Episode 115 - Jess Loseke

Erik Martinez: Hello and welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today's conversation is with Jess Loseke, co-founder of Midwest Barrel Company. What I love about Jess's story is that she's not talking about AI from the sidelines. She is in the middle of using it to rethink how her business operates.

While the market is shifting, the team is leaner, and the old ways of working are not enough anymore, this is the real part of AI transformation that does not always show up in the demos, is not just, "Can we automate this task?" It is, "How do we redesign the business so the right work gets done by the right combination of people, process, and technology?"

Jess is living that question right now, and I think her story will resonate with agency leaders, business owners, and operators who have to help make these changes real.

I'm Erik Martinez and this is the Digital Velocity podcast

Jess, welcome to the show!

Jess Loseke: Thanks, Erik. That was such a great introduction. If I could just take that as my elevator pitch going forward, I feel like that's my life right [00:01:00] now

Erik Martinez: Well, you could use it anytime you want

Jess Loseke: Perfect. Thank you for writing it for me. Just a joke.

Erik Martinez: I have to be honest, AI helped me with that too

Jess Loseke: I mean, you, you've nailed it, so good job

Erik Martinez: Well, Jess, before we get into the conversation of the day, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to this moment in time?

Jess Loseke: Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, I'm the co-founder of Midwest Barrel Company, and what most of your listeners are gonna wanna know is, what the heck is that? So we are a company that buys and sells used barrels. So think bourbon, whiskey, wine, tequila, rum, specialty barrels from all over the world. So after a barrel is emptied at the winery or the distillery, we buy the barrel and get it to its next stopping point.

the thing that I'm really excited to talk about today is that the bourbon and barrel industry is very traditional.

And so barrels have been produced for thousands of years, and anywhere that you go, they [00:02:00] are produced by a worker called a cooper. So some cooperages have more automation than others, but it is still a very standardized practice. And so when we entered the market, there really wasn't a lot of digitization to the barrel world.

So we were the very first company that put a barrel on the internet, and I have set out to run our company in such a way that we are a tech-forward e-commerce business. And certainly with the emergence of all of these AI tools and LLMs, that is completely changing the game.

We were founded in 2015, so like 2015 to 2018 was the founding proof of concept, and then 2018 to 2023 was the di-digitization of it, and now we're going into the AI world and really going to accelerate using AI tools. So I'm excited to talk about all things AI, but that's kind of the brief overview of what we do.

Erik Martinez: That's awesome. Bringing the old and the new together in a very interesting way. And [00:03:00] I didn't know there was a whole secondary market for barrels, so I learned something new today

Jess Loseke: Yeah. So the, um, most people don't know this, but bourbon can only be aged in a brand-new, never used American white oak barrel. So 95% of the world's bourbon is produced in Kentucky, and once those barrels are emptied, a bourbon can never go in that barrel again. But Scotch and Irish whiskey and other American whiskeys as well, they can be used a second time.

And so a service that we provide is really critical because not every single barrel can hold a second-fill whiskey. So we step in, we grade the barrels, and we figure out which ones can hold another whiskey and which ones cannot. And then for the ones that cannot, our goal is to extend the life cycle of the barrel for as long as absolutely possible because they'll go to Scotland, and these barrels will be used for forty or fifty years.

So we wanna get it to this next stopping point as quickly as possible so that that wood [00:04:00] that comes from those American white oak trees lasts as long as possible. So that's really our goal is like we consider ourselves to be a sustainability arm in the life cycle of the barrel

Erik Martinez: Yeah, that is very cool. Well, let's now bring it into the world of AI.

Jess Loseke: Let's do it

Erik Martinez: The first time you and I talked I was struck by how you think about AI. The question is what's now the driving motivation for pushing into AI?

Jess Loseke: Yeah. So I'm gonna answer this question a little bit different today than I probably would've 24 hours ago. But, just yesterday, I had a conversation with someone where I was describing my childhood. And so I grew up very poor, and we were on welfare and food stamps and kind of all of those things. I actually went to a private high school my sophomore through senior year of high school, and my family cleaned at the school so I could be on scholarship.

