How to Use AI to Automate Sales

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Welcome to Powerful Business Strategies, where you will find out that everything you have ever learned about growing your business is wrong. Finally, a show where you'll learn the right way to grow your business by learning business and financial strategies that your competition isn't doing. And now here's your host, the resident of NeXTSTEP CFO Michael Barbarita. And joining Michael for today's show as an executive moderator is chooky obia.

1:00 Yes, this is chokey, and I believe that gratitude is undefeated and growth is about the next step. It is an honor for me to moderate today's discussion with my good friend Michael. Michael how are you great? How's it going, Chucky? How's your weekend? My week one is good. I was nice, Loca. We've had a really good couple of weeks impacting small business owners. It's just an honor to collaborate with you in that regard. Michael, Well, likewise, and thank you, Chokey. As Chicky said, my name is Michael bob Rider, a president of Next Step CFO, and next Step CFO is a fractional CFO and strategic implementation firm, and our vision is to ensure overwhelmed business owners achieve the time, freedom and consistent profits to build a legacy and the life they desire. And our mission is dedicated to guiding small business owners to leveraging their time, exploding their profits and build a meaningful legacy.

1:55 And this show, Powerful Business Strategies and our book of the same name, is a step toward accomplishing that vision and mission. And so with that, I'd like to hand it back to my co author and moderator for the show, Chooky Obio. Michael, thank you, so look a quick disclaimer before we get energized and activate today's discussion, which Michael, I know you'll do the introductions for our guests very very energized about our discussion today. So quick disclaimer. Look, Michael and I are both affiliated with a number of different organizations, and I currently serve as the managing director of business Development for Veta Price, which is a global business focused law firm. In addition to that, as I noted earlier, it's truly an honor to collaborate with Michael to moderate business roundtables, really coast to coast with small to medium sized business owners, and then document the insights that we gather from these roundtables. We've even documented a number of these very powerful insights as part of our book Powerful Business Strategies. But look, please note that the views expressed on this show are our personal views based on successful experiences, and my mission as a fearless moderator is to ask the right questions to help you, the listener, learn the best business strategies that the competition is not doing. Michael, how energized are you about today's episode?

3:21 Oh? God, am I excited? You know? Today excited to have Josh Thomas, who is the co founder of Annabot's AI, which is a practical, practical AI for non techi entrepreneurs. Yes, and Josh is also the podcast host for The Douzone as well as the podcast host for the Basic Business AI podcast. And so we'd love to welcome Josh to the show. Josh, are you there, Hey, guys, good to see you. How you doing, Josh? Excellent? Great to have you guys. Came on camera and I realized I was completely underdressed for that, So.

4:01 That's all right. Hey, you know I Hey, you know, you don't. You can't mind me. I'm the most uncomfortable person in the world, you know, just think of it, Just think. Of it that way. Well, Josh, you know something I don't think we business owners can run from uh these. Days, and that is AI. And that's why I'm so excited to have you on the show today, uh, to give us some you know, some some some insights and some points of view. And let me start by asking you should should you use AI for business? And if so, in what way? Yeah, that's a great question. So here's here's the thing that uh, most people are really trying to grasp is well, what's the point? What is it all for? And a lot of us just recently, over the last several years, we've gone through these cycles of somebody saying, oh, this new technology, it's going to change everything. Remember Bitcoin became a thing, and then after bitcoin was a thing and then it crashed, then it was like NFTs and I still don't know what those are. And I think I even bought some, but I don't know what they are.

5:16 And we've gone through these cycles of like somebody gets this new tech craze and then it dies and it goes away, and then we all feel dumb. And so now AI is here, and it's like, well, I've seen this before, and so as an entrepreneur, what we have to ask ourselves is, well, should we even be messing with this? If I was going to use AI in my business specifically, what purpose would it serve me? And so that's where with me, I asked myself that question. If I'm going to use AI, why would I use it? And the best way that I can think to use AI as an entrepreneur is well, how's it going to increase my bottom line? How's it going to bring more sales in the door, How's it going to make making money easier for me? And so should you use it?

