Generating Leads on LinkedIn with Joe Apfelbaum & Jason Crawford

Welcome to another edition of LinkedIn Live with Joe Apfelbaum and his friends. Welcome, Jason Crawford.

So glad that you made it here with me today. How's it going?

Man, it's going awesome. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to it.

All right. So, uh, you have joined some of our communities. You, uh, joined our LinkedIn Authority Blueprint. You did have questions about LinkedIn and generating leads. And I figured, you know what, why don't we hop on LinkedIn Live, share some screens, share some conversations, maybe share a drink or two, have some water. I don't know if you guys know this, but a 5% drop in hydration is a 30% drop in energy.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you want to get motivated, you got to get hydrated.

Sorry, I had to try to join in on that one.

No, that was good.

That was good. So Jason, can you give everyone just a brief overview, your name, company name, what you do, what mission are you on right now?

Yeah, Jason Crawford. I'm with Hire Options. We connect companies with global talent to help them grow and claim their time back. And my mission is to help solve some issues that I've had in my past businesses where I didn't have the proper staff, team, or department built out. And just a while back, I realized that's what I want to do. I want to help connect small businesses in certain industries, probably more than anything where I'm really effective. And I get them the people that they need right now when hiring stuff.

There's so many people out there that need support. They need employees, they need help, and entrepreneurs, CEOs, they just can't do it themselves. What, what is special about your services that somebody would want to hire you for? Like, what's the thing that you have that's different than any other HR firm? There's so many people doing this outsourced stuff. Like, what—

how does HireOptions Yeah, thanks for asking on that. We are focusing on direct placement, and that's a little bit different than what a lot of people are getting in their advertisements or people that they're meeting out on the road, because there's 3 primary ways to get connected with somebody in an outsourced environment. They're either attempting to hire direct, and I've got some horror stories recently on that from my own experience. You're using a recruiter to go out and find great talent for you and place them into your company. Or you're using an agency that has a large group of employees either they're pulling from or they may go out and do their recruiting themselves. We're in that middle spot because it's kind of a sweet spot. It takes the burden off of the company from doing the recruiting and presents really high-quality, qualified people in front of the, you know, for the companies and the hiring departments. But when you hire direct, there is a different cost scenario compared to using an agency. has a lot more bells and whistles. They've got different compliance that they have to deal with, so the costs are higher. And when you hire direct, you've got a lot more opportunity to be really cost-effective and then very selective and participatory in that process as well.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, so you do direct. And now, so one of the things that you're working on right now is launching a Sales Navigator campaign to reach out to prospects On Sales Navigator. And I wanted to discuss that more with you, get some questions from you, answer them. You mentioned you had some questions with me about LinkedIn, so I'm happy to answer them. Do you have any particular questions that you wanna share?

You know, I'm newer, I'm getting back into that. I was in a direct-to-consumer business for a couple years, so I kind of put the brakes on B2B. Getting back into B2B, I knew this was the primary strategy that we wanted to use in leveraging LinkedIn to get in front of people. The data that's available and the ability to form relationships is just incredible. So, you know, but I am new back to the platform. I've been using all the other social platforms and this is not one, and I was glad to run across you being an expert in the field. For us, you know, we are really effective right now because of all the placements that we've done recently in insurance agencies, real estate brokerages, Accounting firms, law firms. Obviously we can help any type of business, but those are ones that I want to target because it's kind of a, you know, shooting fish in a barrel type of scenario. And I'd love to see, being that I haven't used Sales Navigator much, ways that we can build lists quickly, target those people effectively, get in front of them, just start that relationship, a conversation, and then ideally, if it's a fit, we can talk about it more.

Yeah.

So the most important thing when it comes to using Sales Navigator is recognizing how to be able to send more than just 50, 50, um, messages per month. You know, like some, sometimes people send, you know, 50 messages, they don't get a response, and then they're like, oh, it doesn't work. Well, it doesn't work because you're doing it wrong.

Okay.

