The Human Touch: How AI and Marketing Can Transform Your Brand

Dylan Silver (00:01.262)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s returning guest is currently in Ash Fork, Arizona. He’s a digital nomad and the founder of Fire Everyone AI, helping people capitalize on print media, branding, and turning ideas into dollars. Welcome back, Thomas Rendleman. Tom, welcome back.

Thomas G. Rendleman (00:22.702)
Thank you for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:25.652)
I was thinking about the digital media space and print media and how this kind of coalesces with AI and it’s funny that we’re talking here today because yesterday I made a song using AI and I shared it with you before hopping on here and I think we’re seeing more and more of this kind of, I would say, creative use of technology take off where

Something that would have taken probably hundreds if not thousands of dollars studio time, me having to find someone to help me write the song, me having to scribble out verses over weeks. I got done in maybe half an hour, probably less than that yesterday. And of course in your business, you’re gonna see a utilization of AI, right?

Thomas G. Rendleman (01:18.19)
Yes, AI is definitely becoming a broad topic. So yeah, and I heard the the song and it sounded pretty good and that was It’s incredible what you can do So yeah, I totally get it

Dylan Silver (01:38.286)
You know, you’re involved in, for my thousand foot aerial view, at white labeling processes, at also ghost writing, and really helping people capitalize on their ideas and turning them into a business. And this is, I would say, utilizing a lot of tangent skills, right? So you have the AI, understanding how to utilize AI, you have

being able to network and find people who maybe have these ideas, and then you have the tactical skill of writing and publishing books. And so you’re coalescing these ideas together and helping folks streamline processes as well. What’s the business like? And how did this idea really come about here for you to do wear all of these hats and help people build their brand in this way?

Thomas G. Rendleman (02:35.106)
Well, it’s difficult.

when you’re working so many hours in your business and then try to work on your business, it’s difficult. And it takes time because you’ve gotta know marketing, you’ve gotta know the processes of your business and so on. And most people don’t know how to market. Most people are very much into the processes of their business. So let’s say that you’re a real estate agent, should we use that as an idea?

Let’s say you’re a real estate agent You know the process you talk to someone you qualify them you have them go to the lender and then you look for houses and that’s a very set process then you go through escrow and all the timeframes that are in the contract

The problem is that most agents only focus on those things. They don’t have a process where they can get known. If you’re not known, which is the marketing part of the process, how are people going to use you? How are they going to find you?

And most agents rely on their past clients to get referrals. And that’s a great idea and a great way of doing things. But the problem is it’s very limited. You can’t scale. So the idea kind of came from that aspect that if you want to be known, what better way than to have a book?

Thomas G. Rendleman (04:12.46)
But most people or most real estate people will not write a book. Number one, it takes too much time. Number two, you have to think about everything, all the details of it, and make sure that it’s interesting as well as you educate to prove that you know what you’re talking about.

They just won’t do it. So the white labeling idea came from that aspect if that makes sense

Dylan Silver (04:42.862)
Yeah, I think in my business, aside from this podcast, I’ve been thinking about writing a book. tried to write a book at one point and then I kind of got stuck at figuring out how to publish it. I had a short coffee table book and just for, I guess, to see what the process would look like. I was trying to publish it on Amazon and I couldn’t figure it out and maybe the process is simpler now. This is about maybe a year or two years ago and.

Now I look back and I say, well, if I would have figured that out, maybe I would have more more branding out there. So to your point, people will go however far they go down the path of, hey, let me go do this. And they might get stuck on one thing or two things and then they kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, well, this is, you know, got to go onto the back burner. How often do you come across folks who may be dealing with something similar to that where they might be halfway started with an idea or they might be 50 percent and then they just kind of

abandoned because they couldn’t see it to fruition.

