What does it really take to get your business recommended by AI instead of ignored by it?

 

In this episode of Executive Connect, host Melissa Aarskaug sits down with Mike Montague—AI marketing leader, author, and founder of Avenue9—to break down the rise of Answer Engine Optimization and what it means for every business today. Mike explains why SEO is fading, why AI now decides who gets seen, and why real human conversations are the new competitive edge.

 

You’ll hear how AI actually thinks, how to “teach” the models about your brand, and how small businesses can finally compete with big companies by creating the right content in the right places. This is a simple, clear roadmap for staying visible, trusted, and recommended in an AI-driven world.

Chapters

(0:27) Why AI gives “one best answer” instead of 10 links

(3:49) Conversations replacing SEO content

(6:10) How AI decides what your brand is known for

(12:01) Why your story teaches AI faster than your website

(15:20) What content wins in AI right now

(17:02) Duplicate content becomes a strength

(20:04) Understanding your “share of model”

(24:25) Mike’s quick wins for improving AEO

(27:13) Where real ROI comes from AI recommendations

(31:57) Navigating work, burnout, and multi-hyphen careers

(35:28) Lessons from play, creativity, and human connection

(40:22) Final thoughts on the future of AI marketing

(41:26) Where to connect with Mike

Mike

(0:00) SEO is search engine optimization. (0:03) AEO is answer engine optimization. (0:06) It’s also called AIO, LLMO, and GEO.

(0:11) Answer engine optimization is really focusing on FAQs and what people would type into an AI to get an answer. (0:18) People are asking AI, how do I update this contact record? (0:21) The answer it serves up is a lot different than what the algorithm was serving up in the 10 blue links.

(0:27) In AI, it’s really only the best answer wins.

Melissa

(0:31) SEO is so last season. (0:36) If you’re still chasing blue links and keyword density, today’s guest is all about shaking up this strategy. (0:45) Mike Montag is leading the human first AI marketing revolution.

(0:51) He’s helped brands win the game, behind the game, getting recommended on AI. (0:56) That buyers trust most. (0:59) If you ever want your company to show up in AI, instead of being ghosted by AI, this episode is for you.

(1:08) Welcome Mike.

Mike

(1:10) Melissa, so good to be here. (1:12) It’s a fun show and a hot topic, so I’m looking forward to it.

Melissa

(1:16) It sure is a fun show and absolutely a hot topic. (1:20) Now, you’re behind this big push to help brands get recommended by AI, not just ranked by Google. (1:29) Tell us what human first AI marketing is all about and how you got started in this space.

Mike

(1:37) Well, it’s a super long story for me, so maybe we’ll circle back to it. (1:41) We got time, but I’ll start with what’s in it for our listeners here first, which is I have always been in the conversations game, podcasting. (1:51) I was on radio interviewing people.

(1:53) I did a lot of community engagement stuff. (1:56) I did a ton of sales training and even entertainment things that were all about interviews. (2:04) I used that content for a variety of things, mostly podcasting to build a sales training business called Sandler.

(2:13) That’s an international company. (2:15) They have over 200 locations. (2:16) The podcast, How to Succeed, did great, over three and a half, four million downloads over nine years and was a really cool show.

(2:25) But in the last year of that, which was two years ago, I started seeing all these AI tools to pop up to help me do all the work that I was doing to get it listed, get it ranked, get a show up in algorithms and have people find the show in like a 10th of the time that I was doing it before. (2:45) So I thought, hey, I need to do this for 10 people and try and make 10 times the amount of money in short. (2:52) So I started a company called Avenue9.

(2:54) And my philosophy all the way back in my career has really been people first, human first. (3:00) I’ve written two books. (3:01) LinkedIn the Sandler Way is about how to use LinkedIn for salespeople to start conversations rather than to like build a big following on LinkedIn, make a post and hope somebody buys from you someday.

(3:12) The other book, Playful Humans are 52 lessons that I learned from conversations with people that play for a living like rappers, voiceover actors, jugglers. (3:23) I interviewed a dog surfer champion that is an influencer and he surfs with his dog all day and all the way from happiness and play experts around the world. (3:34) And these conversations turn into interesting content.

(3:39) So in SEO, we used to say content is king, but now conversations are king because anybody can make slop content. (3:47) Anybody can make the content. (3:49) So the conversations between humans like we’re having right now over the last year became the most valuable thing in marketing.

