Navigating AI in Foodservice with Mike Colligon

In this episode of Curiously Stuck, Chelsea Stuck sits down with Mike Colligon to talk about the reality of AI in modern business.

This isn’t a surface-level conversation about tools. It’s about mindset, speed, and competitive survival.

Chelsea and Mike dive into:

• Why AI is a fundamental shift — not a trend
• How small teams can use AI to operate at enterprise levels
• The widening gap between those who adopt early and those who resist
• Where human creativity and strategic thinking still matter most
• How AI impacts leadership, hiring, and growth
• The urgency leaders should feel right now

The future of business won’t belong to the biggest companies — it will belong to the fastest learners.

If you’re building something and wondering how AI fits into your strategy, this episode gives you clarity on where to start and why it matters.

🎧 Tune in, rethink your leverage, and start adapting.

🔗 Connect with Chelsea and Craeve & Co: https://craeveandco.com

#CuriouslyStuck #AIinBusiness #FounderMindset #BusinessStrategy #TechLeadership

Welcome to Curiously Stuck

Every founder, executive, and creative leader has been there—that pivotal moment where you don’t know the next move, but you know something has to change. Curiously Stuck is a podcast for those moments. Hosted by Chelsea Rae Stuck, brand strategist and founder of Craeve & Co., this series dives into the honest, often messy stories behind leadership pivots, unexpected challenges, and the curiosity that drives reinvention.

