Latest / Reframe First / Mike Warren, CEO & Founder at Alethia Strategic Business Solutions | AI is Transforming Industries
Transcript
- Oleksij Rak: And hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. I'm Alexey, the host of the podcast and let me welcome our today's Mike Warren. Mike is investor, executive coach and founder of Alexey Strategic Business Solutions. So hi Mike, it's great having you here. Mike Warren, MBA: Hi Alexi, it's nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Oleksij Rak: Thanks a lot for coming. ⁓ Mike Warren, MBA: Appreciate it. Oleksij Rak: So Alessi is a business and executive coaching and consulting firm dedicated to providing and parallel to his clients utilizing proven consultative coaching methodologies. That's what's written on your LinkedIn, on company's LinkedIn. Yeah, could you tell us more about what you're doing and... Mike Warren, MBA: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: How do you manage to do all of that? Because from what I see, you're founder of the company, but you also investment officer and you're board member in a few companies. What do you do and how do you manage to do all of that? Mike Warren, MBA: Yes. Yeah, wow. That's a great question. First off, I started Alethea in 2000. And I had been in the securities industry for a few years before that. And I was running a broker dealer, an investment bank, and an RIA, and an insurance general agency, and a mortgage company. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: I had been in financial services for a while before I started coaching. prior to that, I had had an exit in my late 20s, which was kind of what set me up for what I had been doing. And that exit was in the CPG space of consumer product goods. And it was primarily in the retail grocery business. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: I had grown up in that business from the time I was born, literally. My dad was in the food business for almost 50 years and ran another service company on the side. So my dad was working 16 hour days, 365 days a year for almost 50 years. And I observed that when I was very young and I had the entrepreneurial spirit. Oleksij Rak: ⁓ Mike Warren, MBA: literally from the time I was born. My mother is Greek, came from Greece when she was 19 and didn't speak a word of English and put herself through school all the way to getting her doctorate. And, you know, so I had really great examples growing up of business, working, going to school and, you know, and trying to live a life that Oleksij Rak: . Mike Warren, MBA: had purpose and meaning. And so my dad helped my brother and I form a business when I was 15. I bought my brother out of that business in my 20s. And then I sold that business in my late 20s. And that's what got me started on the exit, the road to exits. And so I took a little bit of time off and ended up starting out in the securities industry as a stockbroker. Oleksij Rak: you . So. Mike Warren, MBA: And then I was an options trader. And then I started doing financial planning and ultimately it led me into investment banking, mergers and acquisitions and taking companies public, taking them private and doing turnarounds during that time. and a lot of people that had seen my progress from my, my previous exit thought I actually knew what I was talking about and started hiring me to coach them in business. so. After I'd been in the securities industry for about four years, I started Aletheia Strategic Business Solutions, which is my executive coaching and leadership and strategy company. So I've been coaching executives for 26 years now. A lot of C level people, mostly VP, two C level, Fortune 50 to 1000 companies. Most of the Fortune 500 I've coached in. Oleksij Rak: . . Mike Warren, MBA: And I really love that aspect because as an investor who manages and owns a venture capital firm, is, which is what I do as well. It allows me to look at portfolio companies and look at companies and really understand is the leadership good is the ownership good. Do they know what they're doing? My due diligence process is a lot different because I've not only coached in many of these in these companies, I have. invested in several of them along the way also. So, you know, how do I do it? How's the time work for me? You know, it's, actually quite easy. I only keep a handful of coaching clients every year, and that's usually below 20. And that allows me to give them the time and energy and expertise that is required for their advancement. And then my two funds, one is a beverage fund and one is a tech fund. so I find company, well, companies actually find me. I don't find anybody. They find me. And if I like the company, I start doing due diligence. And if we really like them, we'll put them to the test. And if we love them, we'll invest in them and we'll put them in the funds. it's not that difficult, to be honest with you. It's the portfolio management side. Oleksij Rak: Yep. . Mike Warren, MBA: We're venture capital, not private equity. So we're investors first and we're not there to run anybody's company. We're not there to manage their company. We're not there to own their company. We're, we're investors and advisors to them. So, you know, I, I