Inside our AI automation, our LinkedIn automation community, what we teach is you need to be sending hundreds of messages every single month. And if you're not sending hundreds of messages, you're not gonna get a response. People are just not gonna respond to you. because you're not doing volume. There is an element of a numbers game. And so the first step is, I always teach, number one is have a strategy, which you do have a strategy. You did the blueprint, so you know exactly who you're targeting.

Yes.

Number 2 is once you have a strategy, the second component is you need to make sure that you have a list that you build. You know, you have that list. So in your case, you may not have the list yet. So today we're going to build a list for you instantly. And then number 3, the third thing is Make sure that you have messaging to that list.

Mm-hmm.

So you build a list, you have messaging that an InMail that will go to that list. So we'll build that today as well. And then the third thing that you need is you need to make sure that you set up alerts so that when those people like comment or whatever it is on LinkedIn, that you get alerted through Sales Navigator so that you can go in. So if you save them to a particular list, you're still gonna start getting alerts in Sales Navigator to know when is the right time to be top of mind with those people through commenting and through messaging and through doing other activities. And we'll, I'll tell you what those activities are. are. And if you get that process done right and you reach out to 10,000 people a year, which is what the goal is, the goal is reaching out to 10,000 people a year, you're going to get 100 clients out of that. You're going to get 100 really good clients. And if 100 clients pay you $10,000, that's a million-dollar business right there.

Yeah.

And that's per sales rep that you have. So if you want to grow a $10 million business, you do this with 10 sales reps. You follow up like mad. And it doesn't take away from like the calling and the emailing and the direct mailing and the going to networking events. But this is one small component that shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes a day.

If you want to spend an hour a day on it, great.

But if you spend 15 minutes a day running this automation, these tools, you will be successful. So let's, let's go right into the tool right now that, um, I told you to download and start using. And this is the tool that we teach inside our automation community. We meet 6 times a month to work on this. Um, so let me just quickly share my screen. Let me know if you are able to see. I'm going to share my entire screen here just so you can Kind of see what I'm doing. Let me know if you're able to, uh, see, um, see my screen right now. Are you able to see it?

Yeah, I'm looking at your LinkedIn page or a LinkedIn page. You're looking at a LinkedIn page.

So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set up, we're gonna start, we're gonna start researching. Um, we'll go into Sales Navigator just to kind of show you. I'm gonna pull this up here. We're gonna go into Sales Navigator right now. So if you go to linkedin.com/sales, it takes you right into Sales Navigator.

Um, on the top, do you see where it says lead filters?

Mm-hmm.

Leads means people and accounts means companies. A lot of people don't know the difference between leads and accounts. Leads means people and accounts means companies. If you wanna start a new search, you could just do a search in here, but if you click on lead filters, you'll actually be able to just search using filters, which is my favorite way to search. In our Sales Nav Bootcamp, which you have access to, and thank you for being a client of that, we have a 6-hour class that walks you through. One of our classes is called Search. And we teach you these 34 search filters, how they work and how they work with each other.

So it, it does take an hour to do this.

So we're not going to, we're just going to cut straight to the chase.

We're going to go to industry and we're going to type in insurance.

Do you see insurance agencies and brokers right here? That's an option. So you can do carriers, you can do brokers, you can do employees. So we're going to do agencies and brokers. I'm going to press include. Now we have a list of insurance agencies and brokers, and these are all the people that work in those companies. If instead you want to make a list of companies first, you would click on Account on top here, and you would look at the list of companies. There's 11,000 of those companies.

What area are you located?

Are you located in Idaho or Ohio?

Uh, we're going to focus on Texas, uh, more than anything. So Texas and Idaho is a secondary location for us.

Great. So we're going to pick Texas and we're going to take insurance agencies. There's 432 companies in that area. So the first thing I would do is I would select these companies and add them to a list. And I would have a list of companies that I can kind of work off. These are the companies I want to work off. Okay. Now these companies might have employees that, you know, you might want a certain headcount, you know, like you may want a headcount, you may not want a headcount, but let's say you just want companies that are say 11 to 50. Okay. So now we have a list of 17 companies that we're going to work off. You see that these are the 17 companies that we want to work off. Mm-hmm.

So let's go through them one by one.