And so we would clean the multipurpose room, and families would be coming in and out to go to games in the gym, and, I don't think I would ever do that for my kids today. [00:05:00] Just the fact that my mom sacrificed that and, the ego that she had to have to be like, "I clean at the school so my kids could go here," it's something that's pretty profound.

And when I graduated high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I didn't go to college right out of high school. But I realized pretty quickly that I'm a learner, and so I eventually went on to get an associate's, my bachelor's, and a master's degree. And so education is really important, but one of the things that I learned along the way is that I did not have the same access to information or networks that People that had more money did.

And the internet really leveled a lot of the playing field in terms of the access to information because if you remember, we used to have to actually look things up in encyclopedias. And so when we could have access to the internet, that really, gave us, it gave us a lot more access. And access is the problem that Midwest Barrel Company solves.

So we allow anyone and everyone to have [00:06:00] access to a barrel. And so I, I didn't even realize until that I had this conversation yesterday what an intentional mission that I am on because of the access that I didn't have as a kid. And when I look at AI,there's, there's people in all sorts of camps related to AI, and AI is actually such a really broad category.

But I really believe at the heart that it is a great equalizer for like the young Jess, for the Jess that didn't have the money, for the Jess that didn't have the means and the resources, that the Jess that didn't have the connections. And AI is a tool that really levels that playing field. Where right now my business has just as good a chance of succeeding as a billion-dollar company.

And it doesn't mean that we have the same money and the same resources to throw, but I still have the same access to information which has never existed in humanity before. And so at a very fundamental level, I believe this, the, this is the greatest transformation of my lifetime, and I'm getting to be on the front [00:07:00] lines, and I am so excited.

But it is from a human first place. It is not from a narrative of replacing people or getting rid of people or cutting jobs or saving money. That is not my motivation. My motivation simply is, let's stop doing all of the manual data entry that we have to do in the digitization of a business. One of the biggest issues that I have run into since we have founded is I've always used best in class software, but it doesn't connect.

So yes, there are tools like Zapier that you could use to connect them, but then you have to maintain it. And so, that has been one of my biggest frustrations. Claude is changing the game, and for the very first time in our business existence, we're able to tie together data from systems that has taken hours and hours and lots of expensive consultants, and I'm able to do it in minutes. And so that at the heart is why I'm excited about AI.

Erik Martinez: I think that is an amazing [00:08:00] story. And, you know, you are giving your business the ability to compete, and compete effectively against much larger companies who have greater resources. And I think, you know, for me, one of the most impactful things for AI as a small business myself, is we can do things we couldn't do a year ago.

There are things I can do now that I couldn't do even three months ago.

Jess Loseke: And do you know what, Erik? What's really interesting in that is... you just hit on such an important point as a small business owner. So I spent, and I'm not e- exaggerating on this, I spent 16 hours this weekend rewriting our employee handbook using AI.

Erik Martinez: Mm-hmm.

Jess Loseke: And to someone that's listening to this, they are going to think like, "Why on earth would it take 16 hours to rewrite that?"

I mean, it wasn't just the han- it was all of the policies that go into the handbook. But the reality is, is that I had not done a complete [00:09:00] update to our handbook since 2020. There were things in there that just do not exist, and there were new things that had to be added. And the reality is, is that without AI, that simply just was not getting updated, and that is a tool and a resource that employees need.

And so as a small business, we were just opting not to do those things. So this isn't about we wanna cut jobs. This is about we are able to do things as a small business for our employees that we've never been able to do before because we simply were not doing them. And I just think that's such an important point that What you're able to do with these tools that you just simply could not do before.

I mean, think about it just on the financial side, how expensive these tax consultants and finance consultants are. And I'm sure you have a bookkeeper that you work with, and you might have a controller or an outsourced CFO, but you don't have an AP and an AR person, I'm guessing. We're not a large enough [00:10:00] business to have a full-fledged finance department. But now you can have one finance person that runs in conjunction with an AI tool, and it is 90 times better than what we were working with before.

