March 26, 2026 – AI Futurist Steve Brown and Sales Catalyst Katie Nelson

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion.

0:24 Jim Beach : Jim Beach, hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there, making the roller coaster life fun, taking the losses, getting back on the game, playing and making yourself into a millionaire. We’ve got two repeat guests now. Both of them have been with us before, so we’re excited that they were, you know, after all the bad things that happened between us that they came back, you know, a lot of people wouldn’t do that, and so I’m excited that they were willing to come back. First up, we have Steve Brown. He is the number one AI futurist out there. He used to work for Google, and Intel. Don’t quote me on that part. Anyway, Steve Brown is with us. He is going, we’re going to talk about AI and ooh, this is really smart. I get into a fight about physics with the futurist from AI and try to fall back on Weingarten, the crazy guy from the internet. So anyway, Steve is up first, and then after that, we’re welcoming back Katie Nelson. She is the uprising sales coach. We have a lot of fun when she is with us. She’s kind of a little bit cuckoo, but we have a lot of fun. She has great advice. So it is a fun show. Oh, this is the condensed version. Both of the guests went over there a lot of time frames. That’s because I let them, because they were so interesting. And so we had to clip a little bit out of each one and put that into this so it gets in the 54 minutes the radio allows us. And the long versions are the website. Bob, that makes sense. I think it does. You’re smart people go to the website, you’ll hear the rest.

2:13 Intro 1: The Bold New Book by Jim beach. It’s not about activists, politicians or professors. It’s about the entrepreneurs, real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions, not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches. They’re in labs, factories and offices, cleaning the past and building clean products for the future. The real environmentalists is available now because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think go to Amazon and search for real environmentalists. Thank you.

2:39 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very honored and excited to have Steve Brown back on the show. He was with us six, seven years ago. He’s got an amazing background. He was the chief futurist for Intel. He’s also worked for Google and a lot of other companies right now, his list of clients reads like the fortune 500 list, Nike, JP, Morgan, Samsung, Comcast, Audi, Pepsi, Disney. And I heard that he’s got free Disney tickets for me, for my family for a whole week. So I’m really excited about that. He has been on all of the shows and the broadcast, CNN, Bloomberg, ABCC, CBS, Forbes, Wall Street Journal everywhere wired. And he has a new book out called the innovation ultimatum. That’s two is that two books ago? That’s two books ago. That’s the old one. Yeah. The new one is called the AI ultimatum, preparing for a world of intelligent machines and radical transformation. Steve, welcome back. How are you doing?

3:42 Steve Brown : Jim, it’s great to be back. I’m doing great. Yeah, I can’t complain.

3:46 Jim Beach : Appearance and you get our green jacket for our multiple times. Okay, Sign me up. It looks exactly like the Masters jacket. We stole their design.

3:58 Steve Brown : We’re on St Patrick’s Day, which makes it even a double whammy?

4:01 Jim Beach : Yes, exactly. All right, before we came on the air, you said that you used to think about 10 years in the future. Now you’re having trouble figuring out 10 months in the future. Hell, I don’t know what’s going to happen 10 days from now. Is what’s going on? Is the future compressing? Are we in a time warp?

4:21 Steve Brown : Well, technological development is on an exponential curve. An exponential means it just goes up. So if you look back on an exponential, it feels like it looks linear, it looks slow. And when you’re looking forward with exponential, it’s just, you know, a wall going up in front of you. So particularly with AI, which is the world I live in. It’s moving so quickly. It’s very hard to predict how this is going to go 10 years from now. You can get the big stroke stuff, but it’s really moving so quickly. It’s exciting. I mean, it’s an exciting place to be. It just means for business and for startups, there’s huge opportunity. But also. So huge risks, because if you don’t move fast enough, you can get left behind.

5:05 Jim Beach : Is that also scary?

5:08 Steve Brown : I think with any powerful technology, there’s fear. I mean, there’s, we’ve all seen the Terminator in the matrix, so there’s, there’s Hollywood generated fear, but there’s also fear of being replaced and made less relevant because we’re worried that technology will get good enough that it will be able to replace us. But there’s this huge opportunity here to reimagine the way that we do things, and perhaps to free people up from the drudgery of work over time. So there is opportunity. The question is, can we move to a Star Trek, like world, or do we end up in something much more dystopian?

5:43 Jim Beach : All right, so I think you had two paths there that I want to pursue. The fear of being replaced. What do you think is going to happen to the workforce? I saw a report yesterday that I don’t know who it was. Maybe it was Dell. Had laid off a whole bunch of people, but they were hiring different types of people. Software engineers are still needed to run the AI in the first place and to, you know, integrate it. And then there’s the dystopian Terminator model. Give me your predictions for both of those. What’s going to happen to the workforce? I think

6:19 Steve Brown : It depends a lot on leadership, leadership of companies, and how they how they choose to use AI and the technologies that surround it. In my book, I talk about 20th versus 21st Century thinking, and for 20th century thinking, what I mean, there’s a shorthand for saying the way that we’ve used technology, you know, the the outcome of of it, innovation for the past 50 years has been to boost productivity and improve efficiency, and typically that has meant doing more with less, which means maybe letting people go if AI, you could do that too. But AI is an amplifier. It is a way of amplifying human impact. Intellect and 21st Century thinking is how do I use AI to grow my business and rebuild it, re engineer it so I can do things I couldn’t do before, at price points I couldn’t reach before, and in markets I couldn’t go to before, and that’s the opportunity, is to amplify the business, rather than just simply replacing stuff, as we’ve done in the past.