We can either go through them one by one and find people and add them to a list. In this case, I'm going to try to save it to a list. It might not work. I'm going to create a new list. I'm going to call it Insurance Companies in Texas, uh, 50 to 11 to 50. Okay. 11 to 50. All right. I'm going to press save and let's just see if it worked. Um, let's go back to accounts and let's see if it worked. Insurance companies account list. Let's see, are these the insurance companies? Uh, let's see, where are my— view saved accounts, current accounts, insurance companies in Texas. It's only showing me 3. Why is it only showing me 3? Didn't I select the whole thing and save it? Okay, let's try it again. We're going to go to account filters again. This was pretty easy to do, so I'm going to show you how to do it again. Industry You click on plus. We're going to type in insurance, insurance agencies and brokerages. Now we're going to click on— what is the next thing we're going to click on? Location, right?

Mm-hmm.

So if location is not here yet, our headquarter location is here. If location is not here, you can always pick the location from this side here, geography. In this case, we're going to go Texas. And then we can always switch back. Once you pick the geography, you can switch back over here. You see, because the geography is not showing there, but it's showing here. You see that? You can always switch back and forth. In this case, we'll just do HQ in Texas. Company headcount, we're going to swap to 11 to 50. And we'll also include this 150 to 200. Why not?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay, we're going to do select all. So it's selecting 19 total because it could select up to 25 results here. We're going to do save to list. It's going to say which list. We're going to click insurance companies here. So now all 22 are there.

Okay. Mm-hmm.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to go back.

We're going to, we're going to just go back to accounts here just to make sure we have the account list here. We're going to click here, insurance companies. Now we have all 22 here. Okay. So I like this. Now these are the 22 companies. We're going to analyze these companies later, but for right now, let's just build a lead list for people inside those particular companies. So you're going to scrub this filter against that one. Okay. So we're going to do it here. Insurance companies in Texas include. So it's going to show me all the human beings that work in those companies. I have 500 people. Now I want all these 500 people in a list and I wanna start targeting them. I wanna start going after all these people, or maybe I wanna target specific titles here. In this case, I don't care who they are. I just wanna connect with all of them because once I get in the door with one, they'll, they'll, they'll get me in another.

So how do you scrape this entire list?

What do you do? The answer is you do it inside a tool that allows you to do that, an automation tool that allows you to scrape this whole list. So I'm gonna teach you how to be able to do this inside a tool. Okay, you ready for this?

Let's do it.

All right, so step number 1 is you open up the tool. So I have the tool open over here. Step number 2 is you create a new campaign inside the tool, and in this case, we're just gonna do an InMail campaign. What is an InMail campaign? It's the ability to send people an InMail sequence, which is messages. In this case, we're gonna say, I'm going to say insurance agency, AI for insurance agencies, AI for insurance. Are you guys doing anything with AI in the insurance industry? I have an idea for you. Are you interested in hearing it? Okay. Um, so this is like a, a message I'm gonna be sending out to insurance brokerages right now. I'm gonna press next.

Yeah.

Now it's gonna say, do you wanna send another message? I'm gonna say no. I'm gonna press finish. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press add profile. So over here I'm gonna do the LinkedIn website. We're gonna do Sales Navigator. We're gonna do search page. We're gonna do load. Okay. So this is gonna load the search page over here to find People in insurance agencies. I'm gonna pick geography Texas. I'm gonna press include. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take insurance agencies, insurance.

So were you building the list earlier just to kind of get the count to cross-reference this, or why are we building it in both?

Well, this is a separate, this is a separate account. The automation tool is open on someone else's account because I already used up all my credits on my account. So it's not gonna work on my account.

Yep.

So I opened up somebody else's account in my organization to allow me to show you how I actually can start sending messages right now. 'Cause in my account, it's not gonna let me send messages 'cause I, I run out of all my messages at the beginning of the month and then I have to wait till next month. 'Cause you can only send out 800 messages per month and I make sure to maximize it at the beginning of the month.

Got it.

And then I spend the rest of the month following up through email and phone calls and other ways. Otherwise, if I wait till the end of the month and then I just, you know, I don't end up using my credits and then the month goes by and then whatever, you know, you gotta do it at the beginning of the month.

