#363: Unpacking the Implications of AI on Business Operations, Data, Security, Culture, and M&A with Loren Horsager
Intentional Growth
The Future of Mergers and Acquisitions
The valuation piece is an interesting thing. How do you value something when you can see that it can grow exponentially after you purchase it? Well, I think a lot of people are wondering that themselves. But I think this is going to settle out fairly quickly in the sense that there's going to be valuable processes that can be implemented now.
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Speaker 2
think integra mat is no better like i totally agree that getting a full overview on one screen being able to see the whole workflow amazing and the way you can watch the workflow run yeah amazing compared to zapier right but i think that's where it basically ends.
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's why I never switched because I thought when it comes to reliability, just a gut feeling. I stayed
Speaker 2
for Zapier there. Sorry. I actually find Integromat probably even better on that front. I'm just talking about the usability side of things. So like, if you aren't a developer, I find IntegraMats really, really hard to learn. Like, cause some of the things you have to, like, you have to use inline functions, for example. And those functions are literally like STR POS, like for string position. You know, if you, I think that's one of them anyway, but like, if you don't know development, how the hell are you supposed to know what that is? So it's a no code tool for people who know how to code is the way I look at Integromat, which is unreal. Like I know how, if you know, even basic coding, Integromat's amazing. But once you start getting into like iterators and array functions and all this sort of stuff, if you don't know, if you've never programmed anything, you're in trouble. Like there's no way you're going to wrap your head around any of that. I think if you've got a pretty good idea of Zapier, like you're an advanced Zapier user with a little bit of code knowledge, Integromat will be fine like for you. But so I teach people how to use Zapier through a course. And the reason I haven't done that with integra mat is because i don't know where to start you know like there's a lot of presumed knowledge in just basic like integra mat stuff you know and so maybe that's the thing it's like i could create a course for people who know how to use zapier to come across to integra mat but just to learn from scratch i think is a big deal yeah you could
Speaker 1
build up up on your sapia course and if you want to have something more advanced then you can go to integra but i but i absolutely agree and i i overlooked this to be honest because i'm not using integra yet i looked into this uh several times and then i thought okay let's just set up this in sapia because you're right it ended there when it came to actually getting these things in there and sapia does a great job um holding your hand and you know you go through the several steps all the time and you have the standards there and then you have all the different sapia um home or the in-house tools from sapia that helps you with the filter formatting reformatting and all this or reminders the digest yeah and things like that so yeah yeah i agree um it is much easier this way so quality of life could be increased features So for, you know, moving around actions or something like that, this would be a good thing to do. And, you know, less destructive things because you can mess up so quickly in Zapier. If you're working on a, it's like, you know, operation on open hearts whenever I go into my SAP. So I rather make a duplicate of a SAP, then I rearrange and then I shut the one off and switch the other one on. And another thing where I think it's difficult when you pull in sample data. So, you know, for people who don't know, whenever you connect Zapier to any of your tools, let's say, what do we use for example? The Google Calendar, let's put it this way. And you look for sample data, it just shows you some recent samples. Or let's stay with my membership. So I have the last three people who signed up, for example, but it only goes back so far. and if i'm looking for automation for refunds for example and there was no recent refund i'm not able to get this sample in so these are restrictions where i think okay what should i do there so there's no solution or maybe i'm blind
Speaker 2
yeah there i mean that is the world of automation there is just so many different things you have to find workarounds for you know like and a lot of time it is just easier to go ahead and create yourself as a user and refund yourself, you know, to get a real refund in there. Yeah. And sometimes IntegraMap suffers from the same problems. It depends what the trigger is. Maybe IntegraMap doesn't help there either. I think it's a
Speaker 1
general thing. yeah on one hand this is just complaining on you know on a high level where i think we are lucky that we have something like sapia yeah and it is so satisfying once we find workarounds and things start to work and data comes in and out.
Speaker 2
Yeah, it is. I feel like a wizard. I always joke that when you get an automation going and it just runs and it's flawless and you're like, wow, I never have to do this again. You feel magic. It's a pretty awesome feeling.
