ClickAI Radio

In this episode, we're asking the question, How do I improve the quality of my leads?
Do I use special language?
Is there a framework I should use?

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant. Okay. So, one summer, during my college days, I was selling long distance phone service, right? That definitely dates me, I was constantly looking for ways to find people who wanted to save money on their long distance service right now back then, as you probably know, the big fish in the ocean was AT&T.

And so there is this other company that had bought a ton of their capacity and had got the rights to sell that service or that capacity. But at a reduced rate. Right. They clearly didn't have all of the infrastructure that at&t did. So they could undercut him. So I was selling this service and I was looking for customers, how am I going to find a customer? There were times that I stood in the local mall. This was in western Colorado, and I would try to solicit people, right? I'm trying to figure out how do I do this, right. So I went, I went to the mall and set up a little booth there. And you know, the drill, I'm trying to make eye contact as people are walking through the mall, and they were trying to avoid eye contact. And of course, we've all been there, right? We've all avoided the contact, I know I contact It was painful.

Well, there must be a better way, you know, I thought so I had to find some other channel or avenue to find more qualified leads. So I started looking to small to medium businesses, I started thinking Wait a minute, they're going to be making a lot of phone calls. And they would most likely welcome this ability to reduce their costs. So I started literally going through the Yellow Pages, alright, that dates me again to write and I'm going through these businesses, and I'm showing up on like, I can save you some money on your bills. And they're like, hey, alright, suddenly, I found this vein of value, right? So I would go in, I would talk with the business owner. And I'd say I can save you about 25 to 40%. And they just started jumping in on it and signing up.

And interestingly, while I was in those businesses, signing up the business owner, individuals, right employees in the business, they would come forward and they'd say, Hey, you know, is this for personal stuff, too? And I'd be like, Yeah, absolutely. So then I would sign up their employees as well for their own home service also. And so it was this wonderful connection that I sort of stumbled into? Well, it helped me get through college, right? The difference? We know, when I look back at that, right, it was finding the high quality lead, right, it was always interesting to me, that the individuals would come forward and sign up as well, meaning I could have approached those same individuals in the mall, and they would have likely walked the other way, right, they would have not made the eye contact. So when we're looking for high quality leads, it's particularly about finding the right individual, but even more important, it's where and when we find that individual.

So in that scenario, you know, when I was finding the individual, they were clearly more comfortable buying the service in the context of their workplace, as their boss was buying it, then they were buying it standing in the mall. So discovering the buying scenarios for our leads, I think is one of the most important ways to improve the quality of our leads. And as you know, it's often that exact same person or business when you know when we get them into the right scenario that they'll purchase and become a customer. So the question then is, how do we discover those scenarios? Right? What are the techniques for doing that? If a scenario is that critical to reduce the time to value, then how do we find it? So in one of my startup companies, we had been developing some software solutions and at one point, I sold a two week consulting project to a large company. So me and my team went in and we did the work, things went, well, this large company liked it, and we got paid. That was all good. But I thought, Wait a minute, you know, always better to go back after a hot market and a warm market than it is a cold market.

So I started showing up to that same company for the next six weeks after that, every few days, I just show up, and I check in on it. Hey, how'd you like what we did for you, hey, did that go pretty well don't want to be a pain. But we would love to do more stuff for you. Right? So I started walking the halls. And pretty soon I was having Hallway Conversations. Now, in a COVID. world, that would be a little more difficult. But there are virtual hallways, right that we can walk. So this enabled me to, you know, gather their scenarios, right, understand what their pain points were. And then that further enabled me to design a solution. So I crafted a solution that I felt would be meaningful to their scenarios. So not long after that, I had the opportunity to get a pitch that solution in the context of their scenarios, right, addressing their pain points, and we ended up closing a seven figure deal. So it's all about knowing our customer.

Alright, that's that's real key thing. But it's, it's knowing the scenarios in which they're willing to, in fact, bring on and understand the value that it is we can deliver to them. If I address them directly in the mall, it's not going to go well, metaphorically. Now, the stories that I just shared, I think demonstrates some of the things that we can do to improve the quality of our leads. But I think that there's a challenge with these stories that I shared. And one of them is that I think they take a lot of time, right? That's a lot of effort to find the people to go, you know, cultivate the lead, but it's still a good effort. It's the right effort to do. But I often wondered, is there a way to reduce some of that effort. And one of the one of the techniques that we have used leverages AI. And so for most businesses, of course, their customer base shares some common characteristics, which brings them to the business.

So creating a profile, right? If you sit back and think if I created a profile of my customers, right, and I fed them into some AI models, which is what we do, then you search for the people that align well with those profiles, that actually improves the quality of the leads. But I'll get nerdy here for a moment. Most important thing I think, in all this is that it never replaces the human touch in building business relationships. So I don't think that'll ever go away, at least for a long time, right. But what it does do is it puts the leads and our efforts into a quadrant. And so allows us to reduce the amount of effort that we do spend, so that we can have that human touch in the more important set of people that are more profitable, highly qualified leads. What it does is it introduces a quadrant, okay, fact some call it a confusion matrix fact, I hope I don't confuse you with the next 30 seconds.

But it basically has these two variables. One is, is the quality lead predicted to be a quality lead, yes or no? Or is it actually going to be a lead? Yes or no? So those are the two case you need both of those. So in some cases, you'll have a person and is the person predicted to be a quality lead? No. Will they actually become one in real life? No, then the answer is we don't ever really want to spend our time least talking to them about what it is we have to sell anyway. So AI helps us to take that whole set of people and move them away. We don't want to spend our time there. The next the next layer, there's four of these is is this person predicted to be one? No, the AI said no. But in real life, it turns out, they would have been. And so that's a lost opportunity. We call that an opportunity cost, right. So those would be some that hey, just the AI got wrong.

All right, the next area, the next two areas, though, is where we will spend our time, it's where it is predicted that person is predicted to be a quality lead, in reality, they won't be a lead. And so one of the ways we found helpful to mitigate that is to be very clear and crisp, on the profile of the customers know the customers the message there, right. And that keeps that quadrant and that section of people very small. All right. And then the last area is the course one that we really want to focus on. This is where the AI says you're predicted to be a quality lead, and in reality, you are quality lead and you will actually purchase. That's the goal, right? That's the vein of value that we're pursuing. So the real the real goal here is to let us get to those high quality individuals or businesses where then we can build those connections, those human relationships, figure out what the scenarios are for them and then make it really effective at delivering the kind of service that they need. Hey, if you're interested in reducing in reducing the effort to find high quality leads and reach out to us at click ai radio.com My name is Grant. Thank you for joining. Until next time, go get some quality leads.

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.

How can you use what you don't know as your competitive business weapon?
How long will it take me to discover what I don't know to improve my business?
In this episode, we'll address the question how to use what you don't know as your competitive weapon in business.

Hi Everybody, this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so we are talking about using what we don't know as a competitive weapon.

You know, I was looking at something on this from one site, and they're saying, hey, if you wanted to know what you don't know, then go ask somebody. They'll tell you, right, your friends, your family, lots of people will tell you what you don't know, right? For sure.

I was looking at a site recently called mix.com. It's one of those sites that sort of minds the internet, right? So you say, Hey, I'm interested in these topics. And then we'll go off and search for things and put it in front of you. So Alright, if you don't know about a particular topic, it will go hunt for those things. That's certainly a way to discover what you don't know.

Harvard Business Review, they said some about this. He said, Hey, no matter the scale, discovering your gaps is essential for innovators and entrepreneurs and business people. I agree with that. It does require us to discover those hidden areas. In fact, you know, what I find? The older I get, the less hidden that is right? The older you get, it seems like I discover more and more what I don't know. Well, one of the techniques around this is using something like StrengthsFinder. Have you ever tried that? That's a website, right? Where you can go grab a book, and, and it will tell you, hey, here's your skills in these areas. But over here, you pretty much don't know what's going on. All right.

Let's look at another approach, though. This is an interesting pieces came from Game-Changer.net. And what they were talking about is to discover what you do what you don't know, you don't know, here's here's a couple things, right. One of the things was, what you know, is what sits in your traditional industry, what you don't know is where you have an opportunity to optimize. And what you don't know that you don't know is where you find new market opportunities where innovation occurs. I actually really agree with that. Boy, when I've been running my small to medium businesses over the years, it's those discovery moments, when we find out, oh, we didn't know that this was important to the customer. We didn't know that this new technology could help us this way, or whatever it was, that opened the doors of opportunities. For us.

It seems like that the mindset of innovation is really characterized by some deliberate attempts by us to question what we know and what we don't know, and have the willingness to explore it. I find it interesting that the organizations that tend not to move forward are those that tend to quit asking that question, rather, they keep forcing their hand on, I'm just gonna stay in this one area that I do know, and not look for a way to improve on it, or to be exposed to what some of the gaps are. Here's a list of 10 things that came from Game Changer ready, said, Look, if you want to know what you don't know, they said, Hey, have a diverse set of people around you. All right, that makes sense. Here's another says, Listen to what other people are talking about. Ask a lot of great questions, take every opportunity to observe from new perspectives, and so forth. All of those certainly makes sense.

The one that caught my eye was right near the bottom of their list where they said, experiment, new knowledge arises when you try stuff. I agree with that. That makes sense. You know, I think that the shortest path to innovating and building our business is through experimentation. But I also think there's a problem with that. The problem has been for me, running small businesses has been that it takes time to iterate through multiple experiments and it becomes costly and a high risk proposition to the business to the point that you could ultimately run out of capital and cash before you find that vein of value, right where the vein of value is that ultimately serves your customer.

The best This is where I have found AI to provide a solution. It's like, if you take your business numbers and you run it through AI, it reduces the shoot in the dark model of experimentation. I'm not gonna say it takes, you know, gets rid of it entirely. But it reduces, it reduces it enough to preserve capital and actually give more opportunities to keep iterating. Now, you and I recognize that your business is your livelihood. And so why would you continue to make all these costly experiments without the insights from AI on your business numbers. So for me discovering what we don't know, and what we don't know that we don't know, our keys to effectively competing in business.

But I want to be able to do this with fewer iterations based on high probability scenarios that are identified by AI. When I do that shortcuts, my path to building my business faster. And so that's a critical time saving cost saving, as well as a service saving meaning think of the value and the benefits that can be getting into my customer base sooner by taking advantage or leveraging that. The question is, how long will that take one site to particular same effect. This is from Forbes article, they were saying, hey, it takes two to three years for a business to become profitable. Others say seven to 10 years.

