AI, Global Talent & Recurring Revenue The Future of Business

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One of the questions inside of my interview process

now is, tell me what your experience is with AI

and how you're currently using it,

because that is going to be the future of the workforce.

That's a key to business really making good decisions.

We've all made bad ones, but for honest with ourselves,

we can set you in here back.

Oh yeah, I have to be more.

Sometimes it could be super painful.

Even if you don't own your own business,

is it a tool to give you new opportunity

and career advancement in the future?

Or is it a social platform for you?

The consumers use it as a social platform.

The producers use it as a tool.

You could just sit there for an hour.

We come out, you'd be absolutely smarter.

It is the future of business.

America's backbone was built on blue collar business grid,

grind and muscle.

This is where you stop working for the business

and the business starts working for you.

All right, blue collar millionaires, we're back again.

We're gonna predict 2026.

I know everybody likes to predict.

Everybody thinks they're a genius.

Well, I'm not gonna say I think we're a genius

over here predicting, but there are some patterns

and some things that we're listening to and watching

and man, AI being one of those, just advancing so fast.

So we've got about five things we're gonna run through.

Kevin, we'll start with AI.

Some of the things where you see it change in the landscape

and how the businesses that are utilizing it.

We just did a podcast on AI.

The companies that are using it the right way.

Not trying to like, hey, how do I just not answer phones?

Right.

But how do I use this to make my team members stronger,

get more of my ideas across faster,

how to develop ideas, how to kill ideas,

how to look at, create your own board of directors,

all the stuff we say and make better decisions.

Because that's the key to business.

It's really making good decisions.

We've all made bad ones.

Before honest with ourselves, it can set you year back.

Oh yeah, it can be more sometimes.

It can be super painful.

I know I did it.

I made decisions in over leveraging and real estate

to set me back seven, eight years.

Yeah, like literally to catch up.

So I think the companies that are really doing it

on that level and really studying it

and spending an hour, it's fun.

I think they're gonna have a massive advantage over the companies

that are just like, hey, write me copy for Facebook posts.

Right.

That's what most people are doing for.

Yeah, I think some areas it's replacing.

The technology's there where it can replace.

Some areas it's a great supplement.

So one of those examples is like a call agent, AI call agent.

During working hours for your local small business

and AI call agent is not going to work.

You're gonna lose sales.

People are gonna hang up on it.

And it's gotten pretty dang good,

but I don't think it's good enough yet

for you to have that as your primary CSR.

But now after hours, people are already expecting

to hit a voice message or a call center

with foreign voices on it or something like that.

So an AI agent is not an issue

as long as you've got a good AI agent

and you have it trained so that it can push it

into an appointment or whatever the case is

that they were calling for.

So in those situations,

it's a good supplemental situation, not a primary.

But like chatbots on your marketing

to have instant feedback and speed to lead scenarios

and for it to have a conversation with it

to get it into a booking link,

I think that's a fantastic primary example of AI being used.

And then just a simple fact like we had spoke about

on the episode probably before this one right here

being recorded, how you can sit there and have it analyzed,

you can drop your docs in,

it can understand your business,

it can help you brainstorm,

it can be those board of advisors,

it can be your intellectual property

when you create those custom GPTs.

It is the future of business.

And I think the quicker that the company

start adopting it inside of their company

and training their employees,

their team members to understand how to use it,

not just the founder and the entrepreneur using it,

but having their entire team.

And I know for me,

one of the questions inside of my interview process now is,

tell me what your experience is with AI

and how you're currently using it

because I am looking for those that are actively engaging with it

so that they're already trained up

because that is going to be the future of the workforce.

Every position in your company

is going to within the next 12 to 18 months

need to be able to use AI

so that you can stay on the trajectory of growth

and not get surpassed by your competition

that's leveraging it at a high level.

Yeah, let's talk about worldwide talent.

This is a very long time,

people weren't on to it for a long time.

Somebody might say VA's, that's too niche.

We're talk about worldwide talent.

You have so many people that are so incredibly talented.

Back in the day, I know in the 90s,

like I had somebody answering my phone in my house

or then there was the thing I forwarded to their house,

like you felt like you were only in your town.

That was your talent for it.

And why would you want to do that?

Some people are still doing that.

So I look at it like you can get people

whose cost of living is much less,

they're super talented.

And a lot of times their cultures,

we were saying like a lot of worldwide talent

is getting washed away by VA, the lower level.

This is true.

They are so onto that, they're already a skilling up.

They're absolutely doing that right now.

Whereas a lot of people in this country

and I'm doing that, they're gonna get run over.

Look, it's just foolish to not look at the entire world

if to say, hey, I'm looking for this type of position.

