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What if I told you that the “proven strategies” you’ve been implementing are the exact reason you’re stuck? I just spent a week in Denver with 7 and 8-figure entrepreneurs, and what I discovered completely shifted how I think about building a business.

In this episode, I’m sharing the raw, behind-the-scenes takeaways from my first mastermind experience in years. From watching Dan Martell reveal his “go pro” media strategy to realizing why cold traffic evergreen webinars are dying, these insights are going to change how you approach your next six months of growth.

If you’ve been feeling scattered with too many strategies or wondering why your “proven” funnels aren’t converting like they used to, this episode will give you the clarity and focus you’ve been missing.

Key Takeaways:

• Why AI + human genius is the future—the 85% rule that’s transforming how successful entrepreneurs create content and scale their expertise
• The death of evergreen in B2B—why an entire room of millionaires is struggling with automated webinars and what they’re doing instead
• The media moat strategy—how “going pro” with content creation is building untouchable competitive advantages and attracting top talent

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More ways Embodied Marketing can support you:

If you’re ready to hand off your entire marketing strategy (from funnels to ads to copy) and finally get the expert team you can trust, apply here and let’s talk: helpmystrategy.com

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Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. I am excited to dive into this episode. I just got back from Denver. I went to Boulder and I went to Denver. And I was in a mastermind meeting that I am in. I am in a really incredible group that I feel so fortunate to be a part of.

It is a group of seven and eight figure business owners and. The founder of the Mastermind, it’s actually very peer led, so it’s not like a coach who leads it and they are the leader in terms of the content. It is led by all the people in the Mastermind, it’s peer Mastermind. But I feel super fortunate to be in the room and I feel like they’ve done a really good job of keeping the group very I was gonna say pure, but then I was like, that’s gonna sound like pure very pure though with, with.

Entrepreneurs who are in this for the impact in this, for the bigger picture, building a legacy, very heart centered entrepreneurs. And so I was really grateful to be in the room and I figured I’d give you guys some takeaways after the week. So I have some thoughts and just my own takeaways. The first thing I wanna say though is that I noticed something in myself.

This week. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a mastermind and. Especially been to an in-person mastermind. In the beginning of my business for several years, I was in Russell Brunson’s Inner Circle. I’ve been in other masterminds and I love them. I think that one of the biggest benefits to something like that is you are putting yourself in a room where your perspective gets challenged.

You’ve got all these different entrepreneurs and different verticals with different skill sets, different size teams, but all successful and. You get to hear what they’re doing, what they’re working on, what problems they’re solving, how they are thinking, and, and I think so often, like we are so isolated in our own world, in our own business with like these blinders on that just picking your head up and getting out of the day-to-day of your business and shifting your perspective a little bit and then hearing other people’s perspectives gives you clarity that maybe you didn’t even.

Know that you need it or gives you, you know, an idea or inspiration or solves a problem, you can, you know, directly ask for clarity. But I also get a lot of clarity just by like listening to the other entrepreneurs. And I’ve been really thinking about a lot, and I’ve said it on this podcast, like, we don’t know what we don’t know.

And I think as you grow your business at any stage, but also the bigger you get, the more relevant that is because you’ve never been to where you’re going. And so for actually, for most entrepreneurs, like where you are today, you haven’t been where you’re trying to go, and so therefore you might think you’ve got the plan.

You might think you’ve got the strategy. And the next steps and the actions and everything you need to take, but you also don’t know what you don’t know. And in order to shine the light on those things, you have to put yourself in situations where the unknown can happen and you can get that clarity that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

So it’s been a while since I’ve been in a mastermind group, and one thing I noticed this time around is it was almost like there was this filter and I could sit in the room and listen to everybody’s ideas. But not get in this space where I previously maybe have been in other groups where I was like, oh my gosh, I need to do what they’re doing right away, or I’m doing this wrong.

Or that’s the only way to do this strategy. And you know, ’cause there is no right way to build a business. So you’re gonna hear a ton of perspectives, right? Because. Everybody is doing different things because everybody is a unique person who has different skill sets, different experiences, different connections, different relationships, different things that led them on their journey than you do.

And so I think it’s a huge mistake that we sometimes put ourselves in groups where we think there’s only one way. There’s a right and there’s a wrong way. And so as I sat in this room, I got so many incredible ideas and I love observing and just listening again to entrepreneurs speak. But I also noticed myself putting everything through a filter and instead of saying, oh, I’m gonna jump on this strategy, or.

