I Have to Figure This Sh*t Out

Introduction:

This week, Liz Picarazzi and Jaci Russo compare notes with Ted Wolf on their very different journeys to integrate generative AI into their businesses. For Liz, it’s been frustrating. She resisted AI at first—but while she’s ready to go now, her COO, who also happens to be her husband, still isn’t there. That’s one reason Liz says she feels as though she’s been spinning her wheels. Jaci’s path couldn’t have been more different. She jumped in more than two years ago, took every course she could find, and now has custom GPTs talking to custom GPTs talking to custom GPTs. The AI tool she built delivers 10 fresh, fully vetted prospects to her inbox every morning. “It will find the person in charge of marketing,” she says. “It will find their LinkedIn profile. It will find the company website. It will find their competitors.” And it has already produced two new clients. Plus: As this especially challenging year winds down, Liz, Jaci, and Ted reflect on where their businesses hit expectations and where they fell short. Jaci notes a sales hire that failed. “I would have liked to have not spent the money on that person and had this epiphany without the pain,” she says, “but I think those two things just go hand in hand.” Liz cites her $400,000 tariff bill: “It really hurts, and it makes me angry,” she tells us. “But in terms of revenue, we’re doing well, I gotta admit. Thank God for New York City rats and trash.”

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Liz Picarazzi is CEO of Citibin.

Jaci Russo is CEO of BrandRusso.

Ted Wolf is CEO of Guidewise.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Liz, Jaci, and Ted. It’s great to have all of you here. I want to start by addressing something. I’ve gotten some feedback lately that I’m spending too much time on artificial intelligence, both on the podcast and in the newsletter. And I’m certainly open to that suggestion, partly because I like to mix things up and talk about different things, keep it interesting.

But every time I pull back from AI, something pulls me back in again, sort of like Michael Corleone in Godfather III. [Laughter] I believe, when we look back on this year, this time period, we’re going to have a lot to talk about. There’s a lot going on, but when it comes to running a business, I’m not sure there’s anything happening right now that’s bigger or more important than the changes AI is making possible. Do any of the three of you disagree with that?

Liz Picarazzi:
Well, my opinion about your AI content has changed over time. I actually used to think there was too much of it, and when we were at 21 Hats Live and we were given the option to have an AI session, I always chose something else. But recently, as I’ve started to get more into AI for the business, trying to learn, I pay a lot more attention to your content. The one thing I will say—and this has to do with content overall about AI—is a lot of it is about the theoretical or the imperative to embrace AI, but there are very few people who are talking about some of the brass tacks, like tactical things that you need to do to get ready for AI.

So, for example, our friend Alan Pentz wrote this week—or actually it was on his podcast—that if you’ve got your content and your data and your pictures in multiple systems, in Drive, in Dropbox, Slack, all over the place that you’re going to have a hard time adopting AI, because your stuff is not in a consolidated place. And that’s where I’ve been lately. I’ve been spinning my wheels, and it did occur to me that I could move this along a lot faster if I got my stuff organized. But then, oh, is there time to get myself organized? How do I even want to organize those tens of thousands of photos? And suddenly it turns into an exercise that seems too difficult, but I have moved along a lot.

But I have to say that the content that is very theoretical or about the imperative of AI, I tend to gloss over. Anything that’s about corporate AI, I tend not to read. But anything that is really about getting started, how to do this, practical, is really valuable for me as a small business at this stage.

Loren Feldman:
What do you mean when you say corporate AI?

Liz Picarazzi:
I mean more like big corporations. How are they implementing AI, how many people they’re laying off as a result of it, how much money they’re saving on it. I know that’s going on, but I’m not going to spend time reading it.

Loren Feldman:
It’s not going to change the way you run your business.

Liz Picarazzi:
No, not at all.

Loren Feldman:
Right. The challenges you just laid out are really interesting and, I suspect, relevant to a lot of people running businesses. Have you figured anything out? Do you know what you’re going to do?

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, so this imperative to get everything in a consolidated place has partly led me, ironically, to hire an additional person. You would think you’d be subtracting someone.

Jaci Russo:
I would not think that. I think AI is going to create jobs. Keep going. [Laughter]

Liz Picarazzi:
So, Jaci, you’re right. I really started to dig into this about two months ago, and of course, thought I could do it all on my own. It hasn’t happened. You know, as an entrepreneur, I’m a very creative person. I’m very impatient, super impatient, and when I’m not able to set up something because of connections and passwords, I’m just going to give up. And I did for a while.

