Beyond the Grind: Turning Data Into Scalable Wealth with Bill Rice - Episode - 538

The interesting thing about large language models and AI is it can consume the entire internet. But if you have some proprietary knowledge or unique perspective or experience or stories or can talk about unique investing situations and you publish that, we're finding that these large language models, they have an insatiable appetite for something new.

If you think scaling means hustling harder, this episode will change your mind. In Beyond the Grind: Turning Data into Scalable Wealth, we explore how leveraging systems and smart tech can free you to focus on high-impact work. You're tuned in to Streams to Impact. I'm your host, Dr. Allen Lomax, educator and alternative investor, helping top-tier professionals replace the hustle with flow. So each week I introduce you to someone who's Engineered a smarter way to create lasting wealth, because when you stop exchanging your time for money, the real work of life really begins. We provide high-income, high-net-worth individuals access to high-yielding private placement opportunities. If you're curious as to how you can participate, go ahead and schedule a complimentary discovery call today, and we'll explore your options. So just go to our website. steedtucker.com, and you'll see the links to schedule a consultation. Our guest today, Bill Rice, isn't just another tech entrepreneur. He's a former Air Force officer who's mastered the art of predictable lead generation. With Kalidico, he's built a system that delivers over 500,000 leads a year. And that's not theory, that's execution. So welcome, Bill. We're glad to have you with us. So tell us, you've gone from military service to serial entrepreneurship. How did you make that transition? And how did your background in the Air Force influence the way that you build and scale businesses today?

Yeah, it's kind of an interesting journey. And I think it's one thing you can kind of see as a thread throughout that is, you know, definitely a deep curiosity for opportunities and things that we saw in front of— I saw in front of myself as we would move through that. I was originally in the Air Force. I came out of the Air Force Academy, went into— flew for a very short time, but then ended up in— In the Army. counterintelligence for the balance of my career. And we were doing what's often called counterintelligence operations, where we were building operations. And this is where the thread starts, where we were looking for certain activities, certain behaviors, certain patterns. And then we built systems in order to sort of react to those patterns and the behaviors. And in the early days, When I started that, it was a lot of sort of systems type stuff, you know, looking at communication traffic and those sorts of things. But as I was there, I was able to be a part of sort of this rapid transition to the internet coming online. And a lot of that sort of activity started to transition into the internet ecosystem. And this was very early days. This is in the '90s. And so it's just— The internet was just coming online, but adversaries and folks are always trying to stay ahead of our capabilities. And so, they were very quickly adopting some of these places where people just weren't as familiar or didn't understand. And then, in that period of time between— in the military, I also transitioned outside and started working with some of the 3-letter intelligence agencies doing similar things. And so, I started kind of being in the world of building information warfare centers to leverage, again, early components of the internet as part of our capabilities. And as often is the case, when we try to transition into the civilian world, we have to kind of make this equivalency. And so, I ended up in a startup as I came out of kind of the Intel world in financial services, which started my journey there and spent most of the time. It felt like a comfortable place. Financial services are disciplined, highly regulated, which believe it or not, Intel is. I always say it's more interesting on the outside than it is the inside. Inside's a lot of bureaucracy, getting things approved, somewhat slow moving. And so financial services felt comfortable in that same way. And then looking around for a place to kind of use those skills, marketing became very quickly the obvious skill sets. So we were just starting to do marketing on the internet. This was pre-Google. In fact, Google sort of happened in the middle of that first startup. And so we were learning to use the internet to do marketing. And a lot of that was looking at patterns, looking at behaviors, looking at what consumers were trying to do. And then building systems in order to sort of capture that interest at scale with lead generation and/or, you know, transactions, approving loans, and those sorts of things. So that's kind of, that's kind of the shortened version of a very long journey from military to kind of marketing strategy and execution.

Well, thank you for sharing that, Bill. Some interesting things there. You, so you were at the Air Academy. I lived in Colorado Springs for several years as well. I actually grew up in Colorado, but in the—

Nice.

