"We're Forced to Automate" - Surviving the Amazon Age

Sean Weisbrot: In my world, everyone talks about automation all day long, but a lot of businesses don't really know anything about it.

Sean Weisbrot: And one of the things that I think people should be thinking about is business operations and how to automate them.

Sean Weisbrot: What has your experience been? What's the state of affairs of e-commerce and manufacturing and automation?

Eric Turney: Great question. I mean, that's a, there's a lot to that piece too.

Eric Turney: Um, with the e-commerce piece, you have the leg up to where you can easily add automation to so many of your tools, whether it's attribution, whether it's order management, whether it's even shipping, um, whether, I mean, there's so many different pieces.

Eric Turney: You can go into that and then coupling it with manufacturing. Um.

Eric Turney: I mean, manufacturing's getting crazy these days with how much they are. Um, sorry about that.

Eric Turney: They are, uh, utilizing robotics, utilizing, um. Uh, AI to really just scale their models.

Eric Turney: I mean, the vendors that we use overseas are, um, automatic enabling machines, automatic presses.

Eric Turney: Um, in, in the past they would be a team of, let's say 300 that would do the, the manufacturing and they can get the same output with, with about 180, 200. Um.

Eric Turney: So you're looking at less payroll, less man hours, um, to, to really do a more pri pristine job.

Eric Turney: So, um, it, it's crazy. I mean, when we've gone over there and visited.

Eric Turney: Again, these automatic enabling machines, the automatic, uh, presses when they're stamping out molds, uh, have just been a game changer over there.

Eric Turney: They're not cheap pieces of equipment, so not the, the smaller manufacturers can't afford 'em, but I see like the bigger manufacturers really taking over and kind of pushing out some of the smaller ones with these massive, uh, scaled robotic AI machines.

Eric Turney: It's very cool.

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Sean Weisbrot: So when was the last time you went?

Sean Weisbrot: I'm guessing it was to China?

Eric Turney: Yeah. Yep. We had a team go back in October.

Eric Turney: Um, I, I just vi I actually didn't get the chance to go, but, um, watched a ton of videos, video called with them.

Eric Turney: Very, very, and you know, we actually had some visit us yesterday, so.

Eric Turney: Lots of videos, lots of video chats, lots of video calls, and, um, really dialing in their process and watching them dial in their process is, is so cool.

Sean Weisbrot: How does that happen? I've, I've never seen something like that. So explain it if you can.

Eric Turney: Yeah. Uh, which element?

Sean Weisbrot: Like, uh, um, dialing in their processes. Like is it something that you can see happening on the call you, is it something that takes time and this is a process based thing that you're talking about?

Eric Turney: Yeah, no, that's, um, yeah, it, it's kind of been an evolution really.

Eric Turney: Um, 'cause we, we like to. Hop on video calls with them at least once a quarter to check in. And uh, and we work with about eight different manufacturers overseas.

Eric Turney: Most of them are in China. We have one in Bangladesh, one in Vietnam.

Eric Turney: Um, we've seen their process go from.

Eric Turney: 20 workers sitting at a table, hand filling enamel pieces. Uh, sometimes as many as 50 in like white coats.

Eric Turney: Um, just sitting there in like these big dust free facilities.

Eric Turney: Um, 'cause you don't want like a speck of dust to hit the enamel. It'll create an imperfection.

Eric Turney: We've seen that go, uh, move to these. Ro, for lack of a better word, like robotic arms to where they fill the enamel in these machines.

Eric Turney: They set 'em all out on a tray, put 'em in, and the machine actually fills it automatically.

Eric Turney: Um, that evolution watching was in our industry, like, um, a massive game changer over there. 'cause.

Eric Turney: You're taking 50 workers and now you need five that can do the same process and the level of there's imperfections with, um, hand filling enamel.

Eric Turney: It's just the human nature, and you can get it to a t with these enamel enamel machines.

Eric Turney: That's, that's one piece we've seen. Um. Really, really, uh, really be a game changer over there.

Eric Turney: So, and I'm excited to see what like the next process is, um, over there for manufacturing,

Sean Weisbrot: how expensive is it to go and invest in these kinds of machines?

