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The Transparent Podcast
The Transparent Podcast
Ryder Harris - AI-Adoption and Entrepreneurial Success
What if you could transform your career using AI tools? Join me, Nick Ford, as I chat with Rider Harris, the visionary behind GoBananas AI, who transitioned from a sales role in fintech to launching a groundbreaking AI-focused business. Together, we reveal how generative AI tools like ChatGPT inspired Ryder to create workshops that span various sectors, including real estate, marketing, and finance. We pull back the curtain on Transparent Staffing's dedication to transparency and how it's helped us achieve impressive retention rates. Ryder shares his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting how motivational figures like Alex Hormozi helped navigate the challenges of starting a new venture.
Ryder and I unravel the fascinating tale of AI discovery that began with a canceled university course and morphed into a journey of self-driven research and innovation. Our discussion underscores the pivotal role of sales skills for any budding entrepreneur and questions the lack of formal sales education in business programs.
Welcome to the Transparent Podcast. This is your host, nick Ford, founder of Transparent Staffing. This week I have a guest I'm very excited about, ryder Harris. Ryder, I will let you introduce yourself and your company.
Speaker 2:Nick, thank you for having me man. Yeah, my name is Ryder Harris. I'm the founder of a company called GoBananas AI in Kansas City. I founded it close to two years ago. Right now, what I do is I travel the country, I do AI education, AI workshops, kind of just getting generative AI tools in the hands of people all over the country and all different industries, whether it's Austin, Texas, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Minneapolis, Dayton, Ohio. I've been all over the place and that part has been really cool, getting to meet so many different people from so many different parts of the country within so many different verticals Real estate, mortgage, sales, marketing, finance just kind of been all over the place. But yeah, it's been an absolute blast.
Speaker 2:I started the company about two years ago when I was using ChatGPT in my inside sales role at a fintech company in Kansas City called C2FO. I was using it for emails, call scripts, social media content, idea generation, overturning objections, and I just got super excited and that's when I really realized the power of this tool. Had a lot of people internally at the company that I was working with at the time asking me to teach them how to use ChatGPT. I had people externally. I had friends, former colleagues, asking me how to use ChatGPT, and that's when I really knew that I had something and I knew that ChatGPT and generative AI tools were going to be the real deal.
Speaker 2:So went to a conference a little bit after that in Los Angeles. It was a tech conference and met a lot of forward thinking people with an entrepreneurial mindset while I was out there. That kind of encouraged me to take this leap. So went to that conference, met the right people, got in the right mindset, came back to Kansas City and started the company and since then it's been two years of traveling, helping people understand how to use AI tools for their specific niche and their specific industry. And you know we're going to keep that going in 2025. So super excited.
Speaker 1:That is super exciting. You know, AI is obviously a huge buzzword right now. It's kind of like when the cloud got big. It's like the next thing that every company seems to be advertising some sort of AI tool or chatbot or feature and you see it on Google and all these different areas, and definitely something that I, as a business owner, am constantly getting hit up about as some AI tool that's going to change the way I work and I have used it some, but I'm probably where you were two years ago when you were using it, like I use it to, like you know, write emails or like help me write a job description, which, like it's pretty amazing, like I'll put in a prompt for a job description and they'll spit out something that's 85, 90% like correct, and then I just have to go tweak it.
Speaker 1:So just for that alone it's helpful. But there's so many other tools I'm sure I just am uneducated on. So I'm sure I could learn a lot from you. And to give you a little background about transparent staffing I believe in bringing transparency to this industry. I just think that there's a lot of room in recruiting to just be more open and honest with candidates, be more open and honest with clients, and I'm in permanent placement, so I really want each candidate that I refer to a company to be a long-term fit. I don't want there to be high turnover, and so I think the best way to do that is just to be transparent with the candidate and the client about the job.
Speaker 1:And we've had a lot of success. We've made close to 40 placements now with the company and we've had about 98% retention rate. Out of those 40 placements, only one has ended up leaving in the first three to six months so been pretty, pretty solid. As far as retention, I've had a lot of happy clients and candidates, and so you know we had five people that we placed start in January. So shout out to my VP of sales and recruiting, matt, who's joined me in November and has just hit the ground running. So so tell me a little bit, getting in the weeds a little bit, but you were in sales and then you branched out on your own. How did you figure out, like just the basic stuff, like you know, getting your LLC, getting like a checking account or what, what other, whatever other little things that, like people are kind of like? I can't figure that out. How did you go about doing all that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've got to give a shout out to Alex Hormozy for that one. I was a big Alex Hormozy, you know podcast. I was trying to read all of his books. Like I was super big into Alex Hormozy at that time and I think that's something that really helped, you know, give me that push to start the company was surrounding myself with you know, entrepreneurial podcasts and content. So I just remember there were a few YouTube videos that he had talked about where he said so many people drag their feet when they're starting a company and you know they say they have this idea and then they don't do it because they're like oh man, yeah, I've got to do the LLC, oh, I've got to go to the bank and I've got to get this account opened up, and it's like that is not stuff that takes long at all.
