Surviving the AI Revolution: Turning Headwinds into Opportunities

So they just want to. It's. I love that they just, they. It's like, we know that we're going to be late. We're going to tell you we're going to be late. There's nothing we can do about it. We're basically just screwed. There's so little redundancy. It's just such a fragile system that one little thing goes wrong and it's just let the dominoes fall. And it just seems to happen every time now. So I don't know. It's like we used to be good at stuff and now we just suck at it.

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch podcast with your hosts, Ryan Deiss and me, Roland Frazier. Ryan, how are you doing today?

I am. I'm good. I'm sleepy. I got in. This has been the. I did the math. Out of the last 10 times I've flown, two, count them, two round trips went without a delay. The other eight of them had at least one delay on one leg. And last night was no, no exception. I got in well after midnight, so I'm a little bit sleepy.

What kind of delay like, like how long is the average delay you're. You're hitting?

I'd say it's a, it's a good solid at least two and a half hours, unless it's more.

Are they all changeovers, like where you. Where you have a connection or are they direct flights and like, kind of equal opportunity?

Now here's my favorite. This is what I love about it. So I was supposed to fly out at 6:30. I was in. Where was I? It doesn't matter. The. This is when you know you're traveling a little bit too much. You can't even remember where you were. I was in Nashville. Yeah. So I was in Nashville. And, and, and we were supposed to fly out at 6:30 and it was probably around 11 in the morning.

PM. AM okay.

Yes. No.

6:30Pm and I'm going to just say travel mistake. You can't leave late because all of the flights before you have had an opportunity to delay. You got to leave first flight.

Here's what I can tell you. This day wouldn't have mattered because at 11 we get a thing saying you've been delayed in 30 minutes. And then it's like you've been delayed another 30 minutes. And so I keep getting these notices like delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed.

That's because each of those flights throughout the day was delayed 30 minutes. And then you suffer the cumulative result of that.

That is a True fact. Um. Although had I booked it anyway, it was that or fly out the next day, which I didn't want to do. Couldn't do. So. So, yeah.

So that technically you ended up getting back the next day. I'm just saying.

Pretty much I did. Yeah. So they just wanted to. It's. I love that they just. They. It's like, we know that we're going to be late. We're going to tell you we're going to be late. There's nothing we can do about it. We're basically just screwed. There's so little redundancy. It's just such a fragile system that one little thing goes wrong and it's just let the dominoes fall. And it just seems to happen every time now.

But doesn't it.

I don't know. It's like we used to be good at stuff and now we just suck at it.

Doesn't it make you wonder, though, like. So that. That. That's true. And yet Heathrow can be closed for kind of like a day. I think it was recently and I think it was 3 million people or something were displaced by it. And then they catch up within a few days. How. How. Those seem very inconsistent. Like, how can 24,000 flights be canceled and delayed? Let's say, you know, in the United States when the Southwest thing happened and then they're kind of all caught up. Whereas the single flight, they can't seem to get that. Right. Right. It take. It can. I don't get it. So that's interesting to me.

Yeah, it's fragile, but not. I feel like I'm just an old man yelling at clouds at this point.

But.

But yeah, back in my day, um, they used to know how to fly them aerial planes, but they did. It seemed like they generally took off and landed on time most of the time.

Well, on that flight, with all that time, you probably had time to reflect upon. About our topic that we're going to talk about today, and I'm going to start it off with, have you guys noticed that things seem to be getting tighter? That maybe a lot of businesses, certainly within the. The group of people that we talk to, within our masterminds, within our networks are saying that they're either seeing signs of or are fully experiencing a downturn. I know we've talked about this a time or two, but we're going to talk about it a little bit differently this time. And I saw in one of our roundtable members, you, within a WhatsApp thread, you were talking to them about. They were experiencing shortfalls from their. Even their good goals. So they set good, better, best, and they were experiencing shortfalls. And you gave them some advice that I thought was very, very timely for a lot of people that are out there, whatever industry they're in. Do you want to kind of share a little bit of what you said and what the options were?

