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In this episode, we take a look at how to get more time for your money.

So time, what a crazy concept right? Have you guys ever listened to Myron golden? If not, you should look him up. He's got a great, great segment on this right, which is, what's the relationship of time and money? Right? We've all heard the statement. Time is money, but my run really throw some rocks at that right? And then he convinces Yeah, you know what? It's actually time is more valuable than money. And that's how I feel about it as well, it is more valuable than money. So what is the value of it? What's the value of your time? If you looked at 2500 hours working hours per year, and let's say you made $12,316 per year, then your time is worth $4.93 an hour? like wow, how'd you come up with that? At one point that was the poverty line in the United States? So $4.93 an hour is what your time is worth.

So that today that's actually worth or excuse me, that's actually below the poverty line. So the question is, what is your time worth? I have a brother speaking very personally, here I have a brother who has ALS. And it's been disabling him over the last few years for him. And for me, time is the most precious commodity that we have. And it's even become more more more pronounced since this has come about. So when life hands you a situation like that it innately changes the value of time as it has for us, for him especially. But for all of us involved. Now, you know, a second is still a second, right and a minute, still a minute. From that perspective, nothing's changed, right? Time still clicks on from that perspective continuously. But what has changed is the value the intrinsic value that that we associate with that second, or with that minute. Now associated with this is the perception of how fast time goes by all right. And we've all heard of studies like this, there was there was a study of the fluidity of time.

And scientists were looking at how to figure out our emotions, affecting our perception of time value, and how fast time goes. And, and, you know, we've all experienced this, right? When we're doing something that we think is fun, or we think it's a high value activity to us. Time tends to go more quickly. That's our perception anyway, right? And then when we're bored, then the you know, the perception is that time seems to drag. And we've all experienced that phenomenon. But the scientists were looking to sort of prove that. So they did some experiments. And in one experiment, the researchers took some train participants, and they took him to tell the difference between pictures and pictures that were shown for a short period of time or a long period of time. And the participants then viewed the pictures, some that were neutral, right? Or some that were positive, or some that were maybe not as exciting, right, so they had these different ranges like somewhere flowers, somewhere delicious desserts, right somewhere, geometric shapes, I guess if you're a mathematician, though, that might be pretty exciting.

So for each picture, though, they had to indicate whether the picture had been displayed for short or a long period of time. And just as the researchers had thought that participants perceive the enticing pictures of the desserts, as having been displayed for a shorter amount of time, regardless of the actual duration. Then compared to other geometric shapes that were shown or even some pleasing pictures of flowers. So in general, the peoples that ate the dessert pictures weren't shown As long as some of the others fascinating, right, they also found that that the perceived amount of time for the enticing pictures was also related to when the participants had eaten that day. So they found out that someone had eaten recently, then then those people actually felt like these desert pictures were displayed for a longer period of time. So some of it gets quite situational, right? In terms of what what have we already been satisfied, right.

So if I'm being given some information in a business, and if I've not had some either validation or other positive things taking place, then sometimes I respond to that situation differently than if I have had those other sort of mental those, you know, mental validations. Right. And we do that as humans with food and food pictures, right? As well as with other things. I also want to switch and, and say one more thing about this. Turns out that the scientists looked at fear, right. And of course, we've all experienced fear to one degree or another, and of all the human emotions, they felt like that was the most intensely examined one in the study that they should go after. And so what they found was this relationship between fear and and emotions, right, the emotion of fear and time perception. So what they did was they took a bunch of people and think Disney World, right? They took a bunch of people. And what they did was they, they strapped these devices on them, and then they sent them on to a 15 storey drop on an amusing amusement park. Right. I think one's called tower terror. I think that's it.

I don't think that's 15 stars, though. But in any event, what they did was they asked the people, okay, now that you've gone through that, how long What was your time perception of going through that fearful event? And when they asked, almost all the individuals over estimated the duration of the fall, right, in other words, oh, we must have fallen for whatever was five seconds, when, in fact, maybe it was two seconds, whatever the difference was just about everybody overestimated that, and from that, they started to drive that, that when we have some threatening stimuli, that it causes some intense, you know, physiological reactions that that distort our internal sense of the passage of time. And this happens also in business as well, I, I found that these emotions applied in one case recently, where we had found some insights, right, that were, you know, we gathered, we shared with a professional team, it turns out that the insights did not cast a positive light on some of the previous business behaviors, right? mentally, I suppose it felt like they were dropping, you know, 15 floors down. And therefore they were struck with some fear elements, right.

And in this case, they came back and they said, Well, you know, felt like too much time had been spent on these kinds of insights. And that that was not as productive. Interesting, right. And the team was sent back to get other insights. So one of the things about AI is that it will identify things that may not appear as positive, right? It might say stuff like, hey, if you continue to sell this particular product on a Tuesday, it's actually not as helpful for you, right, you're actually going to get, you know, less revenue, if you continue to do that. Right. So could quit wasting time, right on those kinds of things. Rather, if you do it on the second Friday of each month, etc, etc, then this is going to be a higher probability. And in fact, that's, that's what it's been in the past.

So in other cases, I found that when business insights from AI are shared, that focused on building on the good things, then the team typically seemed to be more favorably acceptable of that, and they felt like then it was worth their time, right, fascinating. And so there's a certain amount of vulnerability that comes with this AI stuff, right? That if you're tend to be more vulnerable as a person, meaning you're willing to accept both sides of the story, then you tend to react to a better kind of like, hey, if you ate well, you know, before you did, that, that experiment that those scientists did, then maybe felt like the you know, the the actual dessert pictures weren't as enticing. And similar in a business sense. If you come into, you know, an AI analysis report right on the business, you kind of have to eat well mentally before you show up. Because once you do, then when you come in, you got to be Well, and to say, I can hear some things that maybe we should stop doing or maybe not do as much.

And definitely, let's keep leaning into the good things for sure. Interesting correlation, right? In the end, though, we all know time is more valuable than money. In fact, Myron golden I love the way how he points it out. He said, Hey, if I wrote a check for $100,000, who would like that? And then of course, everyone's raising their hands. Yeah, sure, I'd love that. They're like, okay, but what if what if I told you, you know, you're gonna die today, right? So Well, okay, that's not as valuable to you? Well, what if that $100,000 though, allowed you to get the one, the one qR that would take care of you, and it would heal you 100% of the time, suddenly, everyone would take it, and they would use it, you know, the certainly, you know, extend their life, our perception of time and its value seems to have a connection with emotions that are based on our immediate interests and and also in the avoidance of fear.

And I think what I found over the years is applying AI in our business requires some vulnerability to receive the insights, which can build on the good things we're doing, but as well as to give us some insights on the negative things that we should stop. So to learn more about how to grow your business with AI, join me on a webinar on Thursday.

It's 1:00pm ET, and 10:00am PT.

Go to ClickAI.com/BreakTheTrap

Thanks for joining. And until next time, give more time for your money using AI.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we look at why I don't have the time and you don't have the time to do one more thing.

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, who's got the time? You know, as I work across a lot of different companies, that is one of the common themes right from company to company. It's everyone's slammed everyone's busy, who has got the time to do one more thing, you constantly are struggling, each of us are with a I don't have the time or the energy or the resources to get things done. And the stuff that really matters. I would even add that that applies to this whole AI business. Right? Which is okay, fine. I got some AI insights, Holy smokes, don't have the time to actually do this. You know, think back to the last time you implemented something in your business, and it took longer than what you expected. That is a recurring theme across tons of projects, tons of companies. So how on earth?

Could it be any different with AI? You know, I've, I've always liked Ted, you know, Ted.com, I just love the format of they figured out sort of this formula of Hey, if you, if you do it in less than a 20 minute conversation, we seem to have time to watch one of those right or to listen to something that someone's prepared. That actually takes more work, doesn't it to actually get it small enough, in fact, wasn't a Mark Twain that said, Hey, I would have written a shorter letter, but that would have taken more time. So it actually takes more time to produce things in a more succinct way. So the question is, what are the things that we do take time for? I've come up with a moniker that I use to help me describe that I call it click time, a click time is seven minutes, right?

So I look at things in terms of click time units, am I willing to invest seven minutes of my time into something? And so as we've seen and applied AI to multiple organizations, we'll take a look at how many click times did it require of their time? And how many click times did it require for them to be able to then make a decision? You know, each of us wants to know what needs to be done, but in simple steps, and then you want to be able to get the guidance in a short time, and then move on with it. I was fascinated with this when I started to look at how much time did it take for us as humans to get through a drive through a drive thru restaurant right for fast food. So I started looking for some stats on that. And I found something interesting. This is from 2018 research.

