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Welcome to Business Bourbon and Cigars, the podcast for ambitious leaders who want a backstage pass to the top. Every episode, we're going to sit down with ultra successful industry leaders who have a proven track record and a deep understanding of how to grow a business. And we're going to learn the secrets and strategies that took them to the top. On this show, you'll gain access to exclusive insights and resources that'll give you what you need to achieve your most audacious goals. And of course, we may even sip on some fine bourbon and light up one of our favorite cigars while we chat. My name is Scott Joseph. I'm your host and this is Business Bourbon and Cigars. Why do you think most leaders drown in data and they still miss the turn? The problem isn't a lack of information. It's the lack of a system that turns all that noise into decisions. We're doing today's show because in the last episodes I think it was step one, I asked you to spot shifts early, which means, you know, tracking customer behavior, all those competitor, you know, the moves your competition's making, tech signals, all the friction points. The reality is your team already has a full time load. Not everyone has the capacity to just add a lot more work to themselves or their people. AI agents remove that excuse by taking on the heavy lifts so you can actually, you know, execute. In this episode, I'm gonna lay out a complete blueprint for an AI driven, we'll call it a change intelligence system. You know, it's gonna show you exactly which agents to set up, how to wire them, what they should monitor, the cadence they should run on, you know, and all the outputs your team will actually use. You're going to leave with a 30, 60, 90 day rollout plan and the KPIs to prove it's working. I'm Scott Joseph, host of Business Bourbon and cigars. I've spent 30 plus years, you know, building companies. Some got crushed, some road, you know, up and down with the wave and others grew exponentially. Regardless of the, you know, the market or the economy. Inside me plus ultra. I've watched leaders use the right intel, you know, more importantly at the right time to make moves months before competitors even knew what hit them. So here's what we're going to cover and I want you to stay with me here because I don't always get real technical and, and lay out these step by step, especially on tech type stuff in our shows. I don't always like, you know, enjoy listening to that. And I assume everybody's like me, right? And you guys don't want to hear it either. But I'm going to lay out some step by step things of what you have to do to set these AI agents up and to be able to accomplish everything I already mentioned. First, I'm going to give you the architecture. You know, the agents, their inputs, the outputs you're going to get every week. Then we'll walk through the operating system that's going to include things like your cadence, your thresholds, how you keep this thing from just spamming your team. Then I want to show you the rollout, who owns what in the first 30, 60, you know, 90 days. And then we'll close with the scorecard. This is the thing you're going to use to keep it honest. I want to share a, a quick punch in the gut story which really inspired this and the last episode. There's a mid market company, you know, I know they had all the dashboards, sales, net, promoter scores churn, you know, look great, you know, but buried in their support tickets, in their YouTube comments was a pattern. Buyers were asking about a new integration and their product didn't have it. Their team did what a lot of people do, they noticed it and then they just kind of moved on. Six months later, competitor comes in, launches with that exact integration and took a huge bite out of their best segment. They didn't lose because they were dumb. They lost because they had no mechanism to convert those what weak signals right into action. That's the difference between reports and change intelligence. So I promised you the architecture. Here it is. But you have to build it. You know, you don't need a hundred agents, you need six core agents that are wired to a single weekly briefing. Then you need three advanced ones, you know, once you get things humming. So let's first talk about the six core agents that you're going to put out there. I want you to start with a change scout. I call it a market pulse. It's got one job. Watch the outside world and tell you what it's actually moved. It's going to watch, you know, your competition sites and their pricing pages, job postings, review sites, app stores, the real conversations happening in like say subreddits and industry forums, plus all the conference agendas and analyst notes. When something meaningful shifts, it's going to hand you a clean shift card, you know, that says what changed, you know, where it came from, why it matters to your revenue, you know, or your, or risk. More importantly, what to do next. Now think about this. You never do this all on your own. This is all going to be automated for you. Next you want to give the customer a microphone that you can trust and that's your voice of customer agent, your voc. It's going to pull from your CRM notes, win loss write ups, call transcripts, all those chat logs, support tickets, maybe social media comments and all those open ended survey replies that you do nothing with. Instead of dumping noise on you, it's going to rank what buyers are asking for, what's blocking them and what they love. Each week you get a clean top five. You know the trend lines that matter and a few raw quotes that you can drop straight into a deck. Then you're going to fix what feels slow. This is your product and experience. Friction agent. It's going to look at your funnel analytics session replays the written comments from your customer satisfaction. And you know how likely are you to recommend us surveys all your cancellation reasons. There's fulfillment timestamps. It's not going to lecture you. It hands you a friction heat map and a plain English kill keep fix list with effort versus revenue impact. That's how you pick the next win. Pricing. It's not a sticker you slap on and walk away. The pricing and offer agent is watching your competitor. Prices, promos, checkout flows, your quotes, your discount habits. When pressure builds, it shows you a price pressure index and a simple test list. You know which bundles. Maybe you should try the Florida defend, the anchor price to move and then we get into tech and it can blindside you if you're not watching. So you need a tech radar agent. In a nutshell, it's your early warning and green light system for tech changes. It watches all. It tells you in, in plain English, what changed, why it matters, and whether to build