Entrepreneur Definition: Mike Pritchett Said 'No' To CEO

Wes Schaeffer (00:01.324)
Mike Pritchett sold the big company, starting the new company. From Australia, London, a man of many homes, many talents. Welcome to the sales podcast. How the heck are you?

Mike (00:15.751)
Thank you, Wes. I am very well. I'm very well indeed. Good to be here.

Wes Schaeffer (00:20.654)
I noticed something. think it's an Aussie thing. That's how I know you're Aussie. It's because I'm, y'all call me Wes. Are S's Z's in Aussie land? Yeah, I know. Hey, I'm fine with it. Yeah, it's like Canadians. It's like Canadians out and about and house.

Mike (00:27.92)
Okay.

Did I go for Wes? Yeah, they are. Yeah, I'd say Wes. Fair enough. Fair enough. Well, you know, if you come down to Australia, it's good.

Mike (00:48.313)
Yeah. And Australians, it's also the D's in things like water instead of water, you know, and now that I've moved to London, one needs to up their game on pronunciation and it's not water. So it's water.

Wes Schaeffer (00:54.72)
Yep.

Wes Schaeffer (01:00.462)
Water. yeah. Do you have to like raise your chin when you say that?

Mike (01:06.408)
absolutely. I just put a couple of plums in my mouth and off we go.

Wes Schaeffer (01:10.727)
Do they drink tea in Australia or do you say like stick it up your butt and like drink a foster's room?

Mike (01:16.531)
We certainly don't drink fosters. That's one thing I can guarantee. No Aussie ever in their right mind. We drink plenty of beer, but no fosters.

Wes Schaeffer (01:20.75)
I know. I know it's like Budweiser. It's like it's well popular in a popular ride but like I can't remember ever ordering a Budweiser on purpose. Like if you hand me one, I'll drink it. Like I don't order it.

Mike (01:37.467)
Yeah. It's funny, actually speaking of sales and marketing during the 2000 Olympics, I just thought what on earth is this every billboard in Sydney was packed with fosters ads, whereas Australia is fosters and all this sort of stuff. And every Australian just said, I've never once seen this advertised here. And then because they don't advertise it in Australia, they don't bother. don't drink it. They just advertise it to the rest of the world as the Australian drink.

Wes Schaeffer (01:58.944)
Yeah. Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (02:03.886)
It's so many things. Corona isn't the best beer in Mexico, but it's marketed. Watch Purists will say, I don't own a Rolex, but it's the best marketed. Maybe we can talk about that. Do you need a great product to win in sales? I guess you don't, huh?

Mike (02:16.402)
Yeah, it works.

Mike (02:25.073)
No, you just got to win in sales. You got to win in sales and market marketing helps. Obviously people buy from people and if you got the best best story you can sell it.

Wes Schaeffer (02:31.36)
Marketing helps,

Wes Schaeffer (02:37.57)
So you were telling me before we hit record, I mean you'd built up a business, what'd you say, you had 32 salespeople?

Mike (02:44.083)
Yeah, we had 32 in sales and marketing combined. We had 150 in the team all up. We were in seven countries, a whole bunch of time zones and a whole bunch of headaches for me.

Wes Schaeffer (02:51.092)
Mmm. Dang.

Mmm, I hear that a lot People dream they're gonna make it big and then I thought the people are like I want to make it small

Mike (03:04.743)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting on that same note with funding, right? You speak to people that go, I just want to get funding. just want to get funding. And then they get funding and they made a founder that bootstrapped and they go, well, at least you own it. Right.

Wes Schaeffer (03:16.256)
Yeah. So what we're going to get into what you're doing now in a minute, but what what did you not like about running a big team? Because I mean a lot of people listening to this are entrepreneurs. Maybe they're part of a big team. I'm gonna do my own, you know, and now here you are making a huge shift. I mean you were the CEO and founder, right? So what what's wrong with being in charge? You got 150 people. I'm the boss.

Mike (03:33.459)
Mm-hmm.

Mike (03:39.611)
Yeah. Yeah, look, I think.

Mike (03:45.491)
Yeah, there does get a stage where you're not you're not in the grit anymore. You know, I think as a a CEO founder that or founders ditch the CEO part, if you're a founder in there getting things done that spark of that startup dream and the excitement of every little bit counts and every little move makes a big shift. And then, you know, after a while you go, okay, well, revenues going up, things are flat. And I think, let's be honest, most founders then just

Wes Schaeffer (03:45.923)
me.

Mike (04:11.975)
get the hand grenade and throw it in there to cause drama because we all live and die by the adrenaline. And that's something that I did as well and cause all sorts of challenges in my own business. When I look back at it now at the time, they seem like great ideas. The reality is I think the spark and the energy of small startup and building is a lot more exciting than, know, hey, do we hire another person in the HR team to look after the team that look after the team that look after the people that

Wes Schaeffer (04:17.92)
Mm.

Mike (04:40.419)
may eventually be the ones doing the hustling.

Wes Schaeffer (04:40.93)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I can see that because it's, think I'm more in the, in the startup mindset, you know, hungry. My, my son turned my wife and me onto this HBO series called the pit, you know, and it's, it's about ER doctors and, and there's 15 shows and it was literally 15 hours. So was like starting their shift.

Mike (04:59.196)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Schaeffer (05:11.918)
And of course there's an incident, so they work overtime. So it was 15, a 15 hour shift in an ER and a super chaotic ER. And I'm watching that like a friend of mine is a radiologist. so I'm texting, we text all the time and I'm busting his balls. You know, I'm like, look at you just lounging around, go in, look at some pictures, go home. He's like, yes, I love it that way. And I'm like, I think I'd be an ER doc. It's like.

Mike (05:36.691)
That's not it.

Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (05:41.804)
Let's go, go, go. Shift's over. I'm going home. Don't call me. I'll be back when my shift's on.

