Latest / Exit Algorithms / Buying SMBs, Tech Due Diligence & Scaling with AI featuring Brian Root (#35)

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Buying SMBs, Tech Due Diligence & Scaling with AI featuring Brian Root (#35) · Exit Algorithms

• speaker-0: Welcome to exit algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera. And today I'm joined by Brian Root, a former Amazon and Walmart labs product executive who now runs two ventures simultaneously. Norris advisory, where he helps SMB buyers navigate due diligence and acquisitions and rooted in product, his fractional CPO practice. Brian also holds a US patent in e-commerce product classification and spent years at companies like Assurance IQ and Fundera, where he drove millions in revenue impact across FinTech and InsureTech. Brian, so excited to have you today. Welcome to the show. speaker-1: Yeah, thank you, Pete. Pleasure to be here. speaker-0: Yeah, I'm excited to get into this. listeners that haven't heard of you ⁓ do you mind sharing a bit about your background? Yeah. Start as early as you want and what brought you to your current endeavors. speaker-1: Yeah, I'm guessing almost everybody will not have heard of me. not famous by any stretch. But yeah, I mean, think my kind of through line for how did it get to where I am right now, I mean, could draw it as far back really as kind of growing up. I was exposed to computers by my grandfather who was actually involved with building one of the very earliest computers ever made, which I love to say, because it's just such a mind blowing statement, you know, at this day and age. you know, that really just exposed me to technology at a very early age. I to play around with programming stupid games, quick basic, you know, as a 10 year old. You know, and then I got very into game theory and studying kind of that relates to, you know, both simple games, also companies and businesses. that really ⁓ of transitioned from ⁓ I studied in school into what I started to do as a professional. So my early career was ⁓ a lot of supply logistics, contract negotiation, things of flavor. Went to business dabbled in a little bit of everything because that's just what excited me, just kind of expanding my horizons. And then really got into kind of the technology portion of my career. As you mentioned, I spent about eight nine years combined at Amazon and Walmart Labs. Really, ⁓ I about it as understanding what good looked like in terms both building technology, but also ⁓ building the the cultures, the ways of working and approaching things like customer that I think are largely to many other companies of different... levels of sophistication and size. then had a ⁓ of great opportunities to apply those learnings startups of everywhere from A to very large post-acquisition, technically a startup, that's still that flavor of And then the last step, suppose, like many in today's environment, I ended up getting laid off, which was a very ⁓ shocking and unexpected event for me. I really felt like technology was a career path that was very stable. I a steady upward trajectory for the majority of my career. And that really just kind of was a shock to the system of like, this, what I thought was going to be a good career path for me is now suddenly very insecure feeling. I think I very intentionally that happened said, all right, I need to start expanding my horizons of what is possible, what seems like a viable path for me. And really spent months, frankly, kind of stripping back, like, what do I actually want? What do I actually find rewarding? What am I comfortable with, uncomfortable with? And I will say candidly, my initial reaction to the two things that I am doing right now, which is running my own small businesses and being involved in the ETA space was like, absolutely not. That sounds scary. I don't want to do that. Because the level of, you know, the lack of security, right, that it has compared to when you have a full-time job and have stability and all of those things that you perceive when you're working for a larger company. My initial reaction to that was just like, oh God, no, that sounds bad. But I kind of just dipped my toe in. started looking at buying companies, a website, frankly, was the origin of both companies that I have right now that cost $25 an hour. And the that I just kind of continued to dip my toe in, the more I realized I actually, I really the level of accountability ⁓ comes running a business, the agency, right? The more work put in, the more reward I get, right? subject to the whims of my boss's boss or the investor board or whatever. I can control my own fate within reason, at least. And at least for me personally, what I found is that really appeals to me. I did not realize that it would appeal to me so much before I kind went down this path, but that's me to where I am. Running both companies of simultaneously is a challenge, but it's one that I find a tremendous amount of reward. in both. the core of both is really just the same ⁓ set that I've developed as technology executive over those years, which is, this adding more benefit to your company than it's adding complexity? And we can that at a very broad, mature scale through the lens of my CPO practice, or I can do that at a very small scale through the of how does this small business ⁓ potentially leverage technology or how could it leverage technology better, you know, to yield a better multiple or a better result for the owner. speaker-0: Yeah, awesome. Wow, yeah, I love your story. That had to have been a difficult time, but it seems like it was a blessing in disguise. You made the most of the