Stop Hiring People, Start Buying Back Time

4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1. Hey there, this is Chris Weiser with the AI Profit Leaders Podcast here to introduce Mr. John Hansman from Truett in Northern Washington.

All over Washington.

All over Washington. It's good to have you here, brother. How you doing today?

Thank you. Doing great.

Yeah, it's good to see. Good to see you. So I am really, really excited to have you just to talk about everything. You know, we just kind of got out a little mini mastermind here working together and we're talking about AI leadership and thoughts. Where do you see yourself in AI thought leadership today?

Well, I think one of the primary ways that I'm really focusing is in, uh, Washington State, helping businesses of all sizes, uh, really focusing on trucking and trucking and logistics, but helping business understand that they have to think beyond, uh, the hype that we see online and really think through where are the, the points of my business that I'm struggling like where am I losing money? Where am I looking that I maybe need to— they right now think they need to hire an employee when really they could just reorient their business, work a little smarter, put some automations in place and create something that's going to actually make them more, more profitable.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the hire an employee thing. I've been a business owner for 20, 25 is my 25th year actually in business coming up on 26 here real quick. And almost everyone that has a legacy business, especially like logistics companies, I worked with those a lot in my, in my Wisconsin days. And hiring a person is where their brain, those legacy business owners, goes first, right? So, so how do you see and how do you position that to them as a leadership mindset?

Yeah, well, one of the things that's different about Washington State than probably a lot of parts of the United States, our state's actually been making it really hard to do business. They've done a lot of tax increases and a lot of logistic companies are struggling right now because of gas prices, because of all those things. So, it's about reorienting your mind. Where can I be more profitable so that my business can survive in what— in a really tough market, in a really tough climate?

Yeah, that's very well said. And you know, you're obviously in Washington State leading a technology company. How are you kind of changing the mindset toward your evolving not only your messaging but the way that your clients and prospects see you? Because it's, you know, you've been so focused on IT.

Yeah.

Uh, so focused as to cybersecurity. It's kind of, it's kind of interesting actually. Let me just pivot real quick. It's interesting because most sitting on the technical side, you and I are kind of technical guys. We've known each other for a little while. Um, most technical people don't see AI as tech, but the end users, they kind of bundle that all together. Right. So how did you get yourself past that?

It's a mindset change. And one of the things that most people struggle with in business is we get stuck in the, we've always done it this way. Oh man. My, my, my roofing company. We've been doing this for 25 years. We broke it. Exactly. And, and the reality is, is when you have that mindset, you limit your ability to increase your revenue. I mean, you literally put yourself into a box that it's hard to climb out of, and it's going to get worse. Because what's going to happen is, let's just go back to the roofing company. A new younger roofing company is going to come in, look at AI tools, and they're going to outdo you. They're going to create AI agents.

That's real stuff. Because real stuff, you you look at any newer company, it's kind of funny. Uh, I was talking to somebody the other day about how the boomer generation is kind of like looking to exit and do all these other things, but that's a majority of your owned businesses. Now I understand your, your younger companies are going to come in and try and do faster, smarter things that way. How do we, how do we talk to the, to the boomer guys, right? Uh, and say, I understand you've always done it this way. How do we evolve?

I think it's about talking about generational wealth. I think most the boomer generation, when you really get down to the heart of the issue, they really want to leave a legacy for their family. So if you can really hit them in the heart, hit them in the heart, and it's really about can we help work together to build a legacy for the next generation? And the reality is the next generation is going to use AI. They're already using it right now.

Well, and you want to have something that either you can sell for a premium, and you can't do this when you have all this overhead that are people. So that's a pretty good way to do it, you know, from thinking from a thought leadership mindset, right? Or it's okay if you're going to have to try and hire more people, right? It's going to cost you more money and that digs into your cash and your profit, blah, blah, blah.

Right. It's a matter of when you exit, do you want to have a $50 million business or do you want to have a $7,500, $75 million business or even a $5 million business or a $50 million business?

Something that really impacts.

What is it? What is it going to be? And the decision-making about how much overhead you have, uh, how much creativity you use, How good is your marketing? All those things all work into your exit strategy. And I think most people are thinking— I'm all about employees. Like, I want to have staff, and I think people are important, but there's a lot of things that you can take off the plates of your current staff that make their lives better, make their lives—

it's not so much about replacing them. No, it's making them more efficient, more productive. Exactly. Making them so they're actually using their time for non-remedial tasks that actually make the company money. You know, it's interesting. There's all this, the financial numbers about some of the bigger companies that are out there, and they always talk about how much money does a company make per employee. And that's a big factor in the smaller businesses because most of them, it's in the 5 digits or, you know, even maybe even lower than that.

Well, and both you and I, we both have had the fortunate, uh, opportunity to meet Dan Martell and have him speak. And one of the things I talk about a lot, when you read through his Buy Back Your Time book, he talks a lot about first you buy back your time and then you start to buy back the time of your employee, and it works its way down. And AI is one of the best ways to buy back your time, but also start looking at how, uh, can I buy back the time of my employees and create some success for them and take things off their plate that don't require necessarily critical thinking, that are repetitious, that are, in a sense, a waste of time if now you've got a tool that can do that work for you.

