Fix My Business

Before you add another piece of software, another AI model, or another agent to your business — watch this. The problem: New business owners get told they need this tool and that tool and this agent. Next thing they know, software is 60% of monthly revenue. Scott has seen it firsthand. That’s not sustainable, especially when you should be protecting runway. Where Scott learned the principle — and it wasn’t from technology. About 20 years ago, Scott’s dad — a photographer in his second career — invited him to a weekend workshop in Cincinnati with David Ziser, an internationally in-demand wedding photographer. Ziser’s images are iconic. Twenty years later they still hold up. Scott watched him work: setting the scene, posing the subject, finding the light. Then the secret — Ziser would put a flash behind the subject, firing back toward the camera, so it lit up the veil, the train, and the white of the dress. All light. Nothing to do with the gear. Then Scott saw the gear. Cases of lenses. Multiple $5,000 camera bodies. Tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. Scott had a cheap camera and started to discount the whole thing — I can’t replicate this. Ziser stopped him: “You shouldn’t go out and buy all this equipment. You don’t need it. I would not invest in any equipment, any lenses, any camera bodies, until you know with confidence that you are missing shots that you could get.” And then the part Scott never forgot: “Everything I’ve ever bought has not come from this desire to buy this tool. It’s come from frustration from not being able to do what I wanted to do.” When Ziser hit a wall, he bought the cheapest thing that solved the problem. His equipment grew with his capability — not ahead of it. Applied to software: Earn it. The tool has to be justified by the business, not by what someone else in your industry uses. Keep it in budget. Don’t let software outpace what’s reasonable, especially early. Don’t grow into it. Grow, then earn it. No business ever grew because of the software. People on task are often cheaper. Transactional contractors cost less than a stack of subscriptions, and they don’t become a fixed expense. On the agentic-company videos: If your intent is to build an agentic business and you have the capital, go do it. But if you’re early and you’re not there yet, the tech becomes a boat anchor on your expenses at exactly the wrong moment. The mindset shift: The question isn’t “should I add this tool?” It’s “what constraint am I hitting consistently that this tool would solve?” That’s thinking first. Not tool-first. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Mall developer Alfred Taubman figured out that you can build the best mall in the world, but if people won’t walk into the stores, it flops. He called the problem threshold resistance — if getting in the door takes too much work, people just don’t go. The same thing happens with your call to action. The diagnosis: Most CTAs ask for too much. We all want the sale today, because sales pay the bills. But if the ask is bigger than what the buyer is ready to commit to, they walk. Match the ask to the commitment level. A book might be an impulse buy. A property isn’t — even when the monthly payment is low, the commitment is high. “Buy now” on a high-commitment purchase puts the brakes on. Make the next step a micro step. What’s the smallest thing they won’t say no to? Request information. Download a property report. Tell me about your situation. The attorney example: “Book a 30-minute consultation” sounds inviting, but with legal or medical the result might be something you don’t want to hear. That makes it scary. “Tell me a little about your case” or “download this” is a smaller door. Honor the micro-commitment. Once they take the small step, don’t immediately jump to the ask. They’re not ready yet. How to test it with AI: Take two CTAs you’re considering — A and B. Give your AI model the full context: whether the buyer is cold or already in your world, what the offer is, the pricing, everything. Let it ask you questions. Then have it simulate a thousand prospective buyers and compare response rates between the two. The warning: The numbers will be wrong. The model is wildly optimistic — it’ll tell you cold traffic converts at 10-15%. It doesn’t. Scott has had to walk it back every single time, and it agrees every single time. Use it for comparison, not prediction. You’re not looking for a forecast. You’re checking whether you’ve lowered the resistance enough, or whether you’ve picked the highest-resistance option without realizing it. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

