Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:56
Talk about you know, it’s funny because I talked to I had an interview with the founder the other week and they were just saying, you know, really no one’s talking about Perplexity Computer. And he was raving about it. I’m curious, what are some of the use cases for you? How are you using it?
Solomon Thimothy: 13:11
100%. So I think every professional that’s watching this, I mean, if you’re, you know, working on computers and doing things, accounting, finance, whatever it is that you do, you’re here marketing, you know, you should be giving Perplexity Computer a shot. Here’s what I think about it. I have not had anything that I’ve asked it to do that it didn’t come back doing. So.
I had a ten, 12 people that I wanted to interview for one of my podcasts. I gave it a page as our coaches. I gave it a page . It’s kind of like we talked about us implementers. Like I gave a page. Every one of them.
And then I said, I want you to go find all these people’s email addresses and write them a personal, personalized email. Some of them I said, I know I give them the context of the people. I know I’ve been coached by them, the people I don’t know, they’re like in the UK. So there’s a thing that we use. I’m in Strategic Coach. I’m pretty sure you know what that is. It’s called The Impact Filter. The Impact Filter is what you’re trying to accomplish. What are the big things that you want it to happen? What is the worst case scenario? So I said create an impact filter. Specifically each one of these people, we’re going to attach the impact photo in the email. And it went and did all that connected to my inbox. And every single one of these emails are sitting in my draft and not one of them I had to edit.
Solomon Thimothy: 14:28
I had to send. I’ve already secured almost every single one of them except the people that are on vacation, their assistants and their wife’s email back saying one John and Joe, whatever gets back, we’ll let you know. I didn’t do one thing. Obviously it knows me enough to write those emails. It wasn’t all AI. It was very personal. It talked about me and my journey and some of them coaching me, some of them being my first mentors, and all that context was used. I mean, it created the PDF by itself. I was like, this, this, this like what I know. I used to have EA’s right? That would do this. This was like the EA’s work. I don’t have EA’s doing EA work that they used to do. EA’s are now doing AI work for me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:10
I’d love to hear some of your favorite resources like books. And actually there’s a good episode with you. I think you were on the Strategic Coach podcast or. Yeah, there was a podcast out there. There was so people could check that out because it makes me think of like Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. They wrote a bunch of books together. You mentioned, you know, EOS. So there’s Traction with Gino Wickman, people can check out that episode. And actually, I had the Firefly Group that bought EOS on with David Mann and Derrick Smith. So people check out that. But I’d love to hear your favorite resources. I mean, it could be like groups you’ve been in, like strategic coach or, and or books.
Solomon Thimothy: 15:53
Yeah. Well, I like to usually recommend some of the Dan Sullivan’s because they’re my favorite. You mentioned 10X framework. I literally is, is it’s just been nothing but, you know, Dan Sullivan in my life. So, and the reason I say that is there’s so many good things that you can just sort of model in your life that you don’t need to change it. Once you have it, you don’t change it. So for instance, three days buffer days and these things that I’ve focused days, I’ve, I’ve learned it and I adopted them. And so as an entrepreneur, we have a hard time taking a day off because we think we are supposed to be overly productive. Elon Musks of the world, that we’re going to change the world. Yet I was at Disney World this week and I didn’t give a crap about anything that’s happening. You know, the reason is because I’ve been taught that I need my off day so I can crush it on a day like today where you have a webinar with 100 people and then you and then seven other things.
I can’t do that. Had I been working on Claude code for two days and then I come all tired, I can’t. Does that make sense? Like we, I so so that’s why I recommend the three books that Dan and they wrote together. 10x Is Easier than 2x, which is what I usually recommend first, because most businesses, even the folks that was just on the training, they’re all just trying to 2X, they’re just trying to get a little bit more business this year than last year. They’re trying to get 33% or 10%. And I’m like, look, you’re probably going to get rid of half the things that you’re doing and you can make more money. And I told them that if you want to show up on more on Google, that’s A2X move. If you show up on ChatGPT, that’s a 10X move because that’s where, like you said, is the future, the present, all of the above, right? So like there’s things that you could be doing, like for instance, the gifts that you’re talking about, that’s a ten x move because you’re, you’re going to be remembered. But if you send them a postcard or you send them a gift with your, your logo on a t-shirt, that’s A2X move because they’re not going to wear it, they’re going to toss it or whatever, clean their table with it because not I have 50 shirts that I don’t wear.
