Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.418)
If you're business owner struggling to make sense of how AI can actually help your business and not just feel like a complicated, expensive burden, then our guest Navin Agrawal is going to share a simple win you can implement today. Navin sees AI as a means to an end, a way for small and solo business owners to scale smarter. He says focus less on the tech and more on the results you're trying to get.
Naveen, a big welcome to the show. So excited to have you here.
Naveen Aggarwal (00:31.79)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Adam O'Leary (00:34.476)
Absolutely. So a lot of business owners hear AI and immediately feel overwhelmed. They think they need to be a tech wizard or have a massive budget to get even get started. How do you help small business owners shift their mindset from viewing AI as this complex, expensive project to seeing it as an accessible tool that can help them grow?
Naveen Aggarwal (00:56.558)
You know, I hear that a lot. I hear two main concerns when you start talking about AI to a lot of small businesses. One is, is AI in a bubble or is it just a fad? And the second one being, is it too expensive for my business? Right? And I think, you know, to kind of address the first one, is AI just a fad? Well, short answer is no. It's been around since the 1960s. It's a foundational technology that we've been using since
the early days of the internet and we still see it kind of going mainstream and we're seeing it go past just the behind the scenes and now we're starting to see it become much more accessible and becoming part of the zeitgeist and that's what we're starting to feel and we're seeing it disrupt a lot of different industries. Is there a bubble? Well, I don't think that there's a technology bubble. What we're starting to see is that it's really kind of coming at a financial bubble, right? So we see a lot of companies spending a lot of money.
and lot of efforts and you hear about all these moonshot projects that are occurring. But when you think about the technology at its core, it is a proven technology, right? If you kind of think of it as more like the internet, right? A lot of businesses collapsed, but the technology that was founded during that period is still with us today. And that's what we're seeing with AI. When you think about the question of the cost,
and the complexity of it. You don't really have to worry about the complexity, right? Think of it as making a phone call. You got your phone, you make a call, you don't need to necessarily think about like, how does the satellite work to make that work, right? You just kind of go through it down the pathway of saying, hey, I make a phone call and I know what to expect. Your job as a business owner is to understand what your business needs and what outcomes you're looking for from the AI.
You don't need to understand how the LLM does things or how it's trained or whatnot. And that's the complexity kind of removed from the implementation that you're looking to do, right? And I really do think that small to medium sized businesses, when they are starting to look at the affordability of AI, they don't need to think about it as a $10,000 project. What you're really looking for is more of that 5K, 10K type projects and even a few hundred dollars.
Naveen Aggarwal (03:19.406)
is enough to start seeing real ROI when it comes to like 5x to 7x return on some of the most common tasks that you do. The mind shift is to stop thinking about how am I going to use AI and start thinking about how am I going to build with AI.
Adam O'Leary (03:38.56)
I love that. And you mentioned before that the real power of AI comes from our own intelligence. Can you give our listeners a concrete example of how a business owner can take their existing expertise, whether it's in marketing, finance or HR, and use a simple AI tool to productize it into a repeatable service?
Naveen Aggarwal (04:01.042)
I mean, that's the part I love most about working with businesses, right? It's the AI doesn't replace your intelligence. It really is designed to scale your intelligence. AI is your co-pilot, right? Put it simply, it fills in the gaps from everything that you are. You spent years mastering in craft, be it marketing, finance, HR, in my case, coding and development. That's your strength. What you might not be able to do and what might...
be a difficulty for you to do. AI can kind of play that supporting role that is used to help round out your team and your skill sets, right? Before, in years past, if you wanted to launch a new product or new service, I meant hiring a designer or a coder or a marketer or a social media person even. Now with AI and automation, you can create fractional teams. You can use AI to kind of augment what you can do really well and automate the workflows
to help solo entrepreneurs and operators of small businesses to scale to teams of tens rather than being a single person just kind of out there in the world, right? A great real-world example is a finance person who's working on reporting, right? And you're seeing AI handle financial data, analyzing what once took weeks down to days. A CFO or an analyst might spend three to four weeks compiling, parsing,
interpreting quarterly reports. Today, AI systems can do that within days, cleaning up the data, surfacing insights, flagging issues automatically. That speed and consistency changes how teams operate. Another great example is a marketing consultant that we worked with who used to spend hours creating content briefs for their clients. We built a chat GBT workflow for her that was able to take something that used to take hours.
down to 15 minutes, right? So imagine that type of throughput that you can get immediate feedback on. Another client that we are currently working on is a local home service business that constantly was missing phone calls because they had crews that were out on jobs working on tasks. We built a voice AI agent that immediately answers questions, books appointments, handles common questions, trained entirely on the information they already had on their website.
