AI For Tradies | AI Voice Agents, Chatbots & Proposal Generators

most founders find themselves focusing on $5 an hour work instead of $500+ an hour work. And so the whole game of AI automation is that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to free up that time from team members and founders so that they can focus on the highest leverage work in the business.

If you are a trades-based business owner and you're struggling to keep up with all of the admin work, you're probably on the tools, Who's got time to follow up leads, issue out quotes, get clients on board? If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Today we're going to explore a little bit about how AI can help you. I know for many, AI can feel a little bit overwhelming. You don't know where to start. It can do so much, so you don't know what it can do in your business. And I always say, just focus on what you're currently doing and ask the question, where can AI help you do it faster, cheaper, and better? All trades-based businesses, they have incoming inquiries that need to be handled. All trades-based businesses need to get the quotes out and followed up, and they also need onboarding for new clients. That's what we're going to explore today with Zach Nielsen. He's from elitesystems.com.au. I'll pop a link through to that. But maybe first things first, um, thanks for making some time today, Zach.

Awesome, man. Well, thank Thank you for, thank you for bringing me on. I appreciate being here. And as you know, I'm a big fan of Systemology work. So it's, I feel like it's the, it's one of the most important things any single business can do to properly scale. So, and it works perfectly with exactly what we do because we will usually tell them to go back and do exactly the type of work that Systemology pushes. So, yeah, it's awesome to be here.

Yeah, love it. Well, I know we talked briefly about getting the use cases together because that's always where people struggle. It's kind of like, yeah, but What's it actually gonna do for me? And you popped together a slide deck. So I'm wondering maybe if we start there, you can share it. And if we just talk through each, I really just wanna open the mind for the business owner who's listening to this, who can then go, I can see this, I can see this is gonna help my business. And I know what those next steps or two will look like. You don't even, I don't even need to understand everything exactly, all the technical details, as long as they get the vision for what it can do, it makes it so much easier to then go, great, now let's find the person or the team member that can help us make it happen.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is. And like the way we typically try to— I'll just share this. I don't know if the— I've just shared the slides there as well. It's popped up. So yeah, typically like when we talk to businesses about this, like people are realizing how important it is to start implementing these technologies, especially with the emergence of things like ChatGPT a couple of years ago. Now we're moving into the AI agent era. And yeah, now people are realizing how important it actually is to have this in their businesses to really free up their time. And that's pretty much exactly what we're gonna focus on.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, the first thing I usually always like to start with for people is like, how much is their time worth? It's the question I always like to ask people because every single business owner and founder and every team member of a business has got an hourly rate, even if we don't necessarily charge at an hourly rate. As a founder, I always look at it from the perspective of everything we do has a value. And if we are not focused on tasks that are producing more per hour for the business, then what does that equate to? And most founders find themselves focusing on you know, $5 an hour work instead of $500 plus an hour work. And so the whole, the whole game of AI automation is, is that's exactly what we're trying to do. We're trying to free up that time from team members and founders so that they can focus on the highest leverage work in the business that helps them scale, delegate, automate, systemize with Systemology, and, and free up that time.

Yeah, we're on the same page. I think the main thing— I mean, we always talk about we systemize, we capture what's working, we make it repeatable so that it can then be transferred or delegated down, usually to either less skilled or lower cost labor, or where we are right now, which is robots, which then can do the execution. So then the business owner and key people in leadership team and really the whole organization thinks, how can they work on the highest value tasks? How can they problem solve at that top level and do things that only they can do? I mean, the aim of the game is really to let the robots do everything that they can, leaving you to do only the pieces that are truly human.

Yeah, exactly. And it's 'Cause a lot of people get this mistake and they think like, oh, it's about replacing people or it's about replacing XYZ, but it's really just a leverage game. And we've kind of, we've been doing it for hundreds of years. It's all degrees of abstraction. I like to think of it as, you know, even through farming age where we brought in tractors, we've got degrees of abstraction so that we're not having to do as much of the low leverage boring stuff we don't want to do. We focus up on higher leverage things all the way through to, you know, now the digital revolution we're doing, Automation was the original, the OG of this industry before AI became mainstream. And now we're, yeah, we're focused on digital automation by automating these business processes. And as we all work is so important because it's like taking these processes that people do and then actually just delegating it down to systems once it's been captured properly and the workflow is actually get documented correctly.

Yeah, perfect. Love it.