Mike (05:48.947)
And there's a level of that with startup life that it is just pure energy and rush when it's on, it's on. And that's exciting when you win a client, there's that excitement and that buzz and that, and nothing beats that adrenaline rush of got a massive client, big win, celebrate it, let's go after the next. Once you've got spreadsheets in front of you and you're working to targets that are set for, you know.

at where they are for one reason or another, and then you've got to live up to them and you've got other people that you work into and the board that you promised XYZ. It's a bit of a different beast. And I think any founder that's taken on, you know, large amounts of money as well, like I pretty much bootstrapped my last company, it wasn't well funded. So that's fine. But if you're in that VC freight train, you're effectively just chasing the next, you know, exit for them, or the next valuation.

Wes Schaeffer (06:40.314)
Yeah. So, you sold that what two years ago now, huh? Two years ago this month.

Mike (06:47.419)
Yeah, two years ago. So it's, yeah, it's good to be out. And it's good to be out and moving on to the next thing. had had the obligatory time off, sit on the beach, stare at your navel, you know, start selling beach chairs if you sit on the beach for too long. So it's, it was on the, what, could we do next? And for me, you know, I've, I've had a bunch of ideas and concepts that have always been rattling around my head, but, AI voice for me, you know, I'm into podcasting and that scene and, and

the AI voice was interesting to me, but I sat there and I go, oh, it's a gimmick. It's a gimmick. know, who's going to listen to an AI podcast? And then I started to look at the voices and think they're getting pretty realistic. What, what is here that we can actually do? Um, that's meaningful, right? And then once we got to the conversational stage, I went, okay, so what can we do here? That's meaningful. And, know, I don't think the meaningful side of that is going and cold calling the world with another bloody bot.

There's got to be some purpose to what this can do. And that's what I've been really leaning into and building with Bustra.

Wes Schaeffer (07:52.301)
Yeah. Well, that meaningful, I think, is a key word. I'm still old school. Every day, at least 10 times a day, I mark, ask, spam, and block the cold emails. And I know they're cold because it's amazing how influential LinkedIn is. Because I have a dash in my name that I put.

Years ago I put a red phone in my name just to stand out on LinkedIn. That's how I discovered it. So then I toned it down, just put a dash after Wes. So I get all these cold DMs, cold emails, hi Wes Dash. constant drips inside of LinkedIn messaging. today, today I unfollowed and removed the connection of a guy. look back like over three years, he just sent nothing but hi Wes Dash and

Mike (08:33.81)
Hmm?

Wes Schaeffer (08:52.014)
know, been listening, reading your content, just really inspired and inspired me to reach out. It's like, you lie. You lie. And I'm just done. I'm done with the You know, so how are you different? What are you doing differently with voice AI? What do need to know?

Mike (08:57.447)
Yeah, no you didn't. Yeah, yeah.

Mike (09:04.305)
Yep, absolutely.

Mike (09:10.725)
We got a special thing in there that was going to take the dash out and it's going to call you Wes instead of Wes. So that's how you know it's real.

Wes Schaeffer (09:17.1)
That's right, you're put a, take the dash out, take the S out, put a Z, and I'm gonna know it's you.

Mike (09:21.715)
Nice, nice. That's what we do. No, no, look, AI is incredible and can do amazing things and horrible things and can speed things up and can slow things down and can confuse things as well. But when it comes to AI voice automation and AI voice phone calls, what are we doing and what are we focusing on? The goal for us is to work with clients where there's either a real need where clients are inbound

I think inbound is the absolute holy grail for AI voice, right? And you're thinking, well, hang on, if I call up, I want to speak to a real human. Sure, but what are you getting at the moment? For most SaaS companies, for most health care companies, you're getting either no.

Wes Schaeffer (10:04.005)
For most companies, hi, your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line as our menu has changed. Like, has your menu changed every day for the last 17 years? It's unbelievable.

Mike (10:12.083)
Yeah, exactly. And why do I care that your menus change? I don't want a menu. I want to just be speaking to somebody and get a result and move on. And I think the other thing is that most SaaS companies these days aren't even publishing a phone number anywhere. So you can't get in touch full stop. But if you do have a phone number, then you're on hold for hours, et cetera, et cetera. So what we're

Wes Schaeffer (10:32.046)
Yeah.

Mike (10:36.027)
working on is getting rid of that, getting rid of those annoying IVR systems that you go through, press this, press that, or you end up in some matrix that leads you down a path that you didn't want to go down or you get stuck. What we're talking about is you call up, you're speaking to what feels like a human being. Now, can you probably tell? Sure. But it's way better than sitting on hold for two hours and getting through to a person that's been sitting there having a bad day at a call center somewhere else in the world.

Wes Schaeffer (10:47.704)
Yeah.

Mike (11:03.431)
Yeah, that's not a great experience at all. And then when you actually ask the person the question, they don't have that knowledge to hand, whereas AI does. It has that knowledge to hand ready to go.

Wes Schaeffer (11:11.457)
Yeah.

Yeah, so that's your focus is inbound.

Mike (11:17.447)
That's focus. And mostly inbound. We are doing outbound. Yeah, sure. But the outbound as well is where we can have it for our clients. It's warm in warm outbound. Right. So let's take an event, for example, perfect use case. You've got a large conference. There's thousands of people coming. The most nerve wracking time for an event manager is the lead up to that event that week going, well, we were told a thousand people are coming.

but there were a bunch of free tickets. There was some charge. don't know. So let's just assume maybe 70 % are coming. Maybe it's 80. We don't know. If you could call them three days before the event and just say, hey, just calling up to see if there's any other information that you want to know, making sure that you've got tickets ready, da, da, da, da, da, everything's come through and they can have a human conversation. So yeah, no, we're all sorted. by the way, is that good coffee? Is there going to be, you know, and it can actually give information of the event that's useful to the customer.

And it's extremely useful to the client that is sitting there going, how many people are going to turn up to my event?

Wes Schaeffer (12:17.817)
And is that better than text?

Mike (12:20.081)
Yeah, I think so. It's interaction. It's back and forth. It's an actual conversation. If I get a text that says, you know, just reminder of next week's event.

Wes Schaeffer (12:30.638)
Thank

Mike (12:31.591)
You know, I move on. If I get a phone call and they say, Hey, just want to double check. You're all sorted for the event on Wednesday. If there's anything else you need, can very quickly just say, yep, I'm all sorted or no, no, probably not coming or, look, I'm not sure. And all of that data is then analyzed, gone through and sent into the client, broken out into either a spreadsheet or put into their CRM. So they know exactly the response they got and the intent behind it as well.