Speaker 1:No, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I had a connection to a lawyer. I know there are super easy ways that you can do the LLC online but, honestly, it was my first time doing an LLC. I wanted to make sure I was doing it the right way, so went through a lawyer for that and then just went to the bank that I was already using and opened up a business account and just like that, I mean, you've got the LLC, you've got the business bank account. You're kind of ready to go at that point. So I've got to give a shout out to Hormozy for that one. And, honestly, just YouTube, it's such a blessing right now. How much value is out there for free on places like YouTube, places like even TikTok, like, say, what you want about TikTok? You can learn a lot from there. Um, now, all of the content you consume probably isn't learning, but there's still right.
Speaker 2:You can learn from um. So I would just say, you know, just taking advantage of the free resources out there is what really helped me get going as far as you know, just getting started getting off of the ground and taking care of those things. Because when you first started the company especially, I mean I was 24. I had just turned 24 when I started that business, so I felt like a little bit lost. I'm like, dang, how do I go about this? How do I go about the bank account and the LLC? So finding that content definitely helped and once you get that done, it feels like you kind of got rid of a burden and now it's time to go make money and go show people that you know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. That is a hard, uh transition to. I mean, anyone could go. It's like a hundred bucks in georgia to register an llc and you could probably do it in 30 minutes. Yeah, but going from the point of like having a website and like a name to getting people to pay you to do something as a, as a jump, I uh I still remember when I got started.
Speaker 1:I wanted to get into recruiting. I left Jackson Healthcare, had a $2.5 million book that I left behind because I wanted to just get out. I was burnt out. I was working like 70, 80 hours a week. Our second born was born right before I left.
Speaker 1:It was just time to go and I went out into outside sales, knowing that I wanted to learn the outside sales part so I could do my own recruiting business.
Speaker 1:And so the way I got it started was this company just posted on LinkedIn saying they needed help with job post writing, and at that time I was selling employee benefit programs. So I was like building out employees medical insurance, their dental and vision insurance for employers. So I was like building out employees medical insurance, their dental vision insurance for employers. So like small businesses like 30 to 200 employees or so, and so this lady just posted online, said she needed help with that, and I asked, I sent her a message and said, yeah, I can help you. And I was thinking like I'll get to know her through this and then I can talk to them about benefits. And so she sets me up with a call for that afternoon, like the day. I messaged her on LinkedIn and it ended up being the owner of the company that she had set me up to talk with and I was like, oh, this is awesome. And he didn't own just one company, he owned four companies there you go.
Speaker 1:So this guy was like big, big shot, like just the nicest guy too. Just he's a south georgia guy. And anyway we talked for like 20, 30 minutes and he kind of just interviewed me on like how I would do recruiting for his companies, mainly the steel manufacturing company that he owned that was selling survival storm shelters. They still sell them in home depot and Lowe's and stuff. And so he just kind of interviewed me and at the end he was like all right, well, you know, sounds good, send me a proposal for what you charge me to do all of our recruiting and staffing. And I was like I was not expecting that. I thought that he just wanted me to like help them out for free or whatever. And I was like, yes, sir, no problem, I'll have you a proposal by Friday. And I sent him two proposals because that was one of the sales tactics I learned If you give two options, usually they'll choose one rather than say no. And so we had gone on a call Friday and they hired me to do all the recruiting and they paid me lower than what I would charge now.
Speaker 1:But I was like an internal recruiter, I used all their software and technology. So I went out and registered the LLC, went out and registered a FEIN and a bank account and all that stuff. And what was nice for me? I was going to ask you that I was able to get it going as a side business for about a year before I had to quit my job. It was just side income and it got to the point where I was ready to leave my position as an employee benefits consultant and my staffing business had picked up enough to where I could live off of it. So how did you? Did you just like quit cold Turkey and like hope that you were going to make money? Or like, how did you transition into entrepreneurship?
