We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jenni Schrader a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jenni thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We believe kindness is contagious and so we’d love for you to share with us and our audience about the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?

Giving me the opportunity to help them grow their business. As a newer brand, I don’t take that trust or responsibility lightly, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to help my clients move the needle in their business, and I’m invested in getting them ROI for their investment.

Jenni, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I spent over a decade in hospitality, working in leadership roles across restaurants and events all over the country. During COVID I was on a temporary furlough from my job and I started volunteering with a nonprofit. Between the non-profit and learning everything I could about marketing so that I could launch my own business, that’s where my love for marketing took off.

When I went back to work I was running a restaurant team and was able to take the team from $6.9 million to $11.9 million in eight months by aligning our offer with the clientele that was actually coming through the door. After that I knew I wanted to help small business owners make those same shifts in their business, so I left my Fortune 500 job and started Scale Efficiently.

I started out helping small business owners build and sell courses. While I was doing keyword research for a client’s course landing page I discovered that their topic was being searched for approximately 14,000 times per month on AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. When I started looking at other founders I was already working with, some of them were being searched for up to 40,000 times a month on these platforms and had zero presence there. That really changed things for me.

I learned that GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), which is how businesses get found in AI- answers, was only at an 8% adoption rate but converts at 14.2%. I knew I had to learn everything I could about this and help my clients get ranked in AI search before it became widely adopted, so I pivoted Scale Efficiently to focus on AI Search and Visibility first. Then once my clients are getting seen I can help them make sure those sales are converting into sales.

At Scale Efficiently I offer search optimization packages built around AEO, GEO, and SEO. Our packages include tracking and optimizing the queries you want to rank for, AI-specific content pieces created every week so the search engines can crawl and find you, Google Business Profile management, monthly AI visibility reports, competitor search analysis, and regular calls where I walk you through exactly where you’re showing up and how you compare to your competition. We also look at your website traffic together to make sure the traffic you’re driving is actually converting so you can see real ROI.

Beyond search optimization I also work with clients on their positioning, making sure their brand, their services, and their website are set up to actually convert the traffic coming in. Getting people to find you is only half of it.

The way it typically works is we start with a free 20-minute call to answer any questions you have about your visibility or my services. From there we do an in-depth audit so we can see exactly what needs to be optimized for you to show up at the top of search and beat out your competition. I can fix what needs to be updated on your site or work directly with your web developer to make it easy for them to implement those changes. Then we move into monthly services. Right now depending on the industry, clients are showing up at the top of search within 7 to 14 days of starting their monthly retainer.

Scale Efficiently is a great fit for restaurants, hospitality businesses, home services, health and wellness, professional service businesses, SaaS companies, AI and emerging tech companies, universities, and online learning platforms. Basically if you’re running a service-based business in a high competition market and your ideal clients are out there searching for what you do, I would love to help them find you as the top answer from the AI search results.

What I’m most proud of is that I’m dedicated to studying current marketing trends and insights to create marketing plans that get ROI for my clients and help them compete in the current landscape. I do a lot of research and make sure that I’m recommending and creating plans based on the stage of business my clients are in, where their brand is, and what could be the highest ROI investment for them. I’m not an order taker who is going to execute 15K worth of ads for your business if I don’t feel like they would be beneficial for your business. I’m a former operator who ran real teams, hit real revenue numbers, and learned marketing by actually doing it. I know what it’s like to be a founder trying to figure out why their marketing isn’t working, and I know how to fix it. I’m not teaching frameworks from a book.

What I really want potential clients to know is that if your leads or foot traffic has slowed down recently it could be because search has shifted from Google to AI search engines, and you need to optimize for that. The window in AI search right now is something most small businesses don’t even know exists, and ranking near the top now could secure your businesses spot near the top of search for the next decade. When the internet first came out and Amazon was ranking at the top of search results they got to 20k weeks in their first two months of business, I want my clients to own that space in search before it’s as saturated as traditional search.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I came into the marketing industry right when AI started shaking everything up for marketers. A lot of marketing consultants and freelancers working with small and medium businesses were suddenly out of work, because small business owners were starting to look to AI to handle their positioning, their copy, their graphics, everything. Being in the marketing space I know that AI tools and the conversions you get from your marketing are only as good as the strategist behind the prompt who actually knows how to break through the noise based on what’s resonating with humans right now, and this is temporary, but it’s a painful and disrupting time for the marketing industry.

When I first started the business I led with full service course creation. I had built a process for it, I knew it was roughly a 250-plus hour project to build a course from scratch, and I knew I could help make this a streamlined process for founders who were interested in course creation. I did it once inexpensively for someone I knew just to beta test the process and tighten it up. I also saw that the course industry was growing at a 19% CAGR and thought the demand would be there. So I built out a set of offers around done-for-you course creation and started going to networking events three to four times a week looking for people who wanted to build courses.

What I found was that most of the small business owners I was meeting were either just exploring the idea or wanted a DIY solution. Done for You course creation was being bought by creators, personal brands, and influencers who already had an audience to sell to and a brand that audience already trusted to buy from cold.

So I shifted to positioning and messaging because every business owner I was talking to needed that. The lesson I learned there was that in the current AI era a lot of small and medium businesses I was meeting thought AI could just take that over for them. So I started paying attention to what the small and medium business owners I was interacting with were buying in the digital marketing space, and it was social media, ads, websites, and search optimization. 

A year ago at an AI conference I had asked the question of how has search changed or been impacted by AI search engines, and no one had the answer, the only answer was that the way people were searching was different, so I knew there was a massive opportunity in the Search market and I dove in.

I learned a lot of really valuable lessons through all of the transitions about finding product market fit, and making sure your entry offer is something clients are consistently searching for or ready to solve quickly. I also learned a lot about the difference between a long sales cycle and a short one, and why knowing that difference matters so much when you are trying to forecast and budget for your own business.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

100 Million Dollar Offers and 100 Million Dollar Leads by Hormozi are two of the best marketing books that I have read and use the principles from daily. The frameworks are built around timeless tactics, but give you a solid framework to compete in today’s highly competitive markets. The other I would say that impacts the way I think about about management and creating efficient systems for my business is the 4 Hour Work Week. I use some of the lesson’s learned there to create more efficient processes to get quality client work done more efficiently and build systems that allow me to give high level strategic marketing at affordable prices for small and medium businesses.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.scaleefficiently.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferlschrader

Image Credits

Taylor Radovich Photography