Paul James - Founder of DialHawk | From Brother's Garage to Multiple 7-Figure AI Businesses

When I started off an SEO game, you could literally register an exact match domain by that.com, put no content on the site and it would literally rank. Some people don't just talk about growth. They build systems that force it. Paul James is one of those people from scaling brands to mastering influence. Paul has built a reputation for turning clarity into momentum. I grew up wanting to do music in several bands, but I always found myself in the bands being the person that's driving the business side of it. What I'm doing now, I think that really helped with me learning to nurture an audience. So many new developments started happening with AI, and it's been so exciting for me. So I've been experimenting a lot with that and actually evolving from just doing SEO to generate leads to now using faceless videos to generate leads. He understands that success isn't about hacks, it's about consistency, discipline, and doing the work when no one's watching. This conversation goes beyond surface level wins, into the mindset, decisions, and systems that actually move the needle. ChatGPT, you have to really train it to get the output that you want. Everyone knows about ChatGPT, that's not the secret. The sauce is how you train ChatGPT to do what you want it to do. Knowing how to control AI work for you instead of replacing you is going to be the best way to future proof your job right now. I think learning that you can figure things out on your own, actually doing is going to help you learn much faster. Paul, you've been in the SEO game since 2009. Yeah. So what about the 2009 SEO playbook is still valid? What about that playbook is obsolete with AI and all the new marketing stuff that is available in 2025? That's 2009. That's a long time. It's a long time, yeah. It's kind of crazy because when I started off an SEO game, you could literally register an exact match domain, which means like, let's say you're trying to rank for like, I don't know, best podcast, studio microphone. You could literally buy that.com and then put no content on the site and it would literally rank. It's basic. Yeah. So I mean, it's kind of good. It's not like that. But it was nice when you're trying to like rank stuff and like, you know, whether it was going to be like an affiliate marketing type site or your own business, that was pretty cool. So that's changed a lot since then. You just can't just run and gun put stuff like that. But I would say a lot of like what stayed the same is like good content, trying to Google after all is like a business right. So their job is to a searcher comes. They need to solve their problem. They need to end their search ultimately and solve the problem for them. So if you can do that, that's usually through content providing good content that actually solves what they're looking to to solve. That is like something that hasn't really changed at all. And AI has made that a lot easier because now we have chat GPT. We have cloud. We have deep seek. And I mean, I use a combination of all the above for everything that I'm doing. Now helps with content. And then also I think like we have this whole like ethos of other things that fit in with the SEO now like social and you know, stuff like that like posting videos on social and shorts and all of that stuff can help play a role and is equally important I think. But at the end of the day, it's just about like are you solving the are you answering the question that the person is seeking? And it's interesting because if you go back 2009, like I know I know it's so funny how so many entrepreneurs like started their sort of their entrepreneurial journey with like SEO and making money on Google. And people that have now built like random companies in all these different industries at some point in their life. Like yeah, I was making like 10 grand a month with affiliate links on Google or something. Yeah, like I mean, there's like Bakker, Alex Bakker, some like the biggest people out there. Like I remember they were like doing SEO like right alongside me and now they're like running like big companies and stuff. It's it is kind of crazy to see that. Yeah, I just think it's very cool. And you know, a lot of people try to do different things like look for loopholes like backlinks and things like that and all that's great and does help. But at the end of the day, I mean, focusing on like content and and providing values going to be something that never is going to go away, you know, going back. I wanted to understand sort of where you came from that turned you into the person that you are today that has all these different interests and passions and skill sets and is still like an incredibly successful entrepreneur and builder. Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that it comes definitely from my roots. Like I grew up wanting to do music and was in several bands. But I always found myself in the bands being the person that was like kind of like driving the business side of it. So like I'm thinking about like how can we sell more CDs? How can we sell merch at shows? How can we get on bigger and better shows? And I remember like driving in a van touring, not even having gas to get to the next show. And I'm at the mall and you know, telling my bandmates, hey, we need to sell CDs. Like this is so we walk around with an iPod. That's super scrappy. Yeah, and be like, hey, can you listen to our song? And then people would listen and be like, hey, we got a CD. It's $5. No, obviously there's not really CDs anymore. But you know, that that's just always kind of been my my hustle is like I've always just found a way to like if I want something I'm going to find a way to get it. And as that move forward into what I'm doing now, I think that really helped with me learning to nurture an audience because I learned in the music industry, like everything comes back to like making people feel like they're part of something and like nurturing an audience. And that creativity and everything has just really helped with what I'm doing now, like whether it's doing YouTube or you know, finding brand sponsorships and things like that. Like it's it's been much more than just you know, just business, but making people feel like they're part of a community and stuff. I love that. Yeah. And also me as a person too, like I understand like I could do different things to scale differently. Like I could go get an office building and hire employees. But at the end of the day, the question I ask myself is like, what's the trade off for this going to be in order for me to make this happen? Like if I'm going to go and hire like five people and then I have to show up at an office every day, potentially manage these five people. Like what is that trade off going to be for my lifestyle? So I'm very much a lifestyle driven person and every decision I make when it comes to business, hobbies, anything is does this improve my lifestyle or does it hurt it because you know, money's great and all. But if it's going to like really hinder my lifestyle, I'm not going to take it. I'm not going to do it. So when did you move from music into building a business? Because 2009 was SEO. But I mean, you also had a successful exit and you built an actual say an actual company, like a more traditional company. So what was first? Let me walk you through the timeline. So 2009, 2010, I'm living in my brother's garage, my mom lost her house and I was living with her. And I'm trying to like figure out what to do with my life. So I'm in college. I was thinking about going to become a nurse. I mean, it was trying to become a nurse, but I didn't I didn't like the clinical portion of it. I