Valuable Finance Insights from Tier 1 Capital

Olivia:
Hello and welcome to the Control Your Cash podcast. I’m your host, Olivia Kirk.

Tim:
And I’m your co-host, Tim Yurek. Today we have a great show in store for you.

Olivia:
We have with us Brad Costanzo. Brad, thank you so much for joining us.

Brad:
Thanks for having me. It’s exciting to be here.

Tim:
Brad is a really interesting guy. We worked with him recently. Brad is the founder of Accelerated Intelligence A.I. and an AI and business innovation consultant who empowers organizations to harness and transform the power of artificial intelligence. With a deep commitment to driving business growth through innovative strategies, Brad has distinguished himself as a leader in integrating AI with business processes to enhance productivity, creativity, and profitability. So we have a great show in store for you, and Brad, again, it’s great to have you.

Brad:
Yeah, it’s great to be here, and those are just fancy words to say I use tech to do my work for me and show other people how to do it, which is how we linked up. So yeah, it’s been fun working with you guys. It’s a really interesting field, and it’s changing all the time. It’s never a dull moment. That’s actually one of the problems—it’s never a dull moment. I’m like, slow down, let me catch my breath, but it’s fine.

Tim:
Well, just to add on to that, it’s amazing to me, Brad, to see some of the developments that have occurred from the very brief time we started to the time we actually implemented certain concepts. It was mind-blowing to me how quickly the technology has changed and moved forward. It’s amazing.

Brad:
Yeah, it feels like I put my head down for a week to work on a project, and I pick my head up, and somebody’s already solved that project with another piece of software. You push a button, and it’s done. That part’s frustrating, but it’s also great because the innovation is happening so quickly. That’s both a really good thing and a really bad thing because it can create this level of anxiousness and anxiety, especially if you’re a professional or a business owner trying to stay on top of this and adopt it. But it can be happening so quickly.

Brad:
I like to say that AI, in general, is the new shiny object, but it’s the one you can’t afford to ignore because it’s coming, and you’ve got to find a way to wrap your head around how to use it. That anxiousness and anxiety can come in when you’re trying to stay on top of all the new things. I think that’s what I try to tell my clients, and I’ve had to do this myself: don’t pay attention to all the most edgy cases, like the newest thing today, the newest thing tomorrow. Give it a little time to mature. Stick with the base areas. We can talk a lot about how to find that, but in the beginning, it was like a full-blown sprint out of the gate. Everybody’s running, running, running, and then you find yourself getting tired like, oh my God, now I really can’t keep up with all of this.

Brad:
There’s a concept we can talk about called diminishing marginal utility of artificial intelligence. I don’t know—have we ever talked about that in our private sessions?

Tim:
No, tell us more.

Brad:
This is just a—you know, I was thinking about this before because there are so many things AI can do. I can help you with this and that—everything from coming up with great plans to creating all your content and books and chatbots. There are thousands of things it can do. But as a business owner, professional, or executive, there are only so many things that actually need to happen to move the needle in your business and life. You want to attract more people to your business, convert those into customers or clients, retain them, and give them a better service experience. Yes, AI can create 30-second really cool video clips that would take somebody else—but are those going to move the needle in your business? Probably not. I can create really cool little designs in Midjourney and do all this other stuff, and I can create cartoons and graphics. But if that’s not part of my business, learning how to do every little thing on those edge cases that it can do—I’m not going to have any use case for it. The more you try to utilize AI in every aspect of your business, the more you realize that, wait a minute, these aren’t needle movers. So that’s that diminishing utility of trying to stay on top of every single innovation.

Brad:
I also say this from the lens of—I am not a technologist, I’m not a computer programmer, I’m not an engineer. I am a serial entrepreneur and growth consultant, and that’s what I look for. I look for what’s going to make a difference in my and my client’s business. Will it help me attract, convert, or retain customers and clients? Will it make me more revenue or profit because it’s reducing expenses? Will it free up my time to do other things? Will it unleash creative pursuits? If it doesn’t do those things, I try to filter those out and say, okay, what’s the handful of things that are going to really, really help, and then ignore the rest for a while. When I’ve told other clients and people this, it gives them relief that, okay, maybe I don’t have to stay on top of every single new innovation out there. It’s good to pay attention to what’s possible, but trying to master all that stuff—it’s really not necessary. I like to go in and say, what’s nice to have, what’s need to have, what do we do now, next, and never? Does that make sense?

Tim:
Well, based on what you just said, right? I’m going through in my mind, okay, talking about our journey together. We did our initial call, and you basically gathered a bunch of information as to what we were looking to help us move our needle, right? Then you came back and addressed most of those issues, if not all of them, and you prioritized which ones we should implement exactly, and basically almost in the order that was of most importance and most value, right?

Brad:
Exactly, exactly. I think of this as on a level of—I call this like ICE: what’s the level of impact it’ll have, what’s your confidence in that impact, and how easy is it going to be? I like to go after the high-impact, easy projects first. I kind of score them like that. If there’s a—think about it—you and I do this oftentimes: create a spreadsheet and go on a scale from 1 to 10. Here are 10 projects. If this works, what impact will it have on my business? Let’s say it creates a whole new channel of communication—like, that’s great, this was a problem before, it’s no longer a problem. We were spending $10,000 a month for this; now we’ll spend $100 a month—that’s a high impact. Now, what’s our level of confidence? Well, if we’ve done it before or if there’s a computer program out there that’ll do it for us with a few clicks, I’ve got a pretty high confidence that it’ll work and have that impact. And then once more, the ease, which is the opposite of effort, on a scale of 1 to 10, is this something we have to develop a whole new—like hire full-stack engineers to come in and develop a custom software for, and it costs $50,000? Well, that may be a very like a 2 on the scale of 1 to 10 of ease, but if it’s sign up for this program, install it, start using it tomorrow, $100 a month—that’s a 10. That means it’s super easy and effortless to do. And then if you just take all of the various ideas—and I’d love to talk to you—you’ve heard me talk about the five-bucket framework, I think—we’ll talk about that. That’s how you find these ideas. Let’s say I’ve got 10 of them. Score them all: impact, confidence, and ease, scale of 1 to 10, average them out, sort them by the highest number, and then just start knocking off projects like that.

Tim:
I mean, that makes perfect sense, right? Especially when you’re looking to move the needle the most with the least amount of effort. But tell us more about that five-bucket framework because that’s pretty cool.

Brad:
Yeah, so in working with a lot of clients and facing these problems, one of the first things to overcome is what I call “toolphoria.” Look at all these tools—this is exciting! You get euphoric over it, but then euphoria turns to anxiety. So I just took a step back and zoomed out and was like, okay, step one of what is necessary for somebody like a business owner to employ AI into their business is you have to know what’s possible. You just—the wide breadth of everything that’s possible. And then the next step is to know what are the projects I should do. So I group these—instead of looking at what departments AI will help you with, like here’s how AI can help you in sales and marketing, here’s how it can help you in finance and executive, etc., I just put them into buckets. I said, AI only helps you innovate in five different areas. The first one is thinking. I’ll actually just—I’ll rattle them off real quick, and then I’ll go deeper. So thinking, creating, communicating, analyzing, and automating. Everything that it does will fall into those. I’ll go into a little more detail here.