Thomas G. Rendleman (05:44.238)
Yeah, it’s it’s very common People don’t have the ability to finish a project they start the project which is any business You have to start the project and you kind of have to figure out your way you know along the way you can’t just go in and have it all done at one time the issue comes that People life gets in the way it just gets in the way and if you don’t have the

Ability to continue it you just drop it and a lot of people with that’s called the shiny object syndrome where People will jump around and I’m terrible at it because I like a lot of different things But you have to go through that and finish the project no matter what because if you don’t you’ll never get done So here you have 30 different projects that none of them are completed

Real estate people are really bad about that and so that’s where the white labeling comes in and it’s not just the white labeling if a Person is giving away a book. Let’s say they’re using it as a lead magnet to get people interested in what they do the issue comes in that if you don’t have a lot of Material that people are looking for in a book

They won’t they won’t look at it and I’ll give you an example. I had a friend that he wanted to attract doctors So he started writing a book and it was really just notes It wasn’t really anything that anybody would have read including myself because it was it was very boring and it was on real estate

For doctors, but doctors don’t care about real estate What they want to know is what’s in it for them and how can they get to the end result? They’re not paying for information. They’re paying for transformation and so He didn’t understand that. Yeah, he’s been doing real estate for 30 years But he still didn’t understand the marketing. So I wrote a book for him and the book is

Thomas G. Rendleman (08:04.214)
was a copy of Articles and that sort of thing that I had put together so you could go into the book and online like a PDF and Click on the link and it would take you to the website and the website would give you Automatic updates to whatever is going on. So let’s say it’s a housing

costs in a particular area or Certain things about mortgages that had changed you would get the common upgrade and You don’t have to change the book and that’s a very big thing and Amazon won’t allow you to do that in most cases, which is one of the reasons why people Yeah, they don’t want links There’s been a couple exceptions

Dylan Silver (08:53.134)
with links.

Thomas G. Rendleman (08:59.726)
Alex Hormozi if you’re familiar with him He had a book or two and I haven’t read those books. I’m just going off of what I’ve heard that the links are in there and then They I think it’s like maybe one link in the front and then it takes you to that that page So they do allow links sometimes but it’s not Normal that they’ve done that in the past

Dylan Silver (09:03.034)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:26.828)
And now I want to ask you about turning the branding and the writing of the book into a funnel for them if they’re in a sales funnel or how they are able to process a ties this whole deal, right? So they may come with an idea and they may say, if we want to take the real estate agent example, hey, I’ve got three

Listings currently I’d like to get this to 10 listings on a on a quarterly or monthly rolling basis and I’m interested in writing a book and I come to you with that boom write the book right or let’s do the book and then my thinking is based on

a lot of people’s lack of knowledge of process and how many real estate investors and even agents do I know, right, who are just kind of winging it. They don’t really have a system and a process that you would not only benefit them from that standpoint, but also from the, let’s systematize this. Let’s see where the holes are in your game. And how can we kind of use the marketing and the branding in order to draw people back as leads into the business?

Thomas G. Rendleman (10:43.106)
Yeah, well the idea there would be to write a book, which is what I would normally do and I would white label it so I put their name, their contact information just as if they wrote it. And what that does is when they give it out, like on…

Facebook or a website the idea there is to generate interest and To get an email and then be able to use that email over and over again Don’t spam them, but I’m saying give the give the client or potential client Access to things that would be of interest to them Interest might be monthly Sales

Report of some kind talking about different neighborhoods in that area and so on to give To keep in front of the potential client Because when people are looking for something and they want to buy something or they want to use something They’re gonna remember the five or ten things that Came to them over a period of time. It’s not like they’re going to immediately let’s list our house

Dylan Silver (11:57.689)
Ryan.

Thomas G. Rendleman (12:02.01)
However, that has happened in the past It’s not something that you can depend on so you have to keep in front of people and this is a way of doing it is to give out a Free book they go to a website they enter in their email it comes to their email and that’s how you capture the email and you have to disclose that That this is going to be used for

Dylan Silver (12:24.836)
Yeah.

Thomas G. Rendleman (12:28.374)
for marketing and most people want that kind of information. They want to have more information about what they’re potentially wanting to do, whether it’s buying, selling, leasing, any of that stuff. It’s who are they going to use? They’re going to use the person that looks like they’ve been in business a while, looks like they know what they’re talking about, and a book is a perfect way to push that agenda.

Dylan Silver (12:57.22)
Credibility, yeah.

