Nick Jain, co-founder of Eagle Rock CFO, believes leadership in the AI era comes down to leverage. The best leaders won’t be replaced by AI—they’ll use it to multiply their impact.

Nick explains how AI and smart automation are eliminating low-value work like data cleanup, financial modeling, and report creation. That shift frees leaders to focus on judgment, relationships, and strategic decisions. Instead of spending weeks analyzing spreadsheets, leaders can now generate insights in hours—and act faster than competitors.

He shares how AI can compress consulting-level analysis into a fraction of the time and cost, making elite financial insight accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. From predicting cash flow risks to uncovering hidden cost savings, technology now surfaces what most humans would miss.

Nick also challenges leaders to rethink roles. Coders become architects. Analysts become decision-makers. Owners become system designers. The future belongs to leaders who adapt quickly, expand their capabilities, and use AI as a force multiplier.

Want to learn more about Nick Jain's work? Check out their website at https://eaglerockcfo.com.

Connect with Nick Jain on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmjain/.

Key Points with Time Stamps

• 00:00:51 – Introduction to Nick Jain and Eagle Rock CFO’s AI-powered consulting model
• 00:02:47 – How technology replaces expensive consulting labor by automating data ingestion, compression, and reporting
• 00:05:37 – Why AI gives top performers 10–100x leverage and reshapes white-collar roles
• 00:10:00 – Building a financial model in 35 minutes instead of 10 hours using AI
• 00:14:28 – Margin pressure, rising costs, and why leaders must innovate or optimize to survive
• 00:17:28 – Practical example: How AI can save an HVAC company $100K–$300K annually
• 00:23:25 – Eagle Rock CFO’s model: Delivering consulting-grade insights for 1–5% of traditional cost
• 00:24:28 – Case study: $22M talent agency uncovers $332K in immediate savings
• 00:26:27 – The future of McKinsey, Bain, and Accenture in an AI-driven world

Transcript

00;00;05;20 - 00;00;30;20
Craig Andrews
I was in a coma for six weeks while the doctors told my wife I was going to die. When I woke up, she told me the most fantastic story. My team kept running the business without me. Freelancers reached out to my team and said, we will do whatever it takes. As long as Craig's in the hospital. I consider that the greatest accomplishment in my career.

00;00;30;23 - 00;00;51;07
Craig Andrews
My name is Craig Andrews and this is the Leaders and Legacies podcast where we talk to leaders creating an impact beyond themselves. At the end of today's interview, I'll tell you how you can be the next leader featured on this show.

00;00;51;10 - 00;01;22;08
Craig Andrews
Today I want to welcome Nick Jain. He is the co-founder of Eagle Rock CFO. They are a tech enabled consultancy that gives practical AI, plus human powered advice to small business owners on how to make their businesses more profitable in the next 30 days. I love that quick and actionable. Nick has an MBA from Harvard Business School and has been the CFO or CEO of three businesses up to 100 million in revenue.

00;01;22;11 - 00;01;24;06
Craig Andrews
Nick, welcome.

00;01;24;08 - 00;01;27;22
Nick Jain
Thank you so much for having me on the show, Craig. Really excited to be here.

00;01;27;24 - 00;01;30;08
Craig Andrews
Yeah. So,

00;01;30;10 - 00;01;31;03
Craig Andrews
that's,

00;01;31;03 - 00;01;42;20
Craig Andrews
you know, it's interesting. I was reading an article this morning and it was talking about AI, and it was a little bit of a doomsday article and basically saying,

00;01;42;23 - 00;01;53;01
Craig Andrews
it was written by a developer saying that, his his job is no longer writing code and that those days are pretty much over.

00;01;53;01 - 00;02;15;13
Craig Andrews
And he's been shocked how quickly it's it's moved. And he said in there, probably if you're doing white collar work, they'll probably come in for your business next. But as general as general advice was, you know, get ahead of it and figure out how to how to make AI your productivity tool. And it sounds like,

00;02;15;16 - 00;02;19;05
Craig Andrews
sounds like you guys are using that.

