How AI is Revolutionizing Small Business Management 

Yeah, so I believe in moving fast. It's your greatest. leverage and advantage. You don't actually have to be smarter than everyone else. You need to move faster where when they're still figuring out the idea, you should have already made three or four mistakes and course corrected and now be finding some traction. So the last business that I built and sold, I launched it from my dining room that was under construction. I got some college kids to come and record the video. I didn't even build the product. I knew it was going be an online program. I wanted it to be a membership and I had tested a few target markets before that and had identified this specific target market and so I just launched it with cold ads to this market to test the messaging, test the idea before I actually like built the program to deliver. And I knew if it didn't work, if it flopped, I just refund the people that bought and then never built the program. If it did work, then I would build and deliver simultaneously, work out kinks, you know, these would become like the founding members. And then I could up the price later and have this like flushed out, you know, packaged program. so I, yeah, launched it. It was $12,000 all in launch, including all the ads and everything. That business netted six figures its first year, and I sold it for seven figures five years later. And it was that I found the right niche.

And I had a good offering for that niche, something that they were really interested in. And then I just moved fast. I believe in you can never figure it all out in your head. You have to start doing and then course correcting and course correcting. And so just like you need to get into action and be doing. I think a lot of entrepreneurs sit and think and think and think and think and think, and you're never going to get it all figured out in your head. Like make your best plan and then just like you have to execute. You got to get in the trenches and execute and then just course, correct, course, correct, course, correct. And that's what's gonna get you further faster.

No, I agree what you're saying in terms of, don't try to make it perfect before you launch it. Get in the market because whether it's a product or a service, it only gets perfected by customers using it. So whatever you have in your head, yeah.

Yeah, you won't get it perfect no matter what. You could spend four years and $10 million and I promise you when you go to market, you're gonna realize everything that's wrong with what you built. So you don't have a money problem, you don't have a time problem, you have a not getting into action problem.

Yeah.

Well, exactly. And I think that's the key is like, you you got an idea, get to the minimum viable product. I I work in the SaaS industry, the software industry for many years. That's what the terminology we use is like, you know, build a minimum viable product, launch it, let customers use it, use that feedback to perfect the product. And while you can keep acquiring more customers and start building the revenue line. So that's wonderful. So and as we were talking earlier, you you talking about like, you AI and how you feel very strongly about it. So give us your view on AI and the role you think AI can play, not just in small businesses, but in general, like in change that it can bring in how businesses operate and how AI can be a catalyst for growth as well.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, AI is moving faster than most people realize. It's going to be embedded into many areas of your daily life in the very near future. It's already seeping in in ways that you actually don't realize. And what I see that a lot of marketers and solopreneurs and just business people in general are being, I think, little too cautious and a little too slow to adapt, and that is hurting your speed. You can actually leverage it in so many ways to move faster, to do five times the output at 10 times the quality, and it's easier than you realize. Now, I think that there's an overwhelm because there's new AI tools coming out all the time, and if you're on Instagram or TikTok or whatever your flavor social media choice is, you're getting bombarded by the five best AI apps and then the 10 great and they're all different and they all do different things and it's like very overwhelming and so I think that that kind of has helped like freeze people when the reality is you can

Thanks.

just like pick off one, like one a week that you're going to experiment and do. Now, if you're not regularly, like I mean, multiple times a day using whichever LLM is your choice, know, ChachiPT, Gemini, Perplexity, I'm somebody that actually has three of them pinned. I have pro accounts with ChachiPT, Perplexity, and Claude, because they're all like better at different things, and I keep them pinned in my browser. And the ChachiPT is the one on my phone. that just because when I'm doing phone stuff that's the better one that for me in my personal life anyway. And you should be talking and engaging with them all day every day. And as far as marketers, here's a very simple thing that you can implement in your business right now that is going to increase your output and the quality of your output and the onboarding of it, like the setting it all up, you can do in like an hour. Here's what it is. You wanna get some AI bots that are set up in your Chat GPT. And I recommend Chat GPT for this, because it's the, I think the best one for this particular use case. Yeah, and so you wanna like a copywriting one, a viral hooks one, a viral video one, you know, et cetera. And then you...

