We Generated 5 Million Leads Then AI Found Something 3x Better Than Google

Trevor Mach: Dude, I tip my hat investors that are still in the business this long. They've had to adapt something. Brent shared the stats study that batch dated. It was like there was 90,000 total available market down to, like, 9,000. That's crazy.

Trevor: How do you get advantage in AI? Get curious about it. Find out the number one problem in your business you wanna solve or that's taking you a lot of time. And we've got a client in in epic named Michael. He's wanting to grow his leads and we're mapping out his goals.

Already saw the lead volume that's coming in. And and and I said, what are you doing to follow-up? Because I'm actually not really doing anything with it. You guys probably don't need more leads if you've already got them in there. What are you doing with them in there right now?

Flip on objection proof. Do something to mine the stuff that you've already got in there. And that's probably the most common issue that I see with people who generate leads, and they've got leads sitting in there. And now we've got the ability with partnering with guys like you and your software to actually help our businesses be more profitable.

Steve Trang: Welcome and thank you for joining us for today's episode of Disruptors where millionaires are made. Today we have Trevor Mach with Carrot and Carlos Zamora. And, they flew in Trevor, from Roseburg, Oregon and Carlos from Miami, Florida to talk about how after generating over 5,000,000 leads, how they're now leveraging AI to generate even more leads for their clients today. Now, guys, I'm on a mission to create millionaires. The information on the show alone is enough to help become a millionaire in the next five to seven years.

If you will take consistent action, you will become one. And before we jump in, if you're here to learn how real entrepreneurs are building real empires, please make sure you hit that subscribe button. Because every week, you're gonna pick up a lesson here that's gonna help you create your first or your next million. And right now, you have a 100,000, 250, or even more just sitting inside your CRM. Resurrect all your old and dead leads with the objection proof AI calling agent.

Just text cash to 33777. That's the phone number. 33777 to unlock the money that's just hanging out right now inside of your CRM. You guys ready? I'm ready, man.

Alright. So, a lot's changed in the last couple of years. Yeah. You were on our show, two years ago. And we talked about your journey Yeah.

Right, to go from, marketer to, building this gigantic company, care with, website and PPC management and so on. But you've picked up a company here or there somewhere along the way. Yeah. You've, I I remember Carlos reached out to me, I wanna say about a year ago, I'm just at my daughter's volleyball game, and he was like, hey. Like, we're doing this thing with Cara.

We're doing the CRM thing. Yeah. So what's what's going on?

Trevor: Yeah, dude. So it it was four years ago now. Mhmm. Carlos was was reminding me right before this. I I was losing track of time.

Like, you know, how fast something happened. Four years is crazy. So, this was a handful of years ago, Steve. We we really, of course, focused heavily on the lead generation side of it. And what was happening and and it was kind of a foreshadowing into the AI world, is we were losing the data, and we also didn't didn't have a chance to serve our clients once the lead came in.

What do you do with it now? And so we'd always made it really easy to integrate our product with other CRMs. But, when we started to look at what's next, I wanna be able to have the data across the stack from the web search and the click all the way to the lead and then all the way to the closed deal. And so we were fortunate enough to to align with, InvestorFuse, inquire that company, bring Carlos in, and bring the team in. And, actually, just few weeks ago, I think, we finally flipped the switch that InvestorFuse three point o was no longer being sold.

Everything switched over to what we call CareCRM.

Steve: But Yeah.

Trevor: The the cool thing with that, you're talking about using objection proof AI. Right?

Steve: Mhmm. Well, one

Trevor: one of the cool things, we have so many leads that are sitting inside of our clients' databases. You have millions of leads in there. And one of the most common things that that that we see and when I go talk to to someone, if they're coming into our product or want into my coaching program, and they wanna generate more leads, I'm always like, no. You guys probably don't need more leads if you've already got them in there. What are you doing with them in there right now?

We've got a client in in Epic named Michael. And Michael and I were we were talking a few weeks ago, and he he's wanting to grow his leads, and we're mapping out his goals. I already saw the lead volume that's coming in. And and and I said, what are you doing to follow-up? He goes, I'm actually not really doing anything with it.

I go, Mike, you don't need anywhere leads, man. Flip on objection proof. Do something to mine the stuff that you've already got in there. And that's probably the most common issue that I see with people who generate leads, and they've got leads sitting in there. And now we've got the ability with partnering with guys like you and your as a software to actually help our businesses be more profitable.

So

Steve: Yeah. It's kinda funny. Right? Because, like, I think the who we attract in this industry in wholesaling are hunters.

Trevor: Oh, yeah.

Steve: Right? They're not the farmers. They're not the gatherers.

Trevor: Yep. Right?

Steve: They're not gonna be the one that's gonna, make a belt, right, from the cow. Right? Like, they're the ones that wants to go and Yep. Hunt, kill, and so on, which is necessary, is needed. Yeah.

But the first thing they overlook is, like, well, what's left?

Trevor: Yeah. Right? Like Exactly.

Steve: Because the the the next thing the next lead is so attractive. It's like, this is hot. Like, let's jump all over it. I actually had a conversation with Eric Brewer. This is one of our collective genius.

He's like, what if we on the anniversary of every lead, we just attacked it like it was a brand new lead? Or every single lead, like, what would that do Dude. In your business?

Trevor: Yeah. We we call it resurfacing. So that's something that they built before we had a chance to acquire them, and I'll toss over to Carlos on that. But, yeah, resurfacing was the concept you guys came up with.

Trevor: Yeah. And I think I think the simplicity of the CRM too, it's like our original version ten years ago was on top of Podio.

Steve: And Yeah. I remember that.

Trevor: Fifty, sixty different apps. We had everybody on that. Pace was on it. Brent was on it.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: But salespeople are not good at using CRMs, and we just needed to slim it down and actually get them to talk to leads. Mhmm. So the foundation of the CRM, what I always tell people is the two main leverage points are when a lead first comes in for marketing. We make it really easy just to assign the lead, make sure someone can talk to it as fast as possible, now with AI, of course. And then anytime an existing lead tries to get back in touch with you, we make it really easy.

So it's like when you work everything through that simple foundation, lead's brand new for marketing and anytime throughout the lead's life cycle, it's easy to talk to. It's low hanging fruit.

Steve: What is it missing out? What's a situation where you're saying, like, the lead wants to talk to you and you make it easy? Like, what what are what are those circumstances?

Trevor: Yeah. We treat it just like a brand new lead, essentially. So it could be, let's say, a lead opts in on your website and they get an auto response or an AI call and they text back right away, that's gonna resurface like a brand new lead essentially to your lead intake person. It could be six months down the line from a follow-up sequence, the same exact thing. It's gonna get a action, like it's a call new lead that just came in.

So it's simple. It's an action based CRM, so we make it really easy just for someone to be like, hey. This is the most important thing that you need to do today. Yeah. So when you just process new leads through it, it's super, super simple.

Steve: Yeah. We're actually having a conversation. Was, it was actually we have our Tuesday AI call, with our with our clients. And, Ian set made this comment. Salespeople will work really hard doing the easiest thing possible.

Yeah. Right. So so it's not like they don't wanna work hard. Yep. They just wanna do the easy thing Yeah.

All day.

Trevor: Yeah. 100%.

Steve: So how can we have them working hard doing the easiest thing and that's that. Right? Like, putting the notes in a CRM, that's hard. Yeah.

Trevor: It is. That's a

Steve: It is.

Trevor: That's a that's an AI thing too in conversations we're at. Thanks so much for coming to the panel too. Crushed that. But, like, even AI lead score.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: So not only being notified when new leads come in and existing leads are trying to talk to you, But if you're able to transcribe the conversation Mhmm. Get a summary. And then we have AI lead score that can say, like, how communicative the seller is, if they're mentioning anything about, like, a potential discount or repairs. You're making it really easy for that sales person to crush by being lazy.

Steve: Yeah. And

Trevor: you just go, oh, I have these actions due today but you know what? I'm gonna hit this one that's a 92 lead score.

Steve: Right. Because there's equity

Trevor: in there's there's equity in the property. You know, they need repairs. They're top they're texting back within fifty minutes every time that we talk to them. So yeah.

Steve: So people love low hanging fruit.

Trevor: Yeah. 100%. And and where where we are right now, so as we kinda look at the macro for for everyone listening to this or watching, you start to look at the macro and go, well, so there's a marketing machine that you have in your business. You have your lead and follow-up machine in any business. Right?

I don't care if it's a plumbing business or HVAC or electrician or real estate investor or an agent. You need a marketing machine, then you need some way to follow-up and organize those leads that are already there. But what you're doing is you're collecting data. And with AI now, especially with what you guys are doing with the objection proof, you can now go use that data to give you an advantage. Uh-huh.

And so when you take all the way from what ads are working or what keywords are are working to get me here and what what are the most successful leads look like that actually turn into a deal, you feed those back in to the machine. It makes everything work better. Or, with objection proof or a, a tool like yours where AI can communicate back and forth to the leads, if you have all the the data inside the CRM, whatever CRM they're using, we use HubSpot as a company, and we've been using features like that where you go, oh my gosh. Everybody communication now isn't just an automation. It's a personalization.

It's personalized to the notes. It's personalized to the situation. It's personalized to what's going on. That's where AI is getting crazy cool. And you guys are leading the leading the forefront of it.

Steve: Yeah. I actually saw so I had an honor. So thank you again for asking me to come out. I had an honor to to speak at your guys' event. And while I was there, I noticed behind where you were sitting, there was a wall of topics.

Yep. I think, so there's there's Vivint Vision. There's AI. There's identity. Right?

There's identity. Memories on this guy. But I remember on the wall specific on your on your board specifically, you had, AI, salespeople, and there's, like, a few different things. What were the major themes, the people that came up for Epic Yeah. Right, that came up with what were the major themes that they were, like, asking about this particular

Trevor: That's good, dude. So, yeah, we at at the start, I remember, ticking a bunch of different boxes. So the one that got the most people raising their hands saying, yeah, that's a topic is, how to pivot your business or how do you rebuild it back up if it if it got hit. Mhmm. And we're seeing that happen a lot in the industry.

And when one of the one of the big things so we brought four four or five guys up front who raised their hands, and and I knew their businesses because I'm coaching them. They have gone through a major pivot that we're doing really, really good at one point that then went through crisis mode, had too many expenses, margins were getting shrank. One guy lost $1,500,000 in cash in a year. One guy was losing half $1,000,000. I think it was in cash in a year.

