The Trades Business Owners Are Wasting Time on AI Without Strategy with Julian Scadden

Speaker A: Find someone to help you on this journey here. When it comes to software adoption, integration, solving problems, thinking strategically, go to somebody else, get a third party, get that objective. You can skip a few scars and bruises by leaning in. You're going to learn one way or another. And if you have the money, invest it now and gain that advantage of information over time. Today's guest is Julian Skadden, president and CEO of nexstar Network, where he helps home service businesses grow smarter. He shares practical insights on leadership and the trades and using AI the right way in business. Business owners and leaders, we run past strategy so quickly, and that is such a disservice to our business on so many levels. When you can filter it back through your strategy and then through your values and your principles, you will always make the right decision. Most people spend about 80% of their time researching the software they want to purchase. About 20% of their focus on the integration that should be opposite, because guess what? No software is going to be Perfect. Just spend 20% of your time, pick one, and then spend 80% of your time on the integration.

Speaker B: I'll give you an interesting trope that's from inside the software world, but it actually has relevance in the business world, and that's that no software is worth touching until version three. Here's the reason why. Right? Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the AI for Business Owners Podcast. I am, as always, your host, Jeff Torello. Podcast is of course sponsored by Syngen AI, which is, uh, my AI consulting company. Syngen really tries to focus on the SMB market and specifically not on selling individual products. We don't actually have any products. We sell strategy, we sell. Figuring out for you what makes the most sense. Where can your company benefit from AI if it can? And not every solution uses AI, believe it or not. Strangely enough. Uh, so if you're looking for help or assistance or want a technical nerd to be able to talk to occasionally, give me a call or send, uh, an email and we'll help you out. All right, Today's podcast is going to be pretty fun. I'm going to let Julian introduce himself here in a minute and then we'll get started. Julian, uh, tell everybody who you are and what you got going on.

Speaker A: Well, howdy, Jeff. Thank you for having me. My name is Julian Scadden. I represent a consultancy that serves the plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical industry relative to home services. That business is called nexstar Network. I, uh, we'll be speaking from a few perspectives, so I want to start by sharing that with you. All here. I'm a high school dropout. I'm a ditch digger. I'm a plumber who learned business and therefore I learned how, uh, to lead businesses from having to make payroll, having to pay taxes. And, you know, I make light of it, but the reality is when I skipped informal education early on, I had to make up later. So while I make light of it and I talk about, you know, the real world and hard knocks and learning through scars, the reality is that at some point, business owners, as you all know, and what you're doing right now by listening to this podcast, is a form of education. So I get at least a business today. So when I talk about speaking from different contexts, first, that was the personal context of somebody who liked to work with their hands and get things done and didn't sit still in class. And then there's two more perspectives you'll hear me speak from as I switch. We, as I said, consult and advise over a thousand different businesses. So sometimes I'll talk about what I see, and we also lead a growing organization. So sometimes I'll talk about the. From the perspective of what we've implemented or what we've struggled with. And with that, Jeff, take us away into the, the cyber world.

Speaker B: Uh, that's cool. Actually, I had a question, because I don't know if you'll have the answer definitively, but I think you're closer than I would be to it. I feel like there's a bit of, um, a resurgence in the popularity of trades with respect to education as opposed to not everybody needs to get a college degree. And I feel like there's been an undercurrent to that as long as I've been in the business world. But I feel as though that's kind of gotten a little bit more popular or prevalent in the last, let's say five to ten years. A, uh, the cost of education, number one, and B, the lack of concrete value in the job market, like the amount of layoffs that happened in the tech world the last two years is insanity. Uh, do you have any evidence to back that up or am I insane? Is that accurate or not accurate? What's your opinion there?