Speaker 1
Yeah, it is like this. And you can look for others who don't know about sapia and you create this you are the wizard for them as well yes so but talking about sapien integral mat i think that's just one thing we have to direct integrations between tools and i'm not talking about the tools itself there's still other automation tools like plixi for example That's something I talk a lot on my channel, if you don't know about this. It is a two-way synchronization between Todoist and a lot of other tools. So Todoist or Microsoft Todo. So I use this to have two-way synchronization with my Google Calendar. know Todoist has this on its own already, but it is tightly integrated. So I can, for example, use now Asana, have a two-way synchronization with Todoist, and Todoist has a two-way synchronization with my Google Calendar, and therefore I have a workaround that my Asana becomes a two-way synchronization with my Google Calendar. That makes sense. So whenever I move around my events or my tasks on my Google Calendar, it gets updated in Asana or now ClickUp and so on. So it seems Plexi is not something that you're aware of.
Speaker 2
No, I
Speaker 1
mean, I don't. I only
Speaker 2
use one calendar um but yeah there are a lot of different automation tools out there that are you know special use cases uh you know like pi sync is another one that's two yeah yeah two-way sync for contacts but you know a lot of the time i find that uh direct integrations like this is different because it is a different in between purpose-built tool that's like clearly made to solve a very specific problem totally fine with that i find direct integrations often end up kind of half-baked so like a lot of software companies would create an integration with another tool um just to say got an integration.
Speaker 1
I absolutely agree. I mean, I say rather have some integration than none looking at Notion, for example. So you're completely disconnected from everything. But then I see also, I agree, you know, that you have, for example, you can connect As with miro miro is a whiteboard what i use for mind mapping and you can get in the tasks into miro and then drag them around and things like that but you can't do anything else so they're just there so this is what is half baked i absolutely agree with this and it's interesting to have something like plixi who are giving the same connection, but give you a lot more features in order to set this up. And then it's really helpful. And PySync as well. This was a solution for me. I'm using Intercom on my website for chat and support, and it is just premium there, but it is crap when it comes to email marketing. So I'm using ActiveCampaign in combination. And PySync just syncs this with each other. The issue is they charge you so much money for this.
Speaker 2
Yeah, it was owned by HubSpot now, so that's not surprising. What did you say you're syncing with ActiveCampaign? What's the other product? Intercom. Oh, Inter's gone yeah yeah gotcha yeah so we actually don't try to do the same uh sync but see and this is a lot of a problem with a lot of my integrations typically so we need to synchronize intercom companies with in active campaign and pi sync does not support companies so that just makes it completely useless for us. And every time I go to use PySync, there's like one little thing missing. It's like missing this custom field section, like our subscription service, Chargebee. You know, it's missing, it doesn't work with, like the one or two custom fields that I need, don't come through. So again, it's like useless. And I like wanna use PySync,
Speaker 1
but it's always missing what we need. Yeah was just going back to active so intercom started their series as they call it so you can create your campaigns and I thought okay which is nice yeah which is nice I thought this as well the interface and everything and I thought oh my god finally I have an alternative I don't need to stay in active campaign. I have one tool now. I canceled the subscription. I went to Intercom, built up all this thing. And it didn't work. It was just not reliable. Some triggers never went down. And I was in the support section and going back and forth. And there's a big delay for four days or something until they answer and i said okay i tried to run a campaign here and it's not working this is just not the thing so you can't release this feature and you can't rely on it so i set up another series for my free um email course that you can get where you learn about the iCore framework and it was just not working and you know they they provide you now serious but you can't have a form for people to sign up to this email letter and the the other thing is if people unsubscribe they unsubscribe forever from intercom isn't it yes oh my god problems thank you yeah there's a workaround uh i was using gravity forms because i'm on wordpress and tried to set up so you can use it with tags and people just go to a specific website and the series would stop because that's the so they just unsubscribe this way but it is just not transparent so inactive so
Speaker 2
i use integra mat for the same thing i have a special link that will just cancel the one series that they are in it uh it goes it opens a web hook to integra mat when they click a link in the email and then redirects them to my website. And then the Integromat workflow removes the tag from them in Intercom to shut down the onboarding. But like, yeah, so I honestly, I don't believe Intercom is a good marketing tool at all. It is made for support. We use it because it's great for supporting current customers. As a marketing tool, it's just, it's not there yet. But I am disappointed to hear about the series because our entire onboarding has just been shifted there. And I did not know that it has issues sometimes not working because I can see people going through it, but I haven't checked it. Everyone is going through it. So now I got to go and look at that.
