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We find ourselves increasingly dependent on digital tools and technology in today’s rapidly evolving world. According to Gartner, in 2022, Worldwide IT Spending was forecasted to grow by 5.1%, and as of January 2023, there were 311.3 million internet users in the United States. However, simply using these tools doesn’t equate to digital adoption. Actual adoption entails integrating digital tools seamlessly into your everyday operations to accelerate business value.
Our guests today are Jeff Kikel, President of Freedom Day Wealth Management, and April Moss, Chief Operating Officer of DigiBuild, to discuss how to make the most of digital tools and fully embed them in our work processes to transform our operations.
Digital Adoption in Retail
A classic example of successful digital adoption is seen in retail giant Best Buy. As online shopping soared during the pandemic, Best Buy understood the need to leverage digital tools to survive and thrive in a challenging retail landscape. Rather than merely providing an online shopping option, Best Buy fused online and in-store experiences. This meant that customers could browse products online, see a real-time inventory of local stores, and choose from various delivery and pickup options. This digital and physical retail blend showcased how effective digital adoption can lead to a superior customer experience.
“I could just record one and then send it out to everybody, but just personalizing it is enough to say, Hey, I’m so glad to have you as a client.” – Jeff Kikel
Digital Adoption in Healthcare
Healthcare, another traditionally reluctant to embrace digital technology, witnessed a dramatic shift in digital adoption with the rise of telehealth services. Telehealth platforms, which allow patients to consult healthcare professionals remotely, became a lifeline during lockdowns. The pandemic prompted both patients and providers to adopt this digital tool swiftly, resulting in the widespread acceptance of a previously only marginally used technology. This demonstrated the transformative power of digital adoption in response to a global crisis.
“But when you talk general healthcare, I think there’s still an opportunity there. They’re kinda being enforced into it.” – April Moss
While these examples illustrate how digital adoption has positively transformed businesses, it’s essential to acknowledge the challenges involved. Digital adoption is a complex, one-step process. It involves a significant investment of time and resources, often requiring a culture shift within the organization. Moreover, the rapidly evolving nature of technology means that businesses must continually adapt to stay relevant and competitive.
Benefits of Digital Adoption
Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of digital adoption are substantial. Businesses adopting digital tools can benefit from increased operational efficiency, improved customer service, and more significant innovation. Additionally, digital adoption can make organizations more resilient and adaptable to future challenges or crises.
“I can think of probably on one hand how many times I met with clients on Zoom prior to the pandemic. Now it’s 80 to 90% of my time.” – Jeff Kikel
Furthermore, the value of digital adoption extends beyond the corporate world. As individuals, we must adopt digital tools effectively to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. Whether it’s learning to use a new app to work from home or mastering online banking, digital adoption impacts every facet of our lives.
The past few years have highlighted the power of digital adoption. As businesses and individuals grappled with unprecedented challenges, digital tools became more than just handy gadgets—they became essential lifelines. In the wake of this digital revolution, one thing is clear: those who embrace digital adoption will lead the way in the future.
“We’ve seen over the last probably three to four months within construction bigger adoption than we ever have before.” – April Moss
Digital adoption is not just a trend—it’s a necessity. As we continue to navigate this digital era, let’s strive to use digital tools and adopt them, leveraging their full potential to create innovative solutions, streamline operations, and, ultimately, transform our lives.
Chris Hood (00:00):
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. We find ourselves increasingly dependent on digital tools and technology in today’s rapidly evolving world. According to Gartner, in 2022 worldwide, it spending was forecasted to grow by 5%. And as of January, 2023, there were 311 million internet users in the United States. However, simply using these tools doesn’t equate to digital adoption. Actual adoption entails integrating digital tools seamlessly into your everyday operations to accelerate business value. Our guests today are Jeff Kikel, president of Freedom Day Wealth Management, and April Moss, Chief Operating Officer of DigiBuild to discuss how to make the most of digital tools and fully embed them in our work processes to transform our operations. To support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media, or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood, and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:10):
Connecting access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hoods digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, your digital evolution. Now here’s your host, Chris Hoods.
Chris Hood (01:42):
Great to have both of you. Let’s get right into it. April, would you mind introducing yourself?
April Moss (01:47):
You bet. Thanks for having us on. Chris. my name is April Moss and I’m one of the co-founders of Digi Build, which is a software for construction that does all the takeoffs bid order tracking of all the materials and supplies. We save anywhere from 10 to 15 20% on bids, which is pretty incredible for a very low margin industry. And we save about 40, 50% on labor and which has been a big help for the industry because right now there’s a labor shortage.
Chris Hood (02:18):
Great. Welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Kikel (02:20):
Yes, my name is Jeff Kikel. I am the president of Freedom Day Wealth Management as well as T Works co-working and a couple of other businesses that I own. Been an entrepreneur for the last eight years. Most of my time prior to that was working in the corporate world, and I launched off about eight years ago, went down the path of finding my own financial freedom and achieve that last year. So now I teach people how to achieve their financial freedom.
Chris Hood (02:47):
So today we’re gonna talk about digital adoption, and both of your careers are probably pretty drastically different. Yet there’s this central connective tissue between you, which is digital technologies. And I think you’ll both have this really interesting perspective in terms of how organizations and even consumers adopt digital technologies. If we look at the last 10 years, digital adoption has been fairly slow, but has rapidly increased. Do you think that has had an impact on either of your businesses?
April Moss (03:24):
Well, I’ll just jump in real quick here. Yeah. so for construction, it’s really only been in the last couple of years, probably the last five years max, where any type of digitization in construction’s happened. And that’s one of the reasons why our software is becoming very popular. Most, you know, there’s 150 people that are on a project and they all come from different companies you know building, you know, some type of skyscraper, hotel, whatever it is. And so trying to digitize an industry where everybody’s using something different has been very difficult. But I think covid tighter supply chain issues and then just covid families being impacted by that, has also made people more aware of the importance of digitizing. And we’ve seen over the last probably three to four months within construction bigger adoption than we ever have before. So like at Tampa Build, we went to, we usually have rooms where we do panel speaking. We’ll have 10, you know, five, 10 people in a room. We had over 30 in the last couple that we’ve been at. So for me, that’s really a big idea because in construction it’s been very slow.
