2140 - Leveraging AI and Relationships for Business Growth with Rising Tide's Grady Teske

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1:06With us right now, Grady Teske. Grady, you are the founder and CEO of Rising Tides. You're found on the web at risingtides.io. Grady, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thanks, Josh. It's a pleasure to be here and excited to talk about entrepreneurship, working with your audience, how they can scale your business. I'm all about empowering people, so excited to communicate. Yeah, and as much as you and I would love to talk about koi ponds, because we're each koi pond owners, which is we spent about 10 minutes just talking about koi and you know, dealing with algae and all the life experiences that Koi Pond owners have to deal with.

1:41Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your superpowers in the business world. Do you mind just sharing a little bit about what it is that you do and the impact you have in the world? Yeah, definitely. So I've spent the last eight and almost nine years here now working as a fractional CMO. And in that time, I've launched over 240 businesses. Before that, I've had a decade of experience building multinational subsidiaries. So what I did there was I was working with mainly Asian-based manufacturers, helping their C-suites build out the North American business types. So my actual superpower really has been helping companies build strong systems that drive their growth, that really become the growth engines of their business.

2:20And now I launched an agency this year, Rising Tides, which does that exact model. We work with companies to identify what their core functions are, what their core products are, and look at their audiences. And then we help create a system of conversations that help grow their business. And that follows along the same models that I do for larger corporations and enterprise companies on my CMO side and what I've done in the past in building these multinationals out. Yeah. Well, million dollar question, Grady, what is working right now? Right now, honestly, it's never been easier and simpler to just create direct conversations.

2:54Honestly, over the last year, what I think we've seen is an oversaturation of content in the market. Yeah, you think? For sure. I mean, the amount of craters. And I think also, Josh, even going simply to the fact, knowing that the primary social platforms people use, Meta, X, and TikTok, are all focused on discovery, first and foremost, all focused on discovery. So if you're a business or you're somebody out there who's trying to get their word out, content's not going to do it alone. But we are in the era where you can do direct outreach at a scale that was previously unthinkable. And not only can you do it at a really large scale, we've also found recently that you can also do it repeatedly.

3:32You can actually do outreach and email outreach to people within 45 days, and they won't even have any remembrance of the prior campaign. So it's a great way to build conversations over time, and you don't have to have massively large audiences to do it. So the key thing, again, it's really building out systems around how do we do outreach, how do we do email, how do we do nurturing, retargeting, drawing that direct connection in with your audience. You can do it on a lot of different ways, a lot of platforms, but you can do it with AI today and do it to lots of people, really without any limits.

4:09Yeah, well, you know, and there are, it's really interesting. I think of where we are right now. you know, AI has become or AI enabled tools now have become so accessible that I wonder, you know, if we're kind of seeing a little bit of what we saw in the early days of social media where marketers flocked and I think there was some easy early opportunities and then it became overly saturated. It's inevitable that marketers are going to, you know, use AI in a bad way because they always ruin things. You know, what I'm concerned about is, you know, platforms like LinkedIn, for example. I know already that if you're just using LinkedIn as a lead gen tool, good luck.

4:58Because it used to be the domain of cheap labor. Well, now it's, you know, primarily the domain of bots and AI conversations now, which I think if we're careful, you know, there's going to be a good season. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think you're right. It really is about, you know, just it's relationships. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Because lazy marketers will always go the other direction. That's just their tendency, right? And cheap trying to, you know, get quick bang for the buck, you know, that the easy promises, all that sort of thing. The hard work is spending time and investing in these key relationships that, you know, This is what leaders do, though, because you build enough of these relationships and then you just don't have to work very hard.

5:43Yeah, yeah. And I think to your point, the reality is that there's no one channel that's great. For instance, LinkedIn and other social platforms are really good at potentially opening a relationship and creating awareness, right? But what we found is if you really want to get deep with people and start to build conversation level, it really moves the email pretty quick. Or what we're actually, one of the things we use AI for nowadays is we look at human behavior. And not only are we looking at, hey, do they qualify and fit who our audience is? Are they ideal customers? That sort of thing. We're also looking at where are they most active and prevalent.

6:17And so then we can take the conversation to them. And I think this is an area that we're going to see increasing more. You're going to start to see, when I say talking about outreach, building conversations, it's really going to be coming to people where they're at naturally. and also then shaping the conversations. So it sounds like as much that the conversation is natural in your tone, your voice based off of what you've been writing for. So the key point here is all of these tools are great ways to open up to bring people into your ecosystem. They're all tools though. Ultimately, you have to be a great human participant, create value for them and create a conversation focused around listening.