Sure.

So I, I go hard at the beginning of the month and then the rest of the time I'm following up and, and, and using my connections and things like that.

Okay.

All right. So now I have a list of Texas insurance agencies. I have 4,000 people. We're going to focus on companies that have a certain, that are a certain size. I could also do second-degree connections over here. I like doing second-degree connections because these people are a little closer connected. So I have 677 second-degree connections. You see that?

Yeah.

Um, I can also do people that posted recently on LinkedIn, 183 people. These are the people that actually posted on LinkedIn. So it's likely that they're a little more active. I can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. In this case, I just want to collect all these. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say from current page, and it's going to start collecting these right now. It's going to collect 183 and put it into the list. So I clicked on these 3 dots on the left over here, and now it's going, and it's going to take 25 at a time. You see it took 25, and it's adding it to the queue, to the list. This is campaign number 4. I could have named the campaign earlier. I didn't name it. I should have named it, but I didn't name it. So now it has 50. So it's going to go through this and add them all. Now the beauty of adding this to this tool is that it allows me to be able to then filter and sort inside the tool and not on LinkedIn. So for example, if I want to see who are the people that I could message without using a credit, I will be able to do that inside this tool. Um, and again, this is not rocket science to use this tool, but Once you start doing this, we're going to be able to start sending messages right now. We're not going to have to wait a day or 2 or 6 or a month or whatever. Like right now, um, and within the next few minutes, we'll have messages starting to go out to these people. And the sooner you send out your first 100 messages or 150 messages, the sooner you're going to get leads.

Mm-hmm.

And the better your message is, the more likely it is that you're going to get higher amounts of leads. So if your message is relevant to the insurance company, The insurance people. So I'm going to click on queue, then I'm going to go on the right side over here and I'm going to identify people that I can message. Um, I have 45 people that I can message right now with no problem.

I'm actually going to tag them.

And then what I'm going to do is, um—

When you say no problem, that's your open profile people?

Exactly. Exactly. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to select those people here. I'm going to go ahead and tag them all. Um, right now I'm going to add a tag to it. You have to add like a tag system into the program in order for the tags to work. But now I'm going to remove the filters and what I'm going to say is all the people that I can't message without— all the people that I can't message, I'm going to exclude from this campaign because I don't want to message. I just put them into the exclude category. Okay, and now I go filter and now I could just press start the campaign. There's 45 people in the queue. I press start campaign. And now the AI, the, the automation is just gonna start going out and one at a time it's gonna find the person and send them a custom InMail. And I can customize it as much as I want. Um, I can put their name in there or whatever. I just wrote a very simple message to them saying, hey, I have an idea for AI. Mm-hmm. If you're curious to know about it, let me know if you're curious to know what my idea is. Okay. This'll build curiosity for people that are interested in AI. Again, I'm only sending it to people in Texas. Mm-hmm. People that are part of insurance agencies and people that are second-degree connections. And that's 45 humans. I could have downloaded all 600 just as easy that are not second-degree connections and then probably had a few hundred more. And I could have targeted other markets. There's so much that I could have done.

I could have done it through only those specific companies and filtered it.

I scrubbed it against those account lists that I showed you before that I did on my profile. But in this case, I wanted to kind of show you 2 different ways to do it.

Um, and as you can see, this tool is acting like a human. So it's on your computer, it's literally acting like a human.

It's typing it up as a human would type it up. And that's what I love about this because, you know, LinkedIn doesn't want you to spam people. They don't want you to, to be annoying for people.

They, you know, they, they want you to do things naturally and normally.

And this tool actually does things naturally and normally in a way that a human would.

It's just doing it without spamming. It's not. You know, like if a human works on this, the human might send too many messages too quickly and then the computer says, oh, you're spamming. You know, like that's a problem. That's really a problem.

So now it's gonna go ahead and check every, all the messages that we got just to make sure that none of these people on the list actually sent me a message recently, and then it'll continue sending. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen right now just to kind of get back into the conversation. But now you see exactly how it's done.

