AI Brings the Lead, a Human Closes It: Rich Thomas on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Rich Thomas (LinkedIn), co-founder and VP of Sales, CHAOS Moto · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Rich Thomas co-founded CHAOS in 1994 and is VP of Sales at CHAOS Supplies, the Phoenix company behind CHAOS Moto (USA-made wheel-service chemicals and grips for tire shops) and CHAOSRXOptics (prescription and ANSI Z87.1 safety eyewear for employers).

In this conversation with Jeremy Rivera, Rich explains how three new customers in a month came from one habit - calling an AI-sourced lead back within an hour - and why AI can bring a buyer to your site but a human still has to close the deal.

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Listen on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, watch on YouTube, or read the Unscripted SEO newsletter recap.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Rich Thomas of CHAOS Moto
• 1:10 The hardest problem: motivated people with their own dream
• 2:28 Hire someone different, not a copy of yourself
• 4:10 Really good, but not so good they leave you
• 7:13 Is entrepreneurship innate?
• 10:34 Hand off the work that bores you
• 12:35 AI without shiny object syndrome
• 14:27 Forty AI agents in the back office
• 15:01 A website that shows AI visitors what they searched for
• 16:29 AI gets you there, then you do the rest of the work
• 16:54 Why speed to lead matters more with AI
• 18:20 Three new customers from calling back within an hour
• 19:46 Attribution, the messy middle and sales vs. marketing
• 23:06 A generation that buys with no human interaction
• 25:49 AI brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody
• 25:53 The best salespeople and post-hoc justification
• 27:40 The prescription safety glasses that never fit
• 30:11 Fishing: AI skims the surface
• 30:59 Reinvest AI gains instead of cutting staff
• 33:02 What CHAOS is: great parenting and a bedroom startup
• 35:04 Wrap-up

Unscripted Small Business interview with Rich Thomas

JEREMY RIVERA

Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted Small Business Podcast host.

I'm here with Rich Thomas with CHAOS Moto, and I'd like him to introduce himself and his brand that he's working with right now, before we get far afield with whatever comes up on my brain.

RICH THOMAS

Thank you, Jeremy.

Richard Thomas. Company is CHAOS Moto. It's a division of CHAOS Supplies, and CHAOS actually stands for chemical handling and occupational safety supplies.

We've been in business for over 25 years, and we started out doing just basic safety supplies.

And now we've grown and grown and grown to the point where we're actually manufacturing and making products here in the United States for one of the largest privately held tire companies in the world.

BEST QUOTES

“AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody.”

- Rich Thomas, CHAOS Moto

“AI will get you there to one point, but now you have to do the rest of the work.”

- Rich Thomas, CHAOS Moto

“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, CHAOS Moto

Hire someone who brings an opposing view, not a copy of yourself

JEREMY RIVERA

Every industry and niche has a particular set of challenges that are unique to that particular vertical.

What are some of the challenges in your niche that you've faced and overcome?

RICH THOMAS

I would say the biggest challenges that I have faced and still not have overcome is finding really high quality, motivated workers on every level that have a dream of their own and want to make your dream come true as well as their own.

JEREMY RIVERA

Human resources and getting talent on board with your vision and dream does seem like it's one of those core elements of being a small business owner.

That is very difficult to navigate, because on the one hand, you want people who can be creative.

But also those people that are entrepreneurial and creative tend to be more difficult as a leader, as an owner, to push stuff in the direction that you need to, because you obviously have that inherent conflict of creativity versus participation, right?

RICH THOMAS

Yes, a hundred percent.

And over the years, my biggest fear is finding somebody exactly like myself who wants to do everything exactly the way I would like it to be done, but then there's no creativity outside of the way I think.

So you really need somebody who's different and can bring an opposing view, but still be positive and moving in the right direction, so that you bounce ideas off each other till you get to the point where you have something that you would have gotten better together than on your own.

JEREMY RIVERA

It almost feels like, in a way, it's like dating somebody who has the exact same interests, who likes their burgers exactly the same way, who likes the same sports team.

