Unraveling Sales Mysteries with AI

In this engaging episode of Love Your Sales, Leighann Lovely interviews Gillian Utesch, the founder of Broken Glass Ceiling Marketing. They delve into the transformative power of AI in modern business, exploring its role in automating mundane tasks and enhancing human connections. Gillian shares her journey from a traditional marketing career to becoming an accidental AI enthusiast, emphasizing how AI has allowed her to focus on what she loves and connect more deeply with clients. Leighann and Gillian also discuss the common fears surrounding AI and how it can actually free up time for more meaningful interactions. This episode is a compelling exploration of how embracing AI can lead to greater efficiency, innovation, and personal fulfillment in business.

 

Contact Gillian

Email - gillian@brokenglassceilingmarketing.com

Website – www.brokenglassceilingmarketing.com 

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gumoney/

 

Special Thank you to our Sponsors – Genhead – www.genhead.com and Accelerategrowth45 – www.accelerategrowth45.com

 

Robb Conlon – Intro and outro – Westport Studio - https://www.westportstudiosllc.com/

 

The Brave Ones – Instrumental Version Song by Jan Sanejko - https://artlist.io/royalty-free-music/song/the-brave-ones/119489

 

Ready to grow your business? Schedule a call with us today  - https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/discoverysalesleighann

 

Leighann Lovely: This podcast is presented by Genhead. Genhead leverages AI so small and medium sized businesses can find their ideal clients to make more sales. Other companies talk about AI, but we are using it every day to drive down marketing costs and increase revenue. Learn more at genhead. com. That's genhead. com. 

Another episode of love yoUr sales today.

Leighann Lovely: I am joined by Jillian Utesh. Jillian is the owner and founder, of Broken Glass Ceiling Marketing. I'm thrilled to have her. Jillian is an entrepreneur, accidental AI enthusiast, and a visionary behind Broken Glass Ceiling Marketing.

With a career spanning two decades in marketing, she built a reputation for her innovation. Innovative approach to [00:02:00] create connections in a digital world. Her story is one of reinvention and resilience. After realizing the traditional rules of business didn't work for her, Jillian built a company that tackles the tasks most of us dread.

Oh yes. Most of us dread, uh, data mining, outreach, and engagement. So entrepreneurs can focus on what they love. Her work combines. Cutting edge AI technology with the timeless power of human storytelling, providing that the future of marketing is both innovative and deeply personal. And I absolutely love that.

Obviously, as you know, me and my company also are very into that. So I'm excited to have this conversation, Gillian, about, you know, your story and, uh, you know, your career. So welcome to the show.

Gillian Utesch: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to share my journey along with the destination I've accidentally arrived at and hopefully it resonates and helps someone else.

Leighann Lovely: [00:03:00] Yeah, absolutely. And so tell me where, you know, I, the first question I always want to ask an entrepreneur is why, what made you, drove you, led you into starting, you know, this journey.

Gillian Utesch: It was kind of multifaceted. I did not sit down and say, what do I want to do? I want to be an entrepreneur and I want to do that.

Via a software as a service company, there was not that much linear thought put into it at all. I simply followed my heart that was driving me away from things I didn't want to do. I wanted to focus my day and that's, that's as, as detailed as the original business plan was. My heart is drawing me away from things I don't want to do.

And so then as time went on, I realized what those tasks were, and that was kind of phase one. And then phase two was, oh golly gee, I don't [00:04:00] want to do these tasks. And then phase three was, how can I do them differently?

Leighann Lovely: That's awesome. And you know, when we're driven by our heart's desire, I think that we, we go in full blown passionate about it.

And there's no stopping us. Absolutely. I mean, passion drives the true success, you know, of, of entrepreneurs. You know, I couldn't run a business, that I did not truly believe in and nobody can run a business. I don't think that they truly don't believe in. And when you find that sweet spot of like, wow, now I'm, now I'm doing something I'm passionate about and it's helping somebody.

Gillian Utesch: Wow. That feels good, right?

