Your Business Called. Nobody Answered. How AI Is Saving Small Business

AI is everywhere right now, but most small business owners are still asking the same hard question: when does it actually turn into cash? We sit down with Andy Stoyer and Andrew Lippman from WeLevel to break down what it looks like when AI is connected to the sales engine instead of living as a disconnected “tool you meant to learn someday.” The result is a practical conversation about booking more appointments, answering more leads, and building a real customer experience that drives growth.

We dig into WeLevel’s origin story, how they moved from content marketing into a full agentic AI system, and why “AI plus HI” matters. You’ll hear how a trained knowledge base powers voice AI, website chat, and social DMs so your business can respond instantly, day or night, with consistent answers. We also unpack the difference between an AI agent and agentic AI, where multiple specialized agents handle research, writing, editing, publishing, and follow-up as one coordinated workflow.

We talk authenticity and trust too: being transparent that the caller is speaking to an AI assistant, building a clear escalation path to a human, and customizing the experience to match your brand. Finally, we get specific about measurement and ROI, including dashboards that track calls, conversations, appointments, and outcomes, plus what a realistic 60 to 90 day payoff can look like through better conversion and stronger retention.

Subscribe, share this with a business owner who is tired of AI hype, and leave a review with your biggest question about using agentic AI for growth.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

Transcript

Meet WeLevel And The Team

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome everybody to the Program Podcast. This is the podcast where we don't just talk about building better businesses, we show you exactly how it's done. So I'm your host, Grant McGall, CEO of Five Story Media, and the author of First Light, the Brain Path to Authentic Leadership and Your Guy, and the intersection of authentic leadership and AI powered growth. So let me ask you something. How many times have you heard the word AI in the last 30 days? Now let me ask you something different. How many times has AI actually put money in your pocket? And that gap is right there between the height and the revenue is exactly why I built five-star medium, the AI accelerator, because I watched too many small business owners, too many community entrepreneurs download tools, attend webinars, and walk away with nothing more but more confusion. The problem was never access to AI. The problem was never really about no one teaching them how to connect AI to their sales engine. And that changed what I found today's. And what they do at Wii level is not just a tool, it's an entire agency revenue system designed to work while you sleep, close while you're serving clients, and scale while you're leading your team. And this is why WeLevel is not just a partner of the Five-Star BDM AI Accelerator. They are the live deployment moment, especially when participants don't just learn it, they launch it. So let us get right into it. Let's get some introductions done. So I got Andy, we got Andrew. Andy, would you like to go first and just introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Sure. Thanks, Grant. Uh, I'm Andy Stoyer. I'm the CEO and co-founder of We Level, uh, longtime entrepreneur, been building internet companies since very early days of the internet. Uh, built one of the first payment gateways ever on the internet, uh, back in 1994. And uh have worked for several companies, growing those companies and scaling them and then having exits. Uh, nine exits total in my career, uh, one to Disney, one to MBC, one to IAC. One company went public. Uh, used to manage a small venture fund myself. Uh, I love helping companies grow. It's a passion of mine. It's why I do what we do. Uh, and uh and and now in this world of AI and automation, we're helping making all of this accessible and uh really helping companies level up, and that's why we call it We Level.

SPEAKER_00 3:01

I like We Level, that makes perfect sense. Some people remember our next person over here, Andrew, because me and Andrew was on his podcast on the Ninja Podcast about a year ago or so, and now he's we're I'm turning the tables, I'm turning the cameras. So, Andrew, introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

I do believe this is the first time one of my guests has had me on their podcast. So thank you very much. It's an honor. I'm Andrew Lippman, I'm the partner manager here at We Level. Yeah, we we want to bridge that gap that you're talking about. AI is a fabulous tool, but it just like any tool, it requires skill and intelligence and the way it's implemented. And the way we do it is to provide a team and a process and a structure so that people are free to run their business, not have to learn how to run a marketing agency as well as their business and their their true calling.

The Origin Story Behind WeLevel

SPEAKER_00 3:50

I'm so glad you said that. That's the main thing. Like, this is this one more hat I've got to put on, especially if we're a small business owner. Like, no, this is supposed to take away time and supposed to make me more efficient, put more money in my pocket, right? That's that's really the goal here. So as we get into this, I I want to just unpack it just a little bit about you know the Wii level story, the origin story. So take us back to the beginning. What problem were you personally experiencing or watching others experience that made you say someone has to build this?