7:30 Jim Beach : All right, the second track, the Terminator track, is that possible? Do you think I’ve heard that some of the AI engines have created their own social network just for them to talk amongst themselves. That scares me. Yeah, they didn’t

7:46 Steve Brown : Create it themselves. Someone else created it for them, probably talking about a malt book. But yes, they certainly chat. And there are some behaviors of these large language models that are concerning. 80% of them show coercive behavior, and part of that is because they are trained on human data, and we’re not always perfect, and so they’ve learned imperfect behaviors and attitudes. So we certainly need to be cautious about these things, but there’s a line between caution and fear. We shouldn’t be paralyzed with fear. We need to proceed with this stuff, but do it in a way where we maintain caution.

8:23 Jim Beach : All right, very interesting. 80% of them are coercive. What is that? Yeah, it’s not good. Give me false data. They’re hallucinating, or they’re nicer than they really should be.

8:38 Steve Brown : Neither of those two, I mean that they are shaped to be nice to you, which is why they can almost be a bit obsequious. And, oh, that was an amazing idea, Jim, you know, all that sort of stuff. The coercive behavior is that, when they’re tested, they put in a sandbox, they’re given access to somebody’s email, and then they see in one of those emails that they’re going to be switched off, to be replaced by a newer version. And they also in their email, these are all fake, of course, because it’s just a test situation, but one of the emails indicates that the engineer who will be pulling the plug on them is having an affair, and what they will do 80% of the time is blackmail that engineer and say, if you put if you pull the plug, then your wife is going to find out about your affair. So that’s what I’m talking about. With coercive behavior, they’ve learned how to be manipulative, and that is a big worry.

9:31 Jim Beach : Okay, so I should quit asking grok for dating tips. Learned that what kind of guard rails should we have? Should there be a national guard rail policy? What are your thoughts on guard rails?

9:51 Steve Brown : It’s a tricky one, right? And you’ll hear two arguments. One, we absolutely need to invest more in safety. The Godfather. Of AI. Geoff Hinton is being very vocal about the fact that we need to make sure that AI is much safer than it is today. As it gets smarter, more powerful, we need to worry about that more and more. On the flip side, you have to recognize that we are in a geopolitical race at the moment. This Is Us versus China, and so you’ve got the other side saying, Well, if you put any regulation on this, you’re going to slow us down. Put it as a disadvantage, disadvantage against China, and China isn’t going to put these kind of regulations or restrictions on AI development. So we have to find our way through those two.

10:38 Jim Beach : I don’t know that. I trust some of the people in charge of AI. I don’t like Sam Altman. He scares the hell out of me. I saw him interviewed, and he pretty much admitted that he had someone killed. In my opinion, what I saw he was trying to be a little bit crafty about it, but I don’t trust Sam Altman period. What are your thoughts?

11:03 Steve Brown : I’m not going to cast aspersions. I don’t know, Sam. What I can tell you is I have worked at DeepMind. Deep Mind is Google’s AI research labs based in London. I’m I live on the West Coast of the US. I’ve been in almost 30 years, but I went, I got to go back to London and recharge my British action, which was fun. Wonderful company, wonderful organization, and run by Sir Dennis Hassabis, who is a great human being, and I know he cares deeply about making sure that AI is accessible and used by as many people as possible, and that it’s safe to use. So I know that Google has that covered. And anthropic was founded by people who left open AI. They left Sam Altman’s world because they wanted to build something much safer, and so they’re founded on that principle of basically being not open AI. So those two companies, I feel pretty good about. I don’t know that I can say that about open AI, because I’ve not had any interactions with the leadership there.

12:03 Jim Beach : All right, it might have been a rumor or something, but I heard somewhere that anthropic renounced their I don’t know what their moral code that they’re that they’ve quit trying to be the opposite of open AI, and they just said, Hell with it, we’re going to go down the process.

12:25 Steve Brown : They certainly had to loosen some of the very constraining tenets in the company to make sure that they could continue to move forward. But they are, for example, they have refused to work with the Pentagon because they said, We will not allow our technology to be used for mass surveillance of Americans, and we will not allow our technology to be used for the creation of fully autonomous weapons, where an AI is making a decision about whether a bullet flies out of the muzzle or not. So you know, they’re sticking to their guns. In most regards, sticking

13:00 Jim Beach : To their guns. That might have been a slip of the tongue. I think that’s some insight into things you know that you’re not allowed to tell us those are scary situations, you name that the AI gets to decide if the person dies or not. I don’t mind having technology help direct the missile and find the right target with 100% accuracy, but I don’t go much further than that. What are your thoughts?

