Where Should You Start with AI? - Featuring Alexa Rome

Marketing for other businesses can be a challenge. Knowing how to keep innovating in your business is an even bigger one. Join restaurant owner, motivational speaker, and innovation expert Sara Frasca each week as she guides fellow business owners in taking the next step to level up their business. If you've ever pondered hiring a business coach but want a sample first, come along for the adventure!

Today's guest is Alexa Rome of Berbay Marketing and Public Relations. You can contact her at alexa@berbay.com.

Send us a message to join the show for free business guidance: https://pointnortheast.com/contact-us/ 

Sara Frasca is the founder and owner of Trasca & Co Eatery in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, an experienced and engaging motivational speaker, and the CEO of global business coaching firm Point NorthEast.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

You're listening to level up your business, the podcast where we talk to hardworking business owners and leaders and help them solve real issues in real time. I'm your host, Sarah Frasca restaurant owner, keynote speaker and business coach. I've spent my career not only in corporate America, but also as an entrepreneur, carrying on my family's legacy through my restaurant. Now a business coach and consultant. I'm helping other businesses to use creative problem solving and innovative thinking to drive lasting change. Stay tuned to hear some inspiring guidance that will help you to level up your business. All right, well, here we are, again, on the level up your business podcast. I'm Sara fresca. And I'm joined today with a really fun guest, Alexa, Rome who's Oh, there's my dog. I'm sorry. So very excited. I know we're dog friendly on this podcast. My dog and I are our colleagues and we share a cube. Oh, my dogs under my desk right now. So great. Great. Well, you it takes my my security detail very seriously. So yeah. All right. Well, I am super excited to see you again, we met at the Thomson Reuters marketing event. And you know, just really kind of became fast friends. And I was so excited for you to join me today, we're going to talk about lots of different things, including AI, and specifically how to use AI, especially if you are a personal injury attorney, which was the conference that we were at the last space. But before we get into that, Alexa, welcome, first of all, well, thank you so much for having me. I know it's been quite a journey to get this scheduled. So I'm very excited to be here and talk with you. You know, as you mentioned, I thought we had a great conversation in January, and I knew we could have been talking for hours. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Me too, Alexa. Yes. Well, I guess for our listeners, tell us a little bit about your kind of path, your journey in your career and kind of where you've come from, to get to the Burberry spot you're in now. Yeah, definitely. So as you mentioned, my name is Alexa Rome, and I work at purvey PR and marketing. We're an agency specializing in creating visibility and credibility for professional services. So primarily law, law firms finance, real estate. My journey is, you know, a bit of unique one, but whose isn't, I've been working in PR and marketing for over 10 years, I moved to LA right after I graduated college and started in fashion and beauty PR, really, you know, getting a good foundation in understanding what marketing is. And, you know, it was during the early years where I found my passion for storytelling, you know, transition to lifestyle brands worked in the family business, supporting my dad, he's an architect and design services wound up at, you know, motive companies, which is a renewable energy company on their marketing team, all leading me to purvey joining last July. And, you know, what I found most unique about Barbie was their focus on law firms and professional services. It's an industry I hadn't yet navigated. So that was, you know, really interesting, and the real challenge for me. So, since joining, Burb a it's, it's just been an overall exciting, interesting experience. And, you know, having opportunities to attend conferences, like I did in in January, you know, it's just learning more and more about the industry has just been very, very gratifying. That's great. I know that story that you shared with your dad's business, was really fun for us to chat about. Because I find there are a lot of law firm owners who are similar minded to the way that your dad was before you got involved in helping him market his business. So would you mind re sharing that story for our listeners, just because, yes, yeah, of course, story. So my dad is a licensed architect. He's based in Orange County, California, and he had a successful architecture and design firm for over 30 plus years and, you know, focused in the telecommunication space, you know, drawing designing cell sites in the most basic way of understanding that the things you see in the world that help you connect on your phone, he was a large part of why you have those services. And when I joined his firm, gosh, it must have been 2016 In 2017, he had never had any formal marketing or PR, he didn't have a formal website, he had, you know, Google, you had an email, and he had his very expansive 30 plus year network that he was successful. And, and so my role was looking at, you know, what he had, and what he didn't have and what he needed, and where we could find the happy medium of, of marketing his, you know, company to get it, to elevate it to a place, you know, where it could be. And I think what we discussed was, you know, for him, for him, or for any other client, you know, it's listening to what their goals are and what they want, you know, he was very successful in the industry that he had established himself in. And, you know, he was continuing to build clients in that world. And