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How AI Gives Founders Their Time Back with Andrea Palacio · Built by Margin with Laurie Chen

• 0:04
  Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle.
• 0:26
  All right. Okay, Andrea, welcome to Built by Margin.
• 0:30
  Thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation, Lori. Thanks for having me.
• 0:34
  Tell us more about your journey to being a founder and CEO. Yeah, so I started my first business back in 2016. It was an e-commerce business. I think it was my first— yeah, it was my first journey in entrepreneurship.
• 0:53
  It was, it was a good one, but it was mostly focused on giving us, giving me and my partner the, the freedom to just travel. And we did that for 7 years and whatnot. Uh, then we acquired a landscaping company in Florida, and that was a rough one because we were not prepared for all the stress, I would say, or the overwhelm of managing employees and having teams and 200 customers calling on an ongoing basis, right? So it was very difficult to say the least, especially when I had just had my first son, right? And I was pregnant with my second one. So it was a rough one. But yeah, that's what got me into AI and as a solution for me to kind of solve all this overwhelm of administrative work and all this overwhelm of operations and customer service. And so then I started my AI business and it's been, it's been great. That's kind of been my journey as a, as a founder. So how many years have you had your AI business and who do you serve? So I started my business back in October, so it hasn't been too long, like October, November. It hasn't been too long. I specialize in helping service-based businesses that are basically in the same situation that I was when I was with the landscaping company.
• 2:26
  Great. And how have you seen the landscape of AI change just within the past 6 months since you started your business? I mean, it's changed a lot because we have new technologies, we have competitors, we have emerging technologies.
• 2:41
  Can you tell us more about what— how the landscape has changed itself?
• 2:45
  100%. It has been crazy the way it has changed. I think December and January of 2026, was one of the biggest months where we just saw a complete shift, right, from automations into agentic AI. When you, when you think of 2025, you know, companies like N8N where you had just regular automations. What I mean when I say automations is, you know, you have a trigger, right? Like, let's say an email comes in and we have an action which is sending an automated response message, right? That's what we had.
• 3:15
  And in, and now with agentic AI, you have companies that have launched you know, like Anthropic that launched Claude Co-Work, you literally have AI assistants, you have, you can put together AI agents with Claude Code, which allows you to have that agent review that email, think, reason through that email, connect to different tools, gather information from the CRM, and then respond to the client.
• 3:40
  So the advance has been huge, the change has been crazy, and I, yeah, I am, I love it. It's, it's crazy, but it's awesome. How do you keep up with the changes though? Because if there's constant change, like, are there any like resources or like collaboration sites that you go to that kind of make sure that you're on top of all the emerging technologies and news that are going on? Yeah, that's a great question. So one, so I do two things.
• 4:11
  The first one is that I have my AI just kind of like give me scrape the news, scrape Reddit, scrape like Product Hub and just different sources to understand what's the latest that's been happening in AI, especially for a business. Because AI, you know, you think of AI and it's like it goes into healthcare and biology and then robotics and all these things. But I specifically focus on service-based businesses, right? So how, what tools and what has changed, right, that can actually impact how a business runs and operates. So that would be the first thing. And then the second, I learned a lot through social media. So just literally all my feed is 100% about AI. I don't get anything that's not related to AI. So whenever I'm consuming, it's just me just educating myself on new things that have been released.
• 5:00
  So I, once I, something new has been released and I just kind of like go on the company's website, understand whatever I need to learn, go on YouTube videos, watch them and just, yeah, kind of figure it out from there. Got it. Okay, so I'm gonna have to go to your Instagram and figure out who you're following so that I can figure out who I should be following for AI-related news.
• 5:22
  Yeah, let me tell you, I feel like half my day is split up in 3 different things, right? I'm creating content, I'm having sales calls, and I'm learning. So literally, it's a full-time job to be learning and keeping up with all the changes in AI.
• 5:37
  It's, yeah, it's a full-time job. It's crazy how fast it's moving.
• 5:42
  Yeah, I, I hear ya. Creating content and keeping up with AI is definitely a full-time job. I agree with that. Okay, so how did you, tell me more about how you got involved with AI specifically and with tech. Have you always been pretty tech savvy? Like, is, is that like what drove you into, into this space specifically?