really only liked like the science behind it. So basically, every day I'm coming back from class and I'm trying to figure out like, what do I want to do with my life? Like I don't think this is it. And I came across SEO and that's what got me started. And you know, I still dabble a lot in SEO. I use it a lot with, you know, the handful of clients I still have for SEO and also YouTube and stuff like that is very prevalent. But yeah, so I started a marketing agency at that point and took it very quickly to six figures, moved out of my brother's garage, dropped out of college, which was crazy at the time because everyone's like, tell me what are you doing? Why are you dropping out of college? You think that's a good idea? And I just knew like, you know, this is this is what I had to do. Like I was I was spending more time in class like trying to build this agency than I was like trying to learn stuff. So yeah, I mean, pretty much right before then, right before I went to school, just to cover the music stuff to kind of skip pass out a little bit. But I had kind of came to the the point in my mind that like music is going to be a very hard industry to break into. Yes. And like I did not have the money to fund that to try and make that happen. So that kind of all happened at once, nursing school, ending music, starting the agency all at once. How do you for somebody just starting out who does have like a lot of creative passion they want to pursue? And it could be something traditionally creative like music or it could be them trying to wrestle with business idea one versus business idea two. Based on like what happened with you or it could be college traditional job and you're wrestling with all these sort of life decisions. How do you decide like what you should pursue? Like how did you know the marketing agency was what you were destined to do and you were going to make it successful like no matter what? Yeah. So also the other part is that I now I'm doing music again. So it was like it was kind of just a temporary pause and what I wanted to do. And I was able to like build up that momentum with the funding to actually make that happen later in life. So I think that's kind of sort of like a delayed gratification lesson as well. Like you can do the unsexy thing now to like fund what you really want to do later. So kind of looking ahead. But also I kind of just took like what was going on in my own life. I was working for a heating cooling company at the time. And they were getting a lot of calls from like home advisor at the time when they're called service magic back then. And they were trying to sell leads. And I thought you know what if I could help businesses get leads by ranking my own websites. So that's kind of what led me to go down that path. So I think leaning into like what's going on in your own life. Are there some certain skills that you can learn that are going to help you achieve this and allow you to still be creative with what you're doing. And then just knowing that like this doesn't have to be forever. Like it can just get you to where you want to be going eventually. Because eventually I did a lot of other things. I started a software company. I started a YouTube channel. So I'll all business by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And when I say that because when you think about the strategy to start a marketing agency versus a software company versus a YouTube channel. Like it's you still have to figure out the full complement of business skills and strategy to get it off the ground. They ended up tying into each other very nicely. But I didn't know that was going to be my end goal at the time. At the time it was just I just need to like get on my feet and make enough money to where I can support myself. And then they all eventually I needed a software to track phone calls for the marketing agency. And I built that software company. And then eventually people who were joining the software company wanted more training on doing SEO and lead generation. So that fed into the YouTube channel. And before I know it, like I'm back into the creative stuff again, which is awesome. I love that. And I also think that that's a really smart way when you're when you build a business. One thing that it seems like you've done very well is you look for all these like all these opportunities that are sort of like forcing themselves on you and you lean into it not as a distraction. But when you know your customer so well and you know what they need, then you build stuff for them as opposed to just guessing. Exactly. And sometimes you have to have a little bit of traction to have the luxury to do that because if you didn't have like marketing agency customers, you wouldn't know that you have to build SaaS for them. And then you wouldn't have to know that you have to build training for them. But like if you pay attention, then you like lean into the opportunity that's basically like knocking at your door and can't be ignored. And that's kind of now that I see now that you're laying it out, that's exactly how you've built your entire career. Yeah, 100%. And I also think too, like you said, knowing your customer, part of like not getting too big where you have all these employees and stuff kind of distances you from your customer a lot. So I mean, even I find myself, it happens now with myself where I sometimes I'll get a little further away from the customer service aspect. Just because you know customer services, it's one of those jobs are like it can be super rewarding or it can be super taxing too because you know, if you're answering an email and it only takes one customer that's maybe having a bad day to throw off your whole day and then it's hard to be creative. But I do think it's really important as a business owner to try and still have a hand in that, even if it's once every couple months to like be answering some support tickets and like actually getting on the phone with customers, even sometimes it takes that to really know your market and be able to build what you need to build for them. And I think that you should never really like never never completely remove yourself from the customer interaction. I think that's super important. Okay, so that ended up sort of over time creating your entire business ecosystem for lack of a better description, right? So then you built the marketing agency, it's going well that turns into SaaS, that turns into the actual software that you build out. You chose to exit that business. And so explain to me as sort of like you are, you know, your entrepreneur career progresses. Why did you choose to exit one piece of the business? Why did you choose to keep another? Like just walk me through sort of your thought process for how you, you know, how you sort of structure and how you choose to build things, exit other things. Because that's also I think that knowing when to add on new products, knowing when to exit them, knowing when to sell, like these are all very difficult ideas that a lot of entrepreneurs don't think about when they're first starting out. I think for me, like I was really left with no choice. So to give you some backstory, I was going through a divorce. And it was a long divorce, like a couple of years long. I'm sorry, that sucks. It's yeah. Yeah, it's okay. It actually turned out to be great, you know, like now I'm at my fiance. So that's true. Yeah. And yeah, I'm happy. And it's been kind of rewarding as well in a way because like I always said, like, you know, you can take everything away from me, but you can't take the skills that I learned, right? And I always said that to people like, you know, people who are wanting to start off and do a business like, learn a skill, learn a