00;02;19;05 - 00;02;21;19
Craig Andrews
Taking the advice.

00;02;21;21 - 00;02;31;22
Nick Jain
Exactly. And we're using part of our approach is using AI. But part of our approaches is using a lot of technology that's existed for ten, 20 years, but no one's thought to apply it so much to kind of the,

00;02;31;24 - 00;02;33;13
Nick Jain
the small business space.

00;02;33;16 - 00;02;44;03
Nick Jain
So a little bit of what we do is like fancy AI, but a lot of what we do is traditional technology, but just trying to deliver to an audience that historically hasn't had access to that level of technology before.

00;02;44;05 - 00;02;47;10
Craig Andrews
That's cool. What were some examples of that technology? Sure.

00;02;47;10 - 00;02;56;05
Nick Jain
So like, okay, so if you think about if you've ever worked at a large corporation and hired a big consulting firm like a McKinsey or Bain or Accenture,

00;02;56;08 - 00;03;03;21
Nick Jain
they bring in some very, very smart people who work hundreds of hours over the course of a month and give you, you know, a multi hundred thousand dollar bill for some amazing work.

00;03;03;27 - 00;03;12;12
Nick Jain
But a lot of that is because you're requiring very, very smart people who spent a decade getting, you know, MBAs and PhDs, working very long hours. And that's expensive.

00;03;12;16 - 00;03;16;09
Nick Jain
What our technology does, I think is do three things really well,

00;03;16;09 - 00;03;26;05
Nick Jain
that otherwise those you need very, very smart, expensive people to you. Number one, it eats up data so you don't have to have someone cleaning up data or looking for Excel files or emailing stuff back and forth.

00;03;26;08 - 00;03;34;20
Nick Jain
Number two is it compresses you know, the big data files down into small data files that I can eat if you ever, you know, try to give

00;03;34;20 - 00;03;45;02
Nick Jain
ChatGPT or Gemini like a big data file with thousands of rows or a PDF with hundreds of pages, it often starts losing itself and hallucinating and making stuff up. So you got to compress data.

00;03;45;02 - 00;04;03;29
Nick Jain
That's kind of the second thing we do really well. And then the third thing we do with kind of our technology stack that gives massive leverage to us as a team is we put out a beautiful report. So instead of very, very smart, expensive people making PowerPoints and presentations and writing memos. Our technology does that. So what that frees up the human being.

00;04;03;29 - 00;04;24;26
Nick Jain
I my business partner Dan and I to do is really focus on the kind of critical thinking and the human thinking, rather than eating up data rather than compressing data, rather than making PowerPoints and that's all stuff you would normally have to pay, like somebody 200 or $300 an hour for for 100 hours a month, that now technology does a kind of largely automatically.

00;04;24;28 - 00;04;26;24
Craig Andrews
You know, I actually went through an M&A,

00;04;26;29 - 00;04;31;09
Craig Andrews
where Bain Capital was involved and the,

00;04;31;09 - 00;04;32;23
Craig Andrews
you know, spent an afternoon with,

00;04;32;23 - 00;04;36;16
Craig Andrews
one of the guys and he was asking me questions.

00;04;36;18 - 00;04;50;05
Craig Andrews
I was impressed. He was he's one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I've met some exceptionally smart people. And at the time, I was working in a company that was packed full of exceptionally smart people.

00;04;50;07 - 00;05;08;22
Craig Andrews
What, you know, and just I guess what impressed me was he was very smart from a business standpoint, but he was asking some technology questions about our technology that never in a thousand years, why expect a business person to know to ask these questions?

00;05;08;25 - 00;05;18;19
Craig Andrews
What what do you see his role, you know, so if we just kind of take him as a prototype, what what's his role in the new AI world here?

00;05;18;22 - 00;05;27;03
Nick Jain
And I should mention, you know, once upon a time I used to work at Bain Capital on their private equity team a long time ago. Very, very smart people there. I hope it's one of my former bosses that you're talking about.

