205: How 8-Figure Founders Use AI & Automation To Scale Faster with Matt Leitz

Too many business owners are trying to use AI as a shortcut to fire people instead of using it to multiply the output of their best people. And that mindset is killing their growth.

Matt Leitz has been building automation systems for 7- and 8-figure companies long before AI went mainstream. He’s seen inside the machines powering 9-figure brands… and the truth is simple: automation isn’t optional anymore. If you want to scale, you need a business that compounds output without requiring more of your time.

Matt breaks down how to use AI as leverage — not as a crutch. He shares where founders get stuck, which systems create the highest ROI, how to turn funnels profitable even when ads lose money on day one, and how to build automations that drive revenue for years.

If you’ve been trying to figure out how to integrate AI without breaking your business, this conversation will completely reset your framework.

Mic Drop Moments

• “You can get to a million dollars and not spend advertising dollars at scale. You can get to a million bucks with referrals and just running a good business. You get to a million dollars by people walking by your building.” – Matt Leitz

• “If you can’t make it work on paper, you can’t make it work in the real world.” – Matt Leitz

• “Every one of these sales is a golden egg, but the thing that’s the golden goose is your marketing budget.” – Matt Leitz

• 00:36 You’re Thinking About AI All Wrong
• 01:54 AI Agents and Chatbots
• 04:24 Start With Strategy, Not Technology
• 07:09 Why You Shouldn’t Automate Reporting
• 10:22 Prompt Engineering is Easier Than You Think
• 15:04 How To Build & Leverage Custom GPTs
• 19:41 Collaborating With AI For Better Results
• 26:10 AI Tool that Boosts Sales Rep Performance
• 29:06 Why Tool-Hopping Slows Your Growth
• 30:50 Why Automation Is Required To Scale Big
• 34:35 Are Traditional Marketing Funnels Dead?
• 40:03 When to Focus ON or IN the Business
• 44:42 The Real Path To Scaling Ad Spend
• 53:03 Lead Offers vs. Maximizer Offers
• 01:01:06 Protecting Your Time Above Everything Else

Brad Weimert: Let’s rock, man. Matt Leitz, dude, it’s so good to see you. I have known you forever, like 20 years or something at this point, which is wild. I’ve watched you build and run multiple seven and eight-figure businesses. Most recently, years ago, you started BotBuilders and you’ve done automation and systems for your own companies and huge brands that are nine-figure-plus companies, well before the traditional era of AI. So, I’m excited to catch up with you in general, but I want to talk to you about all things including AI and get your take on it because you’ve got unique context to it.

Matt Leitz: So, the thing that I really want to just kind of say is we’re going to talk about AI, but the thing that you brought up to me that I think is so spot on is people are so sick of hearing about AI, and I’m in a way, tired of talking about AI and the way that everybody’s thinking about it because I just feel like the whole context around it and the way that people are approaching it is so bassackwards that I can’t even, I’m at this point where it’s like, I feel like I got to go out and just make a public service announcement that if you were a small business owner and you’re trying to figure out how do you use artificial intelligence so that you can fire people, you’re doing it all wrong.

And I just really want to, if there’s anything that I can advocate, and we’ll talk about the tips and where to implement it and do all those kind of things. Now is the time that I feel businesses need to be expanding. I would use AI in the context of who is the next human being that I’m going to hire and how can I have that human being produce five times more by using artificial intelligence? Because now’s the time to be hiring and growing as fast as possible.

Brad Weimert: I love that. So, it’s a little daunting, but one of the things that I’ve heard you say is that you feel like business owners are self-employed with assistance as opposed to CEOs.

Matt Leitz: Yeah, and we’re all there, and I don’t want to act like I’m completely away from the business. But really, when it comes to AI, there’s two levels to look at it, if you really were to break it down in this most simple form. There’s the AI that you’re using as a tool to help you be more productive or that your team members are using as a tool to make them more productive, ChatGPT, AI video tools, AI image tools, all these, they’re amazing. And then there are AI tools that you can use to work for you, right? 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And this is where you get into AI agents, into voice AI, into chatbots. And I think that there’s not enough emphasis put on the ladder and because at the end of the day, we’re all working, and it’s obviously, our goal here, I’m proud to say this, Brad, just on a personal level, this past year, made more money than ever before, but also took more vacation time, which was really exciting. And I know that that’s, for a lot of people on here, a really big deal.

But we’re all hustling, we’re all working. And the higher percentage of your time or your key people’s time that you can have invested into things that are going to keep working, like in perpetuity that are working around the clock and automation and these agents and chatbots. The more time that’s invested into that, the more leverage that you’re going to create. And it’s shocking how many business owners, I mean, even business owners that are beyond a million that still have not put in the most basic of automations. And I can understand why, because it does seem daunting, but the reality of it is not nearly as difficult as you might think. And it’s the thing that produces the best ROI in terms of, I mean, not only time and money, and I mean, there’s autoresponders that we set up 15 years ago that are still generating income today, right?

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s back out of that. So, that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you about this stuff in general and where we are, aside from just being entertained by you and wanting to catch up, is that you have built these super complex automation systems well before AI. So, when we look at how we automate systems in business, that’s been there for decades, right? And it’s been there longer than that. It’s just like the last couple decades we’ve had these rules engines that we can build. And that’s still the framework for how we architect these things. But now, they have the capacity to think for themselves in some way, sort of, right? So, when you think about putting systems in place today, specifically when AI is tied into it, where does somebody start? Like, what elements of the business do you feel like are the low-hanging fruit for a mid-seven-figure entrepreneur or earlier? And how does that change as you grow?

Matt Leitz: Great question. So, where you start is by not focusing on the technology. I think what happens is we, okay, hey, I got my CRM system, or I’ve got my ManyChat, or whatever the system is and you get into it and you start looking at all the features and how to use all the rules. And then what happens is now, you’ve put yourself in the box. And what’s really exciting about these times, especially with AI, is that you can literally do anything that you can imagine. I mean, it’s very rare that we’re like, oh, we can’t do that technically.

