091026 ~ Reduce Software Chaos - Christian Fusik

0:00On our around the home with the builders and remodeler's association of Greater Ann Arbor, we call them Bragan Arbor. We're going to talk about reducing software chaos and what to do to help the back end of your business that you're probably ignoring in the technology aspect. Connecting with this expert team of consultants to discuss your current software ecosystem could really help you. The challenges and opportunities that businesses have, they can help you with that. They are the experts. They are powder, POW, WDR, and they can build a tailored package of solutions designed to achieve unique goals and integrate seamlessly with your organization. So how does all of this work and how can your business benefit? We welcome Christian Fusick, co-founder of powder. Tell me about your company. You're paying your high grader or you went to pioneer and then graduate from Whitmore Lake, but you have local ties to our community here. I'm originally from the area, I'm born and raised, obviously, four-site hazily, all the way up through plate sports here, soccer, an Arbor arsenal, all that kind of stuff. Wide world and played

1:00out a lot of hockey. I was that generation that had all the hockey players going through the ice school, so it was kind of interesting. Yeah. Powder is a, so we're veteran-owned. I did eight years in the military, so we're veteran-owned business. Boogie-Face, sir. It's kind of the touch that 9-11 tomorrow is going to be 25 years, so it's kind of crazy to think that our generation is a part of that. What brings were you in, by the way? Army. Army. I was in the Army. Then we actually employ about five others that are retired military as well, so that's kind of our focus as part of our organization. But powder is really yet we want to continue building on technologies inside companies and helping those companies reduce the manual tasks that they're often seeing. But frankly, also, you're trying to say, hey, how can we keep our company safe with all the AI that's going on? How do we consolidate our current softwares because there's so much? What can we do to make our overall business reduce costs, but also make it more streamlined? What is the name of your company come from? Yeah, so we're huge snowboarders. We can actually go snowboarding. It's kind of an interesting name if you look at the logo,

2:00right? But we really, we love going out snowboarding and participating in that process. I love that. That carries through with what you were just talking about with your hockey and everything, too. Yeah. Definitely. I'm not the hockey player. My partner is probably the better of that. But yeah, we definitely love the outdoors. So the your company, how do you handle this when you go in and you're working as consultant with these these other companies? Do you examine their technology? Do they let you know where they have the faults? How do you start on this process? Yeah, we do it in two different ways. We kind of we kind of look at it as like grading your test paper because we always we always think everything's perfect, but something's missing often when at least when I was doing my test back in the day. So we want to go in and kind of observe. We don't charge for it. We really just kind of go in and say, Hey, look, what are you looking at? What are some softwares you have thought about? Do you like what you have? And then frankly, we just call it grading your test paper. And then we try to act as like a sub general contractor of tech. So do you have too much tech going on or too much tech coming at you and you want to bear

3:00between that? We're happy to play the barrier for that so that we can consolidate all those processes. So are you designing software for companies or we'll do any of it. We'll design off the shelf or implement or make things communicate where they already might have it all in place, but they want to have a better dashboard to say, Hey, look, this project or this product or these materials, something we're losing costs somewhere and we can't find it. So we make everything consolidated. It's a big. What's the biggest mistake you see companies making when it comes to technology? Frankly, they're not communicating together and they have too much of it. What do you mean too much? How can you not be communicating and yet have too much? Yeah, there's so you want to have all the right different types of software that are communicating together, but sometimes too many companies will buy all these different types of software and have seven different layers of it. And they only really need to have like two or three a different software. So they could be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year plus on additional softwares that really aren't being used as successfully as it could be used. What kind of software would be good for goodness that I mean, there's so many different types. I mean, from service Titan is a great one for different types of organizations to, but we're not

4:04KPIs, anything. So what we do is what's best for that type of material place. And sometimes instead of build or sometimes we build a software that's proprietary to them because the cost might be a little handful up front, but you're not paying for those subscription bases that really kill a company over a three to five year period. Everyone today is talking about AI because of the news that came out on how this one and theropic employee has stepped down and said, I don't want to do this anymore because he believes that within 10 years, there's a 10% chance. And that's 10% too much for me, but that these agents, the bots are going to take over that they could annihilate humanity. How do you feel about that? Yeah, that's a tough question. You know, it's as we talk about AI, how we talk about AI is making sure companies are safe when they're using it, if they choose to use it. So we go, hey, let's look at it from that perspective and make sure that you're safe. From a view standpoint to the run the threat, I mean, this world has been running for hundreds of