Melissa

(3:57) Yeah, absolutely. (3:59) Now you said SEO is dying a slow death and AEO is what’s next. (4:07) Break down what AEO is for our listeners and how it’s changing the game for marketers and people looking to be found.

Mike

(4:15) Sure. (4:16) SEO is search engine optimization. (4:19) And I think everybody knows what that is by now or they should.

(4:22) I did a lot of that. (4:23) I wasn’t ever really an SEO expert, but I built over 200 websites, got people ranked and was really focused more on internet marketing. (4:31) AEO is answer engine optimization.

(4:34) It’s also called AIO, LLMO and GEO for generative engine optimization. (4:42) I hope AEO is the term that wins because the rest of them sound a little ridiculous to me. (4:47) But answer engine optimization is really focusing on FAQs and what people would type into an AI, a generative AI to get an answer.

(4:57) So where we used to write blog posts about like, I don’t know, how to update a contact record in HubSpot or something. (5:05) And that used to be a blog article. (5:07) Now people are asking AI, how do I update this contact record in HubSpot or do some other marketing thing?

(5:14) And the answer it serves up is a lot different than what the algorithm was serving up in the 10 blue links. (5:21) In AI, it’s really only the best answer wins and the one that’s packaged in a conversational way. (5:29) And so over 50% of searches have already moved towards generative answers.

(5:35) In some markets, it’s over 80% of traffic now are what we call no click searches. (5:42) So somebody used to search, click on a link and go to your website. (5:47) Now they search, get the answer, and they never click on anything 50 to 80% of the time.

(5:53) So it becomes more of a branding exercise and being the one answer that’s recommended so that if people say, hey, go check out Avenue 9 for AI marketing, then it will direct people or they will go look me up afterwards. (6:10) But it’s totally different than I need to be in the top 10 or I’m trying to rank or place an ad for a specific keyword. (6:18) Does that make sense?

Melissa

(6:19) It makes perfect sense to me. (6:21) And I often think of how expensive it used to be to get ranked depending on the word you were trying to get ranked for. (6:28) So a general word like leadership is a lot more expensive to get ranked than a man skating on water, like you said, or dog surfing on water.

(6:39) There’s not as many people that are surfing their dog, but maybe there is in this world today. (6:43) You never know. (6:45) So talk to me a little bit about how to train the machines on your brand.

(6:51) I think that’s an interesting concept to actually get AI to recommend your brand versus having to do the search engine optimization. (7:01) What does teaching the machine actually mean to get recognized?

Mike

(7:05) Yeah, I think this is an important part of the conversation because SEO has changed kind of every decade since it was invented. (7:13) In the early times, a lot of people still think it’s about keyword stuffing. (7:16) How do I put a lot of keywords on a page so that Google will find it, say, oh, this page is all about this keyword.

(7:24) It’ll just use Executive Connect. (7:25) And if I put Executive Connect in the header, in the title, in the image, in the copy a bunch of times that Google will say, this page has the most keywords saying Executive Connect. (7:37) This page is going to rank higher than others.

(7:39) That’s how it started, right? (7:41) Pretty dumb. (7:42) Over that, pretty quickly, Google figured out we can’t take your word for it, right?

(7:47) Just because you could create a page, put Executive Connect on there a thousand times, and spam pages. (7:54) It was porn bots and all kinds of things started in and they’re like, all right, we’re throwing that out. (7:59) We’re not doing that anymore.

(8:00) So what they decided to do was say, we’re going to take everybody else’s word for it. (8:06) So the more people on the internet that say your page is about Executive Connect, the more votes we’re going to give it. (8:14) And that’s really where SEO and backlinking and a lot of credibility building began as the next phase of SEO.

(8:23) And that was good, but it rewarded the big players. (8:27) So big websites and big companies, it was really hard for a small business to be known for something because they’re not going to have as many clicks as a big store. (8:37) So use a classic example, like a small coffee shop versus Starbucks, there’s going to be way more links to starbucks.com than there is to another site. (8:46) So it was kind of heavily weighted towards the big favorites there. (8:50) And there were some things people could do with smaller keywords and finding interesting topics, but largely they had to come up with other hacks like map listings and other things that were listed around or by keywords on those searches to get above the big players. (9:07) AI and AEO has changed the game because now AI learns by kind of the most popular vote.

