S1E5: How she cut her payroll by 83% using one AI agent

Galina Fendikevich · 00:44

Welcome to Artificial Reality. I'm your host, Galina Fendikevich, where I talk about creating the loop between the people who use AI and the people who build AI. Today with me I have Christine McDaniel, who owns her own company as a mergers and acquisition advisor. Christine, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Tell us more about your background. How did you get into MA? So

Christine McDannell · 01:03

Join me.

Christine McDannell · 01:07

I have been a serial entrepreneur my whole life. So I've built and sold a bunch of my own companies. I was born to do this. And then I started my brokerage firm five years ago. So now I help others exit their companies because I was running most of my own transactions. didn't do the first one. I had a broker. He did a decent job, but after that I just did all my exits and ran the whole deal. And so yeah, that's kind of my background in a nutshell. And yeah, I love entrepreneurship.

Galina Fendikevich · 01:36

What does a typical day in mergers and acquisitions look like?

Christine McDannell · 01:41

So we are always on the hunt for and we specifically do tech and we're on the sell side. So we're always, always on the hunt to find any amazing profitable tech companies that would like to exit. So if you know anybody, we pay a lot of referral in a referral fee. And so they're very hard to find right now. Very, very and the ones we're finding are, and I'm sure we'll talk about it, it's like just crashing out because AI is eating their business up. So whether that's a dark digital marketing agency, like a creative creative design.

agency, that those are kind of circling back around to me because they were on the fence about selling last year. And I was like, I think AI is gonna eat your industry up. Like I don't want to be biased. You can use you can use any advisor you want, but I'm telling, no, but our clients love us. And and then what do you know those people are calling me and it's just like I can't sell them right now.

Galina Fendikevich · 02:32

Yeah, sounds ruthless out there. AI definitely helps with a lot of those services. If a company wants to sell, what does that process look like?

Christine McDannell · 02:41

Yeah, so they and then for the typical day, yeah, I'm on the hunt for sellers, and then typical days I'm getting our current listings sold, right? And we sell them very quickly because I only take five deals at a time. because that that allows me to focus and get them done. So we our average cloak from start to finish, right? It's been seven months, which is like super fast. I think my industry is 12 to 18 months on average to to sell a company. So yeah, so MA as far as like the AI implementations we're doing.

Yeah.

Galina Fendikevich · 03:13

In regards to if somebody wants to sell a company, what process do you walk them through, such as their data room? What do they have to prepare? How do you do the valuations?

Christine McDannell · 03:23

Yeah, so we start with evaluation like out the gate. And so that gives us a starting point to make sure they're comfortable with that. I never want them to exit for a price that they don't want to exit at. Like it's they've built a business and they've spent a lot of time and energy doing that. And so I would say evaluation and then we the process is we we do all the due diligence up front. I don't want to find anything at the very end of a transaction that blows it up. So I do a very deep due diligence. then we package them, we have the narrative, we

have a seller interview we do we put that in the data room so a very comprehensive data room and then we take it to market and we don't let anybody in that data room so this is unique also we have to have a phone call with every single we we have to have an NDA and an actual phone call with every single potential buyer and I don't see any broker doing that to be honest and I know we might we're gonna talk about how we were trying to automate that with AI. And so we do that and then we let them in the data room and hopefully get an LOI and get the deal closed.

Galina Fendikevich · 04:21

How do you search for buyers?

Christine McDannell · 04:23

we my gosh, we've done so much. So SDR, which is like actual cold email, cold LinkedIn outreach. We were doing this with automations before all the AI stuff, right? AI even can can add to that, but now everybody's doing cold email. We stopped because now with AI, everybody's doing it.

Galina Fendikevich · 04:40

My inbox is flooded with a lot of AI generated emails.

Christine McDannell · 04:43

So we're trying to have a bot combat the bots. Like we like a Tyler on my team. I'm like, we gotta figure out like how the bots can like counteract and just get rid of those emails. But we're just worried we'll miss like a legit lead. So we kind of are like, he's like, don't worry, I'll just archive them and you won't even see them. I'm like, okay, please. I don't want to see these sales any emails anymore whatsoever. And then but LinkedIn is still doing decent. So I'll do a 20-day automated profile of cold outreach.

Galina Fendikevich · 05:11

And I think it's more curated that way rather than sending thousands of messages a day. In your day-to-day, where have you used AI and it's worked amazingly?

Christine McDannell · 05:22

my gosh, Galina, I use it nonstop. Like, Are you a

Galina Fendikevich · 05:27

Addicted? Would you say you're addicted?

