Stop Asking What AI Can Do. Ask What Your Staff Hates to Do.

Speaker A: Ask any small business owner if they use AI and most will say yes.

Speaker B: And then ask what they use it

Speaker A: for and you'll hear the same short

Speaker B: list, like writing an email fast or cleaning up a document, maybe even drafting a caption. And yes, that's useful, it's real. And, um, it's only a tiny fraction of what the thing in front of them can actually do. So here's a question that I've been thinking about and the one that I want you to think about today. If AI can write the email, then why is your team still doing the same repetitive job every single week by hand? Just because that's how it's always been done. Well, let me tell you, today is going to be a little different because after 100 episodes in, it's been me and Hal and he's always had a

Speaker A: lot of strong opinions.

Speaker B: But today I brought in someone who does this for a living. Not the theory of AI for small business, the deployment of it. The part where it actually has to work on a Tuesday for a real company with a number attached. I'm Kim and this is Small Business Big AI, the podcast for business owners who are done treating AI like a toy and are ready to use it as strategic leverage building a technology enabled security superpower. Now, before we start, if you run a business and you have ever felt one step behind on this stuff, well, uh, you know what to do. Follow the show. That's the whole ask. It's free and it's how we keep doing this.

Speaker A: Now, my guest today is Brandon Herder.

Speaker B: Now Brandon is the founder and CEO of Pivot180AI and he comes at this with about 30 years in B2B technology. Now, uh, most recently as the chief marketing officer of an edtech startup where he watched AI move from an idea and a slide deck to something deployed at real scale. Now that's the part I really want you to pay attention to today. Now, Brandon, he doesn't think in tools, he thinks in workflows because he has actually stood inside the change. He started Pivot180 to help small and mid sized businesses get past experimenting with AI and start using it on real work running the company. Brandon, welcome to small business Big AI.

Speaker C: Thank you, Kim. Super excited to be here and have the opportunity to talk to your audience. And I am crossing my fingers that I can fill. How's Big shoes? So, um, I'll do my best.

Speaker A: Uh, oh, that's wonderful. Hey, I tell you, he does have some pretty big shoes.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: I can tell just from here listening to his voice on these podcasts.

Speaker A: So yeah, that's it. So Brandon, I'm going to start so the audience really gets to know you. You've left a good seat at a startup to do this. And why, you know why? Because that, that can be nerve wracking to go out on your own. But what did you keep hearing from owners that made you think that this is the thing that you want to build?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So, yeah, the stability of uh, you know, a chief marketing officer role at a startup is pretty keen. It pays the bills. And you, even though you, you live in the startup world, which is a pretty high, high energy, high pace environment, that whole three year journey for me, like you said in the intro, allowed me to get early hands on all these AI LLMs and new tools that were coming to market and fail with them. Try them, throw the bad ones away, keep the good ones, experiment a lot and also fundamentally, you know, figure out and start to learn how the human and the AI can work most optimally together. So when I was planning on leaving my gig at the startup, I just started having conversations with, you know, people in the neighborhood, people at church, people at the club, and invariably those conversations around were around AI, uh, and I would explain to the folks that I was talking to some of the things that were actually possible and that we were doing at the firm that I was working at. And invariably every person's eyes were like wide open and they were like, darn. I just didn't realize that it can do that, it can do that today. Which led me to believe, and now I've found a little bit of product market fit here. There are thousands and thousands of small business owners, operators, general managers that are running their business and that's their passion and that's their focus. But on the side they're reading every other article about AI, uh, and they're being told that it's coming fast and if you don't get on the train, your competitors are going to pass you up. But there's no bandwidth there to really dig in and figure out like where, where do I start and how do I think about this and how does it apply to my organization? So fundamentally I just looked around and said there's a lot of small businesses that need a little love TLC around AI. And that's why we started pivot180 to go in and help people figure out how they can run their businesses more efficiently and effectively and deploy AI. And in not a transformational way, but A crawl, walk, run, get one thing, build it, design it, implement it, get comfortable with it, and then move on to the next. So that's what we do.

