#373: Ian Williams on Putting AI to Work Across an Integration Business
In this week's episode of AU, guest Ian Williams of Aspire Audio Video Solutions joins Ron to discuss the weekly business dashboard he built in Claude Cowork that lands in his inbox at 6:00 a.m. every Monday.
This week's episode of Automation Unplugged features Ian Williams, Founder, President, and CEO of Aspire Audio Video Solutions, a luxury residential technology integration firm specializing in estate-level homes throughout the Washington, D.C. metro area.
Ian was last on the show back in August of 2023, on episode 248, and that's the one to listen to for his full backstory. Today we're focused on something newer, and that's what he's been building with AI.
In this episode, Ian and I discussed:
- The weekly business dashboard he built in Claude Cowork that lands in his inbox at 6:00 a.m. every Monday, covering KPIs, cash flow, backlog, and a 13-week forecast.
- Where AI shows up across his team, from technicians dictating daily project updates in Basecamp to project managers recording every walkthrough and QC.
- And Why his most effective prompt starts with "I don't know how to do this. Can you please help me?"
Whether you're still writing the occasional email in ChatGPT or already building automations across your business, there's something here you can put to work this week. So settle in and enjoy my conversation with Ian Williams. Let's get started!
SEE ALSO: #372: Curtis LeMaster on the Training Gap and the Future of the Smart Home
Transcript
Ron:
Hello, hello there. Ron Callis here with another episode of Automation Unplugged. Today we are here with one of our AI Insights episodes where the format's a little bit shorter and we're going to zoom right in to a player in our industry and what their story has been thus far with AI, and their AI adventures, if you will, and a specific problem in their business and how they've solved it and where they're at with AI. So today's guest is a returning guest to Automation Unplugged. I'm very excited to bring you Ian Williams. Ian Williams is an industry veteran. He is a member of HTSA, in fact, and he just brings a wealth of knowledge and experience on all things integration. He's award-winning. He's got many accolades to his name and to his businesses over the decades. And I'm honored to say that we've been friends and we've worked together for many years in different capacities. And when he and I were chatting some months ago, frankly, the conversation went sideways, as it often does if I'm chatting with someone, and we just started nerding out on AI things, and I was like, "Man, I would love you to share that with our audience." And he's doing a lot of things in AI, and so some of them he wants to keep very close to the vest and keep confidential, and some of them he said, "Yeah, I'm willing to share with others, and I'm pretty confident this would help others." And so we have one of those problems and solutions to share with you guys today, and I know you're gonna be inspired, because I looked at it and I'm inspired, and I can see direct applications to my business here at One Firefly, and I know you all will see direct applications to your integration firms. And then just one more nugget for you. If you wanna hear just more about Ian and his story and his entrepreneurial journey, tune into episode 248. So Ian was a guest on one of our regular episodes, which is just a longer format, typically around 60 minutes, and we recorded that back in August of '23, so just about three years ago. And what's interesting is if you think about that, ChatGPT and AI was here in August of '23. But for Ian and for many business owners, it wasn't really top of mind for him at that point. But as you're gonna hear here in just a minute, it's very top of mind for him in the way he's running his business today. So let's go ahead and bring in Ian, and let's get started. Hello, sir.
Ian:
Hey. How are you?
Ron:
I'm good, buddy. How are you? How's...
Ian:
I'm excellent.
Ron:
How's life for you? Tell everybody where you're coming to us from.
Ian:
So I am actually sitting in our testing facility, believe it or not, here in Sterling, Virginia. This is about 20, 30 minutes outside of Washington, DC, right next to Dulles Airport. And I'm gonna go to the wide view on the camera just so that...
Ron:
Yeah, that concept of the testing facility makes sense. Maybe tell everybody what's around you.
Ian:
Yeah, so like on my left here, there's, I think, 16 pairs of speakers. Dolby Atmos surround behind me with two subs underneath, and speakers in the ceiling. To my right are a bunch of Lutron panels with 50 or so light bulbs in the wall. And so on the opposite side of this wall is our rack facility, behind there. And so the technicians and the rack builders, they'll build all the racks, and then this room is mostly used, other than when I happen to get in here and for some privacy, for testing. This is where we configure all of our projects, test, program. Matter of fact, about 95% of the job is complete once we roll a rack out of here.
Ron:
Wow. So it's...
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
Is it very much, and that's maybe another episode, but is it like you're plugging an umbilical cord in and...
Ian:
You got it.
Ron:
That rack is lit up pretty quick?
