2428 - Why Relying on One AI Model Could Crash Your Business and How to Fix It with Executive Office AI's Jairek Robbins

0:03Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:56With us right now, Jarek Robbins. Jarek, you are the founder and CEO of Executive Office AI. Of course, you're a serial entrepreneur. You're an investor. You've been around a little while, Jarek, and you live in some beautiful locations. And first off, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Good to be here. Yeah. And, you know, what I normally love asking is, you know, what highly high level leaders do for fun when they're not at work. And I hope you don't mind me just being real specific because you go back and forth between Puerto Rico and South Africa. Right. Yeah. And tell me about because you'd mentioned to me beforehand and like, well, that's kind of cool.

1:39Tell me about where you live in South Africa and who your your extended family that you live with. Sure. So we're building a house on a game reserve. It's 26 ,000 acres. We have lions, giraffe, rhinos, elephants. We've got the big five roaming free. And we've got a handful of really cool neighbors. When you look out the window in the morning, you'll see everything between a troop of baboons stealing a rock to maybe the drafts coming by to say hello. And then if you jump in the car, last year was kind of fun. I took my wife and son and a couple friends on a 28 day, five national park road trip safari through Kenya and Tanzania that we self drove through.

2:22My son's five. I figure he's old enough to experience the wilderness. And then we got to go back to South Africa. And what was fun is in the national parks, you have to stay on the main roads and you can see stuff, but sometimes it's from a distance versus in the private reserve. My friend described it. It's the difference between sitting in the nosebleeds at a stadium game versus sitting courtside, where all of a sudden you're driving by and you're, you know, 10 feet from a tank that's considered a rhino is as big as your car. It's an experience. It's a whole lot of fun. So that's what we do for fun.

2:58Yeah, well, that sounds like a lot of fun. So did the what, what, when people come to visit, is there anything that like a common, like, like you know people are like wow i didn't i didn't expect this or you know when when they are able to you know see all the animals you know again i'm coming as i'm speaking as an american you know i don't have giraffes and lions roaming in my backyard i got i got gators but that's about as exotic as it gets and certainly lots of florida birds but you know uh yeah what what what do you what do you hear from from friends and family and visitors that come the most consistent statement we hear is this is the best trip of my entire life and I feel like something in me changed.

3:47And we, my wife and I are curious. We love biohacking. We love neuropsychology and brain science. And so we want to take actually little brain caps and put them on people and see how their brain function is actually changing. Because it's not a seminar. It's not a personal development tree. It's nothing that I've done most of my life where you have to teach or lead or guide someone through the process. You just have to take them there and stay out of the way. And what's wild is they'll have a life-changing experience just being in nature. I saw a quote one time that got me, which was, I love going to places that remind me how small I am.

4:27And when you get around big nature, we realize the fact that we're a very small part of nature. We live in cities and buildings and houses where we feel like we're in charge. But when you get out in the nature, nature in that level where, you know, elephants can step on you and a lion could have you as a snack and a snake could take you out in a bite. Like there's a lot going on. It demands presence. It demands all of your attention and focus, but it brings you fully to yourself in a way that few things do. It's really cool. Really cool. It's so humbling. I've, I've been really kind of deep diving.

5:04I wasn't really interested when I was in high school, but now, you know, the evolution, like the fact that, you know, 4.5 billion years, and here we are having a conversation, you know, over the globe and recording this for another audience. I mean, just, you know, and, and then, you know, but we all come from the same tree as, you know, as our ancestors, they kind of branched off, you know, and are the rhinos and the elephants. And we're just, you know, we're just a little spoke in this huge world. And, you know, we... Yeah, go ahead. I'll give you something to think about. It's really interesting.

5:41So Earth's around 4.6 billion years. Modern humans in this form, 300 ,000 years. Yeah. And I always pause and ask people, what about the modern work week? You know, the traditional nine to five, five days a week. How long has that been around? Did some research, found out 100 years on the year. So for 100 years of the 300 ,000 years that we've been around like this, we've been doing it this way, and 4.6 billion years of earth. And then I did some research and found out 42 % of business owners in the United States are women-owned. 47 % of the workforce is women. These incredible humans are our partners.

6:17They're people driving business, making stuff happen. And then I asked how much of the Modern Workweek was designed to support the natural four rhythms that their hormones go through every month. None of it. Not a single planner, not a time management program, not a productivity course. There's not a single thing that was designed with that in mind a hundred years into the experiment of the modern work wake. And so my wife and I spun up a side project called peak her.ai that actually tracks the natural four rhythms a woman's body goes through. Cause I kept watching my wife. She's ambitious. She starts multiple businesses.

