Ep 133 – Kirstin Russ, Practical Edge AI – AI Adoption for Agencies: From Internal Automation to Sellable Services
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Featuring: Kirstin Russ, Practical Edge AI
In episode 133, I dive into the real-world path of AI adoption for agencies with guest Kirstin Russ, founder of Principal Edge AI and Mountains to Sea Media. We unpack the four “zones” of adoption (from denial to productized services), why most AI projects fail without structure and change management, and how to turn internal automations into billable client solutions. We also hit on junior-talent pipelines in an AI world, the risk of “robot-trained-by-robots” content, pricing when you’re still learning, and the discovery discipline required to make automations actually stick.
Key Bytes
• The winning agencies move from “dabbling in automations” to selling AI-powered solutions that solve specific client problems.
• 95% of AI projects fail because of missing structure, messy data, and zero change management — fix those first.
• AI should elevate people to higher-value work; train juniors to work with AI, not to be replaced by it.
• Don’t chase every shiny tool; build repeatable agent patterns and a stable stack you trust.
• Discovery is everything: a “15-step” flow usually hides 30 more steps — price and scope accordingly.
• Monetization starts with ops pain: map ugly manual workflows, then automate the “swivel-chair” steps.
• Thought leadership beats generic AI copy: capture founder audio, codify brand voice + ICPs, then assist with AI.
• Profit vs. quality is a real tension — set guardrails so efficiency never erodes outcomes.Chapters
00:00 Intro & Kirstin’s two businesses
00:57 Why an outsource-first agency model
03:07 Year of deep AI study and first tools “in the wild”
04:43 The four zones of agency AI adoption
06:14 From “getting ahead” to “survive”: disruption hits marketing
09:01 Why AI projects fail: structure, data, and change management
11:00 Practical internal automations (transcripts → CRM, follow-ups, etc.)
12:58 Junior talent in an AI era & the content quality dilemma
15:18 Building an AI content assist system (voice, ICP, research)
18:48 Tool sprawl vs. foundations; avoiding shiny-object traps
20:40 Can clients DIY? Positioning & selling AI services
21:08 Case studies: Square inventory workflow & quote tool
24:38 Pricing while you’re learning; managing expectations
27:18 Aha moments: you can’t do it all; systemize & delegate
29:14 Theme songs, imposter syndrome, and wrap up
Kirstin Russ is a seasoned business strategist with 30 years of cross-industry experience who brings a unique dual approach to business growth. As the founder of Practical Edge AI, she helps businesses leverage artificial intelligence to automate growth, reduce manual workload, and improve profitability—often delivering measurable results within the first week.
Simultaneously, as the driving force behind Mountains to Sea Media, a Western North Carolina-based digital marketing agency, Kirstin helps businesses amplify their online presence through strategic internet marketing, data analytics, and performance-focused web design.
Kirstin's superpower lies in her holistic approach to business analysis, understanding how systems interconnect and where AI can enhance traditional & digital marketing strategies. By combining cutting-edge AI solutions with proven digital marketing expertise, she creates integrated growth pathways that optimize both operations and customer acquisition.
With an approachable style and commitment to practical results, Kirstin transforms business challenges into opportunities. Her guiding question remains: "If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about your business, what would it be?"
Contact Kirstin on the Practical Edge AI website or LinkedIn, Mountains to Sea Media website or LinkedIn.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.132)
Welcome back to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. This week, I'm joined by Kirsten Russ. She's a seasoned business strategist with more than 30 years of experience and the founder of two companies, Principal Edge AI, where she helps businesses leverage artificial intelligence to automate growth and boost profitability, and Mountains to Sea Media, her digital marketing agency in North Carolina.
What Kristen makes stand out is how she blends AI with proven marketing strategies to help businesses work smarter and see results faster. And I'm super grateful to have you today, Kristen. How are you?
Kirstin Russ (00:37.705)
Good, Steve, how are you doing?
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:39.598)
Pretty awesome, thanks. So two businesses, that's probably not too much of a headache. Give me kind of the rundown on the businesses and like what, I know one is fairly new, but you've been running Mountains to Sea for a while. Give kind of the story on the agencies.
Kirstin Russ (00:57.631)
Yeah, so Mount Sisi is a digital marketing agency. sort of started it, my wheelhouse is strategy and project management. So I set everything up so that I outsource the execution part. That's for a couple different reasons. One, I don't have to carry a big payroll and still have expertise and two, because I don't think.
