You Need a 3rd Brain with Michael Greenberg – Business Brain 650

Business Brain, episode 650 for Wednesday, May 21, International T Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them to tune our business brains so that we can each individually and collectively do a little bit better at living those charmed lives each and every week. Our sponsors include shopify.com businessbrain, where you can go and sign up for a $1 per month trial period, and nordlayer.com brain, where you get 22% off of this network security for modern businesses and then Codebrain gets you another 10%. We'll talk more in depth about both of those in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire.

I'm Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean. I'm still out in Lafayette. Tea day, huh? I'm just a guy.

Yeah. Caffeine and I don't generally get along. Yeah. It further reduces my tolerance for humanity, you see. So it's best that these days I would do a mint tea, but sometimes I just do hot water tea.

Oh, that's it, dude. Hey. I am thrilled that we're joined by a guest today, Michael Greenberg from Third Brain. Excuse me. Easy for me to say. Michael, thanks so much for coming, coming on Business Brain and hanging out with us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, that's great. Brian, I. You're. Are we connected via tribe? I know we've had a call before. And then you're in tribe as well, right?

Yep. Yeah, for about six months now.

Awesome. Yeah, it's great. Great business group that. I'm a facilitator up there. It works out good. And I'm excited to hear to talk about automation and what you do. Tell us what you do at Third Brain and what. What that's all about.

Yeah, absolutely. So Third Brain does what I like to call digital operations. And the reason I say that instead of AI and automation is because we start a couple steps earlier in the process. Most companies are not quite ready to actually implement like any sort of AI tool at scale or to integrate it deeply into their business because they either don't have the process documentation, the operations put together properly, or they don't have the data layer for the digital to work. And so we get both sides together as sort of combined technical team plus operations consulting, get the tools working together throughout what we call data automation, which is going to be sort of basic integrations. And then we start doing the more advanced workflow and business process and AI stuff. Once we've got that core layer in that's.

So that was something that stuck out when we, I was looking at the notes that you wrote before the show is, is holding off on the AI stuff. Do you get a lot of pushback? Because everybody's so excited about it and they're like, yeah, hey, I'm going to hire you because we, we really want to implement this AI stack and, and do this stu have to kind of like hey, hey, you know, slow down a bit when you're talking to people.

Yeah, I'd say not as often as you think. Oh, most people are coming to us with the idea that like, oh, either we went too fast and we ran into an issue already or we are concerned but we know we have to do this thing and so we want to get ready first. We work with some like venture backed startups where we are just like hey, here's an AI guy and run. But the majority of our clients are you know, 30, 40, 50 year old businesses. And so it's much more of a stage transformation.

And I love, I want to just highlight something. You said that in the first group of customers you described those folks that have tried something and failed or not succeeded at, at in the way that they wanted to and come to you. Those are my favorite kinds of customers because they already have some knowledge but they know that they don't have enough and that makes life so much easier and they're so eager to be helped and yet are already on the right path. Right. They're already, they already know that they want to be somewhere else. You don't have to convince them of that. You're just there to facilitate which is really where, like where we all like to actually do our work, you know.

Yep, yep. Yeah, it's, it's still too hard to convince people that like hey, you should be doing this stuff.

Yeah.

So we're not leading the horse to water.

Got it. Yeah.

Makes sense.

Well, and that's a really smart thing for anybody in any business. You know, if you, if your sales process is in is. Is mostly trying to, to use your example, you know, lead horses to water. That's a lot of work and a lot of time. Can you take a, can you zoom out a little bit and find an angle where you can find the customers that are already on their way to find water. They just don't know where it is because that's a much different sales process.

So yeah, yeah, that's sort of the core. So I, I have like a big venture thesis I wrote where I said, okay, this is how I'm going to develop businesses going forward. And like, the core of it is that I only want to build businesses that essentially fit, like a budget line item already that exists. So I, I want to productize a service or some sort of AI tool and put it into something that people are already looking for. Because I've tried doing the new thing and that's too much work.

Yeah. It's tough to convince them they need something if you have to explain what it is in the first place.

Yep.

I've spent so much of my career one extra step ahead of the curve, and it's good to be ahead of the curve, but not so far ahead that you need. And it, you know, that you need to teach people what it is that you do wholesale. Right. You know, they don't even understand the concept. That's tough.

Yeah.

And then what I've done is I've gotten out of businesses too soon. Right. Like, I realize, oh, I, I'm leading horses to. Trying to teach horses what water is. Like, no, not interested. And, you know, I could do something else. It's like, oh, if I'd held onto that, you know, five years later, that business would have been perfectly situated to. And I've done fine. Like, I'm, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying, like, but these things happen. Yeah, that's really.

Yeah.

I love that line item. The existing. Find the existing line item. Smart man.

Yeah, that's good. So, okay, let's talk about real world application with what your. Your business does. You mentioned that you're in the process of a very difficult digital evolution with your f. Your real estate business. And I don't know if it's difficult because it's with your dad or it's just difficult because it's tough to do it on the real estate business. But maybe a little bit of both.

Both. So, like, this is a business that has not changed in 30 something years. They still mail, like mail checks and paperwork is a significant expense because of all the stamps.

