[Top Agency & SaaS Series] New Rules of Growth in an AI-Driven World With Solomon Thimothy

Solomon Thimothy is the CEO and Co-founder of Clickx, a marketing intelligence platform for brands and marketers to plan, execute, and measure all their online marketing campaigns. He is also the Co-founder of OneIMS, a leading inbound marketing and sales agency driving measurable results across industries. With nearly two decades of experience, Solomon is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-selling author known for applying 10X strategies to help businesses scale leads and revenue efficiently. He is passionate about helping companies leverage AI to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:18] Solomon Thimothy shares why showing up in AI search is now business critical
• [5:24] How declining demand is impacting small businesses in the AI era
• [9:15] Simple, actionable steps to make your website AI-friendly
• [11:03] The AI tools top marketers rely on every single day
• [15:53] The game-changing mindset behind Dan Sullivan’s 10X framework
• [22:53] How AI-first strategies are reshaping sales and marketing
• [26:19] Mistakes businesses make when creating offers
• [34:26] Smarter ways to qualify leads and upgrade your sales process

In this episode…

What happens when your website traffic drops, leads become unpredictable, and customers start relying on AI to make decisions for them? How do you stay visible when algorithms recommend only a handful of options? And what does it really take to compete in a world where AI is reshaping how buyers discover and choose businesses?

Seasoned entrepreneur Solomon Thimothy highlights the need for businesses to transition from traditional SEO to being discovered through AI-based search systems. He highlights how the buyer’s journey has fundamentally changed, where authority and relevance now determine visibility. This shift helps companies stay present where decisions are being made. He emphasizes using webinars, AI audits, and clear action plans to assess positioning and improve reach. By leveraging AI tools, teams can personalize outreach, automate workflows, and operate more efficiently. He also shares practical strategies for refining sales processes and creating offers that stand out.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Solomon Thimothy to discuss leveraging AI to future-proof marketing and sales. They explore how AI is changing the buyer journey, ways to increase visibility in AI search, and strategies for scaling outreach through automation. Solomon also shares insights on improving offers and maximizing existing CRM data.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Solomon Thimothy on LinkedIn
• IMS
• Clickx
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Perplexity
• Grok
• Scale Growth
• Strategic Coach – The Impact Filter 
• HubSpot
• Quickbooks
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• 10x Is Easier than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy
• The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan

Special mention(s):

• Dan Sullivan on LinkedIn
• Benjamin Hardy on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Tips To Thrive in the SaaS Space With Sujan Patel” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Cloning Minds With Dara Ladjevardian of Delphi” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Venture Capital Series] How Important Are Core Values When Investing in a Company? With David Mann & Derrick Smith of The Firefly Group LLC” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Leading with Passion with Gino Wickman Founder of EOS Worldwide” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[AI & SaaS Series] The Rise of Voice AI and Next Generation WordPress Automation With Arto Minasyan” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “If you’re not one of the three options AI recommends, your business might as well not exist. That’s the reality we’re facing.”
• “AI is the foundation. It drives the strategy. People execute, but it has to be AI first.”
• “Most businesses aim to 2X. I focus on 10X moves. Cut half of what you’re doing and make more money.”
• “Treating every lead the same is a mistake. Salespeople shouldn’t be talking to unqualified prospects.”
• “If you’re in your 20s, you have more time than you think to fail and still succeed.”

Action steps:

1. Audit your visibility in AI-driven platforms: Regularly check if your business appears in AI-generated recommendations by using relevant prompts.
2. Build an AI-first approach across your business: Integrate AI into marketing, operations, and analytics to improve efficiency and personalization.
3. Refine a strong core offer before scaling: Identify your most valuable and profitable service, then craft a clear and compelling offer around it.
4. Personalize outreach using AI tools: Use AI to tailor emails and messages by referencing specific details about your prospects.
5. Maintain and activate your CRM consistently: Keep your data clean, segment your audience, and automate follow-ups with relevant value.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here. I am the Founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. Solomon Thimothy, he’s a CEO, founder of multiple companies, which we’ll show and I’ll formally introduce you. You can check out IMS.net. You know, AI is the future and that’s what they do there. So we’ll check that out. Also Clickx.io and there’s multiple companies which we’ll refer to. But before I formally introduce you I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out since this is, it’s kind of a combination, a part of the Top Agency Series and Top SaaS Series. Some of the interesting SaaS ones were the one of the Founders of Jotform, and how they grew to 25 million users on the back of like a freemium model. That was interesting. The Founder of Mailshake, Sujan Patel, and growing like 70,000 users on that. Just some interesting journeys. Wade Foster, a Founder of Zapier, also talked about their journey as well. And on the agency side, my Jason Swenk a few times, I don’t know, you may know some of these people, Sam, as you’ve been been in the game for a couple decades. And he talked about selling his company and starting an agency group and some of the, you know, kind of the north star of acquisitions as well. So that many more on InspiredInsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One were an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability and the full production. Number two. And we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting. So, you know, gifting, staying top of mind could be clients, partners, prospects, it could be even staff from a cultural perspective, just send us the addresses, we’ll do everything else. It’s not like, I guess some like a one off tchotchke that we send once a year. It’s like a campaign of gifts, like once every 3 to 4 months for years to come. And I like sending, I like getting food. So we send food. So people look forward to getting it. So, you know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my relationships. And I found no better way to profile the people I admire in the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So check out Rise25 or email [email protected].