Speaker 2:it was. It was a side hustle before it became the main hustle, but it was a much shorter time frame than yours, because you said you had a year yeah, I started it in january 2021 and I didn't quit my job until 2022.
Speaker 1:so yeah, I was over a little over a year, yeah.
Speaker 2:Gotcha Okay, cause mine I mean mine was probably geez two, three months, and it kind of just got to the point where I was like you know, ai is getting hot, like this is something that I'm super passionate about, this is something that I'm excited about. Like screw it, I'm just going to jump in. So that's a. That's awesome, man. But for you to get that big opportunity right out of the gate when people say, when that door is open, you got to go through it, because you never know when it's going to close and close forever. Taking advantage of those big opportunities early on and making sure you hit on them and don't miss them, that's something I've realized is super important. So that's a pretty good way to get started, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was nice. And the nice thing was I was very transparent with my boss about it and I told him like, hey, this company wants to pay me to do some recruiting. Do you care if I have a side thing doing recruiting? And he was like, nope, we all have side hustles. He was in real estate, known like Airbnbs and stuff, and he was the vp of sales and, um, he's like, just, you know, if you, if your numbers ever drop off and you start slacking in your job here, I'll ask you how much time you're on recruiting though?
Speaker 1:and I was like that's completely fair, no problem, definitely definitely more than fair for that to be yeah, they were super cool and they just saw it as like, oh well, like he's going to build a relationship with company and we'll probably sell him benefits in a year and so anyway, that's how I got it going. But you know how did you like? Where did you first hear about AI? Because I mean, that was such a like leap. I mean chat, gpt went live and all of a sudden everyone had access to AI and it was like not really being used at all before that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's something I was even curious about. So I graduated from the university of Missouri in 2021 and going into my senior year, there was a sales course. I had never been more excited in my life to take this class and it was AI machine learning sales and, like I was sitting down with with my uh, my counselor or whatever whoever the person that helped you put your schedule together was, I forget what the advisor.
Speaker 2:Yes, advisor. Um, I was sitting down with my advisor and you know she was telling me you know, senior year, these are the last things you need to do, yada, yada. And I kind of had some freedom that I could choose with one of my classes. So I saw AI and machine learning sales and I was so pumped up because that's something I've always kind of been into the tech, the innovative type stuff. And then, about a month before we go back to school, so at about the end of July, I got a notification that the class was not going to happen because there weren't enough people that signed up for it. And I was so, so, so disappointed. So I ended up taking some of my extra time that semester just doing research on. You know what is this AI? When's it going to step on the scene? All of that because it feels like AI stepped on the scene just like that, like it was all-.
Speaker 1:That's how it felt to me.
Speaker 2:Exactly, it was all futuristic movies, it was robots, it was everyone just thinking of how AI was so out in the future. And then, winter of 2022, it's just like boom, ai is here, everyone's using it, like it's arrived. So I would say my middle to late college years is when I really had my interest peaked with AI. I really am curious how that class would have gone and how much. Maybe it would have fast-tracked me even more. Maybe I would have graduated college and went straight into the AI industry instead of fintech. But that was an opportunity that would have been super cool to have. But at the end of the day, I ended up learning a lot of it on my own, which I feel like was nice watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, and I think that's when I really started to get interested. And then it was awesome seeing chat GPT step on the scene and I had had a little bit of experience, and I definitely had more experience than, you know, the the average person at that time.
Speaker 2:So that's when I felt like I was really well positioned to.
Speaker 1:Nice. Well, that's really cool and very exciting that you were, you know, had an eye on it from that early on, like while you're still in college. I remember being in college and I just remember hearing professional sales degree and immediately being like that's my degree, like.
Speaker 1:I knew I was in sales and I think it's a shame because you know, for one Harding University it's a Christian school in Arkansas, I went there to play baseball on a scholarship and they don't have that degree anymore. And the business department, you know, I guess my advisor retired and he was over that degree and just no one else took it up. And so many people who come out of business are going to go into sales. They're not going to be like the management majors, they're not going straight into a management role. I mean more than likely I don't think they should out of college. They're probably going to go into some kind of sales role or some kind of other individual contributor role right so, and I think sales is just.
Speaker 1:You know, especially for yourself, like you want to go into entrepreneurship, you have to know how to sell. You got to be able to sell people. There's no other way around it. So you know. One question I have I know you go and do these workshops for companies that I guess want to implement AI tools. So do you think? You know? I had a friend that told me, you know, I've been in leadership roles with my company and then also in other settings, and he said that you know, whenever I'm implementing an idea, that an A plus idea that I come up with on my own is actually worse than a B plus idea that you came together as a team to implement. How do you feel about that in regards to companies implementing AI tools?
