Disrupting the Industry with ChatGPT: An Interview with a Pro – 91 Days Success Podcast

About Our Guest

Lyn Askin

Garage Marketers: https://www.garagemarketers.com

Raxxar: https://www.raxxar.com

About Me: https://about.me/lynaskin

337-347-6011

lyn@raxxar.com

Transcript:

Long time ago I told my son that I believe that one day either we will tell the robots what to do or the robots will tell us what to do. , and I asked him what side of that he wanted to be on. Do you want to be taking your orders from the robots or do you wanna be a coder?

Do you wanna learn how to use these tools? And I still, my, my son is a software developer now and I still feel the same. I feel the same way about all of them. I feel the same way about Chad, g p t, and others is I want to be the guy controlling those things. So I wanna understand how they work. I want to understand how we can apply those to our daily lives, to our businesses, how we can help our clients with them.

Hi, and welcome to the 91 Day Success Podcast. I am so thrilled today to have the opportunity to chat with a friend of mine, Lynn Asin, from RAR Digital Marketing and Garage Marketers. Lynn and I have known each other for about a year now, and met through an amazing group that we may or may not talk about a lot called Seven Figure Agency, and Lynn has just become a trusted contant.

He’s become someone. Learn. I can lean on, I can ask questions too. He’s a tremendous resource and has such an abundance mentality that I’m just so excited to chat with Lynn today as we talk about everything from homeschooling to chat, g p t to artificial intelligence, and probably a lot of other things as well.

Lynn, before I take over and just do a monologue here, tell everybody a little bit about yourself, if you would give us the elevator pitch intro to Lynn. . Oh my gosh. Jonathan, thank you so much. It’s I’m, it’s really pleasure for me to be here with you. I admire the things that you’re doing with your generosity lunches and the things that you’re doing on the internet.

And so it’s really a pleasure for me to be here with you today. The 30,000 foot view of Lin Askin is been a digital marketer my whole life. Built my first computer. I bought a f my first computer in probably 1994. I ripped that thing apart put it back together and started building computers for people.

Shortly after that I realized that tech support was a nightmare and I needed to build something that was sustainable or, a recurring kind of model. We built an online auction in 1986. I think eBay hired their first employee in 96, and we didn’t know they existed. So we were on the cutting edge of that sort of thing back then.

Obviously we made some mistakes and didn’t see that thing through, but in 97 we built one of our first e-commerce stores that’s still running today. And you know how that story goes when your’re, your accountant finds out that you’re doing websites and things like that, then they’re like, oh, I’ve got some other clients that need some help.

it just it turns into, what you and I do. . Absolutely. No. And it’s so neat to know that, you got started about the same time I did in the industry. We’ve both seen different chapters come and go and seen a lot of things evolve over the years. And I guess one of the things we’ve talked about, but let’s jump into it right away cause I know everybody wants to hear about.

This new artificial intelligence tool called Chat, G P T. And what does this mean to people? I’ve got my thoughts and you and I haven’t talked a lot about this, although I know we’re both efficient autos of it, but talk to me a little bit from your perspective, what do you think the impact of the new artificial intelligence tools.

Is going to be not just chat gtb because it’s going to not be the new tool again, probably in four more weeks. Or whenever, Microsoft is investing and Google’s gonna have their own tool, and there’s other tools that are out there they’re talking about. But what do you see this meaning to the average business person that you and I are dealing with on a day-to-day basis?

Jonathan, a long time ago I told my son that I believe that one day either we will tell the robots what to do or the robots will tell us what to do. , and I asked him what side of that he wanted to be on. Do you want to be taking your orders from the robots, or do you want to be a coder?

Do you wanna learn how to use these tools? And I still, my, my son is a software developer now and I still feel the same way. I feel the same way about all of them. I feel the same way about Chad, g p t and others is I wanna be the guy controlling those things. So I wanna understand how they work.

