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EP356 Let AI Take More Off Your Plate · Profit With A Plan

• 0:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What happens when the business you bought starts to break down almost immediately?
• 0:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Missed calls, scheduling problems, lost invoices, and too many moving parts for one owner to try and hold everything together.
• 0:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: On this week's Profit with a Plan, we're talking about how AI automation can help service business owners replace the chaos with simple systems and reduce the number of hats they wear while they build a business that doesn't depend on their every minute of their day.
• 0:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because your business should support your life, not take it over.
• 0:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey, entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, where we help business owners grow smarter, increase profitability, and build a company that's worth more, whether you plan to keep it or sell it.
• 0:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, business growth strategist and the profit booster behind Infinite Profit. Each week I bring practical strategies and expert insights and real world steps to help you grow revenue, improve margin, and build a stronger business.
• 1:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This episode is brought to you by Infinite Profit, where we, where we turn strategy into profitable growth.
• 1:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I had to turn off my alarm that was going off on my phone, so I stumble a little bit. But, hey, before we jump in, I do have something special for you. If you've ever plateaued your marketing and not that it's not producing the return that you thought it should get.
• 1:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: go check out my free Profit Booster Growth Map. In just a couple minutes, it'll help you identify where to bring in more qualified clients, and where those profit leaks might be costing you more money than you expect.
• 1:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So go get yours after the show at profitbooster.biz. And by the way, there's no sales call required.
• 1:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Now let's get into today's conversation. My guest today is Andrea Palacio. Andrea knows what it feels like to build a business around the life you want and what happens when the business you buy becomes more demanding than you ever expected.
• 2:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Andrea built an e-commerce, company from a sailboat and sold it later, to require, and acquired a landscaping business while pregnant with her second child. The company looked like it was a strong opportunity, but after closing the deal, the operation began to fall apart.
• 2:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Instead of walking away, Andrea rebuilt the business using AI automations to manage calls, scheduling, follow-up, invoicing, and everyday tasks that were creating the chaos.
• 2:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Now she helps other service business owners use simple AI systems to reduce the number of hats they wear and build companies that run without consuming their entire life. Welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, Andrea. Glad to have you on.
• 2:55
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I'm so excited to be here, Marcia. It is great to be speaking with you.
• 2:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, and I love the fact that we can talk all over the world on Zoom, and it just makes it like we're sitting across from each other.
• 3:06
  Andrea @andreapalacio: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And you're going to have articulate the whole story better. I think it's the best one that I've heard.
• 3:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Oh, well, thank you. Thank you. I'll put that up to my training, my AI to help me to be able to produce the podcast in a way that sounds better. Rather than me having to use just my brain, I use the the collaborative brain of of my eyes. So.
• 3:26
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Well, you're doing great.
• 3:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, so it's a perfect leeway into the conversation. But first of all, you were working on a sailboat and you stopped. What is it? What happened?
• 3:36
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, I was… we purchased the sailboat in…
• 3:42
  Andrea @andreapalacio: 2019. We lived on the sailboat and sailed across the Caribbean all the way from South Carolina, where we bought the boat and sailed it across the Caribbean all the way down to Colombia without having any experience. We had never been on a sailboat before, and we had an e-commerce business that we were running, and we were just getting to the most beautiful, incredible islands that people dream of being there. But at some point, you know.
• 4:06
  Andrea @andreapalacio: three and a half something years into it, something started feeling like, okay, what now? You know, it's just, this is incredible, this is beautiful, this is great, but what am I giving to the world? Like, what am I doing? Like, am I going to stay here just in a boat? Just…
• 4:20
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Going, you know, from one beautiful place to another.
• 4:23
  Andrea @andreapalacio: It just felt like I wanted something bigger, like, I was meant for something more impactful, I felt. And so, I… that's what made the decision, that's where we made the decision to just have… start building our family, and we moved back to Miami.
• 4:40
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And we decided to sell our e-commerce business and decided to acquire the landscaping company, hoping to just scale and just basically challenge ourselves a little bit more on a professional level.
• 4:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, and then that's when it all went wrong, right?
• 4:56
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, just five days into the closing, the seller stole $7,500 from us from a past project that we had no idea was even open.