Leighann Lovely: Yeah. That feels really good. Yeah. When I get that call or that text or that email from a client, that's like, Oh my gosh, do you know what just happened? Like I, and I remember the first time that one of my clients text me and said, I've [00:05:00] increased my sales or I'm getting, I'm actually getting.

leads from my marketing. Like I'm, I have, I had somebody from New York buy my product and I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's, that's amazing. And I'm like, so it's, it's working the way that we wanted it to work, you know? And for me, I'm like, well, that's, that's what it's supposed to do. And, but for them, they're like, how are they finding me?

What is, what are we doing? And it's like, well, this is, this is. What it's supposed to be doing, but you, I mean, the first time that that happened, I kind of went, Oh my gosh, why was I ever afraid to do this? Because of course it works if you do it, right? So let's talk about you. Let's talk about your business.

Let's talk about after you figured out what you wanted to do. Where, where did you start? Where did it go from there?

Gillian Utesch: I still struggle to [00:06:00] identify as a software as a service company because I never consciously set out on that plan. My conscious plan. Once I realized the 3 things I kind of shared at the beginning, I thought, okay, how can I do these to get to where I want to go, which in that moment it was.

Rebuilding my marketing company. I had a great career, a great opportunity with marketing, loved my, loved my clients, loved my interactions. But what was most beautiful about it was I got to spend my days actually doing the work of the work because over time I had. Accumulated referrals, I'd accumulated longstanding clients, so I didn't have to datamine.

I didn't have to cold call. I didn't have to send seven emails to get a conversation. All I had to do was pick up the phone and go, Hey girl, how's it been? How's your baby doing? Oh, I know your dog was in the vet. Now let's talk about your project and your timeline for next month. That's how I like doing business and so realizing that there was a big gap between [00:07:00] where I was in 2021 and where I'd been in 2020, realizing that gap and then realizing that I don't want to do these tasks because it just, it felt visceral is the only word I can think of.

I realized, okay. My clients have scattered to the four corners of the earth. They're working from a hammock in Haiti. I can't just meet them at Starbucks to network. I can't just, I can't rebuild how I rebuilt after oh eight. And it took me a while to come to that realization. Then it took me a while to come to the realization that I don't want to do what I.

Now need to do that's different. And then it was golly, gee, what do I do? Because AI wasn't really a thing. Then we didn't have chat GPT. We didn't have open AI. It was essentially a fidget spinner that we couldn't see. And that's exactly the amount of credibility I gave it. Why would I ever use technology or this fidget spinner to do this kind of work?

It's not going to have a human touch. It's not going to be creative [00:08:00] storytelling. It's going to feel icky. It's just not going to work. And it wasn't a moment. Of absolute just desperation back against a wall. I had nowhere to go, but down. So I was like, well, you know, let's give it a go and see if it'll work.

And then fast forward about 18 months. Our latest tool has been online over the last 9 months has been open for public subscription. Hearing your story, talk about how your services, your products, your business can change people's lives. I never thought building something like this beyond just business development, but we've had folks use it to get jobs.

We've had them because they were sending in 3000 resumes that were all getting kicked back from AI. And they were using this to reach out, engage and network. With people at businesses that they actually wanted to work at. And so when a job came up, it's, Oh, Hey buddy, go, go ask Kevin. He's got the rec on that.

So that has been a very unexpected benefit of a very unexpected journey.

Leighann Lovely: That's [00:09:00] amazing. So, you know, and it's, and it's funny, your, your bio that I, you know, just read to introduce you accidental AI enthusiast. So now you're, you're in it, you're discovering what AI has the ability to do. And, and in many, in some circles, This is a very controversial topic, like, Oh, AI is going to take over the world, you know, it's going to take my job.

We've all, we've heard all of this before. You know, back in, in the days that, you know, my dad was working and I'm growing up and you hear that, oh, they're, they're creating robots to do our jobs. Which now, you know, we have robots. All over in manufacturing that are doing, you know, the mundane tasks, and it never eliminated people's jobs.

It just created more jobs of people who had to design the robots and better paying jobs. And so we hear the same thing now happening today is, Oh, my God, AI is going to [00:10:00] take over the world's going to take my job. I'm no longer. It's not true, in my opinion, because AI is only as smart as the person who's programming it and telling it to you.

