Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Chi Odogwu, Founder of The Bulletproof Entrepreneur™

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Chi Odogwu is the founder of The Bulletproof Entrepreneur™, where he helps companies drive growth through AI integration and practical business strategies. A former consultant at PwC and Renaissance Capital, Chi brings over 15 years of finance and management experience to his work with business leaders. He’s a regular contributor to WSJ, Success Magazine, CNET and Forbes, specializing in AI operations, business growth, and wealth building. When he’s not helping clients leverage AI to boost revenue, Chi creates animated stories that make business lessons more engaging.Learn more: https://bulletproofentrepreneur.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-chi-odogwu-founder-of-the-bulletproof-entrepreneur

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Chi Adogu, who is the founder of the Bulletproof Entrepreneur. Gee, welcome to the program. Thanks for having you, Mike. I appreciate you doing this podcast today.

Oh, yeah, you're welcome. I'm looking forward to talking with you. In fact, we were talking just before we started recording. I had you on the show seven years ago, and it was just time just flies. It seems like it was two or three, but seven was a long time. So I'm excited to catch up with you and hear what you've been doing. So give us a little bit of like your story and your background. And then what are you doing now in the industry?

Sure. So my background for those who missed the last one seven years ago, I mean, it feels like two lifetimes with COVID, right? Yes. So basically, I was working as a management consultant in the United States. So I quit that to start an e-commerce company in my hometown in Lagos, Nigeria. I moved back home one of the first baby product e-commerce stores. Didn't quite work out as planned. It failed within like six months due to some economic challenge.

challenges. So I now decided to look back and say, okay, what are some of the things that I did right? Didn't do right. I figured out marketing was like my biggest weakness because I'm a number's guy. My degrees are all in finance. So everything else I could like track. But the marketing aspect and I'll be honest, even in college, I wasn't really that great at marketing. I just knew that. Okay, if I passed all the rest, if I'm weak in marketing, somebody else to do that. So it came back to back me in the butt, right? So I learned how. to be a better marketer, took copywriting courses.

Actually, at that point in time, I spent my last $500 buying five PDS from Jay Abraham about copyrighting and marketing and I just studied all that. And I was like, you know what? I actually do like writing. Let me see if I can make a go out of writing and

get some clients this way. And I got my first writing client from there. I think it was five bucks to write like, I think this was illegal today, but back then it was okay so it was to write like a ebook review and then i did a dating profile and then i started writing real estate descriptions for real estate companies and then and after they're doing other content work for other people so it just grew from just one little five dollar gig on

fiverr to writing and then i was like you know what i really liked doing this at that time also i was hosting my podcast, the Bulletproof of entrepreneur. And then somewhere around 2019, I would say, I had a guest on my show, and he loved the conversation. And he was like, oh, can you help me, like, you know, do some ghostwriting for social media. And I was like, what is that? They're like, oh, you know, the way you interviewed me, just we do an interview and then you write the stuff for social media.

And I'm like, oh, okay, so I started doing that. And then I not figured out with that, I could actually turn it into. thought leadership or writing for publications. So you mentioned Wall Street Journal, a lot of places. So I started like getting bylines in places like Huffington Post where I would write about different topics and businesses. And then people started reaching out to me saying, hey, we want to also be contributors. Can you help us write our thought leadership pieces?

And then I started getting clients that way. Wow. From a $5 fiber gig to Forbes, success magazine, Wall Street Journal, bank rate, box money, entrepreneur. That's a success story. And I don't know that I would ever recommend anyone spending their last $500 on something. But if you did, then Jay Abraham definitely is the one to do it on. So I follow his work and he's just spectacular as well.

So you, and then you said something else when you had that, air quotes, failure after six months on the e-commerce store, you didn't really dwell on that as a failure. You were like, let's see what worked. Let's see what didn't work. Let's learn from that. And you either win or you and people go lose. No, you win or you grow or you learn. You win or you learn. And you learned lessons. You've turned that into lessons. And now you're helping other entrepreneurs become bulletproof. Great. I love that. How are you working now with entrepreneurs in your consulting agency? Okay. So with the advent of chat GPT and AI in 2022, I noticed one thing was that, you know what, this thing is probably going to affect everything we do in knowledge space. So when it comes to writing, right now it's already very good at writing, not the best, but very good at least for the basics, right? But also it's going to help unlock a ton of efficiencies for people. And a lot of people, like every other new technology, they're hesitant to learn how to use it. So I figured, okay, this writing thing,

