The Limiting Belief That Keeps Consultants Out Of Enterprise Accounts

Have you ever looked at a massive company and assumed that they are out of reach of becoming a client of yours? Well, Jamie Shanks used to think the same thing, but fast forward to today. He has built multiple successful businesses. He has experience selling into global organizations like Oracle, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and many others. And he has developed a repeatable approach for turning one client relationship into an entire network of enterprise opportunities.

In this episode, Jamie shares the strategy that he calls the “Sphere of Influence,” which is a powerful way to leverage existing relationships to open doors that most consultants spend years trying to access through cold outreach. You are going to discover why selling to larger organizations is often more achievable than most people think, how to overcome the limiting beliefs that keep you from playing small, and the practical framework that Jamie used to grow from serving local companies to winning some of the world’s most recognizable brands.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why selling into the enterprise uses the exact same sales process as selling to a small business, just with a longer timeline and a larger buying committee, and why that means you’re already capable of winning global accounts

• The “sphere of influence” system: how to heat-map where the champions, decision makers, and power users from your happy clients scatter to over time, and turn those moves into warm footholds inside bigger companies

• How Jamie turned one Toronto client into a chain of introductions running through USAMP, EXO Communications, Tata, and Thomson Reuters that ended in a five-year Oracle deal

• How to reverse-engineer the objections a big company will throw at you (SOC 2 compliance, financial stability, staffing constraints) and design your website, materials, and pitch to dismantle them up front

• The “speedboat versus Deloitte” positioning that lets a small firm win against the giants by leaning into speed and a 10x price arbitrage

• Why the limiting belief that you’re “not worthy” of enterprise clients is unfounded, and how to frame the deal so a champion inside a big company sees a career-defining win in choosing you

• The founder’s trap between $1M and $3M where your own “superpower” starts to cap the business, and the replacement-ladder order for buying back your time

• How Jamie thinks about AI and labor arbitrage with a 125-person team, and why human adoption is far slower than the headlines suggest

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business.

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Jamie Shanks is a serial entrepreneur, CEO of Get Levrg, and pioneer of #SocialSelling. After nearly losing his business to unprofitable growth and drowning in talent costs, Jamie transformed his model by leveraging offshore talent. This pivot fueled market-leading margins, allowing him to scale multiple 7-figure businesses. He previously founded Sales for Life, training hundreds of thousands of sellers globally for giants like Microsoft and Oracle. Today, Get Levrg helps founders scale profitably. A balanced leader, Jamie enjoys competitive skiing and family time at his cottage.

Connect with Jamie Shanks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamestshanks/
Discover more about Get Levrg: https://getlevrg.com/

Have you ever looked at a massive company and assumed that they’re out of reach of becoming a client of yours? Well, Jamie Shanks used to think the same thing, but fast forward to today. He’s built multiple successful businesses. He has experience selling into global organizations like Oracle, Microsoft, Thompson, Reuters, and many others. And he’s developed a repeatable approach for turning one client relationship into an entire network of enterprise opportunities. In this episode, Jamie shares the strategy that he calls the sphere of influence, which is a powerful way to leverage existing relationships to open doors that most consultants spend years trying to access. Through cold outreach, you’re going to discover why selling to larger organizations is often more achievable than most people think, how to overcome the limiting beliefs that keep you from playing small, and the practical framework that Jamie used to grow from serving local companies to to winning some of the world’s most recognizable brands. If you want to learn how to sell deeper into organizations, sell more to your existing clients. You’re going to really enjoy this episode.

Hey, Jamie, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to this conversation A lot that I want to unpack and go over with you, but I thought we’d start. You’ve built multiple businesses agencies over the years that, you know, seven figures plus level. And one of the things that caught my attention as I heard you speak on another podcast was your experience in one of your previous companies, really selling into some of the largest companies on the planet. And so I want to get into how you did that. But before we even do that, take me back in time. I know that you want me. One of your first jobs was actually at bmo, so bank of Montreal in sales. But I’m wondering, were you a natural salesperson or did you have to really figure things out in the early days?

