E136 | AI Secrets Every Entrepreneur Must Know: Speed to Lead, Content Hacks & Marketing Myths

What if the secret to scaling your business wasn’t just hustle—but harnessing the right technology at the right time? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams welcomes UK-based entrepreneur and AI innovator Jerry Jariwalla for a deep dive into how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing business growth, lead generation, and digital marketing.

Jerry’s journey is anything but ordinary. From building one of the UK’s largest locksmith companies to launching AI Builders, he’s mastered the art of solving real-world problems with smart, scalable AI solutions. This episode explores the powerful concept of Speed to Lead—an AI-driven system that ensures businesses never miss a sales opportunity by responding to inquiries instantly. Whether you’re in HVAC, plumbing, law, or accounting, Jerry explains why fast lead response is no longer optional—it’s essential.

Listeners will also uncover the truth behind common online marketing myths, learn how to use AI to create 120+ pieces of content per month, and discover how to rebuild a seven-figure business with just a $20/month AI subscription. Jerry shares practical strategies for prompt engineering, content repurposing, and AI-powered customer engagement, making this episode a goldmine for entrepreneurs, marketers, and business owners.

Entities mentioned include AI Builders, OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, DeepSeek, and platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. The conversation also touches on ethical concerns and real-world failures in AI marketing, offering a balanced perspective on the risks and rewards of this fast-evolving technology.

If you’re looking to future-proof your business, boost your digital presence, and learn how to turn AI into your competitive advantage, this episode is your blueprint. Tune in and discover how to transform attention into action—and leads into loyal customers.

For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com 

Watch the episode here

 

AI Secrets Every Entrepreneur Must Know: Speed to Lead, Content Hacks & Marketing Myths

 
I am so excited. It’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. So last two years, there’s been a host of AI experts pop up in the world. Most of them I’ve talked to are something other than that. Okay. But today I have a legitimate top of the world expert in AI, Jerry Jirawala.

Jerry, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

I am thrilled to have you here today, not only to share your wisdom with the world, but I’m planning on learning myself. And I don’t approach every episode with that, but I am planning on learning myself. So tell me, Jerry, you’ve been, you were an entrepreneur before AI hit the scene, yes?

Yeah, coming along 25 years now.

Okay, so you started out as a young boy. Tell us about your first company. What did you do?

So my first company was a locksmith company and I actually accidentally became an entrepreneur by joining my father who was a one man in a van and we grew that business to a hundred vehicles nationwide across the UK and ended up being one of the largest locksmithing companies in the country. Yeah, so.

That was the first one that got me hooked to entrepreneurship. And as you, as you know, it’s an addictive sport.

It is an

addictive sport, even though it hurts sometimes. And sometimes it hurts for a long time. You know, so many people don’t understand. They think when you open a business and life is grand from that point on. And I’m like, if you do a startup, life is hard for a lot longer than you think. And you make a lot less than you think. But many times it’s one meeting, one introduction, one client that kind of parts the clouds.

Happy Birthday.

the sun shines and life gets good. And I love, now Jerry is coming in from the UK today, so it’s evening to him. Okay, it’s about noon to me. But I love man in a van. You know, here in the States we call that chuck in a truck. so, love that, love that, love that. Okay, so you have been in, I’m gonna say the AI, you.

Right. ⁓

You like build AI solutions, like things that get things done, right? And the name of your current company is AI Builders. Okay. And so you build solutions for businesses using AI. And you’ve been doing that two, three years, four years, five years.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I want to say about two

years. I want to say about two years. And AI Builders was really kind of a natural evolution to the business that preceded that, which was essentially an online marketing business. So I find that my mind generally goes towards marketing challenges and we use the background that I have.

Okay.

of to solve marketing challenges and we build solutions for marketing challenges. But having said that, when you solve one problem, it usually leads to creating another problem. And then, of course, before AI, we would then stop at the AI. Sorry, we would stop at the marketing solution. But now with the the tools that we

our disposal, we’re able to solve more problems. So yeah, that’s why we called ourselves AI Builders, because one problem usually leads to another problem. And yeah, we just go one step at a time.

So Jerry and I are certainly brothers from other mothers. know, most of what I do is in sales and leadership training and improvement for entrepreneurs around the globe. And on the sales side, I always tell people, well, you have one of two problems or maybe you have both. But the first problem is, do you have a consistent stream of qualified leads? And if you don’t, we have to solve that. And digital agencies, online agencies, you know, they do a lot for that. But.