00;05;27;09 - 00;05;37;15
Nick Jain
Yeah. So I think two things are going to happen. And one of which you alluded to is like, look, a lot of white collar jobs are going to, go away.

00;05;37;18 - 00;06;10;05
Nick Jain
Because the, the people who get good at using these technologies and not just AI technology, but technology broadly are going to get leverage. And a very silly example, and I'm going to roll back the clock. 30 years is once upon a time people built financial models on paper before Excel and tools like that came out. And when you did that, if you made a mistake, you had to literally, you know, redo a bunch of physical paper notes and physical paper calculations, and then all of a sudden Excel came out and that one, you know, analyst or junior person could run the financial models for ten, 20, 30 companies instead of one on paper.

00;06;10;08 - 00;06;19;07
Nick Jain
And that's the same sort of thing that's going to happen that the very smart people are going to now act and be able to do the jobs of ten, 20, 100 people at scale.

00;06;19;10 - 00;06;28;29
Nick Jain
And also cover kind of their deficit. So that's the that's the those are two big changes. Number one, smart people are going to get like 10 to 100 leverage in terms of how much work they can do.

00;06;29;01 - 00;06;37;28
Nick Jain
And number two is they can also start to do sorts of work that they are not normally qualified to do. And I'll give a practical example I suck at all things artistic. I can't make music.

00;06;38;01 - 00;06;45;07
Nick Jain
I can't make art videos and stuff like that. So I would have never touched any portion of, workflow that involved kind of the artistic or creative side.

00;06;45;09 - 00;06;48;21
Nick Jain
Now, like, I can do these technologies, can do that part of,

00;06;48;21 - 00;06;56;26
Nick Jain
my job so I can expand to be a little bit more artistic than I would have been, let's say, 18 months ago. And the opposite is true. If you're not

00;06;56;26 - 00;07;00;19
Nick Jain
if you're an artistic person, you're too late. You're, let's say not mathematically or business inclined.

00;07;00;27 - 00;07;07;27
Nick Jain
You can expand your kind of purview of what you do for work over a little bit into kind of the quantitative side of things.

00;07;08;00 - 00;07;10;13
Craig Andrews
So if I go back to this,

00;07;10;16 - 00;07;22;17
Craig Andrews
gentleman from Maine that I met, you know, after I met with him, I thought, certainly this guy has to be a senior partner. And I went on the website, it's like, no, no, he was just one of like a hundred, you know, you.

00;07;22;17 - 00;07;25;00
Nick Jain
Know, business analyst like I was. Yeah.

00;07;25;03 - 00;07;27;18
Craig Andrews
Yeah.

00;07;27;20 - 00;07;36;15
Craig Andrews
But it would seem to me that his job was knowing the the right questions to ask,

00;07;36;18 - 00;07;47;15
Craig Andrews
knowing the right business context to put those in and taking that and having, you know, kind of the wisdom to say, okay, here's what we're going to do. This is the way we're going to leverage this.

00;07;47;18 - 00;07;50;18
Craig Andrews
If we broke that down and maybe that's not the right analysis.

00;07;50;18 - 00;07;56;01
Craig Andrews
If it's not, feel free to push back. But based on your time at Bain,

00;07;56;06 - 00;08;03;21
Craig Andrews
what would be what would be A's job and all that? And what would be your job?

00;08;03;23 - 00;08;15;23
Nick Jain
Sure. So again, jobs will fundamental. First of all, not I didn't really mention this, but it's not just people can do more. But actually what people will be responsible for doing is different. Right. As and you mentioned like the coder, right. His job

00;08;15;23 - 00;08;19;08
Nick Jain
his or her job is not to write code anymore, but to guide an AI that writes code.

00;08;19;15 - 00;08;30;11
Nick Jain
So you've become an art, a good engineer. Software engineers are becoming architects and managers instead of actual coders. So the traditional coding job may entirely disappear over the next couple of years, or let's say decade.

00;08;30;11 - 00;08;36;22
Nick Jain
So in private equity, for example, there's kind of three core things that are going on managing the relationships.