There's some a little bit newer, but for whatever reason, I grabbed the 2018. One, our Here we go. So this is the amount of time that we're willing to invest. So right we make the argument, I don't have time, and yet we still spend our time on things. In what chunks do we do that? Well, this is in this is in descending order. In other words, the first one that I read off to you is the one that takes the longest. All right. Now what this means though, is that just because it takes the longest, right? It doesn't really mean that it's the worst drive thru, or could it also be a function of, hey, there's a lot of people that want to go there. It's probably something between the two of those, right? So for example, the one with the longest wait time in 2018. Now for the drive thru was McDonald's. It came in at four minutes and 33 seconds. That was the average. All right, so if you want those chicken nuggets or for me, it's the Egg McMuffin. All right, you're gonna wait four minutes and 33 seconds. That's less than a click time. All right, the next one is chick fil a four minutes and 21 seconds. And then we've got Carl's Jr. Four minutes and 13 seconds. And again, these are average wait times. party's four minutes and 16 seconds.

And then we drop we break the four minute barrier just like you know we did that with running the mile, right? We Break the four minute barrier, we've got Arby's, and Taco Bell come in about the same three minutes and 58 seconds. Wendy's comes in at three minutes and 46 seconds, which I have to say the frosty is, I'm really, I'm really, I really liked the frosty, especially when you dip the french fries in it, alright, anyway. And then we got KFC, three minutes and 39 minutes, Dunkin Donuts, three minutes and 21 minutes. And finally, Burger King coming in three minutes and 13 seconds. All right. So the average turns out to be three minutes and 56 seconds in order for us to get whatever that is that we're targeting going through the fast food line. All right, that's less than a click time. So I'm willing to invest time as a human least here in North America, to get through the line, so that I can get one of those items. So maybe I do have time, maybe maybe it's where I'm going to allocate my time. Now, one of the problems of some of the AI providers, as you probably know is that it takes a lot of time. In fact, in my previous podcast, I mentioned the effort, right, we looked at some some research and stats of the effort and the cost that it takes just to stand up the data science team to do this, right. It's massive, right? In fact, there's an SMB owner, it's too long of a time and effort before he can actually get any sort of results out of it. So I was reviewing a recent case study where a small to medium business had used an AI platform.

And this is a different platform than then what most of these are, in fact, this platform recently got some accolades. Anyway. So within 30 minutes of loading their data, and seeing the AI analysis, right, so after the models were built, okay, they identified $3 million in additional sales opportunities. Hey, that's like four click times right? Now, I have to admit, that's not a very common amount of time, right in order to get those kind of results so quickly, right. But it's also pretty amazing to see that kind of result as well. I'd say it another way, that's about seven times through the McDonald's drive thru. So that company, they went through for their chicken nuggets seven times. And in that period of time, they're saying, they got some AI insights that led them into $3 million of additional sales opportunities. Wow, that's pretty good return on your chicken nugget. All right. Now, if you were diligent, right, which you are as an SMB owner, and you do the work to run your business.

In the course of doing that, let's say that your critical business information was being safely and securely monitored by AI. And that you didn't really have to actually set up all that AI, let's say that the AI was working on your behalf. And then when the AI found something, then you'd be notified. And now you can use it as an augmented intelligence tool, which is really where AI fits in today's world, right? It's take all the good things you already know. And then you're going to take a few click times, right? A few times through that McDonald's drive thru, metaphorically, right? To look at that insight and see, is it relevant? Can I apply it? It may take you, let's say 10 times sir McDonald's drive thru, to be able to put the decision together to make a change in business direction. All right. That's might be not the norm. All right.

But in any event, when you look at what the big companies are dealing with, and there's a ton of time that they put into and massive teams, in order just to start getting those insights, you start realizing that as a small to medium business owner, you actually can compete against the large organizations by applying AI in a manner that allows you to allocate small time slices to get the AI guidance to increase your sales growth. Now, to learn more about this, I'm inviting you to join me on a webinar on this Thursday at 1pm. Eastern 10am Pacific, and I'll invite you to come register at ClickAI.com/BreakTheTrap.

ClickAI.com/BreakTheTrap

I'd love to tell you more about how it is that as a small to medium business owner, you can get the results in a quick time. Thanks for joining and until next time, find some time

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we're gonna take a look at how many data scientists does it take to predict your SMB success.

Hey, welcome, everybody to another episode. All right. So we've been looking at this problem around how do I help my own SMB to grow? Right? What does it take for me to have all of the sufficient technology that I need to compete today? We've heard the adage, of course, Hey, you know what, if you're not participating in AI, you're going to get left behind, right that there's a lot of large organizations that, of course, pursuing this, and we'll talk about that here for a moment. What I found is that most AI platforms today, they really require a deep technical bench, right? And a lot of that gets outside of the reach of the small to medium business, right. So one of the things that led me into this world was to say, How can I help and find a way to close that gap for the small to medium business? What does that look like? The drive for Business Insights, leveraging AI, through simple platforms is growing at a cumulative annual growth rate CAGR of 47%. From now up through 2030, the safe some of the researchers out there.

Alright, so the need for this and the desire and the appetite for it is clearly growing. But how can you afford it? What does that look like? So I was looking recently, at this came out in February of 2021. There's this report that was looking at some of the top 10 companies, right, that are hiring data scientists. These are large companies, right? And what were they paying for them? Right? Let's say I had the checkbook out. And I want a data science team. What does that look like? Pinterest? At the time anyway, they were paying the most 212k on average annual salary for one, one data scientists. Lift was 154k. Snap was 152k. Man take a breath, right? slack 148k, Uber, 139k, Microsoft 136k. Right. These are average salaries for data scientists, Oracle 132k, Intel 120 3k and Accenture 107k. So the average of that using fancy math 144k. All right, how many data scientists does it take? I don't know, how many does it take to, to, you know, screw in a light bulb. But let's take a look at this. If you're gonna build a data science team, there's 12345678, there's about eight different key roles that are typically done on the stains. Now, a role doesn't always translate into one person. Sometimes it's multiple people. Sometimes one role can go across, you know, a person. Now let me run this by here, there's at least four, four critical needs, right? Let's say as a small to medium business owner, you're going to go build your team, you're going to need someone that's going to take care of analytics, right. And so that's, that's a critical role. So that's a necessary one that's required. Someone's got to know some coding work. So in languages like R and Python, stay with me. A third area is of course, all of the data and database work. So you know, working with SQL and no SQL, those sorts of things. And then and then there's all the algorithms and the models, right.

This is regression models, right? And dimensionality and yeah, the list goes on. All right, that's four roles right there. So it let's just take that, let's say that, and that those are unique enough that I'm going to argue that you will need one person for each of those roles, and using the average of 144k. We're up to 576 $576,000 a year. That's it. Even fully loaded, you know, that's, that's, that that starts to become a big number instantly it goes outside of the reach of the SMBs. If you really had and I was looking across some of the large companies doing this, they've typically got around 10. Right? And so you're in the 1.5 to 2.5 million range. And that's still not fully loaded. Nor does it include all of the technology costs, and you know, et cetera, right, all of the hardware and everything you need for that as well. Is it a surprise? No, it's not a surprise, when you say, Hey, you know, the big companies, they are really getting an advantage here by using the resources to bring in this talent, and then to actually widen the gap between what they can do, and what's available to the SMB world. And that's really started just sink deepest in my soul, right? I was like, wait a minute, wait, hey, it's the small companies that have brought some of the coolest innovations, and, and great opportunities to the planet. Oh, and I didn't even mention, there's another role. It's called the chief analytics officer. Not every company has those. But that's yet one more. And of course, I'm sure you could tell that roll is going to be above the 212 k range. I didn't even include that in there. Right. So let's say that, at the very least, as an SMB, if you're really going to do this, if you're going to put together your own data science team, you're at least in the 500k range somewhere right in there. And that's actually on the low end.

So like, Alright, so how do you let's, let's just assume that we did that. All right, for whatever reason, I've got the money in the bank, let's say we're just pretending let's say I'm going to go do that. How do you integrate this data science team in your company, there are several operating models to do this. There's a decentralized model, that's where you take an analytics group, right, your data science group, and they're focused on a particular function or business unit, and each business unit, or each function in the company, they have their own data science teams, some large companies have that. Here's another operating model, it's more of the functional model, it's where you have sort of this key function, there's one analytics group, but they will reach out and provide occasional support to other teams. Then there's the centralized model. And this model is where you have one analytics data science team that spans across the entire Corporation. And they of course, then go and reach into the different analytics projects, which are owned by the different business units, and, and different business functions. It turns out, that that model, that centralized one tends to be the one that works best for SMBs, right, where, in reality, it doesn't make sense financially, that, of course, you're going to have multiple data science analytics teams, you'll have one for the entire organization. But you know, like I said, in the larger, larger companies, they'll certainly fun multiples of these. So for our purposes, here, we're going to talk about the centralized model. And there's a flavor of that called the consulting model, which means sometimes that analytics group, or that data science team is actually not in the company. It's external, in its reaching in and providing insight, and, and, and guidance and predictive work into different parts of the organization. So it's critical to know that when you're doing this kind of approach with the consulting model, that that the understanding of the business and the key problems you're trying to solve, that goes back and forth, right between the analytics group and of course, then the the SMB itself. But what does this really mean for an SMB? One of the most important things that it really means is that in order for you to do AI, it means that you're going to have to have one of these big teams. And I did not like that conclusion, I was like, this is this is actually really hurting the SMB teams.

