Latest / Big Talk About Small Business / Process Over People: Fixing Key-Person Risk with Jimmy Lewis

Transcript

Process Over People: Fixing Key-Person Risk with Jimmy Lewis · Big Talk About Small Business

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of We Talk About Small Business.com.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: And obviously that was the best intro since I started it this morning.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it was.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, good job.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_04: Mark's I actually have been watching our past episodes and I've been really disappointed in Mark's weeds uh ability to open his up properly.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: So I've now officially taken over and you're welcome to hopefully uh deliberately mispronouncing my name above that Claude Wise or Claude Wise or whatever that.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_04: No, Mark, you do a good job, man.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna keep you as a co-host.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_04: Oh right.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot over the weekend.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: But I was doing a lot of strategy, a lot of contemplation about where I am, who I am in life.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_04: But I was looking at you going, should I or should I allow him to still be on my show?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's kind of the way I felt about you as being one of our investors in one of the companies.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: I wrote a chat on Monday.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_03: Excuse me, sent a wire.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, another subject.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: That was a setting, man.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, really hard time.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you want to have a plug.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not back off now.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_04: We got guests today.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_04: We better know.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_04: We do.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we have Jimmy Lewis with us today.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, Jimmy, appreciate you being on the show.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_04: I know that our audience is going to get a lot of value for hearing your story and your thoughts, your thought process on entrepreneurship and all that good stuff.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_04: Let's kick us off, tell a little about yourself, what is your company, what do you do, how long have you been around, etc.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um Jimmy Lewis, uh co-founder and CEO of a company called True Focus Automation, based out of Plano, Texas.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've been in the title insurance and mortgage industry for the past 23 years or so.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh originally from the Midwest.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm currently in Texas, but uh Midwest kid, kind of like uh you guys there in Arkansas.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: So we're in the Midwest, Jimmy.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Omaha.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Omaha.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Omaha, okay.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: That is the Midwest.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, big Husker fan, alumni, and all that, born and raised there.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So uh but yeah, been in Texas since '99.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh my partner and I started True Focus Automation in 2018.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we're coming up on our eighth year, eighth anniversary at the end of November.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and what we're doing is automating all things related to title, mortgage, appraisal, real estate.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So anything that's manual, repetitive, time consuming, tedious or boring, uh, prone to human error or typos, we look to automate it.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's our background.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we came from an outsourcing uh space.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: My partner and I worked together uh starting back in 2006.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I left the company in 2014 and he reached back out a few years later and said, Hey, uh, I helped our your former employer kick off their uh RPA, robotic process automation practice.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think with your connections and my knowledge, we could potentially build something here.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really what we've been doing for the last eight years is all the stuff that folks used to outsource to us.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're saying, hey, if you can outsource it uh and it's going offshore in most cases, not all cases, um, that's work we should look at potentially automating.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's where the idea of true focus uh came about.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_04: And you're talking about like in those specific fields, the title mortgage uh industries, correct?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, we really are kind of specialists, uh a niche but a niche player in that market.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: We really haven't gone after.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've thought about education, government, uh, healthcare, manufacturing, but you know, all of our skill sets and and background and knowledge is primarily in the real estate industry, if you want to call it real estate, mortgage and title insurance.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's really where we focused at.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And people appreciate that.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of folks who come into the market who have a tech background, but not necessarily an industry or domain uh knowledge, and we provide the best of both worlds there.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_04: So and so it is this a SaaS, I mean, is it something that people buy or or do you actually do custom type of workflows?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: We do both.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh primarily we started out as a custom bill.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh about two or three years in, we uh came up with a solution that was it's called Title Hunter.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's our automated title search platform.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what people do is hey, if you got a property uh and you want to run a search on it to see the uh ownership history, liens and judgments, taxes and all that on the property.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we automated that and we charge a transactional rate for you to push orders through uh that system.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a few tools, a few solutions like that.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The others, uh we're split about 50-50, about half of our businesses that software as a service model where you pay transactionally, the other half is custom bots.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: So folks come to us and say, I've got this process.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, as I said, it's manual, uh, time consuming, and I just really want to take it off of my staff's plate.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think you can automate it?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And typically we we can.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we set up a call where we're just doing a shadow session on Zoom or Teams.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and within 30 minutes or an hour, we can pretty much tell you, yes, this is something we can automate, or no, this is something you shouldn't be looking at automating.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: So that's Eric's domain.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: He knows a lot about automation.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, he had a marketing services company where they actually created a tool that they used to I guess it was help people put listings on low art.com and then greatly enhance that and turn that into a business where they sold that product.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean I do appreciate like uh it's kind of similar.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: The same type of approach there that we're you know, because you dig into like your you know, if you got a title company, right, that's it's doing all the closing documentation and all these.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I I actually used to work in a title company back then.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: I forgot that.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I was well, I was a mortgage, and I was a title I did title uh started out title, uh but I was the cookie man.
