Thomas Ryan

@0:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. Today wel wecome the founder of Bigley Sales. Bigly is an AI company that uses AI to generate more sales. And I got to tell you folks, you know, for those watching on YouTube, you see this, but Thomas is a university hurricanes fan.

I see the football back there. got the helmet back there. I'm a former, I guess a former, because I went to Florida State, mean, it's a huge Florida state, similar to Charlie Ward, Winky, you know, back in the day, Peter work, but I'm Syracue. 

So I can't, I can't root.

@1:00 - Thomas Ryan

for the no we got an award coming next year to the to the canes we got the the top transfer in the country coming over to play quarterback oh man i'm telling you it's i love football season because the miami florida state i know you can talk about mission oh how stay in all these other norer day in usc but florida state miami is my personal favorite rivalry in any sport and that includes the north klana duke basketball i love florida stavors and i mean that's that's a such a fun rivalry but enough about football time is let's talk about bigly tell me what is bigly styles give me a good new background so we have um landing page generators that tie in where you can set up a landing page in a few minutes you can have that then tie directly into our crm have all that data automatically saved and then automate messages out to those people to schedule them into meetings book them out into appointments right so we can take it entirely through the flow

What we're working on right now after the scheduler is actually doing this with voice as well, that you can have a call center basically with the AI.

I can clone your voice, can clone my voice, can clone Barack Obama's voice, and we can have any sort of voice answering that phone in any language on Earth and be able to fill out any sort of form, capture that data, schedule appointments, do a live transfer to an insurance agent, whatever once that data has been captured.

So it can allow businesses to punch above their weight or allow larger businesses to make sure there's someone there ready to answer the phone 24-7 who can book someone into an appointment or bind a policy or whatever they need to.

@2:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, now this isn't your first entrepreneurial adventure, correct? What was let's let's talk about your you know how you started so take us back to the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey what motivated you to take the leap and then what was your first kind of entrepreneurial journey so both my parents were entrepreneurs they both run their own businesses and you know I worked at my father's company for a while and you know I knew he was getting rid of the company and went off to grad school.

@3:23 - Thomas Ryan

and I started really an online staff in business while I was in grad school and the initial idea didn't work the way I wanted to I fought through two years of learning how to build websites learning what the agile methodology means which is basically instead of trying to write down at the very beginning everything and every user flow that is going to happen obviously you need to do some of that you should do some wireframe and you should put together a UI you should see what that UI looks like but it's to really break down a

coding or any project into smaller digestible tasks and then attack those one by one. Right, so you can have an idea of how things are going to look and how things are going to work, but especially programming.

you've seen people using your software, until you've seen that users like it and are adopting it, to go nuts, you know, spending five years building something really isn't the recipe for success.

You want to build something a little smaller, you know, a lot of guys say build half a product and build it really well and make sure it's valuable to your users and then, you know, you want to watch people using it.

So that's really what we did is we built some software. Initially, I spent a couple of years building it.

We went through four or five iterations trying to get it out the door. I got a referral over to, you know, some really good engineers finally after struggling and we finally got the project off the ground and then no one used it the way we wanted them to.

So, I think that's the age-old entrepreneurial story. we found a solution to a problem nobody had. It's not no one had.

It's, you know, we were trying to sell this to Fortune 500s and they bought a different way. You know, they had all moved to hiring people a different way rather than on a referral basis.

They basically wanted to buy people with a purchasing system the same way they bought paperclips. Right? So, you know, the people like, oh, you're a level three, you know, engineer.

We're going to pay $42.79 an hour. You know, people are a strength. That's, it is what it is.

@5:43 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, to that point, you mentioned, you people are a strength and I completely agree with it, that aspect.

And you also mentioned, you know, your fourth iteration, right, before getting out the door. You also talked about creating value.

How do, how, like, you know, as an entrepreneur, how do you find out? if you were like what process did you take to ensure that your product was in fact valuable to the end user?

@6:06 - Thomas Ryan

So I mean if it's something that you really know when you use yourself, you know, that's um, that's a good start.

So I ran sales teams for years and and with Bigly what I wanted to solve is kind of some universal problems that we had and basically every other business I knew had when we talked to these guys.

So, you know, um Reaching out to people in mass, right? Reaching out to people immediately after they've requested something, you know So I can ask you, you know, how many times Have you reached out to a website and they either send you four or five articles that really aren't relevant to what your question is or they're like, hey Uh, we'll get back to you at some point in the next 12 to 24 hours Right and it's to me.

find that very frustrating And usually I'm reaching out because I need help something and now I can't get that help and I have to move on to something else and remember to come back to it and now it's another item my to-do list.

Right? So I think these are kind of universal problems. There's another big one for businesses with a lead when a lead comes in and this is going to vary by industry but for I think for a lot of the people who'd be listening to this show, if you don't respond to that lead within the first hour your odds of closing them drops 90 to 95 percent.

So speed to lead is so important when I had my staff in business. If we got to something three or four hours late, you know oftentimes we might as well throw it in the trash.

Right? Because if it already been kicked out to 10 or 20 other vendors and we were late and it was through some sort of automated system, everyone had been contacted already or 90 percent of the people.

people that we reached out to had been contacted. So we'd call the guy and we'd say, Oh, yeah, I heard from this other firm yesterday.

