Full Transcript for How to sell AI to Main Street (Full Playbook)

Today, I'm going to let you in in a little secret. While everyone is selling AI agents to AI-pilled people in San Francisco, there's a way bigger opportunity to sell AI agents to Main Street businesses. I think that there's going to be millions of dollars to be made if you understand how to do so. Now, I wanted to bring on someone who's actually gone and done this before.

So he's going to share the tactics, the techniques, the strategies, the niches to go after. And it's actually my business partner, Mr. Boring Marketing himself. Now, he's gone and done it before, and he's going to share everything in this masterclass for how to sell AI agents to Main Street businesses. And by the end of this episode, you'll have all the sauce.

You'll have the tactics. You'll be able to get going right now. So if you're someone... who's looking for a business idea, if you're looking to understand how to sell AI agents to Main Street, this is the episode for you. And even if you haven't even thought about it, it's really, really interesting because it's going to get your creative juices flowing.

It's going to connect your brain in a few different ways. And you'll probably learn a few techniques, a few books, actually, a few tools that you've never heard of before in this episode. So I want to give a special thank you to James, Mr. Boring Marketing, for coming on and not holding anything back. and giving all the value to you. I can't wait to see what you build.

I'm rooting for you. Have a creative day and I'll see you at the end of the episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half and I started because I kept hearing companies like Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I? It's been a game changer.

The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards. It's got banking. It's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at brex.com slash solutions slash startups.

Link in the description. We got Mr. Boring Marketer James Dickerson on the podcast. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to help people think about how they can go and sell AI to Main Street. I think it's one of the biggest opportunities in AI. A lot of people are sleeping on it. I want them to see the opportunity, know how to build an offer, find the right customers, and then charge what the work is worth.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people are selling AI to AI-pilled people in San Francisco. And I think the goal of this episode is to show, I want you to show me and everyone the way around how you can actually sell AI to Main Street. Why this is... one of the greatest opportunities of our time. And this isn't just a hook, right? This is like, you're going to show exactly how to do it.

You're going to commit to that. So by the end of this, people will truly understand the tactics, the techniques, the strategies around that. Is that right? That's it, man. All right, let's get into it. All right, cool. So why should you listen to me about this topic? Let's just start there.

As you know, Greg, I started out owning agencies, serving local businesses, startups, things like that. I've run all kinds of performance ads. I've done social and SEO and all these different services for these exact type of businesses. So I have a lot of experience in the market. I personally am an owner of a boring business, a trades business here in Charlotte, North Carolina, and I've been able to grow it doing exactly what I'm going to talk about here today.

So I want to package all that together and just share with people like, hey, this is exactly how I would start an agency again, not just a agency that builds AI agents or does AI transformation, but what's an offer that all these businesses really need and will be willing to pay for? How do you package it? How do you sell it?

Yeah. And what you've been able to do with your boring business, I think it's a mobile what's called diesel dudes. Diesel dudes. Yeah. It's a it's a mobile diesel repair business. So, you know, when a semi truck breaks down on the side of the road or something like that, we dispatch mechanics out there to get them moving again. So it's a costly problem.

It's high ticket size. And I've been able to really grow it through ads, funnels and local SEO. So, you know, as I was kind of thinking about, hey, how can we help people go out there and capture this opportunity? You know, I built a couple of tools in BoringFunnels.com that help people do just this. But with BoringFunnels, I typed, hey, find me plumbers in Dallas worth pitching.

So in about a minute, it went out there, scraped a bunch of information from Google Maps, Google, you know, Yelp, all these different channels and found 100 different plumbers within that market. And then I size them up. So I try to understand how many reviews are they getting? What's the review velocity there? how many employees or technicians do they have? Can I find revenue information out there about the business? And I want to try to find a boring skilled trades business that's doing over $2 million a year in revenue.

And we'll get into why that is. And in plumbing and HVAC and stuff like that, that's actually pretty achievable. So there's a lot of these businesses out there. So In about a couple of minutes, my MCPs that I built went out and went through like their ads, their websites, everything, and found the exact leaks that these plumbers need to have fixed in terms of their customer generation funnel.

