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I Found the Perfect First Business for Introverts — Transcript

by Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast · 13,190 words · 727 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00So, you're 26 years old. What will you make this month from implementing AI into small
0:05businesses? $15,000 this month. Profit. Profit. Amazing. How much did it cost you
0:10to start an AI implementation business in total? $20. This is the best time you could
0:14compete with the enterprises because you have access to the technology that allows you to do
0:18so. You have the same access that they've always had now. Yeah. And theoretically,
0:22you have even better tools than them because they're limited to what they could use based
0:26on policies and governance that they have in those organizations. you move faster than And
0:31you're telling me that a shy introvert can make six figures a year implementing AI in a small
0:36business? Yes, you could make more for sure. What on average do you charge for an implementation
0:40belt? It could be anywhere between $1,000 to $20,000. It just depends on the project. No
0:46sales experience. Sierra, never gone door to door. Never like been in a boiler room
0:50doing this was the most terrifying stuff I've ever done. That's encouraging. Tell me about
0:55the DASA framework. This is the framework that I use to lead up to any AI project.
1:04Is there any hope for shy introverts like me that don't want to talk to people? Yes. In fact,
1:09there's a guy in Ryan, Cincinnati, 24 years old, very shy introvert. You're about to meet him,
1:14who makes $15,000 a month solving problems using simple tools that he taught himself on.
1:20He doesn't know how to code. He's never learned how to sell. and he was working a dead-end job,
1:25making $52,000 a year a year and a half ago. Today, he's making $15,000 a month working for
1:30himself. So, I had to ask him today, Ryan, who are you? How do you do what you do? How do you
1:35sell? How do you price this? And what is the DASA framework, which he claims is the key to
1:39his success. Let's meet Ryan. So, if you were to explain to a 5-year-old how you make money,
1:44what would you say? I made a lot of friends. Made a lot of friends in the space and helped
1:49them solve their biggest problems. Business owners. Yes. Okay. So, you make money solving
1:54problems for business owners using technology? Yep. Accurate. That's pretty accurate. What does
2:01an average customer look like? What type of person? What type of business owner? What are
2:05you charging them for? What? Yeah. The clients I work with right now are all over the place,
2:09but it's currently founders that are very much in the business and understand the power of AI,
2:14yet their teams are not really implementing it the way that they could be. So, that's my ideal avatar
2:20that I typically go after. a startup founder. Startup founder could be young. I've, you know,
2:26I've worked with every age group, especially in Cincinnati. That's not the most techforward
2:30place in the world. There's a lot of people that are kind of getting, you know, dabbling in AI.
2:35There's a lot of people that absolutely don't understand it. Okay. So, I think my my reach is
2:40quite large. What is the average revenue of one of your customers? Yeah, it could be anywhere
2:45between pre-revenue all the way up to 20 million is probably the range I've worked with so far, but
2:52it it is usually sub 10 million for how I've been getting started so far. So, you're 24 going on 25.
2:59AI happens. You start playing around with it. You like nerding out over software and technology. You
3:04feel like that's a skill of yours and something that you enjoy. Yeah. For whatever reason, you
3:08say, "I'm going to make a list of 100 people that I know." And most 24 year olds don't know a ton of
3:12people, right? which it's bodess well for anyone watching this if they're young or don't have a big
3:17network. We're talking about friends and family at church, neighborhood, teachers, people you went to
3:23school with. Is that what we're saying? Previous co-workers, all the above. Yeah, certainly a lot
3:30through just the contacts list on my phone. I was literally going through and seeing who might find
3:35interest in getting help with AI. I was hitting up friends like friends, parents of mine all over the
3:41place. And a lot of the start I had was also through some business mastermind groups that
3:44I joined along the way groups that I entered because online groups. Yeah, online groups,
3:50in person groups. There's local AI groups I'm a part of and business groups here in Cincinnati,
3:54but also there's some business mastermind groups that I'm a part of that I met people like myself,
3:59other founders in different spaces. And a lot of people have opposite skill sets as as myself.
4:04Yeah. So naturally, I I try to help them in any way I can. Okay. So would you consider yourself an
4:10introvert or an extrovert? Very introverted. Okay. So is calling 100 people, meeting with 100 people,
4:16is that intimidating to you? Yeah, but it's way easier if you're not trying to sell. I was just
4:21trying to get on the phone and provide value in any way I can. I'm not trying to pitch anything.
4:25I wasn't even I wasn't even going after a paid offer. I told myself I would have 100 free calls
4:29with people and then look into charging for some of my services. But up until then, it was very
4:35low pressure on me because if you know people don't want to jump on the phone with me, that's
4:39totally fine. I'm just trying to provide value cuz they say that happiness equals expectations minus
4:43reality, right? So if you go in there with like, all right, I'm going to 100 conversations, close
4:4730% of them. My monthly recurring revenue will be a,000 per $30,000 per month by month three. You're
4:53like, I'm literally not trying to sell. That's not like a wink wink. I have nothing to sell you. Wink
4:58wink, right? I I literally want to learn and ask how I can add value to your life and and or your
5:05business. And hopefully maybe, no pressure, I don't even have a sales pitch for I don't
5:10even have anything to sell yet if I wanted to. But maybe hopefully you'll find something about
5:14me intelligent or smart or helpful and you'll say, "Hey, I like that idea. I don't want to do
5:19it. Can you do it?" "Yeah, for a fee. How much?" Is that kind of what you're saying? Yeah. And I
5:24think the first 10 people or so that hopped on the phone with me probably could tell I really did not
5:28know what I was doing. But I think they would get little pieces of value along the way. And from the
5:32pieces I really felt like I was contributing to people as well as from their feedback,
5:36I was starting to starting to able to get traction with what can I actually charge for or what sort
5:42of education I could kind of provide people. Okay. So of these 100 people, give me a rough breakdown.
