Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted small business podcast host. I'm here with Brett Sklar, who's going to introduce himself his company.
And what would you say you do here, Brett?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Well, I do whatever my wife tells me to. That's the most important thing. But then everything else that I do is kind of fun as well.
So. My name is Brett Sklar. I am the CEO of a fractional chief marketing officer company called grow. We provide fractional C to mid size and small businesses to really help them figure out their scale and their growth. Something interesting about that business though is that when I started it in early 2020, I knew that after having started, scaled and sold a marketing agency in the past, this time I wanted to do it a little different. I didn't want to have as many employees, I didn't want to have as much overhead. I wanted a lot more flexibility in my life and in my world.
And luckily, right around the time that I was starting to scale business up, we all started learning about this thing called ChatGPT and Generative AI and taking the world of AI from the things that are happening out there to the things we could actually do in our own fingertips, you know, at our command and control.
And so I decided to build a business that was very AI centric or AI first.
And by doing that, I was able to scale up my business to over 30 fractional CMOs who are all on contract. I have no employees working with about 50 different companies right now and take an incredibly AI forward approach. But most importantly, I don't have a lot of overhead, I don't have employees. AI is doing a lot of that work for me. And so after working with quite a few companies that were asking me more about my AI side of what I do in my business instead of my business itself, I decided to take all those learnings and write a book about it.
And so the book is actually called AI without the the CEO's playbook for actually getting AI right.
And I wrote that after speaking with over a thousand CEOs and learning a lot about their AI adoption journey and their challenges.
Now, in addition to my entrepreneurial journey as running the fractional CMO company, I've spoken with over 1800 CEOs in the last year and a half. And I've taken those learnings and share those with who I can get in front of as far as CEOs and small business owners and business leaders. So that's a quick recap of who I is.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: There's a lot of meat on that bone. Let's I'll take what is the biggest mistake that you can make with AI for 500, Alex?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think what we see out in the world is pretty easy to learn about and that is if you're not verifying and reviewing the things that you're putting out there that's developed by AI, it's very likely that you are maybe not in the world of AI slop, but you are creating misinformation about yourself because people haven't trained their AI models as well as they possibly could.
So that's probably the biggest danger.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: What is the gosh darn hella heck coolest implementation you've seen so far in the wild?
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Ah, gosh, there's quite a few of those. I always say that the hella coolest implementation is when companies get their customer service dialed in with AI and I usually tell people that's the last place to implement. The last place to implement is when you are interfacing with prospects and customers.
However, there have been a couple of really cool tools out there that have institutionalize the knowledge of a company and turn it into a customer service experience that brings higher customer SAT scores to companies.
So that's one of my favorites.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I like that because I came from SaaS and you know, a huge thing with SaaS companies is retention and reducing churn. I mean really should be something that's on the mindset of every business but in particular because of the way that SaaS is set up. Like if you don't have a mindset towards fulfilling customer support tickets quickly, thoroughly and correctly. You know, I suffered through, you know, from the out from the marketing side watching our customer support get gutted and transported to Columbia and just them realizing slowly, oh hey, they're answering tickets so fast.
They're answering them wrong, they're answering them incompletely. They're answering them partially.
They're pretending like they're doing the work. They actually had to hire back the, the foundational customer support team member who had been doing all the lion's share, had to double his salary, give him a five year guaranteed position and two weeks extra vacation in order to bring him back on board after they had unceremonious dumped him. And you know, it's, it's a lesson in how important support is. But I could see also if it's done well, there's so much playground for well
[00:05:43] Speaker B: and that's, you know, on your, on your, your, your original comment about this question was the hella good and the reason why it stands out is because of how poorly I've seen it done.
It is all about training the models really well and training out.