Jeff Kikel (04:34):
You know, and I will say Chris, in our industry, I mean the financial industry we just rolled into the, the 21st century about a year and a half ago. You know, it just by you think construction’s bad. I mean, finance was even worse because so much of, of the ability to communicate was controlled through brokerage firms through, you know, the, the big, you know, the, the end firm that they’re also scared of getting information out there that most firms are just, you know, they’ve got their thumb on it. For me, it was my old firm and then my new firm after I sold my business last year, you know, I, I ended up not sidling up with another firm. I created my own registered investment advisory firm because I knew I wanted to communicate with my clients on the way they wanted to be communicated to. And if I was forced to do it the way I would, if I was through a big brokerage firm or through a, you know, an L P L financial or somebody like that, I would never be able to communicate the way I do today. And, and that’s critical for me to help my clients, quite frankly.
Chris Hood (05:45):
I think you touched on something, construction, finance, healthcare probably has the same issue. The number one complaint about moving forward with technologies is compliance issues or regulatory issues, things that are preventing that adoption of technology. Are you seeing that as being a factor that is either helping or is it going away?
Jeff Kikel (06:08):
I don’t know how it is in April’s world in mine, it’s the walls are slowly breaking down. You know, I’m seeing more and more willingness. I, I just, I’ll give you the greatest example ever. Okay. One of the greatest tools that we have today is, you know, things like Google My Business, a great way to put, you know, somebody could put a review out for you and all that. Legally, up until, I think it was a year and a half ago, maybe two years, we were not allowed to even have a Google My Business profile as a firm, because, you know, the world would end if somebody actually put a review out there.
April Moss (06:46):
I just think about you were talking about healthcare and my sisters an RN and you know, she works for pretty major hospital out here. And I think the digitization of even documents and patient stuff is really taking off because they’re, because they’re getting hacked and they’re being forced to get, you know, more digital and more security around that digitization. So I think in some of the healthcare issues some of the bioscience companies that we you know, are involved with building out their, their spaces they’re really actually pretty tech savvy because they’ve had to be with the tech technology and how they, how those you know, buildings and facilities actually operate, there’s a lot more restriction around it. But when you talk general healthcare, I think there’s still an opportunity there. They’re kinda being enforced into it. For construction, I think it’s, I I really do think it’s the margins have limited, they’re already tight margins within construction and they’re having a labor shortage. And so one of the fastest ways to increase those margins and capacity is digitizing.
Chris Hood (07:56):
I think you’re right. I think margins and just financial success for a lot of organizations is going to boil down to how efficient, how well you can manage operations within an organization. But I think the other side of this is definitely consumer demand. All of us are consumers. Consumers are driving a lot of the impact where businesses now have to adapt to those expectations.
April Moss (08:24):
Yeah, I was just gonna say, the other piece that just came to mind was the whole idea of sustainability, right? For construction, it’s sustainable products, finding substitute products, and, you know, we use AI in our software and we go out and we scrape and look for sustainable products, sustainable suppliers, and we can use AI to say, Hey, what’s a good substitution? No, it’s not. AI’s not the, the all end to everything, right? You still have to verify everything on there, but it’s really a fast way to get information. And so I think from a sustainability standpoint if anybody in construction wants any projects coming up, they better have, you know, sustainable suppliers that they’re tapping into because that’s gonna be a requirement, a financial requirement to get a project.
Jeff Kikel (09:06):
Yeah. And I mean, I would say, you know, just from even our, our business, I mean, where she’s going at it with ai, I mean, that has been, at least in my business, I, I see myself first and foremost as a communicator, as a, as a content provider, and the ability to get to market with information today is so much faster. I mean, you know, I, I put the best example, you know, I, at best in the old days could produce maybe two blog articles a month, you know, just having the time to do it. I typically now do about 12 a week between the three major sites that I have, you know, and it’s, I, once again, people think, oh, well, you know, it’s just cheating. And no, I mean, I, I get it written and then I edit the thing and put my own personal stories in. But it’s that ability to get that information out and then riff off of that and say, okay, create this, create that, create this. I think, you know, for people that are in businesses, if they don’t start to adopt that, they’re gonna slowly kind of become irrelevant in the public.
Chris Hood (10:19):
How much of this do you think is a differentiator for businesses?
April Moss (10:23):
I think it is, from a sustainability standpoint, the technology that goes into making sustainable products is, takes a lot of technology and, and then it takes a different application in construction if you’re gonna use a substitute product that is sustainable. I think the challenge with sustainability is it’s very politicized. And so you’ve got, because it’s been politicized, a lot of people, you know, shy away from it. They really don’t know what it means. What’s it mean to be green, what’s net zero? So there’s all these questions and nobody really knows what it is, and they’re afraid to ask or say anything because it’s been so politicized. So what we’ve been trying to do is say, Hey, we all agree that we should be taking care of what we’ve been given, right? And whatever spectrum you’re on, what we have in front of us in our environment with people, we should be taking care of it.
(11:13):
And if we can disagree on that one principle, forget about the left, the right, all this, all the different politics that go with it, then we’re gonna move forward. I don’t think there’s anybody on the right or left that wants to see plastic in, in the ocean when they’re out there scuba diving or snorkeling or swimming and run into bottles and paper bags, right? So, so what is the solutions to how we come together, you know, from that side of sustainability and creating products. And then I think it also helps small businesses, which is the engine for our country, right? Small businesses. And we’ve been come across, we’ve come across small sustainable suppliers that are creating new things. They’re just not getting exposure. Nobody knows ’em. And so I think that’s the other thing too, of Jess’s point, if, if you’re not in this game and you’re not marketing and you’re not telling people, then you absolutely are not gonna get that reach.
