Mandy Hornaday: Welcome to Growth Activated. I'm Mandy Hornaday, your host with 15 years of experience leading marketing teams ranging from small startups to large service organizations. I've built high performing teams of all sizes and have seen firsthand how fast the landscape has evolved, making marketing leadership more complex than ever. Today, I help marketing leaders elevate their strategies, lead with confidence, and build careers they love. If you're ready to drive impact and unlock growth for yourself and your company, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Mandy Hornaday: I spent $9,000 on a 12-week AI class this past spring. And the most valuable thing I walked out with won't cost you a dollar.
Mandy Hornaday: If you use AI every single day and still have this nagging feeling that you're not doing enough with it, that was me back in April.
Mandy Hornaday: Today I'm going solo to walk you through what happened over those three months. Why I was heading toward burnout in the first place, what the class paid back and how fast, the AI partner I built that's giving me back five to 10 hours a week, how it changed the way I think about charging for my own expertise, and the hardest part of the whole thing, which had nothing to do with AI.
Mandy Hornaday: So if you've been telling yourself you'll get serious about AI once things settle down, this one's for you. Let's get into it. Hey everyone. It is so great to be back with you all today.
Mandy Hornaday: I know it's been a few weeks since our last published episode. I promise there's a good reason for that. And actually I thought today's episode was so fitting to be one of the first episodes that we came back with, because the AI class I've been taking over the last three months is a big reason why I paused the podcast and a lot of things in my business and personal life, so that I could really go all in and take as much advantage of it as possible.
Mandy Hornaday: So I'm excited to share some of my big learnings and takeaways and wins with each of you, in case it's inspirational on your own AI journey to fluency. Many of you know, and might have listened to the episode I did earlier this year, that when I was in Snowdonia, Wales, I did an AI hackathon. I spent the weekend really diving into AI.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, I've used AI in some semblance of prompting and sparring and a thought partner over the last couple of years. But I was really woken up and inspired to go deeper in a prep call I had with Liza Adams, who we later featured on the podcast in early May. It's a great episode. Liza is brilliant. I would encourage you to check it out if you haven't had a chance to yet.
Mandy Hornaday: When I was having that prep call with Liza for the podcast, I really had my own oh shit moment. AI had changed so much within the last 60 days at that point, and it was becoming incredibly powerful. She shared a few instances of forward-thinking marketing leaders doing some crazy things with AI, spinning up a bunch of agents and building autonomous teams. And it really motivated me to spend the weekend diving in, because I didn't want to fall behind.
Mandy Hornaday: I know that episode resonated with a lot of you. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, I would, although frankly it's probably pretty old at this point with how fast everything is aging with AI. But since that episode, I had spent the following few months learning as much as I could, testing things, getting more and more comfortable with AI outside of just prompting it.
Mandy Hornaday: And I found myself at a turning point in mid-April where I was really approaching burnout. I was noticing that I was incredibly overwhelmed with all of the information I was consuming. I was scrolling LinkedIn constantly, trying to keep up with all of these skills and automations and use cases for what I felt like my peers were using within marketing. But I was really struggling to find the time to activate all of this new knowledge.
Mandy Hornaday: And so the cognitive dissonance for me was really growing around what I knew was possible with AI, and what people were implementing into their own marketing teams, and what I felt like I had the capacity to actually pause and test and implement myself. The more that cognitive dissonance grew, the more my overwhelm and frankly my anxiety started to grow with it.
Mandy Hornaday: I hit this point in mid-April where I knew I had to do something different. I knew I wanted to be really forward thinking. I wanted to get ahead of this. I wanted to be one of the elite CMOs really leading the charge when it came to AI transformation in their own departments, both as a fractional CMO, or in the case that maybe, if I ever wanted to make the choice to go back in-house for the right company, I wanted to make sure I wasn't starting from behind.
Mandy Hornaday: Around this time, I came across this female founder on Instagram. Her name is Callan Faulkner, and she was promoting a masterclass where she was going to teach people how to build their business brain. So I jumped on that masterclass, and I'm listening and watching her and absorbing, and I loved her as a teacher. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is how I want to be using AI. This is what feels scalable and repeatable. And I want to be able to apply this to my own marketing departments and teams.
