Jamie Shanks on How to Escape the $5/Hour Founder’s Trap

Julian Castelli (00:01.595) Good morning. This is Julian Castelli and welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership Podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Workfront, CHG Healthcare, Pathology Watch, the San Francisco 49ers, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. We are a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices, and learnings in an effort to help all of us become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast, as well as our blog, and of course, our annual Ski and Tech Summit, where we bring leaders to beautiful Park City, Utah, to enjoy the camaraderie and collaboration in the beautiful mountains. So if you enjoy skiing in the outdoors, and or you enjoy networking and working with tech leaders, check us out at growthelevated.com. And please subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. Today, I’m super excited to be welcoming Jamie Shanks to the program. Jamie is a serial entrepreneur and I’m going to share his bio the way he wrote it. So in the league of B2B sales, Jamie’s career leads like a highlight reel. He’s logged two base hits with his first seven figure agencies, executed a perfect sacrifice bunt by merging his IP into pipeline signals. and survived three strikeouts that only sharpened his swing. Now he’s back at the plate with his new company, Get Leverage, looking to knock it out of the park by helping founders trade their $5 foul balls for $500 of home run value creation. So Jamie, was a riff on your LinkedIn, which was all about baseball, but let me give you the full introduction. So Jamie has founded three seven figure agencies. He’s a pioneer in the field of social selling. Jamie Shanks (01:44.383) I like it. Julian Castelli (01:56.345) As the CEO of GetLeverage, he currently helps founders and CEOs scale by optimizing offshore talent and buying back high value time for low cost tasks. Jamie previously served as CEO of Sales for Life, where he trained over 250,000 sellers worldwide and authored the best selling books, Social Selling Mastery and Spear Selling. So he has a deep expertise in revenue and go to market. He’s a thought leader. And he’s also an innovator in helping entrepreneurial companies get more with less. Lots to talk about, Jamie. Welcome to the program. Jamie Shanks (02:31.342) Thank you so much for having me. Julian Castelli (02:33.796) So we got to start with the baseball analogy. That’s probably the best description on your LinkedIn of anyone I’ve heard. Tell me what inspired that. Jamie Shanks (02:43.662) When I first became an entrepreneur, one of my mentors helped describe the journey of entrepreneurship through a baseball analogy. And I’ve often used it, and I’ll kind of give you an example, and a guy who owns an agency, because remember, you can create your own baseball analogy if you’re choosing to build a lifestyle business versus a SaaS software company, has very different outcomes for a first base hit, second base hit, and so forth. So. Julian Castelli (03:01.21) Keep the copies. Julian Castelli (03:07.343) different. So the way that I was looking at if I didn’t create business, could serve for five years and provide really solid foundation. Like you want yourself a job. Jamie Shanks (03:11.448) He and I were both in the agency world. And in the professional services world, you typically trade on a multiple of EBITDA. And so the way that I always looked at it was this. If I can create a business that can serve for five to 10 years and provide a really solid foundation of an income, basically like if you bought yourself a job, you’ve got yourself going. You maybe hit a bunt you’re running towards first. But if you can pull out a million or $2, Julian Castelli (03:36.4) Maybe get a bunch of money first. But if you can pull that out of rest of your dollars, and you’ve received these or given it to us, maybe you’ve got a first-place chance. And essentially, you roll out of the banks. And the second thing is this, and I’m going go full-front, is just moving that financial return on the market. Taking off out of business. It is something that will life-long, multi-generation income. So that’s worse. Jamie Shanks (03:41.291) in retained earnings or in dividends, great, you’ve got a first base hit. And essentially you go around the bags. A second base hit is this and a third and a home run is truly that financial freedom number where you take enough out of the business where it can supplement a lifelong multi-generational income. that’s, it was first brought to me that idea and it stuck with me ever since that, okay, Julian Castelli (04:04.879) Yeah, I love that. Having a simple framework to benchmark yourself is so valuable across the board. The second thing that I take from that is you’re 100 % right. You don’t have to go from home run or strikeouts or nothings, right? I think you’ve got a much more forgiving curve than perhaps some these venture-backed tech startups that you and I both work with where Jamie Shanks (04:08.751) first principles. What am I