Speaker 2:A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:It's something that I believe to be maybe not completely on board with it, but they need to be open-minded enough to check it out, because I have gone into workshops before where the person that you know, the decision maker and this was great for me at the time the decision maker was all in but the rest of the association or the rest of the board was very skeptical.
Speaker 2:So then you go in and you know, from my perspective, I go in, there's my one contact that I was super excited to finally meet in person, and then you have the rest of the skeptics in the crowd and it's just, it's kind of hard, hard to to maneuver that as opposed to everyone being on board and everyone being excited about AI and everyone being excited about, you know, being innovative and all of those things.
Speaker 2:So luckily, as time has gone on, it's a lot easier for me to be in the situation where everyone is on board because there's so many statistics out there and case studies of how beneficial AI is right now. But from my experience, 100%, it's something that I think everyone needs to be on board with, or at least be open-minded to the potential of what that idea could expand to in the future. So I would say it makes it a lot easier just on everyone. I think it's easier on the implementation. I think when everyone is excited about it, they give it more effort as well. So if I go into a workshop and everyone's not on board.
Speaker 2:You're going to see people on their phones. You're going to see people not necessarily paying attention. You're not going to get as many questions in the Q&A session. So if you can get people excited and that's what I've tried to do at the beginning of workshops now is I don't just dive straight into all right, here's what ChatGPT is and here's how you're going to use it. I like to bring up statistics, I like to bring up case studies, I like to bring up past people I've worked with and how much it's benefited them. All of those things, things. So I agree with the point that you brought up and luckily, when it comes to AI, I feel like that is becoming the case more and more, as opposed to when I first started. It was a lot of people that I'd have the call with and they were excited about it, but then they bring it to the board or they bring it to the other decision makers and they're like, yeah, this isn't really something we're looking to move forward with yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's tough. I mean it's a new technology, especially if you've got a bunch of old school leaders. You know it can often be that way where, like, the executive team is maybe more old school, maybe kind of stuck on their ways sometimes and just don't want to. They're going to be the late adopters. They're not going to be the early adopters to technology and they want to. They're going to be the late adopters. They're not going to be the early adopters to technology and they want to wait and see. Um, they may just be scared of it or they want to be more vetted or whatever. But I think you know, I think it's spot on 99% of the time. If you're in a team environment, get buy-in, because it's so difficult when people aren't bought into an idea to implement it.
Speaker 1:Because I remember being in a boardroom meeting I was on a sales team, recruiting team and the executive vice president of the company so like one of the top four people in the business comes in and he's going to do this whiteboarding meeting with all 30 of us on my division and he's like all right, we're going to figure out this new way to do recruiting and sales on y'all's team and we're going to whiteboard it together and we like spent like two hours like whiteboarding this thing and it was like everyone was super pumped about it, cause all 30 of us like chimed in and we're like putting ideas in and he would kind of change it. And we're like this is awesome, like we were back in with the VPs and some of the directors and we're going to put this into a system that we can roll out to y'all and have it be clean and easy to follow and stuff. And then in the next couple of weeks we'll roll it out to y'all and we're all like, okay, great, this is going to be awesome. A few weeks come by and he brings us into another meeting and he rolls out this new system and it was 100% not what we talked about at all, like completely different.
Speaker 1:And all of us were just like why did we meet for two hours a few weeks ago? Like you clearly either didn't listen to what we said or you'd already put this together and didn't care what we said at all. So he implemented it. We lost a lot of money in like three to six months. No one followed it and everyone just went back to doing things the way they've been doing it before, but then the culture on the team had been killed because it was just like, okay, our leaders just don't care at all about what we think. So that's the bad side of not if you have one guy who came up with something in a room by himself and no one else is about in absolutely, and especially with the the culture thing that you had touched on at the end.
Speaker 2:I mean that's, that's everything. I mean we, even you, even go beyond. Uh, you know business with that. You go into sports like you. Culture is everything in every aspect and yeah, when something like that happens, um, I mean you lose trust somewhere Somewhere, some sort of trust gets lost somewhere within the organization and that leads to a decline in culture. And yeah, I mean you can even look at some sports teams, I mean, that haven't succeeded over the past couple of decades and you know they're bringing in talent. But it's also, you know there's some other things there. It's culture, it's the owner, it's the GM, it's the coaching staff, it's all of these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know if you follow basketball, but look at Nico Harrison and what he's done to the culture with the Dallas Mavericks. I'm from Dallas, okay, my brother is a diehard Cowboys diehard Mavericks fan.
