Stop Painting the Mona Lisa and Hiding It in a Box
- Stephan Bajaio
- Jun 26
- 31 min read
Stephan Bajaio on Be Picked with Andrew Colsky | June 1, 2026
Many service businesses believe their credentials are what attract clients, but that's not the case. In this field, you are the product. If your website only offers a brief About Us page and a few bullet points, potential clients won't find the proof they need.
In this episode, Stephan Bajaio talks with Andrew Colsky on the Be Picked podcast about why people are always honest with their search bar, how to turn your expertise into content people can find, and why your job isn't finished after making a sale. If you run your own practice, work independently, or wonder why a strong reputation isn't bringing in more clients, you'll want to listen.
About the Show
This conversation originally aired on Be Picked, the podcast for professional service providers on how to get seen, get known, and get picked. Hosted by Andrew Colsky.
Connect with Andrew Colsky on LinkedIn and learn more about the show at be-picked.com.
Watch the Episode
Key Moments
01:06 Stephan’s SEO journey
03:40 Acronym soup and what matters
05:55 Control your message online
17:07 From funnels to flywheels
22:12 Avoid AI Content Spam
24:04 Search Intent Over Credentials
25:09 Ditch Jargon Speak Human
30:32 Repurpose Content Build Authority
35:24 Roadmap Challenge And Wrap
Full Transcript
[00:00:12] Andrew: Welcome back to Be Picked, another episode, another week. I'm your host, Andrew Kolsky. We are talking with professional service providers about how to build your business and make it bigger, better, stronger. We are, uh, talking today with Stephan Bajajo. He is CEO and co-founder of Vibe Logic, and he's got a bunch of great information to share with us about doing exactly that, building your business, getting seen, getting known, and getting picked.
[00:00:42] Andrew: Stephan, welcome to the show.
[00:00:44] Stephan: Thanks so much for having me, Andrew. It's a real pleasure to be here.
[00:00:47] Andrew: Well, I know we have a lot that we can learn from you, so I'm excited to get into it. So why don't we start off, give us a little bit of background about specifically the type of work that you do, and then we'll start talking about how that applies to the clients that are listening to this podcast.
[00:01:06] Stephan: Awesome. Well, I'm Stephan Bajajo, as Andrew said. I have a, uh, very extensive, let's say I've earned my 10,000 hours of expertise and then some on helping some of the world's largest brands with their SEO. So their ability to rank in Google ultimately, um, and, and even more importantly than that, just their ability to think about content and how to use that content and why that content matters, uh, where to kind of deploy it and ensure it was being seen.
[00:01:36] Stephan: Um, it's been a pleasure and a pain to do that because the world's largest organizations, as you can imagine, as your clients, are also some of the most red tape-laden places. And so that kind of led me to a, a second act, so to speak, and a, a future act of, um, finally, along my very interesting route of career over the past 20 years, uh, 25 years at least, um, I went from the dot-com boom to now running a agency devoted to visibility.
[00:02:07] Stephan: So helping customers understand what their audience is actually saying out in the real world, how they're expressing themselves, then making sure they're actually getting found in a meaningful way. And it's funny because, uh, while, you know, I may have cut a lot of my teeth in those big, big companies, most of my dopamine these days, though we do work with larger companies, um, comes from more of my SMB clients.
[00:02:34] Stephan: Um, you know, I think they're more willing to listen. There's a lot less red tape, and frankly, they're, they're-- there's an, a- When it's the right client, a palpable exci- excitability about the potential of what it means to their business. But there's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of stuff being talked about, AI, other things, LLMs, where it's all going.
[00:02:55] Stephan: There's a lot of confusion. You've probably heard terms like GEO, AEO, uh, AIO, uh, acronym soup, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and, uh, and I've spent a career trying to define what SEO is. When I first started, it was Stephan's Employment Opportunities. Now it's a little different. So, um, you know, I, I, I like to be the one to kind of, um, set the record straight hopefully and help organizations understand what the true value in promoting themselves is and why they should be doing that.
[00:03:27] Andrew: Right. Right. Great. Well, there's so many topics in there that we need to talk about. Sorry. We can
[00:03:33] Stephan: do a couple episodes. I'm good
[00:03:35] Andrew: with it. Uh, we, we may very well-
[00:03:37] Stephan: Change my shirt so it looks like we did it on different days.
[00:03:40] Andrew: Well, let's, let's start with, um, let me start with the first part here. First part to me is you were talking about alphabet soup there, the SEO and the AEO and GEO, all, all these things.
[00:03:54] Andrew: In terms of a professional service provider, we're talking solo practitioner, small firm type of provider, what are the things that are the absolute most important that they understand what they are and what the differences between them are so that they know where they can start to focus?
