You Don't Need an Engineer. You Need to Know the Work with Chris Prinos | Episode 262

You can either work in the business or you can work on the business. They have the knowledge and the skill to be successful. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow has yet to come. Dive all in on the next chapter of your life.

Hey everybody, welcome to the ProServe podcast brought to you by Collective 54. I'm your host, Greg Alexander. If you're new to this show, this show is dedicated to founders of the boutique professional services firm. So what does that mean?

If you are in the expertise business for a living, you market, sell, and deliver expertise, this is for you. On this show, we aim to do three things. We want to help you make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. On today's episode, I'm going to try to blow up a myth.

And that myth is that to build AI solutions for yourself or for your clients, You need to be a really technical founder, or you need to spend a lot of money building a technical team or hiring a technical vendor. And that simply just isn't the case anymore. And we have a member, Chris Prenos, who is in the process of doing this as we speak. And his story is very interesting because it's not complete yet.

He's in the process of building this, and he's had some quick wins and learned a few things, and he's willing to share that with us. And Chris is the CEO and founder of Indigo Trigger. And Chris, welcome to the show. For those that haven't met you just yet in the community, would you please give a formal introduction?

Sure. Thanks for having me, Greg. Chris Pernos, founder and CEO of Indigo Trigger. We are a services and consulting firm that serves the media and publishing industry with a focus on revenue operations, technology, and process.

So everything in the lead to cash space, supporting media and publishing companies. Very niche. We work with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, a lot of tools that are vertical specific, but helping these companies with technology and getting the most out of their tech stacks. Okay, very good.

And Chris, as I understand it, you are not a data scientist, machine learning engineer, you're not a AI guru. Is that correct? That's correct. And my journey or sort of entry into AI probably started about eight months ago when I sort of got into the gateway drug of lovable, which I think is a great way to think about those platforms.

And I quickly learned about the art of the possible, you know, with some of these tools. And it's been, you know, an amazing eight months, really. Yeah, yeah. Eight months in this world seems like a long time and things are evolving so much.

I think lovable was my gateway drug to that's a good way to say it. It was my it was my marijuana. Hopefully, I'm not going to graduate to the hard stuff. But But all right, let's jump into it.

So one thing that I liked about your approach, and we're doing something similar, so maybe I'm biased, is that you're understanding the role itself. Clarity around a function, job function. And then you're building the technical solution around that role clarity. And that's unique because sometimes I see people start with the tech and then come to the role, which I think is a mistake.

You're doing the inverse of that. So just start with that for me, please. Yeah, so not unlike probably most of your members, when you do big tech services engagements, you're in the middle of a lot of different kind of standard processes, statement of work development requirements, gathering, managing projects and project boards, readouts to customers. You know, there's, and historically and still, these all take a lot of time.

They involve a lot of tools. And, you know, it's just, it's not something that's very scalable. So what I challenged my team to do after the reunion last year was first of all get immersed in AI platforms We got everybody clawed you know clawed access and you know access to tools like Lovable and chat and all that And I just asked them all to make it part of their day. And, you know, basically the art of the possible, have these tools help you with whatever you need help with and see how far you get.

And that's kind of where we are right now. We've got a few folks internally that have done an amazing job developing stuff I would have never imagined we'd have, you know, like six months ago. And some of these tools, not only are they helping our internal team, they're also starting to be deployed to our clients. And, you know, we're starting to think about how to take them beyond just our clients and to others, you know, to make them generally available.

So, you know, and I understand that one of the early solutions that you built and that it's in its early deployment right now is what you're referring to as the AI chief of staff, which is running project management across a number of your projects simultaneously. And I find sometimes when we talk about these things, a real example can be illustrative in a lot of different ways. So tell us a little bit about what that is. So one of the tools that's been developed internally is called Sable.

It was built by one of my senior project managers. And what it does is basically puts a layer on top of some of our core tools. So we use, obviously, email is one of them. Email is connected.