I heard from this other firm three hours ago. I heard from this other firm 10 minutes ago. So if we were late, you know, I mean, you had no chance.

So I think it's like, I mean, think about this, if you're a plumber, right, or if you're if you have a roof leak, what are you going to do?

You're going to call the first guy. That guy doesn't pick up the phone. You're going to pick up the second guy.

He goes, yeah, I can make it over there in two weeks. And you got water pouring from the ceiling.

Right. Obviously, that's not going to go. Next I says, yeah, can be there in a half hour. You're going to be like, great, we'll see in a half hour.

And then you're done. And that's that's the behavior for a lot of people with with a lot of different things.

So the software that I have it responds automatically instantaneously. And then schedules and appointment with that person or pushes them into a call dependent on what we need done.

@9:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Such a great valuable point. think for the listeners, really understanding. Let me give you some examples like from the podcast perspective, right?

Uh, I have to deal with a lot of multiple different systems, right? We have my sick, the hosting system, for example, I was using two different hosting systems.

I paid for one was free. I'm actually sticking with the paid for hosting system because as Thomas mentioned, I had an issue one time with loading a podcast.

I emailed them within like that 30 minutes I was, uh, to him like, Hey, can you send us a screenshot?

Let us help you out. They took me through the process and they got it fixed. Meanwhile, you know, the free version of this other hosting system, not as much, right?

And then that's the value. That's the value add, right? Because again, my time is valuable. And if I'm having to wait, uh, exponential amount of time, I'm going to get upset.

For example, if you go to a five star restaurant and your reservation is, is at, you know, five 30 and they don't sit you down till six.

I don't care how good the food is. You're probably not going to go back to that restaurant because the service wasn't there, right?

that's, it's all about. great in this value. I really love the way you kind of state it. It's, it's really fine to identify and what's valuable to the consumer, right?

Not what's valuable to you in doing that. Now, what are some of the pain points that you saw, you know, going through this process?

@10:13 - Thomas Ryan

What are some of the biggest pain points that you had to go through? Well, I mean, I, I found the automation was all the value in what I've done over the years that, you know, the training stuff, obviously you got to train people, but people don't listen, right?

You know, like anyone on this show, right? You know, how many times have you trained somebody like, this is the way that I need you to do it.

And then you come back and you look at it and you're like, you didn't do anything that I just said, because that happens to me every week, right?

Every week it's, hey, this needs to be done a certain way. And then you come back and you look at it.

And it has not been done the way that you want it to be done. So with this, you can automate the solution.

can, you know, actually have trained it once, get it working. way that you want. And then it works that way forever.

now you can scale up to any sort of usage that you need. So that's the big thing. As far as pain points of building a business, I mean, I have too many to count.

I can write a book on things I've done wrong. think everyone kind of feels that way.

@11:25 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, certainly. Now, let's talk about the actual product. And let's talk about it from the sense of talk me through it from like, I'm a client and I'm going to actually take on this, you know, big lee AI to help me build myself.

What can an entrepreneur expect and how do they kind of work with them?

@11:41 - Thomas Ryan

So what we do is we take all your data, right? We take, you know, any sort of material that you have for your sales, right?

Why us? What's your company history? What's your products or service? What do you do? Your warranties that, know, we feed all of that

nation into the AI. And now it uses that as the sole point of truth. It doesn't go to the internet.

It doesn't guess. If you've told it this, this is the way it's going to answer. And then we help set up some landing pages for them, make sure we're using best practices to convert.

If they need ads, we'll set up ads for them using native Google Facebook TikTok, things like that. There's a bunch of little tricks there where you can just go so wrong and it's not intuitive at all.

So, I mean, it's just something you have to fight through and I think learn to get it right. And then we'll set up the whole process for them.

So, we'll basically, we'll train the AI on what their business does. We'll give it in there. We'll set up the pages.

We'll set up the flow coming in and then have it automatically respond and you know where we're going with this is to have it actually replace the call center as well.

So right now most of it is over SMS and email. We can auto respond to any message and you know again push someone towards a goal.

That goal might be to call between nine and six when their call center is open. Right that goal might be to schedule an appointment for you know us to come and do in-home consultation to fix your roof or redo your bathroom or you know do your kitchen or you know we're doing a lot of stuff in the home.

So or for insurance we have a number of insurance and legal clients as well.

@13:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know let's let's talk about the advertisement for little bit because I think that's a big piece and I think a lot of entrepreneurs including myself get it wrong.

What are some in your you know in your experience what are some of the biggest mistakes you've seen businesses make when it comes to advertisement because there are these little like things you got to know what are some of the business mistakes that you've seen you know owners make when it comes to ad

@14:00 - Thomas Ryan

advertising their business. So I mean, you really need to break it down and kind of step by step. Right?

If we're doing that on Facebook, um, you know, I'm going to talk about video. don't think stills perform very well anymore.

I think a lot of people, they only look at reels, right? If you're on Instagram, you know, they're just not really looking at still images that much anymore and they see a still and they kind of flip right by it.

So the first two or three seconds, they actually have a metric on there that you can look at the first three seconds.

What's your three second view rate on your videos that you're doing? And you want that to be as high as possible.

You want that first three second view rate to be 30, 40, percent, right? To show that you have a good engaging ad.

