Dave: 0:21

Good morning, everybody. It's another Friday morning, which means that you get to spend it with the famous Dave Warden with Triad Business Solutions and Duan Bernhagen, our partner with Web Design Davo and a few other joint ventures that he's a part of. But if you are a business owner or maybe you're an aspiring business owner, this is the podcast for you because what we do here is we walk through some experiences that we've been through in our in our businesses, our business journey, but also things that we've helped our clients with as well along the journey. So if you're looking for some insights, some you know fun quirks that we we talk about, or just unlimited, ununscripted podcast content around business, you're in the right spot. So grab your favorite cup of Joe and let's jump into the show. Dwarne, welcome to another one. And for everybody, we apologize for being a little late today. We're about like 15, 20 minutes late. We were just troubleshooting some things going on with one of our systems and and you know that we both work with, but on a regular basis. Dwarne, you know, kind of runs for his clients and trying to troubleshoot and get through all of that. And so it was a fun morning so far. What would you say that, Torn?

Duarne: 1:29

Well, that's one way to say it. I reminded myself why I have a team to get on the tools for that sort of stuff these days rather than myself. And unfortunately, they're all you know off work in now because we're finished for our week. It's Friday evening, and it's not the sort of thing I want to call them up to take care of. So I'm letting them enjoy the weekends. So it reminded me that I can get back on the tools when I need to, but I'd rather not get back on the tools if I don't have to.

Dave: 1:58

Yeah. It's one of those things where you'll drop in if you need, but that's why you have a team for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. But for before we jump in, so just as everybody knows, if you have questions or if there's something that you want us to either help you get over or answer live on one of these future episodes, feel free to drop your questions down below. We definitely pay attention to that. If it's not live during the session, we'll definitely answer it into a uh a future session. So make sure you're you're you're sharing your questions with us and we'll get those answered. On the second note, if anybody is interested in becoming a guest on one of the future podcasts, we have a registration feature now. So I will have that calendar listed down below as well. So you can schedule out one of your you can schedule to be a guest on our podcast, and we'll talk about some specific topic or education piece that you help your clients overcome. And if you have one or two business obstacles that you want to work through live on air, we'll definitely be able to talk through those as well. So we'll be sharing that link down below. And if you want to listen to past podcasts, maybe you this is your first podcast listening to us, and you're like, hey, I want to get some more of y'all. You can either look up our YouTube channel, Triumph Business Solutions, or and on there you can go to podcasts, the podcast link and watch the video. Or if you're more of an audio person, you can go to podcasts, podcast.triumph business solutions.com, and you can listen to all the audio recordings of all our prior episodes. So thank you for supporting us. We look forward to uh providing you with some great and amazing insights. So with that, Dorne, you were mentioning right before we went on air that you kind of recently were having a talk with your bro. So why don't you give us kind of the the overview of this story? And then I'm gonna I I haven't heard this yet. So this is my first story, so we'll get a live reaction for me.

Duarne: 3:57

So shoot it. Well, we've been talking, you and I, about AI chatbots and agents and all this sort of stuff for a while, and we've touched on voice agents now as well. Correct. Surprisingly, I was chatting to my brother who runs a staging business, excuse me, back in Australia, and he was telling me that he's got a supplier that he normally calls, one of his supplier vendors, and it's always a little bit awkward. They've got an offshore support team, customer service team, who were just a little bit slow on the uptake and getting him the information that he needs so he can move on and get on with what he did, right? Well, he tells me that he was 99% sure he was talking on the last call to a voice AI chatbot. And I was like, Oh, here we go. He goes, but I was actually happier with that chatbot and got my answer quickly, got off the call quickly, and even felt compelled enough to thank the chatbot at the end of the call. And he said the chatbot had a name, I can't remember what he what the name was, but he said they'd given it a name, so it was like it sounded like a real yeah, I was talking to a real you know person, it was a conversation. He said, I was really quite impressed. He said, but the thing that really caught my attention was I felt inclined to say thank you at the end of the call because it did help me with my problem, it got me through that answer for me really quickly, and he said, and normally in a similar sort of scenario, he'd been with people helping him through those problems, and it took longer. And I was like, Wow, that's an interesting point of view. Now I'm no brother is not the most technical person, but he's he's a very smart person. So for him, his time is worth money because he's got a lot of things to do in a day and a lot of things to fit in. So he was real it was he was really quite impressed. So it made me think a little bit more about what's going on, and I've been doing a lot more looking into use cases around this, and I was quite surprised how many businesses have actually started to utilize AI voice chatbots for their inbound business requirements. And I thought, you know what, that's actually not a bad idea for a lot of businesses that are small teams, have a lot of people, like we're talking about before, on the tools. So if your team's mostly on the tools, it's actually quite a viable solution. So that was that was I was curious what your take on that was, and if you'd had any experience recently in this.

