Catalytic Leadership

AI for Agencies: The Simple Shift to Scale Faster with Less Stress

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 4 • Episode 8

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If you’re scaling your digital agency past seven figures, you already know how costly bottlenecks can be. Old leads sit untouched, team handoffs slow progress, and valuable time disappears qualifying prospects who will never buy.

That’s why I sat down with Bryce DeCora, co-founder and CEO of Closebot, to explore how AI for agencies is transforming sales and client acquisition. Bryce brings his background in AI, engineering, and sales to show how agencies are reactivating databases, qualifying leads automatically, and creating six-figure revenue surges without overworking their team.

In this episode, you’ll hear how one roofer generated $150,000 in two days, why clarity in leadership accelerates team performance, and how adopting AI now positions your agency ahead of competitors who are still waiting on the sidelines.

Listen in and discover the systems and mindset shifts that free you from bottlenecks and create more space to scale with intention.


Books Mentioned

  • The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

You can connect with Bryce on LinkedIn for business and AI thought leadership, or follow his research on X.




Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

It is an honor today to have Bryce Decora on the podcast. Bryce is the co-founder and CEO of CloseBot, where he gets to use his background in AI engineering, sales and natural language processing to shape the future of AI agents for sales. Previously a software developer at Boeing working on new AI projects, bryce's passion for learning foreign language eventually led him to creating Closebot. Bryce, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you, good to see you. It's good to see you as well.

Bryce DeCora:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway:

I would love to start with you sharing a little bit of your story with our listeners. I hit a couple of the high points, but how has your journey gone, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader? How'd you get started?

Intro:

Yeah, around being a leader. It's been meandering, but really started when we had our first son. Becoming a parent really forces you to become a leader.

Dr. William Attaway:

It changes your world, doesn't it?

Intro:

It really does. I'm fortunate that it happened when we were so young. We weren't necessarily planning on having kids at that point, but it really forced me to grow up at a young age. This was I was 24 at the time, so it's not like I was super young, but I felt young. So you know, having having a son, getting the first job I could and just wanting to provide for the family, that's what sparked it.

Dr. William Attaway:

Wow, and this started at Boeing, or did you start somewhere else?

Intro:

Yeah, I, we had our son straight out of college. I had to take the first job I could. We grew up in South Dakota and Nebraska and we really wanted to stay around there, but the world had other plans. We ended up out in Washington state, which we love now, but that took us away from family. We have no family in Washington state. It was just up to my wife and I newborn new job at Boeing, um, and that really put us out of our comfort zone and that's where I really started to grow up and become more of a leader. I found myself in a leadership accelerator program at Boeing, so I learned a lot of leadership skills there and even led some projects while I was at Boeing.

Dr. William Attaway:

Nice. Yeah, I can relate to kind of being thrust into that environment when you don't have family nearby. We moved here to the suburbs of Washington DC when our oldest, our first child, was two weeks old, twelve hours away from the closest family, no support system, you know came here for a job and that's a tough thing and it really does create that bond where my wife and I had to really lean into each other. It sounds like you guys had to do the same thing.

Intro:

Yeah, we did Two weeks old as well, because we had to wait until he was old enough to fly.

Dr. William Attaway:

I assumed it was the same thing, just crazy. And people were like you're doing it now, you're moving now, yeah, but you do what you got to do, right you?

Intro:

experience so much, so much growth out of the hard times.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yes, yes, so, so true, so you're. So you're at Boeing, you're, you're leading some projects. You're really getting your, your, your leadership chops developed, sharpening that saw. How'd you get from there to?

Intro:

starting your own business. Well, I. So I was a mechanical engineering student first of all, not computer science. I realized I didn't like leadership at Boeing. It was just such a big company. I didn't want to work my way up the management ranks and just get caught up in the bureaucracy. And I also didn't like mechanical engineering. So I was like, well, I just spent so much time and money on mechanical engineering degree. I don't like it. I spent time in this leadership thing. I don't like the big bureaucracy of this company. I don't want to be in leadership. But I started making more and more friends in the computer science department, specifically because I was learning foreign language and trying to find ways with computers to analyze the way I was learning language just weird hobby stuff. They found it interesting too and they wanted to bring me into their um prototype software group to do some AI stuff. And they were happy to do that and teach me, even though I didn't have any computer science experience or AI experience. Um, they just threw me in.