Speaker A: All right, let's play multi perspective right from the jump. Uh, first, I'd like to say I'm glad, I'm glad that you're in noticing and hearing this resurgence. Um, the other thing that I'll say is, you know, necessity creates the story, you know, so I think there's part of it, too. Good old supply and demand and of course in our, in our society here of capitalism. But the one thing I want to speak to very quickly is it was interesting, you know, early on and you still even see it somewhat today that the vilification of college and you know, then this honorable rising of the trades. What I will say, as I am of the age where I had, you know, shop class and for those of you who don't know what shop class is, uh, they gave us sharp objects, they put us in front of big machinery and uh, you know, guys like me who did really well in that class, they kind of figured out where we were headed next and it wasn't college. And so what I, what I do want to say is, you know, the businesses that we get to work with, and I'll be very clear here that we work with independently owned businesses and some of them are, you know, high school dropouts like myself who took on the trade. And we have others that are MBAs, we have others that, you know, are Harvard graduates that are getting into the trade. So there's this wide range of professionalism within the industry. But back to your question of. I know that our country is becoming more and more aware that with something that has often been cited as the gray tsunami, all the folks who took on these trade jobs are now retiring. Who's going to own it and who's going to do it? And watch out, you know, we're a booming population who have a need. Who's going to do the work? And so we're a little bit behind on the charge. We will fall short of the talented folks that we need in the years to come. But again, supply and demand is a great place to now be on this side of the trades. But home owners beware is going to get tough to have licensed professional services to your home. And this is not a doomsday warning. It's more of let's do something now. Let's start the conversations with young folks and let's take those who are more inclined to tactile service and let's find them something where they can contribute to not only the community and the comfort, but remember, safety is underneath every service that we provide. When I talk about plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical in the states and in the state of the world that we live, we think of it as comfort. Well, don't forget, underneath that is some strong, strong elements of safety when we start to think about the trade. So there you go, there's my soapbox. And I'm glad that we're talking.

Speaker B: No, no, no worries, no worries. Um, just. You jogged a memory, so I'll bring it up. Right. I went to high school in the, in the, in the 80s. I had Home Ec.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Cooking type. I had types too. Um, I did, I did. I had a typewriting class. Keyboarding, I guess it was called. I had print shop where I land. Learned how to run a print environment. And from setting up the thing and taking the pictures and developing the film myself, to running the ab dick printers and pulling out the sheets and making thousand copies.

Speaker A: That's cool.

Speaker B: And I also had metal, um, shop. Yeah, I had a bender and a spot welder. I wasn't allowed to full weld, sandblasting, all that stuff. Those were all electives in my high school. I don't know why they're all gone. I don't understand what. We're not going to, uh, solve that here. But I don't understand why all those things weren't existing. Because I looked at it as, let me go mess around with this and see whether it's something I like or don't like. Am I interested in it? I wasn't even, like, desperately. I had to learn the skill. It was more, I don't know what's printing about. Maybe let me check it out and you can't. We also had an auto shop. I didn't get to that one. And that particular school had a lot of everything. It was a pretty big, uh, pretty big school in Florida. I really think those programs should exist still and not just exist at a trade school after high school. I don't see any reason that you can't be exposed and get a flavor in the same way that you have to take a couple years of a foreign language. You're not going to learn an entire language by doing that, but you're going to get exposure, et cetera. It's the same mentality. But apparently we've lost the time to be able to spend on frivolous activity like these things, which they're not frivolous at all. But, uh, that seems to be what the school system thinks.

Speaker A: And I'll speculate a little bit here, and I know that's not safe ground to play, but I'll speculate a little bit. I think it's fair. Um, you know, I, I, I would think about investment, you know, the materials and, and, you know, as we say, you know, if I can have somebody look at something on their computer now or their iPad, versus having to buy all the metal, all the equipment to maintain all the equipment that we use, and then you Know, the one that I really probably lean towards is liabilities. Oh, my gosh. You know, when I look back, we were cooking stuff, we were sewing stuff, you know, in the home ec. And then, then we'd go over. Like I said, we were working with plastic, with wood, with metal, with hammers. And then we have the automotive class speculation here, but, uh, it's. It's needed. It's needed. I'll tell you one more thing actually, that crossed my mind. Uh, at times, I'll drop in shameless plugs, not for myself, but for things that I think are additive. There was a book that really gave a perspective that I never considered because I was always so close to the kinesthetic learning. Shop class as Soulcraft. Shop class as Soulcraft. And what he speaks to is this innate, innate need of a human at times to build something of their own. And then he goes into the neurological, the, uh, neurological connections that are created when you do some tactile work with your hands. He was talking about, you know, shop class as soul craft. This wasn't solely about careers, and this wasn't solely about, like, I'm talking about giving back to the safety of the community. He was saying, sometimes your spirit just needs to build something from scratch and struggle through it and figure out the parts don't start again. What does that do for you when everything's served up for you on a platter or. You know, it's almost like I heard this too. Video games. Now that will start you from where you stopped versus old video games that always took you back to the beginning. What this teaches the mind and your tenacity and durability and the things that this implants on us as we continue to grow and mature. I've gone all over the road here, but I hope it's holding together for you, Jeff.

