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Liberating Your Business with AI: Sales and Marketing

Liberating Your Business with AI: Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are fundamental elements of finding new customers. But sales and marketing activity can also be a major draw on your time and resources.

So, wouldn’t it be great if you could automate some of the basic sales, marketing and social media activity? The reality is that AI is more than capable of taking on these tasks.

Let’s look at five areas of your sales and promotional activity where AI tools and AI agents can take on some of the fundamental workload.

1. Sales

AI sales agents can automate some of the most time-consuming parts of the sales process, including lead qualification, follow-up emails and scheduling. Agents score leads based on their likelihood to convert, helping you focus on the most promising prospects. They can also analyse sales calls to provide insights on what works, and what doesn’t.

AI product example: HubSpot Sales Software is AI-powered sales software that offers guided selling, sales engagement, deal management, reporting and analytics, CPQ (configure, price, quote) and coaching for your human sales team.

 

2. Business development

To boost your business development, AI agents can help you find new opportunities and increase your access to prospect data. They can scrape public data sources, like LinkedIn, to build comprehensive lead profiles, identify key contacts and even track job changes to turn existing relationships into new business opportunities.

AI product example: Apollo.io is an AI-driven sales platform that provides you with sales intelligence, pipeline builders, a call assistant and enrichment of your prospect data.

 

3. Marketing

A true AI marketing agent automates and optimizes your whole campaign, not just the campaign content. Agents use your customer data to personalize customer journeys, predict the best time to send emails and even recommend the next best actions for improving the campaign’s performance. You get better marketing results with less time-intensive manual effort.

AI product example: Active Intelligence is an AI-powered marketing tool that brings together data points and purpose-built AI agents to deliver fully realised marketing strategies.

 

4. Social media

AI agents for social media can automate your content creation, scheduling and performance analysis – all within the one tool. Agents can generate post ideas, write captions and suggest the best times to post for maximum engagement. They can also provide insights into what your audience is saying about your brand, competitors and wider industry trends.

AI product example: OwlyGPT is a social media AI assistant from Hootsuite. Owly pulls from real-time social conversations to generate fresh insights, effective strategies and social content that resonates with your customer audiences.

5. Data analytics

AI-powered data analytics tools help you quickly make sense of your sales and marketing data, without needing to be an analytics expert. AI agents can track hundreds of metrics, identify patterns in your customers’ behavior and give you tangible insights into which sales and marketing actions will drive the best results.

AI product example: Zoho Analytics is an AI-driven business intelligence and data analytics platform that’s designed to help businesses make sense of their data, without requiring a deep technical background. Zi, their AI Assistant, gives instant answers in the form of charts, reports and key performance indicators (KPIs).

These strategies provide less time spent on low-level sales and marketing tasks and more time to focus on your wider business strategy, talking to customers and working to develop your offerings. 

 

The following content was originally published by BOMA. We have updated some of this article for our readers.

Could Your Business Survive Without You?

Could Your Business Survive Without You?

Would your business still thrive, or would it suffer a catastrophic failure if you suddenly stepped away?

It’s tough to remove yourself from the day-to-day operations when you’re passionate and busy. However sudden accidents, illnesses, or family emergencies can – and will – happen and you need to be able to step back knowing your systems are robust enough to cope.

Build in resilience

For your business to work for you, you need to make yourself replaceable. Large corporations have plans in place to mitigate what’s known as ‘Key Person Risk’. But when you run a small entrepreneurial venture, who is the backup?

The more you can train and empower your team to perform the business’s essential daily functions without micromanagement, the closer you’ll be able to enjoy a lifestyle business.

Establish repeatable and scalable support infrastructure to run the daily operations and create a great team that you can lean on. Your staff need a common purpose – knowing why what they’re doing matters – as well as clear expectations around their roles. By creating a suitable work environment, where employees both individually and as a team are more efficient and likely to enjoy what they do, you’ll breathe easier knowing they have your back (and your business) in an emergency.

Finally, it’s important to know what the business looks like without you. An exit strategy is often thought of as the way to end a business — which it can be — but in best practice, it’s a plan that moves a business toward long-term goals and allows a smooth transition to a new phase. That may involve re-imagining business direction or leadership, keeping financially sustainable, or pivoting for challenges.

A fully formed exit strategy takes all business stakeholders, finances and operations into account and details all actions necessary to sell or close. Strong plans recognize the true value of a business and provide a foundation for future goals and new directions.

Top Tips:
  1. No one is irreplaceable – Challenge yourself to step away for a week. Which systems fall over? Which procedures get left hanging? Which duties get ignored? Go cold turkey as a test case for the time you may have to leave your business in the hands of others.
  2. Embrace innovation – Get systems that are simple, streamlined, effective and can be used by multiple key team members. Make sure anyone can log in and see exactly what’s needed for what reason at any time.
  3. Recognize the value you’re creating – A business that doesn’t rely on its owner is worth a lot more when the time comes to sell or pass the reins to someone else.

