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Cut the tie to anything holding you back from success. Welcome to the Cut the Tie podcast. Hi. I'm your host, Thomas Helfrich. And in each episode, we bring you real entrepreneurs that really overcame challenges on their journey to become successful. We look at the impact, the moment, how it affected everything in their lives. Follow us on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Now let's meet our guest on Cut The Tie podcast.
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Hey. Welcome to Never Been Promoted. Hi. I'm your host, Thomas Helfrich. We are gonna have a fun AI nerdy ass conversation today with Issac Hicks of Autonomi. We're gonna talk about how you can scale, your business with AI agents, and, AI might be the most overused it's not really a word. It's an acronym, but let's say word of the century because more people have said AI specifically because they can spell it and secondly because it's pretty damn cool. But people really don't know how to leverage a combination of two technologies. Yes. AI and automation are different things. We'll talk about that. Of how to use that really with, how to scale your business and having an AI agent specifically to do things for your business is a concept that sounds really novel and really important to growing a company, but really hard to implement, as we'll we'll talk through with Issac. I have a really simple call to action. Specifically, if you're listening to the the podcast, hit the follow button on your favorite player. It's easy. It could be Spotify, or Apple or whatever it is. Just hit follow. Easy. Five days a week, we're out there. Go do that. And if you like YouTube, you know, crush the subscribe button. Much appreciated. But let's get going, so we can help you cut some ties to the shit holding you back so you can unleash this entrepreneur. So, Issac, rocking on stage, looking good, smelling wonderful, I'm sure, as always. Why? Thank you. How are you, man?
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Doing alright. Doing pretty good. How are you doing? I'm,
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it's I think it's a Monday. I it depends on what day this airs out, but, it's a Monday, and I did this thing called a BIOS update on my computer. Don't do that on a Monday. Do that on a Friday after work so you can have the weekend to figure it out. Just leave it at that. Absolutely. I have six cameras. We're using this one today because the other five aren't working.
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Right. That's good that you got a sixth one then.
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They're all exactly the same. Anyway, here nor there. That's some of the things in entrepreneurship that'll hit you. Right? You just, like, some days, no one's touched your computer. You go downstairs. Nothing's working. So it's kinda like, like, probably a metaphor in there, but it's it's too early in the week to figure out what it is. Issac, you and I know each other for a while now. What was a competition? It was some kind of pitch competition. Nashville or something? Yeah. Yeah. It was startup showdown startup showdown,
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2022, I believe. Yeah. Twenty twenty two. Twenty
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You handed me my ass by winning that whole competition, I believe. Like you said, here's your ass. Thanks for playing.
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Hey. What can I say?
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You were good. You were good. But you have a really good product. I mean, like, let let's get into, like, what you guys do today at Autonomi. Give me, like, you know, the sixty, ninety second pitch, and and do do what I like, everyone does back up to how it began.
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Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, I started out as an aerospace engineer. That's what I went to college for and everything. And, you know, it was it was interesting. I liked the subject matter, but I don't know. The the work life of it just really wasn't for me. Then after that, I moved on to business consulting. I was working for Accenture. And while I was doing that, I got to see that there was kind of this disconnect between the problems that the organization had and then what what the consultants were really able to deliver. There was kind of like a gap there. And, you know, through that, I kinda realized that while a lot of companies kinda go for this staff augmentation kind of kind of solution or this, like, really big over engineered project. Really, it's more about this very surgical approach to understanding exactly what the little nuances are within the workflows that you can change and then how you change those. So what we do here at Atomy is we specialize in going through all of the business processes, especially in companies that are, you know, 2,000,000, three million plus where things start to get a little bit more complicated, And seeing where exactly we can apply automations and AI and how we can apply this surgical precision into the workflows to make it so that it's nice and seamless. Nothing changes as far as the end user is concerned. It doesn't mess up any of the departments or anything, but it does get you that scalability, the things that move faster, the things that happen quicker so that you can scale up and move on with your business and prosper.