Ian:
Yeah. It's split loom. It's already been tied into Future Automation enclosures on that side that are exactly the same out on the job site. So yeah, this could be a whole another podcast in itself, which I can geek out pretty well on because I am an operations guy and a process guy. So it really gets my juices flowing.
Ron:
Amen. At the end of the episode, we'll get all your handoffs with emails and phone numbers and whatnot, so people that wanna dig in sooner, they don't have the patience to wait for another AU episode, they can reach out to you directly. But let's talk about the subject at hand. This is an AI Insights episode, so maybe let's start. Tell us about your AI journey there at Aspire.
Ian:
Yeah. So I think for many, my AI journey started out with ChatGPT. Gosh, I can't even remember what version they were on at the time, but probably at the very beginning of '24. I remember specifically I started using it, then we had an HTSA conference, and I can't remember the gentleman's name that gave it, but there were only a selective few in that room, maybe 20 out of 100 members, attended, and it was just sort of eye-opening even at that time, and that was very early on. And so I was...
Ron:
Isar Meitis?
Ian:
Yes. Yes, it was.
Ron:
Yeah. I think he came... He's been a guest here on the show.
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
He's a great AI consultant.
Ian:
And you could see in the room right away, the language he was speaking and the things he was talking about was just kind of going over everybody's head, and I think that's when people started looking around and saying, "Wow, this has got a lot of power behind it and could be done and used in our businesses day to day and beyond." And then from there, as you know, AI has just gotten more and more powerful as the years have gone by. So it's an incredibly useful tool, for sure.
Ron:
It's a transformative tool. It's a disruptive tool. It's changing everything about everything, faster than many people maybe forecast.
Ian:
Yeah. It's hard to keep up with, honestly.
Ron:
Yeah. It's awesome. Let's talk team-wide use, just for perspective, because remember our listeners are guys and gals just like you, Ian, so...
Ian:
Mm-hmm.
Ron:
They're all on varying stages of their journey with AI, maybe from dabbling with writing an email in ChatGPT up through some of the more sophisticated use cases that you're gonna describe to us. What, across your team, maybe what's the level of use, and that's question one, and then question two is have you zeroed in on a platform? Like, is the whole company or team using a particular platform versus another?
Ian:
Yeah, so that's a great question. So I think early on, nobody in the company was using it besides me. Recently, my wife, who's office manager, she uses it every day. Not at the extent that I use it, but she uses it as a tool, and it becomes extremely helpful. Another example of our team using it is our technicians. They're required to do daily messaging at the end of every day using Basecamp, which is a software you're familiar with.
Ron:
Mm-hmm.
Ian:
So all the technicians now are using voice-to-text AI on all of their projects to kind of summarize what they did that day, and it actually does an amazing job articulating what they did, what they didn't do, what needs to still be done, which is extremely helpful at the end of the day. Not so much for me, I don't read it, but the project manager, of course, and then he uses this as well.
Ron:
So just for clarity, are you referring to Wispr Flow or another piece of software with...
Ian:
Another piece of software. So now with ChatGPT, you can actually use voice-to-text.
Ron:
Got it. So you're just going straight into ChatGPT and...
Ian:
Yep.
Ron:
Annotating right through there.
Ian:
Correct. Now, on another level, like my PM, he constantly has a microphone, and then it's annotating and doing some of the Wispr Flow stuff that you're talking about.
Ron:
Okay. And I have here on my desk, I'll just hold it up for demonstration purposes. Are you or any member of your team using like Plauds and...
Ian:
Yes.
Ron:
Recording client meetings and...
Ian:
We are.
Ron:
Doing that? Do you mind maybe just...
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
At a high level, it's not the subject of the show, people, but just what are you doing with this and how has it maybe changed your workflows?
Ian:
Yeah. So it's extremely helpful. I don't use it very much, although I do have one, but I can tell you the project managers all have them. So the project managers aren't required to use them, but I can tell you when the first project manager used it and then showed everyone, everybody had to have one. So he uses it on every walkthrough, every QC. So even when he's by himself. And just for those who don't understand what a Plaud is, it's basically a microphone recorder. And then it uploads a summary of what you discussed. And it can get pretty granular. So it hears the other person and it actually converts the conversation into a summarized version that's extremely helpful.
Ron:
Love it. So I want to say what you're gonna show us today was developed in Claude. Is that accurate?
Ian:
Claude Cowork.
Ron:
Claude Cowork.
Ian:
Yes.
Ron:
Is your team, anyone else in your company on Claude or Claude Cowork? And I guess I'm trying to understand the landscape of use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. What's the current landscape look like in the business?
