Introduction

Dave 0:18

We're here in the favorite cup of joe. Let's jump into the show. Grab your favorite cup of Joe and let's jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode. Give me a second here. I just realized that for whatever reason, our favorite mic is not the right mic. And of course, it's just me today. But you know, these are the things that happens when you you go live. Let me try something. Let me try aided up there. Another USB port. Maybe that'll work. If not, oh there it is. That USB was not working, so we're good. Look at that. I figured it out on a uh Friday morning. We are good to go. So for those of you who don't know, we are the Business Unscripted Podcast. I'm Dave Warden. We're trying business solutions, get over 20 years of you know corporate experience, business, finance, executive leadership, and then another uh about 10 years helping small business owners with strategy, finance, operations, uh, all the fun stuff. So you're in the right spot. And then my business partner, Dwarren, who joins me for some of these episodes of his co-host, he does a lot of experience in marketing, development, and as we both do, AI as well. But Dwarne is not here today, he's had a uh nice long week, a busy week. So obviously, he is gonna enjoy his Friday evening. So, Dwarne, if you're watching, hope you have a wonderful weekend. We'll uh look forward to bringing you back next week. But for those of you, if you're a business owner, you're an aspiring business owner, this is the place for you. We talk about our lessons, our struggles, our things that we've gone through in our own businesses, but also strategies and support and ideas that we are helping current business owners with to overcome and you know achieve more in their businesses as well. So don't feel afraid if you're if you're watching, always if you're watching a replay, drop a comment down below, a question down below. We are looking forward to kind of helping and answering those. We'd love to do those live. And actually, right now, let me just have my uh my agent go out and do our posts that we are live, and we'll be good to go. So hope everybody's having a wonderful and amazing week. For me, it's been kind of a fun, crazy week. Ultimately, things constantly are changing, and it keeps things moving and evolving, and I love it. And we're building a lot of fun, amazing stuff here. I tried business solutions. Hopefully, some big announcements coming out soon for ways that have helped me, and we're trying to make it so that it can help more of you as well. One second. It's easier when Dwarne's here because I can do this stuff when Dwarne's talking. But right now I have to do it while I'm here, so we are good. But let's see. So, as I was kind of thinking this morning when I was uh after got the message from Dorney that wasn't gonna be here, I was trying to think of like what topics that I want to talk about, and a few things came to mind. First, obviously, as everybody knows, you've been listening to podcasts or you you know have had a conversation with with me or anything in the past, you know how much attention,

Why Business Owners Tune In

Dave 4:10

knowledge, time we're dedicating towards understanding and improving not only just AI development for business owners in their in their lives and their their day-to-day, but automation, right? It's so and and then they're not the same. You know, we talked about that a little bit last week, how a lot of people think AI means automation, and sometimes it does, but it also means just like having a workforce for you. And and while automation means more of like, hey, just setting up a recurring process step by step that runs through it, and they they integrate together and they work well together, but they're not the same thing. And so a lot of people, when we're having that initial conversation about their workflows, their day-to-day, what are they doing manually? And we start talking about kind of development. A lot of people want to jump initially to okay, well, how is AI gonna solve that? And we have to take a step back, and it's it's AI is not gonna solve all of that right away, right? Ultimately, what we have to understand is what are those processes, what is the current state, what is the ideal state, and maybe even something to start off is not a full autonomous agent that's working in people's businesses right away. Ultimately, what is the ideal situation for some people is just setting up that flow of new connections come in. We want to have a email chain go out over you know, 14, 16 weeks, whatever it is, one email a week, and just building that out. And what does that look like? That that's like step one. But so many people still don't even have that piece in their system yet. And so there's different levels to automation and and AI support. Maybe that's something that I'll put together now that I'm you know kind of thinking about it, and uh but there's different levels, and you don't need to go from zero to level 10, right? Overnight. Ultimately, the goal would be to get there, and the development would be to get there, but the expectation should not be to go from zero to level 10 overnight, and it was it's it still baffles me sometimes, you know, because we're in AI so much, a lot of people talk about AI so much, so you you think like everybody is doing it, everybody's in it. And I was at a poker game yesterday last night, and this nice old lady, she was next next to me, and and she's she's in HR, and she was telling, you know, she I don't know how the conversation came up, but somebody asked about Chat GPT because I think they were talking about their football draft, and they started using Chat GPT to help them with making picks and things like that and researching. And this old lady was she was excited because she literally just was given the ability to use like co-pilot with Microsoft, and how the ability that it had in her Excel to like delete columns without data was like game-changing for her. Instead of her having to do a lot of manual deletion of the work before she had to upload