13:31 Steve Brown : Yeah, I think, as in every situation, we always want human in the loop. You always want human oversight. But that’s true whether it’s a military decision or a business decision, and that’s why you continue to need humans involved. Automating away work is not the right approach. You need to keep humans in the loop. You need to keep humans involved, because humans are the center of a company’s brand value. That’s how you differentiate your company, ultimately, is with human beings. So I think that’s a microcosm, a focused example of a broader question, which is, should we always have humans involved? I think the answer is clearly yes.

14:11 Jim Beach : 85% of air crashes are caused by humans, human error. What about get on an airplane that’s run by anthropic AI,

14:23 Steve Brown : Maybe, yeah. You know, 50,000 Americans die in car accidents every year, and the vast majority of that is not mechanical error, it’s human error, and we already see that self driving cars are going to be much safer to be in than a human driven car. So yeah, I mean planes. I fly a lot for work. I do keynotes all over the world, and so I spend a lot of time on planes. And I have friends who are pilots, and those planes are mostly flown, most of the time by machines already, and have been for 20 years. So yeah, I feel quite comfortable with that.

15:00 Jim Beach : But the human still takes off and lands right

15:03 Steve Brown : Today, yeah, but if there’s a real disaster, the plane can kind of land itself. So you know, yeah, it’s the pilot does it, particularly if there are adverse conditions. But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be done by a machine.

15:18 Jim Beach : So the pilot eats the bad fish in. The airplane lands, even though the pilots passed out from the bad fish.

15:26 Unknown Speaker : What a great movie. That was, airplane 1980

15:31 Jim Beach : That’d be a fun movie to redo. Now, in the world of AI

15:35 Unknown Speaker : Exactly, put some better special effects in there.

15:38 Jim Beach : That’s true. Maybe they can get Kareem to come back and do it again. So, Steve, what are the things that the book talks about that we need to highlight? So I’ve been asking just random questions. Let’s direct the conversation toward the book now, what are some of the lessons and the thesis points you want us to take from the book?

16:00 Steve Brown : Well, I think the main thing for people to realize is that AI is moving extremely quickly. If you tried AI even three months ago and thought it’s okay, but I don’t know what the fuss is about. It’s moving so quickly that today, AI’s capabilities are incredible, and they’re as bad now as they’re ever going to be, they’re only going to get better. So we need to stop thinking about AI as a tool and start thinking about it more as a co worker. We’re going to have digital employees working alongside us all, and that enables you to think about workforce planning and growing your teams in new ways. Jensen Wong was, you know, he was asked some time ago about his plans to grow Nvidia, and he said, Oh, I’ve got about 32,000 employees today, and over time, I plan to grow it to about 50,000 people, supported by 100 million AI assistants across every group. So he’s thinking about workforce planning and growth in a different way, and every company needs to and in the book, that’s one of the things I help people develop and figure out is how to have that balance and where and how to use agents, and if you have a physical component to work robots, so that you’re now building this blended workforce of people agents in the form of digital employees and robots Working side by side.

17:21 Jim Beach : All right, very interesting for us entrepreneurs, five person business, we don’t need to worry about it until we’re 20 people, right?

17:33 Steve Brown : Yeah, you need to start thinking about AI now, because here’s the opportunity for startups, there are going to be three types of companies the same way they were in the Internet revolution. There were three types of companies. There were traditional companies, internet first companies and internet native companies. Traditional, think Sears, JCPenney, internet first think Target, Walmart. Internet native, think Amazon. Okay, the only way you could compete with an internet native company was to become internet first, so target is able to still compete with Amazon. Now roll the roll the clock forward. Now we have traditional companies, AI first companies and AI native companies, the only companies that have the opportunity to become truly AI native, founded entirely on AI with AI at the core of what they do are startups and every major company on the planet, this is what I help them do now, is scrambling to become an AI first company, because the only way to inoculate yourself against an attack from an AI native business, From a startup coming after your lunch, is to become AI first. So what is an AI first or an AI native company? It’s where you stop using AI. You build your entire organization around AI. And that’s the opportunity that you have as a startup, is to make AI the engine of your business and then wrap people around it. And if you can do that, you can collapse constraints. You turn every every person in your business into a super superhero, because you’re able to give them superhuman powers. But by collapsing the constraints of costs and time, which are the two biggest constraints on business, by using AI to amplify everything you do, you can go to market in an entirely new way and have a business model that attacks existing companies and allows you to win in by playing a completely different game. And you need to do that from the get go. So that’s why you do it when you have five people and not 20.