• 6:32
  unknown: That's right.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_04: My job was as in sales, I'd run around and bake Elder Spunkmeier cookies and take them mortgage lenders and real estate agents trying to, you know, sling some title insurance and closing stuff, and that worked.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_04: I could get into the Pentagon with a bag of Elder Spunkmeyer warm cookies I made.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_04: But that's besides the point.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, but living in that industry, I mean, it was just a like a daily minute by minute, hour by hour chaos of last minute pieces of data to get in, getting all the paperwork together.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's always something you know, that's where it changes at the last minute, you gotta change everything else.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh man, I gotta re redraw all these docs.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_04: It is brutal.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, and so I can appreciate a little bit about what you're doing.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, from my knowledge, I mean, if you went into any title company, I'm sure county by county, there's like different little things that need some sort of type of you know, that's redundant, repetitive things that you're fixing for that.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think it's a good approach, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: No, I was just gonna say, I think the specialization combined with the technical knowledge of what you do is the key.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's like you can't do this stuff just for anybody.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you have to understand how it all eventually works.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, to be able to have that conversation uh gives you a lot more, I think, confidence in the fact that you're gonna, you know, build something that's of value to the client.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we do have a few competitors who have experience in industry and are doing some of the same things we're doing.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some who've you know just come to um the market and they see an opportunity, they have the you know, private equity funds behind them and the the tech you know knowledge, but not necessarily the connections in industry or the understanding of all of the workflows uh and the importance of those workflows to title and mortgage uh companies.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_04: So hey, so what's your pricing model?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, are you like is it a subscription base?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, how do you price?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've tried a variety of things.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, for Title Hunter, the solution I was talking about before we do an automated title search.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we started out transactionally, then we went to a subscription base where hey, you get one bot that's set up and you can push as much uh through that uh bot as possible, and it's one fee, but the last three years or so we're back to the transactional model.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that's for the software as a service, you know, those sorts of uh opportunities.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if a client says, hey, I just want to automate something, uh, process that I want where I want to only IP, um, we quote them, you know, dev cost and time.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Typically it's four to five weeks on average, uh, roughly eight, nine, ten thousand dollars is what we're running right now.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: But we've had quick bots we've built in a day or so or two for 700 bucks, as expensive as$20,000.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It might take us 10, 12 weeks.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we offer both.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if a client is uh fairly small or not really willing to make that investment up front, but they say, hey, I do want to own this solution, I want to own the IP, host it in-house, um, and and and kind of have it as an asset, then typically what we'll do is we'll say, Hey, well, you can acquire it, you're gonna acquire it at a a little bit of a premium down the road.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: We'll build it out on our dollar, we'll charge you a transactional rate for a set period of time, typically 12 months.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of that 12 months, if you've pushed enough volume through there and we've recouped our uh revenue and dev cost plus that premium, uh, then we'll hand over the IP and the code to you.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And typically after that, they still want us to maintain the bots.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, we provide change requests and all that.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: For a few hundred bucks a month, we'll kind of babysit the bots, is what we call it.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a it's a monthly maintenance fee.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but but typically, yes, we either offer the subscription base where you pay us a transactional fee.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's typically there's no minimums on that.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you said, hey, I've got this process and I want to own it, I don't want you to copy it and give it to somebody else, maybe my competitor down the road, uh, what's that gonna cost me?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we we tell them and they acquire it, uh paying it out up front or in uh uh you know installment amounts or in a transactional model where we recoup everything over the course of like said 12 months and then they own the code.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_04: Do you um that's interesting?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_04: So do you are you stacking your bots on top of bigger systems that they might be using, bigger software systems?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or yeah, so we're not actually building a solution where they have to bring in another technology.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: We build our bots work like in between what they already have.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not going to be any change.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your staff, your their our clients' teams are not gonna have to learn a new solution.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we can all of our solutions are API ready if that's a possibility will, but typically we're building a bot that is acting as though it's a human, meaning uh it's going into a user interface and it's doing the same steps a human would do, except it's not getting tired.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: It does it more, it does it quickly or much faster than they could.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, there are lags in the the um website, so you're still gonna have to deal with latency whether it's a bot or a human.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that's typically how we work.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're building solutions that don't necessarily require them to make any changes on their behalf.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of working in the shadows, in between, the team doesn't really know it.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's just connecting maybe legacy tools to old to newer tools or new systems.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it just depends.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And most folks are it's it's a kind of a custom case-by-case basis, and and that's how we look at it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's not really we don't go and say, hey, we have RPA or generative AI or agentic AI, and we think this is, you know, sometimes it's a combination of all three that you may have to leverage.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh or sometimes, you know, they don't need all that, it's overkill.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we say, hey, you just need RPA.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And RPA is the same thing.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's rules-based, repetitive, and if it can't figure it out, it's gonna kick it out and uh say, hey, you need to have a human take a look at this one.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's a separate process.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_04: So in other words, you're building agents, basically.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_04: What you're calling bots or agents.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: We are agents, bots.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I guess bots is the old term from eight, ten, twelve, fifteen years ago.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah uh I still use it and people name it, they name them different names, but the agentic AI has really picked up in the last year or two, you know.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Typically Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, the way people have been using them is more of a generative AI situation.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but now the the agents that folks are building to kind of act like a human and use knowledge or use their knowledge and make a decision.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're just now kind of adding that into the mix for the most part.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's been generative AI combined with RPA or Python, uh basic coding, and that's how we're automating the workflows.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_04: Do you hit do you uh put like uh uh dedicated hardware at their office?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Or I mean how far is it how our bots, if it's say the software as a service where they just ordered from us, we're hosting on AWS and Google Cloud, and we have a third party out of Finland called UpCloud.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and dependent upon the use case, uh, we'll decide which which cloud partner to host.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: So we host there, if they say, Hey, yeah, I want it in-house, this is a little more confidential, or I want to have more control over it, or my IT or security team says, No, we want this on-prem, we'll just say, Hey, you've got to set up a server, and pretty much the bot sits there uh and you give us access.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you have a live server and a dev server.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We get into the dev server to develop it uh and then do the testing, and once it's live, we take it to the live server.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it works pretty well in that regard.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we host it on our side.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: If the client said, hey, I just want you to maintain it.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll host it in one of those uh AWS or Google Clouds somewhere, Chicago, New York, or wherever it may be.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but they can either sit on site, but it doesn't necessarily need you.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: When I say a server, it's not a computer that's sitting there and you're gonna watch it do its work.