And so now I’ve hired someone that’s helped me pull together the systems, get the passwords in the right place, give people the right access. And it’s really helped things, because I was sort of in the way of not only my own AI learning, but that of my employees. We haven’t really deployed AI in a dedicated way in the business yet, and I think that this person is really going to help us do that. But getting past the spinning wheels, I imagine, is something that a lot of small businesses are not able to get through. And that’s the stage that I was at until, literally, I hired someone yesterday.

Loren Feldman:
I want to ask Jaci how she’s dealt with those issues. But first, how did you hire the person you hired to help you? What credentials were you looking for?

Liz Picarazzi:
She’s a contractor who works for one of my close business friends, and when I went to the Inc 5000 conference with this friend who was making the list for the first time, we flew together, we traveled, we stayed in a room together. And I was complaining about systems and passwords multiple times every day. And she noticed that, and she was like, “You really need to get help with this. It does not have to be so difficult.” This person that works for her, but is not full-time, has capacity. And she knew for sure that she’d be able to help me with this stuff. So we had a great meeting last week: went over all of my needs, went over all my systems. I got a proposal. It was a very good one, and then we kicked off some of the projects with her yesterday. So it was a referral.

Loren Feldman:
I think in that situation, you sort of have a choice between trying to make the platforms you’re already using work together, or kind of starting fresh and building a clean, new stack designed specifically for AI. It sounds like you’re choosing the first choice: making your current systems work. Is that right?

Liz Picarazzi:
Yes.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, what have you done?

Jaci Russo:
Well, as you know, Loren, we’ve been talking AI for two years now, and we’ve integrated into different pieces of our company. I believe it is going to completely upend my entire industry. I think that the shift that marketing is going to go through from six months ago to 18 months from now is going to rival the changes that it went through in all of the 1900s.

Ted Wolf:
I agree with that, totally.

Loren Feldman:
Have you had to deal with the situation that Liz described of trying to get all of your systems talking to each other?

Jaci Russo:
Yes, that is already something I’m always focused on. And you know, I feel like I do it better than most, but not as great as I would like to. So I’m still working on it, but I love the technology, and I love the systems talking to each other. And I’m not worried about the machines taking over. And so I want more of this.

If it’s going to help me do my job better and help my clients grow, I’m going to figure out how to be first in line to make that happen. And so my job now, or at least has been for the past two years, is getting the people of my company to see it the same way. As you know, Michael and I have very different viewpoints on this topic, and all other topics.

Loren Feldman:
Michael, your husband and co-owner.

Jaci Russo:
Yeah, that’s the one. That’s the baby daddy that I am referring to. [Laughter] And then, we have clients who run the gamut from they’re scared of it, they don’t want us to use it; they like it, they want to know that we’re using it; they’re using it. And they want us to take what they’ve done and make it better. And they send us 74-page documents of crap. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
How did you initially deal with the situation that Liz described? Did you handle it yourself? Did you get your systems talking to each other? Did you bring somebody in with more experience and expertise?

Jaci Russo:
No, I feel like my job is to figure it out and then teach others. And so I have found a number of experts—our friend Alan Pentz being one of them, and I’ve taken some classes from him. I have been teaching AI for marketing, for beginners, for about a year now. When I have to teach it, I’ve got to go learn it. And so that’s the main driver. If I’m going to stay ahead, then I have to learn a bunch of stuff.

There are a few organizations that I either subscribe to their stuff or I take their classes. There’s a ton of free classes out there that I have found to be very helpful. And then this is the first thing that I can remember where using it is the best—I guess maybe cooking. This is probably equivalent to cooking. You can go to the Culinary Institute, but the most you’re going to learn is from actually standing in the kitchen and taste-testing recipes.

Ted Wolf:
Liz, I’ve got a question for you. What made you actually make the decision to bring in that person to start organizing yourself?

Liz Picarazzi:
It was the feeling of spinning my wheels, knowing that I had made the decision that I wanted to use AI, wanted to deploy it, and I was actually sitting there using Claude and ChatGPT and creating great stuff. But anytime it needed to be pulled in from a system, it would feel like friction. And it just became very obvious: It’s not just the systems themselves, but it’s the passwords attached to the systems. And in my business, we have like 27 different systems, maybe eight of them we regularly use. But if I’m trying to work with a system that I’ve lost my password on, and then it’s not in Keeper, I was finding that was happening multiple times every day. And it just became overwhelming.

Ted Wolf:
Mhmm. Jaci, I’m curious what made you develop the mindset that you have? You’re so open to it and positive.

