Experts Perspective

I sat down with Rachel Minion, founder of Rockstarr and Moon, for an episode of Marketing for SMEs. Rachel spent 20 years in marketing, including a stretch as director of marketing at Ticketmaster, before building a marketing agency around solving one of the most common blind spots in small business: key man risk.

The conversation covers five hires that failed before she found what worked, and how she eventually automated 90% of her most critical role using systems and AI instead of another hire.

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Introduction

Jeremy: Okay guys, welcome back to another episode. Today I’m here with Rachel Minion of Rockstarr and Moon. Rachel, welcome to the show.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful.

Jeremy: No, I’m grateful to have you here. So you’ve been in the game for about 20 years, and you were the director of marketing at Ticketmaster, right?

Rachel: Director of marketing. Yeah, of Ticketmaster.

Jeremy: So I’d love to hear your backstory, because today in this episode we’re going to address one of the biggest problems in small businesses, which is key man risk. Meaning if you have a right-hand person, or if you yourself are stuck in the business, you know the cliché about how you’ve got yourself a job, chained to the desk, can’t go on holiday.

Rachel has actually come up with a product that’s going to replace 8 to 9, how many people do you end up replacing with your marketing product?

Rachel: Seven people.

Jeremy: Seven people. There you go. I have a team of nine, and this is what’s intriguing. So love to hear the backstory, then we can get into the stuff we’re gonna talk about.

Rachel: So I grew up in the world of small businesses. My family had a business, my grandfather had a business. I started my marketing agency after my family’s business closed during the recession.

I always expected it was going to be a side hustle while I grew my career, so I kept it going, bringing on some clients on the side, and I finally had my dream job, running marketing for a division of Ticketmaster. My first year at Ticketmaster we saw 275 different artists.

I thought I had my ultimate dream job, and then the pandemic hit. There’s no events, you don’t need the staff at Ticketmaster. I was on a Zoom call and 80% of us were furloughed effective immediately.

Jeremy: So going back a second, the first one was the global financial crisis, right?

Rachel: Yep. I was running my parents’ business for about 10 years and we were growing it. Then 2008 hit in the US, the bubble burst in real estate, and everything changed financially.

Our clients were printers, and the government printing office shut down, that meant they weren’t getting the work they needed, so they weren’t able to pay us. One of our largest clients, Ritz Camera, went bankrupt during this time. We stuck it out until April 2010, when we were forced to close our doors.

Being a woman in the printing industry, no one believed I had the street cred to run production, do estimating, set up systems, do e-commerce. So that’s where I created my agency.

Jeremy: And then fast forward to the pandemic in 2020.

Rachel: I’d built my career, I was having the best time, and I still had my agency on the side, always meant to be that side hustle.

When they furloughed us, the first thing I did was call clients: “You know how I put your work on hold? Let’s start doing it.” I went full-time effective immediately.

Jeremy: Was it just you at that point?

Rachel: Just me. Originally I’m sitting down with my husband, saying “this isn’t a big deal, right?” He was laid off at the same time. He said, “You’re trading time for money. You’re never going to be able to succeed like this.”

About six months in, I looked at him and said, “You’re right, I can’t work any more hours.” So my husband joined the company at that point, and we started scaling and building teams.

The First Hires That Failed

Jeremy: One thing that stood out for me on our pre-call was the high standard of work, anyone who goes to rockstarrandmoon.com can tell you’re careful and meticulous. Do you have experience hiring from different parts of the world, and what that’s like?

Rachel: Our first hire was out of Texas. We’d worked with him before, brought him in as a sales capacity, he knew the industry, knew what we do. It was the biggest fail.

There was a lack of motivation, a lack of drive, a lack of ability to push the business forward. We’d get on a call and I’d have to take notes for him. I’m the boss taking notes on what he needs to do, that doesn’t make sense. We decided to part ways.

At that point I said, I need the most driven person I can find. They don’t need to know my business, I can teach that. So we worked with agencies out of the US, ended up working with Latin America.

We found one person who was amazing, as driven as me, loved the clients as much as I did. She didn’t want to do sales, but she loved to write. So I taught her everything, the knowledge base, how to deliver the standard my clients expect. She stayed a long time.

Rachel: Right. If clients don’t get me, or somebody challenging them and being brutally honest, they don’t like an order taker. Order takers are everywhere, and they’re not worth the money.