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a headless computer where it's just a server, you know, in your server room, or it can be an actual um desktop that's sitting in the corner.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't have a monitor, so no one can go over and kind of mess around with it, no keyboard, nothing like that.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: So when when you're consulting, sorry, Mark, I'm sorry.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but when you're uh when you're consulting with these clients, I mean, is there a lot of how do you handle the consultation phase, right?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_04: So, like let's say I have a title company, I call you up, I'm like, hey Jimmy, I got can you come take a look?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_04: We got this thing that we're doing.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you're gonna have a lot of uh consultation time, uh discovery time as on the sales side to try to understand what it is that I'm needing.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, maybe you'd have a for it, and that's an easy, like, here you go.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you can subscribe to this, but um, but if this starts getting to the weeds of some sort of you know peculiar proprietary process or data thing out, you could be looking at three, four, five hours worth of work on your end of discovery.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, okay, 10 hours, scope of work, uh negotiation.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and you know, for business owners, that's always a hard one, right?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: Like uh how far do you go?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_04: 20 hours, 50 hours, or you just you quit going to that audience, right?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: I'll spend about 30 minutes, but I'm gonna start charging somebody.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm stupid.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Well I I can't afford the time to otherwise.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: How do you do that?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're not that we're we're not that uh particular about the time.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't want to spend like weeks trying to drop something and get it up and going, but you know, usually it's gonna take two or three calls, but because we're focused on our industry, yeah, and we know most of the the production systems out there, uh, all of the databases that people are going to to retrieve information, and we've probably built something.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: We've built over 850 bots now uh in the last eight years.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have a pretty good idea.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't charge for a consultation.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you said, hey, I want someone to come on site and sit in my office for a week, okay, that's a different scenario.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, we're able to do this without me or any of our team going on site.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: We just get on a shared call, like I said on Zoom or Teams, and you know, it may take an hour, then we may go back and the subject matter expert has to.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm not involved, but they they have our business analyst to do the documentation on another call or two.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: But typically it's no more than a few hours for us to kind of gather that, and then you give us maybe two or three days.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: We'll we'll do some documentation and document the flow in what we call a PDD, a process definition document.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's got the screenshot.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we do the the shared sessions.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: We do the shared sessions, we ask questions, that person shows us the actual workflow, and after that recording, we download it, we take screenshots of you know each step.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about step by step.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some of these processes are 10, 12 steps, some are 400 plus steps.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about each click.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: We document that um and we say, hey, this is the dev effort, this is the uh time we think it's gonna take to complete it.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and here's a workflow.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: We need you to sign off on this before we pass it off to our development team.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: And for the most part, like I said, that can be uh two or three calls, no more than a few hours.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't charge for that.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so what we don't charge for that.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_04: When you're talking about screenshot, like you'd be able to build diagrams and development phases and processes, right?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_04: And what you're visualizing that this bot is going to be doing in its process map.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's like that's what it is.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you went to say Amazon and tried to order something, what's the first thing you do?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: You type in uh Amazon.com, right?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And um then you log in and then you go, you search for a certain item.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So every one of those steps is a screenshot.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're taking a picture of and documenting what needs to uh happen in that step.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Once the client signs off on that, we pass that document on, which could be a couple hundred pages.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: We pass that document on to our development team.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: They do a similar documentation for the development side, and they work with the business analyst to make sure that's a is trued up, and then they start developing.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then every week or two, if it's a multi multi-week uh process, we give the candidate or not the candidate, we give the client an update and we say, hey, you know what, this is where we're at today.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we show them maybe like the first 25% of how the bot's working, and they give us feedback, and then we continue forward.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we can do it all in you know a couple, three weeks, and then we say, Hey, we're gonna you know do a test run or a demo at the end of that two or three week period, and you tell us if we've got everything right.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll I'll be honest, uh, most people forget something or two or three, or they don't have the all of the uh interested parties or or decision, I don't say decision makers, but the people who are actually gonna use the system.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like we had one client uh here in Dallas market, and they had uh they wanted us to help them automate their open order process.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever a new uh realtor submits in a fact, not a fax anymore, but an email or pushes some information, say, hey, I got a new deal that's on the table, and this is the closing day, and I need you to kick off the title search process.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Someone physically has to open that email, extract all the information from that, and key it into their production system so it starts a process.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they showed us the Texas process first, but then they had Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And all four states did it differently.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, well, this is not something that's really gonna work.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: We can't build like one agent or bot to do this.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have to have four unique bots.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: We can probably keep maybe 50% of the code, but the other 50%, uh, there was some uh individual or unique steps that each state was a little bit different.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they would go out to one to a bankruptcy site or to some other portal and gather a piece of information that needed to go into the file to open the order up.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, in those scenarios, we have to kind of keep in mind that okay, the price point might change if you come back to us after we've completed the development, you're like, oh, I've got these additional uh you know, scenarios that I didn't tell you about.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it doesn't make sense to automate all the scenarios.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: It maybe makes sense to automate 80% and you keep the other 20% manual still for a while.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: That we also take that uh mindset to one into it.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we we always tell people this automation is great, AI is great, but it's probably not gonna automate 100% of the workflow or 100% of the orders that come in.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh kind of set the expectation.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us a little bit more about the company.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: How many employees do you have there, or do you outsource a lot of your stuff that you do?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, so I'm the only US employee.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: My partner's in India.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: My team, most of my team is in India.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I have 40, we have 44 people total on our team.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but we have three developers, two in Canada, one in Dubai.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they started in India, but they moved for either work or grad school or whatever.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: But um, that's where they're base.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a uh consultant here in Dallas that also helps me out with uh some agentic AI, the stuff that we were talking about earlier.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's an expert in that.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, for the most part, we have that, and then we've got about 30 people that help us with uh some exception fallout work or data insurance.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Work that's also based offshore.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And these are all people that my partner and I worked with uh at the prior outsourcing shop that I told you about.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I see.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty large shop.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they all started there, and then they went decided to like break apart, like us, and they started their own companies.