1791 – Problem Solving with Chuck Leblo of Interact – Business Solutions Group

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0:58with us right now it's chuck laboe chuck you are chief strategist with interact business solutions group you're found on the web at askinteract.com chuck thank you so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here josh well i also want to point out to your fellow military veterans so anytime i can get a great military veteran owned business owner on the show it's always a delight. You were a sergeant in the Army. What'd you do? So I was in what was back then called the Signal Corps. I don't know if they still call it that, but yeah, I went into the Signal Corps and learned all about telecommunications.

1:33I told my recruiter that when it's wet, I want to be dry. When it's hot, I want to be cool. So that was a good MOS for me. Yeah. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, tell us what is Interact Business Solutions? So Internet Business Solutions Group is basically a, I hate saying the word consultant because I don't know if I ever call myself a consultant, but I guess I am. We solve problems for businesses. So whether it's a very complex problem for an enterprise type company or whether it's a simpler order, I guess it could be a complex problem for very small businesses. What would be an example? That's kind of a general high level overview.

2:12Let's get tactical. What is that? look like. Right. So everyone has problems, right? Nine times out of 10, their problem isn't really the problem. It's just the symptom of the problem. So I'm going to give you two examples. I'll try to do them real quick. One example was a LoJack company. They manufactured LoJacks for fleet vehicles. And they came to me and said, hey, we believe that we're paying too much for our data usage. We need you to do an analysis for us. So we analyzed about 15 million, what are called TCAP messages, right, which are electronic data messages for messaging between cell towers.

2:49And by analyzing it, we did find an anomaly and we're able to get them about$900 ,000 back from AT &T. So that's one example. That's a short-term project, right? It took us about a month to do. The next one is a long-term project, which we've been working on for about a year and three months now. A company came to us and said, hey, we're stagnant. We're doing about$14 ,000 a month in revenue and we're not growing. And so we did an analysis of their company, found out that they weren't branding themselves properly and then some other issues, but they were putting out the market that they were a virtual assistant company and they specialized in back office support for roofing companies.

3:25What we did is we came in and we repositioned them as a business process outsourcing company. We made sure that their people got certified in the softwares that they were using for roofing CRMs and such. We made some operational changes to help them develop SOPs, hooked them up with AI because they're offshore. So they were limited in some of their writing abilities with English. So we hooked them up with AI, built a transformer for them that knew their business. And now they're at$140 ,000 a month in revenue. And it took about eight months to do that. So it sounds like a lot of these problems, I mean, there could be a wide variety of problems and somehow you're just able to kind of project manage and kind of get to the root cause of what might be going on.

4:20And then somehow either work with existing talent or, you know, acquire, you know, the specialists that need to come in and kind of break it down. Is that it? So that's kind of it. So I've got my own special skill sets. I've been a problem solver my whole life, right? That's what I do. I analyze things, I fix problems. But I've also have limitations as far as certain specialties, right? So like I'm not, I can tell you all sorts of legal things, but I'm not a lawyer, right? And I dabble in IT, but I'm not an IT specialist. So I have a group of other, what I call my fractional officers that I can go to.

5:01They're jobs, they're either a CTO, CFO, CEOs, COOs of other companies. And I work with them to finalize these projects if it's something that I can't handle. But a lot of times the projects that I take are the ones that I can handle. Share just a bit about your experience, Chuck, you know, because a lot of times you're probably working with leaders that are having this problem. But for whatever reason, they're not able to come to the conclusions that you're able to. Why is that? A lot of times they just can't see the forest and the trees, right? They're so much. They're so down in the weeds. I'm the first to say devil's in the detail, right?

5:43But they are so far down in the weeds of their organization that they can't look from above and see the big picture. And remember, for the big organizations, I'm doing very technical type analysis. And most of that revolved for the big companies. It's always been revolved around my telecom experience. I spent 20 years in telecom. I was an executive with the phone company. And I did all of this, right? And that's where I learned this. So the big companies that come to me, it's normally telecom related. The small businesses, a lot of times they just don't have the expertise. They opened up a carpet cleaning company.

