Leadership with Vision: Two Worlds, One Mastermind

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to AI for Business.

Speaker B: Hello. Yeah, thank you for, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker A: Of course. Uh, so today I'm speaking with Wesley Huang. He's the founder of sidemate and COO at Agency Workplaces, which both are in the sales and marketing space. Um, in your own words, tell me about yourself, Tell us about yourself. Uh, what do you do these days and what is your focus?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, of course. So spot on. Like you mentioned, I run two different businesses. Right now. I, um, am the CEO of a marketing agency called CIMAE. Essentially we are a B2B marketing company and we work mainly in the tech space. We do primarily cold outreach. Um, and, uh, yeah, we also help our customers with some other additional services like Rev Off. We'll start to help them implementing different, like, AI agents here and there throughout our company as well. So wide ranks of services, whatever the customer is being helped with. But our core service of bread and butter is essentially cold outreach. Um, other than that, I also run operation for a company called Agency Workplaces. It is more on the, um, like the HR consulting side of things. So we give agencies with good culture, unofficial recognition, and just buying just by being a part of the program. They get access to like a bunch of other cool stuff as well. And they get coaching for the leadership team on how to be better leaders. They get access to a community and just some other fun things that we do. So, yeah, those are the two companies that I am, um, running at the moment.

Speaker A: Great. So Agency Workplaces is on the HR and staffing side, if I understood it right.

Speaker B: And coaching, it's all leadership coaching, not necessarily staffing, but yeah, exactly, Leadership coaching.

Speaker A: Great. And simate, if I'm pronouncing you right, is called outreach for B2B companies.

Speaker B: Yep, it's a service company. Exactly.

Speaker A: Okay, which one of these two companies, uh, because running two companies is a lot of work. Which, which one of them takes more of your time these days?

Speaker B: Oh, good question. Definitely sidemate. Um, yeah, I think mainly because with it's the company that I've been running for the past few years, three, four years now, so it's been a while. And we'll scale at the level where it needs more of my attention. Agency Workplaces in the other hand is more of like a long game thing that we like myself and the CEO knew this is what we're going to be doing. Um, just go into the business in the sense that the core, like the way to grow the business is mainly on the branding side of things. Get more people to know about it. And it's interesting we're talking about AI today because we have automated so much of the internal back end, it doesn't cost as much. So really the next step is just scale our brand, get the words out there, get more people to know about a company. So it's definitely less work now, but in the long run, potentially there's more stuff that we can do with it.

Speaker A: Would you say that you're kind of elevating or using sitemate to kind of. Because it's a B2B, right? I'm assuming to help with your agency workplaces to get more visibility, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think with my expertise in the marketing space definitely has helped agency workplaces a ah ton. And I think we've had at this point because of recognition program at ah, this point, I think we closing on about 1,500 applications already. And we are. We literally just launched earlier beginning uh, of the year. So to give the audience some context, it's about four months in. Um, yeah, roughly about a thousand. 1,500 applications already because of the marketing expertise that I was bringing from sidemates.

Speaker A: That's amazing. What, how do you do that? Tell me a little bit more about that. How do you. In what capacity are you using AI? Um, give us a little bit of a peek into the processes and how you do it.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Sounds good. Which, uh, one do you want to know more first? About Sami or about agency More places?

Speaker A: I think I'm very curious to know how you are getting that great traction within a short period of time.

Speaker B: Ah, got it, Got it. With sidemate. I think the good thing about it is I'm the type of person who tried to solve my own problem. I don't try to look into a different industry, get you into a space that I don't know about. So the story was I applied for one of our competitor, um, for agency workplaces and we would reject it because we did not meet the criteria. So I found out that all right, in order for me to meet the criteria, there's a lot of things I have to do. And typically in the agency space that's not really possible for a lot of agencies to meet the criteria. So in a sense I kind of knew that it was a problem if I cares about other people might care about as well. Right. Um, and from me running a marketing agency I had the privilege to take a look at, I get a chance to work with different customers to learn more about strategy, positioning and I got to Learn a lot when it comes to the psychology of things on how to get people interested in your product, how to do marketing, how to build a brand and things like that. And yeah, I just take that, apply it to agency workplaces, build out the workflow, build out the code, email funnel, build out all that marketing effort for agency workplaces and we just run away with it.

Speaker A: Great. Okay, so you basically use tried and tested workflows and methods that you were using for signit, that was working out and you applied it to um, agency workplace. That's amazing.

Speaker B: Correct, Correct.

