The AI Strategy Making Land Deals 10x Easier | Nick Turnbull

Brandon Parker00:00Welcome to the show. Today, have Nick Turnbull, the founder of growthboost.ai. Welcome to the show, Nick. Good to see you. Hey. Yeah. Good to see you again, Brandon. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, let's right into it. We've already been talking about AI a little bit. What's the most interesting thing you're working on with AI right now?

Nick Turnbull00:20Building out AI operating dashboards, taking you know, pre existing softwares that people have maybe just kind of like co mingled with, you know, Zapier or Make or just piecemeal operations that they've been running in their business with like old broken Excel spreadsheets and trying to connect it with CRMs. But now with the beauty of Claude code, you can like really bring all of these things to life and then also make them agentic by adding in, you know, agents to work alongside you in your day to day.

Nick Turnbull00:50So those are some of the fun things that I'm working on at the moment.

Brandon Parker00:54And there's so much... It's like Zapier feels like ancient technology right now. And it's so funny because two years ago, I was like, we're sending Zaps everywhere, we're doing this and we're automating. And now it's like, oh, you're using Zapier? Like, why are you doing that? Because it's... Yeah. What's a good example of something that was heavy Zapier that you've fixed with Cloud Code for someone's operations?

Nick Turnbull01:18Yeah. There's a company that I'm working with right now. It's a financial advisor, CRM system and they have over 50,000 ZAP calls a month right now. Oh my gosh, yeah. So a lot of their business is in there and we're slowly just starting to work on, like, taking those pieces out and moving it over directly, you know, direct webhooks and and, inside of Cloud Code. So one of those is just their top of funnel lead gen. When all the leads are coming in from all their different sources, they used to go to multiple different Slack channels.

Nick Turnbull01:54I'm now building Claude managed agents, which is basically the OpenCLaw version inside of of Claude, which I don't think a lot of people even know about yet. It came out, like, at the end of April, where you can set up a credential vault with several, like, MCPs or just connections into softwares as well as a cloud environment. And then you take that same, like, skill file that you would build in a chat, Claude Chad or Claude co work, and you would launch it in there, and then it's fully autonomous.

Nick Turnbull02:24So what it would do, it connects to a couple of their different tools, and it'll go ahead and scrape all of the research data that, you know, their sales team used to have to do that would take them, you know, anywhere between fifteen to forty minutes depending on the lead. And it does it in, like, thirty seconds. So now it's speed to lead to where the reps don't have to do that, and then everything's just queued up in their their systems to go ahead and just start making dials and getting on the phones and and also teeing up emails and things like that that connects to their other tools to use it.

Nick Turnbull02:55So that's a big one that I'm working on at the moment.

Brandon Parker02:58So the difference between when you're spinning up an agent like that and just a scheduled scheduled skill that runs is that it has MCP, like it has logins into specific places and it's not on a schedule, it's monitoring it

Nick Turnbull03:16consistently or what's like the, what's the core advantage of that agent model? Well, it's in a cloud environment, so then it can always be running constantly. With Cowork, your computer has to be open. So there's no... You can still do the scheduled task. You can... You know? Because, like, right now, I have it running in Cowork where it's running every five minutes. I was just checking everything in Slack and tracking the leads, which eventually will will move off of that to just webhooks. But, yeah, I think that's that's a big piece of it of why...

Nick Turnbull03:50Even though I love Cowork, it's kind of a pain because of that aspect. Now granted, you could set up an old computer or Mac Mini and just have co work always, like, on and running that way. But now Claude has released this this new, functionality, so then you can just have it go and and just keep running. Like, they even have, like, prebuilt agents that you can start using, like, deep research mode, like what Kaparthi had put out with his GitHub repo. There's, like, some support agents that you can do with Zendesk and Slack and everything else there.

Nick Turnbull04:25So, yeah, there's a lot of possibilities right now just building directly into Claude. And, yeah, they're gonna continue to just push out more features every single day, it feels like, at this point because they're gonna IPO here shortly, and it's gonna just continue to advance.

Brandon Parker04:42Take my money. Yeah. Exactly. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I've got a a laptop right here next to me that's just like I will just put put co work into like long tasks and just keep it running as I'm like working on other stuff and it's just so it doesn't get in my way and I can leave it on when I go to sleep and stuff. So anyway, wow. It's amazing that I'm learning and building stuff with this all day and there's something like that that's just such a level up that I haven't even gotten to yet.

Brandon Parker05:13It's... There's so much to get into that it's all about picking where time gets focused, and I've gotta

Nick Turnbull05:20gotta reallocate some of my brain power to what you're talking about now. That's that's the pick. And the managed agents, though, they run on APIs and Claude, so they're not on your, like, normal subscription account, so there is a caveat there. But as long as you're smart about how you leverage the skills and set them up, they're not gonna burn a bunch of tokens. I think that's another hot topic right now, like the token maxing and, like, all these companies have these, like, boards of, like, how many tokens people are using as like their badge of honor. And I think that's a bunch of crap because it just shows people just don't have strategy right now.

Nick Turnbull05:52And they're not really thinking of... They're just looking at these as toys and just thought like it was gonna continue to be cheap and and now the compute costs are going up and just feel like it's wasteful.

Brandon Parker06:02Yeah. We see that. Our compute costs have... I mean, just on Claude stuff, we're over a few thousand dollars a month. And then we do heavy make automations as well. And so, there... All the all the infrastructure starts to add up. With the... What do you think about being heavy on make? Is there a way around that with with GHL or is... Or or make automations... Is there a good way to use APIs and webhooks with GHL?