So I went hunting for a solution, right? And the solution was, how can we get data science and AI and predictive capabilities into the hands of an SMB? Right? How can we do that in a way that it does not require a data science team within your organization? So there's, there's not only this monetary challenge, or hurdle to it, which is okay, at the very least, let's say it's 500k, for argument's sake. There's another problem though. And that problem is, how do you declare return on investment? Right? Have that all you know of all of that machine learning and data science team investment, and that's of course, where a lot of business executives still need to be convinced. Then you know, you can't can't complain them or Can't can't blame them, right? I mean, you're looking at, you know, at the very low end 500k definitely up into the millions of dollars, what is it that's going to turn around a return on the investment that will make that justifiable. And that right there makes it even more challenging for an SMB to say, I'm gonna gonna jump into this. So, as an SMB, one of the things that I found is that you can skip hiring that team. You do not need the team that the platform's AI platforms have matured, to enable SNB teams to get the benefits of AI without actually requiring bringing in all of that sort of expertise into your own organization. Now, that's that's a huge promise, right? That's a huge change. That capability wasn't really even there a few years ago, right now today, what we found what we've developed, what we've provided is a way to do that. That is literally pennies on the dollar. So what I'm offering up to you is to join me Thursday for a web class on how to take advantage of this 1pm Eastern 10am. Pacific, this coming Thursday. I'd like to share that with you. I will be talking with you soon. Listen to me on my next episode, and I will start letting you know how to participate in that. Thanks for joining and until next time, don't go buy a data science team.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we take a look at what it takes to win the SMB war.
Who has a reason to reduce YOUR competitive edge? What tools are THEY using?

Okay, everybody, thank you for joining. So a couple episodes ago, I talked about this Harvard Business Review, where they talked about the gap between the large and small companies, how that's growing and why. And if you if you think back to that a lot of it had to do with big companies innovating more and spending more on r&d, as well as having more data. And they were investing in these intangibles. Right, and r&d and technology and artificial intelligence. Well, they also found that you know, the small companies that invested in these intangibles meaning technology, ai data, that they were found to be more resilient, during COVID, as well. So started to think about how can an SMB win, right? What does it mean for an SMB to win in this war, where even the large companies are going after the footprint? that historically has been the small to medium business area meeting, where we expected more innovation and growth and new things to come out? So how can how can an SMB when I started looking at several sources, and one of those is a group called tech aisle, they had done this 2021 SMB challenges, right? What were the top 2021 SMB challenges, thing that was kind of unique about this is they broke it into three areas, one, the top 10, SMB issues. And then the next was to the top 10, mid market issues, and then three, the top 10, upper mid market, that's, you know, 1000 or more employees, okay, so they were doing that based on the size of the company, and the common thread across each of them. That were the issues, right, that the small to medium business owners facing in the areas of business issues, it priorities, and so forth.

The common thread across them, was increasing business growth and increasing profitability. So companies from the size of one employee up to 5000 employees, least according to tech dial, they said, Hey, number one issues is business growth and increasing profitability. Now those shifts are the little as you went is the size of the company grew. But nevertheless, they were on the top two across cross those three sizes. All right, so how am I going to win as an SMB? First of all, I got to take a look at increasing business growth, and increasing profitability. All right now, that's according to tech guy, let's look at another one. So Business News daily, they came up with 12, small business trends for 2021. And the net of it was, I think it was number two or three on their list of the 12 was AI and big data are driving personalization. And they go in to talk about, hey, how the large organizations are leveraging these technologies to create a more personalized experience. Alright, so that's the second second one that's confirming and hey, gotta grow and got to leverage the resources that you have that you know that that you have, let's look at the next one. This is from someone called SMB group. And they said, Hey, here's our top 10 2021 tech trends. The first two was, number one SMBs reinvent their businesses for a virtual world. And number two, the business performance gap between the SMB digital accelerators and laggards grow, what they're really saying is, hey, for those SMBs, that are taking advantage of technology and using it as a differentiator, are actually leapfrogging and getting ahead, and the AI and data usage fits squarely within that. So now we've got three different groups that are saying, hey, in terms of either challenges or trends or opportunities for the SMB space, we've got this situation where AI and data play a critical role in building a key differentiator for the business.

Let's look at another one. So I want I took a look at the guardian. And they had developed this piece on the state of small business and 2021. Now, the course for them, they talked about the uncertainty that's been created by COVID, that a lot of SMBs. As you know, we all face that. There's also an increase awareness of racial inequalities. And, in fact, in one of their examples, one business committed billions to help advance racial equality. With one of the programs adding I think they said 15,000 loans to small businesses that are in the black and Latin communities. How cool is that? I've also seen AI applied to demographics, to also help serve all communities even better. And I think that's a great way to look at using AI to help address this issue. Now, you know, the movement to cloud is certainly lowered the cost of entry for SMBs, to take advantage of these advanced technologies. But I thought, hey, let me go see if I can find some other evidence, right, if I wanted to take an SMB, and win the war, of all of the big organizations that are now leveraging some of the best techniques to actually keep their footprint and grow and make it more difficult for the SMB space, what else others have to say? So here's another one. I tracked down guidance, financial guidance, financials an interesting one, they had this really cool pictorial where they focused on the small business trends in 2021.

They I think it was like 2400 organizations, SMB companies that they surveyed, they came back and said, 78%, expect to survive, and 19 were unsure. So those are interesting, interesting stats. But when it came down to Hey, what were the things that cause a lot of problems? It was loss of revenue, or reduced budget or temporary closure? Those are the most five, you know, most common COVID impacts. But at the end of the day, it came back to, are we taking our resources and using them wisely? To get the insights to now compete more effectively? That was their takeaway? All right. Can you handle one more? Alright, let's let's just talk about one more, a group called Constant Contact, they looked at small business lessons for 2021. And just to summarize, in the top two, they summarize that the leverage the small business has to use its online marketing and tools was number one, and number two, collect and take action on your customer data. Of course, that comes right back to using AI to segment your mark your market and then go after those vital areas to create success. So that was what that five maybe that I looked across. I thought, Okay, that's enough to look at. And then I bumped into this one from Ernst and Young. This one's interesting, because they were talking about, hey, how do we bridge the gap between big and small businesses? Now they wrote this article from coming from the other direction, right? So the first five that I mentioned, were coming from the direction of Hey, what what what are the challenges I you know, that I face as an as an SMB owner, right? They came from that perspective, the E y one, Ernst and Young one came from the other direction, which is, hey, we're in working with the big companies, how can we be more like the small businesses, right? So they're actually peering the other direction? And what's interesting with this viewpoint, is of course, the ask the question, how do we help the companies, you know, that are big? How do we get them to start acting small?

Now, what is it about a small company that a big company would like, and of course, one of the things that you'll you'll notice right away is agility, right, they aspire to have the agility of an SMB. And in fact, according to a recent Innosight survey, they found that 50% of today's s&p 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years. Holy smokes, that's amazing. So as a result, the larger businesses, they're creating their own internal innovation programs. And what they're doing is they've got this nice blend, this blend of large companies scale, mixed with a small company agility. And what that does is that actually makes it a little more challenging as an SMB owner to compete with that because well, you don't have the skill part, right, we don't have the skill part. So they're trying to be more like the small companies. They're trying to think like that. But you know, sometimes they get up, they get caught up, and you know, all of the minutia that takes for them to turn those big organizations around. So here's what I suggest. It now's the time to think about the key problems, then issues face your SMB and apply AI to efficiently innovate. So they're mimicking your best practices, and they're using AI to propel them. So the question is, then why wouldn't you continue your best practices?

Stop the bad ones, and then use AI to propel yourself. So the second thing in this Ernst and Young articles interesting is that they have developed a practice where they blend large corporate teams with small entrepreneurial teams. Again, they're looking to blend and bring together the big, you know, the small company agility with the big company scale. So when I started this particular podcast episode, I started by asking, Hey, way, how can SMBs win the war? And of course, you might ask yourself, what war? Well, the war is this, the big companies are leveraging the best practices of the small companies with the intent to maintain and grow their footprint, not as they're borrowing the best from the things that you've been doing? Well, so what do you need to do as an SMB owner? Well, I suggest apply some of the big company best practices, which includes leveraging your resources that you have by applying AI. And then here's the here's the trick. Make 10 Smart steps to improve your business before they can make one smart step. And by applying AI over and over again, actually builds your ability to move much more quickly, and get ahead of now, even the big guys are in the competition. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining until next time, as was said in a Batman movie, I think, be mindful of your surroundings. In other words, get moving on your AI for your business so that today you can win the SMB war. Thanks for joining.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

In this episode, we take a look at the secrets of the growth mindset.
If YOU could adopt the techniques for changing your growth culture, would you do that?