00;08;36;25 - 00;08;38;26
Nick Jain
Number two, coordinating people,

00;08;38;29 - 00;08;39;25
Nick Jain
both inside,

00;08;39;25 - 00;08;42;19
Nick Jain
the private equity firm as well as well as a portfolio companies.

00;08;42;19 - 00;08;44;09
Nick Jain
Number three, doing analysis.

00;08;44;14 - 00;09;11;09
Nick Jain
And I think doing the analysis portion is the first part that is going to get largely automated away because machines can not only do it faster, but better, and they can do really three things really well. Number one, they can ingest data. So you can either if you've ever been done an M&A deal, you get a huge wad of documents sitting in a data room, Excel files, PDFs, legal documents, contracts, lists of customers going through all that can take, a team of people weeks to do so.

00;09;11;09 - 00;09;29;21
Nick Jain
Number one, I can do that very quickly. Or just technology broadly can do that very quickly. Number two is to analyze all that information. So not just eats that information like reading it, but analyze and think about it. And number three and you alluded to the second go is like figure out what matters. There might be a thousand things going on at the company, but there's only like 3 or 4 things that might matter.

00;09;29;21 - 00;09;41;28
Nick Jain
And figuring out whether this is a good company to invest in or not, and technology or party some good at some of the leading AI models can do that really well. So they can look they can see the forest through the trees.

00;09;42;01 - 00;09;57;18
Craig Andrews
And that makes a lot of sense. And I think for a lot of these and for a lot of these folks, they are happy to get, you know, to let I do some of the automation that they used to do. It's,

00;09;57;20 - 00;09;59;03
Craig Andrews
yeah, I mean, it's.

00;09;59;05 - 00;10;00;17
Nick Jain
No, I certainly am. Right. Like, I don't,

00;10;00;21 - 00;10;01;16
Nick Jain
what is it? I've a,

00;10;01;16 - 00;10;15;08
Nick Jain
prospective client we're chatting with. They wanted us to build a financial model and yes, I can do it. You know, I'm exceptionally fast. Excel probably like top 1% Excel user. But rather than spending ten hours building a model, it took me 35 minutes, I think, to build one using AI.

00;10;15;10 - 00;10;16;14
Nick Jain
And it's beautiful.

00;10;16;14 - 00;10;17;05
Nick Jain
It's it's,

00;10;17;05 - 00;10;28;11
Nick Jain
it's as beautiful as anything I would have built mathematically accurate and took me 35 minutes instead of ten hours. And I think again, I'm very fast Excel. So like, it can beat me up by night. What is that, 94%?

00;10;28;13 - 00;10;33;24
Craig Andrews
So literally this is like the 10th or 12th time you've said Excel and

00;10;33;24 - 00;10;34;11
Craig Andrews
this is

00;10;34;11 - 00;10;38;07
Craig Andrews
it's fine. It's a technology that thinks near and dear to your heart. You have,

00;10;38;09 - 00;10;44;19
Nick Jain
It's geared to everyone in the business world, right? If you do anything mathematical, right, whether you're adding five plus five, most people will open up,

00;10;44;19 - 00;10;51;11
Nick Jain
Excel instead of a calculator and just add of five plus five on that. Or build all financial models in the world for the last 30 years have been built using that technology.

00;10;51;16 - 00;10;52;01
Nick Jain
And it's great.

00;10;52;01 - 00;10;53;22
Nick Jain
It's literally what everyone uses, right.

00;10;53;22 - 00;10;56;24
Nick Jain
Its role is going to change, though.

00;10;56;26 - 00;10;57;20
Craig Andrews
Well, you found,

00;10;57;20 - 00;11;01;28
Craig Andrews
you found love in Excel, if I'm not mistaken.

