Dashboard: The Big Story in Small Business

[Music] welcome to another 21 hats dashboard brought to you by our sponsor the great game of business I'm Lauren felin I'm here with Gan marks to talk about the things we think business owners should be following this week welcome Jean I am so happy to be here Lauren let's talk about what you think business owners should be following this week let's hear what it is Bring It On well we I think we agree on this because I got three stories that you've written recently uh that I want to talk about so um let's start with this one you recently wrote about uh Team Building platforms that can help business owners engage employees especially if some or all of those employees are are working remotely I have to say I was a little surprised to see this I would have expected you to write about platforms that help owners spy on their employees to catch them when they're not working but but you went the other way with this one yeah first of all I I'm actually surprised that you feel that way I mean I know I complain about the workers and this and that whatever but you're a little suspicious sometimes Jean wait a second but I have often said that you know I I let my employees they do what they're going to do I give them autonomy they're they're grown-ups they're adults and I bristle at these companies that use this these monitoring software products you know you're absolutely right you have said that here before and I also know that how you treat your employees uh sometimes I think you you come across tougher in the things you write than the way you handle your employees oh no I I just it's just a mutual respect that's all I I you know I think business owners should respect their employees I think employees should also have respect as well for their jobs and their bosses and when I don't see that that's what I get that's with the Quiet quitting and the you know you know partially working Mondays or whatever it is you know you know that try that's so disrespectful to me you know it's funny so I and the monitoring software I kind of equated the monitoring software to um when my kids were like younger and they were on Facebook and you like every parent goes through like oh we should be monitoring what our kids are doing online and my wife and I tried it for like about a minute and we're like we can't I mean I literally felt my IQ going down and saying you know what there's got to be better ways to make sure your kids are you know behaving right did you find those ways uh no uh that's I didn't either good many stories for other but but so okay so put aside the monitoring software I did I I did talk a lot about with um with this one company um called BDS trust there or benefits trust they're they're they're in Philly they are like basically a a consulting firm a benefits firm they try to help uh people around the country uh get access to government benefits good for them they have a distributed Workforce that's this is what's important here and um they they really became virtual uh when covid happened so they're like every other company out there everybody that's listening to this we have work from home people fair enough and these work from home people um you know you want to keep them motivated and productive and still kind of engage with the company so there's been this like sign ific an increase in popularity I'm seeing among a bunch of my clients of like gamification applications which are pretty inexpensive by the way they're like three to five bucks a month you know an employee um the one that I featured in this piece was was by bonusly um bonusly uh has its competitors so they're not the only game in town uh BDS trust uses them and um what bonusly does Lauren it's like um I call it the Harry Potter of gamification applications it's like everybody gets points uh managers and employees and you award points to each other like you know hey Lauren you know G great job on that game of business project that you worked on uh 10 points for Gryffindor you know wait who who Awards the points your colleagues or your boss both both so the boss can award points and then you can award points to a colleague a fellow colleague and then at the end of a period uh whatever points that you've got Ted up you can cash them in and you can use them for like gift cards or you can use them for um you can turn it into cash some people take those points and they uh they they you can donate it to charity as well which is great so these are all like different options for um just keeping employees engaged and this one client absolutely loved using it I mean they they thought that it was uh uh it had really you know increased involvement you know what the other thing I learned about this Lauren about all these you know sort of when I was writing this is that work from home is no longer just work from home it's not it's not good enough anymore to say hey okay fine you can work two days a week from home and then that's it there's like a lot of indirect sort of costs and things that you need to do to properly set up your employees to work from home like for example if you're going to have somebody work from home you really need to make sure that your it firm gets involved and make sure that they're secure and right not doing stuff from their their middle graders device and if they're working from home you really should have good collaboration software and if they're working from home you really should have some type of a a rewards platform like bonusly or something else to keep your employees connected to each other and engaged like it's not just working from home anymore it's like a a package of things that you need to make sure that you're providing so that they succeed does that make sense it does I have to say you know I've spent most of my career as an employee and when they've when I've been in places that tried things like this I've always been kind of a reluctant participant right you know especially I I've been to places where they did a lot of you know things to encourage employees to give a colleague a pat on the back and you know there were some kinds of re there was always