Ashtan Moore is the Co-Founder and Partner of Model B, an independent agency that drives growth by creating magnetic connections between companies and their customers. He is also the Co-Founder and Advisor of Blueprint, a brand on a mission to automate the advertising process.
Ashtan has achieved notable results and driven exponential growth for brands including Anheuser-Busch, Cognizant, Gilead Sciences, GN Store Nord, and many more. In his entrepreneurial career, he has founded, invested in, and operated over 10 businesses along with two successful exits.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Ashtan Moore explains how Model B helps people
Asking for what customers want before creating a product
Ashtan’s journey as an entrepreneur
How Model B help companies create excellent customer experiences
The importance of joining growth-minded communities
In this episode…
Have you started a company but are struggling to scale it? How can you better connect with your customers to fuel growth?
Ashtan Moore says that starting a company is already difficult, but growing can be even harder. As a serial entrepreneur that has founded more than ten companies, he has gained a wealth of knowledge and experience on how to scale a business. Ashtan shares his journey running an agency to help founders and executives who are genuinely committed to the growth of their organization.
Listen to this episode of The Customer Wins as host Rich Walker welcomes Ashtan Moore, Co-Founder and Partner of Model B, to discuss how companies can grow. Ashtan explains how Model B helps people, how to acquire product market fit by asking for what people want before creating a product, his journey as an entrepreneur, and how Model B helps companies create excellent customer experiences.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
"The CRM Experience for Financial Advisors With Rick Williams of Redtail Technology" on The Customer Wins
"Tips for Increasing the Financial Advisors-Clients Engagement With Blake Wood of Lumiant" on The Customer Wins
The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler
Sponsor for this episode...
This is brought to you by Quik!
At Quik!, we provide forms automation and management solutions for companies seeking to maximize their potential productivity.
Our vision is to become the leading forms automation company by making paperwork the easiest part of every transaction.
Meanwhile, our mission is to help the top firms in the financial industry raise their bottom line by streamlining the customer experience with automated, convenient solutions.
Go to www.quickforms.com to learn more, or contact us with questions at support@quikforms.com.
Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and in turn grow their business.
Richard Walker 0:16
Hey, I'm Rich Walker, the host of The Customer Wins where I talked to business leaders about how they help their customers win how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of our past guests have included Rick Williams some of Redtail Technology and Blake Wood have Lumiant. Today I'm speaking with Ashtan Moore, co-founder and partner at Model B. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik! the leader in enterprise forms automation, when the last step to earning your clients business requires filling out paperwork, don't ruin a good relationship with a bad experience. Instead, get Quik Forms to make filling out forms a great experience and the easiest part of your transaction, visit quikforms.com to get started, oh man I need to introduce you.
Ashtan Moore 1:02
I need your products I just had a 12:30 call about needing your products. So that's great.
Richard Walker 1:08
Well, let's talk more I think everybody needs to fill out forms better. So let me introduce Ashtan. Ashtan Moore is fervently passionate about growth, especially your growth. From its simple roots as a whole school of Virginia transplant. Ashtan has failed up into an internationally recognized entrepreneur, investor and growth advisor. As co-founder and partner Model B, an AI powered performance ad agency, he helps growth minded companies to steadily scale top line revenue through paid advertising. Aside from his own companies, he volunteers at nonprofits and accelerators that support newer to market companies, to seasoned entrepreneurs, each on their own unique growth journey. And his career is entrepreneur, Ashtan has founded 15 companies and sold two of them. Today, seven of those are still active, of which three are profitable. And the other four are pre revenue, raising capital or new to market man, Ashtan, I wish I had that bio. Welcome to The Customer Wins.
Ashtan Moore 2:04
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful to be here. And the fact that you asked me to be here. Thank you.
Richard Walker 2:11
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because like you have started 10 different companies since age 12. I'm an entrepreneur, I love talking to entrepreneurs. And I want to tell you what this is about. Because if you haven't heard this podcast before I talk with business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. I'm excited to talk to you today because you're so growth oriented. Everybody wants to grow more. But let's understand your business a little bit better. How does your company help people?