Transcript

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Curiosity is one of the foundation stones of grow. Apply it to your your journey on. I apply it to your journey in marketing. Apply it to your journey in life. You know if you find that you don't resonate with somebody. Be curious as to why. Go. Oh well, that person's just them. Why? Why doesn't resonate. A lot of times it may reflect something about you and really not them at all. Welcome to Curiously Stuck. The show where you unpack the stuck moments, curious leaps, and behind the scene pivots of becoming a business leader. I'm your host, Chelsea Stack, former sales manager now turned brand strategist. If you're leading a rep firm and just starting to learn AI in food service, this one is for you. Today, we're serving up a great friend and client of mine who's challenged me to think about my business just about as much as I've challenged him back on his Mike Culligan of High Sabatino and I elevate is joining me to discuss our takeaways from the Moxie Conference and the future of AI in food service. Buckle up. My friends. We have a lot to cover, so let's get curious. Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. I have been so excited to have you here. A good friend, Chelsea, I am so glad to be here. We're I think we're both recovering from a week away at the conference and here in The Voice. Yeah, yeah, I can feel it in my brain more than anything else. So. Yeah. So I'm with you 100%. Super glad to be here. No matter how early it is this morning, I kind of feel like one of those guests from the West Coast, on an East Coast morning news show going on. I'm good. They don't. It's the suspension of time of a podcast, Mike. Nobody knows that it's 8 a.m.. Hence are many sips of coffee or tea? Yep yep yep. Oh, cheers, Mike. I'm so glad that you could join me. Fun fact for all of our listeners out there, Mike was actually supposed to record with me before going into moxie, and both of us were crazy busy. A number of scheduling things. And I at one point I just said, you know what, Mike? We're going to learn so much and so much is going to happen there. Why don't we just do a recap afterwards? And I think that actually might have been the better move, because you never really know when you're walking into a conference like that. You just don't know what the vibe is going to be. You don't know where people's heads are going to be. I mean, hell, literally two years ago, for those that don't know, this conference was every two years we were going into Marcy and gets dropped that week. That's where we were in our eye journey. And if you haven't figured out now yet or not, we are going to be talking a lot about AI today with Mike, since that is his expertise. And so that blew my mind when I started realizing, because I remember specifically I was going up to speak and I was talking, and we were at the point of like, what's good prompting? And like real just general like, you know, the basics, right? And it was so new. We didn't know. And literally GPT is a dropped and and I'm like, I haven't had any time to deal with this. And so this year I feel like it was a cloud co-work. So I was called cloud to work. I haven't gotten to dabble in it, have you? So no, it did drop the one of the keynotes at the conference, the news media on the AI subject. Every time we had a free mountain to just chat about things outside conference, he was geeking out about that. He goes, I know it's out, I know it's out, I know it's out. But I can't look at it cause I just need like a couple days to, like, just geek out on it. And I haven't looked at it. So that came out during the conference. And as I was, I was listening to a podcast in the rental car, driving out to Orange County from the conference, I heard about this other thing called Clod Bot. I think MOT bot was involved. Now it's called Open Call. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Now like the the the the it's open source. And he released that and like the whole internet, you know if you're in the AI space the whole internet's losing its mind over that. So I came back from the conference and I had all these ideas from the conference, and I'm like, I got to build that. And I did, which was insane, which is super cool. And I want to get to that during this podcast. But yeah, that's been foremost what I really want to know. And that's, I think where I was kind of getting of like, you never know what the vibe is going to be. You never know where, you know, the overarching brainchild of of food service is going to be. What was your takeaway like? What what did anything surprise you or, you know, I know you were going into it with definitely an AI mindset, but yeah, well, it it did. So was been on the board for a number of years and this year was part of, you know, a co-chair with an amazing couple of factory people and, and, and three other amazing reps for other amazing reps if you want to sort of Neil Inverse so, the my takeaway was it was AI dominant. What I did was I dominant even with some equipment manufacturers that were there, it was AI dominant. Participated and two breakouts gave one of my own. Those were packed. And what I found was like, people stayed over. You came in to the end of one. I mean, people just. It was 35 minutes past time. They're into their lunch. It's the end of the conference. Aside from, you know, celebration function at the end. And they're like, well, we have a couple more questions. I'm like, I'll stay as long as you like. I mean, I love talking about this. So it was I would say the big thing was AI dominant. And the other thing was the compelling understanding of the group that I need to do something here. Pandora's out of the box, but I'm not. I have no idea where to start. Like some, I don't know where to start. So it was it was it was interesting. And compelling, which in a way validated my passion for it. And, and what my goal is to help other people with it. So I was really, really, really fun. And the feedback was phenomenal. I completely agree with you. It was funny because I knew through you and some others there was AI Alley per se. That was being planned. And I thought, oh, thank God, because there's so much education. A.I. literacy is something that I know in our marketing community. People are very passionate about. It's something that, you know, within my own organization, all of my team members are getting AI certified because we all have to. You know, marketing's been on the front lines of it. We've had tools from the get go that could help us. We have been affected by things like how search is changing, how people are changing, how decisions are being made. So much has changed in our world that we really had to dive right in. And also we have the immediate applications to dive right in and use it. And so I think for us, that's where two conference or the last conference I was at of like, oh my God, how are you not using this tool? And and I could see where it was going. But at the same time, I didn't know enough or feel that comfortable with it myself. Whereas this time around, what's interesting is that I felt more comfortable with the tool because we're using it every day in a variety of different methods. A lot of people around me are studying it, but I'm with you that I finally felt like everyone around me was at that moment that I was at two years ago. And I'm not saying that in a bad way, I'm just saying that like it had mass adoption has now they've realized like, oh, this isn't going away, this isn't a fad, but this isn't the latest thing. I need to consider this for my business or I'm going to be left behind. And I remember thinking that before. I know you've thought that before. That's why you invested all this time in learning it. So let's talk about that. Like, what have you been doing? And share with us a little bit about your own journey with AI and how you got here to be helping with the conference and speaking about it and whatnot? You mentioned I, I'm a rep owner and but I'm a remote rep owner. So, where majority of my team exists up in the Maryland area around our Jessup headquarters, I'm on any given day, kind of a Forrest Gump box of chocolates kind of thing. What is going to take me to get up 95? Right. Like, I wish I could solve that problem for me. I had people just have, drones. Yeah, I know it's coming. I got one on order. I put my deposit in, yeah. The, what drove me, honestly, was email. Right? Email. You know, I've been doing this. I don't want to say how long, because, that's a scary number. Oh, no, I can't fix that either. Yeah, we're into the suspension of reality right now. We're all 25. Yes, yes, yes. My my true story. My wife has never had a birthday cake in the almost 24 years we married. That didn't have a 29 on it. Email was my the bane