• 5:04
  Andrea @andreapalacio: He just disappears five days afterwards. He was supposed to train us based on the agreement that we had, right? We had a 30-day agreement because we knew nothing about landscaping. We didn't know who the vendors were. We didn't know who the clients were. So he was supposed to transition, train us throughout that entire process.
• 5:20
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And within just 5 days, he just disappears. We know nothing about this man. We start losing all of our top customers, then we have the manager just maybe…
• 5:29
  Andrea @andreapalacio: You know, two months into it, maybe a month and a half, the manager just says, okay guys, I am leaving. He wasn't closing any sales. We told him he was now the salesperson because we thought he knew more about the business than we did. So the norm, the thing we assumed like, hey, this, he could do much better at sales than we can, right? We'll keep the business going.
• 5:50
  Andrea @andreapalacio: He because he didn't have any sales, I guess he just felt like, hey, maybe this isn't the role. This isn't the role for me anymore. So he just says, hey, I'm leaving. And that same day, he gathers every single employee of the company. At that time, he had 12 employees.
• 6:04
  Andrea @andreapalacio: in the gas station, just tells them, this two are not gonna make it. Me, me, and my husband, we weren't gonna make it, so you guys all better find other jobs. From there, it just all goes downhill, and we are just… my husband ends up
• 6:17
  Andrea @andreapalacio: having to do the labor so we don't lose any more clients. I am doing admin, customer service, scheduling the crews.
• 6:27
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Pretty much everything, you know, that I could do from a computer while having my toddler and my newborn, because at the time my, my son has, well, or I was pregnant with my second one, you know, it was, it was, I, I, it was so painful that my business.
• 6:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alone, not having kids.
• 6:45
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Exactly, my… it was so painful that my brain, I think, buried the whole thing, and I… it confused the timelines, but it was exhausting. It was definitely one of the hardest times of our lives, because we were, you know, we had gone from living on a sailboat and having all the freedom to scuba dive and kiteboard and do whatever we wanted to suddenly just have
• 7:03
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, babies crying, yelling that need.
• 7:07
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Baboom!
• 7:10
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And on top of that, a business that's crumbling, we are losing… like, we had…
• 7:14
  Andrea @andreapalacio: gotten a loan using an SBA loan, and that meant that we had to put our personal assets as collateral, right? Which meant our home was on the line. Like, everything that we had worked for was on the line.
• 7:27
  Andrea @andreapalacio: it was a very difficult time, because I had been dreaming of wanting to be a mom for years, and those times, I was like, I don't… I don't want to be a mom, like, I don't know why I'm in this situation, I don't like my life anymore.
• 7:41
  Andrea @andreapalacio: why did I choose to do this? So, it just felt like a massive mistake, and you start really thinking about
• 7:47
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Whether it's, you know, what you should do, right?
• 7:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Did you think about, is it me, or is it the business? Obviously, it was the business. I mean, we can see that it was the business, but, I know that this is… I mean, that's really traumatic. So how did you, like, I mean…
• 8:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: there are many of us business owners that every day we wake up going, what the heck am I doing here? You know, I need… I need something better. There's gotta be a better way to do business.
• 8:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How did you lean into the automations and AI to be able to make it easier for you to run?
• 8:23
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, that's a great question. So for so many — for a really long time, because the reason why we acquired the company is because we watched a lot of YouTube videos on people that were into mergers and acquisitions, and they just said how easy it was for you to acquire a boring business, and then you just buy another one, and suddenly you've put them together, and now you exit as a multimillionaire. So it seemed very simple on paper, I don't know, video.
• 8:48
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And when we went and did it, it was, like, the hardest thing. It was really, like you said, it was a traumatic experience. And so for a lot of months, I just blamed it. I'm like, why did they make it sound so easy? I made it on and blamed it on all these YouTube videos and on myself for feeling stupid that I, like, fell for it and just went down that hole.
• 9:06
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And then I just said to myself, you know what? Like, I could sit here and just be a crybaby and be a victim and and be like, why did this happen to me? Or I could man up and say, Hey, I don't have the skills. Clearly, this is the reason why this is happening. You know, they had the skills. So for them it was easy because they had already built those skills. I didn't have those skills, so I had to build them.
• 9:27
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So you start just by, the first thing I would say is just analyzing yourself and you're like, okay.
• 9:32
  Andrea @andreapalacio: If I'm in the situation, it's because clearly there's a lot of things that I didn't know. There's a lot of mistakes that I made. And so when you just say, how did I contribute to the situation instead of blaming it on somebody else, it kind of gives you control back of the situation. And so when that happened, we just started.