I think I was a natural salesperson that was in denial. So what I was a natural was for entrepreneurship. Even as a kid, I started every small business that a student could ever have. I washed cars. I had a landscaping company that employed four of my friends. I had a painting business, you know, painting fences and endless. I had a newspaper route. So I always knew that I was better suited to work for myself. So that was kind of mission one through high school and university. My sales career began when I was a failing student. I actually wasn’t going to graduate 4th year university and I was kind of bombing out last semester and I turned to my roommates and I told them that I was going to sell each of the five professors of my five Classes to give me a B to be able to graduate in there. They lie like that’s not never going to happen. So I was working at bank of Montreal, Nesbitt Burns, I had business cards made up, investment advisor at bank of Montreal, put on a suit and went and booked office time with each of these five professors back to back and sold them on the dream that I was the next stockbroker in training in Ottawa and that I, if they gave me a B, I was going to be that guy who turned everything around. Everyone gave me a B, I graduated and it planted a seat that like oh my God, if I can sell five independent professors who haven’t talked to each other in five disparate classes to go from an E to it be each, I can sell anything. You know, I was there during the dot com boom and bust where we were selling Nortel and JDS Uniface and every other, you know, tech pets.com software you could imagine. And so that planted the seeds. So I always knew we’ll call it. By my mid-20s I was going to be in sales.

I have a very similar background or I guess story that in university or actually college, you know, my grades weren’t, they were, they were okay. But I was in a program that was focused on, it was on Asian studies. But I realized I really liked business. That was really where my mind was at. But the program didn’t have any business courses. And so I went to a couple of the professors and the heads of the program and essentially convinced them to allow me to take more commerce courses. And what I just took, I mean for me it connected as well. It just shows when you are committed to doing something and as long as you don’t give up, I mean you’re almost certainly going to find a way to make it happen. So yeah, I just, it made me smile as you were sharing that story because I have a very similar kind of, you know, set of experiences like that throughout my, my early days of, of just realizing, yeah, anything you put your mind to, you certainly can accomplish it. Even then, even though people around you who seem to be smart and you know, that care about you, they’ll tell you that you can’t do it. They’ll tell you it’s impossible, you can still make it happen.

Yeah. And I actually gravitate to those that were willing to push through adversity. I grew up a bit of a farm kid, worked on farms, had all manual labor jobs, started my own businesses. So I have an affinity to those that went through adverse situations and figured out ways rather than like were gifted onto something or their parents helped them.

[05:29] – Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Selling to Large Companies

What about.

So, you know, when you talk about selling into larger organizations, a lot of people have certain limiting beliefs that hold them back. And I’m wondering what was your experience? I mean, we’re going to get into some of the details around how you actually effectively sold into these large companies, but is there anything that, you know, maybe you had a belief on in the early days that looking back or as you kind of went through your journey, you realize that the initial belief you had was completely wrong, it was unfounded and you know, it just was a limiting belief, but it wasn’t reality.

The limiting belief is that you’re not worthy to sell into the enterprise because it’s for sophisticated people. It is absolutely the exact same thing. And there’s a reason why during mergers and acquisitions, companies tend to not buy very small subscale businesses. Because the time and energy to buy a subscale small business is the exact same process and energy to buy a big business. So why not go after big business? So what I learned in my first agency, you know, I don’t many other kind of fits and started type of consulting businesses, but my first one that took off was Sales for Life, a global sales training business. My customers were local Toronto SaaS, software companies that I was helping with business development, which would eventually lead to me discovering this thing called social selling. And I thought that selling to Microsoft, Oracle, Thomson Reuters, you know, the biggest companies in the world required a completely different person. No, actually it’s a sales process that is just elongated and it has more checks and balances within that process. A sales process is the same whether you are selling $1,000 a month subscription for X or $1,000,000 deal. It just has a longer timeline and has different stages in the process that include more people in what’s called the buying committee. But everything else is the same. Selling to people is the same no matter the size of the business.

