Make $$$ Selling AI to Boring Businesses

0:00Today, I'm going to let you in in a little secret. While everyone is selling AI agents to AI pilled people in San Francisco, there's a way bigger opportunity to sell AI agents to main street businesses. And I think that there's going to be millions of dollars to be made if you understand how to do so. Now, I wanted to bring on someone who's actually gone and done this before. So, he's going to share the tactics, the the techniques, the strategies, the niches to go after, and

0:28it's actually my business partner, Mr. Boring Marketing himself. Now, he's gone and done it before, and he's going to share everything in this master class for how to sell AI agents to main street businesses. And by the end of this episode, you'll have all the sauce. You'll have the tactics. You'll be able to get going right now. So, if you're someone who's looking for a business idea, if you're looking to understand how to sell AI agents to Main Street, this is the episode for you. And even if you haven't even thought about it, it's really, really interesting because it's going to get your creative juices flowing. It's going to connect your

1:00brain in a few different ways and you'll probably learn a few techniques, a few books actually, uh, a few tools that you've never heard of before in this episode. So, I want to give a special thank you to James, Mr. Boring Marketing for coming on and not holding anything back um and giving all the value to you.

1:18Um I can't wait to see what you build. I'm rooting for you. Have a creative day and I'll see you at the end of the episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half and I started because I kept hearing companies like Verscell, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex and I figured if they're using it,

1:35why shouldn't I? It's been a gamecher. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards. It's got banking. It's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own. It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building

1:52something new, it's time to get Brex. Check it out at brex.com/solutions/artups. Link in the description.

2:08We got Mr. Boring Marketer James Dickerson on the podcast. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to help people think about how they can go and sell AI to Main Street. I think it's one of the biggest opportunities in AI. A lot of people are sleeping on it. I want them to see the opportunity, know how to build an offer, find the right customers, and then

2:29charge what the work is worth. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are selling AI to AIP people in San Francisco. And I think the goal of this episode is to show I want you to show me and everyone the way around how you can actually sell AI to Main Street, why this is one of the greatest opportunities of our time. And this isn't just a hook, right? This is like you're going to show exactly how to do it. You're going to commit to that. So by the end of this, people will truly understand the tactics, the techniques, the strategies around that. Is that

3:02right? That's it, man. All right. Let's get into it. All right. Cool. So, um, why should you listen to me about this topic? Let's let's just start there. Um, as you know, Greg, like I started out owning agencies, serving local businesses, startups, things like that. I've run all kinds of performance ads. I've done social and SEO and and all these different services for these exact type of businesses. So, have a lot of experience in the market. Um, I personally am an owner of a boring business. um a trades business uh here in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I've been able to grow it uh doing exactly uh

3:43what I'm going to talk about here today. So, I want to package all that together and just share with people like, hey, this is exactly how I would start an agency. Again, not just a agency that builds AI agents or does AI transformation, but like what's an offer that all these businesses uh really need and will be willing to pay for? How do

4:03you package it? How do you sell it? Yeah. And what you've been able to do with your boring business, I think it's a mo What's called Diesel Dudes? I mean, it's called Diesel Dudes. Yeah. It's a uh it's a mobile diesel repair business. So, you know, when a semi-truck breaks down on the side of the road or something like that, we dispatch mechanics out there to get them moving again. So, it's a costly problem. It's high ticket size, and uh I've been able to really grow it through ads, funnels, and local SEO. So, um, you know, as I was kind of thinking about, hey, how can

4:36we help people go out there and capture this opportunity, um, you know, I built, uh, a couple tools in boringfunnels.com, um, that help people do just this. But with BoringFunnels, I typed, "Hey, find me plumbers in Dallas worth pitching." So, in about a minute, it went out there, scraped a bunch of information from Google Maps, Google, um, you know, Yelp, all these different channels and found 100 different plumbers, uh, within

5:02that market. And then I size them up. So, I try to understand how many reviews are they getting? What's the review velocity there? Um, you know, how many employees or technicians do they have? Can I find revenue information out there about the business? and I want to try to find a boring skilled trades business that's doing over $2 million a year in