Who can I get the most bang from my buck for?

If you say it like this, in America,

or forget about Tupelo, Mississippi,

if I said to you, people you know

that are really strong skilled,

like they're good workers, you'd want them to work.

If you got them to leave what they're currently doing,

would they be expensive?

Yes.

Oh, absolutely.

That's everybody in this country.

When you get the person at a portable thing,

usually they have a track record

of not doing very well.

Where you can go worldwide, that's everywhere,

not just the Philippines, it's everywhere.

You can find lots of people that have really strong skills.

You can do it for less.

And I just think it's an incredible play.

It's just like the NBA, like there's tons of players

from all over the world has made the talent level better.

You can't just say, I'm only picking basketball players

from New Jersey.

Yeah, I remember growing up, my dad used to say,

son, don't settle because you're playing

in a small pine right here.

Another way, you know, is you're fishing in a small pine.

It's like, take that old pine that's in the back

in the rural area, in the backyard

of a little rural country house.

And then you go over to the ocean

and all of the different marine life that's inside.

And when I started doing the windshield business

with you, Mike and Matt, and started realizing

how much easier it is when you open up the pipeline

of opportunity.

And so whether you're looking at it

from a, you know, building your team aspect,

or if you're looking at finding customers to prospect,

it leads to prospect.

When you open up the quantity, the volume of opportunity,

it changes the entire situation.

No longer do you have to be hitting 100 all the time

because there's so much opportunity.

When I was a kid, we lived in Birmingham, Alabama

for a couple of years.

And the guy that we bought that land from,

my dad bought that land from, he had this 10 acre pine

and it was stocked with catfish.

And so the gentleman that we bought it from

would go out at the same time every day

and he would sit there and throw the catfish feed into it.

You would literally, as you're coming across the levee,

you had to drive from one side of it to get over to

where it gets shallow because you could walk in

from the bank into it.

It was almost like it was made to swim in, but it wasn't.

And so he would go to the opposite side

of where you pull in from the feed it.

Well, when you hit the levee, the fish could fill

the vibrations, I guess.

And you would see the waves in the water

moving over to the area to where you fed.

And that's what it's like when you go worldwide

or when you go nationwide and you start to prospect

for talent or for customers.

It's like that catfish that I saw as a kid

running across the water to the feeding ground

and you throw the feed out and it's literally dropping

into the fish's mouth as they're hitting the water.

Because they know this is where they go and get fed at.

And that was opportunity to me

because if we ever wanted to go fish,

I didn't have to do the traditional fishing,

throw the lure out, hope I'm hitting the bottom

where some fish are pulled around.

I knew where the fish were at.

When I see the nationwide model,

there's so much opportunity.

I feel like I'm throwing that lure into that catfish mouth

because they're just all piled in there together.

You don't have to be a great fisherman.

You don't have to work the lure.

It's going to go into mouth.

What was the line our partner Mike Jackson said

that you said and then what did he say about that?

You either have too many leads.

Oh, there's either a labor problem

or there is a lead problem.

And he said it almost feels unfair

and I said in the beginning,

it didn't feel unfair until we moved into this national model

and now it feels unfair,

but there was still action that had to be done.

They had to go prospect.

They just went in prospect and prospected well

and now that they've built that system and model,

it feels extremely unfair.

It does, but they're using worldwide talent

so they never have a talent problem, a labor problem.

The reason I'm saying this, so we have two things.

That's why it literally grows every week.

We have more leads coming in

and then we have a whole pool of talent, the world.

So we never have problems.

We had a higher three CSRs in one week.

So how can somebody do that?

We calling it the national model,

but let's call it the submodel

because that's how I scaled gutter king.

I had an issue which many of you guys have.

I could not find enough talented labor.

They're calling insect, they're hungover.

We all know that.

And right now it's very fractionalized

because everybody wants to go start their own gig

if they're talented.

That's why it's a good time.

So that had already happened.

I saw that and I saw so many,

because it was my own companies, right?

You'd have a guy he's kind of motivated,

he's good, he shows up.

What's he start thinking?

What do I already start my own LLC?

These guys are on blue car millionaire.

They're thinking about it

and their employer doesn't know it, right?

They're thinking of starting their stuff

and then a lot of guys in our group,

they say, oh, these guys are out here.

They're chucking trucks and they're low-balling.

Why don't you look at it a different way?

There's a lot of them actually are good techs.

They don't necessarily have the business acumen.

They're new to it, they'll get there.

Maybe they won't, it doesn't really matter for this.

And then I said, why don't I connect with those guys?