trying to build here? What are my outcomes running the bag? Jamie Shanks (04:24.392) What is? Julian Castelli (04:33.849) You know, that’s where I lost all my hair, my first two of those. It’s all or nothing, you you gotta be the next Facebook or bust, right? Jamie Shanks (04:44.27) That was his point. His point was if you can get a double, you’ve done far more than 95 % of entrepreneurs. So just get a double. And you’ve created millions of dollars of liquidity for yourself and your family. The triple and the quadruple, the home run, everybody wants to hit a home run. But the percentage chance, get the double. Julian Castelli (05:05.839) and everyone’s shooting for it. Of course everyone’s too. Yeah. Well, and that’s critical. And the other thing is like to be proud of your strikeouts. Everyone’s going to have some strikeouts, right? think there’s the tendency to try to bury those and say, hey, those never happened. But like it’s those at bats that help you get the next base hit and give you the inspiration for the eventual home run, Jamie Shanks (05:31.276) Yeah, and I wouldn’t be in this position to be at bat and to know I’ve already put myself in a position where I’m already past first base. And so how do I get to a second? I wouldn’t be in the position to even be staring at second right now if it wasn’t for a couple failures. Julian Castelli (05:41.005) Are you taxed for space? Julian Castelli (05:51.073) Yeah, absolutely. And your latest business, GetLeverage, seems like you’re racing around first or second and picking up some speed. So let’s talk about GetLeverage. What was your inspiration to start with what it is and then tell us the story about how you started it, Jamie Shanks (06:06.638) Sure, GetLeverage is a go-to-market agency that tackles the $5 an hour tasks for small to medium business. So our customers are founder-led customers, typically between 1 500 employees, and they’re all resource constrained. And what happens is Julian Castelli (06:22.735) That’s a common theme for everyone. talked to growth elevator, right? No one has enough time in the day Jamie Shanks (06:25.806) Exactly. The founder, the chief revenue officer and the chief marketing officer have one thing in common. They are stuck in the business, not working on the business, doing $5 an hour tasks. So they have themselves or their small team working on things that here in North America are not value accretive. And so unfortunately, somebody has to do it. And so our company takes and buys back those $5 an hour tasks. Julian Castelli (06:39.501) Thank Julian Castelli (06:49.995) Yeah. Jamie Shanks (06:55.054) from those executives so that they can focus on $500 an hour value creation. It was created because in my first agency, Sales for Life, all of my customers were global enterprise at that time. And myself, we were 27 employees, multi-million in revenue, and I was constantly getting pulled back in to the most mundane, rote, mechanical tasks that I also didn’t like. Yeah. Julian Castelli (06:57.537) Thank you. It was created because it’s diverse agency. All of my questions were put together. And I, myself, I, for 27 years, I’ve been doing that for several years. I’m constantly getting pulled back in. goes one day, and I’m doing mechanical tasks. also… Yeah, because these are multi-step tasks. you know, that might be like 25 steps. And if 23 is not done, the whole thing doesn’t work, right? Jamie Shanks (07:29.614) 100 % and all of our customers are global enterprise and I watched even at the biggest companies the chief revenue officer the chief marketing officer They were getting pulled into all the $5 an hour tasks as well But I also recognized that well It was great to be paid by Microsoft and Oracle and Intel my true love was dealing with Maya kin founder and I was I kept saying to myself like my founder friends were asking about Julian Castelli (07:30.699) Hahaha Julian Castelli (07:48.877) Thanks. Julian Castelli (07:55.532) it. Jamie Shanks (07:58.231) Offshore and best practices because answer your question What I started to do to improve the gross margins and the cost of customer acquisition in my own agency was I started using offshore talent because I recognized I Tried if and I built a team in the Philippines and I built a team in Bangladesh to do I had a team in the Philippines that did customer success and Basically everything customer-facing and I had a team in Bangladesh doing all the marketing function. Julian Castelli (08:04.764) Yeah Okay, so you tried before you built Julian Castelli (08:22.188) that we’ve got for facing. Jamie Shanks (08:27.212) What was happening is my founder friends were really curious how I was accomplishing this offshore. And I also recognized that like my founder friends, every entrepreneur I kept meeting was rooted in this. had the same problems I had. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I loved the, I wanted to have conversations with my peers and the bureaucracy of the global enterprise was Julian Castelli (08:33.916) Right. Yeah, they’re burying in more more work, right? It’s not not taking off with leverage. Jamie Shanks (08:56.958) Less interesting to me. And so I decided I wanted to create an agency focused on my friends the founder and it would serve in the thing that was adding so much value in my business and that’s kind of where I wrote the business plan ironically in 2019 to get leverage but then this weird thing called covid happened and I threw it in a drawer for a couple years Julian Castelli (09:01.536) You should stay focused on life and… Julian Castelli (09:17.879) And was COVID positive for offshoring or neutral or negative? Jamie Shanks (09:24.808) It what it did so offshoring agencies appeared out of thin air during COVID. But what it proved is the thesis that I live in Toronto, Canada. The talent pool in Toronto was unnecessary when I could hire somebody in Toledo or I could hire somebody in Taiwan. Long of the short is what COVID proved is it didn’t matter where on planet Earth you were working, you could work from anywhere and that accelerated the concept of labor arbitrage. Julian Castelli (09:41.554) They hire somebody in one of the short is holding. Julian Castelli (09:53.121) It really did. It really did. The concept of everyone’s on your screen in a window versus in the office, right? And where are your offshore resources located? How did you choose where to get your offshore resources and how has the talent pool internationally evolved over the last five years? Jamie Shanks (09:57.859) Yeah. Yeah. Jamie Shanks (10:13.71) So had two teams, one in the Philippines and one in Bangladesh. And both fantastic. Both offer different value propositions. And then as I decided I wanted to create a business around this, you have a moment where you need to create a bit of a moat or a competitive differentiation. The Philippines has had multi-generations of offshoring. And so for me to come into that, 100%. So you’re now swimming in a red ocean. Julian Castelli (10:37.316) Right. I’ve been hearing about that a lot longer than Bangladesh. Yeah. Jamie Shanks (10:43.704) What Bangladesh offered was immense labor arbitrage in comparison to the Philippines, number one. But number two, you’re now hiring the first generation working in multinational companies. you have easier to attract talent, easier to retain talent, much more pliable to evolve and change because you’re not situated with years and years of working at other agencies and forming bad habits. Julian Castelli (10:49.227) the efforts to. Julian Castelli (11:01.459) Mm-hmm. Jamie Shanks (11:13.804) You could mold the talent to exactly what you wanted. so Bangladesh it was, and it’s been the best bet we’ve ever made. Julian Castelli (11:14.695) Yeah That was working That’s exciting and How was AI? into the whole whole evaluation as you think through both outsourcing and Is AI gonna help you with outsourcing or is it a threat to your business? Jamie Shanks (11:37.903) It’s absolutely going to help. Here’s why. When we set up the business, we had some fundamental first principles we wanted to root ourselves around. And we did not want to get rooted on headcount hiring, nor on hours of the day. We wanted to root it on outcomes. So the customer needs a widget moved from X to Y or, you know, build me a website, build me a social media video. Julian Castelli (11:54.347) Yeah. Yeah. All of our things are typically slowly but they change capability of developing agents to accelerate these. Jamie Shanks (12:05.518) clean up my CRM. Those are outcomes. They don’t care how it gets done. So all of our teammates are chipping away slowly within each capability of developing agents to accelerate the pace, whether it’s quality assurance or pace. And now all of sudden you have AI intermixed with labor arbitrage, and now you improve our own gross margins. That’s kind of our age. Julian Castelli (12:23.531) Yeah, I can tell you, you know, I should have said it in the intro, but we’ve worked with you and you guys are helped to produce this podcast. We’ve really enjoyed that. And I can tell you that your model of outcome orientation versus, you know, an hourly is really attractive. And I can I can also see how leveraging AI allows you to get to outcomes at a reasonable price that probably wasn’t possible. Three, four years ago, right? Jamie Shanks (12:54.626) Yes. The other major factor that I think, and you hear it in the periphery of the odd podcast, this is what taught me in the sales training space. I spent 10 years in change management. I spent 10 years enabling the front and center people to every company, the sales organization, on the change of what was then called social selling, or basically if you think about social media as part of the sales process. Julian Castelli (12:59.05) If you’re ready. Julian Castelli (13:14.378) scale organization. The change of focus on social science or basically social Jamie Shanks (13:22.83) In 2012, I invented the word social selling. 2015 and 16, I was still very much every day having the conversation on why. Why should you use social media as part of the sales process? 