That shouldn't be done. And I see it done so poorly, especially in customer service, that with this one company it increased their customer satisfaction score significantly. And that's why it's in your immortal world.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: Well, I think there's like the flip side of it too. If you think about, you know, ChatGPT, you know Matt Brooks of Seoteric, he says think of ChatGPT Claude, as external customer support representatives and they're currently untrained. They're just scrabbling for any small scrap of signal about what it is specifically you do, how specifically you do it. Because they can't log in, you know, they're, they can't. If you have an app, if you have an internal workflow, if you have a customer process behind the pay gate, they only see the front end sales marketing side, which, I'm sorry, the days of fluffy sales, writing a kaputzki. You gotta get rid of the fluffy. Oh, we provide the best customer service. Yeah, well, so does the ihop. They provide the best customer service. But you deliver rebranding, you know, you deliver, you know, oxygen monitoring hardware. Like, come on, like, give us some detail of what it is that you, you actually really, really do in, in detail so that these bots externally can pick it up. And I love the idea of going through a workflow, you know, making sure, digesting those internal documents and providing a thorough non.
We got the technology before it was ready and we got, we got turned off by it because we had these not ready chatbot interfaces that 3/4 of the time are like, oh, let me get you to a human, or give you a bad answer before they delay getting you to a human.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Well, and Jeremy, this is. So I will tell you that the next two days, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I will be in front of two different groups of CEOs of about 18 to 20 at each of these sessions. And I guarantee, and we do our three hour workshop and it's where I get a lot of insights, but also share a lot of best practices. And I guarantee you all of those horror stories is where everybody wants to start.
Every CEO, they want to talk about the peril and the pain and the problems with AI.
And so because people have taken shortcuts or we as AI implementers or AI advocates have oversold the benefit without the guardrails. And the term guardrails is used so much in the world of AI, and it's both a pain in the butt to keep saying that, but it's also insanely important.
I will spend the first half an hour of the workshop hearing the airing of the grievances of AI Festivus, you know, for the first 30 to 45 minutes of the session. Because there's all of these problems that happen when people over trust AI.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Came up in previous interview. Another really cool implementation of AI capability. And that addresses the stat that, you know, 80% of forms submitted to small business sites never get replied.
And you will. You have, I think it's 3 or 4% of people who left a message, got called back within, you know, half an hour. And an even embarrassed, like, still embarrassing number of 50% or more of people who left a voicemail didn't get a call back at all.
And that's, that's ridiculous. Money on the table, especially for, you know, all of these, you know, fishing for new people, centric CEOs, CMOs and C suite. They're like, we got to get new people in the door. No, bro, like they're, they're getting in the door and it's closed. You're not opening the, just open the door. They're sitting there like the TJ Maxx commercial. Open, open, open. And you're like, I need something in there.
I'm going go somewhere else.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yep, yep, I see that all the time as well.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Tell me about your adventure in AI. And you know, is it accelerating? Are the skills and capabilities much better now than when it started? Is it really iterating in a useful way?
And what is the mindset that you have to adopt to continue to make the best use out of this toolset?
[00:11:02] Speaker B: You know, we could sit here and probably spend hours and hours talking about each model and how they're, you know, iterating much more improved every 90 days. You know, Claude is kicking some butt for a While and then ChatGPT comes out with another model. We could spend a ton of time there. What I am seeing as far as where things are really moving the needle are a couple of big picture concepts.
When companies are leveraging AI to help them scale up their business, outflank their competitors, build better leaders, it's when we understand that intelligence must be looked at in a completely different way.
Human intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And this is where I spend a lot of time in my leadership workshops.
Artificial intelligence now means that every person that has access to any AI, any generative AI tool now has access to virtually unlimited intelligence.
We all have access to Zach Galifianakis and the Hangover. He is incredibly great when it comes to card counting. He knows so many different factoids. The intelligence is unlimited.
What is limited, and let's go back to Zach Galifianakis in the Hangover is judgment and wisdom.
So I spend a lot of time helping business owners and business leaders think through that. If intelligence is unlimited and IQ is no longer important for a business to do, well, what is important?
Well, it's eq, right? The emotional quotient, the people's emotional maturity to use the unlimited intelligence. But it's also what I call AIQ or the AI quotient, which is taking the EQ and leveraging the unlimited IQ that everybody now has access to and to turn it into something useful for a business.