You know, what to do, how to do it, what algorithms to look at, you know, what information, how to read that information, you know, until somebody actually plugs in a real brain that allows it to think for itself. I'm not afraid of it. I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not one of those doomsdayers with like, well, one day it's going to learn how to think for it.

Every single thing that it does, somebody has to program behind the scenes in order for it to work, right? Yeah. So let's I love talking about AI. I think a lot of people out there like talking about AI on the other side of the fence of who aren't afraid of it yet or aren't not yet who aren't afraid of it.

But so let's talk a little bit more about specifics in what, you know, why And how you [00:11:00] accidentally fell in love with this through your journey and how it specifically is able to help in BizDev.

Gillian Utesch: I love that you start with fear because that is the number one, if I am talking to someone in line at Starbucks, my aunt Sally, or even a business, a fellow business owner, fear is always the first word I hear when they think about AI.

And I think that's for a couple reasons. It's. Invisible to us. It's zeros and ones that are floating around around us. So that alone makes it okay. Fear of the unknown. I can't physically see this. I can't physically put it in a cage if it gets crazy. So I think there's that just human fundamental, um, interaction part of it.

But then there is also, yes. The fear of it's going to take my job. It's going to take over the world. And I love the analogy that you use bringing it back to robotics because that's a that's a big kind of line is is [00:12:00] I think there's a big line between AI and robotics. Those are 2 very separate. We could go on, but you really did a great job blending them and saying that we're not trying to take people's jobs.

We're trying to allow people the time and bandwidth to do what is unique to them. Now, I'm not saying that putting a car tire, putting a tire on a car on the assembly line is not a unique thing, but I do hold in my heart that that person is given the chance and opportunity could give a bigger gift to the world.

And it's very similar to that with AI and not to, not to say it in a, in a weird way, but

Gillian Utesch: I have realized I've been able to give a lot more to the world because I was historically coming home from work, exhausted, and I felt satisfied with that exhaustion because I had worked all day, I'd eaten lunch at my desk, I'd cut my bathroom breaks down to 90 seconds.

I had truly worked everything I had, Not realizing I hadn't worked everything I [00:13:00] had because 20 percent of what I had done, I didn't need to do. It wasn't unique to my, to my human talent. So what could I have done with that 20 percent capacity if I wasn't using it for essential but repetitive mundane tasks?

So once I realized, and that was never the agenda. When I was kind of making my pros and cons list of, okay, how do I move forward from here? How do I, how do I rebuild after COVID? Never once did I put on my paper, I want to have more mental bandwidth so that I can be an even better version of myself. And it seems a little odd to say in one sentence, we're going to use technology.

Especially an invisible technology that in my situation acts as a digital version, a digital replica of ourselves. I'm going to use this to be a better human. It just, that part really has a disconnect for people, but it's 100 percent true.

Leighann Lovely: Well, it is. And here's, here's a perfect. So I have an Alexa. I don't want to [00:14:00] say that too loud.

She'll start talking to me, but I have, you know, I have that in my house, right? And here's just a simple example of how much more efficient we are as a family with having that in my house. Now, some people are diehard against that. They're like, Oh, you know what? She's listening to everything we say. She knows everything.

You know, every time we talk about, Okay. X, Y, Z, then I get an advertise on my phone. Okay, well, yes, so there is, there's that, and it's creepy and I don't like it, but it is, it's the way of the world. You know, if I search on my phone for a bicycle, all of a sudden I get advertisements for bicycles. Yes, that's a real thing.

It's an algorithm that once you've searched something, all of a sudden it's picked up somewhere. And now I'm getting ads for Can I, can I overcome that? Sure. I can look on incognito every time I look on my phone. Right. But I do have in my house. So when I, when my husband and I are flitting around the kitchen, I don't have a grocery list that I write things down.