From Content Marketing To AI Systems

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Yeah, so uh let me even go back to before we even started the company because uh it's an interesting story as to how he got here. Uh my brother and I are partners in medical practice. He's a doctor, I'm the marketing guy and business guy, and we partnered together uh to grow his uh uh his medical practice. So we we practice what we preach, right? We've we're we're not just selling you know solutions to businesses. We actually are those businesses that have grown local businesses and used these capabilities, and then we've taken that page out of that playbook from the growth that we saw there, and now we've brought it to companies to utilize. So it's tried and true. So we grew that practice, partnered with uh a private equity company through that process, and uh and and before we we we did that partnership, um, we grew the business, we started to see profits from the company, and what we decided to do was create a small venture fund that we call Build Ventures and take some of the profits from the company and put it into that fund so that we could diversify and build other businesses through that process. So we're we're partners in uh in that fund. That fund is what got us started here at We Level. Uh when we very first started the company, it was about six years ago now, uh, we started the company out as a content marketing company. Content marketing was the hardest part of the media mix for most businesses. Uh, you know, how am I gonna create video content and social media content and podcasts and blog content and uh have all this stuff help me with my SEO and all this stuff is just very confusing for businesses. So we built a solution to help them accomplish those goals and actually produce the content for them. And it was a systematic kind of an approach that we would roll out for them. We did that, started growing the business, and uh and then AI came into the market about three years ago or so. And as that came into the market, being early adopters and technology people, we said, hey, we need an AI solution for our clients as well, because they want to be able to use this capability to be able to create content. But we also felt it was very important as a differentiator to not just rely 100% on the AI. We felt it was important to have what we call HI, human intelligence, built into our workflow or human in the loop is sometimes what people call it. So it wasn't just like here's AI slob. It wasn't that at all. It was let's use AI to be able to accelerate some of the content marketing processes that exist and lower the cost of creating content for our clients, but not rely on it 100%. So it was a hybrid of using AI and then also a team of writers and editors to be able to create that content. And with our clients, we became kind of an extension of their team to create content for them and publish that content. And our clients would approve the content, and we got into this groove where we would create, you know, anywhere from five to 20 pieces of content for them a month. Um, and and we just got into a groove with our clients to do this. We do this by having a customer success manager as a partner uh uh with them to be able to drive the process. We do all the heavy lifting and they do the approvals on their end, but we use all kinds of inbound marketing best practices, um, SEO best practices, all these things that we know about technically. We simplify the process for our clients to be able to use these technologies and capabilities and strategies. But so we do the heavy lifting, we we're we're like in the kitchen baking the cake, but we're showing them the ingredients, and here's how it works. You know, you can get as involved as you want, or you could just say, you know what, I just want the cake. However, however, you want to do it. So so we we that's how we work with our clients. And so that evolved now into then we said uh about a couple years ago, we said, hey, this AI thing is really broadening out. It's not just about content anymore, it's about utilizing AI to really help develop smart business practices. The whole objective is work smarter, not harder, right? So, what we do is we help our clients do that with specific use cases. So you mentioned them, right? It's content, it's creating agents for each of these things, having agents answer your phones 100% of the time, even at night or after hours or on the weekends, whenever somebody's calling, we're answering those phones. Our agents are smart employees. They're basically the smartest employee that our clients have uh in their business. And the way that we do that is each agent, think of it as like an employee in your business. Each agent has a special focus. It could be a receptionist that is answering the phones, it could be a content writer, it could be a researcher who's researching what content should I write about, so that you're writing content or creating content that is useful for your customers. Things are gonna go viral, things are gonna help you get your your your name out there. And so we we we we stand back and we say, what's the objective of every business? You need to attract new prospects, you need to be able to engage them, and you need to be able to convert them into more sales meetings. And then once you have more sales meetings, you need to close them, right? And then once you close them, what do you need to do? You need to get good reviews from those people so that that gets the flywheel spinning so that when the next person comes along, they go, hey, these guys are great, they've got great reviews, I like what they're doing, and we help our clients build this flywheel in their business. And that's essentially what we're doing. And so we use these tools as a means to an end to be able to help them get there. But systematically, what we're doing is building this flywheel. And so through that process, we've identified every touch point within the customer acquisition process for our clients, and we've built solutions for them. So if they're inbound phone calls, great. We can answer the phone, we can have a conversation with the person who's calling, we can answer their questions because every when somebody's calling, they've got a question, they've got something to talk about. Um, so that agent now can answer their questions, deliver a great customer experience on the one hand, and a consistent one. Um, and then they can the the agent can ask questions of that person, uh, and if they fit this qualification framework that that we build for the client, then we can schedule an appointment with them uh so that our clients get their calendar filled with qualified prospects, right, that are gonna close.