That’s not enough. You have to get the lead and then you have to be able to convert the lead. Okay. At an acceptable conversion rate to where you have ROI. And so, um, uh, who knows? There may be another business started here by the end of the day of the Jerry and Dawn show. Jerry gets first billing. just, I just know how, I don’t know how to make people do things. I just know how to make it easy for people to do things. And that’s of course the right way to sell anyway.

you

So let’s hop into AI. What’s one AI marketing tactic nobody’s using, but every entrepreneur should start using like now?

⁓ I love this question. I’m so glad you asked that. so this is almost like if the solution occur, if the solution existed 25 years ago, I would have been the first person to buy it. And that is a solution that we’re calling speed to lead. And as you know, Don,

A lot of people say that they have lead generation challenges. I would argue that they have lead response challenges because in today’s day and age, if your competitors, like if you’re not quick enough to respond to an inquiry, then

Facebook knows that that person contacted you. So does LinkedIn, so does Instagram, so does TikTok and bang, that potential lead or potential person that was interested in your service is now being served ads from your competitors providing the exact service. So to dumb it down completely, completely basic, I used to run a locksmith company.

That meant I had to employ 30 people answering the phones because as I said, if I didn’t respond to those inquiries, then the person would flip over to the yellow pages and call my competitor. Today, it’s obviously the principle remains. If you do not respond to your leads, your competitors will. So speed to lead is an

AI product that answers the phone, qualifies your potential lead, makes sure that you can either provide the service or asks the right question to make sure that it’s a good fit and then either books it in the calendar for you or arranges a callback or arranges a direct transfer to a human.

Love that. Love that.

So

think HVAC, think plumbing, think any emergency service, chuck in a truck or a man in a van. They all need this, but it’s not the only ones. They’re the obvious ones. The ones that frustrate me, Don, are the professional services, the accountants that never answer the phone, the lawyers who are always in court, the architects who are always on site.

⁓ These people are very, very busy professionals and usually they have a secretary or somebody to answer the phone. But a few years ago, as you know, there was this whole outsourcing trend where lawyers and professional services then outsource the telephones to somebody that doesn’t know you, doesn’t like you, doesn’t trust you. And they basically ended up

outsourcing the most important part of the sales journey, which was answering the phone. So now you have people in India, in Philippines, or even in the US or locally answering the phone who have absolutely zero idea of what the business does. And that also led to a lot of lost business. But those people who are thinking maybe, but I don’t do that. I have Sally in the back who answers the phone for me.

or a John, whatever. The issue is with that is that most people don’t have enough leads to keep John on the phone. So John then gets filing, he gets to make the tea, he also does the vacuuming, he meets and greets people walking in the front door, and when the phone rings, it’s usually the last thing that he wants to do.

So, Speed to Lead goes and actually solves that problem because the AI is always happy. It works 24-7. It never takes a day off. It’s paid one-tenth of what John has paid and essentially does literally a better job every single time.

I love that.

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, one thing I share with my clients all the time is this, you know, people hate to wait. Nobody is patient. Okay. And I’m the least patient person ever born in the history of earth. Okay. I can’t stand it. And I don’t think I’m that different. Obviously you’re not either.

I think that’s good.

And so the problem with waiting is I don’t know if I’m in the beginning of the wait, the end of the wait, the middle of the wait, or you’ve just forgot about me. And so Google study after study, the first person who answered the phone and talked to the prospect won the deal 70 % of the time, regardless of capabilities, et cetera.

Yeah.

Absolutely. I think there’s a stat today. I think the person that gets to the lead has 400 and something percent more of a chance of winning the deal than the next person.

Yeah, I so buy that. Okay, thank you for sharing that. Okay, so I’m gonna go the other way. What’s the biggest scam or the biggest myth you see in online marketing that people are still falling for?

So this one’s a little bit contentious and there are two sides of the coin on this. Many, many people say that online advertising is a scam.

And I would say that not doing online marketing correctly is scamming yourself.

Okay, I love that. I don’t know how somebody can not online market, you you have to do something. You have to stand on your roof and yell, I’m a locksmith. Or you have to, we used to have the yellow pages and we used to have newspaper, radio, television, but people are on the internet. And so you gotta go to where the people are.

Yeah.