I tell Alexa, I'm saying that quietly so [00:15:00] that she doesn't start talking to me. I tell her to put something on the grocery list. Right. And then I If my husband needs to stop at the store, he can look up on that app really quick of all of the other things that we need and pick them up. He doesn't have to go, can you take a picture of the grocery list so that I know what else we have.

It is, it makes my life so much easier. That is technology that is being used all, like, all the time. If I tell her to turn on the lights, she can turn on the lights that are connected to her in my house. That's just a small piece of technology that's making people's lives more efficient and easier.

Now, I know people on the other side of the, of, you know, the fence who are like, Absolutely, never have it in my house, won't. We've all seen the horror movies now that are coming out with, you know, the AI people or the AI technology. Yes, there's always a worst case scenario and the truth somewhere in the middle.

On how more efficient [00:16:00] we can become as a society and we have seen this coming on from the day that I got my first cell phone and I'll date myself and age myself now because I was like 19 19 years old when I got my first and it was like a brick, you know, the big huge phone where you're like, yeah, I got my cell.

I have to buy a bigger purse in order to carry it. But that the technology is just yeah. It's ever evolving, and that's the way it's supposed to be. As a society, this is just the next step. And by the time my children, my child, I don't have, I have one. By the time my child is my age, I mean, I'm gonna guess that her entire house is going to be Walk into a room and the lights will go on.

That already exists. It's just not for the general. We now have electrical cars. There's going to come a time where those electrical cars you just literally get into and they're going to be smart to who's in the car based on the smell, weight, what, I don't know. The [00:17:00] point being is that in a world where we're constantly running from one end to the next all the time, And we created this world, by the way, efficiencies are a gift.

They're absolutely a gift that we can, if we can give it to somebody to say, Hey, this will cut down two hours of having to type up an email because you can now just say, Hey, whatever that tool is called, please compose an email to so and so based on our previous communication. And that can look at that and see the style of communication we have, the tone of communication we've had in the past, and it can appropriately do that in a matter of the snap of a finger.

How much more efficient would we be?

Gillian Utesch: When you talk about efficiency, that makes me think about time.

Leighann Lovely: Yes.

Gillian Utesch: And when we come back to, and I [00:18:00] say come back to because, Oddly, through my AI journey, I have come back to so many basic things. Come back to basic as in your network, and it's all in who you know. It's not about how many times you post, and do you post at the exact magical times for each platform, and does your content have this exact set of magical words that tickle the left brain of this person, the right brain of this person.

That's not it at all.

Gillian Utesch: It is completely back to basics and with the efficiency comes time. If someone said, Hey, you can have a million dollars, but you have a week to live. Wow, no one's going to pick the money because it life is so much more than that. And that just resonates back to as driven as we are as a society, especially here in the U.

1. Everyone would still pick time. So starting from that very basic, that very basic feeling. It makes sense that we would choose time in our day over the fear of [00:19:00] something that we don't understand or that we can't see. And so I have loved embracing the journey and learning just from the examples that you gave.

But then on the AI side, how can these take, how can AI take tasks off my plate that give me time to either spend with my family? Right. Or time to simply think, and these weren't luxuries that we had before. The luxury of taking time to, I would never have blocked off time on my calendar time to think, you just don't do that.

And like you would've, I would. You would've chased me with a butterfly net if I'd done that. And so, but now it has naturally progressed to that. And with that has been the very. unexpected results of, wow, what can I do as a human? What greater impact can I have by utilizing these tools that aren't super scary?

Leighann Lovely: Right, right. And, and time has become, we've, to your point, time has become such a finite thing these days that, and you're [00:20:00] right, if any, we're trying to, even employers are trying to shove more work down people's throats in less time. That's not the way to live, but being more efficient in the time is.

And the more stuff, and again, being a company who is again, all about creating processes for automation of what can we eliminate from the daily tasks that are mundane, that are repeatable, that you literally can just automate and be like, yeah, we, that process is no longer has to be manually done, gives somebody back their time.

Now. The human element of this is take that time to yourself. Don't try to shove another task in there.

Gillian Utesch: What I think too, I'm so glad you brought that up. That enters the second fear that people have with AI. The first fear is, Oh, I can't see it. I can't [00:21:00] feel it. It's going to take over the world, take over my job.

