The Secret AI Systems Behind a £100M Empire

Got the man, the myth, the legend, James Dooley here today. James, how would you introduce yourself normally, if people just don't know you? I'd say James Dooley is an entrepreneur based in the UK that's always looking for new investment opportunities and always trying to stay ahead of the game with regards to innovation. And you, well, I would say like, almost like a mentor to me, you know, like in terms of like, you know, encouraging me to use AI and to innovate within the AI space and that sort of thing.

How are you using it within your business? Yeah, we're using it all over the place. So everything from cold outreach, so it could be like cold email outreach. We've now set up the overflow call center to be taking calls, AI calls and stuff like that.

Certain things with like certain staff that was being overloaded on inbound emails. So now the initial kind of outreach can go back and forth on that. We're using it for all sorts of different SEO strategies. So kind of brought our own kind of page rank type link scoring methodology put together, writing content.

There's so many different elements where we're trying to get it to supercharge our existing staff. I know a lot of businesses have actually doing it to replace employees, where what we're trying to do is make it, the output is 10X what the existing staff are able to do. Yeah, that's one thing I've found is like, we've actually hired more since AI came along, but we just take, sometimes we'll take like lower skilled people and we'll give them the tools that make them like, you know, a level seven or a level eight out of 10. Whereas before they were, you know, two or three out of 10.

Have you found the same sort of thing? Yeah, absolutely. We employ quite a lot of virtual assistants throughout the world, whether they're South Africa or the Philippines or India, stuff like that, Bangladesh, Venezuela. We know like globally, the team are global.

And like you just said there, previously, if they was writing certain bits of content or emails, it would be very much, hello, sir. And straight away from a Western country, you're knowing that this isn't someone that's local. So now with regards to certain- Wait a minute. Is it not normal to say hello, sir, dear sir?

Absolutely, definitely not. Hey, sir. Hello, sir. And straight away, you just know in straight away, it's foreign, especially in the UK and in the US.

It's a big turnoff. So it's little things like that and different little nuances that AI can help them into say, this is how you should write it. Also, I do believe in like, especially in the UK, they're very much a nation of like, they like a little bit of banter and a little bit of fun and stuff like that. So we try to personalize our AI kind of prompts to be a little bit different so it doesn't sound robotic.

And we found that that has worked very well as well. And what are you using for the voice agents there? So like people dial in, the overflow goes to an AI bot. How does that work?

So at present, that's a great question. And there's probably about seven or eight different AI platforms at present that we're testing. I wouldn't want to say which one is best at present. We are literally midway through testing one for called outreach on the AI assistant voice and then some for the overflow call centers, just for, I don't want them to sell.

I just want them to gather information, get that information and say then the salesperson will be in touch or gather certain bits of information where sometimes I'd say 50% of my staff time previously was just like fact finding. And I feel like that doesn't need to be done by a human. Like once they've gathered all the information and they know whether that customer fits the model of what we do and within the budgets of what we do, at that point, a salesperson can speak to them. What we was finding was so many members of staff were speaking to people.

And by the time they got the information, the budget was 200 pounds a month, let's say, for lead generation. And it's like, we can't work with you or they only work in a specific small area. And we're like, we can't work with you. And that was wasting so much time where now what we're able to do is all my sales team are absolutely loving AI because it's able to get that fact finding.

And they're just now on calls themselves, speaking to the right people. So that segmentation of the audience of what fits is now their time is being saved that they're speaking to the right people. They're earning more bonuses than ever because they're speaking to the right people that's got the budgets. You're filtering out the less qualified leads so that your sales reps are focusing all the time on the right people and making more money because of it, right?

Yeah, but not only that, the big part there is when you're saying less qualified or they don't fit our model, they do fit somebody else's model. So what we're able to then do is nurture them to say, look, we're not the right solution for you. There's no point in trying to sell to everyone. Like if you're not the right fit, you're basically saying, you're not the right solution for us.