Ashtan Moore 2:39
Well, so I have a few. But they all have a theme around them, which is growth. My biggest one, my growth agency is what we call it. A lot of creative work Strategy work paid media work, but the outcome is always to grow their top line revenue, always, always. And sometimes it's more like sometimes there'll be work on the bottom half of the p&l. Maybe it's like infrastructure building, like sales enablement, but the ultimate journey is always like, how do we help you capture more market share? And what's so interesting about that is, over time, I've learned actually take a step back. And it was just something I want to talk about a little bit today, take a step back and ask if their product market finished, right? Like is what they're selling to people actually providing some sort of value to them? And I'd say the banner would be like, are you building what people want, as opposed to what you want? It's sort of a magic trick in business.
Richard Walker 3:44
Yeah, the whole engineer mindset, and I'm going to build something cool, versus the marketing mindset of what are people asking for? And as an entrepreneur, I've told people, your first idea is not your best idea. It's just the one that gets you started. But I think that actually speaks to something you said about product market fit your first idea may not be the best product market fit. So how do you help companies or entrepreneurs figure that out.
Ashtan Moore 4:09
So that's usually on me, that's where I coach, so I charged no money for that. That's free because they do it through nonprofits, they fill entrepreneurs, organizations accelerator program, excuse me, which is global. They're accelerators all around the country, it's very affordable a couple of days a year. Then there's also so in ELA is what they call it by coach, usually cash flowing company. So that would be like agencies, lawn care companies to services comm it basically their services companies by and large, so they don't really need to raise capital, but I also coach and this is the one that needs to think about product market fit even more. I also coach funded fast growth companies and that's when, founders are like I'm gonna build a product like Quik Forms, and I'm going to scale it up and I'm gonna sell 1000 licenses. I'm gonna to help 1000 people, but usually with those, you need to get funding. And so it's actually even, it's a much higher priority to make sure that you are asking people what they want. Because if you don't, and you build the wrong thing, you've just burnt half $1,000,000, 2 million dollars, friends and family, if the average is 500k, I think precede is like a mil. Like seed is like two plus mil. So do you want to spend all that money on nothing? Because you didn't ask people how you can help them with your product? I think that's a little crazy to do.
Richard Walker 5:36
Yeah, that's a really difficult thing to do. And I've seen companies burn a lot of money. But is that really the secret? You just have to ask them what you want to do in the products?
Ashtan Moore 5:45
Just ask. It's the easiest thing in the world. So I'll tell you a little story. And I won't name the group. Although you could guess it was either one or the other. But I shared a bunch of feedback with a founder who gave me his deck the other week. And so he booked office hours with me. And it was a half hour office hour call, and he spent the first 20 minutes. And my man I really hope I didn't come off the wrong way. If you listen to this, I'm really just trying to help. But it's been the first time 20 minutes telling me why I was wrong. And I was like, no, no, this isn't me. I don't know, I don't know if anybody wants this. What I'm saying is, you haven't asked anybody. And he's like, well, I've talked to, he said he talked to friends family, and they all said it was a good idea. He said he talked to like people at his son's soccer games. And I was like, how many people have you asked? It was like a bunch. I was like, how many people have you surveyed? Is it what do you mean, I was like, how many people who will use your thing you sat down with and had a coffee or given them a survey? He was like, okay, well, when you put it that way, none. And I was just sick, why it's free, ask free. Think about saving all the time building the wrong product and all the money and marketing. Your average, like seed round, like go to market is like for marketing is like a million dollars like so if you're spending a million dollars to show ads to somebody for something they don't want Rich, what do you think they're going to do? Do you think they're gonna buy it? No, they'll ignore it. They'll move on. And they'll be annoyed at you too. They'll be like, Why is Bran trying to sell me something that I would never use ever? But you can ask it's free. In fact, here you go, everybody, you can stop listening to the podcast right now. If you go to surveymonkey.com I'm not an equity holder in that company. But if you go to surveymonkey.com, like a few bucks, you can make a survey and ask real live people what they want, for like five G's, you could ask like, I don't know what, like 500 people, whether or not they'll want your stuff. And then you'll save a million dollars. But he's just he came after me. He was like, I'm absolutely certain this is a good product and a good idea. I even tried to story-tell I was like, okay, so my bar is one of the most popular bars in Washington DC asked me why Rich? Why is your bar so popular? Because we surveyed 100 people in Washington, DC, and we asked them what they wanted, before we ever spent $1 on anything. And what we did is we waited the things of what they wanted the most. And then we made it for them. And now we're doing, I don't know if I'm allowed to share numbers, but let's just say it's mailbox money for me every single month, because people love it, because that built what they wanted. If you don't do that...