Do you know what I mean? It’s like, it just doesn’t work. But you give me a custom made a cutting board. Jeremy, I’m not going to throw that out. I’m going to be like, hey, this thing is this is the best gift I’ve ever gotten. And that’s what you want, right? So those are the first things I recommend. So 10X Is Easier Than 2X, The Gap And The Gain. Some of those resources are really who not how. The best resource I’ve ever been told is not to do any of this by myself. And AI is a who, right? AI is a. Who, believe it or not, even though I’m the one having to prompt it. Sometimes I feel like I’m the Who. I’m like, no, no, no, AI still doing all the work. I’m just telling it what to do. I didn’t do any of it. So who not how 10x is easier.
And then the gap in the game, which I find entrepreneurs getting stuck in sort of this mode of not being happy with their progress, which is like the biggest killer of joy. I tell them, go read that. I’m not, I don’t I’m not saying go strategic, go join and become a member. I’m like, dude, these resources are so priceless for $8 on Amazon or Audible, like you have to have it read and then you need to go fix your business, which like EOS could be a great resource. Some of the other ones scaling up. Do you know what I’m saying? Like those are great tools to go. Then once your mindset is fixed, I think a lot of other things are easier. Then you can buy the tool, you know, thing, go read inbound, you know, from HubSpot or something like that, which I think would drive you a lot of ROI, but it’s always starting with the entrepreneur themselves. That’s my, my favorite resources.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:08
Yeah. Thanks for sharing this.
Solomon Thimothy: 19:09
Yeah. I send these books to my clients. I’m like, here, I’ll send it to you. I’m not trying to get, you know, commission or anything. We’re just giving away resources.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:17
No, I mean, I appreciate you sharing that because smart people like you have told me that throughout the years. And so I would just go on audible and search Dan Sullivan by all of the books. And he’s got a lot because at one point I think he was putting out like one every six months or something. So it was a lot shorter. Yeah, one a quarter. Yeah. And so I just went out and Search his name and bought all of them. I mean, like you said, it’s like $6 to $10. It’s a no brainer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:42
Yeah.
Solomon Thimothy: 19:43
So so yeah, long story short, those are my my best in class resources. Obviously, one of the things Jeremy, maybe I’ll mention it now. I don’t know if you have a book that I can give away. I’m trying to do a giveaway a month with these resources. So that’s one of my active campaigns I’m working on because there’s so many resources and so many people are on our list.
I don’t think they’re all going to go spend how much ever money you just mentioned 150 bucks, 200 bucks. But if I just gave away one a month of this whole entire collection, I think it would drive a lot of value. And we can see tremendous change in the marketplace. I think it brings awareness to these resources. And also I’m just giving it away. I don’t want anything for it. And so it’s one of my campaigns I’m working on. I don’t know, I don’t have a domain name. Okay, I’ll find one. I’ll let you know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:30
They’ll just find one of his domains I mentioned and message them. You know, I do want to talk just about the evolution of your business because there’s a lot of businesses and maybe we could fast forward through like some of the ones. Okay, you started off in your dorm room to today or we go reverse and you talk about IMS dot net and go reverse whichever one works best.
Solomon Thimothy: 20:53
So the IMS concept was, is only a couple of years old. Even though the business has been around longer, the concept has shifted with AI. So as soon as ChatGPT rolled out API, which is, is what you would be probably familiar with, a lot of people know that you use programmatic ways to go get things done. We realized that everything that we’ve done up until that point is irrelevant. We need to build a business that is AI first. AI is the foundation. AI drives the strategy. People will do, you know, execution and client communication and all the things that we do, but it has to be AI first. So the first round of me Training was around using cold email to drive sales, but every single email was personalized using AI. Kind of like I told Perplexity Computer to do, but we were taking data from the CRM system, sending it through the API every single record.
It would then spit back a hyper personalized email, would stick that into it instantly and send emails, and we would get great, great replies because every single email was unique. And then Google and all these big servers didn’t care because they were unique emails and not spam, right? So people didn’t know what’s possible. And if they knew that was possible, they didn’t know how to do it. So we kept pushing the limits on it. The second thing was we took all of the data from their business Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Ads, Facebook ads, CRM system, put in an MCP server, give it to Claude, and then we would ask the CEO, put it on their phone and say, hey, ask it. Where’s my biggest opportunities? Who do I need to call and follow up today? So we would train the salespeople on how to use AI using MCP servers and any data that they had access to so they can query their own database, real time, come up with what they need to do to grow their business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:37
Like the whole brain of the business. So people could ask you questions.