However, there is two or three solutions over here that might suit you better. So it could be, let's say for lead generation, it could be that they only work in a small area. So Google business profile ads could work really well or trying to optimise their Google business profile for them generating their own leads. So a bit of a mini course and educating them of how they can generate their own leads.

They come and leave and they say like, wow, thank you so much for giving us this information. Like you've not just tried to hard sell us something that like almost like trying to shove a square in a circle hole, it doesn't fit. So you've got to try to understand what your demographic, like what you do and who you serve. And then like you said, cross-selling and stuff like that.

It might be that they've got a bigger budget and sometimes it could be you could help in one part, but then maybe PPC or Facebook ads, and you can kind of cross-sell that to another agency that might be able to help them on that front. And then on the sales side, right? Managing a sales team is undeniably like, I think one of the hardest parts of the business, you know, from everything I've tested out, they're almost like a different beast, a different category of people. Are there any AI systems that you've implemented aside from that with the sales team or anything you're planning to do?

Yeah, I mean, I suppose there isn't a magic button to turn around and say, right, this is what you need to do. For me, and this goes in everything of what you do, this is from SEO, from paid ads, from marketing, to everything that you do. It's all about the small 1% gains, like trying to get them 1% gains in every single element. So it could be the segmentation of the audience of the lead.

So they're speaking to the right people, but then making certain that your product is the best for them, making certain that you can then do the quality control of what you're doing. Because a lot of people obsess over new business, where actually what you should be a lot of time focusing on is keeping that client and the lifetime value and increasing the average transactional value and the lifetime value of that client than keep trying to chase. And everyone's obsessed with cost per acquisition. And for me, it's not about the cost per acquisition.

I'm not bothered about that. I'll pay more on the cost per acquisition if the lifetime value is worth more. But so many people become obsessed with the onboarding new and the month free that they can believe in. And you're like, well, if you would have nurtured them in a better way and make them understand what you do and why you are better, that they would pay a premium for it and they can make a higher return on investment.

So it's a bad answer, but it's all the 1% little gains in every last little SOP of what you do. How can you make that 1% better? How can you make this next step 1% better? From the bridge from there to there, how can you make that 1% better?

And it's all just the little bits of what you can do. So there's obviously a lot of different AI platforms that you can be using to try to get just little things of like... So as at present, we're doing a lot with LLM optimization on SEO, right? So people are saying that SEO and Geo are the same thing.

No, there's an overlap and there's a lot of the same skillset, it's a completely different ballgame. It's completely different to rank in the LLMs as what it is for ranking in, let's say Google search or in Bing search. And you might say, well, why is it different? Or some of the SEO community say, why it's different?

Well, you know yourself, Julian, you're absolutely crushing it with everything to do with AI, that the LLMs aren't using PageRank, they're not using Link Juice, but Google SERP does. So how can someone say it's the same thing when one core fundamental is generally based on PageRank and content and the other one's not? So it comes down to on that side, to the infinite loop of self-corroboration, repeating the message so many times that them assumptions become factual. And that's what the LLMs is about.

So it's just little things like that that people need to understand that they can leverage AI in different ways, but trying to think that AI is completely gonna transform all the business. It can do, but all in elements and it is garbage in and garbage out. Yeah, there's a lot of AI slop out there, right? Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then when it comes to GEO and optimizing for LLMs, what's your process there? I know you talked about like overloading the LLMs with information everywhere. Yeah, so like prime example, we're doing quite a lot now with knowledge panels. So trying to get the entity home in place to say who you are, what you do.

you do and who you serve. And repeating that message then across press releases, make sure you're getting citations, guest posts. If you are going to get anything like niche edits, making certain that it's not just about placing the link on the page, the wording around it is trying to feed who you are, what you do and who you serve. So trying to add the paragraph around where the text is.

But if you can do a guest post and you can kind of turn those assumptions into facts, it's all about the confidence score. We internally call it semantic triple factoids. So a factoid is where you get an unreliable bit of information and when it's been repeated so many times, it becomes factual. So that's what the LLMs is about.

