Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Heather Manley has three jobs. Her main gig is leading On-Demand Group, a technology consulting service for individuals and projects.
Then she has two side projects: Heather’s Dirty Goodness Inc., which she started to create quality seasonings low in salt for her dad, and Crooked Water Spirits, a national spirits company.
So, while dedicated to growing all three, she doesn’t have a lot of free time right now to dedicate to marketing and social media for her spirits brand.
But that’s becoming less of a problem. No, she didn’t run out and hire someone to handle it full-time. She plugged the details of what she wanted into ChatGPT and, within minutes, the artificial intelligence-driven bot had pumped out the framework she needed for several posts.
She had to refine them. ChatGPT is prone to the occasional factual error and it doesn’t include any context or emotion in its copy. But Manley was able to use its framework to create, in a few hours, several posts for the Crooked Water Spirits website that, had she started from scratch, would have taken her a couple weeks.
“I’m just cutting out what I feel is irrelevant or too ‘textbooky,’” she says. “I removed quite a bit and then put in my own opinion and flavor.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) I isn’t going to solve all the world’s problems but it’s more than catching on. Many small business owners have discovered a variety of ways in which ChatGPT and other AI sources can help them create content, solve problems and become more efficient.
“I wrote three blogs and two social posts in an hour, where I haven’t done one for two years, because I couldn’t find the mental bandwidth,” Manley says. “I love to write but I’m not super great at it, so it takes me a long time to put together content.”
Much as with Manley’s distillery, Sam Dillard says she hasn’t found a lot of use yet for ChatGPT. But the operations manager and co-owner lists off a handful of ways in which the AI bot has made life easier for St. Paul-based Dillard Movers.
She’s in the process of learning how to use it more and will diversify that use over time.
“The one place we’ve found to use for it is in our marketing,” she says. “We use it to create catchy social media posts. We’ve used it to put together verbiage for our website. It’s extensive the uses we’ve found for marketing.”
It’s a time saver on the writing side, it helps keep a schedule so company officials know when to post, and it helps generate fresh ideas, she says. And, between ChatGPT and some other AI tools, Dillard has created some inexpensive commercials for the company, as well.
English is a second language for Dillard’s assistant, so ChatGPT has helped with proofreading such content, says Dillard, who adds that as the moving company puts together its blog, it will likely contribute content, too.
It also helps with search engine optimization .
“It allows us to put keywords in that will show up a bit more,” Dillard says. “SEO, as a small company, that’s one of our biggest struggles. We find that it’s really hard to get found when there are companies that are our competitors and they have thousands of dollars to plug into marketing every month. We don’t. So, we’ve used it, or we are trying to use it, in ways that can help make the work easier but also be able to cover more ground than if we would have to create content ourselves constantly.”
It also came in handy recently for a human resources function, as well. As Dillard Movers was growing, she wanted to put together an employee manual, but didn’t really have a great idea how to start.
“It helped in creating some HR protocols that we would hand our employees,” she says. “I was able to put together, within maybe about an hour, a handbook I could hand out to our workers as they come on board.
“Where I would’ve had to think of how to write this, what’s the layout, what’s important to include, I was essentially able to say ‘Okay, write me the main points of an employee handbook for a moving company that I can give my workers,’” she says. “It just spit it out within minutes and I was able to grab that, put it in a Word document, expound on it, remove things that didn’t apply and add some more stuff. Within an hour I had my manual. It’s really, really easy.”
Like others, John Arms currently uses ChatGPT as a time saver to help with writing for websites and blogs.
“Its current utility is time saving,” says Arms, the co-founder of Voyageur U. “You can feed it some information, it’s going to pop out four or five pages. The quality is high. It needs writers — it needs somebody to look at it and think about it a little bit for context, to make it a little stronger.”
But it’s the next level that excites him. He’s doing some beta testing with a couple business partners on building an AI technology that can do some strategic marketing planning.
