2100 – The Impact of AI and VR on Business Efficiency with Saritasa’s Nik Froehlich

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05with us right now it's nick frolic nick you are the president and ceo of saratasa you're found on the web at saratasa.com s-a-r-i-t-a-s-a.com nick it's great to have you well thank you josh i'm glad i'm to be here yeah well give us an overview of by the way uh again to our friend that's website, but would you mind maybe just sharing a little bit about who Saratasa is and what you do? Sure. Well, simply, we're a technology consulting company, a lot of fancy words for software developer. We build custom software solutions for people, whether they be startups looking for change the world, make it a better place, or businesses that are trying to make their business more competitive, more efficient, improve the quality.

1:56So it's all custom stuff. Yeah. Well, what an interesting time to be doing what you're doing. And I'm sure that you've seen a lot of, I mean, just in the past year or two doing what you do. I mean, it's been tremendous in terms of tools that have been made available and just what better outcomes that we can create today for clients. Do you mind maybe just from your perspective, you know, for those of us, maybe we don't spend all of our days in development of all kinds. I'm sure this is, you know, in your case, you know, in the work that you're doing with your clients, you've probably seen a lot of, you know, maybe new projects, you know, that are maybe AI enabled that you weren't doing, you know, three, five, eight years ago.

2:43But yeah, give us just kind of a lay of the land of what you've been seeing in your world. Sure. But just to step back a moment, when we started in 2005, there was no mobile or anything. It was just web applications. And that came after the big dot-com bust in 2000 and stuff. But some people were playing a little bit and they're building these custom apps. But the advent of the iPhone and anybody being able to build apps, that really changed everything. I mean, it was a tsunami because now anybody could be a developer, including the startups. And you saw this economy of all these apps that came and then the businesses followed.

3:21Then the iPad came out. There's all this utility. So it kind of created this idea. It changed the world where software is something that you can build for yourself. And you don't buy it shrink-raft off the shelf like we used to at the Egghead store or anything. And the tools now, like you said, the tools that are out there to do this stuff just keep growing and growing. You know, we do a lot of VR now and VR for training and experiences and for demoing products that are, you know, difficult to bring to a trade show, but people can go hands on to it or having people get these experiences. And now AI is a tool that's allowing people to take their existing applications and make them better.

4:08Or if they have data, like institutional data about how their processes work, their teams can access this data now. Now, it's almost like having an encyclopedia, all those encyclopedia books, and you want to look up a topic and you'd have to go there and get it. But now, if you just, you know, Surrey knows it all, but AI, you just say, what does this mean? And it pulls it to you. That's the equivalent of it. That's the metaphor. But think about it for just about anything in business. So it's, you know, we started this business, I started this business because I knew that every business was going to need technology at one point.

4:49Because I saw it take out the travel industry. That was the first one, travel agents. And so if every business is eventually going to need it, well, that's great. So there's always a demand. Secondly, I knew that technology would always change and adapt. So now they're going to need somebody to constantly update it and do it. So that has been proven true. And it's growing at a faster rate. And everybody needs some technology. Every business does. And it's getting more complex. But the tools there, the things you can do, it's just growing. Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to maybe talk about maybe a couple of case studies or some of the work that you've done.

5:30I want to talk about A, and we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Let's talk about VR first. So my family and I just upgraded our meta headset. And it's just fascinating. If someone hasn't been dabbling around or goofing around with what you can do in VR, it's getting really cool. And it's only going to get cooler. My son and I had our headsets on and we were watching an Orlando Magic game, you know, sitting courtside, you know, just silly stuff like that. But there are some really valuable, and you kind of touched on this, there are some very practical business applications. Do you mind maybe sharing a little bit more about what you've seen being done or maybe what you've implemented for some of your clients?