of my existence. So if I had to leave my house and go to, Bristol, Virginia, or the far western part of the state, that could be over a five hour drive, right? So I get up, you know, I, I click emails, grab a cup of coffee, get my stuff in the truck, and I head out, and all of a sudden, you know, this device here starts pinging like I hit the jackpot of a Las Vegas slot machine. There's text messages, emails and, you know, my my heart rate's, like, cranking up. And you're like, you know, it's not a lottery. So you get your meeting on time because traffic changed and then you, you quickly look at something before you head in. You maybe get some lunch afterwards. You kind of scroll through the fires. What can I do? What can I do? Yeah. And then, you know, you head home and maybe it's been a 12 hour or 13 hour day for me, and I just want to be present at dinner with my wife. She patiently waited. She cooked something on this day or we're going out. I want to be present, but I'd be sitting there. I set a rule for the kids for, hey, look, no phones at the table. Let's be present while we can. And so now I got my phone in my pocket. It's still going off like a Las Vegas slot machine. I'm having chest pains. I know, like, I just want to see what that fire is. And I just, like, get done. And I'd either be half present my wife after dinner and I'm like, check in through all these emails. My first quest was trying to figure out how to solve that problem, right. I went through a litany of tools. You know, that you can download off the shelf, that can organize outlook. Then this year we transition to Google. I found a great tool for that, but it was that it was how do I manage that? How do I not let something slip through the cracks? Something simple which let me down a wild rabbit hole and I start, well, I can fix that problem. What about this problem? And that's been, now that's been, if the the candle in the small flame was the email, right? Wasn't a small flame to me. It was that the reality became when my mind got blown, I started to look at it as not this limited tool. You mentioned marketing. You know, you can quickly outline a blog post, give it great information. You still need a human in the loop. It has no name and or should be going. Hey, create a blog post about this. Okay? Said no, it's not how it works and it's nowhere near what your amazing team does. But you know, you start to think past that like what is what is it that it it can't do and I you know, it's I say this to people and I said with 100% understanding of how difficult it is, think infinitely. If it is like that, you know, how do you you know, it's not like, what's this one thing I want to do? But if I could do anything, what would I do? And then work backwards to solve the problem? It's like a puzzle, right? Like. All right. So how do I get that? I know that vastness of information is in there from the way an LM was designed. What machine learning and all that stuff won't go there. But so it's virtually an infinite amount of information and it's just it's in this it's in space designed almost like the neural networks of our brain. So it's it's not it's not linear in where the information is. But we have to be I'd say, think infinitely, but be linear in how we ask. And the information is, is out there. A small personal example was we're getting ready for the holidays. My wife was putting some stuff on a shelf similar to the one behind me down in our family room, and she's like, brainstorm holiday ornaments and then decorations and then she starts flipping through some books. I'm like, what are you doing? She goes, well, our friends sure will ask if I had this book or if she lent it to me, or did I lend it to her? Where's it? So I was sitting there working on a project and I got up. I grabbed my I grabbed my phone and I, like I took three pictures of the bookshelf and I just curiously like curiosity, could it work right, like. And then what's the impact afterwards? So I took three pictures I think I dumped them into. I was messing around a lot with Claude, or it might have been Gemini. They, you know, they all had a little different tweak, similar process. And I said, do me a favor, design me a library in a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet that lists the title, the book, the author. A summary of the book. If the authors won any awards, you know, like previous New York Times bestseller, whatever, or if the books won any awards and generate that in a table and in 30s I had an 88 book list. Spot on for everything that was there, you know, and I mean it. So what's the application of that in terms of how do we how do we use that in our business? How do we use that. Yeah. Moving forward, how do we use that in our personal life. And that's just a simple tool. Well, and I think what I like about the way that you're framing it up, this think infinitely. I mean, let's stop for a minute and just talk about how to your very point and how you got to that place is as a business leader, as a business owner, there are things I mean, I find myself doing it right, that get in the way of you thinking infinitely, of you thinking bigger because you're so busy in the business, you don't get to work on the business. And years ago, when I was at iPhone age, like I gave a whole, presentation about the difference and actually I gave it to firms, believe it or not, about thinking in, you know, working in the business versus working on the business and the importance of doing both and balancing those because you're never going to get away from working in the business. I mean, it just it's a, you know, we could all hope and maybe the goal with AI is to make some of that, you know, shorter or more, efficient, certainly. But when you're thinking about on the business and the bigger picture, I completely agree with you. And I really like that framework of thinking infinitely, because I'll tell you what I mean. I'm guilty of it myself. You mean the team of, like, we'll get in the weeds on something and I will stop and be like, oh my God, why did we not apply this tool? Why did we not think of it this way? And it's just because we have that muscle memory, we have that training of doing it a certain way, and it's not. And here we are. And like we're all very comfortable with AI, we have all the tools. I mean, hell, we've built things on the back of websites now that are like our own tools. With all of it, you know, Eric nerds out on that. And yet even we are so deep in it at times, we don't stop to think bigger. And so I think you've really struck on something that something as simple as your email is a rep firm, right? That's insane. The amount of, po confirmations, the amount of tracking is just that right there. How did that change, you know, working towards solving that problem? How did that change your day? How did it how did that affect your business? I mean, I'd love to know a little bit more about that. That's it. That's a great question. And, we're geeks in this, you know, you and I and and, you know, we are those are the we've had some great debate times. You're amazing. You're amazing web guy Eric Nutter. He's awesome. Oh, his ego just got real big. Eric, you got a shout out? I gotta give him a shout out. He's, You know, we are. You know, we're a fourth generation rap firm. Which is significant. Right? So my partner's son is generation forward. Started with Dave's, Dave's grandfather on his mom's side. Then his dad came home from the Navy. Was actually going to go to, I think, Georgetown Law, as his mom told me. And then her dad said, hey, why don't you come work in the business for a little while? And we have these great pictures, like from the 40s. They're in the old classic 40s suits, ties. And you see this Bloomfield coffee maker in the background? It's like it. It's like an old school show, if you will like something like that, the way it's set up. Come check this out. So fourth generation and I say that because you know it to your point where you were going. It's like there's this part of us that we do it this way because it's worked for so long, right. So and there's always going to be some of that. I mean, yeah, it's not the exact definition from psychology, but they talk about a default mode network, right. Like you can be working on your stuff personally and and be doing really well. And then what happens is you hit that speed bump, right? Like that. You had that horrible day at work, and you, you default back to like, oh man, this is terrible. This job sucks. Whatever you want to say. Like you, you revert back to like because you know, this is where it is. So we hear, well, this is the way we've always done it or this works this way. If it's not broke, don't fix it, those sorts of things. But then what was interesting as we started to talk about this