Oh, yeah, sure.

And they, you know, they say, yeah, we have a digital copy and then they give you a printout because they don't know where it is in digital. So it is both way behind digitally. But also I'm dealing with, oh, my dad's here. They've got. The woman who runs the business is very good at what she does, but she has been understaffed as a business by about three or four people for now, going on five years at minimum. And she's Only worked for this business since she left secretarial school. My grandparents hired her out of secretary college, and then she worked and continues to work at this business now, 32 years later.

It's good to have that, that longevity.

Yeah, but continuity is great.

Continuity is awesome. But you need someone to drive that, that evolution of the business and bringing it into today's world. Yeah, I want to learn more about this. The next thing that I want to do is I tell you all about our sponsors today because. All right, look, running our own businesses, it's awesome, right? And it's also like juggling flaming batons while being chased by, I don't know, a pack of, like caffeinated squirrels. Right? We've all been there. When I launched my first business, you know, it felt like I had to be the CEO, the cmo, CTO and the janitor and everything else all at once. Well, that's where our sponsor, Shopify steps in. Shopify is the built in business partner you didn't know you needed. It powers millions of businesses worldwide, including the ones that I run for. Like, we used Shopify for the merch for one of my other shows and one of my other websites, in fact. And it makes setting up a beautiful store online ridiculously easy. No coding, no chaos. They give you pro grade tools to manage your store, to run your marketing, to process your payments, to handle your shipping. All like a boss, right? And they've got AI tools. They are all in on AI. They write product descriptions, improve my images, and even help launch campaigns. Basically, Shopify shows up to work harder than half of the humans out there. Right? It's great. If you're serious about building a brand and living that charmed entrepreneurial life, you're going to want Shopify in your corner. Turn your big business idea into Ka Ching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com, shop. Go to shopify.com businessbrain again, shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, now let's talk cybersecurity. Most of the time it feels like either A, it's too complicated or B, it's slowing down your team. That's why I love Nord Layer, our sponsor. It gives you enterprise grade security, but it's built for the pace we actually work at. Whether you're onboarding a new hire from their laptop in Lisbon or you're trying to prevent phishing attacks before your first coffee, free sip of mint tea. Yeah, that's my vibe. These days. NORD Layer lets you deploy secure access fast. It's vpn, threat detection, and device management all in one with zero hardware and actually easy setup. And it's also based on zero trust. So you can control who can access what and when and from where. Because your growing team doesn't need to keep unlimited keys to the vault. Right. Entrepreneurs don't have time to mess with outdated firewalls or security spaghetti. NORD Layer gives you clarity, control, and speed. The perfect combination for your charmed life in business. And here's a great part. You get up to 22% off, plus an extra 10% with code brain@nordlayer.com brain. So nordlayer.com brain gets you 22% off. Use code brain for an extra 10% off. That's where fast, secure and sane actually coexist. And our thanks to NORD Layer for sponsoring this episode.

All right, Michael, I'm going to ask you a question. Some of the notes that we got here before is you talked about using, getting some help from AI to write a book that you're working on. And the thing that stuck out to me is that, you know, the, the all took a year of research and, and, and lots and lots of rewriting to get it ready. I know you're. I know this is not a book publishing podcast, but we've, we've done this process and I just love to hear a couple of minutes of insight into how it, how the AI, what it did good, you know, and what it, what it was lacking in.

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing I found was that the AI is like, I'm terrible at the filler stuff, like the connective tissue in between core concepts.

Ah, okay.

It's great at that.

So you give it that prompt and then. And it'll help you fill out that. That content in between.

Yeah, So I found, like, I gotta. I need to put together like 70% of it and then it can take it home.

Yeah.

And then I have to go and polish it a couple of times to sort of remove the AI ness afterwards. But it can take my voice and it gets it pretty darn close. But I have to give it, like, every example that I'm going to use in order how you want to weave them. I have to give that to them. I have to give it like, oh, here are the case studies I want. This is how to put them together. This is the exercise to use. Here is the framework we use. And so, like, it can apply that framework and reformat the case study into a framework.

I see.

But it needs both the framework and the example and the case study before it can do that.

And it'll do that grunt work. But you're giving it the guidance on, here, here's what I want, here's how to do it, do it right.

Well, and you're not, you're not just giving it guidance, you're giving it the data too. Like, you're giving it the information and the guidance and then letting it be your grunt.

Yeah, yeah. So like, if you've ever worked with a writing assistant before. Yeah, that is how I use it. That's cool.

I like that.

That's worked really well for me.

No, that makes sense. Everything that, you know, all the. If I had to sort of distill the advice that I give about AI to people, it's the, you know, garbage in, garbage out. Right. So if you. The more data you give it, Right? Yeah. The more data you give it, the better off the output's going to be for what you want. You know, it's. It's rarely going to read your mind. And if it does, it's probably going to hallucinate an answer that sounds great but isn't necessarily correct. So.

Yeah, yeah. And I would just add in to the garbage in, garbage out. Like, that's why getting your data right matters so much. If there's one thing I leave people with, it's if you get all of your data one place where you can say, yes, this is right for this thing and it's all organized the same, you're not going to run into issues with AI the same way everyone else will.

