AI Sales Systems Replaces An Entire Call Center

I have a mom-and-pop client out of Florida that has a voice AI that literally this deal is only available over the phone. So when we hang up, it's gone. The woman is literally like, hey, I'm driving right now, and the voice AI is intelligent enough telling a woman, if you can find a place to safely pull over your vehicle and park and check the text message I just sent you, there is a one-time discount link for you to check out for this offer that's only available while we're on the phone, and I will hang with you until you do. And talks through, like, hey, did you find a safe place to pull over yet? It's incredible.

Welcome to Inside the Speakeasy Podcast, the private room where today's sharpest founders, innovators, and renegade thinkers come to trade the ideas that move industries. This show is brought to you by HighLevel, the AI-driven business operating system trusted by over 2 million businesses to help automate, scale, and create real leverage. HighLevel isn't just a tool, it's the engine behind some of the most agile and high-performing teams on the planet. If you're ready to streamline everything, amplify your reach, and actually build a business that works for you, you're in the right place. Visit www.gohighlevel.com/speakeasy-mastermind-promo to get an exclusive 30-day trial for being a listener of the Inside the Speakeasy podcast. Enjoy the show. Whether you like it or not, everything we do in life to succeed in business has a component of sales. And I'm so pumped today because in today's episode of Inside the Speakeasy Mastermind, we're bringing a guy that's been selling. Talk about lemonade stand. This guy goes all the way back his entire career. When he's a teenager, started selling, hasn't stopped over 24 years. Everywhere he went, he was number one sales guy, crushed platforms. He went into the world of e-com, rose to top 1% in the Shopify e-com stores. Continued to crush. COVID actually then took them all the way down, got struck through COVID, but then it's come back in the world of sales and leveraged this beautiful AI world we have, combined it with sales, and now is absolutely helping so many companies take advantage of AI in their sales systems to just go 10x the things they're doing. You're going to have a lot to learn today. So excited. Kevin Jacobson from Nashville. Welcome aboard.

Yeah, thank you. Newly to Nashville, New England guy. And, you know, just got down to Nashville less than a year ago. And that's, you know, that's when our story began.

So we won't talk so much about the allergies that you're getting out there, your first trip with allergies. So I won't, I won't overwhelm you. And, uh, but thanks for showing up today. I know you got a lot going on and you've been sick and catching up, but dude, I'm excited. You know, I was just talking to my wife last night and, you know, who's like the anti-opposite on sales. She's like the last person you want sales, but like, she's excited about something, you know, about her business and doing things. And I'm like, I'm like, babe, remember sales is just an exchange of energy about something you're excited about. And she goes, yeah. I go, you're not really selling it if you love what you're doing, right? And she goes, no. Like, so don't be so scared. I mean, so I mean, in general, do you see a lot of people scared of the word sales? Like, what's your take on that? Like, you obviously are not afraid of it. You just love it.

Yeah. I mean, you hit it, right? Like, you know, the exchange of energy and something that you're excited about. Um, and I think that's ultimately why I love sales because if I'm not passionate, I'm a Gemini. So if I'm not passionate about something, I don't have any interest in it to begin with. So when I get passionate about something, I don't really shut up about it. So, you know, I turned that into a lucrative career. Sales is one of those things. It's like you need it in your business no matter what. And it's one of those things that everybody wants to outsource. And I'm a firm believer in it should probably be one of the last things that you outsource.

Yep.

So, yep.