6:18And maybe describe VR a little bit. Obviously, I just mentioned the meta headset, but it's obviously more than that. Do you mind maybe just kind of giving us a little glimpse into that world? So some of them are experiential. So we built this app for this company that when children are going to go under surgery for whatever they're going to do it, we built this app so that they can put it on and they can experience of what it's going to be in. But there's characters and they're like going into the hospital room and getting this stuff. But they get to, they don't have to be as afraid because they've just gone through it in a gaming type situation.

6:53And they know what to expect. And these little characters are there telling them that this is what the doctor is going to do now. So, I mean, that's got to be relieving for a kid, not an infant, a toddler. Another one is for the iron workers union. You know, the people that are going to work there, they need to know what it's like. So you put this on, it's scary. You're up there. You are up there and they're showing you how those beams come together. at exactly what you're going to need to do. There's another one, electrical, climbing a light pole. You got to know if you're afraid of heights or going down a manhole, how scary it is.

7:26There's another one we did. Oh, this is more practical. One of the big cities, they were giving instructions to their employees that are going to get their CDL license around the truck. And you got to practice that, right? So they'd have to take a truck off, put it in a warehouse and bring everybody there and have them do their walk around. Well, we created it in the VR set. So now they could just do that and they could do their walk around and they have to touch and they have to do each piece until they get a perfect grade. So now you get to go through that experience. So when you actually take the test, you've done this, but you didn't have to bring all the people in to the facility.

8:03There's dog training and where you're interacting with the dogs and it shows you how to train the dogs. pickleball how to how to do a drop a drop shot or a turn and we just it's like you know YouTube now if you're going to do any kind of home improvement or anything or anything you're going to look at a you know forget the manual you're going to see somebody how they do it well this is the next level of that really in experiencing this stuff and I mean you could just look at the studies when And some people learn by seeing, some by hearing, some by reading, some by experience. But this puts it all together.

8:40So there's a lot of power in it. Yeah, I will say. There's fascinating things that we're building and that the companies are coming to. And these are not startups. These are businesses that are using these practically. Yeah. Yeah, obviously, I want to talk a little bit about what you're seeing right now or new projects built upon what we can do with AI. Do you mind maybe just sharing a few things that you've been seeing there and maybe some things that we might get excited about to our friend that's listening? Again, may stimulate some ideas. us. What I can say is we're not necessarily building AI apps right now, but it has become such an integral part to our operations, to our planning, to the way that we run our company and brainstorming and ongoing SWOT analysis, ongoing threat, just looking for trying to punch holes and things that we want to do.

9:43And, you know, AI, you know, just again, just from an internal operation standpoint has been just insanely valuable. And to, you know, to our friend that's listening, I'm sure you've heard this before, don't be threatened by AI because that toothpaste is already out of the tube. It's just the reality. So you're not competing with AI, you're competing against other people that are already using AI. So that's why you might not want to drift off into irrelevancy. I'd love some of what you've been observing. So it's very early with AI. This happened very quickly. I mean, I just remembered a year and a half ago, or maybe it was a little longer.

10:24So the full ramifications are still, I think, to be uncovered and where it's going to go. But it's a tool, right? We have plenty of people that call us up and say, I want AI. I don't want to miss the boat. It's like, for what? What are you trying to do? And that, well, I don't know. I just need it. It's like, well, AI doesn't just exist by itself. It's a tool. And it's really good about synthesizing data if we're talking about large language models. And for instance, you know, we started it. We had this thing with our consultants. People call us up and say, have you ever done this kind of job with this kind of technology in this industry?

11:02It's like, geez, we've done thousands and thousands and thousands of projects, right? And then they get on our Slack channel and ask everybody. all day long and we hope that somebody remembers. Well, all we did is hooked up an AI tool to our entire portfolio, which we had a database of everything. It's all there. And now a sales rep or consultant or anybody can just ask, it's like, have we ever done a project in the veterinary related to social media that takes payment accounts using Stripe? And then, there it is. How many hours and everything? It's like immediately. So we had the data. Now that's a very simple, simple.