5:49What percentage church? What percentage extended family? What percentage friends? What percentage
5:54give me just a rough breakdown. I would say 60% from the business groups I'm loosely associated
6:02with. Maybe we could split that half and half with local versus online groups that I met along
6:06the way. How many groups are we talking? There are like four. I'm very involved with two local groups
6:12here. Is this there's a business group I'm a part of, AI group I'm a part of, and then there's
6:17two online masterminds that I'm also pretty heavily engaged with. And I was engaged with
6:22them for about a year leading up to this point because like I said, I had other entrepreneurial
6:27ventures leading up to this, which eventually led me down this path. Hey, if you like this episode,
6:32please just hit subscribe real quick. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you're watching and
6:36listening to this. It would mean a ton. How many people were in each of those four groups,
6:40give or take? The local ones are probably about 100 or so people each. And then the online ones
6:46are much larger, probably about 500 people each at the time. less engaged because there's more people
6:51less engaged like per person. It's less engagement online. There's less engagement but there's more
6:56people. What about the local ones? Are you Yeah. Yeah. There's a local group called Cincy AI that
7:02I love attending. Was it like a meetup group or how did you find it? Yeah, they meet monthly and
7:07I forget how I met Kendra and Helen who are the ones running it, but now I'm friends with
7:11them from attending their meetups and just trying to talk to them and provide any sort of value I
7:15could along the way to them which included, you know, hopping on the phone with them. They're
7:19talking about launching an online version of their group, things like that. Just trying to provide my
7:24insights and being engaged with their communities is very important because they could see that and
7:29they can understand that I really enjoyed being a part of it. And is the Cincy AI one, was that
7:33literally a Meetup group? Like you found them on meetup.com or how does it find them? I I was on
7:39email list but do you know how you found them? No I I think I was just doing Google searches to see
7:44how I could get involved locally. Okay. I think it w it served what I needed at that time and that
7:50getting started with my entrepreneurial journey and really getting connected with people doing
7:53the same thing getting around peers that uplifted me but I think I get the same amount of value from
7:58the local AI groups. What about paying customers? Which groups did you get the most amount of paying
8:02customers? the the local groups or the online groups. Oh, where did I the online groups because
8:07that's since I've had those relationships for such a long period of time. They finally, you know,
8:13snowballed effect and into me working with them in a paid capacity. So 100 people, 60% loosely came
8:19from these four groups. Mhm. And the other 40% came from contacts list on my phone, came from
8:25LinkedIn, who am I connection with? Who am I? Came from Yeah. and you know just trying to if I could
8:31have a meeting with someone and rekindle that relationship I also found that to be a privilege
8:35as well. Okay. Were you trying to make sure these 100 people were all business owners or no? I tried
8:40to stick to business owners whenever I could but there was a lot of people also operating small and
8:45medium-sized businesses that I also targeted or managers or just leaders in organizations. If I
8:50could talk to a sales leader about helping them use AI within their department that was that
8:55was something I also went after. Okay. How many of these 100 conversations did you actually end
8:59up having? All well of the ones that I got booked because I booked way more than hundred and I ended
9:05up having the 100 conversations. Okay. So, how many did you try to book? Cuz you knew there'd be
9:09a funnel, right? Not everybody say yes to a call. Some people say yes and they won't show up. I
9:14wasn't tracking it and I was going through and if people weren't replying to me, I might next month
9:18go back around and try to get them again. But by the end of three months, I was able to hit 100.
9:24Okay. I probably kept going past 100. I probably got to 150 or so when I lost count after 100 cuz
9:29I stopped being meticulous about tracking these specific free calls. Yeah. But I probably hit up
9:34three to four times more than people that hopped on the call. So the goal was uh not 100 reachouts
9:40but 100 real conversations which takes hundreds of reachouts. Yeah. And all let's say it was 300. All
9:47of them were people in your sphere in some way. Nothing cold. Yeah. Okay. People underestimate how
9:53many people they actually have in their sphere. If you open up your contacts on your phone,
9:56you have a really long list of people on there, even from high school, from wherever they might
10:01have came from and then I went out of my way to join these groups, which is not easy for me being
10:07introverted and not naturally kind of doing these things, but I forced myself because I understand
10:11that's what will get me started. But the desire for wealth has to be greater than the pain of
10:16being an introvert. As an introvert, I feel that pain. Yeah. Okay. So, of these 100 conversations,
10:23how many were in person? How many were virtual? All were virtual. Really? Yeah. 100% of them. Wow,
10:29that's surprising. Of the virtual ones, how many were phone versus Zoom or I did everything on
10:34Google Meet. Okay. 100 calls each an hour long on Google Meet. Wow. Okay. The first call was
10:40an hour. First call was an hour. Last call was an hour. Okay. Do you have any gauge of from those
10:46100 conversations or 150 whatever it was, how many turned into a second conversation? A lot did, but
10:53not necessarily to continue people down the sales funnel. More so just to keep the relationship
10:58going. A lot of these turned into third, fourth, fifth, sixth conversations, which eventually had
11:03people working with me. But then after this first call, I would give people some takeaways like
11:08here's my recommendations for you to go implement today and hopefully you get traction with this
11:12this week. And then, you know, maybe a month or two would go by and they say, "Hey, Ryan, thanks
11:16for the advice. This has been working out really well for me. Do you have any ideas about this?"
11:21And then maybe we hop on a quick call or maybe we have a quick meeting to get people rolling
11:25with that. And then I never really have a sell for them until I see or until I started to see a very
11:32specific avenue that I could provide value with, which turned into the offers I have today. Okay.
11:36So, let me back up. When you did when you did the reachouts to the hundred people, did your pitch
11:41change over time, what did it start with? What did it end with? Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people
11:48in the AI space, they talk about doing a AI audit for your business and that's the freebie to get
11:55people on the call or then they'll start to build maybe like a vibe coded product or a SAS product
12:00or something that could take over a software platform for that company. That's how I started
12:04too. I was like, I'm going to do an AI audit with all these people and then I will try to replace a
12:09product for them and try to to tie that ROI back to the maybe the time savings or the software
12:17savings that we're having. I keep using the word value and I do that intentionally because that is
12:22what I'm trying to provide every like every person that interacts with me. That's the experience
12:26I'm trying to provide is Ryan provided a ton of value to us. And the people I was providing the
12:31most value to were the people that I was leading through educating them. And the reason that is
12:37is because let's pretend I teach you how to do everything that I do in my implementation work.
12:44You could take that back to your company and you won't need to rely on me anymore. Theoretically,
12:48you won't need to rely on anyone else to manage these platforms for you. You could just naturally
12:52grow them on your own. and you could implement different products because you understand how
12:57these fundamentals work. So what that turned into present day is doing a lot of education offers
13:03where I teach you directly and we work together directly to build these sort of platforms or these
13:09sort of tools for your team to eventually be able to do other projects on your own. Okay, so zooming
13:16out, you go into this saying like literally what was your first text or DM to them? Hey,
13:21so and so haven't spoken in a few years. Can I do an AI audit for your business? Or if not, what was
13:26it? I never let off with like just copy and paste text like that. I much I started with reaching out
13:33saying just trying to rekindle in general. Just saying, "Hey Chris, hope all is well with you. I
13:39want to hear about what is going on in your life or if I know what's going on in your life. How is
13:42this new role going or how is this project going for you?" And you're doing a little research,
13:47going to their Facebook, their LinkedIn. Oh, yeah. and referring to specific things for sure. Okay?
13:52Because I I've gotten these texts before and it's usually someone that joined a pyramid scheme,
13:55an Amazon, and they want to sell me to non juice or something and it's like, "Oh jeez, hey,
14:00I started a new business. I'd love to talk about how we can accomplish our goals together." Yeah.
14:04I read that and I roll my eyes, right? I would too. Give me an example of what you would say.
14:09It has to be so genuine. It has to be, I am here just to hear about what's going on your your life.
14:15This is what I'm doing right now, and I'm helping people with AI. If you ever want help with that,
14:19let me know. Or if you want to schedule a call with me, here's my booking link. And then I also
14:24maybe give some specific examples. What I love doing is pitching with demos. Having, you know,
14:31YouTube links ready to go that you could send to people to prove, hey, I've been doing this.
14:35I don't I'm Yeah, my YouTube links. Doesn't matter if the video has 30 views or 30,000. Most have 30.
14:42Yeah. Good to know. Good to know. Tell me if this is wrong, but it's like, "Hey, Uncle John. Uh,
14:48how's it going? How's life?" "Good. Just moved to Indianapolis. Awesome. I saw on LinkedIn that
14:52you just got promoted." Yeah. Yeah. It's just casual like that. Yeah. And so there might be a
14:56half dozen texts exchange before you ever mention what you're doing. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah. So
15:02oftent times I would send, you know, a batch of a hundred texts in the morning or emails or however,
15:08you know, LinkedIn DMs, wherever. And then I would start working for the day and I'd get back to my
15:13phone and have like 50 replies back and I have to, you know, frantically reply out to all of them.
