AI Brings the Lead, a Human Closes It - Rich Thomas, CHAOS Moto

Three new customers in one month came from one habit - calling an AI-sourced lead back within an hour. Rich Thomas, co-founder and VP of Sales at CHAOS Supplies, the company behind CHAOS Moto, tells Jeremy Rivera why AI can find the buyer, but a person still has to close the deal.

CHAOS stands for Chemical Handling And Occupational Safety supplies. It started in a bedroom more than 25 years ago and now manufactures in the US for one of the largest privately held tire companies in the world. CHAOS Moto makes wheel-service chemicals and grips for tire shops, and CHAOSRXOptics handles prescription safety eyewear. The full episode recap covers how a salesman bored by building websites ended up winning deals through AI.

In this episode

• Hire a complement, not a copy - Rich's biggest fear is hiring somebody exactly like himself. "You really need somebody who's different and can bring an opposing view, but still be positive and moving in the right direction." He also wants somebody who's "really good, but not so good that they leave you."
• Hand off the work that bores you - after years of trying to build websites himself, he hired his friend Alex Storch, who has a master's in digital marketing from USC. "Sales is what I do. Anything outside of that, I struggle with."
• AI without the shiny object - Jeremy credits Jeremy Moser of uSERP with the phrase "shiny AI object syndrome," and brings up Daniel Hebert of Oleno on SOPs that give a whole team shared context, so everybody uses AI the same way instead of going off on their own AI adventure.
• Forty AI agents - Rich says Alex runs forty AI agents and has probably found over $75,000 in billing, invoicing and accounting oversights in six months.
• A site that matches the search - visitors who come from AI see what they searched for. That is how a 10,000-person utility company found CHAOS for prescription safety glasses. "AI will get you there to one point, but now you have to do the rest of the work."
• Speed to lead - Jeremy cites Jake Melendy's mystery-shop study, where over half of the service businesses contacted never responded at all. Rich picked up three new customers in the last month who told him why they moved: "We called back within an hour of the lead coming in off of AI." Jeremy also points to Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital, who makes speed to lead a focus.
• The messy middle - Keith Perhac of SegMetrics on who gets credit when a buyer finds you in AI, Googles you, then comes in direct.
• The glasses that never fit - a customer went two and a half years without wearing his prescription safety glasses. Rich sent three samples to try and told him, "You're gonna be a customer for life, right?" Then: "AI's not gonna do that."

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Rich Thomas of CHAOS Moto
• (02:28) Hire someone different, not a copy of yourself
• (10:34) Hand off the work that bores you
• (14:27) Forty AI agents in the back office
• (18:20) Three new customers from calling back within an hour
• (23:06) A generation that buys with no human interaction
• (27:40) The prescription safety glasses that never fit
• (30:11) Fishing: AI skims the surface
• (33:02) What CHAOS is: great parenting and a bedroom startup

Notable quotes

"AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody." - Rich Thomas

"You can't eliminate salespeople and you can't eliminate employees on a lot of levels just by throwing AI in. It's not the answer." - Rich Thomas

Rich credits his parents, who let six kids sell anything in front of the house in upstate New York. "We started out of the bedroom and grew it into the millions and it's continuing to grow."

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera.