July 8, 2026 – Ultimate Investor David Leiter and AI Automation Becky Beach

Intro 1 0:04
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. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:25
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there. Being an entrepreneur, it’s so hard sometimes, and you need the support of others, and I’m here to support you as much as I can. I’m trying to give you the education and the motivation to play the game to find great stories that elucidate the process and help you understand what you need to be doing to succeed, and giving you the motivation to get off the sofa and go out there and do it. Two fantastic stories today. David Leiter is first up. He is with the Ultimate Investors. We’re going to talk about every investment class and the casino of life, and as an investor, it’s a great interview, a long one, which always means I’m interested, and I’m excited to share that information with you. After that, Becky Beach is with us. We do not think we are related. We do not seem to have any common beach ancestors, but we share the same surname. She has built an amazing online sales brand and business. It’s just incredible. She is Mom beach.com and has a whole email strategy. It’s amazing. She is making multiple different revenue streams using Claude Co-working a lot, and it’s a great story to learn from. So, I’m excited to introduce Becky Beach to you later in the show, as well as I said, it’s a great one. Appreciate you being with us. We’re gonna get started right after I pitch my book. You’ve got to go by Real Environmentalists. It was a finalist for the Independent Book Action, whatever the year. Please go buy it. It’s a great book.

The Real Environmentalists AD 2:16
Time to talk and no action on climate change. Introducing The Real environmentalists, 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.

Jim Beach 2:48
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us today. Very excited to introduce another great guest. Please welcome David Leiter to the show. He is a veteran investor educator, and he’s the founder of The Ultimate Investor, where he teaches individuals how to build lasting wealth through value investing. You may remember the term value investing from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. David began his career on Wall Street at Credit Suisse First Boston, worked there, and then switched to another security firm, before he went off and started his own property management company. He sold that in 2020 to the largest privately held property management company in the United States. Incredible success there. He has also written a new book. We are excited to learn about it. It’s called Stop Making Stupid Investments: Seven Rules to avoid the hype and build real wealth. David, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

David Leiter 3:48
I’m doing great, thanks. Pleasure to be here.

Jim Beach 3:50
Congratulations on the book. Tell us about it. Is are is the reason so many of us lose money, just stupid mistakes, right out of the title.

David Leiter 4:04
Yeah, I mean, I wrote the book because I saw people making really bad investments over the years, things that I thought that were really stupid. I see friends and acquaintances doing these deals, and I just added disgust. I figured I could never stop people sort of hustling others, but I could help people when I was passionate about it, like how to really pick investments, how to make good decisions, which a lot of people have trouble doing.

Jim Beach 4:31
Yes, they do. So, what types of mistakes did you see out there? Lack of due diligence.

David Leiter 4:37
Yeah, most of it, a lot of it is emotional mistakes, and in other words, I would see people doing peer-to-peer money raising for, like, let’s say, real estate deals, and that on its own doesn’t mean a real estate deal is bad. It’s a great way to put money together to buy real estate, but then they got so hyped up in 2021 or I saw people hustling crypto schemes. Or some stocks or private startup businesses, so the biggest mistake was people would get emotional, they get excited, and they say, “Oh, I’m going to make so much money, or they saw their friends doing it, they jump in, and they don’t really have any understanding of the probabilities of it working

Jim Beach 5:18
all right. What are the type investments that you feel comfortable with, or are you comfortable with any type of it’s vetted correctly?

David Leiter 5:26
I mean, I have a lot of experience with real estate apartment buildings, some mixed use with retail and stocks. I love stocks. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve done more stocks, because you can sit in your office on the computer, and look at businesses all over the world in different stock exchanges, and that’s what people forget. Stocks are a piece of a business, and if you can evaluate the business correctly, and then see if it’s trading at a fair price, you can have a world of opportunity just sitting at home, whereas real estate, you have to go out and sort of kick the tires. It’s just fun too, but those are my two favorite assets.

Jim Beach 6:07
Okay, what particular types of stocks are you all in on? SpaceX,

David Leiter 6:12
I’m not. Actually, you know the thing with SpaceX, and it was, it went IPO at a very high valuation relative to its earnings, and of course it’s an amazing story. Like people’s imaginations can run wild, they’re going to own space, they basically have a monopoly, and so you can think they’re going to just be the best, and that’s probably true. But what matters is when are those cash flows going to come, because they’re going to be investing for many, many years, and the analysis I did is it’s way off in the future, so I think the stock will go up and down, up and down like this for a long time, until the earnings get where it’s going to be, and that could be years.

Jim Beach 6:54
It kind of reminds me of the Facebook offering. Does that make sense to you? You see, the, yeah,

David Leiter 6:59
but you know, back, it’s funny, because actually Facebook won it now, Meta, when it went public, it actually got cut in half, and it was down, you know, half of its IPO price for a while, and you could have bought it, but you know, at some point in there was, it was a good value, clearly, so you don’t want to be too sort of, you want to be able to see that future, but what matters is the cash flows that these companies generate in the end for shareholders. You cannot be an indefinite future of losing money, so there’s a, there’s a balance there. And that’s why investing is part art, part science. It’s being able to see that, take the data and see how that might play out.

Jim Beach 7:41
Is Charlie Munger still working and still alive?

David Leiter 7:45
No, no, Charlie Munger passed away a couple years ago, so unfortunately he was one of the greats, obviously. And you know, I studied Warren and Charlie since 1995 I read the book The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, and that changed my life for me, actually also trying to do sort of, I guess you’d call get rich quick schemes, and I realized, you know what, I have to get serious, I was in my 20s, and that set me on the right path.

