Brandon White With 3rd Brain Digital Operations and Automations

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have Brandon White and he is with Third Brain Digital. Welcome.

Brandon White: Hey Lee, thanks for having me man.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Third Brain Digital. How you serving folks?

Brandon White: Uh, well, what we do is, is we help people introduce AI and automations into their workflows in their business, really to drive efficiency and ultimately to have that efficiency drop to their bottom line so they can make more money.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in AI and automation?

Brandon White: Well, honestly, I’ve been doing it a long time, probably over 15 years. As you and your listeners probably may or may not be aware, but AI and machine learning and things like that have been around a really long time. They’ve actually been around for probably 50 years, but I’d been experimenting before these large language models came out, and integrating machine learning in types of things, like trying to find out, for instance, what someone’s hobby was or what sports team they liked in from email conversations that I was having in my own email. So I’ve been experimenting and built some software applications that were used commercially in the government for this type of stuff. And most recently, I had an exit of one of my companies, and I was doing some talks on AI and automation and where it was going. And the large language models were we had had access in the beta version, so we had seen it coming for over a year before ChatGPT specifically was released. And I started doing some talks and people were really interested and people would come up after after these talks and say, hey, can you come into my company and help me? And I really didn’t have anyone. I didn’t have an infrastructure, to be honest with you, Lee. I mean, I was happy to give people advice, but I didn’t have a consulting company. I didn’t even think about it. I was really just enjoyed talking about, you know, emerging technology and if it helped people. Great. And I had known a friend, Michael Greenberg, who had been in the space as well for a while out of Saint Louis and had this company, Third Brain, and we were in a mastermind group together. And one time, one day I was like, hey, maybe can I just partner up with you and we could work together? I’ve got a lot of people asking me about, you know, coming in and doing work in their company and getting them prepared for to introduce AI and automation. And we just he’s like, yeah, of course. So we hit up a partnership. And that’s how I wound up at Third Brain.

Lee Kantor: So where is the opportunity for those small and midsize businesses to benefit from automation? Is there kind of low hanging fruit for those folks, or is this something that they got to really invest a lot of time and energy and resources in order to, to get any value out of them.

Brandon White: Well, I think it’s just based on really where you want to start. So the low hanging fruit is you could just use ChatGPT or Gemini or, you know, I don’t want to say if you’re on the Microsoft platform, maybe Copilot. I’ve heard some mixed reviews about it, but or you could use perplexity. Claude, there’s tons of anthropic. There’s tons of llms out there that you could just use to hey, help me write an email better. Or hey, I need a contract for XYZ, or read this contract and tell me if there’s any problems with it, or automating your CRM or having things connected so that you can. If somebody emails you, it can dump in your CRM along with other information that the CRM may not automate itself. So there’s low hanging fruit like that. I was talking to a small business owner the other day and they’re like, oh, well, I need to build a flier for this event. And I was like, well, just prompt that ChatGPT and say, hey, I’m building, I’m doing x, y type of event. Can you write a promotion for that? And it did it. So those are type some of the lower hanging fruit that any SMB I mean anybody even if you’re in a, you know, small or medium sized business or if you’re in a big business in a division, you can help you pretty pretty much immediately.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a way, though, to, um, take your workflow? And then instead of having a human do the actual work, uh, have the automation, do the work, and then maybe just have the human just double check to make sure everything’s correct.

Brandon White: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s putting the human in the loop. The thing that we find with a lot of people is they want to integrate AI. They, they they’ve read about it, they’re excited about it. They’re excited about doing what you just described, which is, hey, I don’t have to do these manual labor anymore. I can get a form filled out automatically. I can get an order form filled out out of email. Um, but when we go in, the thing they’re generally missing is, and this is the case in a lot of small to medium sized businesses is they don’t have their operations mapped out. Usually it’s in their head or in one of the employees heads. And the thing about automating things and leveraging AI is you actually still have to know each step. You have to know each step that you do so that you don’t miss it. And I use this analogy. It was from my third grade teacher and she assigned a homework assignment. She said, go home and write instructions on how to write a, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And I thought, along with all the people in my class, that we were going to ace this thing, and I was like, this is the easiest homework assignment we’ve ever gotten. So I went home. I wrote what I thought were instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the next day everybody came in.

Brandon White: They had a drop their homework assignment on a piece of paper in a box, and then all the items that you needed to build a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are in the front of the class, and everybody would go to the front of the room, pick out randomly directions, and they had to follow those directions exactly, exactly like they were written. They could not improvise. And it turns out that I forgot to say, spread the peanut butter or spread the jelly, which obviously made a really terrible sandwich. And it was a lesson that I’ve learned or kept with me for a really long time. And it’s applicable in businesses where people will say, well, we know what all the steps are, or um, or they just they think they know these things. But then when we go to implement, it turns out that they didn’t know or they missed a step. So what we wind up doing a lot of the time is going in and saying, hey, let’s write your standard operating operating procedures down. And once you have those documented, now we can start to look at how can we leverage technology, whatever that is, to make this a more efficient process.