Dave: 6:36

So I I haven't had any experience in terms of like talking to a full AI, although there's probably some times where I think maybe I am, but but you're right. I think if I think if you train it up properly, I mean it can save you time. I actually had a conversation yesterday as well with another individual who uh does a lot of AI. And the the kind of use cases that it makes sense to use in terms of like an AI receptionist or following up right on you know, individuals that maybe have requested a link to your page or you know, some information about your business, like it's just another touch point. I think we've talked about this you know prior podcast as well, that you know, you have to make sure that you're touching down, especially if it's a cold individual, like from like 15 to sometimes 50 touch points in order for them to like feel that you're an expert. And touch points just mean like you know, a connection request, right? A message from a social media account, right? Seeing your post on their thread. Those are touch points, not necessarily you have to like call them and actually talk to them 15 to 50 times, but having an AI chatbot follow up with some information, you know, automates your process. You know, maybe you send out a proposal and you have the AI chatbot, you know, follow up in 24 hours, you know, on that person's account. And and it the the example that I brought up, and I can't, I couldn't remember the actual video that I watched, but it was, and I have to go find it because I I want to watch it again. But it was a guy talking about setting up AI receptionists as a chat option through AI. And what he did, and it was very simple, and it was pretty crazy and mind-blowing that when you when you think about it, is you know, somebody filled out a form with their their name, their phone number, their email, as well as their business website. The business website was the important piece of this. And so immediately after they submit the form, they get a text message, hey, just confirm you are interested in this, right? And you're ready to get some more information. Once they click confirm, right, or they send back confirm. Now the first step of AI goes and literally scrapes their website, right, to learn about the business. And then the second step to that is then they literally go out and create an AI chatbot based on the information that has been scraped off the website. Correct. Then after that, the AI chatbot calls the user at their phone number and then literally immediately in like a minute is talking to an AI receptionist as if it was theirs that knows about their business. Think of how mind-blowing that is that it can happen that quickly.

Duarne: 9:28

That's really clear.

Dave: 9:30

Yeah, and then it's like, hey, if you want some more information about this, let's let's schedule a time, right? The chatbot's trained to schedule a call to then build it out a little, right? Because it's not that's not the final version, it's just this is how it can be done, and you're literally talking to somebody that quick. It's pretty crazy.

Duarne: 9:47

That is really crazy because, like, for me, like I love that use case. I was really compelled. Like, I started doing a bit of my own research into this again, and because I looked into this 12 months ago, eight months ago, six months ago, and honestly, just wasn't there nowadays? I'm seeing it's actually probably very close to being there. Are the voices perfect? No, they're probably not at that same level as what I'm used to with expressive tags and communication and conversation that I'd like, but it's getting a lot better. And one of the scenarios that I was looking into was if you're a service-based business, what's the one thing that happens with a service-based business? People look you up on Google Business, they start working their way through the listings on the Google business. And if you don't pick up your phone, they're probably moved on to the next person trying to get somebody. So if you're a car detailer, if you're a trash removalist, if you're a house removalist, any of those sort of services that someone just wants now and just wants to call and talk to you. And it's not a big sales cycle, it's just a hey, do you do this? Can I get this done? Or even if you're a barber barber, right, cutting hair, like or a hairdresser or a salon, and you've just got people on the tools doing the work, and rather than having a full-time, you know, receptionist handling all these calls, you can have an AI chatbot that handles the voice calls now, too. And can, hey, yeah, sure, what you know, what type of hair do you have? Like, oh, it's coarse, no worries. So with coarse hair, we recommend a little extra time because you know it's a little bit more difficult to cut, and we want to take the extra care. You can put all these prompts in to give that sort of attention. And I think I shared a video with you earlier this week where you were like, I watched this a couple of days ago, and was an example of a tattoo parlor that had introduced a voice AI and meant that they had all of their people, artists actually working on people and it getting all the information and then putting people through to a booking agent in the business who just took all the booking details and scheduled it in. Because yes, you can do all of that scheduling, you can do all of that redirection, but sometimes they chose to have a little bit of personal touch on it. So I thought that was really clever.

Dave: 12:34

Yeah, I mean, I I ultimately when you when you think of the use cases, and I've was kind of saying this to the the lady that I was talking with yesterday about AI, and it's you know, we've I think we talked about it last week about potential the AI bubble, right? You know, people are possibly saying, you know, two business is the dot time bubble. But ultimately the the AI services, the AI businesses that are going to, you know, I think make it past if a bubble does happen, are the ones that do this. They add convenience, right? They add and and they make it easier for the business owner to be a business. And you can have a two, three, four-person business and act like you're a 50 person because you're able to utilize some of these aspects. And something like this is if you're not invasive, right? A lot of people they've they've they're calling into you, and it's just like I'm your router. Think of how many times in the past people have had routing systems built into their phone system. You know, yeah, we built one in you know, and I worked in corporate. We were building one when with you know, if that press, you know, one for this, or two for you know, IT, three for admin, four for fine.

Duarne: 13:41

How frustrating did I get when those systems like like those?

Dave: 13:44

But you don't have the exact option that you want, and you're like, I don't know where I need to go. I want to do that.

Duarne: 13:48

You ended up in the wrong queue, and you're waiting to the end of the explanation to hit that back button. Totally. I used to I used to build hosted PBX system phone systems for people. So being through all of that before, and it's funny, you just reminded me I used a system on 11 Labs today. I was doing some voiceover work that I needed to take care of for a course that I'm working on. And last time I used it, it was about two weeks ago. I was using the expressive tags. Now, what that means is I had there was like little bits of code I'd put in between all my words to tell it how to, you know, say it, the expression to use. Anyways, I must have tried it like three days ago, I tried it and it just kept putting out the wrong that it just kept saying the expression, it was saying the code part that it should be ignoring and using as a prompt. And I kept trying it and trying it, and I thought maybe there's a bug with it, I'll come back to it. Came back to it today, did it again, and like, oh, I was getting so frustrated. And I'm like, I've looked up and it says there's a feedback button. So I've hit the feedback and like this is really not good. This is happening again, blah, blah, blah. And then next to that, it's got a button that says talk to Eli. And I'm like, what? Click that. It is a voice AI system which initiates a what looks like a phone call, puts you straight in touch with somebody, and says, Hey, how can I help you? And I'm like, Well, it enabled my microphone, and I'm like, Hey, look, I'm having this problem with my expressive tags. There seems to be some sort of issue. Did you change the the way this system works in the last couple of weeks? Uh, yeah, we actually did. We did away with the expressive tags. We now suggest that automatically. And I was like, oh, okay.

