 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter our guest today is Paul Dumas and this is smart business Hello, Paul. Hello Thanks for having me. Looks like you're coming to us from Miami Beach Not close. Oh, I don't have the version. We can see the sky. Well, I mean sunny Myrtle Beach, South Carolina today Love me some Myrtle Beach some good golf out there. There is Do you have any good rental homes there on Myrtle Beach? I suspect there is Used to be the timeshare cap of the world may all went out of business I'm sure there's plenty of places you can get because the buildings are still here You're looking to like have a training event rent something a fillet full of cleaning business owners Maybe I was I'm looking for a place for foundation scale Because I need I need more bedrooms than we had at the mansion. We only had 12 already sold almost all of those So you might check out Polly's Island Polly's P. A. W. L. E. Y. S. Polly's Island. It's about 20 miles south of Myrtle Beach and it's It's a similar type set up as Isle of Palms area and that type of thing except that all the homes are significantly older and tend to be bigger Good older is not sounding so great. Well The last major hurricane to come through there was an 89 so most everything's new since 89 Which is true of Isle of Palms too because that was the last time they had a big one come by and clean it up That's that's pretty old But I'm guessing they probably have to do some renovations. It's nice down there when you get actually out on the island It's very nice. All right Charleston Liz when you talk about old homes, you're talking about Old homes. Yeah, it was Francis Marion building it or Calvin Well, you know that new place that they're building right next door to the mansion Tom Yes, I was like, oh, I'm gonna go there. So we went and got that that place is only seven bedrooms Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's hard to find. I mean the mansion is 12 12 bedrooms. It's the largest one on Isle of Palms So but that new one you saw look how much bigger it is More square foot, but it's just used for different things. Yeah, only seven bedrooms. I was like, well, we're not we're not going there So, yeah Hey, Don good to see you All right, well, what are we talking about? I want to talk about it cuz I'm so excited Well, Paul your your first time guest of smart business moves Why don't we take a moment and share with our audience a little bit about yourself and Where you've been and you know how you got here, okay? Well, um, I'm owner owner co-founder of a company called Marketing for cleaners. We specialize in all things internet marketing We tend to focus almost exclusively on residential cleaning services Though I do have a couple pool cleaners and carpet cleaners and window cleaners throw in just to kind of fill out the portfolio Anything from website design redesign to search engine optimization a lot of Google ads some social media although What the way we approach it is what we recommend is typically tied more to What's your average revenue is and where you want to be in three six nine months? and so by the time they come to us, they're usually kind of a smaller outfit and they're not really ready for the full-fledged social meeting but we can out there and We understand the inside and outside of how a cleaning business works so that we can actually analyze a little bit of the numbers and say Okay, where's the breakdown? You know, I had an analysis earlier today with the client We're trying to figure out as the breakdown in the number of leads you're getting or is it in your sales process? Or is it in your follow-up and so we kind of take a consultative approach to everything But the core of what we do is in if we need if you need leads for your website or for your business we can show you how to do it and we've been doing it for 15 years and Hopefully knock on wood be able to do it for another 15 years or longer We're going to be talking today about some really cool stuff You know artificial intelligence and how that's kind of changing the landscape. So I'm going to go ahead and drop your URL to your website if Paul if anybody wants to get a hold of you This would be the best to do it Yes, absolutely. There's a little orange button up in the corner says free consultation. It goes to a Calumny link That's actually my calendar And now in good form all of these things are hidden behind a form Right you have to give me your information before you get the goods and that's part of any good website So even if you're doing a given away quotes and instant quotes online as a cleaning service You better hide behind a lead capture form or you're missing out. So we do the same thing on our site You're not going to see our pricing less. I know your name It's almost like you're a marketing company or something. Yeah, I'm looking at Your free stuff. I'm like, okay. You know that that caught my eye. I'm guessing that gets people Yeah, we've got quite a bit in there. We'd like to give away a lot of information because SEO in particular, which is our core service search engine optimization It can sound like black magic and there's certainly a lot of companies out there They they live on the black magic aspect get you out a 12 month contract have you pay a couple grand a month? You don't know if it's working or not. They can show you anything and say, yeah, look at all the work We've done so we try and be pretty transparent about stuff and show people exactly what we're doing and why and whether they want to get involved at that level is up to them, but we definitely bury them in information both most cases and that way When you're trying to deal in something that nobody understands, you have to be transparent. Otherwise, you're just taking people's money And I'm a big believer I'm a big believer and hopefully all my customers will agree But there may be one or two that disagree if you don't know whether your marketing is working Then it's not So you need to be have some transparency some accountability some what are you doing? And what what are the results and how do we get there and where are we gonna be next month? Where are we gonna be in three months that kind of stuff is very important I think in my internet marketing I hear it all the time. Yeah, we've been running Facebook ads for six months Is it working? I don't know that it's not Yeah, I love that so Paul do you run like a report that people get a report every month from you? We do we have multiple things tracking everything through Google Analytics So you can see where traffic is coming from we track rankings for different keywords which aren't as valid as they used to be But it's good to look for trends in some cases. We'll even integrate with Tracking, you know, number of leads generated versus number of leads closed so they can track and see Over time, you know, not everybody has access to sophisticated reporting in their own system So we try and coach them up a little bit on on that so they can tell, you know Where were you a year ago? How many new customers do you need to hit your goal in six months, you know, the magic number Number if it's a million dollar revenue company that you need to hit 83,333 dollars a month on average And how do we