Slack. We use Asana for project management. Toggle for time tracking and workforce or resource management. And I think those, oh, and then Fathom.

So the Fathom note taker we have, which joins pretty much every meeting our team members are in, whether it's customer support or project planning. So it really brings those tools together in a way where it can then, it uses agents to do daily updates, statement of work building for me based on these fathoms that are automated, pulse check on projects, scope creep. There's about a dozen or so agents that are running. and you can just ask it.

It gives you a morning brief. That's really what it's doing. So if you do those kinds of things, document management readouts, managing a project board, trying to keep customers on task and automating assignments, that's really what it was designed to do. Yeah, interesting.

And you mentioned that you had internal team members build this for you versus, is, you know, hiring a external third party to build it for you. I'm sure you considered both. What, you know, why did you decide to go internal for this? Well, that's what I had available, you know, so, so first of all, you know, first thing I wanted my team to figure out, because I had had a lot of luck with my gateway drug and lovable.

And I assumed, you know, my team members, because I thought it was very easy. I don't have a development background, but I can clearly articulate a problem and what I'm looking to solve, right? So I think anyone that can do that can leverage these tools and get pretty far. Yeah.

And if you found the tools at this stage and maybe use this cheapest staff example, is it a productivity increasing tool, meaning it's making existing employees that much more productive? Is it a tool that's bringing a whole new capability that you didn't have previously. So, and then that has associated benefit. Is it a system, so to speak, where it's, you know, doing work that might prevent you from having to hire a new employee.

So thus increasing the profitability. Tell me a little bit about, you know, it, I guess the benefit of the tool. Yeah, absolutely. So immediate productivity gains, I mean, developing statements of work, drafting, that stuff takes a lot of time, you know, and these tools are excellent at that, especially when you have, you know, a note taker running that has transcripts and decisions and know who's talking and when these decisions were made.

I think you've said on previous calls these tools do better than any person almost you know can really do They make sure you don forget stuff you know As far as so productivity is a big one I'm looking to roll this, you know, right now it's piloted within three users in my company. I'm trying, right now the challenge is how do I get it out to all the users? You know, there's some setup that has to be done and all that little bit of training. So that's kind of where we are now.

But my goal is to allow each project manager who typically manages two to three projects to go up 4X. 4X. Wow. That would be quite a productivity answer.

So could I imply from that that you no longer have to hire 4X project managers? That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, the cost savings of that is enormous.

And those project managers that are going to increase their output for X, I mean, they're going to be that much more valuable to you. They'll have better jobs. You know, if the firm is that much more profitable, there'll be enough money to go around for everybody, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, the business impact on that is enormous.

I can also give people who aren't project managers a project manager and I don't need to have a project. You know what I mean? We have a lot of those kinds of engagements where I have really sharp solution architects and subject matter experts. But having a ride along PM for them is expensive.

So now I can give them that PM ride along agent and everything sort of tracked for them. That's been a huge, huge help. You know, I've started talking to members about the three things that you get when you go down this path. So the first is the methodology itself.

So in this use case, it's the method to manage a project, which I'm sure you guys have a very well thought out method there. The second is the technology, the AI, does two things. It enforces the method. You know, sometimes people don't follow the rules.

And then it scales the method crazy, right? Because it can be done on every single project now, every single task, so to speak. So that's huge. And then the third one, which is what you just mentioned, is capacity.

You know, I now can give you a project manager where previously I couldn't, and that extra capacity is doing the work, which is bringing a lot of value, which is great. You know, if we take the task of writing an SOW, you know, and I'm a recovering management consultant myself, and I know what a pain in the ass that can be, and how many back and forth that can involve, especially depending on the, you know, cooperation from the client, et cetera. Um, when you're writing an SOW, how do you determine what the AI does versus what the human does?