Speaker 1
It was even one of the series I tested was even one of the templates they provide. So, you know, like this, are you interested in this and this? They click yes, then you can download a free demo of my digital journal designer. So the bot, they answer yes. And this triggers sending out an email so people click yes and 80 percent they receive the email and for the other 80 20 percent they were just dropped off the series so i can't you know i had to build a workaround to give them a tag to re-enter the series in order to get them back and i thought okay if things like this happen this shouldn't happen because I want to set this up and then I want to forget it so this never happened in active campaign uh to me at least my active campaign's
Speaker 2
far from being a perfect tool either though I have a lot of beef a lot of beef I'm an active campaign partner it says so on my mug um but I I have a lot of beef with them. Their UI has been super slow lately, like unbelievably slow. And I hate, I literally hate going in to change anything because it's so unbearably slow to
Speaker 1
use. Yeah, that's one of the reasons for Intercom as well that I switched. Why can't anyone get this right, Tom? I don't know. I always think I should start my own stuff. And then I think, nah, there must be reasons why. The issue is really a lot of these companies like ActiveCampaign and what could I think of as well? You know, they started along, oh, Evernote, for example. They started a long time ago and it was great back then but the framework and everything is no longer made yeah for what you want to do in there and the functionalities that you have in active campaign and also the integrations with other tools yeah so this is another point isn't it that we can do much more um this is one of the reasons why it is still there. But now they also try to start this conversation thing. So I thought, okay, then let's do the other way around and make the chat window there. And oh my God, just so you have it, don't do it. Yeah.
Speaker 2
And well, this is a whole topic I could talk about for days in like jack of all trades, master of none. You know, this is a thing that I see a lot of software companies doing. I mean, I don't exactly have the most successful software company, so maybe it's not even worth listening to me. But personally, I hate it when tools try to do everything because they end up doing everything poorly. know and infusionsoft got the name confusionsoft yeah confusionsoft because they try to do all this crap landing pages and this and that and payments and subscriptions and and affiliate like they're doing everything in one tool and then they started doing everything half-baked again you know and so i always loved active campaign because it had a really good crm well a decent crm and really good email marketing and that's what they did and then they brought in conversations like oh this is cool i was like a little bit excited and then i was like this is rubbish and it's still rubbish and then what do they bring in now landing pages now they're doing landing pages and i'm like oh my god now
Speaker 1
it's going down the road and
Speaker 2
i'm like your email editor is crap it is that it's like it is the worst email editor I've used and you're supposed to be an email marketing tool yeah like this is unacceptable perfect I thought
Speaker 1
exactly the same I mean undo things and things like that I'm doing things in email uh creation and active campaign it's just insane and then they create new new features and this is for so many tools you know instead of focusing to do one thing right they just start other things i mean two things to do is for example they focus on being a task manager and nothing else and they barely implement new features. And what they do, they do it well. And they rather focus on integrations with other things so I can access my task. ClickUp, they started with, you know, one app to replace them all. And then they realized, okay, we can't be a grocery list. I mean, you can be, but it's not the best tool for this. However, the approach from Seb Evans, he was on the interviews as well. We put it out there. And you know, it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. It's the same thing. They push out a lot of features and they do this very quickly. And what I realized, they also fix things very quickly, and then take it away. But it is fun for me to use. And, you know, if you're a bit nerdy, you like ClickUp. But I'm not sure. I implemented for clients as well. But I also implemented Asana. And Asana is a lot more restrictive. So you can't be the architect in there. But sometimes this is the better solution, not having so many features, but the features that are there, Asana is always up. It never let me down
Speaker 2
where I implemented it there in the clients. I'm 100% on board with you on this. I was literally going to bring up ClickUp. It was a perfect example
Speaker 1
of trying to do everything because it's their tagline yeah did you actually no no they changed it they changed oh did they so no it's it's no longer let me just try
Speaker 2
one app to replace them all that's what it was yeah
Speaker 1
it was that like two weeks ago because leila she was on the show as well from process driven she actually tweeted about this and she uh figured it out still
Speaker 2
says it for me oh no yeah one place for all your work exactly that's what they changed they haven't they haven't changed their meta title the meta title still says one app to replace them all oh really my in the tab title uh in google it says, yeah, one app to replace them all. But then it says one. See, and this is what,
Speaker 1
you know, this is when you mess up. You change one feature and then you're going down.