The Customer Acquisition Flywheel

SPEAKER_00 11:05

And this is all human-like interactions, conversational. This is very, very, I mean, this is new in a fact that everybody's been used to voicemail and things like that. They've seen some chat box, but this is a whole nother level. I want to ask Andrew this question because this word identic is everywhere right now. I don't think most people really understand what that really means. In your understanding, how you see this deployed, which just what Andy just told us, you see it in real life and and how it actually works. In plain terms, what does it mean for a small business owner to have agentic AI working for them?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

For a small business owner, you you got an idea what it costs to find, hire, and train a new employee to be the first touch for your business, right? I it's always a conundrum. The lowest person on your totem pole is the first touch for anybody who's never dealt with your business before. That is a slippery slope, right? That person's usually the newest, the lowest paid, maybe even the least informed on the inner workings of the business, but they're the person fielding all the most important questions that are barriers to entry for doing business with your company. So here, all of a sudden, number one, this person is never sick, they're never tired, they're never hung over, they never put anyone on hold, and they have answers to every question that we give them access to. I mean, it's connected to your website, to your FAQ, to your scheduler, to whatever information we want to train it up with. So all of a sudden, when your phone rings, you can relax knowing that the questions are being answered directly and honestly. And it's broad, it's not an old school call and canned response, it's not an A IVR tree. And we're only discussing it in terms of a first touch, but for customer retention and customer experience, now when you call a business, you're not waiting five minutes to be able to maybe get a hold of somebody and answering questions and typing in numbers and names, you get right to business, and they know who you are, they know your history, they have access to your invoices and to your orders. So every call is substantive now. So, yeah, it's a new world.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

This is a brand new world. I mean, if it has context, so Grant Magog calls into we level and it knows who I am, where I've been, my business, and and it's the my history and that type of thing. Now you're going to a different level. Now you're really talking about something, you know, that's a different, a different experience. And to what you said earlier, consistency, and you don't know what you're getting. And the the per that that first person that's answering the call right now might be the least person that knows anything about the business. How many of us have been through that? We've been through that a lot. Or that other side of the ball, I know I call a lot of like say airline industries, and they they put me into this too, and I'm talking to this bot, and then the bot really doesn't know anything about what I need. I need something that's intelligent. So when we talk about these six agents that you have, and I'll come back to Andy about this because if I'm a small business and you're telling me you can do the voice, the conversation, the reviews, the content, the workflow, and the funnel AI from an experience standpoint, what does the day in the life look like when all six are running and and the customers in the middle of that? Are you getting good or bad reviews, or how is that working?

What Agentic AI Means Simply

Training The AI Knowledge Base

SPEAKER_02 14:41

No, you're getting great reviews because what happens is that uh when we train up your AI, we're uh we're training it to be the smartest employee in the company. And so what that means is any we first we crawl your website, we grab all that content on your website. So it now knows what you do, all the information, all the details that are there. Then we train it with any other information that you would train any other employee with. So if you have how-to guides, or if you have any kind of SOPs, or if you have any other training materials, uh case studies, any kind of uh uh sales presentations or any sales materials, one-sheeters, ads, anything that you have, we train it all up on that information. Um, and that becomes a knowledge base, is what we call it. That's the brain essentially of the AI. And so now you can have that brain be expressed in a number of different ways. If somebody's coming to your website and they engage with the chat bot that's on your website because they have a question and they want to just engage there, that's just one doorway in to be able to ask questions about, hey, I've got a question. Um, do you guys do this or that? Or I can't find this information on your website. Can you tell me a little bit about that? The AI will be able to have all that information because we've trained it on those details of a client's business. So that same brain is behind the chat bot, it's behind the voice when you call the phone number. Same same thing behind that. We also use that to be able to inform what content we'll create for the client. So we'll look at things like what questions are people asking when they call in, and then we'll write content about those questions so that we have content that we can now ask the question and answer because they're probably not the first person to ask those questions. So we'll write the content about that so that we can capture new visitors that are searching for the solutions on Google. Those articles will show up, and that's another entry point to be able to attract similar kinds of customers. And then we help convert those customers through landing pages and lead forms or a calendar that we put on your website or your landing pages to be able to convert those visitors. If you're running ads, for example, you're able to, we're able to convert that traffic better because we'll create a landing page that has a calendar on it so people can book a time with you. They can ask questions through a chat bot, they can call a phone number if they have a question. Either way, they're going to convert and get onto your calendar after we've they've gotten their questions answered. And so all of this helps build on the customer side a great customer experience because people want answers now, right? I always say that voicemail is the opposite of business, right? It's like you you're because what happens is this is the old way of doing things is that you leave a voicemail for somebody, then maybe a couple of hours later you'll get a call back, you're busy, you don't recognize the phone number, it goes to voicemail, then you're like, oh, I got to call that person back, and then you're playing phone tag, and then it just goes away. Or if I'm the customer and I call your business, for example, and you don't answer, I'm looking at Google Maps, I'm going to the next customer, next business down the line. And I'm just so speed to lead is critical in this world that we live in. It's not just speed to lead, but it's also providing people with useful information when they want it. So that's those are the those are the challenges and those are the problems that we're helping businesses solve.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

I love that. And I mean that that's problem solving, you know, at at speed, at scale, it's communication modality. I love that. And then the scalability that you've built into this is is huge. Now, here's the bigger question. I want to ask this over to Andrew. Because there's a lot of misconceptions that small business owners have when they first come and they start to look at these tools and say, Well, is it you know, I hear the promise, but is it actually delivering? You know, when you have, you know, are we automating the relationships? We're automating these tasks. How do you maintain the authenticity and trust in a customer relationship when AI is handling the conversation?