6:07 If you can find a way to use AI to increase your sales and reduce your effort in making those sales. Then it makes a lot of sense. If you can't do that, then probably don't use AI. And fortunately there are lots of ways that you can use AI to make more money and reduce your effort. Really remarkable, Josh, and I want to pick up on that, right, So we have a number of small business owners Coast to Coast the tune into the show, and a lot of these business owners, Josh, are from the school of hard knocks, right, these are small, family owned businesses. A number of these business owners have let's just call it constructive skepticism when it comes to like you talk about with technology and the tech craze. Now, they'll say things like, look, my customers want to talk to human beings, right, how do you respond to that?

6:59 So I've actually heard that many many times. You know, my people want to talk to humans. Yep, Well my people are different. Oh that doesn't work because this is a more sophisticated market. Yeah, and that's a sentiment that you believe. But sometimes somebody I've been studying marketing and sales for a long time, and one of the hardest things for me to do as a copywriter is to write from the perspective of my client, my prospect, who is thinking about whatever problem they have from their point of view. They're so selfish, you know, they're thinking about themselves, and so we're thinking about, well, the reason that you're not getting results is you're not working hard enough, or you're not doing the right things, and you're not consistent.

7:49 But they're not sitting there thinking that. They're sitting there thinking, well, I hired this coach and he ripped me off, and you know, I tried to sell the thing and it was a scam, and then I just don't have time. I'm too busy. That's what they're thinking it. And so we think, well, my customers want to talk to humans. But here's the problem with that. Your customers, when they reach out to you, they want an answer, and their expectation, according to science, is they expect you to answer within five minutes, and if you don't answer within five minutes, your chances of ever doing business with them drops eighty percent.

8:30 And the average time chooky. Do you know what the average time frame is to get back to an online inquiry? Like for any business across the board? You know what it is? No please tell forty seven hours? Wow? Two days? Huh? Now, chookey. Do you remember a website you were sitting on two days ago? I do not. Now my memory is not that good. Michael may actually have a better memory than. Michael. Do you remember a website you were on two hours ago? No, that's the problem. When you're sixty seven years old, that's where the problem's got. Your memory goes. First, here's the thing. If you're listening right now, just think, listen.

9:13 If you're listening to this show, I want you to just go back twenty minutes. Do you remember a website you were on twenty minutes ago? I don't know, Probably not unless it was Facebook or something or whatever. But that's the thing is your customer is expecting you to get back to them within five minutes, and if you don't, they're going to move on. Ten minutes after they reach out to you, they're already talking to your competitor. And so, according to the surveys that have been done, eighty percent of your customers would prefer an automated means of communicating with your business if it meant they could get a quick answer to their question. Four out of five of your customers would rather not talk to you, not because they don't like you, but probably because they don't want to bother you with their silly little question. I don't want to waste his time, you know, it's just a dumb question. Or they think, oh man, he's just going to try to sell me something, and I just don't want to get in there. I don't want to feel uncomfortable.

10:14 Or the most more likely version is they know you're not going to get back to him for two days, so if I could just get the answer now, I'll take the answer now. And so my customers want to talk to humans. Is it's kinda true, you know, like we're not making that up, but in reality, practically speaking, they just want the answer. They don't care if they're talking to you or a chat bot or you know, the dog or you know, anything like divine intervention doesn't matter as long as they get the answer. Let me ask something, charge, Do you recommend that they have a human backup? Or is that most for most small businesses, that's just not practical.

11:00 So every idea and opinion is based on some level of truth. My people want to talk to humans, you know, you're kind of right, like technically speaking, you're right, but in practicality does work that way what we want to do back to the first question, should we use AI? If AI can reduce your effort and increase your results, then yes, AI is just there to preserve that speed to lead response. Because there's one more stat that I can share with you. If you can if you can respond to your online inquiries within one minute, which is very difficult to do as a human being, If you can respond within one minute, your chances of closing that business goes up by three hundred and ninety one percent.