Mandy Hornaday: And so as I'm watching this masterclass go through, I'm thinking, okay, a couple grand. I was thinking the class would be about three grand, maybe 2,500, maybe four grand if we're being honest. And she gets to the end, and I knew I wanted to do it. It was a 12-week course on how to automate your business. Now, her course was really for business owners and founders, but there was just something that really resonated with me.
Mandy Hornaday: And as I'm growing Growth Activated, I felt like there was a lot I could learn from her. It gets to the end of the masterclass, and she talks about how you can join this 12-week course with her for $9,000. And I was a little shook. I thought, holy crap, I did not realize this type of class was going to be nine grand. But I knew I really wanted to do it.
Mandy Hornaday: So I left the call. My husband was actually cooking at the time and listening to the class. And he's like, so what do you think? Are you going to want to do it? And I knew I wanted to do it, and I was sharing that with him. But I also knew that was a pretty big financial investment. And this year, especially in my fractional practice, I was intentionally not wanting to work a ton.
Mandy Hornaday: My husband and I have been traveling across the UK and the EU this year. We're working abroad. We've got our two dogs with us, and we're really being intentional about enjoying and exploring and adventuring in all of the locations that we're in. We move every two to three weeks to a new location or so. And so I had been intentionally keeping my fractional practice at a manageable rate, so that I could really enjoy this journey that we're on.
Mandy Hornaday: And so nine grand felt like a lot in the moment, in terms of an investment in myself. I took about 24 hours to think about it, to sleep on it. And honestly, at the end of the day, as much money as it felt like, and as much as I had nerves in my stomach with pulling the trigger, I knew this would yield a great return for me and my career. Even if I didn't know how to quantify it at the time, I just knew it in my gut.
Mandy Hornaday: And so I signed up. I knew I wanted to invest in myself. I knew I wanted to learn to build with AI in a way that scales and really has major impact on how I run marketing and how I run my own business, and not just efficiency gains. And I also knew that paying that much money would force me to take it seriously.
Mandy Hornaday: It was sort of this forcing function of going all in and saying, okay, I'm going to extract as much value and ROI as I can. Even if I can't quite pinpoint what the return is going to be or how much value that's going to yield, I just knew in my gut that it was the right thing for me in that season.
Mandy Hornaday: And within a few days of signing up, one of the decisions I made in tandem was that I was really going to eliminate the noise and strip it back within my personal and professional environment. What that meant for me was I went and unsubscribed to every Substack newsletter that I could, anything that was AI driven.
Mandy Hornaday: I declined everything within LinkedIn newsletter feeds. Frankly, I even stopped constantly doom scrolling on the LinkedIn feeds, and I just trusted the process. I told myself, I'm going to learn from this one program, and I'm going to do what this one program tells me to do. And I'm going to close out the outside world of feeling like I have to try all of these things, feeling like I'm behind, feeling like I have to download all of these skills that people are sharing on LinkedIn or try out all these automations.
Mandy Hornaday: I just gave myself the permission to breathe and focus on the program I had invested in. And it relieved so much pressure and guilt almost immediately. Just the fatigue of trying to keep up was worth a lot on its own. Now, it's worth saying that one of my concerns going into the course was, how am I going to make time for this? And it's one of the things I hear a lot from my peers.
Mandy Hornaday: Where do we come up with the time to learn and adopt AI and really evolve our businesses and how our departments run because of it? It is a great question, and something I still struggle with to this day. I knew in this course specifically, they jam packed it with a ton of value. There were two sessions each week, both about two hours long.
Mandy Hornaday: One was a teach and build session, and one was an office hour session. And then on top of that, they ran about six bonus sessions. There was a Slack community where a ton of people were sharing information and tips and tricks and how they were using it.
Mandy Hornaday: I had the best of intentions coming into the course, because it was a lot of money for me. I knew I was committed and I wanted to take advantage of as much as I possibly could within what was being shared, until I felt like I made my money back. And frankly, within three weeks, I knew I had made the money back, both in the tangible way and the intangible ways.