Yeah, I mean, I would compare what a lot of people are going through with being stuck in a little boat out in the middle of the ocean in a thunderstorm. And that's how it feels sometimes in business. And we've come from a season. Many of us have come from a season where we were in a little boat out in the middle, and it was just blue, clear skies with the wind in our. You know, behind us, in our sails. And it's like, this is easy. Sailing is easy. This is a piece of cake. And now it feels like, okay, the wind is whipping. It's all over. We're getting. We're getting rained on. The skies are dark. We don't know what's going in. The waves are crashing all around us. So what do you do? And what I was trying to say to them is I really feel like entrepreneurs in this time make one of two critical errors. And the first critical error is we say, oh, I know what I should do. I should double down. We should build a bigger boat. So let's invest more. Let's launch this new product. Let's create this new venture. We have to close the gap, right? And this is a really noble idea. And it's. It's. It's something that I think makes entrepreneurs great, is when we face hardship, we say, hold my beer, right? So I think that that's a really good thing. But I'll tell you one of the, you know, it's not always the best time to build a new boat when you're stuck out in the middle of the ocean in a storm, okay? That's not always the best time to build a boat. Now, the opposite that a lot of entrepreneurs do is, is they pull in the oars, they go down in the hole, they curl up in a ball, and they say, wake me up when it's over. And that's all denial. Yeah, just outright denial. Like. And what this looks like is, let's not do anything new. Let's not make any new hires. Let's. Let's completely stop all advertising and marketing. You know, let's just do nothing, hoard everything and hope that we can survive, you know, our way through this. And that also does not work. That's like, if you know anything about sports, like, that is the football, American football equivalent of, you know, you're well up in the fourth quarter and so, you know, you just start playing super conservatively and now the other team comes back and, you know, they stop you because you're playing too conservative. You're playing not to lose instead of playing to win.

I was going to say. So what I want to. I want to say that I think there's. There's one more thing that, that people might do that that is. There's. There's kind of two. Two paths of what you just said. For the second thing, one is we get conservative and cut and do all these things and kind of hunker down. The other one is you hunker down and do nothing. And we had a couple of. Of our clients that came to us having hunkered down for six to 12 months. And because they didn't take corrective action, they were in really, really tough financial situations that we had to find ways out of. So that's like all three of those are challenges, but I think that's one too. So just, just pointing out, wherever you are, if you find yourself feeling that you're adrift at sea and you need a bigger boat, better boat, different boat, or you are going to just cut everything or you're going to do nothing, none of those is the right solution, right?

Yeah, the right solution. What I say is like, you just have to keep rowing. So when you are out at sea and when the storm is there, this is when, yeah, the wind's not blowing you where you want to go, so you get the oars out and you just keep rowing. And so what that usually looks like is you keep doing what you were doing that was working and just accept the fact that it's probably not going to work as well as it was working before. But we've got to stay in the game. That is the most important thing. We have got to stay in the game. And it doesn't mean that we don't try to optimize and it doesn't mean that we don't continue to work hard. But we've got to acknowledge that we're probably going to have to work a little or a lot bit harder for the same or slightly worse results. That is just the season that you're in. The tailwinds have become headwinds. And if you have never run business, run a business in a recessionary cycle, then you, you've never felt this before. But, but I'M telling you, like, they happen, they exist. And your competitors are going to make one of those fatal errors. They're either going to do nothing and you're going to, you know, they're going to curl up in a ball and die or they're going to panic. And when they panic and they try to overinvest or they flail. Because the building a bigger boat can look like overinvestment more times than not. It just looks like flailing and it looks like, let's abandon everything that we were doing that we know works, that did work, and let's try a whole bunch of new stuff with the belief that everything has changed. Therefore, we must do all new things.

Let's.

Let's pursue the glorious unknown as though all these new things that we haven't done before are magically going to perform better than the old stuff. And that only never is the case. If it was that great of an idea, you probably would have done it during the good times.

I think it makes sense to say let's keep doing what we were doing and rowing while we're saying maybe we should work on building a motor. But don't. All in, all out, don't give up on all the things that are. Because even a plane with headwinds is still making progress, it will still get to its destination.

Right?

So that or a boat, I should say, since we're using that analogy. But like, even if the wind's blowing against you, if you keep doing the same thing and you're rowing, as long as there is forward movement, you will get ahead. If the wind's blowing that's so strong it's pushing you back, then you know, it's. You're going to have to do something different too. So either stay the course and you'll get there slower, but if you can't afford to do that because your income has dropped but your expenses haven't, that we get that too. And so I feel like this is what we're doing right now is the. The hybrid answer is keep rowing, don't stop. Also test and find what are the tweaks that can either optimize the rowing or supplement the rowing with something else that will get you there faster.