But that was after having having a lot of success, overhiring, not great systems, not managing cash flow well, and then they had to bring everything back down to the basics and rebuild back up. And now each one of them are back to multimillion dollar businesses, really, really profitable. So that was the majority of what the group wanted to hear because everybody's having a situation a lot are

Steve: where

Trevor: they go, oh, shoot. There's some stuff happening right now in business. I need to do something a little differently because this isn't working like it was three years ago.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: And one of those one of those themes that that comes up and that we were talking about, and we we literally mapped out, Steve, what was the what was the path that each one of these guys went down to go from crisis mode to slimming things down to rebuilding, not having success. They all went through the same thing. And you have to streamline things down, simplify things, go all in on one or two marketing channels, and then you've gotta build some better systems with a smaller team. That's where AI, comes in big time. Yeah.

Right? A couple of them were having some major issues with lead management and and capacity there, or they would have too much, headcount or overhead going in those areas. Mhmm. And so where where we're blessed now where they weren't three years ago is now there are tools that can do that, whether it's carrot CRM or objection proof or other tools. But that was number one.

Number two, on there for that group, and part of it might be just honestly because it's the phase that that everybody's in in our group. To be able to get in that group, they have to be making at least 300 k a year. The average in that room was probably $7.50 to 3,000,000. So it the the problems are gonna be are gonna follow where people are in the season. So in that range with my business growth levels, that I have, to get over $1,000,000 a year in revenue, you've gotta you've gotta be a performer.

Right? You've gotta have you've gotta nail one or two things really, really well, one or two marketing channels maybe, one product, one market usually, and you've gotta get really, really good at one or two things, Selling, marketing, whatever it's gonna be. That gets you to 1,000,000. But to get you over 1,000,000 and stay over 1,000,000, we now have to be able to step into be a builder identity as an entrepreneur. You have to kind of abandon some of the performer identity that got you there, because that's the very thing that's gonna hold you back.

Right? And now we have to say, okay. How do I hone in on the things that are my unique abilities, the things I'm amazing at? How do I now shift my mindset to I can't just do this all myself? I can't even just delegate tasks.

I need to find amazing people to delegate results to even.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: So that second topic that people said was leadership. Like, hey. How do I how do I lead better? So those two were were combined. But now when when I go to the other part, this was not on the board, which was interesting.

But the next topic that came up a lot was people asking about leads. How are people getting leads right now? What's working well to make that happen? Yeah. But the AI side of things and hiring, is just layered over the top of everything.

Everybody is curious in how they can build a a more streamlined business, deliver better experience to the people that they're working with, leverage the humans in their business in better ways. Some some are inadvertently you know, we're using inadvertently, there's gonna be some jobs lost. But I think at the end of the day, if we use it well, we're gonna see job growth overall, just people doing different jobs in their doing now.

Steve: So one thing I wanna touch on, because a lot of the people in the business, right, is you gotta put on a strong face. Yeah. Right? You gotta, like, be the the leaders, like, you know, like, we're gonna be we're doing great and so on. Yeah.

But you can't change anything while you're, like, everything's fine.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah.

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We put together a free AI sales diagnostic. It's a quick call with our team where we break down your existing sales process, show you exactly where the gaps are, and show you how to book more appointments as soon as this week. Click the link in the description to get that for free. So is there an identity challenge? Is there, an ego issue?

Yeah. Or the part like, alright, we gotta tear everything down and rebuild? Yeah. You guys have those kinds of conversations? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. So because because, like, there might be someone listening right now who's like, things are freaking hard, but I'm gonna act like it's totally fine.

Trevor: Dude, I tip my hats off to you guys that are still in this industry. Like, we were talking about when we first met, like, 2019 probably at Whole Scaling.

Steve: Yeah. September 19.

Trevor: Dude, I tip my hat to investors that are still in the business this long. Just the resiliency. Because they've had to adapt something. Marketing, hiring, money management, like revenue management coming in. Dude, this is a hard business.

Steve: Oh, good.

Trevor: Yeah. What

Steve: was yeah.

Trevor: That little thing in 2020. But Brent, you probably remember this, but Brent shared the stats yesterday at the panel. The study that batch dated, it was like there was 90,000 total available market down to like 9,000. Like, that's crazy. Yeah.

So have some positivity and optimism if you're watching this and you've been in the industry this long. You guys are absolutely crushing it. And I think yesterday, or like the two day event, like, there was a ton of optimism Yeah. And fresh perspective heading into that and clarity on the identity that they need to take moving forward too.

Trevor: Yeah. Dude, identity so so he definitely remembers this. There's an identity sign up there too, identity upgrade. Right? So that that's that's that's a big thing that I've had to wrestle with as an entrepreneur is we we have businesses, and we have to recognize that we are not the business and the business is not us, and we are not the success or failure of the business.

We the business is an assignment that we have taken or a calling that we have taken. And and and for me, Steve, so as you've seen the the wholesaler industry get hit, and you're making pivots as well with your business, I'm gonna be, serving at a at a broader scale, which is amazing, because your product, like our product, can can extend it tons and tons of types of businesses. Mhmm. We we had seen the writing on the wall coming with the the real estate industry getting hit, and we just didn't execute some stuff fast enough. And so while while you would see the wholesalers, get clobbered as far as the the general volume in the market, our business has been insulated a little bit more than many of the other businesses, but we saw a retraction in that too.

And one thing that I I personally was going through, and I would say about a year and a half ago, I finally got to a spot where I go, okay. I I I have a new outlook on how to treat business and where to put it in my life. And that's led in just a new resurgence of energy of of of of of excitement, of creativity in my work again, which I'm pumped about, is is I had started to believe that after I hit the first ink ink ink award and the second ink award and the third and and the and the fourth and the fifth, that that was me. Right? That it's that's Trevor, the fast growing company carrot guy.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Right? And I remember getting offers. I I talked about it on the last podcast. Giant, giant offers from big private private equity firms that are the biggest ones that buy SaaS companies that is generational upon generational cash. So I could've walked away with no earn out, in with an extremely high confidence that was gonna close.

And so I thought about those two offers for literally less than thirty seconds combined because I had my identity attached to this business that if I sold it and had a pile of cash, at that time, I don't know who I would have been, which sounds silly. Right? Which sounds silly. So that happens. And and also also I had some ego in there.

So I go, dude, give me a year and it's gonna be worth a 100,000,000, which it wasn't. So the market changed the market changed, the capital market

Steve: Miscalculation.

Trevor: A miscalculation. So headline of this podcast is how I lost $40,000,000 in one year, something like that. But that's that's real on paper. So with that said, though, it was also one of the biggest blessings for me because I think if I would have sold the company at that time, I would have believed once again that that was who I was, Trevor, the successful, fast growing company guy, and that's where my value is in this world. Yeah.

And and so the next two to two and a half years were kinda wild because as the capital markets got tightened, as, you know, the wholesaler market got a little bit harder. A couple competitors popped up here and there, and we kinda got stodgy a little bit in our innovation, which is just a learn a learning process for me as a leader. We didn't hit the sync the sixth, inc, 505,000 award. We didn't hit the seventh. And then revenue became a little bit harder to grow, and then and you start to see a little bit of a retraction, and and it can create this anxious striving.

It can create this this little bit of fear when you're trying to get this thing back, especially if that's attacking what you thought was your identity. And so I remember I remember getting invited to go speak up on stage and and and talk about business growth. And I told Matt Anderson, like, I can't I I'm pumped to do it, and I will teach what I know. But I'm also going through a challenge here, so I'm not gonna pretend that I'm not. So I'll teach up to here, like, how to get to from zero to a million, how how to get to a million to 10.

And here's the lessons one to 10. But around that time, I was also going through the the challenge of the 10 plus million, that pain line Mhmm. And and growing through it. So here's where the punchline is, is I wrestled with identity as an entrepreneur about a year and a half after that. Because when the business wasn't doing everything I wanted it to do, like I had been doing the previous eight years in my

Steve: was your identity.

Trevor: And it was my identity. You then start to once you're gonna have anxious striving, you're trying to just get that thing back, do everything you can to make growth. You start to have some wrong, some wrong moves and some misses, so confidence kinda goes down a little bit. So then you hesitate in some of the big bets that you were never hesitating on before that got you that initial success. And, and then my dad got brain cancer right around the same time.

And so all these challenges were happening in my life, and and the the amazing blessing that came out of it is I got clear on what identity was for me. I'm gonna paint a picture for here for you. Okay? I'll paint a picture for everybody listening or watching. And, pretend like it's a bull's eye.

So it's a bull's eye with a, or it's a yeah. It's a bull's eye. You've got the thing in the middle, the the target the bull's eye in the middle. You've got one ring, and then you've got the the outer ring. Okay?

So this is something I call the identity bull's eye. And I had recognized that on the outside rung, it's what I would call achievement. Okay? So the outside rung is achievement. The middle rung is calling or assignments.

So it's the things that we get to do in our lives. Father, husband, leader, CEO, volunteer, son, mother, whatever it is. Those are all assignments we've been given in our lives. And so what was happening was, and I think this happens a lot of entrepreneurs, especially when things get hard, is we got used to something working well. We latched our, our identity on the outer rung, the the achievement, okay, in this assignment that we've been given, that we've taken on as a business owner.

And the second that that that thing gets taken away, once again, anxious striving, fear, worry about other where people are other people are gonna think marks your existence during that time. But the center was void for me. I didn't know what the center was. So when I would go into a room with people who didn't care that I was Trevor, the business guy who had all these ink 500, 5,000 words in the wall, I didn't know what to talk about. Yeah.

I didn't know what to talk about. And and and I think that's probably a decently common thing for high achieving entrepreneurs where we say, I just I just I can't have these same conversations elsewhere, and I feel uncomfortable when I'm in rooms of people that don't care about business. And and, and I was that way. And I would even find myself, with family conversations inadvertently kind of waiting to find a little moment where I could say something that might spur a conversation about some work things I was doing. And, and and and that, you know, that happened for years, and so here's where I where I was wrestling with it.

When my dad was going through the the final you know, six, twelve months of cancer, and he ended up passing away at the 2024, it really forces you to wrestle with the reality of life and and death. And he was an entrepreneur, worked his butt off for decades. He started to try to sell his company about two months before he got his cancer diagnosis. He bought an RV about six months before they went on their very first trip, came back on that RV trip, had his had a seizure within fifteen minutes of getting out on his very first trip as a retired entrepreneur. And then he went down this battle, and he ended up passing away, leaving my mom very, very well off financially.

But when I was talking with him, he said, I would have adjusted some I don't have any don't have any regrets, but I would have adjusted some things and placed priority in some other areas a little bit sooner. And so if even him in in those final days, he found his identity in the Lord, he'd have found his identity as, you know, a a a father and a husband, and and using these gifts he's been given, he was not an entrepreneur in that last year. That's not who he was. It wasn't the money in the bank. It's like, oh, dude.