15:17But making sure that I'm keeping the conversation genuine and not trying to again be salesy because
15:22that's just not my personality. Are you tracking these in a CRM in a Google sheet? How are you
15:27keeping track of these? Back then I didn't. I was just trying to put as much time into just focusing
15:32on setting these as possible. But now that I got rolling and I have a little more traction
15:35and I'm not sending the 100 messages a day, I do have a, you know, a CRM I use. Well, some
15:40people get so hung up, especially when it comes to intimidating stuff, they get so hung up on how
15:44do I track this? How should I tag them? Should I use Pipe Drive Spot? They really just don't
15:50want to reach out to people. These are advanced forms of procrastination that make them feel good
15:54that they're move making progress, but they're not making progress. I've went through this myself and
15:58I still do to this day. That's probably my biggest issue, especially being the tech nerd that's like,
16:01"All right, maybe if I have to optimize my I have to optimize optimize optimize before I
16:05press go on these messages." There's no reason to it because you're going to learn along the
16:09way and learn more from doing that than I'm just trying to When you tell me like, "Oh,
16:13I was I'm I'm reading that as like, all right, you're a winner, right?" Like, you shouldn't worry
16:17about that stuff. Just send some freaking texts. Yeah. If you have no money like you're making yet,
16:22there's no reason to be tracking like crazy. Yeah. There's a time and place for it. And obviously I
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17:24so 100 150 conversations. Do they all go an hour? Do they go 15 minutes? Some, an hour and a half.
17:31On average, they went probably an hour. Some went up to like there was ones that we decided to keep
17:38going for a while up to like I think the longest one probably went 3 hours or so because we were
17:42really getting into a platform that we're using. We were talking about how you could automate
17:45within this platform. That was much more of an automation sort of talk instead of AI. But again,
17:49you know, when I was getting started, I was just trying to get rolling with these calls. Other ones
17:53went, you know, 5 minutes just to talk about, oh, you should do this on chatbt or whatever. Yeah.
17:58And or you know what, you know, let's, you know, do this another time or maybe, you know what,
18:02Ryan, I just want to like say hi or I'm interested in talking about this right now. They went all
18:06over the place. And, you know, it does get to you after like, oh, you know, these calls today,
18:10I had three calls. They all didn't really go the way that I intended. But then it was like,
18:14you know, I have some really good calls along the way where I got some real aha moments out
18:18of people and I was like, how can I mimic that again? Let's try to, you know, tailor
18:23the calls in that direction versus the ones that are failing. Okay. All right. So, 150 people. How
18:28many were a second conversation? Probably a third or a fourth of the Well, no, that it was probably
18:33more of like a fourth or a fifth of them now that I'm thinking thinking about it. But again, the
18:37second conversation could come anywhere between that point to now. And I always am re-engaging
18:43people. I'm not just like, let's finish this call and we never speak again. I'm usually reaching out
18:48and saying, hey, how is this specific thing going? Is there anything you want to talk about more? I'm
18:53happy to hop on a call in 5 minutes with you or whatever you're available. Let me know. Because
18:57at the time, I'm flexible. Yeah. I, you know, recently left the job I was working and for the
19:02past year or so now I was just trying to do these calls for the three months I was getting started.
19:08Speaking of a job, were you working a full-time job at this point? I was working a full-time
19:12job up until July of last year. So, while you were doing all this reach out, you were Yeah,
19:18it the reset reachout started when I knew I was about to leave the job probably in like May and
19:24continued until July or August. Okay. And what was your job and what were you making there? Yeah,
19:29I was working in clinical research as a project manager at a local hospital and I was making about
19:35$52,000 a year. Okay. All right. So, let's say be conservative. We'll say a fifth turned into a
19:41second conversation. Now, 30 people max on 150. How do those conversations go in general? Yeah,
19:48it's again uh very similar. We have a very specific sort of avenue we're trying to go down,
19:52but this time I kind of understand what they're dealing with. I understand much more about their
19:56company. I do a little more research and maybe I even build something for them prior to the
20:01call. These calls go so much better cuz you have a backstory. You know how they are. You know what
20:05they're starting. You know their business. So I'm I'm going to try to see the future and know that
20:10your third call was much more than a fist, right? But we'll get there in a minute. All right. So
20:15you're doing research. You're you're prepping more than you could before. Y Hey, look what
20:19I built for you. Hey, show me what you ended up doing based on my suggestions. Yeah. Okay. how do
20:24those calls go? If uh I'm truly providing value to them, usually a lot of them ended with like,
20:30hey, how can we find a way to work together? We don't really know what exactly that looks like.
20:33Especially I was getting started, I didn't really have a offer ready to go. Like, oh, this is what
20:37it looks like. It'll be this amount a month or we'll build this. I didn't have any of that. But
20:41what we did have following a lot of these second or third conversations was let's find a way to
20:46work together because we obviously mesh well. There's a reason you came back and talked to me.
20:50There's obviously value I can provide which is tied to some sort of tangible ROI. So why not try
20:56to make this work? Did you close anyone from that first call? I don't think I closed a single Well,
21:00I didn't try to close people on the first call, right? But no one was like, dude,
21:04I know you're not like, can I just pay you to do this? That didn't happen in the first. I don't
21:09think so. That's encouraging to me because you could have been bummed out and just and stopped,
21:13right? But yeah, like no, we're going to play the long game. Long game. Long game. Long game. Right.
21:18All right. So 30 conversations, how many turn into a third conversations? I would say probably
21:26about half or more of those again over whatever time period you like. Yeah. Months are elapsing,
21:32weeks, months. It takes time. Yeah. And and a lot of these people, you know, I'm coming back a year
21:37later and people are starting to forget that first conversation. I try to bring it back up.
21:43The moment they start to forget about me, I try to say, "Hey, here's another little tidbit of value."
21:47where sometimes I'm not even trying to just get on these calls with people. Sometimes I'm
21:50I made a YouTube video specifically addressing this audience or maybe this sort of real estate
21:55niche and I send them the YouTube video saying, "Hey, made this. Thought of you when I made this.
22:01Let me know if this resonates." You know, I hate to draw comparisons to multi-level marketing cuz
22:07this is absolutely not that. The reason I draw a comparison to it is because if you were to go to
22:12a multi-level marketing seminar, they would say, "Make a list of a thousand people that you know,
22:18that's what they do cuz it works, right? They know what they're doing. Call every single one
22:22of them and say, "How was how's life been since high school? I' I haven't spoken in 20 years." And
22:28the reason I So I have a lot of friends that have done MLMs schemes, right? And some of them burned
22:36burned their relationships and some of them and they but they made a lot of money. Some of them
22:42burned their relationships and didn't make a lot of money. Total waste. Some of them made a
22:47lot of money and did not burn their relationships. Right. They're great. They're doing great. And the
22:51difference between those two parties is if they burn their relationships, it's because the price
22:56of what they sold did not match the value of what they were selling. Correct. Right. It's it's like
23:00if I sold my grandma a lemon car, she's not going to like me anymore. Yeah. If I sell my grandma a
23:07Corolla at fair market value and it works and it serves her life better, she still loves me. Okay.
