The Secret to Scaling Businesses Fast!

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast guys today I'm joined by Jeremy Bergeron. Jeremy welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It's nice to be here. Do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do Jeremy? Yes, for sure. So I am first and foremost, I am a father. I have a about to be eight year old daughter. And then I have three amazing bonus children, twins that you. just turned six years old recently, boys, and then also another boy who's about to turn eight in less than a week. So fatherhood is the most interesting game changing thing that I'm doing most days. It's just amazing. It's always changing. And then when I'm not chasing rascals and are being chased by the rascals, we have a portfolio of businesses that I work in, my wife works in. And so I typically am working you.

across a handful of businesses in the range of like 20 to a hundred million dollars in revenue. And we bring technology and growth capability to these businesses, different industries, different sorts of businesses. We really like heart centered founders that we love. And so my role is a chief of staff. So I sit a number two position to one of the most amazing full stack polymath entrepreneurs I've ever met, a man by the name of Lior Weinstein, who is just a genius in the world of business and technology. And so I get to support him across a bunch of different businesses. And I feel like most days it's like being Rick Rubin, like music producer, more than an operator, for sure. It's really fun. I get to work with amazing investors and communities and it's really, really fun. Thank you. catching in the field of actually scaling these technological driven businesses Yeah. that's Are the, that's the billion dollar question right there. Right. I mean, what's where, where is the puck headed? Where, where are things moving? And I think you probably have to be, you know, sleeping under a rock or maybe don't have electricity.

Us, but if you have electricity and you're not sleeping in a cave somewhere, you probably know this world of AI that is really, you know, and as far as my world, it's in everything that we do. It's in every business that we do. It's in all the, it's bleeding into all the core functions and all the different processes. And so I think the latest, more interesting thing for us has been this explosion of agentic AI, right? Where now we have agents and sub agents doing all these workflows and processes for us, for our businesses. And so we're seeing the acceleration of you putting that kind of capability in the hands of someone who's in marketing or sales or operations or finance or HR, doesn't it matter. You give them that capability to have their own agents and sub agents, uh, working autonomously on their behalf at a really successful, you know, low hallucination, if not no hallucination, you have a really high rate of, uh, patterning and, and accomplishing and executing. And it's incredible. So we're seeing a lot of that. I've spent the past couple of weeks diving deep into Claude Code. And I'd be curious, uh, Nicholas, if you have been doing that yourself, because Claude Code has been the game changer for me, man. It's been incredible.

man a lot of things that i do are do with quote code actually since i run this podcast show and as you can imagine i'm getting a lot of responses since my my offer is very lucrative right so i've been looking into automating my reply process as it's uh let's just say that it's very robotic since i So basically send the same information its zone offense. a to Am its zero and european, to Uh almost with Kirstie in a been to all basically all the guests and with cote code it's been a game changer for me since i'm located in the uh central european time zone and so uh most of my guests or basically all of my guests are from the us so i am basically six hours ahead of them and most of the replies come when i'm sleeping right so this is where you know the power of ai agents really come into place since i can really just replicate myself and have a nicholas that's on the computer for 24 hours a day so it's uh it's been a game changer for me and i'm actually very curious in what have you what's what's your top three use cases for or using this kind of workflows

your, your love your example. That's a perfect example of a great use case of like different time zones. Wait, one second. I hear an alarm going off. Let me go go you do do? problem let me go turn this alarm off. I just hear beeping one second. problem problem i it's nothing okay it Yeah, one second. Yeah. We're talking to you. Okay. Okay. So you want to cut to in matter because back okay in? this is why there is the magic button of great. I love it. Yeah, I know. I love it. Okay. So you ready? yes I'm ready Okay. So I love the use case you just gave. It's a great example of someone who's in a different time zone, different country, building a brand and there's processes and things that happen behind the scenes that are monotonous, robotic. It's like you could pay somebody a couple bucks an hour to do it or you got to do it yourself, you know? So like, wait a second. Now I can quickly spin up an agent that's responding to people, booking people, answering, maybe even answering questions, guiding people down a pathway. So you wake up in the morning. Oh, look, there's seven more responses and you're now you're talking to Jeremy and it's Monday. It's like all that's a perfect example.