Jaci Russo:
I think that’s been my mindset since I was probably 15 years old. I don’t know. I love being a lifelong learner. I love learning new things. When digital ads came on board, we were one of the first agencies to jump on that and figure out how to use them for our clients. Social media? I was teaching social media classes in 2009 to schools, and I developed a three-class set where I would teach a set to students, a set to the school themselves and teachers, and a set to the parents, because three very different audiences need to learn three very different things.

I started a radio show. A local talk station, kind of a regional powerhouse here in the South, had me do a weekly show for them. It started out as a 60-second, and then it became five minutes, and it was for 12 years. I would take a social media platform that had just been launched and explain it to the business community how they should or should not use it for their customers.

Ted Wolf:
In teaching AI, or even implementing it in your own business, have you run into any problems, setbacks?

Jaci Russo:
No, no setbacks. I think I have a toxic positivity, so I don’t really see setbacks—but I’m working on that. But I have found opportunities to do a lot of things better. We’re smarter. Our signature program at BrandRusso is called Razor Branding, and it’s a three-month strategic brand-planning process. And so we’ve been able to introduce elements of different AI tools throughout that process, and the end product is—I mean, is it a hundred times better than it used to be? Probably so.

Loren Feldman:
Ted, in your travels, consulting with companies about AI, you must see these kinds of situations all the time, like the one Liz was describing: Businesses trying to figure out how to coordinate their processes. What do you generally recommend? Do you suggest figuring out ways to get different platforms to talk to each other, or do you suggest starting from scratch?

Ted Wolf:
I suggest doing what Liz started with, actually: getting somebody to come in and help you, because you’re not going to have time to do it yourself in a small business. So you’ve got to have someone come in and start taking a look—first thing, tying systems together, making sure everything’s linked the way it needs to be. But organizing your information. What I think a lot of people—where it falls down is when they get into developing bots or even agents, you’ve got to get into the workflow. What’s the process, step-by-step? Most people don’t have them documented. If you don’t have them documented, you don’t know where your data is coming from. A lot of data is usually tribal knowledge. How do you get that into a system?

So I think that’s the next step you’ve really got to look at. And I think there is potentially a good reason to listen to what the popular press is saying in big businesses. What they’re doing today, Liz, you’re going to be doing two years from now. And that waterfall effect is really important to know, because they’re not saying, “We’re letting people go.” They’re saying, “We’re not hiring anybody, and we’re going to readjust our employee full-time equivalents,” things like that.

But I think the first step is, how do I get my house in order? And that is, what’s your workflow, document your systems, and things like that. Because you’re going to have to get to a point where you say, “How far can I take the automation and the agents in running my business? And how do I connect with not just my clients, but other vendors that I can partner with?” And things like that. Because the changes are going to be really big when it comes to people. That’s what I’m seeing, and that’s what I’m hearing.

Loren Feldman:
Liz, you have a lot of marketing experience and marketing expertise. I’m guessing that’s kind of where you started using AI: creating content, creating marketing assets. Have you moved toward actually changing the processes by which you run the business to integrate AI?

Liz Picarazzi:
So, my intent is to have the core of these marketing campaigns still come from me, because you I’ve built the product. I know who the customer is. I know the value proposition. I’m not going to let AI do that job. But then the stuff that I write is going to flow down to people who are doing the marketing implementation. So I feel more comfortable with that if I know that my voice is captured from the beginning, because if that’s not captured, then the people working for me are going to copy and paste or port over stuff that isn’t really on message.

I don’t think I’m going to need to be highly involved for a long time, but I know at least for 2026 that I’m going to get my messaging very clear. I have three product lines now. I have my residential, municipal, and bear. And obviously there’s different content for all three of them, and the core marketing structure is the three product lines. But then I don’t want people to just go in there putting any old messaging in or just developing, let’s say, bear-related material. I’m going to want my value proposition to be right in there from the beginning.

So the goal is that in 2026, we’re going to evolve to, I put something in one place, and then it kicks off. My creative team can go from there and use the tools that they’re probably going to know better than I do. I don’t want to have to know how everything works. That’s part of the problem now. I don’t. So I’m thinking, “If I don’t understand this, how am I going to pass this off to someone else?” Or, “If I don’t understand how to get my clear message and my positioning in the system, it’s going to replicate something I don’t want across all the marketing channels.”

Loren Feldman:
Liz, you’re a good writer, and I know you take pride in your writing ability. You said that you’re getting comfortable with making sure that your voice is part of what you’re creating and presenting. How did you get comfortable with AI taking over, to some extent, for your voice?

Liz Picarazzi:
It was that I could see it was being trained on what was important, so sort of in a hierarchy of messaging from the overall product strategy through all of the different customer types and the different messaging. I could see that it was learning, so I became more comfortable with that. It just speeds things up a lot.