• 9:51
  Andrea @andreapalacio: figuring out how we were going to rebuild the business. And we started by just saying, okay, well, we're losing customers, we need to figure out some way to get leads.
• 10:00
  Andrea @andreapalacio: We started running Google Ads, which we ultimately lost a bunch of money, because while you learn to run Google Ads, you're going to lose money, right? So we end up losing, like, another $11,000. We're in this deep hole.
• 10:12
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And at some point after the.
• 10:16
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Things go bad to say in the bottom.
• 10:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hit bottom.
• 10:21
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Exactly. You can't go any further.
• 10:24
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Then you just you're in the worst situation. The only thing that can happen is that you go back up, right? That's the only thing that can happen. So we just started figuring out like, okay, let's just improve the the employees. Let's just try to hire better people. Let's try to let's run better ads, let's run better systems. And then as that happened, you know, we started working over 80 hour weeks, both me and my husband and with the kids. And we are just
• 10:49
  Andrea @andreapalacio: like, this is way too much. It's still not the business that we want for our lives. I don't see myself doing this long-term. So I told my husband, you know, we either sell the business, or we find a way for it to run automatically, like we did with the e-commerce business.
• 11:03
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So, at that point.
• 11:05
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I started trying to hire somebody on Upwork, just to see if they know somebody… AI had just been… OpenAI had just been public, it wasn't too popular at the time.
• 11:16
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I end up hiring someone on Upwork, and I say, hey, just build me this receptionist. I kind of had it, I don't know why, I already had it in my mind. I'm thinking, you know, some type of…
• 11:27
  Andrea @andreapalacio: agent where AI answers the phone, and then it just, like, wrecks the call if it's a billing issue, if it's a complaint, if it's, you know, something where it's already managing the calls, and I don't have to be answering the phone 50 calls a day. We had over, like, 200-som
• 11:41
  Andrea @andreapalacio: When that happens, the guy, the freelancer, just ends up with nothing. Five months later, I had already paid him $700, five months later, nothing. I'm just like, oh god, I'm in the same spot as I was before.
• 11:55
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So I tried hiring somebody else, and this time, this… it was a… it was a woman, and she just built an automation that… on… on a tool that's called Make.com, and the automation was super simple. It was anytime that our crew completes a property.
• 12:11
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Automatically, we're going to send an email with the pictures of the service. So we stop getting complaints and we stop talking to clients saying, Hey, we just did the service. This is what your property looks like before and after. Here's the timestamp of the visit. And also, by the way, did you like the service? Is everything good? Hey, drop us a review on Google, right?
• 12:31
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That worked great. It was awesome.
• 12:35
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah. So then we just like, okay, I start, I'm looking at this automation. I'm like, how hard can this be? And I just start dissecting the whole thing and I'm like, that's it. I don't need to know how to code. Like I could totally do this. I mean, I had been building websites on my own and then I started just diving deep into AI, just learning. I've, by that time I had already taught myself just like Premiere, Photoshop, all these different tools on YouTube.
• 13:00
  Andrea @andreapalacio: and I really believe… I went to school for international business and management information systems, and I really do feel like everything that I've learned has just been as an entrepreneur, rather than in school, right? So…
• 13:13
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So I was like… Isn't that.
• 13:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And, you know.
• 13:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And your story, Adriana, is or Andrea is is common, though you're not alone at the challenges that I'm hearing from you. I'm going, I've heard that before. I've heard that before. I've experienced that one. Oh, yeah, I felt that. So, I mean, everything that you're saying seems like it's this, oh, this huge mistake you met.
• 13:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Meant you created by leaving.
• 13:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: The one business and grabbing the other business, but in reality.
• 13:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Almost every business owner is facing that in one way, shape, or form. The challenges that you've gone through
• 13:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Just by the fact that they maybe knew landscaping, right? And understood that, but really didn't understand the business side of it. And I think what you're sharing is common, like really common. The stress, the high stress, the 80 hours, the trying to figure it out as you go along. I mean, this is crazy. It sounds crazy, but it's in reality.
• 14:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know a lot of business owners are going.
• 14:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That was me. Yep, that was me. Or that's still me. And oh, I still have that problem. And so I love that you were you're able to just kind of like laugh at it now and, you know, go, hey, we did. It was crazy. It was it was wild. But I self taught myself.