It's repeating that message so many times that Google now is confident enough to say this must be true because there's lots of different trusted sources saying the same thing. If I kept saying I'm 23 years old on the internet, all right, I'm not. But even though if I say it, it's not factually correct. But if lots of other sources kept saying James Neely is 23 years old, my knowledge graph would say I'm 23 years old if there was that much information out there.

And it's feeding that knowledge vault of what is needed to be able to do. And that's how you do in the LLM optimization. There is an overlap with SEO. Absolutely.

Because a lot of people are already doing semantic triples, semantic content. They're already knowing how to structure words correctly for rankings within Google and they're already doing guest posts and press releases. So some people have already getting themselves naturally in the LLMs and into the Gemini AI overview or in chat GPT and therefore saying it's the same thing. But a lot of the people that just obsess over links, sometimes they're struggling to get in geo, generative engine optimization, but it's because they don't understand the semantic SEO part of the importance of the words and the sentences and stuff of what's needed.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Actually, it reminds me of is, uh, you know, the book like 1984, George Orwell, like pretty famous book.

They talk about the illusion of truth, which is basically like, if you're exposed to a statement enough times, regardless of whether it's true or not, it becomes true. Exactly. That that's what the LLMs is. That's exactly what the LLMs is.

Interesting. Interesting. And then I know, for example, we've actually white labeled through, um, through Carl and one of your businesses before for ranking really quickly. And one of the things that we actually did as an experiment was rank.

I think it was within 30 days on the first page for our clients, um, website. And, and a lot of that was through Reddit as well. Yeah. Is that something you're actively doing too?

Absolutely. So like for me, you should be on the channel. You should be on the present holistically being seen in as many different places as possible. Um, again, when it comes back down to the infinite loop of self-cooperation, so repeating that message, you want it on as many different trusted sources as possible.

Now having forums like Reddit or Quora is a great way of third party people saying who you are and what you do. And you obviously being able to answer it as well. So for me, if someone says, um, do you think we should be using Twitter for kind of gaining exposure? Yeah.

Do you think we should be using Reddit? Yeah. Do you think we should be using YouTube? Yeah.

Try and use everything and stuff like, no, we're talking about AI using stuff like make.com or NA10 to deliver that message across all different platforms has now become easier than ever. You can set an AI agent up to understand who you are and what you do and, and get that message out in as many different platforms as possible and loading those tweets or Reddit posts or, um, articles that you're doing, let's say on medium on web 2.0s. You can do this for almost for free, apart from like a few tokens of what it's costing you an open AI to be, to be spending on the tokens for using it. It's not costing a lot of money, loading that then into an indexer.

So Google bot and Bing bot is crawling it quickly. Then you're onto a winner. You're repeating that message. And like you just said there, once you get, once you see that message so many times, the LLMs then treat it as being factual.

Yeah. One of the things that we do daily is like, we have, you know, four different websites in the same niche about AI. And then we, you know, we'll take one of my videos, take the transcript, plug that through a prompt, and then we'll create about 56 different pieces of content from it. You know, and it's like, it's on Reddit, it's an article on Twitter, we'll post it on LinkedIn article, four different websites, et cetera.

And it's so easy to do now, right? As well, especially if you have the right prompts in place. There's like, I see you everywhere. You are an absolute perfect example.

If someone came to me and says, give me an example of being omnichannel and omnipresent. If I go and load up my Twitter, you're there. If I go and load up my Facebook, you're there. YouTube, you're there.

Like your Instagram, you're there. Like you are literally every, you are Mr. Everywhere. And that is a credit to you that you've absolutely embraced all the different AI platforms of what can be used.

And not only is it you that's there, the next minute I'm seeing your brand there, that you're link building brands there, that a secondary kind of YouTube channels there. And I'm just like, wow, this guy is literally everywhere. But what you've done is you've embraced taking on staff. You've embraced the AI is going to supercharge your existing staff and using certain channels.