11:38But it's also with our PMO and running our projects and anybody that needs a little bit of help is like, what is our process of doing this? It's right there, right? They don't have to go ask anybody for that. So these are simple tools. Now, we have customers that are very sophisticated on some of the things they have, like in the pharma industry and stuff, which again, this gives them, gives the information very easy to access. and then the next steps are taking that data and do predictive and doing all other kinds of stuff so but there's a lot of things that need to be resolved because um the we want to do this locally in most cases because there's a privacy issue you're sending this data away somewhere right because we're not building the ai engine i couldn't afford that you know you gotta this ai is someplace else and these are tools so there's a there's it's it's still evolving but there's a lot of neat things, you know, there's a lot of neat things, but at the same time, you know, we have a rule in our company.

12:40It's like, I saw somebody write an email. I read the email. I said, you know, this isn't you. Don't do that again. I need to see your personality. You literally had AI write that email and we don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. That rookie move, by the way. Yeah, I think so. I think, I think everybody goes through that, that quick learning curve. I think they do that, Yeah, yeah. They get their hands slapped pretty quick, hopefully, right? And know that, you know, again, I think AI works best when we maintain ourselves in the pilot's chair, right? In the pilot seat and yeah, so forth. Hey, so Nick, I want to ask you about to our audience that has hired developers in the past, what do you recommend as best practice for being a great client or and also just being a better consumer of developers or at least hiring better?

13:39you know, what questions to ask, you know, though, I guess what I'm asking for is the, the typical missteps that you can sometimes see that leads to a lot of delays, frustrations, miscommunication that could be avoidable. From the client's perspective. From client's perspective. Yeah. That's hard. It's difficult because well, every project is different. There is not one system of doing things and our clients, come from all different levels of sophistication on processes, how they deal with vendors or partners, their understanding of technical. If they don't understand, I mean, what we produce is not tangible until the end, and they certainly can't look at the quality of it because they don't know how to judge that.

14:29So it's difficult. We try very hard. We put it into our principles and pillars that we share the risk with the client. We understand that if the client is frustrated, then even if we didn't do anything wrong, we're going to share that risk and hopefully the successes as well. We work very hard on trying to understand the client's perspective and you have to do that. You have to do it and take responsibility very, very quickly, as transparently as possible. And even if we weren't wrong, if they perceive we were wrong, let's give it up this time. Let's try to explain it. And then let's see if the person on the other side is reasonable.

15:16Sometimes they're not. We're not afraid to fire a client. We know when we cannot be successful, unfortunately. But it just takes a lot of, I think it's empathy. We teach empathy. Let's put ourselves on the client side. Do you understand that they don't understand? we understand for us we understand all the nuances of it why does it take 20 hours to put in that comma well because you ask for the comma we got to define it we got to give it to a tm we got to do it we got to go through qa then we got to test everything on production then we got to do it on staging make sure okay and put it in in production i mean yes so let's not just do one comma let's bunch things up all together so we have to teach them about processes and you can't have it overnight and stuff.

16:00But I would say it's the biggest challenge. And when you're successful at that, well, then you're successful. Then they keep with you and they recommend you. 100%. Your website is - Same time as that, the opposite side of it, we care just as deeply for our developers, the people on the other side. In other words, we take care of them just as equally. So if a client doesn't treat one of our employees right, we will tell the client, we will say, we don't do it. this level of whatever it is. And I think by having that mutual respect, our developers, our employees treat our clients better because they know that, I don't know, I think it works both ways around.

16:41Your website, saratasa.com, S-A-R-I-T-A-S-A.com, to a friend that's listening, and maybe they've got some software that's been part of their product or their operations, and there's some known issues, right? You know, if they just want to have a conversation or, you know, kind of dip their toe in that, or maybe they've, you know, they've been kicking around, you know, at least checking in with someone, what do you typically talk about? Like, what's that, those initial conversations, what does that usually look like? So there's two types. there's somebody that comes to us that they want to build something from scratch.