• 6:02
  Yeah. So I've always been into, yeah, pretty tech savvy. I would say back in the day, like before I even went to college, I used to build websites with HTML and then WordPress came out and then I would build websites for friends, family, and whatnot. So I was kind of always curious about that. Um, well, I went to school for management information systems, so not really, it's not software engineer, but it's kind of like the in-between, between, in-between from business and technology, right? So connecting processes and systems that connect both.
• 6:33
  So that's what I did. And then what got me really into AI and automations is, again, when I, when we acquired our landscaping company, we were so overwhelmed that, you know, we just had so many things happen to us that it was exhausting, especially with the toddler and a newborn. It was, it was rough. So I was trying to find solutions and I tried hiring virtual assistants to help me out and I tried different, 5 different countries, 5 different virtual assistants. I failed at training them, failed at really getting them to work and operate the way I wanted, like up to my standards. And so what I did is I kind of always envisioned this customer service agent. I don't know why back then I envisioned that, but I had in my mind this customer service agent that would connect with the tools, like literally what AI agents do right now. I had that vision back then, but I was like, I don't really know much about it, so let me just try to hire someone on Upwork, right? I tried hiring someone and I hire him, I pay him, and 5 months later, between like back and forth, I literally gave him all the system of what I wanted.
• 7:41
  Nothing. Like he just put together this awful dialogue flow that did not work as I expected. Like did nothing. It was awful, right? So I'm like, oh my God, I just wasted all this money, all this time. So I'm like, let me look into this myself. So I start diving into it and I hire someone else to put together a few automations and make for my business. And I'm like, that's it. It's this simple.
• 8:03
  And so I just say, let me just do it myself. And once I start playing with all these tools, I go down this deep rabbit hole, right? I'm spending hours on YouTube learning, having AI teach me everything on how to do it all. So I end up putting all the systems for my business, right? So we have an AI voice agent that is handling every single call. Emails, text messages.
• 8:25
  It's checking inside to see, you know, what, what the client needs, like when their next service date is, because we would get a lot of calls or people saying, you know, when's my next service? So basic questions, the agent was now handling them. Then we were sending automated pictures and automated notifications to people after every single service, requesting them for reviews, right?
• 8:47
  So we had really like we had a low number of reviews for our company.
• 8:50
  And then after doing that, we started getting a lot more reviews. So more business started coming in, more revenue, right? So it's kind of what I did. And then, you know, just kept going from there and I just fell in love with it. I just love the technology side of things. I love knowing that I'm able to help a business get their time back because it is so easy for us as business owners to wear so many hats and it makes it really difficult for us to delegate sometimes because we don't know if the people, if we can actually trust people to do it. And so when we're able to automate certain things that are just manual, repetitive that we do every single day, it just takes this huge load off our back. Like, I literally— what happened to us is that my husband, he was, you know, I— he was out at some point just kind of like doing labor. It was really difficult. And on my end, I was overwhelmed at home with the kids, just doing like taking all those calls. And we went from that to my husband literally now not just not working on Fridays, being able to be at home with the kids. I didn't have to answer the phone calls. I was now more present. And so I saw how much it changed our lives. And that's kind of what motivated me to really say, okay, let me really study this and see how I can bring it to other business owners.
• 10:08
  So what are the top AI tools that you utilize with your clients right now? So right now, my go-to number one is 100% Plot Code.
• 10:19
  With Plot Code, you can build anything you want. So it's not really a matter of can I build this? It's what do I build, right? So that's the question nowadays, 'cause a lot of times I sit down with business owners and they're like, well, can I do this? Like, it's not whether or not you can do it because nowadays pretty much anything that you do in your business is possible, right? It's how do you do it? What process do we put in place? What systems to make sure that all aspects of your business are actually covered, right? So that, and that's my job as a consultant to really come in, help them understand what's really the time-consuming things, what the tasks that are really taking a long time and how we could actually either delegate it to AI or automate it in a way that makes them feel comfortable that things are still getting done, but they're able to focus on like revenue-generating tasks, whereas, you know, the daily to-dos that don't really generate any money but still need to get done. So is your typical client engagement, is it like a monthly, like a short project, or is it, you know, usually lasts more than one year? Like, how do you approach your the way you package your services and work with your clients?
