#338: The ONE AI Use Case In Your Business You Need To Focus On... Highly Tactical Episode

What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another quick solo episode here on the Multifamily Wealth podcast. In this episode, we're going to get pretty tactical in regards to using AI in your business. That's very general, but what I'm going to spend this episode talking about is how you can start to build your business or build the infrastructure of your portfolio business, whatever term we want to use here to continue to best leverage AI as the tools improve as the tools change or as you become more adept at using the tools that are available to you. Alright everyone, before we get to the rest of this episode, I have one simple and easier quest for you. And that is to share this podcast episode or the podcast in general with anyone in your network who you think would find the content valuable. The only way we can grow this show is by sharing it with folks who we think will learn something from its content. So if you have someone in your network, whether it's a friend, a colleague, a business partner, your dog, the guy across the street, I don't care. If you think they would enjoy the podcast, please consider emailing it, texting or sharing it with them. However you see fit. As always, thank you for listening. You guys are the best and enjoy the rest of this episode. And I get so many questions from folks now, whether it's like, you know, in person when I'm chatting with other real estate guys or or gals over Instagram, you know, just internal conversations with my business partners on our deals and with our, you know, with our property management company. How are you using AI? What tools are you using? What's something you've recently done with AI? How should I be using it, et cetera, et cetera? It is obviously a dominant discussion point amongst real estate investors and business owners right now. So what I want to do in this episode is just talk about what everybody should be doing regardless of whether you're using cloud or chat GPT or whether or not you've, you know, whether or not your business is small, large, regardless, right? Regardless of how you're using AI, what tools you're using, et cetera, you know, how quickly you want to grow your business, all that. We're just going to talk about the things that everyone should be doing. And what that is is everyone should be focusing on building the context that they're able to provide all of these different AI tools. So I'll say that again, right? Everyone's priorities should be to build context with everything else just being secondary to that. And when I say context, what I mean by that is building the informational back end of your business and everything that's involved in doing that. And I'm just going to quickly rattle off some examples of how you do that. So building context is using a platform that is easily connected to all of these AI tools, right? For our business, it's notion, you know, it could be obsidian is a big one that that folks use that are a little bit more tech savvy could be as simple as like a Monday.com. But I just recommend notion. I think, you know, we recently changed the notion our property management company runs on notion. Notion speaks effectively to all of the different AI tools and also has some built in AI functionality of its own. But what I'm talking about here is building out a few different workspaces on whatever your informational back end is. Let's just I'm going to use notion because that's what we use and that just makes this conversation a little easier. But substitute if you use a different one. Building a company information workspace, a portfolio workspace, a transaction coordination workspace, a CRM workspace or you know contacts and vendors workspace. And funneling a ton of contextual information into each of those workspaces that allows AI to have all of the contacts that needs to actually really help you make decisions and to produce work for your business. So what I would I like to tell people is you should think about this as if you're hiring an employee, right? If you were to hire an assistant or an office manager or whatever, you would train them. You'd give them their contacts, right? You talk about the history of your company. You talk about all of the different systems and processes within your organization that they're going to plug into. You're going to talk about the goals of your company, right? You're going to talk about what you want to do in three years, five years. You're going to want to talk about your branding. You know, you're, they're probably going to be introduced to various different vendors and contacts that you regularly work with within your business, right? All of the different mortgage brokers or lenders you work with, the real estate brokers, your contractors, the property management team at the property management company that manages your buildings. You would give them everything they need to be successful in working for your company, right? At the end of the day, that's what we're talking about here. But people for some reason don't like realize this or think about this when they're beginning to adopt AI tools in their business. And the more context you're able to give the AI tools that you're using, we'll just, you know, let's just talk about cloud here. Clod's kind of the leader in the clubhouse as it relates to AI tools and, you know, and the effectiveness of those tools right now. Like you want to give cloud the most possible context it can have to work on your behalf. So what does that look like, right? And I'm just, you know what, I'm actually just going to pull up my notion page right now and I'm just going to like read off some of the different categories or, or feels that we've, that we've got built out within it. So for example, when I go to, let's go to home page here. This is rough if you're listening to this on audio, but here we go. So under the company information workspace, I have the mailing address and physical address logo and brain collateral