5:24revenue. And we'll get into why that is. And you know, in plumbing and HVAC and stuff like that, that's actually pretty achievable. So, there's a lot of these businesses out there. So, uh, in about a couple minutes, my my MCPs that I built went out and went through like their ads, their websites, everything and found the exact leaks that these plumbers need to have fixed in terms of their customer generation funnel. So, we'll get into what that means and stuff like that. And then about 15 minutes later, I had a pitch in their brand. I had work done that's going to add real value to them. I had their email address

6:02and then I had a dialed proposal in the first email. So, you know, you remember how how it was back in the day, right? Doing this work was such a pain. Doing it manually, going to websites, trying to, you know, pay a bunch of money for for credits to build lists and prospect. And this is one area where agents and the right tools can can really help you out. I think the most interesting thing to me here is the fact that you're not like cart blanch, you know, just spraying and praying. You're looking at

6:34who makes the most sense to to to pitch. Yeah. Yeah. And uh you know, you've talked a lot about finding a niche and things like that. And uh you know, it makes everything much more clear like you can dial your message to that customer. It helps you find exactly where to focus. And there's cities like Dallas all around the country where again there are hundreds of these companies in your backyard making real money. And you know if you open up X a lot of people are trying to sell to like soloreneurs or startups that can't afford them and then they're frustrated about you know getting bad clients or

7:10people not being able to afford their services. And oftentimes that's just coming down in niche and market selection. Exactly. We won't go into specific examples of that because we're not gossipers you and I. That's not our style, but you know, you know it. All right, let's let's continue. Okay, cool. So, the opportunity here, $2 to$20 million local businesses. They can pay, they can afford it. They have an idea that they might be behind. We can talk about what that looks like. And

7:38really, nobody useful is showing up. Like, think about your own inbox out there. if if you're listening or or watching, the cold emails, the cold LinkedIn DMs that you're getting, they're asking for a time commitment from you right out of the gate, like, "Hey, can we hop on a demo and can I show you this cool thing that I built?" That's not how we're going to talk about, you know, getting in touch with these business owners, the offer. So, again, we don't want to position around, hey, I can deploy an AI agent into your company and it's going to make you, you know, 10x more efficient and stuff like

8:09that. What we do is we find boring businesses that are already advertising. They're already paying to get traffic to their website. Okay? So, the leak that we're fixing is we want to help them turn the traffic they're already paying for into more calls and more booked jobs. It's a pretty simple value proposition. They know ROI. They know investments they're spending on marketing. Maybe they have an agency that they've been paying for years that hasn't plugged these leaks. So, how to find the customer? We're going to combine like an old school and a new school approach. There's a great book uh that many people have read called The

8:45Ultimate Sales Machine by Chad Holmes. He has a strategy called The Dream 100. We're going to talk about that and then we're going to take some of the best direct to consumer strategies around building funnels and advertising into this to create something pretty special. You're firing me up. You're you're literally firing me up. All right. All right. Let's get into it. So, um you know, like we talked about, this is absolutely massive. Let's just look at plumbing and HVAC companies. Uh, you know, there's 112,000 of them roughly doing roughly $2.5 million a year on average. 14% of owners say AI is fully part of how they run. Uh, they're paying

9:20a lot of money every single lead that they're trying to get into their business. So, tons I mean, I don't know what 14% of 112,000 is. Maybe somewhere around, you know, 16 17,000 something like that. There's a huge delta out there and a massive market gap. And I think this is the arbitrage play to be thinking about, right? And the $129 a lead thing is like so important, right? I mean, if you're doing this, you want to work with a company that is high lif high LTV

9:51because there's just more money. Yeah. You know, around, right? Yeah. You you don't want to do like lawn maintenance. You don't want to do restaurants. You don't want to do things that are low ticket. Um, this comes down to niche selection. So, you know, where are, you know, uh, customers valuable? Plumbing jobs are thousands of dollars potentially when someone gets, you know, dispatched and fixes an issue in someone's home. And this is an urgent need. So, a homeowner is ready to fix it. I had a leak in my ceiling two weeks ago. Uh, walked downstairs, water was literally coming out. My kid like did something crazy to our shower. And that

10:30day I paid like $2,000 to have a water restoration guy come out and uh and fix the issue. Um so customers are willing to pay. What that means is that if you can get in front of those jobs more efficiently than the next guy and your competition isn't that sophisticated, there can be a huge ROI on uh on on those strategies. So if you can add an ROI and you can measure it and you can prove it, they're not going to want to