So we do something to stop the scroll on most of our ads, usually relevant to what we're talking about, but something to get them to stop and watch that ad because people are so.

You know, people are so used to ads, they see thousands of ads a day. Right, between online, no boards, driving places, TV, radio, whatever.

mean, you just hear so many ads, there's so much stuff thrown at you. You're used to tuning it out, or like, if I'm listening to the radio in the car, I just flip to the next channel.

Oh, ads click, right? it's literally one, you know, of the finger and on my steering wheel and that ad is gone.

So that's the most important thing, it's that first three seconds. If people aren't watching your ad, you know, so we were doing like our logo at the beginning, we doing a little automation in the logo.

And I think we would lose like 99% of the people during that automation. Right. So that was a fun little learning experience that, you know, you need to get the engagement first.

And then once you have the engagement, you can, you can try selling to them. You know, we can do testimonials.

We can. whatever, we typically want to flip the picture every, you know, second and a half, two, three seconds, right?

Keep showing new images, keep showing new things on the screen. You put the captions up. There's a lot of tools out there where you can, you know, put captions on the screen that come up underneath a lot of the people like 80% have the sound off when they're doing it.

So if you're in a meeting at work and you're not paying attention, you want to have the sound off on your phone.

You don't want to be listening with sound, right? If you're in class watching something, you're on the bus, you're, you know, on a train, if you're right, there's a lot of places where people are looking at their phone where they probably shouldn't be.

Right? If you're, if you're in a public restroom, you know, you're probably not gonna have the sound blaring on your phone.

Right? But these are all places people look at stuff. Yeah. you know, you got to make sure you have the captions on there.

You know, that's the big one. And just keep it interesting. It's got to be. as interesting as the other content that is out there.

And if you've gone through Instagram recently, man, the content's pretty good. I mean, it really is.

@17:11 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I agree. And folks, know, folks listening, you'll see a transition in mind as well. You will probably see my first reels, as Thomas mentioned, I used to also have an opening little logo montage with my name.

Lused everybody. Nobody cared. Right. And now it's actually the worst because they see it's an ad. like, Oh, here's an ad.

Yeah, exactly. And they keep going. Now, you know, I just kind of to Thomas's point, just basically, it's just a real of myself with the conversation with the entrepreneur I'm interviewing and it has captions, right?

And so it tries to draw you in with those captions as well. Those again, as Thomas mentioned, those are things I had to learn on my own.

But now Thomas, one thing you're doing is a three second rule, which is below in my mind, because now I'm going to go back and look at these reels and really see which ones are created in the most engagement, which I

Got to say, folks, this is a great time for a shameless plug. You can actually see these reels on our Instagram at the shades of E as well as our YouTube page and TikTok.

So please, please come follow us at the shades of E on those three channels. But the real, you know, one thing I'm starting to see is a lot more engagement from those reels.

Now, my biggest area is like, how do I turn those reels? Like one, for example, I have one reel that has like 1,800 views.

How do I turn those 1,800 views into followers? That's my biggest question.

@18:31 - Thomas Ryan

And the other thing, if you know some content has performed organically, right, to take that and put some paid dollars behind that or just tweak it a tiny bit and put some $2 behind that can really work.

Right. Because you know that for whatever reason, getting engagement the way most of these social media companies work, you know, if you're talking TikTok or you're talking Facebook or Instagram or whatever, what they do is they put your content in front of people and they see how many people watch.

for 10, 15 seconds. And if enough people watch it, they show it to the next group. Maybe they show it to instead of 30 people, they show it to 200.

And if enough people watch it there, they show it to, you know, 1000. And then are they sharing it?

Are they liking it? Are they commenting? Are they interacting? Right. So that's basically how all of these platforms work.

Um, so you'll, if you see all of a sudden, hey, you've 10,000 views on something that you did. Right.

Well, whatever you did worked, that's something you could put paid money behind. Right. And if whatever you did, it doesn't work and you have 30 views, you know, there's a swing and a miss on this one.

So maybe you got to change your background, right, where you're doing it. I noticed that I did some in my backyard.

I did some reels in my backyard. And then I did some things, you know, sit. And on the top of the building Miami and the ones on top of the building Miami perform much better.

Right. Same story, same, you know, everything. It just worked better.

@20:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Man, sometimes even the aesthetics of the video are important.

@20:17 - Thomas Ryan

Yeah. Yeah, really. Everything is and then switching it, you know, again, it can't just be used sitting on a screen talking for two minutes.

No one's going to watch that.

@20:26 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, and that's a great point because I think, um, how, how would you encourage listeners to really begin to think about how they create content and advertisement and put it out there?

Uh, and then how do they also use big Lee to kind of help continue to push it over.

@20:42 - Thomas Ryan

Yeah. So we're, if you're in one of the verticals that we're dealing with right now, if you're doing legal, if you're doing insurance, if you're doing, uh, home services, we're happy to help.

not taking clients outside of that area right now because we have to do so much to get each of those verticals right.

For us taking people all over the map, it's just too difficult for us to integrate some quickly. And, you know, frankly, we're backed up.

You know, we're, we have more work than we can handle at the moment. So we're kind of putting the brakes on how many new clients that we're taking.

And we're making sure that they're in a vertical that we're already dealing with. You know, to reduce that learning curve for forgetting everything right for them.