Richard Walker 8:48
What you're saying is super, super important yet, I don't know if it's really taught to go do that. But it's a skill in a sense of asking people and getting the surveys. But there's also, as an entrepreneur, there's a trepidation of fear. So I'll tell you, for example, I'm working on a product right now that I intend to release by September 1. And we've been working on it since January, it's in development. And what I did as I went and talked to people at trade shows, and anytime I was talking to a prospective customer or in person with an actual customer, and I sensed that this might be a good fit, I started asking them. And what I did is I asked a lot of different styles of companies, different segments of my market, as well as sizes big to small just to see what their engagement might be on this topic. So I want to ask you, is it Goodness If somebody just says I'm interested? Or do you need to say I would pay money for that? What do you need to hear from them to say this is a good idea and good fit?
Ashtan Moore 9:45
You should read every book ever written by Alberto Savoia. I'm obsessed with him and he knows this because I comment on all of his posts on LinkedIn and I message him and I try to make him be a part of my life. And by the way, he's been wildly helpful he gave me all the slides for presentations for the accelerators and incubators and all the places I volunteer, but he's amazing. But my favorite book by him is The Right It. And basically, he says, if there's no skin in the game, it doesn't count. So if you want to get more advanced, I mean, really just start by asking, please, because so many people skip that step. But what next? Ask them if they'll give you their email, like, can I have your email and put you on my mailing list for when we launch or build a Shopify site, and then let people actually like, click through and try to buy it like see if they add it to the cart, and then like, apologize profusely when you have to email them and tell them that it's out of stock and or doesn't exist, like, only go to that one. But I think one of Alberto Savoia is stories is that there was a founder who would take his products and it was something that IKEA could sell. And he would put it on the shelf at IKEA with a fake price tag and watch to see if people brought it to a register. Like there's so many ways, like and they're all in aisle versus books, but we don't do that. Like I'm sorry, some of us, some of us do. But the ones who are wildly successful, let's come at it from a different angle. Have you ever been fired Rich? Yeah. What did you do?
Richard Walker 11:23
Well, aside from crying in my car from shame, I went and found another job moved on.
Ashtan Moore 11:28
Oh, so that's a little different. Have you ever been fired by a client?
Richard Walker 11:33
Or fired by a client? Yeah, I mean, we've had customers say, we're not going to use your services anymore. And I boiled it down to the core reasons why they do that. And I'm like, okay, great. Let's move on. No problem. Do you ask them? Why? Always, always. And that's why I say I know the core reasons why they're not going to work with us anymore. For us, it comes down to they got acquired by a firm that doesn't use our service. They don't do it anymore, too. They go out of business. Unfortunately, I've seen that. And the third one is, I think they graduated like they finished high school, they no longer actually do forms. Everything's digital. And I say, Congratulations, you made it. You don't need me anymore. It's an amazing accomplishment.
Ashtan Moore 12:13
So I can't stand getting fired, I curl up into a little ball and I cry for hours. But then I shake my ego off, and I marched into the clients inbox attacks. And I go, hey, you hurt me a great note. Just kidding. Why did you hurt me? Unfortunately, we don't get fired often anymore. You see, it's been a CMO moves, or something like that. But I go, hey, go, can I have 15 minutes of your time, I just want to talk through how we could do it better, like next time. And that's great. So like, it's almost like the silver lining. Like every time a client fires you or a customer quits or whatever, it's the golden opportunity to go and learn how you can be better next time, it's constant and improvements. And then if you constantly improve, and you constantly outpace your competitors, who hopefully aren't doing that, although they should too, what you're really doing is you're helping people, like, I love entrepreneurship, because I feel like entrepreneurs, build communities, which we call companies that align people around a common goal of doing one thing, which is helping people. Isn't that so cool?
Richard Walker 13:36
I think it's the best thing. I think humans are, by nature, at our core are dependent on each other. It's very, very hard to live a life of solitude with no other humans around you. So therefore, you have to help each other. In fact, I started changing my way of introducing myself when I talk to people at social events. I don't ask people what they do. I say, how do you help people because it's just more important understand what their passion is for what they're doing.
Ashtan Moore 13:59
Another great party trick is what's one thing in the world that you can change? And go whoa, you can have that. That's another gift survey.
Richard Walker 14:11
Let me ask you a question because you've been a serial entrepreneur. What made you say how to be an entrepreneur? What was your first company? What got you started?
