[00:00:00] Speaker A: Genai is a part of my everyday, not just every day, every hour, work.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: I ended up building the solutions that I was looking for while there outside of it in order to help us out.
[00:00:11] Speaker C: This model is really to diversify revenue.
[00:00:13] Speaker D: I'm Richard Gerhardt.
[00:00:15] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gerhardt. You just heard some snippets from our show. It was a great one. Stay tuned to hear tips about how you can start your business.
[00:00:25] Speaker F: Ramping up your business.
[00:00:26] Speaker D: The time is near.
[00:00:28] Speaker F: You've given it hard.
[00:00:29] Speaker D: Now get it in Gear Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:43] Speaker E: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, founder of Gear Media Studios, content creation space, chief marketing officer of Gearhart Law and a speaker on AI and marketing.
[00:00:52] Speaker D: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship where we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories and their business ventures. What will artificial intelligence look like in 2026? On our program we're featuring Kevin Sorase and he's a pioneering AI innovator and serial entrepreneur often called the father of the virtual assistant. I'd like to know who the mother was, but he's got long work in artificial intelligence, generative technology and billion dollar companies that have shaped everything from smartphones to the way software thinks, tests and evolves.
[00:01:32] Speaker E: And then we have two great presenters. Can hardly wait to hear from them. Tyler Dunnigan, a dynamic entrepreneur and founder of Turnserve, reshaping the multifamily housing industry through innovative technology. That's really going to be very interesting. And then Jen Millard, the visionary CEO of Main Love, who's here to talk about how she's turning Maine's pristine water and community spirit into a refreshing movement for sustainability, connection and growth.
And later on we'll hear from our friend Alicia Morrissey, a great jazz singer. And we've got secrets of the entrepreneurial mind.
[00:02:08] Speaker D: And we'll be hearing from our guests a little bit later in the show about their dreams, their successes and their failures. But first, it's time for your new business journey and we like to ask our panelists about their business journey. So Kevin and I were talking yesterday before the show and he was telling me about some of the incredible highs and lows that he's had in his his career. And one topic that came up was the dot com crash in 2000. I wanted to ask Kevin, when you look back, what was the one decision or moment that changed the trajectory of your business and what did it cost you to make that decision?
[00:02:48] Speaker A: So we had just raised, I was at a company called Perfect Commerce. We had just, I was the CEO. We just raised $50 million of fresh capital, which was a lot of money then, it's zero now, but then it was real money. And within just a couple of months of that, the dot com crash happens basically primarily in the stock market, but when that happens, private markets also dry up. So I immediately laid off half the company. My investors thought I was crazy, the world thought it was crazy. Everyone else in, in, in, in Silicon Valley thought I was crazy. And I said, I've seen this story before and it never ends well for those who keep spending money, but it ends very well for those who save money.
And so very hard decision because these are people you just recently hired. You have a big round, you have 50 million of cash in the bank and you're cutting your burn in half immediately because you know how this plays out for the next two to three years and there won't be more money to raise, which turned out to be the case. So look, I think that's always a good lesson. Certainly when you've got startups and you've got small companies and they're typically not making a profit, cash is absolutely king. I like to say there's only one thing that kills a startup every time they run out of money. Because if you didn't run out of money, you'd keep going. You'd say, well, I'll switch the business plan. I, I don't have the right product market fit, I need a little more time, I need to change up some people. But the minute you run out of money and there's no more, well, then it's over. So never run out of money and you've got a long Runway to try to get things right. You still may not get it right. But you've got chance after chance after chance and you need those chances. The average kind of cycle on the business plan, if you will, from when you got funded to when you actually hit product market fit is often the fifth turn on that plan, right? So Slack, you know, famously was a game company and people were using the messaging service over here and they realized nobody liked the games, but everybody liked this messaging interaction team thing. And Slack became obviously that. And everybody uses Slack and it got bought by Salesforce and, you know, the rest is history.
Multibillion dollar exit and was never a game company again. Their first four business models were a disaster. But the fifth one, you know, the market spoke and fortunately, they listened.
[00:05:02] Speaker D: So running out of money is one lesson. But if an entrepreneur find themselves in that position where the market around them is crashing, would you give them any other advice?
[00:05:13] Speaker A: It always comes down to product market fit right and timing. There was a great analysis by a friend of mine who's a VC in Southern California. He looked at over 100 companies he invested in and tried to analyze them with who were the smartest people, who were the most educated, who were the best funded, Right. Who hired the best teams, who spent the most, who spent the least. All of that, it turns out none of it mattered. The ones that won out of those hundred were the ones that by chance, before they ran out of money, got the product market fit right. They just got the timing right. And when you got the timing right, even the idiot teams won. With all due respect, with all due respect to idiot teams, right? So it was fascinating. He said, here's, here's these kids that should have, they weren't that smart, but I gave them money. They, but somehow they hit the product market timing right and the thing took off and they had a billion dollar exit. And the, the smartest people out of, I'm making it up, Yale, Harvard, mit, Stanford. I don't know if those are smartest people or not, but we'll just say that because that's one measure didn't always win because they just didn't get that product market timing right. So when you've got a real problem that you're solving for real people who have money to pay you for it, you win. If you've got that timing right. And if you're too early, you lose. And if you're too late, you lose. So you gotta hang in there to try to get that timing right.
[00:06:29] Speaker D: Tyler Dunnigan, welcome to the show. What was the one decision or moment that most changed the trajectory of your business and what did it cost you to make that decision?
[00:06:40] Speaker B: I think the most impactful decision that we made was revamping manual tasks to automated software. And this forced us to end up building our own software and similar products. And it was completely out of our comfort zone. We went from service enablement to now we're building software with teams and similar, but it took us from old and scrappy to updated and innovative and it completely changed how we operate as a company.
[00:07:06] Speaker D: How did you make the decision to go from off the shelf to homegrown products?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Really the biggest thing was quality of life for my team and the customer journey. The off the shelf, out of the box solutions, they work at Scale. But they didn't work for our specific needs.
And instead of trying to mold how we operate based off what was available, we flipped it on its head and we built what we needed based off of how we operated. And that brought us speed. Sure, there's a couple hurdles at first, but it really brought us speed in this ability to build it specifically for us and people in our industry as well.
[00:07:37] Speaker D: Excellent. Jen, what was the one decision or moment that most changed the trajectory of your business, and what did it cost you to make that decision?
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Well, I'm a water brand, and the biggest decision that I made was I had to be brave and actually take a $250,000 a year warehouse about a year earlier than I would have projected in my financial model because I could not get underwritten for insurance because my water was not under one roof. It was across multiple storage facilities.
So I had to make a very hard choice of spending a quarter million dollars. Hmm. Two years ahead of schedule, and then finding the capital to backfill that decision and then carry that decision forward. But I would not be distributing in six states. I'm in Florida right now, six states with 15 licenses, if I hadn't taken the risk to say, all right, if I'm in this business, I need to allocate capital appropriately and get a warehouse in fast order.
[00:08:40] Speaker D: How did you balance the risk versus the reward calculation when you were making that decision?
[00:08:46] Speaker C: So I'm very early stage. These gentlemen are probably a little later stage. Right. So I'm a. This was a seed round of. I've raised 2 million. Done a lot with a little here. The decision is really bravery. Are you brave enough to continue to raise money for a physical entity? So I had to convince investors that I needed a physical facility in order to make a company. And so it was individual conversations to prove that I needed it.
[00:09:10] Speaker D: That's great. Well, thank you for sharing that story with us, Elizabeth.
[00:09:14] Speaker E: Okay. So I think one thing that really changed my path was hiring a coach. We had Sonia Sartra on the show a year and a half or so ago, and she gave her presentation on what if it were Easy was the name of her book and how she coaches people. And after the show, I'm like, I want you to coach me. And I had tried other coaches. She is beyond amazing. And one of the first things she said to me was, I see you up on a stage speaking. And I was like, no, that's never gonna happen.
Well, we went to Pod Fest, and I was up on a stage speaking. So that was a Little more than a year working with her, and she really did. She changed the trajectory.
And, yeah, it's kind of scary to get up on a stage and speak, but I did it. Yay.