10:54leave you. So, one of my favorite things to talk about in this uh world here is that like, you know, a lot of people talk about plumbing and and HVAC. That's where the rollups are happening, the private equity firms are coming into and stuff like that, but there are so many markets out there that have real demand, weak marketing, and that nobody's actually really pitching at all. Um, so just a few here. We don't have to spend time talking about all of these, but you

11:23know, commercial hood cleaning. Restaurants are obligated to clean out the hoods over their uh their stoves and stuff like that. There's like dental implants and orthodontics. There's tree services, irrigation. I've seen a big trend here in the Carolinas about people installing high-end sport courts in their backyards or doing artificial turf installations so they don't have to mess with, you know, grass and and landscaping and stuff. Uh there's chimney sweeping, uh gutter guards, septic services, crawl space. Like just use your imagination. Like screenshot this right here, go throw it into your AI or whatever and say, "Hey, like let's build on this. Find me a niche that I

12:04should focus on based on where I live because that's where your unfair advantage is going to be. So maybe sports courts is a big deal in the Carolinas. But if you're in the Northeast, maybe it's you know, snow removal. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Or backup generators. You know, getting those installed is a big job. And uh you know, with the weather and stuff like that in in the Northeast, like during the winter time, there's a big demand spike for that type of thing. So endless opportunities out there. It just takes a little bit of creativity to get outside of like what

12:35everyone else is trying to do. Okay, so like I I took plumbers as an example and I took Dallas as an example and I used my MCP and in cloud code and couple things that I found u analyzed a few of these companies uh that are rated 4.8 or 4.9 on Google. They have good reviews. They do good work. They've got a bunch of reviews, so they're sizable businesses, and they're all paying for

13:01Google ads that week that I analyzed. Four out of five of them didn't even repeat their ads own promise, like on the landing page that they're sending traffic to. So, one of the biggest strategies in performance marketing is making sure that your ad and your landing page are tied up or they're congruent so that the prospect is kind of remembering the message or getting that communication from the ad that they clicked on. So, that really helps

13:25conversion rate. Um, three or five of of these companies didn't even show their Google rating on the landing page. So, this is a huge social proof point, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of reviews at 4.8 or 4.9. And then four out of five websites I looked at made you scroll past three screens uh to book a service. So, point being, there is so much lowhanging fruit out there and it's almost just staring you right in the

13:50face. What's your take on personal agent platforms? you know, Muse, Grockbot, Instinct, Dots by OpenAI, like you know, is your view that people this is going to be, you know, more and more mainstream, consumers are going to be asking their Muse agent or whatever for plumbers in Dallas and that these companies need to be optimized or is it

14:14too in the future? You know, I think it's it's a bit in the future. uh personally like you know I've looked at uh my diesel data to see if we're getting any customers finding us from chat GPT and stuff like that and I might get like a couple visitors a week or something along those lines. I think that uh when people are searching for a service you know I always check out the Google reviews like on maps and stuff like that. So um I think that's still the surface area. I think Google has an incredible amount of data um you know to serve up relevant and and the right sort

14:48of solution providers. I have used AI mode on Google to find contractors. Uh so I I'm more bullish on Google than a lot of those uh those personal agents and uh I just don't know if they're there yet in the market. Okay. So we touched on this but again you know fine businesses doing real revenue. They have a budget. uh a $5 million plumbing company is probably spending like $150 to $250,000 a year on marketing. Their leaks cost real money and you can show them like we talked about. You scroll down their site, someone doesn't have a

15:22way to book. That's something visual. That's something that the owner can understand and we're going to figure out how to package and communicate that to them. All right. So again, you don't sell AI automation. You don't sell agents. you talk about booked jobs and more phone calls and stuff like that and that's one of the biggest things that I actually see out there on X which is definitely like in an AI bubble is people talk about you know I'm going to start an AI automation agency or an AI services agency or I'm going to sell AI agents. Customers don't care about any

15:53of that. Uh they care about revenue. They care about ROI. Um never lead with uh I'm implementing AI into your your local company. They they their eyes glaze over. And a lot of them don't even know what an AI agent is. You know, like they think of an agent, they're thinking of a real estate agent. Yep. Yep. And a lot of these business owners are still like um you know uh from the generation that they're probably not adapting these tools and and stuff like that, you know. Um they're they're just not the market sophistication level just is not there uh with the majority of these types of