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: These are the people that I kind of trust with the work because I mean my reputation is super critical for me.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've been around, like I said, this industry for at least 20 years.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh people, some people still see me as the outsourcing guy.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to get out of that uh image.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we still do a lot that competes with outsourcing.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm like, no, we're a check provider that can also help you with a little bit of that manual fallout exception work.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so I would say roughly 70 is the the total team size, but 44 actually work for us directly, including myself and my partner.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you are though the primary interface between all these clients in the US, or is there anybody else who can deal with the clients?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the primary interface, but that's really just to get the relationship going.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my partner uh comes over about once a year.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: We hit conferences or go see clients.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like we were just in uh Kansas City for a conference, we went to see clients in Detroit, LA, uh, and in the Dallas market.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I've the people that we've hand chosen on our team are people who uh I felt comfortable with don't pass the buck.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And you might see that a lot when you work with India or the Philippines or maybe some of the Latin countries.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, where they they're like, oh, that's not on us.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, nope, I don't care if it's if it's on us or not, you fix it.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're not gonna just throw it over the fence to somebody else.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I make the introduction, typically my partner or myself are uh on the first couple of calls, then I hand it off to we've got some senior folks on my team that uh step in when we're not available, and I feel comfortable with that.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh people understand them, they speak very clearly.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big key as well.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is people do complain, trust me.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: They they they do complain if like I I can't understand this guy.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so um so for me, I am the person who is the relationship guy.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_03: We we had a guy in our office years ago when Eric and I worked together.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: He was the CEO at a company that I was had sold and was taken over by its lender, and I got her back.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: We had a we had a lot of things outsourced to India, if you remember.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: IT, marketing, India and the Philippines.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_03: We had one Indian dude on our staff, he was a young guy, and half the time we couldn't understand them.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: We'd be like, Hey, you talk to this Scott, tell us what the hell he's saying.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, but so yeah, yeah, I mean, one thing I so like what about the hours?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: Do your people work at night so that you can deal with them during the okay.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, I I'm kind of a digital nomad myself.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: My wife and I uh decided to try another country in 2019, about a year after I started this company.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, you know, we lived in Colombia for four years, but I've been to Asia, Africa, all over Europe, India as well.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they're used to doing that.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, my partner is roughly about 10 years younger than me, but he's been doing this and he's used to working until 12, 1 in the afternoon US time.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I have a few key folks and developers who stay until four or five, and that's really why I have the near shore support in Canada, uh, because I've got some West Coast customers who I'm not I'm not a developer.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a I'm a relationship guy, business guy.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I handle the finances, uh, the strategy.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so when it's five o'clock on the Pacific Coast and it's seven o'clock here in Texas, and they say, hey, the bot's not running or have an issue, I need someone else to be available.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we kind of had a four or five hour gap there in the past.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: We've closed that gap.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we have someone who's available.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I won't say Saturday and Sunday, but these guys work.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they work like it's their company.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: My partner and I were just talking about that.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, why aren't they working on Saturday and Sunday?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm emailing seven days a week.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm surprised to see them uh being responsive.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, we need to get something done, they're available.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it doesn't matter what what hour of the the day it is.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: I re I know one of the things we had to do because of those hours, the people didn't like, like, particularly the female employees didn't like commuting.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_03: We actually had to provide a bus for them to pick them up at their homes and take them back.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've got so many stories.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've been to India about 10, 12 times, and the first company that I was talking about, uh, my first trip to India, I think was 2006, and I go over there, and there's like maybe two women working in the company.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Even the people serving you coffee or tea are all men, like serving you your lunch.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's just different coming from the U.S.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah, I'm not saying you don't see male service, but you know, all the cafeteria workers were men, and I asked, they said, hey, well, we just it's risky having women work overnight.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and sometimes if it rains, they have to stay here, so we have to provide cots.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so we did that, we did that as well.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we eventually um they started hiring more women.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think when I left that company, it was it was probably like 20% uh staffed by females at that time.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: But my company today, I'm talking about out of my top, I'd say out of my top, probably don't want to record this, but of my top five or six developers, all but one are is uh female.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, so some of they can work on Mars.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care where they work, as long as they keep doing the work that they're doing, I'm fine.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: So um, but yeah, you're right.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: They there is a concern about women being out at night and being, you know, I guess harassed.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and we provided uh transportation.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: This this situation that I have here with this company, we have I was just over there in January and I was asking some of the women we went out, we took them out to dinner my last night, and they're like, Oh no, I live close.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, three or four of them live together in the same apartment or in the same house they share.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then one lady told me, Jimmy, I take uh an hour, it takes me an hour and a half to get here.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I said, an hour and a half round trip.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: She said, No, one way on a bus, an hour and a half, but it could take you 30 minutes to go a mile or two in India.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the traffic is that bad.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I I understand the the concern about okay, we don't want to have any women because they're either going to get married and leave us when they get married, they're gonna stop working, or they don't want to work overnight.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's when most of the work is available because our US clients uh need us to be available when they are.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, there's all those things to think about, but we we have a pretty solid team, and like I said, I like the split of the the 50-50-ish, where we've got uh you know women and men, half and half in our company side.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_03: The the the labor rates have gone up quite a bit in India.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's not getting near as cheap as it used to be.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's a real middle class there at this point that oh, definitely.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, like I said, I went over there and I saw some nice, very nice vehicles.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: They've got all these restaurants that look like restaurants you see here in the US or Europe, I mean, that are kind of catering to the foreign travelers.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: And definitely along with that, um salaries go up, the overhead goes up, and it always amazes me that um clients have said, Oh, you've been doing this for three or four years.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I should be able to get a better price now.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, well, no, everything else went up.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: Either AI costs or rent goes up or a salary goes up, and it's the same thing in the US as it is in any other country.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: The cost of living goes up, cost of doing business goes up, so I can't cut your costs just because you think I'm I've optimized it.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that's not really that's not really how it works.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: So what were the biggest challenges in growing this thing that you guys have?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's pretty impressive to get to the size you are in the time you've done it.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: So, what have been your biggest challenges?
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think people uh at least in these financial services industries like mortgage and title, there's a lot of uh concern about being hacked or malware or people uh taking control of your data for ransom.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh a lot of people still don't trust uh automation or AI.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so we kind of have to distinguish because we started out strictly as RPA, robotic process automation.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: There was no autonomous bots or agents thinking and making up rules and going off and doing something.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: It said, Jimmy programmed me to do these 10 steps.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if one in one of these steps uh there's a new scenario or something I don't understand, or the website's broken or down or changed, I'm gonna say I can't handle it.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: I shoot an email to the client and say, hey, this one needs to be handled uh manually.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we highly leverage that instead of coming to the table with with AI, but people are still concerned about um AI going rogue and getting loose and disclosing all their uh confidential data.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: We typically don't get access to that, like social security numbers, bank account information.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's not something that the processes we work on, you get you're in a privy to.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: Every now and then you get the last four of the social.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you need to verify like a bankruptcy or uh federal income tax uh lien or child support lien or something like that, you may have to go out and get a dock at the county, and you're not gonna know unless you have something to uh match it up against.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but for the most part, uh that's the biggest thing.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then cost, I mean, people always assume that AI or automation is gonna be super expensive.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I've already shared or disclosed that our work is being done uh offshore, which is roughly half the cost you're gonna get out of Europe or one of the Latin American countries, maybe a little bit more, maybe 60% of that.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's probably a third of what you're gonna pay here in the US.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a concern that we kind of put their mind at ease.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then making changes.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: They may say, you know, you know, I've just installed or bought a new, spent a lot of money on a new tool that uh, you know, I want to make sure that's up and going right.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we try to tell them, yeah, but we're working inside of your system, so we're not making any changes, we're not asking you to buy anything extra.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's typically one of the things that we have to uh ease their mind uh at, I guess a little bit.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so those are probably the main challenges that we've had with with growing uh technology.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, some people are just really scared of AI and they don't even want to see it in the contracts.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or like, you can put automation there.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Don't put AI because it probably won't pass uh our security teams review.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_04: Hey everyone, quick break to talk to the brands and service providers listening out there.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_04: If you offer a product or solution that helps founders scale, we'd love to work with you.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_03: Whether you're looking for a product placement right here in our studio set, sponsoring a segment, showcasing a new book, or even joining us as a featured guest, we've got flexible ways to get your brand in front of real business operators.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_04: Perfect, Mark.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_04: And all they have to do is head over to Big Talk About Small Business.com forward slash contact.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_04: Let's set up a custom sponsorship package that actually delivers leads for your business.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_04: That's Big Talk About Small Business.com forward slash contact.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's it's interesting.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh uh we were talking about is reminding me of like there's a there is a pretty significant commercialization barrier going on right now.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I don't know if you agree with this, Jimmy, but like technology automation, uh I mean there's some fantastic things that that have that have been developed just in the last 18 months that are revolutionizing bottlenecks that industries have faced for since the dawn of time.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_04: But there is so much resistance uh uh uh from the from the buyer side that it's it's preventing significantly.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_03: People are afraid of the information going into the AI database.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: Is that it?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: Is that yeah, I think there's uh that yes.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: We got those same concerns sometime too, because if you put something out online, like my team was just telling me, we're we're doing a website refresh.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you put something out online, Jimmy, that's a sample of one of our reports, someone can just go off there, our competitor, take a screenshot of it, or grab it, download it somehow, plug it into one of the AI uh tools and say replicate this for me.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah I mean, it's possible.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you could probably clone a website really quickly right now with most of these tools, right?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there's there's that governance, and I don't know if you experienced this too, Jimmy.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_04: But like what I'm seeing is like there's almost like there's the squishy unknown uh resistance that that I think is like nobody talks about though.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_04: No one's gonna admit it, but I see it like being a lot of uh a lot of job protection that's happening.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_04: Employees that are like afraid that employees, there's a lack of trust that it's actually like what okay, so for example, I mean I'm gonna kind of tie this to your industry, Jimmy.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_04: Like um, if if I'm a mortgage banker and Jimmy comes and approaches me, and there's these fun, there's these rudimentary tasks that our team keeps doing.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_04: Jimmy knows about that, knows that if he can eliminate that, his team can focus on more strategic or relational or valuable things or more.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_04: More valuable stuff.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_04: But um because that buyer at his client has gone into Chat GPT last week and tried to do it to him or herself, yeah, and it yielded terrible results, they are like, oh, that it doesn't work.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_04: I see, yeah.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_04: They think you're gonna get the same.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_04: They think you're gonna you're gonna produce the same garbage, so it's not worth the investment.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_04: Interesting.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_04: I've I've already experienced that, Jimmy.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_04: Real quick.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_04: I mean we do.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've got a client that I'm gonna talk to.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to uh Scottsdale on Monday for our annual American Untitled Association conference.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I've got a client who moved to a new company about three years ago from a former customer of ours, and uh, we got on a call uh probably like four or five, six months ago, and he's like, hey judge, I mean, you know, all this stuff that you're doing, we've got one or two of our own employees in-house who've kind of been playing around with Claude or ChatGPT, and they've kind of figured this out.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we think we can do it in-house, and sometimes they can.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we got some pretty smart people out here.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think you know, one of the biggest issues is like you said, people like job protection, but like, and we never really go at it like that.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I and just being straight up with you guys, I don't no company, no customer of mine said, because you automated this, we were able to fire five people.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Typically just what we're doing is making them more efficient, more productive.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of you know, one person doing eight title searches a day, now they can do 16 or 24.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or they like you said, Mark, they spend more time on QC, they can do training, they can start calling in the customers, they can help out with sales or other things, you know.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks, Total.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_04: I I tell you, I got a I got a pretty no, this is definitely perspective on this.