I consider myself a good writer, but I can also be really verbose, especially if I don’t have the time to edit things down. So if I’ve written something that’s a little bit verbose, and I throw it into ChatGPT or Claude, it can consolidate it down into not only something that probably reads better, but probably is also better for LinkedIn, for example. I think it knows what LinkedIn likes in articles, and it’s going to convert what I write to that sort of format.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, you mentioned the class that you’ve been taking with Alan Pentz. Alan’s been a guest on this podcast, and I quote him fairly frequently in the newsletter, so his name may be familiar to listeners. You signed up for a class that I think is like eight or 10 weeks, something like that?

Jaci Russo:
It was eight weeks. So what I’ve been teaching is an AI-for-marketing beginner class, and specifically on how to use AI for small business marketing when they may not be in a position to hire someone like Liz has done. They, for sure, don’t need an agency like I work at, but I still want them to have some skills, because that’s what helps them get bigger and become a good client for me.

And so teaching that class was great, but I want to stay ahead of my people, and so taking Allen’s courses, we exceeded what I knew after the first lesson—and there were seven more to go. And so it was awesome. I mean, by the time we were done, we had vibe-coded and built a website, an app, a funnel. I had my robots talking to each other, and so one custom GPT would do a task and then tell the next custom GPT to do their task, and then tell the next custom GPT to do their task.

Loren Feldman:
Okay, I think you’re getting into the theoretical that Liz was talking about before. Can you tell us what those tasks were?

Jaci Russo:
Sure.

Liz Picarazzi:
Thanks, Loren. [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
These are all just for the sake of the class, right? So they were pretend tasks. They weren’t real things I do every day. But what I loved about the way Alan did it—and I think he’s going to do another one, so if y’all are out there and you’re even slightly interested in this thing, sign up. This is not a guy reading from a deck and PowerPointing you to death. There may have been a deck in the first two lessons, but after that, he would give us assignments, and we would just basically program. And I’m not a programmer. I don’t think that way. It kind of hurts my head, but I was able to figure out how to do it.

And so, he gave us this series of assignments around—taco trucks was one of the day’s lessons. And so, we had to find all the different taco trucks from this deck of information like a CSV file, and then we ran different programs to analyze the data, to create a map of where all the trucks were, to create a route of how to get geographically from the first truck to the last truck in a place that makes the most sense. One day, we created fictional businesses, and then we built all of the assets around that business. So in one two-hour class, we developed a business plan, an approach. We solved a problem. We built a website. We built an app. We built a lead funnel. I mean, it was impressive.

Ted Wolf:
And like you were saying, Jaci, you have agents talking to agents talking to agents. That’s a whole new realm. Then you’ve got to get what they call “orchestrate,” and that’s just like, how do I manage these? Because in the future, when you hire someone, I honestly think you’re going to be saying: You’re going to be managing two agents and one person, or 10 agents and one person.

Jaci Russo:
Yes.

Ted Wolf:
And those levels will keep going up. And then all of a sudden, a small business person has to understand that stuff so they can get—I’m going to say, leapfrog ahead of their competition, who won’t, because they’re going to be left behind. It’s just like hiring another employee. I’ve got to do the exact same things. It just works faster, and they’re so much smarter than what most people are. But that doesn’t mean I don’t need people. I think that’s what people are looking for, along with what you said, Liz: Give me some practical, applicable things that I can do well.

Jaci Russo:
And one of the things I told Alan was: I love the theoretical assignments, because it allowed me to separate from my business and just learn the tools. I was doing stuff that felt very smart and fancy, and it made it easy. So I started to realize how easy it’s going to be for other people who are way smarter than me to be able to use these tools to accelerate growth, to accelerate product development, to accelerate marketing initiatives. And so, the divide between the people who understand the tools and don’t, as it gets bigger, that becomes the divide between the people who are growing their businesses more rapidly and those who are stagnating.

One of the things that was fascinating to me, to your point, I read an article—and I don’t think it was in 21 Hats, although that is what I read, mostly—about the radiology industry. And 10 years ago, med schools were telling radiology applicants to just pump their brakes, because we had a glut of radiologists in the market. And we did not need more of them, and they were going to have a hard time finding a job when they finished med school. Fast forward, 10 years later, because of AI, people assumed that was going to get even worse, but the inverse has happened. Now, we have a shortage of radiologists. Because of AI, we are able to do more X-rays because we can use it for more things, because it’s so inexpensive now. And because of the AI, we have a faster ability to return information. A human still has to sign off on it. So we actually are doing what I think is going to happen in a lot of places, where the people who know how to use the tools are in high demand, and we need more of them, because the tools are producing more opportunities for more work.

