Joe Apfelbaum

▶0:05HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we highlight the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Now, let's Let's get started and welcome our next guest. Welcome to the Build by People podcast. Today I'm joined by Joe Applebaum. Joe, thanks for joining me today.

▶0:40GuestThank you for having me on the podcast, Alan. I'm really excited about seeing you here.

▶0:44HostAbsolutely. Hey, as a starting point, I always like to start off by hearing a little bit about your career journey, maybe some unexpected turns, what ultimately led you to leadership.

▶0:53GuestSo for me, it's about when I started, my father really wanted me to be a rabbi. That was his goal for me. In life. I don't know what your father wanted you to do, but my father wanted me to be a rabbi. And after successfully becoming a rabbi, I realized that's not something that I wanted to do myself. I wanted to make money and do a business and that type of stuff. But I didn't have any experience in doing that. So I went to my mother and I was crying to her, telling her, I don't know what I'm going to do to make money. I want to have a family. I want to have money. And so she took me to the library and she said, formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. So I got, went to the library, I got books on web design, I got books on computers, all types of stuff like that. And I started building websites and then people started asking me, Joe, hey, can you build me a website? And I said, of course, this is fun for me. And they're like, we'll pay you. And I was like, what? You're gonna pay me to build you a website? I could build a website in 2 seconds. And they're like, yeah, I'll pay you to build me a website. So I ended up selling web design to people just from the fact that people were just saying, hey, we need a website. And so, uh, that turned into customers starting to complain to me. They started saying, hey, you built me a website, but nobody came to it. You said if you build it, they will come. I said, that's a famous saying. I don't know if it's true. It's apparently not true. If you build it, they will not come. You need to market it. So I started doing research in marketing and there's a concept called SEO. Have you ever heard of that before?

▶2:09HostYeah, I sure have.

▶2:10GuestSo search engine optimization was very popular back then because, you know, you would just make a few changes to the website and all of a sudden, boom, you're ranking on the first page of Google and other search engines. And so I got really, really good at SEO. I reverse engineered their algorithm. And I got hundreds of people to start wanting to pay me for SEO. And that turned into leading one of the fastest growing companies in America. I started Ajax Union back in 2008, and we quickly grew to be one of the fastest growing companies in America. Then I discovered seminars and I discovered personal development and I discovered networking and relationship building. And I started to do that and take that very, very seriously. And one of the ways that I do networking was on LinkedIn. And so I reverse engineer how LinkedIn works.. And so I started getting lots of clients from LinkedIn and people started saying, dude, how are you doing this LinkedIn thing? How does it work? And so I started teaching people that, and then I realized I can create a course cuz people are willing to pay for it. And so I started creating courses on LinkedIn and how to use LinkedIn. I trained over 1,100 companies on how to leverage LinkedIn. And that turned into AI because now AI can help people with LinkedIn and with other stuff. And so I started really digging into AI and with all my knowledge of being a web designer and being a marketer and being a networker and getting really good at sales and things like that, I ended up being able to help a lot of people. And with AI, attach AI to that, to those skills, suddenly I can really impact people deeply. So now I'm on a mission to help 1,000 people change their life and generate $100 million in economic activity for, in their business. So if I help each person generate $100K in profit in their business, 100,000 times 1,000 is 100 million. And so that's the goal. The goal is for me to impact people very, very deeply, make a difference for them in their life. And I'm helping coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, people that are tech sales leaders like yourself, helping them be able to leverage LinkedIn in a powerful way to take their life and their business to the next level.

▶4:03HostI love that, Joe. That's awesome. And that's, there's a lot of purpose in what you're doing there. As you look kind of and self-evaluate right now, what are some of your top priorities?

▶4:11GuestI think my top priority right now is to help more people. Leverage LinkedIn. So I want to help people that have sales teams that are sales leaders make a difference in their business by going into their business and, and really impacting in a very deep way. That would be a massive win for me.

▶4:28HostI love that. That's great. And we need to talk offline too.

▶4:31GuestThat'd be great.

▶4:33HostGreat. What's one initiative you rolled out recently, either for your own company or for a client that you're really proud of?