[00:09:57] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, that's great. That was a great experience. And Elizabeth did an amazing job. I got to witness this birth of Elizabeth's speaker career. So really fantastic.
Looking back recently, one of the decisions that changed the trajectory of our law firm was a non decision on my part to hire a new CPA firm. So we'd been kind of disappointed in their performance over the last six months or so. We didn't really feel like we were getting the right attention to our business.
And we talked with a couple of other firms, but didn't really find the right fit. And so I just kind of kept putting it off, thinking, well, we've got a cpa. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it turns out I had a call with our firm a couple of weeks ago, and I asked, well, how much do I owe the IRS now for this last payment in January? And they said, well, you guys have had a great year. And he named a figure in the six figures that I wasn't expecting. And I just about fell off my chair.
[00:11:00] Speaker E: I don't think I've seen Richard go pale so quickly.
[00:11:03] Speaker D: And so, I mean, the consequences of that non decision means that we didn't really have the opportunity to budget and manage for that expense. And now a lot of the expansion plans and investments that we're planning for this year have to be deferred because we have to obviously pay our taxes and pay the government. So, you know, it was a non decision. And you're always taking certain kinds of risks in business trying to decide what's important, what's not. But my experience over time has been getting the financials right is really super important.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: And.
[00:11:41] Speaker D: And we're calling new CPA firms now. So trust me, we're going to fix this problem. So, in any case, that's it for your new business journey. And thank all of the panelists for their amazing comments. And I'd like to remind everybody to stay tuned for intellectual property news coming up. Soon, we're going to be finding out the surprising things that actor Matthew McConaughey is doing to protect his brand identity. But now it's time for our first interview, and I'd like to welcome back Kevin Serrace. He's just like one of the most amazing people, you know, tech guru, multiple business starter, upper obviously super smart and really just leading the charge for artificial intelligence. We did have him on the show in 2023. Back then, I was not a believer in AI, was a skeptic. And things have changed so much. I use it every day for all sorts of different things.
[00:12:42] Speaker E: So, Kevin, I want to know if you can answer the question now that you wouldn't answer, then when am I going to get the robot to clean the house?
[00:12:51] Speaker A: I can guess at that. Today, actually, we have a good guess.
[00:12:55] Speaker D: What will AI look like in a year? Kevin, tell us what is in store for us in 2026.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: So look, over the past three years, the world has been using something called generative AI, right? Gen AI, which is based on a transformer, and people call them LLMs or multiple modals, but this is based on a transformer model. Primarily.
Video generation is a slightly different model as a diffusion model. Nonetheless, the transformer model was developed post Deep learning, so deep learning model 2012, 2017 transformers, so that we could literally transform language from one language to another across the phrase. And then we learned to ask it questions, and it gives us answers. A couple of things have happened right over the last few years. The amount of misinformation that comes from these things is much lower than it was in standardized tests. It's around 1% on the major models today. Of course, you can force it to tell you bad things, but generally speaking, the amount of hallucination is way down from where it was because of post training, and there's lots of post training going on to correct these. These models. So all of that's good for me. Over the last few years, Gen AI is a part of my every day. Not just every day, every hour, work period, full stop. There is nothing I don't do where AI isn't first. Everything is AI first. I don't go to Word. I don't go to Excel. I do AI first.
[00:14:18] Speaker D: So I'm doing the same thing. And I worry about myself because I worry that I'm going to be so dependent on this that I'm going to lose my ability to think for myself.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Fair. And there was a good MIT study on this last year, as a matter of fact. So let me answer that. So, first of all, we have become highly dependent on Excel since the late 1980s, which means pretty much everyone on this call does very little math in their head. And when Excel showed up, one of the worries is humans will lose the ability to quickly do math in their head. I can tell you, after 30 years, humans have lost the ability to quickly do math in their head. And what's interesting about that Is there's two views. Is one, oh, what a shame that even though we learned this in school, we. We can't do long division in our head anymore. But number two, no one would pay you to do long division in your head. In fact, if you're doing it in your head versus someone else in Excel, you are behind the eight ball, right? You're. You're losing in the competitive race.
[00:15:18] Speaker D: I thought I was just getting old. So it's a relief to know there's a study out there. Yes, I know that supports me.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: So MIT studied people who use AI and sort of the net result of the study is if you use it as a crutch. Hi, give me the answer. Hi, give me the answer. So that means your prompt is five words or one sentence or whatever. You do, in fact, within a few months, lose the ability to critically think. You lose that sharpness. On the other hand, if indeed you're writing two paragraphs of prompt or you're doing really sophisticated things with spreadsheets or with other things and you're really involved in that and thoughtful about what comes out and thoughtful about reading it and editing it, then you're producing more content than you've ever done in your life. You're producing maybe three or four times the content you did just a few years ago. And you're reading and editing that. That is sharpening your mind. So like any other tool, it can be used to sharpen your mind or dull your mind, depending on how you use it. I hope I'm trying to use it most of the time to sharpen my mind.
[00:16:23] Speaker E: Yeah. So we're here with Kevin Sarray. So, Kevin, I had some thoughts about that myself. I feel like people are like, oh, human creativity is going to go. No. What I feel like I'm doing, and I'm not trying to pretend like I'm smart or anything, but what I feel like I'm doing is I am coming up with questions that other people aren't even thinking of. And I'm asking the LLMs these questions and the presentation I gave at Podfest. I think I was the only one presenting on that topic because I was the only one who had thought to ask that question about a podcast. And I think that's where the real human creativity comes in. I mean, that information has always been out there in books, you know, magazines, whatever. You just have to know the right question to ask. But now you have this army of research assistants, and you can compare them against each other. So I didn't just ask chat the Question I asked Chat Gemini and Perplexity, and I was mostly using Claude. And then I was able to compare their answers and with my brain, put that together and say, okay, this is what I think the right answer really is great.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: I mean, that's a great use of this.
[00:17:30] Speaker D: I want to, I want to piggyback on that because one of the things that's so exciting about ChatGPT and the LLMs is that for years I had all of these questions that I couldn't otherwise get answers to. Not without a lot of work, a lot of investment, paying this, paying that, and now I can get those questions answered. And it's just such a epiphany of knowledge and information.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Where, where's AI going and how do you use it today? Right? Obviously, I'm using it for everything. I get two or three or four press inquiries a day, mostly on AI and some on cybersecurity. I know what my opinion is, and I can write my opinion in two paragraphs. But to present that opinion back in press quotable form is what I used to spend a lot of time on, that I actually add no value to my value was the opinion. Nobody's paying me for my quality English because I'm not an English major. So what a great use of, here's my opinion, here's the questions, format it for the press, shoot it back out. Right? Great example. I recently used it for a client of mine that has, you know, tens of thousands of warranty claims.
And what they wanted to understand is what can we do in the factory to reduce those warranty claims? Well, this is all data that does not easily go into a database. It's just people typing, you know, what they fixed and what the problem was. And of course, this is a great use of these models to analyze a large spreadsheet of data that is not aligned at all and say, here's the five things you can do to reduce your Warranty claims by 50%.
And it was brilliant, actually. Like, I couldn't have hired a team of experts to look at 80,000 of these things, right? So these are the kinds of things aside from cat videos, right? These are the kinds of things you can actually do every day. But let me end with this is, is because you, you, you brought up creativity, human creativity. So clearly we're entering a time when we are democratizing access to techniques and technologies that only, say, Hollywood could do or real musicians or whatever. So people generating, creating new music now, including musicians creating new music, I can get to demo. I have a whole other side of my life, which is Broadway and film. And so I'm always working on.
I've got 16 projects right now in my entertainment space, and I'm a partner in an entertainment company. So when we're working on demos and we're going from an idea to a demo, that was weeks or months by the time we got it to a studio and recorded it, okay, today with a melody, everything else can be developed in a matter of minutes. The baseline, the instrumentation, the singer, who's AI, everything. I could put it in a different key, I can edit, I can move the course around. I could do whatever I want. I have a demo, certainly a high quality demo in an hour or two for a dollar instead of literally six or eight weeks.