Speaker A: How would you say in what capacity are you kind of using AI? I'm curious because I know that AI is actually helping a lot with um, helping humans to not to do mundane work and do what's interesting and exciting for us. It's going more towards that way. It's not 100% there obviously. It's just getting started. In what capacity do you think uh, your company uh, has started using is or you see that other companies in your space have started using it and is it really helping? Is it doing it right? Um, or you know, we still have to stick sometimes to you know, what's the way that we've been doing things traditionally.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we've been getting into AI for I would say a very long time now. Even like since the start of agency. This is when GPT first came out and even take a step beyond that. I, before I started my whole business and all that kind of stuff, I was actually an AI and machine learning engineer from Apple. So I build all this automation, I build all this workflow, I know what machine learning is, all that kind of stuff. Um, so we've been tapping into AI for a very long time now and I think it was up until recently where Claude started to deploy like all different features products, which is amazing. That was when we wanted to look into automating as much the backend processes as much as possible. So even up to this point I would say that I want to be careful what I'm saying because obviously things are changing very quickly. Um, I would say right now our focus is to really build out, uh, or not build, but automating as much as the backend process as much as we can. Right. So in both businesses anything that is related to admin, fulfillment, finance, all the kind of stuff has been or has, has been or is, is getting automated by AI. I think on the flip side, the one thing that we are not automating yet and I don't think we're ever going to get to this point is anything that relates to like a human interactions or creative or strategy. That's something that perhaps we use AI to give us advices and run through like a quick checklist to see what they think. But it's still coming out from our team. Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker A: Amazing. So basically what's more, more of the operationals, those are the ones that kind of we can take the humans out and kind of replace it with um, you know, AI because it's straightforward what to do and wherever we need the interactions to be human, we still want to keep the humans obviously and kind of um, in, in the process. Right, so it's basically when you say you mean more the operation side.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. I think maybe the better way for me to think about it, uh, something I have my team to think about it as well, is if there is a step by step workflow instruction and is repeatable. We're doing it the same thing every single time, every single week, every single day, every single time we bring on a new customer. That's something we can automate. Right. Other things like maybe understanding the customer product, really figure out a new strategy that is something is still requiring our internal team to have like a human to human interaction with.

Speaker A: Let me switch gears a little bit into the type of ICP that you're going after, um, for uh, your agency workplaces. Um, yeah, um, tell me about that. What are the type of um, icps, uh, and yeah, how are you kind of what is your value prop for them mainly?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. For agency workplaces we're uh, going after all agencies. So specifically I would say, well right now we're not really, we're not really going after development agency but mainly creative or uh, marketing agencies. Really the value proposition is if you have a good culture, we give you a recognition, an official recognition for that. You get publications and everything gets brag. Get to show that to you, um, your hiring funnel and all that kind of stuff. And when they join the program, when they be a part of the program, I think what they realize is they're getting a lot more than just a recognition. They get a community, they get leadership coaching. If they have a new manager who just got promoted or they just brought on like a new leadership team member, then we help coach those um, folks to be a better leader as well. So no such as added bonus. But what most people are finding more valuable compared to just having the award they can brag about.

Speaker A: Got it. So it's basically they're giving them the kind of recognition and that is a leverage for them. How do you build that? How did you build the kind of credibility? Because you're saying you're the only agency that's doing that, it seems so far. Um, how do you. How do they get the credit? They can bring kind of that trust. What is the. How did you build the kind of trust with them? They say, oh, okay, yeah, what we say and when we promote you, it means something.

Speaker B: That's a great question. And I think that's the long game that we're playing. All right. Like, the brand is not going to build itself within the first year. That is something that is just going to take more time. When people start talking about it more, when people m. More people know about us in the next few years, then the brand will be, I guess, like, get to the next level. But for now it's just simply words of mouth. Um, um, when they join the program, when they, when they become a part of it, they realize, like, hey, I'm actually getting all these benefits. They start telling their friends and all that kind of stuff. But our goal is, few years from now, we are able to build a brand that eventually attracts everyone, can start coming in without having us to reach out to them directly.

Speaker A: So that you're still building the brand ups. And, and that is, I'm assuming, so the kind of referral system I'm assuming right now is the main, um channel that's bringing clients to you. What would be the next best? What were you hoping for to be the next best? Especially like when you have signmate and you're kind of using those cold outreaches. You're saying that's still not the first. It's the referral for switches. Makes sense. Um, what are you hoping for to be the next best, um channel?

Speaker B: Yeah, Um, I would say outreach right now is our number one channel for agency workplaces. And then referral, um, would be second. I think the next bets that I'm hoping for is perhaps some sort of like, ads channel where we can start running ads. And that's going to require maybe like us, uh, bringing in the initial revenue first before we can do all kind of stuff. Of course, down the road we're hoping that we can just relying on our brand. Right. So I think so far those are the two things that we've been doing. So outreach, first, referrals and then ads is probably up next. And then once the brand is established, then that's something we really want to double down into.