(9:18) It’s based on probability and that generative predictive text means it’s predictive on what the most likely next word is or what the most likely answer is for any keyword search. (9:29) And people are using way more words in their prompts in AI than just a few keywords. (9:34) So before it was really valuable to learn, like, you know, if you’re doing one of my number one searches, the best one I ever got placed was for wheel, the word wheel or wheel repair.

(9:47) I was working for alloy wheel repair specialists and they own the number one spot for the word wheel. (9:53) Like, that’s amazing. (9:55) You know, one of the classic inventions of all time, the wheel, they got the number one spot that’s extremely valuable.

(10:02) But nobody goes to AI and just types in the word wheel. (10:06) They say, hey, I scratched my alloy wheel. (10:09) How do I repair it?

(10:10) And they ask a longer question. (10:12) And average, they’re using multiple times words where it might be three to five words. (10:17) In Google, we’re seeing like 15 to 25 words in an AI search, which gives it a lot more context and a lot more nuance for small businesses to compete with these bigger businesses.

(10:30) But how you get recommended by AI is sort of like the way you would get recommended by a human. (10:37) We have to build our brand reputation and we have to be known for something and be like the answer. (10:42) Like, oh, if you asked a local friend, hey, what’s the best coffee shop?

(10:46) They might say that small business, not the Starbucks, because everybody says the Starbucks. (10:52) And AI is trying to be like your human companion, your friend. (10:55) It knows whether you like big brands or whether you like small artisan shops, and it can recommend the one that’s best for you.

(11:03) I think it gives a really cool playing field for small and medium sized businesses that haven’t existed before.

Melissa

(11:08) Ready to lead smarter and invest wiser? (11:12) On the Executive Connect podcast, we unpack executive strategies for wealth and influence. (11:18) Hit the subscribe button now.

(11:21) Don’t just watch, act. (11:23) Yeah, I love that. (11:25) So talk to me a little bit about how a business, like a small business, that small coffee shop talks about themselves on their website, their about page.

(11:36) What should they be doing? (11:38) Sharing their story, why the founder launched ABC coffee shop in Seattle next to Starbucks. (11:47) So talk to me a little bit about that.

Mike

(11:51) Yeah, I think there are some big points here and how we actually go about doing it. (11:56) Number one, I love what you just brought up, which is we have to tell a story. (12:01) It’s branding and it’s teaching the AI that we’re about something and what we stand for and who’s our ideal client, who’s our not ideal client, why we’re different and better than our competition.

(12:16) And when people are talking about this, they’re including us in the conversation. (12:22) And also really importantly, it’s not about creating more AI content. (12:26) It’s about real humans having this conversation and frequently asked questions.

(12:31) Most of it is very similar to SEO, except in AI, we’re focusing more on conversational things. (12:39) It’s natural language models are these large language models. (12:43) So what we’re looking for are how would a human talk about your business?

(12:49) What questions do your best customers ask when they buy from you and how do you answer those questions? (12:55) And so we can structure FAQs on our pages. (12:57) We can be really clear about our brand.

(13:00) I always make sure that when I go on other people’s podcasts and you ask me about human first AI marketing, I give a very similar answer because I’ve trademarked the phrase human first AI marketing. (13:15) And if you type in to AI, what is human first AI marketing? (13:20) I want my answer to show up.

(13:21) So if I show up on other people’s podcasts, if I have multiple copies about this, if I wrote a book on the topic and if on my website, I have the definition of it and examples and other things, now I’m starting to create this whole kind of experience and expertise profile around the thing we’re trying to be known for. (13:43) And it doesn’t have to be a quantity issue. (13:46) It can also be a credibility issue.

(13:49) So the last point I’ll share here is what we’re seeing with AI is that it’s looking for human conversations and things like YouTube videos, podcast transcripts, meeting transcripts, any type of original content, because it’s already learned from everything that’s on the internet. (14:07) It’s already looked at billions and billions of words, which is mind boggling. (14:12) But it’s basically saying like, hey, this computer read everything there is to know on the internet.

(14:17) It doesn’t want a repeat. (14:20) It wants some original take, some natural answer to questions that people are searching for that it can learn from and add new context. (14:30) So I think that’s where the power is for businesses looking to be known is how do we have some conversations about what we do and share those conversations in a way that AI can pick them up, ingest them and learn, add to their knowledge base.