Now, what's interesting about this is musicians are split on this. I have been on podcasts where there's a musician screaming at me, you should never use that. That is a. Is a horrible thing to do. That is that technology is stolen from millions of other songs and musicians and learned on our. The backs of our work. And we've spent 10,000 hours learning our instrument, and this isn't fair. And then the other half go, wow, how do I use this? Because this is going to get me to my demo faster. And my advice to everyone is, look, this technology, these technologies are here in video, in audio and music, in LLM, in analyzing spreadsheets, in writing very complicated formulas. I used it the other day to write a complicated formula spreadsheet that I literally could not figure out. It was too long and I couldn't keep track of it in my mind. Right. If you're not using it, someone else down the street is and they're going to beat you at whatever it is you're doing. So either a musician that you're a musician, for instance, that gets on this bandwagon, or you're going to be out of work in a few years. Now, you'll still play live. I get that. And people want to see you live. I'm not taking. This isn't about live performance. This is about all the other stuff that happens behind the scenes. But your musician friends, half of them are going to use this technology. They're going to use it every day. They are. Already Hollywood is using it to do soundtracks for TV shows. And so what used to pay maybe a thousand dollars to do a soundtrack over, you know, two or three days, now pays $100 to do it in two hours. Someone's going to take that job, someone to take that job and take it from you. And it doesn't pay what it used to. I can't change that. And I didn't say it's fair. I just said it's not going away and it's the worst it'll ever be. Today, all these technologies don't get worse than today. They only get better.
[00:22:07] Speaker E: Well, sounds, Kevin, like to me what you're saying is maybe you have a job as a sound technician today, maybe tomorrow you're an AI technician. So.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, you know what I, what I like to say to the companies that I'm talking to. And there are tasks that are going to go away. You know, software QA is one of them. QA automation is. The people who will be left behind are the robot overlords. They've decided to be the expert in these new tools. And the people who are experts in the new tools absolutely. Are kept by every company because you need that expertise to manage this new set of technologies. Right. You need that. The people who say, I don't want anything to do with this, I'm going to sabotage it. By the way, 31% of employees sabotage 80% of AI rollouts. Here are those numbers again. This is a survey. Just this past year, 31% of employees sabotage 80% of AI rollouts. Right. Which means the boss says, oh, it's not working. Well, my team says it doesn't work at all. I've watched this happen, watch them lie and sabotage it.
[00:23:06] Speaker D: I think one solution to this dilemma is that companies have to incentivize people to adopt the technology.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:23:14] Speaker D: And so, you know, if you're working yourself out of a job, maybe there's some sort of revenue share that the company can do for the team member to kind of bridge the gap between not having a job and having a job. So it's ludicrous to think that people are going to work to lose their job or work out of a job, and some people are going to be able, able to adapt and use the AI, other people will not adapt and they'll go on to do something else. Right. But companies are profiting from this. And I believe in the free market, I'm capitalist. But I do think that if, if you want to get your employees on board and they know they're going to lose their job, then why not give them some revenue after they leave for a short period of time or a bonus or something?
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Here's what is working. Right. It's an interesting idea. I haven't seen any. And do that because at the end they're such capitalists they're not bad people. They're, you know, they report to the.
[00:24:15] Speaker D: Shareholders, and if the company gets it implemented six months sooner, they make more money.
[00:24:21] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Here's what is working is you. You find a tiger team and they are highly incentivized to make this stuff work and show that it works. And then they become kind of the robot overlords to spread it around the rest of the company. Right. So we certainly see this in, again, a software QA and development.
But then you look at things like customer support. So customer support. Every US company shed that and pushed it overseas 20 years ago. This isn't a new idea. Right. And we went overseas because it was cheaper. It wasn't better. It wasn't better English. It wasn't more understandable. It was just cheaper. Let's be honest.
[00:24:59] Speaker E: Obviously, Kevin, too, you did not have the HR issues.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: That's right. You didn't have the HR issues that you're. You're absolutely right. Now what they're doing is saying, I can go from three. I went from $20 an hour to $3 an hour. Now I can go from $3 an hour to 3 cents an hour with AI or 30 cents an hour. In that range. 3, 3 cents and 30 cents. And so they're replacing entire tier one level one customer support with AI, and they're trying it off to the side with just, you know, 1% of the calls going that way, 2%, 5%. But the numbers are very clear that the AI, once it's well trained, outperforms the humans in the job, period, full stop. So you're talking to an AI agent, but it closes the case like 40% faster in most cases than the humans did. And you have less callbacks. So it's actually performing better at a tenth the cost, of course.
So three years from now, will there be any humans in Tier one customer support? I can't imagine it in any business.
Why would we do that? So that's a job that literally goes away.
And you need to either graduate to level two, level three, or become a manager or do something else in life.
[00:26:10] Speaker D: So we need to take a commercial break, but this is a fascinating discussion. We're here with Kevin Sarrace, who's an AI futurist and AI implementer. When we come back, Kevin, I want to talk more about the impact that this is going to have on ordinary people and things that they can do to protect themselves and to prepare for the future passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt. We'll be back right after this Commercial.
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[00:28:43] Speaker D: Once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. We're talking AI here with master AI guru Kevin Serrace. He's an amazing guest and very insightful. We were just talking during the break about how interesting the topic is and how we could just talk about AI all day.
I don't think we'll go that far. But one thing I wanted to come back to though is the fear that a lot of people have about losing their job.
And three years ago when we talked previously on the show about artificial intelligence, there was A lot of fear about that. So how are people feeling now that AI has evolved?
A lot more people are getting experience with it, and not really just the elite and the leaders, but ordinary people who are concerned about their ability to feed themselves.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: So look, this is a hot topic and it's been a hot topic for a long time, even before Gen AI. So let's talk about what we do know. So every new technology that has shown up from the Internet to Google to smartphones to PCs on the desk, we were told that is going to eliminate 20, 30, 40, 50% of jobs. White collar jobs, blue collar jobs. Robots came to General Motors in literally in the early 1960s. It was going to wipe out jobs at General Motors. Except General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of robots, actually employs more people today than they did when the robot first showed up. Why is that? Why is it that when we bring technology on board, the jobs change, but more people get employed? And that's because when you bring technology in, it drives down the cost of the goods and services that you're making, which drives up the demand.
And then you need more people, maybe in different roles, but you actually need more people. You don't need less people. So if GM didn't roboticize its plants, a car would cost $300,000 today. But now you can get a car for 20,000 or 25 or 30,000 because it is roboticized. Therefore more people buy cars, including new cars. Therefore they employ more people. So what's been happening in AI is a little bit of that. There are some jobs that are gone or aren't as plentiful. The first ones were actually coders coming out of school. We all know over the last year or two that entry level coding positions, which used to be hot and on fire, aren't as hot or on fire.
Turns out most people are in fact getting jobs. Right? The employment is like 85 or 90%, but it's not 120%. Right. It's not like everyone could have two jobs. So that is softened a bit. That's not a surprise because we don't need those entry level people. But they're, but, but most companies actually, even though you have seen layoffs, most companies employ more people today than they did two years ago. And you go, I just read this yesterday, it was very fascinating. Including tech companies that two years ago, you know, laid off 20,000 people, have hired a different 20,000 and another 10,000 beyond it. And you go, why is that? Well, they're hiring people with AI expertise and AI experience and that doesn't mean you have to be an AI guru. It just says, you know, the tools that work. I talk to colleges a lot and the students there and they're worried about who's going to hire me and all this. I say there's two kinds of college students graduating today. There's the one that listened to the professor that said, never use Gen AI for your assignments. That's cheating. And then there's the other ones who said, I'm going to use it on everything I do because actually that's what people want to hire. And it turns out when you're in that interview and they're asking you about your experience with AI, one student says, well, you know, I didn't use it a lot. We were told not to. I did play with chat GPT a little bit and I'm willing to learn. And the other one comes in and says, look, let me be honest with you. I did everything with it. I did my spreadsheets with it, I analyzed my formulas. Then I. Then I wrote my papers with it. Now I had to edit them and I changed them. And then I learned how to cheat the cheating, the cheating technology that looks for to see if you did it with Gen AI, because there's ways to do that. So I figured all these out and then in my marketing world, I actually found six tools you've never heard of and they will help you generate your social media ads instantaneously. And we're going to be 100 times more productive in that. Okay, who gets hired out of those two students?