The second fear is. An expansion on the first one. Oh, gosh, is it going to take over my job? And now I'm going to have to do something better. I'm going to have to rise to the occasion to come up with truly unique ideas. And I think that realization scares people more than the fear of AI taking over.

Leighann Lovely: But the right people, the people who truly want to embrace this, that fear, that's, that's not even a fear that would enter my mind is thinking, Oh my gosh, like this can help trigger so many more brilliant ideas. If utilized in the proper way, but I agree with you, those who like to sit and I like to put people in the in different buckets, you have the people who just they go to work to make a paycheck, they don't have any interest whatsoever in what [00:22:00] they do.

It's just a job. They show up. They do their job, don't care necessarily about how well, it's literally the paycheck, right? They're punching in, they're punching out, they're going home. Then you have the people who, you know, they're, they're early usually in their career. They want to suck up all of the information.

They're still navigating and they're, they're interested. And then you have the, that, that, those people who rise to the top. And those are the, you know, the one percenters, the few, the few, you know, I usually, you see them. very quickly climb up that ladder. Usually at some point start talking about like the entrepreneurial journey, the, those are the ones who are like, are embracing.

Any and every change, rolling with it, learning, the life learners, the ones who really, those are the ones who, that fear doesn't exist within them, because they're like, what's next? [00:23:00] I can't wait to take it on. I, I really am excited about this. You know, those, the people in the middle are like, yeah, I'm excited about it, but you know, what, what, what ifs?

And they question it. We need every single one of those people. Absolutely, positively, we need them all. We need the skeptics. We didn't have the skeptics. They would be like, Oh, we're just going to run with everything. Okay. Well, we, we, we need, we need to balance this out a little bit because it would be chaos if everybody was just like, yeah, let's just jump in, you know, every single time, but those, we have those groups of people who are like, yeah, let's absolutely take on.

And I forgot the point of this, but, Yeah. The lifelong learners, there, there isn't, there's not the fee, because they take the time to educate themselves. And when there is an unknown, they try to discover all there is about that unknown, and then they'll try it. And they'll continue to try [00:24:00] and continue to learn.

And that's why I don't, I don't have that fear

because I educate myself.

Gillian Utesch: I'm glad you mentioned educate because there is so much knowledge and misknowledge, we'll say, about AI, what it can do, where it's going, and it changes very quickly. Even though I'm in the field and I try to stay hip on it, there's a lot changing. And it's so, I am not, I did not build my software.

I built the idea of my software and I designed it in Canva and I then gave it to someone and said, make this picture a sandcastle so I can see how that, how that can kind of correspond. But I forgot where I was going now, my ADD kicked in. I used to keep a whiteboard on my computer so I could quickly jot stuff down to keep my, to keep my thought process in.

Oh, I, I have, I have lists.

Leighann Lovely: You should see this desk. There's there's it's covered. [00:25:00] It's absolutely covered with lists upon lists upon lists. But you create, you created the idea. And that's all it takes, Jillian, is that there's somebody out there who has that sparked with the idea of what could be. And then somebody smart enough to build it.

But now I have the question here. You, you built it. You've

Gillian Utesch: accidentally,

Leighann Lovely: accidentally. You built it based on what you didn't want to have to do anymore.

Gillian Utesch: There were tasks. I knew were necessary, but I did not, did not, could not make myself do them. And as I drug my heels along month after month, my business just continued to just spiral down, spiral down until it was finally at the bottom.

And I started looking at AI was, was very, very new. It was very kind of underground at the time. I felt like it was the [00:26:00] verge of the floppy disk. Like, Oh, you can save something and take it to another computer. Like it was that alien to me. And. All this, all the offerings I found, they just did not feel like me.

They felt cringey. It didn't feel authentic to how I would do that task as a human, and I would, that then left me still at the same impasse. I didn't wanna do it myself, and I didn't wanna use these tools to do it either. Well, now what? Now? Now, where do you go? Okay, if I had a wand and I could fix this, what would it look like?

