Tom Gay Podcast Transcript
Tom Gay joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Tom Gay. Tom Gay is a highly accomplished serial entrepreneur who has made a career out of solving complex business and marketing problems through innovative web solutions. He is currently the CEO of EngagePro.com, a sales building platform, and previously founded Refer.com, which served over 5 million users. Throughout his career, Tom has founded several other successful companies, including National Decision Systems, which pioneered advanced target marketing technology tools and earned him two coveted Inc. 500 awards and VistaInfo, which provided geo targeted property risk info to banks, insurers, realtors, and homebuyers across the USA.
Under his leadership, VistaInfo went public and was recognized by Individual Investor Magazine as one of the five best undiscovered small company CEOs in the USA.
Well, good afternoon, Tom. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:09] Tom Gay: Thank you. Good to be here with you, Brian.
[00:01:12] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you so much. This is awesome. And you’re hailing out of the great state of California down in San Diego. Love that place. I lived in Orange County for 10 years, so I appreciate you making the time and Tom, we’re just going to jump right into these questions here.
We’ve got a great story we want to get out to our audience. Tom, your career in business that you’ve had, sold software, software as a service solutions. You’re a serial entrepreneur, which we’ll get into here in a minute. And now you’re the Founder and CEO of Chatbridge Connect. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:47] Tom Gay: Well, there is a common thread that comes through all of it, Brian. And the common thread is. When you see a problem, a problem in the marketplace, let’s just say, and I’ve always operated by the principle that if more than one person has the problem, then it needs a system to approach it, to approach solving it.
And if enough people have it, that is, have the problem, then maybe you’ve got a marketplace and a product to be built that you can take and turn into a company. And that’s always been at the foundation of every business I’ve started. I’m on my seventh one now. And I always focus on problem first, and then the steps to convert that to solution, audience,
[00:02:26] Brian Thomas: marketplace.
I love that. And we’re going to get into that here in a second, but obviously, and I’ve heard this before is find that problem, find the problem that people want solved. Right. And it sounds like you’ve done exactly that, which is going to lead us here into the next question which I really love is I’m inspired by your career as an entrepreneur and the fact that you founded several successful companies to date, what gives you that constant drive to start something new?
[00:02:49] Tom Gay: I think there’s several things. Number one is I want to be in the game. I want to be with people. I want to be involved in learning and continuously growing. And I’ve always embraced the concept of continuous improvement. And to me there is no retirement in my life as a result. We’re in my late seventies and I’ve just started another company.
Now, the other side of the point is that companies that I build create products that do good, that help people. That even creates, let’s call it splash out or splash over benefits for causes that I support. So, when I build a company like now Chatbridge Connect and one of the organizations I’m working with, who is an affiliate and the revenue that they get is being used to build a home for orphan girls in Uganda.
Now, if I were retired, I’d miss that opportunity to have that impact. So it’s always about. Leaning into what it is you can do to make a difference and help people and make it a better world.
[00:03:49] Brian Thomas: That is so awesome. And I’m very, and I’m, I truly mean that I’m very inspired by your story, Tom. Of again, you mentioned in your late seventies, starting a new business.
And then the fact that you’re actually giving back to these various charities and helping, as you mentioned the girls in Uganda is simply. I don’t know, awe inspiring, and I just hope that we get to meet more people like you on this, planet. Switching gears, a little bit here, your new platform, Chatbridge Connect is unique and considered a great productivity tool in the network business that you’re in.
What are some of the benefits?
[00:04:23] Tom Gay: was product of a friend of mine coming to me with a problem. No surprise there. And we’re on the call. A Zoom call, in fact, and he said, Tom, can you help me? You’re the tech guy. I go to all these virtual networking meetings, and we’ve become Zoomified.
There are 300 million of us around the world now using Zoom, probably more now. And he said, we go to networking. Everyone screams, save the chat. We download the safe chat, and we’re left with this very difficult to use. I use the word ugly at times dot text file with all the information jumbled up from the people who went to that meeting.