The VP of Operations and the Dog Attack

Rachel: We had a huge team, and every time we start growing, something happens. I needed to bring in a director of operations, a VP who could take load off my plate.

Probably the most expensive hire we had, we were paying her more than we were making ourselves.

About two months after bringing her in, there was a dog attack next door and my hands were mangled, bitten by the dog, which also killed my mom’s dog. There was an infection, doctor’s appointments, hand therapy.

Because of that, I handed off my client calls to her. Three of our biggest clients left us within a month.

Jeremy: I want to pause you right there, stories like that, you don’t hear. People reframe it, put a polished post up.

I lose clients sometimes too, and it’s painful because clients are hard to come by. People say “work on the business, not in your business,” but if you’re not working your business and someone does that to you, you might not have a business.

Rachel: I didn’t realize the level my clients expected until that happened.

Bringing on a Writer and the ChatGPT Discovery

Rachel: We had a team that was offshore doing production, but I wasn’t getting the writing quality I expected, English wasn’t the first language, so the writing didn’t always land right, even from highly qualified people.

So we brought on a writer in California, one of the hardest states to work with employees in, lots of rules and regulations, even as a part-timer she had to be treated as a full employee.

A lot of things happened. Medical issues, then the fires, then more medical issues, and she didn’t show up for about a month. We decided to part ways amicably.

We brought in another writer in the US after that. There’s a moment where you can tell somebody is calling it in, she was using words we’d flagged as “never do this” in the client bible, writing in a way that didn’t match her usual style.

I asked what was going on. She said, “I just got ChatGPT and thought I could do this better and faster.” I’d had enough.

Losing a Key Person After Three Years

Rachel: We went back to just myself and my key person, three years in at that point, doing all the writing, with the rest of the team handling analytics and admin.

She decided we should start scaling again with a new offer. She looked at it and said, “That’s going to bring in a lot of people. I quit.”

Over three years of intrinsic knowledge working hand in hand with me, I could start a sentence and before I got halfway there, she’d already finished the thought or gotten it into production. No one can just read my mind like that.

I understood, she wanted to get married, have a family, and there’s a level of stress in a role like that. I set her up for her next role, gave recommendations.

Internally, I was freaking out. I said to my husband, “I don’t know how to hire this role. How do you hire a mind reader?”

He said, “We’re not going to. You can’t hire one person to do all the things you’ve trained her to do over three years. What if you just automate 20% of her? Then we can change the entire role of what we’re hiring for.”

Automating 90% of the Role in 21 Days

Rachel: I may have cussed him out, I had no idea what I was doing. I went to bed pretty mad and woke up at 3am, which is my time.

I came into my office, turned on all the lights, and started rebuilding my business from the ground up. I redid every product, documented every process, built brand kits and knowledge bases for every client, every single thing that was in my head went into writing.

I took everything we were reactive about, social posts, newsletters, emails, and put it into the system as tasks. Within 21 days I’d also automated how tasks get into the system, how they get assigned, dependencies, all of it.

Jeremy: So 21 days as in you were doing this night and day?

Rachel: 3am to 7pm, seven days a week, plus still taking client calls, responding to emails, doing production. It was my living hell, but in 21 days I’d automated about 90% of her, and I didn’t need to hire anymore.

Jeremy: So do you code?

Rachel: I have no idea how to code. I’m process-driven, 20 years of experience, I know how big companies work, I’ve seen workflow pipelines.

I can project what’s coming and anticipate a client’s next question, which juniors can’t do well. That’s what went into the system, not coding knowledge.

I started with the simplest things: if this person knew every expectation I had, how do I document it so it’s met immediately? How do I make sure everybody follows the exact same process? I hate instructions, I hate process more than anybody, but if the team isn’t doing everything the same way, the output looks terrible.

I documented every single thing I had, then looked at ClickUp, I already knew it well, and asked, what can I do with this? This was before ClickUp had AI and automation built in.

For example, we used to manually send weekly wrap-ups to clients. We moved to exporting from ClickUp into a document, pushing it into a Google Sheet, then emailing it. Then we brought in a dashboard view so clients could see everything 24/7. It changed the game and took hours out of preparation every week.

From ClickUp to Claude Cowork: Building Rockstarr AI

Jeremy: Yesterday you kept correcting me, it’s not a service, it’s a product. Why does that distinction matter?

