Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh

Agentic AI for Small Business: $3.50 ROI Per $1 Invested with Grant McGaugh

• Grant McGaugh CEO 5 STAR BDM • Season 5 • Episode 36

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Ready to stop grinding and start scaling? We dive into a clear, no-fluff blueprint for using agentic AI to grow sales, improve margins, and reclaim your time. Instead of one-off prompts, you’ll learn how autonomous agents perceive context, plan multi-step workflows, make decisions, and execute tasks across your stack—then learn from outcomes to get better week after week.

We walk through the five domains where agents deliver immediate wins: customer support that resolves faster and cuts cost per ticket; lead generation that researches prospects and tailors outreach to lower CAC; marketing engines that ideate, create, test, and iterate across channels; back-office automation that reconciles books, tracks invoices, and manages inventory; and forecasting that sharpens demand, revenue, and cash flow accuracy. Along the way, we plug real numbers into the conversation—10x service cost reductions, 40–60% time-to-output cuts, and double-digit revenue lift—so you can benchmark your own progress with confidence.

Measurement is the unlock. You’ll get a compact KPI framework tied to the P&L: revenue growth rate, ROI per initiative, gross margin improvement, operating cash flow accuracy, CAC and lifetime value, time-to-output, error rates, cost per transaction, CSAT, and NPS. We also share practical guardrails to deploy safely: approvals, escalation paths, SOPs, and team training that make adoption stick. The human edge—strategy, empathy, and brand—stays at the center while agents handle the repetitive execution. If you’ve wondered how to leverage AI without losing what makes your business special, this is your roadmap.

Subscribe for more playbooks, share this with a founder who needs it, and leave a review to tell us which KPI you’ll track first.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

SPEAKER_01:

What up, brand builders?

SPEAKER_00:

This is Grant McGall, CEO of Five Star BDM. I'm gonna welcome you to a very special solo episode of the Follow the Brand. And it's gonna include myself, but I want to really get into this subject because I think it's so important. Now, as some of you may know this, some of you may not know this, but I was named in 2025 as the number three global thought leader in personal brand branding today by Thinkers360 for 2025. So from 2024, I was around 32. In 2025, I jumped all the way to number three, which is about 29 places in one year. I think that's pretty, pretty, pretty good. And I want to share with you some of the secrets of how I did that, some things you can apply in your own personal brand, whether that personal brand is for career development or business development, it's very important. Understand you do have a personal brand, and whether you want to be intentional about it or not is so important. And I want to really leverage this around uh from a platform perspective to talk about AI and agentic AI. So for important people talk about AI agents, I think it's very important. So this wasn't about working harder, it wasn't about putting in the more hours, but it was talking about working smarter by leveraging the most powerful technology that's been a transformation and a change agent since the internet itself. So we want to talk about something that's either going to make you a fortune or leave you in the proverbial dust. Because if you're not utilizing these new platform in one way or another, you're gonna be behind. It's almost like saying, hey, I'm not gonna use the internet. Well, if you don't use the internet, especially by now, you're definitely in the dust, right? It's very, very important to understand that this platform is not going to where it's gonna get even bigger and better and be a part of the business community as well as all other parts of society in one way or another. So I don't want to say that to scare you. I just say it because the data that we have right now is screaming right at us in this way. So for this particular episode, I'm gonna give you a complete blueprint for leveraging Egyptic AI to transform your small business. So this is kind of stuff we're gonna be doing in the Omaha, Nebraska area pretty soon. And then obviously, my other markets in Miami and South Florida, and also in St. Croix, Virginia Islands, where we're gonna have some online retreats and also in-person retreats on the island. I think that's gonna be very good. So this is not about fluff, this is definitely not about just theory, but these are actionable strategies that are creating real results right now. And I know for me, especially right, because all this is very still fairly, fairly new for a lot of people. You can remember when AI came out, this is 2025 year really got smoking around the end of 2022, end of 23. We're only two years in, and this has really grown. Agentic AI is just coming really into its own in 2025. It's still fairly new, it's still in its infancy, and we're gonna talk about what this is a huge game changer, especially for small business. And if you get on get adept, adept at utilizing this tool set, you are going to be part of something special. So, not just AI, but we've all been kind of using Chat GPT to write emails and create contact. But we are talking about a git AI in this episode, an AI that doesn't just respond to your prompts, but actually thinks, it actually plans, and it can execute entire workflows on your behalf. Let that sink in. So, through our particular AI accelerator programs at Five Star BDM and our partnerships with organizations like the BizHack Academy and ICABA, uh Worldwide Network, we are helping minority-owned businesses and entrepreneurs. And this is specific for North and South Omaha with our BizHack Academy and across the country, access to these same tools for a purpose. That is to grow sales, that is to grow revenue. Usually these are the two biggest problems in small business because if you're not growing in sales, you're not growing in revenue, you're not growing your business. And these are the reasons why you go out of business. And we know that statistically, that 50% of all small businesses go out of business within five years. So we've got to get sticky at this point, particular point in time. These are the types of tools that you can be using that are available now in 14,500 companies, and they have million-dollar budgets. You can do these types of things on a three-figure budget. I mean, talking about less than$1,000, you can really start generating enormous amounts of revenue if you deploy it correctly. And here's what you need to understand. According to McKenzie's latest researcher from this particular year, 88% of organizations are now regularly using artificial intelligence. But here's the real kicker Only 23% are actually scaling agentic AI systems that deliver real business impact. So where do we sit right now? If only 23% of these systems are actually in use right now, we need to let that sink in. Where can we begin to play in this world with these tools? And this should really get you a adoption among small businesses surged at 72% in just the last two years. Now that's not gradual growth, that is explosive growth, explosive adoption, and 82% of small business owners now believe that AI adoption is essential to stay competitive. Not helpful, not nice to have, essential. That's a complete mindset shift from what's happening right now in our market, our market right here, especially where I'm standing in Omaha, Nebraska. Very, very, very important. And let me hit you with some more numbers that should wake you up, right? And that's the global agentic AI market is exploding as well. From I think it was like 5.2 billion in 2024 to a projected 196 billion dollar market by 2020 or 2034, I would say. That is a huge growth. That's a 43%, maybe even 43.8% compound annual growth rate. That's enormous. So small businesses using AI right now are reporting 91%, 91% saying it boosts their revenue. So anybody that's deploying a gentic AI into the business model right now are seeing a 100x almost percentage of growth. So for every dollar you're spending, you're getting$2 out. Pretty much. That's not a bad investment, right? Here's the competitive reality: 69% of businesses feel pressured to adopt AI just to keep up, just to keep up with their competitors, not to get ahead, just to keep up. So in the enterprise world, using AI agents are seeing efficiency gains of about 50% or so. And they they are in customer service, they are in sales, and also in HR human um res HR human relations operations for the most part. So that's kind of where this is going. You're starting to see the adoption that just like from the Microsoft tool set or or or suite of products with your PowerPoint, your Word, your Excel, they're all ahead of adopting. If you don't know these things, you can't work over the Google Suite, right? This is where AI is going. And I think AI is going to be in this model. You've got to learn these things either now or you will definitely know them in the future. And if you learn them now, you're going to be more valuable all the way around, either as an employee or a business owner. Very, very important. So it's about having the right kind of AI doing the right kind of work in your world. And that's where agent AI really, really, really comes in. Now, for a lot of us, especially if you're listening to me right now, I would say you're now at that inflection point, right? Right. What is what do I mean by that inflection point? Just like when websites went from nice to have, oh, that's really nice, to a must-have, especially in the late 1990s, because