From Forensic Science, Recruiter, Real Estate to Founder: Chris Gulotta’s Unconventional Journey

Chris Gulotta: it's not necessarily about replacing the people that are doing the job. That's not the aim. It's about

Carmen: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: freeing up the people to actually do dollar productive tasks and tasks that AI can't do.

Carmen: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Behind the Founders. My name is Carmen Dervet and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. And joining me here today is Chris Galotta. Chris, welcome. Can you introduce yourself?

Chris Gulotta: Thank you, Carmen. Yeah, good to be speaking with you. Hi everyone. My name's Chris Galotta from Next Layer AI. My business helps businesses to learn, build, and implement AI-based systems. So yeah, I'm really happy to be speaking with you.

Carmen: Yeah, great. Very, very exciting for us to dive into the discussions and see how you're of course going to be able to help other businesses scale and navigate the use of AI as well. So I've had the chance to take a look at your LinkedIn profile. You've come quite a long way. You know, you've had a lot of different turning points and journey. You were in sales, you were working as a recruiter. So let's talk a little bit about your life before next layer AI. What was that like?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, I've been on a bit of a strange journey, as we were just saying before the before we started recording. It's it's been a bit of a a shift for me. I actually left school and started becoming a forensic scientist, which not a lot of people know, but I actually hated that. I'm not very good at maths or chemistry. So that pretty important criteria to be in that field. So yeah, I left and started my career in sales, eventually yeah, got into real estate and was a real estate agent for a number of years before making my way into technology. I'd always had a a passion and sort of a natural gravitation towards technology. So I did a little bit in technology recruiting and found my way then into e-commerce businesses and software as a service businesses and working my way through the ranks there as a junior seller, as an SDR, and then an account executive right the way up to helping businesses on the enterprise side learn and implement scalable e-commerce systems. And most recently, yeah, finished up a role at CrowdStrike before starting NextLair AI, so the the cybersecurity company. So that's it's been a a very very fun, varied varied, I should say, varied journey. and yeah, it's been very good experiences along the way.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. I'm I'm pretty sure that you've picked up a lot of different experiences and takeaways along the way. You know, I always believe that the journey is never linear, right? You would assume, okay, this is what I'm gonna be going for, but there's a lot of pivotal points, you know, to go from recruitment, to go from sales. You were once working in the field of forensic science and you worked into tech, and now you're founding your own company. So that's definitely a very interesting journey as well. So I guess the next question that I do have is what made you decide to start your own business and build next layer AI. What was the motivational force behind that?

Chris Gulotta: yeah, it's an interesting one. I come from a very traditional family and I was always taught that you work hard and and you do the right things and you have your nine to

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gulotta: five. So this was a very, very big shift for me.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gulotta: coming from like an Italian background, you know, you you work hard and you do your job and you go home and and you know, that's kind of what you do. So actually starting my own business was a pretty big step. It really was born out of the the want for me to have a little bit more control over my own time and and have freedom over how I spend my time and not necessarily be, you know, stuck to a desk. I do like working hard. I working hard, but you know, just having the freedom and autonomy to to set your own schedule and to to sort of find your own way was something that really attracted me. And having been in the the corporate world or in a nine to five for, you know, going on twelve years, I thought it was just time for a bit of a change. And yeah, you know, I'm 31 now. So I thought if I'm ever going to do it, it's gonna be now, it's not gonna be later in life, you know, when kids come along and that kind of thing. So yeah, I'm I took the leap. And really with AI, the the purpose for me was to Help businesses just to actually understand it because what I was finding, and you know, I started my business this year, actually in 2026. And, you

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: know, even as of right now, you find businesses that still don't even have a website and maybe still don't really

Carmen: yeah, that's true.

Chris Gulotta: have the understanding of what value a website can bring. so every business and every business owner, and you know, whether you're a half a million dollar business or you're running a a multi-seven or eight figure figure million dollar business, It it everybody's on a a different stage in their technology journey. So I saw that as an opportunity for me to come in with AI being such a a huge new disruptive technology to be able to help business owners understand where they're at with technology, where AI can actually help them in their business, beyond the flashy stuff that you see on social media where you've got people saying that they have 12 AI agents running their life. I'm not that type of

Carmen: Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: Person, I like to take a lot more of a consultative approach and build AI intelligently around the systems and processes that businesses already use. And I think leaning on my background at various technology companies and speaking with very, very large businesses globally, I think it really helped me have a good foundational experience to come from a place of being able to actually understand businesses and help them, you know, figure out where they are on their journey with AI or technology in general and how they could maybe plot out or plan for their growth over the next 12 to 18 months, which as we're We're all seeing AIs everywhere. So it's it's very, very hard

Carmen: Yes.