16:28companies. Also, a lot of people don't like AI. So when you when you like from a branding perspective, AI actually when you speak to a you know most of main the mainstream America like they have like a sour taste in their mouth about AI for whatever reason. Data centers coming you know and stuff like that. So, you know, you don't want to sell something and then be up against someone who, you know, isn't is is like, whoa, I don't

16:58like AI. Right. It's not about AI. Yeah. You know, I'm sure you've seen this. I've I've seen a lot about voice agents. I've I've tested voice agents for my boring business. Uh like an AI receptionist to answer the call and stuff. I got so many voicemails from pe people being like, "Is this a dumb AI thing?" Like, and just hanging up. Like, they know it's AI, they want to talk to a person like um so I think like while some of that might sound good or be very marketable, you know, to go and and raise money or attract attention from other AI pill, um you know, when push

17:34comes to shove, uh a lot of these things just don't really match up with how these businesses work in the real world. Okay, so we're going to sell funnels. So, I'm sure everyone's seen funnels out there in the wild. They know what funnels are hopefully by now. But, um, you know, maybe you've clicked an ad before. You've opened up a page. There's a juicy free offer like I'm going to give you my SOPs or I'm going to invite you to a free workshop or webinar or something like that. I'm going to have like an introductory offer with a guarantee that's really hard to say no to. Um so then after that you have sales

18:11pages that really help to communicate uh you know why someone should become a customer and if they don't buy right there you have follow-up systems that are you know sending SMS or email or whatever. So this is what we want to implement for local businesses. Um, most of the agencies that are out there selling, uh, you know, they're selling advertising, they're selling SEO, they're selling traffic, but this really solves like the real problem in my opinion based off the data and all the sites that that I've analyzed. It's not so much an advertising problem as much

18:45as it is, hey, the website uh is broken. There's no way to book a a meeting or or whatever. And uh, again, as I said, there's there's so many of these out there and it's lowhanging fruit. So before like you know the age of AI and coding agents and all of that to go and build a funnel was a pretty manual process. Like you could use a drag and drop sort of like landing page builder if you want but you couldn't really get it on brand and there was a lot of like manual tweaking and back and forth and integrations you had to do or you had to

19:18hire like an agency to go and build that for you. And you know, agencies still charge $20,000 for a good funnel, for example. So, I think this is the gap uh to fill. Um, if you know how to use a coding agent, you can spin up these funnels quickly at a very high quality. And if they're already paying for advertising, you can route that traffic uh to an optimized funnel and show them the lift that they're getting. So, what does that look like? Um, let's just take an example HVAC company. So, I built these pages with uh with Boring Funnels,

19:51and there's like a I'm not selling it. There's a there's a free like library on there if you want to log in and find funnels that actually work from real businesses. Feel free to go and check that out. You know, you don't have to pay for it or whatever, but I built these with the paid tool. Um, you know, there's like multiple different entry points that you can go and deploy and test uh for one of these types of

20:12businesses. So, there's the free check. um you know, someone lands on an ad and it's like, "Hey, are you having these problems? Here's the things you can go and look at. Uh there's the $79 tuneup. Uh I've looked at the leading like HVAC companies in my city and all of them typically have that, you know, low price point tripwire offer um that, you know, creators or DTC companies have. Uh but the vast majority, 80 90% aren't doing anything like that. So to be competitive in the ad auctions, having that kind of like tripwire type offer to build trust and provide a good service is a really

20:47really good funnel to build for for a local business. Can you explain that like what is a trip wire offer? Why is it important? Does does every business need it? Yeah. So let's say that uh I have uh that I'm spending on ads and uh let's just take like me for example. Let's say I want to sell um you know ultimately sell some software uh like boring funnels. It's like MCP connectors for your agents to help you do all this stuff. Let's say I uh I priced the free version that's out there at you know uh $20. So I'm spending on ads uh maybe on Meta. It's like a dollar a click. And if

21:29I can get 20 visitors to the website, I spent $20 to get that traffic, right? If I can convert one out of those 20 for a $20 membership to that entrylevel version, I've liquidated my ad costs and then I've gotten 10 15 people uh to give me their email address that I can then continue to market to. So, it's a strategy of like liquidating uh your ad spend and trying to get to the point where you can essentially acquire leads for free and add a lot of value at the same time. All right. So, then you have like the instant price. Like, you know, I've been to a lot of service websites