Loren Feldman:
So I want to get back to how we can use this right now. One of the things I love about Alan Pentz is that, like Ted, he was a business owner first, before he set out to immerse himself in AI and help others adopt it. So he speaks the same language as business owners. I’m curious, Jaci, you described the somewhat theoretical and classroom versions of what you learned. When you left the classroom, what were you most excited to actually implement in your everyday business life?

Jaci Russo:
Sure, so one of the things that I built during class was a new business tool. I’ve been spending a lot of time completely revamping our new business program here at the agency, and I’m able to save—I’m gonna say, conservatively—30 hours a week now.

Loren Feldman:
Of your own time?

Jaci Russo:
Of my personal time, which, that’s a lot. And so what we have built is a tool that, every day, what it ends up doing is delivering to me an incredibly well-vetted set of new leads in specific industries with an incredibly detailed assessment. And so it serves up in the—

Loren Feldman:
Okay, start at the beginning, Jaci. 30 hours is a lot of time, and new leads are something that every business cares about. How does this work?

Jaci Russo:
So now I have a tool that automatically, in the background, works, and this is what it does—and I’m going to use business banks as an example. It will go out every day and find for me 10 business banks that completely fit the criteria of what the perfect client is for me. And that criteria is very detailed. It will find the person in charge of marketing. It will find their LinkedIn profile. It will find the company website. It will find their competitors. It will compare them into a BANT score: budget, authority, timing, and need, and then we added an F for fit. So it’s a BANTF score. It will rate them, and it will write a first draft email for me identifying specific things we’ve done that are aligned to things that they need, and throw all that into an email for me at 6 a.m.

Liz Picarazzi:
Is that working?

Jaci Russo:
Oh, yeah.

Liz Picarazzi:
Amazing. How is all of that information even publicly available?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I tied a bunch of tools together, Liz. I’m so glad you asked. So I have some scrappers, as one of my classmates called it—a scraper—and four different AI tools of different platforms, all working together in a daisy chain to deliver that information to me.

Loren Feldman:
And then you get 10 leads every day?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I chose that number, Loren. That’s one of the factors. You can just pick whatever number you want. But 10 is a good number for me, because I want to be more focused on quality over quantity.

Loren Feldman:
And what are you doing?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I’m connecting with them on LinkedIn, and I’m starting a relationship. I’m getting to know them. I’m reading what they’re writing. There’s still some human element, I think, to do a good job. I’m not ready to turn my entire life over to the robots.

Loren Feldman:
So you’re not just making a cold call?

Jaci Russo:
No, no, that’s not my business. Other people, that would make sense to them. But no, I will get to know them. I’m not just gonna slide into their DMs and say, “What’s up? You up?” There’s no you-up messages here. [Laughter] Now, the ones that make sense, we do invite them to be a part of our podcast, because we’re always looking for B2B marketers. But that’s not everybody. We only release a podcast [episode] a week. Like, how could I possibly keep up? And so it helps put them into different buckets of: They would be a good podcast guest. They have this immediate need right now. They have a long-term thing. Send them this material that you created a while back that would be relevant to where they are right now. It guides me through that process and gives me steps. And then I have another tool that, once the human—me—says yes, it goes into our CRM and there’s a whole bunch of automation that happens after that.

Ted Wolf:
So Jaci, would you say that that’s the equivalent of what your employees would normally be doing, or a person would be doing, but now the agent technology is doing it?

Jaci Russo:
I would tell you: yes, and. Not only am I doing it, but I have two employees who are also doing it, and we’re comparing our notes, because we all have different sets of leads that come to us, and we do different things with them. So we’re doing some ABC testing. And then I would also tell you that as this works, which we’re two projects in already—so, so far so good. So two new clients have come from this effort in a very short amount of time. And so no, now I’m going to have to start hiring to handle the new work that this tool is creating.

Ted Wolf:
So Liz, I’d love to ask you, if you don’t mind, if you look at AI as a human you’re bringing in, teaching, training, getting them on board, and then trying to get them to self-manage to free your time up, does that help you think about AI any differently? Or is that the way you’ve always thought about it?

Liz Picarazzi:
No, I think that would help me tremendously. You know, I’m older and, I mean, I know that there are many people who could potentially help. It’s just a matter of, how do I find them? And honestly, I was listening to you guys. Like, I’ve never even set up an agent. That’s a concept that I know is a next step, but I’ve got this sort of resistance. Like, I need to figure it out before I do it—instead of: Get in the sandbox and do it. And you know—

Loren Feldman:
Liz, you almost sound embarrassed that you haven’t done that yet.