Mandy Hornaday: From the tangible perspective of cash in, a couple things happened. One is that I started thinking about what was possible, and how to charge, and make money. And I don't say this lightly, but by week three I had a level of confidence in what value I could bring to the marketplace, and how AI could support me in that, that I went back to one of my clients who I absolutely adored and I pushed for a 30 percent rate increase, and got it within 24 hours.
Mandy Hornaday: At that time I also had a few inbound clients come in from my network, and I raised my rate by 70 percent. Because I thought, you know what, if I'm going to take on this work, I want to make sure it feels worth it and valuable to me. And I know that I'm more valuable now that I can use AI as leverage. So I signed two new clients at a 70 percent rate increase.
Mandy Hornaday: And what I thought was really interesting, and you might find interesting as well about those two clients, is that one is in an industry I had zero experience in. A year ago, six months ago, heck, even three months ago, I wouldn't have wanted to take on that work, because I would have lacked the confidence. This is a really unique industry. It's in the rare disease space, and healthcare is its own beast for any of you who are in it, and you know that. And then the rare disease space felt really hard to break into.
Mandy Hornaday: But I knew I had the confidence based on what I had learned. So not only did I take on something completely out of my realm of expertise, I also took on another client who didn't have a marketing function built yet. And for those of you who know me and have learned through different episodes, I am totally a scaler, not necessarily a builder when it comes to marketing teams and departments.
Mandy Hornaday: Scaling is my jam. That's where I love to spend my time. Historically I would not have wanted to take on a client where I was going to be their first marketing hire and build out the function as a fractional CMO. But with AI, I had this newfound confidence and interest. I actually decided to take on the client because one, they're in my network and I love the people I'm working with.
Mandy Hornaday: But two, it felt like such a great opportunity to really get in, get my hands dirty, and figure out how I can evolve my skill set as a CMO and put everything I'm learning with AI to good use. So while it wasn't like I used AI to build my book of business and find new clients, it certainly gave me the confidence to take on work I would not have historically wanted to take on, or felt really excited about taking on.
Mandy Hornaday: And so again, within three weeks, made the money back easily. But I think from an intangible perspective, what it really opened my mind to was all of the ways I can create value in the marketplace that maybe I hadn't thought about before, or even thinking about packaging and pricing differently. For example, for future clients as I take them on, I will likely not do hourly rates anymore.
Mandy Hornaday: I will probably move away from that and either do retainers or projects that are based on outcomes or the work itself, and not the amount of hours it took for me to do something. Because something I've been internally struggling with a lot, and I've talked about it on a few podcasts up until now, is how do we charge if you are AI forward and AI fluent, and you're using it as a power move in your own business or in your own department?
Mandy Hornaday: Getting paid by the hour is not beneficial anymore, because it could take you a third of the hours to do something that it takes your peer who's not using AI to do the same type of work. And I don't want to be penalized for using AI to be more efficient and more powerful in my work. I'd rather be rewarded for that.
Mandy Hornaday: So that is a change I will make, if and when I take on more clients in the future. And then the second really big thing that sparked for me as part of this class is figuring out, so many of us have deep expertise in what we do, and there are reasons we win and excel as marketing leaders. What I've thought about a lot through this class is, how can I package up that knowledge and expertise and have that be what I sell and bring back to the marketplace?
Mandy Hornaday: I saw and was exposed to people in the program who are building their own custom GPTs with all of their knowledge and input, so that you could almost rent their services and have a fractional CMO or a fractional CFO on demand anytime you want. That was really cool and kind of mind blowing to me.
Mandy Hornaday: It's also a great way, by the way, whether you're a full-time CMO or a fractional CMO, to support the business and relieve you from having to be part of the day to day, because you've now bundled up your digital twin who can be the first line of defense, and save you and your decision making and human judgment and creativity for the biggest, highest impact problems. So that was really cool for me.
Mandy Hornaday: And I think the last thing I'll say on that that I would encourage everyone to think about along the lines of that expertise, is which part of what you are building right now within your company or within your clients is your expertise that you should be taking from company to company? Are you packaging up your IP and your expertise as skills? Are you packaging them up as automations? Are you packaging them up as custom GPTs or gems? Whatever it might be.
