How To Get Paid $2,500 + Monthly Checks for "Drag & Drop" AI Employees⏐Ep. #268

So the other day, I come across this guy named Danny. And Danny went in to get a haircut, and he talked to his barber, who's very busy, and said, hey, have you ever thought about using a voice agent to answer your calls for you while you're cutting hair? That way you don't miss out on customers. And he said, that sounds awesome. Danny said, why don't I build that for you for free? He built it for him, and it changed the game for this barber. Now, Danny builds voice agents for barbers, and he charges 2,500 to $5,000 upfront, plus hundreds of dollars a month so to maintain it. But the thing is, is that these voice agents can be created with just a few clicks. You can train them just by dragging a screenshot over from their Google business profile. That's it. Or just by linking their website. Better yet, you can sell to the barbers as you're getting your haircut by pulling out your phone, updating the voice agent on your phone so it answers as Bob's Barbershop, or whatever the name is of the barbershop that you're at, right Then. Then you could have it call the.

Barber as he's cutting your hair and.

Use that as a sales tool. I am hyped about this interview.

You are going to love it.

Danny got his start about 11 years ago helping people optimize their Yelp profiles. And he said there was a very small window of time on Yelp where you could make a lot of money doing this. And then it went away. And he said today, that same small window of time exists with creating voice agents for local businesses. I've talked about this a few times on the POD before. You guys love it. Every single time. This is the first time I've interviewed a business owner that's actually doing it.

I've done it a couple times.

I. I have two different episodes where I launch a voice agent business live. But this is kind of a different beast altogether. I promise you'll love it. Oh, and if you end up starting this agency, or any agency built on top of high level, it would mean the world to me. If you use my affiliate link in the comments below, you'll get 30 days free instead of the normal 14. Let's go talk to Danny, one of my barbers.

I call him my therapist because I talk to him all every week, right? And just, it's cheaper than therapy. And so I was going, I was like, hey, let me rebuild your website because it didn't look that good, and let me Start doing some stuff on Go High Level. He's the number one barber in Huntington Beach, California. And so I felt like if I did this for him for free, he's in one of those buildings where there's.

All like these like, like Salon Suites.

Yeah.

20 business owners in one room and one room.

And I don't.

That's.

That's my lead cycle right there. And so, like, let me build you this website. You'd be my test dummy. At the end of the day, I'll do this all for free. I build on the website. I build on this AI agent. And he was absolutely amazed by the AI agent because there's kind of two type of barbers. There's one barber where he's absolutely busy and he can't take any, like, any phone calls because he's just constantly booked. And there's another barber who is just not that booked.

Right. And so he's like nothing in between.

Yeah, exactly. And so he's the booked guy. And so he was. I was like, let me implement an AI agent because how many people are calling you and you just might miss opportunity from just a scheduled link. Right. And so we implemented an AI agent so that whenever he doesn't answer, instead of going to voicemail, the agent picks up, ask him all of these questions. We, we kind of fed him all of the business information.

You're saying that he's in the middle of cutting, he can't answer. So a voice agent picks up. Correct. And asks a bunch of questions and fills out a form.

Yeah, like, we just gave them all that information. But if they want to schedule something, then it would give them the direct link for them to book an appointment right away. I mean, he was getting bookings from that link just the day we turned it on. And so it gave him the freedom to know that like, hey, this works. And I don't really have to stress about new clients and like, I understand the times, money and stuff like that, but this helped a lot.

So you made this voice agent and you said there was a scheduling link. Tell me how that worked. Specifically if the person said, yeah, can I just like book a time with you? Or would it text them that link or would it ask them questions and then fill out the form for them?

It would text them that link. We thought it would. That was the easiest way. Most of them are tech savvy anyways, in today's day and age, and it'll give them a link to then book them directly with their own booking system that they, they use.

Okay. Is your agent telling them that this is a, like an AI voice agent, or is it just kind of talking to them as if it's a person?