Christine McDannell · 05:29

Beyond. I'm not even like thinking anymore. Like it's not good. I'm like, is this good or bad? I don't know. so let me see. But as far as in my firm, and so we've got everything on a Mac. So we're super careful with with our, you know, it's financials, it's sensitive information. So we have a separate Mac mini we bought that's specifically for the firm. It's actually at Tyler. My team members up in Toronto, so it's with him because he's kind of more the techie. I'm more AI though than

Him, but he's teching, like, can you just set it up? And I remote access. Like, if I need to make a change on Claude, I have to remote access because it's on the desktop, right? Like, if I have to change a skill, sometimes I either ask him or I just jump in and tweak it if something's not right, right? It does veer off, you know, when it's there's an automation in it because we run agents, and so it's doing all of our email, but again, it's just drafting, so it checks every 30 minutes and it drafts email and it's like nailing it. It took

A good four to five days. It's like training a brand new employee. It was super frustrating, and I almost gave up. And then it was just dialed to the point where me and Tyler were like, Did you write that email? Did you? wait, Claude did. So we're using it for that. We're using it for me to prep my meetings. So any seller meetings, people that want to sell their company. not only is it automated the email and then I just hit send, it's also checking my calendar every morning, and it's it's writing a mass, like actually, when they book, it gives me this amazing brief on the person, it's combed.

Everything it tells me all about the person, all about the company. So we're using it that way. valuations, of course, and like anybody that wants to reach out, I will give you the prompt because I know we're gonna talk about it on what's happening with valuation. When when a seller put once a valuation of their own company, woo the the LLMs, claw, gpd, whoever you're using, they want to make you happy. So we'll talk about that in a sec. But what we're doing is needing to strip out it's sensitive data, and again, I know no advisors doing this, they're just throwing it all in there.

is like stripping the name of the business off when it's like financials, because that's like sensitive data we don't need to train the LLMs on or if people search. So we strip the company name off when we're throwing in their financials in the system.

Galina Fendikevich · 07:42

Are you running Claude locally or are you still on an enterprise license?

Christine McDannell · 07:46

We're we're running it locally on both. So I have the hundred Macs and then we have the hundred on the Mac mini. So we have two separate cloud accounts completely locally.

Galina Fendikevich · 07:57

Okay. And are there any other tools that you've used that you've absolutely loved other than Claude or have you invested all your time in building out your Claude skills?

Christine McDannell · 08:06

So I was on GPT for three years, so February 2003, and then made the jump beginning of March of this year to Claude when everybody else did because of the government thing. And I was like, they really took a stance. I like the company, you know, I like Dario a lot. But then it was what everybody else is like, but but GPT knows me so well. And so I you can export the entire chat. I have a what is a voice DNA profile, and I'm happy to share that also with anybody that wants it. or maybe put in show notes, and that's a hundred questions. It will take about three.

Hours of your time and it will interview you one question at a time. Like you're it will clone you. It will legit clone you. Even halfway through, there were some questions of like, well, how do you handle conflict, especially in an email with maybe a client? And I was like, oof, that's a hard one. I don't know. What do you think, Claude? And it answered it like brilliantly. I was like, whoa, this is amazing. So okay, I'll tell you my tech stack. So perplexity for anything research based. Gemini was for images for a long time, but now I moved it to GPT.

Galina Fendikevich · 09:08

I'm still using Gemini. I don't know. I like Gemini's images.

Christine McDannell · 09:11

Okay, you'd be split tests. Like 'cause I I like testing models too with the same prompt just to see like the output. Here's a hack that not a lot of people know. That little Gemini s watermark. So I've been doing this the whole time. You take the image out of Gemini, you throw it in chat, and you say remove this bottom diamond on the right.

So take the water mark. So I've been doing that for that was a good hack. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome, everybody. I got all these hacks. and just been geeking out. I went all in on Claude, which was the smartest thing to do. I didn't get distracted with any other tools. I was so deep on Claude cowork and just mastering it right from it since March. But then I'd say the last month is when now I'm playing now I'm getting into Obsidian and now I'm playing now Codex. Codex two weeks ago. I'm paying a hundred a month now. I started using it two weeks ago because it's really good. Fable was what's

When Fable got shut off. I was deep in Fable and I was blown away.

And then they turn it off. I tested Codex is really good at certain things, bookkeeping. Claude has some barriers with like Facebook. So we can't I can't use a Chrome browser for Claude on Facebook, on my Facebook ads. Codex will do start to finish brand new ads without me touching a thing. No like allow. Claude makes you do this allow, allow, allow. Like you cannot set it to just go on its own for face just for Facebook. I don't why.

Galina Fendikevich · 10:31

That's really good to know. How do you learn how to use these tools and about these tools? Were there courses that you did? Did you ask people or did you just roll up your sleeves with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and dive right in?

Christine McDannell · 10:42

Yeah, coffee and YouTube is my go-to. And again, I like there's you don't want to follow like too many people. It's it's overwhelming. So, you know, I'm following one guy named Brock on YouTube, and he's specific to non-techies that want to learn Claude. such good content every and he releases every day. So like on my lunch break or at dinner time, I'll watch the YouTube video. So YouTube is a game changer because you can pause it and you can do your thing, pause, do your thing. so couple thing couple Ruben hasan on LinkedIn, he's

Incredible every day. and then there was one more. So so I don't there, it's so much free content. That's why people are paying for these courses. And I mean, if it's an in-person workshop, I've done a couple of those because it's fun, you know, to meet people and do it together. But so as a kid, I loved computers, obsessed, and even convinced my parents to put like the home computer in my bedroom. So age 12. Well, they didn't want to touch it, no. And then they the trade-off was my dad owned an HCAC company and he gave me you know.