you had to have an online presence. If you don't have an online presence of your business, you're pretty much not in business, right? Just like when social media went from experimental to essential in the 2000s. Think of the Facebooks of the world. They only came out in 2009 and they've ballooned in the last you know 15 years, uh, along with a lot of other digital companies that were able to ride the internet wave. So this Egyptian AI is this next wave of artificial intelligence, and it's not coming, it's already here, right? Already here. So the question should be it's no longer should I adopt AI. The true question is, how quickly can I implement it before my competition does? Let me say that again. You're a small business owner, you're thinking about what I'm talking about, why you should be in this AI business accelerator, especially if you're not AI proficient right now. You got to start thinking like this. This is very important. How quickly can I implement it before my competition does? Speed to market is everything, right? So right now I've got about 237, 238 or so um podcast interviews, right? And I've interviewed a lot of people from C-suite healthcare executives to a lot of technical founders or tech founders, from real estate moguls to personal branding experts. And you know what they all have in common right now. They're all asking the same question: How do I leverage AI without losing what makes my business special or what makes me special? Right? That's what we're solving today. Because the truth is AI isn't going to replace entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs who use AI are going to replace those who do not. And I'm going to make sure you're in this first wave, this first group. I want to make sure you're on plane for this next wave of technological advancement, that you're ready for what's happening. This is very, very, very important. So here's what we're going to cover in the next 30 minutes or so. So I want you to settle in. I want you to get ready. I want you to take out your pen and pencil. I want you to make sure that you record this or you make sure that you can replay it and really tune into this and where you're at right now, your current state, and you want what do you want your future state to look like? And understanding if AI is not a part of that that that growth plan that you have, especially going into 2026, you got to rethink this, right? So we're going to break down exactly what agentic AI is and why it's different from the AI or artificial intelligence or large language model, right, that you've been hearing about or using. Secondly, I'm going to give you the exact KPI key performance indicator framework that high-growth businesses are using to measure their AI transformation. And third, I'm going to walk you through a practical implementation roadmap that you can start executing today, not next quarter, not next year, but today. And finally, I'm going to show you how this ties into your personal brand, my favorite subject, and why building your brand has never been more important than it is right now in this AI era. So I think this is very, very important. So whether you are running a solo consulting practice, or you just have a 10-person business, or you have a 50 employee business in your operation, this episode is going to change how you think about your business because the future isn't about working harder, it's about building smarter systems that work for you. We are now moving from the information technology age into the intelligent information technology age, right? And I'm going to put another spin on that, what I call the human artificial intelligence age. The merging of human intelligence with AI is going to dramatically shift and change the ecosystem of business, whether it's an entrepreneurial or as a career development as you move forward in life. So let's get ready. Let's go ahead and dive in on some of the things I just I just kind of laid out for you. So let's talk about what a gentic AI actually is, because I'm betting most of you have heard the term, but you aren't quite sure what separates it from your regular AI, you know, your chat GPTs, your clouds, your perplexities, and the like. You know, what is the difference? So I want you to think about injective AI this way, right? Right. So you know you can use your chat GPT to write an email, you can create a social media post, or you can put together and put together a draft or a proposal. That's great. That's generative AI, works very, very well. And a lot of people are adopting it like this. Is great. You just give it a prompt and it gives you an output. One and done, basically. No, you got to engineer it, you got to play with it. You might have some reiterations, but eventually you get to where you want it to get to, and you put it out there, which is very powerful. But that of itself is just the beginning of artificial intelligence. Agentic AI takes it to an entirely different level. Instead of just responding to prompts, agentic systems, they can, number one, they can perceive their environment and they can understand context. That's super important. So think about this: like in in what I call the uh the perceived platforms today, you have data at the bottom, you have information. That's really what LLM's the large language model. They have data and information, and then at the above that you have context, that's applied knowledge. That's what human beings really, really accelerate, applied knowledge, and then you have wisdom, the understanding of that applied knowledge, right? How you can innovate and move things further. So if we start thinking about these machines, number one, they can perceive, and then a gentle AI machine, they can perceive their environment and understand context. What is number two? They can plan, can plan multiple step workflows to achieve a specific goal. That's huge. And number three, they can make autonomous decisions, it can make decisions of itself based on that plan. And number four, they can execute that action in the real world, booking appointments, sending the emails, updating the databases. And number five, they can learn from the results and that change their approach without any human in the loop interference. Game changing, game changing, right? So let me give you a concrete example from our this is our AI accelerator uh program when it starts talking about agentics. Now, this is a little bit more advanced, and we have basic and we have advanced, right? And we'll get into that advanced world for people that are really looking at, but I want to bring this out because this is moving so fast that we cannot negate what's really going to be taking place, especially in 2026 around agency AI systems. So let's just say you're running a small business, right? A traditional AI might help you draft a proposal when you ask it to do that, right? We talked about that. But an agentic AI system, it can monitor, you know, you're running in HubSpot or you're in your mail champ, or whatever you're using for CRM, the customer relations management, your CRM database for your new leads, right? The research, the research you have about the company or the industry, it can draft a customized proposal based on that specific need. It can schedule a follow-up meeting that works for both calendars because it's reading it, and send personalized emails over the next two weeks without you doing anything, right? It can analyze which of those proposals are winning so it can start to adjust, so it can improve in the future. Game changing. Very much a game changer. That's a huge difference. Remember, all this is happening automatically without you doing anything, while