The Importance of AI Business Mentors: How Coaching Communities Accelerate Growth (James Dooley Interviews Alex Drew)

James Dooley: The importance of AI business mentors. Today I'm joined with Alex Drew, who has the ODYS Mentors program and had a mentorship program for a long time, and we've spoke a lot about this over the years. And I believe it's become even more important nowadays in the AI world of having a good mentorship kind of team of people around you that can help elevate your knowledge. And sometimes a mentor could be a no person. So stop wasting money in certain areas. But why do you think it's important to have some, not even a single, but multiple mentors around you?

Alex Drew: Well, again, very good question. And I've been... You've been an early supporter, I think one of the biggest, of the ODYS Mentors program. You kind of love the concept. I remember we, we did the mastermind in Tallinn and I said that is my main thing that I... To be honest, it also was meant to be some sort of corporate operation to kind of give structure to the network of the company, but in a way where there's a win-win. The new version, which is of the ODYS Mentors, which is managed by Gertrude, she wants to put mentors in a room where they win together. It's not about just mentoring someone, the mentees. It's like winning together among mentors. So I, I love this vision. But the thing is you can't be always right. That's number one. Number two, there is always someone smarter than you. Number three, uninformed optimism can get you in trouble. So if you have people within reach, sometimes you may not make a lot of money, but you will save a lot of money to begin with because you won't pour your time and energy and resources into something which might not work or someone else has solved already. How many startup ideas just end up vanishing because all of a sudden three months in they discover a solution already exists? So why not just ask around? Now, when you ask within a Facebook group, you might not get the same response as when you ask within a network of trustworthy individuals that know you. Now, the, the vision behind ODYS Mentors is ever-growing and it's evolving. But, I think that you can't win alone. And you have to have this mentality of abundance where it's like you provide opportunity to people within your network, and you're also able to harness it. I'm also a big believer in avoiding to debate people on certain topics if you know you're right, or if you know they know better than you, in which case you learn. So, why does it make sense for me to debate you if I know you're right? So, I'm learning. But, in case I know that I know my thing, then it's complete waste of time. Let's just move to the next topic. Again, access to a network of mentors, most importantly. And that has been the problem which you addressed at the beginning of the podcast, you know, all those questions like the bubble, especially within the SEO community. Five years, seven years later, you have people that haven't made any substantial progress. Why? Because they haven't looked beyond the boundaries of that SEO bubble or marketing bubble or whatever bubble. Um, I, I think that it's very, very, very strategic to have mentors from different areas of your life. Now, you, you run multiple businesses yourself. You know, you do, you do, you do racehorses and you do lead gen and you SEO and you do AI and you do so many things, right? Um, and each one of those companies has certain people that might not be very good at marketing, or they might not be very good at AI, but they can be someone who can give you a piece of advice. So, those people can be called mentors or even sherpas, even though we kind of embrace the word mentors. And I think mentors... You, you've been my mentor, uh, for many years. Um, not an official mentor, but someone which I always looked towards when I had some, you know, even hard to see, like, "What do you think about it?" So, for you it may be, like, a straightforward answer in just two sentences, but for me it may mean anything because that could save me a million from going to a path where I fail. So, I, I think keeping awesome people close to you in a structured way while giving everyone the chance to win is what we define as ODYS Mentors, and we're going to try and scale it and see how far it gets us.

James Dooley: I'm being asked to someone that's not yet had a mentor, what kind of information and what advice would you give to those people that are trying to do it alone? They're, they're kind of listening to, let's say, another episode that we do about failing fast and they are failing and stuff like that. But sometimes, I mean, we've both spoke about it's important to fail fast, to push the boundaries and stuff like that. But on the flip side, if you can get the advice along the way to not fail and go down a slightly different route, like, look, I went into that and I just ran straight into that brick wall. If you go that way, you can go around this way and stuff like that. Like, mentorship can save you so much time and money. And for me, wasted time is worse than wasted money. I don't like wasting time. So, if someone can help me get to stage number four and stage number five and stage number six and jump from stage number one there, that is worth its weight in gold.

Alex Drew: This is, like, the ultimate hack. I, I don't even... I don't even know why someone would try to... Let's say, you go to a gym and you have... You're absolutely clueless about lifting weights and you start doing it yourself. Maybe you watch some YouTube video, but why not get a coach? Get a coach because he will just, you know, trim that learning curve from whatever couple of months to 10 sessions. Yeah. And get you the basics, get you the fundamentals, at least to get started. And it applies to absolutely everything. If I would want to learn, I don't know, anything, something, let's say, third-party corroborative sources for it, I would probably ask you or someone I know that know... Like, I would pay even. Because that was the very concept initially. People who would book calls and pay with... We did a couple of those in the first version of ODYS Mentors. So, why not shortcut your way? If there is a way to actually do it. Problem is nobody knows how to do certain things. Now, that is a bigger problem. But if there is someone who actually knows how to do it, why not do it through them? And most importantly, people are eager to share. I haven't really met too many people, especially within some sort of close community, that like, "No, I won't explain how this works. No, I won't tell you." Why? Because in most cases, like, one of the reasons why I openly talk about stuff is I know less than 1% will take action. Nobody takes action. Because it's hard. It's actually work. You have to do it, put in the work and time and resources and energy and money and whatever is, is required to, to, to move the needle. So, from that perspective, I think that it's the ultimate hack. It's the ultimate shortcut. And I don't really understand why people aren't actively looking for mentors in every area of their life, from health to business to, I don't know, what, what, whatever is of interest to them.