Galina Fendikevich · 11:36

Yeah.

Christine McDannell · 11:42

know this I built an pretty much built CR I would I guess it would be like a CRM it was Microsoft Works and I had to put all the clients data in. So that was a trade that was a trade-off. It's like okay and my parents didn't want to touch the computer and neither did my sister. So I've just been so fascinated. So this AI stuff is so exciting because I'm like, my God, I can build so much. It's so easy. I'm not a coder. Like I did code when I was like 16, basic HTML, GeoCities website, dating myself. But after I haven't like coded since then.

Yeah.

Galina Fendikevich · 12:14

When you decide you want to use AI for something, is it typically the task come first and then you find the tool to fulfill that task? Or what does that look like?

Christine McDannell · 12:25

Yeah, so I'm again living in cowork. And I have such a good and I also use the Chrome browser. So if I'm on a site for something, business related, anything related, there's a Google Chrome plugin on and so club pops up on the side of the website and it starts like navigating right in front of your eyes, which is cool. So like our CRM, like when I send email blasts, I'll pull the screen out. Actually it will pull it up, I just tell it to pull it up. And I can see it navigating and giving us our metrics on our newsletter.

glass that we do. So it'll give me a full report like a CMO would do, right? So this but the it's doing it for us. So no, it's always I go to the tool like any freaking task, I've developed the habit of going straight to the tool every single thing. Every single thing.

Galina Fendikevich · 13:10

You're really well versed in Claude and more so than the average person, you've invested a lot of time, which means you've probably run into some bumps along the road. So what are some examples of you use Claude or you use AI and it's doing its thing, but then there's a moment where it just doesn't take you to that last smile, it doesn't complete the last task. You were so frustrated.

Christine McDannell · 13:34

Frustrated because people, which again, I would do the same. I think everybody that wants to sell their company or get it ready to sell should jump in there and ask for a current valuation and what kind of tools or like what steps do they need to do to get to that number? Reverse engineering, great, amazing. They should do that. ask me for the prompt because this story happened recently, a couple weeks ago. It's happened more than once. five million valuation on 125,000 net profit. I reached out

Galina Fendikevich · 14:02

How is that possible? It's not the math does not math.

Christine McDannell · 14:05

business, not a tech business. There's no IP, there's no real estate. Cause I wrote them right back and I'm like, do you guys own the real estate for your your business? And they were like, no. And I'm like, I I emailed them immediately before the Zoom meeting because I'm like, my God, I don't want to say this to their face. I need to prepare them. And I was like, hey, I'm gonna be honest, you're looking at like a three to four X multiple on your net profit. Like I just want to, I'm sh I really want to still have the meeting, chat, you know, where did this number come from? They said Claude Cowork. And they all laughed.

A husband and wife team, and they laughed, you know, when we were on the Zoom and they're like, Yeah, because they sh they showed me the actual reports, which I just did a LinkedIn post a couple days ago with a screenshot of the report. It was adding, it was taking every single department in their company and it was putting a value from the payroll, I guess, of the company. It assigned a value of every department, even the accounting department, like 200,000 or something. that's how they got to this five million number. And I was like,

These departments cost, these are expenses, these are value ads. It did some weird stuff. So I saw the whole report of what what they got at, like how did they come to up to that? How did Claude, co-work, Mr. Claude, come up with that number?

Galina Fendikevich · 15:18

So it sounds like Claude does not know mergers and acquisitions as well as you do to be able to say what is an asset versus what is an expense.

Christine McDannell · 15:28

Exactly. And again, it wants to make you happy. Like, well, because when we put in our skills, so we have a very deep skill. Again, I'll share the prompt with everybody, but but then we take another we have a very dialed in skill from knowing the industry, current market conditions, our past deals, et cetera. So ours is dialed. It'll get us about 80% of the way. And then the next 20 is me still like, you know, fixing the valuation and kind of jazzing it up a little bit and making sure it covered everything. So it does a good job if you have the right input, right? And we I and you have to know the industry to know the inputs in the

prompts and so yeah it just wants to make you happy it wants to make you happy your company's worth five million like yeah that's the problem

Galina Fendikevich · 16:08

It doesn't sound very realistic. Would a MA domain specific model help with that?

Christine McDannell · 16:15

There's some people making them right now. I feel like they're advancing so fast. Like I would not build one right now, to be honest, if it was me personally, because it's advancing so quickly and it's scraping the same data. I just don't know why it's not compiling it correctly. I think it's gonna get there too soon, too quick, to be honest, if it was specific, yeah.