So we'll get into what that means and stuff like that. And then about 15 minutes later, I had a pitch in their brand. I had work done that's going to add real value to them. I had their email address, and then I had a dialed proposal in the first email. So, you know, you remember how it was back in the day, right? Doing this work was such a pain.

Doing it manually, going to websites, trying to, you know, pay a bunch of money for credits to build lists and prospect. And this is one area where agents and the right tools can really help you out. I think the most interesting thing to me here is the fact that you're not like carte blanche, just spraying and praying. You're looking at who makes the most sense to pitch.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you've talked a lot about finding a niche and things like that. And, you know, it makes everything much more clear. Like, you can dial your message to that customer. It helps you find exactly where to focus. And there's cities like Dallas all around the country where, again, there are hundreds of these companies in your backyard making real money.

And, you know, if you open up X... A lot of people are trying to sell to like solopreneurs or startups that can't afford them. And then they're frustrated about, you know, getting bad clients or people not being able to afford their services. And oftentimes that's just coming down in niche and market selection. Exactly. We won't go into specific examples of that because we're not gossipers.

You and I, that's not our style. But, you know, you know it. All right. Let's let's continue. OK, cool. So the opportunity here, two to twenty million dollar local businesses, they can pay, they can afford it. They have an idea that they might be behind. We can talk about what that looks like. And really nobody useful is showing up. Think about your own inbox out there if you're listening or watching.

The cold emails, the cold LinkedIn DMs that you're getting, they're asking for a time commitment from you right out of the gate. Like, hey, can we hop on a demo and can I show you this cool thing that I built? That's not how we're going to talk about getting in touch with these business owners. the offer. So again, we don't want to position around, Hey, I can deploy an AI agent into your company and it's going to make you, you know, 10 X more efficient and stuff like that.

What we do is we find boring businesses that are already advertising. They're already paying to get traffic to their website. Okay. So the leak that we're fixing is we want to help them turn the traffic they're already paying for into more calls and more book jobs. It's a pretty simple value proposition. They know ROI. They know investments.

They're spending on marketing. Maybe they have an agency that they've been paying for years that hasn't plugged these leaks. So how to find the customer? We're going to combine like an old school and a new school approach. There's a great book that many people have read called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. He has a strategy called the Dream 100.

We're going to talk about that, and then we're going to take some of the best direct-to-consumer strategies around building funnels and advertising into this to create something pretty special. You're firing me up. You're literally firing me up. All right. All right. Let's get into it. So

like we talked about, this is absolutely massive. Let's just look at plumbing and HVAC companies. There's 112,000 of them roughly doing roughly $2.5 million a year on average. 14% of owners say AI is fully part of how they run. They're paying a lot of money every single lead that they're trying to get into their business. So tons, I mean, I don't know what 14% of 112,000 is maybe somewhere around, you know, 16, 17,000, something like that.

There's a huge Delta out there and a massive market gap. And I think this is the arbitrage play to be thinking about. All right. And the $129 lead thing is like so important, right? I mean, if you're doing this, you want to work with a company that is high lifetime, high LTV, because there's just more money. Yeah. Around. Right. Yeah. You don't want to do like lawn maintenance.

You don't want to do restaurants. You don't want to do things that are low ticket. This comes down to niche selection. So, you know, where are, you know, customers valuable plumbing jobs or thousands of dollars potentially when someone gets, you know, dispatched and fixes an issue in someone's home. And this is an urgent need. So a homeowner is ready to fix it.

I had a leak in my ceiling two weeks ago. Walked downstairs, water was literally coming out. My kid like did something crazy to our shower. And that day I paid like $2,000 to have a water restoration guy come out and fix the issue. So customers are willing to pay. What that means is that if you can get in front of those jobs more efficiently than the next guy and your competition isn't that sophisticated, there can be a huge ROI on those strategies.