some kind of reward for that even if it was um you know just being called out publicly for for being a good human being um yeah and it it just there's something that always felt a little bit faked or false to me I I I don't know do you how do you feel about that yeah so it's funny there's I actually just posted on Twitter this week um this video that um it just caught my attention it's it's not an anti- employee video but um it is um it was a scene from Madmen where uh John Ham as Don Draper was um uh he was with I forget the name of the the the redheaded the actress who um um that that he was anyway she was upset with him and he was said to her you know I you give me ideas and I pay you and she was like yes but you never say thank you to me and he's like that's what the money's for you know right so there there's a lot of bosses and some employees that that are like Hey listen you know you don't need to give me this you can just you know pay me well and I'll do my job do you know what I mean like that's what I need but there are other employees that like to be recognized elsewhere you know they like and and the game is different now with so many people working remote at least part of the time you've been remote for quite some time have you tried any of these platforms no and I I think I'm going to try it now it's going to cost me more it's not just like the cost per month for employee but um you know if if an employe is gonna get a gift card somebody's G have to buy it you know what I mean you know I know who yeah or or if they earn cash or if they want to take the money and give it to a charity um you know like somebody's got to be in the middle of all that so it's but it that money can't be that much I mean if it actually works you'll be happy to pay that money I Su like yeah I agree I mean if it's 50 bucks a month for a gift card or something I mean come on you know what I mean but people are um I I don't know I mean I have to think about it only for my company because I was thinking of trying it but you know things have been fine and and the people that I employ I have a most have one guy that works for me who's in his late 20s but everybody else are over 35 they're they're a little bit that much older whether or not I don't know they've never asked for this I don't think that they you know this is something that would be it just seems like it's a younger person's game do you know what I mean Maybe I'm Wrong maybe I'm wrong I don't know it's interesting it depends on the culture of your Workforce all I know is that this company loves it and this uh I interviewed the CEO of bonusly they've got like tens of thousands of you know employees that use this and you know it's a platform for you know for people that are trying to make connections among all of your remote workers it could be right for your company makes sense all right next topic uh we've talked a lot about artificial intelligence Jean and uh I hesitate to keep coming back to it but I'm kind of thinking it you've been writing about it a lot and I'm kind of thinking it's going to end up being the story of the year uh oh yeah oh yeah there there's and I think that we um I think you and I need to continue to talk about it the reason why is that there's a bunch of news coming in the world of AI and it's important stuff Lauren you know like I think you and I have an obligation to make sure that your community are well aware of the different tools that are that are out and coming out um so that they can leverage them because it's all to save money and you know that I mean I was hesitant with the metaverse cuz that seemed distant and at first I thought AI seemed pretty but it it keeps getting closer and there keep being things that you can actually do now and that's what I liked about the the most recent column you wrote uh where you listed a whole bunch of tools quite a few of which I had never heard of that people can use today yeah and I'm going to um I'm going to keep doing that and also you know I do a lot of speaking um I have booked like a bunch of speaking gigs um over the next eight months um that are just nothing but Ai and Tech there's a big appetite for people out there to know what's what and you know again we've talked about this before but we're going to keep I'm going to keep banging at home if you really want to keep current on AI and and you know how that could impact your business if you're a Microsoft business follow Microsoft and if you're a Google Business follow Google because those they're going to be leading the way but then there's there's other bunch of little smaller apps and Industry focused apps that I'm going to try and make sure that people are are you know comfortable with so I listed out 10 um you and I spoke before chat Che PT obviously we have talked about that right Microsoft co-pilot we talked about that we talked about that and that is big changes coming by the end of the year G give us a quick overview of that Microsoft co-pilot is and will be uh when you're in office we'll use that is the it'll be in a lot of different applications but for business people when you're in office there's going to be a a button by the way I think it's like 30 bucks a month to user they're going to charge for it um you and the button will assist you it's your co-pilot in office so if you're right an email it will suggest better ways to write something um it'll be right there where you can actually ask it for more information like chat gbt does uh to help you enhance uh your research and your documentation when you're in a spreadsheet it will help you just do the analysis or it will automatically perform tasks in the spreadsheet so you're like uh can you please create a pie chart based on the data in fields you know B4 through c17 and it just does it you know um if you are in a PowerPoint you you know like please create you know create a slide with a dog sitting in front of a river and it just does it and if you're in teams I think we talked about this before but which I love talking about is that it will allow you to attend soon multiple meetings at the same time well wait a second yeah I thought so so you Lauren