I don't know when I'm gonna go, and I don't wanna spend the next one, two, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, sixty, seventy years, whatever it's gonna be, hundred years. We'll say hundred years extra. I don't wanna spend that time chasing the dollar and thinking that my value is how how good my business does. Yeah. The center of that, though, for me is so when we move from the outside in on this, that marks anxious, striving, fear, and worrying about what others think.

I I during that phase, I was missing peace. I wasn't unhappy. I was happy. I wasn't depressed. It was just this general weird kind of little fog, this weird little tone of anxious striving that was just kind of always there.

Like, I've gotta there's something I gotta do, and until I get this, it just doesn't feel like it's gonna be there. And I started to ask the question, who am I outside of my business? Who am I in every it's it's what I was hardwired in. Who am I at my core in every situation? In work, as a friend, as a father, as a husband, as a volunteer?

And over that year, I started to discover who I actually was and started to move from the inside out. You take that God given identity, those those gifts that we that we have that are unique to us, unique to you and unique to Carlos and me, we take those and we use them in the assignments and the callings that we've been given as a husband, as a father, as an entrepreneur. When we're a steward of those callings well, then we are rewarded with achievement, and achievement becomes fruit of us living our God given identity in those calling as well, not the root of who we are. It's fruit, not root. So as soon as I realized that, I'm like, oh, dude.

Stop worrying about achievement. Just focus on who who God made me to be and just be that guy every day. Be the encouraging person. Be the leader. Be the person who who is is a generous giver, and just show up no matter how my business is doing.

And the cloud lifted. Optimism grew. I got crazy excited about the vision for the business again, and the anxious driving disappeared.

Steve: You know, it's a lot of what you're saying resonates with me tremendously. Right? I took a, I think, personality test, positive intelligence. Yeah. Have you taken that one?

Trevor: No.

Steve: So it's it's it's it's a Positive intelligence. It's a good book. Basically, what I like most about the book is it actually gives names to all your demons. Right? So you have, like, you got nine different demons.

It calls them shadows. Interesting. But for me, it's their you're all these different demons. Mhmm. And for mine, like, restlessness is my number one demon.

Right? Yeah. I cannot vacation. Right? Like, put me on a beach and tell me I have to be there for three days.

Yeah. I will I will be miserable.

Trevor: Yeah. Right?

Steve: So, like, that really resonates with me. And, like, you know, you go you know, like, wife says, hey, we're I'm gonna we're gonna go spend time with my friends or we're gonna go do this function, like, with my coworkers. It's like, like, how am I gonna make this how can I make it through these next few hours? Right? So, like, all you're saying there, really, really, resonates with me a lot.

So, this this identity thing, this this this this piece thing, I'm surprising to hear I'm surprised to hear you say this. Yeah. Right? Because I I know that we have so much in common. Mhmm.

And, you know, like, one of the things that, principles I learned, from you was the energy audit. Yeah. And the energy audit is just, like, you know, what gives you energy? Yep. Do that all day.

Yeah. What doesn't give you energy? Take that away. Yep. Right?

Delegate it or whatever. Yep. And so for the part about the for me, the energy audit is, like, do what you like to do all day. Yeah. Thought you were kinda doing that, but it sounds like it wasn't really a 100% overlap.

Trevor: Yeah. What what what happened during that season, it was it was interesting. I'm not saying that this is what happens to everybody. This is where Steve, I'm going, okay. I had to learn.

I had to grow. And then Yeah. And then one thing that I've I wouldn't I would say it might be a superpower is is pulling back in the moment and saying, at some point in time, I'm gonna wanna know, you know, how I got into that phase so I can have a trigger to to recognize before I get into it next time.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: So let me write down what happened before I slipped into this phase. What were the traits? What were the things that were happening? What were the things I noticed? Let me write them down now.

Because in two years or five years, it's probably gonna happen again. And so let me notice it faster. Right? But in in that phase, that what I had what I had noticed is because because slowly, some of the business things were not going the way that I had wanted them to. And I had some of the wrong people in the wrong roles, and I had to realize I needed to step in as a better leader.

I I inadvertently abdicated in a couple spots because not intentionally. I I just thought, shoot. Let me give them run or let me give them room to roam. Right? I'm gonna give them room, and I'm gonna go over here.

When you hire the wrong people in the wrong roles and give them room, it actually helps them go in the wrong direction faster. Yes. And so that happened inadvertently in a couple spots. And so during that season, I had actually delegated off everything off my lap. And here's the wild thing.

In that season, I would I would say was the hardest. I delegated almost everything off. I delegated my genius away, which means I love doing this. I wasn't on the podcast anymore. I wasn't running the podcast.

I wasn't doing my content. I wasn't doing blog posts. I was hardly going and speaking in person anymore just because I'm like, I just don't wanna travel for business anymore. And I had pulled back, and I actually created Epic, the event that you were at, in hindsight as a distraction. So I I needed a a creative outlet again.

Yeah. And so I had delegated everything away and and didn't have some of the right people in the right spots to really take us where we needed to go on on the carrier side. I didn't know I didn't know where to wedge myself in. I I couldn't feel like I could put my work in care at that point, and that was all my fault. Nobody's fault of my own.

So with the energy audit, I did that almost too well, but then I delegated some of the things I shouldn't have.

Steve: Right.

Trevor: Okay. And so then I kinda I I would say it was a a six month season where I was trying to figure out, right, what do you need me, guys?

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: Like and I would get in the way, and people didn't want me there. And I wouldn't know how to kind of lead something when when maybe I didn't think that that thing that was getting done should be getting done that way, and I give them some room. But, then I did the energy audit, wrote those stuff back down, and that's when Epic came. Like, you know what? I need to be a better leader for my team.

I need to be a a leader of leaders. And I enjoy creating trainings. I enjoy taking concepts out of my brain and writing them down on pictures and and and training them to people. I enjoy connecting with people. And so that's where we took carrot camps and turned it into epic.

Steve: And became Dan Sullivan. And Yeah. I You're just writing all these little mini books like

Trevor: I'd I'd literally thought that during that time. I go, you know what? The world needs the next Dan Sullivan. But let let me adjust it for the next stuff. But yeah.

Energy audit. I I think it's easy, Steve, when when we start to kinda slide off into some spots that are harder in business, it's easy for us to justify, I'm just gonna put my head down. I'm just gonna crank through this. I'm just gonna work some more. I'm gonna remove some of the things that I really, really enjoy in life.

Maybe the date nights kinda stop happening as much, and maybe you miss a workout once a week, and maybe your buddies call you up for mountain bike riding, and you're like, oh, I'm not I can't go this week and get some work here. I gotta get done. I I inadvertently had let some of that that that trend that was starting in the care side, the anxious driving, the fear, the worrying about others, had me think I needed to dive in and work more and remove some of the things that gave me the most joy. And when that happens, I think it's very, very easy to end up doing more work than you

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Than you like. Drifted. Drifted. For sure.

Steve: Hot drifting.

Trevor: Yeah. Yep.

Steve: So one thing I was so you're wearing the Epic Impact cap. So I was, you know, like I said, I was there a couple days ago. Thank you, Carlos, reaching out, asking me to be there. So we had, obviously, Pace Morb be there.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: Alright. Brent Daniels.

Trevor: We had Steve Trang there too.

Steve: Steve Trang there. Steve Harwood and Brandon Darbella. Yeah. Right? And as we were sitting there talking, I was thinking, like, Trevor's done an incredible job because Pace normally speaks in front of thousands.

Yeah. Right? And, you know, Brent's got an incredible audience. Yeah. You're able to get the five of us sit still in front of a private room.

Trevor: Yeah. It was crazy.

Steve: Which I think is a testament to you. Right? What you're able to accomplish, you know, in your career and the relationships and the value you you poured into others. One thing I wanna ask you, because, like, I was thinking 75, you know, like, I love pace. But I was like seventy five minutes, like, I might get I might get a word

Trevor: in. Yeah.

Steve: I might get a word in. Yeah. Exactly. But it it was it was an awesome panel. So I wanna ask, both of you, what were some things you heard, that might have surprised you that came out of our mouths Yeah.

In that thing because we went pretty deep.

Trevor: That's a

Trevor: good question. Yeah. Tell us to you.

Trevor: Brent for sure because we were just we just been recapping the day, like, how amazing the two day event was in the panel and stuff like that. But Brent's saying, if you're wise, you're family. You're pretty much bullshitting and being greedy. I like how blunt he is, but that was good. I don't know stuff that surprised, but just like Steve Harward, dude.

If you could take his principles and inject it. And also Tim from the from the vault that we went to Yeah. Talking different panel here. Yeah. But how he did the open house and, like, had a charity lined up.

And anytime somebody came to the open house, it's like, hey. Do you know you're donating to this charity today? Yeah. I love simple low hanging fruit things that compound effect over time. It's just, like, such good fulfilling things to do.

But the Brent thing was good. Steve Harwood's stories were good. The lady with the elephant at the event, thirteen minute walk, $13. He was on the panel speaking. Hayes talking about being yourself too.

Like, he's like, I don't want another pace. He's like, I wanna Steve Trang. I wanna Brent Daniels. I wanna Trevor Mark. I have notes.

My phone's over here, but that was that was some stuff that that, stuck out for sure. That was really good.

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Trevor: And Pace, I was talking with Pace, like, before. And, he was asking how much Trevor charged. I gave, like, a round number. He's like, dude, that needs to be way more. Yeah.

So and everybody on every a lot of the Epic members too, they were like, dude, just that panel alone was worth the entire annual cost of Epic Mastermind.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. I believe it. How about yourself?

Trevor: Dude, yeah. I'll I'll I'll pick one, and so I'd never met Steve

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: At Harvard before. I I knew of him. I I knew of the business. Knew it was a big business. And and the simplicity of what he talked about of just the actually caring about the person and stepping in and just serving that person as as the primary default mode that he steps into, It hit me, Steve, because I had done that for years.

And during that let's go back to that season once again where I kinda I kinda let myself believe that I was the guy who was the fast growing company guy, and that's who I was. And then the and that hard eighteen month to two year season after, I had stopped giving. I I I had stopped giving to people because when you're in a season like that, I think it's easy to start to go. Shoot. I got I I gotta I gotta get mine.

I gotta get mine. Yeah. And and it's and it's this weird scarcity mindset that, I'm not used to. And and so even even a guy who I I wouldn't say during that season, once again, I wasn't I wasn't stressed much. I wouldn't have marked myself as an unhappy person during that time.

I I would just say I wasn't getting momentum, and entrepreneurs are I I think entrepreneurs almost more than any other type of person in the world, we thrive on momentum. Yeah. Meaning that something has to grow in our lives for us to feel good no matter what it is. And at that time, I was growing in in in faith spiritually, and that that's really what got me through. But some of the other areas of life, I just kinda feel like, I'm just kinda phoning that in a little bit, and this part here is a challenge that's never been a challenge for me.