AI And Automation Are Not The Same

Dave 7:20

it, but she's like, all I have to do is tell it, and it's like exactly like and that's just like the tip of the iceberg, right? But there's still so many, and actually not so many, the vast majority of people are still just at the tip of the iceberg, utilizing it in ways that is very simplistic. And I say that because as you move up in the levels of understanding and implementation within your business, it becomes okay, now I'm having this kind of delete my rows, and then you manually taking that file and going into the other software and uploading it, etc., to it's gonna do the whole process end-to-end with only your review, maybe to review the the upload. So now you take all that manual process of exporting the new file, uploading it into you know whatever platform you know that you have to upload it into. You take that whole parse out, and you you know, even the beginning part, even downloading the initial report, the raw data, pulling that raw data out, analyzing it, creating it in a new form, uploading it to the platform that you need to go to, and then now you only have to do the final verification. That's level like seven, eight, nine, ten, right? Building all that stuff in. And and that it's it's it was it was just reminds me, right? Just humbles me again to just say, like, you know, not everybody is where you know, Dwarne or I are, or even some of you watching this, who have a lot of experience with it and are are utilizing it. So many other people are still just at the tip of the iceberg. And it's it's really the vast majority of there's another stat, you know, obviously there's tons of stats out there, but the one stat that I saw was about eight to ten percent of small businesses are really utilizing AI in an impactful way in their business. While 90% of people have experimented in terms of like talking to Chat GPT or you know, having a conversation with Gemini, etc. So 90%, 95% of people have like played around with it, used it in some shape or form, but only 8 to 10% are actually utilizing it daily in their business to actually help them be more productive in a in a full-on fashion. And then another one, another stat I saw this morning was that like that 25% of employees in businesses are using it in some shape or form to help with their productivity. And it was just surprising another, you know, if of the fact that there's so many levels, but you also have to like make sure that you're you're you're not pushing too far ahead. You know, and we talk about this all the time. We talk about the two lists that you need to create. You know, you want to talk about the first list is take your time if you if you haven't done anything with AI yet or or automation or agents, etc. Take the the first list is is literally write down what are you doing manually every single day? With you know what is in your processes every single day that is taking up your time manually, right? Writing emails, follow-ups, note taking, anything like that. That's the first list. Those are the things that you're doing on a regular basis, take up a lot of your time, doing it manually. Maybe you wish there could be some sort of automation, support, etc., with that, those processes. That's list number one. List number two is literally what are all the things that like you know you should be doing or you would like to be doing more of, but you can't because of everything on list number one, right? And some of this is not just gonna be in your business. Some of this may be, you know, maybe it's more time away. Maybe it's you know only working, you know, 45, 50 hours a week instead of 70. Maybe it's time away with vacations, different things like that. That's everything that's gonna be on list two. And you know, things like you know, I want to do more marketing, I want to do more outreach, or I want to do more client development, whatever it is, like that's list number two, and you're not able to do it because of everything on list number one. Those two lists combined now serve as your roadmap and guide to where you need to be spending attention to. Because what you'll be able to find out is when you're looking at list number one, you're gonna be able to estimate how much time all of those things are taking and pick the two or three to get started with that are gonna give you the most time efficiency back, and then it frees you up to start filling that time in with things from list number two. And the beauty of that is that as you're working through these two lists, it's giving you that sort of like burst of excitement, right? And keeping things moving forward because you're accomplishing so much off of both sides. So do that for yourself, do that for your business, create those two lists, and then take some time to actually sit down and analyze it afterwards. Brian Mann, how are you, buddy? I hope everything is good. Just me today, no Dwarne. Dworn Dwarne has had a busy week, so he's he's taking the day off. But just me today, hope everything's well. Enjoying all that weather down in Florida, my friend. And it reminded you so another conversation I was having, and for me, when and I'm