• 14:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, how to do everything. And that's kind of the entrepreneurial journey that is so common, that we just…
• 14:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We just figure it out as we go along.
• 14:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So now fast forward. We've gotten through all this stuff. You started to put the automations in. You mentioned that you had automations and ways to to answer calls, to do customer service.
• 14:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to do, you know, lead generation. I mean, there's many tools that you can use to create this, right? If we go back to, say, maybe one, right, which is really common, and maybe the lead generation, how did you do that? How did you build that?
• 15:16
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Great question. So I think the first thing is just to understand. So at the end of the day, AI is just a tool to help us achieve a specific outcome, right? We are not, AI may be the solution, it may not, right? You can't automate something that a process that doesn't.
• 15:34
  Andrea @andreapalacio: and, hey, right now, you know, you're… the system that you guys have going, even if you do it manually, it just doesn't work. So it means you're… you have to rebuild your system, right? So when you're able to do that.
• 15:49
  Andrea @andreapalacio: now you start thinking, okay, well, what can I delegate to AI? What can I automate, right? But that's after you've really understood the exact constraint of your business. On our end, when we looked at, at lead generation, so for our landscaping company, we just started using Google Apps.
• 16:06
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And AI literally optimizes all of our ads right now to the point where our ad spend has significantly dropped and we have received a lot more leads.
• 16:16
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That's just because AI can do… can be a lot… very specific, like, it's going to review the companies, like, a human just won't…
• 16:23
  Andrea @andreapalacio: dive as deep as AI can when it is connected to your Google Ads account and when it can just do deep research in your whole advertising strategy, right? When I look at my AI business, all of my leads come from my content generation. And so I created a content machine where I am literally just recording, but I have AI analyzing, doing research for me, analyzing all the videos.
• 16:48
  Andrea @andreapalacio: It edits the videos for me. All I do… it writes the scripts on my voice, so all I do is just record the videos.
• 16:55
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I could even have AI create those videos for me by using my clone, but I just prefer, I feel like I give it more energy that my clone will be very static.
• 17:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it, got it.
• 17:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Interesting. So, so the fact that you're, you're coming in and you're, you're saying that, you know, you got to have a solid system first, right? You got to understand where the repeatable systems are first.
• 17:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Then you can go in and have AI improve them, right, and maybe manage or micromanage it for you. We all know that you still need human oversight on top of the AI on it, but when you're doing something that has a very repetitive task in your example, your ads, right, or your content creation, this is a very repetitive task that goes on.
• 17:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: all the time that needs to be done all the time.
• 17:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And so you put that to AI and it improves it, right?
• 17:54
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That's correct. That's correct. So, AI can just dive a lot deeper, and especially, you know, the hard thing is just training it, because people kind of expect AI to just, out of the box, do the thing that they… and speak in their own voice, and it's just this…
• 18:08
  Andrea @andreapalacio: super general AI slop type of things that you get because AI was trained on everything in the internet, on different books. But ultimately, if you don't train it to be very specific to you, you're going to get the same result that a million people or more people are just are getting, right? It's very generic. It's not specific to you. And so the difficult thing or the or the where the time.
• 18:32
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Constraint is when you have to train the AI agent or whatever it is, or the system.
• 18:38
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Okay, so I tell a lot of my clients, I'm like, don't expect — this is as if you were hiring a junior employee.
• 18:46
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Right.
• 18:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'll.
• 18:47
  Andrea @andreapalacio: You don't expect… you don
• 18:48
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Exactly. You still have to train them. You still have to give them the SOPs, set up clear expectations, right? The same exact thing happens with AI.
• 18:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right. I love it. I use, in our previous calls, we talked a lot about AI in our, in our industries and how how involved both of us are. I think building that knowledge base. Right. And giving it enough information so it truly understands.
• 19:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: who you are and what you're trying to achieve. And then you tweak and adjust and tweak and adjust until it starts to understand and know you. My eyes know me so well, right? That they're actually doing things for me that I didn't even realize.
• 19:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Which is fantastic. They're giving out my, my information, through, through AI, searches now, which is a lot, a lot easier than what it was in the past. But I think that's all done through the knowledge base and the training and the teaching. And like you said, it doesn't occur overnight. It does take time.