No, it's full person. We use GoHighLevel and there's a couple that you could test out. We liked the girl version of it. I mean, unless you ask. I think it tells you that you're an agent. But just conversating with it, it was really, really good.

Are people asking, do you know?

No. I mean, so go High Level gives you like the transcript of the agent. So they're, they're asking for the booking link, they're asking, when do you open? They're asking questions about the business.

Probably don't know.

Yeah.

So if they didn't know, it wouldn't make a difference because they're getting their question answered and that's all.

Exactly, exactly. At this point, that's, that's what everyone wants. Like, give me the answer to the question. Yeah, I don't want to wait on the phone for a human being. If, you know, if I could. If it's an easy book now, if it's in medical practice and stuff like that, this whole different story. We want them to talk to someone on the reps inside or book or book a call with them. Right. Because now a lot of medical doing practices are doing the membership route too.

Yeah.

Which is what we're going to be implementing in Go High Level as well as for subscriptions. So.

So if this barber is cutting hair, are people calling, like his personal cell phone number, and if he doesn't pick up in like a certain amount of rings, then it transfers to the voice agent or like, logistically, how does it work?

Yeah. So he has his own work number that we connected. So we. There's two ways it could go right away. If they call, the voice agent picks up or. And ring, ring, ring. Instead of a voicemail, the voice agent will pick up. We decided to do the second option because in case he was at a lunch or had some time to pick up, he would love to still pick up, communicate with his customers if he can.

So you already told me this in the beginning. I'm remembering now. But you just replaced his voicemail with the voice agent, period. Right.

Exactly.

Okay.

Exactly.

Super easy. So if he's free, he wants to answer, he answers and it's him. Do you have any metrics on, like, what type of call volume he's getting? Like, how many voice agent conversations are happening on a daily or weekly basis for him?

We're still figuring out the go, high level side of it. This was the free side that we had. So know the metrics we do have are. I would have to pull them up, but they're all good. I don't know if I'm doing ballpark numbers. He told me specifically because I asked him every week. He's like this, this thing made me lazy to a point where I don't want to pick up. So most of the time he is just not picking up and letting it go.

Good.

Yeah.

I mean, that's because he's seen that it's as good or better than him anyway.

Correct. And he's trusting it. Yeah.

Keep watching Netflix with your wife. Like why.

Exactly.

Right.

And that's what I was saying. I was like that this gives you the, the option to leave your phone open at all times. Right.

Like this is what AI is supposed to do, is actually give us more time. And in most cases it's, it's not yet. It's still too early. Right. But it really seems like I keep coming back to voice agents by accident. Right. Like, voice agents are just such a good use case for AI right now that fits so many businesses because there's 33 million small businesses and like the vast majority of them could use a voice agent.

Yeah. Right. And that's the whole theory of like the Yelp that I'm saying. Like this is that Yelp back, that Yelp moment.

Yeah. Or like the Google business profile moment or like the Facebook ads moment or the, the ppc, the pay per click moment in Google Ads when, you know, you could buy clicks for 2 cents and those same clicks today are $2.

Yeah.

These windows don't last forever, but in a way they last a lot longer than we think. Right. Like they're easy for a short window of time. Easier. But then like today, people are still starting web design agencies and finding success like they did in the 90s. Like, I've heard so many stories of people in the 90s that learned HTML, that built websites for small businesses. And it's like that was their first side hustle. Now they're a billionaire. Today, people are still, they're not having to learn HTML, but they're still building websites for small businesses. You know, like, in a sense these opportunities last for a while and in another sense, they're only really, really good for a short amount of time.

Yeah, correct.

Now, you didn't charge him for this, Right. Did you ever charge him after the fact or. He's never paid.