Melissa

(14:46) Yeah, that’s a really great point. (14:48) I love that you said that. (14:49) It is actually quite scary how much content AI understands.

(14:54) So let’s talk about content that wins in the world of AI. (15:00) What is actually, you know, a lot of people are still blogging like they did in 2012. (15:06) You know, what’s working now and what should marketers be doing or publishing that is going to be a win win for AI generated conversations.

Mike

(15:20) Another good question here, because I think this is a major shift. (15:24) As I mentioned earlier, companies like HubSpot that were built on their blog have seen their traffic drop by 80 percent. (15:31) And where SEO was about creating all of these big pages to have this big library of SEO content, and we could create pillar pages of main topics and we get all these subtopics and we’re going to have these random obscure pages in the back end of our website that were about this long tail keyword that’s three to five words long in a magic combination.

(15:52) And we could get that page ranked. (15:54) That’s no longer the case. (15:57) So all of that has been indexed, which is fine.

(16:00) But Google hated duplicate content because then it wouldn’t know which page to rank. (16:05) So if you publish the same article on your blog and on a partner page or a publisher’s page, they would rank whichever one was kind of first or whichever one was most credible and would kind of ignore the rest. (16:20) Well, AI is learning through probability and repeating and reinforcing and reminding AI of the message, especially with new content becomes more valuable.

(16:30) So there’s no longer a penalty for duplicate content. (16:34) There’s actually a bonus for duplicate content. (16:37) And again, branding with that same message and same snippet over and over again in a bunch of different content becomes even more valuable.

(16:45) So if we have the audio transcript of our podcast, plus the blog that we wrote about it, plus the YouTube video out there with the title and the descriptions and the transcript, we start creating multiple versions of the story that we’re trying to tell. (17:02) And that’s how we get it further out. (17:04) So it has really changed the game.

(17:07) Instead of blogging, I think it’s more about credibility building and getting your message in as many places as possible. (17:16) The things that still work in both SEO and AEO are things like getting guest blogs on trusted sites or a Wikipedia page or Reddit is a big one that came out of nowhere. (17:29) They had their content open.

(17:31) And so more content is being ingested from Reddit into AI answers than other places. (17:38) And it was also a question and answer type forum. (17:41) So it lended nice to what AI was looking for.

(17:44) We need to start posting our answers and being helpful in those places to get our content into AI. (17:50) And I think that can happen fairly quickly. (17:53) The shift has already happened.

(17:54) So if you missed it and didn’t know, 2025 was the year of AI answers. (17:59) Google even switched from its main search results being the answer to Gemini’s summary being the number one thing that came up this summer. (18:09) So as far as timing goes, it already moved.

(18:12) The cheese has moved. (18:13) You need to change your path to success. (18:17) And then it can happen pretty quickly.

(18:19) If you get your stuff in the right spots, it can be ingested. (18:23) And the next model comes out about every six months and stuff. (18:26) And there are things you can do to get listed quickly.

Melissa

(18:29) Yeah, I love it. (18:30) I think it’s interesting. (18:32) I’m loving this new era because AI writes like I think.

(18:37) And so I’ve not been that long-winded blogger, writer, talker, very to the point. (18:47) And I love emojis. (18:48) So I’m guilty of a lot of emojis.

(18:51) I feel like my world, if I could talk in emojis every day versus actual words, I’d be living my best life. (18:58) But it’s funny because so many times people are like, did you write that with AI? (19:05) And it’s like actually my words and my emojis.

(19:08) But because we think so much like sentence, emoji, or emoji, and then the sentence, now everything’s considered AI when it’s shortened to the point. (19:18) So talk to me a little bit about the shared model. (19:25) This is a term that feels like marketer share meets minds inside LLMs. What is it?

(19:32) How do we track the share of model? (19:36) Can you unpack that a little bit of what it is and how it works?

Mike

(19:40) Yeah, share of model is basically the idea of how we track this now. (19:45) Where Google had some tools, and I’m sure AI will continue to build more. (19:49) There are some new ones.

(19:51) One of my favorites is called Noah Toa, which you can go and type in your website or your brand, and then it will show you how often or which models it know about your brand and how often it will mention it in the answer. (20:04) Because again, this is a big sea change in what’s happening with the way people search is there used to be kind of one recommended thing, especially in the 90s, 2000s, there was like one algorithm. (20:18) But then Google changed in the 2010s, where it depended on your search history and what type of stuff and it was learning you too.

