AI outreach killed outreach

Ha the pleasure's all mine, Mick. Thank you.

Yeah, when the when I first founded the company, you know, obviously we there wasn't a lot of business going on, right? and so it was something that was more of a a side project, you know, passion pro passion project. But as time went on and we took on more business, there becomes more people involved, there's more responsibilities. I shifted into the role of of managing partner, you know, and Now I I still have all the same duties that I had before. I just have a lot of other responsibilities to other people as well. So that's kinda how that goes.

Yeah, you know, the the tagline is is you know providing enterprise grade process and insight to to small and medium-sized businesses. which sounds very consultancy-like. you know, the reality is if you wanna make it a little more generally understandable, is that most corporations as as most businesses actually specialize in something, right? So I'm gonna just pick an easy example, right? Let's say like it's a restaurant, right? Restaurant makes good food. Okay. That's how the consumer sees it, right? From a business perspective, you know, they've got the supply chains locked down. They know who they're you know, they want their vendors to be, what suppliers are reliable for them. you know, they gotta manage a good amount of people. There's some training involved and you know, they're a brick and mortar business, right? They gotta physically serve food at a place. all those things they're gonna be good at, right? And one thing you'll see often with large corporations is that they're doing that, right? They have many, many locations where they serve the same kind of food off the same menu, using the same vendors, all things that I said train training processes, right? but you'll see them bring in outside help for other things. you know, consultants, right? They might look at the strategy and say, hey, you guys are, you know, focusing on This product or this market, it's not as profitable as this other product or this other market. I mean, it's a very simple way to put it, right? But they have those kinds of insights, right? That they can come, someone from the outside who has an understanding on the knowledge side, okay, can come in and tell them, like, you guys should make this adjustment. They're not going to tell them the the best way to maybe cook the food, right? that's just not their place to do that. But they will help them make the business more profitable. Small businesses don't have that because they don't really have an access point to that, at least generally, right? and that puts them at a a competitive disadvantage when they're already at a competitive disadvantage, right? Because of the fact they're not the corporation, they don't have the capital. you know, they don't have all those processes either. So you know, we we try to fill that gap, right? Find small businesses, and through our business model. offer them that the kind of insights that they may need to make those kinds of you know structural and procedural changes that they may not otherwise be aware of. And you know, frankly, something that I come across a lot would be the persona of like the technician, right? The small business owner that again sticking with the restaurant, because easy example, like a chef, right? Someone's cooked their whole life, they cook excellent foods, they start a restaurant and they have an amazing restaurant. When you look at the numbers, you're like, whoa. We are not where we should be for the amount of sales that we're doing, or right, for the amount of people that come through. The tickets should be higher. There'll be some very simple examples. And with some very simple changes, that business can be more profitable, which then becomes better for the community, right? Because they can employ more people who make more money and have benefits. They're gonna spend that in the community. The community has a place that's theirs. Right. That when they support that money comes right back in the community, doesn't go to some headquarters city somewhere else and then go into the pockets of some some already probably very well off people who are probably not gonna be spending that at any community you're gonna find any commoners. So that's that's the overall mission, right? Im impact the community through small businesses, you know.

Did you say free or three?