On the western slope of Colorado. So yeah, very familiar with that part of the world there. And talking about the beginnings of the internet, I— it is You know, just kind of amazing to me the the way that our entire world has essentially changed in such a short period of time, and and the access that we have to information—it's just it's unbelievable to to even you know just to think about that as I was going through university and and what have you, and. And to get information, we had to actually physically go to the library and how that just is a thing of the past today. I mean, we still have libraries and they're useful places, but we don't go there to gather information. We go there for other reasons these days.

Yeah.

So amazing transition in a very short period of time and interesting that you were in the lead generation and business development during those very early ages. And, and to think of not only has, you know, our, our world changed, but just thinking back to those early days, I was involved in that as well. I was, I was in Guam at the time that the internet was forming. And so because of that, you You know, we— it was just a vital connection to us in Guam and something we just didn't have prior to that. But thinking about how clunky it was and how slow it was as compared to today, and yet we just thought it was the most amazing thing in the world.

Yeah.

So what actually— Led you in that? And what is it that you were discovering through all of those processes at that time? What led you to actually to go ahead and found your company? What were you really solving when starting your company?

Yeah. So, I mean, over time, you know, I kind of stopped at a couple of different places. That internet-only bank that we built that I kind of referenced I ultimately led the sale of that to a private equity. And we had several buyers. We were in this enviable position where we had outstripped the capability of our bank. Because the original idea was we were going to generate home equity loans and the bank was going to put it on the balance sheet. But we were doing so many that we had to go out. In those days, securitization for home equities was not very robust. And so, we were selling them, you know, whole loan sales directly to Wall Street. And that was slow and cumbersome. And so, we were kind of forced to sell. Coming out of that, one of the losing bidders that I was intrigued by more than actually even what private equity was going to do with our bank was Quicken Loans. And so, I ended up at Quicken Loans for a short period of time. And it was there that I kind of saw what we started So with the internet-only bank, we started to see that we could only do so much. And this is back in 2000, 2004 with complete automation. So we needed to bring, you know, people into that. So I started, you know, working on this concept, which was new at the time. Actually, I wrote the first entry in Wikipedia for it, lead management. And the concept was we had all of these leads.

Mm-hmm.

that needed some additional interaction in order to kind of make the final decision. And so I started that with the internet-only bank, but we sort of preemptively had to sell that, went over to Quicken Loans, and I saw it at scale because what was happening at that time was folks like LendingTree were starting to generate just raw inquiries, right? They were just getting, they were very efficient at collecting people together on the internet and getting them to ask to be matched with a lender. Bankrate was an early version of this too. We actually used Bankrate at the Internet Only Bank. Ironically, or probably not ironically, but interesting, a lot of people know of Bankrate today and they probably searched for some rates on Bankrate. But back in the day, what, how they advertised is they actually put ads, rate tables in the newspaper and then use URLs to bring them to the internet. So, so at Quicken Loans, what sort of I discovered and saw is that these large lenders, and this was pre-financial crisis, you know, what we call in the industry mortgage, the mortgage meltdown. It was the go-go days and there was an insatiable appetite for these consumer inquiries. The, the actual banks and the lenders were not very good at marketing. In fact, most of them had traditionally been, and even to this day, largely because they've been spoiled by lead generation. They're just largely sales operations, right? So they're used to being in retail environments and having sort of kitchen table conversations. But that is, they can't scale at the level that these lenders and Wall Street needs this type of lending and programs. So that's where I saw lead generation kind of coming on into its own. And so I stepped out. and created an agency where we kind of our first go, which we still do, is to teach these lenders to actually be able to generate their own leads so that they're not as dependent on all of these lead providers like LendingTree and Bankrate, because I always saw that as a risk. And so, so we can do that. So that was kind of the first thing is like, hey, I know how this is done. And I can show you how to build that capability inside your organization. And then over time, again, insatiable appetite, we found that a lot of lenders that we were working with still needed more leads. And so we actually kind of stepped in and became more of a lead generator ourselves. And we created our own websites, our own mechanisms to aggregate and, you know, collect in consumer interest. And so that's kind of how the agency started. It was just out of this need, this early sort of understanding that the appetite for aggregating consumer interest and intent was only going to grow, and it continues to grow to this day. I mean, a lot of these service providers, both B2C, which we focus on with Kaleidico, but also B2B. B2B has traditionally been, you know, an outbound effort, but we're— because of, you know, a lot of the things that we've learned, it's easier and easier to bring in inbound inquiries even in business-to-business sort of settings.

