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Strategic Resilience and the Reality of AI Implementation with Leslie Hassler · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:01.39) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Leslie Hassler. She is a business scaling expert. Leslie, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. Leslie Hassler (00:13.418) Sure. So I own YourBizRules So president and founder, we are essentially a fractional C-suite for companies before they can afford to hire the full C-suite. So we serve companies in a lot of different capacities. But like you said, what we're really good at is cashflow, profitability, growth and scalability. And in the end, helping that happen in a way that improves the owner's quality of life. Day to day role, chief. Now I was gonna say chief cook and bottle washer. Some days it feels like that. We were talking about this week's a compressed week and we're juggling a lot of balls this week, but really I lead the team. That is my main role with YourBizRules and doing, know, focusing on our growth and scalability, which is an adventure each and every day for the work. And then one of my passions is just really good wine. I think I'm getting too old to drink really bad wine. So I focus on really good wine. Brent Peterson (01:14.444) Yeah, I just did a short vacation to the Rioja region in Spain and you can't get a bad, I didn't have a bad glass of wine the whole time. It was fantastic. Leslie Hassler (01:17.862) Ooh! Leslie Hassler (01:22.464) I will have to get your list of places to go. I have not done that. Brent Peterson (01:26.35) Yes, absolutely. So Leslie, before we get started though, you have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke. You just give me a rating 8 to 13. So here we go. I went to a costume party last night dressed as a screwdriver. I turned a few heads. Leslie Hassler (01:45.658) I'll give you an 11. Brent Peterson (01:47.328) Alright, I never said they're gonna be funny. I just said they were a joke. Leslie Hassler (01:51.726) husband is a dad joke king. And so I was waiting for it, but I can remember this one and then I can turn it around on him. Although he's pretty good at puns. So he tends to figure out the punch lines before I can get them out the door. But believe me, the these kinds of jokes are my day to day experience. Brent Peterson (02:09.868) That's awesome. All right, so let's let's dive in. Tell us a little bit about your business and some of the fractional roles you fulfill. Leslie Hassler (02:18.064) Sure, so YourBizRules we have been in business for almost 11 years. it really came as a creation from a journey I was going through in my first business, asking myself what I wanted to be when I grow up. Where did I want to go in business? And really what it came down to at that point in time was I love business, I totally geek out on business. I think about it all the time. I just wasn't in love with the business. I had my first business. So YourBizRules was born in 2014 as from that conversation. And this is our playground. This is where we get to do phenomenal work. We impact lives, we change features, we transform businesses. And that is truly the mission that everyone on the team has bought into and is exciting. really passionate about delivering. We were having a discussion this week at our status meeting where I was like, I just have to let you know, if you're ever worried about whether or not you're doing a good job, that is a signal to me of how much you care. And we do a phenomenal job each and every day. But so work with a great group of people and we do really great work in the world. So that's a little bit about, you know, what did YourBizRules, it really was formed from a lot of scraped knees, bruised elbows, a few trips around the learning curve, if you will. So I'd like to say that we're at the end of the day, we keep things real, we keep things practical, implementable, and approachable for the business owners out there that are trying to grow and to scale in their companies. What do we do? This whole suite, it's really, if you can imagine a C suite leadership role for your business, that is exactly what we can provide. are embedding some full-time CEOs into some companies that are looking to sell in the next two to three years. And we need to hyper-accelerate some of that growth and scalability. And that embedding is really the best way to do it. We do a lot of fractional C. Leslie Hassler (04:35.798) F.O. work, as well as C.O.O. works, marketing, H.R. Really what we find is though, is that everyone comes in with a major need. Like there's one area that they need the most help with. And then as we're working that area, working the problem, solving the problems, no one problem is about one thing. So we have the ability to bring in the expertise. to do the bits that need to be done so that we have a very holistic strategy, a very effective strategy, and one that ultimately generates results. So in that way, we can be a one-stop shop for a lot of companies for a good period of time. Brent Peterson (05:15.906) We briefly described some frameworks like EOS in the green room and check boxes just as a way to make sure that you're doing what you want to do. And I think repeatable framework is always important. I'm also part of the Entrepreneurs' Organization, which is sort of involved with the EO or EOS, I should say. And you're in Dallas, so do you get connected with your local chapter? And I know there's one in Fort Worth, and I've heard that Dallas is just a... Just a suburb of Fort Worth, is that true? Leslie Hassler (05:47.175) That depends on which side of the line you live on. Dallas, Fort Worth, I love living here. I've lived in either here or Houston. I was born in Houston. But I love Dallas, Fort Worth for the ability to keep their individuality, that we can be this huge metroplex of a collection