Three tweaks. You know, funny enough, I mean, one of the most common things, you know, the first thing you need to do when you come in and and you need to figure out what's wrong with business, right? what's wrong with the business? See where it's at. I mean, because there may not anything wrong with it. And also, I want to go back on that because wrong is a little bit arbitrary. I mean, what's wrong or right is really in the eyes of the holder. There are so many people that are doing business wrong right now that five years from now, ten years or now, are gonna be hailed as geniuses. So I don't know if I sh should be saying what's right or wrong. but there are definitely some best practices. you know, the first thing you need to do, this is gonna be the hardest, the hardest part is getting a hold of these owners and decision makers, right? But once you have them, the most important thing you need to do is you need to sit down with them and and hear them as a person. That's at the core of of helping anyone to be told. I mean, honestly, especially especially in business. there's no golden ticket. There's no golden ticket. you gotta meet them where they are. But with that being said. The most common things that I'm pro I probably come across are people not tracking data in the business, right? Which sounds very generic, but it's a it's a huge problem. And it can show up in a lot of different ways. But you'd be surprised the amount of people that that own and and run a business that if you ask them basic questions about their margins and their profitability, either at a from the for the business as a whole. or for some individual segment of the business, they have no idea. They literally have no idea. that's a problem. That's a problem. If you if you're just out there and you're just bringing money and you don't know where the money is coming from, that you know, that's that's a bit of a problem. You can't break that down. Another thing that comes up probably quite a bit is is just a lack of general process, right? just a business that's just running out of the head of the person that runs it, right? They're the one that figures out how to do the scheduling, they're the one that decides when people are fired, they're the ones that decide who gets hired, they're the ones that determine every single thing about every single thing in the business. it's not sustainable. you know, funny enough, one place that that kind of situation comes up often are when people are looking to exit and you know they're kind of going through the valuation process. and then they they might reach out and be like, you know, what you know, our val like our valuation is so much lower than than than what we expected. Like, you know, what's going on. Or they're they're saying, hey, we want to go do that. Like what are your guys saw somewhere of the businesses? It's like, well, it's running out of your head. That they they know that once you leave, it there's gonna be nothing left to to to build from. They've gotta they've gotta rebuild the entire business when you leave. So that lack of process is huge. and also like you know, you can't take a vacation if everything runs out of your head. but there's obviously other problems too. when bus you know, business relationship based, right? So when the standards aren't clear, when it's not clear what's gonna happen. And it's not on paper, and we got to recognize we're all biased too, right? So when it's not on paper, we make bad decisions, people feel like things aren't fair, the customer gets treated unfairly, the staff gets treated unfairly, and it's poorly managed. but you know, frankly, the the thing that I come across most often, which I think ties both of those in, which is kind of what I talked about a little bit before, is that business of the technician, the person that you know saves up a lot of money. Doing something technical. I mean, whether that's owning whether they're a chef, right? Or they're like a HVAC technician or something, right? For many years they were good at their field field, they saved up a lot of money. They bought a shop, they bought a van, they they hired some people, and they've got enough business to get by, but they never can seem to quite get enough business to. be the have the success that they should have or that they want to be. Or maybe there's a competitor that's that's beating them out when they know the competitor is worse than them. you know that's really the most common thing, really. The technician who just doesn't is not quite a business person by trade. Yeah, those are those are the most common. And they all tie in together. And there's probably an infinite number of variations on those themes as well.

That's a great question. An excellent question. And I'm gonna cover my butt a little bit here and say I I I am not going to pretend to know definitively. So I really have no idea. The technology is advancing so rapidly. it seems like every six months it's it's something completely different than in what it was six months before. With that being said, I mean I think you're right. I I I personally I I I am a a little bit of a believer in the AI bubble. it seems unsustainable. There's I have economic reasons that feed into that. You know, for one thing, it seems that the supply far, far, far, far, far exceeds the demand. I I don't want more I don't want more AI content. I don't. you know, and and I I mean certainly among the I'm right in between Gen Z and and and Millennials. I would say, you know, certainly on the Gen Z side. They're very skeptical of AI. And as they should be. you know, millennials might be a little more open to it, but I I do think that AI slop, right? I mean, like I'll just say it right out, right? Like AI slop, this theme of AI slop. I there's so much of it on LinkedIn. I get it so much in my email. It's like it's to the point now where you can just read it and you know it's AI. And you know, the the core theme, right? That business is relationships. And I I truly believe this. Business