he didn't necessarily suffer from not having a website, though, again, his younger daughter, who studied communication, and works in PR marketing thought otherwise. But you know, it didn't hinder him, he was working day to day building clients and building projects and being successful. So, again, I think it's just something that the takeaway is, is listening to your clients seeing where they want to go, if their goal is to not necessarily grow, but maintain, maybe they don't need that, and maybe it's finding other creative ways, you know, while I was there, I worked with, you know, getting him into media and nomination. So it just is all dependent upon what the client is really looking for. It's great. So I mean, the parallel that I drew, from a lot of the clients that that point ne has is that, you know, they have built a referral model. I mean, it's very similar in any professional service area, whether you're a dentist, a doctor, whether you're a financial planner, or a law firm owner, you've built a reputation and people, you know, refer business to you. And so I think they can, again, I'm drawing the parallel, as you tell your dad's story in the architecture space, you can do well without having even a website, which sort of seems unfathomable now in 20, but he was doing it. And so tell us the results, like once you did the website, once you started putting some marketing, was he able to add kind of the referral network plus the new marketing and one plus one equals three? Well, you know, it was a different time. So we actually never got the website up and running formally. But we did find success in, you know, nominations, which is something that, you know, we do at eBay, as well. So that's was something good to kind of understand the, the reach of nominations and being included in those awards. You know, eventually he did sell his company, it was acquired. And that's honestly how I joined mode of companies because he was brought in to their firm. So I guess, depending on how you define success, it was successful because he was able to successfully sell his business. So yeah, it was, it was, you know, a lot of our law firm, you know, clients contacts, people that we see out in the space have, again, they've built such a beautiful backbone of this referral type of, I'm going to just split it between kind of marketing and business development, in my opinion, that the business development can be supplemented with the marketing and conversely, the marketing, if that's where they've leaned can be supplemented by the business development. And you guys at Burger Bay do both. So that's kind of neat. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting. It's something we've been talking a lot about both following the MPF conference. And also we had, you know, Megan Braverman, our principal and owner as well as another team member attended LMA recently, and I feel like a lot of the conversation, you know, one is, is focused on business development, and you know, building those new clients, but a large theme has been coming back to nurturing those existing relationships. So to your point about reputation and, and remembering who is who is in your inner circle is just as valuable as the new faces. That's great. Yeah, I always I always cringe when I hear about a business that you know, like you call to cancel and they say, Oh, well, we'll give you a discount. And it's like, well, if you would have just given the discount all alone, I would have stayed I wouldn't be calling Right. Bullets. Yep, I think the point of, you've got to make sure you're servicing and nurturing your current clients, you know, possibly a higher rate than just trying to go out and find new. Right, the client, though, anyway, I think that's great. Okay, so you and I started chatting about and one of the big topics of the conference we were at in January was AI, artificial intelligence. And the specific kind of usage was within the law industry, because that's, again, the conference that we were at, and that a lot of the clients that we both serve, so I think, maybe, could you just set up a little bit of kind of? How did you become a specialist in this area? How did you kind of get all of your knowledge and then we can kind of get into talking about AI? Yeah, um, so I think some of it has to do with interests, just general interests, I'm fascinated with technology, I've grown up with it. And I also think, the other part is just being a product of my generation, I'm a millennial, we grew up with technology. So change isn't something we run away from as fast as maybe some other generations. So it's just something I started seeing in the news and the media and thought, you know, how can I better support myself both personally and professionally, and started playing around with it? Unbeknownst to me that I didn't realize until the conference in January, that I was some kind of quote unquote, leader or champion of the technology, I thought, and more people had a general basis understanding. So MPF kind of enlightened me to see the gap that there is right now, particularly with law firms, and I know we discussed but law firms are particularly slower to adopt newer technologies. So I think there really is an opportunity for individuals like myself or Burberry to kind of learn and understand this technology so that we can better service our clients and the resources for them when, you know, they eventually do become interested in using the technology. So I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Because I feel like there's some out there that might not know the answer. What are the benefits? Why pay attention to AI if you're a law firm owner or in the law firm space? So okay, I have a lot of could say about AI, I think it is a buzzword that is being thrown out in the in the world in the media, and it can easily be I roll, you know, AI again, so I think I do want to preface that it is kidding, a