Brandon Parker06:33Are we kinda stuck there because it's GHL?

Nick Turnbull06:37You can use their private integration APIs and and connect... Like I built out my own MCP within GHL to call in to Claude. Are you saying to talk to make in GHL? Or Well,

Brandon Parker06:49what we're the... I think the most sophisticated thing that we're trying to do right now or that we are doing, but it just feels a little bit clunky. I'm wondering if there's a better way to do it, is scraping the entirety of conversations and pushing them into Supabase. So for example, we have someone, let's say, one land seller lead. This person has had a conversation with Maya, the AI. That transcript is in GHL. Then we've sent them some text messages and maybe our client has got them on the phone and we have a transcript of the client's conversation.

Brandon Parker07:22Then we have some text messaging back and forth with them, maybe some emails. So we've got all this conversation history. We push all of that into Supabase, and then we reference it for context so that we can have a... So that Maya can now call outbound again with all that context like, hey, you... Your daughter went away to college six months ago and you said in, you know, July, you were going to reevaluate, you know, that type of thing where where they have context about what they talked about in the past.

Brandon Parker07:53It's just very clunky scraping all that data out of GHL. How would you approach that part? The scraping Well,

Nick Turnbull08:01I think that's a hard part you're running into right now because like their MCP, like if you're using those private API integrations to set up an MCP or just like a normal API call, the read and write permissions is all based off how they have it set up. You can't really do anything else there. So unless, like, you did... Oh, that wouldn't even work. I was thinking you could do the browser function, like the new goal mode that people are using and set it up that way. I mean, there could be a possibility where you do the MCP with the private integration into, like, ClaudeCode and then have the Supabase connected to ClaudeCode and then they start talking to each other.

Nick Turnbull08:38That could be an opportunity if you're looking to completely get away from make and then just have it set up that way.

Brandon Parker08:46Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, I'm just... There's all these engineering questions that you start to think through. I'm sure that at one point we just hit like some sort of tipping point where it's like, that's not even a problem anymore. And so sometimes it's just wait a little bit longer and things fix themselves. Know, it's like, yeah,

Nick Turnbull09:04Yeah. Mean, Opus 4.8, just turn it on, like, max and then just ask it that question and you'll be fascinated. Like, every time the new model comes out, if I have, like, current current, like, client products that I've already built, like, I'll take the new model and I'll run an audit on the code in GitHub and, like, reevaluate it. Be like, okay. Point out exactly, like, how this code base looks today. What are the security flaws and, like, things like that? And I think that's super helpful, I just did that this morning and found some gaps and I'm getting it corrected.

Brandon Parker09:38That's actually really smart way to leverage the new rollouts is just go review all the code bases. That's a great call, It's a nice little tidbit. I just went through and did tech hardening. So I went through and just looked at all of our infrastructure, basically, all of our logins who has privileges across the entire company. It's kind of like a massive project, but it was really eye opening. They're just like, oh, you have structural flaws in your layout.

Brandon Parker10:11But anyway, I'll I'll take that advice there because that's a good one to go look for holes in the code or ways things to make stuff more efficient. What have you seen with 4.8 that's different or what's like your... What's the biggest upgrade you think it's been... Is it noticeably smarter?

Nick Turnbull10:30Oh, yeah. It's definitely noticeably smarter. I mean, I, you know, I build some of these products and then some of them I can repurpose based off of, like, the use cases and how quickly I was able to, like, take one of my old code bases and then, like, strip it down and, like, relaunch it for a a new client, it was, like, thirty... It felt like thirty seconds. It was, like, so quick. I I just was dumbfounded by it. Now granted, I had to do a lot of work to get to this point, to get up to this point and like understand how to navigate it, but like, yeah, it's...

Nick Turnbull11:08It continues to just blow my mind, like the new coding language is just natural language and just have conversations. And as long as you know how to navigate it and put things together, you can do very fascinating things very quickly.

Brandon Parker11:24Are you... What do you see the difference between how you use Claude code and how you use Cowork and are you just mostly in Claude code at this point? Or do you bounce back and forth? And do you have, like, a clear definition of why you use... I know the limitations of co work, but I'm just asking, like, some people say I just only use Claude code because there's no reason for co work co work. Do you see it like that?

Nick Turnbull11:51Yeah. I mean, it's depending on the use case. Like, for a normal person in the world that's still going from zero to one with AI, like, co work is a really good UI, and it gets them thinking about how they need to do it. I just did an AI for small business owners, talk at my local library, which I never thought I'd be doing an AI talk at a library. Bring them back. But I was, like, telling... I was telling all these business owners, and there was, like, 35 people in there about how to go from zero to one and how to go from Claude chat to co work.

Nick Turnbull12:23And I started talking about it, but then I was like, wait a second. I'm like, how many of you are even using Claude? And only two people raised their hand. I'm like, okay. We actually need to go back even a step further and talk about just Claude chat and, like, discuss how, like, this is probably how you've used AI before, like, with ChatGPT or even if you've, you know, had any conversation with AI before. It's just, like, you know, back and forth conversations. So then I had to teach them how to go from a Claude chat project, transfer it into Cowork, and then start talking and and handling it.

Nick Turnbull12:55I mean, at the end of the day, like, Cowork... Like, the scheduled tasks are really good. Like, the the ability to connect tools very quickly for the normal person just means you can just go to the connector aspects is awesome. And then the other benefit is the plug ins. The... Because the plug ins are just packages of skills, and they just release the small business owner one to where it has all the connections built in. So it has, like, QuickBooks, PayPal, Stripe, HubSpot, and you can replace them with whatever you're using.

