Entrepreneurship in the Age of AI: Adapt or Become Irrelevant with Kevin Surace + Others

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following is a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas expressed.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
JENNAI is a part of my every day, not just
every day, every hour work.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
I ended up building the solutions that I was looking
for while they're outside of it, in order to help
us out.

Speaker 4 (00:20):
This model is really to diversify revenue.

Speaker 5 (00:23):
I'm Richard Gearhart and I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. You just heard
some snippets from our show. It was a great one.
Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start
your business.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given
it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to
Profit With Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 6 (00:45):
I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service
intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.

Speaker 5 (00:52):
And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, founder of Gear Media Studios, Content
Creation Space, Chief marketing officer of Gearhart Law, and a
speaker on AI in marketing.

Speaker 7 (01:01):
Welcome to Passage to Profit, the Road to entrepreneurship, where
we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories. And
their business ventures. What will artificial intelligence look like in
twenty twenty six. On our program, we're featuring Kevin Sores
and he's a pioneering AI innovator and serial entrepreneur, often

(01:23):
called the father of the virtual assistant. I'd like to
know who the mother was, but he's got long work
in artificial intelligence, generative technology, and billion dollar companies that
have shaped everything from smartphones to the way software thinks,
tests and evolves.

Speaker 5 (01:41):
And then we have two great presenters. Can hardly wait
to hear from them. Tyler Denagan, a dynamic entrepreneur and
founder of turn Serve, reshaping the multifamily housing industry through
innovative technology. That's really going to be very interesting. And
then Jen Millard, the visionary CEO of Main Love, who's
here to talk about how she's turning Main's pristine water

(02:04):
and community spirit into a refreshing movement for sustainability, connection
and growth. And later on we'll hear from our friend
Alisha Morrissey, a great jazz singer, and we've got Secrets
of the entrepreneurial mind.

Speaker 7 (02:17):
And we'll be hearing from our guests a little bit
later in the show about their dreams, their successes and
their failures. But first it's time for your new business journey,
and we like to ask our panelists about their business journey.
So Kevin and I were talking yesterday before the show,
and he was telling me about some of the incredible

(02:39):
highs and lows that he's had in his career, and
one topic that came up was the dot com crash
in two thousand. I wanted to ask Kevin, when you
look back, what was the one decision or moment that
changed the trajectory of your business and what did it
cost you to make that decision.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
So we had just raised I was at a company
called Commerce. We had just I was the CEO. Would
just raised fifty million dollars of fresh capital, which was
a lot of money. Then it's zero now, but then
it was real money. And within just a couple of
months of that dot com crash happens basically primarily in
the stock market, but when that happens, private markets also

(03:19):
dry up. So I immediately laid off half the company.
My investors thought I was crazy, The world thought it
was crazy. Everyone else in Silicon Valley thought I was crazy.
And I said, I've seen this story before and it
never ends well for those who keep spending money, but
it ends very well for those who save money. And
so very hard decision because these are people you just

(03:40):
recently hired. You have a big round, you have fifty
million of cash in the bank, and you're cutting your
burn in half immediately because you know how this plays
out for the next two to three years and there
won't be more money to raise, which turned out to
be the case. So look, I think that's always a
good lesson. Certainly when you've got startups and you've got
small companies and they're typically not making profit, cash is

(04:01):
absolutely king. I like to say there's only one thing
that kills the startup every time they run out of money,
because if you didn't run out of money, you'd keep going.
You'd say, well, I'll switch the business plan. I don't
have the right product market fit, I need a little
more time, I need to change up some people. But
the minute you run out of money and there's no more,
well then it's over. So never run out of money,
and you've got a long runway to try to get

(04:23):
things right. You still may not get it right, but
you've got chance after chance after a chance, and you
need those chances. The average kind of cycle on the
business plan, if you will, from when you got funded
to when you actually hit product market fit is often
the fifth turn on that plan.

Speaker 8 (04:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
So Slack, you know, famously was a game company and
people were using the messaging service over here, and they
realized nobody liked the games, but everybody liked this messaging
interaction team thing, and Slack became obviously that and everybody
uses Slack, and it got bought by Salesforce, and you
know the rest is his three multi billion dollar exit

(05:02):
and was never a game company again. Their first four
business models were a disaster, but the fifth one, you know,
the market spoke and fortunately they listened.

Speaker 7 (05:11):
So running out of money is one lesson. But if
an entrepreneur find themselves in that position where the market
around them is crashing, would you give them any other advice?

Speaker 2 (05:23):
It always comes down to product market fit right and timing.
There was a great analysis by a friend of mine
who's a VC in southern California.

Speaker 8 (05:29):
He looked at over one hundred companies he.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Invested in and he tried to analyze them with who
were the smartest people, who were the most educated, who
were the best funded?

Speaker 7 (05:38):
Right?

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Who hired the best teams, who spent the most, who
spent the least. All of that, it turns out none
of it mattered. The ones that won out of those
one hundred were the ones that, by chance, before they
ran out of money, got the product market fit right.
They just got the timing right. And when you got
the timing right, even the idiot teams won, with all
due respect, with all due respect to idiot teams, right.

Speaker 7 (06:00):
So it was fascinating. He said, here's these kids. They
should have They weren't that smart, but I gave them money.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
They but somehow they hit the product market timing right
and the thing took off and they had a billion
dollar exit and the smartest people out of making it
up Yale Harvard, Mit Stanford. I don't know if those
are smartest people or not, but we'll just say that
because that's one measure didn't always win, because they just
didn't get that product market timing right. So when you've

(06:26):
got a real problem that you're solving for real people
who have money to pay you for it, you win
if you got that timing right, and if you're too early,
you lose, and if you're too late, you lose. So
you got to hang in there to try to get
that timing right.

Speaker 7 (06:38):
Tyler Dunnaghan, Welcome to the show. What was the one
decision or moment that most changed the trajectory of your
business and what did it cost you to make that decision.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
I think the most impactful decision that we made was
revamping manual task to automated software, and this forced us
to end up building our own software and similar products,
and it was completely out of our comfort zone. We
went from service enablement to now we're building software with
teams and similar but it took us from olden scrappy

(07:11):
to update an innovative and it completely changed how we
operate as a company.

Speaker 7 (07:15):
How did you make the decision to go from off
the shelf to homegrown products?

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Really, the biggest thing was quality life from my team
and the customer journey. The off the shelf, out of
the box solutions they work at scale, but they didn't
work for our specific needs. And instead of trying to
mold how we operate based off what was available, we
flipped it on its head and we built what we
needed based off how we operated, and that brought us speed. Sure,
there's a couple of hurdles at first, but it really

(07:40):
brought us speed and this ability to build it specifically.

Speaker 7 (07:43):
For us and people in our industry as well. Excellent Jen.
What was the one decision or a moment that most
changed the trajectory of your business and what did it
cost you to make that decision?

Speaker 4 (07:58):
Well, I'm a water brand, and the biggest decision that
I made was I had to be brave and actually
take a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year
warehouse about a year earlier than I would have projected
in my financial model because I could not get underwritten
for insurance because my water was not under one roof,

(08:19):
it was across multiple storage facilities. So I had to
make a very hard choice of spending a quarter million
dollars two years ahead of schedule and then finding the
capital to backfill that decision and then carry that decision forward.
But I would not be distributing in six states. I'm
in Florida right now six days with fifteen licenses if

(08:41):
I hadn't taken the risk to say, all, if I'm
in this business, I need to allocate capital appropriately and
get a warehouse in fast order.

Speaker 7 (08:49):
How did you balance the risk versus the reward calculation
when you were making that decision.

Speaker 4 (08:55):
So I'm very early stage. These gentlemen are probably a
little later stage, right. This was a seed round of
I've raised two million, done a lot with a little here,
the decision is really bravery. Are you brave enough to
continue to raise money for a physical entity? So I
had to convince investors that I needed a physical facility
in order to make a company, and so it was

(09:17):
individual conversations to prove that I needed it.

Speaker 7 (09:20):
That's great, Well, thank you for sharing that story with us, Elizabeth.

Speaker 5 (09:23):
Okay, So I think one thing that really changed my
path was hiring a coach. We had Sonya Satra on
the show a year and a half or so ago,
and she gave her presentation on what If It Were Easy?
It was the name of her book and how she
coaches people, and after the show, I'm like, I want
you to coach me. And I had tried other coaches.
She is beyond amazing and one of the first things

(09:46):
she said to me was I see you up on
a stage speaking and I was like, no, that's never
going to happen. Well, we went to podcast and I
was up on a stage speaking so that was a
little more than a year working with her and she
we really did She changed the trajectory and yeah, it's
kind of scary to get up on the stage to speak,
but I did it.