And after a while you realize, you know what, I'm kinda dating myself. I should have gone for something more complementary rather than just the same.

RICH THOMAS

Yeah, that's a great analogy, Jeremy.

And typically when you first meet somebody or you hire somebody, you want that. But then later on you want someone to maybe mix things up or look at things differently and bring something new to the table.

I've always also had this other really weird thought, which is if you find someone who's really, really, really good, like I mean, really good, you're always wondering why they don't have their own business.

Or they're not out on their own doing the same thing that you're doing.

So there's somewhere in between where you want somebody who's really good, but not so good that they leave you.

So it's just the weirdest thing, you know?

Rich's hiring rule: a complement who brings an opposing view, not a copy of yourself

Entrepreneurship: some people just have it

JEREMY RIVERA

There's such a weird set of circumstances in the way that we've structured our world, right?

We set things up where you have to have a job, you have to make income. You're either out there and you're a solopreneur, you're running your own business, or you're working for somebody.

And people's level of creativity gets harnessed for their life in a particular way.

Sometimes it's just a lack of somebody having the awareness that you can do that.

When I was in my early twenties and I was doing the nine to five and working at a call center, genuinely up until the third year when I was doing it, it did not occur to me that I could get paid by anybody other than an employer.

Somebody that saw that I was learning about SEO was like, hey, you should help this business. The tailor I talked to, he needs help getting ranked. You should help him do that.

I'm like, I can do that? And I did. I actually bartered for my first tailored suit. It was my first paying SEO job.

The suit jacket still fits, the pants don't fit anymore, but the suit jacket still fits and he still ranks number one for tailor in Riverside.

Some of my previous guests have been entrepreneurs since they were knee high to a grasshopper, and it was their first instinct. But for some folks it doesn't click or trigger until a few years or many years into their career.

And there's a whole generation of people who are raised in schools of, we're preparing you for your career. We're preparing you to be in a job, versus we're preparing you for the market.

And the market could be freelance, could be consulting, could be your own business.

RICH THOMAS

It's a great point. And you touched on a lot of different topics.

And I wish there was a litmus test, per se, for whether somebody's gonna be an entrepreneur or independent or go out on their own, or just work for you forever and be a great employee.

It's in me to motivate people to always want to be their best and achieve anything that's on their mind or in their dreams.

And I do have an employee who does have a small business on the side. I've helped him tremendously because I want him to have the same feelings that I have of success.

But I will say this, Jeremy. As a sixty year old individual who's had numerous businesses and have made money on just about everything since I was knee high to a grasshopper, like that saying, I do believe there is a percentage of people who possess the necessary skills, the fearlessness there of taking a risk, the excitement.

I don't know what you wanna call it, but I do believe that it is only innate in certain people, and only certain people will ever be able to support themselves for the rest of their lives, owning their own business.

Hand off the work that bores you

JEREMY RIVERA

It's not easy. I've had my seasons.

I've worked every different angle of search engine optimization imaginable, from working with a SaaS company doing their SEO, to working at agencies. I've run freelance, I've been subcontracted with other agencies.

I've been subcontracted with a subcontractor who's subcontracting for the main agency working for HCA, and I had to get drug tested in order to edit their website, like twenty pages' worth of content on their site.

So it's challenging to a degree. But I personally do love the challenge and the freedom of it, as much as it drives me crazy: the required thought process on the business cycle.

How much bandwidth do I have as a business? What clients are in the process? What is their payment process and workflow?

What's been your best experience at wringing extra value out of the business or process that wasn't super glamorous, but just, hey, we need to get this done? Let's do the boring work.

RICH THOMAS

The reason I'm here talking to you right now: I hired a friend who ended up finishing his master's in digital marketing at USC, and that would be Alex Storch. And he connected me with you.

And I tried forever to design websites, build websites, do SEO. I tried on every level, from community college to taking classes in the evening and buying my own software.

And I recognize the importance of being online and selling. And it's just so boring building websites back in the day, and just changing the colors and the words and making the pages work.

And I'm like, I can talk to people all day long.

But when it comes to just working on a computer and typing stuff in and waiting for a result, it just bores me.