Speaker A: Okay. So first is basically, uh, the outreach, the cold outreach. I'm assuming. And then it's the referrals that are probably from those cold outreaches that turn, they turn into warm. And then next is that you want to use ads to kind of promote yourself so that you will attract as opposed to you going after them. Um, I'm curious about the cold outreach because you said, I thought first that the referral would be first, but cold outreach is doing better, which obviously it makes sense because it's a wider net. You can talk, reach out to a lot more companies that may, you know that your value prop means something to them. Um, in the cold outreach space, what methods would you, would you say? Is it like email called Email outreach is at LinkedIn outreach. Um, which methods or which channels do you, do you recommend?

Speaker B: Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Um, and then this is where Signmate, my other actually agency comes in because we run outreach for all, ah, B2B companies. And um, email is something we always look into first because with email you can actually scale indefinitely. Like you can send as many emails you want to. Of course you need to have to have the right setup or in the space we call it the right infrastructure in place. But theoretically, depending how much you can spend, you can scale email indefinitely. With LinkedIn there's a few caveats, right? Like each link you cannot buy like fake LinkedIn profile and start sending out like all these messages. You have to use like a real human profile. And the caveat is there's a limit on how many you can set, right? Same thing with calling, of course, you can use a power dialer and you can do cold call, a lot of them, but you need to have like an actual human doing cold calling, right? Maybe in the future, in a few months from now, we may be able to see like an AI who's very good at doing cold calling. But with email is something that we always look into. At first we use LinkedIn as like a secondary channel in the sense that if somebody who was to be interested in a product or service, but let's say they stop responding after that, then we use LinkedIn as like a follow up channel to make sure that we can get in touch with the person so that they can continue on the sales process with their clients.

Speaker A: Got it. You know what, Recently I have seen some cold outriggers in my inbox in LinkedIn. And uh, what caught my attention was that some people, I don't know if it's an automated system doing that or are they just doing it one person at a time, that they are reaching out With a voicemail, a voice message. So they're basically leaving a voice. Is that. Do you think that's AI or is it something that people are, you know, find out. Okay, that's a tool in LinkedIn. Why not use it? Because I reply to those. Even if it's a no, I'll reply to them.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, uh, it's all automated. It is something we actually, yeah, we, we. We did that a few years ago. M. And even nowadays, you could even do. You can automate like a custom video for person as well. So the way that we do it is we have the client record themselves talking in front of the camera once. And, um, they talk about the product and things like that. And when we automate it using AI, the client, the only thing we would change is the client, the prospect's name, the person that we're reaching out to. Right. So we swap the name, we might change the prospect company, and then in the background, we automate it in the way that it looks like, um, a customer is scrolling through the web page of the prospect that they're reaching out to. Right. So I would be like, I'll just record myself one. I'll run a couple of cold email, cold LinkedIn. When I reach out to you, Sarah, you will see me mentioning your name and I'll scroll through your website.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But all of that is automated.

Speaker A: Got it. Wow.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I have heard, I've heard about the video, but I haven't heard about the voice is there. How is it. Have you heard of any tools that kind of. You can just do the LinkedIn outreach with voice that is kind of doing that?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Um, well, we don't do that anymore nowadays just because the cost doesn't make sense for us. But you. Yeah, even things like Descript, which is like a video editor, you can have like an AI voice that can do it for you now. So every time you do like, uh, you do like a video and you might have like a mistake somewhere in the audio, you can literally just record your voice once and then you can generate like an AI sound of you just say whatever you wanted to say. So there's a lot of tools that can help you with that nowadays.

Speaker A: And do you think those are kind of helpful? I know that I. It made me reply, um, um. But in terms of accuracy, like if it said my name wrong, I'd probably like you m. Know.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What would you say is the level of accuracy, how much you would rely on it as someone who's an expert in this Field and you know, no machine learning, you know, all of that stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah, fair enough. And I think you have a very good point as well. I would say depending on the accuracy is something that we need to think about. Is it something that we should use or should not use? Right. Um, this is kind of not related to the AI, uh, voice, but if I were to give you example, it would be like this. Let's say if I want to reach out to John. Right. John has a coworker, his name is Bob. Right now what I can do is I can use AI to do a research on John and find out that Bob is his co worker. So in the email I can say something like hey John, I have this product. I think it would be very nice. Um, I know you're busy, but should I reach out to Bob instead and maybe I get that? Right. But let's say if Bob is not the right person to follow up with, it kind of make my credibility goes away. Right. So in this case it would might be, it might be better off if I mentioned to John. Hey John, if it's not a good fit, can you please refer me to the right team member? I can reach out to you instead. Right. So I'm not, I'm um, no longer mentioning Bob. It's a more generic message, but it works better than if I was to get the information wrong.

