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- [00:00]
A
Because we do. I mean, just for context, if you're listening to this for the first time, I mean we, we have the privilege, and I do consider it a privilege to get to work with hundreds of small business owners on a fairly close basis. I mean, dozens of like portfolio companies were really close, intimate with and then, you know, the clients that, that we get to work with, you know as well. And so I think we get to observe a fair number of trends, maybe not directly like data. So it'd be interesting to see does this match what we see or yeah. Is it basically just a marketing piece of like, oh, this is really hard, but if you buy our software, it'd be easier.
- [00:42]
B
Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the business launch podcast with your host, Ryan Deiss. Ryan, how are you today?
- [00:50]
A
So good. So ready for summer to be over and to get back to a regular cadence of life. Which sounds stupid because when summer's getting here, I'm ready for it to begin, but man, oh man, I'm ready for everybody to get done with vacations.
- [01:06]
B
I hear you, I hear you. And I am. Roland Frazier. Just didn't want to say that. Yeah, I'm excited for it to go because sales always kind of stink for us in the summer, right?
- [01:18]
A
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, so I'm like, I enjoyed the vacation, I enjoyed the break. Now it's time for everybody to get back to work and to start buying crap again.
- [01:27]
B
I agree, I agree. So if you're out there, start buying crap again. Nice.
- [01:32]
A
Ours in particular.
- [01:34]
B
One thing that I thought would be fun to talk about today, I just saw it come out this morning was the small and medium business Trends report by salesforce.com and it, one of the things in it, they have the SMB, small, medium sized business leaders that talk about what is challenging them and so it'll be fun. I haven't really gone through it yet, so I thought it'd be fun to kind of just do together and see do we agree, do we disagree? And is it just a bunch of stuff that's designed to sell Salesforce or is it actually useful and helpful?
- [02:12]
A
That will be interesting because we do, I mean just for context, if you're listening to this for the first time, I mean we, we have the privilege, and I do consider it a privilege to get to work with hundreds of small business owners on a fairly close basis. I mean dozens of like portfolio companies where we're really close, intimate with and then you know, the clients that, that we get to work with. You know, as well. And so I think we get to observe a fair number of trends, maybe not directly like data. So it'd be interesting to see does this match what. What we see or. Yeah. Is it basically just a marketing piece of like, oh, this is really hard, but if you buy our software, it'd be easier?
- [02:50]
B
Yeah, they did. Let me see if I can get back to that first part. They did start. Like, what I saw was a report that they did on it that was basically the six. The seven. Sorry, solving the seven biggest challenges that businesses are experiencing. And interestingly enough, they are not in order. When I look at the back of the trend report that lists how many people, you know, responded to each one and what percentage of people said this was a problem, they aren't ranked the same. And interestingly enough, Salesforce has the ability to. To solve the seven big challenges that are listed in the report that they sent out. So, yeah, this is a coincidence, I'm sure. But, like, their number one on them, on their kind of what I'll call the marketing report now was building resilience during economic shifts, which I would say doesn't even come onto the list of things that I hear businesses talking about. Being concerned with you.
- [03:58]
A
That is the stupidest thing I've ever.
- [04:00]
B
Heard in my life.
- [04:01]
A
I've never once in my entire life heard a small business owner use the word resilience. I think it's interesting. Like, this is when. As marketers. So there's a marketing lesson here. And so to the marketers at Salesforce, oh, my God, use the words and the language that your prospects are actually using. And I don't think that there's a small business owner alive who wakes up in the middle of the night and thought, oh, I'm just struggling with the resiliency of my marketing. I'm not buying it.
- [04:38]
B
I'm betting that resilience is not a word that's used by almost any of them ever. Yeah, actually, I'm going to read through these and you tell me, like, initial thoughts, and then we'll go to the data where they actually list the percentage of people that said that something was a problem. And it'll be fun to see, you know, where these things fall there. So. Ever wonder how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals, and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the epic deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck. Whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal flow engine so you always have high quality off market deals coming to you. Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three, our closing and integration system so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an EPIC Deal Advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through this system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an EPIC Deal Advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034 will get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there. Challenge number two, meeting rising customer expectations.
- [07:09]
A
I haven't heard it.
- [07:11]
B
Okay, me neither. Number three, adopting AI without losing the human touch.
- [07:20]
A
So you got me with adopting AI. I haven't heard many that are super concerned about the human touch aspect of it. Small business owners are definitely worried about adopting AI and not getting behind the competition.
