Verl Workman's High-Risk Bet on AI

Reminder: The content is not for agents, this is a mastermind-style newsletter for real estate leaders, insiders and content creators. A place where we can openly discuss the challenges of reaching and engaging agents, building brands and dominating niches. You won’t find this content all over social media, so if it’s valuable, forward it to a friend.This week is a little detour into the world of real estate coaching and AI.But the insights apply to anyone scaling a business around expertise(which is many of my friends and clients).In coaching, there’s a huge bottleneck to scaling.You can’t clone yourself as a coach.Yes, you can hire staff coaches.But the good ones are unicorns because they…* come up from the ranks of clients* spend years steeped in your beliefs and opinions* speak your language naturallyYou can’t scale with unicorns.So Verl made a big bet.He acquired Coach Simple, a coaching business management platform.They’re incorporating AI from the inside out, starting with how they run their sales calls, manage their 75 coaches and ramp up new coaches.Here are Non-Obvious Insights from our Conversation…In-house AI Beats ChatGPT (even Custom GPTs)Verl and the newly acquired team built an in-house ‘coach AI’ trained on their massive library of content. Their AI pulls only from resources in that library, returning better results including links to specific resources."I want a shorter path to develop my coaches to be better, right?... And so we took all of our coaches training for 10 years and we put it into “coach AI”... and so it allows us to have a much faster access to content and information that we don’t want ChatGPT infusing its opinion on. I want it to be pure proven workman principles and content."AI Creates Better Profit Margins in Multiple WaysRamping up newer coaches used to take 2+ years. Not anymore."It’s been game-changing. Our [newer] coaches are coaching at a level of a master coach that’s been with us for eight or nine years because they have access to content and ideas and thoughts that you could only get through experience in the past. Now, we’re getting it through really great prompts."They also use their in-house AI it to increase retention:"So now when a client says, ‘Oh, I think I might want to get out of my contract’... you type that in… it [AI] answers in how we train to it, here’s how you figure out what the real issue is and solve it…the Workman Way”Faster ramp up time for staff coaches + higher average client value = better profit margins.That could have been ripped straight from Jay Abraham or Dan Kennedy’s playbooks. Love it!AI Can Help Replicate Your Best Salespeople"We use AI on our sales calls. We’ll practice something and the sales guys would be setting appointments or doing coaching consultations. The AI listens to it. And if we’re practicing a certain thing and the sales person [doesn’t] do it..we talk about it…at the 10 o’clock huddle…So we’re using AI to monitor what we’re saying and how we’re saying it and then improving our conversion ratios hourly.”Imagine taking the tactics of your best salesperson, training ALL your salespeople to use those tactics, and monitoring them for improvement in real time.AI is taking a process that used to be very messy, time consuming and riddled with human biases, and making it cleaner, faster and data driven.Verl is also doubling down on his AI bet. He’s opening his in-house AI building system to other big experts. This might grow into a separate, sellable venture.Alan Weiss, the famed consulting expert, is working with Verl’s team to create an in-house AI trained on decades of Weiss’s best-selling books, articles and audio/video content. “Alan Intelligence" is up and working and opens up un-GPT’d brilliance to his subscribers.Is all this high risk? Considering Verl went from running a profitable coaching business to acquiring a company for a large chunk of change…essentially becoming a tech founder…I’d call that a high risk bet.But it’s definitely high-reward.If profit margins get bigger, and that allows Workman to outspend the competition for coaching leads, they might have an unassailable moat for the next 5-10 years.I’ll have more to share on how Verl is building his “revenue octopus” in a future edition.Want to go deeper? Click on the audio file above to listen to the AI part of the conversation, also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.Or Hit Reply and tell me what you’re seeing or doing with AI.Ask This:If AI made it possible to hire and quickly ramp up a “clone” of yourself, what would you have them do that would 10x your business?Quick Links & ResourcesWorkman Success SystemsVerl’s StoryA big thank you to Verl for being super open and generous with his time and insights! Make sure to connect with him (if you’re not already).And keep an eye out for an upcoming deep dive on AI, pulled from insights across all the conversations I’ve had this year with leaders, CEOs and insiders in real estate.Talk soon!-MattCEO - MicroFamousAuthor - MicroFamousPS Want your own mastermind-style platform like this? Check out our Done-for-You service. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rethoughtleaders.substack.com