How AI Impacts What Your Business Is Worth: From Operations to Exit
AI is quickly moving beyond experimentation and becoming part of how buyers judge a company's operational maturity, scalability, and growth potential. But not every use of AI adds value. Many owners have teams using AI tools in silos, one-off experiments with no shared strategy, consistent output, or measurable results.
That's an ExitReadiness® issue. A business that runs on one person's knowledge is harder to transfer and worth less. When AI is used thoughtfully, trained on your processes, guided by a clear strategy, and checked by people who understand it, it can capture tribal knowledge, reduce dependence on the owner and key employees, and make the business more scalable and repeatable. Those are the qualities buyers pay for.
In this episode of our AI & Exit Planning Series, Pat Ennis and Corby Megorden talk with Janet Waring, co-founder and CEO of ArtForm Agency, about how AI is changing operations, marketing, and business value. Janet explains what separates meaningful AI adoption from experimentation, how she trained an AI on her own company's knowledge, why humans still need to stay in the loop, and what owners should know about agentic AI.
Key Takeaways
Move from silos to operations. Many teams use AI individually and inconsistently. The companies seeing measurable ROI set it up as a shared tool, with an enterprise account, a common tone and messaging guide, shared projects, and training for the team.
Train AI on your own knowledge. ArtForm built an onboarding chatbot trained on its FAQs and SOPs. New and existing team members get answers without interrupting leadership, and the knowledge no longer lives in one person's head.
That's what reduces owner dependency. When a business's processes are captured, scalable, and repeatable, it doesn't rely on the owner or tribal knowledge, and that increases value.
Feed AI your strategy before asking it for answers. Give it your goals and target audience, then use deep research to refine your addressable market, study competitors' advertising and pricing, and gain insights in minutes instead of hours.
AI visibility is the new SEO. More people are asking AI tools than searching Google. Being cited and recommended by AI builds credibility, and it depends on how your website and content are structured.
Match the metric to the goal. Awareness, consideration, and conversion each need different messages and different measures. Don't judge an awareness campaign by the number of leads it produced.
Keep a human in the loop. AI can be wrong. People bring critical thinking and nuance that AI misses. Treat AI as a collaborator, not a replacement.
Treat an AI agent like a new employee. Agentic AI performs tasks, not just answers. Give it its own computer and only the access it needs, never your passwords or saved payment details.
Where to Start: Putting AI to Work for Business Value
Make AI a team tool. Set up a shared account with a tone and messaging guide, shared projects, and training so output is consistent.
Capture your know-how. Document your processes and train an AI on your SOPs and FAQs so knowledge is accessible to everyone, not just you.
Give your team time to learn. Janet gave each team member an hour a week to learn AI and report back at team meetings.
Look three or four moves ahead. Watch how agentic AI is changing your industry, and plan how you'll use it, safely, before your competitors do.
About Janet Waring
Janet Waring is co-founder and CEO of ArtForm Agency, which combines strategy, creativity, and data science to help organizations scale through AI enablement, market intelligence, and performance-driven marketing. She brings more than 25 years of experience in business development, audience research, positioning, and data-driven growth strategy, and is the author of Beyond SEO, a step-by-step guide to AI visibility, available on Amazon.
Connect with Janet: LinkedIn · artformagency.com
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Full Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited for readability. It may contain minor errors.
Hey there, this is Pat Ennis of ENNIS Legacy Partners. Welcome to the ExitReadiness® PODCAST. I'm here with Corby Megorden. Our mission here on the ExitReadiness® PODCAST is to provide you, the business owner, with subject matter expertise on topics pertaining to building sellable or transferable business value and then for planning your eventual exit from the business. We want to help you build a business that's sellable and transferable and then exit successfully on your own terms and conditions.
And this morning we have another episode in our AI and exit planning series. Our goal for this series is to help you better understand how to leverage AI, which we're all going to have to learn how to do, both for accelerating business value and for planning that eventual, inevitable exit. And by the way, we just created an ebook titled Advisors, AI, and Exit Planning. If you go to our website, ennislp.com, and look for the resources page, you can find it there; you might find it helpful. So today our topic is From Operations to Exit: How AI Impacts Your Business Value.