LendingTree and all of the others that are just really lead generation engines there— I mean, insurance industry has those as well. I avoid those entities like the plague because once you get into those systems, you are just inundated with emails and text messages from a never-ending bottomless pit of lenders and insurance agents. So, I mean, I assume people are still going to those places today even though I avoid them. Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, I think you see a couple of different sort of trade-offs there. I think, you know, the larger part of the you know, the consumer populace still likes the convenience or just simply doesn't have the relationships or even the sophisticated understanding of what they need when it comes to particularly financial services. But we see the same need with legal. You know, we do legal lead generation as well, kind of a similar thing. So if you're going for mortgage or life insurance or you need an attorney, a lot of times, It's your first encounter with those folks. And so there's a couple of things that we've noticed from a marketing standpoint, and we leverage this to draw that intent in, is the consumer wants to educate themselves. They feel very intimidated about having a conversation with a mortgage broker or having that first conversation with attorney, which they probably never talked to an attorney before, or an insurance agent or ask about life insurance. You know, consumers don't want to feel ignorant. They don't want to feel in a place to potentially get taken advantage of. So education becomes kind of their first stop. And that, from a marketing standpoint, is a very efficient way to bring them in, to help them with some initial education, and then to, you know, let them know that they, they, they can educate themselves to a level, but at some point they probably need to speak to a professional. We think that the best of our business does some hopefully degree of vetting of the service provider. So we're hoping to match them with someone who is duly licensed, you know, has integrity and those sorts of things. So we, we try to do that. So there's a large part of the consumer base that despite the fact that once, you know, you're a piece of data that can, you You know, these, these folks, um, live and thrive. Um, and it's, again, it's a different type of— not to get too nerdy about this, but it's a different type of agent or broker, um, that usually is getting these kind of leads. This is what they live on. So they probably do not have the skill set to do the more traditional relationship building and networking and referral bases. Um, so this, this industry over time has kind of bifurcated into 2 worlds. So You know, to, to a degree, unfortunately, the folks that are buying leads, you're their subsistence. So they're gonna do everything in their power to get in contact with you, even though you may have already found a solution or, or gone a different way. They probably don't have the skill sets of the retail, the referral-based. If you're new, you know, you're on that side of being a broker or an agent, and you're coming new into the industry, it can be tough not to kinda get sucked into that part because it takes a really long time to build out a referral-based business that can actually sustain. You know, a livable wage. And so, so there is definitely some counterbalances to this approach, but there's certainly a market for it. Consumers generally, you know, like the experience. There has been a lot of activity internal to lead generation and the regulatory community to really tamp that down. There's a set of laws with the acronym of TCPA that's intentionally trying to bring like robocalls and that kind of, you know, intense aggressive contact under control. And it's— I think it's starting to have some effect, but there's always bad actors. You know, wherever there's money, you're going to draw out a lot of bad actors. So unfortunately, you know, what you're characterizing is unfortunately oftentimes a part of the experience, which is unfortunate.

Well, with, with AI, playing a bigger role in digital strategies. Where do you see the biggest opportunities and also the blind spots for professionals looking to leverage tech as a process of lead generation? Where do you see all of this going?