• 11:28
  Yeah, so what we do is we have like a one-time setup fee.
• 11:32
  So what we do is we set up those systems, the, you know, whatever that means. If you were just doing a couple of automations for you, or if we're doing full business infrastructure, so that's a one-time fee. And then from that, you can choose to take on the option of an ongoing monitoring, and where we're actually like on top of optimizing everything and making sure that it's always up to date with all the technology and stuff. Okay, so you mentioned Claude, uh, Claude Code, uh, what else do you recommend? So I like using— so Claude Code work, I'm, I'm super pro on Claude Code work, um, Claude Code. And honestly, after I was using N8n before, I was using Make, I was using all these tools. And so as of December, I just let go of all those tools because everything I can do it, all of it with, with cloud code. So the only things that I sometimes use an ADM for, but I still just self-host, is just like cron jobs whenever I need to schedule something, maybe like webhooks or whatnot. That's when I really use an ADM. But aside from that, most things I do just cloud code. I would suggest to people that are just getting started on this, is just having using Cloud Cowork because Cloud Cowork, and literally just yesterday, they have released so many different, Cloud Cowork is basically Cloud Code but a much easier and simpler interface to digest for the average person, right? That's not maybe not really techie. It will literally be able to control your entire computer. It can organize files for you. It could create reports, create spreadsheets, compare, analyze data, right? So what you want to be doing is, and you can dispatch it from your phone. So you can have your phone connected to your computer. You could be somewhere else and you can be telling Claude CodeWorks exactly what it needs to be doing. So it's like having an AI assistant that's working for you and doing certain things, whatever it is that you normally do in your computer, it's doing that for you. Got it. Okay. What do you think are most business owners that you work with, what are they getting wrong about AI?
• 13:42
  Like, what's the misconception that they have about AI and what it can do for them? Yeah, I think most business owners don't start and don't really implement AI in their business because they have— they don't know— two reasons. They don't know where to start and they don't really trust AI enough. So I'll go through the first one. And the first one is really they don't know where to start, right? So when they have like this paralysis, right? So instead of really testing it out and just know that every single person that started with AI is just like testing it, seeing what works, what doesn't. You'll go through a period of trial and error and you'll start understanding how to actually speak to AI, how to communicate.
• 14:23
  You'll realize that the more context you give it, the better outputs you're going to have. And so it's just you have to get started. Like there is no other way but to say that you just need to download Claude and start talking to it and The second part, right, which brings me to it, is that people don't trust it enough.
• 14:40
  So there's two reasons why people don't trust it enough. The first one is people think that AI is not capable of doing things right. And so they don't even try to give it a task because they think like people think AI is ChatGPT. And honestly, ChatGPT is the worst AI that we have right now out of all of them, right? So people are still stuck in like the ChatGPT from 2023 when it was super popular and it was like all over the news.
• 15:07
  And it turns out it has advanced in such a way where right now you have tools like Claude or Gemini, right, that are so powerful, or like Mana is, that are so powerful that they have just completely shifted the way AI, what AI is capable of doing. So to overcome this, I would say to people, just put in, like, think, list, make a list. Of all the things that you need to do today in your computer, right? And tell AI, literally just ask Claude, Claude, here's my list of things that I need to do today. I need you to tell me what can you help me with? What can you do for me, right? Give that to Cowork and it's going to guide you on what are the things that it can actually help you with. And you will be shocked by the number of things that it can take over and it can actually do for you. And then, and that same piece, people are concerned with security. I think that's also one of the reasons people are like, oh my God, am I really going to give all my business information to AI, right? Like, what if people steal it? What if AI is being trained on all my documents?