So, I mean, I would get a haircut every week. And that's like now he gives me free haircuts. You know, he doesn't allow, I, I try and he doesn't allow me. And he's pretty expensive. It's like $50 a haircut per week. So ideally it's around 200, but we have this was, I told them from the get go, like, hey, I wanted to test this out for you because like this is, you're, like you're my lead magnet. Not only do you have 20 other businesses in here, but the medical guy, like he wasn't a haircut person and he referred me because of talking at a barber. Like, that's a hack to me because like this is a talking advertisement. If you're doing good, right, if you really connect with them and you're, you know, you have a really good relationship with them, it's an easy advertisement that's going on for free.

Have you ever asked him, now that he knows how much value you've added, like, what would you have paid me? Like play that kind of what if game had I been able to run and show you how much convenience this would add to your life, what would this be worth to you?

Yeah, I played that right, right at the get go because we're cool like that. I was like, hey, what would you pay for something like this? And he paid already a thousand dollars for like a bad website just recently. And so creating a website that looks amazing and then having a KPI dashboard attached to it to now understand your business. Because he didn't go to school for business, he went to school for barbering and cutting hair. So this value adds, it's a tremendous value for him because now he really gets to pop up under the hood and figure out his business and figure out marketing, figure out SMS and stuff. So easily $2,500 to answer question and easily a $200 a month fee. Now that's just him. I've asked a couple other people. It could go from as low as a thousand to, you know, maybe as high as 5,000. I think it really depends on your client and how much they understand the value of this and understanding what phase they're currently in. Like, I would hate to go into a client that's like, there's this, they're a startup and they, you know, they have this passion and they want to do this, but they're all out of money. Like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'll give them advice, you know, and I'll, I'll guide them But I'm not going to try to charge them for their, you know, all of their money when they're first starting. And this is usually how I close my deals. I'll create a website for the client I'm already talking to on Replit, like, like a mock up before I even have their first meeting. Like I am, I am researching them, I'm looking at their websites and I'm, I'm asking Chad gbt, breaking down their current website, saying what, what are the flaws in this, if any, and what can I do to help improve this current website? I'll take that information, create a replit mockup for them. You don't have to publish it. You could just show them right then and there with the link that they use. I think it lasts like 15 minutes and then like the amount of like you would like awe that these guys have because they're used to one, people creating websites and taking a month or two for them going back and forth. And two, like, it just shows like how much you're you, you care for them. Like you, you built this without asking for anything, just showing your potential. And they're like, man, this is amazing. It looks good. It's the whole theory of like Alex Hermosi, like if you, if you give them good stuff, like they start thinking, well, damn, like what is how? Like the paid stuff.

Yeah, the paid stuff must be better. And oftentimes it's not, you know, but they have confirma bias. So they're expecting like, oh, this is better, you know.

Yeah. Like the first mockup like that was, we made a couple changes from then and there, but it wasn't major, drastically major than what we first did. And so it's like, I think the theory of just like showing that you did the work without even asking.

Yeah.

Goes a long way.

Yeah. Because a lot of times people go into these quotes and they're like, they kind of, they do some research and so their, their work is invisible. Right. So the person that they're selling to has no idea how much research they've done. Maybe. Luckily you say a couple things that indicate that. But if you're actually doing work in a vibe coding app like Replit and showing them something, their confirmation bias kicks in and like, oh, dang, you really care about this. Oh, oh, this is legit. And it's like the oldest sales trick in the book is assume the sale.

Right.

And you're kind of doing that in a sense because you're saying I've already, I've already built out Half this. So like when it comes time to, for me to actually send the invoice and get paid for this and fulfill this already halfway done. Right. So I'm increasing my likelihood of getting the sale and I'm decreasing my amount of work after the sale because I've already done it correct. Two parts of one stone.