To your other question there, what I would do if I was looking to do some advertising and I don't have a giant budget.

I wouldn't go out and hire a marketing agency. I would go. I would get a video editor on Fiverr or Upwork.

I would look for someone with five stars. I would give them a little bit of content of you talking or someone talking.

Testimonials are great, right? Any testimonial of an actual real person talking is fabulous. know, you have a happy customer and they're willing to say something nice about you.

your business, go grab that testimonial and then hire a video editor and pay them the 50 bucks or whatever to do the video, 25 bucks.

We're not talking huge amounts of money here. It's not like, oh, I got to hire this advertising agency that's going to charge me $2,500 a month.

have that same sort of person, set up your Facebook account for you if you haven't set it up right.

everything I'm talking about here, you can probably do for a hundred bucks. And I would run some ads and I would run them broad.

Now, the more you try to target down or niche down on this for what I've seen, the worse your performance, which is really counterintuitive.

Now, if you know the only people who buy your stuff are over 65, yeah, set it to over 65, right.

If you know that 90% of the people who buy your stuff are women, set it to women, right. Feel free to do something along.

those lines. But with Facebook and with TikTok and all these things, their algorithm is so good. they're doing is they're looking at people who have engaged in content that is like yours.

So if someone has just looked about a solution for weight loss pills, they're going to show them other weight loss commercials.

If someone has looked at other things for children, toys and for children, they're going to show them other children's toys.

If they've looked at other supplements for the gym, they're going to show them other supplements. If they've looked for other consulting plans, they're going to show you them consulting plans.

If you go back tonight and you actually sit down and fool around on Facebook or one of these things, look at whatever ad that you're looking at and you'll notice you're going to see five other ads that are just like that in the next hour.

So you just let their algorithm do the work for you and just make sure it's in the right zip codes.

If I'm doing it in Broward County where I live, I'm just, I've Broward County and that's it. And then I let their algorithm do the work for you.

If you try to niche it down a lot, they do is they raise your CPM. So instead of paying 20 bucks per thousand views, now you're paying 100 bucks per thousand views, and you almost can't overcome that.

Even if your targeting is better, just because they're charging you five times as much for the same thousand views, it's really hard to overcome it.

And frankly, their algorithm is excellent. So yeah, I completely agree, folks.

@24:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I again, going back to when I first started this podcast, I thought I was smarter than Mark Zuckerberg and his algorithm.

So I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do my own. I'm going to narrow down my target. It's going to be this age within this county and this many people that came up with like, well, you identified six people.

I've nipped it down so far. And it's true, you know, at the end of the day, the algorithm were kind of in place.

You can say whatever you want about the social sites, at the end the day, those algorithms do really do help support small businesses build their brand.

In fact, one business in particular that I really love to highlight is baseballism here in Oregon. What their team did was they started with Instagram and just did steals, right?

Post-nout steals memes of baseball slogans, right? And then they started taking off and what they did was, okay, this meme did really well.

Let's put it on a t-shirt and see if it sells. So now they're taking organic views and organic likes from their Instagram, putting them on a t-shirt and now create a business.

That business now sparked into a multi-million dollar business. a national business. can find them at the A.K. Stadium, believe.

They're at Texas Stadium, Breakly Field, the field of dreams. So you can find baseballism stores now all over this country.

I believe they're starting to go nationally too. And it's just they started out on Instagram by simply posting reels and identifying what is the consumer again going back to

that value, right? What did the consumer consider valuable? And in this case, it's their likes, right? That's how they can identify what they considered valuable.

Okay, now let's see if that they consider that valuable enough to purchase it. Okay, and that's that funnel, right?

sales funnel we're talking about, everybody's aware of your product. Okay, now you're trying to get to a loyal consumer down to a purchase, right?

You're trying to convert them to an actual purchase. Well, they were just creating awareness and trying to see if they can convert people to a loyal, now they have a loyal fan base of baseball people, you know?

@26:31 - Thomas Ryan

It's amazing.

@26:31 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and it's again, it all happens organically, right? Building a brand is sometimes very organic, but it takes a lot of work.

It's not doesn't happen overnight.

@26:42 - Thomas Ryan

Yeah, and it's the same thing with everything. So when we're doing landing pages, we'll test different headlines. And you'll, I mean, I can tell you with our main Bigly page, we changed to headline one time.

And our conversions dropped 90% over two days, and I was like, yeah, we're gonna change that. Someone right back, right?

But literally just change in the word and, you know, it was off a cliff and then you tweak and sometimes goes up and you can play around with it.

You change one element on your landing page. You change one element on your site. You change the slogan. You change what's underneath.

And you'll see huge differences with tiny changes. Um, for anyone doing Facebook, I would give one recommendation besides test four or five things at once and you can always do retargeting.

You can say, who's seen 75% of my ad or who's clicked on my ads in the past and make sure you keep showing the stuff to them.

Those are, you know, some more advanced tricks that, again, someone can set up for you. you need help, there's someone on five or who can do that for you who's not going to charge an arm and a leg.

Um, but big thing I would throw in there. Do a free form question. Right. Make them answer one free form question.

If you're doing paid dollars behind it, because that beats the bots right now.

@27:57 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, interesting.