Speaker 7 (10:07):
Yeah, well that's great. That was a great experience and
Elizabeth did an amazing job. I got to witness this
birth of Elizabeth's speaker career, so really fantastic. Looking back recently,
one of the decisions that changed the trajectory of our
law firm was a non decision on my part to

(10:28):
hire a new CPA firm. So we'd been kind of
disappointed in their performance over the last six months or so.
We didn't really feel like we were getting the right
attention to our business, and we talked with a couple
of other firms but didn't really find the right fit,
and so I just kind of kept putting it off, thinking, well,
we've got a CPA, what could possibly go wrong. Well,

(10:50):
it turns out I had a call with our firm
a couple of weeks ago and I asked, well, how
much do I owe the irs now for this last
payment in January? And they said, well, you guys have
had a great year, and he naimed a figure in
the six figures that I wasn't expecting, and I just
about fell off my share.

Speaker 5 (11:09):
I don't think I've seen Richard go payal so quickly,
and so.

Speaker 7 (11:14):
I mean, the consequences of that non decision means that
we didn't really have the opportunity to budget and manage
for that expense, and now a lot of the expansion
plans and investments that we're planning for this year have
to be deferred because we have to obviously pay our
taxes and pay the government. So you know, it was

(11:36):
a non decision, and you're always taking certain kinds of
risk and business trying to decide what's important what's not.
But my experience over time has been getting the financials
right is really super important. And we're calling new CPA
firms now, so trust me, we're going to fix this problem.
So in any case, that's it for your new business journey.

(11:58):
And think all of the panel lists for their amazing comments.
And I'd like to have remind everybody to stay tuned
for intellectual property news coming up soon. We're going to
be finding out the surprising things that actor Matthew McConaughey
is doing to protect his brand identity. But now it's
time for our first interview, and I'd like to welcome

(12:22):
back Kevin Serais. He's just like one of the most
amazing people, you know, tech guru, multiple business starter, upper,
obviously super smart and really just leading the charge for
artificial intelligence. We did have him on the show in
twenty twenty three. Back then, I was not a believer

(12:43):
in AI, was a skeptic, and things have changed so much.
I use it every day for all sorts of different things.

Speaker 5 (12:52):
So Kevin, I want to know if you can answer
the question now that you wouldn't answer, then what am
I going to get the robot to clean the house?

Speaker 2 (13:00):
I can guess at that today. Actually we have a
good guess.

Speaker 7 (13:04):
What will AI look like in a year? Kevin? Tell
us what is in store for us in twenty twenty six.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
So look, over the past three years, the world has
been using something called generative AI, right jen AI, which
is based on a transformer and people call them mallms
or multimodels, but this is based on a transformer model.
Primarily video generation is a slightly different model as a
diffusion model. Nonetheless, the transformer model was developed host deep learning,

(13:33):
so deep learning model twenty twelve twenty seventeen transformers, so
that we could literally transform language from one language to
another across the phrase, and then we learned to ask
it questions and it gives us answers. A couple of
things have happened right over the last few years. The
amount of misinformation that comes from these things is much
lower than it was in standardized test. It's around one

(13:54):
percent on the major models today. Of course you could
force it to tell you bad things, but generally speaking,
the amount of hallucination is way down from where it
was because of post training, and there's lots of post
training going on to correct these models. So all of
that's good for me over the last few years. Jen
Ai is a part of my every day, not just

(14:15):
every day, every hour, work period, full stop. There is
nothing I don't do where AI isn't first. Everything is
AI first. I don't go to word, I don't go
to excel. I do AI first.

Speaker 7 (14:28):
So I'm doing the same thing, and I worry about
myself because I worry that I'm going to be so
dependent on this that I'm going to lose my ability
to think for myself.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Fair and there was a good MIT study on this
last year, as a matter of fact. So let me
answer that. So, first of all, we have become highly
dependent on Excel since the late nineteen eighties, which means
pretty much everyone on this call does very little math
in their head. And when Excel showed up, one of
the worries is humans will lose the ability to quit

(15:00):
do math in their head. I can tell you after
thirty years, humans have lost the ability to quickly do
math in their head. And what's interesting about that is
there's two views. Is one, Oh, what a shame that
even though we learned this in school, we can't do
long division in our head anymore. But number two, no
one would pay you to do long division in your head.
In fact, if you're doing it in your head versus

(15:21):
someone else and Excel, you are behind the eight ball, right,
You're losing in the competitive race.

Speaker 7 (15:28):
I thought I was just getting old. So it's a release.
There's a study out there, Yes.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
No, so MIT studied people who use AI and and
sort of. The net result of the study is if
you use it as a crutch, hi give me the answer.
Hi give me the answer. So that means your prompt
is you know five words or one sentence or whatever
you do, in fact, within a few months lose the
ability to critically think. You lose that sharpness. On the

(15:55):
other hand, if indeed you're writing two paragraphs of prompt
or are you're doing really sophisticated things right with spreadsheets
or with other things, and you're really involved in that
and thoughtful about what comes out, and thoughtful about reading
it and editing it, then you're producing more content than
you've ever done in your life. You're producing maybe three

(16:16):
or four times the content you did just a few
years ago, and you're reading and editing that. That is
sharpening your mind. So, like any other tool, it can
be used to sharpen your mind or dull your mind,
depending on how you use it. I hope I'm trying
to use it most of the time to sharpen my mind.

Speaker 5 (16:33):
Yeah, so we're here with Kevin's Sorray. So, Kevin I
had some thoughts about that myself. I feel like people
are like, oh, human creativity is going to go. No.
What I feel like I'm doing and I'm not trying
to pretend like I'm smart or anything, but what I
feel like I'm doing is I am coming up with
questions that other people aren't even thinking of and I'm
asking the LLMS these questions. And the presentation I gave

(16:55):
a podcast, I think I was the only one presenting
on that topic because I was the only one who
had thought to ask that question about a podcast. And
I think that's where the real human creativity comes in.
I mean that information has always been out there in books,
you know, magazines, whatever. You just have to know the
right question to ask. But now you have this army

(17:17):
of research assistance and you can compare them against each other.
So I didn't just ask Chat the question. I asked Chat,
Gemini and Perplexity and as mostly using cloud, and then
I was able to compare their answers and with my
brain put that together and say, Okay, this is what
I think the right answer really is.

Speaker 8 (17:36):
Is great. I mean, that's a great one.

Speaker 7 (17:39):
I want to piggyback on that because one of the
things that's so exciting about Chat, GPT and the LLMS
is that for years I had all of these questions
that I couldn't otherwise get answers to, not without a
lot of work, a lot of investment, paying this, paying that,
And now I can get those questions answered and it's

(18:03):
just such an epiphany of knowledge and information.

Speaker 8 (18:07):
Where's AI going in? How do you use it today?

Speaker 7 (18:10):
Right?

Speaker 8 (18:10):
Obviously I'm using it for everything.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
I get two or three or four pressing quaeras a day,
mostly on AI and some on cybersecurity. I know what
my opinion is, and I can write my opinion into paragraphs.
But to present that opinion back in press quotable form
is what I used to spend a lot of time
on that I actually add no value to. My value
was the opinion. Nobody's paying me for my quality English
because I'm not an English major. So what a great

(18:35):
use of here's my opinion, here's the questions format it
for the press, shoot it back out right, great example.
I recently used it for a client of mind that has,
you know, tens of thousands of warranty claims, and what
they wanted to understand is what can we do in
the factory to reduce those warranty claims. Well, this is
all data that does not easily go into a database.

(18:58):
It's just people typing you know what they fixed and
what the problem was. And and because this is a
great use of these models to analyze a large spreadsheet
of data that is not aligned at all and say
here's the five things you can do to produce your
warranty claims by fifty percent. And it was brilliant actually,
Like I couldn't have hired a team of experts to

(19:20):
look at eighty thousand of these things. Right, So these
are the kinds of things aside from cat videos, right,
these are the kinds of things you can actually do
every day. But let me end with this, is is
because you brought up creativity, human creativity. So clearly we're
entering a time when we are democratizing access to techniques
and technologies that only say Hollywood could do, or real

(19:42):
musicians or whatever. So people generating creating new music now,
including musicians creating in music, I can get to demo.
I have a whole other side of my life, which
is Broadway in film, and so I'm always working on
I've got sixteen projects right now in my ownentertainment space,
and I'm a partner in an entertainment company. So when

(20:03):
we're working on demos and we're going from an idea
to a demo that was weeks or months by the
time we got it to a studio and recorded it. Okay,
today with a melody. Everything else can be developed in
a matter of minutes. The baseline, the instrumentation, the singer
who's ai, everything. I can put it in a different key,
and I can move the course around. I can do

(20:23):
whatever I want. I have a demo, certainly a high
quality demo, in an hour or two for a dollar,
instead of literally six or eight weeks. Now, what's interesting
about this is musicians are split on this. I have
been on podcasts where there's a musician screaming at me,
you should never use that. That is a horrible thing

(20:46):
to do. That is that technology has stolen from millions
of other songs and musicians and learned on the backs
of our work. And we've spent ten thousand hours learning
our instrument and this isn't fair. And then the other
half go, wow, how do I use this? Because this
is going to get I mean to my demo faster.
And my advice to everyone is, look this technology. These
technologies you hear in video, in in audio and music,

(21:09):
in LLM, in analyzing spreadsheets and writing very complicated formulas.
I use it the other day to write a complicated
formula spreadsheet that I literally could not figure out. It
was too long and I couldn't keep track of it
in my mind.

Speaker 7 (21:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
If you're not using it, someone else down the street is,
and they're going to beat you at whatever it is
you're doing. So either a musician that you're a musician
for instance, it gets on this bandwagon, or you're going
to be out of work in.

Speaker 8 (21:33):
A few years.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Now, you'll still play live. I get that, and people
want to see you live. I'm not taking this isn't
about live performance. This is about all the other stuff
that happens behind the scenes. But your musician friends, half
of them are going to use this technology. They're going
to use it every day. They are already Hollywood. He's
using it to do soundtracks for TV shows. And so
what used to pay maybe one thousand dollars to do
a soundtrack over two or three days now pays one

(21:57):
hundred dollars to do it in two hours.

Speaker 7 (21:59):
Someone's going to take that job. Someone's going to take that.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Job and take it from you, and it doesn't pay
what it used to. I can't change that. And I
didn't say it's fair. I just said it's not going away,
and it's the worst it'll ever be.

Speaker 8 (22:12):
Today.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
All these technologies don't get worse than today, they only
get better.

Speaker 5 (22:16):
Well, sounds Kevin like to me, what you're saying is
maybe you have a job as a sound technician today,
maybe tomorrow you're an AI technician.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
So absolutely, I mean, you know what I like to
say to the companies that I'm talking to, And there
are tasks that are going to go away.

Speaker 8 (22:33):
Software QA is one of them. QA automation is.

Speaker 2 (22:36):
The people who will be left behind are the robot overlords.
They've decided to be the expert in these new tools,
and the people who are experts in the new tools
absolutely are kept by every company because you need that
expertise to manage this new set of technologies, right, You
need that the people who say, I don't want anything
to do with this, I'm going to sabotage it. By

(22:57):
the way, thirty one percent of employees sabotage eighty percent
of AI rollouts. Here are those numbers again, this is
a survey just this past year. Thirty one percent of
employees sabotage eighty percent of AI rollouts, right, which means
the boss says, oh, it's not working, well, my team
says it doesn't work at all. I've watched this happen,
watch them lie in sabotage.

Speaker 7 (23:15):
I think one solution to this dilemma is that companies
have to incentivize people to adopt the technology absolutely and
so you know, if you're working yourself out of a job,
maybe there's some sort of revenue share that the company
can do for the team member to kind of bridge

(23:36):
the gap between not having a job and having a job.
So it's ludicrous to think that people are going to
work to lose their job or work out of a job.
And some people are going to be able to adapt
and use the AI. Other people will not adapt and
they'll go on to do something else. Right, But companies

(23:57):
are profiting from this. And I believe in the free
market capitalists, but I do think that if if you
want to get your employees on board and they know
they're going to lose their job, then why not give
them some revenue after they leave for a short period
of time or a bonus or something.

Speaker 2 (24:15):
Here's what is working, right. It's an interesting idea. I
haven't seen anyone do that because at the end, there's
such capitalists. They're not bad people, they're you know, they
report to the showers.

Speaker 7 (24:26):
But it comes if the company gets it implemented six months,
sooner they make more money.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Here's what is working is you find a tiger team
and they are highly incentivized to make this stuff work
and show that it works, and then they become kind
of the robot overlords to spread it around the rest
of the company.

Speaker 7 (24:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
So we certainly see this in again to software QA
and development. But then you look at things like customer support.
So customer support, every US company shed that and pushed
it overseas twenty years ago. This isn't a new idea, right,
and we went because it was cheaper. It wasn't better,
It wasn't better English, it wasn't more understandable.

Speaker 8 (25:06):
It was just cheaper. Let's be honest.

Speaker 5 (25:08):
Rights like Kevin two, you did not have the HR issues.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
That's right, You didn't have the HR issues that you're
You're absolutely right.

Speaker 7 (25:15):
Now.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
What they're doing is saying I can go from three
I went from twenty dollars an hour to three dollars
an hour. Now I can go from three dollars an
hour to three cents an hour with AI or thirty
cents an hour in that range three cents and thirty cents.
And so they're replacing entire to your one level one
customer support with AI, and they're trying it off to
the side with just you know, one percent of the

(25:37):
calls going that way, two percent, five percent. But the
numbers are very clear that the AI, once it's well
trained outperforms the humans in the job period full stop.
So you're talking to an AI agent, but it closes
the case like forty percent faster in most cases than
the humans did, and you have less callbacks, so it's

(25:58):
actually performing better at a tenth of cost.

Speaker 7 (26:00):
Of course, so three years from.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Now will there be any humans in tier one customer support?
I can't imagine it in any business.

Speaker 8 (26:08):
Why would we do that?

Speaker 2 (26:10):
So that's a job that literally goes away, and you
need to either graduate to at level two, level three,
or become a manager or do something else in life.

Speaker 7 (26:19):
So we need to take a commercial break. But this
is a fascinating discussion. We're here with Kevin Sarrace, who's
an AI futurist and AI implementer. When we come back, Kevin,
I want to talk more about the impact that this
is going to have on ordinary people and the things

(26:39):
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for the future. Passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth
Gerhart will be back right after this commercial.

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Back to passage to profit once again.

Speaker 7 (28:53):
Richard and Elizabeth Gerhart. We're talking AI here with Master
Ai Guru Kevin. He's an amazing guest and very insightful.
We were just talking during the break about how interesting
the topic is and how we could just talk about
AI all day. I don't think we'll go that far.

(29:13):
But one thing I wanted to come back to, though,
is the fear that a lot of people have about
losing their job. And three years ago, when we talked
previously on the show about artificial intelligence, there was a
lot of fear about that. So how are people feeling
now that AI has evolved? A lot more people are

(29:37):
getting experience with it, and not really just the elite
and the leaders, but ordinary people who are concerned about
their ability to feed themselves.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
So, look, this is a hot topic, and it's been
a hot topic for a long time, even before Jenna AI.

Speaker 8 (29:53):
So let's talk about what we do know.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
So every new technology that has shown up, from the
Internet to Google, to smartphones to PCs on the desk,
we were told that is going to eliminate twenty thirty,
forty fifty percent of jobs, white collar jobs. Blue college
robots came to General motors, and literally in the early
nineteen sixties, it was going to wipe out jobs at

(30:17):
general motors, except General motors with hundreds of thousands of
robots actually employs more people today than they did when
the robot first showed up.

Speaker 7 (30:25):
Why is that?

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Why is it that when we bring technology on board,
the jobs change, but more people get employed. And that's
because when you bring technology in, it drives down the
cost of the goods and services that you're making, which
drives up the demand, and then you need more people,
maybe in different roles, but you actually.

Speaker 8 (30:44):
Need more people, you don't need less people.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
So if GM didn't roboticize its plants, a car would
cost three hundred thousand dollars today, but now you can
get a car for twenty thousand or twenty five or
thirty thousand because it is roboticized. Therefore, more people buy cars,
including new cars. Therefore they employ more people. So what's
been happening in AI is a little bit of that.

Speaker 7 (31:05):
There are some.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Jobs that are gone or aren't as plentiful. The first
ones were actually coders coming out of school. We all
know over the last year or two that entry level
coding positions would used to be hot and on fire
aren't as hot or on fire. It turns out most
people are in fact getting jobs right.

Speaker 8 (31:26):
The employment is like eighty five or ninety percent.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
But it's not one hundred and twenty percent, right, It's
not like everyone gonna have new jobs. So that has
softened a bit. That's not a surprise because we don't
need those entry level people they're But most companies actually,
even though you have seen layoffs, most companies employ more
people today than they did two years ago. And you go,
I just read this yesterday. It was very fascinating, including

(31:51):
tech companies that two years ago, you know, laid off
twenty thousand people have hired a different twenty thousand and
another ten thousand beyond it.

Speaker 8 (31:58):
You go, why is that they're.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
Hiring people with AI expertise and AI experience And that
doesn't mean you have to be an AI guru. It
just says, you know the tools that work. I talked
to colleges a lot and the students there and they're
worried about who's going to hire me and all this.
I say, there's two kinds of college students graduating today.
There's the one that listened to the professor that said
never use jenai for your assignments.

Speaker 8 (32:19):
That's cheating.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
And then there's the other ones who said, I'm going
to use it on everything I do, because actually that's
what people.

Speaker 8 (32:26):
Want to hire.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
And it turns out when you're in that interview and
they're asking you about your experience with AI, one student says, well,
you know, I didn't use it a lot. We were
told not to. I did play with chat GPT a
little bit, and I'm willing to learn. And the other
one comes in and says, look, let me be honest
with you. I did everything with it. I did my
spreadsheets with it, I analyzed my formulas, then I wrote my.

Speaker 8 (32:47):
Papers with it. Now I had to edit them and
I changed them.

Speaker 7 (32:49):
And then I learned how to cheat the cheating the
cheating technology.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
That looks for to see if you did it with Jenai,
because there's ways to do that. So I figured all
these out, and then in my marketing world, I actually
found six tools you've never heard of, and they will
help you generate your social media ads instantaneously.

Speaker 8 (33:05):
And we're going to be one hundred times more productive
in that.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Okay, who gets hired Out of those two students, the
second one like, we know this, and so if you
want to protect your job at work, you want to
be that second person. I've gone out on my own
dime and learned all the tools. I've learned more tools.
I've learned how to put them to work in my
home life, in my work life, whatever it is.

Speaker 8 (33:27):
And I am the AI guru in my department.

Speaker 5 (33:29):
So I read this, I don't know, maybe a month
ago or a couple months ago. I want to ask
you if it's urban legend or if it's true. But
a company supposedly had to decide to lay off half
the people in some department or something, and they laid
off the people that had not been using AI.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
No, that's true. There's actually lots of data on this.
There's plenty of articles, and everybody's doing that. Like if
you're going to cut, you don't cut your AI professionals.

Speaker 8 (33:58):
I mean those using the tools.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
And the reason is they're already two or three or
four or five times more productive. They're not ten percent
more productive. Peter Demanda says, the goal is to make
someone ten times more productive in that tax in that task, right,
using AI versus not. And if you think about blog writing,
because it's the easiest one because we all know what
blog posts are, I today, unlike five years ago, today

(34:23):
could write fifty two blog posts. Today that will roll
out over the year. Right, I write my entire year's
worth a blog posts. I don't have to hire anyone
to do it. I can review everything on my website.
I can pick the fifty two topics I get with AI.
I can write them today and be done with that
task for the year, and then I can deploy an
agent to deploy them once a week. I don't have

(34:43):
to do anything with blog posts the rest of the year.
Who stays that person or the person who says, Hi,
I'm your blog post writer, and every week I'll write one.

Speaker 8 (34:52):
They're gone.

Speaker 7 (34:52):
Yeah, but I need to play Devil's Advocate to that
a little bit. I guess it depends on what you're
blogging about. What's important. But A I still can't factor
in experience or, in the case of a law firm,
cases that we worked on that demonstrate that we actually
use this expertise. I mean, AI can go out and

(35:14):
draft a blog post about the patent process, right, but
you can get that information anywhere. What makes us unique
is the experience that we've had and the clients that
we've dealt with. Yes, but here's the thing.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
If that is well documented, of course, A I can
learn from it and absolutely create a post based on
your experience. It doesn't have the experience, but it can
internalize that experience as long as you've written about it
in some way or documented in some way.

Speaker 8 (35:40):
Period, full stop.

Speaker 5 (35:41):
Yeah, Kevin, I want to bring up one more thing.
I want to bring up one more thing because I
think this is important for people. So I have a
chemistry degree, I don't have a programming background. I don't
know how to build websites. But what I'm finding is
if I want to do something digitally, I can keep
asking and I'll get exact instructions for the exact thing

(36:03):
I need to do, So I can teach myself almost anything,
or I can just go back to my reference book,
which is if I don't get the right answer from Chat,
then I asked Gemini. Gemini has gotten a lot better lately.

Speaker 8 (36:13):
But yes, it's the top model as we speak.

Speaker 5 (36:16):
Today, and I like to think for a normal person
out there, if you don't know how to use these tools,
they'll tell you they want.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Yes, you can literally go to say Gemini and say
how should I format my request to you? If I
want the following, It'll say, if you format it this
way and tell me this and tell me who your
audience is, et cetera. I will give you the best response,
so it'll teach you how to use itself.

Speaker 8 (36:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
But I wanted to close with one another thing here
because you know we were talking about music earlier. In
the use of music, think about if you're not if
anyone on here is not a musician, right, you can
now literally go and create a hit song and not
be a musician. I would argue, over the last ten years,

(37:03):
most hit songs were not created by musicians.

Speaker 8 (37:05):
I don't know what they were. I wouldn't call them music.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
But that's just that's that's an old that's an opinion, right,
But this.

Speaker 7 (37:10):
Is outracial attitude, Yes it is.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
It probably is. They certain people said that about Elvis
at the time. But this is fascinating because you can
go to Suno and you can describe the kind of
song you want, what it sounds like, et cetera, and
you can get twenty eight versions of it, and then
you can literally publish it. And there are now four
I think songs that have made the Billboard Top one
hundred that are completely AI generated by an AI artist.

(37:36):
That most of them are not actual musicians. They just
had it in their head. Now this is important because
if we forward just a few years to Hollywood and I,
by twenty thirty, everyone on this call will be able
to make a Hollywood quality film for a dollar a
minute instead of a million dollars a minute, which is
what it costs in Hollywood. No cameras, no lighting, no actors,

(38:00):
no sag no unions, no nothing against any of that.
Just not you don't need any of it. It's you
in a computer.

Speaker 7 (38:06):
But we're democratizing the ability to tell stories.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
And so today, if you want to do that, you
go and get rejected by every Hollywood studio and you
go back home and you have your script and nobody
wants to tell your story. In twenty thirty, you tell
your own story and you put it out there on YouTube.
And someone is going to make one hundred million dollars
on a YouTube film that they produced, that they created,
they did it on their desktop, and they made it

(38:30):
for one hundred and twenty bucks.

Speaker 8 (38:32):
It's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
And the last thing is we've already done this with radio,
because if this was ten years ago, twenty years ago,
there were five or six national radio superstars that were
syndicated nationally right, and could be heard nationally, could have
an audience of millions of listeners. Today, anyone can have
a podcast. We have democratized the ability to have a podcast.

(38:56):
It's now two hundred dollars to get a couple of
mics in a camera, right, And you have a podcast.
And there's forty five million podcasts out there, and there's
you know, a thousand that matter, and there's some mister
Beast and others that are making one hundred million a
year like you guys, you know at the fifty to
one hundred million a year category.

Speaker 7 (39:13):
And more than that, but we don't publicize it.

Speaker 8 (39:15):
We're not bubblicize it.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
But you get the point, right, And so exactly what
we're seeing here in this exact form of what we're doing.
If we had to do this twenty years ago, the
chance of the two of you having a radio show
that's nationally syndicated was almost zero. Even though you had
real content, real expertise, and real interest in doing so.
You couldn't have done it. No radio network probably would

(39:37):
have picked it up. And today you can do it
because it's we've democratized access to it. So that's what's
happening with music? It's what's happening with the PhD next
to you call chat GPT. You you have this thing
that has twenty eight PhDs for penny a minute.

Speaker 7 (39:50):
So it's incredible times.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Use these tools, use them every hour, and you will
become an expert.

Speaker 7 (39:57):
Well, that is amazing insight, Kevin, And speaking of AI,
we are now moving to our AI segment, So Elizabeth.

Speaker 5 (40:06):
Welcome everybody to real AI use cases Business owners round table.
Kevin Sarrace. Your life is AI. But is there one
way that in particular, that you're using AI that in
your business that you really like.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
I'm using it five times an hour, right, but certainly
Press responses where I opine on the question Press has
and then I let AI take my opinion, not its opinion,
my opinion and rewrite the sentences that are appropriate for quotation.
I am using it a lot with Excel because some
of the formulas are so complicated.

Speaker 8 (40:44):
Just write the formula for me.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
I actually literally can't figure it out, or I'd spend
an hour figuring it out. And why do I do that?
I'm not adding any value. So think about all of
the things you can do every hour with an AI
first mentality with just what's given to you in a
handful of models, are a handful of tools, and it's
going to change your productivity. Get it to help you
do the things where you wouldn't add additional value to

(41:07):
it anyway.

Speaker 5 (41:07):
Okay, So what I'm trying to do with this segment
is to give people ideas on how to use AI
in their businesses if they hadn't thought of some of
these things. And I find that the people on Passage
to Profit in particular are very bright and have excellent ideas.
So that's why I really wanted to do it during
this show. So that said Tyler Dunnigan, no pressure. What's

(41:31):
one way that you're using AI that's really helping your business?

Speaker 3 (41:34):
I use it multiple times a day, wake up using it,
go to sleep using it, and I have a running
in the background when I'm asleep.

Speaker 8 (41:41):
Whatly mean it?

Speaker 3 (41:41):
And I think the biggest things for us. We build
websites with it, we look at reports, we crunch numbers
with it, we get opinions from it. It's the third
person in a one on one meeting.

Speaker 5 (41:51):
Thank you, So, Jen Millard, one way somehow that it's
really helping you with your business.

Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah, we use it. I think similar to Kevin and
to Tyler. You know, we make water in cans made
by brewers. Brewers actually calculate things in ounces, barrels, barrel counts,
et cetera. On the retail side, I selling ounces in cans.
So to do that batch yield through all the math.
To Kevin's point earlier, the formula is quite excessive. So

(42:19):
rather than do the exercise of forcing yourself as a
human to create the formula, which will probably be wrong,
and to try two more times, we use it a
lot for formula creation for Excel. And that has proven
to probably be my biggest time saver.