get there if we're stuck at $55,000 a month or if we're stuck at $20,000 a month And what are the cheapest leads? Where do they get to come from and that may shift over time? I mean I Have some test for instance where by yelp well yelp only works in one specific instance in once one way Otherwise, it's the burning money You know Google ads what kind of marketer year and how much budget you have your budgets $10 a day It's not going to work and here's why I take that money and go buy some business cards and go knock on some doors so You got to fit the plan to the company and what their goals are and what they're capable of doing It's not a one-size-fits-all And a lot of our customers will come customer will come to us and over time as they grow what we do for them changes And yeah, that would make sense as their company changes. I would imagine that there needs change as well Absolutely. Yeah, and we've been very fortunate to you know have customers that tend to stick around and Have a lot of success stories that we can kind of you know Someone wants a referral we can send them to the site and they can call 50 people and there may be one in there Doesn't like me anymore, but most of them I think have pretty decent things to say about me Yeah, you've got a strong reputation in the industry. That's Certainly, you know everybody I talked to speaks highly of your work and I love the idea of Evolving the strategy is the business of laws. That's the the goldsmith book what got you here won't get you there and you know as You also have to make sure that you're not Overspending or getting more than you can handle. I mean if you're a startup and your phone starts ringing ten times a day What are you gonna do? Yeah, you're not really handle that if you're a startup. You're probably in the field still cleaning and you're missing half phone calls The other side of it is do you really know why people say yes when you give them a quote You know statistically about 80% of the time it's because you're the first one to answer the phone We talk a lot about that So unless you can kind of remove yourself from your business and look at it as an outsider You don't know enough, you know, I have clients sometimes that they don't ever answer the phone Well, no wonder you're not exposing any sales. What do you want me to do? So yeah, you almost have to look in a mirror a little bit and we're all guilty of not doing that But part of our goal is to kind of have an outside approach to look at it And then also I'm really really good at crowdsourcing. So when people talk to me and they and I say well, this is what I'm seeing Nationally because I spend all day talking to my customers. Oh, you sound smart now I'm just good at crowdsourcing from all my smart customers But it's nice to be able to share that information with them and see well is yelp working Well, I can say only this person in this city is working for in these two. It's not working for and here's why we think That's true. So your experience may vary, but at least they can have a resource. Hopefully to be able to do that Yeah, I love that. So Tom you're a big believer in that as well, right taking taking the information using the data that you have and figuring out how to apply it to multiple different ways Makes good sense to me We want to talk about the good stuff, Paul. We want to talk about artificial intelligence because that seems to As the whole Wayne Greski thing you want to escape to where the puck is going it seems like things are moving quickly in that direction and It's going to be disruptive. It's going to be changing the way we do business and It can be an opportunity or it can be a threat So let's take the rest of this hour and figure out what the threats are and how can we turn it into an opportunity? Okay, well, I'm happy to start off by scaring everybody if you want Okay, so let's think about how fast this is happening. First of all, okay, and I took the liberty of researching a few little factoids Let's think about how long it took for technology to be adopted So it took about eight years after tv was Introduced to the market for there would to be a tv and half the living rooms in america eight years This is tv. We all we probably all watch the tv today, even if it was just for three seconds in the background It took about two and a half years for the iphone when it came out in those seven to get 40 percent market share And now smartphones, if you don't have a smartphone, there's something wrong with you It took less than 30 days for chat gpt to reach a hundred million users They released the first version in november. It was version 3.5, but the first public version was in november In march, so four months later. It's my math, right five months later They released version four and it's 10 times better 10 times on the salicylop But you're talking about a factor of 10 times better than the first version So what is it going to be in three months six months a year? Now we're figuring out how do we integrate this into everything we do And then we can talk about how's this going to affect internet marketing because eventually people are going to stop looking at a screen And how do you advertise? How do you market? How do you rank? How do you do anything when nobody's looking at a screen? But the way I would envision it is imagine i'm sitting here and my phone or my little alexa speaker or whatever is 10 feet away And I simply say hey google What who's the best cleaning service near me that is pet friendly or who's the best cleaning service near me that? Uses products that won't affect my 12 year old with asthma or pick any of a million different questions I'm not looking at a screen. So suddenly local services ads aren't applying I'm not looking at a screen. So suddenly google ads aren't applying I'm not looking at a screen. So suddenly being number one in on a google organic search doesn't apply So then the question becomes how do I become the answer to the unknown AI question? And the simple answer to that is content Disclaimer and well on this call probably have heard me say this a million times We're trying to predict the future here if we're half right. We're all geniuses But it doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to think that things are going to move away from the old days of Let me search for house cleaners in Charleston, South Carolina And then suddenly Because we all had phones because geolocate people maps were involved. So now I could look for a house cleaner near me Now we're going to be in what is going to be called is called basically conversational search But I'm not looking at anything. I'm not getting a ranking of the top three things in a map I'm not getting any of that. I'm having a conversation with google And I'm going to be given information based on what they think is best And we're going to trust that they're giving us the best solution Or Yes No, I'm just curious for for for context, you know, I remember Having some of these discussions. It seems like a half a dozen years ago with You know, hey siri. Hey elux, uh, you know find out we you know, there's Pre-covid absolutely. It was probably five six years ago. We were all thinking that by now Nobody would be you know, googling anything. They would