You know, I’m gonna build my business that way, or I’m gonna implement this this way. I would filter it through and make sure, okay, is that in alignment with me? Is that in an alignment with my life I want, with the business I want, with the impact I want, and also with my strengths. And I think that’s a really important one.

When you hear advice from somebody and they tell you, I did X, Y, Z. To create success, you have to run it through the filter of. Is that in alignment with who I am. Like when you look at someone and you say They did this to create success, and you look at who they are, likely there are strengths and skill sets and components of what they did that amplified something that was easy for them, that came natural to them.

And so finding those things within you is really critical. So I’ll give you an example. There’s a handful of entrepreneurs in this group, and again. There’s no right and wrong. I wanna emphasize this, like, I think we like to have these linear, like this is the right strategy, this is the wrong strategy.

There’s a handful of them in this room who do weekly live webinars and they put a significant amount of ads spend into those weekly live webinars for cold traffic. They have appointment setters and a whole sales team, and they follow up with them and it’s. Relatively successful. It’s it’s a tricky game because it’s cold traffic and if one week something goes wrong, they’re spending a lot of money.

But I know that for me, that’s not a strategy that’s in alignment because number one, I don’t wanna do weekly live webinars like. Sure. Even if it made me money, that does not sound great to me and my business, and to be tied down to doing weekly live webinars. I also personally think in my strategy and in my business, there’s an easier way to build momentum and to scale a business and to put money into different things.

So that’s a strategy where I can go, cool, let me hear about that strategy and understand how they are using it, and then let me make sure that I, you know, take what’s relevant for me. And my business based on my goals, my audience, my strengths, what I know works in my marketing. So that’s an important piece in any group or any event that you go to, is you run an idea through a filter and then it becomes still your original idea because you’re taking it through that filter.

So I’ll give you guys some recaps from being in the room and it was just, just such an incredible room to be in, like such a brilliant. Entrepreneurs, but also building something long term. Like it was nobody who was like, I’m just trying to go to the minimum amount to make this money tomorrow. It’s like they’re thinking about the next several years they’re thinking about their legacy and their impact.

So obviously a big topic of conversation was ai, huge topic of conversation and for me. It felt actually very validating the direction that I’ve been taking AI and. The platform that I built and how I’m transforming all of my products this way because I showed the group it was funny. I’ll share this with you guys because I think you’ll appreciate this as my podcast audience.

So I shared with the group, I shared the product I made, I shared the behind the scenes of the product that I made, and I screen shared it and showed them and they loved it. Hold on this mic.

I gotta fix this. It’s like so low.

Okay, we’ll see if this fixes it.

There we go. It’s like, felt like it was in my stomach. Okay.

They all loved it. They all wanna do something like that with their offers. And I got kind of coined as like this AI genius. And here’s the funny thing, I’m totally not like I feel behind on AI compared to some people that I know. And all I did was this. I found something related to ai. I had a vision and I executed it super quickly and I figured it out as I went.

And then. You know, I look like, oh my God, Emily’s this like AI expert and she’s doing these crazy complicated, like brilliant things, and I’m like, no, really, I’m actually not. Like I did one cool thing, but I did it really fast. So anyways, I showed all of them this, and it was really confirming for me that that’s the direction that it feels like everybody’s going with their products.

We’re gonna move into an era where there’s a lot of tools, a lot of platforms, a lot of softwares a very technical area, era where, you know, digital products and services and all these companies are going to need. Tools and softwares created are going to need to create them to solve their problems.

So that was really validating for me in terms of the direction I’m going with ai. I think that there was a lot of conversation just around ways that people use it, which is really. It, it’s, it’s using it to, to support you with speed. Nobody is using it to write all of their copy or to create all of their content.

We had a guest speaker who said. That AI is going to just increase the capacity at which we can create. And he said something that I found really interesting, which is a journalist, for example, he said can have an article that would take them six hours, written in 10 minutes, and then still spend. The remaining time that they would normally spend on the last 10% of their article.

So a journalist could take an article, they could write it in, you know, very quickly with ai, and it would get it maybe 90% of the way there, or 85% of the way there. But then they still spend the almost same amount of time. Maybe, maybe less, but they still spend a significant amount of time doing that last 10%, which means that the last 10% is now 100 times better than what they could have produced before.