• 16:12
  And what I say to people is like, okay, you already have all these companies that are getting access to all your data, right? You are not really concerned with when you use social media, like Facebook is training on all of your data constantly. At least you can opt out from it when you use Claude. But when you have used Facebook, why do you think that you're randomly having a conversation with a friend, you talk about, I don't know, his glasses, and you'll suddenly start seeing ads on glasses, right? It's literally listening to everything you say. It's getting all of your data. And so honestly, for me, security is not really a concern in the sense that if you want privacy, you shouldn't even have an iPhone. right?
• 16:57
  Like that ship kind of sailed a long time ago when it comes to privacy.
• 17:01
  So we have to really work with, I mean, work with what you have.
• 17:05
  AI, like social media, you're still having all of your data everywhere and it's not even making you money. With AI, it's going to save you time, it's going to make you money. Why not use it, right?
• 17:16
  You can still put the checks like to, what's it called? Like when, when, 2FA security checks, right? Whenever you were going to log in, it says, okay, send me a verification code.
• 17:31
  So you just have— you just set that up and you're good. And at the end of the day, if you— if someone wanted to hack into your information, they could and they will, right? So that's just my thought on it, to be honest. Yeah, that's the biggest concern that I hear on the finance operations side as well is, you know, data privacy. Security, you know, our financial data is, is living inside the AI mind, right? And that's a concern. Um, so yeah, that's certainly a concern, but, um, you know, I agree with everything you said. How do you think about risk, um, risk in general and how AI actually minimizes risk? Like, do you ever use AI to help you make a decision or go a certain path? Like if you didn't have the, the, the tool at your disposal, would it have changed your, your decision about something in your business or even in your personal life?
• 18:33
  So I have— I would say I have maybe a different level of tolerance when it comes to risk.
• 18:40
  Like, I'll give you an example. I lived on a sailboat for 4 years sailing across the Caribbean, right? I never had, never in my life before doing that, been on a sailboat before, right? So when I, when I look at risk, I'm like, okay, is this life threatening? No. Okay. Is this going to help me grow? Yes. Okay, great. That's a plus.
• 19:05
  Can I? Does it scare me? And usually the question is that it scares me.
• 19:13
  Usually that pushes me to do it because I feel like it's going to get me in such an uncomfortable situation that I'm just going to grow from it so much that why not, right? So that's kind of how I look at risk. And when it comes to AI, I don't make my decisions based on AI, but I do like giving AI, okay, give me 10. Like, I will ask it to look at, both angles. Tell me 5 reasons why I should do this. Give me 5 reasons why I shouldn't. And then I use my own brain, right, to think through it and see if it makes sense or if it doesn't. Yeah, that's kind of how I look at it. Yeah, that's smart. Like, you use AI to give you— think of all the alternatives, all the risks, like play devil's advocate. I think that one of the biggest weaknesses of AI is that it it's too agreeable, right? Like it's trained to agree with you. And so you actually have to tell it to, you know, play devil's advocate. You've got to tell it to give a different viewpoint, which it will, but you've got to prompt it in such a way that it will become the skeptic and give you all the different alternatives. That's something that I've learned in using AI. 100%.
• 20:27
  100%. So you— I learned this with ChatGPT as well because ChatGPT is like the worst AI when it comes to, you know, saying yes to absolutely everything. Oh my gosh, I need to jump off a bridge. Oh, I think that would be a great idea. Yeah, it really is, right?
• 20:45
  So, but I was able to tweak ChatGPT to be very different by giving it a prompt in the instructions, like on the configuration end, where it would be like, you're my ruthless mentor, you're my coach. I don't want you to agree to anything you say. Test absolutely everything that I'm telling you. Don't agree with me, right? So you want to give AI those instructions where, again, like you said, it's playing devil's advocate to give you all the reasons why you shouldn't do something and the reasons why you should, right? You want to kind of get both angles on things. And then you just analyze it and you're like, all right, you make your own decision based on what you have in front of you and how you think it could actually impact your life, your business, or whatnot. Is there a source where you go to to get the best prompts to put into AI? Like, is there that one source or do you just come up with it on your own and that's part of the value that you provide to your clients? Yeah, that's kind of the value. I could actually send it to your audience if they DM me, look me up on Instagram, Andrea Palacio. Just have them comment the word or DM me the word podcast.
• 21:55
  And I'll send them the— my list of prompts, all the prompts that I have.
