Selling $100K Without Saying 'AI' Once: Rick Hancock

0:00 · Why nobody is actually a "master of AI"

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket Sisters podcast. Everyone, please welcome Mr. Rick Hancock. Rick, how you doing today, my friend?

Rick Hancock:0:08
I'm doing well, how about yourself?

Jordan:0:10
I'm happy to be here, man. Thank you so much for hopping on. In regards, absolutely, absolutely. I'm really excited to dive in today. I know you are a master with AI and improving workflows and helping businesses scale with AI and agentic workflows. And I'm, like I'm said, excited to dive in, but really quick, can you give us a quick intro as to, you know, what you do, what the company does, who you guys help, all that, all that fun stuff.

Rick Hancock:0:12
Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it.

Rick Hancock:0:40
Yeah, well, first of all, anyone that tells you that they're a master of AI run in the opposite direction because there's no one that could really honestly say that they are a master. Now, am I aficionado? Am I a big fan? Do I geek out? Do I listen to podcasts? Do I read books, read everything online, go to conferences, write about it? I do. That's me. I'm guilty of that. But AI is just...

Jordan:0:46
Ha

Rick Hancock:1:08
While we're on this call, there's going to be updates, innovations. I saw a report last week that Claude, Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, pushed out 72, not like versions, but 72 new additional tools in a 50 day period. Like there's no one alive that can really grasp all of that and then begin to deploy all of those new features. into anything. anyone who tells you that they're a master, they're not telling the truth. As for me, Rick Hancock, CEO of My Mobile Life and the creator of One Click AI, we've been in business. I my co-founder, business partner, Michael Grillo, been business since 2012. And we started off as a, well, we're both journalists. So my background, I was a television guy. He was a print digital guy. I had kind of retired from television first time and went into academia, was a dean at a college, and then I was on the faculty at the University of We recently lost the NCAA championship to Michigan, but that's another story for another day. And then I kind of got coerced back into the newsroom because I'm a geek. I was born with a computer, literally. I'm old now, but I've always been in love with technology. so,

Jordan:2:21
Good game.

Rick Hancock:2:36
As in the 2010 period, that period, traditional media was really going through a seismic shift from traditional analog to digital. And a lot of media companies probably in lot of media companies today still struggle with that transition. know, now it's AI, but then it was literally they didn't know how to deal with MySpace. They didn't know what to do with, you know, what's this AOL thing or what's the social media thing. So the Tribune company, the last company I worked for on the TV side invited me to come back in and launch their digital. integrated platform to merge their newspaper, television, radio, and alt weekly, their marketing and their advertising to try to bring that into one cohesive digital unit infrastructure. so I was torn, be honest with you, because I was approaching a milestone age that I said, if I don't start my business now.

I'll never do it. And so when I was approached to come back and begin this venture for the Tribune Company, I told them, I just give you a couple of years to do it. And then I was going to transition to officially launch my business. So I did that. And that's where I met my co-founder. And we immediately saw it. Every month, I would ask Mike for a monthly report or digital metrics.

I was flabbergasted because each month it was showing that we were having more more traffic to our mobile platforms. And we're talking about 2010, 2011. I mean, the iPhone wasn't really out. You had people still on BlackBerrys. That was the coolest thing. People still had pagers, right? So I'm trying to figure out, our experience, that reader experience is lousy on those platforms. Why are they going there?

Rick Hancock:4:43
kind of introduction that people consumers want news where they are they're not really concerned about the presentation at that point because the presentation sucked it was lousy it didn't look great it didn't render properly you couldn't get half the images you know it just it was it was a bad experience but every month people were That's where they were receiving their news. And we were looking at day partying when people were checking out, checking their phones, obviously, before they go to work during lunch, before they head home. correlating that matching up with the content that they're looking at, the weather in the morning, know, places to go for lunch, and then you know what to do after work kind of kind of things. And so those these analytics that we really didn't have in the analog space, and even on the print on the TV side, you really didn't get that detail level of analysis. prompted us to start thinking on the side of creating a company that reflected this new revolution of the mobile lifestyle, thus the name of our company, MyMobileLife, because we wanted to kind of take that newsroom experience, create content. Our initial goal was really to create a software that media organizations and content creators, when they created a piece of content, it would render appropriately on any mobile device. the internet of things, refrigerators, thermostats, or whatever, we fell flat on our face on that one because we were so far ahead of everybody. People didn't ask for that, right? But what they were asking for, I was joking before.

Rick Hancock:6:22
They didn't know about social media. They didn't know about SEO. They didn't know how to optimize their websites or content creation. And so we reluctantly went into that space because, well, people were asking for it and we wanted to eat. yeah, we've kind of taken off ever since.

Jordan:6:38
All right.

6:44 · The mobile lifestyle origin story

Jordan:6:44
That's awesome, man. Thanks for the context. I think you said something that's pretty important. You said, don't care where I'm at, but where I am at, I want that media channel to reflect where I'm at. That was a horrible way to paraphrase what you said. I'm going to break it down. If I'm on Twitter, I want to look at content that looks like I'm on Twitter.