So if you can add an ROI and you can measure it and you can prove it, they're not going to want to leave you.

So one of my favorite things to talk about in this world here is that like, you know, a lot of people talk about plumbing and HVAC. That's where the rollups are happening. The private equity firms are coming into and stuff like that. But there are so many markets out there that have real demand, weak marketing, and that nobody's actually really pitching at all.

Um, So just a few here. We don't have to spend time talking about all of these, but, you know, commercial hood cleaning. Restaurants are obligated to clean out the hoods over their their stoves and stuff like that. There's like dental implants and orthodontics. There's tree services, irrigation. I've seen a big trend here in the Carolinas about people installing high end sport courts in their backyards or doing artificial turf maintenance.

so they don't have to mess with, you know, grass and landscaping and stuff. There's chimney sweeping, gutter guards, septic services, crawl space. Like, just use your imagination. Like, screenshot this right here. Go throw it into your AI or whatever and say, hey, like, let's build on this. Find me a niche that I should focus on. based on where I live, cause that's where your unfair advantage is going to be.

So maybe sports courts is a big deal in the Carolinas, but if you're in the Northeast, maybe it's, you know, snow removal. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Or backup generators, you know, getting those installed is a big job. And, uh, you know, with the weather and stuff like that in the Northeast, like during the winter time, there's a big demand spike for that type of thing.

So endless opportunities out there. It just takes a little bit of creativity to get outside of like what everyone else is trying to do.

Okay. So like I took plumbers as an example and I took Dallas as an example and I use my MCP and in cloud code and a couple of things that I found analyzed a few of these companies that are rated 4.8 or 4.9 on Google. They have good reviews. They do good work. They've got a bunch of reviews. So they're sizable businesses and they're all paying for Google ads that week that I analyzed.

Okay. Four out of five of them didn't even repeat their ad's own promise, like on the landing page that they're sending traffic to. So one of the biggest strategies in performance marketing is making sure that your ad and your landing page are tied up or they're congruent so that the prospect is kind of remembering the message or getting that communication from the ad that they clicked on.

So that really helps conversion rate. Three or five of these companies didn't even show their Google rating on the landing page. So this is a huge social proof point, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of reviews at 4.8 or 4.9. And then four out of five websites I looked at made you scroll past three screens to book a service. So point being, there is so much low hanging fruit out there and it's almost just staring you right in the face.

What's your take on personal agent platforms? Is your view that this is going to be more and more mainstream, consumers are going to be asking their muse agent or whatever for plumbers in Dallas and that these companies need to be optimized or is it two in the future? You know, I think it's a bit in the future. Personally, like, you know, I've looked at my diesel data to see if we're getting any customers finding us from chat GPT and stuff like that.

And I might get like a couple of visitors a week or something along those lines. I think that when people are searching for a service, I always check out the Google reviews on Maps and stuff like that. So I think that's still the surface area. I think Google has an incredible amount of data to serve up relevant and the right sort of solution providers.

I have used AI mode on Google to find contractors. So I'm more bullish on Google than a lot of those personal agents. And I just don't know if they're there yet in the market. Okay. So we touched on this, but again, you know, find businesses doing real revenue. They have a budget, a $5 million plumbing companies probably spending like $150,000 to $250,000 a year on marketing.

Their leaks cost real money and you can show them like we talked about. You scroll down their site. Someone doesn't have a way to book. That's something visual. That's something that the owner can understand. And we're

All right. So again, you don't sell AI automation. You don't sell agents. You talk about booked jobs and more phone calls and stuff like that. And that's one of the biggest things that I actually see out there on X, which is definitely like in an AI bubble is people talk about, you know, I'm going to start an AI automation agency or an AI services agency, or I'm going to sell AI agents or Customers don't care about any of that.

They care about revenue. They care about ROI. Never lead with I'm implementing AI into your local company. Their eyes glaze over. And a lot of them don't even know what an AI agent is, you know, like they think of an agent, they're thinking of a real estate agent. Yep. Yep. And a lot of these business owners are still like, you know, from the generation that they're probably not adapting these tools and stuff like that.