Lee Kantor: So a lot of people kind of want to skip the first step, which is documenting the standard operating procedures.

Brandon White: Yeah, they all want to skip it. So it’s a terribly painful thing. It’s painful to do that. So yes.

Lee Kantor: Well how do you. So how does. Obviously they’re avoiding it because it’s difficult. So at some point it has to be done. So how what’s the best way to do it. And is there a way. There’s no I way to do this. You have to just kind of manually write down every single thing that you do. Is there like, can you do it like by talking it like by having someone video you? Like, is there an easier ways to do this as opposed to just trying to remember every step?

Brandon White: Uh, the answer is yes. And we go in and we have a formula that we use, a framework that we go in to interview people, and then we wind up building the SOPs for people a lot of the time, if somebody wanted to do that, they certainly could. Well, one, I think what Neuralink and Elon Musk, you might be able to plug your brain in at some point. So I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but that’s probably coming. The other thing you could do is now you could videotape yourself on loom or something like that, and, and tape those processes, and you could probably feed it into a model and say, hey, write the steps for this and then edit that. So there’s different ways to go about it. Or you could just sit down and say, hey, Lee, when you fire up a podcast, what are all the steps that you go through that you do and you know, you could do them and list them as you’re doing them, or someone could watch you. And so there’s multiple ways to go about it. We tend to go in and help clients do it just because we’ve done it over and over again. And we’re pretty good at it to go in and say, hey, let’s we interview people and we usually get it right now.

Lee Kantor: But for people who aren’t ready for you, they can just have someone videotape themselves doing one task and just start there.

Brandon White: So let’s let’s break it down. If it’s something on the computer, I would probably do a screen recording and you could use something like loom for that. Or you could record yourself on zoom and, and you know, share your screen. And I would record it and then I would go back and I, being an AI person, might try to feed it into a large language model, although I do want to caution on doing that, because when you feed those processes into these publicly available models, you are contributing your data to the bigger data set in many cases. So I probably wouldn’t do that, but I would record myself, and then I’d play it back and I’d write down all the steps.

Lee Kantor: So that would be done manually. So there’s no escaping some manual ness in this.

Brandon White: Not in general. I think that you will eventually be able there will be a model that an AI model that you can just say, hey, watch me do this and write down all the steps, just like you could have an AI come into your meeting and do summaries. But like I said, I just caution against that a little bit because if you aren’t using a a AI model that has walls around your own data, then you are exposing your your company data to a bigger data set and that, you know, has some challenges or some bad things can happen because you could be exposing proprietary things that the larger model learned that you didn’t want to expose. So to get around to your question, I think there’s going to be some things in the future where it at least has to watch you. Um, if it’s a physical thing, you could videotape yourself and and probably feed that in, again into an AI model. But right now there is there are manual steps.

Lee Kantor: So now when the person is building out their standard operating procedure for their work. How many different procedures are there typically in a business that you work with? Is this something that there’s 100 or 10, or is this something that this is going to take a minute to get it all documented.

Brandon White: It can take a minute. It just depends on the you know, that question is the variables are how big is the business? How many people do you have working in it? How complicated are the things you do? If it’s a customer service, uh, division. What you know, what are the steps? How big is the company? Do people come in by phone? Do they come in by chat? Do they come in by email? What has to be done? How many systems have to be, uh, accessed to be able to one log that call or find out the answer to that call? If this is, uh, how we take an order to build a metal building. Uh, say you build pole buildings for people. Then what is that process look like? I mean, it can be as simple as three steps or it would be complicated as 100.

Lee Kantor: Now what about the like? I can understand, like if you’re an e-commerce business and you’re putting, you know, you have a shop, uh, a Shopify or you have Amazon and you’re writing an ad and then they buy it and then you have to, you know, send it to them. There’s those seem like processes that are fairly easy to capture and then to build that document. But what if your work is like a marketing agency or an advertising agency or a lawyer where you’re having a conversation and you got to be able to listen, and then you got to be able to kind of understand what the real problem is, not the problem they said they have. And it’s it’s more complexity. And it requires kind of human ingenuity and thought and problem solving, like how do you kind of build standard operating procedures for a company like that?