Eric Turney: Oh, they're, they're not cheap. They're not cheap. Um, I don't know exactly to be, to be exactly.

Eric Turney: Uh, sure. I I can imagine there are hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Eric Turney: Um, there was a vendor that we worked with that started in 2014 with a small crew of like 10 people, and now they're at like, at 400 with these, uh, enabling machines.

Eric Turney: And all, all the profit. I know they put right back into the, the manufacturing and equipment.

Eric Turney: Um, but I'm sure the, their building is like 15,000 square feet.

Eric Turney: Um, they, um, it's a massive operation over there. I mean, I, I, I imagine there, there are multiple millions of dollars in, in, in equipment, um, from, from all their stages of processing.

Eric Turney: So that means they need to, you know, take in a lot of orders to, they need to, to pump out a good volume and an excellent quality to keep their business alive.

Sean Weisbrot: So. You were saying you're, you're not just helping them to work with the automation of their production lines, but also with the business processes.

Sean Weisbrot: You're talking about order management and things like that. Why don't you talk about more about that?

Eric Turney: Sure, sure, sure. Um, uh, like on our end, um, we will send, um, like when a customer gets ready and places an order with us.

Eric Turney: We send a purchase order over there and they, they begin production, um, on the order as far as managing that order on our end.

Eric Turney: Um, a lot of the products that we produce take time to produce, um, some of 'em as much as six weeks, so managing hundreds and hundreds of orders on the backend.

Eric Turney: Can be a daunting task task, especially with the amount that we scaled right around 20 20, 20 21. All of a sudden we were getting an influx of people calling, Hey, where's my order?

Eric Turney: Hey, what's going on? We, we created like a, a big bottleneck when we were scaling and, um, because of the time it took to produce, so we needed to develop a.

Eric Turney: Like more touch points within the customer instead of wasting a bunch of time for our reps and our customer service to answer the call.

Eric Turney: And the customer gets annoyed too when they're like, you know, it's been three weeks.

Eric Turney: I haven't heard from you guys what's going on. What we used with AI was, um, a and we, we use Monday for our, like an order management system, monday.com.

Eric Turney: Um, was a series of touch points along the way to check in with the customer.

Eric Turney: So, hey, your order's in production, your order's in queue, your order's in the plating stage, your order's in the enameling stage, your order's finishing packaging.

Eric Turney: Now it's shipping. Here's the tracking number. Um, touch points along the way have, have helped massively that, uh, that.

Eric Turney: Three week, four week in between time where customers don't know what's going on. Also, it's been a, uh, an.

Eric Turney: Like a chance to upsell too. So in that time when they get those emails, uh, or texts, you can throw out stickers.

Eric Turney: Hey, we do, you know, add-ons. Um, little things like that.

Eric Turney: So in order management, I think a lot of like. DTC e-commerce businesses don't have that.

Eric Turney: 'cause they sell a product, it ships the next day. They're good.

Eric Turney: One-time customers we're kind of in a unique model where it takes us a little while to produce, you know, their, their custom product.

Eric Turney: Here's one we did for, for Bentley. We did a custom letter opener for.

Eric Turney: Um, pretty, pretty sweet little product, but this took, I think, five weeks to produce.

Eric Turney: Um, and that was after artwork has approved 3D mockups are approved.

Eric Turney: I mean, uh, it takes, takes time to produce some cool stuff like that.

Sean Weisbrot: It took time to get the, the base form of what you were gonna make.

Sean Weisbrot: But it took five minutes. Uh, it took five weeks from when they said, okay, go.

Sean Weisbrot: Looks like they, they ordered like, what, 10,000 of these? Something like that.

Sean Weisbrot: And it took five weeks to make the 10,000 units, something like that.

Eric Turney: Yeah. Yeah. And that does include the importing of it too.

Eric Turney: So air freight, which I mean a week typically to, um, to do that.

Eric Turney: So yeah, once, uh, we get the go, the, the 3D mockups are approved.

Eric Turney: They give us the green light, five weeks for them from.

Eric Turney: Start of building the mold till they have it in their hands. Really?