Liz Picarazzi:
I am embarrassed!

Loren Feldman:
Trust me, there are a lot of business owners—

Liz Picarazzi:
Well, we’ll see, Loren. Have you ever set up an agent?

Loren Feldman:
Absolutely not.

Ted Wolf:
So Liz, let me ask, how would you feel managing agents like that? I mean, it appears as though you would like to, I’ll say, explore and thoroughly understand something before you do it, which is very rational. Correct?

Liz Picarazzi:
Yes.

Ted Wolf:
Okay, so how do you deal with the emotional side, then, of managing technology, of managing agents? Because that’s the real story of AI.

Liz Picarazzi:
I guess I could tell you sort of a vivid story, and that is that my frustration level with all of the data and the systems and the passwords needed to feel like I had a connected system got so bad that I had a tantrum—one of my worst tantrums ever—a couple of weeks ago, where I realized I needed to get all these systems talking. But worse, I didn’t really think that anybody cared about it as much as I did.

And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that does sort of get to the emotional thing, because then it’s like: Well, not only do I have to figure this shit out, but I need to try to galvanize my team to embrace it. I’m not going to do that. That’s why I have to bring someone else in to do it, because they can not only know these systems, they can hook them together. But I’m not planning on training my staff on how to use these tools. I’m going to have her do it.

Ted Wolf:
Mhmm, I think that’s very smart. I think the people change capacity is low right now. The pace and scope of change is getting faster all the time. You mentioned that you almost went into a—I believe you used the word temper tantrum, if I remember correctly. That probably would get programmed into an agent, because the values that you have, you will program into that. And when an agent goes crazy—and they do go crazy, just like an employee—you have to know, “Okay, here’s how I have to go back and handle it.” Because the beliefs and values that you have are going to be evident in that particular agent. And you’ve got to be prepared to deal with that.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, well, it’s sort of in my head right now. I have not tried to push these tools a whole lot on people, partly because I don’t have a good command of it. But I’ll give you another example. We have this master spreadsheet, which we use for production planning, pricing, inventory management, you name it, and even tariff tracking. It’s in this great sheet. My husband Frank, who’s our COO, created the sheet. It’s very sophisticated. He basically is in it all day long. And I told him the other day, “Have you tried loading this into any AI tools?” “Oh, no, no, no, I’m not ready for that. I don’t think that will work.”

And I said, “I don’t think it will work either, immediately, but if you structure it in a way where it knows what we want to know from that”—like we’re placing a big order soon, and he is really good at looking at the sheet to do production planning. But it would be a lot easier if he were to put that sheet in there and look at past sales for every SKU and look at historicals as well as orders we have coming in to make that order management. I mean, I would think it would be turnkey, but he hasn’t even uploaded the thing into anything, and I’ve also decided that I’m not going to do that myself. I’m curious to see what it will do, but I have a little bit of a barrier, because I want him to have the curiosity to do that. And he doesn’t have it yet.

Loren Feldman:
Ted, do you have enough information to say how you would address that situation?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, I would say I highly recommend that he does put it into AI. The beauty of what AI is—and I’m going to get just a little technical here—it’s in data processing, looking at systems. You have input, process, output. You put something into the system, it does the thinking, and the thing for you. That’s today’s technology. And then you get an output, and it ends there. But with AI, you have another step, and that’s called competency and communication.

He would be able to communicate, ask questions. It could ask him questions, to make him think deeper about that spreadsheet, and it would uncover an awful lot of gaps that perhaps he wouldn’t normally see, because it’s so detailed in what it’s doing. So look at that AI with him and say, “It’s going to teach you how to critically think at a deeper level.” That’s one of the two skills that AI will bring to a company.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, well, and even a question like scenario planning—like, there’s a big order that we’re likely going to get, but we’re not sure yet. And so, do we put that in the order or not? Well, if we could ask a question, “If we get this order, how should we increase our production order?” I think that that’s probably a pretty straightforward prompt, because you put what the order amount would be, and then it’s going to compare it to historicals and decide. But I can see it really helping with situations like that.

Loren Feldman:
I do want to move on to another topic in the limited time we have left, but before we leave this, I just have to ask one more question. Half the stories I read about AI on LinkedIn and other places are about one particular issue, which is figuring out how AI is changing SEO, how people are adopting what I guess is being called GEO—generative engine optimization—so that they can be discovered on all these AI chatbots. Jaci, is that something that came up in your course? Have you figured out the answer to this holy grail question?

