Growing Your Business with AI: Unlocking Efficiency and Success

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, where we tend to dive into the world of growing your business in the highway paving, construction industry, and I'm, as always, super excited that you're here with me. You can see I have Holly in the background today if you're watching the video of this.

But we are actually talking about something that's on everybody's lips, everybody's playing with, and I think it's one of the reasons we're seeing an incredible acceleration in our industry of adoption of technology, et al, period, but AI, so what about AI? We have not talked about it.

I actually do have an episode coming up where we talked to one of the key stakeholders in the company that created Hey NAPA for NAPA, which is an incredible tool if you're not familiar with it. Make sure you're subscribed so you catch that episode.

I actually talked to Devine and we go into the creation of that tool, how it's used, why it works so well, and what they expect coming in the future with it. Make sure that you are subscribed for that episode.

But today I'm going to be talking a little bit about why I caution about AI. I don't know, you're either like it's the end of the world, it's Terminator happening right now, if you grew up in my generation, or you're like, "No, this is great. This is the best thing that's ever happened."

No matter what, it's making our world move so much faster, and it's here. How do we use it in an effective way? I think there's one thing that if you understand this, you're going to get the most out of AI, you're going to feel better about using AI, you're going to be able to help guide your team to use AI, and it's going to be like a guiding lighthouse, a guiding pillar for AI as you incorporate it into your life, into your family, into your business, all of the things.

That's what I want to talk to you about today. Here is this guiding principle. Then we're going to get into some really great stuff because I like to give you some meaty stuff that you can sink your teeth in. We're going to actually talk about some tools that I've been using, how I use them, how I think business owners in our industry can use them. We're going to get into some of that.

But first AI is not a strategy. Let me repeat that because it's so important, AI is not a strategy. AI is a tool tool in need of a strategy. It's like the tail wagging the dog or the dog wagging the tail.

You can waste a tremendous amount of time with AI. If you don't know what is the objective that you're trying to reach, what is the thing you're trying to make more efficient, what is the thing you're trying to automate, if you don't know what your goals and objectives are in terms of looking for and implementing AI resources, you're probably sucking a tremendous amount of time into it.

I dedicate a certain amount of time each week into learning about some kind of AI. Granted, I spend a lot of time reading and learning because that's part of how I continue to add the most value to my clients, but these days, AI has to be part of that.

But part of the reason I do that is I do it at a super high level because I know part of my strategy is to be able to quickly stay on top of, and when I hear a problem, when I'm sitting in the office with my clients, that I can quickly say, "Hmm, I've heard about something," then I go dive into that deeper and I figure out if that's a solution for them from an AI side.

Some of the things that already know better because I have other clients using those solutions or I'm implementing them. It's really important to know that it can suck a tremendous amount of time if you don't have a strategy in place.

Also, it can be misused. One of your responsibilities as a business owner or a key leader in a business these days is to spend time and make it certain people's in your company's job to spend time determining: How is our company going to be using AI? What is our policy around that use of AI and how do we communicate that policy and enforce that policy?

Unfortunately, this is something that very few of us in the industry really sat down and thought about. I'm getting ready to post on my website just our AI policy within my company so that prospects of mine, clients of mine can all just see “What is this company's policy around AI?”

It's really important because I'm dealing with strategy, messaging, branding, marketing, collaborating between sales and marketing. There's a lot of AI that gets used and we're going to be transparent about our policy so we're drafting that and we're actually going to be posting it.

I have a small, mighty team, but my team is going to be involved in reviewing and finalizing that with me and understanding it as it relates to them. That is really important as well.

Then the next thing, and I mentioned this, is AI is here. Ready or not, it is here. So you need to think about what is your overall strategy for your company? Then on a lower level, whoever you assign to or the time or the energy you put into determining how AI is going to be used, make sure that that's integrated towards moving you towards that strategy, reaching those objectives, getting you to that next level of growth, creating more revenue because it's creating efficiencies in your operations, helping you make smarter decisions.

Remember, this is the key point. If you get nothing else from this podcast today, I want you to get that AI is not a strategy. It is a tool in need of a strategy. Let's make sure that that tail is not wagging the dog, and let's make sure you have a strategy in place.

That's the part where I'm going to make sure today that I give you a link to just schedule a call. If you want to get in my calendar and you want to start having somebody to have this conversation with, I'm happy to make that time, and that's storybuilt.marketing/schedule. I'm always available to you in my audience to have some of these initial conversations.

If you don't know what that strategy is and you want to start thinking about how do you start building that, let's get on the call and start talking about it. I've mentioned a few ways that I'm using it, but I'm helping leaders think about it in their business. I mentioned you need to be thinking about this. Sometimes they want somebody to be helping them facilitate having these conversations, or it's part of that strategic growth initiative.