of cities. And I know that sometimes that's hard for people that don't live in our area to understand that I live, technically, I'm the farthest north in Dallas that you could get. Brent Peterson (05:49.292) Yeah. Leslie Hassler (06:15.652) which is right under Plano. And I'm like, no, Plano is a whole different place. And they're like, what? And I was like, well, the lines blur. But there is cultural differences to where you live. I love that Dallas is a suburb of Fort Worth. Only my Fort Worth people would say that. But listen, I have not actually. That's so interesting that you pointed that out and I... I wasn't even aware that there was a local chapter. So I'll have to go look them up. I was just talking to my team that I need to broaden some of our networking circles and things like that. So this is the perfect time for that. Thank you for that. Brent Peterson (06:54.402) Yeah, so just tell us a little bit about some of the frameworks that you recommend having in place to help grow. mean, certainly measurability is one of those things. In EOS, they call it a scorecard, there's all kinds of terms for other things. there's always a measuring, I think, a measuring, especially in marketing. Like they say, if you don't measure, you're not marketing, right? So measuring is really kind of that underlying factor. Leslie Hassler (07:11.099) Yeah. Leslie Hassler (07:23.664) So, I mean, let's talk about a few things. we're system agnostic, if you were. It's more important to me that there is a system and that that system is in alignment with the owner, the culture of the team, whichever way you want to go. So you've got EOS, you've got scaling up, you could do the great game of business, you could do the pumpkin plan, you could go OKRs and NKPI's, the whole gamut. The truth of it is, is that they're all very, very similar. They do have different cultural flavors and it is important to align yourself with one that fits. The structure should set you free. I mean, that's the whole point of bringing in process or technology or systems like this is that it gives you a baseline structure. I just see so often that people mistake structure for strategy. Right? it's, were, I'll give you a whole nother way to approach this. So we're heavily into AI and we bring AI into a lot of our clients. Now I wouldn't say we're an AI firm, but it is under the umbrella of all the work that we do with our clients. And we were talking about what are people missing the mark on? And in part, they're adopting the structure of AI without the strategy, without the expertise, or perhaps without the context. And I think that's really the important thing to understand with any system that you put on. A, alignment. It's got to be in alignment. It's got to be something that feels of ease to you because if it feels hard, it's never going to get done. I don't care how good the structure is. If it's out of alignment, then people, your team won't get engaged in it. And I think the beauty of some of these structures is that it allows for a team to be engaged for a strategy called decentralization to happen so that there are more than just the owner being working on the business. But I think that other part of it is understanding that you still need strategy. You still need some tension in the thought process that can continue to drive your business forward because that's really what growth is about. Now, I agree with you totally. If whatever you want to improve, you should be measuring. Leslie Hassler (09:46.119) but you don't need to measure everything. You just need to measure the things that matter. And that looks very different business to business. And I think the game we like to play in our company is can we get it down to one? Could we get it down to one metric? And can that metric be a leading metric, not a lagging one? And can we get it so tuned in that we just know this is our dial? Can we get there? And that speaks to the simplicity that you're trying to get with these systems, with that overlay, if you will, into the company, is to get something that's so simple that you can get repeatable results. And that is what drives growth and exponential growth and scalability down the road. Brent Peterson (10:34.414) Do you find that AI now is maybe fooling entrepreneurs into thinking they can do everything by themselves? Leslie Hassler (10:46.206) fooling. I don't think it's AI. I think it's our approach to AI. I will, like I said, we're heavily into it. We have been for the last three years. I don't trust it farther than I can throw it. Why? Not because I think it's bad. Not because I think it's wrong. I think it's job, it's programming, has been designed to get you the closest answer. The closest shortest answer, the quickest it can, because the energy drain that goes through one chat, you know what I've heard is like one chat thread can consume a bottle of water. It is an energy drain. And so they're having to force the system to be so efficient that I feel like it loses its total value. The chat quality today, this last, I will say this last a chat GPT-5 that's come out, it's not bad. Usually, our team will say, chat gets stupid for about six months with every major launch. What was out in the marketplace three years ago was significantly better, but it wasn't scalable. It wasn't what that technology could handle. So I don't know. I think it's our approach and our expectation. So if somebody comes to me and says, hey, I got a strategic plan from chat. And I'm like, well, if you've never had a strategic plan, that's phenomenal. You've got something. But what I know is that it might work for the first iteration that you're going to do, but it loses context because the habits as humans, we haven't learned how to have a conversation with chat in such a way that it actually produces quality work quickly. And I think that's just part of the learning curve that's going on, but it is