(12:03):
And one example is, I was at New York Build and I talked to close to 200 suppliers, one-on-one, just trying to find out about their product. And there was a ton of them that were that were sustainable, but they had nothing on their tables and any of their brochures saying they were sustainable, and it was close to 30%. And I’ve got this pressure from construction projects that they’re like, Hey, you got any more sustainable suppliers? And so we’ve actually partnered with suppliers and said, Hey, let us help you do that. And there’s a company called Emancipate that’s a nonprofit that takes trafficked women. They put ’em through college, and then they te and they all have their bachelor masters, and they’re doing all this marketing for them. They’re doing podcast tours, they’re doing, writing all this great material for them. They’re doing their LinkedIn outreach and really helping to scope some of these smaller businesses up that would never have a chance because they can’t do it on their own. And Jeff knows this, it is a lot of work. You, you know, you, he’s just using tools to help speed up the process, but, you know, there is a lot of work still involved in it. So that’s one way that we’re contributing to helping our suppliers that actually help our clients then.
Jeff Kikel (13:13):
Yeah. But if they, yeah, I’m sorry if they, if they don’t communicate that out, I mean, especially with you being able to go scrape things with ai, if you don’t communicate that on your website or have a podcast or something like that, you’re, it’s just not gonna show up. You know, it’s get the information out there so that you, you know, Hey, this is something that’s a differentiator for us. Yeah. Well make sure you tell people about it.
Chris Hood (13:38):
sustainability is political. I agree. AI is slowly becoming a political conversation, which is unfortunate. But also to your example, there are a lot of organizations out there that are not promoting the fact that they are a sustainable company. And it seems like everyone is promoting the fact that they are involved with AI in some way or another. Like, AI has become one of these buzz words to say, Hey, we’re using AI for, fill in the blank. Is that really helping businesses in terms of attracting new customers?
April Moss (14:11):
I mean, for me, I’ll tell you an example. You know, we we’re looking for sustainable suppliers. We go on LinkedIn, we do all these searches trying to pull those people in, and everybody’s using sustainable. You need a sustainable organization, you need a sustainable family, you need a sustainable face, , I don’t know, wherever they could throw it in, they’re throwing in sustainable. And we’ve gotten, now we’ve met some really exciting people, and actually some cool partnerships have come out of that, but it’s not our target that we’re trying to get to. So I do think we confuse your, don’t confuse your end user, you know? And that’s, that’s what we’re doing by doing that.
Jeff Kikel (14:49):
Well, I mean, it’s the, the, it’s the of AI diversity, you know, it’s, it companies think they need to put this out because people are gonna come to ’em for that. I mean, it’s, it’s an added bonus and it could be a differentiator for your business, but you know, you’ve also gotta actually produce product.
April Moss (15:08):
Yes. If you don’t have your core and you’re not producing something, it’s, they’re gonna get there and it’s, they’re gonna know it’s a nothing burger.
Jeff Kikel (15:15):
Yeah. And, and I see that the whole AI thing, you know, there’s so much, you know, coming from the investment industry, there’s so much money flowing into these companies. And I’m like, been there, done this before 2000, you know, 1998 to 2002 with the.com bubble. Yeah. You slap.com onto anything, and people were pouring money into it, whether the company made money or not. And you know, once again, a vast majority of these companies, the, especially the newer startups that just do AI, are not profitable and they’re not going to be profitable, but money is rushing into ’em because everybody thinks, oh, I can’t wait. I can’t, fear of missing out instead of fear of losing money in those cases,
April Moss (15:59):
Yeah. And I do think there’s a the companies that are just creating ai, right? That’s different from someone like yourself who’s using ai. So I do encourage people not to be afraid, get out there, try chat G p t, try Google, try to do some of these other ones out there because they’re pretty simple and they’re incredibly helpful.
Chris Hood (16:17):
I’m currently writing a book, the first chapter touches on this concept of digital transformation. I’m sure a lot of listeners who are hearing this are trying to compare digital adoption with digital transformation. And yes, there’s some crossovers in there, but when we think about the buzziness of a phrase, digital transformation is massively overused and not understood. I captured a couple of phrases like you were saying, and these are actually in my book, embrace the Future of Business With cloud powered digital transformation, we can help you unlock the full potential of your business with data driven digital transformation. Digital transformation happens with an agile content management system built for speed and scale. None of them are actually defining what you’re going to get.
April Moss (17:05):
Those are really good buzzwords, though.
Jeff Kikel (17:07):
It’s, it sounds great. .
April Moss (17:11):
I think the other thing too, that digitization has happened that, you know, is the human element of it. So in construction, it’s incredibly stressful. My dad was a subcontractor, and the, the pressure to be able to keep work all year, roundup, you know, keep, keep the family fed just getting paid sometimes, sometimes not getting paid, it’s just, it’s this non transparent, really tough industry. And for me, the, the toll was that after a while my dad got into the drink culture and he just got more depressed and he ended up committing suicide. And for for, I didn’t realize that’s very common within construction. In fact, there’s more suicides in construction than there are actually su accidents on, on the projects. And so for me it became kind of a a big aha. And even in our mission statement, we say, Hey, we wanna create a more healthier, happier industry.
(18:09):
And the reason for that is, is we wanna take some of that burden, some of that labor, some of those frustrations off of our clients and, and help ’em have more capacity versus be more stressed. So I, I do feel like these tools that are coming out are something that can help help people just build capacities. Just like, you know, the washing machine and washing dryer came out, and boy, you didn’t have to sit there and scrub anymore, right? The toaster came out and we’re toasting toasters. So you think about some of those, you know, sliced bread, right? Some of those things, diapers. Can you imagine a world without diapers right now? Although we’re trying to figure out more sustainable diapers, but a world without diapers and cloth, and just thinking about how it’s changing, how it’s helping people mentally cope better and building capacity so they can spend more time with their family.