Ashtan Moore 14:19
Yeah, so I grew up helping people, which is so nice. I grew up watching my parents tried to help everybody they met. And at 15 I set off to go figure out how to help even more people. And I ended up having no, I didn't even get my high school diploma because I moved from Ohio where they like homeschool, liked homeschooled kids back then, when I was supposed to graduate. I moved to West Virginia and they were like, no, you don't get a GED until you're 18. And I was like, okay, I'm never coming back to this office. So I didn't know what to do. I didn't really know how to get a job but a job was a new experience. So I started coming to DC and I ended up Washington DC was the closest major city. I ended up clean carpets for money, which is helping people ended up bartending. Which I still love to this day. Do you know how good it feels to hand somebody a drink Rich?
Richard Walker 15:17
A few times. Yeah.
Ashtan Moore 15:20
So good. It makes you warm and fuzzy. And what else did they do? I dealt poker I'm not sure how much that was helping but they'd love to great experience. So what else? I packed warehouses, and that's actually where my first company came from. I did like CRM and helpdesk and it and email for this catering company that realized who I was there bartender for the events like stock, their chalks unpack their trucks. And I'll sort of bring this to a close in a minute, saying something I think is really funny. But they saw that it was really good with computers, they'd be like, hey, we fix my computer, like somebody had a computer issue. And I grew up on computers, obviously, my older brother and I bought our more advanced cybersecurity company called gamma force now, you're welcome Warner. He's gonna feed cybersecurity support gammaforce.io. But he would always be building computers. And I'd always be playing outside, but every now and again, he convinced me to come and like, work on his bulletin board system with them, or build this or build that. And so I had a knack for it. Because I grew up with him. And if somebody's laptop broke, I'd be like, no problem. Hang on a minute, okay. That's a hardware thing. We have to call dell Skubana. If you need a new connector, I'd be like, oh, we need to wipe the OS like because this is completely bricked. But if we do factory reset, yada, yada, yada. So they ended up hiring me when I was like, 19 is their IT director, which is crazy to me. I didn't know what I was doing. But I bought somebody books. It didn't matter. I bought like a list of books waist-high and called my brother terrified. I was like, hey, can I do this job. They're offering me like, crazy amount of money compared to what I normally make. And he's like, he was a oh was a cool, so he was like my on call guy. And I parlayed that into my first client over a couple of years. So I started my first company when I was 21. As an IT sort of help desk support company, somehow parlayed that into sort of doing a weird little acquisition of another IT company. It was cool. I built it up to a bunch of people. And I helped a ton of people, but I never made any money. There's my first company, right? Yeah, I mean, they could barely pay the rent, but I usually did, sometimes. But that was how it all started. And what I didn't realize this whole time is, I didn't know this then. But it's now you know, 15 companies later, you know, that first decade of building companies that didn't sell them money, they always kind of wound down. It was 25 when I started my first marketing company, which you know, equivalent to growth, because we were really good at marketing and my IT company. That's because I ran it. I loved it. I studied it as a kid. And so I ended up doing not to help people. And now that's kind of what my core work focuses on is marketing and growth. Today, what's really funny rates I know we just talked a long time ago this carpets, I used to clean those drinks. I used to serve a private parties and to claim invite me to their parties now.
Richard Walker 18:29
You come full circle their friend, that's awesome.
Ashtan Moore 18:31
Like, I'm like, did I clean that when I think so at like 7am on a Monday and then I came back that evening in a tuxedo and serve drinks. Just kidding. Usually wouldn't be same day. But yeah, I guess they like made it I guess I mean, I still have about the same amount of money in my bank account because I just reinvested into all my companies.
Richard Walker 18:52
I love that and is that you come from grassroots, you understand the hard work ethic, you trained yourself, you apply things to yourself to learn and grow. And then you understood patterns. And you understood, I mean, at the core of everything you help people, and that's the most important part of what you're doing. And from what I see.
Ashtan Moore 19:10
So do you. I imagine how many hours you save founders, executives, managers, imagine how much higher people's closure rates are for whatever their form is doing. Because you make it easier for them. Like imagine how many more people or products or solutions or things, the end of those forms, because of you and building a company is allowing to bring that thing to more people.
Richard Walker 19:36
Yeah, we used to talk about what we thought we were saving people in terms of time, and nobody would believe us that it was over a billion hours a year. So now it's about trees, how many trees we can plant and say based on how many forms are printed or not printed or generated etc. So I want to know I mean, you focus on growth, which I love this that you're talking about. Just ask people what they want, give them what they want. That in itself, creating the right market fit is one of the biggest linchpins to growth, right. But there's more to it right? What else do you help companies do? And what techniques or processes do you use to create an excellent customer experience?