Naveen Aggarwal (06:22.752)
and using their training materials as the inputs for that agent. In most cases, you already have the information that you need. You just have to figure out how to unlock it, right, from PDFs and email threads and putting it into a system that can then be used to turn on. And that's where the expertise comes in. That's where the repeatability comes in. It's that ability to kind of turn that into a solution that can be repeatable.
Adam O'Leary (06:47.127)
So that gets me thinking now because I know a lot of our listeners are, whether they be agencies or consultants or whatever they might be, there's almost this concept of like a billable hour type of a model. And one of the things that as you just started talking about that, it just kind of clicked in my head. I guess how could a business owner use AI to break out of the trap of the billable hour?
Naveen Aggarwal (06:58.765)
Mmm.
Naveen Aggarwal (07:08.11)
Sure.
Adam O'Leary (07:10.783)
in creating more package service that are less about the hours that they're putting in and more about the value and efficiency that they deliver to their clients.
Naveen Aggarwal (07:18.734)
That's a, that one hits home, right? I spent a better part of my career as a consultant and are working at agencies under the paradigm of billable hours, right? It's exhausting and really at some points, like I'm kind of glad that we're kind of looking at that in the, the rear view mirror in some ways, right? But it is a challenge for a lot of businesses to kind of think about like, okay, that's our business model. How does this interrupt or
disrupt that in some ways, right? AI changes the equation because it lets you think about productizing your process. If you repeat a task more than once or twice, chances are you can somehow automate it and use AI as kind of the filler in that space to get 60 to 80 % out of it, right? So think of a copywriter that used to do billable hours and turning that into a workflow that's a subscription for a content engine or a bookkeeper that automates reconciliation.
that charges by result instead of hours. It is not about doing less work. It's about designing systems that already take what you do and putting a value equation on top of it. So that way you're not about the amount of time you spent, but about the product you're doing or producing. And that allows you to kind of start saying, what's the value of what I'm producing and how much are people willing to pay for that? And how can I deliver that faster rather than
in the old paradigm, was how much time will it take me to deliver this? And AI kind of helps smooth that curve out a little.
Adam O'Leary (08:56.717)
That's awesome. That's bang on the money right there. I totally agree with you 100%, especially as AI starts to take over. And I know something that's important to you is this concept of single wins, not to be confused with simple wins, but for a business owner who is just starting to explore AI, what is one simple, low risk and practical task that they can automate or enhance with AI tool this week to see an immediate benefit?
Naveen Aggarwal (09:00.418)
Hahaha
Naveen Aggarwal (09:11.118)
Yeah.
Naveen Aggarwal (09:22.508)
Yeah, mean, single wins can be simple wins. And I think that's a great place to start off with is what are the simple single wins that can occur, right? So start off with this question. What takes a lot of time, but not a lot of thought, right? So what is something that you use critical in your business that you have to do? It's something that you might dread doing like paperwork and back office automate operations that you might sit there and say, I have to do this, something that I got to do. But if I could automate this.
I don't have to start thinking about that stuff and I can do what my core business is really designed for, right? That's usually where AI comes to win. It looks at something like invoice management or accounts receivable or compliance reviews. These are just repetitive tasks, rule-based, that are critical to running your business and they're perfect for automation. They are designed to basically sit there and say, can we take something that's a little bit of a messy process that
required in the past, somebody to kind of review the steps and the processes and always have a human in the middle to kind of remove some of that complexity because AI can interpret within the concept or within the context of what its task is to be able to produce the results you're for. So concrete example would be, what are you already using ChatGVT for, right? So if you're already using ChatGVT or Perplexity to...
do research or write emails for you, right? So think about like if I'm using ChatGBT and I've already like copying emails from my email system, putting it into ChatGBT saying, how should I respond to this or what's a recommendation for that? What if you just connected that directly to your email system? So that way you can kind of have that already built in. So as soon as an email comes into your inbox, you have a process that goes in, reads the emails.
determines what the draft should be and puts it in your draft box for you to review or a perplexity system that's designed to look at your calendar and sit there and say, hey, you have these meetings coming up. Let's go do some market research on these clients that are potentially out there and already automatically review those incoming leads. Do the market research, find out about the company, find out about the person who submitted the lead.
