Adapting and Thriving with AI and Business Innovation | Jen Gaudet

What's the stuff that you have to do in your business that's taking up the most time, that's not really impacting the bottom line a whole heck of a lot, but it's a requirement to fulfill like client fulfillment or like the. It's the easy what's going to give you the biggest bang for the buck, Free up the most time, the most energy or impact your bottom line the most.

Our guest today is a television show host of three shows including the very popular Power CEOs. She's an international best selling author, international speaker on four continents. She spent 20 years in sports medicine and sport performance working with the highest, most highest performing athletes, elite athletes, Olympians all across the planet. Now, as a human performance specialist and a master transformational coach, Jen got a empowers high impact individuals and groups to elevate their life, their health and their business. Jen, so excited to have you on the program today. I know we're gonna have a ton of fun. I've been looking forward to this for a while.

Same. I'm really excited to be here too. Always a pleasure.

Now you know, we talk about challenges that people experience. As a coach you're hearing the challenges of people all over the map and there's always similarities and themes that occur. You know, everyone has their unique story, there's unique circumstances, but there's these themes and things that develop that you've over time. What I'm curious is to rewind the tape a little bit and go back to that point where you were still working with high performing athletes. Very, very involved. You know, everyone wanted to, wanted to coach with you, but you were kind of feeling that pressure and you know, really starting to get burned out by everything. What was the pivot point in the change for you to start getting more into the type of coaching that you do today?

Yeah, that's, that's an excellent question. Thank you for asking that. And this was what the driver behind my book was. Honestly, I hadn't taken a vacation in a long time. And for those of you who have any idea of what it's like to work with athletes, you travel with them, you work 70 hour weeks, you're up super late, you're always there putting your clients first. And then when you're in charge of a team, you're putting the, the patients or the, or the athletes first and your team first. And so like you fall, like some people talk about being on the back burner. No, you fall off the whole, the whole stove. You're on the floor, you're crashed and burned. So. So when you're sick, you don't take care of yourself. When you have pain or anything, you don't take care of yourself. And that kind of culminated over time. I didn't take vacation, and my husband and I, we decided we were going to take a vacation. Like, we found this. We planned it out. It was, like, a big deal. It was going to be our first real vacation in, like, ever. So we fly halfway across the world to this tiny private island for this, like, rekindling or sitting at dinner. And he. He was like, I don't think this is working anymore. I think that we need to consider splitting up. And it was, Richard, the biggest gut punch that I've ever had. And it wasn't because there was not love. There wasn't because whatever it was, because I didn't have time. I didn't have time for my family, and in time for my health. I didn't have time for my spouse. And so that moment was really pivotal for me because I had worked so hard to be the expert and the best of the game and to be that life goal. Right? You set those goals at some point in time, usually other people's definition of success. And I was unfulfilled. Like, it didn't require thought to do it anymore because I've been doing it for so long. So, like, I wasn't really challenged. I was showing up and, like, I was pouring from an empty cup. And so we came back from that, and, you know, for everybody at home, we're married. We have a better relationship than we've ever had. But I had to make a change. And I knew I had to make a change because I'm so passionate about what I do, and. And so I needed to. To find somebody, and I hired a coach to help me to set boundaries myself and to learn what that was like and to help me through that process. And because it was so life transformational for me to finally, like, pick myself up the floor and then put myself onto the back burner first because, you know, small steps and then move it forward that I realized I had to leave because there was no doing it halfway for me. It was all or nothing. So I had to make a change. And I decided because it was so pivotal for me, I went and became a master transformational coach because it changed my life so much, and I thought it would help me with my own work. And it just sort of evolved into, you know what? I can help other people do this same and recognize the same. So, you know, we learn a lot when we're burnt. Like, when we're at that lowest point, there's not very far you can grow. Everybody thought I'd lost my mind. They're like, why would you give this up? But the reality was I gave it up for my health, for my family, for, for my relationships, because that's what matters most. And, and Richard, you said something when you opened up this question, you said that it, it's something that a lot of people face is burnout. Entrepreneurs face burnout all day long. It is the number one reason why people seek me out. They seek me out for two reasons. One, because I, I'm really good at business and so I can help them grow the, grow their business very rapidly. But because I've been through it and I've spoken on stages on five continents and I'm, I don't, I don't hold punches. Look, this sucks. You can't do this anymore. You cannot continue on this path. You have to make a change. Because if we don't pour from a full cup, our business suffers. We can't lead. So I, I really appreciate you bringing it up.

