SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Exit Proof Podcast, the show for entrepreneurs ready to build a name that outlasts their business. I am your host Kwame Kwade, Inc. 500 founder, Shark Tank Alum, and Adjunct Professor of Finance at Johns Hopkins University Kerry Business School. Here is the truth most founders learn too late. Every business has an exit. One day you will sell it, close it, or hand it off. But your name doesn't have to exit with it. We are living in the known economy right now. Attention is everywhere, and being known is all that is left. The founders who endure are the ones building a name no sale, no algorithm, and no market can take away. What happens when you combine LinkedIn, AI, and the right networking strategy? You can turn a platform many people simply use to post updates into a powerful engine for relationships and business growth. Our guest today has spent years helping professionals and companies do exactly that. I am excited today to welcome Joe Affelbaum, a digital marketing expert, entrepreneur, author, and CEO of an Inc. 5000 ranked marketing agency. Joe has trained more than 1,000 companies on using LinkedIn and more recently, AI for business development and marketing. He is also the author of five books, including High Energy Networking and the creator of an AI assistant designed to help LinkedIn users create content in their own voice. Today we are talking about how entrepreneurs can use LinkedIn and AI more strategically to build relationships, grow their visibility, and create new opportunities. I am really excited for this conversation. Joe, thank you for being here. Joe, welcome to the Exit Proof Podcast. I am really excited to have you today.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here as well. We've been friends for so long, and finally we get to do a podcast together. I know.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

So I wanna I want to start. I don't know how much people online. I mean, you have a huge following on LinkedIn and other platforms, but I don't know how much people know about your personal background. You are you were an ordained rabbi. Today your LinkedIn headline reads AI Automation Vibe Coder. So walk me through how you went from one to the other.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

Growing up, my father really wanted me to be a rabbi. My father's father was a Holocaust survivor, so his entire family was wiped out by the Holocaust. He ran away from Poland and he made his way to Brazil, restarted his life in Brazil, and then got remarried, had my mother, uh, had my father, and then he wanted my father to be an entrepreneur because he was an entrepreneur himself. But my father kind of rebelled against him. And my father's like, no, I'm gonna be a rabbi. And so my father went to Brooklyn, became a rabbi, and and right now he lives in Florida, but you know, he was very obsessed with religion, and so he wanted me to do that. He wanted all his kids. We had we're I'm one of six, and he wanted all of us to be super religious and to be rabbis and to do our stuff. And my sister married a rabbi, she has 10 kids, she lives in Florida, and so I decided, you know what, I'm gonna go through this. I'm gonna I'm gonna see, I'm gonna see what it's like. I'm open-minded. You know, you never know. Maybe I'll become a very successful rabbi. And after becoming a rabbi and studying in Israel and all the other stuff that I did, I realized it I didn't feel like I was living my best life. I didn't feel like it was integrity with who I really was. I didn't feel aligned, and I feel very uncomfortable with the whole concept of being a rabbi based on you know what the rules are and my ideologies and the way that I thought and who what I wanted to do in the world. And for me, my soul really vibed with business. My soul really vibed with helping other people make a living, make a fortune, personal development, all that type of stuff around business, not so much around religion, not so much about rabbinical stuff. And so I went to my mother and I told my mother, I said, Ma, I know how to be a rabbi. I studied for years and years and years and years, and I got certified with many rabbis saying that I'm a great rabbi, I'm ordained, and everything. And if I want to start a congregation now, I could start a very successful congregation, but Ma, I want to make money. You know, like I really I don't I don't want to I saw you suffer for all these years trying to make money, and I and I see all these other people suffer, your siblings and other people can't make money. I want to make real money, but I started crying. I was like, Ma, I I don't know how. I don't know what to do. And she said, get in the car. And so I got in the car and we started driving. And I was like, Ma, where are you going? She's like, I'm taking you to a place. I can't tell your father where we're going, but I'm gonna take you to a place. I was like, Oh my god, where are we? What type of sneaky stuff are you doing, Ma? What's that? Anyway, she's on she she pulls up outside the Brooklyn Public Library, and she said the following, she said it in Spanish. Um, she said I'm paraphrasing, she said, formal education, going to college, you're crying that you didn't go to college and become a professional. Formal education will make you a living. You'll be able to do okay, you'll make a hundred thousand dollars a year, whatever. But she said, self-education will make you a fortune. She's like, I don't know much, but I know that you can have all the information that you need inside that building. Now I know your father doesn't want you to go into that building because they have a lot of secular information in the building. It might change your ideology, it might ruin you somehow if you start learning all these things from all these other religions and all these other whatever. And I said, I don't care about other religions. I want business, you know, I want to figure out so she's like, go walk in, see what happens. I was like, Are you sure? She's like, Yeah. Anyway, I walk in, I go straight to the computer section because that's what my soul was vibing with. My soul was vibing with technology. And so I went to the computer section and I did not leave. I did not leave. I got all the books on computers, I read about web design, I read about RAM, I read about reverse engineering computers and whatever, and I just got obsessed beyond. And I started doing it for fun, and then people started saying, Hey Joe, build me a website, build me a website, build me a website. And I was like, that's easy. Right. Open bracket, HTML, close bracket, open bracket, head, close bracket, and I would just go for it and I would build websites, and people started paying me. I would make a thousand dollars for each website I would build. And this is almost 25 years ago. I'd make a thousand dollars for every website I would build, and I would get about a hundred customers every single year to build websites for. Now think about that for a second. Yep. Early 20s, very early 20s. I'm making over a hundred thousand dollars a year in profit. I want to get married because that's what I need to do. I need to get married, but I'm already I already have money to buy a house. Right. And so I'm looking for a house to buy, and that's kind of like my mindset. I was like, wow, self-education will make you a fortune. I'm doing six figures, baby. I didn't realize that I would have to overcome a lot of other things to get this multiple seven figures.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:28

But, you know, that Kwame, that was that was kind of like my transition to like going from you know, my beliefs, I had to change my beliefs around what it means to, you know, it's not about college for me, it's about self-education. And and I had to I had to move on to the next step of of overcoming failures and then moving on to learning new skills. I had to work really, really hard and learn new skills.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Right, right. No, no, and and so you mentioned your mother, and in one thing I read recently, you said you had watched your mom work 16-hour days. What did that teach you, or what did you have to unlearn from that?