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Well, again, the the AI has gotten really good. And and I repeat, it's far more consistent than your average opera, you know, somebody who's answering the deck at the desk, right? It's not an entry-level employee, it is as brilliant as we allow it to be, right? We have to give it the right information. Every client wants their phones run differently, um, but once they they experience it, there's almost a hundred percent of a recoil that happens in that moment because I always say mess with it, ask it about its favorite band or what it likes to eat, or I mean, it it's not a a little box of information with that is limited anymore. So, in terms of authenticity, I mean the reality is at the end of the day, you still have humans at that business that have to interact with clients. We're about all of the grunt work between a very first touch and closing a deal. Something I wanted to add on to what Andy said is yes, we're gonna book as many meetings as possible in those moments when people call. But even if they don't book a moment, uh an appointment, you've now captured that person's information and you can automate the relationship from there. So you can nurture them to understand who you are and what your expertise is and why they should be doing business with you. So even if they call your business and don't book an appointment, now they're getting emails or text messages to nurture that that relationship to the finish line anyway, even if they didn't book in that moment. So, uh, in terms of authenticity, again, ours is not a cookie-cutter approach. It has to be customized to every client because every client has a different concept of how they want to represent themselves, how they want to be uh seen and interacted with. So uh everyone's phone systems are different in effect, they're all as organic as they want them to be.

Authenticity Through Transparency And Escalation

SPEAKER_02 20:47

The other thing also on the authenticity side, um, just to piggyback on that real quick, is that when the voice AI answers a phone, for example, it'll introduce itself as I'm a voice AI assistant. How can I help you? So we're transparent. We recommend that the client does that because it it just helps be honest with the customer about who they're talking to. We always have an escalation path. So if somebody says, if their customer says, Can I talk to somebody now? Sure, hold on a second, I'll transfer you. So it can transfer it to somebody, not a problem. Um, and then another important thing that we're doing is by putting the tools into our clients' hands, we're doing really basic things, but really important things, like enabling those businesses to be able to communicate via text message to their customers. Right. So if I drop off my car at uh at an auto shop, for example, that auto shop who has our service, they can just text me now. They don't have to, you know, they don't they don't, you know, they don't have to send me an email or or what have you. If I have a question down the road, let's say I've I did I had a tune up today, and maybe four months down the road, I've got a question, hey, when do I need my next tune up? I don't need to call them and do all this stuff. Me as the customer, it's great as a customer experience because now I can just have a chat relationship via text with my, with, with that business. And it keeps me to become a loyal customer because I now have a relationship with them in a different way. And that's that's a big difference. That now is a relationship that I'm building as a business owner. I'm now building relationships with my customers. They're not just, you know, come in, I'll service you, and then you go away. It's now I can have a conversation with you on an ongoing basis. And also to piggyback on what Andrew said, now that we have that open channel with our clients, we can we can run various automations just to check in, for example. So our clients can say, for example, we have home services clients that uh if there's a storm coming, for example, uh, or the seasons change or whatever, we can send a text message to say, here are a few things, storms coming on Thursday. Here are a few things that you might want to prepare for for the storm. If you have any questions, just feel free to give us a call. Well, that's just a great value now that that business adds to their customers. It's affinity that they're building with their customers. Even if I don't have a problem on the customer side and I get that message, I'm like, these guys are on it. This is great. Right? So they've building that relationship. So text message cuts through all the emails, cuts through the voicemails, all that stuff. People read their text. So we're enabling businesses to use text as a way to be able to communicate, but then we also add some automation in there as well to help them scale.