Brad:
So in the thinking bucket, this is all the stuff as a business owner that never reaches the rest of the world. This is internal—like you guys own the business together. So this is, hey, let me brainstorm ideas for a book, let me brainstorm ideas for a marketing campaign, let me think through potential content ideas that we may be able to do for our social media marketing. Let me—I like doing this with some of my clients, where we’ll create a virtual board member for their company. So we’ll create a custom ChatGPT with background information on them—like, this is the company, who they are, their background, their services, their products, their prices, their target market and audience. It’ll know a little bit about a lot of aspects of them, and then it’ll know about their constraints, etc. Now we build this virtual board member, so when you have a problem, you go to it, and it’s been instructed to be a business strategist. You say, okay, I’ve got a new opportunity here. Here’s a new product or service that we want to roll out to this audience. What are the pros and cons? Help me do a SWOT analysis or any strategic thinking. Well, if it’s got the background and the context and your constraints and goals, etc., it can give you really amazing advice that you might not have gotten, and it can do it for free. It can help you think through problems. You might say, here’s an issue we’re having with a supplier or a client or a contractor. What do you think we should do? We’re thinking about pivoting. Is there another route? One of the things that AI does amazingly well is it connects dots that you might not have thought of. You can sit around in a brainstorming session, but sometimes you just go over there. It may spit out terrible ideas, but every once in a while, it’s going to spit out some really, really good ones, and it’s getting better and better. That’s thinking.

Brad:
One of the exercises I like doing is creating a perfect avatar—a perfect client avatar or buyer persona. You put in who you are and what you sell, and then you have it say, help me think of different clients and customers—demographics, psychographics, things that like—here’s who I usually target, but who else might I go after that could use my products and services? And it might just say, well, have you—you know, I know that you’re typically working with C-suite executives and busy professionals, etc., but single moms who are also small business owners would also benefit from this because of X, Y, and Z. You’re like, you know, I never would have thought about that. So it helps you think.

Brad:
The next side is creation. So in the creating bucket, this is all the stuff that goes out to the world. It helps you do content marketing, sales copy, and creating books. I know you’re working on a book. It helps you create videos and audios. You can do an entire podcast without ever showing up by training a tool called—there’s many of these, but one of my favorites is called 11 Labs. You train it on your voice, and then you type in what you want it to say, and it creates a podcast for you. Or you have ChatGPT create a script of a podcast in your voice, and then you drop it into 11 Labs, and it automatically creates one without you ever having to think about it or pull out a microphone. It can also take a podcast or a YouTube show and create derivative content from that, which means everything from show notes to clips and social media posts and all that. This is where 90% of the people are playing in—they’re thinking and creating, like, help me create a think—help me think through an email campaign for my newsletter, and then now write the newsletter for me. Cool.

Brad:
The other three buckets are really exciting because they’re overlooked. They’re a little bit more technical in nature, but not overly. One of them is the communicating bucket. That’s where we can communicate with chatbots and voice bots. There are voice bots right now that sound exactly like me. They’re scary accurate. I think it’s something like 30 to 40% of people right now cannot tell the difference between the voice bot and a human. It can answer questions, set appointments, and do a lot. But then how else do you use communication in business? Well, you can communicate with leads, prospects, and give them frequently asked questions about your business. They want to know more about it. It can set appointments for you automatically, integrate it, and say, well, it sounds like you’d be a good fit for our program here at Tier 1 Capital. Would you like to set an appointment? It says yes, and the chatbot or voice bot says, great, I’ve got times tomorrow or the next day at 3:00. Which sounds best? And if they say 3:00, it automatically sends them a calendar invite, and it integrates with yours. So it can set appointments now. It can also help with customer service. This is huge. If you’ve got a big company, a lot of customer service reps working with people answering questions, they can go in and tell them things they need to know about their account or just in general. You can also communicate with employees, stakeholders, and investors in your business by creating a chatbot that’s knowledge-based and understands company policies, etc. So instead of having to open up a big old handbook, you just go in there and talk to the bot.

Brad:
The other two are analyzing. It’s great at analyzing data, and it’s also great at analyzing text, so qualitative and quantitative. If you’re trying to—I’ve built a bot on ChatGPT where I can take a screenshot of a stock chart and have it go in and give me a technical analysis based on what it sees as the patterns. It can say, well, this is creating an ascending triangle pattern or whatever. It can say, here’s your short-, medium-, and long-term bullish and bearish indicators. I can upload a spreadsheet and say, create charts of this, tell me what my clients’ trends are. But I can also upload, let’s say, two pieces of—one of the things I love doing with clients who have a sales team is I take their top sales performers, and I take three or four of their transcripts of sales calls, and I take their bottom or their new salespeople who aren’t doing as well, and I say, analyze these sales scripts, look at the sentiment analysis, look for patterns. How are the A players answering objections where the C players aren’t? Then create a corrective course of action for that. So that’s both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Brad:
The last bucket is automating. Now, that is kind of, to me, that’s the big bucket where if you can get this software to talk to this software, to talk to this software, and you add AI behind the scenes—here’s a little sample I did where I’ve got a little Google sheet where I keep some of my favorite quotes. If I see a quote or if I think of a quote, I can just write it, type it in my Google sheet, and behind the scenes, I’ve got a program called Zapier going in and saying every time I enter a new quote, take this quote over to ChatGPT behind the scenes and use a prompt that I created—a set of instructions that creates a 300-word really engaging, profound, sometimes funny social media post, and then post it to my Facebook and Instagram. So behind the scenes, it just triggers all these actions to happen.

Brad:
To summarize, it’s creating, thinking, communicating, analyzing, and automating. What you as a business owner just have to do is think, go to each one of those buckets and go, where am I spending the most time and money? Write those down, and then ask what would happen if I was able to automate these or use AI to do this for me. There’s a good chance you can do that. But to me, that’s how you find the projects you should be working on, and then look at the level of impact. I’ve been kind of soapboxing this whole time, so I’ll let you kind of ask any questions about those.

Olivia:
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. In working together with those specifically, like the bots and the chatbots and the voice bots, they’re really cool and really engaging. As people become more comfortable with interacting with the AI, as it becomes more popular, they’ll definitely be showing up more. It’s cool how you’re able to upload your content, give it a knowledge base to work off of, and then also give it a voice. It’s pretty awesome.

Brad:
Yeah, it really is. It’s one of those things where a lot of people are thinking about bots, and they should be thinking about it like, should I use them or shouldn’t I? There are some businesses where you probably don’t want to use it because the human touch is way better, especially if you don’t have a high degree of volume. If you’ve got a huge degree of volume, and the problem you’re trying to solve is that, you know, we’re only open eight hours a day, or we’ve got so many people and we’ve got a high hold volume, that’s when it starts to make sense to use them more. But also, I don’t think it is going from—it’s not human or bot. We’re already using bots in call centers. Like, there’s a call tree—every one of us has dealt with it. You call an airline, press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish. Would you like to make a flight? Press 1. Would you like to check on your baggage? Press 2. Until they won’t let you go forward.