So, I think it’s sort of the lost art of pulling out a dang notebook, going to the whiteboard, and really just kind of penciling out what is it that we’re trying to achieve. And to answer your question in terms of where should you be doing this, there’s three things that really matter is how are you going to generate more leads? How are you going to make more sales? And then, how are you going to better support your people? So, just start with that very, very broad framework. Sit down and go, okay, what are some creative ways that I can get more people into this?

And then once I’ve got people into this, what are some creative ways? I mean, as simple as, okay, let’s add a text message on the third day that goes out that says, hey, just wanted to touch base and see if we could help you out. Would it be of value to you to set up an appointment with one of my best people? All right. And the response just triggers an AI, and the AI books an appointment. You could add that.

And even if you didn’t know what you’re doing and you had to stumble around, I mean, we’re talking, like, clumsy with zero tech skills, you got that set up in a couple hours. And what’s the value of that? That thing can run for years, and you’ve now got appointments that are being booked on autopilot. So, if you were to start by thinking of the technology, you might limit yourself because now, you’re like, oh, I can do this or I can’t, no, you can do whatever the heck you want to do. Figure out what you want to do, and then figure out how to do it.

Brad Weimert: So, I’m a huge proponent of that in general. In fact, one of the things that we talk about internally at EasyPay Direct are defining, even when it comes to reports and dashboards, defining what the reporter dashboard is for, who’s supposed to use it, and what you’re supposed to get out of it because everybody’s now defaulted to allowing the platforms to do an AI-generated description. I’m like, listen, that defeats the whole f*cking purpose here. I’m like, I don’t care what the system thinks this dashboard is. You need to think through the intention of it before you create it, so we all know what we’re looking at. Now…

Matt Leitz: I have to add this. When it comes to reporting in automation, it’s funny because I’m just the AI guy, I’ve been the automation person as you know forever. But there’s a lot of times where I will intentionally say, we are not going to automate this. And one of those things is reporting because what happens is, data’s only as good as it’s acted upon and, okay, great, now our reports are all automated and they just show up in this dashboard. Guess what? Not only do they get looked at a lot less, I physically love the act of whoever’s in charge of this particular stat, having to log their happy butt into the program, go and copy and paste it, right? I mean, it’s like, the act of doing that is creating this awareness because it doesn’t matter that the number is reported, it matters that the number is heading in the correct direction. So, that’s just one of those things where I say automate almost everything when it increases and improves an experience.

But that’s one of those things that’s like, they’re fighting me now to automate our stuff. Like, Matt, we’re doing tons of millions. We got to, we have to, right? And that’s, Brad, I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself, right? I think where you get in trouble is you start making decisions on I have to, or once I’m at this size of business, or you’ve watched me fail several times over the years. It’s like, oh, we’re BoardGames.com. We have to sell board games with an e-commerce site. Well, we have to have a warehouse. We have to do this. When in reality, sometimes just down and dirty just gets the job done.

Brad Weimert: Well, the copy and paste for accountability is a huge component. A buddy, who I think you know too, Ryan Deiss, is known now and he’s been pitching this construct for the last several years of having a single spreadsheet as a dashboard, and all management has to log in and log into the spreadsheet, their metric, every week. And yeah, he’s very clear on that. And it’s sort of a red, yellow, green proposition of which direction are we trending. And he wants it that simple and he wants that simple for visibility and accountability and he wants people to log in for accountability.

Matt Leitz: Love that.

Brad Weimert: So, I’m totally with you there. Let’s back out of reporting because you mentioned clarity going into the automation side of things. One of the things that I struggle with, and I think a lot of people do, is they don’t know what the tools are capable of and they don’t know exactly how to use them. And so, very often people use the tools to think, right? So, they play with the automation platform to figure out what happens and they can’t quite get there, but while they’re playing with it, they’re like, oh, sh*t, I can do this? And that’s how they discover or think through the process. So, how do you think about sort of approaching those tools versus trying to get a lot of clarity on the front end?

Matt Leitz: No, I agree. And it’s both directions, right? Because I mean, they will give you ideas when you’re in there. I think the number one thing is just to encourage people to get in there and do it. There’s a big difference between what I would consider to be technology, any kind of coding or programming and these automation tools. I mean, they’re all drag and drop at this point. And the other beauty of it is that it’s shocking how smart ChatGPT and Claude are at using these tools. So, you’re now, I mean, and I think that’s one of the things that it’s kind of an unlock that a lot of people who are using ChatGPT, but to get it to the next level is like, use AI to use AI, I mean. So, it’s like, hey, I’m trying to– I mean, n8n, for example, is definitely the highest level, greatest automation platform ever created. If you’re not familiar with n8n, it’s just imagine like a Zapier or a tool that does integrations but on steroids because it can do anything you can flipping imagine, right? And…

Brad Weimert: Pretty technical, though.

Matt Leitz: It is, it is. Now, do I recommend that somebody go learn n8n? Not really, right? But it’s just good to know if you– like, I mean, now, Brad, this reminds me of way back in the day, like, when you’re first an entrepreneur and you’re so kind of ignorant, but you just want to do everything and all these ideas and like, now, you can finally do it. But take a program like n8n, and there are a million people out there using programs like this. You don’t have to learn how to do it. But what’s cool is if you wanted to, right, like Brad’s point, it’s very technical, all right, well, guess what? If I had to log into this n8n, which is this, it’s a drag and drop, but there’s a lot of code, there’s a lot of JavaScript, there’s a lot of all this kind of stuff, and I had to learn how to do that by myself, it would take me forever, right?

But guess what? I logged into n8n, this tool that I’ve never seen. I just understood the basic premise of it. And I logged into ChatGPT and I said, “Hey, ChatGPT, I want to do this, da da da da da.” And I literally just typed out what I wanted to do, and it gave me the code that I needed for n8n. You copy that code over to n8n and something that I would’ve sat there and taken forever to learn was just done in an instant. And so, if you just kind of step back, and it’s not to say that don’t learn n8n, let somebody else do it, but for example, custom GPTs, I’m sure a lot of people on here have at least heard the concept of custom GPTs or maybe made a custom GPT. Is it worth explaining super quick, just in case?