where I do think we're abdicating our own knowledge and deference for something that can research the internet. But the internet is full of all sorts of quality of information, right? It's up to you. You have to be a participant. Will this eventually be able to run our lives, maybe? Leslie Hassler (13:11.172) I mean, there are a lot of different technologies trying to make that happen. But I also think it should enable us to be using higher levels of our brain, higher levels of strategy, higher levels of innovation and of our imagination. And I don't know that most people approach it in that same view. Brent Peterson (13:30.927) Yeah, my experience, my day-to-day job, we run a company that has human beings that write content, and most people now feel they can just do it all on their own. So that's my first perspective on that, is that writers are at risk of losing their jobs. Writers are losing their jobs because of AI, and entrepreneurs feel like they can just do everything on their own, and then it just leads down the path of how much can they do on their own? And I did... Leslie Hassler (13:42.436) Mmm. Brent Peterson (13:59.979) I did see a great quote from another business leader who said, you know, AI is great on its own, but it doesn't replace a team of experts who can do things. Right. So, and then it also doesn't really, really replace your capacity in my little catchphrase as humans in the loop. And you just can just generating content for the sake of generating content is really. Counterproductive to your business. And I think that's the trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. Leslie Hassler (14:09.786) Yeah. Yep. Leslie Hassler (14:31.154) I agree with you. We were like, we have one client technology company and we asked them a question and the response was something that came from GPT or Claude. And I could read it and I'm like, this is Claude. I know this is Claude. This isn't even you. It's lost personality. It's lost context. And I think especially in content, what I'm seeing is man, everything's starting to sound exactly like the next thing. And when, and especially in marketing, my viewpoint is, When you sound like everyone, your ideal client can't choose you. They get eye-blind or brain-blind, you know? They get confused. They don't know why I should choose you. And they're looking for something that will make their decision easy because we all have too many decisions to make. So you need to maintain the individuality, the secret sauce, if you will, what makes you special in everything that you do. to me, it's only going to become more exceedingly important because right now we are entering into the land of generic and junk food. say as like generic content and junk food content. That's what I call it, generic and junk food. But we probably could have a whole nother episode just on that. Brent Peterson (15:47.405) Yeah, I think, you know, there's a number of paths that entrepreneurs can go down on the AI front. My experience has been the opposite where it gives you too much information. And especially, you know, I've used it to ask, like, what questions am I not asking? Leslie Hassler (16:04.663) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (16:04.94) And it's really good at giving you the questions you could be asking until it gets so big and cumbersome that you can't manage it, which I think is another problem that a lot of people have now in there. And you gave the great example of this doesn't sound like you. And I've had people call me out when I use ChatGPT to create a post, Brent, this isn't you. I think that you feel like there's going to be a turnaround for entrepreneurs to realize that maybe some of the Leslie Hassler (16:23.183) Yeah. Brent Peterson (16:32.32) analytical parts of AI are the things they should be using and less on the generative parts. Leslie Hassler (16:38.106) you Leslie Hassler (16:44.55) So it's so interesting you say that because I have several degrees. And my first one is in journalism. So writing is a form of expression for myself. Always has been, which is why we have books and articles and do all that nice fun things. Yet I use AI a tremendous amount. However, I have invested so much time into teaching AI. My tone, my vernacular. also invested so much time into slowing it down so that I get better quality type things. And even what you were saying, like if you ask me, I have learned in my usage that if I have a research, I'm gonna research in one thread, I'm gonna synthesize or summarize from there. And then I'm go into another thread because that thread is still a simple beast. And so if I add too many layers into one thread, then the doesn't know where to go and it gets very confused and the quality goes precipitously down. So we have really had to get into a methodology of chunking, if you will, and thinking about how to break things apart. Now here's the crazy thing. If you're doing, I do strategic plans all day, my entire company does all the time, all the time. We understand how to break it down. We understand what parts need the research, what parts need. the record keeping, what parts need the different parts and where we need to go a little, you know, let's go into the stratosphere and think larger and different than we're currently thinking. But I can't give all of that to chat in one sitting. Chat can't process not the duality of it, but the multiplicity of it because it needs a simple, it's trying to get you to the quickest, shortest answer the fastest. And that is way complex. Now it can think complexly. However, most of us aren't at a level paying for the software at a level that it really can slice and dice that. So that's where I say, like, you have to keep the human in the loop. You need the expertise to be able to do it. You can surely Google, you know, how to do a strategic plan. I'm sure you've got articles. I've got articles right out there. Leslie