just be Talking to Alexa and Alexa would be sending somebody at their doorstep tomorrow You know what it didn't work Yeah, why is ai what it you know ai is is changing the game, but what makes Today you know why siri doesn't work Siri doesn't work. How many times do you say? Hey, siri call my mom and they're calling somebody named mike and it's trying to work now by the way and So how how many times because you have an accent or you're too far from it or you've got Gump on your microphone on your phone Siri to this day people don't realize siri's still in beta officially It's not an official release. They've never gone out of beta. Wow And it probably won't because they're going to release an ai version of it The difference here is ai is better. It is that much better that you can literally have a conversation with it It is a truly conversational language model Where it can adapt on the fly. It doesn't have to go back to the beginning Remember the old days and this was like new technology. You'd call american airlines and say I want to check my flight status and you talk to a computer then you hear the little As it was thinking it would come back and about half the time the system would fail because you asked it something They didn't know what answer to and it had no way to gate off of that to take you somewhere else So you'd hang up if you're frustrated and you'd call back and All of those days are gone when ai takes over it you You literally as soon as this thing bridges the gap from text to speech which is already happening You'll be able to have entire conversations with someone who is human sounding someone. I say listen to me Last night I have a Can we just hear I have a I have a google voice activated a light bulb in my living room And I asked on the living room light please and my son was like why are you so polite to the light bulb? You just get used to thinking of these things in terms of the the human aspect of it You're going to be able to have a conversation with your phone where it speaks back to you Then that's going to be the difference right now siri doesn't speak back it is act and react It doesn't take the next level And that's what the difference is the quality was so far advanced over siri. I don't know Throughout a number. I don't know what the number is but This ai makes siri look like you're going through a card catalog and finally finding the card you wanted It is that big of a leap in technology When you can go to chat gpt and say Give me the top 10 reasons why I might get fired and it gives you eight that you've already thought of And they've written it out better than what you thought of That tells you that this system is more capable of conversing and and Honestly, how many of us here have hired customer service representatives only to realize that they don't have a phone persona Oh, yeah, the ai is going to be your phone persona. There's no doubt about it. It's already passing medical exams It's already passing the bar. These are the education level of this thing is beyond The sum of all of us on this show And I know I bring the bar down a little bit That's the difference siri is a tool that was allowed That enabled it to to basically speak answers, but where it was getting the answers was still the old way of searching There was no I don't want to call it intuition because it's not intuition, but there was no Well, that's the artificial intelligence part of it yeah, and Once that happens You're going to be able to literally have my phone across the way and Tom You've heard me tell this story once before at least but I can say hey google What pizza company near me has the best deal on two medium pizzas? Well today, it's xyz for 999 Would you call them? Please and have it delivered to my home and use the visa that's on file because you've already loaded your credit card into your phone And 45 minutes later a piece is going to show up and probably have a robot delivery But we may not be there yet. All right, but the part where It does like it seems like it's a little bit different paul I'm still hearing that ai is not like it's not a search engine And so it can't tell you the best of something it can tell you Okay, you're absolutely right But that's a short-term thing because chat gpt still in beta and google is not released barred yet They're going to integrate it in there chat gpt that they put an artificial cutoff where it doesn't pull any information more recent than 2021 It's like november 2021 whatever that was by design as part of their beta test This whole thing is still a big beta test Yeah, but they're going to roll it out So if I if I ask chat gpt who the president of the united states as well as bad example But something you know who won the baseball game last night It wouldn't know it likely would not know if you're on chat gpt as a prompt unless you'd go to bing where they've unlocked parts of it To be more current because bing has chat gpt built into it now, but it's a separate mode when you go to bing.com That's microsoft search engine There's a box then right below it says would you like to use chat gpt for your search and it they're they stair step that in It's not pulling real-time data. You can't ask chat gpt. What's google stock price today? It doesn't have access to that information yet, but they will They absolutely bar none Literally days and weeks from now that will be in place and it will affect everything And the next android updates liable to have ai built into it the next ios update. It's going to be there And so you ask it, you know, what stocks do I want to buy today and based on you know, my financial objectives It might make some recommendations There's already companies big companies out there that are testing ai for that platform and they're out performing the s&p by a factor of about five right now Just in their short-term testing It's going to change the economy Because ai is going to influence everything It's going to change wait wait till ai influences Flight schedules and fuel usage And suddenly these airlines can save 10 percent across the board on their field because their entire schedule is ai based All right, it's going to affect everything All right, so what what are you thinking about like right now where everybody wants google reviews, right? Are they going to even matter? Yes, because people are going to be looking for the best of something and google's going to tie their review system into it Yelp already tied into bing Without it even be an ai if you do a search for bing the reviews that show up in the big map are yelp reviews Yeah, who's the same thing? So reviews are absolutely going to be important What ai in my view at least is going to do is it's going to make Content has always been king when it comes to search engines If you don't have content on your site nobody knows what you do where you do it But content's going to be absolutely critical to answer the question You know well, who's the best cleaning service for You know a family with an asthmatic 12 year old most cleaning services here don't even have the word asthmatic on their site right so When we're talking about An average frequently asked questions for instance the average site has 10 20 Questions on it. Maybe it needs to have 200 And be categorized