Nick Turnbull13:26Plus, it came with 32 skills that a small business owner would use. So then you just take that, drop it into the project and co work, and off you go. And that's your that's your new intern. That's your... And now you have to teach it, you know, your business and your SOPs. But at the end of the day, like, that's how somebody can get a good understanding. First, like, hey. We're gonna plan something out and clawed chat, and then I'm gonna take that because that's usually how I do all my planning. And then we're gonna take it into a ZIP file.

Nick Turnbull13:56I'm gonna download virtual studio code on your computer, and then we're gonna start chatting in Claude code in there and start building out these applications because that's a that's a different mindset and just like the way it's gonna work. But I taught a 65 year old last month how to launch an app on the App Store for a mold remediation business, so I definitely think it's still very possible. It's just what do you want it to do and how you want to interact with it.

Brandon Parker14:23So when you're... You brainstorm in chat, and then you're taking the entire chat into a zip file, like what what are you doing there specifically again? You're turning it into a zip file, MD file, and taking it into COD?

Nick Turnbull14:37Yeah. I pretty much... Yeah. I pretty much go into plan mode, the ask me feature, and then, like, I turn on voice mode, like, with WhisperFlow, and I just started having a conversation of, here's the project that I wanna build out. This is what I need to do. We're gonna plan it here. I need you to do, like, reverse interviewing. So you're gonna ask me questions. I'm gonna tell you exactly how it is. It builds out the whole, you know, folder structure of how it's gonna look. And then from there, I take that ZIP file, and then I launch... I drop it into virtual studio code, and then I keep my chat open because then I'll start having conversations with, okay.

Nick Turnbull15:13What are the prompts and things that we wanna start out with? Because you just take that folder and drop it into ClaudeCode and say build it. Like, it's gonna potentially still miss things because you're dropping everything in at once to where you can go in phases. And I like kinda doing that still, but there's other people that are gonna tell... You know, that might watch this and be like, you could just launch it. And, like, that's what I'm seeing differently in Opus 4.8 right now is when I launched my recent client's product last night, it started spinning up, like, all these different agents to start doing different things as it was just taking over my old repo, which four point six and four point seven didn't do.

Nick Turnbull15:55So you can tell, like, the way it's thinking and and processing things is a lot different.

Brandon Parker16:01Interesting. And so you're asking chat to build you a hypothetical file structure, basically? Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. I I think that that's probably a more... That's probably a faster way to do it and less token intensive. I've... Basically, do this a similar approach, but in Cowork and have it build out the file structure, like, as we're going and going through it. Then there's CoWork will eat up your usage very fast. Yeah. Yeah. So that's like, I gotta be token maxing.

Brandon Parker16:32So, okay. So yeah, I to I need to shift that into chat.

Nick Turnbull16:36That's that's a sharp idea. And if you're using co work, you should really be on the $100 plan because if you're on the $20 it's not worth it.

Brandon Parker16:45For sure, for sure. What else are you building? What's another cool project? Or actually, actually I have a question regarding the business owners. So when you go and you're doing the zero to one, what's the... What do you teach them? What's the entry point of here's... What's the thing that makes it click for them? Here's why this is so powerful.

Nick Turnbull17:07I think it's showing them, like, some of the scheduled task and, like, actually seeing, like, what it can produce. And that's that's something that I see, like, out of the gate where people's light bulbs start going off where I'm like, hey. I disconnected this to QuickBooks, and I did this, and I have it doing that, and these responsibilities are here, and then it's producing these tasks. But, you know, it's high level with a bunch of people in the room. I think it really clicks as if I'm sitting there one on one with them and, you know, I'm walking them through the exact problem that they're dealing with in their business.

Nick Turnbull17:42And when I show them how we can set up a co work for them, that's really when the light bulbs go off. Because sometimes, you know, when you're in these larger rooms with people or even on webinars, like, you know, a lot of people still look at me like I have eight heads. So... And I try to I try to keep it as, like, elementary as possible. And I tell people, I'm like, stop me if you think I'm up here when I'm really trying to be as minimal as possible. Like, I I did enablement for entry level sales reps for, like, eight years.

Nick Turnbull18:13So, like, I always had to be down here when I was teaching new people, and I'm still trying to do it with this technology, but sometimes I forget how much I'm in this on a daily basis, and I need to I need to go back down to ground zero.

Brandon Parker18:27I think that there's a mental... I think a lot of it's mental because there's two things working against people who look at this. For one, there there used to be this giant barrier to entry to being a computer engineer. It was a... It's like speaking German or something. It's like you don't just do it without massive amount. There's a barrier. And then the other thing is just the terminology like triggers that for people. You're like, Supabase or what database you're using or, you know, this and that. And it's like, so those things make people just like, nope.

Brandon Parker18:59I... Impossible. And I think, like, the the breakthrough that I try to give people when I'm one on one is like... Is that this is all now possible just talking how you talk. Like, you can just say the stuff and who cares what it's called? It's irrelevant. But if you do that over time, all of a sudden, you'll start getting the vocabulary to describe what you're talking about. You'll sound like an engineer all of a sudden, but still you never became an actual engineer.

Brandon Parker19:32You know, like, there's there's a there's a mental hurdle there for people that it like doesn't click until they do something themselves and be like, my gosh, you can't just say the thing and it does it, you know. Yeah. And that's the other thing. It's just like people don't... Sometimes people don't type like they talk.