And obviously, there are some overnight successes overnight, you know, air quotes here like Facebook, right? or Instagram. Certainly they didn't take as long to do something like that. But those are the outliers, right? That's the exception more than it is the norm. One particular article called why building a business takes time. This was by Forbes right? They pointed out that Sam Walton, he started Walmart in 1945. It took him seven years before building his second store. All right now, what it turns out to me, or what occurs to me is, you know, you must be in a rush in the short term, right as we're building our business, but we have to expect that it could take a longer term to achieve the kind of success that we're looking for. And in fact, it's been quoted that the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar said hasten slowly. Well, I have to say this, it's not your fault, right?

That scaling your business goes more slowly than you'd like. There are many forces as we know, that act on us as business owners, there's competitors, there's external market conditions, there's employee challenges, product vision issues, right there. Those are big challenges as issues where our customers are changing their mind and their demands. There's new technologies, there's a lot of factors that force upon us. And what we have to figure out is how can we balance all those and iterate to keep finding the vein of value into our customer base. Now, I think while the explosive growth of Facebook and Instagram are a rarity, waiting for decades, though, like Sam Walton, I also think for me, that's a dismal prospect also. So striking the balance of reducing the risk, while decreasing the time and effort to scale your business. By applying AI to get insights on your business. That's the balance that I have found. That helps to reduce that shoot in the dark and help me to find that vein of value.

It's called iterate intelligently.

All right, everybody. That's it for now. Thank you for joining and until next time, expose what you don't know through AI to scale your business.

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 the question, what kind of motivation is needed to scale my business?
Is there a kind of motivation that will enable my business to grow and scale?

Hi everybody, this Grant, thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. Okay, so we're looking at this question around motivation. And what does it mean? How do I actually apply motivation in terms of scaling my business? So I was looking at some examples of companies small to medium businesses that had gone through these pivotal moments right in their organization. I got some of these out of a New York Times article, actually, this was interesting. I'll go through a few, a few examples here.

Here's the first one. So one of these, it was a concierge service, right. And it was this woman who was an intelligent entrepreneur that had started by spending, you know, lots of hours doing errands and handling tasks for multiple clients. In fact, it looked like she took on more than she could handle. Now as the economic conditions changed around her in our environment. Clients began dropping off, right. And ultimately, she decided to close the business. Later, upon reflection, she said, and I quote, I realized that I didn't love what I did. All right, that's an interesting one. Here. Here's another case, right? In this case, it was a company, they had developed a website for parents and family members, right? They're really looking to create a community. Now this is also during some of the early days of Facebook as well.

Now the company was gaining some interest in venture capitalist. But they started to focus more on building new features, new bells and whistles, right? Oh, I can notify you about this appointment or this thing going on here or there. And what happened is, they lost the focus of what their main premise was, which is around building communities, ultimately, the pressure, right, and the growth, obviously, of Facebook, but grew so much that they ultimately they shut down, they had to shut down the company. here's a here's another one. Third one. This was an architecture design firm, and they were mostly doing commercial work. And when some economic conditions around them changed, and they you know, they started to have the same experience, right, clients are canceling work.

And with scarce work, the bigger firms started coming in and competing in their space. Now, too much of their work was in the private sector, and they ignored the public sector where government funding was was taking place. Well, ultimately, the company had to shut down. Okay, so I want to share another story here. This is one from one of my first startup companies, and we kept approaching the healthcare market with one solution. And we just stayed committed to that. Within one year, we were closing the doors, we closed the doors. Were we motivated? Absolutely. We were motivated. The question is, what kind of motivation is needed to scale my business? Right to make it evergreen to keep it going?

What are the kind of motivators really to launch your peak performance? I think there's a common thread among the stories that I shared. One common thread is that all of the business owners were motivated to see their business succeed, except one of them, right, which is the lady who discovered that she didn't love the business. But for the most part, there was a motivation to succeed. My question is, what other shared motivations were there across those, I think there is a shared motivation to stick to their plan and not adjust. And in fact, not adjust to the point that they didn't take into consideration broader market conditions or technologies or competitors. And when I say they, I'm pointing the finger at myself, I didn't do that. My first one, right? We just were like, oh, we're going after healthcare, and we just got one thing and that's it. And then maybe we could just talk louder, right? It'll, it'll make a difference. There needed to be this ability to pivot. So building a scalable business requires us to have the motivation to pivot. So let's focus on on This part, what what motivation, if I have a motivation to run my business or to build my business, I must have as part of that motivation, the motivation to make adjustments now to pivot our business means that we need to let go some things we have formally committed to. And typically we're committing to them mentally and financially and emotionally.

Many of us, right, we know who Mark Cuban is, right? He's a well known name and face out there. His comment on this was, Hey, be open to your current employees and your customers and evaluate the feedback. So he's looking at if you're going to pivot, be very open and candid about that. All right. That's a possible way to look at that. Some say that pivoting is a change in strategy without a change in vision. All right, that might be a way to look at it as well.

But here's one thing I thought was interesting. There's his name. His name's Steve Rogers. He's, he's a Harvard professor. Anyway, he talked about pivoting as well, I thought he had a couple of interesting comments here, one of them that he that he made was, he said, like, the willingness on your part to do something different than what you were originally doing? Right. And he focused on willingness. I agree with that, that in order for me to pivot my business, I have to have this willingness to do this.

In fact, 93% of all successful entrepreneurial companies have pivoted at least one time. So if we look at small businesses, and we look at the number of those that don't survive, of those that survive 93% have pivoted at least one time, it means that at some point, they let go something they'll let go of what the original vision or strategy was, or the original tactics are the original products, they went after that. One of the approaches to do this is to embrace what Steve Rogers called the theory of sunk cost, right? Remember that back to your college days, right? What sunk cost is, it's where yesterday's investment should not impact tomorrow's decisions gotta let go of yesterday, that can be a tough thing. We all heard the story of monkeys, right?

How you could capture a monkey, right? You cut a hole on a tree, and then you put the piece of fruit in it, and the monkey reaches in and grabs the fruit and won't let go. And that sometimes reflects us as small medium business owners, right, we won't let go of something. In fact, what we really need to do is to free ourselves, to respond to what our actual calling is to do something better. Because ultimately, as a small to medium business owner, you're really benefiting so many people, obviously in terms of lives and jobs and prosperity, really impacting people's ability to raise families and so forth. So the real challenge is, let go, don't let our investments and yesterday affect our decisions tomorrow, hey, I've made that mistake. And I've had to learn from that mistake.

So embrace this theory of sunk cost, right? It will make our life easier, yes, it will improve our chances of success, we may have to pivot quite a few times. In fact, I think my son Steve talks about, he pivoted 34 times till the found, all right, this is where he's going to focus on and got his vein of value, right, each of us have to find the vein of value. So people that have succeeded at pivoting. Here's a really big example. We all know Johnson and Johnson, originally, everything that they put into their products was wax, and I believe was the son. I think his name is Sam Johnson, at one point in the company history came forward.

And he said, I've got an idea, dad, and it requires product that doesn't have wax in it. And he brought forward the idea of raid, you know, kill the pests, right pesticide. So although it didn't have wax in it, they did it the company pivoted. So it's critical for us to learn this lesson. One of the startup companies that I was involved with early on in Silicon Valley, we were building software tools for a specific market. But we could see the tide shifting right. And we needed to be able to apply our skill sets and interests elsewhere. So what I did was I began to focus on the commercial market, we pivoted our messaging, our product set, and the kinds of customers we're going after now it worked, it ended up really growing and saving the company.

Interestingly, though, years later, we pivoted back to that original former product set and client set, but the timing was better than at that point. So sometimes you can go back to what the original passion was. But the key is to find those veins of value. And we have to pivot many times as small to medium business owners in order to do that. Alright, so what's the right kind of motivation that we need? It's the motivation to pivot Those are the organizations that tend to scale and continue to evergreen and grow. Okay, everybody, this is grant. Thanks again for joining. Until next time, find the motivation to pivot.

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.

Good gut health leads to good body health.
Good business gut health leads to business insights.
How do you get good business gut health?

Hey, everybody, this is Grant Welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio.

All right. So I was looking back at an experience that I had many years ago. And I was standing in a hospital visiting an elderly friend of mine, he had just completed surgery, he had part of his feet removed because of because of his diabetes. He was fully aware of his diabetic problem. But he also made a determination not to make changes to his diet or to his lifestyle. Well, as I stood there trying to support my elderly friend, I have to admit, I felt a bit conflicted. I wondered, why wouldn't he do anything about it? Why wouldn't he accept some insights and guidance to improve his health situation?

I learned through that I'm not going to judge him. But I'm going to love him, right and try to be there to support him. But I also said to myself, like if I ever get into that situation where I'm diagnosed with something like diabetes, I'm not going to let it get to that level. Right. And now at the time that my elderly friend was going through the surgery, I was I was running a technology startup company. And we were working many hours over time, you know, working harder than we were smarter, hard lesson to learn, right? But sometimes in life, for me anyway, it's too easy for myself or for us as humans, to look at other people's situations and think, hey, they're doing it wrong, even though we're often doing something similar in our own life, right or in our own business.

Well, while my elderly friend was recovering from his surgery, my business we were developing some advanced technologies. And we had prepared it were we were ready to show it to some Industry analysts. So we get in touch with the analysts. They come in, we show it to them. We were so excited, right? We're proud to demonstrate what we had built, we kept saying to ourselves: "Hey, they're gonna love this, right?"" They're gonna give us glowing reviews in the marketplace, right? Stairway to Heaven, right?

So upon completing their review, the analysts came back and said, "Hey, this is an interesting idea. We think you have something here."" So that moment, we felt really giddy, right? We're over there patting ourselves on the back. But the next sentence just caught, caught us. And then they said, but you are at least at least nine years ahead of the market. Well, we were stunned, right? We're like, what how could that be? Right? Surely they were wrong. What do these guys now they're, they're just analysts, right? So to defend our position, we started quoting Henry Ford's comment right about his customer base. We've all heard it, right. We've all used it. I'm sure it goes something like this.

Henry Ford apparently said, you know, if I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse, right? So we were self assured that we are being Henry Ford's at the time, right? Well, the market just wants a faster horse, right. And here we've got a new automobile, right? It cruises, it slices it dices. So we started to demonstrate what we had developed to other audiences and to other firms. And people started sharing their feedback, right? Oh, man, this looks great. But, you know, we can't really adopt that. Right? We're not ready to figure out how to use that. But we continue to double down on what we are doing, right? I liken it to times when when we eat what we want rather than eat what we should but we hope we're hoping though to get the results of healthy eating, even though we're not really eating what we should. All right.