I am super excited to introduce Solomon Thimothy. He is a serial entrepreneur and CEO buying five innovative, growth driven companies one IMS, Clickx. IMS lingo starts and lead AI and really leading IMS redefines the future of marketing. And we talked about this very beginning of how do you use AI? Yeah. How do you use AI to scale confidently and to grow? And we’ll get into that. Clickx is a marketing intelligence platform for brands and marketers to plan and execute and measure their actual campaigns. He’s got two decades of experience. The creator of the 10X Framework, which Sam will probably go into a little bit, which is a proven methodology designed to help businesses double their leads, revenue, and results. And the key part is without burnout or guesswork. And he actually started his entrepreneurial journey right out of college when he launched his first agency. So Salomon, thanks for joining me.

Solomon Thimothy: 03:49

Hey, that was a really good intro and you made it sound a lot better than it was. So I appreciate that.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:55

I’m sure there’s ups and downs throughout. I’m going to share my screen and you know, we’ll start off, we’ll get into the journey and some of, you know, some of the things you overcame and some of the things that helped you grow. But let’s start with IMS. We’ll go to IMS.net, and you just did a webinar and you do webinars on showing up in AI. So let’s start there.

Solomon Thimothy: 04:18

Appreciate that. So I think the, the buyer’s journey as we know it is fundamentally shifted just because we were all used to clicking on blue links. Jeremy. It’s just, you know, we had ten links to click on and we were making our own assessments. You know, link one was the one got the most clicks, right? Two, three the Google Triangle, if you remember position one, two, and three got all the visits. However, we don’t do that. I had a problem with my garage and I went to ChatGPT and I said, hey, find me a garage repair guy that is not, you know, huge company private equity. And you know, that has super high, you know, iPads when they walk out of the truck. I don’t want one of those companies. I want a little guy coming to fix my garage and charge me reasonable. So I said, go to the reviews and look for the keyword low price.

And ChatGPT gave me a local business. I called and got scheduled. It’s not even here yet, but I only called one company because that’s just the way we operate now. We don’t get three more. Three options is what ChatGPT gives you. So if you’re not one of those three options that ChatGPT gives you, your business doesn’t exist. Don’t know what I’m saying. That’s the that’s the reality that we’re facing. So our webinar is how do we show up in ChatGPT in Perplexity, Grok, Claude, anything that they’re searching in? And what is small business do when the whole world has kind of shifted on in maybe not in their favor? Some businesses are not showing up. And so that decline of demand is kind of going down. Does that make sense? Their organic traffic is going down. Their lead volume is going down. That means revenue is going down. And if you’re lucky, and you did do some SEO in the past and you did show up, that means that you’re sort of going up in traffic and getting leads.

And if they did nothing, then I don’t know what’s going to happen to their business. So we want to bring this to all the people on our list. So we run a webinar every two weeks if I’m in town. You know, I have the time and all I’m doing is education. I don’t do anything else. We’re not trying to sell them anything. I want them to know what they should be thinking about, which is showing up in ChatGPT. Perplexity, Grok all of the above and how they can do it. And the concept is called SEO. It’s about creating content on their website, just like you’re helping with GIFs and podcasts and so on. We want to get them recommended by ChatGPT. We want them to have the trust and authority that ChatGPT and all these platforms are looking for, and we want them to know how they can build that over time and at no additional cost, no ad spend, no nothing. That’s what the training is for.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 06:51

Two things on that, Solomon. One. If you could talk about 1 or 2 things that are really important that people go crazy about in the webinar. And number two, if someone wants to watch the webinar, sign up for the webinar. Where can people sign up for that? If they want to check out the whole thing 100%.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:10

So we put a web page just for it. It’s called scalegrowth.com, Scale Growth, which is what everybody’s after. You probably heard.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:20

That’s a good domain name. How’d you get.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:21

That?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:21

Thank you. Good.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:23

I have a lot of cool domains.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:24

Here it is.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:25

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:26

I can judge how add and entrepreneur is by how many domains they own.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:30

I just got too many.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:31

Yes. Yeah.

