Josh Cantwell:: Welcome back to accelerated investor. I’ve been joined by my good friend Mike Gleba, who was my chief marketing officer for a long, long time. Ten years inside of my companies. He’s now on his own, running his own businesses, helping his clients grow their ecommerce brands. And I wanted to welcome back Mike. Mike, I think this is our third podcast together.

Mike Gleba:: This is our third man. Third time’s a charm, right?

Josh Cantwell:: We got to do. Hell, yeah. So what’s going on today? What’s going on in your business? How’s the family? Tell me a little bit about what’s happening.

Mike Gleba:: The family is good. We are very much into sports again, and my son just made his baseball team for next year, which means that next summer, I’ll be pretty much on tour chasing 14 year old baseball players at that point. Nice. And business is good. How about you? How about your time and biz?

Josh Cantwell:: Same, dude. Yeah, family is good. We’re just getting back into the school system. So had, like, a two and a half hour volleyball practice last night and football and all that kind of stuff. And so one of the conversations we’re having in business right now is really around funnels, right? Like top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel marketing. And when Covid hit and things got really weird, you and I were working together, but we started to kind of pare down because I was making the pivot, right, from single family to multifamily, and I didn’t really want to be a real estate guru anymore in the single family house flipping space, because my passion was moving to commercial multifamily, and I was in that weird space, right, where I didn’t want to be someone’s guru if I wasn’t doing it.

Josh Cantwell:: Some of these guys, they clearly don’t do real estate anymore. They clearly are just gurus, but they act as if they still flip houses. I don’t know how they sleep at night, frankly, being a fake guru online. But when Covid hit, I’m like, we’re done with single family. We’re moving to multifamily. I didn’t feel like I was yet the expert that I should be in order to teach. So, really, for the past two or three years, we’ve had our existing list, and we really haven’t built any funnels. We really haven’t built any marketing funnels or brought on a lot of new people onto know followers or email marketing list.

Josh Cantwell:: Now, in the last month or two, we’ve really spent a lot of time. I work with a company called Internet Marketing Nerds. James Starr and Paul, and they’ve worked with tremendous personalities and guys like Tony Robbins and Patrick Bent, David, and all these amazing sort of superstar personalities. And we’ve been talking a lot about marketing. So I really haven’t had a marketing conversation, really for like two or three years of new marketing. So I wanted to bring you on the show and talk a little bit about some of the changes that you’ve seen in marketing, because you’re in marketing every day versus for me, I’m more in real estate every day.

Josh Cantwell:: And I’ve told my team I don’t want to be a real estate guru and a marketing guru anymore. I’m going to be a real estate expert. I’m going to be awesome at raising money and structuring capital and finding deals and buying these huge apartment buildings. And I’ve kind of let my marketing chops dissipate over the years. You have been leveling up your marketing chops the last three or four years. And so, Mike, why don’t you just talk for a second about your business and about marketing and what you do on a day to day basis for your clients, at least, so our audience understands kind of where you’re coming from as we talk about marketing.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah, awesome. So we help our clients, which are 95% ecommerce brands of physical products and 5% like what strategic real estate coach was, where they’re coaches and they have some sort of program or course, we have a couple of those, too. Those are fun because there’s no cost of goods sold and it’s just easier to make KPIs and profit versus physical product businesses are a little bit tougher because there’s a lot of operating costs just in the products.

Mike Gleba:: So we really do two things. My theory has always been like, let’s be awesome at one or two things instead of mediocre at 18. And I think a lot of agencies make that mistake, and there’s a lot of agencies that just grow into 18. But still, marketing changes so much. Right? Like, we know that. I think everybody who’s been involved knows that what worked last week may not work tomorrow. So you got to be on your game. So we do Facebook and Instagram ads, and then we do email marketing and we niche down into service. So just those two services, we’ll take on any e commerce client for the most part, if it makes sense.