23:13So over here, whatever MLM they were selling, if it matched the value that they were expecting,
23:18then they did a service to their friend. Yes, they sold to them, but they needed that thing in their
23:23life, or at least they think they did, which is what's important. So, you could have burned your
23:28audience. You could have burned your relationships if your service sucked and it wasn't worth the
23:33price. I'm guessing it wasn't. We haven't gotten there yet. Yeah. But okay, 30 conversations,
23:3830 second conversations, and then give or take 15 third conversations. Did you close any on the
23:43second conversation? Yeah, I probably did close one or two on some very low-end projects just to
23:50get get the ball rolling. I was charging probably between, you know, $500 and $1,000 for those sort
23:55of projects. But I was just trying to get foot in the door one time sort of thing. Yeah. And with
24:00the vision of having something to follow after with that. But correct it was just to get in the
24:06door. So let's say give or take 150 conversations, 150 hours on average, not including all the time
24:12texting. Let's say 300 hours at work. Yeah. Okay. For all the reach out. Then you get you add,
24:19you know, you got to do some follow-ups few hours. 30. Did the did the second conversations last
24:24about an hour as well? Yeah. Okay. So we're at like 350 hours. We're being conservative.
24:29Probably wasn't that much cuz it doesn't take that much. Like you could text 20 people in
24:3315 minutes. Yeah. I got pretty fast at text. I'm sure we're being really conservative. 350 hours to
24:38get your first call it 1500 in revenue. Let's say two people at 750 each. Accurate. Yeah. Okay. So,
24:44your hourly rate is terrible at this point. You're looking at two bucks an hour for sure.
24:48Okay. But you're building something for yourself and that's the whole point. And you're willing to
24:52play the long game. Yep. Okay. So, so of the 30 conversations, you close two people. Then
24:57you have 15 more conversations on round three. How do those go? I probably close the majority
25:03of them really this time and not on the phone call. Um, again, at this point, I'm like scared
25:09to close on the phone. I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to like give you a price right here and now.
25:12That's terrifying." But we did come up with some sort of arrangement where we would move forward
25:16or work together in an educational sense or build a certain project together. A lot of those third
25:22conversations ended up being successful for me. Are you still doing 100% of these on Google Meet?
25:27Yeah. Okay. And see that's I I'm assuming that a lot of these you could have done in person,
25:33right? You've got you're in the Cincy AI group. Some of these people are within an hour, right?
25:36And I did I did have some like coffee chats with people along the way, but I would say, you know,
25:42above 90% of my are just Google meets. Is that a personal preference? I love just being able to
25:47share my screen and like you share your screen. I'm gonna do the laser pointer on your screen
25:54about what we should do and we could, you know, share tabs and do a lot of that. That I think it
25:59was just the fact that I was a probably nervous to get in person to be completely frank and I was
26:04used to working in this online environment. Um, so these days there are way more inerson interactions
26:11especially over this last couple of months or so. Yeah. But when I was getting started,
26:14I think it was just let's just do what's working for me right now. Let's just get all out on these
26:19Google meets. Now, I know that probably most of these people were not within an hour of you, but
26:23in a in a perfect world, if all 150 were in person and you you had a 20% follow-up rate or whatever,
26:31I bet you anything it's closer to a 40% follow-up rate if they're in person. Yeah. Just because the
26:36date on this is very very clear and you know that and I know that, but you're like me and
26:40I want I don't want to go anywhere. A B I don't like meeting people in person. So, I would have
26:45done what you did. But just for those watching or listening, if you're willing to do in person, your
26:49close rate will absolutely be higher. Yeah. Like maybe twice as high. And I was gonna say, this is
26:54probably my largest piece of advice for anyone getting started is go all out on in person when
26:58you can because like you said, it makes a whole lot of difference about how a you connect with
27:05people, but b if people will work with you in the future, you got that inerson relationship finally,
27:10and it just makes it a much more friendly, much more engaging conversation whenever you have them.
27:14So, as the value of AI continues to do this, which will this will happen for a while,
27:19the value of inerson continues to do this. Yeah. And the value of a Google meet contin
27:28third conversations. You closed literally all of them. Almost all of them. A good amount of them.
27:34I would say maybe 10. 10. And you had already closed two from the second conversation. Yeah. So,
27:40you've got 12 paying customers. Some recurring. We haven't gotten there yet. some one time from 150
27:46reachouts. So, eight nine% close rate. Yeah. Which if you did a cold email campaign to 150 people,
27:53you're going to have probably a 0% close rate legitimately because oh my gosh, yeah, the
27:58numbers aren't big enough. You might need to email 1 to 5,000 people to get one close, right? And so
28:04people watch this like 8% close, right? From all those hours, 8% is amazing. And let me guess, no
28:11sales experience. Zero. You didn't serve a mission for your church like I did for 2 years. Never gone
28:17door to door. Never like been in a boiler room doing this is the most terrifying stuff I've ever
28:22done. That's encouraging. Yeah. Uh introvert. No sales experience. No formal tech experience other
28:28than playing around with tools and stuff. You're not a software engineer. I'm I'm an ops guy at the
28:33end of the day. I'm not a I did not come from an engineering background. Okay. 12 closes. Tell me.
28:38You said 10 out of the 15 you closed, right? And plus the other two. Yeah. Give or take. Give or
28:43take. What did you charge those 10? Like what did the pricing structures look like? Give or take.
28:47Yeah. So eventually this is what my offer turned into starting at the top of funnel. Obviously
28:52we have everywhere that I'm potentially meeting people along the way. We had business masterminds,
28:57local meetups, social media, and previous relationships. That's literally everyone that
29:01I reached out to. Again, I did attempt to do the, you know, mass email outreach. Nothing happened
29:08with it. Zero. That's the introvert's dream if that works. Yeah. And again, a lot of times I
29:13talk to people that make a lot of money from their network and they're a pastor, they're an
29:17extrovert, they're a super connector. You're none of those things. You're 24 at the time. Yeah. That
29:22eventually moves to being in the middle of the sales funnel here with free resources and guides,
29:27long form content workshops, and essentially all of these being lead magnets. And by lead magnet,
29:32it means what is a, you know, freebie that does provide value that gets people in the door to want
29:38to work with me in a longer extent. It's almost like a teaser for um what a full offer would be.
29:44And it's a trust builder and an expertise shower. And tell me how many YouTube subscribers you have
29:50today. Not many. I probably have 100 or so on YouTube. I think I have 100, not 100 thousand,
29:56right? 100. One zero zero. Okay. Yeah. And how many did you have when you first started?
30:02Make zero, right? Zero. Yeah. I started this channel probably a year ago. And the intent of
30:06this content is to show your expertise. You're not trying to go viral, but you want people to see I
30:11publish stuff on the internet. Yeah. Period. It's immediate credibility. Well, you're making content
30:16for these people anyway, right? Why not upload it? Yeah. What's the downside? If I have to do a
30:23demo twice, I just report it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. free resources is long form content, workshops,
30:29lead magnet, and I'm guessing your content is not highly edited. It's screen recording. It's
30:33you talking, it's one go. I don't try to put in, you know, two highle um editing into it.
30:38Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of these resources and guides, for instance, are like prompt frameworks,
30:44their SEO guides, their how to use clawed code. It's a lot of the things people are typically
30:49asking of me, and I want to have them ready to go for whenever it comes up in conversation. So
30:55hopefully from a call that I were to have with you for instance, I wouldn't just be giving,
30:59you know, some advice or feedback on the call. I'll be giving you lead magnet number one,
31:03maybe two and three depending on what you're looking for. Gotcha. Eventually, it's not as much
31:08of a funnel as much as much as a loop because I'm consistently building relationships and I'm also
31:14consistently providing education to people. people kind of stay in that top and middle funnel over
31:19and over again until at some point I'm getting on a call and we have some sort of mutual agreement
31:25to move forward and often I've eventually found what that looks like for me at the bottom here.