2020, we’re still getting companies and their sellers on LinkedIn for the very first time. What this taught me, and I’ll always remember a long curve of adoption. There was an executive from Eloqua. Julian Castelli (13:45.042) The long curve of adoption. Jamie Shanks (13:52.047) one of the very first marketing automation tools. And she taught me that marketing automation by Alicall was vented in the 2000s, early 2000s. Fast forward 15 years later, at that time, 2015, the percentage of world adoption of marketing automation was a decimal point of all marketing organizations. The year 2025, we still encounter companies every day, have never used marketing automation a day in their life. Julian Castelli (14:04.458) That’s by 2015. The percentage of gold that’s off our package is 50. Jamie Shanks (14:20.75) So it’s the human adoption that I think is the slowest part of the AI curve. Why that’s important is I have an army of young, talented people that are learning outcome-based AI, whether it’s the language model, if it’s building the workflows and processes, building the outcome-based products. I’ve got four AI agents being built right now just in our sales team. So what that does is the average executive at a larger company in the future We’ll just say like, I don’t have time to go learn and build this. They just want the outcomes and my team will have already built those outcomes. Julian Castelli (14:55.781) I you’re at a really valuable point because I talked to CEOs CXOs every day And I just put something on LinkedIn as like they’re busy and they’ve got now this almost like this elephant on their back of learning AI and using AI more. And of course, everyone needs to do that. But the ability to have a team that is efficient and trained with the tools to accelerate your adoption of AI and actually to learn from that team as a multi-factor benefit. Jamie Shanks (15:33.273) Here’s the biggest advice I can give to an executive. As a guy who’s a non-technical founder, I have four agents all in different parts of my sales organization. One of them I was reviewing this morning. So as an example, we just released it a week ago. It monitors every single email, Slack, and monday.com conversation. And it basically starts a stopwatch. The second a customer emails or slacks or messages, It starts a timer on how long against our SLAs are we responding to messages. It shows a 24 hour timeline of where we have gaps in response times. It shows it by CSM and account manager, all this great data. Long to the short is you as an executive, you’re the architect. So how do we build agents? I am the one that has 20 years experience of understanding the situation, the challenge, the opportunity, the resolution. Julian Castelli (16:06.432) Wow. 24 hours, I find, of where we have gas. In the response times, it showed it by CSF and account manager, this great data. Along with this short break, you must be expected to look at other examples of how people conclusions. I hope on this 20th, this very good understanding, information, and knowledge, and opportunity to the presentation. Jamie Shanks (16:30.57) I architect by visualizing what does my brain envision we need to do to be able to get to the outcome. I want rapid response for my customer. Then you have internal young teammates who are using, as an example, a lot of our agents are based in Gemini because we’re a Google back end, are actually the ones building out the brain, the language model, or using the language model in a mixed with the workflows. Julian Castelli (16:31.113) I don’t think that’s very functionalizing, but the design I can do, we need to keep people, it’s a good one. I’m not rapid response for my customer. Then you have the young teams for a lot of our agents are based in Japan because we’re group of actors, are actually the ones building out the brand and the line-ups model, or the design as well, the expert, the workflow. Jamie Shanks (16:58.35) visualizing it and turning it to life. So the you as the individual executive learning the intricacies of rag, which is like the lang how a language model retrieves information. That’s kind of valuable to you. But what’s more valuable is you using your nascent knowledge of 20 30 years experience visualizing. This is what my brain would want. You go build it and then them showing you how the workflows work. Julian Castelli (16:59.023) So Jamie Shanks (17:26.636) you double checking the outcomes, you’ll get far more outcome out of building AI agents that way than you trying to learn how actually program. Julian Castelli (17:27.366) Double check. Yeah, that’s that. That’s that’s a very attractive value prop. If if your team can help you know get from A to D like I want to do this, but there’s you know I I know two of the 10 tools required to build that. Let’s get to the outcome. That’s a really great value proposition right now where I know everybody has. some set of those letters they haven’t mastered yet. Like, you know, I’ve got stickies all over my desk, you know, with reminders to learn this and watch this, the next tutorial. And I’m going to learn, but I can’t learn fast enough. And I want to put these things in