Chris Carter with Approyo

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Today’s guest is Chris Carter, a four time best selling author, founder of Approyo, MugatuAI and Charging Bunny, and a global leader in AI and technology innovation. Chris is the go to for companies looking to scale and strengthen their SAP landscapes, save time and money during migration, and leverage AI to create faster, stronger, more stable organizations. His teams help clients reduce complexity, boost productivity, and prepare for the future where AI and people work side by side. He’s here to share his insights on AI security and how businesses can harness both technology and human talent to stay ahead. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Carter: Hi. Thank you for having me. And please, can you walk with me in every elevator I walk into and pitch? You are. Wow. I feel like I’m pretty darn good.

Trisha Stetzel: I love this. You know what’s so much fun about creating these introductions for people is we don’t ourselves often go out and say these things. So I like to give that gift to you’re welcome and I’m happy to share.

Chris Carter: I’m going to I’m going to take that snippet. This is gone and I’m going to use that. I’m just going to go in my earpiece.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that, Chris. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Tell us a little bit more about Chris Carter and all of these businesses that you have.

Chris Carter: Well, I tend to stay very busy. I’m very been very blessed. I’ve been married 26 years to an incredible woman who has raised our two daughters. I am a girl, dad. And she’s given me the fortitude to take the things I love and to try to do things. Um, I learned very quickly when I was young, um, to try, uh, I had the one of the first computer, a Commodore Vic 20. I had an old Atari system, not the video game system, even though I had that and all these systems. And I went off and became a technologist. And I love to try new things. I love to tinker. I love to play, I love to learn. And so I’ve created a number of companies throughout my career and been very blessed and started writing books and speaking. And I still maintain three companies, plus a bar restaurant that my wife runs at, uh, thank God I have a whiskey. Well, shout out to Garrison Brothers Whiskey of Texas. Love you guys. You’re my favorite. But, uh, it’s fantastic.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s awesome. One. Congratulations on having a beautiful relationship with your wife and being a girl dad, because that’s important to you, I love that.

Chris Carter: Oh, I love it. If I could talk for hours just about my daughters, I am. I am the literally the proudest dad there could be. I I’ve got two phenomenal girls who are both in the medical field. One is a nurse and one is on for the oncology wing of Children’s Hospital. And the other one is an EMT. And they both care about people so much. And I give that all to my wife because I don’t care about anybody. No I’m kidding.

Trisha Stetzel: I doubt that just based on what I know about you, you are definitely hanging in there with all the people. And I can tell that it’s really important to both of our daughters for giving back in a way that they do. That’s those are both very hard jobs. And thank you to them.

Chris Carter: So enough about my girls. Now it’s all about me.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. Now let’s talk about Chris. Okay. So, Chris, instead of starting with the beginning because we’re definitely going to talk about Sep. I want to talk about where we’re at right now. And I know I heard through the grapevine, you just got back from a conference and it happened to be about AI. So can we start there? Let’s just dive into that and then we’ll back into the rest.

Chris Carter: 12,000 people attended this conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thank God there was air conditioning because it was 115 degrees the whole time I was there. And I’m a pasty white guy from Wisconsin. That doesn’t go well. But 12,000 people wanted to know more about AI and how it’s helping their businesses and what they can do and where you can go. And so I spoke twice. I’m very fortunate that they asked me to speak twice. And I was talking about some of the activities that we have in my new books and what we can do from businesses on a day to day basis. Why you should start looking to integrate it, how you can integrate it, no matter if you’re a business of one, or if you’re a business of hundreds of thousands of people. There are some little things that you can literally do day to day if you’re in marketing, if you’re in sales, if you’re in the technology team, even in the executive offices, the things you can learn about your company alone with AI helping you bind that together. It’s I get it. We’re in the not even the first inning of AI right now. And I and people tell me this all the time and I say, I haven’t even walked in the stadium as a former baseball player. I would sleep in as late as I could, then go to the baseball stadium to get work done and activities two, three hours in advance. We’re not even to that point in this, this new growth that we’re going to see with AI.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. That’s crazy. So first question.

Chris Carter: Yes.

Trisha Stetzel: What would you say to those who are listening today, who have still not embraced the idea that this is reality, that AI is here for us?

Chris Carter: I’m going to take off the glasses of this, and I’m going to point at them right now. You need to start looking at things, even basic things. Grammarly. Let that clean up your emails. Let that clean up the documents that you’re writing. Go to open AI, go to ChatGPT. Use Gronk, use the tools that are free for you to become a better you. Because that’s really what AI in my mind is all about. Will it take jobs? Um, still to be determined. I think there will be some jobs that will take. And I’ve actually given a speech, um, I do a presentation at a lot of universities where the junior developer will no longer be needed. Okay. Because of AI. Yeah. But what they do need is if you take that junior developer who’s about to get out of college and give them the business sense they need, because technologists need to understand the business and they need to communicate with each other. So that’s why I say it’s going to make you a better person. It’s going to make you a better writer. It’s going to make you a better salesperson, a better technologist, because now you have that helping you to gather that information from your company or from the World Wide Web, and how you’re going to market, how you’re going to promote. And it’s going to help you as that individual or you as that group and that company. And that’s where I see the such a benefit with it. And that’s why I take off the glasses and I point at those individuals watching do that now just by adding the Grammarly app to your MacBook or to your whatever computer you’re using, and watch it clean up and help you just little changes that how you speak and how you promote. It’s incredible. And how those tools they get you.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, and it’s moving so fast. We need to embrace some piece of it so that we can stay relevant in our businesses. Right? You mentioned the human component. Yes. I get that some of these tools are going to replace things, but that human connection or that human to human conversation, communication is so important. So can you talk about how still having that human to human connection is important?

Chris Carter: Oh, it’s it’s greatly important in the AI world because we cannot do this. We cannot have a conversation and have the video and activities going on between us as humans. If you are AI, you’re going to have an avatar that’s going to be manipulated, let’s say, and everybody’s going to know. Everybody’s going to know that the passion that comes out of me and whenever I speak is not there in an AI, I have a passion for helping people. I have a passion for education when it comes to technologies and AI and SAP and cloud, and even with our EV charging business, I have a passion to try to make people and things better. An AI avatar or bot only wants to do what it has to do to make things go forward. It’s not going to show you the passion that we feel for it, and you have a passion for the show. That’s why we’re smiling with each other, and we can interact with those smiles and those head nods. And we know what we’re doing because we have a passion. Ai doesn’t have a passion for those.

Trisha Stetzel: No. And it’s so for those of you who are listening, don’t go in your room and name your chat bot and never talk to a human because that that’s the wrong direction to go.

Speaker4: That was a movie each other. Do you remember that movie by Phoenix? Oh my gosh, that was such.

Trisha Stetzel: A long time ago, right?

Speaker4: Like 5 or 6 years ago?

Chris Carter: Yes.

Speaker4: What a.

Chris Carter: Foreshadow.

Speaker4: Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: It’s crazy. Okay, tell us about your books, because I know that you’ve got a handful of those as well. So tell us the titles and how we can find them.

Chris Carter: Oh geez, I’ve got 17 of them. Um, they’re all my little babies. They’re not my daughters. They’re my babies. Um, none of them are more than 150 pages long, because what I wanted to do with them, and I actually have some literally right here. So they’re there. These are 120, 130, 150 pages. It’s basic AI understanding. They’re all on Amazon. If you look me up on Christopher M Carter or Chris Carter on Amazon, and I literally want to give you some information, I talked to you about chatbots. I talked to you about what the basics of AI and Grammarly and how to use some of these. And then there’s other ones that talk about large language models and small language models and what those are, and why companies need to start looking at their data and they need to start cleaning up their data. Don’t go out if you’re a company and say, oh, just we’re going to put this in and forget about your data, because if you get everything from the World Wide Web, you’re going to not get all of your information. You’re going to get every information. And so I talk through why and what and how and just I, I act as if everybody is a kindergartner. I don’t have grandchildren yet, but I remember those days of taking my daughters to school and having to dummy down everything I said, because I’m a very intellectual person with a 160 plus IQ. I tend to get a little out there, but at the end of the day I’m like, okay, let’s talk to each other as if we’ve got 40 IQs and we’re just starting in this world together, and we’re walking to school together. And that’s what I really wanted to do because people are scared. I know my mom and dad didn’t want to be anywhere near this, and it’s people that are trying. Or maybe they’re afraid of trying. Well, this helps them to not be afraid. This takes the clown from underneath your bed and gets rid of them right away.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh, I love that. So you guys go to Amazon, look up Christopher M Carter or Chris Carter and you can find all of his books there. I hope you guys will take the opportunity to do that. So Chris, how can people connect with you if they’re already curious about learning more or want to know more about you and your businesses?