Mike Gleba:: It’s really difficult and we still try from time to times. And then when we do it, we’re reminded of how hard it is if it’s a brand new brand and doesn’t have proof of concept yet. It’s really hard to go from no momentum to momentum. But if they’ve already got a little bit of momentum, we can definitely put gas on the fire and make things happen really fast. One of our clients just got a target deal and a Kohl’s deal and a Barnes and noble deal, and if you ask them, they’ll give us a ton of the credit for that. And the truth is, yes, we were a big part of that. But they also have an awesome product, which certainly makes marketing a lot easier.

Mike Gleba:: So, yeah, that’s what we do. We scale businesses using those two things.

Josh Cantwell:: Got it. Love it. So one of the conversations we’re having in our business is about, like, top of funnel, what we would consider awareness, right, where the market is seeing some of your free content, seeing a lot of your Instagram posts, Facebook posts, shorts and reels, and a lot of the free stuff at the super top of funnel, some of that could be paid as well. Different types of audiences, lookalike audiences, paid ads.

Josh Cantwell:: But really, there’s this new phenomenon, I guess, just that’s happened in the last year, really, with TikTok, where shorts and reels have become sort of the new awareness strategy, where you’re putting out content that could be literally 5 seconds to, let’s say, two minutes long, and then that’s become the super top of funnel, right? And then from there, people are getting into more of that middle of funnel where they’re watching longer podcasts like this one, or longer content videos. That could be five minutes to 20 minutes.

Josh Cantwell:: And then you have kind of super long form content, which could be sales letters, long emails, could be long form podcasts. It could be 45 minutes. And what we’ve been doing is we look at those kind of in phases. There’s kind of five steps, right? There’s top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, customer acquisition, and then a self liquidating offer where you acquire a customer, and then that customer buys a product and maybe some upsells, and it pays for your cost of advertising, and you make a profit.

Josh Cantwell:: There’s kind of five steps in there. I realized in our business, we were going, Mike, from long form podcasts, right, to, like, a $20,000 mastermind program. So that was steps.

Mike Gleba:: Oh, got it. Yeah.

Josh Cantwell:: A lot of stuff is missing in the middle. So that’s been working for the past couple of years. We’ve grown up a nice mastermind group of about 60 or so businesses that paid an upfront fee. It’s kind of a country club model where they pay an upfront fee and then they pay a monthly continuity for the rest of their lives as long as they want to stay in the program, just like a country club. But I’m also realizing like, wow, we’ve alienated a whole lot of people that maybe want content through shorts, reels, long form or short form content, and then maybe a product or two to just get familiar with what we’re doing, maybe $100 product to $500 product, $1,000 product before they realize, good God, I want to jump into this coaching and mastermind and partnering program. That’s $20,000 a whole lot missing.

Josh Cantwell:: So just to put some context around a full funnel for our audience, that’s a full funnel right from top of funnel awareness all the way down through everything I just talked about to the bottom and realize, wow, we’re never going to scale this thing if we just keep doing what we’re doing, right, long form podcasts, right to a big expensive program. We’ve got to do a lot of stuff in the middle. So that’s clearly a marketing mistake that we need to fix.

Josh Cantwell:: As you work with brands, as you work with companies like mine and others, what are some classic mistakes that you think that they’re making like we’ve made? And what are some things that you think are must haves in your mind to really build out a successful customer acquisition funnel?

Mike Gleba:: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we were working with a coach a month or two ago that had almost the exact opposite problem that you did. And we worked with them for a year. And what they were doing awesome, was acquisition on Facebook. So they were a skincare coach and they were selling 300 ish dollar product and they were doing a great job of it. But that’s all they had in their entire funnel. They had no mastermind, they had no coaching. And we told them like, hey, in some time, could be two months, could be two years, you’re going to run into some trouble.

Mike Gleba:: And that is so many people on Facebook have seen or have purchased and you have nothing else to sell them. Your cost per acquisition is going to go up, your profit is going to go down. It’s going to be a problem. And that day came and it was a problem. And honestly, the guy was a bit of a jerk, just in general sort of tough personality, right? And he’s like, I don’t want to have this I told you so conversation. And I was just kind of like, well, I did tell you so. We talked about it a while ago.