- [07:31]
B
Huh? No, it's, it's really. You misunderstood. Those people are really talking about Rick. Was it Rick, the guy with the human touch song back in the 80s? Yeah. I can only get Rick James in my my mind. But it's not Rick James.
- [07:45]
A
Gasly.
- [07:47]
B
No, no, no. Dag on it Anyway. And I probably have it wrong. He did the. Jesse was a friend. I Can't even think of his name anyway.
- [07:54]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just got.
- [07:57]
B
I have Rick James in my mind and I can't get rid of him.
- [08:00]
A
So.
- [08:01]
B
So the other, of course, and this one, I know you're going to agree with. Maintaining customer trust and data security. If you guys are watching, like, if you're listening, if you could just see Ryan's expressions to each of these. Okay, number five.
- [08:19]
A
Springfield.
- [08:20]
B
Springfield. Thank you.
- [08:22]
A
Five.
- [08:23]
B
Managing growth with lean teams.
- [08:30]
A
I'll give that one a. I'll give that one a 6.8 out of 10.
- [08:35]
B
Okay. Okay.
- [08:36]
A
I mean, definitely people want to manage growth and they don't want to expand their teams anymore. So I'll give that an ish A mostly. Right.
- [08:43]
B
The funny thing to me is it's such a buzzword. It's lean teams with its specific connotations and definitions.
- [08:50]
A
Right.
- [08:50]
B
6. Standing out in a crowded digital market.
- [08:58]
A
Okay.
- [08:59]
B
7. And this is their last chance. Scaling customer engagement across channels.
- [09:09]
A
Fine. Yeah. I mean, fine. Like, so. Yes, it has gotten harder to communicate with our customers and clients across channels, especially as Apple, for example, has made cross platform pixel tracking more difficult. I don't know that that is necessarily a top seven challenge or concern. Just so we're clear. Inflation, interest rates increase, none of these things.
- [09:44]
B
You heard the terminal. You, you've got the top seven. So now you're good. Okay, so now I went to the back of the report and this is in the appendix where it gives the percentage of people that said what the top challenges are. And I'm actually going to scan through here real quickly. I don't see resilience in any of them. So. Okay, these actually do make sense to me. They're not particularly in my mind, insightful, but I'd love to chat about them. So 72% of the respondents said, and this was, I think like 33, 3000 odd businesses was the sample across, you know, a bunch of countries and everything. Increasing sales, revenue. Number one at 72%. Tied. Tied, by the way, with acquiring new customers at number one. So increasing sales revenue and acquiring new customers. 72%. That makes sense. That's. I hear that.
- [10:43]
A
Perfect. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only everybody wishes they had more sales and leads and sales.
- [10:48]
B
Yeah. Then. And so do you want to go through them or talk about them each as we go or kind of run through them and then talk about them? What you're.
- [10:57]
A
Yeah, hit me with what the actual stuff is.
- [11:00]
B
Okay. Number two, at 68%, keeping pace with changing technology. And I do get that because they're all freaked out about AI. Right. It's, it's like even, you know, even to the point of doing too many AI things as initiatives without a plan and just like must AI.
- [11:18]
A
Totally agree.
- [11:18]
B
67%. This is the number three, competition from other businesses. Retaining existing customers is number four. Number five, hiring or retaining talent. These sound a lot more like the things I actually hear then keeping up with demand. So being able to service the customers they've got, which is a scale issue. Understanding customers needs, affording business costs. So basically things just cost too much, which would be inflation, I think as much as anything. Providing a consistent experience and providing quality products and services. Those are all more than 60% of the respondents. And then the last couple, personalizing customer engagements, accessing capital, complying with government regulations and industry standards, engaging customers where they prefer, which sounds like the only one that I've heard on the report that they did of seven things, finding sufficient time to manage the business, going back to scaling and then responding to inquiries quickly. And these are all 55% or more of the people. So more than half of the respondents had those as issues, which I. And those. That sounds like I'm trying to think if there's anything that. The only one that I don't see that we get, I think more is how do I sell this or how do I increase the valuation of the business? Because we do talk to people about that. So our world of business people probably are thinking about that more or is thinking about that more than, than the average bear. So, so the first couple, increasing sales revenue, acquiring customers, keeping pace with technology, competition from other businesses and retaining existing customers, all fairly related to how do I make more money. Thoughts, feelings, emotions on how, how they might address that.