Chris Gulotta: with all of the noise for business owners to actually do their full-time role and also focus on this new disruptive technology. So yeah, that's that's where we come in.

Carmen: Okay, yeah, no, definitely for sure. I think it is quite interesting what you mentioned that you know s even some let's say While long established companies still don't have their own website, you know, and especially when there's all this noise happening with a lot of AI, we're being surrounded by AI, it is really crucial to know, okay, how can we optimize and make the most use of that as well? So I just wanted to clarify. So are you providing consultation services to help all these different businesses navigate how they can optimize and make the most out of AI, or how what are the different services that you offer?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, it's a it's a great question. So I actually started out on a bit of a journey within this business. I started out offering business as voice AI receptionists. and I just found

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: that the the trends for technology in Australia, typically, which is where I'm based, they tend to sort of follow around sort of nine to twelve months behind the US. And the technical adoption in the US is right now, they're really starting to take off on voice AI. And I think Australia is maybe just a little bit. Further back on that progression curve. So I shifted and now I offer a three-pillared approach to my clients. And since making that shift, I've noticed a lot more businesses being willing and receptive to having conversations about AI. So the services I offer is basically I consult with businesses initially on an operations diagnostic, and that helps me understand exactly what tools they use. I'll interview some of their staff and provide them with a pretty comprehensive report back on. All of the things

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: and opportunities that the business could implement for AI. So it's more of an evaluative, consultative process at first. And then in terms of implementation, we operate on a three three-layer framework. So it's building systems around the business's workflows and systems that they already use. It's educating the team, the business owner, and the wider stakeholders around AI, what the AI space is. what's happening in the AI space as well as how to actually use the tools day to day from a tactical perspective and fitting that in around their workflow and then maintaining those systems. So where we've been able to integrate or stitch together various systems that the business uses into AI, making sure that we're keeping those systems running and up to date and optimal and also improving those systems over time. So it's the build, educate and maintain approach that we have.

Carmen: Okay, great. I'm not sure if it's okay for you to share because I can imagine, right, you work with a lot of different businesses, but could you share maybe like a typical example? Let's say, you know, once you've got onto the call, you know, and kind of like tailor-made the best approach in terms of how what they should focus on. Do you typically walk them through the different types of tools that they should navigate or what what what would the typical process be like afterwards?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, good question. So we basically give them a breakdown on their ecosystem. So I'll use a hypothetical business as an example. So there might be a business out there that uses the Microsoft stack. So they have Outlook and Calendar. Maybe they're not using any AI. They have HubSpot or Monday.com as their CRM. So I would come into that business and if they have three or four staff, I would interview all the staff typically for an hour each. I would get them to screen share with me and actually walk through the different things that they struggle with on a day-to-day and they're the clicking and copying and pasting. and doing things manually. And I just

Carmen: Mm.

Chris Gulotta: want to say before we go further on the process, it's important for everyone that's listening to know that it's not necessarily about replacing the people that are doing the job. That's not the aim. It's about

Carmen: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: freeing up the people to actually do dollar productive tasks and tasks that AI can't do. So there's no

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: use in having a person sit there and copy and paste between a document and a CRM for two hours when they could instead be making phone calls or meeting with clients or doing things with the team that are actually going to be more effective dollar producing tasks. whereas we're, you know, leaving the manual workflows and things handled by AI. So yeah, that's the main objective. So say that the business has those tools, we'll come in and basically help them understand how those tools all fit cohesively into an AI ecosystem. And we build, we're totally agnostic with AI tools. So it could be Claude, it could be Chat GPT, it could be Grok, it could be

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: a combination of a few different things. and then not only specializing in the LLM tools themselves, but also recommending other tools that maybe are AI adjacent that have some AI features in there, because our first approach is if there is something on the market that does 80% of a certain functionality that you need, rather than us taking weeks to build that tool for you, at least in the meantime, let's just recommend that tool that may be a little bit cheaper to start with. It fits in nicely to your tech ecosystem. And then we can revisit down the line to see if it makes sense to build something for you custom that absorbs a few of those different

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: features. so that's that's generally the approach. And then once we're sitting down, like the main things that resonate really well with business owners that we speak to is a few different categories. So it's it's reclaimed productivity is is the main one. So when I'm actually presenting these diagnostics, it's what time is that person getting back. If it's a a three-hour workflow that we've taken to one hour. That person is reclaiming two hours per day of of productivity that they previously had lost to a manual task that they can

Carmen: wow.