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Oh, looks like you're muted. I'm still drinking. I'd have to drink now. Keisha, I have to mute my own mic because I'm back here, like, having a coughing fit. And I'm like, that would be disruptive to the degust. You you you've pivoted the company a few times through through the nature of this. Right? And I and I always look for the reflective moments. Talk about what you started originally. Success you had, what you found, what you hated about it, and what and why you had to pivot
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to where you are today. Yeah. For sure. So, you know, what we started with, we started with, unstructured document processing. And, you know, we were we were of the opinion based, like, you know, our hypothesis when we got started was that in the insurance industry, there's all sorts of, you know, documents, claims, forms, stuff like that. And a lot of the time, you have these underwriters that are spending a lot of time just typing this information into business, like, business systems. And that takes a long time and there's value in, you know, making that happen quicker. So we were just trying to automate this data entry process. Now what we realized is I mean, there were a couple of different things that were wrong with that value proposition. But the primary thing that was wrong with it is that that automation was not critical to the capture of revenue for the client. And so if you're not in the revenue chain of the client directly and you're trying to do, you know, something that's more administrative or something like that, it's much harder to get in, especially for these large organizations. Right? If you have a huge company and you're trying to get in with something that's more administrative or something that's more high level, that's not something that people are really paying attention to. You really have to go after something that's in the revenue stream. That's right. Because because we weren't in the revenue stream, you know, we really struggled to get traction. Our positioning was a little off there because we thought it was all about speed, but it's not about speed. It's about intelligence. It's about what can you actually do with that information once you have it. And that's something that, you know, we just really didn't quite understand at first. So,
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you know Wait. Wait. Let me if I if I can do it, I I think that's an important point. I brought this up on lots of shows is the following. If you're building a a product or service, and this is specific more to bigger b to b stuff. Yeah. In the individual world, emotions, and things that like, their their speed, that that plays a slightly different play. But for b two b to get in, these companies are facing lots of pitches and all their employees and people who know people. And the CFO is looking at all this stuff of where do I fund things so my money our money can capital can build capital. If you can't show these two things, one being a % important, the second one being closing the deal, which is one, does it make us more money by a factor bigger than I can get put in a CD? Can I get ROI positive? That's significant. And two, could also chip off some money off operating costs. If you have both, you have something they're gonna look at with legitimacy. If you only have operational cost and speed, no. Right? It's not worth the risk. If it's revenue only, but doesn't but it adds additional cost, possible. But if you could do both of those, you just remove the equation of what to go do. I and ironically, I think interesting, the first thing you built actually is part of just kind of what you became. Because you guys make custom point on solutions to solve a very specific problem. And I think with any the people that probably don't know this about you, but interesting about Issac, he you you could tell him your problem. He'll go through and dissect what it is on the spot and be able to just pretty much you can see him visually architect it in his brain of what that's gonna be and how we're gonna go build it. And that's how you guys sell deals. If someone asks you a question, like, let me explain. Is it this? Do you have that? Do you have these things? What about this? Okay. We would do this. Do you have this data source? And you go through it, and the person at the end is going, I can hire him. So, you know, I I think it's amazing where you did because I you you recognized where you were in the sales cycle early. And And you guys closed some deals, but then you fell you fell victim to the next part, which is implementation. Right? I mean, that was the other part. It's like, you actually closed some deals to sell it. Talk about okay. Now it's closed. So what?
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Yeah. So so, you know, what's really tricky in enterprise sales at all is, yeah, you're gonna go through this long sales cycle. You have multiple decision makers. You have to kind of close and then close again and then close again. Right? And that's one part of the equation. And that that might stretch out your sales cycle six, nine months plus. But then whenever you get into the implementation, like, the implementations are always very custom, very tricky. There's going to be different things that weren't agreed upon in scope beforehand. And so there's this massive client relationship management component to it as well, where you it's very, very high touch the entire way through. And, you know, that entire thing is just so, so resource intensive. And if you're small, if you're early stage, if you're not super well capitalized from a VC or something like that, you're really gonna struggle to be able to get your cash cycle small enough to be able to do it. Because even if the deal is massive, if it's gonna take you a year or two years to actually capture that deal and you're bleeding out the whole time, I mean, it's gonna be really hard to stretch your resources that far. And, you know, that's something that we ran into, quite a bit was just, like, how can we actually capture the enterprise client without significant VC backing? Because, you know, there's a variety of reasons we didn't want significant VC backing. And, you know, the answer is you can, but it's just it's so hard to do, and there's just so many better ways. Because when it comes down to it, like, you're in business to be free and to, like, have your own goals met and to, like, help people and everything, and you just you don't have to do it that way. You know?
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Well, it well, it it depends like you said, I think it lines up to what your personal goals are for the company. You wanna be free and have a business that makes money and does things, but you don't really particularly need if your goal is, no, I need to have I wanna be able to say I sold a billion dollar company. You take the VC money because you wouldn't care about the end result, the product, the or you care, but enough to carry to get to the exit of the billion. Yeah. Like and it and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not judging that. It just it comes down to if you don't align your business to what you are and who you are, just generally, it's it's probably not gonna work because your interests will go. But you guys, ironically, you you funded your company through another company effectively, right, through these projects. Like, so so you which is funny because as as I've talked you through the years, I'm like, why don't you just focus? It seems like that one's making all the money, and it's just being bled over to the other side. And you're probably like, I could have made so much money just by just doing can you would you wanna talk me through that path a little bit of of what you did to keep your your your digital company your SaaS company afloat?
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Yeah. So, you know, it's funny because you know? So the the organization, our SaaS company was called Doxy. Right? And this was this was the company that we were pursuing in insurance with. This was the, you know, automated document processing company. And the entire time we're doing that, we're bootstrapping this by doing these custom point on solutions with Autonomi. So the entire time that we're doing this, we're running cash flow negative, and we're we're making it through these deals. Right? We have a couple of deals in the pipe. We're having the meetings. We're doing the closes. We're getting the implementation specifics nailed down. We're doing that. But the entire time we're doing that, we're self funding using Autonomi, which is, you know, these custom automation solutions, one off kind of projects in order to make, you know, MVPs of different solutions, stuff like that. And, you know, at a certain point, I realized it's like, man, 20% of our sales effort is making 95% of our money. What am I doing? Like, look. What what am I doing? Yeah. And so yeah. Then we just, you know, at a certain point, we just kinda decided, you know, it really seems like you know, Doxy is a it's a very powerful product. I'm very proud of what we've built there, but it really just dovetails nicely into some of these other solutions that we've built with Autonomi. And it seems like what makes the most sense is to have Autonomi be the organization and then have Doxy be one of a suite of products that we offer
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that are able to help businesses get to the next level and really take more of this white glove high touch approach, but do so with these targeted point on point product solutions. I mean, I looked at docs. You should explain that too. One of the things that came to mind was and and and this is how some of the bigger consulting companies or people who go into product or, you know, product service side, is you just build it for one company and just keep customizing it for them with the intent that when they leave, I close it or they buy it and it becomes theirs. And it's like your exit is just, hey, why don't you guys just, you know, give me the three year contract value of what we have for it? Now you're like, you're gonna chunk a change or, you know, and you're like because, I mean, that's that's a strategy for it. It's like, I I don't I don't I'll I'll as soon as that if you have, like, as soon as that customer's gone, I'm gone with it.