Yeah. And, you know, so I think, I think a little bit of what I heard there is it's really important as a business owner, and maybe this is you talking to the business owner out there that's listening to this, you need an AI strategy.

Yeah.

Because if you don't have an AI strategy, either your company's massively missing out, or maybe just, you know, and I just think of people in general that are randomly implementing tools. Most people that I know, I mean, I talked to you about my mom not that long ago. My mom is 75 years old. She uses ChatGPT every day. Yeah. Unfiltered, unfettered access to the LLM. Now that's her and her personal life. Who cares? But what about business owners? What about their staff? All their intellectual property.

Right.

Etc., etc.

Right.

Sorry.

Yeah. Well, and that's the reality. Like, we were just recently talking about this in-house and we're working on some marketing campaigns really to help people understand your staff, especially if you have millennial or younger people, are already using AI in your business.

100%.

The big question is, are you actually controlling it?

Yeah. That's—

are you actually making sure that it's being used the right way? Are you making sure that your intellectual property is not being sucked into an LLM? Are you actually creating a strategy to guide your employees to be more efficient? There's a lot of people— I teach a lot of AI lunch and learns. There's a lot of people who use it okay, use it— there's some who use it well. There's a ton of people who don't know what the hell they're doing.

Well, and it's kind of funny because they see like ChatGPT as the 'I'm using AI,' right? Like that's all they're doing. So how would you take, you know, how would you go into a small business? Yeah, let's say we got a small business owner watching this, this, what's, what's your biggest piece of advice, your thought leadership mindset?

The biggest, the biggest piece is don't think of AI as a tool. You really have to backtrack from what's the pain point, what's the, what are the repetitious things that you're doing over and over and over again that are taking up time. So I'm in the process of talking to somebody who owns a bunch of gas stations. He does a bunch of calculations, spends 45 minutes a day. What if you— we could turn that into a 5-minute look at an email, click a link, yes or no, and your 45 minutes just got turned into 5 minutes that he could do anywhere, that he can do anywhere. He doesn't have to do all the work. AI does all the work for him. All those types of things are what we're talking about. So you look at your business. Are you in accounting? Is there something you're doing every day that is— and your employees, it's wasting money, wasting time. And I think what all of us get stuck into AI commercials on YouTube and Facebook and all of those things, and we go, ooh, let's go get that. And you really have to think about a strategy and look at everything from a, you know, look at it as a business decision or looking at a business strategy, uh, as a, um, how are we actually, how are we actually doing things as a— like, what are the things that people are doing? I think that's what I'm trying to say.

So I think, you know, kind of a summary on that Every single business should be using AI. Yeah, right. But using it in a controlled manner.

Right.

And that's a big factor that you, you can walk into. So, so, you know, looking at 2026, looking at the next year here we have coming up, what are things that business owners should be thinking about implementing from your standpoint?

Yeah, I think it's really going to depend on what kind of business you're in. If you're in home services, I think there's a ton of opportunity in sales automation. How are you getting cold emails, cold calling, all those things out? A lot of those tools are getting better. Right as we speak. You can literally, even today, I've listened to demos, I've watched it in action. You can have AI schedule calls based off links on your— clicks on your Facebook, on your page. So say somebody actually goes on and you're a roofing company again and they fill out a form for a roof, you can literally have AI go ask the questions that you need answered, schedule an appointment for your estimate. Done.

That's crazy.

And it sounds so good right now. Most people just don't realize that it's possible. It's not as clunky as it was even 6 months ago. It's come a long ways. So there's so much opportunity for home services to pivot. There's opportunity for people to use it, to help them with their strategy online for like social media. There's a lot of— we need to think about AI as more automation. Than the LLM side. I think we need to have a departure from that because that's what LLMs—

it's not just about the ChatGPT or the Gemini or the Claude. It's not just— and that's what an LLM is, if anybody's watching that doesn't know. But it's not just that, right? It's got to go way deeper and it's got to be very strategic.

Well, and that's the thing we're finding out. I mean, we've seen a lot of examples of where LLMs, they hallucinate and We know that when you have long conversations, not everything you get out of there is perfect. Mm-hmm. But what AI does better than anything else is automate and do the same thing over and over and over and over again really well. Yeah.

Based on very good instruction, right?

It can nail that over and over and think a little bit outside the box. I mean, just think about chatbots. Think about all the different things that you can do. I literally had residential customer pop on my website. And our AI helped them troubleshoot something. It was a call we didn't have to take for a customer that wasn't amazing. I mean, like, literally gave them a website to where they, where they could find a screen for their— it was like amazing.

Yeah. So you mentioned home services, but you kind of think about any, not only home services, but any business that is client-facing. You should, you know, you just mentioned your own chatbot type scenario. So should every business have something like that?

Yeah, I think if you've got a website, you should have some sort of chatbot on it to answer basic questions, schedule appointments. Be able to get people in front of you because humans aren't always good at that. How many times have you ever talked to a human, especially in the beginning of a sales journey for them, or they're a front desk person and they have a conversation with a client like, hey, did you get an appointment scheduled? No, I didn't do that. I forgot. AI doesn't forget. AI has a mission. Its mission is—

it also doesn't have an ego.