- [13:13]
A
Well, I mean, what I can say is that over the past really three months, every business owner that I've talked to has struggled. Like they've, they've all said like, wow, this has been really, really, really hard. And pretty much everybody is flat or down and the ones that are up are either up because they have just, you know, been killing themselves to get up or they were in the kind of business where their customers pre bought a bunch of inventory out of tariff fears. Yeah, right. So they essentially were front end loading, tariff type type things. And so they know that, that, that they're going to get hammered for that in the, in the latter half of this year. And I think the reason that's happened is just kind of the chaos of the macroeconomic stuff that's been going along. I mean you had you had April 2nd when all the, you know, tariff stuff was announced. There's been wars left and right, but what we have seen over the past 30 days is things calming down. And I know what we've seen in our businesses, and what I've been hearing from more and more business owners is things seem to be kind of coming back a little bit. And it makes sense because frankly, when the market is up, people buy. And when the market is going in, when the market's down, people do still buy then, too. They just don't spread their money around as much as they do when it's up, I think, but they'll still buy. You just have to make sure that you're the one they buy from consolidation. But when there's confusion, when there's chaos, everybody freezes. And I think that's where we've been. And so the advice, I guess, that I've been giving and what I've been saying to people is make sure that you don't go and change a bunch of the stuff that used to work before this period and throw it away and replace it with something that potentially works not as well simply because there was an external factor that caused it not to work. Because we've done that a bunch of times. We've thrown out stuff that worked, replaced it with things that didn't work as well. You always get a little bit of a bump in the beginning because it's new. And that little bump in the beginning gives you that kind of false positive that can cause you to think, oh, we figured it out, but no, you didn't. And so just, I, I would say if it's been tough, keep doing what you're doing. If it was working before, I, I'd say give it another 30 to 60 days if you can possibly stand it and see if it doesn't come back on its own.
- [15:46]
B
And I, I think that's good advice. I think it depends it. To me, it's an allocation issue that, that when things get tight for the, for the macro economy, you know, and, and, and people have less, you know, have fewer dollars to spend, they're going to be more careful on how they allocate them. So you have to be somehow in the list of important things that, that they've. That causes them to make a decision, to make the allocation. And I thought it was interesting and that to me, this goes to three of the, the top five. It goes to increasing sales revenue, acquiring new customers, and competition from other businesses that things have changed pretty dramatically over the last couple of years. And a lot of that has to do with AI in terms of getting customers. The things I think it depends on the business. Like if you were selling cars before and you have your media worked out and you're competing with the, you know, three other dealerships that are the same as you for the, you know, people that are buying in your geographic area or any other business like that. I agree with what you're saying. Don't change, do what you did. You know, it's going to come back. It's just people aren't buying as much because things are tighter. They don't have as many dollars to work with. So, you know, you're vying for them. Your best probably bet is promotions, bundles, you know, those kinds of things. Customer stories to get engagement so that you can stand out and be top of mind when they do decide to make that decision. Make or prompt them to decide to reallocate other dollars to your thing by making it an irresistible offer. Right.
- [17:28]
A
So. And that, that's, that's one thing I was going to say be the simplest offer. Like that's one change that we have made. Instead of trying to come up with the best, most amazing, over the top offer that gets a little bit confusing and complex, we've actually been stripping things away from offers just to make them really, really, really simple to say yes to.
- [17:50]
B
Yeah.
- [17:51]
A
Because right now when everybody's kind of confused, when things are a little bit chaotic, if your offer is confusing, if it's complicated. And where I do see this a lot, frankly is with companies like Salesforce, like if you've ever bought enterprise software, it's confusing as crap. I mean, there's all these different features and levels and pricing options and this seat for that and this one for that. Just going to a very, very, very simple flat rate or you know, if you have a higher ticket program, maybe switching it to a monthly, you know, flat, like just simplify and make it super easy to say yes and then see if you can't do a land and expand or an ascension on the back end after they're already a client. That is one shift that we have made right now, not necessarily to our marketing but to our offer structure that is getting a lot more yeses than it was before.
- [18:39]
B
Yeah. The other thing I would say that, that I've watched try to say all my things at the same time. One thing that, that I thought was really interesting for us was recently we did a promotion at Digital Marketer and had the best month that we'd had in a few years. And, and so what was interesting about that was we didn't get a bunch of new people in. We just gave all the people we already had that had seen the same offers over and over and over a new thing that they could do. And there were two parts of that. One was your announcement of I'm retiring from marketing. And the second was technologically, it was technology related with AI, how do we take that lesson, do you think, and make that. I think if you tell the story briefly of those two things and the results and then, and then in terms of how does somebody use that in the current environment to accomplish, to overcome some of these challenges that we've mentioned.