And then the cherry on top is like, what go high level. And just other KPI metrics that you could add on to help improve their business so that they could continue to grow and scale. Or even like the fear metric of like, dude, you're, you're potentially losing this much revenue if you're not booking throughout these days. Or like I made a KPI dashboard from replit just based off of what barbers and stuff would use. I mean the thing that it created was stuff that I wouldn't have even thought of. Like you should like try booking during these specific days and send these specific emails out or text messages out. Or if you have a team of four, like figure out who is getting more of the reschedules and have like a workshop with that top person. I was like, dude, these are all really good ideas that just generated from chat that you could implement in your own business. And understanding that or just kind of informing that to a client is like very helpful because that's all they're thinking of in, in business. How do I go? How do I continue to scale? How do I, you know, how do I improve? Like, those are the thing, like, I, I mean, don't try to reinvent the wheel. I, I know a lot of people are here trying to create stuff on AI, but instead of that, like, there's a time and place for everything. But figure out what people's current problems are and, and go that route because a lot of the time you're going to get paid faster and you're going to get more clients that way with and you're going to learn more. Like, how do you continue to build and scale with current businesses? Like, that's the beauty of it is I'm like, trust me, I have my, I have my notebook with all these ideas. And I think I asked you this question the other day. I was like, man, can I sell my ideas? Because I don't. There's, there's so much of them. But at the end of the day, like, you focus on problem solving current problems and people's businesses.

Yeah. And helping them identify them because oftentimes they don't even know what their problems are. And until you ask the right questions, what Are the right questions, what are.

The questions you ask to get to.

The heart of their problems?

It's kind of like having a conversation like this with my client. At first I'm not here to sell them anything. I'm just trying to understand what their goals are first. And so kind of like the questions, I mean I want to break down what they're, you know, ideally what their year would look like, what their, what their overall goals are, any idea of like marketing or newsletters or kind of, I mean I ask everything and I just have an hour conversation with them, just kind of breaking down their current business. And I think just with the amount of knowledge that I've learned through the last 15 years, through the E Commerce side and through the mergers and acquisition side and just all of it in the stock market and breaking down earnings reports like you, you could really understand a client just by having a simple one hour conversation. Ideally, the more, the more intel you could get on your client, the better you could figure out directly what they need help with the most. And the reason why I went family, if you're a, if you're a super busy barber, that's probably the number one thing you're going to try to do is you need to expand to other barbers. Right? You need to have more people to kind of guide you or to help free up your time. And so that's kind of you build intel, build rapport and fig. And the main thing is build something that you could show them and reconnect with them in a week or two. And then at that point, once you reconnect with them, the end of that is most likely going to be your, your sale. And whether you're going to create a new website for them or, or they like the website and they want to continue to work or they like the idea of figuring out how to improve their business with KPIs and understanding all that stuff or even not understanding wanting to. That's kind of your approach.

And I do love the idea in this business that you can literally sell to the person that is selling to you. Right. Like while they're cutting your hair. You could. It's a captive audience.

Yeah, exactly.

I love that like if you approach a barber at clothes, he's probably not going to say no to one more customer right now. How scalable is that? You could, I don't know, you can make the argument it's not very scalable, but at X dollars per month or $2,500 up front, it's worth the time and I would have to think your close rate. If you're self selecting a high volume barber and you spending 30 to 60 minutes with them, your close rate will be in the double digits. Like period, is it 20, is it 80? I don't know. But at that point it's just a numbers game. There's 76,000 barbers and I love this niche because there's usually a push pull between the ticket size and the number of businesses or like the approachability of a business. Like dentists are great to sell to. There's a lot of dentists, but it's really hard to get to the decision maker.

Right.

Barbers are cheap, right. It's a low ticket price. So it's like they don't have a good reputation for selling agency services to them. But there's a lot of them. There's even more than there are of dentists. And it's a captive audience. And like you can, they're extremely approachable. You can talk to them one on one. You don't have to go through a decision maker. Right? Pizza shops, there's like 200,000 pizza shops, convenience stores, there's like 400,000 convenience stores. AI opens up all of these like single person solo businesses to agency services where it just, it didn't make sense financially before. AI right. Like convenience store owner or a pizza shop owner is not going to pay 3500 bucks a month to manage your Facebook ads, most likely. Right. Unless they're at scale, they have a few locations, et cetera. But with something like this, like voice agents, like even if we only leave it to voice agents.

