Using AI to Grow a Small Business

Evening everybody, I'm Simon Grew, I'm the Chief Exec and Co -Founder of a company called Magnify B which is a SaaS based platform to help small businesses grow.

So you've just heard two quite technical presentations, this isn't one of those.

So I'm CEO, I'm a Management Consultant by trade and this is a business kind of opportunity here we've got.

What I'm going to do is just take you very simply through something that I do all the time.

So one of the key things for me and just bear in mind that my little technical knowledge is perhaps dangerous as my CTO who's in the room tonight will probably attest.

Tailoring Partner Proposals with AI

So what I do is I start off by looking at our channel partners. So we roll out our platform through accounting firms and similar to small businesses. So it's all SMEs we're targeting at the end but it's through channel partners to get the platform out to enough people.

And what we do is when I speak to accounting firms of which we've got hundreds in the pipeline, I will then think about how they specifically would work with our platform, how it would help them specifically.

So I take what is my master template and from that I build documents, tailored documents for those accounting companies.

Now before we started using AI properly and the stuff we've got in the platform is far more advanced than I'm aware of and used to but I started using Claude recently before I did that it was a quite a time -consuming thing so what I've done is I've cut this down from say an hour or more research into something that takes a few minutes so basically I'm going to take one partner proposal in a few minutes that I've actually created and create a new proposal for that other partner but

Starting with a Strong Master Document

for now how do we do this so what I'm talking about is it's write the first one properly so everything we've heard about AI and it's all over the place of course means that we need to be very careful that the human in the loop if you like is doing what it needs to do.

So what we do is to say write the first document properly take that apply it to AI and say I want to have something that will give me the same outputs but tailored for another company which is perhaps quite different in its approach. So you may get with those accounting firms could be quite compliance based based, or they could be very technical, or they could be, which a lot of them are, advisory based.

So we load the master and the brand guide and we say this is what I need, one page, two page, whatever it might be, and we can do this for a lot of things and I'll show you a couple of other things we've been doing recently as well. And then we give it the new firm's context. So that's just what it'll do for us.

So I use Claude, very sort of co -worker a lot of the time, plus they're just a chat as well. And what comes out the other side is something that's in context, is fit for purpose and allows us to move on and do the next.

So the AI drafts what we call a tailored variant of course and then we just check it to make sure there's nothing in there and you can tell it things along the way such as you know I don't want m dashes in there because that's a giveaway for things and it's also got my style anyway and it's got my the words I would use by then because I've created that first document so you get around some of that that those issues there and then Then I'll review it, QA it and tweak it to fit that environment. And then we ship and then we repeat. So nice and simple.

Time Savings and Essential Safeguards

So last slide here, what I get is I reduce my time from let's say an hour to 10 minutes, it's probably far more than that to be fair because you go out and do the research, look at the different things. We all know how the LLMs work anyway so doing the research is very quick.

The point here is it's taking something that I've already created, tailoring it for another company and it takes just a few minutes. so we're looking at saving let's just say for instance if you you know outsourcing agency costs or whatever it saves you 150 pounds a document and we do hundreds of documents out to various

organizations but the risks are the things that we got to be aware of so before i'm going to show you exactly what we do so obviously some of the stuff on here is teaching you to suck eggs quite a lot of technical people in the room today but don't pay confidential partner information so many

so many large companies legal so there's quite a few Pins and Masons is one that would comes to mind they were sued recently and told by the judge not to be so stupid because they released some information from a junior who's never checked by the senior people and that information was a case that never actually existed so obviously hallucination through whatever platform they've used no one had checked it simple as that.

Data handling terms got to be in place all the time our T's and C's are very tight and they've got to be. Plausible facts, absolutely, just make sure it is.

So anything that I've created so far or my team does, we check to make sure it's 100 % first and then feed it through and tell Claude in this instance not to invent things and just to use the facts it's been given. Simple as that.

And then we've got generic AI voice. So I mentioned the em dashes and things like that. Things are giveaways, so we need to make sure those things are not there.

A Live Example: Creating a Partner Proposal

Okay, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you, hopefully, fully and I kind of put it on screen before so I could do this make it a bit easier so what I've written there is can you create a one pager to demonstrate just how the Magnify B platform could massively enhance how the accounting firm DJH and I'll say that because we're talking to them at the moment with the enhance that the accounting firm DJH work with their SME clients use my template document last year used for the for properly for the Danes document so this is just one and I've not run this I've run it for the last few hours and what I'm going to do is I'll let you just see what's on screen of course and as we just discovered it sometimes takes a little while

but just to show you what it's trying to do so all it's doing is taking a document that it already knows exists and I've got lots of them in there but I've given it one of the last ones I've created and I said okay this is what we need to use it's got all my formatting in terms of the company branding and everything else it's got the certain styles it's got bits and blocks that I put in before and it's got a little kind of logo bit at the end and it's got the various things I need, it's just going to take all those and say look, let's look at, so now researching DGH is zero partnership status, so I didn't tell it that, I just said go and find how we can work with them.