• 21:58
  It's really cool because you could do so many things by having the right prompts.
• 22:01
  Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Yeah, we're definitely going to, to put your Instagram on the show notes as well as on our— on my Instagram so that people will be able to, to get those prompts from you. That's great. Awesome. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about finances. Because at the end of the day, you know, I, I work with, uh, business owners as a fractional CFO and CPA. So I always have to think about the numbers and how they affect people. Um, how do you think about your numbers and your strategic growth? Are you tracking KPIs? Are you forecasting your financials? Like, how do you think about your, your business from, from a high-level financial perspective? Yeah, I love that you mentioned this because I can tell you I had a huge learning experience back in January.
• 22:47
  We were not so concerned about our KPIs or finances. And we had, we had put a manager in place to run our business. And the manager was actually stealing from us, and we didn't even know it, right. And one of the reasons why this happened in the first place was because we didn't have the right systems in place, like the right— not the right systems, but like financially, we were not on top of the numbers as much because we're like, you know, we were doing really good. And so Things can change so fast in a business that you don't even know, like one month to another, things just change.
• 23:23
  And if you are not on top of your numbers, you'll just be, you know, you'll just be lost and you're not able to measure things. So after that experience, we put together like this huge financial dashboard that connects directly to QuickBooks, connects to our CRM, is always able to give us like all the numbers, the efficiency, just tracking how our crews, how our crews are doing. Like, for instance, let's say one of the issues that we had is that our crew was, let's say, spending 10 hours at properties and we were just getting paid for 5 hours, right? So how are we possibly making money like that? And this was solved just by kind of having the right information in front of us. And just, I think it's part of the learning experience of being, becoming or being a good leader. Um, just as a CEO. And I think that's— and I think that's just having the right people, I would say, as well. And in your case, I mean, you're a fractional CFO. I know how much value that is for your business. How about— how is your business structured?
• 24:30
  Is it an LLC or an S corp? It's, uh, an LLC. Okay. And then how are you thinking, um, anything from like, uh, a tax planning perspective or like tax strategy? Because I That's one of the biggest challenges that business owners face in the beginning is that they're not— or they don't plan for taxes proactively or in advance. And so at the end of the next year, they get hit with a huge tax bill and they're like, oh, I should have paid— made these quarterly estimates, you know, or whatnot. Do you feel like you're, you're on top of tax planning for— from both a, like, a legal entity perspective and also like how you're, um, how you're forecasting for potential profit or distributions.
• 25:16
  Yeah, 100%. So I think last year was a really, again, a difficult year because we, we were just moving, um, countries and just like going through all these changes that we kind of let go of the business. And but I can tell you that in like 20— I don't know if it was 2022, 2023, we took a course on tax strategy and on like— it was actually a real estate course, but it came along like it just had this pieces of tax strategy and like how to structure your, your legal entities.
• 25:45
  And that completely changed our lives because, for instance, for 2024, we would have had to pay so much taxes. And just having like the way we structure things is we have the holding company, right? And we have the, uh, the LLC that's generating the income, and then we're able to like depreciate the income through, um, having, um, investment properties. So just having the right structure was able to really saved us a lot of money. And I think, again, like you said, planning ahead, it makes the whole world of a difference because I remember like that year in 2024, we, we did a lot of money. We had to pay a lot of money in taxes. And what we did was like literally last minute December, we were going crazy trying to find this multifamily to be able to use it and in order to like for cost segregation, right?
• 26:37
  So, so if you are able to plan ahead of time, like when July, when July comes, like you should be able to already know exactly how much money you should be making, like how much money you should be investing so you don't really have to pay taxes. Like you really don't. I'm sure if you— and I'm sure you probably do this, Lori, but if you sit down with the right person that could teach you exactly what you need to do and the right way to organize your tax strategy, As a business owner, you don't, you don't have to pay so much. Like, why would you want to pay so much money to Uncle Sam, right? I don't know, it's just me. I'd rather donate that money. I don't know, it becomes worse to worse, I'd rather donate it, right? Yeah, right. No, no, I think you hit the nail on the head.
