AI, Automation, and the Future of Small Business with Ivo Perts

In this inspiring episode, host Dionne Malush sits down with Ivo Perts, founder of Smoothen AI, for a powerful conversation about how artificial intelligence, automation, and smarter business systems can help entrepreneurs save time, reduce stress, and create more freedom. Together, they explore how AI is not here to replace creativity or relationships, but to remove repetitive tasks, simplify workflows, and help business owners focus on what truly moves the business forward.

This episode is for entrepreneurs, real estate professionals, small business owners, and creators who feel overwhelmed by content, cash flow, taxes, team bottlenecks, or too many ideas living inside their head. Dionne and Ivo talk about using AI for content creation, business planning, automation, financial clarity, and overcoming fear around money and technology. If you want to build a smarter, more peaceful, and more profitable business, this conversation will help you see AI as a tool for freedom, not fear.

Connect with Ivo here:

Website: smoothin.ai

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61574797031319

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ivoperts86/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivo-perts-9605a729/

Transcript

Systems Before Strategy

SPEAKER_00 0:02

What if the thing slowing down your business isn't your marketing, your team, or even your strategy? It's your systems. Today's guest built something that's changing how businesses operate behind the scenes, using AI to remove friction, simplify workflows, and give people their time back. I'm sitting down with Evo Pertz, the founder of Smootin AI, what a cool name. A platform designed to help businesses automate smarter, not harder. And what I love about this conversation is we're not just talking about tools, we're talking about freedom, clarity, and building a business that actually works for you. If you ever felt overwhelmed by all of the moving parts in your business, I know I have. Or if you've ever wondered how AI can actually make your life easier, not more complicated, this episode is for you. Okay, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02 0:45

I'm great. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:46

I'm doing good. So what's one thing you want, Dion? I could see we had that conversation. What's one thing you want people to really understand about you that they may not see on the surface?

SPEAKER_02 0:56

I'm a loving father of three kids, and I think that says a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, you don't seem that old to have three kids, but that's that's a lot of kids. How old are they?

SPEAKER_02 1:06

My oldest just turned five.

AI As A Creativity Multiplier

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Oh, they're so little. That's kind of what a great age. So let me ask you this. What drew you into AI and automation in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 1:16

I think I'm in general, I'm just looking at this AI revolution with awe because I'm definitely not in the band camp of people worrying that it's gonna be this monster that's gonna kill all of our jobs and so on and so forth. Actually, I just think it's a blessing in disguise because it's just taking it's like swiping away tasks that were mundane and people didn't like left, right, and center. And I think that's a great upgrade for also the team that was dealing with stuff. So, for example, like me running a business, we always had a bottleneck whenever we needed to create anything from a designer. All right, like even if when I had a team of 38 people, we had one person dedicated for product design, and we had one person dedicated for everything else. So, like the presentations, posters, all this kind of stuff. He was overworked all the time. As every anybody knows, you got a client today, you're gonna present in five minutes, you need something really, really quick, you know, and they gotta go create it. And the way they were doing it before was like, you know, they have to actually go do it, create it. Even if you have these builders of like drag and drop all of this kind of stuff, it still took time. People have their tasks, their pipelines, all this kind of stuff, and now is just the amount of work that you can do is is is super. So I I I'm coming from that background, and I think everybody should really embrace it and just try using it, not be afraid.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

So I came from the creative side where you're talking about, and it takes so long to do things where it's actually, I think AI has made my creativity a superpower. Like I can do things so fast, people have no idea what I just did. You know, even though I'm using AI and they all have the opportunity to, but I'm really embracing it and I love it. It has literally changed my life and my and it has given me time back. Although I s right now I still use all the time to create stuff in AI, but I do know that if I didn't have to do or want to do it, I don't have to. So yeah, so thank you for understanding that because a lot of people still don't.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