Mike Gleba:: So that was a huge mistake. And I see another one of our newer clients with that same problem in the sense that she’s killing it on acquisition and the way that she does it. We send traffic into a lead magnet and we get her email, get their email, and then we put them into a Facebook group. And she kind of runs the old school Jeff Walker launch formula using a Facebook group. So she does all of her talking in there, all of her content is in there. She does the pre launch, and she’s doing really well, too. It’s a smaller business, probably like, I don’t know, 700, $800,000 a year. But she’s in scale mode. She’s definitely hired better providers and she’s trying to grow it. She’s really sharp and really good at what she does.

Mike Gleba:: But she also doesn’t have a back end either. And it’s the same kind of situation because there’s always going to be that 5% or 10% or whatever of the audience who just wants to move fast. Like you or I probably wouldn’t buy an info product at this stage, but we would buy a high level consultant to just say, okay, tell me what to do. Follow up next week. Tell me what to do.

Josh Cantwell:: Right.

Mike Gleba:: So I know there’s two questions there. I think I answered one of them. What did I miss?

Josh Cantwell:: So one of the things you mentioned was just really, it sounds like parts of the funnel are missing, right?

Mike Gleba:: That’s right.

Josh Cantwell:: Somebody had low cost customer acquisition done well, but had nothing to upsell, no other programs to offer. And some people, like you and I will want those higher end programs. I was kind of making the opposite mistake, which is we really sell just super high end stuff between 10,000, $30,000 because I really only want to work with the really high level people. But you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of people that would dip their toe in the water.

Josh Cantwell:: Check out lower price programs and learn on their own. More of the. I’m going to do a self study program, if you will, at home. And I think the problem we’ve identified is that you’ve got to have multiple programs, multiple products at multiple levels to let various people enter your business at different levels. Some people are just going to want to start out with buying a $100,000 mercedes, right?

Josh Cantwell:: But other people want to start with a $500 a month lease on whatever the entry level model Mercedes is, right. The 300 or the 500 level versus buying the AMG. Some people will test out the Mercedes and then they’ll upgrade to the AMG, some dudes will just go for the AMG right off the rip. And so when I watch programs like tv programs, like whether it be shark tank or some of the other ones that have been out, MARCUS lamonas, LIKE, what I see them doing well is saying, okay, here’s an existing business that’s struggling, but they have a couple things they’re doing right, and then they come in and then they help Kind of add the cross sell the upsell, the experience.

Josh Cantwell:: Right. And I think that’s you’re, when you’re in the dirt running your company, that’s really hard to also be good at the marketing to market the company. That’s where mike, where people, you come in and you have the ability to kind of say, okay, I see your company. I don’t have to create your products for you. But from a marketing perspective, here’s what we have to add. Here’s what we’re missing.

Mike Gleba:: That’s right. Yeah. And to your point, I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it’s worth it. We’re an email marketing company, and we help other companies very successfully market through email. We haven’t sent an email to our own list and I don’t know how long. To your point, the shoemakers kids always have the worst shoes, right?

Josh Cantwell:: Yeah.

Mike Gleba:: We’re not great at marketing ourselves, but we’re amazing at marketing other businesses. So it’s just Kind of funny. There’s so much to it. LiKe you said, there’s so many different levers to pull. And I find that a lot of people just don’t sometimes understand the pure economics of their business. We always teach our ecommerce clients that it’s about lifetime value of a customer. And you might not be able to acquire a customer profitably if your cost of goods are really high.

Mike Gleba:: And if your product costs, say, $50 on your shopify store and your cost of acquisition is $25, that only leaves you $25 in margin. By the time you pay everything out, you might be breaking even on that. But if you have a product like, we’re going through this with a coffee brand now, where when he came to us, his cost per acquisition was on Facebook and Instagram was like $200, which is crazy. People have to buy a lot of coffee over and over and over again to hit that.

Mike Gleba:: We were able to change some landing pages, change some ads, do some things, and we got it down to a cost per acquisition of about $20. But he’s still net negative on that. If he sells two more times, he’s positive. So he needs to produce amazing coffee and work on the lifetime value of that customer. We did our job, but if he doesn’t do his job, then it makes it appear like it’s not going to work. Right. And it’s the same thing, I think, with a coaching business, too.