6:55And that's a great way to scale your growth. One of the cycles that I see working really well now is building out these conversations, moving to the point where you're actually involved in either a messaging capacity or directly on a call. But you can do it without focusing the conversation on you by making your part content. You take everything that customers and clients are telling you in conversations. What does that build? Good content for you. You answer those questions on social. When it comes up in the conversation, you can share that information in and it makes it very organic based around, well, this is what I hear.

7:28This is what other people tell me. You don't have to talk about you again. So then again, you can make all these conversations focused about meeting people where they're comfortable, talking about the things that are important and valuable to them and really creating alignment between what you do. So this is, I think, ultimately the direction we're headed. and as far as saturation you're right like it's all cyclical to email marketing which is a major part of what we do and the systems we build out that was considered dead multiple times over over the last decade or so but it continues to remain again as long as you're trying to build good solid conversations you're really leaning the people you're working with you can rise above it's just once you start reaching you know mass publication and print mailings that's you know saturation point for everybody.

8:12So, yeah. Well, you know, I, I really like, you know, my, my brain's just kind of going, you know, one thing that I think works quite well is, you know, when we start this or we start in organic conversation and, you know, it could be something like, you know, Hey, how's the year going? Is there anything I can help you with? What are you guys working on? You know, and just don't treat it as like a sales conversation, but just like, you know, Hey, you know, you're my friend. You know, is, is there anything I can do for you kind of thing? and you're like, yeah, you know, we're really working on this, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you and I were talking about, you know, writing the book and, you know, and I had suggested, well, I hope you're using a lot of AI tools for that.

8:50And you're like, yeah, I'm a ghostwriter and blah, blah, blah. Oh, sorry. I'm not sure if I'm not supposed to say that or not. No, no, I'm fully transparent that I use resources to make myself more approachable. Yeah. That's a normalized thing. You should. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and then, you know, it's kind of an invitation to then just, just, you know, what would you do? Like, if my friend asked me a question, I'm not going to be a jerk and say, well, you got to pay me first. Like, come on, please. You know, so I'm happy to be of help. Now, granted, there's a limit to that, right? I'm not going to, you know, build a whole website or a whole podcast for someone for free, you know, because I got to get resources and stuff and that and leaders wouldn't ever take advantage there.

9:29But I really do. Those are the spots where technology really comes in helpful, where AI becomes useful. You know, there's transactional parts of every conversation. I even think about it at some point, we really start building around conversations, but our ultimate goal is to align to our relationship, right? That's the ultimate goal. So the book that I'm writing is called Build Distribution and it really shifts the focus away from like driving a sales, marketing and sell approach to your business, changing the way you view the outputs of your business and really focusing it more on like, I think a lot of people get into business or do the things they do because they're passionate and excited about it.

10:02And ultimately, the things that continue to drive forward, yeah, the revenue and the money is good, but those aren't the reason you're doing it's for those moments of aha, when you create value for other people. So really, we talked a little bit in there about how we're starting to use and again, this is all very early on, but use AI for automation of conversation on a lot of the things where you're opening up and you're just listening. Those are simple messages. Those can be done through AI. When it comes to somewhere you're starting to add value or answer deep questions. That's where the human gets pulled into it.

10:32But then again, you want to have AI that's listening to those things, looking for shared commonalities across audiences. And then you can create content from it. You can create new products from it. And what ultimately happens is, is the distribution that you build out, the revenue or lifetime value that I talk about as a marketer, that generally just comes. Because what you're ultimately creating is a better way to get connected to people, build relationships that are stronger and qualify out the people that don't make sense into it. It's kind of find your tribe sort of a deal. But the great thing for all of us is that there's so many ways that AI is already building this out for everyone.

11:10And I can see clearly that we're moving towards a future where not only does every business, including SMBs, have AI agents built into there, most businesses will have AI agents as part of their operational core that allows us to be more human again. And again, focus on the connecting part, the aligning part, and the relationship building part of conversations. And you can even do that at mass if you're a SaaS product. It's not just reserved to service-based businesses. So I'm excited about it again, because I started my career in field selling with hard, good products, building those brands out.

11:45And the relationship, the getting in the back door has always been the favorite part for me. you know? So, yeah. Yeah. Well, Grady, who is like an ideal client for you? Like how would they know that you would be perfect for them and vice versa? Yeah. So I have two real core ideal clients. One is functional founders or technical people. They can either have a product background of using it or they're really technical and they build out as a developer. They're a great fit for me because we build systems. So people that and understand and rely on systems, they're a great fit. What we do for them, another key indicator is that they're either starting their business, just getting started so they don't have a lot of backend debt from old past marketing campaigns, agencies, et cetera, or they're transitioning from a sales-led model.