Well, I think it's interesting. You know, you talk about, obviously the experience that you yourself had. And you know, when, when you, you've, you've had an experience as an example, you know, if you've, you've climbed a mountain and then someone else says they're going to go and do that hike, you can relate to that hike and you can share some things with them because you've been there yourself. Oh, watch out for. There's some switchback, like you can get specific about components of the journey. And I feel like you're going to bring that same element of your own experience into those coaching sessions, into the, into the recognition of the people that you, you meet with. And there's an automatic, almost a kinship of people that seek you out because they know, you know, Jen's not gonna kind of BS me around this situation. She knows what's going on. She's been down that path and she can speak from experience.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, it, it pulls on people's heartstrings when they feel like you can relate to them, when they, when you can relate on that emotional level. Like, let's, let's just be real in business. I grew up, I'm Gen X. I grew up with. You leave personal at home and you, it's all business at work. And I, and I was that person in sports medicine. But I've learned that you don't have to be that person. And actually, to be the best leader that you can, you have to be able to talk about the emotions and empathize with your teams so you can clear the emotions. If you don't clear the emotion, we can't move forward in a way that. That is powerful. And so I think that when you're able to actually get vulnerable with other people and with your clients, specifically as a coach, what that does is that gives them permission to get vulnerable back with you. And I think that's where the real power is and the real transformation is. Is when. When we share as coaches. And I'm sure you see the same thing as you move in transformational spaces as well. When we're able to share our pain points and how we were able to navigate through them and connect on that emotional level, it gives them permission to do the same and they feel more comfortable. You know, I just. I feel that's really a superpower that. That coaches have been through. It can. Can. Can have that level of.

Of rapport when you speak about, you know, creating that comfortability, but then there's an air of uncomfortability that happens when we're in business. And so you shared, you know, the first impetus of you transitioning from being an amazing coach in one area to becoming an amazing coach in another. But despite all the success that you've had, there's still things that get in the way of that success. So take us forward a little bit now to a more recent time. We had the pandemic. Of course, everyone knows that that impacted a lot of people's livelihoods and their business. And you had some specific things that happened for you. How did that experience show up and create some challenges in your life?

Well, for starters, I. I was. I was heavy in coaching and consulting space. And when the world shut down, there was no more events. 90% of my lead generation came from speaking. I spoke all over the world. I had an international bestselling book in August of 2019. I was. I was literally a travel warrior. And it filled my programs that had me in demand to speak at companies and corporations. And so 90% of my marketing was events. And all of a sudden, none of that. We're not traveling, we're not seeing people staying in your house happened. And at the same time, as my lead generation dropped off, I had $300,000 walk off my books in two days because companies canceled their consulting contracts. These were contracts. One of them I had worked on for 18 months to go through the vendor to go through the sales process. And we were set to start delivery like April 1st and we shut down here March 17th. So in addition to all of the lead generation stopped, the business that I had to support my teams with for the next six months also dropped off at the, at the same time. So, you know, as a business owner, for me, I take responsibility for the, for the, the families that I feed. Like when you have employees, you're in charge of that. And it was a really, really, really hard time because I watched 18 months of work literally on those, on those, on one of those contracts, nine months of work on the other evaporate overnight. And I had nothing to fill it with because I couldn't go get on a stage and shift over towards more one on one coaching, if you will. So it was kind of like a one, two punch and that's hard. And I'll tell you, Richard, I literally, and I was an athlete. I am a high performing human being. Nothing gets in my way. If I set a goal, I'm going to meet that goal. It was so bad that I had my first ever business pity party. I literally laid in bed for four hours and I gave myself that space and I said, you know what, I'm just not doing anything. I have to like figure this, process this because it's grieving. It's like you built this million dollar, multimillion dollar business and now like your whole quarter went away and everything subsequently went away. I like gave myself that space and said, you know what, I need to just grieve the loss of this and understand that all of that work maybe flush down the toilet, we have no idea. It's outside of my control. But I'm going to like sit and process it so that when I get out of bed, and I stayed in bed until I promise I process it when I get out of bed, I'm going to be able to let the script and figure out what the heck I'm doing moving forward. So I think there's a lot of lessons there, but you have to feel it like when, when stuff happens, it happens all the time. You work so hard to build it and it takes something completely outside of your control. Kind of like we're looking at now with economics at least here in the US like we've had out of control inflation, we have high interest rates, hard to get money if you're a startup. And, and so we're facing economic headwinds right now. It's the same. You have to be able to process what's not in your control and let it go so you can show up and, and figure out how you're going to pivot and move forward.

Well, and speaking of pivoting and moving forward, we're going to talk about that as we come back after these important messages. Have you ever wanted to be a part of a network of visionary entrepreneurs? People who get you, who understand you, who think differently? They're actively going out and making things happen. They're making the world a better place. They're creating incredible change, incredible innovation. And they're having discussions about how to make the world a better place, how to create a bigger, brighter, better future, how to take what they already know, combine it with what someone else knows, and make something grand. Well, you're in luck. There is such an incredible network. It's the epic fit Network. You can go to theepicfit.com to learn more. Apply to be a member of this incredible organization. I'm a member and I love it. It's been fantastic. And I can't wait until we have more amazing people just like you joining this incredible group. We are back with Jen Gallego talking about her incredible experiences here, overcoming some major, major issues. We're just diving into just how, how bad the impact of the pandemic affected her business. And, you know, I'm curious, Jen, you know, you had this, you call it the pity party here. You allowed yourself, you said it probably set a timer for four hours and said, okay, we're good to go. When that forwards is up, I'm back at it. You were ready to hit the ground running and starting to make some kind of pivots and some change. What were some of the first things that you did to try to resolve this, the circumstance facing you? I mean, for anyone watching, if you had $300,000 worth of contracts that disappeared in two days, I think it would be a pretty impactful experience.