Dr. William Attaway:

So I'm just totally curious here Talk about that just a little bit, because this, what year was this that we're talking about?

Dr. William Attaway:

This was probably nine years ago. So so you've got like. In the last three years, maybe four, ai has really been the hot topic. Everybody's talking about it, particularly in the digital marketing world, but nine years ago this was not like the topic du jour. No, that's the very definition of bleeding edge. Yeah, what drew you in? Was it just their invitation, or did this really light something inside of you that you were like oh man, this is amazing.

Intro:

I was starting to love software. One of them was my mentor and I was building this side project called Finite Languages where we would analyze written blogs from non-native speakers and analyze it against native speakers. So I was already like getting a passion for dev work. And then they brought me into this group and I learned the right way to do things because I was just, you know, self-taught and learning off the internet. And when I started with the group yeah, ai very new we were training our own foundational models to pull out text from old handwritten airplane drawings to make it searchable, and it was just really cool stuff and it was very hard. It was not like today.

Dr. William Attaway:

So then, what Like? How do you step from that environment to stepping into a place where there's not a real safety net the entrepreneurial world.

Intro:

Yeah, great question. It was a few things. We were in a prototype group at a huge company and I started to realize they were never going to use any of the software we made. Oh, disheartening. They were just big old company, slow to change, and that was disheartening and none of the work I did mattered.

Intro:

And then at the same time, my wife was starting Laura, now our COO. She was starting to get some traction in real estate and she started making more money than I was. And I was like I have a mechanical engineering degree, I'm a computer scientist doing AI at Boeing, and she doesn't and she knows I mean no negativity when I say this, she doesn't have a degree and she's able to just go out there and quickly make more money than I was. And I was like I'm just going to do that. I think so I did it on this side. I was working at Boeing and then weekends and evenings I would like knock doors and just try to get real estate sales. And when I got my first couple, I went on a leave at Boeing unpaid leave to see if I could make this work full time and I was able to hit my target of how much money I wanted to be able to make. So when my leave expired I told him I would not be coming back.

Intro:

And yeah, that's when COVID happened. Oh, yeah, oh Timing. Oh, the next month COVID happened, and so it was the hardest time in real estate. Yeah, um, we also just moved into a new fixer upper house, so we had like buckets all over the house collecting water from the rainfall. We had a couple of rooms we couldn't go in and they were sealed shut because of, like mold issues.

Intro:

We found out we were pregnant with our second At the same time. It was actually fleas. That let us know Weird thing fleas are attracted to the hormones of pregnant women. So I was not getting bit and my wife was getting bit and I looked it up and they said she could be pregnant. So I was like Laura, I think you're pregnant, and she's like no, I'm not. She took a test and sure enough. So new broken house, no job fleas, new baby on the way, and when you're put in a situation like that, you just have to make it work. So, even though I realized at this point I also didn't like sales, I was gonna sell some houses and I did. You gotta provide.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, yeah, you gotta provide for your family.

Intro:

You do what you gotta do but my my interest was never in the sales side, so almost like I was back in the same position at Boeing doing something on the side. I was doing more computer stuff on the side trying to automate the sales process, and it's that that eventually became what is Closebot.

Dr. William Attaway:

So talk about Closebot, because I know a lot of our listeners may be familiar with it, but many may not be. What is it, what does it do and why does it matter to the customers that you serve?

Intro:

It's a conversational AI that does lead qualification and booking. This is designed to plug in to your existing CRM and, with high accuracy, qualify leads and book them to appointments. We are the number one booking agent right now for high level and soon to be HubSpot Wow.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's quite the accomplishment, just that alone. When you say conversational, you mean this is an AI that is talking to people who may not know they're talking to an AI that it doesn't disclose it up front.

Intro:

Totally up to you when you're building it. We built it in such a way that makes it so quick and easy to build. You don't have to understand prompting. We do all the hard prompting stuff on our end and you just drag and drop components to our screen and the rest happens.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know we were both at a. We met at a conference down in Mexico about a month ago and when I heard you describing this and talking about it, it was first time I'd heard of Closebot and I was. I was just leaning in and I was astounded at some of the stories that you were telling of how this is making a difference for your clients. Of how this is making a difference for your clients. Can you share a story or two where you've seen a client grab onto this, take it, and it has just catapulted what they're doing.