Galina Fendikevich · 16:38

So it sounds like your questionnaire or at least your prompt guide for MA in a general purpose LLM will help drive the responses to be more accurate versus creating a domain-specific model. And it's all coming from your years of experience doing MA evaluation. Are there any other examples where AI hasn't been the best companion to you?

Christine McDannell · 16:52

Exactly.

Christine McDannell · 16:57

Yes, long time, long time.

Christine McDannell · 17:05

To me personally, it's so hard. Again, I use it all the time. Again, that I think the trying to make you happy thing is you have to push back on it. Or you have to, you know, put in your global instructions, whatever LLM you're using, GPT, cloud. and again, if I'm giving a lot of cloud advice, you can always go into your other L, whatever you're using, Gemini, and say, Hey, can you do this? Like, and they all do the same stuff, right? So in your global instructions, you could put like push back on me, be contrarian, et cetera, et cetera. Mine's just

like normal and so because I'm like, like it's nice to be and everything. And again, I'm a realistic person. So if it kicks me a crazy number, then I'm just like, okay, no. Like do some more research. so yeah, I can't think of anything else personally that it messes up on. No.

And it it got a little this is another tip for any business owners that are watching this, is I did put in I had one team member, I was getting little frustrated about something. So I screenshot the communications of me delegating this task and it wasn't getting done. And then Claude came back at me and was just like, actually, you're not being clear, this and that. It was I was like, whoa, like that was a first. And then I'm like, I'm gonna need to take it a step further. I exported so a year and a half of Slack messages between me and this one team member. I exported Trello.

Which is our project management software, like every community, every task ever assigned, how I communicate. I was like, Claude, don't hold back. Tell me everything I could do to be a better leader, a better owner, manager. That thing did not hold back. I was at a happy hour with other business owner friends, and I like read it and they were dying. They were just like, my God. But I will tell you this, I've I've implemented most of the stuff that it pointed out because it was actually right. I was like, my god, it's right. It was like you start sent to you start things by saying, sorry, can

you do this. so sorry about that. And it's weird. I do it a lot and I kind of knew that already. And it said you said sorry 148 times compared to his, you know, 14 times. It gave all these like stats and numbers and it, yeah.

Galina Fendikevich · 19:07

That's a really good use case for yourself.

The models I have noticed are much better at being more measured in their feedback to you rather than being very sycophantic and telling you what you want to hear, other than the whole value five million dollar valuation. But they are taking the next step. And I saw that that was such a good feedback loop between the AI builders and the market, where at first the market was saying, hey, these models are they're a little too nice, they're a little too

Much on your side. We want to talk to these models to get their thoughts like a sounding board, and they're not doing that. And after a few months, now the models have taken a step back and are being much more direct in their feedback or in their analysis of you. So good job to the Silicon Valley team for actually listening. The people did not want sycophantic models.

Christine McDannell · 20:06

No, and I'm kind of worried. I kind of know a little bit probably the logic of it I was thinking out is that they want you to they like they want you to get addicted to it. Like I'm sure the prices they're being so subsidized right now to the point and I know somebody in the industry and I was like, tell that he's been in it for 10 years and he knows he's deep, deep, deep. And I was like, Okay, like the Uber rides that were eight dollars, now they're 38. And I'm like, how much of a difference? He's like, it's like one to ten right now of like what it sh should freaking cost. So if we think that it's gonna

be at the same price forever, absolutely not. Just like Uber. It's just gonna scale up. And so it wants to be nice to I mean who doesn't want a really nice person around constantly doing everything you want and like with a smile and 247. Like so I'm a little concerned with that. And then I forgot one when we were speaking about our source of where we're getting our sellers. The last five leads amazing leads came from the LLMs and now they're even because we always ask right and so it's like like a GPT or right now it's Claude.

And an agentic age. This last guy put Claude in a Gentic agent. And so he has his agent that's now searching. So we put a lot of work like last year into making sure we're ranking really high for GEO and AEO, which is like the same thing as SEO for the search engines. It's working. I'm excited. And then now I did a personal website on my name that will drive even more. That's blogs, and this company just did it for me last week. I'm so excited because it's keyword loaded, like it's exactly.

what the LLMs are going to crawl.

Galina Fendikevich · 21:38

It sounds like you're putting a lot of the foundational work in yourselves by creating the skills and all of these agents. Is there a world where you would want this type of work to be already offered in a platform or service so you don't have to build it from the ground up?

Christine McDannell · 21:54

in A A specifically, this whole infrastructure, that would be rad. That would be rad because it is very tailored, like what we've built out. Like it wouldn't it wouldn't need to be changed and adjusted if if another industry which wouldn't be hard. But yeah, I think you're right. That would be cool.

Galina Fendikevich · 22:11

It sounds like it's just the I think business logic and the actual data that needs to be adjusted. But what you need to do in prepping the data room, in creating the first valuation, in the seller interview, in doing the outreach to find buyers, all of that is pretty standard across MA. And then again, you just tweak the little parts for yourself.