Is just formalized relationships. and they're deep, they're deep relationships. If if we do business together, you know, my livelihood and your livelihood are intertwined, at least if we're doing it right. I'm not, I don't prefer I don't really like to get into a situation where like my livelihood's on the line, but like you're gonna be totally fine no matter what happens, because that's a little risky to me. But you know, our livelihoods are intertwined. And you know, that's where the concept of known, liked, and trusted comes from in terms of Sales and marketing, right? You're not gonna be known, liked, and trusted for an AI agent. Just not. People hate them, customers hate them, they can smell it a mile away. For the people that invest, I mean, it's a whole marketing and business strategy now, is to just basically advertise that you use real people, that real people will talk to you. that that's a whole strategy now. And so if that's how easy it is to get known, liked, and trusted, and it's also So easy to be disliked is to just use AI. It's hard for me to recommend that. When it comes to data processing, tracking numbers, you know, evaluating large data sets, that's where AI really does change the game and it can provide great insights. you know, inside things like now you don't even know how to have to really know how to use Excel. Well, I I use Sheets, and so Jim and I is built in. And I I personally think it's a little bit better than. Than copilot. Some people might disagree with me, but you don't even have to really understand Excel now to build crazy Excel sheets. and that's true for a lot of different things, coding. And those things, it gives a lot more power to owners. But yeah, it is something where people can waste a lot of time. also a lot of people are not aware of the biases that are literally built into most models to appease you, which obviously, you know. You don't need it. No one needs more yes men. There's very few business leaders who need more people telling them yes, you're right. so that's something you can be, you know, bumped into there. But yeah, I mean, I think there's gonna be growth. I just I don't think that the agent, agentic like sales and marketing functionality, like you said, the leaves and all that. There's a lot of data that and I I'm just kind of rambling at this point, sorry, but there is a lot of data that that text messages, emails, cold calls, all these things, the response rates are. way, way, way lower. And I actually recently read a a paper, I can't remember if it was from Harvard, MIT or Stanford. I think it was from one of them. I I might be totally wrong. Maybe it was like Yale or something. But it was some, you know, big fancy school and some Bispress professor put a paper out that basically the idea of the paper is that sales and marketing are going back to basically the fifties, where it's who you know and it's your network. And people are gonna rely a lot more on people that they know personally because just the overwhelming amount of outreach with AI actually basically killed outreach. I I agree with that. I I don't answer AI or anything, but hopefully that answers your question. We could could talk about AI all day.

my gosh.

Yeah, it's funny. It it says a lot about a lot of the creators of LinkedIn and the nature of the audience of LinkedIn. Like the last people that should have been empowered to spew more nonsense should be LinkedIn people. but of course that's that's what it's enabled, and and of course they're gonna use it for that. I I I'm in the same book. actually I love that you say that. So much of the I'm on LinkedIn, I read stuff and I'm like, dude, what? What is the point of this? I mean, let's be real, we know what it is. It's just it's the it's the concept of content like marketing, just with with it's completely hollow. It's the idea that I'm just going to pump out as many posts as possible that I don't have to write because I can now. And that's going to be my marketing strategy, which it I don't know. As far as the AI SDRs go, I mean it's it's it's a to me, it's a travesty. There's I mean, my I kind of got my start in the SDR space and into account executive. So I you know, I come from the corporate sales background. and it's a shame. There's a lot of skills that you pick up in that. A lot of business leaders you know, wet their chops as it were, as an SDR into AE. And that's where they learned a lot of the, you know, not a lot, that's the foundational skills of business to this day, whether it's clients that I work with or, you know, like conversation I have often with a partner. you know, like, wow, how did you do that? And it's like it's it's it's just the the cold calls, the cold emails, having all the difficult conversations with people that you just met 20 minutes ago. you know, that's where you pick up that skill and now it's getting replaced by bots. And it's it's really a shame because the math of it is that, you know, the bot is gonna miss out on like ninety nine percent of sales, but it's like ninety nine point 1% cheaper. So there you go. It's it it you know, it's slightly more positive at the margin. my guess is that once it's all said and done and every person's been called a thousand times by an AI from every company, they're gonna just probably re-evaluate their outbound strategy and just go back to using people, and it's gonna be the same thing as before because that's just what you do when you've saturated the market with something. Now you gotta reach out to them more individually and be more careful. but you know, who knows? I know there's a lot of companies are trying to train their AIs to be better.