Speaker B: No, it's fine. In fact, um, just to throw one little tidbit on your video game comment, and then we'll move on. Uh, there's a feature in some games called Permadeath as a model or a mode.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So in games where you're. You're fighting against the environment and not necessarily just a multiplayer game, but maybe a single player game, you can save progress, pick up where you left off. But if you turn on Permadeath mode, you can only die once. And so it changes the dynamic of how you play because you can't take anywhere near the same risks as when you can always respawn. Right. Uh, and there's a lot of folks on YouTube who play games in permadeath mode to try and showcase how far you can get or how quickly or whatever. And, um, it's that same structure and mentality of you got to go back and start over from the beginning and you get to keep nothing that you took with you. But there's lessons there. There's lessons in all of these things.

Speaker A: That was my point here for our business. Of course, you don't get to start over where you dropped off. Sometimes it is perma death and we pick ourselves up and we go again.

Speaker B: Right. Yeah, I do remember, um, the, uh, school used to sell our printing services to local businesses at a discount. I love that they did. To make themselves money to help. To help offset some of the costs for printing. So we would be running flyers for one of the local companies that was sponsoring a dancer or whatever, whatever the case may be. And we'd have to set it all up and typeset it and do all the lithography and take the photos and then make the plates and then put them on the printers and make them print and line them up. I don't think most people understand how in the 80s multicolor printing worked, but it was literally a different plate for each color. And you had to put the black printed ink back through the printer to get blue on the page and you had to line em up. If you didn't line em up, it would be like they were auto register and it would look wacko. And then you'd have to do red and you'd have to do green, and then you'd have four different runs of the same flyer in order to get four color.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Uh, just craziness.

Speaker A: Discipline, focus, patience.

Speaker B: I mean, some people learned that that was a thing they really enjoyed. It was great. This is going to sound really wacko, but we'll just stay here because I think it's relevant. The valedictorian of my high school, his entire plan was to go be a manager at Albertsons when he got out of high school. He was not going to college. His entire plan was he could make 1987, he could make $50,000 working his way up to be a manager at albertsons, and within three years, he could be running a district and make 75.

Speaker A: Get him.

Speaker B: He didn't have time for college.

Speaker A: Get him.

Speaker B: And he wasn't remotely wrong. The numbers were right. And at the time, Albertsons didn't require a college education for anything. So he could. He was the valedictorian. It wasn't like he was stupid. He had a plan. His plan did not include college. And I think it was valid.

Speaker A: And okay, so for, you know, let's just say that we're all PhDs here. Where are you going to go get your groceries from if we don't have that guy, you know, running the store efficiently and effectively? It's a community, uh, capitalism, community, not capitalism for capitalism's sake.

Speaker B: Right. I mean, I get the idea that everybody has a dream and they want to make, um, money and have the big house and whatever. Okay, sure. But statistically, you're not all going to win the lottery. Right.

Speaker A: So in principality, we can all put in hard work. So I think that's the difference here is this, uh, this is lottery mindset or this entitlement mindset that, you know, if I achieve the certificate, I shall be granted. And that's one thing that the trades will teach you quick. You know, every job that you go into, you're basically starting over. You know, you solder in brand new, you know, you're in a tighter space, you're in a different environment and that joint better hold and, you know, you have to prove yourself again every time. And there's a certain pride, as you can probably pick up in my voice, but also a discipline and a focus to the work that you're doing in craftsmanship, that you can build something that lasts a long time.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've had a couple experiences with electricians, and I find it, uh, entertaining that folks that have worked in the job for more than a year or two, from young to old, doesn't seem to matter. They have very similar mentality. As an example, uh, that there's an option on, uh, a light, a socket, an electrical socket, an outlet. There's an option to use the screw and run the wire around the brass screw and screw it in. And there's an option to push the wire into the little clamp at the back. And the number of electricians who will not remotely go near the push into the back, little spring clip. And you know, as a homeowner, you're just doing your own thing at home. Okay, sure, it makes sense. Maybe it's the easy way out and it's got a little guide on the side, you know, how to cut and how much to strip and all that nonsense, as opposed to how do I make the hook and put it around the screw. But just the one example from a commercial, uh, electrician happened to be showing this to me, but it doesn't matter is it's not relevant. But with, he literally took apart the outlet, shoved them into the back Put it all into the box. And then said, okay, here you go. Something's going wrong. You don't know what it is. You come over here to try and work on it. First off, uh, you just grab it to pull it out. Boing. And it just, just disconnects. Which one was there? What the hell was going. You don't even know where it was because now it yanked itself out because it's this little tiny spring loaded clip.

Speaker A: You go.

Speaker B: He goes, that's nonsense. And then the second one was every single electrician I've ever seen who was worth their salt would wrap electrical tape around the screws on the side of the outlet so that you never grabbed a live connection, you always grabbed tape. And then, um, they're like, it's 2 cents worth of tape on the outside of the thing. But it keeps everybody safe. Also stops them shorting across the outlets. All these little things that you don't learn until you do the job.

Speaker A: Here's when we first met and connected that you brought to my mind. So you look at the people like us, uh, trades. I'm going to lump us together. So we have this attention to detail with, have all this pride. And then here comes something, you know, two little letters. AI. And so you're going to have this idea of I work so hard, I'm so detail oriented. Now here comes somebody telling me that this little tool is going to make my business easier and faster. So either I run towards it because, oh, they can't, you know, they're not going to sell me a lie. Wow. It's going to, you know, improve efficiencies is this report. I can't wait for one part of my life to be a little bit more simple. Or you can have the other guys who don't believe it, you know, that that's just another, that's another spring loaded fix and I don't trust it. So either they're running completely from it when they should be leaning into it, or they're spending all their time doing that when there's, I think there's a real middle ground here. So I watch. And the reason I bring that up is I think any business owners in that. I kind of, you know, I poke and tease my profession here. But I tell you, I bet we all find ourselves there in some way. The savior or the villain. Which one is it? Tell us, Jeff.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, uh, it's, it's, it's an interesting question because the answer is both. Right? There isn't a business out there that doesn't want to take advantage of some level of either automation or labor reduction. However you want to frame that and you know, realistically, a cordless framing nailer versus a hammer, there's a labor savings involved, but there's trade offs. And I think everybody understands that if they've ever used both tools. One has power and it saves your arm and all these things, but you lose some dexterity and some finesse. Also, most of the nailers are pretty damn big and you can't get into small spots and, you know, whatever. And even like an electronic screwdriver or one of the larger guys that, like on a roofing guy where you're putting screws in or whatever, um, nothing's foolproof. There's always a trade off. And AI is the same. The way I try to explain this to people to make it easily understood when I do trainings and other things, AI is software. There's really no getting around it. It's just software. So it's developed or written or created by someone. Sometimes the AI writes the code, but I wouldn't trust that 100%. It needs to be looked at a little bit. But what you're really dealing with is a system that relies on the probability

Speaker A: equation and that's pure business. So keep going for us now, what does that mean?

Speaker B: Essentially, uh, the probability equation is simply the answer. Relies lives between 0 and 1, right? So it's not binary, it's not on or off, it's not a switch, it's gray. And that's how uh, an AI works. That's how all AI works. And folks who think that they can get around that don't understand the technology. But it works like this. If we really get down to a chatbot, take a, ah, chatgpt and you ask it a question and it gives you an answer. What's it really doing? This kind of gets difficult for people to grasp, but it's guessing at each word in its response to you as the probability of whether that word is the correct next word in the sentence it's forming. Which is what? Probability. The most correct response to the question you asked. That's literally what's going on.

