2290 - Empowering Business Owners to Embrace Technology with The Business Therapist's Dan Goodstein

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0:58With us right now, it's Dan Goodstein. Dan, you are the founder of Business Therapist. You're on the web at businesstherapist.org. You also happen to be the head of some organizations. You're the president of IRPA AI. We'll talk about that just a little bit. And also president of Digital Enterprise Institute. You are out there doing good work in the world. Before we get into that, Dan, I'd love to just, what are you doing outside of work? You know, all your efforts. What do you do when you're on your own? I don't know if you're into anything lately, watching anything that's really good. Anything come to mind?

1:37Yeah, I'm a new boater. So I started the boating journey, which I learned is a journey, in fact, in all senses of the word. This summer is my first one, but enjoying that. And I'm getting more and more involved in coaching sports. sports. My, my kids are, uh, seeming like seemingly in a hundred different sports now, and somehow, uh, convinced me to coach. I think all of them, almost all of them. So doing a lot of coaching. Yeah. What, what boat did you get? And what is the, like the, the, the thing that maybe you heard beforehand, but then when you got the boat, you're like, Oh no, it's whatever they're saying about this.

2:19Yeah. It's that time. Like anything come to mind that like you were still surprised with, um, when you, after becoming a boat owner? Yeah, everything. I think it's one of those things where, um, you know, you have to be, uh, first of all, it's a, it's a, it's a fairly large boat. I had an opportunity to buy a particular boat, which was probably too big for me, uh, as a starter, but, uh, so it's, uh, it's a motor yacht. It's, uh, got cabins and basically like a floating condo. So yeah, I had to learn that my controlling nature and my desire to have everything kind of figured out and planned in advance is a useless thing when you have a boat.

3:01So you have to learn to kind of go with the flow and deal with situations as they come. I guess it's a good lesson to learn. Yeah, yeah. But so you're, you said you're in Long Island. So obviously you have a dock there. Where do you go to just kind of putter around or do you actually go off to take a day trip or go off? Yeah, we've got a couple. We've got a couple. There's a lot of great, we're fortunate where we live, the North Shore of Long Island is a bunch of great places right here in the North Shore. So you can go 10 minutes, you can go a couple hours into the city. And we're right across the Long Island Sound from Connecticut.

3:38So there's a bunch of places you could do a day trip or a quick overnight too. Nice, nice. Well, Dan, let's talk about all of your work. And I just kind of high level kind of picked some of the brands that you operate under. Give us an overview of your impact and who you work with and serve. Yeah, so I started my career as a tech guy. I learned very early on that I was better at the business side of tech than the technical side of tech. And so I got into marketing for, you know, big blue chip clients, Microsofts and HPs of the world. Uh, then I kind of landed, uh, accidentally in the media business.

4:18I ran a bunch of local media companies, newspapers and things for, uh, a number of years. And then I, uh, was able to kind of marry the two together. I took over the, uh, media business of a, of a professional association, uh, which now focuses on, uh, AI and automation for, uh, large corporates. But what I learned from all of that was, you know, there was a whole bunch of, you know, either technical people or just founders of businesses in my local community, startups in the technology community. And, you know, as a result of COVID in particular, a lot of people just kind of talking about changes in their businesses and business models and all of those things.

5:03And I started realizing that some of the learnings I had from working in the corporate world were very impactful to founders and startups and small, medium businesses, local businesses. And I also found I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed kind of making an impact in a business that was not necessarily just a big corporate engine, but was actually putting food on someone's table. And so I launched Business Therapist to really focus on that. Well, in your world, what are the main areas that you see business owners today needing therapy? Yeah, you know, some of it's just having a community where they can share, vent, learn from others.

5:55Um, you know, a lot of us kind of, you know, you know, we inherit a business or we get in a business and you, and you, so, and you, you so often are kind of stuck in the day to day, uh, working in the business that you never get a chance to kind of zoom out and, and work on the business. Um, so we do a lot of that. We do a lot of kind of, uh, you know, helping people, uh, you know, could be around business management, finance. It could be around, we do a lot around sales, marketing, customer experience, you know, how to really kind of scale the business, I would say, is the main kind of common denominator.

6:30How do you scale the business? Because it's one thing to operate, you know, a business the same way you've been operating it for two, five, 10 years. It's another to, you know, really be able to scale it. And in today's environment with technology, and that's where the technology piece comes in with technology being what it is, AI. I don't think anybody has the luxury of just keeping their business the way it was a few years ago. Well, so what is a business therapist? How are you, what are you doing with your clients? Yeah. So we have a couple programs that we run around building pipeline, around revamping messaging, around revamping business operations.

7:14And then we do coaching. We do ongoing coaching, networking groups for business owners and founders. Yeah. What is what is ERPA, ERPA AI? Yes. ERPA AI is a professional association and media company that I that I also run. It focuses on business and technology leaders, mostly mid and large enterprises who are trying to figure out what technologies they should be leveraging and how they should be leveraging them. In particular, we focus on software automation and AI. So, you know, no surprise. You can't really do much today without seeing the impacts of AI. And so we talk about that and conduct research on, you know, what players are out there, what technologies are out there, what vendors are out there, and how companies can kind of implement AI and automation technologies.

