Scale Like a CEO

Scaling Leadership in the AI Era with Omer Jamal | Scale Like a CEO

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 47

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Every minute you wait to call a new lead, your odds drop. We unpack how a 60-second follow-up window becomes a growth engine when paired with AI voice agents and an automated media buyer that can even run TV ads for local businesses. With Atlas founder Omer Jamal, we explore the playbook that helps small teams act like big ones without adding headcount: tight pods, clear ownership, and a writing-first culture that turns scattered effort into repeatable results.

We get tactical about the founder-to-CEO shift, starting with ruthless delegation and the courage to document what used to live only in your head. Omer shares how an executive assistant cut hours from his inbox, why SOPs and training loops let leaders step out of the weeds, and how OKRs and weekly priorities create a steady rhythm. He also breaks down the traits that signal promotable leaders—athlete mentality, customer obsession, and process design—and why a flat structure of Team A (growth) and Team B (build) keeps speed without sacrificing quality.

Alignment is the thread that holds it all together. We talk about eliminating notification noise, protecting deep work, and using custom GPTs trained on a customer manifesto and trusted frameworks to keep messaging consistent across marketing, sales, and success. The result is a culture that values enjoyment, freedom, and real technical challenge while staying laser-focused on small-business outcomes. If you care about speed to lead, AI sales automation, pod structures, and building a winning culture that actually scales, this conversation will give you practical moves you can implement this week.

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Omer:

Speed to lead matters. So there's a Harvard Business Review study which says that if you don't follow up with the lead within five minutes or less, you lose 80% chance of closing that lead. So speed to lead, as you know, matters a lot. And that problem is impossible to do with humans because we don't work 24-7, we might leads my slip through the cracks, etc. etc. So AI has gone to a stage where you can follow up with every lead within those 60 seconds. So that's something that we're super passionate about solving.

Speaker:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. In today's episode, the host Justin sits down with Omer Jamal, founder of Atlas, to explore the critical elements of scaling leadership in the AI era. They discuss leveraging artificial intelligence in business operations and the strategies behind building a winning culture that drives sustainable growth at Atlas.

Justin:

Thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

Omer:

Yeah, my name's Omer Schmom, the CEO and founder here at Atlas. Atlas is an AI revenue engine, team in a box. So two agents, one job, which is to grow your business. One agent gets you creates demand with TV ads, and the second agent closes demand by following up with leads in 60 seconds or less with voice AI. So we work with Dan Martell, we work with a number of local businesses, call centers, agencies, all the like. So small to medium-sized businesses is a sweet spot.

Justin:

That's awesome. I love watching the space of what AI is doing in sales, and it's every day there's something new. So it's just kind of a fascinating, fascinating area to watch. I'm curious, tell me a little bit more about the problem that your company is solving and why it matters in the industry down.

Omer:

Yeah, so a lot of small businesses waste a ton of money and time with the marketing agencies and unprofitable ads. So expensive agencies and unprofitable ads is something that we notice quite a bit. Speed to lead matters. So there's a Harvard Business Review study which says that if you don't follow up with the lead within five minutes or less, you lose 80% chance of closing that lead. So speed to lead, as you know, matters a lot. And it's impossible, that problem is impossible to do with humans because we don't work 24-7, we might leads my slip through the cracks, etc. etc. So AI has gone to a stage where it can follow up with every lead within those 60 seconds. So that's something that we're super passionate about solving how I see a future where every business will follow up with every lead within 60 seconds or less. So that's quite exciting. And then also just giving local businesses access to what was reserved for the national brands, right? So historically speaking, local businesses, small businesses shy away from advertising on TV. However, now you you can be a small business and be in the biggest stream in people's homes too for your advertising efforts. We've created an AI agent that launches measures and optimizes campaigns for you. So it's a fantastic tool that saves a lot of time and energy.