That's one we're not being realistic with, with really what's going on. Well, in this case, we stopped listening. Right? We kept saying herself Hey, surely you know, we're being Intelligent with our business. We're asking others for insights, but we weren't doing anything with those insights. We weren't making adjustments or pivoting. I think it was Lyndon B. Johnson, who said, when we stopped listening, we stopped learning. Well, you know, as we all know, just as we, you know, put good stuff into our guts, right? It produces better health for our whole body. And our businesses also need good gut health. So here, here's some examples of what this might be. For example, we all know that, you know, we're going to have good health gut, right? In terms of our bodies, we're generally going to put in more fibers and proteins and, you know, salads and vegetables and complex carbs, and so forth, right? Let's talk about good business, gut health. What does that look like? Because when we have good business, gut health, it improves our business instincts. What does this mean?

One of those is seeking insights. And so that means to leverage dispassionate insights. Now, of course, I'm a fan of using AI to do that, right. It's to take the dispassionate part out, and to bring the insights in, you may have heard about decision intelligence, right, the ability to deep politicize decision making that's that's a challenge, right for us and in businesses. Ai provides that, but you also have to watch out for something called AI bias. Now, that needs to be a topic for another time that we we go over. In any event, the real business, gut health cons, when we take insights that come and then we apply them in our business. In fact, good business, gut health means we've got the majority, or perhaps I might call it the humility to make the adjustments in our business. Now, I saw some research from Gartner once that stated, and I'm paraphrasing a little. But it basically said that 75% of business executives will not evaluate multiple options when making decisions, but rather, will use the information available to justify their position.

And so it's difficult when we have that mindset. And we think, Oh, I'm just going to use the information that's at my fingertips so that I bring in I'm going to use the lens of that of my perception and my priorities, to filter that information. That's a challenge for all of us. So it's not just to bring the information in and the insights from things like AI or other interested parties, but it's Can I change my my perspective, so that I can truly make the adjustments that are needed? Well, turns out, you know, I stood by my elderly friend as he had his feet, partially, and you know, amputated, and I continued to be a support and his friend. But then a few months later, he passed away. And I'm grateful for the lessons he taught me, and in particular, the awareness that it created in me, you know, somewhat ironically, I was diagnosed a year after that with type two diabetes.

And so the question, when that happened, I just, I was stunned when the doctor told me is like, what, oh, my goodness, then I started to think back to my elderly friend, and I kept thinking about these questions like, Am I going to apply gut health principles to my life, right to my personal life? I'm going to eat what I should right? Take the input, the information, the insights from the doctors and others. Would I apply the gut health principles to my business? Would I take the insights that are coming to me? Follow the gut make the adjustments in my business? Am I going to listen? Right? Am I going to adjust? Will I adapt? And the question I have for you is, what would you do? Right? Would you make those adjustments? Well, the lessons from my elderly friend Jerry rang clear in my mind, for sure. And you know what? I was deeply affected in my personal life. And in my business life, by my friend Jerry, I still remember constantly, it comes to my mind every time there's a need for me to make any kind of adjustments, I think, all right. Jerry pointed out to me, you know, through his life, that it's important and critical that we do take the input and we do make the adjustments. Our gut health affects the health of our body, as well as our business. All right. Thanks, Jerry, this one's for you.

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.

Your business is running, you are making sales, but you'd like to Evergreen your business.
What are some tips for Evergreening your business?
Is there anything you can do to reduce the time and effort to Evergreen your business?

Hi Everybody, this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about evergreen? And particularly, how can we fast track key characteristics of our business to evergreen them? Now, the question might be what is evergreen? Well, the purpose of an evergreen business is to make a long term difference for your customers, right? It's a we want to be able to establish enough value over time, so that we can get that into as many customers as possible. Now finding the recipe is you know, to evergreen, especially when you're an early startup phases. And that's a challenge. Right that that certainly takes a lot of time. I actually think that the phrase evergreen is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that sometimes we think well, it's long term, right? The evergreen is long term. But perhaps it's not the length of time that you know that the solution is relevant, but rather the business's ability to adapt. I'll give you an example, an obvious one that we're all familiar with. Amazon started with books, right? And went to well, in all Heck, what aren't they touching today, right. So they evergreen books long enough to open other avenues. And then they pivoted. And so what we're talking about is the ability to deliver sustainable value to customers long enough to let us pivot and continue to serve them. Now that's evergreen. And it's not just the original solution, right? But it's the ability to sustain value, and then pivot to deliver new value. Now, today's easy to use AI, it actually fits squarely in the middle of this using business insights to find the sustainable value. And then recognizing when to pivot either to add more value, or to change out of the value that you're currently delivering. That is core to the use of AI today in our businesses.

Hey, I was looking at a article recently, this was from entrepreneur.com. They said that, you know, there's four kinds of online businesses. This is what they're describing. Here's the four categories, ecommerce. And so that includes groups, right like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, SAS. So that's like Google Drive, and Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. We all know those. There's a content style online business. So this is, you know, the New York Times or nerd wallet or wire cutter. And then the fourth kind is digital service. So that's better self betterhelp, gingo, things like that. So ecommerce, SAS content and digital service. So when we think about an online business, and we think about, alright, what would I do to create an evergreen kind of business, knowing that I got to sustain value long enough to provide enough value so that I have the flexibility and ability to pivot to add more value to our customers? All right, this article stated, this is interesting that evergreen niches never go out of style, right? So this ecommerce, SAS content and digital service those four areas, from from the argument is never goes out of style. Here's some examples.

There's the ecommerce example of Life Fitness, they manufacture extra exercise equipment, Heck, even in the world of COVID. That is, of course, become a massively booming industry. There's others such as you know, the here's a SAS example. The company example is lose it. That's a subscription weight loss program. And then there's content style, a business PC gamer, right, where they review all the latest games. And then let me give you one here. This is a digital service like lynda.com. Now that one's actually a little old, because that's an online education group that actually was bought by LinkedIn who then was bought by Microsoft. But the point is, and I agree with him, you know, those kinds of niches, ecommerce, SAS content, and digital service, those are four kinds of online businesses. And if you want to build an evergreen style business online, you would look into those four categories. That's kind of interesting. So I transition to was thinking more about, alright, what does it mean to evergreen? Let's say that we choose something within one of those areas. And it doesn't have to be an online business. But let's say that it is, what would be some additional techniques that we could do to actually evergreen the business? What are some of the characteristics of it, I looked into something from a CEO has an excuse me, his name is Dave Horton. He's a CEO of tugboat Institute don't know if you've ever looked into any of that stuff. Fascinating, brilliant guy, right? He's, he's got this.

In fact, he made this interesting statement, right, I was reviewing some of this stuff. He said, wealth is a byproduct of an evergreen company. He goes on further to say that evergreen businesses are led by purpose driven leaders highlight that, I think that's critical to in fact, in order to sustain something like a business over a long period of time, hence, evergreen, and hence deliver value over time. There's got to be a purpose. In fact, I think if you ask Russell Brunson, he would go further to say it's not only purpose, he needs to give your people some identity, right, that something that they can connect to and relate with as well. Anyway, back to Mr. Dave Horton, all right. evergreening a business, right. It's it's led by purpose driven leaders. They've got grit, and resourcefulness, you know, to provide the ability to scale. Alright, that makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the things that I noticed that Mr. Horton pointed out, which I think is pretty cool. There's seven characteristics of the Evergreen business, right? So these are the things about the business that give it the best chance of evergreening. All right, now, Mr. Horton does a lot in terms of venture capital. I'm not, I'm not here to say if that's good or bad. I've been involved in startup companies where we had venture capital and others where we didn't. So it just kind of depends. Now, let me read these off. These are actually pretty cool. All right, because he says, look, you know, often entrepreneurs feel under resource, right. And so they often end up needing some sort of venture capital work. But I think the the work that Brunson and those guys do is awesome in terms of helping you not to have to rely on that at all times.

All right, let me get to the seven. Here's the seven characteristics of a company. So let's say you've got your company, what what do I need to have in terms of these qualities within my company? To help me evergreen number one purpose? Alright, so I already hinted at that one, right? Being passionately driven by some compelling vision and mission, right? What's your Why? What's your cause? Right? Number two, perseverance, having the ambition and resilience to overcome obstacles, and keep pursuing that mission into the future.

Number three, people first, boy, this one gets a lot of lip service. But now a lot of companies don't actually make it that way. People First engaging a workforce of talented associates who excel as a team and are motivated by the mission and the culture. In fact, there is one startup company I worked with in Silicon Valley. I joined real early in the days of it, there's just a handful of it. And they said, You know what, yeah, the resumes interesting, were more after aptitude. They would hire aptitude. And then they'd say, we can we can tell you, you know, train you on the job, that your ability to be creative, etc, etc, they had this set of characteristics that were that were crucial to them. I loved it. Ultimately, we grew that thing to a very large organization, we sold it to IBM. So I think they were on the right model their people first they were awesome at it.

Alright, here's another one profit, okay, this is number four profit. The key point here is don't mistake profit as the purpose of the business, but recognize that it's essential for survival and independence. And it's the most accurate measure of customer value delivered. All right. I agree with that. But I love how it's, they say it's not the purpose of the business. The purpose of the business is to deliver the value into the customer.

All right, number five, private. This is an interesting one because it talks mostly about your ability to create a network of other companies that are around you, that support you, and that ultimately help you to deliver what it is you're taking to the market.

Number six, paced growth. This is a critical one. I've seen organizations that growth Too fast, and then their internal operations and business processes can't scale to support it. So it's actually getting the right pace of growth. Obviously, there's the other problem, which is not enough growth. But this is all about having the discipline to focus on the long term strategy, right, where you're balancing, short term and long term performance.

All right, and then the seventh one, very interesting. It's around pragmatic innovation. So this is all about having continuous improvement processes built around taking a very calculated risk approach to innovation. Now, my experience has been that AI applies to several of these, I'll call out two of them. The two I'll call out is paced growth, and pragmatic innovation. In my work with AI, some, some groups I've seen will go apply AI. And if the model says, hey, it's 90% probability, then they'll just run to it and go do it. But they won't take into consideration the impact to their business processes, so needs to be applied intelligently. The others around pragmatic innovation, here's the key thing about AI, when you're going to use it to help build and grow your business and to evergreen it, you actually want to take reeds from the AI on a continuing basis.