Still At The Tip Of The Iceberg

Dave 12:45

still learning and growing, you know, evolving, had a conversation with a prospect yesterday, and it was opening to me because I create proposals in a way that wants to encompass almost everything that we want to do in the proposal. And so the conversation I had with the with this prospect, who we've done other things before, so it wasn't like a new prospect. You know, she gave me the feedback of like, you know, a lot of the stuff is a lot of it is you know overwhelming, and especially when you know she wasn't with me to read it. And so she got lost in the details, she didn't see the the true vision, and for her, it was like needs to be more visual, more simplified. And so I am taking that piece of information and now looking at our process and how can we simplify what we're doing, but still feel like we're giving all the information in terms of like they feel like they're getting the value, they understand the pricing, they understand all the different sort of complexities of what we're doing, because it it isn't as simple as hey, here's this one price. And so you may be in the same boat in your business, like it's not as simple as here's here's the monthly investment, or here's the monthly retainer, especially when you're talking about like AI advisory support growth, because if you don't clearly define the scope, you can start doing some scope creep, and we've talked about that on the on past episodes about how you could get lulled into doing more than what you actually initially wanted to for a client because it wasn't clearly defined in the proposal or in the agreement. So, but what I learned from the conversation was just simply try to have at least a visual concept so that people who are visually right more inclined and learn visually can actually see the flows and everything like that. But it also highlights the importance of making sure that you have a scheduled proposal conversation with your prospects afterwards. And some people you can hear this from both sides. Some people say say it, send it to them ahead of time, send it to them in the morning. Of some people say don't send it to them until you actually have them in the meeting. You know, ultimately it depends on you know what you feel that conversation is like with with the prospect and and your relationship with that person. I don't have a preference either way. I've I've done it both ways, both ways have worked, both ways haven't worked. So really, I don't have a preference either way how you do it. It's pretty much how your preference is. You want to send it to them ahead of time, let them review it while still having the scheduled time to go over the proposal and go through questions because I think that time is important. And for us, it was very important because what what we came through and talking through, she realized that you know, half of the stuff that she was thinking that we were initially talked talking about in our first meeting, she doesn't necessarily want to start heading down that path yet. So it was really good we were able to redefine and kind of simplify the scope, where it's it's now more of like just a simplified project instead of an ongoing, open-ended sort of advisory, you know, kind of AI implementation review of different things in our business. So those things right there are very important to have in that follow-up call with your proposals of really sitting down with them and kind of walking through does this align with your vision, right? Is there anything you want to change? And it's always an open-ended conversation. Remember, all of our partnerships, right, they're two-sided. It's not you know one-sided. So always approach it as a partnership, always approach it as how can we help you? And if it makes sense for both sides, then it probably then we can move forward. But don't be afraid to say no too. Like, you know, somebody wants more of your time, more of what you're doing, and you don't have the capacity, or you don't in, or you know, you don't have the even the knowledge base, sometimes you know, saying no can actually do you a lot of blessings and and favors in that fashion. So going back to kind of the the implementation, right? So you know, you have level one, tip of the iceberg, just just doing a couple things for you in your process of hey, I'm gonna take this file and I want to clean it up, like tip of the iceberg stuff. Now, maybe you've been doing it a lot more, you're starting to get into cowork, you're starting to make even you know, codex. I even saw like Joel High Level now has some sort of you know Chrome automation you know capabilities, and and really it's not about like it's easy to see, oh my god, this person, I gotta go try this version, or I gotta go try that version. They're all pretty much the same, right? Some may be a little bit more user-friendly, some may be right, you know, more advanced, but ultimately you have to feel for yourself what is comfortable for you. You know, what are you using? So, you know, if you're if you've been on cowork and you and you're comfortable with cowork and you're not you're not finding any difficulties with cowork, then just stick with cowork. You don't have to necessarily go and try all the brand new browser tools out there. Because if you start to do that, you're you're just gonna start regressing in the actual success rate of the processes that you're running. And then you're trying to retrain a new software on everything that you do, and it's