- [19:48]
A
Sure. So for the first one I did, I announced that, hey, I'm no longer going to be teaching marketing. And frankly, because I haven't because I don't do marketing anymore. All I've ever done is talk about what I was doing and I don't do in the trenches day to day marketing more. It's what I used to do. And so that's what I talked about. Now Roland, as you all know, we're, you know, we're running companies and we're helping business owners scale and exit. We're not really involved in the day to day, in the trenches marketing. So it's not appropriate for me to teach marketing. So I basically came out and said I'm no longer teaching marketing anymore. And what that created for our audience, who kind of knows me as Ryan Deiss the marketer, was a happening. And I. A happening is simply something happened. It really is that simple. And the whole idea is it starts a conversation and it re engages people. And if you want proof of this, just walk up to somebody and go, hey, did you hear what happened? I promise you they'll go, no. What? And if you're like, ah, nothing, I'm just messing with you. But like you will get their attention if something happened. So the first way that you can create some sort of attention is just to create a happening. And a happening can be a new discovery.
- [21:04]
B
Right.
- [21:04]
A
A happening can be a big change. You can, you know, incorporate a happening. If something happened out there in the world, you can talk about how this thing that happened actually does matter to your business or to your audience. But just to bring something new and novel into your community, that's the first thing that you can do to get people's attention. And that's what we did there. So we leverage the happening of my retirement, which does it really matter that much to people? No, not really. Not Really, I mean, does the fact that I've decided I'm not teaching marketing, I mean, I guess it matters to some people, but does it really? No, it doesn't actually matter, but it was something that happened. And so it was a resetting and a recapturing of attention. The second piece, really, I think, is just as simple as the. You know, we could talk about shifting and taking something that was old and making it new, but I think right now, today, it really is as simple as AI ing things. I mean, right now, there are a lot of businesses that are being rendered obsolete because of AI, and that was certainly the case for digital marketers. Training products. They're training products. People don't want to learn digital marketing. They don't need to learn digital marketing anymore, because AI will just do it for them. And so what we needed to do was to pivot and to restructure that entire product line instead of saying, we'll teach you marketing to we will just give you our trained AI, bots agents, GPTs, pre trained bots agents, you know, and GPTs. Now all of a sudden, people went from, I don't need this, I don't want this to, oh, my gosh, I absolutely need this and want this. So the second thing that you can do is just say, if, frankly, you're kind of getting disrupted because of AI, which is the single biggest disruptive event that any of us have ever experienced in our life, more disruptive than the Internet, more disruptive than social, then I do think asking the question of how can I aify my business is a very, very important question to ask. So we incorporated happening, and we AI ified, and those two things combined. Yeah. Gave us the best month we'd had in years.
- [23:11]
B
Yeah. And so if we kind of try to expand that, let's say that you've got a service business. Let's start there, because I feel like that's the easiest. Then what's the happening that you could talk about? It could be related to the AI. It could be. You could play off of what Ryan did. You could retire from accounting, because now you're in the business of, you know, strategic planning or something like that. If you're. If you're. An accountant or if you're an attorney, you could say, you know, we will no longer be, you know, doing. It's no longer business as usual. I guess that would be the. Like, how can you come up with an angle that we're not doing this anymore because we've evolved, and that separates you from the competition. Into the, the now that, that to me, you know, like into what's going on and what's in people's mind. So I like looking at these things that come out especially when they're not marketing ified and they're the actual results from. You know, these are the things that 3,000 plus business owners say are challenging and then say okay, how can we help people increase sales and acquire new customers? And we could basically say we're retiring from lead gen as you know it. It could be as you know it might be a good way to tag onto whatever you do. I'm retiring from accounting as you know it. You know we're no longer going to be accounting the same way. We now use AI to analyze all of your expenses and you know, data that you give us and we upload your last year's tax return and create a strategic plan for you that's optimized by you know, 10 billion hours of Internet knowledge. You know, something like that. I like that kind of as, as you know it, I'm retiring from this as you know it is, is easy because if you were an accountant and you said I'm retiring from accounting, your people might go find another accountant, which would be bad.
- [25:00]
A
Yeah. And that's why the framework of the, of the happening is something happened which means and therefore. So something happened because of the emergence of AI. We're retiring from accounting as we know it, which means we're able to deliver a higher degree of service and therefore we can now do the following things for you at even better rates. Yeah, yeah, let's have a follow up meeting. Right. And so now there's a call to action. So think about that. It's not just this thing happened. All right, see you later. Right. It needs to be something happened, you know, which, which means this change is occurring and this is how we're adapting. And therefore in the end, therefore is this is how it applies to you. So just remember that, that basic structure and framework.