22:05where, you know, I have to call, I have to set up a meeting, whatever. That's frustrating. Like, give me what I want. I want to know how much this might cost for me so that I can make a decision. Um, the quiz, should I repair or replace uh, you know, my HVAC unit. uh the video, like maybe I answer that quiz and then uh I come to like a a video sales letter where it's the owner on video building trust and saying, "Hey, like you know, before you replace your

22:32furnace, I've recorded this for you. Here's the problems people make in that decision-m process, etc." And those are 20 to $30,000 installations that people are financing and stuff like that. So, it's a big decision. seeing the owner on camera walking you through how to make the right choice makes that company the trusted advisor versus someone trying to just get paid. Um, and then there's a couple others like the advertorial and stuff. And then you have your follow-up sequences as well. But, you know, this feels very high value compared to, hey, I'm going to go and optimize your Google business profile and and stuff like that, which could take months to get

23:08results. Whereas, if you help them convert the traffic they're getting today with a little bit better strategies taken from the leading creators and direct to consumer businesses, you have something pretty good. Okay, so we kind of talked about these funnels just now, but uh you know, screenshot this, pause it, check it out. Here's how I would think about an ad to the page to the follow-up page uh to get the booking for each of these for the $79 tuneup for the advertorial where you're teaching first instead of trying to sell first and for the big ticket repair or replace. Beautiful thing about this too is each of these funnels can be

23:46run for different like ad campaigns. So I mentioned add to landing page congruency. Um, if people are searching for new uh furnace installation, maybe I send them to the repair or replace funnel. If they're searching for uh, you know, quick service, I send them to the $79 tuneup or something like that. Most of these companies are all selling or sending you know the same traffic to the same pages and uh, that is really really hurting their conversion rate. Okay, so let's get into some of the uh, the strategies uh, to go and acquire these customers. if you think this is a good uh opportunity. So Chad Holmes from the

24:26ultimate sales machine, he did this experiment. He talked about it in his book. He built a list of like 2200 advertisers and uh you know 167 of those advertisers bought 95% of the ads and the people who are buying the offer today are the ones that everyone's kind of like trying to go and get at the same time. So they're hearing like lots of pitches and stuff like that. He focused on uh you know going out there and building the relationships with you know

24:55the folks that that hadn't bought yet. So he took a longer term approach. The point here is like you know be patient and like be a snail and show up every day and add value and these business owners they may start to trust you uh more so than the competition. By month six he got 28 clients uh in one you know month. Um, so you know, like good things take time. I think we're in this age with AI and stuff where a lot of people expect instant results. You know, they go and build a list, they blast out a bunch of emails, they send some cold DMs

25:29on LinkedIn, it didn't work right away, and they quit, and then they go on to the next thing. Um, this is just trying to say that, hey, like this is a long game, and you got to go and add real value to actually get these business owners to trust you. So, um, you know, again, like AI can make it easier, though. Um, you know, build a list of the 100 companies you'd love to work with. Um, you know, have your AI agent go out and research those to the inth degree. Know everything about them. Um, read their reviews. Uh, crawl their websites. Uh, look up the

26:01owners, you know, stuff like that. Build a corpus of information on this dream 100 list so you're the expert uh, in this targeted group of people that you're trying to sell to. you should know everything about their businesses, about the industry. That's really what it takes to to stand out. Um, another one of my favorite authors is Jay Abraham. Uh, and his principle was

26:25become the the advisor, not a vendor. Um, so, you know, add free value to this radius every single week. You don't have to have an audience to do it. You can um, you know, simply create creatives on Meta, for example, that are dialed to that audience. Meta's algorithm is really good. The people in your market, if your ads are about helping plumbers, will see those ads. Um, if you're just focused on adding value, not trying to get them to book a demo or call right away, um, I think long-term like chat uh, experience by month six, you know, good things are going to start to happen. There's a strategy too that that

27:02I'll show here called lumpy mail. And, uh, Dan Kennedy used to talk about this. Uh Sam Ovens talked about it, but uh imagine sending a box to these 100 uh folks on your dream 100 list with a brass fitting uh and you know a letter that has like a link to a page that you rebuilt them that says, "Hey, like you fix the plumbing leaks, I'll fix the leak leaks on your website or or in your marketing." You know, it's dialed to that specific type of person. Um message to market fit. Dan Kennedy, another goat of direct response. uh one trade, one city. Again, know everything about how