Speaker 2:They just killed that entire town's mentality around the mavericks like they all think that they made a terrible and pretty much everyone in the nba thinks it's a terrible decision yeah, I've even seen some conspiracies with that trade of like they're trying to tank the organization, which is insane to me, like I've never seen that bold of accusations after a trade before I, oh, I've read things that Nico Harrison's like a plant and that he was planted there to like bring it down and like Cuban.
Speaker 1:Mark Cuban like apparently he tried to shut it down, like he went in and tried to stop it before it got finalized and it was already like a done handshake deal. No way going back before Cuban found out about it. And then Anthony Davis gets like a done handshake deal. No way going back before cuban found out about it.
Speaker 2:and then and then anthony davis gets hurt in the first 30 minutes. Right, I mean, it's, it's like you can't even make it up. It is. It is weird. But yeah, like you had just said, like that adds to you. You also wonder how the the locker room is feeling. Like. How is it affecting the locker room? We know how it's affecting the city, but how's it affecting the locker room? Like none of those players now think they're safe, none of them.
Speaker 1:It just it's a completely disposable exactly yeah, well, jason kidd, he, he responded to it really well, but he was like they asked him do you know about this? The head coach had no clue this was going to happen. Talk about making a decision completely making like a d level decision, in isolation, with no buy-in from anyone other than, I guess, the owner, the new owner. But uh, jason kibb was like he responded well to it, though he was just like my job. He's like I just work here and my job is to coach the players that are here yeah and it's like well, mean what else can you do?
Speaker 1:So anyway, well, yeah, so you know you're a single operator, you're, you know, the only employer right now and your business relies completely on you running workshops. It sounds like so how do you scale that? Can you clone yourself yet with AI so you can, like, send copies of yourself out to do more workshops?
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, not quite yet. That's something I'm trying to work on. No, yeah, that's something that I've started to think about. This year you know it's been 2023 did a couple workshops the year that I started, because I started mid 2023. And then, 2024 did you know? 2.5 X? You know the amount of workshops, and then this year I'm on pace to do 10 X the amount of workshops.
Speaker 2:So you know, as you do the math, it's going to get to the point where it's impossible for me to be in two cities at once on a day when I'm doing workshops. So the goal is to eventually start hiring and have people essentially do what I do, whether that means me doing still exactly what I'm doing. I'm traveling, I'm doing some of the workshops and there's someone else doing that as well, or it's me doing more of the operations and closing the workshops and I have people going out and conducting the workshops. There's a lot of different ways I could go about it and that'll be a bridge that I'll cross, you know, once that time gets there. But for 2025, it's just it's a lot of emails, it's a lot of calls, it's a lot of social media content. I've been blowing up TikTok, instagram reels and LinkedIn. I've built a nice following on TikTok. I'm up to 28,000.
Speaker 2:That just helps with personal brand. You know cause? That's TikTok. There's not going to be a lot of my target audience on there. There's not a lot of CEOs and you know VPs of sales that are going to be scrolling TikTok and see some guy named writer GPT making a video about chat GPT and inquire about a workshop. My, my target market isn't necessarily on there, but I think we all know that building personal brand is something that's really important right now. So that's what I'm trying to do there. But yeah, I mean gonna have to hire at some point and that'll be an exciting problem to tackle whenever I have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is exciting and finding the right people.
Speaker 1:Obviously I'm biased, but finding the right people is so important because you know, unfortunately companies see all the time how expensive it is to get the wrong person in a role, especially if you're small, because then you're really like, if I hire the wrong person it could kill me.
Speaker 1:Because now I'm wasting all my time trying to either one fix what they did wrong or train them on how to do it right. Time trying to either one fix what they did wrong or train them on how to do it right, and when I could be focusing on my business and that's what I tell you know, cfos, especially if I'm talking about recruiting, it's like, hey, how, how expensive is it for you to have the wrong person in this role? Have you thought about how much time it's gonna take away from your, your best players, to to either fix things that if this is the wrong person for the job, or just time away from their desk to train them when they could be, you know, having high volume, high output activities that are not training people or dealing with those things. So, yeah, I mean so this year it sounds like you're just going to keep scaling by doing more workshops, doing more events, and then I mean you're getting paid to have people fly you around and do stuff like that. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's such a blast. There are times where I'll be in and this is no shade to this city. This is just an example of a smaller city that I've worked in, but Dayton Ohio. That's not really a place that I ever saw. You know myself like going to in my life. Like you know, that's just kind of a place where you know what would pull me to Dayton Ohio and so many people would say that about Kansas city, they'd be like I don't, I don't ever know why I would have been to Kansas city, cause that's where I live right now.
