Podcast appearance
Building RightResponse AI with George Swetlitz
Why a 220-location operating problem became a practical AI reputation-management platform.
Why a 220-location operating problem became a practical AI reputation-management platform.
Josh Thomas keeps the conversation grounded in the operator's problem behind the product: what broke at scale, why existing tools were not enough, and what George built after living with the consequences.
“If you try to get AI to do everything for you, then you're kind of missing the boat. We need AI to do a very specific strategic thing for you so that you can go and focus on something else.”
RightResponse AI did not begin as a search for somewhere to apply generative AI. It began with an operating problem: locations with comparable services converted demand differently because their public reputations were different. The episode connects that experience to a platform built around visibility, credibility, review responses, and local growth.
He built it after managing reputation across roughly 220 healthcare locations and seeing how differences in visibility and credibility affected customer acquisition.
No. The platform connects review acquisition, response strategy, review intelligence, competitor analysis, and publishing controls within a broader reputation-management workflow.
The conversation is most relevant to location-based businesses and multi-location operators that depend on local visibility and customer trust.
AI performs specialized tasks inside defined workflows, including understanding reviews, selecting relevant business messages, analyzing sentiment, and supporting quality control.
The original episode is available from Leverage Everything and through the listening link on this page.
Explore the Review Management Platform
This transcript was generated from the original episode audio and lightly formatted for readability. Minor speaker or wording errors may remain.
[00:00:00] Ladies and gentlemen, it's time. We've read all the books, we've bought all the courses, we've tried all the tactics, all in search of some mythical secret to growth and scaling that always just seems to let us down whenever we find it. So now I invite you to take a completely different path with me. It's not risk-free and sometimes it's a little bit scary actually, but it's this path that is forged one winner after another. If you've made it here on this show today, we're going to spend the next 15 minutes demonstrating how to let leverage everything. My name is Josh Thomas, I'm your host. You can find me on all social media at JT, literally this podcast is brought to you by VA IQ, the smart choice for hiring remote international talent so you can leverage your business with experienced virtual assistance. We recruit train and manage VA's to fill critical roles in your business so you can stay focused on innovation and growth. Typically, recover up to 50 hours a month and two times your profits. You can also save up to 70% versus hiring locally to learn more, go to VA IQ.net. Today's guest is George Sweatlist. He is the co-founder of Right Response AI, a reputation management platform that helps location-based businesses win more customers by improving their visibility and credibility through strategic review response and local search optimization. George brings a pragmatic approach to AI having built the platform specifically to solve the operational pain points he wants face. George, welcome to the show. What is one thing you do better than anyone else and how do you use that to your advantage? What we do better than anybody else is leverage AI to help people to help location-based businesses grow revenue. And I think that's really kind of the critical thing here. And you just talked about leverage. And whether it's me trying to leverage myself by offloading things that I don't have to do that I can focus on growth is the same problem that a business owner has. They want to focus on the things that are important for their businesses. And so what I found in my personal life, professional life and in what we do as a business is leveraging AI. And in today's environment, if you're not leveraging AI to stay focused on what you need to do to win, you're leaving money on the table.
[00:02:36] So let's talk about that because it's a hot topic. You can just take anything that you're talking about right now and add AI onto the end of it and everybody's like, whoa, you know, but there's kind of like the light side and the dark side of AI because some people are, you know, have gone like full elbows deep into using AI and they got burned. And now they're coming out and they're trying to figure out, okay, well, maybe AI is not what it has cracked up to be. So what are some ways that we can apply AI effectively because there's a lot of hype out there right now, George? Yeah, you know, the advice that I give to people is to start small. Don't try to tackle huge things. Try to tackle small things. So I'll give you an example in my, you know, in my role as co founder of right response AI every day people visit our website. What we do now leveraging what we know about AI is we high, we have a service that tells us who's visiting the site doesn't tell us 100% of the time, but sometimes it can tell us who's there might give us a name, like if it's an email address, like if it's a LinkedIn URL. We then pull that into a system and we have AI do research who is this person is this company relevant to us right response AI is this person a good buyer. And if it passes all of those tests, we craft an email for that person and then send it out.
[00:04:15] And so that was something that I used to do myself that would take an hour a day to go through all these people and do that work. And now AI does the bulk of the work, I eyeball it, make sure it's the people that I want us to talk to and send it out. And it saves me about 55 minutes out of that hour. And I can spend that time then onboarding customers and having marketing conversations. So if I, if I try to broaden the scope or do it all with AI, then you run the chance of being burned, but you have to kind of be very tactile. You have to use AI to do things that it can actually do. And we found, for example, at right response AI, which is our company, that there are things that we can offload from a business owner.
[00:05:13] So for example, every business owner of a location business has to deal with reviews, which is kind of what we were designed to do. AI can do a tremendous job of tailoring that response. And we can talk about that a little more, but, but that's a very small thing that you can ask AI to do very well. And so that you as an owner can now spend your time kind of running the business, improving the business, growing the business because you, you're using an AI agent to do something discrete that it can do. Yeah, I think the most important thing that you're sharing there has to do with, hey, if you try to get AI to do everything for you, then you're kind of missing the boat. And we need AI to do a very specific strategic thing for you so that you can go and focus on something else. And that seems to be where a lot of people fall off, the promise of AI being able to do everything, but really it can't.
[00:06:21] There's a lot of things that it's being promoted to where it can do, and it just doesn't do very well, demos well. But out in the wild, you know, people don't typically want to pick up the phone and talk to a robot, you know, they want to talk to a human, generally speaking. But that's now anyway, maybe maybe in five years, we will lose the ability to talk because we're just, you know, pushing our thumbs and, you know, completely isolating ourselves from humanity, I don't know. Yeah, look, I mean, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And so, you know, I can do something for you. If you're running a business, you have to figure out how to use it. You're never going to learn. If you don't try and start, and again, my advice is start with things that are small and free up time that make your employees more productive. So, for example, a lot of our customers come to us because the quality of our review responses is better than anybody else's.