So that that resonates me because part of one of the things that got me out of that was actually I flipped back into this mindset of waking up and saying, let me just encourage something every someone every day. And if I'm feeling a little bit, down or unsure or unconfident leading into today, I can pick up the phone and call somebody, or I can text five people, and I can encourage them and ask them how I can serve them. Now Steve takes his neck to the next level. Yes. But right around that time so I've got this this streaks app, and I set five daily nonnegotiables.

And one of my five five daily nonnegotiables is message five people. And that came from that time where I'm, like, everyday I'm gonna message five people

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: Encourage them, see how I can serve them. So that resonated with me, man, and, so many others, did as well. But

Trevor: Steve mentioned momentum too. Steve Howard mentioned momentum too. And it's one of those things when you're in it, you're like, okay. This is good. I'm getting good results.

He said something along the lines of, like, when you're in momentum, you need to, like, put your Double down. Put the pedal to the metal and just, like, completely triple down on it.

Trevor: Yep.

Trevor: Which is good.

Steve: Yeah. I got a a marketing coach, and he was saying, like, that is the single most important thing inside your business. Because, like, when you've got momentum, everything's easy.

Trevor: Yep.

Steve: Yep. And you don't have momentum. Everything's so freaking hard.

Trevor: Oh, it is.

Steve: Right? You got pull teeth. You got it's it's just a grind. Yeah. Right?

Yep. But momentum, like, you can be, you can be running full speed, but it doesn't feel like you're running.

Trevor: Yeah. Exactly. You just got

Steve: the you just got the wind in your back. Exactly. And so right now, AI, obviously, is relevant. I know you kinda touched on it a little bit, but, you know, AI is kind of a big deal right now. Yeah.

So, you know, you guys have generated it's kinda crazy thing to think. 5,000,000 leads.

Trevor: Yeah. Over the last twelve years. Yeah.

Steve: I mean, the same number to think about. It's a

Trevor: lot of leads.

Steve: A lot of them are going

Trevor: to go. Sellers. Not all, but most are sellers. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. It's a lot of freaking leads. Yeah.

Trevor: I wish we had a tool that could help call them. I'll try to find something. Exactly.

Steve: We'll we'll put we'll put something in them.

Trevor: They're in our database somewhere.

Steve: Yeah. Those I love

Trevor: the opening of this podcast how you said that. They're in the CRM.

Steve: They're in

Trevor: the CRM. They're in

Steve: the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM.

They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM. They're in the CRM.

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Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. So I'll I'll first talk about kind of, what what I call the AI continuum. And so I I drew this for our team a little over a year ago, trained it to our our epic members a little over a year ago. And and essentially, at at the far left of the AI continuum is the basics.

Right? You open up, you open up, or Claude, and it's and it's a basic chat interface. So I would say the majority of the world recognizes AI is that. I get to go there, ask it for a recipe, ask it to make me a workout plan. I get to ask it advice, do my math my my kids' math homework or whatever it is.

The next level of AI usage is a well trained chat. Right? So you take GPT or Claude, you feed it information, put it in a project, give it context. It could be a a brand messaging document. It could be examples for how you wanna do Facebook ads or whatever it is.

So it's a well trained chat, but you're still you train it with with some documents. Now you're still using the chat function. The next level up is is agents. So agents would be kinda taking some of the well trained chat function. You make it even great.

What you guys do, it's an agent. Right? And in saying, how do I now take this, have this well trained agent that solves this problem, go out and do things for me now? Because a well trained chat won't do things for you, outside of that chat box. But the agent can.

And so that's the next level. I think I think what we're moving into right now in business, the people that are closer to the kind of the tip of the spear is this last six months, especially, I think the next twelve to eighteen months, is gonna be trying to move from well trained chat chats into agents at scale to help people deploy them easier. So that's that's what you did with objection proof is is you you took it and said, I'm gonna make an agent way easier to deploy in your business to solve this problem. And we start to see a lot of people doing that right now. I I think we're gonna find marketplaces pop up in in big ways where they're already starting to pop up, but in big ways where someone can go in and build their whole thing off of this platform that now they can go pick and choose premade agents that people have made, and they can inject them into their business.

Those are already starting to pop up. I think that's gonna be bigger. So, the next thing I think in this in this season, Steve, is like with Carrot, I'll kinda cast the vision there. Because people might look at this, and they're going, dude, Carrot's cooked. Right?

So you can you can go make a a website in cloud code, make it look amazing, and all that can happen right now. You know, I could spend some level of time and make something do some level of automated AI outreach. Right? Is it gonna be as good as yours? Is it gonna be as good as as our websites?

I I don't believe so, and I know you don't believe so either, But someone could think that. Dude, I'm just gonna sit on Claude code and jam jam jam jam jam. And I got this thing calling people. Yeah. So everybody's thinking that why are these companies here?

So I think the ones who are gonna win are gonna have two things, in common. They're gonna be the ones who take it and make it a platform that people can use AI to build on top of. So what we're doing with carrot we're talking about earlier is making it so it's not AI sites or carrot. It's how do you use AI to build on carrot and make Karat the actual platform you build on so you don't have to worry about the page speed, the tech stack, the security, the structure, the other features behind it, and then work with people so they can build AI agents that go onto our platform that go people can go deploy into their business.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: So that's where I wanna go. But then you take the second key, which is data. So in the AI agent, level, which is level three of four, I'll tell the fourth one here in a second in in my eyes. There's probably one I'm missing. But is is then taking your unique data, which you guys have a lot of you know, call data.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: Right? We have a lot of lead data. We have a I mean, look at every lead that submits. We know what addresses are wanting to sell all around the North America. Every lead that submits step two, we know their motivations.

We know if they're motivated or not. We know if there's a roof that needs repaired, in the CRM. We know all their conversations because we're sucking all those in from text messages and emails and phone calls. We have all the phone call conversations in there. So we have all this data.

So if you can take your smart data, and this is where everyone that's out there jamming on Vercel or jamming on cloud code, and you think that you've got this advantage, where guys like Steve, platforms like Steve's or like Carrot have an advantage if we use it well, is we have this data that you layer over the top of the same AI platform y'all are building on, and we make it smarter, perform better, faster. So, the AI or the data is the advantage. I think within twelve months, AI is not gonna be the advantage. It's gonna be the it's gonna be the the table stakes. Yeah.

The data is the advantage. And so everyone everyone out there looking at AI, I would ask the question, well, first of all, start to dabble in it and figure out, are you at the very bottom? Are you are you just using it for chat with your kids homework? And I'm using it to make an email every now and then. Move up to the next level to well trained chat and just go learn how to make a project in clog or a project in GPT.

And and say this is my marketing project for my company and ask it, hey. I wanna make this my marketing project. What are things I should put in here? Have it have it make those documents with you. Just move to there.

If you're already using that routinely, let's get your first agent online. Okay? Pick the one the biggest challenge you're trying to solve in your business, the biggest constraint, and go to Steve if the the leads in your in your thing are the biggest constraint. Add your first agent. Don't go build it yourself.

Almost all of them get to 80 to 90%, and they're like, and they're posting on Instagram, oh my gosh. I'm in Claude mode and code mode. Look what what I'm building. We were at Nick's office yesterday.

Steve: Some

Trevor: of the ego going around.

Trevor: What is Nick doing literally this week? Because he's been building massively. He's flying to Pakistan to finish his stuff because he's like, I could only take it to 80 to 90%. Yeah. He imagined the average person, they can't take it across the finish line to make it operational right now.

Steve: That's the the part that, I take, as a tremendous blessing. I have tremendous gratitude for Mhmm. Is that, like, I have an engineer here. I like I

Trevor: Exactly. Like, I That's the advantage.

Steve: I've been there. And then Yep. Just down the hall is another brother of mine. So I Yep. Recruited him away from Intel.

Exactly.

Trevor: Couldn't can't afford the top one yet, but maybe in a year or two, he'll be here.

Steve: One day. One day. Yeah. The smartest one, I can't afford. He he gets paid pretty well from Amazon.

But the six of us are all in like, there's there's six of us. I'm the oldest of six boys, and all six of us have engineering degrees. Right? I'm electrical. The other five are computer science.

Yep. And, like, every once You

Trevor: guys can finish it.

Steve: Every once in a while, stuck. Mhmm. As a hey. Here here's where I'm stuck. And then, like, someone will chime in.

Right? Yeah. To have six engineers of which five of them were free, then I hired one. Yep. And now four of them are free.

But they have access to, like, you know, people that do this for a living. Yeah. It's like, here's where I'm stuck. We're, like, how do you fix this? And they're, like, oh, just do this.

And and it takes no effort from them.

Trevor: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Steve: Do this.

Trevor: And that's what's happening right now because AI is is is pretty sexy, and you can do all this cool stuff with cloud code and cloud co work. And and and I think if you're if you're curious about it, y'all, you should go test it out and do some stuff. You should.

Steve: I don't want it discouraging from doing it. I just want them to be aware. Like, Elon Musk gave this great interview. Right? Because, like, he said we were, like, weeks away from full self driving Mhmm.

For, like, five years.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: Right? And what he I remember him saying in interviews, like, what you don't realize is, like, this event horizon. Mhmm. You just you think it's there. Mhmm.

But as you get closer Yeah. There's more that shows up. Yep. So, like, Claude Code gets you to 90% Yep. Pretty fast.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty fast.

Steve: But that last 10% is just technical obstacle after technical obstacle after technical obstacle.

Trevor: And that's where the performance comes. So when when when you look at once again, going back to how do you get advantage in in in AI, get curious about it. Find out the number one problem in your business you wanna solve or that's taking you a lot of time. Do some experimentation, maybe put it in a cloud code, cloud co work, get see what can happen. But then I would go see if there's a tool that already exists that does that well for you.

Yeah. Or if you got the capital for it and you wanna go solve the problem, go hire an engineer and help you help you finish it. But, it it's it's the companies that have the data layer. When when you have guys, you know, you're we we know your two biggest biggest customers by volume. They're putting a ton of phone calls in there.

And so when they're talking with hundreds, if not thousands of people every month Yeah. It's really hard to compete with that that data when someone is just adding it onto their own business that they take three phone calls

Steve: a day. That's the reason why Tesla was so hard to

Trevor: catch. Exactly.

Steve: Right? Like, yeah, you can go and, like, replicate a lot of it, but but they've already mapped the entire country over and over and

Trevor: over again. Yeah. So the the final stage of the AI continuum is full autonomous automation. So with that, I've I've been working with some of my buddies, and, there's this thing called paperclip. Have you seen paperclip yet?

Yep. Interesting. Right?

Trevor: Yeah.

Trevor: And so we'll see what people do with it, but this guy and they're they're very smart. It's it's a tech company, came out at at at Dan Martell's ecosystem. And, they have, I think, five or six guys full time on the team right now, and they each have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten employees, AI employees underneath them. And I looked at their setup. It's a full blown AI org chart.