8:14Yeah. Yeah. So obviously one of these areas I think you do a lot of work on is going to be the intersection of AI and sales. Do you mind maybe just kind of sharing some observations and best practices that you are seeing here we are into the second half of 2025? and mostly, you know, I just want to let, you know, a business owner who might be falling way behind in their tech stack or their, you know, how they operate, you know, to kind of let them know where standards are today. yeah um i mean it's a big topic obviously and and the you know the bad news of it is that if it's if it's the first time you thought about it you're you're behind right uh it's moving very very quickly we used to have you know on my podcast we used to talk you know every week about predictions for the next three years now it's like an impossible task you got to look at predictions for the next three months because uh the world changes every 30 days now um but the good news is that it presents a really big opportunity for business owners on a couple different fronts, right?

9:23One is it's never been easier to get access to resources because of AI, because of how democratized AI is, right? You can have a sales team, you can have marketing, you can have a podcast, you can have operations, finance, there's AI tools for almost every aspect of the business. And so, you know, the challenge we all have as business owners is usually resources and people. And that's becoming less and less of a challenge thanks to some of these AI tools. The other piece is there's never been a better time to kind of accelerate market share. You know, if you're if you're competing with a larger company, it's harder for them to change.

10:05Right. Big companies take a long time. They're very slow moving. They've got a lot of moving parts. It's very difficult for a large corporation to pivot and change the way that they do things. So that represents an opportunity for companies that can be more nimble, more flexible, make changes quicker and adapt quicker. Well, Dan, maybe let's come up with something specific that our friend that's listening right now, what is something that they could do today? Maybe one or maybe a couple of things. Yeah, we, one of the things that we're really excited about is the, as you kind of alluded to, AI for sales, right?

10:46You know, if you're a small business owner and you don't have a couple hundred salespeople working for you, you know, how do you go out and reach a lot of people in a short amount of time? And so, you know, we've been leveraging and implementing a bunch of AI tools around the sales process, around finding, you know, leads and prospects out there that are interested in the services that you provide, doing enough research on them to reach out to them in an intelligent way, not in this like generic automated, you know, spray and pray mass mailing that we've all seen on our LinkedIn's and email spam and all that stuff.

11:25and then actually doing the outreach, doing the outreach at scale. You know, there's a lot of people out there that'll tell you, you know, emailing is dead or telemarketing is dead or now even LinkedIn messaging is dead. But the reality is it's just it's become much more cost effective. And, you know, if you don't have to have a human being that you're paying, you know, 50, 60,$80 ,000 a year to do, then, you know, you can reach a very large audience in a relatively short and cost-effective way. Yeah. And so is there a particular platforms, tools that you'd recommend someone investigate? Yeah, we have a tool that we recommend.

12:08I'm sorry, Dan, not just a specific brand, but maybe a brand category. Like what could they search or have a conversation with their AI right now to kind of figure out, you know, what they should be adding to their tech stack or, you know, again, kind of sales system wise, you know, they should really look at adapting. Yeah, there's a couple of different categories. I mean, if they have existing people doing sales, there's a whole bunch of kind of sales assistant things out there, you know, research assistants and things that will actually, you know, help you write emails, help you do research.

12:42But I would look into, it's called conversational AI, but, you know, AISDRs. where these are actual agents. If you've heard of kind of agentic AI, these are actual AI agents that do the full tech stack or the full skill set of a human being. They do the research, they find the data, they write the emails, they send the emails, they respond to emails, they do follow up. They do, you know, and this is where I think technology should play a role, right? They do the stuff that most human beings hate doing, that chasing, that monotonous work, that, you know, making the thousand phone calls where you get one call back or one person answering the phone.

13:27You know, AI can do that now, which is great. Yeah. So to our friend that's listening, what obviously, Genic AI is obviously something that you could help with. Like if they want to set up agents, you know, to provide sales support, that's something you can help with? Yeah, we do. AI are human. We do. We do. We help organizations build sales teams and sales strategies, go to market strategy, marketing strategy, revamp their marketing messaging. But in short, yes, you know, if you want to kind of see what's out there from an AI tech stack standpoint and also figure out kind of how to implement it.

14:06We've just been fortunate to implement a few hundred of these. So we know the good, the bad and the ugly can can save you some some time and you can save you the time and you that I went through doing. Yeah. So to our friend, Dan, that is listening right now, you know, obviously they can connect with you. But you also have resources, right? So what are all the places that someone that's listed our conversations? They're interested in this subject. How can you help them? Yeah, go to, like you said, businesstherapist.org. We also have this professional association, which is IRPAAI, I-R-P-A-A-I.org, which is a research media networking group around technology and AI and automation.

14:52And we have a podcast. We have a weekly podcast that we do for more large enterprise, but it's called The Digital Leader Show, and we talk about technology and business topics. where do they so the digital leader show i mean they could just search for that in their podcast app do you have a what's the best website for that podcast yeah you could just do uh it's erpaai.com slash podcast erpaai.com slash podcast yeah there it is okay and we have all the links by the way um to our friend that's listening right now you can just click in your podcast app so that you can access everything that we've been talking about uh dan goodstein again thank you so much for joining us.

15:34It's been a great conversation. My pleasure, Josh. Thanks for having me.

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