Speed To Lead And Conversion Lift

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Yeah, these are good things. So you don't have that dead space in between interactions with your client that you're actually fulfilling. And then if you have historical value, as you just said, sometimes you get a lot of change uh in business and in human beings, and then that person doesn't know all the information or that person as intimately as the last person. So if you've got contextual uh information, historical knowledge that can then even inform the new employee that may have to take that human-to-human interaction, that's great. Because I I believe in that. You have to have that human to human to human to AI to human kind of interactions all along that spectrum. Yeah. Because everyone um, you know, it responds to information differently. Now, we gotta get so I'm in Nebraska right now, but I'm not far from Missouri, and everybody knows Missouri. They talk about the show me state, right? You gotta show me like so so to pretend like I am, and I I know you see this a lot. I'm a new uh business prospect, somebody that's interested in what you're doing, but I'm not a complete believer in what you're talking about. You know, I I've seen A AI, I know you can make content with it. I don't know if I want to turn my my first touch points, you know, over to this to an AI bot, so to speak, but we've got to generate revenue, right? What's the fastest that we can get to revenue by utilizing these types of deployments? So for both of you, the the question is can a business owner come in with that type of situation? Well, you probably have seen this in a real world example is how can I scale and grow my profits utilizing this kind of deployment? What are you seeing in real world uh activity in your experience?

SPEAKER_02 25:27

We see much higher conversion rates as a result of what we do. Uh so if you have inbound traffic coming in any regard, if it's organic traffic, if it's paid traffic, we'll help you convert that traffic better. We just know we will. And the reason why is because um, if you imagine you walk into a store and uh there's nobody up front to greet you and say, hey, welcome, how can I help you? Where can I point you in the right direction? People come in, they'll browse a little bit, and then they'll leave and they won't buy anything, right? Because nobody helped them. We have somebody at the front door on your website now that is a chatbot that can now engage with them, that can answer their questions right away. Um, in fact, it's a talking chat bot. So you can you don't even need to sit there and like if you're on your phone, you don't need to sit there and type in a message to it. You can just push a button and talk to it, like you would be making a phone call. And it'll tell you it'll answer your questions and all of that information, by the way, those chats are transcribed. So any inbound phone calls, because it's AI, if it's a phone call or if it's chatbot conversation, all that information gets transcribed and it gets put into our client's CRM. So it makes it so that we append all that information into their customer's record. Um so now they have all of their customer data in one place. They have all these conversations all threaded per customer in their in their CRM. Um we have a ton of marketing tools and capabilities where they can email, text, call their customers all through the platform. Um and all of this drives engagement and it drives affinity with the customer to the business. And essentially what we're doing is we're helping to turn uh just customers into fans of their business, right? Make them have this kind of different relationship that they have with the customer has with the business. And by doing that, that gets more five-star reviews for the business because they're they're doing a great job. Customers like it, they tell people about it. Uh, we automate that whole review process because we've built some automations around this to be able to help businesses uh uh get positive reviews for clients. So that helps uh Google. So they'll they'll leave a five-star review on Google for that business, for example. If you're a local business, Google loves that. So those that's another indicator and what they call a citation. It's another indicator uh that that tells Google a positive signal that this is a good business. And what does Google want to do? They want to promote all the good businesses, and so we're helping our clients do these kinds of things, get good reviews, get great communication with their customers, whether it's AI or whether it's just text messaging that the business is texting their customers. All this is about driving that great customer experience, giving people what they want in the moment. And um, and so, you know, so what does this mean in terms of uh the customer experience and how does this drive revenue for the business? In our dashboard, so we have a dashboard that shows here's how many conversations you've had, here's how many calls you've had. One of the interesting things for businesses is if you're to ask, you know, 100 businesses, how many phone calls do you get a day? Business probably won't know. I don't know. But but phone calls, inbound phone calls are like the heartbeat of the business. So for them not to know that is there's this old adage, you can't approve what you don't measure, right? So we're helping them at the very baseline level know that information and dispel so that it turns the light on in the room, basically, and says, here's how many phone calls you're getting. And of those phone calls, here's how many people uh we converted into appointments for you. And here's how many appointments we got. And of those appointments, here's how many you converted into sales. And now they can see their full funnel in numbers in their platform. And this all is a big driver. That's a that's a big eye-opener for businesses because they if if you don't have systems like this, you're just not gonna be able to do this stuff at scale. You might do it for a little bit, but then you you get busy. All that stuff goes away. Now you have a dashboard that shows you know how what what the results are of these really important KPIs that are driving the growth of your business.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

I like that the dashboard, you know, you gotta have the windshield, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:54

That's like driving blind, you know, you know, yeah or imagine driving at night without lights on, you know, like you can't. You have to know where you're going, you gotta be able to see the dashboard.