They've got names on these AI employees. Each one of them has a job description, has roles that it does, and you can log into it, and you can see the whole Kanban board of all the work that's happening. And it shows, like, Johnnycakes AI or whatever his name is. He's doing this thing right now, writing this copy for this thing, and then Jill AI is waiting for that. And Johnny Cakes hands it off at 03:00, and now Jill's got it.

And then it comes to a completion. I I do think that that's coming. It's it's already here, but but I think that's it's gonna be a number of years before something like that gets to the general business very early.

Steve: Yeah. Like, it's it's it's here, but, like, you wouldn't pay for that today. Mhmm. Right? But there's gonna be a time Yeah.

Where you will pay for that.

Trevor: Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So those are those are the four steps, guys.

So figure out where you are in that continuum Mhmm. And then ask yourself, can I do more in that air in that one I'm already in? And then maybe start to dabble in that next one up and see what happens.

Steve: Well, no. I I encourage everyone to look at it and and play with it and and learn from it because, like, I went through my my own journey with PPC. Yeah. Right? Like, I I did all my own PPC.

I wish I had still had, you know, like, because back then, right, like, it was $2 a click Yep. $12 a lead Mhmm. For, like, sell my house fast in Phoenix. Right? Like, it was a great, great time to go live.

Right? But when it came time, like, alright, like, I'm too busy Mhmm. To do my own PPC campaigns. I need to go hire a professional Yeah. An agency.

I could ask all the questions Yep. To make sure that the person that I'm giving stewardship to my business to knows exactly what he's talking about. Exactly. So, like, I think I would encourage you guys, like, you know, like, you should dabble. You should play with it.

Right? Because, like, if you decide you if you feel like you can take it all the way, then go all the way with it. Yeah. If you feel like you can't, like, now at least you can ask questions of the person that you're gonna hire Oh, yeah. To delegate.

Again, it's stewardship. Like, this Yep. Your company.

Trevor: Yep. Right? It's like how you train salespeople if you've never talked to a seller before.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well nope.

Steve: I I

Trevor: I was gonna say on on the PPC I didn't mean to interrupt you on the PPC topic, right before this, I was looking at some of our data. So the last six months, we've been doing a huge effort, building a big old data lake with all of our data because we're we're going all in on this whole layering data over the top of the AI, AI model. And and, admittedly, for I I would say during that season when I was going through that challenge and I was abdicating, didn't have the right people in the right roles, and, we didn't innovate in some areas. And, one of the things that we really stepped into about six, seven months ago is we said, okay. We're gonna eliminate every objection that people have.

We wanna make it so people would be insane to go off and build their own CRM or go off and build their own website, or even use any of our competitors to build custom. So we're having people come back over in droves, and and because we said, well, we're gonna be the fastest out there, which we are. I I haven't seen anything, even custom sites, faster than what we have now. We're gonna keep that edge. Number two, though, was going back to the data and AI side.

As we built this data lake inside of our, Google Data Studio, we can slice and dice every lead, every visitor, every website. And I was pulling up some data earlier today, and I go, okay. Let's look at, all motivated house seller websites that are, Google pay per click traffic, and let's look on just mobile devices, or let's just look on just desktop, or let's look on both of those combined. And let's see not just what sites are converting the best, but what pages are converting the best across the thousands of pages across our system. And while I see people posting on Facebook, you know, flexing their their muscles on how good their conversion is on some of their home homespun of landing pages.

Hey, we're crushing it 26, 22, 29%. Routinely, every single month, the highest converting pages on our system, one was 39% today. That was that is bonkers. It's a lot of that's the ad is really it's a really tight ad group.

Steve: 39% is outrageous.

Trevor: It's insane. So I'm using that as a outlier. Yeah. But it was dozens of leads in the past thirty days motivated house sellers 39%. I don't know what their ads look like, but I do know that ad went to that page, and it turned into a full lead.

And so then you see 33%, 28%, 29%, 35%. We took that data. We looked at it month over month over this last year. We started to see what are the what are the the web pages that have the most commonalities of always showing up at the top, and then and collectively, they've generated hundreds and hundreds of seller leads over this past twelve months. We took that.

We ran it through, our system to compare all the traits, and we could look at them as knowing what we know and go, oh, yeah. They all have these five things in common. But we fed it through that, came up with the commonalities. The cool thing is they don't all look the same. So if people think that there's only one exact format of a web page or one exact phone call, like, you have to say exactly these words every time, that's not the case.

Yeah. But there's a format. There's a formula. And so we took that. We then fed it into our system, came out with, right now, our our three top converting design funk designs.

So now you can just fully drag and drop over. We call them full page patterns. Just full page pattern, landing page straight over that's gonna convert like mad. And what we what we're moving into that was our first experiment. What we're moving into is I wanna have dynamically updated pages.

That's just where things are gonna go with AI. Based on the visitor, if they're coming on a mobile device from a Facebook ad in the North in the Pacific Northwest, And our system recognizes that it's a motivated house seller page, Pacific Northwest, Facebook ad, mobile device, that these are the elements that need to be shown and dynamically update the page. That's where I wanna move in the next six to eight months.

Steve: Yeah. That's crazy.

Trevor: Yeah. It's it's text there. We just need to build it out now and make it work.

Steve: Yeah. I know. But that's that's still insane. Yeah. The because these are the problems that we're solving right now with our phone system.

Mhmm. Right? It's like, because, like, we were we built everything on top of someone else's phone system. Yeah. And then in February, they kinda, like, crapped the bed.

Trevor: Oh, gotcha.

Steve: Alright. No more of that. So we built our own phone system. Right? And, like, these are the kind of things that we have to figure out.

It's like, hey. You know, when they call from this, this is what they have to get. Right? This is just different, different voice agent, different message, you know, like, the memory component. It's just it's just interesting that you can't, in real time, based off who called, give it different information.

Oh, gotcha. So it's Gotcha. But, like, before, you wouldn't have had, like, a dynamically responding phone number. Right? Yep.

Yep. But now he's like, okay. Based off, like, if we've called this person before, here's the agent that shows up on the call.

Trevor: Dude, that yeah. That starts to get pretty complex, but when you solve that problem, which he as well.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Well, that's we're we're in the middle of

Trevor: solving that problem. Right?

Steve: But now it's like, oh, okay. It's a completely different conversation. Whereas before, it was always just, like, you know, one eight. Yeah. Now it's dynamic.

And it it's it's required. Right? Because, like, the human that's calling in doesn't know that there's not a human on the other side. Yeah. So, like, has to behave like a human.

And if you can behave like human, you just have to give a different personality.

Trevor: Where where do you think, switching the tables on you really quick.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Where where do you think, laws are gonna go, regulation with AI calls? Is there any thoughts that you've got? What was popping in my mind is is are they gonna start to slap a law saying that we've that the calls have to say it's an AI voice? What do you think?

Steve: I mean, probably. Yeah. And I think it's not gonna matter by the time they have to regulate. Because, like, I I look at it, like, right now, we're in this interesting time where you'll hear people say, I don't wanna talk to AI. Mhmm.

The data doesn't show that.

Trevor: Yeah. I agree.

Steve: The data has shown, like, people are totally okay talking to AI.

Trevor: I had an amazing AI conversation for support for some big company. I can't remember what it was. It was a much better experience

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Than any other support experience. And it happened quick. Didn't have to wait for an operator to come on. Mhmm. Didn't have to take their survey at the end of it.

Yeah. Any of that stuff.

Steve: Yeah. If I get what I need, I don't care who I'm talking to. Yeah. It's the the the the problems are when, the the bot is limited in its training Mhmm. And, like, give me a human.

Trevor: Yep.

Steve: Right?

Trevor: Yep.

Steve: But if the bot is properly trained, most people won't care. Some people will. Some people are like, I need to talk to a human. Mhmm. Right?

So I don't think by the time the laws get around, it's gonna matter.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: I think right now, the people that are kinda freaked out, the analogy I've used was, like, in the early two thousands, you hear people say, I would never put my credit card on the Internet. Yeah. Right? Like, are you crazy? You're gonna put your your credit card out there?

People are gonna steal it. Now, like, I don't know what this thing even is, this link. Right? Like, it just scans my face, and it just takes my credit card. So I've never been on this website before.

Yeah. Right? But there's this link thing. Yep. Right?

And then I just authorize it, it scans my face, and then it just has my credit card right there.

Trevor: There's Waymos driving all around Phoenix

Steve: All around here.

Trevor: Yeah. With no driver. And but eventually, that's just gonna be the thing.

Steve: People are gonna

Trevor: be they're gonna be scared if there is a driver in a car eventually.

Steve: Well, there's gonna be laws, right, at some point where, like, you're not allowed to drive anymore because that's just dangerous. Gotcha. You know, you listen to moonshots, they talk about, like, at some point, it's gonna be, like, how dare you get in front of a car? Like, this is they're gonna treat it like smoking.

Trevor: Gotcha. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Steve: It's like, it's dangerous. Like, you're you're taking this unnecessary danger to the public.

Trevor: I believe it. Yeah.

Steve: And so yeah. Like, right now, I'm not concerned because by the time the law is passed, I think everyone will be indoctrinated AI. They're not gonna be gonna care.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: And at that point, it's like, you know, like, this is Steve. I'm an AI assistant, and it's Yep. Whatever. I don't think people are gonna care at all.

Trevor: And and we we've been doing it that way. So we've been doing pilot tests with AI calls. So if anyone's if anyone's nervous about running AI calls to your leads, we've been doing it for, what, three, four, five months

Trevor: Yeah.

Trevor: Through through our system.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: To to our prospects at Care.

Trevor: B two b.

Trevor: And b two b. And so our our team was taking, you know, batches of a 100 leads that were not being followed up on, basically

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: Where they were they had conversations with them months ago. It doesn't look like they've moved to something else, and our team wasn't getting to them. And and we were kinda testing ones that said, hey, we're we're an AI AI bot, ones that didn't. And and I was talking to Pete and her team, like, I think we just need to leave it in there that it's an AI bot for now. Because there are some things at least in that system we were using.

It's like, well, like, it's really, really, really close. There's a couple of things in there. Let's just say it's an AI bot and see what happens. And it worked. So we sent out two batches of a 100 calls.

It booked these numbers aren't gonna be exact, but they're gonna be close. It booked seven demos.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: Literally just calling leads that were there, talking to them over the phone, getting demos booked on the phone, on the our team's calendar. And Pete was telling me we got a customer out of that, out of the 100 dials. Yeah. Like, dude. Okay.

Let's do this more then.

Steve: Absolutely. More.

Trevor: Yeah. It works.