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. You know, we talked early on about sort of this, this amazing transformation that happened when Google went on this this, you know, came about. And all of a sudden you had access to like the, you know, the Alexandria of libraries, like everything was immediately available to you. I honestly think we're in a very similar shift, right? So AI has now not only made available to you, you know, the world's infinite library, but it also has incorporated an augmentation of a brain. It's kind of like it's got a brain to help you process that. Because one of the drawbacks of Google Search, if you've ever been kind of down that path and you're trying to research something, or even quite honestly trying to figure out insurance, alternative investments, you know, which is kind of, you know, your wheelhouse. When you're trying to figure that out with Google, you bring in all kinds of information, but the degree to which the credibility of it, there's like no sorting and filtering and credibility, even the mechanisms to sort of, you know, ranking doesn't necessarily imply that it's the best information. Now AI is changing that to some degree. It's bringing in some intelligence to that process. So I think there's, there's kind of 2 aspects to that question. One, I think the providers of that, it's kind of getting back to The world in which you need to provide information that's unique out into the world, right? So, you know, having a Substack newsletter where you're putting out information that's unique from your perspective and your experience, it having, you know, again, going back to having a website, like a lot of service providers, a lot of small business owners, a lot of financial advisors, You know, they could buy leads, so they just kind of abandoned the website and producing good quality information. The interesting thing about large language models and AI is it can consume the entire internet. But if you have some proprietary knowledge or unique perspective or experience or stories, or can talk about unique investing situations and you publish that, In some way that these large language models can get access to, again, a website, something as easy as Substack where you can publish a newsletter, but it also is sort of publicly visible. We're finding that these large language models, ChatGPT, Perplexity, you know, Gemini, all the, all the kind of the main names, Claude, are, they have an insatiable appetite for something new. And so we're seeing clients pop up into those type of ChatGPT, you know, inquiries. And then the second component of that that's really interesting that I think will only grow is unlike a lot of what we do in lead generation for the leads that we sell, we're bringing in kind of the least educated consumer. I think what, what we're starting to see or potentially see is a higher quality lead that one has the sophistication to understand what AI is, what ChatGPT is, to use that to ask more complex questions. And then they're looking for something unique that puts you into the cited inquiry. And then they come to you as kind of the expert. So there's a lot of things to unpack in that sort of simple, simplified version of it. But I think for service providers in general, people that are in the industry, start publishing again and publish unique, original stories and experiences. And then I think that's going to bring in a more sophisticated, higher quality consumer, even just organically, right? You don't even need marketing agencies per se. Unless you need to scale significantly. So it's, it's definitely changing the world.

Yeah, it definitely is, and in ways that I think we're just not— well, I don't think we'll understand until we're actually there and, and end up living in it. I guess that's the way the future always is. We can speculate, but you can never really predict.

Yeah.

What the future is going to do. But I had heard a— it was a Stanford professor who is in the tech industry was talking about the changes that are coming in the next 15, 20 years here, and he was comparing to the 1900s— in 1900, there was about 95% of traffic in urban areas was equine-powered vehicles, and 15 years later, that had completely reversed, and that was at a time when change was slow. Right.

Yeah.

Compared to today. And so when we're thinking about not just AI where, you know, the robotics industry is just getting its legs and this fellow was predicting that in 15 years there will essentially be no human labor.

Yeah.

And if you look back at what happened to the equine population in that 15 years, you know, it just decimated the population.

Yeah.

Because there was no need for their labor any longer. So the question is what's going to happen to humans when in this— our whole culture worldwide is based upon the need for human labor. What's going to happen when that is no longer a necessity?

Yeah. Yeah, I think there's, I think there's some interesting threads to pull on there for sure. Whenever there's been, you know, tectonic sort of technology change, the, the skill and the labor definitely seems to change. Um, one thing that, you know, just from my read of things, um, there will certainly be an offset in the short term of folks that are doing certain things. Um, you know, I think, um, you know, in our industry, content creators, um, to some degree creatives, um, uh, that, that are doing design work. Um, but, but what I am seeing like immediately is one, if you've ever tried to have AI design something, it does very poorly without like professional design, like designers guiding AI to do design work. Yes, productivity goes up, but it also gets better, right? They can, you can actually get AI to design something well if you put a professional behind it to guide it.

Mm-hmm.

The same sort of thing as we're building agents and workflows and those sorts of things, we're seeing, yes, the people doing the deliverables are being offset. But what we need is people to train and create specifications for the agents to do a good job.

Mm-hmm.