[00:04:14] Stephan: Okay. That's a great question, and let's frame this correctly
[00:04:20] Stephan: My great uncle, Ellie, lived to 104. That's a long time to live, and it was a good life. Like, it wasn't the kind of life that, you know, he was old, decrepit. He was-- At 102, he wanted to learn Chinese because the cleaning lady who was coming in spoke Chinese, and he already spoke 11 languages. This is the kind of guy we're talking about.
[00:04:41] Stephan: A lot of wisdom there. And the reason I'm framing that is I asked him over lunch, 'cause I used to leave my conductor office, my old company, and I would walk over to his place in New York City, and I'd sit and have lunch with him. And I asked him, "Hey, Uncle Ellie." We'd have these kinda almost interview style.
[00:04:58] Stephan: I'm always trying to drink as much wisdom as I could. And he said to me, you know, I asked him, "What's the secret of life?" And he said, "It's about recognizing what you can control and reacting to the rest of the world in a way you can control, 'cause that's all you can." So let's take that same wisdom and approach the problem we're talking about today, which is, okay, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, all of these AEOs, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, all acronyms for like basically LLMs, large language models, that are trying to interpret web- websites and call out when they should be responded in when you put in a prompt, right?
[00:05:55] Stephan: What you can control is what you say about yourself. You cannot always control what the rest of the web says about you. Right. So step one in your business is control what you can control. The depth at which you choose to expose, in the right way, what you provide is what you give the rest of the world to interpret.
[00:06:22] Stephan: So if you're thinking about your website and, you know, uh, you provide a service. One, if let's say you're a dental office, right? Are you talking about it in terms of crowns and, and, and bridges and s- I, I don't know what- That's my language, right? Right. Do you say tooth pain on the page? Do you have it as a dropdown in your menu?
[00:06:47] Stephan: Do you offer it as something very specific, or is it jargon, right? The way in which your consumer searches, their demand expression, no one lies to their search bar, right? So the way they express themselves will ultimately find a home or no home on your website. The funny part is it's a zero-sum game.
[00:07:07] Stephan: There's never been a Google search that you've probably done that's equaled zero results. The same thing with an LLM. They're going to give you something, even if they make it up, and by the way, they make it up a lot. I see. A lot, right? So before you go off and, like, worry about the rest, look at your business, look at your website, and realize that people don't go homepage and then go through the website.
[00:07:31] Stephan: No. It's like a mall. What's the entrance to a mall? I don't know. You could go through Macy's, Nordstrom's, Dick's Sporting Goods, through the, through the, uh, the door that's closest to the food court. Depending on what you're looking for is usually where you're gonna park and where you're gonna enter the mall from, right?
[00:07:50] Stephan: Okay. Right. Same thing with a website, except the parking was doing the searching. So they're doing the searching, and then they're looking for a specific service, a specific need, a specific product, something. Well, if you don't have a page that speaks to that, and not just like a bullet point, right? A bullet point on a page, like, I can't tell you how many times I go to a page that says services, and then it's got a few boxes.
[00:08:12] Stephan: Those boxes are not clickable. They don't go to a deeper page. Maybe at best they have a paragraph about what they offer. And if I was looking for that specific service, the best you have to offer me is a bullet point or a paragraph, meaning my entire need to engage you as a professional has now been limited to a bullet.
[00:08:31] Stephan: Of all the things on the internet, do you think you warrant showing up one for that topic? That's the question I would ask you to ask yourself. So-
[00:08:43] Andrew: Right ...
[00:08:43] Stephan: when you provide something, I give this one all the time to mental health clinics I work with, um, you're providing, you know, uh, grief counseling or postpartum depression, right?
[00:08:55] Stephan: Okay. Are we talking about that, one, in the language of the consumer? Two, are we realizing, like for grief, for example, mental health and grief, is grief one thing? Is the person who lost a kid, very unnatural thing in the course of life and very unfortunate-
[00:09:14] Andrew: Mm-hmm ...
[00:09:15] Stephan: or the loss of a parent, should they be spoken to the same way?
[00:09:19] Stephan: If you're literally a professional in mental health, you would say absolutely not. But yet your version of projecting yourself to the world and what will be interpreted about you, which again, you have the most control of 'cause it's on your website, isn't defining any difference between those two audiences.
[00:09:34] Stephan: Right. It's not defining the difference between the loss of a pet, for example. Mm-hmm. Completely different. Has a stigma associated with it to people that don't, aren't pet owners and don't understand it, right?
[00:09:46] Andrew: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:46] Stephan: So there's nuance in what you provide. As a practitioner and as a real professional, you offer that and that's some of the value you offer.
[00:09:55] Stephan: But if you're not bringing that to your digital presence in the way you're showing yourself to the rest of the world, which by the way, has more likelihood of ever crossing paths with your website than they do with you individually as a human-
[00:10:07] Andrew: Right ...
[00:10:07] Stephan: there's no chance that you will ever meet as many potential prospects in person as would pass in front of your website.