Nick Turnbull19:49It's just like how people get mental blocks when they're writing emails. They overthink it, and they're trying to type something out. I'm like, that's not how you would speak this to somebody on the other side of, the conversation. So now you have the ability to just use WhisperFlow and just have a conversation with ClaudeCode, and you'll be amazed. Now, granted, you you can use Codex too. It's just as powerful, and there's people that are saying that it's better right now as well. So I I try and dabble on all of them to test it out, But at the same time, like, 5.5 came out and everyone's like, oh, it's AGI.

Nick Turnbull20:23Now 4.8 came out. They're like, oh, it's the same. And now this is AGI. And I'm just like, that's why I'm just like, I'm staying in my systems. I'm not gonna really try and change anything because it's just gonna be a back and forth race until something happens.

Brandon Parker20:37Yeah. There's there's something to be said for just learning something, driving deep into it, unless there's some sort of clear reason to switch for sure. What is the... What do you think the most complicated, impressive thing that you built that you even surprised yourself with is?

Nick Turnbull20:58Well, made that land that land ops CRM system for our land business. I was pretty mind blown by that. And then also when I was just dabbling with the OpenGIS data and ended up scraping 600,000 parcels off the off the county website and filled out internet. Yeah. That was pretty that was pretty impressive back in March. And I was like, oh, okay. There is a lot of possibilities. As long as the data's out there, I can get access to it. Those are two big ones that I was just like, okay.

Nick Turnbull21:28This... That was kind of like my gateway drug into like Claude code. I was like, all right, there is a lot you can do here. And then like what I just built for one of my customers that is a, he's a pretty big influencer on the internet and his particular field, he has like a million and a half followers. And I pretty much replaced like six tools, a couple of people on his team. And then now his YouTube manager just handles all of it. And it's created like a whole command center for his for his YouTube content.

Nick Turnbull22:01So he can figure out exactly what his competition's doing and how he can draw more eyes to his channel versus others. So these custom these custom solutions that you can build with Cloud Code, as long as you know how to have conversations with it, can really open everything up.

Brandon Parker22:19And are you... When you build something... That's something interesting because we are building out and we have we finished building out a giant command center for Land AI. That's our entire operation. Everything we do is now appified. And so everything lands in one spot anywhere we wanna see metrics for the cold calling, metrics for Maya, metrics for the clients, metrics for whatever, it's all just in one giant beautiful dashboard. And Yeah. It's it's just exciting.

Brandon Parker22:50The there's these things that you always kind of wish you could do or maybe you think, oh, you know, if we were a Fortune 500 company, we'd probably have this beautiful dashboard, like the heartbeat of the company and we could have our finger on the pulse. But you don't... You could be a you could be a laundromat now and you can have that. And that's that is... That's exciting.

Nick Turnbull23:12Yeah. I have a friend that's actively invest in real estate that I know that also owns like four gas stations in their hometown. And they are wanting me to build out that type of system. And they're like, yeah. We need to track it for gas levels and, like, all these different things, prices, and whatnot. But, also, we wanna integrate it with the restaurants that we have, our smaller restaurants that are in our gas stations. So, like, we can track food costs and, like, all these things. And it's just mind blowing. Like, that stuff wasn't possible before because there wasn't a software company that was out there willing to, like, give people the keys to do that.

Nick Turnbull23:50And now you have the ability to do that with all the coding functions within AI now.

Brandon Parker23:56What's the most interesting client that you think you've built out tools for?

Nick Turnbull24:04Well, now I'm working with a holistic doctor and he's also like pretty big on content, but he's doing all this stuff like taking his... Working with his clients and trying to build out, you know, their own internal, like, hey, this is your... Everything going on within your body. Now, granted there's like, you know, HIPAA stuff. HIPAA stuff involved, but there's a tool... There's a program out there called Karagon that you can actually work with to like connect all that data and stuff, but it becomes there.

Nick Turnbull24:38So it's like, hey, after you visit me, here's your system, here's everything going on in your world, because there are people out there right now that are using these like AI operating dashboards as, like, personal health software. Like, they're connecting their Apple watches, their Garmins, their old 23 and Me data, their blood tests from function, and they're getting all this snapshot. And they have, like, voice to text to where people are talking like, hey. This is what's going on with my body today, and it's creating its own own brain and, like, understands the body and can identify things a lot faster than needing to call up a doctor.

Nick Turnbull25:15So that's a pretty interesting thing that I'm doing right now. And again, I'm pretty vertical agnostic. Like, I'm still doing stuff in B2B tech, but there's so much opportunity right now, like in these little niches with this technology and that's really what excites me.

Brandon Parker25:33Yeah that is exciting. I have a health dashboard actually with function health and all that stuff you're describing. It's great. The best thing about it is it'll tell me to take breaks you know the days that like I'll beat myself up like oh dude you're gonna skip the gym today like it might... The system will be like, no, you need a rest day actually, you should just chill out, take a walk. I'm like, this is actually... Thank you. I need a computer to tell me that because I'll never choose that for myself. If I do that, I'll beat myself up on So,

Nick Turnbull26:05it's pretty cool. I'm debating getting rid of my Apple Watch and getting that new Google Air because there's no screen and it's... And I'll tell you the time, but it's just kinda like a band. And then you still get all the health data. Just trying to eliminate all the notifications and everything else going on in the world now. So

Brandon Parker26:23there's two things. Yeah. I wonder, like, it's kinda cool. You think about this massive technology shift could almost bring us back to more real life stuff. It's like maybe we stop typing on our computers and getting notifications on our phone and having our wrist beep all the time. It's like all of a sudden, it's like just this eerie silence and we're back to being human because AI is just doing everything in the background and we don't have to worry about it anymore, know, like that's a hopeful picture.