Yeah, exactly. What we don't want to do is to decide that because what we were doing isn't working as well as it once was, that it is permanently broken, that this boat that got us here is now the wrong boat and we need to build a completely new boat. That is not the answer.

Right?

Keep, keep Rowing with the boat that you got and understand that it's going to be a lot, a lot harder and understand that there's going to be times when, you know, you get some holes in the boat that you got to plug and there's going to be times you need to make some tough decisions. So. Yeah, and there's also going to be times, unfortunately where you're going to have to lighten the load. So you've got people and stuff and things that are on this boat that made sense for the journey that you're on before when, when the waters were smooth and they just don't make as much sense now that the water is rough and the winds are, you know, in your face. And so I have to throw some of these things overboard and that, that sucks. But that's just the reality of the circumstances.

Let's move from the metaphorical analogy to a real life situation with one of our companies. Do you want to kind of share what, what we've experienced in one of ours and kind of what we're doing about it?

Well, I mean, I, I think with, I can speak to this particular client company as, as that we were talking about because, you know, in this case they're, they're talking about they were looking to make a bunch of hires. They were going into this year thinking we, we expect to experience really strong growth. And they came into this year and they're not seeing the growth. In fact, they're seeing a slowdown. So they're saying, do we continue to stick with our, with the hiring plan that we had in place? And the answer at this point is are the people that you're planning to hire going to help to drive new growth? Or are you simply looking to make these hires in the hopes that the growth is going to magically appear? Because very often it's like, oh, we need to make these, these hires because of this growth that's going to come. You're always trying to hire ahead of need, right? And in this case it's like, no, no, no, we might need to adjust our hiring plan because we have to acknowledge that that growth might not be there. But one of the advice that I, that I gave him is, look, if you've already begun to make these hires, it's not always the worst thing in the world to go ahead and make those hires because, and this sounds really, really, this sounds cruel, I guess. But oftentimes if you can bring on new people, sometimes the new people that you get are stronger than the people that you have right now. You know, you're able to attract talent during these seasons where other companies are letting people go. And this is a time where if you're hiring, you can attract some really strong people that may very well be stronger than the ones that you have right now. And so it is an opportunity to uplevel your own talent. And so, yeah, that's tough to let somebody go during a difficult time. But you do need to look out for, for your own, you know, for your own opportunity. But now is the time to reevaluate your plan. And it's why, by the way, I hate annual planning. All everybody who went and they, they built these like 12 month plans back in December thinking like, oh, we had the Trump bump and everything's going to be hunky dory. You know, we're going to be crushing it going into, going into 2025 and they projected out this like massive growth and now it hasn't been here. They're having to completely throw their plans out, you know, out the window. But if what you did, which is what we recommend and what we teach, if you're doing 90 day plans, quarterly plans, then you've got an opportunity right now, as we're recording this to, to do your Q2 plans based on what you now know to be true so far this year. And so yeah, you need to adjust your hiring, for sure, you need to adjust your hiring. You may even need to do a reduction in force, you may need to do that. You may need to adjust your technology spend. I mean, so one of the things that we're taking a really close look on and evaluating is how much are we spending across the board on all of our different tech stacks, across all of our different companies saying, do we really need that? Do we really need that? Do we really need that? Is anybody actually using that? We're not taking a chainsaw to it, but we're absolutely going in there and making as many cuts as we can. Because it is in these times when you want to be ultra protective of cash, any investment that you make, you want to make sure that there is a clear through line to ROI and ideally a quick one that you're going to put it in and you're going to get that money back quickly. I don't believe right now, if your cash position is tight, now's not the time to risk that precious cash on long term bets that may or may not pay off.

So one of the things that we're doing that you're heading at, at one of the companies that I'd love for you to share is leaning into AI as basically a way to not build a different boat, but to make the boat go faster and to serve customers in the meantime. And I know we're heavily AI driven at all of our companies and we're going to do an episode talking about that when we get our, our, our data together a little bit better. But, but the one that you and I were talking about I think is a good one because let's talk about the niche that we're, that that company is in and what's being done based on what we see trend wise and customer feedback wise and how we anticipate that that will change things and then we can talk about how to, how to extrapolate from that to the broader market of companies and industries, how everyone might apply that. Does that, that sound good?