Olivia:
I know, and it’s frustrating.

Brad:
It is, but we’re all used to dealing with that, and those are better than getting no answer and saying, well, we’re putting you on hold. But just imagine now that you can talk to a bot that says, listen, what do you need? I can understand English, or Spanish, or whatever language you speak. I can automatically understand it, and then it can answer questions, give you answers really specifically when you need them—24/7, consistently. What these tools allow you to do, especially the voice bots, is if you get in trouble or it senses that you’re not getting the answer, it says, hold on, would you like me to transfer you to a human agent if they’re available? If you say yes, it transfers you to a human agent, and that human agent gets to see a transcript of everything that you were asking. It’s just—it’s like the next level up. Depending on the type of company you are, there are some tremendously powerful chatbots and voice bots that can be put into place. But yeah, you have to think, will this help my business or hurt my business? I tell people, don’t just automate it just to automate it—make sure it’s actually solving a problem.

Tim:
Yeah, for sure. Especially, you know, I could see it coming into play—what was coming to mind was right—what I want this to be in the world is we were trying to, like, at home, we were trying to find a part to fix a leak in a water heater, right? Like, why can’t we just put in the part, like, you know, take a picture of the water heater, and you could tell me which piece this is at Home Depot instead of having to go all the way through everything, right?

Brad:
What size? Did you actually do that?

Olivia:
No, because—

Brad:
Well, a lot of times that works. I did see on Home Depot they have a lens—

Olivia:
Like Google Lens? I’m like, did you try this?

Brad:
Yeah, well, even on ChatGPT, Google Gemini, but like all of them basically, but let’s just say ChatGPT, which most people are now at least a little familiar with. You can upload a photo of something and, A, say what is this? But, B, you can say, like, let’s say something’s broken. You can upload a photo, and sometimes you circle it, or you just describe what’s broken, and you say, how do I fix this, or what’s the part needed for this? Like, it’s mind-blowingly effective. Like, every single day—I work in this stuff, but every single day I’m blown away. I’m like, I cannot believe it just did that.

Tim:
Check that out, Brad. I haven’t used that feature yet.

Brad:
No, yeah, it’s so fun. I’m trying to think of other things that I’ve used that for, but yeah, it is famously effective for uploading images and saying, tell me what this is. People are even taking an image, like a screenshot of a computer program they use. Like, let’s just think of a—Trello is a famous project management interface, and it’s very easy—it’s a kanban board, and you can take a photo or an image of a screenshot of your dashboard if you use it, and then you can take that over to ChatGPT and say, I want to create a code, like software code, that will be a project management system, etc., and I want it to have the exact same user experience and layout as what you see here. Please create the code for me, and it, nine times out of ten, it will do it. So it’ll take a screenshot of that and it’ll write the code to create it. Once more, the amount of time and money that saves.

Brad:
I just created—speaking of code, I’m not a coder, but I just created code the other day. I had an idea for a little Chrome browser extension, and I was like, you know, my idea—so I’m an investor in Bitcoin, right? And I was interested to see if—I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I went to a website and instead of prices in dollars, I could push a little button in my Chrome browser, and it would automatically change all the dollars—like, if something costs $500 that I’m looking at, I could push a button, and it would change it to, you know, how much Bitcoin would that be? Like, how many Satoshis, which is the unit, the smaller unit of Bitcoin. I just had an idea like, that would be cool to push a button, and it turns all my US dollar prices into Bitcoin. And I said, I went over to ChatGPT, and I said, here’s what I want to do. I have no idea how to do this. I’m a complete idiot when it comes to coding. Please walk me through this and help me flesh it out, and it did. And in about 30 minutes—well, first of all, in about three minutes, I had the code. Then I kept on getting errors when I tried to install it. What did you do with it? So I would take screenshots of the errors, and I was like, oh, now I know what to fix. And it says, here, I just fixed it. Do this. It took me about 20 or 30 minutes, but I now have a working Chrome extension that will switch things over to Bitcoin prices on my web, and I did no thinking except for, here’s what I want, and then I just used it as my coder. So it’s really amazing.

Brad:
By the way, I know I’ve mentioned this to you in our one-on-one sessions, but there are two mental frameworks or models that I use all the time to remind myself how to get the best out of this. I call it the MAC model, which is: it’s your mentor, it’s your assistant, and then it’s your critic. A lot of people just think of it as an assistant. They go to ChatGPT, and they say, do this, and then they get results they don’t like. They’re like, well, wait a minute, maybe it was garbage in, garbage out. So remember, I don’t know how to do this. Like, I want to create code for this Chrome plugin. Well, I treated it as my mentor. I said, ChatGPT, here’s what I want to do. I’m dumb. Walk me through this. Explain it like I’m dumb, and teach me how to do it, and it did. It says, well, here’s exactly what you would do. Then I had it be my assistant, and I said, now create the actual code base, and it did. Then I said, well, now I have to critique it, or in this case, troubleshoot it—what’s wrong? But most people will sit down with ChatGPT and not know what to do, and they don’t think—ask ChatGPT, how do I use you? You tell me. Help me help you, Jerry. It’s one of those things that—it’s a really great reminder that you don’t have to know because it knows, and it knows how to use itself better than you do.

Tim:
Right. It reminds me of going to my wife and saying, honey, I don’t know why you’re upset. Please help me help you. What is it you want from me? I see you’re crying, and I don’t know why.

Brad:
Right. Before I just jump in and try to fix this problem, what problem do you want it fixed, anyway?

Brad:
But then the other little framework is—I’m the Hollywood director. So I set the scene. ChatGPT or whatever AI is your actor. I may say, write an article about the benefits of infinite banking, and it writes one, and I go, wait a minute, hold on, cut! Way too complex. Too much jargon. I need you to explain this so that a sixth grader could understand it. Add in some examples and add in some humor. It’s like, okay, go, action! And it does it. And I’m like, nope, cut. All right, let me give you more background. Here’s what I’m trying to do, right? And I just think of myself as being the guy in the director’s chair, and the AI is my actor that never goes on strike. That gives you the permission to keep on using it to make itself better—like, nope, make it better. Nope, make it better. But a good director, a good Hollywood director, doesn’t say, cut, didn’t like it, or they don’t say, cut, didn’t like it, do it again. The actor would be like, well, what didn’t you like? You have to direct me, right? You have to guide me. You don’t just say yes or no. Actually give me guidance. You know, I think of this as like the difference between the art and science of AI. The science is create a well-constructed prompt or instructions. The art of it is sculpting it to get what you want. Analyze my writing so you can write like me. We did that with you guys. Add in more of this, take out this, here’s what I like, here’s what I don’t like. How could you make it better? Maybe write like this author, sound like this. That is what makes the difference between getting okay content from this and getting world-class content from things like AI.