Mandy Hornaday: I've now started to look at things through the lens of, what am I building that is mine, like my internal frameworks that I need to make sure I have documented and housed in my own systems, versus what is really just relevant to this company and is theirs to keep, essentially. So I've now been looking at things through that lens and really thinking about what is true to me and my expertise that I want to be evergreen and carry with me no matter where I go. And so I would encourage you to think about that as well.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay. So back to the time part, because I want to talk a little bit more about this. Time is one of the biggest bottlenecks for so many of us in the CMO seat, in terms of not having the time or the capacity to really invest in big change. And so ironically, even though I had great intentions to take full advantage of all the content they were sharing, by the time I was in week three and had doubled my practice overnight, a lot of that time I was going to invest in the course started to very quickly drift away.
Mandy Hornaday: So I had this sort of unique opportunity to pair what I was learning in the course and solve one of my biggest challenges, which I knew was going to free me up from the day to day in order to take on this extra work. And I think a lot of people say, start small, automate one task, start to build the muscle. And while I see a lot of value in that approach, and frankly there are small things I have done that have made a world of difference, I actually went the other way. I took one big hairy problem that I knew was going to save me easily five to 10 hours a week and free me up. And that's what I dived in with.
Mandy Hornaday: So I spent a good two to three weeks building an AI partner that we now refer to as Scout, but it's sort of like a momentum maker. I built it with the vision of, how can I get work to move faster through one of my teams? One of the teams I manage has about 15 marketing people on it. The company itself is about 500 million. So it's tons of stakeholders, lots of different moving parts, lots of complex departments and environments.
Mandy Hornaday: And one of the things I knew was just draining a lot of my time and energy, and draining the team's time and energy, was figuring out who's responsible for what, who needs to approve what, how does work move through the system, if you will, and get to production. And how do we overcome the bottlenecks that are constantly stalling work? That was the problem I set out to solve.
Mandy Hornaday: Because I knew if I could solve it and give an AI partner to my team of 15 people that told them exactly how to move work forward faster, that one, I would stop getting hit with all the Slacks and the emails and the hey, can we have a quick huddle about this? Or hey, can we have a quick call on how to move this project forward?
Mandy Hornaday: I knew it would immensely free me up in a really big way. So I committed at least two to three weeks of significant time. I would say I probably spent 20 to 30 hours building this Momentum Maker AI partner. And it has instantly saved me anywhere from five to 10 hours a week over the last three months. And it has removed the friction for my team as well, because now they can move forward with confidence, and work is getting out the door a lot faster, which is probably the best part.
Mandy Hornaday: I'm going to share more about this Momentum Maker partner that I built on next week's episode. I'll give you all the gory details in case you want to build your own. But for me, it was totally worth the investment, because I knew it was going to have a huge payoff, and it totally did.
Mandy Hornaday: Now, throughout the course, as you can imagine, we built a lot of different projects. We built a lot of different skills. We built a lot of different connectors and dashboards and live artifacts. We learned how to schedule tasks. We learned about Claude Design and Claude Code. There's a lot of power behind what I learned. But one of the hardest parts of this course, and implementing AI in a scalable way, was actually the decisions you have to make.
Mandy Hornaday: I noticed this firsthand when I was building this Momentum Maker I was just sharing about. And I noticed it in all of the other things I built, both for myself and for my teams. If we go back to the Momentum Maker here for a second, part of why work stalls is because the answers are unclear. The answers of who owns what, who has to approve things, who doesn't have to approve things, who needs to be involved, who doesn't need to be involved. All of those questions.
Mandy Hornaday: A lot of times work stalls because the answers aren't clear. And what I noticed when I went through to solve and build this AI partner was the amount of decisions I had to make. So while I thought the work was going to be in documentation, and it definitely was, there's a lot of documentation as we all know. The more you can provide AI the stronger the output is going to be. But what was actually shocking to me was how much was unclear because I hadn't made the decision on it.
Mandy Hornaday: And that even carries over into the strategy sparring partner I've built, and I'll share more about that soon in the coming weeks. But how often are we going after the wrong segments, or the wrong ICPs, or we've got the wrong messaging, because we aren't making those decisions really clear for ourselves and our entire teams? So that was truly the hardest part. And I definitely experienced some decision fatigue.