Chris Gulotta: now spend doing other things. there's other things as well, like you know, metrics around sales close rates if we're into implementing proposal generation processes or AI agents to help with the quoting and and proposal process for businesses. there's lots that go into it, but it's yeah, typically time reclaimed. And people even as well, I've I've had business owners on calls with me that just say, like, I want AI to work for me so I can spend more time with my family. Sometimes it is as simple as that, and other business

Carmen: of course, yeah.

Chris Gulotta: owners just want to, you know, double down on growth. So that's that's good too.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. It's definitely, you know, I I think there's a lot of power when it comes to showcasing numbers as well, because that's when you can really objectively measure the efficiency that AI can do, right? While also trying to keep the humanistic balance of having the human interaction as well, right? For example, when it comes to calls and not completely delegating everything to AI, but I think it is very powerful to show, you know what? You're you are literally having a portion of your life and your time back as well to be able to focus

Chris Gulotta: Yeah.

Carmen: on other things that AI b AI support won't be able to do as well. yeah, I I have a lot of follow-up questions afterwards as well, but I think the first question I wanted to know was what kind of businesses have you worked with, small scale, large scale, industry wise?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, our specialization's been quite varied. So we've got businesses, solo operators of mortgage broking books doing $200,000 a year. we've got businesses that we're speaking to that are north of $100 million a year and everything in between. So it's quite a variety of mix in terms of industry. I'm tending tending to see a lot in the financial sector, mortgage broking, accounting,

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: financial planning, corporate advisory, those types of businesses really I think can see the potential value in AI and are also experiencing pretty significant pain around manual work. workflows and and processes. The other what other areas as well is like industrial manufacturing, aviation, that sort of sector again has a lot of very text heavy, data heavy processes around you know engineering and that kind of thing that that can definitely be automated as well as the sales side as well. So it's been a real variety, everything from you know automotive, agency for you know marketing agencies as close as they are to technology, again, it's even hard for them to to get a grip on what AI is doing while they're so focused on the marketing side. So yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's quite a variety. There's really not a business that I've come across that there hasn't been a a good fit or a substantial need for so far. It's just I think having business owners or people in a position to have the conversation be receptive about about AI, which I'm seeing increasingly is is is ramping up

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: quite a bit.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah, definitely for sure. It does surround everywhere as well. So, obviously, you know, I have received some of the notes that you sent earlier via email. And there's one thing that you specifically like to go deeper on. So I wanted to, of course, give this opportunity for us to dive deeper into this discussion, which is around the misconceptions or challenges. about AI. So talk to me a little bit more about your thoughts around that.

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, I mean nothing in particular and we've kind of already addressed it, I I think.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: you know, the the the reason why I started this business and sort of zoomed out from s focusing on such a a niche solution like voice AI was I noticed that there was a a problem around AI. When it comes to sentiment, there's a lot of fear and doom and gloom in the industry and on the news everywhere you look. And unfortunately positive news doesn't sell and there's been a lot of positives from AI, but like any technology, there's there's

Carmen: That's true. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: gonna be disruptions. It it's just a a fact of life, unfortunately. And you know, as a salesperson, I think the role I used to have is gonna be one of the first or one of the the the soonest ones that are gonna be disrupted. and I've got family members that are likely to be you know disrupted by AI. But I think whilst there is a lot of doom and groom and I I use the word disruption just to say like I think that the opportunity in the next five to ten years is not necessarily going to be AI agents and Elon Musk's robots coming in and doing everybody's job. I think what is going to happen, and this is pretty commonly reported across a lot of founders and CEOs, is that the people that don't use AI are going to fall behind the people that are leaning in and using AI and learning how to do it as part of their day to day. So if you're a business owner and you're listening to this and and you imagine you have two candidates, two employees applying for a role, And one candidate says, I have no interest, I've never learned AI, I've never tried Claude, I don't wanna know about anything to do with AI, I just wanna do my job and go home. Or on the other side you have another candidate who says, I spend my spare time a couple of hours a week tinkering and learning. I you know, I use Grok for certain tasks or I built myself an automation to scrape some news for me every every morning or something like that. Even the simplest things to show that you're leaning in and willing to learn and adapt with the new technology, I think that's the direction the world's gonna go. And even right now that we can talk about hiring, I think for me very soon

Carmen: Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: as as as much as I've built AI systems and agents for my business, I'm getting to the stage now

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: where I will need to look at hiring and bringing on potentially some support or or or people around

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: me because AI only does a certain amount of work for you.