[00:10:14] Stephan: It is literally the brick and mortar of your digital, and you're choosing not to get into detail. You wouldn't do that in a pitch. You wouldn't do that when providing service to someone. But yet for some reason, either we're averse to, like, self-promotion. I get it, some people are maybe introverts and so forth, or we're not a marketer, that's not my job, or we're, um, unsure where to even start, so we don't.
[00:10:44] Stephan: Right?
[00:10:45] Andrew: That's a big one.
[00:10:46] Stephan: The, so, the, but the idea is, one, there are people that can help if you don't know where, first and foremost. Right. Two, you don't have to be on a podcast to necessarily, though it helps, to necessarily promote your business. So you don't have to be this crazy extrovert, whatever. But if you're the product that you're selling and we don't even have a bio page for you, maybe a video to earn trust.
[00:11:12] Stephan: One video, okay? I'm not asking you to do a podcast. I'm asking for one nice video of you. Potentially some blog posts you've written, so we know that you're an authority about what you say you're an authority about. These are the kind of things that not only build authority in, on your website when someone's consuming it, which they can get to 100 different ways, potentially, not just through SEO.
[00:11:33] Stephan: That just happens to be where my background comes from. But I've also been a CMO, and I've, I've been charged with all the channels. So you need to think of it as, "This is my asset. This is my digital more than a storefront. Am I building the departments out? Am I building the sections out? Am I going deep enough to allow for other people to consume?"
[00:11:53] Stephan: And if you don't know how to do that, turn to a, a professional like Andrew, someone like me. There are plenty out there. I know it's kinda scary 'cause there are some... If anyone guarantees you anything, by the way, run.
[00:12:04] Andrew: Right. Exactly.
[00:12:06] Stephan: They're usually salesmen. Exactly. Like, there are no guarantees. If there were guarantees, they wouldn't take you on as a client.
[00:12:10] Stephan: They'd just outrank you and then sell you the leads. Um, so the reality is that- Good point ... there are no, there's no guarantees in any of this stuff 'cause if they... You know, I'm not sitting on my yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean. No such luck. So there is no answers to the algorithm. But hey, listen, if you create really meaningful content, you can then use that through a lot of different methods.
[00:12:32] Stephan: You can then, that could be part of a newsletter. It could be, you know, you write a great blog post. It's, it's a newsletter. It could rank in Google. The LLMs could say that this is really authoritative and pick that up as a source. There's a lot of great things to do. So I'd say I understand why many people feel overwhelmed by it, but don't be.
[00:12:51] Stephan: There are people to help. And by the way, side note for all those that I mentioned who are not, and I'll let Andrew ask another question. Um, for all those who are not willing to be a marketer because that's a dirty word in your mind or it's not what you got into your business to do, here's the big secret I don't know about you guys, I got into my business to help people.
[00:13:15] Stephan: I know that sounds kinda weird, but like ultimately, you will make money one way or another, right? More of it, less of it, we could argue there are some years that are better and worse and okay. But at the end of the day, did you just get in this for the money or are you actually trying to help? Do you get the dopamine out of helping people?
[00:13:32] Stephan: If you do, which is usually a T-shirt I wear that says, "If you're not helping people, you're just selling stuff Then you didn't build your business, hang your shingle, take the risk of starting a business to hide yourself in a box, right?
[00:13:48] Andrew: Right.
[00:13:48] Stephan: And, and the biggest exposure of you to the rest of the world isn't sitting around waiting for someone to show up at my office, and I have a chair back there, but nobody's showing up, right?
[00:13:59] Stephan: Or it's I recognize that my web presence is my business presence, and I'm proud of that, much like I am the color decor of my office, and I take pride in it, and I show it, and I make sure that my personality, my thought process, coming on a podcast like this, exposing what I do, um, has value. And if you never work with me, that's cool too.
[00:14:23] Stephan: As long as you find value in what I provide, I get dopamine. So I'm... Maybe that's selfish of me, but I think y'all should be selfish in that way. Provide your expertise before someone ever gives you a dollar.
[00:14:35] Andrew: Right. Wow. Wow. So all right. So I, I wanna, I wanna kinda summarize that in, in the way that my brain was processing it.
[00:14:44] Andrew: Good luck. Okay. And we'll see if I'm getting it right. So, so I, I've got a, a, an upcoming book called Left of Trust, and in that book, I think I talk about basically conceptually all the same things that you just talked about. And, um, here's, I think, the biggest point that I was taking from this. Number one, first, you, you, you gotta be out there, period, and not be out there.
[00:15:11] Andrew: But if you are out there, what I, what I personally see as a big mistake that a lot of people make is they will spend a lot of money trying to create this beautiful website with beautiful, you know, graphics, whatever, and then they're done, and then it just sits there static, versus the person who actually gets the clients who has a website, nice hopefully, but on it, there's continuous growth, continuous content that answers deeper and deeper the actual questions that the client has.