• 27:22
  Um, it's exactly about not paying the IRS, not paying Uncle Sam more than you should, and moving it into a tax-deferred asset. You know, there's a lot of ways to do that, a lot of ways to structure your entity, structure your profit and income into tax advantageous assets and defer the actual tax. You still own the assets, right? So it sounds like you are working with a proactive tax planner and not just a tax CPA.
• 27:53
  And there's a big difference in that, you know, tax CPAs are there to check the box, make sure that you're compliant, you know, with all your numbers and reporting to the government. But it sounds like you have a good grasp on what tax strategy looks like and what tax planning is capable of being so that you're a much, much more informed and proactive business owner.
• 28:16
  Yeah. So that leads me to the question of, okay, so how do you utilize AI in finances? Is there any one particular tool that you find to be very useful for either your clients or for yourself?
• 28:33
  I love that question. So I would say that I had something really good. I kind of, I don't think if I, or if I, no, I probably didn't move it because I moved everything. Like I said, I moved everything to Cloud Code. And one of the things that we did with Cloud is just like I said, having that dashboard where we're able to visualize in a scorecard, right? So first we have that dashboard where we're able to see our finances, like we see revenue, cost of goods sold. We're able to see exactly like our margins, what did it look like month So that changed our whole, just the way we operate our business. It changed that completely. So we want to answer your question. I use AI to be able to connect all of that together. And, and then in the scorecard side of things, we're able to like analyze all of our marketing, all of our sales. We analyze all of our KPIs.
• 29:23
  And what we do is we have a prompt that is our growth strategist. And basically what it does is it goes through our financial data and analyzes exactly what decisions we should be making.
• 29:35
  I don't know if we still have it 'cause I don't operate that business anymore.
• 29:38
  I think it's my husband's the one that manages that business, but it would send emails automatically on a weekly basis to tell exactly where the red flags are, what things need to be improved, what are the things that, you know, maybe you're doing really good and just be able to optimize before things get really bad. So.
• 29:59
  And you said the name of that, the, the software that you mentioned, did you mention Revio? Uh, no, no, um, no, it's just a prompt for a growth, um, um, it, it's a growth business coach like what I had in, it's just a prompt, it's, yeah. Okay, got it. Okay, great. Um, so last question for you is what is one AI decision a founder could make today that would compound positive for them over the next 3 years?
• 30:29
  Well, that's a good question. What is one AI decision compound today over the next 3 years?
• 30:40
  I would say using Clock Cowork, starting to use Clock today, giving it, like I said, your list of tasks, seeing exactly how capable it is and how much it can actually take from you. And once you see it's something, it's kind of like when you have a limiting mindset of how much money you can make, right? And you're like, I want to be making$5 million, but you're still stuck at a place where your mindset is set only to $500,000, right? And you just need to get rid of that limiting belief. I think the same thing applies to AI. It's like you have this limiting mindset where you think you're only capable of doing using ChatGPT as Google type of thing, and you're not able to get past that because you, you need to get rid of that limiting belief. And the way you get rid of that limiting belief is by seeing and actually testing AI and seeing it actually do the work for you. As basic as it may seem, if you need to do a report, just have AI say to it, I have all these employees, they're doing this.
• 31:47
  This is my spreadsheet, analyze it, review it, and give me a complete report. Once you see something like that, once you get past that point, you'll be able to like— something unlocks in your brain, and you'll just want to start using it more and more and start learning more about it. So I would say that would be something that compounds because then you're just going to get curious, want to learn more, you'll start implementing your business, start getting a lot of time back, and eventually start making more money because you're focusing now on the things that actually generate more revenue for the business.
• 32:18
  Yeah, absolutely. Well, Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your insights on AI today. I, I really learned a lot and I'm definitely gonna go follow everything that you're following regarding AI now.
• 32:30
  So yeah, it's great to have you on the show and just thank you so much for joining. And we're go— we're going to send all the listeners to your Instagram and, and to your website and so that they can download prompts that you mentioned during the show.
• 32:44
  Love that. Thank you, Lori, for having me. Appreciate it.
• 32:51
  Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm Lori Chen.
• 33:02
  See you next time.