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You might as well just sell it to them. So Yeah. Yeah. And, like, you know, I think that's another that that's another one reflectively looking back. You know, we we kinda went a mile wide and an inch deep with Doxy starting out just because, you know, we saw how much opportunity there was where we could build this infrastructure tool and then just kind of, you know, configure it however we needed to for all of these different companies. And we thought that's that's the big vision. Right? That's how we're gonna that's how we're gonna make a billion dollars is we're gonna be able to have this, like, custom turnkey solution for everybody. But the thing is, like, we were wrong twofold. Right? And the first place we were wrong is if you try to market to everybody, you can't capture anybody, which, like, yeah, business one zero one. But we thought, oh, maybe maybe it would be different because we can target a specific avatar, blah blah blah. But, like, it it doesn't matter how good your product is. You have to it has to just be so blatantly obvious to them. It's like, hey. It's for you. It's not for anybody else. And, like, if you can't do that, you just get lost in the noise. And then the second place where we kinda, you know, messed up is in the implementation, the configuration burden is so great that I mean, it it's your typical enterprise sale, right, where the the configuration burden is so great that unless you're well capitalized, have a huge team or any all that, you're gonna spend all of your time and resources on this configuration to make an implementation that maybe the end client won't be satisfied with. And, you know, the truth of the matter is, if you have six people and you're delivering something to a company that has 50,000, a hundred thousand people, it's very, very difficult to make that happen. You know? So it's it's very difficult to make that work. And, you know, we just we weren't we we didn't have the proper resource allocation to be able to do that and do that well enough to, like, springboard and keep the sales cycles going and manage, you know, the dozens of sales cycles we would want to to really scale that up. And yeah. It just didn't make a whole lot of sense.
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And you guy did you guys chase the VC path at all? I mean, I I did some competitions and things, but, I think when they could discuss is, like, you know, if you took the VC or the private equity or whatever the, you know, external funding route. So It's it's an endless route. Like, you got you already know. It's it's crazy when I hear, like, oh, they saved it. They raised a hundred million, and they're already planning their next raise because the intent is to burn through the hundred million without the ability to sustain cash positive to grow. And that may I always shake my head at that because I don't have the experience of it, but I'm like, that doesn't that doesn't seem like a that seems like a pyramid scheme.
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Yeah. You know? So so we did we did pursue VC, and, you know, we we got a little bit of angel investment We had some VC conversations that went pretty far and everything. But the thing about that is the VC sales cycle is pretty similar to the enterprise sales cycle where it's the same kind of thing where, oh, you need all these documents. Oh, now you need more documents. Now you need to prepare all this. You have to spend all this time. And, you know, I'm a technical founder, so I'm trying to spend all this time raising the money while also spending all this time managing the product. And then at a certain point, I just had to take a step back and it's like, okay. What am I actually doing? I'm gonna spend all of this time trying to court these VCs who may or who might just waste my time for six months and then ghost stay because that's what most species end up doing. And, you know, maybe I'll end up capturing a little bit of money from them, and then I can use that, but then they're gonna buy in. And then I just look to the future and, you know, there's that whole thing where it's like, oh, it's better to have 7% of a billion dollar company than have 0% of nothing. And I look at that and I'm like, why not just do things a little bit differently and have majority control of the large company? And I I I, like, I didn't sign up to eventually lose majority control of the thing that I worked so hard to make. And then what? I bought myself a job, but now it's higher paying, and now I get, like, some validation or something. I I don't know. It just it it was not the right personality fit for me to go the VC route. And at a certain point, I kinda realized that.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, sure. If you could sell it for 70,000,000,000 when it's all done or 70,000,000 out of it because you're 7% or whatever it is. Right? Or I don't have that math right, but I think that's that. Is that right? 70. I think it's 70,000,000. So or you could be a % owner of something that makes 7,000,000 a year for ten years. It's about the same. And you're like and it's yours. And you could then go sell it probably for 20. And so 21 as a services company. And my, I guess my point is, is people you know, I I know it's instantly relevant. We started off as an AI company. That's when we were we were like, hey. We're gonna create content with this because we we understood the OpenAI places a little bit. And and quickly, I saw how much VCs wasted time. And you're like, you you know, you have AI. We actually had revenue on the concept, but we just manually delivered. Like, we were raising money just to create digital versions of that so we an AI version of that's agents, effectively. We'll get it to you in a minute, but it's like we wanted to create agents basically to do that work. And it's it's amazing how much time I could see them wasting with, oh, I just need this presentation. Just one more slide to do. I'm like, that's not it. Either you you and and you go through that a couple times, and I was like, you know, I can build a company or I can raise money. I can't do both at the same time. And I just said I I told our investors you know, I had friends and family. I was like, we're moving to a services company with the idea we're gonna back into a technology company at some point. I have to do it that way. Otherwise, we're done.
