76 | Transforming Operations and Outsmarting Challenges using AI Solutions with Susan Frew

0:00Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and I have a really exciting show for you today. Many of you approach me on LinkedIn and talk to me and share how much to learn from the podcast, but a lot of people are asking to talk to actual practitioners, people from businesses who are not just training people on how to do this, but they're actually using this in businesses and learn from them what they're doing and how they're doing it and why they're doing it.

0:31And today, our guest, Susan Fru, is the best example I've met so far. I'll take AI tools going all in and really solving really big business problems. Anything from finance to operations to customer service, you name it, she's actually done it and she keeps on perfecting the process. And she's going to share with us exactly what she's doing in multiple aspects of the business. Susan and I have had multiple conversations since we've met. She was a trainee in my course and she is a renowned sought after speaker. So she's a keynote speaker on multiple conferences, both in her industry and in other industries, talking about how to run businesses and recently how to run businesses with AI.

1:18So we talk a lot about that as well and we have a lot of things in common. And she's a great person overall. So I know we're going to have a blast in this conversation. And so I'm really excited to welcome Susan. Susan, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Matis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:13Thank you, Isar. I'm so excited. I have told everyone that I know that I'm going to be on this podcast. I was like, I'm going to be on the podcast. I've been following this podcast for so long. And this is star power. I said, it's here, the Bon Jovi of AI. That's the way I described it. Oh my God. Now I have a really high bar that I need to pass. But I appreciate that. And I really appreciate you. And I really think that the stuff that you're doing, and we both speak a lot of conferences. So we meet with a lot of senior people in different industries. It's not common to find somebody who is a CEO like you that also gets their hands dirty.

2:53So you run a large successful company for years that has nothing to do with tech, but it's like a home services company. And yet you are, you yourself personally are involved in applying and testing and doing all these things, which is not common would be an understatement. Like literally, I don't know any other CEO other than you that does it at the scale that you are doing. There's a reason for that. So perfect segue. So how did this all happen? My background is in tech. I was with AT &T Wireless for many years and ended up my career as an international general manager of two countries in the Caribbean, Grenada and St.

3:35Vincent and the Grenadines. And I started New York City as a salesperson. But in the plumbing company, my husband and I started it together and it grew really fast. And I kept stepping away because I really love the pull of the stage and speaking. And that's just what I love to do. And we ended up getting in some trouble. And I had to come back and we turned it around. And then I stepped away again. It keeps going back and forth. So this is the last time I'm stepping back in. We are automating everything and it is going to be a shining example of how you can leverage AI in your business. And then it will be time for us to move on to something else.

4:18So that is my motivation. Awesome. So the motivation is there. So really, let's look from, and I think it's a great motivation, whether you want to step away or not, by everybody who is on top of the pyramid in any business knows it sounds glamorous when you're not actually doing the job. Once you need to do the job, it's really tedious and it's really stressful because you are, whether you are doing everything or not, in most cases, you're not doing the things, you're still in charge of it being successful. And if it's not, it's your problem to solve and there's always problems to solve. And so whether you want to step away or you just want to have less stress on your hands, going through this exercise of looking, how can I automate things in my business using AI is a very important exercise.

5:07Not to mention the fact that if you don't do this and your competition will, you're going to start losing business to your competition because they will be able to do things faster and better than you and cheaper than you and still do it as good or even better, which means you're going to lose clients. So how do you get started? Like how do you pick the use cases you want to go after? Because there's a gazillion of cases in a business. How did you get started picking the right ones? Here's my best advice. And this is how we systemize the business. At first, writing all of our systems and policies and procedures and putting them in an AI system that we were able to put online.

5:43And that was one of the things that we started with. But we went old school. So we took big flip chart paper and put it around the room and all the people that were involved and all the policies and system and said, OK, what systems do we have? What's broken? What needs to be refined? And what can we automate? So you always have to start from that ground floor, organic way of doing it and bringing the right people to the table. There's the humanization of that. And then automating all the pieces in there that you could in order to leverage your finances, your headcount, your resources, all of that.