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Well, what I had what it taught me is that you gotta work hard if you want to make it. If you want to make it in life, you got you can't be lazy, you can't sit around, you gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. You guys see me hustle on LinkedIn Live. Yeah, you see me hustle on Facebook, on WhatsApp. I am hustling, hustling like I'm hungry, like I have no money. I'm hustling like I have I'm doing okay, but I'm hustling like I have no money, like I have nothing. I already have my five kids, I already have a lot of stuff going on, multiple businesses, but I am hustling, hustling, hustling. Why? It's just ingrained in who I am. I can't not work. And so, like I watched my mother work, and so I learned that. What I had to unlearn was that hiring employees will be the demise of your business. Why? Because my mother always said that if employees are better than you, they're gonna take over your business and you're gonna lose your business. So she was always afraid to hire sales reps. And if the sales rep was better than her, she would fire them. And so she would she would kind of really struggle with delegation and with hiring people. Now I create and hire AI employees. I have a guy named Peter that works for me. I have a guy named uh Rufus Roofington, who has a whole roofing uh directory called Roofer Butler. I have all these people that are working for me that are AI employees. I also have human employees that manage the AI employees, but it's just so much fun to be able to have employees. And the first hire that I ever made was a sales rep. And that's how I was able to grow, one of the fastest growing companies in America. You have to hire people that can sell better than you.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah. And and I I want to talk about Pierre, I want to talk about Rufus. Um but I want to segue into um sales. I mean, one of the things that you I you know, just based on looking at your your profile and the things that you've done, you have been able to leverage platforms like LinkedIn to really build a sales machine. And people like me, and I know people who are listening to this podcast, like some of us just get a mental block about how to, you know, the mindset of sales. So, based on your experience, what can you tell somebody right now that is, you know, struggling to just build that um system to be able to scale what they're doing?

SPEAKER_02 10:23

I would say the number one thing you need to do is have a strategy. That's another thing I had to unlearn from my mother. My mother relied a lot on luck. My mother's like, if you're lucky, you'll make it. Go get a blessing from a rabbi, and the rabbi will bless you, and you'll get lucky. Right. And I said, Ma, I already got lucky. I have the most wonderful mother in the world. Right. I'm already lucky. Now I don't want to get lucky. Now I want to make millions and millions and millions of dollars and impact millions of people. So how am I gonna do that? The answer is have a plan. A plan includes a business plan, a marketing plan, and a LinkedIn plan, believe it or not. Most people, when I say show me your written business plan, marketing plan, and LinkedIn plan, they roll their eyes. So it's a very, very simple. A business plan is how much revenue do you want to generate, and how many clients do you need? How much does each client need to pay you? What are you gonna offer them? A marketing plan is how many leads do you need, how many of them need to be qualified, what are the stages you need to take them through, and so on. And then a LinkedIn plan is what are the specific activities that you need to do on LinkedIn? What can you delegate to employees? What can you delegate to AI agents, and what can you have to do yourself, like for example, actually have the conversations with people. So, for example, we have an AI agent that will write up your posts, create your images, and then with your approval, post on your LinkedIn every day from now until forever. And you never have to do that again. And this is something that we rolled out this week. We rolled out a new AI agent inside Evy AI that will write your content, create your images with your photo on it that look exactly like you, perfect with your brand colors, and it writes posts for the next year, and then you approve them all, or you could write for the next 90 days and then have them be a reoccurring post, and you never have to write content again, and the content gets published with the AI agent, and it's approved by LinkedIn 100% with the official LinkedIn API like Hootsuite and Buffer and so on, and and go high level and whatever. And for us, building AI agents and AI employees that can help you and knowing how what you can delegate, that is a next next level game changers for entrepreneurs that are part of EO, YPO, Vistage, Inc. 500, you need to delegate so that you can get things off your plate. And the number one thing that you need to delegate is making sure that you have agents helping you every single day.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

So that was one of the topics that since we're already on it, I want to talk about that. So there are a lot of people, there are two people, actually three categories of people right now who with AI. The ones that are just like I don't get it, which you know, okay, you know, but then there are people who are dabbling in it and are just dabbling in chat, you know, the the chat you know function, and then you know, I've been you know, I've I've been living in cloud code for the last probably two months, and the uh what I can build and and and what I can uh you know uh in terms of just make efficiently doing my work is mind-blowing. What would you tell somebody right now who is like, okay, I am behind the AI learning curve, now I'm I I get it. Where should I start?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