No, they don't, and I think I mean it's kind of funny because like um one of the companies I was working for recently, it's a relatively large corporation. I mean, they have two thousand two and a half thousand people. They just recently bought, I heard from an ex-colleague, they bought like 60 licenses of AI for like their top management to trust test out and try out the waters, and they don't know it. So, like everybody looking at it like it's a it's a game for all these big companies and all that stuff. No, no, no, they haven't figured it out. It's actually an opportunity for all the smaller people to figure things out much, much, much quicker. And like another example I can give you recently, I was super shocked, but because we I managed to like build myself an entire website with all the content on it, with all free prompts and and this is not a plug, I'm serious. It's just like sharing my uh my experience recently. So, in the middle of different projects and and different clients, client work and all this kind of stuff, I managed to build a full site with over 52 pages. And also we have seven different paths. So the the whole idea here for smooth smoothing is more than just the app, it's a movement behind it, and it's something that I'm trying to give back a little bit to the community. Because when I started out, there was no place where you could find out about like how the finances work, why a report's looking different than than some than than what's actually in my bank account, like what's happening here. You know, your accountant looks at you like as if you're stupid, but you know, and and and and you feel stupid actually at the same time, right? And nobody's nobody's helping out. So if anybody wants to check that out, go to smootin.ai and we have like four tracks that you can you can look at. You can if you want to learn, there's just learning, purely learning. If you want to grow your business, we have like specific sequences and tools for that. If you want to protect your business and protect your profit margins, we have stuff for that. And actually, for people who are in trouble right now or like they're feeling the pinch or something like that, we have what's called the fix-it now track, where you have like suggestions, tips, tools, frameworks to really figure out how to get out of a cash crunch and start growing the business again. And uh and all that in two days, it's instant, it's insane. I mean, it's my brain, right? Like it's it's not that like it's not the AI making it, like it's it's just the amount of decisions you can do. And you're absolutely right regarding the creative part. Like for me, I'm very creative only in the morning. So like I have a I have a window of maybe between you know nine to noon, something like that is great for my creative work. But now they are I can bounce back ideas and that creativity just comes like bubbling up again. It's it's it's insane. I'm like, wow, you know, like even in five minutes, I can I can I can have this magic bottle that like like a magic genie comes out and like fixes all my creativity issues.

SPEAKER_00 5:52

It is a magic genie, no doubt. And you know, I've created so many websites, I've created ebooks and presentations. One weekend I challenged myself. I did 18 presentations in a weekend. And then in the last two and a half weeks, I've created four 40 ebooks from start to finish of things that I've over the years I put together where I had a VA help me or I had the words and I didn't have it all together because I also run a 200 people organization. I have a real estate brokerage. I'm I'm working, I do this stuff on the side at nights. So I'm at home and I'm creating this stuff. My husband's like, What are you doing? I'm like, I'm just recreating all the ebooks that I just spent all these years and all that money paying people to help me with. And he's like, Are you kidding me? And they are so great. They're so much better than they were. They look amazing. I was able to figure out like I'm not super techy, but I'm super good at learning things, right? And so I'm really good at creativity. So what the tech I don't know, I'll try to figure out. And if I don't figure it out, I'll have someone help me. But I learned how to make the Python in Claude where I can just tell to use the same thing over and over again, right? So it's creating these beautiful ebooks. They all look the same. They look like that. I've graphic designed them so beautifully. And so I am just in love with it. I can't even stop myself from using it.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

Yeah, no, 100%. I I I love it. I I love your ambition and I love the I love the feedback. I love the energy.