Wes Schaeffer (12:35.468)
you

Wes Schaeffer (13:01.998)
Do people answer? I mean just before we kick this off, I got a text from my dentist. You know, I got a cleaning tomorrow. And I confirmed. You know, I probably wouldn't answer. I don't need a phone call. You know, and they don't need a phone call either, right? Are you coming or not? mean, because obviously they'll give away my spot if I have to reschedule. And then I don't answer. I mean, I rarely answer my phone. I just...

Mike (13:23.633)
Yeah, true.

Wes Schaeffer (13:29.218)
I keep getting, I've been getting a call regularly so I answered it just before this and there's no, there's nobody there. So just put them on mute and go about my business and you know about a minute later they hang up so maybe it's farming to see if my number is valid or whatever but I mean get that a lot. So I don't answer my phone very much and a lot of people don't answer their phones anymore.

Mike (13:37.01)
Yeah.

Mike (13:43.067)
Yeah, right.

Mike (13:47.217)
Yeah. Yeah. And, and it is a problem. Yeah. There are a lot of people that don't answer their phones, which is totally fair. you know, I think if you're reaching out with email, you're reaching out with, with, with text message for an event that they've registered to, you know, they may respond back. personally don't spend the time to respond to emails, emails to me. go in and I go, especially anything unsubscribe. I actually select the entire inbox. I hit delete, and then I move on with my day.

with a very quick scan down for any names I recognize. So that's WhatsApp to me, I use and I look at WhatsApps. We can do WhatsApp messages as well, but I think that the point of an actual phone call, especially on the inbound level, having somebody to just pick it up, have that conversation, rewire that through to a human being if it's relevant, triage it. And also on a sales point of view, to be able to go through things like the Bant framework.

Wes Schaeffer (14:14.648)
Yeah.

Mike (14:42.917)
or any of the other frameworks for that matter. But on Bant, just very simply just saying you've got the budget, you've got the authority, you've got the need and you've got the timeline and then putting a time in an A's diary for a demo, but the time comes through and it says, okay, Wes is booked in a time, I've got to write that time. Wes is booked in a time and it's in your calendar. I say it right for an Aussie, I it right for an Aussie. I shared an office with Wes for like so long and I never thought that

Wes Schaeffer (15:02.382)
Hey, I'm not saying you say it wrong, you say it right. The way an Australian says it. It's all good.

Mike (15:12.175)
I sounded like I'm saying Zed at the end until you said it now. So the calendar appointment goes through and it's actually got all of that filled out. Yes, budget X, authority yes, need time.

Wes Schaeffer (15:24.6)
Yeah. So.

So again, your focus on inbound and I think that's fine. Does the system say that it's AI or no?

Mike (15:37.115)
Yeah, so we always like to call it out. For us, we call it out. up to the client if they want to say if they don't want to say anything, that's totally fine. And a lot of the time you wouldn't know. In fact, I was joking around, I'm going to build a an agent, I better make sure my mom doesn't watch the sales podcast, but I'm to build an agent to call my mom and just see if I can get away with like a 45 minute conversation without her knowing it's not me. I think I can do it. I think I can do it we record our own voices in. I think I think I can get away with

But mostly that's just gonna be because she's talking for 45 minutes and I just have to the arms and arms.

Wes Schaeffer (16:04.513)
Well...

Our parents are trusting. Our parents are trusting, right? And they're obviously they're a generation removed. So they're not quite as deep into this. And look, that's why older people get get snookered. You know, my mother-in-law, she just passed away a couple months ago. My wife is the forget the technical term, a state trustee or whatever for a neighbor she just passed or husband passed a couple years ago. Now she did. And so we're in her house.

Mike (16:12.157)
This is true.

Mike (16:22.055)
Thanks.

Wes Schaeffer (16:36.662)
like looking things up and my father-in-law was helping her right and he's like can you help me he he couldn't couldn't do any work on her computer because all these notifications come up because everybody you know click here to be notified you know of this blog or whatever so she would just by default accept all these things so many so i'm in there just turning notifications off showing them how to do it but my my mother-in-law

Mike (16:55.506)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (17:06.254)
She had subscriptions to everything, And she was a smart woman. She had been in business for years and did contracts and stuff for a big health plan out here. But she still fall for stuff.

Mike (17:08.305)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Mike (17:20.155)
Hmm. And that is a problem here, right? And this is going to happen regardless across every different avenue of technology people are finding. And even without technology, they're finding ways to put things in the post and send it out to you, which is almost now the easiest way to trick people because they go, well, at least this is real. It's a piece of paper. It's not, right? And unfortunately, those scams keep going on. And I'm hoping there's more tech that helps people out to

avoid them. But I think on the AI voice side of things, it's like everything else, you know, it sounds like a human, sure. But so does an email when you're getting it through or a letter in the mail, right? And so it is that level of is it real or not, there's going to be a lot of education, I think, for people to realize, is it real or not? I believe it's always good to call it out. And definitely for our AI agents, everything we put out, say, Hi, I'm an AI voice assistant calling from X, just wanted to follow up about blah.

And then people know, right, which also takes away any level of, which I find hilarious when people say, Ooh, I want to test it out. then you're, Ooh, there was this tiny little bit at the three minute mark where I think I could tell it wasn't perfect. And he's like, have you ever actually had a conversation with a rep? Because no rep sounds perfect up to three minutes. They're arming and ah-ing or distracted or delayed or whatever it might be. So, you know, if you're getting to three minutes or even to three seconds with an AI rep and not being

you know, convinced that it sounds great, then you're in a pretty good spot.

Wes Schaeffer (18:52.234)
Yeah. So on the outbound, are they making cold calls or is it more confirming things?

Mike (19:03.835)
Look, like I said, it is totally up to the client. So we can do complete outbound cold call to people. Personally, for me, I just find the success rate, most cold calling success rates pretty low, right? You get to a point in cold calling where you, know, unless your list is absolutely perfect to people have opted in or whatever that might be, it's not great. There are obviously laws as well around B2C, especially B2B. It's a little bit looser. You're allowed to call B2B. B2C, don't be calling people at home that aren't on an opt-in list.