bit concentrated in the world. But I think, you know, there's two sides to AI, there's one side of the camp, everyone use it, use it every day, and you think it's great or you avoided at all costs. And what I'm advocating what I want to advocate for is just an understanding of AI technology, finding ways that it can better your day to day. So if you are not, you know, for Burberry, we use it for we use Grammarly to support our proofreading efforts. We use it for content creation, to help formulate, you know, different forms of content, and we use Canva to support our design skills. But you know, there's other forms of AI that might not necessarily be a fit for us. And so I think the benefits for law firms, at the end of the day is finding ways that AI can make your day to day more efficient. So that so that these companies and individuals can focus on the real work, you know, the law that they are trying to practice and, and use AI to support their, you know, administration tasks that are time consuming, and and, you know, just taking up time away from the day to day. I've got a great use case. I think that's the right term. That happened this week, actually. And the gentleman who's running our session today will give a chuckle because it was his idea. But we said hmm, I wonder how many Google reviews it would take to go from a 4.8 to a 4.9 on Google My Business. And he used chap GPT to get the answer. And so the mathematical equation version was quite complicated. And we found out that for this particular business, it was 11 150, that would change the Google My Business rating from 4.8 to 4.9. So I thought that was great, great use of AI in solving a math problem. Yeah, and AI, you know, data analytics is also a large part of it. So for, you know, bourbon, we use different databases that have aI components in them that, you know, for meltwater example, is a PR database that, you know, can can aggregate all of the client placements, so that we are not necessarily on Google searching every day spending arduous amounts of time figuring out where they were placed. It's, you know, compiling all of that for us, and it's pulling, you know, certain data. And then, you know, the real goal of AI, is that, taking it to that next step. So we have all this data, we have this information, what is it telling us, and that, I think, is my next step, and AI is really trying to utilize certain applications to help analyze that data, to your point about math of really understanding what it's telling us and how we can get to that next step. For our clients. Just to be honest, my 11 year old would have had no problem with that math equation. But for me, it was too complicated. So but I'm, I'm not a math, I studied words, I'm all about words. And so yeah, I mean, my day to day, personally, I'll use AI. If I'm in the kitchen, and I have a recipe and I, you know, I'm cooking for one, like, can you mathematically get this down to one. And I think that's a good point. And a good little segue for individuals who might be overwhelmed with AI. And I think, actually, I might have heard this at the MPF conference, but it's finding ways to use a AI in your personal life, play with it, you know, low stakes, so that you can understand, you know, what works, what doesn't. And then having that basic understanding and taking that into your professional world, it's a lot less overwhelming. If you think you have to start, you know, chat GPT write my, you know, blog post XYZ, it might be a little bit overwhelming, you don't know if you're doing it, right. But when it's low stakes of fix this recipe, and you start figuring out what works and what doesn't, you can transfer those skills to other parts of usage. That's a great point. And I love you know, how you started with the fact that you're of a generation that has leveraged technology, in every aspect of your world since probably forever, right? Yeah, yes. So for an old lady like me, or someone from my generation, it is a little bit more intimidating. What do you think are good baby steps? If you're speaking to someone that's maybe my generation or older, or is just less, you know, familiar with technology? Where can they start with AI? What are some, like tips? I think. So I don't disagree. I mean, regardless if you grew up with technology, like myself, or you aren't as tech savvy, I think Undoubtedly, it is overwhelming. There's there's a lot being created constantly seeing a new AI funded venture, capital company, startup, all of these things being generated, which is incredible, the innovation being created right now, but to your point, like where do you start? Where does one start? How do you even get into this? I think it's two steps, I would look one depending on you know, speaking and professional uses. So, I would look at the current applications and and digital products that you or a company is using. So for example, you know, Burberry has asked me to kind of be our AI champion. And so, as that informal role, I have been looking doing an inventory of the products that we use day to day so, you know, Microsoft Teams Canva grammerly. You know, even our Microsoft Outlook, most of those services already have an AI component built in, in some capacity. Some of them yes, they require premium payments, but I think I think my point is, you don't necessarily need to find new applications or products to bring into your world, there's a lot of things you're actually already using that can be improved or expanded upon. And so I think that's a good baby step. And I think truly, it's one, one thing at a time, you don't need to jump into 12 new programs in one day, you can start as basic as Okay, Microsoft Teams has certain AI, transcription services that premium offers, and there's a free trial. So give yourself you know, a month to play around with that free trial and see what works. So I think that is a great baby step up just playing around with it. And then I