So I hired this guy who's a friend of mine, wasn't sure what's gonna happen, and he has blown up the business, like you can't imagine, and has been using AI to take us places that I never thought we'd ever go, and finding leads and customers through LinkedIn and rebranding the company and the colors.

So to answer your question: communicating and verbalizing and talking to people, sales is what I do. Anything outside of that, I struggle with.

Inventory, the warehouse, driving a forklift, whatever it might be.

But if it's motivating someone else to do it for me, I'm pretty good at it. So that's what I found out. Just don't even try to do those other things.

Find people who really enjoy doing it and keep motivated.

Forty AI agents and a website that matches the search

JEREMY RIVERA

You touched on something that's become a staple element of basically every interview that I do now.

We have to spend a little bit of time sussing out and digging out the role of AI within small business.

Share your perspective on how you're leveraging and framing the cost slash opportunity within AI, without falling prey to the pretty shiny syndrome.

I think it was Jeremy Moser who described it as shiny AI object syndrome. We just get obsessed with these things.

And sometimes it's hard to get that B2B value out of it that's promised by everybody on LinkedIn. They're promising you're going to go to the moon if you buy my AI course or you do this with AI.

But at the same time, there's a reason why my friend Daniel Hebert at Oleno, they're working on SOPs to make AI strategies and services that connect multiple teams, so they're doing the same thing at the same time on AI.

'Cause right now it's like everybody's a Yahoo. Everybody's off on their own AI adventure, and there isn't a lot of cohesive use of it across the board.

So what's your experience with those tools? What have been those conversations you've had with your new resource who seems to be helping you take it to market?

RICH THOMAS

Well, it's a great question.

So Alex has forty AI agents working for him.

And in the last six months, he's probably found over $75,000 worth of oversights in billing, invoicing, accounting.

And then he has it going in and correcting things on the website in the back side of the portal.

But more importantly, if somebody searches for a product that's related to CHAOS Moto through ChatGPT or one of the AI sites, when they go to our site, whatever they're searching for, that homepage, that image comes up.

And so they honestly feel like, I have found the right site.

If they searched for another product and came to our site, that search would bring up those products immediately.

And the site immediately becomes customizable and follows their previous searches for similar products. It's unbelievable.

And so I have an appointment tomorrow morning, a Zoom call with an extremely large utility company, 10,000 people, who need prescription safety glasses, who found us online and went through AI and found our site and liked our site, because when they went to our site, they saw utility workers.

Jokingly, if they were looking for cowboys, they probably would have found cowboys wearing safety glasses, or clowns.

AI will get you there to one point, but now you have to do the rest of the work.

So what I say tomorrow at eight thirty in the morning to convince them that we're more than just a website, and that they just found us online, and how I portray the company on a personal level and what I say and do, is gonna actually take us to the next level of, quote unquote, onboarding.

Quote card: AI gets you there; you do the rest of the work

Speed to lead: call back within an hour

JEREMY RIVERA

I think you're absolutely right. We can't sit back and just expect the money to roll in because we typed a prompt into AI.

It's not a wish fulfillment machine.

And there is a bigger transition: the more effective you are at leveraging those AI tools for your marketing, that puts more onus and more expectation on your business workflow and intake process.

And you have these gaping holes.

They've reached out and said, I want to work on my SEO, help me get this up to snuff. And I follow up with them and I try giving them a call as a customer and I get nothing back. They might not even ever call back.

Editor's note: On tape Jeremy cites a speed-to-lead study from memory. The verified figures come from Jake Melendy's Ignitvio mystery-shop study: over half of the service businesses he contacted never responded at all, and only 2% of those that did followed up more than once.

RICH THOMAS

Jeremy, I don't want to interrupt, but I have to interrupt. And only because you are so spot on.

I have picked up three new customers in the last month.

And those customers told me the reason they're moving the business to me is because we called back. We called back within an hour of the lead coming in off of AI.

I'm realizing that no one is calling anybody anymore.

They think that the computer can do it all, right down to closing the deal. And the human element has to step in.