If you're a CEO and you're generating over a million dollars in revenue, that means you're an athlete. You're an athlete. Let's just let's just say you're an athlete. 96% of businesses are doing less than a million dollars of revenue. If you're a CEO and you're doing more, I'm not talking about profit, let's say you're losing money. I don't care. If you're doing over a million dollars in revenue, you are an athlete. You're playing a game on the highest level, right? Let's acknowledge that. If you're an athlete, the number one measure for success for an athlete is who is the coach? Who is the coach? I just got a book called Lombardi's Rules. Who is the coach? Every athlete has a coach, and a great athlete has a great coach. So here's the number one thing I would tell you to do. If you're an entrepreneur and you want to build AI employees, if you want to learn Claude Code, hire an expert that knows how to teach you Claude Code, hire him for 25 hours, have him sit with you and download his brain into your brain, and you will become an expert in Claude Code. It's not going to take one minute, it's going to take 25 hours. But you will sit down with this expert 25 times for 25 hours, and the expert will download the knowledge that he has or she has in their head, and you will know everything there is to know about infrastructure, about capabilities, about architecture, and about application. Those are the four words, and I want everyone listening to this down to write that down. Find someone who can help you build the infrastructure. Make sure that you understand how to set up a server yourself with clawed code on the cloud, with hosting, with databases, with whatever you need. It doesn't cost more than $7 a month. That's how much it costs to have a server that can run unlimited AI agents on it. You want a higher quality one, it's $20 a month. It's very affordable. The next thing you need to do is you need to understand capabilities, what capabilities, what APIs, what MCPs you can tap into in your industry, in your business, what are the capabilities that these AI employees can have. Then you need to architect what they're going to do, and then you need to apply it real time in your business. I have one called Sarah. She's a BDR. She lives on the cloud. What she does is she monitors every lead that comes into my Go High level, into my CRM, and she identifies is this a good lead, is this a bad lead? Because I want to have 20,000 leads coming in every single day. I can't have a team members monitor to see if it's a good lead or a bad lead to make a difference to understand what's a good lead, what's a bad lead. So I have an AI agent identifying this is a good lead, this is a bad lead. If it's a good lead, she enriches it. She finds her LinkedIn, she finds her time zone, she finds her location, their cell phone number, she finds out everything about them, gives me a reason of why they're a good lead, and then starts pinging our people and saying, hey guys, you haven't reached out yet, what's going on? Here's a message. Send the first message, the second message, the third message, the fourth message, the email, the text, the everything. She does it all. She gets it all ready. We have to approve it. We can set it on non-approval mode, but everything's on approval mode. Also, Sarah has voice. That means Sarah can pick up the phone and call the person. Sarah has a phone number. She could pick up the phone and call the person and say, hey, just want to verify your phone number. Thank you for calling us. I'd like to book you for tomorrow at two. Are you? And she can call every single lead to verify, and the transcript is there. This is real. You can do this today. You don't have to write a line of code. People say Claude Code. You're like a Claude Code. You don't have to look at the code. You don't have to know about the code. You don't have to be tech savvy. You don't even have to know how to use a computer. You don't, you just need a coach that will sit with you for 25 hours and train you, guide you, and support you. I just ran 30 entrepreneurs through a six-hour intensive. One guy is doing $75 million in revenue in his business. His mind fell off his head. Like he was like, what is I like? And he did it himself. He got the server, set up the employees, did the whole thing himself, and he was like, I I just need a high, I need to work with you, Joe. We need to sit down for 25 hours in my office, and we just need to get this done. So it doesn't have to be, it could be like if you're in Dubai or whatever it is, it could be over the phone. But the idea is get a coach. That's the idea.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Yeah. No, no, and and and I I I'm telling you, from my personal experience, just what I've been able to do the last two months when I took Cloud Code seriously and went in there and wanted to learn, and and it's it's transformed my business completely. Things that I couldn't do a year or two ago, I needed to hire somebody to do. Now I can do it on myself from A to Z. So one thing I wanted to talk to you about is content. And and one of the being in personal branding myself and telling people that, you know, you need to, in order, you know, for the people who need your service to find you, you need to be known. You need to, you need to, you know, you need to be out there, um, you need to build a brand that stands out. And so now that everybody has these capabilities, AI capabilities, how do you stand out, you know, when everybody can just produce attention has become so commoditized that you know everybody can produce content at scale. How does an individual stand out on a platform on LinkedIn even when you're being assisted by AI?

SPEAKER_02 18:43

The answer is your story. The answer is your story, your authenticity, that's how you stand out. If you don't tell your story, if you're afraid of sharing your story and you're being transactional on LinkedIn, or worse, worse, I look at Tiger 21 members' profiles and they have nothing on LinkedIn. That is terrible. You're worth a hundred million dollars and you have nothing on LinkedIn. Shame on you. You should be posting regularly things that can add value. You're a philanthropist. Share about your philanthropy, right? Share about helping other people, use your network. You already have 10,000 followers. You're posting nothing. It's an embarrassment. Or worse, you're posting just about your company. Who cares about your company? People want to know who you are. So everyone can post about industry topics. Nobody cares about your industry topics. They can go to ChatGPT to learn information. People want to know who's Kwame, who's Joe, who's Michael, who's Sarah, who are these people, and what are they passionate about? What are they obsessed about? What are they doing? And if you can get into that zone and share what you would share at a networking event instead of sharing what you would share at a trade show, it's gonna change the game for you.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Now, so for somebody that's listening right now, I I meet a lot of people who have a LinkedIn profile they haven't seen in a long time. And so if if for somebody that's listening and thinking, okay, I need to get on LinkedIn, what are the three things you would tell them to do to get started? And what are the repeatable things they have to keep doing in order to stay visible?

SPEAKER_02 20:11

First of all, have a conversation with David. David's on this website called footprintaudit.com. You give him your LinkedIn profile, and he basically does an audit. You don't have to, you don't speak. His name is David. He's there, he sits there 24-7, he lives in a box, and he's he's able to help you. You can chat with him if you want, just put in your LinkedIn, and then you can chat with David. David will help you with everything. Okay, so go meet David at footprintaudit.com. That's number one. Do an audit of your profile. That's the first thing you want to do. The second thing that you do one time, but if you the second thing is have a checklist for at least three things you can do. One thing to get you exposure, one thing to get you credibility, and one thing to get you to your goal, which might be conversations or something else. Okay? Let's call it conversations for now if that's your goal. Okay? Again, one thing that you do to get you exposure, because I could give you a hundred things, but I give you one thing to get exposure, one thing to get you credibility on your checklist, and one thing to get you conversations or whatever your goal is. Okay? Now, let's talk about those three things, okay? Because we know how to get an audit. How do you get how do you get exposure? The fastest way to get exposure is twofold. One, adding connections. You can have an agent add connections for you every day, or you can add it yourself. I like adding it myself because I like looking at who I'm gonna add it. Like I'm adding EO members, I'm adding YPO members, I'm adding Vistage members, I'm adding people on the Inc. 5000 list, I'm adding Tiger 21 members. You know, you just search Tiger 21 on LinkedIn, you'll find them. They're all there. They write Tiger 21 on their profile. So you find the people that you want to connect with that are your ideal clients, that are your centers of influence, that are people that are working in your world. You want to work with high net worth individuals, find out where they hang out with. You want to work with BI members, go connect with B and I members. But connect with 20 every day. And then write a piece of content. But don't write it yourself, have an agent write. It for you. We have an agent that will write content for you every day and then post it for you. And then set it and forget it. Okay, so set that up and forget it. But the part that you have to do every day is just look at 20 profiles and connect with them. Okay, so that's one. That's exposure. That will get you more followers. Every connection on LinkedIn becomes a follower. Most people don't know this. Every connection on LinkedIn becomes a follower. You can have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. So you I'm not saying connect with 30,000 people today, but 20 a day is about a couple thousand a year. Do 20 a day. That's number one. The second thing is credibility. How do you get credibility? The fastest way to get credibility is leave comments. So get used to leaving five comments a day. Go find people who are your target market or your centers of influence, the people that are in the position to refer business to you. For example, there's a guy named Mark. He was the global chair of EO. Marco Stockley. I don't know if you know who he is.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