Speaker 5 (42:34):
That's brilliant. Yes, everybody has been, and so Richard Gerhart.

Speaker 7 (42:39):
Well, it's a tough crowd to keep up with, that's
for sure. And I guess I'll have two examples, a
business example, but also a personal example, because I think
that you can use CHATCHPT in your normal, everyday life.
So the first example is I wanted to analyze the time.

(43:00):
So if you're working at a law firm, we have
a software that records all the time that the attorneys
work on a particular project. And I looked at our timesheets.
For twenty twenty five, we had forty two thousand time
entries that were created by our team, and I put

(43:21):
those into code Pilot. Not my favorite AI tool, but
it has confidentiality protections in it, so it was appropriate
for this kind of analysis. And it just really came
back with a wealth of information that would have taken me.
You know, it would have been impossible for me to
do it. And so I can see what kinds of

(43:41):
projects are profitable, where we're getting most of our revenue
from how our team members are doing. And I just
kept asking it questions and then at prepared management reports
based on the information that I thought it was most
important for our to see. And you wouldn't have really

(44:02):
had this kind of flexibility and this level of analysis
before using just the software that comes with the firm
management software where the timesheets are recorded. So it's really
been a boon and it's offered some actionable insights that
I think are going to help us do a better job.
I would encourage people to not just think of it

(44:25):
as a business tool, but it's something that can be
helpful on a lot of different levels.

Speaker 5 (44:29):
I gave a presentation at Podfast and the name of
the presentation was five tips to influence what chatchept says
about you and your podcast. So when I did that presentation,
I went to Google Gemini, I went to chat ept,
and I went to Perplexity Quod and asked them all
for the five tips and then went through and sorted
there was a lot more information than that. So I
went through and pulled out everything that was relevant. One

(44:52):
thing I will say that I thought was pretty funny
was I asked each of them which LLM is the
most accurate, and they all gave me different answer. And
what do you think they gave me themselves? So Google
Gemini says, oh Gemini, Claude. Clod says Claude.

Speaker 7 (45:08):
But you bring up a good point, though, and that is,
and you say this all the time, but I'm just
reiterating it, and that is you have to sometimes check
with different gbts because you will get different results between them.
You will.

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Passage to Profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.

Speaker 7 (47:36):
We're a nationally syndicated radio show heard in thirty eight
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(47:59):
and we are also a podcast database top interview entrepreneur podcast.
So subscribe to the Passage to Profit Show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
and also on the iHeart app. And now it's time
for intellectual property news, and of course we're going to

(48:20):
be touching on AI today. We're going to be talking
about the intersection of last celebrity and artificial intelligence. Actor
Matthew McConaughey, who is one of my favorite actors by
the way, has taken a proactive step to protect himself
from AI deep fakes by formerly trademarking and asserting control

(48:42):
over his voice, likeness and personal identity. And let's be honest,
if you've heard Matthew's voice once, you know who it is, right,
And that's I guess the point.

Speaker 5 (48:51):
Well, the concern is that, as we were saying, AI
tools can clone a voice in seconds, and so I
am quite sure I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure that
Matthew McConaughey would not want to have someone clone his
voice saying, yeah, I hate dogs, all dogs, every hog.
That's not his brand, and I don't think he hates dogs, right,

(49:13):
but somebody could do that to him and put it
all over the place, and then you know, that would
hurt his brand a lot. So I think people have
to really be careful and not let people steal their voice.

Speaker 7 (49:25):
This is really about control. It's about controlling his brand,
and he's trying to use trademark law along with privacy
law and also unfair competition law to draw a line
and say, look at folks, you can't use my voice
or my likeness unless you get my permission. And so

(49:49):
that's where he's really going with this.

Speaker 8 (49:51):
Of course, and we're talking about.

Speaker 5 (49:52):
Him because he's so well known, but it can happen
to anybody, and if AI can convincingly be you, that
and the question becomes who owns you?

Speaker 7 (50:03):
Yeah? I mean, And that's the part of it. And
what's also fascinating to me as an intellectual property lawyer
is that the law is really kind of struggling to
keep up with some of these AI trends, and attorneys
are trying to use more traditional tools to protect their clients,
but the tools don't really fit the situations especially well.

(50:25):
And so while Matthew has announced that he's protected his
voice with trademarks, it's not strictly true. We checked. He
has eight trademark registrations, but they are only for segments
of his voice, so for particular statements that he repeats.
You know, often you can't yet protect the sound of

(50:46):
a person's voice with trademark or copyright. You can protect
the voice if it appears in a film. You can
protect the film, or a podcast. You can protect how
the podcast is produced and the words that are said.
But you can't just protect a voice yet. So I
think he's taking a proactive approach here. I think he's

(51:09):
probably trying to scare away some people, but he's also
leading the way for a lot of other celebrities who
have concerns.

Speaker 5 (51:17):
And consumers are already confused, and you don't want to
inadvertently use somebody else's voice if it's playing in the
background or we have a whole presentation about that. So
was it him? Was it Ai?

Speaker 7 (51:28):
Well, that's just it, And you know, customer confusion is
sort of the bedrock of trademark law, right. The idea
is to prevent people from being confused. And I guess
we'll see if mister McConaughey has any success with his
legal strategy, and you know how he can continue to
protect his brand.

Speaker 5 (51:48):
So, Hollywooder Main Street, this is where intellectual property is
heading next. And I think it was Mark Cuban who said,
in the age of AI, intellectual property is king.

Speaker 7 (51:57):
There you go. So that's this week's intellectual property news.

Speaker 5 (52:02):
So Timer done again with turnserve dot com, we want
to hear your story.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
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or suppliers that spoke our language or were able to
show up and be predictable enough to provide the solutions
that we needed. And probably on the tail end of

(53:03):
my journey in Corporate America, in that management facility, I
ended up building the solutions that I was looking for
while they're outside of it, in order to help us out.
And it worked on a small scale, and it was
just to provide services for us that we needed, not
really for profit by any means. It was a call
at that point and just helped pay the bills. But
then it worked so well for us. I had friends
in the industry that we're asking for similar services and hey,

(53:26):
we're struggling here, can you guys can help us. Next thing,
you know, I had two, three, five, ten phone calls
from friends around the industry and I completely left Corporate
America and I went full fledge into Turnserve and fast
forward today. You know, it started off just me and
my spouse and then we're doing everything. And now in
the past few years, we have launched four different brands

(53:47):
undernath of our umbrella. We have services, supply, software, patented products,
you name it. We were one of America's fastest growing
companies last year, the top five hundred in the US
and at our peak, because it's and all, we had
over sixty two employees and we're on five different markets.
And I say all that because that growth journey has
been fun, but it's been necessary for us to talk

(54:10):
about things like we're talking about today, like AI and updating.

Speaker 7 (54:13):
Things as we go and being innovative and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
And where we're at right now is you know, the
journey's kind of surreal to reflect on. It's started off
at my kitchen table and now we are in like
I said, five different cities.

Speaker 7 (54:25):
We partner with Shehrian Williams.

Speaker 3 (54:27):
All these big other providers and all these massive real
estate complexes, and we're trying to be fast and we
constantly lean on conversations like we're having here to think
about how can we innovate, how can we test and
make sure that we're talking about the right things. That's
been my journey so far in the corporate side and
getting into entrepreneurship and expanding, and we're going to heavily

(54:48):
lean on software dev as a continued path here for
the next two years.

Speaker 5 (54:53):
How did you get these relationships with these big companies
like Sherwyn Williams.

Speaker 7 (54:57):
Step by step?

Speaker 3 (54:57):
You know, I think the first thing is really just
providing something that's unique and needed.

Speaker 7 (55:02):
I think it's creative.

Speaker 3 (55:03):
Sometimes we create something that's really interesting for us and
it doesn't resonate with anybody, it doesn't provide a purpose,
And that's the trap that I've fallen into quite a
lot being active and engage all the time as I am.
But I think that for us, you know, we look
at the market, we look at our customer needs, and
we look at what we're able to do as a company.
And by way of example, for Searan Williams, you know,

(55:25):
they are a huge fortune five hundred, they're in all
these complexes that we're in. They have an old school
way of doing things. We were looking at the market,
looking at the products, and we just realized there's probably
a better way, better solution, to better system to provide
what we were doing for this particular situation. Liquid Liner
is our bathtub brand and essentially we renew and rejuvenate bathtubs,

(55:45):
and we have software that goes into that. We have
technology and products. It's a long story, but where I'm
going with that to answer your question is, you know,
we just developed our own product because we're trying all
these things on the market.

Speaker 8 (55:55):
So we ended up finding the right partners. We ended
up doing our R.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
And D seventy iterations of our own product before it
was you know, thumbs up. So we went through the
whole patent process. You know, that was a learned a
lot there and in that time we were testing it
had a third party test in it came back best characteristics,
best testomer results in the industry in its segment. We're
lucky because we're out of Cleveland, Ohio. That Sherwan Williams
backyard as well. And we knew people that knew them,

(56:21):
they knew of us, and just little by little, you know,
they said, Hey, I had a customer that's interested.

