In my early twenties I worked nine to five at a call center, and until my third year there it “did not occur to me that I could get paid by anybody other than an employer.” Then somebody who saw me learning SEO pointed me at a tailor who needed help ranking. “I actually bartered for my first tailored suit.” The jacket still fits. The pants don’t.
I told that story to Rich Thomas on Unscripted Small Business. Rich is co-founder and VP of Sales at CHAOS Supplies and runs sales for CHAOS Moto, and he’s been an entrepreneur since he was selling things in front of his parents’ house in upstate New York. What I took from him wasn’t about AI tools. It was about people: who you hire, what you hand off, and what you do with the time AI gives back.
You can watch the full episode or listen on Castos.
Hire your opposite, or you end up dating yourself
Rich said his biggest fear in hiring is finding somebody exactly like himself, who does everything his way and brings no creativity he doesn’t already have. “You really need somebody who’s different and can bring an opposing view, but still be positive and moving in the right direction.”
The way I put it on the show, it’s like dating someone who orders their burger your way and cheers for your team, until one day you realize “I’m kinda dating myself.” You should have gone for complementary. Rich loved that, then added the part I hadn’t thought about. If someone is excellent, Rich always wonders why they aren’t out running their own shop. So you’re looking for a narrow band: “you want somebody who’s really good, but not so good that they leave you.”
If you’ve hired your first few people, you know that tension. You want the person who argues with you, and you’re nervous they’ll eventually leave to do it on their own. Rich’s way through it is to help them anyway. He has an employee with a side business, and he’s helped him “tremendously.”
Boredom is a hiring signal
Rich spent years trying to do his own marketing. “I tried forever to design websites, build websites, do SEO.” Community college, evening classes, his own software. It didn’t stick, and not because he couldn’t learn it. Sitting at a computer “typing stuff in and waiting for a result” bored him.
So he hired a friend, Alex Storch, who went on to finish a master’s in digital marketing at USC. Rich’s report on how that went: “he has blown up the business, like you can’t imagine.” Alex runs AI agents, finds leads on LinkedIn and rebranded the company. Rich went back to what he’s good at:
“Sales is what I do. Anything outside of that, I struggle with.”
Here’s the part I’d underline if you’re a solo operator. Rich didn’t hand off the boring work because he got too busy. He handed it off because someone else would enjoy it and be better at it. “Find people who really enjoy doing it and keep motivated.” I’ve written about the same lesson from Alan Lazaros on not being the bottleneck.
AI gains should be reinvested, not cashed in as layoffs
Rich says Alex’s AI agents have probably found over $75,000 worth of oversights in billing, invoicing and accounting in six months. That’s the kind of number that tempts an owner to start cutting. Rich went the other way:
“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.”
I agree, and here’s the thought experiment I used on the show. Go back to the 1990s and tell Microsoft you can make its employees 10% more productive. They would never answer, “Great, let’s cut ten percent of our workforce.” They’d ship more product, reduce churn and fix more bugs. So if AI saves your team time, anything you gain should go back into the business “to accelerate income, to expand product offerings, to deepen customer satisfaction, anything else is just foolish.”
Attorney Matthew Fornaro made a version of this point when AI replaced his overhead but not his judgment. The tool takes tasks. Where the freed-up hours go is still your call.
The safety glasses story is the part AI can’t copy
The story that stuck with me most was about a customer who called Rich about a pair of prescription safety glasses from two and a half years back. They never fit, he never wore them, and he never returned them. Rich offered him a free pair, asked his height and weight, and offered to send out “three samples of glasses to try on” so the final pair would fit. His reason: “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.”
Then he told the customer, “You’re gonna be a customer for life, right?” The customer is a manager who now tells his own workers to wear them. “AI’s not gonna do that, right?”
That same instinct is why Rich’s team calls AI-sourced leads back fast. He says three new customers in a month moved their business to CHAOS because “We called back within an hour of the lead coming in off of AI.” I quoted Jake Melendy’s speed-to-lead study from memory on the show and got the number wrong. What his mystery shopping actually found: over half of the service businesses he contacted never responded at all, and only 2% of the ones that did followed up more than once. Alex Radetic’s version of the same lesson is the black hole after the conversion.
What I’m taking from Rich
- Hire for the argument, not the echo. A complement who disagrees with you makes better decisions than a copy who agrees.
- Hand off what bores you, on purpose. If you dread a task, someone else probably loves it. Rich’s version: “just don’t even try to do those other things.”
- Treat AI as a lead source, not a closer. “AI will get you there to one point, but now you have to do the rest of the work.”
- Reinvest the hours. Put what AI saves into more output, better service and faster follow-up, not a smaller team.
Rich summed up the whole company as “a result of great parenting.” His parents let six kids sell anything out front of the house, and he never stopped. For the full episode recap, read Rich Thomas on why AI brings the lead and a human closes it on Unscripted Small Business, and for the marketing angle, what AI-referred leads need from your landing page and your sales team on SEO Arcade. You can find Rich’s products at CHAOS Moto and CHAOSRXOptics.