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_04: Well, you know a lot about it.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_04: Well, AI company.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and I'm I've been studying, I've just watched this damn news for about two years straight on these things.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_04: And all what I'm starting to, I believe that the frontier of all companies like anthropic and open AI and Gemini and these folks and and that's fear model in the news and media for press release attention.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_04: So when they come out and say 75% of all white collar jobs are going to be eradicated in the next nine months, NBC, ABC, Fox News, everybody chucks on that shit, wants to get to get their view, and they start and then now anthropic's the number one leading, most wicked freaking platform that's ever existed, and it raises their freaking investment dollars, and it's all about going.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that makes total sense.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_04: And everybody gets scared as hell, and now everybody's afraid they're gonna lose their job, it paralyzes them.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_04: No, I get it, and and it keeps them from from evolving.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_04: And I mean it's well, and I I don't and I mean to the point, Jimmy, my realistic practical experience is what you said is is the reality.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, if I can take the shit work off your plate, yeah, and it's just like offshore, it's like offshoring.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_04: If I take this off your plate, it allows you to and the bookkeeping off the accounting department.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_04: So they're and then they can go on things that they never got to do.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_03: No, I get it.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's but it's the systemic freaking fear that's going on is I never had that sphere myself.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: I was always confident I could find something better to do to join anything.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's the whole goal.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, but but you know, one thing about AI that I've wondered, you guys know a lot more about it than I do.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I've put strategic questions in there.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, what do you think about this?
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_03: What if this company does this, or what if we do this with this other company?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I've been very, very cautious to not necessarily name the companies that I'm thinking of because I don't want that idea then to be out there for somebody else to pick up.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: Is that a rational fear or not?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_04: Depends on your subscription model on on whatever model on whatever you're using.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, because if you if you like we use pro models in Gemini.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean it's in a pro I mean isn't a pro subscription.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_04: Like it'll tell you if it uses your information to train its own models.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: It allows you to check or uncheck that that toggle toggle or untoggle that that lever.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_03: Suppose every time I make the quarter setting up.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean I well sometimes in my subscription, it never does.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the one that I have in the plan, it says, but it specifically says we never use this information to train.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_04: Now, I mean, then you I guess you could argue, is that really true?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_04: You know, but I mean, like, uh, but I mean I think there has to be some level of I just wondered about that.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I yeah, I there have been before you could tell if you're I was gonna say we we decided uh one of the clients was saying, hey, I don't mind you running public records through uh Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, and those would be public mortgages.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're public records.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody who has access to Washington County, Arkansas website, they they log in, they can say, Okay, let me pull up this property and see what the current deed or mortgages are.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: They can do that.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's a contract, a purchase agreement, especially commercial deals, which are fairly complex and have a lot of confidence, they don't want to process that through there.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we built our own uh LLM.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's really kind of a small language model, but we built that just to handle those specific scenarios.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: And my team uh found an open source model and we just modified it to what we needed, trained it on ours.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's definitely not as robust or I say accurate as what's in the market because they've they've spent millions and billions of dollars training these things over years and years with you know millions of of data sets and points.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it's gonna take time to get to the same accuracy state as the commercial ones that are out there, but that's an option too.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: You can build your own uh in-house.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_04: But uh what do you think is like the biggest AI hype going on right now that's maybe impacting the decisions of your of your cockatele?
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, absolutely the biggest one is that the the AI is can do exactly what the human does and can probably take on the entire process.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I I guess it depends on the process.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: If it's a four or five-step process, maybe yes.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're seeing is you still need human in the loop um for a lot of the workflows that we've automated.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: You need eyeballs, and you really why would you want to just rely on AI if there's a potential for a claim or a fine, or one of the things we really don't do is moving money around, shifting money.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like we'll say, hey, uh we built bots to say, hey, you collected$200 for recording fees to do e-recording, but the fees were only$180, so you owe that client back$20.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or the reverse, you undercollect it, you need to collect more.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: We'll build bots to make those decisions, uh, but but not the ones to kind of move money.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I still think there's the the biggest hype is probably, oh, AI is going to replace humans, and right now it can do 100% of the workflow.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's not, I would say that's not the case.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: We still need human in the loop on a lot of the work that we're doing.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Some work we don't, but um even the fallout work if it's 5-10%, you know, you want to have someone look at that.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're ultimately your name is uh on the bottom line, you're signing off on this deal and saying it's accurate, you know, your person may not need to do a 15, 20 minute QC, maybe they do a two-minute or three-minute QC, but still that see how much more work they can get, four or five, six X volume done per day by leveraging automation or AI uh to automate the process that someone was doing 100% manually today.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: So my experience, I I I don't know what you guys know at all, but I will I will say I use it every single day at this point.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, like four or five months ago, I couldn't say that probably six months ago.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: And the more you use it, the more uses you find for it.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_03: That that you know has been my experience.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_03: So I imagine these clients that you serve, you go in, you fix one process, it works, then they go, Oh, hey, where else could Jimmy solve?
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly that's exactly how it goes.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: We we've got one.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Account, it's a perfect example.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're in California, and we started with them three and a half years ago with one process.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted the open order process, but they had four different flows.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we had to build four different open order processes.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're up to like 45 bots.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_00: We've built 45 workflows, automated workflows for them in three and a half years.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the employees who were a little bit concerned.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're like, hey, can you do this?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: What about this process?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: Take this off of my plate.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, you I was outsourcing it to India or the Philippines.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: How much of this can you uh automate?