31:30We could talk about that more. Okay. I don't need more cowbell. I need more founders to come on this
31:35podcast. I'm running out of people. So, if you or someone you know has started a business or a side
31:40hustle or growth hacker, anything. If you've made thousands of dollars in a short period of time,
31:44go to tkos.com, fill out the form, and I will give you free publicity as a guest on this podcast.
31:50If it's your friend and not you, I'll give you a,000 bucks for sending them my way. Send them
31:55to tkos.com. So, what we just described is kind of this. We kind of skipped over the middle part.
32:01In between steps one, two, and three, you're sending them stuff. Yeah. Right. based on what
32:06you had learned about them on the call. Correct. Okay. So, tell me about your offers and how did
32:10you land on those? Yeah, this came from what I learned on the free calls with people. So,
32:16I figured out that what I'm really good at doing on these calls. I'm good at building tools.
32:21I'm good at helping with business operations and systems, but a lot of people found a lot
32:26of value in what I was teaching them and sort of having that framework mindset saying this is how I
32:32would go about it in your shoes, which eventually led me to realize, why don't I just try to turn
32:37these into some sort of educationalbased offer. So on the far left, you'll see the private coaching
32:42offer and then I have cohort groups. Those are the two main offers, but obviously I also, you know,
32:48do implementation builds or just, you know, AI builds, website builds, things like that as time
32:53goes on. But I try to keep people start gets people started by doing the private coaching
32:58in the cohort groups. Okay. What the private coaching looks like, usually it's a 3month sort
33:03of deep dive into your business. I work directly with the founders of a leadership team to be able
33:08to implement AI and tech and tools long term. Mhm. Really focusing on employee engagement with
33:16those tools. Really focusing on adoption. Yeah. Adoption is the is the best word to describe it.
33:22But obviously not everyone could afford that. That's my high ticket offer. The one that I am
33:26most ingrained into your business. I'm essentially becoming a thought leader in your business. Uh you
33:31know people say this AI officer functional C AIO or right whatever you know terminology you want
33:37to use for it. Yeah. So that's you know the high ticket one. But obviously most people especially
33:41in my immediate network they don't they can't afford it. What is what does this cost give
33:45or take? Yeah. Give or take it's 5 to 10 grand a month. Yeah. Okay. And that's like your ideal that
33:52that's like I am not you know most people I'm not even trying to pitch them. That is here. You know
33:58they can't afford it. Yeah. And also you know I can't afford to take on infinite clients of that.
34:02I I want to take on one or two of those people max. Yeah. How many hours per week does this take?
34:07Give or take. Yeah. Right now I'm per client I have one client doing that with me in the current
34:14you know 3 month sprint. Mhm. Probably takes 10 hours or so a week for me to focus on that. Okay.
34:21Okay. All right. And then cohort groups. Yeah. And this is what I really love to do. The cohort
34:26groups are essentially month-long sprints with me where I get groups of the one I'm doing right now,
34:3310 people to build alongside each other a common goal. So for the one I'm doing right now, we're
34:38all building websites using Claude that optimizes SEO and their lead funnel. Okay? And we're all
34:45working on it together. People are coming from different backgrounds. One person, you know,
34:49comes from an accounting background, real estate background. So you're not matching together blue
34:53collar business owners, white collar. You're just like, whoever I got for this 10 weeks, if
34:57they qualify and or four weeks, if they need it, if they can pay, you're in this cohort. September
35:03cohort October. And I have done focus related ones as well. Like I've done real estate specific ones
35:08in the past. I did one for acquiring businesses. Mhm. To make essentially acquisitions agents to
35:16help with writing letters of intent, working with brokers, underwriting deals. We had, you know,
35:21AI specific boot camps or cohorts for that. And now I'm doing this one that's much more general,
35:27but um this has been the largest one yet I've been doing this month. Okay. What do you charge
35:30for this? This is just $1,000. That's awesome. So, 10 grand for one month's worth of work. Uh, and
35:38it's I mean, it might even be less work than the private coaching, right? Yeah. How many hours per
35:43week? It's a lot of hours. So, the way they work is every week, Monday leads off with like a lesson
35:49plan. The end of week, we have a call because both of these are with the whole group. Monday,
35:54full group lesson plan. Thursday or Friday full group kind of breakdown, talk about how things
35:59are going for people, discuss what problems they came up that they came through. Obviously,
36:04most people are probably reaching the same sort of questions and problems by the end of the week. So,
36:07it's a great time to interact and get those out of the way. And in the middle of the week,
36:11I'm having 30-minute one-on- ones with people. So, with the 10 people I have going right now,
36:16you know, it it certainly adds up. But not everyone books a one-on-one every week. Correct.
36:20How many hours per week would you say it shakes out at? Yeah. So, let's say 2 hours on Monday,
36:262 hours on Thursday, and then 5 hours in between. So, another 10. About 10. Okay. 250 bucks an hour.
36:34Really? I mean, call it 40 hours for a month, $10,000. And how big could this be? How big are
36:40you comfortable letting it get? Probably double that size. 20 people. Yeah. Yeah. I think the
36:45first one I did was literally just me working with a friend. I called it a I called it a cohort group
36:49cuz I tried to get more people to join. I had one person join. Great. Let's work together is
36:53much more one-on-one. That was to get the, you know, trial period out of the way. And you're
36:58making content out of it. Imagine. Yeah. I'm repurposing a lot of this. The second one I did,
37:02three people still $3,000 a month. Yeah. Like it was great. It was awesome. It was It felt really
37:08good to have people, you know, people that weren't previously buying into work with working with me,
37:13being able to afford something and also me provide something that will theoretically
37:16last them for the rest of their business days. Yeah. All right. Implementation builds. Yeah.
37:22This is something you could be getting this from these guys too, right? Correct. It doesn't have
37:25to be one or the other. I've had multiple people that go through the cohorts work with me to build
37:29something post cohort and all of that is oneoff things and I usually calculate that based on using
37:35and how hourly rate I came up with for myself and also understanding how much time I think it will
37:40take because I'd worked on a lot of these projects over the years. What hourly rate? It's $200. Okay.
37:45I know these are all over the map. Yeah. What on average do you charge for an implementation build?
37:50It could be anywhere between $1,000 and I can imagine charging like 15 to $20,000.
37:57It just depends on the project. Yeah. What are some examples of charges that you've given out
38:02for this? Yeah. So, a lot of I don't know how obsessed I am with the AI agent terminology,
38:08but building AI tools that are scheduled and fit directly into your business. I do a lot of that.
38:15That's kind of the the the theme including like you know marketing specific tools. For instance,
38:22the most recent one I did was working with the realer to repurpose content and just produce a lot
38:27large amount amounts of content for them. Sales builds to help with the outreach funnels and then
38:33newsletters and the things like that. They're all over the place. They widely vary. Okay. Would you
38:38say 2,000 average? Yeah. Okay. So, of the 12 f and I know you've gotten customers since then,
38:45but of these first 12 people, how much revenue have you generated lifetime from them? Oh, jeez,
38:51that's a good question. Probably I would say the average person joins a cohort group of mine
38:56and then probably works on a project with me. So, about $2,000 maybe on average. On average. Okay.