Eric Turney: And five weeks is on a a pretty extreme scale most of the time. That doesn't sound seem like bad.

Eric Turney: Two three. I know, right?

Eric Turney: Yeah. You'd be surprised in the Amazon age, people want two day, they want it yesterday,

Sean Weisbrot: so Yeah. But you're doing a business to business custom solution like. It's coming from overseas.

Sean Weisbrot: Of course that's not gonna come in a day or two.

Eric Turney: Yeah, me and you think alike, but not, not.

Eric Turney: Um, and especially like large, um, large corporations that come to us with their, it's typically like a marketing team, and they're, they're put on like, I guess their executives are putting pressure on them, and then they're putting pressure on their employees and it's like.

Eric Turney: A, we get that so much.

Sean Weisbrot: They probably spent six months trying to figure out if they wanna work with you. Yeah, yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And then you sign a contract and they're like, all right, why isn't it done yet?

Sean Weisbrot: And you're like, I just got the contract signed yesterday, man. Gimme a minute.

Eric Turney: Yeah, exactly. Speed is so, such a, um.

Eric Turney: Overlooked thing. I feel like, um, craftsmanship, speed is, yeah.

Eric Turney: In, in today's world, people want things so fast and it, it, we're, we're forced to, to automate our processes or we kind of get left in the dust, you know, then move on to the next thing.

Eric Turney: They want a mug now. They don't want the letter opener.

Eric Turney: We're just gonna get mugs from our other guy who can print 'em and.

Eric Turney: 10 days, you know, or whatever. So

Sean Weisbrot: what kind of things have you noticed recently that have made you feel the pressure to automate your own business?

Eric Turney: Hmm. I like that question. Um, uh, looking at competitors.

Eric Turney: I think and what they're doing with their websites, uh, and maybe not even direct competitors, just other websites that are on the, the cutting edge.

Eric Turney: It really put a, a stamp on us that we have to get ahead of this.

Eric Turney: Or we're gonna get left behind. I mean, one example is there's a, a, a competitor of ours that has a tool on their website that is a image editor, an AI image editor.

Eric Turney: It's not the greatest tool. I mean, it's, it's kind of fun to play around with.

Eric Turney: Um, but we aren't even on that stage yet, to be honest. We are, uh, adding like a.

Eric Turney: An an editor, you know, an AI mockup tool on your, on the, uh, is is months away for us and they're already unrolling it so that, that they unrolled that, I don't know, it was six months ago or so, and that really drove home to us that we need to really get serious about ai, about automations, about.

Eric Turney: Really the customer journey and implementing these tools, or we're not going to be able to scale like we want to essentially.

Sean Weisbrot: So this is what, like a tool that lets you, uh, upload the thing that you want to be produced in a way that also kind of turns it into a 3D model, from like a 2D image or something.

Sean Weisbrot: Or

Eric Turney: the theirs doesn't do a 3D model. It's pretty basic. It's very like, uh, stage one.

Eric Turney: A beta version, and it's just for, uh, a couple of their products. They do it for patches.

Eric Turney: So you could upload your, um, your logo and, uh, let's, you know, here's a patch here that we did.

Eric Turney: Um, you could upload or you could just write in text like this and create a simple flat patch like that with it.

Eric Turney: Nothing 3D yet. Um, but. The, the tool was really cool.

Eric Turney: I mean, it gave the option to upload your logo and see, uh, rudimentary, simple, you know, idea of what it'll look like.

Eric Turney: Uh, without having a graphic designer too involved, I feel like you could probably vibe code. I think so too.

Eric Turney: That's

Sean Weisbrot: so funny. Like I, I don't know why you're, you're talking about months.

Sean Weisbrot: You're like, it's months away. I'm like, why isn't it like minutes away?

Eric Turney: That's, I just got on the rep lid train like two weeks ago.

Eric Turney: Um, and lovable and like using it for tools like that I've designed, like I used to use Bolt AI and like have done some kind of fun things with it.

Eric Turney: But, um, the one snag that we have.

Eric Turney: That I think is very fixable though with Rep Lid is it outputs all of it in, uh, JavaScript, which is fine.