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in that case, they're typically buying the solution to own in-house.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they're really kind of like replacing the outsourcing model.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: They still have some AI costs, which aren't as much as people say think they are.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're not like extravagant.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I use all these tokens and my bill was$10,000 last month.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's not what I've seen.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's crazy.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: At least in my experience.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: But we're not like a big, you know, Oracle or somebody either.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, who's probably doing a lot more of that, or Walmart or Amazon.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I think if there's a lesson though for small business owners in all this, and this is something, you know, we talk a lot about this in our classes like what are the weaknesses of small businesses?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: We were just talking about this last night.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_03: We had a speaker, he's got half a dozen companies, you know.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_03: And and he buy, he's a big believer in buying these mature small businesses that have been around a million years and the owners are dying off, retiring, whatever.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Loves those.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: And he said, one common problem he finds is that they're all they don't have process.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: Instead, it's like they rely on one person.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, Jennifer knows how to do that.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody else in the place knows how to do it, but Jennifer.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so that to me is a really good reason why companies need to be thinking about taking care of these, you know, moving these things into applications, bots, whatever you want to call them.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: The process that takes that one person who knows everything out of the equation is that really increases the risk for their business.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and I don't think people talk enough about that.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_03: I I think in small business, you know, I mean, if you again you take my speaker, but he's not the only one that said this.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_03: I could say the guy the week before said the same thing.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: He's bought a lot of companies.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: They don't have process, they're dependent on one person, they're dependent on the owner too much.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, these are just common problems that they face.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_04: One of the problems though with with if you got a person that owns that process, that's where a lot of your protection is.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_04: It is.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, it's it's a plaguing, it's like a double, it's like a multiple paradoxical situation.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's a hostage.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_04: They are as the owner 100%.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would say probably 80% of the clients we do, they don't have a document.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's in someone's head, or it's in five people's head.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: That one person is the main person.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: What if they die tomorrow?
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Or they go work for your competitor, or they retire, or they get sick, they're in a coma for six months.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is your business gonna shut down?
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, document.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the first step that we do.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: We do that screen sharing session.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're doing a lot of it.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: The least you're gonna get is a fully documented workflow that if a new employee comes, say you don't want to deal with us, and you know, I just want to go back, you have that that documentation, you can go and give that to a new trainee and say, hey, this is the workflow, and they'll be like, oh wow, this is great.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: Before you got to look over someone's shoulder and hope that person has thought of all of the uh scenarios, um you know, or maybe some specific or new use cases or new you know, new paths, uh and then they they've given that to you because when they're gone, they're gone.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's one of the things that I think we give a value.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're also documenting that, and you keep a copy of that, and you can have that for a future, or you know, for some reason, three years down the road, you have a tech person that you hire to handle this.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, they have that as a starting point.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you have a code, they've got everything.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_04: I want to chat with Jimmy about something I think is really valuable for our clients in the last few minutes that we got.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_04: Sure.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um that as you've been talking that's interesting to me is this documentation in the business development cycle, right?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_04: Like what you just talked about.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_04: You have a business analyst that gets on the phone with a client.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_04: The client starts, the business analyst is asking some discovery questions about what they're wanting to achieve and eliminate.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_04: And then you said that the business analyst provides these this wireframe, and and just for a visualization, I'm I'm just making sure like we're talking about boxes with lines, diagrams that are showing a process flow.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, that's the first part.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: Programming 101.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's how we were taught to do computer programming in 1976.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_04: Right, yeah, and you're mapping out this process and then um, and then I guess, okay, so I just want to go through the flow of this because I find it intriguing.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's so valuable.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_04: Like if you're a landscape, right, or if you're a custom home builder for the love of God would they think that's so disappointing.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_04: You're menuing through client, you got the analyst.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_04: The analyst is asking certain questions about the project, yeah.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_04: They're not showing a process flow to the client right now, they're just listing.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_04: And then the analysts, after the call, goes and then they create this diagram.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_04: What are they using to create that diagram?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_04: Are they using a program or is it?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: So for the most part, we're using a tool called UiPath.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um UiPath is kind of the originator, the original RPA tool.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I can't remember if it was Hungary or Bulgaria or something where they started, but been in business 20 years, and that tool allows you to fairly quickly do like a like a workflow diagram.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, if you use it 100%, you can just kind of take that that uh recording and kind of upload it into UiPath and it'll kind of spit out what the flow kind of looks like.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of it is still manual.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, when they take that recording, they chop, they they digest the course the flow first, and they take and they say, okay, at this point, this is what the person said, and they take a screenshot.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just plug that into a word doc, you know, and put some you know just lines of description underneath that, or what step involved, and then what the next step is.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then, like I said, you might have a 200-page, 100-page doc that you're able to deliver to the client.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: The client looks at it, and the first first or second page has that flow.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was a project manager, program manager prior to getting into uh real estate.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I'm familiar with you know using uh the tools that are required to kind of map out the project, so map out the flow.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: So they do that first, and then all of the detail underneath that is is shared with the client so they can take a look at it and say, Yep, that's exactly.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh nope, you missed a step here.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: You need to add this in here.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that goes back and forth for a few rounds.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: Very rarely do we get it right 100% the first time, but it may be 90-95% there, and a client just needs to give us a little bit more information to clean it up or tighten it up.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_04: To to the listeners out there, here's the most substantial value what Jimmy's talking about.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_04: You are just you are defining the expectations between you and the client that that hopefully prevent scope creek, where your basic your business is now expectations for that.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, getting business.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_04: The other thing is that you have if if you guys line up the expectations correctly, you're gonna have a happy client at the end of it that will be doing more work with them.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_04: Everybody's on the same goddamn page.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, we can like and I and I'm just saying this in like with with passion because I'm going through with you know, VuPodcast videos right now.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_04: Like we're how do we set the correct expectations?