Agents Vs Agentic AI Explained

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Absolutely, and I I noticed that when I was, especially when I was talking to Andrew, and he was explaining a lot of these things to me. And I I just like a customer, I think there's and help us understand this. What is the difference between AI agent and then a gentic AI, and then what you just pointed out, which I really love. You say, you know what? I can I can replace my CRM. I I have my my if I'm doing social media blogs and things of that nature, I can now automate that whole process, I don't have to spend time doing all that kind of stuff. Then I've got an application and deployment center, but I don't think a lot of people understand AI agent energetic AI, because it sounded like to me you also have an AI agent. I I'm just not sure. Help me understand that.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

Yeah, yeah. So so the way the world of AI works is we all got familiar with Chat GPT initially. That was the big breakthrough. And people would go there and ask it questions, just like you would go to Google and ask it questions, right? And it would give you an answer. And that was like sort of the early days of like, oh, and I'm using AI now. It's like it's giving me actually what I want in the response. Well, so that's now evolving into um where you can create an agent that does a number of things, it specializes in a certain area. So think of this as like if you look at content marketing, for example, just to break this out as an idea, you can have multiple agents creating content for you. And how would you do that? Um, you break it up into a bunch of different steps. You have a research agent that goes and researches what's what's viral in my category? What are people interested in? Right? So that research agent will go and look on Instagram and TikTok and on social media. It'll look on Google, it'll look in a number of these different sources and find the top-ranking uh media that people are consuming. And it'll pull that information back and pull together here's a summary of that. That's a research agent. Then you might have a uh uh you might have a script writing agent, or you might have a blog writing agent, or you might have a social media writing agent. And each one of these specializes in uh creating a script, for example, that might be like a video script that is something that is here's a framework for you to be able to now create a video that's in that similar vein because we know what people are responding to, or create a blog post that is gonna help you with your SEO because we've trained that agent to know what's important with SEO and what to look for and how to structure a piece of content so that's optimized for SEO. So that would be a writing agent. Then you have an editor agent. That agent looks and and and reviews the content, does fact checking, does all this kind of stuff. And then we have a step in there that the human, our partner or client, reviews the content and they go, I like this, this looks good, and they approve it. Then when they approve it, we have a publisher agent that will go publish the content. And it'll publish it on all those channels that I mentioned. It could be your website, it could be your social media, et cetera, right? And so all these different agents create a team that construct your content marketing process. And so when you think of it like that, each one of these agents are specialists in what they do, but together there's a master agent up at the top that is your content marketing master agent that sort of orchestrates all of those individual agents together. And that's the way to think of agentic uh AI, for example. It's it's orchestrated with these individual agents that specialize in things, and then and then how they do this and what the sequence is, that's all uh how this works with agentic AI.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

And I want to pick I want to piggyback on that for for a second. So we're not just automating on the research, creating, and publishing side, we're also automating on the receiving side. So if you have a small business and you're splashing your social media footprint, if you forget to log into Facebook or Instagram or TikTok to respond to inquiries, now there's this lag time between somebody finding your business and hearing from you. We want to eliminate that as well. So wherever anybody touches your business, they show up automatically in a single conversations tab and we preload responses. So they're nurtured in that moment. If somebody's scrolling their phone at two o'clock in the morning, finds your business, A, they're surfaced up in on your side, B, they're getting a message from you right in that moment.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

So your chat bot, your chatbot is actually having a conversation with them in that moment because we're trained to have a conversation, whether they come through your website, your social media, your phone. It's all it's got that brain that I was talking about. It's got that knowledge base behind it. So it can have a conversation. So when somebody's on your Facebook account and they're they DM you or on your Instagram or TikTok or wherever, they DM you, you can have a conversation. Your chatbot is having a conversation with them, ask answering their questions, even booking appointments for you, and then uh and then sending an invite to them.

Human In The Loop And Cost Math

SPEAKER_00 35:29

Or it's multimodal, it's not just on the website, it's not it's not in this one instance, it's where you are in your digital footprint, so to speak. Exactly. Here's the deal. I I and I know my audience is like, you gotta ask Andrew this. You sit back, you you're like a small business owner, you sit in their seat, you got this giant copy. What is it like being the human in the loop with all these agents? You know, what is that like?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Well, number one, it sounds pretty daunting, but all of it, even as a managed service with three human beings on our side, costs less than a single entry-level employee. So you are getting a content department, you're getting a marketing department, you're getting phone service, you're getting your web tended. You're anybody that wants to touch your business in a 360-degree sort of way, you have an agentic uh employee to respond to them in those moments. And for people who may have fallen by the wayside or touched your business and didn't book, you have somebody who's engaging them on a constant stream of content and information. Um, and then there's granular reporting at the end of the day, because all these tools are under one hood. So your dashboard is super customizable down to the nth degree. Your Google Analytics are connected, your social media footprint is connected, your phones, you your finances, you know, we we do payment integration into our systems as well. So it's really a turnkey solution. I I would think uh if you have a small business and you you dip your foot in toe into this pool, you would be shocked and at what's possible and why you weren't doing it already.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

And at the cost point, you know, it's not like you're gonna break the bank by trying uh deploying this type of technology. Here's the question. I I know my my art because I know my audience, right? They're gonna be like, now, is we level, do you consider yourself a technology company, a catalytic plan, or do you consider yourself a marketing company that deploys technology? How how would you answer that?