Chris Carter: Oh, I love connecting. So find me on LinkedIn. Give me a little message that says, hey, I heard you on the radio, come on in Houston Business Radio. And I was with Trisha. I want to I want to follow you. I want to talk with you. I want to have a conversation. I’m good with coffee, and I’m good with whiskey. So if you ever want to do one of those with me as well, please. I’m in Texas.

Trisha Stetzel: Maybe both. I’m just saying. Whiskey and coffee. There’s such a thing there.

Chris Carter: I refuse to answer that question on the fact that I have a speaking engagement in Ireland later this year.

Speaker4: I love.

Trisha Stetzel: That. So you started already? Um, like prefacing the next part of our conversation, I believe, which is rolling into SAP and data is so important and using AI. So let’s start somewhere. We can start at the beginning. Maybe let’s define SAP just in case people are not familiar, and then take a deeper dive.

Chris Carter: You got it. So SAP is actually, um, a German based company. It is an ERP solution. So an enterprise resource planning solution. And what they did is they moved everything together into one central database your HR, your finance, your warehouse management, everything that you possibly could do to run a company in one nice, neat, clean package. It’s called SAP and it’s the S4. Now we’re going to the cloud. That org or that information is in your central repository, your central database. This and you need to keep it as your clean. One record of truth. Because if you have one record of truth, it makes everything within your organization all on the same page. And when you have that, that’s a beautiful thing, because now everybody knows what they’re doing with the same data. And you can make decisions as a CEO, as a CFO, you can now make and leverage decisions based on that one record of truth, because it’s been kept and cleaned and the AI tools of SAP, Jul, and of course, the Microsoft tools that are built in help do that. And it makes it makes it wonderful and easy for people running those systems at companies to be able to do that.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. Okay. So those of you listening who have multiple spreadsheets and multiple departments, you need to talk to Chris. I’m just saying.

Speaker4: You’ve got.

Chris Carter: The largest um you’ve got the largest industry sector in Texas. And that’s the oil and gas patch. No matter if it’s upstream or downstream, whatever the activities are with oil and gas, literally everybody from Diamondback to Chevron to Shell, everybody has SAP running in their organizations. They just may not have migrated them yet like they need to. But those are the tools, and those are the companies and all the partners that are wrapped around it use it. We’re we work with contango and it used to be White Star Petroleum. Love that organization. I come down there and I meet with folks and they all are trying to still figure it out, and that’s why they work with us. But it’s a tool that makes it simpler for them to be able to do their jobs. So yes, they do need to have conversation with us.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes. Yes they do. Um, so tell me more about who SAP is for the types of businesses, the size of Of businesses. Who needs SAP?

Chris Carter: Well, ten years ago, I probably would have said it would have been for companies that are the largest in the world, down to maybe, uh, half $1 million or $1 billion. But now what SAP has done is they’ve brought it down to organizations. I just made reference to contango, White Star Petroleum. They’re a $20 million a year petroleum organization. And that’s a $20 million company. They’ve got smaller companies as well that are leveraging it. Um, smaller user counts. But at the end of the day, SAP allows you to bundle your finance, your HR, your warehouse, your oil and gas upstream, downstream activities. It gives you the ability to put it all in one central repository and one record of truth. So you can be the multibillion dollar diamond backs and shells and so on that are in the patch. Or you can be a smaller $20 million a year partner that is around the patch and any you can be in retail, you can be in oil and gas. You can be in manufacturing, discrete retail. It’s we’ve got industry solutions in the SAP ecosystem that fit everybody’s needs. You just need a great partner like us at Aprio to be able to support you, to implement and support in those activities along the way.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. So if folks are interested in talking specifically to you and the business at brio and SAP, what’s the best way to find you?