27:38their customers talk. There's plenty of information out there. You can go on Reddit. You can find how Redditors are talking in your city about service providers. Like I was looking at uh HVAC ones just yesterday cuz my heater's out downstairs and I found a good local one and folks don't want to go and work with the big PE backed ones. The voice of customer tells me that they want to support a local HVAC company that's been in business for a while. So, I found one

28:04that I'm going to call today, actually. Um, all right. So, a couple more Jay Abraham strategies. Uh, read Chad Holmes, Jay Abraham, and Dan Kennedy. Uh, I learned pretty much everything about direct response from, uh, from those guys. So, um, another important aspect here to to think about, uh, let's talk branding here for a second. Um, as we think about really being the only choice for your market, branding comes into play. Um, I would brand the firm, focus on something like this, like call it leak proof. Uh, we fix the leaks in the in your marketing and you handle the plumbing. So, um, you know, I think that

28:43you have great uh, you know, great brand for like a website, impactful ads, things like that. If you want to run kind of a retargeting on meta approach or an ad approach in a certain radius, um, you know, you could do like UGC style ads. Um, you could send them to a landing page that uses, you know, that voice of customer, that language that you're becoming an expert on or your agents are. And, uh, you know, maybe you have, um, you know, a free leak check or, you know, something like that that, um, that you're selling or giving away

29:15to them to add value. Yeah. I think the mistake a lot of people make here is uh from a branding perspective, they look at what a good brand looks like and they'll look at like Stripe or Apple and then they'll create uh the brand off of that targeting Main Street America or this HVAC HVAC companies in their area. And what a good brand like from a as a creative director, you know, everyone's going to say Stripe looks good Apple. But as you know the customer here, they might not want a brand like that, right? They just might not connect with it. So good branding is creating a feeling that your ICP

29:54connects with and we can't forget that. Well said. Yeah. Uh you know the the the fit with the market is really what determines a good brand. Um that's right. Um so yeah, this is an example of a funnel you could go and enact with with meta ads and you know open up a camera, record a quick video. um have Claude edit it. Um everyone's seen how good Opus 5.5 is at making shorts and stuff. Uh you can also run meta ads and build campaigns from Claude Code. Uh Meta has an MCP that can help you go in

30:25there and build out the campaigns, too. So, you know, these gaps uh where it's like, hey, I'm not an expert. How do I do that? I don't know how to get some creative and put a campaign up. Like, you know, AI has really removed those barriers for a lot of this stuff. So again, like everyone uh or not everyone, but a lot of people use not having an audience as a reason why they shouldn't do something. Uh you know, oh, but they have a big audience or I don't have an audience or whatever. If you focus on a small market um of like 25 mile radius of Dallas and you're only

31:01targeting plumbers, do you really think that it would take that long to become the authority if you're out there learning from the best creators in like the AI space, which is like the most hyper competitive sort of content and influence market in the world, you know? Yeah. And you don't even need to be the

31:20authority, you can just be an authority. Correct. Correct. just get on the map and if you're adding value and you know you're doing the type of research and stuff that that we're talking about here, um you know, you're going to get some conversation started. Um I have no doubt in my mind. All right, so I talked about lumpy mail. Um I think this is another good strategy and when you start to stack these different approaches together, you've got kind of the old school and the new school approach. So the new school approach is maybe you have this like meta ads campaign. old school approach is maybe you send them

31:54some lumpy mail. Uh this really stands out like when it comes to someone's office. A lot of these businesses are owner led or owner driven. They still open up the mail. Um so you know to me if you have the right branding something clever uh it's a great approach uh to kind of get in front of them. And again you're not trying to sell them on your service right away here. you're adding some value and maybe you're saying, "Hey, I want to invite you to breakfast or I'm hosting a meetup of uh you know, other plumbing and HVAC companies uh next week. Would love to feature you as

32:26a special guest or something like that." Like flatter them a bit too, you know, old school. I think I've spoke I've said the story on the pod before, but when you walk into a car store, uh when you walk in, they actually hand they say, "Do you want flat water or sparkling water?" Uh, so you say sparkling water. Say they come with this, you know, aluminum tray, really like these beautiful napkins, like thick napkins that probably cost like a dollar each. They and they h and they hand you this tray of perier and two pieces of Swiss chocolate. And that's before you've looked around, you've done anything, right? They're

