Happy Thursday!

Really quick before I dive in, I get this question all the time: “How do I actually make money with all these AI tools?” Thats why I built Playmakers- my AI agency program where I teach you how to charge local businesses $500-$5,000 a month to set up and manage AI for them. You get three live calls a week, plug-and-play automation templates you can deploy for clients on day one, a 5 Day First Client Challenge, and my personal lead lists with businesses in your area ready to connect.120+ people are already in the community building agencies right now. Go to playmakersai.com and check it out.

Okay, let’s get into it.

A guy named Mike flew from Nashville to my studio last week to walk me through a business most people would swear is already dead. He's a baby boomer who's been doing internet marketing for 25 years, and he said something I hadn't heard anyone put this plainly: for the first time in his career, every single thing he does for a living can be handed to AI.

One of his clients went from zero to around $80,000 in a single summer off a one-page website. Another has paid him every month like clockwork for years. Mike figured out a long time ago that 300 clients on a monthly fee is a million-dollar business, and nearly all of the work can be outsourced. And it’s really simple.

Listen to the full interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and by the end, you will have everything you need to run this hustle in your own community.

Mike helps small local service businesses get found and get booked. Plumbers, roofers, HVAC guys, pest control outfits, tire shops, the kind of business you call when your toilet is leaking and you need someone today. He boils it down to two words: traffic and conversion.
-Traffic is people finding you, and for local businesses that's about 90% cell phones.
-Conversion is whether those people are convinced (within a few seconds) that you're the one to solve their problem.

Most local businesses are terrible at both. The bounce rate on a typical local business website runs around 90%, meaning nine out of ten people leave almost immediately. Web designers keep building beautiful, award-winning sites with giant hero images and hard-to-read text, and the reviews and proof that actually close the sale get buried below the fold where nobody scrolls. There are 33 million small businesses in this country and most of them don't know what they don't know. That gap is what you're going to sell into.

Here's how you start:

Land one business before you build anything. You don't need a website or a logo or a business name to begin. You need one local owner who wants more customers. Go to a networking meeting, or just walk into the independent shops near you, and ask a simple question: do you want to see your business grow? If they say they already have all the work they can handle, they're not your customer. This separates the people who make real money from everyone else, because it requires you to show up in person and have the conversation. Mike gets nearly all his clients this way. Walk an owner through what's broken and what it's costing them, and the talk usually ends with them asking how soon you can start.

Fix their Google Business Profile first. Start here, because it costs nothing and most owners never touch or even think about it. Get the business more reviews, respond to every single one, and keep fresh photos and videos posted. You can't pay for reviews, so you ask. Every customer, every time. If a business has a couple of one-star reviews dragging it down, you don't fight them, you drown them out with a steady stream of new five-star ones. Google notices when an owner ignores their profile, and so does every customer comparing three plumbers when their toilet is overflowing. You can knock this out in an afternoon and the owner sees movement fast, which buys you trust for everything after.

beehiiv launched Community- a feature that takes your newsletter replies out of your inbox and puts them somewhere your whole audience can see them- and talk to each other about them. Every newsletter and podcast you drop posts to your feed automatically. You don't promote it. It's in front of the people who already love your content, and the conversation keeps going long after you hit send.

You can add Community access to any subscription you already sell. It takes just minutes to set up, and you can decide on free, freemium, paywalled, or paywalled with upsells inside. All of it works on day one. Get more juice from everything you produce. Use code CHRIS30 for 30% off three months on beehiiv.

Build one page that converts. Forget the fancy multi-page site. You want a simple page built around a headline, a short video, some social proof, and one obvious button that gets them to call. Mike has run the same headline structure for 15 years: a bold promise with a guarantee attached, like "We'll give you the most thorough pest control service you've ever had, guaranteed, or it's free." Swap the service and it still works. Lead with the problem before the solution. "Scared termites are eating your house? Watch this 45-second video." Adding that one problem-first line quadrupled his click-through rate. You can build a page like this in an AI website builder in under an hour.

Give them content they actually own. Once the page is live, you keep traffic coming with content that lives on a domain the business owns, not on a platform that can change the rules tomorrow. A blog post and a podcast get indexed by Google and pull in customers for years. The catch is that most owners freeze the second you tell them to write, so don't make them write. It's a shorter trip from your brain to your tongue than from your brain to your hands. Ask the owner to name 50 problems their business solves, then have them answer each one out loud while you record. This is where the AI earns its keep. ChatGPT or Gemini cleans the transcript into a blog post, and you've got audio and written content out of the same five minutes of talking.

Own a search term and turn it into a jingle. Every business has two to four words it can completely dominate in search, as long as it picks the right ones and grabs the matching domain while it's still available. Mike built Nashville Party Boat Rental, Local Nashville Honey, and West Texas Pest Patrol exactly this way. Then he does something pretty unique. He turns those words into a 15-second jingle and runs it as a skippable YouTube ad targeted to a tiny local radius. The search term lands in the first five seconds, so even the people who hit skip still hear it. You can get 40,000 plays for a couple hundred dollars, which makes it the cheapest local advertising going. Suno writes the jingle now, so you don't need a recording studio to pull this off.

The math: Mike charges around $500 a month per client, plus a one-time jingle fee of about $2,000, and each client eats up roughly an hour of his time a month once it's running. Fifteen clients at that rate is a comfortable living for a few days of work. Get to 300 and you're running a million-dollar business- all of it handed to a trained assistant or AI tool.

There are 33 million small business owners out there and so few of them understand traffic and conversion. Most will keep paying $5,000 for a pretty website that books zero jobs, because nobody ever showed them the difference. That opportunity is sitting in your own zip code right now. Pick one local business you already know, fix their Google profile this week, and show them what happens. Then go land the next one.

Again, Listen to the full interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and by the end, you will have everything you need to run this hustle in your own community.

Lastly, I'm always looking for cool, unique businesses to share on my podcasts. If you have one and are comfortable sharing your journey, drop your info here!

Have a great week!

Chris

P.S. I share deep dives on business ideas and complete playbooks three times a week on YouTube and every podcast platform.