Erik Martinez: I think that's so profound because, you know, as we were talking pre-show, this notion that you can document what you do. I remember as a young intern, my first intern out of high school, I was lucky enough to get one out of high school, did it for five years, and I remember somebody say, "Hey, you need to document your job."

I'm like, "What are you talking about?" what do you mean by that?" funny, I grew up in a lot of small businesses, and none of them have documented procedures. It is all tribal knowledge.

And I think what you hit on is we now have a way to systematize through documentation, which in my opinion, allows us to leverage AI more effectively, And allows our employees to do a better job because they can go get [00:11:00] answers quickly and don't necessarily need to go through Jess every single time for every single question on how the business operates.

And I imagine that still happens even as you're going through this process

Jess Loseke: Well, the hardest part is in a small business, e-especially so, when we talked the first time, I told you a little bit about being in the spirits industry. it's been tough. we've been in a major downturn over the last fifteen months, and so our business went on a... We did a hockey stick, in growth.

And when it changed E-every system and process, you know, the SOP that we would build, three months later it was broken. And so I feel like we really stepped out of the discipline of doing that pretty quickly while we were going through this major growth phase. Well, then the opposite happens when you have to scale back.

And everything that you did have SOPs for is unwinding. And now we're at the point where I'm like, "Okay, great. We have a smaller team, but now we have this really great tool, called AI as a broad [00:12:00] category. use it." But the problem is AI cannot operate autonomously if a process doesn't exist.

If there is not a pattern for something to happen, AI cannot predict and fulfill the next step in pattern. So that is the hardest part of implementing AI, is that you have to go back to square one and really ask, not just what am I trying to achieve, but how, step by step, by step by step, do I achieve that?

Because we can't check if it is correct if the system doesn't even know what to do. So that part has been interesting and does take a lot of iteration to get right, and it feels slow. And then by the time you get something built, there's an update to the LLMs and things are changing, and so it's quite the process.

Erik Martinez: It is quite the process. You know, we were talking pre-show of like something I had that was working two days ago has broken, and it broke across Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. I've never seen [00:13:00] that actually happen before. It's a very, very weird thing. And, you know, I, I think one of the things that you're, you're pointing out is that as this technology improves and changes, maybe improves is not the right word, but gains new capabilities and new powers, right?

Um, it will break existing processes. And so if you're not, if you're not systemically kind of identifying what it's gonna do, it's gonna create some problems. This leads to kind of a nice segue into the next question, which is when you're looking at what to work on, what's important next in your business, what questions are you asking yourself to decide what you're gonna focus on first? Because I think a lot of us are struggling with that like where do we start to get the benefits of this? And, documentation is one piece of that, but how do you decide what do [00:14:00] I document first?

Jess Loseke: Yeah. So two parts to this answer. The first one is because of the problem that you're describing where the technology is changing so fast, so I get my documentation down, I train the LLM, the LLM changes, and now something is broken. There are a lot of business owners that are kind of like, I don't wanna do it yet.

that seems like a lot of work." But I'm gonna challenge that thought because Before you used the word AI in your regular speech, would have you ever said, "I don't want to grow because I would have to change my process"? Because that's the reality is when what I just described, this really fast growth where three months later the process that you had established doesn't work anymore, it's the same problem.

We've been facing this problem for forever. This is not a new problem. We're just attaching a new tool to the problem. To answer the heart of your question, I do think that there are a lot of people out there right now that are talking about what do you do the most frequently that is a [00:15:00] repetitive task and start there.

And while I don't think that's bad advice, that's not really the place that I'm starting because if I'm doing something repetitively, I know how to do it and it's probably not, like, a huge pain to me. What is a pain to me are the things that are not getting done in my business because I cannot afford to hire for them.

Those are the things that are killing the growth of my business right now. Let me just use email marketing, for example. Email marketing is the heart of how we have grown our business. From day one, we've had an email list, and every single week since the existence of our business, we have sent out an... we call it an inventory email announcing to the world, "This is what we have in stock." And it's our number one driver of conversions, and even if it doesn't convert, it generates phone calls and leads and, it is great. I do not currently have anyone on my team that is an email expert. There are those of us on the team that at one point or another have manned the email front, but the [00:16:00] reality is that I've got some choices that I need to make.