Eric Turney: Um, for a tool like that. It's just we're so SEO friendly that, uh, and Google doesn't like JavaScript as much as it likes simple H-T-M-L-C-S-S.

Eric Turney: All you need

Sean Weisbrot: is to be able to have the wording.

Sean Weisbrot: You, you just put SEO around the tool, but the tool exists as the language it needs to be in inside of your website.

Eric Turney: Yeah. Yep. And, and we've, you're, you're a hundred percent right.

Eric Turney: You kind of, you kind of blanket it in, um, you know, uh, your tool, uh, and then have all your code and HTML and everything else.

Eric Turney: Um, it shouldn't be that hard, but. You could probably put

Sean Weisbrot: even, you could probably even SEO proof the code itself.

Eric Turney: Mm-hmm.

Sean Weisbrot: So you could say like, the name of the tool is related to the thing that you want that to rank for is like, you know, you.

Sean Weisbrot: AI powered, you know, upload your image and see how it looks without a graphic designer in five seconds or less.

Sean Weisbrot: Or we give you a free pizza. I dunno. There you go. I like it. What?

Sean Weisbrot: Whatever you free coupon

Eric Turney: and dominoes.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. Like some people will call, they'll do um, uh, like they'll do cold email outreach and they'll go, I'm gonna give you a $15 gift card to Amazon.

Sean Weisbrot: Just show up to the call.

Eric Turney: Yeah, I've gotten those. And you get it. Yeah. I've never actually showed up to the call though.

Eric Turney: Yeah, I, it is enticing, it gets me to, at minimum open the email.

Eric Turney: That's, you know, with the amount of outreach emails we get, that's, that's a leg up.

Eric Turney: You know, we get hundreds every day. So Do you do vi, I mean, what's your favorite vibe coding tool?

Eric Turney: Um, lovable. What's, what do you like?

Sean Weisbrot: I use Cursor with Claude 4.5 currently.

Eric Turney: Mm-hmm.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I started off on Lovable and then, uh. I, I joined a community of Vibe coding people.

Sean Weisbrot: This is like seven or eight months ago, and they were like, screw lovable. You should use Cursor.

Sean Weisbrot: Because Cursor is closer to the developers environment that they typically use with a local where, where the files are, uh, the repository is cloned to your local hard drive.

Sean Weisbrot: And so. Developers typically will develop locally, and then if there's no issues, they'll push it to the repository. Nice.

Sean Weisbrot: And then from there, whatever you're branching and all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, I don't know if you've ever worked at any of that stuff, but, um. It gets more complicated.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, so I, I used to have a software company, so we, we had multiple branches that we worked with and all the developers had their own systems and they all developed locally, and then they all pushed to the development branch from their local drive, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Sean Weisbrot: So, uh, I. I learned from them best practices. 'cause I'm, I'm not a technical founder, um, but I learned from them best practices for development and branch management and pushing the code and, you know, quality testing, you know, uh, quality assurance and all that.

Sean Weisbrot: So I, I, I learned from them. It was a very expensive lesson, but I learned from them how to take an idea.

Sean Weisbrot: Develop it and launch and you know, get it to production, which a lot of people that vibe code don't have that experience.

Sean Weisbrot: And so they don't know how to do it. And so a lot of people say the code sucks.

Sean Weisbrot: Your code can't be like, I like, the funny thing is, I, I had spent three months building, uh, a SaaS tool and got it to production.

Sean Weisbrot: I told the people in that community and they're like, you can't do that.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm like, what do you mean you can't do that?

Sean Weisbrot: They're like, you can't vibe code your way to a production tool. I go, I just did. That's insane.

Sean Weisbrot: They're like, you can't do that. Like, it just doesn't work.

Sean Weisbrot: It was, it was a full on sa, like it's a full on B2B SaaS with a website and everything, and the, the goal was to connect to your QuickBooks.

Sean Weisbrot: This is not for e-commerce brands, um, but the goal is to connect to your QuickBooks, ignore the revenue, and only focus on the expenditures, where you could then see every line of money that went out and all of the details around it, like the QuickBooks would show you where the goal is to be able to accurately see where your company is spending money.