Speaker 8 (56:25):
In what you guys do. Do you want to be
introduced next thing?

Speaker 3 (56:28):
You know, it starts off in just a casual conversations
with people that you know around the industry to being
in their boardroom giving a presentation on a product that
you've hadded, and now they're talking about how quickly they
can get across the US and sold through their stores
to the other clients.

Speaker 7 (56:41):
So step by step is the answer.

Speaker 8 (56:43):
There.

Speaker 7 (56:43):
You have a couple of different companies, right, and they're
providing different kinds of products and services. So could you
give an example of sort of the customer journey? How
would somebody find you? And then once they become a partner,
what is it that you exactly provide to them?

Speaker 3 (57:00):
So how people find us is one they have a
huge need. So somebody has a you know, they manage
a facility of building, they have twenty thousand residents across
the US, they're short on staff. They communicate you know,
old ways. It takes them ten days to send a
letter with all those kind of things. But people find
us to expedite their process between runners.

Speaker 7 (57:19):
In a nutshell, that's what we do. If you're a
property manager and you have units that are turning over,
you need certain things done to the units between tenants,
and that's where you come in.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
Yeah, and you have a matter of days, not weeks,
and the industry is built for weeks and months, and
we do it in a matter of hours or days
because of things like our software. Our systems sink directly
to our property management customers, and that creates a predictable, routine,
quality of life item. It's good for us, it's good
for them. We show up, we dispatch. We also have
software to do that that's unique to us, and we

(57:52):
handle whatever it might be from services, supply, unit readiness,
aucmentsy readiness, permits, it doesn't matter what it is.

Speaker 7 (57:58):
And then punch out closure, repeat.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
So really we take this nuanced process that's probably twenty
steps that normally took a lot of manual work between those,
and we automated and streamlined. We speak their language. We
have things that are in their hand where they don't
have to go back to their computer. You know, it's
very quick, predictable.

Speaker 7 (58:14):
So you would like, for example, paint the apartment or
fixed a faucet, and so you would secure a contractor
to do that. Yes, we facilitate, coordinate dispatch.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
I'm just curious what kind of things do you have patents.

Speaker 8 (58:26):
On right now? It's a lot of around performance codings.

Speaker 3 (58:29):
You know, we do have some in house IP and
whatnot that's not probably I shouldn't probably called IP you
guys know, it's better from your seats where it's unique
to us, but not for like licensable display or use
so to say. You know, but a lot of ours
are like I said, like liquid liner and there's a
few derations of that product. We have a backpack feature
for our service systems and whatnot. They're all loosely around

(58:53):
the service and supply realm is what we focus on
right now for our audience.

Speaker 7 (58:57):
Those are typically considered to be trade secrets, right They're
a secret that gives you a commercial advantage, and so
every business has them, and it's but it's and it's
good to protect them, you know too as well. So
it does give you a competitive advantage.

Speaker 5 (59:12):
So how are you marketing this?

Speaker 3 (59:14):
You know, it's been a lot of grassroots and referral
based business so far. We're in a unique space because
the industry that we're in, we go after big companies
that manage thousands of apartments.

Speaker 7 (59:25):
We don't go after thousands of apartments, so to say.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
And when in that game, if you get one customer,
and it just could be by introduction, out of dire need,
out of SEO search result, whatever it might be, they
find you once and we're in that unique position where
it's kind of like an anti selling industry, meaning they
have properties throughout every major city in the US, and
they their question to us is, hey, how fast can

(59:48):
we scale you cross and get you in these other avenues,
Whereas a lot of times in sales you need to
fight and compete for those things. For us, it's a
unique proposition where they push us out as far as
we can go. But it's a combination of online presence, workmanship,
all those kind of things grassroots. But really, if you
just kind of break and burst that bubble, you'll get
into twenty thirty different property management companies that might have

(01:00:09):
a million plus apartments under management, and you're going to
be very busy.

Speaker 5 (01:00:12):
Kevin, do you have a question or comment?

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
I think what you're doing is brilliant, and it's brilliant
because there is a need. Technology can help reduce the
cost of dealing with this prepping you know, apartments, as
you say, and it's a.

Speaker 8 (01:00:26):
Space I'm relatively familiar with.

Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
And if you get a large you know, a large building,
they've got hundreds or thousands of units and they're changing
all the time. See, there's no value in them trying
to deal with each of those, the painting, the redoing,
the cleaning of the carpets, the prepping with furniture, for
taking pictures and all. It just there needs to be
a system to do that. And you know what did

(01:00:48):
you do? You found a pain point. You found a
pain point, the actual pain point. You said, we're going
to solve that pain point and try to keep a
little bit for ourselves. The best businesses are not people
who come up with solutions where there's no problem. You
found the problem first, and that's that. I think I
can have a solution that's scalable so you can grow
a very large business and it's unique.

Speaker 3 (01:01:09):
It's good for you, absolutely, thank you. Two points on
that too to speak to it too. So obviously, the
space is essential, it's living, it's predictable. Fifty percent of
renters move every single year. And not a lot of
people realize that you've seed a complex that has five
hundred units at it. That means, you know, two hundred
and fifty those needs service every single year. You multiply
that across all of the units under management. There is

(01:01:29):
a huge shortage of workers that could do these kinds
of things. And the other point I was going to
make is this most these complexes, they rely on outside
vendors and suppliers. By way of example, the average apartment
community they need around one maintenance technician per one hundred units.
The average today because of the labor shortage is there's
normally one maintenance technician servicing over three to four hundred

(01:01:52):
units on average. They could probably four x or staff
and be adequately staff at that point. So this is
a huge shortage creating a huge demand for us, occurring
every single year.

Speaker 5 (01:02:01):
So wait a minute, So if AI takes your job,
you got a job for these people.

Speaker 7 (01:02:05):
We do always hiring.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Look, people ask me all the time what jobs are
absolutely safe maintenance, HVAC, plumber, electrician. We for decades have
told everyone to go to college, and they did, God bless,
but they didn't go to trade school. And so people
are retiring out of the trades, you know, multiple times

(01:02:29):
faster than people coming in.

Speaker 8 (01:02:30):
And it's actually a serious problem.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
And AI is not going to be a plumber or
a maintenance tech very easily, even a robotic AI for decades.

Speaker 8 (01:02:39):
So these are very safe jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
Just to bring AI back into the conversation for a second,
it's a yes, go to trade school, learn how to
do these trades, learn how to repair hvac. It turns
out it's really hard and we need people to do it.

Speaker 7 (01:02:53):
My dad was HVAC and he had a great job.
I don't know how he would respond to AI. He
was an HVAC guy, and I guess he would smiling
down from heaven telling me, aha, I would still have
my job, Richard. But you, as an attorney, may have
your head on the block.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
So in Silicon Valley, we're not hiring entry level coders,
and even if you are going to get a job,
it's not going to be the rate that it was
just a few years ago. However, if you're a plumber
and you're willing to show up in an hour, not schedule,
like I've got a clod toilet, I need you here
an hour, no problem, three hundred and fifty dollars house call,

(01:03:33):
and they're only going to be there for fifteen minutes.
So you can figure it out and say, well, if
they were working every hour three hundred and fifty dollars an hours,
about seven hundred thousand dollars a year for that plumber,
why code, Well, you can make seven hundred k year
you know, fixing toilets.

Speaker 5 (01:03:48):
But that was another question I wanted to ask Tyler
about what do you do about the guys that don't
show up? Because I've worked with contractors and they may
or may not show up.

Speaker 7 (01:03:57):
Yeah, does your software fix that? Yes?

Speaker 3 (01:03:59):
And no, I think you're always anytime the's a human element,
you're going to get human things. We do our best
to mitigate as much as possible. So I'll give a
quick example. When you submit on our website, there's a
lot of mechanisms. It's called a round robin, and pretty
much that means there's certified installers that are appropriate for
that job, that are that are able to be selected
in dispatched to a certain outcome. Now, the way it

(01:04:19):
works is that the installer, the contractor whoever else it is,
they are able to select and we play them based
off the location ability and things like that. And if
one isn't available right then and there, and they hit
the dispatch and time or arrival on time, it's geofense
and all these kind of things. If they aren't there,
the next up is and there's an arsenal of people

(01:04:40):
on that round robin waiting.

Speaker 8 (01:04:41):
To take that work or or what have you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
So there's a lot of steps in manual work and
service work and that's never perfect, but we really try
to safeguard as much possible to avoid that and be
predictable and the smooth as possible.

Speaker 7 (01:04:53):
That way, you're not waiting days and days and days.
You have a matter of hours.

Speaker 5 (01:04:56):
In our space, it's like the Uber model.

Speaker 7 (01:04:58):
Similar, yes, very similar.

Speaker 3 (01:05:00):
Certify installers they show up to any of our locations,
they'll sit in classes with us. We'll make sure that
they know what they're doing, they know our process, they
know how to be safe. We've verified and bet their
work and there's an arsenal of things that we do
to verify how they operate on site as well. We
really do a video with them before they leave a
certain job site and they go through a twenty check

(01:05:21):
process and there's a lot of safeguards and quality controls
that we do to ensure that things are going as
they should.