A lot of times they have bands and trucks

that aren't branded and everything

and I'll work with them to make sure

they have the right insurances

and then I used them as subs

but I did it like a hundred times over.

And it solved my problem

if I had too many leads, too many complexes calling me,

super-seasonal, you gotta get them done

before the snow comes, especially up north

and then I needed more labor.

So I was doing a hybrid where I had tons of employees

and then I had these things

and then it was so good, I just switched to it.

So guys who are usually reluctant to that,

like, nah, nah, I can't do that, they'll mess it all up.

You gotta change your frame, lots of subs,

just like lots of employees, we'll suck.

You gotta find the right ones, you gotta work with them,

you gotta look at them as partners

and not some subordinate to you.

And when you do that, you can grow much faster.

So we call that the national model,

what we're doing with, it doesn't have to be national accounts,

we're doing both the things

but that's another way to get more talent to do labor.

So when we were talking worldwide talent,

we're talking more back end, right?

It means answering phones, doing all this stuff,

you don't need a person in your office for 65 grand.

That's right.

You could get three people like that

who are probably each one of them's better than that.

I hate to say it.

It's just been my experience, I had people like that.

In a company I just sold, we let go of somebody

getting $78,000 a year, doing the thing,

she was just getting circles running around.

Well, I've just seen that there's a level of entitlement

in our country that's not in other countries

and it's not that I'm anti-American or anything.

I'm right, the opposite of that, I'm very much American

but I'm also very much business and entrepreneur

and opportunist and when I see someone

that doesn't have a level of entitlement

and they're hungry and they're disciplined

and like my executive assistant said there and said,

hey, I'm going to take a construction class

because I want to better understand

what y'all are doing in absolute restoration

so that I can help you more on that end of it

with those processes.

And I was like, holy crap, I never asked her to do that,

but she on her own time is gonna go do that

to educate herself up so that she can bring more value.

That's the difference that I see

when you start getting overseas.

There's a different mindset.

But on the national model side of things, you know,

I think once you see it, you can't unsee it

and I have seen it, this is your second time around,

this is my first time with the windshield business

and it's such a great win-win handshake

between your local guys because they don't have that overhead

and a lot of them don't want to get

turned into a big empire and, you know,

a goliath of a company locally.

And when you're sitting there feeding them volume,

that solves their marketing issue.

I remember my quality of work was not a stress level

when I was out there with a couple of helpers

when I first started my restoration company.

It became stressful when I grew outside of

where I couldn't be on the job site with my team every time.

When I had multiple jobs running

and I couldn't be there to police it,

that's when I had to start learning that business acumen

with systems and everything.

So we are coming in and helping the local guy

and the local guy's helping us

and we're giving the easy button for these national companies.

It's a beautiful model.

What's next on our list?

Personal bread and social media.

Let's give a shout out to Blake Press

and coming on our show.

He's doing, he's killing it built himself to 35,000 followers.

Like a quarter of a million views per video.

He's a young guy, I think 25 years old, smart.

He just figured out the social media game.

And you look at what we did.

We got almost 300,000 people in blue color millionaire.

So many of the principles he's using, we have used.

It's free.

So many people don't use it.

They don't want to get on camera.

They don't want to put themselves out there.

They're worried about what people nobody cares.

It's free advertisement.

But you got to do it the right way

and bring in the right people.

I'm leaning more towards after he came on it,

reminded me of the power of social media

and the organic free side of it, not the paid ad side.

He's never ran paid ads.

He talked about literally how you go in there.

You post daily.

He gave skills and tactics on how you leverage your posts

so that it gets what you want.

Using local Facebook groups and posting in those and whatnot.

And he has people that reach his out and said,

hey, he saw this post.

That's even his follow-up sequence to an extent.

Because he'll put a quote out, get ghosted

and they'll say, have been seeing your feed

because of the way he works, the system on social media.

And I look at how many thousands of dollars

I spend every single month and how many months

it didn't produce any leads that were converted

because we were testing and trying to figure out

and how everybody's fighting over this Google ads

and Facebook ads, but yet you got your guys

like Blake out there that's bringing leads in,

building a ton of brand awareness

because of what he stick, not only for his company,

but also for him.

So his opportunity is going to increase over the years

just because people see him out there making himself,

he's showing what he does.

He's showing he's in entrepreneur.

He's showing that he's in the contracting space

and especially the concrete space.

We've never done a sponsored ad.

We've never paid a dollar and we up to 300,000.

I'll get sometimes 100 messages in a week from members.

I appreciate those messages, right?

And a lot of times it's guys they want help

and a lot of this opportunity,

hey, I'm looking to buy this forming business

on the North and so on here, it's just opportunity.