You know, they're just not the market sophistication level just is not there with the majority of these types of companies. Also, a lot of people don't like AI. From a branding perspective, AI actually, when you speak to most of the mainstream America, they have a sour taste in their mouth about AI for whatever reason. Data centers coming and stuff like that.

You don't want to sell something and then be up against someone who...

is like, whoa, I don't like AI, right? It's not about AI. Yeah. You know, I'm sure you've seen this. I've seen a lot about voice agents. I've tested voice agents for my boring business, like an AI receptionist to answer the call and stuff. I got so many voicemails from people being like, is this a dumb AI thing? Like, and just hanging up.

Like they know it's AI. They want to talk to a person like. So I think like while some of that might sound good or be very marketable, you know, to go and raise money or attract attention from other AI pilled people, you know, when push comes to shove, a lot of these things just don't really match up with how these businesses work in the real world.

Okay. So we're going to sell funnels. So I'm sure everyone's seen funnels out there in the wild. They know what funnels are hopefully by now, but you know, maybe you've clicked an ad before you've opened up a page. There's a juicy free offer. Like I'm going to give you my SOPs or I'm going to invite you to a free workshop or webinar or something like that.

I'm going to have like an introductory offer with a guarantee. That's really hard to say no to. So then after that, you have sales pages that really help to communicate why someone should become a customer. And if they don't buy right there, you have follow-up systems that are sending SMS or email or whatever. So this is what we want to implement for local businesses.

Most of... the agencies that are out there selling uh you know they're selling advertising they're selling seo they're selling traffic but this really solves like the real problem in my opinion based off the data and all the sites that that i've analyzed it's not so much an advertising problem as much as it is hey the website uh is broken there's no way to book a meeting or whatever and uh again as i said there's there's so many of these out there and it's low-hanging fruit So before like, you know, the age of AI and coding agents and all of that to go and build a funnel was a pretty manual process.

Like you could use a drag and drop sort of like landing page builder if you want, but you couldn't really get it on brand. And there was a lot of like manual tweaking and back and forth and integrations you had to do. Or you had to hire like an agency to go and build that for you. And, you know, agencies still charge twenty thousand dollars for a good funnel, for example.

So I think this is the gap to fill. If you know how to use a coding agent, you can spin up these funnels quickly at a very high quality. And if they're already paying for advertising, you can route that traffic to an optimized funnel and show them the lift that they're getting. So what does that look like? Let's just take an example HVAC company.

So I built these pages with boring funnels and I'm not selling it. There's a free library on there. If you want to log in and find funnels that actually work from real businesses, feel free to go and check that out. You don't have to pay for it or whatever, but I built these with the paid tool. There's like multiple different entry points that you can go and deploy and test and for one of these types of businesses.

So there's the free check. Someone lands on an ad and it's like, hey, are you having these problems? Here's the things you can go and look at. There's the $79 tune-up. I've looked at the leading HVAC companies in my city and all of them typically have that low price point tripwire offer that creators or DTC companies have, but the vast majority, 80, 90% aren't doing anything like that.

So to be competitive in the ad auctions, having that kind of like tripwire type offer to build trust and provide a good service is a really, really good funnel to build for a local business. Can you explain that? Like what is a tripwire offer? Why is it important? Does every business need it? Yeah. So let's say that I have that I'm spending on ads.

And let's just take like me, for example. Let's say I want to sell, you know, ultimately sell some software like Boring Funnels. It's like MCP connectors for your agents to help you do all this stuff. Let's say I priced the free version that's out there at, you know, uh, $20. So I'm spending on ads, uh, maybe on meta it's like a dollar a click.

And if I can get 20 visitors to the website, I spent $20 to get that traffic, right? If I can convert one out of those 20 for a $20 membership to that entry level version, I've liquidated my ad costs. And then I've gotten 10, 15 people, uh, to give me their email address. that I can then continue to market to. So it's a strategy of liquidating your ad spend and trying to get to the point where you can essentially acquire leads for free and add a lot of value at the same time.