So a lot of that stuff as well for me I'm using I'm using Staff Code. I'm also using Claude Bot through something called GetBotler. So you go to GetBotler .ai It's a product that Lior launched recently and it allows you to just spin up agents pretty quickly. So you can use Telegram or WhatsApp on your phone and then you can communicate. You don't have to have your laptop open, right? You can just communicate to the agent. So that's been interesting because I get kind of daily updates on my phone through you know, I have a bunch of different email addresses across different businesses. Lior has even more email addresses and calendars and so we're a bunch of different types of businesses and different things happening and so I'm using this agent to manage all the emails, manage all the calendars across multiple inboxes and outboxes and who's saying what and who's working on what and what's need to be flagged or what's on fire or all the things. I get updates on my phone just here's what's happening across the portfolio.

Any kind of anecdotal research or hey, move this invite to this time or hey, I can't meet with Nicholas so let's reschedule to next week. Like all that's being done just with agents in the background. So no like pull the car over look at the calendar okay, no, no know I can just message the agent it's taking care of it. I built a dashboard actually this morning I built a dashboard super easy dashboard but if you're getting into Staff Code like me you probably have more than one session you're working on multiple things you might have multiple sessions well if you lose that session or multiple sessions or you turn your computer off or how do you go back to what you're working on? And so I just built a simple dashboard that shows like all the previous you know projects that I was working on through Cloud Code in Terminal so it's a nice dashboard it's got 30 different things I was working I was like oh yeah I can resume it I can go back and edit it and change it so that's helpful to give me visibility on what I'm building now I took I had a website like I used to Vibe Code you know quite a bit I'm sure you're familiar with Vibe Coding Base 44 Lovable Replit right some of these sites amazing Base 44 one of my favorites but now that I've got Cloud Code I'm not even I'm not even Vibe Coding anymore because I can build on taking websites off of Base 44 and launching them through Cloud Code it's just powerful so website building optimizing business stuff like doing marketing doing planning a lot of strategy a lot of managing of X's and O's on calendaring and emails flights and booking and all that stuff if really helpful

yeah that's been interesting and then the other thing is we're building like operating systems for businesses that are in the 50 to 500 million dollars in revenue range so we'll come in and like look at an org chart and actually look at where can we start to insert agents so -agents into supporting these executives and leaders and their teams across a big business that's doing a bunch of different things so we're doing a lot of that that's been interesting so building these entire operating system dashboards where marketing and sales and ops and finance all live together talking to each other with intelligence and it's just incredible so we built a tool for one of our businesses we have a high ticket sales team that sells a high ticket program for chief technology officers that want to be fractional CTOs and you know we're going down the road with all these CTOs they're all using these obviously using these tools as well but it's like the proliferation of these things Nicholas is just insane you you

it's just insane about the utility and the use cases it's just I can't think of where I'm not going to use it you know I'm like I have I literally have two MacBooks pulled up you know I have I have a Mac mini I've got two MacBooks I'm usually building or working on something with Cloud Code during the day multiple things and so it's awesome man I'm having a great time if you can't tell yeah yeah it's i just realized yesterday i was like thinking about making a new website for the podcast that we are on currently -huh i was like uh you know i could i could wipe code it and it would take less time than actually doing the coding and then i realized i have could code in my pocket so i pulled up some very good like website designers and their portfolios and i pulled it into cloth and said that based on these kind of websites create me a website for the podcast and it just spinned up a basically done website in like 10 minutes it's just yeah it world to live in

it's true it's really true man it's like I yeah me we had a sales team a meeting for one of the businesses this morning and one of our sales guys at the end of the meeting pulled up like four or five different websites he built for friends like one buddy had a yacht business ops business like he just built these websites amazing looking websites like clean functional like UI UX like really really good this is a sales guy who has no technical ability now he has slow code and he's got a ton of technical ability it's like ridiculous so I love it Nicholas I love it I'm excited for you I'm excited for me I'm excited for the world I'm definitely bullish on it I think it's gonna change a lot of things for people I think it's gonna give people a lot of time back you know a lot of people are hesitant about AI and I think there's some cautiously optimistic I think yeah let's be cautiously optimistic and you can't stop the freight train of AI it's almost like if we were having this conversation 30 years ago and I said hey Nicholas do you ever heard of the internet you know like yeah the internet's gonna be everywhere and everybody's gonna have it like you couldn't slow the internet down you couldn't have slowed smartphones down you couldn't have slowed you know We -Fi down you couldn't have