The Two Lists That Become Your Roadmap

Dave 18:33

just can be complicated for some people and it can be overwhelming. And then essentially I've seen them just stop doing it, and now they go back to what they you know they're comfortable with in their cover zone. And especially with YouTube and all that, it's so easy to just see every new shining piece of software and be like, oh, okay, like I gotta go there. So find what works, but don't get and I say this like find what works, but like don't be afraid to like use different pieces of software for different processes. You know, ChatGPT, OpenAI, they have very good, you know, sort of image gen, but maybe they're not so good in the process control, which is more clawed, right? And so finding out what is working for you and kind of building that tech stack is gonna be vital as well. So, like for us in in our world, right, we use a lot of claw, and we also then use open AI as sort of like our adversarial review function. So here's one thing that we do. So when we're coding or we're doing any sort of development for a dashboard, we start everything in Claude and we start the conversation in Claude, it either reviews a project that we already have open, or we do the planning for a particular idea, things like that within Claude. Claude then creates a spec document, and what we do with the spec document is when we send it to Codex and we say, Okay, Codex, I want you to do an adversarial review of this spec plan, provide me all your findings, any insights, anything that's overlooked, and provide provide me back the findings. Now, the beauty of this within Claude is there you can actually have a codec, it's actually an add-on into Claude's CLI for Codex, right? So it actually does it right within the same chat. You don't have to like try to go back and forth and move things between two chats, it's right there in one. And it'll do the adversarial review right there in that session. And then once the findings come back, you can then tell Claude, hey, review the findings and update your spec, correct the information, and then move forward with implementation and design. Now, once the design work's done, the implementation's done, then you can go back to Codex and say, okay, now I want you to do an adversarial review of the actual code that was created based on the spec plan, the updated spec plan. And again, they don't find findings, sometimes it doesn't, most of the time it does. And then they go back and forth and they keep correcting themselves until things are you know, a good first version, right? Especially when you're developing first. But the beauty of that is like just like us humans, we are preferential to our own work, you know, and that's why it's so important to have like a second set of eyes on some things, is because you know we look at it, we know what we're doing, we know our processes, so we think that most of it's fine. But once you get that second set of eyes, then you can find things or maybe holes, or maybe ideas, or maybe a process, or a calculation that maybe you're missing, or maybe even something that you want to that you should add in that you just weren't even thinking of. That's the beauty of Claude versus first codex, is because Claude's the same way, and or codex is the same way if you if you code in codecs, right? They're preferential to the way that they code internally. So by having another software review a spec plan, review the code, it's able to kind of point out some of these things that maybe it missed on its own because it's preferential to its own output, right? So it's good to always have that sort of process integrated within your day-to-day. So that's just one step. Now, a lot of people also are using the desktop apps. I've actually pretty much, I would say 90% of the time, have stopped using the desktop app. And I strictly communicating to my Claude, to my Hermes, you know, to my codecs, whatever it is, through the CLI functions, which is basically the terminal functions on your computer. A cleaner way to do that would be using a software like anti gravity, IDE, you know, there's cursor, there's so many of them out there that you can talk to you know, terminals. On your computer. The reason I like that is because you have more flexibility on them. And if you think about it, like the desktop apps are the platforms' way of basically simplifying their backend coding functionalities for users who are not necessarily deep into the raw information. But it's still a it's still a chat output. You still are able to like you know see files, everything like that. But I like the CLI's functionality more because it can do a little bit more. You can point it easier at different folders, different structures, and it can still do like Claude, it can still do co-work functions, it can still go and control the Chrome from code or even from the CLI. And you can schedule jobs in the code versus just having to do it in cowork. So as you level up, we've talked about that earlier in the show. Like there's different levels. Like I'm just kind of talking about progressing in kind of your support and you're playing around with it. Now, the majority of you, I'd say just stick with the desktop app. Now, big question I get too is is what are what are some ways that you can actually or or how can I utilize it better? So here's some things that we're doing, and you can possibly even start doing for you and yourself. The first one is be proactive with your mail, your outreach, your follow-up, right? So you can actually schedule your job, whether it's in co-work or whether it's in codex, you can actually schedule a, you know, maybe it's every hour or every two-hour review of your mailbox and have it summarize what emails you need to respond to that are important. And you can actually have it actually go out and you'll kind of draft the first replies based on how you trained it. Now, again, all of these things kind of come back to training, but we'll talk about that in a second. So that's one process, right? Is have have a scheduled either process, scheduled review, or it's gonna go out to your email, it's gonna review all the emails that you have from the last two hours or you know, overnight, whatever it is, and summarize what are the ones that need your action, what are the ones that need your response, and you'll kind of then be proactive and draft those replies. That's step one. Step two is you can actually to that, then actually have it start to auto, right? You can start going through your mailbox and actually have it start like filing and routing different things so it's it's out of you and clean up your email box. You know, you can have it suggest it go into your email and suggest, hey, what folders based on your knowledge of my email and my business, what folders do you suggest that I create in my email box to make my my email system better? And it'll it'll give you the suggestions, you approve it, it'll go out most of the time. It can actually make those changes for you depending on your email system.