think, to my point earlier, is playing around with it in your personal world. So whether that's chat, GBT just seeing the prompts, what works, what doesn't? I understand this can all sound I guess, a bit overwhelming. But really, it's just one day at a time. Because it is constantly evolving. And I think I think AI has the ability to support day to day work personal professional. But the second it starts to become a burden or is hindering that or making it overcomplicated. It's not serving its purpose. So I think that's really important to remember, too. That's great. And abandoning it is not. I mean, I would say leave those behind anything that's burdening you, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up just kind of, you know, the inclusion of AI into some of the tools we're using already. I mean, I remember not long ago that my Outlook emails, were just me typing. Now it's recommending the end of the sentence. And, gosh, I would say 75% of the time, it's right. So it has been learning my style and the way that I speak and write and communicate, which has made it easier for me to just even write emails. So that's great. Obviously, we've got things like Alexa and theory and all of those tools that kind of are voice driven voice. Ai. What's your favorite AI tool out there? So I use, I use notion AI regularly, I use it more personally. But I've also branched out to professional use, I think it's a great organizational platform. So I'm a huge advocate of notion AI, it can be a bit overwhelming. But for someone whose brain is bouncing from so many things, it's very helpful to kind of organize all of that and the AI component is very different than some of the other like Chachi VCs that I've experienced. from a professional standpoint, I think Grammarly plus is really incredible for proofreading. It's just a, it sinks into your emails and your Microsoft and it's so helpful to have a second set of you know, quote unquote, eyes helping you with some of those grammar and stylistic errors. I also really love chat GPT but I you know, recently started playing with the the the plus version, so check GPT four, and they came out with a, I think Chad should be T four plus version A few days ago. I'm I'm not as familiar with what the difference is. But all that's to say is the newer versions are pretty incredible with what it can do. But I think that leads me to also my fear with AI, as you know, it's often discussed of, you know, huge reliance on technology and AI and I think that's kind of the big, you know, aha moment that we have to be aware of, is yes, it can do so much. But it we still need the human role to be reading and comprehending and making sure that it still sounds human and it makes sense and it's the right information because it's easily it's it's an easy spiral from there. That's great. Another of my favorite is otter AI Have you used? Yes, we have used otter AI? It's very helpful. I don't know, have you used it through Microsoft Teams or anything in that capacity? I have. And I've also seen, and maybe we've leveraged it as a team at point northeast to transcribe meetings through zoom. I'm actually not sure if it was otter AI. But anyway, the transcription of a meeting into words, so that someone has the notes you can refer back to it is fantastic. So I agree. Yeah, we haven't. We're playing around with it, too. So I think it's a great tool. That's great. Okay, well, I think it might be even fun. If you and I collaborate on a little list, we can add that to our show notes today of some of our favorite tools, and we can link to them. So that'd be good. Any other kind of tips, as people kind of play with AI, anything else you want to kind of mention? You know, I think AI is, is an incredible tool. And like I said, it's very easy to be consumed by this ever growing buzzword, thinking you have to be doing it all and being an expert. And I think just being open to a new technology, and not necessarily worried about you know, mastering a skill, just constantly learning and knowing that tomorrow, there will probably be more tools available to us newer versions, and that we are, you're never, we're never going to be quote unquote, masters or experts. And so like, Be okay with the lack of perfection and know that it's like anything in life, the more you learn, the more you will evolve, and you'll be able to better serve your clients. And so I think it's just really important to just keep educating ourselves about it, and finding ways to support your existing day to day. That's great Alexa, as we kind of have our tagline at point ne it's up into the right. So if you're picturing a grid, it's like baby steps, but ever, in that positive direction. And I would say, maybe learning some of these things, you know, there's that moment of oh, insecurity or awkwardness when you're first learning something, but the eventual goal is just to have that Kaizen up until the right. So I love how you said that. It's great. Yeah, yeah. So you know, I think and I mentioned that, like, I mean, I'm lucky that I, that Burberry supports, you know, up to the right growth, they want those, they, we want to be at the forefront of these technologies, so that we can better service our clients and help, you know, help them achieve their objectives. But at the same time, they might not need certain things that is out there. And so that's where we come in to make sure we have an understanding so that we can service them in the way that they need. That's great. You and I are in a similar capacity in terms of serving clients that may or may not have needs for this sort of thing. But I think it helps us to build our toolkit, so that when someone needs something, we say, you know, this is the tool or why don't you tried? And I think again, I think AI can be a terrific way of being more efficient, more effective, etc. And, you know, some of those tools are becoming enabled by AI. And so I again, I echo everything you said about trying it being comfortable, not being afraid. It's all a part of just kind of learning and weaving it kind of feathering it into your business. So yeah, exactly. So Alexa, tell me and so that we can tell our listeners, how can they get in touch with you? If they need some help? You know, whether it's marketing PR. Maybe they're a law firm out there, and they're needing some help, or they're just needing to pick your brain on AI? Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah, as I say, so you have my email. It's alexa@burberry.com. We have a website burberry.com as well. We're also on LinkedIn, and we are on Instagram. So if you direct message us message us on LinkedIn or you know, email, always available, happy to answer we'd love to connect with you and hear about your goals and wherever they fits into that. That's great. I think, you know, networking with others to say, what have you used when you've come up against a problem and so I think just picking your brain I just see kind of what are you seeing broadly, what are other law firms doing with AI and even more broadly with other tools that have the resources, etc. So you guys have been fantastic in supporting our point northeast clients. And just, I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this big and important topic. So thank you again. No, I appreciate you having me. It's it's been lovely. I mean, do we have to go? I have a quick question for you here. Of course. I was interested to know how your clients are using AI or if they are? Yes, well, I will tell you, before I answer the client part that my team said, we're using Fathom notes ticker, when we're in zoom, so I get it wrong. It's not otter AI, though, I have used otter before. But Fathom note taker was our preferred kind of transcription service for our meetings. So wanted to get that right. You know, I would say, again, I feel as if there are all sorts of tools that are incorporated into our already using Google. Another one that I've seen people try is the Microsoft pilot, AI tool. And I have not used it personally. But I have kind of done a little bit of research. It is a pay to play platform, or a paid platform. And I think it does a great job of kind of compiling and making a summary. So if you would say to the AI, you would, you know, ask, what's the latest on X, Y, and Z project? And then it would spit out, you know, what is the latest with whatever the project is? It could be, you know, how are things progressing between Alexa and die on getting the podcast scheduled? And it would give him a simple summary. I chuckled, because we reschedule it. Yeah, not well, but there we are. Um, so the usage, I think, again, you know, Microsoft is the platform that we use appointment, emails, and, you know, using all of the different components so that we can, you know, keep our calendars organized, and we have SharePoint that we're using. And if that pilot ai ai is accumulating, from all those different tools, and able to serve up a summer, it can be a real game changer in terms of the time spent searching and kind of going back through your notes. Um, so yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, again, I think, chat GPT has been one that people have used for, you know, write a, write a message, write a blog, how can I mark it simply to a certain demographic? I have seen it used, you know, as far as giving people the first steps to answering the question, and then the human imagination comes in to say, Oh, wow, there's an idea. There's a nugget, how can I take it from there? So that's been great. Yeah, no, that's great. I'm always interested to hear how others are using it. And like, as we've said, shared, there's so many tools. And like I said, I'm always advocating for the ones that I use, but I like to hear what else other people are using, because I haven't even heard about them. So that's like, great to hear that. There's so many other great tools, and I can't wait to look up. Yes, it's great. And that's why I think you and I can start the kind of conversation and put some of our favorites into the show notes. And then we can ask, what are people using? What are they finding successful? So it'll be a good conversation, especially since we both have so many law firms. Yeah. Well, well, thank you for being on with me today. I truly appreciate it. You already so much for having me. Yes. And just to pick your brain has been so helpful for me personally, and then here on the show for a lot of our clients. So thank you again, we will put your email in the in the show notes, like I said, so that people can get in contact with you. But you know, anytime someone has a question, I would say the very first most important thing is just to ask, right? I mean, you're never alone. If you're out there running a business, or if you're the CFO, and you don't know what to do next, or you're trying to find a marketing resource. I mean, just ask, just ask someone and you and I will both be available just to give people a nudge in the right direction. So yep, and I think that's a great point. Never be scared to admit you don't know something. It's a huge, huge lesson that I feel like I'm constantly reminding myself so ask questions and be okay with not knowing. That's right. I agree. Well, thank you again, and thank you to all of our listeners and viewers out there really appreciate you spending some time with us. Whether it's AI or any other business or marketing Question. Fire away, everybody. Let Alexa and I know how we can help. All right. Have a great day everybody. Thank you again Alexa Baiser thanks so much for tuning into this episode of level up your business with me, Sarah Frasca. If you have a problem in your business that's keeping you up at night. Please join us in a future episode so we can help get you unstuck. Just clicking the link in the show notes and send us a message. Please remember, stay innovative friends