[00:15:48] Andrew: So posting a blog, posting your YouTube videos, posting material, updating things, keeping it vibrant and active, also having a great Google business, uh, profile. You gotta have that. So, you know, if you create this beautiful website that sits there static, I'm assuming it's just gonna go cold and nobody's really gonna do anything with it.
[00:16:13] Andrew: You gotta have this deeper level of information that understands the question that a client has and answers their question, not what you want them to, to, to ask.
[00:16:26] Stephan: Yep, and I know what half your audience is probably thinking to themselves. Damn, Andrew, that's a lot of work, right?
[00:16:33] Andrew: It is. It
[00:16:34] Stephan: can be. It is. Now, there's a reason why it's called optimization, right?
[00:16:37] Stephan: Optimization is a verb and it's continual. It's not optimized. I didn't SEO this for you. A lot of people like to use that term. There's no such thing, right? Because it's, it's a zero-sum game. It's a constantly moving game. But But authority is built over time. You have to think of your website and SEO like a 401, not day trading.
[00:16:59] Stephan: You're probably gonna retire off of it.
[00:17:01] Andrew: Exactly what I talk to-
[00:17:01] Stephan: Well, yeah, you're gonna retire off of it, but it's not something you should be day trading or checking every day in that regard. What you should be doing, however, and this is something I like to talk about, in marketing people talk about funnels.
[00:17:14] Stephan: So I'm sure you guys have heard some marketer has said to you, "Oh, you know the funnel. We have, uh, considera- awareness, consideration, purchase," right? Cool. A funnel works great if your intention is to bring someone to this one point and sell them one time. I'm not in the business of funnels. I actually think it's an hourglass, and all the sand goes down to the bottom.
[00:17:40] Stephan: So what happens post-purchase? When you're building that blog post, are you just building it because you wanna get more new clients? Or do you provide that to people who have already bought from you so that they can, you can be top of mind for them when it's time to do it again, right? So that they can feel like they're getting value.
[00:18:00] Stephan: Are you just trying to sell stuff? 'Cause guess what? The Internet's full of that. And if you're like me, you're a human, and you've been consuming a lot of this AI slop and nonsense, you're sick of it. Enough. Like, there's no empathy out there. The Internet is a cold, dark place. And let's face it, Steve Jobs is seeming a lot smarter now, having decided to choose his same black T-shirt every day so he'd have one less decision to make, right?
[00:18:27] Stephan: Who doesn't have decision fatigue right now? Right. And you know what? You also have fear of missing out. Like, I don't know about you guys, but I always feel like I'm gonna make the wrong decision 'cause I've never had so many damn choices. I've never had so many damn choices. You wanna buy a shovel, it comes in 700 colors.
[00:18:43] Stephan: A color for the shovel. I never thought I needed to worry about the color for the shovel. Now, I could be neurotic, and I could sit there and not hit purchase on Amazon because I'm still picking what color it is, and I don't understand why a red shovel costs slightly less than the rest of them. But nonetheless, that's where my head space and my time is gonna get sucked up.
[00:19:02] Stephan: Versus, versus I need to be thinking in a different way. I need to be recognizing that, you know, the more my expertise finds its way in front of people, the more my expertise helps them, the less scared they feel about taking an action, the more likely they are to be able to take an action. Now, if they do that with me, that's great.
[00:19:21] Stephan: That will fill my bank account. But it'll also fill my dopamine, uh, tank, which is what I'm also just as interested in doing these days. So for me, I like that. That's something as a business owner I wanna do, and it should be something you wanna do as well, is try to cut the noise out for the people who just frankly don't know.
[00:19:41] Stephan: They don't know. They don't understand. Instead of saying the jargon of, you know, um, EMDR. EMDR is a, a, a mental health, uh, uh, modality, right? That a lot of people don't even know what it is. And it's like, okay, I could obviously create a page that does that and explains what that is But maybe I need to actually think about the problem it solves, think about the way someone might express that need, and before they even recognize that need, great.
[00:20:07] Stephan: Now they consume that, great. I didn't just build that, by the way. You know, maybe I wrote a blog post about the values of EMDR and how it can help. Cool. Should that only be waiting for people who are looking to do EMDR, or should I provide that to my therapy clients as well in a newsletter that says, "Hey, you know, in case you or someone you know has a need for something like this, this is when you'd wanna possibly deploy it in your mental health."
[00:20:33] Stephan: Right? Right. So that's just an example. You know, you do one... You do this in business naturally. You cross-sell, you upsell, you do all these things, and you, you know that once you've built a relationship with someone, you're much more likely to potentially... You've broken the seal. They're much more likely to spend money with you, especially if you're good at what you do and you've proven yourself.