Every single strategic growth initiative that we're doing moving forward, we are thinking about “Are there AI elements that we want to recommend or suggest or specifically even tell them to steer clear of because you don't think it's efficient or the right time for their business?”

I use this every day in my business. I'm constantly thinking about it, using it, getting better at it. Then I'm also saying no to certain ones that I'm coming across too. Let's talk about a few ways that we see based on my research, based on my experience, based on conversations that I've been having with folks in our industry that I'm seeing things really make an impact on business.

We're going to talk about four key areas. The first one that we're going to talk about is solving labor shortage problems. All of you guys know we are adding more and more content around workforce on this podcast, on LinkedIn, because that's where I hang out and I also created a lot of resources. But a lot of the work that we're doing is workforce-related because that's the biggest bottleneck in our business.

How is workforce going to be addressing this? Two high-level areas. I know that there's already been testing on autonomous equipment and vehicles inside of our industry actually on paving projects. We even see this going on more on the paving side than at the plant operation, but we're seeing this happening and we're seeing it accelerate.

I know that there are going to be at least one approved fully autonomous paving project tested this summer moving forward. Something that I think is probably worthwhile just in terms of being a consumer or an ingester of is what is happening with autonomous equipment? Could that be a fit for your business?

If tests are successful in the next year on those types of things, do you want to be an early adopter or do you want to be a mid-range adopter? What is your threshold for when you see those things working? Do you know what the ROI would need to be for you to justify looking at things like that in your business?

One of the things we can do if we do hop on a call is we have a workforce ROI calculator. It really breaks down what are the costs of your turnover, of your recruiting expenses, opportunity costs, all of those kinds of things to help you really understand what is the financial impact that your current workforce strategy is having on your business.

This might be something that you want to have a really good grasp on. If you're looking at making big investments in any kind of technology or any major equipment investments and how that's going to impact your business, can you recruit the workforce or what changes would you need or can you eliminate? Are you going to be an early adopter of some of these tools that come out?

Also, AI is an incredible way to look at what areas in your company might you be able to increase efficiency. Either certain roles, jobs, processes, or projects that happen on a recurring basis that you might be able to increase efficiency and thereby make your team more effective or get by with less or allow them to do things that you need them to be spending other time on.

The next category that we're going to talk about is data entry and some of these start weaving into each other. This is one of those areas where I guess we're going on almost like a level deeper on the creating efficiency, supporting estimators, supervisors, accounting, almost everybody in our company these days is doing some kind of data entry. This is something that can be a huge impact.

Then all important and one that I think sometimes we say only the giant companies have to think about this, but really, I don't think that's true, I think once you get into that upper small to medium-sized business, if you want to create a real competitive advantage, you should be thinking about the third thing, and that is supply chain analytics.

Historically, we've relied on people with a really good historical knowledge of these types of things, or people that are really gifted and skilled with spreadsheets to track these things, or we've just winged it and licked our finger and stuck it up in the air to try to figure out these things as well.

I feel like AI is going to make really getting into the analytics of supply chain and helping that really impact our bottom line much more accessible to smaller-sized businesses that are still really, really dependent on looking at the cost of their inputs.

This is going to be really exciting. Like I said, these are all layered. Part of it is data entry, but here are some of the benefits. We can get better forecasting moving forward. Imagine if maybe there are opportunities for you to hedge.

I know my husband is a trader if you've talked to me much in the ag industry and so hedging is something he talks about a lot. Arbitrage is something he talks about a lot to me. Not something I hear people talking about as much in our business, but definitely something where I think there is tons of potential for even medium-sized businesses to reap giant rewards. If we can really understand these analytics, how can we reduce the cost in our business?

The fourth area I want to talk about, which is super accessible, and this might be somewhere where you want to get started today if you haven't already dived in and you just want to start test driving some of these things, or you're looking for some new ideas, is daily productivity.

Maybe for you as the business owner, or if you're thinking about key people inside of your company and things, tools, resources, and AI products that might be able to help them, I'm going to share right now a few that I am using and a few that I have heard about that may be of interest to you.

First off, one of the things that I love is I spend a ton of time on Zoom. That's how you meet with all of my prospects and clients, almost 90% of the time. The rest we tend to do in person or we meet at events. But so many of my weekly meetings happen on Zoom.

But I have a note-taker anyway. I like that tactile feel, but I use Fathom on a regular basis. It is a Zoom app. It's built-in, you can just add that app on there. It is incredible because I can actually make specific highlights during my conversation.

I can create all my customized labels, but then afterwards I can go in, it's generating a transcript, but based on about 10 different types, meeting types, standup meetings, sales meetings, general meetings, it will actually scan the whole transcript in all of the meetings and pull up notes that are based on those and it's really incredible.

It gives me the high-level things we talked about and a few bullet points under each one. So quick and efficient. We use this when I take a conversation with the client for onboarding and then my project manager can actually take that and build out their project management in another tool we're going to talk about later.

She doesn't have to be part of the call. It's quickly summarizing it. She can see the deliverables in there. She can see the problems and challenges they're having. All those things are succinct and summarized. She doesn't have to read the transcript and she doesn't have to watch the whole thing.

Another way that I use Fathom is in our weekly team meetings, it actually will extract the tasks, or the to-dos for you so it has a feature where it will go down and everything that is something that somebody is supposed to be taking action on, it creates a list of those things so a huge time saver, a huge efficiency. I find as a sales tool, this is absolutely something I can't live without anymore.

Another tool is Zapier. This is an automation tool. Largely, we use this on the marketing side, internally inside of my own company, and also in our clients' companies. If it's not something you're familiar with, it is a tool that can connect almost any software to another software.

If you think about the concept of if this happens, then this happens, Zapier is a magical wand in between that makes that happen in our companies. I use something called ScoreApp to build assessments, which are great tools. If you've been listening to the podcast, you may have actually taken one of our assessments. We build that tool, ScoreApp is a great product that I like to do that with. It's got some AI features built into it as well to help you quickly create those and generate some ideas.

But once we do that, we want to connect it to our HubSpot, those two, we can make forms directly on HubSpot, but because I want to use this ScoreApp product on the other side, I need a way to connect them. Zapier is how I connect them.

You set it up once. I've hardly ever had any problems with the Zaps. They call them Zaps, breaking down or not working, so really an incredible product. It can allow you to do so much stuff. Great when you think about automation and efficiency for your teams.

Alexa is another one that seems like something we have in our homes all over the place. I'm going to give you an example of how I use this. There might be another podcast on this at a different time. Michael Hyatt, one of my favorite authors, he talks about the ideal week and building your ideal week.

I actually have a laminated sheet right here in front of me with my ideal week. I never hit 100% on my ideal week, but it is a great model for me to always be shooting for.

Today is Wednesday and Wednesday is my content creation day. I work on content for my own business. I also think about content for my clients’ businesses during this time if we are in a scenario where I'm actually building and developing that content for them on a quarterly basis.

This is the day that I have blocked for that. That's part of my ideal week. But in my ideal week every single morning, part of that is what I call my workday startup ritual, it's all the things that if my day falls apart and I get nothing else done, everything else falls apart, if I can get that done, I know that I'm moving the needle in my business and I'm doing the most important things.

It is just under two hours, but what I do is I have actually built a routine into my Alexa app that when I tell my Echo in my room a certain cue, it actually starts that and triggers it and then it has waiting periods in between each activity.

I may be taking that a step further, I just recently got, and if you're on the video, you can see this, I haven't hooked it up, I haven't really got it set up yet, but I had a Stream Deck. I'm really excited about this. I got it to be able to create better presentations, to be able to maybe sketch ideas out while I'm doing these types of things, videos for social media, explanatory videos for my clients, all of those kinds of things so I could bounce between video, my sketch pad, all of those kinds of stuff.

I need to get it set up. I'm so excited. But also, as I've researched how I'm going to start doing that, I've realized you can actually create some of these routines and processes for productivity in it too.

I could create a process where I push one button, it opens just the screens I need for producing the podcast, nothing else, so everything's clear and starts running me through a routine to make sure I get that done efficiently. There are all kinds of ways to use that tool as well.

But I wanted to share the Alexa tool with you because it takes me through, it prompts me, and it keeps me on track for that task every single day in the morning when I'm doing my really essential startup routine.8

Another tool that we use inside of our company, and there are different ones, is we use Monday as a project manager. I said that sometimes my project manager, well, all the time now. We'll go into Fathom and look for stuff to build out that core after an onboarding call of what does our client's project management board look like?

What is going into their specific project? How long is this project going to last? What do we think the deliverables are going to be? When are the meetings that we need to have? It allows us to figure out what subcontractors we're going to need to apply to the project? All of that stuff.

Well, Monday has incredible AI features built into it as well. If you're into these types of things, Asana might be another project management tool that is heavy on the AI side that you might want to explore as well.

Everhour is another AI tool that I have not used, but when I was researching for this episode, it was something that came up. I think it might be relevant in the industry so probably, because it's relevant to me, because it might be relevant to my clients, I’m probably going to be looking at it some more.

