With any business there's a ton of costs. There's fuel. There's tools. There's the people they have, who need a livable wage that's going up every day. Licensing, taxes, insurance, and so on. And inside that budget, hiring a full-time designer or an agency just isn't a reality for most of the small and medium businesses I talk to in Winnipeg.

So marketing gets pushed to the side. They've got the system they figured out five years ago, and they're sticking with it, because it's working fine enough.

I didn't understand any of that when I started.

Beauty for beauty's sake

When I came out of graphic design school in 2022, I had a vision of what I'd be doing. Creating beautifully curated graphics every day, taking hours on end to perfect them into the most gorgeous thing anybody had ever seen. I still love doing that. Putting creative touches into a brand and getting something started is still my favourite part.

But once I entered the actual working industry, reality hit. Businesses don't have the budget for beauty for beauty's sake. Art and design have different jobs. With art, you make something for yourself, and whoever is interested buys it. With design and marketing, it needs to have real results. A chair is meant for sitting. A car is meant to be driven. What we're doing as designers is making something work for the business, so that everything chugs along faster than it did before.

Here's the choke point, though. The amount of marketing you truly need to do for a business has expanded exponentially over the past two decades: the website, the social, the print, the emails, the Google listing—all of it kept current—is a full-time job (or several) on its own. For years, only large corporations could capitalize on that. They had the department. Everyone else had a person doing it on their lunch break or in a spare few hours.

Then ChatGPT showed up

About four months after I started working in the industry, ChatGPT showed up.

It was flawed. It still is, and I think AI always will be in some way. But even in the beginning, a simple prompt could generate almost any answer, and it opened doors that just weren't there before. It felt like the Gutenberg press. It changed the game and the roles we play as marketers and designers, whether we liked it or not.

Let me be clear about where I've landed on it.

Humans are still the most important part of what we do. When something is purely AI-made, you can feel it. It's less authentic, it's cold, and it's missing the warmth that shows up in real design. We shouldn't be using AI to replace the work of creating something beautiful. We should be using our time to create the beautiful thing, and then using AI to push that idea further than we could with just our human capacity.

So I decided to experiment with it in every way that felt ethical to me, inside my own business first.

How I actually use it

Here's a small example. A considerable amount of my time used to go to checking every letter and every period to make sure it was there. And despite all the work I put into it, sometimes a typo would still slip through, and it would be out there forever. Now the hours I used to spend spell-checking, I use AI to quicken that process.

Research is the bigger one. I can still research with my own capabilities, but now I can send AI out to do a scan that would have taken me several days, and have it back within an afternoon. Instead of physically searching for things, it pulls the most relevant information, and my job becomes sifting through it and making sure I understand the topic to my full capability.

There's a human process inside that. Fact-checking. Making sure the links are real and the examples actually apply. Then reworking those examples so I can use them. That's what lets me work with AI as a team member, or a tool, depending on the day.

At the end of the day, it's not the AI doing the full work. It's helping me along in a process that would have otherwise taken forever. That saves me time, and it saves my clients money.

Human knowledge is what makes any of this work. I understand basic design principles; I know the different time periods and styles, and that means I can explain to AI exactly what I'm looking for. It, on the other hand, has a grasp of the internet that I could never have the capacity to hold. So it's teamwork. My strengths, its strengths, and a constant pull between the two. Finding that balance is the whole thing.

It's become a real system between us, not just a tool I open when I'm stuck. I bring the question, the client, the instinct about what's right. It goes wide fast, on research, on drafts, on the parts that would eat my afternoon. I check it, correct it, and make the call. And then we write down what happened, so the next time something similar comes up, neither of us is starting from scratch. The things that repeat become a process. That's the part that changed how I work more than any single task it does.

What surprised me is how much it expanded what I can do. Not just faster writing or research, but things I didn't think were mine to do. Small fixes on a website that used to mean troubleshooting for hours. Understanding what the numbers on the back end actually mean. Setting up an automation and having it work. It's taught me things I didn't know I'd be able to learn, and it's changed where I think I can take this business.

On the design side, I still make the ideas on my own. Logos, the base of a brand, those are very clearly my own thoughts and my own hands. I don't go straight to AI and say, "make this for me." I've tried, and if it worked as well as a human, I'd be fully into it. It's not there yet, and I'm not sure it ever will be. What I have noticed is that once there's a solid foundation in place, AI can execute the basic design work well.

What this means for a small business

And that's the thing I want to give to businesses that can't otherwise hire a designer or a marketer.

The marketing job has grown enormously, and it's a lot to put on a team that's already doing great work. "Fine enough" is where most of them are, and it's costing them more than they think. Those businesses shouldn't be left out just because they don't have the resources to hire a full department yet.

So what I build is a system. The brand rules written down so anyone on the team can use them. A website that actually works. The print pieces and templates already made. The marketing emails and the replies to new leads planned out in advance. And AI set up to handle the boring, repetitive parts. Then I set it up so the people who already work there can run it. That's what I do at EEBE Design, and it's how I run my own studio too. One person, one system.

And I set this up for clients too. Not as a tool I hand over and walk away from, but as a way of working they can learn. The same loop I use: ask it, check it, decide, write down what happened. So the person on their team who's already doing the marketing off the side of their desk has something that makes them faster, and gets better the more they use it.

Not many agencies or freelancers offer this. They want the steady income, and I understand where that comes from. But a lot of owners have been sold something they were never taught to run themselves, and that's the part I've pivoted away from.

To be fair, this isn't for everyone. Some businesses should hire a full-time social media person. Some are big enough that an agency makes sense. If your marketing is a full-time job on its own, hire the person. This is for everyone in the middle.

The reality I'm building for

Over the years, I've moved from being just a graphic designer to understanding the back end. What the metrics look like, what results actually cost, what ad spend gets you, how the pieces come together. Because at the end of the day, what we're after is the best customer experience. Not just how graphic design works, but how people work. How they want to be treated when they meet a business. And how the employees at that business want to work with the marketing, so they can do it themselves.

That's the reality I'm building for.

What's the marketing job in your business that nobody's actually doing right now? Tell me, and I'll tell you straight what I'd fix first.