No, I love it. And you're going to want to listen today because I mean, we're going to talk, Kevin, about, You know, AI being everywhere right now and, but it's more about, yes, there's so many tools, I'm overwhelmed, but I just want to know as an entrepreneur, and we're going to get into this in a second, you know, what can I actually do today to make my life better in every part of my business? You know, I got my marketing, I got this, I got that. But sales, I mean, is everything. I agree with you. It is something that we all kind of want to let go, but nobody's going to be able to sell the passion better than the leader and the founder. And we know we have a lot of entrepreneurs. And Speakeasy Mastermind Mastermind, a lot of entrepreneurs listening today. So I want everybody to really pay attention because there's some great things. You're going to get some great nuggets we're going to learn today that Kevin's going to share about how you can optimize leveraging AI. And even if you don't love it, there's going to be so many tools now, I imagine, to help you get through it. So that being said, I just wanted to drop that seed so you could stick around before we get into that again. So 17 years, let's just rewind for a second. Then we're going to jump into some good nuggets here. You know, 17 years, you're on the East Coast. And you've been through everything. I mean, I mean, what any, just you started, you were number one at Verizon in your area. You remember you telling me, is that right?

In my early twenties, I believe I was like 20 or 21. I was the top sales rep in all of Southern New England. My first year I started working at Verizon Wireless. That was fun. All the top sales reps from all around the country. We got to play a softball game in Fenway Park, right in front of the Green Monster. So that was, that was fun in my twenties to really crush it. and especially because it was, it was my first, like, serious sales job. My first sales job was just selling hot tubs over the phone, and it was a summer job. And, like, I remember the first time I hopped on the phones, I definitely, like, threw up. I don't remember if it was, like, before or in the middle of calls, but that first day, I, like, puked. I, like, I was scared. I was scared of sales, just like everybody else, but I'm, I am the type of person where if I know something is necessary, there's good fear and there's bad fear, right? There's like, your fight or flight that, you know, your primal instinct to survive. And then there's that fear that, you know, you need to overcome to level up in life and in business. And for me, thank God my father was in an MLM when I was a teenager. And so he put me on to Jim Rohn's teachings and, you know, we got a lot of OGs in here that probably even maybe even knew Jim Rohn. Right. And so that helped me out a lot. It put me on, it helped me realize that there was more out there for me than the town I grew up in. And so I started pursuing, you know, greater things. And so that was one of the ones that like, I'm like, it was the old original VSL. You would see a commercial like Dean Graziosi infomercial, like a midnight type of like type of thing, right? Where it's like, you see the commercial, you call the number, they send you a VHS in the mail. I was the guy on the other side of the phone when you called in and said, hey, I watched the VHS. Or, hey, I noticed that you got your VHS outbound dialing. And so I was running a VSL before VSLs existed. And I was a setter before I knew what a setter was. Right. And, you know, fast forward to what I do now, it's pretty ironic because how I help my clients the most is in the setting process, in their sales process and converting more of their leads in, in that part of the sales process.

Let's dig into that. And, you know, I'm going to, we'll jump around in your career because I know we have some cool things to talk about on the commerce side, but Now let's go to more like what's going on today. You just said you're helping your clients today with that. I mean, first question, you just kind of, let's lead into it. Like, what is the number one thing? And I know we have two different, I think a lot of, we have some solopreneurs, we have some entrepreneurs that are doing a lot more, you know, what is the, you know, biggest thing you're seeing, maybe the biggest thing that you're seeing people are doing wrong or incorrectly as entrepreneurs that they can probably shore up right away?

Well, you know, for me, it's, you know, I think, I don't remember who said it, but I think it might've been Bill Gates said, you know, juvenile delinquents or, you know, B or C students make the best entrepreneurs, right? Because we're always looking for ways to optimize and, you know, maximize efficiency rather than we want to work hard and work smart. And so for me, the main thing that I noticed that people are doing wrong is just the shiny object syndrome rather than really doing like a time audit and like looking at their process and figuring out where the bottlenecks are and how they can actually integrate AI into those bottlenecks to create more scalability in the areas where human beings are the bottleneck. And I didn't get into this space when I went all in on AI in late 2022, early 2023, which was earlier than most people. Now everybody's like AI, AI, right? For me, it was just, I had gone back to sales after losing my e-commerce business to COVID and all of these other crazy things that happened all within a short amount of time. And I was just trying to solve an internal problem on the sales team that I was managing. I was co-managing, I was closing, I was helping with the setting, and I was like integrated into the marketing team, but I was only getting paid a commission as a closer. And so for me, it was out of desperation to like maximize my efficiency and reduce all this busywork that comes along with being a closer. And, you know, you talked about the energy, right? And for me, at the end of the day, it was about the Pareto principle of, you know, where is 80% of my work going that actually isn't directly revenue producing? And all this energy, these little micro-commitments and these little, you know, the decision fatigue that by the time I get on a call and I have a hot lead, I may not close that person because I'm just burnt out. And they might've been a lay-down sale, but because I wasn't able to be present, because of all the other things that I had going on. So for me, that's what I was trying to solve for. And then it evolved from there.

