AI Can’t Improve What It Can’t See: Why Documentation Is Your AI Foundation with Tim Meinhardt

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. And we'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, And today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Tim Meinhardt. Now, Tim is the founder and CEO of Owner's Edge, where he helps executives get their organizations focused, aligned, and committed to executing on their highest leverage priorities using the Objectives and Key Results methodology. His latest venture is Opsbox, which is a managed service that builds and maintains the documented systems, SOPs, workflows, taxonomies that determine whether a company can actually adopt AI or whether it stays stuck. He likes to say AI can't improve what it can't see. He has an operator path going back decades. He ran a mortgage company for 17 years, co-founded IIS, which is an internet services firm that became the 11th fastest growing company in Washington State, and an unfunded startup to exit store and under 6 years. He's also a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, and he co-founded the local chapter of the Exit Planning Institute there in Sarasota. What sets Tim apart is really his work bridging operational discipline with AI readiness. So, Tim, welcome to the show.

Gosh, Marc, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. So, I've been looking forward to this conversation. We've got some interesting topics to dive into. But before we do, Why don't you give our audience a little bit of background? Like, tell them the story of the twists and turns that brought you where you are today.

Oh my. Well, you kind of mentioned it that I started out in the mortgage industry, did that for a while, decided that that wasn't my chosen path for the rest of my life. My computer kid at the time was convinced this thing called the internet was going to change the world. Ended up incubating his company inside the mortgage company, ultimately closing it, becoming his partner, and off we went to the races. We were actually in Washington, D.C.

Wow.

And so, we were the 11th fastest-growing company in Washington, and we finally got it right. We were very sexy, always approached to be bought, purchased, and somehow it never got through to the finish line. We finally did get it right in March of 2000. Perfect timing, just all preplanned, by the way. Just kidding. At the height of the internet. So, that began to lead me on to what's next. It's funny, I am a Certified Exit Planning Advisor, and I tell the funny story that back when I sold the company, I said, what do I do now?

Yeah.

And so, they said, well, it's a great book, Who Moved My Cheese? And I went, oh, that's great. Good luck, Tim. So, that's it. So, that was my whole entire ability to really plan for a proper exit other than some crude conversations with our attorney to put some things in my kids' names and so on and so forth. So, off I go into what am I going to do next? So, somebody called and said, Tim, There's a company I know. This woman really needs help. Would you mind going in and giving her a day of your time? And if so, what would you charge? And I'm like, I've never even thought about this. So that started a long career in what I would call advisory work and consulting work. And I've worked with all kinds of companies from architectural firms, furniture-making companies, high-tech. I was up in the DC area, some GovCon work. And ultimately fell into a methodology called Objectives and Key Results. I was— had a good friend at the time that was the head of the public sector for Red Hat. And he said, Tim, I always love it when you pivot and do different things. Would you like to come in and put this methodology into our organization? And at the time, they were almost $500 million. So my first response was, Sure, what's the methodology that you want to put in? Well, I want you to read this book by this guy John Doerr called Measure What Matters.

Yeah.

So, great book and I'm a huge proponent of it. And so, and then I read The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst, which was a big deal at Red Hat because Red Hat was really a meritocracy, not a traditional business. So, Very different in its approach, but also very healthy in my humble opinion. So, that started me in doing Objectives and Key Results. Did that for probably 8 years. I actually had a podcast of my own, still sits out there, OKRs Q&A, and haven't done an episode in about 3 years. And, but I really enjoyed Objectives and Key Results. So, I transitioned from the DC area down to Florida. and began to do some back to my roots, so to speak, which was smaller business. Look, I was a small business when I was a mortgage company.

Right.