And the magic of going to a networking meeting comes in the follow up. What do you do afterwards with the information you received in the meeting from the people who attended? So, if you’re going to get a return on your investment, then you want to do something to follow up on that time. So, he says to me, can you help me?
I’m getting nothing out of this. It’s so hard to use. Well, I said, let me take a look at it. And about 3 months later, we had a prototype. And 3 months after that, we had a initial version ready to roll and took it out to the marketplace and said, if it’s true that the value of networking is in the follow up.
Then here’s a solution to how you get from that ugly save chat to an actual follow up system that converts to sales, converts to speaking engagements, converts to the opportunity to form joint venture partnerships with the other people who went to that meeting, if that was your purpose. So, we introduced that in the middle of this year, and people are saving enormous amounts of time. You can review an entire save chat in a save file in 10 minutes and pick the 6 people or 8 people or 10 people out of that. You can reach out and click on any links. They shared and see what they’re all about.
Now I’m into building relationships, but in order to build a relationship, I need to know something about you. So, if you post your LinkedIn profile or your Facebook page or whatever. Now I can easily go there and see who you are. And open a conversation about you, about what it is that you’re wired about.
So, everything here is about bringing people into better connection with each other, helping them form relationships, doing it efficiently. And obviously in the end, people want to see a result. And with Chatbridge, our users are getting massive results, where in the past, it was very likely that they didn’t do any follow up with that Zoom networking downloaded save chat.
So, we’re still in the early stages of it. It’s growing globally. We love it. We’re making all kinds of improvements to it as time has gone by over the last few months and our clients are giving us lots of great feedback and support.
[00:07:07] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love it. And Tom, just. In full transparency here, I had the opportunity to get a 5-minute demo from you in one of our networking meetings.
And I really appreciate the fact that you gave us that time to show us, but it is a really, I think, unique platform out their product that you’re designed, and it was phenomenal. It was able to grab, as you know, in that network meeting, there’s just a ton of information to download and. You’re absolutely right. I’ve seen those Zoom download files and they’re a mess. So, thank you for designing this again, finding a solution to a problem. Tom, last question of the evening here. I’m a technologist, been a technologist for many, many years. And we like to ask everybody, cause we’re a tech platform and podcast.
If you’re leveraging any of that new or emerging tech in your business, and if not, maybe you found a cool tool or app that you found really useful, you could share with us.
[00:07:58] Tom Gay: Well, thank You can’t be in our business, Brian, without being curious. We’re all curious. I’ve been using AI as an example from a season before ChatGPT was out and actually have built it into some other tools that I have brought to market right now.
So, I’m staying tuned in on that. However, the one area that I’m really excited about is the merging of AI and video. And I’ve been looking for a solution. I may have it. I don’t know yet. That’s the trouble with being a technology get about as you’re always looking at what you have, where things are going.
And maybe there’s something even better just over the horizon tomorrow or this evening even. But what I’ve been focusing on lately is because I’m a content producer, produce a lot of training content for my different tools and I’ve been looking for tools to convert. Video content into bite sized, short additions, shorts, if you will, whether you’re talking about Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok because the content that I produce is digestible in a 45 second clip or a 30 second or a 1-minute clip.
So I’m looking at ways to streamline taking hours of training content and just turning it into a new version of itself. And I found a couple that I think might be a solution. And yet there’s always a tug of war between looking for the next new and staying focused on what you’ve got to do today to build a company, a successful company.
And so, that’s where I’m my, most of my attention on technology has been lately.
[00:09:35] Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. And you’re absolutely right. There’s a lot to be doing on your day to day to keep the business going. But again, going back to what you’d first talk to us about is that problem.
If you’re focused on solving that problem, you’re going to come up with something, not necessarily trying to come up with some newfangled technology to wow your customers, right? So, we do appreciate the share on that. Tom, it is such a pleasure having you on tonight and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:10:06] Tom Gay: Thanks so much, Brian. I really appreciate getting to know you and look forward to that as well.
[00:10:11] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Tom Gay Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