James Dooley: Yeah. Have you ever heard of people doing this? I mean, we... I actually had it set up and it's a multi-agent kind of... I've got Alex Hormozi being one of them, even mentioned a few times Gary Vee, and I think there's, like, seven or eight others that's within there. James Sinclair is one of them. Daniel Priestley's another. And it's going to learn everything about who they are, what they do, what their kind of mechanisms are of, like, what a successful business looks like and what they believe the future of, let's say, AI is, what the future of marketing is, what they have strong beliefs in. And I kind of throw ideas in there and they, they all come back with different ideas of what they believe I should do. And it's so bizarre how different they come back with. But what it does to me is there isn't ever... They're always right, they're always wrong. The ideation part, it, it's annoying for the wife, if I'm being honest with you, because what ends up happening is in my subconscious, without even me knowing it, 48 hours later I wake up at 2:00 in the morning and it said, "Ding! I've got the idea." And it's normally from an amalgamation of a few different ideas. And I've actually now started to use... It's created within Claude. And it's, it's... It speaks to each other. And I don't know whether what your thoughts are of that, whether you've got something similar to that or you've heard about having people like that and who you probably would do it with. But it's, like, almost I've got another one which is a no mentor. So I, I give it advice... Oh, so I give it an idea and say, "Look, I'm on about putting this amount of money into this business. It does this and it does that." And it gives me all the reasons why it's a bad idea. And it... Because I'm very, very, very optimistic about everything. And I'm like, "Yeah, this is going to work. This is going to work." And then there's one thing that I might... I'm doing too much. Like, I need to stop spreading myself too thin. So I need that person to come back to me, or I need an AI agent to come back to me and give me the reasons why I shouldn't. And then at that point he's then going, "Give me all the reasons why you think I should." And then I've got that... Another agent then comes back and I give it the pros and give it the cons of all the reasons. I know I think it's because it's great because of this, this and this. And then give it the no person's thing and it almost comes back with a score. Unless it's scoring above 75%, I don't do it. And actually a lot of them that I probably would have done only scored 60%, and it ends up me being like... But it, what it, what it allows me to do is save all my ideas that I had and I can put it in the order of what they... I'm not saying it's always right on the scoring, but it's pretty damn good. And it allows me to prioritise. And some of them come back with, like, 10%. I was like, right, bin that idea. Get it out of my brain because it's a really bad idea because of this, this, this. And I didn't even think about compliance of scaling that out. And I'm like, that's going to massively slow things down. But there might be other industries that isn't compliant, and you're not needing to do that. And I'm like, oh, I can scale that bit out like I want to with AI agents and stuff. So, it's just things on that front. And I do... Would you do anything with the LLMs to help you on that, to give you advice?

Alex Drew: Yeah, to be honest, I haven't positioned it as a mentor, but I would ask it to challenge the ideas or to find, you know, three to five to 10 reasons why it would fail and when it would fail. Sort of like, again, reverse success. It's not going to be successful, it will fail. Help me understand when and why and what would be those decisions that kind of made it fail. And then, when it does that, now let's fix them and let's try again. So, I think, generally speaking, a very well-trained LLM or a focused one or a given... Regardless if you give it a persona background, it could be a mentor in a way. And you could have multiple mentors. And the, the beautiful part is with this more advanced, uh, sort of like agentic, uh, type of, of AI, that they learn based on their own iteration of things that they say and the context they get from you. They become... They actually become better. Like, Hermes, I, I've heard that it's much better, um, given it kind of compounds on, on the knowledge it is given. And if you have enough context or enough... Give it access to data, it can actually help you. Um, I even had an, an idea for ODYS Mentors for mentors that are very, very busy and they cannot afford to mentor someone. We could potentially interview them over a podcast and then could train an LLM so you'd have, like, James Dooley, for instance, the AI version of James Dooley as a mentor. And someone would be able to buy a subscription and have a conversation with the AI sort of version.

James Dooley: Yeah. The known information part. Why? Because, uh, you can't be scalable and you can't be... Like, let's say, uh, your popularity increases and all of a sudden you have 100, you know, people a month willing to have calls with you. That's... It's impossible if we end up monetising, you know, the, the program in such a way. Not that you don't want to help, but it's just literally physically impossible to do 100 calls a month. So, that would be one option.