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Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I mean, I I I don't know. You know? Like, I don't I don't want to talk badly about going the VC route because there is, you know, like, people are very successful doing that. People do, like, you know, they build their dreams doing that. But I I really think that it is extraordinarily overhyped to do the whole, like, go get the VC money and then blah blah blah. You know, it's like they they hype this up so big. It's like nobody talks about the guy who's casually making $30.40 mil, and nobody even knows him because he doesn't even need anybody to know him. And he's just living the best life. If he answers to nobody, he doesn't need to make any reports. He doesn't need to go raise a series b, series c, series like, that's just exhausting, man. Who wants to do all that? You know? Earl earlier, first year, I got asked to present in Dallas. I live in Dan Atlanta. So I flew to Dallas to present at this private equity
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fundraising. Like, this is like your pitching. And and the what I quickly saw, everyone's from there. I was the outsider. And if you weren't and that whole group's focus was definitely on, like, medical or health care service, like, it was, like, I was not in anywhere near I did get a client out of it, so it would be net net perfect positive. My leg goes, I'm gonna be the other entrepreneurs. I get there, and what I quickly saw was, like, how, like, regional it was even. It's like I like, there I had no business being in Dallas at all. A friend of mine who knew it was from there, he got me in that. But, like, if you're raising money and and you're and and you're, you know, doing this dream of this and that. And with the funny part was, one of the guys that was there trying to raise money was one of those guys. He's, like, was probably worth 250,000,000, flew around in private jets, and he was like, oh, I wanna go now go build, like, a, you know, multibillion dollar company. I kept up with him, and he's like, yeah. I got away from that. I'm just finding my own thing. Now he's like and even he was like the guy you never knew. I think he sold, like, pallets of wood or something. I don't know what he did, but he just made tons of money doing shit. You'd be like, what? Yeah. Let's let's move this, just conscious of time. Talk about some AI agents because there's a lot of world of AI, and and anybody's, like, looking to scale any of their businesses. How to leverage AI correctly in it to actually provide scale versus something else someone else else else take care of. We struggle with this. Sometimes we get these tools, and I'm like, I look at my credit card. I'm like, why do we we don't have we don't even use Loom anymore. Why do like, little things. And you're like and so tell me how to do it. Like, just take walk me through the way to use an AI agent and what an AI AI agent is to you. Just just give us the playbook a bit.
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Yeah. Absolutely. So so first of all, to start off, what an AI agent is is a combination of artificial intelligence and automation in order to perform a task that would typically require a human being to do. Now AI agents can be as simple as, like, a workflow where there's, you know, content that gets generated or something like that, Or it can be as complex as a system that has a continuous loop of recollective reasoning that touches every piece of your business and kinda acts as an overall controller. Right? Now what I've seen lately, especially looking at LinkedIn and looking at, you know, everybody who's blowing all this stuff up, is, like, everybody talks about, like, oh, these agents are so amazing. Look at it. I have have something that can automatically schedule stuff on my calendar. Oh, I have something that can automatically write an email for me or whatever. But it's like, though that's cool and everything, but is that actually driving any value? Right? And, like, is that actually doing something that is getting an ROI and saving some time in that business? Because, yeah, it looks cool. Look. It looks amazing to see, like, these things happening all on their own. But, you know, if it's writing bad emails or if it's, you know, scheduling things on your calendar that are not necessarily the correct things to schedule or it's not handling that correctly, you know, it's it's it's not actually doing much. And then there there's also a lot of focus on these agents that are very flashy, but they don't do so like this this meeting scheduler is an example. Right? So something that can read an email and then schedule the meeting from the email. It's like that's pretty flashy, but that's only saving, like, actually ten, twenty seconds every time you need to schedule that meeting. You know? What's much more interesting is an agent that can handle the entire conversation up to the point of setting the meeting and then setting the meeting so you can cold convert to appointments
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without ever even interacting with the cold lead. Like, that I'll give you the yes the yes and yeah. The the yes and on that one. The improv. Right? Yes and it puts it in the right go high level or your email filter and drip sequences, and it's gotten them to say, yeah. I'd love to get some emails about this, this, and this. It's customized an email path for them in the future for your newsletter. That would actually be useful because that way, I don't have to downstream think, okay. I have to tag it, drag it, go do this, or I have to explain to a VA or somebody else to do it. It's crazy. There's some questions coming in from LinkedIn. Yeah. Let's take those real quick, if you don't mind. Absolutely. Always like to see interaction. Thank you, by the way, for LinkedIn. We think LinkedIn fixed something because we weren't seeing any connections from LinkedIn. Long time. I guess I guess LinkedIn's broken. Dan Myers. Bill Gates. Get him in here. How can AI powered automation revolutionize your business processes and drive strategic growth? I think maybe through example. You wanna give an example of where that's when you're I know you have some pretty cool customers that's done this. How would you answer that?