opportunity, speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I would not pretend that it was all sunshine and roses. And I just got laid off immediately. It was like, all right, I'll just start a small business and everything will be fine. It was probably six to nine of the hardest months of my life, right? Before I started getting traction with rooted in product first. But I think that's part of the reward of it. I know that every dollar I make, to large extent right now is a result of having persevered through that tough period. nothing else, I can take a lot of pride from that as I think a lot of ⁓ business owners do. speaker-0: Definitely, that's awesome. Yeah, and your interest in technology from an early age, I like that, you know, it's no surprise that that's your area of expertise really now, right, and helping businesses with that. What has been some of the big tech shifts that you've seen throughout your career? speaker-1: I mean, I think it's to speak to ⁓ being more impactful than ⁓ coming out within the last couple of years, right? You I think I learned a lot earlier in my career, ⁓ you particularly at Amazon in terms of the philosophy, if you will, of how to approach applying right? You know, a lot of the things that we started building at that stage were often Excel prototypes or literally just documents that said, here's how we should do things ⁓ we get to the stage of being fully automated. But it was kind of this philosophy of define If I can't give you a structure of exactly how would walk through this procedure or process or the logic that I would feed to a machine in any capacity to achieve the right then ⁓ not really automating something and we're not really creating something that's scalable. We're kind of creating something that has an inherent human dependency that we can't do anything about. And ⁓ that something we were always trying to eliminate in some capacity at Amazon. was either reduced cost by offshoring it, eliminate as much the non-value added parts of human process as possible or automate it fully. And I say that because think that fully applies to today's world. Now that we have AI and I have, you super smart magic machine on my desktop at all times that, can ⁓ do anything, right? I think ⁓ same process applies there, right? Because what I see, and applies again to large companies, small businesses, pretty much across the board, there's a, you know, naive or knee jerk response to say, I can feed it garbage, basically. can, know, like, misspell half my words and I can be super unclear about my intent. And it's still going to interpret something and it's still going to give me a nice answer that looks like it understood it and it looks like it's value added. And so in any given interaction, you can kind of get fooled by that a little bit and think, I don't really need to go through that process of articulating what good looks like. I can just feed it a bunch of stuff and it'll start making good decisions. And I see people Again, doing this at a small business level, see very large companies with sophisticated tech organizations falling the same trap. And that, think, is one of the shifts, right? That we have something that is enabling us to go through of a rigorous process to get something that looks like a good output. And it can be really dangerous, right? A lot of the work I do again, kind of in both lenses is sure, we can slap AI on this, but let's evaluate whether we should, right? In terms of what is the impact we're actually getting from it? What is the cost that it is incurring versus the cost that it's actually saving? A lot of the time, what you find is like the AI is kind of an irrelevant layer. What it depends on is how well have you articulated what we're trying to achieve and what good looks like, or the sequence of events and decisions. that you need to make in order to get to good for that thing. And if you've done the first part, can give it to somebody else to do. You can offshore it. You can give it to AI. You have a plethora of options almost, right? In of how to ⁓ execute that thing. If you haven't done that work, it, who knows what you're getting out, right? Like it's very risky to hinge your business on that. And, know, from small business sales perspective, like if I'm looking at a company that says, you know, we're AI enabled and I dig under the hood and it's just like, we just feed a bunch of prompts to chat GPT and implement whatever comes out. like, you don't have a technology layer. have ⁓ like have a black box, like I don't know machine, right? And that's frankly, kind of worthless, right? Like I don't, I can't value something if I don't know what it's actually going to produce in the future. speaker-0: Yeah, I love that perspective. Yeah, how do you go about determining if they're using technology in the right way or if it is just like you mentioned, of just they're slapping it on and trying to square peg round hole, just put a plug and play. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, to some extent, going to be difficult from a buyer's perspective to truly ⁓ the information you need. So what I look for typically is signals. If you can show me that says, again, this is the outcome that trying to achieve. This is the sequence of events that we go through. And there's any level nuance or sophistication that shows that you've thought through. of the edge cases, then I'm probably going have a decent degree of confidence that you've thought through what you need. You've probably done some due diligence as to how to build that software relatively accurately. even if it's not perfect today and there's room for improvement, at least you're probably building off a relatively solid base. If you don't have the documentation, at least can I get that from you verbally? Can you explain to me? A lot of people kind of think about this as systems thinking. Can you Talk to me in a structured way about how you have thought about implementing this technology. I'm be little bit facetious, but if it's just like this guy contacted me on LinkedIn and said that you could implement AI from a business and he came in and did a different $5,000 and it seems be working, then I'm like, okay, I don't trust any of this. So I'm looking those of signals. And I think you can kind of see it sometimes in the speaker-0: Mm. speaker-1: the customer-facing experience for some of these businesses. Again, a lot of the time, a company will slap on AI enabled and you go to the website and it's just like, oh, you have a chat bot. OK, like great. That's probably not even being used very much. So what is being used for, how it's being talked about, how it's been, any evidence you can provide about how it's been structured or prompted in the case of an AI potentially. that at least give you the clues, right? My experience is good thought process yields good software. Bad thought process very rarely is going to yield anything of any value, right? So if we can dig into the thought process that at least gives fair amount of indication. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ that makes perfect sense. sounds like that's probably part of your due diligence process, the phase is do you, yeah, how do you focus on or do you focus primarily on technology or how does that impact your due diligence process? speaker-1: Yeah, so I I focus primarily on businesses that I would describe as tech enabled, right? And that would include, I think, pure software plays, SaaS companies, for example, but also a wide range of companies even that could live in the purely the physical space for the most part, right? You could have a plumbing company that has some sort of proprietary software that helps them provide better customer service or better their customers with more efficient marketing. There's range of potential applications where can be used as a lever. So digging into how it being used, it being used for, how was it developed, right? What can typically provide is, to some extent this depends on how open owner is willing to be. But best case scenario, I've been able to get under the hood. I can tell you with fair degree of confidence, is this software that you can actually build upon and is a software that's providing any sort of differentiation for you in the market? Or is it just off the shelf or something that any of your competitors can replicate with very little effort? Or if I'm not getting a ton of information, at least I can with a relatively high degree of confidence say, these are the signals that I'm getting. And when I'm getting a signal of this nature in my experience, or the experience that I can bring to the table is hopefully valuable, you are probably or probably not going to get a piece of software that is actually valuable based on the way that they're talking about it, the way that they appear to have implemented it, sometimes even the route they've gone down. Again, there's going to be a big difference in my mind between hiring their buddy who's a computer programmer versus hiring a legitimate known offshore development firm versus in ChatGPT. You're going to get a wildly different result probably from ⁓ three things. ⁓ ⁓ as we're hunting for clues. ⁓ But think the more you know what to look for and how to probe for it, the more valuable the clues are, hopefully. speaker-0: Yeah. Oh, I appreciate that level of detail. And you're advising people through the business buying process. Do you do kind of a valuation of businesses or make sure that the buyer's not overpaying, for example, or trying to... Yeah. What are maybe some levers that are big buckets that increase the value of the business? obviously technology, beyond just that and EBITDA, course. Love hear your perspective on that. speaker-1: Yeah, so I mean, I think there's a couple of things I'd speak to there. And really, I realize I've kind of talked only to evaluation of existing software in the conversation so far. There's reciprocal side of that, which is also assessing the business for opportunities to bring in software. And so I'm looking for in that is, to some extent, the same thing. Have you articulated a? repeatable path, right? Like, ⁓ you doing the same process over and over again in a structured way? And you haven't thought to ⁓ bring software to automate or any part of that process. But if there's something that's repeated and that is not 100 % reliant on human judgment, we can probably automate some part of that, right? So evaluating for opportunities to layer in subsequently is something that, you would, properly applied, make a buyer probably ⁓ to pay a little bit more of higher multiple for it. Because what that's saying is your is currently valued on a non-automated basis. we can least a business case to say some parts of this should be automatable. can either ⁓ yield a cost savings revenue growth from that. ultimately, my valuation for that business go up once I've actually layered in the software. So that's one thing. I think these go hand in hand, but definitely looking for a business where the owner has intentionally extracted themselves from the decision making process as much as possible. Which I think is common for non-tech businesses as well, but it really to how much do you have a business will ⁓ endure beyond the individual's who's sitting in that CEO chair. versus something that requires