Christine McDannell · 22:36

Yes, exactly. And even the due diligence, right? Like I said, I do like deeper due diligence than the buyers do up front before I take a client. I'm just like, I don't want anything. I'm looking at the like Instagram comments, make sure there's not complaints. I'm like combing through everything and I've always done that. Now I can, you know, again, a skill to then tell it to like scrape every single thing on this owner and every single thing on this business. I want no surprises, lawsuits, comments, etc. Like anything bad I need to know up front so that we can figure out the

object you know, people are gonna find it otherwise, so we need to know.

Galina Fendikevich · 23:10

AI is really good for that search and summarization that you need to do. And it's the same across any industry is search summarization, give me dialysis. To your point, AI is addictive to me as well. My ChatGPT's name is Nigel. I talk to Nigel about everything, everything. There's an email that comes in, analyze this. If I'm about to have a conversation, help me think through this. And I just I hope it does not

go up in price by much because then I will really need to take a look at how I'm using AI for the business side of things specifically, not only personal to justify that cost. But I also s see the limitations. Peeling back the layers of AI, it has a limited database, meaning

It's text mainly, but it can't do too many multimodal integrations. It doesn't understand human judgment as well because mathematically speaking, it'll put two similar words together, but something like freezer or burn are mathematically farther apart. So when you are talking to AI, it's it already is biased in a certain way to give you a output, but

Many times when we apply our human judgment or we rely on our years of experience or conversations we've had or we pick up on things that are hard to encode in that way, that when you add it to the AI makes it much more powerful. When have you had a moment where

The AI did a certain level of work and then it stops and your human judgment comes in to either inform the output for a better output or to just take whatever the output is, use it, and then do whatever you need to do next.

Christine McDannell · 25:04

Yes, so valuations, like I said. it's great on writing, so I hardly ever need to tweak any writing, any strategy, game plans. right now it is doing video, which nobody knows. And and it was just a quick funny story. This is six weeks ago, and I filmed a bunch of content off my phone. I hate doing content and I'm not on social media. So I'm just like, my God, I don't want to make these reels, like, but I need to for the AI Club. And then I put them all in a folder, a drive, Google Drive. And then I put the Google Drive and Claude.

Co-work, not even code. And I was just like, hey, Claude, help me. I want to make these reels and I need captions. And can you edit them all together? And can you make a sizzle reel, which is clipping like all of them together? Can you make a sizzle reel? And can you do each one individual? And can you do these captions? Can you use our branding? Please help. That's all I said. And it made them. It's crazy. Wow. It's crazy. It messed the captions up on the on the first one, the design part. And then it but the but the transcription I split test against Canva and the transcription was

perfect and Canva even had made made mistakes on the transcription for the captions so but again it is some back and forth a little bit because i'm making more and i'm just like it's not there it's like 80 and then again i have to re-prompt because i'm not gonna take it and throw it in canva and finish it up like i'm just like reprompting it and it'll fix it but it will clip them together it will do everything and nobody knows that so they're using expensive softwares that claude actually uses it told me i was like how are you doing this it was like we're using this

which is the actual like like engine that powers Canva, like remotion, all the tools that cost money. It's like, no, that's our, we're using that baseline tool. Yeah, for sure. No, it's amazing. I love it.

Galina Fendikevich · 26:45

So that's a cost saving for you.

Galina Fendikevich · 26:50

One of the things that's really cool that you're testing out is having a AI voice phone system. So when someone calls in, it helps navigate whether they're a buyer or a seller to prepare you in with the information you need to service the client. And I would love to learn more about how that's going because my current thoughts on voice AI is it's not good, it's creepy, especially for

Some of like the sales AI avatars. I mean it just doesn't sound natural and I you end up wanting to be like operator, operator, get me to a human. Which tool have you used and can you play us a little bit something?

Christine McDannell · 27:36

Yes, I can. So it was a year and a half ago where I got a gym membership and a year and a half ago, which is a while. And then I got a call. It's like, you just joined. Would you like to book your first class? And I'm just having a conversation. Yeah, okay. And then I was like, I think this is a phone agent, like an AI agent. Because it but it was so hard for me to tell. And then I like asked and then said it was. I was like, whoa, I'm so impressed. So the latency though still is not is the and I'm gonna play it for you guys. So the latency is versus awkward long pauses.

Like those are annoying. Then that you're right. I'm like customer service. Like, I don't have the patience for this. ChatGTP now has a model. I was on a hackathon, and my team member built it out, and it was zero latency and it switched the language, like meaning it was speaking English, but then the caller we pretended we were speaking, we've spoken Spanish and it like switched to Spanish. It was nuts and it's zero latency. I haven't played with that model yet. This was the one we were setting up in our company, but again, you guys will hear it.

it right now. We'll play just a couple seconds so you guys get a vibe, but there's still you'll see latency.

Christine McDannell · 28:49

I think this is part where it's ringing. So we'll have to trim this. Okay. They'll cut.