Sean Weisbrot: So that you could then determine whether you should be trying to reign in certain expenses or cancel certain expenses like subscriptions, things like that.

Sean Weisbrot: And, um, I had built a, uh, budget. So like you can, you can say, this is my budget for this kind of an expense, and then you would be able to see what you've actually spent.

Sean Weisbrot: Balanced against what you expect to spend or what you want to spend.

Sean Weisbrot: So you could see if you're under budget or over budget or just on, you know, where you should be for each of those categories.

Sean Weisbrot: But then also add a subscription manager. So it would say, I think this isn't a subscription.

Sean Weisbrot: Is this a subscription?

Sean Weisbrot: Yes, it is. Okay. Do you want this to be a subscription or do you wanna get rid of this, blah, blah, blah.

Sean Weisbrot: Then I had built a chatt powered, uh, chat bot that was able to actually read the database so you could communicate with it about your expenses.

Eric Turney: Oh, I like that too.

Eric Turney: That's just So you connected to the QuickBooks API and just ran kind of like that. Yeah,

Sean Weisbrot: the, the actual software was pretty easy for me to build.

Sean Weisbrot: It was the QuickBooks, uh, APIs, web hooks and different, uh, refresh tokens and, and all of those things that were an absolute nightmare.

Eric Turney: That's so funny. QuickBooks is a nightmare. I'll, I'll say that.

Eric Turney: It, it, it has its place and, uh, but I'm not good at it. So

Sean Weisbrot: I, I actually had four businesses ready to pay me to join, and they were all, and, and, and the, my, the, the.

Sean Weisbrot: The focus for me was these were people I found from the podcast. They were guests that were running businesses.

Sean Weisbrot: They were spending over a million dollars a year within their business.

Sean Weisbrot: And I feel like that's where this really starts to become necessary because it's no longer just the founder of the business spending money.

Sean Weisbrot: There's now maybe like a financial officer or an operations officer, or a technical officer or a marketing officer.

Sean Weisbrot: Everyone's got different budgets, right? So at that point, you've got multiple people. That have control over where money goes.

Sean Weisbrot: And so somebody has to make sure that people aren't stealing money or that there's double charges on things that you know shouldn't have happened, or that there's subscriptions that are unnecessary but are continuing to exist, uh, you know, a lot of different things.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I wanted to work with companies that spent over a million dollars a year in order to justify what I wanted to charge them for the service.

Sean Weisbrot: Um, and it was working. I got everything working. It was perfectly good.

Sean Weisbrot: I was ready to, to get those companies on, and then I had made an update and it broke the API relationship.

Sean Weisbrot: Oh, and I spent weeks trying to fix it and I couldn't, and I said, I'm just gonna give this up.

Sean Weisbrot: But like I could probably spend $5,000 to some developer who could fix it, and it'd probably make it work forever again, like better again.

Sean Weisbrot: But then what if it breaks in the middle of like having people pay me?

Sean Weisbrot: I just, I don't, yeah. Onboarding. I, you know. Yeah, that could just, from those four customers, it would be a six figure, you know, six figure a RR,

Eric Turney: but could see how it would work and be beneficial in our business.

Eric Turney: 'cause we, we audit those quarterly, we audit our subscription services and do a big one yearly and how much we're spending and budgets are always, uh, uh, quarterly.

Eric Turney: At least for me, I'm like, oh, we gotta do our budget this, this quarter. We for next quarter.

Eric Turney: I'm like, Ugh, just hire someone. It's it's tires. Yeah. Yeah. That's true too. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: But that's what like an accountant is for, or a comptroller is for.

Eric Turney: Yeah. And we have a finance director, James, and he's wonderful. He, he kills it.

Eric Turney: But, um, it's just, uh, that, that asp I, what I like in the business is building landing pages, working on, uh, processes, writing.

Eric Turney: Content. Um, AI can do all that for pages. AI can do that to AI is such a massively awesome tool to do that.

Eric Turney: It's still, we still need, there's still some human touch that, um, that needs to be added, at least for in the realm of.