All right, so then you have the instant price. I've been to a lot of service websites where I have to call, I have to set up a meeting, whatever. That's frustrating. Give me what I want. I want to know how much this might cost for me so that I can make a decision. the quiz, should I repair or replace, you know, my HVAC unit, the video, like maybe I answer that quiz and then I come to like a video sales letter where it's the owner on video building trust and saying, hey, like, you know, before you replace your furnace, I've recorded this for you.

Here's the problems people make in that decision-making process, et cetera. And those are 20 to $30,000 installations that people are financing and stuff like that. So it's a big decision. Seeing the owner on camera walking you through how to make the right choice makes that company the trusted advisor versus someone trying to just get paid.

And then there's a couple others like the advertorial and stuff. And then you have your follow up sequences as well. But, you know, this feels very high value compared to, hey, I'm going to go and optimize your Google business profile and stuff like that, which could take months to get results. Whereas if you help them convert the traffic they're getting today with a little bit better strategies taken from the leading creators and direct to consumer businesses, you have something pretty good.

Okay, so we kind of talked about these funnels just now, but screenshot this, pause it, check it out. Here's how I would think about an ad to the page, to the follow-up page to get the booking for each of these, for the $79 tune-up, for the advertorial where you're teaching first instead of trying to sell first, and for the big ticket repair or replace.

Beautiful thing about this too is each of these funnels can be run for different ad campaigns. So I mentioned add to landing page congruency. If people are searching for new furnace installation, maybe I send them to the repair or replace funnel. If they're searching for quick service, I send them to the $79 tune-up or something like that.

Most of these companies are sending the same traffic to the same pages, and that is really, really hurting their conversion rate. Okay, so let's get into some of the strategies to go and acquire these customers if you think this is a good opportunity. So Chet Holmes from The Ultimate Sales Machine, he did this experiment. He talked about it in his book.

He built a list of like 2,200 advertisers and 167 of those advertisers bought 95% of the ads.

And the people who are buying the offer today are the ones that everyone's kind of like trying to go and get at the same time. So they're hearing like lots of pitches and stuff like that. He focused on, you know, going out there and building the relationships with, you know, the folks that hadn't bought yet. So he took a longer term approach.

The point here is like, you know, be patient and like be a snail here. And show up every day and add value. And these business owners, they may start to trust you more so than the competition. By month six, he got 28 clients in one month. So, you know, like... Good things take time. I think we're in this age with AI and stuff where a lot of people expect instant results.

You know, they go and build a list. They blast out a bunch of emails. They send some cold DMs on LinkedIn. It didn't work right away and they quit. And then they go on to the next thing. This is just trying to say that, hey, like this is a long game and you got to go and add real value to actually get these business owners to trust you.

So, you know, again, like AI can make it easier, though, you know, build a list of the 100 companies you'd love to work with, you know, have your AI agent go out and research those to the nth degree, know everything about them. read their reviews, crawl their websites, look up the owners, stuff like that. Build a corpus of information on this Dream 100 list so you're the expert in this targeted group of people that you're trying to sell to.

You should know everything about their businesses, about the industry. That's really what it takes to stand out.

Another one of my favorite authors is Jay Abraham, and his principle was become the advisor, not a vendor. So add free value to this radius every single week. You don't have to have an audience to do it. You can simply create creatives on Meta, for example, that are dialed to that audience. Meta's algorithm is really good. The people in your market, if your ads are about helping plumbers, will see those ads.

If you're just focused on adding value, not trying to get them to book a demo or call right away, I think long term, like Chet experienced by month six, good things are going to start to happen. There's a strategy too that I'll show here called lumpy mail. And Dan Kennedy used to talk about this. Sam Ovens talked about it. But imagine sending a box to to these 100 folks on your dream 100 list with a brass fitting and a letter that has a link to a page that you rebuilt them that says, hey, you fix the plumbing leaks, I'll fix the leaks on your website or in your marketing.

