Ep163 AI for Blue Collar Industries, with Tommy Dee

So roofing, I understand it very well and I know that climbing up the roof to measure it properly is very important. And so over time, what is what we've been able to do is we've been able to use satellite imagery to give us the opportunity to measure these roofs. Right. Agulinx actually provides us with that data to like within inches. Used to be within a couple of feet, we had a 15% waste margin down to 3% waist mark. Right. So we don't even have to climb on the roof anymore.

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Welcome to Manage Self Lead Others. My name is Nina Sunday and today get ready to be inspired by Tommy D. A visionary who transitioned from construction to nursing, earned four science degrees, pioneered in home IV hydration, and created a medical scribe program. A prolific writer with two books and many articles, Tommy blends his diverse experiences to offer unique insights in healthcare, entrepreneurship and today his book is Blue Collar Revolution Leveraging AI for a New Era in Contracting. Welcome, Tommy D. Well, thank you, Nina.

It's a pleasure. Appreciate being here and the opportunity to speak with you today.

Now, I'm excited to have this opportunity to talk about AI from the trades point of view because that's the, the audience that you've written this book for. What I found most interesting was when I got to the self assessment, your little quiz and I reckon that's a reason to get the book. But, but let's just cover the, the. I think it's four areas that you focus on, which is plumbing, like any sort of trade, contracting, H Vac. What are the other areas? Roofing and financial management. Those are the areas you cover.

Right. And basically it was what I, what I did was I actually allowed AI to tell me who to write the book for. And it made those suggestions right there. Those were the biggest, you know, trades that seemed to have the issues. I also was a roofing contractor, so I used it as a way to test my, you know, test my own knowledge against what AI knew. And so when I would ask it a question and it gave me back a response regarding, I think I used the example of scheduling roofing jobs and tracking of jobs or materials. It literally is a Four man circus when you got a really busy roofing company and the ability to use AI to train that down to a system, oh my goodness. It was just mind blowing when I discovered that. And that's why I was like, this has got to go in the book.

Now when you do, when anyone does the self assessment, there's four categories ranging from AI enthusiast to cautious adopter. And I really think that the, the cautious adopters which are a step ahead of the people that aren't adopting it at all. What do you call the people that are ignoring it? What is it? Luddites?

Ostriches? Like, I don't know, I mean, well, honestly, because they use AI on a daily basis and, and it's almost like calling yourself a purist when, when you're using it without even knowing, you know, so you go to the gas station, you're using it, you, you start your car, you're using it, you, if you have a smartphone, you're using AI. You are an AI user, period. So. And people just don't like if your phone does spell check. If you. I want, I challenge people to go in their phone and take out all the AI help things in their phone. Makes your phone useless, right? Yeah. So very good. It is a thing about educating, which is why I wrote the book, why I, I encourage people to do the self assessment. But those, those that are skittish, if you will, are operating in a place of misk or misinformation.

You know, and here's the thing, you give five reasons cautious adopters should care about AI and the fifth reason. But I think it's the first survival in a changing market. If you're not using AI very soon, you're going to be left in the dust. There's an arms race with our AI and if you're not keeping up, you will be left behind.

Well, it's not left behind, you're going to be pushed into something else. You're going to become a customer service rep instead of a typist.

Yeah.

You know, so I remember, I remember my mom being trained. My mother was a crane operator for automobile manufacturer here called General Motors. And during the 80s there was some legislation that pushed all the jobs out of the country, leaving my mother who was a blue collar worker at its finest. She was making top dollar union wage as a, as an auto worker. She had to go and be a typist because like that was the only female job available.

Right.

So she went off and went into a typing pool to learn how to type. And I remember her taking us to class or whatever. I was still young, she took me. And I remember women literally like hitting those keys so fast it looked like they were playing speed piano.

Oh yeah, Any words?

Yeah, you know, and, and I, I laugh because I watch ChatGPT produce information and, and I, I converse with my GPT day, I call it Charlie. I converse with Charlie every day. And, and what Charlie does is he types just as fast as those women do. And that to me was where like light bulbs went off and I'm like, wow.

In fact, I'm noticing that people are giving their preferred AI a name and I think that's a good move because. And it's becoming more than that, it's becoming a strategist as well. So one of the chapters is about streamlining project management. And you describe yourself as once being a one man band plumber. So tell us about that and how AI can transform project management in the trades.

One of the key factors in the plumbing industry is that you, you can, you are limited to your growth and scalability as to how fast you can get jobs done, especially when you're a solopreneur or a one man band. And so in order to increase your profitability, increase your income, you have to get more proficient at getting jobs done. And there's several ways that you can do that. But one of the ways that AI was able to, to help with that was by, by giving it information on a daily basis for a month, it was able to then give me back an analysis and assessment of my own activity data, entity entry and tell me where I needed to focus. More time here, less time here, you know, and it, what it did was it time chunked for me every 15 minutes, told me what I needed to be doing.