Chris Carter: So the best way to find the company is app. Com app r y o com or find me on LinkedIn. Uh, you can also hit us up at the info at. And if somebody would really like to have a conversation, we’ve got an eight 800 number on the website as well as my Twitter feeds and text feeds and X feeds and all those feeds. If it’s not me, it’s the company. So it’s, uh. Or find me at a convention or trade show. I’m literally, um, all over the place. And that that brings me to the point that we’re going to celebrate today, Trisha, today is my 50th podcast of the year with any group, and I am so honored that I get to do it with you. So we were.

Speaker4: Oh my gosh, back a little.

Chris Carter: Bit. So I was so happy that your number 5050.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow, Chris, that is amazing. I’m so excited to be a part of your 50th podcast.

Speaker4: You’re a sweetheart.

Chris Carter: Thank you. I’m I’m just honored to be here because I think what you do and how you help the Houston Houston business groups is fantastic. The knowledge you provide. And that’s strictly what we want to do and what I try to do every day. I’ve been very blessed to do this since 1989. I, I know you weren’t born yet, but they’re back in the day. They were the 1980s with a lot of hairspray for women. It’s kind of.

Trisha Stetzel: Well, you might be surprised that that was the year I graduated from high school, Chris.

Speaker4: But really? Oh my gosh.

Chris Carter: You’ve got perfect skin, girl.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh. Thank you.

Chris Carter: Look at me. I now have perfect skin.

Trisha Stetzel: Perfect skin as well. For those of you who are not watching, you guys need to get on YouTube and come watch the video of our podcast today and not just listen to it. I know most of you are in your car if you’re just listening. Alright, so uh, anybody who’s wanting to connect with Chris, you guys know I’m going to have all of the links in the show notes. You can point and click if you’re sitting at the front of your computer, please don’t do that while you’re driving. You can always just take a note and come back to it later. So you talked about, um, the data and the data being important and having a data repository that is the end all be all the place that you go so that it is the truth and it is the best data that’s available for you and your business, your company. How does that or how does SAP actually increase productivity and reduce costs and reduce the complexity of running a business? Can we talk about that?

Chris Carter: That’s a great question because what it really does, and I’m going to take off the glasses again for this to get in a little technical. It puts everything together in one place. You don’t have to have 25 different applications running. You don’t have to have a finance system. You don’t have to have a warehouse management. You don’t have to have an HR system. They’re all under the guise of SAP, and they’re all the modules. And all those modules come together. And so when they all come together, that’s how you get that one database of truth. A lot of times, and it’s still going on today. Companies have ten, 15, 20. I know companies with even more different disparate systems with all these separate databases, and they can’t get the data together to be able to make business decisions that help them guide their company for the future. Trying to do predictive analytics on anything in their company is literally asinine. It’s impossible. So now you get rid of all those systems you put together one and it easier to use, faster to use, more cost effective for them. And it gives you what you need from a knowledge base for you to be able to have those dashboards to see what’s going on in your company.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. So I hear brains rattling out there in my audience. Oh my gosh. I’ve been using these same 25 systems for years and the migration scares the heck out of me. So tell me a little bit about the migration process.

Chris Carter: So it can be scary and it will be scary. There are there are templates that we use. Um, SAP has been fantastic over the years in building these templates to match competitor systems or smaller systems. You can use everything from a QuickBooks to Sage to dynamics, and there’s a template to help merge that into SAP. Now, SAP is more expensive. There’s more to do, but now that it’s a cloud based environment, it gives these companies the ability to say, look, I don’t have to hand up my hands on the infrastructure and the networking and the security and all those ands are now gone. And you put it into that S4 environment on an Azure environment, and it’s pretty much hands off, except you have an organization like us that manages and monitors it, so you don’t have to do that activity. It helps you sleep easy at night. I’m I’m literally like the 1980s when we had pagers back then, instead of you getting that call, our team gets the call and we’re your pager to help you sleep easy at night.