Yeah, it was, it was my entire quarter's worth of revenue. But the, the reality is, is I was not heavily on social media. I had literally that year started to bump social media up the totem pole because I was starting to realize that I needed that. And, and P.S. i was, I'm allergic to tech. I was in sports medicine. I was on fields with athletes in clinics helping them recover. Like, I hated EMR and having to put notes on a computer. So, like, having to be on social was, was horrible for me. That's why I chose events as lead generation. So the first thing I did was I went on online, I went on Social media and I talked about it and it was uncomfortable because I literally and I know you opened this up with I have three television shows. Yes. I still to this day don't like cameras. I don't do a lot of interviews outside of of my television show. But because it's uncomfortable for me and I don't like to be that center of attention. I'm the coach in your corner, I've got your back, I'm the support, I want you to shine. And so I did the uncomfortable thing and I went live and I said hey listen, this is really stressful in so many ways and here are some of the things that I'm doing to mitigate my stress. And I literally went live and I went live regularly on social and people immediately tuned in. I didn't realize how much of an audience I had built because I really wasn't that active. But when I started becoming active that was something that gave me an outlet and and there had a audio only app that people were on. It was called Clubhouse at the time. I would go in there and I would have conversations and it was kind of magical because people were craving connection. And honestly I'm going to say this. I think the pandemic happened for us. I hate the way that it was handled. I hate that they locked us down and there's. We're dealing with mental health issues still to this day from, from lockdown, however, I believe that we were heading down that dissociated kind of our heads locked up in technology space and when we were forced to utilize tech to connect, I think it changed the way we as humans view connections, how we want to do business, how we want to show up. Because now you see there's more work life balance, there's more people interested in connecting and an impact. And I think that was a shift for us globally. But that's what I did. I asked myself what can I do to have the maximum impact? And I got on social and I talked and I went to other people's stages and talked on Clubhouse and I put things together and mental, I put a mental health summit together. I co facilitated that with some other people because it was important to me that we still showed up. And I know this is true. The more value we put in the world as entrepreneurs, the bigger problems that we solve. The money will always follow, the business will sort itself. So I was looking for what strategically can I do, how can I get that audience and what can I add value that people will start following and want to approach me from a Coaching and a consulting standpoint. And so that was the biggest shift. And it took that pity party and that stepping back and that letting go and saying, look, this is outside of my control. And I took a breath and I coach people all over the world through their isolated feelings. And how can they reconnect when they're locked down? I'm in Texas, and we were only locked down for, like, eight weeks. And it was. We were able to get back out, but some people were not able to get out for a year or better. So I did a lot of coaching on the personal side because it was a very big struggle for people, and that was my pivot. So, you know, if you're listening and you're going through something and you have to pivot, and look, AI is causing this pivot right now. Knowledge base is going away. Marketing has to change. Everything that we have gotten used to has to shift. We have to leverage the technology. If that's the case, how can you add the biggest amount of value? How can you connect with humans? Because I believe that AI is all about getting back to being more human. Like, what is that in your field or what you're trying to do or that problem that you're trying to solve? And so I think that was really my step back and I think strategically, so it was, how do I get in front of the most amount of people because my lead gen's dead.

It's interesting that you mentioned that and doing it strategically because you had a reason to start implementing some AI things strategically in your own life. Last year. You had a bit of an issue where you managed to conk your head and get a pretty nasty concussion. So how does the, The. The. The sports medicine person who's now coaching people about their health deal with a concussion in business? What were some of the things that happened to you in that scenario? And how does that kind of transition to a bit of more of an AI direction in your own business?