now, schedule it or ignore it. Don't wait for a trend or some small spark to turn into a fire. Your KPI anomaly agent, right, is going to watch your core numbers, your traffic, your trials, your average order, you know value, your customer, acquisition costs, lifetime value, closing rate, show rate, service times. And it's only going to ping you when something is outside the norm. It tells you which metric moved, what normal is and how big the spike or the dip was. And it's going to let you know the most likely causes pulled from all those other agents. No noise, just insights you can actually use. And once you have these six core agents humming, now it's time to layer in the advanced trio that I talked about earlier. I know this sounds complicated. Stay with me. The first of the three is what we'll call the experiment Orchestrator agent. It's going to turn insights into a real test plan with a hypothesis metric, you know, guardrails, sample copy, a reporting template so you can go live fast. The second's the meeting briefing agent. It's going to package everything into a 10 minute leadership brief and a three slide deck. One place no homework PDFs that end up dying in your inbox. And then finally the postmortem win loss agent minds calls you know the your proposals and your CRM stages so it can update why you win and why you lose by segment and competitor. And then it refreshes your talk tracks. Everything connects the same way. It's going to be one intake, you know, one brain, one brief. Connectors, you know, pull data on a schedule. The agents enrich and scored against your priorities. You know, segments, products, KPIs. And every week you get a single brief and one living backlog. No rogue channels, no random spreadsheets. So now let's set up your operating system. That's the architecture. This is going to be the operating system. Keep your cadence tight. Daily stuff is automated. The anomaly agent pings only if a threshold is crossed. And then weekly, you know, maybe your briefing drops Monday at 8am and it's on the leadership agenda by default. You know what changed out there? 10 minutes. Take up 10 minutes that meeting and then you move on. Every other week you want to hold a 25 minute change council, you choose one or two moves to test and push everything else to the backlog quarterly Sit down with the if we were starting a new business today to directly compete against my current business, what would we do in the new business to put our current business out of business? This is an exercise. That's the question we'll name the exercise that that's the question you're going to ask and let the agents feed the pre read so it's grounded in reality. I know this sounds complicated and you'll lay off when I say keep it simple. But that's what you got to do. Keep it simple. Are you tired of hitting roadblocks in your business? Maybe you're feeling, you know, overwhelmed by the challenges that never seem to end. No matter how hard you push. It feels like you're just stuck in the same place. You're trying to break through, but you never quite get there. I want you to imagine if you had the support of a community of top tier business leaders who understand your struggles because they've all been there. More importantly, they're ready to help you overcome them. The Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership Retreat. It's exactly what you need. This is not just a typical business event. It's where visionary entrepreneurs, they come together to tackle their biggest obstacles, learn innovative strategies. They're there to build meaningful relationships that can propel their businesses forward. You're going to leave with actionable insights and a network of powerful connections that are ready to take your leadership to a new height. But here's the thing. The unexpected benefit that you're going to get from attending this retreat is really the deep, genuine relationships that you're going to build with other like minded entrepreneurs. The way our mastermind process works at these events means that you're not just learning strategies and solving challenges challenges. You're actively helping others in the group while receiving much more in return. And it's this collaborative environment that really fosters powerful connections. And the relationships built here tend to be stronger and they form faster than you ever might expect. These aren't just contacts or acquaintances, they're true allies who are going to continue to support you long after this event ends. And yes, we're focusing hard on business growth. But let's not forget the Business Bourbon at Cigars Leadership Retreat. It's also a lot of fun. So this community, it's real, it's welcoming, and it's built for entrepreneurs who want to level up, learn and grow together. You're going to walk away not only with a game plan for your business, but also a group of genuine, high caliber relationships that are going to take your break business even further than anything you've ever imagined. So I've got a special offer for you today. The first five people that are watching or listening to this episode, they're going to receive 50% off their ticket to attend the next retreat. Don't miss out. This opportunity is limited. Spots always fill up fast. So visit me+Ultra.com BBC50 or click the link in the show notes and you'll get a 50 discount code. Then secure your spot. For Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership Retreat no drip alerts for each key number. Set a normal range and call it the green Zone. Only ping yourself if it jumps way outside that range or moves maybe let's say 20% plus for a full week. For competitors, only surface changes that hit the wallet or the offer, like price, you know, what's included or how they position it. And do not call something a trend until you see it in at least two places you know or a meaningful like say, chunk of conversations I'll give you an example, if signups average 500, 540 is normal, 700 or 350, I want an alert. Hold the line on your guardrails. A human being needs to own every recommended action and either approves or rejects it with a reason. That way your AI system learns your preferences. Each card is going to tell you where the info came from, you know, and only the right people are going to be able to see this. Personal details are going to be hidden and you log every view, you know. The third step, you want to make sure you deliver outputs that your team is going to actually use. Your weekly brief is two pages at the most. It's not novel. Page one is you know, what changed the three most important external shifts, the three biggest buyer signals and, and the three top things that are causing the most friction. Page two is what we're doing, right? I should say what you're doing. Each recommended test comes with a link