[00:07:24] What does that do for them? It means that the person that they have in their organization handling reviews, not going to fire that person. But they can, that person can spend their time on the people who are writing the one two and three star reviews, the ones that need the actual human connection. So, it's more time to spend with those people to save revenue, to save customers. And if you think about AI as doing work, lower level work, that your employees can then take that time savings and apply it to something higher value, that's a winning proposition. Yeah, well said. And so, I'm curious if you can dive in a little bit more on your software. It sounds like it came, it rose out of a, of a need that you had. And so, how does, how does somebody go from, you know, being a successful CEO to building an AI software? Like, what a weird, what a weird change. When you're 60 years old, right? So, you know, yes, I was the CEO of a 220 location business. And we struggled with these things every day.
[00:08:38] You know, when you have 220 location reviews are coming in. How do I respond to those reviews with meaning and usefulness and empathy? But how do I actually do that in a 220 location business? How do I understand the competitive dynamics of that of the location of 220 locations? And so we struggled with that. And so we ended up selling the business. It was a private equity back business and we sold it. And about a year later, chat GPT got launched. And I thought, you know, that this could solve the problem. So I got it teamed together. And we decided to always wanted to build a software company. And so we, we decided to go after this problem. And I can tell you, you know, when we started. There's been so many, you know, so many versions of AI since then, since we started and it gets better and better and better. And so the quality of our product gets better and better and better. And that's, you know, that's really the key is, you know, there will be things that it can do now, which are good. There will be things that it kind of fails now. What do you decide? The next generation of the LLM might be good enough to get that done. But you got to get in there and you got to start thinking about how you can leverage. That's kind of, at the end of the day, I had a call today with a guy as a six location car wash business. And he struggles with how do I, how do I do all this stuff? We went through, we showed him all the things that it could do. And he signed up on the spot, made for a year in advance.
[00:10:25] And, you know, his onboarding actually tomorrow. So, you know, that guy realized the leverage that AI could provide him in his business and just wanted to go after it as quickly as possible. Yeah. And that's, that's another thing that I think you're, you're bringing up a great point here is we can, we can, we can go and hide in the corner and like close my eyes and like, nope, nope, it's not there. I can't see it. It's not there. We can do that for a while, but eventually like it's coming. You can't stop this from happening. And if you embrace it now in some way, it will be so much easier to, to adapt more deeply as AI becomes like this universal thing. But if you shut it out entirely, then you will get replaced. And, and I think that's the, the challenge that's hard for us to see. It's like, AI is not coming for your job. Somebody who uses AI is coming for your job. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a great way to think about it. It's a great way to think about it. I stole that from somebody else. But it makes total sense. And so, yeah, so credit anonymous. But, but that's really what it is is because if I like to give this example, because we, we're in complimentary industries. And so I place virtual assistants like humans. And the key to success for a virtual assistant is number one, you got to have the right person.
[00:11:57] And number two, you got to put them in the right environment to succeed. Like, you take, you take a guy with no legs, then no matter how good your training program is, he ain't going to win the marathon. You know, you take Usain Bolt and you stick him into a little room with popcorn and fried chicken to eat. He ain't winning the marathon either. And so, making sure that you have the right environment to succeed is essential and making sure you have the right tools and the right people operating those tools is essential. And it's always going to involve at least until the robots take over. It's always going to involve human input and a human running that just augmenting that with AI. Right. No, 100% agree. I mean, you know, like you said, people try AI and bad experiences. And we see that we hear that a lot. I was talking to a customer the other day and they were talking about. You know, they threw all their reviews into Chatsy PT and ask Chatsy to be to analyze it. And they got all sorts of crazy results. Especially when they were asking for numbers like averages and stuff like that. What I said was, look, the problem is, AI is a really bad at math. It's a language of auto, not a calculator.
[00:13:17] Ask AI to do math. It puts all its resources trying to figure out this math and then gets lazy on the stuff that is good at. So in our software, we do all the math in a computer program. And we give that math to the model and we say, language model, don't do any math. If you need numbers, go look at this table to get them, but never do math on your own. So it goes in and looks at the table, gets the, gets the information it needs. It spends its time analyzing words. And so you get a good result. And so again, it's your, you know, you talked about putting people in the right role. Well, you have to put AI in the right role. You have to know what a right role is. And you have to know what a bad role is for AI. And, and most people, you're running a roofing company or you have five cars. That's not your, you don't know that. And you're probably not going to know it because you're busy running your business. You know how to fix an air conditioner and how to get, you know, a crew to do a good job.
[00:14:25] So you have to rely on, on vendors on people that are spending their time trying to figure out how to, how to deliver a good results through AI. Yeah. And so tell us where we can go like who's a good fit to use your service and where can we go to learn more. So a good fit to use our services any, any business that's location based that gets Google reviews. If you get Google reviews, then you can win by responding to those reviews in a useful way. That's kind of the premise. And you can visit our site. Right response AI dot com. Right response AI dot com. And, you know, learn all about it. Schedule a call with me. Start a free trial. You know, just dive in and try things. Excellent. Hey, we're going to wrap up from here. Thanks so much to our guest George wetlets for coming on and sharing a little bit of wisdom about how to leverage with AI for those of you who want to connect directly, you can learn more by going to right response AI dot com. And once again, if you want to leverage your time, energy and resources to the max managed remote talent could be your answer. Learn how to save up to 70% off your next hire by going to VA IQ dot net. Until next time, remember this. You want to win push your chips in. It's time to leverage everything.