[00:20:53] Stephan: So now, why you would ignore that bottom half of the funnel, or not the funnel, but the hourglass-
[00:20:59] Andrew: Mm-hmm ...
[00:21:00] Stephan: those are the people that are gonna sit at a dinner table and say, "Andrew is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and if you don't work with him, you're probably losing money right now." Right? That's the conversation that's gonna happen naturally, but it's only gonna happen if you worry about your customers, the ones that have bought from you.
[00:21:16] Stephan: Too many companies are just like, "I get them through the door. They're good. Now they're... We do customer service." You know? But it's like we don't provide value back to them. Why aren't we? Right. They're, they're your ambassadors. They're the people who are gonna write reviews. They're the people that are gonna talk to other people in your localities.
[00:21:31] Stephan: They're the people who are gonna be your references when you need them. Um, those are the folks you need. So don't only look at it from a funnel or sales perspective. Start thinking of it as a cy- a life cycle and understanding that I'm not in the business to sell something to people one time and that those people, I wanna provide them value before they've met me, if they never meet me, if they do meet me and work with me, and then after they've worked with me.
[00:21:57] Stephan: As long as I can do that, I'm building a flywheel and a model that allows me to bring value to a lot more people, and my universe just got a lot bigger.
[00:22:07] Andrew: Right. Right.
[00:22:08] Stephan: Yes, stay there, put one thing up and yeah, I posted a blog. Congratulations. Think about how to use that thing in the most... You know, I'm not saying you have to be a content engine, and do not go to AI and start trying to crank content.
[00:22:20] Stephan: That is a fool's errand, I promise you. If you look at how it ranks, it performs for a hot second, and then it drops, and then good luck to trying to get those ranks back. So what I'll tell you is, don't see that as the model. Build meaningful, human-centric generated content. If you don't know how your consumer's searching, there are plenty of products and people that can help you understand that.
[00:22:43] Stephan: It's a looking glass into what they care about and their problems and their needs. The more you understand that, the better practitioner you become And the more able you are to actually get in front of them and help them. So-
[00:22:54] Andrew: Right ...
[00:22:55] Stephan: if you're willing to make that effort, which you should be because it's your business after all, you did take the risk.
[00:23:01] Stephan: So, um, you know, at this point I'd say live up to your business, you know? I- if it's really as good as you say it is, why would you paint Mona Lisa and put it in a box?
[00:23:12] Andrew: True. True. You know, it's, I, I think two of the, two of the takeaways from that are, number one, the concept that when you generate content, and if you're doing a- You know, these different things.
[00:23:31] Andrew: That content is out there, and when you generate more content, now you have more content out there. And if you are doing it properly over a year, now you have a year's worth of content out there. Yes. And the chances, it's, it's like going from if I put one piece of content, I bought one lottery ticket. Yep.
[00:23:49] Andrew: If I put 100 pieces of content, I now have 100 lottery tickets, and then they just grow on top of each other and grow on top of each other and grow on top of each other. So as you build your business, you're building your business. Mm-hmm. Um, so that's one point that I thought was important. The other point was, um, this concept of, and, and this is one that I find hard to, to get across to people until they get it.
[00:24:16] Andrew: People have this concept, you know, I, I went to, to, to medical school, and I spent four years there, and then I did all this other work before I got my license, and I'm good at what I do, and I, I, I get good results and all that. And that's great. That's wonderful. That's the type of person you wanna hire. But that's not what's gonna get them in your door.
[00:24:36] Andrew: What they wanna know is, "I got this sore on my arm. Can you fix it? I don't care that you spent four years or three years or 10 years in medical school. Can you fix the sore on my arm?" Mm-hmm. And so you have to address it that way. What are they searching for when they search at 3:00 a.m. and they can't sleep?
[00:24:54] Andrew: They're searching for, "I got this sore on my arm and I need it fixed. How do I fix it?" Not, "Oh, tell me the best doctor out there that went to the most years of medical school."
[00:25:04] Stephan: Yep.
[00:25:05] Andrew: It's important- Yep ... but honestly, they don't care.
[00:25:08] Stephan: That's, that's the funny part, right? I, I'm always shocked at how many people, um, uh, so, so there's, there's an interesting, I think, thing to tease out with what you just said, Andrew.
[00:25:18] Stephan: So there's a problem and condition. Literally, it could be medical, it can be anything, right? I express my need. So one of the number one things I see people do is they say, they talk in their jargon, right? It is a, uh, polycarbonate stemware. Does anyone know what that is? I know you can't hear me or answer, but it's funny if you said it to your, to your YouTube or wherever you're consuming this, your Spotify, whatever you're listening.
[00:25:45] Stephan: A polycarbonate stemware is an unbreakable wine glass. But if I call it polycarbonate stemware, what are the odds you're gonna find my page about unbreakable wine glasses if I don't mention unbreakable, right? What am I really trying to do? I'm trying to make sure that when I host a barbecue during the summer, that I'm not gonna have glass in my lawn.