Solomon Thimothy: 22:40
Absolutely. People didn’t know what MCP servers were just like things like that. We didn’t do this before. This is not a traditional marketing business. We didn’t have these resources. Then the third thing is now we were doing the EO concept because that has just fundamentally shifted everything. If there was one thing that we get asked the most in our business is, guys, am I in the right place at the right time or am I, you know, this is going to all die like, you know, like, like a dinosaur. And the answer is yes, it’s all going to die like the dinosaur, including the blue links, because even Google has gotten away from blue links. It gives you an AI overview, reading all the content that it has and spitting it out on the top so you don’t have to click on a single blue link in your life. So why? Why is that?
Because they’re losing market share every single day to somebody else, right? Every single day. It doesn’t matter who it is. They’re losing market share, so they have to change with the times. So that’s why I put AEO in front of all of this. Because every business owner needs to know where it’s shifted. And they need to use AI to grow the business, which is the MCP service. They need to do personalized outreach. They can be spamming anymore. They shouldn’t even be doing email newsletter because most email newsletters end up in promotions. Tab. So who gives a crap? In my world, it doesn’t even do anything right. How many clicks? What’s your click through rate on an email newsletter? Not much because our audiences aren’t dying for our emails, if you know what I’m saying. Right? We’re not Coca-Cola, so you need to add value to every single conversation.
The way you do that is do personalization. Don’t just send everything to everybody. Most people don’t even segment their list. Jeremy. So like, how can you write one email that makes sense for everybody in your inbox? It doesn’t make sense. Do you agree? So AI is the only solution that we see that companies can use. And let me tell you, it’s cheap. It’s pennies and pennies and pennies for API calls. And it’s not hundreds and thousands of dollars like ad spend. So if you’re creative and wise, you could use AI to do multiple things in your business. Actually all aspects. So we’re not using AI to do the business. We’re using AI as the foundation to help us execute. And we’re executing all of those things in these businesses. So we want to help them implement AI in places that they didn’t even know.
It’s possible, like their CRM system today. My first thing, 8:00 call one of our clients wants an AI chatbot on their website. High roller real estate business. And we just had a whole conversation about why aren’t we doing this with every single client? Because everybody’s stuck in their own little, you know, CRMs that they don’t use. Some sort of a generic chatbot that we train to answer questions so their customer service don’t have to do it. It’s small things, but everybody knows they need it. It’s just like, we just gotta execute, execute, execute. It’s the perfect example of the kind of things we deal with every day.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:22
You know, you have a really good chart. Solomon on click Clickx.io that I like. Okay, so people could check it out and it’s very instructive. Right? And so if we look at it, obviously it says a comparison of how we stack up, but I thought it was it’s just a lot deeper and it goes into kind of your methodology and thinking because you and you mentioned this in a, you know, a second ago, which is like one offer creation is, is their cold email, paid ads, content, CRM, tech setups, sales process, follow up, system accountability, all this is really a, a system.
So I wanted to start at the top and really just talk through the offer creation, right? Because like people can message cold email and the offer is terrible. Nothing else matters. And I don’t know if you meant this to be an order, but to me it looked like it was in a specific order. Can you talk about mistakes people make with with this piece?
Solomon Thimothy: 26:19
Yeah, 100%. And I think it’s a service provider mindset that you would just say what you do and that’s not an offer, right? So I would ask, you know, consultants and agency owners, what do you do? And the first thing they say are the services you offer. I’m like, well, that’s not an offer because that’s just the service, because that puts you in the commodity list. You’re not going to get anywhere with it. So I love the way you positioned yourself. You are the one that connects them with their the Dream200 or something like that. Jeremy. Does that make sense? It wasn’t like, hey, I’m gonna help you put a podcast. They’re talking features.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:47
Instead of benefits.
Solomon Thimothy: 26:48
Exactly. You’re going to help them figure out the strategy, do the production, and then get them in front of the people that they’re dying to get in front of, which is the actual offer that you’re trying to put in front of people, which I absolutely love the way you positioned it. So it’s the same thing a lot of our clients are struggling with. And so what we try to do when I get these calls, I mean, Clickx started off as a software, but then the challenge is there’s disparate data and nothing is making any sense because lots of little problems exist in the business. I can’t really grow their business. So we still run a software in the back to run all these things that you’re talking about, but they offer creation sort of becomes the thing that we have to consult them on. So we take a look at their biggest again. Dan Sullivan comes into here. What is the thing that makes them the most amount of money that I think is the 10X part, right?