you're sleeping, while you're with your clients doing human-to-human interaction, right? While you're focused on the high value work that only you can do, that's that's the goal. That's the difference. Of the blocking and tackling, of sending out communication messages, right? Or developing communication messages. What if you took all that off your plane and it's automatically be being done by an agentic AI system at such scale and precision and fidelity that the other human on the side can't tell the difference between you and your AI or your agentic AI um avatar? Let's just say what that may be. Let that think in, let that sink all the way into what I'm talking about. This is huge. Right. So let's talk about structure or education, how you're gonna how you're gonna understand this, right? How you're gonna understand where you we are right now, what you need to understand, and the three waves of AI transformation that businesses are experiencing, right? So wave one is automation AI. Using the AI to automate repetitive tasks. We're talking about writing the emails, we're scheduling their posts, we're generating their reports. This is where most businesses are stuck right now. This is kind of where they're at. It saves the time, but it doesn't really transform your business model, right? Just speeds things up just a little bit. This wave two is called augmentation AI, um augmentation artificial intelligence. You're using AI to enhance human decision making. Using the AI to enhance human decision making. This is where AI analyzes your data, it spots the patterns, it gives you insights to make better decisions faster. And it's super powerful. And this is where the high performers right now are playing in. Huge, huge. This is where the real transformation happens. This is where you go from being an entrepreneur trading time for money to being a business owner building scalable systems. Very super important. So we start talking about the future. This is what right now the research is telling us as we go into 2026, but as by 2028, just two years from now, 33% of enterprise software will have agentic AI capabilities. Up from less than 1% right now, less than 1% right now, that was in 2024, to over 33% of this enterprise software is gonna have agentic AI. So if you're don't, if you're first of all not versed to it, you don't understand how it what it does or how it can enhance your business, that's gonna be a major problem. But then you have to implement it because in two, three years, your entire competitive fabric and the market that you're looking to influence will be agentic AI enabled. Right? Right? So that's a 33% increase in just a couple of years. So, so what does that look like really like in practice? He's like, well, how does that affect my business? Let's let's take a look at that from a five, um, and I think I think about five use cases we can talk about with some real numbers as we go, you know, move forward. First of all, we're talking about customer service and CS, or we call it customer support. So I want you to imagine with me having an AI agent that handles the first three tiers of a customer support or what we call answering the questions, you're troubleshooting the problems, or you're you're processing the refunds, let's say. And you're only escalating, I would say, only complex issues to your team. Now, in this particular case, we're talking about a bank. You know, there's a bank that's using AI agents. You might start to notice that as you start to interact, interact with some of these uh large, larger um entities, like banks and retail and things like that. So they're using the AI agents and they're reducing their customer service cost by 10x. I want you to really understand what I'm saying. It's like I can either pay someone$15,$20 an hour to do this, you know, that first triage of work, or I could pay basically a machine to do it for maybe less than a dollar an hour. That's a no-brainer. What do you think the business is going to do? They're definitely going to cut their costs by 10x. It's very, very important about where that where you sit in that model. But that's that is in really interesting, you know, the financial picture. But the customer satisfaction actually improved. People like, well, customer satisfaction actually improved. The big question is, why did that happen? Because no one likes just talking to the machine. Well, you know, how is that human interaction taken off the plate? How does that actually improve the customer satisfaction world? Because resolution times dropped as far as getting your problem solved by 68%. That's why. That's beauty. So if I'm solving the problem that you called up for or you interacted with, or your chatbot by 68%, and my cost has dropped, you know, by 10x, what do you think is gonna happen? Right? And and I want you to understand this. Over a third of the consumers say they'd rather interact with an AI agent if it means not having to repeat themselves over and over and over to multiple people that don't understand their problem and not giving the resolution what they want. So fast service with no friction, that's exactly what your customer wants. Who would not want that? If you get the resolution that you're wanting, why not do that? So that's the first case. We're talking about lead generation, right? And an Egyptian AI can qualify your leads, right? They can research your prospects, people that you want to influence to consume your product or your service, and personalize your particular outreach and schedule discovery calls, even follow it based on the prospect behavior. So it's not gonna be the same thing to everybody, it's not that swipted. It actually is being very, very flexible on what it can do. So when you start thinking about this, you gotta say, well, what are the numbers, you know, around that? You know, what was the financial impact that we're talking about? So in this particular case, because I am in the brand new world and I know about marketing. So I know a marketing company that's you know what, we're gonna go into this AI world and see agentic AI world and see what this is going to look like. So they invested, you know, about ten thousand dollars for them, and this is a pretty big company, you know, national, and an AI email automation. You know, so what is the result? Let's take this 10 grand, let's go ahead and throw it at it, see what we get back. And they generated about of that 10 grand, about$50,000 in net new sales while saving another$10,000 in their total overall cost, right? What we call that in our world is a 500% return on investment. 