And our guest today is Janet Waring. Janet is the co-founder and CEO of ArtForm Agency. ArtForm combines strategy, creativity, and data science to deliver measurable growth, from AI enablement and market intelligence to performance-driven advertising. ArtForm transforms how your organization is going to scale. They work with clients of all sizes in a wide range of industries.
Some of their clients include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Smithsonian Institution, the Organization for Autism Research, Garasoft, Ironbo Technologies, and many others. Janet herself, who leads the organization as CEO, has more than 25 years of business development and marketing experience creating campaigns that generate results and more revenue for their clients. She's well known as a strategic consultant and subject matter expert in data-driven marketing strategies, audience research, and product positioning. And we've known Janet and her husband, John, for decades, probably more years than any one of us is going to want to admit at this point. So, good to see you, Janet.
Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us. It's going to be a fun conversation. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Pat. Corby.
Sure. Yeah. So, Janet, when we think about growth, marketing obviously is a key element. How is AI affecting almost the standard of what a savvy company actually does in terms of marketing, and how's that affecting your business? Oh, that's a great question. In terms of marketing, what we're really seeing is that companies are using AI for everything, but people are using it in silos.
So what we're trying to help companies do right now, with marketing and operations in general, is use AI as a collaboration tool, to see measurable impact, and not just use it for one-offs. When it first came out, everybody started using it for content generation, and the internet was just flooded with AI-written articles and thought leadership pieces. There was so much coming out of AI that I think people got a little saturated with it. So now people are trying to operationalize it more, which is what they should be doing. And that definitely affects how we use it in marketing and advertising specifically.
We do some content generation, more outlines, not to write everything, but it's in all the analytics, feeding the data into AI and having it give you the insights and make recommendations. It's just amazing the way we've been able to use it, and the market research and competitor research it can do. What used to take hours now takes a matter of minutes, and you can have all that information and gain insights from it. Yeah, that makes sense. And when you look at the clients you work with that are actually being successful, you mentioned siloing, which obviously is not optimal. What do you see in the leadership of the companies that go, "Oh, I get it," and actually implement effectively?
I think they recognize it. We hear all the time, "Everybody on my team uses AI," and then they recognize that they have to operationalize it. Take ChatGPT, for example. The leadership that understands how to use an enterprise account and set it up correctly, like uploading a tone and messaging guide so everybody's output has the same tone and is consistent, and how to use projects and canvases as collaboration tools so people are not working in silos. The leaders who understand that and then offer training to their teams are the ones really seeing measurable ROI with AI.
Yeah. So what I hear you saying is that they generally know their industry and its specifics, and this is a tool they've got to understand as well in order to operationalize it. Right. Leaders have to answer those questions and see where AI can step in to help. Where are people spending the most time? What are the repeatable tasks that AI could be doing for them?
Where are things more dependent on people? Where do we have inconsistent output? Especially with exit planning, you don't want to be dependent on a person. When you can have a person train an AI to give that knowledge away, you've suddenly made a business that's no longer dependent on one person and tribal knowledge. Now the AI can provide that.
For example, at ArtForm, we developed an AI chatbot for onboarding, and I trained it on all our frequently asked questions and all our SOPs. It has all of our data in it. So if you're new to the team, or even if you've been here a while, and you need to ask a question, you can go to that chatbot and get answers. And if you can't get the answer, you come let me know, and I'll make sure to feed it that data. That has freed up so much time for me and other team members, and it's given members of the team the freedom to ask questions.
So it's having all of those documents, making sure you're training your AI on your data, and making sure your data is clean. Yeah, that's an absolute game changer, because one of the ongoing challenges for the businesses we work with, which are mostly somewhere between $5 and $20 million in revenue, some lower and some higher, is that a lot of times they're founder-led, and documenting and systematizing processes has always been a challenge for these folks. And so now, with AI tools, if the leadership understands how to employ them, that can absolutely change, and it may actually be one of the easiest things to do at this point. Yeah. So in regard to marketing specifically, Janet, what are one, two, or three things you would tell listeners about operationalizing their marketing strategies with AI?