So it’s not that AI is replacing what we are doing. It is making it so we have an increased capacity to do things even better, and yes, faster, but still put the depth in it. So I really loved that viewpoint of. Like as content creators, we’re still gonna put the time into the content. But now the, the capacity that AI is unleashing is that we get to put more depth in the content than we could have before because AI is helping us get 80, 85% of the way there.

And now that last 15% is so much more powerful than it was before, and I think that’s a great way to look at it. I do not think that you can use AI to just fully do everything. And I, I don’t know if that will ever exist. I think an element of human is necessary to have connection with other people. So it’s figuring out how to use AI to get you to that 80, 85%, maybe 90% of the way there, and then using your brilliant brain and creator mentality to do that last 10%.

So a lot of people talked about ways they could use ai especially as it relates to like repurposing content or summarizing ideas and just helping in the process, supporting in the process. And then of course, the what I built, which is a no code application. So we had a guest speaker come in, Dan Martel.

Who’s brilliant, but brilliant entrepreneur. I really enjoy his content. I knew him before, but he came in and, and spoke to us and it was so validating for me what he’s doing. While also gave me some really great ideas and things to think about that I wanna talk about with you guys. So. He has his, his business model is essentially two parts.

He has Dan Martel Media, which is all of his content and media that he creates, and he creates quite a lot. And if you do follow him, you know, in the last like one to two years, he’s exploded. I don’t know where his following was before, but it’s now 1.5 million and it’s just like taken off his YouTube, his videos, his entire team.

So he has a hole. Business basically, which is Dan Martel Media. And then his background is softwares, so he’s built software companies. He’s sold software companies, like his zone of genius is actually development and softwares, which he has a massive advantage now with AI because that’s what everything’s turning into.

But he has taken that expertise and then front loaded it with ai. So he’s got a whole department that is building both internal tools that they don’t sell and external softwares that they do sell. Things that make my platform that I built look like a kindergartner, right? Just very advanced use of AI and tools that they built to do all sorts of things from analyzing content to you know, managing team or processes, like crazy amount of things.

And so he’s taken his team of developers. And now that this is what they do, and he said that they are in a situation that he never thought they would be in, which is the kind of product manager of a feature in an app. Is moving slower than the developer can, which is that, that’s my experience too.

It’s like when I tried to build a software three, four years ago, the, the pace at which development was, was so incredibly slow to build a feature to get something done. Now it’s so fast. That anybody else involved in the project can’t even keep up with it, which obviously opens up a ton of opportunity.

So basically his whole thing was, this is your model. It’s the media side, which I’m gonna talk about, and then it’s your expertise now front loaded with ai. And that’s exactly what I’ve been saying and it’s the direction that I’m thinking. Now. He opened my eyes to the media piece, so I wanna talk about this.

So he decided. At one point he had been doing YouTube for like 10 years, and in the last few years, maybe it was even like last year and a half, I don’t know, not that long ago, he decided, I’m gonna go pro. He said, with creating media with content and he invested in somebody to, to film, to reproduce, to edit, and to just produce mass amounts of, of content, but quality.

And I wanna emphasize that quality content, because people get lost in this and then they start creating surface level content. And he said that. You know, if he knew the impact of this, he would’ve done it way longer ago because the impact all around of what he specifically said was building a moat around you that nothing can touch is what creating, he didn’t say these words, but I’m gonna say them.

You’re war mart. You’re following people who consume your content, which is absolutely true. I have said this so many times. If you have a warm audience and you have a list, no matter what happens, you’ll be okay because you just serve those people. And so he invested a ton. He decided, I’m gonna go pro, I’m gonna take this to the next level.

He invested a ton in the content creation. And so he is got that piece. And then he took his software background and his development team and. I don’t know. They have a ton of different businesses and things, but they front loaded everything with ai. So he definitely opened my eyes to the media piece around taking it to the next level and investing in that.

And I think even with ai, I think two things with ai, I think it’s gonna be easier to do this. Like there’s no excuse not to actually create a higher volume, but also quality output of content, because AI makes it so much easier to do that. The original thoughts still coming from you, but there’s that.

And then also how the need for quality. Like he’s really good at disruptive content and building that platform is so essential today and investing in that. And he said, you know. There’s the sales side, which they do millions just from talking to their followers and communicating with them. And then there’s also this side, he said, where it’s like, if we need a role filled, we have hundreds of quality applications, people wanting to quit their job, to come work for them.