But there would have been a key question that you asked to invite AI for its opinion. What phrase or question the prompts?

Well, I have a, I'll be honest, I have a library of prompts that I've created and it's kind of like a recipe book, you know, kind of like, you know, what grandma would have done if she was baking, you know, different, you know, baked goods. And she came up with something unique. She would write down the recipe to that. She'd do it several times and then once she had that ready, boom. I don't necessarily have to do that. What I do is I tell, I tell Charlie in the role of a, an artificial intelligence expert, I need you to become a AI engineer and engineer the best prompts for blank blank. And so I tell it, I Want you to provide me the best prompts and for writing a book. Or the best prompts for coming up with a million dollar business plan. Or the best prompts for scheduling my. My yoga classes with my wealth growth class. Like I can just tell it whatever I want to by telling it to be the engineer itself.

You know what's curious about that, Tommy? You've given me the next piece is because the previous episode prompt Eng we're talking about, you tell AI like if I want show notes for my podcast, I tell AI you are an expert podcaster and you do show notes and then go on. Now what you're saying is talk to AI and say give me the prompts that you need in order to get the result that I want. That's the next step along in terms of framing it. Well done.

Right now working on kdp. I'm. I'm gonna. I just wrote a third book. I know I just launched my second book, which you haven't even got yet, but my third book in publishing right now as we speak. And I, I told it I needed to create it. About the author page. And since I started a new. I started working with Kalind Klindia, not Charlie. Clindia knows nothing about me as an author, but Charlie does. So what AI is Lindia. Lindia is a. Is. Is. It's. It's kind of like a chat GPT.

But it's the name of an AI. Right.

Yeah.

The ones I know of are Claude, chat GPT, copilot.

But it's. It's a. It's a 4.0 version. So.

Right.

I call it Clindia, I think because I, I don't. It cuts off and it doesn't say quad. So.

I see. So that's your name for it.

So yeah, I, I have, I have. I have names for these things. But the new AI doesn't know me as an author. I wrote the other two books in Charlie. So here I'm working with this one. So I basically told it, well, interview me as an expert, as a publicist, come up with questions that you need to ask me to create a wonderful about me. And so it did. Then I took those questions and I put it in Charlie. Charlie gave me the answers and I gave it back to Glyndy. Now just copy paste.

One of the most valuable resources list at the end is listing different AI tools for contractors. Can I just check? You're just sharing the opportunity. This isn't paid advertising or anything. You're not an affiliate with these tools.

No, not at All. And a lot of these tools are free. And I feel like that's the most important thing is that as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, or just anybody in general, we should have the ability to test something out before we use it. And I think it's helpful to do that so that you can get a good demo out of it before you decide.

Well, getting back to that chapter on the recommended tools for contractors, but let's talk about contractor Marketing Pro. That's one you spent a few paragraphs on. That's AI driven marketing platform. Can you tell us briefly about that?

Right, so AR AI Marketing platform is a, is a, a program that provides the contractors with the ability to schedule out their, their, their social media posts. So like we used to. And here in the States, we used to use what was called the Yellow Pages. One of the biggest marketing tools a business had back 25 years ago was the yellow Pages. It was the, the phone directory. Right, the business directory. Right. And so with that being gone, what it's replaced with is Facebook groups.

Yes.

And so Facebook has this feature called groups. And you can go on and add yourself to local groups, niche groups, focus groups, whatever, and then market and advertise in those groups to however many members are there.

I tell you what, when I'm looking for a local contractor, I go to my community page on Facebook and I can search for, you know, Window Washington, and then that post will come up where everybody's put in all their preferred workers. That's where I got my last cleaner.

I mean, that's an example. That is an example of AI at work right there, using it the way you did. Now when I create a, when I create over in the marketing app, I am able to then put those posts out on a regular basis. That creates the, the, the same, the same type of marketing that a TV commercial had by showing the same ad every, you know, every third commercial break, you know, okay, so you can train it to do that type of, that type of work, which is important to somebody who's just like, as a plumber or roofer, whatever. I'm. If I got glue on my hands, the last thing I want to do is play with my mouse and my keyboard, you know, So I, and then hiring somebody to do that, I almost have to stand over their shoulder as they do it so that they do it the way I want it. Right. So then at that point, you have to be cautious because when you talk to the person over their shoulder, many times those people fall into emotional, the human thing, which is to Become emotional. If you tell, if you're demanding with somebody, they typically react negatively. Right. Whereas with AI, if you talk to it, if you demand it to do things, it performs positively.

Yes, yes, indeed. Let's move on to plumbing project management tools.

Let's see what we, I think you.

Mentioned Procore or Builder Trend.

Let me see.

Specialized advanced scheduling and invoicing.

