FIR 127: Anatomy of a Baby Step (SmartStep)

Share:

Listens: 0

Financial Investing Radio

Business


In this episode, we take a look at the anatomy of growing your business one step at a time with AI. Hi Everybody this is Grant, thank you for joining another episode of ClickAI Radio. So when we think about transforming our business, right, any sort of transformation of your business, obviously requires a vision of where you want to go. And certainly a commitment to make that change, of course requires more than that. But those are two fundamental pieces, obviously. Now managing the change, of course, is one of the more difficult tasks for a business owner. Now of all the things that I could change in my business, which one should I pursue? There's always tons to do in our business. And the other question is, how do I even prepare my team to handle the change? And then how do I make the chain stick so that the organization continues with it over some time? Oh, and then one other question, now that we've made the change, what should be our next change? Right? What are we going to change next? If you've ever watched the Star Trek next generation series, I'm clearly dating myself here. If you ever watched that, there was a character on there called data. And data was brilliant. data was an Android. and data knew a lot of facts. He was fully functional in a lot of ways. However, one of data's downfalls was his awareness of how much information to give a person. There'd be times when the captain Captain Picard would ask a question, and data would ramble on with long answers. data would go on and on and on, obviously, being unaware of the human's ability to either remember the information, let alone to be able to assimilate it, and then to act on it. But AI is a bit like data in Star Trek, right? It can, and often does give a lot of information, meaning many, many insights, it can go on and on and on. And not all of the insights are of the same value or quality. Now, while this might seem useful, of course, it's obviously overwhelming. Not long ago, I was applying some AI for a beauty product supplier, and the amount of insights which came from their data was enormous. And the question was, where to start, right? That's a lot. It's too much. any effort, as you know, to improve your business using AI? should start with your business questions first. So it's one thing to just start looking at your business information. But really, you got to start with the question, Where do we hurt? Where are the pain points? What's the vision where we trying to grow? And of course, we still want to leverage AI to discover those things, that it's hard for our brains to see. But this is a critical step, it's a necessary step where we guide the AI in terms of the business questions that we have first, and it should serve as input to where the AI should focus. Now, even when you do that, there are generally many insights which are discovered. So the real question is, therefore what? Let's say that you've done that work, you've got your business questions, you got some AI insights. Now what what are you going to do with all those insights? So it was on this journey, we discovered what we call a smart step. So when you're making an adjustment to your business, right to apply the AI insights, you're looking for the smart step. And a smart step has these characteristics to it, right? It's anatomy includes these things. The impact, the insight needs to have high impact, of course to your business, it's got to have high relevance to your business problem, as well as high probability, right? Not all AI insights are the same level of probability. You want at least those three but in reality, there's one other key point that you want, you need to select a change that your business In this and your team is willing to make, I've seen multiple organizations who go through this process, they get the insights, it's relevant to the business. But you know, this is the way we've always done things, people start thinking, right? Why would we make the change, right? And so this becomes a big hurdle for a lot of organizations. So you apply AI insights using smart steps. And one of the reasons why is not only to deal with all of the mass of information so that we, you know, we don't go through this Star Trek data scenario, right. But it's also to avoid change fatigue, organization can get overwhelmed with too many changes to make. And as a result, it's hard to measure the effectiveness of a smart step if you do too many of them. So in reality, over time, you mold and groom your business in a series of successive smart steps. So the flow looks something like this, you're on your business, which of course, produces business information. And then you analyze your business information, leveraging AI, then you pick one or two smart steps from the analysis, make the changes to your business, that's your sounds easy, doesn't it. And then, of course, you run your business with those changes in you give them time to stick, and then you repeat that process. Now, we have found that this style of iterative and incremental changes to your business, where you leverage the analysis from AI like this, that is sustainable for a business, otherwise, it's too much now, maybe a way to think about it is as a set of stairs that are ahead of you. But in this case, you decide as the business owner how wide each step is, and therefore, by making that decision, you're also deciding the angle of the staircase, by literally changing the course just the width of the step. So for example, you might apply some AI insights as a smart step in your business and execute for six months, that would be the width of the step, right, you're gonna take six months to see the results of this. And then while you're doing that, of course, you are capturing more business information. And now it's time to at the end of that six months, say, we're gonna let the analysis from the AI give us some additional insights. And then we'll pick one or two smart steps, and we'll repeat and apply those, of course, you might decide to make the adjustments on a quarterly basis, it's really up to you. It's your business's ability to handle the change, as well as your ability to respond to disruptive behavior. And so sometimes the change is intentional, right? It's part of our vision where we're going. In other cases, the width of the step, right meaning how long we wait, before we make the next change is placed upon us right there. It is put upon us by other factors, of course, that are outside of our control, might be the economy might be competitors, might be a pandemic, could be legislation, new taxes, whatever it is, so on and so forth. The key is, is to take those inputs that come upon you, and then change the width of your step, right? Don't wait as long and then make some more incremental steps. Do them a little more quickly, and then you might spread it out over time. So I'd encourage you to consider using smart steps to grow your business. It's where you take AI or the insights from AI in bite sized chunks and you decide the size of those chunks. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining and until next time, apply your AI and smart steps. Thank you for joining Grant on ClickAI Radio. Don't forget to subscribe and leave feedback. And remember to download your FREE eBook visit ClickAIRadio.com now.