Unlocking Business Growth: The Power of Connection Expansion and AI Integration

I have a really special guest today. Scaling Smarter wants to welcome Devon Sizemore. He is the author of Connection Expansion, and this is a system I use. I read the book and I have recommended it now many times on the show, as well as the founder of ACES, which is a group that basically makes that connection expansion methodology available in a community. Devon, welcome to Scaling Smarter.

David, thanks so much for having me, man. Been looking forward to the conversation.

And I want to say, Devon, the reason that this book is really meaningful is because how Devon built this whole connection expansion philosophy in his early career. Why don't you talk a little bit about your journey?

Yeah, 100%. I think it's really important to understand what drove a system and why it exists. And my first big company was a digital marketing agency. And I found myself in a crowded marketplace with a scarcity mindset surrounded by competitors that were cutthroat in a very hard sales world. And I was a little bit of a fish out of water because that wasn't me. I like people. I'm curious. I'm pretty good at sales, but I found myself in that world where like, it just didn't align with how I wanted to grow a company. And so I just started to ask myself, there's gotta be a better way. And I know you're a systems guy too. And so I just started dissecting the system like, okay, how do I go to a networking event and get more people's contact information? How do I follow up and get more people into meetings? How do I conduct meetings to get better results, meaning more connections or more clients? How do I nurture people to keep them again? And so I just started asking myself, if I go through the cold relationship journey? How do I heat it up quicker? And how do I control the pieces I can to get better output? And so I started back then building the system which exists today just by asking myself those questions and solving my own problem.

It's really impressive. And then you had some metrics that you talk about in the book about the kind of growth you experienced as compared to other divisions in these companies that you worked for.

Yeah, it's, I like to give a blanket statement here because it's mind-boggling if we actually get into the 100x growth.

Yeah.

At one point with one of the companies I was working with, we had 200 referral partners and the other branches had 8. And so we're talking about such a wide bandwidth of strategic opportunities and partnerships. We just got inbound flows. We fast forward to today. This year we're on pace to receive more than 3,000 inbound connections. Those are warm, edified connections directly referred to me. 3,000. I know people listening and watching, like, that would blow up your company. So even if you got a fraction of that, it's going to fundamentally change the trajectory of your business.

And everybody should stay tuned for some of the things that are coming out because of software that Devin is developing as well as software that I'm developing. And it'll be a few weeks from now. Stay tuned for some pretty powerful announcements that will take this concept and blow it up even bigger. So tell me about how you're using software now, and especially AI workflow automation. Let's talk— tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think if people are not slowing down to look at repetitive tasks and figuring out how to streamline that in today's era, Like you're totally missing out. And I think the first sample of it we dove into, and I dove into this back when having a calendaring tool was like foreign and people would get mad. Like I would send them a calendar link and they'd be like, that's not personal. I don't want to book that way. And now if you don't have a calendar link, you're a loser. Right. And I think, I think that's a great example of if you don't make it easy for people to book with you, why not? Also, if they book with you on your calendar, you can drop them into automations. And so that triggers a task on my calendar. On my to-do list in the CRM that makes me follow up. It also triggers email reminders to get you to come. It also triggers an email that follows. It also triggers a 6-week follow-up email, which is what we teach. So that goes. The other thing, things we started struggling with is the volume of meetings. I do so many meetings and I'm like, man, I need to get these notes in. Okay. Now with Fathom, we're able to zap the notes straight out of Fathom to the contacts in the CRM instantly. Right. We're able to take email referrals, log them in a simple form, and have all of the follow-up process automated. And so instead of having to sit there and manually task manage, all of that's done behind the scenes now. And the reason we can automate so much of our follow-up and outreach and nurturing is because it's all templated. And so we don't do custom messaging because we found the formula that works. We're using it for that. We also built, I think we're up to 7 or 8 GPTs now of various forms that solve a problem. So build introduction templates so that we can introduce people quicker. We have one that takes you through my whole connection expansion exercise, which was a need for us to streamline the process, but now we find it's great for our clients. We have one that builds deep tags, which allows us to expand our tags inside the CRM so we can sort our databases better. We're always looking for ways to Optimize and systemize what we're doing. And then, as you mentioned, we're going in beta on a software of recording this in the next few days to help streamline how we're connecting people and enrich our LinkedIn and CRM data so we can do even more between the people in our network. So almost everything we're doing is touched by a software, an AI, or a system in some way, shape, or form.

So where do you see this going in the next Couple of years, maybe I forget it. It's too hard to look that far forward anymore. Things are changing so fast in the next year. Where do you see this evolving into?