Justin:

Incredible. I love how AI seems to be a great equalizer right now and giving access um you know to those small businesses is really great. So, you know, I noticed that you are this is not your first, your first gig at you know, starting up a business and then um you know getting it to profitability. You've you've successfully scaled and sold off a couple of companies now. So, you know, I think for the conversation, would love to hear just any insights either from Atlas today or you know, any prior um, you know, companies you've been involved with. But the first thing I want to talk about is, you know, as you made the shift from, you know, any of the businesses, kind of starting as a founder, you know, typically founding team of one, two, three, right? And then shifting into growing a team and becoming the CEO of that company. Tell me a little bit about you know, what were some of the big shifts you had to make personally as you navigated that?

Omer:

Yeah, you know, that's a really good question, Justin. And I think the biggest shift for me mentally was to sharpen my leadership skills, right? And a big part of that is how important culture matters as you grow into an organization. So, you know, when you start out, it's maybe two or three people that that kind of get the business off the ground. But when you grow, maybe 10 to 14, 15 employees and team members, you know, it to grow that culture internally and to make the same impact that you might have when you're a smaller team. And you know, that same team might grow to 50 employees, 100 employees, whatnot. So that culture um adaptation was something that was very new to me, taking that knowledge amplification that whatever it is that I might be talking about, how does that relate to the broader ecosystem of our team members? And how do we drive that philosophy to move this operation ahead? So um learning leadership skills was a challenge, and it took me a while to get better at it. It's still something that I look at it as a challenge, still something that I want to get better at. It's all about culture. I underestimated the importance of creating a winning culture that I've spent a lot of time here to do at Atlas, and it's not something that I had done previously in both my startups previously.

Justin:

Yeah, I've been studying and teaching leadership for over two decades, and I still think of it as something that I practice. It is, it is something that requires constant intentionality in the way that you're showing up for your people. So I love that you're acknowledging that. I'm curious, how did you go about developing those leadership skills and acquiring and then continuing to practice? Tell me a little bit more about that.

Omer:

Yeah, I mean, I'm an avid reader, so read lots of books on it. I read The Trillion Dollar Coach, some books by Jim Rogers, and just an avid reader, lots of reading, following some people on blogs and Twitter threads and things of that nature, watching a lot of interviews from successful CEOs on YouTube, being a student, so to speak, learning the knowledge, and fair enough, what's really gonna work with my style and what's gonna resonate with the team at the same time staying aligned to our mission and vision over here. So just being a student of the game, and I've been fortunate enough to have some really, really good mentors who've guided me along the way, so to speak.

Justin:

And as you look back, oftentimes in scaling a business, there are things that you have to let go of, moving from that mindset of the founder to really leading the business. What was the hardest role to let go of in that transition and what made it difficult to delegate?

Omer:

All of them, right? So maybe let's just start with email. So as a founder, your users just sifting through your email inbox and replying back to everybody, scheduling meetings and whatnot, uh let hustle on 24-7 culture. So I've been fortunate enough to have an admin assistant. That was the first thing that we just let go and offload and buy me back some time, an hour or two hours every day. So I have an assistant who cleans up my email inbox, just leave so it's necessary for me. So we've taken a two-hour job, brought it down to about half an hour or something every day, which is invaluable. From there onwards, just like customer delivery, sales, and marketing, just delegation of all the nuances that go into running a successful business, whichever sector that you might be part of. You have to hire the right team members, give them the coaching and guidance so that they could get to the right place and deliver on the company mission. So anywhere from product development to customer success to sales and then to marketing is the ladder that we've gone down the rabbit hole of delegating to my my team members.

Justin:

Yeah. And so you mentioned that that you found leadership in culture building to be important. So I'm curious, as you're growing the business, how do you identify and develop leaders internally versus how many you hire from the outside?

Omer:

Yeah. I'm a big big believer in growing the talent from within, building a farm team. We have an athlete mentality, so it's something that uh we we try to vet for out of the box as much as possible. That whoever's joining has the right attitude and winning attitude that's gonna mesh in well with our team here at Atlas. With that said, I would always love for it to be internal and external because people know them, people resonate with them, it clicks, right? Versus having somebody outside come in and get to know our culture because I I truly do believe we we have a unique culture here at Atlas. So we're still a new company, so we're only two years now. So we're still learning the growing pains of growth, which is always a wonderful problem to have. To answer your question, Justin, it's always been internal.