It's just wrong, right? And it's not allowed. It's quite simple. So we don't do anything like that. If we're talking B2B, cold calling out to other businesses that are relevant target markets, that's fine, but call it out straight away. And same way I would if I'm, you know, I started out as an SDR and I would always call and say, I didn't have an iPhone, that's for sure. I'd always call and say, 20 years ago, you know, I'm just calling, I'm a salesperson calling about X.

I hope you don't mind, but if you can give me 30 seconds, you know, it's that opt out factor, like very clearly giving them an opportunity to say, no, I don't have time by, you know, rather than pretending it's not a sales call. And that's the same that I'd call out for AI. Call it out. It's a sales call or it's a call about X and I'm AI. Do you mind giving me 30 seconds? Always good to add humor in there as well. If you can make a joke, the AI, you feel like if you can make them laugh, at least you might get them on for 30 seconds.

Wes Schaeffer (20:30.668)
Yeah, hell, I was using rotary phones when I started calling.

Mike (20:35.175)
Yeah, that's a little different from speed dialers. I think I at least had a clutch one, but you know, well, strangely enough, we're working with a client in Germany at the moment. And it, I almost fell off my chair when they said a lot of their information still goes out by fax. And this is

Wes Schaeffer (20:39.906)
We get faxes and pagers.

I rode my horse in Pony Express.

Mike (21:03.271)
Two days ago, I had that conversation. said, get out by fax. And they said, yeah, we're working with medical, doctors, journalists. I was like, okay, whatever it takes.

Wes Schaeffer (21:11.544)
Right? Whatever it takes. So what does it take to start a business today? So you this is what two years old, three years old?

Mike (21:22.163)
No, no, this business is in market for three months, but up and running for a year. I started a year ago.

Wes Schaeffer (21:27.466)
Mike (21:31.325)
Very new business.

Wes Schaeffer (21:31.438)
How did you find the inspiration? Like how did you know this was a good venture, know, pathway to go down?

Mike (21:38.589)
Yeah, great question. And I actually coach other entrepreneurs on this as well as how do you find out is it a good business? Is it just a passion? Is it something you're excited about? For me, it's very much about, does it excite you to start with? First, start with that. Are you passionate about it? Are you interested and engaged by it? If it were to actually succeed, would you want that job? Right. That's a great place to start. Once you've done that, it's about, you know, exploring the market and looking at the numbers. Like what can this be charged for?

Therefore, you know, what's your profit margin at the end? Is there a market there that that can service that and get to the level of scale that you'd need to to make a profit in a business like that? And those very simple business questions is just a spreadsheet. So I actually find one of the most creative spaces. You know, I love creativity. This is this is my painting, my daughter and I did behind me here. I love painting. I love art. And and one of the most creative places I think it can be is an Excel spreadsheet. You get to paint the future and go.

Here's my forecast. This is what the world could look like. This is what this business could look like. How can I, know, and of course I'm not talking about creative accounting in the other sense. I'm talking about forecasting. Let's dream. Let's go. What if we did have 4 million clients on this? What if we did have, know, whatever that number might be, what does that business look like? And some businesses you look at and go, oof, if we got thousands of clients, this business would be a nightmare, right?

And that's just the reality for a lot of businesses, but they don't do the forecast. just get to the nightmare and go, what did I do? and so for me, having had businesses in the past, successful and unsuccessful, I look back and go, this business, when it scales is a dream.

Wes Schaeffer (23:24.244)
Alright, so why why AI just think it's here to stay?

Mike (23:31.339)
I think it's definitely here to say, I think it's definitely here to stay. think in the same way, computers, tech, internet, all of these things as they came online, automobiles, manufacturing, the whole thing. You you look at those, those evolutions that happen. think it's in a, it's in an excitement bubble that everyone's excited about it and talking about it and no one can get away from it. In the same way that, you know, plenty of things in the past were when they first came out and everyone was amazed by the iPhone and then there's other iPhones and there's other Samsung and other things.

Wes Schaeffer (24:00.494)
Thank

Mike (24:01.171)
The excitement will die down. think the impact, underlying impact will be huge. Positive and negative. I think there's definitely negatives there. There'll be job losses and other things, but that happens in every single cycle that we go through. And this one will be no different.

Wes Schaeffer (24:22.65)
So because it is new and there's a lot of hype

Mike (24:22.757)
or will be very difficult do so.

Wes Schaeffer (24:33.701)
You know, it's like do you want to be bleeding-edge? Do you want something to be more mature? You know, do you think is it riskier to be early or is it is it less risky to be early?

Mike (24:45.895)
Yeah. think early is as good as late. And I think bleeding edge is, a challenge, versus leading edge. think for my last business, I was at the exact right time at the right place and we lent into AI five years ago, plus, and, and, know, built products around it back then. I don't think it's bleeding edge right now. I think where we're at, there are still problems, but it's, it's leading edge with a, you know,

a lower case L that's going to a bigger case L or there's like a trailing little case B, whatever you might want to put it. Yeah, there are still challenges. There are still hurdles. There are things that fall over. And I think that's fine. I think we're at a stage where most businesses are wanting to experiment and lean in. And if they don't lean in now, at least to learn and test what works for them, I think companies are going to fall behind.

Wes Schaeffer (25:40.088)
So you're looking around, you're staring at your navel, getting sunburned, and you go, AI is it. What's your first move? Did you hire an overseas developer?