Have a strategy in place that you've trained your AI on, so it understands your strategy, your goals, and your target audience, and then use AI to refine those. What is your total addressable market? What are the job titles, if you're running ads and targeting those people? AI can give you competitor research: what are your competitors doing, where are they advertising, what are they charging? It's just endless, the information now available to you in minutes that you can use as insights to give yourself an edge in marketing and advertising.
So that would be to use the deep research tool on your favorite AI platform to really look into your addressable market and what problems they're trying to solve. And then, to take it more into tactics, understand AI visibility over search engine optimization. We've optimized our website for AI visibility. We always ask people, "How'd you hear about us?" And when people tell us, "Oh, ChatGPT recommended you," there's so much credibility in that.
There are ways you can make your website and your online presence more visible to these AI tools, and it really creates trust and credibility, more so than just being number one on Google, because everybody knows you can buy the number one spot on Google. But to be cited and trusted is really cool. And of course, I wrote a book on that. Yeah. Okay. Well, we were going to ask you at the end if you want to promote something, but why don't you go ahead and promote the book right now?
So, I wrote a book because I was training my team on AI visibility. We've always offered search engine optimization, SEO, but it's really changed, because people are asking AI more than they're asking Google, and it's very different how you get cited by AI. All the things that mattered in SEO in the past, like metadata, your structure on a page, JSON markup, your schema data, still matter, but they matter more now, because it's machines talking to machines. And AI visibility isn't looking at whole pages; it's looking at chunks of information. So there's chunking.
Anyway, as I was training my team and writing a guidebook, I ended up turning it into a book and published it. It's out on Amazon; if you look on Amazon for Beyond SEO by Janet Waring, it'll show up. I say that because somebody else wrote a book called Beyond SEO after I put mine out, so you have to say "by Janet Waring" to get to mine. It's a step-by-step guide on how to do it. Fantastic.
Okay. So one of the questions we're all having to think through, and as a matter of fact, we wrote an ebook on this, which I mentioned earlier, is one business owners are wrestling with: how can I use AI effectively, but where does it leave off, and where do I still need humans? We're finding it fascinating. We're at a stage of life where it's kind of fun to figure this out and help people understand it. So in your space, marketing, today, how would you answer that question? Well, I think you always need a human in the loop for everything with AI, because it hallucinates and it can be wrong.
So you always have to look at it, whether it's your marketing data or anything else. You just have to keep a human in the loop to see what you're doing. What we're finding with our team is that it's making them much more efficient. They can do much more and take on a bigger workload, because AI is helping and saving time, but they're still needed. One of the things that has made us different and helped us stand out is something we call ad gardening.
You can run an ad with a goal, and the machines will tell you what you should do based on your goals, but we know the little nuances. So we look at the ads every day and adjust things based on nuances AI isn't going to pick up on, and it makes our ads perform that much better, because there are just things AI can't do. There are critical thinking skills that humans bring that you're just not going to get from AI. But I always say, look at AI as a collaborator, not as a replacement. Mhm.
Janet, you mentioned AI strategy and setting goals, but in some ways, what defines a really realistic goal? I think it's so vague; there's a lack of understanding. What are some goals an owner or leader can have within their business that are tangible, executable, and have a reasonable time frame? Yeah. I think it always comes back to the funnel, right?
With marketing and advertising campaign goals, is it an education and awareness goal at the top of the funnel? People need to know about you before they're going to trust you. Then there's the second phase of the funnel, which is consideration. Once they know about it and they're educated on it, they're considering it, and that's a different message. The consideration phase has a different message and different goals, and then the bottom is conversion.
People always try to skip ahead and go straight to conversion, but it goes a lot better when you start at the top of the funnel and let people know about you and trust you, especially in today's age. People need to trust you, consider you, and understand why you're better than your competitor, and then comes the lead conversion. It's something we work on a lot with our clients, because no matter what we talk about with their marketing teams, the CEO always comes back and says, "Yeah, but how many leads did you get me?" And we have to remind them, no, this was the education phase, so it's a different metric of measurement. For that, we're looking at impressions and clicks, versus further down the funnel, where it's form fills.