Justin:

Well, that's great. And so, you know, I'd love to dig into that a little bit more. You mentioned, you know, when you're hiring looking for that athlete mentality, but I'm curious, you know, what specific qualities are you looking for when you're promoting your leaders? You know, kind of how are you observing that?

Omer:

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is someone who's extremely, extremely driven, someone who's customer obsessed, someone who really, really wants to make a difference to our clients because everything lives and breathes and starts and ends with the customer. And then process shredding. I'm super, super big on process shred, and how do we make this scalable and duplicatable in the easiest way, shape, or form? So as those three things align, that's what helps me to align with the leader themselves, that quick decision making to put them in places where they would most succeed along the business paths.

Justin:

Great. And then, you know, thinking about organizational structure, what are some things that have prompted you to shift organizational structure as you've grown?

Omer:

Yeah, we we've kept the flat um organizational hierarchy, Justin. We believe in team A, team B, right? Team A is sales and marketing, all outside the building activities. Team B is all inside the building activities. So uh product development, RD, coding, our engineering team lives under team B, and a sales and marketing team lives under team A. So I like these small pods, right? Uh, anywhere from three to five people. I think that's what helps you scale one leader within that pod. Um, that's what's work best for us.

Justin:

And you know, share with us a time when you felt overwhelmed by decision making as you've been growing and what helped you to break through it.

Omer:

Yeah, I'm super, super big on self-care, right? Going to the gym often, getting a little bit of fresh air on a daily basis, meditating daily, journaling daily. I think those things just help you stay sane. The human mind is quite chaotic. And with today's generation of social media apps and all types of apps, whether that's on your computer with Slack notifications or social media notifications on your phone, it's one of those things that you could really get bogged down and get distracted and feel super overwhelmed. You might have 200 emails here, you might have 45 Slack messages, and then your social media is blowing up. So you can get really, really chaotic in your brain. And quite frankly speaking, I don't think there's any other way to get rid of that chaos by just eliminating the notifications altogether. That's what I believe in. Have my phone on do not disturb for most of the day. I do not get notifications, I don't believe in notifications. I set aside time to check my socials, I set aside time to check my emails, and I stay quite active just in the outdoors here. That helps me just stay calm and manage my manage being overwhelmed.

Justin:

I'm a fellow zero notifications person. I like if you want my attention, I I'm the one who chooses when you get my attention. Yeah, no notifications and totally live by my calendar. I also really like that you're talking about finding that balance through being outside, exercise, meditation, journaling. Those things are so important to keep in your daily cadence just to kind of keep yourself grounded. I've I've found that those things help me. And when I when I see myself kind of losing control a bit, it's because I've strayed away from those practices. So I love that you highlight the the importance of that.

Omer:

It's the only thing that works.

Justin:

So what's one of the toughest things that's been what's been the toughest part of maintaining alignment and culture as you've grown the business?

Omer:

Yeah. Toughest part is just people alignment, I think, right? Continuing to have that startup fiery energy that gets your business to a certain stage. I think that's super critical to have as you enter this growth mode. So making sure that people are aligned with your vision and mission, ensuring that people understand what the philosophy is, making sure that customers are being attended to at all fronts. You might have team members in different sectors, whether that's marketing and sales that needs help from product development. So that cross-functionality and that collaboration is always challenging. And how overcome that messaging aspect, because you know, without communicating the same thing to a customer again and again, where you know, we might have a sales and marketing team put out some message on socials, which helps drive business, closes a customer. But if the customer success team is talking about something else, you're you're kind of not gonna please the customer, right? So I think that to sync is super, super important. How we've tried to done it, I've literally created GPTs, custom GPTs that people can just ask questions to so that we always have messaging on point. So, you know, if I'm busy or the senior executive team is busy, the goal is to ask the GPT first, and you're always gonna have a clear message, and that's on point rather than waiting for approval from one of the executive team members. So I found custom GPTs could be quite helpful to bridge that gap and to making sure that everybody's synced up.