Rick Hancock:6:59
Yeah.

Jordan:7:06
Or if I'm on YouTube, for example, I'm going to consume a video that looks like it belongs on YouTube. If I'm looking at a website and it's not optimized for mobile, it's optimized for desktop, it's going to look like garbage, like you were saying. And I think that actually correlates very well on the SEO side, right? Because of people that are consuming your content organically. But also, I think just as important when it comes to paid advertising.

If you own a business and you are advertising on Instagram or Facebook, you want to make the content that you're distributing look like it belongs on Facebook and Instagram. Same thing with TikTok or same thing with YouTube shorts. There's different nuances in different captions you can use. You're just a different, a video format that is appropriate for these different channels. So I think it's important to actually look at how that channel is structured. Then obviously do your best to match. that structure. Getting back to the mobile life, correct me if I'm wrong. How exactly would that work? Is it taking companies that traditionally optimize for desktop only and you kind of help them optimize for mobile? Or maybe I'm, that's probably a dumb question.

Rick Hancock:8:21
It's almost about the mobile life, my mobile life. So it's almost my mobile lifestyle. So you can talk about the technical aspect of rendering content for mobile, but there's a lifestyle, there's a mindset on how people are on the go. And you just described it, the platform that you're engaging the content in, you want it to be reflective of what that content can produce. in its shining moments is the best case scenario for those platforms. So it's taking the psychology of content creation. We also, to this day, we still go back to our newsroom roots. And we think a newsroom structure is a great platform to distribute. to the content ideation, to content discussion, to distribution. So we set up all of our clients almost when we have to have editorial calendars. We have discussions. We have beats in the newsroom. If a company is just focused on a particular area, or we can break down different service delivery aspects of their company. So we break it down into beats. We have editorial meetings with our clients. And then we discuss where. how to create that content and where it's going to go. So yeah, technically, you're talking about a website being, in this day and age, if a website isn't mobile friendly, I can't imagine. We could probably find a couple of websites that were built in the early 2000s and 1990s that still aren't mobile optimized, but it's crazy if a company is at least not having that. the search engines penalized. They especially, we would really, coach and counsel our clients early on that Google penalized companies that weren't mobile optimized for because Google, you can never really predict how Google is dealing with this algorithm, but you can make some high level analysis that Google wants to provide the best search return for where a person is, where they're located, how they're receiving it, and things like that. So the mobile lifestyle, yes, reflects

Rick Hancock:10:34
a mobile device per se, but it's really the lifestyle part of it that we want to focus people on the go. We want to make sure all our clients, whether it's on their website, social media, or any other kind of media. And we've emphasized, like, you you talked about social media, we use and coach and counsel our clients. You know, we're talking on the digital marketing side, not so much on the AI side yet, but We focus on the website. Your foundation has to be there because I was joking about MySpace. I've mentioned MySpace three times in 20 minutes. MySpace hasn't been spoken by most people in 20 years.

People were building businesses off of MySpace and then my space went away. And how many times did we hear discussions people are building up nice businesses on even current existing social media platforms and the social media company changes the rules. People were expecting early on with Facebook came out that every time they posted a piece of content, everybody would see it. No, it doesn't work that way. The algorithms work depending on the level of engagement and they're a business to make money.

So they would rather push you into their advertising buckets. they're going to play games and try to figure out how you can.

Knowing how to create organic content that's gonna go viral, that's a skill, right? That's a science on the skill. And then you can, you know, game the system a little bit by doing paid ads, but the reader knows the difference. You know, you can have the, I mean, it's gotten better over the years. And some people are very, very good at creating paid content that feels very natural, really cool.

Jordan:11:59
Mm.

Jordan:12:15
Okay.

Rick Hancock:12:18
and you don't feel like you're being sold to. But most of time, you know it's a paid ad. So we would rather the earned media on your website driving that is a foundational location. You have a better opportunity to capture your customer data. You have a better opportunity to engage and own that customer at a greater authority.

And you own it. You're not going to go anywhere. I like LinkedIn. I've been writing on LinkedIn pretty regularly for a while now. And I could tell over the period of time how they change the algorithms, what's more important now. So I can go down that rabbit hole if you want. hopefully I answered my mobile life aspect of it.

Jordan:13:05
You're totally good.

Jordan:13:10
Before we move on to the AI side, break this down as if I was like a child that knows nothing about nothing. Can you describe to me, I'm a hypothetical potential client, basically what business I would run that would best fit for your services and exactly what you would do, like a through Z process of, you know, onboarding me to helping me with what you guys do and then to seeing results. I think that, I think that would help me understand more. what exactly you guys do.

Rick Hancock:13:41
Well, I think because we've been in business almost 15 years, we've touched a lot of different businesses. We don't even call ourselves on the agency side a digital marketing company anymore. We're a digital communications company. Because anything in the communication space we've been able to do.