So that was your pain point. So let's talk about what was the first thing, or maybe it worked backwards. Like, what are the, maybe a simple, the simplest things or a couple of things that you'd say for this, you know, for those who are listening that people might, that you're finding almost all clients we could talk to you like, we got to start here. We just got to automate this right now. Yeah. Like, what are you finding mostly is very common?

Qualification, segmentation, nurture, and follow-up.

So let's spend some time on each of those. So first qualification.

So, so on the qualification side of things, you have, before AI, you had a couple options, right? You create intentional bottlenecks in your pipeline, right? It's, you block people from getting to the next stage, whether it's a filling out a form or, you know, whatever the case may be, right? But when you're a solopreneur, if you don't have leads like in volume, then that is too risky. You kind of just want to flood everybody into your account.

Everybody. Yeah.

And take a call with anybody when you're first starting out and then, you know, let God sort them out, right? Versus, and then when you get to scale, it becomes the opposite problem. And so what got you to this level is usually not what's going to get you to the next level. And that's where most people are kind of. Keeping those same processes as they scale and it becomes the bottleneck. The thing that was working is now the thing that's causing you to not be able to level up. And so for the qualification aspect of things, those sticking points are the things that increase bounce rate. And so you always want to have people in a sales conversation. This is why my experience in the Shopify world is so clutch for me now because when you're running hundreds of thousands of visitors to a website every month and a 1% increase in conversions is multiple 5 figures in revenue because your average cart value is like $40. When you go and you apply that to that thought process and that meticulous, you know, thinking to a high ticket service industry, now that 1% increase in conversions is multiple 6 figures, right? And so I just look at people's sales process. The qualification aspect is it's important to qualify. There's a balance that's necessary, right? If you overqualify, you're, you're creating rigidity in the conversion. Right. And so if you're driving 10,000 leads a month, but then you also don't want to have your sales team spending so much of their time in the problem unaware, solution unaware phase of your nurture, right? And so you have to, the way that people are solving for this pre-AI is like a lot of long form content. They're reeling people in with short form and then they're nurturing and indoctrinating them with long form content. But now you have this whole other element of your business that you need that requires your attention and a lot of time and energy and team as well.

Right.

And so if you're able to drive a decent amount of traffic, they're decently qualified people and you just have the right segmentation along the way, financial qualification, you segment them based on that. Maybe it's a downsell to a low ticket where they don't require a sales call. And then only the people that are financially qualified actually make it to the booking page, right? There's so many different ways to do it. That's why Even though we've worked with over 200 clients doing this over the past couple of years, everything we do is, is still pretty custom. It's not, it's not templated.

That's— yeah. So, so back to the AI part of qualifications. What's a— now with AI, what have you been doing to help that process out?

Yeah. So mainly it's creating leverage for the sales team with chat AI, voice AI in those pipeline stages, right? So like, One example I'll give you is we have a GLP-1, like e-commerce brand, but they use a call center and they use, you know, they use SMS marketing, right? When they came to us, that was their process. And with them, we just incorporated a highly trained voice AI to replace the call center. And so rather than this, I think it was like something like 6 grand or a month for the call center and the conversion rates were atrocious, like absolutely atrocious. What they were losing in skill, they were making up for in volume, or at least that was the reasoning behind paying $6,000 a month for something like that. And ultimately we just came in and we trained out, robustly trained out a voice AI to the point where now they have a voice AI that actually can close these deals over the phone and collect payment.