(20:25) So if you search for a keyword like wheel repair, and I searched for it on the other side of the country, and with my background, I would see different results. (20:34) They would show local map stuff. (20:36) They would show preferences.

(20:37) If I had already visited a website multiple times, they would assume I want to go back and show that more. (20:42) And it was sort of creating our own individual algorithms. (20:45) But now with AI, every question is basically a fresh search.

(20:51) It’s doing the work and rethinking the question every time it’s typed in. (20:56) So what we can’t say is, I rank number one in chat GBT for this keyword phrase, because that’s not a thing anymore. (21:04) So share of model means how much or how many of the times does each of these models chat GBT, Gemini, Claude, perplexity, recommend you or list you in the results if you asked it to name the top 10 companies in your industry or your area.

(21:23) And there are some tools which will do it. (21:26) I’m surprised that they’re still mostly free, because it’s got to cost both companies a lot of money to do these searches, and then kind of do them again and find out how many times it’s recommending you and what it knows about your company. (21:40) But a really easy way and you got to be careful not to be tricked.

(21:44) So sometimes it’s best to do this logged out, because it’ll already know about your company. (21:50) If you’re on a pro version of chat GBT, it already knows me. (21:53) It knows about my company.

(21:54) It knows if I ask about human first AI marketing, it’s going to say Avenue 9, because that’s what I do every single day. (22:02) So if I log out and I go to a different model and say, tell me what is human first AI marketing, see what it says. (22:09) Test it yourself and see if you’re getting any kind of mind share and see how specific you have to be to name it.

(22:15) One funny thing that happened for me as I searched Mike Montague, there’s actually like a thousand different Mike Montagues in the world. (22:24) No. (22:25) Yeah, I think that’s right.

(22:26) There were multiple in Kansas City where I was there. (22:28) But also I’ve had some weird careers. (22:30) I was an on-air broadcaster.

(22:32) I was a sales trainer and a marketer. (22:34) And then I moved from Kansas City to the Boston area this year. (22:38) So it said there’s multiple Mike Montagues known for this.

(22:41) There’s one in Kansas City and there’s one in Boston. (22:44) And I had to kind of train the AI and be like, could they be the same person? (22:48) And I asked and I made it kind of do the work to rediscover like, oh yeah, it looks like there weren’t posts for this Mike in Boston before 2025.

(22:57) So it’s likely that they could be the same person. (23:00) And I kind of trained the model on updating my resume and my background and my location. (23:06) And I have to kind of reteach it just like you would a referral partner.

(23:10) That’s a human in your business.

Melissa

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(24:00) That’s so fascinating. (24:02) And I love to talk tactical and ways of winning today in AI and really get your recommendations. (24:12) So if you could give our listeners the mic cheat sheet, what are three quick wins that every business owner should do this month to improve their AEO footprint?

Mike

(24:25) Well, number one, if you don’t have a pro version of Chad GBT, it’s 20 bucks a month. (24:31) That’s less than a trip to the coffee shop we’ve been talking about already. (24:35) Just go do it.

(24:36) You’ll start learning it. (24:37) You’ll get its memory and you can start sharing things. (24:41) When you share links publicly, like of your searches to other people from AI, it actually makes those available to Google and other indexed searches.

(24:50) So if you do FAQs about your company in chat GBT, and then share that with other people in your company, that link becomes an indexable link. (25:00) So I would say number one is start using it, start figuring out, see how people are searching, see how you search, learn about it. (25:06) Number two is record powerful conversations, whether they’re conversations with your clients, where you can collect the FAQs and get their questions that they ask and customer service or your chat bots or your help email, like start using AI to collect and track all of these transcripts and these answers so that you can get the best FAQs possible.

(25:29) Number two is like, if you don’t have a podcast, and I think we’re still on number two. (25:33) So I’ll say with number two is conversations that are happening inside your company, capture your founder story, capture your best salesperson talking about your product, capture your best customer doing it. (25:48) This is exactly what I do at Avenue9 for my clients is I’ll interview these people.

(25:52) If you don’t have a public podcast, do a private one, open up a Zoom, record it, take the transcript and find a way to publish it in a way that is available on your blog or on the website so that AI can use that information as an index of what your company is about. (26:09) Number three, I think is the kind of guest blogging and the brand strategy of figuring out what you want to be known for and see how many places you can get known for it by. (26:21) So can you guest blog?

