Lunch & Learn - Session 26

Well, hello there. It is Wednesday, Lunch and Learn, and we are excited to be here today. We do have a wonderful guest with us, not that all of our other guests aren't wonderful too, because of course they are, uh, but it's going to be some fun conversations. And as usual, he's a little bit tardy, so it tells you that AI doesn't always help you to to be on time. Typical founder for us. I'm Tom Powell, and joining me today, we've got Jackie Kuiper, our general counsel and one of our co-founders, and Candice Powell, one of our main leads and obviously someone very close and dear to my heart. And so excited to have you guys here, both of you guys. And we are going to be talking about AI. Now, you're both too young. Remember the TV show originally, Star Trek? But you guys hear me talk about Captain Kirk.

I'm pretty sure you and I have a picture as Trekkies somewhere. You and I are in the Trekkie outfit.

I know, I know. I did raise you to be a nerd.

Raised me, right.

Which is awesome. So, you know, as we've been going through these processes, my kids used to laugh that when I saw the first Iron Man, I'm like, ooh, I want that. Of Jarvis, right? Which was about the ability to be able to communicate. And it really, I come to find out that being a kid of the '60s and '70s, that that came out of the Star Trek original thing where I'm like, ooh, it'd be so cool. As a little kid, I'm sitting there going like, I could just ask the computer, hey computer, do this, hey computer, do this. So as we've been involved with technology from Silicon Valley early, and you know, as I said, the first computer that I really tore apart was a 512K. Computer, an Amstrad. Didn't even have a— it had a green screen, uh, and that was the first one that I tore apart. And then an Apple Lisa. We're now to the point that we're having, uh, scary stuff going on with AI, but also really cool stuff going on with AI. So, uh, let's jump and just kind of start right there until Joe joins us. Um, gonna put it on the spot. What has been the best part of AI at this point for you guys? Either one of you.

I think I've had, it's gone in flux, but I've had moments where I feel like, oh, I'm getting this, I'm using it. It just added like a measurable benefit to my life, whether it saved me time with something or gave me a head start on something. And so those little like dopamine hits where I feel like I'm getting it, those, that's been big wins for me.

I, I think, and I, I think this will relate with a lot of founders on here. I've had, I've, I've had bought and sold, started up multiple businesses, and there's a few businesses that like, as I'm into the AI and, and incorporating it into how I just function now, I'm thinking, Oh my God, if I had had this tool for this specific business when I owned this, or right before I sold this, um, there were businesses that, I mean, they ran me ragged, that I just, I was, I mean, the like epitome of founder's isolation paradox, but I was also physically having to be many, many roles. Um, I'm like, man, that would have been so great to have this tool then. Um, Even just the other day, I mean, and it took a while of back and forth, but I built, and I know, Dad, you've had this experience too. I built a really cool website, like, template for what I was trying to put together. And it was just, like, incredible to do that with AI, right?

Oh, it's unbelievable. I used to have the marketing people. So, the web designer sat close to my office because I was always so involved in that. And our first website cost us well over $100,000 and didn't nothing. It was like a stagnant landing page. And now I go in and I build something and I do a meta prompt that I've learned from our guest today of how to do that type of stuff, who I'm going to introduce here just quickly. And then all of a sudden it's like pow, and I can say, oh no, move that to the left, move that to the right. And all of a sudden, not the greatest use of my skills nor the best use of my time, but it's instantaneous almost gratification of being able to see something out there. So we are talking about AI, artificial intelligence, but more so really all the things that have to do with how do we make businesses more efficient. And here at the Founder's Office, I've got to start and introduce our guest today. Most founders don't have an information problem right now. They have a signal problem. There's more data, more tools, more AI, more noise than ever before. And yet the real question hasn't changed. What actually matters and what do I do with it? That's the question. That's why I'm looking forward to this conversation with Joe Stolte. He's not someone that showed up when AI got popular. He's a builder. Multiple companies, multiple exits, real outcomes. But what makes Joe different is how he thinks. It's also how he breakdances, but we'll have to have that as part of our conversation. Joe has the ability to take massive complexity and reduce it down to something you can actually use. He does this with me often, by the way. He sees patterns most people miss. He reverse engineers what works, and then he simplifies it. So it's not just theory, it's executable. And that's the piece I respect because a lot of people can explain AI. Very few can translate it into leverage for a founder who is actually in the arena. Joe does that. Joe Stolti, my friend, tell me how you're doing today and where are you? You actually be in your office, so you are in Austin today, I think.

Yep, I'm doing good and I am home for once.

For once. You're usually like on beaches or down in New Zealand or Australia or something. Along that line?

Yeah, we just got back from a month in New Zealand and a bit of time in LA in that month. And yeah, we got to go to 4 different cities. I was on 7 or 8 different podcasts, spoke at a couple events. It was really fun to be out there, just watch kind of how businesses in Australia are thinking about AI and their future.

Oh, we love that. Well, so first of all, Joe and I met because of another friend of ours, Gary Sanchez. And Gary Sanchez said, hey, I just met this guy. I just I spent a day with him and he got me more clarity in my business in that one day than I've had in many of the other masterminds or other things that I've ever done. And by the way, he comes out of the private equity. He was, you know, he knows, comes in from the Pacific Northwest, has bought and sold a number of businesses, just had an exit. And you need to meet him. And that was the conversation I think you and I had about a 5-10 minute conversation. And I said, I'm coming down and I'm bringing Jackie. When do you have time? We're like, we're having a baby. Next week.

But come on over. But come on over.