500% all. That's a 35% improvement in the time efficiency. Efficiency is is is huge when you start thinking how to deploy AI, what it can do for me. There are two things, and I say this a lot, a lot of my shows. I always talk about these two things that technology does that uh uh better than any from a human standpoint. Um, better. And that is first, communication, the modalities of communication, right? Right. And then speed, how fast it can do those types of transactions. So if you can get speed to market, you need to speed something up in your world and you need to communicate better in your world. You can deploy Tintec AI in that world. And what you're going to see across the board is about 80% of the businesses that right now are using AI in marketing or their sales, they're reporting about I think about a 40% rate jump in 20% or more of the things that they're doing. I think that that's pretty awesome, you know, and the things that they're able to accomplish in their world. So I want you to start thinking about am I going to save money? Am I going to save time? And am I going to communicate better in the world I am? So in this use case number three, we're talking about marketing and the content creation. Because everybody knows you like AI in this world, content creation is huge. That's text, that's uh um audio, that's video, right? And the likeness that's going out there and the creativity that's going out there, the amount of content you can create from the blog posts to managing all these social media campaigns to optimizing and your span across all these platforms to know them ahead of time. And all of these are running based on performance data, you know, and it's running 24-7, depending on what it is that you're doing. So, in this particular example, it's a business owner that's using uh Shopify. Uh, that was their platform, right? Retail. And um, they used an AI assisted to auto-generate marketing content, those campaign ideas, performance reports. And what it did, it enabled them to better, they had better data-driven decisions with far less effort. That's huge, right? Right by utilizing these agentic AI models. And in my number four case, when it comes to the operation and workflow management, think about all the administrative tasks that you that you know just eats up your entire day, the scheduling, the invoicing, the expense tracking, the report generation, all that back-in work. And if you're in healthcare, think about all that time you're sitting there inputting all this information into an EHR system, that goes away. If you took all that out of your day, how much time is that giving back to you? Remember what I said earlier. If you can get, if you can control your time, you can speed up certain things, control time, and then you can also communicate at scale, you get more time back in your day, right? And so if a gentic AI can own those entire workflows, that is going to help you uh uh a lot. And that's when getting looking at operations, you want to look at your workflow management. And we've had some people, especially I got friends over in other parts of the uh the world, uh in Europe, uh, some of them are right in the lower Europe, you know, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, world, right? They've had some cafes out there uh because they're utilizing these systems already, right? And they have AI inventory, uh, I'm gonna say AI inventory systems that automatically will monitor the stock level, what you have, and flag the waste, right? In that system. This is just a small cafe. So, what's the result of that? They were able to cut their inventory waste by about 12%. What does that result in financially, right? That's the you know, what is the language of business is finance. So, what was that in finance? They're saving thousands of dollars a year by just doing that, just that one thing. So they were able to cut the waste and being able to automatically monitor their stock level, they're getting all that money back and they can utilize it in a different way. We've seen a I have, I think over in um I think it was over in uh Turkey. Uh, they're using QuickBooks, you know, Agentic AI for their bookkeeping. And a lot of people use QuickBooks. I use QuickBooks. You know, this is important. So the AI will automatically categorize the expense, it'll reconcile the transactions, and it'll even follow up on all the overdue invoices. Not only that, think about this. It's gonna clean up your books automatically, it's gonna show you the healthier cash flow that you have, and hours of all that manual data, like right now, we're going into the end of the year, goes away. All that time that you got to go back to look at all these done, already done for you, reported, and it's very, very accurate. We're also seeing a lot of these IT departments right now, they're using AI agents for their technology because some of its legacy, so it's older 79. Now they need to modernize all this tech, and they're seeing productivity gains of around 40%. These are huge, real numbers of what you can do to deploy these agentic AI models into your business to take out all the excess time. So you get an efficiency gain, and automatically is going to result in the financial model that you're gonna have, and you can do more with less. We hear that all the time, especially in healthcare, right? So we're getting excited. I know I'm getting excited about how I can do this. So if you need an agentic AI that can monitor your industry, that can track your competitors, can analyze your market trends, can deliver strategic insights that can now inform all your decision making. Think about that. And it can cut your forecasting errors. We hear about that all the time in sales forecasts. What's your forecast? Think about that. If the AI can cut your forecasting error by other 50%, I want you to think about that. Your predictions for demand, revenue, cash flow, all of it becomes far more accurate than ever before. So companies that are using AI for demand forecasting right now, right now, they're already seeing about a 20% higher revenue and about 15% lower inventory cost on average by deploying addented AI into their into their system, into their business operations, right? Not even just customer facing, just in the back end business operations, you can drive all that cost out of your business and utilize the profits to grow to do other things that you really, really want to do. That's very powerful by having the right product at the right time for your consumers. Now, they're also doing this in other worlds. You know, I know that we have people in Paris also in London. Now they have one of my clients, they already have an AI assistant, right? They manage the AI assistant will manage the inventory, they'll deal with the suppliers, they'll personalize all the outreach in multiple languages. Everybody knows in Europe everybody speaks a different language. That's going from state to state, it's country to country. And so this is going to do this in multiple languages, and it handles all the shipping logistics. So, what does she have to do? She's working out on this small little boutique. Um, I think she has an art, she's doing art. Yeah, she has a little boutique over there, and she focuses all her time now on the design and the strategy and the thing that only she can do. She doesn't have to worry about how the business operates. This is one of the biggest problems you see in small business. They're very good technically in what they know how to do, right? They're experts in what they know to do. What they're not usually experts in is finance and business operations. It's like I didn't learn all that stuff. I got to learn all that stuff. It's it's kind of hard, or you have to consult out for a lot of that. So it's more expense. So if you're gonna automate a lot of that finance, a lot of that business operation yourself, that is going to help you a lot, right? So you can also utilize these tools for inquiries, price now, just the quotes themselves accurately. You can manage all your supply chain, what that's going to look like. And again, you can expand and grow in other ways and think about where can we what we can do next. And now you're growing, you're in growth mode at this point. So you're just not holding the line, right? You are actually growing. And these aren't tech companies, these are just traditional businesses, just like yourself, just like your mom and pops in every corner of the United States, right? And they're using AI to compete and they're using AI to grow. Now, we're gonna keep moving this forward because I want you to really take a sip of water and think about what I'm talking about. This is a fundamental shift in go-to-market business strategy going into 2026.