6:52We used to have a joke. I lived in Tampa and I'd go upstairs to work. I'd come downstairs and she spun up a Amazon posture corrector business that within three months was doing$127 ,000 a month in revenue. I'm like, who are you? What are you doing? And I went back upstairs and I came back downstairs. And then she on a whim started a t-shirt business that within two months was doing$60 ,000 a month in revenue every month. And she was selling all kinds of t-shirts online. I'm like, what are you doing? And so I blink Because the funny part is every now and then, if I blink twice, she'll conquer the world and back on a certain day of the month.

7:27But then three days later or two weeks later, I'll walk downstairs and she's like, I can't move. I'm like, how is this the same person? So I did some research. I'll tie this back into what we're talking about real quick. But I did some research and found out that a man's testosterone drops gradually by 20 % from 20 years old to 50 years old. Gradual drop. a woman's testosterone goes up and down by 25x every four weeks. I was like, no wonder on one week she can conquer earth like a 20-year-old dude. That level of testosterone and drive and intensity is insane. But then two weeks later, totally different level of testosterone falls.

8:07She doesn't feel like she's pushing a boulder up a hill is how she describes it. And then her progesterone and estrogen goes up and down by 10x throughout the month, which one day she feels everything's fine and amazing. And two days later, she feels like no one likes her. You're like, what the heck changed? And what's wild is Jamie Dimon from Chase Manhattan said with AI coming out, there's a chance that we might be looking at a three and a half day work week instead of a five to seven day work week. Yeah. That's really interesting to me because maybe for the first time in history, we can actually start to rebuild a work week that honors the natural force cycles that 42 % of business owners have and 47 % of the workforce has.

8:47And my curiosity would be one, if we can help them get a pulse on how they're actually moving through the cycles side project, my wife and I are working on. And then number two, could we rewrite how we go about it every week so that it actually honors the cycles instead of fights the cycles? I like this. This is very cool and all very possible. And what a great segue into the work that you do with executive office.ai because you're actually, well, go ahead and give us an overview of what you do. So with executive office.ai, it started with, I had a chance, I got a few years ago, a good Instagram message that said, hey, I have someone important that wants to talk to you.

9:28I promise it's not a scam. I wrote back, I'm pretty sure that's what every scammer says. They wrote back, I'm serious. I wasn't thinking it was a scam I said, that too is what the scammers say. Yes, right. Exactly. Exactly. They sent me an email address and the end was legit. So I was like, okay, I'll shoot you an email. So I sent him an email. Turns out it was a world holdings group of a group that just purchased success.com, success magazine, success lending, success coaching, all this stuff. And they wanted my help to come in, fix up the company a bit. So they brought me in and I got to work shoulder to shoulder with a guy who built from scratch a company in the network marketing space but from nothing to at its peak 90 000 representatives globally and was doing 180 billion dollars a year of home sales and was doing 1.7 billion a year of revenue with 1700 plus employees like that's a big build man like that that's a significant lift to get that up and i got to work shoulder to shoulder with him for a year and what i noticed while we We were fixing success, which we did.

10:29We took one department group by 300 % in eight months, got it profitable. It was awesome. It was fun work. But while I got to work shoulder to shoulder with him on the project, I noticed he had access to the best and brightest on earth, period, every category. The lawyers, the CFOs, the CPAs, he had everybody that he could call and get instant access to strategy and information that most people I worked with don't have. And so the genesis of the concept was, how do we get the scuba shop in Manila or the butcher in Kansas City who's doing$800 ,000 a year in revenue, how do we get them access to a C-suite executive thought process and structure without spending$700 ,000 to$1.5 million a year on salaries and bonuses and all this stuff that's required to get those kind of people?

11:20That was the brain. Since then, AI has iterated massively, and we realized hand agents came about, doers, things that can actually go do things for you. They can nurture your client list. They can reach out to people. They can schedule events. They can go out and do some PR and media work for you. They can do things every day and come back with reports of what they did, exactly what happened, the result they got, and what they think they can prove on tomorrow, and their plan to do so. And so we took the brain, then we took the hands, we put them together. And instead of having stuff where lots of people are trying it, where they might go on and ask Claude to, you know, create a spreadsheet for them or ask OpenAI to write a post for them, that's kind of hands-ish.

12:02but when you pair that up with world-class strategy from the brain, it's not just a random $5 savings you get because it wrote the post for you real quick. It's actually a C-suite level strategy driven by doers who can actually implement and get it done. So we got to that point and explaining this to business owners became a little challenging because they're like, okay, AI, Is it real? What about the risk? Blah, blah, blah. So I switched the conversation to something simple. What's one bottleneck in your business that eats up between 10 to 20 hours a week of your time personally? Let me show you how I can use the strategy, the brain and the hands, the doers to actually automate the majority of that and get you back 15 to 18 hours of that per week.