Mike (25:56.403)
You know what I did? Very first, very first practical move that I did. said, AI is it. Let's find what communities are out there that are big into AI. Now I knew enough about AI and enough about product. I'm not a, I'm not a tech guy. I'm more a product guy. I the vision of where I want it to be. And then I can, I can build a team around that. So I was like, where, where is that team? Yeah. Where can I find the right people? And I actually jumped onto a WhatsApp community here in London, found a

bunch of techs and entrepreneurs and other devs that were just chatting about everything, stuff that I had no idea about, stuff that I did have an idea about. And I would just scroll through that group and then look at who's on it. And I just put community questions out there. And when certain people came back with really great answers, I just connected on the side and said, Hey, you know, I see you're on this group, you know, we should chat. And I just jumped on calls and got to know people. And then one of those, those people actually said, Hey,

Love the idea of what you're thinking about. And that stage, it was actually a different concept within the voice space, a different concept altogether. And he said, look, I love the idea of what you're talking about. let's see if we can work together. I could help spin something up. And, and he did, and we started working together for a few months on that until I realized, hang on, this is more achievable on a concept conversational level than the product we were building. It's also a lot bigger scale. If we can get into the business of.

inbound phone calls and outbound where necessary. So that's where, you know, I said, let's, let's rock and roll. Let's build something. And we've built that platform. Now we're not building the LLM behind, right? Where we're like everyone else relying on, on big tech that's out there already that have spent billions of dollars and we can switch between all of them as we choose to. that means very quickly, if something does change and open IR does something incredible or Google does something incredible, well, our client benefit from that.

rather than us sitting here going, sorry, we've got to do another round of funding to go and chase something we're never going to beat. So that's the position we're in at the moment. And what we're really offering is how to then build all the other elements around it, the integrations into those systems that give you the calendar appointments, the CRM integrations, being able to transfer calls, all that sort of fun stuff. Actually making it useful and done for you.

Wes Schaeffer (28:15.182)
So is it safe to say, mean, are you kind of building a wrapper and,

Mike (28:22.867)
Yeah, a big part of it's a rapper, a big part of it's a rapper. And, and, and it's not just a rapper to say, Hey, this is the same thing. Let's just put a cloak on it. It looks different. It's then what can you do with that? You know, that's different. So take perplexity, for example, perplexity is a rapper, right? And, and it's a huge business. It's a fantastically successful business. I use it all the time. It's fantastic. Um, but they're not building their own LLM. They're not stupid. They're going, hang on. All the LLMs work like this. We could use them to work like this.

And then they've gone and built perplexity. So, you know, in the same way, I think most of the businesses in the future are going to be relying on some way, or form on the big models that are out there and then building on top of them, which is, almost kind of like saying, hang on. you just an e-commerce business? As in you're like, you're relying on the internet and therefore it's like, yeah, of course I'm relying on the internet. That's where my business is held. That's where everything lives, but we're doing something different. Right.

And that's where I think there's a lot of value for entrepreneurs moving forward as well. It's not easy. It's not easy to spin something up. Everyone has this idea of kind of going, but you can spin something up over a weekend and on Monday, you're an entrepreneur and you've got a business. No, you're not. Even if you do get a product away by Monday, which you won't, if you happen to get a prototype up, it'll fall over pretty quickly under scrutiny. But if you do manage to build a product, which is great,

Wes Schaeffer (29:22.99)
.

Mike (29:48.517)
We all know the next part is understanding sales and marketing and market generation and actually building a team to go and deliver that.

Wes Schaeffer (29:57.804)
Yeah. So what do you say to the purists? know, because people, want to build the next iPhone, right? Or next Apple kernel and, you know, build it up from its core versus just build a wrapper. You know, there's a, where I live, there's like 50 wineries. And one of the big ones is called Wilson Creek. And I know the founders.

Mike (30:15.624)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Schaeffer (30:24.546)
The Wilsons and know, second generation is running it now and we have a big balloon and wine festival out here. Is that coming up this, I think, mean next week, two weeks, it's always in June. And you know, Wilson Creek, they have a huge balloon shaped like their almond champagne. And I just learned a few years ago that they white label that. They don't even make it. So what their fame is for.

Mike (30:50.959)
Yeah. Well, if it's actual champagne, they can't make it because it has to come from the champagne region. it's, yeah, and this is one of those things as well, branding and everything else.

Wes Schaeffer (30:56.174)
Yeah, right. But look, we're ugly Americans. say, we'll call it champagne and say, come over here and fight us. But I digress. So it's sparkling whatever. It's sparkling juice. And it's cheap. Yeah, they sell it. They sell it at the place. But like you can literally go to Costco or Sam's Club right here in town and buy it for like $10 or $11 a bottle. But I mean, what they are known for is something that they just

Mike (31:04.871)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike (31:21.181)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (31:25.39)
put a wrapper on and mark it. Now they do make some of their own wines.

Mike (31:28.967)
Yep. And you look at that with anything. So you say, I love I love Ford motor cars, right? You go, great, excellent. So let's break it apart. You know, and once you actually break it apart, they're just a rapper. Like they just, you know, Ford might be a bad example, and somebody is going to get very offended by this. But you know, effectively, you pull apart a car. A lot of them are built by the same manufacturers and the same bits and pieces in the back end might actually be for doing that for a lot of the others.

That's okay. But then you take a TV, right? I love Samsung. No, I love Sony. Okay, well, they're the same thing, right? Yeah, once you actually break it down to the factory and where those parts came from, I got a friend that's very, very wealthy in the US that their entire business, I was so jealous because effectively, if you break it down, once again, all they did was take a product from China, bring it into the US, which now is going to get taxed. But you know, they, they then sell it. Yeah, well, everything will get taxed.

Wes Schaeffer (32:23.52)
As it should.

Mike (32:28.059)
And then they just sell it, right. And that's, that's all all they're doing. And when you, you look at any business, it's like a game of football, you break it down, what have you got? Well, you got you got a bunch of men or women dressed in laundry, with a ball, trying to get it over a line. Okay, cool. So that's pretty stupid. What's not once you actually bring it together, there's so much amazing stuff going on there, right. But when you'd rip anything apart, and I think this is what people are trying to do with AI is go, that's just a rapper. You're like, Yeah, okay.

cool. And a baker is just somebody that gets a bunch of flour and water and makes bread. But the bread is amazing. And it's put into a coffee shop and you know, or a shop and people go there and smell it and love it. And they have their bread there. Right. So yeah, this is one of those things that any business I think when you pull it apart, it's very, simple. It's about how you put those parts together, how you serve the customer.