“You’re able to ask it ‘give me more expansive thinking about my market segmentation, give me more expansive thinking about my brand, give me more expansive thinking about my product set,’” he says. “It can get very strategic very quick. It’s as if you can go into a room of thousands of thinkers and ask them to synthesize some very basic points.”
Whereas large companies can afford agencies and speakers to help them through marketing like this, AI can level the playing field for small businesses by giving them similar insights at significantly reduced cost.
Arms wrote the book “Bang!” last year to simplify marketing for every business. He and a couple partners are now beta-testing an AI tool called Rob Bot that will provide information on customer segmentation, strategy, brand positioning and other aspects of the customer mindset and journey.
“That is a mindblower,” he says. “The most important part of any plan is a customer journey and I can work on that and understand it. I can pull in focus groups and do surveys and that sort of thing. I can have AI do that work for me and, early tests are, it is more expansive than what I would get through the traditional methods in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. … My hope is it becomes very consumable for small businesses.”
Nancy Korsah, president and CEO of Black Business Enterprises, has fully embraced ChatGPT and is teaching classes on it and other artificial intelligence programs.
The tool isn’t designed to replace people — you always need the human component, she says — but it can help overcome writer’s block and give you some different perspectives.
Born in Italy, Korsah speaks seven languages, with English being most difficult for her. So, she uses ChatGPT to help communicate with her members. She also used it to write a romance novel that has sold a couple thousand copies.
“It just helps me fine-tune and be able to get things out a lot quicker,” she says. “It has cut down a lot of time that I would’ve otherwise wasted.”
Korsah teaches on several AI softwares out there available to help people create an income stream. One of her favorites helps business create inexpensive marketing campaigns that saved thousands.
Her focus is on working through these techniques with Black-owned businesses, many of which got started on shoestring budgets. The technology can level the playing field considerably for those businesses.
“It has been a life changer for some of these people and it’s actually taken some people out of poverty,” she says. “People are able to launch and scale their businesses without the cost, which I find invaluable.”
She acknowledged that some fear such technologies and that, in some cases, AI is being used to commit fraud. Many have used AI to, for example, create bootlegger Amazon or bank websites that look almost real. Korsah suspects regulators will soon step in and start taking a closer look.
“That’s where my concern is, all these people being duped,” she says.
But she also says AI is only going to gain in prominence, so people would do well to embrace it “so they are not left behind.”
Indeed, ChatGPT has gotten a lot of press in recent months and is probably the best known of the artificial intelligence tools from which small businesses benefit. Garrio Harrison, fractional chief revenue officer at Clario and a partner at Curious, says it is one of many.
So, business owners can use ChatGPT to prep a sales team by having them roleplay with the program, having it mimic likely sales objections coming from personas with different characteristics and teaching salespeople response strategies.
“A tool like this gives them the ability to try different conversations, try different answers to questions, and navigate based on the responses,” Harrison says. “This is something that really good sales folks do.”
But there are myriad more. How about, he says, Midjourney, an AI image generator that has recently taken the internet by storm. It allows people to create images that could pair with content they have written, so instead of spending thousands on stock photography, you can auto-generate your own.
“You’re able to get exactly what you’re thinking about,” he says. “So, if you go, ‘you know, what would be really nice here is a photo of a guy standing on a stage with his arms stretched out and the stage should look like a TED (technology, entertainment, design) stage and I want it to be photorealistic, you can have that photo generated. It would take the tool about a minute tops.”
Or there is Notion AI, which can help with writing, editing, brainstorming, summarizing and more. Harrison takes the transcript of his podcasts, pops them into Notion, and has the tool create his show notes. It could also generate blog or social media posts.
“That’s going to be a game changer for productivity,” he says, adding that he recommends business owners become familiar with the best uses of each tool and figure out how they might apply. Options are many and the benefits can be significant in terms of saving time, generating ideas and, ultimately increasing revenue. “Generative AI is the foundational thing,” he says. “We’re in for a wild ride.
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