Damn. That's what—

and so they replaced that entire call center overseas, higher quality calls, higher conversions. And now the people who are ready to buy don't even have to wait to get on the phone with the actual person, but the ones that aren't ready to buy are being handed off and nurtured, either handed off in real time to someone who's available or being booked on a calendar conversationally so they're not slipping through the cracks.

So let's get into this one because I think everybody's now, or a lot of people out there have seen, hey, insert an AI sales rep, voice AI in there. And there's this fear of, or I'd say lack of knowledge or just confusion on, come on, can this person really answer these things? And what about the customer on the line talking to an AI agent? Does that like, how does that feel? So walk me through. And I wanted to just, and I'm gonna answer, ask you a few questions. You can hit 'em all at once. Is like, you know, A, what tech have you found that you like in the voice AI out of those that are interested in this topic? And then what about just the consumer worried they're talking to an AI? And you know, how good is the AI? So kind of 3 questions in one there.

Yeah. I mean, I'll answer the last one first, 'cause it's the quickest. It's just human conditioning. We're gonna be conditioned to talk to an AI and it's just a matter of who's gonna adopt it first. And create leverage for themselves within their business. It's gonna happen. You know, a decade ago, people were irritated that they had to talk, they had to call their credit card company and talk to an IVR before they could get on the phone with a real person. Now you're lucky to get on the phone with a real person in any capacity. And if you are, they're overseas, right? And so now that into the next phase of evolution in this process is we're not outsourcing overseas. Now we're outsourcing to AI. I literally had a call with PayPal today and their voice AI. If anybody who's watching or listening, I actually, I just became a beta member of a company that Dan Martell is part owner in and it scours your social media for people to like find connections, like second and third degree of separation with people that you know. So I would love to get in contact with somebody at PayPal because their voice AI is horrible. And you would think a huge corporation like that would really have this stuff like dialed.

I think Venmo is the worst UI user experience of an app that is so popular. Like, I don't know, I don't know about you, but like, I get so annoyed with Venmo and like how slow it is. Like you're putting a name and it just sits there and thinks and like, you know, like, wait, I just Venmoed last week. Can't find Kevin again?

Like, I have a mom and pop client out of Florida that has a voice AI that literally It's my favorite recording of all of our use cases because it was like, this deal is only available over the phone. So when we hang up, it's gone. And this is that GLP-1 client. The woman is literally like, hey, I'm driving right now. And the voice AI is intelligent enough. And this is where it comes into like how you train it and what I like to refer to myself as an AI broker because technology is changing so quickly. I don't, I'm not married to any platform. Yeah, I helped with the entire GHL AI employee rollout. Sean Clark asked me personally to come in and consult for their voice AI stuff because I was providing support to other voice AI companies that they were vetting for their product, right? I say all that to say, like, I've been around the block and it's incredible to me that I have, I have a voice AI that my client is using that is telling a woman, if you can find a place to safely pull over your vehicle and park, and check the text message I just sent you. There is a one-time discount link for you to check out for this offer that's only available while we're on the phone. And I will hang with you until you do. And talks her through like, hey, did you find a safe place to pull over yet? It's incredible.

I'm an AI agent. I'm on the clock. There's plenty of me. I would go all night with you. Let's, in fact, let's have a conversation for 2 hours till you get home.

Well, yeah. And you set parameters around that to like ensure that they're not like wasting tokens and people aren't just like, trolling the AI and stuff like that. But, you know, ultimately it closed the deal. It collected $3,000. It was like a $5,000 GLP-1 offer and it was $2,500 on the call only. And that woman paid over the phone with her credit card without any human intervention.

Love it. So what AI tech are you liking today? I know you're broken. That might change by the time the podcast comes out, but who are you recommending on the AI agent side?