And the experience that you can give that customer in working with you. Can you make it simple? Can you make it what they want? Can you solve their pain point? If you can, you got a business. It doesn't matter if it's built on the back of flour and water or AI and, you know, a bunch of other components brought in to make it happen.

Wes Schaeffer (33:40.28)
And yeah, I was in the tech space for years and that's when it dawned on me. Like you open up the guts of these computers and it's an Intel or an AMD chip. It's a, you know, Seagate or Western Digital hard drive and, you know, Nvidia graphics card and like they're just assembling stuff. You know, we just put it a different form factor. You know, had our own operating system to control the things, but the guts were the...

Mike (33:41.651)
Much better.

Mike (33:58.023)
Yeah. Yeah, it's assembling stuff.

Wes Schaeffer (34:08.814)
You you lay them apart, you break them apart, lay them down, you're like, I don't know, is that a Dell? Is that a Gateway HP? I don't know.

Mike (34:15.921)
Yeah, I had a guy in my podcast who, who has built a multi-billion dollar company in the storage space. And, know, we're talking online cloud storage and they couldn't get hard drives fast enough. They ended up going down to the local store and just grabbing consumer hard drives and we're plugging these things in. so effectively they're charging a person on the end to upload footage to go back to a thing they could have bought down the street, but it sits in their warehouse instead of yours. And they've got you on a monthly contract. That's amazing.

Wes Schaeffer (34:42.635)
Yeah.

Mike (34:44.807)
but it serves a purpose and they then did triple back it up and all those sort of fun things. So they've got a great business. I think that the key to any business is how do you save a customer time and how do you solve their problem? And if you can make that experience pleasurable and have a nice graphical user interface, good service behind it, in our case, we're done for you service. So we're not sitting here just going, hey, jump on our platform. It's the same as someone else's with a new funny face on it.

Wes Schaeffer (34:51.8)
Right.

Mike (35:14.279)
We're actually doing that service for them, setting everything up, doing the numbers. We've got a human in the loop that's checking, making sure that the AI is not hallucinating, that calls are actually going through correctly, and fixing the prompts as well, which a lot of people jumping in there thinking they're prompt engineers because they put in, do I prompt engineer into Google or chat GPT? So that's the key is that the team in the backend making it work smoothly.

Wes Schaeffer (35:40.542)
And so you said a year ago you had the idea, but then you've been live for three months.

Mike (35:47.953)
That's right.

Wes Schaeffer (35:49.848)
So you just bootstrapped for those nine months?

Mike (35:52.529)
Yeah, bootstrapped. Yeah, my goal is to not raise my goal is just to bootstrap this one out, you know, funded myself, but even then, I'm not and whether it's a sort of an experiment for me as well. I did a little bit of business coaching. But when I between the two ventures found it's not really my passion, it's not for me as much as I do enjoy it. And I think it's fantastic. And business coaches are awesome. I'm not one of them. So I went right, I'm going to get back in and play the game again. But

I want to do it from zero because you hear so many excuses when people go, oh yeah, well, it's good for some, but I've now got a family or I've got this or, you know, I could never do that because XYZ. I thought, well, rather than just saying, well, it's good for me because I exited the company. So isn't that great? I want to get in there and, and bootstrap it up.

Wes Schaeffer (36:40.558)
Well, you had me on your podcast and you yelled at me and made me cry. So yeah, it's good you recognize it. You're not a coach, man. mean, you're a mean coach. So mean, there's something. Maybe there's a room for a mean coach, but I mean, just go develop some stuff, okay? So that's good. You found your lane. You're gonna edit that crying out, right? You promised me. You said you would. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but for nine months, like who...

Mike (36:53.885)
Ha

Mike (36:58.296)
Of course, of course. Hang on, this is your podcast. You get to edit that.

Wes Schaeffer (37:08.486)
Who are you bringing on? mean, are these software developers? Are they AI experts? You know, like how big was the team?

Mike (37:14.139)
Yeah. So, everything in, in my work so far has been AI and AI engineers and developers, and now on the customer success side where we've got a person on the customer, one, one other, and myself on the customer success. and the rest is, is devs and engineers. So, you know, building out the platform, building out the backend. and then a lot of time, even though people go, Hey, it's easy to integrate into. HubSpot, Salesforce, all this other stuff that takes a lot of work.

just to get things right. so that's been the main part of our work at the moment. And I think the future development of what I'm building is going to be salespeople. It's, know, what I do know very well from my previous venture is that enterprise sales motion and, how to put that flywheel in, in again. And yeah, you could laugh and say, well, hang on, can't you just get BuzzTrail to call the world? like I said, I don't think.

boiling the ocean with a million calls out to people in their mobile phones is the answer. I think the answer is still, you know, smart marketing, good salespeople, people to people, and then using BuzzTrail as an engine to be able to make that more efficient and make the salespeople's time efficient. know, sitting there just dialing number after number after number doesn't work regardless. But if someone's calling inbound, you may damn well make sure that someone picks up that phone at all hours of the day.

You know, and, and that means having an AI available after hours on the lunch break, you know, the amount of times I've heard of leads going, you know, unmet and then not call back. And then you look in the system and you go, why did nobody call back Sue? it was a private email address. So, you know, it's just busy and I assumed it was nothing like, yeah, well Sue happens to be the VP of whatever, wherever, and you missed it.

Wes Schaeffer (38:58.606)
Hmm.

Wes Schaeffer (39:05.422)
How soon do you foresee having your first one or two or three salespeople?

Mike (39:14.483)
I think within the next few months. Yeah, we're looking to hire next month. I'm always looking for salespeople, but yeah, think within the next few months.

Wes Schaeffer (39:24.74)
And what will you have them do day one?

Mike (39:29.389)
day one, to be honest is, is make sure they know the tools that they can work on. So we, we use things like clay, for example, we use, HubSpot as our CRM. So just making sure they're across the tools. and then to be honest, it's going to be getting on and calling. I always like people to start with their network and go, who do you know? Right. Like just give them a call practice, jump on the phone, call people, you know, they're the worst people to call. Just sell them the product and have a chat. you're going to stuff it up anyway. So go for it. and then from that point.

you know, we have a database, so there will be cold calls happening without a doubt for, for SDRs. but my goal is hopefully fingers crossed. get our email marketing correct and our, our, LinkedIn marketing correct. And we get those in bounds in so that, and I spending most of their time in meetings that are booked with buzz trail.