We started from scratch to start IIS. And so that journey and that craziness of being a business owner to get something up and running, it's what I truly enjoyed. So I wanted to find a home back there a little bit in the small business. That led me to a couple different places as I moved down here in Florida from doing business valuation work. to ultimately doing and becoming a Certified Exit Planning Advisor and realizing— and I think the funny part was all the things that no one ever said when I went through the sale. And the 3 legs of the stool, and I'm sure other people have listened to your podcast, understand those things are critically important. And so, I really believe in impact. And advisory work is one thing. In fact, I had a discussion this morning. With somebody that said, hey Tim, we've done this, you know, this study of, of, of what the company really needs. And, and, uh, we sent it to them and the, the price was expensive. And I said, well, that, you know, there's a deliverable there, but, you know, it's not gonna fix their business. Okay? People want value for what it was that they, that they're paying you for. So, um, so I built a couple programs inside, um, Owner's Edge. And that's a whole different story on why it's not a truancy anymore, as you and I were talking offline. But the critical issue that I found was in this little small area that no one really likes to talk about. Okay, everybody knows it's important, but no one likes to face it because it's really arduous. And this is about documenting how your business operates, plain and simple. Everybody knows it. I don't care what methodology you look at, whether it's EOS, whether it's exit planning, whether it's, you know, the Value Builder, whether anybody that you talk to. At the end of the day, if someone wants to buy your business, if you want to exit your business, if you want to build value in your business, it has to be more of something that's not just in your head. And you've had several people— I've listened to some of your podcasts that talk about that. So, To me, this was a really critical issue, and I had a particular client at the time that I call what is an octopus owner. Okay, so—

Okay.

Everything, every decision's got to run through them. So I became frustrated because I was like, we're not building any value here in your business. You're going to wake up one day and go, okay, it's time to, to go, and like, there's nothing there to sell. So I said, Rich, finally, could you just talk it out? I know you can't write it out. You say you don't have any time. He said, sure, I can talk it out. I went, oh, oh, that's great. Now what do I do? Okay, like, I'm not gonna write it down. So, I put a little bit of an innovative hat on and I decided I thought it was really important, like, make it really easy for Rich. So, I wrote out a script of what, just what I wanted him to say. about whether it was a process or actually just a procedure in his company. So I got it to where it could be put together, and he started talking, and I got his CFO to start talking, and it worked. And I was like, wow, this is really, really neat because now it doesn't take people a lot of time to do this. That's one of the biggest problems that the market has been telling me is No one really wants to do it. It's taking people away from their day job. Okay. And that's critical, especially for smaller businesses. But it's also the two-edged sword. You know, what keeps you busy is the reason that you are so busy is because no one can count.

Yeah.

So anyway, speed forward, conversations I had, everyone at least in the Tampa Bay area and in the Sarasota area, EPI chapters, Business Transition Council, ACG, they all said, Tim, you really need to commercialize this thing. So in January, I kind of made that plunge and said, okay, now let me make sure my scripts are right. Let me make sure I've got all this right. Like, I know it works, but if I'm going to really take this to the market, it really has to work. So I did what little bit of gussying up I would say that I needed to do, and off I went, which is a journey in its own because suddenly I'm not really an advisor anymore, even though I am an advisor. I'm really not. I've started a company that when I initially started, I thought it was a great idea to be able to do and write very quickly by using a script and just transcribing. Well, that's still true, but that wasn't solving the problem. Okay. And so from your audience's perspective, the problem isn't writing things down. There are, as I've come to learn, hundreds of companies that say, hey, follow, we can write it down, we've got a SaaS product, we'll help you write everything from a training manual to, you know, we can write it, we've got templates for you to use. So to me, that was never the problem at the end, was I just thought I came up with an innovative idea. But what sat behind that, which is really more important, Mark, is I don't care if you write it down, is can your business run on it? Because can the information be trusted? Okay. So, it's almost like payroll when you run a small business. Like, everybody trusts you to get paid till you miss a payroll.

Right.