Jim Beach 8:13
All right, what about the methodology appeal to you so much? So, for someone who doesn’t know the core belief of Charlie and Warren Buffett, what is their core philosophy?

David Leiter 8:25
Well, they are buying pieces of a business. This is where there’s two things going on in the stock market, in particular. There’s the casino, which most people operate in. They buy a stock, they get, I heard it’s going to go up. SpaceX is incredible. The stock’s going to go up. They know nothing about the business, the fundamentals, what they’re making. They just heard stories to Warren and Charlie. The reason they were successful is for two reasons: a) they looked at stocks as pieces of a business, b) they understood that markets and the psychology they can go up and down, detached from the earnings, and periodically stocks fall very hard, people get very negative, and that can be a great opportunity. It’s not always a great opportunity. You need to know what you’re doing, but that’s really how they got wealthy. They were able to act when other people were scared and selling.

Jim Beach 9:13
All right, very true. And what about investing in things that you don’t understand or don’t know? Buffett’s famous for saying that I don’t invest in tech because I just don’t understand it very well. What are your thoughts on that?

David Leiter 9:28
Yeah, exactly. It’s very hard in technology because things change so fast, and he cannot see the future where it would be five or 10 years from now, but most people think they can. They, you have to have a lot of humility about what you know and what you don’t know, especially in the world of AI, where everything is changing. So, what people don’t do is say, “What’s not going to change? You know, what’s not going to change, and can I be involved in those things as well? So, there’s there’s two sides to it, but yeah, if you don’t understand it and can explain it to somebody in a couple minutes, you. Probably shouldn’t be doing it.

Jim Beach 10:02
I like that a lot. What about crypto, David? I know you have a chapter in the book on crypto, and I love the title. I’ve got 99 problems, but crypto ain’t one. I guess you’re not a big crypto fan. Tell me about your thoughts.

David Leiter 10:19
I’m not a big crypto fan, just I’m not telling people what to do. People get upset when I say that, but it really is a problem. It’s an, it’s a non-productive asset. People need to understand you have productive assets. That’s a great business that throws off cash, an apartment building that throws off cash. I don’t have to trade my apartment building to make money. My return comes from the asset. Every month I get the cash flows in crypto. The only way you make money is you have to believe you can sell to someone at a higher price, and they buy it, and they have to believe they could sell to a higher price, and that has to go on indefinitely, because your crypto does nothing. So, it’s had it’s been fraught with so many problems, scams, people hack. I had a friend lost 140 bitcoin. He had like 145 because he got hacked. It’s like it’s a problem I don’t have, I don’t want to have, and it’s just a game of sentiment, and you thinking that everyone’s going to get hyped up and drive the price up. It’s not real investing, it’s speculation.

Jim Beach 11:19
All right, we introduced a new word there, sentiment, feelings, emotion. Obviously, I should invest on my emotions, right?

David Leiter 11:27
No, that’s actually one of my seven rules. Emotions are the enemy of investing, and people really have a hard time with this, especially entrepreneurs, because in business you put all your energy, your emotion, your willpower, you do everything to succeed, so I’ve had many friends who are successful in business, and then they lose money investing, because they think if they just get excited about it, that that’s the way to do it, like they did with their business, but it’s actually, you have to take the emotion out, make a rational judgment about the company, the business you’re investing in, about its future, about its probability of success, and that’s almost an unemotional thing, so it’s the opposite.

Jim Beach 12:06
What about this idea that you buy from people that you trust and like? Do I care about that?

David Leiter 12:13
Well, look, he clearly, if you’re going to invest, you would, you would like to like the person. I think it’s a starting point. I saw people just on that alone give people money, wire money to someone on a real estate deal on some kind of startup, because they like the person. I will tell you, people who are investment promoters, many of them are very savvy and shrewd, and they know, and they’re charming, they know how to talk to people, that doesn’t mean they’re bad people or their intention is bad, but if they’re good at raising money, that’s one thing you have to look at. What’s their track record? Does it have oversight, like audits, especially in these private deals? I saw so much money lost, and it’s not reported because it’s peer to peer. No one talks about it. They talk about FTX, because that was in the news. There’s so much money lost peer to peer, giving money to somebody, and you, it’s not just because you like them, you have to go farther than that.

Jim Beach 13:09
All right. Do you dislike all of the peer to peer platforms?

David Leiter 13:13
No, I don’t. I think it’s a great thing. I started out, I got money from a few people, and I bought property, and I made those early investors a lot of money, so there’s nothing wrong with it, but I treated them well. I am an honest person, and it worked. But what happened is every asset that gets hot gets sort of polluted at one point. It’s like real estate was great from 2009 10 interest rates were zero, everything went up. Then everybody thought, I’m a genius, I’m going to raise money, and I’m going to buy properties with other people, and that worked for a while. And then nobody thought interest rates would go up, all these things, and they, and a lot of people lost everything that they made in those previous 10 years in a few deals, because the deals kept getting bigger, bigger, bigger, and so you just have to, you have to realize these ebbs and flows of emotions and markets and hype, and then despair, and actually the best time to buy is when everybody hates an asset.

Jim Beach 14:13
What are your thoughts on speaking of assets that everyone hates? Airbnb right now.