Money Anxiety And Cash Flow Truths

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Thanks. So before smooth and AI, what were you seeing in businesses that made you say something has to change?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Oh, great, great uh question. I think what definitely has to change is the whole attitude towards money and how money works. And I think there's a big discussion that nobody's having, which is taxes. And I think that that we have a bad relationship with taxes, and taxes get a bad rap a lot of the time because somehow for a lot of people it seems like it's coming out of nowhere, or like, you know, if I'm small, I'm being overtaxed and all this kind of stuff. And I think and you have all these tax advisors that just go out there and try to fix the question in terms of like how not to pay tax, right? But I think at the end of the day, maybe this is a bit more specific for me because I'm in Europe and I actually see where my my my my money's going in terms of taxes, right? And and and I I see the system, it's helping me right now with the kids and all this kind of stuff, you know. Like, so I want to give back and I want to be part of the community. And like I think with that, I think a lot of the the stigma and and and all this kind of stuff is just purely just not having had anybody kind of guide you in terms of like this is what's going to happen when you start a business. And there's two big kind of levers that nobody talks about. One is timing, because and this is probably gonna hit home very specifically for you because you're you're in the real estate, you're a real estate brokerage. When you earn the money and when you pay taxes on the money that you earn, those are completely two different things. And you might have already spent that money because you you you use it as your own. When in fact, you what like if you wanna if you're in the for the long term, whenever you get money in, like the part that's meant for suppliers should go to the supplier box, the parts that go that goes to whatever, like split it up straight away. Just get get it out of your wallet, get it out of your bank account, put it in another one. Just don't look at it, you know. Like it's just gonna be so much easier. And trust me, you'll live on the money that you have, like you'll you'll make it happen. But uh or you'll make more. Exactly, because you'll be pressurized into doing it, right? Like your brain is gonna go straight away, like, okay, now I understand it's not as much, like I need to make more, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

So it opens up your eyes in so many different ways. And I always say that like if your business doesn't work without manipulating taxes here or there, you're underpriced, or yeah, you've made some mistake somewhere on on the price or something like that. So I would just yeah, advise people for that. And and and that's kind of also why I'm saying like and and I like I said, I mean, you don't get this, nobody teaches this in school, nobody teaches this in uni, there's no course for this. People in the financial sector kind of expect you to understand these things and know them off beak and so on and so forth, but that it that doesn't happen. You know, there's a reason why financial people have degrees in finances and it takes four years to learn them. It's the same as medicine, right? Like it's it's it's a whole ecosystem. But for operators, you don't need that much to know that much. You need to know like the things that are like are gonna impact my my business. And most business owners live on cash flow. That's why we made smoother than with cash flow, more so you have like direct insights of what's happening actually in the bank account rather than what's happening with your reports, which are again back to the timing thing. You know, you might be looking at a report from last year. It's like, okay, how does that help me this year?

Jobs Versus Tasks And Real Fears

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Yeah, for sure. So a lot of people feel overwhelmed by AI. And what you said earlier about, you know, people think it's gonna take your job, but I just just talked to someone yesterday, it made so much sense to me. He said, if I came into your company and looked at your staff and was able to take away 20% of what they do and give that to AI, what could they do with that 20%? And I was like, oh my goodness, that makes so much sense. They could help me grow the company instead of doing the the menial or minutia, whatever you want to call it. Those tasks that every day that they're complaining about because they are. They don't want to answer the phone. They don't want to, you know, respond to every email. They want to do other things and grow the company. But AI allows that if you let it. And on top of a million other things. Like I shared this story once before, and you'll understand my husband had a liver transplant over a year ago. And while we were in the hospital, I was uploading the test results, I was uploading the x-rays, everything that I was able to see into AI. And then then I was asked questions, and then I would tell it to give me questions to ask the doctor. So when I'm talking to the doctor, I actually sound like I know what I'm talking about. I knew nothing about liver transplants.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

And I guess you're I I bet your anxiety level went drop by like a m multiple.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

A ton because I was able to understand what the unknown, because a lot of times, and and I think of it this way a doctor has one brain, and there's the brain is not filled with medical information. There's other things in that brain. But AI is millions of brains. You know, there's all I just think of it like that because there's only so much one brain can hold.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Yeah, yeah. And like I said, I mean, I was listening in on the podcast for of Jensen Jensen Huang yesterday, and he made a very good statement, which is, you know, if we can make the distinction between a job and tasks, we're just making make we're like the AI is completing tasks, but the job is something different, right? And I think Dion, right, like you being from real estate, you'll appreciate this really. Your business is all about building relationships.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

And AI gives you more time back to spend to build those relationships.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

For sure.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

Why are you afraid of it?