Dave: 15:35

Oh, really? It would have been nice for you to tell me.

Duarne: 15:37

And I'm like, yeah, we do that automatically for you now. The latest you know iteration actually removed the need for having that. In fact, if you have it, the system's probably going to try and read it. I'm like, okay. So I went through and changed everything I just did, tested it, worked fine. And I'm like, you know what? I would have sat there trying to get a hold of support, sending an email, waiting for that to happen. I got onto this live chat bot, had a quick conversation. Within 30 seconds, I had my answer and I was able to move on with my day and finish my task. And I looked over at my wife at the time, who's sitting next to me working on something, I said, Did you hear that? She goes, Yeah, what was that? And I told her, and she said, Well, that was handy. And we went on our day. So there's real use cases that people are using this stuff for. And you can train these to look at your knowledge base. If you're an IT company, if you're a like we're talking about before, uh, you know, any sort of business, you can just teach it what you want it to do and the information to use, and you know, get it to grab that information and be a little informative, which is really quite interesting. So I think there's a lot of great use cases out there, and I know you and I had a little conversation about it after I mentioned we're like, I think this client could use it, I think this client would really be able to use it. We hadn't we had written it off six months ago because it wasn't there, but it's at that point now where it is, and I know some people are looking at using it for outbound in Australia. There's actually a use case I saw where one of the very large telcos has partnered with a bank and they're actually sending out a thousand automated voice chatbots to do outbound calls uh to handle these outbound calls with known scam phone numbers so that they actually tie up those scammers on these AI calls so they're not actually attacking real customers uh in Australia. I heard that last week and I was looking at it, that's really, really clever. And they're saying that some of these calls are lasting up to 20 minutes, so they're pretty convincing models, and they've got all these different personas and you know, voices, and they're having conversations with overseas scam call centers where they're actually allowing them to tie up those individuals and stop them from scamming their customers. And I thought, what an interesting use case. And I hadn't really thought about it until just now. How this is another great use of that sort of technology, uh, not in a way that I would personally, you know, have thought to use it, but still it's a great technology for the outcome.

Dave: 18:25

Yeah, I mean, I I mean when you when you when you think about it, you know, I I like that one because obviously everybody hates scam callers, right? Uh uh that's an interesting kind of one that they focus with. But I I would say uh, you know, find find a way for you to possibly use it in terms of think of something that you need to do that maybe you don't. And and it does and it shouldn't replace a hundred percent of your interaction. And that's the other thing that's pretty interesting about some of these is that it can then communicate to you if you need it, based on you know, human interaction. And you know, so let's say you need to make calls, you know, to follow up on maybe you send out proposals or you send out you know chats in terms of like you you're connected with somebody on social media, and this is where it's it's it's interesting. And I guess this is where the legal side comes in, and I don't know any of this yet, so this is not legal advice or anything when it comes to anything like that. But I would say, like, if you're connected with somebody and their phone number is public, you should be okay to call them, right? And and do some sort of cold outreach like that, and but maybe a lot of people don't have the time. And so you can use a you can deploy it in that fashion where you're outreaching just to set a time on your calendar, right? So you create your cold call script or your outreach script, your prospecting script, however you want to call it. And the idea is just calling business owners and giving them those through two to three pain, you know, related questions, right? The emotional related questions that if they have something about this, let's have a conversation. And the chatbot can schedule that conversation with you, and you know then it's a warm meeting because they've answered yes to the questions that are the emotional questions that essentially you can help them overcome. And if somebody's no, right, okay, the the chatbot doesn't have its feelings hurt it, hangs up and goes to the next one. But yeah, it's public, you're not you're not dialing private information. You're not if it's a public number out there, you can open it up and call it and ask, hey, are you feeling some of these ways? Right now, again, if I'm wrong in terms of legal, I'd I would hope that you know somebody would let me know that so that we can you know make sure that we give the right advice. But in in this aspect, if it's a public number, you should be able to call it. You know what I mean? So if somebody has a number on their public profile, then that's saying that to me, that's saying you have the right to give me a call. So if it's on your LinkedIn or your Facebook or your lineable profile, whatever, or any other social media network, and you have your phone number there, you should be able to, you should be able to cold call. And so same thing with your AI. And I think now the biggest thing is that I think it has to say, like, hey, this is Dave's AI assistant, right? Or you know, this is TriF Business Solutions AI assistant. We are giving you a call, you know, quickly to you know, see if you had you know problems around you know, cash management or you know, you or tax payments in terms of like do you have savings and reserves in your business, that kind of thing. I think is where the last thing that I read, but I obviously the legal side of this is also changing just as quickly as the the human side of it in terms of you know how it sounds and all that. So it's it's expanding rapidly, which is which is if you're not staying on top of it, you you could be months behind very quickly.

Duarne: 22:20

Yeah, and look, I like I think there's a definitely an opportunity for outbound related work. For me, I think there's enough opportunity for a lot of businesses just on the inbound work to think about right now and be surprised at what they can actually achieve with inbound, just handling and you know, helping those inbound. I remember years ago, we used to spray a lot of virtual assistants. We'd had a shared virtual assistance service and it was a reception service where we'd just take in calls from different business owners who didn't have time to answer the call. And we would take the messages, send them through, let the business owner know that someone had called and what it was about, and uh help them out. And it was just we we our team would have to be a little bit familiar with the client's website or products and services, but we couldn't, they couldn't be all over it because there was like you know 10, 15 clients that we were handling at the same time. It was just a small little office setup we had. But with these AI systems, you could have hundreds of businesses set up, handling all of their inbound and have them all trained up on everything you could possibly imagine that's available and directing, assisting, providing some advice and suggestions. You know, imagine if you were at a winery and someone called through and was like, hey, look, I've got a cooking a lamb roast on the uh Sunday night, had some friends around, just wanted to know what would be the best wine that you have here to match with that or pair with that. Well, based on that, I would suggest this, this, or this. How many friends are you having over? Maybe you want to look at maybe three or four bottles for that, so you can all yeah think think about like the the ability, you know, and obviously the the beauty of it is that as the more and more that they it it interacts, right?