Yeah, that was all I was going to say. I mean, approachable, you have no time. Like I could have went directly with the voice agent as well and say, hey, like I'm sure you're busy. And I tried calling and no one answered. And that's why I walked in the barbershop. Like, have you heard of a voice agent before? Right there you. Right. And they're yes or no and kind of like, man, the beautiful thing about a voice agent is once you set it up for one person, you could test it in front of them as well.

And that's what I was going to say.

That's what I've been doing.

Your hand out from beneath the cape, right? Because he's cutting your hair and you just call it and just have him talk to it.

Correct. And he's done that. And he's done that to me in front of other salons and stuff. Like the people next to him, he's like, hey, come here. Like, I want, I want you to meet Danny. He calls the, the number, he's like, talk to it. And next thing you know I get a transcript of a whole AI voice.

Yeah.

They're like, is he cute or not? And they're asking now these crazy questions. So it's like, but I mean it like once you show, like once you have that. And that's why it was so important for me to have him as my test dummy. Because I knew the value of having a finished product and showcasing that and seeing how well other people could react on just a nice website, something that really works. You could, you know your SMS marketing on it. You have newsletters, you have reactivation tool. Yeah, the whole level, right. And most importantly, like if you have an AI agent and you can call them, you showcase the work and they're like asking all these questions about the business and they actually know about it. They're like, like, sign me up. Like, say let me create it for you and you test it yourself and then if they like it after that, then you could close the deal. You're going to have more success creating it first and doesn't take that much time. If it's a good lead, you should do this. You're going to have more success creating the deal and showcasing that. Closing the deal after you show them everything that you created. In my opinion, I mean you could.

Even take it so far. Like let's say you walk into a barbershop cold and you're getting some good reception from him. You heard about voice agents and like he doesn't even know you're selling to him yet, right?

Yeah.

Let me show you this. But before you pull out, you pull out your phone, you open up high level on your phone and you go to the settings for the voice agent and you change out the name of the business to his business name. Right? Then before you call and you call it like, hey, this is. He's like, what? That's me. And it's like, yeah. Could you imagine that?

Yeah, that's good. Like, yeah, you could easily set that up if you know you're gonna go showcase or you show them like, and they're like, wow.

Yeah.

And that's barber salon, the nails, massage, like all of those type of industries like that you're gonna schedule appointments and they're asking and they're calling tackle that.

And I've done this myself. It's literally that easy as going in the voice agent and changing the name of the business and Then click save and then it updates automatically.

Yeah. And usually, I don't know, I mean I, I think we just put in their website and have, I think agent will extract all of the information, all.

The FAQs, the opening hours, etc.

So even better if you put the name and their website, you should like if they're going further deep in the conversation asking these questions, it's even better.

Yeah. Are you able to share your screen and show what his dashboard looks like? This Barbers.

Let me see.

For those listening or watching. KPI stands for key performance indicators. And for years it was, you know, relegated to Fortune 500 companies. Big budget companies, like basically what, what goals or what metrics are we tracking to know that we're being successful or not? And now with AI like barbers can know what KPIs mean. Barbers can have KPIs, whereas that was never, that was never realistic for common local businesses. I'm curious what his KPIs are like. Is it new appointments? Is it, you know, revenue? Is it.

This is our test dummy account. So I don't, I haven't worked on this. My partner does another thing. I was gonna say, guys, like, I couldn't have done this without, without having a good partner on my team as well. I picked a partner who is good at coding just because like replit can have difficulties kind of going through that finish line of stuff. And so having a partner where I'm just all sales, all vision ideas, giving her the stuff that needs to be fixed, it really helps out in the long run.

So your business partner is doing the kind of the integrations and stuff and you're focusing on the sales.

Correct. So this was the missed call section. We created this on the 28th and we have 125 missed calls. I don't think it was right away when they started. Yeah, we didn't implement it right away. We just created this number.