11:48 Oh wow. And you're thinking like, well great, but I can't hover around the phone all the time. I can't just be waiting for emails to come in and fire back. I'm only human. You're right, You're only human. And so that's where AI can come in and preserve that opportunity. Because people tend to seventy four percent and I'm not making these statistics up, by the way, ninety five percent of all statistics are made up, but these are not. So seventy four percent of online consumers at least are going to go with the company that responds to them first period. And so if you can respond First, your chances of doing business with them is extremely high. AI can respond within five seconds.

12:35 Interesting, and we certainly have a number of other questions and Michael, I'm going to just interject here with a quick question or Josh, So there are a couple of phrases Josh that you've used this idea of an answer or a quick response. What do you have in mind? Like what are they really respond because I would imagine folks will get frustrated if the AI chat body is not really address the question right, So take us through that thought process if you don't mind. Yeah. Sure. So there's a lot of really crappy chat out there. It's like, yeah, chatbots aren't new on site chat, which this also works on SMS, social media, Google, my Business, pretty much anywhere that you can communicate with your customers, including voice. We can do AI voice. It's come a long way in the last couple of years. But most people when they're thinking of a chatbot, they're thinking of this little badge on a website and they go and they and they pop it up and it's like, oh, what do you want? Yeah, what's your email? We'll get back to you later. And it's like I already get rejected enough during the day, like now the guy I want to give money to is rejecting me too. That's weird and so all right, So the first thing that we need to change is that perception. The other thing that happens is we think any kind of automated thing when we think of an automated conversation, and a lot of us we're thinking about when we have to call our bank or we have to call our insurance company

14:07 or something, and it's like press one to be connected to accounts receivable, you're like, oh, you know, and it's just the worst experience ever. Agent zero zero zero zero. We're trying to get through. I just want to talk to a human. That's because the experience that they're giving you is horrible. Same thing with AI chat. The experience they're giving you is horrible. It doesn't mean it's always horrible. It just means that they don't care. They don't care enough to make a good. And so if you care enough to make a good, or you hire somebody that does care enough to make it good, then that experience is pretty much seamless. The experience that we build with aichat is the one that we would want. I've been in sales for two decades, not nearly as long as Michael, but Michael was Michael was selling like forty thousand units of his of his food is cookie dough or something.

15:01 You know, really you know. But but but the thing is this is people want to be treated with respect. They want to be acknowledged, like, oh, you have this question, that's a great question. And then we train it to say, here's the practical answer to that question. And then we also train it to say, by the way, I have a few more insights for you. Would you like to book a call and we can talk about that with a human. And that's the goal ultimately, back to your other question, Michael, is we want to get them on with a human. We just want the AI to help it along and get more people to show up to that call.

15:43 Yeah, so it's the quality of the training that's critical to the value of the robot. Is that Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, definitely. But the idea is you could certainly build a crappy bot and make your experience much more difficult, But the equality of the training and the presence and ability to capture that lead right there. When they're hot because a lot of times what happens is somebody shows up to your website or your funnel, or it doesn't have to be a website, it can be anywhere. But it's just everybody can visualize going to a website and clicking on a button, and so what's happening there is, if your targeting is good, you got the right person.

16:29 If your messaging is good, you got them thinking about doing something with you. And man, this makes a lot of sense. But what about something that you didn't cover. That's where they engage with the chat, and the chat will answer those questions because it already knows, oh, you're probably thinking this, this, and this, because we pre trained it to answer the questions and oh what about this? Yeah, that's a great question. Here's the answer. Would you like to talk to somebody about that? We're always training it to answer your question and then try to push you to the next thing, whatever that may be, even if it's making a purchase, which we can we can do that without talking to a human as long as as long as it's a pretty straightforward, say oh you can, you can do that without involving a human at all.