What A Prospect Taught Me About Proposals

Dave 25:18

And then from there, you can say, okay, now I want you to develop the routing, right? So develop rules and routing for our email that can move things into the boxes as we're going through our email review every two hours or whatever time frame you you set your process to. That's something that can be simple. It's a big complaint that I hear a lot of people say is you know, their mailbox is too full, they don't know who to respond to or when something comes through. Sometimes things get lost. This is the best way to do that. And then all you have to do a lot of times is look at the output and approve the drafts of the emails that it tells you, and it'll go out and send it, especially depending on your connection to your to your email system. A next process that we do is we actually do a lot of auditing of our processes. And so a lot of times, people with their skills in their system or with their their setup and their recurring scheduled jobs, they set it and forget it. They're just like, okay, this is gonna keep working. However, you probably know in AI, everything changes, right? Models are changing on a daily basis, social media platforms are changing on a daily basis. So things break down, and if you're not constantly staying on top of it, you will you know come back in three weeks and be like, well, why isn't this worked in a week and a half? Well, it's because something updated and you weren't paying attention. So a lot of the times what we do is we actually run audits on our processes, on our thing, on our you know, um scheduled jobs to actually say, like, what's the success rate? Like what has been working, what's been failing, what's been breaking down, and then how can we improve those things for future, right? Um, I saw this from Boris from Anthropic, and he kind of said, you know, every time that they do make a new release, anytime that they upgrade a model, you know, they're adding things into the system prompt, they're deleting things from the system prompt. And so your skills that might have worked right two, three, you know, a couple months ago may not work the same way. You may be noticing that you're getting diminishing right results from your skills, and you may be wondering why. Well, according to Boris, his thing is you may even be better off just deleting all your skills and restarting because of the way that it was written. It was written for the model right three months ago, not written for the model today. And so part of that maintenance piece of human involved and you staying on top of your system is actually running. I I would suggest weekly some sort of process against your skills, against your recurring you know, tasks of hey, I want you to create a scoring metric system, and every week I want you to review the skills against a scoring system and see are the is the current way the skill written versus cleaning it up, giving me a better or a worse result. And then if it gives me a better result, I want you to actually approve that change and save it to the skill file. A lot of times you can do this with your output as well. Like you may like clawed any of the other systems. Anytimes it runs a process, you can have it save the output. Typically, it already does, but you can have it go find those output files and produce a audit report at the end of every schedule process. That could be part of your wrap-up skill. Would be produce an audit report when you wrap up, save it to this, you know, file location, and then you can have another process that goes to that file location at the end of every week, analyzes all of the runs from all of your scheduled you know items, figure out what broke down, what the skill didn't cover, where it got held up, or where things failed. And then you can have that audit system process, once it's done analyzing the last week's reports, go back to every one of the skills or any one of the scheduled and and submit a you know change or an update. So now you're you're now this is becoming right the self-learning, the self-improving process of always staying at the top of it and the involvement. And where you come in is it's typically always going to ask you to approve those changes, but you now can review it and say, Yes, I do approve it. Right. And so that's that's now right the next level of I set my job, I have these recurring processes set. Now I'm staying on top of it, now I'm keeping it up to date because things change so much. If you do use the desktop version of Claude or anything, right, you probably notice that like almost every day there's a the hey, you know, restart for an update. It's truly game-changing how much things are evolving in the world today. Um, and that's why like we say this all the time. We are not telling you anything that's groundbreaking. I'm not telling you anything that you can't go out and do right now for yourself in your business. Anything we say, like we we say it all the time. Our goal is not to try and teach you something that you can't find out and can't do yourself. Our goal is actually to help save you time, anxiety, and stress related to the actual implementation of these things within your business and in your processes. Because we're there, right? We're we're in it 13 hours a day. So if you have questions on it, like don't feel afraid to ask. Don't feel don't even feel like you're behind, right? Because you're not behind. Again, we talked about it, like only really 10 to 20 percent of people are actually fully utilizing it on a regular basis within their business. So if you think about it, like you're you're definitely not far behind at all. So those are two ways that we're using it, right? Obviously, our email, and these are just kind of beginner ways, but there's a lot of other things that we're doing, right? So we have we're building, you know, what we call like you know our engines in the back of our operations. So uh we have a content engine. So that's built around these transcripts from these shows. It's built around strategies that have had conversations with clients, prospects, things that we've pointed them in the right direction, things that have worked. It's built on our information, right? Things that we're doing that that is an impact to