Carmen: Absolutely. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: you need somebody to have these human-to-human conversations like this, but also to back up your efficiency as an employee with AI tools and automations and processes that you've learned. So again, back to that hypothetical question. For me personally, I'm always going to lean towards the candidate for the role who has lent into a new technology and can improve their efficiency by 20 or 30%. That's going to be the person I think that will be the disruptor in the new market.

Carmen: Yeah, definitely for sure. And I think it also goes to show that it's also like learning mindset and also that it's about staying informed about the ongoing trends, the ongoing market, and also like trying to upskill yourself as well, you know. so I think that's also like another piece as well. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about you mentioned that, you know, although you are working extensively a lot with the help of AI, you are looking to bring on, you know, some support. in terms of like hiring VAs. My first question is, have you ever had experience hiring offshore VAs before? What was your experience like there?

Chris Gulotta: no, no experience. I'm I'm sort of exploring the process at the moment.

Carmen: Okay. Okay.

Chris Gulotta: I think the the the balancing act for me is, you know, having somebody that I that I can work with or or call on within the business that has that exposure to AI. and I'm starting to see now there is an emergence of candidates in the market. I've just done some sort of high level research and it seems that there are

Carmen: Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: people out there with that expertise. So yeah, no no real experience on my side, but keen to get into

Carmen: Okay. Okay.

Chris Gulotta: it. Because like I said, I think the the tooling and the agents can only get you so far. You still need people to consult with clients and to, you know, understand workflows and to ask really good questions and to be a human to actually understand and to care about

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: the business rather than than just having an agent collect feedback and building systems from there.

Carmen: Yeah. And just going back to the fact that, you know, while we were discussing, you were talking a lot about all of the different day to day tasks that you're involved in. You know, you interview the staff, you're also doing the consulting, building, coming up with a different program. I can imagine that it is quite time consuming, right? so you mentioned that, you know, going forward, you're looking to find one or two people to support you. If in terms of that If you could delegate some tasks that you want to take off your plate, what what would it be and what kind of person are you looking to hire?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, it's a great question. I'm I'm a big fan of Alex Hormosy and he recommends when you are looking at bringing on your first hire, whether it's a contractor or a full-time employee or anyone in between, it's important to understand. what tasks you should be delegating. And I'm kind of going through that process at the moment. So I basically sort of roadmapped my entire business and looked at the the journey of a customer through start to finish. I've

Carmen: Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: identified some opportunities probably in the second half, I think, given my background, I personally would like to retain the sales and the marketing. And I'm still learning paid ads, but all that side of things and the organic content.

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: and and that side of things. and then potentially having somebody I think come on board to run more of the delivery. So I mentioned that three pillar approach that we execute across. So helping

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: clients understand and learn and educate teams on AI systems would be a big thing. So having somebody that's pretty adept in using even basic AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude and

Carmen: Okay.

Chris Gulotta: some basic automation workflows would be would be good. And then obviously building those systems. I'm not a super technical person but I've somehow managed to build some pretty good system. So again, they

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: don't have to be a coder, but just somebody that has a fundamental understanding of how to translate a workflow workflow from a concept into a system that people can actually use. And that's a fine balance that point.

Carmen: Okay. Yeah. Speak like a different language. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, I think you know, there are some very, very technical people out there that when they try to approach a a business problem or constraint or workflow, the outcome is sometimes too technical and it's it works incredibly efficiently and it's probably better than anything I could build, but without ha having a proper understanding of the business, sometimes the usability or the the interactivity factor that the business would have, you know, there could be a great automation, but if it's hard for people to use or to to start or to kick off.