COVID sucked for so many different reasons. I got sick a bunch of times. I lost a lot of friends. But from a business perspective, we killed it. It was a time where, because we adapted to the environment. So what does that mean? We deal with lot of some nonprofits, trade associations, membership-driven organizations, chambers, national organizations, and things like that. those membership organizations, they make a lot of their money on their annual conventions, conferences, or even regional workshops, but they make a lot of money through people paying for registrations and all corporate sponsors are paying a lot of money. So during COVID, people couldn't gather like that. But the corporate sponsors still wanted to engage those audiences. So we turned into a virtual business. We did virtual conferences. were putting on the conference itself. We were delivering food around the world. We were putting on shows and entertainment and comedy shows. And so that was awesome.

15:00 · How 70 percent of his early clients came from a cigar lounge

Jordan:15:06
for sure.

Rick Hancock:15:07
But so we have a diversity in that we have clients from IBM and the weather company to the local cigar shop. And how do we get there? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of companies try to come up with fancy frameworks and analogies and our x, y, z step of getting, you know what my framework is? I listen. I listen to people.

And that is how we have been successful. Again, going back to the cigar lounge, when we first started the business and I moved to Atlanta, Georgia from Connecticut, I would drive, I live in suburban Atlanta, I would drive into the city every single day trying to get business. I was getting my butt beat. Nobody, they didn't like this outsider coming in and.

It was mostly digital marketing services we trying to sell. I would drive back up to Alpharetta, Georgia, about 26 mile drive back up and go to my cigar lounge and sit in there and just slump back in my chair, smoking a cigar, trying to figure out like, what, how am I going to get this business going? You know, I invested a lot of money. I've still owned my house in Connecticut. I have a house here. You know, got a kid. You know, it's just the whole, whole kick in the bootle. But then the guy, so, so the cigar smoking is not a cheap hobby.

Jordan:16:24
Yeah, yeah.

Rick Hancock:16:31
So the guys that would come in are CEOs of companies or have their own companies. And then they would come in there. Now, their disposition was a lot better than mine because they were successful. But I would hear their business problems. They were overwhelmed by some of these complex SEO, paid advertising, website, social media. And I would just sit back and listen to their problems. and then came up with some solutions to their problems. And so I found listening

Jordan:17:05
That's how business works.

Rick Hancock:17:09
the heart, the beat, foundation of entrepreneurs, we solve problems. If people have a headache, wear the aspirin. And so we just became, I just became laser focused on listening to people's problems. And even if we didn't have, it was just me, my business partner, my mic is a more, even though he's a journalist, he's more technically focused. So he would do our app developments, our website developments, and he was kind of the COO. He would kind of keep the trades moving. So we had a lot of

Jordan:17:13
Yes.

Rick Hancock:17:39
companies don't have that technical expertise on staff, we did. So I was able to over promise sometimes, like we can do that, we can do that, we can do that. So I would never say no, we can do that. And then sometimes if we had to pull resources in, we did. And honestly, for the first six years that we were in business, 70 % of our business came from cigar lounges. I mean, we're talking about big projects, big, big, big projects that we got tapped into. One of our biggest was the providing IT staffing solutions to the weather company and IBM. We had no experience in recruiting, talent acquisition, or anything like that. But the guy had a problem.

And so we figured out the solution. so that's how we get customers. That's how we got clients. Is that the perfect framework? Can that work for other people? I think it can. Just be good listeners. That's the framework. That's the only framework you need.

Be a good listener and, you know, I mean, be realistic if you can't deliver on something, you know, because that's going to hurt your credibility. if you can actually pull those things together and we were following it, you know, in that lane of digital communications, a very broad spectrum and very transparent in what we actually could do and what we may outsource if we can't do it. But that's what's kind of worked for us.

Jordan:19:02
No, thanks for that insight. I think you said something so valuable, but the one thing that all businesses have in common is that they solve problems. It is literally the foundation of businesses. So by you listening to these problems and then internalizing that and then thinking of solutions, of course they're going to hire you. I mean, you're obviously a great communicator and if you know how to listen, you can build rapport that way. So when you say, yeah, what are the person's name is? Yeah, John. that problem sounds pretty tough, I just have an idea that can actually help you. And he's like, okay, what do you have? And I can go into your spiel or whatever the solution might be. You said something earlier as well that you said, if I don't start my business now, I might not ever. Have you always had the desire to become an entrepreneur, to be self-employed or, yeah?

19:49 · Growing up with printing presses in the basement

Rick Hancock:19:49
Oh, yes, sir. I'm so glad you asked that question because that's my origin story. That's where I start. So I'm fortunate both my parents are still living. My dad will be 95 in May and my mom will be 93 in June. And my father has been an entrepreneur all his life. And even to this day, even though he's he would never say he's retired.

People still can go, he was a graphic designer printer and provided supplies for big web presses. And to this day, you go to Coin Graphics and buy supplies from him. Now he doesn't operate, just outsource. It just gives him a reason to go into a spreadsheet and muck around there. But so at seven years old, one of the earliest memories, grew up in Long Island, New York, we literally had printing presses in our basement.