6:21They're a roofer. They don't understand the big picture about developing a marketing plan or developing SOPs for their business. All the things that they should really have. They'll understand that the best way to improve your profitability is at the bottom line, not the top line. They're always trying to bring on more revenue. It's like, we need more revenue. No, you don't. I'll put you out of business if I give you more revenue because you're selling a loss. You have to do that analysis first, right? Yeah, so it sounds like some of this stuff is just very data-driven. Some of it seems pretty numbers-driven in particular, like if we're doing accounting and kind of going through operations.

7:03Some of it seems technical. Some of it seems kind of growth and marketing related. I think when I think about hiring a problem solver like that, I wonder if someone looks what you do and they go, well, you're not a specialist because you solve problems across so many different areas. Do you find any resistance there? Not really, because like I said, we have the specialties in our wheelhouse, right? The people that we can go to. Sometimes you need a generalist to see the big picture, right? But as far as, you know, specialties, the majority of the time, you know, listen, I've got like 20 years executive experience in the phone company, but then also 20 years of running my own business, right?

7:46And through those years, you learn the trials and tribulations of what works and what doesn't work. Right now, most small businesses, they need more revenue. I know how to generate revenue for companies. So that's one of the big problems that I solve right now is they need more revenue or they need to become more profitable. And that's what I did for the phone company for 20 years and then also private business. So 40 years experience in that. Yeah. What would be, I'm just thinking about to our friend that's listening right now, let's maybe think of some other areas where they might be experiencing.

8:21Maybe you've noticed some trends. You're like, you know what? I see a lot of SMB folks struggling with this. I don't know if there's maybe just kind of a list of other things that if you got a problem with this, you know, if you got a problem, yo, I'll solve it. Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it. and then we bring in Chuck. So listen, so one of the biggest paradigm shifts that I'm seeing right now, and it's both positive and negative, or people have positive and negative reactions to it, is AI, right? And so I like to say AI is like it was when the computers came out in the early 80s where everyone was starting to get a business computer or a home computer.

8:58So businesses came out and they did their business. They bought this business computer and it's sitting there, but they don't have anyone that knows how to use it. They don't have anyone that knows how to set it up. So they hired companies to do that. And then it started coming out in the homes. And then what you started seeing was on job applications or on skill sets, it said must be PC literate. Remember that? They don't put that on there anymore. Everyone knows a PC, right? That's the way it's going to be with generative AI. So when I talk about AI, I talk about generative AI. So AI is the big picture, everything.

9:33Generative AI is, not to get too technical, but I guess with your audience, I probably can. Generative AI is, well, think of chat GPT. Chat GPT stands for chat, generative, pre-trained transformer. And what a transformer is, is a neural network of data, right? So they feed, they fed chat GPT with just millions and millions and millions of codes, right? This is what a book looks like. This is what a dog looks like. Then they would give a thousand pictures saying, is this a dog or a book? And it had to make the decisions, right? So they trained that pre-trained and it can actually generate ideas or texts that have not been generated before.

10:14So if you use it properly, you can come up with novel ideas, right? That, you know, brand new that can be used for your organization. So I tell small businesses out there, you have to embrace this. You have to learn how to use generative AI and you have to learn it properly. And the problem is, is even now, when people go to Google and they want to find a restaurant, they type restaurant near me. That's not a good prompt, right? It might suit their purposes because they don't care. But if you're going to use a prompt like that on chat GPT, write me an article, right? You're not going to get something good out of it.

10:54But if you train that AI about your business, about your customers, about your target audience, about your keywords, your products, your services, you train it about all of that. So it has that information. Then you give it the right prompt, you know, write me an article. Well, you can listen, you can get iterative. You can say, give me a list of 10 article ideas for my roofing company. And then it gives you 10 ideas. And you say, okay, on idea number one, write this article in first person from perspective of the owner of the company, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you write that and you get beautiful content.

