flywheel. You’re putting in a bunch of data in the beginning, and then every time it goes and does something, it’s having that [00:20:00] flywheel effect coming back into the system. And this nice little learning loop occurs, which is where you go from AI slop to really, really targeted, really, really good advertising.

Trudy Rankin: I mean, I find it fascinating because I like technology and I like seeing what it can do for us and basically, the things that we can do that make our lives easier can usually be good, but sometimes they can also be a little bit… You know, you don’t know what the unintended consequences could be.

So I’m curious, as you build your business around your Miss Pepper.ai, which is this ability to build dashboards for businesses, what steps are you taking to ensure that organization’s information, data is secure you know, and, protected, if you, if I can say it that way?

Dan Kurtz: Absolutely. So with everything that we’re doing, so from the data side to put it nicely, the data is both SOC 2 and ISO [00:21:00] 27001 compliant. We’re encrypted both in transit and at rest, and then everything is being pushed to secure buckets with, you know, certain permissions and deletion schedules.

On top of that, any of the integrations that we’re currently doing and building out anything agentic inside the system is all being routed through Pipedrive, which Pipedrive itself is ISO compliant and GDPR compliant and all that other stuff. So we are just simply shuttling the data around, and we’re using people who are already compliant in order to make sure that those tubes stay secure.

And then of course, ownership on the back end. We’ve got a red team that we work with, so anything that we build in the app, new features, stuff like that. I’ve got a friend who has a team of just red team hackers, and basically hand them the software in the GitHub repository and say, “Okay, take it and break it.

Tell me where I missed.” And then they’ll come back with a full list, and here’s where you need to patch, here’s where you need to harden, and we just keep buttoning it up.

Trudy Rankin: That is interesting. And just for listeners, if you don’t know what Pipedrive is, Pipedrive is a [00:22:00] CRM system that a lot of businesses use for a lot of reasons.

It’s one of the simpler ones to use, but it’s also got a good reputation as well.

Dan Kurtz: I misspoke. It’s Pipedream.

Trudy Rankin: Pipedream, not Pipedrive? Pipedream. I don’t… okay, tell me about Pipedream. Don’t know about that one.

Dan Kurtz: So Pipedream is owned by Workday, and they are same way that you would have Zapier, Make.com, all those other little apps to push things from A to B, they’re owned by Workday, and they actually have all of that compliance already built in.

They also have something like 13,000 in it, or 3,000 APIs, 10,000 tools, something like that, and you can just basically string everything together. So everything that they do is secured GDPR, DPA, HIPAA, and then SOC 2 Type 2. So we’re using them to do a lot of the integration stuff on the back end so that we are meeting the security requirement that everybody that’s around AI is worried about.

So we’re at least trying to button up as many of those things as we can in as many spots as we can.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, [00:23:00] that’s good. And for anyone listening who’s thinking that’s a lot of acronyms, those are acronyms that you really do need to know about. You need to understand them, especially if you’re using AI tools, because it’s all around the management of people’s information and data and things like that, and there’s some pretty strong rules that have come into play just recently, and also some that have been in place for a long time, and it’s really important that you do know and understand those.

I want to just touch on something that I’m very aware of because I know that for a lot of our businesses, a lot of our listeners, they’re trying their best to stay on top of what’s happening in the AI space and in the acronym space when it comes to managing, you know, people’s information and stuff, the security side of things.

But being able to stay on top of what’s happening in AI and in that space is not the same thing as being able to put it to good use.

Dan Kurtz: Yes.

Trudy Rankin: Talk to me a [00:24:00] little bit about how you have been focusing on trying to make sure that the tools that you provide are the most absolutely valuable and useful to your customers.

Dan Kurtz: Absolutely. So in anything that we do so starting from the very, very beginning, if it’s a manual process, how do we take that? How do we automate pieces of it? Then from there, how do we scale it? AI is, like, the last thing. Like, the full auto AI thing that I’m talking about, that’s been three years in development from stitching together multiple end-to-end workflows in order to make all that happen.

So, it’s been done, it’s been proven, it’s been tested. Now it’s time to take those rigid parts that need to exist and put them inside of a piece of software. So the AI portion of it, because a lot of people, if they’re using full AI, the problem is, is that it can veer off the path at any given time.

They change something in the model, something goes wrong. So instead, you use AI just very specifically, “I need you to give me this [00:25:00] output based on X, Y, Z. It always has to be like this.” And then AI now becomes instead of a creative and just going all over the place like a toddler with crayons in his fist now becomes more of an assembly line worker.