So I can outsource to an agency, I can go on Upwork or to a offshore solution, and I can, hire somebody much cheaper than the US, the Klaviyo expert. I could hire a US-based contractor that's probably California, for example, that is a Klaviyo expert that they could do our e-commerce platform management.

Those are all solutions, and none of them are bad. But I don't have this person, and I really view this as a time to say, " What could I use Claude to do in my email marketing?" Because the reality is, is that any of those solutions I just gave you, they don't know our tone and voice, so I'm gonna have to train them on how to talk like Midwest Barrel Company.

They also don't know what we have in stock and, for example, on Monday right now We currently have an email scheduled to go out at nine AM, like always, and it is featuring a Willett rye barrel. Well, yesterday I found out we only have eighteen of those in stock, so that's probably not a very good [00:17:00] feature for Monday morning.

And so if I am engaged with an agency and they've already built that email, I'm gonna have to pay a lot more money for them, or they're gonna say, "Nope, you're out of hours, and we're committed to other clients." And so none of those are really great solutions. So really because of how important this is to the business, I really need more of an in-house solution.

And so th-this is a great example of something where I am having Claude go in and analyze all of our Klaviyo metrics. We're gonna feature Smoking Wood for Father's Day on Monday, and so I'm having it analyze all of the Smoking Wood emails that we've ever sent, what have been the best ones, what are the open rates, the click-through rates.

I'm looking at the copy, I'm looking at the images, and then I am using Claude to write new copy. And the one part that I'm also using that's not quite there yet is Claude Design. It will get there. It's a little slow, but we are almost there. And so that's one of those things where, that's a big pain point to me, but to go hire somebody outside, [00:18:00] the lift and the expense is so significant when AI is almost there.

So if I can have somebody on my team get that to seventy-five percent, I have the time and the capacity to make to get at the final twenty-five percent. So that's a great example of where I'm starting at.

Erik Martinez: I think that's really interesting 'cause, you know, I was telling you I was just at the Build a Better Agency summit, and this year's key research that they presented was a study of clients talking about what they expect from their agencies. And one of the things I just heard you say i'm gonna paraphrase, and you can tell me if I'm completely off base. I'm doing stuff internally because it's so hard to train you guys to get up to speed and make the last-minute changes that I need in order to respond to market conditions. I have an inventory issue on this planned feature.

We planned that months ago, but inventory is dictating that, we need to make a change, and you built it a week in advance because you need some lead time to [00:19:00] get it and go through the approval cycle. So we have got to find, for you, using AI internally with some team members who can get it to a certain point, gives you the flexibility of making those last-minute changes without having to go through an extra set of hoops.

That's what I heard you say.

Jess Loseke: But to... on the agency side, where there's a real opportunity is the pain point that I just described is not out of stock flows, it's not abandoned cart flows, it's not welcome series emails. Those are all things that agencies are really well-positioned, and if an agency could come to me and say, "Hey, we're an expert in all of these areas, but we know that you've got real time needs to deploy.

Let us help you build out your Claude marketing project brain, and we're gonna help you train it so that you can do that part in-house, and we're only going to do the things that really supplement your weekly campaigns. Because you're, you're the expert, you know your campaigns that [00:20:00] you need to run.

That's not what we're experts in, but we are the Klaviyo experts, so we're gonna come support you from behind and make sure that those things marry up." That's the sales pitch that needs to come to me right now

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I think that's also what the research kind of told us. It's a little less about doing the specific thing, and it's a little more about orchestrating how all of these technologies work together. So if you had a partner who can come in and say, "Hey, you know what? We can help you connect Klaviyo and Shopify and your inventory and all these things and make them work better together," that is something that would appeal to you.