Ian:
Yeah. So I would say primarily it's two use cases. It's ChatGPT, and it's Claude.
Ron:
Okay.
Ian:
Now, Claude kind of... ChatGPT just came out with their Cowork version. It's still app-based. The big difference between Claude Cowork and the others is it's a desktop version.
Ron:
Right.
Ian:
So the reason why I say it's very different is because it's a desktop version, it can actually see all of your files on your computer, whether you share them on a company level. Now, obviously you have to get permission to do so, but it does have the capability to see everything on your desktop computer. If you've been in business for 20 years and you have all that material regarding your company, it can go in there and do what's called a memory or a CLAUDE.md, and I don't wanna get, like, too much in the weeds.
Ron:
We can go as much as we want.
Ian:
But the one thing about ChatGPT is it's not going to remember every little detail about your business. You almost have to reintroduce that per every prompt. Now, it's gonna remember some of the conversations you've had, but it's not gonna understand like, oh, I want this logo, this font, Arial, number 10, right? It's not gonna do that. Whereas Claude Cowork and CLAUDE.md, you can get extremely granular.
Ron:
Yeah. You can prevent the necessity to repeat yourself, which is...
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
Just a glorious thing, the power of good memory.
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
All right. Let's zoom in to our use case here. What are we gonna dive into? What was the problem or the opportunity in your business to apply some tech? So maybe what was it and how were you previously doing it? Let's explore that, and then we'll talk about how you've applied, we've already stated, Claude Cowork to help you solve it.
Ian:
Yeah. So Claude Cowork in itself is a fairly new operating system, I guess you could call that, or AI, right? It's probably, what, three, four months old?
Ron:
Came out, I wanna say it was launched to the world, to my knowledge, in the December, January timeframe.
Ian:
Okay. All right. So we're at about six, seven months. So this is a very interesting platform in that I would say to anybody that is very interested in using it, this is something that the more you put into it, the better responses you're going to get. Where ChatGPT prompting, of course, a lot of people now watch YouTube videos and they've been able to master a lot of really good prompts. Cowork, it's a lot of work upfront, meaning the more visibility it has to you, your business, you can attach QuickBooks, Google Calendar, Sheets, Docs, whatever you want. The more you sort of set it up in the beginning, the better the responses are. So I took the liberty of doing that. I took a lot of time putting as much information, as many files, as much documentation that I had already created using other platforms, whether it's Google or Word or ChatGPT, and I imported that into the Claude Cowork frame, okay? And I started slowly working on some documents. I started getting more and more detail. For instance...
Ron:
Let's talk about that document. What did you aspire to have in front of you? Without maybe immediately going into how you made it happen, what did you want to have in front of you to help you run your business better?
Ian:
So I wanted a dashboard, and I not only wanted just a simple dashboard, I wanted a dashboard that was at a very, very granular level. Something that I could easily read on a Monday morning, take 20 or 30 minutes, go through it, and understand exactly where my business was at based on performance, financials, what we need to do in the next coming days or weeks or months. And I took a lot of time, but I was able to do it.
Ron:
How did you do it previously, previous to having this... We're teasing a bit, this new aggregated powerful dashboard, and we're gonna show them. So folks, we're gonna show you a... what do you call it when you black out all the sensitive data?
Ian:
A redacted version.
Ron:
Redacted version. We're gonna show everyone a redacted version of what you created, so we're not just gonna use words here. How did you do this before, before you had this new powerful tool?
Ian:
Oh, I mean, you've got to go to all different areas of your business, right? You have to basically get the information that those things such as QuickBooks, such as D-Tools, you can do reports, you can do summaries there. You can obviously do reports in QuickBooks, get your P&L, your balance sheet, all the above. But you have to go in there and search for it and do it manually, and then kind of sift through it one by one to kind of figure out where you are, and then sort of piece the puzzle together over hours' worth of work. This does all that for me.
Ron:
Right.
Ian:
I don't have to go lift a finger. I have automated this so it produces that document with beautiful gauges, how I wanted to set it up, percentages. It literally gives me top to bottom everything you could possibly imagine to forecast and understand how well your business is running.
Ron:
I think we show them, Ian. Do we go ahead and share the screen and put it up there?
Ian:
Let's do it.
Ron:
I'm excited. All right. I'm gonna let you drive. I'm gonna put it up on screen, and you just maybe take us through top to bottom what are we looking at, okay?
Ian:
Yep. All right, so I'm gonna have to focus out just for a second.