Mike Gleba:: If you sell right into the mastermind, then that’s awesome. You have great lifetime value. It probably didn’t cost you $20,000 to acquire that customer, right, right. But you need to sort of feed that, too. And that’s where that top of the funnel shorts and everything come in, because there are a lot of people who would probably dip their toe in the Water, spend 100, 200, $500 on an info product to see if they like you. Right. To see if the content is good, to see if it’s worth pursuing. And a lot of those people will grow up and want a mastermind group or need a mastermind group. I think there’s a certain level as an entrepreneur in business where info products don’t really help anymore.

Mike Gleba:: They do like we’re always learning, but it just requires a different mode of operating. And that’s where the mastermind stuff comes in and you got to lure those people in somehow, right? I know I just went down like three tangents, but did that make sense?

Josh Cantwell:: Yeah, no, for sure. Like, in our business where we’re trying to help other people grow their portfolio from residential single family duplexes and quads and then buy their first apartment building or scale their apartment portfolio, I sometimes make the mistake that I’m like, I’m just going to teach you how. I just bought this $20 million, 200 unit building. And then I’m hoping that you could unpack that, scale that backwards into a 20 unit building, right. That you could buy for 2 million.

Josh Cantwell:: Probably making a big mistake in saying, okay, people are going to understand, just chop a zero off the end of all the numbers, right. And it’s the same lesson, even though in my mind it is, it’s really not. And so there’s a lot of people that, a lot of people in our mastermind who are like, look, I’ve got 50 units of residential, 200 units of residential. I own a couple of small apartment buildings, but I want to keep growing and buying more.

Josh Cantwell:: And if they’re currently not in the mastermind, there’s no way for them to dip their toe in the water with us, other than listening to our podcasts, getting our emails, maybe seeing our post on social, maybe some of our paid ads when we do a live event, which is only three times a year, so there’s limited availability to engage with us in short form content or to buy something that is a home study course that they could do over a four or eight week period, learn a whole lot. Like when we used to sell 40k flips, right, Mike? We used to do a five week live coaching program that was live fulfillment.

Josh Cantwell:: And if people would go through all ten classes, all five weeks, by the end, they knew exactly how to flip a house, how to get the money, how to get the capital, how to find the deals, how to evaluate, how to fix them up, how to sell them, and the whole thing. And then a lot of those people were like, wow, that was such a great experience. Let me go to the actual live event, the three day live event, or, wow, that was such a great experience. I want to sign up for a coaching program.

Josh Cantwell:: And so we’re totally missing that whole piece of it now. No different than other brands where they’re like, hey, we only sell this really expensive coffee. Well, what else can I buy that’s a less expensive version, smaller amount, like organifi. Right? One of the companies I buy some products from, you could buy these big, giant tubs of nutritional supplements, green juice, red juice, yellow juice, whatever they call it.

Josh Cantwell:: And if you buy them all, they’re like $250. Or you can buy these little sleeves, the little sleeves, which are the one time pouch that you drop into a water bottle, and you could buy 20 of those sleeves for $30, and you can get a taste of the program. Right, right. So even a lot of investors that I work with that are doing multifamily, they’re like, hey, I barely know you, but I’m going to pitch you this $5 million apartment complex. Will you invest?

Josh Cantwell:: It’s like, well, what about all of the nurturing relationship building, letting them engage in some of your content, letting them engage in some of your stuff free at their own time, on their own dime, or their own time. And then they get used to it. And then they’re like, oh, I really like what I’m hearing, and I’m not being sold. So now I’m going to pay attention to the $5 million apartment complex.

Josh Cantwell:: Right? So just what are your thoughts on that, Mike? Your comments on the warm up, the relationship building, the small bites, the small pieces, the relationship building. Maybe they buy a product that’s inexpensive before we just kind of swing for the fences. Right? So important.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah. And we talk about this a lot with our ecommerce clients and using the coffee guy as an example, we’re kind of talking now, like, well, where do you want to go with your business from here? He’s a really small business. He’s a startup, and he’s competing with black rifle coffee. And coffee is everywhere, right? What I think black rifle coffee did so well is they’re not really selling coffee. They’re selling their community, right? Like, they target a very specific, politically charged up person, and people want to wear their shirt. People want to be part of that. People want to show off that they drink that coffee, right. Because it’s more of a statement than anything.

Mike Gleba:: And it’s about building a brand, right? So the coffee guy needs to really stop focusing on how do I sell more coffee, but how do I build a unique brand to sell more coffee? And the way that he does that is by taking some sort of position and being somebody different in the marketplace. So, yeah, the shorts and stuff like that, what I love about those is you could take one of your podcasts or one of your events or anything that you’re doing and turn that into a lot of content pieces, right? And there’s probably, we could talk about AI if you want to, but there’s probably some AI software now that can help produce that stuff more at scale.

Mike Gleba:: But yeah, email is still, in my opinion, like the best nurturing. Every year email dies, right? Like, we hear it. Every year email is dead. Ryan Dice probably been saying that, like, making fun of it, saying it for years, and it’s still like a massive driver to everything. Text too, though. Text is important too. But yeah, all of those things are incredibly important. And that’s really what we do on the email side of our business. It’s like we obtain.

Mike Gleba:: Remind me to tell you about a couple of other cool things we’re doing with email now that might be interesting to what you’re doing, but we obtain the email address or phone number, and then over time, those people will definitely purchase something. Some people just need to see things seven times before they buy, even at a lower price point. That needs to happen.

Josh Cantwell:: Yeah, perfect, Mike. So let’s talk about that. So we talked a little bit, like, high level about different funnels and what people need to build a funnel, whether it’s for an ecommerce brand or selling physical products, whether it’s for a coaching brand, whether it’s for investors, for your multifamily apartment buildings. Like we talked about, top of funnel, middle funnel conversion, giving them experiences. But let’s pivot for a second, and I want to kind of interview you more about the latest and greatest marketing strategies, whether it’s AI, what’s new with email marketing, what’s kind of best practices with text messaging, maybe some little nuggets that our audience can actually go back and start using in the next couple of weeks, month or less.

Josh Cantwell:: So your expertise again is in Facebook and Instagram ads, SMS and email marketing. Let’s talk about that for a second. Let’s talk about email marketing because we do still have a fairly big email list that’s very active. We have over 75,000 people. We get almost a 25% open rate. We send tons of content out. So what is the latest and greatest? What are some email marketing strategies that you think are must dos and some of the latest and greatest things that are working.

Mike Gleba:: So for email, there’s two that I absolutely love and I’m going to give you the name of the apps. And they work for ecommerce businesses for sure. I don’t know if they necessarily work with non ecommerce businesses, but I’m 100% certain that there is like a competitor to these that will work. And I can do some research for you. But the first one that we use is called open send and this is anonymous email retargeting. So if I go to your website now and I don’t give you my email address, I’m gone. Right.

Mike Gleba:: But if you have opensend installed on your site, it will get my email address and then you can drop me an email. And that’s a little bit creepy, right?

Josh Cantwell:: Whoa.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah. So I go to your site, I give you no contact information, I bounce, and then 45 minutes later I get an email that basically says like, hey, you were just on our site.

Josh Cantwell:: Totally creepy.

Mike Gleba:: A little aggressive, but you can definitely throttle the aggression. So you can set it up. So only send anonymous emails to people who have visited my site, say three times in a week or twice in a day or a particular page a couple of times. Because in the ecommerce world, if somebody visits a product page like three times and doesn’t buy, we probably just need to show them a better offer or something to push them over the fence. Right.

Mike Gleba:: I do believe open send will work on a non shopify site. So that’s the first one I would recommend everybody do. It’s not 100% matched. So, like, if you send 100 people to the site, you’re not going to get all 100 of them, but you might get 70 or 60 or something like that.

Josh Cantwell:: If I’m a real estate investor and I put this open send on my site and I have a site that has my portfolio and it has content around our multifamily investing opportunities. And I put some content out, let’s say, on social media. People are clicking through that content, visiting our website and I don’t know who they are. Right. They’re poking around the Internet and they end up on my site. They show up on my site, let’s say twice a week.

Josh Cantwell:: I can use opensen to essentially gather their email address and then send them an email back that says, hey, I saw you on our website, we’re looking for more information about investing.