[00:26:06] Stephan: That's what I'm... Or on my patio or... Right? That's what we're talking about. So what is the actual problem and how does the consumer, the, the, the need get exposed literally? Not on your terms. Your terms are jargon. Your jargon should be there and probably needs to exist on that page. But should it lead the conversation?
[00:26:27] Stephan: Mm-mm, not necessarily because you're not talking to a bunch of other doctors, right? You're not talking to a bunch of other professional practitioners who know exactly what they need half the time. You're talking to people who don't know what they need, but they may think about where they are in their awareness process.
[00:26:44] Stephan: "I'm aware I have a problem." You could go even further, "I'm unaware I have a problem and now I'm gonna educate you do have one." That's one. Right. Right. Two, "I'm aware I have a problem, but I don't know what the solution is." "I'm aware I have a problem, I know what the solution is, but I don't know who can solve it."
[00:27:03] Stephan: I'm aware I have a problem. I know what the solution is. I'm aware of people that can solve it, but I'm not sure which one I should choose. You can see all of the ways that a person might end up finding their way to you. Recognizing that you need to do that is one, and then the number two thing I think I wanna tease out of what Andrew just said is you did spend $400,000, $500,000 on your professional degree in order to get to the place you got to.
[00:27:35] Stephan: Sad to say, that might not just be doctors in the future. That might be, might be my five-year-old kid when she goes to college. I'm not ready to pay for that. But- You know, when you think about that, I'm always shocked when people's About Us is just a few photos of people. It might have a paragraph about them, and that's it.
[00:27:58] Stephan: Really? You're telling me that I shouldn't be able to click on your photo or your name and get an entire page about that person in your business? Literally, in service run businesses, you are the product.
[00:28:12] Andrew: Right.
[00:28:13] Stephan: You're the one they trust, and yet you don't even deserve your own full page that can rank for your name when someone looks up the professional services individual who they were told about at dinner and don't remember the name of the company because it's some sorted weird name or it's spelled in a unique way and blah, blah.
[00:28:28] Stephan: So I type out, you know, um, plastic surgeon Stephan Bajayo or something like that, and Bajayo you're never gonna spell correctly. So the reality is, like, you need a page that's gonna speak to that, that person, that product, right? And should that product, uh, be some just photo or can we get a video going for a little bit, and can we get a paragraph, and then can we get your CV or a few things about where you were trained or associations you're a part of?
[00:28:57] Stephan: How about what I'm like outside of work? Maybe you don't wanna be that person. That's cool, too. Maybe I'm too professional for that. But you know what? I have a dentist site I can show you that does that.
[00:29:07] Andrew: Mm-hmm.
[00:29:07] Stephan: Do you think I'm going because I know the dentist goes to Orlando on and, and Magic Kingdom on their vacation?
[00:29:13] Stephan: No. Did it make them more human? And for someone who doesn't enjoy going to the dentist, might that make me more likely to be like, "Hey," when I go in there I'll bring up the fact I just went to, you know, Disney World. Right. I also saw their CV, I saw their background, I saw they were trained at Columbia and they did this and they did that and blah, blah.
[00:29:31] Stephan: Wow, this dentist is someone I should probably consider going to, right? Mm-hmm. Yep. But guess what? If that dentist also has a video, one video's great just introducing themselves. Another video might, or another video or another blog post they might have is, you know, um, how I've been trained to help people who don't like going to the dentist.
[00:29:53] Stephan: Cool. Aren't there a lot of people out there that don't like going to the dentist or are scared to go to the dentist and don't go because of that? Cool. So are you getting that article that was written that also shows up on their bio page out to your customers to say, "Hey, we know going to the dentist can be scary.
[00:30:10] Stephan: You've overcome it 'cause you're one of our clients. However, for those you know who aren't over it yet, here's a thing we've written that might help." Right. "Feel free to share with friends and family." Like- Right ... you know what I mean? Like, you're, you're, you're... And that's not gonna get acted on immediately.
[00:30:25] Stephan: You're not gonna get this windfall of clients tomorrow, to Andrew's point. But this is another asset that over time is gonna have value. And if you can't afford from a time or money perspective to consider building as many of these things out, I'll argue we're on a podcast right now Andrew has a transcript of this podcast that'll come out of this.
[00:30:49] Stephan: So not only... That, that's a beautiful thing now is that, like, we used to pay for transcripts. We don't do that anymore. It's f- free as part of what you basically use to record now. Mm-hmm. Uh, or an LLM can help you pull that out sometimes or whatever. Anyway, point is he'll have a transcript. That transcript can become a blog post.
[00:31:06] Stephan: It can become show notes. It can become quotables. You could bring that back to an AI and say, "Hey, read through the transcript of this episode. Pull out five quotes I can use for social, um, that came out of this, this, this conversation, and create graphics for me I can post on Instagram with my logo of my company and so forth."