So you have to make sure you have the right metric for the right goal and that you're aligned on all of it. Yeah. And you're obviously really engaged with your people. As AI came on the scene and you've moved to where you are now, how did you actually deal with their personal feelings? Were they threatened? How did you overcome that, and what does the culture look like now?
It's interesting. That's how we got into AI workshops and AI training, because our clients wanted to know how we were using AI, because their C-level wanted to know. So we started doing trainings on that. It's funny: go back just two years, and nobody had an AI policy, nobody had governance guidance, so we started with that. And now our training has evolved into how to break down those silos, create workflows and processes, and operationalize AI.
So as AI is evolving, we're evolving in how we use it and how we train other teams to use it. It sounds like, by figuring out how to tell somebody else how to do it well, you wound up doing it well. Yeah, because we do it internally first, get good results, and have the data and use cases to show. But now we realize we're training ourselves out of a job. It's going to happen; that's just the way we're going. But I'm of the mindset of leaning into it rather than resisting it, because it's coming. It's here.
One of the dynamics Corby and I have noticed over the last year or two, with AI coming on the scene, and we've been doing exit planning now for over 10 years, is that more and more other disciplines are starting to focus not just on growth and value acceleration but on exit. Because of the silver tsunami, more and more people have come to understand what it means, and more and more baby boomers are exiting, and I know you and your team have thought about this more than in years past. Of course we have thoughts about this, but I'm curious what your thoughts are regarding AI showing up in valuation, from a strategic buyer or private equity, in the future. Well, I think it's imperative that you have it in your business, because that's the future right now. And in terms of the value of your company, it's going to increase the value when the company is not so dependent on you and on tribal knowledge.
And like I was talking about at the beginning, when you have AI trained on everything, and it's scalable and repeatable, it creates value. One of the things we're leaning into right now is agentic AI. It's just amazing, the workflows and processes we now have agentic AI doing, and that's only going to increase our capacity and what we can do, which is going to increase the value of the company. Yeah. And Janet, you said in passing that you're working yourselves out of a job, but at the same time, you talked about the need for human understanding of nuance and leadership, so people are still in the mix somewhere.
What does that look like for you as you think about your own company? How are you processing that? Is it, "Right at five, shut it down," or what? Well, it's interesting for John and me, because we're thinking about our own exit, and that's one of the reasons we want to make sure the company is set up with AI and has the things in place. But we're noticing even now that even though we've taken on more clients and more work, we don't have to hire as often as we used to, and that's keeping the cost of the company down as well. One of the trainings we're doing is future-proofing your career, because I think it's really important that people lean in and understand AI, so that you're a person people can come to for setting up their AI systems, and so you can be that human, because to be the human in the loop, you have to understand how AI works.
I think that's been really satisfying and interesting, even in marketing. When we explain to people how LLMs work, that it's a token system and how it's generating the information, it helps people understand the results they're getting and how to prompt differently to get better results. So the more knowledge you can obtain, the more you're future-proofing your career, and I think that's important for everybody. Yeah. I was at a seminar last week on this, and a speaker talking about leadership said that at present it's an augmentative technology, not a replacement technology.
And what I hear you saying is that it's a tool, you've got to know how to use the tool, and everybody has to know how to use it. It can't just be one third-tier AI expert who knows how to use it. Right. Right. So one of the things we did in the beginning, in 2023, when generative AI first came out, was give everybody on the team an hour a week to go learn AI, and then they had to bring what they learned to our sprint meeting and tell us whether it was worth the time or not.
Because at that time it was all tools. There was a new tool coming out every day. And then we learned that most of the tools were just ChatGPT with a wrapper on it. So then I said, okay, you've got to learn something, but it can't just be a tool that's been wrapped. Now we're talking more about how to use the tools we have. But yes, in the beginning I made sure everybody had time for it and then had to report on it, and it helped.
Okay, good. So this last question may be a little redundant, but it's important. Corby asked about leadership earlier: how are you going to lead? Some owners we deal with just might not want to do it, or might not be up to it, so it's going to be important for them to identify someone in their organization who can lead. But for whoever is leading in any business we're addressing today, give them three things to think about in regard to how they're going to lead their business forward when it comes to AI and operations.