Intro:

Yeah, my favorite one to talk about is a marketing agency that started running reactivation campaigns for roofers and he sent it was about 700 leads through this reactivation campaign over a couple of days and he churned up over $150,000 worth of business for this roofer in a matter of two days reactivating old leads he didn't plan to ever do anything with. I mean, they already pay for these leads. They came in at some point through Facebook so he had the information already there and all it took was doing this and revenue comes out the other side. So any company you do that for, I just love you.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, absolutely. Generate $150,000 in revenue in two days? Yeah, I agree.

Intro:

Any company is going to lean into that. Another one did it for a chiropractic office and he ended up getting them so much business that they were too booked out on their calendar and he ended up temporarily canceling the service with this marketing agency because he's like, hey, we have all the business we need now. Like, first of all, thank you. Second of all, we don't. We don't need this service anymore because we're so busy. Uh, maybe we can start up again in a couple months. So wow, I mean wow, he, he lost the client temporarily from that, but like such a win what an amazing case study that that marketer can say, hey, look at this.

Dr. William Attaway:

I mean wow. You know, as as this show has continued to grow, we're starting season four this month and there's about 50,000 or so people who download episodes a month listening to the stories that are like yours. A lot of these people are in the digital agency space and I bet some of them are not familiar with what you're doing, and what I want to do is I want them to get to know you and what you're doing and why and that's why I invited you onto the show. I think Closebot can be an incredible tool in the bag for these agency owners who you know, like you say like this was just something that they were able to offer as part of a database reactivation, like do this, and what an amazing result that they're getting in both of these stories that you're sharing. I love that and, of course, I mean you know your results may vary, all of that stuff, but this is a tool that I think every agency should be utilizing.

Intro:

Yeah, absolutely. And when I was on stage speaking there, we had people raise hands to see who was using AI in their business and it was surprisingly few. I remember that.

Dr. William Attaway:

I remember that and you know I see it a lot outside of the agency world, you know, with people who are still kicking the tires, still not sure this whole thing's going to happen. My wife and I were at the movies a few weeks ago and the people behind us were talking about AI. We're standing in line and I'm trying not to listen, but of course I'm listening and there's one guy was like hey, have you tried out this new, this AI stuff? And the other guy was like, nah, that's not going anywhere. And I'm just laughing inside my head thinking hold on, it's coming to you. Wow, this is the world that we live in and I think even in the agency world there's a lot of people who don't understand how far this has advanced and how something like CloseBot can make a dramatic difference for their clients and the results that they're getting, not to mention creating phenomenal case studies for the agency that they can use when they're doing outreach to potential clients.

Intro:

Yeah, and you may feel like you're behind, but just from seeing how few hands were raised during that event, if you take action now, you're ahead.

Dr. William Attaway:

So how does somebody get started with you, with Closebot? How do they jump in if they have not been on this train yet? What's the first piece?

Intro:

You can find us in the app store of High Level or just search Closebot. We're all over the internet and create a free account. We have a free account where we even cover all the usage up to 100 messages a month, which is usually enough to get one business off the ground. Do that, prove it works, get that business to pay you, and that'll more than cover the costs of an agency account.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that. Simple, easy, jump in and get started for free. I can't say. I know a lot of businesses that are doing that right now.

Intro:

Yeah, we're confident that it works.

Dr. William Attaway:

And I think that's what that reflects. I want to talk about your leadership for a second. At CloseBot, you know you are leading at a higher level today than you had to even just a year or two or three ago. Yeah, and that same thing is going to be true a year, three, five years from now, as you continue to grow and find more and more success. How do you continue to level up? What do you do to stay on top of your game and be the leader that your clients and your team are going to need you to be in the days to come.

Intro:

I think listening is the biggest thing, is the biggest thing Listening to our users and listening to our staff members. When you listen to the pain and really internalize why that's there and what you can do about it, that tells you where you need to, where you need to go, where you need to grow. I'm trying to think of a specific example. I mean, not long ago, we had, like you need to grow. I'm trying to think of a specific example. I mean, not long ago we had, like you said, we're growing fast and you know, our team just felt like they lacked vision in it. They didn't come out and say they lacked vision, but they kept asking what projects they need to work on.

