A developer named Mike cut software changes from 30-60 days to ten minutes, letting the team adjust financial projections in real time during strategy sessions. When an Oura ring shipped to the wrong address, American Express's AI support portal gave dead links, forcing a manual workaround.
In, in like when we suggest a change now, like it used to, when in our software, and if you've ever been on our program, you know, the advisors compete against each other and we have this software with dashboards and we're tracking everybody's numbers. Previously we would ha— we would have to hire coders and it would take like what, 30 to 60 days, Hoagie, to get a change made in the software.
I can only imagine the bill too.
Oh yeah. No.
By the hour.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on the software. Now, what does it take when we suggest to Mike a change? 10 minutes?
Minutes. And whenever he's up and he works some long hours, because trust me, like we're sitting there going back and forth. He's like, try it now. All right. Works. Let me know if there's anything else. It's like on-the-fly developer. It's pretty awesome.
Yeah. But it's really just in, in real time. Like we built this projection tool. Well, he built it. I, I, didn't build it, but he built it. And we were doing projections for a strategy session that I was gonna do, and the numbers just looked too good. And like, you know, I, I wanna get on a strategy session and kind of get people excited about what their numbers could be. But we always run into this thing where there's also just the, the unbelievability of the numbers. Like, yeah, if you are losing money in your service department, you can't believe that somebody's making 50% Net to gross. Like it's too, it's too much of a jump. And frankly, we don't even want them thinking that way. We want them thinking about getting over the losing part, just break, you know, breaking even or making a little money. And then we'll, the next thing is let's get to 20 or 30% net to gross, right? Like we, we kind of understand it's, it's, it's too far. So I, I'm, I'm asking him to kind of like tailor it down and I'm like, well, go, don't take our top 30% of clients. go 50. Well, that's too much. And he literally on the fly was changing these projections, taking all of our data, and with no issue whatsoever of, of just, you know, moving it where we wanted it in real time. And all of those things before would have required a programmer, a bunch of money, and probably telling the programmer 5 times they don't understand our industry.
Mm-hmm.
And no, it's not you know, whatever. There's always this gap between what people understand and how our industry's so different in the accounting.
Yeah.
Because most businesses don't, don't have gross profit the way we have it. They just have cost of sale. The way, the way that things are expensed are just different. And so, yeah, it's fascinating to me that on that side of it, it's very, very useful. But on the human interaction side, when it comes to customer service or whatever it is, did I tell you guys a story about My aura ring. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so still to this day, the only option I have, which I feel bad doing, is just telling American Express that I never got the product. Yeah, like that's the only option because none of their customer service portals work for my problem, which is they sent it to the wrong address. The AI says, "Oh, you got to go to this website," and then that website is always a dead link. So it's funny.