SPEAKER_00 12:22

I don't know. I just don't understand it. A lot of people, you know, have the idea that it's affecting, it's affecting the planet and those kind of things. So I did it, I actually did some research where I said here's AI, and it's like this really tall building, and here's Amazon, YouTube, and Netflix, and they're smaller buildings. But if you stack those three on top of them, they're making they're they're doing more to the you know, to the country or the world than AI. Like people are so worried about it. But here's the thing it's life, and if it's a way to have a better life. I just don't understand the mindset about that at all. Do you have people say that to you anything about that in your country? About those stuff?

SPEAKER_02 12:57

No, let's say there's we're yeah, sorry. I've got less kind of fear mongering because I'm more with the IT crowd. Like I I like 10 years ago, well, not 10 years ago, even what five years ago, I was running a real estate on online real estate marketplace in Ukraine. So I'm I'm very close, close to heart to you in terms of your business. So I I I really understand, I understand it. So so I'm I'm I'm not purely from a tech background now, but like the past four years, my specialty's been more toward geared towards like SaaS type of businesses and helping them grow and and and this kind of stuff. But so like a lot of them don't have like it's funny because they're skeptical from a different perspective. They're like, is it actually going to change anything for me? And I'm like, have you tried it? And they're like, Yeah, we've tried it, but like there's this is a problem, this is a problem, right? And it's a lot of people are still looking at it from a like a tool perspective of like it's not perfect. Like it's not, it's it's it's it's not yet perfect. We still have to create exactly what that tool is going to do for us. And so you have that also that mindset from it, like, and that's why like yeah, we're not using it because like it's not there yet, you know. But when it is going to be there, like somebody would have be eaten your your business for lunch because you're standing still, like you you just need to live in you just need to be modern and kind of accept that like it's going to be here, you gotta learn how to work with it, use it for personal life. It's kind of like the internet, it's going to stay here.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Yeah. You know, I there was a chart someone put up a couple of weeks ago where it showed all the people in the world, like the billion, eight billion people, right? But they had little squares, and all these little squares showed how many people actually used AI, and there was less than half. And then it went all the way down to like the one percent club. People like you and me, we're in that one percent club. And I don't know as much as you do, but I know more than they do. And so that being said, this is it was very interesting to me. And I just kept looking at it, thinking, I don't know in my entire life if there's any ever been anything that allowed me to be in the 1% of the world club. That's really cool, huh?

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Very cool. Congratulations on that.

Fast Automations For Content And Video

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Thanks to you too. So let's talk about this. What are two or three things someone could automate this week that would instantly give them their time back?

SPEAKER_02 15:09

I think for sure what you can automate nowadays is all the content aspect of it. So if you're running a blog, if you're running articles, if you're running anything like that, I think you can definitely prep everything in a way that um the research is done automatically, either at a specific time or you just click a button, all this, and so on and so forth. So you can structure everything so that these things are automated and you don't need to spend so much time on the stuff that um, you know, is how to say the first tier of tasks that you need to do, right? So doing research, getting um all the sources that you need to, all this kind of stuff. Then it depends on your preference. But the way I like to look at it is also the it's the the articles are automated, all this kind of stuff. But then I proofread and I change it to be in kind of my my voice more and stuff like that, right? So use it as a ghostwriter, copywriter, something like that. I think for yeah, if you're doing anything with content nowadays, you can definitely automate all of that. And another one I'm gonna actually give to you. I don't know if you've used this this AI yet or not, but it's called uh wizard.ai with a V, not a W. No, how do you spot visit so like a wizard, just not with a W but with a V.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Okay, can't wait to see it.