can do you can attend a teams meeting in person and if you have another teams meeting going on at the same time you tell co-pilot to attend it on your behalf and what it does is it listens in on the meeting it then provides you at the end of the meeting with a full transcript it's not exactly the same thing as attending the meeting though I mean you it's not going to talk for me is it it's not GNA make the brilliant suggestions that that I would have made had I been there I would think that a bot can pretty much duplicate your thoughts Lauren a very short amount of time okay but it'll it'll it'll summarize the meaning and then if it hears your name and people are asking you to do things it'll schedule follow-up tasks for you and Outlook automatically I'm not sure I'm crazy about that idea either it's coming so there's co-pilot uh Google is going to do the exact same thing with what's called Bard and duet and then there's other little apps there's a cool app called crayon which which creates art and photos and other Graphics right from giving it a text description like you know is is Art in quotation marks uh it is but it's but it's you can say like you know create a you know a drawing of Lauren hitting a baseball in you know kamsky Stadium you know and it will create an image doing that it's pretty crazy you know so I like that yeah so all those apps you know well here's the one I want to ask you well maybe a couple but tell me about interview AI uh that sounded really interesting from your description yeah it is a um it's a preparation tool and and what it does is it it works it's really great if you're like a remote contractor or you're a freelancer it will conduct with you um like demo interviews um you provide it with information in advance about the job or the project that you're looking for and its algorithms will generate and ask you interview questions so that you can be prepared for that interview and then future iterations of the product promise to um uh have you do the interview you know and and video they'll it'll video you and then come back with comments to you like don't blink so much you know or uh stop smirking you know or you you know use a more positive tone to stop saying um so much so it's like a it's like a personal that's what AI is it's like it's like a good personal assistant to help you do important tasks is it only uh usable by job candidates or is there a use for it for business owners as well right now the business owners that they're focused on are individual business owners like Freelancers and independent contractors so that's generally what it would be you could probably turn the tables and if you're like hey I'm going to interview somebody for a job let me pretend that I'm the employee and maybe it'll it'll give me some good interview questions to ask uh you know potential employees so I'm sure you can turn the tables on it as well um by the way I didn't mention in this listing uh but I'll mention in the future there are already some interesting AI applications that do um that do video interviews um one of them is called higher View and um and you know what it does is it actually oh so you can attend two interviews at once exactly right so you're super productive but what it's a creepy application Lauren because it will it videos your interview and then it provides the employer with a report on how you did not only how you answer the questions but your a voice your eye movements it's very creepy and they're biased so people are concerned about this there's issues in different states about using these tools because they were written by biased developers uh but they'll get better hopefully and a little bit less biased over time you had mentioned another one that watches videos for you right so yeah adify yeah it's adify and what it'll do is you know there's a lot of like let's let's take let's take this example okay like you know somebody listens to this podcast where woring the out of everybody but I don't know there might be a couple of nuggets you know that might be of interest you know so theoretically this app will listen to this podcast on on your behalf and then provide to you a summary of all the pertinent points so like for this 30 minute conversation you'll get like a 30- second summary of the one thing that we talked about that has any relevance but if you want to like you know I don't know you you know there's so much great content out there you want to see an interview with you know an old interview with Steve Jobs and it's like an hour and a half long and you have have the time to watch it you can use aify uh to watch that YouTube video for you and then deliver to you you know the five or six takeaways that it finds from there which is so cool my only complaint about your right of about aifi is that you had a sentence in there that said as a business owner we often have to wear all the hats and I think it would have been better if you had specified the exact number of hats that business owners have to wear I'm a little disappointed you didn't do I wear I'm bald so I wear all the hats last one there was a one called Haywire a Content generator is does that just do what people have been using chat GPT to do or is there something in addition that it does it is it's very similar to it but what it'll do is that you can set it up to watch for certain news stories and have it actually take them and regenerate them that you can then use as your own personal blogs or of Interest so if you're in the uh I don't know home remodeling business and you've got a Blog about Home Remodeling um it'll it'll keep content of any keep track of any Home Remodeling related stories take them and then create an own story from the story you know to like rewrite it uh with any other salian points that it finds online um and it can also take become like different personalities so it can uh you know you know if you want somebody writing it from the from the uh standpoint of a salesperson versus the standpoint of a you know of a a service person or an accounting person that can do that as well the thing that struck me about this is that it sounds like it's current um