(26:23) Can you answer on Reddit? (26:24) Can you publish stuff on LinkedIn? (26:26) Can you create a YouTube video about this topic?

(26:29) It doesn’t even matter if anybody ever watches it now, which is wild. (26:33) It used to be to show up in these algorithms, you needed, you know, millions of views on your YouTube video for it to matter. (26:39) Now it doesn’t because AI can find that information and use it and index it, whether anybody’s seen it or not.

(26:46) So those are the big three tactical things for me.

Melissa

(26:49) I love it. (26:50) That’s such a different way of looking at things. (26:53) So true.

(26:54) Talk to me a little bit about the real ROI of being recommended. (27:01) What does all that mean for business results? (27:05) Where does real ROI come from within AEO and AI marketing?

Mike

(27:13) I think the best ROI comes here because if we’re thinking about artificial intelligence now, it’s really similar to real intelligence. (27:22) So I’ve mentioned it a couple of times throughout the show already, but the way we teach AI to remember us know what we’re known for and what we do for a living is the same way we would teach a human referral partner. (27:33) We can do both at the same time.

(27:36) We can be sharing stuff on social media, and this is what I’ve done with my company. (27:40) And when I interview people, I share it. (27:43) When I talk about something cool, I share it.

(27:45) I write a blog and I email it to people and send it to my list. (27:49) And I’m trying to make sure that everybody in my network knows what I’m doing for a living, the problems I solve, the questions I answer, what I’m an expert for. (27:57) And by coming on this podcast to talk about AEO, I’m actually doing what we preach, right?

(28:03) And I think by doing that, you’re building both sides. (28:07) And so it used to be they were kind of separate. (28:09) If you’re working for SEO results, it wasn’t really writing for humans.

(28:14) It was kind of weird and esoteric, and it was more about lead generation stuff. (28:19) I think the branding strategy is a great way to think about people here of like, what are they going to be known for? (28:29) Again, with conversations, we’re having conversations with real people.

(28:33) So we can focus on our clients and case studies and building trust and reliability by showing up over and over again. (28:42) And that’s when you start getting referrals. (28:44) And referrals are the easiest business to close, they’re the highest value ones.

(28:47) You can focus on keeping your clients and building better relationships with them, which is the easiest way to grow and expand your business. (28:54) You can teach existing clients about new products and even recapture old people that haven’t worked with you in a while is by reminding them, hey, I’m still here, this is what I’m doing. (29:05) Here’s what I’ve learned lately.

(29:07) And it’s just a really great way of branding and marketing your business that builds natural lead gen and it doesn’t feel like a growth hack. (29:16) Like, oh, if I just, this is what I hated about social media. (29:20) If I just post enough, if I just get enough followers, someday somebody will buy from me.

(29:25) That’s a myth. (29:25) It’s like field of dreams. (29:27) If you build it on YouTube, doesn’t mean they will ever come.

(29:30) If you build a following on Facebook, doesn’t mean anything really to you. (29:34) But if you have enough conversations with enough real human beings, good stuff will happen. (29:39) They do exist.

(29:40) We don’t need for those ghosts to walk out of the magical field for us to get business here. (29:47) So I think that’s the cool ROI for me. (29:50) One more I’ll share in here.

(29:52) I feel like I’ve already done too many. (29:53) But in my backlog of building these FAQs and this archive of podcasts and these blogs of my thought leadership is this knowledge base that’s evergreen content. (30:03) So it grows over time too.

(30:06) Where a social media post is so ephemeral, it might be good on X for six hours or on LinkedIn for 12 or a week. (30:15) And then it goes away and it’s never seen again. (30:17) A conversation that’s indexed by AI and growing a brand and sharing a podcast that we can go back to and use again.

(30:25) A year later with Playful Humans, I used it to write a whole book that’s now up forever on Amazon and stuff. (30:33) That to me seems like I’m building something of value rather than just trying to hack an algorithm that might change next month and reset my whole go to market strategy.

Melissa

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(31:25) Yes, such good nuggets. (31:27) I’m curious. (31:28) So a lot of people these days that are executives are also working a side hustle.