I want to understand how we can apply those to our daily lives, to our businesses, how we can help our clients with them. I think it’s the future of content creation. I think it’s the future of digital assistance. I think it’s the future of ordering things online. I think it’s the future of communication in a lot of ways.

So again my stance on it is that I want to know, I want to know these tools inside and out so I, I can tell the robots what to do versus them telling me what. . Oh I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, I was just talking with a gentleman yesterday and we were going back and forth about it, and he goes, I just I don’t quite see how we’re gonna be able to leverage this.

He’s not in the marketing business, and he wasn’t quite sure. And I said, I really believe in my mind, in current chat, G p T terms, it’s all, it’s gonna be the person that learns about how to ask it, the right questions. And I think that’s gonna be the case with any ai And that gets back to the programming interface that you talked about.

The ability to ask the right questions makes all the difference in the world. Anybody can use chat g p T and open it up and say, write me a blog post about X and it’ll do that and it’ll write a pretty decent one in most cases. Yes, there could be some flaws. The facts are not always perfect, but overall it does an impressive job.

But where I find it gets so impressive is when you start asking it the right questions and providing it with enough information. And a simple example of that is, if I’m writing I’ll use our industry as an example. If I’m writing a blog post and I tell it, I want you to act as though you are a marketing expert with 25 years of experience working for the following companies in these vertical industries.

And I’d like you to write a outline for an article on this topic, in this tone of voice designed to be appealed to this audience. , it’ll create an amazing outline for me, and then I can utilize that and chat g p T to continue to refine that and build some of that out in a very effective methodology.

The other area where I think as marketers we miss where that’s going is we look at it as content creation. Oh, great. This is gonna help us with content creation and it will. But today was a great example, and I suppose this is content creation, but I needed to create a standard operating procedure for my.

On a particular topic, not nothing particularly difficult, but it’s was basically how to go about setting up authorship profiles for blogging for our clients. Even better than I do, the importance of Google Eat or E A T now and authorship being the, a part of that. And there’s some processes to go through to help our clients get set up as authors because most of them haven’t done that plumbing on the internet to get that set up.

And while I knew what I wanted to say, I was able to actually give chat, G p t an outline. Have it then create the step-by-step process to setting up these accounts, what U URLs to go to, what information was needed. And it did an amazing job of, and I’ll just use LinkedIn as an example. One of the things I wanted to do was how to establish a LinkedIn profile for a prospect or for a co client.

And it, here’s the U URL to go to, here’s the things you’re gonna need in order to set that up. Here’s the processes and it’s, one through 17, here’s the steps you need to take Exactly what I needed for an , but that process would’ve taken me, maybe knowing my a d would’ve probably taken me an hour to have done, put that all together.

And once I gave it the outline and the context, it was able to fill in the tidbits in literally 45 seconds. And that’s one of the things where I see there being so much value, not just in content creation, but in, in doing things like that and helping us regardless of our business. Relevant material for our teams, for our clients whatever that may be, and just making us more efficient when we have that knowledge.

I think you nailed the I think you nailed it. You hit the nail right on the head. Whatever metaphor assembly we’re trying to use here. Sure. The prompt engineering and how you. , these tools to do the questions are the things that I’m talking about. , I wanna learn how to tell these things what to do and how to give us the best output.

And the I’ve used this tool of hundreds of ways and I love the idea that you’re using it for SOPs. This week I used it to answer a question in a chat group. Somebody’s Hey, do you have a clause in a contract on how to if a client leaves, they break our contract.

Did somebody have a buyout clause for the website? And I just asked Chad g p t to create that for me. And in a couple of seconds I had something that looked very reasonable to use. Now of course, those all come with caveats, not a lawyer, Chad, g p t is not a lawyer. And you should run those things by your attorney if you’re making legal contracts.

But it gave me the fundamental. Fundamental foundation of what I wanted to cover in that little clause. So I did it, pasted it in and they loved it. And a lot of great uses for this tool. I’ve used it to be more thoughtful to sometimes I struggle putting my words together and I wanted to write something heartfelt bereavement for a friend whose father died.