and we were doing especially Nolan and I were doing a lot of research on what our next CRM was going to be. We had the transition from that. Yes. And so you had to do you had to do a real honest assessment of where we were been and where we'd like to be. Right. So Nolan did this thing in our office where he looked at our office manager, happens to be his mom, and he looked at our assistant office manager, Brian, and we had an older CRM and what they were doing, some of it was redundant, but they were cutting and pasting like these things from emails that says, hey, factory sales manager so-and-so said, yes, this extra discount, you know, would apply to this job based on size of the order, the rules of the company, whatever it may be, and their their cut and paste that into the CRM. When we added that up, you know, the number of days they worked, you know, what their average salary was. It was somewhere around 150 to $180,000 in a year. So then on that simple repetitive task. So as sales organizations, you know, this very well, like a you're looking at a spreadsheet for, for your company and you're like, we got to get sales up. Right. Well, we had, we had and that was just one thing. We had $180,000 sitting there in a in what I would call a leaky bucket. I didn't need to go out and get a new line. I didn't, you know, didn't need to go out and generate more sales. I just needed to clean up some systems in my own house. And, and and that was the great start that allowed us to pick up, you know, another employee and and, and do some other things in infrastructure that we wanted to do. So it's those sorts of things that built that out without getting too geeky about the actual system. But if you can take mentioned peers, right. So peers coming email it is it is now very easy to they would take that they would load that into our previous CRM. They put it in a spreadsheet too. Right. So we had a record of it and then they track it somewhere else. Well I mean that email comes in and a simple automation says, hey, when an email comes in, check to see if it has an attachment. If it has an attachment on it here, right, then you can do something else to analyze all these attachments. Which of these are pros but those here right now we have a document list of the Po it can get. You know our new CRM. You just if a Po comes in on an email we push a button and it goes it reads whatever structure that's in PDF is. Most of them reads the PDF part. Is it? And then puts all that data in our CRM, which was previously, you know, well. And what's crazy is that, I mean, this is how I just want to stop for a moment. This is how quickly things have changed. That was not possible, what, two years ago? I mean, I don't know at what point they started it started being able to do more complex tasks because it's moved so fast and like. And it's funny because also like, we'll have conversations sometimes and I'll be like, yeah, I remember when we couldn't and I'm like, oh, wait, that was two months ago like this. But no, that's that's a great point. I mean, I've had I've had so long ago that you've been able to do these things. Now, I've talked to factories. Yeah. Let's let me be really clear. I, I you asked me a question. I'm not a coder, right. I, I, I think I learned COBOL and Basic in high school on an old RadioShack 1280 that used a a rectangular cassette recorder to record the data. It was free, floppy disk of any kind, you know, and, and I still somewhere buried in a box here. I saved a copy. I think it was 1988. It was either time magazine or U.S. News and World Report. IBM had released the first personal home computer, and it was a it had it's not going to mean anything was that the Tandy had a Tandy growing up and I remember yeah, yeah. Tandy was ten was an offshoot of Radio Shack, right? Yeah. Yeah. You could build those, but. So this thing, basically it was an 80, 88 processor. It had a, ten megabyte hard drive and like, a 2.5MB hard floppy disk and a five megabyte floppy floppy disk. Wow. All right. And and a green monitor. And the cover of time magazine was IBM released the home computer. Will we ever need this much power? Right. That was 1988, 1980. I know I have a daughter that, you know, have kids that weren't born, you know, before 98, 1998. But the reality is it was a blink, you know, and that was the home computer. Now, now, any one of our phones has probably thousand times, a million times the power that that computer had. And, and each manufacturer of phones is going to come out with something new and something else and something better. And I've been on the phone with clients talking about, hey, what about this tool? Can I use this? I'm like, by the time I get off this car, there's probably a hundred other tools that are going to be released, you know, and it's like, yeah. So that's another aspect of what happens in the early adoption. We start chasing shiny, the next new shiny object. And you know we've done it. You know Apple's trained us every year. Hey every year in September or every other year in September, we do that Big Apple release. And they're going to introduce the latest iPhone, Apple Watch, whatever it's going to be. And we chase that shiny, shiny object. Now we have this platform, Infinite Intelligence. And we get bombarded on our social media. We get bombarded and you know, if we follow this like, oh my God, that's crazy, that's going to do this, we're going to do that. And we just need to win that back a little bit. If we want to think about business a little bit. Yeah, we got to go. How do I not chase this tiny object. How do I look at you know, I got to do everything starts with an assessment. Like what? What what is your tech stack today? What tools do you use all the time? What are your pinch points? Right. Don't approach it. Where tomorrow I'm going to be an AI company and everything we do is I. Oh, then you will have some really poorly written emails and your social media might go to crap. And I hate to tell you, but it's not that I mean, and I don't want me. It's not that simple to be like sitting in a in the ivory tower or anything. I mean that you your point earlier of being curious and your point I think to of finding an assessment is so important because you quickly identified here's where I'm losing time as a business and here's where I can, you know, without really I mean, at this point and again, on our end, we can build a lot of tools. You can build a lot of things yourself. And if you don't chase all of the shiny objects and you don't chase with the latest and greatest and just focus in on literally like, here's the problem, here's how much time we save. How do we solve it? There might be a tool that's already built that can do that. Or the beauty of where we're at now is in some cases, if you have someone who's very savvy or you hire someone who's very savvy, a lot of these things can be built yourself. Like you don't have to go to super complex coders and systems. Now, not to say there's not a place for that, because I know we run into that as we watch people cowboy a lot of things, and sometimes we'll say like, cool, but have you tested this? There's a reason why even on our end, we will still go with, well, there's a whole team behind this particular product. We know that we don't want to be in the business of servicing that product, but there's other things that we are perfectly capable of coding ourselves. We have coded ourselves. It works wonderfully and it's our tool. So I really, I like the way that I think it's very tangible for people that are listening out there to understand, like how you identified one specific problem. You multiply the $180,000 of time of labor. That is huge, not just to a rep firm. That's huge to any organization. I mean, just that efficiency alone. And how long did it take you to solve it? Like how long like in dabbling and coding or I don't know, figuring it out. Like how till you felt comfortable. Like was it a month or two weeks? You know, I know there's a testing period, but, like, how long would you say all in to feel comfortable with solving that issue? I've been doing a deep dive on this for, a while. And, you know, I went from, you know, like, everybody starts with ChatGPT or something like that. What's the hey, what's the best pizza place near me? Right. Which is, that's a Google search. Right? And we need to be we need to be, I want to be that. We need to be. I want to be also somewhat brain about this because there is there's energy consumption with AI and resource consumption using it as a Google search is really important to not do right. Like think about that infinite come comment earlier. What can I do? So for, I had a foundation to answer your question and for us, I think it was, a lot of it was immediately solved just with a tool in the CRM. And then, you