It's dialed to that specific type of person.

Message to Market Fit, Dan Kennedy, another goat of direct response. One trade, one city. Again, know everything about how their customers talk. There's plenty of information out there. You can go on Reddit. You can find how Redditors are talking in your city about service providers. Like I was looking at HVAC ones just yesterday because my heater's out downstairs and I found a good local one and folks don't want to go and work with the big PE backed ones.

The voice of customer tells me that They want to support a local HVAC company that's been in business for a while. So I found one that I'm going to call today, actually. All right. So a couple more Jay Abraham strategies. Reed, Chet Holmes, Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. I learned pretty much everything about direct response from from those guys.

So another important aspect here to think about. Let's talk branding here for a second.

As we think about really being the only choice for your market, branding comes into play. I would brand the firm, focus on something like this, like call it leak proof. We fix the leaks in your marketing and you handle the plumbing. So, you know, I think that you have great, you know, great brand for like a website, impactful ads, things like that.

If you want to run kind of a retargeting on meta approach or an ad approach in a certain radius, you know, you could do like UGC style ads. You could send them to a landing page that uses, you know, that voice of customer, that language that you're becoming an expert on or your agents are. And, you know, maybe you have, you know, a free leak check or, you know, something like that, that that you're selling or giving away to them to add value.

Yeah, I think the mistake a lot of people make here is from a branding perspective, they look at what a good brand looks like and they'll look at like Stripe or Apple and then they'll create the brand off of that targeting Main Street America or this HVAC company, HVAC companies in their area. And what a good brand,

as a creative director, everyone's going to say Stripe looks good, Apple. But as the customer here, they might not want a brand like that, right? They just might not connect with it. So good branding is creating a feeling that your ICP connects with, and we can't forget that. Well said. Yeah. You know, the fit with the market is really what determines a good brand.

That's right. So, yeah, this is an example of a funnel you could go and enact with with meta ads and, you know, open up a camera, record a quick video, have Claude edit it. Everyone's seen how good Opus 5.5 is at making shorts and stuff. You can also run meta ads and build campaigns from cloud code. Meta has an MCP that can help you go in there and build out the campaigns, too.

So, you know, these gaps where it's like, hey, I'm not an expert. How do I do that? I don't know how to get some creative and put a campaign up like, you know, AI has really removed those barriers for a lot of this stuff.

So, again, like everyone or not everyone, but a lot of people use not having an audience as a reason why they shouldn't do something. You know, oh, but they have a big audience or I don't have an audience or whatever. If you focus on a small market of like 25 mile radius of Dallas and you're only targeting plumbers, do you really think. That it would take that long to become the authority if you're out there learning from the best creators in like the AI space, which is like the most hyper competitive sort of content and influence market in the world.

You know? Yeah. And you don't even be the authority. You can just be on authority. Correct. Correct. Just get on the map. And if you're adding value and, you know, you're doing the type of research and stuff that we're talking about here, you know, you're going to get some conversations started. I have no doubt in my mind. All right. So I talked about lumpy mail.

I think this is another good strategy. And when you start to stack these different approaches together, you've got kind of the old school and the new school approach. So the new school approach is maybe you have this like meta ads campaign. Old school approach is maybe you send them some lumpy mail. This really stands out. Like when it comes to someone's office, a lot of these businesses are owner led or owner driven.

They still open up the mail. So, you know, to me, if you have the right branding, something clever, uh, it's a great approach, uh, to kind of get in front of them. And again, you're not trying to sell them on your service right away here. You're adding some value and maybe you're saying, Hey, I want to invite you to breakfast or I'm hosting a meetup of, uh, you know, other plumbing and HVAC companies, uh, next week would love to feature you as a special guest or something like that.

Like flatter them a bit too, you know, old school. I think I've said this story on the pod before, but when you walk into a car chase store, when you walk in, they actually say, do you want flat water or sparkling water? So you say sparkling water. They come with this aluminum tray, these beautiful napkins, thick napkins that probably cost like a dollar each.