39:00So, 25,000. Wow. From the first 12. Yeah. Yeah. So let's just say that almost for your first like
39:10batch of customers for all the time spent I guess it doesn't include some of the implementation
39:15time. Y you got paid $50 to $100 an hour to start a business. Correct. Right. To generate content
39:21to generate testimonials to get a a uh like a foundation of customers that could start referring
39:27people to you because that doesn't include all the referrals. Right. Right. What about customers that
39:31you've acquired since those first 12 people? Yeah. The majority has come actually late this
39:37summer. I'm going to have the best month of my life, which is about to be making about 15 grand
39:42this time projected. Amazing. You know, if you would have asked me a couple months ago, there
39:46was months I was like, I don't know if I'm going to make any money this. It was very up and down,
39:50especially with I had a lot of travels over the summer. I tried to finish up a lot of projects
39:54going into that. And then the introvert in me stopped my sales funnel and you know,
39:59it it spirals really fast. But I got to the point that this is going to be my last month. Yeah. The
40:0315K. So, in a year and a half, you went from making $4,000 a month at your 9 to5 and you had
40:09a bunch of conversations. Didn't really spend any money other than a little, you know, tech tool,
40:14software tools, 20 bucks a month maybe when I was getting started. Yeah. Like the Yeah. So, $4,000
40:19a month working for the man pre-tax. Mhm. To 10 to $15,000 a month working for yourself. That's
40:25right. And you're not professionally trained. You don't have sales abilities. You just like
40:30tinkering with software tools and AI tools and you provide value to people and then they ask how they
40:35can pay you for it. Yeah. And I think the proof behind it is I put in the time and they see the
40:40content going out and they see the demos and they see everything that I've made for others because
40:45I've been recording it along the way. So it I don't need a degree to prove that I could do these
40:49things. I have all the proof in the world that I can ride people. What percentage of your revenue
40:53today is coming from those first 12 verse people after that? Yeah, the month I'm having right now,
40:58I probably about have 50% of the people being first engagement clients and then the other half
41:06being clients that I've been working with. Wow. I mean, so you were able to more than replace your
41:12income solely from your personal network. Yes. Right. And then everything above that is coming
41:18from either referrals from that personal network or people that you found since then. And really
41:23the people you found since then are still kind of in your personal network. you're just expanding
41:26your network by joining these networking groups and actually reaching out. Y what tools do you
41:31use to do all these like what are your favorite tools? Yeah, it's I'd a make it whatever tools the
41:38businesses are currently using. So I make it my business to understand but if you know you're not
41:42using any AI tools or any platforms right now as of August of 2026 I would just say jump into cloud
41:50and learn everything you can about claude. Don't get distracted by all the other shiny objects out
41:55there based on what we know right now and what's working with people. I would just do cloud. Okay.
41:59What like non AAI tools or other AI tools like CRM? Yeah. Marketing. I've done a lot within
42:05go high level. They have a lot of that's the CRM platforms I use a lot and I've done it you know a
42:10lot with like naturally Salesforce and HubSpot and all these other large CRM systems. And then from
42:16the automation side I use a lot of NAN which is just strictly automation built for people.
42:21If this step happens in a business workflow, then these steps of actions happen autonomously. Okay,
42:27I want you to do something right now. Open your bank statement and add up every single
42:31software subscription that you're paying for. Your CRM, your email marketing tool,
42:34text message platform, calendar booking app, funnel builder, review management,
42:39even a separate form builder or automation tool. I've talked to business owners paying $500 to
42:44$3,000 a month across eight or 10 different tools, and half of them don't even talk to each other.
42:49So then they go pay for Zapier on top of that just to make things connect. High level replaces all of
42:54it. CRM, email, SMS, funnels, websites, calendars, automations, reputation management, invoicing,
43:00one login, one dashboard, one bill starting at 97 bucks a month. A guy in my community was paying
43:063.47 just for Clickfunnels, 99 for Mailchimp, 25 for Kalan, 79 for a review tool, and 49 bucks for
43:13Zapier just to glue it all together. That's 600 a month if you're not counting. He moved everything
43:18to high level and cut his software cost by over 80%. But the best part isn't even the
43:23savings. It's that everything just works together natively. A lead fills out a form on your funnel
43:27that creates a contact in your CRM which triggers a text and email sequence, books an appointment
43:32on your calendar, and then asks for review when the job's done. One workflow, zero duct tape,
43:36and then you can white label the whole platform to resell it to other businesses as your own
43:40software. Charge them 2 to 500 bucks a month. Check out gohighlevel.com/tkopod. They'll give
43:46you a 30-day free trial to see what I mean. And how are you finding new customers today? Would you
43:51take the time to do so? I reach out to 10 people every day doing the same thing I've been doing for
43:55the past year. I go into my contacts and I see what sort of value can I provide. Maybe I think
44:00I want to run a education group based around this information or this deliverable. Who can I prevent
44:08uh potentially provide that to in my network? I go in and I, you know, text 10 people or I call
44:1310 people who I consider my friends. Now, I've been doing this for a year now. Hey, you know,
44:18I'm going to be building this alongside other business owners. Are you interested in joining
44:22us? It's a much easier. So, yeah. And, you know, I don't feel any guilt at all in doing that because
44:28I feel like I'm giving them so much value in these offers that it outweighs any sort of like,
44:33you know, salesy feeling that I've had. So, if you generate 25,000 in the first 150 um customers,
44:38and that 25,000 is growing, right? Just imagine if you had those same 150 conversations today
44:45and instead of your positioning as I think these are tools are cool. I just want to know how I can
44:50help you. You know, instead of that, it's yeah, I make $15,000 a month solving problems with AI
44:56for business owners. That's right. And I can do that for you. Yeah. Like your close rate will be
45:00orders of magnitude higher. Yeah. Especially if you understand the problems they have and
45:04that's just through genuine conversation. Yeah. How important are networking groups,
45:09in-person stuff especially? It's everything. It's everything, man. It's I would not be where
45:14I am without it because I mean, let's be honest, there's a lot of AI dudes out there, right? The
45:19guys that were drop shipping dudes became crypto dudes became Shopify dudes, became uh, you know,
45:25and I've been that guy. I'm utterly guilty, too, dude. I'm not I love those guys. I'd rather have
45:31that guy in my corner than the guy who's been an account executive for 14 years, right? Cuz
45:35they're they're out there. They're trying stuff. So, I'm not dogging on those guys, but there's
45:38a lot of those guys. I was flipping real estate two years ago. Yeah. Amazing. Oh, yeah. Real. I
45:43did forgot that. I've done that, too. But like, when you're in person, then you're in the 1%.
45:49Because the other guys are in the 90. They're online. Yeah. They don't want to. Uh they could,
45:54but they don't want to. I mean, Cincinnati is not a huge area. Um, what other tips or tricks do you
46:00have for people to be successful at this? Yeah, I think trying to establish mentorship wherever you
46:05can. Get in the rooms with the people that are the step ahead of you or even two steps ahead of you
46:11and understanding how they got there. And a lot of it is through this genuine relationship building
46:16that you'll quickly find out. And obviously there's just been strategies of doing so. The two
46:20strategies that I kind of split equally is seek to serve and pay to play. seek to serve meaning
46:28I am going to try to provide value to this mentor in any way I can hopefully to receive guidance in
46:33return. Pay to play being I am going to pay to be in these rooms with these people or pay for these
46:39coaches or these consultants to tell me out along the way. Yeah. Now, what what about the theory
46:44that gez I don't want to show this guy how to vibe code cuz then he's going to make his own website.