You are never trusted again. And so, I look at this kind of similarly. That doesn't matter what you've written down. Okay, but if people don't value it as a place to go and say, this is how we do things, then what's the point? In fact, it becomes worse. It was— I've now wasted all of my top-level people that I needed to be focused on driving revenue, driving efficiency and profitability, taking them away from everything to go through this arduous process. So whether you bring in a consultant, You go to SaaS. That's not the important thing. So what I decided was really what we really should be doing is managing this for people. And I'm sorry to be long-winded here, but—

No, this is—

The management aspect of this is really the critical point. Okay? Because if you do all everything right and you hand it off to somebody that's got 50 things to do during a day, Okay, this is not a simple task to keep things updated. It's not a simple task to make sure that it's a place— we call it an ops box, an operational box that sits on your system. So what sets us apart is we're not a SaaS product. We're not a software company. We're essentially a managed service. So think of us like an outsourced IT department. So the information that's important to you lies in your business. I can tell you, if I was a buyer or as a seller, I don't want someone to say, hey, where are all your jewels? I go, oh, they're over in that software company over there. Okay? No, I want them to be able to show them and use them. And I want my people to be able to use it in an environment they feel comfortable with. So whether it's, you know, Google 365, you know, Notion, whatever your flavor is. We are then going to be able to manage that. So we said, well, how are we going to do this effectively? So you mentioned initially taxonomy. So we use ISO formatting. We take it then to the next level, put directories in front of it, and then from there we put links to the operating process procedures. And we went ahead and we've recently added the ability to do screenshots. So if you want to be able to do something, you can go to our recording area. and put on your screen and walk right through exactly how you do things. So that we felt was critically important because if we're— if you don't have somebody managing it, once it gets out of date, okay, it's lost. It's just like payroll.

Yeah.

So in a roundabout way, we started doing SOP work, but really that's not the gist of it. It's really operating knowledge and the operating layer that sits below your business and has to be up to date. It has to be current. EOS would tell you that's called process rot, where things are not updated. Now, we were going to talk a little bit about AI. And so AI is a very interesting topic that's coming. Reminds me of the old adage where you're in the tunnel and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Right? You don't know if that's the light at the end of the tunnel or a freight train, but it's coming.

Or yeah, an oncoming train.

It's coming fast. And so, you know, I read up on AI and, you know, we're becoming a very agentic world, so to speak, or everybody's trying it out. How does it feel? Is it us? How much does it cost? What's our return on investment? So on and so forth. But what sits underneath it, which I would love to claim fame that, well, that's exactly why I started Opsbox, but it's not. But what it does do is provide that documentation that's the foundation for what I would call AI readiness. So, yeah, it's one thing just to jump into saying we want to do some type of agent work of any kind. But if there's not a foundation that AI could look back and look at workflows, you really are at a stuck point, or it's not going to work the way you want, or worse, something's outdated and it grabs the outdated material, and that probably could be your worst outcome. So what do you do? You end up rewriting a workflow. Well, now you're back from the beginning. You're spending a lot of time, energy, and effort. So You know, AI really, it can't improve what it can't see. And so the interesting thing is we're all using it right now as kind of a single, like we all do. Everybody that I know uses, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, you name it, you name the flavor, Grok, whatever, for themselves as much as anything. How do I sound better? How do I sound more—

Right.

They do it for research, whatever it does to improve their, their business. Smaller businesses, hey, I can theoretically cobble together a contract. I could interpret financials a little bit better. So one of the great, most interesting things I heard recently was that what's so affronting about AI is it's taking You know, the straight A student who worked their whole life to be knowledge aware and saying, "Ah, I can just go to chat. It can tell me everything." So very fundamentally unique world. So premise-wise for me, I think we all would love to say that we've taken the time to make our business more more let me reverse that less owner dependent. I think that's a very good point. I mean, Eric mentioned that. I think a couple other people in your podcast have mentioned that. Less owner dependency is critical. Can't sell your company if it's— well, you can, but it's— you may sell at a discount. They may want you to stay there for a long, long time. So, it's the old, geez, I went from being, you know, the king of my own, you know, castle to now I'm just a pawn in an acquisition. You know, so, um, that, that in itself is a whole can of worms. But what's critical is it's no longer becoming, uh, in my humble opinion, um, nice to have.