Speaker 5 (01:05:26):
So how do people get a hold of you?

Speaker 3 (01:05:28):
Two ways, So turnsort dot com if you need any
help property wise, and outside of that, you can find
us on LinkedIn and myself there too.

Speaker 7 (01:05:35):
That's where we mingle the most passage to profit with
Richard Analysabeth Pierhart.

Speaker 5 (01:05:39):
So now Jen Millard has been waiting patiently for her turn.
She has mainlove dot com. Welcome Jen, tell us your story.

Speaker 4 (01:05:48):
I started main Love two years ago now, so we're
coming up on our second anniversary. So maners are very practical.
There's a lot of conversation about water, There's lots of
conversations around plastic and chemicals. Those things can all carry
on over there. Maners are very practical, and with the
decline of alcohol, this model is really to enable brewers

(01:06:09):
to diversify revenue and make water when they're not making beer.
So I am an asset, light, fast growing CpG product,
so I don't own any factories, which allows all that
expense to be actually reallocated to sales and marketing, which
is what drives CpG. So we have been working on
what it's basically distributed manufacturing, so we use multiple brewers

(01:06:33):
to make the same product. Licensed in fifteen states, we
are moving to distribution in five and I sit here
in Florida as number six, so we are off to
a great start. We did about twenty one thousand cases
last year and about a half a million dollars just
in four months and predominantly from Maine, so we have

(01:06:55):
great aspirations. Everyone needs water here and water and aluminum.
I would say every rural community. You know, obviously everyone
has lots of headlines around water and water quality, water scarcity,
but really one of the other factors is recycling. In
rural communities, people think that glass is the best thing

(01:07:17):
to drink out of. If you live in a rural community,
that glass is not being recycled. So there is not
a single place in Maine where glass is recycled. It
is piled into piles and shipped down to New Jersey.
And honestly, I've been told there's only two or three
furnaces that are hot enough to actually do glass recycling,
and they're in New Jersey. So the aluminum can is

(01:07:39):
because every brewer makes a sixteen ounce aluminum can. It's
a great value to the consumer, and the consumer knows
how to recycle it. And seventy percent of that can
will be repurposed in forty five days.

Speaker 5 (01:07:50):
Excellent. I could see that Richard want to make a
New Jersey jo.

Speaker 7 (01:07:53):
Yeah, I mean lucky us. I mean, we're getting all
of these glass bottles from Maine and we can't recycle
them fast enough, so I hope somebody's working on that. Well.

Speaker 4 (01:08:02):
I did just get a water license for New Jersey,
so we'll be entering the New York market probably towards
the fall.

Speaker 7 (01:08:07):
So what's all that about. You have to get a
license to sell water.

Speaker 4 (01:08:11):
Interestingly, drinking water is regulated by every state and currently
no one is answering the phone at the FDA, so
that has been entertaining, and I have used AI to
solve some of the lack of phone calls. I might
add to the FDA. So this is simply water and
aluminum to solve a problem for people who don't want
to drink out of plastic. And our biggest impact is

(01:08:34):
in stadiums in colleges where you might have twenty thousand
people attending a concert, twenty percent of that twenty thousand
are going to buy a water And ideally I'd like
it to be in aluminum because it's better for people
and it's easier to recycle.

Speaker 7 (01:08:49):
Sometimes we hear about this microplastics right from bottled water,
and we consume a lot of that around our house.
I do kind of worry about some sort of accumulation.
What's the story with the aluminum is there any kind
of residual that leaches into the water.

Speaker 4 (01:09:07):
That each can is does have a liner. We actually
use a b Pawnee Liner Special liner, which is an
epoxy liner. That's the closest thing you're going to get
to no plastic. There's no plastic in aluminum. Of course,
even in glass when you twist off the top, what
they're finding is that twist off top is grinding plastic
into the glass and it actually has plastics in glass

(01:09:30):
than does in plastic. And so we're really focused on
providing a consumer choice. And that's how we position this
product is you do not offer an aluminum choice today,
you have clients customers that would like to purchase in aluminum,
and so we offer an aluminum choice.

Speaker 5 (01:09:45):
So your innovation with your water is really the container.

Speaker 4 (01:09:49):
Our innovation with water is the creation process using multiple
brewers to get them licensed to produce drinking water under
one single brand in a distributed fat and to keep
the economics for that creation of the water.

Speaker 5 (01:10:04):
In Maine, how do you produce water?

Speaker 4 (01:10:06):
We utilize brewers that are already connected to the best
source in the nation is Sebago Lake, Maine. This is
the municipal water for two out of five manors. So
when I first started the company, people would say, Jen,
if you want water, just go get some from the faucet.
That's exactly it. So if you've not lived in an
area with water scarcity or water quality issues, people in

(01:10:28):
Maine take it for granted. This lake is connected. Portland
Water District connects forty five breweries to the same facility
of water, so we utilize the brewers that are connected
to that same body of water. It is the gold
standard of water for beer. Literally, if you're making beer
in Colorado, they're changing their water chemistry to reflect Sebago

(01:10:49):
Lake Maine. And so if you have the gold standard
of water for beer, why are we not producing it
in cans for consumers? And it's important to me the
word water does not appear in the main economic plan
one time for the next twenty years, and I think
that's erroneous. Maine has a long history of natural resources.
Whether you're timber, whether you're lobster, whether you're blueberries, whether

(01:11:11):
you're craft beer. Why should water be any different? You know, Really,
we're selling the sense of place, the nostalgia, the provenance
of may We're so proud of the source we are
the only water that puts the source on the front
of the water. Even Fiji water is not always from Fiji.

Speaker 7 (01:11:27):
So, Kevin, do you have any thoughts or comments about
the water business.

Speaker 2 (01:11:31):
I do, actually, which shocks you probably, But you are right.
You said something Jen that maybe people didn't pick up on.
But over the last of five to ten years, there's
been a decline in now a larger decline in the
drinking of alcohol across the board. And the youngest generation
is drinking much less than we did when we were
that age.

Speaker 4 (01:11:52):
Sixty five percent of gen Z does not drink.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
Yeah, it's fascinating. And look and look the data are
clear of this. It turns out probably no amount of
alcohol is good for you. That's not going to change
my habits, but it is changing gen Z. And so
why not put really high quality, good tasting, safe water
into cans. All of these breweries, all of these companies,

(01:12:18):
they can make cans like crazy cans are very easy
to recycle compared to glass, and much less energy. By
the way, aluminum melts at a much lower temperature, re
melting glasses like melting sand.

Speaker 8 (01:12:29):
And you know, Kevin, and there's.

Speaker 4 (01:12:31):
Only a couple places in New Jersey.

Speaker 8 (01:12:33):
You know, that's right.

Speaker 7 (01:12:34):
It's very hard.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
As it turns out, most of it doesn't get recycled.
Most of it gets just dumped into the dump, right,
and the energy to recycle it equals that of the
energy of making news. So nobody really wants the recycled glass.
So aluminum is great. It's a great idea. And we
know that people are buying water, they're buying Fiji water,
but they don't really want it in plastic anymore.

Speaker 7 (01:12:56):
So if we can put water.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
In cans and that becomes normalize, it's a very good thing. Lastly,
you know, if you're in California airports, it's illegal to
sell water and bottles, so the only water you can
get is in cans.

Speaker 4 (01:13:09):
And they're to see more municipalities at the zip CO
level that are moving no single use plastic. We've also
helped fourteen colleges become no single use plastic.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
Water is a great idea, and it's a growing business,
and you know, you can ultimately have a very large business.
And look Pepsi Coke, all these people they are in
the water business, but they've been unfortunately mostly in it
plastic bottles.

Speaker 4 (01:13:33):
Yeah, liquid death is my primary competitor. One of my
goals here is to enable an aluminum category on shelf.
If you look today, the aluminum is all over the place.
Merchants don't know how to merchandise it. I was a
retailer in your career, so we really want to be
frenemies to Liquid Death and help merchants line up an
aluminum category in store so customers nowhere to shop for

(01:13:55):
it and everyone knows how to recycle aluminum. I'm not
teach to do anything new. And to Florida is really
the tam here. Liquid Death is going public at one
point five billion. They have less than one percent of
the market. I believe Maine to Florida to be one
hundred million dollar business over five years, and I think
that's a reasonable assumption.

Speaker 7 (01:14:16):
So Jen, how did we get to this point where
we're buying bottled water because when I was a kid
growing up, you just went to the faucet.

Speaker 4 (01:14:25):
Loss of trust. People don't trust their tap, they don't
trust how their water is being treated. You think of
all of what's impacting the cultural conversation around water, it
ultimately comes to distrust. Is there chemicals in here? Is
it in a lead pipe? You know, it becomes distrust
of your municipality. You know, boiling orders. For example, in Austin,

(01:14:47):
I had a beautiful boiling order a couple of weeks ago.
How does that happen in a city like Austin, Right,
it happens. So it's really this loss of trust. And
so one of the things that I believe that main
brings forward is a humble and authenticity from Maine that
is very trustworthy. That's why our brand is very straightforward.