my business today. Is that where you solve problems? Jamie Shanks (18:11.106) That’s what, and so I have a documented list. So we have an agent listening for response times. The next one that we just launched that’s in beta right now is it listens to every sales call, whether that’s a prospect, a customer, a monthly business review. And I’ve created a brain called Revenue OS and Service OS. And I’ve taken every sales methodology that is important to me as the brain. It takes the call. Julian Castelli (18:33.735) I love it. Jamie Shanks (18:39.926) It scores the call. gives coaching feedback to the CSM, the account manager. It allows them to ask questions and it retrieves information around, here’s what you should have done on that call. You forgot to book a meeting in a meeting. You forgot to ask them about this product. And so that’s agent two. Well, long or the short, I’ve got all these different agents. You, the executive, document what is it that I wish… Julian Castelli (18:46.792) You forgot to ask about this product. So that’s agent’s input. All this work is done on these different agents. You can look at exactly the documents. What is it that I wish somebody could like to download for me or that I can fix it up in the process? And you get something that’s much possible for you. Jamie Shanks (19:06.934) somebody could do an autopilot for me or that my brain thinks about in a process, then you get somebody to build that process for you. But you have to visualize how it works. Julian Castelli (19:17.36) Yeah, how do you how do you bridge that gap between? What the the the executive wants and then you know, you’ve got your your team members who are you know cranking it out? But then you know that iteration and that and that normalization to get to the right? Right outcome and and and the equilibrium. What’s that process like? Jamie Shanks (19:39.545) For me, I literally draw it on a sheet of paper with a pen and I show how my brain thinks in a sequence or a linear fashion. basically, let’s use this real life example of call coaching and analysis. So you first need to create a brain that understands sales methodologies the same way my brain works. So you visualize this thing on the side that says Julian Castelli (19:46.83) It’s either. Julian Castelli (20:04.67) Right. The next thing is, okay, so you start at the top. Every color bars is recorded in Google. It’s a bit of a fed into Google Drive. That’s the starting point. Jamie Shanks (20:08.488) Something’s got to go through a brain to figure out was this a good call or a bad call? So the next thing is okay, so you start at the top We every call of ours is recorded in Google and it goes auto fed into Google Drive and Gemini great That’s the starting point. We have a transcript and we have a video we scale down it’s got to go into the brain and it needs to go through a Learning model and a grading rubric. So what did I do? I built a scorecard Julian Castelli (20:27.974) down It needs to go through a learning model and creating program. This is what the food that enough people say is good, fantastic, and also very cost-effective. I’m not even talking about the customer call. This is how I bring the state food that are best. You have to develop that. Jamie Shanks (20:38.338) This is what good, bad, and ugly looks in every facet of a prospect call, of an onboarding call, of a customer call. And this is how my brain would say good, better, best. Because you have to develop that. That’s your job as the executive. That is Julian Castelli (20:53.734) But do you, if I’m that executive, are you going to provide me with that, those steps so I can go away and do that? Jamie Shanks (21:01.038) I think it’s irresponsible to think that the engineer, the 28 year old who’s an expert in AI modeling will actually understand the workflows and processes of 30 years of sales knowledge. So you actually have to be able to, you the executive, you have to show how your brain did critical thinking. Julian Castelli (21:09.477) the expert in. Julian Castelli (21:19.621) So who provides that middle expertise? Okay. Jamie Shanks (21:29.25) That’s actually the piece that’s visualized. You’re actually going through, you’re visualizing logic. Well, my brain would do this. It needs to go into a brain. It needs to come up with a score. The score needs to be visualized onto a spreadsheet, spreadsheet onto a web page, and then it allows, and then it needs to have some sort of feedback loop. You have to actually show people that. Because otherwise, the engineer will have no concept of what they’re capturing. Julian Castelli (21:29.349) Okay. Julian Castelli (21:35.363) Right. Yeah, there’s too big of a gap, right? Jamie Shanks (21:58.979) Yeah, they’ll know how the tools work, but they won’t know how a sales process works. Julian Castelli (22:01.765) course. Yeah. So it’s really that product design or process design where the rubber hits the road in terms of building great things. And then having a team that is cost effective, time around the clock, benefits sometimes, and can build these tools, that sounds very attractive for a lot of companies that are trying to just get that next step for AI automation in their business. Sounds like a great way to accelerate that. Jamie Shanks (22:33.038) 100%. And every part of the business, think of recruiting and talent acquisition. OK, we need to collect resumes. We need to screen for these things. We need to be able to conduct asynchronous first interviews through video that we don’t have to be there. All you do is you take a process that your brain actually does all day long in a sequence, and you say, we are going to step by step walk through this and find ways for an agent to tackle these pieces. Julian Castelli (22:47.223) video. You’re gonna breathe extra. Right. How much does this all cost? What’s your pricing model? Jamie Shanks (23:05.106) So at GetLeveraged our pricing model is a flat fixed subscription. So the way that what we do is we deploy a pod of talent for a monthly subscription that basically we agree upfront. Here’s an SLA of, of Cape. Julian Castelli (23:19.023) So the CEO can just say, okay, I’m gonna put this much towards this budget, let’s see what we can build. That’s a lot easier than some hourly number that you don’t know where it’s gonna come back. Have you found that your clients like that? Jamie Shanks (23:29.784) Correct. They love it. The CFO loves it. And what is important to us, obviously, is the checks and balances of work coming in and under the original SLA. And that’s why we have an account management team that can work on upsells and cross-sells. But it’s us working in the background with a finance team and a service delivery operations team that’s ensuring that we don’t have too many people sitting on a bench, but we always have the talent ready to go. Julian Castelli (23:45.764) it It’s us working in the background for finance, service and operations. Ensuring that people sit in the bench. That sounds powerful. Give us an example of one of your client wins who actually executed one of these AI processes that really. Jamie Shanks (24:08.43) All of the AI tools. Yeah, so the AI tools are only used internally so far to serve the work. We have not sold the AI tools out to customers. We what we sell out. Julian Castelli (24:19.286) No, but if you know an example of someone who said, hey, here’s the process I want to build and then you guys built the AI tools and so you’re providing a blended service. You’re providing an outcome service that is blended AI tools and human expertise, right? Is that a way to think about it? So give me example of something that you built for a group in the go-to-market space that, you know, Jamie Shanks (24:35.8) I see. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Julian Castelli (24:42.72) What I want to do is let the listener understand like, I could build that. How much would it cost? You know, I want to give them that example that you know, might connect those dots. Jamie Shanks (24:42.744) What if they’re Jamie Shanks (24:47.022) Whoa. Jamie Shanks (24:52.014) Maybe it’s because of recency effect, one of my favorites was Because I’m a seller at heart my brain always leads towards the left brain sales data serum optimization and so forth We have a customer who and I didn’t know this if you’re a golfer. There’s 18,000 golf courses in the United States One of our customers is the management opcos that run hundreds or thousands of golf courses Julian Castelli (25:16.119) And it’s been up close. Jamie Shanks (25:21.1) I used to think when you would go to a golf course that it was not only owned by, you know, Bill and Jean, but it was run by them. Well, it’s actually not. There’s many layers. The underlying soil landowner is typically owned by some wealthy LLC local residents that nobody knows who they are. Then they hire a management company that Julian Castelli (25:21.696) I used to think like we’re to of course, at the end year, it was actually not. There’s the same layers. The other way is to wait for an end-owner is to be owned by some wealthy local residents. Okay, so like the hotel business kind of thing is all different layers of flags and operations and ownership of land. Okay. Jamie Shanks (25:51.023) the hotel business to take over the entire golf course. Exactly. And then they hire employees, which are like the general manners, the, you know, the, the golf pros and the so bit. So long of the short is this management company sells to the underlying soil owners who most of them are wealthy local residents who’ve created an LLC and have tried to hide themselves. Well, Julian Castelli (26:01.251) Yeah. Julian Castelli (26:09.219) Right. Jamie Shanks (26:18.744) We built clay agents to go through court documents, municipal record registrants, sewer and water bills that are all sitting in the public domain. And you can triangulate who are the underlying people who are the owners of the LLCs. Because it’s incredible how many of these LLCs have been sued. Julian Castelli (26:43.424) And this because because that’s the ICP for this company and and so they had a problem like You know, this is a unique. This is a unique problem. They kind of