Yeah, yeah. Because I do think it's broadly applicable. So what, what we do at the scalable company is we work with businesses and we, we work with them one on one to help build out and install their company operating system. And so this is kind of their, their central hub for all of the inner workings and knowledge of the business in, in part so the business can be more efficient, be more profitable, scale faster, but also so that the business owner can step away and have a life again. Like that's the basic idea of what we do. And this process of building out the operating system is fairly labor intensive. It's labor intensive on us and it is somewhat labor intensive on the client, on the people that we're working with. It's why it's a, it's a one on one consulting service that we offer. And one of the biggest constraints that we have to scale is just how long it takes to walk a client through this process. So it should take 12 to 16 weeks. In reality, it's like 18 to 22 because we're having to wait. You know, we send stuff to clients, hey, is this what you meant like and to wait for approval? And they've got to review it and they're like, ah, make these tweaks. And so it's, and I think anybody who's any, in any type of services business where you're waiting on client approval or you're waiting on the client to do anything at all. So approval is one thing, but when they actually have to do something, they actually have to create a deliverable and then send that back to you. This is what will delay the process, sometimes months. And so it puts it on pause and it's gobbling up Capacity.

Yeah. Also, you know, remembering back to a business of ours that we discontinued as direct result of that, back in the day, when you and I first got together, relatively, we started a funnel building company to build marketing funnels for people. And we grew it in a few months to a half a million a month in sales. And then we turned it off and basically got out of the business because the clients would not deliver us just the basic information that we needed to be able to build their stuff. And the only other option would be that we did everything, built everything, created all the content and etc. In which case we were like, then we'd like to have 100% of that, and why would we do that for somebody else?

So, like, that was a great.

That was a $6 million business built in, you know, a few months, that then we just were like, the model doesn't work because the client.

Right. And so in this case, you know, a lot of what we're asking the clients to produce, they don't even know how to produce it. So we literally have to teach them how to produce it. They have to, like, watch some videos, they have to show up for a meeting with us so we can explain to them exactly what we need. The frameworks, the models. They go, oh, I get it. Here's our version of that. We go, great. And then we go and put it in, and then we can kind of create the process. So it requires some learning on their part and all these other things. Well, the, the, the realization that we had was if we can shorten this fulfillment cycle, number one, we can take on a lot more clients without having to go and hire a bunch of people. Cause right now our, our head of client services is like, our capacity is here. Our, our account managers are overwhelmed. We need to hire more people. I'm like, we don't need to hire more people. We need to be pushing clients through the process at the rate that we're supposed to be pushing them through. So let's solve for that first, not just throw more people at it. And I'll tell you, two years ago, when everything's up and to the right and money's free, we probably just hire more people. Just being transparent. We probably just hire more people because it's the easiest thing to do, you know, so. But we're like, no, no, we're not going to do that. How can we shorten it? So what we're doing is now, thanks to AI, what we're able to do is instead of asking the clients to learn this Stuff we can take the transcripts of the videos that we would have the clients watch and we can put those videos into ChatGPT to train AI. So now AI is a bigger expert on our process probably than I am. And I'm the one who created a lot of these models and tools and frameworks, but I've also forgot a lot of it. It remembers 100% of it. And so all we actually have to do is interview the clients, just ask them a couple of questions and then our team can now go in. We've created GPTs and so our team now can take the questions that we've got, the answers that we've gotten back from the clients. Based on those, fill in a GPT and, and instead of asking the clients to produce the work, we can produce the first draft of the work in seconds. What used to take the clients literally months to do with a 30 minute interview and then a few minutes of inputs and Then seconds of ChatGPT doing what it does produce, basically an initial draft that would have taken months to do. You now schedule a call with a client to, to review that. They give you the feedback. We go back and forth. What we believe and what it's looking like that we're going to be able to do is to go from eight one hour calls. So currently the process requires eight one hour meetings over 12 to 16 weeks. We think we can get it down to just four likely 30 to 45 minute meetings and we can get it down to four to six weeks. So you're talking about taking this from the original 12 to 16 weeks down to four to six weeks. So cutting it down at least in half and what it currently is cutting it down by a third. So and also having a much better client experience because they don't have to watch a single video, they don't have to do the work themselves. We're actually doing all the work for them because of AI. And I think this is what so many businesses need to look to do during this time. How can we leverage AI to create more efficiencies to expand our margins, especially right now if, if things are getting tight.