(31:35) So people are multi-hyphenate now. (31:38) They’re doing more things. (31:39) They’re not just marketers, just engineers, just HR people.

(31:44) So for those people that have kind of a lot of irons in the fire, what is your recommendation for those people that are still trying to figure out what is their one thing?

Mike

(31:57) Love this question because I am definitely a multi-hyphenate person. (32:01) If you haven’t noticed already, I’ve been a DJ, a game show host. (32:06) I was on the radio, a public speaker, a sales trainer, a marketer, a web designer, and an author and stuff.

(32:16) So I have a lot of things and it’s not great for people that want to put you in a box. (32:21) So a few tips here. (32:24) Number one is I like to be known for how I do my work and not what I do for my work.

(32:32) So that’s why I did the Playful Humans project was because I want to be playful. (32:37) I want to be fun. (32:38) I want to be creative and collaborative with other human beings, regardless of what I happen to be doing or getting paid for at the moment.

(32:47) So sometimes I think a lot of people think their purpose is a what? (32:50) What are you going to be when you grow up? (32:52) The answer is actually how do you want to be when you grow up?

(32:56) Because especially for young people graduating now, and I know that’s not the executive people you talk to, but maybe their children, they’re going to have nine different jobs in their career and seven of them have not even been invented yet. (33:09) Like prompt engineer or podcaster weren’t things when I went to college. (33:13) I couldn’t get in there.

(33:15) So I think it’s more important to decide how you want to be known and go for that as sort of the lowest common denominator is. (33:25) I’m a sales and marketing expert who creates a lot of content, is a creative and an entertaining person that also leans into education and technology because I’ve built a bunch of websites and integrations and online courses for people. (33:41) So I think about kind of my Venn diagram overlaps in internet marketing and creative content marketing.

(33:51) But I like to move in and out of all of those things. (33:55) And I think it is important to choose that it will hurt you if you switch and it hurts people from recommending you because they don’t know if you’re in real estate this month or if you’re in an executive at a medical company the next month or you’re talking about your, I had a side hustle of personalized gifts or something and other things. (34:20) It can really confuse people.

(34:22) And so I do think you have to build a reputation, but the key is building it around you and your personality and what you stand for. (34:31) And not about necessarily the product or service you’re offering.

Melissa

(34:36) I love that. (34:37) So I have to ask, because I’m curious, of all the careers you’ve taken and had and jobs you’ve worked through, what are some of the lessons that you’ve learned along your journey that you can share with our listeners? (34:53) Some of the best lessons learned.

Mike

(34:55) Oh man, this goes back to the Playful Human’s book. (34:58) So I appreciate you asking. (34:59) Again, it’s available on Amazon, or you can go to playfulhumans.com slash quiz. (35:04) And there’s a fun personality quiz about how you play, how you like to play. (35:08) Some people like telling jokes. (35:10) Some people like parties.

(35:13) Some people like puzzles and games. (35:16) Some people like exploring outdoors. (35:18) All of those are great answers.

(35:20) But I think, again, you got to kind of find out how you best enjoy life. (35:24) What’s the most fun, fulfilling? (35:26) What gets you in a flow state?

(35:28) When do you feel like you’re doing your best work is the key to making an impact, making money, and being successful with what you do? (35:36) Because if you’re missing any of those things, it really hurts. (35:39) It’s really hard to be successful.

(35:40) So in all of those things, what I’ve learned is you got to find, and maybe a lot of times people try to find it in one job, like, oh, this job has to give me all the fulfillment and fun and personal time and passion time and the travel that I like. (35:58) Well, no, that’s not true. (35:59) I think being a multi-hyphenate and doing a lot of things is key to finding happiness long-term because all those bars, I think about them like moving things.

(36:11) Like if I lower one, another one goes, or it’s keeping different balls in the air, that it can change over your life. (36:18) Just when you think something gets balanced, it gets out of whack. (36:21) So I hate the term life balance, but here’s my one hack for everybody.

(36:26) This changed my life and the way I work more than anything else is that there’s different types of work. (36:33) And a lot of times you’ll get advice that’s aimed at the wrong one. (36:38) So hard work doesn’t equal success in every metric.

(36:44) If you’re doing physical work, that’s true. (36:47) Hard work equals success a lot of the time. (36:50) Um, with physical work, if you’re driving across the country or you’re building a brick wall, it’s kind of miles per hour.

