One of my clients recently watched me explain the system running behind her marketing.
Her response: “I don’t understand a word of what you just said, but thank you.”
Honestly, best review I’ve ever received. Because that’s exactly how it should work.
In this episode of The Jo Show, I’m pulling back the curtain on how I actually run McKee Creative — one strategist, eight AI agents, and a system built from my home office in the Whitsundays that handles SEO research, long-form content, social media, cold email outreach and Shopify admin across five client brands. Most of my clients barely know it exists. They see the results.
The scattered marketing problem most small businesses know too well
Five dashboards. No real answers. An email list that hasn’t been touched in months. SEO work done 18 months ago and left to starve.
This is the default state for most small product businesses — not because the owners don’t care, but because genuine joined-up marketing across paid ads, email, SEO and content is a full-time job. Usually more than one.
AI marketing for small business is the answer to that problem, done right. But “done right” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
What the AI team actually looks like
I run eight named agents, each with a defined role inside the business. They’re not chatbots. They’re not prompts I run manually when I remember to.
They run on a schedule. They monitor rankings, write content, watch ad performance and flag what needs attention. Some output goes to my inbox. Some gets implemented directly onto client sites.
The difference between using AI casually and having it do real work inside a business is enormous. I want to be straight about that.
What building this actually took
Months of things breaking. Agents confidently getting things wrong. A lot of muttering at my screen.
I think the AI credibility problem is real — there’s a gap between the way AI tools are marketed and what it actually takes to make them reliable inside a live business. You deserve to know that going in, not discover it after you’ve committed.
The system I have now works. But it didn’t work immediately, and it didn’t work without effort.
What joined-up marketing actually means
Small businesses rarely get truly integrated marketing. They get a social media manager, or an SEO agency, or someone running their ads — each operating in isolation, none of them talking to each other.
What I’ve built is a single system where every channel feeds the others. SEO research informs content. Content supports email. Email supports ads. Ads surface data that improves targeting. One strategist overseeing the whole thing, with AI doing the repeatable execution underneath.
That’s what I mean by joined-up. And it’s what small businesses have always needed but rarely been able to afford.
The cost question
I brought the cost of running this agent team from $1,000 per month in March down to $20 in April — with the same output quality, arguably better.
If that number interests you, I run a workshop covering the exact setup: the agent team structure, the tools, how I built it on Windows as a non-technical person, and how you’d build your own version. Details are in the episode.
Working with McKee Creative
If your marketing feels scattered and you’d rather hand it to someone who has already built the infrastructure, that’s what I do.
One strategist. The AI team running underneath. Results your clients notice without needing to understand a word of how it works.