[07:41] – The Small Firm Advantage in Enterprise Sales

For let’s say take us a small consulting firm, you know, somebody maybe just even has five people. Do you think that going after larger organizations, right, you know, bigger engagements is a, is a good move or are there certain criteria that you would advise people, hey, if know, wait until you have this in order or you get to this stage of business before you start thinking about these longer sales cycles and, and going after some of these, you know, very large organizations or enterprises.

Couple ways to think about it. You can get addicted to chasing minnows and rabbits all day long if that is Intentional fine. And I’ll talk to you about that through my agency. Get leverage, but you can scale step your way through it. This is the classic route. Most companies, they try to sell the SMB, then they go to the lower mid market, then they go to the mid market, then they start dabbling in the enterprise and it takes them half a decade or a decade. Or you could step back and recognize I have the same capabilities to win a global enterprise opportunity as does a counterpart. I need to reverse engineer the objections that I’m going to receive. Let’s, let’s picture your consulting company and you’re up against a classic Deloitte as an example, what you’re going to do with your speedboat, Speedboat Racer. Because that’s essentially what you are. I’ll tell you there’s a quick saying. During a hurricane, only two types of boats survive. The Speed Racer and the Mega Cruiser. Like the, the Cardinal ship, the, the Cardinal flagship. Every other ship is washed away. So your advantage is speed. So what you’re doing is if you’re up against Deloitte, you’re reverse engineering. I have to build my website, my sales material, my talk track to recognizing. These are the list of objections I’m going to get up front. They are going to ask me about SOC2 compliancy. They’re going to ask me about the staffing constraints of being able to serve the business. They’re going to ask me around financial stability. So what I’m going to do is design the entire experience in reverse. I’m actually going to tackle those objections up front and I’m going to showcase why those objections are dumbfounded. And here is the consequence of choosing Deloitte as an example. You’ll pay $1,000 an hour for the same outcome that my Speedboat Racer will be able to do for a hundred. And here are the details to your objections. But for an arbitrage of 10 times, I’m going to be able to get it done twice as fast or five times faster for a tenth of the cost. That’s going to allow you to redeploy all those savings into growing your business differently. The outcome’s going to be the same. So you will build your entire demo experience against those objections and that will give you the opportunity to start tackling the enterprise up front. You have to then understand what the enterprise decision making criteria is going to be. And most likely it’s going to be around technological and data safety. So things like SOC 2, it’s going to be around financial stability and it’s going to be around staffing constraints. If you can overcome those, you have a great opportunity because what you are going to play on is speed and price. Now that comes to the decision making criteria of do you want to play in that sandbox. I fell ass backwards into selling into the global enterprise. When I started Sales for Life I didn’t have any ambitions any bigger than I wanted to help my fellow Canadian SaaS, software companies, specifically those that were in Toronto, Canada. I wanted to help them. I fell into winning Oracle, Intel, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft and quickly I realized I had a superpower and I could lean into it. But what I grew to understand about selling into the global enterprise was I personally was falling out of love. Ten years later, starting to fall out of love. With selling to the global enterprise there’s advantages and there’s disadvantages. And I felt that the SMB, the small to medium business was being neglected. And when I started Get Leverage I wanted to focus in on intentionally serving them. It’s a much more difficult market to serve at scale because it has its own nuances. The total addressable market is infinitely larger but it’s very difficult to grow at scale because of churn issues and so forth. But I intentionally have chosen that path. Now you have the opportunity to win it if you want to be there.

We’ll get then more into the SMB and what you’re doing with get leverage in a few minutes. But for I want to stick with the selling to these larger organizations because for, for many, right, it’s just, it’s, it even starts the limiting belief of like I, I can’t do this or I need to be bigger, I need to be more established. And what I’m hearing you say in your experiences, you just, you really need to reverse engineer. You need to be prepared for the objections that you’re going to encounter so that you can then you know, create that differentiation, the competitive advantage so that they see a real reason to, to engage with you.