(36:57) The further you drive, the further you will get, right? (36:59) Or if you’re building a brick wall, the more bricks you put in the wall, the longer or wider it gets. (37:04) There’s only one option here, which is more bricks, right?

(37:07) But most people don’t work in that area anymore. (37:12) And with human beings, it’s pretty easy. (37:14) They figured out you can work for about eight hours a day.

(37:16) That’s why we have an eight hour work day and a physical thing until you get too tired and you just can’t do it anymore. (37:21) You start making mistakes and falling apart or injuries go up. (37:24) So safety programs have done a lot of work around physical labor.

(37:28) That’s not that interesting. (37:30) Mental labor is a lot different. (37:32) A lot of people haven’t adjusted that research now shows that there is a law of diminishing returns, which means you can do a lot of mental work for a little bit, but after about 90 minutes, you start to burn out.

(37:45) And if you work so much that you’re working in mental work for over 60 hours a week for more than six weeks in a row, you slow down and you produce less output than if you had just worked 40 hours a week and took the rest of the time off. (37:59) So even though over those six weeks, you would be working 120 extra hours, you would produce less output. (38:08) So you could have these 120 hours back in your life.

(38:11) And so if you’re working in mental work, you gotta understand that like, I’m gonna have these peaks and valleys. (38:16) I’m gonna get burnout. (38:17) I need to understand how to rest and recharge and go for a walk and let my mind de-stress from all of the effort I’ve been putting it through if I wanna do my best work.

(38:27) But there’s one more tech, which is the spiritual work or the emotional work where the opposite is true. (38:34) That the harder you try to make somebody love you, the less likely they are to love you. (38:39) The harder you try to sell somebody or market something, the less likely they are to buy it.

(38:45) And same thing with parenting or emotional work like therapy and stuff. (38:51) We know it’s not the harder you tell somebody the right thing to do, the less likely they are to take your advice. (38:57) You tell a kid to not eat the marshmallow.

(38:59) All they wanna do is eat the marshmallow. (39:02) So we have to take an opposite approach. (39:04) We actually have to give space for emotional work.

(39:06) We have to ask questions instead of make statements. (39:09) And we have to pull back and understand that we can’t do that work by pushing. (39:14) We do that work by pulling and it changes the outcome completely.

(39:19) So the biggest mistake I see people make is that they’re applying physical labor stuff to an emotional situation or they’re trying to get emotional in a physical labor job and those just don’t line up. (39:34) But the key to I think long-term fulfillment and avoiding burnout is by switching between these tasks all the time. (39:42) It’s like, you gotta go move your body.

(39:44) You gotta go do something physical. (39:45) You also have to connect with a human being on an emotional level. (39:49) And most of us feel good when we feel smart and we’ve created something and we’ve put something into the world that is a value.

(39:57) And so it’s not any one metric is the answer that I’ve learned.

Melissa

(40:04) I love it. (40:05) That’s such good advice. (40:06) I appreciate you sharing.

(40:08) Any final thoughts or anything that we didn’t touch on today that you wanna share with our listeners before we close up?

Mike

(40:15) Sure. (40:16) I think that AI is a game changer and it changes almost everything. (40:22) So if you haven’t rethought what you’re doing, even the way we go to work, machines and robots are taking over a lot of the physical labor.

(40:29) In some cases, that’s great. (40:31) We want robots doing bomb disposal or hazardous mining that would kill a human. (40:37) So in a lot of ways, that’s great.

(40:41) It’s now with AI taking over a lot of intellectual jobs that we don’t need somebody to take notes in a meeting or transcribe a podcast or other copywriting things and stuff that aren’t heavy intellectual or emotional task. (40:57) However, it’s raising the bar than for emotional work, for creative work, for leadership and connecting and deciding in a world that we can make anything we wanna make, what should we make? (41:11) And what is actually gonna make a difference?

(41:13) And so I think those are the tougher questions or those are the ones that I’m having fun at Avenue9 helping people answer. (41:19) If you wanna help with that, avenue9.com or Mike Montague, I’m in internet marketing. (41:24) So the good news is I’m pretty easy to find.

Melissa

(41:26) I love it. (41:27) There you go. (41:28) Find them at Avenue9 or on the social channels.

(41:32) Mike, thank you so much for being here, sharing your knowledge and your time with our listeners. (41:38) That’s the Executive Connect podcast.