It’s very much a binary yes, no, pass, fail, here’s this thing you asked for. Using it in that capacity definitely helps to rein a lot of that in. And then, and of course dealing with any of this stuff is, like you mentioned, security, privacy, how do we make sure all that stuff stays where it needs to be?

And a lot of that stuff, like for example, anybody sends messages on our platform, they have to meet all the criteria. They’ve got to pass all the things. So there are different levels of permission, which is why we have the software set up the way we do. So first thing that goes out is ads, because that’s the most harmless thing you can do is put an ad in front of somebody and just let them start to get to know your company.

Then the next is cold email, because that’s more intrusive. So you don’t need to necessarily have to have permission to cold email, but let’s call cold email what it is. [00:26:00] It’s spam. It’s B2B spam. For lack of a better term. If you’re not, if you’re not doing it correctly, it’s… You know, it can come across as very…

i’m sure everybody listening has dumped God knows how many messages every morning into the other folder. But you start there, and then once you get permission there, “Hey, can I give you a call?” “Sure.” Okay, now it goes ahead, gets the phone number, and starts doing the messaging back and forth there.

But that person’s already given permission. So the whole way down, it’s up to the user to provide custody. There’s no point at any point in that funnel where you can just jump ahead and say, “Hey, go blast this list.” The system won’t do it. But you have to, again, starting from the very upper echelons of the coldest cold that you can be, and then working your way down to becoming a potential customer.

Every single one of those things has check balances and gates that they have to pass through before certain functions turn on just for that one person. This way you’re not getting in trouble, you’re not hitting TCPA violations, GDPR, any of that fun stuff

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, I think that there’s so [00:27:00] much wrapped into what you just said.

We could talk for ages in trying to unpick it. And just because there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of technical knowledge and knowhow, underpinning that, and the ability to do that. Pardon me. And prior to AI, obviously we didn’t have some of the rules that we have now, but prior to AI, you would basically have to have a human doing most of that.

And now you’ve got tools that can help with that. I want to jump back to something else that you said and that is that whole when you’re working with an organization, you’re looking at their processes looking to see what can be automated, streamlined, whatever. Talk a little bit about how you make the decisions in conjunction with the owner about what processes are actually worth keeping, and which ones that if you automate them are just going to amplify noise and do no good.

Dan Kurtz: Absolutely. So I work in reverse. [00:28:00] So if the owner of the company has brought us in or somebody on the C-suite, whoever it is, I’ll say, “Okay, where’s the department we need to start?” And the first thing I’ll do is go find the most overworked, overloaded employee who’s like 10 seconds from quitting and start asking him, “What’s wrong?”

And it’s nothing against the owner, it’s nothing against the upper board, but it’s very much the person who’s oftentimes the direct report, the, I don’t know what the politically correct term is for it, but the employee. They’re not a manager, they’re not a C-suite, they’re not the owner.

An employee who’s overworked. They’ve had scope creep in their duties and responsibilities with no increase in pay. They’re now pulling, you know, an extra 20 hours every week on top of what they were previously doing just to try and keep up. And because they’re doing such a good job, they’re being rewarded with more work and more scope creep.

So that’s the person I want to talk to first. It’s like, “Okay, well, here, show me everything you’re doing. Which ones are mechanical processes? Is this data that’s being pulled? Is it a report that has to be [00:29:00] made? Is it a pivot table in Excel? Just walk me through your process, show me what your thing is that you have to do, and I’m just going to start a stopwatch and we’re going to find out how long it takes you to do this.”

And then the whole time, just take notes, figure out what that process looks like, then move on to the next task, and then go through several other people in that department who are having similar issues. Get the general consensus, and then say, “Okay, here’s the things you need to automate first, because this process is taking 10 hours a person, this process is taking 20 hours a person, and then this process is taking 15 hours a person.

That’s out of their week. So if I can get those three processes automated, you’re going to wind up getting 45, 55 hours a week worth of productivity back out of three people. Do that across a department of 20, and all of a sudden your company’s going to the moon.”

Trudy Rankin: It’s a very real scenario because as I said, I’ve got a background as a CIO.

It is just a fact of life that when you’re using a process, you’re very [00:30:00] unlikely to go in there and change that process simply because it takes so much more effort to understand what’s going on, ask why it’s going on, ask should we keep doing this than it is to just keep doing it, and those questions are really important. And unfortunately, you can ask the employee, “What are you doing?” But you still have to have the other side, which is going, the managers basically going, “Okay, I can see that we’re losing time here.” But every change, program, project, whatever, actually takes effort, and it takes somebody who understands what they’re doing.