Brad:
Once you kind of really—I love the term grok, right? To grok something—for those who don’t know, it means to really get it, like boom! Like, the minute somebody groks infinite banking, right? In the beginning, someone’s like hearing about it, and they’re like, okay, insurance policies and cash flow and bar—okay, I kind of get it, but I don’t know if I get it. And then the minute it clicks, like, that’s grokking—like, oh, boom, now, okay, now I get it, I know how to use it, I know what to do. Same thing with AI—like, all right, I understand the frameworks, I understand how to talk to it, I understand what it can and can’t do, and then I know the tricks to get it to do what I want it to. That is where the learning curve becomes insanely steep, so after a little bit of time, you become incredibly capable.

Tim:
Exactly, and one of the best things we learned in our time with you was how to build the custom GPTs to have their own personality, their own knowledge base, so that you’re able to prompt them to do what you want them to do without having to tell them how to do it every single time.

Brad:
Exactly. One of the things I’m working on right now with another private client is—they’re a hard money lender for real estate loans, and they do a lot of volume. He says, you know, we need a newsletter email drip campaign. We just need to stay in front of these people twice a week, every single week. Can you help me? I was like, yeah, let me create a custom GPT that will write 104—two emails a week—emails for you that are original, well-written, valuable, informative, but also with the desire to help build your credibility, brand awareness, answer questions, and just stay on top of this. So behind the scenes, a custom GPT, which you just mentioned for anybody listening or watching who doesn’t know what that is—that’s like a knowledge base and a little set of instructions for ChatGPT behind the scenes. You only have to build it once, and then you get to use it. What I did is I just took a bunch of information on them—who they are, what do they sell, you know, about the company and about the writer. Then I said, analyze his style, and I said, this is who they are, this is how they write, and these are—I loaded up a bunch of testimonials and case studies, and we just created this knowledge base about the company. Then I had it come up with, like, 104 different email subject lines, tried to make them as original as possible, and then I put that behind the scenes as well. So now it knew, and then now I built this for them so that they can just go in and have it write exactly like them. They were able to write about 104 emails in—you know, over the course of an hour or so. You just have to wait for it to actually print out. You copy those, put them into a Google Doc, and then now you just have a human come through and do the final touching, like, okay, I like this, don’t like this, let’s do some minor editing.

Tim:
Those custom bots—those are really amazingly useful. To have to hire a good copywriter to write 104 valuable emails for a year—I mean, it’s going to take them—I could have done it, it would have taken me easily a month, and I probably would have charged them $25,000 to do so. So it saves a lot of time, a lot of money, and that’s just one of the many powers of this stuff. But I’m glad you like the bots because, yeah, they can be really, really useful.

Olivia:
Well, you know, Brad, as you were discussing this, what immediately came to mind is, with limited knowledge of AI, for us to learn the system without the hacks that you provided us and the shortcuts that you helped us with, our minds would have been completely blown trying to figure this out on our own. Your knowledge of AI and the system is really—there’s always going to be a need for somebody like you to simplify it for somebody like us who knows that the technology is out there, doesn’t know where to start, and to invest the time—not so much the money—but the time to figure it out is just not a real efficient way to allocate that time.

Brad:
Yeah, thanks for saying that. It’s also—if you’re stumbling around, it’s really easy. Especially, I mean, you’re not sitting around retired with nothing to do on your hands. It’d be one thing if that’s all you had to do, but you’re running a business and you’re trying to do the other stuff. Yeah, it might be fun to tinker over here, but then you realize you just go down this rabbit trail, and you’re like, what am I doing? I’ve got other things I have to do. Trial and error is not a great way to do it. The way I learned, and you know, kind of my background in this really came from necessity and fear. So the necessity part, you know, I’ve been a growth and marketing consultant for a very long time. After I sold my last business, that’s what I really focused on—helping other businesses create everything from marketing plans and growth strategies for their business. One of my clients was a marketing agency, and I was kind of serving as a strategist both for them to grow their agency, but I was also working with their clients as an external consultant to help make sure that the strategies they were doing—and you know, there’s a lot of marketing work that goes on behind the scenes. I’ve been using AI tools for four or five years in one shape or another before they were ubiquitous. Then in November a couple of years ago, ChatGPT and OpenAI came out, and they just kind of dropped the microphone and showcased what was possible. The necessity part came with me going, okay, I’ve got a lot of work to do here. Let’s just see if I can do it quickly. AI allowed me to do the work I had to do anyway a lot quicker. But then the other piece was fear because I was taking something that would take me, no joke, two to four weeks to do, of real heavy mental bandwidth, and I would often charge about $25,000 to do a big strategic marketing plan. In the first month or so of OpenAI coming out with ChatGPT, I was able to do two to four weeks’ worth of work in two hours, and it was just as good, if not better, in some cases. I remember where I was sitting, right here, and I remember where I was thinking, I’ve just obsoleted myself. That old saying is, if you and a friend are outrunning a bear in the woods, you only have to outrun your friend, right? I’m looking at this as a marketing and growth strategist, etc., and I’m thinking, I have to outrun everybody else who’s starting to learn this because if I don’t, my skill sets that I have are going to be obsolete really, really quickly, or the price is going to have to come way down, and I don’t want to do the same amount of work for one-tenth of the price. Therefore, let me start to learn this because I have to. There’s another saying in this space that AI is not going to take your job. People using AI will take your job, and that couldn’t be more true. So I had to use it, and then as I felt that fear-based necessity in order to put it to work, I was getting tremendous results, and then that led to word-of-mouth referrals, people saying, hey, Brad, can you do this for us? Then I would either do it for them, but I would also teach them. I kind of have a knack for teaching this stuff and simplifying it down because I need to simplify it for myself to understand it, as I said, I’m not a tech. So one thing led to another, but yeah, fear and necessity led to me figuring this out. The vast experience I have, not only as a consultant but as an entrepreneur, has allowed me to go, okay, well, I know what CEOs and entrepreneurs need, and I also know what is overwhelming. Keep the overwhelming stuff out, know what’s possible, be good enough to be dangerous, and then know how to find the people who can do it for you.

Olivia:
Yeah, and to me, that’s the real rub. So tell us a few tricks for a tech newbie to really take advantage of this, hit the ground running, and then we’ll talk about—I know you have a book and some knowledge that you could share with the community.