But we might be interrupted, right? That's how we got to know each other, which is great. So, Joe, the purpose of this is we have founders that are looking at raising capital, growing their businesses, looking at exiting on that. And we really have transformed our company from a standpoint of we don't even talk to people if they don't have some AI implementation strategy. You're obviously the key place that we send people to make referrals over to what you're doing Prime and Prime Elite and, and all the various areas. Tell us what you're doing in AI and how'd you get started in that.

Yeah, I'll go in the reverse order. So the way I got started in this is I, I did a small stint in management consulting, and then I did a small stint at Microsoft where I was basically doing the same kind of work, somewhere at the intersection of growth and process engineering, at this intersection of like sales and marketing. And, um, left and just decided to be a startup guy. So I left Seattle, I moved to Venice Beach, California, and I was basically living between LA and San Francisco. I built and sold 6 companies, had 4 successful exits, and my last company was a company called Daily AI. And my business partner was a guy named Peter Diamandis, who founded A360 and Singularity University. He now runs the, the largest AI podcast on the planet. And, you know, we built, built, scaled, and sold that company in 3 years and change. And what happened is that company, we made a decision that we were going to be AI first in everything that we did, no matter what. And that was back when we were one of the first 1,000 API users on OpenAI's API, like before ChatGPT came out. So you got this really interesting like download, like what is working for real with AI and businesses because we AI-ified everything from engineering to sales, customer success, product management, the whole business effectively, strategy, decision-making, and got to watch how it just kept getting better. So we had a lot of friends both in Silicon Valley, friends that are in service-based businesses and other places saying, hey, How are you doing what you're doing? Like, we love your product, Daily AI, and we want to know what you're doing behind the curtain. You know, because we had basically, normally at the size of a company like that, we'd have, you know, between 80 and 100 employees. We had 17. And so everyone was very interested in how we were doing that. And I was like, cool, I'll show you. So I started doing workshops. Those workshops turned into a community. We now have 92 members. And so today I'm the founder of a company called Prime AI, and I hired a guy who's my business partner named Gus Van Dender to run the business. We, we help small businesses that are doing, you know, usually between $1 and $25 million. A small number of those are venture or private equity backed, and otherwise many of them are bootstrapped, growing to the point where they'll probably sell at some point in time. And we've really focused on helping you transform your organization to an AI-first organization. And as of now, like kind of the promise we're leading to the marketplace with is, hey, we're going to help you unlock your next million without increasing payroll. Um, that way we encompass all parts of the business, you know, growing your sales and revenue, but also helping you increase the capacity of your team so that you don't have to hire more people. You just can grow with the people you already have.

I love that. One of the things that I, I have found unique about Joe is he's— and, and Gus, but, and the team, the group in, in general. First of all, it's a great group, but the second really most important part for me is when Bill Gates wrote his book, I think it was called The Speed of Thought, a number of years ago, probably 15 years ago or longer. And he talked about that building a, or adding technology to a broken system only speeds up bad results. And so, where you really take that systematic thinking and you bring it back in, which even slows me down at times, which is fantastic because it's like, go back, talk about the constraint. What are you really trying to solve? Yes, Tom, you want to boil the ocean literally and figure out how to do all these different 52,000 things and have the capacity of team and other things to do it. But which one's really going to change? How did you come up with that? That's got to come back from your past.

Yeah. You know, I mean, well, there's two parts to it. The first part is I started my career and I became a Lean Six Sigma black belt, if you remember those back in the day. And, you know, we learned about the theory of constraints, we learned about process engineering, we learned about lean thinking, which is about removing waste and eliminating steps before you drive automation. And my expertise is really applying that in a service-based business setting, particularly at the intersection of sales, marketing, and operations. And so like I had that lived experience and that really just dissolved into my brain as like part of my operating system when I moved into the startup world because startups are very different from these large companies that I was working with and working in. And, um, you know, because I'm now 43, not 23, and I have 3 kids and I have deep reverence for my time— I like to think about investing my time like a time portfolio, maybe the way that like Munger and Buffett invested their money, meaning I look at a lot of opportunities but I try to only sink my teeth into a few— that requires me to say no to a lot of things. And when I looked out, you know, we've now installed AI in over 397 businesses as of yesterday. The number one challenge is focus, you know, and I like to think about your focus is directly related to your strategy and strategy. There's been a lot of like books and, you know, MBA and white tower, quite frankly, nonsense that's been written about that strategy for businesses that, that are, that are in the early stages is very simple. It's what are you doing and what are you not doing? And the quality of your strategy is directly proportionate to how good your not-to-do list is and your discipline to continue to say no to that. Like, if you have some great things on your not-to-do list and you're staying focused on the things that are what you're supposed to do right now, then you're in a good spot. Well, how do you pick what to do right now? Well, every business that didn't just get started yesterday has a constraint. It's like a kink in the hose, right? We've all had that experience where you're messing with the garden hose and it doesn't work, or the pressure isn't coming out. Well, in your garden hose, you wouldn't go make the end of your hose bigger because that's not the problem. You'd go back and find the kink and unkink it. But for some reason, in our businesses, we forget that. And so like, we don't— what we'll doing is, let's say we have a demand-side problem where we don't have enough leads and sales, we'll go add a supply-side solution to increase capacity for leads and sales that don't exist. That's the equivalent of making the hose bigger, or the inverse of that, right? And so, you know, after seeing this literally hundreds of times and just saying, hey, you, you should focus, and where you should focus on is, um, where the constraint in your business is, it just puts the horse blinders on to all the, the tools And the distortion and the nonsense that's going out in the marketplace. And it basically allows you a really simple way in a really simple manner to go, hey, here's where you get started and here's how you get started. Because those are the biggest questions that I get. It's like, hey man, how do I get started with this AI stuff and how do I actually make it work? And it's great. Well, before we go AI, we're going to look at your, your process and your systems and your business. And when your business is a system, where's the biggest constraint? Great. What's the root cause? Awesome. Let's find the right tool for the job because you wouldn't walk into a hardware store and just grab, you know, like a hacksaw when you, when you need a hammer, you grab the right tool for the job, right? And so this is kind of like what people do with their AI tools. They just sprinkle AI fairy dust on things and think it's going to solve all their problems. But if you don't start with at least a problem, preferably the most important problem in your business, which is the constraint, then everything else is just a waste of time in my opinion. And we don't have a lot of time because this stuff is going so fast.