Love it, love it, love it. So I've put together a little slide here on the framework I like to call the dollar per hour ladder. So it's basically like, it's the same kind of principle, is just getting people to think of their time in terms of like, what are the specific tasks that they're doing right now that can be actually quantified into the value that they provide to the business? And this is typically how we we figure out what exactly is it that a business should automate. So I kind of put a bit of a preface before this, before we move into like the use cases and how that would be beneficial to the businesses because then they kind of have a pre-framing in like, oh, okay, so if I start to have a think about what are these, what are these tasks that I'm doing right now as a founder? Is it like, am I doing, I'm spending most of my week on like $5 an hour work or $20 an hour work? Versus like strategy, closing deals, and things that like produce a lot more high leverage to the business.

Yeah, one thing that we are working on right now, which I mean AI has been great for, um, is building out dashboards, which previously probably was $5 an hour work of a team member cutting and pasting and putting spreadsheets in. Like anything that's just moving things around And that is quite often really prime for AI to step in. And it was frustrating for me to get the dashboard just right and get it updated and make sure that it always delivered. Whereas once it's automated, it just runs like clockwork and gives me that extra level of visibility into the business. I feel like that's been a big win. And I know some of the use cases that we're going to talk about is in that middle $50 an hour bracket with scheduling and quoting, which oftentimes thinking about how does the business make money and then trying to systemize all the tasks around that, that loosen up bottlenecks, that make things run more freely, uh, everything from handling that lead, getting some sort of quote, selling them, onboarding. Like, that, that's right in the sweet spot of critical client flow.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and kind of leading even into that and adding on to that is like, um, digging into the real world scenarios of what exactly is the current process look like. And, um, like you're saying, what actually, what actually is the highest leverage levers in the business that produces the highest amount for the business and What we typically find, I mean, with a lot of trade businesses is like one of our clients, he was, he's on site consistently. He's trying to bring himself off the tools by applying these methodologies as well, by documenting process and then applying systems and automation to that and AI so that he can free up that time. But before he'd be on site, he's getting 70 calls a day of being on site and he's missing half of them. And usually he'll, because he's on site, he's on the tools, he's literally on roofs, this particular one. And he's like, oh look, I can't really get back to it until like the afternoon. And there might be 10 separate calls in there from people who have called them up from say a Google search because they've been listed on there with great ratings, but they've missed it because they didn't have anything in place to actually handle it for them. So stuff like that where they're on site and their phone's ringing, they're like under a sink, you know, they're in an awkward spot and they can't get the phone out and they're like, ah, so you know, fun stuff like that. Or, you know, another example here of quotes that go out. Like in the era that we're in now, people require more touchpoints than ever in terms of trust. Obviously it's contingent on the type of business that someone might have, but particularly in trades as well. Oftentimes what we've found is people, they'll send out a quote, but then no one follows up for a week. And so the customer's already called a couple of other people and because there was no follow-up in place or they've just slipped their mind, which can happen because they're busy and they're doing things, and they don't get followed up and so they lose the job. So having something like a follow-up system in place where it just— every single quote that goes out has a systematic process of follow-up, just checks in with people and says, hey, what are your thoughts around this? Is just instrumental. It's like an automatic process that helps them increase the close rate without having to do really any additional work. So it all happens on their behalf. And then Yeah, another kind of— I'll briefly touch these ones. It's like the new subcontractors, like so many of trade businesses who are bringing on subcontractors and they need to do insurances and paperwork and, you know, inductions and safety checks and all these different things. And they end up doing, you know, full day of admin just to try and bring someone on board because it's— there's no structured processes in place for it. And by virtue of that, you can't really put in any automation or AI into it because it's not structured yet. And then obviously end of day, adding an extra 20+ hours a week. We've actually, that's probably really conservative, I have to say. One of our clients, he was spending about 50 hours a week on reporting. This was part of his particular work was doing Make Safe jobs. So he goes out to weather damage and at the end he would have to do reports and usually his contractors would also have to do reports as well. But the challenge being, because there was no systemology frameworks in place of capturing the, the flow and then going through and actually having AI to be able to handle that, um, or even team, he's spending 50+ hours a week on, on this admin. So it's a, it's a bit of a stitch-up. He's doing more than a full-time job worth of work every single week.

What's pretty scary is a lot of the cost here that business owners don't even realize they have. Like, it's invisible to them. They're just doing the work and they don't realize the cost of not getting back to that lead. That lead has just called 3 other plumbers and they're looking to get back to the first person who gets back to them because they think, ah, well, they're the most trustworthy and someone I can work with. And by you not doing that, you might have spent $100 to get your phone to ring on running an AdWords ad, and now you've just lost that and you're just flushing cash down the toilet. And each one of those, there is that situation where you don't realize how much it's actually costing you by not having a process and letting these things slip through the cracks.