Trevor: You close one deal in your CRM

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: And talking to those that same avatar that's been in the business since 2019 Yeah. If you're marketing the last seven years, you have enough leads in your CRM that it makes sense to get AI column. Yeah. You close one deal, it pays for your AI for the year.

Steve: Yeah. We had a It's like

Trevor: a no brainer.

Steve: We had a I think Stratton said he had one deal. I think 500, he bought it for $1.50. Yeah. Right? That was just in his CRM.

Trevor: Oh, yeah.

Steve: I think I think he's pretty happy customer.

Trevor: Oh, huge. And and that's where it comes back to to how do we use our systems well? How do we use AI well? And I I think lead scoring is is it's gonna be it's gonna be table stakes for for businesses in the next two, three, four years where you have to know the quality of the the leads in your system, whether you're a plumber, electrician, or in any business. And, you know, once again, we we use HubSpot for our business, and and there's a cool lead scoring system in there.

But, yeah, we've got the lead scoring system in in Carrot CRM that does that as well. So if you match the lead scoring up with an amazing AI outbound system or a lead manager in the case like objection proof, that's where you start to really get some pretty cool stuff because then you can filter it. If you you don't have to filter it because it's an AI system calling, but theoretically, if you wanted to, you could filter it. Have your humans maybe call the highest lead scores and then send the AI to everybody else. But it's gonna be interesting seeing

Trevor: what happens. And that's bare minimum where it's at. I was having this conversation with Epic members. Like, at bare minimum, it's just the the example I was just talking about where it's like, dude, if there are leads in your database, you're not you're a sales guy. You're not touching them as much as you know you should be.

It's like when you go to the dentist, they're like, how much have you been flossing? It's like, not as much not as much as I know I should be.

Steve: Next question.

Trevor: Yeah. So it's it's one of those things. It's it's a no brainer at this point. I met with Stratton a couple weeks ago. He said you're his he's your biggest and favorite customer.

Yeah. But, dude, the amount of the amount of leads he has coming in per day, it's like, dude, this is a a no brainer. You need to go just absolutely big as possible with AI.

Steve: Oh, yeah. I know he's stressing our system for sure. Yeah. We we, we're we're having to implement things because he's breaking things, which is great.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: It's what you want. Right? Yeah. I want to have massive success. So then looking on the CRM side, like, where do you see like, where where is Carrot today?

And then where do you see Carrot, a year from now with having to pivot with AI?

Trevor: For sure. And I I would say good context for anybody watching this go back to maybe, like, November, December with Nick Perry. He He gives a bunch of stats and he's using Carrot CRM with objection proof.

Trevor: On this podcast. Right?

Trevor: On this podcast. On this podcast. Go back and watch that. But I don't know. I see the AI getting better, of course, the voice.

There are some people out there like Kong who's posting almost nose to tail using AI in in his wholesaling business. So I think for us internally with Carrot CRM, the AI lead scoring getting better, deeper integration with phone system. So kind of repeating what we just went over. When that all improves, you're gonna have better morale with your sales guys. Mhmm.

They're gonna close at a better rate. You may be able to spend less money on marketing. So I don't know. I'm I'm blessed to work with John that has developers. I know he talks with you guys at as a at Objection Proof pretty frequently.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: But I see that I see the AI scoring getting to a place where it's really really good and it's just you can be lazy like you were saying earlier. It's like I'm just talking to the leads that are begging to hear from me.

Steve: Yeah. So this is kinda where I see the world. I don't know when it's gonna be. It's gonna be six months. It's gonna be twenty four months.

Yeah. But, basically, right, like, I'm at home. Right? I'm in my office, and I just open up my laptop. I put my headset on.

Mhmm. And this is gonna be like a Brazilian buffet. Right? Where, like, I don't know what it is everywhere else, but, like, the ones I've gone to.

Trevor: Green card, red card?

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Right? So, like, I'm ready for leads. Right.

Green. Yep. And then AI connects the call, and then I just talk to them. Yeah. Alright.

And, like, alright. It's time for lunch. Red. Mhmm. And then that's it.

And all day, every day, as a salesperson, all I do is I just talk to people that wanna talk to me right now. Yeah. There is no putting notes in the CRM. There's no reading notes from the CRM.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: There is no, like, sorting. Here there's no putting tasks in future dates. Yeah. And there's no, like, what are my hot tasks today? Yep.

It is just straight Brazilian buffet.

Trevor: Yeah. All that. Yeah. Yeah. I I I agree.

I think the days of logging into a CRM and and doing filters and and and searches and all that kind of stuff are it it's already getting phased out or it needs to be getting phased out. Now I I think that there are gonna be use cases where someone wants to really slice and dice and be a power user.

Steve: Sure.

Trevor: But, where where I think things are going is is a lot more talking to the CRM, typing in a thing in the CRM as as you go and say, hey. Give me my my top 10 most motivated leads, And and not actually go into the system to do the search. It's it's basically like, I I would like to go, Steve, to the ideal wave of magic wand scenario. Pretend that this technology didn't exist in any way, shape, or form, the way that it currently does. What am I trying to get done?

Well, I would like to know the people that I actually actually wanna talk to me that might be a a good deal that I can close. That's all I wanna know. I don't wanna log in to something. I don't wanna filter, search, sift, do anything like that. So I think that's where things are gonna go.

And they will have a interface, a back end that will allow people to really slice and dice and go deep on it. I do think there's gonna be a lot more talking to the systems and have their system go build the thing that you're saying. Yeah. Hey. Set me up a a follow-up sequence for these types of leads.

And then it's gonna go great. And it'll ask you some questions. It'll queue it'll create a follow-up sequence. Hey. You wanna review it?

Yeah. I'd like to review it. Hey. Can you tweak that one a little bit? Adjust this one.

Why did you put that there? And, like, tell me about the the concept of why you put those words there. Awesome. Cool. Lock it in.

Schedule it up. Hey. Do you want me to send this out to any leads right now? Which leads would you suggest that I should send them out to? Here's these ones here.

They haven't had a contact in fourteen days and yeah. Key those ones up. Like, that's where I think CRMs are gonna go. Websites are gonna go that way. On on the on the AI side of things already, this is something that we're working on right now.

On our on our side for our sales site. We wanna build it into the Carrot side as quick as we're able, is all those phone calls that come in. Alright? So we we have tracking phone numbers on our system now. Everybody gets one free one, but then you can buy $3 a month.

We have our AI tracking, which is not in any way, shape, or form covering over what you're doing. It's the basics. But here's the reason we're doing it, because we want everybody to have their tracking numbers, either in our system or integrate with a system like yours so the phone the phone calls can can go in there, at least transcripts can. And if you imagine, let's say you have 50 calls or 100 calls or 30 calls that month, and you guys are already doing this, reviewing all those calls, you're probably coming up with common objections, what questions. There's a whole bunch of things that are coming in those calls.

Well, websites need to be be dynamically updated websites. Your marketing campaigns need to be dynamic dynamically updated based on what the content of those calls are. So if that system recognizes, hey. I reviewed your website, and these three objections keep coming up the last sixty days, your website really doesn't address them well. I suggest that we should address it here, here, and here.

And because you're tying this to your Slack channel, and your Slack channel has a bunch of testimonials, I think we can use this testimonial there. Do you wanna approve these changes? So that's where we're gonna go with that. So that's part of the reason that we're seeing if people can move their tracking numbers over because you do that. Also, there's content marketing.

Hey. We've noticed that they hear some themes that are coming up from people. There's no content in your website about it. You would you like us to whip you up a a structure for a blog post on this topic? Do you want us to make you a social post on this topic?

Yeah. Cool. Let's make it. And then it's gonna be able to make that. So, that that's where I think it's gonna take the product marketing role, which most businesses don't do Yeah.

And automatically make sure that your marketing is updated based on real time what the market's doing.

Steve: It's funny to hear you talking about it in this way. Right? AI dynamically updating your websites

Trevor: Mhmm.

Steve: Because you cut your teeth as a copywriter Yeah. Which is, like, I would say, a younger version of Trevor might be offended Yeah. By everything you're saying here. Yeah. Is that accurate?

Trevor: Not not really because I I I guess I care a lot less about the sitting down and writing copy. I care a lot more that am I delivering a message that resonates, build trust, and is truthful. Yeah. And as long as long as it's well trained, good copy, and it's in the way that is the person's brand voice, which Yeah. Like, in in the Care platform already, we have a big old box that when someone signs up and launches a site, they ask some questions.

We know what their goals are and their mission and stuff like that. But it fills out this box that essentially is the the prompt box for all of the AI content that might be created later. So theoretically, anything that's created is gonna be pulling from that box.

Steve: Well, I just say that because, like, a lot of copywriters consider themselves kinda like a bit of like an artist.

Trevor: Oh, dude. I I did I did copywriting out of necessity. I I didn't I didn't do it because I'm sitting there as an artist loving it.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Even even my own models that I draw. I've talked to Braden on my team who takes my hand drawn things in my iPad and he makes them look awesome. I was talking with Braden and because I fed one into AI to have it make a version of it.

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: And I go, hey. Can you just kinda emulate this? It was it it was basically me sending him a thing that he would normally do that end product, and I just fed it into GPT without a lot of training. He goes, you just did this in GPT? I go, yeah.

He goes, that's scary. Mhmm. I go, yeah. I mean, we we we just we gotta keep on figuring out what these AI tools can do so we can free up the humans to go do the next thing.

Steve: Yeah. So we touched on this a bit as far as, like, people go in the chat, right, and and typing in their queries.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: But, like, for someone right now, like, if I were to go and had to sell my house for fast as fast for cash Yeah. You know, like, traditionally, I would go to Google.

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: Right? But now, it's like, ah, you know, I already have CHI GPT. I kinda got pretty comfortable with it.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: And, like, you know, my my parents are are older, then we need to sell their house. Let me just see what chat comes up with. Yeah. There's more and more people doing that now Yeah. Than before.

Mhmm. So what are you seeing there, and how are you helping your clients prepare for that?

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. So overall, let's look at the data first. So the the vast majority of the leads online are still from our platform, which I I would say is a good wide cross section of the industry. The vast majority are still SEO Google organic.

Now with that said, part of organic is all the people doing radio and TV, and that are someone's doing a brand search for that company name. Right? So a hunk of that could be that the TV advertisement got them to do a Google search. But I I think it was 38% this last quarter of all the leads were from Google organic. Number of years ago, that would have been 60%.

So it's starting to even out. Google PPC now is almost up there. It's in the it's 38 30% and above, where five years ago, it was, like, 17%, 20, something like that. So Google PPC and Google organic are are the two the two major players, 65% or total of 65 to 70% of traffic are the leads. Facebook is right behind it.

So chat g p t is still really, really small in comparison by volume. You know, less than one to 2% total of the lead volume.