Jaci Russo:
I am also tracking the story, and I have not. Because it sounds like, unlike Google, who releases their criteria, OpenAI, Claude, the other platforms have not released their criteria yet. What we have focused on is doing the right things the right way, and you’ll get the right results. And I think that’s just a good lesson for life in general.

Loren Feldman:
That was kind of true of SEO, too, right?

Jaci Russo:
Correct. And so if you just are not trying to game a system, not trying to trick it, but if you just do the right things and earn your way into people’s consciousness, typically, you’ll turn out okay.

Loren Feldman:
Does that make sense to you, Ted?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, it does make sense to me. Everything that she said—I fully agree.

Loren Feldman:
So, last thing I want to discuss, this has been another in a series of crazy years. A lot has happened this year, and I’m just wondering what impact this has had on each of your businesses. Liz, you’re a perfect example. As we know, it’s not been an easy year for you with all the tariff insanity. What has that done to the performance of your business? Have you been able to hit the numbers you expected to hit when the year began?

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, so we have had a lot of changes in the proportion of our customers. So we started in residential, and then we got into the municipal market like three and a half years ago, when New York City really started to focus more on its trash and rat issues. So my municipal business is only three and a half years old. My residential is now 13 years old. And last year, the split of my municipal versus residential business, it was still 60 percent residential, 40 percent municipal. This year, it’s 70 percent municipal, 30 percent residential. And that’s because residential sales have gone down a lot, but because we’ve really focused and invested on the municipal market, that’s helped us because government contracting, they’re not as vulnerable sometimes to changes in pricing.

For us, the situation in New York with the rat and trash issue, it’s also fairly political. So there has been a mandate for a couple of years for commercial districts, such as business improvement districts, to containerize their trash. Well, that became a funded mandate like three months ago, which means the funds for these business districts to pay for the trash containers are there, and my business has really benefited from that. So revenue-wise, I’m growing. We have expanded a lot into public parks and also into other cities. Baltimore is a huge city. We’re expanding more into Chicago. And then we’ve got the GrizzBin, which is a whole other thing for our bear enclosure.

But that proportion of 70/30 being municipal has saved us, because if we had just focused on homes and multi-family properties and didn’t have these public-space sales, we would really be in trouble right now. And I never would have known a few years ago when I chased that opportunity with the city that it would help me in this situation. I’m not a religious person, but I do feel like there’s some sort of a higher power that these two things are happening at the same time. I’m going to be $400,000 in tariff bills this year. I’ve got another $120,000 to go that I’m expecting in December. And it really hurts. It really hurts, and it makes me really angry. But in terms of our revenue, we’re doing well. I gotta admit. Thank God for New York City rats and trash. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Have you been able to maintain your margins at all? Or are you way off?

Liz Picarazzi:
We’re off. We did a surcharge, so that has helped a lot.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, how about you? You’ve had some uncertainty this year, too, in that you hired your first big-time sales lead with very big expectations. As you’ve told us, that hire didn’t work out precisely the way you’d hoped, and you’ve been rethinking things since then. What has this year been like, in terms of BrandRusso’s performance?

Jaci Russo:
You know, it’s shocking. We’re not going to end up at the highly ambitious goals that I originally projected, but we’re still going to end up in a good spot. So we have, I think, turned this into a year of some disappointments, because of that hire being so expensive and so colossally failing—and some really great wins. We’ve got some incredible clients that have been with us for 5, 10, 15 years. We’ve got some great new clients that we’re excited about. We’ve really fine-tuned.

After that person fell apart or left us, I blew up our entire new business process and just started back at basics. And it’s kind of like remodeling a house. Every time I opened a wall, I would find knob-and-tube wiring or someplace where there was no insulation or the rotten floors and subfloors that I have to replace. But we’re coming out of this with a completely remodeled house that’s now practically brand new. We’ve integrated AI in all these different places. We’ve got a real system that anybody can now step in and work, and I feel really good about that time and effort. I would have liked to have not spent the money on that person that I did and had this epiphany without the pain, but I think those two things just go hand in hand. So are we on track now to have the biggest year of all time next year? You betcha.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds, based on this conversation, as if you basically replaced your big-time salesperson with a big-time commitment to AI.

Jaci Russo:
We did, and yet, I’m still going to end up having to hire probably two people next year to run the system once we finish a few more tweaks over the next few months, because my job is not to do the jobs of this agency. My job is to provide opportunities for us to hire really talented people to do those jobs. So I’m in it right now to get it right, and then I have to get out of it so that it can grow.