Like, what is the thing that makes you the most amount of money, profit, it’s easier to execute and they start, you know, naming all these things and they, and they also tell the ones like, we do a lot of this, but we don’t make a lot of money. It takes a lot of energy. And nobody in our team likes to do it, but we have to do it because our competition does it. I’m like, you don’t have to do it because your competition does it. You need to work on the 10x thing that is going to help you 10X your business. So we eliminate all this crap that they shouldn’t be doing and try to create an offer off of the thing that drives them the most amount of revenue. So that’s why it is, it is in that order. And then we drive promotion to that thing. And we like to test with cold email because you spend $0 on ad spend, you get the kinks out, get some emails, some calls, get on the phone and figure out whether this offer is good or not.
It’s easier to tweak and cold email campaign than to run landing pages and funnels and ad copies and creatives. Do you get what I mean? Like, until you got that down, you don’t even want to be spending money on Zuckerberg. So it’s kind of that small order of what a business should do, especially consultants, coaches, and all these B2B brands that they don’t really have a good handle on a good offer. So we do a lot of calls. And then what happens really beyond that is we get those calls for them and then they blow the sales call. Jeremy. It happens. Then we’re like, oh, that was a qualified lead. They had the problem. They were ready to make a decision. And your sales rep didn’t do any probing, didn’t have any, you know, didn’t do what they were supposed to do, diagnose the problem.
They sort of started getting into sales mode and start pitching products and not discovering whether or not this is the right fit for them. And all of these things we discovered. So we had to build a sales process that we can teach. So we can help organizations truly from inside out. Isn’t that crazy? Like that’s, that’s like no marketing agency ever want to do this kind of work. But, but if you don’t, you can’t really help somebody. That’s my opinion. You can’t generate quality leads and leave it to chance because no organization is going to say, yeah, we’re bad at sales. You discover these problems and you start to fix them, if that makes sense. That’s how you truly liberate them so they can make more money.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:45
Yeah. And I think, you know, this path that we’re looking at here is really just, you know, following through with these pieces, we could see where maybe there’s breakdown or a company can look and see where are we lacking, right? If it sticks in one of these places, it doesn’t go forward. You know, I wanted to stick for a second. Solomon on the cold email piece and, and maybe something that you’ve seen that works really well from the cold email because I, I was watching an interview with you and you were just talking about obviously personalization is a big thing. Are there any specific examples that stick out? I know you’ve talked about, you know, talking about the offering. And then the company’s website is scrolling in the back. So, you know, what are some of those things that have worked really well? Give me a personalization standpoint.
Solomon Thimothy: 30:33
Yeah. Appreciate you bringing all this up. My memories. Okay. So we built a lot of things over the years to make it work. So one of our latest innovations, you’ve probably seen it, but those tools are very expensive. We built it in-house. It’s a hyper personalized image. So I can make this, you know, a Stanley mug. Put Jeremy on it. Stupid stuff like that. We put in an email. It just shows that we took the extra minute with the website changing in the background. That was literally a hack. We went and took a recording of their website, and then we took a static video and we would put it in front because our customers can’t make a thousand videos.
So we would make a dynamic background with a static video in front. And the static video explains what the client could do for them if they give them five minutes of their time. And then because it’s a dynamic video, they think they literally did it in front of them. It’s just like stuff like that that just shows one more ounce of personalization. You see, your competition is sending black and white email, which is white background and black text. You can do that and expect better results. It’s just what you do every single day. Is that 1% better kind of mindset, right? What can I do to make my email? So we try to make 3 or 4 things in the email hyper personalized, and we use AI to do that. So we’re not just spinning email copy. It’s hyper personalized intro.