Eric Turney: Like wanting to rank in on Google, um, AI content still does, does fine.

Eric Turney: And, and I've seen ai, there was a website, AI Invest, if you've ever heard of it. They, they.

Eric Turney: Or a hundred percent AI content. They don't, they don't hide it.

Eric Turney: They have off AI authors on their pages and they skyrocketed.

Eric Turney: I mean, they were getting millions and millions of clicks per month.

Eric Turney: And then Google finally dropped the hammer on 'em. But they still, um, they still rank very well.

Eric Turney: Um, and it's very, very user friendly. Awesome articles. Written, written very well.

Eric Turney: I imagine their prompts are crazy long, but, um, but yeah, you can, you can, all those things, you can help the old ways of hiring a writer, hiring a developer to build your pages.

Eric Turney: Hi. I mean, it's, it's, it's exciting. Uh, it's awesome. Um, a one man band can do so much.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I mean, I, I literally built a business that was ready to, to have multiple, you know, multiple clients by myself, where five years ago my tech company had a full-time team of 17 and we couldn't push anything out fast enough.

Eric Turney: Yeah. Yeah. Even um, last week we had a problem with the form where in certain browsers it wasn't allowing you to upload an image or a file, and we were like, what is going on?

Eric Turney: It would've been, uh. A call to our developers, it would've been a meeting, it could have taken days or however long, and paying them however much.

Eric Turney: Um, I threw the code into Claude. It diagnosed the JavaScript air, gave me the code to put in. It was super simple to, and the problem was fixed in half hour.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you see the envir, like, are you, you're looking at the code at all, like you're, are you.

Sean Weisbrot: So you open the files, you can see the code, but you don't touch the code yourself?

Eric Turney: I do, yeah. I'll, uh, okay. I, I, I definitely do, um, H-T-M-L-C-S-S, all that.

Eric Turney: Um, I can totally do myself. Um, and, uh, JavaScript I'm not nearly as good at.

Eric Turney: Um, but it is a fairly simple language. It's not the most.

Eric Turney: Complex once you see like the basic elements of it, it's very fun too.

Eric Turney: But, um, but yeah, in the past, I mean, we're paying developers a lot of money to do stuff that AI can do like that.

Eric Turney: It's so nice.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. People don't realize that there's, there's developers that still put their head in the sand and go.

Sean Weisbrot: I can't do that. And then you go, but it just did.

Eric Turney: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And you're like, well, it can't do that at scale.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like, yeah, but it it's doing it at scale. Like they, they, their head is in their ass.

Eric Turney: There are, there are. Um, yeah, I've seen it.

Eric Turney: Cause issues in certain cases, but I feel like a lot of that was me not giving it the, the, the correct information to work with.

Eric Turney: Um, and I think that is kind of the, the bottleneck for a lot of developers is, well, maybe they're afraid of job security too.

Eric Turney: I mean, that could be a big one.

Eric Turney: They're like, they don't want to admit that their job's going away, but.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, yeah, I mean, like I, I talked to my brother about this 'cause a long time ago.

Sean Weisbrot: He, he, he works in marketing automation now. He did finance. He, he, he works for Intercontinental the Oh nice.

Sean Weisbrot: Like headquarters in Atlanta. In the first time around, he worked with him for a number of years doing more like financial risk assessment, but now he is a little bit more into the marketing automation side and he figured out how to automate, you know, let's say gotta do a standard 45 hours a week.

Sean Weisbrot: He, he's automated 15 hours of his work, so 15 hours a week he doesn't have to work and he is still getting paid for that.

Sean Weisbrot: And. I am like, why don't you offer to automate more of the business?

Sean Weisbrot: He's like, if they know that I could automate more of the business at some point, I'm gonna be necessary anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: He's like, so,

Eric Turney: you know, I need

Sean Weisbrot: to. Well, he, he was, he was consulting them at some point and then decided to go back to being an employee because they offered him like twice what his original salary was.

Sean Weisbrot: Nice. And, and he was able to get all of the benefits back and he was able to get, uh, they, they reinstated him as if he had never quit.