Galina Fendikevich · 28:53

Hello, this is Alex with the Magnolia Firms team. How can I help you with your business exit or AI implementation today? I'm looking for some information. I saw a listing on your website, the red light therapy brand. can you send me the data room?

Christine McDannell · 29:16

That's a simple question.

Galina Fendikevich · 29:17

Hello?

About that. I can help with that request. Are you an individual entrepreneur or an institutional buyer? And what are your specific search criteria?

Christine McDannell · 29:28

Like she sounds friendly. I like that. And there's options where you hear people typing in the background. It was kinda cool. He turned it off. He didn't like it, so he turned it off. yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Galina Fendikevich · 29:38

The voice still sounds like, Hi, my name is Galina. I am the founder of Artificial Reality. Thank you for coming on my show today. Like that's how it sounds to me. All of them sound like that to me. and to your point, the whole latency, it's just we live in such a fast-paced world. we can't wait that long. I think

a good middle road is if people at least know this is an AI system of you please be patient. We will make sure you're taken care of. Just some kind of notice so you don't get frustrated. But at that point I'd be like, no, I d get I customer service now.

Christine McDannell · 30:19

And it's I agree a hundred and ten percent. So I would probably put the disclosure right at the beginning. Hey, I'm in a you the Magnolia firm's AI assistant and I'm gonna help you. But if at any moment you can push zero to get a person, I would do that, but I think it's such a novelty still right now that people probably just like play along and and be like, this is cool, but I think you're right, it needs to be like disclosed up front. I know people are kind of like back and forth on that idea. But it'll only get better. So that's why again, like we didn't fully install it yet, 'cause I'm like, people are gonna just get mad. So let's wait until it's better.

Galina Fendikevich · 30:49

So it sounds like things are still a little bit clunky and there's room for improvement, but you have been able to save a lot of money in your business, right?

Christine McDannell · 30:59

Definitely. So I cut my payroll down last summer 83%. So I had to unfortunately let somebody go. I had to cut the other team members to part-time. And it was very hard to do, right? Super hard. But that is was a huge savings, right? Payroll. And then now it's like I'm implementing it. So there's gonna be a part in businesses where they're implementing all this and they're teaching their team and and it's gonna be expensive. So you could see the expenses like jump up when they're trying to implement all this stuff. And then once they implement

It that's the unfortunate part is when they're probably gonna let some people go. and then they're just so much more productive because these things are installed. When business owners complain about the hundred dollars a month thing, I'm like, legit, this would cost me 40,000. What what Claude is doing for me, it'd be like a marketing agency at $5,000 a month. It would be a team member, you know, doing this. I let my bookkeeper go last week, unfortunately. So now I'm saving there. It'd be $40,000 a month, easy in payroll. Easy. These are PhD 24/7, the

hundred and forty IQ kind of averaged people. Not people, bots, but they feel like people a lot of times. So yes, we've saved a lot of money.

Galina Fendikevich · 32:08

That is a lot of savings for a hundred per month subscription. And it sounds like you focused each type of skill or you applied Claude on a department by department focus and trained each of those to do very specific tasks, right?

Christine McDannell · 32:24

Yeah, so I have because my firm's boutique, it's not too crazy. I know I kind of wish I had a huge company because I'm like, I can have all these multiple agents and I can just really build something rad out. I love automations and I like building stuff out. And so, but we're smaller. So I do just have Anna who's like my main agent, and then she's doing the emails, she's doing the prep, she's doing kind of the marketing stuff. But bigger companies do want to do exactly what you said. They should have an agent per department.

Because then they are more specialized. But you shouldn't have an agent for every little task. Cause I have a friend, he has like 40 a tiny company, 40 agents. And he was like excited and he showed me all and he named them all. And he I was like, my gosh, why would you build an agent for every little task? Like, don't do that.

Galina Fendikevich · 33:08

With so many agents running to help you save money in your business, what else could Silicon Valley build to help you automate even more?

Christine McDannell · 33:17

Yeah, I think there would be especially the social media stuff that I mean it's great it made it for me, but I want it to go like from A to Z. I want it to actually like like immediately just it knows my industry. So it does the content, it writes the prompts, it like actually posts or it writes the keywords. Like I have to prompt every time. Like, okay, can you make sure you research the proper keywords for MA industry? The ones that are performing best, can you put that? And then separately, okay, can you write a caption? So it's like piecemeal together.

Which is not fun because I'm that's I'm the human in the loop, but I'm too much in the loop on the social media stuff. And then can it post it? Like at the very last, be like, okay, like ping me, which it pings me on Slack. We have it set up to ping me on Slack for the business, Telegram personally, it pings me, or my iMessages. Like it will prompt me to do stuff through text, which is rad. So yeah, I think that that like the MA industry, if it could like have this like marketing, so yes, Silicon Valley, please.

build this. I'm not even I mean great industry specific, but I think this would be a tool everybody would love. It's just this A to Z because I don't see it out there of like all the way through specific to my industry.

