Business Development, Collaboration & Co-Creation

Full video transcript

Conversion happens in a conversation — the question is how do you get to talk to someone. This is the final keynote of the Scale With AI Summit, day three, with Shelley Burman Rubera closing out the event.

Shelley Burman Rubera is a business owner and entrepreneur who started by teaching dance classes to pay for her college tuition, went on to found and run the second-largest dance school in Boston, became one of the first female bodybuilders, and later turned that experience into a personal training and lifestyle consultancy. She discovered her real passion was building businesses and helping other business owners and entrepreneurs grow. She is a Master Certified Business Management Consultant, a certified business coach, an emotional intelligence trainer, a business communication strategist, and the author of “100 Tips to Small Business Results.” She is president of Small Business Results, a coaching business that has helped over a thousand businesses get off the ground.

Rubera opened by explaining that the talk would explore the intersection of AI and human relations — how AI is reshaping the way people connect, create, communicate, and co-create. She gave two historical examples of co-creation before AI. In 2006, Nike and Apple joined forces to bring the iPod Nano into sneakers and onto arms so runners could track fitness and calories while listening to music — a partnership that has continued in various products since. Also around that time, Bonnie Low-Kramen, a longtime private assistant, and Vicki Brackett, one of Microsoft’s top AI trainers, co-created a training program called Be the Ultimate Assistant, combining human assistant skills with technology; the program has now been delivered 60 times around the world.

Rubera then described her own co-creation story. In 2024, after following Darby Rollins for years and trying to integrate AI into her business without being an AI specialist herself, she reached out to him by email. Within five minutes of describing her existing program — which runs from concept, to a strong LinkedIn profile and website, to a Google profile and SEO, to email marketing — she saw where his offering could fit. Together they created a “Business Development and Marketing Brief,” a 50-page document combining AI and human expertise. They set her up as a partner, invited 12 of her clients to a webinar, and all 12 bought the brief. Clients called the report “the Holy Grail of all marketing,” with one saying she wished she’d had it before writing her book or launching her website. The two later did a joint webinar called “The Power of Co-Creation.”

She framed her goals for the talk as: understanding how to integrate co-creation to leverage AI and your brand, how to approach co-creation and collaboration, and how to use AI as a partner and tool for co-creation. Embracing both AI and human skills requires building trust (which comes through shared experience and transparent communication over time), empathy in your writing and speaking, and people skills such as emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and creativity — the things AI can’t do on its own but that you can feed into AI.

She defined co-creation as working together to innovate and solve problems, creating value beyond what either person could do alone — she couldn’t have built her AI offering without bringing in Darby as a partner. She described three types of co-creation: referral partners (the core of her business, people she refers to and who refer back to her); being part of or building a community where people combine brands and knowledge; and brand partnerships, where each partner keeps their own brand — as with Darby — but creates a joint offer that doesn’t take away from either person’s core offer. Benefits of co-creation include expanded reach (she pointed to how far the Summit’s audience list reached through combined promotion), combined strengths (she is a human expert, not an AI expert, so she fills the gap with a partner), and increased value for clients, who often want a partnership unpacked further into both the technical and the “doing” side.

Rubera then walked through her brand-statement exercise, calling brand clarity in the age of AI “our most important tool.” She said people rarely state clearly who they serve, and gave a homework assignment: write a list of who you work with, a list of what they want, and a list of the outcome they get from working with you, then combine those into a 12-to-15-word sentence used as your introduction at networking events. Her own example: “I work with entrepreneurs who want to know what to say and do to build the business.” She lives-demoed the exercise with a “massage therapist” example (clients want professionalism, skills, flexibility, schedule respect, pain relief, stress reduction, and personalized treatment) and connected it back to a related exercise she’d done with a client, Chris Lennon, turning his differentiating statement into a question: “Are you a coach or a consultant ready to unlock the potential of AI, to revolutionize your business and skyrocket your growth?” — later rewriting his profile to name who he serves (startups, marketing agencies, established companies).

On choosing a co-creator, she outlined four steps: define your objectives and make sure your audiences are aligned (her objective was bringing AI into her business, and she and Darby shared an audience of small-business owners); assess and assign roles and responsibilities so each partner works from their strengths; identify who else needs to be brought in and elevate everyone’s strengths and resources; and start small and test, the way she and Darby began with a webinar and focus group. She cited her long-running relationship with Constant Contact, in which she integrated her “Truth About Succeeding in Small Business” framework into their event marketing — filling rooms and converting attendees into Constant Contact trial or paid members — as one of her best co-creation relationships, one that ended only when Constant Contact was acquired and stopped doing event marketing.

Her second homework assignment was to create a list of potential co-creators, distinguishing simple referral relationships from deeper ones where partners actively do project work together — she named her SEO person, website person, AI person, and marketing team as examples she both sends business to and receives it from.

On sales, she stressed the need for a clear, specific offer per audience segment — describing how she once had to build a dedicated LinkedIn-profile offer after realizing she didn’t have anything specific enough to convert leads a LinkedIn specialist was sending her. She urged narrowing your audience rather than trying to serve everyone, telling a story about an attorney who resisted picking a niche until she agreed to focus on “families with children,” found a networking group for that audience, and picked up an elder-law client as a direct result. She also recommended offering prospects a choice (such as “do you want me to teach you to do this, or do it for you”) rather than a closed yes/no question, and closed with a call to tailor and refine how you use AI, treating it as a partner rather than a replacement, balancing “integration over competition,” and following a model of educating and engaging your audience to become a trusted, credible advisor.

She ended with two action items: create your own 12-to-15-word brand statement and practice it until it’s natural, and write a list of your potential co-creators. She also mentioned an upcoming mastermind Q&A session on November 15th from 12:00 to 1:30 for attendees to bring their brand statements and co-creator lists for feedback, and pointed attendees to LinkedIn as the best way to reach her directly, noting she offers complimentary time to anyone interested in exploring a fit.