17:26A lot of that. And then there's what we call the code takeover. It's somebody that's moving long, right? They have something and they're unhappy with their developer. They haven't had one and they want to start doing something. We call that a code takeover. So for that type of person that you described, well, first of all, we always try to find if there's a match because Because I categorize my profession as three levels. There's the highest level enterprise, censure, whatever. They charge, I don't know,$350 an hour. I mean, it's for enterprise. It's very, very, very expensive. Those are huge contracts, over$2 million for a project or whatever.

18:04And then there's the individuals, the small little team, full stack. They can do everything from the design all the way. They're inexpensive. And for mom and pop type projects. And then there's the middle market, which we are. which can do really big things because we have specialization and everything. So the first thing we try to do is find out where that fit is. What are you looking for? What is your budget? Nobody likes to talk budget. Okay, how much do you need to work done? So it's kind of difficult because many times they don't know. It's like, well, I got these problems here. Well, I don't know.

18:37Okay. So the next thing we will probably do is say, let's do a code review. Give me your code and we're going to do a forensic on it all the way down. So we understand what it is. So we understand the technology, how old it is, how well it's written. In other words, is it abstract? Can we see it? Are there comments in it? Is it easy to do? Or is it what we call spaghetti code? It's like, shoot, don't pull this little thread because everything's going to break. And then we'll come back to them and say, well, here's our analysis. This is, you know, we could work with this or we will not work with this because we can't touch it.

19:10If we touch it, it's going to fall. It's a house of cards. Sorry. And then we'll ask them now, what do you want to do? And then we can start assessing, okay, well, it's going to be this many hours and stuff. And we hope that they want to go for a long-term engagement, even if it's minimal hours a month, but somebody that we can have our hands on because there's ramp-up time. We have to understand the code. We have to understand their business. We have to understand how they work. And there's a lot of hours built into that that would be wasted if they left and they came back a year later. So we're looking for those ongoing relationships, just like you would have with your accountant, right?

19:47You typically stick with an accountant because they start understanding the stuff. You don't just skip around, I would guess. So that's what we're looking for. We're looking for the right fit. We're looking for something that we could be successful with so we feel good and that they are getting – they've chosen the right company. Yeah. Saratossa.com is the website. You can click on the orange button right on the front screen there. It says get a free consultation. And anything else? We just have like one minute left here. But just in terms of like next steps, I mean, obviously you've worked with big companies.

20:22You've worked with smaller companies. You've worked with companies like iHeartMedia, Cheesecake Factory, Makita, and a number of others. But anyone in particular that, you know, it's like if you are experiencing this, please get in touch with us. I would say if you have a legacy system, something that you rely on technology, you know that technology is important for you, but it's no longer doing what you want it to do. Like it's an old beat up car, but you know you need a car. You can come to us and we can help modernize it or reinvent it, re-visualize it using newer tools. That would be the number one.

21:07for somebody that already has something or somebody that says, I need to get into the fray, but I'm afraid to because my competitors have it too. There's an easy entryway, but you can't just go from zero to competing with somebody that uses software that has been doing it for years. But yeah, that's what I would say. If somebody that has something that they like, but it's not, they know, they have an idea of, they think, I want to do this with it. And if I could do this with it, I would be more efficient. I'd make more money. I could offer more to my clients. I'd be more competitive. Any of those three things.

21:45And I want to know what's available out there for me. I don't know exactly what I want, but take a look at my code. Tell me what I got. And let's brainstorm. Because we have those sessions. We'll brainstorm with you. We'll talk about it in front, right, to decide what we're going to do. There's no cost to that for us to figure out what should be done. Nick Froelich, again, CEO of Saratasa. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great conversation. Thank you, Josh. Pleasure being here.

22:18Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program. Please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

22:59I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

23:41I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.