And by the way, if you guys are watching this live or you're watching the replay, write live in the chat so we see you live.

Or write replay in the chat if you actually see, are watching the replay. Um, and let us know what industry you're targeting, cuz clearly Jason's targeting insurance agencies. Just write the name of your industry in the chat so we can see what's going on. Um, we'd love to hear from you. Both me and Jason would love to see you guys in the chat. So go ahead and let us know what you guys think. And if you want to join our community, just write the word community in the chat and I will invite you to join our community if you want to learn how to do this 6 times a month.

It's a good one. Joe, on the— just real quick on the, uh, 800 limit, does the 45 opens count against 800? Is it just 800 sends total, or did you only focus on the opens because you weren't using some other credit? Can you remind me the details on that?

Yeah, so with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you get 50 credits per month to send InMails to people that you're not connected to.

Now they claim that you can send out messages to people that have certain type of profiles If they have those types of profiles, you can send 'em a message without using one of your 50 credits.

Okay. Because those people opted in to receive messages from strangers, usually because they have a premium account. That's usually what it is. If you have a premium account, automatically your profile becomes open. If you have Sales Navigator, your, your profile becomes open, and then you can receive messages from people without them having to use a credit to message you, which means it's more likely that you'll get more messages in general from people.

And if you're in business development, you don't mind getting messages cuz sometimes those messages are potential clients.

Mm-hmm.

I leave my profile in a way that's more open because I want to receive messages from strangers because those strangers sometimes wanna hire me for my services and I'm open for business. And so if you're, if you're offering services, if you have a services page, usually your profile will be open. If you have, uh, a, a LinkedIn Sales Navigator, usually your profile by default will be open unless you go and close it.

And so there are percentage of people, I would say 40% of people on LinkedIn, in some industries it's more, in some industries it's less.

They have profiles that are open.

And if you can find those people, that's gold because you can, instead of sending just 50, you can actually send several hundred per month. Now there is a limit to sending InMail, period, whether you're using credits or whether you're sending InMail.

And that limit is around 800.

So if you get 800 free, you're not gonna be able to use your credits even if you have them.

Okay.

You get it? You can't use the free ones and then use the paid ones. It doesn't matter. There's a, there's a, there's a hard limit. that LinkedIn has on how many messages it's going to let you send per month to people that you're not connected to, period, through its system. Once you hit that limit, you have to wait till the first of next month in order for your account to be sending stuff, continue sending stuff, because they limit your account to 10,000 per year, which is 800 per month. So you can only save 10,000 people into Sales Navigator.

I don't know if you knew that.

That's the limit. The hard limit is leads on Sales Navigator. You can only save 10,000. You can only save 10,000 accounts in Sales Navigator, although I went past that and I figured out how to get past that.

But once you get past that, if you want to manually save something, you can't manually save things.

So I know how to get past their limits because I'm hacking LinkedIn, not hacking in a bad way.

I'm just like kind of figuring out how the system works to try to maximize the system as much as possible for my clients.

I'm not doing anything that's not legit.

I do everything white hat, above board.

Um, and I'm using tools that help me do things above board.

Like for example, I have something called Link Navigator. Have you seen my Link Navigator tool?

Mm-hmm. I think so.

Mm-hmm.

And Link Navigator, and it's available in our community.

If you, if you go into, if you want the Link Navigator tool, just go to Link Navigator in the chat. I'll also make a video about it and post it. Uh, but it essentially allows me to visit one page after another page using an automation, a JavaScript automation that just goes page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4. So if you wanna visit profiles or if you wanna visit CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and whatever you like looking at. And then you want to just see a sequence of websites. The Link Navigator Chrome extension will allow you to go from website to website, to website, to website within a certain interval. And you can make the interval random. You can make it specific. You can have a next button. You can have different groups and filters and notes and all types of stuff. My point is that you gotta be really careful when you're using automation, any type of automation, whether it's legit automation or not legit automation. And everything I do is 100% white hat.

The key is I do things like as if a human would do it.

That's really the key. Do it as if a human would do it.

Like type, if you're gonna use an automation, use an automation that types up each letter like as if you're using one finger. 'Cause that's what most humans do.