Yeah. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna back up a little bit and say that my business coach since 2020 has told me that I need to get over my fear and allergy to tac, and I strategically ignored him until I had to get on social media at the pandemic, and then I was concussed and had to look at other options. But when you have a concussion, you think you're good. You don't realize the deficit that you have. As soon as the, like, major headaches go away, you don't realize you're not laying down new memories. That you're not functioning on all cylinders. And I was literally unable to do anything for almost two whole months. I couldn't think, I couldn't function, I couldn't walk without getting dizzy. And so I. It forced me to stop. And the first thing that it did for me is I recognized the gaps in my business because I had righted it since the pandemic. Things were going great. I was all over the world again doing cool things, and all of a sudden I. I literally couldn't do anything. So I saw where the gaps were and what team members were truly capable of when it all fell on them. I realized that I wasn't letting go of certain things and empowering certain team members to grow. And. And it helped me to see where the holes were in my business retrospectively. So I was able to fix that. But the really crazy thing, Richard, was about two months in, when I was able to, you know, like, walk and I looked normal again and I could start getting back to a little bit, a semblance of normalcy. I thought I was good. And it was three months after that that I found hundreds, I'm talking hundreds of emails in my drafts that I assumed were sent. And I had been writing the emails and responding and just not hitting send like it was the basic process things. And then I was like, oh, wow, okay, well, that's a lot of lost business, and that's a bad, damaging brand situation because I do what I say I'm going to do, and I'm the one who dropped the ball. Like, I was writing these people off for not following up with me after I responded, but they never received my response. So it actually was on me. So, like, it was really interesting being somebody who knew I was good from a physical standpoint because I dealt with this for 20 years and then realizing I really wasn't good. And that was where I spent a lot of time looking at how can I automate things, how can I catch errors, and how can I make more efficient some of the processes that my team members were not filling some of those gaps. And I leverage technology to do it. So it kind of was like a big. A big evolving situation. And now I have a lot of AI leveraged in my businesses. I wouldn't go into business without asking myself, how am I going to leverage that? And a big part of my consulting is AI strategy for everything from micro businesses to PE firms. So it literally has changed because I had that and because I was forced to leverage technology and learn technology to survive, it's changed How I do business altogether.

It's so interesting that, you know, you, as you identified, you've had a coach for a really long time, and they've been, you know, prompting you and suggesting you need to do some things. And we all have experiences where we, we know something, but knowledge does not equal understanding. And it's one thing, you know, there's the expression that knowledge is power. I think that knowledge, when applied and actioned in your life can become powerful, but knowledge on its own is just a bunch of knowledge. And so I recognize that although you, you knew that, yeah, you had to start implementing technology, but there's probably a bit of an aversion to it because it wasn't really your wheelhouse, but to be an experience where you had to start implementing it because of what transpired. So how would you look at back in some of these experiences and thinking about how they've added layers of change in your journey? You mentioned that the pandemic happened for us to some degree, and what it created. What's the power, the advantage of being able to look back on some of these things, take reflection and say, how am I moving this experience forward into a positive future?

Well, I think, Richard, the, the first thing is everything happens for us. Everything. If you, if you hold onto the belief that everything good, bad or ugly that happens in our life happens for us, then you're able to take that kind of positive outlook and find opportunities. And anytime that there is a challenge, like I look at this right now, we're in economic unrest. We're in political unrest right now. Like, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world. And where there's uncertainty, I see opportunity. I could wallow and I can say, oh, poor me, and I don't know who's going to be the next president. And I don't know, like, all of these things that are outside of my control, and I could let that stifle me. But as an entrepreneur, I think it's really important that we ask, well, what is this creating for me? What can I do? What is within my control? And how am I going to find those opportunities to move forward? And so I think that I'm gonna be first to say I make big mistakes because I fail big. Like, I, I'm a go big or go home girl. I'm an all or nothing girl. I said that about sports medicine. I had to leave sports medicine because I couldn't define that line in that, in that role because I was so passionate about it. I'm really passionate about what I do now, but I do it within a filter of boundaries. And, and I've learned where to say no and I've learned how to say no in a way that builds relationships and I've learned how to really lean into what do I want to contribute to the world and use that lens on everything. So is there an opportunity and is it alignment with how my gifts, my strengths, and how I want to show up in the world? Yes. No. If the answer is no, it's off the table. I don't even consider it further. And so, you know, if you're looking at this and you're looking at failure and you're afraid of failure, you're doing it wrong. We cannot move forward if we don't have fails. If we're not failing, we're not showing up big enough in the world. And so, like, my fails are big. They're pretty epic. We could go on for days talking about the failures I've had in businesses, but the reality is, every time I have to look at it from, from a what is this, why is this happening for me lens and how does it fit and how do I want to show up moving forward? It's who am I becoming and how am I going to get there? So that's kind of the lens I look and it's the lens that when I coach clients that we take as well. In fact, we just talked about this on Monday as we start to set our strategy for 2025.

Amazing. Well, we're going to come back and talk about strategy and the opportunity that AI presents when we come right back. There's certain moments in our life where we know that things are going to change. That happened to me in August of 2009. My life completely and totally changed from forever for the better. I learned about this incredible concept called the infinite banking concept. Becoming your own banker. It was created by R. Nelson Nash. Nelson became my friend and my mentor. I loved him dearly. I now have the blessed life of being able to teach his incredible message, his incredible concept to the people I love to serve. You can learn all about it by registering for a free webinar@learnibc.com Go ahead, take the initiative. Start your learning journey now. The power of AI at your fingertips. How exactly can you start using AI in a strategic and powerful way? And more importantly, how do you even begin doing that after you're recovering from a monstrous concussion? Well, we're going to find out and Jen's going to let us know what her steps were when she first realized she needed to clone and duplicate herself using the power of AI technology. What was the first iterative step that you started to take, Jen, when you realized you needed to start doing things differently to fill in the gap from where, I guess your memories and things that weren't allowing you to proceed forward from the concussion circumstance? How did you realize that this AI is going to be the future of, you know, revolutionizing your business personally?