Nick Turnbull26:54Yes. I'm optimistic on that. I I mean, the millennials are are trying to bring back the nineties childhood, so I'm I'm a 100% on board for that. I'm so pumped on that. I actually went to the boardwalk with... For my niece's thirteenth birthday this

Brandon Parker27:09this weekend, And it felt like it was the nineties. The kids were in big baggy jeans and like the, you know, the the fair sounds going off. The people are... Yeah. Was just like, oh, this is... I... This feels good. I like it. Yep. So they're watching old movies and stuff. They're watching like the Goonies and old like Sublime, you know, the old old bands and stuff. Yeah. It's it's a really interesting time to be here. Sublime's got a new album coming out I just saw on Spotify. I was pretty pretty shocked by that but... No kidding. Yeah. I mean, they're having like a resurgence and I guess that makes sense.

Brandon Parker27:41They ride the wave. Yep. That's cool. Funny. So what's... What have you built specifically for land? What's the... What's your angle on land these days? And what do you what do you build, and what what what direction is it going? Yeah. So, I mean,

Nick Turnbull27:58going back with those... These AI operating dashboards, like, you have the ability if you have a buy box and, like, exactly, like, what you're trying to set up for your own business with the GIS data that's out there. You can create your own mapping systems. You could pull in all these different data points. Some of the tools that are out there now have open APIs, so you can pull in additional data on top of your own and really get get your acquisition channel humming as long as, you know, you can do all the distribution on the back end.

Nick Turnbull28:29So those are some of the things that I've been working on. Like, I was on the land portal podcast recently, and I've had two separate developers reach out to me. Very old school gentleman, been in the space for, like, thirty years, and they're trying to figure out how implement this. And, like, I'm building out acquisition hubs for their particular buy boxes in very specific areas of the country. But both of these guys can perform on the back end because, you know, one of them has done over, like, 4,000 spec homes. The other people have done, you know, over, like, I think close to $1,000,000,000 in multifamily acquisition.

Nick Turnbull29:04So... But they're all old school. They don't use these tools and technologies, and that... Those are some of the things that I'm starting to bring to the table and and helping them out and showing them what's possible today.

Brandon Parker29:16Do you have access to their data sets of all the stuff they've done in the past to pull from? That's

Nick Turnbull29:23that's another big piece of it. And it goes back to like my whole thing with Growth Boost, it's all about extracting your domain expertise. Like AI is only as good as, you know, the data that you're giving it, as well as like how you are gonna communicate with it. So you can't just be like, I'm gonna buy this out of the box AI and it's going to start doing all my lead gen for me and... Or whatever use case it is. If you don't sit there and train it and, like, do the things that it needs to do, you're gonna see really shitty results. And that's when I talk to my clients about those pieces.

Nick Turnbull29:54I'm like, okay. I can get you these certain data points, but I need the back end, like, the last thirty years of data on, like, what your house specs looks like and, like, all that. And that's how, like, we can really make these systems super powerful for you.

Brandon Parker30:09Yeah. There's there's the hidden advantage to people who were collecting information for a long time, even if it's as simple as just collecting your SOPs over the years. Like, here's kind of anything written down of how we do stuff or here's, like, data of how it turned out. All that stuff that used to be almost kind of worthless, it had very little marginal value, now is the keys to the castle. Like, it pays off exponentially if someone has been documenting and keeping track and there's just historic

Nick Turnbull30:42data, which is exciting for people who've been doing that. Yeah. There's a a home inspection company that I'm helping out right now that they've been recording all of their data for, like, the last twenty years on home inspections, and now they're using it as training data because, like, there's a huge gap in that industry right now to, like, get young talent in. So now I've I've been building them a system with, like, all their old, like, Zoom data, Otter data, like, old m p four, like, recordings, and it's built this training database for them.

Nick Turnbull31:13So that's another one that has been really cool to work on. And it actually got my whole idea around... I launched this product called Pass the Keys. So it's passthekeys.ai, and I'm targeting, like, business brokers, trusted advisers, like CPAs, you know, estate planning attorneys, where they have the relationship with the business owners, but these business owners might not be as sophisticated as that person, but still that stuff's all fragmented, where a lot of that domain expertise is just stuck in their head.

Nick Turnbull31:45A lot of these business owners with cash flowing businesses, they're boomers, they're about to retire. Some of them don't even have an iPhone, so they don't wanna be in that part of it. So I built it out to where it has conversations with extracts all of their domain expertise, and it gives them a view of their dashboard of customer data operations, key people that you need to interview, and it's all in a stop shop. So that's kind of my baby right now that I'm really working on outside of just doing things for clients that I think has a lot of legs to stand on as we're heading into the next like five to ten years as people retire.

Brandon Parker32:22That's really interesting actually, because I was just addressing something similar with our operations manager who has been with me for going on three years here. And he has so much random domain expertise of just... He's got the keys of the castle. He knows all the little things. Yep. And we have most of it systematized, but also he just does things naturally that I have no idea.