How could I ever duplicate that?

But when people say post every day,

post good stuff every day.

That's right.

I'd rather you post once a week and like bring it.

Too many guys do too many sloppy things.

They throw some stuff in chat GBT.

Nobody goes, it gets crickets.

They do it for a week. They stop.

You guys would be surprised.

Some of you guys like my posts and stuff.

I take a lot of time to write those posts.

I come back to it.

It's like doing a report sometimes

because I want it to be like I'm writing something here.

It's like I'm trying to get my thoughts together.

But I like doing it.

But some of these posts just keep giving.

Like it's like a year later and somebody messages me.

Like, hey, I wrote this post.

I'm thinking like I wrote it like a year ago.

You never know you're in hitting.

So if I was a blue collar guy posting on my social media,

I would do it on my personal page

because it's your new website.

So you can have your family on there and everything.

I wouldn't put any dumb stuff.

Getting drunk and a bunch of memes about who you hate

and politics.

I don't understand.

I screen people when I have interviews.

I look at Facebook and Instagram, man.

That's how I screen.

And if that's what you want to do, do it.

But I don't think that helps your landscape

and business at all.

It doesn't matter what side you are.

But that's a website.

I always go on people's thing.

And I see what they're like, what they're about.

We have people coming.

I've seen their social media are coming to our event today.

We want to make sure that we're like-minded people.

So I would go in all out on that.

And then you should have pictures of your trucks,

your employees, doing jobs.

And Blake had one line.

I repeated it till I like it.

Satisfying content.

We all like to watch concrete come out and get ported.

I don't know, it's like it.

Every one of us probably likes to watch a rehab show.

We've all sat there and killed three hours on a Saturday

and next thing you know, you're like, what am I doing here?

You could just keep watching it.

So you need satisfying real content.

Then you have to become authoritative.

You're the guy who does it.

Show them who you're doing it.

And that's your social proof.

If you do that constantly, and then be yourself.

Open up to people.

They want to do business with people in their communities.

They know, like, and trust.

They don't want to do it with a robot.

They don't want to do it.

It's just a free way to get leads.

That's why referrals work so well.

Social media can create more referrals

that will create more referrals.

Like I would be all in on that.

He came in and he trained boardroom elite.

And I'm going to drop two secrets for the audience listening

on the podcast since they tuned in.

Because I don't want to give all of his juice away

because he was very gracious to come in

and teach our boardroom elite members this.

But the satisfying content, the educational kind of project

driven, so he was showing the project

and he would educate what was happening there.

The satisfying content is just that movie

of showing what's happening.

So in the trades business, it's so easy

to have satisfying content that we can film.

Like I think back from the carpet cleaning side,

sitting there showing carpet cleaning,

when we're extracting water on the water damage,

when we're installing a roof and putting down,

tearing off the old, putting down the new.

Like there's just so much in trades

that people will sit and take the time to watch.

But the other thing was, as he would sit there

and he would get his local groups

and he would post in his local groups.

Once a week, once a month, he would post a project

some pictures and stuff in there of what he's doing.

He didn't pitch them.

He didn't try to sell them.

And that was exposing that he did that work

without being spammy, so he did get kicked out

of the local group.

Yeah, I'll give you guys an example.

If somebody's a friend of ours,

he's in our elite group, Steven Starrick.

If you watch his content, it is very clear

that he's a nice guy, he's smart,

he knows his stuff inside now.

I love he does this thing with the camera

where you're watching, but he's talking

and he's got his face there.

And he's talking about how he does ADU's

or he's talking about what he's doing

on this huge Marriott hotel roof.

I forget it's my buddy and I'm like learning.

I like it.

I don't know how to do an ADU.

I like watching it.

Next thing I know, I watch five of this things.

So if you're somebody in Venture, California

where he's at, you're feeling pretty confident on that.

And not to rip on the guys with the political things,

but if you watch Steven Starrick, you'd be like,

yeah, I have an ADU, he's the guy to talk to.

Whereas somebody else, I might not know if you do ADU's,

but I know what you think about ICE.

Yeah, that's right.

And that's okay.

First of all, you're never gonna get anybody

to change their opinion on that anyway,

but I don't think it.

Where Steven's like, he's thinking about his family.

How do I get more jobs and everything?

And I know it works for him.

And he's building people are going to his thing.

They're watching those videos,

even if they're not commenting.

And they're saying this guy knows what he's talking about.

And then when they get on the call with him

and they see his proposal, that just elevated him.

I think at the end of the day,

to kind of touch basis between those two examples

is what is social media for you?

Is it a tool for your business?