Speaker A: That's a great tip. So basically what you're saying is that the less we were giving the. We're giving the model, the less chances to make mistake.

Speaker B: Exactly. Unless you know a hundred percent sure there's some data that you can get with AI that you know for a fact that it is accurate. But if you're just guessing, especially things like role description, like you have no idea who's in charge of what in what organization, I would say just give it.

Speaker A: Mhm, mhm. Yeah, understood, understood. Um, but your recommendation for cold outreach for the most part is basically email. It seems that it's working. It's the safest and bet still. Um, and it works kind of well. Um, and tell me about Cymate. What type of ICP are you targeting? In simate, who do you want to kind of this podcast to get to, who do you want to, you know, target with it?

Speaker B: Yeah, fair enough. Um, with Cimi, we work with B2B companies with cold email. Really we can only do B2B. There's a lot of laws and regulations when it comes to B2C and we focus primarily in the tech space. So software company, tech startups, we Also work with other services as well. So any company that are B2B, they are, would be under our ICPS. But in general, we try to focus more on the technology sector.

Speaker A: Got it. So B2B companies, if they are more, more focused on technology, those are the ICP free assignment. And you can help them with, um, uh, outreach and kind of. They're out. They're. They're out. They're the cold outbound reach. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, what would you say? What is your main bottlenecks in both of these? Whichever. Whichever company you want to. You want to talk about what is your bottleneck? Kind of keeps you up at night, or if not at night, just makes you wake up earlier.

Speaker B: Oh, man, that's such an interesting question. Um, I don't have much to say about agency workplaces. The bottleneck for it, as I mentioned, is just the brand gift, right? It just. We have to invest into the company in the long run. We just have to understand that right now not a lot of people know about us. Maybe five years, ten years from now, it will be a different story. Right? But I can definitely speak for Sime. And, uh, I think this is the part where AI can comes in a lot. Um, the biggest bottleneck for us really is a margin. I think that most people, I don't know, like, they don't have the right expectation when it comes to cold email. So it does take a lot of effort for us to try to explain to them, like, look, we charge you this much, but in reality we don't really pocket all of them. Right. Um, it's kind of funny because if you take like a cold email agency and you take an advertisement agency into comparison, right? Let's say if a company wants to run ad, right. They kind of expect that. Okay, if I want to work with an agency, I have to pay a service fee for the agency. Now I also have to pay for the ad spend, right? So let's say this month I want to spend like $10,000 on ad. I pay $10,000 and I pay a fee for the agency to help me run that ad. Right. With cold email, I don't know why the expectation is the complete opposite. Like they expect everything just grouped together. But no, it's just like ad. There's infrastructure, there's data, uh, there's so much thing that is going on. So definitely the margin is something that keeps me up at night. And I think also the reason why I'm very, very excited for all of this AI age nowadays is because that is going to Help us optimize our margin because now we can cut through a lot of these where we would need maybe like subscribe to a more expensive tool. Maybe we have to hire another person to do it that we didn't have the budget to look into. Well now we can't because all we gotta do is just automate it.

Speaker A: So if I want to say like in a nutshell, what is keeping you up at night, it is people's expect clients expectations that you want to help them kind of to adjust with what is really possible to do with the uh, email outbound. And then you're also thinking how you can help them really with the tools that are out there in the AI space. And you're constantly on the look to find maybe the best tools to be able to kind of or you know, create maybe the, the tools that are going to really help them kind of maybe get closer to that expectation or kind of being able to explain that um, how it actually can work and help them. Sure.

Speaker B: Yeah. I would say the margin is the bottleneck and with AI, ah, it's going to help us with having better margin that allow us to scale the agency even to the next level.