Alex Drew: But, for sure, I mean, I think every single question we ask AI is some sort of... We're seeking guidance, we're seeking mentorship. And that, that, that's a good thing. And one thing I, which, which I've observed is that usually youngsters... And by the way, I, I had this new thing in my head. Well, I, I need to stop partnering with people that are way too young because they're not yet there. They, they're so naive in regards to certain things. They're 100% sure something is going to work. And I'm going to... I've started bringing in more seniors in the business who've been through things in life. And, um, I, I think the exact same thing applies to, to, to anything, really. You have to tap into someone who already went through stuff and experience. There have even been some, some rumours, and you've been a big advocate of, like, stop doing these calls or stop doing this. Like, just bring awesome people into a mastermind or into a room or into a retreat or something. Let, let them work their things out, and you're going to see amazing things will pop out of it. So, there've been some sort of community. I can't remember, you know, where I read about it. Basically, they didn't count your successes, they counted your failures. So, you had to, for instance, be bankrupted at least three times. You had to be, uh... Had to be, uh, sued in the past a couple of times. You had to gone through all these failures, and you literally had to prove you've done that, then you were admitted to the group. Which is interesting because it goes back to failing and why you learn more from failing than from being successful.

James Dooley: Yeah, for sure. The opposite. I mentioned there about the AI, the, the LLMs being able to help give advice and the different kind of characters of how you could bring their history and what they believe in. The other part is in person. So, going to the masterminds, going meeting these people face-to-face, being in an environment where it's a group environment. How important do you believe it is for you to come over to, like, this now in Manchester, not just doing these podcasts, but physically being in an environment where you're in a mastermind environment? There's maybe eight people in that group. And you know with the right group, someone's going to grill you. Someone's going to want to know deeper of why you're doing that when you could be doing that. And at times almost you walk out like, "I thought I had a good idea and I've just been absolutely abused." But in a good way.

Alex Drew: Yeah. How important is these in-person mentorship meetups?

James Dooley: Well, that is what you describe is sort of like a very genuine and profound coaching setup where you have a coach that kind of pushes you or a mentor that tells you exactly the inconvenient angle to things or opinion, which helps you grow. Problem is it's so rare to find. Just like we were talking a couple years back, or even not that far away, when you're saying, like, I've stopped doing most masterminds in the industry because I get very little from them. Like, there's not enough people grilling me. There is not enough people sharing knowledge bombs, in which case, like, it's a complete waste of time for me. So, um, it's a blessing when you can find such a group. If there's one member in, in, in such a group... Like, I've been... I can be straightforward to you. There've been events and conferences where I go into mastermind and had to fake someone calling me to get out of the group because it could be a complete waste of time. I'd rather go to my hotel room and just do some work than be there and stay there for the entire day and just in, in a group of people that they're not bad, but they're not there yet. It's one of them, I suppose, it's the classic saying, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Yeah. That's... So, like, if you're in that, if you are there and you just, you're just there to mentor everybody else and you're like, you're not taking anything in for yourself, then, then that's a bad group. But what about when you're in a good group? Like, how does that feel to you? So you're in a group and you feel like you're the dumbest person in that room, and when you're going through certain things, obviously you're going to be bringing a lot of value, but you're with people that have been through the trenches, that have understood things. How good is that feeling?

Alex Drew: That feels like some sort of initiation experience. That feels like some sort of going through, like... Like growth. Yeah. Growth on the spot. It's not like reading a book and perhaps... Yeah. ...getting some, you know, catching some ideas. It's like on the spot. And it literally goes through you. Sometimes people end up telling you certain things which you haven't thought about before and you literally get goosebumps. Yeah. Because of that. So, I think that is a blessing if you can get into these groups. And sometimes it happens because of some sort of randomness. Someone just put together a group and they thought you might be a good addition to that group. And that's one of the reasons why we've... We're going to be very strict when it comes to curating who ends up being part of the Mentors program at ODYS. Because you really want to... Like, we've invited you and you accepted. Now, if we start bringing in mediocre people, average people, they're going to bring us the whole level of the group down. At some point, in order to avoid disappointing you, maybe you will not, like, openly leave the group, but you will just be less involved in it. So, we try to bring in even people who have nothing to do with marketing or SEO or AI or LLM marketing, but just amazing people, very successful in some area of life that we can learn from. So, we literally seek to bring in people so awesome that we feel the dumbest in the room. That is... I think we should even put it to some sort of objective.

James Dooley: Yeah. Become the dumbest person in the room. And then you grow. Means you're in the right room, doesn't it? Anyone who's watching this, I hope you like the importance of AI business mentors. Let us know what you're doing for your mentorship program to level up your knowledge to try and take yourself on to that next level. I'm always a big advocate that every day is a school day and you should always be trying to be a better version of who you are today than you was yesterday. Alex, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having you. Awesome conversations here.

Alex Drew: Thanks for having you.