And so one of my sales reps, he got a lead off of AI and called within an hour. And not once, but three times we've gotten customers because of that.

And it's making me really wonder: is this really that simple?

Here's the glitch in the system. Everyone has resorted to this and they've forgotten about the reality of actual human interaction, of talking to somebody.

And so if this is the case, and I wish I could keep it a secret, for all my competitors: just keep going AI and just letting those customers sit out there in space till they come to me, and I'll talk to them directly and turn them into a customer the second they contact me.

How CHAOS turns an AI-sourced lead into a customer: AI brings the buyer, a human calls back within the hour

Sales and marketing: collaborate, don't cannibalize

JEREMY RIVERA

Speed to lead, yeah. I don't know if it's just a blind spot in their business or, like you're suggesting, an over-reliance on AI.

But speed to lead, Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital, it's one of the things that they focus on.

In his interview he focused on, hey, if you do the quickest thing possible... and it's so many just really obvious things.

But you're right. Hey, competitors, don't listen to this. Don't learn this lesson.

Because it's the bottom of the funnel stuff that's making the difference now.

There's almost this huge messy middle, as one of my other interviews put it. It was the owner of SegMetrics, that's right.

He was talking about how we look at analytics and we try to determine how many people on mobile phones converted.

Well, if they found your site on mobile through Claude and then emailed that to their wife, and their wife did a Google search and then emailed it back and said, yeah, go check it out, go get this, and then they go type it in directly to the site: was that a Google lead? Was that an AI lead? Or did they come direct to your website?

Well, yes, they did all three. So who gets the attribution?

And so he called it: corporations set up these death pits, these battle matches between their salespeople and their marketing team, and make them fight like the Joker. There's only room in my organization for one, and he snaps the pool cue and tosses it. You've got a minute.

And that's happening everywhere with sales budgets and marketing teams, and it's just suicide for the company. You're cannibalizing when you should be collaborating.

There's so much in marketing and understanding what is the friction point happening in my sales call that could be smoothed over.

Because there's nothing more slick than being on a sales call and they're like, I don't know if the product can do this, and you drop in: we wrote an article about that. Last month.

Boom. Not only do you know what the problem is, but you already solved it previously and have that resource available, where you can say, I'll send you the link.

That's friction that you don't have to solve. The better that you can equip your marketing team with those sales friction problems, the better your sales call goes.

And there's people who have those problems that are going to discover that now organically, through both AI and Google, because you've taken the time to create a resource that solves the problem.

AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody

RICH THOMAS

Yep. 100%. It couldn't have been explained better, what you just said.

And to add to it, the way I see it in the future is there will be a trained group of individuals who were brought up purchasing things without any human interaction, or minimal.

I mean, we've seen it where you go in and order food at certain fast food places or whatever, right? You do your own checkout.

That's all they will know. And they will not be dissatisfied.

But there's still this group of people that are out there that I talk to from time to time, and I might get into some small talk and then learn more about them and where they live and what's happening around their location, whether it be architecturally or weather wise or whatever.

And what I learned is, even from back in the days of dating, right? There's all these barriers and things that make people uncomfortable.

And as you get to talk to them and you learn more about who they are and where they're born and what their parents do and what they do on the weekends and what kind of car they drive, and all these little things, suddenly all these barriers start to drop and people become comfortable.

And then their level of ability to say, I'm willing to do this, increases.

And I don't think AI can do that. I think that they can ask all these right questions about what size, what color, and then take your money.

But I think at the end of the day, when we talk about a culture of people being lonely, right? I feel like if you can add a little bit of entertainment, add a little bit of interest, be sincere about it and then respect people's time and then lead into business professionally after the small talk, it lands almost every time over AI.

If I'm buying a mirror or I'm buying something really simple and you just go to whatever big site and order it, that's all you want. You don't need any more than that.

But if it's something where you're spending a decent amount of money, and you have questions and you want to feel comfortable and you want to come back again for service or whatever it might be, I want to talk to somebody.

AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody.

Quote card: AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody

JEREMY RIVERA

I think there's something about that. It's almost like there's portions of the purchasing process that are just instinctive, they're not fully rational.