you. that stuff down you couldn't have slowed down everybody's gonna have you have to have a website if you don't have a website you don't exist right there was a time when if you didn't have a website you didn't exist everybody has a website now it'll be using you for sure the companies that you pay to do the things you do they're using it so I think it's smart for us humans to at least lean over the edge a bit and look at some of these tools how could this make my life easier and for us it's been accelerating that so I'm very bullish on it it's true you know what's interesting Nicholas on this point and I don't know if you've found this I don't know how old you are but okay great this is actually great or the past Thank give or take Nicholas you.

I've spoken to a handful of like 20 to like 15 14 year olds to 20 year olds and I've asked them what they think about AI and do you know that almost all of them have said that they basically were not interested I don't really like it something to that effect they weren't like I love it I'm so excited about it and I thought that that was an interesting opinion now of course it was scattered across only a handful of people you can't say that's what people think because you're 19 you're using it all the time so you're you're you're the first 19 year old that I've personally connected with it's like using the tools and excited about it a lot of my friends and their kids that have teenager kids like they're like no we don't want to do it we don't want to use AI I'm like wow I don't know are you finding that with some of your friends are you finding some of friends are like no no no are you finding most of your circle is like all in of -huh sure you. Yeah. right right right

yeah 100% % it's crazy and even to me maybe even to you a little bit it's like it feels like it's moving fast where it's like oh my gosh like what I thought I knew a lot last week I know way more this week you know I'm learning more like I'm becoming smarter I'm becoming more effective better at you know working across a bunch of different contexts because of these tools like it's insane hmm yeah i'm uh you said that you have a high ticket sales team right uh what's what's your guys' approach to marketing as i'm in that field i'm interested in how you guys handle that well in terms of that's a broad question I mean in terms of marketing we market through Google and Facebook yeah Google Facebook IG I think is the channels that we use now we don't we haven't done much YouTube or X or LinkedIn and then we have an agency that works like in use that basically does all the you know the funnels and the legion for us and then we have a team of setters and a team of closers yeah

and has it has it worked what like uh the the in -house agency like are you uh you know satisfied with it since i hear a lot about you know uh like teams uh paying a lot of money and then zero results for sure for uh are marketing internal and external partners I think the folks that we have now are promising for sure they're an agency they're not like internal employees but we've brought them in in in-house to be the sole marketing person for now so we'll see we'll see it's early but the thing that we're noticing is the communication between marketing and sales needs to make sure that it's happening more consistently because marketing you. is doing their thing and setting up leads and appointments and then you have the sales team in another silo doing other things and so making sure marketing and sales are talking is really important especially if you're in a startup smaller business and we have this business is I think we've got the largest community of fractional CTOs over 300 in the community but this business is under 10 million a year not huge revenue size but we see the value in supporting these leaders and creating these opportunities for them so it's a sales marketing game so in terms of leads for you you said you do leads but you do leads for who

okay okay okay Thank you. series series a b2b go to market okay siris talking to us okay cool okay so yeah I know because I guess it's series series a and series a she's doing it again dang it that's cool okay so so b series a and b that any other details about to kind of businesses is it just any b2b business that's series a or b or is like a certain kind of business Well, it needs to be technological, like involved in technology, like it could be AI or data. Yeah. okay And probably around the 50 to 250 employee mark. Yeah. cool Im keep that in mind I'm interested in like, I always like this question, like, what would you change if you could change one thing about what you guys do? What would you change to actually enhance the client success or growth? for for that business for business? for Staff the one that we just talked about what would I do differently to enhance the client experience We. so like once the client's already in the program being coached and supported what would I do to make their experience even better Yes.