That's good advice.

Yeah, I like it.

Yeah, man.

All right, so our, you know, our listeners are typically, you know, SMB, small business owners, entrepreneurs. What can you tell these folks, like, on your digital operation sides, like, hey, either, you know, here's the opportunity maybe you're missing, or here's something that is. Could be causing you internal problems that, that you need to pay attention to when it comes related to your, your digital ops.

Oh, yeah. So I think sort of the, the big thing that I see with most business owners is you have not spent enough or maybe any time on your operations or on setting up best practices or standardizing the way you organize files. Some of these things that seem like they don't matter, you've probably spent no time on that stuff. And that stuff matters a lot. When you, when you have five people, it matters. Yeah, like one. I used to, we used to do a lot of like project management implementations. And if somebody was below a team of three, we'd say, hey, we can't even help you. You don't need this yet. You just need better communication inside of your team. If you're at 5, 10 people, then you need project management software to start tracking like all the tasks going on. And so the technology is probably not the thing holding you back in most cases. Like, technology solves no problems. If anything, it makes them more complex. Yeah, most people are going to be better served by like, hey, we only have G suite, or we only have 365 and we just use all the heck out of all the tools that are inside of that thing. And you start by just standardizing as much as possible. Oh, we onboard clients, client onboarding template. Oh, we have complaints. Well, we. You probably get the same 20 or 30 complaints. What are the average responses? Put together an FAQ for sales. Decide on a naming convention for your digital files. Like all these things don't matter. When you're a small business and you're just hustling to get that first few hundred thousand, but then going from like half a million to a million, that's often a matter of making sure you can deliver on one thing repeatedly. And making sure you have that really organized makes all the difference.

It makes sense. I also find just from my own experience, I get distracted by the latest Shiny SaaS app and you know, so then all of a sudden I've got all these subscriptions and you know, I'm like, wait, how do I integrate this? And I mean, do you see that too when you're working with people?

So that's one of the first things we take over for clients is like, hey, we're going to take over all your tool vetting and we're not going to buy any new software without us.

Yeah, that's smart, man.

And we have what we call. And with the book, we're going to put out like industry specific sort of tactical guides. But we have what we call level three certified. Level three is a unified data layer in our framework.

Okay.

And so a level three certified piece of software is one that has open integrations for every data point, so that way it can sync for every use case that you would need. And like, I've made this mistake myself. I chose Fathom for one of my companies. It's a video recorder.

Oh yeah.

Fathom only has a zapier export option and it's only on a new recording, so there's no way to really export it. And when you have hundreds of recordings, it becomes difficult to search through. We had to make a little AI scraper to scrape all the transcripts automatically out of Fathom so we could have like a more useful database.

Is that something that you've marketed for other people to use if they, if they find themselves in a similar situation?

You know, I've got about 30 tools that I probably should do that for. That I have not. And that's one of them.

As someone who has spent his career building tools for, you know, myself and, or my businesses and never thinking to productize the tools. I tell you, productize your tools. One of the first things I built was in what had been, oh, December of 1999, we had a website called Mac observer that we had started and I built our own content management system from scratch because WordPress didn't exist. And I never thought to like, you know, turn that into a business. That might have been a good idea. I don't know, maybe I'm just thinking.

But we may, we may not be here talking.

We wouldn't be having. I'd be on my private island, Shannon. Yeah, that's where I'd be. Yeah, exactly.

So definitely makes sense.

We have, I have taken a little more productized approach this time.

That's good.

We've got a ghostwriter tool coming out. We've already launched a podcast booking service and that has a tool interface that is coming out in a couple months. Fathom Exporter, I think is probably on the list.

Great.

And I anticipate we'll have quite a number more.

That's cool. That's awesome. Well, I love hearing about this. This is such an important part of business is digital operations. And I do think that most. You can do a lot when you're small, but as you start to scale, if you're not organized and you don't have the SOPs, the FAQs to use all these acronyms and this centralized repository. And the thing that really stuck out as we were talking today is when you said, hey, just decide on the standard and stick with it. It'll make your life a lot easier. Even though I'm such a non standard kind of person and I've got, oh, I'm going to use notion for this and I've got this in G suite and I've got, oh, I want a loom for this and I use calendly and da da da da. And then all of a sudden I'm paying $500 a month in subscription services. So yeah, I think that's a huge opportunity to kind of narrow those things down for people for sure.

Simplify first. Yeah, yeah, I like it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for coming on and talking about your business. What's the best way for people to learn more and get in touch with you?

Go to thirdbrain Co or follow me at agendive Tech on social media.

All right, perfect. We'll put all the links in at businessbrain show for this episode as well. The audio for this one's coming out on the 21st. And we. Thanks again for coming on talking to us, Michael.

Awesome. Thank you.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having us, man. What a. What an absolute blast. And you've already got me thinking. So I'm glad, I'm glad you came on. I'm glad to get to meet you. So I'm sure we'll talk more. Folks, thanks for hanging out with us. Make sure to leave a review for the show at BusinessBrain show review. Keep on living that charmed life and we will see you on Friday.