@27:58 - Thomas Ryan

Yeah. Otherwise you'll get a lot. a lot of fake things from all of these sites. You'll get fake calls, you'll get fake forms, you'll get, you know, and we're doing some roofing stuff and it was pretty obvious some of the things we're getting in were fake, right?

So we were running some roofing ads and we're like, okay, this guy's in a different state and he lives in an apartment building.

And he says he doesn't own the home, right? So you have a rental in an apartment building, you're looking to get roofed out on your, it worked out on your roof.

Like there was some things that just jumped out at us and as soon as you add in a free form thing, you know, if you make it mandatory and typically the bot doesn't know how to handle that.

They'll have it automatically press a button but they don't know how to handle the free form. So it'll eliminate most of the spam that you're getting if you put that on there.

@28:50 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That is a great, great tip. Now with like myself, there are multiple different social media channels, right? LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, they'll do...

something different. What would you say from is there a channel that individuals should be focusing on more than others or do they all provide the same kind of benefit?

@29:10 - Thomas Ryan

No, they're all different. So something like LinkedIn, I think works, like we use LinkedIn all the time for staffing, right?

We would find so many people on LinkedIn it was crazy because we could go and search for exactly what we were looking for, right?

So if I'm looking for a white albatross, I can put in white albatross, you know, and search it all the way down and here's the 50 white albatrosses, right, in my state or in the world or whatever, and now I can send them all a message.

And that's pretty effective. On LinkedIn, anyone who's not the more likely to reply, it means they haven't been there in the last 30 days.

Most people aren't on LinkedIn unless, you know, people are going to hate me for saying this, but unless they're looking for a job, they're not on there.

So. You're not going to find a lot of business executives hanging out on there. And if they're not in the more likely to reply, it means they haven't touched anything there in the last 30 days.

So if you send them a direct message on there, you're probably not going hear anything back in LinkedIn charges like $3 per direct message.

Their advertising is prohibitively expensive and you're going to be advertising in front of a bunch of salespeople. Tip talk, younger folks.

You're looking for people in their 20s, you're looking for people in their teens, advertise on TikTok. Right? Facebook, you get a full gammon on there.

There's a lot of grandmothers on there looking at baby pics. We're doing some things for solar panels. Most of the people who are looking at solar panels on there are over the age of 65.

@30:47 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Interesting.

@30:48 - Thomas Ryan

Yeah, I thought it was interesting too. So for stuff like roofs and solar panels, we're talking most of them are 55 plus.

Are there really a lot of 65-year-olds on Facebook? But guess where my mom looks my baby pics?

@31:05 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

They're enough.

@31:07 - Thomas Ryan

You know, so they're on there. I mean, if they have grandchildren, you better believe they're on Facebook. You know, and there's something like 3 billion people on there right now.

Maybe I'm exaggerating slightly. Maybe it's only 2.5 monthly active users. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's so large. So older people, you'll find them on Facebook.

You won't find them on TikTok, Instagram. So you can advertise at the same time that you do Facebook. So those are really the same product for me.

But you definitely need reels if you're on Instagram. You know, so especially if it's kind of like a quick purchase, know, that stuff works really well.

You're typically not getting high intent. You're getting stuff that someone sees and they're like, Ooh, I need this, right?

Or, Ooh, this could be nice. And then Facebook's algorithms are so good. They're looking at it. They keep showing them other similar content because they know they're in the market for something like that Because they keep engaging with it Right Google is really good for high intent, but it's expensive So you want to look at doing?

Long tail keywords things that are less obvious There's a tool we use called hrefs, which I would highly recommend a hre fs I love hrefs They'll give you every kind of relevant keyword that you know you can possibly think of that people might be searching for They'll show you your competitor sites.

They'll show you your competitors top pages. It's a little expensive I think it's a couple hundred bucks a month But you know if you're doing stuff online a lot of stuff online, and it's really cool and really worth it And I'm sure there's some other free competitors along those lines Neil Patel has a lot of the stuff with the SEO

So all of these things, it's different things for different types and something we're exploring right now and getting set up is a lot of native ads as well.

Where I think these days they can do a lot of the stuff that you can do with Facebook on native, right?

So the tabulas and the outbrains and the media goes and all those guys.

@33:26 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, you know, two Thomas's point folks that are listening, I'm probably going to start to slowly transition. Now we have the shades of entrepreneurship on LinkedIn, but it's not really like that Thomas pointed out, you know, I think it made a lot of relevant sense to me is that platform is really focusing on hiring and retaining employees.

I'm not looking to grow my business from an routine employee's perspective. I'm looking to grow it from a consumer perspective from a folks one in the listening.

Now don't be wrong. I think LinkedIn still has a valuable piece and I still use it very heavily from a business perspective, I think from the shades of entrepreneurship perspective on the business page.

You'll either probably see it disappear or slowly just kind of stop posting. You'll probably still always be on there.

So if you want to tag it by all means, but I think that Thomas is kind of pointing out, my focus might be more on creating the reels and create a content that's going to be valuable to the listeners.

That's also educational, right? Because I believe that is in fact the value that this podcast is able to provide is that education piece that ties back to the entrepreneurship, right?

@34:25 - Thomas Ryan

And the one I skipped is X. haven't tested much on X yet, but I'm planning on especially for B2B type things, right?

Because there are lot of business executives on there. There is, you know, I would say in general kind of a higher level of discourse that you're going to find on X than you do on Facebook or Instagram.