46:48Has your thinking on that evolved over time or is that a genuine concern that people should have?
46:52Because some people say um give away the secrets, sell sell the implementation. Do you agree with
46:58that or not? I give every old thing away. I just I will give away if I you know I give all my trade
47:05secrets away. I follow the exact format I use to teach the cohort groups. I will tell you exactly
47:11what I do. But I think people still are looking for the partners like me who have this sort of
47:18build their mindset, have the sort of operational brain to work alongside you and to be a thought
47:23leader and to be on top of the AI spin and everything that's happening these days with
47:28AI. They want to have these genuine connections with me moving forward. So in these cohort groups,
47:33I tell people exactly what I'm doing to build. I don't leave any secrets. So theoretically,
47:38you could go off and do all these things on your own. You'll never need me again. Mhm. But
47:42I find over and over again that by providing all this value, people would rather continue to work
47:48with him because they said, "Wow, look what Ryan did with 1,000 of my $1,000 that I made and look
47:53what he created for me. So, let's continue this relationship." Well, it's like I don't want to
47:57show this guy how to fish because I'm catching all his fish. If I show him how to fish, he doesn't
48:01need to buy from me anymore. But what happens when you show him how to fish is that then he learns
48:04how to fish. Then he comes to you like, "Hey, how do I catch bass?" Oh, well that's a whole
48:08other thing. How do I catch trout? Well, that's cold water. That's right. Well, can you show I
48:13want to catch bass? I'm sick of eating catfish all day. It's like it just gives them more and
48:19more opportunities to pay you money. For sure. So, instead of selling fish, you're selling coaching,
48:23you're selling consulting, you're selling a subscription service of lures. You know what
48:27I'm saying? Like, you just got to have faith that it will work out better if you believe in the law
48:32of abundance, as woo woo as it sounds, and just give it all away. Absolutely. And it'll come back
48:3610fold. Tell me about the DASA framework. I use a bunch of frameworks in my work. I like to follow
48:42the Alex Formosies in the world who use frameworks to describe any sort of business uh solutions they
48:47have. But this is the framework that I use to lead up to any AI project. So whether it's in sales,
48:54marketing, this is the path I follow and it starts with the D which is diagnose which
49:00essentially means finding the problem that you're looking to solve. A lot of people are trying to
49:03solve non-existent problems using AI and that's a waste of time. You want to actually be getting
49:07some sort of outcome from what we're trying to build. So that's the D. A stands for articulate.
49:12So saying what the dream solution would look like for your business if we built something like this.
49:18For instance, my team wouldn't have to work, you know, the full 40 hours a week on this. Because a
49:24lot of this is taken off their plates. It could be more time uh saved or more money made, whatever,
49:31you know, whatever sort of spin you want to put on it. The S stands for systemize which means
49:36try to bring all of the ideas together from your team. Try to bring in SOPs or you know standard
49:42operating procedures about what is currently working. Who are people in the space that are
49:46doing this properly? Let's study them. Try to make a system that would work that we could plug AI
49:52into because if you have a working system already with a lot of manpower and a lot of manual work,
49:57then AI will make that so much easier for you. So I think like the slogan I I love to use is
50:03if you're automating chaos, you're scaling chaos. That's what I'm trying to prevent with using this
50:08sort of framework with everything I build. So then finally AI can be implemented into a
50:12project. I like if you're automating chaos, you're scaling chaos. It's kind of like a
50:16business. It's Do you you watch The Office? Yeah. In the episode where he he starts Michael Scott
50:21Paper Company and his accountant's like, "You're out of business. Like the more paper you sell,
50:24the more money you lose cuz you're selling paper at a loss." And he's like, "Crunch the numbers
50:28again." He's like, "Crunch. Did anything change?" No. Yeah. It's like that's what happens when you
50:33sell something at a loss. You don't want to sell more of it, right? You automate chaos,
50:36you're scaling chaos. Yeah. And then it, you know, puts a bad flavor in your mouth about all the tech
50:40that we're implementing. Oh, chatbt doesn't work or, you know, these automations don't work. You
50:45just had a really bad system to start with. AI is using the data that you feed it. Give it the,
50:50you know, proper information. It'll work. I like to call a of the dosa framework articulate. That's
50:55like the aha moment. You articulate the problem to them that they're experiencing but they don't
50:58have a structure around. Right? You're like, "Oh, so you're telling me that blah blah blah
51:02blah blah." And they're like, "Yes." Right. They get it and then it's like buy in. Some of
51:07this is happening on the calls that I'm doing with people. It's like we we're always well a you know,
51:11the hard part is trying to get the problem out of their mouth. But then what you know I could
51:16give them that our aha moment on the call and then once we start to work together in a paid fashion,
51:20we could take over with the systemize and AI implementation steps together. Now,
51:24if you it sounds like you're you're it's taking three calls for you to close your average deal,
51:28right? Where would you place call number one, two, and three along this framework? One is, you know,
51:33the D and the A step. Both of them. Yeah. Because the a lot of people kind of know the problems
51:40they're currently having in their business. Yeah. Sometimes you have to get it out of them, right?
51:43Sometimes we're like, well, how is your, you know, this revenue track and how is this different
51:48offering going? It does sometimes, you know, first call oftentimes could be just the diagnose step,
51:54but I try to get through the first two steps on the first call and then the articulate step kind
51:58of snowballs into the second and third call of people typically. Okay. And then the rest of it
52:03is post close. Correct. I've talked to a lot of people that do AI implementation and some of them
52:08struggle to ask a question good enough to elicit a good enough answer about what they're struggling
52:14with in their business. M because if you're a business owner and I'm trying to solve problems
52:18with AI for you and I if I ask you something generic like what problems are you struggling with
52:23in your business right now? They have all kinds but they don't know how to match their actual
52:28problems with the answer to that question. So are there any like creative workarounds to to bubbling
52:33that out of them? Uh it's still one of the most challenging things I face. But I love asking like
52:38what is keeping you up at night? Like what is the thing that is haunting you because you're going
52:42to have to go deal with it the next day. There's often times I have a lot of solutions that could
52:47fix the problems that are really like haunting people like oh you know I'm not making enough
52:51money to pay my staff like well let's dive into that more or you know this one project is going
52:56wrong in all these different ways let's let's dive deep into these this is like you know I want to
53:02help you solve these problems with my specific expertise. Yeah. By the way obviously this whole
53:07episode is about AI implementation. I have a community playmakakerai.com where that's all
53:12we do. There's almost 300 of us and dozens of us have gotten our first paid customers exclusively
53:18from what we learned in my group. We will teach you how to learn AI, how to implement AI, how to
53:22vibe code with AI, how to sell AI services, how to price it. There's a whole community of people
53:28and they're only doing that AI implementation for small businesses because I firmly believe this is
53:32the best business opportunity in the world right now. There are 400 million small business owners
53:37in the world, 33 million in the US, and all of them need AI, and you can solve that problem
53:42for them. So check us out at playmakersai.com. You've heard the phrase with regards to like
53:47prompting AI. Garbage in, garbage out. Garbage prompt, garbage output, right? Yes. You could
53:52also say the quality of your question equals the quality of your answers. For sure. So generically,
53:57if we go to church or hang out with people, how you doing? Good. How you doing? Good. Stupid
54:02question, stupid answer. Yeah. I was in a on a podcast once where the first question was,
54:07"What was the last thing you cried about?" Yeah. I'm like, I just had I'm like, first of all,
54:11I'm a little embarrassed to admit. Second of all, I I need like 3 minutes to think about that. Yeah.