So one of the big things our platform does, it links into Xero, QuickBooks and soon to be lots of other things, pulls all your finance data in, places it back in a form of dashboards, benchmarks you, lots of things like that. So it knows to look now at things like this and say does it work with Xero, are they the right partner, how does it work for you, how can I emphasise that Magnify B can really help them with their clients. That's what it's trying to do.

So now it's updating table sales, branding and everything else. But in the meantime, so it's gone away and done all that research for me. It's gone to see what DGAH is doing, how big they are, do they fit our model. In certain times it will come back and say this isn't your usual size of organisation Are you sure? So I did one this morning and it was just a two -person accounting firm so very small and they came back and told me are you sure you want to do this? Your normal size is you know between 10 and 20 partners or more. That's the kind of stuff it comes back with.

So again checking rules against the template. It'll keep bouncing back and forth but at the end of the day there we go. So I've just created that document. So it says why they're a fit. So it tells me all this as well.

So DJ8's top 40 status in the country. Cloud ready. So they've got a zero platinum Martynham Champion and they've got a network structure around it and all in discussion with Hurstline so it's decided, because I've got bits in there from the previous ones, it's not relevant which is great. So if I just open this up now, so now it's just created this from scratch, got an em dash in there so I'll tell it off later.

So we've got, tells us what it is, it says why they were a natural fit, it's put all this together and obviously obviously I have to check it but that's the point. A scale that changes the maths, client base, ready to use, how we support them specifically so we have a copyrighted what if scenario planning tool in there that helps you understand your business and what the impact of changes will be in your business before you have to make them which is very powerful. Benchmarking etc and then it says look this is how we do it, promotion partner, we've got a 10 % revenue revenue share, very affordable licensing and we mention what the prices are and there's the bit at the end it puts in.

So really really simple one to start with, so what we do is use this for lots of things like this that are fairly generic but actually we need to then tailor it to that particular organisation.

Using AI as a Business Assistant

So the next bit to show you, so one of the things I do quite a lot, so my role is mainly around attracting investment for the company which we've done so far to about half a million, we're doing that now and also attracting the channel partner especially at the top end so my main role is the top 200 accounting firms trying to get them to buy into what we do and accept they can be a channel partner and move forward so you can imagine so on the left

downside here some of you may be able to see i've got quite a few things pinned here but two of them

Tracking Investors and Channel Partners

a channel partner dashboard and investor tracker okay so very quickly just i don't want to show too much detail on here this is what i can create and i have created and every single morning it runs and tells me the status of all my investment.

So I've just created a little tool at the side, and I've said look, it's an artefact, let's just have a look every day at different investors and tell me where this is going. So I've got quite a lot of things and people in there, and if I click on last activity, there we go, so it's just done this, different people showing in different places, it tells tells me, introduced by, company status, the last information in terms of activity, and how many days etc.

Same thing on the channel part of the dashboard. So that's now going to go in and pull that together, so 200 of 230 companies, it'll take a few minutes to do this one.

So what I'm doing now is to say I'm talking to endless companies, hundreds of companies that are accounting firms with SME clients, which is what our target audience audiences. And it's going now to have a look for my HubSpot, looking at my emails, matching it together and seeing when I've last interacted with all these people. And then it's saying to me okay well these are the things that you need to be aware of.

So every morning I get a reminder telling me to look at such things and that one, two or three individuals need me to act on them. So yes I can try and remember to do all this but if you imagine this is effectively having my own PA or VA or whatever it might be, someone to say to me don't forget these things now that takes and we've kind of analyzed this for a while that takes a tremendous amount of my time normally so when i'm doing this it is genuinely freeing hours per

day because a lot of my work is around trying to think who to speak to pull those things together get the information out even responding in slightly different ways telling them trying to make them encourage them to buy this or to get on board to sales of their clients and what i find is is me just having those tools to hand at any time and I can press a button within a few minutes I've got something else is fantastic.

So that's just two, three little examples of it but as you can see down the side here so I've got lots of different bits down here that I'm asking of course like we all do in terms of chats, but basically I've got some schedule stuff here.