Sean Weisbrot: So they gave him all, they, they gave him all of the benefits of those, uh, extra years.

Sean Weisbrot: It was like six or seven years he wasn't working for them.

Sean Weisbrot: And then he went back and they, so they, they, yeah, they double basically doubled his salary and gave him a crap ton more benefits to, to do, like to sit around and do pretty much the same amount of work or less.

Eric Turney: That's so funny. That's, yeah. Uh, developing AI businesses where you can consult and work within companies to automate their processes, their archaic processes, I think is a gold mine for people.

Eric Turney: Um. I was even talking to my, um, father-in-law who works for a local just insurance agency, state Farm.

Eric Turney: He was going over all the manual data entry that he does, that he pays someone to do, and just like a secretary, a local.

Eric Turney: Person and I'm like, man, you could totally have AI do all that.

Eric Turney: It would be a simple to automate your data entry is no one should be doing data entry anymore.

Eric Turney: Um, he's like, no, no, no, no, no. We that, I, uh, try. I'm not playing with that.

Eric Turney: I mean, yeah, developing a business like that is, is genius.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. Well, it's part, part of what Mark's doing.

Sean Weisbrot: Nice. The guy that I had introduced you to Off air. Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: So for those of that reference, so what's the most important thing that you've learned in your business so far?

Eric Turney: Oh man. That is, that there's the most important thing that I've learned in my business so far is, um.

Eric Turney: I think that. Hmm, that's a great question there.

Eric Turney: I want to go a lot of different ways with it.

Eric Turney: I'd, I'd say that it, the most important thing that I've learned is that it's probably way harder than I, than I thought, to be perfectly honest.

Eric Turney: It's, um, there's a lot of late nights staying up. There's a lot of early mornings, there's a lot of.

Eric Turney: Things breaking and you having to figure it out.

Eric Turney: Um, I really had a roadmap when we first bought it, and I thought this was going to be a, we do this, we do this, we do this, we do this, and we are scaling to the moon.

Eric Turney: And it was, um. It's been a, it's been there a lot more than I, than I thought.

Eric Turney: And, but I love every minute of it. It's, it's a blast.

Eric Turney: And I'm working on something that's, that's growing and it's, it's so much fun.

Eric Turney: But, but I think the, uh, for most entrepreneurs that, like the YouTubers make it sound so easy, a lot of 'em, you know, the Alex Hermo of the world and, um.

Eric Turney: It's a lot of, uh, there, there's a lot that goes into it. Um, and unexpected problems that happen.

Eric Turney: Um, that's kind of a, that was kind of a cop out answer, I think, but it was, I think it's, it's very true.

Eric Turney: Well, if you wanna give it another go, you can.

Eric Turney: Um, the most important thing I've learned in the business round two, um, I want to say that.

Eric Turney: Um, your employees are your business too. That's been a big realization for, for us.

Eric Turney: Um, treating your employees well is huge. Um, because I can't do it alone.

Eric Turney: I can do a lot of things and AI can do a lot of things, but I can't do everything by any means.

Eric Turney: And having a, a really strong culture. And making people feel happy to come to work and compensated well.

Eric Turney: And, uh, you generally get a lot more out of 'em.

Eric Turney: I mean, the previous founder didn't prioritize that, uh, uh, very much.

Eric Turney: I mean, as much as we do, I should say. Um, and we have.

Eric Turney: Crazy people stay here for years and years.

Eric Turney: Um, and we like to have like a fun environment.

Eric Turney: I, I didn't know be beginning opening the business, how much crucial that was. Um, and it's, uh. It's massive.

Eric Turney: We've, I think we've all had those like crap jobs where we're like, the boss is an a-hole and like Yeah, exactly.

Eric Turney: I've bet a few over the years. That was my last job I ever had.

Eric Turney: Exactly. Uh, no one likes those. Those, those aren't fun, those stink.

Eric Turney: And, um, that's the last thing we want to do. Uh, I'd rather, um.

Eric Turney: Make a little less to to have a happy work environment.

Sean Weisbrot: Thanks for watching. If you liked this insight, I've handpicked another video for you right here on the screen.

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