You have to understand and really important component is people buy from people and this is a people buying process. So even though you see the logo, IBM, McDonald’s, Harley Davidson, whatever it is, that is just a cohort or a collection of people that are making decisions on behalf of a business. So from a limiting belief, recognize that I’m not selling McDonald’s, I am selling. What is a buying committee unfortunately larger than most small businesses. Just the one buying committee there will be larger than selling an entire small business. But that buying committee is made up of people. There’s Decision makers, champions, influencers, and then there’s going to be detractors. Okay, now I need to break down what is it that they’re focused in on? One of the reasons it’s very difficult to sell into the enterprise is because change requires so much cross functional collaboration that the status quo in a big company is sometimes better than change. There’s less incentive incentives in a big company for change and innovation because you can hide in the background in a big company and when you get a spotlight put on you for a big failure, you’re, you’re going to be fired in a big company. So that’s where you have to make the change is so asymmetrically greater for the people that you’re helping in the big company that you can almost show that they could make a level jump in their career because the reward is so immense that the risk of being fired for not choosing the classic traditional business but choosing your smart, your startup is that they’ll be able to take a level jump in their career. You have to understand the psychology of the people that go to work at big enterprise companies are not like you who runs a small business. You think in days and weeks in a small business, they think in quarters, years and even decades.

[15:16] – The Sphere of Influence Strategy for Landing Bigger Clients

Sure. One of the areas that a lot of people struggle with even before having the opportunity to have these conversations with executives inside of large organizations, it’s just even getting to that point, getting that initial meeting and a belief that many people have is I just need to find, go on LinkedIn, sales navigator, find the decision maker and start reaching out to them. You have this concept that you talk about the sphere of influence. And so I’d love if you could break down for, for those that are joining us right now going, yeah, I see the value. And instead of spending the same amount of, of energy to try and land a $5,000 client or a $15,000 client, I’m going to go after 150,000 or a half a million or a million plus dollar client. What do you suggest? How do you, you know, what have you found to be most effective in actually getting a seat at the table and having somebody on the other side say yes, I’m willing to carve out time on a busy schedule to sit down and you know, hear you out or, or have you take me through your, your demo or your slides.

This is how I’ve grown every agency from scratch. And it starts with a simple premise. You own an agency, you own a consulting company who wins a, a group of customers and what will Happen is I want you to picture your happy customer is this ipod your case. Think of it as the logo to one of your happy customers. What will naturally happen, typically every 18 to 24 months is a healthy percentage of that population of decision makers, champions, influencers, key stakeholders who used your solution will up and leave employment from that company and start scattering. If I’m trying to grow into the global enterprise, what I’m not doing is trying to build a it’s known as a total addressable market or a database of every fast food restaurant company from largest of employees or revenue downward or if I sell, I don’t know to shipping and logistics companies. I want to start with the biggest companies and call downward. You have no competitive advantage there. What you want to use is, is the leverage of experiences and the sphere of influence to get your first couple footholds. Because once you get footholds in the enterprise then it’s much easier to start spreading your wings. So the way that it works is you take your happy customers and you reverse engineer who no longer works at that company and has migrated onto other businesses, ideally migrated on to bigger mid market or enterprise companies.

And Jamie, so just interrupting and confirm for so are you saying these are people that. So let’s say you’re working with company A and now people at company have left, they’ve gone to work a company, you know, B and C, B, C,

D, E. Yeah, right.

And so are these people that have left people that you had a relationship with or maybe you did not have a relationship with them, but they just worked at the company that you were

working with different levels of the sphere of influence. So first you’re going to heat map this and you use LinkedIn and LinkedIn Navigator can help you determine think of the order of operations of the health or the what’s called the social proximity of that relationship. The best are those that left employment of your happy company and they were the person you worked with day in, day out. They were your champion and they’ve left next ring around that might be those that were part of the buying committee that signed on the documents said yes and now they’re also a decision maker. Next might be those that were power users of your solution. Next might be those that just work there in the the job function or the marketing department that you sold into and had like periphery knowledge of you. So you’re, you’re creating these rings around each business and what you’re doing is visualizing a heat map of like where did a scatter graph where did everybody Go. And what is the strength of the relationships that I would have around there? So let’s make this story real. I start sales for Life in September of 2012. I win a company in Toronto called Vision Critical. I win the business.