Mandy Hornaday: AI can actually be an amazing sparring partner on how to figure out those decisions. And it was also a great partner in terms of helping me uncover what those gray areas were. It actually told me where work was going to stall and where work was going to fail, because of what I hadn't documented or because of what I hadn't decided. And it was right.
Mandy Hornaday: So it forced me to do the thinking, and to make the judgment calls to fill in the gray. Truly that was the hardest part of this exercise. That is where a lot of my thinking power went. And it's why I think so often we ourselves become the bottlenecks on our own teams or within our own companies, because we have to make those decisions constantly and all the time if they're not actually documented.
Mandy Hornaday: So when I launched this Momentum Maker AI partner, it easily saved me five to 10 hours a week, because I stopped getting the Slacks and the emails and the calls, and I really only got pulled in when something was unclear. And then I was able to take that unclear situation, make the call, make the judgment, and then update the documentation, so that that decision has now been translated and captured for anyone else down the road who has that same question. Using AI in that way is what makes everything scalable. And that is where I saw the most power in it.
Mandy Hornaday: And it's worth saying, I was in a CMO mastermind a couple of weeks ago and I asked the question to everybody. I was like, is anyone else in documentation hell right now? Because the decision fatigue of having to make all these decisions to then document them feels like a lot of work. But at the same point, documentation is how you make a decision once instead of every time somebody asks. So I knew there was a lot of power in the documentation, and that it would save me a lot of time in the long run and make everything I was doing feel more scalable and repeatable.
Mandy Hornaday: Going through that for the first time was really interesting. And it actually pointed out to me how much of the way we operate often lives in our heads. AI makes it easier than ever to get things documented. There were a lot of tips and tricks I learned in the course to make documentation a much easier load. But I don't think I realized how critical documentation is, and how much time I would be spending doing it, in order to fully recognize the power of AI in my organization.
Mandy Hornaday: And on that note, guys, you don't need to spend $9,000 on an AI course in order to start getting more value in a repeatable way from AI today. So I would just ask yourself, based on what we're talking about here, where is your team getting stuck? Which situations are causing bottlenecks or friction? And use AI to be your sparring partner. Just talk to it and tell it what you're encountering, where work keeps getting stuck, what ideal state would look like for you.
Mandy Hornaday: And tell it to ask you any questions it has in order to get to the bottom of where the confusion is. Then work through the decisions you need to make, and share that clarity with your team. You don't need to spin up a ton of agents or gems or custom GPTs to solve this. I mean, they're obviously great, and there are ways we can do this. But I have to imagine there are a few things your team keeps getting tripped up on that you could help solve in the next 24 or 48 hours, if you just took the time to make the decision, add some clarity, and share it back with your team.
Mandy Hornaday: And ultimately that's how we start to reclaim back our time and our day. I just want to encourage all of the marketing leaders out there who feel like you're caught in the day to day of running your team. We really have to be thinking about, now more than ever, how are we working on our departments, not just in our departments?
Mandy Hornaday: And one of the ways we get out of the day to day is by removing friction, removing the questions for your team, so that they can run forward without you having to be in the loop on everything, and you still have the confidence that great work is going out the door. So I would encourage you to ask yourself, what are the one to two to three things you could clarify for your team, or take the time to put in place, in order to start a little bit of a snowball effect of pulling yourself out of the day to day?
Mandy Hornaday: Now, this wouldn't be an AI episode if I didn't give you some of the ways I'm using AI differently than I did three months ago before I started the course. And I'm going to give you some softballs here, because when I look back on how I've used AI differently, there are a few things that have become so ingrained in terms of how I work.
Mandy Hornaday: I still have a lot to learn and I'm still experimenting with a lot, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But when I look back and say, okay, what feels so natural to me today that I wasn't doing regularly three months ago before the class started, there are a few things that come to mind. The first are two tools I use day in and day out. I've actually gotten notified that I'm in the top zero to one percent of users across them.
Mandy Hornaday: One is Wispr Flow. If you guys don't have Wispr Flow or don't know what it is, it's a dictation tool. It allows you to talk to Claude or talk to ChatGPT. I think you can go for about 20 minutes at a time. That has been a game changer, because you can just go out for a walk and talk to it about your problems, like some of the stuff about the team friction and where work is getting stalled.