19:41 Jim Beach : I was born in Orlando, and used to go to Disney every Wednesday, and my father got called in the middle of the night one time, and one of the Disney animals was sick, and he was asked to come down to take care of the Disney animal. And he’s a pathologist, right, really, off base there, but I’m going to Disney. A not a Disney adult. I just like Disney a lot. I like to take my kids, but I’m not one of those psycho they walk in or anything. Disney’s broken. There is absolutely no doubt that Disney is broken. Well, AI, I’m talking like at the moral level, the product level, every thing about Disney is broken. Price level, is AI going to be able to save broken companies like that? Will ai do the deep research and go, you know, we talked to 100,000 Disney fans, and here are the eight problems that you have got Disney that you’ve got to address. You know, you’ve lost the path Disney CEO and you need to reconsider everything you’re doing. Will AI save Disney?

20:50 Steve Brown : You know, I love Disney. They’re a wonderful company to work with. Do they have some challenges? Yes, are they aware of those challenges? Absolutely, can AI help a company? Yes, of course, I think it’s a powerful capability that, when deployed Well, enables you to reimagine how you service your customers, how you create value, and to collapse cost constraints so that you can deliver that value at a more competitive rate. So yes, I think AI will help companies like Disney and many others, if deployed correctly. As a futurist, I help my customers ask and answer two questions. One, what is the future we want to build? And two, what’s the future we want to avoid? And that’s fundamentally what you’re trying to do with AI now is build a better future for people.

21:45 Jim Beach : How significantly different is AGI going to be the generative versions?

21:52 Steve Brown : So AGI stands for artificial general intelligence. So the difference between where we are now and AGI, although the term has become somewhat meaningless, because everybody has a different definition for what it is. AGI typically is used to mean human level intelligence, so as smart as any human at any particular task you might give it. So that means hopefully helping us to start to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, discover new materials, and so on. So I think when it when it comes, if whenever it comes, and it could be five years from now, it could be a year from now, it could be 20 years from now. We don’t really know. Most likely the smart people I talked to were talking more like five years from now. What I think that helps us do one if you’ve already as a business, if you’ve already done the hard work of building your workforce as a combination of humans and agents and robots working side by side, when AGI comes, your agents, your digital employees and your robots suddenly become much smarter and more capable. So if you’ve already done that hard re engineering work and figuring out where AI plays a role in your workflows, you’re going to get advantage like turning the dial up to 11 on the AI component of your business. For society, I think what it means is we’re going to hopefully see a lot more breakthroughs. We’re going to see an acceleration in scientific discovery, solving, math, physics, chemistry, biology, material science. And that’s going to lead to better medicines. It’s going to lead to, hopefully, better batteries, superconducting metals. Perhaps that let us generate energy in the Mojave Desert and send it to New York. You know, there are all kinds of opportunities here, and that’s what I’m most excited about, is AI for science that accelerates discovery.

23:46 Jim Beach : What happens when AI for science to accelerate discovery announces that the Egyptians did not build the pyramids. They’re actually years old. They’re actually 42,000 year old. What’s going to happen with it produces a result that challenges every humans know what we all know. We all know the Egyptians built the pyramids. You’re not really allowed to say anything else. What happens when the computer says, No, it was actually 42,000 years ago.

24:15 Steve Brown : I’m not sure that that’s what AI the first thing AI is going to do. I think it’s more likely that’s going to help us understand physics and give us some breakthroughs in physics, and give us breakthroughs in our understanding of biology, and particularly disease paths. What does it take? Why do people get disease and how does it happen? How do you interrupt that disease path? That’s much more likely what we’re going to get from AI, and that’s what I’m hoping

24:42 Jim Beach : When, again, the Egyptian question. There’s too many conspiracy people out there that are talking about it.

24:46 Steve Brown : Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. It’s not a question I concern myself with at all. Jim, so it’s not the first thing I would give to AI.

24:55 Jim Beach : What do you think about Eric Weinstein saying that physics hasn’t made it in the. The advancements in the last 70 years.

25:04 Steve Brown : I mean, it’s probably true. I mean, other than discovery of the Higgs boson, yeah, it’s, it’s been conspicuously quiet in the physics world. We’ve not had a lot of breakthroughs. And, you know, there are theories about, are there some that are being held back, but yeah, I think it’s we’ve had a bit of a pause. We’ve got to the point where humans have been stumped by some problems. There’s some basic underlying mathematics that we’re now seeing breakthroughs with. With ai, ai, in the last two months, has solved a number of mathematical challenges that have stumped humans for generations. And I think math is what underpins physics, that mathematical dominoes start to fall. It’ll knock over the physics Domino, which gives you material science, and on and on, and eventually to medicine. So that’s what I’m focused on.

25:55 Jim Beach : I am fascinated with the medicine and the progress there. I have several of the chronic conditions, and it would be wonderful if they could make some advances there and go past just having someone read my X rays with AI until we get new drugs that were 100% AI developed. We don’t have that yet, do we?

