I know what it takes to be a small business owner in Columbus. The 80-hour weeks. The five-star reviews you fight for. The marketing that used to work on Facebook but barely moves the needle now. The stuff behind the computer screen that every business owner hates doing but knows needs done.
That is why I started Cbus AI Agents.
AI is the tool that gave me my time back. And now I build AI agent systems for small business owners in Central Ohio who are drowning in the same work I used to drown in. Content schedules, lead follow-up, proposals, training plans, marketing copy. The stuff that pulls you away from the work you actually started the business to do.
In this first episode of Central Ohio AI, I talk about why I believe so deeply in small businesses, why Columbus is the right place to build this, and why the businesses that figure out AI search and AI agents now are going to be the ones that win the next decade.
I also get into a few things that have changed:
Social media organic reach is collapsing for local businesses
Facebook ad costs have tripled for industries like fitness
AI search is replacing Google for a growing number of people
The businesses that AI recommends are the ones that will get the customers
If you are a small business owner in Dublin, Columbus, Powell, Worthington, or anywhere in Central Ohio, this podcast is built for you. One episode a week. No jargon. No hype. Just honest conversations about what AI can actually do for your business.
Subscribe at newsletter.cbusaiagents.com and follow along.
Jeff Binek
Founder, Cbus AI Agents
Dublin, Ohio
Timestamped Chapters
00:00 — Welcome to Central Ohio AI
01:05 — My backstory: Friendship Fitness, 16 years of small business in Dublin
02:10 — The entrepreneurial drive and why small businesses matter
04:30 — AI is lowering the barriers for starting a business
05:45 — Why I want to help people bring their passions to life
07:00 — The shift: social media organic reach is dying
08:30 — Facebook ad costs have tripled ($8/lead to $25/lead)
10:15 — Fake leads, bots, and the saturation problem
10:50 — People are leaving social media and moving to AI search
11:30 — How local businesses get found on AI search
12:15 — The Google-to-AI shift and the early-mover window
13:30 — Why getting time back is the real goal
14:15 — The two buckets most business owners fall into
14:45 — Shoutout to Laura Young at Bakes by Lo in Hilliard
15:25 — The stuff business owners hate doing (and AI can handle)
16:15 — AI as your personal assistant, subject matter expert, and business coach
16:50 — What I wish I had five years ago at Friendship Fitness
17:30 — AI agents working while you drive to your second location
18:10 — What this podcast will cover going forward
18:45 — Subscribe at newsletter.cbusaiagents.com
Full Transcript
All right, guys, what is going on? My name is Jeff Binek from Cbus AI Agents, and I’m excited to start our new podcast here, really going over what’s going on in the landscape of being a small business.
We’re going to be trying to talk as much as we can specifically about the city of Columbus, Ohio and the surrounding suburbs, what it means to be a local small business and how we can better serve our community.
So really what we’re going to talk about with this and where this podcast will go is first we’re going to tell the stories about how we are working with small businesses to integrate AI and AI agents specifically into their business to help them complete tasks to achieve their goals and really help pick up the slack of whatever they are struggling with inside of their own independent business.
We’re going to talk about that a little bit today, but we’re also going to try to give real detailed X’s and O’s of things that you guys can start doing now and how to prepare for what is coming.
Quick backstory on me. I’ve owned a handful of different small businesses. The one that most of you probably know me from is Friendship Fitness in Dublin. I founded that business and ran it for 16 years and recently sold that company off to Andy Era, who’s doing a phenomenal job running that company now. Could not be more proud of what we accomplished there and then also what they’re still accomplishing today.
But I know what it means to start something from scratch and to try to grow local SEO so that you show up on Google, to try to get five-star reviews, to try to deal with the bad reviews, to try to get yourself found now on AI search and to get local people to hear about you and to go to trade shows and farmers markets and to do grassroots business-to-business linking. We’d do lunch and learns, outreach, just everything that it takes to run a small business. All of the people, all of the alignment, having a mission and working towards that every day. I really deeply understand that.
At the same time, while I was doing that, I was also running a couple of other side businesses. Those were just things that I got interested in over time. My entrepreneurial journey for me really probably started when I was like 16, my mom would tell you. I’ve just always been interested in and loved the idea of my brain having some imaginative idea, some creation, and then just going and bringing it to life and bringing it to other people. If I’m interested in it, maybe there’s other people out there that are interested in it. I’ve always just thought that was so cool. It’s been something that I’ve really enjoyed just starting and creating.
So I am just a huge believer in small businesses generally. And I see a future now with AI where more and more people can take those little side hustles or those ideas. Whether you’re a teacher or you work at Ohio State or you run a full nine-to-five job and you’re starting to maybe get interested in some other stuff or maybe you’re picking up a couple of side hustles to pay off your student loans faster, whatever it is for you. I think it’s faster and easier and better now than it’s ever been with AI.
It’s taken some of the bottlenecks that used to stop people. I would have a lot of conversations consulting people for small businesses, and when I saw what would stop them from actually going and doing the thing, I think a lot of those barriers are gone now, which I just think is so cool.
