Isabella was one of the first agencies on earth licensed to deploy AI voice agents — working 18-hour days, scaling fast, looking successful from the outside. Then she sat down with M&A lawyers to find out what it was all worth… and got the wake-up call that changed everything.

In this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, she breaks down the exact difference between an agency capped at a 2X valuation and one building something worth 20X — plus the AI employee playbook agencies are using to target 70–80% margins heading into 2026.

If you run an agency, sell AI services, or want to start an AI business without a technical background — this one's a cheat code. 🚀

• Why "human-centric" AI services quietly kill your valuation
• The micro-SaaS founders making $30M–$80M with teams of 5 (or one 18-year-old)
• Productize vs. service: the real reason one founder builds 20X and the other stalls at 2X
• Why AI voice agents for cold calling is the WORST use case (and what to do instead)
• The 3 AI agents businesses are paying the most for right now: Speed-to-Lead, AI Receptionist & After-Hours Agent
• How to price agents like a real employee salary — and stop leaving 5–6 figures on the table
• The exact difference between a $3K/month agency and a $50K/month agency
• Isabella's 90-day, $100K playbook (and the #1 mistake that makes it crash and burn)
• Her 3 non-negotiable principles for starting an AI business today

The AI gold rush isn't consulting or "ChatGPT training." It's productized AI employees that do the work, scale without breaking, and get compared to a real salary — not a "bot."

🌐 Website: https://izzygpt.com/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/izzword/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

Luke Pierce has built 80+ AI systems with a near-100% adoption rate and he uses a 7-point scorecard to know which niches print $1M+ before he ever sends a single pitch.

In this episode, Luke Pierce (founder of Boom Automation) breaks down the exact framework he uses to score any industry and predict — before a single sales call — whether it'll make money or bleed you dry.

He's worked with everyone from small local businesses to mid-market investment firms, and he's learned the hard way that the niche you pick decides everything: your close rate, your deal size, your margins, and whether you're still in business in twelve months.

→ The 7-point scoring system that separates $1M niches from time-wasters (and the ONE criterion that overrides the other six combined)

→ Why the most painful, "perfect-on-paper" niches are actually the trap that kills agencies

→ The 5 local business categories with a pain point AI absolutely crushes right now — and the exact automation each one will happily pay for

→ How to find any industry's #1 AI opportunity without ever working in it

→ Why specialists get chosen while generalists fight for scraps on price

If you run an AI agency — this is the playbook.

Website: https://boomautomations.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-pierce-boom-automations/

💬 Which niche are you going after? Drop it in the comments.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

While you're manually checking LinkedIn on Wednesday, your competitors closed the deal on Monday. In this episode, Jeremy breaks down why prospecting in 2026 isn't a volume problem — it's a timing problem — and reveals the exact AI-powered system that's separating winning agencies from the ones bleeding out.

If you're still buying bigger lists and sending more cold emails hoping something sticks, this conversation will completely rewire how you think about lead generation.

✅ The 5 AI employees every agency should be hiring TODAY (and which one to build first)

✅ Why the "send more messages" diagnosis is destroying your pipeline (and what actually works)

✅ The critical difference between a lead list and a buying signal — and why confusing them costs you deals every week

✅ The REAL buying signals local businesses send every day (hiring spikes, review velocity, job changes, website updates, social engagement, expansion announcements)

✅ How to build an operational ICP that filters in real-time — not a useless persona doc collecting dust in Google Drive

✅ The "waterfall filter" system that qualifies prospects for free before AI ever touches them

✅ The 4 components you need for a 5-minute response system that's structurally impossible to beat manually

Agency owners selling to local businesses (home services, med spas, restaurants, plumbing, wellness), founders scaling B2B outreach, and anyone tired of spray-and-pray prospecting that stopped working five years ago.

🌐 Website: https:https://tc9.ai

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygrandillon/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

For 20 years, the SEO industry sold one promise: rank #1 on Google and the traffic will come.