Mike Gleba:: That’s right. Exactly.

Josh Cantwell:: Wow.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah. And it’s really cool. And there’s some even other ones that will get you like. So the main application for Opensend is direct to consumer ecommerce brands, but they do have a business version of it for b two b. But I think there might even be some more sophisticated b two b ones which will link you immediately to the LinkedIn profile, maybe send a connection request, do all of the things and you can build automations from there.

Mike Gleba:: But I don’t have ROI stats for you in front of me, but we’re currently running open send with about ten of our clients and we’re absolutely crushing it. We’re picking up thousands upon thousands of dollars in revenue that they wouldn’t get otherwise.

Josh Cantwell:: Really? That’s phenomenal. How about you mentioned there was another app too, you, opensend was one. What was the second one?

Mike Gleba:: The other one is similar. It’s called post pilot and same idea, anonymous retargeting, but with direct mail. So we’ll build like a nurture sequence. In ECom we call them flows. Somebody will come to the site, they’ll give their email address or maybe not give their email address. There’s two ways I can explain this, but let’s say that they do give an email address. They go all the way through the nurture sequence.

Mike Gleba:: We tell them the brand story, we show them the offer, we show them the product and we will send them a postcard in the mail. And that does really well. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that yet. There are definitely a lot of brands outside of Ecom that do this as well. I’ll occasionally get postcard, but I don’t think a lot of people are doing it, which to me direct mail is as old as can be, right? But we went away from it for a while.

Mike Gleba:: Now I think is a great time to stay present and not in inboxes or text messages or whatever. Also you can do the anonymous retargeting version of it so I could hit your site today, not give you any of my information. Postpilot will automatically reverse append who I am, my mailing address, and drop me a postcard in the mail.

Josh Cantwell:: Wow. So I would imagine it would work really good for an ecommerce brand where you would send them in the mail, a coupon.

Mike Gleba:: Right.

Josh Cantwell:: And they were going to buy a shirt, like they were going to buy golf shirt or they were going to buy, I’m looking around some sort of picture frames, whatever they were going to buy, and all of a sudden they’re like just going to click away from it. I got busy. I didn’t really want to buy it in that moment. All of a sudden, six days later, four days later, I get either an email using open send or a postcard using postpilot with a coupon. Now I’m like, that’s right.

Josh Cantwell:: Now I can get this for ten to 20% off. And I was already kind of interested in this product.

Mike Gleba:: That’s right.

Josh Cantwell:: What’s the likelihood that I buy now? I buy now I’m on their email list, and now I’m a customer. Now they’ve acquired me as a customer. Now if I have a good experience with our product, now they can start to message me, whether it’s through retargeting ads, Facebook and Instagram, more direct mail, email marketing, sms. You kind of unleash the weapon with all the different marketing strategies to get me to buy more.

Mike Gleba:: Right? That’s exactly right.

Josh Cantwell:: Silly.

Mike Gleba:: Love it. What I love about the postcard thing is when you open your email box, you probably have a bunch of messages from a bunch of people. And if you’re subscribed to a bunch of lists, it’s all there, right? Maybe you have some filters set up, but when you go get your mail, a nice, well designed postcard definitely stands out amongst, what, eight pieces of mail or something like that, versus an inbox with, who knows, thousands for some people, right?

Mike Gleba:: So, yeah, it works really well. And I think that that’s applicable to any business. It doesn’t have to be Ecom could be like, imagine anybody who comes to the Freeland site automatically also gets a postcard. And you can build logic into it as well. Like hit certain pages so you know that they’re interested in certain things or stayed on a certain page for a certain amount of time. So you can kid your message, it won’t be perfect every time, but still, it’s just another way to stand out in the crowded marketplace, right?

Josh Cantwell:: Yeah. I mean, imagine all the investors that are out there that have money to invest, and they’re looking at different apartment sites, listening to lots of different podcasts. They end up on your site, you capture them through opensen and through postpilot. And now all of a sudden you’ve got their email and you’re emailing to them, you’ve got their physical mail, you’ve reverse appended it, you’re sending out postcards and emails to those people, and now you’re feeding them additional content, maybe back to some more podcasts, and all of a sudden you have an investment opportunity.