 I can't. Take my phone and stream to my apple TV. I am not techie, but I knew the problems I had. I knew how I wanted to construct the solution. I then just needed a partner who could build that. And that kind of comes back to the human connection. It took both of us to work together with our individual human uniqueness to build this software to do this task.

It wasn't something that I just did. All by myself.

Leighann Lovely: Right. And [00:27:00] that's where it, this all ties back to the human, the human condition, this thing that we're seeing all desperately trying to grasp onto, right? Is that I can sit in this room that I'm sitting in right now in my home office. I'm completely alone in my home office, but I can connect to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world if I wanted to, not all at one time, but I can connect my desperate desires to connect with humans is to be.

And because of the world after COVID, after all of that, we were so separated. And, you know, the human condition is that we need other humans. But there's a lot of stuff that we don't necessarily need, and that's what we get through these tools.

Gillian Utesch: There's a lot of steps in between connecting. Right. It is [00:28:00] not just walking into the Starbucks anymore.

There's a lot of steps from Raleigh, North Carolina to Haiti, or to, you know, South Africa. I thought I had a very strong network because I could fit, it goes back to the seen and unseen. I could physically see them. I could meet them at conferences. I had a strong network. If I was going to play Red Rover, I could see who was on my team and I knew we were going to win.

Translate that to a virtual network. It's a little bit difficult to know exactly. Okay, who is here? What is their skill set? How can we go together? But that's where the connection comes and having the free time in your schedule and the mental bandwidth to really and truly invest in those relationships versus using your time to invest in scrolling for hours or cutting and pasting for hours.

It is. It remains this. I live in. I find myself kind of in awe that utilizing technology and technology as polarizing as AI can [00:29:00] actually create such a stronger human to human interaction.

Leighann Lovely: Yeah, and you said something that everybody else right now is going, well, how does AI do that? How do I have a , stronger human connection with AI?

Gillian Utesch: It takes out the noise, and it reduces the timeline.

Gillian Utesch: So in a relationship, there's both people. And even if there was no AI, and you were a person who was number one top on your game, which none of us are, at least not every day, then you're also depending on the person you're trying to connect with to be 100 percent on their game.

That's an even stronger stretch. Now we want an even larger number of folks to kind of be these A plus humans, which is exhausting. So in that timeline, yeah, I may not check my email. for three or four days because I'm just tired, or, oh, I may not respond to that LinkedIn message. I just don't want to. When you multiply that over your life, how much time was lost in those transactions?

Whereas utilizing avatars to do the logical next step in a very [00:30:00] sequential and efficient order leads us to the part no human would put off the opportunity to talk face to face with someone. They, you want, that's what we crave to do. We are supposed to live in packs. We're supposed to engage with each other.

This isn't a task that you want to procrastinate, but golly gee, if you tell me, okay, it's the numbers game, which we know it is. If you said, okay, Jillian, you need to reach out to a thousand people on LinkedIn if you want 10 of them to respond to you. Oh, but if you said you have 10 people every month that are new, that want to talk to you, that sounds super exciting because the noise is out of that statement and the time it took a month to get there, not three months to get there.

Leighann Lovely: That's the exact explanation that I was hoping to hear is that, you know, this isn't a, Hey, I'm going to send my avatar out there and just spam everybody. No, it's going to go out there and identify the right people to have the right conversations with in order to, and it's going to remove that part [00:31:00] where I'm trying to figure out who is the right person.

Who is the. But it's going to lead me to eventually having that real interaction with the right person at the right time for both of us.

Gillian Utesch: Yeah. And I'm glad you said both that has been when I was going through COVID was a very, I didn't realize it, but it was a very transformative time for me and kind of like growing my business.

I didn't know I was going through the transformation as it was happening. I just knew when I arrived at the end, Oh, wow, I'm a different butterfly than I went in. Same thing with my business. Oh, I'm a different business than, than what I started out to be. And so that's kind of been interesting, but I realized in COVID that I'm really an introvert.

