A $10m Acquisition for Freedom and Family

So I really got to know the business and not all sellers give that kind of access. Because of that, when I was able to start on day one, I already had a plan. These are the contractors I would hire.

These are the pieces of software that I'm going to integrate with. And now I'm executing on that plan. Usually when people come in, they take 60 to 90 days to get to know the business.

Great, Anika. Let's – one more just question in the weeds and then we'll kind of zoom out to close us out. Sure. On this point of the levers that you're pulling to kind of arrest the decline and stabilize the business. And then further – layering in more tech, bringing AI to bear.

You mentioned that at the top. Talk to us a little bit about the near-term plans here. Not the big picture, moving into adjacent services and the kind of medium and longer term, but the immediate tech upgrade that you're going to do for this business and specifically with AI, because of course you come from AI at Amazon and layering in AI to small businesses is going to be

more and more a lever that we hear everybody pull. So let's learn from you.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the first thing before we talk about AI is really the team. So really, you know, getting to know the team, getting to know their strengths and weaknesses, and providing them the training that they need and what they need. So for example, none of the customer service reps have video or microphones.

They all have physical phones that they answer and they talk to, you know, on the phone and we need to communicate. So I put everybody on Google workplace and I have them installing cameras and microphones so we can talk to each other. And then eventually they're going to talk to our customers that way.

So really figuring out, you know. what they need, what their strengths and weaknesses are as a team, getting them to be more cohesive together. And once we do that, then we put the AI in.

Because if you don't have team cohesiveness, the business processes running, and then you try to insert something so new to people who have never used it before or are completely unfamiliar, that is too much of a shock. And ultimately, that's going to affect our customers. And so this is the first thing I'm working on.

Now, I am personally very capable of going through the business and saying, you know, hey, we can build an AI agent for this. We can like, you know, create cover design with a diffusion model. We can... there's so many different ways that I can do this myself.

What I'm doing is I'm actually hiring a contractor to come in and do that while I focus on the marketing. So what I'm looking for is for them to go in and do the in-depth interviews of every aspect, right? The general manager, the customer service agents, and really come up with a list of products.