#138 How to Scale your Business with Marketing and AI Part I

Leaders, grow, scale, and exit. Most founders think they're building an asset. Many are building a job. Welcome to Grow, Scale, and Exit.

How to sell your business for millions. Well, hello, everyone. We are talking today about how to scale your business with marketing and AI. So I want to kind of start.

We've gotten some tons of questions from you, And we're going to start by you asking me some and we'll chime in. Sound good? All right. People always ask us about our businesses, right?

And so we have 16 businesses. And one of the things that we've been doing is we've been scaling businesses, we've been selling businesses, and now we're tired. You know, it's exhausting. And we're kind of in a phase right now that we actually like to partner with operators now with the business instead of us having 100% equity, we like to partner with businesses.

And then we like to just partner with businesses who are between two and eight million. And that has so many complexities with those businesses. And so we love to support those businesses and help them. Well, you know, ultimately, you know, we've owned 100% of the company, you have all the responsibility, all the things you have to do, and which is a great thing, because you get all the reward.

You know, on the flip side is we can help more people this way, right? Because now we take a minority share, we add in the things that speed them up and help them grow quicker. That is really the key to what we're trying to accomplish with what we're doing now. Yeah.

So one of the biggest questions that people ask us is how do they break through that ceiling of 1 million? Because I think a lot of people can get to the 500,000, they get to the 100,000, 500,000 to the million, and they need to figure out what they can do to kind of get through that ceiling. Yeah. And, you know, at that point, you know, you're in the business.

You're really at a place where you're just being the operator and you're running, but you don't have time to really think outside of the box. And, you know, we can add in that value to getting them their customer acquisition costs or their lifetime values or, you know, figuring out how to do a different marketing strategy or a different channel for that business. You know, that's really the key. And I think what happens is as the business grows, right, As you start getting past a million and get to 2 million when you get to that middle range You start looking around and thinking the company is making more money but I'm making less money and I'm having so much more headaches and that's when the chaos starts to rain and that's like that That messy middle is what we call it Well, and it's a defeating thing because ultimately you feel defeated because you're like hey I'm growing I'm doing all the things right to grow and grow and grow But every time I add on, I add a new expense or a new thing that's going to take away from my profit margin.

And my goal is to grow the profit margin. Yeah. One of the things you said to someone the other day that I thought was so powerful and I thought this is so true is you were like, you just, we love business owners and we love to help them succeed. You know, I think that's so, that's what makes us different is like, we just really can connect.

We relate. Yeah. We relate. We know what it's like and we know that people came in to help us and that was valuable.

Those ahas, we got excited about those things we would take. That's why we went to the events. That's why we watched all the things we did. That's why people are probably watching this content now is because they want to get those nuggets that are going to take them up a notch.

And when you learn this stuff, you can't take it away, right? And this is one of those things that once you have it you can add it to your business over and over And I like adding it to them Yeah And people always ask us about our portfolio Like are they all in a certain space But there's actually some weird ones that we have in our space that don't all collide. Some of them are in the real estate space. So you want to kind of talk about some of our different businesses that we have?

And some of them are all over the place. Yeah. I mean, well, you know, we vertically integrated and then, you know, for the majority by far, because then when we add one, we could kind of grow the other. And then people saw that value to partner with us on those.

The, you know, the other thing is like, then the things that we kind of like are the things that we kind of see the industry going. I mean, we've added in things that are there and, you know, we've got sweet spots of like what we own that are cash flowing, you know, type things as well that we hold in businesses. And some of the businesses are businesses that are retiring. They just want to kind of, you know, they're done.

And so we can kind of help. But the bulk of who we like to work with is active businesses who they just are stuck and they want to stay active. They want to keep running the business, but they're just burnt out. And so that's where we come along.

We can add cash into the business. We add systems, we add marketing, we add AI, and that's when it can kind of explode. Well, I mean, they're just hitting a wall. They're hitting a ceiling.

I mean, because you have to become someone new. You have to think completely different to go from here to there. And they're just tired of punching at the wall. I mean, if we can get them sooner and they keep that energy, that's even better.

If not, we've got to reinvigorate them and kind of drive them with new vision and new clarity. Like, aha, oh my gosh, this can happen. And that growth and that's exciting. So one of the things that we always say is as the job of the CEO, their first job is to figure out what's the company's right next thing to do?

Like literally, like what's the next right thing? Yeah. I mean, you know, and that's going all the time. I mean, you look back at Blockbuster.

That guy had a decision to make, you know, whether he was going to sell Netflix and didn't, right? That was the wrong decision. And you don't want to make the wrong decision because it's life or death sometimes in making that right decision. And then thinking through that, knowing what's going to come, planning ahead, and then having people around you to kind of guide you through that.

Yeah. And I think the number one thing that I see all businesses is the demand and supply, right? Supply and demand. We learned that in real estate.

Everything in real estate is supply and demand. But guess what? With business, it is too. And so the number one issue that we see every business face is either that they don't have enough leads or customers.

The demand is too low. We need to get more leads and customers. We need more sales. We need more revenue.

and then the other part is other people that we deal with they go look I don't have a supply issue please don't give me any more leads please don't give me any more customers because I can't handle the ones that I have yeah and that's and it it constantly every business it's always like this it should be yeah it should and you know I was talking about that with another company earlier this week you know and and really what we went into is sometimes they couldn't even identify who their customer was, right?

Because they were just all things to all people. And then without doing that, they couldn't simplify their marketing to drive in that customer. And just back to the supply and demand, it always switches back and forth or it should, like you said, and you figure out this. Once we help someone figure out their sales and marketing, then they've got a supply problem and then we've got a demand problem.