12:34So right now we're kind of having a renaissance with people that are between$10 million a year,$50 million a year. They're actually building towards an exit in the next couple of years, and they want to move away from the fact that they're entirely sales dependent. So these systems are great because they build on the existing models that you have. We can work off a salesman behavior. We can supplement and drive the right opportunities into it. I call at the end of the day, a lot of what we do when we build distribution is we qualify, qualify the right people in. So if you're running a business and you're either launching it for the first time as a tech company, or you've got that like good runway, but you want to move to make your business more consistent, more reliable, less focused on human sales-based leads, you're a great opportunity to connect with me.

13:17And we'll look at what you do today, and we'll add in technology, we'll add in content, and we're going to basically create a system that maps from the beginning of your user journey all the way to the end, conversations. And it really focuses on scaling that. Yeah. So in addition to someone who might want to have a conversation, do you have resources that you recommend, you know, things that you're creating content or otherwise? Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, once you start to build off this baseline, creating content is a natural fit because people start telling you what you need, what they want to hear en masse.

13:51Personally, I do create on YouTube. I have a YouTube, which is at Grady Teske. I just started building that out there, but we're trying to, again, create content based off of what people are telling me they need for their business, based off of what we're learning from implementing these systems. Also, my newsletter is even the best way to work with me. It's free, but we call it the weekly invoice. The only cost is reading it every week. And what we do is we try to break down exactly the systems we put into place for businesses. We try to share exactly what we learned, how we're changing our outreach this month, how we're changing our conversations, the new tools that we're doing.

14:23So that's a great way. Again, weeklyinvoice.com is a great way to see what we do, how we do it, and apply it yourself. And when you're ready to scale it, then you can reach out and start to do business with us. We'll help drive it to you at a different level. Yeah. Well, Grady, what are next steps for someone that's listening to our conversation right now? If they'd love to just kind of have an exploratory call and see what they can learn from you and see if there's maybe some opportunities to collaborate. Yeah. So if you hop over to our website, risingtides.io, there's a book of call link right on the top there that'll connect you directly to me.

14:56If you're interested in working with me directly as a fractional CMO and building the team out, building a budget in the system. That's one way to do it. If you're a better fit for working in the agency model and really building out the system, we can drive you on that route. That's the best way to get connected with me. And like I said, if you're not sure, ultimately just join weeklyinvoice.com. See if it makes sense to you. Follow along with what we're doing. I'm sure you're going to find value in putting in your business because as much as possible, we just try to share what we're doing and assume that you'll want to work with us because you want to work with the expertise and the experience we have.

15:28Brady, last question I want to ask you. I see you've got a turntable behind you. What has been on your turntable lately? Oh, well, I would say that probably my favorite record, and this is a little bit of an older one, it still comes up very often, is All Things Must Pass, the George Harrison double album. We've got a couple versions of it, the ones with the colored gnomes and the ones without. But yeah, you can't go wrong with George Harrison with the Beatles, post-Beatles, just a great songwriter and also a great thinker. You know, I heard a statistic about that, that that was actually the highest.

16:04And I'm going to get this wrong, but you could you could double check on this. But I think it is the number one best selling solo post Beatles album of all time. Yeah. Yeah. I know when it launched, it was it was at that time for sure. It was the most popular. But yeah. And I was really surprised because I thought, you know, John Lennon for sure would have had that. uh paul's solo stuff you know maybe um but no it was actually george harrison and you know i and i really loved the interview um that i saw with paul when he was talking about you know just the unfortunate situation for george who is so talented but he's just you know surrounded with john and paul and it's just it's any other situation george would have been you know so prolific during the Beatles, but you know, George was lucky to get a song, maybe two, an album.

16:57And so, you know, I just, you know, I remember this interview with Paul where he's like, well, you know, when, when George, you know, all things must pass came out. It's like, well, we saw just how much work that he had built up, that it was so unfortunate that we weren't able to make a lot of that part of the music that we were making together through the Beatles. And I just thought that was really great. You know, there's one song that is really special to me from from George Harrison as well. It's called Blow Away. If you're ever feeling it's the one that goes blow away, blow away, blow away.

17:32That one. That is a really great song to listen to. If you're ever feeling super overwhelmed. I just have some memories of going through a tough time. And I listened to that song probably three times in a row. And I started crying and I had that release. And so please look that up on Spotify to our friend that's listening. It really is just such a nice song about, and it's, you know, and it's just done in the way that George does, right? So it's a great tune. Man, great, great, great conversation. Thank you so much for being a guest. Definitely. Thanks very much, Josh.

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