Chris Hood (18:58):
I think that is so important in terms of the human connection that we all strive to have within our businesses and back to our consumers. And even in consumers, we think about building construction, ultimately, somebody is going to have to live in or occupy a building, as opposed to just having talked about ai, AI just outputting a bunch of stuff that has no human emotional connection to it. How critical is this type of perspective when we’re thinking about digital adoptions in our businesses?
April Moss (19:34):
That’s a great question. So for, for us, you, you just nailed it. So in construction, we originally started with, we got this platform, it we’re built on blockchain, it’s got ai, you know, really cool, sexy software, right? In construction, everybody should adopt it. Well, as we got to talk to our customers and understand more about what they’re looking for, and some of their biggest complaints about software that’s already out there is that there’s no customer service. Nobody returns my calls, nobody onboards me. I can’t get this done. So they get frustrated and partially use it. So 80% of what we do today is software. 20% of what Digi Bill does is we have construction procurement managers that handheld people through the process and walk them through their first several projects and they’re, they’re monitoring their projects in the backend. And anytime that they maybe say, have to call a supplier or something comes up, they’re making sure that they reach out and say, Hey, just wanna let you know everything looks good in here. I know you can hop on and see yourself 24 7, what’s going on? But that human element, and that has made a significant difference. When we started pivoting at first we were kind of like, oh, we don’t wanna tell people, we’re actually looking on the back end and making sure things are going smoothly. And one of the biggest construction companies said, that’s brilliant. You should be marketing that.
Jeff Kikel (20:52):
I, I think the other part for me, I, you know, as an example, just even the simplest things, I mean, one of my, one of my absolute favorite things now is Loom because I can log into Loom and, and especially for a client that’s a new client, okay, they’ve opened up an, you know, we’ve opened up an account for them, so they didn’t really have a relationship with the brokerage firm prior to that. I mean, I’ll just quickly go in and in 10 minutes do a quick loom. And I personalize that to every single client. And it’s okay, hey, go here, go to the site, here’s how you’re gonna register, here’s the things that you wanna look at when you’re on the site, everything else. And just doing that personalization, I get so many compliments on that because the other part is they have that record and they can go back and watch it again and watch it again and watch it again. So it’s just those simple things and it’s, you know, I could just record one one and then just send it out to everybody, but just personalizing it enough to say, Hey, I’m so glad to have you as a client. Let me show you around the website so you know what you’re looking for, and just put that together. Boom, send it out. It takes 10 minutes of my time, but it’s 10 minutes of my time that I’m sure that the client is, they just know I care enough to take that time to do that.
April Moss (22:14):
That’s a great idea. We use it internally for that same purpose of like, Hey, we came up with this new widget, or here’s a new idea. But that’s a great idea with customers cuz Loom is so easy.
Jeff Kikel (22:24):
Oh God, it’s, I mean it’s the simplest thing. It’s high quality and like I said, clients just love it. I mean, they, they love that fact of, oh, okay, great. And I mean, I even do it now, I’ll, I’ll send them something about their account platform, but then I send them one that’s just like, Hey, I just wanna show you the different places where you can get information. I’ll be sending you a, you know, a newsletter once a week, but if you want to go in and look at, you know, old is or old shows that I’ve done on YouTube or the podcast or whatever, here’s, here’s where you go find them and everything else. And then they’ve got that. Now, whether they use it or not, I don’t care, but I, I want them to have it. And it just, I find I get less phone calls first off because people know where everything’s at. And so really the phone calls I get are, Hey, I’ve got something that needs to be done. But also the fact that people are just happy because it’s like, oh, okay, I, I don’t feel like I’m lost.
Chris Hood (23:18):
Last week we did an episode on personalization, you know, we can use AI as an example to create in incredible amounts of personalization, but to our earlier discussion here, we lose the human element of it. Where’s the intersection between personalization and then having an actual authentic connection with your customer through the technology?
Jeff Kikel (23:41):
You know, from my perspective as much of it that I can personalize to them, you know, where I want to use technology. I mean, I think the coolest thing that happened was we had a pandemic, at least in our industry, because I can think of maybe on, probably on one hand how many times I met with clients on Zoom prior to the pandemic. Now it’s 80 to 90% of my time because they don’t have to get in the car. I mean, I live in Austin, Texas, which the, the idiots in this town decided to build industry without building roads. So, you know, there’s no alternatives and you’re gonna spend an hour in the car wherever you go, that’s an hour that they are never getting back, you know, so they love going on Zoom and a lot of times it’s, it is way easier. And I’ll tell ’em this, Hey, when we’re doing an account review, let’s do it on Zoom, because otherwise you would, we would both be sitting in a, in a conference room together training our necks up to the, to the the TV monitor, watching what I’m doing when I could just present it to you on the screen.
(24:47):
So most of the time that I, I actually meet with clients in person today is that first meeting of just getting to know each other. I like doing in person. I really don’t like doing those over Zoom and I at least wanna meet with them one time per year in person. But the other three times I meet with them, typically it’s on Zoom real quick. And, and they’re so much more open to it. And it’s funny, the older the client that I have, the more open they are to it because they just, once they learn Zoom, it was like, oh crap, this is great. I can do this, I can do this with my, my kids and my grandkids and everything else.
April Moss (25:22):
That’s fantastic. Yeah, I think it’s, the human touches is everything. I mean, we’ve lost it and now we’re getting it back and that’s exciting to me.
Chris Hood (25:30):
Change is constant. The pandemic just introduced the fact that disruption can happen at any moment, at any time, and you’ve gotta be prepared for that. And so if we start to look forward towards the future, what advice would you give the listening audience?
April Moss (25:45):
I guess I, I think that not to look at change as disrupting your life, but enhancing your life. Too many people look at it as a negative and, and sometimes it’s hard, you know, sometimes people won’t change until it’s easier to, it’s, it’s safer and easier to, to change than to remain where you’re at. But to embrace it and look at it in a positive way, I think that our growing up, you know, we we’re always, you know, being told to change and grow and do all these things. And I think for some reason change has become a negative in our mind. And I think we need to get rid of that and really think of it as is a, is a positive aspect of life, not, not a negative.