This marketing space is so noisy right now. It's hard for anybody to be really good at more than one or two things and I think to really provide the client with You know a high quality holistic program takes a few people so So that is set up again intentionally as an outsource model. I It's a wow before years old in October officially, although I've been in the marketing
agency space for a really long time. And basically I deal with primarily B2B and service based businesses and they're usually, I mean think they're still considered SMBs but I think for a lot of them it would feel big for me. They're five million to 50 million in size usually. So again, been in that space for a while. I look at a project holistically.
I'm a generalist at heart anyway, so I want to understand the whole business and how everything works together. And I also have some operational background myself, so that sort of lends to me wanting to understand that part of the business as well. And ultimately, I think for a strategy development, that's a great way to do it. Because again, everything has to fit together, especially in the smaller businesses. There's a lot of people wearing a lot of different hats, and there's no really
Frequently no delineation between a lot of the areas. So so I like that The AI agency sort of evolved from that it's technically a DBA under the marketing agency because I just wanted to be able to talk about AI separately But at this point really services the same the same clients because Some of this this AI work spun out of existing clients
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:07.278)
Mm-hmm.
Kirstin Russ (03:17.801)
I've spent about a year in some intensive AI studying and cohorts and developing and now have a couple actual tools out there in the wild. that's been a fun next step, fun iteration. I think it allows, it allows another layer of somebody's business growth.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:47.15)
So we're in, we're in a space, I think we just hit last week or the week before was a thousand days since chat GPT was released. It's set at least our industry on fire. know, you know, a million other industries are also, you know, having massive adaptation and chaos as a result of AI staffing and legal and accounting and every SAS platform has integrated some BS AI tool that is probably of no help anyway. But.
From an agency standpoint, I've seen there's, there's four different levels of adoption. We'll say there's like the denial aisle, route where it's, and I think it's owners that are, they've been in business 20, 30 years. They're like, this is how we've always done it. They're probably the same folks that are like, you've got to be in the office every day, or I don't think you're actually working or like, you know, the kind of old school mindset. And if they don't have like a young team, that's like, Hey boss, we've got to do this.
Kirstin Russ (04:23.999)
Okay.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:43.819)
They're probably looking at a cliff coming real fast at them. The second is like that kind of curious, like, yeah, we can use it for something. We don't know what, we don't know what it's going to do. We don't know how to embrace it. The third is like they're embracing it internally. They're building their own automations for themselves there. When this that happens. And that goes back to like the, if this, then that platform that I think was like one of the first and then Zapier. And so they're kind of dabbling with it.
And so maybe they've built their own automations to streamline, but the fourth is where you're at, where it's like, how do I turn this into a service, sell this to my clients to give them solutions to their problems and monetize AI. I think that agencies that are in that from the third, moving into the fourth, but definitely in that fourth, like zone we'll call it. That's like, who's really going to thrive. And I'm seeing a lot of shops doing that, doing like AI consulting for their clients.
what is your problem? it customer journey? Is it customer acquisition? Is it, know, CRO problems or whatever the problem is, how do we use AI to solve it? And that's where you're at. And that puts you eons ahead of the, you know, lower two and a half ish zones of agencies that are probably not going to be around in, I don't know, a year, two years. Like it's happening so fast. Right. So talk about like that adaptation for you to say, all right, I need to.
get into the space and learn some tools and sell some solutions to clients.
Kirstin Russ (06:14.379)
I mean, honestly, when I started the whole extra classes and learning and groups and whatnot, it was to get ahead. So whatever it a year ago or so, I mean, using chat GPT kind of since the beginning, but really getting into understanding how to build my own agents, how to string them together, how to make full automations work. That was about a year ago. And at that point it was to get ahead. And then I looked up like six months later and it was really about
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:23.136)
Mm-hmm.
Kirstin Russ (06:43.679)
to survive because yes, our industry is getting incredibly disrupted. And I think sometimes rightfully so. I I just saw an article yesterday about, I think it was in the AI Ready CMO, it was that newsletter and it was talking about how we are, that the marketing industry is no longer hiring junior people to do.
But it was also interesting to take on what the junior people were doing, because none of it was really valuable stuff. I mean, it was reading a press release, proofing stuff, or probably getting coffee for people. I think that I get the whole, sometimes it's almost hazing, right? Like, my gosh, I went through this part, so you have to go through this part as valuable as it is or isn't.