Speaker 2:Um, and it's like getting to meet face to face with a group of people there, make connections with them and then, just, you know, go hang out in the downtown before you have to go back to the airport and catch your flight and go to the next city. It's just been, it's, it's been super cool Cause, you know, in college you like to think that you know where your journey is going to take you, but you really just have absolutely no idea. So there are plenty of times where you know I've got a late flight back home and I'm a window seat person and I'm just looking out the window and it's just, it's pretty incredible man. It's a really cool journey and I'm, uh, I'm, I'm excited to see where it keeps taking me.
Speaker 1:That's awesome man. Yeah, that's really exciting. So you know I follow a lot of, uh, motivational speakers and things like that. My podcast one was, uh, this guy, earl nightingale, who is like a tony robbins of another generation. It has a lot of content around what separates successful people from. And then, like art williams was another one, that he has this speech called the do it speech and he, his main thing is just go do it. Like, stop sitting around talking about it, stop trying to overthink and overanalyze everything. And one of his lines is that he's like you know what I found out about smart people? They just don't get around to doing anything. They just keep trying to find out an easier and a better way instead of just doing it. And that's.
Speaker 2:That's something that I've I had to tackle when I first got started is because I was like, okay, do I niche down specifically to sales, cause that's my bread and butter, or do I down specifically to the mortgage industry, which is where I was getting the most demand at the time?
Speaker 2:But I didn't have any experience there. So you're getting pulled in all of these different ways and it's like, instead of waiting around to make the right decision, it is better to make a decision and then find out later if it was the right decision or not. That's one thing that I learned early on is you're just going to waste time by waiting days, weeks, months trying to make the right decision. And then you're going to fast forward three months and you're in the same exact spot that you were in three months ago, when you could have made one decision. Maybe it was the wrong decision and you learn it, and then you can pivot, you can adjust, or you made the decision, it was the right decision, and then you look back and you're like, man, I wonder what would have happened if I didn't make this decision.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I 100% agree, and I think that you know just making a decision.
Speaker 1:I talked about this with my VP of sales and recruiting, and he comes from a project management technology background. He's a director of systems and director of enterprise systems, and so he would do like large scale project implementation for technology and stuff like that, and so he can have a tendency to overthink everything and not do anything. Like you know, like like in sales, like cold calling on clients, like he wants to have like the perfect script, and I'm like, dude, just pick up the phone, call them and just see if you they're probably not going to even answer anyway, and then you just wasted like 10 minutes trying to prepare a script for someone who was going to send you the voicemail. So he I hired him because of that, though, because I'm much more of a let's go jump off the cliff and see if there's water afterwards, and he's like wait, no, like we should get a parachute and like check the surroundings, and like the wind speeds, like I'm like, oh, we'll figure it out later, just go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, time is of the essence. You got to make make a decision. Maybe it'll it'll bite you in the butt. But also there are times where, yeah, it's going to be the right decision. And that's something I learned the hard way for sure when I got started, because I was just so hesitant to. I didn't know if I wanted to reach out to people that were directors of sales. I didn't know if I wanted to reach out to people that were CEOs of mortgage companies. Instead of just firing off a bunch of emails and calling people seeing if they were curious about AI, I was sitting there for hours at a time being like, okay, do I email them this? Do I email them that? Do I email that to this person or this person? So if I could give a message to a writer from two years ago, it's just hey, send emails and call people and the rest will work itself out.
Speaker 1:From two years ago it's just, hey, send emails and call people and the rest will work itself out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and like you know, that's the thing with you know sales like I got on linkedin and was training uh matt, like just how, like how I structure things, like how I go look for leads and stuff like that and um, you know, so one morning I just got on linkedin and sent out like 100 messages in a day like oh in, oh, in a couple hours, and they were tailored, but they were largely copy and pasted and then tailored to the company or the role that I thought I could help them recruit on and I sent out probably, probably sent out closer to like 75 messages and only one of them turned into a lead.