Automating Daily Briefings and Follow-Ups

So all the time, QuickBooks Prospects, so Xero which is accounting company, accounting package was our primary one to begin with, we're now introducing QuickBooks so I've now got QuickBooks Prospects. So through accounting firms who do QuickBooks, so that's Intuit's product and they are then saying okay we've got clients who can do this, that and this and they've all got QuickBooks. So I now need to monitor that, so I've got weekly QuickBooks

Prospects in there, I've got Channel Partner Morning Briefing comes in and tells me the bits I just mentioned, who I should be focusing on, HubSpot Investor Follow -ups, so it's given me the whole list to look at plus it's saying you know I want to speak to John or Bill or whatever it might be or Sarah because they've said some such a thing the next thing I'm about to do

which you can do is to get it to look for news articles and items that people are writing on such things and say well actually you know is these investors are they actually doing what we want them to do with investing in things like us are they targeted correctly and what are they saying about this kind of market so fintech or business tech or whatever you want to call it and we're still at 200 out of 230 companies so we're nearly there and then I've got the top one

is the channel partner log watcher the sign up log watcher here so i've got so 19 new it's saying on there so each time we bring on channel partners it's telling me who they are what they're doing what they've done what the last activity was the same thing so as well as me being able to look at hubspot emails and everything else which you know it's a lot easier these days anyway to search on those things this is just here and the best part of it is it drops a little note in my diary and said here's the update click on it nine o 'clock in the morning whatever it might be and it's all

there to see as well okay so now it's double checking eight of 119 companies so this is the trouble it's a huge undertaking this though because it is linking to my hubspot which has around 8 000 contacts roughly at the moment so and also it can look at linkedin but it has to use co -work or something like that to look at linkedin i don't know if you're all familiar with it but basically if you ask something to look at linkedin it says i can't do that bots are restricted it can only do certain things but if you're running co -work on your machine and you give it access to your logged in linkedin profile it'll go away and do it so last thing from me and

Automating Educational Content

i can't show you this could take too long one of the things in our platform is we provide how -to videos so the whole system is about educating and improving the chances of success for a small business so one of the big things is we have around currently 250 videos short ones two to to four minutes long explaining how to do bits of business so it could be finance could be sales marketing process whatever it is and what we do is we run those videos through a tool we use called Synthesia which is very very good for what we want actually it's not very cheap but it's very good

and to do that I've got a choice where I've somebody to create everything from scratch we have created the scripts ourselves so the scripts in terms of you know someone talking into a video, then all we have to do is to say, here are the scripts, Claude, in code work, and I say go away and create these videos in the form or the format of the ones we've already got working.

Now it can create those in Synthesia, it can also then upload them to our CMS, Content Management System, and it can also publish them if I want. Now I don't let it publish them but I get it to upload onto the CMS.

So in the right areas, doing the right things at the right time, I get the chance to have all these visible so it saves me for it still takes quite a long time and it takes a lot longer in a way than a human would to double check it the first few times but what i get is i can set it off running and it will continue on its service and then it just just gives me the results at the end so as long as my machine's turned on i believe there's a way of doing that without the machine being turned on now um it will continue to happen so i in the end what i get is all this information information, all these videos created and on the CMS ready for us to check and make sure the system can take them.

AI as an Extension of Business Memory

So the last bit from me, if I can get 76 out of 119, we're getting there very slowly, is I've discovered that the biggest challenge for me at the moment is remembering too many things at once. We've got so many different clients, so many different things happening. We're a small company, we're trying to grow and we've got a small C -suite team. So this is effectively acting as my memory most of the time.

So the last 3 months I'd say I've been treating it as VA or PA and said okay look I can interact with it, I can talk to it on my phone, I've linked the phone to the desktop as well, I can just say can you do this, off it goes and does it and it sets the whole thing up and sets it running as long as my computer's turned on. What I've discovered as well is even if it's not it'll wait until it's turned on then go ahead and do it in the background as well. well.

So just personally from someone who's not technical and always has a struggle with admin and we don't want to start recruiting people to do that at the moment, it's a tremendous boost and it gives you the chance, I mean this has just been running in the background of course, but it gives you the chance to have data and information to hand.

And one of the biggest things for us is no matter what we do, we've been, we always preach the fact that management information is the key to business success and it really is. So that's what we preach and what we develop and deliver as a business. Claude helps us do that tremendously and that's just one of many of course, you know, as they say, lots of others exist.

So almost there, 117, 118, here we go, so fingers crossed, there we go.

A Complete Channel Partner Pipeline

Okay, so now I've got a full channel partner pipeline, 230 partners tracked, 40 active, less than 90 days, overdue follow -ups, new not yet contacted, I've got a full list of who they are, most urgent actions and there's the whole list.

Now that's channel partner status, prospective or registered at the moment, I've got activity, last connected, except contacted, so this is my full list that I work from all the time and every morning it will do this automatically, I'll just run it now, it'll be there when I wake up and it's all ready to go which is fantastic.

So takes the pain away, very easy to use and from a business perspective because that's my perspective it's just tremendous

Building AI into the Magnify B Platform

and what we've now got is the platform itself has got ai built in properly we can now interrogate all the finances from a business and give it the reports that we want tell people what to watch out for give it a small company a pathway to look at very affordably before they have to talk to their accountant and do more so that's what i use um yeah that's me