Thank you for joining me here today. So recently, I was taking a look at a site that was talking about some of the pain points around SMBs. Right? What are some of the things that make it difficult for small to medium businesses? I've been so busy doing some AI work, and projects that I've not had a chance to podcast recently. So I've missed doing this. Alright, so let's let's take a look at this. I was interested in focusing on what are the things that hold back a small to medium business. And I look through what lots of organizations are saying certainly looked at what my own experience has been as well. I found one in particular, that was interesting. It's called WalkerSands.com interesting site, they focus on accelerating the growth of b2b brands. Anyway, in their on their blog, there was a gentleman who had written down a list of 100 pain points, and it caught my eye and I, I started to look through those and then I copied them down. And then I started to categorize them. And I noticed that well, there were some that focused on business process pains. There was cash flow pains and competitive pressure pains, eco system paints, which are a How do I deal with, you know, those that I'm partnering with?

Of course, there are pains around expenses, of course, financial pains, government pains, legal pains, marketing pains, and then there are some personal pains, right things that happens in our lives, then there are product pains, and finally, workplace pains. So I went through on each of the 100. And I started to categorize them as well, right, this one's business process, this one's workplace and culture, this one's product and marketing and so forth. And then I sat back and I counted them up. And what I came back with, first surprise me, and then I realized it was confirming because it reflected my experience with working with lots of companies. So here's here's the results. Now this is an order of repetition. In other words, this is the ones that had the most number of pain points. Alright, so this is out of 100.

So the top one was 30% of the pain points on his list, dealt with workplace slash culture slash mindset kind of issues. Right? All right, that was the one that was the most repetitive. Now I need to say that the weighting of all of these that I'm going to go through certainly not the same, right. So at any given point, you know, one pain point could become more detrimental than 10 others combined. So I didn't look at it from that perspective. In this particular grouping, I just said, hey, how many of these in this category are there? Alright, so here's the list. It's 30%. We're workplace culture mindset. And then the next most repetitive was marketing. So 15% were marketing, and then 12% were financial. And then it drops down into single digits area. So 5% for competitive pressure, another 5% were personal, another 5% of them, were business processes, and then down to ecosystem and product, both of those are 4%. And then going down a cash flow is 3%. So there's only three out of the 100 that talked about cash flow. I thought that was a little small, you know, my experience with small, you know, doing small business stuff is cash flow is obviously extremely critical, and an important one. So that's why I pointed out a you know, in terms of the numbers of these, it's not that, you know, they're all weighted the same. All right. So it's an interesting look, though, as I've looked around lots of companies and worked with tons of companies over the last 35 years, I've noticed two common themes regardless of industry. The one is culture. workplace mindset challenges.

You could be in the medical industry, healthcare, you could be in financial services or banking, you could be an aerospace or defense, wherever it's, this is a common thing, culture or workplace or mindset challenges, just our are always the common thread. And then number two, which is real closely related, is communication challenges, right? That's always a big a big issue. And sometimes that feeds into culture itself. But if I, you know, those are the common things that I see. So when I, when I looked at this guy's list, and I see that 30 of his 100 dealt with workplace culture mindset, I wasn't surprised that, you know, he, at least from his perspective, that that was a common set of problems. Last month, or maybe it's six weeks ago, when I did my previous podcast, I shared some findings from a Harvard Business Review report, which talked about the small company trap, and how to break that. Now, if you recall, there are two and I invite you to go back and listen to it. If you haven't heard that one. There are two key areas in investing. Well, let me back up, there are two key areas to break that trap. The first one is investing and and adopting technology. So in that bucket, I put things like you got to have control your data, you have to have, you know, good systems to help you. Obviously, I think AI is a key part of that. And of course, I make a pitch and appoint a case for that. Right. So the Harvard business folks said, that was one of the common themes that they saw of small companies, and big companies that both survived and flourished through through COVID, as well as in other times as well.

Okay, that was the first one. second one was marketing slash brand equity. All right. So when you look at this other guy's list that I was talking about earlier, on pain points, marketing was high on the list. Interestingly, there's a little bit on on technology that was in there in terms of pain points. Here's the thing I wanted to get to those. When you look at the list above, you know, marketing had the highest repetitive points, other than the culture piece, right. And it was central to Harvard's finding, my experience has been that when AI is properly applied, it helps close the gaps between the marketing needs and the pain points we have there. And where we need to go to right in order to accomplish the kinds of outcomes, the Harvard that Harvard was talking about in that report. Now, what I did was I pulled together a list here of some of the marketing pain points that this particular gentleman included. Right. And and I'll just, I'll just mention some of them. Number Number one here, that he'd mentioned was, we are not able to get new customers. All right. The other is nobody knows who we are. Or here's another pain point. I'm not getting any foot traffic, or or online traffic. The other is, let's see. This is a commodity business. How do we differentiate ourselves right? on something other than price, right? Hey, Mike, my take on that is you need a good offer. I know an offer guy. Here's another one. I have no clue why we just lost that big sale. All right. Here's another sales are down 30% from last year, why? and so forth, right? Now, those are all interesting marketing problems.

And I've had an opportunity recently to be doing some things with an organization where we've been applying AI, looking at these kinds of questions and discovering, hey, what was the behavior that drove growth or that caused, you know, customers not to repeat their business right over the last several years, an AI brings out some really interesting insights for these kinds of organizations. So I'd say hey, you know what, the Harvard folks are, right? You got to invest in these kinds of technologies so that you can compete, because the table stakes have changed in terms of what it means to compete effectively with our marketing and AI is a piece of that. So I reiterate AI properly applied, does help us close the gaps between where we are today and where we need to go. But I want to come back to the previous point about workplace culture and mindset, right, which is by far the most common recurring pain point across organizations. You can even have the best marketing the best technology but as Peter Drucker used to say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Remember that culture eats strategy for breakfast. So you might have a strategy of a I'm gonna do AI, and I'm gonna apply it into my marketing. But if I don't have a culture and a mindset that will adopt and accept and put into place those particular changes that are coming out of that, that's a waste of time, right? So how do you achieve a growth mindset in your business, it's not enough to do the marketing, that's obviously critical. It's not enough to do the AI. Although I would say that it's critical as well. It requires these two things. Number one, you do need to apply the marketing best practices and use an AI to help you do that is certainly key. But number two, most important, you got to have a growth mindset, it's a change in thought, on adopting and adapting the way we work, right, we have to address the culture part. So growing our businesses by just technological insights alone, in my experience, that's naive to consider. Now while we may have short term gains, doing that, it doesn't possess the power to sustain at least my experience.

So what means sustainable growth? While it typically requires this mindset, that's continuously evolving it continuously vulnerable, right, continually speed being asking for what do I need to do or improve next, it's where I want me to take on new insights, and then to accept the need to change and grow. But you got to do it in steps, right? That's, that's the key. If I get too much insight, or too big or things to change, then it's overwhelming. And I might as well just stop because the human brain sort of shuts down, right, and the culture won't accept it. So it needs to be given in doses into a series of steps become smart steps. Now, I've seen large companies apply culture change techniques. But if they're done in mass, like I said, it becomes overwhelming and soon against syndicates drop. So from my experience, the growth mindset secret is these two things, number one, got to apply AI insights to your marketing, your sells your internal operations, take advantage of those platforms that are available today.

And I can tell you about the platform that we provide, we build on the big guys to do the stuff. Alright, that's the first one. Number two, bundle those insights that you get with a culture hack to make minor, you know, but yet still measurable adjustments to the way you work in order to adopt those AI insights. If you do number one, without doing number two, my experience has been the organization doesn't sustain. If you don't have the mindset for growth, than this stuff really isn't for you. Now, you might go one or two times through it. Now we like I said, we call this a smart step. Smart step has those two components in it? So the growth mindset, what that really is, is it's a succession of multiple smart steps.

When you're doing smart steps, think of those two components:
1) applying AI insights to your marketing, your sales, your internal operations, and,
2) then to applying a hacker culture hack to your organization that allows you then to change the way you work to adopt those changes that will come to you from the A AI insights and then grow your business right. Doing this puts you on a path of sustainable incremental growth. Now, as you know, there are so many pain points that an SMB experiences, and I'll be the first to say this, what I'm talking about does not solve all of them.

But I have found what it does do is it focuses the people on digestible attainable steps, which shifts the culture and the profits one step at a time. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining and until next time, get into the growth mindset.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

What are the two secrets to helping your small-to-medium business break the Small Size Trap?
Would you apply those secrets if you knew them?
Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. In this episode, we look at the two secrets to investing in your small to medium business to break the small size trap.