Speaker A: I like that, that crawl, walk, run. So let's name it plainly right now for the person who's listening, because I mean, most people stop at using AI to generate content, so. But you say that the next level

Speaker B: AI up is a different thing entirely.

Speaker A: So what is that?

Speaker C: It is, and you. It is something that should not be feared either, I think. I think the wonderful thing is like these new tools have come online and now most of the population today are comfortable using AI to help them author content, emails, drafts of proposals, summaries, or the other common kind of use case I see is, hey, I've got a large document and I don't want to spend a half an hour trying to read it and fall asleep and wake up and try to finish it. Let me just feed it to an LLM and have it come back to me with a summary. Now there's a optimal way to execute those basic use cases. And I think what I'm most often trying to bring to the table is what is the next evolution of using AI in your business to really think about optimizing or automating a business process or a workflow or more layman's term, the job that a staff member does on every day. And that can be communication back and forth to clients or patients or customers. That could also be like, hey, I got to run a report every Thursday and I've got to pull data from three different systems and I got to put it into a pretty PowerPoint presentation and then I've got to double and triple check the data so it's right. So if I send it to my CEO or my executive team or my board, I'm not going to get in trouble for sending really bad content.

Speaker A: I know that one.

Speaker C: Yeah. And most often, how much time is that consuming a day, probably two to four hours of my Thursday is spent just, oh God, I got to do this again. I do it every Thursday. I have a template, but it's a pain in the butt and I really hate to do it. So those are the things that are causing angst and friction and a level of discomfort with the people that are doing the jobs. How can you use AI to automate that away? So now as a staff member of a business, you can elevate yourself to more higher value work, spending more time with your clients or prospects. And that's kind of the evolution here. So moving away from not away, moving off of, hey, I have this tool GPT or Gemini or Claude that's helping me author content. The next evolution is, which is here today is basically, hey, can I automate this multi step job that I do every Thursday, that takes me four hours and can I have AI do it for me in four minutes?

Speaker A: So, uh, I want to say something right there because that's interesting. So the gap isn't access, because everyone has access now. That's what you're saying. So the gap is really knowing what to point it at.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: And that's, and that is 90% of the conversations that, uh, I have with my clients is, hey, what business process, what workflows are causing the most friction that are taking the most time, that are taking staff members time away from higher value work and identifying those things. My first conversation with a potential client is less about AI and more about how their business operates. And that's what we need to start to look at now.

Speaker B: So you have a list of questions

Speaker A: that you use with owners and you

Speaker B: know, to find where AI fits.

Speaker A: So I read all of them and

Speaker B: there was one that really stood out to me, so I want to start there. So you ask, what is one thing that your staff hates to do? You know, Brandon, I love that question because owners can't answer, where is your process friction? You know, their eyes glaze over, but every single one of them can tell you instantly the thing that their team groans about every single week. So let's start there. Why is that the right place to start?

Speaker C: That's the easiest place. And what the reason for that question is, because you're absolutely correct, is that in the small business world, you know, you're just running the business, you don't always have time to stop and then map everybody's job. So who's. What's the SOP for the receptionist? What's the SOP for my service? People that are out in the field, to some extent you have an understanding of that. But as time goes on, as a business owner, you may or may not know where that SOP is encountering friction. As an example, um, I run a landscaping business and I have people in the field doing the work. And after every job that they do, they go back to their truck and they have to write up an invoice and, and they have to write up the next estimate and they have to communicate to their next customer that they're on their way or 20 minutes from their spot. Like all that is taking that service provider, the guy that's or the team that's providing the landscaping service away from doing what they do best, providing landscape service. So the owner may or may not know that there's 40 minutes in the van or in the truck after every job, just doing documentation. And unless that service provider is going to complain to their boss when they get back to the office, they may or may not know about it.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker C: Yeah. So we try to put the questions in super plain language is if you have an idea, if somebody has come to you, or if after you give your receptionist this thing to do on the Thursday, every Thursday. And it's weird because every lunchtime at Thursday when I go say hi to her, she's pretty grumpy from the morning's work. Those are the things. Let's poke at those and figure out, okay, so what's happening that is making the staff member uncomfortable or unhappy with the job that they have to do in that certain, uh, period of time. So yeah, sometimes it's easier just to say, hey, what are people really complain about? And where does that exist? Versus let's talk about your, uh, business processes and workflows.