The second one, like we know this. And so if you want to protect your job at work, you want to be that second person. I've gone out on my own dime and learned all the tools. I've learned more tools, I've learned how to, how to put them to work in my home life, in my work life, whatever it is. And I am the AI guru in my department.
[00:33:20] Speaker E: So I read this, I don't know, maybe a month ago or a couple months ago. I want to ask you if it's urban legend or if it's true, but a company supposedly had to decide to lay off half the people in some department or something, and they laid off the people that had not been using AI.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: No, that's true. There's actually lots of data on this. There's plenty of articles and everybody's doing that. Like if you're going to cut, you don't cut your AI professionals. I mean those using the tools. And the reason is they're already two or three or four or five times more productive. They're not 10% more productive. Peter Dimandis says the goal is to make someone 10 times more productive in that tax in that task. Right. Using AI versus not. And if you think about blog writing, because it's the easiest one, because we all know what blog posts are, I, today, unlike five years ago today, could write 52 blog posts today. That will roll out over the year. Right. I write my entire year's worth of blog posts. I don't have to hire anyone to do it. I can review everything on my website. I can pick the 52 topics with AI. I can write them today and be done with that task for the year, and then I can deploy an agent to deploy them once a week. I don't have to do anything with blog posts the rest of the year. Who stays? That person or the person who says, hi, I'm your blog post writer, and every week I'll write one.
They're gone.
[00:34:43] Speaker D: Yeah, but I need to play devil's advocate to that a little bit. I guess it depends on what you're blogging about and what's important. But AI still can't factor in experience or, in the case of a law firm, cases that we worked on, that demonstrate that we actually use this expertise. I mean, AI can go out and draft a blog post about the patent process.
Right. But you can get that information anywhere. What makes us unique is the experience that we've had and the clients that we've dealt with.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Yes, but here's the thing. If that is well documented, of course AI can learn from it and absolutely create a post based on your experience.
It doesn't have the experience, but it can internalize that experience as long as you've written about it in some way or documented in some way, period. Full stop.
[00:35:32] Speaker E: Yeah, Kevin, I wanted to bring up one more thing. I wanted to bring up one more thing because I think this is important for people. So I have a chemistry degree.
I don't have a programming background. I don't know how to build websites. But what I'm finding is if I want to do something digitally, I can keep asking and I'll get exact instructions for the exact thing I need to do. So I can teach myself almost anything. Or I can just go back to my reference book, which is if I don't get the right answer from chat, then I ask Gemini. Gemini's gotten a lot better lately, but.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: I think, yes, it's the top model as we speak today.
[00:36:08] Speaker C: I like Gemini.
[00:36:09] Speaker E: I think For a normal person out there, if you don't know how to use these tools, they'll tell you they want you.
[00:36:15] Speaker A: Yes. You can literally go to say Gemini and say, how should I format my request to you? If I want the following, it'll say, if you format it this way and tell me this and tell me who your audience is, et cetera, I will give you the best response. So it'll teach you how to use itself. Right. But I wanted to close with one other thing here because we were talking about music earlier and the use of music.
Think about if you're not. If. If anyone on here is not a musician, right?
You can now literally go and create a hit song and not be a musician. I would argue over the last 10 years, most hit songs were not created by musicians. I don't know what they were. I wouldn't call them music. But that's just. That's a. That's an. Oh, that's an opinion. Right.
[00:37:00] Speaker D: But this is a generational attitude.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Yes, it is. It probably is. They. Certain people said that about Elvis at the time. But this is fascinating because you can go to Suno and you can describe the kind of song you want and what it sounds like, et cetera, and you can get 28 versions of it, and then you can literally publish it. And there are now four, I think, songs that have made the Billboard top 100, that are completely AI generated by an AI artist, that most of them are not actual musicians. They just had it in their head. Now, this is important because if we forward just a few years to Hollywood And I, by 2030, everyone on this call will be able to make a Hollywood quality film for a dollar a minute instead of a million dollars a minute, which is what it cost in Hollywood.
No cameras, no lighting, no actors, no sag, no unions. Nothing against any of that. Just not. You don't need any of it. It's just you and a computer. But we're democratizing the ability to tell stories.
And so today, if you want to do that, you go and get rejected by every Hollywood studio and you go back home and you have your script and nobody wants to tell your story. In 2030, you tell your own story and you put it out there on YouTube and someone is going to make $100 million on a YouTube film that they produce, that they created. They did it on their desktop and they made it for 120 bucks. It's going to happen. And the last thing is, we've already done this with radio, because if this was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, there were five or six national radio superstars that were syndicated nationally, right? And could be heard nationally, could have an audience of millions of listeners. Today, anyone can have a podcast. We have democratized the ability to have a podcast. It's now $200 to get a couple of mics and a camera, right? And you have a podcast. And there's 45 million podcasts out there. And there's, you know, a thousand that matter. And there's some, Mr. Beast and others that are making 100 million a year, like you guys, you know, at the 50 to 100 million a year category.
[00:39:04] Speaker D: More than that. But we don't publicize it, so.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: We don't publicize it, but you get the point, right? And so exactly what we're seeing here in this exact format of what we're doing, if we had to do this 20 years ago, the chance of the two of you having a radio show that's nationally syndicated was almost zero. Even though you had real content, real expertise, and real interest in doing so, you couldn't have done it. No radio network probably would have picked it up. And today you can do it because we've democratized access to it. So that's what's happening with music. It's what's happening with the PhD next to you called ChatGPT.
You have. You have this thing that has 28 PhDs for a penny a minute. So it's incredible times. Use these tools, use them every hour, and you will become an expert.
[00:39:48] Speaker D: Well, that is amazing insight, Kevin. And speaking of AI, we are now moving to our AI segment.
[00:39:56] Speaker E: So, Elizabeth, welcome, everybody, to Real AI Use Cases Business Owners Roundtable. Kevin Sarrace, your life is AI, but is there one way that in particular that you're using AI that in your business that you really like?
[00:40:13] Speaker A: I'm using it five times an hour. Right. But certainly press responses where I opine on the question the press has, and then I let AI take my opinion, not its opinion, my opinion, and rewrite the sentences that are appropriate for quotation. I am using it a lot with Excel because some of the formulas are so complicated. Just write the formula for me. I actually literally can't figure it out, or I'd spend an hour figuring it out. And why do I do that? I'm not adding any value. So think about all of the things you can do every hour with an AI first mentality, with just what's given to you in a. In a handful of models or a handful of tools, and it's going to change Your productivity, get it to help you do the things where you wouldn't add additional value to it anyway.
[00:40:58] Speaker E: Okay, so what I'm trying to do with this segment is to give people ideas on how to use AI in their businesses if they hadn't thought of some of these things. And I find that the people on Passage to Profit in particular are very bright and have excellent ideas. So that's why I really wanted to do it during this show.
So that said, Tyler Dunnigan, no pressure.
What's one way that you're using AI that's really helping your business?
[00:41:24] Speaker B: I use it multiple times a day.
Wake up using it, go to sleep using it, and I have it running in the background when I'm asleep.
I would mean it. And I think the biggest things for us, we build websites with it, we look at reports, we crunch numbers with it, we get opinions from it. It's the third person in a one on one meeting.
[00:41:42] Speaker E: Thank you. So, Jen Millard, one way somehow that it's really helping you with your business.
[00:41:47] Speaker C: Yeah, we use it, I think similar to Kevin and to Tyler. You know, we make water in cans made by brewers. Brewers actually calculate things in ounces, barrels, barrel counts, et cetera. On the retail side, I sell in ounces and cans. So to do that batch yield through all the math to Kevin's point earlier, the formula is quite excessive. So rather than do the exercise of forcing yourself as a human to correct the formula, which will probably be wrong, and to try two more times, we use it a lot for formula creation for Excel, and that has proven to probably be my biggest time saver.
[00:42:24] Speaker E: That's brilliant. Yes, everybody's has been. And so Richard Gerhardt.
[00:42:30] Speaker D: Well, it's a tough crowd to keep up with, that's for sure.
And I guess I'll have two examples, a business example, but also a personal example, because I think that you can use ChatGPT in your normal everyday life. So the first example is I wanted to analyze the timesheet. So if you're working at a law firm, we have a software that records all the time that the attorneys work on a particular project. And I looked at our timesheets for 20, 25. We had 42,000 time entries that were created by our team.