Thomas G. Rendleman (12:58.498)
I know what I’m doing. Yeah. So that’s,

Dylan Silver (13:01.132)
I was speaking with a gentleman yesterday who has a company that helps people plan for and deal with estates to my understanding, but it uses AI. And so a lot of the times, and I don’t know if this is exact model, but this is what I was thinking, whether it’s his business or maybe a new potential business that I thought of, but people need assistance.

in so many areas and specifically with like an aging population, parents, family, grandparents, so on and so forth. so ultimately those people when they’re dealing with estates and settling estates, they’re going to have real estate that they’re going to need to part ways with or do something with at some point or figure out what to do with. Right. So whether it’s estate planning or whether it’s connecting people with

people that could help with maybe elderly care and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of I would say freebies or or low cost information that people can give away that would have high utility that even you know AI can help with a lot of this. That could still become leads down the line and in talking with him he was saying yeah people are using this in the insurance space to this idea of like hey let me provide you a cost effective or free service that

Once I see that there’s enough like catalysts or signs that, hey, you may be about to sell your property, sell your estate or in the insurance space, you may be looking for a new insurance or type of insurance that that’s what I’m going to get in touch with you. So this applies to so many different realms. Right. And so if people have email lists, people have the book and if they have this information that is cost effective or that they’re able to provide at a reduced rate in some way.

And they’re also able to see maybe through AI, hey, this is the instance where they had this question or this is where they interacted with the app in this way. I should reach out to them now.

Thomas G. Rendleman (15:06.87)
Yeah, there’s a lot of freebies. There’s a lot of ways of doing it for free. The problem comes in that we only have a limited amount of time to work on these things. And so it’s like the Henry Ford idea. You you start with…

Certain thing and you work your way through it, but now it’s very complex because it isn’t just an assembly line. It’s It’s about a lot of other things that have to be done and you can’t learn all those it’s not possible and Continue to work on your business. So it’s better to get somebody that can actually do those things and Set up the marketing and then you as the entrepreneur

Need to push that and so that’s kind of the new way of doing it To give you an example, it’s difficult to do like the doctor the The things that my friend was trying to get doctors to retire and use him it’s it’s

very difficult to do that in marketing wise and still run the process to find the house to do the property management to do all these things. You have to take most everything off of your plate to really make it work and focus on one thing and that is to get the client.

You have VAs or, in this case, AI agents, which are another story, to be able to speed up the process. Because you just can’t do everything yourself. If you try to do everything yourself, you will fail in 2025. You just can’t do it.

Dylan Silver (17:03.748)
You’re competing with machines at this point, right? So Tom, we are coming up on time here. I know that you’re rolling out Fire Everyone AI. This episode should be live either sometime, I would say August or early September. Where can folks go if they want to maybe learn more or they may be interested in a book for themselves?

Thomas G. Rendleman (17:27.882)
just go fireeveryoneai.com and that will be up and running very shortly. It’s not up and running right now. And if you want to call me directly, I can give out my phone number. Is that okay? It’s 1520-728.

Dylan Silver (17:44.76)
Go ahead, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

Thomas G. Rendleman (17:51.246)
8030 that’s one five two zero seven two eight eight zero three zero. You can just call me directly you know the the thing is is that When you’re offering something You have to have that connection I don’t mind people calling me if if I’m if I’m sleeping in the middle of the night I won’t answer the phone I have it turned off or I have it turned on mute but if I’m up

I’m there and that’s one of the things that real estate people should do is if they are up And not with a client they should answer that phone because if you don’t answer the phone within just You know seconds there at a voicemail and if they leave a voicemail No more than five minutes. They’re calling another agent so Get in tune and do your job

It’s about people even though AI is very powerful. It’s all about that human touch. If you don’t have the human touch at all You won’t make a dime in my opinion

Dylan Silver (19:00.962)
That’s the truest thing that you could possibly say, no question. As much as AI is replacing so much, think people, even, I think it was YouTube that said we’re not gonna monetize the AI video. So everyone wants still real connection and to be able to talk to people, which is interesting, right? But Tom, thank you for coming back on the show here today.

Thomas G. Rendleman (19:28.355)
One last thing, if your viewers want to really do something,

Just make sure you bring value. Even AI with value will work, but you have to have that human connection. If you don’t ever have a human connection and you’re just having AI write a bunch of stuff, it won’t work. You have to have stories, you have to have interests, things that connect with people. And then make sure you pick up your phone, because that’s the biggest issue. When I was a broker, agents just don’t pick up their

And if you don’t pick up your phone, how are you gonna do it? How are you gonna get a client and how are you gonna keep a client because if agents feel or clients feel like they’re being ignored They’ll just go out and get a different agent. It doesn’t even matter if they sign a buyer-broker agreement or or anything else So thank you for having me on and make sure you pick up your phones people

Dylan Silver (20:34.072)
Tom, thanks for coming on.

Thomas G. Rendleman (20:36.194)
Thank you. Talk to you soon.