And I think that's something that we as agencies are struggling with in terms of our change, because we're also trying to do the same things you're doing, right? We're trying to internalize and operationalize and figure out where AI fits within our ecosystems so we can do a better job. And so it, it's kind of like this very [00:21:00] interesting problem.

I've talked with some executives from large agencies, and I've talked with, independent agency owners, and I think we're all kind of feeling that same like, " We've been building the things for 20 years, and now we're having to shift into this new mindset." So are there any other things, like, just from your perspective, that agencies or consultants need to know in order to work with somebody like Midwest Barrel and be an actual valuable partner?

Jess Loseke: Yeah, so there's, there's two things in the conversations that I'm having with other founders. So there's the founders that are like me, and then there's the non-tech founders. And I really think agencies today need to separate us into two different camps because it's two totally different sales pitches.

Non-tech founders know that they need to be using AI, but they don't want anything to do with it. So they're the ones that are great to go to say, " You, you can outsource everything to us. We'll train your team. We'll get you set up and going. We can maintain it for you." That's one sales pitch.

But then there's founders [00:22:00] like me that , I wouldn't describe myself as a technical person, but I lead my business tech forward, and I understand that you are literally today, you are learning the same things that I am learning. So why would I pay you to outsource when you don't know my business?

And so it becomes more of I wanna collaborate but I don't want you to gatekeep. So I don't wanna feel like I'm tied to having this ongoing retainer because the technology is changing so fast, and I don't know how fast you're changing, but I wanna hire and work with people that aren't gonna gatekeep anything.

And so right now, I understand that agencies, your whole world is being turned upside down. And the last time we talked, we even talked about ads and how right now there's a lot of people in the agency world that aren't using AI because Meta and Google, everybody's coming out with their own AI ad platforms. And so why are you gonna reinvent it when you know it's coming? And so that's an interesting twist [00:23:00] too, and something that we just don't know how it's gonna really play out yet. But I think that there certainly is a place for the agencies to partner. I made a LinkedIn post a couple weeks ago asking for, "Does anybody in my network know a Klaviyo expert?"

So exact same problem I just described to you, hoping I would get like referrals from people in my network. I did not, but I got a lot of comments from people that want to know somebody that knows somebody because I want a shortcut. I don't wanna test your agency, and then it doesn't work.

I want somebody to say, "Yep, this is who you work with. Go spend your money with them. It's the best money you've ever spent."

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and I think we struggle as a group with marketing ourselves, making ourselves known, sharing our knowledge in a way that makes you comfortable enough to say, "Hey, you know what? I will give you a try." I'm struggling with that.

Of course, I'm also still trying to figure out, like, you know, being completely 100% honest, [00:24:00] like, what is it that I wanna do in this whole realm? Because there, as you said, AI can impact so many different businesses and so many different industries and so many different practices that figuring out kind of where you sit in the curve and what your specialization is, is actually becoming a question. And a few months ago, I would've said, "Hey, you know what? You kinda need to be a generalist." But the tech is changing so fast that specialization is becoming more and more important.

Jess, I'm curious, if you're talking to somebody who is like I am totally overwhelmed by all of this What is the mindset shift that they need to make in order to start moving down a similar path of like, "Hey, we're gonna be AI forward. We're not gonna..." You know, as we talked pre-show, we're not trying to go for efficiency. [00:25:00] We're looking for meaningful impacts that allow us to grow and compete in our business. What's the mindset shift that people need to make in order to get there?

Jess Loseke: this is probably going to be my most favorite question of our conversation, and 'cause this is what I'm most passionate talking about right now. I think the conversation right now in the business world is all around visibility, and that's the hot topic, and they might not be using the word of visibility, but they're using the concept of my Facebook ads in 2019, 2020, they popped off, and none of that works. It's too expensive. They don't convert. It's, I used to get so many leads through my SEO efforts, and now no leads are coming in, and our traffic has tanked on Google. Like, it's... I mean, it's crazy how down it is. so visibility is... that's the pain point, so that's where people are targeting the conversation, but they're missing two steps.