Dave: 24:10

It saves the cut it saves the conversation, it gets better and better around your business. And and even for something like that, it could just be something of like, you know, what and you tell it once somebody you know wants to order, if you don't trust it yet, then just say this is when you hand it off to you know the live number. And so then your live team is only taking orders, you know what I mean? Yeah, it's it's it's a beautiful aspect of it. And oh, absolutely.

Duarne: 24:38

I mean, imagine getting to that point where it's recommending that you might need three or four bottles and then says, Hey, look, we actually have a special right now on a case of six bottles. Would you like me to drop you through to one of our team members so you can they can place the they can process the order for you? Sure, that'd be great. And then bang, they get through, and then suddenly they're not having to do that whole rapport education spiel, which you know it's definitely needed and it's definitely helpful, but it just helps your team. Like the amount of times, like I can recall I used to work for a large appliance center retail outlet back in Australia for a while. The amount of calls that would get put through to our department where it's like, hey, I'm just checking, do you have this TV in stock? We'd have to look up in the system, see if it's in stock. Or, hey, I just wanted to check this TV, does it come with XYZ? Yeah, it does. Or, hey, look, you know, what time do you close today? And like these questions that we you can have very easily in a data file, which could have been answered and wouldn't have required pulling you off the floor, someone else taking the call at the counter and then putting it out on the PA, transferring it through, that person not picking up the phone because everyone on the floor was busy, and then repaging and get everyone back in again. That customer sitting on the line, still waiting for the information, where they could have got served and out of the call in under a minute in most cases, and got the information they needed, and they would have felt happy about that.

Dave: 26:14

So I mean, it's it it's it's now again as we said it said at the beginning. You as a solo business owner or like a one or two business owner team can now become a 30-40 person team because you're not wasting your time on mundane tasks that aren't going to be right revenue revenue generating. Same thing with with cold calls, you could have it trained that you know if somebody says, Well, I want to talk to I want to talk to the owner or something, like it could be transferred to you, like that's the beauty of it. So just think of that, like the ability there. Obviously, I don't want to talk like the whole show about like the AI voice chat. There's so many options out there, and you know, if you just go to YouTube and and search, you know, setting up voice AI. And or there's there's and if you don't want to set it up, there's plenty of companies out there that could you know that already has this kind of live and ready to go. Venom, because there, I I saw that there are some other scam ones from before that were actually scamming people. But you know, do do your research in the platform, you know, have demo conversations, be willing, you know, don't sign a long-term contract with anybody and just test it out, you know, and and make sure and when you're doing the demo, you know, ask about like what are the legal, you know, what are the legal grounds around it. And if a company doesn't know it and they decide, oh, there is none, I I would be a little you know concerned about that because there are some legal you know requirements of voice AIs, I believe, you know, if that you should be aware of. And again, this is not legal advice. This isn't telling you to go do it and then go don't go say, oh, those guys on business unscripted said I could do whatever. That's not what we're saying. We're saying be smart.

Duarne: 27:53

Yeah, be smart, be vigilant. And look, the other thing to keep in mind is shop around a little bit because you've got all you can eat plans, you've got per minute plans, you've got per call plans. It can get very confusing very quickly. And that's something that you and I found when we went out and started looking into this over the week. And it's very much something that you should come with eyes wide open and definitely don't sign long-term contracts. Anyone who's trying to sign you up to a 12, 24-month contract, run the other way because the technology is changing too quick, which means the pricing can change very quick. And in most cases, pricing will be reduced over time rather than going up. So if you don't feel like you have to lock yourself into thousands of dollars every month to be able to use this technology, because it's gonna make it more affordable for you and better as well, right?