You don't want to overdo it, like, you know, looking at the cake in the oven too often kind of thing. But hey, you know, every couple months, you're going to be watching, all right, what has changed, has it affected our model, etc. and take those insights early. In fact, you'd rather know those insights early rather than later. So AI plays a role in evergreening our business. Alright, a couple things I wanted to point out here. Many evergreen companies, you know, they'll bootstrap or they'll sell fund and never require institutional capital. But what I've noticed is that those that practice these principles, these seven principles that I talked about these characteristics, and use AI on a continuing basis over time, you'd never you the bad practice is you go run the AI once and then forget it. And that's a recipe for failure, right? That's not that's not the right way. Because just as Amazon is no longer just all about bucks, right? You would no longer do that with your AI, don't just run it runs. And then and then leave it as is because your business and the world and the context around it will need to change just as Amazon's changed, and so forth. So always make sure you're keeping it up to date and fresh. So these seven characteristics around evergreen in your business are foundational to actually growing to a point where you can take your hand off of the wheel a bit, but still stay in touch with AI that's reminding you on a continual basis. All right, pivot here, make this adjustment there. All right, everybody. That's it. Thanks for joining. And until next time, fast track those seven characteristics with AI to evergreen your business.

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.

So, we've all heard about biohacking our bodies to improve longevity and brain function.

But what does it mean to biohack our business AI? It unlocks the secrets to improved business longevity and business brain function.

Hi everybody this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. Okay, a few days ago, I lost my voice. Hopefully it's coming back. I'm leaning into my microphone. All right. So I wanted to talk a little bit about biohacking. What the heck does that mean as it relates to our businesses?

So a couple years ago, I was reviewing a blog. It was something by Dave Asprey, those of you that watch or listen to him, view him, many of you him as a father of biohacking. Anyway, there there were two big buckets where biohacking was being applied, right. One was longevity. And the other was improved brain function. So if you're thinking about, Hey, I'm trying to improve my personal health, right, I'm looking at how can I improve? You know, the or I should say, increase the probabilities that I'll live longer. And then of course, another way of biohacking is to say, I want to think better, right? I want to use my brain better. Right now. In reality, I think we want both of those qualities in our businesses, right?

So we want our business to thrive with longevity. And we want our business brain functions, of course, to operate at the right level, like Grant, what's a business brain function? Well, I think it's the ability for the business to operate and grow intelligently. I use that word intentionally, because there are some kinds of growth that are not that intelligent. In fact, it's actually bad for the business. Now, I'm going to assert that our businesses are like living entities. Well, okay. You remember in one of the old Mission Impossible Tom Cruise movies, I think he makes this statement one time where he's talking and he says, Hey, he says, the traffic on our road, like on a freeway, he, I think he said, is like a living organism. Someone taps on their brake and I ripples through the whole system. Obviously, that's a bit of a joke. But there's an analogy here, right?

Because our businesses have moving and interrelated parts. So let's let's turn back here to Dave Asprey. So he outlined seven, seven elements here for biohacking our bodies. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do an analogy here, of those seven elements, but I'm going to apply it to our businesses. With AI. We're going to hack our businesses with AI by using Dave's seven elements. All right, you're ready. All right, getting your seat lean forward. Okay. Here's the first one. The first principle the Dave points out is gut punch your posture. All right?

When I think about gut punching my posture, what the heck does that mean, in my business? Well, typically, if I'm going to change my posture, it means in business sense, I'm going to change the positioning of my business structure. Right. So this often means that I'm changing roles and responsibilities or operations, obviously, the way things are structured, and how things are sitting or moving. So in an AI sense, a real common theme when evaluating AI insights on our business, is the realization that we need to make adjustments to the way the business operates. Now this can feel like a gut punch as this affects people's positions and jobs and what they're used to doing. So it turns out this first biohack gut punch your posture applies to AI in business, because we're going to be making changes to the business structure. All right, you're ready.

Number two, eat nutrition. All right, that makes sense. How does that apply to business? Well, we're talking about intake here, right? What is it that we intake in our business, and while there's several things, one of those is clients, and bringing in good clients that are that are right fit for the business purpose. Actually critical. Now we want to use AI as a way to understand the patterns of best customer behavior. In other words, we want to do those, we want to know those that we serve the best. And we want to optimize towards that. Now not doing this brings pain to your business and your body. It's like eating a steady diet of Twinkies. That's not good, right? So you may get the initial Sugar Rush of the business deal closing by bringing in that bad client. But afterwards, you're going to experience nausea, headaches, stomach pains, fat gain and muscle loss.

Did I miss anything? Well, I had that experience one time, it was in one of my startup companies, we desperately wanted to go do this business. And it was a one off it was different than what we were actually always doing. But we thought, Oh, this would be cool to have, you know, this big name associated with our company. So we kept pursuing it. And we signed this million dollar deal. No, no, no doubt million dollar deal. I felt like King of the Mountain man, I was having the Twinkie Sugar Rush. I was like, whoo, next thing I know, off the next nine months were hellish. It was painful. Yeah. Yeah, not the right thing to do for our business. Okay, so we use AI to understand those best fit customer patterns and to see them clearly and optimized, lean into those right? Eat nutrition for our business, right? Bring in the right kinds of clients. Okay, let's move on to number three. So get in touch with nature.

So Dave says, hey, go get in touch with nature. I'm all for that. I'm a mountain guy. I love the mountains. Alright. So get in touch with nature for our businesses. What this is really saying is, I want to build connections with things that are outside of my four virtual walls, whether they're physical or virtual. Right, getting in touch with nature is leaving our places where we typically are. And getting back to first principles. So getting outside of our four virtual walls, it's interacting with other sources. Like I saw recently, Elan musk says, How do you say that five times fast? musk says I don't know I'm not on Elan musk does open AI API. It's actually really cool, right? And someone is built a this cool app on it called AI channels. All right. Here's the cool part about it. The idea is, is that you reach outside of your typical surroundings and you're looking for insights from the world around you. Right now this is viewing AI. It's this is important because you want to view AI as augmented intelligence, right? You want to use it to open the door to viewing the world differently and getting additional insights. Peck I even think Gutenberg, when he designed the press, the printing press, he pulled insights from multiple industries together to create that. So when we get in touch with nature, we go to first principles, but we also look outside of our typical surroundings for other insights around us.

All right, number four, number four, here we go. expose yourself to sunlight. Alright, so this can literally mean exposing yourself, as well as your business leaders to insights, right, the sun brings light and insights. This is critical. Now, not long ago, I was working with a team where some AI and analytics insights were made available to senior leaders of a company However, they did everything they could to avoid, dismiss and hide the findings because it put a bad light on some of their previous actions and business decisions. And so you know, if you're going to expose your business to the quote unquote, Ai, sunlight, it requires some vulnerability on your part on each of our parts. So this is a critical piece of biohacking our businesses, right, exposing the things we may not have done well, and being willing to make adjustments. All right, to move towards the truth, that's much more important. All right, let's move on to number four, my number five number six, otherwise counting the number every go it's achieve a state of consciousness. Now, sometimes, you know from a biohacking perspective, this means breathing. Alright, fact let me take a breath. There we go. All right, I took a breath. Alright. So taking pause as a business. Now that's a critical part of any business, right? In fact, I've seen change fatigue overwhelm multiple organizations, right, we get really excited about Oh, I'm gonna go make these changes, right.

I'm gonna pivot my business to the future. All of that is great. I watched another company recently use AI and data analytics to make changes to their internal business operations. And they did it on a regular basis. And it was awesome. They were really methodical about it did a great job. And so this had some initial positive benefits. But that's kind of turned addictive, right? So the company continued to push new change after new change, you know, leveraging the insights, that's all good. But over time, the employees started to experience change fatigue. And so AI must be used with care when doing this, right, we have to gauge the right way to do this, how fast to do this. So achieve a state of consciousness in our business makes a lot of sense. All right. And then the last one that I mentioned here is, again, this is from Dave Asprey, his last show gratitude? Well, I'm all for that. I think that's really huge. In fact, every day in my personal journals, I try to write down things of gratitude. How did what were the great blessings that I saw in my life for the life of my family, the day before. And so I pause and reflect on that. So that's early in the morning when I'm trying to get my mojo on. But that's, that's a great way to start the day. So show gratitude. As a business, I found it helpful to give back as you know, to worthy causes. In fact, my son, Steve just did that recently, he identified some charities with his business to give into really awesome. Now, a critical goal of AI should be to improve not only the efficiencies of the business, but really we I think we have a broader responsibility to improve the well being of the customers we're serving and of the employees that we're bringing into our companies. Now.

The goal, of course, is to bring a higher quality of life. Right. And I think that's a critical element to the ethical and healthy use of AI. This open ai.com site says, Hey, I'm reading the quote here. They're like discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. All right. All right. It's a balance in all of this now, the activities for biohacking our bodies, I think, you know, in order to improve longevity and approve brain functions, I think they're admirable, and some care and caution has to be you know, has to be used when applying that some people get way out there. But I would also say in a similar manner, biohacking our businesses with AI requires the same need for exploration and balance. So with that, I'd say let's go explore. Hey everyone, thanks for joining and until next time, let's get started biohacking your business with 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.

Running your business AND being a MARKETING GENIUS AND hiring AND training AND selling AND delivering AND...well, you get the idea, is a challenge.

How would you perform differently if you could have insightful guidance on WHERE to FOCUS your MARKETING activities WITHOUT BEING A MARKETING GENIUS?

Hi Everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. All right. So today we're talking about blasting, blasting by your competition without becoming a marketing genius. I remember when I was in college, and I was taking my classes in computer science and business, all those kinds of things, economics, etc. And then I had a marketing class, and I was like marketing, Holy smokes, why do I need marketing? And it turns out, I never did become that marketing genius, you know, is like oh, marketing. Wow. Okay. So the question is, are you a marketing genius?

So you and I've had the opportunity to, to help build and run multiple startup companies and marketing such a critical role. You know, in your college, you're like, gee, do I really need this in my life? But the question is, if you're a small to medium business owner, are you a marketing genius? And if not, why not? Right? It actually is, we know as you know, takes a lot of time, to as a small to medium business owner, to of course, run the business, but also to do marketing itself in when you wear so many hats, it's actually really difficult to pivot constantly back into that role, or to never leave the role, and yet still take care of other things. I was looking recently, I was looking up recently, some material on how to become a marketer. I thought, Oh, this will be interesting, you know, because you hear you know, people like Russell Brunson, or Steve Larsen or others, right, talking about what it means to be a marketer. And I ran, I ran into this particular book, I think, I think it's like 30 years old. It says here, learn how to be a marketer. In five steps. You're ready. These are the five steps number one, complete high school.