SPEAKER_02 16:22

And what it does basically it's it's a it's it's an automated system where I just because I have also a YouTube channel where I share a lot of these these practices, frameworks, and all this kind of stuff. And basically you give it, you can just give it a link. You don't even need to give it the file to a a a longer a longer video file, and it automatically it puts everything through transcript. And by the way, it's got the best transcription technology out there because it's like the transcript is amazingly good because a lot of times you get like words off here and there, and so on and so forth, right? Depending on the intonation and the and the and the accent of the person. But basically, what it does is it it creates and it rates also the videos that it creates in terms of like usefulness, and then you can add automatically underneath it subtitles, b-rolls, music if you want to. It chooses all these places, but you can then also edit it if you want to within their system, and then you can schedule in front and just upload your whole month's worth of of videos, for example, in one day. So now I'm I'm basically uh I have half a day that I spend a month doing all of that, and then I've automated all my all my videos to all my platforms for the for for a month, and I post about five, six videos uh a day.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Oh my goodness, you just helped me so much because I've never heard of that. And I'm I have been struggling with the video side, and because it's just it takes a lot, it takes a ton of time.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Yeah, you gotta learn a whole new skill set, you know, like not only and and and the filming skill set is much more difficult because you need to like know the angles, how is this going to look, you know, what's with the lighting, what's with the camera. There's really a ton, like even if there's a ton of affordable stuff out there, like just the the amount of knowledge that you need to then set it up, it's it's kind of it's more complex, right? But then if you have help with actually the editing side, because the editing is the other aspect of it, which takes a ton of time and needs a ton of information, and like how do I actually do this and all this kind of stuff? And now, like if you can polish those videos automatically, yeah, that's that's that that's a game changer.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

So funny, because I made my little app called transcript to I mean transcribe to script.com, so where they could go in, transcribe a video, and then outputs, I think, 20 different pieces of content for them from the and you know, it's just something that I made, and people look at it like that is amazing. But I created that and then I created one called I think it's 30 day content planner. But it what it does is you put all you fill. So here's what happened to me. A church came to me a couple weeks ago and said, Hey, can you give us some ideas on content for 30 days? I'm like, Oh yeah, sure. So I gave it to him, and it looks so good. I was like, oh my gosh, you know, what if I could just do this for all small businesses? Let them pick what their business, put a little bit of information, and then we output it. You know, because it probably's been done somewhere before, but guess what? My people don't know that. And so then I can create this for people that I know and people that are small business owners, and it is super cool, Eva. And I was like, this is amazing. Like I just saved them hours of work in less than 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 19:19

Yeah, 100%. 100%. That's why I said that's why uh the the the comment that I made was like, you know, the the amount of content, the amount of assets that I could make that like I can give out for free for people, it's insane. Like it's and and this is where this is where the knowledge base comes back into because like it this is not gonna make sense for a 20-year-old that hasn't gotten any experience, right? Yeah, like that's the other aspect of it. Like I think that like people are afraid of it because 20-year-olds are afraid of it because it's basically as smart as a 20-year-old because the 20-year-olds have no experience, right? But the one thing that the 20-year-olds have that an AI doesn't have is the capability of refreshing and upgrading their memory. Yeah. And AI cannot make a decision, it cannot say this is good or this is bad. It's you know, it's it's it's it it has no opinion as such, right? It can only go by what it can find online or where what like this is the benchmark, this is like good, you know, in general standardized averages, medians. But it you can make a decision and you can make it go to one place or another place, and that's why these agents become like really, really powerful, because the longer you start working with them specifically, you start seeing that like you're giving it this small life and like some some know-how and a little bit like right, but um and it's it's a hate great helper, but it's never going to be able to make a decision like that.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Yeah, it's not, and you know, something is simple, like I always have this goal, I'm gonna make a million dollars a year. And I always look at that and I think I need 187 people, just pay$37 a month, and I'm at a million dollars on this simple little thing that saves them hours of time, uh lots of money. But here's the thing now, here's where I get stuck. Okay, I have all the stuff, I have all these great ideas, and then how do I get it out there? So that's always been the biggest thing for me. The I'm definitely not the integrator, I'm the visionary. And so recently I started working with someone that's trying to help me get it all together in one spot because I could create all day long, all night long. I could never sleep, and it's just not, I mean, at the end of the day, what am I doing it for? Because if it's all stuck in my computer when I die, it'll be useless.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Exactly. We got to share knowledge, right? And uh the way we share knowledge has changed so much, like even in our lifetimes, you know. Like we I still remember cassette players and CD players, basically.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