Yeah, yeah. 100%. And that's what we find, like, both, both of our work, that's why it intertwines so well, is because when you start to actually audit where your time's going, where your processes are at, what's slipping through the cracks, what processes are not actually producing the highest amount, or actually even just identifying what am I doing throughout the week, what am I actually doing right now? I have no idea. A lot of businesses don't do that. And by actually being reflective on that and figuring out where your time is going and also the team as well, then that's where you actually start to get the leverage back because you can start to document, you start to create proper processes around things, and then you bring in the technology to amplify that. So I wanted to just briefly touch on this one because we're at a very, very— I feel like we're at a very interesting point in history right now with things like ChatGPT, kicking off a couple of years ago, that was kind of the, I think, an entry point into where we're at now with things. We've gone from automation, which has been around for a long time, but most people, when they, when I've said to them the word automation, they think of an assembly line, like a conveyor belt with something happening versus what it really is, is the actual process of automating business processes in any form. Could also be robots as well. But we're moving from that. It's been around for decades into now things like since ChatGPT has been released, we're looking at implementing AI into workflows. So this would, this would be a perfect example for something like quoting. So for people who are doing quoting, they usually will have some form of variation in what they need in terms of the output. Because someone would inquire with them and say, hey, we need this job done, what would you charge for something like this? And so that's where they'd need a bit of intelligence, which is where things like ChatGPT implement that into automation. And now we get AI automation, which is just fancy, fancy for machine learning. And then now stage 3 is like AI agents where you've got things like, have you heard of OpenCore, Dave? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Cloud Code, OpenClaw, all these different AI agentic technologies. I mean, we've been implementing this into businesses for years, but just as more like slivers of specific workflows, which kind of fits exactly in to handle process. And now with OpenClaw, Cloud Code, all these things going mainstream, we've hit an inflection point of adoption around AI, and people are starting to wake up to how much this is going to absolutely impact their businesses.

Yeah, so we are right at the start here. Definitely open claw, got everybody to sit up and go, oh, this thing can think and act and do things on its own. And I think it was just the awakening, whether or not people use that tool or not, but it's just pretty much what's possible. I mean, we had the same thing happen when ChatGPT came out. That was when everybody was like, oh wow, AI is really a thing that can actually do something for me. And this was like the next awakening moment to go, oh, and this can be automated and I can have different processes run on their own cadence and do work in the background and then report back to me like a team member would to say that they've done the work or they had some challenges and they need some help. Like it's, yeah, pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, absolutely. It's always enlightening for me. Like it's refreshing every time I talk to a business and they're either very, very new to automation, they haven't had much exposure to AI or automation, any of this world, and then their whole business is manual. And then you actually, they say, oh, you know, we've got everything documented, but we just don't have any systems to handle this stuff. So when they come to us or just start to dive into this world and you show them what's actually even possible with this, their mind just explodes with like, oh, there's so much opportunity. An example of, of just, just last week we, we finished off automating a process for a business and they're a perfect example of, of using like Systemology type of frameworks and then implementing automation thereafter. And we basically took the process of their Google Ads, they do Google Ads for businesses and taking what they do, doing generating reports from how, from structured reports from how they want their Google Ads to be done for clients. And then that generates for the person who's handling the ads. And then it literally generates action points for them to approve. They just select what they wanted to have happen. So it might say, you know, adjust the keywords in this, go and add the negative keyword here, disable this bidding, adjust this. They just select from almost like a punch card menu in Slack, and then they approve it and it goes and does the work on their business. And ever since we've implemented that, it's, it's saved them pretty much a whole salary of a person, but it's also the impact that's having on the business now. And they're like, what else can we automate? I need more of this. And they get it now. They're like addicted to like, where can I, where can I optimize more? But yes, we always have to come back to, no, gotta, you gotta make sure everything is properly documented first before you implement more systems.

Our gold standard that we always refer to is a lady down here in Melbourne called Shannon Schmidt, and she runs an accounting firm, and she's been a System Hub and Systemology client for 8 years. As soon as the AI revolution hit— we're going back a little over 12 months ago now— she saw the opportunity, has absolutely crushed it. Um, the first task she did, one of them was she used to log into, or have— she's got a team of about 20 accountants, and she had some backend offshore stuff happening, but they log into the ATO portal for every client every week to get every news update. They'd squirt it into a spreadsheet, they'd review it, they'd send it off to the client. Took them about 1,000 hours over the course of a year to do. They ended up applying some automation and AI and basically took it from 1,000 hours down to less than 10 hours. And it's just a human in the loop. It jumps in, um, the robot pulls everything out, squirts it into the spreadsheet, drafts it up, the human in the loop reviews it right before they have to hit send to make sure it all looks great. And she's now done this in hundreds of tasks through the organization. That was one. So you can imagine the— just the multiplying effect. And, and you're right, that the clients of ours that are absolutely crushing it are the ones that are very clear on their process, and then they work with an AI automation specialist, or they built up the capability internally, and all they're asking is, how do we do this process that we already have documented, how do we do it faster, cheaper, and better with AI? Um, so there is a huge rush right now we see in the systems world for businesses that are waking up to it, that are like, oh wow, we have to get our process captured 'cause that's kind of like step one.