Intro:

And I'm a big fan of Steve Jobs. Something people say about Steve Jobs is everyone knew what to do. The vision was so clear that no one ever had to. Everyone knew what to do. The vision was so clear that no one ever had to ask him what to do. And so I clearly saw there was a vision problem, and that's a me problem. So I had to look at, you know, re-identifying our vision, our mission statement, what our financial goals are and how we're going to get there, and then organize a meeting to let everyone know this and then backtrack our KPIs, both weekly and daily, on how we're going to get there, and then everyone knew. So that's a specific example on how listening can help guide you on what you need to do.

Dr. William Attaway:

Bryce, I I love that. I think what you're describing is amping up the clarity. You know, I think Brene Brown is spot on. She says clarity is kindness. It's kindness with the people that we lead and it's most kind when we're clear with ourselves. And what you did there is you forced clarity, you called a force play and all of a sudden, now there's no ambiguity. Everybody knows where we're at, where we're going and what we're doing to get there. And if you're a leader listening to this and you have not increased the clarity with your team, I promise you they need it. Ambiguity never serves anybody well. It is impossible for your team to hit the bullseye if they can't see it, if they don't know where it is, if they don't know what a win is for their position, for their team, that they're on, they will never hit it. So I love that you talked about that. I think that's so incredibly good, and the way you know is to listen.

Dr. William Attaway:

That is one of the most powerful tools in a leader's bag. Love that. You shared that, thank you. When you're thinking about Closebot, like where do you want to go from here?

Intro:

Like what is one thing that you want most in these coming years, as you were just on this rocket ride of growth right now- I'm a technical founder, so most of my own desires come from where I want the product to be the features I wanted to have, the reliability I wanted to have. I'm I'm not very focused on revenue. I do focus on revenue just because I know how much it costs to bring on new developers and, um, I just want to build the product as fast and good as possible. So we have our roadmap of features, both our public roadmap and our private one, and I I just want to make sure we get the, get it to the maturity level that we want it to. You know, right now it's like a child and we're teaching it all the lessons and growing together with it, and we want to see that child become an adult, a full-fledged adult, someday.

Dr. William Attaway:

So, as you think about that and where you want to go with it, what do you think the biggest thing is? That's stopping you.

Intro:

Um, yeah, I think imposter syndrome um is. It's a big thing people have to overcome. I have to overcome it and I have to set some really big goals. Sometimes I don't set the goals as big as I need them to be. Like we we just raised a friends and family round of funding um late this last year and at first I wanted to raise a hundred to $200,000 and then, just getting real with myself, I'm like I need to dream bigger. So we raised much more than that and then in this next funding round that we'll do early this next year, same sort of thing.

Intro:

When I sat down I was trying to think about raising as little as possible, but that just won't do it. It's scary to think about bringing on all that money and having to deploy it into growing a team so fast. But it just has to be done. And if we put ourselves in the position where it does literally have to be done or you die, we can usually make some pretty incredible things happen, and I've been there in the past. I've told you about a couple of the scenarios where I literally had to make it happen or we would die. In some cases, death is the death of a business, or having to sell a house that we love, or having to go back to a job that we hate, but oftentimes it's good to be in those positions where it's do or die.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so good and I appreciate the transparency there. That is so good, and I think it is something that we can all relate to at different points in our journey where we've been in that exact spot and that's a theme that I've heard as you've talked about this. You know it's when your back is against the wall, it's when there's no other way but we've got to make it work, and that's when you come out and that's when the rocket starts. You're always learning and I think that's when the rocket starts. You're always learning, and I think that's another theme that I've heard throughout your story. You know you didn't stop learning when you left school. You know you are continually learning, even outside of your direct area of responsibility. You're learning over here and learning, I mean, it's part of who you are. I'm curious is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening?

Intro:

Yeah, the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. Yeah, absolutely, sinek. It's phenomenal. It just it talks about how infinite your thinking needs to be. We're not thinking about competing with a certain competitor today, you know. We're thinking about just driving value for our customers now and into the future, taking all the lessons learned from myself and other thought leaders and software products, and just building on the back of giants that have already built stuff. That's amazing.