Naveen Aggarwal (11:45.846)
and be able to produce you an entire report while putting that into your calendar. So that way, when you get to that point that you were ready to review your day's work, you already have an outline there. So you're not going through and saying, OK, I have to go take the output from one system and make it the input of another system. And that's kind of where the power of simple wins come into place. So you're probably already doing this. But now let's make it so that we connect the system. So again, you're not using AI.
building with AI. The goal is to not just get another tool, but how do you connect these tools together in a smart workflow that all kind of happened in the background.
Adam O'Leary (12:26.037)
I love that. And I guess once somebody will go ahead and say, automate that first win, right? So whatever it might be just to save them time, what's kind of the next step? What's the next logical progression from there?
Naveen Aggarwal (12:38.798)
great question. you know, I think the best way to kind of think about this is how do you stack one win after another one, right? It's a whole bunch of small little wins that kind of add up. So if you think of a baseball analogy, right, you, want to hit a hit a single and you want to hit another single, you want to hit another single. And eventually you just start seeing those home runs kind of add up over time. Right. And that's kind of what you want to do here. You want to take one win and you want to sit there and say, how do I scale that one win? How do I kind of.
either take that one win and enhance it by adding the next step in that process, or is there something that I can use within the same infrastructure that I've already built and kind of build on top of it, right? So I kind of mentioned the voice AI agent earlier, right? So I'm working with a couple different clients that kind of came to the solution independently, but we're building voice agents that are acting as a AI receptionist for that.
You kind of think about that aspect like voice is a great use case for AI and for automation. Voice is a natural way that we as humans engage with the world and it can be messy and AI can make a lot of sense out of that context. And so what we did was we start off with a chatbot that knew how to answer questions and it already had the intelligence of being able to answer the clients clients customers feedback and
be able to be able to talk about the services and whatnot. And the next evolution of that was to add this voice and add the capabilities of connecting it to its CRM and calendar tools. So it can now all of a sudden, not just answer questions, but say, hey, would you like to schedule the next or an appointment for you? Check the availability, make sure that it's able to kind of get that booked in there. So we were able to take something that was already kind of built, add a new feature to it.
The next phase for that is to add another stack to that is to make it go from inbound calls for this voice assistant to outbound. So imagine leads coming in and now all of a sudden you can turn it into a sales agent, right? So taking our AI voice agent and making it go from receptionist mode to a sales mode where it calls a potential lead and, you know, qualifies them.
Naveen Aggarwal (15:03.854)
pipelines are already there, right? All the tools are there. It's already connected to the CRM. It's already connected to your phone system. It's already connected to the calendar. Now all of a sudden, it's just a matter of how to change that use case that we had before, give it the right context and make it kind of do something a little bit differently. each time we kind of add a new feature to it, we were kind of building off of what already was its capability and saying, how do we scale it a little bit further? How do we go a little bit further? And all of a sudden you now have
not just one little part of your process that's being automated or AI automated, but you have an entire platform that exists.
Adam O'Leary (15:44.639)
that's where should people go to learn more about you?
Naveen Aggarwal (15:48.558)
Yeah, you can find me at explain consulting. That's the best place to find me. I have www.explain.consulting That's that's my website. I do post a lot on LinkedIn where I post a lot about practical guides on my website You'll see that's kind of more my consulting side of my business. That's where I do spend time talking about workshops auditing existing processes helping clients kind of figure out ways to use AI to
Build solutions, be it coding development, custom coding and development solutions, audit their systems to figure out where AI can do it and really help them kind of get to realization a lot faster. But kind of like what we've been talking about, scaling the business here, I'm kind of eating a little bit of my own dog food here is that we are looking at launching a couple new products. We have a new marketing automation tool that we're building. It's under the URL persona.
dot explained dot services. It's a AI persona engine that allows you to kind of test your marketing ideas and concepts using focus groups. Artificial or AI powered focus groups that allow you to kind of control how your marketing message might be perceived by your ICPs. And then I think it gives you the ability to kind of figure out like.
what's going to happen in the future. That's in beta right now. We're testing that out. And we also are looking at launching our AI voice assistant as a product. So again, finding out, did we take a repeatable process and sit there and say, how do we productize it? And that's kind what we're doing within our own organization.
Adam O'Leary (17:35.009)
That is so cool, Naveen. Man, it was so good to have you on. I'm so excited. Absolutely. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for jumping on today. The insights you shared were insanely valuable. And I'm so hoping that these two product launches that you're going to be doing are going to crush it for you.
Naveen Aggarwal (17:39.032)
Great talking to you.
Naveen Aggarwal (17:52.014)
Stay tuned, I'm hoping it does well and we'll be posting a lot about it in the coming weeks.
Adam O'Leary (17:58.615)
Well, signing off for now, have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