Brandon Parker32:52And so it's like trying to figure out what he's up to. And so what we ended up doing was... In in in collaboration with him, like we... It was like, hey, I wanna figure out all the different things that we're missing here and get it documented. And so we've gone through and interviewed every other position of the company and then had done an interview with him and then taken all those transcripts and put them into a put them into Claude and basically try to look for overlap on tasks or inefficiencies, lean six sigma things that we could make more efficient handoffs and all those things.

Brandon Parker33:29And there's just a massive amount of value in just passing... It's kind of like passing the keys thing. It's like what what are all these people doing? What do they know? And then how do we even make that more efficient? And how do we replace a key person if they were to, get hit by a car or something.

Nick Turnbull33:46Exactly. And that's exactly where I think there's a huge benefit for it. So where I'm going, I'm going to like a networking meetups with just business brokers and stuff and it's starting to get that out there.

Brandon Parker33:58That's cool. Are you at a... I mean, do you have... You must have to just choose which projects you can accept and work on. There must be... Mean, there's almost unlimited amount of people who are probably interested in you building for them. What do you look for in in the right client?

Nick Turnbull34:16I come from, like, a sales and operations side. So, like, as I'm going through some of these calls, I really try to understand, like, do they have the blocking and tackling of their operations already done? Because if not, then you're talking about like normal revenue operation things that I possibly have to go in and like reconfigure, you know, some of the bigger companies. It's like, okay, is everyone on board to potentially bring AI in? Or is there a bunch of change management pieces that we're gonna have to run into? So those are those are definitely like two things that I look into because like, I tell customers, I'm like, if your CRM is really crappy or like, don't have really good processes already, that's just like normal structure for a business, throwing AI onto it is gonna be really bad.

Nick Turnbull35:00So until you fix that or you wanna hire me to potentially go do some of that stuff, but that stuff might take a lot more time than than I wanna put my energy towards. I'm like, you gotta solve that before I can come in and help you. So those are definitely two of the big things that I look into. The best clients are the ones that are like, hey, I'm watching all this stuff on the Internet. I have like these three ideas that I see all these other people. Can you build these three things for me? And then we just kinda like plan it out over the next three months.

Nick Turnbull35:31Because ideally, like to do one project at a time unless they're like smaller projects and I can come in and be like, okay, we'll do this one in two weeks, that one in two weeks. But typically with these these softwares and things that you're building, you wanna build it in two weeks, test it for two weeks, and then like fully launch it in the business by week, you know, four or five.

Brandon Parker35:51What's the success been like handing those off once you get it built and then now they have to adopt it and then they have to keep it alive to some extent. Gotta keep it's almost like a living thing that needs to be updated and fed information. How how's that part going?

Nick Turnbull36:09It's good. I mean, it's taking some of my private repos and moving it over and, you know, transferring over Vercel and Supabase if needed. And primarily, if it's not super API like heavy, I'll just handle the keys, like the Anthropic keys and things like that during the initial phase, and then move it over from there. So that's kind of been... That's been a new world that I've been into, because a lot of these people have been on retainers, but I think that's a great company idea.

Nick Turnbull36:44If there would be like a one shot, like software that you could press to like transfer everything over. And there's nothing there yet because right now, you got like three or four tools on the backend that you have to eventually transfer. Now granted all those tools make it pretty easy to move it over now, but that is one piece that I've been thinking about.

Brandon Parker37:06How about personal systems? How has it affected how you work for yourself or just any personal systems you have?

Nick Turnbull37:17Yeah. And it's funny. It's like, I would love to spend more time on my own personal systems, but I'm so busy with my clients. And I was telling my wife this the other day, I'm like, I need to work on my business again. Cause I was starting on it. Like I got the Mac mini, I had open claw and I was doing all those things and it's integrated into Slack and doing that. And like I even had like my own like dashboard running, but then I got so busy with my clients that, you know, I still use it, but not to the extent that I know I can be like, Hey, this is super powerful. Like the Hermes agents, like that's the big thing right now.

Nick Turnbull37:49And it's interesting to kinda see people completely shift off of OpenClaw over to that. So there's, like, a list of my own ideas that, you know, I'm trying to build out. Like, the health dashboard's one. Finance is huge. Like, I use Monarch right now, and I'm like, oh, I could just... I could rebuild Monarch and just have it for myself. Like, anyone can get a Plaid subscription now to connect your financial accounts. So, like, that type of stuff and helping with the family, like, with my wife and kids and stuff, like having our own, like, just internal dashboards.

Nick Turnbull38:20So those are things that I'm hoping to have done by the end of the month. That's a big goal of mine.

Brandon Parker38:25Nice. Yeah. I... The the personal systems are the most... They, like, draw me because it's about my own life, you know, like my health system or my financial system, like you're saying. Building those things out, those are like my Saturday evening. Like, oh, I'm gonna go just play and build something for selfish. But it's like, I don't get to it as much as I like, but it's always like, I'm always very excited about it when I do. Yeah. I can only imagine. How many kids do have? You have two kids?

Brandon Parker38:56Three. Three kids? Yeah. I mean, you could probably build out some really intro... What do you... What what would you build for your, like, a lifestyle or a family management

Nick Turnbull39:04type systems? What do you see there? Exactly what I think I would build out is, a full family management system from, like, groceries to chores to like all the stuff going on in our lives. Like just being able to like have like an agent review that because I even like my wife and I would try to have like a sync up on Sundays, but sometimes that's hard. I'm like, if I could just have this agent, like send us a text message of like, hey. Here's your weekly digest of everything that's about to go on for the week and, like, command and conquer, that that would be huge.