Jeff Kikel (26:32):
Well, and I think, you know, from my perspective, one of one of my specialties is working with businesses in transition and specifically family businesses helping them, helping that owner of the business make that exit from the business eventually. And you know, I think one of the biggest challenges, and I see this today, the largest generation of business owners ever in history was the baby boom generation. So they’re, we’re, we’re on the very forefront of a lot of these businesses transitioning to another owner. And the problem is, the most likely buyer in this case is my generation. Gen X, you know, that is now in our fifties, we’re the most likely buyers of these businesses. And you have a disconnect there because the, you know, baby boom generation comes from the get up, work hard, do everything, technology sucks, kind of port, you know, attitude.
(27:28):
And you have a generation of people that grew up like, Hey, we grew up with computers and we understand how things work and I don’t really wanna work 90 hours a week for, you know, I don’t want a job, I want buy a business. And I think the biggest challenge is you have the smallest generation of people coming up behind the biggest generation of people. We also are the lowest percentage generation of business owners. So there’s a lot of baby boom generation out there that needs to differentiate their businesses and adopt technology and make things much more much more efficient in that process, otherwise they aren’t gonna find anybody that wants to buy their business.
Chris Hood (28:08):
Well, thank you both for joining. It’s been wonderful having you and awesome perspectives. Thank you.
Jeff Kikel (28:14):
Thanks a lot Chris.
Chris Hood (28:15):
And thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve, grow, and reach a wider audience. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Show or chris hood.com. And please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening. We find ourselves increasingly dependent on digital tools and technology in today’s rapidly evolving world. According to Gartner, in 2022 worldwide, it spending was forecasted to grow by 5%. And as of January, 2023, there were 311 million internet users in the United States. However, simply using these tools doesn’t equate to digital adoption. Actual adoption entails integrating digital tools seamlessly into your everyday operations to accelerate business value. Our guests today are Jeff Kikel, president of Freedom Day Wealth Management, and April Moss, Chief Operating Officer of DigiBuild to discuss how to make the most of digital tools and fully embed them in our work processes to transform our operations. To support the show, visit chrishood.com/show. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on social media, or you can email me directly [email protected]. I’m Chris Hood, and let’s get connected.
Voice Over (01:10):
Connecting access. Granted, it’s the Chris Hoods digital show where global business and technology leaders meet to discuss strategy, innovation, and digital acceleration. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, your digital evolution. Now here’s your host, Chris Hoods.
Chris Hood (01:42):
Great to have both of you. Let’s get right into it. April, would you mind introducing yourself?
April Moss (01:47):
You bet. Thanks for having us on. Chris. my name is April Moss and I’m one of the co-founders of Digi Build, which is a software for construction that does all the takeoffs bid order tracking of all the materials and supplies. We save anywhere from 10 to 15 20% on bids, which is pretty incredible for a very low margin industry. And we save about 40, 50% on labor and which has been a big help for the industry because right now there’s a labor shortage.
Chris Hood (02:18):
Great. Welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Kikel (02:20):
Yes, my name is Jeff Kikel. I am the president of Freedom Day Wealth Management as well as T Works co-working and a couple of other businesses that I own. Been an entrepreneur for the last eight years. Most of my time prior to that was working in the corporate world, and I launched off about eight years ago, went down the path of finding my own financial freedom and achieve that last year. So now I teach people how to achieve their financial freedom.
Chris Hood (02:47):
So today we’re gonna talk about digital adoption, and both of your careers are probably pretty drastically different. Yet there’s this central connective tissue between you, which is digital technologies. And I think you’ll both have this really interesting perspective in terms of how organizations and even consumers adopt digital technologies. If we look at the last 10 years, digital adoption has been fairly slow, but has rapidly increased. Do you think that has had an impact on either of your businesses?
April Moss (03:24):
Well, I’ll just jump in real quick here. Yeah. so for construction, it’s really only been in the last couple of years, probably the last five years max, where any type of digitization in construction’s happened. And that’s one of the reasons why our software is becoming very popular. Most, you know, there’s 150 people that are on a project and they all come from different companies you know building, you know, some type of skyscraper, hotel, whatever it is. And so trying to digitize an industry where everybody’s using something different has been very difficult. But I think covid tighter supply chain issues and then just covid families being impacted by that, has also made people more aware of the importance of digitizing. And we’ve seen over the last probably three to four months within construction bigger adoption than we ever have before. So like at Tampa Build, we went to, we usually have rooms where we do panel speaking. We’ll have 10, you know, five, 10 people in a room. We had over 30 in the last couple that we’ve been at. So for me, that’s really a big idea because in construction it’s been very slow.
Jeff Kikel (04:34):
You know, and I will say Chris, in our industry, I mean the financial industry we just rolled into the, the 21st century about a year and a half ago. You know, it just by you think construction’s bad. I mean, finance was even worse because so much of, of the ability to communicate was controlled through brokerage firms through, you know, the, the big, you know, the, the end firm that they’re also scared of getting information out there that most firms are just, you know, they’ve got their thumb on it. For me, it was my old firm and then my new firm after I sold my business last year, you know, I, I ended up not sidling up with another firm. I created my own registered investment advisory firm because I knew I wanted to communicate with my clients on the way they wanted to be communicated to. And if I was forced to do it the way I would, if I was through a big brokerage firm or through a, you know, an L P L financial or somebody like that, I would never be able to communicate the way I do today. And, and that’s critical for me to help my clients, quite frankly.
Chris Hood (05:45):
I think you touched on something, construction, finance, healthcare probably has the same issue. The number one complaint about moving forward with technologies is compliance issues or regulatory issues, things that are preventing that adoption of technology. Are you seeing that as being a factor that is either helping or is it going away?
Jeff Kikel (06:08):
I don’t know how it is in April’s world in mine, it’s the walls are slowly breaking down. You know, I’m seeing more and more willingness. I, I just, I’ll give you the greatest example ever. Okay. One of the greatest tools that we have today is, you know, things like Google My Business, a great way to put, you know, somebody could put a review out for you and all that. Legally, up until, I think it was a year and a half ago, maybe two years, we were not allowed to even have a Google My Business profile as a firm, because, you know, the world would end if somebody actually put a review out there.