Brad:
Yeah, for sure. So for a tech newbie, start with ChatGPT. You can get a free account. I always recommend the higher-paid ones, but if you’re just starting, just play with ChatGPT. If nothing else, yes, there are other tools like Claude, Gemini, Perplexity.ai—these are a lot of chatbots. They do similar stuff. Just jump into ChatGPT, and if you do not know how to prompt, say, ChatGPT—dearest ChatGPT, I don’t know how to use you, but give me some ideas of how I could use you. Or even better, if you have a—let’s say you have a job, maybe you are the head of logistics for a corporation, right? You may go to ChatGPT and say, I’m the head of logistics for Acme Company, and I’ve never used ChatGPT before. First, give me a list of various tasks that ChatGPT might be able to help me in my job role with. It’ll give you a list, like, oh, you could do this and this and this. Awesome. Now say, create a prompt—because prompts are the instructions—create a prompt for every single one of those ideas that will help me become more productive and capable, and it will do it. So it’s acting as your mentor. Here’s who I am, you tell me how I can use you. I don’t know, and it’ll tell you. Then say, now give me the prompts to use in order to get what you just told me to do, because that sounds good, but how do I do it? It will give those to you. It’s one of my favorite little techniques to open people’s brains to go, oh, be darned, like, I never even would have thought to ask it to do that, but it just did. Then continue to let it be your mentor, and then your assistant. Then if you get something that you don’t like, say, how would you make this better? A lot of people like to use this to write books. I’ve got an idea for a book. I’ve never written a book before. Can you give me a strategy to sit down and learn how to write a book? It’ll say, yes, here’s your game plan. Then I might say, all right, great, my topic is how to use AI in business. What’s a good format for creating chapters? Can you just create them for me? It’ll create it for you. Now you can say, well, those are okay, but how could you make them better? It’ll go make them better. This is how you play with it.

Brad:
I like to say FAFO—F-A-F-O—which is f*** around and find out, right? There’s another one—FAFF—F-A-F-F—F-A-F-F-I-I-O, which is f*** around and figure it out. So one of them is, find—just see what it does. But then the other one is, well, let me f*** around and see if I can figure this out because now I’m going to really use it as a sounding board, and let’s figure this out together. A lot of the clients that I get, I don’t know how to do everything on AI, but I’m really good at the figuring it out part, and AI makes it a lot easier to do that.

Brad:
One of my other favorite tools that any newbie can use is a Chrome extension called ChatTube. You don’t have to use the extension—I do, I pay the $5 a month, but there’s a free version. This allows you to go to YouTube, and it creates a little chat window, like a ChatGPT window, on your YouTube videos. If you’re trying to learn something, I may pull up an hour-long lecture or video on something, and I just go to this ChatTube, and I go, summarize this. Create an outline of what I need to know. I don’t want to watch your whole hour video—just give me the good stuff. It’s a great way to learn things you haven’t learned. If people don’t understand how infinite banking works—because I know that this is one tool in your big tool chest of that people can use—I might go find a video on YouTube or ChatGPT and say, okay, I heard Tim and Olivia talking about this, but they didn’t do a great job of explaining it, which I know is not true because you guys are great at this, but I could say, give me a summary. What am I missing? They can start to ask questions of it, and then once it clicks and they need more help, say, hey guys, I finally grok it, I finally get it. Can you help me out? This is great.

Brad:
So there are just a few ways to really start to play with it. Once more than anything else, I would think of the five-bucket framework: thinking, creating, communicating, analyzing, and automating. Just write down what tasks you’re spending your most time on in each one of those buckets. Then you could either ask AI to help you find those, or you could call somebody like me, and I may be able to work with you to work through it. In fact, I’ve got a great freebie I’m happy to give away, which is I’ve got a perfect prompt formula or GPT. It will allow you to use a prompt that I built that helps you build better prompts. If you don’t know how to prompt, it lets you build better prompts. So if you go to acceleratedintelligence.perfectprompt, you’ll get—I’ll send you the information on there, and it’s just a really great shortcut to getting pretty good at this stuff.

Tim:
Appreciate that.

Brad:
Awesome.

Tim:
You’re a wealth of knowledge, and we appreciate you coming on today and sharing it with us and our listeners. How do people get in touch with you if they want to reach out?

Brad:
You can send me an email at [email protected]. That’s one of the best ways to reach me—just that’s my direct email. I’m happy to give you my direct phone number: 214-673-05N9. I’m not afraid to give that out for people—just, you know, I appreciate a text instead of a phone call. If there’s a way that I can potentially help you, answer the questions, I’ve got a lot of resources. The way that I work is both with education and implementation. So on the education side, I think of this as enablement. I’ll work with groups. I just launched a 12-week AI accelerator for entrepreneurs and executives, where every single week we do a 90-minute session, and we just kind of go over things like we’re talking about now. We go over all these buckets, we do workflows together in a group setting. I’ll also work with people one-on-one, much like I worked with you guys, where we do just dedicated two-hour sessions every week, typically, where we’ll do implementation sprints. We’ll find out what are the things you need to do, and we’ll work on them together. Sometimes, if you need—sometimes it’s just saying, look, go use this software, or if you need other resources that I can’t provide, I’ve got a great Rolodex of resources. Then I also do corporate training. Sometimes a company will bring me in to do a one- or two-day workshop or a keynote speech, trying to really enable their people to understand how to use this and create a culture of innovation from the high level to the low level. Once in a while, customers want some custom development, new tools, chatbots, this, that, and the other, automations, and that’s something we can also help with as well. The first part, though, is just really wrapping your head around what’s possible.

Tim:
Yeah, and we’ll have all that information in our show notes. I could speak firsthand—Brad is great to work with and is certainly great at opening your mind as to what’s possible using AI and simplifying it in a way that it’s easy to digest. It’s not like he’s just prompting ChatGPT while you’re on the call. He’s telling you exactly his thought process as he’s going through it. It’s a great way to dip your toes in and get a lot of impact in a small amount of time.

Olivia:
Yeah, it’s a wealth of knowledge and more so an incredible guide on our technology journey, for sure.

Brad:
It means the world to hear you both say that, especially after working with you. It’s fantastic. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.

Tim:
Thank you so much for joining us today, and check out the show notes for the freebies and to get in contact with Brad.

Olivia:
Thanks so much, Brad.

Olivia: “Hello and welcome to the Control Your Cash podcast. I’m your host, Olivia Kirk.”

Tim: “And I’m your co-host, Tim Yurick. Today we have with us Adam Zuckerman. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today.”

Adam: “Yeah, it’s great to be here. I think I like ‘otter’ better. That should be a new nickname.”

Olivia: “Hey, you got it, at least for the next hour. All right, let me tell you guys a little bit about Adam. As an entrepreneur, attorney, and MBA, Adam is a subject matter expert focused on the impact and implementation of future-facing technologies and the fourth industrial revolution, often at the intersection of enterprise growth and startups. With a diverse background in many industry verticals, including energy, finance, nonprofits, startups, and Fortune 500 companies, he serves as an advisor to several organizations, keynotes events around the world, and has been hired to present on the future of marketing and technology to leading global agencies. He’s also an Eisenhower fellow, adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, and has been a guest analyst on the topic of business and technology on CNBC nearly two dozen times. So again, thank you so much, Adam, for being with us. We’re excited for a great show.”

Adam: “It is great to be here. That is a bio that I haven’t heard for a very long time, but it’s a blast from the past. Glad to be here, and we’ll talk about what we’re working on today too.”

Tim: “Yeah, awesome. So, Adam, I appeared on your podcast several weeks ago, and it occurred to me that you and I have a lot of synergies in the business that we do. So I was very, very interested in the estate planning concepts that you have experienced and you have sort of perfected in my eyes. So if you could give us a sort of a background on your journey as to how you got to that point and, more importantly, some of the collateral and the products that you have designed and implemented.”