So when somebody is overwhelmed, they wanna start at solving the visibility problem, [00:26:00] but they really need to go back to an identity issue of who am I as a leader and what is my business and what do I want it to be? Because what your business was and has been does not necessarily need or should it be in the future, and that's exactly what you just described where you're going through your own identity crisis as a business leader of what does the market command, what's available to me, what does the market need, and who do I wanna be?

until you solve that problem, it is extraordinarily difficult to solve the visibility problem. So before you even get to visibility, let's say you tackle identity. You know who you are, you know your North Star, you know where you're going. The next issue that you need to tackle is capacity. Because with AI as a broad stroke term, we have the capacity to do infinite things, but we only have a limited availability of time.

And so it's very important to go clear on what you want to have [00:27:00] capacity for and what you need to have capacity for, and everything else is noise and if you don't have that identity clear, it's very easy to get distracted and go for the shiny opps- object. And I don't care what influencer, what agency, what AI expert that you listen to, they are pointing you to some new solution that you've never heard of and you've never used, but you need to go download it today because it will change your life.

And so you've gotta have that identity, and you've gotta have the capacity, and once you have those two things solved, you can really tackle the visibility issue. But people are ignoring the first two, and it's going to be a problem that's going to resurface twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six months from now because they're not gonna have done the work, and everything is going to continue to break.

And if you don't accept that I wanna be a leader that evolves and changes and that moves forward in this digitally chaotic world, then you are going to feel like a complete failure because you're gonna wake up every day trying to be in a game, that the game is changing, and you don't wanna be in that game.

And there still are, there's still so much human-human interaction that doesn't require [00:28:00] AI. But if you built your business in a way that you have a digital footprint and that is a requirement, and you don't wanna be in the digital space, you've gotta make some big shifts. And we talked in our first call that you totally pivoted, and you are at a point where you're like, "Was this pivot right? And is this going to pay off? And what am I doing?" And you're looking at a window of time to decide, " Oh my gosh, did I just bet on the wrong thing?" And I think that beautiful things come from the uncomfortable. Every point in my life that I look at when it's been a period of hardship, a period of trial, a period of being really uncomfortable, that is where the most profound growth has come.

So if you feel uncomfortable right now, you are probably growing. And if you don't feel uncomfortable and you are skipping over this conversation, then you need to decide, am I doing that because I've chosen an identity that doesn't align with what we're talking about, or because I'm oblivious? Because if you are being [00:29:00] oblivious, then you are going to wake up one day and that visibility problem is going to be so big, and I'm gonna be like, "You gotta go back to identity."

Erik Martinez: I think it's interesting, as you were talking, I was visualizing in my head the iceberg, the classic iceberg, right? You've got ... you see it looks like a mountain, right? It looks like a mountain as you get closer on the water, but then you go underneath and there's this, just this massive thing.

and I think what you're saying is really, you know, at the end of the day, we've got to kind of go beneath the surface and figure out what the iceberg looks like underneath in order to create that visibility opportunity above the surface.

Jess Loseke: Yes, and I'm a huge assessment junkie. I love all types of personality and just psychology assessments. And so I feel like I innately know myself, and I was built for a time like this. my top talents are, like intellectual curiosity, question-asking, I love to learn. And so those are all critical thinking.

Like, those are all things that fit right in this [00:30:00] nice AI box. But for a lot of leaders, that's not going to be true. And if you don't know that about yourself and you go down this AI rabbit hole, you are going to wake up one day, you're going to quit, you're gonna have spent a lot of money, you're gonna have no progress to show, and you're gonna say, "AI doesn't work," and your competitor is gonna zoom past you.

And so if that is not you, you have to find somebody on your team, and that person might be there and might be in a different role, or you might not have them. You have to determine what is the team of the future that I'm working towards, and do I have that, and do I have the capability to be that leader?

And you might still just be a great salesperson, and your team needs you to be a great salesperson. But if you are not a learner and you are not curious, you cannot lead AI implementation.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I totally agree. I think it requires, a lot of rolling up the sleeves work and getting in and, as we were talking about, should I build an app or not? You were talking about a team member who you're having that conversation with and there's pros and cons to that.