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_04: Because there's so much subjectivity going on between a client and what we can do, right?
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_04: Especially in our field of videos.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean, it's the same thing with software development.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_04: It's just like, I mean, I can say, hey, Jimmy, I want this bot that does X, Y, and Z.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_04: Jimmy spends 200 hours and I pay$20,000 for this bot.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_04: I get it, I'm like, God dang, man.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_04: This doesn't do a dang thing.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_04: Now I'm discouraged.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'm mad at Chippy.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_04: All these firestorms are prevented with this, with this exercise you're doing at securing your business.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: We we we definitely try to focus on tasks that are very mature, uh, very few, like exception paths.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, it's some volume.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you can get a fairly quick ROI.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we this is not a two, three-year return on your investment.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: Typically, we've got clients who are getting an investment back in a couple months, but definitely want to keep it between six and twelve months.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think people really appreciate that because we don't oversell, we don't add a bunch of extra tech if it's not required.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um but you know, I think the key is, like you said, document the workflow, the people can have it in their hand.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: If they're comfortable with that and it's a win upfront for both sides, then they'll move on and they'll find something else for you to look at automating.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really the relationships that we form.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to just do a one-off.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: We've got some where we just built one bot and then that was it.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, uh, we're building a relationship where the client's gonna keep coming back to us and say, okay, now I got another idea.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think about this?
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_00: And again, we're not charging you for that initial consultation.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the price that you quoted was is much higher than I would quote you based on uh 200 hours of work.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm just saying it could be a big investment if you're a very small business, you know, it could be a substantial investment, but it's a steal if you're a multi-million dollar company.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like the opportunity is as organized as you are, and as as disciplined as you are in the way you're running this thing, is go find somebody else who's an expert in another industry that's got similar problems and just simply roll out the model to them.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_03: Have them be the Jimmy of this other industry.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I agree.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking for a Jimmy right now to kind of take over sales starting next year, or at least help out with sales.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but yeah, you're right, whether it's another industry or moving into Canada or Europe or some other market.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we need someone who knows that market and that domain that we're going to go into if it's not real estate.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: Because you got all the rest of it there.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it just seems like you've got such a great method that I mean I I was I recently used a different landscaper than I've used for the last, I don't know, probably 17 years or whatever.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_03: I was so impressed with their process.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like you said, the guy comes out, he talks to you, he finds out what you want, he does a detailed scope, he gives me an aerial view, turn into a plan.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: The quantities are listed there.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: Before I sign, then I've got I get an electronic contract to sign.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: Smells out exactly what he's gonna do.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_03: He does it.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: I get I had a change order, I get an electronic contract to sign for that the price.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: At the end, today they finish yesterday.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_03: Today I get a document that says sign off on this.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_03: We've done everything we said we were gonna do.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: We have no other obligations to you whatsoever.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: And but I mean, I thought it was a really great process they used.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_03: And if you you can take what you do and apply this to like a million different fragmented, mature industries that have no process at all.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: They don't have enough staff to really do these things, and got people doing them who aren't good, or they just don't do them.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_03: Like Eric said, and that creates a million problems.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_04: So very interesting.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_04: Jimmy, hey man, it's been really great chatting with you today.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_04: I think there's a lot of value that entrepreneurs get out.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_04: I appreciate you sharing what you share.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_00: For having me on, yeah.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and you're you're paying it forward.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_04: I really appreciate that factoring you, and I know that our listeners do it.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_04: If people want to get a hold of you and talk with you more or hear more about the services you offer, how do they do that?
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all over uh LinkedIn all the time.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first place.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just look up Jimmy Lewis DFW.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's Jimmy Lewis DFW if you add it on to the end of LinkedIn.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: But also our website, uh true focusautomation.com, which like I said is under uh renovation right now.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: It should the lot the new site should be live on Friday, I believe.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, or I mean just email Jimmy at TrueFocusNow.com and that'll come directly to me.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: So True FocusNow NOW.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: True Focus Automation seemed too long years ago.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: My wife said, Why don't you just say true focus now?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, okay, and it's stuck.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: But Jimmy at TruefocusNow.com and you can hit me there.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like I said, otherwise, uh, LinkedIn, our website, and there's I've got a WhatsApp uh button on there.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can get me all kind of ways.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_04: Great, perfect.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh all right, Jimmy.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_04: We'll appreciate you having on among closes, Alex.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_04: So, folks, thanks for joining us again today.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_04: We hear a lot from Jimmy about processes, especially in the business development part, getting that stuff together, or how do you keep your scopes and reach with your clientele?
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_04: So, offshoring, all those types of techniques, and of course the almighty fear of AI and how you can overcome those things.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_04: Don't forget to subscribe to our channel on YouTube, join us on LinkedIn, and don't forget to go to our website and check out all the episodes we've been doing.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_04: I think we're up to like a like 160, 168, 69 episodes, which is cool, which is fantastic.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_04: So, like and share it, subscribe, and that helps us to continue to help you, and which is the whole point, partner here, because we sure the hell are not getting paid right now.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_04: We are not.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_04: We are not getting paid.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_03: We have donated millions of hours.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: You should have been charging 30 minutes ago when we started the clock.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_04: But this has been another wonderful episode of Baby Talk About Business.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_04: See you next time.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for joining us, Jimmy.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_04: Appreciate you.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_04: Have a good rest of the day.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Big Talk About Small Business.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming shows, be sure to head over to our website, www.bigtalkaboutsmallbusiness.com, and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Big Talk About Small Business.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: And be sure to head over to our website to read articles, browse episodes, and ask questions about upcoming shows.