Trisha Stetzel: And you need somebody like Chris to get and his team to get you through that migration. That’s what makes it better, right? And this human connection and having somebody on your side and a team of people who can help you with those things that go bump in the middle of the night, right?

Speaker4: Actually, let me.

Chris Carter: Pull out my hair. You don’t want to pull out your hair for that.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. Uh, would it be okay with you if we spend a little bit of time talking about your other businesses? Would that be.

Speaker4: Okay? You want to talk about.

Chris Carter: The whiskey or.

Trisha Stetzel: So, uh, we tackled it, right? We know. We know what that business is. And you have mugatu AI, which, by the way, we might have to, like, talk a little bit about where the name came from. But does that is it part of it or is it a separate business? What is that business focused on?

Chris Carter: Great question. Because it is a separate, separately wholly owned organization of mine that’s not part of apparel, but we built a tool called Overwatch that we resell to partners and to apparel as well as others that maintains and monitors landscapes across the ecosystem. So no matter if you’ve got SAP or Oracle or Dynamics or Sage, plus all the security predictive analytics tools, we built that tool. So it would literally monitor entire landscapes without having a higher 50 people to do it or 20 people to do it. It does it with one human being with multiple dashboards, so people can actually get the benefits of their systems without having to do all the day to day and the updates and the upgrades. Everything. That tool does it for them.

Speaker4: Wow.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s amazing. All right, so, um, some people may find the name Mugatu familiar. You just have to tell us where it came from.

Speaker4: So I hope they do.

Chris Carter: Well, if they’re if they’re my age, they might remember a Ben Stiller movie called Zoolander. And in Zoolander was an actor by the name of Will Ferrell in one of his first movies, and he played a character called Mugatu, and he was a bad guy. He was the mean guy. Well, I I’ve loved that name of all these years. And as a matter of fact, I goof around with one of the videos on. I’ll send you the link, um, that we’re doing with him in the early part of the movie. And it is to me, I just it rolls off your tongue. It’s mugatu and it’s it it was just the name I’ve always wanted to figure out how to use. And so I named my AI startup after that. And lo and behold, people love it.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my gosh, it’s so much fun. And thank you for sharing that. Okay charging bunny.

Chris Carter: Oh EV charging based upon solar. Rather than taking from the grid we give back to the grid, we actually sell all of our excess power to the grid. We never pull it. We’re always pushing it to the grid. Um. I love my Tesla. My daughter’s got it. Um. I’m love EV. I think some of the things that we need to do. By no means am I green. I’ve got my Corvette and I’ve got a suburban. I’ve got my trucks. But I also think that we should give back. And one of the things I thought about, I was literally driving that car around with my daughter one day, and there were weren’t many Tesla stations, and I was looking at the Tesla charger and I thought, it’s constantly on. Why is that? And I thought, well, what if you had a larger battery backup system? You had the ability to be able to pull from the solar. Look at all the sunshine and beautifulness in Houston. That’s there all the time. And I tell my friend Cliff Saunders down there, it’s a beautiful state. It’s very hot. There’s a lot of sun and it’s sunny, usually all 365 days of the year. Someway, somehow. What if we could harness that a little bit more, put that into systems that actually store it, and when it’s done being stored for the day at 2:00 in the morning, you can sell that back to the grid to help the grid better the rest of the world. And so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a passion project. A little side thing that I’ve been working with, and we’ve got a couple of them built up and it’s it’s working. And I love the fact that it’s working.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that and thank you. What an amazing idea. And I hope there are others out there who embrace that and follow.

Speaker4: I hope there are others that let.

Chris Carter: Us put them in their facility, because they don’t have to pay for anything.

Speaker4: And everything in.

Chris Carter: And we just work with the the governments to set them back up as a push instead of a pull.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. One more. Carter’s pub I know you made reference to it earlier. Tell us where it is.