And it's almost like the best salespeople provide the best post hoc justifications, so that you can justify that decision after the fact.

There's something about the sales click process that's intuitive. It's just chemistry, it's something.

But the best salespeople are successful because they provide a good set of rational reasons after the fact, that you can look back and say, yeah, no, that purchase did make sense, because he mentioned this feature and that.

And the post-sale satisfaction definitely is higher from a human salesperson interaction closing process, versus just, I've clicked a few buttons and great, now I don't have the money. I don't have the thing yet, but I don't have the money anymore.

It's like my wife's post-TikTok guilt session of, I don't know why I even bought this purse. I don't even remember when I bought it.

She's like, well, I guess I get credit to go buy something else off of TikTok. I'm like, no, stop buying things off TikTok.

The glasses that never fit: a customer for life

RICH THOMAS

Yep. That's so interesting. I love that.

And you're making me think of a recent situation where a customer called me, and he got a pair of prescription safety glasses from me two and a half years ago and they never fit him correctly.

He never wore them and he never returned them.

So he called me and he said, these don't fit. And I said, well, how come you never returned them? He's like, I didn't know what to do.

And I started asking him some questions, and I said, well, one, I want to take care of you. I'm gonna send you another pair of glasses for free. Just keep those.

But I said, how tall are you? He's like, well, I'm six one. I go, well, how much do you weigh? He goes, 195 pounds.

And I go, I can understand why the glasses that you ordered didn't fit, by your height and by your weight.

And I said, have you lost any weight since you bought those glasses, or gained weight? And we went through all these questions, and finally I'm like, I know which glasses will fit you. And he's like, you do?

And I go, I'm gonna send you out three samples of glasses to try on.

And you pick out the pair that you like the most and then send them back to me, and I'll make you the pair of glasses that fit you perfectly, because this is a medical device that you wear on your face, but you need it for eight hours a day to do your job safely.

And I go, once you find a pair of glasses that are comfortable, that fit great, you're gonna wear them every day, all day, and you don't even have to think about them.

But for two and a half years, you've gone with your eyes unprotected, because you didn't make this phone call and I didn't know about it.

And I said, so we're gonna do that. He's like, you will? I go, yeah. I go, you're gonna be a customer for life, right? He goes, yeah.

And so, sure enough, I'm putting together these glasses, but AI's not gonna do that, right?

And he's a manager, and he tells all of his other workers to wear these glasses.

Down the road, we'll always send people if there's a specialty fit type person that needs to be talked to.

He was so impressed, and I'm like, that's just what you do. You know, that's what people used to do.

AI skims the surface; a salesperson goes deep

RICH THOMAS

And I don't mean to talk too much, but Jeremy, you've made me think a lot with your insight. And I came up with this when you're talking.

AI, if you're fishing, and I mean actually fishing for bass or something, you're skimming the waters to pick up whatever you can pick up that's there. And you're gonna grab a certain amount of fish that are at that level.

Whereas if you take the AI and you couple it together with the salesperson, you can get the fish on top and you can get the fish down below that are deep, that aren't on the surface.

And the two of them together, now you've caught something. You have something in the net.

And so when you're talking about collaborating between the two and fighting, really they need to work together in companies that don't see that.

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.

Quote card: throwing AI in is not the answer

Rich's fishing analogy: AI skims the surface, a salesperson reaches the fish down deep

JEREMY RIVERA

Yeah, there are tasks. It's the companies that look at the potential savings on their bandwidth and immediately think about reducing their workflow that are cutting themselves off from the productivity of additional freedom from being over-tasked.

What if you went back to the nineteen nineties and told Microsoft, hey, I can increase your employees' productivity by ten percent?

They would never turn around and say, great, let's cut ten percent of our workforce.

They'd say, I can ship ten percent more product onto the market. I can reduce the churn from this product. I can decrease the amount of bugs from this product.

The cutting your nose off to spite your face thing is so totally true of those organizations that are looking at the gain of productivity possible from AI and immediately thinking to translate that into cutting human resources.