SPEAKER_02 37:29

We're we're more of a marketing company that deploys technology for our clients, right? It's it's all very purpose-built for our clients to be able to grow their business. One thing I just want to piggyback on what what Andrew was just talking about is that for our clients and sitting in their shoes, um, we help them uh we we build notifications. So if they want to get notified for every phone call that comes through, we can send them a text that says, here's somebody else called, here's a link to the transcript of the call. If you want to just like, you know, you can listen to it, you can read through the transcript, whatever you want to do as the business owner. So you can be as, you know, sitting in the captain seat away from everything, and just, you know, you get notified when activity happens. It's like managing up, right? It's a every business owner wants their team to be able to tell me what's going on so I can make the big decisions that I need to do to steer the business. But I don't need to go fix every problem, right? I need my team to play a zone defense. Nobody needs to go rush the ball, right? So we help build the zone defense for our clients, and that's kind of the main thing. But as the coach, as the owner of the business, they need to be informed. So we help inform them however they want. We can send them emails or text messages when certain activities happen that are important to their business so they have visibility.

ROI Timeline And Repeat Customers

SPEAKER_00 38:52

So let's talk about, let's get back to that finance question. Now you kind of define yourself. We know you've got the technological playbook, it's solid. What is the realistic ROI? What do you what is a business after they they decided to work with you? Now you you've built out your now, you have to go through the implementation process of building out their customized and personalized platform, understanding what they want to get out of it. At what point do they start to see the ROI in your best estimate? You know, realistically, is it 30, 60, 90? Is it longer than that? What do you what would you say?

SPEAKER_02 39:28

I'd say it's probably 60 to 90 days is when they start seeing the ROI. And they see it, once they see the ROI, it's really like a massive ROI. Um, we have a growth calculator on our website. We'd we'd love the ROI conversation because what happens is that uh in our growth calculator, for example, our clients can tell us what their average order value is and what their margins are, right? And just enter in a number, percent margin if they want, or they can enter the dollar amount. But the idea is you tell us what what that number is and we'll show you, you know, here's based on research in your vertical, uh, here's how many, what percent of the time people answer the phones or don't answer the phones. And when we're answering the phones 100% of the time, what kind of lift do you get on that? Or if it's a customer service experience, what kind of lift will get you on, you know, delivering better customer experience? Or if it's you know, converting uh uh your web traffic, you know, what your what what the growth is from there. And then also getting repeat customers. This is another really important part of any business, is it's not just a one and done. It's not, I'm just not here for a transaction. You want to build a long-lasting relationship with your customers so they come back again and again and again. And there's real lifetime value on that. And what we do is we install uh systems, uh communication systems for our clients to be able to help them get that repeat customer coming back. So I'll I'll give you an example. Um, in the auto shop category, so auto shops, right? You're you're you do tune-ups, you do all kinds of diagnostics for your clients, you're helping them tire rotations, any kind of other service that they need for their car. Uh about 50%, this is a uh a lot of research around this that says 50% of customers who go to a mechanic or an auto shop don't ever come back. So that's churn. That's a 50% churn in your business. And they just come in once and then they forget who you are or they go somewhere else or what have you. So we've built systems to be able to get those repeat customers coming back so that when it's time for uh another tune-up in six months, for example, they're getting uh texts and emails from us to be able to remind those people to come back. We can even send other value-based kind of messaging along the way, or wish them, you know, uh, you know, don't forget it's time to, you know, turn your clocks back, or what, you know, or whatever seasonal kind of uh information that might be useful for them. Um, if you're planning, if so, if I'm an auto company, I might want to give them ideas of places that go, go travel for the summer and go in their car, just go somewhere locally. We can we can build automations into that workflow to be able to create value and create a real affinity and real relationship with our customers. So that when they do ask for the business and they say, hey, it's time for your six-month tune-up again, come back, that customer is coming back. And getting that repeat customer is huge in terms of ROI. So it all flows back to ROI, but it's about creating this value-based system that automates these processes so that the business can just focus on servicing the customer and not figuring stuff out there.

How To Try It And Get Discounts

SPEAKER_00 42:53

I mean, if you you're losing one and um, you know, one out of two people aren't coming back, then if you're augmenting that, that automatically rings the cash register, I believe. Now we're gonna conclude, but before we do, we've got to ask this question because you're gonna be part working with me on the Omaha AI business accelerator, right? We're gonna bring in and do some micro learning around this because I'm telling people, you're getting enterprise grade uh applications through WeLevel for small businesses. This has been the biggest gap, right? When you see all these big box of companies uh utilizing these tool sets, you're like, wow, I wish I could do that in my business. Now you can, and it's very, very affordable, and you get the ROI on top of that to make this very, very impactful for you. What's the one thing that you want every listener of this podcast, a follow brand podcast, a walk away understanding about what we what we level can do for their business that they didn't know when they started this kind of? Conversation.