Yeah, I think for us, we're seeing acceleration everywhere because of how efficient we're becoming, right? So we're buying back so much time for myself and my team, which is allowing us to accelerate our overall growth. And so I think what you'll see specifically for us, we're gonna accelerate everything we're doing. You're gonna see in a bigger, badder, amazing way. And I think you're gonna see that in all industries and all sectors. The companies right now that are really looking for how do I systematize and optimize, integrate AI, streamline, use all these tools which have become so much more affordable. That's the big thing here, right? Some of these tools have existed for a long time, but they were very cumbersome. So either labor intensive or cost prohibitive, those two things have pretty much gone away for the majority of use cases inside of a general business. So I think if you're not bolting on, testing, trying to streamline everywhere and anywhere and increase your client experience, like what could we bring to the client for almost no cost that increases value? At some point, your competitors are going to start doing it and you're going to see them accelerate growth and you're just not going to be part of that.

So who are your competitors right now? Because what you do is distinct in terms of the whole connection expansion methodology.

Yeah, such a good question. I've had 2 meetings today that shine a light on this, right? I was on with someone and there's some amazing networking groups out there, like amazing. And if you're looking to do business networking virtually, there are some best practice places. They're all good for a different reason, right? Some are faith-based, some are revenue-driven, some are are deep relationships. Some are men, some are women. There's reasons. What I find is we found ourselves in a lane that I've yet to find anyone else really playing in, which is my guarantee to people is if you come to one of our networking meetings, you're going to meet someone new every single meeting. Every single meeting you come to, you're going to meet someone new, guaranteed. Because of how we built my cold client experience, it supports that statement. The other thing is because of how we build and we're not chasing referrals, we're chasing connections. Big distinction, right? Referrals are aligned prospects that want to buy your product or service. We're chasing connections, right? Strategic opportunities that could open doors. We attract people that are not there to just sell the next thing. They're there to actually connect. And so the people that hang around our world are all givers. They're all strategic thinkers. They're all looking for really interesting partnerships. Man, I've yet to find someone doing what we're doing the way we do it. And if I do today, like I said, those 2 meetings, they said, oh, I'm in this organization and it's doing this. In both cases, the organization was doing lead gen, which is great. But in both cases, they said, man, they're not sending me the caliber and quality of leads I think. And I said, I get it. I tried lead gen for a long time. It doesn't usually work. What does work though, is I can give you strategic aligned opportunities chasing the same clients. I find that equals deal flow much more. I know that was a long-winded way to say, I don't think we're competing.

It's interesting regarding lead gen. Lead gen used to work to a certain degree depending on how much energy in terms of money you wanted to invest in the lead gen. You could get a sort of return depending on what type of lead gen you were doing, whether it was paid ads or whether it was cold outreach or social media, whatever. Put a certain amount of money in, you could expect, assuming the lead gen was done well, You could expect a certain kind of return, which is way different than what you're doing because the energy you put into what you're doing continually grows the power of the, and the number of referrals that you'll end up getting. But today, lead gen sucks. It has gotten weaker and it, as we see AI accelerate and technology accelerate, we're almost seeing an inverse curve with lead gen. It's almost like accelerating down faster. Yeah. I— is lead gen dead? I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is really ineffective and very expensive. I've even heard recently some senior marketing people talk about it costing $500 to $1,000 per qualified lead for things that used to cost $10 and $20 to achieve. And that's just not sustainable. Now, there are a few businesses They can afford to pay for that. And these are not necessarily even high-ticket items. What you're offering is, to me, it's the only thing that really is— will give you a position where you invest and it grows. Every time you invest a little more, it actually gets bigger instead of you're just investing to keep it going. Now, I always ask my guests this question. If tech— there was no limitation, you could do anything with tech, and you had no budget limitation. What problem would you solve?

I love that. I think before we hit record, we were geeking out on tech. I think one thing I identified, right, which I thought was interesting is how do you, how do you deepen relationships in the places you're already playing and ease that process without it having to be so manual? I think to me, that's fascinating and it's got my wheels turning so much lately on if you join We could use a big name. If you join BNI, you have a local chapter, you have a region, you have national, you can access everyone's data. It's all part of the system. Then it takes a lot of effort to get that data and either drop them through an email sequence to schedule a meeting or outreach, get them connected on all these different social platforms. And if you do it, yes, you're going to see a return 100%. You should go do that. Go connect with everyone in every organization you're a part of, right? If you're part of a chamber, go find everyone that's on the chamber list and every day add a couple of them. So I think technology that allows us to take these databases we play in and translate those into some sort of relationship, that's interesting to me because it, it expands how fast we can build relationships. Geeking out. I just saved a 100 AI tool tech list to my Google Drive yesterday or last week. Nicole and I go through. Every day we take one tool and we just dissect it to figure out what are they doing? How's it work? Does it work for us?