What you just said, Joe, could be said like 3 times really slow. Like 3 times slow. It's so important that that lands for people. One of the things I'll say about you is it's almost like you want your clients' success sometimes, like it feels like almost more than they want it for themselves, which is really beautiful. And I think it can be overwhelming because No one wants— like, it's FOMO, right? No one wants to miss out. We know how important AI is, but it can be so daunting. Like, where do you start? Like, oh, I'm gonna— I'm gonna— I've heard of 8 different tools. I'm gonna log in, I'm gonna get an account, and then I'm gonna go stare at it and feel overwhelmed and, and maybe try ChatGPT and ask it a question like I'm Googling something. If we— going back to just like slowing it down and saying it 3 times slow, I hear you giving the advice of like look at your business first. Where are your constraints? What's your main one? And then let's add AI to the equation. Can you like guide some of our audience if they're in that boat, like just overwhelmed? How do they slow down and, and take this approach with AI?

Yeah, first of all, you know what's nice about AI is I can tell you what to do. I could just do it for you or with you. So like if you said, if you go to dmjoe.com, as in direct message, dmjoe.com, send me the word constraint test, I will send you a bot that will ask you questions like a friend, help you find your biggest constraint, and then tell you which AI tools it thinks you should use. So, but, but to slow the process down, okay, we could, we could put AI anywhere. You know, there's, we, after doing almost 400 automation installations, we found that there's 5 stages of any business, that 5 stages of maturity that businesses go through. And so what happens is we first get started and we just grab tools. Because they're cool and everyone's talking about them and ChatGPT this and Claude that and Claude Code and oh, look at this picture thing I did. And you know, you just start collecting tools and then what you don't do is you don't point those tools at a problem in your business. So they don't really save you time and they don't make you money, right? Then eventually you'll go, oh my God, I gotta figure out this prompting stuff. And you go start copy pasting other people's prompts, right? And you're like, okay, I've graduated from treating ChatGPT like Google and I'm in the game. And then you start to save a little tiny bit of time. Maybe you make a little tiny bit of money, but copy pasting is a bit like wearing somebody else's shoes. Like it just, like it'll get you around, but it doesn't really scale and it's kind of gross. So what I mean by that in your business is like the minute the context changes in your business for your market and your process and your customers, all of a sudden that copy paste thing doesn't work. And because you copy-pasted it, you don't know how it actually works and how it applies to your business. You don't know how to make solutions on your own. Now you get to this next level, which is level 3. This is what we call the builder. In this level, you're actually building solutions for problems in your business and, and that are specific to your business, your market, your situation. Now you don't even have to go through stages 1 and 2. You could just go straight to level 3. And kind of ignore all of the tools that are out there in the world and go, man, what problem, what's the big problem in my business that I have? And if we could just take your business, we could put it in like cut it down the middle and you either have the demand side of the business, which is like branding, marketing, lead sales and conversion, or we have the supply side, which is capacity and fulfilling on the promises that you delivered and sold on in the marketplace, right? And so you typically have one side of the business, like if you're in your early stages, let's say sub $3 million where you're almost always lead constrained, you You don't have enough leads, you don't have enough sales, you don't have enough conversions. Great. If that's your constraint, right? Your people have, or your, your, your people in your business have lots of capacity and they could take on more work. Then we can ignore everything on the supply side. Who cares about note takers? Who cares about AI tools that are going to quote unquote save you time? We want to use AI tools to get leads, sales, and conversions. So we've just isolated the whole world of your business and the whole world of AI tools to that surface area. And we just keep shrinking it. Is the constraint leads? You don't have enough leads. Do you have plenty of leads, but they're not closing? Are they closing, but they're not onboarding fast enough? Great. Let's pick one of those. That's the biggest bottleneck. And then let's zero in on that. And then now we've stopped from so-called boiling the ocean, which is like taking on too much scope in your problem. And we're just focused on one simple, narrow thing. Let's take another example. Let's say you're like an accounting firm or a legal firm or like a consulting firm, right? Almost all of these businesses are supply constrained, meaning they can only grow as fast as the capacity of the people in the business. Like CPAs, for example. I don't think anyone on here runs an accounting practice, but if you do, this will be instructive. If not, take it as an example figuratively. Like most CPA firms, their bottleneck is they have one or two what are called master CPAs that they're like where the buck stops, right? With all of the tax returns and strategy and all that stuff. Well, dude, they can only grow as fast as those CPAs can process throughput. So you would apply AI to making sure those people could handle more tax returns and give out more tax strategy. Then you go grow the business that way. So that's nice. So maybe you don't run an accounting practice or a service-based business. Um, maybe you run a technology company. Whatever company you run, at level 3 of this 5-stage maturity curve or ladder, you're basically going and finding real problems in your real business, preferably the ones that are the biggest problems, meaning the biggest constraint, and you're using custom tools or any kind of tools to solve them. Then what happens after that, and I'll just kind of walk through the, the, the end of this, is you get to level 4, which is what we call a systemizer. Systemizers have a system for building their systems. It's like meta, because once you build one system to solve, let's say, leads, you can then take that system, take pieces of it, and then port it over to another part of the business and another part of the business. So now all of a sudden, the speed with which you add, let's say, an AI automation or a solution to the business to make it give you your company results is faster and faster and faster. Then eventually, after you've got— we've, we've looked at this, usually it's when a business hits about 20 automations in their business, you get to level 5, which is what I call the architect. And this is where you can scale leads and sales without scaling headcount. And for those of you that skipped accounting class, that translates directly into pretax profit, which is the big promise of AI, is how do we scale without adding more headcount so that we can actually generate more margin in our business? And about 15% of the companies we work with are at that level 5. They right now, because they've done the work over the last year or so, have more than 20 automations. They have plenty of capacity to grow. and all they have to do is go pour more fire on the growth engine. And let me, if you're following with me so far, let me go one step further. When people say you should adapt AI or you're going to die, it's not like if you don't get AI in your business, you're going to evaporate into pink mist. It's actually just basic strategy. If you, if Jackie runs an AI-enabled business that's at level 5 where they can scale sales without adding more headcount, and I don't, and we are going after the same market and have the same customer acquisition cost, what Jackie has that I don't is she has capital to reinvest into the business, which means if, if all she did and she wanted to play checkers instead of chess, she could go buy more customers at the same customer acquisition cost and outcompete me. If she was really smart and wanted to play chess, she could invest in a personal brand or making her brand bigger online, which brings down her customer acquisition cost then it's really checkmate for me because she has more capital to grow her business. She has more capital to invest in things like brand, which lower customer acquisition costs. So she can literally go buy all the market share she wants and take the rug out from the rest of her competitors. And that's what it looks like when it's like that, when people say adapt or die mechanically, that is how it is showing up right now. So if you are not on a path to get to this architect stage, or even if you're just getting started, The best thing to do is pick a problem, solve it with AI, then systemize it, then go from there. Right now you get a huge advantage if you guys, if you guys do this. In 12 months, you, it's not going to be an advantage. It's going to be the way the game is played. And you're either going to have to retire out of the arena or get some new tools. Because you don't want to be the person in the arena with a spear when everybody else has upgraded to a Gatling gun, because you're not going to win that fight. And I don't mean to frame it in totally competitive terms, but it's, boy, is it going to get pretty competitive, especially if you have one hand and one foot tied behind your back and everybody else is running freely with AI. So that's what I mean by attack your biggest problem. And then the rest of what I said is like, well, that's why it's important to do stuff right now, because less competent, less experienced people in the marketplace are going to use AI and they're going to play this game in a way that you can't, and they're going to win. Because there is no outcompeting that.