Nick Turnbull39:36And there's people already doing it. Like, Greg Eisenberg, who does the the startup podcast, He just had... He had this... I forgot his... The guy's name, Andrew. I forgot his... I can't remember his last name, but he was just on there. Dude runs 30 companies and, like, he does it all through text now Cause he has, he has his whole system on a Mac mini back at his house and he runs everything through that. And he could just be constantly on the go speaking at events and like everything he's got, he was talking about like all of his personal health systems and what he does for his family too.

Nick Turnbull40:09And I was like, yep, that's exactly what I want to get to. And like, people look at that and like, that must be really hard. I'm like, it's really not. It's just sitting down and doing exactly what we talked about at the beginning of like, go into plan mode, take that, move in there, and then, like, you can do all these scheduled coding task and things now with Claude code to where it just keeps running and does everything that it needs to do. And then you gotta, you know, your first MVP and polished product and you just kinda work on it from there.

Brandon Parker40:40Yeah. That's one of the nice things that Claude code, and this has freed up for me as I do more of my work while I'm walking. I'll I'll still be productive, I can go on a long walk at the beach, two hour walk or whatever, and I'll just be hashing out the ideas like the plan mode off often that type of that type of thing I'll be able to do. But yeah, the idea of running it all from text is next level, but that's the way we're going. That is exciting.

Brandon Parker41:12What what have you built for yourself so far?

Nick Turnbull41:17Yeah. I mean, I built out my initial stuff for our land business, but personally, I haven't built out anything personally for me other than, like, I have my command center for growth boost, like, that I have tied up to GHL right now that, like, just manages, like it's like my project management dashboards for... It's pretty much my Notion. I don't need Notion anymore. I just Yeah. Fortunately, I took screenshots of Notion. I'm like, let's build this out ourselves. And I also wanna, like, make it look like these things. And now I have it to where it's set up for my own business, and I have a couple different data points connected.

Nick Turnbull41:52But that's as far as I have it right now, but it does exactly what I needed to do. And it's got a little agent there and helps me out throughout the week. It keeps me accountable on, hey, just had this Zoom call. Here's the top priorities and, making sure I'm I'm staying on task with everybody.

Brandon Parker42:10Yeah. That's the... You've got so much going on. I'm sure that the prioritization of your time becomes one of the key strategy decisions that you end up making. And it's... The way that I envision business is it's a prioritization and a decision making game because eventually we run out of leverage. We only have so much time. And so it's just, okay, what decisions do I make in what order decides how well I do?

Brandon Parker42:41And so I've been trying to take a lot more time making the correct strategy decisions and deciding where I spend my time. And I built out a... I call it CEO brain, but it is all of the decisions that I've made over the last year, the outcomes of those decisions, the way that I... Like, the mental models or frameworks that I use to make those decisions, and then kind of the priorities I thought the company had at certain times and the outcomes of that. And I'm trying to build a, like, a decision making assistant essentially that uses good frameworks.

Brandon Parker43:19And and that's something I've been building. I've I've been using Obsidian because it has you connect disparate ideas and see the relation between them. Have you been using Obsidian at all or do you...

Nick Turnbull43:32I like Obsidian a lot. That's what I'm using on the back end for Pass the Keys as like the business brain. Mhmm. And then also with the the holistic doctor, we're starting to build that out because like he's got all these ideas and like all all this different stuff and he kind of wants to start piecemealing it all together. He's like I could make my own GPT health for my specific, know, business. So it's interesting.

Brandon Parker43:57Yeah. I think that the visual that Obsidian gives you just with all those where it actually looks like a brain is one of the best Looks things like about

Nick Turnbull44:05a death star.

Brandon Parker44:06Yeah. For sure. It's like, yes. This is cool. Like, feels like it's gonna come to life at some point though. Know? So... Cool. Well, what else what else are you working on that's interesting or anything we've kind of glossed over here. You want to dig a little bit deeper into?

Nick Turnbull44:25I don't think so. I mean, level, like those, those are definitely all the things that I'm, I'm working on right now. I think like where we're at, Voice agents was, like, the big thing before. And now it's like, okay, let's take it to, an enterprise level and OpenClaw really open up the ideas. And now the ability to, you know, build these these, these dashboards. And it's interesting right now, like these dashboards, like, are they gonna be used...

Nick Turnbull44:56Like, are you gonna use them in five years or is everything just gonna go to voice? And, like, these dashboards will still live and you can log into them any any point in time. So, yeah, I don't know. It's just interesting right now, like where we're at, like, I'm kinda, you know, this is the wave that everyone's trying to build with AI, but like how long will it last before, like the next thing pops up? But I think we're going to get closer and closer to voice because iOS 27 just the Bloomberg like leaked it and Siri's going to connect to Claude. It's gonna...

Nick Turnbull45:28Claude, Gemini or Chatuchiki, you can choose. So then you just plug your, like, account in and then Siri has the back end brain of of a large LLM, which I don't understand how that's gonna be for, billing purposes and stuff, but I saw the visuals of how it's gonna be. I'm like, yeah, you could just be on a walk now and, you just ping Siri and Siri could go start doing all these things. So I would expect it more and more to get the voice. Like you're going to have a foldable phone, like the new foldable iPhone that's coming out.

Nick Turnbull45:58Like I even, where are they at? I got these, the, the meta glasses and I didn't use them for a year. Like we got them, we got them through Pace Morby's owners club retreat because I thought they were kind of creepy, but actually I've used them recently. I'm like, these are pretty sweet. Like, there's a lot of there's a lot of benefit there. And I've heard, like, I go to these trade events and things here in Chicago and because you can change out the lenses.