5:05thousands of years before us. So there's always been threats. And I think that we just need to learn how to manage those. So it's good that the media is protecting it because now we'll figure out how to combat how quickly AI is growing. I think AI is growing too fast in certain circumstances. So that's why when we talk about it, it's more or less making your business communicate faster. We're not trying to create terminators out here. So at the end of the day, we stay away from that kind of and I think that with the announcements, people are going to be more concerned and then put more effort into regulating how it's used. Do all companies have to use artificial intelligence or not? I don't think they do. I think that they need to have practices in place to protect their companies because you need to have governance of how it's managed. You need to make sure that your employees are not taking your sense of information and putting it in chat GBT. You really need to protect your organization because when you put that information in chat GBT, it can be utilized elsewhere. Correct. And then frankly, if you're putting an Anthropic, which is cloud or chat GBT or any of these other different variations, frankly, those are also open to get hacked as well. So you

6:07need to really protect on how you're prompting those and how you're doing it. I don't think every company needs to implement AI because at the end of the day, if you're making systems communicate, it's not really using AI. It's using communication systems. And that's how we look at AI. We look at it to improve your business, but making sure that you're not actually losing your sensitive information. But could AI also help businesses reduce the employee cost? Because now you've got AI doing a function, maybe that a human being was doing before or doesn't it work that way? Yeah. We want to make the manual tasks that an employee is often where they're like, this is I should be focused on something else and removing it. We don't try to find how to make removal of employees. We try to make that employee not spend that 10 hours a week or that 15 hours a week losing cost by doing Excel work instead of, okay, how can we manually do that? Or sorry, remove the manual process, but then also focus where that can put better time and use other data. And that is possible with AI? Absolutely. We do it all the time. Really? How does that

7:08work though? So it's all communications systems on the back and looking at your API connections, looking at your, how do you communicate your different Excel standardizations to your CRMs? How are they actually, is everything plugged in correctly? And then we've even developed our own software called Weaver that you can actually implement that makes different types of AI communicate. What happens a lot of the time is Chatchy BT doesn't communicate within Thropic, but they're both good in their own ways. But let's remove the also have gamma, you have proplexity of slack. And we created a software you're able to actually connect all of these to make it more smooth. Do you know how wild this is? Yeah, it's kind of a crazy place. And you know, we have better minds inside that help us develop these. Again, I'm just one of the co-founders. But who is your other co-founder? So my other co-founders, Jared Campbell, Jared's fantastic. He's, I would say, our beautiful brain, if you may say. How did the two of you know each other? Golfing. Oh, I like it. I like it. See, it still does happen the old fashioned way. Companies being created. We're talking with the co-founder of powder, Christian Fusik on Ann

8:11Arbor's talk station, 1290 WLBY powders, well, POWWDR. And he leads business development and the partnerships that drive the company's growth with 15 years of sales leadership built on a foundation of military service. Christian brings the accountability and integrity that come from serving before selling. And he pairs an opportunity driven mindset with deep experience curating partnerships with solutions providers who share powders mission to deliver fortune 500 level capabilities at a scale and price built for growing businesses. How achievable is that for a small, you're doing with a lot of small to medium size businesses and businesses had some financial problems lately, of course, how conceivable is that they can hire you to take care of all this for them so that they can succeed and grow. Yeah, we need to make sure that we're able to look at their current, you know, tech stack and say, can we, can we help you one reduce cost in time? It's hard to, it's hard to measure time when you're reducing the employee efficiency or reducing the

9:15how much inefficiencies may be there. And that's hard to always measure if it's not something factual. So how we look at it is going, okay, let's first look at how, which tech we can either remove or make more efficient first. And then we look at, okay, what efficiency and employees. And then we also how we run our businesses is we're not, you have to do this project this fast. We actually have the ability where we can spread out our work over a significant amount of time. And if you're only able to budget a certain amount, we'll work with that as well. Well, that's really great to know. Give us some concrete examples of how this could benefit. And in particular today, you're here on behalf of Bregan Arbor in there around the home segment. Builders, remodellers, interior designers, how could they utilize the technology that you have available to help streamline their business? How would that help them? Yeah, there's so many different ways and it's really hard to kind of put it together. But let's just talk about say a generalization of different types of examples. Today, we're working with an organization and frankly, they're getting materials coming in from a certain job and it needs to be set on. It's a roofing company and they always need to have