And that's true leadership.
And I think the second key point that I learned in working with business owners and business leaders is AI, when it's used properly, actually exposes great leaders and exposes really, really crappy leaders as well.
It differentiates people that have a leadership mindset that can think through in transformative ways versus the people that are more like managers that are task managers.
And they might have a team of people who are also task managers.
And if AI is giving this unlimited intelligence and taking a lot of the tasks off the plate for us with some AI agents and AI automation, but with a lot of work being done to prepare for things in minutes versus hours or weeks, then leaders who don't know how to adapt themselves to this world where tasks are now easier and intelligence is now available, by the token they are going to fail miserably.
And so when I get asked the question, which we all do of, is AI really taking our jobs? My short answer is no.
But AI is taking tasks.
And if you do nothing but manage tasks all day long, whether you are a frontline worker or you are a manager, the tasks are going away then. And if you're not really reinventing yourself and transforming yourself as a leader, then, yeah, that job task managing is going to go away because those tasks go away.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: I love that framework. I was just talking with my wife about this, this conversation of is, is AI, you know, because she works at a tattoo shop and, you know, she's like working out the logistics of, you know, what AI kind of has taken over, you know, marketing tasks and some of the work of, you know, helping her come up with the, the stencil lines and procreate, you know, you know, but she has some definite new physical, hard skills. The machine can't tattoo.
But Even in her very specific niche job, like, you know, 20, 20, 30% of what she would have done as a tattoo apprentice three years ago is, you know, being handled. And so she doesn't have to worry as much about that, but she can be more creative and she can spend, you know, she can get, you know, if she thinks through, oh, well, I didn't have to manually cut my clips because now there's autocut in TikTok and, you know, it's. It's pre digesting these different things and choosing how they go together, how it wants it to go together, and then boosting it for you. Those are all hard skills that, you know, those are tasks that you had to do to execute, but now you don't have as many tasks, but you can be more creative.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's exactly, you know, the CEO, there's a guy named Micah Kaufman. He's the CEO of a company called Fiverr F I V E R R. Many of your audience probably knows it. You use it for, you know, getting logos, you use it for getting websites for landing pages. Everything's pretty cheap. Now, if you can imagine, his entire business model is almost going away overnight because of generative AI. You can do your own logos now. You can do your own graphic design, you can do your own web pa.
Generative AI. Even if you've never built a website before, SEO, a lot of that stuff can be automated.
So one of the things he said, which I thought was just unbelievably thoughtful in how he approached it, is he said, with generative AI, the easy tasks are getting automated. The things that are just time wasters and time suckers, the hard tasks, the things that require a lot of thought, are now becoming the easy tasks.
But the things that we thought were impossible or that we could never do, the big hairy tasks, are now not only possible, but doable. So easy tasks are getting automated, hard tasks become easy, and impossible tasks become possible.
And so if we take your wife and a tattoo artist and a lot of work she probably does to promote her business is through social media, through visual Images, it is 30 times easier for her to get content out there. But what she had, now she has the more time available where she can think through, analyze through what's going to make a bigger impact. How do I attract the people that I want with the designs that I want versus just doing the basic, you know, roman numerals or, you know, same dragon or same snake or whatever else. So it allows a person like your wife who is in the Tattoo, you know, very creative business to focus on the creativity instead of spending all of her time rewriting and re editing and re cutting TikTok videos, YouTube videos and thought leadership processes. Pieces about images that could really have, in her case, an image is worth a thousand words and so she can do a lot more with it.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: That's absolutely true. I'm curious, what do you think happens with people who struggle with creativity? You know, I think like there's a Myers Briggs, like I'm an entp.
It's funny because I went to an SEO conference and they asked, you know, what everybody's Myers Briggs scores were and 95% of the room was ENTP or ENFP, you know, so either everyone there, but I know that there's those sensory people. And again, you know, another conversation with my wife this morning. There are people who, you know, they, they need the boundaries, the guidelines, and then they just live and inhabit that role.
So what happens to, you know, our stolid workhorses who just, you know, they come in and do the job?