So that’s really my goal with starting this new company is I want to help people bring their passions to life. The things that they love doing, the things that they’re interested in, whether it’s full time and you want it to completely take over, you want to leave your current job and start a full-time business for you and your family, or whether it’s just a side hustle, or whether you’re interested for your kids.
This is something I’m so excited about. I want to own my own small businesses. I want Maria to run her own small businesses. And I want our kids to grow up in a world where if they have an idea, if they have something they’re passionate about, or they have something they want to do, that they understand how to create it, how to market it, how to build it from scratch and give it out to the world.
I just think that’s a beautiful thing. I think if we all get closer to doing that, number one, I think our society would generally be a little more happy because you have a little bit more control. You’re doing something that you care about, even if you end up making a little bit less money. I do think at the end of the day, having control over your time, control over your growth, control over what you’re doing matters. As I build this business, I remember how much it doesn’t feel like work when you’re doing something that you decided you’re going to do. You decided that you’re going to work on it. It’s different than having somebody else tell you this is what you have to do because this is what I decided I want for my business. And now I’m going to tell you that now you have to do it. It’s a totally different feeling.
So as we kind of go into this, there’s a handful of things that have changed. And I want to just briefly touch on that before the later podcasts where we start to get into more of the nitty gritty.
What has changed, I think, for me personally, is I have started to use AI search for almost everything. I really replaced Google in terms of being my key search engine of how I would maybe find a business that I want to be a patron of. And I’ve gotten off of most social media now. We’ll talk about that a lot more in episodes moving forward.
A lot of social media is currently right now AI created and AI driven. It may still be video or pictures from the actual business, but most of the captions are AI created. And what you’ll start to see is people will create these things called AI avatars. A website for that would be arcads.ai. And what you can do is you can upload videos of yourself and it will create an AI avatar that is almost completely indiscernible from you for certain features. It’s very good at like you talking directly to the camera in a full vision shot. What it’s not great at is still action. So if we’re talking about gym marketing, it can’t have somebody doing a pull-up or a push-up and the naked eye can’t tell it’s AI. It’s not quite that good yet, but it is close.
So more and more, when you’re on social media and you’re scrolling, you’re going to be seeing comments from AI and bots. Reddit is 90% of this now. You’re going to start seeing more videos, images, ads that are AI bots and AI creating and being pushed by AI. I think that’s going to, number one, really saturate the market and drive people away from the platforms, from being able to enjoy them.
Number two, as a local business, you’ve probably already experienced this. The organic side of social media used to be very powerful. When we first started, I had a rudimentary blog, a Facebook page, a Facebook group. If I posted on Facebook, I would say like 95% of my clients would see that and engage with it. Now, if I were to post on Facebook, it would get like 13 views. If you post something on Instagram, it’s gone in a matter of moments. A very low percentage of our actual clientele, even though they follow our page, even though they engage with all of our content, a lower percentage is still going to see that content. It becomes less and less powerful as time moves forward. I think that’s going to be a major challenge for the social media companies as local small businesses start to realize that they aren’t having as much success with them.
What I’m doing now, I have a lot of consulting clients that are gyms specifically. And a lot of what we spend our time on is marketing. It used to be that you could get Facebook ads, you could get leads for around six to eight dollars a lead for a gym. Now that’s more like $25 a lead. So you can imagine if you spend $1,000, that’s 40 leads that you would get for $1,000. It’s not very good, considering that of those 40 leads, probably 10 are fake or bots or AI. They’re not real people. They don’t even respond to you. Another 10 of them are going to forget that they clicked and not even remember you. So by the time we get down to the actual people who sign up, it’s less. So your thousand dollars just doesn’t go as far as it used to. A lot of that is because there’s major saturation in the advertising market and the marketing world, but also because I think there’s less real people of the customers that you want engaging with those platforms.
So if I’m somebody who you would want to be a customer for your business, and I’m not on Facebook or Instagram anymore, that’s a potential lead that you were trying to achieve in doing Facebook or Instagram marketing. That’s just not where your eyeballs are. But what am I doing? I am searching a lot on AI. I am going to Grok or Claude now, and I’m searching on there for where can I get my car fixed, playgrounds for my kids, travel plans, where to get the cheapest gas. I’m going to AI for that now.
So how do you, as a local business, how do you get onto that? How do you start to score for that? That’s stuff that we’re going to be breaking down. That’s really what I’m working on with local Central Ohio businesses. I think we’ve got a small window, just like if you go back when Google first started and you look at who are these powerful websites that were absolutely crushing it in SEO and Google Ads when it was new, a lot of those businesses became super powerful. That’s like how Amazon was created.