And I, I just, I couldn’t find the, . And what chat GP sped out for me was almost perfect and beautiful, and made a couple of edits and I was able to just reach out to them with just a message of hope and, obviously to send our best regards for their family. A lot of great, a lot of great uses for the tool.

I, I’ve used it hundreds of different ways. I do love the idea. , if we can figure out how to engineer these prompts. You prompt engineer these things and how , I think there’s, I think there’s skill in that. I think there’s money to be made in that. Oh, absolutely. I don’t believe that the standard person, in fact, I watched the video just before getting on this call where somebody asked Chad Gbhi to write a quick article on something and they took it in every AI detector they put it.

Said 100% AI produced , because there were no mistakes, there were no no analogies, no, no sort of language used, like we talk. It was written by a computer and it was pretty obvious. And so I think understanding how to ask the right questions, understanding how to ask it to do certain things is going to be the key to getting good results.

Or just, using the tool properly. . Yeah. Oh, abs, absolutely. No question about it. One of the we may come back to chat, g p t, but one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about, something we share in common that we’ve never actually spoke about, but I know that you homeschooled your son and you talked about some of the things you shared with him about where, which side of the equation he wanted to be on.

And we’ve done the same with our youngest, in fact he’s in another room right now doing virtual high school as you and I talked, , not that it’s gen typically related, but talk to me a little bit from an educational standpoint as to maybe why you chose that and I’m most interested in Lynn now that he’s beyond that and he’s went, I believe he’s in college, if I’m not mistaken.

May have actually graduated. I apologize. I should know the details. I don’t. But talk to me a little bit about how you think that focus has helped him. propel his career, his learning, whatever it be forward. This is one of my favorite topics. If you get me talking about my son, grant you may not get me to stop and so you may have to cut me off at some point.

I’ll worry. Fair enough. Grant started reading really early. My wife and I would read to him when we put him to bed at night and from very young. And so when he was Just about three. He Grant used to say, I can do it my own self. Because he was independent and he said, I can do it my own self.

And he took the book and he started reading to me and he was just barely three years old if that. And he just read these books beautifully. And we knew early that. I don’t, gifted is the right word but certainly blessed with some skills that maybe other kids his age didn’t have. And so we encouraged it.

We took him to, gifted course classes and we, and it was difficult to find those sort of things. I think. on certain ends of that spectrum. If you needed help, there’s more help there for you. But on the other end, it wasn’t as available to us. And we had to hunt to find him chess classes and photography classes in the summer and things like that.

And he went to school. He went, he started early, so he started kindergarten just before his fifth birthday, he was still four. Some of those kids waited until six. And so he was at a, at. In a disadvantage on the playground. We didn’t get to get picked for basketball.

He was two years younger than some of the kids in his class. But in the classroom he, I don’t know, I guess he probably took that as some sort of challenge and he just did really well in school. Somewhere around fifth grade or so. He was, the bullying was just a little too much and we decided it was time, we had wanted to homeschool him and it was something certainly that we.

Throughout the years. I think at Grant’s, his first, I think it was kindergarten parent-teacher conference we asked the teacher have you heard him read yet? She goes, oh, no, we don’t start reading until after, December . So you have no idea. It felt awkward.

Exactly. It felt awkward. And it was something that we thought about doing and we wanted to do. We weren’t sure how to. Obviously our family only wanted what was best for our son but there was certainly some pushback about us maybe homeschooling him because they wanted him to have a, normal, life.

Yeah. Wanted him to have those experiences that, that most people have. But when we homeschooled, it started that in about fifth grade. We continued with the same curriculum. We did Abe Academy online, which was the same curriculum that was in his school. And Jonathan, he no longer had to write his spelling words every single day, all the way up to Friday.

He was an incredible speller and he wrote them once and he passed the test on Monday. That was pointless for us to make him do them Tuesday. Sure. Thursday, Friday. And so he got to move ahead at his speed which was pretty accelerated. And so by the time he was 14, I think we were out of.