Brad Weimert: Sure, yeah. I think that the term GPT has been thrown around since the beginning of ChatGPT and it’s confused people a little bit. And also, ChatGPT’s architecture around like a custom GPT or a project inside of ChatGPT or a workspace for a whole company, I think, a lot of people aren’t clear on how to use those. And by the way, the only reason I know how to use them is because I f*cking asked ChatGPT.

Matt Leitz: And you’re right, exactly. All right. And if they take nothing away from this episode except for that, right, is like, it’s so funny because I teach people AI, and now when I teach people AI, I say, this is going to take about 43 seconds. If you want to do something, you just tell ChatGPT what you want to do. This is it, right? Here’s what I want to do. What do you need from me? That’s your prompt. And anybody, I mean, I hate to say this, I know you have a lot of smart people on here. Prompt engineering, it’s kind of a flipping joke. What it really comes down to these days is knowing what you want to do. So, it’s like, you having your brain that you can elevate and think as a business person because you don’t need to have a perfect prompt when you go to ChatGPT. So, we’re going to talk, I’m going to just sort out everything you said about ChatGPT, right?

So, there’s a thing called GPTs, right, which basically allows you to create your own sort of pseudo-software in ChatGPT and all it does. Okay? And this is it. This is literally it. It basically gives you two functions, okay? It gives you an additional prompt, a box that’s labeled instructions. And literally, this is exactly the same way that you develop AI-powered software, right? It’s cool because you can kind of make your own thing inside ChatGPT that has the same exact behavior as something that you were to code.

So, in this instruction box, you can put a prompt and it used to be kind of limited. Now, it’s long and you can do pretty much anything. And with this prompt, you can give directives as to how you want this custom GPT to behave and what you want it to do. I’ll give you a perfect example. Very often, I’m writing scripts for sales, for social media, for ads. And so, I go, okay, well, I’m tired of writing these scripts, so I’m going to train ChatGPT on how to do this. Okay? So, the first thing is to create a prompt that gives instructions. And we’ll talk more about what that looks like. But the instructions ended up being, hey, you’re doing this. We want to do this in five phases. The first phase is going to be coming up with the hook, and the second phase is going to be this, right? And really, just all of these instructions, and we’ll talk about how to create these instructions.

And then the second component of this is anything that you want to upload. All right? Any examples that you want to give it. So, this could be documents, PDF files, spreadsheets, you name it. Okay? And then there’s a few other things, you can add buttons, and you can do this, but just imagine what you’re building is an interface that’s exactly like ChatGPT. In fact, it is ChatGPT, right? When somebody shows up to use your custom GPT, they’re using ChatGPT, but the only difference is, is they’re using ChatGPT that you have programmed with your instructions in the instruction prompt and that you’ve trained with anything that you’ve uploaded into the system. So, again, what are you creating? All you’re doing is just creating an interface on ChatGPT that can do anything that you can imagine, right?

I’ve got another one that’s a book summarizer. I don’t read books, so I’m like, I want to have the perfect book summarizer. So, I got down to the scientific of exactly how I want to summarize the books, right? I’ve got another one that takes copy that’s been written by ChatGPT and it runs it through ChatGPT and makes it so that it’s undetectable as being AI, right? So, just imagine, anything that you can imagine, you can build into a custom GPT. Now, that’s great, but that sounds very complicated because how am I going to write these complex instructions? Well, Brad nailed it. How do you write these instructions? You don’t. You let ChatGPT write the instructions, right? So, I just go to ChatGPT and say, hey, ChatGPT, I want to create a custom GPT, and my goal is to blank, right? My goal is to have it write scripts, use my stuff. I wanted to upload. All right, what do you need from me? And just basically go back and forth with ChatGPT, and literally, it will give you exactly what you need for you to copy and paste that information into instructions and go create your own custom GPT.

And it is just mind boggling what you can create by just leaning on ChatGPT to tell you. And even if you don’t know how to set up the custom GPT, right? Just say, hey, I don’t even know how to do it. It’ll just tell you. Okay, can you just make this really easy for me? Sure. Go and copy and paste this. Click on this button, paste it in there, all right, and you’re done. So, it’s a really, really exciting thing. If there’s any process that you’re going to run or your team’s going to run or whatever it is, just know that you now have the capability to train AI to do that functionality exactly how you want. And you can get it done in an hour, two hours, and you can create magic.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that most things in life and in business, the vast majority of people abdicate responsibility with these tools instead of effectively collaborating with them. And so, I see people outsourcing their thinking and really, it stops because then they hear what we just said, they tell ChatGPT, then they copy and paste. And I think, for me, my experience both for our internal applications and for other elements of the business that we’re consistently working on, we have to be iterating. And you have to take the output. And we know that all of the LLMs hallucinate on some level.

You also have to know that even if you tell the best copywriter in the world to write a sales page for you, you’re still going to have to read the f*cking sales page. You still have to review it and say, does this match my brand? Does this match my language that I want to use, right? Is this exactly what I want? So, like, that last 5%, call it, or last 10 is a big deal. And sometimes, those 5% or 10% can be the difference between actually getting you the outcome you want or not.

Matt Leitz: The keyword there was collaborate, right? When I said that you can do this in an hour, the truth is you could do it in two and a half minutes. Like, you could literally go, ChatGPT, and say, hey, I want a custom GPT that’s going to write scripts, write the instruction prompt for me, right? It would give you the instruction prompt, you go and paste it in. But I will get in this long, long, like, it is a collaboration. It really is. And the thing is about hallucinating, it’s…

Brad Weimert: It’s only fun when there’s mushrooms involved.