But if you don't do it, they don't [00:31:00] stretch, and if you do do it, it creates some new challenges down the road. But if you don't go through some of those processes, learn how to do the prompting, which I know it's really interesting when you see the data come back, people are not interested in prompting.

Jess Loseke: It is the, it's the foundation of everything. And, Erik, my husband is my business partner, and he has his PhD, so this is not a dumb man. He's very, very smart.

But do you know what? He does not like process.

He does not like doing all of the steps. He is a fly by the seat of his pants type of guy. And so he cannot lead AI implementation, because AI implementation requires you to go step by step through all of the process, In fact, like I literally sat down with him in a meeting the other day and he's like, "I'm failing to see how I'm going to use this in sales."

And I, my face was like, " Okay, we, we're gonna go back to like 101 here." And I mean, that's my business partner, and that's my life partner. and I can say that about him, like he [00:32:00] is, he is the best salesperson that I've ever met, and he is saying, "I don't see how I'm going to use this for sales." And that, so if he is an owner of a company and he's saying that, how do we translate that down to the person, the janitor that cleans the office?

And because they need to be able to understand in the same way how AI can positively affect the humanity of their business. And, so it's just a very interesting topic

Erik Martinez: It is a very interesting topic, and it sounds like that is another podcast episode just on its own we could definitely go down. Well, I'm curious before we move to close, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of these insights. I think some of what you have shared here is what the research is saying, that it's coming from a real person.

It's not just numbers on a page. So I really appreciate that. If there's, like, one thing that you would like to leave the listening audience with above and beyond [00:33:00] all the great things we've already talked about, is there anything else you'd like to leave as a last thought?

Jess Loseke: Yeah, I think my last thought is just no matter what your role is when you're listening to this podcast, if you are an agency owner or you're a business owner or you're a leader somewhere, the lens of AI implementation looks very different at a Fortune 500 company than it does at a small business.

And for us small business owners, we feed the world, and that is what our economy was built on. Like my grandparents, they were farmers, and they were, you know, the true tried and true American worker. they immigrated to the Nebraska plains and, you know, they, had that small business owner mentality, but not even what they would have called a business.

And I think for the majority of us, we are out here still trying to build these businesses. And when we are looking to accelerate growth by using AI tools, it's not something to be scared of, and we're not coming from your jobs. No, we [00:34:00] want bigger teams. We want more people. I wanna create the best and most amazing places to work. I don't want you to have to go work at a Google or a Facebook or an Instagram to get amazing benefits. I wanna build that in my community in Louisville, Kentucky. And it isn't something to be scared of. It's something to lean into if you're open to it, because I really think that this is the most exciting time that we're living in, and I'm just really, really excited about it.

Erik Martinez: Well, I love that, 'cause I am very excited about this too. I was a big sci- read l- ton of sci-fi when I was a kid. I still read some today, and I think, you know, the thing for me, it's like I'm seeing some of the things I've read about coming into life. And I think this technology has the ability to do two things for us.

One, it allows all of us small businesses to compete way more effectively.

Jess Loseke: Way more effective.

Erik Martinez: But two, It allows us to go places we haven't thought we could [00:35:00] go before. Your imagination is the only limiting factor, because it's it's gonna continue to get better and more powerful and more impactful.

And yes, there are some negatives to that. I think, you know, we tend to focus on the negatives too much, but there is a lot of really positive, good things that can come out of using this technology.

Well, Jess, thanks again for coming on.

Here's what I keep thinking about after that conversation. We're all looking for the thing to automate, the repetitive tasks, the thing we do over and over. And that's not wrong, but Jess made me think about the other list, the one we don't write down because we've already decided it's too expensive or we don't have the right person or we'll get to it someday.

That list is where the growth is hiding. So here's something you can do right now. Open up a blank page and write down the three things your business needs that nobody is doing. Not the tasks that you wish were faster, the work that isn't happening at all. That's your AI [00:36:00] starting point. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Digital Velocity podcast.

Have a fantastic day!

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