So what I like about AI is that I think it allows, I am certainly human first in it. I've played with it enough and had it do enough things wrong that it doesn't stand on its own. In my view, it is intended to allow people to do the higher value things. So it takes over the...
The task, it's a lot of task driven things that it can do. mean, some of the stuff that I use it for internally that takes a huge weight off my shoulder is research. I like, have, I don't know, half a dozen agents built for like the whole sort of client research flow where you're doing ICP research and buyer journey and trends and opportunities and roadmaps. I have different agents set up for that so I can do this whole, run this whole.
you know, set to get an output and even chatting against the agents, I can run that whole thing probably in a couple of hours and have that entire client overview where before if I had to do that research by hand, I mean, and then fill in your other work, you're looking at a week or two before you get it finished. So, so I think there's a couple of things I was only thinking about this analogy this morning as well. Part of the value in AI is not just in
Kirstin Russ (09:01.511)
making things faster, it's in breaking things and putting them back together different ways. So one of the analogies that people use a lot is when we went from horse and buggy to cars, right? Like people didn't want a faster horse, they got a car instead, which is a completely different solution and benefit to the same issue. And I think that's where we're going to really start to see
more power in the AI. I mean, think a lot of us are using it right now just to do things faster. I am too. But I think when we figure out how we can, again, just rework systems to make them even more efficient and not necessarily just faster, I think that's gonna unlock some of the power. And I know everyone's heard about the MIT study that said 95 % of the AI projects are not working right now. And I think...
That's what you and I were talking about really at the top of the hour is structure. think people don't have. And it's doing, it's forcing me to do the same thing too, right? Put some more structure in my business so that, so that then the AI can actually use it. There's I think an IBM commercial out right now that talks about, but our data is here. It's in the cloud and it's in the iPad and it's here. And, the AI person is like, yeah, and the AI can't use it. So I think that's.
part of what we're all learning is that those projects didn't work probably because they were pushed. A board member somewhere said, have to use AI, a CEO said, we have to figure out how to use AI and they just pushed it from the top. And I think there's a whole lot of change management that has to happen. People are afraid of losing their jobs. There's a lot going on that isn't being managed in the implementation level. And then again, there's a lot of structure that isn't in place to allow
the systems to access what they need to really be good at what you want them to do.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:00.555)
Yeah. I think there's some, some really cool, simple stuff that people have been, have been doing. you know, like for me, my calls are all transcribed using an app called crisp. And then that has an AI agent built into it. So it can give me, a follow up email and it can remind me of things down the road. And I built something that automates its integration into my CRM. So if I look you up in my CRM and we had calls, the transcripts are right there and some like pointed, points from the calls are there.
Things like that. But I think the big lift stuff is really fascinating to me. And that thing you talked about from MIT, that 95 % of projects don't even like work or see the light of day. the ones that are really like moving mountains and like, you know, cancer research and like big heavy lifting stuff, traffic patterns and crime patterns. like, that's like, I'm all for that kind of stuff. You know, my, I do have two fears and they're kind of
minor from like the marketing industry standpoint when you mentioned about junior talent and I'm seeing this already start to happen in agencies where if they're not bringing on a junior bench to train in I three to five years they're gonna have a massive talent gap and So in small agencies is not a big deal but if you if you I don't know 15 20 people and above if you're not grooming junior talent to get coffee and you know organize
the magazines in the office or whatever, like who's going to be the next creative director in 10 years? That's going to be a massive problem. The other one that we see time and time again is if, if all the content online starts to be created by robots and the robots are reading the content online, now we have this incestual loop of robot created and inspired content. And that's, that's very scary. And it's, it's words and images and videos and
To me, that last part is very scary.
Kirstin Russ (12:58.091)
So I wanna talk on the junior talent, because that's kind of, yes, we have to have it. mean, everybody has to have this learning in the industry time. But I think that's the whole point too of it's human first, right? Like the AI isn't now anyway, doing anything really all by itself. So why don't we have that junior talent who maybe we're training them to work with the AI systems. Maybe that's.
what the junior part of it is. And it's less about the menial things that really are not. I mean, I'm huge on, again, it's the AI should be doing the things that that people can do, but don't have to do to free the people up to do higher value things. So I think that maybe just puts the junior, you know, we're giving them a different, it's just a different start point for them. And then to your point about content, that is,
That is a, I don't know how that's gonna shake out because I actually have an AI content assist tool and it's, most of what I've built so far is to solve a problem for me or for a client. I don't have really anything that's just sort of, let's see if this works. But this I built because I need to generate content, I need.