Number two, obtain a bachelor's degree number three, complete a marketing internship. Number four, gain work experience. And number five, obtain a graduate degree if needed. I thought it was joking. But they were actually serious. That Nah, I don't I don't think that's what we're after. Really, what, what I'm really thinking about is most of us aren't marketing experts coming from business, right? We're not graduating from college with a marketing degree. But what we're really interested in what I'm interested in, is how do I apply marketing to my business? Right, even though I'm focused in other areas, how can I really be effective at marketing with my business, so I was looking at this other less than they had eight steps that I thought was kind of interesting. So I'm gonna I'm going to use these eight steps. And then I'm going to show some techniques for applying these so here are the eight steps one, conduct marketing research again, don't forget this is about applying marketing to your business. Alright, so number one, conduct marketing research. Alright, to profile your target market. Three, identify your unique selling proposition for develop your business brand. Five, choose your marketing avenues. Six, set your goals and budgets. Stay with me, seven, nurture your loyal customers and eight, monitor and review. I was like, Alright, that's a little closer again. That's nothing you'd perhaps really hear from someone like Russell Brunson, right.

Here's what I did with the list though. I looked at those eight steps that they just articulated. And I said, I can identify four areas where I would apply artificial intelligence. In other words, here's really the point. When I'm running my small and medium business and am super busy, it is a benefit and a real it's gold to the business, if I can get insights from AI at certain places where I'm making marketing decisions. So I'm going to show how those apply AI for these, the four that I chose is step two, profile your target market. Step three, identify your unique selling proposition. And then step seven, nurture your loyal customers, and then eight, monitor and review. So I'm going to break those down, I'm going to start here with step two, profiling your target markets.

Alright, so when, as you know, when when you apply at least one we've been applying AI to a company, we look at the business information, and we identify key subgroups for those customers. So let's say let's say you're looking at your at your customer set, what you're really interested in knowing is of that customer set, which which ones actually break down into markets or sub markets, and what are the most profitable ones there, this is a critical activity, because you want to be able to understand best how to reach those customers in each of those sub markets. The AI examines the good and the not good behaviors within each target market. So when we apply it, we're going after a breakdown of sub markets across that that customer set, our experience has been this is gold to your business, right.

So for example, one company that we are applying this to, you're ready for this, this is kind of a unique one, but as an example, but the their market segmentation was based on customer behavior before, during and after a US holiday. And their business was directly affected by this segmentation. And it turns out that it was actually a different group and segment of customers that would get involved before, during and after their marketing was best served, we discovered through the AI by promoting seven days or more before the upcoming us holiday. And this permitted them to reduce their post holiday spend, and then redirect them to pre holiday spend. Now, there are certainly other target market segmentations, right, other than holidays, but for this particular example, when you're profiling your target market, ai does a great job at helping you to understand the nuances between those different profiles of the market. And that helps you to redirect your spend. Now, here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So this particular group we were working with, it's not like you know, they were massive marketing people. In fact, they looked at that and said, Wow, we never would have seen this right. So AI really shines in this area.

All right, let me go to the next one. So this was in that list. This was Step three, it was called identify your unique selling proposition. Here's one of the key ways that we've seen to apply AI. It's actually a very timing based approach. And by that I mean, I've seen this work best if a company is willing to pivot, one of the most expensive things you and I know that a company can do is to continue down the wrong path too long, right. And so if you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to discover, hey, I'm on the wrong path, obviously, that's beneficial to business. So identifying your unique selling proposition often comes with some intentional planning, and some trial and error. So the cycle from what I've experienced goes like this, number one, connect your business activities to AI. Number two, apply your unique selling proposition number three, the AI monitors this, and they gives you early feedback much earlier than then most of our brains can do it right. And then number four, This, of course, saves you time and money as you pivot away from the pain and then into the money or into things that are more profitable. And so finding the unique selling proposition requires trial and error sometimes, right. And so AI being connected to this allows us to do that trial, discover those things very quickly with AI, is this going to continue to be a positive thing or not?

Now, the good news is, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. right let me go to the next one in the list. This one was number seven in their list is called nurture your loyal customers. Now, what I found is one of the most insightful features, let me say that again, one of the most insightful features of applying AI in this area is the ability to analyze scenarios. Here's how it works. The AI gives us insight to the customers and the markets, right that you're working on. And you know, specifically those that are performing well. Typically, what you want to do is when you find those golden veins of customers that are performing well, you really actually want to drill more into that and discover nuances, where you can really exploit and build out because you really want to get your services and your products into that customer set. So with this, what what happens is you execute a series of AI scenarios, and it does some analysis that looks at and provides predictions. So building on the previous example, right of the company had mentioned a moment ago, where they were segmenting, based on us holidays. It turns out in that situation, right? Again, this is just the example unique to them, not saying it's for you, it turns out that the better customers that ultimately did not refund and got more value, were the ones who purchase before the US holiday. And you're ready.

Now here's a deeper scenario, right where the AI identifies this. And what it did is said, Look, it goes deeper into that and says, Hey, there served better by those that you talked to that were later in the day, can you believe that in the time of day, and when they were using a specific salesperson with a specific product. So now the AI got very specific and says, have very high probability that in the situations before you, you know, seven days before, this us holiday with this particular salesperson in this product, to have a very high probability of producing X amount of percentage increase in sales, not only but also to get customers that are truly loyal, that don't refund and that actually get value from it, that combination performed higher loyalty and greater value. Now, that's obviously a very unique situation. And there are many other scenarios as well. The key point is, typically, it's hard for our brains to see all of those connection points. But the ai ai picks that up. Now, this enables us to raise the level of service to our loyal customers, and also, to course, grow the loyal customer base. Because when you think about it, if there's any base that I really want to grow, it's not just that I want to bring in more revenue to my business, it's, I want to bring in more loyal revenue, I want to bring in customers that understand and appreciate the value of what it is that the business is providing. Here's the key point.

You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So AI really shines in this area. All right, so let's take a look at one other here. So this was step, excuse me, this was step eight in their list. And so what I found here, this one was called monitor and review. And you know, it's easy when you read a list like that, and you go Okay, sure monitoring review that's on almost every list, right? here's here's the critical aspect, though of applying AI. The basic premise is this. What we've seen is over time, your business context changes, right. All I all I have to do is say COVID. And we all nod our head. Yeah, business context has changed. But it's always certainly not you know, anything as large as a pandemic, could be new competitor could be new products, new technology, changing your customer base, new laws or regulations, all sorts of things occur, right, which changes the business context. What this means is that your assumptions and the patterns around those change, which means having AI continually monitoring for these adjustments, and making you aware that it's time to make your own adjustment that's actually worth gold, right? Not waiting too long to continue down the wrong path.

The AI In fact, starts to pick it up before our brains do and says, Hey, this is going outside of the patterns here. Need to make you aware of it. Now, the key point is and you probably know what I'm going to say now, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. So I know in my years of running different small startup businesses is it doing marketing? You know, it's always a challenge. On top of everything else you're doing, heck, I'm taking out the garbage, right and helping to deliver the services and products and trying to find the next customer to sell, looking to hire and so forth. You know what that means. But having AI to help fill in and fine tune the scarce resources, fine tune the scarce resources that we have in our small medium businesses, in the ways that I just articulated those four steps, right, there is huge benefit to businesses.

So we've looked at these four areas. And what it does is it reduces the need for you to be a marketing expert. I'm not saying it doesn't reduce the need for marketing at all. What it does do though, is it reduces the amount of expertise that I need to have to help pick the right places to go focus or to move away from the AI applied in these areas really helps a lot.

All right. Hey, stay tuned for some upcoming webinars. We're gonna host right to bring more information to you on how to apply AI to your business. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, use AI to help your marketing.

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.

Disruptions take many forms, some come from competitors, some come from partners, and some come from pandemics.

As a small business owner, are we creating the disruption or aligning with the noise it produces?

What can we as small business owners do with disruptions without taking our last cent?

Hey, everybody, this is Grant Larsen. Thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about disruption, right disruption to our business disruption to our profits. How do we use disruption to grow our profits without taking our last cent? That's a huge issue and topic today. What we really want to discuss is aligning with destruction. What does it mean to do that? We all know who Clayton Christensen is, back in the 1990s. I think it was he had coined this concept called disruptive innovation. I'm going to quote something that he said on that, alright, you're ready. It's three sentences. So buckle up. All right. So when another company comes along with a novel technology appealing to a niche market, you're not likely to respond right away to this marginal demand. He goes on to say, yet, as new technology improves, suddenly a broader swath of customers find they need it, and you don't have it. Last sentence, here we go. So you have to marshal your resources to deal with the shift in demand as quickly as possible. And quote, all right, so here's here's not. So if the disruptions coming, of course, from our competitors, often our teams, and we've all lived this, we're focused on some other projects. And we often don't have the right set of skills even to address what that disruption is. And so we've got to pivot to deal with that. This style, as we all know, is rather reactionary in behavior, right? It's quite common for us, though.

So the question is, is there another way, if we continually ask the question about emerging competitors, and preparing for continual disruption, then our business can be more nimble to address disruption, the challenges we all know is we get caught up in the daily weeds of running and executing the business and then stopping to step back and look at this actually takes a lot of time and effort, of course, now, as a small business, most of us find it really difficult to set aside some innovation team, right, that's constantly looking at disruption. You know, the big, the big organizations will often have those kinds of teams. But one approach is to continually keep a pulse on the most effective and least effective behaviors of your teams. And then being prepared to draw the least effective behaviors on a continual basis. This actually is one of the key key characteristics of AI. When you apply AI on an ongoing on an ongoing nature to your business, it actually helps you to inform, hey, this is something that is not adding to your bottom line in as effective as a manner. And so you want to leverage that right? Take advantage, stop those ineffective behaviors. This means that though, we have to continually rethink and retool, we have to be prepared to relook at our offerings and our operations, and be willing to make adjustments to those. And sometimes if we get too comfortable, that actually turns to really hurt us. But again, we're all busy on a regular basis doing this is difficult. So again, leveraging AI helps us to augment our own intelligence, freeing up our brainpower for creative thinking, I don't know about you, but I know I don't want to sit and go through endless sets of spreadsheets to try to find patterns and discover what this stuff looks like.