Speaker4: Oh, so.

Chris Carter: It’s in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. It’s about 15 minutes from the Wisconsin Dells, which is the world’s largest city of water parks in the United States. And what we do is I was fortunate enough to have a wife that said, ah, you go pick out all the whiskeys. So the first set of whiskeys came from Texas, which is Garrison Brothers Whiskeys. Nancy and Dan are great people, and so we’ve got, um, all of their whiskey. And then I picked out the next 90 bottles of whiskey that I wanted from wherever in the world, um, my buffalo Trace’s and Pappy’s and, uh, you name it, it’s in there. Driftless Glen. And it’s great food. It’s great fun. We have bands every weekend. My wife runs that day to day, and it was another passion project for us. We, um, unfortunately, the owner passed away and it sat empty. And there weren’t enough restaurants in this area, especially with quality good products like ahi tuna tacos and rolls that actually had real hummus, real homemade hummus. So we’re very much an organically we take them from our local growers, we figure out where we’re going to make, and we have that as our menu. But we wanted to be healthier. Um, she saw her husband ballooning up in weight and said, let’s be healthy about this. And so we picked healthy foods. And again, it’s so much fun to see our neighbors come in and eat with us and generally are typically always there. And it’s fun.

Speaker4: I love that. Back to.

Chris Carter: Our community.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes, absolutely. You’re such a giver. Chris, I’m so blessed to have you on and to be your 50th podcast this year. It’s a blessing, uh, that you and I met. And by the way, you guys, I did connect with him on LinkedIn. It was just a thing, right? It’s how we got connected. Um, as we finish up today, is there one piece of knowledge that you would like to share with the audience?

Chris Carter: Oh, especially since we’re all business people here. Never be afraid to try. You’re going to fail. Look at baseball players. As former baseball player, I failed seven of ten times, but I still hit 300. Try try try. Never stop trying. And if you see success, keep trying. More on that success. If you failed, take the knowledge you learned. That is success. Every failure is a 100% learning curve and keep using that. And I so I tell businesses I love telling young people when I go to colleges and talk to them, you are going to fail miserably at a lot of things, but you’re going to learn from it and you’re going to take that knowledge and do something else, and you might fail that time. Look at Edison thousand plus times. He failed at the light bulb. And now I’ve got a light over my computer. I’ve got a light over my head. But just keep trying. It may not be a thousand times. It may be one time you fail and the next time five times. Just keep trying. And remember, at the end of the day, there’s a little sign right there that my cousin’s daughter made for me. Love each other. You know, at the end of the day, be a good human being. Um, you know, there’s a lot of things going on in this world, good, bad or otherwise. But remember, be a nice person. Be a good person, try to help others out. And if you’re getting up that ladder of success, grab your hand back behind you and pull somebody up with you. That’s good business.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my goodness. Yeah, we are cut from the same cloth, Chris. Golly, I’m so glad that you were on the show today. You have made my day and I know that you’ve made others days. Thank you for all you do in your community. Thank you for providing such an amazing service to our business owners and leaders who are out there listening. If you guys want to connect with Chris, remember you can find his books on Amazon at Christopher M Carter or Chris Carter on Amazon. You can find his books or at a p e r y.com so you can find his business there. Did I get it right, Chris?

Chris Carter: You did? Absolutely. You’re good. Next up next, I’m going to tell you how I named AB Royal.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. Yeah, I’m going to have to invite you back. I see this already. Okay. My friend.

Chris Carter: Thank you. Oh. Thanks, kiddo. I love that. Oh. Happy 50th. Happy 50th.

Speaker5: Oh! Happy 50th, happy 50th. This is amazing.

Trisha Stetzel: We’re celebrating. Oh, wait, I think I can do some confetti.

Chris Carter: Yes, we should be able to do this.

Trisha Stetzel: And balloons. You’re only confetti and balloons.

Speaker5: Woo! There they are. Happy 50th.

Trisha Stetzel: All right, my friends. That’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that I had with Chris today, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours. Your business, your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.