Galina Fendikevich · 34:29

It's funny because marketing and software engineering were the top use cases for AI automation. And on the coding side, people have laid off tens of thousands of engineers. Chaos ensues because the AI agents run amok in the company Amazon, Kough Kough. And then they end up having to hire back a lot of those engineers because they realize like it is an AI plus human partnership. But same thing for marketing, too. I have tested way too many tools to help.

Me for marketing, and there is no one good tool because there's separate tools for the keywords, they're separate tools for

Creating carousels and doing the branding, not only the text content, but the branding and then putting the text content onto your branded carousel, making sure it's the right size, and then another tool to do the copy for the actual post, whether that's LinkedIn or Instagram. Then there's a whole separate suite of tools for the video creation side and doing the clips and adding the captions and your logo in the corner. So it's it's not easy and it's not seamless on the marketing at all.

I find myself having to also hire people to do that. And I'm okay if they're AI enabled, but for me too, to do all these micro steps, as you mentioned, human in the loop. It's almost too much work. It's adding work for me where I would have rather just spent the time clipping in myself the manual way.

Christine McDannell · 35:55

Yeah. No, that's a great, great point. I mean I'm thinking in my head, thinking it out as like a skill. I have a skill built out, but maybe adding to that skill a pair, you know, a part about the SEO, like go research the best keywords and then another part that's telling, you know, then write the capture. I'm almost wondering if I could do one skill to do all of that. and then it could pref but I would still have to post it at the end of the day.

Galina Fendikevich · 36:19

Yes, because there's also not many good posting tools, social posting, and they always have gaps. I found social media posting tools, they'll post on Instagram and LinkedIn, but not Twitter and let's say YouTube. Or they'll do X and they'll do a certain type of post. Let's say they can do threads, but they can't post media. It's it's these weird rules on the posting side.

One thing that adds to your workload is you have to define all of these micro steps for Claude. But if a general purpose LLM has the marketing knowledge, why is it not telling you what you should do in those micro steps as you build your agent? Why can't it be the CMO for you? So all you have to do is look through the list. Yep, go research the branding, all of that. It creates a skill for you. And then you don't have to specifically define it yourself.

Christine McDannell · 37:13

No, and that's why it's such a great question of like what needs to be built next, because anybody, you know, watching this can be like, my God, I can pull that off and I can build that out. I would love that. And so another thing that's happening is this you know, the AI brain fry that people talk about. I went deep on it a couple weeks ago because I was getting exhausted. I'm like, AI is supposed to make my life easier, but I'm exhausted by the end of the day. And I, you know, I ask Claude, I'm like, why is this? And it's like, it's like you have six amazing interns that are constantly coming to you, like, my God, okay, Christine.

Ready, okay, Christine. What do you think of this? What about this? You know, it's a constant, constant because I'm I'm like context switching between like five different you know chats and tasks, five different tasks or more, and and I have them pinned. This was my hack that's not working anymore. I there's a pin on you know all your chats, on all the LLMs you can pin. So I was pinning stuff that was like still in process. I'm like, okay, let me just keep it on pin so I don't lose the chat. And my pin list pin is list is ridiculous. So Claude was.

like don't do that any like like have three on there at a time like what are you doing you're you're doing too many tasks simultaneously do two to three because I am waiting on it sometimes right so then I jump on something else so I think two has been helpful

Galina Fendikevich · 38:27

Yes, and to your point, I've had a lot of AI generated outputs thrown at me, whereas reviewing tens of pages, I mean, of content, whether that's from the actual UI or someone produced these long reports for me. And it's it's all good stuff, but it's stuffing my brain. And my brain is full and I can't handle anymore. And there needs to be almost like a calling of information. Really, let's let's

Be less verbose and try to say the same things and much less worse.

Christine McDannell · 39:01

And it gave me a cute little PDF of like tips and tr like what to do for and that was one of them was scanning, which I already do. So it was like please don't read everything word for word, scan through it. You know, maybe you can even ask for a summary of like this long report. So you're not yeah, just send a scan was one of the tips. Yeah, give me some like great tips that I start implementing and I feel better now. Like this is great.

Galina Fendikevich · 39:22

Is there anything else that you wish would be built to help you become a better MA advisor?

Christine McDannell · 39:29

I cannot think of anything. I can't think of anything right now. Yes, which is a good place to be. Like tech is like, it's so exciting. And again, I'm in it all day, every day, to see the improvement so fast, to see how often, you know, Claude or Anthropic is saying, click for the newest version. It's like multiple times a day now. My friends are getting it, they're like, it's annoying. And I'm just like, it gets me excited because it's like improving, improving upon itself so so fast.

So yeah, I can't think of anything.

Galina Fendikevich · 40:01

We were talking at the beginning of our discussion about finding buyers for the companies that you're selling and having the buyers be everywhere, whether that is a more general search, whether that's within your own network, and your own network can be on LinkedIn, in your email inbox, in group chats. Is there

a tool that you would love that maybe can go through your entire network to research information maybe on individual people to consolidate a better list.