Solomon Thimothy: 07:33

So so long story short, there is the next one. So we literally do this for, for now, from the love of our hearts about what is happening in the marketplace. And we build these audits for people that are trying to figure out where they rank, you know, in these prompts, we help them build the prompts. We go and find the answers. We look at the brands that is being recommended by AI, and then we tell them what they should be doing to fix it. I think it’s a real big problem, Jeremy, that if, you know, small business owners are usually focused on the business, not so much on promotion. If somebody doesn’t do you know, their own research, they’re not going to know. So we’re just like letting the whole world know as much as we possibly can. And it’s free. We don’t charge anything.

And we have gotten great reviews, you know, from just folks being there. So we’re excited to be able to kind of bring this to light. And I’ve also started an AI podcast just because there’s so many people like you that are forefront of AI and, and we just want to be the, you know what I mean? The carrier just like you are. So we can bring awareness to what’s happening in the marketplace. So I absolutely love teaching and sharing what we know. And since it’s changing so much, I’ve never done a presentation that’s the same twice. It’s been changing. So we have new case studies and new success stories every time I do it. I think it’s just a it’s just a fun way to get it out to the marketplace.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:55

Yeah. So people could check out if you’re watching the video, you can see we’re looking at it right now. ScaleGrowth.com for the next one. What are 1 or 2 things that were I mean, again, every presentation is going to be different. So when they show up next time, it’s going to be different from this time. What were a few things, key points or key questions that people had from this go around?

Solomon Thimothy: 09:15

Absolutely. The typical question is like, first of all, am I showing up? And we tell them how they could do that searches themselves. We talk about what they should be doing to their website. A lot of people have some organic presence, probably from building a site once or doing some SEO, but that doesn’t carry over to a AEO. So we talk about what they need to be doing specifically for their website. So we give them specific a game plan, and then we talk about how they should be building a blueprint so that they can actually attack this more, you know, professionally, right? Rather than me building my own kitchen and bathroom by myself, which I don’t know how to do.

I hire a contractor who then gets a designer. Does that make sense? And the designer goes and finds all the appliances and all the the things that need to be used to make a really nice kitchen. People say, well, where’d you get your kitchen done? Well, that’s the same approach that I’m using. It’s not supposed to be like some throw some FAQs on the website and get my website slightly faster and throw some schema markup. Like those are great things that tactics that people talk about when it comes to SEO, but that doesn’t really complete the picture in my opinion. You need to have a good strategy so you can consistently create content that then gets you even more visibility in AI. Those are the three things AI tools.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:28

Can you talk about that for a second? Some of your favorites? You know, I mentioned in if you see anyone in Inspired Insider, it looks like a good podcast interview for your AI podcast. I had Dara who founded Delphi AI, and so I had him on very cool tool. You can interact with it.

I actually interviewed his AI clone and I interviewed him and put it into one interview. So it was super interesting. So I played around with that. But what are some of your favorites? Obviously, you mentioned Perplexity and ChatGPT. What are you most using lately?

Solomon Thimothy: 11:03

Oh, so well, first of all, my I say this on the webinar, my day to day, my personal life is ChatGPT just because I can talk to it. You know, I’m in the car doing all the things that I like to do this, you know, whatever I need to get done. My work favorite is Claude because it’s got three things I’m doing at once. I’m doing chats, I’m doing co work, I’m doing cloud code all at the same time. I know it sounds insane. Then my the other thing that’s happening at the same time is Perplexity computer.

So I’m not using, you know, one manus or one little tool or open cloud or whatever. I’m actually trying to just use the big, big, big dogs and push it to the to the limits. And we as a company, we all have accounts in these platforms. So everybody is forced to use AI to figure out the solution first before we go and start wasting each other’s time and Zoom calls or whatever else. So, and like I said, I literally was on it till 10:00 at night. I mean, that’s past my bedtime. Jeremy. You think I’m up in 2 a.m.? I’m not. I go to bed early, I wake up early, but like, that’s how much I’m doing it. And you ever go to you ever go to bed and your laptop is half closed because it’s working.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:19

I just keep it open.

Solomon Thimothy: 12:21

So yeah, yeah, my room’s dark. I’m like, yeah, it’s like that. And I closed it in the morning. I’m like, whatever I told it to. I’m sure it’s done, you know, at 4: 45 in the morning. But that’s kind of it was building pages. I don’t know what it was doing, but the fact of the matter is like just Claude by itself. There’s so much you can do for you. I don’t know if I need another tool now. I built ten tools for myself with it like it’s just been insane. I mean, there’s a reason why stock prices for software companies is going downhill, because people are going to be building their own CRM systems, it seems.

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