Wow. We were trying to figure out what to do. And we were lucky enough that, that here in Louisiana, we were able to dual enroll him. And so Grant started taking college courses at 14 online. And then when he turned, I think he was 15, he got to go on campus. And so he was, my little 15 year old was on campus to get college courses.

And and then he took the s a t and scored really well and got a full tuition scholarship to the University of Louisiana. He. Started college the fall. He was 15 years old and he just took whatever credits he needed and just in December, he graduated a computer science degree from the University of Louisiana.

All tuition was covered by his scholarships and so that in a nutshell that’s the base of the question you asked me, but what. , what you really asked me was how did that prepare him for what he’s doing now? Yeah, exactly. Something really interesting happened while my son was homeschooling.

He didn’t really have high school experience, so he didn’t have a prom and he didn’t have those basketball games and football games and stuff. And so we thought college is gonna be his thing. He’s gonna, he’s gonna get on campus and he’s gonna find his people. And we even go put him in the dorm the first semester.

and then Covid hit . Oh, no. Everything went backwards again and went back to online. But my son was particularly well equipped for online schooling because he’d been doing it for his whole life. And again, he just, he progressed, he, he tested out of computer science classes. He received scholarships from the computer science department every year and just, he just thrived.

But we didn’t do the work for him. He had to learn how to study. He had to learn how to prepare. He had to learn how to speak to people online. He had to learn. Obviously he’s been, he’s had technology in his hands since he was very little. We’ve never limited him that way. Always had a good eye on him, but he’s always had a very good moral compass.

And I think it’s, again, my wife and. for all of those years, we asked ourselves, are we doing the right thing? Are we denying him things that he would’ve gotten in schools? Are we , have we hurt him and hindered him in any way? But as I look at the young man that he’s become, I wouldn’t change a single thing because he’s a remarkable.

No, that’s awesome. I so appreciate you sharing that. And it’s exciting for me to hear about someone that’s gone through and now has, essentially walked out on the other side having graduated and got his degree and is pursuing something he’s passionate about. It’s just such a, an amazing story and I.

Really appreciate you sharing that. Cause I think it’s something that as AI is changing the world, I think part of what it’s changing is our educational system. And I think it’s going to have some dramatic impacts. I don’t know what those look like at the moment, but I do think it’s gonna have some dramatic impact.

Just if in nothing else, just in the way that we have to teach and test our children to understand where they’re at. , our traditional means may not work well any longer. It’s kinda like a basic math multiplication test becomes really easy when you have the calculator. So you’ve gotta think of other ways you’ve gotta do things.

So now thank you for sharing that. That’s just, that’s amazing. Let’s take a little shift here and let’s talk. rar and your the, I guess RAR was first, right? That’s where we started. Correct. Talk to me a little about how did you decide to get into the digital marketing space, Lynn, and what did it look like as you were building that from the ground up?

That’s a great question. Obviously I. , I’ve always been entrepreneurial. So every great story of mine starts with the fact that I had a paper route when I was eight or nine years old. . Yes. And so that’s where I go back to and, I was an entrepreneur. I had to sell, candy and things to, to be able to afford to go to church camps and church trips.

And so I was, I always, we didn’t have a lot. My, my house was full of love but we didn’t have a lot of money and. I knew that if I wanted something, Jonathan, I had to work for and I had to figure out how to get it. And at 15 or 16 I was speaking at church and someone one of the members of our church said, Hey, would you be interested in the job at the radio station?

And so I became a disc jockey at the radio station when I was 15, I think. And I worked there for a few years of high school. , start a mobile disc jockey company, and then , and then, you just keep fighting the good fight, trying to fight your way through life and trying to figure out how to build something for yourself.

I went to college for a couple of years just didn’t have I wasn’t prepared. I would say probably for college. And I didn’t understand what I needed to do there because I high school was pretty easy and I didn’t know how to study and didn’t really have to. at some point college and the financial pressure of not being able to afford it was too great.