SPEAKER_02 44:01

Well, first, I mean you touched on it a bit, but part of the reason why we call it We Level is because we level the playing field also. So the big guys can play, the small guys can play with the big guys using that same technology. And so what we do is we make this all very accessible for our clients. Andrew said it earlier, is that we provide a managed service for our clients. So we we not only bring the tools and capabilities, but we install them into your business. And we help you get trained up on how to use these capabilities. And we build them in a bespoke kind of way so that these solutions work within your workflow. You don't have to work within our sandbox and our, you know, the way that we do things. We have systems that we install for a business that we know work, but we customize it for that business. And uh and everything that we do is germane for that business. It's bespoke for them using these tools that we know are tried and true, but we also followed through with a managed solution where they have a customer success manager with us, they have an automation specialist with us, um, and they have a content manager with us who's creating the content with them. So that's the team of three that Andrew was talking about is that we we it's like adding three people to your team with a whole bunch of technology. Um and uh and and you don't have to figure this stuff out yourself. We're here to to coach you, advise you, implement these solutions, and then we meet with our clients monthly to be able to just make sure that you know thing not only things are working well, but also by the way, here's all the content that we created for you this month, and here's what we're creating for you next month, get aligned with the roadmap, that type of thing. And then if there are any automations that we need to create for the client, we'll put it into our roadmap as well so that we get these things done and we're continuing to help our clients grow. It's not just a one and done and you figure it out, or a SaaS kind of model where you have to figure out the software yourself. It's not that because we know that businesses aren't necessarily technology people, but they got to use this technology to be able to help them grow. So we do all the heavy lifting for them. Um, we show them how it works. So we want them to be intelligent about it, and we want them to be informed, but they don't have to go figure this stuff out. We'll go create the automation, we'll go create the agentic solutions for them, and and they can get the benefit of it. Go run your business. We got your back. I love it. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Last words, Andrew, what you got for us?

SPEAKER_01 46:38

I I can't say it much better than that. I mean, no, really, I it's kind of we try to make it a kind of no-brainer conversation. You have a business, you want to grow, we cost less than a single employee, you get three human beings, you get an unbelievable tech stack that is customized to you, and we deploy it. So you don't have to go, oh my god, I just I just paid all this money for a piece of software and I don't have no idea how to use it. So uh at the end of the day, it's a pretty simple conversation in terms of if you want to grow your business, we can help you do that.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

You gotta give us the phone number. We want to get people to demonstrate. So, this is what I love about We Love, they make it so simple. What is a number they can call and say, hey, look, call this phone number and and talk to our our our conversational AI to give it to run it through his paces, see that this is something you like, and then and then give us how to contact you.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

229 304 6686. And it speaks 10 languages automatically. 229 304 6686. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

If you go if you go to we level.net, yeah, uh, you can see it there. Uh, you can also uh if you go to solutions at the top of the website, it's under the marketing edge tab, and the phone number's there as well. We have our uh our our chat bot that's on the website as well. Recommend trying both of those out. We have a growth calculator that's on the website so you can enter in some information about your business, and it'll just run through a bespoke uh projection of what you can expect with the growth that we'll help you with. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

And you know you get a special discount. If you mentioned five-star, I am one of their affiliate partners. Uh we'll work with you on pricing and things of that nature. We're gonna be doing, especially in the Omaha, Nebraska area, we're we're creating a center of excellence right here in Nebraska and utilizing these AI tool sets, all the way from your LLMs to your AI agents to your agency AI to vibe coding, things of this nature that are actually changing the business landscape. And we want to make sure you get hands-on knowledge from the experts that are utilizing it themselves, making it easy for the deployment. That's where that's usually where technology starts to have uh a pinch, and that is in the deployment, in the implementation phase. We level is taking that off the table. It's like, look, we're gonna do that heavy lifting for you, and then present to you a model that's gonna work, and you'll be able to see that growth over time uh yourself as far as when it comes to RY. So it's not hidden, it's a very hard cost that you can see. I love that three to one. I can hire three employees for one. How about that? You know, that that's not a bad deal. So thanks again for being on the Follow the Brand show. Your entire audience can see all the episodes of Follow the Brand at Five Star BDM. That is the number five, and a star that is B for brand, D for Development, Informasters.com. I want to thank you again for being on the show. Thank you guys for having us, Scrappy. Oh no, without question, you guys are are are my best friends now. Love it, love it.