And if you don’t have that personalization of information, maybe you shouldn’t be doing a cold email because you have nothing about this person. So what we usually get the data from is their LinkedIn profile. So if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, we don’t have anything to say because we’re not going to figure this thing out. Then we go and read their copy on their website. We read the entire page copy. So we can now be relevant to what they actually sell. So hey, does it take a lot of tokens? It does. But you also don’t want to. It’s not a volume game. This isn’t who can send the most emails, because guess what? Those emails don’t make it to the inbox. It’s because they’ve been sending trash. So it’s just iterating different inbox providers. I mean, everything is up for tasks. Isn’t that crazy? Like this is like, this is like our job. We do this for a living and we enjoy it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:42
Yeah. It’s interesting because, you know, some people see that and it’s like they’re blown away. And, and maybe if you’re like a savvy marketer, you’re like, I know what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter because I’ve gotten those messages and I know what they’re doing, but it still works because they’re showing my stuff. And to me, it signals like, at least they took extra time to like create a process to make it personal. Even if I’m like, oh, I know logically they don’t have a mug with my logo on it, but like they took the time to create something that, you know, went the extra mile a little bit. You know.
Solomon Thimothy: 33:19
That’s that’s what I’m saying. And also it’s possible today a lot easier. And the tools I told you couldn’t, I couldn’t scale because I would pay them $500 for rendering. I’m like, I can’t do that. My clients don’t have that kind of, you know, lifetime value or whatever for a cold email campaign. We’re just doing this so we can get them a couple more meetings. It’s the incremental, right? They can get a few more meetings than what they already have. So I have to do it for low cost.
They’re not spending $1 million on cold email because I have to show them 10X the ROI, which Jeremy. That’s my model. So if you give me $1,000, I got to get you $10,000 in ROI. So I’m very careful about charging you because you’re going to ask me for 10X the ROI. It goes both ways, right? So I have to do things very cost effectively. So that’s what we ended up building it in-house. All this fun stuff we get to do. I don’t know how we’re going to do a podcast in 30 minutes. It’s not going to work.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:11
On the sales side. I know you work with a lot of B2B companies. What are some of the big mistakes you see? Maybe even sophisticated companies that have a good sales process making that helps improve their that can improve their sales process?
Solomon Thimothy: 34:26
Absolutely. I think treating every lead the same is a problem that a lot of companies do. It’s because you can get a call in lead, you can get a website form submission. You can get somebody trying to subscribe to your newsletter. None of those are the same. In fact, a salesperson should not be talking to a person that’s not qualified. And if they’re talking to people that are unqualified, you’re wasting time, right? So what I would like them to do is use marketing automation to get them qualified. Or there’s specific forms on their website where the qualified leads go to. So one of my forms on the website is called Apply to Work with us.
You saw the giant apply on our website.
Well, the giant apply on our website is how I know they’re qualified. Within that, I asked them several questions that qualifies them further, and if they’re weak in their answers, I still think they’re disqualified. So I use these practices to get the the noise right, like out and we got a couple of signals and I’m asking questions like, do you have a business partner that needs to be there? Because I don’t want that to be an objection later. And if they lied to me, that means that they lied to themselves. Like these are just things. So a salesperson could take that form and say, hey, Bob, I got your information. What would you like to connect? Not goes to sales. There’s a million other form on our website, like download ebooks or whatever else. Nobody should talk to them. Does that make sense?
That’s when I send them an email that drives them to a free training, like the one I just told you. And then from the training, they’re asked to jump on a call because they’ve gone through the training to know that they’re interested in doing it. So I think salespeople just need to be more careful with just giving their time to people that are not qualified. The second thing is, the CRM is literally the thing that we as marketers use to drive them more sales. Most entrepreneurs don’t have a clean CRM system. When I say clean is the first name, last name, email titles, the last task that they did, their emails are not synced with their CRM system, so there’s no context. So Perplexity Computer couldn’t really help you. They don’t have a modern CRM system, so it doesn’t even have an API like a mobile app.
Does that make sense? Like an order or something similar that recording every call and appending to their CRM system, like these are just mistakes that could be avoided for $8. My order license, like 12 bucks and I have like four recorders, by the way. Like one of them is bound to work. Jeremy, does that ever happen to you? Like one doesn’t show up. Like, do I have five? Everything is being recorded because God forbid, like I, you know, I get on a call with you again and I don’t remember the context. I can go to Otter and tell me what happened. And everything is driven by AI. That’s like literally the foundation. So get your order or similar. Does that make.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:03
Sense? Fathom. There’s our there’s.
Solomon Thimothy: 37:06
Exactly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:06
Everyday there’s a million of them.