Hi Everybody, thank you for joining. Okay, so the small size trap. What is this? Well, it's when a small company has a challenge of getting or growing larger, right? It's where you have a difficult time breaking the barrier of getting from a small to a medium and ultimately to a large size company.

Here's a couple of statistics this came out of a Harvard Business Review. What they found was that until the year 2,020%, of small companies became medium or large each year, right. So every year. Now, the downside is that by 2017, this was cut in half. Wow. Now let's look at that same period until 2,080% of large companies retain their size. All right now by the year 2017. Though, this said not cut in half, but actually had increased to 89%, almost 90%. So in the same period of time from 27 from 20. Yeah, let me try that, again, from 2000 to 2017, small companies 20%, drop down to 10% that actually became medium or large each year, whereas the large companies actually increase right, that that's incredible. That's the small size trap.

So Harvard, you know, in this research article, they said, What was it? What was the difference? What allows a company to break the small size trap? So for the small companies that became larger, what were the secrets, and there were three of them that they pointed out. One was something called investment in intangibles. That's number one, number two, a higher asset base. So they're bringing in more revenue Make sense? And number three, they were a younger company. All right. So that's that was the secret sauce for small companies. But what about for the big companies? What was it that allowed them to either retain their size or to grow? And what they found is it was investment in intangibles. So the common thread here is, there's investment in intangibles for small companies to break the small size trap. And for the large companies to become larger, it's investment in tangible. So the question is, what the heck is investment in intangibles? I love this part because it gets to, I think, excuse me, it gets to the core of what it really takes for a company of any size to grow. The number one thing was an investment in research and development, data technology, artificial intelligence, I was number one.

Number two was brand equity and marketing. Right? So market awareness. So the ability to create that. So those are the two secrets around investment in intangible. So as a small to medium business owner, you look at yourself and say, Alright, where do I put my scarce resources? Well, according to the study, you know, they found that you did invest it in technology, right? you invested in brand equity and marketing. So those are the two key areas. The interesting thing about this, is that with AI with the big companies, right, it's giving them this leapfrog capability, right? They're jumping ahead, getting bigger and bigger. And it's allowing them to not only just incrementally grow and retain their size, but to actually leapfrog. So one of the most important things to do for a small to medium business owner is to take advantage of the AI that is coming available to you. And there's multiple platforms for that to do that on. Google's got some cool stuff.

Clearly, Amazon has some things and certainly as your does as well, there's the cloud based approaches. One that I found really interesting is while while the big cloud providers have an awesome set of platforms, they're still required. Significant team and skill sets around that. There's another group that I've seen that I'm really impressed with. It's called abl AI, B, LA. They're built for how you bring AI into the business right there, they create these views that are incredibly simple for the business owner as well. So one of the things that we find interesting with click AI is leveraging these skill sets so that the small to medium business owner actually doesn't have to worry about the AI portions of it.

Rather, he can focus on the questions around, what is it that's affecting my business? What are my pain points? What are the things that I'm trying to move away from? And what are the targets I'm trying to go to? And in fact, I think Russell Brunson put a book out called Traffic Secrets. And I think I think it's page 19. Actually, he's got this cool view there that says, write out your pain points. And write out what your targets are things you want to move towards. When you can answer those questions. That's actually a great entree into a business view around AI right? It helps you to say alright, what problems do I want to go see if I can solve with AI? That's great, a great place to get started. So the trick here as a small to medium business owner, don't shy away from investing in the marketing and the brand equity and don't shy away from investing in AI to leapfrog your competition. Hey, that's it for now. Thanks again for joining and until next time, invest in your INtangibles.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

Is AI relevant to my marketing funnels?
If so, how do I apply AI to my funnels?
Can I move my customer away from pain toward pleasure using AI?

Hey, thank you for joining another episode of click AI radio. All right. So I was looking at Russell Brunson his book called Traffic Secrets. I don't know if you've looked at that. It's got this he's got this great these great insights on how to drive traffic to your business interior to your sites and such.

Alright, I wanted to call out something in there. So he's got this activity, it's on page 19. If you have the book, open it up to page 19. If not get the book. He gives it away for free. So Alright, so page 19. He's got this, this little activity on there. I'm just flipping through it right here as we go. All right. And and what he's focusing on here is moving customers away from pain and towards pleasure. And he's got this, I'm gonna read something. I'm gonna quote him right here.

He says, He says that the next step to entering the conversation inside your customer's mind is to understand which direction they're moving, right and quote, so in essence, he goes on to say, hey, they're moving away from pain towards pleasure. So he's got this framework, he draws this line. And it's he's got this little person moving away from pain, towards pleasure. And he makes the point that as humans, we're either walking away or running away from pain, or we're moving towards pleasure. And it's that way for our customers. And it's important for us to get into the heads of our customers so that we know which direction they're moving. Well, when I was a kid, my family spent many summer vacations at Lake Powell. It's this lake at the southern Utah, Northern Arizona area. Anyway, we did a lot of activities like you'd imagine right swimming, waterskiing, cliff diving, so forth.

For the most part, we were moving towards pleasure, right, I'd like people to use Russell's framework. But one time, though, there is this massive storm that hit the lake. And we my parents had this really small ski boat is like an 18 footer. We were about an hour away from our camp on the lake. So we were kind of a ways away. And so the big storm comes in, it's not like you can get out and get on a road because the big cliffs there, there's just no way out. So you're sort of stuck down inside these big, high Cliff areas. And the waves got really massive, so big that they're coming over the front of the boat. So it started to get a little scary for us, right. So for about an hour of watch, my dad tried to navigate through these massive waves trying to get us back to our little Cove and get to some safety. So I would say in that case, we were moving away from pain. Now the interesting thing here is that in both scenarios, it's the same boat. It's the same Lake, it's the same location. Sometimes we route we were moving, of course towards pleasure. And other times we're moving away from pain, right?

So sometimes in business, we are moving toward pleasure, or we're moving away from pain. It's the same quote unquote boat, metaphorically, right with our businesses. What changes as we know around us is the context, right? So like, like in this lake Powell experience. When the weather was great, we were focused on moving toward pleasure, right? We wanted more skiing, more snorkeling, more eating food, and so on. But when the weather course turned bad on around us, then of course, our focus shifted to moving away from pain. Now, what I'd like you to do is draw two lines. All right, take take out a piece of paper, draw two lines, like the ones on page 19, and Russell's Traffic Secrets book. So you're gonna have two lines. And the first one is going to represent the spectrum of moving away from pain towards pleasure for our customers, right?

So that first line represents our customers, we want to move them away from their pain towards their pleasure. And as you know, this is generally where we start our focus as business owners And it's the right thing to do, right, we want to serve our customers. And so we want to help them move away from their pain and towards pleasure. And then if you look at the second line, draw that. Alright, that's going to represent the spectrum of moving away from pain, towards pleasure for ourselves, meaning the business owners. Now, there are things in our business that are painful, of course, and we seek to course move away from those, and certainly there are business pleasures that we move toward as well. Well, my experience has been that the more closely we assert, we understand our customers and we seek to serve them, the closer these two lines come together, right. And in fact, at times, they may, they may even lay on top of each other. So I'll give an example.

The more we see business impact on our customers, in other words, the services and products that we're providing, if we see that that's impacting our customers, in other words, if we see that it's reducing their pain, and increasing their pleasure, in general, that translates into a greater reduction of pain and a greater increase of pleasure in our own businesses, right. So these lines can in fact, get very close to each other. So the question is, what does this have to do with funnels and AI? Well, the answer is everything right funnels track the footprints of customer behavior, right, as we're looking to bring them into our products and services. Ai analyzes those footprints, meaning the customer behavior.

Now, one of our pain points as a business owner, is to misuse and Miss apply our resources in the customer acquisition process. This manifests itself in lost sales or sales reductions, you know, when we perform in a not so good manner, this creates a pain situation, right. And of course, as business owner, we want to move away from that AI analyzes customer behavior in our funnels, right. And in doing that it uncovers the pain points, that ultimately means that you may not be serving your customers most optimally. Now, this is great insight for business owner to have this clarity, and to be able to pivot or adjust. You could look at what's happening with that funnel and the results of it and to discover, oh, things don't go well.

In these situations. We want to move away from that because that creates pain for us as business owners. And in a similar manner. Ai analysis of customer behavior and funnels uncovers pleasure points that ultimately mean that you are serving your customer very well. And in this case, ai provides guidance on which of those activities you should do more of now by applying AI to our funnels, it means we can emphasize the productive behaviors, and de emphasize the unproductive behaviors. And by doing this as a business owner, you're able to more effectively deliver more of your products and services. In other words, helping your customers to move away from their pain and move towards their pleasure.