Dave: 28:48

And and the advice that I would say too is start small, right? Yeah, test it. You know, just like you would do with any ads, right? You you want to test like A B, you know, and you can have you know maybe two or three scripts that you're testing over a small group of people, then you're able to kind of one figure out you know which script is working the best, right? And then you know, kind of duplicate that one and and run with it and increase this the spending at that point to your larger group of you know phone numbers or contacts, etc. So that'd be you know, piece of advice number one. And then number two would be, you know, we've talked about it in the past, you know, Alex Rabose and the business models and all of that, and and so much that so many people don't even know about it that we've we've actually started designing you know support system around this is is taking his lessons, right, his teaching, and then actually then implementing that for business owners. And I think when you think of cold calling like this, or you think of any sort of ad spend, right? So many people nowadays just focus on, well, here, send me your information, I'll call you, right? Or I'll give you this free lead back then, right? And when you think about that, and I've heard this from so many people, and I I I fell, you know, I I did this, right? So I can talk about it is I was like, oh, here's my free ebook, or here's my free this, or here's my free that. Well, so many people are doing that nowadays, and and and so everybody just kind of clicks, right? Especially when it's in Facebook, you know, Facebook will pre-populate your data. So you can just click, boom, and then you know, they get whatever free, you know. So you're not and the bad side, the downside of that is that you're paying money to be in front of these people, and you're you're not getting anything in return unless you actually close a lead. And so essentially, when you when you think of that, right, you know, most of the time, I would say 90% of the people that I got leads from Facebook were not even like one qualified. Even though I was asking qualified questions, they were just answering, and then when you give them a call, they would never pick up, or they uh you know I I can't tell you, I I could probably count on two hands. I called people and uh they were like, Oh, I don't have a business. What? Why did you why did you request my book on how to become a little bit more profitable, right? Or something like that, and so so. So when you're thinking of ad spender or doing some sort of call cold AI conversational, try to develop a an attraction offer model for yourself and for your business that actually is entry level, small, gets benefit back to the to the person you're calling, but at least they can pay you. Right. So maybe it's maybe it's a $19 quick five e-course book, 30-minute e-course book, or maybe it's a $19, $27 you know, offer phone call with you, and in the call, you know, be descriptive, in the call, you're gonna tell them A, B, and C as an outcome for them to walk away from the call. Because the idea then is that now for anything that you're spending in terms of generating leads, you're getting paid for that, right? So if it costs you, even if something costs you $10 a lead, right, for a person to actually purchase and set up that meeting, they're paying you 19, right? Or they're paying you 27. So it doesn't matter that your cost per lead is $10 or $15 because they're paying you more than that. And so all that does is proofs one that you're able to then get people to buy this low-ticket introduction or output that you're gonna give them in the session. And then what you then can do is now you can ramp up your ad spend, you can ramp up your cold AI outreach spend. Because if you've proven that you're gonna get 27 for every 10 you spend, then you can ramp it up to 100. And if you spend 100, you're gonna get back 270. You spend 200, you're gonna give it, you're gonna get back, you know, 540. Right. And the idea there is that now you've proven that you can get paid to do your marketing. And so many people focus on well, here's this free thing, free thing, free thing, and they wonder why they don't get any marketing return because you're not doing anything unless you actually sign the high-ticket client. And this is why it's so important, and this is why I believe in this that you know Alex says in his book, you have to do these things in order, right? You have to have a high quality, high-producing level one, which is your attraction offer, right? Once then you've proven your attraction offer that people can buy, you can ramp up your ad spend, which then leads you into level two, phase two, right? Which is level two upsell and level three downsell, right? So now once somebody's bought in that $27 course, they're in your they're in your pipeline, right? You can follow through with them. Hey, how did it go? Did you did you implement it? Right, you spent $27, did you implement it? Right. And then you upsell them to your next program, your next support group. Well, hey, if you've had some trouble with that, like let's have a conversation. It sounds like it's still a problem, right? Or it's still an issue, right? Now you're upselling into your the next step. And so so many people think upselling is a bad thing. No, upselling is just you go from where they're at to the next program, it's supporting them. And as long as like you're not forcing it down their throat and it's a problem that they're trying to overcome, upselling's a good thing, right? Because you're supporting them.

Duarne: 34:04

Value adding proposition at that point, right? Correct, correct. When you get asked if you'd like a warranty when you buy a new electronic item, you get the choice to say no, but you deep down know, look, there's a chance this thing's gonna break and it's gonna have to go back. Yeah, that warranty might actually pay for itself, right? It's a convenience fact. I might do that.

Dave: 34:27

So it's it's as long as it's a benefit, right? And so I use the example a lot of times of of the cell phone salesman, right? You know, you buy a cell phone and he tries to upsell you. Hey, do you want a case? Do you want a phone? Do you want a screen protector? And if he didn't do that, right, and you walked outside the door and you dropped your phone and it shattered, and he didn't try to upsell you with the phone protector, and then you walk back in and you go to turn, hey, I just dropped the phone. Can you can we exchange it? Like, sorry, you can't do that. Like, you gotta pay me a full you gotta buy a whole new phone, you're gonna be pissed, right? You're like, oh my god, why didn't you say that? Like, I didn't know that. Like, I would have bought it if you just told me. This is why if you upsell properly and says, Hey, by the way, I'm just gonna give you this option. If you buy a phone protector and you buy a case right now, you're protected. Because if you walk out that door, the minute you walk out that door, it's yours. And if you drop and break it, I can't exchange it. And then if you still say no, you're the only one to blame at that point. But if you don't upsell, right, and so this is why it's so important for like your clients, your customers, because if you have a an extra step solution, like it's it if and you're really passionate about helping people, this is why it should become natural to just say, Hey, I I know you bought this, by the way. Like, here's my next logical move for you to help you, right? And then from there, if they if they like, well, I can't afford that right now, or like maybe that's not the support, you downsell into another option that can help them, right? That's still there. And then from there you go to continuity, right? Let phase three is continuity. So you have to prove attraction, you have to prove upsell, you have to prove right your downsell strategies before you can move on to that full-term longevity and continuity. I think so many people want to just go to continuity and they forget and and they're like, Well, how do I get there? How do I improve? And so this is the one thing that we're like focusing on too is like the attraction side. What do what do we just do that is entry level that can get us paid to the market versus spending marketing to hope to get free leads? And so, you know, kind of taking that back to AI and conversational, develop some low ticket that you know, if every call you know is you know one to two dollars and it you know, maybe it takes you four or five calls to get somebody to agree to a quick session, right? And in the session, maybe the session costs $49. Well, and that let's just do the math, right? So if you need one person to pay you $49, and every call is is costing you, let's just say two dollars, right? Because the AI length and everything, and even that's a long phone call for AI, right? But you know, if you produce a script in that case that can basically give you, you know, one out of every uh 25 calls purchases. So, you know, a a four percent close rate. You don't think you can come up with a script that's a four percent close rate? And the idea here is that the AI is also gonna learn and improve the script itself as it's having the conversation. And it's a 30-minute or it's a 45-minute conversation with you, then you're gonna give the script, you know, here's the four things that we're gonna actually give you in this session. And then once it books, boom, they pay you $49. You don't think that you could have a 4% close rate on that to then move those people through? And even then, right, you don't need every one of those 49 to upsell into the next level because you're still making money, because you've proven that you can upsell and grow your and scale your marketing and still get paid for it. So you're not losing money on your marketing, even though you're probably getting 100, 200 meetings a month, right? Maybe not a month, but you know what I mean. And you maybe only need one or two of those extra close in your in your package, you know what I mean?