And my dad was doing, know, odd jobs printing church flyers or the kind of small advertisement kind of things. And, you know, it was the coolest thing in the world, A, because I could look at my dad's eyes and. know, see the joy he was having of running his own business. But the other thing was, it was the only time I was really allowed to get my hands dirty, because my dad would let me put my hands in the ink and ink up the rollers and stuff like that, and I wouldn't get in trouble. But I always knew that at some point in my life, I wanted to have my own business. Now, my father knew how hard it was work. He was born and raised in the segregated South and a Korean War veteran hero was injured and worked really hard. So me and my sisters wouldn't have to work. We went to college, get good jobs. was his American dream for us. But I wanted to be him. I was like, no, I want to be the boss. I want to have my own business.

Rick Hancock:21:41
And so I knew it from an early, early stage. But because I was fortunate enough to be, go to college, get a master's degree, had great careers, was on television for 20 years as a news anchor reporter. You know, from the outside in, a lot of people were like, dude, you made it. Why would you want to do something else? Look, I was really good as a journalist. I won awards. It's very good. But it wasn't my passion. I mean, I didn't go to sleep thinking about this is what I want to do.

I didn't dream about this is what I want to do and I didn't wake up saying this is what I want to do, but I was good at it. Being an entrepreneur is...

Well, being told as a journalist was the most competitive thing I did because a lot of people want to do it. Being an entrepreneur is the hardest thing I've ever done. But it's the thing that's brought me the most satisfaction, the most joy. It's allowed me to meet some of the most interesting people. It's to help people. And it answers my personal origin why of yes, this day and age, our entrepreneurs made or born, up before AI, would say, know, entrepreneurs are born. It's really hard. A lot of people have a lot of great ideas, but if you're not ready to deal with the ups and downs, the highs and lows of it, this is not for you. AI is changing that a little bit, and I've actually have started two courses.

Jordan:23:02
risk.

Rick Hancock:23:12
for entrepreneurs over 50. One is using AI to really start a business. Another one wasn't really so much entrepreneurial based. It was just introducing AI to people 50 and over. Because we're living longer, lot of us gonna outlive our money. And so we're gonna have to find ways to make money.

And AI has democratized that. Those days where, again, growing up, guys who retired, my father's friends, they would go to the golf course and be a starter, or they would go to Walmart and be a greeter, or they'd get some little odd job. Those things don't exist anymore. And even some of the other retail jobs, they just don't exist anymore. So I think that the...

Taking your knowledge, what you know, your expertise, what you were known for. There are plenty, of ways, millions of ways that people can deploy what they know into some revenue generating opportunities that may have always existed, but the legwork, what you had to do to kind of put that together would have taken longer. Now, just put in a prompt, get a vibe coding tool. and you can accelerate that. I'm not saying it's going to be easy. Being an entrepreneur, there's nothing easy about it, but there's a process there that you can follow. So some folks who never thought about being entrepreneurs might have no choice but to endeavor down that road. And I think that you have some new opportunities here that you didn't have in the past.

Jordan:24:49
No, absolutely. On the topic of entrepreneurship, I think there's so many traits and characteristics one must possess to actually start the process of becoming an entrepreneur, to actually take that leap. Because my younger sibling does not care about financial gain in the slightest. My stepmother is an extremely hard worker, but doesn't care about increasing her income. Those are like two things that you can, and lastly, Taking risk, right? Your risk tolerance has to be, I would say, pretty freaking high if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, if you're gonna take a pay cut, if you're gonna rely on yourself to generate revenue for your family, for the household, et cetera, right? There's a lot of characteristic traits an entrepreneur needs. Secondly, because AI is here, and after this question, we can definitely dive into that.

It allows so many people of all ages to start an online business with the help of AI. The barrier to entry is so much, so much lower now. But again, you need those characteristic traits to actually become a successful entrepreneur. The way I describe business and entrepreneurship is I'm going to war every day. I don't know if everybody else feels like this, but...

Like the doubts that slip in, feel like competition is on my back 24 seven. I feel like time is like, this is so dumb, but it's like a belief I have like time is running out because someone's going to outwork me and out, out catch me, whatever the case is. Granted, I did play sports for 15 plus years at a very elite level. Maybe that's where my entrepreneur spirit comes into play. But nonetheless, I feel like I'm going to war every single day. Unless you're ready to battle to go to war, entrepreneurship is not for you. That's what I want to say.

Rick Hancock:26:36
Yeah, no, I don't disagree with anything that you said. I look at it from the, you you still have to be strategic, you have to be smart. So one of the things I've learned over the years is that I shouldn't be, you know, I should be about my business, not in my business. And removing myself as the bottleneck, you know, opened up so many different...

Jordan:26:40
the

Jordan:26:45
for sure.

Rick Hancock:27:00
things and freeing up my, what I do best. So, you know, in the AI space, we got into the AI space because I think I told you we were doing talent acquisition services for the weather company and how it worked was that they were RW2. So IBM and the weather company would give us a rec, we would go out and find somebody. They would interview them, they like them, they would come on as RW2 and we would contract them out. they would stay on the contract for maybe six months to maybe a year. And most of the time that they would then hire those folks full time. They would give us the rec back. We go out and get another contractor. And that went swell for a few years. And then all of a sudden they weren't backfilling. And so finally, you know, I asked, hey, what's up? You know, were you sending this to another vendor? You're not happy with us? said, no, we're replacing them with AI. I'm like.