Mandy Hornaday: When I created the documentation for the Momentum Maker AI partner I talked about, it was just me and Claude talking back and forth, and I used Wispr Flow for that. If I had to type out everything, one, my hands would have been killing me. But two, there's just so much more context you'll find yourself sharing if you're speaking. And it saves a ton of time as well.
Mandy Hornaday: It just felt so natural to me. Now I use Wispr Flow for almost everything I'm doing that's engaging with AI, and I love it. And then the second thing is Granola, and it could be any transcriber. I know a lot of you love Granola. I love it too. And actually Wispr Flow just rolled out a transcript service within Wispr Flow, and I've heard it's pretty good. I might actually move from Granola just to cut down on tools and keep my tech stack a little bit cleaner.
Mandy Hornaday: But if you are not transcribing every meeting you are hosting, or your team is hosting, start today. Immediately. Even if you don't know how you're going to use it, guys, start today. There is so much value and IP and your own frameworks in there. And of course the work itself, taking a transcript and figuring out who needs to do what moving forward. Transcripts are gold for so many different things. And the sooner you start transcribing every single meeting you're in, the more you'll have that history of knowledge.
Mandy Hornaday: This is something my team with one of my clients, we've put this into place. One of my project managers now owns every single team meeting that happens, so that she can get the transcripts and get them all into one folder. So we now have access. I now have access to every transcript for every stand-up, every program check-in, every project meeting we have. We have it all in one master place. And that has done wonders for how we manage our work. But also, there's so much more we could be doing with it. I'm really excited to have that information to continue to use all of that gold in new ways.
Mandy Hornaday: One of the other quick wins, and I say quick, it's probably more simple than it is easy, is turning on connectors within your AI workspace. Prior to the course, I had heard about connectors. I honestly had maybe one or two set up. And now I have easily 20 different connectors. Any system I'm in, whether it's HubSpot or Granola or Notion or Slack, the list goes on. There are so many different connectors. Of course your Gmail and Google Drive and things.
Mandy Hornaday: The information at your fingertips, even if you're not ready to automate things or touch that element of it yet, just the power and information you have at your fingertips by connecting all of your different data sources into your Claude environment or your ChatGPT environment or your Gemini environment. The information you have is incredible. So don't sleep on connectors. I know a lot of you probably are using them, but in talking with a lot of my peers, a lot of us haven't necessarily done the work to actually sit down and say, okay, what connectors exist? What am I using today? How can I make sure to get connected?
Mandy Hornaday: And I say this is simple and not easy, because I totally recognize that depending on your environment and your governance with AI in your organization, you may not be allowed to turn on connectors, or you may have really strict policies in place. So I totally appreciate that you may not be able to use certain connectors in a big powerful way. But for those of you who can, and if you can't in your work life, try and do it in your personal life, so that at least you're learning and you're experiencing what it could look like for you as you go into other organizations.
Mandy Hornaday: And last but not least, one of the things I use probably daily at this point, that I wasn't really using a lot before I started this course, is HTML artifacts. And you guys, I turn almost everything into an HTML artifact. I just think it looks so beautiful. It helps with the amount of presentations we have to do for executives, for our peers, for our teams. Such a big part of the CMO job is communication and collaboration, and I have found HTML artifacts to be such a great way to bring everybody along with you on the journey.
Mandy Hornaday: Now I use HTML artifacts for dashboards. I've actually mocked up a lot of my North Star reporting dashboards that I share with my ops team, and I say, this is what I want, can you go build this for me? I also use HTML artifacts for team meetings. Rather than putting together a deck, I will visualize our strategy, our roadmap, our plan, and just make it really beautiful. And honestly, you can do it so quickly.
Mandy Hornaday: I will also use HTML artifacts to turn those heavy deep research reports, that I'm sure a lot of us are pulling out of AI, that just feel so hard to consume and read, but you know there's gold in there. I will use HTML artifacts to visualize the most important parts of those reports and then share that with my team.
Mandy Hornaday: So I know some of those may not have been mind blowing tips. But honestly, one of the things I learned from the AI course was that a lot of the most powerful things in my day to day are not the most complex. I have yet to go spin up a ton of agents, a ton of scheduled tasks. I have tested these and played around with it, but I have not automated everything in my department or in my business. I'm nowhere close to that. But I feel like I've learned so much. And there's still a lot that I haven't figured out.