Well, I'll tell you, it started by learning and testing different AIs that were out there. We were talking before the show about some of the things that I implemented. One of the first things I implemented was a note taker. And I had played with OTTER previously, like the transcriber previously. And I. I played with some of the technologies before the concussion because it really got public. I think chat came out in November or December, and then my concussion was in, like, March. And then, you know, it wasn't really available to the public until the end of the year. But I started with the transcribers because I realized I was. There was gaps. I wasn't remember things. And I have. So for those of you who don't know, I have an eidectic memory, so if I see it, I remember it. But I was unable to lay down any memories at all during that time. And when you're concussed, you can't focus. So if we were having a conversation, normally I would be taking notes furiously just so that I could pay attention, because I'm adding anyway. But when you're concussed, it's to a whole other level. So I couldn't pay attention enough to take notes that I could see it so that I could remember it. And I wasn't able to lay down memories. So I relied very heavily on testing all of the transcribers that were available out there. And that's where I started. So I read about them, I tested all of them, and I chose the one that gave me the format that I could deal with in my adult brain state. And so that's where I started. And then I asked myself, okay, this is great, but you still have to deliver services, you still have to answer emails, you still have to do all of these other things. And I own. I own multiple businesses. I think when I was concussed, I was at like seven businesses at that point in time, and a TV show on top of it. So I was taking notes with the transcriber and having to read it immediately before having conversations. So that was the first implementation. And if you're Looking at this and you're going, oh, I'm scared of this. You have to start. The only way to get comfortable is to start. Um, and then when chat came out, post bait, like when it came out to the whole public, I started leveraging that and putting it in. Because when, when you're concussed, even post concussive thinking a lot gives you a headache and you get to the point where you can't find words. So I would literally talk to Otter. Otter would transcribe it. I would copy a piece in the chat and say, please make this into a letter or an email or a script. And so I was leveraging it very early for that purpose. And what that taught me was that it doesn't matter what's happening. I could be driving, I could be dictating, I could make. I can make protocols. So what did that translate to in business and all these gaps in our SOPs? Because I was filling the gaps before and, and we didn't have SOPs in writing to train people. So people didn't know what they did not know because it was in Jen's brain. And they would just go to Jen. Like, I had all my team members trained to just go to Jen. Well, that's grossly ineffective when you have a concussion and you can't remember when you're Jen. So I started like dictating to Otter and then putting it in chat GPT to have it make sops so that everything was there so that if anybody had a question, I now trained them to go to the SOP first and only come to Jen after the fact. And so I started closing gaps by testing with the things that were available. And, and that was really powerful because I overcame my fear of technology. I mean, I was resistant, Richard. Like, I didn't. Let me tell you who Jen was. I did not have a smartphone until the iPhone 5 was out, and I didn't have Internet in my house. And so my daughter was 16, which was when the iPhone5 came out. That's the first time everyone in sports medicine thought I was Amish. They called me names. They, like, they made fun of me because I still had like the flip phone and they had been on multiple iterations of smartphone. So, like, I was so anti tech, it's not funny. And this forced the issue. And the only way to get comfortable is to do it. You have to do it. So just reading and learning is, is fine. But for, for me, I'm a kinesthetic learner, so I had to test. And so that's what that meant for me and for my clients. Because I'm, I'm, I'm constantly talking about AI. I talk about AI on LinkedIn every single week and have done so for a year and a half now. And why do we do that? Because you have to start somewhere. If you're afraid of it, learn about it, read about it, test it, test it in the way that you feel comfortable. Don't put any private information into a public app and you know, nothing that's proprietary, but you have to start using it to get comfortable with it. And most people do learn better when they do and they experience and they, and they play with it to find what, what works for them. So that's kind of the breaking it down on a, on a meta level, how I did it. I don't know if it's helpful for everyone who's watching, but I mean, that's, that's my recommendation. Just get in there.