I remember Vision Critical from back in the day. Yeah.

I do this heat map and I start with where do people go? And of course, those, because it was a market research company, those go to other market research companies. I want a company called usamp. USAMP out of Los Angeles. I fly to Los Angeles, do the deal there, start working with them. Somebody leaves USamp and goes to an adjacent industry, goes to the telecom industry called EXO Communications. I go to EXO Communications. Turns out somebody left EXO Communications to their direct neighbor across the street in Herndon, Virginia. To Tata Communications. I went Tatted Communications. Somebody leaves Tatted Communications and goes to Thomson Reuters. Somebody goes to Thomson Reuters, connects me to Oracle. And in like five to six chess moves, I go from small local business to doing a five year deal with Oracle. And it’s that heat map. Every time you win a customer, it’s heat map, heat mapped heat map. And the larger you become, the more opportunities start to arise.

[20:34] – Turning Past Customer Relationships Into New Revenue

Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. Jamie, I appreciate you breaking that down. And I want to make this very tactical for everybody who’s joining us. What are you saying? What are you doing to actually get those meetings? So walk me through in the scenario from Vision Critical to the next, to the next, are you just reaching out to that person by email and saying, hey, I know you used to be at this company where you’re working. I’d love to come and talk with you about, give me an example of what you were saying because again, I mean, they’ve maybe heard of you and

there’s no magic answer to this.

And just to clarify, if you had a relationship with somebody, right, and you, you worked with them, it’s very, that to me is a very easy, you know, contact to, to follow up with or, or check in. But in the situation where maybe you didn’t work directly with them, walk, walk us through how you position that outreach and, and actually get that meeting.

It’s nothing special other than, you know, vision Critical. You used to work there, you know what it’s like to succeed and fail there. Here’s what we did at Vision Critical. And if you want to include social proof, like it’s got a link to an article or a case study or what have you, help me understand how, how you would be running something like that inside Your current business, if it worked at Vision Critical, why wouldn’t it work where you work today? And, and would you be that person that kind of runs programs like this, or do you think the successes at Vision Critical in that could warrant you brokering me an introduction to somebody that would deal with that in your organization? Those are basically the questions I’m asking myself, and I’m trying to craft that in a call, in an email, in a LinkedIn message. And I’ll try a variety of different things, but I’m leaning in on the centerpiece that you know what it takes to succeed and fail at Vision Critical. And if there is a success from that place, why has it not been transposed into your new business?

Got it. For the person who doesn’t feel like they’re a natural salesperson or feels uncomfortable, you know, promoting themselves, doesn’t want to come across as, as salesy, is there any guidance that you would provide to them on, on how to make this kind of an approach, you know, work and, and be very effective?

I don’t know how to make somebody a seller, but I assume your audience, everybody you know, is a business owner or a founder. And you have to realize really quickly as a business owner or founder, and I guess you’re listening, saying it’s easy for you because you’re a natural seller. If you were a technical founder who doesn’t feel that they are a natural seller, you have to become a seller to succeed. I. You have to sell employees, to join you investors to invest in you vendors, to give you terms. You are selling all day long. So this is just another conversation piece to expand your business. I wish I could tell you that there was some magic bullet to convert somebody to sales, but it’s more of a willingness to succeed and not fail. Like, I think that I learned sales because I was scared of failure, that not because I wanted to be a seller, I just didn’t want to fail.

[23:59] – Outreach Tactics That Actually Generate Meetings

Do you think that this can be delegated? So, you know, take the technical founder, because we certainly have a lot of those people in our world who aren’t the most comfortable with talking about themselves and promoting the business. And they come from a background of science or technology, engineering, so on and so forth. Do you think this could work by delegating to them, bringing on somebody in that business development function and have them. So even though they maybe weren’t part of those projects in the past, could you plug somebody in, arm them with this information, and they could work those channels for you? Or do you think that would not work as well?