They'll just click one finger. Hi, how are you? My name is Joe. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. So if the automation is doing that, then it's as if the human's doing that. It makes no difference.

But if you're sending out boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, LinkedIn will block you with a 429. A 429 is LinkedIn's way of saying slow down. You're messing up our system.

You're using too many resources too quickly. That's a 429.

So if you ever get one of those, 'cause you opened up too many pages at once, you're moving too fast. And humans will often move faster than machines that are programmed to move slow.

Mm-hmm. That makes sense.

So yeah, I like pushing the limits. I pushed the limits in my marriage. That didn't work out, but I pushed the limits with the LinkedIn and it's working out so far. So what— so, so I walked you through the step-by-step process. Now you have to execute. You have the process to execute. You do this literally 15 minutes a day. You set it up, you let it go, you let it run.

You can watch it run if you want, get popcorn and watch it run, or just put it in the background and go do what you got to do.

But once you get used to doing this and you set it up 15 minutes and you make little groups of, let's say, 150 people that you're going to message each day, Mm-hmm. And you do this for 5, 6 days, then you're done.

Now you move to email automation.

Now you start saying, okay, now that I have this list, you take that list, you export it into a sheet, you enrich it with AI.

Mm-hmm.

And now you run an email campaign to those same people. And again, email has limits too.

You don't wanna send a billion emails to a person.

That's annoying.

Um, the recommendation is every 5 days you email them. That's the recommendation, every 5 days.

And you send 'em a message that value-added message. You don't say, hey, I'm just following up on the message I sent you last time. Did you get it? That's annoying. Well, you send 'em case studies, you send 'em information about the industry, you send 'em things about themselves. You make sure that each one's a personalized email. Like right now I'm working on the Inc. 5000 list.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm enriching it and I'm enriching it to the degree of knowing each CEO on the Inc. 5000, how many followers they have on LinkedIn, when they opened up their LinkedIn account, what their headline says, how many recommendations they have, what school they went to, and what their underwear size is. So I can send somebody a message that is very unique to their exact situation that they're in. I know what's on their photo. I can have AI analyze their photo and tell me if they're smiling in their photo or they're not smiling in their photo. Like to that level of degree. Hey, listen, John, I noticed you're not smiling in your photo and you have zero recommendations and you have 10,000 followers, but you have no recommendations and your link to your website's broken. Can I help you? Do you need help? And then tomorrow I send him, or 5 days later, I send him another message and say, listen, I just found this crazy thing that gets you recommendations on LinkedIn. I'd love to send it to you. Are you open to me sending it to you? It's a 3-step process. I can show you exactly how I did it and how I got 500 recommendations on my profile.

And here's my profile link if you want to check and you don't want to believe me.

And then the guy clicks on it and I know he clicked. So I send him into another sequence. I knew you were curious about it, John. So here's the demo, here's my Loom video. And then I could see if he clicked on the Loom video or didn't, and I could send him another message.

You get what I'm saying? Oh yeah.

I can take him through a whole sequence and, and now the person feels like I'm playing with him. And you know, a lot of people won't respond, but they'll enjoy the game. You ever walk into a bar and chat with somebody and they don't respond to you, but do you know they're listening because you see their face smiling?

Sure. You know, it's been a while.

He's like, I'm married, Joe, leave me alone. So you have fun with it. You have fun with it. And then eventually you try to get a response from them and the response might be them clicking. The response might be them opening, but they're watching. And one day you'll stop sending them messages and they'll hit you up and say, hang on a second. What am I, chopped liver? You found a better prospect? You know, I miss you. I miss you, Joe. Where did you go? Keep hitting me up. I was like, pay, pay if you want to play.

Question for you, Joe. I mean, you just laid out a sophisticated and amazing marketing automation. You can do that because that's your business. How long does it take you to do that? Because to take me as a small business, even with a team, it's going to take me a long time to map out and implement that marketing automation, which you're saying, hey, LinkedIn is great, it's got its purpose, but this other side of it really cements the ability to get, you know, these leads and ideally accounts. Just, oh yeah, I know it wasn't really the focus of today, but since you walked into it, I'm just curious. How long does it take y'all to set that up for a small business? Or what have you found, even from a case study, what it takes small businesses to set that automation up? Because I frequently get intimidated by it and don't do it to the extent that you do it. And when I just heard that, I'm like, God, that makes so much sense. I love the personalization. I love the timing on that. Obviously, including things like, oh, they clicked on the video. Now let's put them into a different workflow.