In general, I know that they're all kind of out there. You know, the other thing I want to stay away from is typically any of the like, oh, get our expanded like audience network.

I typically shy away from all that stuff because I've just found so much fraud on there. mean, just so much fraud that we turn that off just to avoid because they recommend it.

So the first thing you do is like, oh, they're recommending the setting. We should turn it on, right? And then you do it and you get a ton of engagement and then you try calling them and the phone numbers are fake or they're a real phone number, but you pick up the phone and you call them.

They're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't fill that thing out. That particularly from that audience network type stuff, I see a lot of fraudulent material.

And we did set up security on all the stuff. If we're sending some to a landing page, we have security on there where you can basically see there's nothing's private anymore, by the way.

Privacy is you're like, oh, we're going to this to this website like no one knows. Know what your IP is they know.

I mean they you know they might know your dog's name It's they're gonna know everything.

@36:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

They probably know your dog's name cuz it's your password Followed by that one exclamation point folks. I know it don't lie.

It's probably capital letter and one exclamation point at the end I know it Now this has been some phenomenal advice Thomas now for the folks that are listening that one over and more about you Maybe they're interested in connecting with you.

@36:26 - Thomas Ryan

How do they connect with you on LinkedIn or other social sites? Yeah, mean just come to bigly sales calm, right?

That's probably the best place to find us And I haven't even really gotten into the AI much at all which if you want to talk about that Yeah, I know we've been talking about sales and so much having talked about the AI Yeah, it's been having lot of fun with marketing, you know over the last couple years here and You know all the ways they can go wrong if you're doing lot of stuff on Google Make sure you get some security tools like if you're spending a significant amount of your budget on Google get some

security tools, make sure you're blocking VPN traffic, make sure you're blocking data center traffic. We were getting murdered by data center traffic for a while.

Some one of our competitors put a bot farm on us. So we kept having new IPs come in, but they were all coming from like, you know, Moses Lake.

But you know where Moses Lake is there, kind of up in your neck of the woods.

@37:23 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, yeah. There's not many people out there.

@37:25 - Thomas Ryan

Not many people. It was more people coming to us from Moses Lake than lived in Moses Lake. Right. So we were trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

And we were like, Oh, there's a big Amazon data center there. It's an AWS hub. Right. And then it all made sense.

So make sure you block that stuff. There's a lot of tools out there that you can use to do this.

Some are more expensive than others. But you can go and, you know, block that traffic. if you're paying 20 bucks a click, 30 bucks a click for something, 50 bucks a click, you want to make sure it's.

You're a competitor down the street clicking on your thing a hundred times a day. You want to make sure it's not a Bot farm in Pakistan, you know Send in traffic your way just to blow up your account Because they can overwhelm you pretty quickly and then you get no results out of it.

So You got to be careful with all these guys with Google. That's we definitely had that happen to us So it's not that I'm saying don't use Google Saying that you want to be careful because the the assumption that they protect against this sort of fraud on their network They they don't they don't care and they will you know you'll reach out to them You'll be like hey, guys got to do something about this and they'll be like no we don't You know you met one of the things you mentioned was AI in fact, you know bigly sells, you know, essentially is is Helps find the perfect client right using AI.

@38:52 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

How do you know? How does it go through that? How do you do that?

@38:55 - Thomas Ryan

So I mean the AI the big things we're doing with the AI is to automate that outreach, right, to automate all the issues that I saw over the years without reach that you would people would forget to follow up when they're supposed to, right?

They wouldn't follow up. They would follow up once or twice and then be like, eh, you know, whatever. And oftentimes the guy was just busy, right?

So he was busy. He was in another meeting. He was on another phone call. He didn't respond to it.

They forgot it wasn't a high priority. He got 47 other things going on. So someone filled out your form.

We're going to assume that they're relatively interested, right? They went to your website. They filled out a form. They said, hey, I'm interested.

We're going to assume they're aligned to you. But they're probably busy. Number one, you have to respond right away.

Right. So any of those that lag time is death. If you wait a week to get back to that person, they're not even going to remember that they filled out your form, what it was, what it's about, right?

They're going to have no idea who the hell you are. You're going to call them and they're going be like, oh, what?

@40:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I don't think I'm interested. Click. Right?

@40:07 - Thomas Ryan

And you're probably not great on the phone. In general, unless you've done hundreds of thousands of cold calls, you're probably not super smooth on the phone.

Some of you might be, but if that's not your forte, some people kind of stumble over their words, or they're a little uncomfortable picking up the phone and calling someone they don't know.

So I would lead with, hey, you filled out my form, right? I'm giving you a call to tell you about the thing that you said you're interested in, something along those lines, right?

To immediately let them know it's not a cold call. It's not something out of the blue that you're responding to that.

So because a lot of people don't like it, they don't do it right away. They have a lag. They say, oh, going to have my admin do it, or someone else, or I'm going to have someone get to it on Monday, right?

That just murders their sales. It just kills their sales conversion, right? The big thing is automation right away and then auto respond to every message and then push them towards goal.

Again, push them to call back when the call center is open. Push them to schedule an appointment for an in-home consultation.

Push them to schedule an appointment, you know, to really be able to push them to take an action. We're going to be able to add to push them to a website, like a page to buy something.