And they hand you this tray of Perrier and two pieces of Swiss chocolate. And that's before you've looked around, you've done anything, right? They want you to feel good. And it's the law of reciprocity. If someone gives you value, you want to give value back. So all of a sudden, you had no intentions of buying a Cartier tank, but you walk out there spending $10,000 because someone handed you a 35-cent Swiss chocolate.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, another story there last night, I was at baseball practice for my kids and one of my good friends there, another dad, he his dad, his dog actually just died. And he was like, yeah, you know, so nice today. Our vet called us and she made a donation in our dog's name to the veterinary college where where she went at Tufts or something like that.

My first question to him was, who's your vet? You know, I have two dogs and I want them to have the best care. And wow, what a story that creates a moment, a marketable moment. And maybe she didn't even do that out of like, you know, a marketing approach. But if you have the goodwill of your prospects in mind and you're becoming their trusted advisor, which is the whole strategy of preeminence from Jay Abraham, like my friend will never go to another veteran vet in his life with his animal, you know? I mean, I want to just rescue a dog right now and go to your vet just to work with that vet, you know? Exactly.

Exactly. So those moments are really powerful and not enough people even consider them. All right. So, you know, you can go and do all of this stuff with AI these days. You know, you can build some people are more experienced than others. A lot of people like to, you know, build their own solutions out there. A lot of the folks in in like the boring marketing and community, though, are trying to start, you know, figuring out like, hey, how can I go and offer a service to, you know, these businesses? So this is just like a screenshot of like what the boring funnels product produces.

But again, like do whatever you want. I have a tool that helps me, you know, find opportunities. the prospects, score the prospects, get the contact info, build the pitch, and then deliver, you know, a high value proposal with that build in about 15 minutes. So do it however you want, like no, you know, no obligation there, of course, but this is kind of how I approach it.

Find, pitch, and deliver. All right, so back to the old school stuff, an AI meetup, a breakfast or something like that would be a nice touch. I think that a lot of these business owners still want to meet people that they do business with in person. It's very important, especially if you're kind of in a local market. I know you're big on IRL stuff, making a comeback and things of that nature.

I think that there's a big opportunity to go out there and do it in your backyard, in your city for a specific market or maybe multiple. Okay, so again, like these business owners, you can show them the math here. We kind of talked about that a little bit in terms of like, you know, cost per lead and things like that. But let's say they're spending on ads and they're getting 100 leads a month.

It's $129 a lead. You know, they're spending like $13,000 a month on leads. If the page loses about 20% of those, they've got, you know, $2,600 kind of going nowhere or going out the door. You know, so one plumbing job at, you know, $1,714 pays for 13, you know, of those leads that they're already getting. So if you can help them get a few new jobs a month, like if you're out there playing with these AI tools and stuff like that, designing and building, like if you think you can do a little bit better job than what they currently have, you can you can start something in this space.

And realistically, if you're listening to this podcast, you can. Because you understand way more than the average person in all these tools. And when you look at the websites and the experiences of some of these Main Street businesses, it's it's appalling honestly with i mean like you've shown with how much they're leaving on the table because for them it's like they didn't have anything and now they just have something up they just want to get something up um but you know it's in some ways remarkable that any of these websites or some of these websites convert at all yeah it really is it really is i agree

Um, so just in terms of pricing, like this is kind of like the whole, like, you know, agency prices, software costs, like it's a great time to create a high margin business, approach it like a service business, but, you know, running it with AI, um, And, you know, actually delivering and doing the work at a high quality is the easiest it's ever been.

Perhaps you have like an introductory install where you build like a funnel and you take it live or something like that. And then, you know, monthly you're analyzing the data, you're testing, you're making updates, tweaks. You're actually measuring, you know, the call volume that's coming in and stuff like that. Later, who knows? Maybe there's like a performance angle to, you know, there's a lot of agencies that got their start that way.

You know, hey, I'll only charge you when, you know, we get a job or maybe you start with that if you're just getting started. So this brings up another point to me.