Carmen: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: then that's going to be a big bottleneck in terms of, you know, the process itself. and then yeah, working as well with maintaining, not only maintaining the systems, but maintaining the client, meeting with staff on a r regular basis, keeping everybody happy and, you know, going through that that cycle of exactly

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the retention piece as well. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: and learning about new new problems. Once we, you know, automate certain things, there'll always be new things to to work on. So

Carmen: Yeah. Now that makes sense. I mean, definitely sounds like there are a couple of different sets of hands that you could use when it comes to support as well. So have you already started searching and exploring different agencies or different ventures in terms of looking for that support? So where where are you at in terms of that stage of team support?

Chris Gulotta: I think I'm pretty early on, but I think my needs are adapting quite quickly. Like I said, ever since I made that shift in my business over the last sort of four months,

Carmen: Course, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: I I I'm probably starting to really stretch my limits personally on on capacity as a solo person. So I think

Carmen: Okay. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: yeah, whilst it is pretty early, I think the need will eventually well very quickly I think expand. So

Carmen: Yeah, yeah, definitely. For sure. I can imagine that as well. I mean, at the end of the day, right. it's always I think what's interesting is that I've, you know, had a variety of conversations with the guests coming here on this podcast. And a lot of them they've also had experience working with VAs and some of them have a hard time. delegating part of what they do to someone else because it's kind of like, you know, that's their baby. They've been nurturing it, taking care

Chris Gulotta: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: of it. And it's kind of hard to like let go of that. But at the same time, it's also coming down to the trust element, right? Do you trust someone enough to be able to do or execute in the way that you have in terms of align with your vision and your goals and everything like that. So it's like a lot of different factors coming into that as well. so I totally get it. So I actually wanted to circle back to a question that Or something that you brought on earlier, and I'd love to dive into the discussion with you. So you did mention that in the earlier days you started off building this business as like AI receptionist for businesses. So the reason why I wanted to know your thoughts is because we've also worked with different business and clients, and they're like, you know what, we want to bring on a client, a service or customer care specialist because we have like a chat bot in the system and then there's clients or customers coming in asking questions. But as soon as they find out it's an AI chatbot, they're like, no, we want to leave. We want to actually talk with a human. So I just want to love to know from your experience, what are your thoughts around that?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, it's it's a bit of a conundrum, isn't it? I spoke to a business last week. They are growing very rapidly. They're in the financial sector and they are compliantly using AI agents to actually make outbound calls. so it is starting to take off a little bit. And I take your point around people having concerns around speaking to AI, and it's kind of a double-edged sword because and

Carmen: Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: and this is the challenge that I was having when I spoke earlier about freeing up human teams. I think my value perception or my perpetual Perception of this process has shifted. And I personally believe at this point in time, the tasks that we're freeing up humans to do are things like client engagement. And that is my belief. So now I can't really backflip and say, well, yeah, I think AI should be taking phone calls. Cause I think ultimately that's probably the technology to make that to a good enough level is probably going to be here very soon. But I personally don't think it's quite there yet. By the time you factor

Carmen: Mm.

Chris Gulotta: in latency and delays and that kind of thing.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: AI is very good at at phone calls for specific tasks, potentially like routing and doing different things in that regard. And yeah, I think in terms of using AI, it's you know, from the customer's perspective, I think the value to the customer is they're calling for a purpose. So if we can use technology to get them a resolution to their purpose faster, like we've all been on the phone, right? And you it says like press one for sales, press two for this, and then you press two, and then there's three other menus you have to get through by listening and pressing buttons.

Carmen: yeah. It's a lot of pressing buttons. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: That's called an IVR system. Exactly. So I think people will complain about AI and speaking to a robot, but if we're aiming on getting the fastest possible resolution, I would posit the question to people, would you rather speak to an agent that knows the answer to your question and that can help you? That is AI.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: Would you rather sit on hold for 15 minutes and press countless buttons trying to get through to somebody? Because That's really the the difference in value. The other side to that as well is particularly for smaller businesses like trades, you know, they're obviously super busy working very hard day in, day out.

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: They don't always answer the phone. So the challenge is if somebody wants to book an appointment, can we have an agent that answers that call and to answer some basic questions and to book that appointment in to the tradesperson's calendar without them having to stop the job or or put the tools down? So that's the other thing as well. It's just balancing that speed and efficiency and making sure people

Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: do still feel feel cared about. But I think when these systems are built and implemented, consumers and customers should know that it's actually them that, you know, the the business is thinking about and they are top of mind. although it is seemingly impersonal to use a technology like that. The the point of it is to try and get customers help faster, basically. So that's that's that's how I see it personally, yeah.