Ron:
Yep.
Ian:
Because I need to see my dashboard. So you can obviously see at the very top it says this is a redacted version. The amounts and some of the identities have been blocked out, percentages. And this is just because I don't want everybody knowing what our financials are. But this is done in a certain way that's extremely easy, sort of an overall summary, a green status. Lets us see some of those things that we've done really, really well. It also kinda gives me some red, some things to look at, some other information. And so this is just, like, straight away from a high level, tells me what week. But as we dive into this, right off the bat, it's given me the five most important findings ranked by business impact. So it's asking me about specific invoices, it's asking me about deposits, it's asking me about unbilled backlog, revenue truth down to the ledger, collections that are self-executing and what we need to collect in order to stay on track. Execution window in the next seven days out. What are the most important things that we need to do? The pipeline, once we get down here, it actually gives me what my actions are for the week. So it'll have the reason, the impact, the who is behind it. You can see here on the right-hand side, the who. It gives us by when. So it's extremely detailed. And so as...
Ron:
It's exactly the way you wanted it because you talked to Claude and ultimately curated what information is presented and in what order, and in exactly what way you wanna receive it.
Ian:
Yeah. And if we have a couple minutes, I'll pull up another doc that kinda shows that, what I did in Claude, just for the audience to see what sort of work you have to put into it in order to get these results. One of the things that I was most proud of are sort of these KPIs. So KPIs for me, once you start getting into a multimillion dollar business, is extremely important. You need to understand from a high level where exactly your business is. Are you on pace for booked sales? Are you on your revenue pace, gross profit margin, net operating profit, your cash flow, your conversion rates, your backlog, your production? There's just so much that goes into it. So this, just from a high level, when I look at this, I'm like, "Okay, we're behind pace in our revenue," but booked sales, which is a different goal, we're at pace. This gross profit margin is thrown way off because we collected an extreme amount of money last week. It was our best week of collecting ever, and that hasn't been reconciled within QuickBooks yet. So it's showing our gross profit's 92%, which is just ridiculous. It's nowhere near that.
Ron:
So it's not real time. It's running a sequence on a planned schedule, and on that schedule it'll pull the data, synthesize it, and create this report.
Ian:
Yes, but I also told it that I do want it to be accurate for that date, and I'll give you an example. We're at the end of the month here, so our books get reconciled on the third or first Monday of every month. So the next report that goes out, there's a good chance that this gross profit margin will go way down. And also, that's there in QuickBooks knowing that we also have to order equipment from some of those collections. So again, once that gets reconciled, it'll get brought down. But I did ask it to give me a real time, real stamp from Sunday to Monday. And so I'm just going through here, but you can see it gives me the weeks of cash flow, invoicing runway, my client concentration, billing that's eligible for the next 14 days. And that's based off some of the proposals that are sitting in D-Tools letting us know based on phase and where we're at.
Ron:
Mm.
Ian:
So this is really, really going in there very deep and pulling and extracting information that simply I probably couldn't do on my own, unless I wanted to spend 40 to 50 hours a week doing it. I mean, here's real week signings. Here tells me all the stuff that I need to know. Booked by the month. This goes down sales velocity, relationship economics. It gives me my revenue and profitability analysis. And here you can kind of see that GP rate, month after month after month. You can see there, last week 236% So this is giving our average. Now, I would say this year we're running way above average than we normally are because we're having an extremely good year. Cash receivables, collections, 13-week cash forecast. It kind of breaks everything out, and this is based on your current expenses that QuickBooks knows of in detail in your balance sheet, credit card statements, your backlog, your production pipeline. This is the real deal. I mean, this is an incredible piece of work here that I can read this for 30 minutes and understand where we're at. It also gives me a report down here for my team. So I can actually say, "Give this to Janet, give this to Jeff," a couple others, and say, "Hey, this is what I need. This is still pending. We really need to close this right now."
Ron:
Yeah. This is fantastic. What can you share... I think anyone listening or watching, and by the way if you're listening, folks, you may wanna go over to YouTube and watch this one. It's pretty impressive, the visual here. Even with all the redactions, just seeing the type of information Ian as the business owner and operator has in front of him to make better and more informed decisions about how to run his business. So it's very, very cool. In terms of making this happen, Ian, just at a high level, and I know you had another screen maybe with Zapier. Did you wanna show us that maybe before we...
Ian:
Well, I...
Ron:
Wrap here?
Ian:
Yeah. I have the Zapier document. So these are some of the backend automations that we have. You can see here weekly D-Tools time entries...