with all of our color codes. I have the glossary acronyms and lingo that we use as a multifamily real estate business company. I have our mission, our values and our vivid vision. I have all of the entity information for the entity, you know, online real estate partners LLC. I have all the information about me and how I communicate and talk, all of the brand voice information for how the, you know, we want to sound as a business. I have all of the working preferences, right, that I want to instruct AI as a release to how I want it to work with me. I have this big document, which is interesting of like lessons learned that I just keep adding to as I learn things over the years, that almost becomes like a do diligence resource for us in the business for when we're doing do diligence on deals like AI can reference that. I have our organizational chart. I have our, you know, how to delegate a project, right? So this is if I create a project and I want to delegate it to somebody on our team, I can use cloud to do that. And then all of our, you know, kind of information or document back ends like employment agreements, operating agreements. All of, you know, I have an area in here called content to consume that I add content like articles and books and all of this stuff that I want to read that I haven't had a chance to. And then if I want, you know, AI to summarize it on a, you know, during a weekly brief, it can do that. And then I give it all of the software that we use in our business, right? Invest next at Folio, BuzzFrow for the podcast recently for our CRM, Meow for our financial management, Behi for email marketing, you know, Gusto for payroll. I have all of this stuff with a bunch of information around that. So it has the context of all the tools we use. You know, that's just in that one section. And then there's, you know, a little bit more that I'm not going to bore everybody with on this. But the one thing I should mention too that I haven't is I have a whole business history in here. Everything that's happened in the business each year that we've been in business. So with all of this, I'm giving Claude absurd context on how we think as a business are, you know, and then I didn't even get into our acquisition criteria and all that, but that lives in our acquisitions board. So I'm giving it all of this ammunition to completely understand what's going on within the business. And then I think above and above and beyond that excuse me, what's more relevant for folks is all of the portfolio level information for your properties. And this is, you know, especially important if you want to start using AI or Claude or whatever to analyze your portfolio to help you make decisions, etc. But we have a whole big board in here that has all of our property addresses, the stage, you know, of the business plan, number of units, the property management company. We've got the total current basis, which is calculated on a monthly basis by taking our basis at closing and adding all historical cat-backs, current loan amount, current interest rate, low maturity date, lender name, current occupancy percentage, current monthly rents. We have our total renovation budget when we bought it, our total renovation spend to date, renovation status, we've got all the entity information, we've got insurance renewal dates, and then within that we actually break it out per property to include even more information about the building, right? All the tax card information, the unit mix, the history of the deal itself, like how we found it, you know, what our plan was when we bought it, etc., etc. And then we just, you know, basically just all this information on the current portfolio outside of the current financials on a day-to-day basis, but just as it relates to the portfolio in general. And every month we take all of our statements from our management company and we upload them to Notion, and we continue to add to all of this information so that we have a dashboard that we can reference to make decisions and for cloud to quickly understand everything that's going on in our portfolio at any given time. So all of these things are things you should do, regardless of what tool you're using. And if you are looking to actively grow your business or portfolio, right? If you want to own, if you know, If you want to buy a duplex a year and get to 10, 15 units, you don't need to do any of this stuff. Frankly, it's a distraction that you shouldn't even listen to this. All of this commentary in this episode is like, do you own 10 units right now and you want to get to 250 and you want to grow a real business. You want to scale a business. If you want to raise money, if you want to build a brand, if you want to take asset management of your properties more seriously and maybe you don't have enough time to do it effectively right now. All of these different scenarios are scenarios in which you need to be building the foundational informational back ends that you can then plug Clod into to give it the context that you can expedite some of your workflows. Some of the other examples of this are Clod's integrated with my calendar, my Gmail, Notion. It's also integrated with, and I'm spacing on one here, oh, B-Hive, my email marketing platform. It can look at all of these different things and it can look at Notion, it can cross-reference everything. And once you give it the required context for you to really start to unleash it, that's like that's when things really start to happen for you. And the one thing I think is also important to mention here is this is not something that will ever change. Like the critical thinking capabilities, the work production capabilities of AI can continue to increase, the effectiveness of the models can continue to increase. But the constant forever will be you need to give it the context that requires in order to make educated decisions for you on your behalf to understand that your business at the level that you do, like you have to give it the ammo in order to do all these things. So I think that there's something like