My AI agent just found me $4,200 a year in payroll fees that I didn't know I could negotiate. Now, mind you, that $4,200 is from one vendor. And honestly, I wasn't even looking for that. I was looking at something completely different. So if I'm here to tell you that I'm surprised about something, I'm happy that I just found $4,200. Let me explain what's going on. Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you fix your business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP job. And today I want to walk you through two of the experiments that I've been running on this channel. And I'll kind of give you some updates because I can't stand when people run experiments or they tell you something they never get back to you. So here we go. Experiment number one. I talked about it in last week's episode, and it was using AI to do my bookkeeping. And I told you at the time that I was running parallel systems, my CPA versus AI. Which one was gonna battle it out? And essentially I'm happy to report to you that the September run, if you will, was smooth for well, both of them. I mean, the CPA did what the CPA does. And the AI does did what the AI did. Now, here's the difference. My C EPA has years and years of experience with knowing how to code my transactions. And so the rules are built in. Whereas AI needed help more frequently with coding the transactions. But here's the thing. Every day, Monday through Friday at 8 a.m. or thereabout, I would get an a message from my AI bookkeeper who would say, Hey, here's yesterday's transactions. How should I code them? And in the beginning, I needed to give a little bit more, but by the end of the month, it was really doing a great job of suggesting what the coding should be. So it became less and less of like, hey, code it over here versus just scanning it and saying you're good to go. And then it started to pick up on some. Scott Todd (02:29.698) well-established rules like, hey, when we get revenue into the bank account, well, then that's just revenue. when we have certain expenses like payroll, boom, it just hit the payroll. When we paid our VAs, it knew their names and it hit them as well. And it just started even not even recommending anything to me. It just did it. And so at the end of the month, when I compared the revenue and expenses from the CPA and the AI, what happened was The revenue and the expenses aligned. It matched as you would expect that it would. Okay. Now, there were some transactions that were coded differently. The CPH coded them one way, the AI coded the other. And I don't really believe that that is a deal breaker. And the reason it's not a deal breaker is because it's not necessarily that the coding has to be exact and precise. So when I say coding, what I mean is. That if I spent the money on software, that it's coded software, or if I spent the money on travel, that it's coded travel. It helps a great deal, especially if you're comparing year over year, or you're comparing different transactions, or you're looking at different categories. That's important. But at the end of the day, the most important part is that the revenue and the expenses total the exact amount, right, of profit, right? That's what we're looking for. Now, here are some of the differences though. First of all, the AI agent got me my financial statements much faster than the CPA did. In fact, I had the financial statements on the first day of the month from the AI. And it was well after that that I got them from the CPA. So the human involvement of looking at it faster to me was through the AI. Clearly, the lower cost option is the AI. The AI, I don't really know what it cost me. Because I'm just on a subscription and it's using like my grok bot subscription for 200 bucks a month. And clearly that was just some fraction of it, but way less than what I spend with my CPA. But the one clear difference that I found was the thing that kind of surprised me the most. And that was the fact that my AI agent began suggesting to me cost savings. Scott Todd (04:54.796) Now, some of them I just dismissed. Like, yeah, no, it's good. I'm I'm okay with this subscription, but it began to look at my subscriptions. And then it brought to my attention something that I was really surprised about. And here's what it was. I pay my payroll company. I have multiple businesses, so they each have their, they each have a payroll account with this company. And I pay them a fee every time we run payroll. So I think on one company it was like $140 a month. And the other was a hundred, I'm sorry, $140 per pay period times 26 pay periods. And on the other company, it's like 106 times 26. That was what we were paying. And the AI looked at that and said, Hey, I think you have a cost savings here. And I was like, What do you mean? And they said, it said, Hey, there is a lower tier plan. that you're avail that you qualify for if you're not using these other services. And quite frankly, I didn't even know I had access to those other services. So in almost three years, I had never used those services once. They were like background checks and other things that just really aren't relevant to my business. And in fact, I called up the payroll company and I said, is this true? Like, is Is this true? Because like I'm paying over $100 per pay period when in fact I think I qualify for a lower plan that's like less than $40 per pay period. And they looked at my account and they said, yeah, that's true. So with that one suggestion, my AI agent literally found for me $4,200 in annual savings. And it wasn't, again, it wasn't even something that I was looking for. I didn't hire it to go out there and do it, do that. I hired it to record transactions. And, you know, I think that the thing that surprises me the most is that at the end of the day, as a business owner, I cannot examine every single transaction and know that I'm on the very best plan. But and I'm not