Matt Leitz: Right. We’re going to try to deviate from that path. But here’s the reality of it, is that when you create these things with ChatGPT and it’s really not a matter of hallucinating, it’s a matter of challenging, right? And yes, does it make mistakes, but it’s not like what you used to be, right? Remember when ChatGPT was new? It’d just be like, just tell you that the capital of Ohio was Cleveland. It would just do weird stuff like that. It’s not as bad as it used to be, right? It’s not saying you shouldn’t fact check it, but the thing is, is that, it doesn’t always do its best work the first time. And simply remembering to, whenever it gives you a piece of work, if you literally just did this, you say, I’m going to challenge you. How can you make that better? Do another version. Okay, I want to challenge you one more time. Do it even better so that it’s the absolute most perfect prompt that’s ever been written. And every single time, it will get better. So, just kind of don’t accept the very first thing that it gives you and just challenge it to keep getting better. And if you just do that, you will get better outputs at ChatGPT.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point, that there is a delineation between hallucination and just subpar work, right? And it might not even be subpar by the way. There is hallucination where it does weird things and it gives you a statement and states it as fact when it’s not, right? It read an article somewhere and thinks it’s fact. But the other side is just optimizing the output, and that can be done, like you said, by challenging it or by human intervention, which is like, hey, sometimes, I want to change the prompt to customize it exactly how I want it, right? And that’s part of the process.

Matt Leitz: And those kind of things can be caught in real time with your collaboration. Another thing that I don’t think a lot of people do is to– and I don’t use Claude as much, but I’m sure, all the LLMs are very, very similar, is to go into the settings and to set up your– because that’s another level of prompting that you have is the system wide prompting. And you can have ChatGPT write a prompt, right, that you put into those settings that’s going to tell it that, and it’s okay if it takes an extra half a second for an output. I mean, I’d rather have higher quality results. But you can say in your settings of ChatGPT, every time that you go to give me a result, I want you to double check your work to ensure that there’s zero hallucinations, and if there’s anything that is in question that you’re not certain of, I want you to recognize those things.

And furthermore, I want you to learn about me so that we can work better together. So, every time we have a conversation and that conversation’s ended, what I write in my settings instructions is when I’m done with a conversation, I’m going to type in the words “finish conversation” and I want you to tell me what you’ve learned from that conversation to help better work with me in the future and I want you to reiterate what you’ve learned so that I can tell you if I want you to add that to your permanent memory so that we can work better. So, every single time that I get done with the ChatGPT conversation, I just say “finish conversation.” And it says, oh, okay, well I learned, because it’s already learning basic stuff, like, hey, you’ve got a son named Noah and a daughter named Vivian. And it already puts those things in memory. You don’t have to train it to do that, but it’s not going the extra level of understanding that, okay, what’s important to Matt Leitz is these things, right? And when I did this, he did this, and he insisted that my work be at this level. So, if you continue to have this ongoing training, it just keeps getting better and better and better.

And I have people say, well, Claude is better because of this and this and that. Well, it’s like, no, it might, I don’t know. If it’s better, who knows? But it’s not better for me because I have so much time and energy invested into ChatGPT that at this point, it’s like that employee that I’ve been training for years. Like, I’m way too vested to move at this point.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And I think, I mean, the models will continue to change, but I love the prompt and the iteration there. So, let’s shift into some practical applications that you’ve been using. We’re nearing the end of 2025 right now. First and foremost, what’s your punch list of AI tools that you’re using right now outside of ChatGPT?

Matt Leitz: I would say, and I’m trying to think of the– we’re using one for our sales team that it’s going to come to me, that it’s absolutely a killer. So, what it’s doing is, and Brad, we’re going to have to update the notes because everybody’s got to use this. So, imagine every sales conversation that’s happening is not only being captured, but it’s being analyzed. So, we give it the inputs and go, okay, a good conversation needs to check all of these boxes. It cannot check any of these boxes such that if any conversation happens that shouldn’t be happening, it’s automatically notifying our sales team. It’s letting them know what’s going on, and then it’s giving instant feedback to our salespeople such that it’s like, hey, that was good, but you should have done this and you line off script over here, and it’s just this phenomenal thing where the entire sales team loves it. And then when they get done, instead of them having to sit there and craft the perfect follow-up, it’s writing up all of the messages for them to follow up with the prospect. So, that one is just absolutely killer. That’s it.

And like, with anything, the closer something can be to the point of sale, the better. Chatbots, I probably don’t need to go and rant about chatbots. You know I’m happy to do so. But what’s exciting is that you can now have chat on all of your platforms and it’s getting more and more integrated such that it can be an absolute seamless experience all the way across the board. So, you can have AI-powered chat on all your social media, on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, if you’re running on WhatsApp. And I think the thing that people aren’t using enough AI is text because the thing about it is like, I think people are a little numb to text messages that go out that are marketing messages that are, oh, hey, you should check this out. Here’s a link to go by. I mean, it’s literally like the same 160-character text messages have been going out for so many years with a link to go do something, right?

Brad Weimert: And it’s evident. Well, so look, I want to talk about both of those things. I want to talk any specific platforms you’re using or tools you’re using right now would be great for people to know. You mentioned n8n. We’ve mentioned ChatGPT. Then I want to talk about actually the sales process and kind of the traditional funnel and how it’s shifted. But before we jump into the sales funnel side of things, are there any other platforms or tools specifically that you use?

Matt Leitz: Yeah. So, we’ve got our own white label of high level. And so, what we’ve done is just kind of layered on a bunch of really cool AI stuff on it. And so, that’s our core. I mean, no matter what your business is, you got to have your core CRM, and look, all of these cool tools that we talk about, 90% of your focus should be on your core business, on your CRM and really, really dialing that thing in. We still use ManyChat for all social media interaction, and then we’ve got kind of custom-built stuff for some of the AI that we’ve kind of built onto our existence of high level. But at this point, pretty much, because people always say, well, what’s the best platform to use? I mean, any of these platforms. You can go to eight figures and beyond on any of these CRMs at this point. The key is using it and dialing it in.

Brad Weimert: Totally agree. And it’s interesting because asking for a list of tools at this moment in time relative to AI is fleeting, right? You listen to this in six months, it’s going to be irrelevant. So, the message of pick a platform, build into it and stick to it is a big deal. Like, most entrepreneurs waste most of their time by focusing on chasing the shiny object to try to improve their performance instead of actually building on the fundamentals and leaning into it and committing to it.