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, even at, to that point as well is, is there's less room for error with a lot of AI systems because they just, like you said, they, they do it better. And once you've got the process super clear, that's the power point is when they've actually got that there, it's just so much more reliable to have a process the system handles it, and then the humans just focus on overseeing, having the, the nuanced depth that only humans can really have. I mean, at the moment, who knows where it's going to go. Maybe, maybe they get to a point where AI is way better than us at nuance as well. But at this current point in time, um, it's, it's, it's the, the side of things that humans are really good at, is overviewing, making sure nuance is there. And I find also probably the bigger thing too is around like especially when it comes to nuance of communication with AI. Humans are very good at like, all right, injecting a little bit more emotional intelligence into the systems as well. And then obviously parts that are just repeatable automation side, that's like cool, system handles and we just oversee. But yeah, like it's the degrees of leverage that you can get as a business by implementing this type of thing with the systems-first approach is just immeasurable for most of them. So I mean, it is measurable, but it's also immeasurable in terms of some of the bandwidth people get back. So yeah, I mean, I won't touch on this one here because it's kind of, I guess we were kind of going over that, but like differences between people who rush into AI, the biggest thing to avoid, I think, for all of your community is, and they'd be doing this obviously by being in your community anyway, but is around not rushing into AI with no documented processes. Because they typically will just scale mess. That's the biggest thing we've seen. And the common pitfalls is they'll try and automate before they've documented, they try to automate before they've actually gotten clear on what all the processes are. And so as a result, they're trying to, they have to backfix everything because it's just not clear in the first place. And so I'm always like, no, don't do that. Go and figure out what your process is and then you start to implement it. And that's where you get this massive inflection point of leverage. Yeah. So yeah, let's dive into the 3 use cases. I guess what I was thinking of doing with this particular one is just giving people an idea. And that was that kind of pre-framing in the very beginning around like what is, what do people value their hourly rate as? And then kind of leading into some of these, like these are some of the simplest systems to implement into a business. I've got some more slides and then we can go into a bit more depth of what this looks like for a business. And how they might look at implementing something like this. But kind of just briefly, like, we've seen even with purely just this stuff, and to be— this is even conservative, but like up to a full-time job for a lot of businesses depending on their size in time saved purely just from implementing some of these simple systems.

Oh, hey, I know you're tuned in right now, so I'll keep this super quick, but you like awesome YouTube videos, don't you? Well, there's not really that many YouTube channels that create great content about how to systemize your small business. So I want to make sure that you catch every video that I publish. So if you haven't already, firstly, give this video the thumbs up and then go ahead and subscribe to my channel. You can even hit the bell notification to make sure that you're the first to know when I publish publish anything. So go ahead, do it right now. I'll wait a sec and then I'll transfer you back to the video. Yeah, it's not only just the time, like going back to what we mentioned earlier, something like the AI voice agent handling those incoming inquiries, not only does it free up the time, but it makes all of those leads that you're getting infinitely more valuable where you were leaking that out of the business. Like, people want— it's that speed of reply, especially in sales. We know the point at which someone outreaches, every minute that passes beyond that initial outreach, that lead starts to decay. So we need to make sure— there you go, you've got it right there on the first slide.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you said, it's like 78% of customers buy from the first responder. So speed is key, and oftentimes these days people are— it's even more important now, I would say, as well, because everyone is also accustomed to doing a bit more research before they go and just call someone. And so if they've researched your business, there's probably a good chance that they're, they're researching it and they've gotten and looked at, say, the Google reviews, or they looked at your website and done a little bit of that, gathered some information up front. If that information is available. And so when it's there, they're much more ready to buy if they're more primed to actually do it because they've done the research versus prior, you know, there wouldn't be as much of that information. And so they have to call first to get the information and then go beyond. But oftentimes now it's like it's more of just a confirmation of like, okay, cool, yeah, sweet, let's get it booked in. And so any businesses that are not actually doing that, I had a perfect example of another guy. He does floor renovations. So he does the, I forgot the name of the material, but like the kind of glassy type of epoxy. Yeah, epoxy. Yeah, he does like epoxy and he'd be driving, he's driving all over Southeast Queensland trying to go to different sites and he's not able to take calls or he's taking it during a lunch break and he's, you know, trying to call people back who are calling in the morning and, you know, just not being able to take it until the very end of the day and then still having to do his admin work at the end with invoicing and scheduling. And, you know, by implementing something like this, it's like it's just taking all the calls. It's getting rid of also tire kickers as well. That's one of the big things, just being able to properly pre-qualify people so that you're not having to focus on like every single person who might not be ready to buy yet. There might be some people who are just inquiring to get information around like, what does this potentially look like to do this for my XYZ, um, solve this problem, and that they can't do it unless they've got speed of reply, um, or they've got the capacity to do it.