Speaker A: That's brilliant.

Speaker B: And it gets it about 8 out of 10 times. Pretty, pretty, pretty good. It's not perfect. It never will be perfect again. It lives inside of 0 and 1, right? It can't be any better than that. But it's trained on a lot of stuff that is repetitive inside of our world. And so it has a pretty good opportunity to get certain things Right. And the thing that's the most entertaining, if we step out of that low level, keep the concept of there's a probability engine running. Um, and now talk about language. If you think hard about it for a moment, you probably only use 5 to 6,000 words in your week, and you use a lot of them over and over again. And if you're a service person dealing with the clientele, you're probably saying the same thing, uh, over and over and over.

Speaker A: Perfect.

Speaker B: So what I want you to get out of that repetition is the model, the language model sees that repetition and understands 8 out of 10 times, this is the way he answers. So this is probably the answer I can predict for the question that's being asked. And that's how you get the capability where a chatbot and a website can answer a question you ask about your order, because it knows how to do that. Um, and it's seen that happen before, or in our case, on the software side, this is how you solve this problem. This is how you add two plus two. We'll just talk about it that way. This large language model has been trained on examples of code to solve two plus two a thousand times. And it looks and says they all kind of do this. So this seems to be the way to solve two plus two. Okay, now it looks like it can write code just like it looks like it can talk. It's just predicting the next possible most likely word.

Speaker A: I want to interject there. What if we took this same logic, you know, and I say we, meaning us as business owners, you're successful, you're listening to this podcast. M. You know, maybe you're thinking about starting business and you can think about this in a future state. For those of you who have been running businesses for some time, let's, let's take that same repetition and predictability thinking. And that's how we built our businesses. You know, we've met with enough marketing reps that have promised us leads that will come to the business. We have implemented QuickBooks or another software of some sort in your business. And, you know, and it's all use the trades here. You know, there could be an application here to purify the air or the water. And no matter what product it is, and I'm sure they're all great and, you know, they've been tested and approved. You get the salesperson who comes to your business and he tells you, oh, this is the simplest, fastest install in the industry and it's going to work perfectly. We don't believe that when you have the marketing person show up to your business and they tell you, you know, we're going to get you more, more views, more impressions, more and more and more. And you don't believe that. But why, what is. Why is the predatory cells of AI right now? And you know, I think I can answer my own question, but what I'm doing is trying to draw the same parallel that business leaders, owners, managers, human beings. You have repetition, you have probability in your discernment. And for some reason I'm seeing us start to circumvent that as it comes to AI because we're getting snake oiled into this is a quick fix and this is greater than anything and you can't run from it, you can't avoid it. There's just so much em baggage tied to the way that this is being presented and surrounded around us that. Believe your intuition. When we recruit people here, uh, to join our organization, we spend a. I've heard there's, you know, very few people have a longer process than us. And so I've always heard the term, you know, slow to hire, quick to fire. But the reality is that when people actually get on our process, but what I tell them, the point for them is to pick up data points and to trust their intuition. Much as we're doing the same, I want to give the candidate that same experience. Now I've used a few examples here. Let's get back to the framework that I'm hoping to impress upon you is that there is no savior and there's no pure villain. And yet implementing anything into your business and ultimately where I want to land this plane here for you, Jeff, is what I'm seeing, especially in home services is I'm seeing number one, the predatory sales techniques, number two, the fear tactic of like, I don't want to miss the boat or fear that I'm not going to do it because everything's working now and I'm not going to do anything. But what I'm really, really seeing more than anything in our industry and I'm not sure how prevalent this is in other industries and for whatever you've seen, I'd be interested in what you can share. I'm seeing bolt on pieces in different functions within the business. I'm not seeing holistic solutions across the operations. And now this creates more m distraction. If you've ever implemented a software in a business, you understand how distracting that is. Now imagine that you're bolting on one piece in the middle of a processor into one function of your business and Then you bolt on another, uh, AI or software and another, and none of them are connected. And now all of a sudden you're becoming some API, software engineer, IT professional

Speaker B: instead of your, uh.