Stop Chasing Every New Tool

Dave 32:32

everybody else. So that's our content engine that drives a lot of our social media, it drives a lot of our newsletter writing. And so the beauty of that is that it's not just going out and picking anything and writing it, it's actually in our voice, right? So the content engine is important to again build awareness. We have the commenting piece. So a lot of the awareness now on social media is around conversations and generating engagement through conversations. So, you know, getting out there and commenting on influencers' posts or your network's posts when they come across your feed, adding value in those conversations is what's going to generate you more awareness, more impressions on your profile than if you just post on a regular basis, especially LinkedIn nowadays. Always generates conversation. So that's another piece. We have our outreach piece, which again is the it brings all of the you know conversations from new connections, old connections, our network, people that have DMed us and have you know we're we're having a conversation with them. And the beauty of this now is that I've trained it on how the conversation should be, and you can train it on how you want your flow to be and the ultimate goal, and how we can analyze the results of the conversation. And from there, right, for me, it comes into our command center and I'm able to approve every one of the conversation pieces. So nothing is actually getting sent to a prospect or a connection or a network member, whatever. It doesn't get sent to them unless I approve it. Same thing with the copy, nothing goes out unless I approve it. That's the human involved, and that's why it's so important. And I tell I don't tell people to just go out and do it autonomously unless you're trying to do something in mass and you're confident in the messaging. That's when you could possibly do something autonomously, and you're not trying to like you know be personal and things like that. We all I'm on the opposite side for that. I like to actually review every message that comes up, so it gives me a little history, and you could have it do this yourself, right? Like co-work, whatever, have it go off to all your social media accounts, pull in all the conversations that you're having, have it analyze each one of the conversations and suggest the next message, and then give that to you for approval. Then you approve it and it goes out and it sends it. Those are some of these processes when you think about like what can I be doing with AI, what can I be doing to you know save time? These are some of those things. You know, a lot of that manual part of any one of your processes should be some sort of automation or more efficient, right? If you have to recreate a proposal every time, that probably takes you a lot of work, right? Now, if you had either one of two ways, right, you had an automated system, you could actually just build the template within the automated system with whatever custom field you want. And then once you have a conversation with a prospect, you can just go into that template and fill in the custom fields, right? And update those custom fields. Now that's an automated process. How much time would that save you if you do if you are doing that manually? Right. A lot of other people may be, you know, client delivery, you know. You know, so how much time do you spend analyzing or researching or going over a topic, right? Well, that's gonna be where AI is gonna save you a lot of time as well. Maybe you maybe you write newsletter and you like writing. Actually, I had this conversation last week with somebody, right? He loves writing, he wants to write, he wants to keep writing. He doesn't want AI to do the writing for him, so he doesn't know how AI can help him. And I said, Well, what's your process look like? And he said, Well, you know, um, I have this conversation with them, you know, I

Codex As A Second Set Of Eyes On Claude

Dave 36:18

record it so I don't miss anything. I then go out, I research their you know, job titles, I research the companies they've worked for, and I like to pull in and get more information, you know, about them, so I do some research on them. I said, Well, that's your that's right there. Like, you know, you're doing all of that manually right now, right? And he said, Yes. And I said, Okay, so what about if you updated the process to be you recorded the meeting, you then had AI analyze the meeting, it pulled out the job titles, it pulled out the companies that they've worked for, it pulled out maybe some other pieces of information about their life that you wanted to write about, and then it does all that research for you, and then provides you a report that you can then take and have all that information at your fingertips when you're ready to write. And he's like, Oh, yeah, I guess you're right. So, those parts, when you when you think about how does AI support you, it it supports you because your situation is going to be different than everybody else's, right? And it supports you by allowing you to do the things that you actually want to be doing in your business. It gives you and frees up your time to spend more time doing those things that you enjoy in your business. Everything from list number two, right? That we talked about earlier. That hour, hour and a half that he would have been spent researching an article every single time, you multiply that, even if it's just an hour and a half a week, right? One article a week, that's gonna give him back 75 to 80 hours a year. So he's now freed up basically two weeks of his time by just automating the research process. And that's why I think people they don't realize how important it is to manage your time better. Because an hour a week, right? An hour a week, 52 weeks a year, that's 52 hours. That's a whole nother week and a half of extra stuff that now you freed yourself up to do that you want to do or need to do from list number two. And that's the vital important part, I think, though, right? Just because you freed up your time doesn't mean it's a productive freed up your time. So if you free up your time and you don't spend it doing the things on list number two or the things that are going to give you more enjoyment, give you more joy, or grow your business, if that's the journey that you're on, uh then it's not necessarily, you know, a successful freeing up of your time. So you have to be you have to be strategic about it. You have to be, you know, motivated to then say, okay, when I save this hour, I'm actually gonna do what from list number two. And that's the thing. Your list number two looks different than my list number two, looks different than Warren's list number two, and so on and so on and so on. Which is why I say I can't particularly give you the set of rules or the processes that you need to be doing in your business because your situation's different. Right? And I and I never start off a conversation or I never start off an engagement by saying this is what you need to do. Our engagements start with let's go through this, let's go through each list. Where are you at? What do you want to be doing? What's your what do you want to be accomplishing? That's where we're gonna focus our attention because if if me coming in and giving you a a set strict list, that may not be what you want to do. And so this is why, even if you're gonna do it yourself, you have to start with those two lists, otherwise, you could go down a rabbit hole. And I've seen it happen with a lot of people, they just start going down a rabbit hole