Ashtan Moore 20:14
Let me boil down marketing and sales and growth view and single word. It's action. Like, that's it like so the question is what I like to ask founders, executives, marketing leaders, and marketing leaders, the CMOS we work with, usually, they usually come prepared with this. This is kind of because they're already, they're making a big salary. They've been trained by a great university, they've been through a bunch of great companies, so they know what they're doing. But it's often the smaller companies that are trying to get market share, that don't recognize how simple this is, which is action, like how many actions you take in a day, I like sales, too. I like marketing, like advertising, like paid media, I like PR, I like anything that gets you in front of other people. And all you have to do is ask yourself, if I got in front of that person, x times, how many y conversions did I have on the channel, Google ad? Cold call, you hold the minus sign on the corner? Like we have to riffle through all these different tactics. You know, the different hang on can I remember their name, Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler wrote a book that I liberally borrow from Thank you, you too, called Predictable Revenue. And they say that their spears their nets, and then their seeds, you plant seeds for growth. You set nets, to capture folks that you throw spears to capture clients. And I would encourage all founders, executive marketing leaders, newer marketing folks, again, the CMOS already kind of ahead of us. That's why it's so hard to capture market share versus, the fortune 500. They're already doing all this, but like, how many actions did you take yesterday? Like last week? Like how many spirits did you throw? How many knots do you have? Sad? How many seeds did you plant? This is a seed Rich, this podcast, we're planting a seed.
Richard Walker 22:18
That's right. Absolutely. It's funny, because when I think about sales, and that's always been a struggle of mine. I'm a product guy. I love building great product. And yes, I think cool products are cool, too. But I was trying to figure out how do we improve sales. And what I've kind of come back to is when you think about the hunters, and the farmers, I feel like we're more fishermen, in the sense that we've thrown a lot of nets into a lot of ponds, and we see what happens. We don't have any control if anything goes into the net. So I have partners that suddenly produce great sales that I didn't know about, or word of mouth that brings us something or we went to a conference and six months later, somebody's calling us. So I'm really big, I think the seeds and the nets, but I don't know about the spears.
Ashtan Moore 23:02
Yeah, building authentic spears is very wildly time-consuming. But it works and but they work better if your spheres are sharper. And one of the ways to sharpen your spear is not just to figure out the perfect message. It's also to figure out, one, how to help and two, how to give. How are you helping? How are you giving, if you have a great products, it's going to spread by word of mouth, your spears will sink deeper, although that's probably shouldn't throw spears at people and sinking into them. It's kind of weird. But the other thing is, how are you helping so here's my theory for sales and growth in 2023 is that once upon a time when we were in the land of kings and queens, if a business leader, AKA a king wanted to do commerce, with another business leader, aka another king, they would send a procession or queen procession of men and women with gifts, Celkon gold and jewels and entertainment and music and food and wine and cheese. throw a big party. And then they'd say we would like to commence trade with you because we brought you all these gifts. So you're probably going to say yes, right? So what are we giving in these spears? I'm about to write an email to a friend of mine. And I'm gonna say, hey, I love everything that you put together and your business deck but we need two things. We need one newsletter that provides authentic value to the people to whom which you want to conduct business with. And I don't mean updates about who you hired this month because nobody cares. So we need a newsletter that caters to the provides value like mine, everybody should sign up marketing mishaps Monday, I interview marketing leaders, and I see what's the biggest mistake you've ever made and what did you do about it? And then I get the former CMO of Tushy on there, and they tell us Would you read that Rich?
Richard Walker 25:07
I'm going to, I didn't know you had it. I'm gonna sign up today. That's awesome.