I mean, you can show some things through a few cool, you know, charts in Google Slides or an Excel things like that. But what it doesn't do, those are dashboards that are basically historical. The AI however, has the ability to discover the patterns that use insights that that are difficult for us for our brains to actually see. Now, some will view disruption as part of their Risk management strategy. And so it's important that we look at this, are we going to look at disruption from an innovative perspective? And we're going to take whatever the whatever the destructive disruption is, and am I going to use it to innovate forward? Or am I going to look at disruption from a perspective of let me manage the risk, it's not that one is better or one is worse, some people and some organizations are driven more by moving away from pain. And other organizations are benefited or more focused or motivated, I should say, by moving towards some goal or vision, either one, both have to respond to disruption. So not long ago, I was talking with a utilities company, and there had just been a major storm in the northwest part of the US. And they were scrambling to deal with the outages. Now, these kinds of disruptions, of course, affect our daily processes. And it may require changes to our own business processes and management structure. I was looking at a report not long ago, it came from Accenture. And the report in this article I was reviewing it's called the report was called breaking through disruption, embrace the power of the wise pivot. Now I love the way that Accenture uses the term wise pivot. Because that truly is the essence of organizations that have survived. It's their ability to to pivot. Alright, one of the things that Accenture pointed out in this is that they looked across 18 industry sectors and they surveyed, you know what those organizations or organizations in those sectors had been doing to deal with with with disruption, they looked over an eight year period of time.

What they found is that the majority of them actually left about $41 trillion in enterprise value, they left it meaning they left it exposed, they didn't go embrace it or take take advantage of opportunities. $41 trillion of money left on the table. That's massive, right? That's really massive. So this was about 63% of the companies that they looked at, faced high level of disruption during that period of time. Now those, that report was pre COVID. Right? That's huge. All right. Now, we all know that, obviously COVID hit and actually those numbers are much higher, right, in terms of the percentage of companies being impacted by disruption. COVID being one of those. So as a small business owner, what's our job? Are we in the job of creating disruption? Or are we in the job of aligning with disruption? Well, I would say it's both. But let's talk about disruption right now, in the sense that we align our businesses with it to ride the tide. Okay, that's often much easier for us to do as small business owners. Now, I ran into a framework that some organizations have put together around parameters to evaluate a disruptions potential impact to your business, I kind of like what they did here. They broke it into three areas. There's evaluating it from an industry perspective, looking at the impact to competitors, and your protection from competitors. And what would happen to you if your competitor won? So that's the first category, the other category?

The second category was internal, which is, what's the impact to your current business? And what level of internal challenges are you having? And then the third category was focusing on your customers, right? How do your customers feel about this disruption? Is it impacting them? Is it is it just a novelty to them? What is that? So what I did was I took this framework, and I filled it in with an example of blockbuster and Netflix, right? Who doesn't know this one? Right. Let's, let's try this one out. Okay. So from an industry perspective, so we've got blockbuster, obviously Netflix comes in. And and at the time, how is blockbuster responding to this? Well, you know, when it first started to happen, actually, as Clayton Christensen pointed out, look, okay, Netflix comes along, and yeah, they have this shipping DVD thing, right? And okay, they're starting to stream a little bit, but you know what, they just think that their customers think this thing's a novelty, it's going to go away. There are some internal debates, obviously in blockbuster, right. They're looking at this saying, you know, what, we're unwilling to pivot were unwilling to make changes to this. And at the time, the industry's impact, at least some sure from their perspective, I wasn't there in their board. rooms for sure.

But from the external behavior looks like that they didn't view that it was a winner take all scenario, right? And so this competition from them certainly didn't see or from, from Netflix didn't seem that much of a threat. All right, hindsight 2020. Obviously, what we do see is how did Disney and Amazon and Hulu and so forth, how did they respond to disruptive streaming? Well, we all know that they aligned and leverage did is we all have multiple accounts today, right across these different streaming platforms. So I refer back to Clayton Christensen, right, when another company comes along with a novel technology, and you're not likely to respond right away. Because you know what, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal. There's some point though, where it crosses this threshold where suddenly your even your customers are starting to ask about it. And he can't ignore it, right? And even organizations like Disney, and Amazon and Hulu line up with this, right? So let's try another example. Let's say instead of talking about blockbuster, let's talk about you. And instead of talking about Netflix, let's talk about the disruption of COVID. Alright, so you with the disruption of COVID on your business. So if we look at the three areas, all right, what's the impact here of COVID? To your industry, and to the competitors, your competitors in your industry? Right? What is the impact to them? What's the internal impact to your business? And what's happening? Is there some internal controversy? I'm sure there is? And what's the impact to the resources of your organization?

And then the third category is how, how are your customers being impacted by this? Is this a novelty? Are their own processes being disruptive? The question is, how will you pivot and align? Now? What does this have to do with AI? Right? Well, quite a bit, I would argue the key message here is about pivoting your business. And as a small business owner, you actually can't afford to pivot with blinders on using AI to analyze and expose your sales behaviors, you know, discovering, not just sales, but business behaviors, and so forth. discovering what you don't know you don't know that, that actually becomes even more critical now than ever. And then as you discover what you don't know you don't know and AI exposes those things. You need to be able to prevent, you know, pivot pivot your business. Now to learn more about how to pivot with the current disruption. We're going to be launching a webinar soon, so keep an eye out for information on this. You can get started though by going to click ai radio.com. Alright, everybody. Thank you for joining and until next time, prepare to pivot your business in the current disruption.

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.

The competitive landscape has changed; large businesses are investing more and more in R&D & AI, outpacing Small-to-Medium business investment.
With COVID-19 having much more significant impact on Small-to-Medium businesses, every tool we can use to re-kindle small businesses is needed.
In this episode I have the opportunity to interview a technology provider who has seen the secrets to business growth through AI.

Hi Everybody, this is Grant Larsen, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So glad to have you here with us today. All right, I told you a couple episodes ago about something exciting that was coming up. And this episode is one of those pieces, it is an opportunity that I've been looking for for a long time to bring in. One of the industry experts that I work with. His name is Tommy Stewart Say hi, Tommy.

Hello, hello. Thanks, Grant. Thank you.

Alright, hey, thanks for being here with us today, Tommy. So I'm excited about this conversation. Because the relationship that I have with Tommy and his organization is foundational to the work that we do at click AI. Now let me talk about this. Tommy and his group provide an AI platform. And there's some real beautiful synergies that we have between the click AI work and what Tommy and his team are doing. So without further ado, let me stop chatting here and give you Tommy a chance to introduce yourself, talk about your background and who you are.

Thanks, Grant. And this is a really, really an exciting opportunity just to sit down and have a chat with you. But for most, for the most part, you know, this has been a great run for us all. And this is an exciting space. So I've been in CRM and sales for 20 plus years, I won't say how long I've actually been but and work for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Teradata and the likes. And, you know, I've been very fortunate to meet our CEO, he sold his last product to Salesforce. And we're on this journey, really to democratize kind of a core capability to millions of people across all businesses. And the exciting thing is that I've enjoyed over my career has been able to solve problems, right, you know, whether large or small. And so I feel like I have a unique opportunity today in this marketplace to introduce a technology that has been far reaching and that kind of black box to individuals who never thought they would have access.

And so I'm really excited this is I think I'm in a new space in my career where kind of like when we started CRM, and that initiative with Tom Siebel, and seeing it, you know, match rate over the time with the likes of Salesforce. I think we're in the cutting edge, I think we're in the space that is actually going to change how people do business. And small companies and what you're talking about are going to really pick up speed speed, because there's technology available today. That wasn't available years ago.

Yeah, that's amazing. I love the way that your company's name is spelled. Can you spell that out?

A-i-b-l-e

Yeah. So it's pronounced "Able", right. But "AI-ble", alright, and the mission or the vision that you talked about, which is to democratize AI. That's when I first met your organization. That's what resonated with me immediately. And I immediately saw "Wait a minute", I'm seeing this divide. It's a bit of a digital divide between big companies and small companies, and how I feel that the big companies are getting this advantage that is propelling them. And we're gonna go over a few things in this episode today that will actually call that out. But that is propelling them, which is good for the big companies, but not so good for the small companies. And I saw Aible as a way to help propel the small and medium business to take advantage of AI. So are you ready for just a slew of questions I'm going to run by you?

Absolutely. Fire away. Let's have it. Let's go.

All right, here's one. Okay, so you and your organization and you and I partner together And together, we bring this AI to small and medium businesses, but from what you're seeing what problems do you see small to medium businesses face today? What are they experiencing as you guys go around and talk about various companies?

Well, you know, let's start with the basics, you know, raising and managing your capital, right, you know, everybody needs revenue, but fundamentally adopting new technology or top technology that is really been tasked to help enterprises and so When you think about a small business trying to get into the market, launch a new technology or launch a new product, and have the same capabilities of large companies, typically, the cost to acquire that technology has been so far off, it's been impossible. So many small companies are figuring out how can I start? How can I adapt? And how can I stay contemporary, because at the point in time, where large companies are going to take technology, they're just going to move some of the small companies away. And so a lot of small business owners are figuring out how can I use what I have today? And a reasonable amount of spin? And how do I actually differentiate myself in the marketplace? And so that's kind of the main thing is how do I get started? How do I innovate? And how do I adapt to when change happens? And how do I drive business results? And so using a technology like artificial intelligence, you know, augment it with human intelligence, right? You know, you got to have to have that human intervention component, really will help small businesses. And so that's what we're seeing today. And there are several companies that are saying, I'm just going to put my toe in the water and take a stab at kind of what's going on, I think that's the best way to do it. So hopefully, that helps, you know, some small companies understand that. It's not that far off, and you have access to the capabilities at the big boys, but you got to take advantage of it.

Yeah, that was one of the things that impressed me when I first met the CEO of your organization, one of the things that he did last summer was amazing. He said, You know what, for a period of time, I'm going to make our technologies available to organizations that are trying to solve problems or are being impacted by COVID. And any gave it away for a period of time. It's like, hey, if you want to, if you're solving problems, or your business is negatively impacted, then you know, we'll we'll make this available. That's that's true humanitarian, I love that about your organization. Alright, so there's a series of problems, you see their sales problems or supply chain problems appear to categorize them. Do you see sales solving with sales problems? Are companies using AI a lot for that?

Absolutely. Because there's, there's so much that's in the normal, what I call the sales journey. And typically, you know, I come out of the CRM business, right? And CRM was a great tool that everybody adopted. And it was fundamentally built for operational efficiency, right? How do I create velocity? How do I assess risks? How do I forecast? How do I navigate my customers through their lifecycle? But you know, at the end of the day, you know, navigating sales using artificial intelligence is so much more than just CRM. In fact, some of the market indicators suggest that a lot of these CRM companies are buying AI companies, because their CRM needs to be a little bit smarter. And so, you know, so who are the right customers to go target? What are the most profitable customers to target? What is the right lifecycle? What is the right marketing campaigns? How do I use my spin, so using AI to help you look at data, whether small or large and identify blind spots, identify opportunities that you couldn't see on a historical facing dashboard is really going to be exciting. And we see sales as one of the leading areas where artificial intelligence is taking a big enroll right now.