skill, like you cannot take that away from you. So I kind of got thrown into a situation where like I almost had to rebuild. So I decided to exit the company for that reason was one of the main drivers behind why I wanted to exit. But I did it in a way where I'm still involved, which is really cool. So the new owners have taken over like the role of like managing the company, but I'm still involved in like a profit sharing way. So okay, that's not bad. It's been really cool actually. And it's now it's allowed me to focus on other things. Like I'm pursuing like my passion, like the music and stuff. And we're traveling around the world in an RV, which has been really fun. I know, I know you are. So it's been like, it's like opened up so many doors. And also like, it's been like one of the best things that happened to me like, can you explain how a divorce causes you to have to sell a company? Because listen, like I think that the person that you're with can be the biggest advantage, especially for an entrepreneur because listen, building anything is difficult. It'll be a lot of times when there's ups and downs. And I think that when you have like the right person at home, your partner, your spouse, whatever has been wife, whoever, you know, you're with, that can be like the biggest blessing or the biggest curse to your success. Now, I don't. So if if obviously, you know, you're going through a divorce, things aren't going great. I get it. But how did it come to the point where it forced you to sell a company? Yeah. So good question. I totally agree with you as well. Like if you don't have peace in your life at home, like it's almost impossible to do anything else and like build, right? So that is like super important. But yeah, I mean, in a divorce, you're losing half of everything, half of your, you did not like pren up or post not. No, because I didn't have anything when, you know, when we got married, we got married young. So like, at that time, I didn't have anything. I mean, it was living in a garage. Yeah, that's fair. Okay, fine. Yeah. So I mean, like, you know, everything was sort of like built up during the marriage. So you lose basically half of everything. And then because, you know, you're the person driving the income, you're also having to pay like, alimony and maintenance. So that becomes like a huge burden. And when that happens, you have the, like, you're not forced to sell. But I guess the, well, you could be in certain scenarios. I wasn't forced to sell because we were able to work out that I wasn't forced to sell. But in the end, you know, like I was put in such a tight financial position that it was like lifestyle choice, right? Do I want, what kind of lifestyle do I want to live? Like I like to drive nice cars. I like to live in a nice house. And I didn't want to downgrade. So for me, selling that seem to be the best way to still achieve what I wanted to do and kind of give me a reset. Okay. So after this exit, where are you now? You still have, you still have the marketing agency. You're still at this point, what year is this approximately? That's all happening. Yeah. Like when you sold the company, like this is really recent this year. So the beginning of this year, I sold the company. This is all very recent. Yeah. Um, divorce finalized last summer. So that's going to year. And then I was going through the divorce for two years before we actually finalize things. So yeah, it was a, it was definitely a rough like three years for sure. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm like so great right now. Everything is like amazing. I'm happy for you. Thank you. Yeah. Like I'm living my best life now and so happy. And what the reason I asked sort of timeline was because I was I was trying to understand from like a business perspective, like the marketing agency had evolved. Yeah. Obviously was this is like now fast forwarding like 2009. So like almost like what, 13 years. Yeah, let's hop back to there. So the marketing agency sort of scaled down over time naturally with building the software company. Yeah. Because like running two things at once, not like you said, focus is important. So like you definitely do have to decide what you're going to focus on. I still keep my hands into marketing. Yeah. Quite a bit like I have like, I'll say like maybe like a dozen clients or so, but I'm not actively seeking clients understood. But I want to still have a pulse on what's going on. And when you think about after the exit, like your first thought was where should I spend my time? Should I rebuild the marketing agency? Should I go into something else? Should I, I mean like now you're building up the YouTube channel, but you never stopped. So I know that there's like creative pursuits, but where did like the the entrepreneurship business energy go after that exit? After that exit, I think it went into AI and content creation. So so many new developments started happening with AI. And it's been so exciting for me. Like, I don't know about you, but I just love 1000%. Yeah. Like it's just, it's so crazy to think like, I can literally clone my voice with 11 labs or something like that. And then be typing something and have it like make content for me. So I've been experimenting a lot with that and actually evolving from just doing SEO to generate leads to now using faceless videos to generate leads or like, you know, certain content with AI, which has been insane. I mean, I've taken, for example, I've taken reels that I've done on Instagram that have gotten like a million views and literally clone the real with AI and using nothing but like pictures and like 11 labs voice. And it'll still get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of leads. So like just thinking about that is kind of crazy. Quick question. What's your go to when you got 10 minutes before a meeting or a workout? For me, it just used to be whatever I could grab, which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage. That's why I'm partnering with Hule. This black edition ready to drink is a complete meal. So it has 35 grams of protein, six grams of fiber, 35 essential vitamins and minerals. It is no sugar added, gluten-free, under five bucks. I always keep a few of these in my fridge. 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Obviously, as an entrepreneur, you understand the potential. As somebody who was sort of like always on the bleeding edge of marketing of tech, like you see it probably better than most. So what was the sort, I mean, obviously, it's easy to ask why is AI interesting? It's incredibly interesting. But where did you see the biggest opportunity with it? Initially, I saw the biggest opportunity with helping businesses get AI implemented. So being like an AI consultant. But then I saw how I was utilizing it with myself with like Instagram and stuff like that. And I thought like, you know, hey, we could be doing this for other people are teaching other people how to implement this. So I started putting out like courses and trainings on how to implement pretty much what I'm doing, generating leads on Instagram. Because I still generate tons of leads for the software company. Just posting 30 second videos with my phone. Sometimes I don't even have to show my face. So, you know, you get people to reply yes to the video and then have, you know, follow up. Like a DM, they send them like a DM. Okay, so this is what I really want to unpack because every time somebody does an AI conversation podcast, whatever, it's all this like super complex shit that the average business person does not understand. What right now have you found is a really strong marketing strategy leveraging AI. You could literally go into chat GPT right and ask it for