17:17 Interesting, and let me ask you this, Josh. You know you talk about in your tagline practical AI for non techie entrepreneurs. What if a business owner does not have technical skills, are they still able to utilize it or how would they go about utilizing it? So, the best way that I can describe this is AI is a tool. If you can swing a hammer. If you can learn to swing a hammer, you can learn to use AI. Now you might think, well, I don't want to swing a hammer. That sounds like a lot of work, or it's too heavy for me. Your my skills are better used elsewhere, And that's all fine.

18:04 It's all true. You don't ever have to pick up a hammer to know what a hammer is and how it works. You also don't have to pick up a hammer to get something hammered. You can just get somebody else to do it. And so, hey, I'm not super techy, I don't know how all this stuff works. Great, you don't really have to know how it works. The only thing that you really have to know is that AI is a tool that can increase your sales and reduce your effort. And as long as you know that and you find value in that, then you can always get somebody else to use the tool for you or set it up for you, and you literally never have to touch it. I'm the best example. I am not actually like a super tech genius. I'm just a guy that understands this is the future. And so I surround myself with the smartest possible people to take how I would handle a sales conversation or a sales situation and translate that into the tool of AI, so that the AI can do it for me. And really, if you're an entrepreneur and you're not super techy, that's really the best way to look at AI. I can download my brain and my processes into a machine that can operate ten times faster than me twenty four to seven, and it rarely ever makes a mistake. It makes some hilarious mistakes, don't get me wrong, but it rarely ever makes a critical mistake that's going to cost you a sale. Whereas

19:34 humans are prone to error, they have fights with their boyfriends, they have sick days, they have all kinds of things that are wrong, but the machine is always going to show up and just follow your instructions. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating, And I want to pick up on something you said Josh, just this idea you've referenced a few times now, the conversation, the sales conversation and the ability for this AI resource to translate that. Can you talk to us about the concept of a conversational funnel? Sure? So it's it's this big broad term of a sales funnel is basically designed to dump a bunch of people in the top and then we and then we squeeze them down and and eventually a couple of people come out the bottom and they pay you. And it sounds kind of painful when you really describe. It's like going into this medieval torture device and where they're just like, give me your credit card, right right, Yeah, that's that's the uh what you were you were describing those the Home Shopping Network. It's like they've got everything down to a science. They know they're people, they know what words to use, they know how fast to talk like, that's the machine and it's very effective. But the way that people buy has shifted over the years, and where we're at right now is people aren't looking for the super hypy,

21:07 like make a million dollars with no effort. They're not looking for that anymore. They don't believe it. They've they've already saw they already saw that episode and they realized that it was completely staged. They already bought that product and then got burned. And so now what people are looking for is they're not looking for these big, bold claims, but they're looking for authentic connections. Would you rather be squeezed through a vice or would you rather have a conversation with a trusted friend. Most people are leaning that direction, especially gen Z, and you know, and we may think if there's you know, some guys with with grayish hair or less hair on this call or maybe listening in, like, ah, those guys, you know, they're ruining everything. But here's the thing.

21:56 Gen Z as of right now is sixty percent of the market that is making decisions on technology and business systems and those sorts of things. Gen Z is now the majority. And gen Z doesn't believe in your hype. Gen Z doesn't want to hear your bold claims. They want to build an authentic connection and do business with people that they feel right about. The best way to do that is to sit down face to face. That's not very practical. So we have technology to help us. We infuse AI to recreate that conversation with a trusted friend in an online environment in a variety of different ways, both to bring people into our funnel and also to process them through our funnel. But that whole time, we're right there with them, just answering their questions, not being pushy, saying hey, let me give you all the information you need to make the right decision for you, because that's how people are operating today, and that's where gen Z's going, Jen aalfha aff it. These guys just want the information to make the decision, and that's what we need to focus on.

23:07 And Josh, let me ask you this. How does the conversational funnel generate higher quality leads and appointments? Is it through those authentic connections or other other ways? Sure, so think about it like this. If I'm thinking of a service professional, let's let's do professional services like an accountant or something, just to give us something to visualize. So if you're running an AD for your accounting services online, we do we do accounting services, tax prep, tax planning, whatever. And you make a claim like hey, we can save you fifty percent on your tax bill next year. All right, you got my attention. I'm going to book a call.