6:21So I love several things you're saying, and I'll highlight all of them because they're like a subtext of the things you said, but each and every one of them is very important. One is you don't want to do it yourself. Like one of the things I teach in my course, and you've been there, but you've actually done this before, you've taken my course. You want a committee. You want a group of people in the business that will be involved to help you in the brainstorming, to help you in the implementation, to help you in delivering this to other people in the business and so on. And so you want to start with that.

6:47The second thing is the human part is the most important part. Yes, it's a tech revolution, but at the end of the day, until you have an army of bots doing everything for you. People in the company working with you and they must be on board. And if you don't do this with them, you try to shove them down their throats, it is going to fail. If they feel a part of it and empowered to actually use these tools to do more for themselves and for the business, then it's going to be a big success. So that's the second thing you said that is very important. And the third thing is you have to start with actually knowing, mapping your processes in the company on a detailed level in order to make these decisions.

7:24Otherwise, you will be throwing pasta on the wall and hoping something sticks, right? And it may not be the right thing. So I agree with all of those. So what were some of the things? Just give us a list of examples, and then we'll dive into a few. Some of the things that you've already automated or that you are in the process of automating. One that's an ongoing thing is the systems. Because we, in the very beginning, I had written systems, but they were outdated and they didn't work and no one was following them. I put it on a program called Trainial and like training and manual together. And we started building the systems in here and in there.

8:01And it was AI assisted, which was a huge help because, you know, how many of us stare at the screen and we have to write a policy about uniforms? And like you sit there and look at it for 30 minutes and do nothing. So this way you just put, I need a policy about uniforms, boop, done. And then you can edit it and keep moving on. It also makes the onboarding experience with employees better. So that was number one. Another thing that we did is we added in an AI bookkeeper, which categorizes all of your transactions. That does require some trading, folks. That's not an out-of-the-box perfect It's trading just like any good employee.

8:41And then I moved into making some custom GPTs, which you and I have spoken about. One, to help me with budgeting. One, to help me analyze my financials and my business plan for the next year. And that's towards the end of 2023. And that was something that was a great experiment. And I'm still using it. I'm using it all the time. I use HeyGen, make a lot of avatars for my marketing. I'm getting ready to do another AI-based project for marketing. I have 37 ,000 customers in our database, and I know that there's an AI solution out there and how to reach them in the way that they want to be reached.

9:22So that's still a work in progress. So let me touch on a few things that you mentioned. One, you mentioned budgeting. The other, you mentioned GPTs. So those of you who don't know what GPTs are, we're going to dive and actually show you how to develop some of them. But GPTs are like a mini, very detailed version of ChatGPT. And instead of saying, oh, it can do the universe, you actually give it instructions on something very specific you want it to do. And then you can share it with your team or with other people that can then benefit from that custom version of ChatGPT. And so we're going to show you, or Susan is going to show you how she's using that for budgeting.

9:58And I find it brilliant. Another one is Heijen. And I will share links to these things in the show notes so you have access to those as well. HeyGen is probably the best tool out there today. There's a bunch of them that allows you to create avatar-based videos of either generic avatars and they're getting better and more and more human. But you can generate an avatar of yourself or other people in your business and then just upload script to them that either you write or ChatGPT writes for you or anything else. And then it will say that so you can use it for product description, you can use it for marketing, you can use it for customer service, you can use it for training inside your organization.

10:32Like literally any video you want a person talking about something that you can do and you don't need a camera. You don't need a lightning. You don't need a studio. You don't need to edit. You don't need any of these things. And you can pop out even personalized videos that will say the name and the name of the company to every single individual differently based on Google Sheets. So it's a very powerful tool. N36. Yeah, which you can now speak, which is awesome. Absolutely. It's absolutely amazing. It's one of my favorite demos. And it's one of the most jaw-dropping demos that I do when I speak is I show people how I can speak whatever language they pick.