I look at his content every single week and I proactively leave a comment. I am one of the only people that do that. Historically, if you go back to all of his posts, you're going to notice that I commented on every single one of his posts. I'm doing that, I'm doing that intentionally. I'm doing that because he is a high net worth individual who's already sold his company, he's very successful, and he's in the position to refer major business to me. And so I want to, I want to, and plus I love him and I want to support him. So I put I comment on his posts every single day. I proactively, he's one of my five people that I comment. So just five. Just five, five a day. Now you don't have to have the same person every day. So you can have your five for Monday, five for Tuesday, five for Wednesday. Inside EVAI, there's a uh a list that you can have. And you can save, you can save it in a spreadsheet if it's easier for you. But I like having it on my browser, so I could just click open, open, open, open. I have five per list, and I have my Sunday list, Monday list, Tuesday list, Wednesday list, Thursday list, and I'm done. Yeah. Okay, so on Sunday I just go to my Sunday list. It's a routine. I just go to my Sunday list, and boom, I got my five people on my Sunday list. And these are the five most important people. And then I don't just comment on their last post, I comment on all their posts, I message them, I do all the things I need to do. Yeah. That's credibility. And then the final thing is which is conversations. If you don't, a woman called me this morning, and her name is Megan. She has 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, she's in Boston, she wants to raise money and she wants to be a philanthropist. She wants to be worth $100 million. She's not worth $100 million right now, but she will. She has the hunger. She's still not in her 50s. She's young. And so I she called me this morning at 7 30 a.m. You know why she called me?

SPEAKER_01 24:19

No.

SPEAKER_02 24:19

Because two days ago, I was playing a game called the Prospecting Party game. A game that takes my 29,000 connections and then organizes them and tells me, asks me, do you know this person? Do you not? Are they a potential client? And she came up as one of the connections during the game. I do about a hundred at a time, it takes about five minutes. Claude Code created this game for me. And anyone can play. Anyone, anyone in my network can play. You can go to prospectingparty.com slash qualify. You can join. If you're approved, you can get in. You have to have a thousand connections to play. Anyway, um, so I'm playing the prospecting party game, and Megan's name comes up. So I'm like, oh my god, Megan, oh my god, we haven't spoken since 2019. I was still married, she was still in a relationship, whatever. I press follow up, I open up her profile and I say, call me, 917-865-7631. I literally put my cell phone number, 917-865-7631. I said, call me. This morning is 7 30 in the morning. She called me up. She's like, Joe, good morning. I was like, good morning. She's like, oh my God, I didn't realize how early it was. I was like, no, no, I'm up. Let's talk. And we spoke for 30 minutes. She told me she wants to raise money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all the things. And we just build this deep, meaningful, we reconnected. She wants to go on my boat. She wants to hang. She wants to let she wants to introduce me to all of her friends. Like, oh my God, we reconnected. That's perfect. You know? But it was because I did the third thing, which is conversations. I invited her into a conversation and I segmented my relationships to understand who I know and who I don't know. So if you have if you have 5,000, 10,000 connections on LinkedIn and you don't know who you know and who you don't know, play the game called the sort. Have you heard of the sort before? No, tell me. So Kwame, Kwame, the sort is where you sort your connections. You literally sort them. And for every connection, you have to identify do I know this person or do I not know? So for example, you have 8,455 followers or connections or whatever, right? I would download your connections from LinkedIn by clicking a button, you could download it. Then you would upload it into the prospectingparty.com game, and then you could play with all my other clients together, okay? Because you're a client, so you can play with all the other clients together. And then you basically just write um uh prospecting party game just pulls up your profile, and then you could decide, do I know this person or do I not? And you could do it on the in the car while you're while you're while you're waiting in traffic. It's just a few minutes, and then you write yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, yes or no. If it's a yes, it says, you know, like is this an networker? Did do they want to network or do you have to ask them or absolutely not, whatever. And there's a follow-up button if you need to follow up with them. You just push the follow-up button, and then you just go through all your 8,000 people. It takes about eight hours to go through 8,000 people. But you don't do it eight hours in a row. You do five minutes a day for like, you know, a hundred days and then you're done. But then you know who are the thousand that are the most important to you, and then you know who you need to be building conversations. So I say about ten people a day you follow up with. You don't have to follow up with everybody, but if you have a thousand people and you're doing 10 a day, that every 90 days you're going through your thousand people, that's gonna change the game for you completely because now you're actually staying top of mind with the thousand most important people in your life and you're doing it strategically. You're not just doing it like whatever.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

I want you to talk about follow-up. What do you mean by that? Get a thousand, and what does follow-up specifically mean?