Speaker A: Yeah, so basically you don't do it is my point.

Speaker B: Right, of course.

Speaker A: And now you're spending more time chasing, trying to figure this thing out which you were sold that was going to make your life easier. So buyer beware, take your time. Use frameworks when implementing anything new into your business. And I don't know if that's just heavy handed in my industry, Jeff, or if that hits in a few different ways.

Speaker B: I don't think it's industry specific at all. I think it's the way all of these things are being, being moved. Uh, I'll tell you what I've been doing with my clients for quite a while here that, that is really trying to help. I approach this from the perspective of you don't need a tool, you need a strategy. And m, it may be after we've figured out a strategy, that there are appropriate tools for you. But before we even go down that path, let's have the conversation that says, where are your biggest problems? Where are your biggest pain points? Where do you want to improve? Either fix, grow, whatever that is, what do those look like? And uh, let's map that out. Let's spend a little time and let's come up with. Okay, look, I think you might have an opportunity to buy a solution for this to solve that particular problem. I think you shouldn't even bother looking at these tools. You don't have enough pain to afford the expenditure. Also, I, uh, look at it this way. If someone comes to you and pitches a tool and that tool is supposed to solve this massive problem for you, if that tool works and solves that problem, all of your competitors are going to buy it too, and you'll be right back to zero. You're just spending some money. Uh, my point is, if it's so miraculous that it solves everybody's version of

Speaker A: that problem, we're going to all adopt it.

Speaker B: You have no choice. Right? Think, uh, of like a cell phone or a website, right? Everybody's got a cell phone, Everybody's got a website because you didn't have a chance. Table stakes.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, so if there's a revolutionary tool out there, you can wait. Because if everyone's going to have it, you don't need to be the first one on the block so you can sit and wait on that. The other side of the equation is if you Have a particular problem that's stopping your business from growing or revenue or whatever the sequence is, or whatever your priority needs to be. That's the thing that you should probably investigate. Time on. Can I automate this? Can I buy a solution? Can Jeff help me figure out an answer? Okay, any one of those. But it should fit into an overall strategy. So you should still back up a minute and go, wait, I want to achieve this goal or these goals, and these are the three big pain points that I have. How am I going to address those three? Uh, well, this one I might be able to do automation. This one I can hire someone that's a specialist. This one I might need a tool. Great. Now we have a bit of a strategy and a roadmap. Which one's the most important and which one costs. Like, do you have money to buy all three now, are you going to wait? Like, that's the strategy part that I don't see people doing, because the hype is deafening for, buy this tool, solve all your problems. Like, and it's, you know, no tool will solve every problem. And I think, you know, like, I've seen construction calculators on phones make a lot of things easier for folks framing, whatever, figuring out the pitch on a roof, like, just, sure, great. Those are great. That's a little, tiny little point tool. But it didn't help you bid that job, right? Like, you figured out your materials, et cetera, before that. And, um, like, there's pieces to it, and no one's going to just look at the calculator and go, okay, well, tell me the bid. No one. Whatever that answer is. You might use the calculator to help you come up with the bid, but you still have a strategy for how you're going to make that bid. And there's a tool in the middle. I'm trying to make an analogy to say, same way with AI. AI can help. In some cases, AI is not the answer. In some cases, having a strategy for which ones are the right ones for you is probably the smarter investment. So you pay somebody like me some small amount of money up front to help you figure out your strategy and save all the effort and time of buying a tool that ends up not being the right answer.

