🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube
Three new customers in one month came from one habit: calling an AI-sourced lead back within an hour. That’s what Rich Thomas told host Jeremy Rivera on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast. Rich is co-founder and VP of Sales at CHAOS Supplies and the sales lead behind its wheel-service brand, CHAOS Moto. He talked about hiring people who think differently from you, handing off the work that bores you, and why AI can bring a buyer to your site but can’t close them for you.
Twenty-five years from basic safety supplies to US manufacturing
CHAOS stands for Chemical Handling And Occupational Safety supplies. Rich says the company has been in business for over 25 years and started out selling basic safety supplies. Today it makes wheel-service chemicals and grips for tire shops under the CHAOS Moto name, and prescription safety eyewear through CHAOSRXOptics. In his words, “we’re actually manufacturing and making products here in the United States for one of the largest privately held tire companies in the world.”
Hire someone who’ll push back, not a copy of yourself
Jeremy asked about the hardest problem in Rich’s niche. It wasn’t supply chains or pricing. It was people: “finding really high quality, motivated workers on every level.”
Rich’s biggest fear is hiring somebody exactly like himself, who does everything the way he would and adds no creativity of their own. What you actually want is friction that moves the business forward:
“You really need somebody who’s different and can bring an opposing view, but still be positive and moving in the right direction so that you kind of bounce ideas off each other.”
Jeremy compared it to dating someone with the exact same interests, the same burger order and the same sports team, until you realize “I’m kinda dating myself.” Rich loved the analogy, then added a thought he called weird. If you find someone really, really good, you start wondering why they don’t have their own business. His answer is a balance: “you want somebody who’s really good, but not so good that they leave you.”
He doesn’t treat that as a reason to hold people back, though. One of his employees runs a small business on the side, and Rich says he’s helped him “tremendously” because he wants him to feel the same success. At 60, after owning numerous businesses, Rich believes the drive to work for yourself is innate in a certain percentage of people, and only certain people will ever support themselves owning their own business.
Hand the work that bores you to someone who loves it
Jeremy asked about the unglamorous back-office work that drives a business. Rich’s answer was a confession. For years he tried to do the marketing himself: “I tried forever to design websites, build websites, do SEO.” Community college, evening classes, his own software. He could see why being online mattered. He just couldn’t stand the work. He can talk to people all day long, “But when it comes to just working on a computer and typing stuff in and waiting for a result,” it bored him.
So he hired his friend Alex Storch, who finished a master’s in digital marketing at USC. Rich wasn’t sure what would happen. Then “he has blown up the business, like you can’t imagine,” using AI, finding leads and customers through LinkedIn, and rebranding the company.
“Sales is what I do. Anything outside of that, I struggle with.”
Inventory, the warehouse, driving a forklift: Rich says don’t even try to do those other things. “Find people who really enjoy doing it and keep motivated.” If you want a way to decide which tasks to hand off first, Louis Swart’s hourly-value rule for ending busywork is the companion listen.
AI found a 10,000-person utility company, and a human still has to win the call
Jeremy brought up the risk of chasing every new tool. He credited Jeremy Moser of uSERP, a GEO agency, with the phrase “shiny AI object syndrome.” He also mentioned his friend Daniel Hebert at Oleno, who is working on SOPs so that multiple teams in a company use AI the same way at the same time, working from shared context instead of each person going “off on their own AI adventure.”
Rich’s version of a good AI rollout is Alex. “Alex has forty AI agents working for him.” In the last six months, Rich says, those agents have probably found over $75,000 worth of oversights in billing, invoicing and accounting, and they correct things on the back side of the website portal.
The part Rich was most excited about is what happens on the website. When someone searches for a product related to CHAOS Moto through ChatGPT or another AI tool and lands on the site, “whatever they’re searching for, that homepage, that image comes up.” He says the site “immediately becomes customizable and follows their previous searches for similar products.”
That’s how a utility company with 10,000 people, which needs prescription safety glasses, found CHAOS through AI. When they reached the site, they saw utility workers. Rich joked that “if they were looking for cowboys, they probably would have found cowboys wearing safety glasses or clowns.” He had a Zoom call with them booked for the next morning. And he was clear about who does the closing:
“AI will get you there to one point, but now you have to do the rest of the work.”
His job on that call was to “convince them that we’re more than just a website and that they just found us online.” Jeremy agreed: “it’s not a wish fulfillment machine.” The better your AI marketing gets, the more pressure it puts on your intake process.
Calling back within an hour won three customers in a month
Jeremy raised the research on how small businesses handle inbound calls. The study he had in mind comes from Jake Melendy of Ignitvio, who mystery-shopped service businesses. In Ignitvio’s lead response study, over half of the businesses he contacted never responded at all, and only 2% of the ones that did followed up more than once.
Rich interrupted, because it matched what he’d just seen. “I have picked up three new customers in the last month.” Each one told him why they moved their business:
“We called back within an hour of the lead coming in off of AI.”
One of his sales reps got a lead off AI and called within the hour, and “not once, but three times we’ve gotten customers because of that.” Rich’s read on why it works:
“I’m realizing that no one is calling anybody anymore. They think that the computer can do it all right down to closing the deal. And the human element has to step in.”