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Yeah. So so, you know, I'll first give an example, and then I'll talk about what the overarching strategy is. So an example is I had a client who is in a product space ecommerce business. Right? And something that they were struggling with is that their warehouse was very hard to manage because they had they would get these orders in and then they would have to deal with all sorts of stuff around the orders. They'd have to pick the orders. They'd have to make sure that everything was being tracked out of picking that order, enter it into the spreadsheet. And then they're trying to gather intelligence on where they're sourcing their products from in the first place to see what sources of products are going to be the most efficient. And, you know, all of this is being done by hand in spreadsheets, and people are making mistakes putting this in. And there's just this huge burden of trying to capture and collect the data while also fulfilling the service of picking the orders, packing them up, and shipping them out. Right? So how we were able to apply AI to this process is we abstracted all of those logistics into a little application that sits on tablets. And so now everybody walks around with a tablet in the warehouse, and they just walk up to the they walk up to the bin, they scan the bin, take out the product, pack it up, and all of the consumer intelligence, all that stuff is handled in the background. And so nobody has to actually sit there and type all that information in. And because of that, they're able to make much better decisions about where they're sourcing their products from and make sure they're getting the ROI on their sourcing while drastically reducing the amount of pick time that's required. So now they can get on top of things quicker, they have better customer service, they have higher customer lifetime value because of that, and their business has grown quite a bit because of this implementation.
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Now So there's another question that came up around that. What what is another one where you I mean, I wanna call that revolutionized because, like, Amazon's got that to another level. Right? Robots go Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where's where you've taken a company that's really like, oh, wow. I never even knew that was impossible.
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Yeah. So, another major one that we have is we helped this organization that was in, like, health care fulfillment logistics. Right? So they take care of organizing everything between the claims processors, the insurance carriers, and the actual end clients and providers. Right? They're kind of the middle man for all of this. And that they receive everything through email, and then they have systems that they're using to track. And it's essentially that they're acting as an admin station for all of these organizations to interact and orchestrate together. Right? So what we did for them is we set up agents on top of their email inboxes that could understand what was coming in from that email and who it was coming in from and automatically pull out the proper information, put it in the proper place, write down all of the stuff, and kick off all of the new workflows. Right? And because of this, what used to take, you know, a team of twenty, thirty people four hours a day to do is now being done by a single AI agent, you know, and, like, they they get emails continuously, so it's hard to, you know, say time for time. But I mean, they don't spend any time on this anymore because the AI just doesn't. Right? And that takes me back to what I was talking about is how do you actually find value in, like, process automation with AI and all that? There's all this noise. And, really, it's a three step process. Right? The first thing you have to do is you have to be able to extract all the decisions that occur to some kind of standard operating procedure. If you can't if you can't fully define what's going on in some kind of standard operating procedure, then it's not really a candidate for automation. And maybe there's some decisions that require judgment and stuff, but it's like, what are those judgments? What are those decision points? And you you really have to have it mapped out to the point where no matter what the scenario is that comes in, you know how to handle it or maybe there's, like, a couple edge cases that you can send off to another person. Once you have that, then you can build the logic around how that's going to be automated, and you want to be able to compare on a time for time basis. And so, you know, if if you're an accounts payable coordinator and you have an invoice that comes in and the automation is, how do I get this invoice into all of the tracking spreadsheets that it needs to be into into the ERP, and then how do I send off whatever needs to go back to the client. Maybe that takes the accounts accounts payable clerk three minutes. Maybe this could be done by an automation system in seven seconds. Right? Once you can do that time for time comparison and you understand the volume that's there, then you can calculate ROI. Then you know if it's worth your time to automate. Then you know how much value you're actually going to get out of doing that. Because there's also plenty of automation projects, system projects that don't go through this step of really making sure they understand what the ROI is gonna be, and then they end up just automating things that don't need to be automated. You know? Well well well,
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extending that with the idea of AI. So automation being a different technology from AI. Yeah. A lot of the time on the easy ones are three minutes. Like, and a lot of the time, that's the outsource. That's the BPO candidate. That's where it goes to India or wherever else to be done. The the time savings are on the the exceptions Yeah. Where you kick them out. That there's no learning mechanism, which is where AI, I think, injects itself to learn from the data of how they did it and get the positive feedbacks or whatever else of, hey. This is probabilistically above a certain number. It's like that. In the past, ninety nine percentile, they've answered it this way. Automate. This is this is where AI can be inserted in is when it's kicked out to a human. To learn from that, to build into the automation with the idea that there's no checkpoints, but there's just use probabilistic levels to say it's okay to automate that because it's it's similar enough. Is is that fair? Is that where the AI would be inserted into an automated process From from your Well, so so there's kind of there's kind of two places where you where you really see
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AI can take a lot of the heavy lifting. So the first is anywhere where there needs to be some kind of natural language generation or some kind of natural language based logic. So things like writing copy, writing emails, generating reports, sending spreadsheets, anything that requires a more, you know, text based reasoning, text based logical analysis, that's a right candidate for AI. And then another right candidate for AI is when you have some kind of big data problem that needs to be solved. So an example of a big data problem that needs to be solved would be, which one of my suppliers for a given product is giving me the best bang for my buck. Right? And so it's like, you're gonna have the products that are coming in. Those products are going to have different lead times. The product quality for each of these suppliers is going to be a little bit different. The return rate for each of these suppliers is going to be a little bit different. And for a human being to sit down and solve that problem,
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that's a multi week affair potentially. But that's, like, exactly. Yeah. I could look at how long it took to respond to emails and how many emails were sent in in in the contextual nature of that or the tonality of it of likely impact to that, you know, customer service agent of quitting. And, like, there's a lot there's a, like, the real data that starts getting fuzzy, if you will, but that it's real and it's measurable because of a human could never do it. Right? They they'd have, you know maybe they can have a conversation with, you know, whatever. But, yeah, I think to apply that is a whole different process in itself. I mean, that's like it's a whole it's like next level. Right? It's one thing to do an SOP and automate it. It's another than to introduce basically the smartest employee that's learning all the time to your team.