Eli Schwartz is the man telling everyone that promise is dead.He's consulted for Tinder, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, and Mixpanel. He wrote the book on product-led SEO. And in this episode, he doesn't hold back on what AI has actually done to search and why most SEO agencies are about to get wiped out.

→ Why ranking #1 on Google is now worthless (and the data proving it)

→ How one company lost 60% of their traffic but kept their revenue

→ Why the $5K/month blog post retainer is officially dead

→ The "search market fit" framework most startups completely miss

→ The brand signals AI is actually paying attention to (it's not what you think)

→ Why eBay lost the SEO war to Amazon — and what every business can learn from it

→ The $30,000/month link-building mistake Eli made early in his career

→ Why your SEO agency might be lying to you (and how to tell)

→ What agencies need to sell instead of rankings to survive 2026

If you're a founder, marketer, or agency owner who's watching AI Overviews eat your traffic — this is the episode that explains what's actually happening and what to do about it.Eli isn't sugarcoating it. Most agencies won't survive this shift. But the ones that adapt are about to win bigger than ever.⏱

Eli Schwartz is an SEO consultant and the author of Product-Led SEO. He has consulted for Tinder, WordPress, SurveyMonkey, Mixpanel, and dozens of high-growth companies. His upcoming book Customer Intelligence (Wiley) explores how businesses can actually understand their ideal customer.

📩 Follow Eli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwartze/

📬 Subscribe to his newsletter: https://www.productledseo.com/🎙

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

Luke Pierce, founder of Boom Automations, has closed over 80 AI builds ranging from small projects to six figures and his #1 piece of advice to agency owners is to stop leading with AI entirely.

In this episode, Luke breaks down the exact framework he uses to identify ready buyers, run discovery calls that close 60%+ of qualified prospects, and turn operational chaos into six-figure deals with local businesses.

If you're an agency owner, automation builder, or consultant trying to sell into plumbers, clinics, contractors, or real estate teams — this is the playbook.

→ Why leading with "AI automation" kills your deals before they start

→ The 5 positioning pillars that separate $100K agencies from price-shoppers

→ 7 signals that reveal a local business is sitting on $100K+ in operational waste (before you ever talk to them)

→ The exact 30-minute discovery call structure that closes 60%+ of qualified prospects

→ The 9 workflow questions that uncover billable system components

→ How to do live ROI math with the prospect's own numbers

→ How to handle the 3 objections unique to local businesses without losing the deal

600+ manual invoices automated per month for a home services company

100% reduction in quoting process time

Lead intake systems that score, enrich, and route in under 2 minutes

Proposal generation triggered by a single form submission

🌐 Connect with Luke Pierce:

Website: https://boomautomations.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-pierce-boom-automations/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

Most agency owners are stuck doing 20 sales calls a week, chasing cold leads, and burning out, only to close maybe 5% of them.

Isabella Bedoya did the opposite.

No cold emails. No sales team. No paid ads.

Just a razor-sharp 4-step system that attracts high-ticket clients, warms them up automatically, and converts them — sometimes while she sleeps.

In this episode, Isabella breaks down exactly how she:

→ Sold $180K of AI agents in 6 weeks from LinkedIn alone

→ Replaced 200 exhausting sales calls with one system that made 3X more money

→ Charges $10K–$20K per AI agent — without ever hopping on a pitch call

And the most counterintuitive part?

The more she gave away for free, the more people paid her.