Matt Leitz: 100%. And I think if there’s any secret to our success, because we are always at the front line testing all these new tools and trying all of this stuff, but the reason that we, I mean, because we’ve doubled six out of seven years, our revenue goal is always to double, right? And there was one year that we didn’t hit it because we deviated from our path. But the way that we always do that is because we’re stacking in automated systems. So, if you really think about it, like all this work that you’re doing and all these projects and all this kind of stuff, too often it comes and it goes. But when you build, and when I say automation, I don’t just mean machines because so often, we’ll spend a whole year and just customize the automated systems that interface with our sales representatives, for example, right?

So, that’s, I think, a big part of what people don’t think about enough because they just think, oh, automation is all the stuff that’s over there and my people are over here. Well, the two can be fused together. If somebody is in your sales pipeline and they move from one stage to the next, there should be a series of things that happen. Now, if they get moved from one stage to the next and they don’t move for 10 days, there should be another series of things that happen. And yes, some of those things are send an automated message, but some of those things are, have an alert pop up on the dashboard of your sales rep, so they take action. Fifteen days later, if nothing happens, an email goes to the sales manager’s inbox so they can walk outside and say, “Bob, what the hell you doing, man? Give this guy a call. It’s been sitting there for 15 days.”

And you start to realize that it’s like, it’s not that hard to set these things up. It’s really not. And the way that we’ve been able to, as you know, I mean, I was in the real estate education space for a long time, and there’s a lot of people in that space. It’s super crowded. And we were able to just kind of come up and just dominate. And that’s because we had these systems in place. I mean, Dan Kennedy said the wisest words in business history, I believe, when he said, “Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.”

And there was a point in time where it was like automation was this cool thing to add on or whatever, but it ain’t like that. I mean, if you’re going to go out and spend money at scale, like when we started running– and this is the other thing to really recognize because you can get to a million dollars and not spend advertising dollars at scale, right? I mean, you can get to a million bucks with referrals and just running a good business. You get to a million dollars by people walking by your building. But if you’re going to scale, like you got to have a predictable way that you can put in money and get back more money.

And it’s no longer a luxury to automate, like it’s just the reality. And people were like, well, how did you go from 0 to spending $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 a day on ads? Well, the way that we did it is we had all of our automated systems in place such that when we generated the lead, we were maximizing our service of the lead and our sales of the lead because all of the automation was in place. So, I can’t think of many things in business that are more valuable that produce a higher ROI for a longer time than getting your automated systems in place.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. Speaking of those, historically, and I know when you started RealEstateInvestor.com, for example, we were in an era where everybody was teaching and pursuing lead generation and conversion through a traditional marketing funnel, which was get a bunch of people in top of funnel and pull them through some marketing automation, maybe a sales call to sell them something. And that was the bottom of the funnel. There has been a rather significant shift in certainly the marketing buzz of the traditional funnels not working the way they used to. How do you think about the change in traditional funnels selling through bots and how that interacts or just lead generation in general?

Matt Leitz: I think it’s an and, it’s not an instead. It’s funny, traditional marketing funnels don’t work out. I’ve seen a million dollars a day generated through funnels, you know what I mean? They still work. Competition has gone up. The reality of it is that, I mean, we’ve been doing this since, like, I remember when the term squeeze page was a new thing, right? And there has not, in my opinion, at all, been a sudden shift of funnels don’t work or whatever. It’s just this ongoing continuum of people get sick of seeing the same thing, so you got to switch it up from time to time. Oh, and by the way, guess what happens? Old stuff starts working. All right? That’s the funny thing. It’s just that I go numb when I land on a landing page and it looks exactly like the last landing page that I saw and the one before that, and the one before that.

Perfect example. I remember a couple years ago, a shift went from you land on a funnel and there was used to just be a form box and you just typed your email in the form box, and then somebody figured out, oh, if we hide the form and we have a button and they click on the button and it pops up, then it’s going to get a higher opt-in rate, right? And for years, that was kind of the standard. And you know what’s really funny is, we tested going back to a traditional opt-in form and it smokes the click on a button and it pops up, right? Why? Because people are like, oh, okay, this is so easy. I haven’t seen one of these in a while. So, just know that funnels are not going out of style at all.

But different strokes for different folks. And so, we have a portion, still to this day, we’re the chatbot guy. The majority of our leads come through traditional funnels. We have, I’m sure, a much higher percentage than most people that come through social media and chatbots and all of these alternative methods. But we’re still running funnels like crazy because they still work like crazy. You just got to be willing to test. And it’s just the dumbest things can make all the difference. I mean, let me give you a small example, and this is a little but, so I mentioned having a form on the page, right? So, the majority of traffic is, anybody listening to this would know is now mobile, right?

So, when you land on a page, if it’s got a form there, what do you got to do if you want to type in the form? You click in the little box, and then the little typewriter pops up, and then you start typing. So, what do we do? Well, I just said, hey, programmer, can you just make it so that the cursor is just in the first name box so that when somebody comes to this, literally, they open it, right? And then, the cursor goes boop, and it goes right into the first name, and then the little typewriter just goes pop. Skyrocket conversions just with that one little hack, right? So, it’s so many times you just got to step back from it and just look at it.

Yesterday, we’re doing a promotion right now with Robert Kiyosaki. And it started out, it was like a little flat and I just kind of, I was like, okay, what’s going on? And I just realized that, like, I haven’t re-examined the settings of this webinar in a year, and I’ve just allowed other people to do it. And I just went into this thing, started playing with some configurations and all of a sudden, it started crashing. So, it’s just like, earlier we had the conversation, Brad, if you recall, I said, “Hey, don’t start by going into the tool. Start by with having a whiteboard.” And you said, “Well, you go in the tool and you get ideas.” Well, I think that that really is that mindset of in it, above it, in it, above it, and having these different perspectives and almost scheduling time to go, okay, this is where I’m going to step back from it and just look at it because it is those little things that can make the big difference.

And as you know, if I can spend a thousand dollars a day profitably, a lot of times I can spend $50,000 a day profitably. And it really just comes down to all of these pieces put in place. So many of those pieces being automated workflows that will just continue to work like clockwork when I put them in place.

Brad Weimert: I think that’s an interesting takeaway. So, I think the traditional business knowledge that we hear is work on the business, not in the business. And that’s the goal, right? And that is the goal also, by the way, that was painted by Robert Kiyosaki in Cashflow Quadrants, right? Work on the business, not in the business, but certainly where I am and certainly even at Elon Musk’s stage, he’s in the f*cking business all the time, but to a crazy, granular level.

Matt Leitz: But focused on the right things. Okay, here’s the deal.

Brad Weimert: Of course, yeah.

Matt Leitz: Work on the business. Okay, yeah, cool. Yeah, you’re right. Okay, we all want cashflow businesses, and yes, that’s what we want. And that’s why I try to get on a soapbox sometimes, and I just say, focus on the damn automation because look, could you give this podcast to somebody on your team in hopes that they think differently enough to start recognizing some of these things? Great. But guess what? You own the damn business because you’re smart and because you can think and you can problem solve. So, what I’m encouraging you to do is start making more of that focus on, and AI, it’s just an extension of automation and just a cooler way to do it, right? So, it’s yes, it’s AI and it’s automation, but thinking about how can we do this and recognizing that sometimes it’s just logging into a webinar platform took me all of about seven minutes and like, I’m not even kidding, like $15,000 came through in the next few minutes, right? So, yeah, it is on your business. There’s no doubt about that. It is in your business, but it’s also on your business because it’s the thing that’s going to keep working when you’re not working. And ultimately, every minute that you’re investing into your business, it needs to either go into a person or it needs to go into a system.

And the advantage of automation and the advantage of systems is they’re not going to quit three months from now. They’re not taking a vacation. So, it’s just been this thing where I came to realize, and the way this whole happened was we used to run on Infusionsoft and we hired consultant after consultant after consultant. And they were super expensive. And we would hire the best. Oh, they’re the best. And I would say, you know what I really want to do is I want to do these things. And they just reached a point where, actually, what the tipping point was, is somehow, I’m not going to name any names, somehow this guy who was the best Infusionsoft consultant on the planet somehow managed to lose all of our credit card data. And I go to Infusionsoft, I’m like, hey, how do we fix this? They’re like, fix this. We didn’t even know you could do this. Like, this is like, we’ve never seen this happen before.

So, I was like, well, one of two things are going to happen. We’re either not going to use a CRM or I’m just going to learn how to do this stuff. And so, I went to the extreme, I went into Infusionsoft, I said, “Do you guys offer coaching or consulting?” They said yes. I was like, “Can I do it in person?” They’re like, “We’ve never done that before.” I was like, “I don’t care. I’ll pay you extra.” And I showed up every damn day in Infusionsoft’s headquarter so much so that like I was eating at their cereal bar and they thought I was an employee. And I just learned the stuff inside and out. And what I learned is like it ain’t rocket science. You’re paying people. And look, I’m not saying that you should be managing the day to day, but take some time to understand it and get it and set up some initial stuff, even if somebody else finishes it for you. If you can learn to like, all right, I’m going to zoom out with my notebook and my whiteboard, right? Okay, now I’m going to get into it. And I’m like looking at high level, I’m looking at it and I’m going, holy.

Like, that was where, like for ManyChat, we just became the best in the world at ManyChat because I was like, I was thinking outside the box, right? We were making AI with ManyChat, like in ways that like, they were just like, what do you mean, right? Because I thought about it outside the box before I got into it. When I got into it, I was like, holy sh*t. Now I see this on an even crazier level and we just started building this stuff and it’s like, that stuff is still producing leads and revenue to this day. So, I’m going to get off my soapbox now, but just like, if there’s something to get into, it’s the stuff that’s going to be generating the leads and turning those leads into sales day in and day out. And that’s automation.

Brad Weimert: I have a very hard time with a lot of cliches and one of them is it’s all about mindset, right? And that’s the most frustrating thing to hear when you are a new entrepreneur in particular because you’re like, hey, shut the f*ck up. Tell me how I’m supposed to do this. Tell me how to make money. But the shift in mentality of when to get your hands dirty, what to focus on and what not to focus on, when to focus on the business or be in the business, those are all mental approaches and mental constructs for how you should run the business. And even within this, you get confusing advice. And that confusing advice is try to work on the business, not in it. And that’s not a one size fits all. And I think that you articulated some very good points, which are, there’s a time and a place to get your hands dirty, and your approach has served you very well. But the in it element is most impactful and important to you when it creates automation through technology or functionally automation through investing in a person.

Matt Leitz: That’s it, yeah. And the people, we all know you need the people, right? I’m a proponent of the people, what make the whole thing work, but the people you never know, right? The people, it’s like, look, this person might want to do their own thing and I’m going to have to support them in that. I’m going to want to support them in that. But the technology is just invest in it. I mean, just every decision you make, right, the same way that when you have your money and you’re like, how can this money, if I invest this money, make me more money? You should be doing the exact same thing with your time. How can I invest this time and it can make me more time? And if you’re putting something in place that’s going to continue to run and continue to feed your people and allow you to scale, I mean, just think about it like this, okay? And this is for those that aren’t advertising, this is just the God’s honest truth. You got to be a freaking magician in this day and age to spend a dollar on advertising and be profitable on day one. Like, you got to be a marketing freaking badass, right? Is it possible? Of course. But there’s so often where it’s just like, people are like, they either– well, too often they go, oh, my advertiser sucks. Well, no, your advertiser doesn’t suck. Your offer sucks, right? But here’s the reality. Even if your offer’s good, that doesn’t mean you’re going to make your money back.