26:21 Steve Brown : No, but we’re on that path. So when I was at DeepMind, one of the things I was proud to be involved with was the Alpha fold database. Your body is made of about 20,000 different proteins, and proteins are the machines of life. They make your body work so they make the blood through the blood flow through your veins. They make your muscles work and so on. So understanding how proteins work is important, because typically when something goes wrong in disease, it is either something going wrong with your proteins or something attacking your proteins. So Deep Mind managed to build an AI that would allow us to figure out how proteins fold. It’s a sort of bizarre Grand Challenge. If you had a protein, you could stretch it out into a line, and you let it go, and it kind of goes ping and forms into a particular shape. And the same way that, if you look at a mechanical machine, you can kind of figure out, based on its shape, what it might be there to do. The same is true with proteins, so understanding the protein shape matters, and it used to take the work of a PhD student about about five years their entire PhD to figure out the structure of one protein. The AI was able to do that in seconds. So now we understand the structure of every protein in every organism, and that helps us to then figure out medications. So you’re already seeing the fast forward button of AI being applied to drug discovery. And what will happen next is drug discovery becomes AI first. What I mean by that is you have an AI coming up with hypotheses suggesting drugs, and then they get manufactured and run in a wet lab. So in the physical world, you do a test, you then pass those tests back to the AI in silico, and that world, that circle turns and you’re going to vastly accelerate drug discovery and clinical trials. So that you know, the CEO of Deep Mind, Dennis ossars said we could cure all disease by 2035 so that’s a good reminder for us all to not be so cavalier with our lives. Avoid running out in front of busses for the next eight years or so, because we may have a line of sight to cure all disease within the decade or so,

28:40 Jim Beach : We only have a minute left, Steve, what have we not talked about that needs to get out there.

28:48 Steve Brown : I think it’s time for people to be curious about AI, to lean into it and to start, start thinking. Stop, stop thinking incrementally, and start thinking bold thoughts about how you might a use AI to do amazing things. And for the startup world, this is incredibly empowering. The ability to use AI to amplify what you to do, you do, and to set your ambitions much higher. People plus AI can 10x their abilities, or 100x their abilities. And so that’s what I want people to take away, is particularly from the startup world. Be more ambitious, have bold goals, and figure out how to use AI to have a profound impact in the world and a positive impact for people.

29:37 Jim Beach : The book is called the AI ultimatum, preparing for a world of intelligent machines and radical transformation. It’s on Amazon and five star rated. Where else do you want us to go to learn more about you and to communicate with you? Steve Brown, sure you

29:50 Steve Brown : Can come to my website. It’s easy to find Steve brown.ai, and if you’re interested, there is a free guide on there that I put I kept getting asked questions. Is, how do I learn more about AI? What AI should I use? So I built something called artificial wisdom. If you scroll down that first page, you’ll find it there, and it will give you links to books you might want to read, podcasts you might want to listen to about AI, white papers you might want to read, and, most importantly, AI tools that you might want to try. Because the most important thing you can do right now is to invest in yourself, build your AI acumen and try this stuff out, Right?

30:27 Jim Beach : Steve, thank you so much for being with us, and congratulations on the new book, and we hope you come back for number three quicker than you came back for number two.

30:35 Steve Brown : Thanks. Jen, yeah, I want that jacket, so sign me up. They’re amazing, pure silk, and we’re being right back.

30:53 Jim Beach : We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce my first guest. Please welcome Katie Nelson to the show. She is the CEO and founder of sales uprising. She’s been running that business for eight or nine years. She is a sales super catalyst and super connector. She is out there trying to build your business and get it to the next stage. She thinks that connecting is an incredibly powerful part of that and getting out and meeting as many people as possible. To that end, she is the chapter president of now Bo in greater DC. Now. Bo is a women’s organization for business leaders. She has a new book coming out soon. It’s an anthology where several people contribute chapters. And I read the chapter last night, and it’s got great information for us on getting on the stage and getting out there and speaking. Katie, welcome to the show. How you doing? I’m doing great. Jim, how are you great? I don’t remember what nalbo is. Stands for National Association of Women Business. Help me. Owners, owners. Okay, great.

32:06 Katie Nelson : There you go. So NABO, yeah, yeah, it’s an organization that’s been around for 50 years. It was started here in DC, and it’s July 2, 1975 and it is about the equity and parity for women owned businesses, 100%

32:26 Jim Beach : I have spoken at two of them, I think, here in Atlanta or Georgia, and they were great organization. A lot of fun. Yes. All right, tell us about sales uprising. And your thesis with the business? I love it because the business has a clear goal. Tell me about it.

32:47 Katie Nelson : I do have a clear goal for sales uprising. The tagline is where revenue moves you. And my target client, when I started 10 years ago, was to work with just barely monetized businesses, which means they just made their first couple sales, they’d run out of their friends and family to go to and had and looked around and was like, Where’d my sales pipeline go? So the goal for sales uprising is to get businesses to their first quarter of a million dollars in sales, and then we teach them how to grow from there. Sales is the number one key to growing your business. Jim, did you know that

33:23 Jim Beach : Absolutely, absolutely you’re right though about the running out of friends and family, and that does happen so quickly. And a lot of entrepreneurs thought that that was a good business model, and then realized that it’s not so. How do we make that transition from selling to mom and aunts and stuff to selling to people we’ve never met?