Speaker A: You've really touched on something that I've. I've been guilty of. You know, I've been guilty of leading with adrenaline. And it is. It's getting to the tactic of execution, believing that you're providing value versus pausing to say, what is the strategy? Is this in line with our overall strategic bandwidth, uh, capabilities, what problems is it solving today? Does it need to be today? And again, we get that, you know, we get that adrenaline bias, and we want to make something happen, you know, whether we're sold it or we believe it ourselves or push for it ourselves. But, oh, my goodness, business, Business owners and leaders. Let's just pause right here. I'm going to repeat it again because Jeff said it so eloquently and it's like second nature for him. But I'm telling you, as somebody in a confessional booth right now, we run past strategy so quickly, and that is such a disservice to our business on so many levels. When you can filter it back through your strategy and then through your values and your principles, you will always make the right. You will always. I'm. I'm not always, never, guy, but I, I can tell from experience you will always make the right decision. If you seek wise counsel by pausing, reflecting on your strategy, where you're at today, where you're headed, uh, what's your intent, and, um, I love what you said, too. If it's going to be adopted, it's going to. You're not going to miss the boss. And if you do want to tinker, if you do want to be that early adopter and that front runner, you know, there's terms that are called sandbox, there's terms that are called beta. There are terms that are called, you know, there's ways of deciding how you slowly test and integrate and implement. A guy said something to me once, uh, that really punched me square in the nose. And I share it here today. So hopefully it never hits anyone else like a punch in the nose that you can, you know, smart people learn from their mistakes, and the wise learn from the mistakes of others. So it's more of one of those type of statements. And the. And the guy told me, he said, hey, you know, hey, Julian, um, you know, most people spend about 80% of their time researching the software they want to purchase. About 20% of their focus on the integration. He says. He said that should be opposite, because guess what? No software is going to be perfect. And this was years, maybe a decade ago. He says, yes, yes, spend 20% of your time, pick one, and then spend 80% of your time on the integration. And what I thought of when. Well, the reason I bring that up is when you were sharing is. What I thought of is it's similar to strategy. It's aligned with. That's what the 80% integration means, is you Know how, uh, you know what's going to happen when I wake up with. And it's in bed next to me? Oh, my gosh. You know, we had a good time pursuing it, right? We had a good time last night. Oh, my gosh, I don't know what to do with you now. Who leaves first, you or me? Well, you know, bad analogy there, brother, but I took you on a ride.

Speaker B: Well, I'll give you an interesting trope that's from inside the software world, but it actually has relevance in the business world, and that's that no software is worth touching until version three.

Speaker A: Where were you? I needed you a few years ago. Sorry.

Speaker B: But here's what. Here's the reason why. Right? So version one of the software is always rushed to get out.

Speaker A: Yes. Just ship.

Speaker B: And it's never finished, and it never has all the features it's supposed to have. Okay. But it needs to get out there because the business needs sales. Version two is all the bug fixes from version one that all the existing customers of version one are freaking out about that they desperately want resolved. And so version two comes out and it's almost all bug fixes. Version three finally has the features they really wanted to get in version one, but they never had the time to get to. And then they had to do the bug fix release. That's version two. And so version three is the first time that they actually can ship the software they originally thought of making way back when. And then the next thing I'll say to you is, what version of AI, uh, do you think you're buying right now? If you go buy a tool, do you think you're at version three yet? Uh, you're not at version three of anything. All those tools are at version one at best. And then the VCs are pushing them to go make it a SaaS product and get it out their door as hard as they can.

Speaker A: Right? Yeah, we're not going to get into that, Jeff. I'll tell you, though, from a business perspective, too, in business leadership, uh, on, you know, so just forget about AI. Similarly, you know, I will tell people, just ship, you know, v.1, because I don't want to try to answer every question in my head. And that's usually how we spend a lot of time and resources. Create. Create a beta version, ship it out. And, you know, the way I'll say it is the customer will tell us what's not working, so they'll find the bugs. But they also start, like you said, it starts to influence the features Instead of thinking of the features, you probably won't think of that stuff. So, you know, in business, we're the same way, we do that. But then we don't think when we're the consumer or purchaser. Oh, I'm sure they thought of all that. It's going to be fine. It's packed so nicely.

Speaker B: Well, think of it this way. I mean, this happens for any product but software specifically. Right. Uh, we get an idea for a product, we go, here's a problem we want to solve. Cool. Do we know all the requirements to solve that problem? Do we understand every different customer's different backend infrastructure? Like, do we have all that? Hell no.

Speaker A: Impossible.