Yeah.

I think it's gonna be, you gotta have it. And there are gonna be really big winners and losers. We could go back. Um, I had— this was on my podcast, but futurists, okay? Um, and they would talk about from Ritz Camera to you know, Blockbuster to, you know, my phone that I used to use that I love, the BlackBerry, you know, great ideas at their time. Where are they today? You know, so the disruption there was the internet, which I had a, you know, kind of a front row seat to view. And I'm not a technical person. Okay.

Right.

So, Marc, that was the humorous part of it and everybody knew it. that knew me and were like, how are you doing? I go, well, I have a very, very bright, wonderfully bright partner that really, you know, and he knows really bright people. So it was kind of how we began to be known as a go-to provider. But I think AI really is one of these things that, you know, if you recognize this early on and you come at it from A standpoint that I want my business to be able to run, not on informational know-how, not like beating my key executives to death with questions every single day, and not myself that needs to work seven days a week in order for my business to continue to grow. Because there's an invisible ceiling; everybody hits it, and they think just by adding people, they're going to add. You know, they're going to be able to solve the problem. The problem is that just adds more chaos. And so I think the sooner we as small businesses address this, the better off we are. And it has all the ancillary tails that you could bring with it from the ability to be transferable, the ability to actually be scalable, go from capable to scalable to transferable.

So— Yeah.

Anyway, that's kind of the premise on all of this. And I was mentioning to you offline that I've been so deep in this lately That, you know, I just, the more I learn about this particular, it's a really difficult area for companies to address. I talked to a gentleman the other day that said, yeah, we just kind of continued to bolt on software till we think we've got it right. Like, I'm like thinking, well, I don't know how you're gonna unbolt it all. All right.

Right.

But it works okay. Like, who's to say? So anyway, I've done a lot of talking here, Marc. So—

No, but there's so much rich stuff in there. And I think it's worth sort of unpacking some of it and laying out really the structure that you showed, which is if you really want a business to be valuable and transferable and sellable, which many folks that are building a business That's why they're doing it. Then it's got to run on processes, not people. And in order, and the other thing is, if you want a business to be current today, it has to enable automation and artificial intelligence as much as possible, which also depend on processes, not people. And so, the convergence of sort of both of those things makes processes so important and having an operating system like this Ops Box that allows you to manage those processes in a way that they don't get stale. So, because as you say, like, and there's a great example of, you know, even just myself, I built a little Claude Cowork program that runs automatically and it does some tasks for me. And I changed how I do it because I just started thinking, oh, you know, it would be slightly better if I do this. And then the next week when it runs all these processes, they're all wrong because I'm like, no, that's the old way because I didn't go and update the instructions. Whereas if I had had a process for updating the instructions, it would have run correctly and Saved me all that time and effort.

Well, Mark, you've really hit on it, and I call it kind of a flywheel effect. So let's just walk through this. Okay, so we know we need to do this, okay? And we know it needs to stay current, okay? So think of that premise, okay? So we're going to help you stay current, okay? Now we're also going to innovate, okay? So how do we do that? Well, what's going to— what's What's going to change? Well, our processes may have procedures. So having the ability to update quickly, okay, we check every quarter. We don't care if you want to do it every month, okay, every week, we don't care. Okay, we've given you an unlimited amount of usage for us to be able to say, hey, when you want to reshoot something or you want to change something, you want to screen capture, go right to our vault, take care of it, we get it, and we'll return it to you. as done consistently every single time? Well, you start thinking about that for a second. That's what I was driving at when we're all using it now individually. Well, imagine, and people now are going more to this, more to Gemini, okay, more to Copilot and saying, look, this is our company. What could we be doing better? What could we innovate on? And AI gets back and goes, we don't know.