Hey, hey, Angela, can we pop up while Candace is asking the question? Angela, can we pop up how you get in touch with Joe Stolte? Again, this is a personal recommendation out there for everybody. We use Joe Stolte and his team to help us with our implementation. We actually have within our, our company, we have people that their sole job is implementing AI procedures across this very vast number of portfolios, companies we have. But Joe Stolte Jackie and Gus and their team are a big part of why we've been able to learn this and go. And it's not about replacing the humans. It's about having our team members be able to use their unique talents and be able to excel at what they do instead of getting stuck in all the things that are constraints for their own time. So it's not just a constraint about the business, but it's about, you know, what is Jackie's constraints? What are my constraints? What are Candice's constraints across the board? So this is how you get in touch with Joe, learn more about Prime Elite. And the other one was DM Joe, and that looks like that's a live— is that a Delphi, or is that— what is that, Joe? That looks like—

that's just, that's just a redirect. It just takes you direct to my Instagram inbox where I have some AI automation set up. So you can just ping me and send me the word Tom, and we'll know.

So you can put— you can put— you can go right there and know about it. Uh, and yes, we will be posting that up there. Candice, I'm sorry, I spoke right over you as you were going to jump in.

That's okay. I, I have like 75 questions, but I will try to not ask all of them. I think one, I'm in, I'm imagining somebody on this, on this show is sitting here going, it, I know I'm operating at maybe not even at tier 1 yet, but like, maybe I'm not even there yet. I'm using Chat or Claude or Gemini as a search engine and like, I see the Copilot button, I just don't know where to start. And then I see people on the opposite side who I will— I see a lot in our pitches that they are AI-enabled. And when I dig into it, when I ask some questions because of the education we've gotten through you guys, what I realize is they're still probably operating at a, at a level, you know, 1 or 2. What is that kind of tipping point? And what, like, what is the tipping point from being at the, the level 1, level 2, to getting over to level 3? Because it feels overwhelming. I mean, if you just go onto your YouTube, and I'm sure everybody's YouTube is like this right now, everything is like an AI thing screaming at me to watch this video of like, if you need, you need to watch this right now because it's about AI and, and you're behind the curve now because we've all switched. We've all decided we're on, on Claude.

Yeah.

So let's, let's break it down for maybe somebody who's sitting here like, great, I, I wanna be at level 5. I'm barely at a 1.

Yeah. Tactical, practical. So like if you wanna go from level 2, which is the copy-paster, to level 3, which is the builder, then the big difference is like, oh, you need to learn how to do prompt engineering. Or how to talk to your AI to come up with solutions for your specific problem. So the, let's just say you're in this place where you're still treating ChatGPT like a Google search. Well, you're probably only doing that because you've never learned how to, to prompt.

Mm-hmm.