SPEAKER_01:

Right?

SPEAKER_00:

So we know, and I'll at least I'll share with you, the numbers right now show that about 66% of small businesses are either using or experimenting with AI tools right now. That's what they should be. I hope you're in that number. But here's the distinction growing businesses are leading adoption at about 83%, while declining businesses are at a much lower rate. Right? I want you to make sure you get the 78% of growing small businesses plan to increase their AI investment next year versus only 55% of their declining peers. So, like, what does that tell you? That means the people that are deploying AI and their business are growing. The people that are not are are either going out of business or they just have no growth rate at all. It should tell you something, and there's a huge gap between winners and losers, and it's only getting bigger. And that's why we're doing the AI business accelerator. We don't want to be on that on that train going to nowhere. We want to be on that plane going to somewhere, right? And the businesses that embrace agentic AI are even growing even faster, and they're operating more efficiently and they're capturing a lot more market share than those who don't, or they're just on the fence about what this is starting to look like, right? But I get it. Some people are like, wow, that sounds all great. These are great examples. You're not showing me everything, you know. No, all this sounds great, but how can I trust the AI to truly run my business? That's important. I already asked that question. That's a great question, right? Here's the thing: you're not handing over control, you're building systems that have the guardrails built in. You're setting parameters and decision frameworks, and you're reviewing the performance and adjusting what is needed for when you deploy it. Remember, that's when you're going to bring me in. We'll help you set up the system, right? So you're not going at it all by yourself and trying to do it yourself. You bring in somebody that really truly understands agentec AI systems, how you can deploy it into your fabric of your business to train up all your employee bases, the people that need to know how to use it. And then we grow with that, right? Think about a gentic AI as like you're hiring a new employee. You don't expect them to just read your mind. You've got to train it, right? You've got to give them the processes to follow, and you got to check their work until they get better, right? And I think that's just exactly how agentic AI will work. It's the same way, except it does it faster.

unknown:

Right?

SPEAKER_00:

Remember, it's working 24-70, and never has a bad day, right? For the most part, unless it's set up incorrectly. You got to make sure that it is set up correctly for what it needs to do. And we know this because the data backs it up. Around 64% of all CEOs believe that AI success depends more on people's adoption than the technology itself. So, what does that mean? That means you've got to get trained up on this. That is that human AI, the HAI component. This is, I've been in information technology 30 plus years. Typically, when a deployment goes south that goes bad, it's because we didn't put enough money into the training of who's going to actually be using the actual technology. End user adoption is the number one reason why technology fails. Number one reason why technology fails is the inadequate training, the inadequate understanding, how do you get to that uh uh RRI that we've defined because it wasn't implemented at the highest level. You you can't just pour money into the tech itself, you've got to pour money into your most valuable resource, which is the human capital. Very, very important. So remember, culture, not code, will define how effectively the AI will scale inside your particular business. So I want you to get a better understanding. I hope you have this understanding that agentec AI is what it is, right? Then why it matters to your business, and then you got to get to this next question, which is how do I measure the success? You're right with me. You are with me now. If you're thinking about that, well, how do I measure the success? Because here's the very, very hard truth, right? What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets improved. This is so so important. We know that 97% of organizations, and I want to give keep giving you these statistics so you understand what I'm talking about. The language of businesses, finances really about the numbers. What are the numbers? 97% of organizations, 97% will struggle to demonstrate value from AI. 97% will struggle to demonstrate the value from AI. And the question is why? Because they are not tracking the right metrics. What is the promise? What are we talking about here, right? So as I go into this, I want you to really understand this, and I'm going to give you the exact KPI key performance indicator framework that separates the AI winners from the AI experimentors. Very, very important. These are the metrics that Fortune 500 companies use, but I'm going to show you how to implement them in your small business starting today. So the KPIs that will tell you if your AI investment is paying off or not, or if you're just burning cash on these nice, shiny tech objects, right? All right. And if you're listening to me, especially if you're listening to the follower brand, we're talking about a gentle tech AI revolution for small business. I want you to stay with me on this. What we're talking about is this AI and how it's going to transform your business right now. We got to get very, very practical on what we're talking about. Can't be pie in the sky on will that work for someone. We got to make it work for you. And you've got to get that golden egg out of your goose, right? Very, very important. So you can have the most sophisticated AI system in the world, but if you can't measure the impact, you are flying blind. Right. So that identific AI K API framework for small business. That's going to give you the exact metrics you need to track. T-R-A-C-K track to ensure your AI investment delivers the IRI, ROI that you were looking for. So these five categories that have organized, it's going to help you to measure if you're having success. And that's going to tie in back to my, you know, my I have a brave blueprint strategy. We teach this at Five Star BM. That's brand identity, that's resilience, authenticity, vision, and execution. So we want to start with the foundation, your money metrics. And these are the non-negotiables for any business. And AI should directly impact these particular numbers. That's KPI, number one. That's revenue, that's revenue growth rate. This is your North Star. How much is your money growing? Are you making more money or not? So what's the simple formula? You've got to have a way to measure that, right? So what is the current period revenue? What you got now minus your previous period revenue, right? Divided by your previous period revenue times 100. It's going to give you some numbers. Here's your target. I want you to understand that. Growing small businesses using AI are seeing about a 20 to 30% revenue growth. That's year over year. And I would say right now, if you you know, if you're not seeing double digit growth within six to 12 months of implementing an authentic AI model, then there's something wrong with your implementation. Right? We got to look at that because we're measuring growth. You got to first measure your growth rate. What does that look like? And you gotta understand where it's at now. And after you deploy it, what is it looking like three, six, twelve months out? If you're not seeing that double-digit growth rate, something's wrong, right? And as we move into number two of our KPI, and that is gonna be about you want to know that AI is boosting that bottom line. All right. So what's that number? What's the number I really need to know around that? We have found that on average, AI tools are delivering about three dollars, about three and a half, you know, might say yeah, yeah, about three dollars and fifty cents in returns for every one dollar invested. So you put a dollar in, you get about three dollars and fifty cents out. That's not a bad investment. Think about that, right? Not bad at all. I give you a dollar, we give me three dollars and fifty cents back. That's a pretty good deal. So let's think about that. We got to make sure we're getting that. So if you invest like a thousand dollars, you should see about$3,500 back. Uh yeah,$3,500 back in return and increase revenue or save cost. Somewhere down the line, you see that. That's a 30 well, about 300 or 350%, you know, ROI. That ain't bad at all, right? That's pretty good. That's pretty good. So, so so what's that? What and that's not really the best case, but you know, that's kind of the average. But if we're tracking each of our AI projects and we want to use a simple formula like net benefit divided by cost times 100%. Now, I might have said that very fast, but these are things we need to get to measurement. You need to understand financial measurements in your business so you can truly see what's moving the needle and what is not. So if you spend$1,000 on an AI chatbot and it saves you$5,000 worth of time or increased sales, that's at least 500% ROI.