April Moss (06:46):
I just think about you were talking about healthcare and my sisters an RN and you know, she works for pretty major hospital out here. And I think the digitization of even documents and patient stuff is really taking off because they’re, because they’re getting hacked and they’re being forced to get, you know, more digital and more security around that digitization. So I think in some of the healthcare issues some of the bioscience companies that we you know, are involved with building out their, their spaces they’re really actually pretty tech savvy because they’ve had to be with the tech technology and how they, how those you know, buildings and facilities actually operate, there’s a lot more restriction around it. But when you talk general healthcare, I think there’s still an opportunity there. They’re kinda being enforced into it. For construction, I think it’s, I I really do think it’s the margins have limited, they’re already tight margins within construction and they’re having a labor shortage. And so one of the fastest ways to increase those margins and capacity is digitizing.
Chris Hood (07:56):
I think you’re right. I think margins and just financial success for a lot of organizations is going to boil down to how efficient, how well you can manage operations within an organization. But I think the other side of this is definitely consumer demand. All of us are consumers. Consumers are driving a lot of the impact where businesses now have to adapt to those expectations.
April Moss (08:24):
Yeah, I was just gonna say, the other piece that just came to mind was the whole idea of sustainability, right? For construction, it’s sustainable products, finding substitute products, and, you know, we use AI in our software and we go out and we scrape and look for sustainable products, sustainable suppliers, and we can use AI to say, Hey, what’s a good substitution? No, it’s not. AI’s not the, the all end to everything, right? You still have to verify everything on there, but it’s really a fast way to get information. And so I think from a sustainability standpoint if anybody in construction wants any projects coming up, they better have, you know, sustainable suppliers that they’re tapping into because that’s gonna be a requirement, a financial requirement to get a project.
Jeff Kikel (09:06):
Yeah. And I mean, I would say, you know, just from even our, our business, I mean, where she’s going at it with ai, I mean, that has been, at least in my business, I, I see myself first and foremost as a communicator, as a, as a content provider, and the ability to get to market with information today is so much faster. I mean, you know, I, I put the best example, you know, I, at best in the old days could produce maybe two blog articles a month, you know, just having the time to do it. I typically now do about 12 a week between the three major sites that I have, you know, and it’s, I, once again, people think, oh, well, you know, it’s just cheating. And no, I mean, I, I get it written and then I edit the thing and put my own personal stories in. But it’s that ability to get that information out and then riff off of that and say, okay, create this, create that, create this. I think, you know, for people that are in businesses, if they don’t start to adopt that, they’re gonna slowly kind of become irrelevant in the public.
Chris Hood (10:19):
How much of this do you think is a differentiator for businesses?
April Moss (10:23):
I think it is, from a sustainability standpoint, the technology that goes into making sustainable products is, takes a lot of technology and, and then it takes a different application in construction if you’re gonna use a substitute product that is sustainable. I think the challenge with sustainability is it’s very politicized. And so you’ve got, because it’s been politicized, a lot of people, you know, shy away from it. They really don’t know what it means. What’s it mean to be green, what’s net zero? So there’s all these questions and nobody really knows what it is, and they’re afraid to ask or say anything because it’s been so politicized. So what we’ve been trying to do is say, Hey, we all agree that we should be taking care of what we’ve been given, right? And whatever spectrum you’re on, what we have in front of us in our environment with people, we should be taking care of it.
(11:13):
And if we can disagree on that one principle, forget about the left, the right, all this, all the different politics that go with it, then we’re gonna move forward. I don’t think there’s anybody on the right or left that wants to see plastic in, in the ocean when they’re out there scuba diving or snorkeling or swimming and run into bottles and paper bags, right? So, so what is the solutions to how we come together, you know, from that side of sustainability and creating products. And then I think it also helps small businesses, which is the engine for our country, right? Small businesses. And we’ve been come across, we’ve come across small sustainable suppliers that are creating new things. They’re just not getting exposure. Nobody knows ’em. And so I think that’s the other thing too, of Jess’s point, if, if you’re not in this game and you’re not marketing and you’re not telling people, then you absolutely are not gonna get that reach.
(12:03):
And one example is, I was at New York Build and I talked to close to 200 suppliers, one-on-one, just trying to find out about their product. And there was a ton of them that were that were sustainable, but they had nothing on their tables and any of their brochures saying they were sustainable, and it was close to 30%. And I’ve got this pressure from construction projects that they’re like, Hey, you got any more sustainable suppliers? And so we’ve actually partnered with suppliers and said, Hey, let us help you do that. And there’s a company called Emancipate that’s a nonprofit that takes trafficked women. They put ’em through college, and then they te and they all have their bachelor masters, and they’re doing all this marketing for them. They’re doing podcast tours, they’re doing, writing all this great material for them. They’re doing their LinkedIn outreach and really helping to scope some of these smaller businesses up that would never have a chance because they can’t do it on their own. And Jeff knows this, it is a lot of work. You, you know, you, he’s just using tools to help speed up the process, but, you know, there is a lot of work still involved in it. So that’s one way that we’re contributing to helping our suppliers that actually help our clients then.
Jeff Kikel (13:13):
Yeah. But if they, yeah, I’m sorry if they, if they don’t communicate that out, I mean, especially with you being able to go scrape things with ai, if you don’t communicate that on your website or have a podcast or something like that, you’re, it’s just not gonna show up. You know, it’s get the information out there so that you, you know, Hey, this is something that’s a differentiator for us. Yeah. Well make sure you tell people about it.
Chris Hood (13:38):
sustainability is political. I agree. AI is slowly becoming a political conversation, which is unfortunate. But also to your example, there are a lot of organizations out there that are not promoting the fact that they are a sustainable company. And it seems like everyone is promoting the fact that they are involved with AI in some way or another. Like, AI has become one of these buzz words to say, Hey, we’re using AI for, fill in the blank. Is that really helping businesses in terms of attracting new customers?