And he’s like, I would’ve just done the media literally just for that, which. As a business owner who hires team members frequently, I totally agree. Like if it gets you that quality talent that quickly and easily, it is in and of itself worth it. And I think the investment in media. It’s sometimes hard to justify because you can’t see a direct ROI.

You can’t go, okay, this person listened to my podcast and then two days later they bought. It’s definitely the long game. It is playing the long game of building a following and building that moat around you of. People who engage with your content and like genuinely connect with you, that becomes this snowball as it gets bigger.

And I look at Alex Hermozi who did the same thing. I knew Alex Hermozi before he started creating content. When he had his successful business, he lived here in Austin. I’d hang out with him and he barely created any content. And I remember I was still hanging out with them when they decided. To start creating content and after that it’s like he’s exploded millions of followers, hundreds of thousands of YouTube listeners, and it’s come from investing in a media team, investing in a team who creates a large amount of content, but quality content.

And I think that’s so important to note because I have actually said I don’t agree with his strategy of like distribute stuff across a bunch of platforms. And the reason that I’ve said that is because I think that leads to poor quality content. And I’m not talking about necessarily quality in terms of like you’ve got a professional videographer and you have all this expensive equipment.

I’m talking about the depth of the content itself. When you look at Alex Hermozi, when you look at Dan Martel, when you look at their content, you get a lot of value from it, just from their Instagram videos, especially from their YouTube, their podcast, like there’s a lot of value for free being given with their content and.

It, it made me realize that I would like to invest in that a lot more. So I’ll be setting some goals and making some up levels in terms of what I invest in and looking for actual support here in Austin to help me. The joke kind of became in the group to go pro. And then Dan said we’re, we’re going pro max now.

You know, ’cause the iPhone Pro Max. But anyways, that was eye-opening and just thinking about your business in that way. The business model, if you’ve got the media, which is the content, which attention is currency, so it makes sense, that should be a massive priority for your business. And then you’ve got whatever your expertise is, which is your current offerings, your product, your services, but your front, loading it with ai, whatever that looks like for you.

Creating a platform, creating tools, creating a system, and front loading it with ai. It is taking your ip, your proprietary processes and blending it with AI to ultimately make a solution that’s faster and easier for your ideal customer. So those, the, the way that that is, is laid out as a business model is exactly what I think everybody needs to be focusing on.

Like, I 100% agree, and I think putting the investment in the media right now. Is more important than ever because it will become, it’s going to just become more and more competitive with ai, like the people that can now produce mass amounts of content. It’s easy now to create content, right, but creating good content.

That still really has thought leadership behind it and intention, it still takes the human, it takes the creator in you. So the AI gets it again to the 85% and then you still spend the time and the depth to get it to that a hundred percent. But now your a hundred percent is probably what used to be your 500% because of ai.

So that will definitely be a focus of mine. Those were big takeaways. A couple other takeaways is just this group, it’s always a reminder for me when I get into a room with high level entrepreneurs. The conversations are never about how to do something themselves ever. It is always the, the concept of who not how.

So I wanna take my business here. I want to invest in media. I want to grow my following and my impact through really valuable content. It’s never, okay, how am I going to do that as the CEO? It’s who do I need to help me do that? And so it’s refreshing when I go in a room because it can be easy to. You know, here, not for me.

I’m, I actually feel that I delegate really well, but it’s a reminder for everyone as you get to that higher level and as soon as you possibly can, the way that you look at problems is not who should do this or how can I do this? Like, how can I physically do this and make the time to do this? ’cause that’s going to be extremely slow and probably not successful.

It’s who do I need to hire to do this? And Dan talked about the more that you grow your business and the more success you have, it means the more resources you have and the way that you hire when you become more successful is you go top down, not bottom up. Up. You don’t go hire first. The most base level role, you go hire the leader who can then hire the base level roles.

And I know not everybody is there, but it’s just the reminder of that bigger picture thinking. And you know, a lot of conversations of people’s hot seats was like, I wanna do this in my business and I have this team, you know, situation happening or, or whatever. And. It’s not, how am I going to do this? How am I gonna solve this problem?

It’s who do I need to surround myself with and how do I need to look at this from that perspective in order to get to that place. And then, and a couple other like small things that I think are takeaways worth mentioning is the entire room pretty much has the same. Struggle and feelings on evergreen strategies and evergreen webinars and evergreen strategies.