So in this manner, your direction moving from pain to pleasure is directly connected to your customers movement away from pain towards pleasure. So these lines do get very close. Applying AI on your funnels unlocks the doors to continuous insight to help your customers on their journey which is course what we're all about as small to medium business owners. Now eating frybread late at night, while watching the moon rise over the cliffs at Lake Powell. That was always a treat. And I would call that moving towards pleasure. And I actually think we could all use a bit more of that. Alright everybody. Thanks again for joining. Until next time, move your business and your customers away from pain towards pleasure by applying AI to your funnels.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook, visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

We look at the question, How can I use AI if I don't have enough data?
How much data do I need to get value from AI?

Hi everybody welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant. All right. So this is a very common problem, especially in the AI machine learning world, right? So you got a business, you want to be able to apply AI to your business, but you look at your data and you're like, I don't have enough data? Or do I? That's always a big question around AI, how much data does one actually need? We were working with a newly formed company, they were providing coaching to their clients. And they wanted to have insights on their client base so that well, they could improve their messaging, as well as their client acquisition. However, they only had a handful of clients. So they didn't really have a sufficient amount of data to leverage AI. And so we went about the business of building out a framework. So I'll introduce that framework to you later, as I walk through this. First and foremost, what is the lack of data? Well, one of the biggest problems around AI is those darn computers need a ton of information, to be able to start extracting the patterns and the predictions from it. So the very nature of AI requires this now, what would be some ways to get around this, one of the groups out of kt nuggets stated, hey, if you want to get rid of or overcome this problem of low data, well, you can always reduce the number of classifiers. Holy smokes, what does that mean? That is such a nerdy talk.

What that really means is when you're looking at your business, and you're breaking down the business problem, you want to reduce the amount of category. So you might have sales, for example. And you might say, well, I want to look at sales by geography, or I want to look at sales by salesperson, each of those would represent a category. So the fewer categories you have, typically the less amount of data that you need. So you could actually reduce your categories significantly, and have a lower or smaller amount of data and you can get started sooner rather than later. Now as time goes by, and as your data amount crows or the volume grows, you can certainly introduce more categories. Each category itself needs a sufficient amount of information or data in order for the AI to be effective at it. So what would be some of those numbers?

Well, here's here's some examples. If you're going to do some classical machine learning AI work, typically you'll need maybe 1000 rows of data. Now I'm not talking about AI that's used for images, or voice or text or things like that, what I'm really talking about is AI specifically for business information. So might be sales information, or might be information coming from manufacturing or payments, or whatever that might be. So at the very least, for your classical machine learning where you're looking to do some linear dependencies, you want to understand the input and the output relationships, generally 1000 rows of information of information would be would be the lowest amount that you would go with. Now if you're gonna go for some of these other kinds of AI, right, where you're looking to do advanced neural networks, then you're going to do well over 1000 bits or pieces of information, right? Whether that's images or whatever, you're going to get 10,000 50,000 100,000 of those.

But for the purposes of this conversation, what I'm going to focus on is not the image style kind of AI but rather the AI to help someone with, say a sales problem, or a refund problem or something like that, that's going to pull out of their business transactions, the information that they're getting from that. Now, the problem with a small amount of data is that it creates a problem called overfitting and overfitting creates this situation where it starts to create predictions that are too tightly coupled to a very small amount of information such that the the, the algorithms are too tightly connected to just a small set of data. What it means is you're getting predictions and analysis that are not generalized enough, right? Hence, they're over fitted. All right. So what can one do to do to address it? So the first thing is, is reduce the number of categories that I've mentioned. There's another technique also. And it's called data generation or data augmentation.

And this is a technique that's being used by some organizations where let's say that you had 1000 rows of information, then you apply some techniques where you generate or augment or, or artificially, if you will create additional data based off of the set of data you already have. And this allows organizations to get started sooner rather than later as well. In fact, the open AI group, they use something or they produce something called GPT, two or GPT. Three, that's a technique for generating human language, data augmentation. But I'm not talking about that I'm talking about business information, as it relates, in this case, to your sales or to refunds or to your payments and your payment processing. Well, this data augmentation technique is certainly something that you can do. But one of the things that I found most useful without getting overly complex for the business, because going through these techniques that I've that I've mentioned briefly, right, such as data augmentation, that's fairly invasive set of activities to do. A lot of businesses, especially small and medium businesses don't want to nor should get deeply entrenched in that it takes up a lot of time.

So there's another approach that we've developed that I call the continuous feed framework. And the continuous feed framework, its purpose is to line up your business for AI, right? It's Think of it like a drip system in your garden, right, where you're continually dripping little bits of water to a plant or something like that. The approach is you connect your business systems up to the AI engines, and like this drip system in your garden, you slowly start dripping data into the AI engines, the AI engines, then over time, continue to run and rerun on the data that's available. But what's it look what it's looking for, is for overfitting, it's looking to determine, Do I have enough information to in fact, have a generalized set of patterns that are now predictable and reliable. So when the model begins to develop this accuracy, and these predictability characteristics, then AI analysis and prediction activities can begin to be harvested, which produces insights for your business.

And I know I sound like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs right there. You know, it's Science, Science, Science, Science, right? All the guy hears is bigger, right? Bigger is better. Let me say it another way. If you have a small amount of data in your business, then you can easily and non invasively get started with AI by connecting your business systems up to these AI engines. And then like, like I said, like this drip system slowly build up that information. And when the AI starts to exhibit non overfitting, and highly accurate models, that's when you know, alright, I have enough that I can start taking the insights out of this and and using it to impact my business, which actually, ironically, has the effect of producing more data for you in the future. So it starts to become this nice, iterative and symbiotic relationship. All right, everybody, thank you for joining and until next time, get a continuous feed framework.

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What is the one simple hack to increase my revenue?
If you could apply a 3-step framework to overcome the main reason for business failure, would you?

Hey, welcome, everybody. This is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining. So okay, been looking at this problem around revenue, right. And as a small to medium business owner, this is constantly a challenge. In fact, I was reading recently, some common reasons why small to medium businesses fail. In fact, this was something I saw on investopedia. And of course, was looking at other places as well, I came back with these four reasons, right? These are the most common reasons, one, financing challenges or hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So let's talk about the first one financing challenges or hurdles. Right. So some of the challenges, of course, running out of money. That's always a big challenge. In fact, the first startup company I got involved with, that was clearly the problem.

You know, not only were we working, not smart, but we of course, didn't even think through what sort of runway we had on the finances. And so that clearly means that on a day to day basis, we have to be tracking, what's the revenue stream looking like, and how are we producing this. In fact, one of the things about this first one, right, the financing hurdles, it's what's strikes me is that if we address it, it actually gives us more runway to then address those other three, right management challenges and effective planning or, or even bad marketing decisions that we're making. So one of the things that I noticed here from the Small Business Administration, some results that they had, they said, 20% of small businesses fail in the first year 50%, go belly up. After five years, and for only 33% make it to 10 years, those are amazing odds. So this first, this first challenge here around financing hurdles, really stands out as the critical one to address. So I started to look at it. So what are some of the issues in here, and one of those is around missing the mark on how we price our products. And often we get stuck down into these pricing wars. That gets into how do we how do we define products? What's a funding model for those and so forth? Well, what led me to this next piece I'm going to go over is after working with some small to medium businesses, I started to hear this common theme about what do my business numbers mean? What do they What do they translate into?

Where should I be investing my time and energy as well as my scarce resource? So I noticed over time, that simple framework started to appear out of this, right. And the thing about frameworks is, they help us to focus on the things that are most important. And then help us to de emphasize the things that aren't important. And so this framework has appeared over some period of time working with organizations doing this. So I wanted to introduce this framework. Now a framework generally has a series of steps. And so in this framework, there's three steps. I call this framework, the PIE framework, spelled p, e, maybe there's another way to spell pi. That's the way I know how to spell pie, the pie framework P-I-E. Alright. And again, this came out of addressing the question, How do I solve these funding hurdle challenges, right? And then in order to do that, what do I have available to me as a small to medium business owner that I can apply into this framework to help me resolve it? So the PIE framework came out of this out of these groups, right, that I was working with, and here's what P means ready? P means problem and information preparation, like what the heck is that? Right? So for problem and information preparation, one common thing that I've noticed is that some organizations will not literally write down what are the serious problems We're facing How would I prioritize those? Right?

What, what are the most important problems we're facing? And then what's the information that I have available to me to help me serve as insights? Tell me solve that problem. that's step number one of the framework sounds simple, right? Sometimes life is just the simple things. The second step is the I pee. Okay, so the ideals with intelligence augmentation. Now, this is a course, where artificial intelligence comes in. Now, I intentionally use the term intelligence augmentation, because I personally think that's where AI is today. I think it's at the point where we apply it intelligently. And so the insights that come to us that have that have examined our our information and the problems that we're looking to solve, that serves as input then to the great intelligence you already have, and so P problem and information prep, step two, intelligence augmentation, right, and then step three, is executing on guidance. So that's the E, execute on guidance. Now you think, why would I have that in there, I find that interesting that over a period of time, a lot of organizations won't execute on the guidance. So you're been given this guidance from AI, and they won't do the execution on it. Here's the key about AI. First of all, the reason why we use the term intelligence augmentation is we're not expecting that we apply it blindly. So we do want to obviously, apply it intelligently, within the context of business constraints that we have that that is critical. On the other hand, though, while that's being said, I noticed that some organizations will do nothing, right, they won't make any adjustments.