It's a race to the bottom, man. you know, there's a lot of a lot of things in business that you know, internally we try to look out for. There's a lot of signs that that you can look at that a business knows that they're going downhill and they will do things that don't make sense in the context of something you would do if you were trying to expand your market share. And it's it's a very fascinating concept to think about that if you know the ship is going down, right? You're using that kind of metaphor. depending on what your priorities are, you might not be worried about getting the water out of there. You might be worried about something else and just letting the ship sink and saving what you can. And for a lot of people, that's making more money. and for a lot of people that looks like making more money at the margin. And so you'll see that. I mean, in small business, it might it usually looks like they're raising their prices or they're just doing things that otherwise just like clearly don't make sense. But with corporations, you know, y a lot of times they're looking, you know, 10, 20, 30 years down the the line, at least what they're planning. And they will make some decisions that and they're gonna brand them as like this is the future, right? This is the future and this is why we're doing it. And anyone that's not doing it is an idiot or whatever. I mean, that's just how they're gonna brand it because they're not gonna come out and be like, yeah, we're doing this because like we we otherwise cannot afford to do anything else. But I think there's you know, and that doesn't have to be true for the whole business for it to be true for a segment of it. But there's a lot of companies that release, and I'm not gonna say anything specifically, but there's a lot of companies that put a lot of money into a gentic AI. Just to lay I lay off everyone selling the Agentic AI and say that they are, you know, redirecting. And I I would imagine that's probably gonna happen again. And the reason is is they sunk so much money into LLMs and Agentic AI on a bet. And now they have to figure out how are they how are they gonna get that money back? And I think a lot of them realize that they're just not gonna get the RD money back. unless they do these things where it's like slightly more or less profitable at the margin and then completely reliant on AI. you know, for them that's a that's risk mitigation. It it's not doesn't necessarily mean that that's the future. obviously AI will be a part of everything. but is it going to be everything? I know. I don't think so. It's not gonna replace people in a people context just because I don't think people are gonna stand for that. I mean, I'm if you give me the option of AR a person, I'm choosing a person, most people are gonna make that choice.

Term, right?

I would say go all in on it. I'd say go all in if you wait for the day when you're which I I did for a time. and that's that was I think the hard thing for me to overcome, is waiting for the moment when I that I thought would reveal that I'm perfectly qualified for something. The reality is is, you know, you're qualified to do what you're qualified to do, and that's really determined by your results. And so anytime you move into something new, you're not gonna be qualified for it. And, you know, in corporate, it might be a lot easier to tell yourself that because you're gonna get a position, you're gonna have a bunch of people telling you from the top that you're qualified and that they're super happy, you know, and all this kind of stuff. But the reality is is how many people have we, you know, if you've ever worked in corporate or anyone that's ever worked in corporate, how many times have you seen someone who was qualified come in and completely just be terrible and like clearly be unqualified? in reality. And so, yeah, but we we have a social hierarchy to l legitimize that basically and be like, well, it just wasn't for them, right? But if the internal fear is like, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna be, you know, I'm gonna fail. Right? Like that's the thing that's really that you have to address. And so for me, I say just go all in. Just go all in and do it. And you know, like like we talked about earlier. I'm not saying take unnecessary risks. with yourself. Certainly don't risk other people's livelihoods. but don't sit around and wait for the moment when someone's gonna tell you it's it's okay to do something. Like, you know, look in yourself. And if you know you can do it and you know you can do it well, go out and do it. Don't wait for anyone to give you permission. Yeah, that'd be what I would tell myself.

To reach me? Yeah, I mean if anyone wanted to to reach out to me, they can send me an email. Andrew at VBCG. So that's the acronym for Virginia Business Consulting Group, partners.com, VBCG.com. Yeah. VBCG Partners.com, sorry. Lost my train of thought.

The pleasure was all mine, Mick. Thank you.