Yeah, it doesn't have an ego.

We actually, we use internally at my firm we use a chatbot to replace our front-facing client, existing client relationship discussions. And it was such a good example for me because watching how we had a scenario where we had humans there previously and they would always try and troubleshoot stuff all the way to the point of even if they didn't know, they would try and troubleshoot it. And the AI doesn't have an ego. It doesn't care. It's not like it's like, okay, I don't know this, escalate, right? Not I don't know this. But I bet you I can figure it out. Just give me enough time.

Right.

And meanwhile, your customer service is going down the drain. Exactly right. So any other— you mentioned home services, you mentioned logistics earlier, trucking industry earlier. Obviously, that's a huge focus for you moving forward in 2026. What revolutionary things or unique things that are you doing for the, for the trucking industry?

Well, one of the, one of the biggest things that we're, we're looking at with the trucking industry is to really help them become more efficient. Again, especially in Washington, it's a state where efficiency is king. Efficiency is really what's going to help organizations stay in business, remain profitable, and, and keep growing. And so we're looking at how do we team up with vendors that they're already using? How do we help them with in-house information, get all that organized, and just make sure that they have a strategy that's really working? And they're not just picking somebody off the street to help them.

Yeah.

Like it's really about partnership with us, somebody you can trust to help walk you through the conversation.

You're kind of giving them that strategic vision, helping them, you know, kind of walk down that AI path. That's pretty much an unknown path right now. And instead of going down the crazy road, you're kind of trying to take them down the yellow brick road.

We don't want to play whack-a-mole with tools, right?

Good phrase.

I like that. Yeah. We, we want to create a strategy. Match a tool to the strategy, and then deliver profitability.

Yeah.

But though, that's our goal. Our goal is to say—

what's key there is you're starting strategy first, then saying, let's, let's, let's figure out what your problem is, put a strategy in place to solve that problem, then hit it, you know, then decide on a tool, not kind of the other way around.

Way too easy to play whack-a-mole. There's too many commercials out there.

How fast is AI stuff evolving?

Yeah, it's way fast.

Non-stop, right?

And there's so many new companies coming out.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

You know, so, so kind of putting a bow on this whole discussion, what's the one message you'd like maybe a new Jon Hansman audience to come away with?

Yeah. Well, I think that AI today is not something that the business owner should do alone. There's, there's too much risk involved in wasting time trying to find the right tool for your solution. When A, you work with the right partner, we can either build it for you We can find a tool that already exists to fill the need, and we can measure the metrics for you to make sure that it's working. You have to have somebody who knows how to do those things.

Yeah, that's just not— that's not just a tool vendor though.

No, it's a partnership. Yeah, it's, it's somebody that you trust to come in and partner with you as a strategist for your business.

Yeah, long-term, long-term strategy.

Like it's really about having, you know, even another officer in your, in your world to help you make really good decisions so that you have the right tools moving forward and you're not wasting time. You can't— like, we live in a world right now where if you waste too much time, you lose money.

Yeah, we just had—

you just had examples of that just in our conversations of people who are losing millions of dollars because they don't have a system in place to follow up.

Well, they're so— they're so obsessed with the way it was, right? And you mentioned this early on, but we've always done it that way, right? Show me a reason why. I mean, I think for the first time, every business can benefit from something. Let's just take when the internet kind of came into play. Well, it took a long time for that to mature and evolve. This is like rapid jumping in chunks. And I think the adoption has been really quick for businesses. But you got to really say, I want to use this to evolve.

If you don't believe me, call a Fortune 500 company. And listen to their automated attendant.

It's all AI now.

It's all AI. And it's 100% better than it was 2 years ago.

2 months.

Yeah, it's rapid. It's so rapid and it's so much better. So we're seeing leaps and bounds. And I think every business owner needs to just take a step back and come up with a plan and execute as fast as possible. And diddle-daddling around with tools and trying to play with everything isn't going to do it.

And trying to become an expert on that too, right? So let, let, I think first of all, it's identify the problem. You said that earlier, identify the problem. Then let's figure out whether we build our internal tool or find something else that's out there. Both those are strategically planned though. That's not just like, oh, I'm going to go figure this out on my own. Cause like you think about wasting time, you know, as a business owner, what are you good at? You should be good at your craft, right?

And not, and I was trying to, I was just going to say that I was going to pick on a dentist for a while. You don't want your dentist playing with AI. You want him being really good.

I kind of want some AI teeth.

I don't know. Right. No, exactly. You want him. Focused in on what they're really good at.

Yeah.

And allow them to focus in on that. And that's what a business does really well, is when the owner does like what they're great at.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

And focusing on money and revenue and cash flow. Let you guys handle that.

Exactly.

All right, John, appreciate having you on the show today. Uh, really excited for your future and your 2026. Your visions are awesome and really looking forward to it.

Yeah, me too. I'm excited.

All right, thanks, John. Appreciate you being here today.