And hence, I put E as the third step to the framework. So if you want to have a simple hack for improving your revenue, you apply the PIE framework PIE, identify your problems and the information preparation that's needed to address those, run those in through artificial intelligence to then give insights that then augment your own intelligence and then make a plan to execute. On the guidance, three simple steps. I have found that when we've applied these in organizations, and they've executed on it, they'll discover things that they didn't even know that they didn't know.

And that permits them to grow with the right kinds of customers without taking on new resources, which is a big challenge, obviously, for small to medium business owners. So there were four common reasons why SMBs failed, right? That it started with one financing hurdles to inadequate management, three, ineffective business planning and four marketing mishaps. So today, I've talked about the PIE framework to address this first one, right, which is around financing hurdles. The other three items of course need to be addressed. But with continued funding through AI inspired guidance, it's been my experience that it gives a runway right gives us a much longer runway to address those remaining three items, but we'll discuss those at another time. For now let's focus on overcoming the financing hurdles through the pie framework. Hey, thanks for joining and until next time, get some PIE.

Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.

One simple hack to increase your revenue.
In this episode we discuss how to increase your revenue through your business numbers.

Grant
Hi everybody this is Grant Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. In this episode, I have the opportunity to discuss with the infamous Blake nubar on how to get a grip on your business numbers.

Everybody, welcome to another episode of click AI radio. This is Grant Larsen, I cannot tell you how excited I am today to have a visitor here with me someone that I've been dying to interview for a long time. I have really admired this man and what he's done. Blake nubar.

Blake
I appreciate you having me here, man. It's a pleasure. I'm ready to have some fun and and thanks for having me on the podcast.

Grant
Thanks for taking the time to do this. You know, I've chased you for some time, right? Just keep trying to track you down wherever you are on the planet, right? Trying to get a moment of your time. But thanks so much for doing that. In fact, I was remembering the first time that I met you. I happen to actually be sitting right next to you, right. And it was at a funnel hacking live. And I think it might have been the first one that I ever went to. And I'm sitting next to you. And we're just chatting for a minute. And then you were so humble all sudden, they're like, Blake nubar, please come up to the front. They call yell, I'm like what the heck, you had won this award for everything you've done to the business. How cool is that?

Blake
Yeah, it was wild, I would award the growth on that thing was insane. Actually, that was on the product. And that was really cool. And yeah, I remember sitting next to you specifically. And I was like, Wait, are you Steve's Dad?

And you're like, yeah, I'm Steve's dad. I'm like, man, he talks about you all the time. Like in such an awesome way. It's fine. Nice to meet you. So, ya know, collecting the first is my first time walking across stage getting the the two comma club award. And that was done with an online business that it was called the b2b formula. I was working with a guy named Brian page on that. We kind of started that thing from ground zero type thing. Brian had a he had a course out really. But you know, wasn't making sales didn't know what a funnel was. All that good stuff. And we kind of like teamed up, you know, and we found each other through this thing. We started building this thing out. And you know, next thing you know, by implementing funnels and getting the right traffic sources in place. We did a million dollars in 43 days with that offer. And we were there at that funnel hacking live collecting that award that was actually here in Orlando, Florida, I believe, which is funny enough, because it's back here again, this year in 2021. Which should be exciting. So yeah, that that was a it was an exhilarating experience. A lot of crazy stuff happened. But on all Yeah, crazy to like help grow a business like that.

Grant
I think about how you got started, I've heard a little bit of your origin story. But could you just take a moment to talk about how did you get started into this? Yeah, so

Blake
Um, that my whole online journey and my funnel journey is different. My funnel journey is probably more applicable for this. So I was working in the nine to five, I was working in a fitness company. And we were working on building out this certification program for people that want to become personal trainers. If you want to become a personal trainer, you had to pass this exam. It's just like a standardized thing that you have to do. I don't know if it varies from state to state, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But we're building out the certification. And we want to like really go all in on this thing. So we spent we like really transformed how a training program should be. And we like we finished this thing. Like, it was crazy worth like nine months on this thing. It was a ton of time, but it was it was awesome. I had like a mobile app. It was this book. It was an online program and like all 360 views and amazing product. And we go and I hand it over to the marketing department and I'm like, Hey guys, like we're ready to rock and roll and start selling this thing and I almost like hand over the torch and they just couldn't sell it. Like nothing was moving and I just remember getting frustrated cuz I'm like, hey, like, Why is this not working? Like I thought that's your job. You're supposed to like market this stuff now and they're like driving traffic to like a website just like nothing was working. And I remember go I went home one night. And I was like frustrated Of course and I'm sitting there it's like three in the morning. I'm staring at my ceiling fan. And on my laptop on my on my bed. So I just remember pulling it open and looking through it. And I see this ad Come up. And I just remember the ad it just said weird marketing experiments to increase traffic conversions and sales online. I'll never forget the saint of it. And it's this crazy guy on it. His name is Russell Brunson. I had no idea who he was. And he was just like, full of energy. So I clicked on this ad. And next thing I know, I went in in a sales funnel. I didn't know I was in a phone, I thought I was on a website. But lo and behold, I was in a sales funnel.

And it's basically Russell just being like, you want to grow a business online, you want to start a business, you need a funnel, you need a funnel, and he's like, going through all these different types of funnels. And I remember I was like, so intrigued by it. I was like, a 90 minute presentation, and I was so captivated. I remember, I watched it. Again, I watched it twice. So I watched this thing twice. It's like six in the morning, I go straight into the office, I started sketching out a funnel on the board, and the marketing department like, what are you doing, man? I'm like, I know how we're gonna sell this. We're gonna use a sales funnel, like, what's the sales funnel? And I'm like, I don't really know yet. But this guy Russell talks about it. And I think I think this is how we can sell this thing. So I start sketching this thing out. I call up one of our celebrity trainers, who is like the poster child of this brand new certification. I'm like, hey, so and so we need a webinar. Like I bought the perfect webinar stuff. I sent it over to him, he like records this webinar, he sends it back like a week later, I build my first funnel out ever inside of clickfunnels. I put this thing in, and I go to the marketing department say, Hey, guys, instead of like what you were doing, just drive traffic, I do what you do, but just send them to this thing here. And they're like, Alright, so they send people there. And people start often. And people start watching this thing, right? When we go deliver the offer. No one buys like not a single person purchase this thing. webinar ends, we're done. I go outside. I'm like, I'm like Kirsten to myself. I'm like, Oh, another fail What idea. And I remember how like one more last, like lackluster hope of trying to get this thing to work. And I walked back inside. And I just went to my computer and I clicked on the refresh button. And we made our first sale for like, it was like 797 bucks like $800. And I went nuts. And it's like I this Russell stuff works right funnels work. And I walked in the next day and I quit. And I set out on this journey for the for the next year of trying to understand how you know, basically the science of selling stuff online, like funnels and offers and messaging and all that good stuff. And the rest is history.

Grant
One sale. That's amazing. That's it.

Blake
There's no I think that's one thing I think a lot of us will relate to. And if you if you haven't relate to yet, you know, some people are watching and listening, they have it. The one thing I think a lot of people will tell you is that when you make your first ever sale online, whether it's $5 or 500, there's this feeling that happens where you just like there's no turning back, I want more of this experience again and again and again. Yeah,

Grant
Yeah. I love that, that so so your secret sauce as a business owner, it sounds like it's a combination of things. One, you stuck with this clearly right? And it took lots of tries to do. But I've watched you build from that, because I've seen some of the things you've created since then, which is just incredible. I think you've really been perfecting the art of the launch the product launch. He talked about that for a moment. Yeah.

Blake
So anytime you have a really creative idea, right? I'm never an advocate anymore. I used to be right of building it out first and then launch it. And I've kind of flipped that on its head. Now it's more like launch it first and then build it out. Because a lot of things that prohibit entrepreneurs from moving forward that stopped them in their tracks as they think they have to go build out these products and services first. And it's really difficult, right? There's a lot of friction in that. And almost it's like a recipe to fail and quit and give up and not want to do it again. So I'm more of a fan of See if you can go sell the idea that you have first and then go spend the time building it out. So anytime we have an idea, what we like to do is really go really hard in the paint, when it comes to launching because launching is definitely it's the way to prove your concept. It's the way that it gives you the short term capital to inject into building the process and fulfilling on it. And even putting more even gives you the capital you need to put into evergreen strategies like paid media and things like that. So we're just like what we do really well here my business partner and I is that we when it comes to a new idea, we really like to watch hard and aggressively like we like, we don't just like to send an email. We don't like to just make a Facebook post or a couple ads. Let's say we like to be the loudest people in the room where by the end of it, I'm hoping people look at me and like man, that Blake nubar dude, he's super annoying, because then I knew we did a good enough job because you couldn't escape us during that launch. So launching is one of those things where it's like, it's you got to become a master of it. Like you have to know how to do it. But you never want to stay in it. It's like learn how to launch and then learn how to move that stuff to the Evergreen model where it just keeps producing for your business day in and day out. So watching is it's it's something you have wasted you have to learn it you have to become really good at it and There's so many different types of launches you could do honestly, it's like, fall one of the frameworks and put your idea into that framework and then just see how it does and see if the markets willing to judge and pull out their credit cards to pay for it.