Oh, no, it’s, it’s 100% scalable. I mean, my company, Sales for Life taught this to 500,000 sellers around the world. And they were doing, using the sphere of influence to tell the stories of their customers to other future customers. It’s, it’s hyperscale. The end recipient of the story is just being reminded, you used to work there. You now work here. A lot of people, when they go into a new business, want to bring in the people, the process and technology that made them successful in the past. You’re just reminding them, here’s what’s worked for your old firm. Let’s bring that forward.

That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned that you did a lot of testing of different approaches with your messaging tweaking, whether it’s through email or phone calls. Is there anything that stands out that you tried that did not work at all? And you would caution people like, hey, be careful, or that that just tends not to work. And anything on the other side that you would say, maybe certain language or ways of structuring your, your approach, that works a lot better.

One thing that just from an email perspective, that, or LinkedIn messaging that I can tell you does not work is, you know, having this cadence or sequence that you’ve built out in some engaged sales engagement platform like a sales loft or an outreach that is pretty vanilla. Like, and then the last message is the breakup. I always hated this. The breakup email, like, oh, I guess, you know, you don’t have time for me. If I don’t hear back from you in 24 hours, you know, I’ll cut you off kind of thing. It’s just like, here’s the thing is, I can’t tell you I’ve been selling for 20 years. Millions of dollars of revenue have been created from messages, whether it’s voicemails or texts or emails or LinkedIn messages that I sent to people that they stored in a folder. And it wasn’t that. It was a no, it was just a no. Right now you know that that buyer just, it wasn’t in their top three priorities. And it’s important to teach people that when, when you’re trying to sell somebody, for the most part, executives have a top three plan or a top five plan. And in this quarter, there are like three or five things that I’m focused on right now. And if it’s, if it’s anything outside of it and you’re a half baked, you know, true executive, that’s just noise. You just push it out like, no, that’s not on my quarterly plan. I. I can’t. I can’t listen to it. That doesn’t mean I didn’t save it and you didn’t put a bug in my ear to put it on an idea list for future quarters. And so what happens is quarters later, they’ll pull me out of a file folder and they’re like, hey, Jamie, you wrote me a year ago about this idea. Now I’m. Now you’re on the forefront of my brain. So those breakup emails are ridiculous and

that never burn bridges. I always keep the conversation open.

It’s a no. Right now. There’s something called the Chet Holmes pyramid, which dictates that only 3% of a market is actively trying to buy something right now. Another 7% is like formulating the idea. And the rest of the 90% are nowhere near you right now.

[27:52] – How Founders Can Scale Through Delegation

Yeah, I remember reading the Ultimate Sales Machine way back in the day by Chet Holmes. It was really resonant. That was a great book. I want to shift gears a little bit now from sales to you actually being a founder, building multiple businesses in your experience, and maybe this is most recently with get leverage, the current agency, what have you found to be the hardest thing for you to step away from and delegate? I know you’ve approached how you’ve built this business differently from others, but for those who are going through that journey and maybe they have a few employees and they’re building up or they’re still holding on to a lot of things that maybe they shouldn’t be doing, what’s been your experience there any, any kind of principles that you use or anything you found to be really important in helping to grow the business.

So I’ll tell you what I’ve done well and what I haven’t done well yet. So far, it’s almost the same for every founder as you get to scale. We have 125 employees. And so you would think I’ve stepped out of everything, but it is the same story from every founder. Your super skill is the last thing you relinquish because you know what it’s like to succeed and fail. You know what good looks like, you know how difficult it is to scale. And so I’ve scaled every facet of this business, yet I am still part and leaving founder led sales. So that answers where I need to improve. But where I’ve succeeded is there’s this tipping point in every business, whether it’s at about a. It ranges between 1 and $3 million where the throughput of the founder like the horsepower of the founder goes. It’s kind of like revving a car in second gear or if you’ve ever been on a motorcycle like that 10,000 RPM band and it’s just huge acceleration to 1 million, 2 million, 3 million. And then the tac hits the red line and it actually has diminishing power. And at that 1 to 3 million mark, what was the superpower of the founder pushing everything through them actually starts to slow the business down and will either cap it, kill it, the whole bit. Unless the founder understands a very simple principle. From Dan Sullivan, the who not how to get to scale. You need to grow through people. And your job now is to select whose. And the who’s do the house. They figure out the people process technology. You don’t do any of that. You couldn’t care less the how you are focused on who’s to get you house. And that’s why I have 125 employees. So every other part of it has been scaled. We’ve scaled account management, customer success managers. We’re starting to scale strs my account executives the closer that’s the last part to scale. So I still need to find my who’s to get to my house. So the way that you built this