I had to get back to work and so , moved back to Las Vegas, got a job working in a casino and ended up buying a computer and got into the internet that way, back when we had, AOL and the disks and Oh yeah. And that kind of thing. I, at some.

started selling things online. Again, built an online auction. , built an e-commerce store and to do those sort of things, back then we were just getting into SEO and trying to figure out how to rank and I guess that started way back then. And, when you have those skills you can use them a couple different ways.

You can sit in your cube and you can keep your knowledge and you could work on your stuff, which is what I did for a long. I had my e-commerce store that we got several orders a day, and I would click a button, I would import the orders, I would click another button, it would process all the credit cards.

I would click another button, it would send my drop ship orders out. And it was pretty good life. We were doing okay. And then one day I think man came into my store and he came in from the local Chamber of Commerce. And, it was a welcome, welcome to the neighborhood.

Kind of thing. And he said, what do you do here? And I’m like I, what I really do is I click a few buttons each day, but where I spend most of my time is I try to get my site to rank on Google. And I showed him, the time we were number one for M Toner, which is magnetic, right?

Yeah. That they use for banks. We were number one for vicar tone and when made lot of money selling that online. And then he basically says, oh my gosh, I need your help. , this small business in Crowley, Louisiana, had spent 30,000 on a website, $15,000 on the backend code to, to run it. Wow.

And none of it really worked. And they were in an $8,000 web hosting package and he asked me if I could help them and part of me like no, I don’t know. But another part of me, the heart of service part, thought I could help them. and it did help them. And we built them a new site. We got them ranked for all kinds of cool things.

We helped them grow. Now they’re a really big business now. And of course that led to referrals and things like that. But what I realized, Jonathan is everybody on that street needed somebody like me and somebody like you on their side. , everybody in our town that has a business needs somebody to help them navigate these things.

And, if you wanna expand that out, everybody in. Everybody in our country that has a business needs somebody that they can trust that understands these things to help them navigate growing the businesses online. And so we started doing that and it started out as, Louisiana seo expert.com or something.

And we were getting. To do SEO that had just spent a bunch of money on a website that we were having to rebuild every single time. And so we’re like, man, we’re getting them too late in this process. We’re going to have to start building websites for these people and promote that. And wanted a little more techy name than Louisiana SEO experts.

I think that, and the Rockstar story’s kind of an interesting one. It, it’s not a name that’s super meaningful to me, but. I went out looking for techy names and I found that one and I made ’em an offer and they declined my offer and I forgot about it, for several, for a year or so, and I’m like, man, what was that name again?

I think I really wanna finally, tech company launched and I made ’em another offer and they declined me. I don’t know, maybe they didn’t respond this time. And I went on GoDaddy and I typed a rockstar.com in the search box and it was available and I bought the domain for nine bucks. So that’s love it sort of how racks are.

Okay. How about garage marketers? Wh what caused you to decide, I think I know, but I’ve never talked to you about this. Exactly. What caused you to make that shift from racks? Are the generalist agency very successful doing well to switch into the mode of garage marketers focused on a niche and focused there?

What caused that to happen? And talk to me a little bit about that transit. . Anybody that has, that’s had an agency knows that working in all different industries is difficult. , you have to reinvent the wheel every time you get a new client. Because you have to come up with new, you have to have a better understanding of their market.

You have to understand their. They’re potential prospects paying. You have to come up with new marketing plans. You probably have to build new websites. You just have to relearn everything every time you get a new point. Absolutely. And at some point as you did, I think we both probably came across Doss, Nell, Josh Nelson at some point and he had a niche marketing agency.

And they were he had a better way to do things. And while RAR is still existing and we still, we still do a lot of work. We help a lot of agencies do RAR and do a lot of white label work. The right way to do this sort of business is to be an expert, to be an authority in your market, to be an authority in a niche, to really, truly understand your client’s pain and their client’s pain.

And to be able to replicate that over and over again. And we felt that there was. a little bit of a hole in the market for garage marketing. I know it is one of the more difficult ones. It’s difficult because it’s often spammed, and the LSAs are spam. The Google ads are spam.

The Google My business locations are spammed. But with, with the experience that I have I’m not afraid of a challenge and we chose that niche. . Excellent. I certainly, again, that’s where you and I had met and I know you’re one of the coaches now through seven figure agency, and I think originally that’s where you and I met is when we joined at the end of 2021 and made this dramatic move as I’m sure you did as well.

we needed a lot of help. We had a lot of questions about how do we go from being a generalist agency to being a niche focused agency while still making sure we’re serving our clients? Cuz we didn’t want to just drop everybody cold in the process. And I want to thank you publicly for the assistance that you were one of the key.

Coaches, it really helped us through a lot of that and helped us answer those questions to figure out how do we do these things in a way that is honoring our past commitments as well as honoring the goals that we want moving forward to continue not only to better serve our clients, cuz that ultimately is how we get success, but to better serve our teams and create a company that is better suit.

For supporting them and what they need, as well as obviously our goals as leadership as well. So just huge benefits there. I think you hit on something really important there that I don’t want to just pass by. Sure. We operate our businesses in the interest of our clients for sure.

In the interest of ourselves and our families for sure. But we also operate our businesses in the interest of our team and our employee. Absolutely. Saw a quote recently that said, make your dream so large that all of your team’s dreams can fit inside of them. Oh, I love that. Y we can’t just take it east, Jonathan.

We can’t just be comfortable here. In, in, in our world, we have teams to take care of that, have families that, that want to grow, that they have goals and dreams of their own that we want to help them receive, get. And so we have to make our dreams large. that our team’s dreams can fit inside of them. It’s one of the favorite quotes that I’ve heard this year, and we really want to take that to heart.

I think it’s important to, when you have a business to take care of obviously we take care of our customers and our clients and our families, but we got, we have to remember our teams also. And I know you’re all about that. No we’ve learned so much about that through Seven Vigor Agency and seeing how.

Creating those repeatable processes helps our team create security in their work, create excellence in their work. And the feedback we’ve gotten from our team is how much more they actually enjoy what we’re doing. Because they’re not having to stress out every day about going, okay, we were able to do this for these six customers, but now this is a brand new.

New niche. Somebody in a brand new industry we don’t know anything about. Now we’ve gotta really hustle and not that they don’t want to, but it’s so much better when they can go, okay, we happen to specialize in the water damage restoration field. And when we know those customers and we know their needs and we know the needs of the customers they want to work for.

it allows us to provide a much higher level of service, and that brings with it much more joy on our part because we know we’re doing a better job than we could if we picked up in, the local oil change place. Not that you and I couldn’t create a great program for them and everything else and do a good job, but I’m pretty con at this point.

We couldn’t do. An incredible, a great job because we just wouldn’t know them as well as somebody that specialized in that field. And it’s just been a great learning experience and has really taught me the value of our team. And I love that quote as well, what a great idea to make our dreams big enough that all of our team’s dreams can fit within that is, is fantastic.

That’s amazing. Yeah. I think that the ability to do great work. , confidence comes from achievement and you want your team to, to achieve and you want them to be confident about what they do. And so repeating these processes over and over, you get better, and you get better and you get better.

And like you said if I we be well within our, range to, to help the local auto repair shop. But in our company, in our agency, in rar, we have over a hundred clients that are in all different niches. Some of ’em duplicates obviously. Over the last three years, we’ve built 400 websites.

That is not an easy task. And so there has been times where we’ve lost team members because of overwhelm. We’ve burned out team members because of overwhelm. It’s challenging and. As the c e o or the founder of this, I wanted to make my team’s life easier. I want to get better results for our clients and I wanna specialize.

I wanna be great at something. I wanna be the best in the world at marketing garage doors.

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