It can integrate with things like Monday, Asana, or possibly even Slack, which we use on a regular basis as just a different tool to help you track hours. It's not necessarily an AI tool, but it integrates with a lot of really great AI tools that allows you to track.

Imagine you have somebody that does maybe administrative and accounting activities, but you're really trying to figure out how much time are they spending on each thing? Are they spending enough time on the right things? You need this kind of information to help you decide if you're going to need to make another hire in the next couple of years.

Sometimes you just want to be able to allocate. If you're doing job costing, there might be a way to allocate how much time is being spent on certain activities with some of those in-hop office support staff. That may be something that some of my clients that are really getting into optimizing are going to be interested in.

Then there are all kinds of stuff within the Google suite. I'm not even going to get too much into that, but if you use Gmail, you've seen all kinds of AI writing prompt tools in there. In terms of helping with email, in addition, there are a couple called Ellie, HyperType, and several other email tools as well.

A few that I have not used but I'm going to mention here because while I was doing my research, I thought that they warranted, and I may be looking into some of these, are Snipd. It's a podcast-listening app, which I'm super excited about.

I'm constantly getting ideas for content or inspiration from podcasts I listen to or things that I want to test out and I'm constantly moving over to my notes app and I'm cutting and pasting and marking the timeline and making notes to make sure I remember.

Well, from what I saw, Snipd sounds pretty exciting because it does a lot of these things with you or for you. It'll actually give you a summary beforehand. It's actually pulling key points out as you go and you can quickly save those so all of those key points that you want to go back and commit to memory or be able to reference later with a quick tap of your headphones is what they promise, that it will actually take care of basically creating a note in that section or clipping that for you so you can go back and visit it. That's something I'm pretty excited to try out.

Another thing is if you are using ChatGPT for search, I know so many of us these days are saying, "Hey, I can just search with this," this is probably the biggest hit to Google since Google came out, is Perplexity.

The reason why I'm excited to maybe start using Perplexity a little bit more is because it cites its sources, which reminds me of, quite frankly, Hey NAPA. Why I think that's incredible for our industry is because it references its sources when it gives you feedback.

Same thing with Perplexity, it tells you where the information came from so it's not just making anything up. If you use AI or you've been using ChatGPT for looking and just basically googling researching, searching things, you may want to check out Perplexity and also you're going to want to check out Hey NAPA if it's anything related to the asphalt industry as well because they have great source data in there as well.

Then one more mention just because I'm a mom and I found this intriguing and I'm excited to look at it to see if it would help my kids is Wisdolia. It actually will take [inaudible]. It'll take a presentation, it'll take slides, it'll take information from a URL, all kinds of different places, and it'll create flashcards and studying support tools to help you study and learn a topic and prepare for a test, and then you can customize it once it does that.

I think this might be something if you are continuing your education or if you have kids at home, this might be another one that you want to check out. If you're thinking about increasing efficiency in your company, I hope that some of this was helpful for you. But just don't forget AI is not a strategy. It is a tool in need of a strategy.

Make sure that you get on my calendar. If you want to talk about if you're ready to start increasing productivity inside of your business, we also have that Growth Assessment Tool. We’re going to link to both of those. A quick link to schedule with me at storybuilt.marketing/schedule and also to take that Growth Strategy Assessment, which is storybuilt.marketing/assessment. You'll actually get to see and get to actually go through one of those tools that I've used ScoreApp that I mentioned and it integrates AI if you're building those types of assessments into your company.

Make sure that this week, you pick no more than maybe two or three of these. If I've dropped some that you're curious about, you're piqued about, maybe you're even wanting to just get on my calendar and learn about this ideal week or how to create a morning ritual’s kickoff day for your business day, definitely do that.

But try to pick no more than two or three of these that you're going to experiment with this week to try to increase your productivity or maybe you're going to sit down with your team and really think about how could we impact our supply chain or how could we impact or have a strategy to impact this labor shortage challenge we're having in the next coming three to five years.

There are some great challenges and thoughts as it relates to AI and really taming that beast of AI and helping you start to think about what is the strategy that you're going to use to help wag AI in your business to get results.

This wraps up this week's episode of The Contractor's Daughter, a huge thank you as always for joining me. I hope that you got something from these four points that we talked about. We are going to solve labor shortages, help you with data entry, address supply chain analytics, or super quickly if you want a quick lift, increase your daily productivity for yourself or a teammate in your office.

Until next time, keep growing your business and thriving in life. If you enjoyed this episode, do not hesitate to subscribe and leave us a review.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.