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Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, I think that, you have the like, where it really gets crazy, where, like, the big potential is is when you're able to use the artificial intelligence to gain real business intelligence that you haven't seen before. So, like, a couple examples of this are you have a relationship with a client and you have your clients churn, and whenever they churn, they start interacting with you in a certain way. Maybe the email cadence gets a little bit longer. Maybe they the tonality of emails gets a little bit different. Maybe they start pushing meetings or something that you're gonna have, something of that nature. And especially in service based organizations where, you know, customer lifetime value might be 5, 6 figures, this becomes really important of being able to see when a customer is going to churn and proactively prevent that. And that's the kinds of things that AI can see when that customer is going to churn and let you know ahead of time so you can offer them that promotion, that extra attention, that whatever in order to save them and then boost your customer lifetime value. And that's, like, where you really start to see the value of artificial intelligence beyond simple automations. You're muted again.
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I got a quick cut. Here's a rule. Never have a granola bar before a podcast live. Just just general podcasters listening out there, bad plan. It shows up and anyway. Coolest thing you've built? Like, what was the coolest use case? Talk talk to me through it because, like, did you know it was gonna be the coolest when you started? Or you're like, oh my god. I discovered this was actually the coolest thing ever. Talk about, like, your coolest your coolest client. Go brag for your client. And I'm asking from a marketing perspective because I want them to go reshare this episode. But
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Yeah. Absolutely. So, I think the the coolest thing that we've built so far is we have a so for one of my clients, we built a system that helps helps organizations take advantage of tax rebates when moving from nonrenewable energy sources to renewable energy sources. Right? So especially for manufacturing companies who have very large electric drains, like, they they might stand to make huge amounts of money in rebates by switching from, you know, gas power to solar power or something similar to that. So what we did was we built a platform that could ingest the electric bills and gas bills and all of the bills that they get, and then automatically do the calculations to look at the c o two equivalent of the before state and the after state when switching to renewable energy sources, and then generate the report that's required in order for them to get the rebate back for this other company to get the rebate back. So not only is the tool able to sell itself by being used by the renewable energy provider to get the switch, but it automatically generates the assets that are required for that company to be able to get the money back to pay for the install. And so, essentially, our client is able to go to their clients and say, this isn't even gonna cost you anything because we can find the money for you and get the government to pay it for you in order to do these installs, and then do that install. So they're essentially selling a free product because we've enabled them to sell a free product to their clients. And because of that, they're, you know, they're growing exponentially. They're able to do all sorts of amazing things because, I mean, it's easy to sell something for free.
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I mean, some days. It's got that value still. Right? Yeah. Of course. I'm just I'm just happy I'm not on mute when I got back on right now. Small things in life. As you look forward to the future, like, and and you're starting to think of how you're you know, you pivoted quite a bit from one thing to, you know, from a SaaS to I like this model better. You know, maybe talk about the future, what you're worried about, how you're gonna scale, like, what's the you know, what what are the ties, so to speak, you have yet to cut that you're gonna need to to make the current direction of the company just be great?
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Yeah. So, you know, like, a lot of the business that we do right now is very, very high touch and very, very custom. And I'm really looking at, you know, using, like, the clients that we have in order to find these common threads and being able to create productized solutions on top of that so you kinda get the best of both worlds between the product side and the service side. So what what we're currently building is what I'm calling the Autonomi solutions hub. And in the Autonomi solutions hub, we have a couple of very high value products that have been great for our clients that you can come and you can get a limited version of those completely for free, completely free of charge, and you can upgrade in order to get a higher level version of those for a small nominal fee. Right? And so this is more of the product model, but the way that it's designed is we have these on top of the sales and marketing portion. And so our tools that are more productized help with the sales and marketing, but we always know that fulfillment is going to be unique to the organization. So by the time we've bolstered the fulfillment in marketing with our free and low ticket offers, and we've already provided a lot of value, whenever they start running into these more complex issues that are related to fulfillment, they're gonna come back to us for help with the fulfillment side. And then that's how we're gonna be able to generate this playbook. Right? And once we have this playbook, we can take these solution sets that we've created for these other companies, and we can go out and find companies just like them and get into the mergers and acquisition side and start purchasing companies that we know what the solutions are going to be because we've done it before. And, you know, in order to do that, we need to start moving away from these, like, smaller kind of super high touch solutions and working towards this creation of a global business improvement playbook that we can really slot into these organizations and these different industry segments. And that's kind of what our long term vision is, is to be able to eventually have a suite of solutions that are so powerful that we know that if we go out and buy, you know, a $5,000,000 e commerce brand or a $10,000,000 retail brand or something, we know exactly what is required to take that from 10 to 20, from 20 to 50, from 50 to a hundred because we've done it before. And so we do it for our clients first, and then we do it for ourselves later.
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I like that. And then it it moves you into a a different acquisition model from private equity and pieces like that to be able to divest certain asset groups, if you will. Absolutely. I like that. It I mean, it takes you in the same path, but, I think I think there are more companies getting bought on a a services technology play mix than ever now because I think cash flow is what people are looking you know, does it make money? Because because if it doesn't, it's not much of an asset ten years from now. Right? And it's like I I I believe that's what I've seen. Are you I assume you'll see you're seeing something similar where there people are favoring real business versus the the the Ponzi hype.