Loren Feldman:
Did your revenue grow this year?

Jaci Russo:
It ends up being flat, instead of growing. We originally projected a 15-percent up, and we’re going to end up 1 percent up.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Ted? You’re more of a startup. What were your expectations for this year? And have you met them?

Ted Wolf:
I think the expectation was surprise, and that’s actually what happened. My son and I co-founded a business. I’ll say, for three or four years, we worked on developing and trying to figure out a solution to that 72-percent change-initiative failure that’s in companies, and that’s documented by McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. We looked at that and said, “Okay, that’s a huge solution, if we can put that in place,” and that means people can’t implement because of people’s resistance to change. So we sat down, designed a system, had it coded, and started using it, along with education, on: How do you get people to change? And we focused it all around goals, and how do you get it plugged in to the company?

Along comes AI, and all of a sudden, it’s like we have two sides of the AI solution that we need: the technology, which we have through the IBM partner Plus program, but then we have our people-resistance module, if you will, where we go in and help organizations get greater adoption of the technology. And I would tell you that we’ll probably triple—good possibility of tripling our revenue for next year. Because this is a message, and people see that we need it, and it’s changing businesses. So for me, I’m very excited about what happened this year. I’m actually more excited about next year.

And Liz, after hearing what you are paying in potential tariff fees and things like that, I would suggest—I’m not a friend, because I don’t know you well, but if I was a friend—I’d say you have to start looking at AI as a way to offload those costs, or at least increase productivity, to make their effect less. And that’s as much psychology as it is technology.

Loren Feldman:
How would you offload those costs, Ted? What are you referring to?

Ted Wolf:
Exactly what Jaci was saying: Figure out how to automate some of the things you’re doing right now and make AI very intelligent so it can write it the same caliber of what you write Liz, but it can also do all of the processing, inventory, operating side of the business just as well as your husband. And then go from there with other agents. Take it slow, make sure you’re protected. Low-risk, low cost to get started. But you have to do that. And the people side, your mindset is key in that whole thing.

Loren Feldman:
Well, it’s your mindset, Liz, as well as your husband’s. How are you going to convince Frank to take the leap?

Liz Picarazzi:
I’m probably going to bring in someone else to do that. Or I’ll just get over me being stubborn and upload that file I told you about and play with it myself and see how magical it is, and then tell him, and just have the true evidence for it. I don’t know what it is. He also really likes being close to the data, and he’s very proud of those spreadsheets and models that he’s built. So that’s reluctance. I mean, it’s the same reason why we don’t have scanners in the warehouse for boxes. Because he likes using a clipboard. He likes going in there with a clipboard.

Ted Wolf:
Liz, if I can just mention to you, I mentioned the 72-percent people resistance to change. With all respect, that’s an example of it. We all get stuck in our comfort zones, and we do the same thing. So I would suggest downloading or uploading the file. You may get some unbelievable insights, and it could be a big mental hit, if you will, in your own mind, so you get excited about it.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah. You know what, maybe I can help give him a moment of addiction. You know, that moment when you’re like, “Oh my God. I can’t live without this!” And you have that realization.

Loren Feldman:
Well, in Frank’s defense, I feel compelled to point out, as you’ve discussed here many times, Liz, you guys come with different sensibilities. And you’re more entrepreneurial in nature. He’s more conservative and cautious in nature. And the mix, I think, has probably been pretty good for you over the years.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, it definitely has been. And we’ve learned how to deal with a lot of the conflicts, but the conflict in this area over my frustration with systems, lack of integration, it sort of needed me to tantrum to get it done. Like me tantruming is part of the reason we hired someone to help us.

Ted Wolf:
And that’s a normal part of change management.

Loren Feldman:
Tantrums?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, you have to hit that point where you say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m done. I’m done. I’m ready to change now.” You’ve got to get somebody to the point where they’re saying that, or they will continue doing what they’ve always done.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yep.

Loren Feldman:
Will Frank be listening to this episode, Liz?

Liz Picarazzi:
He definitely will be. Hopefully he won’t tell anybody how bad the tantrum was. [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
You know, we talk about it over here, Liz, because I’m the “Go, go,” and Michael’s the “No, no.” And so, you know, you need the gas and the brake to make the car go properly.

Liz Picarazzi:
No, we are a very good mix. We really are. I’m so fortunate for that.

Loren Feldman:
Well, if Frank or Michael decide they need equal time, they know how to reach me. Please remind them of that. But for now, my thanks to Liz PIcarazzi, Jaci Russo, and Ted Wolf. Thank you all for sharing.