Do you have a book suggestion recommendation to my listeners besides Connection Expansion, which I recommend all the time?

Ah, it's such a hard question because I read so many books and I've worked with so many authors. I'm going to glance over at the shelf. You know what? I really shout out to Chris Jarvis. The Be the Draft book, I think is super interesting. And I think it's accessible for just about everyone. Like it's a good life lesson. And then all of his other books on finance are phenomenal. And then I just picked up Mentor Minutes. This is the one that's sitting on my desk. So shout out to Jim because his book's sitting here. So that's what I'm reading right now. But I read a ton. If you go to my website, I have a book recommendations tab full of books that I recommend.

Okay. All right. Thank you. And give me a prediction. Like if you could look out 5 years, do you have anything that you can predict based on how technology is shifting?

Yeah, I think that there's going to be so much more business done out of your current market. And so I think if people are just playing in their local market, unless they're just a hyper-specific retailer or local provider, there's so many missed revenue streams by not allowing technology to open up your marketplace. And I think if people are not thinking about additional revenue streams, that's going to be the future. There's so much access to a global market. You can increase your revenue streams in so many ways. And I think technology is going to make that easier. I think if we talk blockchain and crypto, which is all the foundation is technology, right? That's going to unlock a lot more too. So I think just an infinite amount of ways to make money attached to what you're currently doing. And that's what we're gamifying is how many revenue streams can we create? Without moving away from our core purpose.

So in that same vein, how, what would you, what advice would you give to people that feel like they might be displaced because of AI? So designers, developers, people in administrative roles, things like that. What advice would you give them?

Yeah, I have a client that's a web dev guy and that was questioned today. He said, man, I'm not sure how much longer website development is relevant. And I think it's the same advice across all those platforms is there's still strategy. There's still best practice. There's still hyper creativity that comes into impact in those places. Now, do I think your prices may drop because there are tools now that make the deliverables much quicker and easier? Yes. And so I think you need to be thinking about shifting what you're selling, right? So if you're selling the website versus selling the strategy to build a converting website. Those are 2 different sales pitches, right? It's the same for like logos. If you're selling the logo versus building a highly aligned mission-oriented brand, listen to the language. It's very different, right?

Yeah.

So I think anyone who can play on the strategic side, right, really get to know people and help them align, you're always gonna win. I think if you've built yourself on the output side, it's gonna be a race to do it as cheap and efficient as possible because that's what tech is driving right now. And It just is. If anyone in the development space right now, they've never been able to develop stuff quicker and easier than today. And it's only going to get easier tomorrow.

Yeah.

So that's my advice to those guys is I don't think you're dead. I think you just need to really hone your craft to be the strategic leader in your space. And then think about all the other revenue streams back to what I just answered, right? What else could you be doing that supports that client? Could you build a community? Could you host a mastermind? Could you do group coaching? Could you bring clients together in a different way? We got to think a little bit more creatively as business owners in general and diversify our income. I think that's something I made a mistake on in a couple of companies. So do that, focus on the strategy side. I don't think you're going to be irrelevant, but I think you're going to have to shift.

I might have you back on because there was a whole series of questions that I actually forgot to get to. Related to some of the partnerships you've had, and you talked about in the show notes that you had lost money with those partners, but I don't think we have time today. So if you'd be interested, we could do this again maybe in a few months.

Always keen to talk more. Yeah, I think between you and I, we could dive in and geek out on all sorts of things. But yeah, I've learned a ton of lessons, and if anyone wants to connect, man, I'd love to share what I'm doing. And I'm always curious to learn what other people are doing too.

Devin, thank you for being on Scaling Smarter. And this is one of those episodes I'm really going to push out there because I think my listeners will benefit a lot from hearing what you have to say.

Thank you so much.

Oh, last question, I almost forgot. How would somebody get a hold of you if they want to?

Yeah, so connectionexpansion.com will talk to you about the community we host, which is free. Come hang out there. Much more than what we talked about is in my masterclass or devinsizemore.com, D-E-V-I-N size them more dot com. All of my stuff's on there, all my social links, connect with me on any platform. Say you heard me on this show. That way I know where you heard about me and I can tell David, thank you.

Okay. And, and all those links will be in the show notes. So thank you, Devin, for being on Scaling Smarter.