Right.

You know what you're doing. Right? So if it's written down, you might be able to say, hey, if we were doing some things maybe differently, if we looked at it a little differently, well, that begins to change. Well, now we want to be able to make the change to our system. And this is where the flywheel comes in. So you can then innovate. Okay, let's re-document quickly so that our company knows, and we've already got a system where it's updated and it's current. So as we're changing and iterating, it's following us very quickly. Now you go back and say, okay, here's our new process. Here's the flywheel. So now what do we do? How can we do this again? And it continues to improve itself. That's where the winners and losers are going to be over probably, in my humble opinion, and I have no right to claim myself as an expert on this, but I think over the course of the next 36 months, this is what's going to change. I mean, look where we were. no less than 18 months ago. Where were we 18 months ago? Think about everybody. Think about where you were with artificial intelligence 18 months ago. And I laugh humorously. My wife still says, you know, I don't— it's hocus pocus to me. All right. Okay, fine. Well, you wanna go, hey, I got it. My back hurts or my neck hurts or, you know, and, you know, then they start using it. So we're gonna slowly get into that. business piece. And we're already doing it on some level. Some are more, what I would say, early adopters, you know, some are more mainstream. You know, that's the old, the old book about, you know, you start out early adopters take it first, mainstream happens. And then there's the laggards. They're the last ones. Okay. And then it starts that cycle again. I think in watching the internet take place, I mean, this obviously is dwarfing it with speed and disruption. We're not even sure what this thing's gonna be able to do. Marc Andreessen, recently I listened to a podcast with him and he said right now it's the most intelligent person that you can hire, train, do whatever you want. Like it's reached that point. And so I think it's gonna start happening with business. And I think what's really important is, are you prepared even as a small company? Look, If you're, let's just say you're, you're in a blue-collar industry where all of a sudden your competitor's kicking your tail. Well, what are they doing differently? You don't have things documented. You're still doing back of the napkin. You know, you've got your, you know, cohort buddies, whatever you want to call them, running your business. It's all done informally. There's nothing written down. We do a lot of shadowing when we hire people, you know, so the onboarding takes longer. And the next thing you know, you start looking and going, you know, we can't see it as a balance sheet or as a P&L line item, but we're starting to be affected not only by AI, but one of the reasons is that we're not empowering AI to look at our business to improve it. And I think that's really the most unique takeaway that I think I'm seeing right now is businesses, first off, they don't want the rot. That's just terrible to go through that process. But secondarily, you know, they're going to want to take advantage of things. And unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of projects that are not being completed because they're running into roadblocks for one way, shape, or another. And, you know, you take the same problem with a small business and just multiply it by adding a couple zeros. Now you have a big company doing the same thing. Okay, right. They're trying to run something from an agent perspective and, uh, it's not working. So, um, anyway, that to me, that's, I think, a very good point to, to, um, to emphasize to people that, look, it's, it's nice to have, but it's not like—

Right. Yeah, it's much more than— yeah, it's a must-have. And you talked about, I think it was Marc Andreessen that was saying, you know, it's the smartest employee you could hire. You know, I was listening to someone the other day that was saying, you know, a lot of these VC and PE companies are looking for who will be the first $100 million or even billion-dollar one-person company where the rest of it is built off of You know, AI agents and, and building out these processes. Because as you describe, if you as the entrepreneur can see how to create value in the world and then define that process, then there are, you know, agentic solutions to run that process for you. And then you can develop another process that makes that run better, and another, and another. to where your idea is essentially running on the processes that you built. And one of those processes could be, and now make this process better. And so it's continuing to improve even without the original originator of the idea having to be actively involved.

And I laugh when I'll accuse ChatGPT of, you can do better than that. Oh, I can. Tell me that in the first place, you know.

That's right.

But I think it, you know, it does its best, you know, if you look at the language learning model, it's an ability to guess properly of sorts.