✅ The 3 AI agents businesses are paying most for right now — and how to sell them fast

✅ The exact email sequence that converts cold leads into high-ticket buyers

✅ How to build a personal brand that makes Forbes, podcasts and clients come to YOU

✅ The upsell ladder that takes clients from $47 all the way to $20K/month

✅ How to use buyer enablement to sell $10K AI agents straight from a landing page

This episode is for you if you are:

An agency owner stuck trading time for money

Trying to sell AI agents but don't know how to package or price them

Tired of cold outreach and discovery calls that go nowhere

Ready to build a high-ticket offer that sells while you sleep

Wanting to productize your AI services and scale past $50K/month

🌐 Website: https://izzygpt.com/

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/izzword/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

In this episode, we sit down with Ashley, AI operator and founder of AI workforce Alliance, who cut her workweek from an unsustainable 80 hours to 25 hours, by systematizing the exact workflows that quietly drain most modern businesses.

It’s a real breakdown of the 5 workflows Ashley automated first, and the 11 AI-agent “workforce” she built next.

If your team is:

• Drowning in inbox + follow-ups

• Spending hours repurposing content

• Doing the same research before every call

• Losing deals after hours (and weekends)

• Struggling to define what “sales-ready” actually means

This episode will give you a clear playbook for what to automate first and what to protect as human-only work.

• The 5 workflows Ashley automated.

• 11 agents that act as 80% of her operational muscle

• How to build a content engine that only costs $75

• How to automate your inbox without automating relationships

• How to build an after-hours AI agent that qualifies, enriches, and books meetings

• How to use an AI CFO persona to stress-test pitch, offer, and closing hook

• A simple 3-question filter for deciding what to automate first

• Why 2026 will be messy and how to build foundations before you build agents

AI workflow automation

Content repurposing systems

Inbox triage + drafted responses

Lead qualification + CRM enrichment

After-hours AI agents (chat + voice)

SOPs, SLAs, and knowledge bases

Renewal prep + relationship intelligence

Client sentiment tracking (“happiness meter”)

AI CFO roleplay for sales enablement

The automation-to-agents autonomy spectrum

2026 readiness: foundations → automations → agents

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/theashleygross/

🌐 aiworkforcealliance.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/

In this episode, we sit down with Chris Long — AI search researcher, co-founder of Nectiv, and one of the leading analysts studying how LLMs actually read, search, and cite the web — to unpack why traditional SEO playbooks are quietly failing in the age of AI.

This isn’t about better keywords. It’s not about ranking higher. And it’s definitely not about writing longer content.

If your team is:

• Ranking well in Google but not getting mentioned by AI

• Watching traffic decline while visibility feels unpredictable

• Confused by contradictory SEO advice around AI search

• Still treating AI like “Google with a chatbot interface”

This conversation will finally make AI search make sense.

• Why AI engines don’t read pages top-to-bottom like Google

• How AI uses context windows and “chunking” to extract answers

• Why most of your web page may be invisible to AI

• How one search can fan out into dozens of unseen queries

• Why keyword lists collapse in AI-driven search

• What AI engines actually look for when choosing sources

• Why tables, bullets, and structure outperform “great writing”

• How citations influence ChatGPT and AI Overviews

• Why traffic is becoming a vanity metric in a zero-click world

• What KPIs actually matter as we move toward 2026

• How to rethink SEO strategy for a world where AI is the reader

AI search Behavior

Context windows and content chunking

Fan-out queries and query expansion

AI vs Google search mechanics

Zero-click search and declining CTR

Brand mentions vs traffic

AI citations and third-party influence

Content structure for LLMs

Search visibility in 2026

The future of SEO and GEO

💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-long-marketing/

🌐 https://nectivdigital.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vendasta/

X: https://x.com/vendasta

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendasta/

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast… 💜

💬 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/show/0KWXAOn

ABOUT VENDASTA

Vendasta is an AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement platform that helps businesses get more customers—and keep them. Our platform unifies fragmented tools across marketing, sales, and operations, and uses AI assistants plus proprietary SMB data to automate busywork, streamline workflows, and amplify the humans on your team.

We help digital agencies, franchisors, and MSPs scale profitably, deliver better outcomes for local businesses, and grow long-term revenue with less manual effort.

👉 Transform Your Agency with Vendasta – Book a Demo

https://www.vendasta.com/request-demo/