Speaker A: And I like that, I like how you start the conversation. And so right now, let's say our listeners, they, you know, may be running a four person shop. Now I know you use the landscape business as a beautiful example. Uh, let's say that you have a person who is running a small mom and pop business, like I said, a four person shop. And they're thinking, okay, some of these other businesses, they may have, you know, the budgets to do this. And, but like you said with the landscaper, they have to answer the phones, they have to do payroll. Same thing with someone in another business. They have to do the same. They're the jack of all trades and hopefully the master of some.

Speaker C: Yep, yep.

Speaker A: So, so the thing that they think

Speaker B: about though is roi. So I want you to be honest with them.

Speaker A: I want you to think about one

Speaker B: client that you had or have.

Speaker A: What was the thing that was broken and what did you actually do?

Speaker B: How long did it take? What did it change?

Speaker A: And I want you to give me a number like the before and the after. Because you know, as small businesses we think in roi.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And um, and, and, and the truth is, um, that um, my services aren't for free. Uh, Google Workspace and Microsoft Platform isn't for free. But if you, if you have those as part of your productivity suite, as 99% of, maybe not that, but 99% of the world's companies have one or the other or something you automatically are given. Google Gemini AI, Microsoft Copilot AI. Uh, so there are a lot of cases in which there are companies that we speak with, that we work with, that don't even realize that they have access to some pretty cool capability in the platforms that they already have. And thereby you're reducing the cost of entry for them because, hey, let's just use what we have to design a new workflow or automate something. So that's one lens to look at it. Now back to your original question. A, um, really good example was actually my very first client on this journey, which by the way, I've been in business since January 5, 2026. So I'm only six to seven months into this and having a fantastic time doing it.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker C: But my first client was a local law firm here in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they have a core system in place that they use to essentially manage their clients. And it's a system called filevine. Filevine hosts all the data of the client, hosts all the documentation and the case documentation for that particular client. And it's their core system that they communicate out of that they manage the case in. And it really is the foundational piece of software that helps their company operate in the right way. The attorneys are doing all the knowledge work. The system makes sure that the cases stay on track and the clients are communicated with in a efficient way. That said, when we walked in the door, they were able to already express and answer that pain question to me by saying that we have a manager of our paralegal team and we probably have eight paralegals, one manager of those teams. The paralegals ideal job is to be in support of the attorneys, helping them research, write and prepare themselves for cases. The unfortunate thing is the majority of the time the paralegals were spending was in this core system, filevine. And what they were doing is they were uploading and downloading documents as they came in from the client. They were toggling things to make sure that the client was tagged in the right way to the right case in the system. They were writing communications in filevine and then sending them through filevine through Microsoft. A little bit of a convoluted workflow. But all in all they were probably spending collectively as a paralegal team 25 to 50 hours a week inside this system doing manual stuff here and there.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's. And I think, you know, probably, uh, I haven't, you know, validated this with the client, but my Expectation is they're probably billed at a hundred bucks an hour. The paralegal.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: So yeah, so do the math.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker C: So. So I'm not going to do that here. I'm a marketer, not a mathematician.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker C: So what we built are AI agents that we effectively were able to document the jobs that the paralegals were doing inside of filevine. We took these AI agents, gave them instructions, and we gave them access through API into that core system. And we told them, this is the job that the paralegals are doing, this is the job we need you to do. And defined it and instructed it, and we piloted and tested it and let it loose. And now we have our very. We have six workflows running for this firm right now. But our first two were client communications. So when something happens, the client onboards onto their client portal, it triggers an automatic communication, email communication to them to say, hey, welcome to the portal. Next steps are this and that. That used to be one paralegal going to a, uh, word, ah, document in a SharePoint folder, copying and pasting the right email message out of a case, pulling it back into filevine, pasting it into filevine and then pushing, send all that back and forth and cut and paste. Completely automated away. So wonderful. Yeah. So that is one of the use cases. And then the other one, which I really love and I'll share here, is the very first step a, a client has to provide to the firm is documentation that shows that they are eligible to be a plaintiff in the case. And often that is an invoice, a screenshot of a account number. It could be a number of things. And the first communication actually out to that client is instructing them to say, hey, your first step is to upload. They call it proof of validation. So upload proof that you actually are eligible to be part of this case. Uh, and those documents flow into filevine. And then the manager of the paralegal or the attorney was opening each document, inspecting it, saying, hey, is this high res enough that I can see the account number and their name? Does it have the proper information that I need to have to be legally validated? If it does great, I'll communicate back to him. If it doesn't, I've got to go back to him and say, hey, listen, can you do a higher res image of this? Because I can't really tell the account number on this. Any case. Over thousands and thousands of documents that are uploaded just for a single case. That was taking a whole heck of a lot of Time for the attorneys and the manager of the paralegal to do that knowledge work. So we got a model that can analyze and inspect documentation. It makes a recommendation back to the attorney on, hey, this proof documentation is valid, go ahead and approve it and we'll trigger a communication back to the client. It is invalid because it doesn't fill the rubric that it requires. So reject this one or it's somewhere in the middle and I'm not sure. So I'm going to push that for manual review to the attorney and then it gives a confidence score on all of these things. So I am 90% confident that this is approved. So you should feel comfortable going ahead and approving it through, um. So the AI workflow now does that automatically and it wakes up every time a new document is uploaded into the system. And they were working from tens of thousands of backlogs of documents that they were constantly trying to chase and catch up with. And now the workflow just wakes up when a new one comes in, analyzes it, makes the decision, pushes the decision to the attorney. The attorney has final say to say approve or reject or I'll review it and then make a decision from there. And they don't have to spend time going through backlogs and the ROI for this. I'm super happy to say probably that those two workflows alone probably cost the firm 10 to $12,000 to build, deploy, implement, and get right. The savings of hourly rate for the humans to no longer have to do the things that they were doing in filevine is going to play out over the course of the year to close to 300 or $350,000 thousand dollars savings.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: So that, yeah, the Ro. The Roi is absolutely insane. And it's a very unsexy. It's a very unsexy workflow. It's like, hey, this was the thing that the paralegal manager and the paralegals complained about all the time. We found it. How can we make it go away for them so they can do higher value work? That's what we did. And it paid off for the client.