Okay, I'm nerd, I'm tech, I was familiar enough with AI, but wasn't a practitioner of it. So me and my business partner decided to, you know, see what this thing was all about. And we went and got, found a pretty decent AI certification program and went through it and walked out with that we're AI certified.

Didn't mean Jack because we still didn't know how to be AI consultants. really, it was so new. You know, if you want to be a business coach or some type of consultant, there's a whole body of work, decades, centuries of how to do this and the tools available on the networks available. and most time people want, want advisement or consultation on the things that they're struggling with with their business. AI was so new. You know, you have camps, you have people that are embracing it. Then you have other people that. don't want to hear about it because they feel threatened about their jobs and whatnot. So the tools just weren't there for folks to become AI who are AI certified and especially non-technical AI consultants because AI will trick you into believing that you now can do all these technical things. I'm guilty of that. Our platform, OneClick AI,

29:10 · Why AI certifications alone are useless

Rick Hancock:29:10
started as a custom GPT. I made a custom GPT and then that sucked. And then I went on a Vibe coding platform. That sucked even more. But the idea was good, was solid. It was a tool that was going to non-technical AI consultants be able to advise, assess, advise, and implement.

Jordan:29:21
Yeah

Rick Hancock:29:33
So I handed off to my business partner, which I should have done and he just laughed at me. So it was about time, you know, so he spent time to build this, build this thing out. So the AI space is very, very interesting for a lot of people because change is the most difficult human nature trait that we have to manage. AI has just compounded that even, even more. And so we're dealing with a lot of different. levels of engagement points. So we dumbed it down. We took it back and we touched on this a little bit earlier about listening. But and I mentioned that Anthropic pushed out 72 updates in 50 days. There's no way can keep up. So you have to stay grounded and rooted. Sorry. So someone came.

You have to kind of be very, very focused. Uh-oh.

Jordan:30:33
Can you hear me and see me okay?

Rick Hancock:30:36
No, hang on. Something happened. Hold on.

Rick Hancock:30:45
Hold on, can you see me?

Can you see me?

Jordan:31:27
Hey, what's going on?

Rick Hancock:31:28
I have no idea.

Jordan:31:30
Okay, yeah, so my internet, guess, went out. It said, you're not connected to the internet. Try again. So I just exited and we came back in. Last thing I heard was basically being a consultant, going back to listening. And then that's kind of where we.

Rick Hancock:31:45
Yeah, going back to listening and also just keep it basic. I've now begun whenever I'm trying to get AI business, I try to go 45 minutes before I even use the letters AI, because it's not about AI. It's not the magic saw. It's still listening to people's problems, business problems, finding solutions. What are your end goals? What are your objectives?

The AI is background noise. It's not about the latest shiny new AI tool. It's always going to be about the AI strategy. And we are laser focused on that. And it's kind of moved over. When we're doing digital marketing, we're kind of going to morph, because we're still two businesses, right? We still do digital marketing. We've transformed all of our existing digital. marketing clients over to AI. So now we're kind of serving as a chief AI officers. But we started off with an assessment and we call it an AI readiness assessment, but really it's deeper than that. It's understanding their current situation as a business in the industry, a competitive analysis.

Then we move into where the organization, whether it's the organization as a whole or individuals or departments, where they are in AI readiness assessment, more importantly, where their data is located inside their organization, because AI needs data. It needs good, clean data. It needs good, clean structured data before you could even think about implementing anything related to AI.

We focus on that. That's just good business practice. That's another kind of framework, where I try to simplify by just say listening. But listen, and then assess, then advise, and then you can implement. And that's the framework that we live by and thrive by.

Jordan:33:45
The thing for the context there, can you give me one specific example where you guys installed AI or AI systems into one of your clients businesses?

33:55 · The $100K cigar lounge case study (no AI buzzwords allowed)

Rick Hancock:33:55
Surprise, surprise, I'm gonna bring up a cigar example. So one of our clients is a fairly high-end cigar lounge here in North Georgia, North Atlanta. The owner is my age, hates technology, hates any discussion about AI. He just has a problem, his problem.

Jordan:33:59
Hope so.

Rick Hancock:34:22
and not to get too far in the weeds, but in Georgia and in the county that we live in, bars, cigar lounges, and restaurants are taxed if you are, and this cigar lounge also serves alcohol, you need a consumable product. We had to, you know. get legislation passed in the local city council to make the cigar the consumable product instead of a hamburger. once you, and so the other complexity in that solution is that depending on your designation, are you a bar or are you a cigar lounge will determine your tax exposure. So.

The advantage of what he went into his business was that he needed to have a balance between selling alcohol and cigars. He was out of balance. So this year, to maintain the more favorable tax exposure that he's, business exposure, he has to sell $100,000 more worth of alcohol than cigars. and he didn't really have a plan for that. And so he asked me to, because we were doing digital marketing for them, know, say, okay, how do we do that? I used AI on the analysis, being able to go into his point of sale systems, POS systems, to scrape customer data. You know, he's been in business 10 years.

