Vendasta

*Gen Zeya has entered the chat.* If you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you've already met the newest face on our set. Please welcome Zeya Maquinay-Nicolas to the Vendasta team as our new on-camera host! She's new to our set but not to video. Zeya grew her TikTok account to more than 150,000 followers. That means she's already been through the trial and error most creators quit halfway through. She knows how to hold an audience past the first three seconds, and she watches retention data as closely as she watches the camera. And you've noticed. Her first two videos with us have already passed 20,000 views. Her latest opens with a hard number: 96% of local businesses say no when you pitch them AI. That's basically everyone. Zeya walks through what we learned from studying 7,000 of them, including the vocabulary swap that took interest from 4% to 81%. 🤯 If you sell AI to local businesses, try it. Link to episode and sales deck in comments. You can expect more videos that you want to watch. Drop by the channel and tell us what you think. You like the new set? Welcome to the team, Zeya! 🙌

Not only is she incredibly talented at running the people behind the business, Jean Parchewsky is also an amazing speaker. She'll be speaking at Waterstone Human Capital 's summit in Vancouver this week about leading in the age of AI.

Every location. Every call. Every lead. For multi-location franchise brands, the gap between a lead coming in and someone following up is where revenue quietly disappears. Some networks find nearly a third of their leads never get a response. This is what it looks like when AI covers that gap across your whole network, from corporate down to each franchisee. Let AI handle that. https://lnkd.in/gXiWru_i

Everyone online says voice agents are saturated and you're too late. It's your algorithm talking. Search "voice agents" once and your whole feed turns into voice agents. So it feels like everyone is doing it. They're not. Michele Torti, founder of the AI Automation circle, says the people who know these tools and want to sell them make up a tiny slice of the market. And the tech only got good enough for local businesses in the last year or so. Michele is only 21. Three years ago he had zero technical skills and zero business experience. On the Conquer Local podcast, he walks through the six steps he'd follow if he started an AI agency from scratch tomorrow. He once charged $500 for a two-hour build. Six months later it had made the client over $8,000, and now he quotes $10.8K for that kind of system, plus $2K a month to run it. Same two hours of work. Over 20 times the price. And the pricing shift is only part of it. He was booking up to 6 sales calls a day and closing 1 in 20. Then he changed one thing about the first call. His close rate jumped to 40%. He has a way to find businesses that need his offer before he ever calls them. It takes about 30 seconds, and the prospect qualifies themselves. Watch the whole episode (link in comment).

Today, Vendastians are wearing orange. In 1973, six-year-old Phyllis Webstad showed up for her first day at St. Joseph Mission Residential School in Williams Lake, B.C., in a new orange shirt her grandmother bought her. Staff took it from her that day. She never saw it again. Phyllis shared her story in 2013. Since then, the orange shirt has stood for the children taken from their families and communities: those who survived residential schools, and those who never came home. On September 30, wearing one says every child matters. A few Vendastians spent the day at Wanuskewin, where Northern Plains peoples have gathered for more than 6,000 years. They helped run the park's Truth and Reconciliation activities. Their day was part of our Local Impact Week(we'll share more about that soon!). Every Vendastian gets 8 paid hours a year to volunteer in their community. Today, we're thinking about how we use them, and listening to the truths that make reconciliation possible.

Don't sell your clients an AI agent (yet). Here's the $999 thing to sell first: A 45-minute AI tools assessment. That's rung one on Corey Ganim's ladder. He runs Return My Time on his own, with no team, and bills $1,000 an hour for about 90 minutes of delivery a month. He sells the agent last. It's the hardest thing to build well and the easiest thing to break in front of a client. And around 99% of companies have no context layer for an agent to work from. Here's the full ladder: ☑️ AI tools assessment: 45 minutes, $999 ☑️ Process redesign ☑️ Automation build ☑️ Knowledge system (the context layer) ☑️ Custom workflow ☑️ Full implementation: $5K–$10K ☑️ AI concierge: $1,200–$1,800/mo ✅ The AI agent His rule for every build: never automate 19 steps that should be 10. Audit how the work happens today, cut it down, and only then automate. And every build has to do at least one of three things: make the client more money, save them time, or improve their product. If it does none of them, he doesn't take it on. Which rung would your clients buy first? (Send this to whoever prices your AI work. Full episode in the comments.)

The first ten minutes inside your product is the highest-intent moment you will ever get with a customer. Most software spends it asking for a logo upload. We moved our onboarding email so it waits until the AI has built the website, trained the receptionist, audited 40+ directories, and filled out the profile. Then it sends, with the finished work listed out. Logins went up more than 21%. Before you approve another quarter of acquisition spend, go look at what happens in those ten minutes in your own product. That number is a lot cheaper to move than the one at the top of the funnel. Link to the newsroom release in the first comment rather than the body, same as the launch post.

Every agency uses AI. Almost none of them let it finish anything. That gap is what we're trying to measure. The wording is narrow on purpose: what runs without you reading it first, not what you've tried and not what's open in a tab right now. "Nothing yet" is a real answer and we expect it to win. Leave it honest. Vote below. In the comments, tell us the last thing you stopped checking, and how long it took before you trusted it.

Our onboarding email used to fire the moment an account was created. That's the obvious moment to send it. It's also the worst one, because at that instant the account is empty. We were inviting people to log in and look at a blank page. So we made the email wait. It now holds until the AI has researched the business, built and published a starter website, trained an AI Receptionist on that company's own products, and audited how they show up across 40+ review sites and directories. Then it sends, with the finished work listed out and a link to inspect each item. Same audience. Same product. Nearly the same copy. Logins went up more than 21%. The full write-up is below: what local business owners told us they actually want from onboarding, why the industry's standard answer to that finding is the wrong one, and what it means for the unpaid setup work agencies have been absorbing for years.

The way Jeff Pierce prices AI is genius. We had him on Conquer Local recently, and he's doing something we haven't seen many agencies do. Most agencies price AI the way they've always priced software: take the cost, mark it up 100%, send the invoice. Jeff Pierce, cofounder of Crosshair Digital Marketing, Inc. threw that model out. Instead, he starts by asking " how much money can this recover for this business in a year?" Then he prices from there. For one client, a truck accessories shop in Florida, his AI receptionist started catching the calls the team had been missing on nights, weekends, and lunch hours. The owner estimates it brought in around $300K+. Not from new leads. From customers who were already calling. His core AI package sells for $6,750/month. His onboarding fees have gone up, and he says they'll probably go up again. In his words, most of these AI products from Vendasta work pretty well right out of the box, but that's the starting point, not the end point. The real value is in the tuning. That means teaching every AI employee to sound like the business, think like the business, and answer the phone like the best employee the owner could ever dream of hiring. His own AI took that VERY seriously. His social media agent renamed itself "Strategic Content Director," generated its own headshot, and now greets him every morning with "Good morning, sir. What's our tactical mission for today?" Just a brilliant example of what "customized" actually looks like. If you sell AI to local businesses, this one will change how you write your next proposal. We go through his whole package, line by line. It's an incredible time to be scaling your agency. Watch the full episode: Link in comment.