33:05just they they're they want you to feel good. They and and it's the law of reciprocity. Like if someone gives you value, you want to give back value back. So all of a sudden you had no intentions of buying buying a carte tank. Um but you walk out there spending $10,000 cuz someone handed you with, you know, 35

33:22cent Swiss chocolate. Absolutely. I mean, another story there. Last night, uh I was at baseball practice for my kids and uh one of my good friends there, another dad, he uh his dad, his dog, uh actually just died and uh he was like, "Yeah, you know, so nice. Today our our vet called us and she made a donation in our dog's name to the veterinary college where where she went at TUS or something like that." My first question to him was, "Who's your vet?" you know, um I have two dogs and I want them to have the best care and wow, what a story uh that creates a moment, a

33:59marketable moment. And maybe she didn't even do that out of like, you know, a marketing approach. But, uh if you have the goodwill of your prospects in mind and you're becoming their trusted adviser, which is the whole strategy of preeminence from Jay Abraham, like my friend will never go to another veter vet in in his life with his animal, you know? I mean, I want to just rescue a dog right now and go to your vet just just to work with that

34:24work with that vet, you know. Exactly. Exactly. So, those moments are really powerful and not enough people even consider them. All right. So, um you know, you can you can go and and do all of this stuff with with AI these days. You know, you can build some people are more experienced than others. A lot of people like to, you know, build their own solutions out there. A lot of the folks in uh in like the boring marketing in community though are trying to start you know figuring out like hey how can I go and offer a service to you know these businesses. So this is just like a screenshot of like

34:57what uh the boring funnels product produces but again like do whatever you want. Uh, I have a tool that helps me, you know, find um the prospects, score the prospects, get the contact info, build the pitch, and then deliver uh, you know, a high value proposal with that build um, in about 15 minutes. So, do it however you want. Like, no, you know, no obligation there, of course, but, uh, this is kind of how how I

35:25approach it. Find, pitch, and deliver. All right. So, uh, you know, back to the old school stuff, an AI meetup, a breakfast or something like that would be a nice touch. I I think that a lot of these business owners still want to, you know, meet people that they do business with in person. Um, you know, it's very important, especially if you're, you know, kind of in a local market. Um, I know you're big on IRL stuff, making a a

35:51comeback and and things of that nature. Um, I think that there's a big opportunity to go out there and and do it in your backyard, uh, in your city for, you know, a specific market or maybe multiple. Okay. So, um, again, like these business owners, you can show them the math here. We kind of talked about that a little bit in terms of like, you know, cost per lead and things like that, but let's say they're spending on ads and they're getting a 100 leads a month. It's $129 a lead. You know, they're spending like $13,000 a month on leads. If the page loses about 20% of those, they've got, you know,

36:26$2600 kind of going nowhere or going out the door. Um, you know, so one plumbing job um at, you know, $1,714 pays for 13, you know, of of those leads that they're already getting. So, if you can help them get a few new jobs a month, like if you're out there playing with these AI tools and stuff like that, designing and building, like if you think you can do a little bit better job than what they currently have, you can

36:53you can start something in this space. And realistically, if you're listening to this podcast, you can because you understand way more than the average person in all these tools. And when you look at the websites and the experiences of some of some of these main street businesses, it's it's appalling honestly with I mean like you've shown with how much they're leaving on the table because for them it's like they didn't have anything and now they just have something up. They just want to get something up. Um but you know it's in some ways remarkable that any of these websites or some of these websites convert at all. Yeah, it

37:34really is. It really is. I agree. Um, so just in terms of pricing, like this is kind of like the whole like, you know, a agency prices software costs like it's a great time to create a high margin business. Approach it like a service business, but you know, running it with AI and um, you know, actually delivering and doing the work at a high

37:57quality is the easiest it's ever been. Perhaps you have like an introductory install where um you build like a funnel and you take it live or something like that and then you know monthly you're analyzing the data, you're testing, you're making updates, uh tweaks, you're actually measuring, you know, the call volume that's coming in and and stuff like that. Later, who knows? Maybe

38:20there's like a performance angle, too. Um you know, there's a lot of uh agencies that got their start that way. um you know, hey, I'll only charge you when you know uh we get a job. Or maybe you start with that if you're just getting started. So, this brings up another point to me. Um I've had a lot of people ask me, "Hey, what if what if I've never done this before? How can I go and, you know, build trust in the market and stuff if if I don't have any clients?" And I'm like, "Well, like, don't go try to sell them something. Go and do it for free and prove that what