And change management projects in organizations tend to fail because managers don’t give them enough time, they don’t give enough support, whatever. How do you work with managers to be able to go from the, “Hey, these employees are, you know, spending a lot more time than they really need to” to going, “Okay, manager, you’re going to have to take some of your precious time now to [00:31:00] oversee a project that’s going to help save that employee time and cost you time”?

Dan Kurtz: Yeah. So a lot of times with doing that, so, I love that you brought that up too. So because there’s oftentimes there’s… Not that there’s a disparity, but when the direct report, the manager approaches the employee or the C-suite, or God forbid, the owner approaches the employee that’s doing that work, oftentimes it’s the response of, “Yeah, no, everything is great.

I’m completely fine. Everything’s on board.” Meanwhile, they’ve got this mental and physical backload of things that they’re doing. And it’s not that they don’t want to talk to the management about it, but a lot of times from the employee perspective, to them it feels like complaining to management, and they don’t want to cause a ripple.

They don’t want to cause that whole rift to happen with upper management and all that sort of stuff. Then it opens a department-wide thing. The whole thing just snowballs and it’s messy. So for them, a lot of times it’s easier to just say, “No,” and, “We’re good,” than it is to open that can of worms and like, “Hey, I’m drowning in 20 hours additional work.”

So a lot of times, like I said, [00:32:00] we’ll go through that process and I’ll bring it to the manager. I’m like, “Hey, here are the things that as an outside consultant, this is what I’m seeing, this is what I asked about, and then this is what’s actually sucking up the most time. You guys had hired me for this, but I think this is going to be ultimately where you need to be.”

And it’s not a matter of trying to outdo the manager or supersede them. It’s a, “Hey, here’s the boots on the ground. You know, I’ve been here a week talking with everybody. Here’s what’s going on. Here’s how it works. Here’s where they’re spending the most of their time. If we can turn these three things into physical processes in the office,” whether it’s through automation or whatever the software happens to be.

The software is irrelevant. But if we can take these data aggregate processes, “Hey, this report’s gotta be run every Monday.” “Okay, how long does that take?” “Two hours.” “Okay, turn that into a 15-minute Zap in Zapier or in Make.com or in N8N,” or whatever they decide to use, depending on their technical, affordability.

They’re now getting their human capital back. [00:33:00] So it’s less of a discussion, I think, bringing it to the manager of like, “Hey here’s what’s going on,” and more of like, “Hey, you could have double the productivity of the same people in the same amount of time if we just get rid of these three things.”

And then they’re like, “Oh, well, let’s do that.” And like, “Yeah, that makes most sense.” And then we’ll plod through and figure out what that looks like, and I’ll help them usually set up the automation, because I’ll oftentimes take notes watching them do the process and like, “Okay, well, this goes to this bubble, this bubble talks to this bubble.”

And then, you know, I’ll go wire them all up in Zap and say, “Here, here’s the base template. Tell me if anything’s wrong and we’ll start iterating.” Let it run for a week or two, tighten it up, and then that guy now has a full SOP, and then now has a troubleshooting guide for that automation if something breaks.

So he’s now a process owner at the employee level.

Trudy Rankin: I’m going to touch on something that I know is the elephant in the room basically, and that you sort of sparked the question when you mentioned the human capital. Because I know there are too many managers [00:34:00] who go, “Productivity, yay.

Let’s streamline this process.” And then once this process is streamlined, “Well, I don’t need you anymore.” And obviously my belief is is that’s pretty silly because that somebody has just been through this process of learning how to help streamline that thing. They understand how it works and stuff like that.

But in the drive towards productivity, and you see it a lot in the news, really high level managers are going, “You know, bye bye, we don’t, we just really don’t need that many staff.” And that just reinforces for employees that if they help say what the process is and how it works, that if they do that and it’s become streamlined their expertise is no longer required and they’re going to do themselves out of a job.

What kind of advice would, A, you give to a manager who thinks that way, and B, an employee who’s scared that’s going to happen?

Dan Kurtz: Sure. So to your point, there’s been a lot of stuff in the news recently. Oracle letting go 30,000 employees with 24 hours notice, [00:35:00] Microsoft doing the same, and now Xbox just got rid of a whole bunch of people in this, I think it was in the past 48 hours got rid of a ton of employees so that the current exec could now bring in several thousand H-1B visas instead.