connections, their thought process. And they've done as much as they can to, again, it doesn't have to be automate, but ⁓ at ⁓ structure thinking, these are my clients, these are how I approach them, these are the conversations that I've had, these are the things that you need to be aware of. The more that they can provide is context so that the buyer comes and is... hopefully able to take in all of that context and start to make equivalently good decisions. Like that's a good sign to me versus if it's just, you know, I call up Bob every quarter and we renew the contract. Okay. Like we are probably in a bit of a danger zone there, right? Cause I don't know how to that relationship with Bob or what that conversation is or any of these things that are yielding, you know, the renewal of that contract, right? So again, the intention. almost to extract yourself from the decision-making process the signal that I'm looking for. How well you've done it, know, a lot of times it's gonna be variable, like an owner that knows that they have to approach it something that they can hand over rather than something that is just kind of continuously gonna be dependent on them. think almost always you're see a more valuable business, right? the buyer perspective at least. speaker-0: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, owner dependence, eliminating the key main risk. Yeah. And then ⁓ love that way you said too about focusing on the opportunity for ⁓ new technology, like how, ⁓ you could take the business going forward. speaker-1: Yeah, I think that's where bringing in outside expertise does add a lot of value. For as much as AI is really easily accessible, like you can go to ChatGP right now, type in whatever you want and get an answer. To actually figure out how to use it in a business context to add outsized value to your business, it takes a lot of work. will give you an example. I spend a considerable amount of my time building software for my own business using, know, cloud code, things like that, Where I started with that was, you know, like painful in retrospect, right? Like you can't just like jump in and automatically start things that are actually impactful pieces of software, right? You have to learn how the system works, how to interact with it. You know, you have to learn frankly, still ⁓ a amount about shipping software because ⁓ like, speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: it does 90 % of it for you, but the other 10 % is like really in the weeds, like software development stuff that takes a fair amount of time to learn, right? So expect any small business owner to like have the spare time to do all of that themselves while running business, like it's just probably not realistic, right? So it's not that like most people are missing these opportunities because they're just not thinking of them. It's probably because they just don't have the bandwidth to realistically, you know, take advantage of them. So. Having that outside perspective to say, here's where you could do that, right? Given the right expertise, given the right time, whatever it may take. I think it can be a big unlock, right? Because it's bringing more sophisticated perspective, at least on that one lens of the business. speaker-0: Definitely. Yeah, wow. Let's, I'd like to dive in a little bit more on piece, the growing and scaling. What are maybe some of the first things that you would look at? speaker-1: in terms of how to scale a business using technology, you think? Yeah. So I think I would break it down like this, right? So there's kind of two areas you can focus on implementing software in a business. One is for right? So ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: What I'm looking for there is something that if ⁓ more of this, ⁓ ⁓ in the context of implementing through AI, there's also a critical kind of subcomponent to question of, and it doesn't need to be of the utmost highest quality because you are going to get things that kind of veer towards the average when doing an AI-based process, least ⁓ in today's world. So if we do a lot more of this and it's quality is fine, then that will yield better results for the business, right? So things like, know, ⁓ outreach to customers, for example, right? Like I don't need to have, ⁓ know, an absolutely perfect, you know, tailored pitch when I'm trying to, you know, identify hundred thousand ⁓ local and see if they need, you know, janitorial services or whatever I'm speaking things up, ⁓ Like I just need to find people who are in market, right? So that's something I can do in kind of a very automated way, right? So is an area where I would look for kind of growth lever. How do we set up a machine, a process ⁓ to continuously this and just kind of not necessarily set it and forget it. Cause I think having a human in the loop is really critical to actually getting decently high quality output or at least making sure that it's not going off the rails, you know, Outlet. speaker-0: So 90 % of the the way. Yeah, right. speaker-1: Yeah, right. Exactly. kind of one category of where I would look at, ⁓ we implement some sort of automation or something to dramatically expand reach things that drive revenue, right? It doesn't have to be marketing. think that's kind of the ones I'm discussing it right now, but there's a lot of other opportunities for that as potentially. ⁓ The other is And this really relates more strongly to the type of business you're looking at, but repeated internal processes that can be automated or in some cases even eliminated with better software, with automated decision making, for example. ⁓ that's a more interesting bucket often