From Rabbi to Tech CEO: My Secrets to LinkedIn & AI Growth

My father really wanted me to be a rabbi, and after successfully becoming a rabbi, I realized that's not something that I wanted to do myself. I wanted to make money and do a business. Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. I started building websites, and then people started asking me, Joe, hey, can you build me a website? And I said, of course, this is fun for me. And they're like, we'll pay you. And I was like, what? You're gonna pay me to build you a website? I could build a website in 2 seconds. And like, yeah, I'll pay you to build me a website. So I ended up selling web design to people just from the fact that people were just saying, hey, we need a website. And so, uh, that turned into customers starting to complain to me. They started saying, hey, you built me a website, but nobody came to it. You said if you build it, they will come. I said, that's a famous saying. I don't know if it's true. It's apparently not true. If you build it, they will not come. You need to market it. So I started doing research in marketing. There's a concept called SEO. Have you ever heard of that before? No.

Yeah, sure have.

So search engine optimization was very popular back then because, you know, you would just make a few changes to the website and all of a sudden, boom, you're ranking on the first page of Google and other search engines. And so I got really, really good at SEO. I reverse engineered their algorithm and I got hundreds of people to start wanting to pay me for SEO. And that turned into leading one of the fastest growing companies in America. I started Ajax Union back in 2008. One of the ways that I do networking was on LinkedIn. And so I reverse engineer how LinkedIn works. And so I started getting lots of clients from LinkedIn and people started saying, dude, how are you doing this LinkedIn thing? How does it work? And so I started teaching people that, and then I realized I can create a course cuz people are willing to pay for it. And so I started creating courses on LinkedIn and how to use LinkedIn. I trained over 1,100 companies on how to leverage LinkedIn, and that turned into AI because now AI can help people with LinkedIn and with other stuff. And so I started really digging into AI and with all my knowledge of being a web designer and being a marketer and being a networker and Getting really good at sales and things like that. I ended up being able to help a lot of people. And with AI, attach AI to that, to those skills, suddenly I can really impact people deeply. So now I'm on a mission to help 1,000 people change their life and generate $100 million in economic activity in their business. I'm taking a look at your LinkedIn right now. You have 1,100 people that are connected to you on LinkedIn. You posted 5 days ago. The way that you posted is good. You didn't include an image or anything, and you're not really connecting with your audience. I see one person commented on your post. So it looks like you're kind of missing community. You might be missing a strategy. And so I wanna help 1,000 people such as yourself to be able to start leveraging LinkedIn in a better way. I see, I look at you and I see almost everything about you on LinkedIn. I see you don't have recommendations. You know, you're missing a lot of key indicators on your LinkedIn. So I wanna help people that have sales teams, that are sales leaders, make a difference in their business by going into their business and really impacting in a very deep way. You know, if I take a look at the company that you're working with, I do see that you guys do have a lot of sales leaders there and a lot of people that are doing sales, director of member services, account managers, all types of people. But if I look at their LinkedIn, they're doing a terrible job at using it. They're not leveraging it properly. Your CEO Brandon has 20,000 followers on LinkedIn and he's paying for LinkedIn, but the last time he posted was 4 months ago. That's a waste. That's a massive waste. So if I can help your CEO, if I can help you, if I can help more people at your company, that would be a massive win for me.

I love that. That's great. And we need to talk offline too.

That'd be great.

Um, what's one initiative you rolled out recently, either for your own company or for a client, uh, that you're really proud of?

I'm really proud of a client, Tina. Tina came to us. She didn't really know how to leverage LinkedIn. She was a networker for quite some time. And we taught her our 9-step framework on how to create a strategy, how to build the right assets and the right actions to take every single day on LinkedIn. As a result of the work that we did with her, she tripled her business over the past 2 years, completely changed the way that she operates. We had another client that came to us. They had 62 sales reps, but the sales reps weren't using LinkedIn effectively. They were kind of just on there to be lookie-loos, to be lurkers, to be watching what people are doing. We did a series of trainings for their team. We gave them an AI to help them be able to be more effective. One of the sales reps that took the most action ended up closing a million-dollar deal. What I think people need to do is they need to clone themselves with teaching AI what exactly you sound like, what words you use, what words you don't use. Should you use long sentences? Should you use short sentences? And once you train the AI on exactly how to speak exactly the way that you would speak, Then suddenly it becomes a no-brainer to start using artificial intelligence in the right way. But most people are not doing it correctly because they don't even, they didn't even take the time to identify their voice strategy and how they speak. And so what I do is I'll go into a company and I'll download exactly how each person speaks, train an AI so that they can communicate more effectively. So we're very big fans of GoHighLevel. We actually integrate into GoHighLevel Evie AI, our tool. That we use consistently to be able to post, engage, and message on LinkedIn, to be able to research prospects. That's essential. All the different AI tools that comes along with it, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Suite, um, those are tools that are imperative for our operation to be able to do the things that we need to do. I also use a variety of different AI tools that help me out, like tools that help me edit videos, tools that help me create presentations, slide decks, tools that are super agents, MCPs, I use tools like Make.com, N8N, Zapier. Those are tools that really help me on the backend as well. And then I do vibe coding and I use tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, and I use Replit, Cursor. Invest in your people, train your people. So many organizations are not willing to train their sales teams properly. Spend as much as you spend on their salary on their training and watch what happens. It'll completely revolutionize the way they show up. The dedication they have to your company. If you're not investing in training right now, your employees are not learning. And if you're not growing, you're dying. So if you want an organization that's thriving, if you want to have a high revenue per employee, hire really, really smart employees that have an amazing attitude and then train the crap out of them. Want to make networking easier and more effective? Try Evvy AI, your AI-powered sidekick that helps you connect, engage, and grow your network. Faster than ever. Click the link and start building smarter relationships today.