So what that is is like on our, on our work orders. What we're able to do now is instead of having like a trail of different products that we have to use, invoicing, estimating, etc. I can literally just use my smartphone to take pictures of the job. It will, I could put the notes in straight to the pictures. And then what it'll do is it'll produce my invoice, it'll produce my estimate, it'll produce the schedule, it'll produce the everything, all the documents off of those pictures and my voice. And then I'll have all of my documents sent through the email to my clients and then when they respond and deal with it, it's sent back and it sets in my server so I never actually have to sit down and write an estimate anymore. I just take pictures and say what I'm going to do and it does the rest for me.

And you know what, when I engage a tradesperson, I want before and after pictures as well. So that's an excellent idea. There's H Vac, which is air conditioning and heating and ventilation. There's business management software there. So you've got House Call Pro or Service Titan, which streamline operations and customer service. Can you tell us more about those?

To run a very successful H Vac company, you have to have a good, a good amount of service, service management because you've got a, you're running anywhere between three and 30 servicemen at a time. You know, so, and, and so you've got, when you have a, a staff issue like that, where you got 30 people out doing stuff is very easy for there to be a lag in production or, or, or in, or in service calls where certain population is like the 1 percenters, they're the ones that are doing all the calls while the other ones are taking their time because of maybe pay structure etc. And so what the AI is able to do is structure and track that activity so that the non performers do not get rewarded and the overachievers are perform or are high performers are actually rewarded. So it sets it up where we're able to take care of our staff, not only making sure that they're they're all working and doing something and it's organized but we're actually able to track and reward, you know, high performers and people working inside outside of those parameters that they were hired to. So, and then we can see it as well on our analysis when people fall outside of that. So it immediately is a non biased, hey, we're not picking on you. You're just not performing. See out the door, no hassle, no fuss, no muss, no hr. And so that's what's beautiful about AI it doesn't have a personality to worry about. It doesn't have that bias that people can accuse it of having.

Right, Fair enough. So now roofing project management software, you've got platforms like Accu Links, Accu Lynx Help roofing contractors. These are ones you've tried out yourself.

So Accu Links is, well, what I, what I do is I try them out, I do the demos and so like I, I spent a little bit of time when I was writing this book researching all these different, different opportunities enough to understand what the value of them would be to my, to my readers. And so like Accu Links, I, I as a roofer, like I said, I was out there for, I did that for almost 12 years of my life. And so roofing, I understand it very well and I know that climbing up the roof to measure it properly is very important. And so over time what has been a, what we've been able to do is we've been able to use satellite imagery to give us the opportunity to measure these roofs. Right. Accu Links actually provides us with that data to a, to a, like within inches, used to be within a couple of feet. We had a 15% waste margin, now we're down to 3% waste margin.

Right.

So interesting. We don't even have to climb on the roof anymore. You can call me right now and I can go to any roof in the world and tell you what size it is and how much material you need. I can even probably give you a breakdown and report a 6 to 12 page report that you could add to an appraiser and I could do that straight from my desk today.

Tell us about the financial management and how it logs it locks into AI.

So now we've got AI tools that'll help us put together spreadsheets for investors. Like blue collar industry has become kind of like a high commodity. And so we need to have things like a P L. We have to have IT loss.

Yep.

Financial statements and stuff in order for us to get the loans that we need to continue to operate at the levels we're operating.

So tell us the web link for. For this Stan Store of yours, please, Tommy.

Yeah, you go to Stan store, forward slash. Tommy D. Like, like my name?

Yes. All one word. T, O, M, M, Y, D, double.

E. D, double E. That's it.

And. And it's S, T, A, N for Stan. As in Stanley.

Yeah, like Stanley, but the short version. But Stan Store. And like I said, it's got. I actually have. I give away what's called the Billionaire Behaviors worksheet guide. Yeah, my, my brand is. Is blue collar millionaire. You know, I come from a long line of blue collars, but none of them were millionaires. And I was the first one in my family to get a college degree. So I utilized the ability to. To learn and convert that back into the blue collar industry. And part of my story is that I basically turned $10,000 into $2.7 million in 14 months.

And look, it's time to go. So thank you for sharing your wisdom and your expertise and your AI tools.

No, absolutely, Nina. Thank you for having me.

We've been speaking with Tommy D, also known as Tommy Dobchik, on the Manage Self, Lead Others podcast for people managers. I'm your host, Nina Sunday. We bring conversations with thought leaders who share ways to transform team dynamics. Connect with me on LinkedIn and share what resonated with you today. I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you found value in our conversation, remember to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps others discover our insights on how to elevate team culture. You'll find Tommy D's links in the show Notes for a richer experience, you can catch the video version on YouTube and Spotify. Workplace culture hides in plain sight. Is yours flourishing? Until next time, stay curious and keep wising up. This is Nina Sunday for the Manage Self Lead Others podcast. Signing off.

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