Which was shocking to me and everyone, because I lived this persona. I said, okay, I'm in sales and marketing. I have to put myself out there. I have to go to every wine and cheese night. I have to do this. Even though it was just emotionally. Now I like people, but it was still emotionally draining for me.

Right? And so having that [00:32:00] detox with Covid, I. And many other very similar things like that. I realized who I was because I could be myself with no outside influence, no outside judgment. I just organically became the shape of clay I wanted to be versus the shape of clay that the pressure of the world around me was pushing me into.

And so with that came purpose. I didn't know to what capacity that purpose would be, but I knew I wanted all of my choices to be. Um, and so I wanted to be able to have purpose in them and to be something that really reflected my heart and what I wanted to do. And so kind of using those as my drivers, I wanted to have connection with people.

I wanted to connect people together. That is another thing I love. I love being the person who, Oh, I got a guy. Oh, I know somebody. Oh, I've got the best. I love off. I love. That's like my honest, unofficial role in the world. I'm sorry, my unofficial role in the world. I love to provide that, but not having a virtual network, I wasn't able to do that.

So that was a part of my love cup, my personal love cup, [00:33:00] that wasn't filled because I wasn't able to do that for others. So utilizing AI and our AI avatars to help me get back in that arena, that has been huge in fulfilling my human, my human love cup in connecting and connecting people.

Leighann Lovely: That's that's so I love when I hear you know that those types of stories like it's just it's amazing and and and I agree like I my digital network has and understand that I started on LinkedIn from.

Like the days of like, Oh my God, LinkedIn is brand new when, when you actually, this is, this is hilarious. We used to have parties called LinkedIn parties. And the whole purpose of this was to go to introduce yourself to people. And then at the end, you'd be like, all right, so we should connect on LinkedIn.

Right. And that was like, so you had to meet people in person and then it was, so let's connect on LinkedIn. So we didn't just randomly reach out to people on LinkedIn. We met [00:34:00] them first, then connected. It seems kind of backwards now, doesn't it? But this was the day, yes, right. But this was like LinkedIn was brand, brand, brand, brand, brand new.

So my network. I have a very large, you know, network on LinkedIn and, you know, some of those connections go back to like day one of like when LinkedIn just, and I'm still in contact with them and it's, it's funny to think like, Oh my God, we've met in person, but that was like, so again, I'm dating myself anyways, that, but I love, I love, you know, what you just said that was just so well, Put and we are coming to time.

Leighann Lovely: So I, I do want to offer you the opportunity for your 32nd shameless pitch. Because I do with everybody, but Jillian, this has been such an awesome conversation. I can see the passion. I can hear the passion in your voice and, um, yeah, so 32nd. [00:35:00]

Gillian Utesch: I first thank you for letting me come on and share this journey because I, I live, I'm realizing I'm not unique.

I'm not special. If I've gone on this journey or someone else is maybe thinking about going on this journey, I'm glad that I could share this to maybe motivate and inspire them to say, it's okay. Come on over to the AI side. The water's not cold. There's no sharks. It'll be okay. The music's playing. I just, I love that.

I also want to invite anyone to check out our YouTube channel, brokenglassceilingmarketing. com. I like, I'm nosy because I'm a southern girl and I like to know how things work, how they go together. So I do a lot of loom videos showing how we construct our avatars, how our avatars interact as your digital footprint so that folks can see that and kind of get a better, because it's, it's, it's interesting.

I say, okay, we're going to build an invisible, an invisible version of you. Put them out on the internet and let them go make friends for you. That sounds absolutely silly beans. So I like folks to see that so [00:36:00] they can feel confident. And also my personal website, JillianUtash. com, I talk about all kinds of crazy things, recipes, organizing things that I like, stories that I've met because we are a comp, we are a total of our connections.

So stories I've heard from my girlfriends and friends along the way that have helped shape me into the human. I like to feature those and talk about those as well.

Leighann Lovely: Awesome. Again, Jillian, thank you so very, very, very much. I will have where you can reach out to Jillian on your show notes. So please don't hesitate to check the show notes for that information.

And again, this has been an amazing conversation.

Gillian Utesch: I loved it. Thank you.