here's our most popular questions for our visitor to our site And here's the other 90 questions for search engines and ai Maybe we need to have a glossary of terms as a plug-in that you can put into a website where you can Go in and have a term and then write a description of that term as long as you want it to be You have a glossary hidden behind the scenes And that's just for search engines to seek so that you don't have to have on your home page that you're pet friendly or that you're You only use hypoallergenic you can have it built in behind the scenes So that your site becomes two parts you have the user experience, which is what everybody has now We all want a pretty site that works. That's the user experience And then structurally buried behind the scenes You have all the other Turning your site into a wikipedia or encyclopedia of everything Because nobody wants to read 5 000 words about how you're pet friendly, but ai may need that to work now and ai can pull from that to Answer the questions that consumers will be asking I had a call earlier today with someone where they have Material data sheets for all their products, you know a password protected portal for their employees You know what kind of glass cleaner to use what kind of general purpose clear What kind of this that they have that for their employees so they're aware of it and then they also had You know the whole product list they had this that and the other Well, why not make that information public so that ai can synthesize it And be able to tell oh, yeah Well, these guys use a eco friendly glass cleaner and eco friendly this so If you have allergies, maybe this is the right fit for you A lot of those safety data sheets are like images like pdf files. Can can they be crawled? If if it's a pdf that is formatted properly as long as you can highlight it and copy and paste from the text from that pdf then Google system can crawl If it's just a Hey, I took a jpeg and I converted it to a pdf just to make it downloadable. No, they can't read text and images things like that So there's there's ways of making it where you can and the oversimplified test is if you can highlight the text and copy and paste it into an email Then search engines can crawl Because it's just text. It's just a pdf file instead of an html document or a php document Things like we're getting way too technical, but yes Hey, paul matt ricketts has got a thought here I know he's been noodling around and looking in the ways that he can use AI as an internal tool and You see he's he's talking about using internal data to to train an AI tool for for for training his people Sure, I already have I've already heard of people taking their entire handbook For instance and plugging it into AI and then saying would you please create a 25 question Quiz on this employee manual and it spits out the questions Can you format as an html form please and it spits it out as a form and you put it on your employee portal And they got you can easily create little quizzes to get people to pass things you can have them You can have the different sections of your content and then ask AI Can you expand upon this please and write this in a sixth grade level or write this as a ninth grade level? Just expand on things so that you can have A more robust system for people to access some people can read a bullet point and get it Some people need three paragraphs to get some people learn different ways The image side of AI does not work yet, but it will imagine being able to say hey Take all the headlines in this document and create an image of each one So that someone visual can pick up on what's going on Or maybe you do a video you turn your entire handbook into a video or 10 videos different modules And it will literally close caption it and take that text and have a digital avatar reading it There's this guy's the limit on how people are going to use this There's people a lot smarter than me out there that are going to find even better ways to use it But that's just the top of my head different applications. You can think of to be able to do it And then you will eventually There's people who've already written this but they haven't to my knowledge made it commercially available But imagine being able to have a chat system on your site that only uses your website as a data set So when people come in and ask questions, it's only using your site It's not using the old internet And you build your pricing into the background where customers can't see the pricing But then your chat engine can go ahead and either integrate with your You know management software or integrate with whatever you put on your site That's in the data set and people can literally get a price right through the chat There's some people that have kind of done that but they're doing it not with AI They're simply using old old time if then logic and if Somebody asks a question that the if then doesn't work for it just doesn't have an answer with AI You'll still be able to gate them to a resource I mean at some point you're gonna Every one of the cleaning services every business in the world name it car dealership airline is going to have an AI reception Where it's a voice that sounds human that is going to be able to Answer all your questions give you a quote right over the phone and if you ask a question that you can't that the AI can't answer It's gonna say Would you hold just a moment? I'll get you on the phone with a manager and then your phone will ring and it's time for the human And the human will come in you'll be able to log into your system And there'll be a transcript of that convert of that phone call So you can pick up the conversation from there It's coming and it's coming in months not years. It's not 20 years ago when we used to laugh imagine something you're gonna be plugging your car in this is happening now It is absolutely happening now There there was something that I heard yesterday that A term that I wasn't familiar with the uh the the Turing test t r i n g You're familiar with that. I'm sure Have you ever seen the movie blade runner? Uh bits and pieces the entire book is basically an exercise monitoring test It's a series of exercises where you can verify whether something's human or artificially intelligent It's kind of the point where machines can exhibit the same level of intelligence as humans You can't distinguish between the two And there's a lot of smart people out there that think that by the end of this year AI will be to that point that Just through voice conversation You can be talking to to an AI bot and you would think you're talking to a person You would know the difference by the end of this year from a simply context visual and Auditory standpoint. It's almost there now. So I don't doubt it You know, you'd have to be pretty sophisticated to decipher it now if you're reading AI content constantly on I don't know whatever people are writing articles I mean you go to yahoo.com and there are all these different articles that are clickbait About half those now are AI generated and you can tell because there is a pattern when you don't do it, right? You know, I have people all the time. Should I use AI for blogging? You can but You better do it smartly because if it takes me