For an expert to put this together, you want to budget about 20 hours. That's that's basically time time spent doing it.

If someone's really good, they'll charge you three to five hundred dollars an hour to do it. You know, so you're looking at five to ten k.

If someone's terrible, it's going to take them a hundred hours and they'll charge you fifty dollars an hour.

Okay, but that's those you'll still pay the five k, but it's going to take a hundred hours in six months and it's not going to be right and it's not going to work.

Yeah, but you know at the end of the day when you're getting a divorce lawyer, you spend a thousand dollars an hour if you have money, or if you don't, you spend three hundred dollars an hour when you're going to. Uh, a therapist, you, you, you, if you want a terrible therapist, you spend $125 an hour. You get a therapist that will just ask you the following question: how does that make you feel? Hang on a second.

They pick their nose.

How does that make you feel? And if it's a great therapist, they don't take insurance and they charge $750 an hour and they expedite your divorce, you know? But the idea is, the idea is, you know, that's what things cost. You know, experts charge money. And so it'll cost between $150 an hour or $50 an hour for someone terrible. And then, you know, $200, $300, $400. Now, can you find somebody for $5 an hour that's great? Yes, you can find somebody for $5 an hour that's great, but you might have to travel to another country and take shrooms.

You know, you might have to spend several months finding and training that person, but you can.

But, you know, at the end of the day, it's just about time, effort, energy.

It doesn't take forever to do. Within a week, you can have it all done if you're willing to invest $5,000 to $10,000.

But if you want to do it yourself, join a community, spend the time.

It'll pull your hair a little bit, but it'll work and you'll get it done. And again, you do micro projects.

You don't do 1,000.

You start with one automation and then you clone it and then you do another automation and then you clone it and you do another automation and you don't do it all at once.

And I talk all about this in the Ajax Union podcast. So if you guys go to ajaxunion.com/podcast, Or you get my book, High Energy Marketing. I actually wrote a book because people were asking me, Joe, can you tell me how funnels work? And I literally sat down by hand 4 years ago and wrote the book on how the marketing funnels work. And I called it High Energy Marketing because people were asking me how it works and I didn't have AI at that point to write the book. Now I just push a button, AI writes the book in a second. But I have a book in my voice that I wrote step by step how the marketing funnel works, how email automation works, how PPC works, how all that stuff works, and how it works together with your funnel. So you can build this out again. And even if you build it out, I want to say something else, Jason, to you.

Even if you build all this out, then you have the automations and you have LinkedIn running and you have campaigns going. And da da da da.

When somebody responds, you still have to have a pipeline and a follow-up process. That's just the beginning. Some people will be like, oh, I got the lead, but they didn't close. What was? How did you follow up? What was your sales process? How did you deal with the rebuttals? Like all that stuff. They don't even have that figured out. So that's another whole component that you have to realize that if you have a tera— if you get leads, if I give you 100 leads and you don't work those leads just because you have one call with them or you try to schedule it, but they didn't, whatever. And then you let the lead die. You know, you need to have someone in sales going out and actually banging on those doors for people that raise their hand.

Like I'm hiring somebody now for Evvy AI because 2 weeks ago we launched Evvy AI for teams.

So Evvy AI is our AI for LinkedIn. We have 13,000 people using evyai.com. And if you're listening to this right now and you want to try Evy AI, just write AI in the chat and I will send you guys a demonstration video of Evy AI.

I actually just published a, uh, a video on LinkedIn that walks people through how to use Evy AI on mobile because the mobile website works on your cell. If you go to Evy AI on your cell, you can generate a post, you can check out your saved profiles, you can update your, you know, you can get ideas. There's so many different things you can do. So I made a 5-minute video on how to use Evvy AI on mobile. I published it today, um, and I put, put it on LinkedIn.