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Yeah. You know what? Like, something that I've really been falling in love with recently are you know, there's so many brick and mortar businesses. There's so many, like you know, they're kind of like the standard businesses that that nobody ever pays attention to, but there's just there is so much potential there. Well, it's like, you know, let's say it's a a painting company or like a laundromat or like a, you know, a house cleaning company or something. It's like, do you know what you could do with a house cleaning company if you applied artificial intelligence and AI agents and better marketing and all of that stuff to a cleaning company versus all of the other cleaning companies? You know how quickly you would just completely dominate everybody in that space. And, you know, there's this huge opportunity, I think, for people in traditional high level tech services, business to business services, where the standard for your marketing and for your sales and for your approach is so, so high. Being able to take that skill set and those tools and bring them back down to the traditional brick and mortar space, I mean, there's just so much opportunity there, especially with, the whole all the baby boomers are retiring and there's, like, so many businesses going up to the market that are cash flow positive, price to sell because the guys just wanna retire. I mean, that's the wave. That's the real wave that everybody, like I mean, that's what I'm looking at personally because yeah. It's it's amazing to be able to provide these improvements for different businesses and everything. But if you can start buying those businesses and improving those on your own, I mean Yep.
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God, the sky's the limit. Because there's thousands of those. The the timing of that conversation, I just had on the show Roger Wakefield, who's the YouTube plumber. So if you search search plumbing on YouTube, he he comes up. Like so he's he's kind of a big deal. Ironically enough, we had to gotten a discussion about bidets and how he said, oh, I can't live without mine anymore. It's like seat bidet. If you're not a bidet user, you just don't know. But if you are, you know exactly. He takes it with him to conferences. He actually videoed it coming out of the, you know, the the luggage, and he did a video because he's a plumber. He installed it into his hotel room. Yeah. That being said, he was saying, go find trades. You have to look at kind of how you do the licensing of these guys that don't have a clue about marketing. It's just, you know, it's Bob who's the plumber who just everyone knows whom they call him. And he's like, those are the businesses to buy if you can sort out the master licenses because they're established. People know who they are, and then you just gotta replace them with the right kind of people to say, oh, no. You know, I'm gonna send Ted out. I'm gonna send, you know, whatever, this other guy because they're they're they've never thought about selling their business ever, and you could there's a lot of ways to do it. And you're you're spot on with that. There's ways to buy businesses, especially in the essential services where these guys that they were trades, and they built things, and they never knew marketing. They never needed it. They just showed up for stuff to do. Yeah. I was blown away by the way. He was saying the guys who just run a van for, like, HVAC, like, basically, like, contract, they make $3,400 k a year installing stuff. And I'm like, I might just become an HVAC guy. At some point, I'm just like, you know what? Maybe that's just easier. I can I can figure that out? It's not that hard. Electric volts. And you know what's the craziest part about that is they make that 3 or $400 a year, and they don't do
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any reactivation. They don't do any customer nurturing. They don't have any email campaigns. They don't do any advertising at all. And it's like all these things that are just so, like, you know, one zero one in the, you know, professional business to business market, especially if you're coming from, like, a SaaS background or something. There are so many companies that just have none of that. And it's like, if you just put an email marketing funnel on top of the company that's already, like, on top of that plumbing company, and you could reactivate 20% of those people. It's like, you can get a a 20% increase in bottom line in, like, a week.
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You know, it's crazy. Well, it it it's crazier. The companies that placed them own the $600 a year maintenance that sends them out. And those guys make $50, but their whole idea is you're going out to see what their units are like, and you can try to sell them a unit, and you make money when you put a new one in. And it's like you don't they have this small, like basically, the marketing is paid for by the anyway, I I'm with you on that, and and it's like it makes you look like, why don't I have to build anything? Just go get it and put a couple you know? It's not that easy, of course. Yeah. But I think when you start looking at, like, technologies to apply, like you said, a brick and mortar, things never thought about it. In the simplest of proven fashions, you you can really make an impact for it. And you you might have that revelation. You might buy one or two companies and see it's gross in a few hundred thousand a year and, like, I just gotta focus on I don't wanna do any of this other stuff anymore. I might just shut this down. Because you're like, this is just so much easier. Yeah. But but you know what's funny is those same opportunities
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that exist in brick and mortar, they exist in, like, you know, traditional professional services businesses Right. In South businesses and stuff too. And that's really where, like, the AI agents and the surgical approach I was talking about before really like, that's where it really works its magic because it's like, do you have a custom targeted remarketing campaign that can go study the person that that, bought from you before and go learn about what they're currently doing and then send them the well timed message about, oh, I see that you're trying to move into this market. Here's 10 tips that we have for how you can get into this market easier. Because that's something that AI can very easily go out and, you know, look up their LinkedIn, look at their recent business history, see what the news is about them, and then send them that message that you know is gonna be relevant. That's something that's pretty straightforward to set up that you could just print off the back of that because you of course, they're gonna want to know more because it's exactly what they're doing. But how much time would that take you to do on your own when you could have an AI agent just do it for you? And those opportunities exist too.