Ashtan Moore 25:11
Yeah. So what am I doing? I'm investing hours of my time every week write value to other people. And I get like subscribers that I don't know all the time like HubSpot dings is like some person you don't know is just decided that you get to be in their inbox. But what am I doing in I'm taking a raw material, and transmuting it into a valuable little email and medium article that helps other people not make the same mistakes that marketing leaders have made. So I'm gonna ask my friend, if we can build one of those for their company, and we're gonna build it and people that we don't know, we're gonna sign up. And the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say, what is a one-hour consult you can do with somebody for no money. They do every time that you can do half an hour post work with you put into a little document, you say, here you go. It helps them not a proposal, and say, if you want a proposal for us to do the things we're suggesting you do, you can say that we'll send them something with dollars on it. Now, how do I do that Rich? Well, everybody who's listening to this, I will spend an hour with you. I don't care who you are, what you do what your company has spent an hour with you and provide my own experience around whatever your greatest challenge in marketing, business growth or job, I don't care, like, I'll give you an hour of my time and we'll figure stuff out. I have a calendar link you can book me on. And I'm happy to give that so. So just do you want to hear a story about what happens when you do that rich? I love this type of stuff. Absolutely. So I say that to my friend Nino. Nino's amazing, I love Nino. So I got Nino Japanese. He's an amazing connection, amazing human. And she heard me say that. And so she booked an hour of my time with a friend of hers is the founder of a fast-growth ad tech company. The results of that meeting this week is that I have connected him to a company that specializes in b2b SaaS, growth, sales, new sales. I've connected him to a marketing company that specializes in seed round reseed, and for instant family stage companies that he's going to hire and helping with that I am an equity advisor for that company. So I will make money if you call me about that one, called the upstart factory. Not an equity advisor for the sales company. I don't know if it matters for him or not anymore. It's all just helping but. And I reached out to an investor for his company, because he's raising another $1.4 million to get to his seed round. And they're literally right now they tried to call me on this podcast because they're so interested in his company. So that's because I'll give anybody now tomorrow, I might give somebody an hour who wants advice on mentor, this high school aged entrepreneur, she is in high school, but she's like, really into DECA Neha is amazing, she's going to be the president one day, I mentor her every week, for no money or it might be somebody who has a problem with their boss, I don't care if I know stuff, you can have it.
Richard Walker 28:28
Passion, I'm gonna shed some light on what you're doing. Because I've actually done this too, I would go present an entrepreneur class in college. And at the end of my presentation, I would say I invite every single one of you to call me up, ask me to go to lunch with you. I will pay for lunch. If you drive out to where I'm at, I will buy you lunch. And I will spend one or two hours with you talk about whatever you want to talk about. And then I turn around and say, but I also know, maybe one of you will do that. So the truth is, you may have 1000 people listen to this, and only one or five or 10 actually do it even though hundreds should do it because of the value they're gonna get. That's awesome. It's such an intelligent thing. And I'm gonna also say back something you said, I think what you're saying is that the spears as they should be gold-tipped, they should be value, if you're gonna throw them at somebody given the value of that spear when they collect it. So you mentioned one of the things I'm going to switch shift gears on us a little bit. You said this is the day and age of 2023? Well, what else is happening in 2023 is AI Artificial Intelligence. And when people are trying to connect more with their audience with their prospects, etc, AI is becoming a crutch maybe so I'm curious, how do you see AI impacting customer experience?
Ashtan Moore 29:43
I think there's just so many ways to get to the finish line a lot faster. So many ways. This company that I'm helping to build for, because my current growth agency kind of specializes in companies like 10 plus million like series A plus that I got tired of saying no to people. So now I'm helping a co-founder buddy build a company that supports all the people I had to say no to. We're like, oh, you're precede great, we can help. And we're using AI to make it so that we can help them in a way that it's affordable to them. Because you only have so much money and a friends and family round in a VC and a seed and the more you spend, the shorter the runway, the less time you have to harden your products and get some cash in the door. So we're trying to speed that up for two reasons. One, so they can be a theater to my company model be released to help them because that's what we're doing. So what does AI do? It gets you there faster? It doesn't. I don't think it's shortcuts. I don't think it's shortcut. Well, I guess that's what it is. It's a shortcut. But you have to know your destination. And what they say is somebody very smart said this, whose name I forget, AI isn't going to replace you, the person who uses AI is going to replace you.
Richard Walker 30:58
Yeah, I agree with that. I totally agree with that. I actually started this year by telling every employee on my team, one of your goals this year is to find an AI that will help you do your job better, faster, easier. Because we're going to embrace this. I've talked to a lot of people, I really think there's only two companies going forward those driven and powered by AI and those going out of business. Now, that may not affect the plumber. I don't know, because it's a hands-on business, but in our tech space yeah, I see it that way.