Solomon Thimothy: 37:08
Yeah, a million of them. Right. So get one that integrates with your CRM. Get your emails syncing. Get your stages proper. Make sure the information is like every. Emails going back and forth in it, and make sure every single person in your team is using it because you can’t have one person not using it, because then it’s all useless. Because what we do is we query that database and we find the opportunities deals that are not being talked to. You know, I’ll give you free campaign idea for everybody here. There are no companies that I know takes the entire list. I gave this to a, I don’t know, private equity company that builds these little machinery like a little staircases.
They build these custom modular staircases so OSHA can make sure that you’re not going to hurt yourself trying to climb up with this big machine. They have hundreds and thousands of records in their database, their marketing team, website team, everything. But their CRM is never used to follow up with every single lead. So if you have a bunch of leads that are not in opportunities, you have 80, probably 80, 90% of your contacts are dormant contacts. You download them, you clean them up, and you go through this process, verify the email addresses. Do some kind of list, you know, clean up or append company names or whatever else. And then you would send a cold email campaign, but it’s going to a warm contact because they’re in the CRM already. Hopefully they know you.
You get a lot better responses than complete cold outreach because they don’t know you. And so you can be reaching out to every single person in your CRM system with some sort of value add. And it’s not salesy and it will create conversations. You can do that for very, very low cost. And if you did that every 6 to 8 weeks, you’ve touched your your entire list 6 to 8 times in a year, and nobody’s got the bandwidth to call and email and text every one of these people manually. This is how you use tech to scale. Great. It’s like instantly account a couple of, you know, list optimization tools and some inboxes. How expensive could that be?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:08
I’ll point out too, like if you go to Clickx.io, you can see this is the follow up system portion of of this. This could be a whole infographic in itself, I think some. And just these two columns. And I did have the founder of Krisp.ai, as you’re mentioning that also it started out as like he has an interesting story of it, got rid of background noise in Zoom, but then they, they’re like, someone’s going to knock this off. And so they had other things. And one of them is a meeting, you know, records your, your meeting note taker. So there’s a million out there to follow that Solomon mentioned someone just so people get a like a deeper understanding of IMS.net what you do. Let’s talk about maybe a specific example. Yeah, you have a lot of them. I don’t know if you want to talk about IPA or flow rock, what would be the best one to talk about? Like what you what you did?
Solomon Thimothy: 40:00
Absolutely. So there’s one right there. It’s called BBJ Linen. I’ll give you that one. I’ll give you another one. So basically this was a B2B and a B2C company. So people who had their weddings would go to their website to buy or rent linen. They don’t buy, they they rent. And then their biggest market was these wedding planners who are planning this million dollar weddings. And they would just have the most fanciest chargers and plates. And you know what I mean? The, the, the chair covers. I mean, I learned everything in the wedding industry and the centerpiece and all these things. So they came to us saying, look, we have crazy, crazy, crazy competition, but we are very, very high end brand.
That means that we charge ten times everybody else. And so that’s just what we are, right? Their stuff comes really good and they, you know, they give you the best material, they import it from all over the world. So they had a really good business. So and this is the story with so many of our clients. This is a backyard in your that’s your backyard in Skokie, by the way, literally the company’s in Skokie, which they got bought out, right? Private equity again. So we helped them out. Founders, couple of owners scale scale, scale, scale, scale. I mean, this is when SEO and paid search was the game plan, if you know what I’m saying, because their, their salespeople did a lot of the, you know, networking events and stuff that we didn’t have a space for, but we did all the digital and then we knew there were talks to get acquired and they get acquired.
They, we kept working with them until they bring it in-house because private equity company has like a huge marketing arm that that does all their portfolio companies. Like this is the story of so many businesses. We built the website, we built the e-commerce engine, we fixed all the tracking, and then we got to drive traffic to get the e-commerce. Then we got to do the lead nurturing. Like we talked about, we implemented CRM system or work with their IT people. It was nothing but challenges, right? Like you talk about $100 million company, nothing ever is going smooth because the it doesn’t talk to the service and the service doesn’t talk to sales. Sales doesn’t talk to marketing. Nobody talks to anybody. Would you agree? Like which company actually operates like in a normal fashion? None. Because the bigger they are, the more disconnected they become. Which is why I love tools like HubSpot, because you can do sales, marketing support all in one, rather than three different systems that all have to be synced up at night. I mean, that’s what these guys did. Their ERP system and their QuickBooks or whatever didn’t talk to each other. Right. So you don’t know your past customers or it’s not labeled properly.