So I like to build relationships with the founders. Directly after I vet the platform, and then I become, you know, kind of a champion for their products. So I have a great friend that I've been working with for over a year at Rizdial. Uh, his name is James, and their platform is absolutely incredible. I wouldn't even do it justice to where he's gotten it at this point in, you know, early 2026. I need to actually get caught up on how extremely Like how, just how incredible the feature rollout has been. He just took Les Brown actually as a client. I was talking to TR about it because they both have Les now as a client. I'm like, I got to meet this guy. He's bucket list. So, but yes, so Rizzdial is incredible. And then I have a great relationship with the guys over at Charlie AI that specifically, I like to work with tech platforms that are, that the founders have a sales background. And that's something that we also, it sets us apart from everybody else, right? In this space really is one of our little mottos here internally is tech people build tech that works, salespeople build tech that converts. And so, you know, we're focused on what is the output? What's the revenue production of the product? Not just plug in a SaaS and let, you know, figure it out.

I love it. Okay. So, so. We talked qualifications. You kind of threw in a little bit of segmentation here. I'm looking into your list of 4. What else in segmentation are you seeing with AI tech that's helping out?

Yeah, segmentation again, make friends with the founder and then I become a champion of their product if I think that their product is great. And so my friend Douglas James is the founder of a company called LeadFi. And I can, you know, we can plug if you want. I can get you like discount links and stuff for all these platforms. Because again, I have a relationship with the founders for the listeners, but these guys on just opt-in. So your opt-in form, standard opt-in form, name, email, phone number. They're able to do a soft credit pull on every single person that opts into your funnel. And so you're able to segment based on real buying power now.

Nice.

And so that works incredibly well for high volume, high ticket. Sales companies, right? But it also works extremely well for live events. So one cool thing that, that he, you know, he had mentioned to me is that nothing changed year over year from the live event that the client that he was working with, except for they put LeadFi on the front end of the opt-ins and they 3x'd their revenue back of room once they made the pitches from stage.

Oh, wow.

Because they were, they gave people different colored lanyards based on like what's available in their home equity line of credit and their other business line of credit versus— I think that of the guy with the fake Rolex pretending to be rich and the guy that's, you know, kind of being low key, but he's actually a billionaire. You, there's no lying anymore. You opted in for us to know what you have available and we're crafting our offer based on that.

What do you do at a live event? How do you put the people with the white lanyard in room number 1 and the different group, like how do people know where they're going?

Yeah, they were giving them different colored lanyards based on their buying power rather than like, you know, I went to Tony Robbins Business Mastery and it was incredible. And because of my relationships, I was able to hang out with Eli Wilde while I was there. And we had different colored lanyards, but it was based on what we paid to be there versus this event was the lanyards were based on, you know, who we are in our financial level.

I wonder if they gave that information. Well, you're blue because you're richer than this guy in red, but anyway. Sure they didn't.

Yeah. I mean, that's part of the opt-in language, right? You know, we're going to be able to market to you and all that when you opt in. But now the opt-in language says we're also going to be doing a soft credit pull to make sure we craft offers that fit your financial.

And based on that pull, you can immediately have a whole different VSL and everything else based on that immediate first name, almost like page 1. Okay. Page 2 is now different based on the segmentation of that information. Okay. That's cool. So that's segmentation. And then what about the nurture side?

The nurture side is this bandwidth, right? How long do you think that your sales reps are nurturing leads? How long, especially listen, the biggest human bottleneck in this industry and, you know, God bless Cole Gordon. He created a lot of millionaires with his process, but he also created with his solution. He created a bigger problem. And that is that low barrier to entry, kind of churn and burn, low skill level appointment setter recruitment pipeline process, which is just like they got a 90-day revolving door. Your average setter doesn't— either gets fired or finds a different offer to close for in 90 to 120 days. And that revolving door is a bottleneck in so many high-ticket businesses.

Got it. Okay. So the nurture AI does what?