Talk to our team about structuring your business to make it more reliable.

 

 

The following content was originally published by BOMA. We have updated some of this article for our readers.

Understanding the Impact of Cost of Sales (CoS)

Understanding the Impact of Cost of Sales (CoS)

Cost of Sales (sometimes called Cost of Goods Sold) is one of those metrics you’ll hear a lot when reviewing your operating costs and the overall profitability of your business model.

But what does ‘Cost of Sales’ mean? And how does understanding this key metric help you get a handle on the financial efficiency of your operations.

What is ‘Cost of Sales’?

The Cost of Sales (CoS) metric measures the direct costs involved in producing or acquiring the goods or services that your business sells over a given period.

Think of it as the money that disappears out of the door with each sale.

For a product-based business, it’s the cost of the raw materials, the labour directly involved in making the product, or the wholesale price of items bought for resale.

For a service-driven business, it’s the direct labor or subcontractor costs for delivering that service. It’s crucial for understanding your true profitability on each item or service sold.

How can CoS impact your business?

Knowing how much it costs you to produce one unit or sell one service can be an incredibly revealing metric. Spend too much on operational costs and your margins will be too small. Spend too little and the quality of your product or service may suffer.

Let’s look at the impact of your CoS number, and what it can tell you about the financial efficiency of your small business.

1. Profitability:

A high CoS directly reduces your Gross Profit Margin, impacting the money available to cover your operating expenses and ultimately shrinking your net profit. Managing CoS is vital for creating sustainable earnings from your business model.

2. Pricing strategy:

Understanding CoS is crucial for setting competitive prices while remaining profitable. If your CoS is too high, you might underprice, leading to losses. If you overprice, you run the risk of losing price-sensitive customers. Your CoS is vital for guiding your minimum selling points.

3. Inventory management:

For product-based businesses, your CoS number is directly linked to your inventory valuation and management. When you reduce waste or obsolescence through efficient, proactive inventory management this directly lowers your CoS and improves cashflow.

4. Operational efficiency:

Analyzing your CoS helps you identify any potential inefficiencies in your production or service delivery. This could include areas like excessive material waste or unproductive labor. Streamlining these processes directly reduces your CoS and boosts operational performance.

5. Financial health:

When you manage your CoS well, you can build real strength into your financial health. Good cost control gives you solid financial foundations on which to grow the business. And by improving areas like operational efficiency and your gross profit margin, you also make your business more attractive to lenders and investors – opening up better access to funding.

Talk to us about reviewing your Cost of Sales

Want to give your financial health a welcome boost? Getting in control of your CoS and your operational efficiency is an important way to do this.

Book some time with our team to review your numbers and get your CoS under control.

 

The following content was originally published by BOMA. We have updated some of this article for our readers.

Can You Build a Viable One-Person Business?

Can You Build a Viable One-Person Business?

A solopreneur running a complete and viable one-person business is no longer a pipedream.

Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI, was recently quoted as saying that a one-person, billion-dollar business could be possible by 2026-2028, using tools like GPT-5 and the other generative AI tools that allow individuals to create and manage AI agents.

The idea that one person, a solo CEO and entrepreneur, could generate that kind of capital on their own, would have seemed crazy less than a decade ago. But with the power of AI and the accessibility of flexible coding tools and AI agents, it’s a real possibility.

Let’s look at how a one-person business could work, and how the basic business model differs from the traditional tech start-up model that we’ve known for so many decades.

How the old startup business model worked

Technology and software-based business models have been with us since the 1970s. Software has brought us into the digital age and given us a host of new tools to play with. And delivering a software-based business model has had a standardized model.

You will:

  1. Have your initial idea for a software product
  2. Write a business plan
  3. Look for funding (whether private or public)
  4. Hire a small team and start the business
  5. Develop and launch the product
  6. Find and convert your customer audience
  7. Refine the product and scale the business
  8. Generate revenues and make a profit (if you’re lucky!)

This is the old model. It works, but it’s slow to scale, needs multiple people and requires significant funding to make it work.

How a one-person business model works

There are multiple differences between the old start-up model and a one-person, solopreneur business model. The one-person model is predicated on the foundations of artificial intelligence (AI) and its ability to remove the staffing needs and automate your processes.

Typically, with a one-person model you would:

  1. Start with finding an audience – likely using a social platform to connect with potential customers
  2. Discover the needs of this audience and develop your business idea
  3. Create a basic coded version of your product/service idea using AI (vibe coding)
  4. Launch the product and refine it based on audience feedback
  5. Build a tangible community around your product
  6. Build AI agents that can be tasked with automating every aspect of service delivery
  7. Scale the business quickly and increase your audience exponentially
  8. Generate fast-growing revenues and hit your aspirational profit targets

The new model is less reliant on people and faster to grow. It can be controlled, in theory, by one solopreneur with the skills to utilize AI, create basic coding and find the right business idea.