saying this to dog on a CPA at all, but the CPAs in the world. Scott Todd (07:23.982) They're not necessarily looking at those transactions either, saying, I think you have the opportunity to save money. And I just was really taken aback by the fact that my AI agent just delivered to me this gift that will continue to keep on giving. So that was $4,200 for the next 12 months. It's $4,200 a month, a year, sorry, $4,200 a year for multiple years. Again, I've been paying this for three years. So right there alone. I just paid for a bowload of AI usage on that savings alone. And it was all proactive. And if your AI agent, if you're using them, if they're not suggesting ways that you can save money, well, then you should definitely be proactive and ask it: hey, look at these bank transactions that you now have access to. Where's my cost savings opportunities? Question everything. Now, earlier this year. I did that with another service. I used it with Cloudflare. And I think my Cloudflare bill was almost, I don't know, $350. And AI suggested that, hey, that seems like it's kind of high. Give me the bill. And I gave it the bill and it said you should cut off all of these other services. You don't need them. And it also took my Cloudflare bill in January down from $350 a month down to $30 a So again, AI is very, very good at that. And it's not something that I've seen a proactive effort from the CPAs and the bookkeepers of the world. And again, I'm not here to dog on them. I think that they do a fantastic job. It's just an opportunity with AI that we can do something that's different. And you see this across the board. Lots of people are talking about AI saving on money. Well, this is how it helped me. Now, word of caution. Do not fire your accountant off of my podcast. Do not do it. Don't do it. But see, here's the thing: that experiment that I just ran gave me an answer to a question that I didn't ask. And what I want it to do is I want the AI to bring to me ideas that we can test. Scott Todd (09:48.43) Constantly, because that's the most important part of growing the business, is constant testing. And I mentioned this in episode 79 of this podcast, which was a few months ago, where I think it was in July, where I talked about this experiment that we were going to run on churn. And when I talked about the testing, I said, Hey, whenever we run something, we want to create a hypothesis. Whenever we run a test, we want to create a hypothesis and we want it to have a verdict of either true or false. Okay. It has to be true or false. And at the time, at the time, I said that the test that we were running in one of my companies is that in a SaaS product that we have, we did not allow certain people to accept reviews. And we turned that on, thinking that sellers with Reviews actually churn less. And that is still remains true that they churn less. And in fact, we did see a decrease in our churn from where we were. It was, it was let's see, it was 2.84%. And since we talked, it went down to 1.97%. Now that's a that's an improvement of 30%. That's pretty good. Okay. And I could have just come back on here and said, Hey, we yeah, we wanted to test to see if churn got reduced and it did. What yeah, we won. But as we dug into the numbers, we realized that the thing that we did, the thing that we did to reduce churn while churn was down. The thing that we did didn't have an impact on it. So again, what we did was we turned on reviews for certain sellers that didn't previously have it. And we saw that churn rate of that membership go down. But here's how we know it didn't have an impact. Because when we looked at the numbers, we realized that ultimately the P score, which is the correlation between that thing. Scott Todd (12:00.756) And something else, the measurement that we were looking at was a 0.52. Essentially, that was a coin flip. It could have gone either way. And while the overall number, the churn number, did decrease, the real failure occurred because the thing that we turned on to make it possible, it never got adopted. So, what do I mean by that? If you go back and listen to episode 79, you'll hear me talk about the fact that. We were going to make this switch within our system, which we did. And we were going to help people to get their first reviews. And that did not happen. I went back and looked at the team. I said, Did we do this? And they No, we didn't do that part of it. We turned it on, but we didn't promote it the way that you wanted us to. That was a failure on my team's fault. Like we messed that part up. Okay. Now we still saw churn go down, but the switch that we turned on to make it possible, it didn't get adopted. We didn't promote it. And in fact, none of the sellers in that watch list even used it. So it could have just been a coincidence that the churn rate went down. And that's the thing about the testing is that in a business, you want to always be testing something. If you're not testing something, then I think that you're missing a real opportunity to learn. From these micro experiments. And these micro experiments are the thing that will help you to innovate over and over and over again. Throughout the many episodes of this podcast, I talk about how important it is that you know your buyers, how you speak