April Moss (14:11):
I mean, for me, I’ll tell you an example. You know, we we’re looking for sustainable suppliers. We go on LinkedIn, we do all these searches trying to pull those people in, and everybody’s using sustainable. You need a sustainable organization, you need a sustainable family, you need a sustainable face, , I don’t know, wherever they could throw it in, they’re throwing in sustainable. And we’ve gotten, now we’ve met some really exciting people, and actually some cool partnerships have come out of that, but it’s not our target that we’re trying to get to. So I do think we confuse your, don’t confuse your end user, you know? And that’s, that’s what we’re doing by doing that.
Jeff Kikel (14:49):
Well, I mean, it’s the, the, it’s the of AI diversity, you know, it’s, it companies think they need to put this out because people are gonna come to ’em for that. I mean, it’s, it’s an added bonus and it could be a differentiator for your business, but you know, you’ve also gotta actually produce product.
April Moss (15:08):
Yes. If you don’t have your core and you’re not producing something, it’s, they’re gonna get there and it’s, they’re gonna know it’s a nothing burger.
Jeff Kikel (15:15):
Yeah. And, and I see that the whole AI thing, you know, there’s so much, you know, coming from the investment industry, there’s so much money flowing into these companies. And I’m like, been there, done this before 2000, you know, 1998 to 2002 with the.com bubble. Yeah. You slap.com onto anything, and people were pouring money into it, whether the company made money or not. And you know, once again, a vast majority of these companies, the, especially the newer startups that just do AI, are not profitable and they’re not going to be profitable, but money is rushing into ’em because everybody thinks, oh, I can’t wait. I can’t, fear of missing out instead of fear of losing money in those cases,
April Moss (15:59):
Yeah. And I do think there’s a the companies that are just creating ai, right? That’s different from someone like yourself who’s using ai. So I do encourage people not to be afraid, get out there, try chat G p t, try Google, try to do some of these other ones out there because they’re pretty simple and they’re incredibly helpful.
Chris Hood (16:17):
I’m currently writing a book, the first chapter touches on this concept of digital transformation. I’m sure a lot of listeners who are hearing this are trying to compare digital adoption with digital transformation. And yes, there’s some crossovers in there, but when we think about the buzziness of a phrase, digital transformation is massively overused and not understood. I captured a couple of phrases like you were saying, and these are actually in my book, embrace the Future of Business With cloud powered digital transformation, we can help you unlock the full potential of your business with data driven digital transformation. Digital transformation happens with an agile content management system built for speed and scale. None of them are actually defining what you’re going to get.
April Moss (17:05):
Those are really good buzzwords, though.
Jeff Kikel (17:07):
It’s, it sounds great. .
April Moss (17:11):
I think the other thing too, that digitization has happened that, you know, is the human element of it. So in construction, it’s incredibly stressful. My dad was a subcontractor, and the, the pressure to be able to keep work all year, roundup, you know, keep, keep the family fed just getting paid sometimes, sometimes not getting paid, it’s just, it’s this non transparent, really tough industry. And for me, the, the toll was that after a while my dad got into the drink culture and he just got more depressed and he ended up committing suicide. And for for, I didn’t realize that’s very common within construction. In fact, there’s more suicides in construction than there are actually su accidents on, on the projects. And so for me it became kind of a a big aha. And even in our mission statement, we say, Hey, we wanna create a more healthier, happier industry.
(18:09):
And the reason for that is, is we wanna take some of that burden, some of that labor, some of those frustrations off of our clients and, and help ’em have more capacity versus be more stressed. So I, I do feel like these tools that are coming out are something that can help help people just build capacities. Just like, you know, the washing machine and washing dryer came out, and boy, you didn’t have to sit there and scrub anymore, right? The toaster came out and we’re toasting toasters. So you think about some of those, you know, sliced bread, right? Some of those things, diapers. Can you imagine a world without diapers right now? Although we’re trying to figure out more sustainable diapers, but a world without diapers and cloth, and just thinking about how it’s changing, how it’s helping people mentally cope better and building capacity so they can spend more time with their family.
Chris Hood (18:58):
I think that is so important in terms of the human connection that we all strive to have within our businesses and back to our consumers. And even in consumers, we think about building construction, ultimately, somebody is going to have to live in or occupy a building, as opposed to just having talked about ai, AI just outputting a bunch of stuff that has no human emotional connection to it. How critical is this type of perspective when we’re thinking about digital adoptions in our businesses?
April Moss (19:34):
That’s a great question. So for, for us, you, you just nailed it. So in construction, we originally started with, we got this platform, it we’re built on blockchain, it’s got ai, you know, really cool, sexy software, right? In construction, everybody should adopt it. Well, as we got to talk to our customers and understand more about what they’re looking for, and some of their biggest complaints about software that’s already out there is that there’s no customer service. Nobody returns my calls, nobody onboards me. I can’t get this done. So they get frustrated and partially use it. So 80% of what we do today is software. 20% of what Digi Bill does is we have construction procurement managers that handheld people through the process and walk them through their first several projects and they’re, they’re monitoring their projects in the backend. And anytime that they maybe say, have to call a supplier or something comes up, they’re making sure that they reach out and say, Hey, just wanna let you know everything looks good in here. I know you can hop on and see yourself 24 7, what’s going on? But that human element, and that has made a significant difference. When we started pivoting at first we were kind of like, oh, we don’t wanna tell people, we’re actually looking on the back end and making sure things are going smoothly. And one of the biggest construction companies said, that’s brilliant. You should be marketing that.