- [25:55]
B
Yeah. And then like as far as acquiring new customers and increasing sales revenue, which were the, the two that were tied for number one. I just got off a meeting that's a weekly meeting that one of our, our port cos has and we were looking at day over day sales and I'm looking at sales are hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, five days a week and then fall to almost nothing on two days a week. Well the two days a week that they follow almost nothing are week ends when we don't have people in the office. And I ask why don't we have people in the office? Because our customers are the type of customer. They're not business customers. They're customers that are available and interested in talking during the weekends and might be working other jobs because we're, you know, helping them start new businesses. So maybe they're working a job 9 to 5 during the week while. Which is the only time they can talk to our people. You know, it's not nine to five, but, you know, but basic business hours or business days anyway. And now we don't. But we don't make any effort or availability to talk to them during those other eight days a month. Eight days a month. If we could get an extra, you know, just over. What is it, $133,000, you know, a day, which would be less than we're selling on those other days. During those eight days, we make an extra million dollars a month. You know, that's like a $12 million change to the business just by thinking about doing things differently. And then how do. So that's a. How do I acquire new customers and increase sales revenue? And then if you want to put the tech stack on top of that, how do we get more people talking to our, you know, talking. How do we get more people to the point where they're making a buying decision with us? And that's really, to me, the easiest best way to do that right now is either add a sales team if you don't have one in any business you've got. And I want you to argue with me about this, Ryan, because that seems to be the single biggest change across every business. We've got to have an actual sales team that is outbound talking to customers and closing them, as opposed to just hoping they'll walk in the door and buy the thing that's on the shelf, or hoping that they'll see the ad online and click on the site and buy from the site. That's just not as effective, particularly as you get into slightly more expensive things. But let's talk about that for a minute.
- [28:28]
A
Yeah. Well, it's funny. In the businesses that previously were just a go buy, go buy something. So just a direct purchase. We added sales teams, and it completely changed everything. But we also had a number of businesses that have only ever been sales by a sales team. And now what we've been doing is saying, how do we make it possible to have a frictionless experience where the people who do just want to go and buy something without talking to somebody? How do we make that happen? And so we've begun implementing that this month, and that's been effective as well. I think really the lesson is people like to buy in different ways. And so to think about all the different ways that people like to buy and to make those available at the right time because you don't want to necessarily, you know, show everybody all your price points in your entire product line. Super, you know, super early in the.
- [29:18]
B
In the process, there was some sales people that were doing that and it was terrible.
- [29:21]
A
Yeah, that, that's a bad idea. But there are times when it can be appropriate to give somebody the opportunity to receive an offer and, and to make a decision without necessarily having to get on the phone. So I think, yes, adding a sales team, adding that direct sales outreach is almost always going to make you more money if they're, if they're well trained, if they're well managed. But the inverse is also true. And I think the lesson here is try to let people buy the way that they want to be the way that they want to buy.
- [29:52]
B
Yeah, I love it.
- [29:53]
A
I also love that. I just want to point out that your, your idea for increasing sales is essentially, if you're not going to come in on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday. That just is amazing to me.
- [30:05]
B
Right, right.
- [30:07]
A
Yeah, it's genius.
- [30:11]
B
So then, speaking to all seven of these, the top seven, increasing sales revenue, acquiring new customers, keeping pace with changing technology, competition from other business, retaining existing customers and hiring or retaining talent. One of the things that, that we do that is from the private equity playbook is we acquire other businesses. And so all of these things, all of these challenges can easily be solved through acquisitions. You can get instantly new customers, new revenue. You can acquire other people's technology. You are acquiring literally your competitors when you do this kind of stuff. You are retaining existing customers by bringing new things into the fold. And you get the hiring and talent that exists in the other company to help yours, you know, either supplement it, you know, help you keep up with demand, etc. So, like, it solves all of those problems, or it certainly addresses all of those problems. So that's something that, if, if you haven't thought about, I think acquiring a business can really help with a lot of these challenges. And I don't think acquisitions are.
- [31:20]
A
Really.
- [31:20]
B
Top of mind for a lot of entrepreneurs. They're thinking, more ads, right? I get more customers, buy more ads. How do I get more ads? Or I need to start content marketing, like something that, like if you want the guarantee, because ads aren't guaranteed to generate new business and be successful. And neither is content marketing. And it's a long game to do content marketing and neither is biz dev.
