Our initial plan was modest: create promotional videos with me as host and Lou as the guest, and use digital marketing channels to drive interest in the book. 

Once we started, we quickly realized that the conversations we were having had the potential to go beyond what was captured in the pages of his book.

We decided to change our ambitions, “go bigger” and develop a full-fledged brand centered around a podcast and Substack as our digital delivery system. 

Our strategic vision centered around generating content that captured the Thrive A/F ethos: “Whether you think you are old, or you think you are young—you’re right.”

Since we were starting from scratch and doing all the work ourselves, we had tremendous freedom to define our brand and what we wanted to create. 

On the flipside we were working with an extremely limited budget and only ourselves to execute the vision. It was time to get to work!

Lou has an active physical therapy practice to run so his time is limited. He quickly settled into the Chief Content Officer and Subject Matter Expert roles based on his vast experience with patients, and the deep research he did for his book. 

While I am an owner of CrossFit Terminus, we’ve been in business for 13 years and I have partners that are the prime movers of the business. This gave me the opportunity to act both as a business consultant and co-owner of the Thrive A/F brand. 

This meant I would act both as a strategic advisor and handle the hands-on execution of producing the podcast, Substack content, and the digital ecosystem we needed to support it.

For Thrive A/F, I would have to find a way to merge these roles (and a few others) to bring the brand to life: 

• Chief Technology Officer

• Co-CMO 

• Content and Brand Strategist

• Graphic Designer

• Podcast Producer

• On-air Talent/Host

Once roles were established, we decided the only way to accomplish our goal was to leverage AI as a force multiplier. The challenge was doing it without sacrificing the essence of what would make the brand work - the human connection at the center of our relationship and our shared passion for the subject matter. 

We established “authenticity” as one of our guiding principles and knew that if we leaned too heavily into AI-produced content we would fade into the background noise of sub-par fitness “slop” pervasive in the marketplace. 

I was quickly reminded that things change when you spend more than a decade managing teams. In my previous role I had a great team and plenty of opportunities to develop my strategic vision, collaboration, and leadership skills, but developing my “hands-on” skills had taken a back seat. 

In my most recent corporate role I was involved in planning and adopting AI across a wide variety of marketing functions, but it was still early days and progress was slow. With Thrive A/F I couldn't afford to be conservative, so it was time to shift my focus from theoretical to practical and figure out how AI was going to help us launch and grow.