I think those iterative steps are really important. And, you know, you kind of started off talking about using a note taker and so using, you know, Zoom meetings. And of course, at the time of this, you know, this is still in a, you know, this is after the pandemic when this happened to you. So I've been basically operating a Zoom or a virtual based business in Canada for probably close to 15 years. Not quite that full time, but a lot of it. And although I used to have an office and I had people come to me, you know, living in, where I used to live is Edmonton, Alberta, which is, you know, a northern place. And you know, when it does get cold and there's snow on the ground, one of the worst things you can do is actually drive on the roads because it's, it's dangerous. It can be very dangerous. And so I said I would just tell my clients, look, just get home to your family, get a snack, pop yourself in front of the computer. There's no need to drive. You know, get home, get changed, have a shower and drive to my office. I don't want you on the roads. I just want you safe at home with your family. We'll figure it out. And that really helped me start to implement the technology side a lot more. And then when the note takers came on, I started implementing. You mentioned Otter. That was one of the first ones I started using as well. And they really have revolutionized the way that I conduct business and they've helped me pay more attention and more focus. You talk about taking notes when people are doing things. I still do that. But now I have the note taker taking all the notes and I get to take the most important things, I get to isolate things, and it allows the thinking process to begin a little bit more. I'll share another quick example with you that maybe would help our viewers. You know, I was at an event and we had about 300 financial professionals and we did an exercise where we got them to manually collect their feedback on what we, what they wanted us to deliver to them. How did they want us to support them in future initiatives. We took all that feedback, we hired a virtual person to enter it all manually into a spreadsheet, and all that data got plopped into Chat GPT and we could see trends and themes and it could help set the vision for the next three years of what we wanted to do to support that membership. And that was a way that we could take all of that data and distill it very quickly into something that was actionable, that we could move forward. And I wouldn't have thought about that. It was another team member that actually thought, hey, let's use ChatGPT to solve this. Meanwhile, I'm going through all these manual spreadsheets, you know, and so there's so many ways to use it. And if you aren't even asking people around you, a great way to start, I think, is to start asking the people you know around you, have you used it and how are you using it? And that'll start opening pathways to your brain to discover what might be possible in your world.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, it's, it's about overcoming fear, right? We're always afraid of the unknown. And so we have to just break that barrier in whatever way we can, right?

Yeah, totally. And so once you started to do this and your team, you, you work with the team, how did. I'm just curious what started to happen with them as they saw you creating SOPs, and you were probably discussing with them how you were going about doing that. What started to transpire within your organization when it comes to utilizing these types of tools?

Well, it was really funny because the first thing that happened was they're looking at, oh, okay, we, we have to change the way we communicate then. Because they were so used to, and access to me and I realized that that wasn't working and we, we shifted that. So it became kind of like a little bit of a friction point because they didn't feel like they would have as much interaction with me because they weren't coming to me for everything. So we had to solve for that. And we created like a daily communication Google. Like we use Google. I just used a Google sheet. And anything, any questions that they had, anything that was happening, they would put down on that. And then we would have like an end of day or a beginning of day huddle. And we, we played around with times because I have people in different time zones and things. And we found a time that worked and now it's once a week. We have a once a week team huddle. It happens usually on a Wednesday because that's a slow day of business. But we, we have a once a week touch base where we cover everything and we still have that kind of transactional log for the questions. But the funny thing that happened was when I was creating these SOPs that they started asking how are you doing this so rapidly? And I'm like, well, you know, this is the process. And so what if you were to do this and take everything that you're doing so that I don't have to think about all this and do all these things? Because you've changed some things with some efficiencies. Because our teams do things more efficiently than we do. If we're not hiring people smarter than us, we're doing it wrong. So I hire. My COO is way better at implementation than I am. I am a strategist, I am a visionary. I am like that 30,000 foot view person who can come up with the plan, but she's the implementer and the communicator to everyone else. So it empowered her when I showed her what I was doing to then take that. And of course then that, that, that is an example for the clients. And so it's trickled down into all of our clients now. All of our clients are more effective and efficient and are using these processes. And it was an, it was an empowering moment because it fostered a different kind of communication. It wasn't them coming to me because they needed something. We were coming and we were having more and more growth focused conversations in our weekly huddles as opposed to day to day. I don't know what am I supposed to do all the, all the transactional stuff. So I got completely out of transactional by automating this stuff. And you know, it keeps going on and on and on and on. But once you get that, then you ask what's the next thing I can do? What's the next step? I mean, I created an avatar. I had my avatar deliver my group coaching session. I have a group of people, some of Them have been with me for three years in group coaching and, and even my COO was in the meeting and I had my avatar, Jen, deliver the content that is on my private LLM, trained on my stuff, and it delivered laser coaching. 96% accurate to what I was doing. And at the end of the meeting, I came off of my. I'm always in the meeting and two on two. Two screens, two. Two logins. And I came off and it was me. And I'm like, thank you for testing out Jen. Jen. Generative gen. And what did you think? And nobody realized that it wasn't me delivering the session. So what's possible there? And I of course, like full disclosure, like the, the one answer that was not what I would have coached around. I did do that once I came off camera and, and so that everybody got what they needed and I promised I would never do this to them again. But what's possible when you clone yourself.