three 30 seconds to figure out you're doing it How long does it take google to do it and if google knows you're doing it? They decide to penalize AI content somewhere at some point down the time and then the road then Are we all in trouble? And we're all at the whim of the 800 pound gorilla and I know google's behind on AI But they have more money than most small countries. So they'll catch up. So it's my understanding that They can distinguish if you use chat gbt to write a blog post for you and just post it that Google can figure out that that was written by chat gbt. Sure There's a couple of different AI engines out there and they all have different styles So unless you know how to Inter prompts to override that you know how to do a real-time edit to change certain things and personalize it Let's say we're writing a blog post and we want 10 questions to ask your raid service before you hire them Stay at our topic that a lot of people have on their site Well, there are certain things if you're going to use AI you almost have to have it write and rewrite sections of it five or 10 times So that it becomes personalized to perhaps the company that is writing it And has a personality in the style of xyz If you want to know how AI works go and have it write Three paragraphs on any topic but do write three paragraphs on Why the sky is blue in the style of and then pick different people william Faulkner William shakespeare William Holden an actor and you'll bring three different things. Yeah, there you go And you will get three completely different articles on the same topic But you can see how easy it is to manipulate the quote-unquote style or voice of the AI engine So as long as you're sophisticated in how you're getting you're asking for the content You can go a long way towards making it less obvious, but if you're just doing a standard write an article on this Anybody who's used a system for more than a day can tell that it's AI generated because there's a certain pattern to their language We all have speech patterns. It has its own So if I stick all of my stuff all of everything that I've written And into An AI platform. I don't even know which one And I teach it what I sound like and then I say Write an article about cleaning toilets in my voice You can do that Let's say you have a website where you've been blogging for three years and you got 500 articles on there You can say In the style of the writer on this site and you put in your domain name write this See how it works. Sometimes if it has enough information, it absolutely can do that I can have it write a blog article in the style of a new york times author and it'll do it because there's enough content Out there on the new york times and it knows really clearly what their Editorial standards are and it'll do a pretty good job of matching that It's scary, but it'll do it. You've seen people already go out there and say, hey, uh, write a write a poem about Cancel keepers in the style of dr. Seuss and you'll get a dr. Seuss all rhyming poem that talks about your cleaning service It takes about eight seconds for it to do it so Jenny is uh throwing us a softball here. She wants to know, uh You know How AI I guess contributing to campaign management with made central or plans to incorporate more AI into made central's functionality um Yeah, I mean made central, you know, AI is going to be changing The tech stack in in all of our businesses. It's much bigger than just made central but It's certainly big on our radar screen. We're asking questions like there's like a hundred Or more templates that you know, we have inside of made central for email for text and Where are we going to need templates anymore? Are you going to be just verbally hey, I want to send an email campaign to All my you know every two week customers who live in this particular zone who Haven't had their home cleaned in the last three months and tell them about our You know spring special And it was it'll spit it out. I mean, these are things that we're looking at. It's not there now, but uh You know as the technology evolves. I mean Paul think about this. This is really setting here from a you know somebody who's You know got a got a big interest in this AI is evolving quickly But the application of what are we going to be able to do with this AI with inside of our businesses is really the interesting point We're going to be chasing it, right You will but there'll be some things that become a lot shorter like there's a site out there I wish I could remember what it's called Oh, I should have looked it up before but there's a they're advertising on tv about Go in there and using AI It'll write an iphone app for you. You put in all the criteria and it'll write the app and it's functional Then you just have to go through the process of submitting it to the app store their stuff um You know, I've already had situations where simple basic little javascript forms or calculators I can have AI say Hey based on this criteria Would you write a javascript that calculates x y z and it'll spit it out It as long as you know what you're doing with the code you can manipulate We need to to integrate it into a website. I've already done this a month ago. I did this for somebody We're trying to come up with something. I don't even remember what it was. It was a calculator for something and So the ability to as long as you understand how the application works And what platform it's in there are going to be people out there. There already are people out there I'm not that person. I'm not a coder. I'm not a You know, I don't work with microsoft.net or any of that Too old for that stuff But there are people out there already who know how to ask the AI to write a module of code And then they just write the bridge to make it work there So let's say you want in your scheduling software to have A google or an apple maps api integrated into it so that you could do what you're talking about with the dispatching And then you use ai to bridge that That apple map api with whatever you're doing for your calendaring Your schedule So now you have a geolocated schedule. So you know if paul is going over here on tuesday And for some reason Liz is going over here on thursday, but they're only a mile apart Why wouldn't you take some effort to get both those customers on the same day? And you'll be able to use ai to do that and it's not going to take an engineer who's a Ai genius they're going to be able to write these modules and then just simply bridge them together So to answer jenny's question in time how we schedule how we provide customer service how we Give quotes how we do sales all of that is going to be Powered by ai and a lot of it's going to be be automated You know the whole and you get to the point when somebody be having a conversation with a bot that's ai driven You know, I know a lot of people that are are like Offshoring customer support because it's more economical and that's you know kind of No, it's not cutting edge But I mean it's it's it's it's a way of getting it done You know in a more economical way And I think the next iteration of that is it's going to be ai driven and there's not going to be human Involved anywhere with with a lot of that Well another application potentially