Are they just being boxed out or do they have to be. We have to, you know, understand that there are these different personality types that aren't going to take the bridle and run away with it like an ENTP might.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
So what I see, you know, if we look at a parallel from about 40 years ago, let's talk about software developers.
And for the last 40 years, software developers were having their hot girl summer, right? If you were a software developer, not only were you pretty much guaranteed a decent base salary, but if you brought a ton of creativity and curiosity to the table, you had the potential to do bigger things, make more money, make a bigger impact.
Now let's fast forward that. You know, the software developers are definitely having, they're on their struggle bus.
They're having to reinvent themselves. But now all of us who have access to generative AI tools are in the same place where software developers were 40 years ago. And if we learn how to use these tools, we will all, you know, become more effective, become more efficient, be able to do more things.
However, the people that are going to really knock it out of the park and the people that are going to really take this and make something very big of themselves are the ones that bring two real factors to the table.
And one of them comes before the other, before you can have creativity, because I think it is creative people and creative processes are going to really help us solve big problems where big money can be made and big problems can be solved before you get to that creativity, you have to be curious and you have to bring curiosity.
And so my call to action to every one of those workers that are the task managers that are afraid that their jobs are going to go away is this.
Learn how to be curious, learn how to bring curiosity.
If you don't, you're going to be on the struggle bus. If you bring curiosity, which breeds creativity, you will have an opportunity to use your work partner generative AI tools to really help solve problems in a way you never thought imaginable.
So that's, that's my, that, that's how I approach that.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: I'm curious as somebody who, you know, has all these conversations, is using AI on a regular basis. What's something that you've struggled with to do in your business in the past month?
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Every time I try to automate the sales process a little bit more, I feel like I take two steps forward and 1.75 steps backwards.
And it goes back to something I mentioned early on. You know, where I really don't recommend using AI to automate the front end of the business as far as the selling process or where you're engaging with customers. Now, there's an exception. There was one company that did an amazing job, but it took them years before they put trust in a system.
And I struggle with this because I have seen AI do an amazing amount of work. I'll give you one example, and this is probably the better example than the customer service example, but I didn't think about it at the beginning of our session.
RFPs or requests for proposals. Lots of small businesses use a process called request for proposal or RFP to go after business.
And here's how it looks.
Let's say I am a retail company with my own property, and I need new concrete poured on my parking lot because it's got potholes all over the place.
So I create an RFP to a bunch of concrete or driveway or parking lot people and I say, okay, I can send it out to 10 people, 20 people.
Here's my request for proposal.
Those concrete companies or those pavement companies or those driveway companies would have to go take a look at it and respond to each item in the RFP and talk about how great they are and why they're the best choice.
I've worked with concrete companies, the paving companies, to automate that RFP process.
So now doesn't mean it's completely automated. It means that the system is doing the research, AI is doing all of the drafting.
So a process to respond, respondent, RFP which might have taken, you know, 30 to 40 hours in the past.
Only takes about two hours, of which an hour and a half of that is just reviewing what AI wrote.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: And so that process really fixes sales.
So I love to see other businesses where I've helped them like build and rebuild that RFP process.
So instead of being nervous about responding to RFPs and how much time it would take to respond, they're now like, give me more, give me more, give me more. Because we've automated this process.
But for me and my business, because I'm a very human centered business, it's really hard and I struggle to find a way to automate any of that outbound sales without it seeming very automated and some hint of AI slop, which I refuse to allow in my business.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: No, I get that. There is definitely.
The folk who fall into the sales world are definitely usually very high eq and there's definitely a lot of specific personality types that come into sales. And you know, it's, it's about, you know, it's the intangible things. You know, you can read through a hundred transcripts raw and miss the moment where the reply of, okay, so ready to get on board? Yeah, it says Y E A. Yeah, no, that was a. No, that was, that was a hedge. That was. Or a.
There. It could be a transient moment. You need to give me more information. But that's.