Like you said, one piece of content can be broken down and creating 57 different pieces of content across all different platforms. It's not that difficult to do anymore. If you know the core fundamentals, it's almost like going back to university and understanding how to use these tools, not university, but like, you know what I mean? Like sit down and work out how to leverage, like using these that can get you out in as many different places as possible.

Yeah, actually one of the things that I do on a daily basis is I actually have like a journal. I call it the leverage improvements journal. And it's like each day, okay, what am I working on that I need to turn into a bigger lever? Someone else needs to do it.

And like you said, embrace taking on staff, but give them the tools to be able to do that stuff as well. For you, you've got an empire, right? Like you've got all these different companies. I know you were talking about even landscaping and stuff like that.

The size of your lever must be huge, right? That's not an innuendo. This is very high, you can enlarge this please. Yeah, my lever is very big.

Thank you very much. But no, on a serious note, yeah, it's built into a large digital empire of what we have. There's a lot of different businesses involved, a lot of different business partners involved, a lot of different staff involved. And don't get me wrong, it's tough.

I'm not saying it's easy, but what I'm saying is that the people that sit down and understand and learn ways to make things easier with leveraging AI, then yes, it allows us to 10X our output. We're involved in fencing companies, groundworking companies, building companies, basically all sorts, cleaning companies. But we are generally UK based, but we do a lot of consultancy for people over in the US and overseas like Australia and stuff like that. But yeah, it's turned into a big empire.

To be honest with you, at times I wish it was smaller than what it is because there's certain staff that I don't even know the names of and it kind of got to a point where now it's become too big for not just myself to manage, but you've got your C-level suite and you've got different businesses of what's going on. Sometimes when you lose control yourself, you've got to let go and delegate, but sometimes it's kind of nice having some sort of control. And yeah, when it gets too big, sometimes it can be a little bit like, I want to get back in the trenches. I understand that I love innovating.

So I love being in the trenches, learning new things. So I've taken myself out of the business now and I'm just literally innovating what could be done better. What 1% gains can we do? Knowing that this 1% gain on one little SOP can massively improve the whole business across the board.

Yeah. I think that's it. If you just relentlessly improve all day, every day, and you say to yourself, you're never going to stop. You're always going to be doing it, especially on a long enough timeframe.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then have you also, I know we've talked about SEO, we've talked about your sales teams, managing the empire. What about on the video side? Are you doing any sort of AI avatar stuff there? Yeah.

So we've got a lot of different stuff. So obviously me and Kazra, we try and do a video if we can per day. So just a lot of that now is just for business owners to understand different options of what they have. So we're saying that, look, we are not the only option for you.

Don't have a single point of failure. Go out and use several differently generation companies. Try and do your own SEO, try and do your own PPC, try and generate your own leads as well. You should be looking at growth and not just word of mouth.

So me and Kazra do some ourselves, which is just real in-person kind of videos between me and him. However, yes, I have several different AI avatars now for different, let's say, lead generation channels. So I've actually got one, which is, well, I've got three and they're all cartoon-like. So one of them's an angry version of myself.

One of them's a funny version of me. of myself, and one of them's like, I call it the Coray version, which is very factual and to the point. So when someone asks a question, sometimes if I want to do it in an angry response, like prime examples, some people you know say in the industry, is link building illegal? Right?

And it's a frustrating kind of topic. Now you can just say in a factual, no, it's not illegal. You don't get arrested for doing link building. That's the factual answer.

But at times it gets asked so many times where some people think that it is, that in an angry tone, you're saying like, are you so stupid to think that this is illegal? All right, it's against Google guidelines if you're going out looking to buy links, but no, it's not illegal and stuff like that. So these different personas can say it that I wouldn't want to say what I'm saying on angry version of me because they'll, you sound arrogant, but then doing it through an AI cartoon avatar can come across as being a bit funny in delivering a message that you actually want to deliver that you might not want to say yourself. So I've got different personas from that on cartoon avatars and then I've got my real avatar as well, which is some people don't know.