What’s the true opportunity of the one-person business?

The true opportunity of the one-person business is to be able to found, operate and scale your business idea without any of the traditional foundations of a tech start-up.

    • You don’t need a huge team – in fact you might be able to run the entire enterprise yourself
    • Your delivery is entirely digital – so there’s no need for physical production processes
    • Your overheads are negligible, increasing your profit margins and revenues
    • AI agents can scale easily as the customer demand grows
    • Automation and AI removes the need for you to work ‘in the business’
    • As the solopreneur, you guarantee yourself an income and lifestyle.
What are the potential downsides of the one-person business?

The idea of being able to generate thousands, millions or even billions of dollars from a business where you’re the only human employee might seem like utopia to some.

But as with any utopian dream, there are potential issues and downsides to the solopreneur dream of creating a one-person, billion-dollar business.

Here are some possible outcomes to consider:

    • You could over-automate and lose connection with your customers
    • Your tech may break, failing to operate and scale as intended
    • Your AI agents may produce garbage outcomes and ‘AI slop’
    • You may feel the pressure of running the business solo, with no other founders
    • You may miss the social aspect of being part of a human team

Sam Altman’s dream of a one-person, billion-dollar business may become a reality over the coming years. With the speed of AI development, it’s more than possible.

 

The following content was originally published by BOMA. We have updated some of this article for our readers.

State of Our CPA Practice Today: Client Considerations of Private Equity

State of Our CPA Practice Today: Client Considerations of Private Equity

State of Our CPA Profession:
Client Considerations of Private Equity

State of Our CPA Profession: Client Considerations of Private Equity.

(Full Transcript)

Welcome to Weinberg Partners. I’m Jennifer Farrington, a business development director at the firm. Today we welcome Paul Weinberg, the founder and CEO of Weinberg Partners, a full-service CPA firm that provides client advisory and taxation services around the US and world. Thank you for coming.

Hi, Jennifer, how are you?

I’m doing good. Can you talk with me a little bit about the history of Weinberg Partners and how you got started and kind of where the firm stands today?

Sure. I founded the firm in 1986 with an idea marketing, idea to market to higher end executives or mid-market executives at Fortune 100 companies in the Chicago area. And we got a lot of clients that way in the pharmaceutical industry. And that really kick-started Weinberg Partners.

In 1999 I became a chartered accountant in Canada and was able to offer international services. The firm moved along, and in 2012 we primarily relocated in Las Vegas to serve the private equity business and venture capital business that was presently in Las Vegas.

Today, we’re a thriving firm with about 10 full time employees. We’re completely remote, and we have verticals in taxation. We offer CFO services. We have a non-profit practice, and we offer public company support services where we work with the company’s auditors on the 10k providing those types of services, we write the memos for their further annual reports.

So that’s it, in a nutshell. That’s where we’re very busy, very busy firm.

Given the merger and private equity activity we’re seeing today in the marketplace, can you kind of speak to some of the changes that you’re seeing and how it’s really impacting your firm?

Great question, the private equity and merger and acquisition activity. I just want to say, overall, for the profession, is probably good. I think there’s a lot of confusion with a lot of firms, maybe our size, maybe a little bigger, whether they should stay independent or not, whether they can stay independent.

We were going to stay independent. We employ AI. The younger generation is demanding it. So, we use AI for financial statement prep. We use AI for research.

You when you worked at a big, big CPA firm, there’s a lot of politics, and there was a lot of focus on the hierarchical structure of those firms, Partners, Senior Manager, Manager, we have a flat organization, and we feel that benefits us.

I think what’s happening in private equity is partners are running into each other. I don’t think that the focus is necessarily on the client.

As a matter of fact, I know it’s not on the client, but we haven’t heard from the clients yet regarding private equity or the bigger mergers and acquisitions.

All we hear from are the firms and the consultants about how great it was, and when a partner is getting a big check, it was great when a consultant makes a commission off it. It was great.

We haven’t heard from the clients, and I can tell you that in our firm, over the past year, two years, the clients that we’re getting are from large CPA firms, all of whom you know, that have gone through mergers and acquisitions.

And I don’t think it’s coincidental, and it’s not to disparage any of these bigger firms. They have great resources, they have great people, and I think that, you know, our focus is on the client and solving clients’ problems in real time.

And there’s a huge opportunity for firms our size, that are that have already adapted technology, that don’t need capital to grow. All these private equity deals are, is capital to the companies.

The private equity firm knows nothing about public accounting. I they’re banking on the CPA firm.

Like I said, I think private equity is good, but I think that there’s an opportunity for independent firms to grow their businesses from clients who maybe aren’t getting the attention that they otherwise did before there’s a lot more than meets the eye. So, we’re trying to grow this well.

Thank you for sitting down with me.

Today, and if anyone would like to talk about any accounting or tax issues, please reach out to me at jennifer@weinbergpartners.com.

Thank you. Thanks, Jennifer, have a nice day.