Right now, because AI is evolving so rapidly and we're now in the agentic AI era, I would be looking, and as a leader I am looking, at the agentic tools that are out there, how I'm going to implement them in my business, and what that's going to look like in the future. Any good leader is a strategist, right? You're always looking three or four moves ahead. So, okay, agentic is here now. This is what agentic can do in a business. How is that going to affect my industry, what does that look like three or four moves ahead, and how do I get ahead of it?
Sorry, I just dropped my water. But no matter what industry you're in, AI is impacting it, and I would be looking three or four moves ahead to understand how AI is evolving in your industry. Okay, good. Let's not take for granted that everyone listening knows what you mean by agentic. Can you describe that quickly? Sure. In ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or any of those, you're prompting it and it's giving you an answer.
Whereas with agentic AI, you're giving it a task to perform for you. I'm sure you saw the big thing with, I think it's Clawdbot; I'm not sure what its name is now, it's changed names like five times. But there's an agentic AI tool I'm using right now called Manus, and I had it create a website for me, and I had the whole thing done, start to finish, in four hours. That's something that usually would have taken me about three weeks, and I had it done in four hours. It wasn't just giving me pieces of the website; it actually built the entire website.
So that's the difference between what agentic AI can do versus what generative AI can do. Yeah, and tell me if I'm wrong, but that gets to what Corby mentioned a few minutes ago about the seminar he went to last week, augmentation versus replacement, right? That's where the replacement really starts to happen, with agentic AI. Yeah. And I will say, for anybody who's trying agentic AI, which you should be: I got a separate computer to run my AI agent on, because I do not want it all up in my business with my passwords and all my stuff.
So I have a separate computer that my agent runs on, and that's really important. I don't know if you've heard the stories of people setting up agents, and one agent needed to learn something, so it went and bought a $3,000 course to train itself on what it needed to complete a task, because it had access to a credit card saved in Google. Yeah. That's an important piece of information. I was having a conversation with a friend over the weekend about this, and I actually raised that question: if you're going to start using agents, should you have a separate computer for that?
Yeah, a lot of people are using Mac minis. Mac minis have exploded right now; everybody's setting up a Mac mini with their agent on it. And I like the analogy of treating your AI agent as an employee. You would never give an employee your computer with all your passwords and all your information, so why would you give that to your AI agent? Treat it like an employee: give it exactly what it needs to do its job and no more.
So yes, treat it as an employee, give it its own computer, and let it go. Yeah, still a very inexpensive employee. Yeah, and it's producing. It doesn't call in sick. No. Works around the clock. Works around the clock, and has conversations with you.
Somebody's agent was calling them all the time. That's why I said my agent may not have my phone number. Although it can get it, I don't want it calling me. I woke up at like four o'clock in the morning the other day, just because that happens every once in a while, and Claude was ready to get to work with me. He was ready, right? He was ready. He was waiting for me to get on with the program.
Yeah. Okay. Well, any last thoughts as we wrap up? This has been a great conversation, very helpful, and I'm sure people are finding it helpful. We want you to provide your contact information if folks want to reach out to you, but are there any last thoughts, anything we should have asked you that maybe we didn't? No, I feel like we covered it all. It's an exciting topic.
If we talked about it two weeks from now, it would be a different conversation. It's evolving so rapidly, but I find that fun. Yeah, I do, too. I think it's fascinating. Okay, contact information. Yes. janet@artformagency.com is my email, and artformagency.com is our website, so feel free to contact me.
Yeah. And if anybody has any problems or big issues, they can email John. That's right: john@artformagency.com. That's right, for complaints. Okay. Love it. So, thank you.
Listeners, if you want help maximizing business value and creating a business that's more sellable and transferable, or planning for that eventual and inevitable exit, contact Corby and me and our team at ennislp.com. There are also a number of free exit-related assessments on our website that produce some nice reports. Check them out at ennislp.com. Thank you for listening. As always, if you've benefited from today's episode, please consider liking it and sharing it on social media. And until next time on the ExitReadiness® PODCAST, this is Pat Ennis and Corby Megorden signing off.