Oh, you're I thought you were like 30. So that's cool. Yeah, I'm like I'm 57. I'm gonna be 58 in two months. Well, it's just coming so fast. I'm like, I'm running out of time here, I gotta get this done.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Right. And like, and now but now you have this cool thing because like and it it is helping me with my exact anxiety for sure.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Oh, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 21:51

And I think a lot of small business owners have a lot of anxiety. I mean, it's natural you're you're in there and you're anxious about everything because it's like it's it's it's it's the unknown. You don't have The safety net of like work and whatever the job and like this kind of stuff, right? But it's helped me structure it because for me, like obviously, I don't know. Like, do I have HD, ADHD? I don't know, but like I mean, I've got something along those lines because it's always thinking about like, okay, what's the future bringing? What's the future bringing, right? But now with AI, I can actually map out all of my ideas, incorporate all of my ideas into a substantial plan. And it's not just living in my head and like making me anxious of like, how am I actually going to do this? And it actually shows you, okay, like, hey, this is not crazy, like we can do it step by step. These are the processes and so on and so forth, right? And it's almost therapeutic, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

It's funny because over the weekend I just looked up, because people said to me before, I think you have ADHD, and I'm like, oh no, I don't have it. Then I looked up over the weekend, what kind of medicine do I need to take soon? Because I'm out of control, you know? And then I thought if I was gonna make a post that says, is there a cure for squirrel disease? Because I can or is there medicine or anything? Because it's just like there's so many things going on in my mind. I'll sit there and I'll watch, I'll watch a one-hour training. I'll get off the training and I'll be like, idea sparked, and I'll go right to AI and I'll be like, create an ebook about this, this, this, and this. I just watched this. I it was amazing, and this is what I took from it, and boom, done.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I I can definitely relate. I'm on my mind's the same. It's always racing, always thinking like it's it's a blessing and a curse at the same time. But I would say the entrepreneurial mindset is they're all similar, right? And that's why like when we get together in a room, we're all always coming out with like new ideas, new motivation, all this kind of stuff. So I love it. I get energy from it as well, right?

Connected AI With Notion And Better Prompts

SPEAKER_00 23:38

I think it actually makes us smarter. And I and that's when I talk about people are like, it makes you dumb. No, no, it actually doesn't. I learn from it every day. I learned things I never knew. I go in places I've never been, I create things I couldn't do in a fast. I mean, I could, I'm a very good designer, but it's great at many things like that, where it would take me hours. And I used to we used to screen print t-shirts. We'd have to separate all the colors on the thing to do separate shirts. You know, I'm the old manual. I've been doing this a long time. I was in art institute. I learned on a Mac with a screen this big. If I still had it, I'd probably be a millionaire today because you know, that Mac, that's how we designed on a screen that big. You know, it just doesn't make sense how wild it is and how fast the time goes and how many things have changed. I think it's just the greatest opportunity for people, for business owners. And I would ask you this question because I think it's really important from your standpoint. Where do you see AI going in the next 12 to 24 months that people are not really paying attention to right now?

SPEAKER_02 24:32

I think uh Claude Cowork, I mean, there's been a lot of noise around it, but so few people that I've talked to that even use Claude have tried co-work and the interconnectivity. And I gotta tell you, once that came out and I connected my Notion, I connected my Google Drive.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Amazing. I mean, I'm I was blown.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

It was like, yeah, for for everybody listening to this, uh my uh like my jaw drop because it was it was it's insane. It's not you know you talking to chat and then you know whatever you need to then copy paste to somewhere else or whatever. It's like go to this page, get this information. So like if you get it like with Notion, it's an insanely incredible because with Google Drive, it's like it will make the files, but it can't go and manipulate those files. But with Notion, you can allow it to basically create files, edit files, create any whatever that you need in within Notion, and it can update the Notion pages. So that means that if there's a knowledge, like you can yeah, the way that you interact then is different because it has Notion as the knowledge base. So that means you've made it so much smarter. You don't need to retrain, like re-ask the question or start a new chat, and then you have like, oh Jesus, it's not in memory, this is in memory, what's in memory, so on and so forth. Because like once you start really deep, you need the memory or you need more context, right? So there's a problem with that, and depending on the type of system that the yeah, if you're using Chat GPT or Claude or whatever else, the setup's a little bit different. And I think the fact that the the Claude has done this, I think everybody else will probably follow suit because it just makes a ton of sense. But uh yeah, that is something that is I think underrated for sure.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