- [31:42]
A
Right.
- [31:42]
B
But you know what does get you? Instant customers and technology and people and all of that buying a business already has all that stuff. So I think that should be really high up on the list of solutions for how to meet some of this stuff. What are your thoughts on that?
- [31:58]
A
It does that at a fixed known cost as well. Right. Like you know exactly what it's going to cost when you, when you get into it. So the other thing, by the way, that can help tremendously with retention is winning in general. If the businesses that we've had that were growing steadily, we typically didn't have massive retention issues. I mean, even if people are trying to poach, you do run into that, there's no doubt about that. And so you get a little bit of that. But usually it's fairly easy to get the people to stay because if you're growing as a business, then people are getting promoted. You're constantly providing the best opportunity for them. So I would say the best avenue to improve employee retention goes back to what we're talking about before, which is sales. Let's get growing again. Now, a lot of people, I don't believe that growth solves everything because at some point you're going to run into systems issue and the constraints are going to go into other places. That's the folks who said that they're concerned with fulfillment, so they got supply issues instead of demand issues. But a lot of the folks who are worried right now about losing their great people, I bet those are some of the same people who are also worried about their sales because their people haven't had a raise in a couple of years and so they think they're.
- [33:14]
B
Going to lose them. Yeah, I agree. And I think, I think also in terms of solutions to a lot of these challenges, the new technology and the new opportunities that AI provides are really like those solutions address a lot of these challenges. And they're so I think it's definitely something that you want to, you know, you don't want to just put your head in the sand. You want to think about how, how do I start with the first job to be done that I would like AI to do? And so if, you know, if 72% of the people said acquiring new customers and increasing sales revenue, then how can I help you with that and let AI coach you as to how AI can help you with that? Tell them about, tell it about your business. Describe it and then give it the task of, I want to increase sales revenue, give me 10 strategies, right? And, you know, or I want to acquire new customers, give me 10 strategies and you'll have to work with it. We had a. We talked about this on another episode, but, like, AI isn't Google. If you use it effectively, you don't say, how do I get more customers? And then it just spits an answer and you're like, good. It gives you answers if you give it a lot of context. And then you need to argue with it about those answers and brainstorm it and refine that because it's wrong. A lot of times it hallucinates it. It'll. You know, how. How many times if you've used it at all, when you call it on something, it's like, oh, I'm sorry, I.
- [34:34]
A
Really screwed that up.
- [34:35]
B
You know, it's like, my apologies, I completely overlooked. Blah, blah, blah. I mean, it happens pretty much every query for me, right? So. And I know for you too. So as you use AI, just remember that it is. It's still nascent and it's still got a lot of. A lot of growing to do. I just thought it was kind of interesting to talk about. Anything else in on this that you think is worth chatting about or should we wrap it up?
- [35:00]
A
I just think that I'm still a little bit confused as to how, based on that survey data, they produced the report that they produced. But if nothing else, marketers, this should inspire you to be bold because, oh, my God, if Salesforce can run a survey like that, get data like that, and produce a report like that, what could you do? I mean, just take all truth and accuracy, throw it out the window. Don't be constrained by it whatsoever. Go nuts, my friends. Go nuts.
- [35:39]
B
I was really surprised when I read the list. I mean, I expected to see a list like I see, like, we're talking about in the appendix. When I saw the piece that caused me to click through to look and see what the challenges were, I was like, this is like a bad Inc. Magazine article. You know, the. It's a clickbait. Five things that were written by some, you know, journalist that doesn't know anything about the topic that they're writing about. So it was. It was interesting. Well, we'd love to hear what you guys are experiencing. Challenges, you know, wise. Do you agree with the top challenges that we heard, or are you more, you know, aligned with the article that Salesforce wrote that that got us into this in the first place? And. And if so, what are you doing about addressing those challenges? We would love to hear, and if we hear good stuff, we would love to share it with the rest of the audience here. And thanks for being with us. If you like this episode, please share it with friends. If you didn't, you know, try a couple more and you'll find one you like. We'll see you next time on Business. L hey, Roland Frazier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch. They acquire already successful businesses and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits, and if they want market share, they increase that. They can get new products and services to offer, all instantly. Hey look, 90% of new businesses fail. 90%. Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%? What most people don't realize is you can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit, and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses for over 30 years now, and I cover the whole process in my EPIC Investing strategy training and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com epic to get your free access to my EPIC investing training right now while it's available.