an idea. Like I want, I want a trending video idea that is going to blow up or I want you to analyze this competitor's YouTube channel and find their best performing video. Like I want the outlier the video that really went crazy. Then you can have it transcribed the video for you and find out exactly what was talked about. So now it's kind of I use AI like my assistant, right? I'm making it do the things that would normally take me or even an assistant a very long time to do it can do within a second. So then it can pull out what the video is about. You can have it ask, ask it to rewrite the video in a way, like come up with your own sort of like hooks in it. And then you can either post a video yourself, like redo it, redo your own variation of it. AI will tell you what the caption should be. AI will even do the thumbnail for you know, which is kind of crazy. So you could do that or you can have like something like 11 labs, clone your voice or if you want to be like an AI consultant and work with business owners and help them do this, clone the business owners voice. And now you're doing content for them, but they don't have to do anything because business owners, they don't have time to like learn all of this. So yeah, I mean, that's been huge for me. Then using something like many chat to automate follow up. So I always end pretty much every video, especially short form videos and make them comment yes, like, hey, if you want, if you want to get started coming, yes. And then if you look, you'd got comments pouring down the Instagram feed or even on YouTube. That's like, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then you're responding back to them with a link to get them in. Now you can go a step further and let's say like you need to build out a landing page for your offer. Well, in the past, we'd be using something like click bottles or something like that. Well, no, you could just use deep seek. They have they have the thing called deep site. Really super cool. If you haven't checked it out yet, I have not yet. No, check that out. This is crazy. You can literally go in and type make me this website or here's my video. I want my video on the website. Make it like a webinar replay or make it a landing page and it will design it. It'll write the copy for it. It'll do everything in 10 seconds. That's insane. I didn't realize it. So I listen, most of what you just described I use as well. So what we're really talking about is like using AI for research, for content creation, for as like it, it could be an aid for you to create more efficiently and more effectively or it can literally, if you want to really just replace you completely because now again, it can clone, it can write the script thumbnail, clone your voice. I think with, is it Hey, Jen? Hey, Jen. Yes. That was hard. Yeah. Crazy. It's like, it's so crazy. What if you feel three knows also crazy with cinematic footage and stuff. So you can use it for basically all content creation and research, but then you can also use it for, I mean, I didn't realize building out landing pages, websites, copy, copy. Is there anything that writes copy better than most copy readers that you paid to write copy? So that's what I was going to ask you. So I find that chat cheaply at least has limitations when it comes to writing. And I was going to ask you also, like, what does it do very well and what does it sort of not do so, so well? And I'm curious that if I just give context, I don't do a lot of like, say 10 minute YouTube style videos. I do a lot of like long form podcasts. So I use it for research. But I'm curious, sort of two questions. First, does it do a good enough job of researching writing hooks, where you actually see the performance when it when you sort of rely on it? And then secondly, what sort of AI tools are best for what tasks, meaning in my personal experience, chat cheaply is good for research. I don't love the copy it generates. So I use cloud for copy writing. So are there other nuances like that? Yeah, totally. And I think I think the way that I look at these tools is it's more about how you use them. So it's much chat gbt, you have to really train it to get the output that you want. And I think that that's the biggest takeaway here. Like if you're going to go in and you're going to learn AI, it's everyone knows about chat gbt, right? That's not the secret. The sauce is how you train chat gbt to do what you want it to do. So like if I tell chat gbt that I want it to be a world-class copywriter like John Carlton, I'm going to get really great copy coming out of it versus if I just say, hey, right, right, right, this. So I think that that's in the nuances of it. It doesn't, I haven't really found personally like using something like deep seek or chat gbt or like using these different tools that it makes that big of a difference if you're training the if you're training properly. Yeah. Okay. So I think that's the biggest thing. And I don't know, maybe it's just like my creative brain where I'm in there like tinkering, like figuring out exactly like what kind of output I'm getting from what I'm typing in. But it learns. It keeps like a history, a record of what you're saying to the point where now I can tell chat gbt to write an email from me and it sounds like it sounds like me. Like it writes better emails than I write emails now. Like it's so easy. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. There was a Navale Ravicon tweet that just I just saw yesterday. And it was it was so prolific. It was this is what he does, you know, it takes this like really simple wisdom and just, you know, he finds a way to package it in a way that you're like, oh shit, yeah, that's right. But the tweet was if you can train someone to do it, you can train AI to do it. Yeah. And it was, I might be paraphrasing, but that's really what it comes down to. I think we're at a really unique junction right now where we're about to see a huge boom with AI agents. Yes. And that I think is like the thing to watch out for. Have you been dabbling with like, uh, what is it? And eight and eight and yeah, and some of the very tiny bit, but that's like that's what I'm that's kind of at my Amazon for the future is dabbling in that more and learning it more, be mastering it. I think that's where the future is headed. I think over the next year or two, that industry alone is going to make so many multi millionaires. Like if you're sitting here right now like watching this and you're thinking like, what's the next like thing I should do? Become a master at that. So what, so break down, break down your, like your audience building content strategy. You kind of already touched on it a little bit. Um, but there's sort of two components that I see at least and you can correct me. But the way that I see it, you have sort of like the research piece. And then you have like the faceless channel piece. Or even if you want to be on camera. Yeah. Like for me, I'm kind of doing a combination of both, right? Like I'm taking it and using it for like idea generation. Um, I trust it to give me better captions, better titles and I can come up with better hooks and I can come up with. But I still want to be the face. I still want to be the brand. So for me, that's normally what I'm doing. But for a lot of business owners out there, like if they're running a plumbing company, they maybe don't have time to do that. Or maybe if someone wants to like help someone generate leads for a plumbing company, they could very quickly go out and start, you know, uh, Miami vibes Instagram page and start posting videos about the top five places to eat in Miami. And then next time post, hey, do you have a water heater leak, you know, yeah, give this