23:55 I'm going to have a conversation with you on the phone, and during that kind of conversation, well, how long you've been in business? Have you ever done this for other people? Is this legit? Am I going to go to jail? Or is the irs king I'm pursuing? And there's all these objections that come up when I have the conversation. Sure, and you, as a salesperson, you got to overcome those or there's no sale. Now. They have all those questions in your funnel, but they don't have an opportunity to ask those questions. That's where we can start peppering in some AI, both on the front end instantly to where it's like right here on your website, I'm engaging with them with AI. Oh have you guys done this before?

24:36 Is this legal? Do you guys have license? How long you've been in business? Hey? I can answer all of those questions, and then there's some follow up questions. It's like, well that's great, but I don't know if I trust you yet. That's going to happen whether they if they get on your sales call, that's they got to go through that process. Anyway. And so what we do is we nurture them on the back end with automation and AI, and we send them emails and messages and videos that say, hey, I know you probably have some questions about who I am and how this process works. Let me show you the step by step, and then we overcome those objections over time, and we keep inviting them back into the conversation whenever they're ready. So they're going to show up on your sales call now more informed, more motivated, and they have all the information that they need. They just need that little human touch or reassurance that they're in the right place and this is the right guy for them. That's where AI can help you give a much more qualified person.

25:38 By the time they end up on that call, all their questions are answered. They already know like and trust you, and it's just a matter of is this a right fit for me or not? And you, as a vendor really should be focusing on that more than selling somebody. Make sure you got the right person, because we've all had the wrong fit and that's no fun. So part of the trade process, then of the robot, of the chatbot, if you will, is the handling of objections. Is that fair? Yep? So they Yeah, so so you can you can train the robot to handle the common objections and and that, and then it will do that work for you.

26:22 Really amazing, really amazing. Josh, let me ask you this, what will do you have any thoughts or comments on how AI will impact search engine optimization? Yeah, well that's a that's a big right turn there, but we can definitely. Yeah, I just want to know if any thoughts. No, definitely, but I want to put one punctuation mark on the last thing you said about objections. Oh, okay, ultimately, and this was I can't take credit for this, but when I learned this about as it changed everything for me. Okay, there's there's there's two questions that any prospect has whenever they're considering your product, and there's a bunch of them, but there's two main questions. Does this actually work? That's one question, and that's a question that everybody's going to have.

27:23 Does this actually work? Is this real? Is this legit? And then once that question gets answered, you can answer that question with social proof, with demonstrations, with testimonials, with your white paper and all these things. You answer that question. But there's one more question that makes all of that irrelevant. Is this going to work. For me? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you did this for five hundred other people. Cool, But what about me? I'm different, I'm special, I'm unique. I've already tried all of this stuff. Is this going to work for me? And the sooner you understand that that's the only real question that you have to answer, the easier your sales will be. And I know that I'm getting away from AI here, but here's the thing.

28:14 If you know how to answer that question, your AI will know how to answer that question. If you don't, your AI won't. If you're great at sales, you can make AI multiply your sales. If you're terrible at sales, the AI is just going to expose you at scale. So really, the way that AI needs to work for you is you need to get really great at the fundamentals of running your business, and then AI can give you exponential growth. Focus on that first pepper and AI as a bonus, I just wanted to add that punctuation there. On excellent and then that was great insight and respect to Seo Y.

28:58 So here's what we're seeing happen, is you go to Google and you type in a question, and now least the first half of your screen is taken up by an AI curated response, and they give source links to the source material, but you're getting your answer like right there. You don't even have to scroll, you don't have to click on a link. You're just getting I think it's Gemini. It's what they're calling it. Now, Google Gemini. You can go and Google anything right now. And that big white text that you see or black text is an AI curated response. It's them deciding, it's their machine deciding, based on searching thousands of different web pages, here's the answer.