▶4:40GuestI'm really proud of a client, Tina. Tina came to us. She didn't really know how to leverage LinkedIn. She was a networker for quite some time. Time. And we taught her our 9-step framework on how to create a strategy, how to build the right assets and the right actions to take every single day on LinkedIn. As a result of the work that we did with her, she tripled her business over the past 2 years, completely changed the way that she operates. We had another client that came to us. They had 62 sales reps, but the sales reps weren't using LinkedIn effectively. They were kind of just on there to be lookie-loos, to be lurkers, to be watching what people are doing. We did a series of trainings for their team. We gave them an AI to help them be able to be more effective. One of the sales reps that took the most action ended up closing a million-dollar deal. So think about that in terms of ROI. They only spent a few thousand bucks on the training, but they got a million dollars worth of revenue. And now all their sales reps are all motivated to be able to start leveraging the platform by posting, engaging, and messaging and connecting, because that's the way to do it these days. It's all about LinkedIn. So That's the initiative that I rolled out and that's the results that we got.

▶5:43HostSo communication, it's obviously becoming harder and harder to really get engagement, right? And you deal with that, getting engagement on LinkedIn, getting a brand name, really building that, that personal brand. So what's one area where you're trying to improve engagement through better communication, or how are you approaching making people actually see, understand, and act on information?

▶6:04GuestI think that people are now starting to use AI more than ever in their communication. And I think a lot of employees are not, a lot of employees are not trained on how to use AI in an authentic way. And so they end up not using AI at all. What I think people need to do is they need to clone themselves with teaching AI what exactly you sound like, what words you use, what words you don't use. Should you use long sentences? Should you use short sentences? And once you train the AI on exactly how to speak exactly the way that you would speak, then suddenly it becomes a no-brainer to start using artificial intelligence in the right way. But most people are not doing it correctly because they don't even, they didn't even take the time to identify their voice strategy and how they speak. And so what I do is I'll go into a company and I'll download exactly how each person speaks, train an AI so that they can communicate more effectively. And when you do that with AI, it becomes more efficient, it becomes more effective, And people start moving things faster.

▶7:02HostMakes sense. What tools or platforms are most essential for your operations today?

▶7:06GuestI would say tools related to marketing and sales. Those are the most essentials. Have you heard of GoHighLevel? Mm-hmm. So we're very big fans of GoHighLevel. We actually integrate into GoHighLevel Evy AI, our tool that we use consistently to be able to post, engage, and message on LinkedIn to be able to research prospects. That's essential. All the different AI tools that comes along with it, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Suite, those are tools that are imperative for our operation to be able to do the things that we need to do. I also use a variety of different AI tools that help me out, like tools that help me edit videos, tools that help me create presentations, slide decks, tools that are super agents, MCPs. I use tools like make.com, N8N, Zapier. Those are tools that really help me on the backend as well. And then I do vibe coding and I use tools like Lovable, bolt.new, and I use Replit, Cursor. Those are the tools that I'm constantly teaching my students how to use. And in terms of community tools, I use school.com. To host our community. We also use ActiveCampaign and we use several other tools like SMTP tools, but for the most part, LinkedIn has been the tool that has generated the most revenue for our business.

▶8:10HostOh, that's great. And I love that you're so tech forward and you're thinking, you're not afraid of technology. I feel like a lot of, uh, leaders that I interview or talk to, there's a level of maybe nervousness around using tech, but I, I love that you're embracing that.

▶8:24GuestYeah. And, and, and embracing tech brings us to like my vision, what I wanna do. Over the course of the next 12 months, I want to be able to add another 1,000 people to start using Evvii AI in a meaningful way. So 1,000 people, that means people that are using our pro version of Evvii AI, supporting them on a deep level. We do tech support twice a day, every day, holding people hand to help them be able to be more effective. So for example, you have 1,000 people in your network, we'll download your entire network, use AI to research your whole network, tell you who you need to be commenting on, who you need to be engaging with, will help you be able to write the comments on each person's post with a click of a button so that you can have AI do 80% of the work. And so over the course of the next year, we're gonna be impacting many, many people deeply. We're not trying to go viral, but we're looking to make a difference for 1,000 organizations and their employees. That's great.

▶9:16HostIf you could leave one piece of advice for our community, Joe, maybe something you wish you had known earlier in your career, just Any advice in general, what would it be?

▶9:24GuestInvest in your people, train your people. So many organizations are not willing to train their sales teams properly. Spend as much as you spend on their salary on their training and watch what happens. It'll completely revolutionize the way they show up, the dedication they have to your company. If you are not investing in training right now, your employees are not learning. And if you're not growing, you're dying. So if you want an organization that's thriving, if you wanna have a high revenue per employee, hire really, really smart employees that have an amazing attitude and then train the crap outta them. Teach them AI, teach them LinkedIn, teach them soft skills, teach them hard skills, teach them how to do the job really, really well and watch your company thrive.

▶10:05HostThat's great. Well, Joe, thanks for your perspective today. Thanks for joining us on the Built by People Podcast.

▶10:09GuestAppreciate it.