Some people don't even know whether this is me or whether this is AI version of me. So yeah, there's obviously you've got yourself or you've cloned yourself as well. Um, but yeah, I've got, I've got a couple of different versions. I went, basically I went for two full days, um, in a podcast studio.

I got, um, a sound engineer, um, to do my voice. Um, and obviously uploaded it to 11 labs, 11 labs. Now the version of 11 labs of what comes through is, is a great version of my tonality and my voice. Um, we use certain different avatars like, Hey Jen and stuff like that, load it into that.

And I think I've got 47 different kind of clips of me in different backdrops and stuff like that. So I've got one for like, I mean, I'm an investor in a sports betting brand. So every single day they want me to do daily tips, um, where it's just too much work for me to do every single day as well as running the other businesses. But because I'm the face of one of these brands, and also I've got somebody else who's the face of one of the brands, I've cloned him and cloned me.

No, it basically says I am the digital avatar of James Doolit. I am the digital avatar of this sports betting tipster, but it allows us to then deliver the messaging in video format of who our daily selections are and stuff like that. So, um, but we're always, we're always innovating. We're always trying to see is there a better version of the, like the sound engineers, is there a better version of 11 labs?

Is there a better version of Haygen? Um, at present, I believe them two are the best. I don't know. What are you using now for your AI avatar?

Yeah, I would say exactly that. Like Haygen plus 11 labs. It's just, it's the easiest and most efficient workflow. And when I've tested the human, I've literally done this several times, like taking exactly the same topic, talked about that topic as a human talked about as an AI, AI beats me every time on watch time.

Yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's brutal. I mean, I get a lot of hate on YouTube for it, but it's, um, overall, you know, you can't really argue with the facts. It's crazy. I think one thing that I'm going to do is actually split the channel.

So, so I'm planning to just have human on my main channel and then across my channels, I'll have the AI avatar so people can choose like, which one do you want? You know? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Another question that I was interested in was like, you know, when AI first came out, number one, people were worried it was going to take over. Number two, people worried that it was going to particularly an SEO take over the business or make SEOs redundant.

But it seems like now I don't know about you, but I see, I tend to work harder than ever, even with AI, even with the leverage of it. Do you find the same? Um, yes. Um, but I think that's just your nature.

I think this, because you're looking for continuous growth. Um, I think it could make a, I could make it people's life easier that you had to work less. But I think if I took all the work off you today and you had no work on next week, you'd still be really busy cause you'd find new things to do and new stuff. So what I'd say on that is that AI can help you sit, have more free time because it can do things that you might have took a full day on doing and it can do it within 30 minutes or even 10 minutes.

Um, so it can help you. But then entrepreneurs like myself and you, if then we've got a spare hour, we're like, well, are we going to the gym or are we going meeting friends or we're working harder? We can't sit there and do nothing. So we're going, we're going to fill that space or that void or with probably new ventures, another new brand that we launched it or something like that.

And that's where, um, it allows us to grow obviously at a rate of knots. Um, the people that don't look to embrace it, then I just feel that are going to fall further and further behind. Like why, why not embrace it? Why?

If I can get a video out there, which is a 10 minute video of getting all the information in a 10 minute video. Because I talk too much. I know I talk too much. My, my video would be 25 minutes delivering the same information as what my AI version would deliver in 10 minutes.

So the AI version of me is better than me at delivering information to people. Like that's facts in my opinion. So if people don't like it and going, Oh, I want the human version of James. Well, that's fine.

But it's going to take me three times longer to explain what Google can explain in 10 minutes. Yeah. We found the same, even with, uh, you know, we, we've been paying the premium for human content because we, we always felt like that's what clients want. And then the last few months we've seen the switch where like we get amazing feedback on the AI content, the human content we have a, don't get much feedback or it's like, it's a bit like average.

And so we're actually, we're just moving fully into AI, for example, for content it's, it's like we're gradually seeing the point where AI can do things better than humans. Yeah, for sure. And to be fair, things like AI content with the right prompts, you can add tonality, you can add humor in today if you wanted to add that in, or you can make it where you're saying like, there's so many articles we've had, right? I'll give you some great examples on this.