because ⁓ you're looking for there is more cost savings. And think it's really dependent on kind of the ⁓ the scale of the business that you're at and the cost of those repeated activities, right? You there's a lot of things that AI can easily do, you know, that people are tempted to just let them do or let AI do it because it seems cool, right? then you dig another hood and you're like that process was costing you like a fraction of a penny to do ⁓ And you do it, you know, a of times a week, whatever, I'm just making things up. And so you're actually paying more for the AI to do it than you were to do it manually internally. Those things are a horrible fit for technology and software. ⁓ you're looking for is those things that cost in aggregate. ⁓ roll up cost doing the individual action times, how many times you're doing it per week, per month, or whatever. And that is a substantial line item for you. Then you say, all right, there has to be some solution where we can automate or semi-automate the thought process, the... ⁓ logic, whatever it is, the thing that achieves that result. And if we can apply technology, we can lower cost basis of the business in a meaningful way. If it fit one of those two bills, it's not really worth thinking about candidly. So ⁓ where technology into every business, where it should fit, where it might fit, I think is highly variable. But if you kind of at least start with that very high level framework, that at least tells you where to look or where not to look, I think. speaker-0: ⁓ I love that. Yeah. Tying it to a metric focusing either, you know, the first one seemed more top line focused. The second ⁓ line improving efficiency and reducing costs. Yeah, wow. have you seen technology a business owner ⁓ make ⁓ business dependent on them? You know, reduce that owner dependence that we were talking about earlier. speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I've seen some really good examples. I one of the businesses that I helped facilitate the purchase of, the founder had, I believe himself, if I remember correctly, programmed suite of completely proprietary software. ⁓ A of it was not to quality that you'd expect from an off-the-shelf product. But what it did do really beautifully was kind of encapsulate his thought process, right? The entire thing was mapped out for his bespoke needs. Here's how I think through this process. Here's the data that I need to see. Here's how I make decisions. And so basically what he was left with was, here's a piece of software that replicates how I think, basically, right? And there was a lot of opportunity to take that and improve it and make it more usable for ⁓ subsequent owner and other people involved in the business. But it was just this wonderful artifact of like you've taken your brain as much as possible and dumped it into. computer, right? And not only helped his business, you know, at the time he was actively running it, but it helped the transition process in a big way as well. Right. And, know, ⁓ don't expect everybody to be able to, you know, code their thought process into software. He was a bit of a unicorn, you know, candidly. But, ⁓ you again, you can ⁓ certainly it down. You can, you know, structure a spreadsheet. You can, you know, anything ⁓ that isn't just like I think through it in my head and I write on some scratch paper is going to yield some value if you can store it in a structured way. know, ⁓ I think one of the interesting avenues for founders that have time and interest is to ⁓ working with AI tools like cloud code and all other comparable tools there. Because you can take that document, you can take whatever you have in your Google Drive and say, here's how I think, like help me structure this more, help me ⁓ build software if you want to, right? I wouldn't encourage you necessarily to put that software at the center of your business because it's going to have flaws and bugs and probably is going to be a security risk in a big way. But you can at least use it for your personal purposes, You can use it hand off to the future buyer say, like, yeah, I'm not saying use this, but at least it's structures reflects my structured thinking, right? I think there's accessible flavors of this for everybody, think, depending on how sophisticated you are with technology or not. speaker-0: Yeah, 100%. It sounds like the one client, you know, very but for layman, you that maybe doesn't have a super crazy coding software development background, it could make a custom G-Chat GBT and just give it, you know, tons of context of how you think and how you write and decisions and stuff like Right. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And again, think the is in being able hand off something structured. Right. It doesn't have to be right. Like it just has to reflect like here's how I run my business because the more that we can understand how you've made the decisions that you've made, the more we can properly evaluate as buyers. What can I to improve this? I don't know how I can improve. You've made a series of random decisions over time, some of which have worked out. ⁓ Like I don't how can build on that. I do know how I can build on you've based on the structured way, some are right, some are wrong, but I at least pick out the pattern of the ones that are wrong or bad or if some optimal and think of ways to improve that. Then I have a thesis, right? That's actionable. speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah. It would definitely increase the value of the business, the comfortability of the buyer. if you do it before the sale, it could help your team too. They have a product they can run by and questions by and things like that. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Well, Brian, you have two ventures going on at the same time. I imagine it's very difficult to structure your time, like with all the busy stuff you have going on during the week. I was curious, how do you go about making a that ⁓ is focused you get the right things done? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, it's a realistic struggle, right? mean, one of the things that kind of smacked me in the face pretty quickly when I started running these businesses is literally a never ending list of things that I could get done on daily basis. Like I sometimes because I'll come down from my office and ⁓ wife ask, are you done for the day? I'm like, that's a meaningless Like, ⁓ no, ⁓ I'm ⁓ I've decided stop. That's a little different. ⁓ ⁓ way that I approach it, at least for now, which I'm finding works in terms of balance is a of things. ⁓ One, have to be ruthless about my prioritization. A lot my preparation time for any given day or week is in thinking about, again, to some leverage. If I put my time here, what's the outcome I'm going to get for it versus any of the other tasks or activities that I could spend my time on. Naturally, anything that I'm doing for a client probably rises to the top. This is a service business. Both of them are services businesses that I'm running. So making that my clients are happy is paramount. But ⁓ also to really balance things that help my businesses as well. Exactly as I've been saying, I don't want to... ⁓ look at somebody's business that I'm evaluating and see, ⁓ you just lucked into a bunch of clients and of the decisions you made worked, some didn't. I'm trying to take that approach with my businesses as well, not necessarily because I'm trying to sell them, but because that's what I believe yields the best result. So I also have to take a step back sometimes and think about how do I build, for example, and venture you know, aspects that without me, right? So, you know, where I referenced earlier, I'm building a lot of software. A lot of that software is to me, you know, automatically or identify opportunities to pursue new clients, to engage with those clients, to, ⁓ you know, have a lot of these conversations in a way that doesn't require me to sit there for an hour thinking about the right way to approach it, right? You know, so building the scaffolding for myself now. which takes a lot of time candidly so that next year or whenever I can spend a lot less time on that. So to me, I've always approached, again, both of these businesses as, I don't know the time span on them, but they are long-term endeavors in my mind. It's something that I both want to from a quality perspective, but also a revenue and a quantity perspective. But the way that I want to do that is by, if anything, decreasing the amount of time that I have to spend on both businesses over time by automating and by structuring my thinking and by creating processes that are highly repeatable. And I think it's worthwhile to me today in the short term to spend a lot of time the efforts ⁓ building those platforms, it, so that life is easier in five or 10 years as I ⁓ continue to both businesses. The last thing I want is one or both businesses, sticks and everything's going fantastically. And the only way that I can support that is by working 20 hours a day. Like I left that world. I intentionally, I'm not in big tech, living kind of lifestyle, right? Like, so I want to build both businesses, but in a way that ⁓ scales to effort, candidly. speaker-0: Love that. Yeah, that's a great perspective. Building this scaffolding, as you said, yeah, doing the hard work now, it's probably frustrating too, to make those systems, but it's pay dividends ⁓ later on. Yeah, and as you ⁓ build out team, ⁓ all those are gonna be, they'll have access to them too, right? Yep, yep. Yeah, I love that. And I know we touched on AI. I'd like to go in a little further. How are you using it today or maybe some use cases that our listeners haven't necessarily thought about? speaker-1: Yeah, so I'll speak to this from a couple of lenses. there's, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I suppose I've tried AI for all of the bad uses as well as the good uses, right? Like I have, you know, over the last couple of years, know, as ChatGPG came out, for example, tried to use it to write thought pieces and to write LinkedIn posts and to do outreach to potential customers and things of that nature. My experience with that has been that it is woefully insufficient for almost all of that, right? All the things that are like the easiest ⁓ to and the easiest to like think about applying AI to seem to, you it's just, I think of the problem is everybody's doing them. ⁓ And so quickly it just turned into like, ⁓ this is more AI slop. Like, you know, I'm dismissing that, right? ⁓ So to it well, ⁓ is significant challenge, right? To do it in a way that people don't realize that you are automating a significant amount ⁓ of process it, I think is a huge challenge. when I say that, that to me rings as exactly the same ⁓ as my at Amazon, right? Different context, but Amazon was insanely ⁓ automated, you know, today, not so much, but at the time that I joined, very much known for quality of customer service. Right. So like the face of it, what I'm buying from Amazon, the face of it was, everything is made super easy for me. If I have a problem with my order, they fix it. If I need to return something to make it easy, blah, blah, blah. Right. So the engagement with the company was, very customer obsessed and in a lot of ways personal. The