And I put those into Copilot, not my favorite AI tool, but it has confidentiality protections in it. So it was appropriate for this kind of analysis. And it just really came back with a wealth of information that would have taken me, you know, it would have been impossible for me to do it. And So I can see what kinds of projects are profitable, where we're getting most of our revenue from, how our team members are doing. And I just kept asking IT questions and then it prepared management reports based on the information that I thought it was most important for our team to see.
And you wouldn't have really had this kind of flexibility and this level of analysis before using just the software that comes with the firm management software where the timesheets are recorded.
So it's really been a boon and it's offered some actionable insights that I think are going to help us do a better job. I would encourage people to not just think of it as a business tool, but as something that can be helpful on a lot of different levels.
[00:44:20] Speaker E: I gave a presentation at Podfest and the name of the presentation was 5 Tips to Influence what ChatGPT says about yout and your Podcast.
So when I did that presentation, I went to Google Gemini, I went to ChatGPT and I went to Perplexity Claude and asked them all for the five tips and then went through and sorted. There was a lot more information than that. So I went through and pulled out everything that was relevant. One thing I will say that I thought was pretty funny was I asked each of them which LLM is the most accurate and they all gave me a different answer. And what do you think they gave me themselves. So Google Gemini says, oh, Gemini Claude says Claude.
[00:44:59] Speaker D: But you bring up a good point though, and that is, and you say this all the time, but I'm just reiterating it. And that is you have to sometimes check with different GPTs because you will get different results between them. You will.
[00:45:12] Speaker E: So Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind is coming up. Two more incredible stories from entrepreneurs are coming up and IP in the News is coming up. And this one is a really cool one. So don't go away.
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[00:47:23] Speaker D: Passage to profit continues with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. We're a nationally syndicated radio show heard in 38 markets across the U.S. we'd like to do a shout out to our affiliate KRFE, 580am and 99.5 FM in Lubbock, Texas. Thanks for listening. And also our podcast is ranked in the top 3% of podcasts globally according to Listen Notes. And we are also a podcast database Top Interview Entrepreneur Podcast. So subscribe to the Passage to Profit show on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and also on the iHeart app. And now it's time for Intellectual Property News. And of course, we're going to be touching on AI Today we're going to be talking about the intersection of law, celebrity and artificial intelligence. Actor Matthew McConaughey, who is one of my favorite actors, by the way, has taken a proactive step to protect himself from AI Deepfakes by formally trademarking and asserting control over his voice, likeness and personal identity. And let's be honest, if you've heard Matthew's voice once, you know who it is, right? And that's, I guess, the point.
[00:48:42] Speaker E: Well, the concern is that, as we were saying, AI tools can clone a voice in seconds. And so I am quite sure, I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure that Matthew McConaughey would not want to have someone clone his voice, saying, yeah, I hate dogs. All dogs, every dog.
That's not his brand, and I don't think he hates dogs. Right. But somebody could do that to him and put it all over the place, and then, you know, that would hurt his brand a lot.
So I think people have to really be careful and not let people steal their voice.
[00:49:16] Speaker D: This is really about control. It's about controlling his brand.
And he's trying to use trademark law, along with privacy law and also unfair competition law, to draw a line and say, look it, folks, you can't use my voice or my likeness unless you get my permission.
And so that's where he's really going with this, of course.
[00:49:42] Speaker E: And we're talking about him because he's so well known, but it can happen to anybody. And if AI can convincingly be you, then the question becomes, who owns you?
[00:49:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:54] Speaker D: I mean, and that's the heart of it. And what's also fascinating to me as an intellectual property lawyer is that the law is really kind of struggling to keep up with some of these AI trends, and attorneys are trying to use more traditional tools to protect their clients, but the tools don't really fit the situations especially well. And so while Matthew has announced that he's protected his voice with trademarks, it's not strictly true. We checked. He has eight trademark registrations, but they're only for segments of his voice. So for particular statements that he repeats often, you can't yet protect the sound of a person's voice with trademark or copyright. You can protect the voice if it appears in a film. You can protect the film or a podcast. You can protect how the podcast is produced and the words that are said, but you can't just protect a voice yet. So I think he's taking a proactive approach here. I think he's probably trying to scare away some people, but he's also leading the way for a lot of other celebrities who have concerns and consumers are.
[00:51:08] Speaker E: Already confused, and you don't want to inadvertently use somebody else's voice if it's playing in the background or whatever. We have a whole presentation about that. So was it him?
[00:51:18] Speaker D: Was it AI well, that's just it. And, you know, customer confusion is sort of the bedrock of trademark law.
[00:51:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:51:25] Speaker D: The idea is to prevent people from being confused.
And I guess we'll see if Mr. McConaughey has any success with his legal strategy, and, you know, how he can continue to protect his brand. So.
[00:51:40] Speaker E: So Hollywood or Main street, this is where intellectual property is heading next. And I think it was Mark Cuban who said in the age of AI, intellectual property is king.
[00:51:48] Speaker D: There you go. So that's this week's intellectual property news.
[00:51:53] Speaker E: So Tyler Dunnigan with turnserve.com we want to hear your story.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: Turnserve is a platform of services supply similar solutions and we partner with some of the largest property management firms in the US and we in, we make their facilities rent ready, we keep them stocked up, we communicate with their, their tenants, with their teams, we dispatch and, and we're in logistics all the way around. In a nutshell, we make the experience of getting a facility ready for the next renter or for the occupants that much more streamlined. And how I got into that was, you know, I used to be in single family real estate flipping houses and it wasn't quite big enough. So I talked to mentor, they got me involved in multifamily real estate, apartment complexes and whatnot. And I learned the management, I was a there, I was in the finance, you name it, and we did everything really well. The only issue that we kept on having was I could not find the vendors or suppliers that spoke our language or were able to show up and be predictable enough to provide the solutions that we needed. And probably on the tail end of my journey in corporate America, in that management facility, I ended up building the solutions that I was looking for while there outside of it in order to help us out. And it worked on a small scale and it was just to provide services for us that we needed. Not really for profit by any means. It was a cog at that point, just helped pay the bills, skills. But then it worked so well for us. I had friends in the industry that were asking for similar services and hey, we're struggling here, can you guys can help us? Next thing you know, I had 2, 3, 5, 10 phone calls from friends around the industry and I completely left corporate America and I went full fledged into Turnserve and fast forward today. You know, it started off just me and my spouse and then we're doing everything. And now in the past few years we have launched four different brands underneath of our umbrella we have services, supply, software, patented products, you name it, we were one of America's fastest growing companies last year, the top 500 in the US and at our peak, because it's seasonal, we had over 62 employees and we were in five different markets. And I say all that because that growth journey has been fun, but it's been necessary for us to Talk about things like we're talking about today, like AI and updating things as we go and being innovative and whatnot.
And where we're at right now is, you know, the journey's kind of surreal to, to reflect on. It started off at my kitchen table and now we are in, like I said, five different cities. We partner with Sherwin Williams and all these big other providers and all these massive real estate complexes, and we're trying to be fast. And we constantly lean on conversations like we're having here to think about how can we innovate, how can we test and make sure that we're talking about the right things. That's been my journey so far in the corporate side and getting into entrepreneurship and expanding. And we're going to heavily lean on software dev as a continued path here for the next two years.
[00:54:43] Speaker E: How did you get these relationships with these big companies like Sherwin Williams step by step?
[00:54:48] Speaker B: You know, I think the first thing is really just providing something that that's unique and needed, I think as creative. Sometimes we create something that's really interesting for us and it doesn't resonate with anybody. It doesn't provide a purpose. And that's a trap that I've fallen into quite a lot, being active and engaged all the time, as I am. But I think that for us, you know, we, we look at the market, we look at our customer needs and we look at what we're able to do as a, as a company. And by way of example, for Sherwin Williams, they're a huge Fortune 500. They're in all these complexes that we're in. They have an old school way of doing things. We were looking at the market, looking at the products, and we just realized there's probably a better way, better solution, a better system to provide what we were doing for this particular situation. Liquid Liner is our bathtub brand and essentially we renew and rejuvenate bathtubs. And we have software that goes into that, we have technology and products. It's a long story. But where I'm going with that, to answer your question, is we just developed our own product because we're trying all these things on the market. So we ended up finding the right partners. We ended up doing our R and D. We had 70 iterations of our own product before it was, you know, thumbs up. So we went through the whole patent process. You know, that was a. Learned a lot there. And in that time we were testing it, had a third party tested, it came back, best characteristics, best testing results in the Industry and its segment. We're lucky because we're out of Cleveland, Ohio. That's Sherwin Williams backyard as well. And we knew people that knew them, they knew of us. And just little by little, you know, they, they said, hey, I had a customer that's interested in what you guys do. Do you want to be introduced? Next thing you know, it starts off in just a casual conversations with people that you know around the industry to being in their boardroom giving a presentation on a, on a product that you patented. And now they're talking about how quickly they can get it across the US and, and sold through their stores to their other clients. So step by step is. Is the answer there.
[00:56:34] Speaker D: You have a couple of different companies, right, and they're providing different kinds of products and services. So could you give an example of, of sort of the customer journey? How would somebody find you? And then once they become a partner, what is it that you exactly provide to them?
[00:56:51] Speaker B: So how people find us is one, they have a huge need. So somebody has a, you know, they manage a facility, a building. They have 20,000 residents across the U.S. they're short on staff, they communicate, you know, old ways. It takes them 10 days to send a letter, all those kind of things. But people find us to expedite their process between renters. In a nutshell, that's what we do.
[00:57:11] Speaker D: If you're a property manager and you have, have units that are turning over, you need certain things done to the units between tenants, and that's where you come in.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: Yeah, you have a matter of days, not weeks. And the industry is built for weeks and months. And we do it in a matter of hours or days because of things like our software. Our systems sync directly to our property management customers and that creates a predictable, routine, quality of life item. It's good for us, it's good for them. We show up, we dispatch. We also have software to do that that's unique to us. And we handle whatever it might be from services, supply, un readiness, occupancy readiness, permits, it doesn't matter what it is, and then punch out, closure, repeat. So really we take this nuanced process that's probably 20 steps that normally took a lot of manual work between those and we automated and streamlined, we speak their language. We have things that are in their hand where they don't have to go back to their computer. You know, it's very quick, predictable.
[00:58:05] Speaker D: So you would like, for example, paint the apartment or fix a faucet. And so you would secure a contractor to do that.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Yes, we facilitate, coordinate dispatch.
[00:58:14] Speaker E: I'm just curious, what kind of things do you have patents on right now?
[00:58:18] Speaker B: It's a lot around performance coatings. You know, we do have some in house IP and whatnot. That's not probably, I shouldn't probably call it ip. You guys know this better from your seats where it's unique to us, but not for like licensable display or use, so to say, you know, but, but a lot of ours are like I said, like liquid liner and there's a few iterations of that product. We have a backpack feature for, for our, our service systems and whatnot. They're all lo.
The service and supply realm is what we focus on right now for our audience.
[00:58:48] Speaker D: Those are typically considered to be trade secrets, right? They're a secret that gives you a commercial advantage. And so every business has them and, but it's, and it's good to protect them, you know too as well. So it does give you a competitive advantage.
[00:59:03] Speaker E: So how are you marketing this?
[00:59:05] Speaker B: You know, it's been a lot of grassroots and referral based business so far. We're in a unique space because the industry that we're in, we go after big companies that manage thousands of apartments. We don't go after thousands of apartments, so to say. And when in that game, if you get one customer and it just could be by introduction, out of dire need, out of SEO, search result, whatever it might be, they find you once. And we're in that unique position where it's kind of like an anti selling industry, meaning they have properties throughout every major city in the US and they, their question to us is, hey, how fast can we scale you across and get you into these other avenues? Whereas a lot of the times in sales you need to fight and compete for those things. For us, it's a unique proposition where they push us out as far as we can go. But it's a combination of online presence, workmanship, all those kind of things, grassroots. But really if you just kind of break and burst that bubble, you'll get into 20, 30 different property management companies that might have a million plus apartments under management and you're going to be very busy.
[01:00:02] Speaker E: Kevin, do you have a question or comment?
[01:00:04] Speaker A: I think what you're doing is brilliant and it's brilliant because there is a need.
Technology can help reduce the cost of dealing with this, prepping, you know, apartments, as you say, and it's a space I'm relatively familiar with. And if you get a large, you know, a large building, they've got hundreds or thousands of Units and they're changing all the time. See, there's no value in them trying to deal with each of those. The painting, the redoing, the cleaning of the carpets, the, the, the prepping with furniture for taking pictures and all. It's just there needs to be a system to do that. And, you know, what did you do? You found a pain point. You found a pain point, an actual pain point. You said, we're going to solve that pain point and try to keep a little bit for ourselves. The best businesses are not people who come up with solutions where there's no problem. You found the problem first and then said, I think I can have a solution that's scalable. So you can grow a very large business. And it's unique, it's good for you. Absolutely.
[01:01:01] Speaker D: Thank you.
[01:01:01] Speaker B: Two points on that too, to speak to it too. So obviously the space is essential, it's living, it's predictable.
50% of renters move every single year. And not a lot of people realize that. You see a complex that has 500 units at it, that means 250 of those need serviced every single year. You multiply that across all of the units under management. There is a huge shortage of workers that could do these kind of things. And the other point I was going to make is this.
Most of these complexes, they rely on outside vendors and suppliers. By way of example, the average apartment community, they need around one maintenance technician per 100 units, the average today because of the labor shortages, there's normally one maintenance technician servicing over three to 400 units on average. They could probably forex their staff and be adequately staffed at that point. So there's a huge shortage, creating huge demand for rush reoccurring every single year.
[01:01:52] Speaker E: So wait a minute, so if AI takes your job, you got a job for these people?
[01:01:56] Speaker A: We do.
[01:01:56] Speaker B: We're always hiring.
[01:01:58] Speaker A: Look, people ask me all the time what jobs are absolutely safe. Safe maintenance, H Vac, plumber, electrician. We for decades have told everyone to go to college and they did, God bless. But they didn't go to trade school. And so people are retiring out of the trades, you know, multiple times faster than people coming in. And it's actually a serious problem. And AI is not going to be a plumber or a maintenance tech very easily, even a robotic AI for decades.
So these are very safe jobs. Just to bring AI back into the conversation for a second, it's yes, go, go to trade school, learn how to do these trades, learn how to repair H Vac. It turns out it's really hard and we need people to do it.
[01:02:44] Speaker D: My dad was H Vac and he had a great job. I don't know how he would respond to AI, but he was an H Vac guy and I guess he would smelling down from heaven, telling me, ha ha, I would still have my job, Richard, but you as an attorney may have your head on the so, hey.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: In Silicon Valley, we're not hiring entry level coders. And even if you are going to get a job, it's not going to be the rate that it was just a few years ago. However, if you're a plumber and you're willing to show up in an hour, not schedule like I've got a clogged toilet, I need you here in an hour. No problem. $350 house call. And they're only going to be there for 15 minutes. So you can figure it out and say, well, if they were working every hour, $350 an hour is about $700,000 a year for summer. Why code when you can make 700k a year, you know, fixing toilets?
[01:03:39] Speaker E: But that was another question I wanted to ask Tyler about. What do you do about the guys that don't show up? Because I've worked with contractors and they may or may not show up.
[01:03:47] Speaker D: Yeah. Does your software fix that?
[01:03:49] Speaker B: Yes and no. I think they're always. Anytime there's a human element, you're going to get human things. We do our best to mitigate as much as possible. So I'll give a quick example when you submit on our website. There's a lot of mechanisms. It's called a round robin. And pretty much that means there's certified installers that are appropriate for that job job that are being. That are able to be selected and dispatched to a certain outcome. Now, the way it works is that the installer, the contractor, whoever else it is, they're able to select and they. And we place them based off the location, ability and things like that. And if one isn't available right then and there and they hit the dispatch in time or arrival on time, and it's geofence and all these kind of things, if they aren't there, the next step is, and there's an arsenal of people on that round robin waiting to take that work order or what have you. So there's a lot of steps in manual work, service work, and that's never perfect, but we really try to safeguard as much as possible to avoid that and be as predictable and as smooth as possible. That way you're not waiting days and days and days, you have a matter of hours in our space.