I don't know how long I'm going to be able to do it, but I know that there's going to be something here with this new emerging industry. And if people can figure out how to be more efficient with it, not just writing alone, but like interfacing some of these AI systems, like Open AI, ChargeypT, into creating what they call AI agents, where rather than take, for example, Mike,

if you were to do research on me for the, podcast, you would go spend some time on the internet, Googling and all that. We can easily set up a system in five, 10 minutes and say, hey, anytime I have a podcast guest, quickly research the person and write a summary for me and then put it in a Word doc and send it to my inbox

so I can take a look. And all that takes like 10 minutes to set up. So you could do that for different things. And you find that rather than you spending time to do those processes yourself, you have an AI bot, so to speak, doing all that for you. So now you have free time to do more stuff.

And then you can also use it to like expand your creativity as well because you can now say, okay, I've always wanted to explore. So take for example personally in my life, I've always had like a couple of songs kicking around in my head since grad school. This is back in 2007. But I'm like, I wrote one stanza and that was it. Now with the new AI music generators, I was like, you know what? I want to complete this song.

So I like, how am I going to come? So I said, hey, teach me how to complete this song? I have this stanza. So if I say, oh, yeah, it has a good hook and everything, but this is how you can structure it. And these are the type of beats that will go with it. And then over the summer, I worked on it. And I was like, you know what?

I have a song. So I actually released three songs instead of one. Because after I got the first one down, I was like, the other two ideas I was kicking around now that I know how to do it, I can easily do it because the system is already there for me. So let's even pause on that because you're making a point. that I think a lot of people are misunderstanding about AI. I feel like people hear about AI and go,

oh, you put this prompt in, you go submit, you go copy paste and put it out there on your social media, your website, your blog, and AI and chat GPT becomes your brain. And that's not the case. What you just described there was it was giving you some help to clarify some ideas.

And then you looked at what, the prompts came back with. And then you with your knowledge were like, okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, now that makes me think of this. And now from my experience, I'm going to do it this way. It just guides the process. So I feel like people think AI will take over the world and replace everyone's jobs. But in reality, AI will make people like you and me that are thought leaders do our work

even more efficiently because it gets us started, does some of the leg work. And then we come in with our expertise. to polish it up, but AI is never meant to go copy, paste, send. Yes, 100%. I think of it like it's a creativity multiplier, just like you said. Once you have the nugget and you give it, it doesn't have brain fog, it doesn't get stuck, it doesn't have writers block or anything like that. It will keep generating.

And as long as you have a prompt to keep generating, you yourself will start thinking, oh, okay, I have this idea. It's helped me go this step. Now I can take it from that. The human is the most important thing. Yes, because guess what? I couldn't write one line of a song. So if I put something in like what you were describing and it says, okay, well, the next

line you should consider writing something like this, I would still be drawing a blank. So it wouldn't be the solution for me. So I just love how in a business and a marketing sense I use it all the time. but it's just a starter when I can go, oh, yeah, see where it's going here. Now I'm going to bring in my expertise and polish up that section, this section, and then you're always making it your own. And I think that's huge. And then the other thing that you were talking about is it just kind of goes out and does some of the busy work for you.

Go out and just research this person's bio, email it to me so that I have it for my interview. Well, that just saves time. Exactly right. So like even you, Mike, we can use you as an example. you're the authority marketing coach and strategies. You can create your own authority coach jingle or authority positioning jingle just by taking your bio and a few other things you've done, put it in the system and say, hey, I love, who's your favorite musician, Mike?

Oh, I don't know. Pick anyone from the 80s. Let's just say John Bon Jovi. John Bon Jovi. So I love John Bon Jovi. So I love the John Bon Jovi's song. I'm even drawing a block of John Bon Jovi's song. So let's create a jingle in this style of John Bon Jovi's song.