Josh Cantwell:: You build a relationship with them and then they invest. Right. Because it’s a lot of times it’s not about the initial contact, it’s about the follow up.

Mike Gleba:: That’s right.

Josh Cantwell:: And Mike, those are two phenomenal ways, phenomenal ways to capture and follow up unbelievable stuff in the sake of time. Mike, what’s another strategy? Maybe that you think maybe around Facebook ads or Instagram ads or if we want to pivot to AI, what do you think is happening with marketing relative to AI and some of the efficiencies that are being gained because of AI? I don’t know if you have another kind of quick tip around, something else you want to touch on if we want to pivot to AI real quick.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah, let’s talk about AI really quick, because I guess in some ways it freaks me out a little bit. And I think once you understand its potential, I listen to you. Remember Ryan Dice and Perry and digital marketer Ryan and Roland have a new company, scalable, and they have a podcast called business lunch. And I listen to it regularly. It’s a really great podcast for entrepreneurs. And I was listening to an episode the other day about AI, and Roland and Ryan were talking and something felt off to me. Now, I’ve known those guys since 2010, so I know how they talk, I know how they interact.

Mike Gleba:: At the end of the episode, Ryan reveals that the whole episode was done by not them. Like, Ryan didn’t even know the episode happened. So Ryan had a conversation with Roland about AI in their voices, totally talking to each other for 45 minutes, and Ryan didn’t even know about it. So they explain how they did it on another episode, but essentially they use a handful of, like, chat, GPT wrote the content this particular voice matching service created, like Ryan’s voice and Roland’s voice. And then the next thing that they used set up the discussion between the two of, so, like, you and I could totally fake podcast number four. And neither one of us had anything to do with it. But other than our very best friends or people that really know how you and I talk, nobody’s going to know.

Josh Cantwell:: That is filthy.

Mike Gleba:: It’s super filthy.

Josh Cantwell:: I wonder what people’s reaction were to that. Did they feel, like, duped and mad that they listened to it? They thought it was great, and then they’re like, ryan wasn’t even like, do you feel like, weird and slimy and upset? Or do people think it’s like, wow, that’s unbelievably cool?

Mike Gleba:: I’ll bet it’s a little bit of both, right? Because there’s going to be some point in the not so distant future where it’s going to be really difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not, right. And that episode is a perfect example because it’s hard to tell. There’s a slight robot. I’ll send you the link, or you can put it in the show notes, but I’ll send a link where they talk about it and then the link where they explain how they did it. But yeah, super interesting.

Mike Gleba:: So there’s things that you can do, like on the Facebook ad side with AI to produce shorts of yourself at scale where you didn’t really do totally the technology to fake. And I don’t want to use the word fake, but that is what it is. You can use this technology to produce content of yourself speaking at scale. So if you have a team behind you in the right applications, you can be like, hey, I need 300 videos to talk about this by next Friday. And let’s run some ad spend on it and see how they do. So that’s, stuff like that is getting really wild.

Josh Cantwell:: Wow, that’s unbelievable. I was talking to Glenn Leto, my partner in the apartments, and he is really involved in the Columbus, Ohio sort of technology council. He’s on a bunch of boards down there. And he said, now when they go, the conversation used to be around these big technology companies, Facebook, Amazon, intel, the new chip factory, Honda EVs, this plant, he said last time, all the same companies, all they talked about was AI.

Josh Cantwell:: And he was blown away because the whole conversation pivoted from technology, the way we think of it, like adding technology to a car to make it an electric vehicle so we can be more green, more environmentally friendly. And they’re going to build this new plant in the northeast Columbus suburbs. And then what was the housing? We’re going to need so much housing to support the workers and the people that are going to live there because of this new plant.

Josh Cantwell:: And then all of a sudden he showed up and it was like the whole conversation runs around, how are these companies introducing AI into everything, not only from manufacturing to customer acquisition into housing and everything else that goes along with it. So that’s unbelievably strange and weird. The question is, it’s here. Are you going to fight the curve and hope that AI doesn’t blow up the world?