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Well, it was really funny because the first thing that happened was they're looking and they're like, oh, okay, we, we have to change the way we communicate then. Because they were so used to having open access to me and I realized that that wasn't working and we, we shifted that. So it became kind of like a little bit of a friction point because they didn't feel like they would have as much interaction with me because they weren't coming to me for everything. So we had to solve for that and we created like a daily communication Google. Like we use Google. I just used a Google sheet. And anything, any questions that they had, anything that was happening, they would put down on that and then we would have like an end of day or a beginning of day huddle. And we, we played around with times because I have People in different time zones and things. And we found a time that worked. And now it's once a week. We have a once a week team huddle. It happens usually on a Wednesday because that's a slow day of business. But we, we have a once a week touch base where we cover everything and we still have that kind of transactional log for the questions. But the funny thing that happened was when I was creating these SOPs that they started asking how are you doing this so rapidly? And I'm like, well, you know, this is the process. And so what if you were to do, do this and take everything that you're doing so that I don't have to think about all this and do all these things because you've changed some things with some efficiencies. It was an empowering moment because it fostered a different kind of communication. It wasn't them coming to me because they needed something. We were coming and we were having more strategic and more growth focused conversations in our weekly huddles as opposed to day to day. I don't know what am I supposed to do? All the, all the transactional stuff. So I got completely out of transactional by automating this stuff. Then you ask what's the next thing I can do? What's the next step? I mean, I created an avatar. I had my avatar deliver my group coaching session. I have a group of people, some of them have been with me for three years in group coaching. And even my CEO was in a meeting and I had my avatar Jen deliver the content that is on my private LLM, trained on my stuff and it delivered laser coaching, 96% accurate to what I was doing. And at the end of the meeting, I came off of my I'm always in the meeting and to onto two screens to two logins. And I came off and it was me. And I'm like, thank you for testing out Jen. Jen Generative Gen. And what did you think? And nobody realized that it wasn't me delivering the session. So what's possible there? And I of course like full disclosure, like the one answer that was not what I would have coached around. I did do that once I came off camera and so that everybody got what they needed and I promised I would never do this to them again. But what's possible when you clone yourself and your clone is trained on your thought processes, your sop, how you laser coach all of your content for years. It just creates a lot of opportunity. And my team now thinks outside of the box. They're like well, if you can do that, can we do this? And I'm like, I don't know, why don't you test it and try it? And I've empowered them to test as well. So, so the way that AI really expanded in all of the businesses was empowering the teams to play with things in a safe manner according to our policies and in when they found something, give them the credit for it, how they train everybody else. And that's what has really escalated everything efficiency wise in the game. And you know, that's, it's an empowering thing. It's allowing them to think and to make those decisions pretty powerful.

I love what you said about, you know, in your, in your coaching business and how you're meeting with clients and how they used to come in, you know, a little bit, be a little bit more aimless into the meeting and now they're coming in a little bit more attentive with, hey, I'm doing so and so and you know, with AI and there's a little bit more almost traction it sounds like, because of the implementation that's taking place. What I'm also curious to hear a little bit more about is now that you've been doing this for a while, we've seen a little bit of how it's transitioned in your personal business practices and how you're elevating your team by giving them that autonomy to be able to, hey, look, before you come to me and ask about a bunch of things, have you tried doing it in one of these other formats and then is it trainable or repeatable that you can bring to the team? What I'm curious is what have you started to see happen with the clients that you serve and coach in their businesses? And I know you're invested in a few different type of AI platforms. You can speak about that a little bit. But what are some of the kind of, I guess what are the little things that people are changing that's making a really big, you know, it's moving the dial, making a big impact on efficiency or reducing time and then contrasting that. What are some of the big ideas that you see people going for now that they wouldn't have done before AI was a part of their practice?

Those are excellent questions. And, and so I mainly coach in the professional services sector. So the majority of my clientele are, are medical, legal, financial engineering. So I move in that space and I have about 20% who are trades. So the impact is a little different in the professional services as opposed to the traditional services. So I'M going to address the professional services first because that's the bulk of the business. What we have seen is, I'm going to just give an example because we've done this and we've encouraged this. One of our clients has 17 clinics. He was able to take the work of seven and a half full time employees who were simply fighting insurance by operational efficiencies and API connections, utilizing AI. And so he's growing as he grows. He didn't let go those people, he repurposed them to people first. So now the front desk is actually getting back to greeting the people who are coming in and people feel like they're welcome instead of them being on a phone and on a computer and not making eye contact. So remember I said I think AI is here so that we can get back to being human. What has happened is that there's less turnover, there's more happy employees, which yields happier clients. And customer satisfaction in the United States at least is a big component of reimbursement, especially in a hospital system or a hospital owned clinic system. That's part of your pay and your reimbursement is customer satisfaction as well as your clinical outcomes. The other thing we've seen is errors of detection, error detection and clinical notes and, and less denials initially on authorizations for insurance because the AI is taking the notes and going, wait, did you mean this code? Because according to what you said here, this is the traditional code, whether it's the ICD10 or the CPT or whatever, the billing code. So you're now not having human error, trying to figure out what's the right code to make the submission and getting denied initially. So there's big efficiency happening on the things that everyone hated to do. No one likes to deal with claim submission and so it's that must process.

Faster for the person who needs the service as well, which increases a happy customer at the same rate.