Carmen: Yeah, definitely for sure. It's all about Yeah, finding the balance as well because I think what I've seen a lot in different websites that I go on, whether it's through WhatsApp or chatbots, is that they do have these generated chatbot FAQs and then you

Chris Gulotta: Mm-hmm.

Carmen: know, so that they're able to answer you in the more generic stuff, but then when it's something very specific, they're like, Hey, I can link you up with like a human agent or something like that. So I think having

Chris Gulotta: Yeah.

Carmen: that is a balance of efficiency, speed, but also while keeping the human element of it as well.

Chris Gulotta: Mm. I think there's a nuance to this conversation as well. Like there was a business that I spoke to a long time

Carmen: It is. Yeah.

Chris Gulotta: ago where they had a support team, I think of around 10 people. And the the bulk of the team were being caught up with their time on answering the phone and just triaging the initial question. But I think more than 50% of their call purposes were very basic, generic, you know, just asking a question about a product or just chasing up my invoice or chasing up my order, all of which an AI could handle. But then there was a subset of around 40%. of calls that were very specific, very detailed, that took the customer representative minutes to forty-five minutes to actually handle. So that is a perfect use case where within a single business even the use case is split because AI should be used to handle the simpler tasks that people can get. help with faster to then free up the support team to actually help the more complex cases and to reduce the wait

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: time on that side of the equation as well. So it's a

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: balancing act. And I think the space will quickly evolve and we'll see in the next six to 12 months that it's very common and normal for voice AI, but right now it's not there yet.

Carmen: Yeah, for sure. Definitely a very nuanced topic as well. And I think that's one of the reasons why we always love to ask our guests, you know, what are your thoughts, perspectives on AI? Because it is so varied, right? And of course there's also like very different views. So I think it's always good to gather those multiple perspectives, how it influences our day-to-day life as well. Okay, great. I would say this, is there anything That this is something I like to ask a lot to my guests coming onto the podcast. But as one of the, you know, last final questions I do like to ask is if there was anything that you would like to pass on or share to the business founders who are just starting out or inspired or thinking of going into the world of entrepreneurship, what would it be?

Chris Gulotta: Yeah, it's a great question. I I think back yourself and believe in yourself, but also have a plan. don't I didn't have a plan. I kind of had a plan, but

Carmen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Gulotta: at the same time, I think you need to strike the right balance of having a plan and also being ready to jump without n having everything figured out. So I think you need to obviously, you know, if someone's listening to this and they want to start a business and leave their nine to five, obviously you need to look like look after your family and do all those things first and set yourself up with a bit of financial runway and and each person will know, you know, their individual situations. But that's probably the the most important thing to to to focus on first is to make sure that you're okay like within your life. And then yeah, if there is an opportunity for you to start a business, I actually I kind of started doing my thing on the side. So I started having some very level conversations. how I actually got started was reaching out to people in my network and running free AI reviews, having free conversations and asking for a review in return and asking for feedback on the process that I ran. And that just helped me firstly get some quick wins on the board. It helped me get some reviews, it helped me gain some confidence in the business, helps me get my my brand out there as well. So anyone that's wanting to start, you don't have to dive in headfirst. You can You know, if you have any any time after hours or outside of hours or on the weekends, offer people things for free if you're a service business. Try and do some work where you can prove your value first to get reviews and to get credit and to get you know, happy customers. And then you can slowly start to ramp up towards getting paid services and then eventually, you know, you may be in the position to to do your thing full time. And that's where I found myself. So yeah.

Carmen: Yeah, great. Chris, thank you so much for this really valuable insight as well. I think there is a lot of value when it comes to, you know, especially in the early stages of starting your own business, to, you know, have through word of mouth, right? You know, to be able to within your personal social network have them do like a trial, even if it's for free, because that would obviously improve your brand, support your branding process, your reputation. all the reviews, which would hopefully have like a snowball effect because they will probably know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who might need your services or, you know, jump on a discovery call and everything like that. So that's definitely very valuable as well. That, you know, just keep pushing, believing in yourself and you know, like your network is your network net worth as well. So Chris, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast again. I'll definitely put all of your website, your Instagram handle in the episode description so that people are able to reach out, stay connected to you. but thanks again, Chris, for joining on and be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. This is Behind the Founders and speak to you soon.