I saw a McKinsey report that had stated that, that 60% of large companies were getting some benefits for by using AI in their sales cycle. So let me say the other of the big companies using AI, which has a lot of them now, 60% of them were gaining revenue advantages and increasing their sales because of AI. So I think there's enough precedents there, the US in the small to medium business space should go after that. So on the benefits side, so you've seen companies come in, try to adopt AI? What have been some of the benefits that you've seen organizations experience? Can you talk about some of those?

Well, first and foremost, doing less, doing more with less, right, as a small company, you don't have a decision science team, you don't have 25 business analysts. And so being able to allow an individual to do most of what, you know, five, or six or seven people are doing other companies is first and foremost, one of the benefits secondarily, is really focusing on business impact. So our our custom loss function, our AI is trained, or algorithms are trained around what are the best financial and business outcomes. So it allows you to prioritize, I mean, the main thing you can't do as a small company is to have a six month strategy that was off target, right? You don't get time back. Right. And so it allows you to actually deprioritize and then secondarily, to be extremely agile, right disruption, never asked for permission, right? The COVID the pandemic came, it didn't say, hey, America, hey, I...

...can I do this?

Okay, if I did this, no. And so as a small company, you need to basically see some of the opportunities and one of our customers here went from being a manufacturer of machines to being a manufacturer of solutions. For the pandemic and medical equipment, and having that ability to pivot, having that ability to look at data, and to look at opportunities and be really opportunistic and nimble, is some of the benefits that we've seen in the early stages.

Okay, fascinating. Now, on the flip side of that, what have been some of the hurdles that you've seen these companies go through while they're on their journey? You know, applying AI?

Well, in fact, when you say AI scares a lot of people.

Yeah.

I don't know who's old enough. But there was a show called Lost in Space, and the robot would come out, and it was really spooky. That robot look nothing like the Terminator, right? You know. So for those of us who are older, or younger folks who are listening, have no clue what we just said. But at the end of the day, right, artificial intelligence scares a lot of people. And so one of the big, you know, hurdles is adoption. Right? How do I get started? This seems so foreign. That seems so far away. This seems so complex, and the industry has actually, many companies been very, very successful by making this a very complex, you know, solution for people who have statistical degrees, who sat in departments and got paid a lot of money to do some really cool stuff,

You know, tape on their glasses, right?

Yeah, absolutely. But now, you know, that hurdle has been removed. And so it's not as far as you think it's not a big leap, as you believe it is, we've been invented our capability into tools that people are using today like Tableau and Salesforce in Power BI, and we can actually download somewhere outcomes in an Excel spreadsheet. Because that's been the big step is adoption. How can I use this advanced technology today, and as a small company, you don't have six to nine months to do a digital Indian transformation, right? You have a matter of weeks and months. And so we, we see that as one of the biggest hurdles, and the biggest fears is just Hey, I just don't have enough or the skill set to get started. And that's been the biggest fear for most small companies.

One of the things that myself, my organization did was when we saw this connection with Salesforce and Tableau, we said, hey, let's do the same thing with Click Funnels. And so in a similar manner, you can come along, be running your sales processes through there. And out of that, then comes the data that moves right into an AI pipeline, that starts to give you the information on that. But I won't, I won't give too much away on that secret. Let's start though about the human element in all of this. So it seems like so when you're in a really big company, obviously, the human element is important, meaning the mindset of the people, but I think it's even more important than the small and medium business. Because as you said, You can't be wrong for that six months strategy, right? You're closer to hand to mouth. And so with that, what I found is this need for executives in the small, medium business to be vulnerable, if I could use that term, meaning to be willing to be open to the insights that come from AI? Have you seen examples where organizations have been given AI insights? And sometimes they move and execute on it? But other times they don't? Can you talk about how important mindset isn't this?

Well, collaboration is key. And if you were to go and look at our, you know, kind of our mission statement, you know, ClickAI & Aible really helps companies kind of transform around strategic decisions and kind of act optimally, if you will, react to change and collaborate, right? We have a solution that is involves you the human human input, right. So part of our even modeling design, we ask business users for that, the outcome of that is can be a rather illuminating, right? And that's kind of where the insights begin to evolve. But it's experienced the 20 year veteran who's done supply chain who've done sales or marketing can say, Well, I believe the model is correct. But here's kind of how I would apply it today. And I think there's that balance between accepting what AI gives you and allowing the human intervention, the business experience to be embedded in that and then making those strategic decisions. And we have a platform that does that. And I think it's important, especially for a small business for a CEO to now understand that his entire marketing budget has been spent targeting customers that aren't profitable, can be illuminating. Wow, we just spent our third quarter marketing budget on people who don't have a high propensity to buy our product, right? And then having someone say, okay, we understand that, but what is the what is the human part of that, then that will allow us to transition and to take that data? And so, it has been an exciting journey, right? helping organizations identify blind spots, opportunities, areas of improvement, just think about the productivity per employee, right, getting 20 30% productivity improvement just by having better decisioning. Right, based on business impact, and so we think there's a little bit of fear From executives getting information, but there's also that illumination that comes about that leads to profits and better focus better alignment of resources that overcomes that initial aha moment.

You had mentioned blind spots, I think, for me in the organizations that I've worked with and applying AI, using the Aible platform, I have noticed that, that it's the blind spots where the biggest opportunity for revenue and sales and business growth have taken place. It's that area where you don't know, what you don't know, right. And when AI exposes or illuminates things in that area, I've seen business owners come to me and say, "I had no idea that you know, this was the case, or that I was causing this problem", or that, "oh, if I just tweaked into this more than, you know, my sales will magnify dramatically.

Okay. And part of that, though Grant is because the solutions that have been presented to provide that have been historically facing right review facing the dashboard. So the world right, and so we've looked at a lot of cool, colorful dashboards with, you know, automation, and they look fancy, but they're all looking in the rearview mirror. And the problem is that 90% of these decisions are being made by looking at these dashboards, looking at PowerPoint and looking at data that fundamentally looks we're looks at historical data and allows you to make decisions that sometimes aren't the right ones.

Yeah, it's no longer valid. So not long ago, there is this Harvard Business Review article that came out that was talking about somewhat of this digital divide, right, where, whereas looking at the impact of AI and technology, on big companies and small companies. And you know, for a long time, sort of the myth has been that sort of the unspoken word has been, hey, if you want to innovate, and go do something exciting, you're going to go into the small medium business, that's where the companies can be nimble and grow. This Harvard Business Review a few months ago, came out and said, we're actually finding that that competitive edge is waning, that in fact, what's going on is that the big guys are innovating more now. They're adding more to their r&d budgets. And in fact, when Lou Gerstner wrote that book, he says elephants can't dance. They even quoted that right? Where they're talking about even IBM itself, your I can now pivot and do things more nimble. Now, you may or may not agree with some of that. But what you can't ignore are some of the statistics that are coming out. And these statistics are showing that it's becoming more difficult for smaller companies to become big and profitable. That's what they came out from the Harvard Business Review, you know, the small companies of yesterday, right, the Apple's and Amazon's and Netflix and Microsoft, they went through a period of time where, hey, they made this investment in technology. And we're able to lean into that, and produce these large mammoth organizations. But what we're finding now, and this is interesting, this is some stats from the Harvard Business Review, this was 2019. So what I'm going to share here is this was pre COVID. Right? So before COVID, in 20 1910, to 15%, of large companies reported losses, and in 20 1960 to 65% of small companies reported losses. That's that's a big, that's that's huge, right. And this was during economic boom time, right?

In 2019, the economy was doing pretty well. Now, during COVID, almost two thirds, I'm sorry, before COVID, almost two thirds, then of those small companies couldn't cover their expenses. Now, let me pivot into COVID with COVID coming on, and the impact to the businesses has not been equitable, right? We know that, in general, the big companies have not lost to the same degree that the small companies had McKinsey in a report just a few months ago said that during COVID, at least 36% of the 6 million small businesses close so that's over 2 million businesses closed. We haven't seen the same 36% loss, you know, for the big guys during that same period of time. So what this means in my mind is we need to provide something that will help the small to medium business owner, maintain retain recapture competitive edge, the big guys aren't getting as negatively impact in general, obviously, certain sectors are like transportation and others. But in general, the small businesses have definitely taken it on the chin, the little guys taking it on the chin, and with the big guys investing more in technology and leveraging AI and getting access to these technologies ahead of the small to medium size business.

It just occurred to me that this is a ripe opportunity to take something like what ClickAI is providing with Aible, which is to democratize AI make it available for the small to medium business for pennies on the dollar. I mean, I was doing some analysis the other day, and I think I, what I came back with, you know, you're gonna spend around $300 thousand dollars to reproduce one of these teams to start doing AI by the time you hire your data scientists, right, and your computer scientists and you start purchasing the platform, and everything you're going to spend at least $300,000 to do this. And I think one of the cool things that we've created through this partnership is the ability for small and medium businesses to go nowhere near that number and yet to leverage, you know, tons of years of work experience and insight and technology to help the small to medium business, progress and grow. You have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, in. First and foremost, I think you've done a great job in creating kind of a turnkey solution that can get companies up and running and be competitive tomorrow, right? I think that's a competitive that is, but you talk about the large companies, I was at a CIO conference a couple years ago at Columbia University and hurt this gentleman, Toby redshaw, who's at Verizon, who's head of strategy in 5g innovation. And he was talking about enterprise agility, right? Big companies understand being slow and methodical is not going to have you gonna allow you to survive, survive. With the pandemic, it is forced a maxi ramp up. And so if small companies believe that they're going to be larger or fast, smaller and faster than these large companies, that's changed. Innovation is now their competitive advantage. It's a survival tactic. I mean, companies have gone out of business. And so you're finding these large company be more innovative. And even in the banking industry, where you see small credit unions who had that personal touch, and the one to one experience, getting pushed aside by big banks are saying we have to do both, we have to have a social presence and a big financial presence. And so they're getting in more social media, they're using AI to determine the best customers and in turn, you know, predictions and stuff like that. And so having small businesses, grab a hold of technology and be just as nimble, as an enterprise organization, at 20%, or 25%, of the cost is not only a competitive advantage, but think of the things they can do. Right? You know, being really fast, right? And putting booster rockets on, on the back of kind of this engine, if you will, of innovation. And so it's not a nice to have. It's a must have just to be in the game. The world has changed so fast that technology, who adopts it when they adopted how fast they adopted could be a game changer. And so large companies have figured it out because they had to, you know, but small companies, they don't figure it out the they will be non existent. I think your organization has done a really good job in providing that gap. And then people should be jumping on like tomorrow.