• 19:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What about, some of the neat works that are out there right now, such as, the skills or the coworking or the, the early coding kind of thing? How does that play into some of your automations?
• 20:05
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So are you referring to like how I include scales or use cowork instead of cloud code or what are the tools?
• 20:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, well, there's different ways, right? Well, let's take a step back. From what I understand, there are five or four or however many levels of AI, right? There's the one that you ask basic questions. It gives you basic information back.
• 20:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Then, as you start to progress into the higher levels, it's enabling the AIs to start thinking a little bit more on your behalf and doing things for you. So, do your skills require
• 20:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Are they entry-level skills, like level 1 and 2, where you can ask it to, do some things and it gives you back the information? Or are your automations working more on the higher levels, where it requires, certain trained skills, certain, connections, certain, maybe.
• 20:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We'll use some language here without blowing the doors off of people, but.
• 21:00
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Okay.
• 21:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Api and MCPs and things like that.
• 21:03
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yep.
• 21:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: that will help the AI work on your behalf. How are you?
• 21:08
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yes.
• 21:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I've seen those.
• 21:10
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That's a great question, and I love that you bring up the different levels of AI. I tell my clients we have five levels of AI, and most people only experience level one, right? So think level one, something like you're speaking to either Claude or ChatGPT, and you're just using it to brainstorm. So you ask questions, it responds, right? I personally live at level five, and level five is when you're using tools like Claude Code or Codex, where
• 21:33
  Andrea @andreapalacio: you are now building your own tools and your own solutions. And so, a lot of people just kind of look at,
• 21:40
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Level 4 as being the last level where you're using tools like Cowork, and you can actually have AI do a lot of work on your behalf, like creating presentations, pitch decks, Excel sheets, financial statements, reports, right? AI can do that for you by just having a conversation with it, right?
• 21:58
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I personally, I've just spent so much time building and automating my system, like my entire three businesses. And when I say three, I think of my personal brand as its own entity, right? Its own thing.
• 22:11
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And I have over 80 automations that were built on Claude Code. I have over 20 agents, AI agents, and I have just different systems, like again, that whole content machine, right? When you have from the top, you're doing the whole research, gathering ideas, to the recording, to the video editing, to publishing automatically to seven different platforms.
• 22:34
  Andrea @andreapalacio: You're now, I don't, you know, normally I would have had to go to LinkedIn to post, to Instagram to post, to TikTok to post. Now I just literally just change a button and I don't even do that. My EA does that and it goes out to all seven different platforms. So that is an entire system that just saves you so much time where you would normally, you know, if you're recording, editing, doing the whole thing.
• 22:57
  Andrea @andreapalacio: It could take you hours per week. So the whole goal for a business owner is to do a time audit and an energy audit. Right? Understand exactly where your time is going, where your energy is going, and then you start thinking. You're like, okay.
• 23:11
  Andrea @andreapalacio: What can I delegate to AI? What can AI do for me, even for your team? Because if you free up your team, now you and your employees are now going to be able to focus on high leverage activities, like just building that relationship with the client, just being on sales calls, closing that emotional connection that only we can do. And this is where you just start.
• 23:32
  Andrea @andreapalacio: you know, just see the difference in how fulfilled you are as a human, and most importantly, like, how much value you're really bringing to the other person that you're serving, right? That client.
• 23:43
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Or even to your own team.
• 23:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I love it spending time on the things that, that only the human can do that engagement, that connection, that emotional support that you, you really, truly want to have. But let's take a step back. So you and I are level fivers easy. I'm doing the same thing. I've got a second computer that's.
• 24:02
  Andrea @andreapalacio: It's running.
• 24:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: constantly for me, doing some things, but… The everyday business owner They're stuck in level one.
• 24:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, maybe they'll take a step into level 2, maybe they'll play a little bit at a level 3, right? But this kind of stuff is very scary and overwhelming, and it can be almost another job to get everything set up.
• 24:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Do you recommend that they take time on the weekend to learn this stuff, or do you recommend that they hire people to do it? How do you, how do you expect people to, the everyday business owner, to start to add these automations in?
• 24:39
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, that is a great question. So I'll tell you that the number of business owners that I see that are overwhelmed by this whole thing, it's like when they just see through social media and they see like everybody's talking about AI, they don't really know where to start. And it could be just, it could feel like too much. My suggestion, my first suggestion is just pick one tool. If you ask me, just go all in on Anthropic, on Claude.
