Case study
Fifteen thousand unread messages, and the deals inside them.
Jesse Rhodes Jr. A speaker with a full calendar, a published book, and more incoming than one person could open.
The problem after visibility
He was already known. Then the volume outran the capacity.
Jesse came to us as a working speaker and the author of Leadership Unlocked, published by Blue Cactus Press in paperback in October 2023 and in hardcover in December 2024. Before the stage he ran audit and technology functions inside large companies: Director of Global Audit Services and IT at Walmart, Director of Internal Audit at Target, Senior Manager at Deloitte and at EY, and, until 2026, Amazon. All of that was his before we met. The other case studies on this site are about a name coming up at all. His is about what happens once it does, every day, faster than a person can respond.
Over fifteen thousand messages had built up across email, text and LinkedIn. Some were noise. Some were speaking requests, from people who wanted to book him, waiting in threads nobody had opened. The work he wanted to do was arriving, and it was arriving into a queue.
The first thirty days
Every system connected, then everything read.
Thirty days of Claude training, run with him personally, starting with his inbox rather than his website.
His systems, linked
Email, text and LinkedIn connected so Claude could work across all of it as one body of messages rather than three.
Fifteen thousand messages, sorted within a week
Claude read and categorised every one of them in the first week and gave him next steps for each category. Reaching back out to the people who had written was automated, so the replies went out at the pace the messages had come in.
Multiple speaking engagements, recovered
Inside those threads were bookings waiting for an answer. Several came back inside the thirty days. They were already earned; they had not been claimed.
The database
Twelve thousand contacts, organised into something he can use.
Separate from the messages, his CRM held over twelve thousand contacts, accumulated over years of speaking and unsorted. Each was categorised and organised so the list became a database: who these people are, how they came in, and what a next conversation with them looks like.
An audience that size is an asset only if it can be used. Most established speakers already have one. Few can reach it.
The part nobody asks for
Whether the replies land at all.
Automated outreach at this volume is only worth doing if the messages arrive. His email authentication, DKIM, DMARC and SPF, was configured properly as part of the work. It is a small job that no client would think to ask for, and it decides whether thousands of replies reach an inbox or a spam folder. We do it for every client we send on behalf of.
Underway
The brand, clarified. The site, relaunching.
With the backlog handled, the work turned to the brand itself: a clarified coaching offering, and his website rebuilt and relaunching the week after this was written. Both are in progress. The book was already his, and it stays his.
The same training, a different result
Four clients, one course, four things built.
The thirty days of Claude training is the same product each time. Buddy Buck used it to build an app for his town. All Climate’s staff used it to automate their own work. Steve Chua used it to build a voice, finish an audiobook and put a working prototype in front of his partners. Jesse used it to read fifteen thousand messages and answer the ones that mattered. What comes out depends on who is sitting in the chair.
If this sounds like you