thought leadership content from my business owners or higher level people in the business, because they have it all in their brains. It's all tribal knowledge that is not anywhere except their heads. And they're not going to write it. I can't write it because it's not my knowledge. They're not going to write it. So the intention is that I get them to record it. I'd like three to five minutes on however you want to record it on your phone.
send it to me in our Otter, however you want to do it. And then I've done a whole lot of work up front. So I've got some knowledge-based items that are, you know, some writing directions for the blog post, but the customized work is a lot of brand voice work. So there's, you know, some things that sit in the knowledge base that the writer can access to, or the writer has to access to write the blog. so we start with...
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:13.517)
So it knows the client's tone of voice, the client's brand, and it can, OK, yeah,
Kirstin Russ (15:18.443)
It's basically that, it's brand voice, tone and style guide, and ICPs. So research came out that showed that the LLMs do a better job of writing when they know who they're talking to. And I think that's part of what we're all learning and how we prompt. Now, a lot of people give them a role. You are a top marketing strategist, or you are a top writer, whatever it is. I think that gives the LLM some context and helps it get going, so it knows who it's writing to.
And it uses the the literally the system instructions for the agents say the audio recording is the holy grail do not make things up do not You know do not add things so I have a research agent so whose only job really is to take that information that is in the audio and
just find supporting facts. So we have some footnotes and you know like this is educational, this is factual. And then from there it's just writing and making sure that there's a couple of QA checks to make sure it's done right. So ultimately that is AI writing fed by thought leadership and I think that's the hard part.
You're right too, because on the SEO front, we're all now trying to figure out how to make sure that the LLMs are pulling up our information. So it is a little scary, at least we still have, I think the separating information that's coming out is still thought leadership. It still needs to be unique and real case studies and first person.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:57.816)
Yep. And I think that's different. And I've done that and I've had friends show me like, here's how you can have your agent ask you the right questions so that you're speaking into it and it's prompting you, but it's still coming from me and my brain and my heart. You know what I mean? It's not like write me a thousand word article on fill in the blank. That's the part that scares me that the laziness I think is going to get to that. I hope it doesn't, but that scares me. And as people want to lean more and more into efficiencies, does it turn into
Kirstin Russ (17:12.629)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:26.956)
I'm relying on this robot to do everything for me and whether that's professionals or kids in school and they're not able to think for themselves. you know, so that's, I'm the first to admit, I'm not a great writer. don't love writing, but I know there's a difference between what I can come up with and what AI can come up with. And so I'd rather it be from me, not great, then here's this super polished thing for like, cause that's just not who I am anyway.
You know, I'm going to throw in an F-bomb here and there, and I'm going to use analogies from my world of gardening and fishing and yoga and whatever. And sure you can train it for that, but I'm afraid that efficiencies are going to be chasing profit more than quality of work. Right. And, and so I think that's a concern. I'm all for profit. And if I can, I don't know, replace six people and pair it down to three with some really talented prompt engineering and really talented, you know, junior talent and things like that.
Now I've increased my profitability in my business. Am I sacrificing the quality of work for so much profit? And so there's a dance there that needs to happen, you know, and those efficiencies of automations are beautiful, but is there a sacrifice for it? You know, and again, big concerns, red, blaring red alarms everywhere on some of this stuff.
Kirstin Russ (18:48.075)
And I don't have the answers obviously and I think that none of us do. It's been interesting just again since I've been in it, know, pretty hardcore like the last year just watching the evolution because it is fast. I have on my screen I have think I have ten tabs pulled up for like new tools that I saw referenced today because I want at least look at them. Which is sort of another point. There's a whole lot of discussion around the tools and how to
you can't get buried in the tools because there are a hundred new ones every day. And so it's more about, again, it's the infrastructure and the structure and the things that you have in place because a lot of the tools do the same things, just have a different name, maybe one different spin. I think we should certainly use, find the ones that work for us and they're gonna be different. mean, even my AI build partner, we use a different.
tech stack to a degree. I'm not really the tech person so it doesn't matter so much what I use but he has his tech stack and that's what he wants to use and that's what he's comfortable with and that's what he uses and I think that's where we all have to get because it's it's I love shiny objects and they're very distracting and that happens with all of these things so for a while I mean there's a time here that I don't read these newsletters at all because I need to not be distracted.