SPEAKER_02 27:29

So if you wanted to follow up with me, I call it the five eyes. So if you wanted to follow up with me, what would you do? So you would maybe say, Joe, do you want to buy my services? And I would say, absolutely not, right? Because I what are you talking about? That's weird. So don't do that. What you want to do instead is you want to follow up with me. Say, Joe, what are your goals? What do you want to achieve? How can I help you? Who do you want to meet? So number one is introduction. That's the first I. Introduction. So, like, offer to make me an intro. You're doing NERV in Baltimore this year. Maybe I want to speak at NERV. Maybe I want to speak about Claude Code or AI agents, and you might have a slot for me. That would be wonderful, right? So you say, Who do you want to meet? I want to I want to speak for entrepreneurs. Now you might have a slot for me. That's number one, introductions. Number two, the second thing is invitations. You might say, Joe, I'd love for you to come to NERV. I want to invite you to NERV. We have an extra seat. I'd like to gift you one because you're so awesome and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Now you're inviting me. I'd be like, I don't know. I don't know. Let me look at the dates. And I look at the dates and I happen to be available for like maybe one or two of the days, and or maybe it was just the one of the days, and I and I can come as your guest if I'm willing to volunteer or whatever. Who knows? Whatever. And so now all of a sudden you invite me to the thing. Or you're doing a party or a networking event or something's happening in New York, and you invite me. That's the second thing, the second I. So the first eye is what? Um, introduction. The second eye? Uh invitation. The third eye is information. You have ideas that I don't have. You have access to information that I don't have. So, for example, you said, Joe, there's a new Claude Code skill called superpowers. Would you like me to send it to you? I know you're obsessed with Claude Code. That's information that I don't have that I need. Now you're gonna start sending me, asking me, do you need this information? Do you need this information? And so that's the third one thing is information because you know what I'm into. And so you're gonna proactively say, I just read a book. That's information. I just read a book, dude. It changed my life. It's called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Do you want me to send you the summary? Oh my god, yeah, send me the summary, dude. I'd love to read it. Thank you. Now, now you're doing me a favor. You're asking me if I want information, and I'm saying yes, now you're top of mind. The third thing is ideas. You know me, you know my business, and you have ideas for things I should be doing. So you might say, Joe, did you hear of Bordy? I'm like, what's Borty? Bordie's an agent that you speak to. It has 500,000 relationships. You can call it, you can WhatsApp it, and it makes introductions to 500,000 people in its network. And so if you want to meet people that can give you speaking engagements, that you let you speak for EO chapters, Bordy knows who's an EO. He has 500,000 people. There's only 20,000 people in EO. Bordy has them all. I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing. I would love, I I would love to, I would love to look into that idea. And so you're giving me ideas, which is the fourth eye. And the last eye is identity. Identity is I want to know who you are. I want to know, oh, really? You were number one on YouTube. Tell me more about that. Uh tell me more about that on the ear thing. Tell me more about your goatee. Tell me more about your shirt. Tell me more about your preferences. Tell me more about your identity. Who are you? Like you're interested in me, you're having me on your podcast, which is amazing. That is that's a level of top of mind where you're really getting to know my personality, who I am, what I'm into, what I'm passionate about. That's all part of my identity. So if you do those five eyes, which is introductions, information, um, invitations, ideas, and identity, that's something we teach in our system as part of the greeting, feeding, and meeting uh system. I I have frameworks for everything that I do. So greeting, feeding, and meeting, this is part of meeting. But this is part of feeding, I mean. It's part of feeding.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Right, right. So, no, this is so for for for any everybody that's listening. I mean, I feel like one of the things what has become clear to me just from the conversation we're having is that LinkedIn, there are there there is a role for AI in terms of making your your your life much more easy in terms of being able to do things at scale on LinkedIn with the help of AI. But at the end of the day, it also boils down to the soft skills and you know the five eyes, especially what you have to do that you know builds the connections and and extends the relationships and deepens the relationship, it has to be you. So you have to get in there on the platform and actually do it. And I think that's where a lot of people think that you can just set it and forget it.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

And and it's I mean, if you're having a call with me and you have your robot, call me. I'm just gonna ignore the robot. I'm like, what is this garbage? But if you call me, pick up the phone and call me, right? And you say, Joe, send me your thing, and I show you my strategy here. I don't know if you can see this. Is my strategy?

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

Do you see on the bottom it says send the word demo to 973-841-8868? That's the call to action. You see? Yeah. And but do you see there's plan, people, promise, story, profile, yeah, uh, what does it say there? Profile, systems, exposure, credibility, and conversation. So this is the framework that I give people as a gift. When I'm with them, I give them as a gift. But I for I don't just shove this in people's faces. I say I actually have a framework, and then I walk through them the framework, like, can I have that? I was like, it's my last one, but here you go, I'll give it to you, whatever. Please don't lose it.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

So you know what I mean? Yes. So so and one thing that I have I have learned from you, which I don't do, and I want to, is that you will pick up the phone and call people. On LinkedIn Live. On LinkedIn Live. I was on a live with you, and you just like w what about that? Tell me more about that, because it is such a thing that I mean a lot of people, including myself, just cringe on the idea of just picking the phone and calling, but you've had so much success. Why do you do it?

SPEAKER_02 32:45

I'll tell you why I do it. Because I was born in the 70s. I look really young. Most people think I'm a 25. And when I'm when I'm at like a restaurant and someone comes over to me and they're like, ooh, how old are you? And I was like, How old do you think I am? And she says, 25. I was like, You nailed it. You nailed it, girl. You nailed it. Um, so so I never I never I I wouldn't tell somebody that I'm really not. But I was born in the 70s, and I look really young because I exercise and I work out and I have a good spirit and I'm curious and creative and whatever. But when I when I um when I build relationships with people, when I really, really get to know them, for me, what I'm what I'm looking to do is hear their voice. And I want them to hear my voice. When I send a text message or an email or whatever, no one hears my voice. My voice, the voice, not even the photo. You're looking at me right now. You don't care about what I look like, you care about what I sound like. The voice, my voice, and this is what I talked about earlier. I don't exist. Joe Apfelbaum doesn't exist. Joe Apfelbaum has a voice. And my voice enters your head through your telephone, and my voice becomes the voice in your head. Now you have voices in your head, the voices in your head, you think are you. So what I need to do is not become me in your head, I need to become you in your head. And if I could become you in your head, now I'm talking to you from you. I just I just hacked all the cybersecurity lines. I just I just jail broke the relationship. Do you get what I'm saying? I jail broke the relationship and now I'm in your head. Right. So if I'm in your head and you're hearing my voice, and I'm giving you what you want through my own lens, through my own perspective, through my own relationships, through my own experience, I'm giving you my frameworks and helping you get to your goal, you're gonna align with me. But if I just send you a DM, I'm not a voice, I'm something you're reading, you're not, I'm not really being with you. So I grew up in the 70s, and in the 70s, they didn't have caller ID. They didn't have call waiting, they didn't have texting, they didn't have email, they didn't have any of that stuff. I remember in the 80s, I used to call my grandmother, and sometimes I would get a busy signal because she was on the line, she was a busy signal, and that's just how it was because there was no call waiting. Right. And I would have to memorize her number. There wasn't even an area code. I would just have to dial her number without an area code because it didn't matter. And so I want you to think about that from that perspective. That's the only way that humans can communicate is through voice. No one reads your sign language unless you're giving them the middle finger because you have road rage. You know what I mean? But most people, you can have your eyes closed and I can communicate with you and you can get the message from me. You can be underwater and I can communicate with you with bone density, bone moving density. That's vibration. So at the end of the day, we are just a vibration. That's all we are. We're frequency. And so my frequency to connect with your frequency usually has to do with the voice. That's why podcasts are so important. That's why, that's why what we're doing right now is so important. Getting yourself online, sharing your message with your actual voice, not with an AI-generated voice, but with your actual voice, putting your actual voice online. It it the the way that I'm talking right now, an AI agent can talk like this. Yeah, you know, ChatGPT got pretty good with their A with their thing that they did last week or two weeks ago. It's very good. It's very good, but it's not this. It's definitely not this.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