Adam: “Yeah, I’d be happy to. It’s an unexpected journey that’s taken me to where I am today. So the current role is founder of a company called ‘Buried in Work’ that helps people simplify their estate planning and end-of-life tasks, all the way from when someone’s 18, 19 years old to past when someone passes away, whenever that might be in their estate transition. I was very fortunate to be in a situation based on all the skills and roles and opportunities that I had leading up to where I am today—that’s a little bit of what Olivia mentioned in the bio—to position me to build this company. And the funny thing is that I didn’t expect to make this company at all.

My father was at my house doing a bit of woodworking in the basement, and he walked up the stairs and said, ‘I’m tired.’ When he says, ‘I’m tired,’ it’s a little bit different than if Olivia or you, Tim, or I say it. When we say it, we want to take a nap; when he says it, it is an indication that he has to go to the doctor. The reason why is six and a half years prior, he was diagnosed with leukemia. I donated bone marrow to him a long time ago. He went to the doctor, and they checked him into the hospital on a Thursday, and 12 days later, he passed away far too quickly.

So, I hopped in and helped my mom transition everything on the estate. As with many people, it was a complicated and confusing situation. I took very diligent notes of everything I did. When I met with my mom’s financial planner and showed her what I had put together, she said it was the most comprehensive transition she had ever seen in her life. On one hand, I had that little devil on my shoulder saying, ‘Ah, she just doesn’t want you to move your mom’s money,’ and on the other shoulder, the angel saying, ‘Well, you’re pretty organized; maybe there’s something to this.’

She encouraged me to put it online, give the resources away, and share my learnings with others. I talked to a few friends and showed a few adults my mom’s age what I had done. The overwhelming response was, ‘Adam, you absolutely need to give this to other people.’ So, I built a website, and within a week, we had over 10,000 visits. The feedback was, ‘The information you put online is great; here’s my story, here’s what I learned; how can you help me with this?’ That last question turned into what became ‘Buried in Work,’ where we are creating resources that help people before they need it and after they need it. It’s effectively sharing information, giving the gift of organization.

Now, we’ve got products like checklists, guides, and the most comprehensive estate organization system available right now, called the Estate Preparation Package. It’s designed so that if you get hit by a bus, your family will have all the information they need to deal with your incapacitation or passing away—they won’t have to search for it. We can talk about that in a bit. We’ve also got card games now to help you capture those memories from loved ones, like the ‘Nothing Left Unsaid’ card game, which helps you quickly get through questions like, ‘Do you have a will? Do you have a trust? Who helped you with it? Where are they located? How do you feel about palliative care?’

We started off helping individuals, but now we’re working with businesses, service providers, attorneys, CPAs, synagogues, temples, churches, hospice companies, and nursing homes. The interest in what we’re doing is quite frankly wonderful. That’s a quick overview of where we are.”

Tim: “You know, they say that Innovation is the mother of necessity, right? So I think it’s incredible that you were sort of backed into this position, and you basically became the executor of your dad’s estate. All of a sudden, I think your background as an attorney probably helped you with the organizational skills for sure. But that being said, there are a lot of attorneys out there who aren’t really organized as well, so it was obviously a combination of a lot of things. But at the end of the day, one of the things that attracted me to your company is the fact that this is an all-encompassing process that really doesn’t seem that difficult to implement.”

Adam: “That’s right. On average, it takes 570 hours to administer an estate in the United States, and the reason isn’t that the process is extremely difficult—it can be challenging if you’ve never gone through it before—but rather, the people going through it for the first time are in a time of grief, stress, and they’re on a scavenger hunt to find information. What we found is that if you organize everything in an estate, in a status, in a place that’s easy for your loved ones to find—your heirs, your spouse, your executor, your administrator—the effort will be the same in terms of the process, but they’ll have the tools to go through it much faster.

By doing so, we’ve expanded the definition of estate planning—not just having a will or a trust or giving directions on what to do with your assets or belongings when you pass away, but really positioning your entire family to have the tools and resources they need. What I mean by that is, if you have pets, what’s going to happen to them if something happens to you? Who’s going to water your plants? What bank accounts do you have, where are they located, how do you access them, how are your bills paid? On average, women outlive their male spouses by 5.8 years in the United States, and there are many millions of people about to find themselves in a situation where they’re not familiar with paying the bills. We have a solution that provides peace of mind by giving them the information they need—knowing where accounts are, how to pay bills, and what needs to be done.”

Tim: “You know, that is so important. In our business, when we help families ensure the breadwinner or businesses ensure key people, there’s going to be a windfall of money coming into that estate, family, or business. A lot of times, the people left behind may not be familiar with handling money or paying bills, let alone managing a large amount of money. And it comes at a time when the key person, who the survivor relied upon to make large decisions, is no longer there. Now, at the time you need to make these big, important decisions, the key person you’ve always relied upon is gone. This puts the survivor, whether it’s a spouse or a child, in a very overwhelming and confusing situation.”

Adam: “Tim, you’re right. It’s funny, my dad always said to my mom, ‘Don’t worry, Adam will take care of it.’ And in a way, he was right, and he also knew my sisters would help out because they’re involved in some capacity. But in his mind, if you asked him, ‘Where is the receipt for when you replaced the roof 20 years ago?’ he’d go to the office, second drawer down, six files back, and he’d know exactly where it was. But him knowing that is very different from someone saying, ‘Oh, Adam knows the files are in the office.’ So, whereas you might think, ‘Oh, I’m totally organized,’ or ‘Oh, my child knows the key to my safe,’ it doesn’t mean they actually know where things are or have the information in a way they can process. What’s important is to step back from your perspective and, using design thinking, put yourself in the shoes of the people who’ll be impacted to see how they would react if something happened. That’s when things get surprising.”

Olivia: “That makes a lot of sense, Adam. It’s funny because, as a young adult, you start thinking about these things—your parents, the things you’ll have to deal with. And it’s funny because so many families don’t talk about this stuff. Those conversations aren’t being had about money, it’s still not talked about at the dinner table. Are you seeing that a lot in your position, or are these people who come to you more from the older generation or the younger generation when planning?”

Adam: “It’s a pretty even split and changes depending on the week. What’s been phenomenal is that we found when the older generation comes to us, they’re not just looking out for themselves but also thinking, ‘Hey, I’ve got children that I want to position better.’ So they’ll buy an estate preparation package and they’ll also get one for their child or for their children. And then we also have people coming to us saying, ‘Hey, here’s a life event—I just got married, I just had a child, I just got a new job, and I want to make sure that things are in order.’ And then when they see it, they go, ‘Oh wait a minute, I actually need to get this for my parents too.’ So then they buy multiple packages, sometimes they only buy one, sometimes they don’t buy anything and they use our self-serve resources on the website as well.

But the neat thing is that the people coming to us often are doing so because someone they know—whether it’s them directly or a family member or a friend—has gone through this process and they saw how hard it is, and they’re looking for solutions. This is not something that you typically wake up on your own and go, ‘You know what, today is the day I’m going to spend going through my bills or gathering my information and writing down my family genealogy and gathering the information so all my tax returns are in the same place.’ Something happens, and with the way the demographics are going in the country right now—10,000 Americans turning 65 every day—this ‘something’ is going to happen to more and more people at a faster and faster rate.”