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Right.

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So small businesses that measure AI or artificial intelligence ROI regularly, you know, they're more likely to achieve their goals because they're measuring the right thing. So we move into what's the third thing we need to measure, Grant? That's that growth profit margin. It's the margin after all your business operations and everything that you're doing and what it's costing you. How much am I really getting back in private margin, right? This tells you how much of your revenue turns into profit after you subtract all the cost of goods sold. Right? So revenue minus your cost of goods sold, we call that cogs, you know, divided by the revenue times 100. And you've got to have a benchmark. What is the benchmark on that? The industry benchmark. So around 60 to 80% gross margin for service business. And that's about 30, maybe to 50%, I think, if you have a product business, right? So AI should help you improve those margins by at least 5 to 10%, you know, percentage points, but reducing either production or delivery cost or your labor costs. These are very, very important to really. So I'm giving you the framework. How do I measure these things? So these are the things you want to measure. Because if you're not measuring these things, you're not seeing the ROI as it's coming back around. So then that number four thing, we've got to look at our operating cash flow. Now that's the lifeblood of your business. One of the big reasons why business is so other business. You have to understand the operating cash flow that you generate from your operation. And I think this stat here should make every entrepreneur you should pay attention to this. Because more than half a small business say that an AI tool for cash flow forecasting, cash flow forecasting would solve a critical pain point for them. Not be nice to have, but solve a critical pain point. Why is that important? Because AI can cut forecasting errors by up to 50%. No, you're cooking with gas. That means your predictions for your demand, your revenue, your cash flow, all of it becomes far more accurate. You're making decisions with confidence instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that these numbers are going to pan out. Right? We don't want to spray and pray. We have to have a very particular target. We have to understand positive cash flow every month within about three to six months of operating expenses in reserve. That's what we're looking for, our target. We want positive cash flow every month with three to six months of operating expenses in the reserve. And you're using AI to protect cash flow with 90% plus accuracy. We're going to get there. And we start measuring number five, and that is your customer acquisition cost. You have to understand they call it CAC and marketing, we understand that. And if business and the CEO level, you must understand this, right? That is the cost to acquire the customer and the lifetime value of that client, right? How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? What's the formula? Well, in our world, we always looked at total sales and marketing costs divided by the number of new customers required, acquired, I should say. Right? It's very important. So now we deploy JITIC AI into the model. Customers, we know there's clients or I should say companies that are using AI for lead generation and qualification are seeing about a 25%, 35% reduction in their CAC, right? That's that cost to acquire a new client. That's pretty, if you can reduce the cost in that world, that's huge. So if you're spending about$500 to acquire a customer, all business,$500, AI should help you get that down to about, I'd say$325 to$375. Not bad. So instead of spending$500 to get a client, they're going to spend about$300. We're going to high slide,$375. That's pretty good. Right? Let's give you some more numbers. Number six, and I talked about this. That is your lifetime value, your customer lifetime value. Some people will use it as CLV. How much, if you acquire that customer, how much are they going to spend with you during that entire uh lifetime that they are a client? Right. I think that's pretty good. So how much you know do they generate over the entire relationship with you? And you have goals around this. So your CLV should be at least three times your CAC, right? The cost to acquire. And you're so if you acquire somebody for let's just say it was$500, they should be spending about$1,500 with you. And that's going to give you some understanding. So if your costs are around that uh level, your AI is going to help you to increase that CLD. You want that to increase by improving the tension, upselling, and reducing the turn. So if I can help you get the retention, the upselling, the reducing the turn, you're going to increase your CLD. I think it's super, super important. So as you think through this, I want you to like sit back and like, hmm, is this information I'm giving you right now valuable? Is it valuable to you in your business and what you're doing? Is it valuable? Because if it is, you're going to keep this recording and you're going to refer back to it, and then you're going to start thinking about these things and what you can do to truly move the needle forward. Because I've given you the formula now that you need to measure to see if you're really getting a ROI on your genetic AI deployment. Right? Let's talk about three or I would say I'll give you this. I'll give you another KPI. All right. And that's time to output ratio. What do you mean by time to output? How long does it take to complete key business processes? How long does it take to complete key business processes? Whether you're creating a proposal, you're onboarding a new client, or you're delivering a product, the AI should cut this time dramatically if remember if deployed correctly. And you've got to have a target around that. You need a target, time to output ratio. Hmm, what are we talking about? So 40, 40 to 60 percent reduction in time to output for automated processes within three to six months. That's what we want to look at. Remember, something that's repetitive, it's something that's repetitive and it doesn't change. It's not changing a lot within your business. You can deploy a GTIC AI too. And then you should start seeing a return on that investment, especially within three to six months, right? And we know that other companies they found about a 50x spend improvement for content creation. That's just on content creation, right? 50 times faster that they can do that. So you start thinking about that. What can I do to cut down on my time to output? And if I can deploy Angelic AI in that world to get these big productivity statistics, these big productivity gains is really what we're really looking for. This is what we get excited about because now you're generating money. So if 80% of your small business right now, right now, especially in Omaha, if you're using, if you were to use AI and you can improve about 20% productivity, that's going to deliver to your bottom line over and over and over again. Especially when you compound it, right? And you double your productivity. This is fun, this is phenomenal. And we know not only in small business, but companies like Microsoft, they found this. This is true. Microfalls, Microsoft found that people using their AI assistant, like your co-pilot, right? If they're using AI assistant copilot tools to complete everyday tasks, they're doing it about 30% faster. With 70% of all those other people, you know, that are using it. So you're 30% faster than the people that are using it, 70% of those, they feel way more productive. That's a huge improvement. That's transformational. That's that's you're not going back there ever again. It's not just about the speed, right? Right. It's about the innovation, what they're able to. To accomplish now because their taunt their teams now have more time to think strategically instead of being just the minutiae of busy work. Now you can actually get something done. So when you track metrics like a task completed per employee or orders shipped per day to see if they're rising or falling after AI implementation, now you're starting to see a lot of change and you're starting to deliver a lot more profitability to your business. Remember, we talked way earlier in this conversation around errors. If we can reduce your error rate, now think about this. How often do the mistakes happen in your process? And what is that really costing you financially? And if you can deploy an AI agent to make far fewer errors than the humans that are actually doing these repetitive tasks, remember, these are just the busy work stuff. I want my human, my human intelligence working on the more strategic, innovative, creative uh operations in my business, not who's taking out the garbage today, that type of thing. You know, let's deploy human humans. I want to understand this. The most intelligent species on the planet is the human, not the AI. Humans make AI, right? I want to put in or invest more of my time and money into the human, right? And make in bringing them up. I don't want them doing menial tasks. They they're far more valuable than that, right? So you got to be able to measure this. So you want to aim for your error rates to be below about 2% when you deploy AI into that managed workflow, right? So that's your benchmark. And we know that high performing systems achieve about 90%, 98% accuracy level. It's huge, right? So now you give them your your your, you know, that's the biggest cost usually in a business is their their labor. And if you can start utilizing that labor in more effective things, like why are you taking your most expensive asset to do the most menual tasks? Let's let's flip the script on that. And then let's start talking about the cost per transaction. I think this is another very important thing. How much does each business transaction truly cost you? Whether you're processing the order, you're handling the support ticket, or you're closing the sale. How can we deploy AI to drive that cost down, right? And we know that that people that are deploying AgenTech AI in these worlds, they're seeing about a 10x that I talked about earlier, reduction and customer service, right? Right. I think that's very, very important. So if you're using AI in that world and you're saving to some people, they're saving$20,000 a year just through the cost reductions themselves. Now you're starting to cook with gas. You're starting to get focused on AI and what it can do as you shift your mindset about what I am talking about, how this is going to change the business fabric framework, how you're going to compete going forward. So if your customers don't care about your AI, they care about their experience. We got to measure that. You got to remember what I just said. Your customers really don't care what you're doing, as long as they they care about their experience. Did you improve my experience? Well, that was good. Let's do that, right? So if your customer satisfaction score, your CSAT, right? And we know by different surveys that have been out there, each interaction, we want to know how satisfied were you. Get these reviews, everybody wants to know how