Ron:
I don't see at the moment.
Ian:
Uh...
Ron:
At the moment we're still seeing... There it is. Now I see...
Ian:
There it is.
Ron:
Your Zapier.
Ian:
So at the top here, this is just one of the things that we're executing. So there's four steps in order to get this to tie into the Claude Cowork. But this is actually from D-Tools, it's sending out our time entries to a Google Sheet which then Claude Cowork can then decipher and read accurately to then ultimately put into the dashboard. So you can see here that every Friday at 8:00 PM, date, it's got a webhook, it goes out, custom report, creates a spreadsheet which then Claude Cowork can read off of.
Ron:
Yeah, so this is a very interesting and extremely useful piece of information.
Ian:
And it just kinda keeps going on. We're basically at the end here, but...
Ron:
Yeah.
Ian:
25 pages worth of information.
Ron:
Yeah. Amazing. Maybe close out, somebody that's tuned in, they say, "Man, I'd love to get started with that." What's maybe a couple of tips, methods, what should they do, people that are curious of how to start heading in this direction?
Ian:
Yeah, so I think the best tools are on YouTube. So if you go on YouTube and you look up Claude Cowork, and just look into the basics, start watching the videos, and the most important section are setting up that file, letting the desktop see other files, making sure all of your business stuff is there. Here's one thing that I learned from Cowork, which is probably the most important piece of information that I can give to the audience, and I wish I could pull up the other document, and it has all my prompts built in, and I'm happy to share that with anybody. What's really interesting is if you don't know something, you can ask Cowork how to do it step by step, and it will show you. So there was quite a few things I didn't know how to do in Zapier, and I was getting a little frustrated, and I said, "Well, let me go back to Cowork and just ask Cowork what I need to do." And it literally spit out or generated step by step on what to do, and it lined up perfectly with a whole nother software that I was using. It's amazing.
Ron:
Yeah.
Ian:
You can also ask it questions like, "Can you ask me five questions that you really need to know in order to execute this properly?" So it will tell you what to do, which is fascinating to me. So if you get hung up, you just ask, "I'm not understanding. I'm at a roadblock. Can you please help me?"
Ron:
Yeah. I think you said it wonderfully, so I'll just maybe give a different variation on the theme, and that is this environment of using AI is different than any of us have ever used in our lifetime. It's not a case where there's really ever a good reason to say you don't know. Because guess what, folks? None of us know. You can just go to AI and ask it and say, "How do I do this?" And it will literally give you the answers.
Ian:
Yeah. It's funny, in some of my prompts, my first word is, "I don't know how to do this. Can you please help me?" And as long as you have the ability to ask for help, you really don't even need to know what you're asking help to do. It will sort of figure that out on its own for you, which is just amazing. I could have never done this document by myself, or it would have taken me probably a year to kind of... But then I wouldn't have been able to automate it properly, which is so amazing. This goes out to me at 6:00 a.m. every single Monday.
Ron:
Yeah. Beautiful. Ian, thank you for sharing awesome content. How can people... I have some banners here I can put on the screen, depending on what you want...
Ian:
Yeah.
Ron:
To share. How can people get in touch with you?
Ian:
Yeah, I would say the best way is LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn account. I don't know it offhand.
Ron:
We'll drop it in the show notes.
Ian:
They can also... Yeah, drop it in the show notes. And hey, reach out to me via email. I'm extremely responsive via email. My email is going across the bottom. Just hit me up and ask me, "Hey," these are kinda some of the things I've been working on. I mean, you have no idea of some of the stuff I've done. This is just one project I've worked on lately. I've got technician matrixes. I've got labor calculators. I've got all sorts of cool things that I've done that are pretty incredible.
Ron:
Amazing. All right, so for our listeners, it's Ian, I-A-N, at A-S-P-I-R-E-A-V-S dot com. That's
Ian:
It is, yeah. We can be reached there.
Ron:
All right, so this is an office line at 703...
Ian:
It is.
Ron:
373-0700. Ian, thank you for sharing...
Ian:
Yeah, man.
Ron:
So openly and transparently with everybody. And man, congrats on your journey, and it sounds like you're well on your way. And it's really impressive what you've done.
Ian:
Yeah, we're getting there. It's kinda like you get this, and you have another level to reach, but we're doing good things. It's exciting times.
Ron:
Awesome. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Automation Unplugged.
Ian:
All right. Thanks, Ron.
Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.
Resources and links from the interview:
Show Notes:
Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-williams-07498017/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aspire-avs