David Leiter 14:20
Well, I think that was it’s a great concept. I’m not an Airbnb investor. I used to have one unit I had on Airbnb, and then I realized actually a long-term lease on that unit was going to pay me more, so I kind of got out of it. The big thing there is that people – this is the big mistake people make if they’re buying Airbnb investment properties, is they price it on what they think their nightly rate would be as an Airbnb, and if it doesn’t work out and they need to convert to long-term rental, they now have paid too much in many cases, and now they’ve taken a huge risk, and by the way, cities change laws, they bring. Remove the ability, like in New York, they removed the ability largely to use Airbnb, so it’s you have to be really, you have to buy it based on the long-term rental price, and then if you want to Airbnb and try it, if you’d like.

Jim Beach 15:15
What about the New York market and all of the new regulations that our new mayor is doing there. What are your thoughts on the my own dork market?

David Leiter 15:25
I own properties in New York, but mine aren’t rent regulated, so I don’t have as many problems. But they basically did a 2019 a rent law, which froze, sort of, it made it very difficult for landlords to raise rents, and then this year they’ve just frozen them completely, so all they’re doing is punishing the landlords, and then on top of that they have this rule, well, if you don’t maintain your building, we can take your building, it’s really like some socialist utopian, it’s not my, not my thing, they, I think they actually really want to make landlords lose their buildings, as crazy as that sounds, it’s sort of their long-term goal. If you read the their politics, so I stay away from it. But on that note, you can buy rent-regulated apartment buildings at very cheap prices, but you are, you have all these restrictions, so I don’t know if it’s actually cheap or it’s going to be expensive,

Jim Beach 16:22
you have a chapter in the book where you talk about investing in real estate and the importance of an audit. There, explain that to me. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a piece of property that had an audit.

David Leiter 16:33
Well, if you, if you’re investing with other people, they should have some audit oversight if you’re wiring money to some company or something. This is, I just wrote it in there for people to think, because they, when they do these peer-to-peer deals, they send money off, and they really don’t know. I’ve seen people raising money for various types of things, not just real estate, and they basically live off the money, they charge all sorts of fees, and then they just, nothing happens, and that people lose their money. If you have an audit, and that doesn’t mean you’re 100% protected, but it’s a lot better if they have professional people, an accountant, an auditor, legal counsel that are involved in these peer-to-peer deals. As

Jim Beach 17:17
an early real estate investor or a neophyte, would you invest in one of these group deals where a syndicate gets together and buys the apartment building?

David Leiter 17:30
Well, again, there’s there’s reputable companies that do it. I think you have to find a company with a very long track record, because people who invested from 2010 11, and some of them are smart people, and they, and they did well, and they bought at Lowe’s, but they never saw cycle, and so when rates went up, a lot of them got killed. So you ideally want to see somebody with 30 years, like a group, a company that’s been doing it, and they’re harder to find, but there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s it can be a great way to invest. You just have to realize with private deals you’re tying your money up for long periods of time. You have no control over it, and you’re making a decision based on that person that you’re investing with that they’re going to make good decisions with your money.

Jim Beach 18:20
Very true. What about the NFTs and things like that? I can’t hear what you think about those.

David Leiter 18:31
No, they’re all speculation, you know. I’m no expert on artwork. I know artworks. I once was in Steve Wynn’s house, and I saw Picassos and Warhols, and they’re worth enormous amounts of money, and I have no idea how to gage what’s going to go up, but you’re basically, they had these uh apes, what was it, the board ape, and they were 300,000 now they’re, I don’t know, a couple $1,000 and you’re just speculating again, like crypto, that someone else is going to buy it, like Bitcoin, that, and want to pay more for it. This is not investing, and it’s largely a waste of time. In the meantime, you’re, you’ve got your money tied up, and all these hopes, wishes, and dreams, and you, there’s real businesses compounding, making products, goods, and services, that’s investing, looking at those businesses, you

Jim Beach 19:23
What about systems? You know, I have a lot of guests on this show, and I try to let the guests tell their story without my interpretation. You know, so I have guests who come on and talk about their trading systems, and I don’t make many comments. I let them speak for themselves, and if the listeners like it, they can do it. If the listeners think that it’s BS, then they can dislike me for putting it on the radio in the first place. What are your thoughts on these systems? I gotta thank you.

David Leiter 19:55
I think it’s absolutely absurd. Let me just tell you. Is there’s people who have systems, Renaissance Tech. Now, Renaissance was a fun Jim Simmons, returned 30% of years. He had an algorithm, it worked on short-term trades, he didn’t sell it to anybody. If I had a system that printed money, I would not be selling it. I just.. it’s.. it’s just insane to think if your system really worked. But what happens is people create trading systems. There’s a lot of money in selling them. Again, it’s an emotional allure that I’m going to make money quickly and easily with this system. Charlie Munger famously said, “If you want a system, go to business school, they’ll teach you systems that don’t work. There’s no system, it’s a framework for thinking. So, the trading systems are ridiculous. They might work for a while. They won’t work again. You wasted your time. You’ll likely lose your money,

Jim Beach 20:49
right? Very true. I think. Go back and just tell us a little bit of your entrepreneurial history. Give us some insights on your career and what you think the highlights and the low lights have been.