Yeah, I think that's the, one of the best points of, of it is, is that asking the customer to do anything or the client to do anything is always a delay point. And, and we're doing the same thing with Epic. We basically built 12 different GPTs that, that do the work for them that they again, like, they don't know how to write a letter of intent, they don't know how to negotiate a deal or create an offer for a business or finance it, or analyze a financial statement. And all that can be done where what they have to do now is either upload documents they got from somebody else or and then it gives them exactly step by step what to do or it asks them questions and ideally not more than five and then they, they get all of the things processed. So I think this is like across the board. One of the biggest challenges, if you've got a professional services company, like I mentioned, the funnel building company, we have a tax prep company, getting the clients to upload all their stuff is really tough. We just had a conversation where onboarding, because sales are made by one company and then referrals are made to the company that does the work and they're on two different salesforce iterations and, and they kind of should be, but. But then we have to basically duplicate the questions that we ask, even basic questions. So we use AI now to connect everything and reduce the amount of input we need from the clients dramatically and across the board. The goal is basically how do we ultimately elevate the customer experience by requiring less of the client and providing more value in the form of being able to do what they. To offer them the value they contract with us for with a minimal effort on their part.

Right.

That's really what this is all about, whatever business you're in.

Yeah. I'll give you an immediate application that I think everybody can. If you're listening to this right now and you have a business, two things that you can do that I do believe will create some additional margin either in time or cash. The first is if you are a services based business, see if you can adopt what we call AI squared because it's the combination of artificial intelligence and actual intelligence. We're not trying to get our clients to interface directly with AI. What we're saying is we are going to go talk to the clients, but then our people are going to go back and interface with AI on our clients behalf. And just that makes our people so much more efficient and so much more effective. The output that they're producing is light years better than what they were doing and orders of magnitudes of light years better than what we were asking the clients to do. And most services based businesses you're asking the client to do something, asking the question like how do we remove all work from, from the clients completely and turn it into a list of questions that we ask them and then work that we do with the help of AI squared, actual intelligence plus Artificial intelligence. So that's the first thing that I would look to do. And just start with, you know, go, go through and map out your fulfillment engine and each step of the process at any point in time, where am I, where are we asking the, the client to do any work and say, how can we turn this into, from them doing something into us asking them questions and then us doing the work with the help of AI? The second thing that, that everybody can do, whether you're in professional services or not, if you have checklists, if you have standard operating procedures, right, if you have playbooks, instead of teaching these to your people and expecting them to follow it, because look, this, they're not gonna, not for any length of time. They're just not. And we do this like, this is what we teach, this is what we do at the scalable company and our own people. I don't follow my own freaking playbooks that I've built. I forget that I made them. If I forget that I've created checklists and SOPs and I don't follow my own best practices, then how can I possibly expect my team to do it? But if you will turn those into GPTs and you will start with the SOPs that you've already created, I believe that just about every SOP can and should be a GPT. And this is how we begin to create a more automated workforce again leveraging AI squared, artificial intelligence plus combined, you know, multiplied by actual intelligence. If we're doing this, you'll find that all of your people, they just get so much faster, so much better, so much more effective, and you don't need to make as many hires. So, so that's what we're asking ourselves. How do these SOPs become GPTs?

And for people that don't have any idea of what a GPT is and much less know how to create one. Any advice on that? Like, how did, did, are you building these? Did you educate yourself on how to do it? Is somebody, did we hire an AI person for three or five hundred thousand dollars a year to build them for us? Are we having an outside agency do it? What, what, what is the solution for people to do that?

So I, I, I believe that right now, if learning some basic aspect of AI is, is an incredibly high leverage skill and is, you know, I think it's, it's sort of like learning to use a computer at this point. Like if you're a business owner and you're like, I don't really think I need to learn how to use those newfangled computer thingies. Like I don't know that you get to do that. So I do think like having some basic understanding of the usage of AI is absolutely critical now in terms of a GPT. A GPT is basically just kind of a pre built, encapsulated. It's like an app, right, that does just kind of one specific thing in terms of the like building that. I haven't built it. Our business partner Richard, like he geeks out on this stuff. He built all the ones that we did. He learned how to do it, he taught himself how to do it using YouTube videos. I don't think it's that complicated now. Do I think it's the best use of his time? No. We have somebody on our team, Kevin, who's now doing all of those. Kevin's a product person. Kevin understands technology. That's on the scalable and digital marketer team. I know on the epic team we've got Matt and Ryan. They're phenomenal at those, you know, at that as well. On just about every team you're going to have somebody who has enough technical acumen to be excited about this. But here's what I'll tell you. I don't know if you've experienced this as well. Every CEO and business leader I know who starts using AI figures it out pretty quickly. Because if you have high executive function, you're going to naturally be good at working with AI because it's simply telling somebody what to do and asking probing questions, right? So if you have a high executive function, then you're going to be good at prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is just having high executive function. The people who really fear AI and who suck at using it are very often individual contributors who just want to be told what to do. If they have very low executive function, then they're typically not going to be very effective and at using a wide open AI, but they're going to be just fine utilizing a GPT that just walks them through step by step. A closed guided process. Which is what a, which is what a GPT is. So long winded way of saying, I think that every, everybody needs to learn some basic usage of AI. Just like you had to learn the Internet at some point. But that's not very much in terms of the creation of a GPT. You probably don't need to do it. Somebody in your team should.