Wes Schaeffer (40:22.84)
For the outbound, you say you have a database, where'd that come from?

Mike (40:28.499)
So we've built up a database from buying mostly Cognizm data. So Cognizm data to our target market. I think one of the sort of obvious spaces for this is insurance companies, insurance brokers, finance brokers that have inbound that they're missing because they're on other calls or doing other things. And also when people call them,

It's often the same question. Okay, great. You know, can I ask you about X, Y? It's prescriptive. They've pretty much just got a form they're filling out. That can very easily be done and triaged by AI. So my goal is to target in on that market and build it out. Therapeutics has been a space as well. Health and therapeutics has been a space that we've had success already and event companies.

Wes Schaeffer (41:01.198)
Thank

Wes Schaeffer (41:16.674)
Nice, yeah. That's cool. Very nice, so who? What's that?

Mike (41:20.721)
That's who we're going after. That's who we're going after.

Wes Schaeffer (41:26.252)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's good to have it dialed down because you know I talk with people and I don't know where to start or how to start people don't answer the phone where do I get good data? You know should I call a cell phone like am I allowed to call a cell phone and do I leave a voicemail? You know like what are your thoughts on that?

Mike (41:46.163)
I love leaving a voicemail personally. think it adds up sort of like a credit, right? If you leave a voicemail and then you leave another one, now don't keep calling, calling, calling. If they're not calling back, not calling you back. Leave it alone. But if you're leaving a voicemail, you know, two, maybe three times, if it is a specific person that you know is relevant, you know, once again, when they say call mobiles, absolutely, I will go for the mobile every single day of the week over a landline personally. And if I get through to them,

That's fantastic. I'm always calling someone though that I believe it's a relevant product for. If I'm just calling random people, why would I do that? So I wanna know my exact target market. I wanna know my value proposition. I wanna know that it's relevant to that person and the pain that I'm solving and that I can call. And there are cool tools out there. I saw one recently called Glyphic, which is a really interesting tool about helping you refine that down and get the exact.

science on why this particular person wants to buy. I love that sort of stuff, but you can also get lost in the science to be honest, if you're talking about startups, I just say just find a list, buy a list places like Cognizant, a fine great place to start, you can do clay and all sorts of stuff to refine things down, but get a list that you can call and hit the phone. And then you're really just making sure that you're adding value. And on a sales pitch, for me, it is always starting with

Wes Schaeffer (42:50.541)
Yeah.

Mike (43:12.253)
You know, Hey, Mike here calling from buzz trailer. Hope you don't mind me calling you out of the blue, but I think this is relevant for you. Do you have 30 seconds? And most of the time people go go on. You've got exactly 30. me your elevator pitch. Let's go. And then they've given, they've opened the door and they've allowed you to have the elevator pitch. You better damn well know your elevator pitch and you better do it really quickly and don't stay concise.

Wes Schaeffer (43:33.388)
Yep. Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (43:37.966)
Will you text somebody cold? Or like after a voicemail, send a text or send a text to have them about to call.

Mike (43:42.939)
You know, I've never tried it.

Mike (43:47.409)
I've never tried it unless somebody has connected with me on WhatsApp. Then I've WhatsApped and I don't know how it is in the US, but most areas, especially through Asia where I lived for five years and here WhatsApp is everything. In fact, I don't bother communicating any other way but WhatsApp. And so that's something I've done, but I've never actually text messaged someone to be honest, just out of the blue.

Do you find it works?

Wes Schaeffer (44:12.322)
Well, I'm wondering like, what's that?

Mike (44:15.357)
Do you find it works?

Wes Schaeffer (44:18.062)
I don't have, it's not done much to me. Almost nobody leaves, I don't get many inbound calls, calls. I get a handful, almost no texts. But if I have someone's cell phone, I will leave a voicemail message and send a text right behind it.

Mike (44:42.951)
Yeah, okay. I like that.

Wes Schaeffer (44:45.486)
And you can maybe test the other way of sending the text first and saying you're about to call. tell people, if somebody, if I'm just chatting with somebody, say I'm gonna give you a call and I don't have their number, I might text me before you call or I won't answer. But I've also learned relatively recently that, and it makes sense that when you text from a CRM, the text is green.

Mike (44:59.283)
Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (45:14.998)
Whereas you text from your iPhone and go into an iPhone, it'll be that blue message. So there's more success with that. But the problem obviously as a company that doesn't scale, you know, and you have no history. So that's a bit of a catch-22 in that regard.

Mike (45:19.869)
Yeah.

Mike (45:34.427)
Yeah, it's interesting. like it. Yeah, following up and thinking back, I do that on WhatsApp. If I if I can get somebody like last night, I was in a networking event, my question will always be, you know, are you on WhatsApp? And they go, Yeah. And I go, Great. Excellent. Let's just for me. And I always say for me, that's just super easy. I lose emails and phone calls are more difficult. Can we just do WhatsApp? Yep. And I'll always just send them a WhatsApp and give them a

Wes Schaeffer (45:59.118)
Sure. Yeah.

Mike (45:59.923)
So that works well, but that's a contact that I've made, right? As opposed to, I just found this number.

Wes Schaeffer (46:07.406)
So one thing I've been working on is a little lightweight CRM like for for I'm calling it the pre CRM like because I'm a HubSpot partner and user and been a future self partner since 2008 you know but most these platforms today they have

Mike (46:15.697)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (46:28.334)
Thresholds right you you know, let's say you buy a list you get a thousand names you get whatever five thousand names now You go over your threshold. You already have maybe nine thousand you get two thousand now. You're eleven Oh the thresholds ten now you pay more but out of all those that the two thousand you just bought There might be 20 Leave, you know deals that come out of that and you know, maybe a hundred that you would stay in touch with over a year or so and so

Mike (46:41.085)
Mm-hmm.