explained it to you like hey, this is these are the hidden Hidden customers, but you can’t find them. They’re not they’re not in the shop Jamie Shanks (26:46.294) at the ICP. identifying any of these people. Julian Castelli (26:59.753) How do we get to them? And so you guys solve that problem with AI and ingenuity. Jamie Shanks (27:04.302) 100%. So now we can identify, you know, 1234 Ontario Limited LLC kind of thing is owned by three local people. Well, we pulled a sewer record or we noted there was an article of a local restaurant that talked about Bill, the local hero, and it said at the very bottom of the article, Bill also is the actual owner. of the local golf links golf course. it just, so long of it. Julian Castelli (27:35.844) So your agents are out there just crawling all this minutia and connecting dots and saying hey it might be this guy or this gal. Jamie Shanks (27:38.414) crawling and building out the database, building out the database of all the soil owners of golf courses. Yeah. Julian Castelli (27:46.881) Wow. How many targets or ICP matches did you find? Just roughly. Hundreds, probably. Jamie Shanks (27:54.607) I should ask the team, it’s like when we did our test to which the customer decided to move forward with us, we were able to in a sample test go over 50%, which they couldn’t get five to 10 % because it took as a North, you had North American executives who work at this golf entity who were spending like an hour doing a Google research on one. Julian Castelli (28:05.667) They couldn’t get five weeks. Wow. As an entrepreneur, work in the engineering industry. get super-initiable. And I’m spending like an hour Yeah. No, that’s not labor arbitrage. That is actually acceleration of AI outcome, right? I think that’s a critical thing. You think about offshore, it’s labor arbitrage and doing the mundane tasks. And there’s value there. Jamie Shanks (28:23.986) Yeah. Julian Castelli (28:32.268) But if you can accelerate your path to actually solving real problems with AI cost effectively, that’s a pretty compelling value proposition. Jamie Shanks (28:40.014) 100%. Julian Castelli (28:41.666) Well, that’s great. I can see why your clients are excited and see why you’re growing so fast. That’s super exciting. So that’s a great example of how you’re helping clients. Tell me a little bit more about your learnings as an entrepreneur and building these agencies. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned that other people can benefit from? Jamie Shanks (29:00.724) One day I’m going to, so a couple of interesting things. So I’ve been writing a weekly investor newsletter in every agency I’ve ever created since day one. So every week, it’s a five to 10 page newsletter. Sometimes it’s like, yes, it’s like almost to myself. Now I have contributors in which, so I’ll give the backstory. Every head of each department, which thankfully now I’d get leverage. have a head of everything except Julian Castelli (29:14.21) 5 to 10 pages per week? That’s some serious investor relations. Wow. Jamie Shanks (29:29.71) Soon to be sales. I’m still leaving founder led sales, but long or short as everybody contributes To all the knowledge that goes into this weekly investor newsletter this weekly investor newsletter is my way of Absorbing and because I asked them fundamental questions. What were the key wins of the week key losses? Where are you finding roadblocks? What do we need to focus on next week? What do we need to talk about? triangulating all that information so that when My Mondays are just dedicated to internal from department to department I’m actually seeing where one department is missing information from another I’m a huge believer of overt communication So I’m kind of bridging all these Long of the short is I’ve been saving all of these to which I’ll be able to one day write a book that showcases all of my thinking from the moment of inception of a business idea to a thousand dollars MRR Julian Castelli (30:20.45) the moment of inception of a business idea. I was, example, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I’m a bar, and it shows the things, all the things one, the things two. But it’s healthy understanding is something I focus repeatedly. There’s a principle, or first principle, to serve the important decisions, the process of that first principle. Jamie Shanks (30:25.602) to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to a million dollars MRR, the whole bit. And it shows how the thinking evolves. That’s piece one. But piece two, what it’s helped me understand is something I call the three Ps. There’s a principle or a first principle to certain important decisions. There’s a process to that first principle. And then there’s the platform to execute it. So I’ll make this real for you. When I started GetLeverage, Julian Castelli (30:47.329) And then there’s the platform experience. So I’ll make this real quick. My experience in dev leverage, I have set on the first time as well. never again have accounts receivables or first of all, a day after the day. Jamie Shanks (30:52.626) I vowed a first