[01:04:47] Speaker E: It's like the Uber model.
[01:04:49] Speaker B: Similar. Yes, very similar. We will certify installers, they show up to any of our locations, they, they'll sit in classes with us. We'll make sure that they know what they're doing, they know our process, they know how to, to be safe, we verify and vet their work. And there's an arsenal of things that we do to verify how they operate on site as well. Well, we deliberately do a video with them before they leave a certain job site and they go through a 20 check process and there's a lot of safeguards and quality controls that we do to ensure that things are going as they should.
[01:05:17] Speaker E: So how do people get a hold of you?
[01:05:18] Speaker B: Two ways. So turnserve.com if you need any help property wise and outside of that, you can find us on LinkedIn and myself there too. That's where we mingle the most.
[01:05:27] Speaker D: Passage to profit with Richard analyst Gerhardt.
[01:05:30] Speaker E: So now Jen Millard has been waiting patiently for her Turn.
She has mainlove.com welcome Jen. Tell us your story.
[01:05:39] Speaker C: I started Maine Love two years ago now, so we're coming up on our second anniversary. So Mainers are very practical. There's a lot of conversation about water. There's lots of conversations around plastic and permanent chemicals. Those things can all carry on over there. Mainers are very practical and with the decline of alcohol, this model is really to enable brewers to diversify revenue and make water when they're not making beer.
So I am an asset, light, fast growing CPG product. So I don't own any factories which allows all that expense to be actually reallocated to sales and marketing, which is what drives cpg.
So we have been working on what it's basically distributed manufacturing. So we use multiple brewers to make the same product. Licensed in 15 states, we are moving to distribution in five and I sit here in Florida as number six. So we are off to a great start. We did about 21,000 cases last year and about a half a million dollars just in four months and predominantly from Maine. So we have, you know, great aspirations. Everyone needs water here and water in aluminum. I would say every rural community. The, you know, obviously everyone has lots of headlines around water and water quality, water scarcity.
But really one of the other factors is recycling. In rural communities. People think that glass is the best thing to drink out of. If you live in a rural community, that glass is not being recycled. So there is not a single place in Maine where glass is Recycled, it is piled into piles and shipped down to New Jersey.
And honestly I've been told there's only two or three furnaces that are hot enough to actually do glass recycling and they're in New Jersey.
So the aluminum can is. Because every brewer makes a 16 ounce aluminum can. It's a great value to the consumer and the consumer knows how to recycle it. And 70% of that can will be repurposed in 45 days.
[01:07:40] Speaker E: Excellent. I could see that Richard wanted to make a New Jersey joke.
[01:07:43] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, lucky us. I mean, we're getting all of these glass bottles from Maine and we can't recycle them fast enough. So I hope somebody's working on that.
[01:07:52] Speaker C: Well, I did just get a water license for New Jersey, so we'll be entering the New York market probably towards.
[01:07:58] Speaker D: The all that about. You have to get a license to sell water.
[01:08:01] Speaker C: Interestingly, drinking water is regulated by every state and currently no one is answering the phone at the fda. So that has been entertaining. And I have used AI to solve some of the lack of phone calls I might add to the fda. So this is simply water in aluminum to solve a problem for people who don't want to drink out of plastic. And our biggest impact is in stadium and colleges where you might have 20,000 people attending a concert. 20% of that 20,000 are going to buy water.
And ideally I'd like it to be in aluminum because it's better for people and it's easier to recycle.
[01:08:39] Speaker D: Sometimes we hear about this microplastics, right. From bottled water. And we consume a lot of that around our house. I do kind of worry about some sort of accumulation. What's the story with aluminum? Is there any kind of residual that leaches into the water that.
[01:08:57] Speaker C: So each can is, does have a liner. We actually use a bee pony liner special liner, which is an epoxy liner. That's the closest thing you're going to get to no plastic. There's no plastic in aluminum. Of course, even in glass, when you twist off the top, what they're finding is that twist off top is grinding plastic into the glass. And it actually has more microplastics in glass than it does in plastic. And so we are really focused on providing a consumer choice choice. And that's how we position this product is you do not offer an aluminum choice today. You have clients, customers that would like to purchase an aluminum. And so we offer an aluminum choice.
[01:09:35] Speaker E: So your innovation with your water is really the container.
[01:09:39] Speaker C: Our innovation with water is the Creation process using multiple brewers to get them licensed to produce drinking water under one single brand in a distributed fashion and to keep the economics for that creation of the water in Maine.
[01:09:55] Speaker E: How do you produce water?
[01:09:57] Speaker C: We utilize brewers that are already connected to. The best source in the nation is Sebago Lake, Maine. This is the municipal water for 2 out of 5 mainers. So when I first started the company, people would say, Jen, if you want water, just go get some from the faucet. That's exactly it. So if you've not lived in an area with water scarcity or water quality issues, people in Maine take it for granted. This lake is connected. Portland water district connects 45 breweries to the same facility of water.
So we utilize the brewers that are connected to that same body of water. It is the gold standard of water for beer.
Literally, if you're making beer in Colorado, they're changing their water chemistry to reflect Sebago Lake, Maine. And so if you have the gold standard of water for beer, why are we not producing it in cans for consumers?
And it's important to me the word water does not appear in the Maine economic plan one time for the next 20 years and I think that's erroneous.
Maine has a long history of natural resources. Whether you're timber, whether you're lobster, whether you're blueberries, whether you're craft beer. Why should water be any different? You know, really, we're selling the sense of place, the nostalgia, the providence of Maine. We're so proud of the source. We are the only water that puts the source on the front of the water.
[01:11:14] Speaker A: Water.
[01:11:14] Speaker C: Even Fiji water is not always from Fiji.
[01:11:17] Speaker D: So, Kevin, do you have any thoughts or comments about the water business?
[01:11:22] Speaker A: I do, actually. Which shocks you probably. But you are right. You said something, Jen, that maybe people didn't pick up on. But over the last five to 10 years, there's been a decline in our, a larger decline in the drinking of alcohol across the board. And the youngest generation is drinking much less than we did when we were that age.
[01:11:42] Speaker C: 65% of Gen Z does not drink.
[01:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it's fascinating. And, and look, and look, the, the, the data are clear about this. It turns out probably no amount of alcohol is good for you. That's not going to change my habits, but it is changing Gen Z. And so why not put really high quality, good tasting, safe water into cans? All of these breweries, all of these companies, they can make cans like crazy easy. Cans are very easy to recycle compared to glass and much less energy by the way aluminum melts at a much lower temperature, re melting glass is like melting sand.
[01:12:19] Speaker C: And you know, Kevin, and there's only a couple places in New Jersey you know that's right.
[01:12:25] Speaker A: It's very hard. As it turns out, most of it doesn't get recycled. Most of it gets just dumped into the dump. Right. And the energy to recycle it equals that of the energy of making new. So nobody really wants the recycled glass. So aluminum is great. It's a great idea.
And, and we know that people are buying water, they're buying Fiji water, but they don't really want it in plastic anymore. So if we can put water in cans and that becomes normalized, it's a very good thing. Lastly, you know, if you're in California airports, it's illegal to sell water in bottles. So the only water you can get is in cans.
[01:12:59] Speaker C: And that's starting to see more municipalities at the zip code level that are moving no single use plastic. Plastic. We've also helped 14 colleges become no single use plastic.
[01:13:11] Speaker A: Water is a great idea and it's a growing business. And you know, you can ultimately have a very large business. And look, Pepsi, Coke, all these people, they are in the water business, but they've been unfortunately, mostly in it in plastic bottles.
[01:13:24] Speaker C: Yeah, Liquid death is my primary competitor. One of my goals here is to enable an aluminum category on shelf. If you look today, the aluminum is all over the place. Merchants don't know how to merchandise it. I was a retailer in my first career, so we really want to be frenemies to liquid def and help help merchants line up an aluminum category in store so customers know where to shop for it and everyone knows how to recycle aluminum. I'm not teaching anyone to do anything new.
And unique to Florida is really the tam here, Liquid death is going public at 1.5 billion. They have less than 1% of the market.