Brandon White: Well, I mean, the first thing is you could just have I drop in on your conversations and listen to your notes, because it can summarize and it can give you some ideas of what’s going on. And you could train that model with your with your own data. I think I think there’s probably still some challenges around, you know, you you mentioned a whole bunch of different use cases. So I think that it just depends on your business. It depends on some e-commerce businesses. What you just described may not be as sophisticated. They may not be using Shopify. They may be using an old version of WooCommerce that doesn’t have automation built into it. So what if you know, you have to integrate. The customer comes in through your website, you have a WordPress website, you have WooCommerce on the back end there, but you have a CRM that’s separate so that you can keep track of customer service and maybe your dropshipper. So you have to take that order and you need to put that order into another Manufacturing system. So that could be done manually. And maybe you want to. Automate that so that you could you can it automatically happens if it doesn’t already. So I think there’s opportunities in almost all businesses depending on the system. Sometimes in some cases you might not be able to automate everything. Yet just because some of these legacy systems that are ERPs or some sort of some sort of legacy software may not be open enough to allow you to do that. So I hate to say that it’s a case by case basis, but it really is a case by case basis, because even a law firm could be set up six different ways with their technology.

Lee Kantor: So who is the ideal client for third Brain?

Brandon White: Uh, we see a lot of Main Street businesses. So everyone from manufacturing companies, um, we see service companies, marketing companies who have multiple clients who are or managing multiple clients. Um, we we tend really to be focused in the manufacturing right now. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity there. And that industry has not made significant progress with their systems to date. So there’s just a lot of opportunity to to automate manual order taking and, uh, order taking from the customer all the way down to supplies. And those are the sort of opportunities that we’re seeing right now.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the pain that that manufacturer is having where third brain can really make a noticeable difference quickly?

Brandon White: Uh, well, just I mean, I’m going to give you one that’s simple. It’s just to automate, uh, uh, ordering process. So if if it was being done on a piece of paper, maybe it still gets done on a piece of paper. But we now scan that we we now digitize it, and now we automatically put that into the ordering system where that was being done manually before. I’ll give you another example. We have a franchisee company that has about 60 franchisees franchises of this of one type of restaurant, and they receive multiple accounting pieces from every store, every day that need to be reconciled. And they need to be reconciled because some people are paying by credit card, some people are paying with Uber Eats, some people are paying Grubhub, some people are paying debit card. And all these types of transactions are settled in different systems. And they were managing that system manually every day with all those spreadsheets. And they were missing a lot because they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t figure out if there was missing money. And I didn’t mention cash. People do still pay with cash and they couldn’t reconcile their books. And we automated their entire back end financials so that every day they can actually see if they’re off. And that’s a huge deal for their business because they were basically in catch up mode every day. They didn’t know if it was off completely or if they missed something. So I’m giving you two very different examples, but those are some examples.

Lee Kantor: Now in your business, what is the way that you kind of leverage AI and automation?

Brandon White: Well, we try to automate everything, everything from meeting notes all the way down to customer calls to anything that we can automate. We do try to automate. So our back end systems from our all tied together, I didn’t go through. We have different levels of automation that we talk about as a progression for people. A one through six. But what at level one you’re in analog. At level two you’re in sort of siloed cloud silos where we and then you get to an integratable cloud services where you can integrate software, but where we are in our businesses is that we’ve been able to get to a unified data layer. So that’s really stage four. And if you can get all of your data into one spot early in your company, then now you can do almost anything with it. And that’s when you say the best way for me to describe how we manage our businesses is that we actually have a unified data layer, so all of our information from all of our systems are all going into one repository. And once we have that, we can feed different systems with it relatively easily, which if you get to level five, you have automated workflows with the human in the loop. And then level six, which just isn’t completely possible for just because the technology is completely AI driven automation with no human in the loop. We just haven’t seen that yet. But with our business, we’ve gotten everything to a unified data layer, and that allows us to do automated workflows.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Brandon White: What do we need more of?

Lee Kantor: Yeah.

Brandon White: Uh, we’d love to have more customers. So anybody out there who needs help, who’s looking for to automate processes, document things, or figure out just a strategy of how they’re going to integrate all of this new technology into their business? I think the other thing, Lee, that I do want to mention quickly is that just because the technology exists doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your business. And that’s that’s the expertise that we really bring, because sometimes you don’t want to automate something just to automate it if there’s actually a reason not to. So I throw that out there to listeners, because I think it’s important to figure out not just using technology for technology’s sake, but really think through where in your business it makes sense and where it doesn’t in some, you know, automating customer service completely probably is not a good idea. I think anybody listening to this has hit zero and yelled agent! Agent. Agent. Operator. 50 times into their phone because you just want to talk to a human. So sometimes you need to figure that out for your for your business where it does make sense and where it doesn’t.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what is the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Brandon White: Yeah, just reach out to us. We’re third brain. The number three D brain brain.co.

Lee Kantor: Well Brandon, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Brandon White: Thanks a lot Lee. This was a lot of fun.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.