It's conversationally nurturing people, continuing that conversation. You know, it is, it's meeting people where they are. You know, I like to refer to standard SMS marketing as a billboard versus AI SMS is actually a sale. You're actually having a conversation with a trained sales professional. It's the difference between what Russell talks about, a website and a funnel. You're walking through a sales process. With SMS marketing, if someone doesn't convert, you just throw them in a follow-up sequence. And it's like, if they buy or die, and that's the mentality.

Right.

But there's no actual nurture. There's, unless you have a setter in there.

Right. So this is helping replace the setters. So they're having the conversations, the AIs.

Appointment setting was never supposed to be a human being's job. It just had to be because technology wasn't there yet. What we're doing is we're allowing those setters who want to be closers anyway to have the opportunity to be promoted into a closer position because now more leads are being converted into close— into sales calls.

Got it. Got it. Okay. Walk me through as a recipient, as somebody who's going through a— if I'm a customer going through a funnel that's got the AI nurture setter, if you will, what's happening? I've opted in and now is it back to like the first thing we talked about where I'm talking to an actual live agent or more through text dialogue and email dialogue that's just having the conversation? Like what's going on there?

I mean, it depends on the sale, the current sales process, but you know, you know, think about the last thing that you opted in for, right? When you opt in, maybe you book a call, maybe you don't, maybe you opt in for a lead magnet. Right? What happens? Hey, thanks for opting in. Now you're on their email list. Now you're on their SMS list.

Totally. Yep.

And then they're gonna keep blasting you until you opt out or you block the number and, or you buy or you book a call right now. Instead, you're getting those same SMS notifications, but now you're getting a separate text message, which is what used to come from that triage person. Right? It's like, hey, this is Kevin. I know you booked a call with Eric tomorrow. I wanted to make sure I sent over the proper homework and everything to make sure that you're going to be on camera, ready to go for the call. Right? And maybe you'll get a phone call the same way from the voice AI to ensure that that show rate is good. But then what happens, and it usually says this is coming from, you know, you're not able to reply to these messages. Right? Normal, standard SMS, right? But now they're in a conversation with, and whether you want to disclose this or not disclose this, or, you know, depending on TCPA, like all these different regulations and things, there's ways to go about it to ensure that your client and prospect feels like they're receiving a concierge white glove service from your AI, not being handed off and not acknowledged. Properly by AI, right? Because you don't have time for them, right? Versus, so, but now they're able to say, hey, actually I'm not able to make it to the call. The AI can now reschedule them instead of them just going and canceling it, right? So your show rate's increasing, or it's like, hey, I noticed this on your website. Now it's trained on your FAQs, right? It's trained on continuing to nurture that sale.

Yep.

Every sale is different. Every buyer is different, right? So you have buyer personas, right? And then you have your nuanced things that go on in your sales process that prior to implementing something like this, those were just fall-offs. That was just same reason why Hiros is so successful, right? 30% of your ad budget is wasted because of garbage tracking. And that's what Alex Becker solved for. Well, that's what we're solving for on this side of things with the SMS and the voice AI.

Right. Love it. Love it. I mean, I could see that even in Speakeasy Mastermind and others, you know, the, just, just the follow through and the nurturing. And that was the last one, right? Follow-ups, right? So you need nurture and follow-ups. So what, talk to me on how you're solving that or how AI's solving that. Yeah.