Here’s a more common scenario. You work really hard, you make an amazing offer. You run ads to it and you make 75% of your money back. What do you do? Well, I mean, you can’t keep spending money, you’re going to go broke. Or you build automation around it, right? And then after one week, you’ve recouped 85%. After two weeks, you’ve recouped 90%, right? After 60 days, you’ve recouped 150%. And guess what that means? Scale to the damn moon. And just realize, it’s like this is beyond a million, if you want to scale, it’s recognizing, like I’m just kind of giving my emphasis on automation and AI because it’s, I think, the thing that you should be focusing on, but nothing matters more than having a predictable mechanism. Funnels are still– I don’t give a sh*t what anybody says, it’s still a funnel, right? You need a predictable mechanism where you’re capturing a lead, and then a system that is going to cultivate that lead using technology and people working together in tandem to make a predictable outcome such that you can go and spend money at scale.

And if you’re spending time and energy on, I mean, obviously, your product is always going to be first, right? There’s nothing more important than that because it’s useless to build a funnel and automation if you don’t have a good product. But if you’re focusing on anything other than that, it’s a waste of time and energy. And the missing piece that people have is they’re stopping too soon and not recognizing that it’s the automation that’s going to get them over that hump. And it’s a little bit deterring. It’s disheartening, right, when you’re spending money on ads and you’re not getting the return, like it hurts. But you just got to realize, that’s where most people stop. And you got to keep getting in the game and you got to get crystal clear on, okay, this is where we are in day one. This is where we are in day 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, because what they don’t tell you is that– just started working with a guy at Cardone who was the CEO of a major corporation, like a billion-dollar company. And he said that when they spent money on advertising, they didn’t expect to recoup their money for at least six months, was a breakeven point. And just think about that.

Brad Weimert: Well, they had cash.

Matt Leitz: They have cash. We don’t have that, right?

Brad Weimert: Exactly. Well, and just for clarity, so for clarity, anybody that’s advertising aggressively and has been knows what you’re talking about. Anybody that has not spent a bunch of money on ads or doesn’t rely on paid traffic to convert may not understand the fundamentals and the way they were explained. So, if you’re driving traffic, and you were talking about profitable spend, right? And the recap of this is just, your offer when they get to the landing page, might convert at a level that doesn’t pay back the amount of money that you put in on the first day. And you have two ways to fix that problem. Let’s assume the offer never changes, right? You have two ways to fix that problem. One is to create automation to consistently follow up with that lead, with the same messaging or different messaging or different channels to try to get a higher conversion rate over time, right? And that might take you 5 days, 10, 15, 20, 30, whatever.

The other is to offer ancillary options for purchase because the initial offer didn’t captivate them enough. And that’s increasing LTV of that initial person, again, over time. But that might be, hey, you don’t like the marketing as a service from us that we’re selling you. How about you download this tool? Or how about you use our paid GPT or whatever, whatever? But it’s getting a few extra bucks to cover the cost, the lead on the front end. And that’s the general summary, unless there’s something else you want to add to that.

Matt Leitz: 100%, yeah. And it’s just recognizing that if you’re willing to play that game, once you get there, I want there to be hope in this too for people who tried advertising and it hasn’t worked, because you realize there’s nobody that– like, there’s no reason to spend. Like, now this is for direct response. Anybody who’s got a major brand, it’s a totally different deal. Coca-Cola is not like, well, how many cans did we sell with from that commercial? It’s different. But if you’re like, hey, I’m spending money on marketing and I want to get money back, it’s this thing that realized that day one, you’re not going to probably win day one. It’s going to take that follow-up that Brad’s talking about to get there.

But as soon as you cross that threshold, I call it the magic number, as soon as you’re making more money back than you’re putting in, accounting for any cost of delivering your service or your good or whatever that is, once that magic number between, okay, what is it that I’m making from a customer, really making, like money going in our pocket, minus how much does it cost to acquire that customer? When that number is good, you spend as much money as you possibly can. I mean, that’s it. You feed the beast and you grow that thing, and that’s how, like it’s, you can grow traditionally by just being a good product, being a good service, but assuming that you’re not a venture capital-based company, if you ever want to multiply, like you’re going to have to spend money on ads, and therefore, you’re going to have to put these systems in place in order to do it.

Brad Weimert: Love it. So, some people– actually, let me reframe this. The venture capitalists and the people that are funded companies learn that lesson very early because the people that give them money are like, hey, figure your sh*t out. You need to make the ads work. Bootstrap companies very often, it takes them forever to figure that out. And some of that is just a mindset shift. How do you think your mentality in business has changed from your first seven-figure business to the eight figures and beyond?

Matt Leitz: I think the thing is, is that you kind of know that you’re going to get your lickings. And like, at first, you come in so hopeful and you’re like, oh, cool, we’re going to run this offer, do this ad, and it hits you and you’re just like, oh, and you want to curl in the ball, you want to cry. And after you’ve done it for so long, it’s sort of like, you’re not even expecting it to work out of the gates, right? Like, I consult for Grant Cardone’s companies. That’s a little bit different, right, because he’s got this name recognition. So, everything we do, it just kind of works the first time.

But like, at BotBuilders, a smaller company like ours, nobody knows who the hell Matt Leitz is. And so, when we put out a new offer, a new product, a new service, I mean, it’s always going to be a little flatter than what you hope it’s going to be, right? But you’re no longer looking for this thing to work or be a home run out of the gates. You’re looking for indicators because the reality of it is like, it’s just know that it’s not going to work at the level. If you’re trying new stuff and you’re iterating as fast as you should be, it’s not going to work. But you just need to know, you just need enough of an indicator of does this have the chance if optimized to become a winning offer, okay?

And I’m going to take this one step further, Brad, because we’ve been talking about automation and basically expanding the funnel. Okay? So, the way that you want to think about it is this, all right? And this is having worked with some of these big players and grown a couple of kind of educational-type businesses, like we get this down to a science, but it could apply to any kind of business. It doesn’t matter if you’re dog walking or whatever the hell you’re doing is, you’re going to– anything that you sell, think about as an offer. You’ve heard us use this term offer, right? And you’re going to try these different approaches and these different offers, okay? We’ve got a $300 offer that we sell on a webinar. We’ve got a $7 offer that we sell on a sales page. We’ve got a $10,000 offer that we sell via application that we get on the phone and we sell people, right? So, you’re going to want to continue to develop offers, okay? And the reality of it is, is that you’re going to make your best educated guess as to which one is going to work the best. But you don’t always know, all right?