Speaker A: Mhm. Amazing. Got uh, it, um, I would like to know a little bit against switching gears. Um, do you have a, other than uh, the outreach systems, a kind of more of a structured system or process that will consistently bring in these new companies, let's say these startups, um, in a way that you kind of. Well, let's say it this way, more qualified leads, more qualified companies that you can actually serve them and help them. Because there's not. We can't help everybody. We would love to but we can't help everybody. How would you. Is there a system that you follow, say oh, I know that or I get these signals that tells me these companies are the ones that I can help best.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the short answer is yes. And it all is all on the data side of things more than what channel you're using with. So for example, if I want to work with B2B companies, of course that's something everybody can help. Let's say I only want to work with tech company who has maybe like 10 to 15 employees, who has all this criteria. They have to be in the fintech space and the CEO has to be younger than 28 years old or whatever it might be. Right. What I would do is start off with big list, right. Like this is all the B2B companies that are in the tech space. Right. And then what I would do is I would use AI to filter it all out. Right. I go one step at a time, right. Maybe the first step is filtering out and removing all the BB company in the US only. Right. And then the next step might be to look into the companies that are in the fintech industry. The next step would be see if this company has had an increase in headcount for the past three years. The next step would be see if that company have a founder who's younger than whatever age you want it to be.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So you see right here it's a step by step by step by step process. It um, started with a, um, big list, right. And B2B Tech Company. This is like hundred if not millions of company out there. And now I'm able to condense the list and really laser target on the companies that I want to work with. Right. And from there I can find actual decision makers from those companies that I want to reach out and contact them. Right. So this is on the data side of things. And of course what I can do with this data is I could run multiple, like different channel with it. If I want to do cold email outreach, I just need to enrich the person's email or to send the email to them. If I want to go LinkedIn, I can enrich the LinkedIn profile and send them a message on LinkedIn if I want to run ads for them. Well, guess what, I have the list and I can also run LinkedIn ads to them as well. So it doesn't necessarily about the channel that you want to go with. It's can you get a targeted list that you know for sure that is going to be your icp?

Speaker A: Would you think that is kind of, this kind of pipeline would be more predictable or um, the more you know about them, would it make them even more predictable or I mean it does, right? But we don't know still how, what percentage of the data that we have is kind of reliable or even if it's out there about these people. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, a hundred percent, uh, super predictable. I mean there's still going to be things that you're not able to see from a company perspective. Right. You might not be able to see maybe like the company like spreadsheet. Do you know for sure that they have like good cash flow? Do you know if the person you're working with is like nice person or are they like a, like a troublemaker that you're getting yourself into? Right. Those are the few things that you don't know what you're getting Yourself, yourself into. But at the very least you get a chance to filter out um, most of the criteria that you want to work with. Right. Uh, for fancy reward, this is what we call marketing qualified leads. Um, and this is something we can figure it out. When they hop into like the first initial conversation with people or with us, this is what we transition them into. Sales qualified leads and this is where we see if they have the budget. Ah, are they a good person, are they a good culture fit to work with our agency?

Speaker A: Yeah, got it. Okay, so from marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads to that process, um, what question were you hoping me hoping that I asked or want me to ask? Um, that you want to cover that. I have it. Wow, that was a long way to ask. Is there anything else that you want to kind of share that I didn't touch on?

Speaker B: I think you asked great questions. Actually. I think in general I'm more of like, I think my skill set is more on like the operational side of things. Like maybe just how my brain work. It's just like a bunch of like different cylinders just firing out whenever like a problem comes in. So I just think things from a very operational perspective and I think nowadays the um, the biggest question, not just myself or you are asking is like how do business start adopting all of these AI tool? Right. And I think I hopefully can briefly mention a few ways that businesses can do that. They can use AI to help leverage like their marketing to help whether or not a prospect is a good sales qualified lead. They can use that in the internal operation. But I think in general anything that you could like you have a good defined processes for like you know, this is step one and then step two, step three, step four. And you know for a fact that that is a repetitive, repeated, uh, repeated task, then that's something you can bring AI into. But that's the number one question that myself, my team is trying to figure it out and I'm sure our business owners are also trying to figure out how to bring AI, uh into the company as well, so.

Speaker A: Understood, understood. So so far as your ICP and the people you want to kind of listen to and know about your companies, it's the startups with technical product and all basically tech products, um, and other companies that do B2B and also I'm assuming the um, the marketing agencies that want to get that kind of recognition, kind of leveraging your um, agency platform. Um, um, who else would if I did I miss any, any kind of ICP Persona over here or not?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, No, I think you hit the spot on both companies I'm running.

Speaker A: Thanks. Um, and last but not least, how can people find you and connect with you?

Speaker B: They find me on LinkedIn. I'm probably most active on that platform. So it's LinkedIn slash, I think, like in. And then my username is heywestley. You can also find me on YouTube as well. On YouTube is @hi, Wesley instead. So, hey, Wesley on LinkedIn and hi, Wesley on YouTube.

Speaker A: Awesome. I'm going to leave the links, um, for the listeners to be able to easily find you. This was great. Thanks so much for your time.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me, Sarah.