It doesn’t make any sense to go where they’re not. what, I mean, just like marketing 101 is there’s 8 billion people on the planet. They’re for all practical purposes, they’re all strangers. You know, even if you know 10,000 people, you don’t know anybody compared to 8 billion. And so how do I get some of those 8 billion to know who I am and have interest in what I do? To me, that’s a lead.

Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

And then once they know who I am and what I do, how do I get some of those to actually buy? And that’s kind of a basic funnel, but that’s the funnel everybody’s dealing with. Strangers to buy, and it’s never going to change. That’s just physics. All right. So tough questions. How’s this? I’ve been waiting for you. I got all my tough questions lined up because I’m like, I can ask Jerry all my tough questions. So.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they haven’t changed.

if you lost everything today.

How would you use AI to rebuild a seven-figure business as quickly as possible?

Ugh.

I would do it for 20 bucks a month.

Do what for 20 bucks a month.

I would use AI for 20 bucks a month. would purchase, I would actually go and pay. And I think the, the one big mistake that the majority of people

do not is pay open AI pay Anthropic for the paid version of chat GPT or Claude or whatever your flavor could be deep seek if you want. but I would pay those platforms and use it to learn. And what I would use it to learn is anything you want, because once you pay for that 20 bucks,

You could then go and have just an interest and it will carve out a whole curriculum for you. And Don, let me tell you a quick little story because this is a little bit of a personal one. I suffer from ADHD and I’m off the charts as most entrepreneurs are, as I soon found out recently, and my children are.

And, you know, to try and get them to try and get me to follow one thing after another is really difficult. So, of course, with AI, the thing about AI is if you put in rubbish, you’re going to get out rubbish. So the trick with AI is to make sure that you prompt it correctly.

So the first thing that I would do is learn how to prompt because once you know how to prompt, you can then talk the same language as the tool that you’re trying to use talks. So can you imagine going to India or China or Spain and speaking at a member of the public, stopping them in the street and speaking your language because you can speak that language.

but not taking the time to learn their language despite the fact that you’re in their country, it’s never going to work. No one’s going to tell you where the shop is or wherever you’re going or where the beach is or whatever it might be that you’re looking for because you’re not speaking the same language. So first of all, learn to speak AI and AI’s language of choice is prompting. So the first thing that I would do is buy a

paid version of whatever AI of your choice. Secondly, I would make sure that AI taught me its own language. So that’s as basic as saying, how do I learn how to prompt chat GPT? And you’re asking chat GPT.

Then learn how to use the different models. What’s the difference between 4.0 and 4.0 mini? People think that AI is AI is AI, but unfortunately, it’s not. Now, that’s today. That might change later on. However, at this stage, we still have to choose which tool to use. Now, imagine using a sledgehammer to open a can of baked beans. You wouldn’t do it.

So you want to use the right tool for the right challenge. So once you’ve got your AI, then you’ve learned the language, then the world is your oyster. Then you can go and learn anything you want. once you even have an inkling, you can go as deep as you want because the chances are that AI has been trained on years and decades and centuries worth of information and it can probably compress it.

in a very, very, you know, very, very short way of you understanding even what it might be before you even know whether you like it or not.

I love that and I have seen the wisdom in cooperating with AI, collaborating with AI to here’s what I want to do. What should I be asking you? know, prompt and let it coach you on how to get the most out and then and I certainly echo

get the paid versions. we have paid versions of ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and API access. Not only in ChatGPT, the different modes, but actually even the different large language models have some idiosyncrasies. so Gemini works better for some things than ChatGPT, which works better than that. Okay. All right. So next question.

I’m looking for a zero to hero marketing win using AI. What’s the wildest crazy thing you can tell us from zero to hero?

Well, first thing is content is king. Today, the most valued commodity in the world is attention. And if you can keep someone’s attention for more than three seconds, which by statistical notion means that most of your viewers have dropped off by now. So if you can keep…

people’s attention for more than three seconds, you’ve already won. Now, how do you do that? By is by consistency and what people don’t really understand well enough, because I know a lot of people do that attention is king. The person that holds the attention is always going to hold the power in their hands. As a business owner, the way that you do that is getting people to know, like, and trust you.