Dr. William Attaway:

And I love that. You're not focused on your competitors. I think that is wisdom and that is what I see in the most high-performance leaders that I work with. They're not focused on who's right behind them or who's running perhaps even ahead of them. They're focused on their thing and moving that into excellence. And that's what I hear from you, what I heard from you when we met in Mexico and what I hear from you today in our conversation that that drive is what is behind all of this. You're going to make something that is going to be absolutely excellent, that is going to serve your customers, your clients, to the highest level, and it's only going to get better.

Intro:

Absolutely. Ai moves so fast. There are going to be times where there are certain features we're not the leaders on. Maybe another product is the leader in some area of features and then we come ahead, but it's the infinite. I mean, we're not playing for the now. It's not about the best price. It's not even about the war. It's about forever. What we're building is for the forever goal.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love it. You know it's easy for some of our listeners to look at you, bryce, and think, wow, what success, what a trajectory. And he could never relate to me. I mean, all the problems that I've got he's never had, he's never really had the challenges and you've been so open today about sharing some of those. This tells when your back was against the wall, you did have to say this has got to work and you put your shoulder into it. You know, even in the midst of the highlight reel, I think it's important for us to understand that the leaders that we admire most, that we see from afar, everybody has challenges, everybody has troubles. If I had the ability right now to just snap my fingers and solve one problem in your business, what would you want that problem to be?

Intro:

Oh gosh, that is a great question and I'm not hesitating to answer because I don't have any problems. I'm just trying to identify what the biggest one is.

Dr. William Attaway:

There's a menu, a menu to choose from right. Yeah, I know the feeling.

Intro:

I got the same thing. There is a menu, I think. I think I think if you could tell us exactly the growth trajectory of AI over the next even six months, that would help us out tremendously. But in fact, all of us building AI applications are just fighting blind. Yeah, it's not like building other software apps, where things change every six months. It's like they change every week. I read publications every day and I listen to podcasts every week about what's happening this week in AI, and then we have to adjust our trajectory accordingly. But if you, dr Attaway, could tell me exactly the cadence of how AI is going to improve or not improve over the next six months, we would be set.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well, if I develop the ability to see around corners, I know who I'm going to call Perfect.

Intro:

And that's the hard thing we just don't know. As a leader, it's your job to collect all the information you have, all the information from your past experiences and decisions. You made where that landed you, and then just throw the dart and your team just follows you there.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, and there's never a point when you're ever going to be 100% confident. If you're waiting for 100% confidence before you move, before you make a decision, you will never move 100%.

Intro:

When I started this, I had no idea how to build an app. I didn't know what high level was Wow. I didn't know what high level was Wow. I had only built apps for myself, so nothing ever for other users. Building this app as a self-taught developer, using Google every step of the way Wow, and my mentors. And then slowly, you figure stuff out. And slowly, like you figure stuff out as things break, you know, as you are put in pain, you figure stuff out and now it is where it is today, where I am CTO, ceo, co-founder of CloseBot, and we have a dev team, have a product manager. They're all ex-professors at a respected university. They taught computer science and C-sharp. It doesn't happen overnight. It happens through a lot of pain.

Dr. William Attaway:

Yeah, a lot of sleepless nights too, yeah, less.

Intro:

So now, now that we have a team, that's another thing. If you're in a position where you're having sleepless nights and you feel like you're on the brink of being able to afford someone, I would say just put yourself in a little bit of pain, take less, pay yourself and hire someone, because my life changed when I brought in team members and learned how to leverage trust to them. That was huge for me. That's good advice.

Dr. William Attaway:

Bryce, this has been such a phenomenal conversation. I'm so grateful for your time and the generosity that you've shown in sharing so transparently from your journey so far, and I know the best days are still ahead for you. I can't wait to see what CloseBot's going to do in the days ahead. I know our listeners are going to want to connect with you, continue to learn from you and more about Closebot. What's the best way for them to do that?

Intro:

Connect with me on LinkedIn for more big business thought leadership type stuff. I do my own AI research and I share about it there, or X is a great way now to connect with me.

Dr. William Attaway:

Brilliant, I will have those links in the show notes. Perfect. Thank you, price. Thank you so much for today. Thank you.

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