There’s all these issues we would help them fix. Day after day, send mass emails. I mean, it’s just literally what our team is so good at doing. So when we talked about the AI component, you know, people think that we just use AI to execute all this stuff. We actually don’t because AI is not quite there where you can just say something and just go and, you know, go drink a cup of coffee. It’ll get stuck. I tell this to my wife, she’s like I said, honey, anybody that’s doing cloud code is not really like enjoying life because every five seconds he says, what should I do? What do you want me to do? You have option A, option B, option C. I’m like, there’s no way I can go for a run and come back and say, this thing is done. Because three seconds later it’s like, oh, I got I hit a snag. What do you think I should do? I’m like, I don’t know, figure it out. Right?
Like, so we have to be there every step of the way to help them get to where they’re trying to go. So. But by the way, another company took it from founders grew, grew, grew, grew, grew, get bought out by private equity, I mean, hundreds of examples of companies that come to us and say, hey, we need help. And the reason why we get these clients. Just so you know, because we just don’t dive ourselves into an SEO campaign and dig a hole because that’s not really the business. Does that make sense? It’s a means to an end. We got to do the SEO. But the most important thing a founder is looking for is revenue growth. Would you agree? Totally. I couldn’t care less if they showed up one day and then Google went down tomorrow. That’s all noise. What they’re looking for is signal.
Can I get more sales? What do I need to do. So we look at the business and say, well, your sales sucks. Your foundation is not good. Your follow up system is not working. And we actually have to fix these things. So these aren’t very cookie cutter campaigns because nobody comes to us with the same system. Nobody’s coming to us saying, everything is perfect in my company, you know, can you just help execute? It’s usually the strategy, figuring out getting our hands really, really dirty, hiring all kinds of expensive developers to find what really is underneath, fixing it with them at their pace, which is six months for a six week project, right? So it’s like all this stuff is what we’re really good at. And then eventually we get there and then guess what? Their business value grows and sometimes people want to buy them out.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:43
This is Solomon. Thanks for walking through that. I mean, there’s a lot of moving pieces with with any company. First of all, I have one last question. I just appreciate you sharing your expertise, knowledge. You know, people can check out I’m s dot net to learn more. We’ve pulled up Clickx.io. And then if you want to check out their latest webinar, you can go to scalegrowth.com to check that out. My last question is just around when you first started, okay.
Out of college, as I mentioned, you know, you actually started a business. Okay. And I’m wondering, you know, I was just talking to someone the other week and a friend who’s an entrepreneur and their son is choosing not to go to college and to start an agency, actually. And I’m just wondering if you’re talking to that or that’s your child, what advice do you give them at that point in their journey? And they’re like, I’m, you know, they made a compelling case for skipping college and just going right into their business.
Solomon Thimothy: 45:47
Yeah, I have a different perspective because I had to go to college because my parents didn’t want me to do business and because they would be like, your son dropped out of college because he wasn’t smart and that’s why he did whatever. So they said, you can do whatever you want. You can pick any degree you want. You just have to graduate. I don’t know how many podcasts I’ve said this on. I’ve never walked at my graduation because I didn’t care. I just needed to graduate. And so you’re ready to get to graduation? Yes, I didn’t care. It wasn’t my thing, I didn’t care. I mean, I it’s not that I got bad grades. I only had A’s and B’s, and I worked full time to pay for my college. And I also had a business. It was just like a very crazy time in my life.
But mind you, I think if I waited until I was 30 to start a business, I wouldn’t be knowing all the problems that business comes with. When I was, you know, faced with this in my 20s, I can handle a lot more. I can do a 15% market pullback and not have to worry about losing sleep about it. You know, it’s like, what I was just talking to my people. I’m like, yeah, this is normal. It’s fine. Because when we were growing business, it was 2008 and that was the Great Recession. We we didn’t know what we were doing. Does that make sense? Like, that was my 20s. So I guess it’s just I knew that I wasn’t cut out to be a good employee because I don’t know how to just pay attention and do what they tell me to do. I always went outside of the box, and I’ve always did things I wasn’t supposed to do. And then any corporate job, you know, like, hey, listen, that’s not your problem. Why don’t you just fix your thing and go home at five? And I didn’t like that. Or I was promoted and not paid for my work that I was doing. So it was kind of like, okay, this isn’t going to work for me.