So it's a good question. We've been using, you know, sort of the about me files. There's a way to set these tools up to sort of define your guardrails on, you know, tone and, you know, what not to do, what to do a lot of. So you kind of have to structure, you know, when you're using Claude Cowork and some of those platforms, it's important to set the foundation right.

so it can be repeatable in how it does what it does. My concern was losing that personal time. I always thought, well, no one's going to be able to write an SOW that's as compelling as me with the right tone, and that's just wrong. The real challenge is me losing time writing a perfect SOW when I could have six or eight of them out there in an automated way that are pretty damn close.

you know yeah earlier you talked about how you were connecting to your existing tools and you rattled a bunch of them off asana yes and uh this is something for some reason i haven't seen members take full advantage of and to me this is the low-hanging fruit because once you're connected to all these systems the the tool starts to compound its value you know just because of the source data um when did you start doing that was it easy was it hard any advice for listeners on that front.

Depending on what platform you're using, you know, these platforms now, most of them are quite open. Anything with, you know, an API key or anything like that, HubSpot, Asana, Fathom, I mean, you can connect them to a lovable environment or cloud code in, you know, under five minutes if you have the credentials you know So I think when you structuring something like this planning for the connectors is important What tools do I want to bring together Once you get the connections and the plumbing done then you can kind of unlock all kinds of capability I can have leads coming in the HubSpot that are creating, you know, Asana projects that are talking back to HubSpot, you know, and pulling email and looking at Fathom Notes.

So the connective tissue, those connectors and the plumbing are really important. I would not be afraid if you're a non-technical user to just get in to start connecting, you know, some of your key business systems. I would caution again, you know, there are some guardrails around, you know, how to get stuff connected to, you know, your email and how to do that. Because you want to be careful about what you're putting out there.

But, you know, that is one thing I think that we need to do more of is just security structure, governance, and sort of the charter for how we're going to operate with these tools. And again, that's something we hadn't necessarily planned on. But now that we have, you know, all these agents running and different, you know, team members using different tools, that's a new problem I've got to deal with. Have you gotten to the point where you've had clients say to you, hey, Chris, I want a discount because I know you're using AI and therefore your labor cost isn't as high?

No, not yet. My clients, I think probably like everyone else's, they want a job well done on time, on budget. And I think the last thing they're thinking about is how I'm getting it done. you know what's the problem is when it's late or when it doesn't work you know so i haven't hit that that roadblock yet yeah which is good i hope you don't sometimes i hear members say that they're getting that from their clients and i'm like are their clients crazy they're getting a higher quality product faster like isn't that the dream you know so all right well listen this was a good conversation i appreciate you sharing with us your journey where you are in the journey congrats on the progress that you've made so far.

What's next? Where do you think you're taking this? So we've started to get our customers involved in a bunch of the platforms that we've been building. So there's three phases that I see, getting the internal team agents and tools and foundation set, packaging those up into a solution that I can bring to our customers, you know, in a well sort of packaged way.

And then I think, you know, you've been talking about in some of your recent posts, how do I then figure out or monetize that so that anybody could use, you know, what we're doing. And we have this idea for this outcome agent that we're building, you know, and we've already got customers in some of our tools. So the next step is really hardening some of that stuff and then figuring out how we can, you know, take it to market. Yeah.

That last step is really exciting for you because, you know, if you get into outcomes, you're now divorcing revenue from expense, meaning you're delivering value to the client without labor. You know, the scalability of that and the margin of that is really high. So keep me posted on how that's going. Sounds good.

Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks again, Chris. Just a couple of calls to actions for listeners.

So if you're a member and you want to hear more of Chris's story, attend the member private Q&A session, which we'll have an upcoming Friday and you'll get to ask questions directly. If you're not a member and you think you'd might like to learn more, I'm going to direct you to my new Substack channel. You can find that at Greg Alexander C54. C as in Charlie, the number 54.

And on Substack, I talk about what's happening in the large professional services space as it relates to professional services. And I translate that to what boutique owners may learn from that. So I direct you to that. But thanks again, Chris, and thanks for everybody listening.

I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.