Jeff Kikel (20:52):
I, I think the other part for me, I, you know, as an example, just even the simplest things, I mean, one of my, one of my absolute favorite things now is Loom because I can log into Loom and, and especially for a client that’s a new client, okay, they’ve opened up an, you know, we’ve opened up an account for them, so they didn’t really have a relationship with the brokerage firm prior to that. I mean, I’ll just quickly go in and in 10 minutes do a quick loom. And I personalize that to every single client. And it’s okay, hey, go here, go to the site, here’s how you’re gonna register, here’s the things that you wanna look at when you’re on the site, everything else. And just doing that personalization, I get so many compliments on that because the other part is they have that record and they can go back and watch it again and watch it again and watch it again. So it’s just those simple things and it’s, you know, I could just record one one and then just send it out to everybody, but just personalizing it enough to say, Hey, I’m so glad to have you as a client. Let me show you around the website so you know what you’re looking for, and just put that together. Boom, send it out. It takes 10 minutes of my time, but it’s 10 minutes of my time that I’m sure that the client is, they just know I care enough to take that time to do that.
April Moss (22:14):
That’s a great idea. We use it internally for that same purpose of like, Hey, we came up with this new widget, or here’s a new idea. But that’s a great idea with customers cuz Loom is so easy.
Jeff Kikel (22:24):
Oh God, it’s, I mean it’s the simplest thing. It’s high quality and like I said, clients just love it. I mean, they, they love that fact of, oh, okay, great. And I mean, I even do it now, I’ll, I’ll send them something about their account platform, but then I send them one that’s just like, Hey, I just wanna show you the different places where you can get information. I’ll be sending you a, you know, a newsletter once a week, but if you want to go in and look at, you know, old is or old shows that I’ve done on YouTube or the podcast or whatever, here’s, here’s where you go find them and everything else. And then they’ve got that. Now, whether they use it or not, I don’t care, but I, I want them to have it. And it just, I find I get less phone calls first off because people know where everything’s at. And so really the phone calls I get are, Hey, I’ve got something that needs to be done. But also the fact that people are just happy because it’s like, oh, okay, I, I don’t feel like I’m lost.
Chris Hood (23:18):
Last week we did an episode on personalization, you know, we can use AI as an example to create in incredible amounts of personalization, but to our earlier discussion here, we lose the human element of it. Where’s the intersection between personalization and then having an actual authentic connection with your customer through the technology?
Jeff Kikel (23:41):
You know, from my perspective as much of it that I can personalize to them, you know, where I want to use technology. I mean, I think the coolest thing that happened was we had a pandemic, at least in our industry, because I can think of maybe on, probably on one hand how many times I met with clients on Zoom prior to the pandemic. Now it’s 80 to 90% of my time because they don’t have to get in the car. I mean, I live in Austin, Texas, which the, the idiots in this town decided to build industry without building roads. So, you know, there’s no alternatives and you’re gonna spend an hour in the car wherever you go, that’s an hour that they are never getting back, you know, so they love going on Zoom and a lot of times it’s, it is way easier. And I’ll tell ’em this, Hey, when we’re doing an account review, let’s do it on Zoom, because otherwise you would, we would both be sitting in a, in a conference room together training our necks up to the, to the the TV monitor, watching what I’m doing when I could just present it to you on the screen.
(24:47):
So most of the time that I, I actually meet with clients in person today is that first meeting of just getting to know each other. I like doing in person. I really don’t like doing those over Zoom and I at least wanna meet with them one time per year in person. But the other three times I meet with them, typically it’s on Zoom real quick. And, and they’re so much more open to it. And it’s funny, the older the client that I have, the more open they are to it because they just, once they learn Zoom, it was like, oh crap, this is great. I can do this, I can do this with my, my kids and my grandkids and everything else.
April Moss (25:22):
That’s fantastic. Yeah, I think it’s, the human touches is everything. I mean, we’ve lost it and now we’re getting it back and that’s exciting to me.
Chris Hood (25:30):
Change is constant. The pandemic just introduced the fact that disruption can happen at any moment, at any time, and you’ve gotta be prepared for that. And so if we start to look forward towards the future, what advice would you give the listening audience?
April Moss (25:45):
I guess I, I think that not to look at change as disrupting your life, but enhancing your life. Too many people look at it as a negative and, and sometimes it’s hard, you know, sometimes people won’t change until it’s easier to, it’s, it’s safer and easier to, to change than to remain where you’re at. But to embrace it and look at it in a positive way, I think that our growing up, you know, we we’re always, you know, being told to change and grow and do all these things. And I think for some reason change has become a negative in our mind. And I think we need to get rid of that and really think of it as is a, is a positive aspect of life, not, not a negative.
Jeff Kikel (26:32):
Well, and I think, you know, from my perspective, one of one of my specialties is working with businesses in transition and specifically family businesses helping them, helping that owner of the business make that exit from the business eventually. And you know, I think one of the biggest challenges, and I see this today, the largest generation of business owners ever in history was the baby boom generation. So they’re, we’re, we’re on the very forefront of a lot of these businesses transitioning to another owner. And the problem is, the most likely buyer in this case is my generation. Gen X, you know, that is now in our fifties, we’re the most likely buyers of these businesses. And you have a disconnect there because the, you know, baby boom generation comes from the get up, work hard, do everything, technology sucks, kind of port, you know, attitude.
(27:28):
And you have a generation of people that grew up like, Hey, we grew up with computers and we understand how things work and I don’t really wanna work 90 hours a week for, you know, I don’t want a job, I want buy a business. And I think the biggest challenge is you have the smallest generation of people coming up behind the biggest generation of people. We also are the lowest percentage generation of business owners. So there’s a lot of baby boom generation out there that needs to differentiate their businesses and adopt technology and make things much more much more efficient in that process, otherwise they aren’t gonna find anybody that wants to buy their business.
Chris Hood (28:08):
Well, thank you both for joining. It’s been wonderful having you and awesome perspectives. Thank you.
Jeff Kikel (28:14):
Thanks a lot Chris.
Chris Hood (28:15):
And thanks to all of you who are listening. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. Your feedback helps us improve, grow, and reach a wider audience. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for the show, you can connect with us throughout social media and online at Chris Show or chris hood.com. And please share this episode with your friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else looking to grow their business and start their own digital evolution. Until next week, take care and stay connected.