• 25:02
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Chat, right? Just go all in.
• 25:07
  Andrea @andreapalacio: And with that one tool, you can pretty much build almost any system that you need or want, okay?
• 25:12
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Now, instead of, doing it all.
• 25:18
  Andrea @andreapalacio: trying to just do it all at once and hoping that it's going to automatically do it. We have to be conscious that we do go through this process of feeling uncomfortable. It's totally normal. You are going to fail anytime you're learning a new skill, new language. I had to learn how to do sales. I had to learn how to do content. I failed a lot of times. If you ask any successful entrepreneur, they have failed more times than they have succeeded, and that's part of the process. So it's okay.
• 25:43
  Andrea @andreapalacio: to feel uncomfortable as you test different, as you test these tools and try to build these automations or systems, right? But it's also trusting that it's okay to fail and it's okay to just attempt to delegate it to AI. Like, hey, how can you help me do this? And AI is the only technology in the world that will teach you how to use it.
• 26:02
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Right, so you don't even have to, like.
• 26:06
  Andrea @andreapalacio: try to figure it out on your own. If you don't know what you're doing, just literally take a screenshot of the thing and drop it into Claude, or say, hey, I'm trying to do this, and it's giving me this screenshot, like, what should I do now, right? And so, it will guide you step-by-step onto what it should do and how to do it
• 26:22
  Andrea @andreapalacio: I… I love… I have both clients. I have clients that hire me to do the full work for them, and I have clients that are a part of my, program where I'm just teaching them step-by-step on how to become an AI-first company. I love both, but I do feel like the people that just
• 26:41
  Andrea @andreapalacio: you know, if you hire me to just do it, you're still going to be in that mindset of, like, I'm still typing, I'm still thinking that AI can do things, but I don't know how much, because the systems are done and built, right? Whereas…
• 26:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 26:55
  Andrea @andreapalacio: You go through the program, you are going to start changing your identity. You're going to start learning that you need to be speaking to your computer and not typing anymore. Like nobody types it, like nobody that's an AI first company is typing anymore, right? Exactly.
• 27:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Place.
• 27:07
  Andrea @andreapalacio: So just these little changes, these little habits are different now, and how do we implement them, to just ultimately change our entire output? Like, just your level of productivity, and as the founder, as the business owner, you're setting the standards for everybody else in your company.
• 27:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exact.
• 27:25
  Andrea @andreapalacio: What you do makes a massive difference because you're telling them where to go.
• 27:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think where I recommend people start, and I'm not an AI coach at all.
• 27:37
  Andrea @andreapalacio: It'.
• 27:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: a lot of AI in my in my world. But I think the space that I always do is like, okay, first of all, when you're when you're leading the company, you have to understand you don't have to know how to do everything, but you have to understand the capabilities.
• 27:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: and the possibilities. So by getting involved in AI to help with your automations and to smooth your systems over and make your business run better, you have to understand enough so you have to get your hands a little dirty. I always like to make sure that they're taking
• 28:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What is something that you do every day, all the time, or once a week you do this process?
• 28:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, then that's the first process you start to work on with AI to help improve it for yourself so it can do more for you. Then as you start to get your the training wheels off, right, and you start to ride the bicycle a little bit more, then you can start to see the possibilities.
• 28:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Of what it can do. And I love your example of saying, hey.
• 28:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This is what I'm struggling doing. Help me build this right. And asking AI to help you do it is a great way to learn how to pull back the curtain and get your get your hands dirty with it. But I think that's what you have to do as a as an AI forward company, which is.
• 28:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Almost going to be required here really soon. If you're not thinking in this pathway, you're going to get bulldozed over. But having that.
• 29:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thought of what can, what are the possibilities?
• 29:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I think that's the exciting part, that if you don't get involved with yourself and start to play a little bit.
• 29:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Then you're relying on someone else to tell you what's possible. Then you're relying on someone else to fix it, relying on someone else to create the next thing for you. And then now you're deep in pockets rather than deep in the idea and the possibilities that you can where you can take your company.
• 29:32
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, 100%, and I completely agree with you. In fact, I see that, you know, when you train an employee in your business.
• 29:39
  Andrea @andreapalacio: there's 3 things that you go… that you see… look at whenever they're doing a good or not so positive job, right? It's the training that you provided, the expectations that you set, and the motivation that they have, right? And so, when you become an AI first.