I love that question Yeah. personalization I think personalization at scale is really interesting to me I think you have an opportunity to you know you're bringing someone into a program that's already been a tech leader for 10 20 years they've been a cto or a vp of engineering or you know they've already led teams they're really good at what they do and they're leaving that world that they know really well to start to very advanced unit. Yeah. their own business and become a fractional cto and it's it's an exciting world it's scary it's like now you're going to be a business owner you're going to leave the cushy salary you're going to go try to make more money and have more time for you and your family and your whatever so it's a lot to do and when you get into it being supported and held in the role while you're learning how to generate leads you're learning how to nurture leads learning how to close deals you're learning how to be a CTO you got to do that but how do you retain clients how do you not shop your hours you.

how do you get four or five clients paying you really handsomely each month and paying you well so personalization I think would be really interesting is like really knowing who your members are from a not just a name and experience but like what's their personality type right we do some of that we have the Colby index and we have everybody take the Colby test so we know everybody's Colby score which is helpful but I would use all of that more detailed and specific and I would automate a lot of connection points between members and you know the team giving that personalization touch points like wow they feel like they're hearing from us and they're supported by us but it's actual automation in our voice and tone connected to them because it knows who they are that could be interesting from an experience perspective I think it'd be just more sticky you know

yeah Colby's Colby's a really cool test yeah Colby's good Neogram is good DISC DISC is good Tony Robbins owns the DISC one there's some amazing assessments StrengthsFinder 2 .0 is another really good one these assessments can be really revealing if you haven't taken these and look you're 19 it's awesome if you have not gone down these it shows you amazing things that maybe you don't always realize you're really good at or things you need to work on it's phenomenal StrengthsFinder 2 .0 Neogram Colby DISC you. all of those I would take all of them Mm -hmm. Okay, I will look into them. it I it one more. send me your results Okay. I have one more tip. I'm not sure if you are using Whisperflow. Do you know Whisperflow? you you you It's been a game changer for me when it comes to talking to Claude and these tools. And so, you know, typing all of it takes forever. And really, it's very good. Like, you can talk for six minutes and then it just, you know, puts five paragraphs of text. yeah What's your experience with it? same Do you use it?

yeah we use it yeah yeah it's great I use both I like I use whisper and text I like some of the -huh. some of the typing feels like creating you know theres it's like there's like this creative element to it which I actually still like that and I love just you know of course audio just sharing the getting the thought out of my head and into the space is also really powerful yeah I'm curious, how do you guys envision the future of TechCXO over the next few years? of cto ctox Yes, sorry, yeah so that's what's one of the businesses that we work in how do I envision that over the next two years I mean I think that it continues to be the largest community of fractional cto's in the world and I think in two years we've crossed a thousand members or more easy and just become more of an institution for technology leaders that you.

want to be entrepreneurial and really like make more money and create more of a lifestyle we'll become more of a recognized brand there because we also own to .com so we'll have cto .com being like the flagship you know domain umbrella and then we'll have ctox and other things that support that and so I think in two years i just gets more brand recognition I think that we'll have a bigger community and then we'll probably have our hands in different industries doing different sorts of collaborations because you can imagine if you have all of these cto's that are now working in all these different businesses well we have visibility and access into all that and so we might collaborate and co -invest in deals or build things with them or bring them into some of the stuff we're doing so there a lot of collaboration I see as well good question amazing. You said you have 300 Ctos on board, on have over 300 yeah Yeah, that's a lot, lots of exposure it's you guys.

phenomenal it's like having over 300 you know technology nerds that are really good at tech and it's like just even listening to them talk like it's like being in the room of a bunch of all Stars you know and like they're all different like this person was in finance that person was in healthcare this person was in logistics that person was in IT like it's all different and to hear them talk about the world of technology and where the world's headed from their perspective it's fascinating dude it's like incredible so I get to be a part of those conversations all the time because we have them all in our program and we're coaching them and guiding them it's great Okay, great, Jeremy. So to wrap this up, for those that are interested in learning more about your work or just connecting with you, where should they go? just go to my website jeremybergeron .com Okay, so thanks for joining us, Jeremy, on today's podcast, and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks good thank you Nicholas the project you is radio you we are good the you are you. Thank you.