and a live dashboard. Page two also includes three decisions that need an owner and a short watch list. Let's say you need detail. You open an agent card. It's a single screen with the, you know, the title, a source, confidence, potential impact and the next step, the owner, right? And the due date. And when you're ready to push a change live, you grab the test kit. It already has the hypothesis, the success metric and threshold. You know, guardrails, draft copy, maybe screen variations, a rollout plan and a link to the live report. So now we come to the 90 day rollout. Keep it simple. You know we're building momentum, right? It's not a science project. So week one, we just want to get the signals flowing. You pick an owner, right? And you're the sponsor. You plug in the basics like CRM support, web analytics, call recordings, pricing pages, reviews, and you turn on three agents. Market pulse, voice of customer and your KPI anomaly. You sent simple alert rules and quiet hours. End of the week, you send a one page update to your exec team. Only you know what changed, you know what are you doing next. That's it. Keep it small. You'll start to fine tune all of this the next week. So now we get into weeks two through four. You're going to start turning that insight into action. And you add the friction agent and the briefing agent. You start a tight 25 minute change council, one experiment per meeting, right? No exceptions. You're going to track work on a simple board. You want to observe, frame, test and go. If you're in a business that ships up ship and in this window you Run two quick tests, one on the pricing or the offer and one on the customer experience. You want to learn fast and move on. So now you go into weeks five through eight and you start to scale what works. You want to turn on that tech radar, that pricing and offer agent in the weekly update now goes to product marketing and client success. You add clear kill switches so weak tests don't drag on. And you start to publish your first company wide change note, right, what you changed, what you tested, what's actually happening. So everyone's buying in, everyone's seeing this. And now you move to week nine through 12 and you lock it in. You turn on the experiment orchestrator agent, right? And the win loss agent. You tie wins and losses to segments and competitors and you refresh your talk tracks. The what change slot is Now a permanent 10 minute part of every leadership meeting. And you retire one sacred cow in public if it only exists because that's the way you've always done it. It's gone. Ownership stays tight. You have to set priorities. You know, you're the one that's going to break ties and you're the one that's got to protect the time your change. Intelligent system owner is going to run the cadence, curates the brief and manages the board ops. Or your analyst is going to keep data pipes clean and safe. Experiment owners are going to rotate, right? They're going to build the test, measure the results, then your keeper to kill it, and then legal and security, they're going to keep us safe without slowing us down, hopefully. So then the final step, right, Step five is all about how do you know it's working? You watch a scoreboard, you know your goal should be signal to decision in five business days or less, at least two real tests per month per core product or, or say segment. Most alerts are going to lead to a decision or a watch list item, not a shrug. Now you start to hear competitor moves before sales hears, you know, hears about them on sales calls. Then the lagging results, right? The win rate's up, time to fix might be down, discounts are down, revenue, there's a revenue lift and say inside of 90 days, if those aren't moving, you fix the system. So what's this look like in real life? Well, a competitor, let's say they bundle a premium feature, you'll form a task force. You run a 4 day, 14 day landing page test for one segment, protect your price floor, watch trial to paid and support volume and decide in a week, maybe your cancellations seem to be jumping at the checkout, right? You watch the replays, you make the one line fix. You start shipping within 72 hours. No committees. Final rule. So this last no orphan insights. Everything gets an owner and a date. Even the watch list. The brief ends with three decisions. You know, you got to make them share the wins fast and the autopsies even faster. You want to celebrate your adapters? Remove all those anchors we talked about in the last episode. Keep the brief trite. One page, two at the max. If it runs longer, you're hoarding. You're not leading. If you're hearing all this and you're thinking, yeah, this is too much, remember why you watched or you listened to this episode. You want to transform fast and lead, not react. In the last episode, you know, it was titled how to lead Innovation. Three steps that transform your business fast. I laid out what it takes. Doing that by hand takes an army. If you could or would have tracked it all, you'd already be doing it already. AI makes it practical. It organizes the signals you already have, turns them into clear actions and runs in the background, you know, so you can stay ahead of the market and your competitors. Here's the reality. If you don't build this, some of your competitors are going to, you know, and that's how you get disrupted instead of doing the disrupting. And by that time it might be too late. You know what if this episode really clicked with you? Get in the room where we'll pressure test your change intelligence system and make it real. You know. At the next Business Bourbon and Cigars Leadership retreat, we have an AI expert, Ethan King. He's going to be leading a hands on session on using AI and automation to scale without the stress. Integrating, you know, agents into your daily ops, creating high performing content with a small team, converting with story selling and automating image video workflows. If that sounds like something you're interested in, the first five listeners are going to get 50% off. Go to me plus ultra.com backslash bbc50 or hit the link in the show notes and grab your code and lock your spot. Cheers everyone. Thank you so much for listening to Business Bourbon and Cigars. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with other business owners and friends. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the show on YouTube and your favorite podcast player. My goal is to bring bring you conversations each week that challenge you and give you a no nonsense approach to growing your business. Make sure to join me next week on Business Bourbon and Cigars and for more information on our latest episodes, masterminds and events. Head to business. Bourbon Cigars podcast.com Again, that's business. Bourbon Cigars podcast.com.