He religiously, every time someone checks out, he has their name, their credit card information, their past purchases, whether they stayed in the lounge or they took a cigar out. So he is sitting on a mountain of data that really kind of painted a profile of every single one of his customers for the last 10 years that were still coming into the lounge.

Rick Hancock:36:29
So we used using very, you we wanted to do this manually. So you could have done that. You could have just downloaded all these spreadsheets and analyzed it and stuff like that. But AI was like so simple, so easy, easy to do. And then we were able to craft through AI a content marketing message, their platform. know, people do come to the website fairly regularly because every time he has new cigars, he'll post them on the website and people will go. But also his, it's more of a Facebook crowd than an Instagram crowd or an X. I don't even think we post on X anymore because most of them don't go on X. It's more of Facebook crowd.

And so we started offering, you know, certain content. But then more importantly, we started tailoring content through his massive email list, knowing what people were buying, incentivizing them to come in. You know, we know what they like to drink. We know what they pair their cigars with, and just motivated them to come in and spend more on what. So we're able to customize for clients. for customers, his cigar, people coming to the lounge on what they liked. So they came in with the QR code or coupon code to go in there. just needed, through AI, he has a pretty sizable lounge. It's like, okay, everybody that sits in that seat right now on average is spending $27. We need them spending $47. you know, and the 20 extra dollars coming from alcohol sales. And so we're able to do all that analysis through AI. Now, in our executive summary, how we outline this and we have 90 day goals to achieve these, I never once used the word AI, not once, not once, because that would have been a turnoff for him. I mean, now this client relationship, I know him well.

Rick Hancock:38:31
We consider each other friends. We talk business all the time. But even if you don't have that level of personal relationship with a client, you got to listen to what they're saying. Jeff told me, I hate AI. Don't come in with any AI solutions. Or don't put in, start saying you're going to install this and you install that with AI. So we didn't. that is a case study that is on a lot of our literature. it's on a lot of information we put out there because that's a really good example in the stay and age of AI that because most people aren't in love with AI like I am and talking to them and trying to sell them on the idea of why they need to embrace it. But I can sell them on the idea that I can get you to make $100,000 more and I charged him $20,000 to do it. So the return on the investment. I said, OK, now back in the good old days, if I said, Jeff, OK, I'm going put this plan together and I'm going to charge you $20,000, it was harder to gauge the return on the investment. And it might have been couched in billable hours. And you could have had scope creep that's coming in. This just makes it so much cleaner. Here's the plan. What are your business goals? How much are you trying to make? here are the resources that we're going to deploy. Here's the plan. We're going to do some 90-day sprints. And here's my invoice.

Jordan:40:04
People care about the result. They hardly care about the process unless their mind and brain is wired to care about the process. the vacation. Sell the Miami Beach or the Hawaii Beach. Don't sell the plane ticket. Don't sell TSA. Don't sell sitting next to some person you don't want to sit next to. You can have such a good time in Miami or such a good time in Hawaii. The beaches are so pretty, palm trees.

Rick Hancock:40:21
Yeah.

Jordan:40:34
So the result, so the extra 100 grand that your cigar client is going to make. Nobody cares about if AI is implemented in the process or if it's all manual. I just want the extra 100 grand. I want to get tax level. That's what I care about.

Rick Hancock:40:34
Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Hancock:40:44
All right. Yeah.

Yeah, and I agree. I agree with you 100 % Jordan people, you know, and then, you know, when people talk about systems, like, people don't want to be taught a system, they want a system, you know, they don't want you know, they, they just want it, you painted it, you know, beautifully. No, they don't want, you know, what, what SEO does, they just want the results of what SEO does, you know, they just want it done, they just want it, they just want it done. So I agree with you 100 % on that point.

41:00 · Personalization beats every generic AI tool

Jordan:41:15
One thing that you said that I have to talk about. Can you hear me okay?

Jordan:41:29
You're frozen, so I'm just gonna wait a second.

Rick Hancock:41:31
Yeah, you're to in and out, but.

Jordan:41:45
I'm not sure if you can hear me, but you're still frozen.

Rick Hancock:41:48
Yeah, go ahead.

I'm still frozen? I'm frozen?

Rick Hancock:42:52
Can you hear me?

Jordan:44:20
Shout out for more

Jordan:44:28
Hey, what's going on, Rick? Yeah, I still, I just sent you a screenshot. So I, your fruit, but I still, I'm still in the suite, in video suite. What? It says you left on my end. Okay, let me leave and rejoin.

Rick Hancock:44:30
Yeah, I still, I just sent you a screenshot. So I, you're froat, but I still, I'm still in the suite in the video suite.

Rick Hancock:45:03
Yeah, no, I hear you trying to get back in.

Rick Hancock:45:12
Yep, yep, I do.

Jordan:45:26
Thank you.

Hello? Testing, testing, testing.

Hello, I cannot hear you or see you.

Rick Hancock:46:08
I see you're trying to come in, but you're not coming in.

