The AI Sherpa Podcast

Podcast Transcript:

Jack Monson: We are back with the AI Sherpa. It's Robert Mitchell. What's going on today, Robert?

Robert Mitchell: Jack, how you doing?

JM: I am doing great. I can't wait to hear what nuggets you have for us in the AI world today. You had said something a while ago about how fast AI is moving, and you were making some comments about what you need in this fast-moving world.

JM: Tell me about that.

RM: What we need—remind me—you say what we're looking for in this fast-moving world.

JM: Yeah.

JM: Tech is moving so fast.

RM: Oh yeah. Yeah. So here's the thing. When it comes to other types of technology over the years, industrial revolution all the way through to personal computers, those technologies have given you time to adopt.

RM: They've allowed the non-users to become users, to get trained up. And there hasn't been a lot of disruption—or at least there was—but there'd been plenty of time for people to get adopted into the new technology. Even laggards could take their time and still be okay. Not so with AI. Even more so than that, the genie is already out of the bottle.

RM: And it's like if somebody were to say, Hey, I want to run a race, and they show up at the racetrack, and the race started three hours ago, and there's people almost at the finish line now, and you're going to start the race. Now you're going to have to run a lot harder, a lot faster, just to catch up to the people who are in last place.

RM: That's what's happening with AI right now. If you don't have a Sherpa—and I use that term because that's what we use at WSI—but you don't have some head advisor or consultant that is navigating the different solutions, products, just technologies, capabilities of AI and how it applies to your business, then you're not going to be able to stay in the loop. For example, if you are running a painting franchise, you are head-down support, training, upskilling, marketing, all the stuff that franchisors are typically doing. Frandev, all that stuff, right?

RM: AI is not something that you have the time to be up to date on. You are heads-down trying to make your business model and your franchise owner successful. Deviating from the workflow on a daily basis takes time and energy. And some people are doing a really good job of that, but even they are still falling behind the capability. So having a Sherpa that you can—.

RM: Much like a lawyer, right?

JM: Yeah.

RM: That can stay abreast of the different laws and inform you. That's what's important these days.

JM: Yeah, the worst corporate executives out there are the ones who think, We don't need a lawyer. I know enough about the law. No, that gets you into a lot of trouble. And I like what you said about how things are moving so much faster now than with technologies in the past.

JM: Think about a hundred years ago. If a company really decided they were going to get deep into radio, or maybe the advertising division of a huge corporation was going to get deep into television 75 years ago, they could take the time to learn the industry. It was moving at a snail's pace.

JM: It wasn't really changing much between 1948 and 1949. You could actually become a leader by studying and learning and talking to people. Now, by the time, like you said, by the time you even get up to where the industry is today, by the time you get there, it's already passed you by. So you really do need that outside counsel when it comes to AI, just like you do with a lawyer and maybe a few other disciplines.

JM: I also think there's something there about how you don't know what you don't know. So you're not really even sure what to study when it comes to AI. So they need someone to actually help them.

RM: I think that's an important point because sometimes you don't know. That applies to, for example, image generators. Those are fun—text-to-image generators, I should say—or text-to-video or text-to-audio.

RM: At first glance, they're like, Oh, that's a funny tool to make a meme or an image. But now they're getting so good that you give it your brand guidelines, you give it your color scheme of your brand, and then it can do on-brand content creation inside of tools like Canva. So now what was just kind of a fun thing a year ago is now actually actionable by a marketing department. And hate to say this, I guess we're going to go ahead and skip ahead to 'on notice,' but if you're a marketing agency being hired by a franchisor for outsourced products like that, or logo development, or content creation, some franchisors now are opting to pull that in-house because they can actually do a few of those deliverables—content especially, copywriting especially, but now some of the video assets, some of the audio assets for sure.

RM: And those marketing agencies that typically—that was their ballywick—now they're losing some of that business.

JM: Yeah, and I think it comes back to the time factor once again. Because you could do something using AI faster than you could hire a team, hire an agency, get them to learn your brand, learn everything that you want to teach them about the colors and the themes and all of those things.

JM: By the time they're up to the point where they could start creating something, you've already been paying them for six months, as opposed to AI, which takes about six minutes.