David Leiter 21:05
Well, I mean, I started out of school, I didn’t really have skills. I went to a liberal liberal arts school, where I learned a lot, but I didn’t really have skills. I took a sales job. I learned sales through a back door. I got into Credit Suisse on Wall Street. That was a great experience, because they taught me how to evaluate businesses. They called it credit training. We were lending money. I was on the trading desk, but it was loans, so I learned how to look at businesses. Could they pay us back? That’s where it started, and plus the Warren Buffett book. And then I left there. Eventually, actually, was at a trading firm for three years. That’s how I also know trading, even the most professional, the best guys, it’s very difficult to do it long term and make money. And then I went on my own, I owned real, I had bought real estate on the side. Eventually started a management company, and it was a small company in New York, and I sold it to Associations Inc, and they, you know, they’ve been running it since management’s very hard, the best part of real estate is owning it. I don’t think it was the best idea to go and try to build a management company. I did it out of sort of selfish reasons to help manage my own, and then I took on other people’s buildings, but it’s a lot of work, especially in New York with all the rules, and then after that I was sort of semi retired and I living off my investments and I just had seen all these bad deals and I started writing about it, you know, and that was sort of an entrepreneurial thing, people have a skill, something they’re very good at and they can help others with it, so it wasn’t a plan, I just started writing, Tony Robbins read it, put me on stage. I spoke at an event with Ray Dalio, Jeffrey Gunnlaug. My first time speaking on a stage about this subject was that stage. It was quite, quite an introduction. And since then I’ve been teaching people, and I wrote the book, which basically puts everything that we’re talking about into it. And I think I’m really happy. How it came out, and so far people have loved it, who’ve read the preliminary copies. It comes out officially on july 14,

Jim Beach 23:08
and it’s already listed on Amazon for purchase right now. So, you can get it. Go ahead and get it, please. Loyal listeners,

David Leiter 23:20
yeah, it’s on Amazon, Barnes and Elm, it’s everywhere. It’s published by Wiley, so it’s widely available july 14. Stop making stupid investments, which was a cheeky title, but really, if you just.. I want to wake people up. Investing is the greatest game. It’s the greatest game you can get involved with people in the stock market, the greatest entrepreneurs, you don’t have to be super skilled yourself. You can participate in the growth, you will earn way more from investing than you ever can from just going and grinding it out in whatever you’re doing. So it’s just a great game, and I was just sort of disgusted about how polluted things have become. Hard working, good people were getting their money taken. It happens all the time by investment promoters, and even the ones that mean well, but they don’t know what they’re doing. Should I have a trusted advisor? I mean, I tell people, have an advisor, and people say I can’t find a good one, so that’s a whole nother conversation, but the purpose of an advisor, a financial advisor, which I’m not, is that they keep you on track. They could talk you off these emotional cliffs. They should be able to do that for you, even if they don’t lag, that they don’t even meet the market returns. I’m not opposed to it, only because people on their own tend to do the opposite actions. They jump out when markets are crashing, and when markets at our highs, they can’t take it anymore. They have follow and they jump in. A good advisor will keep you on track, and you have a plan. How much do I make? How much can I save? How much can I invest? How long I’m going to do it for? It’s important to have a plan. And so that’s why I tell people to have an advisor,

Jim Beach 25:04
Ben Franklin, you’re snickering already. Why are you snickering?

David Leiter 25:11
Well, the publisher actually came up with that. I think it’s just a funny, it’s just a perfect sort of funny picture, like Ben Franklin, who’s known for being, you know, very good with money, very smart, with tons of wisdom, and it’s like he’s looking at you and saying, What are you doing? And that’s what I met so many great, nice people, I’ve talked to 1000s and 1000s of people, and I met, I had a guy sold his company for 50 million, he was giving a million to this guy, 2 million here, and I yelled, I said, “What are you doing? You’ve won the game, and you were just.. you don’t need to do this. These people are idiots. You’re way smarter, actually. And he, he later said, “You know, you saved my family. He was just wasting his money. So that’s Ben Franklin. He’s just saying, “What are you doing, folks? Get smart. Investing is a great game. Avoid all this hype.

Jim Beach 26:07
And your publisher is Wiley, which I would consider one of the top three business publishers out there. So, congratulations on that. How did you get a deal with Wiley? That’s pretty prestigious. How’d that happen?

David Leiter 26:21
Well, again, I think Tony Robbins always said something: motive matters. In other words, what is your motive? I really wanted to help people. I wasn’t thinking about a business at all. I was just so disgusted. And then, when I wrote, I actually wrote a preliminary thing. It was called the 20 rules to know to stop making dumb investments. I wrote it on my iPhone notes. I sent it out to a group of about 1000 people, Facebook group, and so many people replied, and I just started going from there. And you know, being around good people around Tony, I love Tony. I think if you go to his events, you meet people there. It’s kind of how I got into that, and then I went to, I was able introduced to an agent, the agent put the book out, and Wiley really liked it. So it’s really about proximity, who you’re around, and the Tony Robbins organization, and his events, you tend to attract really interesting, great people, so it’s a, it’s a great friend circle, and so that’s really it. I just kept doing it, and my motive was sort of, you know, I really wanted to help, and I think that comes across. It

Jim Beach 27:32
does. That’s such a critical part of just the way the entire book is presented, and the way you talk about it, too, it’s very clear you haven’t pitched us yet, you haven’t tried to buy anything yet, and I always wait to see that. How long does the guest take to try to sell me something? And you haven’t tried it all, so I value that motive considerably. I think, well, thank you.