satisfied were you. One to five, one to ten, what where where what does that look like? So if you had a CSAT score that's improved about, I'd say about 15% on average when businesses are adding AI, that's big. But why is that happening? You just put a machine in the loop instead of putting a huge. How is that happening? Because the resolution times drop by 68%. We talked about this earlier. So important because customers, they're not getting frustrated, waiting for a response, telling the same story to five different people and no resolution. This is very, very important. So if you're you're looking for about an 80% target rate, and then the AI either is going to maintain or improve that human-level satisfaction while handling a lot more volume. So they're talking to a lot more people. They don't get tired, it's 24-7 a day. This again becomes a no-brainer. And we all know some people do this, especially marketing. You should be measuring this. That's your net promoter score or your NPS. And we have to understand: would your would your customers start recommending you to others? Referral. That's what we're talking about. Would you refer someone else to an experience you you just had? You know, we we know that's usually, hey, if you ate at a nice restaurant, you tell somebody else about it, hey, you need to go over there, you know, they utilize them. I love five-star BDM because they do great work, everything that I expected from them, I'm gonna refer you to them. That is what we want to get to. So, what's our formula for measuring that? Because we know that the percentage of promoters about nine to ten ratings. And you want to, you know, this is your formula, so you want to be able to understand the percentage of people that are promoting you to other people, right? If you can get to that number, that's very important. So we know that in I had one client of mine that did that, they they they measure their net promoter score, and they noticed by when they utilize the AI tool that it doubled. Like, wow, because they're doing something new and innovative, and it was so cool to get involved with that, and it actually delivers a very predictive and a very accurate result. So, again, you're talking about your retention, that's up. You're talking about your recurring revenue, that's up. Things that are faster, that things that are better, that very consistent, everything is up. So we want to start looking at that because you go from an average net promoter score to world class, now you're moving somewhere, right? If you're a small business owner and now everybody's referring business to you in not only in your local economy, but also in your state economy, in your regional economy, in your national and international, that's huge. So your AI should definitely not be hurting your MPS. You know, if it's dropping, you need to know what you're doing. Remember, we're measuring these things because if you're starting to see, hey, people don't like what we did, you need to change. Something's not right. Because it should, as our statistics have told you, should be going up. So if it's not deployed correctly, that's a problem. I'm giving you the things to measure. You need to measure all these things that I'm talking about so you know if your AI is gonna work for you or not in a very short period of time, right? Right? Are you sticky with your customers year over year? Because if you're not sticky, they're gonna they're moving away. Remember that the the lifetime value of the customer. So we need to understand from a formal standpoint, our customers at the end of that period, are you got more customers or you have lower? You know, we have to understand that. If I started out with 10 clients, let's say now you only have seven after I deploy my AI, that's a problem. It should be doubling that, right? So you need to benchmark around that. You need to be see how healthy you are from a business, you know, what that retention should look like. So your AI should improve retention, it should be providing better, faster, more personalized services for you, right? Then we got to get into response time. How quickly do you respond to customer airqualts? We see this all the time. Like, man, they had me on hold all day, they didn't respond to me. I'm waiting on people. Take the friction on your business at the end of the day. You want to sum this up. What is Grant talking about? Deploy a Gentic AI, take the friction on your business, put more money in your pocket. That's basically it. What does that look like, right? I think all these things are very, very important. You want to have more market share. What is the growth rate around that, right? You want to have more launch velocity. So you deploy your products and you're growing faster. You should be able to do that. You should have more innovation. You know, now you got all this extra time and money. How do you now innovate even faster? How do you get better even better on all the different things? Remember, technology is just an enable, should enable you to do what you do at scale. That's what we're starting to look like. We want to make our customers and are better, and we want to make our employees more productive. End of day. All these things are very, very important. And I know I gave you a ton of KPIs, key performance sanitatives, but you want you to keep this video. So when you start like, hey, we do need to deploy agentic AI, but what should we be looking at, right? We will look at all these things. You want to look at your revenue growth rate. You want to look at your ROI on your AI initiatives, right? What does that look like? That 35% dollar metric. What does that look like? Your customer satisfaction score, your productivity gains, your revenue per employee. You want to track all this stuff at least monthly, because once you've got a baseline, you're seeing the improvements. You know the difference. You you layer in on the other metrics as much as you can, but those are the things you really, really need to hone in on. Revenue growth, your ROI on your AI initiatives, your customer satisfaction score, and your productivity gains and your revenue per employee. I gave you those five, just paring it down for you, because I think it's very, very important. And the key is that you you can use this as a dashboard, right? You can create that. If you're looking with your AI, um your authentic AI deployment, you want to create a dashboard so you can you can you can study these types of things and see it. So you can see what the intelligence is is telling you. Business intelligence is huge. We want to make it visual, visible, right? We want to make it accessible and you can review it weekly. You can see immediately, like almost like looking at your stocks and bonds that go up and down and that type of thing. But at the end of the day, it should be delivering uh a positive result. And if not, those are things you want to start looking at, or the growth rate is not where you want to be. So let's get into that as we end this up. Talk about our mindset. You know, here's what I learned, I know, in you know, in my business experience. And I was there at the beginning, let's say of the internet boom. Here I am, you know, 25, 30 years later, at the beginning of a genetic AI boom. This is very important. Metrics drive behavior. When you measure something, people pay attention to it. And when you celebrate the improvements in these metrics, you reinforce the behaviors that drove those improvements. So I don't want you to just detract these KPIs. I want you to use them, tell it like a story. This is the narrative. Share it with your team, celebrate these wins. And if you have problems, you diagnose the problems, and people understand where these problems are coming from. You begin to adjust your AI implementation based on what the data is telling you because, again, it was deployed accurately and it's measuring those key performance indicators so you can see exactly where you're falling short and what you need to do to make it happen. So remember, these metrics aren't just numbers on a screen, they represent your real impact. Revenue growth means you can hire more people, you can serve more customers, you can make a bigger difference, you can improve cash flow, right? So you can sleep, take the stress out of your life, take the stress out of your business, have more time for the people that you really want to be with, right? You want to get these higher customer satisfaction scores because you are helping them. Your business should be helping someone along life's way, and they help to tell their friends, like, hey, you got this problem, call so-and-so, they'll solve it for you. That's a true power of what measurement looks like. That's why these KBIs they matter. So we've kind of covered agentique AI, what it is, why it matters, how to measure success. And then now you really want to get tactical. How do you actually implement this in your business? Right? Right? How do you get your hands dirty with a gentic AI? Right? This is what I want you to do, especially if you're listening to this. First, you need to do an internal audit of where you're at, what you're saying. And if you believe everything I just told you, you don't have to believe what I'm saying. This is the data saying this, what this list look like. I want you to write all this down, start thinking this through for what you need to do. And then just join our AI business accelerator. We have a basic and advanced. I would adjust AI is really in the advanced world. So if you're not very savvy on AI itself as a we'd call a large language model or an AI chat box of just giving you data and information, then you need to definitely look into the the the basic class. So you can have how do you grow sales and marketing from a business? This is not just general, it's not theory. I'm gonna show you how to improve your sales and marketing with them with the guaranteed RLR. And then we get an agenda. We're gonna start now, we're gonna start automating some of these processes so you can then can can concentrate how I can grow my business. So you start with the tools that you are where you have to fit yourself into. Where am I at in my journey? Right? You need to look at all these things. So you're like, all right, I see where I'm at. Now I know where I need to go next. I think that's so important. So I'm gonna thank you again for being with me on this very special follow the brand episode. We're gonna be branding a whole lot. If you want to know more, actually go to the website five starbdm.com, take a look at all the text video and other information that I have out there. We're gonna be rolling this out right now, pretty soon in the Omaha uh area into uh 2026. So look on the uh um be on the lookout for that. If you need send me an email, you want more information around it, please send it to me. We would right now securing everything we've got put together. If you'll see a landing page come out, I'd like to send it out. Join our email list so I can make sure you are on the the latest and greatest for about what we are uh unrolling out here in 2026. Thanks so much for being with me today. Remember to go to five star beat them, that's number five star SDR, be for brand, be for development, and for masters.com. This is Grant McGull. Thank you so much.