Mandy Hornaday: And one of my next big challenges I'd love to take on is how to have this living, breathing marketing brain of information. And by brain, I mean who our ICP is, what our product messaging is, what our go-to-market motion and strategy is, what our brand guidelines are, what our brand voice is. Everything that is at the strategic core of how we run marketing. How do I keep that up to date? How do I make that marketing brain a living, breathing product? And how do I use AI to do that? Because I know there are tons of ways you can. That's one of the things I'm really excited to figure out and take on next.
Mandy Hornaday: And then from there, how do I take that marketing brain and empower my team to all work from the same brain, and layer on AI in their own roles in their own ways, so that we as a team are multiplayer with AI and not just single player? Single player meaning everyone kind of uses AI in their own way, but there's really no connection between us. Whereas multiplayer meaning we are all on a team, we're singing from the same sheet music, meaning that marketing brain in a way, and experiencing the power of AI as it relates to all of our roles on the team.
Mandy Hornaday: But despite having so much more to learn, one of the things the past three months have bought me is peace and confidence. I have come out the other end of the last three months feeling more confident in my ability to add value to the marketplace than I have felt in a long time. And I feel peace and confidence with my AI fluency, and the track I am on, and what I am building within my marketing teams and within my own business. And that alone is worth the nine grand, if we're being honest.
Mandy Hornaday: And more than anything, I think what it encouraged me to do, and a big part of why I took the leap, is I really wanted to put on my own oxygen mask first. I kept thinking, there's so much for my team and department and company. When you think about AI transformation, there is so much to be done. And before I tried to be the master orchestrator for all of these changes within my department, I needed to put on my own oxygen mask first and learn how to use it in a repeatable, scalable way. In a way that I now feel confident in, and can go direct my team, and actually build a department-wide strategy that fits into the broader company strategy in terms of where we need to be going with AI from a marketing perspective.
Mandy Hornaday: And so if you're wondering if a class is right for you, I would highly encourage it. I will say the class I took was Automate to Accelerate, run by Callan Faulkner and The Uncommon Business. I'm a huge advocate. I learned so much. I would say though, one of my biggest wishes was that I was going through it with other CMOs. The course by nature had a ton of different roles across a ton of different industries. It was really a lot of business founders thinking about their broader business and automating their business.
Mandy Hornaday: And there was a lot of context switching for me around, okay, how do I get this to apply to marketing? How do I get this to apply to my CMO role? And because of all that context switching that had to be done, I purposely didn't take full advantage of everything available in the program. As an example, there was a Slack community with like 3,000 people. I'm sure a ton of gold was being shared in it. A lot of great connections could have been made. I just didn't have the time or the capacity to go dig and sort through what felt relevant to me, or who felt relevant to me.
Mandy Hornaday: And so one of the things I came out of the course really fired up about was creating an environment for CMOs to go through a similar experience as it relates to our day to day from a CMO. How can we empower our teams to move work forward faster? How can we step out of the day to day of our roles, so that we can get back to the work only we can do that involves human judgment and creativity and strategy? Which is so needed right now, because AI is obviously creating this sea of sameness, and it's going to be more important than ever that we are thinking out of the box and using our human judgment and our creativity to drive what's next for our companies.
Mandy Hornaday: And so if that sounds like something that really excites you, I am actually building a room for CMOs who are ambitious, who care about their growth, and want to be AI fluent in a way that matters at our level, who don't want to fall behind. And I'm building a place just for you.
Mandy Hornaday: I'll share more in the coming weeks. We'll be launching this fall, but there is a waitlist on growthactivated.com if you want to join and stay apprised of the information as it comes out. I'm excited to share more about the Momentum Maker partner I talked about in today's session next week, and break down the build for you and share some tips on how you can build your own.
Mandy Hornaday: I hope this was helpful. I've missed you all. I'm rooting for you. And in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. Thanks so much.
Mandy Hornaday: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I would love for you to pass it along to a friend or a colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like.
Mandy Hornaday: And as always, in the meantime, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