They've come the long way so far,

tell them, you basically program them by talking to them. You give them like your brand book, if you have one, your ideal client avatar, all that. If you're doing it for clients, then of course, for every client, you would put their information in and get an output. And you can either create these or you can literally just buy them and they're very inexpensive. There's a guy, I think it's Darius. Just Google like D-A-R-I-U-S AI Trooper. I think it'll come up like Darius Academy. He'll sell you like 70 for, I don't know, like $100 or something like that. And you can just copy them in. The onboarding is super easy. In an hour, they're all set up in your account. You can have them all programmed and now they can be creating repurposed content for you, video scripts for you, like all of that in conjunction with you. You can't just like 100 % outsource it. but they can create an outline and then you work with that and then you send them the draft and then they give you suggestions and ideas and you go back and forth and all of a sudden your output is so much faster and you end up with a much higher quality stuff because it thinks of things that you're not thinking of.

No, absolutely. you know, mean, we at Growth Natives, know, that's the company that I, the founder, CEO at, you know, we've got about 350 people in our company that are helping customers with digital transformation. And we also do, you know, lot of marketing and content and social media related stuff as part of the services we offer all our marketing teams. And in fact, all our digital transformation teams as well. They are certainly... deeply entrenched in using AI. even our consultants that are working on package software, software like Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, HubSpot, and then also the developers that are coding new software that can be used by our customers, all of them. are using certain elements of AI in their work life. And it is having a tremendous amount of impact on our output that we can. and not just.

And I highly recommend people use it in your personal life too because the more streamlined your personal life is and that your personal needs are being met, the more time, energy and bandwidth you have to make money, right? So you need. help at home. And yeah, and I'll just give you a quick example from my personal life. So annually, I get like my physical with all and I do like an extra special, you know, tons of blood tests and you're, you know, and I run like a, you know, million tests. I'm a little bit of a like a biohacker and whatever. And so I had done my annual thing. had these like 12 lab reports. And so I put them in chat, chachi, PT. Now I did you know, prompting matters, become an expert prompter, take a course on prompting prompting matters. So I I prompted it with what my specific goals are in my health goals, right? What I care about, what I want to know. I also said, you have all of the knowledge of, and I listed out 10 of the biohacking doctors that I follow and that I believe in their advice. And said, you have all of their expert knowledge and these are da, da, da, da, da. And so here's what I, and I said, and then you have to tell to ask you questions. I said, ask me questions that I'm not thinking to have told you.

Yep.

right, like ask me questions about my life. So then it started and it dove in and it actually, I had forgotten, which I never would have said this to my doctor in the office because she never would have like dove in as deep as chat GBT with me, but it was because it was asking me all these questions that got me thinking and I was like, I actually recently have been waking up in the middle of the night and it's taking a long time to get back to sleep. So then I told it that it came back and it said, basically it was like, yeah, it makes perfect sense because of this and this in your labs. Here's what you need to do. You need to double your magnesium, take these supplements, lower your room temperature to 67, it gave me a list. I did that list that night. I did wake up, but only for 30 minutes. The next night, I did the list every night. I've done the list every night since then. Starting the second night, I have fully slept through the night every single night going forward. By the way, Three weeks later, my doctor still hadn't even looked at my lab reports and called me. And I had already had a full analysis. I was now sleeping through the night, which makes me a more productive entrepreneur during the day, right? And had all this like great information. And I got way more at a chat chibit that I know that I'm gonna get. And I actually like my doctor. I've got contrary urge medical, but she just doesn't have the time. doesn't have extensive knowledge. You know, like I'm just not gonna get that level of service. I'm still gonna meet with her and like finish my physical. but like I'm off to the races. Day one that I had my lab reports, I was making changes that night and it was positively affecting my life. Meanwhile, three weeks later, I just don't have a call from my doctor, right? So like that's like things that you can do to just simplify your personal life.

But how do you, I again, I think I totally believe that if you have a better personal life and if you have more time, more organized personal life, your professional life certainly seems to do better. No questions there, like, hand in glove with each other. But the example that you just gave, on the healthcare side, do you think using AI, to help you decide the changes that you need to make? mean, guess, know, lifestyle changes and maybe like, you know, some supplements that you need to take care of and that I think that's probably good. But do you think it is good enough that one should actually really rely on AI for like true medical advice as well? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

No, mean, AI hallucinates there. You know, the changes it was telling me was like, do red light, this kind of exercise at this time of day, this, you know, temperature for your None of this is going to even if it's wrong about a couple of these things, it was suggesting all very healthy lifestyle things, right, that were going to help with my specific set of facts and my goal, which was sleep through the night and it knew my lab reports, it knew that I was like low in these things, you know, etc. Now, if it came back and

to some lifestyle changes and so on. Yeah.