What is what is so let's let's let's stay on that for a second. Because that's something that I've been I've been telling my clients, you know, prospects also, that at the end of the day, the the differentiator, it's it's you, the auth, the authentic you, with your insecurities, your quirks, everything that you thought you didn't you didn't want to bring up is what's gonna make you a certifiable human that people can trust. So can you speak a little bit to the fact that you know we are entering an era where AI can do pretty much a lot, you know, but the human part of things is I feel like what is going to differentiate the people who are known from the from from the noise that we're seeing.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

If you really, really, really want to connect with people, pick up the phone and call them. Pick up the phone and call them. The the problem is that you have a belief. And your belief is that when you pick up the phone, you're bothering them. Yep. And it's because you don't have a relationship with them. So if if your mother's still around, I don't know if your mother's still around, if you want she's around, so if you want to communicate with your mother, you don't send your mother a text, you don't send your mother an email, you don't send your mother a telegram, you don't send your mother a fax. You pick up the goddamn phone and you call your mother. And if she doesn't pick up, you call her and call her and call her and call her and call her and call her and call her and call her. Like my kids, call me, call me, call me, call me, call me, call me, call me, come on in to pick up the phone. Okay, you have kids?

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yes, I do.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Okay, when your kids want you, do they call you?

SPEAKER_00 37:38

No, they text me.

SPEAKER_02 37:40

They text you, okay. My kids call me off the hook because I don't look at my text messages. Right. So if they want me, they will call, call, call, call, call. If they're if they're like six, seven or eight or nine, they're not texting you, they're calling you. And so they want to hear your voice because they're still in that place of like they just want to hear dad's voice. Yeah. My kids want to hear my voice. They want to hear their mother's voice, their father's voice. I love my mother's voice. I want to hear her voice. That's why I call her every single day. I call my mother every day. Every day. I want to hear her voice, I want to hear to hear my voice. I want to vibe with her, I want to love on her, I want to connect with her, and I want the same with my kids. I send my kids voice messages. I want my kids send me voice messages. My kids call me. If you want to connect with someone, truly connect with someone, pick up the goddamn phone and call them. Call them and just and and and don't try to sell them anything. That's the key. Call them and tell them how much you care about them.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

And you know what? If I didn't take anything from this conversation, that is the one thing I'm going to have to work on. And I mean like Start with me. It's safe.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

Okay, all right.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

Call me, call me once a week. Call me once a week. If I don't pick up, send me a voice note. But call me once a week from now on just to get your muscle going.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

I will.

SPEAKER_02 38:52

I was scared to call you, but flip. I just called you because I just want to say I love you and I appreciate you and I'm practicing. And I will be like, wow. And it might turn into a five-minute conversation. It might turn into it might turn into I can't pick up because I'm on a I'm I'm on a roller coaster somewhere. I'm diving a whales. I would do that. Literally call me every single week from now until forever to get your muscle. And then find one other person that you're gonna call. Maybe you're gonna call And Dolan. Yeah. Once a week. And I I pick up the I love I love Andolan. Right? I knew I know you love Andolin. We spent time in Philly together just now.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Oh, okay. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:24

And she was telling me how much she loves you. I'm the I'm the marketing communication chair of EO US East Bridge. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Can we can we talk about that a little bit? Um yes, I will call you. I will. And two, I want to talk a little bit about EO, you and I in EO, and one of the things that, you know, I have a business where I, you know, people in in the EO community in terms of um size of business, uh, you know, all that, that's the audience I'm trying to reach, you know. But we all we have this non-solicitation policy, so I'm I'm always hesitant to reach out and build connection. What am I missing?

SPEAKER_02 40:07

Here's what you're missing. You want to know what you're missing?

SPEAKER_00 40:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 40:10

What you're missing is permission. Permission. Permission. So here's here's what m there's a concept when you're dating called consent. What is consent? And date. In the world of Dend, you get it. You're like consent. Oh, I get what consent is. But what is consent? What really is consent? What is consent?

SPEAKER_00 40:30

Is it permission to to interact?

SPEAKER_02 40:38

I mean, do you do you need permission to say hello to somebody? Do you need consent to say hello? No. So consent is to get permission to do something that typically you don't have permission to do. I'll give you an example. In the dating world, if I want to touch someone physically, nothing crazy, just touch their elbow, I say, excuse me, do you mind if I touch your elbow? And if they say, Yeah, please don't touch me, then that is that is consent, and that is healthy, a healthy conversation to have. Whereas if I just touch somebody, whether it's the opposite sex or the same sex without permission, even though they might not say something, I just broke a rule, which is I did something without permission.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 41:19