Well, then they've got to bring in the salespeople and then get the salespeople going in and then get them up and running So then you have a breakdown in the chain to training people and getting them up to speed on your product and on your services and without losing the connectivity to the customer to the flow of driving that sale all the way through The businesses that are going to win over the next decade are the ones that use AI to work smarter, not harder. So they have an AI assistant that answers your calls and follows up with the leads for you.

Hi there. It's another happy day at Camzell. This is Jonathan. may I please have your name and email address in case we get disconnected?

Shayla Finch, and my email is... It's nice to meet you. How can I help you today? I'm interested in enrolling in business coaching.

That sounds like a great step for your business, Sheila. I can certainly help you get started with that. Since you're interested in our business coaching, I'd like to collect a few more details to make sure we get you connected with the right person. What is the best phone number to reach you at?

Thank you, Sheila. Just to confirm, that's... Yes. Great, thank you for confirming that.

And what is your current business focus or any specific goals you're hoping to achieve with coaching? To grow my business and make more money. That's a fantastic goal, Sheila. I've noted that you're interested in business coaching to focus on growth and increasing profitability.

Someone from our team will reach out to you soon to discuss this further. Basically, it can help you close deals. It can actually do outbound calls as well. But here's the deal.

If you're anything like me, and I'm sure a lot of you guys are, you're running your business. You're driving in sales. You're driving in tons and tons of revenue. You have no time to go figure out all this AI stuff.

Set up the appointment and go ahead and get AI built into your business, whether it's the caller, whether it's the leads, whether it's the automation, whether it's the bot. You need these things in your business. I know you don't have time, but you can make time for this one thing, and now you'll have it for the rest of your life. You can test it out with us.

So when someone on our businesses, right, when someone fills out a form, it calls them right away. It asks them the right question. It connects them to the right person. In business, speed is everything.

So the first person to respond usually wins the deal and we can show you exactly how to do it. Yeah. So let's talk about hiring for just a second. Cause I think one of the things that people get wrong is they feel like I don't have the money.

How many times have we heard? I don't have the money to build a team of A players. And what we say is, if you get your systems right, you can actually have B or C players because the systems are so good that you don't have to pay the money for the A players. Talk about that.

Amazon dominated that space, right? When they set up the warehouses, they had such a good system. They know how a piece went all the way through and what it cost them to move a piece all the way through that they could hire lower cost people to do those, which then says you're providing a job to the masses because then only anybody can qualify. So the more complex it is, the more talented they have to be to solve that problem instead of having it in a system is essentially an economy of loss.

Let's just talk real quick about fires because one of the things that I see people do, it's kind of like... Speaking of fire. Yes. You are looking fire in your outfit as well.

But if you think about kind of like a pool, what I see happening is there's like almost six swimming pools that you have and you've got a hundred buckets. And then what, it's kind of like filling the swimming pool. You go, okay, let me, let me take my bucket. I'm now going to fill this one.

Now I'm going to fill here. Now I going to fill here Now I going to fill here Guess what That pool is not filling up And instead you almost need to take the buckets that you have and fill up one of those swimming pools get that running instead of kind of dividing it up or you can relate it to just the dumpster fire. They're the water essentially, because they're moving from pool to pool to pool. And that really is something that if somebody's paying attention to, it really needs to unpack that.

How many hats are you wearing? How many of these things are you going around versus getting one of these stable and then moving on to the other? And to your point, they say, I don't have the money to add someone into running that. And I go, well, how much is it costing you not to?

But even more than that, it's also, even if you don't even hire anymore, stop trying to fill or put out 10 different fires. Put this fire out. Now we're going to focus on this fire. Now we're going to focus here.

And then at your job as the CEO is to figure out which fire to put out. You know, let's talk about marketing for just a second and branding. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen people do is that they never figure out, number one, who they want to serve. They don't figure out their target market.

And then the second one is they don't choose an enemy and they don't get that enemy going. So talk about both of those things real quick. You know, so just jumping in with the enemy side of it, you know, picking somebody that is going to be your competition and then, you know, throwing rocks at them, if you will, of like, hey, this is we do this better than them. And I think you really dominated that, especially when we started in the real estate space is that you were you saw a problem and you saw that other competition was not solving that problem.

So you just dominated with this is how we solve the problem. We solve that problem. We solve that problem. We solve that problem.

Yeah. Tell them about it. Well, okay. So when I had, okay.

The biggest problem in real estate is the agents don't have to do that. Yeah. So I used to run these ads. Okay.

And it literally, I'm going to, I'm going to show you an ad that I ran and it got so much backlash from people. I literally had one girl in the grocery store at Whole Foods. I never forget it. We were at Whole Foods and she came up and she's like, you're Chantel Ray, aren't you?

And said it really nice. I was like, yes. She's like, well, I just want you to know, I do not like your, your new commercial that you have. It's very offensive to me.

I remember. And yeah, she was like, it's very offensive. You say that real estate agents don't answer their phone and all of this. And I take offense to that because I answer my phone or something along those lines.

She was just really mad. I calmed her down really nice and I tried to calm her down. But you have to throw stones at people. Name some examples of people that throw stones at their competitor.

Going back to that is like- In a nice way. Still in a forum, they would throw stones about an agent not answering the phone. We would all say it. They just didn't do it publicly customer facing.

But when I did it, it was World War II. But the customers weren't allowed to know that essentially they weren't able to answer the phones. And that was a problem for all of us in the industry. Yeah.

So that's a real big issue. And I do want to give you one more little tidbit that I want to talk about with marketing. We are getting ready to do... Our next episode is going to be all about the tips on marketing.

And so you don't want to miss that if you want to get the latest episode Make sure you subscribe so that you can be the first one to get our latest Uh youtubes and stuff out there. So thanks for being with us guys. Hope you enjoyed it till next time. Bye.