Speaker 1:But now that's a client, they're a client that I have now and so it's like you have three or four hours to get a new, new client. Like that's very low um effort for the return. I'm gonna get out of that and that's what I was trying to tell him. Like you cannot spend like 10, 15, 20 minutes on every message. Like you'll never get, you'll never even hit the cap that you can send out on LinkedIn, exactly.
Speaker 2:I agree and that's why you know, obviously I'm traveling the country teaching people how to use AI. But I still think you know I don't like these automated emails enough. Quite yet, where you have the template and it's like first name, company name, like it fills in all of that information because it's not quite personalized enough. So I still like to manually send my emails, like I will use chat, gpt or Claude or some AI tool to write the template. But I, like I think personalization is is needed because especially now, like when I get emails and people trying to sell me things, I can tell within the first five words if it was chat, GPT generated only if the person like didn't prompt it very well and didn't make any adjustments. So I still think that's funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I still think that, um, you know, using AI for outreach is definitely something that I believe in and something that I do, um, but I'm still not quite on the the automated email grind yet. I still like the making a template, adding some flavor to it, that way it's directed to the person and then sending it manually.
Speaker 1:That's the way to go. I mean, it's been four years now and I get messages all the time. And the worst is when I get a message that's like hey, we help accounting firms like you to do blah, blah, blah. I'm like dude, like either one of this is automated like either this is probably ai or automated, or you didn't even look at. Like you didn't take the extra two seconds to just open my linkedin profile before you messaged me exactly, and I I did.
Speaker 2:another reason I kind of have a bad taste in my mouth from these automated email campaigns is I tried one right when I got started and the name of the girl's company was wrong in this database that I was using in this app that I was using. So I emailed her and where it said company name, it was just a company name. That was completely off. And she responds and she says something like I hope your AI workshops are better than the AI tool you use to email me because my company name is not my company name.
Speaker 2:And I read that and I was just like, wow, I'm like I just got my butt whooped by this girl. But those are the type of lessons that I have learned you just you have to learn from them and you have to roll with the punches of the day to day entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, you've been in sales so you can't get scared by that kind of stuff, and let it the nose, or just people saying, no, I'm not interested, some people just hate that.
Speaker 1:Like, they just can't stand, like, and that's what I would do, these these things I'd be like I would do these things. I'd be like, hey, let's say we make salespeople make 50 phone calls a day, so you're making, let's say, what is that? 250 phone calls a week and let's say one of those phone calls turns into a new client. Okay, you failed like 99.99% of the time, but it doesn't matter, because you got one client and that was your goal for that week was to get one new. And you're getting four new clients a month.
Speaker 2:That's pretty good, you know, and so I did as many sales internships as I could throughout college and that is what I would recommend to you know. I know I know college is becoming less and less popular for kids these days because of, you know, the online money and being able to learn on youtube and all these these courses and stuff. But for those kids that are in college or about to go to college, that have business ambitions, sales internships every summer would be my biggest recommendation.
Speaker 1:I agree 100%.
Speaker 2:I knock doors my sophomore summer in downtown Kansas City in a suit, sweating like crazy, walking into these office buildings selling office supplies and like you had just touched on. So that was 50 doors a day and if you could get two sales, that was an unbelievable day, that was a great day. If you could knock 50 doors you could get two sales. Whether it's 500 reams of paper or it's some toner, anything like that, that became a good day. So I think ever since then I have been numb to being told no.
Speaker 1:You learned so much that summer.
Speaker 2:You get so used to it that you understand that that's how the game is going to be played and that you can't take it personally. It's business to business. It's not person to person. They're not trying to hurt your feelings.
Speaker 1:It's business to business, and when you learn that, I think, when you become a savage from a business perspective, yeah, I think that's great. Yeah, and for that's the thing that I'd say to entrepreneurs I call it entrepreneurs, people who want to be an entrepreneur, but I haven't done it yet that you have to learn how to sell. You got to learn sales, you got to get comfortable with failure, because you're going to fail and you should fail. You should fail often because if you're not failing, you're not trying. So I think that you have to get comfortable with that, and I, you know, I played baseball in college, so I think about it in terms of, like you know, bat, the best hitters in Major League Baseball fail 7 out of 10 times. Yeah, and they're crushing it.