AI is not good at reading subtext. It can't, it doesn't do a good job of taking those subtle human nuances of tone, particularly if you're only giving it the transcript. Then it could miss it entirely and totally classify a failed sale as a positive sale. So there is human Galifianakis in the hangover, right? Exactly.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: The intelligence without the common sense. Yep.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: Intelligence without common sense. That's, that is AI at this moment for sure.
What do you think is going to be the biggest unlock for businesses in the process like that? They're going to, you know, if you start down this path, where are they going to see the biggest change first?
[00:27:06] Speaker B: So small businesses, and it depends on the definition of a small business, but small businesses, I think they've been hyped up with the promise of what AI can do for them. And so they've taken a couple of big swings at base. Right. They're at bat. Right. And they try to swing for the fences and it's a swing and a miss.
And we're seeing this all the time. In fact, MIT and this is more on the enterprise side. But MIT did a survey that said 95% of all AI pilots are failing in businesses.
Where I am seeing businesses succeed small, medium and large is not in swinging for the fences.
It's taking the ideas that we saw in the movie Moneyball, which is the idea that happened with Major League Baseball many years ago with the Oakland A's, who were losing every season, and they decided to change the way that they saw success in baseball.
It wasn't about the home runs. It wasn't about how hot, you know, a player's girlfriend is or how their swing looks.
It was one thing getting everyone at bat to get onto first base.
If they get everyone that goes to at bat onto the base, then they will start winning games. And it completely rewired the art and the science of how baseball is played.
And so businesses have this opportunity to not try to swing for the fences, but to get every one of their team members, every one of their vendors, every one of their partners to start thinking about how to leverage AI to get 1% better each week.
And if everybody in a small business gets 1% better each week, you calculate that over 52 weeks and you get 68% productivity gains, 68% more dimensions.
And as a small business, that's everything, especially small business owners who struggle with time management more than anything else.
So if you as a business owner and everyone on your team can focus on getting 1% better leveraging AI every week, you're 68% more productive as a company at the end of a year, and then you can really start kicking some ass.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: It occurs to me in the moment that it's almost.
It's more advantageous to look at as almost a democratization of intelligence across the organization, because everybody's getting access to the same level of IQ at the same time.
So if you give your individual team members the freedom to, you know, make those productivity gains themselves to eliminate their own personal headaches by just a small, hey, like, you know, your task for this work is just figure out one small headache that's happening and see if you can solve it with, you know, Claude code. Well, I put it on, you know, here's the terminal, here's to interact with it. And it does all this stuff, you know, just find those unlocks, but put it into, you know, it doesn't have to. We don't have to have an.
An AI department who's going distribute this mana from heaven from on high, but doling it out and seeing, hey, what happens when I give these tools across the board?
[00:30:55] Speaker B: That's where I see the gains.
It's not the big putting it in. First of all, don't ever give AI strategy to the IT department. If you've got an IT department, that's a formula for failure. And there's a chat from my book that talks about that, but it is.
There's no way to centralize how to get the gains out of AI.
So you as a business owner, you as a business leader, it is about giving people some confidence to try things.
Give them some of the guardrails again. That's one of the most popular words we hear in the world of AI.
And create an environment for sharing what's working and not working in as real time as possible so that other people can see the impact of using it.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: I love that.
As we kind of come around to close, is there anything that you really have on your heart that you want to make sure that people get?
[00:31:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we covered a lot of it.
The one big thing that I would leave people with is to think about the fact. And I said this before, but I'll end with it as well.
In a world where intelligence is unlimited and where everyone has access to intelligence and it's no longer a competitive advantage, how can you bring judgment and wisdom to that unlimited intelligence to help bring people together and find value in what people do day in and day out in your company?
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Absolutely love it. Thanks for coming by. For my listeners, I'm going to make sure that Brett's book, any of the resources mentioned gets linked in the show Notes episode.
Brett, I think you have, I think you said a substack and a LinkedIn newsletter. I'll make sure that those get linked. So anybody who's interested in following more of your content can find you. For other unscripted Small business episodes like this one, check out unscripted small business.com thanks for tuning in.