Steve: Yeah. GPT is less than 1%.

Trevor: Right now, less than one to 2%.

Steve: But it's I was surprised to hear it that low. Yeah. I thought it had been higher. But that's just

Trevor: me. Well, to add a caveat for, like, b to b, like, selling carrot investor fees, we do get a lot of leads from A lot. Chat g b t, Claude, everything like that. So that's, like, the entrepreneur, like, search. It's a different avatar, obviously.

Trevor: Yeah. You can change same stuff fast. I'm I'm gonna pull up this text message that it's, it's from a guy named Dave.

Trevor: Yeah. There's still coming in.

Trevor: Big investor. So while while the volume is lower, Steve

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: What we're finding is this. So this one came in, Sunday. I said, yo, just locked up one, just locked one up for a 115 k. ARV is $2.20. Found me on chat g p t, carrot emoji, flexi emoji, straight up into the right emoji.

And so, and that wasn't his first one. So he he's he's he's got a $100,000 in profit pipeline within sixty days of launching updates on his website, and he went from not being mentioned in GPT at all to now being mentioned. That's a $100,000 in profits within sixty days of making these changes. So it's real money. The the conversion rates when someone goes through chat GPT then over to the website are markedly higher than any other source, higher than Google organic, higher than Google PPC by far, because they're because people are seeing a level of trust in these AI tools once they get a recommendation.

So we're seeing conversion rates higher. I I don't have enough data yet to say if if, profit per deal is higher. I'm I'm seeing great profits come out of them, but I can't there's not enough volume yet to go yeah. It's it's higher, but they've been good.

Steve: But the conversions are you talking about the from landing page to registration?

Trevor: Yep. From someone land clicking the link in chat g p t if it's linked up to then actually becoming a lead. It's in some months three times higher even than Google organic Yeah. Which is pretty crazy

Steve: Yes.

Trevor: On on average. So those are good indicators, and the leads from chat g p t are growing every month. We're starting to see perplexity pop in there, grok every now and then pop in there. But the one wild card, Steve, is the biggest one of all is Google AI overviews, which you cannot parse and tell the difference between that and a normal Google search. It all shows up as Google organic.

So that's still one of the big things that when when we're looking at what people have to do to get mentioned in AI search, you have to you have to, first of all, recognize, well, AI search will just eventually become search. So let's stop calling it AI search. Let's just say it's it is search. It's the future of search. And you see every quarter Google making changes that adjust the the traditional organic search box.

One thing that I think gives some solace some solace for local service businesses especially is the the local searcher who's looking for a local solution for something like emergency plumber or, you know, how to sell my house fast, things like that, those are showing up with AI overviews a lot less than any other type of searches. So now that is because that end consumer still wants to be able to look at a couple options and and sift around to go, okay, which option do I wanna go with? It's a local solution. Yeah. But that that gap will close as GPT and Google find better ways to give the right data in front of people.

But people should prepare for search to be a or AI search to be searched. Couple things people can do, simple stuff right now that everybody can do no matter your business, that not only helps with AI search, helps with Google organic search as it currently is, And these also help to to increase the conversion rate of all of your marketing. It would no matter what type of marketing you're doing. First thing, not most important, but first thing is make sure that all of your, your NAP, your name, address, phone, and your website are all the exact same on your website, your Google business profile. If you have a Facebook profile for your business, if you have LinkedIn profile for your business, if you have any profiles for your business, make sure they all have the exact same business name led to the letter, same phone number, same address, same website.

Because that's a big deal for AI search is is first of all, let me recognize the business. Is but if if your business has three different versions of your business name and one of them is an old phone number that you forgot to update and you've moved you you moved out offices since I've been here. If your Google business profile still has your old office in it, it's gonna go, I think this is the same company, but I'm not sure. So it's confidence that it's you is low, which means it's gonna lower its its chance that it's gonna show you up in AI search. Yeah.

So get those first. Number two then is go through your website and look for, any opportunity to actually show your experience in doing the thing. Get rid of stock photos, show real photos of of of of a transaction or a deal, but actually put a caption or in the copy next to it. Explain what was going on in that. Hey.

Not don't just say we buy houses from inherited people. Don't just say we we can put a water heater in your house. Say, hey. Here's John on our team installing a water heater on Oak Avenue. Click this to see the options and the full case study of how we save this homeowner, blah blah blah blah blah, whatever.

Yeah. Hey. Here's a picture of, you know, Jill sold her house to us. She inherited a house from her uncle, and she sold it in seven days on Oak, you know, near Oak Park in Chicago. Click this to see the full case study.

So just go through and make sure that people see how long you've been in business, put that on there. If you have licenses, certifications, if you're licensed agent, a licensed contractor, put those on there. Actually, name the license number. Link it up to your licensing web your board at at the state board. They like to see that.

Have a good robust about page. Talk about how many deals you've been you've done, how many clients you've served, real photos. Just just bring the realism forward.

Steve: Mhmm.

Trevor: And that's what we did with Dave. It's all we did. He had an existing Carrot site, updated the design, added those elements to it within sixty days, a $100,000 in profits.

Steve: What I'm hearing there Mhmm. Is this is a much, much lighter lift than SEO optimization.

Trevor: Way lighter.

Steve: Right? Because SEO is, like, you gotta do these things. You gotta do a back links. You gotta go do blog articles or whatever. You gotta do all these different things.

It's like, this is like you can knock this out in an afternoon.

Trevor: You you totally could. Yeah. We we've got a few AI tools that we we do in this this challenge that we do, this monthly challenge, AI, AI SEO challenge. And it's three days, two hours a day. We make it so we're rolling up sleeves with Dave went through that thing, and then he just hired us to finish the rest of it.

Yeah. But, we've got these little AI tools that you just put in put in your your URL. It's just custom GPTs is all. But in your URL, it it goes through our knowledge, spits out the answers, make these updates on your site, or make these updates on your Google business profile, or things like that. And, yeah, you could in a handful of hours make a pretty big difference.

Steve: Yeah. That's that's that's crazy.

Trevor: Page speed is critical for for AI search we found, though. It it's a pretty big difference. It was a 30 to 40% difference in the data we saw, and the other parties were seeing that if your website loaded in under one and a half seconds on desktop, because because AI search doesn't care about mobile. They're looking at your normal desktop experience. If it loads in under one and a half seconds, you had a 33% higher chance to get sighted in an AI search.

So those people that are looking at a website that's loading in five, six, seven seconds, it's got the, you know, 82, you know, desktop page score, and they think, that's not a big deal. Well, in AI search, it is. And it hurt and it hurts your conversion too.

Steve: I mean, that's gonna be true with even Google. Right? It's just like, one of the things that I I did a lot I dabbled a lot with real geeks. Are you you're probably familiar with them. Yeah.

Right? And, like, all my sites look the same. Right? Chanleyhomes.com, gilberthomes.com, tempehomes.com. Like, I had those three domains, and I built those all out.

It was all on real geeks.

Trevor: Mhmm. And, like,

Steve: people always say, like, your site's ugly. Right? Yeah. But the results were not. Yeah.

They it worked. Right? Like, it was, it it was I didn't design it for SEO. I designed it for PPC. Or not I designed it.

I used them for Yep. For, pay per click marketing. And at that time, they were the gold standard Yeah. On the realtor side.

Trevor: Yep. They were.

Steve: And it was just funny. Like, I had so many people, like, you know, people that in in the realtor world, they're like, how are you making money with these sites? Like Mhmm. They all look exactly the same. Yeah.

Google likes the page feed. Yep. I don't know what else to tell you. Google likes the page feed. They like the way the headers work.

Like, they can process the headers. Yeah. But there's no, like, loading.

Trevor: Mhmm.

Steve: No, not iframe. What would you call those things? That, JavaScript or whatever. There's, like, there's none of those things. Yeah.

Right? Like, they click on it, and they have that result, and it's fast. Yeah. They're not bouncing.

Trevor: It decreases your your cost per per lead, because your quality score is gonna be higher. Right. As a result, there's so many things. I mean, we we could probably talk for three hours or some PPC conversion, but that that's one misnomer I hear all the time. I I was on a call literally today right after visiting, Brent's office or Pace no.

Pace's office. A big investor in Sacramento. Amazing people. Been Carrot members for, like, ten years. And and they wanna look different, which is good.

They've had that same Carrot site for about seven years, and it hasn't changed measurably, but they ranked number one for everything. A really, really amazing business. And so his, his his his ask was, a guy who works for the company, very smart, a guy, he said he said, I wanna trim the content down, and, I wanted to wanted to look better. He didn't use the word prettier, but that's essentially what it was. Let's make this thing look prettier.

So then I showed him data, and and as we were digging into it, you people need to understand that the aesthetic of a website is only it should be designed for the need of that specific audience, and it should be designed to remove resistance from that audience to get to the end result. So I'll give this analogy quick really quick, Steve. So look at Amazon dot com and look at apple.com. Could not look further for me from like, they look complete one eighty opposite.

Steve: Amazon's the real geeks version.

Trevor: Exactly. And so you've got two of the highest probably grossing websites in the world, or those two websites could not look more differently. So you look at it and go, well, is is there like a format for high conversion? There's not a format. There are principles, but we have to look at what is the marketing that got them there.

We have to look at, what devices are they probably visiting on? What are they going there for? And Amazon, they're going there for a completely different reason than they're going to Apple. Like, I wanna go to Apple to see the sleek design, so it needs a bunch of white space and a bunch of just clear space. Not a lot of words because I need to show the big photos.

And opendoor.com has a lot less words and big photos, and they're a tech enabled experience. They're not trying to say they're the mom and pop. They're not really focusing on Google organic rankings for a lot of those. They're they're building a brand, and so when people say, I wanna look like that or like that, we have to say, well, who's your prospect? What are they looking for?

What do they need to be able to convert? And pretty in this space is not what you need to convert. And oftentimes, people, they water down their pages with not enough content to actually eliminate the objections from that prospect to be able to work with you.

Steve: I mean, I can I can say right now, if I was in the market for a water bottle per se

Trevor: Yeah?

Steve: Right, and the page was loading like a like an Apple website, I'd be very frustrated.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Right? Exactly.

Steve: If I was to buy a phone charger or a keyboard Yeah. I don't want Apple loading.

Trevor: Yeah. Exactly.

Steve: I want an Amazon page.

Trevor: Yep. Right? Yep.

Steve: Give me five thumbnails if I wanna go see what the back of it looks like.

Trevor: And you can click it once to buy now and then you're out. Yeah.

Trevor: Yeah. Yep. Your brother's doing good work over there.

Steve: What's that?

Trevor: Your brother's doing good work over there.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He is. Yeah.