plumber call. Do you notice, um, when you do true faceless, because I get the research piece, but the faceless piece, I feel like I can, I can at least still tell if it's like AI generated or not. But do you notice? It still performs decently well. That's the crazy part about it. Yeah. Is that people don't really care? I think we might, I think we might eventually see a world where, you know, we have a Paul James AI page in a Scott Clary AI page and people come just to see their content instead of just ours, right? That's so great. So the, I mean, like this could be like the future of info. We already see. Yeah. I mean, who knows, right? AI influencers. Yeah. So when you post faceless stuff to some of the businesses that you work with, yeah, still get leads, still get leads. Obviously not as great of content, right? You and I can tell. Yeah. Like, yeah, but I mean, like, but it's like zero effort. Zero effort. Yeah, zero effort. Some leads versus significant effort, meaning like CEO has to show up film and it might work and it might not. So if you look at the payoff, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's like, I think people should be doing a mix of both. Yeah. If they can, if they can't, they should at least be doing faceless. Why not? What do you have to lose? So people don't really care. So they don't, even though people are smart, they'll trust AI. It's not about, it's, if a business is using AI to create content, like faceless content, or even like a Hey Jen like avatar style thing, people don't care that much. Not really. And I think it depends about the type of content, right? Like, you know, if you're watching like the top five restaurants to eat or something, like, you don't really care if it's like AI necessarily. With some people too, but mostly you just care about, is it going to be good food? Yeah. So if it, if even if it gives you an idea that you can then go and research, like, doesn't have good reviews. Yeah. It's still like putting the idea in their head. So yeah, I think it's obviously not as great of content. People can tell it's AI, but it does still generate leads. And that's a crazy part about it. I'd literally, the early testing of this, I took some of my top performing reels and cloned it with AI. And they still were my top performing reels, even though it wasn't me. And that, and that, and that to me just blew my mind. I was like, wow. What would be your advice for somebody who's listening to this who's working in a company who's like, shit, I don't want to get replaced. So what would you tell them? I would say, like you said, the output of what you get out of like chat GPT is based on the puppeteer, right? It's based on a person who's controlling it, at least right now. So I think being very good at knowing how to control AI and knowing how to make it work for you instead of replacing you is going to be the best way to future proof your job right now. I fully agree. And I mean, even in the future, as you know, with stuff with the NAN, where it's actually, it can borderline make decisions, right? And what it should do if a customer says something on a phone call, it can decide what it wants to answer. There's still someone that has to be there to be the puppeteer and set all that up and monitor what's going on. Be that person. You have to be that person. Yeah. You teach a lot of, I guess, sort of like business opportunities. And like I looked at some of your content and even going way back, you were sort of like showing people, okay, this is like right now, this opportunity is a land grab. Find a way to go build the business around this. So you're not just like teaching the tools or being like, okay, so here's the tools, but here's how you monetize it as an entrepreneur. One of the things that you talk about frequently is like local lead gen with AI. Now, lead gen is always a great business opportunity through literally showing people how to make more money, but explain why that's an opportunity. So local lead gen, what does that mean? Somebody's listening to this and they're like, oh, I want to start a business. I know AI. This is a great way to actually make some money. Where do they start and what do they do? So in the past, to not to generate leads, we were looking at SEO, things like that, things of that nature. But now with AI, we can set up an Instagram page and start flooding it with videos or things of that nature. Or even content in general, it could be Facebook posts, it could be posting in groups, things like that. So there's this huge multi-million dollar market, multi-million dollar a year market. You look at companies like Angie and HomeAdvisor, they're doing I think 500 million a year or something crazy like that. So they sell leads to business owners, essentially, like let's say you go and you need a new roof or your roof is leaking. They will sell the the lead or the phone call from someone who needs that service to five different roofers for $100 a call. So that's the opportunity is really stepping in and providing a similar service to them, but generating your own leads using AI and then selling them to business owners. And if you want to stand apart from like Angie's list or HomeAdvisor, offering exclusivity to the lead because they sell it to five different times to the same like the same to like five different rivers. Yeah. So only one person is going to get that job, but all five people are going to pay for it. It's kind of it's kind of shitty of that. It is. Yeah. And a lot of their a lot of their people that they work with aren't very happy with it. So that's it. That's so that's like a but they choose to work with them because you could disrupt. Yeah, you could disrupt. It's very good point. Yes. It's a very disruptive marketing opportunity because of the fact that there's an opportunity there that people are choosing to work with this company because there's not a lot of options or the options that are out there aren't super saturated yet. I also think that to your point like AI, AI allows you to compete, right? So yes, can can could you have built a lead gen company like an angi's list via SEO pre a yes, of course, you can. Yes, there's competitors. But if you understand sort of lack of a better term new age marketing, then you can compete with really, you know, resources are so you don't need the resources, you don't need a lot of money to build a company. Because if you actually listen, you just went through that workflow or even if you do it without the workflow, you could have like 10 different pages posting content nonstop. It's crazy. Yeah. And then and then you have something like my software, that's what it did was it handled the the tracking of the leads into reporting and automated billing. Dialogue is like a CRM to a degree or no. It's similar. It's it's more of like tracking reporting and invoicing of the lead. So we're not we're not really concerned with what happens to the lead once they get it to hand it their job to close it. But we're panning the distribution of the lead. Some of the questions that come up around AI that you continuously see, like whether or not it's comments on YouTube or just like people that reach out to you, like what are people struggling with? Honestly, I think a lot of it is just getting started. People seem to find a lot of excuses of why they can't get started. I'm not technical savvy enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like stuff like that are like, you know, I don't have the confidence to do this. And like my brother the other day decided he, you know, he's not super tech savvy, by the way, just to give to a professor, usually like anything that's technical related. He's like Paul can just do it for me. I'm like, go to lovable.dev