We think you you know have lupus or you know something like that I'm going to then Schedule with but what what it will do then though is it will prompt me like my gosh I need to get into the doctor. I probably need to get into a specialist I need to ask the doctors a thousand questions. I need to take control here I need to order a lot more testing and so I'm not gonna just let a doctor kind of push me around and be like It's probably not that we ran one simple test. It didn't seem like anything and just like shoo me out the door, right?

Yeah.

I know that if it's telling me that now I'm going to get serious.

It's giving you the depth. It's giving you a very in-depth analysis of your health situation and it could be giving you like, know, 10 suggestions, know, 8 of them could be tangents but like 2 of them could be real and really can drive you. But I do like, you know, let's delve a little bit deeper into what else do you think

Right.

Yeah.

You know, I love this idea about, you know, focus on your personal health, focus on your productivity on the personal life so that you can be more productive in everything else. Any other suggestions, hacks that you have that you view successfully?

Yeah, so on my personal life, recently we had this time of year, I like to host like little cocktail parties and stuff at my house. It's a great time to get, know, friends together that it's hard to stay in regular contact with. I've got kind of my core group, but then the broader group, you know, life gets busy. So I find it.

Like everybody, yeah.

Yeah, so like one efficiency thing that I do is I just host like a four to seven p.m. Saturday cocktail party. I'll do a few of them this time of year and then I can get 20 people at a time and I get to like connect with these 20 people, keep those relationships going and I just use ChatGPT. Basically I'm like this is how many people, this is I want all finger food, I want easy, I want da da da da da and it just like spits out a grocery list, this, that, I hand it to my housekeeper and I'm like, here's the plan for Saturday. This is what time the party is. Have the house ready, have everything ready. I need everything cleaned up at this time. And just like, done. I can just do the whole thing very quickly and effectively.

Great. So that's one. Anything else, Heidi, you would like to talk about? We haven't talked about your bookkeeping AI powered software. So let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Okay, we can talk about that. actually, before we get into that, let me give you some of my predictions on AI, and then that will be a good lead into what I'm working on right now and why, and why think the work that I'm doing now is important and is going to be really game changing. So here's my belief with AI.

Yes.

I believe that, so we are technically in web two right now. Now the general public thinks that we're in web one because they missed web one, because web one was nerds and early adopters and future hackers and know, right? And so, but we're actually in web two and we are straddling web three. do, there's a whole portion of the web that's in web three. My belief is that we're actually going to kind of just cruise through through over web three and we're going to have full adoption not in web three but in web four because web four is AI backed web three. And when you AI back web three, you create really powerful. and positive use cases for the average person, which is why people adopted Web2 and not Web1. Web1 didn't have a bunch of use cases for the average person, but in Web2, big companies like Google and Amazon, and they started these interactive services, launching them, which was the birth of Web2. And then people are like, this internet thing makes my life better. There's like things I can do that are actually useful. And then everybody started getting on the internet, right? And then the internet grows and grows and grows. So web 3 right now is, you know, a lot of the... crypto bros, early adopters, blockchain people, that group. And so it's not getting full adoption, but we're gonna back it with AI and then we're gonna birth Web4, which I believe we're actually already starting to birth now, and that's gonna take full adoption. the thing with technology is the faster it moves, the faster it moves. It's the compound effect. So AI is going to be embedded in almost every area of your life in the very, very near future.

Now I do think we need to be thoughtful about AI and like all that. Now we're not gonna have like the whole Terminator thing and whatnot like that's, you can read why, but that's not what's gonna happen with AI. There's other things to be concerned about for sure. However, there is really positive things with AI that you can harness in your day-to-day life. And so here's an example of that. Now,

Yeah.