Same thing with networking. In networking, you have it's okay to reach out to another EO member and ask them a question. It's not okay to ask them for a favor. It's okay to ask them a question. So I reach out to an EO member, for example, let's call her Deb, and I say, Hey Deb, I have a question. Do you want to meet with me so I can learn about your business? We could you could learn about my business, and we could see what we are doing. I'm curious to learn about your business. We're in the same chapter. She has a right to say, I am not interested in meeting you. Please never contact me again. She has a right to do that. She also has a right to say, Oh, thank you. I'm a little busy right now, you know, unless it's something important or you want to you want to do business with me or whatever, I'm not really interested, but thank you. And that's okay. Yeah. She might also be afraid of saying that, and she might say, Governance! He's selling me, he's selling me tuna fish, he's selling me his tuna fish, and you'll be like, you'll be like, Really? You're gonna call governance on me because I said hello and I want to get to know you? Right. You know, people people are not gonna do that. Now, you know, you're afraid that people are gonna do that, and that's a valid fear, but the you do you do that in in the the way that I do it is I do it in the aspect of EO. So, for example, what I do is I'll I'll message an EO member, be like, hey, I was looking at your EO profile and I couldn't find your website. I wanted to send it to a friend. What's your website? Now, if they don't respond to you, don't communicate again. They're not responders. Yeah, don't harass them and call them and if they respond right away, be like, oh my god, I love your website. Do you want to get together? I'd love to I have some ideas for you. We'd love to talk to you about um about what you do, just ask you some questions about your business because someone in my forum wants to do business with you, but I want to make sure that you're the right thing and they don't want me to tell you who they are. So, do you have a few minutes? Whatever. You can come up with a good reason to want to get on the phone with someone that's not, I want to sell you my services. Right. And then you build a relationship, and then you start getting more consent and more consent and more consent, and before you know it, they're a full-blown client of yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, so that's that's something that people don't think about. And I I listened to I heard this yesterday. He said fear means false evidence appearing real. Alex Harmozzi said something about fear. He's like, fear is not identifying the thing that you're afraid of. Fear is not analyzing it. Because once you start analyzing it, you start realizing, hang on a second, I'm not really that's not true. There's lies in the fear. So it's not I'm not gonna get into a solicitation issue by just asking someone if they want to get together and build a relationship and get to know each other, right? That's not gonna happen. Here's here's the thing that I did was I joined the US East Bridge. The first thing I did was I joined the chapter. I joined the chapter. After I joined the chapter, I joined the board. Right. Because I started making suggestions to the president about their marketing for the chapter specifically. And she's like, dude, we need you on the board. Do you want to co-chair with somebody else? I said, I don't want to co-chair with anybody else. If you want me to be the chair, I'm going to be the chair.

SPEAKER_00 44:13

Right.

SPEAKER_02 44:14

But if you want them to be the chair, I'm happy to be part of a committee, but there's no two cooks in one kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Right, right.

SPEAKER_02 44:19

The guy heard about it and he's like, listen, let him be the chair. I'm not interested in being on the board anyway. And she's like, okay, all right, fine, good. So now I'm on the board, I'm running the thing, and I'm doing a damn good job. I'm getting on the WhatsApp group and I'm messaging people. People want to become my clients, not because I'm promoting my business, I'm just promoting the chapter. But people are noticing me and they want to become my clients because I am active in the community. So volunteer, be active in the community, help people out, and you're going to get referrals and clients. Um and and just that just happens naturally. I also volunteer to give a LinkedIn class. So I gave a LinkedIn class. If you want to watch it, you can go to EOevent.com slash LinkedIn. Eoevent.com slash LinkedIn. And that's another thing you can do is you can share other people's resources in EO. So you're in an EO chapter, let's say you're in EO Baltimore or whatever. You can message the whole chapter and say, hey, I just interviewed a chair of the EOUSE Bridge, and he told me he did an event and he has a replay of the event. It's on EOEvent.com. If anybody wants a link, let me know. I'll send it to you privately. Yeah. And then you'll send them EOEvent.com slash LinkedIn. And I happen to have built that website, which is a website that I own, EOEvent.com. Yeah. So it's like, oh my God, you're sending them EOevent.com slash LinkedIn. It looks like an official EO website. Meanwhile, it's a website that I created to promote an event that I hosted for EO.

SPEAKER_00 45:38

Yeah, that makes sense. So um I want to switch to family. You you you are clearly a very devoted family guy. I know that uh you've publicly talked about um you know challenges that you overcome. You've talked about, you know, the the thing that jumped out of me recently was the book you wrote about losing 50 pounds. 99 95 pounds. Let me know, let me not undersell it. 95 pounds. And so let's start there. What what led you on that journey? And and and what what did it teach you?

SPEAKER_02 46:20

You gotta shake your butt. Um the the thing that led me on that journey is you know, I I wanted to be around when my kids get older. And I I built my business to be one of the fastest growing companies in America. We're on the Inc. 500, blah, blah, blah. But I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today. And I wasn't moving, I was smoking, I was doing all types of things that were detriment to my health. And then one day I was filming my daughter, and I asked my and I we were watching the video after, and I was like, What's that noise in the background? And she's like, that's you breathing. And I was like, that was a shocking moment for me. I was like, oh my God. And so I realized, you know, my kids are really young, I need to start losing weight now. I need to get and so I started, you know, doing all the things I needed to do. I ended up losing weight before my before my kids. I'm a single dad, five kids, love my kids very, very much. I was married at the time when I started, but changing my physical body also helped me have more confidence, it helped me be able to improve my personality and blah, blah, blah. And it ended up, you know, being having having some effects on a relationship, you know, because transforming from a person losing 100 pounds can also transform the way that you show up. And also now you're happy, and you used to be sad, and now you're a happy person. And maybe a person doesn't want to be with a happy person, they want to be with the person you used to be, um, which was more shy and scared and more reserved and so on, and afraid of public speaking and afraid of having his photo online because he's too fat or whatever, or hiding behind the shell of a human being. But now that you're confident and you're happy and you're out there, all of a sudden you become scary. And so it the relationship doesn't work out. But that doesn't mean that I'm not a better dad to my kids. I love my kids very, very much, and I want to be around, and I also want to be an example for them. So my daughter now runs. None of my none of my siblings were running. My brother runs because I ran. My sister runs, she exercises because I'm I'm the catalyst of starting to help people understand that health is one of the most important things you could have. Both of my parents are overweight. Both of my parents are not healthy at all. They're in their 70s, thank God, and they're okay. And I hope they live till their 80s, 90s, 100, 120. I hope they do really well. But the chances of them doing that with their health conditions that they're in right now, with them not taking care of their health and still eating sugar and flour and all those things that they're eating in their in their 70s, it is very, very, very risky to do that. So I need to start young. So me starting in my 30s, me starting my health journey in my 30s and being able to accomplish losing all that weight was excruciatingly hard. It was a very, very difficult thing. And I work on it every day. I have my challenges every day. I'm standing right now for this entire thing. Yesterday I did a Claude Code masterclass for 30 clients. I stood the entire time. I was exhausted after. Standing, standing for eight hours a day is like running a marathon if you do that all week, all uh all week.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

Is that what you do? Is that is that what you do now?