[00:31:29] Stephan: Cool. Now, what else could he do? He could ask me a question that he asks all his guests. Awesome. Now he can take that same question-answer from each guest, take all of them together, and wrap that up into a roundup, and that roundup could have socials and so... So do you see what I'm saying? Use all parts of the animal.
[00:31:49] Stephan: I'm not a hunter. There are multiple ways to use one piece of content. So if you're gonna invest yourself in creating the content, think about the ways you can use the content. That's where an AI can help you, by the way. Go to an AI and say, "Hey, I have this great piece of content, this blog post. Give me 5 or 10 ways I could think about using this out in the wild-" Mm-hmm.
[00:32:11] Stephan: that would get in front of and then tell them in detail who your audience is." It will come up with some really creative ways to get that content out. Do I think they're- Absolutely ... as good as what Andrew and I would come up with? Eh. But, you know, they're definitely close, right? It's, it's gonna get you going, and you're gonna start getting excited about it, and then you're gonna start building up authority.
[00:32:32] Stephan: Authority in your space didn't happen by you just hanging a shingle. It's not gonna happen on the web by you just slapping up a website, no matter how pretty it is, right? It's gonna happen because you're validated. You're credible. There's proof of that on the web. You've shown that you have your, you know, this is an example of me showing my 10,000 hours in this space and then some.
[00:32:54] Intro: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:54] Stephan: I've been there. I've done that. You can probably tell that by hearing my voice and what I'm talking about today. You can definitely tell that from Andrew, right? So- The reality is, like, are you gonna show your 10,000 hours, or are you gonna only allow them to get seen once someone walks through the door?
[00:33:11] Stephan: 'Cause if you do, that's fine, but I hope you have a great referral network, word of mouth, and that you can dine on that for the rest of your career. I don't know how broad you're gonna be able to make that business because after all, it sounds like it's basically you and no more and won't be more, and there's no aspirations for anyone else because, you know, if you wanna...
[00:33:30] Stephan: If it's, if it's by you, that's one thing. If it's buy you, it's another thing, right? The difference between those statements is the letter U. It's also the person you. So are you in this to be by you or buy you? If they're buying you, cool, but we know that's limited in the number of hours you can sell. So I hope your hourly cost goes through the roof.
[00:33:50] Stephan: May that definitely happen. I wish nothing but that for you. However, if you're in the business of B-Y, by you, meaning Stephan started a practice that's really great, and anyone you work with in Stephan's practice is gonna give you all this greatness and this, this stuff, wonderful. It's by me. You're not going to buy my time.
[00:34:11] Stephan: You're gonna buy my process, my methods, my training, my this, my that. You can work with me too, but you get what I'm saying? Like, it doesn't mean that other doctor, that other dentist is not worth going to because they're not that person. So recognize that. It's the same thing in a law firm. It's the same thing i- in a, in a CPA firm.
[00:34:30] Stephan: It's the same thing in all of these types of businesses. You're probably not the only person. If you are, God bless you, and I hope you kill it. Otherwise, if you have aspirations to grow it further, then you probably have to find a method to kind of take yourself out of the equation 100% of the time because You're gonna be limited
[00:34:48] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:34:49] Andrew: Yeah
[00:34:49] Stephan: I had to come to terms with that when I am no longer a, you know, multimillion dollar SaaS platform valued at half a billion dollars like my previous business was. Like, I, I don't have any of that. Bootstrapping this thing myself, I'm back in the trenches, I'm doing the work, um, there's not 100, 200 people working on my team.
[00:35:10] Stephan: It's, you know... And so it's kinda nice, I'm not gonna lie. Uh, I- Right ... I get to get that dopamine again. But, you know, I, I, I feel you guys. I know where you're at. I- it's not that different than the world I live in.
[00:35:22] Andrew: Yeah. Well, you know, boy, we, we could go on for days with this stuff 'cause there's so much good information that you've shared.
[00:35:30] Andrew: You know, I, I do want to, um, sort of challenge the listeners to this. Based on what Stephan was saying about the multi-use of the same content to make things easier for you, I challenge you, after listening to this podcast, to go onto my website, bpik.com, and you're gonna find a blog. Guess what? There's gonna be a blog about this particular episode.
[00:35:55] Andrew: And then I challenge you to go to the YouTube channel, and you're gonna find this podcast there, but you know what else you're gonna find? You're gonna find a bunch of short clips that came from this episode. And then I challenge you to go visit our LinkedIn page. You know what you're gonna find? You're gonna find a bunch of short clips from this that lead you back to the video, that lead you back to the website, et cetera, et cetera, and on and on and on.