Hassler (19:07.152) But at the end of the day, to actually get one that works, how to get one that changes things in your business. Because it's often the more simple plans that have greater traction than it is the complex plans, which just kind of, I don't know, people lose interest on. They just can't handle the complexity and the day-to-day life which is already complex. So, you know, there's a lot in there that we've talked about is the human quality, but it's also understanding that you can use generative and analytical, but you still need a level of expertise on top of it to get back something that is productive, efficient, of quality. Brent Peterson (19:53.551) Yeah, that's really a great approach. So Leslie, we are just burning through time. It's going so quickly. I can't believe it. If you have some, yeah, if you have some predictions on this coming year, you know, I went to GLC, which is the leadership conference for EO and everybody was talking about tariffs. And are you seeing any trends in businesses that are seeing, are you seeing anything that you can point to that's going to Leslie Hassler (20:00.375) So fast. Brent Peterson (20:23.564) see what's going to happen the end of the year in the first quarter of next year. What is your prediction for businesses? Leslie Hassler (20:29.926) I am going to put this under the umbrella of the trend that we need to be focusing on is how to be more strategic in our businesses and less reactive. The soup de jour is tariffs. Four years ago, was COVID. What was it the year before? What was it the year before? The truth of it is that we are in a period of exponential change. Look at ChatGPT, good AI, you know, in the last three years, the immensity of what has been happening. Most of our management, most of our operations of business is still 10 years behind the power curve, if you will. And I think that's why we're driving so much conversation on tariffs, because we're constantly behind the eight ball. There is a way to get ahead. I don't have a crystal ball. Nobody will have a crystal ball. But I do believe that there's a certain level of strategy that's insightful enough that it allows for the flexibility and the responsiveness to opportunities as well as detractions. Every time we're going through this in the last four years, again, again, again, again, we have the opportunity to break down the business in such a way to build it back to something that can actually keep pace. Most people though don't want to keep pace. They want to slow down. They want the status quo. They're still talking about what it was like in 2019, what it was like in 21. We can't go back. Like, I don't have a time machine. I don't know if you've found one yet. Right. The only thing I know is that forward is the only path. And I am more passionate about building businesses that can be resilient, that it doesn't matter. Insert the blank. We have a plan for that. We've mitigated some risks. We've positioned the business in such a financial position that we're not worried about the downside. Leslie Hassler (22:50.502) We're actually going, and now here's opportunity A because five businesses just went out of business. I can take care, I can bring in some quality individuals or now I can take over this market share or now I can do X, and Z. And this is not a new theory at all. It was the birthplace of Amazon Marketplace in 2000 in the dot-com bust. This is a time period where more innovation can happen. But I don't see that being the conversation. I see a whole lot of wishing for yesterday, complaining about today and not finding the path forward to where things like a tariff, you have that back pocket plan. You have a path forward. You're like, okay, that stinks. I don't love it today, but guess what? It's not gonna stop me because I've already planned and been strategic enough in my business. to know how to navigate that. That is the conversations I wish we had more on a daily basis because those are the things that bring you forward. And if you wanna know who in your circle you should be having the conversations with, I want you to find the person that's not sweating and not complaining. Because chances are they're already doing it in their own business. It's just not popular. So nobody's wanting to talk about it. So they're like, okay, I'll leave you all over there. Two hours later, I'm over here. I'm finding that next kernel of opportunity to take advantage of. Brent Peterson (24:24.098) Yeah, wow, that's great. That's a great line there. So Leslie, we only have a few minutes left. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Leslie Hassler (24:38.896) Well, you know what? Well, I will give a little gift out there. So we have a page for your audience. It's going to be at yourbizrules.com /UE UE. And we've got a couple of things there. One, some access to our books. So we do books. First one that's on the page today is First This Then That. But also if you're I don't know, interested in having those conversations about driving a more strategic and resilient business, we'd be happy to chat with you. And there's an easy way for you to reach out and schedule a call. Brent Peterson (25:14.158) That's awesome. And how do they find you? us the best way to get in touch with you. Leslie Hassler (25:19.78) So yourbizrules.com / UE is probably the absolute best. That'll get you what you need fast. But we're really heavily into LinkedIn. If you want to do a little lurking, a little bit of suspect and prospecting, then we do have a LinkedIn newsletter called Profitable Growth for Business. You can kind of see a little bit more of the conversations that were. Brent Peterson (25:44.482) That's perfect, Leslie. It's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much today. Leslie Hassler (25:47.878) Thank Brent Thanks for having me. Brent Peterson (25:53.047) That went great. Yeah, boy, the time flies, doesn't it?