know, looking at the automation and how that would flow. But it took it took 15 minutes to get, the idea from the flow rate at that point. And when I was doing this, it might have been another, you know, 30 to 45 to make sure I got all the fields in the right place and tested it, and I can I was going to have somebody yelling me in the office that you just auto delete it, like all of our purchase orders. And, you know, we had that because you mentioned it to we call an error. There's always trial. Yeah. I mean, I was talking to a factory that deals with a very, you know, professional marketing team like yours. And somebody put out, they I had something it got out. Right. Like they posted it as a social for this brand. And then another rep group was like, you know, did what we all try to do for our factories. We we repost, retweet, whatever it is and, you know, with a comment saying, yeah, that's great. You know, and all of a sudden somebody read it and goes, well, that machine doesn't actually have that. And there was you. You're like kind of like, whoops, right? And then and we've we it's it's been done. You know it's it happens. Right. I would honestly be an error. And let's also take your time. Human error occurs. Research error occurs. So I mean I think that there's a fine line of like the problem. I said, what did I say in my speech. It's become exponentially more important. Or you know, or X exponentially more consequential to understanding the tool, checking the tool and using it in the right ways. It's not an easy button or then you just get set up, the work's done for me and I walk away and leave it to the bots. You do that and you will be that factory that has something posted, you know, incorrectly. That said, being also on the other side of it, in in the production side, human error also occurs. And I know one thing we've had to deal with which everyone's going to have to deal with soon. I told a couple people I was like, buckle up and welcome to our side, where then people will say, well, you use the AI for that. Well, that well actually know someone who just made a mistake. Like, I mean, that does happen, right? And I'm not making excuses. I'm just saying that there's also this like lens that we're starting to see things through of what do we trust and what do we not trust and what's authentically made and what's not. One of the bloggers that I follow literally this past week because of my blog and because or not or whatever it's called, it's changed again. Yeah. So it went from moment to clod bot call a bot and then slide. Oh, anthropic, the parent company, the clogs. I claimed I sent them a letter, said, hey, that sounds just too much like like our thing. So they went back to it and, they, they changed the name to Open Call. And, yes. So it's morphed. But the point is, is even in his blog, he normally has like a little nano graphic that says 100% human content. Right? Because he writes all of his blogs, you know, 100%. He doesn't use AI. This time he said I had to use AI to do so much research because this is happening so fast. And I, you know, didn't understand it or I needed to know more. And so he actually pointed that out. And, you know, that's the age that we live in now that these things can happen quickly. Yeah. So I mean, you know very well and maybe a lot of people don't, but if you generate if I sat here while we're on this podcast and I type in, hey, generate a, generate a blog post about doing a podcast that are doing it, you know, talk about this, this and this, and it's going to, you know, you give it some good guardrails, you give it a tone. Maybe it's learned your voice over time. It's going to write it like you, it's still going to generate this text and it's going to have artifacts in it that that you and I don't see. Right. And those artifacts kind of identify the origin to where it came from. So Google, for instance, has a, what they call a gem, where you can drag a Google photo and you can drag a photo into it and it will tell you, it won't tell you if it was created by Midjourney or some other one, but if it was created by nano banana or one of Google's AI image generation products, it'll tell you that. Right? So, we're in that place where there are narrow now because some people have figured out about that artifact thing. There is, there's a product out there, that you can feed that into, right? It strips it of the art attacks, it gives you a clean output, and then you, then you reformat it and post it. So people are working around that. I remember having a Tesla and, and Amazon sold this weighted thing that monitor steering wheel to kind of fool it because Tesla wants you to put a yes. Yeah on the wheel. Right. Husband. So it's it's it's the same thing. You're kind of quadrant A system that you shouldn't. Right. You know, I love the fact that you mentioned that that bot that blogger about doing, hey, I write this 100% of the time and then identifying when he didn't or she didn't, because it's really important. If you look at meta, meta actually asked you to tag it, you know, is this AI, is it not AI? It's still going to run it through an algorithm and try and figure it out. And what we're also learning is that and and as a marketer, you know this well too, is that, that handwritten human stuff still tracks farts, tracks higher in the algorithm. Right. Being human still matters a lot. And this important leap here is to go, hey, it's not it's not about, replacing us and AI and and we had a keynote, at the conference and did an amazing job on this. Everybody likes to say, hey, AI is not going to replace you, but somebody who knows AI is going to replace you, and and there's no truth to that. Yeah. We just I woke up this morning to, Amazon laid off. You know how many people, right? Yeah, 14,000, I believe. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot. And, you know, so I'm changing, right? So, you know, we talk about office managers in our business to bring it back to business. And, and whether it's a receptionist or whether it's something like that, you know what? I can I can put a bot in your business or anybody's business out there. Voice agent I do it all the time. That that is you mentioned earlier. Hey, humans make mistakes. Now, this was human. We actually, you know, it's a typo on our part or we got bad information and then we put it in there. It happens. We're we're business and we're moving at, you know, really technology is driving the speed at which we're all moving today. Right? So you could not ask an agency had we not embraced an adopted and learned and understood AI. I mean, that is just the reality of scaling. And in our world that I think, is what's going to happen and is happening now in your world as a rep in the manufacturing world and food service. And I think that to pull this full circle, that was the that I felt and saw and heard at the conference that last time wasn't there. It just wasn't me too. I spent a lot of time just replaying all of my encounters at the conference, you know, and it was, you know, how did you get there? What tools do you use? How can I use it in my business? And I'm like, oh, do you mind talk to me about it. Like, full disclosure, I'm a complete noob to this. I don't I don't even like don't judge me because I don't know where to start. I'm like, but all of us are learning. You. All of us. You're figuring it out? Yeah. It was going to say, like all of that's my response. Or like for a minute I thought you were saying I'm like, but that's the truth is, all of us are like, yeah, we're all learning. Yeah. That's like in real time. No judgment. And what I'd say and I said this to a couple people at the conference is like, well, you're so far ahead of everybody. I'm like, I'm going to tell you that, that if if I was studying Mandarin, right, and I had the time in Mandarin, you know, it's going to be a big gap. You know, I'm going to keep learning and, you know, you may never catch up. I said, but in this space right here, if you want to say I'm here, right, and you're here, you can catch me and pass me in no time. It it it may very well depend on what rabbit hole you go down that that that brings your curiosity in and that pulls you in the ability to learn anything right now is simply defined by two things. First, your imagination. Second is your available time period. And that's it. I did a I did I did a massive deep dive. One I tried to break clawed right. I'm like, how far? I think you called me after this. I feel like we had the conversation after. Oh yeah, it was nuts. It was crazy what it came out with. Did you get stuck in a loop? Is like, every now and then I get stuck in, like, a loop, or it's just like it kind of it just can't get itself out and you're like, okay. And then you get frustrated. And so, so in wrestling, Lee,