backend of it was like the most impersonal thing you could imagine. Right. It was just, you are you know, one of a billion customers, but we've built the systems to surface all the information and create the experience that makes it feel like it's very tailored to you. Right. I think you can take that thought process and apply it to, to as well. Right. The more that you're just kind of using it to create generic messages, the less it's going to resonate. The more you use it under the hood in a way that's hidden, subtle, know, helps to ⁓ make me more informed and then create human actions as result of that, automation of just, I'm going to send you a chat GPT message, right? The that resonates, think. So I ⁓ that's a area of opportunity people in how think about using AI in particular. A lot of it is just the easy answer is often going to be the one that really works. And I would encourage people to go down that path of like, by all means use it. Have that experience of it not working. Just don't stop there. think the thing that differentiates the people who are successful, ⁓ and companies, should say, using versus not in today's world are the ones that are being very thoughtful about it and learning from the experience, not just kind of glomming onto like... ⁓ this capability came out. I'm going to jam it into my business or I'm going to jam it into like how I create contact on LinkedIn or whatever, right? through the learning process. It's a tool, right? You have to treat it like a tool. You have to learn how to use the tool and probably going to be bad at it initially, right? But like embrace that, be okay with it. You know, get the feedback, learn how to adjust like really, you know, ⁓ there's very fundamental difference in approach, I think, in terms of what yields success versus what just seems easy to do in the moment. speaker-0: Yeah. Wow. I love that psychology. That's really useful. Thanks for bringing that up. And that's a common, very common mistake people are making as they dabble with AI. Trying to have it do everything instead of viewing it like making it the full product view it like help you to research and produce a better, better product. Right. speaker-1: Yep. And one thing I would also really caution people against in some capacity is if you don't know what good looks like in a particular area, marketing sales or whatever, like do not let your AI do it for you ⁓ just like, you're going to get a above average result, right? Unless you are giving it explicit instruction and guidance and context and feedback on what good looks like continuously, right? is not going to cut it as a differentiator for almost any business in any capacity, right? So, you know, think that's where a lot of people go wrong as well. And that's been a of my personal journey and understanding of how to use AI in a way that actually it does add value to my business, Marketing, business dev, ⁓ sales, things that I'm ⁓ experienced in, right? In my previous So, you know, I've used AI as a way to help myself better understand what good looks like, but that's been candidly a year and a half long journey probably to get from, you know, implementation of something which turned out to be crap, but like to get to the point where now I feel least more confident saying I can differentiate. value added activities from non-value added activities, where I can differentiate what actually works in some contexts from what clearly doesn't. And I'm sure there are people who way more sophistication in all those areas who would look at what I'm doing right now and be like, you're getting so many things wrong. And I am, but my point is it's a learning journey. I'm continuing to, the systems that I'm building have loops built into them intentionally to say, this didn't work, why? Learn from that. continue to evolve as we use this technology. So fundamental advice anybody who's thinking about using software, particularly AI-based software, is just don't plug and play and go away and do something else. It has to be an evolution of you learning to use the tool and the tool learning from you what good looks like and continuing to calibrate towards what for your business in your context. speaker-0: That's great advice. Yeah. Wow. You know, it takes some hard work and some trial and error to make a really practical, useful tool. speaker-1: Yeah, yes, definitely. speaker-0: I love that. Well, I know we're coming up on time here, Brian, but I wanted to give you the floor if you want to plug your business and where can listeners find you easiest? speaker-1: Yeah, so mean, easiest place would be on LinkedIn, just Brian Root, pretty straightforward. you'd like to investigate either business more in depth, the relevant websites are ⁓ rooted product.com or Norris Advisory. That's N-O-R-I-S, advisory.com. Always happy to have a conversation with anybody who, you know, certainly this context is thinking about buying a small business. think entrepreneurship through acquisition is a... really fascinating space that, know, coming from tech, people have a lot of really valuable skills that they don't always necessarily see how they would translate to being a small business owner. But, you know, from my perspective, and having gone through that journey myself, I think things that you learn about how to build software often really, really strongly translate on how to build a business as well. So happy have a conversation with anybody who's even, you pondering whether ⁓ that transition be right for them. speaker-0: Great, yeah, awesome. I appreciate all the insights today, Brian. It was great having you on the show. speaker-1: Yeah, thank you. to be here.