And prompting is not a difficult skill. And I think in like a year the AI will be so smart, like you won't need it. But right now you definitely need it. And I'll give you an example. There's something called meta prompting. Meta prompting is asking the AI to come up with the prompt for you, right? As an example, right? So you could go into a tool like ChatGPT. I personally prefer Claude. I have from the very first time you guys have all met me a couple years ago or whatever, a year ago. And you could say, hey, I want to write a prompt for insert outcome you're trying to achieve. And here's why I want to do this. Ask me any question you need to to get the correct context, and then when you're done asking questions, I want you to write me the perfect prompt to help me get my outcome. Poof, magic. It'll write you the perfect prompt, or very, very good prompt. And the reason why that matters is to go from a copy-paster to a level 3 builder is you need to know how to bring the right tool to the right problem in your business, which requires two things. Number one, that you know the right problem to solve, period. And then number 2, it requires that you bring an AI, uh, let's call it an agent, a custom GPT, or some kind of automated workflow as a solution to that particular problem. That's it. Now, I— the devil's in the details, right? Like, we, we have a whole methodology on systems for building your systems, and you guys have, you know, you guys have heard my sermon on that. It's probably more than we want to get into today. But that's basically it to go from level 2 to level 3. It's, man, like, learn how to prompt just a little bit. And I just gave you the keys to the castle. Just ask it to ask you questions and write the perfect prompt. And then start building AI solutions for your specific problems. Extra credit if you pick the biggest problem, which is the biggest constraint that's holding back your growth. And again, if you go to dmjoe.com and send me the word constraint test, I will send you a bot that will help you figure that out. That's it. That's all you have to do. So we've gone from Google searching and tinkering and dabbling to I'm going to now use AI as a tool to solve a problem in my business. That's the only shift from level 1 and 2 to level 3. The first 2 levels are like, we're getting there, but we're not pointing it at something that's gonna solve a real problem in our business. The biggest quote unquote problem, which actually isn't a problem, is people use beyond Google searches, they use ChatGPT to write emails for them. The question you should probably ask yourself for that particular part of how you spend your time is, how do I eliminate email instead of automating email? Because email is on my list of, I just, it's not in my life anymore, right? Like we have AI that my AI has run my inbox for a year, and then where it doesn't run my inbox, I have an incredible AI-first human named Christine who does the rest for me. And the reason why this matters is because you don't want to automate things that don't deserve to exist. And that's why Tom brought up the famous reference to Bill Gates, right? If you automate crap, you get automated crap. So we want to cut the crap out and automate the stuff that's supposed to be there. The next thing that I'll say is like, look, if you're looking for help, like just get training, get your whole team trained right now. If you have an A-player in your business and they're a 10 out of a 10 on AI, AI, they are 3 times more productive, and that is a low estimate. Put differently, if you have 10 out of 10 A-players in your company who are not trained in AI, they are 3 times more expensive. So however you want to look at it, getting your whole team trained on like even just pick a tool that you standardize in your whole company, I would recommend now just make that tool Claude, right? Because Claude is the most robust most sophisticated model.

So let's pause. You don't have to buy 52 of these things out there. No, no. So, so Claude is the one that's the go-to right now, and it is, you know, for again going back in the old days, so AOL was kind of the leader and then all of a sudden it's Google, right? So these racehorses may change here and there, and they probably are going to change for specific tools, but you know, that, that is really where that is. Joe, I'm going to pause you for just a second because I did— somebody told me while I was down, uh, standing in line getting a cup of coffee when I was with you, and they said, oh, I just used this thing called Lovable and it built my website in under an hour. And I'm like, yeah, I gotta go see this because I doubt that's actually— go there. So I went to Lovable and I looked at it, I'm like, ah, this is going to be a pain in the ass. But I then went to my Claude and I said, this is what I need to do This is the outcome I'm looking to do, and here's the information on these people. And if, if you guys go check out frondsforskytavern.com, was a fundraiser that we did, and put that on there, this thing created the meta prompt, which then I put into Lovable, which then created a website that is fully functional. And it was absolutely amazing. Now, that was—

it took me to drive home, you had it built.

Yeah, that was, that was— and it's got videos, it's got all sorts of different things in there. And that was kindergarten. Starting level, what you're talking about, because we've now used these to create— so we've got a question from Ernest in there. It says, we're scaling a company nationally for a home service client, 14 regions to cover 1,600, or 1,600 over the next 5 years. Could AI break down each role or responsibility to generate into an AI workflow or opportunity to make things more efficient and automated? Sales, estimates, contracts, project management, delegation, follow-ups, reminders. I mean, That's an, that's an army of agents right there. That's an opportunity if I'm understanding it correctly. Right. So what do you think, Joe? Can you help out Ernest? I think he's a perfect client for you.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, um, well, I don't like to prescribe before I diagnose because that's malpractice, and it sounds like everything you just described is stuff that we've built in the past depending on your situation. And, you know, um, Tom knows we, we have like 33, 34 different bots that we've built in a pool in a tool called Poe that we're now in the process of moving over to Claude. Everything from like finding your ideal buyer, optimizing your offer. We have a tool called the Automation Architect that basically will talk to you like a friend and take your loosely, loosely coupled idea of what you want to automate and distill it all the way down to a map that you can hand over to a builder like me or Gus or someone else. And have them build it for you in a tool like N8N, or you could hand it over to a tool like Cloud Code, which writes your code for you and have it build it for you. So getting it specific and making sure you don't boil the ocean and handing it, like packaging it into like a thing that turns into an automation is the part that humans are still better at than AI. And we built a tool where AI becomes your partner to figure that out. So you listed, I don't know, a handful of automations in there. We'd go one by one. So short answer is like, I'm pretty sure we could help you and I'm pretty sure I could give you that tool to figure out what you want to do. You send me the output and I can tell you like, yeah, we could build that and how fast. One more thing I'll point out, guys, is like if you're a leader, and I think everybody here, if you're an entrepreneur, a business owner, management team, you're a leader. Like I think our job, I think it was Max Dupree that said the leader's job is to shape reality, shape perceptions. Like right now our perceptions of when work is supposed to be done is, is based on a world that doesn't exist anymore. So like normally when you ask a team member like, hey, when should— like, when will you have X done? What do they usually say? Tomorrow, next week, end of week, end of the week? So in the world of AI, there are very few things that take less than 3 hours to complete. And I mean like full websites, full automations, full drafts, full mock-ups, whatever. And so typically when The new reality, the new perception that you should have once your whole team is fully enabled with AI is that when you ask them when they're gonna do something, they should be like, oh, that'll take me about 90 minutes. And you say, great, book a meeting on my calendar in 90 minutes and show me a first draft of what you've got. Whether that's an automation, an agent, a website, a bot, whatever, a first draft of a proposal, research, doesn't matter. In 90 minutes, that's a lot of time in the world of AI. End of day is like forever. I've got projects right now that, that are delivering, you know, millions of dollars in cost avoidance that were cooked up in literally 8 hours, you know.

And so, so let's talk about that because you guys, you guys just chatted about this with your team and that you guys are putting it out there like, go. And you, you had a term for it, like it's a contest of your team. Yeah, of course one of my team members looked at me and goes, yeah, you need to run that, Tom. And we all get paid $5,000 to $50,000. So thank you very much, Joe Stolte. But yes, we're now— this contest is awesome. So you got to tell— you got to talk about this to get your team members not fearful of AI, they've got to go break stuff. They've got to get out there. They've got to try this stuff.

That's right. So what, what I'm saying is the real— a post-AI reality, things happen in minutes and hours. They don't happen in days and weeks. And in order to get your team to a post-AI reality, you're going to need 3 things, okay? You need to set expectations, you need to introduce incentives, and you have to have some accountability.

You got that, Kelly?

First thing we need to do is, uh, create— set expectations. And setting expectations could look like this, like, uh, hey team, AI is changing the way that we do work. We're on this planet as a company to do— here's my vision— and in order to do that and get our clients, customers, and patients, whatever you call them, the best possible results, I've made the decision as a leader to, um, make our entire company an AI-first company. Uh, now in order to make that happen, I've got some really exciting news. You know, today is April 1st. Let's say June 1st, uh, we're going to do a hackathon. Okay. And we're going to do a hackathon in a tool called Claude Code. And so we're going to get the whole team together for a day. And what's going to happen is you guys are going to use Claude Code to solve a specific challenge. And the person that gets the best outcome is going to get $50,000. And we're going to put you in teams of 2 and 3. Now, to prepare you for this, we've hired an outside company, or we've prepared a training that we're going to walk you through to teach you how to use Claude Code. Now, here's the rules. The rules are: go to the training and show up to the, the hackathon and do your best. Uh, next rule is you're gonna probably fall in love with this so much that you're gonna be watching YouTube videos ad nauseam to get every edge you can in Claude Code, which is totally cool. We just ask that you do that off hours so it doesn't interrupt your day-to-day work. We're going to have some judges. They'll, here's the criteria, they'll give you the money. Off we go. Okay. I do, I just set expectations. Okay. And I introduce an incentive. I'm going to give you some amount of money that feels large. We have another guy in our same inner circle program as Tom that like, he launched this to his team in the Philippines and he didn't make it a competition. He made it an individual contest and he gave them, he's going to give them $1,000 if they present an idea and they win, which for the offshore team, $1,000 is, you know, like like a month's pay or half a month pay for, for, for, let's say, you know, mid-level people operating in the US, I would say make it 2 months pay as the bounty for your, for your hackathon. Anyway, long story short, I just went through expectations and I went through incentives. Now the next thing is accountability. And you're gonna say, hey, look, I wanna give everybody a chance to win. So we're gonna do the hackathon. We're gonna have a great time. There'll be a winner. We'll celebrate them publicly. It's gonna be awesome. But guys, we're doing this as a forcing function to get the whole company to just learn and become an AI-first company. So this will, this is not gonna be the end, this is gonna be the beginning of learning all the things AI. And if you can learn how to code with AI, you can learn any AI tool after that. So we're gonna start with the hardest one and everything else is downhill from there. Okay? And here's the deal, we're gonna give you, after the hackathon's done, we're gonna give you 90 days to get 30 to 40% of your job done by AI, which is gonna give you a lot of time back to work on things that are more important to you. At the end of the 90 days, if you hit the target, you're gonna, you're gonna get celebrated and we'll make a leaderboard. If you almost hit the target, we'll give you some coaching so that you'd be successful. And if you're way off on the target, we're gonna give you what's called a performance improvement plan where you've got 30 days to figure it out and we'll give you all the support in the world. But if you don't make it through that performance improvement plan, we, by the way, we don't want anyone to end up there. We'll give you every possible training resource to survive. We will happily go make phone calls and help you get placed in a non-AI-first company because you're not going to be comfortable here anymore. Like, we're going to start moving really fast. And if this is not your jam, no problem. We, we don't want to leave you high and dry. Here's awesome severance and some phone calls for a safe landing. We're going to take a hard right and we're going to go extra hard into AI. So what did I do? I set my expectations. I introduced incentives. Incentives are money if you do it and no job if you don't. Delicately. And then I have accountability. I do what I say. So I pay you when you win and I performance improvement plan you when you drag your feet. Now look, some, like if you have 10 people in your company, one will be the person that's like the mega early adopter that does it before everybody else. One will be the one that totally drags their feet and resists, and the rest of them will just be in the middle. And that's why you create incentives. You know, Charlie Munger said, if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. And Tom has heard me say that probably 100 times now. So, Charlie Munger also said something to the effect of like, never ever use another tool when an incentive will solve the problem. Just because as, as human beings, like we're so driven by incentives and environment that like we're just going to use incentives for not the fastest person to adopt or the slowest person, but the other 8 in the middle so that they are incentivized to make change. 'Cause we don't love change. So let's make it easy for our team to change. So that's what it looks like to get your team to change in a fast, provable, awesome way to do it. It.

Dad, you're muted.

Joe, you're running some videos out there on YouTube because you pop up on my feeds, talk about it all the time, right? And you've got some, some different deals running out there. What's, what's going on? How does someone get involved with you? We've showed the LinkedIn, but there's some things going on there at various different levels. I, again, I'm going to, to qualify this statement. It's not about the AI when you're working with Prime. It's about as the human. And what he even just talked about is the process for the human to be able to use the AI. It doesn't do any good to go automate something if it's not already a good process and if you don't find out what the great constraints are. So how does someone get involved?

Yeah, I think easiest way is if you go to dmjoe.com and send me the word prime, P-R-I-M-E, to let me know that you're interested. We can set up a phone call and someone on my team can walk you through the details, tell you exactly what's involved, the criteria for entry, and then the investment. Um, that's it. We're super easy. I will say this, like Tom knows this, we're, we're pretty picky about who we let in the group. We got 92 people in our WhatsApp group. Our first hard cap is 100, so we've got about 8 spots left. And, um, we're just— what we're trying to do is create a community of givers. It's typically people that aren't like— this isn't your first business and you just didn't get started yesterday. These are experienced folks, um, that want to give, meaning they're going to dive in, they're going to show up to the calls, they'll show up to live events, they'll do the work, they'll grow their companies and then they'll bring the fruits of their experience back to the group. We have a WhatsApp group that is like, it's the most active WhatsApp group I've ever been in and it's just pure value, pure help. You've got me and Gus and a bunch of other people that are even farther ahead than me and Gus on certain things and they're just pounding away and sharing their best fruits. And if you are stuck on something, there's like a 90% chance that someone else in the group has already solved that problem. They'll answer your question. And 100% chance that me and Gus and our team will be there to help solve it for you.

It's a real— it's a real-time mastermind of real people solving real problems out there generally, and they're founders, right? And— or the— and the founder's team. So we're all co-founders here in this scenario. I gotta do a shout out for, uh, Candace. She recently built a website. She had super cool fun doing that one on the level because she saw what—

still at kindergarten level, and I had to show it to Gus us, which was probably the most—

but it was super cool because I did mine and then all of a sudden she did hers and it was magical type scenario. It was super cool. But I, I'm gonna back up from there. I don't know, 6 months ago, maybe 8 months ago, we go down to our first event, Jackie and I, and, uh, Jackie writes a bot that does this thing that took our, our artifacts, which was super cool. This was back earlier days of N8N and different things. And you had it write this bot that instantaneously pulled up a dashboard of how somebody's pitch deck was fitting with what our things were. And it was the coolest, coolest.

Thank you for being so proud of that. I'm going to— that was all Joe. And Joe, I'll say it again. It's obvious, like being part of your group, you care so much about everyone's success. And that keeps coming through. And I know a lot of this, there's, at least for me, there's a little bit of like anxiety and urgency and like FOMO. And I feel like I'm behind and there's so much to do. For the audience, Joe has developed so much good content. Give that a little bit of time. Don't be afraid. Go in. You really are ahead of the curve even looking at this and working on it now. And I think you've said several times, Joe, the best way is just to go start playing with it and give it some time. I'm going to answer some questions in the chat and I'm even going to like put my Joe Salty hat on in answering this. Heather, we're a real estate company managing multiple assets, engaged in acquiring new assets. How can AI systems make us more efficient? Go ask AI, go ask chat, go ask Claude how the AI systems can make you more efficient. Start there.

I'll also say about a third of our room are real estate investors or people working in the real estate real estate space. We've got a handful of like multi-nine-figure investors. One of them who's also in the same group with Tom is like, they're just going systemically step by step solving their biggest constraints. So they've built a tool that just takes a first look at every deal that comes in and also then takes the first pass at diligence. So they've taken their diligence process on a property and they're in grade A multifamily. Company, which, you know, a lot of stones to unturn to validate those assumptions. They've taken their process from 5 days down to 5 hours, and we think we can help them get it down to an hour. So if you just look at the entire process of like acquiring properties, you know, you, depending on your strategy, right? You acquire them, you finance them, you stabilize them, and you pull your capital out, and then you optimize them over time. Each one of those phases has very distinct levers that we've already helped people pull with AI. So yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on the type, what, what you're doing, what asset class. But generally speaking of all the real estate people we work with, whether that's on the agent side and the consumer side or the almost institutional grade investor side, we've been able to disaggregate exactly what they're doing and then go in and take these things in the machine that normally take a crap ton of humans to figure out and time and data in 20 different places. And it's just done, you know, it's, it's an order of magnitude faster, you know, 5 days to 5 hours is actual order of magnitude. And we, again, I think we can get it down to an hour, uh, depending on the data they have coming in. So, longer answer, and Ask AI.

I, I got to tell you, I love that because we're in the process of building something that is just mind-boggling. But when you've got 30 years of underwriting loans and investments, there's a lot of looking around the corner, seeing boogeymen, getting it wrong, seeing other boogeymen, having downturns and all that stuff. But that it's able to start walking through and asking these questions that it's making our agents way better than what's automated out there because it's also taking our human experience through the archives of the stories we tell. Like this time we did this and I lost $400 million. If you want to go see that, it's out on the internet, you know. So those are painful experiences that you get to learn through, right? But when you put it in there now, all of a sudden it's learning it where when it's just a startup company, you don't have that. Which goes to one last point about what we do here at the Founder's Office. Us, and we're, we really articulate this. If you are not getting your thought processes, your processes as the human tied up with some intellectual property, you are missing a huge opportunity. Because as soon as you put it out there, it becomes anybody else's unless you've said, this is mine, I named this. And that is going to be a big part of the game. That is the Founders Law Group. That's what we do here to help founders be able to extract extract their value out of the companies. And part of that, as you're doing it, one last question on this. You've raised money, you've put money into companies, you've sold companies. How can you use AI to raise capital in this process? What, what's like one tip you'd start with?

Yeah, you know, I used to take people through this process. I have a process for how I think about raising money that's like risk-off for the founder. So you spend the least amount of time to get the maximum cash out out of, of institutions' pockets and into yours. And I'll tell you, man, a big part of that was like, okay, you, you have your network of people you can reach out to to get capital, but then after you get out, out of who's at an arm's length distance, like, who do you reach out to? Well, we built this thing for this guy that literally uses an off-the-shelf tool, and it goes out and it scrapes— like, it takes your deal, whatever it is, like Series C or Series A in this market, and it just goes and scours millions of registered databases full of venture capitalists, family offices, high net worth individuals that have raised their hand to raise money on places like AngelList. And it just makes a list. It grades each investor based on fit. And that's the first tool. The second tool is we can go into your LinkedIn and analyze who on your LinkedIn has second and third degree connections into those funds or to those people so that you can ask for introductions. And I mean, like in the world of fundraising, my experience, guys, has been like you either went to, you know, Stanford and you're platinum-plated and the world is your oyster and they beg for your business to be fun, you know, like you have the pick of the litter, or you're on the other side of it, which is like, dude, you better get— better put your pitch pants on and get ready to go get in front of some people. Well, how do you get in front of the right people and not waste a bunch of time? I'm trying to solve that problem and We solved it. I am done raising money, but we solved this problem for another company and we did it in like 3 or 4 hours and it worked really well. He has a list of like 175 people that are, you know, meet his criteria, are a fit for his deal stage. And looking at like third-party reviews don't seem to be like, like vulture capitalists or like good partners and strategic, which is awesome because that's about about 125 more than he had to begin with. So that's like, for me, that's the big bottleneck in fundraising is like at-bats with the right people. And we solved that in hours using AI. And if you went and asked AI how to do that, you could literally do it too.

So we, we did that. I love that joke because that is a big part of what was the original book we wrote, Six Secrets, with my business partner Bill Fisher. And it was about you want to make the presentation to the right people.

People.

You don't— you can cut down the number of presentations you make by just making it to the right people, which getting that story down. And, and I absolutely love that for the people out there raising capital. Joe Stolti, uh, Angela, one more time, let's show how you connect with Joe, or dmjoe.com to ask the questions. I've got the prime constraint ID up on there, which I know I have access through my app. Uh, Joe, there you go. You guys are gonna kick my butt, but, uh, I like trying it out there. Uh, super cool. So you can, you can get through Prime Elite. You can find Joe on LinkedIn. By the way, if you go out there to his YouTube channel, you can also see, uh, Joe as an Olympian, uh, breakdancer. Not kidding, right? World class.

I'm not— I was an Olympian. My breaking crew won 2 world titles, and I was on the board that got breakdancing into the Junior Olympics and eventually the Paris Olympics, which happened, uh, 2 years ago in Isn't that super cool?

So you get to do that. I get to watch his son come up, and Jackie and I've seen his son do the breakdancing up there, which is super cool. Joe Stolte, thanks for joining us today, and thanks to Gus, and thanks to all the members of PRIME, because we just learned so much out there. And you do not need to be afraid of AI. You need to embrace it because it's not going to replace you if you are the one embracing it. It might replace you if you're not. So the best way to do that is jump on board. And I always look back to it in, in old days of the library, There was librarians and Dewey Decimal System, and you went and you looked at a card and then you pulled the book, or you asked the librarian, they had to order it. The, uh, Google did not replace librarians. It just replaced the non-performing clerical librarians. You still have very high-level librarians out there, and they use the tools to be able to get there, right? So utilize that. Uh, thanks for joining us today. I do want to tell you, I'm going to be down in your neighborhood not just because I come down to see you, but I'm going to be speaking in Houston here on May 2nd. So a month out from here, it's a 2-day event, Shortcut Pathway to Mergers and Acquisitions. So if you're thinking about raising capital or an eventual exit, just know this: the deal isn't the moment that defines the outcome. The structure behind it is. Going deeper at M&A Launchpad, Houston, May 2nd. And they gave us a little coupon code there. So I'm going to be one of the keynote speakers at M&A Launchpad. Joe Stolte, thanks again for joining us. Check out Prime, check out Joe. He's got a bunch of YouTube videos out there and they're, they're just worth a ton. And appreciate you, my friend.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, guys. Have a great day. Candace, Jackie, thank you so much. And Angela, as always, thank you for running this. Have a great day.