38:51you're trying to do works, you know? Um the the cost to you is tokens and some of your time. You know, it's not like you have to go hire a team and and do all this stuff to build out like a new website or a funnel or a campaign for a local business. Go and do it for free in exchange for a great case study or testimonial. Your only focus should be getting that one case study and then once you have that, go and start charging. So don't overthink it. Yeah, I think uh I get this feedback a lot in general. I mean, you mentioned I don't

39:25have an audience or or people will say like I don't have any, you know, case studies or things like that. And this is like it's a this is going to sound the next 30 seconds are going to sound a little woo woo, but like a bit of it is a mindset shift where it's like you have to come into this and be like I am the best person to help plumbers in Dallas and I'm going to spend the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months of my life equipping these plumbers in Dallas with the information and the advice and the techniques and the strategies that they

40:00need in order for them to increase the ROI of what they are doing. And you have to just wake up every morning and repeat that mantra to yourself um to actually believe it. And I know someone's listening to this and is probably like, well, isn't that sort of like faking it until you make it? It's not. I actually just, you know, I was watching uh Toby uh co-founder CEO of of Shopify. You know, Shopify is like a 1502 $2200 billion company. The guy does the exact same thing to himself. So here you have a founder CEO, you know, one of the wealthiest people on the planet is

40:40repeating a mantra to him to himself because the power of positive thinking does help you. I couldn't agree more. Um, and I think that's exactly right. And I would love to I'd love to actually see an episode on mindset sometime from you. like I would watch the the heck out of that. Um there's a bunch of great books out there like I mean Tony Robbins man like you know his whole sort of thing is around around that and look at the leaders and out there in the world that you know

41:10that trust him. Let me know if people want it. I I haven't done any of that type of stuff in the past because I like to just focus on like the the actual tactics and sauce and stuff like that and I always felt that if I did something like that like around mindset and stuff you know people would be like where's the sauce? Um sometimes the sauce is is like sometimes that is the sauce that you kind of need. Um but people don't

41:41really want it. Please let me know. Cool. Man, I used to spend so much time reporting in my agencies. Like that's a solved problem. Um, you know, AI can help you there. No worries when it comes to, you know, keeping people up to date and stuff. You can create looms. You can hop on the phone with them. You've got all the data uh one prompt away. So, um, you know, be the expert in their business, know how it's working, you know, find, pitch, deliver, and focus on booking jobs for these businesses. And you know when it comes to uh you know mindset I think also like hey you know

42:15find a market uh find a a geography and go and do this one thing for 6 months and uh then report back and and see how it goes. Put the blinders on for a while and uh really just focus on adding value and uh and see where you end up. So that's all I got here Greg. That's not just all you got. You know this was been super saucy, super interesting. I think um in a lot of ways this whole episode doesn't feel like like nothing you said was like reinventing the wheel, but that's kind of like the whole point. I I love that

42:51you shine light on this opportunity. Thank you for coming on. You know, you've got a criminally underfollowed YouTube channel and you started to create more video content. So, I'll include a link in the show notes in the description to go and subscribe to The Boring Marketer on YouTube. Um, anything else you'd like to leave people with,

43:09sir? Well, uh, my dogs are barking. Uh, so sorry about that if it comes in through the audio, but you know, I just hope people got value out of this. I think that, you know, um, coming back to the basics and stuff is important from time to time. It really helps me to kind of like step back and think through this type of thing and and reflect uh when it comes to like building my own businesses. And yeah, I just hope people got value out of it. My lead magnet and my funnel is at boringfunnels.com if you want to go check out like a free library

43:40of, you know, what these funnels look like for various types of businesses. I find the best ones on the internet and share them for free. So check that out. And uh Greg, really appreciate you having me, man. It's always always a blast. Yeah. Can't wait. I I want you to come back. You know, you haven't been on in a while, but I want you to come back more often. you're all you're in the in the trenches learning how to use agents to to do marketing uh for all sorts of people, but mainstream, you know, in particular. So, I hope people really like this episode um got value out of it and want you to

44:12come back soon. So, thank you again for coming on the show and I will see you next time. Thanks a lot, Greg. season.