So I love Claude. I mean, I just put I I feel like there's so much, and I'm just learning about it, you know. And I don't know, like with the notion part, I had no idea. So there's things that I still don't know about, but I know enough that I know that Claude is a beast and I use it non-stop all day long. And now I need to learn what you're talking about. How do we how do I do that? Uh so I need to learn about notion so I can figure it out because I already know about Claude. Now I just need to put them together. And I love that you shared that. So if give me one.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

I'll show you one more one more spawn quick to I don't know if you use it maybe or not, but um in Claude you have and in Chat GPT you have speci you have settings, and in the settings you can have like general settings, yeah, and you can tell it how you want it to work together with you. Yes, and it's basically a prompt, but that prompt is like it's like that's that prompt that it goes back to every single time.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Got it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

Like and the way I formed it is that I ask it to challenge me, and when it when you challenge me, challenge me based on you know empirical data. So either there's research behind it, or the this is the best practice, or like these are the benchmarks, or whatever it is, right? So it's not just you pushing back because it's uh you know, I I I like that fetish. No, it's like the reason is because I hate yes men, and Chat GPT for sure was always a yes man, you know, like, yeah, oh that's a great idea, oh that's a great idea, or that's a great idea. And now you can actually play around with it and say, listen, I've got these three ideas. Tell me really like what you think, right? And it does a very, very, very good job at at then not just saying yes, because then your tentacles go everywhere and it's a whole wired mess, you know, like you can't you can't figure out what's right or wrong. And the this way it helps you set up also priorities in terms of like, okay, let's say all three ideas are great, you know, let's put them in terms of like popularity of like what people are searching for online, maybe, right? And then you can set your plan ahead. And then again, it helps with my anxiety because I can put everything into a plan and like you know, task managers and this kind of stuff.

A Rock Bottom Story And A Framework

SPEAKER_00 28:17

I have zero anxiety when I am working with AI, just not. There's not you can't even break that wall down because I'm so focused on it and I love it that much. So I want to go back to one thing that's important about this show that I would like to share is that people have to go through adversity to get to the other side. And I wonder through your career, what is one thing that you went through that was really difficult that you pushed through to the other side to get to where you are today?

SPEAKER_02 28:39

So many rock bottom cases for me, actually. I think uh yeah, I think I guess the story that that will that will probably resonate with your audience quite a lot was it was 2014. And like I said, I was running the real estate market marketplace in in Ukraine. So similar to to Zillow in the US, although we were more expanded. We had Zillow plus Trulia at the time because we had built our own CM system, we had built call tracking, we had built a ton of tech, also how to visualize apartments and this kind of stuff, like if they're broken. Like we have we had a ton of we had a ton of tech that we were offered. And this is 2014-15.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