But yeah, think it's about, all of this is more foundational and we have to be paying attention to.
Just, mean, how you build an agent is gonna be the same no matter what platform you are deploying your agents in. So I think there's that fundamental level and then there's, my gosh, maybe this tool will do everything for me and they never do everything they say they're gonna do.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:40.782)
Yeah. so think two, two thoughts. One is you've done this DBA practical edge AI in order to monetize AI for your business. Has that, have you found success in that? Have you found clients that are like, yeah, I need that. I'll pay for that. Or, and cause the other side of the coin that I'm seeing is we can figure out AI ourselves. Why would we pay you for it? So what's the strategy there and how has it panned out for you?
Kirstin Russ (21:08.491)
So we have a couple projects that we've actually done and delivered. They are operational. So they were basically replacing processes that were incredibly manual. If anybody uses Square as their inventory system, they probably are aware that it's an interesting platform and has just some odd setups. So we have...
And it's not end to end yet. We're building a section of a workflow that can have more, more put on the beginning and more put on the end if they decide to do it. But basically it's taking them from doing manual input of when something comes in and then for, and because they have, they do wholesale to retail. So there's this internal, like I have to lose a case. And if it's going from wholesale to retail, have to lose, lose it out of.
I to transfer it as a case from wholesale to retail, then I have to lose the case and have to gain the per items. So that whole process was manual. we have, and here's part of what is super important and we learn quickly on this job. The discovery call is like the most important thing you could ever do. And if it takes you three hours to do it, you should do the three hours because you get in this and you miss, you didn't.
they didn't tell you steps or you didn't ask enough questions to get the steps. then, so this project we thought was gonna be a 15 step flow is now 45. Yeah, so learning curve for sure. But ultimately it will save them probably five hours a week. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's, it's not just saving you five hours, it's five hours you're doing something else with.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:43.522)
Wow.
Kirstin Russ (23:00.171)
Another one was a quote tool that's a similar thing. just tried to, they have to go out, it's a waterproofing company, they have to go out and look at buildings and measure the buildings, square footage, the windows, that kind of thing. So we just built a forum. for the people in the field doing the measuring, literally all they have to do is put the information into the forum. Just walk through it on their phones even, pretty easy. Next iteration of that would be if we can get the phone to do the measurement.
That's a little bit harder. Lidar helps, but it's a little bit harder when you get a certain distance away. So anyway, and then that just maps to give them a proposal and like their internal documents so they can see the margins and whatnot. So part of that's really just automation. The money part is just the mapping into their spreadsheet. And then the only AI part is the client ready proposal. And then I've got some like the
AI thought tool. I want to try to figure out how to productize it. It's a little manual right now with all of that like brand voice work upfront, but I think that's the separator and what makes it different than a lot of the other similar tools that are out there. So I don't know how necessarily I'm sure I can automate that. That's a lot more work to automate that whole process than the writing.
So yes, some real projects that are helping people. again, those came from existing clients. Just because I was already in discussions, I heard pain points in its role.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:38.702)
Were they cool with you kind of learning on their dime or did you present like, I've been doing this for a thousand years and I already know it and I can whip this up for you or were you like, hey, we want to try something. You're the guinea pig. We think we can save you time and money if we do this.
Kirstin Russ (24:54.155)
So one, think the quote tool, think we probably had a fair price market value. We knew it was early for us and they know it was early for us. So we could probably charge more now. The square tool, we totally undershot it. We probably should have charged 5X what we charged. yeah, totally learning. the client got a little edgy at one point because we were running behind, partly because
the developer is spending time in forums trying to figure out how to do the things that Square doesn't want you to figure out how to do. So yeah, that was a huge learning experience. And I had to, when he was a little edgy, I just had to remind him that if we, again, if we charge for this project, knowing what we know now, it would be 5X what he's paying. So at some point you have to say, okay.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:47.28)
that's the same as how it was, listen, 20 years ago when we were all trying to figure out how much to charge for a website and it was the Wild West and it was like, what can I get away with? What's the perceived value from the client? And here it's what's the perceived value of the time that we're gonna save you and what you can do with that time and the efficiencies we're gonna create for you. And we don't know how long it's gonna take us, but we're gonna figure it out. And so we might not be super profitable, but look at all this money we made and look at what we've learned along the way. And it's very much Wild West making money off AI right now.
and so I think that from that standpoint, it's super exciting. but you're learning, you know, you're learning on the client's time and dime, which cool. not?