Whether it's in marketing, whether it's in sales, whether it's in fulfillment, it needs to go to the other side.

Anything that you gain from AI capability should be seen as a reinvestment in the organization, to accelerate income, to expand product offerings, to deepen customer satisfaction. Anything else is just foolish.

RICH THOMAS

Yep. I agree. I agree. You have great insight, and you follow it up with great facts. I love it.

What CHAOS is: the result of great parenting

JEREMY RIVERA

My final question for you is, what do you wish that people knew about CHAOS?

And it's funny to put it that way because it's the name of your company, but you can play with that as an allegory, or just what do you wish people knew about your company that you want to put out there into the world, onto the internet?

RICH THOMAS

I love that question. No one's ever asked me that question.

What CHAOS is, is it's a result of great parenting.

And my parents were very entrepreneurial and allowed me and my brothers and sisters to sell anything out in front of the house, out in a farming community in upstate New York.

And we all were encouraged, all six kids, to go off to college. And even during college, I always had little businesses on the side selling things.

And even though I sold pharmaceuticals for a big company for five years, the whole time all I could think about was just running my own business.

And I felt like I was just a cog in a big wheel of pharma, an employee ID number.

And so as soon as I could, I started my own business.

And suddenly all those skills that I've learned from my parents, whether it be education or just rolling up my sleeves and just getting to work, that's what CHAOS is. That's what we did.

We started out of the bedroom and grew it into the millions, and it's continuing to grow.

I think by the time we're done, we might be at thirty, forty, fifty million dollars.

And it's been nothing but satisfaction knowing that I'm doing something that my parents would expect me to do.

Where to find Rich and CHAOS Moto

JEREMY RIVERA

I love that answer. And I really appreciate you coming on to share your insights and your experience and having a great conversation.

A recap of this is going to go up on unscriptedsmallbusiness.com for anybody that's listening and wants links to see Rich's site and what he was talking about, the customization that's possible there.

Give a final shout out if there's any resources or any point of contact you wanna point people to, if you're writing any books or having any marketing material that you want to put out there.

RICH THOMAS

I would say Jeremy Rivera, Unscripted. I learned a lot talking to you.

I say watch your podcast and listen, because it's just nice to know that people like you exist, and that for free you can get good information like that to change your life.

JEREMY RIVERA

Well, I appreciate your time and the conversation.

RICH THOMAS

All right, thank you, Jeremy.

Key Takeaways

→ Hire a complement, not a copy. Rich's biggest fear is hiring someone exactly like himself. You need somebody who can bring an opposing view and still stay positive, so the two of you build something better together than either would alone.

→ Hand off the work that bores you. Rich tried for years to build websites and do SEO himself. Hiring Alex Storch, who loves that work, is what changed the business. His rule: find people who really enjoy doing it and keep them motivated.

→ AI brings the lead; a human closes it. CHAOS's site adapts to what an AI-referred visitor searched for, and that is how a 10,000-person utility company found them. But as Rich puts it, AI will get you there to one point, and then you have to do the rest of the work.

→ Call back within the hour. Three new customers in one month told Rich they moved their business because CHAOS called back within an hour of the lead coming in off of AI. While competitors leave leads to the computer, a fast human callback is the glitch in the system.

→ Fit and service make customers for life. A customer whose glasses never fit got a free pair, three samples to try, and a few questions about height and weight. He is now a customer for life, and as a manager he tells his crew to wear them.

→ Couple AI with people instead of cutting them. AI skims the surface; a salesperson reaches the fish down deep. You can't eliminate salespeople and employees just by throwing AI in.

Work with CHAOS: Shop USA-made wheel-service chemicals and grips at CHAOS Moto, see the employer prescription safety eyewear program at CHAOSRXOptics, or browse the CHAOS Supplies press room.

Read more from the CHAOSRXOptics team: The best safety glasses are the ones people actually wear, How to run a safety-eyewear program for your crew and How to order prescription safety glasses.

Tire shops can request a shop sample, read CHAOS Moto's product answers, or ask about national accounts. Connect with Rich on LinkedIn.