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You know, in in conscious of time, just to be end with this, I will tell you, like, one of the agents I may build for like, we do we do this manually right now, after going to Podfest for the week for a conference. I people are I see all the stuff people care about, like, huge interest in monetization, huge interest in this and that. I went to an SEO track, and they gave, like, kind of step by step of how to use to build your podcast through SEO. And I never really considered it as, like, the actual strategy you should use for it. But I was like, man, it'd be nice if something would, like, continue to look at the monitor of the competitors' current topics, keywords, come with my long phrases, but also injects where we are unique. But, specifically, automate the Google keyword planner for the week of what's low volume high search term that's in that keyword set so I can just go create content that week on it instead of me having to do all those those steps. So I'll leave that out as a challenge. Do you wanna throw me that tool or that'd be great. Because I could sell that day after day to every podcaster on the planet. Like, hey. This thing just does your keyword planner based on your competitors, your value prop like, I can imagine the fields. What is your what where are you different? Here's what your topics should be in this week specifically because of how the keywords are set up. Go do thirty minutes on this in here, like and make sure you're using these kinds of keywords. I I assure you that would work.
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Yeah. The the trick with SEO, and this is, this is something that I think people struggle with too is whenever you're selling SEO. Like, the results of SEO are delayed. And so what you gotta do whenever you're doing something like that is you gotta you gotta make a loss leader out of it, and you gotta allow yourself to just provide the service. You you just provide the service for, like, three months upfront, six months upfront. You don't charge anything for it until
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that. You put them on, like, a, like, a twelve month retainer or something. In in this case, I'm just giving you the data so you can go do I'm telling you what your podcast should be about for the week. Like, I don't even like, I agree, like, loss leader or not. Like, but this Oh, you're you're not even talking about, like, doing the SEO. You're just talking about what should you make? The the tool. So, like, if I had a tool that looked at my competitors, looked at my niche of where I'm trying to fit in, looked at the the free Google Keywords Planner whatever, and said, hey. These are currently this week low volume, high or high volume, low competition words that are near where your brand is and what you're trying to do. Here's, like, five long, you know, long keyword sentences, how to do this, the the five magic steps of x, whatever. Create your content week on that because it should do better because people are searching for it right now. That but that work, just to have that as part of my daily workflow that says, hey. Go do it. This this popped up. Go do a show about this. Go talk about it. Oh, by the way, here's the AI that says here's ten ten ten ideas about it that and this without work. I'm about to lose it. Hold on. That oat is, like, stuck perfectly somewhere in the back of my throat. It's a magic spot. Anyway, I mean, if you know how to build that, I bet you could build that in the afternoon. But because Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That would be something that I could package up and resell to a podcast teams because every podcaster on the planet would benefit from it that hasn't gotten to that to that upper echelon level because that upper echelon level has figured it out. Maybe not so explicitly, but even they would benefit From a tool that says this is what you should be talking about, it'd be great.
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Absolutely.
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Issac, thank you for coming on the show today. I will never need a great time to do it ever again before going on a show. It's done. You're the last guy. I just want you to know you're the last person I'm ever doing that with. Well, I'm honored. Because my right eyeball feels like it's gonna pop out. Thank you. Listen, get Autonomi Com. I'll put it up here real quick. It's, if you're listening, getaut0n0mi.com. So if you need something that's specifically built, you wanna just learn how to use agents or AI today in your business. Because you guys aren't, like, you know, two year cycles. You're, like, knocking stuff out in sprints and, like, hey. Let's it works. Let's here's, you know, here's five more things we can do. ROI ROI ROI. It doesn't make sense, and then you got your ROI package. And you guys are fast. You can go from initial conversation to something live generating ROI in your company in less than a week. I'll leave you ask you this question. Do you do you are you fee only, or do you do any, like, you build me the podcast thing, we sell it, it ends up being rev share on Yeah. So so I I do actually do some stuff like that as well.
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You know, it it depends on how much work upfront and what the allocation looks like and stuff like that, of course. But, you know, a a very a very profitable stream for us is this exact thing where it's somebody in market who wants the solution and knows that they have a thousand places to sell it, just doesn't wanna go through making it themselves. So, like, if we can make it and then we can have some kind of joint joint partnership about it, we're we're happy to be the the silent partner in the background that's cranking out the fulfillment while you use your name, your brand to go sell the thing. It's a win win for both parties.
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You know, we have more conversations obviously coming up anyway, but that'll be one of them. Absolutely. I I see that as a massive of the things I saw that people do that were interested in a podcast, and these are people who are really actively out there, was monetizing their podcast, the and s and how to use SEO to get more those two things are very related of how you make more money. And so we'll we'll follow-up with that. But if you somebody else has an idea that wants that you wanna pitch it, getAutonomi.com. Absolutely. Issac. I'll I'll be right back with you. I'm gonna say goodbye to everybody, but I appreciate you getting on here today. It's been great. Sounds good. For everybody who's still here, thank you. It you know, we are here to help you learn from other you know, to help you cut these ties, the things that hold you back in entrepreneurship. And a lot of times, it's just based on knowledge. It's it's based on perception or some kind of preconceived idea that you think you have about the world or what you think you should get, or there could be other things too, but but I hope you learn from our guests of what they're doing, ways they've pivoted, way they're thinking about business, and, you know, I hope you reach out to them if you have a need for what you're doing because they they're they're not on here by chance. They actually really do well. We we really curate our guests to an idea of they will add value to your world. So thank you so much for listening tonight, and today. If you, have any questions, get a hold of us. Remember, hit that follow. Smash the follow on your, Apple or Spotify account, and, till you get there till we can meet again to go unleash your entrepreneur. Thanks for listening.
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Thank you for joining us on this episode of Cut the Time. Let's stay connected. Please hit that follow button on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. And if you're ready to advance your entrepreneurial journey even further, join our free community at facebook.com/groups/cutthetie. Cut the tie to everything holding you back from success.