10:17their materials ready for the next job. They need to make sure the next job is going. They need to make sure the follow-ups are coming through and creating that lead generation but also making sure that the back end is successful too. And then frankly, the office work to pay those employees is always going through. So what we did is we created an entire dashboard where the ownership can see, okay, yes, we have the jobs going on. We have the correct amount coming in. We're able to employ our employees but we're also, our jobs are getting completed on time. We do have impacts from weather that are potentially coming. So we have to reduce those in a day. And then on the back end, we're looking at it from a financial standpoint. Okay, are we profitable enough where we can frankly, the owners still want to make money? Let's be real about it. But also do we create enough ability where we can actually pay bonuses too? So our goal is to actually look at the overall finances of the organization. Not physically see the numbers but say, hey, look, sometimes keeping employee retention is huge in today's market. So if we make the business more efficient, you're able to also pay your employees more too, which is always the benefit for a lot of small business. Christian, I love this. I love this and I'm thinking about the friends I know who are in business dealing with logistics, for instance. It's a nightmare when a

11:20company doesn't have the products in that they need and it's stuck somewhere and no one understands where it is or when it's coming in, maybe the person who's running the software on the logistics program gets it but it's not available to others to really understand and it's also, it was integrated to other parts of the company. So it doesn't, it doesn't bring everything together. It sounds like you guys can do that. Well, and we do that a lot a lot of the time and then also a lot sometimes that employee leaves and they don't know what to do with the system. Exactly. So what we do is we make sure that one, the system operates in a way where you don't have to look at it all the time. At the end of the day, you can only, we call it the 80-20 role. You can make a things efficient to an 80 percent but 20 percent needs to be observed. And frankly, what happens a lot of time is that employee needs to be able to see what's going on but you also need to have a backup for that employee for vacations and all that as well. Well, you can visit their website at POWDR.AI. POWDR.AI and get more information on the solutions that powder can provide you

12:21and your company. Where do you see all of this going in the future? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that there is going to be a small increase in fear and then I think from an AI perspective. But I also think that we're going to get to a point where we need to look at the realities of where the businesses are at and how we all want to spend more time with our families. So I think that we need to look at AI in that perspective and developing A8 concise that way. Our goal as a company is to always talk about it in that manner. If it goes outside of that, we'll stay away from it. But frankly, that's where we see. In addition from that, companies really need to become more efficient as more less than type of employees in the trades and that's impacting their business as well, hiring and stuff. So how can we make ourselves more efficient? Still increase money and still make sure that we're profitable too. Because we do know that there's a drop in the trades and that's difficult to say. Yeah, that's right. A quote from one of your clients, powders, marketing, automation, and brand work have sharpened our message and expanded our reach with measurable impact. How do companies get started with you?

13:24Anytime. Frankly, they just contact myself or Jared. Typically, I run all the beginning calls. And then we have a team that really does a lot of different stuff. So you can reach me on my cell phone, 734-489-2079 or email me at Christianatpowder.ai. And similarly, you can actually then begin the communication. Typically, in the beginning, we really just try to understand what you're trying to do as a business. We try to have an open conversation over a couple of coffee and learn about your business before we even do anything. You're not paying for it. You're not doing a, and frankly, we'll buy the cover coffee. So at the end of the day, it's really just trying to do good business with good people. And that's why we kind of leverage our integrity from a military standpoint. Because if we mess that up, we look, you know, not good. Give that phone number again. 734-489-2079. Thank you so much. Christian Fusik with powder, one of the co-founders. And you can go online to POWDR.ai. That's POWDR.ai and access their website through that portal.

14:27They are members of the Builders and Remodelers Association of Greater Ann Arbor, information about the membership there. And all the details and events that are hosted through Bragg, you can go online to Braggannarbor.com. I'm Lucianne Lance. This is Ann Arbor's Talk Station, 1290WLBY.