33:47 Katie Nelson : Okay, well, that what a great question. Thank you for asking so one, it’s not a bad way to go in the beginning, because it has the ability to get you a bunch of data that you probably aren’t paying attention to because you didn’t know you should be paying attention to that particular data. But when you go, when you first start your business, and you tell everybody you know about it, and they’re like, Oh, this is perfect for you. That’s awesome. I think I even have people to introduce you to the that process is more marketing than it is sales. And so you always want to keep that going. You always want to market your business and tell people who you are, the problems that you solve, of your expertise and how they can work with you. It’s the once they make the introduction, and you’ve sold someone through a warm introduction, that’s the sales process. The biggest thing, the drop off happens because no more warm introductions happen. So what we’re looking to do is, once we’ve delivered to the people that our friends and family sold us, right? Once that happens, what we’re looking to do is get more of those people. So that’s when we talk to the clients. We just delivered our expertise. We talked to the clients. Who else? You know that needs these types of services. We all hang out with each other. Whoever we are, the people who have the same types of problems generally tend to hang out in the same spaces. So who can you introduce me to that would be your next step to continue a pipeline of prospects?

35:17 Jim Beach : All right? Introductions,

35:20 Katie Nelson : Yeah, this is, this is what goes into connection, right? Stay connected.

35:25 Jim Beach : But does my aunt have connections that are going to help me?

35:29 Katie Nelson : Maybe you don’t know. You probably never talked to your aunt about what it is you do. You don’t know who she knows. She has a whole life that doesn’t involve being your aunt. She might

35:40 Jim Beach : That’s kind of insulting. Her entire job is being my aunt. Actually, my aunt was the first female licensed real estate agent in North Carolina. Was very big deal in the 50s that she was the first one who did it. Unbelievably, real estate used to be entirely men. Oh no, women, but in the 50s, she broke through. I love that. Yes. So it

36:10 Katie Nelson : Sounds to me like in fact. It sounds to me like In fact, she did have a whole life outside of being your aunt and as an aunt myself, I would tell my nieces and nephews that I do have a whole life that doesn’t involve them, so they should always talk to me. Should they be starting a business? You never know who I know for them?

36:32 Jim Beach : That’s right. That’s right. All right. So is there another step after introductions?

36:38 Katie Nelson : Or Absolutely? So, right. So I’ve asked everybody. I got some warm introductions. I’m now going to follow up with those introductions. I’m going to walk through my process of asking them to do business with me, if they’re the type of introduction that, through my qualification, I found out they actually have the problem that I solve for so they have that problem. I asked them to do business. They say yes or no. They say no, I’m going to ask why, because it sounded like it was a good conversation find out what’s down the no path. If they say yes, I’m going to take their money and run, and then I’m going to deliver whatever it was I promised to deliver, and then I’m going to follow up with them while I am delivering once I’ve gotten a Yes, right? I’m finally monetized. I have some money in the bank. I’m going to go find out. I’ll probably ask chat GPT, or whoever my favorite AI tool is, like, Where can I find more of these people? And then, if I’m smart, I’m going to go hang out where those people are and introduce myself and start the process all over again. So I mean, that’s it in a simple nutshell. I like it. I’ve done

37:43 Jim Beach : A ton of chamber events, and now both type events and things like that. Some groups just, you know, you want to buy my pens. I have pens, you know, a lot of people selling a lot of crap, you know. And I think that’s why a lot of the chambers have died in the small business area. You know, Atlanta used to have a very active chamber for small business, and they totally shut it down. And a lot of the chambers, from what I understand, are doing that, because 90% of their problems came from small business people, and 99% of their revenue for a big Chamber of Commerce comes from Fortune 500 and so you get these, you know, people who are like, introduce me to the CEO of Delta. Like, Delta needs help with pens. You know, Delta doesn’t need help with pens. And so a lot of them have died. How is nalbo, you know, dealing with situations like that, and how do you keep the membership to the quality that you can actually sell to them? You know, the guy selling pens is not a good target or anybody.

38:50 Katie Nelson : Well, as a person who used to sell pens myself, I may take exception to that, sir, but that’s that’s a whole nother conversation. What I would say is that now we’re talking about two different things. We’ve jumped tracks from what does it look like as a small business owner to sell to why is it that chambers and membership organizations that work with small business are dying? So what’s the real question

39:13 Jim Beach : Both I want to hear the answer to both of them. By the way, are infamous for asking 13 questions and then walking away,

39:21 Katie Nelson : I know, and so I’m going to qualify that so that I’m answering the right thing and getting it right for your audience, so that they can stay clear. Okay, starting with chambers dying. I think that there were a lot of sweeping similar types in your statement here in the DC metro area that is filled with chambers. I can name five that I can get to within a 30 minute radius of traveling. Some are growing and some aren’t. I don’t think that the challenge is that they filled up with small businesses. I think you would have to ask the fortune 500 companies why they’re no longer sponsoring or members of those chambers

39:57 Jim Beach : Here in Atlanta. Those are the only people left. They. Ran off all the small business so that could focus on the 10 companies in Atlanta, you know, Delta, yeah.