Yeah. And let's make it catchy. And let's mix it maybe with a little bit of jazz or something else. And then it's in the, it wouldn't exactly be, of course, John Bon Jovi's voice, right? But it will give you the vibe of the style. And see, what you just described? there though is called prompt engineering and I feel like it's like if you had 10 people that I said please help me create a jingle for my company and all 10 used chat GPT you would

probably get 28 different responses because one person would put the prompt request in one way another one would have a different wording and you would get different results so it really the output really is dependent on the input yes exactly exactly right So what are you doing to help the clients and the companies that you work with use AI? So the first thing first is starts with teaching them how to use it properly. Because like you rightly said, a lot of people think it's just putting a random prompt and you get, you know, the AI to do the work for you. So I can't get garbage and garbage out. If you don't give a good prompt, you'll get garbage results.

So you have to think through it in a structured manner. So you have to give it a context. You have to give it examples. You have to give it some background and styling. And then you also have to give it your other expectations or remove some negatives out of it. So when I say negative, it would be like things like don't use cliche words, for example, or don't sound like my competitors in the space or don't even sound like an AI or something like that. But you have to give it very good parameters.

for it to be able to create what you wanted to create, especially if you want something to sound like you. So the first aspect is training. The second aspect is now looking at efficiencies, right? Because if you're a team of five, how can you operate like your team of 20 or 50? What are some of the efficiencies that can help take off some of the mundane tasks and do the heavy lifting so that your people can get more done in an eight-hour day

than having, increasing your head count by another 20, 30 people? with now reduce your cost. And of course, with more people, you have to manage people and not manage your business. Activity suffers and your profitability suffers. So those are the two ways of which I go in and help clients, like, see how they can implement this. What are you seeing when you first start, you know, getting the lay of the land with the company, what are you seeing that their mistakes are typically? So the first things first is there's always apprehension and fear.

from employees because they think you're trying to eliminate them from their job of cost, but when you tell them that no nobody wants to actually do more work outside of the work age.

We don't want people going home and turning an eight-hour day to a 14, 15-hour day. I used to do that. It really sucked. But if you can do 15 hours of work in four hours, I mean, that frees you up to, even do more stuff because guess what, now your people can also be thinking strategically to help you.

So the business owner and you're on task, but also thinking strategically about, okay, now that we can do some of this heavy lifting, what are some other things that we didn't have time for that we can now do to now take market share from our competitors? So the first thing is always apprehension. The second thing is always like, you know, the struggle, because it's like learning a new language. So you have to struggle and really teach people how to get their minds around structuring things properly. And that just takes time and practice. I always tell people that, hey, look, you don't have to do it all at once. So Chi, after 15 years in financing,

consulting and working with companies with AI, what are you finding their biggest mistake is when they're trying to integrate AI into their existing business strategy? So the biggest mistake I'm finding is, first of all, people are not used to working in a structured manner with AI, right? So there's a lot of apprehension and fear people thinking AI is going to take their jobs, not knowing that, no, it's supposed to help you increase your productivity. And then the second aspect is also thinking in a strong... I think that's where a lot of companies struggle. A lot of people know that, yes, you can use it to create content.

social media posts, etc. But what are some of the operational stuff, right? Like onboarding a new client, making sure your clients. So you, for example, Mike, you have an awesome welcome sequence for having a guest on your podcast. Many things like this, this, right, the touchpoints you have. A lot of companies could do that and facilitate better relationship with their customers if they're able to create more of these touchpoints, if they're better prepared for discovery calls or even meetings with clients to collect

information and data. So they don't know exactly comes into play to help them succeed. All they know is they've been doing business one way. So my job is to primarily come in and listen to how they operate and then I'll spot some of the gaps and say, okay, in this particular section of your operations, walk me through your operating procedure. I'll say, okay, now that you have these five steps outlined,

we can actually turn that into one step with, you know, make automation with chat GPT as the engine or cloud as the engine, and then you go in and just verify and you're good to go. So figuring out how to like logically put the AI agents and systems in their operations is one of the biggest places where they need, clients need help with because they can't think about that themselves. They just know that they've been doing business one way and it works for them, but you know what, if we can't. cut this down from like five hours to 30 minutes, guess what? They can actually get double the amount of clients they can work with.

You know, so things like that. Yeah. That's really huge. And I think a lot of times people don't realize kind of like the concept of opportunity cost. Meaning if I'm working on this, then I can't be working on that. And when you use AI to speed up and make the first task more efficient, now that frees your opportunity cost to be able to work on that other thing that might bring in that next client or focusing on that 20% of your activities that bring in 80% of the impact.