You we're just going to keep adding features on here. And the other thing is a lot of the form fill type stuff.

Be able to have that done via a landing page, you know, via text that we can have the SMS go back and forth with them.

And ask qualifying questions, verify information, right? So we can get a lot of the information that we need over SMS.

finally, what we're adding here, which should be how March timeframe is the voice to be able to have. have it actually field a voice call, which I'm super excited about.

So, you know, those are the things I'm working on. And there's enough complex problems in there that I'm plenty busy.

@42:11 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, no. And again, folks, that big league AI does a lot, you know, AI auto respondents, scheduling, powered emails, texting, phone calls, and additionally, that AI landing pages.

So, this is not just like one little thing. It has multiple layers that are kind of stacked on to this product.

In fact, Thomas, tell me a little bit more about the AI landing page. would love to kind of hear about that specifically.

Oh, I lost your voice.

@42:46 - Thomas Ryan

Sorry about that. I hit the mute button accidentally. Right now, we're building out a number of different templates. So, we have kind of a base template where what will happen is you'll put in what your company name is, your logo,

a little bit about your business, the services you provide, right? Just, you know, with a couple words and it'll build a full landing page for you.

So maybe you're throwing a party, right? you're, you know, you have an event, you're doing whatever that you're trying to do and you don't want to take a couple of weeks and pay a developer to build out a landing page.

It will literally just create one on the fly for you in a minute and then you can go, you can edit it, you can, you know, play around with it, change the wording.

It'll have the AI write all the text for you. And then you can go in, you can pick any image from your website, any image from the internet, right?

You can use our image generator, which is tied to, I believe, on splash in a couple of others right now, which will, you know, create images for you and you can put those up and, and, you know, do it with a couple of clicks and, you know, our basic page generator is easy enough where anyone can do it.

What we're doing is we're adding right now a bunch of different templates that are relevant for different things. So, if you're trying to sell an individual product, there's going to be a template for that.

Right? If you want to schedule appointments, there's a template for that. If you want a multi-step form where the final step is to make a call, there's going to be a template for that.

Right? So, we're taking these different business scenarios that we're dealing with right now when we're saying everything should be templated.

So, you can create this in seconds instead of days.

@44:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And that is, so I'm in the healthcare world and that's where I'm trying to get us to is the standardization, some templates.

Right? So, like data, we deal with a lot of data except you can pull data in many different ways and the thing about data is data will always give you what you want but it'll never get you what you need, especially in the healthcare world.

@44:53 - Thomas Ryan

Right? so, we're trying to figure out how to do that.

@44:56 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, man, happy hat. Believe me, trust me, all that fun stuff. But yeah, again, leveraging AI folks, think it's not, don't be afraid of it.

think it's a really good way to help improve your business.

@45:08 - Thomas Ryan

Again, it can sink a lot smarter and faster than we can. so just leverage it. It's not here to take over your job until they make your job easier.

Yeah, and I'd really like to define AI right now. What AI is today is an auto responder. It's auto complete, right?

So have you all ever typed something into Google and you start typing and you put in the first word and then you say Bahamas and it says flights to hotels, things to do, restaurants, right?

Well, Google knows these are the five or six most common searches that come up with it, right? And if you put in, you know, again, you start typing something and it tells you, well, this is what we've seen and this is what we think you're probably gonna be looking for.

That's basically how AI works. They've fed it all the time. content on the internet. So it's not thinking it's not Lex Luthor thinking in the background like, ah, this is, you know, this is my schemes for taking over the world, right?

It is auto completing. This is what I've seen before. So when someone asks about this, this is what they've been looking for in the past.

And it basically tries to guess the next word correctly. It tries to guess the next phrase correctly. And that's how it works.

And that's how the image generators work. And that's how, you know, the text generators work. And it's pretty darn good.

It wasn't really useful until about a year ago. And then when GPT three came out, all of a sudden it became wildly useful.

And it's improving by leaps and bounds. So you can use it to generate images. you played around with mid journey, something like that.

mean, the edges are wild that it comes up with in a few seconds that you put in a prompt.

And I'm not a graphic designer. I could screw up a stick figure, but I made some marketing flyers for my team.

I'm like, guys, this is what I was thinking of. And I put an a prompt and I played around with it for five minutes and I said, here you go, use these.

And they looked really good. if you don't like it, you say change this or change that or whatever. And it does it.

So you don't need really graphic designer anymore. You can pretty much make. I mean, my nine year old can use, know, Canva and can take an image that she creates on chat, GPT, and superimpose some words on it.

And she can do the graphic design. I mean, she could do my graphic design work if I wanted to.

And she's nine. And, you know, it's just not that difficult. So things that you never would have been able to do before.

you can do. For writing, we're doing a coding contest, right? Responseing a coding contest actually at Laracon in India.

And I needed the rules. So I said, I don't know what rules I'm going to need for a coding contest.

So I found a couple of rules from coding contests that, you know, some other people had put on Google and some places like that.

And I went to the ATBT and I said, make, you know, convert this from to a coding contest rules for this.

And here's what it is. And here's what I want done. And I wrote a paragraph and I copied and pasted in the thing and bang, you know, about 30 seconds later, I had everything for my coding contest.

And then I had to tweak a couple of different things. But, you know, it took what would have taken me hours.

And I was able to do it and five minutes.