can easily manage my load on a weekly basis and I spend a lot of time reading and studying. Oleksij Rak: . . Mike Warren, MBA: different businesses and different types of marketing and sales and everything else because I like to stay very current with my clients. ⁓ yeah, I've got the investment firm and the coaching firm and they both run very ⁓ symbiotically together. They intertwine very, very well. Oleksij Rak: How do you manage to like do both coaching and investing in parallel? Because these are kind of two different cases, two different approaches, I would say. Mike Warren, MBA: Well, you know, you'd be surprised that they're really not. So I'm a people person first, and then I look at products and services. So if I'm looking at a company that I want to invest in, the first thing I'm going to look at is the people. I'm not going to look at the product. I'm not going to look at the service. I'm going to look at the people. And if the people are coachable and they're receptive to ideas that are Oleksij Rak: Yeah. OK. Mike Warren, MBA: different from what they have, then I know I've got a company that I can help shape and mold. So I'm able to coach those executives and coach those leaders in our portfolio company. So they actually work really well together. Now, when I'm coaching people that are not in our portfolio companies, that's not a very hard thing for me to do either. I probably spend 10 to 15 hours a week doing my coaching. And I probably spend 30 hours a week on my investment banking and funds. So it's very manageable for me. just, I've just learned to, I've learned to compartmentalize really, really well on what needs to get done, when it needs to get done and understanding how to eliminate a lot of noise and, and focus in on a lot of signal. So I use a lot of the tech type of mentality, which is signal to noise ratio. and I try and keep my signal to 80, 85 % and my noise to no more than 15 or 20%. So I can be very focused for very short periods of time and it allows me to hyper work on projects. So where people take four to six to eight hours of work on something, I usually get stuff done in two or three hours. I mean, I've only had one hour of sleep. Oleksij Rak: . Mike Warren, MBA: Tonight so I went to bed at 630 this morning I was up doing work talking to my clients overseas and so I don't require a lot of sleep either I sleep maybe three or four hours a night max so I I know how to manage that signal to noise ratio so it's really it's really not that difficult to cross over into both worlds because You know listen businesses are made up of people people are usually the the weak link Oleksij Rak: you you Mike Warren, MBA: In a company, it's not usually the product or the service. So if you work on the people and you fix the people, the rest of it is easy. Anything is investable if the people are investable, in my opinion. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. And talking about your tech fund, like what's stage and at what stage of the business do companies come to you, to your fund? Is it something early stage or? Mike Warren, MBA: I like, yes, I really enjoy early stage companies because that's where I believe the most amount of ⁓ valuation gain can come from. It's also where you're really shaping the culture and the behavior of the company. And you're at one of the most critical growth stages where if you're in a Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: And listen, I don't do startups. Okay. I just want to tell your audience. I'm not a startup guy. I've been a startup guy and that's a very dangerous place to be as an investor. But you know, some of the biggest exits come from, you know, startups. mean, just look who's on the stock exchange right now that, you know, they're trillion dollar companies now, you know, Apple, Amazon. Oleksij Rak: So. . Mike Warren, MBA: People like that. know, so some they all started somewhere right and I just like a little tiny bit later stage. So we really get in around seed Series a series B type of stuff pre seed little dangerous for us Don't like them. got to be producing some kind of revenue Really want your valuation somewhere between five and maybe 150 million Is a good area, but I really the sweet spot for us between maybe Two and a half million three million in valuation to 25 million because you can really move the needle with companies and get them up to a hundred two hundred three hundred million dollars of valuation Especially in the tech space and you can do it very quickly. So if you wait to get into later rounds Yes, it is safer if you get in earlier rounds it is riskier, but the upside is way higher when you get in earlier. So I really like that that early stage seed series a level are my favorite. Those are my favorite companies that come to us. we are spread across tech in several places. So health tech, fintech, pay tech, real estate tech, Bev tech, anything that has has a functionality that will provide something better to the world. Oleksij Rak: . What the most common Mike Warren, MBA: We're a premium brand type of fund. Both of our funds are premium brands, both in the CPG space and tech space, and they are all better for you products and services out there. So they're not just