and it will build an app for you. Yeah. And he did it. And sure enough, he's got like an app fully built out of his idea that normally would have taken eight months and probably $20,000. And he did it in two days because he did actually just get started. So you have to start like no excuses, just open up chat. Even if you don't know what to do, like if you want to build out an app, ask chat GPT, what is the best AI app coder? Okay, it's lovable.dev. How do I use lovable.dev? Like you can literally ask it anything treat it like you're like teacher. What was your out of all the videos that you've put up on AI? I'm curious. What was the most watched? I recently did one that said I asked deep seek how to make money. Everyone wants to know how to make money. What did it say? So I told deep seek that I, you know, I want to know how to make money like home advisor, like theoretically, you know, if I was coming into this as a beginner and knew nothing, could I rely on something like deep seek or chat GPT? So I asked it and it came back and gave me 50 of the top businesses that I should go after. So like I didn't have to think about what niche I wanted to enter. It told me what to enter. It told me how much to charge these businesses per lead and it gave me an exact blueprint of like exactly how to get the leads and how to get how to even reach out to these business owners and get them to say yes to working with me without having to lift a finger and it was totally accurate, which is a crazy part. So I basically documented this and put it on video and it went really crazy. It was got like 150,000 views in a few days. Indeed is a success story partner. Now if you're hiring, indeed is all you need. Let me give you an example. If I needed to hire a new editor for this show, I'd go to indeed and be super specific. Not just can you edit audio, I'd say I need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years gets our style and knows our software. Someone who's done this before and here's the thing with indeed sponsored jobs. I'd get people who fit that description. 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Just go to indeed dot com slash clary right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed dot com slash clary terms and conditions apply hiring do it the right way with indeed. HubSpot is a success story partner. Now look, if you're in marketing right now or if you're an entrepreneur who's hired marketers or if your founders who leads a whole marketing team, you know the drill. You are creating content for 12 different channels. You're launching campaigns, you're scoring leads, you're analyzing all the data and somewhere in there, you're actually supposed to do great marketing and it's exhausting and you're spread to thin. But this is what actually works for marketers to give you your life and your time back. HubSpot's marketing hub, HubSpot's content hub combined with their new AI called breeze. Now what this actually does is basically everything that you shouldn't have to do yourself. It remixes your content instantly. 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I know you're going to tell them do the research use AI but what are some of the things that you've discovered about good content that you may have not realized before you leveraged AI? Like what are some of the patterns that you're seeing that show up for any creator really? I'm noticing particularly it can come down to something as simple as like the actual like title of a video. The thumbnail of the video and even like the structure like how it starts off and if you can replicate those obviously I'm not saying directly copy but if you can get very close to what they're doing you're almost guaranteed to go viral. You notice this? Yes. Really? Yeah. So go reverse engineer like your competitor or any competitor of yours and look at like their top video in the last let's say like month. Try to reverse engineer it as close as you can make it a little bit better. Yeah. You're almost guaranteed to go viral. It's almost impossible not to. So what AI is doing is it's just taking the guesswork out of content. Yeah. So you can use AI to like research this for you. Yeah. You know with YouTube there's tools like vidIQ which will show you like outliers scores that's pretty helpful but just being able like sort through data that normally normally like I mean you just wouldn't have like the time energy resources all of that. I want to unpack like a few sort of I don't know like just some of the things that you've done in your life and your career. I think they're valuable for entrepreneurs like forget about AI for a second just like how you've built in the way that you think I've touched on this but I think it's useful to go into it a little bit deeper. You have and if you feel like this is not a fair assumption that's fine but I feel like you've been able to reinvent yourself multiple times and you've you know you've persevered through a lot of ups and downs. When somebody is going through a difficult period in their life and their business which everyone will at some point what's your advice to them like what is the mental model or the daily practice that gets you through those more difficult times. I would say I'm always looking at the bright side like I'm not I'm not a like glass half empty kind of guy. I'm always looking at like you know it could always be worse. So I try to focus on like the little lens because that very quickly allows you to snowball and not always be focused on the negative because when you're always focused on the negative like you're just doomed like you're you're not going to have a positive outlook on what you're trying to accomplish. So is that not really to you? It does yeah I think it's a blessing yeah that's tough because a lot of people just a lot of people they don't have that I know I know a lot of like listen when things don't go right forget life just in business like when things don't go right I think a lot of people just they just feel like it's worse than it is yeah and that doesn't happen to you. Not as much no I'm always like I think my mom raised me that way to like you know someone's always got it worse than you and that kind of stuck with me so that's just kind of how I always try to think like there's it could always be worse and on the other side of this one day I'm going to look badly this isn't a forever thing right whatever you're going through is not a forever thing it's just a right now thing and on the other side of this one day you're going to look back and you're going to be like you know I learned this is this is tough it was a hard thing to go through but I learned this isn't this and maybe it was the best thing that ever happened you maybe something else came out on the other side that you weren't expecting. What would be the the one thing that you had to unlearn to become a successful entrepreneur something that was holding you back. I think learning that you can figure things out on your own you don't always need to like know everything right away because like actually doing is going to help you learn much faster than than trying to like have all the pieces to the puzzle right away there's a lot of very book smart people that end up doing nothing because they still feel like they don't have everything yet they still want to keep learning so I would say just like doing like learning how to just actually do and and figure it out along the way being okay with making mistakes too you know sometimes we we can be perfectionist I can get that way sometimes where I'm you know is it ready or should I yeah I'm the same way yeah you just got to get to it so I've thought about this a lot and I and I think that there is an obsession