Jordan:46:09
That is so annoying. can, I'm in on my end, but I don't see you or hear you. Like your side of the screen is just pitch black.

Let's see, maybe if I turn off speaking of I'm going to log back in and see what happens with joint studio. there you are.

Jordan:46:37
My mistake, Rick. Sorry about that. We'll do our best to say what we have to say. I'll let you bring us home and then we can get out of here. I know it's probably pissing me off. It's pissing me off. My mistake, my friend. Rick, I think you said something extremely valuable. I think the difference between your cigar client earning an additional $10,000 or an additional $100,000 is personalization. If you were to send a generic

Rick Hancock:46:46
Okay, no problem.

Jordan:47:07
newsletter email to every single person who has ever purchased a cigar or purchased an alcoholic beverage at your client's cigar lounge, I don't think you would have achieved as good results that you probably did. But by customizing the list, by making every email personalized to that respective customer's favorite cigars or favorite drinks to indulge in, whatever the case is, But because it's personalized, you can have five X, 10 X, maybe even sometimes 100 extra turns. And I know this to be true because that's exactly how we use AI internally and on behalf of all of my clients. So I run AI powered outbound go to market engines. And what that really means is, is we send cold emails and cold LinkedIn messages to our prospects or our clients prospects. Now the difference between a 1 % reply rate and a 5 % reply rate is personalization. If I were to send 10,000 emails using a generic template, that's how you achieve a 1 % reply rate. But if we incorporate 10 different layers of enrichment, 10 different areas that we can enrich that data to make it hyper-personalized, that's how we can achieve a 5 % or even a 10 % reply rate. So instead of talking to John saying, hey, I don't know.

I have a horrible example right now, but long story short, because we can make the, email written as if it's only made for that one person, the recipient is like, how the hell do they know that? That's really impressive. I don't even care what the offer is. It's the simple fact that you know, my business almost as good as I do. I'm going to reply to that email. Now the second way we utilize it is by giving value upfront in the form of a lead magnet. Now opposed again, to sending a generic PDF lead magnet, we make this lead magnet hyper-personalized to the person who replied to that email. So not only are you getting a hyper-personalized email, but a hyper-personalized audit. How do they know all of this about my business without speaking to me, without literally speaking to me? How do they know this? And they craft it a, I don't know, a done for you advertising campaign. This is actually really good. I'm sold.

Jordan:49:32
before I even speak to the person who sent it to me. And that is the power behind it. Well, one, AI, and two, personalization. So I think your mindset is already on the right boat of personalizing the email list or the cigar land list. It's just interesting because I don't think people realize how powerful AI actually is. So I have a question for you. I use Cloud. Cloud code is my baby. That's literally my best friend.

Rick Hancock:49:57
Yep.

50:00 · Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini, and when Rick uses each

Rick Hancock:50:00
Yep. Yeah. Hey, brother. You know, I if you told me two months ago that chat GPT wasn't going to be my main squeeze for the rest of my life. I was crazy. But Claude, co-work.

Jordan:50:01
What what do you utilize for for all of this?

Rick Hancock:50:24
and the chat feature. Again, I'm not going to get into the line coding. My business partner does, and he's fallen in love with it. We've in fact installed it into our platform. But CodeWork, and I was just working on a project right now where it went into my Google Drive.

And I've set the parameters of how far back I wanted to go to kind of come up with a narrative for my next six weeks of LinkedIn content. And it was free. And not only did that, created the go to market messaging, the lead gen lead funnel, sales funnel kind of stuff. I would recommend to anybody who may be listening to this that Don't get married to just one. I use Google Gemini, which I think is solid for certain things. A lot of creative. I love the Nano Banana and the video component. And we are a Google business, meaning that we use the business workspace. So having Gemini embedded, having access to my Google ecosystem is very, very helpful and I think is very, powerful. ChatGPT just knows the most about me.

Jordan:51:22
Yes.

Rick Hancock:51:41
And I have a lot of different things and projects set up and I love projects. I love a lot of features. So I'm not going to poopoo on any of them. But Claude has blown me away. And it's blown me away. the agentic, especially on the agentic side of the world where that's another buzzword.

Jordan:51:51
Ha

Rick Hancock:52:03
You know, we got into AI prompt engineering was like, you need to be an expert prompt engineer. Now you have context. But the agentic world and people understanding or not even understanding what agents can do, most AI right now is agentic in nature, meaning before a year ago, if you put something in chat, It wasn't reasoning, it wasn't thinking, it just was pulling from a plethora of information and it was able to, through super automation, come up with an output. That was good. It was better than anything you could probably do, but it wasn't thinking, truly thinking. And it also wasn't pulling from other tools. So most of the tools now, and Claude, is it's an agent, you without creating an agent using, you know, OpenClaw or some of this other stuff to really make it, you know, agentic. People are working in an agent environment and don't even really know it, but it's so powerful. It's connecting to your browsers. It's connecting to your tools and your drive. It's connecting to other third party apps. It's just... and it's seamless and it almost reminds me of I'm an Apple guy through and through. Yes, I speak a second language of PC, but I'm an, and why, why did Apple? Because it was so easy to use. just, it just did it, right? Claude has gotten very close to Apple and where chat GPT is a little bit more PC.