Into the country. Again, typical business and, at the large technocratic level is the way I like to phrase it. The technocracy at the top. That’s just how they do business. But on the other side of that coin, you have companies like OpenAI who just doubled down on human capital and hired a ton of new employees to come in-house, because I think they understand the value of human capital.

It’s not that there’s a trade-off, it’s that with, again, with AI, with great power comes great responsibility. There’s a certain level of ownership and accountability, and yes, if you do it wrong and you’re doing it out of place, you’re going to wind up seeing slippage in the company when you use AI.

There’s been studies on that too. Developers are 20% less productive if they’re vibe coding with an app instead of [00:36:00] doing it themselves. But again, it’s processes first. People first, sorry, processes next, and then profit comes after that. So if we can get the processes, there’s… Without the people at the start, the processes fall by the wayside, and they’re just like, “Oh yeah, we’ll hire somebody to go manage that thing,” and then it never happens, and then the automation breaks, and then they’re back to somebody else doing the 25 hours extra work every week, and the cycle continues.

Trudy Rankin: Or they’ve had to bring in a contractor who kinda knows what they’re doing at twice the price of the salary of the person that left to fix the problem and keep it going. So at the end of the day it comes down to are you going to be a wise manager or are you going to be somebody who’s only just in it for the money, and you don’t care about the long-term viability of the business and the people that are there?

Because, anyway, that’s my personal belief, I think people are what make the business. It’s fascinating and I’ve just realized that we’re running out of time. We could talk about a lot of things here. Lots of things here because I’m part of a community that’s run by [00:37:00] Dr. Nick Sweeney here in Australia that basically is all about understanding how to use AI tools, AI agents, AI automation, all the stuff that you’re talking about and that you are doing with your tool, doing it in a secure and, an ethical way. And some of the things that some of the people who are there who work as consultants or they work in an organization and they’ve been told, “You’re the one who’s responsible for, you know, going in and doing all of this stuff,” and they’re going, “Um, you know, what do I do first?”

And trying to understand how they can do that. And so I’m sort of deep in that side of things, and I find it really interesting. And I’m just… like I said, I could ask you lots and lots of little techy detail things that I would be interested in but the listeners might not be quite so interested in.

But it is a real, it’s a real thing. It is a real new opportunity for people who are in organizations, who, if they can pick up the skills, [00:38:00] can sort of be ahead of the curve and they’re the ones that the organizations keep instead of get rid of, if you understand AI and how it works and how you can do the sorts of things you’re talking about.

If you were going to give advice to employees who are in an organization, and that’s what they’re facing, you know, the CEO has said, “Hey, we’re going to start using AI,” or, and everybody’s using it anyway already in the background, just playing around with it. What kind of advice would you give to an employee about how they might get to the place where they could go to their manager and say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about… I think we should do X,” instead of just letting it happen to them and get steamrollered?

Dan Kurtz: So there’s a couple moving pieces there, and I do want to touch back for a second on the management piece just very quickly. The thing that I’m seeing with a lot of that is, and we’ll come back to this, is this is the version of the Industrial Revolution hitting the white collar community-

Trudy Rankin: Yes

Dan Kurtz: is all this is. So in that same vein, [00:39:00] the automations, the AI, all these things, they are the machines in the factory that are putting the tires on the car. You still need a mechanic. You still need somebody to make sure that you have two headlights and not four. You still need to make sure that the engine gets put in not upside down.

That’s all the QA stuff, and that’s where the employees go. They go from being the line workers to the plant managers. They’re responsible for this department which is now this automation or this AI that’s now taking care of some of that process. So now that employee technically has a nonexistent direct report.

It’s giving them a level of accountability. It’s letting the manager see that they can handle stuff like that, which in my world, if you can handle managing an AI, you could probably handle managing a person. That person should be up next for a promotion to the next level whenever that’s comes around, just because you’ve shown that you can delegate, you can work with the system, and you work well with the rest of the team.

So instead of a firing, it actually shows responsibility, accountability, all the things that people look for upper management. The people who [00:40:00] don’t care aren’t going to watch the automation anyway. So there’s a lot of that. With the employees in mind, though, switching gears if you are in a position where there is AI, take some time.

Figure out how to best work it for you. There’s a ton of different ones out there. Find one that you like. They all pretty much work the same. I try to be as tool agnostic as possible just because who knows where we’re going. There, X is launching a new one. GPT’s supposed to have another one this week.