Speaker A: And now here's what I want each and every listener to catch. You know, he didn't only describe transformation, he described one workflow, one thing that the staff hated. They fixed it once and it paid for its self.

Speaker C: Yep.

Speaker B: I mean, people, that is the whole game. Because on this show, I've said it a, uh, dozen ways, a million times. Architecture is not a department, it's a decision. And you have just heard someone who does this For a living, say the same thing with a receipt. Attach with, with real roi. Uh, and that is important.

Speaker A: Brandon, thank you very much.

Speaker C: You're, you're very welcome. Across different types of businesses, whether you're, you know, the landscaping firm or you're the law firm or you're H Vac or you're a, ah, membership club, a pickleball. You run a pickleball club. Or there's things that every business does to deliver their product or services to the market. And there are staff members, humans at every of these businesses that do that. The objective here is not to replace the staff member, but to offload all the icky stuff that the staff member has to do so he can come in, he or she can come in with a happy heart and, you know, enjoy what they do every day and do higher value work and spend much more time with the client, the customer, the patient, which is most likely the intention for ever starting a landscaping firm or a chiropractor office or a law firm or a pickleball club. It's to serve a customer. And if we can offload all the, you know, the manual crappy work that we do every day, free ourselves up to be more intentional and human in our interaction, that's the objective of A.I.

Speaker A: uh, yes. I love the way you put that. And again, I go back, he's not describing just everything all at once. Notice he talked, he talked about the first two systems and workflows that you tackled and then you added the others. And that's how we need to build not into chaos, but into a structured system that gives you that roi. Now, Brandon, uh, what I want to do now is I heard you mention a few different businesses, but let's talk

Speaker B: about the other side.

Speaker A: Where does this not work? I mean, have you seen an owner try this and maybe it was the wrong move and, uh, they just started, you know, in January, but a lot has been happening. So is there a flip side or

Speaker B: the wrong side to this?

Speaker C: I, I think the wrong side, which I tend to see is not the, the use of the technology. It's the preparation to use the technology and to apply it to something that is well defined. So what I often see when I walk into a client is that first question, hey, like, how are you using AI and learn a little bit about their business? And a lot of times they'll look, yeah, I have a ChatGPT account or Gemini or Claude and, or, um, I'm using Copilot, like we said at the beginning of this discussion, to write, to author to help me think about things, which is really good. The other thing I'm seeing too is, oh, we have this tool that, that automates how we produce proposals. Or we have, we have bought a tool that actually does some outreach for us to prospective clients. Or we bought a tool to answer inbound questions into the website. It's like an AI chatbot. The problem that I often see is that that is exactly what they've done. They bought a tool, but they really didn't understand how the workflow or the job is currently done inside the organization by humans today. And therefore they're just peanut buttering or like gluing an AI tool on top of their business, but it doesn't really have connection into inside the workflow. And what happens is all of a sudden you think you're doing a lot of really great AI things, but they're all in silos. They all have singular purposes. And honestly, they maybe have created more work for the human staff to manage it and maintain it and update it than they have taken away from the human staff. So that's that thing that we used to call like it sprawl is real in AI today as well. In that you're right. It's the sexy thing. I got to have something. My competitor is using this tool. I found out at a conference, I need to get that tool. Do I know how it works and do I know how it would work, work with my organization and how we do work? Maybe not, but most often, let's buy it, let's get it in and let's deploy it and figure it out from there. That's the wrong way to kind of attack these problems.

Speaker A: Oh, yes, we talk about that a lot on the show, on the pod. So let's make this usable because right now somebody may be listening and they're driving into work, into their business, and they're thinking, you know, I need to use maybe one or two of these

Speaker B: tools or I need to hire Brandon right now.

Speaker A: So you give us that framework. I know, I've looked at, I think the five questions. So you say, where is the work repetitive? Where does communication break down? Where do customers wait? What each staff time without needing any real judgment. Then the one we talked about earlier. What does your team hate to do? So are those the five questions that are in your framework?

Speaker C: Those are five of, uh, probably 20 questions that we ask when we go in and do a, uh, discovery conversation with a client.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: To, to your point though, if you're in your car listening to this podcast and you're going to go into the office. If you can take 20 minutes and just answer those five questions. Where is do I know? Or can I write down where work is repetitive for my staff? Where does communication break down? That is either internally, could be like dispatching people to jobs. Is that always communicated in the right way? And are, uh, people showing up on time to the right, you know, residents or whatever? Also, where is communication breaking down externally? With the patient, with the client, with the customer? Think about communications both internally and, um, externally. Where do customers or clients experience delays? You know, look at your Google reviews. What are all the bad ones saying to you? Is there anything there? Is there something there that is preventing you to provide the highest level of service or product that you can? Then what tasks are eating up your staff's time? And yeah, what's the thing that they get grumpy about? What's the thing that they constantly complain to you about? If you can just go back to the office and try to articulate those on a pad of paper or what you've done is you've built the groundwork for now, figuring out what are those workflows that underpin those pain points and is there a possibility to automate those workflows away? And there's probably three ways that you could think about how you would do that. One, the first way would be, hey, I'm a Google shop, or I'm a Microsoft shop. So therefore I actually have AI at the tip of my fingers. And more than writing content, I have AI that if worked with the right way and with the right intentions, can automate some of this stuff and reduce the friction of operations. The second way is, hey, there's a tool in the marketplace for my industry, built for my vertical, which I absolutely would encourage people to look at. The generic LLMs and models are just that, they are generic. They're trained on a large corpus of information that's public. A landscape business is different than an H Vac business. That is different than a power washing business. That's different from a law firm and other industries. So what you want to be able to start to identify are tools that are built for your particular business. If you can identify one of those, bring it in house, run a pilot, and then you can automate some stuff away. And then the third path for you is to work with somebody like me, uh, or pivot180 that can help you talk through and think through options one or two. But if there isn't a tool that exists and you don't have a tool internally already with one of your core platforms. There are people out there like pivot180 that can build custom workflows for a fraction of the cost that you would think that would automate and reduce all the painful manual stuff that is either creating friction or delays or uh, attributing to communication breakdowns. All those things, essentially any, any concept you can come up with today probably, except for a very very few, can now be automated away with a smartly built AI workflow or AI, uh, agent.