Um, but you know, Jason, what I want to just leave you with is that artificial intelligence is extremely, extremely good, but you have to work with someone to work the AI with you. So I'll work with people directly and sit with them and be like, all right, let's do a strategy session. Let's figure out your whole business and then we can have future strategy sessions where we actually execute on what we, on what we came out with. Um, and then we can have coworking sessions. We do coworkings every Monday. Me and you worked this, this Monday. What did we build? We built a resume. Go ahead.

Yeah, basically like a resume scraper, cuz we're gonna start feeding that into the recruiting process to automate a lot of the recruiting process.

But you saw step by step the way we built that auto, that scraper. And it's not rocket science and it works, but for me to build it takes me 45 minutes, or let's say an hour. For you to build it, it would probably take you 10 hours. You would finally do it, but it would take you 10 or 15 hours the first time. That was my 30th app that I built in the past 2 months. 30th. So, and that's how fast I am. I'm able to build an app in an hour because— and I hired 3 coaches to work with me and joined 4 communities. So I've been trying to do this for like a year, and finally I found the right coaches in the right communities, and I got my shortcut.

Within 2 months, I became proficient at it.

Mm-hmm.

Because for a year I've been watching people on Instagram and YouTube and trying to figure it out, and I could not figure it out. And finally I found— and I, and I also made the time too. You have to make the time to dive in deep into it. So in between sessions, I would actually sit and spend 4 hours at night or 5 hours at night just racking my brain trying to make it work. So besides me hiring 4 coaches and joining 4 communities and paying for those communities, mind you, I also spent several hours each day trying to figure out how it works to get to that proficiency level of where now I can build an app in an hour and I can charge somebody $5,000, $6,000 to help them build that app during that hour.

You know what I mean? Or they can join my community for nothing, for like almost nothing, and just experience it every, every Monday.

Yeah, I'm doing the same thing right now, and I love your approach, how at a minimum you're building out a great prototype, seeing how it works, and then handing it over to the development team, which now you have sped that process up. It's how you want it. They're not taking all this time, uh, doing this pre-work, and so you've saved a bunch and they can run faster. But I was hiring some developers and I said, wait a second, you know what, I'm gonna stop here. You have to coach me 2, 3 hours a week while we're working on these projects together. And then that may just be the prototype, and then you go out and build the project that I've specced out. But I love how you have gained that knowledge really to speed things up.

Okay.

Yeah, no, and that's something that I also want to coach other entrepreneurs on. I feel like, and we spoke about this, I want to go into like your EO chapter and sit in front of 300 people or 200 people or even 20 people And just say, guys, let's build a prototype right now and watch me do it. And they will watch me build the prototype in an hour. There will be a working prototype with a front end, with a back end, with AI attached to it that works with a plan of how to promote it with an SRS scope that you can send to a developer for them to flesh it out. And the ability for you to kind of go back and forth and iterate. I, it used to take me 6 months for me to iterate, just to iterate, to understand what I even want. And now I just sit down with HTML and JavaScript and, and Claude and ChatGPT within literally an hour or two. Now I understand what features I want because I implemented the features, I tested it out and I didn't like the way it looked. And I, I'm the only one that really has the vision.

Mm-hmm.

You know, even, even graphic design, like even graphic design, most people don't even know what they want. And when you show it to them, it's not what they want. And then they get frustrated that they spent all this money and now you want more money. Now you want more money for me to da da da da. You should have known. You you you know as an agency, people would say, Joe, you guys should have known. You should have known what I wanted. You should have known how my app should have worked. You're the experts. I'm not the experts. You should have known how to make me a fully functional app for five hundred dollars.

It sounds like some of those marriage conversations coming back into this business as well.

Oh man. All right. Well, I want to wrap up. I know that we're over time, but I just want to say thank you so much. Um, I appreciate it, guys. If you're watching this and you got value, hit that repost button so more people can see it. Leave a comment. Let us know if you want us to do this again. And Jason, thanks for having me on here.

Thanks for joining me. Um, and I'm looking forward to doing more of these with you.