That's right.

And so taking that and applying it to a business, you begin to see like, oh gosh, like look at the opportunity that we have Okay. And some people don't want it. Let's be honest. Some people, they're more of the laggards. I don't want to do that. I'm happy just the way I am. And when I go to market, I'm going to get discounted so heavily I can't see straight. Look, at the end of the day, we're all going to exit our business whether we want to do it horizontally, right?

Or vertical first.

Or vertically. Okay. I prefer to be vertical rather than horizontal when I exit my business. Okay. So we're going to exit. So what are we going to get for that? And that's where you look at the efficiency gains. And I mentioned this recently in a post that you need a champion. I call what we've built a higher propensity for adoption. It's not adopted in an organization unless you have a champion that says, I'm not going to answer that question. It's in our documentation. And it doesn't take long for people to start going, we know where to go for the right information. So you need a champion for sure. But you also need someone dedicated or a service on our part dedicated, okay, to making sure that we're keeping that company honest. Okay, look, if I looked at something and it says it hasn't been updated in 7 months, how do I know it's accurate? Okay, so.

Yeah.

The way we've built our service is that at least quarterly everything will be checked and say, look, you know, we write out a note. Evelyn, have you updated anything here as far as how we're onboarding people? No, everything seems to be the same. Now you could have major rewrites if you put in— I'm gonna use the word— another bolt-on. All right. So if you change a major software package, A lot of processes will change. And so, it's the ability to continue to build. Like, one of the things I tell people is we all talk about the 5 Ds, you know, that hurt businesses, but it's the ability to overcome them. You know, it's like cyber. It's like cyber. Okay, the biggest thing with cyber was everyone, you know, the premise is everyone's going to get hacked, right? So, it's not— you can do your best not to get hacked. But really, what you make sure you have built is that resiliency plan to come back to state, to back to normal again. So, I kind of look at this as kind of that premise as well.

Well, Tim, you're obviously an expert in a lot of super interesting topics and we could talk about it all day. But I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, like, give us the pitch. Who exactly do you work with and how exactly do you help them?

So I would like to just make it simple for everybody. So look, what Opsbox— and our website is opsboxengine.com. Opsbox. So we help growing companies turn trapped, scattered, outdated operating knowledge into a managed operating layer. So think about that for a second. That's one thing that we do. And then we create the conditions for better efficiency, stronger profitability, easier growth. I like easier growth. I was all about easier growth and improved transferability and better readiness for AI. And we do this with less dependence on the owner. It's key people and informal know-how. So if you look at, kind of look at that, that's really what we're all about, Mark, is how do we take a company and do those things? How do we get that information that's trapped in that owner's head or the key employee's head? How do we get it on paper? Okay, how do we get it to a place where people can see it? How do we take the scattered stuff that's everywhere, organize it inside OpsBox? And let's get rid of the outdated stuff and put it in an archive so that it won't hurt us moving forward. So now we have this operational layer with which from there we create the better conditions to make sure that we're operating more efficiently. Okay, we're going to build stronger profitability, making it easier for us to grow. Okay, obviously improving scalability and, and being prepared for AI. And then obviously, if you want to transfer your company, you have this you can go to. So that's really how I leave it with people. They can find us on opsboxengine.com.

Okay.

You can go there and ask for a 15 or 30-minute conversation. We'll more than happily walk people through what's going on in your world. How can we make it work for you? And again, we price it as a service. We have a setup fee that we charge. And then based upon how many things we're managing, is what we charge on a monthly basis and allows you to rewrite them, change them, and do whatever you want. When you add some more, as long as you're within one threshold, you're great. If we add a little more, we'll increase it a little bit. And we felt that was the best way to deliver it to the marketplace. So, Mark, thank you for having me today. This was really—

Oh, thank you, Tim. I really learned a lot. I'm sure our audience did too. And we'll talk to you again soon.

Great. Thanks, Mark.

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