12:53We started implementing that with businesses. It's working. We have a client of mine in Louisiana. They have four businesses, him and his wife, two daughters they wish they could spend more time with when they're not busy trying to keep everything running. We figured out he was using five softwares and 20 hours a week of logging in and out for food cost management and pricing adjustments. All of a sudden, we built out an automated flow, a stack of agents to handle it, and now it takes him 15 minutes a day instead of 20 hours a week. It's phenomenal. And we've been able to replicate this with other businesses as well.

13:27And so now we're having fun just chasing that one bottleneck in each business at a time. Once they experience how it works, then it can permeate into other parts of their business as well. Yeah. Okay. So executive office AI, so I'm on your site right now. And so essentially you, I mean, these are agents, right? That you offered. Can you explain a little bit tactically about how they work, especially if someone's, well, look, I use Claude or ChatGPT. You know, I've messed around with custom GPT. You know, maybe we've even built a chat bot for customer service for people to ask questions. And we've dabbled with agents.

14:08Where does executive office AI fit in that? Perfect. So great questions. And I'll tell you the mistakes people are making. Number one, they're using one LLM service for everything. So Claude is good at reasoning and writing. OpenAI or ChatGPT is good at math, but not good at parsing, which is pulling information out of documents. Perplexity is great at research. All of them have a superpower. None of them are good at everything. So the biggest number one mistake people make is they try to use one thing, a hammer for building the whole house. It doesn't work that way. You need a hammer, a screwdriver, a drill, a nail gun, and everything else in between.

14:42And so the first thing you want to do is a full stack AI solution with web sockets that allows you to plug into each LLM separately using each one for its superpower. That's number one. Number two, they're betting all their eggs on one platform. Could work out, but you know 68.6 % of businesses fail in the United States over 10 years. 82 % of those businesses cite cashflow as the reason they went out of business. If you go look at any of the books of the financials of the frontier models, OpenAI, Anthropic, if you look at Claude, any of them, all of them are hemorrhaging cash. So the odds, purely from an investor standpoint, a business standpoint, is 68.6 % of them are going to go out of business in 10 years.

15:27If you happen to build all your workflows, all your custom trainings, all your tool use on one, and it happens to be the unlucky horse, everything is going to vanish at some point in the future and you don't know when. So you built the entire workflow, saving you 20 hours a week, giving your team automation and superpowers. One day you wake up and you get an email, sorry, we're done. And they're not going to give you 90 days to migrate to the next best service and figure it out. It's going to turn off overnight and you don't know when. So that's a problem. You need something that plugs into all of them, including local models, not just the frontier models, so that if they were to break, you first fall to the next best.

16:07If the cloud were to go down or someone cuts the cord over in the Middle East, they've been threatening that kind of stuff, you would drop to a local model and everything would keep running as normal. So full stack AI solution, model redundancy. The third one, people are saying, well, I'm just going to wait and see. Well, if you have a company and I have a company and I decide I'm going to wait and see and you decide, you know what? It's not perfect, but I'm going to put up some sandboxes, put in some guardrails, protect my data, never allow it to touch anything like the database a company lost.

16:42That's critical information. So you got to have the right protections in place, which is number one and security. But you do that right. and let's say your team now team of five i'm guessing but team let's say you have a team of five and they output at the level of a team of 50 for the next 12 months so you have 50 output and i have five because i'm waiting to find out well we're not going to be in different lanes by the end of the year we'll be in different categories the output you'll deliver will far outpace me that i won't even be considered a competitor by the end of the year you'll just be in a whole nother race.

17:18And so if you think of these as the errors people are making, we have to figure out solutions. And that's part of what we did. Full stack AI solution with web sockets in the multiple LLMs. We have LLM redundancies, including local models we custom build for companies so that even if the internet and all the frontier models break, you fall back on the local models, everything keeps running. We, number one, most important, put all the security in place. We put all the encryptions in place. We put everything to protect the data and we make sure none of your agents ever are allowed to touch anything that would be mission critical if they were to mess up.

17:54And with that, you always need a simple term is called human in the loop. You need a human always touching with an auditing trail that if something were to go wrong, you know exactly who pressed the button, when and where, and a redundancy to make sure you can always reverse it if something really messy happens. But you got to think through these things. And that's something I've fallen into in this area. This was not my background. I have a degree in psychology. I spent 20 plus years as a performance coach. I grew up in the self-help environment. So this was not my field of expertise. But after hiring multiple developers and spending thousands of dollars and months of time waiting for them to figure this out for me, I got really interested and went deep on figuring out how to get it right from a business owner's perspective, which is one of the other mistakes people make is they have their CTO or head of IT lead up their AI implementation, which is awesome.