What we're doing at my company, is cashflowy.ai, flowy is spelled with a Y, so cashflowy.ai. And so we are essentially bookkeeping AI, bookkeeping and invoicing for solopreneurs, micro businesses and. we get rid of the need for a human bookkeeper. AI of highly great use of AI would be accounting. And I think that AI is actually going to take over all areas of our accounting. In 2025, we're to be able to do people's tax returns as well using AI. So it's going to be the cost of an H &R block, but the quality is if you paid like a four or $5,000 CPA. So it's going to have dramatically better quality with lower costs. Our bookkeeping AI, so just so you know, a human bookkeeper, a good human bookkeeper is a 70 % accurate. We are in beta. We are not actually to market yet. We don't go to market until early Q1. We are 94 % accurate today in beta on MVP. Right? so it's and like our target market. So like a solopreneur is like our main target market right now. You can either do it manually on a spreadsheet, which 69 % of our target market is doing right, which is a lot of work and a lot of time that you're not putting into actually working with clients, getting clients, making more money in your business and a ton of room for error. Or you can get a clunky, expensive software like a QuickBooks, a Xero, a FreshBooks, which

That's what.

Yep.

The reason it feels clunky for you is it's not made for you. It's made for a bigger business, so it has a thousand features you will never use. It has a complicated dashboard. So often then they have to go hire a human bookkeeper to do the software for them because the software is so complicated. Now you're paying two, three hundred dollars a month for a human that's maybe seventy percent accurate and you know you ask them a question it takes them two, three days to get back to you to run the software. then when we ask them about their numbers like what the key numbers in their business they don't actually know them. So they have just enough information to kind of do their taxes, but they don't actually have enough information to make smart decisions on their business. And so we're solving all of that with a highly affordable, sleek, elegant software where the AI bookkeeper does it all for you. Any solopreneur can manage their entire business financials on cashflowee.ai in less than one hour a month.

decisions.

You can do it yourself. Even if you don't have tech skills, even if you hate accounting and don't know anything about it, it's that simple. Honestly, your teenager could do it for you in under an hour a month. You have an elegant dashboard that shows you exactly what you need to know, the numbers that you should know in your business. And we're gonna be doing trainings then on what those numbers mean and how to make smarter business decisions based on those numbers. And that's like free to all of our members, like short little bite size things.

I got it.

You know, so that's the market that, we're targeting and they are the in the U.S. That's the biggest market. They're twenty seven million. It's the fastest growing. It's expected to be forty two million by twenty twenty six because especially Gen Zers, they all want to be, you know, freelancers, digital nomads, know, coaches, consultants, therapists, you know, things like that and have, you know, flexible time, flexible money. They have like a lifestyle business. And so that's kind of the main target that we're going. after. Obviously you can use cash flow for other use cases but that's you know the primary market that we've built cash flow for. And then we'll eventually be launching WellFlowy which is going to manage all your personal finances in a way that has never been done before and is like extremely exciting and going to help you grow your net worth and really understand how to do that in a super smart, highly affordable and efficient way. So you know I'm building something that I believe is is game-changing and it'd be incredible value to people and there's other people doing the same thing. So we're finding ways to leverage AI to make all of our lives easier and better. I don't believe that you should be spending your precious time here on this earth on like numbers on spreadsheets and entering expenses and categorizing income. Like you should spend your precious time with your loved ones, taking care of your health, working out, seeing new clients and this should all be done automated for you. Yes, AI is going to take a lot of jobs as it should. What I want to do is free people up to be in their creative best self doing their powerful good work in the world, not bogged down by minutia and admin work. we shouldn't like we don't need humans to do that. Right. Like, I mean, kind of think about the Industrial Revolution like, yeah, factories got efficient and got machines and that took away a lot of those. jobs. But we can then, those people that would be in those jobs, we can educate and they can do things that are much more exciting and fulfilling. They're not just standing there doing like this.

much more valuable, much more valuable.

like 40 hours a day or 40 hours a week. Like that's crazy. That's not healthy. Like you're going to die young doing that, right? Like let's instead figure out what your core genius is and let's help you unleash that. And now artists can create more art and coaches can do more coaching and you know what I mean? Moms can, dads can do more moming and dading and not have their like sit down on Sunday night to like figure out the budget and the bills and the this like let's, let's have that robots do all that. And so that you can be the park with your kids. How about that? And they will do a better job. They will give you better information and then you can make smarter decisions with that information.

No, I think I totally agree. think, you know, AI is a game changer. It's going to change the way we conduct business, conduct our personal lives, you know, and then, like you said, you know, if we're smart enough, we use it for mundane things and, you know, free up a ton of time that we can actually focus that time and energy on things that we love doing and things that are more impactful. Well, Heidi, I would like to thank you for being a wonderful guest. And I'm sure our listeners have learned a thing or two from the chat that we just had. I love the part where the focus on yourself is really a focus on everything else in your life, basically. So thank you.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.