28Th of December.

I think it was November. Yeah, November. We could go back a little bit.

125 missed calls.

Yeah. And you could see, I mean they're even today, they're coming in. And so a lot of people and you, you'll. I think you could get the transcripts of these. I don't know if it. They'll show them here, but throughout, especially holiday season, they were coming in and he was just letting them ride and they were getting booked. He would show, I mean he would say we're, we're getting booked. He would pair them with the number.

And I call these FMCs, formally missed calls. These are no longer missed calls.

Right, exactly. We use this with the GoHighLevel account that we had from you. So we took advantage of it and just kind of went from there and just use it as a test. I mean, and now we have our. Another Go High level. And so we kind of. This is my showcase to clients still, you know.

Yeah. Beautiful. So he's gotten you more barbershop customers then?

Yeah. So it's to a point where we were like, we had a, we had a pause and we took like a, like two weeks just to kind of dedicate Go High level and what, what everything that we could learn from Go high Level. So now we're, we have probably, I would say four or five calls the remaining of the week from barbers and someone related to him that introduced us.

From one free customer.

From one free customer. I haven't spent anything on ads, I haven't spent anything on, on sponsorships or anything like that. This is just from one free customer.

I just keep hearing this over and over. Like, to get your first agency customer, start with your circle, your sphere of influence and do it for free. Right. And if it, if it's not magical, if it doesn't work, then you might not get referrals, which means your product isn't that good anyway. Right. You got to revisit the drawing board, which is okay because you either win or you learn. Right. But if it is magical, if it is good, then either you get them to pay you for more stuff or you get them to refer you.

Yeah, exactly. And everyone has like their own barber or their own, you know, massage person or salon or nail it, you know, so it's like, yeah, start with that. Even if it's a family member, like figure out one guy.

Oil change guy.

Exactly. Yeah. Now I'm doing, I'm doing home inspections for one of them. I got a meeting today with a home inspection and their website and their ghl. A drone washing commercial company, washing drones and all that stuff. A remodeling company in the real estate. So like again, all different industries all need the same thing. So it shouldn't be that hard to kind of niche down and figure out the best, the best industry. But they're definitely out there.

What would you have done differently, if anything, about starting this business?

Start faster. I think the idea that you need to learn every single thing before you start is absurd. Like get in there, get your hands dirty, teach yourself. Teach yourself everything you can and be dedicated to helping people. Right. I mean, that's the end. The end goal is like, as more people you help, the more that money will come. It's the law of abundance.

How does your pricing look today versus your first customer? Like, what do you think you're going to charge these next few customers, both upfront and ongoing?

I think we're still in the beginning phases of things, and I think we could kind of customize per client, but I would say anywhere from 2500 to 5000, just because I know as time goes on, there's going to be more tools or easier tools or easier access. Clients or people are coming in. I mean, there's competition. That's what it is, supply and demand. Right. And so I know that and I think, I think working well and fast is probably my goal. And I think we're going to up the monthly to 2 to 500, depending on what all they need. I think that's a good range. I mean, if you have 20 clients, you know, my goal is just a passive income for this and to kind of use this money for bigger projects with apps and developments and businesses through AI still. But my, like I said, I have a book of ideas and I think all of them need money and dedication. And so this is kind of my. My focus for that.

Beautiful. Danny, where can people find you?

Danny propertrends Mail. Com. If anyone wants to connect, I'm a wealth of knowledge, so feel free to reach out.

Beautiful.

Okay, this episode was a little different. If you're watching on YouTube, you'll notice that other people were watching. As I interviewed Danny, I came across Danny in my paid community, TK Owners. He's a member of it, and he.

Used some of the tools that he.

Learned from TK Owners to build this business. But I had him present this interview to my Playmakers Community, which is a group of people building AI automation agencies, AI voice agent agencies, etc. So if you're interested in either one, check out playmakersai.com or tkowners.com thanks for.

Hanging out on the Kerner office.