Fable’s going back away on the 12th. There’s all sorts of stuff happening. But the principles are at the point now where we’re beyond prompting. We’re now at the point where an individual can go and for 20 bucks go pick up a Claude subscription, put it on their desktop, and feed it their information of what they’re doing every day and say, “Hey, how could I best optimize my process?

Here’s my calendar. Here’s my Google Drive. Can you optimize my Google Drive?” And it’ll just reorganize things into the correct folders and put them where they need to be. So start learning how to get [00:41:00] yourself organized and optimized first. Start there. Because once you’ve done that, you can go outward and share with other people, “Hey, I made this tool.

If you’ve got Claude on your computer, go dump it on your machine. You’ll be this much more productive. I spent some time and put it together.” Oh my God, and now all of a sudden the department little by little is getting more optimized as a unit without upper management really seeing or being involved with it.

Obviously, if you’re doing it on a work machine, they’re going to see it at some point. But the principle still remains is spend some time, figure out how to get your own time back if they’re not in a position where they’re going to hire a dude that, “Hey, here’s my X, Y, and Z. How do I do this and mitigate my schedule?

What’s the best way to go about this, this, and this? Here’s where I’m currently having a problem. Is there a way to automate pulling this web sheet?” And just figuring it out for yourself and then doing what you need to do in order to make it happen. Make it so that you’re the use case for them to go ahead and get the AI, to get the automation, to get you guys out of stuck. [00:42:00] That’s the best way to do it.

Trudy Rankin: That’s really good advice. I know with this group that I’m part of, a lot of the people in there are using it personally at home just to help organize their home lives as a way of learning about it and experimenting and just figuring out how it works. So I think that’s really cool.

So I think it’s interesting what you’re doing. You’ve obviously put a lot of thought into this tool that you’ve developed, this Miss Pepper.ai that helps with digital marketing and basically helps make that whole marketing process a lot easier and more streamlined, and probably more effective given, you know, the honest truth is, is most businesses aren’t that great at marketing, and certainly small businesses, most small business owners are terrible at it.

It’s their worst nightmare. So if people were interested in finding out more about it, where would they go? And… yeah, answer that one first and then I’ll… got another question for you.

Dan Kurtz: Sure. So we’re in the process of redoing the website along with launching the software, so big undertaking in the middle of the Q, you know, start of Q3.

So the website [00:43:00] is misspepper.ai and we’ll be relaunching with all the, you know, updated services and everything else on there, marketing automation stuff, business stuff. We’ll have the sales operating system up there. And then of course your regular SEO, advertising, creative strategy, we do all that as well.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, that sounds really cool. And if people were interested in actually getting in touch with you or just, listening out for what you have to say online, where’s the best place for them to do that?

Dan Kurtz: The best place is I’m actually talking about this stuff on LinkedIn every day, so I’m eating my own cooking, going out, doing research on what’s happening in the market, writing my own hit pieces against this stuff, and putting it out there.

So doing that on a regular basis, you know, you can get my own opinions of a lot of the stuff. And again, I am very much advocating for humans and AI working together, not replacing anybody with, you know, a factory full of robots. That does nobody any good. So if you’re of the same mindset, if you are employed, if you are trying to be employed, if you have been replaced by [00:44:00] AI I’m gunning for you.

Trudy Rankin: No, that sounds really good. Look, Dan, it’s been really, really interesting talking with you, and like I said, we could keep talking for a very, very long time, but I just appreciate you coming onto the podcast and wish you all the best.

Dan Kurtz: Yeah. Thank you so much, Trudy.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. Excellent. All right. And I’ll put anything, any sort of links and things into the show notes so that people can figure out where to go.

Dan Kurtz: Yeah. Absolutely.

Trudy Rankin: There you have it. And if Dan’s got you wondering where to start with automation, here’s an easy way in.

Pick that first task that you grind through every week that makes you grit your teeth, the one that’s the report, the data poll, whatever it is, and the next time you do it, run a stopwatch and jot down each step as you go. Then hand that list to an AI tool and ask it how you’d automate it, and you’d be surprised how much of it doesn’t actually need to be you.

Now, Dan’s links are in the show notes, so have a look there. And if this one was useful, hit follow so [00:45:00] the next episode just turns up without you having to remember. And if you’ve got 30 seconds, a quick review really does help the right people stumble across this show. And when you’re ready for some practical help building the online side of your business, just go ahead and sign up to my newsletter and it’ll land in your inbox every week, and you can just sign up by going to onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter.

That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter, and I’ll see you next time.