Gemini is Google's Google, know, Google's utility that the common man could use and you know, some better and and you know, Microsoft, think, you know, what they're doing is not great. You know what Elon's doing with his ex is not it's not great. You know what Facebook is doing with llama. It's not great. But if you want to and your tool stack, you know, center around Google Gemini, OpenAI, chat, GPT and anthropics code, Claude code, a co-work.

Rick Hancock:54:10
you're well on your way to building a nice little portfolio of AI tools that will accomplish anything that you need to get accomplished.

Jordan:54:19
my gosh, you don't need to know how to code at all for cloud code. You just need to have the idea and you can go into what's called plan mode. You're like, Hey, Claude, here's my idea. How the hell do I execute this? It's like, yeah, I got you buddy. This is how to do it. Cool. Now go do it. And it's like, okay. 30 minutes later, it's done. It's like, Holy shit. It's talking to my LinkedIn. It's posting content. It's drafting scripts. It's making carousels. Like I don't do anything. Like it is insane. The amount of

Rick Hancock:54:31
Mm-hmm.

Rick Hancock:54:34
Yeah, right.

Rick Hancock:54:48
Yeah.

Jordan:54:49
Efficiency throughput that that has happened like my I not to get too specific too specific in numbers But I run a multi six-figure agency and I have such a small team Because of code like the the increase in profit because of this, know, like we can go on for days I know time is wrapping up here. But what is one thing?

Rick Hancock:54:52
Yeah.

55:00 · Sam Altman's 1 person billion dollar business (already happened)

Rick Hancock:55:01
Yeah.

Rick Hancock:55:10
Well, Sam Altman, did you hear what Sam Altman said last year? He made a prediction and it's come true. I was listening to a podcast last week. It's not one, but two, that there would be a one person business having annual revenue of a billion dollars from one person. Billion for B. Yeah, it's happened. It's happened already. It's happened already. And so, yeah, man. So you need to step up your game,

Jordan:55:13
HAH!

Jordan:55:25
Billion?

You Already who?

I know, I'm fucking... That's funny. That's funny. But like, who though? Like, who did that?

Rick Hancock:55:39
You need to step it up.

Rick Hancock:55:43
You know what I'll text it to you. I'll just I'll just listen to the podcast and It was a medical prescription company where basically he is providing the best prices for prescription drugs and just has his whole apparatus in place where people plug in what they need, what drugs, and he is able to find the best prescription drugs and using other platforms. So he cobbled together all the resources that people actually do in it. He's just the middleman and just has army of agents that he's orchestrating to go get this stuff. Yeah.

Jordan:56:23
That's what I mean. Like the only limitation you have is your ability to think of the idea. You know what I mean? Like the fact that he can do that is absolutely insane. It almost sounds to me like a good RX type thing with medications or even an Amazon for medications, know, kudos on him.

Rick Hancock:56:37
Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's called Medvo, but I'll get it over to you. I'll find it and I'll email it over to you so you know exactly who it is. Maybe you can get him on your show.

Jordan:56:51
No, I appreciate that. One more thing. What is something that you want to leave the people with before we close out here?

Rick Hancock:56:59
You know, it's business but not business related. At this point in my life that it's, I'm in this business incubator. I know if people ever heard Daniel Priestley, Dent KPI program, key person of influence. And the reason I went to the incubator program, even though I had been in business, been going on 15 years now, is that we had all the puzzle pieces. I just needed some structure in getting some of these things. And they've done a great job in doing that. what...

What was really stuck with me is that wanting to be a key person of influence in my space. So I've chosen the AI space. And specifically, I want to be the key person of influence. And people want to talk about AI readiness assessments. I want Rick Hancock to be that guy. But more importantly, I want to be able to be in a position where the spotlight's not on me, but I can shine a bright light on others.

That's the why. There has to be a why. It can't just be about making money. can't just be about following my dream of following my dad's footsteps of starting a business. There has to be something else that's driving me. And that really is. To me, I want to focus on people 50 and older who are really worried about their future. Ageism is a real thing. People are losing their jobs, even people your age. But folks who are 50 and older thought that they were going to ride off into the sunset into a lifestyle of retirement or less stress of work, that's not the reality. And so if anything I can do to try to help people find and navigate through these very kind of challenging, changing times.

That's what I want to do. So anything that I can do, say, write, produce, create, will be directed towards sharing that with people who might need some additional guidance. So any light that gets shine on me, this podcast being one of them, I will definitely be pointing that to other people to give them additional resources so they can power up.

59:00 · Why people 50 and older are the hidden opportunity in AI

Jordan:59:09
No, thanks for that closing note. Desire helps us start, but our why is what allows us to keep going. So great, great light on that. Rick, was a pleasure having you. Thanks for talking about AI with me. I freaking love AI. I'll have you back on in the next six to 12 months and see how things are going. Yeah, it was great having you on. Thanks.

Rick Hancock:59:22
Yeah, cool.

Yeah, Hey, love to. Love to. Okay. All right. Take care.