Now there's different caveats to this. If anyone's watching this correlation doesn't always mean causation. And there's a big caveat to it that it could be the freshness of the content, but we went in to six different old websites of what we had and we got the existing articles. We loaded it into our AI agent and asked AI to rewrite the same article in a more concise manner, but getting all the information in and adding any new attributes that might be missing from this page.

It was literally, we just loading the page, go in, optimise this. Once we've got the prompts, we're to say, optimise this, gets the page, spits out the AI version. We re-upload it. The sites have absolutely transformed.

They've absolutely skyrocketed. So when someone says that AI content can't rank or whatever, I'm telling you that human written content being optimised with AI and being rewritten still a lot of them still had like the double dashes, no like the EM dashes in there and That's how little on the optimisation of what we've done on the AI, but with the EM dashes, with the double dashes still far outranked our content, our human written content. They're like I said, there's caveats, it's freshness of content. We added a few different attributes onto the page that we might not have had, but with a single prompt pre-prompted with it of what we wanted to do, make certain you're writing semantic triples, make certain you're concise with what you do.

We want no fluff, yadda, yadda, yadda. So all that information being there, but single prompts then saying optimise this page, optimise this page, optimise this page, AI version written of that page far outperformed the human because it can just make it more concise and it does it in a format that the algorithms can understand and pass that information much better. There's so many articles where I was writing in the first person, like I believe this, well who's I? Or on others where we're saying our team, well who's your team?

Like instead of saying Julian Goldie provides X, Y and Z, I was putting like I provide or we provide, who's we? Like within the algorithms, who is we? It's not feeding the algorithm of what it needs to be fed. Julian Goldie provides X, Y, Z, Julian Goldie is da, da, da.

Do you know what I mean? So like feeding that bit of information is so important and that's where in the wrong hands, AI can, it gives someone a microphone. This is what my version is of AI. It gives someone a microphone and it amplifies what they do.

So if they're a brilliant singer, it amplifies how good they are at singing. But if the prompts are shit and you're i.e. you're a shit singer, it amplifies, like you're just going to scale averageness. So you need to understand prompting and being a decent prompt engineer to then garbage in, garbage out.

If you're good at prompting, the AI version can be way better than the human version. Yeah, 100%, 100% agree with you. Well, it's been a pleasure speaking with you today. I've learned a lot, a lot of good takeaways there in terms of, for example, making sure that you don't just focus on removing your team, but actually empower your team, you know, and the things you mentioned about AI and SEO, like you can't really mix this up.

SEO is quite different to GEO. These are two different strategies and require two different approaches as well. So I really appreciate the advice. today.

James, what's the best way to get in touch with you or anything you want to plug before you go? Yeah, it's nothing really to sell. So head on over to jamesdooley.com. That's my main website.

I've got all the social profiles on there. I'm relatively active on YouTube and a lot of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all different platforms, LinkedIn. If you want more information, then you can follow me on there. If not, then peace.

How do we find the angry avatar? AI James Dooley. So it's going to be ranking. I'm not actually, a lot of it was not there for rankings.

A lot of it was for internal. Someone's asking a question. We were sending the video out, but we're actually now going to, we've had really good feedback on it. The sarcastic James Dooley and the angry James Dooley are actually getting a lot more feedback, positive feedback than just the factual.

So I don't really, I can just be factual myself. So the, the cartoon versions, I'm going to bring out angry and sarcastic James Dooley. So like the sarcastic one would say, yes, link building is illegal. You're going to get arrested and you're going to get sent down for 10 years.

It's worse than murder and all the rest of it and stuff like that. And it's just taking the make. And then the angry version is saying, like, are you so dumb to think that this is illegal and stuff like that. So it's, you'll see it soon when you type AI avatar, James Dooley would then start showing up with some of these in time.

It's all right. We'll check it out. Thanks, man. Cheers Julian.

Cheers, man. Thank you.