11:31Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, for those of us who have been on it, you know, if you, by the way, if you're not on it and you're lagging behind when it comes to implementation of AI in your company, listen, you're not competing with AI, you're competing with everybody else is not dilly-dallying. And I understand the apprehension. I understand the fear. I understand, you know, we don't want to make mistakes. Also, you know, maybe I think that there's a lot, you know, Chuck, where people don't realize what they could be doing within their organization. But you want to maybe talk about what's possible or what you're seeing happen right now to stimulate some ideas on what folks should or should be doing?

12:13Yeah, so absolutely. So listen, once you have a trained GPT on your business, you can go into it. And like I say, things can be iterative. You can ask it for an idea and then tell it to expand on that idea. But I can go into Chad GPT and tell it, create a seven email campaign for new customers that have visited my website. And it will create all of those emails beautifully for you. Okay. So it'll write that for you. But then you can also go into it and you can say, create a mark based on the information given, write a marketing plan for 2024, make it seasonal. I want to do five posts a week on Facebook, three posts a week on Instagram, blah, blah, blah.

12:57Give me ideas for the posts. Right. So you can use it for that. You can upload a spreadsheet into it and tell it and ask it to analyze the data in the spreadsheet. There's so many applications, a Rupert. OK, so hellstorm hits, right? You can load in once it's pre-trained, you can load in the vertical and horizontal coordinates of where a hellstorm hit. And it will look at your CRM to determine how many existing customers you had that were in that area so that you can send them an inspection email. But then it will also come up with a list of addresses that were potentially affected by that hellstorm so that you can target your team to go to.

13:40There's so many things if you know how to use it and what to do. You can also do your chat bots and things like that. Very intelligent chat bots, you know, so that you don't have to be there at midnight to answer people's questions because it'll answer them for you based on the information given. Yeah, yeah. I like it. All right, Chuck, you're a problem solver. Your website is askinteract.com. And again, for leaders that are listening to this right now, how do you typically kind of begin new relationships? You know, let's say someone reaches out and say, listen, we got some ideas on, you know, maybe what we should be doing.

14:15But all I know is that we've got some pain points right now. Like, what do those initial engagements typically look like with you? So normally, I work on referrals, right? It's hard to market that you're a problem solver, right? People don't need a problem solver until they have a problem. But typically, so if an organization reaches out to me, it could be as simple as, hey, Chuck, we've got this problem. And then what I'll normally do is do a quick assessment based on their business and come up with a, here are the steps that I see need to be taken to develop the problem, to work out what the true problem is, and then some of the fixes that we would probably look at.

14:55And then once they sign off on that, now we're engaged and we actually start working on it. But I give them the roadmap of how we would fix it. So if they want to go fix it themselves, they can. And I normally don't charge for that. I have a little segment called, what's your problem? And people were like texting me or sending me things. Hey, I've got this problem. And I was answering for them and all this. And then I started getting phone calls. And I get a phone call and be like, yeah, you know, I got this problem. I need to get a loan from the bank and blah, blah, blah. And I'm helping these people for free over the phone, telling them, you know.

15:28And I said, OK, no more of that. I don't have time to solve these problems, but. Yeah, excellent. Your website, askinteract.com. And I think you've got some resources here as well. Someone's been listening to our conversation. What do they do next? Where do they go? So, well, askinteract.com is going to give you the menu item, Interact, where you can now give me a call. You can set up a virtual coffee. You can set up a true meeting. You can send us your problem on the form, right? That's the easy way to do it. It also has links to all of our social media, LinkedIn, Facebook. And then my phone number, of course, is on the website as well.

16:06Yeah, awesome. All right, askinteract.com. Chuck LeBeau, again, you're the chief strategist. Again, the name of the company, Interact Business Solutions Group. Chuck, it's been great having you. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, Josh. I appreciate it.

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