with like knowledge accumulation yes and okay great you've learned and you've watched 10,000 YouTube videos on something but like just go do it just go do it and I've actually found myself like I think that anybody who's an ambitious person they kind of fall into this trap at some point of just like loving just consuming content yeah or podcasts or books or whatever nothing wrong with that no keep us in the podcast right but I think that listen I think that there's a point where you know you're you're just really consuming information because you don't have the courage to like take action yeah it makes you feel good it's like an excuse almost so I mean like I think that just shortening like that gap from education to doing is very very important when you learn something I mean like I feel like you're the kind of person that you learn it and like the second you're done the YouTube video you're trying that thing opening up that tool executing exactly I mean because you teach a lot of entrepreneurs too so I'm assuming that you see some bad habits in people that you work with it's ironic because you're kind of like you're kind of like teaching your own competition but that's like besides the point to a degree I mean like you're teaching people that are kind of doing the same thing as you but forget that when you work with so many entrepreneurs you teach a many entrepreneurs what are some of the worst habits that you see them doing that sort of holding them back and people that are just starting out what should they do differently yeah I think a lot of people feel like they're not confident enough to like actually get going and I think that confidence is one of those things where like it actually takes the experience to be become confident at whatever it is you're trying to do and if you're never getting started you're never getting that experience well you're never gonna be confident at that thing so yeah I think that's the that's one of the hardest habits that I have to try to get people to to just like take action so that because if not then it's like a chicken egg situation yeah exactly get out there and make a mistake like what's the I always say ask yourself what's the worst that's gonna happen well business owner asked me this and I don't know how to answer it just tell him you don't know how to answer it and you'll get back to with an answer like you know it's not it's not always like the worst like just beat I feel like people feel like they have to like know it all in order to like do the thing they're doing and I just don't think that's the case like humans understand like we're not all perfect like we're gonna make mistakes like you might not know everything but being honest about that and like for me when I hire someone I'm not really concerned like do they know literally everything I really would rather know like are they capable of figuring it out are they a problem solver like if I'm hiring someone to like work on my kitchen and do a remodel like maybe they haven't worked with this particular tile before but I'm confident in their ability that they're going to learn or figure it out because they've figured out tough things before I think that skill set is going to be one of the most valuable skill sets it already is but I mean like going forward we're talking about like if you're an employee and you want to not be laid off yeah the ability to figure shit out is incredibly important a self starter you know like especially like like I said and we talked a lot about AI but the fact that you literally have AI in your back pocket to like ask questions to yeah like just figure it out where do you think marketing AI like where do you think we're going to be in like the next six months or what's your forecast like you you deal with these tools and you expose yourself to them every single day what are some of the trends that you see it's hard to even imagine like even as myself like someone who like developed software companies and things like that like where does that leave us even you know because it's like it's like someone can go and like create their own software nowadays but I do still think of like the aspect like there does still need to be the puppeteer like there still needs to be someone making sure it's secure that things are working bug fixes so I do still think there's going to be a need for that but I think there's going to be a shift in efficiency I think I think AI agents are going to be huge they're going to be taking over a lot of the mundane tasks of things that like even something like cold calling but I think it will be like more of like a handoff thing like maybe AI's agent is handling cold calling someone answers the phone they get someone on the line boom transferred over to an agent or something like that so I think we're going to see more shifts like that where it's more like AI is kind of doing like the beginning of the task but then it's shifting off to like maybe a real person to kind of finish the job and make sure everything is good I think that's I think that's probably a smart take because I think that the most important thing in the age of AI is the human to human interaction yeah because again yes you can get leads but when you're trying to close significant deals at least now I think that there is still a level of trust yeah and it's the the person buying the thing wants to understand that there's a person on the other end that's going to take care of the problems if there is any so I think that yeah you can use AI for like that like to your point it's going to be the beginning of top of the funnel the beginning whatever you want to call it but human so now humans are going to do the more complex tasks the tasks that require trust to be built and and report to be built and they're not going to be wasting time doing the adventure yeah and the admin stuff that really can be outsourced to AI yeah you can't really get rid of like emotion right no so that'll always be there hopefully hopefully we'll see I guess but every time next year at least I don't think we're getting rid of that component every every time I do like an AI podcast or conversation I'm like I hope I don't like watch this in 50 years like running away from a robot it'll probably be less than 50 years if I'm happy yeah I know I like oh only I do I hope I be like five years from now if that doesn't happen so what I really want to show because obviously you've also built a massive audience and a lot of what we're talking about is how to help businesses but I mean you kind of like listen to your own you listen to your own advice you eat your own dog food for lack of a better description but like I've seen I've seen what you've built so for people that are call them skeptical whatever their business owners their content creators how can you sort of quantify the results of your marketing strategy that you've used for yourself like how is it impacted your business your life all the different opportunities that it's led to because when you actually look through your content like you've blown up and I know that you use your own marketing strategies for a lot of your content so maybe just lay out like how your life has changed as you've applied your own strategy to all your own content yeah for sure so you know a big part of like I said is lifestyle for me and my mom came and visited my fiancee and I in Orlando and she flew in and we had a Mustang at the time we don't anymore but we had a Mustang at the time which means like trying to get everyone into that car is kind of crazy small car to get everyone into yeah we actually decided to surprise her and take her on what she was wanting to be like her dream vacation basically um she loves casino she loves gambling so she