Struggling more to convert, especially in the B2B space, which was validating for me ’cause that’s what I’ve seen and it’s what I’ve seen in my own business. It’s why we live launch. But it is a focus for us to, to have evergreen working better. But I don’t think the answer, don’t quote me on this and say it’s for everybody, but for a lot of people, I don’t think the answer is evergreen Webinars.

I think the answer is, in the future gonna be the media grow your following. Invest in that content, that valuable content, and then actually DM conversations and building that sales team and directing people from your content into different experiences. Maybe it can be a webinar, but the consensus is cold traffic to an automated webinar is not working for most people and almost nobody in B2B.

So they’re either doing live webinars every week, which a handful of them in the room were doing that. Or they’re doing kind of like what I do, which is quarterly live launches and they have an evergreen strategy that consists of more the, the content, the outreach, bringing people back to their offer.

So that was, that was something that was validating in terms of the marketing and where marketing’s at right now. ’cause I think people have this like. Really incredible idea of evergreen webinars. Now I do have some clients who have Evergreen webinars and they work, but they’re actually all not in the B2B space.

They’re in the B2C space because I think in that space you can get audiences that don’t have an oversaturation of people. I trying to get them to sign up for webinars. And then the last thing is focus. So for me, I used my hot seat time and I said, all right guys, like here’s all my ideas. I have so many ideas, and also I know that simple scales.

And bringing it back to what is the focus right now? What can I go all in on? And I kinda laid out all the different paths and the routes that I could go and the ideas that I had and was like, if you were me, where would you focus? And I’ll share, this is where I came to. My focus is gonna be the media. And what that looks like going pro with the media and, and really upleveling that. And again, I don’t just mean like literally the studio setup and the pro of the cameras, I mean the volume of the deep content. And putting more out there in a more disruptive, polarizing way. And taking that content creation, both the podcast and social media, and using visibility ads.

Getting on other people’s podcasts like the, the media as a whole to the next level, and then taking my products and front loading them with ai, like what I did with my launch product. So doing that with all my other products. And I laid out all the ideas, all the things that I had, and those were the two that I walked away with as like.

We’re going all in and we’re doubling down on that. So focus is super important. And when you go to a meeting or an event or something, a lot of times you do leave with a lot of ideas and you do have to sit down and have that conversation with yourself of, okay, I’ve got all these things I could work on, and probably all of them could be successful, but not if I try to do all of them at the same time.

So let me boil it down and see what’s the one or two things that for the next three to six months, I’m going all in on. And so that was kind of where I came with that. So hopefully you guys got some takeaways from this. It was a super powerful meeting. It’s just a reminder of. Also like surrounding yourselves in community, having a coach and getting that support, why that is so important.

We did just open the embodied CEO Mastermind, which is an expansion and little bit of a shift from my Elevate Mastermind. So I actually took the retreat out of the Mastermind. I’m gonna have my retreats be separate offerings. Which makes the Mastermind more accessible, more affordable than it was before.

And I’m taking 10 entrepreneurs. We start August 14th, and I’ll spend six months with you deep in the trenches of your business strategy, your marketing strategy. There’s going to be a lot of. Overhauling and updating offers. I think every business is gonna have to shift their offers because of AI in the next six to 12 months.

So I’m, I really feel I’m at the, the front of that and in the innovative experiences of that. So I’ll go deep with you. In weekly calls, you get a couple of private sessions with me. There’s a private texting group and it’s six full months of that. And again, the price is more accessible than it was before.

So if you are interested in checking that out it’s embodiedmarketing.com/ceo. You can fill out an application, you can read more about it on that page. It also is open to men and women. So my retreats are going to be the only thing that’s women only. I’ve had a lot of men who have said. I wanna be in the Mastermind, but because I had the retreat, I kept it women only.

’cause obviously we’re all in a house together. So yeah, if you wanna join that, and it’s just the culmination of business strategy, marketing strategy, the CEO mindset and the CEO work that I do. And ultimately moving you towards that goal of having it all, the money, the presence, the health, the relationships, all of it.

So you can check that out, and I personally read every application and reach out to the qualified applicants. Thank you so much for tuning in today, guys. I hope you have a beautiful, beautiful week and I’ll talk to you next time.