RM: Yeah. You just feed it your existing content. Actually, just give it access to your hard drive and where all of your brand documents are—all the 20 years of previous ads that you've created in this one folder. Just give it access to that to absorb and then generate a like-minded post or whatever the content is. So exactly right. It's faster.

RM: And people would probably argue with me about this, but it is better, especially if you know how to properly prompt the AI.

JM: Yeah. And I think that's the whole key—finding that Sherpa who can help you properly prompt. And I would also say there's a lot of creative things that AI could do for a marketing team that maybe takes away some of the bias or some of the previous notions that a marketing team may have about a brand.

JM: Or some of the ideas that you just want to stay away from, or maybe even the idea of we've always done it this way. AI doesn't think that way, right? It just looks for the best solution—not so much what the internal politics of a company might actually say. You mentioned a couple of minutes ago about one of our favorite things to talk about here—who's on notice with AI. So tell me more about that.

JM: And maybe who's on notice now and how does a company decide what they're going to do and who should be on notice next?

RM: Yeah. So let's take an example of what we were just talking about—the marketing department. I think that WSI is a digital marketing leader, right? We're in dozens of countries, with hundreds of digital marketing franchise owners around the globe doing digital marketing for small business owners.

RM: So we know this space, and we've been optimizing using AI for the last two to three years, making our deliverables even better, which is why we don't charge per hour. We charge per value proposer or value deliverable.

RM: So we have already been using it to make our services better and make our franchise owners more optimized. But back to your question—when you're looking at a marketing department of an organization, franchise or otherwise, and let's say you've been using AI for the last six months, and your team is more efficient, and you have three people in that team, and you don't need three people anymore, how do you pick?

RM: Which one gets the short straw? And the easy litmus test is who's excited about AI. Because what you want is not somebody who is a laggard or a Chicken Little—or scared of it.

RM: What you're intending to do by helping upscale your employees or increasing the AI intuition of your employees is making sure that those people are more efficient and more productive. And if somebody is a laggard or somebody is anti-AI, then they're going to be the lowest producer. They're going to be the one that's dragging the rest of them down—the, what's it called—the one that's—.

JM: We always call that person the Gilligan. The one that's going to cause the destruction of the entire team.

RM: Yeah. So that person will typically be left behind. This happened recently—a little anecdote for you. One of our clients is acquiring a hundred locations.

RM: And when you are an existing owner of a bunch, and you acquire another bunch, there are systems that are redundant and people that are redundant. And so he asked the question, We're going to do this huge change management over the next couple of months. We're going to analyze workflows and whatnot.

RM: And then we're going to help him identify which ones are better. Honestly, who's going to stay and who's going to go is up to him, of course, because you can't have two accounting departments. You just don't need that much labor. That's something that AI is going to be able to help with as well, because you can use this particular change as a catalyst for optimizing a whole department.

JM: That's great. And I think maybe that should apply not just to what you're doing with AI, but to your entire business strategy, right? Like how does who's still in the boat with you next year and the following year? How does that affect what your business strategy is? Are you going to focus on sales? Are you going to focus on improving operations and products? Are you going to focus on growing overseas or whatever your strategy is?

JM: I think there's a place where AI can actually affect those decisions when you're making that strategy right now. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

RM: I think that we use the term AI, and it's overused. So when you say that AI helps the strategy, it really helps in the ideation—having another board member that's the smartest person in the room.

RM: I've actually had some of our ICs say, I asked my smartest employee this question, this is what she said. And it ends up being AI, right? But I think that when it comes to leadership or strategy or any type of decision-making, or any type of navigating of different things, you'd be a fool—an absolute fool—not to employ the smartest person in the room.

RM: And so AI has gotten to the point where it's smarter, and each model has gotten better and better. So as you're ideating and figuring out, you know what? Our sales are down from last quarter. Our employee retention is down. These are the metrics. What should I be doing?

RM: I know as basic as that might sound, AI truly has access to all of the supporting documents from every smart business coach in the world. So why would you not want to try to tap into that?

JM: I want to stay on the labor topic for a moment, and maybe it's within franchising, and maybe it's franchising plus other industries. But you mentioned an interesting stat recently about Gen Z and the aspiration of being a content creator.

JM: Tell me more about that.

RM: The good and bad news is that AI will help them do that. But I heard this on the All-In podcast—not as good as, of course, the Sherpa podcast—but they were stating a statistic that 57 percent of Gen Z aspire to be content creators for a living, for a profession.