(01:15:07):
It is a gen Z brand. This is water purely
from Maine. There was no other marketing. It is directly
what you see what you get.

Speaker 5 (01:15:14):
I do want to say I quit drinking out of
drinking fountains after I saw this in college. This nicely
dressed young man, nice looking everything, hacked and puked and
sneezed all over the drinking fountain while he was getting
a drink, and it was so disgusting.

Speaker 12 (01:15:33):
Well, to answer the original question, statistically, people that are
born outside of the US, Central America, South America, they're
taught from birth that you don't drink tap water.

Speaker 4 (01:15:44):
You won't go to a family in Mexico and see
them drinking tapwater. It won't happen. They buy water two
to three times greater than an average American. Maine statistically
has the best water and Sebago Lake is so clean
that it has a waiver for solid from the EPA.
So when that water gets to my house, in my house,

(01:16:04):
it has not been filtered. It has just been sanitized
with chloridamide, but not filtered. It is that pure. So
you can look this is a three hundred foot deep
lake and five miles wide, and you can look down
fifty feet in this lake. It is very, very clean.
But it's really the forest that keeps the water the

(01:16:25):
purest because there's no water treatment plants here. It's actually
the forest that is doing the water treatment. So the
give back for this business is actually to land trusts
so that private land can be made for public access
for hiking and environmental exploration, but more to preserve the
trees around the watershed so that we protect the quality

(01:16:47):
of the water.

Speaker 7 (01:16:48):
Is rain water the cleanest water.

Speaker 4 (01:16:51):
You'd have to ask a better chemist than me, and
I suspect it's the catch of the rain at the time,
and what jurisdiction.

Speaker 5 (01:16:57):
You're in now. Absolutely, I tried that exp I met
when I was a kid, and the water was full
of all sorts of particules.

Speaker 4 (01:17:04):
It pulls everything out.

Speaker 7 (01:17:05):
So basically, no matter where you go, you're gonna get
dirty water if you're not careful, unless you get it
from Maine, right.

Speaker 4 (01:17:11):
Sotu, you get it from Maine. That's the point exactly.

Speaker 7 (01:17:15):
Well.

Speaker 5 (01:17:15):
The other thing about your aluminum. As a chemist, I
just want to bring up when plastic water bottles get
really hot, they do emit chemicals, and aluminum, I think
is a much more solid solid to say yeah speak
and it doesn't do that.

Speaker 4 (01:17:30):
The can that we use, I have an eighteen month
lifespan on my product because I don't want products to
sit on shelf longer than eighteen months. But there's another
company that uses the exact same can and makes emergency
water that's good for twenty five years. I doubt it
tastes fantastic at twenty five, but I bet it is drinkable.

Speaker 5 (01:17:48):
So where do I have to go to buy this can?
I order it online?

Speaker 4 (01:17:51):
Yeah, you can order it online at mainelove dot com.

Speaker 7 (01:17:54):
We run a.

Speaker 4 (01:17:55):
DTC, a direct to consumer subscription, and you can find
us on the Eastern seaboard, moving down ninety five from
Maine down to Massachusetts, primarily at Hanaford Brothers seven eleven
convenience stores. But our larger brand expressions are actually with
sports teams and typically soccer teams. So we do a

(01:18:15):
lot with the soccer team in Maine, which is the
Hearts of Pine and their youth foundation. I'm down here
in Florida meeting with Fort Lauderdale United for the same
because the biggest impact to reduce single use plastic. All
these facilities serve water in plastic bottles, and to make
it easier on the facility and better for the guests,
we should convert them to metal.

Speaker 5 (01:18:36):
I have to try this water.

Speaker 4 (01:18:39):
Anyone on this call wants to email me at Jen
at main Love, I would be happy to send everyone
a sample. No worries, I.

Speaker 5 (01:18:46):
Will do that. Listeners, you are listening to the Passage
to Profit show with Rich and Elizabeth Gearheart. Did we
have some great discussions. If you missed any of the show,
our podcast comes out tomorrow. But don't go away because
when we come back, it's Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind
will be right back.

Speaker 10 (01:19:01):
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Speaker 9 (01:19:48):
Eight hundred two seven seven one four three two, eight
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two seven seven fourteen.

Speaker 8 (01:20:00):
It's Passage to Profit.

Speaker 6 (01:20:02):
Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit,
and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll
to the bottom of the passageprofitshow dot com website and
check out her album.

Speaker 5 (01:20:16):
And now it is time for Secrets of the entrepreneurial mind.
So I am going to start with Kevin Serais. Kevin,
what is a secret you can share with our audience?

Speaker 2 (01:20:28):
My biggest secret is in my upcoming book called The
Joy Success Cycle, and it is to take every task
and make every task a joy moment. Every task, I
don't care if it's firing someone, I don't care if
it's dealing with a rough customer or a rough situation.

Speaker 7 (01:20:42):
Everything can be a learning moment. It can be a
joy moment.

Speaker 2 (01:20:45):
And the more joy you bring to every task, the
more successful you will be.

Speaker 5 (01:20:49):
Excellent. Okay, Tyler Dunnigan, what is a secret you can share?

Speaker 7 (01:20:53):
You have to stay curious.

Speaker 3 (01:20:55):
When you're open minded in every situation, every scenario, that's
how you innovate. If you don't seem curious, you're going
to close minded repeat results and it's not going to
be that great. Stay curious.

Speaker 7 (01:21:05):
Love that.

Speaker 5 (01:21:06):
Jen Millard, what's your secret?

Speaker 10 (01:21:08):
Well?

Speaker 4 (01:21:08):
I think you have to have resilience and bravery because
I never hear no, I just hear not right now right.
So you have to have that persistence and that resilience
to hear now a thousand times and to believe in
what you're building. With facts and with data, but really
to be brave enough to execute it.

Speaker 5 (01:21:27):
Excellent, And Richard Gearhart, what is your secret?

Speaker 7 (01:21:30):
I'm going to say, stay up to date on what's
going on in your industry. Where we were at podfast
last week, which is a big conference of podcasters in
case you haven't heard of it. A lot of people talking,
a lot, for sure, but one of the great things
about going to the conference is really hearing about all
the new technologies, the new approaches, and then taking that

(01:21:53):
information back and incorporating it into our content generation. Right. So,
you know, staying ey top of your industry is so important,
and there's so many tools now coming out, like AI
tools for example that we were talking about that really
make a difference. And by staying on top, you are
also keeping yourself competitive. And so the businesses that want

(01:22:18):
to continue, they want to succeed and grow, need to
know what's going on in their industry, what their competitors
are doing, and what leverage is available from new technologies.

Speaker 5 (01:22:29):
That is a really good one, and mine is going
to be don't just take an answer from one of
the LM's chat GPT or Perplexity or clod or Google
Gemini don't just take their first answer, because sometimes they'll
say they can't do it, and then you can just
keep digging deeper. So very analytical. I ask a lot
of questions, so I just keep asking and asking and
asking and asking in different ways, and eventually they will

(01:22:51):
cough up the answer. And then the other thing if
you're just getting new with these AI tools. What I
think is the very best thing about using these tools
above all, is it never treats you like you asked
a stupid question. So you can ask as many idiotic,
stupid questions as you want and it will never treat
you like your stupid And in fact, it may say, oh, that's.

Speaker 7 (01:23:14):
A good question after you're talking with chat chipets, like
they have a very optimistic view of whatever you're doing. Yes,
but it's nice. I mean I get these dopamine heads
from chat schipt right. It's like I type in the
query and then it says, yes, that is an excellent question.
You know, I get better strokes from chat GPT than
just about anywhere. So stop asking it if it loves you,

(01:23:35):
because don't do that all day.

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):
I'm telling you that I ask your wife, do not
ask JET.

Speaker 8 (01:23:42):
It'll always love you be.

Speaker 7 (01:23:45):
So, that's great. That's it for us. Passage to Profit
is a Gear Media Studios production. It's the nationally syndicated
radio show appearing on thirty eighth stations across the US.
In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected
by feed Spot Podcasters database as a top ten entrepreneur

(01:24:06):
interview podcast. Thank you to the P two P team,
our producer Noah Fleischman and our program coordinator Alisha Morrissey,
our studio assistant Rusicatpusari, and our social media powerhouse Carolina Tabares.
Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts.
Our podcast is ranked in the top three percent globally.
You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram, x and

(01:24:29):
on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on
this program is believed to be correct, never take a
legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearheart
Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs.
You can find us at gearheartlaw dot com and contact
us for free consultation. Take care everybody, Thanks for listening,
and we'll be back next week.

Speaker 1 (01:24:51):
The proceeding was a paid podcast. iHeartRadio's hosting of this
podcast constitutes neither an endorsement of the products offered or
the ideas ex brast