54:16You know, it's a great question and it almost always gets a great answer. So that question in
54:22this business in this industry is so critically important because if you cannot diagnose the D
54:27of the DOSsa framework aka show them that there is a disease that needs curing right then there's no
54:34disease that needs curing but we all have problems even a perfectly ran business has problems that
54:38could be better optimized right any other creative ways of getting that answer other than what keeps
54:43you up at night which is a great one that comes to mind I like what your your friend said on the
54:48podcast you jumped on like trying to get elicit some sort of response that they weren't expecting
54:52from you. That's the sort of main goto. But I love asking like why questions when people are talking
54:59about their business. They might act like, oh, all of this is going fine. Like I don't want to, hey,
55:04I don't want to be vulnerable with this guy that I haven't talked to in years, so I'm just going to
55:07talk about, you know, yeah, the marketing portion of our business is going fine. Operations are
55:12going okay. And I, you know, trying to pinpoint maybe very specific things about them, like, well,
55:17what about this particular offering? been have you been able to get that off the ground? Yeah. A lot
55:21of these, you know, the questions I ask go into the studying leading up to these calls. Okay. So,
55:27you're 26 years old. What will you make this month from implementing AI into small businesses?
55:32$15,000 this month. Profit. Profit. Amazing. Everyone is saying that AI will kill small
55:39businesses. You say the opposite. Why? This is the best time you could compete with the enterprises
55:44because you have access to the technology that allows you to do so. you have the same access that
55:49they've always had now. Yeah. And theoretically, you have even better tools than them because
55:53they're limited to what they could use based on policies and governance that they have in those
55:58organizations. You can you move much faster than Well, do you know how many organizations can't
56:01implement chat GPT because they don't think it's secure enough or it's not secure enough? Yeah.
56:06The hospital system I was looking at, they, you know, they're trying to move forward with their
56:11AI implementation, but it's a hard, you know, it's hard to get it going for them. Yeah. What
56:15is the most a small business has ever paid you to help them with AI? Yeah, I've been working with
56:20the same business for the past year or so now. So, I've made about 15 grand working directly
56:26with them. And what have you done for them? It's been the advising. It's been business advisory,
56:32how we're implementing AI and the software tools into their company, making sure that they're on
56:37track to reaching their goals. What industry and what size of a business is this? It's a small
56:42startup. It's a really a tech startup. Are they funded? Nope. Wow. Pre-unding. How much did it
56:48cost you to start an AI implementation business in total? $20. Cloud Pro or Claw? I think at the time
56:55it was Chad GBT, but yes, back when Chad GBT was cool back when Yeah. That that was the that was
56:59the craze. Yeah. What is an AI tool that everyone is hyped about that you find to be useless
57:04for business? I'm not a fan of Open Claw to be completely honest with you. Where did it go? Yeah,
57:11there's been a lot going on in the background of them working Google trends right now and it's
57:15going to look like this. I don't even need to. I think it's perfectly fine for AI users like myself
57:20who understand how to use the tools to be using OpenClaw, but I don't like the fact that people
57:24are trying to implement them into into their business as fast as possible because of the access
57:28you're giving it. People just don't understand how big of a risk it is. Yeah. Why are you doing
57:33AI implementation for small businesses here in Cincinnati? Why not move to Austin, New York,
57:38San Francisco? Yeah, I mean this is where I was born and raised and people really need it
57:42here. I love serving the people that, you know, I grew up around, the people that, you know, have,
57:47I don't know, have served me to this point. A lot of people in, you know, the Austin,
57:51Texases of the world or the San Francisco, they have in-house people doing this or they, you know,
57:57their neighbors are AI experts or AI influencers already. Yeah. There's much less of us in,
58:04you know, the Midwest and particularly in Ohio. So, I love being the person that people could
58:08rely on locally. And you're telling me that a shy introvert can make six figures a year implementing
58:15AI in a small business? Yes. You could make more for sure. Have you ever automated someone's job
58:20away? Nope. Cuz I mean, we're we're growing the pie here. Yeah. At the end of the day,
58:24no jobs have been automated away. I've just tried to make them more efficient. I think
58:29I'm all about efficiency and how you could spend the majority of your time doing what
58:33actually matters versus taking, you know, the email management stuff out of off of my hands,
58:39things like that. Okay, let's say that you get a call tomorrow from a plumber with five crews.
58:44What is the first thing that you automate for him? There's a lot of logistics that go into
58:48the home service space in general. A lot of people really struggle with how can we optimize routes?
58:54I've been working on solutions related to that recently with home service businesses. Likewise,
58:59a lot of people in the space you aren't usually the most techsavvy individuals. So potentially
59:05they need tools that fit their lifestyle. And by that mean I mean let's try to find the right
59:10tooling or CRM system that their teams will actually use. understanding why they might not
59:16use certain tools out there, what confuses them about it, and trying to get to the root cause of
59:20those problems so they could grow and scale to the point they want because of the tools that
59:25they brought into their business. Beautiful. If a 20-year-old wants to do exactly what you do,
59:30what should they do? They should do the exact same thing I've been doing, which is trying to
59:34get in person. Don't make the mistake I bet I made a year ago and just trying to go all out online,
59:39but meet as many people as they can in person. try to find mentors, build solutions that they
59:45see problems for in their own world. You know, for instance, if you're currently in university, how
59:50can you make solutions for people in your classes or your professors? Try to take the problems that
59:56you see around you and and find solutions for it. And likewise, if you've never used AI before,
1:00:02I love starting by making a video game because it takes all the pressure off of you and it
1:00:07and it puts your effort into something that's a lot of fun and engaging for you. And that's how
1:00:11I actually that was my first ever project I ever did is I made a video game. What video game? It's
1:00:15called Lift Line. It's a ski resort trivia game cuz I'm a big big into skiing and snowboarding.
1:00:20So, um I took something I love and I kind of made a Wordle style game. Yeah. Found it. That's cool.
1:00:25See, I'm a small business owner and I get 20 emails a day from 26-year-old AI bros. Yeah. Why
1:00:31should I or other small business owners hire you? Because I'm a true go-giver. If you haven't read
1:00:37Bob Berg's The Go-Giver, I highly recommend you doing so. I try to just provide as much value as
1:00:43I possibly can with no real expectation in return constantly. If you need some sort of solution,
1:00:48I got you. I will try to make it as affordable for you as possible. And through doing so,
1:00:53I think people just naturally gravitate towards me. If people want to get a hold of you or hire
1:00:57you or learn more, how can we find you? Yeah, I am constantly posting on social media under my name,
1:01:04Ryan Shooter. That's spelled s c h u e t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t
1:01:06t t t t t t t t t t t t e r. We'll link to that. I'm always on YouTube. I'm on Instagram. I'm on
1:01:10Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. That's where you'll find me the most often. But I'm also starting
1:01:13a newsletter on Substack called Freedom Based Founder. Okay, Ryan. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you
1:01:18so much, Chris. If you or someone you know has ever asked AI, hey, will you make me money? And
1:01:23it actually did. It delivered. I need to hear your story. I want you on the podcast. Go to tko.com,
1:01:30fill out the form, and we'll have you on. If your friend did that, if they made money with AI,
1:01:34send them to tkos.com and I'll give you $1,000 for the referral. If you like this content, please
1:01:39share with a friend, hit a like or a comment below, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner

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