Exactly. Exactly. So where do you find a or where do you see AI going these days? I think it's it's speeding at the at the speed of light. And I think that's a lot of times two years ago people wouldn't have dreamt of where we are now. Where do you see AI supporting business in the next three to five years? Mike's the first billion dollar one-person company. That's how fastest thing is moving because you can literally, again, I'm an advocate of not replacing employees with AI, but it is getting so good that you can actually have your sales team become an AI voice agent, where rather than you employing employees,

Let's take, for example, what people do is they outsource their call centers to Asia, like the Philippines, and they pay people five bucks an hour to do the work. You can have an AI where you're paying it one cent an hour, and it can do the work of 30 call center people. And it'll never take a break, works 24-7. So you can imagine the amount of volume and data it's generating, and you now have another agent looking at the transcripts and saying, hey, you know what? these are some of the things people are saying there might be an opportunity for us to actually create a new business or a new vertical. So I strongly believe

within the next three to five years we'll just have people who are running like multi-million dollar or multiple million dollar business is just one person in the loop and the agents are taking control or if it's even a billion dollar business you'll find head count

is reduced drastically because there's always has to be someone in the loop right but head count will reduce drastically and then cost will also reduce, but profitability will go way up. But that will also free up time for other people to be more creative. So people like you and I, you know,

people who have never explored certain parts of their creativity or certain aspects of businesses that they want to try out, there will be very low barriers to like experimenting in your business and saying, oh, I want to try these five services. Let me try it for like a month or two months and see if I can get clients with it. Those are the type of things will happen. So people will now start becoming, like, take for example, general bills, right?

Many different products, many different product clients. Still one person. And guess what? You can fail fast and find out, okay, this is not working, this is working, I'll focus on this one. Rather than you wasting a ton of time trying to figure out which verticals will work for you. So we're really speeding towards a very, well, I say, hyperproductive society. see. Yes. People want to move quick. And that's the mentality we have with instant message and text and microwave and all of those things where, you know, let's see that business idea. Let's push a few

buttons. Let AI create the marketing plan, business plan, next steps. And like you said, fail fast because if it's going to fail, I want to know faster than not. I don't want to waste time and effort and resources and money. So we've talked about you writing for some of these top publications and you write for Wall Street Journal and Forbes and Success and Entrepreneur. What is some of the insights that you're seeing in building businesses and business wealth in the AI era? So building business and business wealth in the AI era, I've noticed that, well, thanks to writing for these publications, I've noticed that it is probably going to be the greatest time to make

wealth and money to these new technological advances, right? Because it used to be you needed to have the bank role of Microsoft and co to be able to do all this and make a ton of money or even Amazon. Now with literally 100 bucks a month and I think there's nobody listening here

that cannot afford to invest a hundred bucks in five AI tools and not see at least if I were to put it just modestly maybe 50X return on their spend. That's where we're going. Just a hundred bucks a month

you can see 50x return on your spend because now you've opened up business opportunity. But Mike, I would also say your because it's like if everybody

is a superhero, it makes a society kind of ne a little bit, right? So you need to also be able to position yourself and you need to also be able to stand out in as much as everybody has the same tool bag as you do and they have super super

skills, right? So you need to be able to position yourself and stand out so that you can get that attention. And the only way to get that attention is to be doing things that you and I do which is, you know, taking positions in the market, becoming thought leaders,

getting to show up in these places of high credibility. So that that way you're getting a ton of visibility as well because there is nowhere else to stand up. People want to actually connect with a human being, but when you have that authority positioning behind you, it elevates you above others, and then that plus the tools now gives you the added edge.

So I think that's where it is. We're going to be in a time of unprecedented productivity and world creation. I strongly believe in that. I agree, and I think that when you can do all of these things and get that guidance, you become that bulletproof entrepreneur, that you put in your title of your business.

So I love how you do that. And I think that people listening here would be interested in finding out a little bit more about the Bulletproof Entrepreneur. So how can they do that? Yeah. So if you want to find out about the Bulletproof Entrepreneur, just go to Bulletproof Entrepreneur.com.

And I'll send you the link. So you can check it out. We have a newsletter. We have a podcast. And of course, you can just email me at Chi at the Bulletproof Entrepreneur.com. I'm happy to respond to your listeners and help anywhere I can. Excellent.

Well, Chi, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. My pleasure, Mike. Thank you for having me. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www.