It's, it's funny. Like, the because I've trained a lot of salespeople, right, over the years. And they're, like, they have this thing, like, the seller is not gonna go for it and, you know, like, they're not gonna agree to this price or they're not gonna agree to the innovation because, like, they can just list it with a realtor. But, like, it's just these things that they tell themselves. Right?

Yeah. And it's just and what I have to tell them is, like, get your brain out of their body because that's what you're doing. You're putting your brain in their body. Yeah. And it's the same thing here.

It's like, well, I want it to look prettier. It's like, well, you're designing it for you.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. You're you're not the prospect.

Steve: You're not the prospect. Yep. Right? The prospect doesn't care about any of that. Yeah.

Right?

Trevor: Yeah. The the most common thing that I'll hear around design is like, hey. My my my cousin's a a a designer. She looked at it, and everyone agrees there's way too many words in this thing. Now and and no no no one's gonna no one's gonna read it.

Well, first thing is if you want it to rank Google organic or AI SEO, it's gonna need some robust content. But the second thing from the conversion side of it is if you're we we looked at this data. I studied I tested it years ago and corroborated it with marketingprofessors.com. They have some data on this study of long copy versus short copy. Right?

So there are situations where short copies are gonna perform better, and there's situations where long copies are gonna perform better. They they showed this this, continuum basically where it showed the industries and the types of of calls to action where short copy works better than long copy. Now the long copy worked better in two industries, by far. Long copy worked better in the financial or real estate industry, and it worked better in medical than short copy. Everything else, short copy worked better.

And that's because those are two of the biggest decisions people need to be making. And when they're sifting through and go, man, I got this major problem. I gotta make sure I'm making the right decision. They've got all these questions, all these limiting beliefs, all these challenges in their mind, and sometimes you need to be able to to to bring them down that journey and eliminate those objections to make them comfortable. And long copy in those cases perform better and turn into more profits.

So there's a balance there.

Steve: I mean, for me, what I'm hearing is high ticket versus low ticket.

Trevor: Exactly. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: If I'm gonna spend a lot of money Yep. I need to make sure I made the right choice.

Trevor: Yep.

Steve: If I'm not spending a lot of money, get me out of here.

Trevor: Yep. Exactly. Yep. 100%.

Steve: Is there anything we haven't talked about here that we should be talking about?

Trevor: No, man. We've covered a lot of we've covered a lot of topics. Guys I'm trying

Steve: to suck everything out of you guys.

Trevor: No. Do it, please. If there's anything else you're you're curious on, man, I can sit here all day. Yeah. I mean, I'll just kinda finish the thought, and I'll toss it back to you, and you can take it where you wanna go or wrap it up either way.

We got nothing but time today. We're just here. Yeah. But, one one thing that we talked about with the epic group this week is, Brandon Jarvillo is wicked smart. He's doing a lot of testing and building out a bunch of stuff on AI.

And and I think when people see all all the the testing that the people at the tip of the spear are doing, they're posting stuff on Facebook and YouTube and and and, in in Instagram. I think I I think people need to pull back and go. That doesn't mean that we should do that, and it and it also doesn't mean that there should be pressure on you to think you've got to build everything with AI right now. And the thing I want people to do is if you got a number one, you have to you have to go. What is the outcome I'm trying to drive in my business?

And what is the the biggest problem or constraint in my business that I need to try to solve it? Find that first. Because I see a lot of people building AI stuff for things that they shouldn't even be building anything for. Like, it's not the problem in their business. Go solve that problem.

That's a major distraction. So identify the problem, the constraint, and goes and then say, how do I solve that? There's a couple ways you can solve it. You can go solve it with people, go to upwork.com, go to employee that you've already got, go hire somebody, or you could go see if AI can solve it for you. But, guys, it's gotta start with not just doing AI stuff because we think it's cool, Going okay.

Once again, what's that? What's what's the outcome I'm trying to drive? What's the constraint? Let's go identify that now. Let's go solve that.

And so don't just go crazy with AI trying to build AI everything right now. I think we're gonna get AI burnt out within the next twelve months, and it's gonna snap back where people are gonna go, okay. That was kinda cool, but these are actually the areas where it's useful. I'm gonna use it all the time.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, I'll say for myself, like, I didn't set out to create an AI tool for sales. That was not my intention. I was like, I'm trying to focus here.

Trevor: Yep. Exactly.

Steve: I'm not trying to play with AI right now. Yep. But there were so many people that said, like, hey. I need this tool. I was like, well, if there's enough people that need this tool, then let's build this tool.

Yep. And then, I had a meeting with Adam Whitney, who I've never really got a chance to know very well, what we were talking like. And he built out this private money, management tool. Right? Because everything was in spreadsheets or whatever Yeah.

QuickBooks and so on. And he was like, I had this problem, and I've tried every tool. Yeah. And he's like, look. I just said screw it.

And he just built one himself Yep. In the afternoon. Yep. And, like, now he's got, like, I don't know, it's, like, 50 users or, like, a couple 100 users. Yeah.

Right? But, like, he solved their problem that he was having. And it wasn't for lack of trying to solve it. Right? He had to go and, like, try all these different things.

Yeah. And Eventually, I was like, screw it. I'm just gonna make one myself and Heck yeah.

Trevor: The the former military guys that get into wholesaling just absolutely crush from, like, their discipline and

Steve: Yeah.

Trevor: Resistance and just being able to stay with Is that

Steve: what he is?

Trevor: Adam Whitney is. Yeah. Him and Bill both are.

Steve: Yeah. I knew Bill was. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, they're just like, screw it.

I'm gonna figure it out myself. And, like, he showed it to me. I was like, that's pretty cool.

Trevor: It's it's impressive what what you can do. It it is, man. Yeah. Heck, yeah. But, dude, I, yeah, I I appreciate the time with us.

And Yeah.

Steve: Well, if someone wants to check out the the AI challenge, what's what where where do they go?

Trevor: We'll we'll get that link updated, carrot.com/disruptors.

Steve: Okay. And

Trevor: I'll take him to your link right to the challenge. They'll be able to jam with Trevor three, four days on,

Steve: you know,

Trevor: and the cool thing about the challenge is updates, as you know. Yeah. Being in this space every month, it's literally new tactical stuff to It's

Steve: always something new.

Trevor: To take away.

Steve: Yeah. Like, I you go to bed and, like, you know, class number one, you wake up, GPT is in

Trevor: the morning. Exactly.

Steve: And you the next day, I was like, Grox number one.

Trevor: Yeah. That was just Well, we we

Steve: saw number one again. Right.

Trevor: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We we saw a change like that with AI SEO one month over one month where, GPT and even Google was looking at Reddit as as, like, one of the number one sources, and then YouTube trumped it the next month.

Steve: Oh, really? And so

Trevor: you go, shoot. Let's really look at the video strategy, because they're both really using YouTube a ton. Mhmm. Because YouTube is a a massive place to get a ton of data through transcript transcriptions. So, yeah, that that changed month over month, and that's

Steve: to me. I didn't know about that one.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. YouTube trumped, Reddit for, for sure for Google, and for, ChatGPT, at least at

Steve: that month. I would say rightfully so. Yeah. Those Reddit those Redditors are crazy.

Trevor: Oh, yeah.

Steve: Yeah. They've got some, they've got some crazy ideas.

Trevor: For sure.

Steve: I've I've gotten lost in in Reddit, and Yeah. You can go down through a rabbit hole.

Trevor: Mhmm. It's just

Steve: it'll just feed you more and more

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: Down the rabbit hole. It's like actually, it was it was TikTok's worse. Yeah. But before TikTok, it was right. Yep.

Oh, yeah. So, last words you'd like to leave all the listeners with?

Trevor: I'm thinking of Epic and just so many great people including Steve that we got to talk to. And I think one thing, we can talk AI tactical stuff, but the practice of studying yourself and taking time away from your business to reflect and think about your identity is a $100,000 per hour task plus if you have some level of routine and and rhythm to it. And I think with the identity, I think this was Steve Harvard saying it yesterday with the identity. When you are the top version of yourself, you're trying to creatively think about how you can give and it doesn't need to be money all the time. Yeah.

So think about ways that you can give to your team, to the clients that you serve, to your friends, family, study yourself, and Yeah. That's always a worthwhile investment. Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor: I love it. Yeah. Kinda kind of going back to when I was talking about that eighteen month, you know, journey of of trying to find that that next season. If if if anyone's going through a challenge like that, number one, it's normal. We're we're all gonna go through a version of that.

Our business cannot be ultimately right forever. Yeah. Exactly. Number two, if you haven't gone through it yet, listen to what we're talking about because you will. And and I think that the biggest thing is just recognize that this business journey, like, I I believe this world finishes, Steve.

I believe that business exists for three reasons. The business should exist to fund your vision. So we should have some clarity of what our vision is, including our giving and our lifestyle should fund the division. Shouldn't over fund it and grind you in the ground because you're you think that your identity is this, you should fund it the right amount. Number two, it should give you work that interest and energizes you.

Right? If we're just grinding ourselves in the pulp to try to keep up with the next person, we're doing a bunch of things we don't like. Your work should interest and energize you. Right? Life is way too short.

And number three, it should create an impact that you're proud of. And so if if we look at business in those ways, not as our identity, not as the thing that we should worship, not as the thing that that defines us, but it's it's this tool that allows us to do those three things. Under our vision, create an impact that we're proud of and and enable us to do work that interests and energizes us. Man, like, you could do that forever. So, recenter back in those y'all if you're kind of off of it from a mix.

I've gotten there before, and hopefully, I won't get there again, but I probably will. I'll I'll forget all these things I just said and get in the moment and you slide into it, and then you go, oh, shoot. Here's the here's the the triggers that got me into it last time, and here's the plan that got me out.

Steve: But now

Trevor: I've got a plan to get out of it

Trevor: Yeah.

Steve: If someone wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

Trevor: Yeah. Best spots on Instagram. So trevor.mock, mauch, or carrot.com. Check out what we've got going on over there. And then, if you like the entrepreneur kind of mindset stuff, I've got a podcast called the entrepreneur Freedom Formula.

So you guys can find Entrepreneur Freedom Formula wherever podcasts you're listening to.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Social media at its lows 21, and then we both do the podcast for care at the Evergreen Marketing Show. I've been doing most of those solo lately, but we're gonna get Trev back on and really get the the content back.

Ramping on this is an inspiring trip to get out there and get all more podcasts and stuff.

Steve: Alright. Awesome. Awesome. And guys, you you guys got value today. Please make sure you subscribe.

Leave a comment. That way we can reach more people, create more millionaires. Thank you so much.

Trevor: Dude. Love it. Appreciate you.

Steve: For coming on. Thank you. Thank you.

Trevor: The other day. That

Trevor: was awesome.

Steve: My pleasure. My pleasure. I'll see you guys next time. Steve train. Jump on the Steve train.

Disrupt us.