Rachel: This is iteration one, automating one person, my project manager, getting into delivery and review. That’s phase one.

Come January this year, Claude Cowork started doing things I’d never experienced before. My husband said, “You gotta try Cowork.” I said, “I don’t want to learn another technology, I’m confident in what I have.” He said, “Just try it, try to break some things.”

I took every task, every process, every brand kit, every client bible, and made a knowledge base for every client. Then I built in each of our frameworks and skills, and how and why we do things. I fully automated my entire team.

That’s phase two, higher production, faster, better quality, no back-and-forth in review cycles. One of my clients this past year got a 93% increase in profit year over year.

Jeremy: So let’s talk suitability.

Rachel: This is a marketing department in a box. If you’re an agency owner doing $500K to $1M with an offshore team, absolutely suitable, you already know ClickUp and a bit of instruction-writing.

But we took ClickUp out of it. Version one was me playing in ClickUp. Version two was Claude Cowork.

Version three, releasing by the end of the month, is a self-contained product with the marketing team built in, here’s the task it’s doing, here’s the approvals, here’s production, and you approve everything.

What Rockstarr AI Can and Can’t Replace

Rachel: Can you use it as a marketing department? Absolutely, for certain things. It will never replace ads, you need a person there, you need that genius behind it.

Mistakes are costly, and the bigger problem is the algorithm changes constantly. What’s working today won’t work tomorrow. So ads, no.

But everything else, case studies, emails, social posts, blogs, even a website, landing page suggestions, prospect research, sales ops.

I do my prospecting on LinkedIn. Separate tech gets the connections and sends sequences, but my system gets me the meetings after that, follow-up, all of it, though I approve everything first.

Before a call it does all the research on the person, so I show up five minutes before knowing if they’re my ideal client, their pain points, what they’re posting about. After the call it takes the transcript, pushes it into the CRM, and preps my follow-up email.

Jeremy: So is it replacing a project management tool?

Rachel: Sort of, depends how your organization works. It has its own internal project management for the things it handles.

It’s going to replace the admin for sales ops, VAs, and the pieces of a marketing department where people aren’t needed at a higher strategic level. I don’t need somebody to sit and write a social post, an organic post isn’t going to bring your next client.

But if it’s written in your voice with your knowledge base, it can do solid thought leadership.

If you don’t have a knowledge base, you can use ChatGPT all day and it’s going to suck, you’ll be fighting with it. The IP behind our system is years of testing across hundreds of clients, refining the methodology.

Pricing and Positioning

Rachel: We’re pre-launch and talk about pricing openly, $5K setup to build your knowledge base, then $500 a month.

That replaces multiple tools, project management, email tools, outreach tools. HubSpot alone can be $20K a year for certain contact volumes.

Jeremy: Can we go after highly competitive niches, mortgage brokers, buyers agents?

Rachel: Ads agencies are a good example, the only way we get jobs is by yelling loud and promising ROAS on the first call, which doesn’t differentiate you. We need to fix your positioning.

It’s not about promising the best ROAS, nobody cares, because everyone’s promising the world with guarantees that aren’t worth anything.

What you need is to position yourself so you know their business better than they do, here’s what we’ve done, here’s the case studies, here’s the plan.

Jeremy: How do people get the first bite of the apple before jumping in at $5K?

Rachel: Come to rockstarrandmoon.com, find Rockstarr AI, book a demo, we’ll walk through it. If you’re not interested in technology or marketing and have spent money on tools you never use, we’re probably not the right choice.

But if you want a marketing team without hiring an agency or bringing someone internal, we’re the right fit. We specialize in B2B founders, that’s who we built this for.

• Key man risk shows up when critical knowledge lives in one person’s head. Rachel’s three-year employee could finish her sentences, but when she quit, that intrinsic knowledge walked out the door too.
• Documentation came before automation, not after. She rebuilt her business by writing down every expectation, process, and client bible entry before she ever touched a system to automate it.
• Ninety percent of a critical role was automated in 21 days, using ClickUp first, then rebuilt on Claude Cowork once it could handle far more of the actual thinking work.
• Paid ads was the one thing she wouldn’t automate, because mistakes are costly and algorithms shift too fast for a static system to keep pace.

This conversation is from Marketing for SMEs with Jeremy Yang, helping Australian SMEs get more out of Google Ads, Meta Ads, and the systems behind them. Listen on your preferred podcast app, or watch on YouTube.