Duarne: 38:11

That's what all these big guys who talk about, like the Alex Mamosis, they talk about running these ads and spending thousands and thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even on these ads. But they prove it first, and then the ones that work, so don't all work, they double down, triple down, quadruple down, and then just push, push, push on the ones that work, and they have really good return, you know, ROI, return on investment, and that's the key. It's about you know, and it's not always gonna be the case, like you might find in your testing that you know it doesn't work out, like that's not gonna get you the results you want. And this is why you've got to be careful if you've got a budget of say a thousand dollars a month for your ads that you need to run, then maybe set up 10% for testing on each of two or three ABC tests that you're gonna run, and then whichever one works out of those the best, then put the rest of the budget against that one and just turn the other ones off and just run that for the first week of the campaign. See how that works, see what sort of reactions you're getting to that, and that could very well get you a much better result than just continuing to run these all the campaigns at the same time and burning all your budget up, and then find out that one of them was actually doing okay, the other two were just not doing very well at all, and you just wasted all the budget, and you could have got a lot more results by reallocating the budget into those other ones.

Dave: 39:45

Well, and it's it's even Facebook ads now, like it's crazy because I happen to, you know, again, there's there's so many options out there, and I and I think like with what I saw was was somebody kind of breaking down the the way that meta ads and everything work, and now they kind of want you to kind of group everything into sort of one bucket and AI, and then let their system put it out who they need to do, and kind of above my pay grade and in terms of you know expertise. But because I remember when we first started, you know, kind of getting into this, right? You had you had your your ad set, and then you had your ad your your campaigns, and you had you wanted to have like A B testing in different campaigns so that they didn't steal from each other. And I think now like Meta wants you to put everything under one, right? And and and let it do running very nice.

Duarne: 40:33

Right. Well, let's say we when you're setting up these new ads nowadays, you're basically getting multiple titles, multiple images, multiple descriptions, and it runs it and it can do it, it'll do a general you put all just your general information and it'll make a variation of like three or four variations of each portion of the data. Then it'll mix and match them, and you could have 20, 30 different variations of the same ad going out in the same campaign now, and it'll do its own A, B, C, D, E, F testing on it, and then just keep reallocating and doubling down on the ones that actually perform the best. So people who fight that tend to find their results are not as good anymore when you're trying to manually do it all yourself and force your approach, which is a but there's it's overwhelming the amount of platforms out there that you can actually do marketing and advertising in the paid spectrum now, and pay per click, it's always going to be there for quicker results than the long-term strategies, but it comes with that risk that it may work, it may not work. And a lot of people who try it, and I've had this conversation oh look two and a half years ago on a lineable. I remember chatting to one individual, and he was sharing with me that him and his partners in their business had put together $5,000 and put it towards a three-month advertising campaign on paid click pay-per-click ads. And it went nowhere. They just could not, and they used a company, and the company couldn't get the results they needed. And they said, Well, that's all the money we've got for that pay per click. This is not working, move on. But when I delved in and asked a few questions, he wasn't even sure what was actually done at the time, whether it was ABC testing, he wasn't familiar with you know what sort of techniques or what the ads looked like. It's because it's for a lot of people, they don't know this stuff. It is a whole new world, it is a little bit daunting. And if you get the setting wrong, like with meta, sometimes when you set up a meta ad, it's a per day rate or it's a campaign rate. So it might be a hundred dollars for the campaign over five days or ten days. But if you get that metric wrong or and you put 10 $100 a day and you and you have a 10-day cycle, that's a thousand dollars you're gonna run. So it's very easy to get that, you know, just misunderstand what it's saying or miss what it's saying and get that wrong, even though they try and make it summarized in the side and all of that. The one I see this a lot on is when you get Google ads and then the rep from Google calls you from the AdWords rep and says, Hey, look, I want to help you optimize your ads. And we used to have this so many times with our clients, and then that person who gets on the call from Google, so I've noticed that this campaign's still in a row. How about we increase the budget on this? And then they're like, Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I reckon we should double it. Let's put let's double that. Like that's gonna get you these results. And they get off the call and they've just increased your spend by double what you're originally planning to spend. But if you don't go in and check the results and seeing if that's actually turning around, it most of these guys won't schedule a follow-up call from Google like a few days later to see if it's working. They're not checking on your account to see if it's working. Once they make that phone call, it's on you. And we've seen that a few times with clients, and I'll be we were managing their ads, and we're like, what happened here? We didn't change this, check the logs, and then call the client and go, Did you get on a phone call with Google Ad people? Oh, yeah, they told me they're gonna fix some things to make it run better. Did you agree? Yeah, they seem to know what they were talking about, and then you explain how much they've actually just committed to spend, and they didn't get any better results because you know maybe they put it on the wrong budget on the wrong campaign, and it just didn't get the results they were expecting to get. So I totally get where you're coming from. Definitely do the testing. Once you get a good result, double down on that.