[00:36:14] Andrew: You're gonna go to- Preach. Preach ... my Google Business page. Yeah. It's... And it's all from this podcast, because the information here, to me, is so valuable, why am I gonna hide it in one place? I want it to be around the world. So, you know- That, that part
[00:36:32] Stephan: is just so important I appreciate that, by the way. And just so you all know, like Andrew's giving you the roadmap right now.
[00:36:38] Stephan: He's literally spelling it out for you. It's not, n- no offense to him or me, this is what we do. It's not rocket science in that regard. It does take some elbow grease, I'm not gonna lie, but the amount of elbow grease it takes has gotten a lot less recently with the advent of AI and, and the tools that use AI in them, and there's a lot...
[00:36:56] Stephan: It's a lot easier than you would think. But like, again, does Andrew make money right now because you watch this? No. He, he makes zero dot- Trust me Well, I don't think he's gonna get... Unless he's selling stuff on ads on YouTube, maybe. But the reality is this is not a source of income, right? Yet he's sharing and taking the time to put this podcast on and share all this goodness, right?
[00:37:17] Stephan: Ultimately, that will come back to him in some form, both karmic, and I mean that in the best way, or business-wise, right? So there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to, you know, um, to have these kinds of conversations. If you don't like writing, for example, sit down and have an LLM or, or anything. Go on a Zoom and record yourself talking.
[00:37:40] Stephan: Mm-hmm. I don't like writing, so I just talk to it. There'll be a transcript. Go and edit that, and all of a sudden you got a blog post. It's that simple, right? Um, and, and then- So- ... you can level up and understand what keywords to use and how to do it, and it becomes an art and a craft and, you know. But I'm saying you could Bob Ross this right now, guys.
[00:38:00] Stephan: We could do happy trees. Like, for those who know what that reference is, like I'm, I'm not saying you gotta be Picasso. I'm saying y- you can start with some watercolors and, you know, and it's a lot easier than you think, and it won't make a mess. So stop trying to be perfect, get some content out, follow Andrew, and listen to what he's telling you because he paid me to say that.
[00:38:21] Stephan: No, he didn't. Uh, but follow him because he's got good advice. He's bringing on people hopefully that are providing that value to you, and then listen to them and try to apply little aspects of that in order to make your business better. It's, it's right there for you to have. That's the funny part. It's just 99% of people won't slow down long enough to recognize it and then try to apply it to their real world situation.
[00:38:46] Andrew: Right. Right. Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do one thing 'cause we're way over time here, but- Sorry ... l- lean in 'cause I wanna whisper this thing to you. I don't want the listeners to hear
[00:39:02] Andrew: Don't tell. Don't tell 'cause only a couple elite people use it, and man, they're all
[00:39:10] Stephan: That's awesome. That is awesome
[00:39:13] Andrew: Yeah So-
[00:39:13] Stephan: That's
[00:39:13] Andrew: between us ...
[00:39:14] Stephan: my, my lips are sealed.
[00:39:17] Andrew: Excellent. All right, Stephan. Man, so much good information. I am going to beg you to come back. Would love to. Um, because there's so much here.
[00:39:27] Andrew: But we are so incredibly out of time, um, I am going to have to end the
episode here. I'm gonna give you the last word before I close out.
[00:39:38] Stephan: Sure. So one, if you wanna reach out, please do. LinkedIn is my modus operandi. So Stephan, S-T-E-P-H-A-N, B-A-J-A-I-O. My company's Vibe Logic, vibelogic.com. You can look me up, look me up in the LLMs, look me up in the search engines.
[00:39:55] Stephan: I guarantee you'll find me. Um, it's not all about selling, believe it or not. I'm happy to just have a conversation, give you a few words. If I can help, um, I'm happy to do so. Um, good people should help other good people, and hopefully we can help more people while we do it. It's a, it's a nice way to, to conduct business, and frankly, I really do believe it comes back to you in the most meaningful ways.
[00:40:17] Stephan: So, uh, the more you all can provide that goodness out into the world, the more we all can hopefully profit, uh, emotionally, financially, and in every other way possible. So here's to your dopamine. Happy to help when I can, and, uh, find us online. Based on Andrew, we're gonna be everywhere, so.
[00:40:37] Andrew: That's the goal.
[00:40:38] Andrew: So all right. So go, go look up Stephan, follow him on LinkedIn, and, um, you know, connect. And, uh, follow us, check us out, bepic.com. Thank you so much for listening for this episode. We hope it brought you good, valuable information. We want your businesses to succeed. You have every reason after going to school for so long and getting your degrees and doing what you're doing, y- you still need to get the, uh, clients in.
[00:41:03] Andrew: You have every reason that you should. So come back next week, listen to our next episode, and we'll do sort of a secret, we're not gonna tell you when I'm gonna have Stephan back, but you'll see him pop up again. So see you next week on Be Picked. Thank you.
[00:41:18] Intro: Thanks
[00:41:22] Andrew: If you are enjoying this content, please like and subscribe. Thank you
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