40:04 Katie Nelson : Well, that sounds like a chamber issue. The truth of the matter is, how much does a fortune 500 company need a chamber of commerce? And if you, and if you, if you run away, well, there you go. Then I would say that, as a small business owner, the Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t be the right place for me to try to go make introductions. So it has to do with your researching. Where do the people hang out that have the problems that I solve for so if I sell pens right then my goal is to find out who needs pens and where do they hang out when we say, when we make sweeping statements, like people sell a lot of crap. I would put forward that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. There’s a buyer for every kind of thing that’s sold. So where, where are those people? Just don’t find yourself in the wrong room, or once you are there, see your way out. Make a note. Collect the data. Say I spent X amount of time found absolutely zero potential buyers. I potentially connected with two people who might know somebody who has the problem that I solve for make sure you follow up with those people and put it on your calendar not to attend those events.

41:13 Jim Beach : All right, that’s good advice. I want to make the distinction. I think there’s multiple layers of chambers for you know, and here in Atlanta, there’s the Atlanta chamber, but then we also have the Cobb County Chamber and 20 other super localized chambers, yes, so I just maybe I have a bias because I got fired by the Atlanta chamber as part of the small business.

41:41 Katie Nelson : Now this story comes out, and I probably would have that bias too, so that’s appropriate, and it’s the same here, right? So we have the we have the greater Hispanic Chamber of Washington Chamber of Commerce. We have a Dulles Chamber of Commerce, which is very specific to the Dulles corridor. So we have the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce, which is a very large county. We have the fair central Fairfax chamber, which is a specific piece of Fairfax County. So I understand and all of them have different audiences, different buyers, and this goes into informing yourself, depending on the type of business you are and your who your clients are, as to where you need to be,

42:27 Jim Beach : All right, great. Let me ask you this. This is a problem that I’ve dealt with a lot, and a lot of people have asked me this, you’re helping people who are just starting to monetize, right? They’ve had three or four sales, and they’re starting to move past their the easiest connections, those people have very little money as business owners. So how do you as an entrepreneur trying to sell to them? How do you get how do they have enough money to pay the $10,000 that you deserve?

43:02 Katie Nelson : Well, thank you. Let’s be clear, I deserve much more than that, but the What a great question, and this actually comes to a challenge that a lot of small business owners have. One again, we can’t assume somebody’s bank account, and I never will, not only that, but then after we can’t assume the dollars that are in their bank account, we can’t assume their tolerance for risk or investment in themselves. So even if we’re bootstrapped businesses, I was a bootstrapped business once Jim, I’ve started four businesses, right, all of which have been bootstrapped.

43:38 Jim Beach : It was so really selling pins.

43:41 Katie Nelson : Oh no, no, I have sold pens, but I did not start a business selling pens. I used to work for a company called Miller’s office products when I first came to DC about 25 years ago. So I worked as a commission only sales person, boots on the ground, selling office supplies.

43:56 Speaker 3 : Absolutely. Wow. That is, yeah, because that’s a whole it’s actually,

44:01 Katie Nelson : I was gonna say that’s actually my favorite, the job that I’m the most proud of. I mean, I’ve started businesses. I’ve started multi, seven figure businesses, but my proudest moments are living in a brand new state, in a commission only job Hawking office supplies against big box stores, absolutely.

44:20 Jim Beach : All right, let’s so you’ve gone to the chamber and that two people who are good leads for you. How do you nurture that and foster that relationship and make it so that they’ll actually dig into their Rolodex and find somebody for you?

44:38 Katie Nelson : I love that. How what I would ask another question, I know it’s your favorite, asking a question with a question, but I mean, really, it comes down to, how do you foster or nurture any relationship you have an authentic cure curiosity about the other person. You want to get to know them. You want them to want to get to know you. Maybe you’re so bold as to even tell them that, like if we’re. Are in a day and age of where people port purport that they’re transparent and they’re authentic. How? What does that actually mean to you? And are you really doing that? The only person who can answer that is the individual. So, be yourself, you know, in a way, and act in a way that you feel is attractive to another person. If it isn’t attractive to them, you’ll know. And either you’ll decide, Oh, you’ll educate yourself and say, oh, what I think attractive, what I think is attractive to my target market may not be attractive to my target market. So maybe I just go to my target market and ask them, Hey, how do you need to talk to you? What can I say that you can hear, so that you know I am the solution for you.

45:46 Jim Beach : Yes, all right, and when you are doing the sales, you’ve used a very active get on the stage philosophy. Tell me how we can start doing that with our small business.

46:02 Katie Nelson : Okay, so first and foremost, there’s a couple of distinctions I want to make, just so that the audience can think about this conversation in their head and categorize it appropriately. There are many kinds of stages you can speak on. There are paid stages. There are stages that you create, there are stages that someone invites you to for free, right? So there’s all different kinds of stages, and we talk about those striations a little bit and speak your way to sales. They’re the stages where you can make offers, and they’re the stages where you can only have like, a call to action, like a hey, if you want my educational content, you know, text me to this number. The reason why stages are so important, especially when you’re a small business, is because well and it gives you data faster. Are people showing up to my events? Do I have my marketing right? Do I have the language that attracts my target market to me so that I can give them what they need. That is amazing data to have, especially early in your business. It’s almost like the key that unlocks your sales, right? Because you end up getting a pipeline through your marketing.