this started at probably 7: 36:44

00 at night. You know, it was after dinner. I was sitting on the couch and I just started asking questions and I'm like, because I'm I'm a limited sky. I'm like a no limits guy, really, because I want to push all perceived limits. I believe that we can truly be limitless, that limits are learned in many ways and like I just think how what's the wildest question I can ask this? Like, you know, what's the like? How far can I push this? Then you go, yeah, but why? Or yeah, but what about and then you just one question, one answer. What happened in the end is that after now this is like at 430 in the morning, I'm bleary eyed, bloodshot. I'm gone. Like we want, I know, like, and I'm doing this deep dive is 430 and it finally goes, look, what do you really want to, like, go back to that original question you were asking me, you know, a little while back and chat and I said, hey, you pushed back on me and, and and I comes back. Well, that's that's very astute of you, actually. I kind of end up with I think we've gone as far as I can go here. And I was like, I went back, I saved the chat, and I like, I it's this whole metaphysical path, like, if you think about what AI is and I'll just I'll take you there, then I'll bring you back to that thinking limitlessly for work and our business and then ultimately humanity. Right. But I said, hey, all right. So everything I've learned about a large language model is that you break everything that only tokens and the machine learning has trained you to recognize patterns over time, and you get better and better and better at this with every iteration, with everybody that uses it, that also trains you on these patterns. Basically, you know, in simple terms, if I said if I typed in, Mary had a right nine times out of 100, it's going to be the last, right, most recognizable pattern to follow. Mary had a so I said, I said the cloud. I said, all right, thinking about starting a present day and going back as far and time as your knowledge let you have assemble that memory. And what I want you to look for is patterns across that massive span of time that the human mind is not necessarily is probably physically incapable of comprehending. Right. That big span of time, we can we can crunch numbers in a computer. We can process data in sheets. But to go back and look at the scale of time, every book written, every historical account and see that, and it came back with these recurring patterns. You know, the information density paradox was one scale dependent crisis was another collective cognition inversion was another narrative calcification and fragility capability coupling. Right. These four things are converging right now in this time period. And, you know, I think in a in a keynote that, it was interesting, two keynote speakers talking about AI at the conference brought this back to, fire might have been one icon they brought up. The next one was the Industrial Revolution. And then you saw an image of a brain. And it's at each of those times we created a system where we bettered ourself as humanity, but it cost us in resources, right? So fire, wood, all those things. Industrial revolution, amazing move. The entire world, or almost the entire world forward in so many powerful and and and life changing ways. Yeah, we started to consume more and more fossil fuel. Right. And now now we're looking at, you know, how do we how do we mitigate our carbon footprint so that we're not doing that? Then, you know, now we have this thing where we have infinite knowledge. It's the, you know, where maybe Henry Ford democratized transportation, you know, by slowly displacing the horse and buggy, you know, now, if you couldn't afford a horse and, you know, then you save money for a car, you could get so much further. It spread the world out. The railroad changed everything. Now we're here, we have the democratization of information and how do we how do we do that? Right. So giving a set of information. Yeah. And it's figuring out how to get it out. Right. We can think small work on those little tools, solve the leaky bucket problem we had in my business. You know, figure out an email problem. What's next? What's the next thing you know? How do we how do we how do we dial in our businesses so that we work on our businesses, like you said, and not in our businesses? Right. Because we're small business owners. People see us going out and we do sales and we we do marketing campaigns, we work with clients. But when this camera's off, you know, and I'm and I happen to have time in my office taxes, accountants, you know, you know all that minutia of running a business, right. Employees, you know, those sorts of issues. I mean, there's all kinds there's business development, relationship development. Yeah. If you get to that place right where where my initial notion was email. Then I got to that place like, look, I don't, you know, I'd love to cure the world, but, you know, let's start with saving people ten hours. Like, what would you do with ten hours a week in your day? Right. You're young, you know, maybe reinvest that ten hours in your business. You're closer to retirement. You know, you're thinking about, you know, the value of time and spending time with family and being present. Maybe you invest like ten hours that way. What you do with the ten hours is yours, right? Time is that thing where we don't know how much we have in the bank. We don't know when we're going to run out, and we can never buy more of it. Right. So it takes getting older, realize that, oh, wait, that's my most precious commodity. It's my house, my car, what I have in a bank account. It's this, this. And if if the goal is we can buy back ten hours of that time, what does that do for you? You know, and the reality is, is that as each as each minutes tick by on this podcast, like 5 to 105 more tools have popped up that can save us that time. Now we need to be good stewards of that time and and leverage that. So for me, what I like to do is I like to, I like to I love that in your business, on your business comment you made because it's it's spot on is I want I'm not I'm not getting out of the human side of it. I want to use this tool to get more of the human side in it. Yes, I want to spend more time talking to you, talking to my clients, talking to my team, engaging with them. You know, doing that while I want to spend more time outdoors. Done. Like, yeah, you know, I want to be free, you know, for for our business and for for me and my personal brand, which is a whole other, you know, discussion for another time. You know, I, I'm a people person and I really get a lot of inspiration. And that's what makes me creative, is getting out there and seeing and hearing and listening. And maybe not all of it is applicable in that exact moment to my business, but that's what inspires so many things. And having your finger on the pulse. And if you're two in it because of minutia and because of things that now tools can save, you know, can can help you with, then you're missing out on all of that connection and all of that community. And that's what we crave, you know, and that's I mean, they're saying over and over, community is where the future is in marketing. Certainly. Because why? Because we're all, you know, either, I guess, not working from home as much now. But, you know, we're all on a device, we're all on a screen. We're all, you know, getting through the work all day, and we're exactly. And and everything is fed to us, is personalized to us, and we're becoming more insular. And so because of that, what do we crave? We crave people. We crave community. We crave belonging. And so I'm hopeful in my business, at least with the things that we're doing, it is freeing me up. I mean, you know, we're only seven years in this, this. So I still