So, the way that you got to think about your business is like this. Is that fully baked? If you think, okay, between now and the next five years, you might end up developing 10 offers. All right? And you should always have a queue of what’s your next offer. What’s the thing that I’m going to be selling? Okay? And when I say an offer, I’m referring to the pricing, the packaging, the positioning, the process, and what you’re selling it and who you’re selling it to. I call it the five Ps. So, if you know you’re always in this offer creation mode, I think of all offers end up being one of two things. And I didn’t learn this in marketing school, I just made this up.

But the first one is called a lead offer. And a lead offer means it’s the first thing that I’m bringing to market. It’s the tip of the spear. If I’m spending money on advertising, it’s going into my lead offer. And it might be that it’s a $7 thing, and then I’m going to upsell from there. It might be that it’s a $15,000 thing and I’m going to downsell from there. Okay? But whatever you’re doing, whatever your first thing that you go to market that you’re spending marketing money on is your lead offer. All your other offers are maximizer offers. Okay? So, the reality of it is, and like Grant Cardone’s companies, for example, they sell 178 things, right? And I’ll see them, sometimes they’ll try to advertise 102 of them. And it’s just really tough. I mean, you’re advertising against yourself, right? And what a better approach is, for them, it’s a few, right? But for your company, it’s probably one, maybe two things that you’re going to advertise. Okay? And you’re going to figure out, whatever those best things are become your lead offers, and everything else becomes a maximizer offer. Meaning it’s an upsell or a downsell from the initial thing that you advertise.

So, you work hard. You got a $7 thing, you got a $300 thing, and you got a $10,000 thing, right? And you might advertise them all and be like, oh, man, the $7 thing is generating more leads and you just do the math and whatever math’s out the best. Probably the number one mistake that entrepreneurs make because they’re making decisions based on just, oh, I think that this will work. No, just pencil it out. Like this is, I say this more than anything around here. If you can’t make it work on paper, you can’t make it work in the real world, right? If you can’t make it work on paper, you can’t make it work in the real world. And look, you might not know the exact conversion rate of what your $7 offer is going to get versus your $10,000 offer, but you can guess.

And if you can’t guess, you got a friend who might know. And you start to pencil these things out. So, you’re like, okay, well, our first offer is going to be our $7 offer. And you run ads to it. And the ads, you only get back a 30% ROAS, return on ad spend. Well, 30%, that’s pretty rough, right? That might not be it. So, you obviously need to pause those ads, but what do you do? All right, let’s make our next offer this $10,000 offer. Okay? Now, we got a $10,000 offer. So, we can advertise this $10,000 offer. And all right, the $10,000 offer gets a 60% ROAS. Okay, guess what? Now, that’s our lead offer, and our $7 offer becomes a maximizer offer. And it just goes into the autoresponder like Brad talked about. And it ends up being this thing where you’ve got this whole suite of products and services that you offer. Whatever one gets the best ROI is the one that you lead with, and then the rest of them are either upsells or downsells that are going to help you maximize your dollars. And all of that is to increase your ability to spend money so that you can grow and scale, because at the end of the day, every one of these sales is a golden egg, but the thing that’s the golden goose is your marketing budget, right?

And the more that you build out this suite and these automations, the more that you can increase that because it is totally possible if you’ve got a good, because you’ll hear this called different things, you’ll hear it called the front end and the back end, right? You’ll hear it called an ascension model or a descension model. Those are just fancy ways of people acting like they have a plan. Whereas the damn truth is you just got to make a series of offers that are going to serve your people very well, that have a good chance to convert. And then whatever’s making the best ROI is the thing that you’re going to advertise, and the other things that are going to be the things that come after it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And the fun part about that today is, if at any point, if you were listening to this and at any point, you were like that sounds complicated, listen to it again and literally type those things out into ChatGPT and say, what’s a likely ascension path for these? What should I offer first? What should I offer second? If they convert at different rates, model that out to me, these are the prices. And you can do that with your own pricing, and you will get this model laid out for you through the robots.

Matt Leitz: There you go. That’s it.

Brad Weimert: Matt, I love that. What advice do you have for entrepreneurs starting out today?

Matt Leitz: Protect your time more than anything. And I’m the guy that teaches AI and I have to constantly stop people and go, it’s great that you’re learning how to use this tool, but is this what you need to be focusing on right now? Because this AI stuff is unbelievably powerful when it’s applied to the things that matter the most in your business. But if you’re using it to do things that are not the most important thing in your business, then it’s called a distraction. So, really stop and recognize, and I just have a particular method for growing and scaling. Everybody’s got their own style. But I’m just big on how can we build a system such that we can put a dollar in and get $2 out and then scale the thing to the damn moon. So, if it’s not around that, right, I don’t like, I love all of this stuff. It’s so much fun. And yes, do I get distracted? I mean, my mind is blown when I get into some of these AI tools. I mean, I get addicted to them.

But then I’m like, you know what? Did using this Midjourney for six hours make me a dime? Like, not really, right? So, just refocus and just get freaking non-negotiable about investing your time into the things that are going to give you scalability. And don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty on those things that are going to continue to work, right? Making an image in Midjourney is not going to stand the test of time. Making a kickass autoresponder that you could write using ChatGPT and then drop in and have done in a matter of an hour and a half and you’re going to be using this thing, again, still making money off of emails that I wrote 15 years ago. All right? Leverage, focus on the things that are going to keep going in perpetuity forever and ever and ever. So, use the robots to do your bidding and not the other way around.

Brad Weimert: F*cking love it. Matt Leitz, always love hanging out. We need some face time sometime soon, dude.

Matt Leitz: All right, cool. You’re the man. Thank you, Brad.

Brad Weimert: Appreciate you carving out time, man.