Grant
Are there certain social media platforms that you tend to focus on for your launches? Yes, so we, I'm a fan of Facebook.

Blake
I like have this love/hate relationship with Facebook, because it's like, as much as as great of a place it is, it's like you have very little control as an advertiser. So Facebook's a really good spot we enjoy. I think the all our biggest launch we've ever done was only by utilizing Facebook, which is crazy, right? It's just because Facebook to me is the hub. Like if you're on social media, you're on you have Facebook, on your phone, or you use Facebook, you might have the other ones too, you might have like tik tok and Instagram and all the other ones. But Facebook is definitely the core. So I'm like, Okay, let's focus on Facebook, which a reason behind that was a we didn't want to get overwhelmed. I didn't want to like every additional platform, you have to like fake have to. It's just more stuff you have to create. It's different type of content you have to create because the platforms have different ways of posting and stuff. So we're just like, let's do Facebook. That's our favorite. But now as we've expanded the business, and we've grown, we really focus on Facebook and Instagram, those are kind of the the two big honey holes, I would say when it comes to it. We do email marketing and things like that. But it's really Facebook and Instagram, because like I said, that's where every I mean, everyone's on Facebook, I mean, and you take it literal ticket, figuratively, the world's on Facebook. So what better platform to use, and the one where everyone's kind of congregating.

Grant
Okay, that's awesome. So you know where you're going to find your people. So you grew this business and you become expert at launches and launches. And you got to a certain point in your business, there was some time or place or condition you got into Lake where it led you to reach out and try to track down someone like myself, what were those conditions?

Blake
Yeah, so I remember, you know, the business was growing, we were doing really big revenue numbers. And I remember when I was working with Brian, right, previously, I remember, he had a consultant that was really advocate about understanding your data. And I didn't get it at first, I'm just like, What does any of this stuff mean? And as you really start to see, when your business grows, if you don't have a grip on the numbers, you're kind of in trouble. And I remember we were getting to a point where our revenues were, you know, high six figures every month. And I'm just over here. And I remember I think I reached out to I don't know, if I reached out to Steve, or Steve reached out to me. But I remember one instance happened in regards to conversations like, you need to talk to my dad. And I'm like, he knows this stuff. And he's, it seems like it's what he does. And I'm like, Okay, done deal. And the reason I reached out to you is because I realized that in order for your business to have a grip on it to have a pulse on what it's doing to scale it right with predictability. You're you have to understand these numbers, and especially having understanding numbers in a way where you can make really educated decisions based on that data. See, most entrepreneurs, when you're first getting started, you let your intuition guide your decisions. That's great. Like you have a gut reaction. Oh, this is a cool idea. Let's go watch it. But as that thing works, you need to use less intuition and more data to kind of guide where you want to go. Now, if you want to develop new products sure where your intuition run wild, right. But when you want to make really educated decisions on growing your company and what different verticals to go after what different traffic sources, it should no longer be this game of guessing right, which a lot of entrepreneurs start making the mistake of it's like I touched one thing it turned to gold, we think we can touch some more turns to gold. And it usually always backfires. It has to be the data. So I started thinking, Okay, I don't want to make that same mistake where it's like you think you're the end all be all, and everything you're gonna do is going to be magical. It's not, who can I contact that knows data because I'm staring at this stuff. And I it's like a foreign language. I'm like, looking at like, I don't even know, but I'm just staring at these. And I'm like, this is this way too much data here. And like, no one had a really easy way of organizing it so led me to contacting you. And that's kind of where things began.

Grant
That freaked me out at first and I'm like, Oh, yeah, we're gonna do some AI on this. That just sound weird to you.

Blake
Yeah, I was just like, you know, I've heard of AI before. And like my geeky brain can like understand it to an extent. But I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Grant, just do your magic because this sounds crazy to me still.

Grant
Alright, so it's important to you to understand your business numbers, like you said, so that you can figure out some predictability. It helps you what influenced some of your planning or your next like, if you don't know your numbers in your business, right?

Blake
You can skate, you can look you can get to you can just run a start a successful business and grow it to an extent flying blind. Like you can do that. You could you know, you can get a little lucky. You can have something that's pretty stable. But if you really want to grow your business and you're wondering why you're capping out and everything, your tribes not working, there's a good chance you have no idea what your numbers are, right? So if you really there's I don't know another Way to scale a company then by really understanding your data, because when you understand your data, you know, what's converting what's working, what's not. And you can focus more energy on the things that are working and put more money behind those, hence, scaling those. And like kind of divesting out of things that aren't working so well. And the only way to do that is to really have a grip over the data inside of your business, which honestly, is probably the last thing entrepreneurs do, right? Because it's just so overwhelming. You just like the one thing you want to avoid. But I can't express at least in the last few months, how much I like realized how important it really is, to having a grip on it and what it can do for your business. It's the difference maker in your business.

Grant
Okay, that's, that's awesome. So when you got started working with us, how much did you have to know about AI? That, were we shoving it down your throat? We're like, hey, learn logistic regression. Come on Blake.

Blake
Great, I had no idea of anything you you you had, like, I knew nothing going into it. And I still didn't have to know that much. Because working with you, you're able to articulate the data in a way my brain my, you know, kindergarten brain could understand with pictures and awesome things like that. So going into it. No, I knew absolutely nothing. I didn't have to know anything, which was great. Because you knew exactly how that data worked. You knew how to show me and you basically just were withdrawal. You're like, this is what this means. I'm like, I understand that instead of me trying to figure out what to do. Or the guess is it literally taught you told me what, on this day or this time or after a holiday or before holiday or during this season? Or during this quarter? This is what you should do? and not do. I was like, I can understand that. So it was simple.

Grant
So let me ask you about that in terms of ways to make something like this easier for a business owner. Now that you've gone through this experience, what would be some some tips that you would share with others to help them in their journey going through this?

Blake
Yeah, just look, data is one of those things. Again, I can't stress it enough anymore. And I don't think many people geek out on it. Like, the thing is, always have a grip on your business when it comes to the numbers, because then you can have the ability to have someone like grant come in and help and help you and show you on what to do with those numbers. Right. Having those numbers is great. You might tell me all day, I know my conversions in my business. And I know, I know my opt in rate. And I know this grants the person that can tell you what that really means and what to do with it. And that's the difference. Because it's one thing, knowing about the numbers, the next is being able to take action on what that data means. And if you look at most things, right? There's every software on this planet will tell you numbers, right, here's your conversion rate, here's your OPT in rate, here's what won the split test. But there's another layer after that. And that was like that was what I was really impressed working with you is that you were the second layer, you were the the team that came in, I was like, Hey, this is what this means. That's great. But this is what it means to do with it. So I would advise anyone, that's whether you're just getting going or you're looking to grow your business, start to get a little grip on your numbers, because then you're able to, you know, work with someone as amazing as grant to help you really scale those numbers by making those decisions.

Grant
Blake, you've been more than generous with your time with us today. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for doing this. Any final tips or comments to people who are starting to grow their business? Yeah, so starting to grow your business, always make sure a I'll start from the beginning, you're gonna solve a big problem, right?

Blake
Find a big problem, if you find out that you're capping a lot, right? There could be a lot of reasons, like I said, data could be one of them. But just remember, like, solve really big problems, right? Because then it's gonna give you room to grow. And as you start growing, get a real grip on those numbers. Because seriously, there's no other way to scale. You can't scale a business without that predictability. And having that predictability is going to give you the chance to grow your business on a whole new level. Again, understanding what those is and work yourself like grant or some this AI technology. That's absolutely amazing, right? It tells you exactly what to do in order to make those decisions. So no longer do you have to guess anymore. I mean, we've been guessing our whole lives as marketers with split testing and things like that. It's amazing to know that you can go into situations right where the data is, this is kind of how this is how it works. And these are the these are the ways you need to react based on that on on all that information. So that's my final words. I know it's more like this is the geek mind going but solve big problems, get a grip on your numbers and then find a way to take that those numbers and use them to make those decisions to grow your business on a whole new level.

Grant
Hey, thanks again, Blake for joining us. And thanks everyone for listening in. Until next time, get a grip on your numbers.

Thank you for joining grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.