Is it a, even if you don't own your own business,

is it a tool to give you new opportunity

and career advancement in the future?

Or is it a social platform for you?

The consumers use it as a social platform.

The producers use it as a tool.

I'll sit there and watch my friends and videos

and I'll get some education,

but most of the time I'm producing

and dropping content there because it's a tool for visibility

that doesn't cost me thousands of dollars a month

and add cost to it.

And so I think when you look at these things,

this is where 2026 is businesses

that are utilizing these things

or positioning themselves for great success

and they will outpace their competition.

Because the competition is not strategically thinking

like this right here and they're not looking at

what they need to be really focused on and leveraging.

All right, last one, fifth thing I see

is the companies that have a subscription,

recurring revenue.

And every company has to talk about this every day.

They just have, it's just a better model.

It's always been, it's a better model to sell.

It's a better model to compound growth.

Yeah.

The companies that are doing that just have an advantage.

And if you don't have that,

you got to figure out a way to do it

or potentially get it a bolt on business that can do it.

And if not, I did a whole post about this

then you got to get your cash into something that does it

for you personally, for your family.

But to build your business, that's a better business.

I'm not even interested, I don't even look at businesses

that don't have that model, not interested.

When you start seeing it,

you start building your framework and your buy box

and you realize, look, you can make money doing anything,

but there's definitely easier ways to make money.

And when you have a customer that's going to come back to you

and buy over and over again,

that is the definition of easy

because you're not over here trying to kill

and eat every single day.

I like Bill Gates had a thing.

He said, I like lazy people

because they figure out how to do hard stuff

in less time.

I like that.

And I always look at everything I say,

what's the path, the least resistance for me

to get where I want to go?

So if it's money, how do I get there?

If it's free time or whatever,

that doesn't mean being lazy.

It's just like, you have to take a little bit of thought

and think about that.

And to me, recurring revenue is just such a better model

to get there.

You're just stacking.

That's why I grew every company in every year I've ever had.

That's because of recurring revenue.

If you're a roofing business,

you could absolutely hit 4.6 million

and 4.2 the next year.

And you didn't really do anything.

You just had that $600,000 job that year.

I want the $600,000 job every year.

I want the recurring.

And then you just dad 15, 20% on.

And that's when you actually can step away,

use worldwide talent.

That's right.

And you can still grow,

because you have the systems to do.

So if you don't know what you're recurring revenue is,

go to chat GPT and start talking to it about it.

Here's my business.

Here's my business.

How can I add recurring revenue?

What can I build the end behind this that makes sense

so that my customer buys from me over and over again?

And then how would I pitch that to them?

You could just sit there for an hour and you come out

and you'd be absolutely smarter and have more to do.

So those are five things.

All right, we'll be back next week.

Guys, check out BlueColorMillionaire.net.

We have events tonight.

Chris and I are here.

We have a suite down in Atlanta at the Hawks game.

We're doing a steakhouse dinner with 16 guys.

We're super excited for that.

We do events.

And of course, we have boardroom elite.

That's a group, 30 entrepreneurs, high level operators.

Great, and there's some women in there.

Great people, doesn't matter if you're a woman or a man.

And then we also meet three times a year.

We're meeting in Tampa, March six, seven, and that's great.

We had one in Atlanta in November.

It's incredible to meet people discuss.

You got to, you know, people always say getting rooms.

But to me, you get around other high level people.

You come off with ideas.

You have people you can call.

It's so different.

We both have that.

It's so different than I'm always ripping on your buddies.

You drink beers with, but they can't help you with their business.

They don't want to know.

They're just trying to escape from their job.

Get around other entrepreneurs who are doing big things.

They can be at the same level.

They can be higher.

They could even be a little behind you,

but they're just thinking like you do.

They might see things you don't.

It's incredible opportunity.

And of course, Chris and I are always helping guys in there

and doing conversations with guys

and trying to get them to the next level.

BlueColorMillionaire.net.

See you next week.

Hey, if you guys liked what you heard today

and you want to get more information on that

and learn more, come to our boardroom elite.

at bluecolormillionaire.net.

We meet each Thursday on a Zoom small group setting.

We talk about all this stuff that's worked for us.

Operations, hiring a players, getting commercial accounts,

buying businesses.

You got access to Chris and I.

We go over that in great detail.

If you guys really want to make money,

we design this for us five years ago,

10 years ago, 20 years ago.

All this stuff I wish I knew then that I knew now,

that's where we give it to you in that format.

BlueColorMillionaire.net.

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If you don't want to hear the answers,

turn off this Liberty Mutual ad now.

12 months, a towel, piano.

Enjoy being fully alert.

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