Speaker 2
So I'm actually looking to switch away from ClickUp. I really, really liked ClickUp at first. I used to use them every time we were rolling out a new feature for our product. I used to use them for inspiration on UI UX. But I've stopped doing that now because I honestly find it over complicated. And navigation
Speaker 1
is just a pain. It is just not intuitive enough, I think, especially in open up tasks and then going back and you always click wrong and now building up the team i think it is fine and when you make it simple and you don't allow people to change stuff but if people start doing their own stuff in there but on the other hand what what are your thoughts on the other one that claims to be the all-in which is notion yeah
Speaker 2
so
In this week’s episode of the podcast, I had the privilege of chatting with an old friend, Loren Horsager, a seasoned tech entrepreneur who has literally been talking about artificial intelligence (AI) since the '90s. Loren became a lifelong tech enthusiast after he helped automate the accounting tasks he was responsible for in the commodities trading business he was working for in the '90s. Loren was first on the podcast over six years ago (ep. #84), talking about how companies can embrace technology and software to increase their multiple, and potentially even the valuation method. I couldn't think of a better person to have on the show. With the entrance of AI onto the scene, the stakes and rate of change are even higher.
Today, Loren unraveled the significant strides that AI has made, along with its practical implications on businesses, particularly privately-held ones. We dove into how AI, when properly understood and integrated, could bring about a transformation as impactful as the launch of Netscape in the internet era. Join us as we explore this fascinating topic, in what I hope is a very practical and actionable conversation, while also shedding light on the importance of the bigger conversations we need to be paying attention to as the world of AI evolves.
// Sign up for the Intentional Growth™ Starter Kit: the kit has intro videos on each of the 5 Intentional Growth™ Principles, the Intentional Growth™ Financial Scorecard along with videos reviewing a case study on how to project out the value of your company, and the entire Intentional Growth™ Podcast Library.
//WATCH THE INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE: Intentional Growth™ Podcast
Key Takeaways:
1. Transformative Potential of AI for Private Middle Market Businesses: Firstly, we acknowledged the transformative potential of AI for businesses. Loren predicted a significant evolution in the world of AI over the next 12 to 18 months, likening it to the revolution caused by Netscape during the internet's early days. As a business owner, I see this as an alert that now is the time to start considering how AI can fit into our business strategies to gain a competitive edge.
2. Data Protection and Custom AI Solutions: Secondly, we discussed the crucial importance of data protection and the value of custom AI solutions. I was quite alarmed by the number of businesses that aren't giving data protection the attention it deserves, given the importance of data in training machine learning models. Moreover, Loren made a compelling argument for the creation of custom AI tools that are tailored to tackle specific business problems. I see this as a great opportunity to utilize AI for enhancing efficiency and solving problems in a targeted manner.
3. AI in Boosting Productivity, not Replacing Teams: Lastly, we emphasized the idea that AI is here to augment, not replace, our teams. It's crucial to remember that AI can be used to boost productivity, streamline operations, and minimize costs - but it's not a replacement for human intellect and creativity. Loren's vision of bots that understand job roles and work alongside humans has got me thinking about the future of team structures. It's an exciting time for us as business owners, and understanding these aspects of AI can help us navigate the changing business landscape more effectively.
Links and Resources:
Email: loren.horsager@modelmind.ai
Intentional Growth™ Vision Board
Intentional Growth™ Online Training
Reach out to me if you have questions about the Intentional Growth™ Training or Fractional CFO services
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