“Here’s the glitch in the system,” he said. Everyone has leaned on automation and forgotten about talking to somebody. “I wish I could keep it a secret,” he added, so competitors would keep letting AI leads sit out there in space until they come to him.
Jeremy pointed to Alex Zweydoff of ClearLead Digital, who does property management digital marketing and made speed to lead a focus of his interview. If you run a service business, Cameron Tope’s speed-to-lead playbook shows what fast follow-up looks like day to day, and why a 5% close-rate lift beats 20% more leads does the math on it.
Sales and marketing should be collaborating, not fighting over credit
Jeremy connected this to the messy middle, a phrase from Keith Perhac of SegMetrics. A buyer finds your site on a phone through Claude, emails it to their spouse, the spouse runs a Google search, and then somebody types the URL in directly. Was that an AI lead, a Google lead or a direct visit? All three. So who gets the credit?
Jeremy’s point was that a lot of companies turn that question into a death match between the sales team and the marketing team, and “you’re cannibalizing when you should be collaborating.” The better move is for marketing to learn the friction points that come up on sales calls and answer them in advance, so a rep can say “we wrote an article about that” and send the link. Rich’s reply: “it couldn’t have been explained better what you just said.” If you want a simple way to collect those questions, try the free Customer Question Notebook SOP.
For anything that costs real money, buyers still want to talk to somebody
Rich expects a generation of buyers to come up purchasing with no human interaction at all, the way self-checkout and kiosk ordering already work. For a mirror or something simple, that’s all you want. For a bigger purchase, he thinks small talk still wins. As you learn about someone, “suddenly all these barriers start to drop and people become comfortable.” Then their willingness to say yes goes up. “And I don’t think AI can do that.”
“AI might have brought me there, but I want to talk to somebody.”
A pair of safety glasses that never fit became a customer for life
Rich told a story about a recent call. A customer phoned about prescription safety glasses he’d bought two and a half years earlier. “They never fit him correctly. He never wore them and he never returned them.”
Rich said he’d send another pair for free, then started asking questions: how tall are you, how much do you weigh, have you gained or lost weight since? Then he offered to send out “three samples of glasses to try on,” so the customer could pick the pair that fit before Rich made the final one. His reasoning:
“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.”
He told the customer, “You’re gonna be a customer for life, right?” The customer is a manager, and he now tells his workers to wear the glasses. Rich’s summary was short: “AI’s not gonna do that, right?” And: “that’s just what you do. You know, that’s what people used to do.”
AI skims the surface, and a salesperson gets the fish down deep
Rich came up with an analogy while they talked. Fishing with AI is like skimming the water for bass: you grab whatever is near the surface. Pair it with a person and the catch changes:
“If you take the AI and you couple it together with the salesperson, you can get the fish on top and you can get the fish down below that are deep that aren’t on the surface.”
That’s why he thinks companies that try to replace people outright are making a mistake: “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.”
Jeremy took it one step further. Imagine telling a software company in the 1990s you could make its employees 10% more productive. Nobody would answer by cutting 10% of the workforce. They’d ship more product, cut churn and fix more bugs. In Jeremy’s view, anything you gain from AI should be reinvested “to accelerate income, to expand product offerings, to deepen customer satisfaction.” Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on why employees resist AI covers what happens to adoption when your team hears the opposite.
CHAOS is a result of great parenting
Jeremy closed by asking what Rich wishes people knew about CHAOS. Rich said nobody had ever asked him that. His answer: “what CHAOS is, it’s a result of great parenting.” His parents let him and his five brothers and sisters sell anything out in front of the house in a farming community in upstate New York. He ran little businesses through college, then sold pharmaceuticals for a big company for five years, where “I felt like I was just a cog in a big wheel of pharma.”
As soon as he could, he started his own business. “We started out of the bedroom and grew it into the millions and it’s continuing to grow.” His aim is that “by the time we’re done, we might be at thirty, forty, fifty million dollars.” And the part he cares about most: “it’s been nothing but satisfaction knowing that I’m doing something that my parents would expect me to do.”
Run Rich’s test on your own business this week. When a lead comes in from AI or your website, how long until a human calls them back? Which task in your week bores you enough that someone else would do it better? And when AI saves your team time, where are you reinvesting it? If you buy safety eyewear for a crew, CHAOSRXOptics runs a corporate safety eyewear program for employers, and tire shops can set up CHAOS Moto national accounts.
Also on Unscripted Small Business
Rich’s point about handing off what you’re bad at pairs with Mitchell Wilson on why you can’t scale chaos, which makes speed to lead a systems job.
Want the step-by-step version? Use the free AI Lead Callback SOP built from this episode – eight steps and a printable one-page worksheet.
Two more takes on this conversation: what marketers should learn from AI-referred leads and speed to lead on SEO Arcade, and Jeremy’s own reflection on hiring your opposite and handing off what bores you.
Connect with Rich
- CHAOS Moto: chaosmoto.com
- CHAOS Moto answers: product questions from tire shops
- CHAOS Supplies: chaossupplies.com
- CHAOSRXOptics: prescription safety eyewear
- LinkedIn: Rich Thomas
🎧 Listen: Castos | 📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube
Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.
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