so uh that's a difference between this and chat GPT because my understanding is chat GPT stops in September of 2021 that is absolutely correct and by the way one of the differences between Google bard and chat GPT uh is that Google bard is current just so you know and chat GPT which is Microsoft's by the way uh you're right ends at September of 2021 this Haywire is you're you're right on target there it is looking at um realtime news that's being generated information and turn it into stories for you I checked out chat GPT to see if it could help me prepare the 21 hats morning report and when I realized that the information stopped in September of 2021 I decided this probably isn't going to be terribly helpful for my daily email newsletter you can use board to do that you might want to continue consider doing Haywire uh or Haywire Haywire though is more of a service that sets it up and then it just runs for you um I mean I guess it can be used on demand but it's really designed like if you want to keep a continuous blog going on your website um different stories and such it will do that for you but I would try Bard or I mean that that that will have the most updated information I didn't know that uh Bard was current thank you for for sharing that so you also recently wrote a story about AI in which you suggested that insurance agents are going to have a major or have a a major AI problem that none of the AI companies are prepared to solve can you tell us about that yeah and I picked on insurance agents only as an example because they uh they're kind of indicative of like business owners around the country insurance agents are old man you know like you know first of all people apparently like young people stay in the insurance business for like one to two years they It's like got a high turnover who can blame them it's brutal uh and the older people there that have their book a business the you know more than you know half insurance agents are over the age of 40 and I the point I made is you know I went in this I wrote this for Forbes I laid out some of the great AI That's Coming For The for an insurance agent some of it from you know like we mentioned you know cop pilot Google bard but then you know HR platforms CRM platforms are going to have great AI that insurance agents can use to look for more business and then there's going to be there's already some insurance platforms specifically for the industry which I mentioned the column uh that are using Ai and plan to use more AI to help insurance agents again manage their book of business while they have it as well as uh search for like the best you know deals and binders and whatever um and help you know keep their clients up to date and suggest other you know policies really good stuff but the thing is to Lauren is that it's it's not like you push a button and it happens I mean this is like transformational stuff so you've got older people that are running businesses um that are set in their ways I know them because they're my clients I am one of them and they're like hey man if it ain't broke don't fix it leave me alone you know so you've got Microsoft and Google and all these companies investing in this great you know AI technology but it's it's it's going to be risky to implement it for businesses there if their data isn't good they're going to have to get it fixed they're they're going to have to convince their employees and ensure them that they're not being replaced by a robot uh they're they're you know you got to be Innovative you've got to like give it some time you've got to figure out you got to put the effort and the time into it um and then you're taking a risk that maybe the wrong message gets sent to your clients and upsets people a lot of older people don't AR going to want to do that you know they're like hey man and I think they're going to get hurt if they don't do it but you know you can't put a gun to their heads it's I think it's going to be the biggest thing that that you know we as a generation are going to have to be dealing with it's like we all most of us I think have heard the example of the lawyer who filed a brief that was created by chat GP had a buch of fictitious uh legal cases cited in it um that that would scare anybody um but especially somebody who might be older and a little reluctant to give it a try anyway I'll give you a good example though Lauren is like take your own business you know like you've got research that you want to do for you know for the for the daily Roundup that you do youd want it distributed on social you want it to go out on email you know there are tools right now that can help you automate that um and there will be more AI tools that will definitely help you automate all of this but you're going to have to trust them and you trust yourself because you've got a process for doing this and I bet you you old man are going to have a hard time at some point saying like I don't know if I'm want to invest in this and spend the time and I don't know like you know it's it's going to be daunting for you you know I'm not saying you won't do it because you know you know but it's you're not wrong Jean yeah right it will be tricky yeah so and I think that that's you know that's that's an issue that that that a lot of these tech companies are going to be facing is uh convincing the old man my my uh recommendation to tech companies is just you know play the long game because eventually we're going to die and when that happens then their technology will be well on that happy note Jean Marks is a CPA who writes weekly on small business for the guardian the hill the Philadelphia inquire the Washington Times the Chicago Daily heral Forbes an entrepreneur you can also hear him on ABC radio's eye on the world with John B Gene hosts two small business podcasts with paychecks Corporation and the hardford this episode was brought to you by the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to help build healthier companies you can learn more at Great game.com thank you Jean thank you Lauren it was great speaking and uh we'll speak next week always a pleasure have a great week everyone [Music]