SPEAKER_02 49:05

You have a standing desk and that's I have a standing desk and I stand, that helps a lot. But I I end up sitting, I have a laptop, I'll go to the living room, I'll sit down, I'll get tired. Right. So if I'm not if I'm not presenting, if when I'm presenting, I want to present with power, right? I want to present with persuasion, and when I'm doing a webinar, I want to stand. And so I have a standing desk and I have three uh three monitors on the standing desk. I have a laptop on the side, I have my phone, I have a whole thing set, I have a whole setup going on here. Yeah. And usually when I'm on Zoom, you're right.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

The energy is different. It really is. It's different.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

If I sat on my if I sat down right now, I'd be like, all right, Kwame. My posture wouldn't be good, my energy wouldn't be good, my voice, but if I'm standing and I'm dancing and I'm shaking my butt, I am alive, I am well, and so my wellness is very important to me. It is very, very important to me.

SPEAKER_00 49:50

In in the beginning of this part, you mentioned overcoming challenges. And I know that you were going somewhere with that, and I wanted to return to that. You know, you've had a very busy and and and and very successful career. You've you know, you've owned an agency, um, um ever is doing really well. I mean, I see everywhere I turn, I'm seeing you somewhere. Um but obviously every it it's not all you know it's always what we you know publicly, what we see, there's there's I'm sure there's been some very hard moments behind it. Is there anything that stands out to you that you know you want to share um you know that has really been an inflection point for you and has gotten into you to where you are in terms of overcoming a moment in your life that you felt like wow, this is a turning point.

SPEAKER_02 50:43

I would say the most important thing, the most important thing, um the most important thing is when I had my lowest moment in the past decade, being able to already have done all the personal development to be able to make it through those dark moments was literally, literally the most important thing. That was the most important thing. So going to landmark, doing Tony Robbins, reading hundreds of books on personal development, journaling, affirmations, the miracle morning, all the things that I've done. All the work that I've done on myself, physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychedelically, all the things that I've done to improve who I am, to take my personality to the next level, that's what helped me overcome the hardest challenges. For example, when 2020 hit, I was going through a very difficult divorce. March of 2020 came within two weeks, I lost 75% of my recurring revenue in my marketing agency overnight, just like that. Very, very, very difficult moments. I ended up gaining weight. I ended up getting sick with COVID, my kids ended up getting sick. I was I I I didn't know what I was going on in my life. I was in court, I was dealing with all the biggest bullshit in my life. I thought I was gonna lose everything. I thought my kids are gonna hate me forever. I thought I was failing as a father, as a CEO, as a friend, as a human, as a person, as a as in society, my whole societal thing changed. Everything changed for me. And I felt like such a total, total, total failure. But you know what? I rose back up. I rose back up, I'm hungry, I started a new business after I settled my divorce from scratch, and now we have clients in 40 countries around the world. I am so so so so grateful.

SPEAKER_00 52:30

Awesome. I have two last questions and then we'll wrap up. So I want to shift to legacy. Um and I have a specific question that I wrote. Let me let me get into that. So 30 years from now, you know, um the products are sunset, the agency, a memory, uh, and then someone in Brooklyn says your name, what do you want the next sentence to be?

SPEAKER_02 52:58

Giver.

SPEAKER_00 53:00

Explain.

SPEAKER_02 53:02

I believe that the secret to living is giving. Not faking, not taking. Maybe for some people waking and baking.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

Right.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

But I believe the secret to living is giving. That's the most important thing. I think that you have to be a giver, make a difference for others, and that's kinda like what what I strive to be. I strive to be a giver.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

And and why is that so important to you?

SPEAKER_02 53:27

Because I think that I want to be a conduit of blessing in my life, and I think that giving is part of that. I think it's part of like what I grew up with, you know, watching, you know, the whole concept of religion is important, and I love it, and I think it's great for people. But I the only part of it that I really, really love so much is the way that people give to each other.

unknown 53:48

Right.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

The way that people are just giving and giving, and society is giving, and I I I love that concept. I love being a source of blessing, a conduit of blessing for other people. So that's that's a very powerful thing.

SPEAKER_00 54:01

And and and a follow-up to that, five books, two companies or more, are giving what we just talked about. Um, I know it's more than two. Uh you have you know, two podcasts from what I've researched. Uh, you you have 57,000 followers and growing. Yeah. Um if you had to sell all of it but keep one, which asset would you keep and why?

SPEAKER_02 54:26

Um I don't think I would keep any assets. I think I would just sell everything. I I think that I'm not taking anything with me to the grave. Honestly, I'm not taking anything with me to the grave. So, you know, I would I would just give it all up.

SPEAKER_00 54:41

Final. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that I haven't I haven't brought up?

SPEAKER_02 54:48

No, I think you're doing great. I think we did a great great conversation. I think we went through it. I appreciate you very much. And uh yeah, thank you for being in my life. Thank you for interviewing me. I'm looking forward to seeing the the video.

SPEAKER_00 54:59

Absolutely. And how can people follow you? Where's the best place to follow you?

SPEAKER_02 55:03

If you go to joelinkedin.com, my cell phone number is on the top right. That takes me straight to my LinkedIn, and then just hit me up. Let me know that you watched the episode. Let me know that you enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

Joe, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast today. And uh this was this was this was the tour de force. And I'm I have to go back and listen. There's so many gems, and I have to go back and listen, but I really appreciate your time today. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 55:23

Uh, thank you for interviewing me. I appreciate you too, and we'll talk again soon.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

Bye. Bye. That was a tour de force in marketing. I have been following Joe for a while now, and I am excited that he was able to make LinkedIn feel less like a feed and more like a strategic tool you can use to build relationships and grow your business. If there's one thing I took from this conversation, it is this the tools multiply your voice, but showing up in your own voice with real relationships behind it is still the whole game. If this conversation gives you something, share it with a founder who needs to hear it. That is how names get known. And if this is landing for you, everything I'm working on regarding the known economy lives on the website knowneconomy.com. That is where I am figuring it out in public, and you can follow along. Until next time, remember your business will have an exit one day. Make sure that your name doesn't. I am Kwame Kwade, and this is the Exit Proof Podcast.