@48:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I agree. And folks that don't use it like to Thomas's point, there's going to be some some edits that need to be done.

So make sure you go back and read it. you're going to use chat GPT, make sure you go back and read the content that is providing you.

Make sure you just double cross reference it. But again, it's there to really help you speed up your work.

@49:13 - Thomas Ryan

I use it for my newsletters a lot. Yeah. And if you get work done from anyone, if you don't read it, I mean, I wouldn't expect a very good rod going out the door if you don't proofread things.

@49:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Very true.

@49:23 - Thomas Ryan

So, you know, we were using it for SEO. I have a professional kind of editor. Um, that's on the team, but they're putting out my SEO teams putting out 20 articles a day right now because they use chat GPT to do the base work and then they edit it and they put in pictures and do what they need to do and make it look nice.

And, you know, we would have been lucky to get 20 articles a month out the door a year ago.

@49:49 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Right. It's hard.

@49:50 - Thomas Ryan

And now we can do 20 a day. And if we weren't doing the editing piece, maybe we could do 200 a day.

But, you know, with the editor with. the taking the time to make sure the content is good and it looks good and you know the graphics are good and all the other stuff you know we're we're at about 20 a day but just you can be so much more prolific than you ever could have been in the past using these tools they're definitely not something to be afraid of there are things that will save you massive amounts of time one of the other things where i've seen a lot of businesses doing is you know especially slightly bigger businesses you know one of the guys in my ai group he was doing software for trucking companies where they used to get in an email saying hey this is what i need and they would have to input that into their computer system and every time they didn't put it it would take them 20 or 30 minutes and they would get a thousand of these orders a day well they have the ai do it now their error rate is lower right and it's saving them you know 20,000 minutes a day

30,000 minutes a day for one mid-sized trucking company. And for everything where you're doing a lot of manual labor, there's an AI scraper, there's an AI, you can basically have chat GPT look at this and say, take this data when it comes in and put it into the computer.

And even if it's structured poorly, you can do that. You can have a programmer do that in a couple of days generally.

You find an engineer and have them do that in a couple of days for you and it's not that complex in most cases.

@51:44 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. Again, folks listening, I really hope you're taking know of lot of stuff that Tom is the same because again, a lot of this stuff is here to help you.

It's easy to use. And again, there's like you mentioned, you don't know who your target on it says he was mentioned with the solar panels.

He's 65 year old individual, 70 year old that are focusing on the solar panels. so leveraging AI and leveraging the marketing tactics that some of these social media channels have is going to be very beneficial for you to help grow your business.

@52:12 - Thomas Ryan

Thomas, thank you again so much for joining the show before leave. Is there anything else you'd like to say before we let the listeners go?

No, I mean, just I think the most valuable thing you can do is learn AI. This is what I'm telling to like we get kids coming out of college.

What should I look right now? should I do? What should I focus on? Learn AI, right? Take the time, play around with it, join some groups of people who are using this stuff, see what they're doing.

But, you know, it's just you will be the most valuable member on any team that you join, right? If you're if you're a fan of doing things yourself, it gives you you can do work 10 times as fast, right?

If you don't know how to do something. Go ask chat. GPT.

@52:59 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Right.

@53:00 - Thomas Ryan

Talking about something on the computer. I need to set up this piece of networking equipment and I don't know how to do it I need to set up a landing page She's big way, but I need to get my printer set up I don't know how to do it right rather than try to fight through this and figure it out for yourself Just go ask chat TPT It will know how to do it and if you hit a roadblock you're like hey I hit this roadblock and I don't know what to do and it'll be like oh that must mean this so now do this this this and this Because it has seen every one of these scenarios right the entire you know The entire the entirety of human knowledge on the internet is in this program Right every technical document that has ever been written is in this program So just ask it the question and it'll give you the answer if you need to do something with program and ask at the question I'll give you the answer, know, there's guys that I know who I was able to I'm not an engineer by trade I was able to stand up Something in Python

on in about two hours. I had to download like 15 different Python libraries.

@54:05 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I had to set up a compiler. I had to like, it was like a 40 step process.

@54:10 - Thomas Ryan

And I was able to get it done.

@54:12 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's like, it's literally like looking at those Lego instructions.

@54:15 - Thomas Ryan

Have you ever played with the Legos? At least the ones that aren't too advanced. You know, once I stuck into the ones for like 15 year olds, I can have problems.

But like the, you know, the beginning ones that they get the kids and all of a sudden you have this beautiful like Lego structure in front of you that you would never have been able to put together without those instructions.

So they can show you how to do everything and just save you so much time. You want to set up a web app, right?

You'll be able to set up a web app in a day, right? You'll be able to program it, get it live, get it on the internet.

Um, you know, you want something a little more complex than just a landing page, you know, you can go to bubble and ask chat GPT how to do it.

And, you know, boom, you'll have that thing live. So you You know, it, I really think it makes all problems kind of solvable.

Um, for most people and if you use it, you know, you'll know how to do everything. Right. You'll be able to figure out everything.

It's just if you want to spend your time on it.

@55:17 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Thomas Brian, CEO of Bigly AI. Thank you again so much for joining the show for those interested in connecting with Thomas.

I'll have this information on the shades of entrepreneurship newsletter, which you can subscribe to by visiting theshadesofe.com