However, if you’re a roofer, you’re going to be on a roof. If you’re a plumber, you’re probably in someone’s basement. If you’re a lawyer, you’re probably in court. So people are probably thinking, how do I create content if I’m supposed to be doing my job? Well, the answer is using AI. And AI can be used not to replace you,

because it’s not there to do that, but it’s there to put a cape on your shoulders so that you can do five times the things that you would have ordinarily done five years ago. So what I mean by that, use the paid version to create a content plan. If you don’t know what a content plan is, ask AI. And then when you’ve got your content plan, tell it…

tell AI when you’re going to record the content. So if you’re a lawyer that goes to the office every single day, then tell AI that you want a content plan so that you can record a video from the car on your way to work, and that video should be less than three minutes long. And if you did that every single day for three minutes, one, you would never have to think about the topic

Secondly, you would never have to think about the content because it would tell you or it would guide you. Thirdly, it would probably help you to repurpose that content into written format because you just gave it a video. So you’ve inserted it with information and you can then redistribute it because Facebook consumes information differently to LinkedIn as do the other ones.

And at the end of that video, you’ve probably got a 500 word blog that you can go and post on Medium. So that is the zero to hero. And if you did that every single day and you did one video, you could probably repurpose that into six pieces of content, which a few times by 30 days, and let’s say you only visit the office 20 days, then that’s 60, I think. No.

120 pieces of content every month, if my maths is not wrong. ⁓ So most people that could produce 120 pieces of content every month would never have to starve in their life.

Yeah.

I totally agree. And, you know, I think that even before AI kind of popped up on the horizon for most people, and it’s been out there for 15, 20 years, but it’s just most people were unaware until the last couple of years when open AI kind of hit the scene. But if you own a business today, you can be your own marketing channel, your own media channel, and you can literally

put out what would have cost you millions of dollars 20 years ago for nothing. Near nothing, let’s say that, for near nothing. Yeah, and if you’re not doing that, that’s crazy. Your competitors are. And that can go even further. It can be books, etc. I content, I agree, content’s king. Okay.

That’s what he brought us.

Jerry, you’re known for getting results. First time for me to actually meet you, but I’ve heard of you by reputation for a long time. Tell us about a big AI marketing fail.

an AI marketing fail to do with my business or to do with anybody’s business.

whichever you think best. And here’s how I look at failure and success. I think the world looks at failure as being the opposite of success. And I’m like, I disagree. I think failure is part of success. I have failed at many things that I ultimately became successful at because I learned something and I changed how I was doing things.

Ultimately, it got better. And I’d like to say I only failed once. Sometimes I failed over and over and over and over and over and then I figured it out. So it may be one of those where, the first stab at it, it stunk. Okay. But we ended up with the sun shining and the birds singing and all that.

always a pleasure to have you.

an iterative failing to a positive notion. think I would say the going, like using AI for everything and trusting it for everything would be an iterative learning process.

where you will learn through failure. So, for example, you may have heard the case where somebody tried to use chat GPT in court.

Yeah.

So that would be an example of possibly where it might be illegal. Or I would suggest that there is this whole industry, which I only come to find out recently of people using AI and using it to monetize. These are people who are abroad using AI to sell

student services to students in the US to do their homework, to do their assignments. So there is this whole industry that exists, which I had no clue about where people are sitting abroad using AI and of course, they’re intelligent people, but American students are paying those people to do their assignments.

my… my gosh.

So that’s absolutely a failure in terms of the AI world. wouldn’t, I’m not sure whether you would call that an AI failure or a human failure. But yeah, I don’t know if that answers your question.

No, no, that’s great. And here’s a real world case study. So one of my authors, just published his book. We don’t use AI to write books. Okay. We get your thoughts and feelings out of your head and heart and get them to paper. This book was very successful right off the bat. And within three days we had four.

copycat autobiographies and probably at somebody, not in the US, probably at somebody in developing country using AI to put out a book and the publishers take care of that, but still you have to deal with it. so AI, like many other powerful tools can be used for good or evil, you know.

please use it for good. So Jerry, if somebody in the audience wanted to reach out to you or to AI builders, what’s the best way to do that?

Instagram. Thank you for asking that.

Yeah, my pleasure. And trust me, Jerry is all over Facebook and all over Instagram. So, it’s been my distinct pleasure to have you as a guest today. What’s the attorney say? The attorney says, I reserve the right to recall the witness. And so, I’m just telling you now, Jerry, I reserve the right to recall you at a later date for more wisdom about AI.

It’s like, it’s coming out of

I would absolutely love to share that. And thank you so much for having me here today. It’s been an honor.

My pleasure. That’s today’s episode of the Proven Entrepreneur Show. We’ll see you next time. Bye now.