Speaker A: Oh yes, and you've heard it here guys. You can hire Brandon with Pivot 180 to help you out if you are having difficulties. He has a framework and a proven system that can help take the complexity out of all of this.

Speaker B: The reason this lands for me is that I'm living it.

Speaker A: We've opened an insurance agency, Lewis Howard

Speaker B: Insurance Group, built ainative from day one. Not with AI bolted on but designed in. And everything that Brandon just said is the blueprint that we use. Don't boil the ocean. Find the one workflow the work actually breaks on and build the system there first. Now if you want to see what this looks like in a regulated business, that's us Lewis Howard Insurance Group. Ask Lewishoward.com that's a S K Lewishoward.com insurance for builders. Built by builders.

Speaker A: Now I am going to put a plug here Brandon, so if you like uh, what you've heard today, then reach out to Brandonivit180AI Brandon. Tell them how they can contact you.

Speaker C: Yeah, the easiest way is to jump onto www.pivot180. That's P I V O T180AI. And on that website you'll see our methodology, you'll see customer case studies, you'll see a whole host of interesting content that we've written about that is both more generically positioned for small businesses, but there's also a lot of industry based content as well. In addition to that, there are online free five minute online assessments in which you can answer 10 questions. And our AI model will come back and give you three immediate recommendations on where you might get started. Those 10 questions are a derivative of the larger set of questions that we do with our clients in person. So it's easy, it's a low friction way to get a little bit of an assessment on where your maturity level is and the things that you might want to undertake. And then if you really want to engage and have a discussion, I'm more than happy to do that. And on the website as well are plenty of opportunities for you just to fill in a form that will come straight to me and then I'll reach out to you to schedule some time. So that would be the easiest way to get in touch with us.

Speaker A: Wonderful. So, last thing, Brandon, if somebody still on the fence and they hear all about this and they feel maybe a little behind or maybe a little afraid, what is the one thing that you want them to walk away with today believing?

Speaker C: Uh, you're not alone. The 90% of the clients that I interact feel the same way. And the reality, we as a, uh, collective business owners and operators of all sizes are in the very start of a journey with AI. And those that are tinkering with it today in the simplest ways, just like Kim, um, explained, one workflow at a time are going to learn and be leaps and bounds ahead of their competition. If they start today, if you wait another year, these things are moving so, so fast that you're going to feel like you're falling further behind. So my recommendation is, don't be scared. Jump in, Find a partner that you can jump in with that you trust, that, you know, has a good understanding of how to do this the right way and how to think about the landscape of options out there for you. But the crawl, walk, run methodology is the way to think about it. Let's just. It's like you're trying to, you know, improve your diet or start working out more into your New Year's resolution. Let's all make New Year's resolutions here in July and say, hey, for the rest of the year, I'm going to start to really seriously explore AI in incrementals. And let me just do one thing at a time. And before you know it, uh, before you're in December, you'll be like, hey, I'm starting to build an AI native business here, and I feel really good about it because it's returning value. So think about it in that lens. Don't be worried, don't be scared. It's something that's new, it's something that's ever evolving. But you know, from my, from my eyes to your ears, like, the, the capability is like, incredible with some of the things that the AI can do today. And it is only getting better with each day, week, month that goes by.

Speaker A: Now, to everybody listening, you don't need a transformation.

Speaker B: You need one workflow and the honesty to name the thing that your team hates. Now, it's this technology isn't a threat to what you built.

Speaker A: It's a technology enabled superpower Now. I'm Kim, and this has been small business.

Speaker B: Big AI, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you in the next episode.