David Leiter 28:02
Yeah, thank you. I mean, I would like people to buy the book, because I think it will help them. To me, if, if you read the book and you avoid one thing, because I’ve seen people – I’ve seen a six year old woman lose her entire life savings in a real estate scam, and she’s still working today. If you just have these guard rails, and then in the third part of the book, I tell people, if you really want to pick your own investments, don’t get faked out by some social media guru telling you it’s easy. This is actually how you do it, and it’s what they call the framework, which is based on Warren Buffett. Like, you want to be realistic about what it takes. If you really have a passion for it, you want to pick your own, you need to do that third part of the group, the third part of the book, but look, I’m not raising money, I’m not doing anything like that. So this is a fun passion project for me. As long as it’s fun, I’ll keep doing it, and I really enjoy seeing people have great results, and like come to me and just like thank me that they got them on the right track, and that they’ve saved millions, hundreds of 1000s, and then on the other side, they’ve tends many of them tend to make money, they make better decisions now.

Jim Beach 29:13
Where do you see the macro economic situation in six months a year? We’ve been told that a major recession is coming. I feel like we’ve been told that for a decade now, almost. What are your thoughts?

David Leiter 29:27
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, again, I default to Buffett because I regard his track well, his track record is the best of all time, 50 years over 19% a year. People have done more in law and short term, but it’s clearly unarguable that his system works, and he always says I’m not a macro investor, I’m a micro investor. I look at businesses, the real thing you have to think about, because I people predict where interest rates are going to go, recessions, no recession, it’s largely a waste of time if you’re going to invest, just think sometimes the economy. Good, sometimes it’s bad. Is your business that you’re invested in it can withstand changes, because there will be ups and downs, and you have to think, can I stay in this? Is this business going to last? And can you psychologically be prepared if you own a stock and it goes down 3040, 50% but you really, you understood the business, and can you handle that? And that’s a big thing people do not think about at all, their own ability to withstand that volatility. At the end of the day, the market is the stock is not the company, the company’s not the stock. There’s two different things going on, stock market is casino up and down, up and down. You should be buying companies and thinking can it withstand through bad times, good times in that macro environment.

Jim Beach 30:52
Great advice, David. I hope the book sells very well for you, and congratulations on getting it published. How do we find out more? Follow you online, get a copy.

David Leiter 31:01
Well, I’m on social media at David Leiter, you know, X Instagram also have The Ultimate Investor, but depends on the tag, so I’m all over social. YouTube is at The Ultimate Investor, The Ultimate investor.com is the website, they have links there to the books on all the major retailers and independent retailers as well, so that’s how you can reach me. So, follow me. I post a lot of content, I post videos a lot from my events, little clips people really seem to enjoy that are valuable sort of investing principles.

Jim Beach 31:39
Fantastic, David. Thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we’d love to have you back.

David Leiter 31:44
Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Jim Beach 31:46
And we will be right back in just a second with someone who has the same last name as me. What are the odds of that? We will be right back, you

Intro 2 32:07
Well, that’s a wonderful question. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s that’s that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question. And that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 32:28
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. I’m very excited to introduce our next guest. Please welcome Becky Beach to the show. No relation, and we have this strange same last name, but we are not related. I’ve come from the English, and I think that Becky and her family come from German beaches, so we’re probably not related anyway. Excited to welcome her. She is a speaker, an author, and an AI-powered business consultant. She loves to help people use AI-powered agents to drive business success. She has a podcast and several books that I found on Amazon. One, the Easy Button for Mom Life Newsletters. I love that idea, that wives and mothers could have an easy button. I think that would be a great idea. She helps her coaching clients get through all sorts of digital product and online business problems, and that is her specialty, helping digital businesses thrive. Becky, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Becky Beach 33:34
Oh, thanks so much. You’re really happy to be here, Jim.

Jim Beach 33:37
Tell us your story. How’d you get started in online sales?

Becky Beach 33:41
Oh, sure. Well, it all.. it’s all because you know, I got pregnant with myself and Brian, and I was working this really toxic job, and I had a boss that he kept telling me I was worthless and not creative enough, and I didn’t deserve my title, and I was on maternity leave, like three months unpaid, they wouldn’t give me any time off, and during that time I decided to build a blog called Mom beach.com and then I started writing the newsletter for moms, and that really changed my life. And then I started growing my business, and I just kept growing and growing, and to this day I may make about 100,000 a month for my businesses. I have four businesses now.

Jim Beach 34:18
Fantastic, Mom beach.com yeah, Mom beach.com That’s, yeah, I never knew about that. What an amazing success. And so, what do you put up on Mom Beach? What is it talking about? What are the issues you discuss? Lazy.

Becky Beach 34:35
Oh, yeah. Well, it start.. yeah, start off as a start off as a finance blog for moms, because I’m just extraordinarily gifted at saving money and being very resourceful. I grew up in poverty, so I’ve always had a way to get what I need for less, so that’s what really got Palm Beach on the map. And then, during Covid, exploded, I was getting 300,000 page views a month, and that enabled me to quit my job at the time, so. Been job free for six years doing my business,

Jim Beach 35:05
very impressive. What are you selling on the site? Courses, and what anything else in addition to courses?

Becky Beach 35:13
Yes, I have a Shopify store, and I sell courses, printable planners that moms could, you know, download and print off on their printers. I sell spreadsheets like that, use Google Sheets that they could use for budgeting and other other activities, and yes, I have a number of products, and also made a new store called Becky beach.ai which focuses totally on my AI courses and AI tools, like skills I have GPTs for sale, like stuff like that,

Jim Beach 35:42
unbelievable. All right, let’s talk about the AI in a minute. What are the courses featuring or covering? What are the topics we can learn in the courses?