And then I had the most support, support parents that said, you do whatever you want, but mind you, my dad went and got a lease to an office space about a month and a half into me running a business. So I had to really figure out how to make money because I was supposed to pay the rent. And so like, I figured it out, right? It was like, you did it. I’m just like I said, I’m very grateful for an amazing team. None of what I told you is possible because I don’t do any of it. I’m here or I’m doing a webinar or I’m doing something else. It is the team that does all of this amazing stuff. I’ve said to this, to my dev team, guys, I’ve never come here and told you what I want and you guys said, it’s not possible. They never told me it’s impossible. I just go and then somehow they make it happen. I’m just like, I’ve. Yet it’s like so many years. Like I’m waiting for them to say, this is not possible. I’m just like waiting. And they’re like, no, you a.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:32
Question real quick. If you go back to your younger self like this person and you were to tell yourself something, maybe to avoid doing something or to do something that like helped your growth, what would, what would be advice or two you’d give your younger self at that time?
Solomon Thimothy: 48:49
Well, I would have taken more risk that the Solomon today is a much higher risk taker than than then. But again, I’ve never ran a business before and I’ve also never worked in an agency. I’ve never worked anywhere that was beyond just a couple of jobs that I had. So I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I don’t blame myself for not taking the risk. But today I take a lot more risk as a business. Calculated risk, meaning like throwing ourselves into the AAU thing and building tools that we don’t know actually is going to be relevant in a month because AI could just change. And then everything we’re spending money on didn’t work. So there’s a lot of risk that we take. But, you know, kind of like an Elon Musk thing, like you don’t know until you try. You know, maybe the data center in space is not going to work, but we don’t know. He doesn’t know. We don’t know what challenge we’re going to face.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:38
So maybe experiment more, take more risk as far as that goes.
Solomon Thimothy: 49:41
Absolutely. And and by the way, if you are in your 20s, you have a lot of time to fail. Like you have more time than you can imagine to fail. You can fail in your 50s and still make it. Because I think the last time I wrote, like Warren Buffett didn’t have any money until it was like 50. I was like, guys, I think we’re doing pretty good because you can wait till 50 and then figure out how to make the multiple million. Just go, just try it, test it. Yes, I would really. I mean, one thing I had going for me is that I’ve hired coaches ever since I started. So and I have they, they’re calling me. They they’re not I’m not working with them, but they call me on their vacations. They’re out there, you know, doing golf. And they would call me and say, I saw your Instagram video and I saw this. And man, I just want to tell you.
I’m literally, I had a call last night from a mentor of mine on WhatsApp. We were just chatting about something and that dude just called me. He’s like, just want to know everything about me and how old my kids are and everything else. Just because like, you know, just those people help me out in 2016 and 2014 and 2010. And, and, and, and today is Dan Sullivan. I’m in his 10X program. You know what I’m saying? It’s like I’m fortunate that I have access to these people that have coached thousands of entrepreneurs, and they don’t think I’m a weirdo, because we all have the same problem, ADHD, trying to do a lot of things at once, not really focused. I’m not talking about you, Jeremy. You’re focused.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 51:13
Yeah, right.
Solomon Thimothy: 51:14
The rock star. But you know, like trying to, you know, do more than we think we can. Or it’s just like we have, we have a different mindset and, and you can’t really talk to normal non entrepreneurs and try to help, you know, help yourself. You need to talk to people that coach entrepreneurs. You need to, your financial advisor should be helping entrepreneurs. Your CPA should be only helping growing small businesses, not doing ten, 99 or whatever they do with like w-2s and stuff because that’s not you.
So like you need to align yourself with people that literally work with craziness of an entrepreneurial life Because every day you have a new idea. Some ideas may not work. Some ideas will be flopped, some might be a $400,000 loss, or a $2 million loss or $10 million gain. You don’t know. So you want to have people that will guide you through this process. It’s never you. There’s other people who’s done it before. You just need to pay them. Do whatever you need to do to get their help.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:13
Solomon, first of all, thank you. I love that. I always try to hire smarter, better people for different areas of my life. So I want to thank you. Everyone check out. We talked about Clickx.io. Check out IMS.net. If you want to check out the webinar scalegrowth.com and we’ll see everyone next time. Solomon, thanks so much.
Solomon Thimothy: 52:33
My pleasure.