11:08And, but let's really start with the GPT about finance, because that's something I actually haven't seen anybody do before. And I'm not the financial wizard. And that is why this was the first one that I needed to create because I needed an assistant. So what I did is I created a virtual CFO. So the way I built it. And so I like to look at these like they are a customized search engine. So this little GPT is a search engine that's going to do just this one thing for me. And I'm treating it like it's an employee. It's my CFO and that's how I built it. Sunshine is the name of our company. So Sunshine Finance Navigator.

11:46And so here, if we go into edit GPT, this will show you how I built it. So basically. Basically, just for one second, for sure, for those who are listening and not sharing the screen. Let's stay with us. You're probably either driving or walking your dog and doing dishes, so you can't watch the screen. But there is a YouTube version of this that you'll be able to watch afterwards. And the link to the YouTube video is going to be in the show notes as well. But the way you get to GPTs, those of you who don't know how to get to them, you go to chat.openai.com, which is the regular chat GPT, and you click on the GPT store and then you can click on create or new or something like that on the top right corner.

12:28And then you can create your own GPTs and then you get to the editor in which Susan's going to share with us what she's actually doing. I believe this is the beginning of the app store and I missed the dot com millionaire boom. So I'm trying to take advantage of this time. I feel like if I, as a business owner, I'm having challenges figuring this stuff out for my finances, probably other business owners are as well. So what I did is I went into the back and I told it just like you hear in really good prompt engineering that its role is a CFO, chief financial officer of my company. And I asked questions like, how can I improve my debt?

13:08What are some strategies to reduce debt? How should I set financial goals for 24? analyzed my financial reports for Insight. And then I was able to upload them, spreadsheets. I uploaded business plans and I asked it to analyze. Now, at first I said, analyze this spreadsheet for future cash for 2024 budget. It says column A is not equal to column B. So it analyzed the spreadsheet. So now we had to say, analyze the data in the spreadsheet and always saying you are the CFO, which now I built in there, and you are going to analyze this data inside the spreadsheet and produce these questions that I have for you.

13:53And that's exactly what we did. And I actually have a new product that we're going to start demoing. So I'm in the process of writing a business plan for that, and I'm having it help me to create that process as well. So I want to jump back to something you showed me just before we started recording. One of the exercises you did with this, which I find absolutely brilliant is you've uploaded last year's numbers. So the actual outcome of last year together with a plan for this year in order to allow it to help you create a budget for your plan. And again, this is maybe not a professional CFO or an accountant, but like you said, it's not starting with a blank sheet of paper to have to figure out how to do the budget.

14:40and it can get you, it at least gets you think on a lot of things on aspects of this that you may not think about yourself. And this is absolutely amazing. Yeah. It's been a really fun exercise in order to work through this. And it's been really helpful to me because this isn't my background. I don't have a CFO background. I, you're not really a finance person. I'm learning to love the numbers as many of us do. This has been just incredibly helpful out there. And that it's just been something that I've been using for the last couple months and I'm really loving it. And the data you uploaded to help you create the budgeting, it was like a CSV file exported from whatever accounting system as far as your last year's numbers?

15:23Yeah, I pulled it out of QuickBooks into a spreadsheet. I'm sorry that I can't, it's not, I'm not able to show it to you right now. I'm not exactly sure why not. But what I was able to do with it is I was able to take my last year's numbers, the concrete year to the end of 2023. And I put it in a spreadsheet and I threw it in there. And then I said, for 2024, we want to adhere to these percentages. So I feel like we weren't as successful financially as we wanted to be in 23 because we were overspending in some areas and not spending enough in the others. It's just, you know, every business owner struggle.