Becky Beach 35:52
Oh, yeah, so do a number of things like that. Before I was doing, I was doing AI a lot, I was focused totally on email marketing strategy, and my top-selling course at the time was coffee talk emails, and I talk about how you write an email every single day, you just share different stories about your life. It’s kind of like Seinfeld, how every episode is like some kind of little story that happened, it’s kind of useless information, but you know everybody really loves hearing about stuff like that.

Jim Beach 36:18
Give me an example, what would one of those sound like,

Becky Beach 36:21
oh, well, like recently I went, for instance, I went to the post office, and there was a lady there complaining that her package hadn’t shipped, and she was going on and on about it, and then before I left, she says, “Oh, hasn’t even been shipped yet, like, like I got confused of the date, so I talked about that in my email, so it’s just some useless thing that happened to me, like a life story, and I shared about it, and I got such a big response, because in the email I called the woman a Karen, because she just kept going on and on and asking to speak to the manager, and saying that she knew the post, the postmaster general, and just making a big hurrah, and then I got a lot of people responding back, oh, was it nice to call her a Karen, and like there was some positive and negative, and like, also negative feedback.

Jim Beach 37:05
She sounds like Karen to me.

Becky Beach 37:07
Yeah, yeah, I know, right?

Jim Beach 37:10
Karen would complain about someone being called a Karen,

Becky Beach 37:13
right? Right, yeah. Somebody just one person emailing back saying, I have a friend named Karen, and she’s the nicest person, and I just don’t appreciate, you know, you calling that woman a Karen.

Jim Beach 37:25
Well, I think they defend themselves with their own actions. Oh

Becky Beach 37:32
yeah,

Jim Beach 37:33
what are you doing with AI? What have you discovered there that’s saving you time and money?

Becky Beach 37:39
Oh, so much. Yeah, I’m only working like 15 hours a week now, and I’m running four different businesses, and I use Claude Co-work to automate everything, like my emails, my podcast script, and then also my social media, like it just schedules to buffer my social media scheduler, and it’s just amazing to keep and make Instagram carousels automated, it’s just because Instagram carousels are the best way to grow on Instagram right now. Everybody just loves them, and they get high engagement.

Jim Beach 38:07
All right, what are you putting in your Instagram, carols? What are the stories in the pictures about showing?

Becky Beach 38:14
Well, mostly to promote my workshop, like I have a workshop coming up. I do one a month, and I have the next one’s July. The next one’s in July on the 16th at 3pm central. You know, so I’ll talk about that later in the episode on how people could join that. So I’ll talk about my workshops I have, you know, my products I’m selling, and it shows a great way to, you know, get the word out.

Jim Beach 38:37
What’s the.. what are some of your tricks to becoming more organized and better productivity in the house and with all your businesses. What are some of your tricks to become more productive?

Becky Beach 38:49
Oh, sure. Well, you, I made a whole bunch of skills, like 70 really premium AI agent skills with Clyde Cowork, and what I’ll do is I have them like totally help my business, and this frees up so much of my time. I got one that will make me a website for my podcast episode, like I just upload the video of my podcast, and it makes a website that’s animated and looks really professional, and there’s a number of things, and you know this very great radio show was found with my skill, and the AI actually pitched to you, so the AI wrote to you. Yeah, yes, but of course, before, yeah. So, so I got this radio show booking because of my skill.

Jim Beach 39:31
Why did you choose Claude for your age? It’s

Becky Beach 39:35
just, it’s just such a great tool. Like, I’m also experimenting with Codex, that’s like the answer to cowork, and it has cowork, and cowork came out around March, and it’s just really taken the AI world by storm, because you know, Claude, I think, is the best writer. It just sounds more human than any other AI tool out there, in my opinion, and I love how it writes, and also programmed it, I mean, trained. It to sound like me based on my own, the way I talk, because I’ve been writing like I even did journalism in, like, in high school I was on the yearbook team. I’ve always loved writing. I write stories, like you saw all the books I’ve written, and so I just, I programmed it to sound like me when it’s writing, and I just love it, because it just sounds exactly like how I write.

Jim Beach 40:22
Are you using a free version of Clutter? Are you actually paying for it?

Becky Beach 40:25
Oh, I’m paying for it. I’m paying for it all. I’m paying for like $200 a month, that playing the max, the double max, you know? Because I’m such a heavy user, like I have it running all day, and it does automations for me, so I could step away and my podcast scripts written like everything, like I’m getting pitches written and drafted, and all I gotta do is hit send after I review the content, like that’s what I did with your show, I just, it wrote a pitch to you, and even found you, you know, and it pitched to you, and I just reviewed it, and I hit send, that’s all I do is hit send on these emails it writes for me,

Jim Beach 40:59
I’m looking at the email, it’s a great pitch, you know. Yeah, standard things that pitches do, like even pitches have changed in the last year or two, where all good pitches include some sort of suck-up line at the beginning, like, you’re so smart to have built this show, now can I be on it? And, yeah, it even does that, you know, it even does the suck up lines and stuff.

Becky Beach 41:25
Oh, right. So the third

Jim Beach 41:26
paragraph is before you introduce yourself and say I’m Becky Beach, and so it’s just very.. it’s a great pitch. How does the mind.. how did you teach it to find people to email in the first place, targets.