for ai is imagine you have a feedback system a quality control feedback system And the customer is giving you feedback after hopefully every time you're in their home Imagine using ai to draft an email that synthesizes. They were an Intelligent appropriate response to the last month of their feedback And all you have to do if you want to is to review it make a couple edits and send Suddenly what you should take 10 minutes of drafting an email to reply to a customer who's mad that you forgot to clean something That email is 85 90 done. All you gotta do is review it and go. Yep. That sounds good And at the same time it modifies the work instruction. So the next time you clean the home you're Correcting whatever problems that you're having and instead of asking how did we do on a out of five stars every time? What can we do better? What could we do worse? Maybe you started modifying those forms and say if there were three things that we could do better What would they be if there are three things that you think are just exceptional? What they should do would they be and then you put the notes into that customer record saying They really love when we do this. Please make sure to always do this because that may be what is causing you to keep that customer And on the flip side when we miss doing this They call and complain. So make sure you do this. I mean, you're going to be able to get a much more Detailed amount of information about the customer experience rather than yeah, they were here today. Everything was great That helps nobody And on the HR side helping you with if it's if it's a performance issue You know your ai can can support your your supervisors make you a better leader, you know giving you the No prescription to okay. We'll pull you know this this cleaning professional aside You know these are the things that that you need to do recommend A corrective action forward if you will write a termination letter, right? And I know people that are using this to write They're they're they're recruiting and so I mean a lot of us being you know it's it's It's not all integrated and completely automated, but it's being used in businesses in a lot of different ways today So actually and well, I think as we look at the Go ahead pa As I said, you know, we talked about scaring everybody with how this is going to change but on the flip side it's also going to improve our marketing because imagine a world where You can put in the criteria of who is your ideal client to facebook or yelp or Angie or pick a platform And if they're using ai to place your ad Only for people beyond a gender or an age or a zip code It's going to make every ad platform on the planet more effective But What's happening what's going to happen and I'm not guessing here. This is absolutely going to happen It's going to splinter the the marketing landscape remember I don't know 15 years ago. Netflix was the only streaming service. So we all had Netflix and now we all have hbo and paramount and stars and amazon prime and hulu So we're going to get to a point where we're going to have to advertise on tiktok we're going to have to advertise on facebook and instagram and yelp and And we're going to hope that ai can help us only hit of the 100 people who see my business on yelp I only want my ad I want to pay to be in front of the three people that fit a very specific demographic we always talk about When businesses do you know who your customer is and if they answer anybody then you're absolutely don't know what you're doing If you can tell you know what 75 percent of my customers are this gender between this age group And they generally speaking work and then we can start feeding those into these ad systems And you're not going to show up in front of as many people But the people you show up in front of are going to be far more qualified as a potential lead And that's where ai is going to help not scare us so much. It's going to absolutely help us be more efficient with their advertising You know You you go back, you know 15 years talking about the net flex, you know go back just a little bit further You know it used to be marketing was a was a was a money game and this was before the internet really was You want a full page or a half page? Right the yellow pages and whoever you know had the biggest ad won and with seo and everything involved in digital marketing it seemed to democratize in a little bit you could you know have good content and You know not spend a lot of money, but but but pay attention to it and work hard and you could compete And is it coming full circle again that it's just going to be a money game and whoever throws the most money I think in the short term. Yes until the different platforms figure out a better way Um, we talked about google delaying their ai they fumbled out of the gate But I think part of that was intentional the reason google isn't leading the ar charge It's because they don't know how to monetize it. How do you want an ad? On a conversational search like we talked about where my phone's across the room Because if I asked my phone a question across the room and it says while I look at the answer listen to this ad That's how they try and do it people will stop using it. They will revolt The other thing that's kind of scary as we look at having to do this and this has very little to do with ai But it plays into it Thankfully, none of us here have to worry about this because we're still a long way away But you know what the number one search engine is for 18 to 24 year olds right now for the first time in history It's not google. Do you know what it is? For the 18 to 24 year old the number one search engine is tick tock Oh, that makes sense. So what happens with that 24 year old is 44 and suddenly in your demographic as a cleaning service Now this is further down the road, but google is not always going to be google Because they aren't going to take over. There'll be something besides tick tock by then because these generations You know my 20 year old son thinks i'm a complete moron for having even a facebook login You know and thanks to his older brothers an idiot for being on instagram all the time because he's 20 and instagram is for the Old folks so every generation is different But it used to be social media was where we went to look cool and talk to friends and let grandpa see pictures and stuff like that But they're using tick tock as a search engine They're going in saying I need to learn how to write a resume and they're watching 10 videos on people who talk about writing a resume They're not going to google That's kind of scary Sarah mitchell From um, oh, what's the name of her company? Tom? Do you remember? Yeah from eco mama. She has been doing that in tick tock for over a year now So when she first was telling me about this I was like You're doing what? She was like, yeah, I use I use tick. That's how I find everything. It's faster. It's easier. I get my answers like this I'm never going to have to watch a video that's going to take longer than a minute And I I get everything Now I'm I'm too old for tick tock But I have young people work for me and they teach me this stuff But I would say if you're having a hard time hiring cleaning, you know technicians And you're okay with