And now the quality of these voice agents, like, if you've had the experience of a well set up one, they're at a point now where they're actually really great to use. I was just over, uh, in the States just last week, um, for a speaking engagement, and I was in Florida and had some time there, and I thought, oh, I want to go, um, on one of these jet boat rides. And I called up, went through to the AI, it asked me, oh yeah, what are you looking at doing? When do you want to do it? Here's a couple of times available. Great, I can book you in now. Now that was kind of such a great experience for me. Like, I— that's probably one of the first times I've had a voice agent where I didn't touch the human at all It went all the way through to booking, and then I got to go on the experience without having that. Now, different businesses are going to require different things, like trades-based businesses, maybe there's some more triage. You need to understand the project, you have to go out and maybe quote for it and that sort of thing. But all of the pre-qualification, having an inbound call, a voice agent trained on your knowledge that then can answer some basic questions, if it's the right fit, then books in a proper call on your calendar, all happens seamlessly without you. Like, the user then as well, like, they feel like, oh, I've taken that first step, I'm booked in on the calendar, that action's happening now, versus I've left you a voicemail message and I've left 4 other people a voicemail message, now I got to play a waiting game. Like, it's such a different experience.

It is, yeah, it is. And actually, funnily enough, one of the most, one of the most common use cases for AI voice agents is acting like a smart voicemail system. So having it re— say, for example, like if there's a business who they oftentimes a lot of tradies will use their own number that they've got as the business number and they use it for all sorts of things. So you kind of can connect these AI agents as a redirect from their whatever numbers the, the the actual trades are using, and then it redirects to the agents afterwards, or you could have it redirect straight away to these agents to help pick it up, say, during business hours. And that's where you can have the natural conversation with it. And oftentimes, as you said, depending on the business, they might have doing some prequalification, seeing if they can get them booked in, or just taking a bit of a summary of the call and then getting the call back. But something that maybe requires a bit more personal touch. And, and the beauty of these technologies now, you can build this logic into the actual systems themselves to be able to say, hey, if this person looks like, you know, based on XYZ criteria, they're actually ready to get booked in for this thing. You can build that into it and it can go and actually do that for you versus like, oh, this person maybe needs a little bit more, a little bit more care for this, or they might need a bit more of a personalized touch, then it can gather the information and then redirect to a summary for the person to call back later. But they're still not missing any calls because they're still— every single person, you could have 5 people calling in at once. The system can still handle it because it handles all these in parallel versus, you know, hiring a team of receptionists to try and handle 5 calls at once. It's like there's only so much capacity that people could have. So yeah, and probably Another important thing around that is just a lot of people in this era are starting to become more comfortable with using that, and some people actually even prefer it more because they can gather information on the business first and information about something without necessarily talking to someone straight away. And then once they feel more comfortable, then they might want to do that later, or they might, like you said, they might go straight through from start to finish completely without anyone in the middle.

Yeah, and the good thing is now there are off-the-shelf solutions, like if you want to be a bit of a do-it-yourself, where things like Bland, where you can get a phone number, connect up your knowledge bank, and let it know the arc of what you want it to do. And you can listen to some of the recordings and learn and adjust it and get closer and closer. Or again, you work with someone like Zach and then they help to implement it. What do you see from a technology point of view with this one? Like, how do you like seeing this implemented?

The most common use cases in terms of— you mean like use case-wise?

More so like, what tools are you using at the moment? Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So really good ones. I've popped a couple down the bottom of the slide there too, just for visuals as well. But VAPI is a really good one. Bland AI is a really good one as well. Atlas is another quite good one too. And actually one that's coming up a lot is GoHighLevel. It's just like CRM. A lot of people are familiar with that one these days. I use GoHighLevel personally as well. I've got the agency there for it, but like it's a really good one for that too. And then with a lot of these tools, if they're external to a CRM platform, you can use something like N8N or an AI agent to connect them together. Some of the platforms also just have them directly built in and you can build the inbound call, the outbound call, and the agent into one spot, which is just, yeah, super helpful. So in terms of tooling at the moment, some of the most common ones we do is VAPI, GoHighLevel, Atlas, and Blend is, we haven't used as much of that, but we've heard good things.

Yeah, cool. What, tell us about this next use case.