16:02And I told it to create the budget towards these targets of these percentages. A target of percentages of spent on HR versus spent on CapEx versus spent on marketing. Yes. And it helped you build a budget based on X growth, based on last year's numbers, and then the new percentages. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So that was what saved so much time. I can't even begin to tell you. And we're starting a new product. We're going into, I want to make dog washes in people's garages because we're plumbers and we can bring the hot and cold water out there, the drain, and then we can build you a dog wash. You need like a guinea pig that you want to test us on?

16:43I know. Isn't it a great idea? I think that the market is ready for that. I think people are going to love it. And I had Jack GPT create an amazing logo for me, which of course was spelled wrong, but I popped it into Canva AI and I fixed it. And it's called Sunshine Dogs, D-A-W-G-S, which was really cool. And that's our next thing. So I was also having me help create the marketing plan for that. That's fantastic. Okay, cool. So OneGPT helps you with finances and planning and accounting and budgeting. What other GPTs did you create that helps you regularly in the business? Here's one. So I'm a member of National Speakers Association and I live in Colorado.

17:30So I'm part of NSA Colorado. So I built this one. I'm really most proud of because this is like the one that I had learned the most after all the other ones that I had created. This one, I really knew what was happening and I was able to customize it in a better way. So what I, why I built it is speakers, professional speakers are usually always looking for places to speak. They want to improve their talk. They want to find different audiences. Lots of different things that I knew a fair amount about. So when I built the GPT, I put in there and I said exactly what we wanted to do is to find speaking engagements for professional speakers.

18:11And then I added these cues in there. How can I improve my presentation, locate speaking opportunities, compare speaking styles of industry leaders, content ideas, social media and blogs, which we know a lot of people use AI to do creative ideas with social media marketing and marketing out there, places to speak paid and unpaid. And then I went through and I found as many articles and documents as I could possibly find. and I put them in there so that I'm now training the search engine to be able to use that information and to go out and find speaking engagements for people. And everyone's are going to be different.

18:56And another thing I put in there, which I thought was really important, was analyze my competitors. And not that you want to go dog eat dog with your competitors. I wanted to do that for one reason. Because one, if you analyze the competitors, you might know the competitor and you can say, hey, can you recommend me for next year? Or you could also find out, do some research on them and see maybe why they got the engagement. Maybe you could pitch it in a different way or a similar way or whatever that looked like. So I thought that was a really good way of figuring it out. So this one I love. I just keep continuing to create them.

19:36I haven't made any of them public yet. I want to generalize for a second the one he did for NSA because NSA, not the NSA people usually think about speaking association, that kind of NSA. I want to touch on three different aspects of this. One is regarding what you said, those of you who don't know, you can upload reference documents to the GPT, which becomes quote unquote training materials for that GPT. And this could be anything. It could be your employee handbook if you want to allow employees to ask questions about how do they get PTO days. This could be reference materials on how to write specific scrum procedures if you're in a software company.

20:17This could be the actual segments of the book traction on how to run EOS properly, like literally any reference material you want. And then the GPT can use that information in order to answer the questions and to have a very specific conversation with the person. So this is something people need to know. The other thing that I find that is really helpful, and that's something you did at scale here, is you can define these conversation starters. Instead of, again, letting people get into the GPT and kind of figure out what you wanted to do, you can define these initial conversation starters. Like you said, in this particular case, how do I find more speaking gigs?

20:53how do I find my competitors and maybe what where they spoke or how much they make these kind of things yeah you can generalize this to any other thing you want people to use the gpts for which then like you said you can give it to anyone and then those people and this anyone could be people within your business or the world and then people can benefit from that particular tool and another one that I created, this spark of awesome. So I did a keynote weekend for a client and then the theme of their conference was spark. So I took my book compete on awesome, not on price. And I completely, I didn't show you this early, but I completely changed the cover with their logo.

21:36And I let them meet, I met the person who was running the conference. She wrote the forward and then I created two additional chapters and they're using AI. I self-published it on a AI site called Book2Digital. I'm forgetting it. I'll send you the link to it. Draft2Digital, that's what it is. And I was able to produce the book for$2 and then created for the same conference their own GPT on how to deliver better service and everything else for that conference. So then you can do that. You can totally customize the conference experience now for your clients. So I want to, first of all, I find this absolutely brilliant, like everything else you do.