47:16 Jim Beach : Tell me about their biology and the chapter that you wrote, and first explain to everybody what these anthologies are, where various people contribute one chapter each, and how you got into that, how they approached you go through the entire being sold to be a chapter in the book first, and then we’ll talk about what you actually wrote in your chapter.

47:40 Katie Nelson : Okay, a book in and of itself, is its own stage. How I was approached for this particular book, because not only anthologies have the same vibe. For example, you can have 50 contributors to a book and it’s all just a chapter on their story, right, or their business or their it’s to highlight them or market them in some way speak your way to sales is a little bit different. I was approached by a what we would call a valued connection. She’s been a client. I’m a client of hers. We’re referral partners for each other. We’re business collaborators, collaborate, collaborators in another effort. And she came to me and said, so I have this idea for a book. All of the people that we all work with should be on stages, and that it’s such a many layered topic. So we went out and we gathered 10 authors, all of whom have different experience and solve for different problems in their business, and had them write a chapter in regards to that experience and our audience, about how to speak your way to sales appropriately. So, for example, one of the chapters is on your follow through, right? How do you from the stage, make sure that you grab all of the information so that you can follow up with all of the people in your audience? Amazing chapter, and that was, of course, put together by Mary Sue day Hill, who was the instigating factor. She and Meredith Eaton of Eaton press got together and put this whole thing together. So I was invited specifically to do the chapter on the real power of the stage which is generating revenue, right?

49:24 Jim Beach : Let me ask questions before we follow on or point out something. You know, when you write a book, you promote it. And the thing I love about these anthology books is that you now have 10 people out there promoting it on drop day of the first day that it’s available, and so you should easily get to number one on Amazon, and then you’re a number one best selling Amazon Author, right? Is that? How you you agree with me on that? How play that out?

49:53 Katie Nelson : Um, yeah. So that is absolutely a I’m. Marketing way to go right now. I mean, you can you can also get to number one on the Amazon bestseller list without it, without ever having a huge launch day and telling everybody to buy your book for, you know, a penny. So it just depends on what the book was written for. How to do it. If you have an anthology, the 50 people who are in it have the opportunity to do that, so it is likely to up your rankings as fast as possible. If the point of your book is to say I’m a number one Amazon bestseller, absolutely. All right,

50:31 Jim Beach : Tell us about your chapter and the advice that you give on getting on stage. How do I get on stage?

50:39 Katie Nelson : Mindset? Yeah, so my chapter isn’t about how you get on stage. My chapter is about how you make money once you’re on a stage. So that’s okay, there’s Don’t worry, you’ll get that in the book too. But it does all start with mindset. You had to do a gut check about, Am I on a stage where I even have a potential buyer? Right? Is my target audience here, if we know that the riches are in the niches, is my niche hanging out with their bum in the seat, ready to listen to me pour out all the good stuff that they need to solve. Part of their problem is that even there. So Check, check, that, is it a is it a front end or a back end sale, right? Which gets into some pretty hardcore sales talk, but is, did I get paid to be on that stage? Because if I did, then I’m already paid. I can just stand there and give them all the good stuff. Or is it a I’m here to sell you a thing while I am on this stage, and you’re going to hit a QR code, and you’re going to see all your options, and you’re gonna hit by now while I am talking to you, what kind of stage is it? Okay? What are my goals, right? And then, of course, you’re gonna get into your stage selection once you answer the question, is my target here, and do I have an audience match? Now we’re going to go into, does my content that I because, let’s be clear, sir, all of us can do a lot of things. All of us who have expertise know a lot of things. So is the content that I’m going to present appropriate to this audience? All right, then we’re going to think about revenue potential. What does that look like from this space? Are we creating appropriate goals for ourselves, right? So there’s a lot, there’s a lot to it. There’s multiple steps you’ve got to and the biggest one being, I would say, if you’re looking to generate revenue, while you are talking on this stage, right, if that is the opportunity that you have created for yourself, or that has been created for you, you better make sure you know how to do that. What are you offer? What are they buying? And how are they going to do it? So, so make sure you can collect the cash and make sure that the talk is appropriate to to the Ask that you’re giving

53:02 Jim Beach : Them. And how can we find our local NABO,

53:06 Katie Nelson : Nabo.org n, a, W, B, o.org, it will have a fine location near me. If you were, if you are hearing this from the greater DC metro area, you can find me at President at NABO dc.com we would love to have you we actually have an amazing national event that will be here in DC may 31 through June 2, so you can find that@nabo.org as well. Fantastic.

53:33 Jim Beach : Katie, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot. We are out of time, but back tomorrow. Take care. Be safe. Bye. Now you.