the 18 to 24 year old which in some markets you don't want to do But sometimes you have to you might run a hiring out on tick tock because that's your audience I wouldn't want a bunch of 18 year olds working for me, but you know different markets different folks But I mean it's coming when that 18 year old becomes 28 And they're still using tick tock and googles for the old folks Then what are we going to do so that we have to look at those things Where are we going to be in three months? We're going to be in three years We're going to be in 10 years if we still plan on being business in business and there's certainly A lot of us out there that still intend to be doing business in 10 years So we got to know that and if if if that generation follows tick tock Then we're already seeing it now with facebook the average facebook here the average facebook user Unsurprisingly gets older by a year every year because they locked in their audience during that time frame and they followed it They're not gaining a lot of users. They're losing users because At some point we're no longer able to use technology, but I mean you can go back my space was that way the facebook took over and instagram took over twitter kind of On the side now tick tock is this Generation not my generation Hi gen X all of us who don't care about anything but um We have to be aware of that and see where the people are now thankfully the 18 year old is not hiring you to clean their home Because they don't have a home yet. They're still it's like my 20 year old They're still wake on dad to pay for the cleaning But it's going to happen and we just have to pay attention to it and ai is going to change it all There's going to be an ai social media platform where all your friends are going to be virtual And you're not going to know it it's going to happen. It's going to be probably somebody's going to do it as a joke And it's going to take off it's going to happen so Like the year from now White and I know that this is crystal ball type stuff, but You know you're recording this to you you know I don't I think the I think ai is is is you know every month there's really cool stuff that's coming out but You know, I've seen a lot of technology that was really hot and the expectations. There's a there's a technology adoption curve that Spikes really high and then it kind of drops and then it kind of goes up slowly And it's not so much the technology is not awesome. It just takes businesses a while to figure out what to do with it um But in in time maybe sooner than we think A lot of stuff that we've got people doing in our businesses from from sales to scheduling to recruiting to hiring You know if ai is not doing it ai is certainly going to be be assisting and You know our our world will will change a meaningful way I like the question about you know made central and it's not just made central It's every you know piece of technology we use is Going to be a lot more relevant paradigms are going to change, you know Absolutely The idea of of of how we give quotes and You know, it wasn't that long ago that the idea going to a website and plugging in number of bedrooms number of bathrooms And I want every other week cleaning and actually getting a quote and booking your credit card in That was cutting edge You know, how long is it? Is that even going to be a thing? You know, it's it's going to be replaced by ai and a conversation and it's it's going to The interaction is going to be completely different I haven't really researched it But you got to believe somebody's already working on it where you could have a button on your website That you'd go from typing in information to speaking it in Yeah, so I'll never fill out a form again. I'll just say it It'll turn your standard leave capture form or your quote form Instead of it having a field says first name last name email address It's just going to be what's your first name ball? What's your last name do us? What's your email ball at marketing for cleaners? You're going to have a conversation with the website I haven't seen that but it would be so easy to put together that I can't imagine somebody's not going to already have a Little icon next to the form saying would you just like to speak this form? Whatever fill it in with your voice. I sound like a caveman. I thought that way, but It's going to happen and you're talking about a year from now I would be surprised if a year from now some big company whether it's an AT&T or a spectrum or even like a call reel Doesn't have a virtual reception service that you could train to where we no longer ever answer our phone And you can have phone service 24 7 for pennies a day And if I want to call you at midnight and get a quote and book online I'll be able to do it or not book online or book over the phone. I'll be able to do it You'll come in the next morning go now we had eight people sign up over Okay, well one of them's this afternoon because they had room for the schedule and you had communication to the staff to be able to do it all and in the level of detail in terms of the the scope of work they can have a conversation the conversations that They have on the phone when you're giving a phone call at all that can be captured in a way where it can be incorporated Not only you know in the work instructions, but also the pricing and Pricing is going to look like what the airlines do and this is something that we are working on now where Dynamically based upon Time of day day a week days were busy days that were not busy that your company can offer You know here's 10 different prices under different scenarios pick the thing that you want to do just like flying across country and If they want to go Friday morning bad enough You never say no you just give them a price that's high enough that you can then go back and Convince somebody else that they want to get their home clean next week and you're still making an extra buck Your teams never go home at the end and then your teams never go home midday because they don't you know Have enough work your ai would be Taking the leads that you have and working it to the point where they're going to offer a deal to somebody It's going to be so doggone good that they're not going to pass They're going to going to take that to fill that hole and that that functionality is going to become an employee benefit First is your competition because you can almost guarantee your staff that you're going to spend 20 minutes less a day behind the steering wheel for whatever the time of year That's what or imagine the personnel issues and tom i think i heard you mention this Somewhere else is imagine if you can have ai handle all of your quality control employee management If you have an employee that's constantly doing x y z and then you can have ai analyzed what they're doing wrong And send them a message about what they're doing wrong. You suddenly don't have The personality conflict of oh the trader's just picking on me. I don't like this job anymore Whatever Be understanding computers Right. It's it's it's cold hard data Your ai's ai has read all the feedback from every house you've played in the last 30 days and they say you're not very good at this Here's how you can get better In one of our circles, we had somebody