I own a boring business. Here's how I'd sell to me

Hey Boring Marketer,

I tried an AI receptionist at my own business, a mobile diesel repair company called Diesel Dudes. When a semi breaks down on the side of the road, we send a mechanic out.

I got so many voicemails from people asking "Is this a dumb AI thing?" and then hanging up.

That test changed how I look at everyone pitching AI to local businesses. Those callers came from ads I paid for, and they wanted a person. As the owner, I don't care how clever the thing answering my phone is. I care whether the call turned into a job.

So when Greg Isenberg asked me on his podcast to show how to sell AI to Main Street, I told him what I'd want to hear from the other side of the pitch: don't sell me AI. Show me how to turn the traffic I'm already paying for into more calls and more booked jobs.

This is the plan I'd run if I were starting an agency today, with one trade in one city and no audience, from finding the companies worth your time to getting paid.

Skip lawn care and restaurants. You want jobs that are expensive and urgent, because that's where an owner can see what you're worth in dollars.

I know this from the customer side too. Two weeks before we recorded, water started coming through my ceiling (my kid did something crazy to our shower). I paid a water restoration guy about $2,000 that same day. Diesel Dudes works the same way: a truck stuck on the side of the road is a costly problem, and it needs fixing now.

Plumbing and HVAC are the obvious picks, with about 112,000 companies averaging about $2.6M a year. They're also where the private equity rollups are happening, so look further out too. Commercial hood cleaning, dental implants, tree services, irrigation, chimney sweeping, gutter guards, septic and crawl space all have real demand and weak marketing, and hardly anyone is pitching them.

Greg made the point that where you live is your unfair advantage. Sport courts are taking off here in the Carolinas. In the Northeast it might be snow removal or backup generators. Paste this into your AI:

Here are trades with real demand and weak marketing: [paste the list above]. Find me a niche I should focus on based on where I live: [your city].

Look for local businesses doing $2M to $20M a year that are already running ads. They have the money, and they already spend it on marketing: a $5M plumbing company is probably spending $150,000 to $250,000 a year. They also have a sense they might be falling behind. Only 14% of small business owners say AI is fully integrated into how they run.

A lot of people on X are selling to solopreneurs and startups who can't afford them, then getting frustrated about bad clients. Most of the time that comes down to the market they picked. Cities like Dallas have hundreds of these companies making real money.

Building this list used to be a pain: going through websites by hand and paying for credits. Now an agent can do it. I typed "find me plumbers in Dallas worth pitching" into BoringFunnels, and in about a minute it had pulled 100 plumbers from Google Maps, Google and Yelp. Use whatever tools you like.

Then size up each company:

From the outside, 13 to 15 people is about $2M. Skip franchises.

Now look at what happens after someone clicks their ad. My agent opened five good Dallas plumbers on a phone, all rated 4.8 or 4.9 on Google and all paying for Google ads that week:

These companies do good work and have the reviews to prove it. Their pages are what's losing them money, and an owner can see that for themselves. Scroll down their site with them and show them there's no way to book.

Then run the math with their numbers. Here's an example using a plumbing benchmark of about $129 a lead (LocaliQ):

So you only have to get them a few new jobs a month to be worth paying. If you can measure that and prove it, they're not going to want to leave you.

I use BoringFunnels for this part too. It finds the prospects, scores them, gets the contact info and builds the pitch and proposal in about 15 minutes. Do it however you want.

Never lead with "I'm implementing AI in your company." Their eyes glaze over. As Greg pointed out, a lot of owners hear "agent" and think of a real estate agent, and plenty of people just don't like AI. Talk about more phone calls and more booked jobs.

What you're actually selling is funnels. Most agencies sell ads, SEO and traffic, but from all the sites I've analyzed, the bigger problem is usually the website. Agencies still charge $20,000 for a good funnel. If you know how to use a coding agent, you can build one quickly at high quality, send their existing ad traffic to it and show them the lift.

For an HVAC company, that could mean seven ways in. I built these pages with BoringFunnels (the company on my slide is a sample I made up):

Then match each search to its own funnel. Someone searching "new furnace installation" goes to the repair-or-replace quiz. Someone who needs quick service goes to the $79 tune-up. Most of these companies send all their traffic to the same pages, and that's really hurting their conversion rate.

If you want to see this built out for a local business, the Keystone Roofing funnel is free (Keystone is a sample roofer we made up). It started from one prompt and has the booking page, the quiz, the page that explains the estimate and the follow-ups. You also get a real funnel every week, taken apart from the ad to the last email and ready for your agent to build from. All free with an account, no card.

Think about your own inbox. The cold emails and LinkedIn DMs all ask for your time right away: hop on a demo, let me show you this cool thing I built. Owners get those too, so don't send them.

Build a list of the 100 companies you'd most like to work with, and have your agent research each one: their reviews, their website, the owner. This is the Dream 100 from Chet Holmes's The Ultimate Sales Machine. He worked out that 167 of 2,200 advertisers bought 95% of the ads, and he went after those. Nothing for four months, his first sale in month five, then 28 more after that. Most people send a batch of emails, hear nothing and quit.

While you're waiting, stack the old school with the new school. You're not selling your service yet in any of this:

A friend at my kids' baseball practice told me his dog had just died, and his vet made a donation in the dog's name to the veterinary college she went to. My first question was "Who's your vet?"

If you want to go deeper, read Chet Holmes, Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. I learned pretty much everything about direct response from those guys.

If you've never done this before, don't try to sell anything yet. Do one for free in exchange for a great case study or testimonial. The cost to you is tokens and some of your time. Not sure what to build? Start from a funnel that's already working. Your only focus should be getting that one case study, and then you start charging.

After that, I'd price it in three layers:

Five clients at $1,500 a month is $7,500 a month. That's arithmetic, not a promise.

I used to spend so much time on reporting at my agencies. That's a solved problem now, because all the data is one prompt away. Send the owner five numbers every Monday: leads, booked jobs, cost per booked job, response time and revenue from booked jobs. If leads are up and booked jobs are flat, it's the phone.

At the end of the episode, Greg said nothing I'd shared was reinventing the wheel, and that's kind of the whole point. Holmes, Abraham and Kennedy were doing this decades ago. What's new is that an agent can do the research and the building for you.

As an owner, I'd pick up the phone for someone who knows my trade, found my leak and already did the work.

So pick a market and a city, and do this one thing for six months with the blinders on. Then report back and tell me how it went.

Watch the whole episode with Greg

Start with the Keystone Roofing funnel: every step, the move behind it and the 16 follow-ups. Free.

Everyone on X is selling AI to each other, and there's a plumber in your city paying $129 a lead to send people to a page with no way to book.

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Keep it boring,
James