I've had a lot of people ask me, hey, what if what if I've never done this before? How can I go and, you know, build trust in the market and stuff if I don't have any clients? And I'm like, well, like, don't go try to sell them something. Go and do it for free and prove that what you're trying to do works. You know, the cost to you is tokens and some of your time.

You know, it's not like you have to go hire a team and do all this stuff to build out like a new website or a funnel or a campaign for a local business. Go and do it for free in exchange for a great case study or testimonial. Your only focus should be getting that one case study. And then once you have that, go and start charging. So don't overthink it.

Yeah, I think... I get this feedback a lot in general. You mentioned, I don't have an audience, or people will say, I don't have any case studies or things like that. And this is like... The next 30 seconds are going to sound a little woo-woo, but a bit of it is a mindset shift where it's like you have to come into this and be like, I am the best person to help plumbers in Dallas and I'm going to spend the next six months, 12 months, 18 months of my life equipping these plumbers in Dallas with the information and the advice and the techniques and the strategies that they need in order for them to increase the ROI of what they are doing.

And you have to just wake up every morning and repeat that mantra to yourself

to actually believe it. And I know someone's listening to this and is probably like, well isn't that sort of like faking it until you make it? It's not. I was watching Toby, co-founder and CEO of of Shopify. Shopify is like a $150, $200 billion company. The guy does the exact same thing to himself. So here you have a founder CEO, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, is repeating a mantra to himself because the power of positive thinking does help you.

I couldn't agree more. Um, and I think that's exactly right. And I would love to, I'd love to actually see an episode on mindset sometime from you. Like I would watch the heck out of that. Um, there's a bunch of great books out there. Like, I mean, Tony Robbins, man, like, you know, his whole sort of thing is around, around that and look at the leaders and out there in the world that, you know, that trusts him.

Let me know if people want it. I haven't done any of that type of stuff in the past because I like to just focus on the actual tactics and sauce and stuff like that. And I always felt that if I did something like that around mindset and stuff, people would be like, where's the sauce? Sometimes the sauce is...

Sometimes that is the sauce that you kind of need, but people don't really want it. But please let me know. Cool. Man, I used to spend so much time reporting in my agencies. That's a solved problem. AI can help you there. No worries when it comes to keeping people up to date and stuff. You can create looms. You can hop on the phone with them.

You've got all the data one prompt away. So be the expert in their business. Know how it's working. you know, find pitch, deliver and focus on booking jobs for these businesses. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, mindset, I think also like, hey, you know, find a market, find a geography and go and do this one thing for six months and then report back and see how it goes.

Put the blinders on for a while and really just focus on adding value and see where you end up. So that's all I got here, Greg. That's not just all you got. This has been super saucy, super interesting. I think in a lot of ways this whole episode doesn't feel like nothing you said was reinventing the wheel, but that's the whole point. I love that you shined light on this opportunity.

Thank you for coming on. You've got a criminally underfollowed YouTube channel and you started to create more video content. So I'll include a link in the show notes in the description to go and subscribe to The Boring Marketer on YouTube. Anything else you'd like to leave people with, sir? Well, uh, my dogs are barking. Uh, so sorry about that if it comes in through the audio, but you know, I just hope people got value out of this.

I think that, you know, um, coming back to the basics and stuff is important from time to time. It really helps me to kind of like step back and think through this type of thing and, and reflect, uh, when it comes to like building my own businesses and yeah, I just hope people got value out of it. My lead magnet and my funnel is at boring funnels.com.

If you of you know what these funnels look like for various types of businesses i find the best ones on the internet and share them for free so check that out and greg really appreciate you having me man it's always always a blast yeah i can't wait i want you to come back you know you haven't been on in a while but i want you to come back more often you're all you're in the in the trenches learning how to use agents to to do marketing uh for all sorts of people but mainstream you know, in particular.

So I hope people really liked this episode, got value out of it and want you to come back soon. So thank you again for coming on the show and I will see you next time. Thanks a lot, Greg. See you soon.