that was um They wanted to help with an employee issue That they had and so we just punched the issue into because she had already typed it into facebook Hey guys, this is my problem blah blah blah So we just live we just took her problem Put it into ai and said what are the best five ways to handle this employee issue Y'all they were all good They were all good. I was like, oh my goodness Alrighty, so there is just less and less need for A lot of what humans currently are doing It's kind of crazy Yes, especially when you can like take your policy manual and other You know rules regulations and just information about your business and feed it into an ai tool If i'm a supervisor and i want to know how to handle something I just ask the the bot the question and it gives me A much better answer than any human being could It's exciting, isn't it? It's exciting It's also kind of nerve-wracking because you don't know where it's going. Oh, we lost paul He'll be back. Yeah, you will I thought I was the one having bad internet issues his his were just as bad as mine if not worse So yeah, it's really exciting, but it's also so Disconcerting Because you know How's it gonna impact us? I feel like we are in a little bit better position because so much of what we offer is You know, I hand it takes takes physical A physical person A lot of people are you know jobs are going away Yeah, the activity of providing house cleaning services is certainly Going to be in demand for the foreseeable future But how we manage that everything from a marketing to recruiting to sales and scheduling and you know All the all the all the major processes and like the foundation's process flow that we teach All of that's going to be turned upside down and stuff that people are doing is going to be done by ai and And if a human's doing it, it's going to be oftentimes assisted by ai it's um It's going to take it's going to take fewer people to manage professionally manage a house cleaning business And we're going to be more profitable doing it It's going to be exciting Hey paul long time. No see Yeah, that's weird. They just went black on me. Sorry. I figured you're tired of talking to me Pull the plug So excited and you went to to put something in the jet gbt So in the last few minutes here, um, you know, we've we've talked a lot about how ai is changing quickly and how it's going to be changing How business is conducted in a lot of meaningful ways Um You know, I've talked to a lot of people and paul. I gotta I gotta tell you I've learned More about ai from you as much from you as I have any any other resource you definitely are a Wealth of knowledge you spend a lot of time studying this but your your real game is helping cleaning businesses Generate more demand through through through digital, you know technology and I guess ai is going to evolve that But here we are today in April 2023 and if people are interested in growing their Cleaning business by generating more demand Um, that's your bag. You can help them, correct? Absolutely and our goal is to You know walk them through the process and kind of create like I said a three six and twelve both plan It's not a situation where Give me your credit card and all your money and we're gonna do exactly for you What we do for everybody else it doesn't work that way. We really try and Figure out are you a three person shop? Or are you an 80 person shop and what is going to give you the best best bag for your buck? And kind of listen to you and see what are your goals? You know, some people are content to do what they're doing I'd say most people are looking to grow at a certain clip and Sometimes you have to tell them. Hey, don't spend money on this yet. You're not ready and Almost argue with them a little bit because somewhere else. They said, oh, I should be doing this Well, maybe not let's see where you are in the flow and It's worked for us that approach has worked for us very well over the years And you'll give them a little bit of coaching as well if they're not answering the phone You know, you'll help them understand that you know increasing your your ad worth spend isn't really going to help you much It is I'm sad to say that that conversation happens more often than it should you would think in any business, but We all get busy and we sometimes get so down in You know neck deep in our business that we forget What's happening around us and I'm guilty of it too Anybody who's ever sent me an email knows that I get 300 emails a day and can be slow replying and I have to You know step outside and go, okay, what's my own weakness? Oh emails my weakness Let's have those emails go somewhere else that somebody else can handle them And we all have to look in the mirror sometimes and sometimes it's nice just to have a friendly face It doesn't have a stake in what you're doing. Look at it and go, you know what maybe we should try this I'm going to drop your uh url and chat one last time. I appreciate that and You're not sure just reach out and have a discussion with paul, you know, you Sometimes we don't know what we don't know but uh the landscape is changing and What got you here won't get you there and I think it's safe to say that just because something's working now with all the Changes that are taking place with with technology and AI we're going to change with that Marketing part of it. I think my best advice that anybody is And this advice is true anytime but particularly over the next six to twelve months Be prepared to change be flexible because we talked about you know, 90 percent of what we talked about here We're trying to guess what's going to happen And You never know there may be something new come down the pipeline where somebody figures out how to do x y and z and We may find out in six months. We no longer need a website because we're all just getting it telepathically. I don't know But be prepared be flexible um I've been advising people the last ever since AI came out whatever you do don't sign a contract for anything because A 12 month contract is probably going to take you six months down the wrong path But hopefully you work with people that are Keeping up with this work with people that are open-minded enough to know when they're right and when they're wrong And open-minded enough to say okay. Well, we're not doing that today But give me 30 days and we can be doing that and let's see how it works and Be flexible because we are in a paradigm shift right now This is no different than when electricity started rolling out through new york city This is no different than when the first polio vaccines started rolling out through pennsylvania wherever I think saw this is a Generational shift in every aspect of our life And just embrace it have fun with it, but be flexible All right, we are at the top of the hour So Paul say It was a pleasure. Thank you We'll do this again in about six months and we'll see where we are Oh, you're gonna play back these clips and show that i'm wrong about everything. I know it's fun I think that you're gonna be a lot more right than they're wrong. I wouldn't worry about that You uh You guys have a great rest of your week. We'll be back next wednesday. Uh five o'clock eastern time till then take care Bye. Bye. Bye y'all Thank you