Yes. Improved clinical outcomes, improved customer satisfaction. So you're seeing people restoring faith in the process that has been quite frankly lost. So like that's something that's happening. Another thing that's really been powerful with private LLMs, really and a couple of other automated technologies like legal discovery can be done in minutes Instead of spending 40, 80 hours, you've got a, you've got a medical negligence potential case and you've got a 4,000 page file. The AI can read it, summarize it, pull out exactly where it got the summary and say yes, you have a case, and here's why. And here are the Points. And here's the summary, you know, and that would be 40, 80 hours of junior associates. So what you're seeing is that mundane task work that no one loves to do that burns people out. We started on burnout. So I promise I've got a point in this. We're now full circle, taking out the things that are burning people out and getting them back to doing what they love so that they're really passionate and energized and everybody wins in that circumstance. So those are some of the things that we are seeing now that people are overcoming their fear of artificial intelligence.

And when you're in a conversation with someone that you're coaching with, how, you know, again, strategy, often it's easier to see things for other people than it is to see for ourselves. When, when you're, they're. You're learning about their business, maybe the law practice or medical practice or like say, trades. We talk about that. We'll get to that in a second. But how are they. Are you asking about what problems are frustrating them? What's dragging efficiency down? Like, where are you losing customers?

What are the bottlenecks in your business?

Yeah. And so, and so then, you know, they mention a few things and it's like, cool. Have you tried AI for that? Have you tried this for that? And then they're going to start saying, well, what do you mean? How does that work? And then that's where you're able to kind of expand on. Well, here's an example of. And you can, whether it's one you've used personally or another client, you can start to get them to see. We take this piece and this piece and this piece, we feed it this kind of data. We make sure we custom design a few prompts so that it's asking it consistently. And then we just, we just feed in the new information and let it go to work. Like, is that how you're having those discussions now?

So the answer to that is sometimes. But really on the AI strategy side, it's an operational look at the business. It's a, where are your bottlenecks? It's what are you hoping to achieve? What goals are hoping to achieve? And then I do an impact matrix. I am a huge fan of data and impact matrix. What's the stuff that you have to do in your business that's taking up the most time, that's not really impacting the bottom line a whole heck of a lot, but it's a requirement to fulfill, like client fulfillment or like the, it's the easy what's going to give you the biggest bang for the buck, free up the most time, the most energy, or impact your bottom line the most? Those are the three things that we look at. And then we look at how simple of an integration is it? And the first AI we implement is always the simplest integration that frees the most amount of time because it costs less that way. And then we use the ROI in time on our people to solve other problems that people must solve. And then we use the ROI on the bottom line side of that or the resource side of that to put the next integration in. And we look at it at the impact matrix. What's going to make the most impact? Impact whether. What's the small needle that's going to move the biggest doors? And a lot of times people put it in and they use it in a way that, you know, someone has done a really good sales job with. It's next to never that it's almost always an operational efficiency.

Yeah, amazing. Well, I know for myself I've, I've built a custom GPT I'm still working with, but it's, it's taken something that takes me on average between two and three hours down to around 20 minutes. And it's the thing that frustrates me the most, which is writing insurance cover letters to explain to an underwriter why they need to approve, you know, Bob Jenkins's insurance case because of all these reasons and, you know, rationalizing it so the fact that you can have something else produce that mental energy and just give you the summary or the Kohl's notes version to determine, well, do I need to put more energy into it now or can I just move on with my life and go to the next thing? That's really, I think, where we're gonna start to see speed of implementation take place. And you've given us several ideas as to how that's happened in your own business and a couple great examples with some clients. So, final thoughts on that. Jen, what was it? What would you like to summarize for anyone who's looking at implementing AI into their business or exploring that use case somehow into the future? What would you like to leave people with in regards to it?

Know where you're going, figure out what your bottlenecks are and, and whether it's an impact matrix? Do an assessment and understand where your time and your team's time is going to and what are the things that are most easily repeated and automated. And do that first. When you do that first, it gives you the mental bandwidth to actually look at the bigger picture applications in AI and to really look forward and say, okay, what's coming down the pipes? In medical, they're robotics mixed with AI. Like, the doctors are going to be literally just talking to an AI because they're not going to be operating the tools anymore that are way more effective and efficient than what we can see with our naked eye, for example. So what are, what is coming down the pipes? Once you free up that bandwidth, you can start to look forward and say, okay, what's going to be the industry disruptor moving forward and how can I learn about it and get that edge? Because it's about the edge. AI is about the edge. Anybody who wants to bury their head in the sand is going to get run over. If you're a business owner, you have to leverage the technology. You have to leverage the technology, otherwise you're going to be left in the dust because it's saving 40 to 70% of operational capital right now.

So what an incredible summary. Thanks so much, Jen, for being on the program. Absolutely loved it. Incredible stories and incredible actionable advice for all the entrepreneurs to take out. And for those of you watching, make sure to tune in next week as we continue to find out all the ways that entrepreneurs are innovating and overcoming the major challenges of life.