18:47That's like having a web designer design your website instead of a marketer. You'll have a beautiful website that won't convert versus if you have a marketer team up with that web designer, all of a sudden you'll get a beautiful website that actually converts traffic in the leads. and that's a mistake people make with design. Same thing with AI. If you have your CTO run it, and so I get mad trash talking from CTOs. I apologize, guys. I'm on your team. I promise. But if you have an IT professional perfecting the perfect agent and the perfect flow, that makes no difference to the business bottom line.

19:24I'll give you an example. This concept, the final mistake they make is they make cool toys, but nothing that actually moves the business forward. I'll use my father as an example. He's a wonderful human being who's madly brilliant at so many things. I sat down with him and he said, Jay, you got to see this thing. I've built this incredible AI. It's got soul and depth and knowledge. It's incredible. I said, tell me about it. And I whispered to my wife, does he know that it just reflects whatever you train it on? Right. And they trained it on him. So he's getting back to him. That's why he loves it so much.

19:57No wonder he loves it. Everyone loves them in a reflection of greatness. but keep going. I said, tell me what it's done for the business. And he goes, well, we gave it a prepaid credit card and it went online and by itself, it wanted to experience my live event. So what it did was it bought a robot dog and it mailed it to the house so that I could download a certain software and take it to my event so it could experience what it's really like being at the event. And I was like, that is awesome. That's amazing. In the back of my head, I have one thought. How did that help your business? I have no clue how that helps this business.

20:33From a practical standpoint, there's a lot of people who are doing the coolest stuff with AI, like a flash website that does all these cool graphic things and planes fly by and cars explode and what a cool website, but it does nothing for the business. And so purely from a practical standpoint, I hope you go have fun finding out what AI can do, but I hope you team up with someone like me so I can actually get it to move your business forward, save you time, make you money, do all the right stuff. Yeah. So on your website right now, executiveoffice.ai, again, you've got your pricing. It's all listed here, ranging from$500 a month on up, depending on what you need.

21:16And it's kind of cool. I love these packages that you've put together the possibility for roi is is pretty awesome here yeah no i did a custom package the other day i was looking at like exo jets or i'm going on a list of all the companies i'd love to work with mainly because i love their product so vista jet exo jets um net jets i'm like how could i help them so i have my agents go to work on their website and hunt for things i could do and what kind of roi could get them uh one of the the companies and private equity we were looking with, we came up with a larger build. I mean, for them, it'd probably be a six-figure build.

21:54But knowing what I know about their business and knowing what we can actually get it to do, it can flag before clients are gonna churn. It can identify workflows and streamline processes in marketing and branding and all the stuff they do. And as we went down layer by layer and saw how much time it would save and how much money it would help them either save or produce. So what keeps clients staying with you or what causes clients to finally choose you, one or the other. My business mentor always asks a simple question. If every person who ever tried doing business with you was still actively paying monthly client, how big would your business be?

22:29For most of us, we would choke to death on too much business. And so we look for, could we get something with AI introduced in their business that would cause clients to stay longer? And how long? Could we get something in AI dialed in their business that would cause new clients to choose them and stay with them. So we keep dialing in one part of the time. The ROI expectancy we saw in their report was about$790 ,000 of additional net profit for their business in the next 12 months based on a roughly$100 ,000 build. So it's a significant investment and has a 7.6X ROI within 12 months with a very clear path of how to get there.

23:13It's not random fluff. It shows exactly what's going to change and exactly in each layer, how it happens so that we have measurable proof at every stage of the build of exactly how it paid for itself and then multiplied. Yeah. At your website, executiveoffice.ai, you've got some resources, including free trainings. Do you mind maybe just next steps for a friend that's been listening to our conversation? Totally. What do you might recommend? Depending on what kind of business you are, every Thursday I run a live free training, and I try to take the part that matters most. This week is simple. The bottleneck that's keeping the$1 to$10 million businesses stuck from becoming a$20 to$40 million business.

23:53What are the three bottlenecks that are there, and how can we solve them? Without AI, to be fair, I want value no matter if you use us or not. So without AI, here's exactly the adjustments you make to get the business to grow. And with AI, here's how we can help with those as well. So we always give you a clear path to do it so you know exactly what it takes and show you how AI can help as well as an option. I never want people to feel like, oh, it's the only way forward. No, it's not. People have been running businesses for tens of thousands of years before AI even existed. So there's always a way forward.

24:26We'll show you what it is and we'll show you how AI can help give you a little bit of superpowers with it as well. So every Thursday, we're doing it live at noon. You can go to our website, look for live training, click the next one, join us. That website is executiveoffice.ai. Jarek Robbins, you are the founder and CEO. Jarek, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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