22:20But I will say something again to generalize this. The age of AI, one of the things, one of the gifts it gives us as business people, as marketers, is personalization that wasn't possible before. You can personalize everything. Think about what Susan just said. she personalized a book for a single conference that happens once in a lifetime, right? But she created a book that had additional chapters, printed the book and brought it to the conference, an actual physical book, but it's a one-off, right? It's a variation of the books you already created that is customized to this conference. I teach in my courses how to create one-off brochures.

23:02If you have a client you really want to get, don't give them the general brochure you give them. create a brochure for them that will talk to their pain points, their needs, their industry, their drives and motivations. And historically, that was cost prohibitive. That's why we didn't do it. And it took a very long time, so it just didn't work. But now you yourself, whether you're the CEO or the salesperson or the head of marketing, or it doesn't matter what you are, you can create a high-end professional-looking brochure that would be customized to the specific needs of a specific client and walk with it to the meeting without investing three weeks and $6 ,000 to create that brochure.

23:42And so the ability to create customized things that really make you stand out. Like I've never seen anybody show up with a book customized for anything. Definitely built for one conference. And so I find this absolutely brilliant. Thank you. I thought it was pretty cool too. And it was a lot of fun. And I definitely do think that will set me apart. And now I also don't know if you can see this one, Granny GPT. So that's when I start getting a little too old to be hitting the conference scene. I can use that one. I can create my avatar of what I look like now. And so Granny GPT, I'm joking around with it, but not really.

24:23It's a GPT to help the older generation generation be not afraid of AI. That's fantastic. So where can I get more coupons? Where does my AIRP card? I want to say something about this as well. And this is where I really like the platform that they've created. It allows you to experiment without taking any risks and while having fun. And as you're doing this, like, oh, I'm going to develop a grant in GPT that will do whatever. doesn't matter like saying how do i find coupons and when you do that you're going to learn how this thing works and you can experiment back and forth and there's no risk it's a it's half joke half i'm actually helping other grandmas but in the process you're going to learn how gpt's work which will allow you to actually implement this for other stuff in your life and in your business could be personal life as well like planning trips like we like taking trips as a family creating a trip plan planner gpt and i'm sure there's a gazillion of them already but you can create one for yourself that is customized to your needs, to the age of your kids, to the stuff you like to do.

25:28And then it can help you find trips in your budget, in the types of things you want to do. So don't be afraid of this thing. Literally go ahead, play with it and have fun. Yeah, it's going to be a wild ride. I'm really excited. I love making these GPTs. I always say like I'm not a creative person. Like I don't do crafts or so or anything, but this is my creativity. And I actually told my neighbor that a few weeks ago, she loves to sew and she sits in her house and sews for hours. I'm like, OK, AI is my sewing because I will sit in here and watch videos and I'll create things. And it's just so much fun.

26:06And I just really want to encourage people not to be afraid of it. Like dive in there a little bit at a time, baby steps. Look at the human element first. See what you can automate. See what you can then free up so you have more time to go and do more powerful things. and serve the world in a better way. I want to piggyback on the last two sentences that you said, because a long time ago I had another podcast that was called The Business Growth Accelerator. And in there I interviewed a woman that had a, she's a psychiatrist and she had a psychiatry business. Like she had her own clinic and people and so on.

26:44When she started, she was just on her own. And she said that one of the first things she did as the business started growing is she drew a chart of all the things she did not want to do. And then next to, and it's like a, it's like an org chart, right? It's like an org chart that has titles and things like tasks that needs to be done and a number underneath that. And the number was the budget she needs to have in order to hire a person. She doesn't have to do it. And I found that I, I still remember this. This was like three or four years ago, because I thought it's a brilliant approach for a solopreneur starting to grow a business.