Kirstin Russ (26:27.443)
Yeah, and again, think, you know, as long as they know, as long as everyone's on the, fortunately, have a really good relationship with that client and, you know, he's like, I mean, we go have a beer every so often. So, you know, it's like, can have that conversation with him.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:36.42)
Yeah.
Perfect. love it. I love the direction you're going. I'm super pumped for you. know, think, you know, kicking the tires on some of these AI models you're building, people should go check out practical edge.ai and learn more about what you're building and how you're helping clients find solutions with AI. think more agencies need to move in that direction. I'm concerned for the cliff that's coming very fast at a lot of agencies.
To wrap up, I want to throw a couple random rapid fire questions at you that have very little to do with AI. So the first is, if you could only use three apps on your phone for a week, which three would they be?
Kirstin Russ (27:18.207)
You know, funny enough, I use the weather app a lot.
probably chat GPT that I did. Perplexity is probably my favorite right now. I just haven't put it on my phone yet. And what else do I use a lot on my phone?
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:27.255)
You
Kirstin Russ (27:37.983)
Maybe ESPN.
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:40.065)
Okay, nice, I dig that. What's one aha moment that you've had recently in your business?
Kirstin Russ (27:48.24)
so I mentioned that I'm a generalist. I'm also a big DIY-er. So sort of it's, and it's been several over the last, I don't know, year or so, maybe not one massive one, but I cannot do it all.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:03.215)
I cannot do it all. And there's more to that. And therefore I need to delegate. I need to build a system. I need somebody to do these other things. Yeah, that's a freedom aha moment for lot of entrepreneurs.
Kirstin Russ (28:04.477)
I cannot scale and grow both.
Kirstin Russ (28:15.935)
Yes.
Kirstin Russ (28:20.339)
It is, and it's a little scary because it's letting go and then you realize how much of a control freak you really are. But it's also the thing that's forcing me to have some more structure in place. You know, I mentioned that I outsource things. I might have a client where I have three or four outsourced people or teams and I found that I was...
you know, I'd get the client and part of my onboarding was I would send a separate email to each one of those teams. And I'm like, this is dumb. So I started, I do a master sheet now in Google Drive. I share it because I think it all, matters that they, each of them knows what else is happening also, not just what their world is, but I share it. I may send one email out, one link to the sheet. has everybody's information on it. That sounds kind of lame, but that's a big time saver.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:14.521)
Yep, yep, I love it. And then finally, if your agency had a theme song, every time you walked in the office it would play on a loudspeaker, what would it be?
Kirstin Russ (29:23.307)
Mmm, walk-up song.
Kirstin Russ (29:29.503)
had one in my head last week that I, and I don't remember.
man that's a really good question i wasn't prepared for that one.
I'm gonna have to think on it.
I feel I used to know music really well. I am so terrible at the new artists and the newer music. So yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:55.088)
Yeah, all good. I think music catches people off guard. They're either like, you know, I've asked what's your go-to karaoke song. People are like, I don't sing karaoke or, you know, things like that. So my, my current song is, uh, uh, it's called backup plan. Uh, it's a country song. I can't remember who sings it. Bailey Westbrook and somebody else. And, and it's like, there's no giving up. Get the haters out of your brain. Like focus on, you know, the only backup plan is getting back up kind of thing. And I'm, all for that. So, um,
Kirstin Russ (30:22.069)
Love it.
Love it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:25.763)
Yeah, you'll have to get back to me.
Kirstin Russ (30:27.339)
Yeah, I to check that one out too, because I've definitely spent some energy around imposter syndrome and trying to push through that and push through some money thresholds inside the agency. Yeah, I like it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:34.979)
Hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:43.481)
You're not alone there, my friend. think anybody in our industry has, anybody in the world has battled with imposter syndrome. It's a human nature and we all struggle with it. So you're not unique there if that's any consolation for you. Yeah, Kirsten, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate your time and experience and sharing it so freely on Agency Bites with us.
Kirstin Russ (30:56.331)
Appreciate it.
Kirstin Russ (31:05.525)
Awesome, thanks Steve, I appreciate it. I love the pod and I love the work you're doing and I look forward talking to you soon.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:13.86)
Likewise. Thank you again.
Kirstin Russ (31:15.264)
Thanks, see ya.