• 29:53
  Andrea @andreapalacio: founder or business owner, these two things, the training and the expectations that you set for your employees completely change because now you know that the job that they should be doing should not be taking as long because the 10 hours that was taking them to do just two tasks, they should now be able to fit in those same 10 hours, eight different tasks just because of how productive they are by delegating a lot of tasks to AI. And so the whole training, the whole
• 30:18
  Andrea @andreapalacio: set of expectations as to what you expect from them is completely different.
• 30:22
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Right? And so.
• 30:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm.
• 30:24
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That changed the whole thing. Yeah, of course. That's your competitive advantage as a business.
• 30:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly, and I think that's when we start to look at, okay, how are my operations going to improve? How are my financial projections going to improve, right? Because if I can make my human employee more productive.
• 30:45
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Then they're enabling themselves to get more done in less time, meaning either I.
• 30:50
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yep.
• 30:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: less or my company is able to grow and scale.
• 30:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right. I mean, there's so many options that we can do by improving and innovating the way we operate our company and going back to your original experience of, you know, not knowing how to do anything to now you've got all this stuff being done for you that's opened it up where now you can grow the company.
• 31:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because you're not stuck in the minutiae, you're not stuck in the everyday.
• 31:20
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yep.
• 31:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Tasks that, you know, the, the, the leader or the CEO shouldn't be doing. Right. They should be delegating and moving and then allowing the company to grow with them, because that'll definitely hold you back.
• 31:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But I think this is such a good conversation. I think that we can do so much with AI, and I love the idea of just figuring out what is possible, and then starting to take those little steps to
• 31:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to implement them into your business so that you can innovate and be bigger, better, faster, stronger, even at whatever pace you want. If it's a small incremental improvement or in market domination, it's all possible, but it's not possible if you don't involve AI in it.
• 32:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So, Andrea, we can talk, like I said, for days on this stuff, but where can listeners find out more about you, how you built your systems, and maybe how they can get a little support?
• 32:16
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah, of course. So I have actually built a personalized business stage.
• 32:22
  Andrea @andreapalacio: guide where you're going to be able to identify exactly what stage of the business you're in and how AI can really help you leverage, you know, just if it's lead generation, if you're now just trying to scale and build the systems, how you can actually utilize that. I'm most active on Instagram, so if you just DM me the word stage 26, I will send you over that quiz that will show you exactly what the steps that you should
• 32:47
  Andrea @andreapalacio: take are in order for you to really get your hands — just get started and know exactly what it is that you need to start building for your business to really go to a next level, especially by using AI.
• 32:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it, love it. And I think, I think that's, you know, that's the starting point, right? We, we're being, we're, we're drinking from the fire hose with AI. It's coming at us so fast and everybody's talking about it and they're all doing all these things and the business owner goes, where do I start? Right? And this is a.
• 33:15
  Andrea @andreapalacio: That's a.
• 33:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: place to figure out exactly where to start based on where you are in the in the business. So I would encourage you definitely to take Andrea's quiz and get that going.
• 33:26
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yeah. Yeah. And on Instagram, it's just my first name, last name. You can find me there. Just DM me that word and you'll get it automatically.
• 33:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Perfect. And yeah, all of that will be in the podcast notes, so you'll have easy access to it as well. All right, well, thanks for listening and tuning in today. I hope you're walking away with some practical ideas that you can put to work in your business to become more profitable and a more valuable business. And I know that AI and
• 33:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And improving your systems and your automations and and making the technology.
• 33:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, that cost pennies work for you 24 seven, seven days a week without a vacation or a holiday or complaints, you know, it's really it's really a fantastic tool to start looking at innovating your company with.
• 34:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah. All right. Before you go, if you want a clearer path on more revenue and and stronger profits, go grab your free profit booster growth map after the show. It'll quickly show you the top opportunities to grow revenue and stop those profit leaks that may be holding you back.
• 34:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Go get it now, now that the podcast is almost over at profitbooster.biz.
• 34:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And if this episode gave you value, be sure to subscribe and share it with the other business owners who may need to hear it. I'll see you on next week's show with more strategies to help you grow smarter and profit stronger. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so much, Andrea. This is fun.
• 34:51
  Andrea @andreapalacio: Yes, thank you so much, Garcia.