Wes Schaeffer (46:58.294)
Cause I built an automation for doing outbound and streamlining it and creating the cadence and the multimedia, you know, assign the tasks in the call, leave a voicemail, send an email right behind that that reinforces it. You know, look them up on social media, complete the task, complete the task, that next step. You know, one day, two day, whatever your cadence is, but that, that outbound email is cold.

Mike (47:17.587)
Mmm.

Mike (47:26.033)
Hmm.

Wes Schaeffer (47:27.296)
Right? like if I acquired a list. And so, how do you protect the, you know, your IP reputation, your domain reputation from sending a cold? You know, it's a one-off, but it's still automated and it's cold. So, that's something I'm tackling right now.

Mike (47:46.237)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I like the pre CRM idea because I have had that challenge where you go, I don't need all of these contacts in my CRM. But I've got to load them in somewhere to send all the emails out. Then all of a sudden, you we ended up we started at my last company at 100. Sorry, we started at free for HubSpot, as you do. And I was so excited instead of Salesforce. And that was great. But then we ended up spending 120,000 a year on HubSpot.

Wes Schaeffer (47:58.946)
Yeah.

Right.

Mike (48:20.651)
And it was just cause the company grew and now, okay, I was fine. were turning over 20 million. It's not the end of the world, but it was a lot of money looking back that we didn't need to spend because most of the data in there was probably rubbish, as opposed to just going, let's just cool our jets, bring it back to where it needs to be and, and go.

Wes Schaeffer (48:41.198)
And yeah, they're smart, man. All these apps are sticky.

Mike (48:46.171)
Yeah, yeah, and and expensive as well. You know, Salesforce, don't get me started. But that's ridiculously expensive. And the large companies are spending huge amounts of money. But you kind of you're trapped, you can't get out. So look, I think on a business model, yeah, if you can find a way to help that out and, and be a part of that. I love it.

Wes Schaeffer (48:47.618)
You know? Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (49:05.728)
HubSpot is becoming Salesforce.

Mike (49:08.243)
Yeah, it is, unfortunately. And there's a million coming up through the ranks that I think are going take HubSpot space.

Wes Schaeffer (49:14.668)
Yeah, I I literally like I may keep it because you know, I started as a partner and I got a great deal and for me it made sense because they're great support and all and it let me shift costs appropriately and I resold it and made money and then they changed the partner agreement plan and then they keep increasing but like I made a list here like if I were to replace HubSpot

But it does a lot. You know, if you start looking at like lead pages or unbounce and quiz types tools and, and email marketing and like that password protects something. So I use it kind of as a hybrid membership site, you know, in a way, but I'm just saying, can I dumb things down? I want to keep it simpler and simpler and simpler. Cause back in the day, it was cool to be super advanced.

Mike (49:45.853)
Mmm.

Mike (50:08.455)
Yeah.

Mike (50:13.681)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (50:13.684)
if then you were tagging on the email, did you click the top buy now button or the middle or the bottom? And I'm like, we don't need to know all that.

Mike (50:23.707)
Yeah, yeah. No, it's too much. And especially now with AI as well, there's just too much information. There's word salad, right? You just got a little bit of words. Okay. Give me the one line that I need to know. And I think we've got to remember always, you know, people buy from people, and you've just got to spend as much time as you can in front of another human being to sell.

Wes Schaeffer (50:32.738)
Yeah.

Mike (50:47.597)
And, and for me with any business and same with BuzzTrail, ironically, yes, we're putting AI agents in there, but it's to get people in front of people. Because if you can actually free up your time of your reps so that they're spending more time on phone calls, on video calls, in meetings, having coffee, having a beer, you know, that's where deals are done. It's not done, scrolling through data and mucking around with, you know, waiting for inbound calls or trying to chase out bounds. I think it's, it's about.

Wes Schaeffer (50:48.258)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (50:57.027)
Yeah.

Wes Schaeffer (51:16.578)
there.

Mike (51:17.351)
getting in front of people.

Wes Schaeffer (51:20.718)
Cool, well I'm linking to your LinkedIn and to your site so it's buzztrail.ai, right?

Mike (51:27.609)
That is us. That is us indeed.

Wes Schaeffer (51:29.758)
And who do you want reaching out? mean, is it for bigger companies right now? Do you want like a real estate agent? You know, individuals?

Mike (51:35.123)
Yeah, yeah. So anywhere, anywhere from real estate agent up, think realistically, you know, it's, it's a matter of do you have a an inbound challenge? And do you have a sales team that can work with a tool like this and love to love to hear from you and for any listeners that want to mention Wes, not Wes, but maybe just put it in as WZ. You got to do the Z drop me a Z in a message.

Wes Schaeffer (51:53.999)
Wez, wez, no they have to do the zed. It's not even zee, huh? It's zed.

Mike (52:01.803)
find me on LinkedIn, the links there and, and drop me a, a where's with his head and we'll, we'll chat and I'll, I'll offer you a better deal. But yeah, very keen to, to work with some of your listeners and see what we can offer them. But I think it's really about inbound challenges and obviously we can do outbound. just, don't want to promise something I can't deliver. And I feel the, the dream of, we're just going to call everyone in.

in America and suddenly we're billionaires is just not reality.

Wes Schaeffer (52:32.782)
Yeah. Yep. Cool. Cool. Well, all right, Mike, reach all the way from, you're in London, right?

Mike (52:37.491)
I'm in London, sunny London. It's actually sunny right now. I'll take it while I can. we're,

Wes Schaeffer (52:45.742)
sunny California, I got palm tree right outside my window here, know, come visit. I'll get you some of my Wilson Creek Almond Champagne.

Mike (52:50.482)
Very nice.

Nice, nice. am in, well, one of my main reps is in San Diego and I might be across to Santa Monica soon for a conference. So we have a lot of work over in the US.

Wes Schaeffer (53:05.518)
I am in between the two. I got two daughters in San Diego. So if come that way, let me know.

Mike (53:10.196)
very nice. Very nice. I will indeed. Thank you for having me on the sales podcast. Always good fun.

Wes Schaeffer (53:13.742)
All right, good to see you. Yeah, man. Thanks for coming on the show. Have a good day.

Mike (53:19.251)
Cheers, you too.