have some building to do. But it's freeing me up to spend that time to spend time doing a podcast. Now, that was the goal for years and years, and I couldn't get out of my own way to do it until I put certain things in place. So it's interesting because, you know, I went down a short rabbit hole. We kept me on a leash there. Good job. I'm not very well leashed, but we started talking about the conference and the last part that you and I just went back and forth about the human part was, was was the other side of the conference. You know, we, we had we had an amazing author and speaker runs a podcast talking about self from the heart. Right. You know, it was it wasn't it wasn't about I mean, it was about, hey, let's connect with our people. Right? We had we had Mike Messer off, you know, talk, you know, talking about and and how impressive were you in that breakout or in that and the the keynote and the keynote. Yes. Yeah. You like you've been to enough of these, right where that's a that's a moment where the hardcore old school salespeople kind of they walk out and grab my phone, catch this thing. You know, I'm like, I could catch up on Malcolm for it. He had everybody. He had everybody present putting their phones down. They stood up, they shook out. They they shut down for he did a two minute like, let me take you just quiet for two minutes. And then when he was done and brought everybody out of it, it's like, oh by that, that was meditation. And not like everybody thinks meditation. I'm really, you know, it's that quieting the mind. So to bring the humanity into that end of that last thing was that was the other part of the conference. And I, you know, it really was a full circle moment. Yeah. Proud of moxie because it was tying it together. We have this we have this big push, you know, for sales, you know, let's move more boxes. Right. Then we have this, you know, other push for time that that can be soul crushing for so many of us because of being in the business and having to be on the business at the same time, like you said. And then, you know, we have to we have to find that time to also heal ourselves. Right? Like our good friend, mutual friend Jason. And, you know, the, the food service power plant network. I give him a shout out, too, but, you know, it's like, how how do we bring that balance into our lives, you know, and and make that work? Another presentation was the Bert Chef project. Another great cause. But it's. The thing is, it's about. Yes. Embrace the tech. Don't be afraid of it. It's out of Pandora's box. If it turns out to be a terrible thing, it's really out of our control anyway. So do everything we can to to make it good, right? Like right. Leverage that in your community. If you learn about this in your business, don't hold it close. That community thing, that's a great word right? In marketing we are there's it started with Facebook groups. Then I think, Alex Hermosa, you know, it owns I think school.com as Qualcomm or he's a massive investor in it one way or the other. And that's it's all communities and about every kind of subject you want to learn. And there is a value in learning together. Right. That's like that's from each other community. Yeah I'm working together. Like I wouldn't be where I'm at if I wasn't a part of a community on the marketing side. And to be honest, that's how I met some amazing mentors, right? I and they're amazing. And I wish to the working in versus on part of my goal this past summer and going into this year was getting the right people in the right positions in my company. So I could spend more time there because I get so much out of it when I am able to be there, but that I'm reading the email skims. I'm still, you know, I'm not as active as I want to be, but that's the goal that I've set for myself because I can already feel and see. I mean, the people that were coming, I said, hey, I'm going to be speaking, you know, moxie and like, I have a breakout or whatever. And I don't know if you noticed, but there were a number of people come and they have nothing to do with food service. They have absolutely nothing to do with the network that I have in food service. And my network is what allowed me to start this company seven years ago. But I've made a whole new community of marketers and really smart, amazing people because like you with I, I was very curious and said, if this is the shift I want to make in my career and this is the direction I want to go, I got to find my people. And it's a really beautiful thing when you're all learning together is, and I, I think I said this to you offline previously, but name your podcast curiously stuck. Like, I just want to say it's brilliant. To be honest with you, it's a really when we think about branding and all those things that go into marketing and you go like, you know, we want to we want it to resonate, we want it to catch people's attention, and we want it to be like, quite for what we're trying to deliver. And, watching your podcasts and, and, you know, this one is that curiosity. It's the origin of everything and somebody to bring it full circle on. I when somebody says, Mike, you know, I want to do it, I don't know where to start. My daughter's, my daughter's boyfriend is his birthday yesterday was a realtor, just turned 36, in Birmingham, Alabama. He came up to visit right before the holidays. And he's like, you know, Mike, I, I've been embarrassed to say this to you, but I'm going to do it because I want to ask, like, like, please don't ask me to marry her, you know, or her to marry, like, don't like it or grab her chest face. He's like he's like not he's a great guy. Just this one to them. I'm teasing. I be fine with it. You know, he's a great guy, but I'm like, okay, hold on. So, you know, he goes, but he has like, you know, I, I want to I know I need to be doing something good. I just don't know where to start. And I just said his name happens to be Mike as well. And I just said, Mike, like, start with what you're curious about. Start with your curiosity. I said, I'll tell you what I know about you. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you've been taking guitar for a little over three years. You love, jam bands. Big fan of Jerry Garcia's playing style of Stacy from fish. And your your favorite band is goose. Okay, I apologize, I don't know the guitarist and cases. Right. I said, but curiosity it like open up I think Gemini. And I said, hey, you know, I've been taking guitar for three and a half years. These are my like top three guitarists, blah, blah. You know, give me three sets of tabs and based on their style of play that I might be able to incorporate into my learning. Right? I honestly had no earthly idea what the output would be. Right? I'm just typing it in like, let's just see what it says. Like he brings it out, it talks about the actual it does a, you know, like a paragraph depth level of, you know, this is actually Jerry guitar, Jerry Garcia style of playing guitar. It has a name, it has a structure. It explained it. Then it had like a strip of tab music for guitars. Right? I take notes, right? And he goes, no, no, no, it's guitar. Call it tabs. I'm like, I didn't need to know. So tabs it is. Then it takes Triana. Stacy, his his style of guitar player is different than Jerry Garcia. He does this. He has a tendency to work these chords pretty hard. It's really intricate finger work, blah blah, blah. Then it gets to the guitar player just does same thing tabs and his like his right. Sort of like I know idea should start curious. But I suggested that because I what I know right right. What it's about he can type but something that I'm like I didn't see that coming. He goes, you know, I've read a lot about the fire that burned the Library of Alexandria back in ancient Greece, and I've always been really