Becky Beach 41:43
Oh, yeah. So I have a scrape in the internet. I was actually doing systems as my career, like making systems, like I made a whole system for a hospital before, like EMR system, and I used to do that, like systems engineering and software development, and like user experience. So I use those skills that I learned on the job to really helps me build these skills out in a really good way, but you don’t need to be a developer to make skills like anybody could make them. I just kind of approach it from a systems and development standpoint, so I have it like scrape the internet and I put on there’s this thing called fire scrape, and you could put that as a connector that helps it scrape the internet a lot better, like, so you just go into your customizations and clot and enable that as a connector, so it could scrape, and then it could, like, just go in, even in the back end of some of these websites, and find data, because all these websites have, like, XML and, like, different scripts running in the background that it will actually scrape and find information from,

Jim Beach 42:40
you’re using the word skill a lot, is that the same thing as an agent?

Becky Beach 42:46
Yes, like the way I’ve made them are like more AI agent type of skills, because an AI agent will actually do things on your behalf without you touching the computer or your keyboard, you can just step away and the AI agent will run and it uses the skills you can, you can make skills that you just on the fly, you just say, ‘Hey, do this, and then it will do it, or you could schedule them out, and when you schedule them, they become an AI agent, and I’m sorry, I mean, like, about 70 of them.

Jim Beach 43:12
Wow. And how hard is it to do that? Give us an example of what it takes to create one of those.

Becky Beach 43:18
Yeah, just Scott, anybody could make them. You don’t need a development background like I have. You can just say you just have it do something that you want done in your business, and then you say, could you save this workflow as a skill, so that that way next time I can just, you know, like, and then it will name, name the skill. The next time you sit down, you just go run such and such skill, and it will do it. Yeah, kind of like if you’ve used Photoshop, like there’s Photoshop actions, and you just record yourself doing an action in Photoshop, and then you run it. You can even do batches in Photoshop, and it’s similar to that. If there’s anybody that uses Photoshop out there,

Jim Beach 43:54
I still do. Yeah, I love Photoshop.

Becky Beach 43:58
Oh, yeah, yeah, so it’s great. I use it all the time.

Jim Beach 44:01
All right, so how did you even come up with 70 different functions? I can’t think of 70 functions my business does.

Becky Beach 44:08
Well, I have four different businesses, and I’m doing a variety of things.

Jim Beach 44:12
List those out for us, Becky.

Becky Beach 44:15
Okay, sure. Well, I put all 70 in a plugin, and I have a program called the AI executive team.com where I sell these skills as part of my program. Yeah, so they’re all part of my program, and I have about, like, over 100 students already enrolled. So, for instance, I got animated website, and that’s where you just upload a video, and then it’ll make a website out after your video of your podcast video, and then it’ll make a blog from your video. That’s another skill than blog. There’s a lot of blogging ones, because I’ve been blogging for 11 years at Long Beach. So, there’s a lot of podcasts for bloggers, and there’s also a lot for self-publishers. I’ve still published over 70 books. I got lots of skills for that, and also making digital products, because I probably made over two, 2000 digital products by now. Courses, you know, printables like spreadsheets, like a number of things, so there’s lots of skills for just about every type of online business.

Jim Beach 45:09
The mom blog space gets ugly sometimes, you know, the moms turn out to be horrible people and stuff like that, and abusing the kids, you don’t seem to be. Are you blogging about your family and the stuff, or is it business from a mom’s perspective?

Becky Beach 45:30
No, I don’t blog about my family. In the past, I did take my child to, like, Dollar Tree, and we did, like, $1 Tree decoration hunt, and we’ve done some Dollar Tree posts when he was very little, and I didn’t put his picture on the blog, but there’s kind of nothing like that. I mostly focus on, like, making and saving money in business for moms like that. That’s the target. I do have some mom life, like organization, because I use Pinterest now, because Google took a lot of my traffic away during the helpful content update. It also steals my content with the AI overview, like a lot of my money-saving articles that I use from the personal experience of being very poor. Google over you, I was taking the content, so now you just search, you know, how to save on a dime for families of four, or like just stretch $100 for a month for families of four, and then it will actually, you know, give you the answer instead of going to my blog, because I was like ranking the top for those articles, and that’s how I was getting most of my traffic.

Jim Beach 46:30
Yes, Google is becoming less and less useful every time I use it. I just, I don’t like Google, never have, never will, and it just,

Becky Beach 46:40
yeah, it’s gotten very unuser friendly, and a majority of people just use Chad GPT. Like, I noticed that they’re taking a lot, lot more than market share when it comes to search, and you can also get yourself like promoted on AI search if you just, you know, I put out a lot of context. That’s what I – one of my courses is called AI Search Authority, and I show what I do to get, you know, recommended by AI search, because a lot of my clients end up paying for my high-ticket programs, like I have one that’s like five, $5,000 and I had someone join that program from AI recommending me.

Jim Beach 47:15
Wow, what are some of the AI marketing tricks?

Becky Beach 47:20
Well, just, you just put out content, because you may think, oh, I’m putting out all this content on social media, or I’m like making YouTube videos, and they’re not really going anywhere. Well, they are going somewhere, because you know who’s looking at them, the AI. The AI is like scraping constantly to get content from humans, and that’s what it’s programmed to do, to constantly scrape the internet, and if you’re constantly putting content out there, and it usually goes to the new content first when it’s scraping, like those rounds of scraping, and if you have new content out there, then it’s going to get you, and it’s going to rank, rank you first when someone’s asking for for suggestions on who can help them.