RM: Which is probably the reason why unemployment is so low—they're not even looking for a job. They're thinking they're going to be TikTok famous.

RM: And what does that mean for what we talk about on a daily basis? Your labor pool is getting more and more sparse. You have people that have an ulterior career path. So I'm not going to poo on their ideas. I think fine—if they want to do that, it happens to a lot of people. But as franchisors looking for talent and for employees, you're going to have to find ways to optimize your existing workflows that need less labor.

RM: So I think it's—again, you'd be foolish not to try to figure out solutions. Like even Jan-Pro—I just got back from their national conference or their master franchise conference, and there was a presenter there—one of their suppliers that does vacuums and mops and whatnot, sells them to the franchise owners.

RM: They have a robot now. And they just casually mentioned it—we have robots now, just whenever you're ready. And it's not like a Roomba—don't get me wrong. It's not that kind of robot. It's like you put it in a bathroom, and it goes head to ceiling to floors, wet, dry, everything. Done in five minutes.

JM: Yeah, exactly.

RM: That's not AI, mind you—that's robotics. But that's an example of just being proactive about what's happening with the labor pool. Salespeople are the same reason, same way.

JM: Yeah. And I think there's something there, though, that maybe we need to look at—changing some of the positions and the jobs and the roles that all of these franchise brands have had.

JM: If there is this huge majority of young talent that wants to be a content creator—terrific. Then come join Jack's franchise company and create content using AI that can actually help grow our franchise system. And I think maybe that's where all of these things meet—finding someone who does have that ambition to create content and be creative and knows that AI is the way to go.

JM: But also they've got the business sense that I'm not going to be TikTok famous, or I'm not going to be a rock star on Instagram, but I could do some really cool stuff for this franchise brand.

RM: Honestly, I got to tell you, Jack, I've been streaming this for—I want to say three years before AI. I thought TikTok was the new frontier for Fran dev—for franchising in general. Not all brands, but a lot of brands.

RM: I have yet to see a good franchisor do it right. And what I'm trying to say—I’m heavily involved in TikTok because it's honestly where I get a lot of my news. I can get it there before I can get it other places. A lot of the time TikTok is snippets from YouTube videos or other speaking engagement stuff I wouldn't have access to anyway.

RM: But when I think about franchisors and how they're trying to get exposure for their brand—you’re exactly right. You get somebody who's got the chops of social media and content creation and create a fun way. For example, Jan-Pro—people love before and afters. One of the guys I follow cleans pools in England. It goes from a muddy swamp to a beautiful pool. I just love the scene—the before and after.

RM: How cool would it be to have a Jan-Pro video? They do stadiums, right? Jan-Pro does stadiums. They do all kinds of big event centers. Imagine a video showing a stadium transformation from dirty to spotless. That would be fun for content creation, right?

RM: Nothing to do with AI, but I just thought that would be something I would love to see—a franchisor really adopt. But going back to AI, I think in order to make that happen, you have to have some automations in place, and that is AI.

RM: A lot of the time, where it stops is on the camera. You get the video—it’s created on the camera—and then you're not able to redeploy it in the right channels, in the right format. Then you have to have text on there. It gets to be a headache, and you have to hire a marketing team to do it.

RM: Let me just tell you—there are automations with AI that tie all those together in a way that you could take one video and, with a click of a button, repurpose it for five platforms with text, with audio overdub, and have it ready to go.

JM: Yeah. And I want to ask about doing that content or doing anything with AI. What did you say—that AI intuition? Tell me about that, and then I've got a question for you.

RM: So AI intuition is what we talk about at WSI when we're working with clients. We have a structured approach. As you said several times, we don't come into the organization with all the answers.

RM: We come into the organization to upskill the existing employees, give them permission to use the tools and AI, and then watch them run—watch them blossom. And then what happens is they come to us saying, Can I do this with this workflow? I've been playing around with this little thing, and I thought maybe it'd be cool if AI could help automate some of these steps, or make me a call agent for my outbound calls or inbound calls or whatever.

RM: And so what happens is that AI intuition gets better and better. They come with all the best ideas. I'll tell you right now—the person who's not going to have the ideas or not know how to implement AI is the CEO, the president, the founder.