Ashtan Moore 31:25
Yeah. So I think the other thing that's going to happen with AI is the phrase Google it is going to be replaced ChatGPT it. I know this because one of my teammates at Model B asked me yesterday, they were like asked, and we need to put a Facebook disclaimer up for like this new coalition we're launching. I know we wrote one last year, like you know where I can find I just go ask ChatGPT. And they go, whoa, that's a great idea. And then two minutes later, they have this. Here it is, this is amazing. So what are we doing? We're saving time. Now on the topic of AI and saving time, I believe that if we were 30% more efficient, and we put the productivity in the right place, nobody on this planet would be hungry. So I think ChatGPT is going to help us with but it's up to us to make sure that we take that time that we now have and we used to produce value for other humans otherwise, or cells or have a coffee, like but if we fill up that new time with more dead space, like with things that don't produce value, we're wasting what we've been given, we're wasting that gift.
Richard Walker 32:35
For sure, for sure. Hey, as we wrap this up, I do have one more question for you. But before we get to that, what is the best way for people to connect with you? And you've mentioned some great resources. Maybe you want to repeat them?
Ashtan Moore 32:46
Yeah, so actually the way to sneak onto my calendar. I know this is kind of meandering, but I haven't built like an ashtanmoore.com. By the way, Ashtan Moore I'm like on everything I have never posted on TikTok, probably not that one, but Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook muted. So maybe not that one either. But if you want to book time with me just search for medium.com/ashtanmoore, or Marketing Mishaps Monday. And at the bottom of those blog posts are those interviews. There's actually a link to my calendar. And if you want to talk to me and do that hour that I talked about, seriously I'll talk to anybody, everybody's so interested registers, you know that. So I'm trying to prove this. And so far, I haven't been proven wrong. Everybody has something that is so unique, special like that some experience, they have some glimmer of knowledge that if you dig it out of them, you're gonna be better for that meeting. And so if you just get into a meeting, and you listen at level three, there's three levels level one is when I'm waiting for my turn to speak level two is when I'm listening truly to the words that you're saying. And level three is when I'm listening so intently that I can hear between the lines, the stuff you're not saying, I have you do that for an hour with another human and your life isn't changed, improved in some way, listen harder, because I haven't been in a meeting yet where that hasn't been true.
Richard Walker 34:21
Nobody's gonna prove you wrong on that. And I believe it's a core belief of mine for a long time that I can learn something from every single person that I connect with. I've learned a ton from you today. It's been amazing. So here's my last question, who has had the biggest impact on your leadership, or how you approach your role today?
Ashtan Moore 34:42
I'm gonna go ahead and cheat on this answer. And I'm gonna have to say it's the entrepreneurs' organization at large and also YPO have a spousal member at YPO now I find it, hate saying this, but I don't have a coach, I should have a coach, tell everybody to get coaches. But I just write everything down every time I talk to somebody, and they suddenly see something valuable as so many questions. And being in the Entrepreneurs Organization and being in YPO, and getting to be around people who have done it before, is asking them questions and listening. It's incredible, like how much it's changed everything I do. So yeah, I'm gonna leave it there and say, you know, find a community organization full of people who are the people that you want to become. And listen at level three, and everything will become different. Because you'll be asking people who have made it to the summit, how they got there, and they'll be so happy to share. Because once you're on the summit, you generally have a bunch of resources, because you manage to, like climb that mountain and get up there and provide value to enough people one step at a time that you have cash flowing businesses and mailbox money. Those folks will take time for you and share how they got there. So look, if that full circle Rich, just ask.
Richard Walker 36:10
Just ask. That's amazing. So let's put in the full plug for Entrepreneurs Organization, because I'm a member, you're a member, this is how we met. You are in Washington, DC. I'm in Austin, Texas. I mean, we've never met in person other thread the Slack conversations and saying, let's have a Zoom call, let's talk to each other and then come on the podcast. So yeah, I echo what you're saying. And if there's other entrepreneurs out there, look in your city, there's an Entrepreneurs Organization chapter near you, I'm sure. Hey, I want to save you a big thank you to Ashtan Moore, CEO of Model B for being on this episode of The Customer Wins, go check out Ashtan's website at modelb.com. That's B as in Bravo. And don't forget to check out Quik! at quikforms.com where we take the work out of paperwork. I hope you've enjoyed this discussion, and we'll click the like button, share this with someone and even subscribe to our channel for future episodes of The Customer Wins. Ashtan, thank you so much for joining me today.
Ashtan Moore 37:07
Wait, just to close it, my mom I found out listen to all listens to all my podcast. Hi, mom. I love you. Nice.
Outro 37:17
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