curious about the scrolls that were lost. I'm like, okay, sure. Like I had no idea. Like of all the things that was going to come out of your mouth, sir. Right. But like that is when we went from Jerry Garcia Triana stage. It goes to like the burning of Alexandria. Yeah. So I type it in and and it comes back with like ten pages of information about the scrolls. He got like, two pages in his eyes or thing. You could almost see smoke coming out of his ears because his brain was just starting to catch fire. But it's be curious. Be curious about everything. You know, I think, I, I love Ted Lasso. Right. And there's a scene in Ted Lasso, right where he's playing the guy who used to own the team that he used to coaches, you know, plays kind of a jerk on the show, right? And they're playing darts for something against Sirius. The guy makes it bad, and Ted's like, you know, what do I have to do to win here? It's like, well, you need two balls and a 22 bullseyes and it's white. And he's standing there. He goes, you know, when I was a kid, my dad was a coach, and we would go to the pub, Moogle Bar, where I grew up every Sunday, and we'd play darts together. And it's up first. The Bulls are then he tells a little bit more of the story version of the bullseye, and he says, you know, I took my son to school and it said something about be curious, don't judge. And he looked at his competitor on the darts and he goes, had you been curious, had you asked me something about my background? And he looks away from the dart board and he throws a dart, hits the 20. As you would know that I've been playing this my whole life. Pressure doesn't affect me, but you have to start by being curious, not judgmental. So I think curious, like, should pervade all of our lives, you know, how do we do it better? How do we learn more about each other? How do we become a city? I think is one of the foundation stones of growth, you know, which so high that curiosity apply it to your your journey on. I apply it to your journey in marketing. Apply it to your journey in life. You know, if you find that you don't resonate with somebody, be curious as to why. Go, wow, well, that person's just them. Why? Why doesn't resonate. A lot of times it may reflect something about you and really not them at all. But you won't know that until you when who knew? And and if I can put a wrap on that for everyone. You know, you just gave fantastic, you know, stories on the why and the how and really to articulate. I think to all of our listeners, the breadth of what to your point, the infinite. What did you say before infinite? Or infinity thinking? Thank you. But let me just put it for a moment to all of our food service reps and friends and business owners out there, take exactly what Mike just said and apply that to, like, I don't know, a product line or a problem that your customer's facing or, you know, the type of customer that you're wishing to call on or you want more of in your business, or maybe just switched your product out for something else and you don't know why. And be curious. Ask those questions. And you know, in that ten page document that maybe it gives you afterwards about burning scrolls. But not because you asked about something else. You know, just know that. Check the sources, of course. Look into it. But just right there, you've used this tool to help you think bigger about your business, understand your client more, get ahead than the competitor. And I think that that's the connect that your personal life and the things you're interested in. Apply those things over to the business side. And then all of this other stuff. I mean, again, you know, Mike has shared with all of us a lot of different tools and way. He's saved time. I know that he also consults in this, I think, on the side. And, or do you have a community that you can share with us? Don't you have a community or you're working on one? Sorry, I don't mean to spill beans. Oh, no. No, I thank you for the plug, I appreciate it. The the elevate effect on school.com. Yes. It's, it's, you know, all small businesses are welcome. I'm focused on my community, which is all of these food service people are, you know, serving on Marcy. The goal is to elevate that organization. I think that I want to democratize all of this, and I want to lift everybody up. I heard that a bunch. You know, a high tide raises all boats at the competition. So high tides rise. All boats. I was saying that, one of our clients, Philip Chao. I'll give him the shout out. I've loved all the shout outs we've had on this. This is, like, the most tagged podcast ever. Philip Chao, all the time in launching a product, not in food service in a different industry, says high tide dries all boats. And you know, when he first said it in front of me, I was like, that sounds nice. I mean, I get it. And then over time, we've been working with him for 3 or 4 years now. I have watched in his industry how everybody is taking that mantra and they're all doing better because of it, and they're all working together because it's about in their case, about people saving more, having better outcomes in wealth and in retirement investments. So like again, very different than food service, but like the greater good is so much bigger than just one wealth advisor making more money or getting a new client. And I agree with you. And that makes my heart sing a little bit that it made its way to you and to to a couple other people. So this is very cool. Mike, I have love we I know we've been on for a little bit of time. I, I think this works part two. So I think there's more stuff to talk about, maybe a little bit more in the weeds. I wanted to make sure that, you know, today we covered things broader. We're coming out of moxie. There's a lot of conversation happening. You know, I know I've already been asked once to give my speech again. So I'm really excited about that, and I know that. So many people can benefit from what you were sharing, especially in your last session. So, thank you for joining us. And and put another plug. What's the name again of that, of your community, the elevate effect. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you Mike. Thank you Chelsea, again, thank you for putting such a great effort into such an amazing podcast. Every episode you've done so far, I have saved and enjoyed that. You take us on all these different places and I'm super grateful just to be a small part of that. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. We're really, truly in the beginning, I got a little derailed by a two thing in December, but we're back on track, Mike. We're about like like happens. Life happens. Thank you so much. And we'll talk soon. Take it easy. Thank you. Ashley, I think, is one of the foundation stones of growth, you know, which so far that curiosity apply it to your your journey on. I apply it to your journey in marketing. Apply it to your journey in life. You know, if you find that you don't resonate with somebody, be curious as to why. Go wow. Well, that person's just them. Why? Why doesn't resonate. A lot of times it may reflect something about you and really not them at all. The ability to learn anything right now is simply defined by two things. First, your imagination. Second is your available time period. You can build a lot of things yourself, and if you don't chase all of the shiny objects and you don't chase with the latest and greatest and just focus in on literally like, here's the problem, here's how much time we save. How do we solve it? There might be a tool that's already built that can do that. Or the beauty of where we're at now is in some cases, if you have someone who's very savvy or you hire someone who's very savvy, a lot of these things can be built yourself. Like you don't have to go to super complex coders and systems.