Automating Your Email Triage

Dave 40:13

and they just start like, oh my god, this is so fun. Let me try this, let me try that, let me try this. And now maybe you freed up your time, but you didn't free it up to go do things on list number two. You freed it up because now you're kind of doing unproductive work with things that aren't necessarily going to help you. And so it's really important to kind of really pay attention and stay on top of what you're doing with your time, how often you're doing it with your time, right? So that you can become more efficient and more successful in your business and love a lot. So those are kind of the two things, I guess, that I was kind of talking about a lot this week. Additionally, it's been it's been fun for me this week. The last two weeks, really, you know, we kind of mentioned how we've been doing a lot more with Hermes integration in our business. And if you haven't watched, if you haven't watched any of our future past episodes, right, Hermes is kind of that next level to like even your Claude, right? It kind of allows you to be that autonomous, right? You can be out of the office. Now, the thing with you know Cloud Cowork is yes, they have the app, but you're really limited to what file locations you've given that access to. It can't go out and control anything on your computer or have a lot of other API connections that you haven't already set up. The beauty with like Hermes is you it actually is like a full-on autonomous agent within rules. That's what I like Hermes over like OpenClaw, is it's it's a lot more closed. You set your own rules, you set your guardrails, and but it'll it can API into softwares you have API connections to. So, for example, you know, mine it's API connected into our QuickBooks for our clients, it's API connected into our Kick, which is another accounting software that we use for a lot of our clients, our PayPal, and a couple other softwares as well that we use on a regular basis. And then right now we utilize it through Slack. So I can be in Slack on my phone, on my computer, any computer, and it talks back to the one computer that I have my Hermes on. And all my connections, all my you know, environment is on that one computer. So when I'm talking to it, it's not trying to work on any computer, it's literally here, main computer, all the files are here, it has access to all that. I can communicate with it anywhere. It's gonna go run and it's gonna provide me back the results, documents, whatever it wants in Slack. Now, we're the be is the fun part of this week is we're actually kind of looking at, you know, I've talked about the command center and the things that we do, which is the one platform app that we have, which does everything that we were kind of talking about today, where you know, it has a today page. Basically, I built it to be an executive assistant for somebody and business owners who don't have money to pay a full-time executive assistant. So it's more proactive, really, you know, as we talked about, like gives you the emails that you need to respond to with the you know,