Tim: “Absolutely. So, are you seeing that so much of our bills and life are now online, and when people don’t do this preparation, I imagine it’d be very difficult to know where everything is because all you would have is your parents’ phone, you know, if they’re tech-savvy enough to have all the apps and everything set up on bill pay. I know my neighbor passed away recently, and his sons were looking through his bills, and they were like, ‘Why is he being charged $125 a month for this?’ It turned out to be their mother’s cell phone bill from when she died like 10 years ago, and he’s been paying this bill for so long. So you just don’t know what’s out there if you don’t have it written down somewhere.”

Adam: “Yeah, that’s so true. The joke used to be—and I say joke in quotes—between attorneys, if you wanted to know what bills somebody had after they passed away, just check their mail because within three months, you’re going to get a letter of delinquency. But that was a joke from two decades ago. Things are very different now, where you know, ‘Go paperless, it saves the environment, it helps the companies.’ Well, that also means there isn’t as much of a paper trail. And you’re a little bit younger than I am—maybe you’ve seen the movie Zoolander, the joke of ‘The files are in the computer.’ Well, if the files are on the computer, it doesn’t mean I know how to find them. It’s the same thing with the office, only even worse. And that’s exactly right—people now also have to worry about something called their ‘digital legacy.’ That’s your email and online accounts and passwords. Who has access to it? What happens to your files when you pass away? If you have Facebook, is it memorialized? Who can log in? What do you want to have happen to your photos? Should they be deleted? Should somebody get them?

What computers and phones do you have? Because if somebody’s not paying for the service on the cell phone, all those two-factor authentication text messages that we get, guess what—they’re going to be locked out of accounts if they could get in. And then you have to worry about, well, even if they can get in, should they be getting in? Because they may not be legally supposed to. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, I have a power of attorney, I can get into all these accounts after someone passes away.’ The reality is the power of attorney privileges cease immediately when the person dies. You have to go through and get a letter of administration or a death certificate, and then you have to file with them. So we’re creating templates to help people go through all these processes. There are a lot of tips and tricks that if you haven’t gone through it, you’re not going to know—not because you’re an idiot, but because you’ve never gone through it before. And that’s what we’re trying to do is just make things easier for people to simplify the process.”

Olivia: “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Is it different from state to state? Do you work with all of the states, or are you mainly in the Maryland area?”

Adam: “I love that question. We have a lot of customers in the Maryland area because that’s where we started, but our resources are countrywide. If you want to find out the requirements for a will in Arkansas, come to the website, and we have that. We won’t provide legal services, so while I am an attorney, we’re not offering legal advice, but we are providing the information and tools people need to navigate these processes.”

Adam: “As an attorney, I’m not providing legal services, and the team isn’t providing legal services. What I mean by that is we’re not drafting wills, we’re not drafting trust documentation for you. What we are doing is helping you get your information in order and then giving you a link to a service directory on our website where you can find attorneys in your area, tax professionals, funeral homes, cemeteries, hospice companies, long-term care hospitals in your area, and then they’ll be able to serve you better.

What people have told us is that after they’ve bought our estate preparation package, they actually saved money on their legal bills because the attorneys had all the information they needed. And while they’re billing hourly, they’re able to work even faster, so it pays for itself in a unique way.”

Tim: “Yeah, that’s absolutely true because, you know, the attorneys at least have an idea of where to go for the information, but it takes time to learn the stuff, right? It takes time to know—in our industry, it takes time to learn what questions to ask to get the right answer, and I’m sure it’s the same way in your industry and as the executor of the estate and as an attorney. So, yeah, it’s definitely a learning curve, and it takes time to learn things. So having it all in one place, I would imagine, makes for fewer mistakes along the way.”

Adam: “Service providers are very happy. There are a few tax professionals that we’re working with, and one is looking at a four-figure order—he’s getting estate preparation packages for all of his clients. The reason why is it’s an appreciation token; it gives you a reason to check in with them on an annual basis, it gives them a talking point to tell their friends, ‘Look what just happened,’ so it’s deal flow. There’s just a lot of stuff that is working out really well.”

Olivia: “So, Adam, you mentioned a card game. I’m curious as to how that developed and if you can give us a sort of story as to how it’s been successful.”

Adam: “Okay. We were sitting in the hospital with my father, and we were just joking. We knew that things were kind of on that downward spiral toward the end, but he was very competent and had all his faculties, give or take, up until just a day or two before he passed. We started saying, ‘Dad, tell us one more story about this. What do you think about that? What’s your favorite food that you ate? Tell me the story about how you met Mom. What’s your legacy that you want to leave? If there’s one more thing that you could have done, what would you have done?’ Because the reality is, when somebody passes away, unless you have a recording of them, unless you had a conversation with them, their stories are gone, and that’s unfortunate.

So what we did is we took 126 questions across six categories and put them into a card game. It’s called ‘One More Story.’ You can get it on our website; it will be on Amazon probably by the time this goes up. It’s actually in Johns Hopkins Hospital right now in the gift stores, which is kind of neat, and in other places too. It just allows you to have these stories and conversations.

What is interesting is how people are using these cards. I originally thought they would be designed and delivered in a way that you could use them when people are getting older. So, they’re poker-style cards, a much thicker box, really easy to open, the finish on them is tactile design so it doesn’t slip out of your hands—you know, we’ve all seen those bad playing cards, but these are high quality. They’re printed in the United States, and their GSM 300, if that means anything to anybody, so the weight is hefty.

But people are buying them, and we’ve gotten emails saying, ‘Oh, after going through the game, I left them on my kitchen table. My teenage daughter and her friend, I came home, and they were going through the questions,’ and it led to conversations. We’ve had people reach out and say that they’ve taken them on dates, which I thought was crazy, but when you think about it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, they’re really good get-to-know-you cards, why not?’ We were written up in a ‘Best Father’s Day Road Trip’ guide, which is pretty neat.

And then on the other side of the equation, the ‘Nothing Left Unsaid’ one—it’s a little bit more of a heavier topic. It has questions like, ‘Do you have a will? Do you have a trust? Where are they?’ It goes through a lot of the questions that you really want to have answered if you can, without having to write everything down. But that’s the ‘Okay, really quick, let’s get this done,’ and lawyers and CPAs—they’re buying them and giving them to their clients as well. They’re leaving it in their office in the waiting room so when people see them, it gives them the idea of, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t think about having a guardianship designation in my will. That’s what this definition is; I should talk to my attorney about that.’ So it pre-educates them and helps with an upsell from the business side—a lot of use cases, some of which were unexpected, some of which are working out better than we thought.”

Olivia: “That’s amazing. So Adam, you were talking earlier about working with, you know, businesses, CPAs, synagogues, and everything like that. In what capacity are you working with them?”