I agree with you. I think it just depends on you if you're, if you're naturally curious about this and want to go and you know, building a GPT you know, even the first one I built took, you know, five minutes. It's like, it's very simple. It's, it's almost like a macro. I was trying to think of the simplest way to describe it, but you're really just taking your prompt and saving it into something that you can name so that it can be used over and over again. That's, that's effectively what it is. And it can get as complicated and as code written as you want it to be. Interestingly enough, you know, only using ChatGPT or Claude, I, and you know, Ryan, that works with me and Matt. We've all built actual code programs without using code, like in languages we don't know how to do because we asked chat GPT or claude and it gives us the actual code. And then we post that, you put that into Python and you have to, you have to be comfortable not fearing breaking things, which I think is what holds most people back from tech is that they're just afraid. Like, I don't, I don't know what that gobbledygook on the screen is. So I'm not going to post it into, you know, a shell that has access to things in my computer that can blow it up, you know, and it almost never does. It does occasionally, but, but if you're comfortable with, with the ability to break things, you will, you will do well. And I love what you said about the executive function because it really is just asking great questions. And great questions require typically, the solicitation of feedback built in, the establishment of some role to define the scope of the question, a task that you want to accomplish, and that those things actually shape the way to build a perfect prompt. So I think that everyone can benefit from taking the time to learn how to really prompt. I mean, you can use GPT just by saying a simple question that's one sentence long. But if you want to get like an amazing, amazing result, you're going to be, your prompts are going to be, you know, like a page long, you know, almost every time to really get the most out of it. So I think it's good. But I do think that there's probably somebody in your life that already knows how to do this and just figure out how to get that. They're probably already on your team, they're probably already in your life, you know, friend, family member or something like that to get you to get what, what we're talking about here, because it's not terribly complex. And if you're not doing it, you're going to get left behind. The story I was going to tell real quick was my father. And my father is, you know, 91 years old. He is still a practicing tax attorney. And he just never, like back in the. Was it the 50s, I don't know when the typewriter was invented, but like, he had a secretarial support staff in his law firm where they were back in the days with the dictaphones and they would dictate whatever he wanted and then it would get edited and come back to him and, you know, he would send it back and they'd make the edits and he'd make one more and then he'd get it back. And I always felt it was a terribly inefficient process. And so I learned to type because a. I was interested in computers, but also I felt like I wanted to be able to do it myself because it seemed like I could, if I could type well, to give it back and forth and have the delays and edits and all that just seemed incredibly inefficient. Unfortunately, he never felt a need to learn how to do that. And then as computers came in to being, he wasn't curious and didn't believe that he needed to keep up with tech because he's a brilliant tax attorney and tax strategist. And that unfortunately let him get completely left behind. Technically, he was practicing himself. Then he came to work with my firm when I moved to California and worked there for several years. When I left the firm, he stayed, but he was still not working with computers, not having like, writing up by hand what he wanted to write up and was able to do that for several years and have a good income. But unfortunately, now he's been completely left behind and the firm doesn't send him as much work. I'm not there anymore. The firm doesn't send him as much work because it's a very long inefficient process. And he's just. He's just been left behind, not keeping up. And while you might not aspire to work when you're 91, you know, I don't think he planned to either, although he still loves what he does. But it, it has cut his income, you know, from first in half and then, you know, by 60% and then 70 and then 80 to where he's just become obsolete technically. And, you know, I'm not saying this with the. I'm going to use words that are stronger than I'm trying to communicate, but it's a burden on the firm to meet his Needs because he chose not to keep up. Technically, if you do not embrace computing, the Internet, AI, you will find yourself in that position, I promise you, because it's you. This is where everything is. This is where everything is going. It's only going to evolve more and more and more and you'll get farther and farther and farther behind. If you don't at least get familiar with it, it should become easier and easier and easier to use. But like a rejection of it, like he rejected typing man. Don't do that. Just don't. You're going to be making a huge.