Audit Your Automations Before They Break

Dave 43:18

the the draft, you know, your meeting notes, drafts, all of that kind of stuff, content, outreach. But we're also kind of building for those that want to have Hermes in involved, the actual sort of Slack conversation system within the command center as well. So not only can you have your team members in the software, I mean they can be connected, right? Whether it's Outlook or Google or whichever version you want to integrate, but you can have your team members in there and they can also integrate their side, but then you can also have conversations back and forth, just like in Slack. So the idea would be that we're trying to, you know, kind of limit the number of softwares that you have to have in order to be successful, as well as bringing people together from their team to manage our clients better, you know, manage our processes better, and just as we said, just be more efficient. And so for me this week has been you know a lot of that development time. And what I've loved is just learning, right? I mean, again, if you would ask me like at the beginning of this year, if you would have asked me that by the end of this year, you would be doing a lot more like fractional AI, custom you know, app development, dashboard development, workflows, and on top of what you've already been doing for finance, I would have told you that you were crazy. I'm like, what do you mean? I don't I don't know what any of that stuff is. I don't know how to code, I don't know what ID is, I don't know any of that, right? And here we are, you're right, it's August, middle of August, and I'm deep into it. As we said, like you know, yeah, we have Slack integration is developing our own software, our own platform. We've developed three or four different sort of use case platforms for ourselves that we are utilizing to kind of support our clients. Uh, and then we're also helping other clients assign custom builds to simplify their workflows as well. So it's it really is evolved from what we where we started at the beginning of the And I can only imagine where things are heading next year. You know, before we know it, it's going to be December. And, you know, we're going to be celebrating 2027 and kicking 2026 out the door, right? So with that, I think we'll leave it with that. My focus for you guys this week, right? Make those two lists. Really think think through, and I think I said this last week, but really think through what are the things that I am doing on a daily basis manually that I just wish I could save time and not have to do manually. I'll review it, but I it just takes so much of my time. So as you're making that list, estimate how long you're spending doing all of those. And once you get done with list number one, create list number two, right? What are all those things that you know you should be doing more of, you want to be doing more of, and make list number two, and then take a step back and analyze both lists, right? Look at list number one and say, okay, this one, if I if I automated this, I could save an hour, I could save two hours here. And with those three hours, what from list number two would you start doing more of? And make that plan. Like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna automate these, and then I'm gonna start doing right more outreach, or I'm gonna start doing more manual phone calls, which is something that I enjoy. Whatever it is on list number two that is yours, right? That's how you analyze the two to bring them closer together. Now, what you also want to realize is that it's not just gonna be as easy right up front. Like you may spend a little bit more time doing those audit, like to save an hour every week on a process, it may take you this

Hermes, Slack, And The Command Center

Dave 46:58

week five hours to automate the process to learn it, especially if you're doing it yourself, right? Because you gotta learn it, you gotta you know go check it, you gotta make sure all the copies are right, all whatever it is. But when you put the five hours up front, and now over the next 12 months, you're still what 45 hours ahead, 47 hours ahead than you were if you would have just kept doing it manually. So realize that there is an investment up front of time if you're doing it yourself, or right, some money, and or a combination of both. But you can do this yourself. Like, don't think that you can't. Like a lot of this stuff is as simple as having an idea and communicating it. That is the beauty of where we're at today. So, nothing that we're telling you is something that you can't go and do yourself. All of these things are something that you can do yourself. The question you have to have and answer for yourself that you have to answer, nobody else can, is do I want to invest my time to learn it, to go through the stress, to the replication, to the correction? Or would I much rather write utilize somebody else that's been there and have that offset? So it's really up to you. Everybody's different. Some people want more hands-on, some people want more hands-off, they don't want to understand the back end, they just want to see the front end and how it works and what it's gonna do to save them. I get it, everybody's in a different plus every place, everybody has a different list, too. A lot of people want to free up their time because they have a lot of other things that they want to be doing, and it's not learning how to create with AI. I get it, it's not for everybody. Just like I don't want to, you know, go spend more time in a courtroom and you go as an attorney. Like, who wants to do that? Some people do because they like to be argumentative. I get it. Or I don't want to, you know, go out and sit in the heat. Who knows? So everybody's list number two is different. So for you, analyze those. That's that's your project over the weekend, my homework for you. Make those two lists, analyze it. I'd love to hear it. Share it down below. What is the one or two things that you found from your list number one that could save you one to two hours a week? Again, that's you know, one hour is 50 some hours a year that's saved. Two hours is over a hundred. So, what could you do with that time if you were able to just save one to two hours a week in your processes? What would you be able to accomplish in your life, in your business? That's what it comes down to. So I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing week. You guys made it through the you know episode today. I appreciate you guys. We love you all. As always, you know, do all that funny algorithm stuff, you know, like share. We're live every single Friday morning around 8:30 a.m. And we are here. If you're a business owner and maybe you're like, hey man, I got some information I want to share, some education I want to share with with your viewers, please put a message down below. There's there should be a link as well to request to be on the show. We're more than happy to bring you on, um, do some QA, bring an obstacle or two that maybe you're facing in your business too. We can point you in the right direction, and you know, it'll be impactful for everybody. So if that's you, feel free to you know put a request down below. If it's also you and you're like, hey, I want to start doing more, but I don't know what to do. Feel free to shoot me a message. We

Your Homework: Make The Two Lists

Dave 50:02

can give you some pointers and see if it's something that you know makes sense in in your business or in your workflows, or at least give you the right direction so that you can start doing it yourself as well. So with that, I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing weekend. It's fun because now it's actually like starting high school football season again. So we got you know some some football games to go to tonight. So it's it's gonna be interesting. Hope you guys have a fun time, and we will see everybody next week. Hope you guys are good. Peace.