That was a long time ago, okay.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Yeah, we we built our full first call tracking before it even became a thing, like an internationally online, like with our own tech. It took us two weeks. We set up the company initially. We had, I mean, I had backing. We we had two I had two co-founders that that that gave the initial I was the sweat sweat equity basically, and they they had the cash. But we arrived at a point where we needed new new money coming in, and we had found this partner. It was a Danish group, a conglomerate. We were super excited because they had they were the owners, it was a media company, they were all the owners of this Danish marketplace that was like super atop, like for a super small market, you know, it's a three million, three million population in Denmark or something like that. And they were making like 50 million per year in revenue. Like it's an insanely good company and all of this, and like we were super excited, they had already visited us, all of this kind of stuff, so and so forth. Like it was just the lawyers, like due diligence, last bits and pieces, and all this kind of stuff. And then one thing that happens in in in Denmark in July is everybody goes on holiday for three weeks. And during that holiday, unfortunately, the MH 17, the Malaysia Airline was down, and it was 300 souls died obviously, right? And but everything stopped. And yeah, you know, at that at that point, we were like, you know, obviously everything's being called off. And uh, we had to sit down and we're like, well, we're out of money next month. Like there's there's we were expecting the money to come in, like there's there's really very, very little that we could do. Luckily, we managed to scrap together a little bit of money and reshape everything. And and one framework came out of this, which I call the growth mode framework, which is basically very, very quickly, I'll just explain what it is. It's very simple. It's a very simple framework, it can be made more complex, but it's a very simple framework in a sense that categorize all your expenses into three buckets. You have your essential bucket, which is without this, there is no business. I cannot make business. So that's your computer, maybe your office, internet connection, phone, whatever it is that you do, you know, you will know what the essential stuff is. Then you have the supportive roles. These are roles in people, roles also in terms of tools, everything like everything that is a supportive rule that role that has a supportive role in making your productivity quicker. So AI would be one of them, right? And then you have everything else, which I put in the investment bucket, but basically the investment bucket, the way you look at it, is all the stuff that's you're hoping or you're wishing that is going to make an impact on the business, but it hasn't proven itself yet. If you have those three levels and the proverbial crap hits the fan, the you're you're you know that you know the stuff that you need to cut straight away. And if it's really, really bad and pro you don't need the additional productivity, then you have another level that you can you can switch off. But at least you keep the essentials, at least you keep payroll, like you at least keep everybody afloat, right? And you weather the storm and you're outside uh in a much better situation, instead of being like reactive, like, oh, you know, it's it's on my lap now, what do I do? And using that, we actually managed to grow the business further. And the the nail in the coffin here was that we actually managed to close the brown with the same people in December of that year because we went out on uh to a conference, uh on a conference tour in October, and they saw that there's a lot of interest from other companies that were like they're let they're looking in and they're like, hey, we can pull the trigger. And we're like, okay, but the terms are changed now.

Core Takeaways And Where To Connect

SPEAKER_00 32:43

So much different now. Cool. So there's so many questions. I mean, I could sit on here all night with you. I know it's night there, but it's it's evening here. But what's the biggest takeaway you want listeners to walk away with from this conversation today?

SPEAKER_02 32:56

I think don't be afraid of money, don't be afraid of talking to money, don't be afraid of making mistakes. And I think that um if you guys uh feel that you're struggling regarding, you know, money or finances, these kind of things, know that everything is fine. You can find answers either in AI or in Smoothin AI, and uh live with less anxiety tomorrow. I think that's the main message that I'm trying to put forward to everybody. It's like it's it's about time that this taboo has been taken down and there's simple life lessons, that's all you really really need, but somebody needs to teach you them.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

So yeah, for sure. So they can connect with you on Smoothan AI anywhere else.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

I'm putting everybody on Smooth and AI because on the first put the first thing you'll see is like what brought you here. And then you have like I said, we have the four tracks, depending on what you want. You get you get curated um email sequences based on what what brought you there. In the photo, we have all our social media links. So if you want to follow us on YouTube or on TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And uh for now that's it.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

So for our audience, if this episode got you thinking differently about your business, your time, or how you're using AI, then it did exactly what it was supposed to do. So success today isn't just about doing more, it's about doing what matters better and surrounding yourself with the right tools, the right people, and the right thinking to get there faster. And I think we both proved to you that that can happen in two different areas, two different parts of the world, two different industries, two different ages. I mean, I'm old enough to be his mom. So there's all kinds of things happening here, right? So just don't be afraid to try. I always tell everyone, you can't break it. It's not ours to break it. You can't break it. Just try, give it a shot, see what happens. Thank you so much for being here with me today. It was a pleasure. And it's so nice to know the owner of Real T1 Group franchise is from the Ukraine, and uh, he's a pretty cool guy. And so he's done it, he's built a full almost 450 franchise company all over the world with Real T1 Group. So we're a Real T1 Group gold standard in Pittsburgh. So very cool. It's nice to meet you. It was a pleasure getting to know you.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Thank you, Dion. Pleasure was also mine.