So, I mean, you know, again, like throw them into a long-term follow-up sequence, right? How many of those people convert? We don't know. You know, I mean, you know, you can look at your dashboard, you're probably converting at maybe 1 or 2%. Fantastic. Amazing. But now, what if you're actually meeting people where they are? What if you're, you know, what if they're, your AI is trained to answer those actual questions without them having to get on a call with your team? At the end of the day, and that's the why, you know, I mean, we're rebranding now, but that's why our company was named Leverage AI, right? Because ultimately what we're doing is we're creating leverage for the sales team. I want more people getting across the finish line than was ever humanly possible so that the sales team has the bandwidth and the energy to be present on those sales calls. Again, 80/20. If you're spending 80% of your time doing things that aren't revenue producing, now you only have 20% of your energy left for actual cash-collected revenue-producing activities. And so then you're kind of burnt out when you get to those calls versus now the sales teams that I've worked with. I'll give you an example. I got a $150 million a year alternative business lender out in New York. A year ago, they came to me. They're like, we have a 55-person sales team. We have 600,000 leads that we've accumulated over the past 3 years that are just in a long-term nurture sequence that are doing nothing, right? We're gonna hire 30 to 50 more salespeople. So they were gonna double their sales team.

Oh God.

To work those 3-year-old leads.

Geez.

It was gonna cost them millions and they were probably gonna lose about 1/3 of their existing sales force because they were probably gonna be pissed that they were giving all their leads to new salespeople because the company created a bandwidth restriction, even though those leads belong to them, they don't have time to work them.

Yep. Yep.

Right? Because they're competing on leads every month. They have 12,000 or so new leads coming in and they have like 3 to 5 other competitors. So that team has to be like, convert those people in a week or two and just move on. Right?

Yep. Yep.

So now we come in, we create an AI system that re-engages as many of those 600,000 leads as possible. Requalifies them, segments them, nurtures them, books them, all without any human intervention. Over the next 30 days, they had, I believe the numbers were 1,700 AI booked calls on their calendar.

Wow.

From those 600,000 leads. And that was just phase 1, because we can't just hit 600,000 leads at once, right? There's A2P, there's all these different regulations, right? But 1,700 additional appointments on their existing sales team's calendar in that first 30 days or 60 days. And this was about a year ago. Pardon me that I don't know the exact numbers, but I think it was $1.3 million in additional funding revenue that came directly from that AI database reactivation campaign in the first 30 or 60 days. And then from there, now here we are a year later, they're on pace for about 200 $250 million, and they haven't hired one additional sales rep. Their close rate has gone up.

Yeah.

Their booking rate has gone up. Their show rate has gone up. Their sales reps are spending more time closing deals, so their commission has gone up, so they're happier employees.

Of course. So, so with all this stuff going on, you know, my next question is, let's look ahead into the future. What is the human going to be needed for? On the sales side at some point?

Again, it's leverage. It's just that 80/20 principle of what are the high— what's the cream of the crop? What are the things that I need to spend 100% of my time doing? And that is, you know, that is working with your clients. I mean, you think about even the back and forth between when you're a solopreneur, everybody can relate to this. You spend all this time trying to acquire a client. You have an influx of cash and now you have to deliver. And now you take your eye off of revenue and you focus on client success. And then you got to go through that cycle all over again when money starts to get low.

Yeah, that's right. And you got to go scramble and rebuild and all that shit. Yeah. I mean, could there be a world where even the closers are replaced by the agents and maybe the job ultimately becomes the AI strategist of the funnel that says, all right, I got my whole team of agents. I got my setters, my follow-up, my nurturers, my qualifications agents. My job is to now look at the data and just sit there and say, all right, I might need to reprogram my agents to now have this answer when these things happen.

I mean, could that be the future? I mean, are we going to lose, are we going to lose closers next? I mean, don't listen. Don't we want to, right? Like even the people who are listening right now, watching that are closers, wouldn't you rather be a solopreneur? Wouldn't you rather be a founder, right? If you're an appointment setter, wouldn't you rather be a closer? Like at the end of the day, We're stepping into a golden era that's going to free up less. All the minutia, all the things that we don't like doing are going to be done better by AI. And then we can focus more of our time and energy in our life on things that we want to do that we're passionate about. You think about like what the Roman Empire, right? When things got, what came from that, right? Like the Renaissance era, the art, the music, all the things. That we don't have time for. We're stepping into a new golden era like that, that we're going to have, you know, who's going to win in 2026 and beyond? The visionaries, the creators, the ones who are creative, but don't have the bandwidth for focusing their time and energy and their life force on that creative endeavor. Right.