Becky Beach 47:57
Yeah,

Becky Beach 47:58
I regularly put out content, I don’t even care if I get very little likes or views. I know, no, the AI is going to find it, and it’s hungry for new content,

Jim Beach 48:09
right? That makes a lot of sense, not the

Becky Beach 48:11
old content, because you may think, oh, the old content is ranking the highest. No, it doesn’t care about the old content, it’s already gotten the old content, it’s hungry for the new content.

Jim Beach 48:21
Does your whole family work in this business now?

Becky Beach 48:24
No, just me. My husband has a job, he’s a systems engineer, and he does tech support and builds computers for a company for about 17 years now. And my son, he’s getting interested in creating his own digital products, and we’ve also written books together. He’s 11 years old now. Oh, he’s 10. He’ll be 11 in October. So, so we’ve been writing books together, and a lot of the books I’ve written for tweens are written with him too.

Jim Beach 48:53
And what is your process for writing a book? How AI, how much AI are you doing with that?

Becky Beach 49:00
Well, Brian and I, that’s named my son, will like talk a bunch, you know, and like kind of flesh out a story and characters, and a lot of the characters are based on him and his friends, and then we’ll go to the AI and give the AI all our outlines, like everything we’re thinking of, like all our character designs and descriptions, and then then we’ll tell it like a loose story of what we want to happen in the book, and then it will flesh out a really nice outline that’s detailed, and then we’ll go through and we’ll edit the outline if we don’t like something that’s happening, and then we’ll just have it write the book chapter by chapter for us, you know, based on the outline we’ve compiled, so it is our solar ideas and characters, it’s just helping us with the writing, and then Brian will like suggest we’ll proofread together. So, it took, took about two weeks to write our book, called Brian Holmes. It’s like the first series, what this book is. It’s, it’s kind of like, like, you know, Sherlock Holmes. Well, this book is called Brian Holmes, and it’s saying that my son is like a long lost nephew of Sherlock. Locke Holmes, kind of like Enola Holmes on Netflix, where she’s a niece of Sherlock Holmes, but we’re just, we’re just using a, you could use public domain stories, and as long as they’re in public domain, you could use them in your book.

Jim Beach 50:15
Absolutely fascinating. So, how long of a book will that produce? What do you consider a book these days?

Becky Beach 50:20
I have a private right here. It’s like I self-published it, and I have a copy. It’s about.. it’s probably about 300 pages, you know. It’s not that that long. It’s more for tweens, like, that are kind of getting used to reading chapter books, or kind of transitioning from, you know, storybooks with pictures into chapter books. So, it’s more for tween children,

Jim Beach 50:42
fantastic. He’s actually got that published on Amazon, and everything.

Becky Beach 50:48
Yeah, it’s in Barnes and Noble, Amazon, because I use this other site called Draft to Digital, and it will even put it in Books a Million, and I think Books Millions out of business now, but it puts it in all these different bookstores, so you’re not just, you know, stuck on Amazon, because if you go to Amazon to self-publish, that’s it. You can’t, if you, especially if you get an ISBN, that’s the number of the book, like the Library of Congress, you know, gives each book, and they’ll, they’ll like take your ISBN, and that belongs to them now, because they gave it to you for free. Well, drafted Digital also give you a free ISP number, but you could use it for Amazon, you know, all these different, different bookstores, like, like, even like Kubo, and then also Barnes and Noble, too.

Jim Beach 51:32
All right, great resource there. The AI package is the website, is that AI Executive skills.com Did I hear that right earlier?

Becky Beach 51:45
Oh, you mean the website to get the skills? No, no, it’s called the the AI Executive Team com, all one more DA Executive Team.

Jim Beach 51:52
Okay. Well, Becky, you are just a bundle of fire and absolutely amazing. What a huge, huge success and an inspiration for us and for women in particular. So, what do you want to say to stay-at-home moms?

Becky Beach 52:11
Oh, I just say that moms

Jim Beach 52:12
in general who want something more out of life.

Becky Beach 52:16
Oh, yeah. Well, you know, you can do anything to set your mind to. If you think you could do something, you can definitely do it. Find a way, because I’ve learned from I grew up in poverty. I had nothing, you know, like I could barely get through school. I had to take loans out to be able to afford to go to school, even you know. So, if I could do this, and I didn’t have a disability, I’m just disabled. So, if I could do something like this, and I think anybody out there listening could do it just just takes some, you know, willpower, and, and, like, yeah, the willpower, and you just, just want something better of life, and you could do it for yourself if you set your mind to it, because you know, if Elon Musk can become a trillionaire, I think anybody could get where they want to be in life.

Jim Beach 52:57
I think so. Great inspiration. All right, How do we find out more? Follow you online, give us a rundown on all the URLs again.

Becky Beach 53:04
Oh, sure. Well, you, you should sign up for my free AI workshop. It’s a Claude workshop on how you can get started with Claude, and it’s taking place on july 16, Thursday at 3pm Central time, or 4pm Eastern. If you go to Coach Becky beach.com/ai workshop, that’s Coach Makey beach.com/ai workshop. You could sign up for free, and you also get a free Claude Artifact, which is a little app that you can use to skyrocket your business growth.

Jim Beach 53:35
Fantastic, Becky. Thank you so much. And we’d love to have you back. Great stuff.

Becky Beach 53:41
Oh, yeah. Well, love to come back at some point.

Jim Beach 53:44
We are out of time for today, but you know what? We do that’s right, we come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars by now,