wanted to go on like an RV trip around everywhere and like try out all different casinos right so we randomly we're we're very spontaneous we randomly saw a billboard that said rent an RV so we're like this is interesting we should do that so we tell her to wait at home and willow and I my fiancee we we say we're gonna go get a rental car because we're sick of driving around in this Mustang like with all three of us it's too much so we come back we actually come back with the RV and then we and then we film it for the for YouTube of course for vlog and um yeah she comes out and tell her to come out and look at the rental car and it's actually an RV sitting there I love that and now so I mean you've built out um like a massive audience like talk to me about like even like the business opportunity like the the partnerships opportunity like neither of us will or I are like camping people per se like maybe glamping right like we I also like glamping yeah but we don't want to be out in the woods like an intent so we're we're skeptic we didn't know if we're gonna like RVs necessarily but we go on this trip and we just have like the greatest time ever my mom is super excited we go up to Mississippi, Biluxi and then we come down to Miami to the hard rock here and we just take it all over and um we get the idea this is fun what if we could do this all the time well lifestyle me I'm thinking like how can I fit this in my lifestyle I don't really want to buy an RV right now but I want to travel around in an RV right so we look and we see that there's a there's an RV show coming to Tampa this is like they rent up the fairgrounds and they have it's like a big thing in Florida they also do it like Pennsylvania too but they bring all the RV company manufacturers down from all over like the world trade show for like a trade show and RVs are expensive um but they don't have to be we found out which I'll get into that but anyways um we go down there and I emailed the guy before we go down there of an RV that we see on YouTube that we absolutely love it's like this uh they call it cacti green color so it looks really really cool and it's a coachman and I email coachman and I say you know I'm an influencer and I do content on being free financially I think it'd be a really cool opportunity if we could integrate you into my brand and talk about how like you know people can travel around in an RV and it's not as expensive as they might think it is and you know just live a free financially free lifestyle and we've been that you know traveling RV aspect and he's like yeah come on I mean come on down to the show we can talk so we go down to the show we look at the RV and funny enough they're all there like all like the decision makers like the person in charge of social media um you know the person who's who's running everything at the the whole division of like coachman our specific RV is a prism um and yeah I mean we just love the RV and I convince them like hey you know can we work something out where I'll post X amount per month talk about the RV people are gonna see it in the videos but I want to do it organically I don't want it to feel like a sales pitch because that's not who I am I want it to just people see it in the brand it's gonna feel organic and they're totally down with that they're like you know what that's funny enough that you should say this because we actually are looking to tap into a younger demographic that's so funny yeah so RVs the cool part is is that you can finance them over 20 years so if they have a bathroom really yeah so like a hundred thousand dollar RV comes out to like eight hundred dollars a month I didn't know that so someone could theoretically live in an RV they're really really nice like super nice so I knew that like motorhomes and RVs were like very big in Florida yeah like so when I used to go down to Florida like my grandparents always had a place down here and sometimes there was a period where they had like a house and then they they had like a I think an RV I can't remember the day now RV is like the one that attaches motorhome is the one that you can ride well they're kind of used interchangeably so the motorhome is the one that has like the vehicle in it yeah and then I guess it would be like a towable would be yeah yeah exactly but some of them are very very nice yes they're very nice it's actually a big thing two people come down from Canada to Florida every year I know I know for the winter yeah it's really really big down here and these little communities and stuff like that but you're right I don't think that I'm talking about grandparents like I don't I don't think that younger people really using them exactly so we we found that the target demographic like even on YouTube is like 50 plus yeah so this is a big opportunity for them to come into a you know a new demographic yeah it's an opportunity for me because we get an RV you get like a lifestyle upgrade you can have fun yeah yeah that we love doing and we've turned out we just love doing it and I don't have to pay for it I love it and this is all the result of personal brand personal brand content strategy all of it yeah it all just kind of feeds into each other so you really can build a lifestyle around you if people want to connect with you if people because I know you vlog put out a ton of content so there's a couple of reasons why people want to connect with you so follow the vlog check out all your RV adventures you also have a whole bunch of AI training and if you are actually looking to make money create a business that that you know you're proud of and also sort of gives you the lifestyle that you want this is where you can learn about okay one business idea is Legion I know you have a whole bunch of business ideas for people but this is just one that's all YouTube as well yeah YouTube I am Paul James on YouTube and then hello Paul James on Instagram those are like my two main platforms and talk about a little bit different stuff on both so definitely recommend checking out both and yeah learn about stuff for free keep up with the lifestyle stuff it's fun the last question I like to ask because you've given over a lot of tips but say you could only pass on like one bit of wisdom to your kids it's like the most important thing that you've learned that you think will make the biggest difference in their life what would that lesson be or those words of wisdom be and why I think always keeping in mind like the perspective of like everyone in life has a different perspective and you know when when something happens to you in life maybe think about like what their perspective was like in that moment and being patient and you know also just being like a self-starter no no excuses you can accomplish anything you set your mind to accomplish you know where there's a will there's a way and then for like a younger generation of entrepreneurs because you you work with so many what would your advice be for them I notice the younger generation they're like they have this relationship with making money where they think it's almost a bad thing like for them being cool or like appearing like they have money is almost better to them than actually trying to make money and like sell stuff to like their audience so like they're worried about being like a sell out or something like that which I just think is so backwards and funny I don't understand that at all I mean you know listen I don't know what people's reasons would be for not wanting to make money but know that whatever those reasons are you won't have an impact and you can't do any goodness world without it I mean I'm be a sell out like it's no cool being broken like not having any money so yeah that would be my advice for that