Quoting, quoting and follow-up automation. So this is a just, this is such a no-brainer for like every, every trade business in terms of what they do. It's just like such an easy, simple way to close more deals on, on autopilot without having to touch pretty much anything. So a system like this, as we, you know, chat about before, a lot of people require a few more touch points these days than they have before. Obviously, that's depending on what the business is and what they do and their sales cycle. But typically, the more touch points you can have with a prospect, the better it'll be in terms of close rate. And so, but a lot of people, they just don't follow up with them. So having a process in place or a system in place that can, every time a quote goes out, you've got a use case that could look like this. So this is what it might look like in a business. So you've got a quote that gets sent out, that's logged in a CRM, and then automatically that starts essentially a timer. And say on day 1, 24 hours later, you might have a check-in with that, with that lead, say, hey, sent through the quote, let me know if you've got any questions. Then day 3, you've got another check-in there, which might be just a, you're not even trying to follow up on something, you just got a value add there to provide some value to that person. And then a lot of, a lot of trade businesses will have an expiry on their quotes as well. And so they'll say, look, this is valid for XYZ days. And so maybe they set up the automated quote follow-up to end at the final day of their quotes. And so they might have a 7-day urgency one. I mean, you can probably check the copy there. I probably changed this. That was me, but just an example of one. But like it might be like, hey, you know, 7 days left of this until the quote might expire. Let us know if you're looking to move forward and then maybe a final nudge on the day of expiry of the quote. And so this would occur every single time any quote goes out and it's just like they don't even have to think about it. And then even, you know, looking at this on another level could be you've got something that AI, where AI could personalize the actual outreach message to that person. So you could use automate automation as a, as a standardized template for this. And you could have AI as the next step where this could actually automate the personalization of messages that goes out to these people based on the check-in. So there's a lot of ways you could do it. But as a simple process, this is such a high leverage move for every, every trade business.

I think starting with something like this at a base level and then like all of these things, you start here and then you improve and learn and you tweak and you add this bit in it. And once you've been doing it for a little while, something that, um, we're doing with some of our clients using Cowork, uh, is where, as in Claude Cowork, we're connecting up, um, Fathom, which, uh, takes the call recordings and squirts it into like a repository and organizes and sorts by client, and then we've connected up, um, our style guide and the way that the quotes look, uh, and then we're able to, like, for the generation of quotes and, and pitch decks, like, we've plugged in a PowerPoint skill set so that way it can bring in everything that it learns about those calls. We've hooked up HubSpot as well, so it's got full visibility into the message threads. It can combine it all together and then generate out the pitch deck slash quote. That's the way that we do it, uh, and then it's hyper-tailored to them. Like, there's these little tweaks, like how far do you actually take this, depending on sort of where your technical skill is. But I think just getting the basic thing installed first and having something like what you've shown here will be a game changer for many trades-based businesses, for sure.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And like you were saying, it's, it's, we would always typically say to businesses, you're better off starting with the simple, start with simple first and then you can always add things later. It's very, very easy when you go down this path to start over-engineering things. It's like in the beginning, nice and simple. That's the best way to go. That'll give you your 80%.

That'll give you the most, most leverage, which is like a very core principle of Systemology, which is capture what you're currently doing, not what you would like to be doing, and just make that repeatable. Just that on its own can deliver exceptional outcomes for most businesses.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, um, because the reality is everyone's got typically a process behind what they're doing, and if they just get that visibility and then apply some systems to a captured system then like the leverage, the leverage is just automatic for that because you can implement the automation into it and then you can look at, all right, how do we improve things once you get the time back?

Yeah, love it. Let's take a look at the last use case you've got here.

Perfect. Yeah, so subcontractor and client onboarding. So typically what we've found with a lot of trade businesses is they'll say they've got a subcontractor starting on Monday and they need insurance certificates, they need ABNs, they need their white cards, they need inductions and safety gear, XYZ, and they might need other paperwork to get access to something, obviously depending on the business. And what ends up happening is they spend half a day chasing documents, sending out texts for documents and trying to get forms signed and everything done. And they end up wasting, you know, half a day or more on just purely document chasing and scrambling to get the information together. And then, you know, if they're— depending on the size of the business, if they're hiring a new subcontractor, you know, every month or so forth in the business, then it's just a full day gone because they haven't had that in place. And some businesses do even more than that depending on their on what their staff roster looks like. So, and the same thing also for client onboarding. If they're still chasing to get documents from people and sign contracts and XYZ, then it's the same thing on Repeat. And so a system like this in a business might look like what we call a one-click onboarding. So say a client or a subcontractor is added into the CRM, they get a welcome message sent with say, a welcome pack, and it's got forms in there, the documents they need to sign, and what to expect. Maybe it's got an onboarding video in there on what they need to be doing, or even just a document that they need to read and go through, sign and acknowledge. And then they've got a documents collected system that takes the information once they do that and then leads to the next step, and then doing a compliance check. And obviously there's different systems that can handle this, but it might look like even an AI just verifying the information that they've got is correct and then cross-searching to make sure that there's something in place. Even in terms of simple, a simplistic version of that might be just purely you run it through an AI that verifies some information on there. Does it all look correct? Is it structured correctly? Is this all the information that we need? Have they filled it out properly? And then once that's finished, it assigns it to say someone who who reviews the whole onboarding, have they done everything correctly, and then their induction is finished. Yeah, I love that.