better mousetraps, they're actually better products and better services for the consumer. And that's really where we focus. Oleksij Rak: problems that they have at this stage when they come to you. Money? Mike Warren, MBA: Money. Money is always number one. ⁓ One of the biggest mistakes in business is that you're under capitalized. And I talk about this in a book that I just finished writing that's in publishing right now. And it's one of the hardest things to overcome if you're underfunded. And so people always wait too long. to get the funding that they need to move their product or service to the next level. So a lot of times I will get companies that are requiring a rescue mission. They've run out of money or they're really close to running out of money. They've tapped all their resources, friends and family, and they can't raise capital because they don't know anybody or they don't know how to raise capital or they're just, it's not their business. Oleksij Rak: you Mike Warren, MBA: And so they come to me and say, Hey, can you help us? And if they're too far along in the stage where, you know, there's not enough time to do a proper raise and work to the cap table as it sits, you know, in their company currently, then I, turn them down. I, but I always tell people the biggest problem is you're under capitalized. Always get more money than you need and be very frugal with that money. Oleksij Rak: What else operationally at this stage? Some growth problems? Mike Warren, MBA: Be very careful with that money. yeah, that's the biggest problem, 100%. Operationally, well, yeah, the next big problem is the wrong people in the wrong positions, or sometimes the right person in the wrong position. there's, again, listen, my philosophy is people are what screw up businesses. It's usually not the, you can figure out what the widget needs to be. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: figure out what the marketing needs to be. You can figure out how to do the sales. It's people. People are the biggest problem other than the under capitalization of a company. People are always the biggest problem. No question. And I fix a lot of that. And I do that. I fix a lot of that. I know it sounds funny, but it's true. you know, I've been on, I don't know, I've been on probably a hundred podcasts in the last 10 years, right? And Oleksij Rak: So, yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: I get that question a lot and every time I say it, people are like, yeah, you're right. People in my company suck. People in my company are not in the right position. Sometimes I don't know what I'm doing. It's more prevalent than anybody saying, ⁓ my product isn't good. My service isn't good. Nobody ever says that. Everybody says their product and service is the best. But people in leadership know that usually the biggest problem besides the money Is the people no question and it starts from the top by the way. It's not a bottom-up Issue it's a top-down issue. So my mother used to tell me all the time in You know the fish stinks from the head down not the ass up and she's right, you know, so when I'm going into companies and I'm working either in the coaching space Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: or in the investment banking space, the VC space, the first person I'm talking to is the CEO of the company or the founder. I want to know what their psychological makeup is. I want to know how they lead, how their emotional intelligence is, what their leadership style is, how they hire the people that they hire. I want to know everything about the people side of the business before I do anything else. And then I can... very quickly assess who is the problem, where is the problem, what is the problem, and how does it get fixed. It's very methodical and very easy to figure out, but it starts with the people every time. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. And with regards to current changes in the world with AI, with all the stuff, how do you make a product and how do you put product on the market nowadays? How do you go to market? Because it changed a lot. Mike Warren, MBA: ⁓ Yeah, well, listen, there's I want to answer this question carefully because every Every sector has its own You know way to get the product to market right if it's a if it's a service business Getting the product to market is going to require You know really boots on the ground right you're have to have people you're gonna have to use Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: Marketing you're gonna have to use sales. You're gonna have to use all kinds of tools to Educate and make the public aware that you exist, right? If you've got a product it's it's the same thing but products Like physical products require a totally different mentality than a service type of product now when you talk about The big changes that have happened in the last couple of years Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: There is no doubt that AI has absolutely changed everything about business and how we do everything. we're just scratching the surface right now. And the US is farther ahead than anybody right now, but it's not gonna be in the next 10 or 20 years. We are right now, but that's gonna change. Oleksij Rak: Yep. Mike Warren, MBA: what you're going to be seeing and what we're all afraid of, which is very much coming to fruition already, is that a lot of jobs and a lot of people are going to be replaced by AI. It's not as prevalent or bad right now, but it is starting to go that direction. And I'll give you an example. I have a law firm in Los Angeles that I have been coaching and doing strategy work for nine years now. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: They're a very prominent ⁓ litigation firm for business and employment law. They are the best, the best I've seen out there for what they do. They win 98 % of their cases. They hire some of the best attorneys I've ever seen. But here's what's interesting. They left an office that had 50 people and now they're down to 18. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: And the reason why, one of the reasons why is a lot of what is happening in the legal world now can be done in AI and does not require a lot of service staff to it. Yes, you still need legal secretaries to manage the calendars and put together retainer agreements and other stuff, but a lot of that stuff is now AI done. So you can take an entire lawsuit, you can feed it into an AI program. and it will spit out anything you want. It'll give you questions for depositions. It'll give you responses to the complaint. It will systematically do all this stuff where it used to take hours and hours and hours of paralegals and lawyers to do this. It takes literally minutes now. So these attorneys can actually do more work, have more billable hours, but have less stress because they've got AI doing a lot of the work for them now and all they have to do is check to make sure the AI did it the way that it's supposed to be and it's in their voice. So it has changed a lot of how business is run. And that's just one industry, right? That's just the legal industry. ⁓ My CPAs now for the fund, for the funds, they use AI generated reports now. So, you know, if I need a, if I need a financial document, Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: We just ask AI to produce it at whatever program we're using, whether it's QuickBooks or Nav or anything else, there's AI components to all of it. It reduces a ton of work and time. And I'll give you another example. In our fund, in our tech fund, we will do a lot of the legal work for our portfolio companies. So they might need a PPM. They might need an LPA, they might need subscription documents, they might need all that stuff. Most firms charge $25,000 to $30,000 to do all those documents. ⁓ And it takes them a month to do them. We do those documents in about five hours and we don't charge nearly that amount of money to the client, which reduces a lot of expenses, both to the company to the fund and to our limited partners as well. We pass that savings on. that, you know, a couple of years ago we couldn't do that. It wasn't AI driven like that. Now it's very AI driven. So there's a lot of benefits to what the changes are. But going back to your original question, how do you get products and services and things to market? You have to use technology these days. Everything is technology driven. There's nothing. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: There's no product or service that I know of anymore that is not technology driven all the way down to milking a cow. It's all technology driven. Those ⁓ combines you see out in the corn fields and wheat fields and cotton, they're all technology driven. Every one of those things, they don't even need drivers inside the cabs of those ⁓ combines anymore. They can do it all from a computer to... Oleksij Rak: . . Mike Warren, MBA: within a millimeter of space and the farmer never needs to leave the house. mean, that's how far we've gotten, right? And so I think it's really, really important that people understand that it does not matter what you do. If you are not up to speed on your tech stack, no matter what it is, no matter what product it is, even in our beverage fund, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: You know, we've got a couple of brands that use very specific tech stacks for sales, operations, the management of the company, everything. So again, I don't care what it is. If you are not versed in technology, you will not advance your company. I don't care what it is. Even if it's selling pet rocks, it won't matter. You still have to use some kind of technology. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: to get the product or service out into the public through the distribution channels into the retailers or direct consumer, you're gonna use technology, period. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. Michael, which sectors? You just mentioned the legal sectors. Mike Warren, MBA: Mm-hmm. Yup. Oleksij Rak: in hours. I recently had to compile a retainer agreement and I did it with Claude in one hour's time. Yeah, and it's a great agreement. I gave it to lawyers who took a look at it and it's a great agreement. Mike Warren, MBA: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah, you probably saved yourself $1,500 of legal time where you can do the document now, have your attorney look it over. It takes them 20, 30 minutes to read it. They charge you, you know, for a half an hour, an hour of time. You've just saved yourself a ton of money. We do it all the time. I do it all Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I tried to do and I succeeded. And I'm not a lawyer myself, you know, but still I can read legal documents and I see that it looks good and it covers all the questions and lawyers confirm it. But, you know, my question would be what industries do you think can be disrupted with this technology nowadays? Because there are industries which are quite archaic, quite old and Mike Warren, MBA: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: They used to do everything manually because they were like either huge documents or some complicated processes or whatever like... But there are sectors that can be disrupted nowadays. Mike Warren, MBA: Yeah. You know, I think, and this started a few years ago with a company that I had been coaching the entire leadership team in the pharmaceutical and let's call it the aesthetics space. I don't ever name clients on shows, but this is a... Oleksij Rak: Thank Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: ⁓ medium sized publicly traded company that I was an advisor to their board. And I coached the entire leadership team from the inception of them going public and pharma. They all came from big, big pharmaceutical companies and they took their product and they used tech to start moving it where all of the big companies like You know, let's call it, ⁓ let's just name a couple of the big ones. Allergan, Merck, Medtronic, some of these other ones, they became kind of late to the game using the tech stacks to really move product. this smaller company, that's how they started out. They, they were an aesthetics company. are an aesthetics company, but they use tech and tech stacks and AI now. Oleksij Rak: Okay. Mike Warren, MBA: for just about everything. And they started doing that about four years ago. So they were a little ahead of the time. kind of playing, the market is playing catch up to them right now. But that is an industry that I think could easily be disrupted using different types of technology. Health and wellness is another one. Okay, there's a company that ⁓ we're raising capital for that we're gonna put in the fund that is a health and wellness tech company. And they, Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: They place therapists and nutritionists and other people inside doctors offices and the entire thing is tech driven. So they've got their own app, they can go in and see the client's chart, they know the prescriptions they have, they can assign physical therapy, they can assign pep tech, they can do everything through that tech stack and this is in the medical field. I know, medical can absolutely be disrupted as well. No question for sure. And there's, there's, listen, let, let, again, let's, let's, let's talk honestly, like every, industry could be disrupted in some way or another. Now that AI has become very prevalent in the, marketplace. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. . . Mike Warren, MBA: I mean, but listen, there's a downside to AI too, and a lot of people don't talk about this, but when you take the human element out of it, it also creates other problems within the organization where you get a lot of siloed departments that are like, no, no, no, we don't need to talk to marketing. We're sales, we've used AI, we know exactly what to do. Oh, we're operations. We don't really need to talk to marketing because we've got We ran our model through AI and we know that our operational, you know, how we're doing operations is perfect. So marketing needs to get on board or get out of our way. Like I see a lot of that right now. So when you take the human interaction piece out, which is what AI does, I think you, ⁓ I think you're setting yourself up for failure. So while, while we could and will reduce certain Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Mike Warren, MBA: Workforces because of AI, we still need the human element in there. No question. Somebody still needs to feed the machine, right? For now, for now. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. We'll see. ⁓ What do you think and what have you seen the most successful implementation usages of AI? From what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing the most, when people build it bottom up, those small, small, agentic pieces and injections in certain processes and then turn it into system, from what I've experienced, it used to work for them. because if people try to do it top down, it usually fails. But how is it in your experience, from your point of ⁓ view? Mike Warren, MBA: Well, you know, for me, AI has definitely changed a lot of things on how I do business. And again, though, the business that I'm in is people to people, right? So when you're coaching, AI is great if you want to come up with some, let's call it framework for how you coach, right? Or it could be a framework for how the session Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: should go, you still need people interacting. And you can do by telephone, can do by Zoom here. I still get on airplanes a lot and face to face with people. I have been on 26 airplanes in the last 42 days. So I still like the human element. I think another area that is prone to danger Oleksij Rak: Okay. Okay. So. ⁓ Mike Warren, MBA: in the AI space, but also prone to advancement is in the medical space, right? You obviously don't want a surgeon who's looking up on AI how to, you know, do a heart valve replacement. ⁓ But if there's a way to utilize AI for something that they can't see or that is ⁓ something revolutionary out there that is scanning the world of every heart valve operation that's taken place in the last 20 years and they find something that could be very useful, right? But it still needs, it still needs a human element no matter what you do. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure. You know, problem I have currently is an ability to make a decision of where to move first. I ⁓ run a software company and I have great people in my company and I understand like with this current age of AI, I can build any software and this... indecisiveness of what to build next. And how would you approach it? ⁓ I'm looking into what can be disrupted. I'm looking into industries, I'm looking into sectors, I'm looking into something that's really old and is to be disrupted. Because there is opportunity window. Mike Warren, MBA: you I'll tell you an industry. Oleksij Rak: Everybody feels it nowadays that there is an opportunity window and you need to choose what to do, you do not need to get stuck in this decision. Mike Warren, MBA: Yeah. I will tell you that I think one of the largest industries that needs to be disrupted, that has not been disrupted in 20 to 25 plus years is the banking industry, especially in the United States. And, and in particular, the mortgage side of the banking, the lending side. So Oleksij Rak: ⁓ yeah. For sure. Mike Warren, MBA: Mortgage lending, small business lending, ⁓ these all need to be disrupted. They are all antiquated. ⁓ Many of these companies are still killing a million trees a year to ⁓ create paper stacks that are, it's just very wasteful and very antiquated. And that business needs to be disrupted. We are working with a company that just started last year in the mortgage space. Again, I won't tell you the name because we're about to start a $10 million round for them. But it is a massive disruption in the mortgage industry that brings together the loan officers, the banks, all of the ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: lenders out there and it allows the consumer to be able to use different parameters to look for products without having to give their social security number and having a lot of these people that are out there who do a lot of dirty dealings bait and switch type of stuff. It really exposes them and that has not been out there. Oleksij Rak: So. So Mike Warren, MBA: in the market. know, how do you compare rates? How do you compare fees? How do you compare time to funding? There's so many different parameters in there and it has been nobody's ever put the pieces together fully in that business. This is the first company I've seen in 25 years that has figured it out and there is room for many, many more just like this. But these guys will be Well, they're already first to market and they will be biggest to market very, very quickly. There is no doubt about it. But that, the banking industry is so antiquated. You have to talk to too many people. Too many people touch a file, whether it's for an SBA loan, a private loan, a mortgage loan, a car loan, a boat loan, an RV, I don't care what it is, anything that is under the lending umbrella, it's 100 years behind the times. And that's even in the US. It's worse than other countries. mean, go to Europe and try and get a mortgage. It might take you six months to get a mortgage, even if you're a citizen. I spend three to five months a year in Greece. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: You know, I've been through the just to open a bank account there. I had to get my cousin to help me who worked at the bank for the last 20 years just to open a checking account. I mean, the banking system worldwide is is is beyond antiquated. So that is a great area. If you if you could figure out something in that in that space to. You know, create a create a better process and eliminate a lot of the. You know, the things that people have been doing for many, years that are super slow. I mean, that would be a godsend. mean, think of it, think about it this way. And I don't want to go too far into the mortgage industry, but you know, I I've I've been finance. So I look at all these things with AI and. A lot of the technology out there right now, you literally could fund a loan. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: in 24 to 48 hours. You could have the underwriting done on somebody. You can have the credit background done. You can pull all the documents from the IRS. You could get everything you need in 24 hours. The problem is 30 people touch that file. So you've got too many people touching a file. then you wonder why you have so many fees when you finally get Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Mike Warren, MBA: you know, do your loan, right? You get $100,000 mortgage and you've got $10,000 worth of fees. And you're like, my God, how did I rack up 10 that? Well, 30 people had to get paid, right? And it took three months to get the file done. It's so antiquated, so, so antiquated. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and there are for sure other sectors like that which... Mike Warren, MBA: ⁓ my God, there's so many. There's so many like that. just, I was just thinking of another one. I lost the train of thought, but, ⁓ there, there, it is, it is endless. How many industries are out there doing things the same way for the last 30, 40, 50, 60 years. And you know, they're getting, they're getting passed up by companies that are able to do it more efficiently. Oleksij Rak: What other trends do you see in the market nowadays besides this huge change with AI and what do you think we are all moving in a few years? Mike Warren, MBA: No question. Well, I'll tell you what another industry that I think is on the brink of another, it's evolving, but it's not evolving well. And it is one of the businesses that I'm in, which is coaching. There are a lot of 18, 19, 20, 22, 25 year old kids out there. And I call them kids because I'm 57 and I have ⁓ seen a lot of business over my life. And I've consulted, coached in thousands of companies now. I've had lots and lots of exits. I've seen a lot of stuff in my days and I've been coaching for 26 years. These kids get on Instagram, get on TikTok, they get on YouTube, and they sell people air. Okay, all of these marketing agencies. Well, I'm a marketing coach, I'm a sales coach. These people have never built a business. They've never even worked in a business, most of them, longer than three to six months. And they're out there telling people that they can coach them, that they can ramp up the revenue. And I have found very few of those people. Oleksij Rak: . Mike Warren, MBA: have any credibility whatsoever. And if you use those people 99 % time, you're going to lose your money. You're going to lose your money. And so the coaching industry has become extremely competitive on the low end side. And guys like me who charge appropriately for our services, is, you know, I charge my minimum is $500 an hour. But I've got clients that pay me $10,000 an hour for time. Oleksij Rak: Okay. Mike Warren, MBA: I've got the experience to do that and the experience to handle it. But you've got a lot of people out there who have never done anything in business, they've never done anything in the coaching world, and they're out there telling people they have done this and done that and they coach this and they coach that. And then they take your money and they run and you never see it again. That's a huge problem. And so that's another industry that is getting... You know, like I said, it's evolving, but it's getting bastardized out in the marketplace because of AI, because of the ability for these kids to go into like Woodpecker and expandy and Zapier and, you know, and HubSpot and LinkedIn and create these, you know, these, these, these funnels and all this stuff in record time. I mean, it's just, it's crazy what, what can be done out there. So you're getting a lot of people that are using these tools but have no real experience in business trying to tell you how to use them in your business. That's a big problem. I see that a lot. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. Awesome. That was a great discussion. I promised you to let you go sooner. ⁓ Thank you a lot for this discussion. Is there anything else you would like to add on top of what we discussed? Mike Warren, MBA: Listen, I tell people all the time, know, they ask me, and you've asked me a couple of times, like, are the industries? What are some of the things to disrupt? Where to go? I think it's less important to be thinking about what the next thing is. I think you need to pick something that you're familiar with. Oleksij Rak: Thank Mike Warren, MBA: that you know, that you understand, and become the best at it that you can be and better than anybody else. And then market as being the premium brand in the space. So it doesn't matter what you do. Just be the best at it. And no matter how many times people tell you no, no matter how many times the door gets shut in your face, no matter how many times you fall down, you just stand up. Get up and do it all over again. Listen, not every one of my businesses have been successful. I've had portfolio companies that have gone out of business. I've had a couple of my own businesses go out of business. It's just part of the business cycle. As long as you have more wins than losses, or you have at least a win that's bigger than your losses, you're gonna be fine. So. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Yep. Mike Warren, MBA: Find something that you love, become the best at it, and don't quit. That's what I tell people. And I'm telling you that as well. And your audience. That's it. It's simple. Oleksij Rak: Awesome, awesome. Thanks, Mike. Thanks a lot for great conversation and wish you the best of luck. Mike Warren, MBA: I appreciate you having me. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. Thank you. Okay. Oleksij Rak: and have a great day! I've