Speaker 2:That's what I was going to say is because we're a baseball family. I've got an older brother and a younger brother and we all played baseball and I think that's another thing that kind of prepares you for something like sales is yeah, I mean, you're successful one time out of three. That's a good day. You did your job. That's a good day. You did your job. That's better than most people. So I think that's a mentality that honestly contributed to yet again just getting used to being told no and understanding that it's not the end of the world and it can almost be a good thing, because then it just teaches you more.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, it sounds like you're having a lot of success coming into 2025. There couldn't be more hype around AI, so I'm sure that's going to do nothing. But I mean, everyone's hearing about AI, even like the old dogs not wanting to learn new tricks, they're hearing about it. People are talking to them about it. So I'm sure the opportunities are going to be huge for you, super pumped for you, and to follow along your entrepreneurial journey. But what else? What could people listening help you with? Like, what would be your? What would you want people to know about what you do?
Speaker 2:Honestly, just anybody that's kind of at the entry level, or they have a basic understanding of these AI tools level, or they have a basic understanding of these AI tools. I think what I'm able to bring to the table and why I've had good word of mouth and referrals, is because I've made something that is very, very complex, very easy to understand. And I think that's become very important because when I first got started, people heard AI, you hear AI workshop two years ago and you're like no, that sounds so complicated, like I do not want anything to do with that. But then you know, luckily I have so many reps under my belt that I've understood the best way to help people learn and help people understand how they can use these tools, give them use cases, give them resources after the workshop. So it wasn't just me throwing them into the water.
Speaker 2:So I would just say you know any, any organization or any association that is trying to take the next step with AI. Maybe you have some sales reps that know how to use chat GPT or you have some executives that know how to use chat GPT. There are a lot of tools out there. There are, you know, more innovations than ever. There are more use cases than ever. And, yeah, I'm just, I'm pumped for 2025 and going to be traveling all over the place and helping as many people as I possibly can.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, Ryder, it's been great to get to know you a little bit and learn a little bit about your company and kind of what you do. Is there any closing thoughts you'd give to? You know, the idea behind the podcast was bringing transparency to small business, and so what last closing thoughts would you share with anyone that's, you know, on the fence, ready to dive into entrepreneurship?
Speaker 2:If you have something in mind, then go for it. Take the leap. I wouldn't say that if you're someone that you just have no idea what you want to do, you're just like, screw it, I'm going to open up chat, gbt, find an idea and then jump in. Don't necessarily do that, but find something. It doesn't have to be your passion. Sports are my passion, but that doesn't mean that I have to work in sports. Ai is something that I am passionate about and it's something that I have been able to provide value to, so I can help so many people with AI. So I would say anything that you have experience in, if you've, you know, maybe you're working in a job and you're thinking I could do this better by myself. I can start my own company around this. Take that leap, take the chance. If you fail, you're going to learn and then you'll know for the next time. But I would just say I couldn't encourage you enough.
Speaker 1:Take the chance, go for it, because I think the last thing you want is to look back and regret it. 100%, I 100% agree. What I would say is just take the first step. Taking the first step is a lot easier than sitting around regretting not having done anything and just continuing to kind of think about it, especially if it's really an itch. You have to get into entrepreneurship. Take the first step. Go research the industry a little bit and learn a little bit more about the industry, or look into the company you work for now. That's one of the best pieces of advice. My granddad owned a 300-employee insurance company and I told him from 18, 17 years old, I want to start a business. And when I went into my first internship, the advice he gave me was don't just learn your job, learn the entire business. Learn every department and how they all interact with each other and how they work. If you ever want to start a company, you're going to need to understand those things because you're going to oversee all of it.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent Great advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one. One other thing I would say is a lot of these people when and this is something that I wish I would have known when you, when you start like a service-based business. So if you're going to help someone with marketing, with you know copywriting, things like that you don't have to expect to be making money right away. It is best for you to go to maybe a family friend or a family member if they own a business, or someone you know locally. If they own a business, do it for free, get a couple reps in.
Speaker 2:Like help them, get the case studies, get the statistics, make sure that what you're doing is actually helping people, and then you have that you know confirmation, you have the confidence, you have the conviction then you can go ahead and start charging money. Um, so get those reps out of the way first before you start charging people.
Speaker 1:What I would say yeah, yeah, that confidence boost and the feedback that you'll get is invaluable. So well, uh, ryder, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Uh, this uh was a great conversation and I'm sure that uh, we'll continue it offline and and uh see how we can help each other. So I appreciate your time, man.
Speaker 2:Nick, I really appreciate it. Man, that was a blast. Best of luck to you with everything.
Speaker 1:Thanks, I'll talk to you later.
Speaker 2:Thanks, boss.