And it's, it's a great combination of automation and AI. That's, I suppose, the takeaway here. I think for all of these, it's about having clarity around, well, what's being done. Then there'll be elements that can be automated, and then using the AI as the glue to stitch things together, because oftentimes AI, you'll do a little bit and then it'll get stuck or it'll come to the end of its thing and then it's like the handoff or the handover to the next part of the process. And AI is great at being that glue because it's an intelligence layer that can figure things out and go, oh, it broke here. But based on all of that information, I know what you wanted to do and now I'm going to take that step. So I feel like, and I could see how something like this in particular, you mentioned GoHighLevel, which is a great solution for a lot of trades-based business owners, I think, would handle this like an absolute champ.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, like in terms of tooling, you could use, like you said, GHL. You could use even N8N is a really good one for something like that. Could even use Make.com or even just Zapier. Zapier can sometimes handle stuff like this depending on the business, and they might have something like DocuSign or Anderdoc to help with the, you know, the different signage or other contracts they might need to to fill out. So those are some of the ones that we use with businesses. We typically will try and always say to, in the aim of simplicity, to focus on, if a system can handle as many things of the process as possible, then opt for that. So an example of that might be like, if you go HighLevel, I know they've got documents and agreements and different things in there and forms that you can fill out and you can plug all those together. Inside the same system, fantastic. And if not, then there's obviously different tools like N8N where you can plug and stitch different tools together to get the job done. But at the end of the day, as long as they've got the process captured of what they currently do and then they apply this to it, you can use any sorts of different tools to do that.

Yeah.

So yeah, this is a really, really powerful one for, for a lot of businesses to, to implement.

Seeing all this come together, like, I— the perfect stack that I see for this with— again, I just like to look at my best clients and then go, which ones are crushing it? And then I try and go, what is it that they're doing? And the elements and the pieces are firstly process first, getting very clear on what they're doing. An accelerator on that is getting a systems champion, so someone in the organization who has visibility, who's tasked with this job to capture best practice and help to champion and build up the culture around, you know, process and AI approaches. Having that in place, then working with a provider, some sort of, you know, team like Zach's where they can then accelerate the implementation, and then you have your systems and AI champion off the back end of that, learn, oh, this is what they've done. Oh, they've put this in place. And then they oftentimes step in to handle the maintenance and the tweaking. And how do we make sure that the team's using this and accelerating adoption? Because that's oftentimes where a lot of this stuff falls flat is if you work with— we all know what it's like. You work with a consultant, the consultant comes in and does all this great work, and then the consultant goes and it sits in a folder or it sits on someone's desktop and then it's forgotten about. Where the rubber hits the road is making sure that this is used. And that's why I love AI as a catalyst for this because it's immediately obvious to everybody the ROI that it delivers. And then people get excited by it because they're like, oh, I didn't like doing this little admin task. Now I can, automate it or get AI to do it. So I think it's this unique situation of all of these things lining up now that creates a tremendous opportunity for those fast movers. So I know you're big on action items. So how do we take some things that we've learned today and start to think about getting it into place?

Absolutely. So in the aim of simplicity to start, because a lot of people, they'll probably look at some of the systems and be like, oh, what do I do with an AI AI voice agent or whatever these things. First thing, I mean, most people are doing this hopefully, but if they're not, start using AI, start talking to it, learn to chat with AI like Claude, ChatGPT, some good free options to start doing something like that. Doing like things like meeting recording, you mentioned around like using Fathom, using some of those other meeting recordings for that too. Another good one I've started using recently, which would be good for trade businesses, is Granola. It's like the, spelled like the, the cereal. And that's really good for like in-person meetings. So if they're taking notes, they're meeting up with prospects on site, being able to take notes physically is really, really cool. And then another one would be, so leading on from that, they wanted to start connecting, say they've got inquiries coming through, how they could start to look at what this process looks like in terms of automation. This month you could look at signing up to the free tier of say Zapier. Or if there's another provider you're already with, if someone inquires on your website, being able to look up the tool for something like that so you can go and see how that connects to, say, your CRM, and then just starting to bring those leads straight through to your CRM. And that'd be quite literally a 2-step process and not super hard to do. You could look up things like YouTube for how to connect a site form to a CRM to start capturing leads better. Versus it going into the nether. And then when it comes through, you remember to do it later. Maybe you've got one more step in there that just alerts you and says, hey, you've got an inquiry on your website. And so even if you're not fully moving fully into, say, an AI agent build right now, although I definitely recommend taking a look at it if you can, would be, yeah, seeing if you can get an alert for that so you can reach out to those people. So there's a couple of pretty simple ones, and just those alone will give you 15+ hours back. Yeah, love it.