RM: That's why we have to have a bottom-up approach with all these people in the trenches. So AI intuition is about that, right?

JM: Got it. So that actually leads to the question I was going to ask—where do you fall when it comes to customizing a solution for any brand, and let's just say it's a franchise brand, versus just doing something out of the box or off the shelf? Where do you fall on that?

RM: Going back to how we position ourselves—we are not a hammer in search of a nail. So we don't go in with a solution before we know their problem. And that's the definition of insanity, right?

RM: Now, we do have some in our back pocket. We have solutions that we have vetted—some off-the-shelf products. We don't make any money off of them. We say, You know what, based on the problem that we've identified here, you should go with X solution. And one of those that I’ve mentioned a hundred times is Easy Assist for franchisors with particular needs.

RM: That's a little bit easier to connect—it’s easier for people to see. It's like almost every franchisor should use that product, in my opinion. But when you're looking at off-the-shelf versus custom-built, it depends on the client.

RM: Sometimes, if you are a company that's embedded in Microsoft, there might be a solution you should look at that's using Copilot and their embedded ecosystem. If you're an organization that's a Frankenstein—that uses Google and SharePoint and all the different types—you can't do that. You have to have a bespoke solution that helps those different products talk.

RM: And then there’s one client we work with that has a legacy software solution. It's like they built it, and their franchise owners have to use this product. It's locked up—no APIs. You can't get in there; you can't get out. So we had to do a workaround. We basically get exports from that software and do something outside of it.

RM: That’s an example where you do a bespoke solution. But sometimes you would do an off-the-shelf product that works for all the different needs of the problem.

RM: But here's the final thought I have on that: if you're looking to adopt a new SaaS product—whether it be FranConnect versus HubSpot or something—you want to make sure you're asking the supplier the question, What are your thoughts on AI? What are you doing in the realm of AI? Because here's the thing, Jack—most of your solutions will come from a SaaS product you're already using.

RM: So you might want to lean on those suppliers to come up with a solution so you don’t have to. They might already be doing some of the things you need—automations or whatnot. So that’s my thought on basically leaning on your SaaS partners.

JM: Yeah. And if you're spending that much money on a whole new SaaS solution, there should be someone within that organization who could step in and help guide you through the process when it comes to AI. Or perhaps if it's a big enough spend—and this goes back to the AI Sherpa idea—if you're spending a large enough amount of money on some big new investment, maybe that is a good time to reach out to you or one of your colleagues.

JM: You could say, Can you take a look at this big deal we're about to do? What are we missing? What should we be looking at, and where can we apply many of these AI things that we've spoken about? Where can we apply that? So I think reaching out to you on that makes sense.

RM: Yeah. I want to give you an example of that. We’re one of the largest suppliers, I guess you’d call it, for HubSpot. We’ve been with them—we were one of the first ones to sign up as a supplier. So we have the ability to set up and have discounts for our clients.

RM: One of my clients recently asked me about HubSpot, saying, What do you think about this product? The problem with solutions like this, Jack, is they only have the ability to sign up and then log in, and that's where they stop. They might have some training, but where you really extract most of the value from these is in creating automations, customizations, and tying it to other software.

RM: That’s where you need somebody to work through your whole process—not just the prospecting stage, but also tying in things like Proposify automatically into your HubSpot so they link together. Basic automations make your sales process faster, more efficient, and have a higher turnover.

RM: So going back to your point—having a Sherpa that can navigate not only the product you should use but how to best implement it and integrate it into your other tech stack is invaluable.

JM: Very good. If someone is in that process right now, or they're exploring maybe a big investment for 2025, or they're looking at their budget or trying to make some other decisions, and they need a Sherpa, where can they reach out to you with some questions?

RM: You can find me at rmitchell@wsicorporate.com. But I do want to double down on that. Don’t sleep on this. If you’re truly looking for help, our first call is free. So don’t worry about paying money. We want to do an assessment, look at your business, and help identify where the problem areas are in the organization—what keeps you up at night, where the bottlenecks are.

RM: We identify those, and then we put a roadmap together to see how we can address them one at a time. Reach out to me if you have any questions about AI in general, or just want to go through our process.

JM: Very good. Thanks, Robert. We will talk to you again next month.

RM: All right. Cheers.