Josh Cantwell:: Or are you going to embrace it and use it as an entrepreneur and have your business be bigger, better because of it? There’s going to be a point where if you’re not adopting it, everybody else is adopting it and you’re screwed. You’re a worse entrepreneur. You have a bigger uphill battle to fight because you’re not using it. That’s where we’re at. Now. I’m not an expert in AI, but I’m also slowly adopting. It’s not like something that I really need for my apartment buildings at the moment, but I also know that five years from now, the resident experience inside of our apartments could be drastically different from filling out an application to moving into a unit to some of the amenities that we could offer and who’s using the amenities and what are they willing to pay for for those amenities?

Josh Cantwell:: All of that tracking because of AI. So we’ll see what happens with that. It’s wild stuff.
Mike Gleba:: Yeah. In terms of real estate, I think there’s a million reasons why real estate investing is a great business. Here’s another one, knowledge workers are going to have, even ceos. There’s going to be AI that can make better decisions than ceos to some degree. And there isn’t going to be an AI who can fix a toilet better than a human, right? At least I don’t think so. So the management companies and the contractors and the rehabbers and all of those trades are probably going to be in really great shape. And if you’re running that business, I feel like you’re in great shape because I saw, for instance, an AI app that came out this week, came across my radar that does exactly what my email marketers on my team do, that make a really great wage. It will go through the shopify history and determine what campaigns have been sent and what worked and what products are selling and create everything from the decision, the strategy, the copy, the design.

Mike Gleba:: It will do everything that an employee does. I don’t know how well it works. It’s brand new. But even if it doesn’t work well, now, the fact that that’s out there, give it a year, right? A lot of these programs get smarter with use. That’s AI, right? Yeah. The message to my team is like, hey, you need to learn how to dance with these things. We need to figure out how to use them to make your job better so it doesn’t eliminate you if it sucks. That’s the message we want to tell our clients.

Mike Gleba:: If it’s great, then we want to figure out how we can use it to just be better and get more done. So totally. Very interesting time for all of us, for sure, in business. Yeah.

Josh Cantwell:: Fantastic stuff. And as we kind of wrap up this episode, what I just heard you say was that I want to have a robot take my man.

Mike Gleba:: That’s right. I think about that all the time. Like, oh, man, some robot going to come in here and just take over. Like that movie with Will Smith. It’s super old at this point, but I. Robot, right. That’s what I feel like we could be going through right now. It’s wild.

Josh Cantwell:: Oh, my gosh. That’s another reason for the first Amendment. Or the second amendment is the one including the guns. Probably need to keep that one around if we’re going to have robots.

Mike Gleba:: There you go.

Josh Cantwell:: Right?

Mike Gleba:
: Yeah. Awesome.

Josh Cantwell:: Let’s keep some weapons later on. Mike, listen, fantastic stuff today. Fun as always. Let’s keep doing these. We’ll keep hammondagging it and sharing content with our listeners. Mike, tell our audience where they can find you, where they can find your agency, whether they can engage with you online.

Mike Gleba:: Yeah. 110 media on e. 10 media. If you want to email me, my email address is Mike at 100 and tenmedia.com. But, yeah, if you need any marketing advice, feel free to drop me a line. I’ll point you in the right direction.

Josh Cantwell:: Awesome stuff, Mike. Thanks for joining us today on accelerated investor. We’ll see you next time.

Mike Gleba:: Thanks, Josh.

[CLOSING]

Josh Cantwell: Well, guys, there you have it. I really enjoyed that episode with Mike. Man, being responsible to others is such a motivator. Giving to others, I feel so good about myself, right? Such and such a good place when I give to others. Number three, making a new decision. I remember when I was diagnosed with cancer and came out of my hospital bed and had an opportunity to restart my life, I had to relearn how to eat, I was not going to go back and redo my life the way I had been doing it, so making that decision. And then finally, as Caleb and I mentioned, don’t quit.

Guys, listen, everybody can do this business. Everybody can be successful. Everybody can be a multimillionaire with real estate. Keep getting your education, keep listening to podcasts like this. But most of all, go execute, raise capital, make offers. Don’t quit. We’ll see you next time on Accelerated Investor.