Yeah, I appreciate that. So one final question. Yep. For one more?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay.

One more question. Therefore, what? In other words, if you were to say something to a small to medium business, what would you say to them to get started with this? Because as you mentioned earlier, people hear AI and they, you know, shutter and run the other direction. And, and yet our whole purpose has been to make this adoptable with as little effort as possible, what would you say to the small to medium business get started with a

Start now, right? It's not as far off as you think and your discovery of technology and capabilities, or a lot of really cool things out there. Look, for those companies that are purpose built. We happen to be purpose built around business impact. We don't train our models on accuracy, log loss, and all those other amazing, cool scientific statistical words that you know, get people goosebumps, right. It's all about business impact. So start now start small, and align your strategic imperatives and infuse that second thing, use the data that you have today. Most companies said it's going to take me years, let's figure out what you have today. And then lastly, from a cultural transformation, it's not a big leap. Give people insights into the tools that they use today. You have someone who's doing supply chain working in sa p give them insights in sa p, give them insights inside of Tableau given insight inside of Salesforce, you know, give them some insights on the PowerPoint, you know, just allow them to use it today in a way that they can ingest and make decisions and and watch the difference take place. You know, it's it's not a big leap. You know, we are very excited about being a part of a capability that is intended to be used as widely as PowerPoint. Right. Right. At the end of the day, this sophisticated capability can be used by anybody. And and so I would say to every small business CEO, start now, start with you have and get people immediate value where they work today and see the results.

Build on from there. Excellent. Well, Tommy, thank you so much for taking time with me today. I really appreciate that in for answering a million questions that I warned you that I'd be throwing a lot at you. So I'm going to do this, everybody. Thanks again for joining this episode. For additional insights, please go to click ai radio.com get signed up and subscribe and we will get more information to you. Thanks again for everybody. And until next time, get some 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.

Some argue that Humans will be Overtaken by AI and Robots and become obsolete.

In this episode we look at some industry pundits view on this and the impacts to your small-to-medium business.

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So this is an interesting title here. Russell Brunson said, What about AI?

It came about it wasn't too long ago, I was reviewing some articles. Actually, I'm gonna refer to a couple of those here in this particular episode. But I bumped into this one out of Forbes. And the interesting question that it brought up was, you know what, it comes down to humans or automation, right? That was that was the way in which the author is sort of pitching it right. Humans are automation. That is the question that almost sounds as daunting is to be or not to be right. That is the question. And for some people, humans vs. Robots can be just about as intense of a question. Recently, Gartner, which is a leading technology research firm, claim that AI augmentation, will create almost $3 trillion of business value, and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity worker productivity, globally, in 2021. That's this year. That's amazing. Now those are those are big numbers. And out of that comes some concerns.

People are saying, oh, gee, robots are taking over right? The question that they pose is and that I pose, as well as will automation make humanity obsolete? So as I thought about that I dug back into the treasure trove of my past. And well, you know, I'm not quite this old. But I imagine to the horse and carriage providers and Henry Ford's day, I suppose they felt like their world was coming to an end, right as a motorized vehicle, you know, grew in popularity. So the question is, does each new innovation though, mean that our humanity is becoming more obsolete? So I think to address this, the first question is, what's automation.

So when I was growing up, I spent some time on a farm as a kid growing up. And then to us, there is some automation that was available. Now, my dad, he milked cows, and he did it by hand. When it came time for me to milk cows at that point, we had this milking system. So we would hook the cow up to the milking system, the milk came into a container underneath the cow, we would unhook it, and then we would carry it over to this milk, you know, big, massive stainless steel milk VAT, and we'd pour it in there. Not long after that a complete pipeline system came in, right that that that's where it goes right from the cow all the way over to the milk VAT without me carrying it. I was like, wow, that's automation was so high tech. Right? It was so 19. One was that it was so 1970s there he go. The question is, was AI becoming obsolete because of this automation? And I think well, maybe a skill set was becoming obsolete, not necessarily myself. So not long after that. I recall seeing the first automated haloed her and I thought Heck, man, now I'm in trouble because that's how I make money as a kid right? I'm gonna haul hay in the summers. It's where he go out in the field. The the you know, tractor driver or the farmer would drive it slow. And you'd be picking that bales up out of the out of the field, putting them up into the trailer, right, being pulled by the tractor. Oh, gosh, when I saw that, I thought Holy smokes was I becoming obsolete because of this automation. Again, maybe, a skill set was becoming obsolete.

So when we think about automation, it's a broad category right and includes some level of machinery or apparatus or a system that handles you know, the redundant behaviors. Artificial Intelligence fits within this broad category. And there's so many different words for this right? You hear artificial intelligence you hear augmented intelligence, hear automation intelligence, you hear intelligence augmentations We can flip in a million different ways. Bottom line is, there's some additional intelligence that's coming into our life that has some form of automation. And the intent of it is to, in fact help us. Well, as I was searching. When I get back to our title here, what was Russell Brunson saying about this? A recent Forbes article that I bumped into was discovering whether automation is going to replace humans? And we'll have will humans have anything left to do?

If artificial intelligence takes over? Wasn't there an old movie, I think I saw it once; It's called Wally, right? I think that's kind of like, like the extreme of it right? Where all the humans became lazy and just sort of hung around and did nothing. While automation did that. So that's a very interesting view of things. In this particular article, though, from Forbes, Russell Brunson, who, as you know, is the entrepreneur and co founder of clickfunnels, he was interviewed in this article. Now, one point, my son, Steve, worked for Russell. And he did that for some time. And Steve's been on this podcast before, Russell has been a longtime fan of automation. All right, he built the click funnel software to automate many of the funnel aspects for entrepreneurs. So automation is a spectrum, right? It's from the most simplest tasks to the most complex and AI is a step in the journey of automation. Right?

The real question is, though, gosh, what about the role of humans in this automation, right? So there's something different about AI automation that causes us to ask these questions. In this particular article, Russell takes the posture, hey, it's gonna take both humans and automation, in such as in this AI case, to be successful. It's not just going to be AI. It's not going to be just humans, but rather, there'll be this collaborative joint partnership that will be needed. I agree with Mr. Brunson. Right. I, I think AI is so far away from any reasonable threat as to remove our humanity and make us obsolete, right. But it turns out that, you know, I can make arguments that people use horses for bad reasons, you know, before the horses came along, people have used cars for bad reasons, right? Whatever the invention or the automation might be that comes into our life, we end up owning and controlling it, are we going to use this and leverage it for value. So we must use AI, of course, for ethical purposes. And that that starts to become a real critical thing. In fact, in 2020, there was a series of failures, ai failures, where people were using AI in a way that actually started to cross into unethical boundaries. So it can be done. But that's not a unique problem for us.

Heck, we've been dealing with that for a long time. I saw in a recent article from McKinsey again, that's another research firm that they stated that some big companies are using AI driven insights to produce 20% or more of their sales revenue. That's huge, right? That's big companies driving sales revenue. And that's a great use of AI. Right? When you think about everything that's happened with COVID, and the impact of businesses and economies, this is an awesome way to leverage AI. Right. So it's one that we must emulate, though and leverage for small to medium businesses. And so whereas this McKinsey research is pointing out that the big companies are taking advantages. There's a gap here with a lot of small to medium businesses not having access to that. That's what we're about. We're about solving that problem. So here's the question, will there be a need for humans with AI in our future world? The answer is, well, yeah, you know, we need to pivot, just as I lost my job, right, milking, you know, carrying the milk and all from from the cow, you know, over to the milk fat, or as I lost the job, hey, you know, of putting the hand you know, by loading the hay, you know, manually under the tractor. It was education and the ability to pivot. It's more of a mindset problem, right. And it does require that for sure. Now, you know, I was driving through some farms not long ago, there's still some fields out there that actually don't use the new automated systems. And Gosh, what that's been around for 40 years or so now, just as they're still really old technologies out there, like coal ball and things like that, that still run the majority of massive computer technology, you know, within our within our economy. So it's not that it totally goes away, but the focus shifts and the competitive edge shifts. So creativity is, you know, the human spirit. These are the unique qualities that are so outside of the reach of anything from AI at this point, it's a long ways out there.

Recently, I watched an interview of Tony Robbins, and he was interviewing that AI robot called Sophia, I think you can look it up on YouTube, right? And at one point, Tony asks, Sophia, the question was, "Do you have emotions?", and Sophia, the robot responds and says, well, the moon reflects the light of the sun. And yet we often refer to it as moonlight. In a similar way, AI reflects the values of the people. And I think, you know, this robot was basically saying, it's not necessarily that, that I have emotions, it's that I'm reflecting the things that you know, I've received from people. So it turns out to be successful with your business using AI, it's crucial to bring your intelligence and your good practices and your values to the game, right, you have to do that. And it requires all those.

So as AI reflects back to us insights and guidance, we need to be ready to pivot away from the destructive behaviors and patterns that we're doing in our business, and then more fully embrace the good patterns and the insights, that AI points out to us. Alright, so coming soon, I'm going to share with you some ways to leverage this technology for your small to medium business. This is a, this is a passion. This is a mission. In fact, our goal here is to democratize AI. It's to level the playing field for the small to medium businesses to put more of a competitive edge back into the hands of the SMBs. And this is even more critical than now ever with COVID. Right? What's happened, if you look at the impact to big companies versus small companies, well over 36% of small companies have gone out of business so far. And I think the number is even above that now. Right due to COVID.

We haven't seen that same kind of drop, though, in the larger companies, they're showing more resilience. And yet, so much of the great spirit of innovation comes out of these small to medium businesses, we need to pick this up and pursue this right as a group of committed business owners to leverage democratized AI, so that we can continue to provide value to our families and to our society, and to our customers. And so this is something that I can tell I'm very passionate about. All right, one other thing. So I have some interviews coming up with some AI technology players, I think you're gonna really enjoy those. These are companies that both provide AI as well as companies that have been applying and getting benefits from AI as well. So looking forward to bringing that to you for each of those events. Okay, everybody, thank you for joining. And until next time, bring all of your human intelligence and combine it with AI to get the best of both worlds.

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