Hey everyone!
This year is already off to a very, very interesting start for me personally and our members.
Sorry for the delay in getting this newsletter out there. Q1 was wild and we grew a lot.
Here’s what I’m writing about today…
1. What business owners are actually building with AI
2. More Entrepreneur Trading Cards (and Rand updates)
1. What business owners are actually building with AI
Over the last several years, most of what you've heard about AI has been sloppy.
Sometimes it's someone on Twitter who built something cool. They always talk about the cool thing, never the all things that broke along the way, or how it will break in the future if you actually do the thing yourself. Sometimes it's a use case that's genuinely impressive but has zero application to your business. Sometimes it's someone fabricating a story entirely.
Today, a teenager can clone himself as Sydney Sweeney on a video call. Fascinating. But useless if you run a plumbing company.
There have been smaller wins. AI video got good enough to actually use in marketing. One of our members used it to generate B-roll of his technicians, his branding, his uniform, repairing a water heater. Footage that would have cost thousands to shoot. He just prompted a tool. Genuinely saved him thousands of dollars.
Real, measurable cost savings. But still a rounding error on the promise of AI.
AI has mostly benefited marketing agencies. More assets, faster, without adding headcount. For someone running a plumbing company, even the stuff that sounds transformational tends to fall flat in practice. None of our home services members have cracked customer-facing AI voice agents yet. Customers recognize it immediately, get annoyed and hang up. Today most of our members use it as after-hours call coverage. It’s better than voicemail.
For most business owners, AI has been used as a better version of Google. A thought partner. Research tool, occasionally some analytics. Useful, not transformational.
All that changed ~2 months ago.
I noticed it because we run over 70 business owners through peer group calls every month. Most of them have been trying to figure out AI for a couple of years. And AI talk has dramatically increased only recently.
Nearly every call we run now, AI takes up ~30% of the discussion. Sometimes more. Every group has at least one or two people who have built something significant, something they're actively using that impacts the daily operations of their business.
The most dramatic example is a member of our home services group who owns a national mobile mechanic business and partner in two HVAC companies. Over 8 weeks using Claude Code he rebuilt his entire operating system from scratch. Phone calls, SMS, dispatching, invoicing, Google Ads tracking, route optimization, customer feedback, technician performance dashboards, job heat maps, online booking. Everything Service Titan does, and more, built by one person talking to an AI.
Before he built it he was spending ~$5,000 a month across his software stack. Now he pays ~$200 a month in API costs.
But the cost savings are almost beside the point. What he can do now that he couldn't do before is build whatever he wants. When he needs a new feature, he builds it. When something breaks, he fixes it. No support chat. No workarounds. No feature requests.
I'm not going to ignore the downsides. He has dramatically increased his key man risk. He's also likely reduced the marketability of his business if he were to sell. There’s probably deep security layers that haven’t been created. He’ll go through a trial and error period service titan has already gone through. His system has no uptime guarantees, no security audit, no compliance review, and no support team. And his $200/month in API costs assumes Anthropic's pricing stays where it is today.
He knows all of this. He made the trade anyway.
He's doing a live demo for ScalePath members in the next couple of weeks. If you're a member, you'll get the invite. If you're not and want to be in the room, reply to this email and let’s talk.
That's one story. Here’s 2 more…
One member runs a construction company. Non-technical guy. Over the last few months he built a multi-agent AI assistant that runs on a Mac Mini in his office around the clock, no screen, no clicks required. He named her Peggy.
Peggy has four agents. A finance agent that pulls live job data, generates his weekly work-in-progress report, and runs AR aging before the workweek starts, without him touching anything. An operations agent that scans his inbox every 30 minutes, maintains his to-do list, and sends him a morning briefing before he wakes up. A sales agent that keeps his CRM current and flags anything going quiet on the revenue side. A personal assistant for everything that doesn't fit neatly into the other three.
His team emails Peggy like they would any other colleague. She responds.
Another member owns a towing company. Couldn't sleep one night, started messing around with Claude around midnight. By the next afternoon he had a fully automated QA pipeline pulling recorded dispatcher calls from his phone system, transcribing them, scoring them, and dropping the results into a database for reporting. Something his team had been kicking down the road for months because nobody could find ten free hours a week to build it manually.
Five hours. Problem solved.
3 different businesses. 3 different problems. 3 different people with varying levels of technical ability. All of them built something real in the last couple months that they're actually using.
12 months ago none of this was possible.
There is so much out there being shared between small business owners in private group chats. If you haven't found a place where business owners are talking about what's actually working with AI in their businesses, I highly suggest you find one.
2. More Entrepreneur Trading Cards! (and Rand updates)
if you're just getting caught up on our entrepreneur trading cards, read this.
We've decided to double down on making more entrepreneur trading cards.
We didn't fully anticipate this when we started, but people absolutely love these things. They keep them on display on their desks. Kids love looking at their Mommy or Daddy as a trading card. I fully believe we're going to turn these into an artifact and celebration of entrepreneurship.
We've significantly developed our production process and can now make many more cards than before. And I would easily say that our designs are at least twice as good. They are absolutely amazing. Here's an example card, one of my favorites of Eric Pacifici.
Our member deck of 100+ cards is almost ready. We're handing it out at SMBash in a few weeks. After that we're producing our Class of 2025 Acquisition Deck, nearly 200 individual card designs for people who bought businesses last year. Then a Dallas-Fort Worth deck, aiming for 100-200 owners. Then decks organized around holding company owners and prominent CEOs.
We're also likely launching a separate brand focused entirely on making cards for anyone who wants them, businesses, communities, events.
If you want a card made for yourself or someone you know, reply to this.
A few other things worth mentioning…
Helping a member raise $1M in debt
Some of you saw my post on LinkedIn about this. One of our members was in a tough spot earlier this year. I basically became his part-time employee for a few days, tapping old contacts and old relationships, trying to find a path forward.
One of the most meaningful moments came from an introduction to Jeff Sands, the author of Turnaround Artistry. I had made Jeff an entrepreneur trading card at Main Street Summit and handed it to him in person. He loved it. Keeps it on display in his office.
When I made that card I had nothing to ask for. No agenda. I'd just read his book years ago and wanted to do something nice. That gift eventually found its purpose. With Jeff's help, our member saved well above $100,000.
I also found him a private debt financier. $1M loan. He's on the path to a profitable, cash-flowing business.
Negotiating a domain name
One of our members has the potential to build a worldwide recognized premium brand. He already owns a manufacturing company doing a few million in revenue, but he needed to lock down a six-letter domain that would last the next 30 years.
The domain was listed at $18,000. But one problem was that his last name is literally the domain name. We thought if he reached out to the broker directly he'd give away his leverage immediately. So I reached out instead.
Thirty days later we got it for $10,000. His target price exactly.
Domain negotiation is an obscure, opaque market. But it's kind of fun.
Launching in Dallas-Fort Worth
ScalePath's first in-person peer group. We have a strong business coach taking the lead on the ground there. If you're in DFW and want to know more, reply to this email.
Panama
In June I'm heading to Panama for a week with nine other entrepreneurs, most of them running holding companies with multiple businesses. We're surfing, disconnecting, and spending time together outside of a Zoom call.
This is the first trip we've organized like this. If it goes well we're planning to do more of them, open to ScalePath members and the broader community. If you're the kind of person who'd want to be in a room like that, reply to this email and I'll keep you posted.
Okay, that’s everything. See you next month!
Rand Larsen
[email protected]
