Building a Profitable Tech Business in the AI Era | Chris Wiser x Randy Brian

What's up everybody? Welcome to the AI Profit Leaders Podcast. My name is Chris Weiser, your host, here with the superstar Randy Bryan, founder, CEO of Tech Rescue. Cool. Uh, Ryan's, uh, Randy's one of my clients, so it's kind of awesome to have you on the podcast. Actually, also, we were supposed to record 2 days ago and he was late.

No, it wasn't me.

No, it actually wasn't Randy. He was not late. He got, he got pushed back because other people canceled. Anyway, so here in Austin, Texas, live at South by Southwest. Love having you here. Tell me, tell everybody about yourself. So he's there, by the way. He's really nervous. I can just tell. I can tell.

He's got podcasts all the time, but you know, he's outside in the sun.

It's like, I love it, man.

I mean, so I'm a, I'm a dad, I'm a husband. I've got 4 kids, have 1 grandkid, pretty much been doing something around tech like my whole life.

For a long time. Yeah. We've been friends for 5 years, 5 years plus now doing cybersecurity, IT tech side. But last year, I'd say what, 6, 6 to 9 months, you've been kind of venturing into the AI space.

Yep.

And we're here at AI Profit Machine House. And what does AI mean to you? Like you're a small business owner. You're about what, 40 minutes south of Austin in San Marcos, Texas. San Marcos. What does AI mean to you as a small business owner, not only as an owner, but then let's get into what does it look like for actually delivering that service to clients and talking to people? Yeah.

So, I mean, everybody knows this already, but it basically allows people to do more. And it is a tool in the hands of the right people can be phenomenal. And I always tell a story about, We were remodeling a house back in the day, my wife and I were. Next door neighbor was a contractor and he had this amazing saw and he heard one day I was going to put up crown molding. He's like, dude, you need to borrow my digital saw. It's like the best saw on the planet. And I'm like, okay. And I borrowed it one day, borrowed it. He went off to work. Anyway, I cut my first piece of crown molding and got it up there. There was like an inch gap. And the moral of that story is The greatest tool in his hands, there wouldn't have been any gap at all.

Best tool in the world in his hands.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And, but in my hands it was trash. I could have just used a handsaw and done better. And the moral of the story is AI is like that. If you're an expert at something, you can use AI basically to like leapfrog yourself with your knowledge that you already have. Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I see out there, and you mentioned a point there that's kind of pretty relevant. There's a lot of people that are talking about AI and, and the big like public consensus around it is this is gonna displace all these workers. This is gonna crush the world. It's gonna end our economy. Like all this doom and gloom shit, right? Versus what you're saying specifically is AI is here to superpower people that are already good. Did I read that right?

Yes, you did. And then also you have to remember the, the CEOs of all these companies need billions and billions to be flooding in. And so if they say it's going to take everybody's job, the investors are thinking, oh man, it's a good place to spend my billions. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so there is going to be a lot of transition, you know, over the next 3 to 5 years. It's going to be crazy like we've never seen before. But yeah, it's a, it's a powerful tool in the right hands.

Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that's key with that, and I want everybody to kind of realize what Randy is saying there, we are going to see change.

Yep.

But one of the reasons we have AI Profit Machine here and AI Profit Machine House and AI Profit Con that we're doing, All these things are here to help the consumer, not only you as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, as a dad, all these things, but also to help you as a, as a human to kind of get away from that negativity, that mindset around that. And it's helping you be profitable, to be successful, to have a livelihood, right? Would you agree with all that?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Because I, I don't like, I think this is the greatest opportunity small business owners have had ever. And, you know, you and I are both old enough to go back to the dot-com boom and Y2K and all that, all that stuff, to kind of watch that stuff happen. It's never been like this. No, right?

Never.

Do you have that same feeling that I have? Like, it's never, it's never been like this. In fact, I often, I feel a lot that I, I'm, well, I, I need to sleep. Shit, I gotta sleep. Damn it, I don't want to sleep. I want to keep working on stuff because it just like superpowers me so much, right?

Right.

How are you using that to empower your staff?

So first off, I sat down with my team about a year ago and said, hey guys, I don't know what this is going to look like, but we're going to become an AI-first company. We're not going to—

So it started here. Yeah.

And we're not going to replace your jobs. Where we want you to use AI so you can do a better job.

Yeah.

So you can get more, more done. And that's, that's really where it started.

So what was their, you know, so you're, you're saying as a leader and this is a really good, actually, I absolutely applaud that because that's such a positive mindset and such a good thought process because you're a year, you're a year. I mean, we're March of '26 right now.

Yep.

Go back a year. That's a big change. So you're empowering your staff. What was their reaction to that? Were they like, AI is dumb. I don't know anything about AI. F this. Like, what was their mindset?

Yeah, I think the level, like level 1 techs, I think they were a little bit afraid of it. But I just sat down in a few hours and made a level 1 tech custom GPT, helps them fill out the tickets, ask questions. And, you know, they just went right in, went right into it. And it's gotten better over the last year.

So, well, I mean, If anything, it's like being early like that. And just so you know, just, just for you that are watching this, even if you haven't started right now, it doesn't mean like you missed the boat. We're still early. Get into it. Like, the best time was when Randy started, honestly. The second best time is tomorrow or today. Like, get on, get on it and work on it. But the fact that you had a strategy that was headfirst on it probably made them happy and relieved and excited versus Oh shit, he's going to replace me with robots. Right. Would you agree with that?

I would agree. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Because we've not used it to replace anybody, but we've used it to be able to do more.

Well, I think you can, you know, one of the things that I see with it and you've kind of watched, you know, we've known each other for a while, seen my, my business owner side as a while for a while. Kind of watch these things happen. I'm using it to superpower my staff like we have our VAs doing crazy stuff now. We have our assistants doing amazing stuff now. So I think all of it is we're using it to strap like rockets on the back of our— what was— I don't wanna say low, low performance is the wrong term, but our, our entry-level people, it's enabling them to do so much with, with less now. Like, right. So I think it's been a really, that's a really powerful mindset.

And so early on, I also made sales, basically sales helper for my wife. Is basically she does that for tech rescue.

You're not using the Wiser method? Yeah. Custom trainer?

No, no, no. We are. We take, I take everything I learned from you and like right now we're, we just met on yesterday with a 200-member nonprofit about AI and we just go into the dashboard and get all the stuff and the tools you have to help and put that in a custom GPT.

So it's opening up opportunities for you that are huge because I want to ask you this straight out. Would you be in a place as an IT company where you could go into that 200-person company, do their IT?

Sure.

But you could. But would they be looking at you versus how they're looking at you for AI?

I don't think so.

Exactly. Exactly. So the opportunity is bigger and awesome.

And that came out of one of my speaking engagements and I met the CEO afterwards. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]