Justin:

Yeah, that's a great use and random, like just I want to dive into that a little bit. How do you keep that current? Like as you change information, because you know, the what I found is organizations who use AI for that knowledge base, it's only as good as the info that you're keeping in there and what it thinks is current. So, how do you keep that up to date?

Omer:

Yeah, so you know, the first thing that we've done is we've literally tried to take my brain and put it in there. So we have a customer manifesto, we have a press release about the business itself, but then there's some practitioners that I like to follow, whether that's in marketing, whether that's in sales, whether that's in product development, that the custom GPT is trained on their philosophy. So that's the knowledge base, right? That's the knowledge base for it to kind of articulate. So there's three or four practitioners within each sector within the business, and from there onwards, there's a customer manifesto, there's some presentations in there, there's some press releases in there about the business itself, just to ensure that we always think from an first principles approach to attack that problem. So we we just launched this about six weeks ago. The response from the team has been phenomenal. How do we keep on updating it? I think that's it, right? We we at quarter by quarter as we move along and we move the rocks along, we're gonna find additional information that you need to feed the custom GPTs and we'll feed it in there as the business evolves. But the the core thing is that the the everybody's driving row in the same boat, and you're not you're not going in multiple different directions. We're all going in the same direction.

Justin:

Yeah. So as you look into the future, how do you define the leadership culture that you want to continue building?

Omer:

For me, it's all about alignment, having an excellent culture that reads enjoyment, freedom, and technological challenge and innovation in the AI space. We are building the future of AI here. We're aligned with some incredibly intelligent people, both internally and externally, to make a real impact in the application layer of AI towards small businesses. Think about your local home services businesses, professional services businesses, and there's millions of these, right? So that that's our mission. How do we leverage AI to help the small business owner? And how do we help them do things efficiently to get ready for scale without the need for hiring more staff? Because AI can do that. So for me, it's all about just alignment with internal and external stakeholders to get there. I know, I know it sounds simple, but it's really, really hard to do so.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, and so in that vein, what are you doing today to prepare that your next layer of leaders to build that future?

Omer:

Yeah, all communication, writing first culture over here, having the mentality, having OKRs, having weekly tasks to align with. So it's almost like creating a little system, right? The inputs lead to the output. So we're just practicing and practicing and getting better every day. We're big on learning. So we set aside budgets for everybody if they want to take courses or learn externally from people. We have access to some really, really good educational content that can be super beneficial for folks. So we want people to leverage that and utilize that to the best of their ability. So learning is where it all starts and ends.

Justin:

Well, absolutely love that. Absolutely love that. And you know, I'm curious if somebody joined your company tomorrow, what would you want them to say about your leadership in five years?

Omer:

That's a good question. I think leadership is always assessed based on probably a bad sign of a good leader is when they talk too much about themselves, right? I think people should probably touch on that externally. But to me, like I mentioned before, right, Justin, I think it's all about just alignment and making sure that you're doing the right things. When you do the right things, your team always rewards you with their hard work. So if you have the right culture and a winning attitude, things work out in your favor. For me, what I want to have an impact on and make sure that my team remembers is that we are customer obsessed, right? We have an athlete first mentality and we document everything. So, right, they sometimes probably get annoyed at me if by repeating those same goals over and over again, but it works. So just being super organized, right first, have that winning mentality, which helps you problem solve through things, is something that I want to make sure that we do at all times.

Justin:

Great. Umra, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you so much for the time. One final question. Well, actually, two, I'll have two questions, but second to last question. What's one piece of advice that you'd give another founder about scaling themselves as a leader?

Omer:

Just figure out how to duplicate yourself, create SOPs, create processes, document everything, train your team, educate your team on it, create custom GPTs. You just got to figure out how to take that note of you and transpire that to five or ten to get that multiplying multiplier effects.

Justin:

Yeah, well, thank you, Omer. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

Omer:

Yeah, they could just connect with me on LinkedIn, Omer Chamal on LinkedIn. Would love to connect and happy to be resourceful to anybody.

Justin:

Great. Well, thank you so much for the time today.

Omer:

Likewise, thank you for speaking to me, Justin.