We're going to get it back. Yeah, no, I love that. Okay. So I'm going to kind of now bring it all back a little bit now. And we covered a lot and you dropped a lot of great tips and tools and kind of got us thinking about the future. Now I'm, I'm listening here and I'm overwhelmed and I'm like, okay, maybe I have a smaller, let's go to the smaller type of team now. Cause we kind of talked about the bigger companies and all that. Now I'm smaller, I'm a solo, or maybe I have, you know, 10 people or less on my team and we're doing, we're still making good revenue. That great example you gave earlier about the person who's like, yeah, we got our hand of clients, but don't know, you know, if we lose 2, I got to really hustle. Where should we start? What would be the first place you'd recommend if they didn't have the ability or the, let's say they didn't have the budget today to go hire somebody like you or others to help them rebuild their AI sales team? What would you suggest to them?

You know, it's funny because I think, you know, you know about this, but the client that I'm working with now where we're renting out the Tennessee Titans stadium and we're throwing this big Guinness World Record event, something that is so interesting about my involvement in that event is we're setting the world record for the most amount of people certified in Stop the Bleed certification ever, right? And it actually is directly tied to what I do in my AI business, if you think about it. Because what do I do? I come in and I look for where I triage people, right? Think about if you're bleeding out, we have to stop the bleed first.

Yep.

When I come in, I'm gonna triage you first. We have to look at where are you bleeding out most? Where's the most amount of time or money being wasted?

So we have to do a self-triage. We essentially have to look at it and say, where are we?

Do a time audit and do a conversion audit.

Yeah. Yeah. Where are we hustling? Okay. That's great. You got me thinking even in the speakeasy world, you got my head spinning here with some, you know, really need to rethink things.

Cool.

Well, is there any last minute sort of tips or maybe even a tool or two that you love that something, or maybe something I didn't ask you that you wish I did now that we're wrapping up? Chat here.

I don't know. There's so much, you know, there's so many tools. There's so many, there's so much noise. I think rather than like what is out there and what's great, I would say advice is don't get caught up in all the hype, right? Just focus on where you're at right now and what's going to buy back time or increase revenue. And don't get distracted by shiny object syndrome. Like, you know, I think it's the like Family Guy where he is like, ooh, piece of candy. Ooh, piece of candy. That's 95% of everybody that's doom scrolling on social media, whether you are a, you know, 8-figure founder or solopreneur, right? Is there's so much noise. Where do we find the signal? And the signal is, Where are you bleeding out? Time or money?

Love it. Love it. Focus there. That's great. Well, cool, Kevin. Thank you so much for spending some time inside the Speakeasy Mastermind. Podcast was great having you. Great to know, get to know you more. And then you got my head spinning on the sales side and I think, and it's so important. Love what you said. I'm going to go triage after this call probably soon and figure out and stop some of my own internal bleeding here. And thank you so much. Looking forward to more chats with you.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Eric, for having me and anybody, you know, if you want to reach out and have a conversation about you know, where, like, what is going on in your business or where, like, where you're bleeding out. Cause sometimes it's hard to see the label when you're in the bottle.

Right.

And so, you know, I've had the pleasure already, even though I'm a new captain and we haven't even launched my chapter yet, I've had the pleasure of working with some of the Speakeasy Mastermind members and have great client relationships with them already. So feel free, just reach out in, you know, Facebook, or if you're in Speakeasy, you know where to meet.

And we'll drop some links in there for you too. So definitely you'd be able to find Kevin. Awesome. All right, man. Well, thank you so much. Have a great day and feel better.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you.

And that's a wrap from the Speakeasy Podcast. If something sparked for you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it, review it, and pass it to the one person who needs to hear this right now. Want in on the Real Mastermind? Tap the link in the show notes to apply. Until next time, keep scaling, stay sharp, And don't be the smartest one in the room.