We need to have people that can build workflows that replicate some of the work that they were doing. The agents need supervision. They need tuning because they have a propensity to sort of go off track because they're people pleasers. So they will always deliver a deliverable, but the quality of that potentially will degrade and not always be within specifications. So we see that. And then to the degree of just like more potentially blue-collar labor, I honestly think from some of the research I'm doing that we're going to be at a horrendous deficit for those folks. So although we may not have people— I'm in auto, you know, in the auto world— we may not have people on the lines putting together automobiles. But there's an insatiable appetite for power to fuel the AI and the agents and the robotics. So nuclear energy, alternative energy, all of the energy sectors are going to explode, which needs significant labor to bring that energy to bear. Wiring all of that energy, like electricians. I was just watching something about Sam Altman's new Stargate, which is basically this massive center to host all of the infrastructure they need to bring the AI on, you know, to the scale that there is demand for. The other thing that's significant in that, we think about power sometimes, but water just to cure, you know, to cool all these systems, the plumbing. So plumbers, he's got like, it was super fascinating. He has a massive number of plumbers and innovation in moving and recycling water. So there are going There are going to be a lot of problems to solve to host this new ecosystem. And a lot of those skills are skilled trades. Again, people like myself, white-collar workers, we may be at more risk than I think some of the skilled trades, which I think is going to have a short-term, maybe even a long-term deficit because we don't train a lot of plumbers and electricians anymore. Those are cottage industries. But now we kind of need those skills at scale.

Yeah.

So anyway, it's interesting. You can definitely look at 2 sides of the coin, and where we'll land, like you said, we won't know until we wander into the future.

I'm not sure we're going to need plumbers and electricians. You know, if you, you know, you look at how inefficient automobiles were in 1900 and how even 15 years later they were Compared to what we have today, they were bumbling around with these inefficient automobiles. But you projected that just even 10 years later into, you know, 20— I mean, in 1925, had some pretty reliable vehicles by that time. Mm-hmm. And that's what's going to happen with robots. I mean, if you look at in homes, you know, you can buy your automated vacuum cleaners. Well, they're pretty clunky and not very good at the jobs that they do these days. But 5 years from now, those home vacuum cleaners are going to become much, much more efficient. I think it's not going to be too long. I think that we're That robots are going to be doing brain surgery and heart surgery because they'll do it much more precisely. They can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week without any any fatigue. And of course, you're going to have to have a physician overseeing that. But it's the physicians aren't going to be. The ones getting their hands bloodied doing those surgeries. So, you know, people laugh when I, when I say those things, that robots are going to be doing the plumbing and the electricity, but, but I think they're going to, and they're going to— they'll do it faster, more efficiently, and without Needing to take a break. They can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So big changes are coming in the labor market, looks to me like. So we'll see where it all ends up. Well, let's sum this up. And if you can just, you know, you have exited multiple businesses. What advice would you give to professionals who want to grow something that they can eventually Scale to the point where they can sell it at a profit and step back from that.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, I've obviously spent a lot of time in in the services industry. I think, you know, services still there's all kinds of opportunities to look where folks are, you know, challenged. We looked at leads; they needed they had an insatiable appetite for leads, and we can build leads more efficiently in the services sector. I think the things that you're always looking. looking for is what is sufficiently complex, but presents a product that's not necessarily, you know, unique to, you know, there's no reason for them to have it internal, right? Because the actual product itself is somewhat generic, but to create that product has a level of complexity and intricacy that the business itself doesn't have the time or the expertise to devote to. So on a services basis, that's what I always look for is something that, again, you can do at scale and that you can sell that has a very common repeatable look to it, but it is sufficiently complex internally to create that. And then you use systems to do that at scale. On the product side, kind of a similar thing. I mean, you're looking for a product that has the kind of the largest addressable market possible. And as we've started to build some products in the AI space, one of the things that we find that's kind of interesting is when we first started building sort of AI products, we thought people wanted to know how to do that inside of their organization. And what we're finding now is That's generally not the case. They want the same product they were getting before. They just want it faster and lower cost. And so we are now taking those products that we built in AI. We're using them internally to deliver some of the same things that we were delivering for before. We're just able to deliver it at a greater scale and with more efficiency and take back that margin internally. And so at the end of the day, Most folks that you're selling to are looking to relieve pain or to make their life easier or to give them some additional margin. And those are the places in which you can find some good businesses.

Well, Bill, it has been a pleasure having you with us today. And all of you enlightened investors, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us today. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to Like, share, and subscribe. Until we meet again on next episode, live abundantly in all areas of your life.

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