comforting in this and that yes, it's a lot of work to settle this up if you haven't done any of this. But if you ever want to hire someone in your business, if you ever want to better adopt AI in your business, if you want to do any of these things, you need to begin working on this now. And this is like how you get a head right now, in my opinion. Like the bare bones use of AI right now is like you upload at least to it and you ask, you know, cloud to do at least abstract and to pull out all the key information, you know, a contract, you ask it to create a nice pitch deck for you. You know, all the one-to-one interactions are like, you know, a good use right now. But where you actually really start to unlock productivity gains is when you give it the insight into all of these different platforms. And the actual like use case of AI will continue to change, will continue to develop. But what won't change is the requirement of doing this, which is taking your whole brain and getting it into cloud or excuse me, like a notion and then connecting cloud. So I want to share a couple of shortcuts to just around the cell. Like again, this is a real tactical episode. But for example, if you connect cloud to your to your Gmail, which you can do in an ongoing basis with a schedule task within cloud co-work is asking it to analyze your emails over the last seven days and to identify any conversations that you've had where or I should say you have it analyzed it over the last excuse me 21 days. That's what I do in my business or my my schedule tasks as I do with the last 21 days. And I basically have a lengthy prompt that that basically identifies any email conversations, any workflows or any types of work systems or processes that I can further schedule on a recurring basis to where I can start to remove myself from the business or that cloud can take over for me in the future. So for example, something that it ended up identifying when I did this was when our property management company is working through the process of renewing a lease, part of that on our end is like doing a quick little rencom search to identify, you know what the right renewal offer should be. And that's a fairly involved process on my end right now. But what I can do is I have a daily email brief schedule task running. Cloud said, hey, you know, you're running this daily email brief, add it, you know, add to it. If it sees any emails that are related to setting the rental price for a new apartment or renewing a lease and making a renewal offer to a tenant, have it run a rent com search for you and to draft to reply with that research already done. And I was like, great, yeah, do that. So once you actually connect cloud as well, you can start to ask cloud to improve how it's working on an ongoing basis. You know, for example, another thing that is a little bit more of a time consuming process is getting a lot of your, you know, your vendors, your contacts, like all of the folks that you regularly interact with into into cloud, which is something that's very valuable to do because at that point, for example, when you get a, and this is like a very specific use case for us, like we'll get a loan application from a bank. I upload the loan application to cloud coer can say, hey, complete this for me for this particular deal. And it goes in completes all the entity information. And you know, in a loan application, oftentimes you have to provide your insurance broker information, the title company information, pulls all of that from our contacts, completes the whole thing, form, he shoots it back over. Now, the only way that it can do that is that if it is if it has all of that up-to-date context as it relates to who we're working within the business. And another thing that I have been doing weekly is again, analyzing my emails over the last seven days and saying, and basically highlighting any contacts, vendors, you know, service providers that I should add to our notion database for future reference. And it says, hey, I noticed that you had a conversation with this lender. Is this somebody that you plan to work with in the future? If so, should I add them? And I just click yes, bang, adds it, connects with notion, edits notion on my behalf, et cetera, keeps it up-to-date itself. So a lot of this work is just getting it off the ground initially. And then after that, things start to get pretty straightforward. And what's funny is like, I created a notion account for our business. I synced it up to cloud co-work and I just asked cloud to build out the notion page. I just voiced the text described what I wanted and built it out for me. And it saves me a ton of time in doing all of this. Sync it up to my Google Drive and said, hey, look through all my Google Drive, identify what notion pages we should create. You know, yep, sounds good. I'm clicking through. It's asking me questions. It's running in the background. And it's just like, you know, just saved me a ton of time. So all of this to say as it relates to like, what's the found, you know, the fundamental message I'm hoping that you get out of this episode is work on building a extremely thorough foundation for your business and then connect it to cloud or chat to you or whatever you're using in your business, right? And ask whatever platform using cloud, if it's cloud to continually update it on your behalf and to continually keep that, you know, fresh. And once you do that, the adoption of all of these AI tools down the line or in the future, or as you want to make in person hires or not in person hires, excuse me, you know, in business hires or direct hires makes that process far easier as well because you've already done the hardest part when hiring, which is like you've built the required training tools and context that the new employee needs to be successful, which is like a byproduct of all of this. I hope you found this episode valuable. If you learned something, please leave the podcast a rating and review. And as always, I appreciate you guys listening. I'll catch you on the next episode.