Adam: “That’s a good question. So it depends on the company themselves. We have a bunch of different offerings, and we custom tailor them. If you’re an association or religious organization, we have fundraisers where you can take our products, and we have a commission structure that goes back to you. We have custom-branded white-label options, so ‘powered by Buried in Work,’ where we have 1,700 articles on the website, 30-plus guides and checklists. We’ll sit down and go through and say, ‘Alright, which of these are good for your community?’ and then we come up with a package where that can live on their website, or they can send people to us, and we’ll host a page for them where they have an instant, effectively, custom-branded resource bank for their communities or clients in a matter of weeks.

That’s great for hospice companies that want to focus on doing what they need to do, but they don’t necessarily want to say, ‘These are the instructions on how to transfer a car after somebody passes away in Pennsylvania.’ We have that information; we can put that together really quickly for them. Employee benefits—companies are offering our resources to their employees instead of just giving them a gym membership reimbursement, which is great, but this is something that gives them a lot of peace of mind. Sometimes it’s, ‘Okay, we just want to make the resources available,’ and other times it’s, ‘We’ll actually buy the estate preparation packages,’ or have you come in as a workshop.

End-of-life service providers—obviously estate sale providers—same thing, games, checklists, whatnot. Retirement, senior living communities, hospice, palliative care, pre-need insurance, therapists, death doulas—there are a lot of people interested right now. To give the exact answer of what we’re working with them on, it really is specific to the company we’re dealing with. As an example, earlier today there was a religious organization in Maryland that we’re talking about setting up a custom webpage for them that will host all the information for their congregants. For their members, the congregation, if something happened, their website would link to us. They’d have a special password, and they’d have everything they need to know about end-of-life planning in one spot.

So, long answer to a short question.”

Tim: “Yeah, because it does impact everyone, right? At the end of the day, most of us are going to deal with this unless, well, you have really good siblings. The former Chief Deputy Technology Officer at NASA was talking to me about one of the products, and I think his quote is one of the best we’ve had, and we actually put half of it on our box. The second half was, ‘Leave your heirs the gift of organization,’ which I think is brilliant. But the front half of the quote, which not a lot of people know, was effectively—and I’m going to paraphrase it—’Whether or not you settle somebody’s estate, somebody is going to settle yours.’ And that’s the truth of it. We all have an estate plan; the estate plan just might be dictated by the state’s laws or regulations if you don’t have something in place and you’re not taking matters into your own hands. So if you don’t want someone to advocate on your behalf without them necessarily knowing what your wishes are, it’s best to get organized and take control of the situation yourself, and he’s 100% correct.”

Olivia: “Wow, that is so profound too because it is spot-on. I mean, somebody’s going to settle my estate, somebody’s going to settle your estate, somebody’s going to settle Olivia’s estate—hopefully not for a long time—”

Tim: “Exactly.”

Olivia: “—but giving that person the gift of organization will make that job so much easier. And again, we see it a lot where people are so unprepared for the inevitability that is now right at their doorstep. And it is, as I said, overwhelming, confusing, and a lot of times, it’s maddening. They’re like, ‘Why didn’t he or she do this? Why didn’t they take care of these issues?’ And a lot of people just think, ‘Oh, I’ll get to it later. I’ve got plenty of time,’ or, ‘Oh, I just don’t need to deal with it.'”

Adam: “…because it’s someone else’s problem, but it’s unfortunate that the reality is that every single week I get phone calls from people going, ‘They weren’t prepared, they didn’t know, they didn’t wake up, they fell, they slipped—what do I do?’ And it’s heartbreaking to see. Fortunately, we are making the process a little bit easier for people who are willing to spend a little bit of time getting their affairs in order.”

Olivia: “Yeah, and I love that it sounds like you have options for pre-planning and for people who didn’t necessarily plan—checklists for both to get them through that tough time—which is a really good thing because, you know, you don’t necessarily have control over whether that person does the planning, right? You could nag your parents forever, and they don’t necessarily have to take those actions. But having that guidance afterward, I’m sure, is a big relief because there’s so much unknown.”

Adam: “Yeah, and like, we have analytics on the site. Right now, we have 12 active users on the site—I’ve got the dashboard up in front of me—so they’re in Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Illinois, Montana, Washington, Maine, a few other places. So there’s actually more than 12 people; there’s a little bit of a delay. And we can see the pages that people are hitting. Right now, most people are on the ‘Find Unclaimed Property’ page—we have links to every single unclaimed property database in the country, both state and federal. But the second most-visited page right now is the checklist of ‘What to Do After Somebody Dies.’ It gives you 56 steps: ‘Do this, do this, do this.’ You can tell that those groups of people are likely in very different stages of the journey.

What I want to see is that the number of people utilizing the website shifts to the preparation pages as opposed to the after pages. But the reality is, right now, most people are looking—when you look at the metrics across the board—at pages that are, ‘Oh shoot, something just happened.’ And that’s a challenging thing to see for a lot of reasons.”

Olivia: “Yeah, but like you said earlier, you know, it starts with a trigger. There’s always a trigger to these thoughts in your head like, ‘Oh, I need to take steps.’ So hopefully, after they go through this checklist, they’re able to shift focus on, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want to do this to the next generation—let me get my stuff in order and be proactive going forward.’ So I’m sure some of the people are going to end up there, at least, right?”

Adam: “And that’s the hope. I’m sure that’s the hope.”

Tim: “Yeah, so Adam, just out of curiosity, do you have any estate planning attorneys who are subscribers to your website or your services? Because I think they would—on the surface, you could look at it and say, ‘Well, that almost looks like replacing them,’ but I see there’s tremendous synergy there.”

Adam: “Absolutely. We have numerous estate planning attorneys who are content contributors on the website. We are in discussions with several right now about taking our content and white-labeling it. What we do is make their jobs easier because attorneys don’t want to spend time educating their clients on what a will is—the attorneys want to do the legal work and actually get paid to do the work that matters. So this is something that they’re viewing as the ultimate intake document, where we’re helping them do their job better. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re not actually creating wills and drafting wills—because as it stands right now, I don’t want to take that work away from other people; I want to help them do their job better and get people personalized service in the jurisdiction that they live in.”

Tim: “Yeah, and like you mentioned earlier, it helps everything become more efficient from a cost perspective and from a workflow perspective, right? Because attorney work isn’t necessarily quick, but if they know exactly what they’re doing, it could certainly make it faster. And that efficiency—you could hypothetically charge more for it, right? Because it’s a better service.”

Adam: “Exactly, exactly.”

Olivia Kirk: “Yeah. So Adam, how could our listeners find you or locate you or get information from your website? Phone numbers, whatever you want to share.”

Adam: “Very easy—just come to the website, it’s buriedinwork.com, so B-U-R-I-E-D-I-N-W-O-R-K dot com. You can email me personally if you want—[email protected]. There’s a contact form if you’ve got questions, and me or somebody from the team will get back to you. Real people read the emails, it’s amazing.”

Tim: “I heard you’re very organized.”

Adam: “Sometimes. Sometimes.”

Olivia: “Awesome. Well, it was great speaking with you. This was so informative, and you know the work you’re doing is certainly going to make an impact for generations to come.”

Adam: “Thank you, I appreciate it.”