their language, how you know the audience, all of these components. And you learn these things through a lot of testing, experiments. Let's see if I use this headline. What happens? Let's see if I use this color. What happens? Let's see if I use this terminology. What happens? And we can't have too many tests running at one time because then they could overlap and we're like, well, I don't know what caused this to happen or not. So when I run a test in my business, it's a very clear test point. And we're running it for some period of time so that we can collect the data and say, this worked the way that we wanted it to, and there's correlation in there. Scott Todd (14:28.738) Or it didn't work. And there's correlation to that. And as I just said to you, with this whole churn experiment, it worked the way we wanted it to, but it had nothing to do with that. And that's important to know. It also identified for me a failure within my organization that says, hey, I had one expectation and it wasn't delivered on by the team. There was an execution failure there. And that's something that I learned through the experiment. And that's the benefit of you running experiments within your organization because it's through these experiments is how you're going to grow. So whether or not you're running, you know, a bookkeeping experiment or a churn experiment or a headline experiment or a color experiment, whatever it is, the most important thing to remember here. Is that this hypothesis that we're testing has to either be true or false. We have to do that. And remember, one of mine was a not yet. I'm saying it's a not yet. So in that case, it has to be false. If it's not true, it's false. And the other one, which was my accounting one, it was a yes. And remember, I'm walking away at $4,200 just because I ran the experiment for a month. So Go experiment with it, test it out. And again, the services that I was using with that was called slash books. You can just, it's in a GitHub repo. You can tell your AI agent, just install this and run it every Monday through Friday at 8 a.m. and let it link up with either BankSync. Or if you're using GrokBot, you can use Grok Finance. If you have a business question, head over to Scott Todd.net forward slash ask. Look forward to seeing you in our next. Episode. Take care.

For the month of September, Scott has been running an AI bookkeeping agent in parallel with his existing accounting system and team. Nothing has been cut over. At month end, he's comparing both sets of financials. The setup, in five steps: Bank feed. BankSync.io (~$7/month) pulls daily transactions from connected accounts via Plaid. Daily ingest. At 8am, Stu — Scott's bookkeeping agent — grabs the prior day's transactions, filters out anything already processed, and ingests what's new. The queue. New charges wait to be categorized. Nothing posts automatically. Human confirmation. Stu proposes a category and the rule it believes applies. Scott confirms or corrects. Only then does it post to the ledger. Portability backup. The ledger copies to Dropbox, so the books can move to whatever agent platform comes next. The rule: The agent doesn't spend money and doesn't post anything unconfirmed. A second test inside the test: Grok recently released a Grok Finance plugin with read-only bank access — also via Plaid. Scott is comparing it against BankSync to see if both produce the same result, since Grok Finance is free. On the CPA question: The accounting team isn't going away. The CPA still oversees the work. The question is whether the low-level coding work can move, freeing people for higher-value work. Currently running three companies through the system. More advanced land-investing accounting is being tested separately — Accounting for Land Investors students should watch their class LMS. Before you try this: Vet any repo you connect to your financial data. Check the maintainer, the update history, and what the code does with your information. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask

Meta released a new AI agent framework called Muse. There will probably be another one next week, and another the week after. If you try to rebuild your business around every new agent, you'll get whiplash and never get traction. Scott's approach: Don't chase them. Learn what each one is good at, and use it for that. What Muse does well: It's tightly integrated with Facebook and Instagram. Scott gave it a link to a Chipley, Florida property on Landmodo (0.66 acres, owner financed, $200 down, $229/month). Muse pulled the photos and details, drafted a Facebook Marketplace listing, and asked for approval before posting. What Muse doesn't do: It's a single "God mode" agent. You can't build multi-agent workflows the way you can with Grokbot or Hermes. The bigger opportunity: Connect Facebook Messenger, then have Muse check for new messages every 30 minutes during business hours and auto-reply with your next step, like a link to your website. Coming up: Scott plans to have his Grokbot agents hand new listings to Muse automatically, and he'll map that workflow out on a future episode. The takeaway: Check out Muse if you sell on Facebook Marketplace. But don't build your whole business on it. Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask