Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the AI Edge, the show that makes AI simple, easy and practical. From chaos to clarity. AI made easy. Let's cut the chaos.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I want you to picture your business walking into a room. Not you, your business, the actual operation. And I want you to picture what it's really wearing.
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Oh no, where are we going with this?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Because you think your business walks in looking like a sharp, put together grown company, but what actually walks in is 12 different apps stacked on top of each other, wearing one long trench coat, trying to sneak into the movie as a single adult.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: A booking app, sitting on an invoicing app, sitting on a CRM, wobbling through the door, going, nothing to see. Here we are, one normal business.
That's your system. 12 apps in a trench coat.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: And today we're going to unbutton the coat.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Lets do a head count. Everybody at home count with us. You've probably got a booking app, a separate texting app, an invoicing app, a CRM you pay for and haven't opened since the free trial, a review platform, a Facebook inbox, an Instagram inbox, a website form that emails you, a spreadsheet, a calendar app, a quoting tool, and at least one app you're still being charged for that. You forgot you signed up for that last one.
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Hurts, doesn't it? Somewhere right now there's a $19 a month app quietly billing an owner who hasn't logged in since the.
Nope. Since a long, long time ago. Smooth. We keep it clean on this show. Point is, you've got a graveyard of subscriptions and you're the only mourner still paying for the funeral.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: And here's the myth we're killing today.
Owners think more apps means more organized. Every time a problem came up, they downloaded a solution. Missed appointment booking app, Lost lead CRM, Late invoice, Invoicing app, Bad review app.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Each one solved exactly one problem in isolation and quietly created three new ones. Another login, another bill, another island of information that talks to absolutely nothing else.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: So now you don't have a System. You've got 12 tools, 12 passwords, 12 bills, and a business that still feels like it's held together with duct tape
[00:02:26] Speaker B: and hope numbers time. Studies show the average small business is running north of 10 different apps just to operate day to day. Some teens are bouncing between a dozen
[00:02:37] Speaker C: or more or apps than employees.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Your tech stack is better staffed than your actual company.
Your apps have a bigger team than you do, and they don't even show
[00:02:47] Speaker C: up to the Christmas party.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: And here's the real cost. Research shows employees lose somewhere around 20 to 30% of their workday just switching between tools and hunting for information.
Toggling, searching, copy, pasting the same customer's info from one app into another.
That's up to a full day every
[00:03:07] Speaker C: single week per employee.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Gone not to work, to app juggling. You're paying a full salary and getting four days of actual output because day five is spent playing which app did I put that in?
[00:03:20] Speaker B: You didn't hire an employee. You hired a full time circus performer who spins 12 plates and occasionally serves a customer.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: And when one plate drops, a lead falls through. An invoice never goes out. A follow up gets missed. The owner does. We need something to manage all this.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: And downloads a 13th app to manage the 12. Sure. You cannot fix a pile by adding to the pile. That's like being buried in a hole and asking for a bigger shovel.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Let me get one more tool to organize my tools. No, the problem was never that you were missing an app. The problem is you've got 12 that refuse to speak to each other. Like a family group chat after Thanksgiving.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: And that's the actual disease. It's not the number, it's that they're disconnected. And your booking app doesn't know your invoicing app exists. Your CRM has never once met your text messages. Every tool is holding one puzzle piece and hiding it from all the others.
So the only thing connecting the whole operation is. Say it with me. A human being's memory, usually one specific human. Shout out to Jessica, still holding 12 apps together with her brain and a
[00:04:33] Speaker A: prayer, call to action number one. And it's free. And it's a little scary this week. Add it up. Pull your bank statement and your card statement and list every single software subscription your business pays for every one. Then put the monthly cost next to it. Then add it up.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: I want you to see the real number because I promise you it's bigger than you think. And I promise at least two of those. You forgot you were even paying for that total. That's what disorganization is costing you every month in cash before we even count the wasted time. You can't fix what you won't add up. So add it up. This week. Bring the tissues. Let me make it real.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: H Vac home service. You know we love you. This one's for you. Picture a solid H Vac company, six trucks, good techs, busy summer. Here's how the trench coat actually plays out.
[00:05:28] Speaker C: On one job bead comes in on
[00:05:30] Speaker B: the website form that's app one, and it emails an inbox nobody's watching. Somebody finally sees it, manually types the customer into the CRM app 2, books them in the scheduling app, app 3, which doesn't sync to the CRM. So now the info lives in two places, slightly different. In each, HEC, gets dispatched by text,
[00:05:52] Speaker A: does the job, writes the total on a paper invoice, and later somebody types it into the invoicing app app.
Then someone's supposed to manually send a reviewed request. App 6, but they forget because they're a human doing the job of an integration.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Six apps, one customer. And every handoff is a place where the whole thing can break. The customer info gets typed four separate times by hand. Slightly wrong each time. And if any one person forgets a step, that job leaks money.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: And multiply that by every job every day. Six trucks. That's not a business running smoothly. That's a business surviving on people manually stapling 12 apps together all day long.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Now the owner thinks the fix is hire an office manager to keep up with it all. No, you're about to pay a human salary to be a human API to sit there and shuttle information between apps that should just talk to each other for free.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Now flip it to a different trade. Electricians. Same trench coat, different pockets.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Electrician runs estimates in one app, schedules in another, invoices in a third, keeps customer history in a fourth, and chases payments in a fifth.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So a customer calls and goes, hey, what did you quote me for the panel upgrade back in the spring? And the electrician goes, everybody say it. Let me check the other app. Call back. Last week's whole episode, Live in the Wild. And now he's digging through five apps on the side of the road, trying to find one quote. While the customer slowly loses confidence that this guy can rewire their house if he can't even find his own estimate.