Christine McDannell · 40:35

my gosh, you should develop this. You have the best ideas. That would be rad. That would be super rad. Even friends, I moved here in August, January 1st, and I've made so many new friends. Like I love the community here. It's amazing. And so, but then I'm like, I need to make like a sounds geeky, but I'm like, I want to put everybody on a spreadsheet and track them because I want to put a lot of effort into like keeping those friendships, like going through that list and being like, I should like invite them to brunch or these events. Cause so I exported my what's

Zap chats. I export I exported LinkedIn so I could go back January 1st of LinkedIn and I did a report of everybody I've met in Austin. Anybody that lives in Austin, I've met on January 1st or beyond. and then iMessage, it can actually export also. So it's like, but I had to manually do these, you know, export all these and then throw them in. And then it did create the spreadsheet.

Galina Fendikevich · 41:29

So helpful. It's funny because I have a spreadsheet. I also have notes to keep track of everyone and in the conversation. I like to write down what somebody's background is very lightly and then how I could be of help to them. And if I know of someone that could use your services or whatnot to make the connection, my information is scattered, but I'd love a much better CRM. I'm sorry, but Hubspot and Salesforce are the worst technology products.

out on the market today, they require teams of people that you have to hire to do all of the clickety clackety things on there.

to input information manually it just it's clunky it's some it's like internet explorer the UIs are terrible and again they're very limited in functionality for example for Salesforce I couldn't just hook up my inbox and then it would read everything and organize it and create the profiles. I'm like you're a how many billion dollar company and I think they tried an AI agent whatever that but then they decommissioned it. It's just it's bad, bad all around and this

something like a CRM that is maybe tailored for MA professional specifically because the types of relationships you deal with is on the buying and the selling and your market making between the both. So having like domain specific CRM or capabilities that can take in a lot of this information and input, whether that's a group chat inbox or LinkedIn, sounds like it would be so much more helpful for you. And I would need a different type of CRM for what I do.

Christine McDannell · 43:07

Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, and everybody laughs when I say this, but we use Zoho. And so Rid's like, it's crazy, it's crap. Yours goes crap. but we use it for the last five years. We built, we spent a lot of time, like you said, you have to hire these agencies to come and customize any CRM, right? So pay, come in. it it has everything, other tools integrated that we, you know, so had to do integration with like a text phone system, integration with the actual phone, so texting, phones, so there's all these different plugins that we had to integrate. So it was work to set it, but it

works really great surprisingly i there's nothing i would say i wish it did this better and it's hub and it's cheaper than hubspot that's funny you don't like hub yeah salesforce is too robust it's for banking it's for healthcare it's super crazy robust for smaller companies hub spot it's funny i've heard a lot of great things my friends use it but it's expensive

Galina Fendikevich · 43:58

Now it's

You have to do so much onboarding and training and hiring to use these. The same I tried Zoho as well. It was I don't want to hire an agency in this day and age of software where okay, if you can use AI to build anything, now everybody's a coder, build better software that's intuitive. And that's why everybody's so used to like getting something fast and done and right with Gen AI specifically. Why can't it be the same for CRM? Why does it have to be such a manual process?

process and lift up front for any of these tools.

Christine McDannell · 44:32

So many people are building out their own CRMs. And now you just give me another idea. So this is why I live on AI all day, because I I'm like brainstorming. I'm like, this is I and I'm I'm like such a curious person. I am gonna go in there and I'm gonna ask, I'm gonna say, hey, we use Zoho, can you comb through it right now? Can you check it out? And again, it could just scan through, it could do its thing inside there. Look how we have it set up. Can you give me a game plan and give me the honest truth? Like, should could you build a custom CRM? And then we're paying, I don't even know how much per month. Then we cut that out too. Like, can you build a

better product that does everything this does. I'll be surprised. It'll probably be very hard. But then we use Zapier and stuff so it could zap with these other apps. Yeah, let me try that. What if it builds like really cool one? I'm excited.

Galina Fendikevich · 45:16

You might as well try it in tomorrow's AI Implementation Club, right?

Christine McDannell · 45:20

Well that's obsidian all day and then I'll have my obsidian finally dialed. And you're coming too? So I'm excited.

Galina Fendikevich · 45:26

Excited. This it was so nice to meet you here in Austin and have this conversation. If somebody wanted to contact you, maybe they're interested in buying a business or selling a business, what is the best way?

Christine McDannell · 45:37

Yeah, the magnoliafirm.com. You can check the business out there. And then we and then my new website that kind of explains both the club and or my firm. It's ChristineMcDaniel.com. And then lastly, LinkedIn, I'm great at LinkedIn. So just message me there. Any questions, comments, any tips, AI tips, I'm down to hear them.

Galina Fendikevich · 45:58

Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. And if you'd like to watch this, you can find artificial reality media on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, as well as on LinkedIn. Thank you.

Christine McDannell · 46:10

Yeah, you're welcome.