principle that I would never again have accounts receivables or what’s called days sales outstanding. Because in my first agency, what actually killed the business is we were millions and millions of dollars of revenue, but we were chasing accounts receivables past DSO 30 days, which is a magic number of death, which essentially means you have to become your own bank. You have to get. Julian Castelli (31:05.65) But actually, the business, you’re really dependent on personal company. You’re the least liquid player in the game, yet people are borrowing from you. Yeah, inadvertently. No one’s really talking about what’s happening. Jamie Shanks (31:25.026) because 100 % I’m paying two payroll cycles to go collect last payroll cycles amount of money. So long or short we died from that. So I vowed a first principle we would have days sales outstanding zero. So that’s a first principle a process is we are going to Julian Castelli (31:33.235) That’s a death spiral. Julian Castelli (31:40.799) Peace, gentlemen. Julian Castelli (31:45.439) And you do that by billing upfront a fixed fee. And you eliminate all the work of how many hours and what’s the person, who was it, and what’s their hourly rate. Jamie Shanks (31:48.088) building up front and 100 % and we would only take by one source through a credit card and then so from a platform standpoint We did strike Julian Castelli (31:58.569) Right, right. So you’re not chasing it. You know, just that problem alone. Think about that challenge across the, you know, the economy. How many people have that problem? It’s huge. Jamie Shanks (32:08.014) Well, here’s the outcome. We started this company on a $10,000 credit card. That is it. That’s how we started this company. And now this company is 115 employees. So we used positive cash flow cycles to build the whole thing. And it was built on a first principle of getting my ass kicked in a previous business. that’s why the strikeouts matter. that’s why. Julian Castelli (32:22.9) Thank you. Julian Castelli (32:27.908) That’s why those strikeouts matter, right? You learn and now you’ve got this nugget of expertise that you’re leveraging for your own business, but you can teach other people. Jamie Shanks (32:39.062) And that’s where first principles and sticking to those, and that’s something that it’s taught me. I’m 47 years old. It’s taken me a long time to understand that you have to document some core first principles that can never be broken. And then you just build a process around it and platforms to execute against it. And it’s amazing if your bets are right in those first principles, you’ll go far. Julian Castelli (33:02.217) Well, Jamie, think you’re demonstrating why you’d make a great partner to other entrepreneurs because you’ve been in their shoes, you’re applying first principles, you’re learning, you’re making things better in your business, and you’re helping other people with their business. So where can people find you and find GetLeverage? They want to learn more. Jamie Shanks (33:17.548) I’m all over LinkedIn. can connect with me on LinkedIn. Jamie Shanks, CEO at GetLeverage. You can go to our website. GetLeverage is spelt off. It’s Get, G-E-T, and then L-E-V-R-G dot com. Julian Castelli (33:33.125) L-E-V-R-G dot com, get leverage. Awesome, well, we’ve enjoyed having you on here and I look forward to continuing the conversation offline, but thanks for joining us this morning. Jamie Shanks (33:35.936) Play on words. Jamie Shanks (33:43.79) Thanks a lot. You take care. Julian Castelli (33:45.503) All right.

Introduction & Jamie Shanks Welcome (00:01)
Julian introduces Jamie Shanks, serial entrepreneur, founder of GetLeverage, and pioneer in social selling.

The Baseball Framework for Entrepreneurship (02:43)
Jamie explains first base (buying yourself a job), second base (millions in liquidity), and the rare home run of financial freedom.

Why Strikeouts Matter (05:05)
Failures sharpen judgment and enable smarter second and third innings.

What GetLeverage Does (06:06)
A go-to-market agency that eliminates $5/hour tasks so founders can focus on $500/hour value creation.

From Global Enterprise to Founder Focus (07:29)
Jamie shifted from training enterprise sellers to serving founder-led SMBs.

Why Bangladesh Over the Philippines (10:13)
Labor arbitrage, first-generation offshore talent, and building habits from scratch.

AI + Labor Arbitrage = Leverage (11:37)
AI agents accelerate quality, speed, and gross margin inside outcome-based delivery.

Building AI Agents as an Architect (15:33)
Executives design the logic; engineers build the workflows.

Example: Golf Course Ownership Intelligence (25:16)
AI agents analyze public records to identify hidden LLC owners for targeted outreach.

The Three P’s: Principle, Process, Platform (30:25)
Start with a non-negotiable principle, build a process around it, then execute with the right platform.

Zero Days Sales Outstanding (31:45)
Jamie eliminated AR risk by billing upfront via subscription — enabling growth without debt.

Closing & Where to Connect (33:17)
Find Jamie on LinkedIn or at getlevrg.com.