Nick Turnbull46:30And contractors are using them now to like take photos of things that they're doing and it's sending it... It's connected to Claude and it's sending it back to like their CRM or their operations team at their office in quoting. Wow. So, and these are just blue collar people that are building these things out and just getting these ideas, and I love it. So there's so much opportunity right now, it's super exciting.

Brandon Parker46:56Yeah, that's great. Well, I will be so happy when this, I don't have to lug around a cell phone, that feels like my least favorite piece of technology at this point, it's like, why do I have this brick in my pocket all the time? I don't like it, so yeah, that'll be... I want them to make at least just a tiny foldable iPhone is probably the probably the play. That sounds good. There's a new phone out there that's getting a lot of hype called side phone and it looks like an old iPod and you can slide out.

Nick Turnbull47:23It. They actually have the scroll, like you can use it, but you can slide it out and put like an old BlackBerry keyboard on it. And it has like the Proton VPN connected and it only has like three apps and it's like Uber, Google Maps. And like, I don't even think it has a browser on it, but there's a lot of younger people that are picking those up because of the screen time and everything else. And it's just kind of like a simple phone to use again. And then like, yeah, if you have that plus AI, like in other facets like voice, like, yeah, you don't really need that because like, what if you had like a Mac mini or some type of thing set up at your house that you could call on anywhere you're at and it's on like a local model and it's set up to your devices.

Brandon Parker48:07Yeah. Again, it's like this theme of the... A lot of the technology being abstracted away. It becomes more of the piping to get things done. So like the first example was Notion. We both were heavy Notion users. Now I just basically use we use it as like almost like a database or reference, but Yeah. Don't open it often because we interact through Claude. So Notion has been abstracted away. You just mentioned that abstracting away even even abstracting away the cell phone like with like a lot of that is just becomes unnecessary if you can just talk and get the thing that you want or need.

Brandon Parker48:44Oh, the dashboards, that was it. Like, are we gonna keep having dashboards? Well, I mean, they might go the way of Notion where we just open them barely ever. They just keep track of everything almost like a database. We might need to open them, but we can just say, hey, what's this number? And it'll just tell us. Or give me these numbers and it builds you a little page and shows it to you and not even have to worry about clicking through dashboards even.

Nick Turnbull49:06Yep.

Brandon Parker49:07Yeah. Interesting. Where is where is the best place for people to find you and who are the people who should be trying to find you? Like, someone if hears this and they're like, I want to work with Nick or talk to Nick, who's who are they and who aren't they?

Nick Turnbull49:26Yeah. I mean, right now I'm working with business owners of any shape and size. I'm working with large enterprise, like VC funded companies with 200,000,000 in backing and like 200 plus employees to like solo franchise owners. So I'm very open. They just, you know, the folks that are coming to me, they're open minded about AI, they wanna implement it. I'm not here to like try and, you know, convince somebody that they need to do it right now. I think there's enough people out there and enough information that, you know, if that's the choice you wanna make, you can.

Nick Turnbull50:00So that's primarily who I'm working with. I mean, I highly encourage anybody right now that is like in an IC role or a w two position, like get on skill jarred up anthropic.com. You can do Gemini's got it with Google, Chatuchiki has their own, like, go learn this stuff, become AI native in your space, because that's how you're going to level up against your peers and your job. That... And a couple of my old coworkers since I left my job in January have reached out to me to tell me like, Hey Nick, like, I took your advice.

Nick Turnbull50:34Like, I'm doing these things now. And like, everybody in the department's trying to learn from me. And I'm like building out these systems internally. And I'm like, that's awesome. Like, that's exactly what you should be doing to get an edge and like show that like, that's how like the modern day corporate America is definitely going to operate in. But I'm glad to be out of it. So I don't have to deal with it myself, but, but yeah, you can reach out to me at, you know, growth boost dot ai. It's got all my contact information on there. Follow me on LinkedIn. I am going to start a YouTube channel. Like I already have like my social set up for X and X and YouTube, but those are probably going be the three, three places you can find me and go from there.

Nick Turnbull51:13Like if you're just trying to figure out, hey, what exactly can I do with AI? Have a five minute assessment on my website. You take it. It's a couple questions and then a text box at the bottom where you can kinda like brain dump. And it'll send you an email and then a PDF of like a whole analysis on your business and everything that's that you potentially need to do there.

Brandon Parker51:37Fantastic. The final question I usually ask just a fun question as we wrap up here. If you could send one message out and the whole world would see it, say it's on Twitter, but the whole world could see it. So it's gotta be short, pithy. What would you say? What would be your message to the world? Man, that's a deep thought.

Nick Turnbull51:59I don't know. That's a hard one. I could probably go in a couple of different directions there. My Twitter tagline on my current account is, is, is stop wishing, start working. And I think that's probably something I would, I'd most likely say. And I always live by because, you know, there's, there's so many dreamers in the world and they see all this stuff on the internet. But if you just sit there and watch YouTube videos all day and don't take action yourself, like you're never gonna move forward. So definitely my big thing is do the work, take the action and you wanna achieve your goals like anything is possible.

Brandon Parker52:37Big time. I love it. Yeah. Well, great great to chat with you again, Nick, and we'll have to do this again, hear where you're going, and people can find you at growthboost.ai

Nick Turnbull52:46or at your LinkedIn, and thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. I appreciate it, Brandon. Thank you so much for your time.