29:46 Now. The problem with that is there's a bunch of weird stuff on the Internet. Some of it's not true, and it's not entirely obvious that it's not true, and AI is not sophisticated enough yet to tell the difference, and so the veracity of those answers is sometimes questionable. You know, I've got some stuff I post on my Facebook occasionally with just like really off AI responses, like can you cook spaghetti with gasoline? And it's like yeah, actually it's a nice flavor, and like just go and ask some weird question and like sometimes you just get these bizarre results.

30:31 So how is AI going to affect SEO in that way? You know, to a certain extent. SEO may not matter, It may not matter how much you do if Google is just going to curate a response and bypass you one hundred percent anyway. And so where I think AI is really going to affect SEO as far as content creation is Google's going to get more sophisticated about figuring out that you're using AI and it's going to deprecate eight year results and it's going to delist you and you're not going to show up. Google's looking for authentic, real content that is unique, despite the fact that they're using AI to just clobber you anyway. Yeah, right, looking for that authentic content that's unique, and they're going to figure out how to do it. Just like they figured out how to delist all of the SEO kind of optimized stuff from ten years ago. They got rid of that stuff. They're going to figure out how to get your AI content out of the way so that the real stuff stays near the top. But then they're going to cover that up anyway with their own AI. So I mean I think Honestly, the best way to get in front of people is to pay for it.

31:43 Yeah, believe so, Josh. I mean, one of the things that we focus on in this show our strategies that the competition isn't doing. And I've been fascinated by this conversation about how you can almost position AI as a competitive advantage strategy in a way. So let's stay on that just for a minute or two. Give us a sense, like, what are some examples that you have of how someone has been able to maybe position their business, whether it's a service or product, where they got ahead of the competition truly corner to market based on AI. Yeah, so I want to take one step past AI on that AI is a tool that will help you augment whatever results you're getting. And so here's a way that here's a way that we stand out in a red ocean industry and we use AI to help us. Okay, so we do you guys are doing a podcast here, radio show. We have a version of that that we call a flip show. And the flip show is very simple.

32:58 We are seeking out our ideal client, and we're building a show around a topic that's related to our ideal client. And what we do. It's not it's not exactly necessarily on the nose, but we're building a show that we want to attract people too that are our ideal client, and we have a conversation with them. And Michael just went through this process. Actually, it's why I'm on this radio show. Michael was on my podcast. It was the d Zone, right, yep, I have I have two, so I sometimes I forget. But yeah, So Michael came onto our our show and at the beginning, I did the intro and in that intro was a little soft pitch about the thing that we do, and then I featured Michael.

33:54 I put a put a spotlight on him, and I asked him a bunch of questions and I gave him a great experience. And that's real, by the way, it's authentic. It's the same thing that you should be doing. If you get onto a sales call or get to know you call, you want to ask, like, tell me a cool story, man, I want to know who you are. And Michael starts busting out all this home shopping network where he's selling like five truckloads of cookie dough, and it was like, dang, man, that's that's awesome. Yeah, that was a lot. That was a lot of fun, Josh yeah. And so we dug into that conversation. We had a great experience together. And then we finished up the conversation and I did another little by the way, you know, this is what we do, and then we turned the recording off and then Michael and I just talked for like ten or fifteen minutes, and it was we're just two friends, like we were. It was a conversation with a trusted friend. And at that point, Michael's either interested, he's already he's already heard me like indirectly pitched twice.

34:59 He's either interested in what I do or is not. But I've built a relationship that's going to last and that may produce other benefits for me or for him, or maybe we meet up down the road. Six months later, it's like, oh yeah, Josh, yeah, No, we had that interview. It was awesome. And that's something that you can't say that like you can't remember the last time you were on a sales call six months ago. It's like, who was that guy that was trying to sell me internet service? Right right? What a great dude? Like nobody's thinking that you know. But if that internet dude had a podcast and it's like, hey, I like to talk to my people who use internet service to talk about, you know, what the quality of their bandwidth or something. You know, Like that's a conversation.

35:48 Like that's a relationship that you build. And so if I'm going to go into any red Ocean market, it's alter competitive and a lot of different people are selling the same thing, and it's like, how do I tell the difference. I'm not even going to talk about my product. I want to talk about what's important to you that's related to something I do, and then we're going to build a relationship. And that relationship has an unlimited value. And I'll give you one quick example here. I know this is a long I don't want to go too long, but the very first podcast I ever started was called how to Lose Money, and we brought on entrepreneurs and investors.

36:30 They shared a major failure story and a lesson they learned from it. I think it's still on Spotify and one of the very first guys I was horrible. By the way, you don't even have to be good at this. You can be horrible at it. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you just have a conversation. And so I interview this guy and it was great interviews twenty minutes and six months later, this is a long time ago. Six months later, I found myself out a job and I was trying to figure out, well, how am I going to pay the bills? And so I just started reaching out to people I interviewed on a podcast, like hey man, what are you working on? And so this guy gets on he has a problem I can solve and I said, well, I can solve that problem for this many dollars and he says yes. And that turned into a five year relationship that was worth over a million dollars in income for me. And the only reason that was possible was because we sat down and we had a conversation and got to know each other.

37:31 Yeah. So if you want to stand out, the Flip show is the way to do it. And I call it a flip show and not a podcast. It is a podcast, but I call it a flip show because the idea is I'm flipping the whole concept of a podcast on its head. I am not I love it that people listen to my podcast, but I'm not focusing on who may possibly passively listen to my podcast. I'm focusing on the person who's right here in front of me that I know is listening as the guest, and then we have a conversation later about doing business together. It makes sense, or we just build that connection. I've had people send me referrals. I've had people do business with me. I've had people come to my house and hang out for a party. I've been invited on stages just because we open that conversation. Remarkable.

38:22 Well, Joshua, you gave away our secret that you don't have to be talented to do this, but you. Just got to dress up man like, they'll get. Time. That's right, That's as simple as that. Well, if our audience wants to reach out and find and find out more about what you do, how would they do that? Yeah? Sure thing. So if you are a social media person, you can find me on Facebook. That's the best place because I'm kind of older. Uh. You can find me on Facebook at JT literally, And if you want the entire Conversational Funnels blueprint, I give that away for free. You can go to conversationalfunnels dot com and you can download that for free and you can use that to if you want to talk about starting your own flip show. It's actually very straightforward. We have a team that builds everything out for you. Literally all you have to do is show up, push a button, have a great conversation, and close some deals. That's all you have to do. We do literally everything else. You don't have to be creative. You don't have to figure out what to say. We'll tell you exactly what to say.

39:42 We'll coach you up, make sure that you're good at it, and we'll fill your pipeline full of people that are highly qualified and very interested in talking to you about whatever it is that you do. But you can go to conversational funnels dot com. You can download the whole blueprint and read that book. A call if you'd like, and we can have a conversation see if that makes sense to do business together. That is outstanding, Josh. It was a pleasure having you gave us some excellent insights. Really really. Just so happy you were able to find the time to share with us. Appreciate it, got it. Thank you, Take good care, sir. So chookey yes, like yeah, So why don't we go into compliments and then just bring it back to me. I've got a couple of things I'd like to close the show with.

40:34 Absolutely so very excited about the segments business compliments, and there are five notable business owners that we want to compliment as part of today's episode. And these business owners. Are located coast to coast doing incredible work servant leaders beyond measure. First things first, Larry Vault, So let's start with Larry. So, Larry's known as the Personal Financial Code and Larry's always inspired to serve business owners and individuals as well, so both as it relates to business and personal financial advice.

41:15 It's interesting a bit about Larryman. He had always wanted to work with business owners, focus on helping people save money, create budgets, build their business dreams, and just achieve really their life potential. So great stuff with Larry. And you can find out more about Larry on alignable dot com and you can visit alignable dot com do the search for Larry the Personal Financial Coach and get those insights. The next business owner that we want to highlight and really spotlight is Lisa Cagey with Ever Recruits. Great business name. By the way, it's sort of like the word ever and recruit combined ever Recruits, and they are an employee recruitment company. They've created a whole company recruiting studio that empowers both.

42:05 The company and the candidate. Right, so it's just a really authentic and enriched experience as part of the recruitment process. You can check out Lisa team at ev recruits dot io. The next business owners that we want to highlight are with Brier Design and Mueller and Jessica Tolman. Their website is Brier Dashdesign dot com, so Briarheyphendesign dot com. They are interior designers who pride themselves, Michael on their. Ability to work across a range of aesthetics. As you know, I mean, people have very strong views about how they would like their interior spaces designed and decorated.

42:46 And I love it. And and Jessica say they say they really believe that good design happens when good collaboration happens. Isn't that incredible? That is awesome? Yes, So we'll put really The next business owner is Ashon Nichols and ashes with Ashton Nichols and Craftsmen. They are and. Michael, we have a lot of regard and a lot of regard and admiration for Asher and his team there. They do residential construction. I love sort of their mission statement in a way right. They are a diverse family of carpenter's crafts people and professionals, and they've been doing remodeling and renovating work for over seventeen years, coming up in two decades. Really remarkable, And Michael, they've got three p's as part of their purpose, a three P focused purpose statement on people, process and product.

43:51 Check out Asher and team and I think you will be pleasantly surprised and impressed of just how service oriented they are. You can visit them at ashon Nichols dot com. And the last, but not least, Carlos Sanchez with Continental roof Company website is my sincyroofo dot com. So they're based in Cincinnati, the greatest Cincinnati area. Love that website again, it's my since roofer dot com. Their team has decades of experience and Michael, you'll be energized by this, and I think our listeners will be energized as well. They can have a roof as good as new in as little as twenty four hours.

44:33 Yeah, that's amazing, absolutely amazing. So Michael, those are the business owners that we wanted to spotlight as part of our business compliments. I want to toss it back over to you. Thank you, Chicky. So you know, one of the points that Josh made is if you understand the fundamentals of business, you're going to be able to train AI the right way and successful firstus, If you don't understand the fundamentals, it's going to be harder to train a to do the right thing. And that's what we work on to bring to you. We bring to you the blocking and tackling of business, the fundamentals and these but and these fundamentals as strategies that your competition isn't doing because they've never learned how to do business and implement strategies the right way. But the other thing I wanted to talk about in closing chekey is in our lives as business owners, we have saboteurs or organizational terrorists wo yeah, whatever you want to call it. And it's normally family and friends. By the way, who are the ones who are going to tell you that you can't do this, that A're going to fail to go get a real job. I mean anyone ever tell you to go get a real job, or the question what you're doing.

45:52 I mean, if you have. Access to our chat function, put it yes in the chat. If someone who didn't get the support that you needed, or the people that you wanted to believe in you the most, are telling you that this isn't going to work, that's a real frustrating thing. And one of the things that we do in our strategic implementation program is to make sure that we optimize your environment and make sure that you're surrounded by the right people, the right type of people who are going to encourage you and keep you on the right track, because there's always going to be those days that you're going to want to quit your business, and you should never quit on a bad day, And there's going to be those days when you're just going to ask yourself, why did I go on this journey of becoming a business owner. It's so much safer and so much easier to get a job, and it's so much safer and so much easier to give up on your dream. So you need to say the course, and many times you can't do it alone. And that's why for the few select people that come into our strategic implementation programs. We made sure that your environment is optimized and that you're surrounded by the right people who will encourage and support you, including of course myself, Chucky and your implementation strategists at next STEPCFO. Yes, So to get a copy of powerful business strategies, simply go to

47:22 our website www dot NEXTSTEPCFO dot net. It's totally complementary and until next Monday at noon Eastern time. For Chucky Obio, this is Michael Barberita, and remember, don't keep doing what your competition is doing. You have been listening to powerful business strategies finding out that everything you ever learned about growing your business is wrong. Tune in next week and every week at noon Eastern time on W four CY Radio with your host Michael Barbarita of Next STEPCFO and moderator chugy Obo