I believe Maine to Florida to be $100 million business over five years. And I think that's a reasonable assumption.
[01:14:07] Speaker D: So Jen, how did we get to this point where we're buying bottled water? Because when I was a kid growing up, you just went to the faucet.
[01:14:16] Speaker C: Loss of trust. People don't trust their tap. They don't trust how their water is being treated. You think of all of what's impacting the cultural conversation around water. It ultimately comes to distress.
Is there chemicals in here? Is it in a lead pipe? You know, it, it becomes distrust of your municipality. You know, boiling orders. For example, in Austin, I had a beautiful Boiling order a couple weeks ago. How does that happen in a city like Austin? Right. It happens. So it's really this loss of trust. And so one of the things that I believe that Maine brings forward is a humble and authenticity from Maine that is very trustworthy. That's why our brand is very straightforward. It is a Gen Z brand. This is water purely from Maine. There was no other marketing. It is directly what you see, what you get.
[01:15:05] Speaker E: I do want to say I quit drinking out of drinking fountains after I saw this in college. This nicely dressed young man, nice looking everything hacked and puked and sneezed all over the drinking fountain while he was getting a drink. And it was so disgusting.
[01:15:23] Speaker C: Well, to answer the original question, statistically, people that are born outside of the us, Central America, South America, they're taught from birth that you don't drink tap water. You won't go to a family in Mexico and see them drinking tap water. It won't happen. They buy water two to three times greater than an average American. Maine statistically has the best water. Water and Sebago Lake is so clean that it has a waiver for solids from the epa. So when that water gets to my house, in my house, it has not been filtered. It has just been sanitized with chloridamide, but not filtered. It is that pure. So you can look, this is a 300 foot deep lake and 5 miles wide and you can look down 50ft in this lake. It is very, very clean.
But it's really the forest that keeps the water the purest because there's no water treatment plants here. It's actually the forest that is doing the water treatment. So the give back for this business is actually to land trusts so that private land can be made for public access for hiking and environmental exploration, but more to preserve the trees around the watersheds so that we protect the quality of the water. Water.
[01:16:39] Speaker D: Is rainwater the cleanest water?
[01:16:42] Speaker C: You'd have to ask a better chemist than me and I suspect it's the catch of the rain at the time and what jurisdiction you're in.
[01:16:48] Speaker E: No, absolutely not. I tried that experiment when I was a kid and the water was full of all sorts of particulates.
[01:16:54] Speaker C: It pulls everything out.
[01:16:56] Speaker D: So basically, no matter where you go, you're going to get dirty water if you're not careful. Unless you get it from Maine.
[01:17:02] Speaker A: Right?
[01:17:02] Speaker C: Unless you get it from Maine. That's the point. Point. Exactly.
[01:17:06] Speaker E: Well, the other thing about your aluminum, as a chemist, I just want to bring up when plastic water bottles get really hot. They do emit chemicals and aluminum I think is a, you know, much more solid. Solid to say. Yeah, so to speak. And it doesn't do that.
[01:17:21] Speaker C: The can that we use, I have an 18 month lifespan on my product because I don't want product sit on shelf longer than 18 months. But there's another company that uses the exact same can can and makes emergency water that's good for 25 years. I doubt it tastes fantastic at 25, but I bet it's drinkable.
[01:17:38] Speaker E: So where do I have to go to buy this? Can I order it online?
[01:17:41] Speaker C: Yeah, you can order it online. At mainlove.com we run a DTC, a direct to consumer subscription.
And you can find us on the eastern seaboard moving down 95 from Maine down to Massachusetts, primarily at Hannaford Brothers Seven Elevens convenience stores. But our larger brand expressions are actually with sports teams and typically soccer teams. So we do a lot with the soccer team in Maine, which is the Harts of Pine and their youth foundation. I'm down here in Florida meeting with Fort Lauderdale United for the same because the biggest impact to reduce single use plastic. All these facilities serve water in plastic bottles and to make it easier on the facility and better for the gas. Yes, we should convert them to metal.
[01:18:26] Speaker E: I have to try this water.
[01:18:29] Speaker C: Anyone on this call wants to email me at jennanelove I would be happy to send everyone a sample. No worries.
[01:18:36] Speaker E: I will do that. Listeners, you are listening to the Passage to Profit show with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. Did we have some great discussions? If you missed any of the show, our podcast comes out tomorrow. But don't go away because when we come back, it's secrets of the entrepreneurial mind. And we'll be right back. Back.
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[01:19:38] Speaker G: 8002-7714-3280-0800, 277-1432, 800-277-1432. That's 800-277-1432.
[01:19:51] Speaker D: It's passage to profit. Alicia Morrissey is our programming director at Passage to Profit and she's also a fantastic jazz vocalist. You can scroll to the bottom of the passage to profitshow.com website and check.
[01:20:06] Speaker E: Out her album and now it is Time or Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Mind.
So I am going to start with Kevin Serrace. Kevin, what is a secret you can share with our audience?
[01:20:18] Speaker A: My biggest secret is in my upcoming book called the Joy Success Cycle and it is to take every task and make every task a joy moment. Every task. I don't care if it's firing someone, I don't care if it's dealing with a rough customer or a rough situation. Everything can be a learning moment, it can be a joy moment. And the more joy you bring to every task task, the more successful you will be.
[01:20:40] Speaker E: Excellent. Okay, Tyler Dunnigan, what is a secret you can share?
[01:20:44] Speaker B: You have to stay curious. When you're open minded in every situation, every scenario, that's how you innovate. If you don't stay curious, you're going to get close minded, repeat results and it's not going to be that great. Stay curious.
[01:20:55] Speaker E: Love that. Jen Millard, what's your secret?
[01:20:58] Speaker C: Well, I think you have to have resilience and bravery because I never hear no, I just hear not right now. Right.
So you have to have that persistent and that resilience to hear no a thousand times and to believe in what you're building with facts and with data, but really to be brave enough to execute it.
[01:21:18] Speaker E: Excellent. And Richard Gearhart, what is your secret?
[01:21:21] Speaker D: I'm going to say stay up to date on what's going on in your industry. When we were at podfest last week, which is a big conference of podcasters, in case you haven't heard of it, a lot of people talking a lot for sure.
But one of the, the great things about going to the conference is really hearing about all the new technologies, the new approaches, and then taking that information back and incorporating it into our content generation. Right. So, you know, staying on top of your industry is so important and there's so many tools now coming out, like AI tools, for example, that we were talking about that really make a difference. And by staying on top, you are also keeping yourself competitive. And so the businesses that, that want to continue, they want to succeed and grow, need to know what's going on in their industry, what their competitors are doing and what leverage is available from.
[01:22:18] Speaker E: New technologies that is a really good one. And mine is going to be don't just take an answer from one of the LLMs, ChatGPT or perplexity or Claude or Google Gemini. Don't just take their first answer because sometimes they'll say they can't do it and then you can just keep digging deeper. So I'm very analytical.
I ask a lot of questions. So I just keep asking and asking and asking and asking in different ways and eventually they will cough up the answer. And then the other thing, if you're just getting new with these AI tools, what I think is the very best thing about using these tools above all is it never treats you like you asked a stupid question. So you can ask as many idiotic stupid questions as you want and it will never treat you like you're stupid. And in fact, it makes may say, oh, that's a good question.
[01:23:06] Speaker D: Yeah, if you're talking with ChatGPT, it's like they have a very optimistic view of whatever you're doing. Yes, but it's nice. I mean, I get these dopamine hits from ChatGPT, right? It's like I type in the query and then it says, yes, that is an excellent question. You know, I get better strokes from ChatGPT than just about anywhere.
[01:23:24] Speaker A: So stop asking it if it loves you because, oh, don't do that all day. I'm telling you that. Ask your wife. Do not ask. ChatGPT always love you back.
[01:23:36] Speaker D: So that's great. That's it for us. Passage to Profit is a Gear Media Studios production. It's a nationally syndicated radio show appearing on 38 stations across the U.S. in addition, passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleishman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, our studio assistant, Rishiket Bussari, and our social media powerhouse, Carolina Tabares. Look for our podcast tomorrow. Anywhere you get your podcast. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