Mistake you'll regret, especially this one, because it's made for you. If you're an executive, this technology is made for you. It is exactly built just for you. And if you're wondering, okay, how did we get here? Didn't we start off talking about rowboats in the ocean and economy? If you need an excuse to do it because they are connected. You know, I loved what you said. You don't need to build another boat, but you do need to perhaps, you know, build a, build a motor on the end of it so you don't have to row as hard. I think AI will be the motor that lots of businesses attach to their boats and that is the thing that propels them through this season. And look, maybe this is all overblown and maybe we don't go into any type of recessionary cycle or dip during this time, you know, in which case, fine, great. But if we do, I firmly believe that the businesses that win and that are better for it on the other side, because there will be another side. There always is. There will be another side. And the businesses that are better for it will be the ones that keep rowing. And the ones who are really better for it are the ones that attach a motor to it. And I think that AI is that motor. And so looking for the ways to do that and using a recession. If you're scared, use that fear as a reason to double down on AI to throughout your business. That's what we are doing. And I know, I know I'm doubling down. I know I'm looking. I'm getting way more creative than I was last year. Let's just say.

Yeah, yeah, it's really cool to see. Awesome.

Well, hopefully that helps you guys if.

You are finding yourself in that situation. Don't give up on what is working and what has worked just because it's not working as well. But do innovate and try to figure out in terms of your resources, does it make sense to add the people or the capex or the other things that you were thinking of adding given where you are right now. Maybe it's a chance to up level your people like Ryan said. Maybe it's a chance to find people that you wouldn't otherwise be able to attract because other businesses are letting them go that aren't dealing with this. But don't give up that primary engine that you've got that has fed you and kept you going just because it's slower. And it's probably just slower because it's going through hard, you know, rougher seas or ice at this point. And you just need to have like, what's the, what's the thing that can optimize what you've got? Because that's what the extra engine is. That's what a sail does to a rowboat.

Right?

It optimizes the propulsion by drawing on the benefit of the natural force of wind when it's blowing in the right direction or even when it's not. You can tack and get ahead, um, but you don't stop rowing just because you've got the sail and you don't not build the sail because you're committed to rowing. It's possible to pursue two courses at once. So I think it's, take that philosophy. Don't give up on what's working, optimize. Look at your hiring and capital expenditures and say, is it a chance to uplevel? Should I take this? Is it going to be a spend or as Ryan said, is it going to actually drive growth and revenue going to drive growth in revenue? It's a no brainer. I think it's a yes. If it's, if it's not because it's dependent upon more customers or more revenue that you might not now be likely to receive, then don't just batten down the hatches and say I'm going to hire ahead and hope it's going to work. Don't do nothing. You've got to be proactive through this whole cycle or you'll find yourself worse off than when you went into it. But if you are proactive and you do the things that we talked about today, I think you actually can get ahead. I think you'll, you'll come through the storm, the high seas, the ice, whatever. It is a better business and, and you know, be in a better place than you are right now. That, that's my, my summary. Two cents. Anything that you want to add to that, Ryan?

I'm just reminded of that scene in Forrest Gump. You know, when, when you got Forrest and Lt. Dan out in the shrimp boat in the hurricane, right? And he's like yelling at, you know, God and all this stuff. And it turned out that theirs was the only shrimp boat that survived the hurricane because they went out and all the other shrimp boats were destroyed. And next thing you know, they've got the biggest shrimp in business because they kept rowing. And so I think if you need an analogy and if you needed inspiration, go back and watch that scene. Maybe don't yell at God. Let's not blaspheme team.

But also don't be one of the boats that got destroyed.

But yeah, don't be, don't be one of those that stayed in harbor and got destroyed because of it. But yeah, so that's, that's what I got to say. So it's all I got to say.

I love it. Awesome. Well, hopefully that was helpful to you guys. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with other people. We also appreciate your reviews, but really the sharing is what drives more and more people to come in and get value from this. And if you've got comments, thoughts, feelings or emotions about the things that we talked about or you want to share with us, hit us up on social. We are there. We are easy to find. And we'll see you next time on Business Lunch. Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck.

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