Speaker B: We never can. Yeah, right. Little bit of Norman Schwarzkopf. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Right. Let's put out version one because it's going to blow up.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: But the folks who buy version one are jazzed about it and they'll give us amazing feedback and we'll retrieve all the requirements we had no way of finding beforehand. Oh, you can do market research. Yeah, yeah, uh, whatever. Not true. You're not going to get the same information from market research that you're going to get from people trying to use it. And, you know, telling your support team, you suck. Why doesn't it do this? Excellent. That's a requirement we're going to put. I've done this a few times. What I end up building, when I'm super successful, I'm able to create what I refer to as a customer council, which I get to meet with once a quarter. And they are my big customers or my loud customers, my vocal customers. Right. And they've heavily invested in the solution that we're building and they want their say. And, and it's great when I get to sit with them for an hour once a quarter and hear the things that they need prioritized, because that helps my roadmap, that helps me build the right solution and gives them what they want. And also what customers I haven't found yet will want. And that's the correct way to go about it. Right.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. I mean, this is so additive and I love what you're doing here. Helping folks out. Look, I'm going to tell you right now, Jeff doesn't ask me to say this and he might even cut it, but I'm going to tell you right now, uh, I'm going be really direct, you know, find someone to help you on this, on this journey here. I get to lead a business that Helps other businesses be excellent in the specific industry we're in. But when it, when it. When it comes to software adoption, integration, solving problems, thinking strategically, we. We have some. We don't use. Jeff, you know, we talked about that. We have a guy that we use, and I connected him, and hopefully he'll be a guest on this podcast someday. But go to somebody else, get a third party, get that objective. I want to tell you, you're listening now because you're curious. You're listening now because you are a good steward of your business or of yourself, and you want to professionally develop. You know, you could skip a few scars and bruises by leaning in. And I love that he said it earlier and it wasn't a. It wasn't a shift of language as a sales pitch. It, in hindsight, will be a small investment that you make by bringing on someone like this who can help give you objective feedback. We always had a joke here in our consultancy here at nexstar. Uh, you know, if a business wants to have us out and it's an additional fee to have us come out to visit your thing in person and, or work with on a specific need, let's say, how much does it cost? And we used to say it's free.

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: Well, wait a minute. I thought you just told me, you know, it's 20 grand. Well, yeah, by the time I'm done, you're going to save so much doggone money, this is going to fail in comparison. So, Jeff, I know you didn't ask for it, but I feel compelled to do it as a. As a consultant here that advises people all the time. You're going to learn one way or another. And if you have the money, invest it now and gain that advantage of information over time.

Speaker B: Well, I appreciate you your generosity, but I would also add to what you're saying, like, think about it from the perspective of a trade. Trade. How many times have you been called in your trade to a homeowner's house because they tried to do it themselves, and they could have just called you because you knew exactly what to do. Right. Either way. And it's the same structure where you shouldn't be an AI, uh, consultant, unless you're an AI consultant. You should have your own expertise in your business.

Speaker A: There you go.

Speaker B: You shouldn't have to become an AI consultant to figure out how to use it correctly. That's why, why people like me exist to help that transition and give you the value without all the time wasted. That's really what it's about.

Speaker A: I'M stealing that. I'm stealing that. That was such a great comparison and analogy there. Very few people are going to, you know, try to, uh, reinstall a water heater today or rework their. Their breaker. And they know that, boy, you know, it feels real harmless just to install a AI agent. And it's going to change my business. No, careful. Thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, there are a few things that you can do for your own personal exploration with AI that I recommend people do to learn and explore and see and be like, oh, I wonder if this could do more. Uh, but when you're trying to integrate an AI tool with your existing business docs or your finances or your billing or any of that, you probably don't want to play around. You probably want to do it right. Great. Uh, and that's. That's the types of things that we can solve. So.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love it, man. I love the work you're doing. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thanks. I appreciate that. Well, any questions, anything you want to ask while you got a nerd that you can talk to?

Speaker A: Uh, I think right now I'm a little saturated and filled up with these analogies you gave me that were very beneficial. And. And, uh, I know where you're at. I'll find you.

Speaker B: Yeah, you do.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: Thank you. I appreciate the time. It was a good conversation. I, uh, hope the audience gets some good, valuable information out of it. And, uh, it was good spending time with you, Julie.

Speaker A: Thank you so much.