I know we've covered some, um, yeah, really key insights from building the case, which I think all of us agree now that this is a tremendous opportunity and what the impact can be both in time and money. And then we had a look at taking that down to real-world examples and said, well, here are 3 use cases, and then finishing up with some, some action items. So just in the tail end, is there any sort of, yeah, final things you want to kind of wrap up for us?

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess in terms of, you know, if you wanted to even look into some of the specific use cases that we were looking at, I'd encourage people to look at, you know, the tools that they maybe currently use. There's a lot of people who don't fully utilize the current capabilities of the actual technology. And, you know, for example, if there's some trade businesses in your community who are already using some of these tools like GoHighLevel, GoHighLevel actually has some pretty cool options in there. Just for example's sake around voice AI agents, they're not super difficult to configure. I mean, depending on your tech savviness, of course, but looking into something like that and connecting in a number to that so that you can, you know, go and actually have some of the inbound calls coming into your business being handled with AI. So definitely have a look at some of, some of those ones and also things like VAPI as well. Doing a bit of research into that. There's, I can, if you want, I could send through a few resources on that too. But there's, you know, a lot of those, they're starting to get a little more complex, but you can keep them simple. You can keep them very simple, setting up like a simple automation with Zapier to handle, you know, your quote sendouts. If, you know, say there's a business that might be using Xero to do their invoices and their quoting, then you could set up a simple automation that as soon as a quote gets sent out, you put an email that goes out after, you know, that cadence that we talked about that has a simple automation cadence in there with a few steps, purely just an email to check in on them, say, hey, how are you doing? Any questions about the quote? And that'd be a simple way you could start to do that. And there's a lot of really good resources on like Zapier. I believe it's either zapier.ai or zapier.com. I'd have to check the URL for that one. But around how they can do that. And then obviously, you know, some of those free tools we talked about, that's really, really good ways to just get started in the space and start to just work with AI, understand a little bit more how it works, start implementing these free tools that are there, and then trying to even dig into some of those use cases as well. And just try and keep it as simple as you possibly can in the beginning, as long as you followed the Systemology framework and captured how everything's working right now. And then of course, you know, if they want things where things that are more complex, they can look at us as well if they want to do that. Been trying to do as much of the simple things as they can.

Yeah, I think sometimes the one I mentioned for trades-based businesses is, um, oftentimes it's just jumping into Google as well and using Gemini. Like, a lot of them are already paying for that tool and it's heavily integrated, and there's— you're probably not using it even to a fraction of its full potential. Like, um, it does some great things. You know, there's, there's Google Gems, which are, um, you can custom code, uh, and that sounds a little bit scary, but it's, it's, um, it's quite, uh, easy to do and, and to get it to create workflows for you if you want to go that step further. And you can use some of the tools to code up little apps or, and if it's not you, like find your systems and an AI champion in the team just to start nibbling away. Because once they start nibbling, then you'll see the opportunity. And when they get stuck, that's when they reach out to someone like Zach and his team and they can say, hey, I want to do this thing. I've got this process in place. This is how far I've taken it. I've set up a Google Jamf, but I want to make this automated. How can you help?

Help.

Like, that's, that's really when you want to sort of start to tap in. I'll make sure— and I can see, um, on the screen here at the moment, for those that are listening, it's elitesystems.ai. I'll pop a link through so you can find out more about Zach and follow along with his work. Um, where's the best place for people to go though if they do want to keep an eye on what you're up to?

Um, I'm quite active on Instagram, so my My handle is @itszachneilson, one word. So it's a good place to find me. I post a lot of AI content there and helpful tips for people to understand the whole space and break it down for business owners. Yeah, rock and roll.

Well, I appreciate you spending some time today. I love the alignment with your process-first approach. That's one of the reasons why I thought, yep, we need to have a little bit of a chat and just looking forward to seeing where this continues to go. So thanks again, Zach.

Absolutely. Thanks for your time, man. Appreciate it. Thanks, Daniel.