If we can get ahead of teaching and training the AI to find our business, to know our business, to see our business, to understand our business and be able to read reviews and recognize that we are a high quality local business and who we serve and what we serve, then as more people start to search there, this year it might only be about 14% of all search traffic that has shifted to AI. YouTube and Google are still the power players. But every year, AIs are carving something like seven to 10% out of the market from the old way to the new way. And when that starts to shift and AI gets north of 50% or 60% of our searching, then we want to be the number one in our local market for whatever our small business is.
Now, that’s just a marketing piece, and that’s a focus, not the focus. The really big one for me, guys, is I want to help business owners get time back. I have a small and growing family of young kids, and I understand the challenges of what it means to be a small business owner. There are things right now in your small business that you know need addressed. That you know could be better, that you know you probably should be doing. And you’re maybe just not, or you’re not focused on it, or you don’t have anybody in your organization focused on it right now. A week goes by and a month goes by and the thing just doesn’t get addressed. Every small business suffers from this. How big or small that problem is is probably equal to the quality and the success of your company.
The reason that I find most business owners deal with this is most small business owners are usually fit into one of two buckets. They either are great with people. They’re a great networker, they’re a great communicator, they’re personable, they’re fun to be around. Or they’re great with what they do.
I’ll use Laura Young. She bakes cookies. She has a bakery. So she does more than cookies. I love cookies, so I love her cookies specifically. She’s in Hilliard. Check her out. Bakes by Lo if you haven’t. Her cookies are phenomenal and she is phenomenal at what she does. She did my son’s birthday cake. It was incredible. It was amazing. It was customized. It was so good. And Laura has a smile that’ll light up the room, is personable and engaging, is fun and nice, kind and sweet. If you get Laura in front of you and you’re talking to her about your son’s birthday coming up, the sell of what she’s going to get you kind of happens naturally. And then you taste the product and you’re like, holy crap, I’m hooked. I’ve got to go there all the time. And that happens very naturally and organic.
Now, if that’s who you are, if you’re really good at that portion, doing the work or networking and talking with the people, a lot of times what happens is you absolutely despise sitting behind a computer screen and droning on in QuickBooks or Excel over the books. Or you absolutely hate organizing a content schedule for marketing and copywriting your captions for Instagram. Or you absolutely hate building out your website, communicating in email with clients, looking for lead generation, following up lead nurture. You hate doing that stuff. Most small business owners do.
And this to me is where AI really comes in. You can now have a personal assistant, a subject matter expert, somebody who can work 24 hours a day for you, who can help you plan and organize, who can put those things into a branded, easy-to-understand guide for you and your team, and does all of this while you can be out doing the work that you do and enjoy. And it takes less time, it moves faster, and honestly, it’s better work than you’re going to do, and it’s better work than most of your employees are going to do too.
If I had the tools now, if I had the agent network and system that I’ve set up for myself now, if I had that five years ago, that would have totally changed the way that we do business. I also think that would have totally changed our development or growth. When I opened a second location, I think with the AI agents working for me, that would have been significantly easier. I would have been able to do a lot more faster. I would have been able to be in two places at once because I wouldn’t have had to sit there and work so much on the digital aspect of things. It could have just been done for me. If I want a presentation branded, I’m not sitting there on Canva or Google Slides and trying to figure things out. The AI agents are doing that perfectly for me while I’m driving to my second location. My AI agents are going through and making sure that my team has the proper training and marketing plans that they can execute on without me having to sit there and type them all out and brand them all up.
It can all just be pushed out and well organized for us. This is what we can create now. This is what exists today, and it’s getting better every moment.
If you guys are a Dublin small business and you’re interested in this, I hope you follow along. If you like the podcast format, I’m going to do a blog and a podcast every week just to start explaining some of these tools and some of these items that you can start to implement. Usually the podcast flow will be me free-forming a little bit about what I see and how I see this best integrated for small businesses. Some real X’s and O’s, where we’re actually going to sit down and go through a workflow of something that you can do. And we’ll talk to clients who have actually implemented this in their business and how it’s helped them.
I hope you guys can follow along. You can also go to newsletter.cbusaiagents.com and follow along and subscribe to our podcast as well. Thanks so much, guys.
Show Notes
Mentioned in this episode:
Friendship Fitness, Dublin, Ohio — friendshipfitness.com
Bakes by Lo (Laura Young) — Hilliard, Ohio
Arcads.ai — AI avatar creation tool
Grok, Claude — AI search tools Jeff uses daily
Cbus AI Agents — cbusaiagents.com
Key takeaways:
Social media organic reach is collapsing for local businesses — Facebook and Instagram are showing your posts to fewer and fewer of your actual followers
Facebook ad costs have roughly tripled — from $6-8/lead to $25/lead in fitness, with a large percentage being bots or fake leads
AI search is growing at 7-10% per year — the businesses that get found by AI now will dominate when it passes 50% of all search
Most small business owners fall into two buckets: great at the work or great with people — but struggle with the computer/admin side that AI can handle
AI agents act as a personal assistant, subject matter expert, and business coach all in one, working 24/7 for less than $100/month
Subscribe: newsletter.cbusaiagents.com
Website: cbusaiagents.com