Dave: 44:57

Yeah, and and I think like too, like obviously for me, ads can seem daunting, you know what I mean? Because especially the system, there's so many options, there's so many different things. You know, having somebody on your team that understands it, whether it's you know in internally or externally, I think is a benefit to anyone. And and the worst case you could do is is again go to your go to your chat options, your AI options. I'm sure you know there's plenty of AI sort of I think there's some you know, some AI ad support platforms right now. I mean there's AI for there's a few ads there. Yeah, you know, it's just if you don't know, that's fine, like but be willing to learn and and educate yourself on it. You know, don't just use the the naive, well, I didn't know, so I'm just not doing it. That that doesn't work in business. If you truly want to be successful, you have to be willing to grow, learn, and actually, you know, uh what supplement your weaknesses. You know, if it's not your strength, great, supplement it. Be willing to find somebody or something that's going to help you supplement your weakness. It's the biggest thing you could do in business and life. You know, play to your strengths. Everybody says, well, you know, work on your weaknesses, and and but then what what happens if you only work if you only work on your weaknesses, your strengths are going to become weaknesses, right? Uh screw that. Focus on your strengths, what you're good at, and find ways to supplement or offshoot your weaknesses. That's all you can do.

Duarne: 46:25

I like that advice. That's good. So, what else what else is happening with you and during the week, Dave? What what else have been going on for you?

Dave: 46:33

Yeah, so I mean, uh, for me, it's it's definitely learning the things that are coming out with AI. It's pretty, it's pretty robust, you know. And so I've been doing a lot of playing in codecs and and creating some new things that I'm excited that'll be rolling out, you know, just to further support our clients and and the services we do around you know, finance and cash management and and cash flow forecasting and everything. So I'm excited about that. Not gonna not gonna announce anything now yet, because there's still a lot of things you gotta fix. But I would say not having any coding experience about a week and a half ago to now I'm still I'm still I would still consider myself a novice, but what you can create can is actually pretty crazy. It it's it's pretty pretty amazing.

Duarne: 47:21

So it's pretty gnarly, isn't it? Like what you can do. I I was playing around the other day, I was just demonstrating to my wife and my son what you can do nowadays. And one of the things that I created in Codex was I created a game of Pong. Remember the old Pong game with the two paddles? Yes, and I said, I want to create my own variation of Pong, I want to have this scoring system and make it. So it made me a variation, and then it came back with some suggestions, and within five minutes, I had a working version of it that I was able to play with my son in two-player mode using my keyboard. And at that point, I said, Well, what do you think we should turn the paddles into? And he's like, What about turtles? I'm like, Okay, so we made turtles and we turned the ball into coconuts, and it created those images, and we off we went. We had this little game we were playing in between, and it was fun, and it just it was a great little demonstration for me to show him how you could use the AI to create these retro style games. And can you imagine how long it took for the original Pong to be coded up and work and created? Yeah, and we did I just knocked off an example of it in a couple of minutes, and I was like, this is just blowing my mind, and that's just a simple little run in the you know, run on my system, and there was no real guardrails or parameters, although it did suggest some. But yeah, like what you're describing with the vibe coding, like that's really crazy cool stuff, and it's very, very getting very, very good. And they're not perfect. Like, I've got friends who are in coding games, and I was chatting to him the other day, he actually does mobile game development. He's actually started implementing all of the QA that he's doing, the first level of QA in AI, because he's finding that it picks up a lot more of the stuff quickly, and they're able to get you know releases out a lot quicker because of it, and it frees up his testers to come in and do the Q the second section of QA. So it doesn't take away the human aspect, but it certainly helps. And like I sent a team, my team of developers, I sent them a new tool to play with that I came across. And it was rather interesting because I said, Look, I want you guys to, because they're all doing different projects at the moment. I said, I want you to try this and see if there's any use cases that you're doing right now that you could use this for. Every one of them came back with a different use case on the same app. And one of them actually, who's building one of our internal apps at the moment, came back and said, I just I've been using this and I've just streamlined you know some of our code, so we're actually it works better now and it's wider. I'm like, oh, that's cool. So these tools are getting better, they are getting really useful, and I think it's like we're talking about the voice AI stuff, right? It's it's happening so rapidly, it's really hard to keep up with. And as somebody like you, I've seen what you've been building, as somebody who is not a coder, it's a pretty remarkable system that you've managed to put together in such a short period of time. And for most people, they wouldn't believe that that was possible. And I think you even mentioned to me you had a conversation with someone during the week who saw what you were doing and said, Oh wow, how many months have you been working on this? And it was kind of a little chuckle that you had, and was like, Yeah, yeah, a little bit off, but yeah, not as long as you might think. Um, but it's um this is where we're heading, right? I mean, one thing I love about all this AI technology in the development world is while it's not perfect, it is really, really, really good for prototyping. For sure. Um, it's so good for prototyping. It's this it's doing what 3D printing did for the for you know the world of prototyping, you know, products, physical products. It's doing that for digital products. And I think that's really remarkable and interesting to see.

Dave: 52:14

Yeah, I mean it's it's like like you said, I think you have to you you have to get a general understanding of it one. And I think that's for me the biggest thing that I learned, right? Because you know, obviously there's the code, but then you have a repository, which is where the code has to sit, and then you have you know the database, which probably kind of goes into the back end of the code that it communicates with in order for your front end, right, in your front end to whole other platform, that your front end pulls from you know the both sources and creates your front end, right? Which is code, that's what it's telling it to do. And it's just you know, learning all of that and understanding how they all interact, and then you know what happens when it breaks, you know, and figuring that out on your own. And so, like when you think about it, you know, I'm I'm a finance guy, right? I'm a I'm a finance guy, a business strategy leadership type guy. I don't know coding, I don't know any of that stuff. And and and to but you have to have that inner curiosity, I guess, in order to try and learn and grow, especially you hear me talk about it all the time. When you are if you're implementing profit first, number one, right? Because then your your your operating expenses are limited to your specific bucket. So you have to be innovative, you have to be you know efficient with your spending. And so being willing to do some of these things yourself and learn, it can be right, cost effective because now you're you're getting it to a spot where maybe it works viable and you know, you proof of concept, and now you just need to bring in a coder to clean it up versus code the entire thing. And a lot of like if I think about truly the the what we're trying to build, it would probably be like a 15, 20,000, $25,000 coding job.