[00:07:33] Speaker C: Meanwhile, the electrician down the street pulls
[00:07:35] Speaker B: it up in two seconds. Quote, job history, invoice, payment status, all one screen. And goes, yep, panel Upgrade. Quoted you 1850 in April, or want me to get you on the schedule Thursday?
[00:07:47] Speaker A: One of those electricians looks like a pro. The other looks like he's losing a fight with his own phone. Same skill, same license, completely different customer experience because one has a system and one has a trench coat.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: And here's the part some of you are still nervous about. So let's hit it. Han on. We keep saying connected, automated. Let the system do it. And somebody's thinking, so you want me to replace my people with Software.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Oh, we want to replace the software with software.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: We're not coming for your team.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: We're coming for your 12 apps.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: The manual work, the retyping, the copy, pasting the shuttling info between five tools, that's what goes away.
Nobody on your team dreamed of growing up to manually copy a phone number from a booking app into a CRM from 40 times a day.
That's not a job.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: That's a slow leak with a heartbeat.
When you connect it, all your people stop being human duct tape and start doing the stuff that actually needs a human. Serving the customer, doing great work, growing the business.
And businesses that do this don't shrink their teams. A lot of them hire because now they finally got the capacity to grow instead of just tread water.
We've watched this movie with every technology.
[00:09:13] Speaker C: People swore off the Internet, swore off
[00:09:16] Speaker B: email, swore they'd never buy anything online.
Now you run your whole life from a phone. The tool that felt scary on Monday
[00:09:26] Speaker C: is the tool you can't live with by Friday.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: And the businesses that dug their heels in every one of those times, they didn't stay the same. They fell behind. Quietly, then all at once. Because AI and connected systems are faster and nobody nowhere ever wants slow.
Your competitor is not smarter than you.
[00:09:48] Speaker C: They just stopped wearing the trench coat.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: They tore down the 12 apps and built one system, and now they move twice as fast.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: While you're still logging in to your fifth login of the morning, call to action number two. If you want to see what one connected system actually feels like instead of just imagining it, go to the hello, LLC IO and talk to Izzy. Izzy's our AI agent.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Ask her something like a customer would and watch her never once say, let me check the other app. She's got the whole picture in one place instantly. Because that's what a real system does.
That's the feeling you want your customers to have. And right now, your trench code can't give it to them. Go be a fake customer. Go bother our robot at midnight. See what connected feels like.
So here's the fix, plain and simple. You don't need a 13th app. You need to tear the pile down and put everything communication, scheduling, follow up, invoicing, reviews, customer history into one connection connected system where it all talks to itself automatically.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Answer first. That was episode five, never lose the conversation. Episode six, kill the 12 app trench coat and run it all from one system. That's today. That's the foundation. That's a business that finally runs like a business instead of a magic trick.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Gut check If a customer called you right now and asked about a quote from three months ago, how how many apps would you have to open to answer them? If the number is more than one, you're wearing the coat.
And that's fixable. Which brings us to the big one. If this episode described your business a
[00:11:44] Speaker A: little too accurately, book a discovery call with us.
This is the discovery meeting. A real conversation, not a 50 slide pitch. We map out every app you're running, show you exactly where the manual leaks are, add up what it's really costing you, and show you what it looks like to run the whole thing from one place.
H vac, electrical, plumbing, whatever you run, we build it to fit how your business actually operates. No jargon, no pressure, just a clear picture of your trench coat and what it looks like to finally take it off.
Homework in order. One, add up every subscription this week. Two, talk to Izzy at thehellolc IO and feel one connected system.
Three, book the discovery call and let us map your pile, add it up, feel it, then fix it in that order.
Because your customers don't care how many apps you have, they just feel it when you're disorganized. And 12 apps in a trench coat feels like 12 apps in a trench coat, no matter how good you are at the actual work.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Now, before we let you go, big stuff happening the next couple weeks, so listen up, because next Tuesday is not a normal episode.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Next week, July 28th, instead of our regular show, we're going live with a full demo of Izzy. You get to watch our AI agent actually work in real time. Ask questions, see how she answers, see how she books, see what answering first really looks like. And if you come to that one, you might just catch a sneak peek
[00:13:28] Speaker B: of the brand new hello Plaza. Before anybody else, consider that your early access. July 28, 9am CST.
Come watch Izzy work and get a first look.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: And then mark this one down big. August 4th, 9:00am CST we are officially launching the new hello plaza. Our upgraded 3D experience, fully unveiled. You do not want to miss this one.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: So two dates. July 28th, the live Izzy demo, and your sneak peek.
August 4th, the full hello Plaza launch, both 9am CST.
Both the kind of thing you wish you'd been at when everybody's talking about it.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: After, come see what we've been building.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: This is the AI edge. Keep pushing the envelope. Drop your monthly app, count in the comments. Be honest. The trench coat knows. Take the code off.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: We'll see you next Tuesday for the live Izzy demo. Same time same mission. From chaos to clarity.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Catch you next week.