company was a different from previous companies. And what I mean by that is quite often you’ll see that people will hire with a mindset of filling capacity. They’re hiring for what the business is dealing with today. They’re not necessarily hiring for for growth, meaning they’re not hiring for the person that already knows what they need to do to go from where they are to three, four steps into the future. And that can happen because they think it costs too much. They don’t need that right now. But I’m wondering in your experience, Jamie, did something click for you where in this latest business? Because it sounds like you’ve been very intentional in hiring people that are already several steps ahead. You’re not only hiring for capacity, as maybe you did in the past. And so I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but can you just talk through, have you changed your approach to how you think about kind of team building and hiring strategically not just for capacity, but for growth.

One of the best books that will get somebody going from zero to one through this process, it’s Dan Martel’s buy back your time. So there’s something called the replacement ladder inside this book. I think it’s foundational for every founder. Think of it as Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, five layers and in the exact order of operations, you relieve yourself of these tasks first. So first thing you’re doing is buying back your own capacity. Because you, the founder, could do 10 times more in any one function than any employee can. So that order of operations is think of it as like VA type work. Like I haven’t read my, I don’t control my email, my calendar, I’m not on any Slack channel. There’s periods of time I don’t talk to anybody throughout the whole day, so I have more time to think. So I have a virtual assistant. That’s level one. Level two is customer support. Now I’m start to relinquish myself of the burden of all the kit, all the house fires. Not sorry, there’s kitchen fires and house fire, there’s kitchen fires and dumpster fires. Now I stop relieving myself of the dumpster fires, of all the customer requests escalations, root cause analysis of why we’re doing X with that customer. You move yourself out of customer success, then you move yourself out of marketing, or maybe it’s product innovation. So now all of a sudden there’s those that are thinking about growing the business beyond you and starting to create lead flow for you, then sales, and then finally you’re at the top of executive leadership and you start to even replace yourself, even out of the CEO role. So you go into the owner box. It’s a great principle to think about. So to answer your question, that first million dollars or a few million dollars, you have to get yourself out of the things that take up 80% of the bandwidth. It’s like other people’s priority is not your own. So get yourself out of email, get yourself out of Slack. Any founder that, that’s proud of being on Slack is insane. They’re, I, I don’t believe like a scalable founder. And then you get yourself out of your calendar, you get yourself out of customer requests, and all of a sudden your day opens up dramatically. Now that’s where you start to buy yourself out of the more important roles.

[34:24] – How AI Is Transforming Sales and Marketing

Right now I don’t want anyone that would disagree with the statement that we’re in a time of just massive change, rapid developments, whether it’s AI or just other technologies. How has that impacted how you think about business development and how you think about building your, your company. I mean beyond just a typical statement that people are, are using their teams, are using more, more AI, more agents, all that, is there anything about how you actually maybe shifted your, your strategy or shifted how you think about building your team or going to market or, you know, actually building the pipeline and growing the business.