Duarne: 54:07

You know, I'd probably say closer to the you know, 50 to 100, honestly.

Dave: 54:12

Okay, based on colour. So okay, so 15 to 100,000, and that's like you know, just getting it up to up to par, that doesn't even count like the ongoing sort of you know support of it. You know, that's just getting it up and running to prove proof of concept. Whereas now it's costing me zero, it's my chat GPT subscription. I'm able to get it up and running, get it to a spot where eventually, you know, the proof of concept isn't built, and then I just have somebody come in and kind of make sure it's cleaned up, it's closed down so people can't come in and change it. And then from there, maybe have somebody on the back end that kind of manage it if that's something that needs to work. Or if I just use it for myself, I don't need anybody to close it down, it's just for me and my clients. I haven't decided that model yet, you know what I mean? And so it's costing me zero, right? And now you're now I'm innovative because I don't have a hundred thousand dollars to drop a potential software that I don't know where it's gonna go, but I can do it for free. I can do it for my time, and that's what you need to realize as a business owner is that like you have all the time, right? You have the same 24 hours as me and Dwarne. It's just how do you use it? Right? Are you spending too much time on the on the couch watching TV? Are you spending too much time sleeping? You know, are you spending too much time lazying around, right? Doing things that aren't helping you reach your goal. And if you are, then the the only fault of where you're at is your own. And again, I say this all the time, it's not where you're at, right? That's just not where you're at.

Duarne: 55:43

And we're not saying don't relax with all Dave's like always saying is that you need to make an active choice as to where your time is being spent, and you get a choice in that. Every everyone has the same choice. And what's interesting is there's something you were saying there. You are looking at creating an app and not you know at a very low cost. What you're actually doing is creating a proof of concept, and another really great value proposition is if you create a proof of concept, you can then take that to investors and get other people to invest in your idea and prove what you're working on, show them something that's viable. That's not just a bunch of words on a piece of paper saying, I want to build this, I'm gonna hire someone to build this. You're actually showing people. So I think what we're gonna start to see as this really takes off, is a bunch of micro vibe coding projects popping up where people are building very niche apps and not relying on the big apps to do everything and try and make it work for them. They're gonna start building their own apps to solve their own problems in their own businesses, and they're gonna be able to do it in a much more cost-effective way. Right, and we're gonna start to see a heavy investment into a lot of these smaller apps, and people are gonna take bets on them because a small app, even at a small fee, can still make a lot of money. I've you know, my friend who does builds mobile games is testament to that. Like he's got a couple of games that do reasonably well over the last decade, they've done pretty good. They've been able to, he's been able to have a pretty good life, you know, from it. And he's growing and developing those constantly, but there's a lot of other companies out there who are building small micro apps all the time and doing quite well out of it. So we're not saying run out, leave your job, get a start coding, you know. But I mean, in your spare time, I mean you could certainly get in and try it. And look, jump if you're not sure where to start with coding, maybe you need to do a coding fundamentals course. There's plenty of very low-cost platforms like Udemy, Allison.com, where you can go and do these courses for not for free or almost free. So you've got at least some foundational background. So when you start doing it, you can start getting a bit of an idea on what to do, or jump on YouTube and learn from YouTube techniques. But it's not going to be like I know for you, Dave, it's been quite a learning curve. There's been a couple of things that caught you by surprise, and you you use that description of like this connects to this and this. It's kind of like when you first learn how a car works, and you're like, okay, so the engine connects to the transmission, transmission connects to the drive shaft, drive shaft connects to the differential, differential has wheels connected to it. And look, and I might be talking a foreign language for some people, but you know, being someone who understands mechanicals, then that's very logical for me, that's very sound and easy for me. This is how coding is once you actually get to know it, everything's connected together. And when Dave talks about accounting and cash flow, it's kind of like over my head some of that stuff. It's like, well, I'm not an accountant and I'm not into those numbers, and that's like very complex for me in some situations, and I'm sure for others, but we can become familiar with it with a little bit of practice and a little bit of willingness to learn it, right?

Dave: 59:18

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So I think we had a great episode, Dwarren. I know we're we're kind of right up on it, and I appreciate you kind of joining me again. We had, you know, so if you are a listener and you made it this far as always, we truly appreciate you doing it here. So if you could help us get the reach out for for the episode. So whether it's you know sharing this on your network or you know, giving giving the channel a like and subscribe and a thumbs up and do all that fun algorithmy stuff, we would definitely appreciate it. Our goal here at Triumph Business Solutions is to service or impact a thousand business owners by the end of 2028. So if you could help us on that journey, that would be fantastic and I would appreciate it. Hopefully, you got a tidbit or two that was impactful for you and your business. If you have any questions, drop them down below. You know, shoot us an email at growth at triumphbusiness solutions.com. We'll be sure to answer those questions in a future episode. And if you want to join us, the link is down below wherever you're watching this to join us uh at a future podcast so you can book your your show request and we will get back to you and reach out to you as well. So hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing day. Juarren, glad there was no earthquakes this week.

Duarne: 1:00:26

Yeah, and uh nothing, nothing, nothing noteworthy.

Dave: 1:00:29

Oh good, no aftershocks or anything like that. So good. But I hope you guys have a fantastic and amazing week. And until then, we'll see you. We'll see you in the next one. See ya.

Duarne: 1:00:38

Thanks.