I have two philosophies around it. It’s integral to the whole business. So I’ll answer the two parts. Part number one, the adoption curve. I went through the marketing automation revolution, the social media revolution. One thing is you have early adopters, you have early adopters, early event, early innovators, you know, early majority, late majority. That curve is dramatically longer than you think it is because the bottleneck to all of this is humid usage, utility and adoption. So what’s happening is the news is perpetuating, like, you know, new agent of the week. The technology is moving exponentially faster than the average person or company is keeping up with it. It is the smallest cohort of your LinkedIn feed are actually building agents to do anything meaningful compared to the average company. So recognize that human adoption is way slower than you think it is. That’s on one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is it’s a huge tailwind for me because my company get leverage, does sales and marketing tasks for small to medium businesses. I have 125 offshore teammates who have embraced AI for everything, to accelerate the work, to do, quality assurance, to ideate. But what was also going to happen is millions of companies are going to try to stand up their own agents. What they forget is that they need teammates to manage those agents. And I have the army of talent to do that. So it’s amazing, like I’m able to do things much faster, much better than I could before. But agents are only co pilots beside a human. And if you combine AI with already operating leverage of labor arbitrage that I have, it’s amazing.

Are there any concerns you have or things that kind of not necessarily keep you up at night, but you wonder, could this have a large negative impact? Is there anything that we might need to change dramatically about how we’re running the business? Are there any of those unknowns or uncertainties that are on your mind?

I think for most successful founders, you’re playing a game of football, rugby, soccer. Pick your favorite game on the field and you’re just adjusting to the game on the field as it’s happening. Bill Belichick Classic. The the Patriots would get their ass kicked in the first half. They’d go in at halftime, they would adjust on the fly. And the reality is I can’t. It’s like trying to control the stock market. I’ll never be able to control where AI is going I just have to play the game a little bit faster than the game is being played out on the field. The good thing is if I stay nimble, I’ll always be faster than the early majority, late majority of the massive cohort of people and companies that’ll be later to this party. So there’ll be endless opportunity there. I think sweating how it might cut jobs and it might do all these sort of things, it’s just like hey, when, when whatever the change is going to come, like a stock market, you have no control over it. You will just play that game in that moment. It is, it, you know, it’s almost like the ADHD of, of entrepreneurship. But I think any entrepreneur that fools themselves that they want to sit there and pontificate, it doesn’t really matter, you will just keep playing the rugby game just hopefully a little faster than the game is evolving.

[38:53] – Why Business Owners Must Continuously Adapt to Change

I just finished reading a new book by Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler called We Are as Gods. And one of the things that stood out from that is with any technological change or just really any change throughout history, always going to be a lot of developments. There’s always going to be abundance that comes from that. There’s also going to be new challenges that come from it and we just learn to, or we need to learn to navigate those challenges. They’re going to come, they’re always going to come. That’s just, you know, the, the reality. So I think what you’re saying is a good place or this is what makes successful entrepreneurs successful is learning how to navigate those challenges and continue to make progress.

I’m a non technical founder and I can tell you my first instinct to any, any technological change is I, I’m not the first to try it and I have a sense of hesitation that I’m somehow going to break it or my computer. You know, I’m the guy who wrote the books on social selling. I was a little later to social media number one and number two, I didn’t really like it at first but I had a fundamental, I, you know, the yellow brick road went two ways. I had a choice, either evolve or die. The same sort of thing. I’m not old enough because I think anyone listening, if you choose to not go down the AI path, that’s fine, but you’re self selecting yourself out of the workforce in a period of years and that’s fine depending on your age or your income or you know, your, your situation. But I’m in my 40s and so I know I have this evolution and probably one even more like there’ll be another one. In my 50s and 60s, I’ll have to do another level jump, and I’ll just keep level jumping until I don’t feel like doing that anymore. But I’m the guy that doesn’t want to do this. Most of the time. I kind of like tradition more than I like innovation, naturally. But then I will lean in because I know it’s good for business.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, Jamie, listen, I want to thank you for. For coming on. I appreciate. I know we just kind of dug into a little bit of the story there. There’s a lot more. So where should people go to learn more about you and everything you have going on with get leverage.

Hey, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and. Or get leverage. It’s spelled G, so it’s get G E T and then L e v r g.com and happy to help.

We’ll link that in the show notes so that everyone can find it there. Definitely a unique spelling. So I appreciate you calling that out. Jamie, thank you again so much for coming on.

Thanks a lot. You take care.