00;11;02;01 - 00;11;03;02
Nick Jain
Not quite love, but,

00;11;03;02 - 00;11;04;05
Nick Jain
we decided to take a,

00;11;04;05 - 00;11;05;15
Nick Jain
a relational bed. So

00;11;05;15 - 00;11;06;24
Nick Jain
my. And now wife, then,

00;11;06;24 - 00;11;07;25
Nick Jain
then girlfriend had,

00;11;07;25 - 00;11;17;04
Nick Jain
an opportunity to go to two very good schools. One was offering her a lot more money, and the other was offering her less money. But it would be closer to where I was living and would allow us to continue our relationship.

00;11;17;10 - 00;11;36;08
Nick Jain
So we actually put this down on a spreadsheet and calculated, hey, is it worth giving up this expensive scholarship for a versus? You know, a shot of true love? And the answer we figured out was yes. And I kid you not, at a college professor who quantified happiness, that was his entire thing that he became famous for David, Danny Blanchflower.

00;11;36;10 - 00;11;51;02
Nick Jain
And he one of the things he became famous for was quantifying the value of a happy marriage or a happy relationship. So I took the numbers from his research, stuck it in our in our little Excel model, and said, like, here's weighing a very, very nice scholarship against the value of a lifetime marriage. What's the break even on?

00;11;51;02 - 00;11;56;24
Nick Jain
It's like how how much do we have to bet on this relationship for it to be worth? You know, giving up a lot of money,

00;11;56;24 - 00;12;02;28
Nick Jain
for a scholarship as a bunch of 22 year olds. And the answer came out, let's take this bet. And you know, thankfully, it worked out.

00;12;03;00 - 00;12;08;13
Craig Andrews
That's amazing. That's amazing.

00;12;08;15 - 00;12;13;24
Craig Andrews
That there's, there's some especially so close to Valentine's Day that would say, where's the heart in that? But,

00;12;13;24 - 00;12;15;06
Craig Andrews
no, I like it.

00;12;15;08 - 00;12;23;10
Nick Jain
Well, that's a look that you you the heart. Oh, so I'm a believer that marriage or relationships broadly. Right. Come down to kind of

00;12;23;10 - 00;12;33;25
Nick Jain
a alignment of values. Number two, some sort of spiritual or emotional connection. And number three, that it practically works. Everyone's got and the like. The first two are kind of the, the, let's say the touchy feely side.

00;12;33;26 - 00;12;50;14
Nick Jain
Those are important to relationship. But let's not also undermine that. The fact that there are some practical things about a relationship that everyone wants. You have a checklist of things that you're looking for in a partner. They look a certain way. They have a certain religious belief system. They have a certain career track economics. Right. Like how much money they make.

00;12;50;20 - 00;13;08;27
Nick Jain
People have those checklists and what type of life they want to live. Right? It doesn't even have to be the hard characteristics. It's like some people want to live a very sparse life, and some people want to own private islands, and you want to make sure you are aligned on kind of the life you want to live. And those are things that I think a lot of people should be a little bit more thoughtful about.

00;13;08;29 - 00;13;10;11
Nick Jain
You know, before they find,

00;13;10;11 - 00;13;24;03
Nick Jain
that marriage. And I'm not talking about, you know, dating when you're, you know, 16 or 22, but the person you're going to spend 40 years with, a lot of things have to go, you know, right. And be aligned at the beginning so that you can have that marriage that lasts 40, 50, 60 years.

00;13;24;05 - 00;13;38;07
Craig Andrews
Yeah, that makes sense. And actually, that makes a lot of sense. So cut back, pivot and back to the whole I thing. I, I mean, I was listening to a video,

00;13;38;07 - 00;13;41;15
Craig Andrews
a firm that listened to a, was it economics?

00;13;41;18 - 00;13;49;03
Craig Andrews
They have like a 94% accuracy rate on predictions made four quarters out. And,

00;13;49;05 - 00;14;01;21
Craig Andrews
and they're they're saying that, you know, they're seeing revenues rise, but there's continued margin pressure as, as we go into 2026.

00;14;01;23 - 00;14;17;13
Craig Andrews
And the thing that seems obvious is if and some of that is because labor costs are going up and there's, you know, other inflation in the economy, cost goods sold is going up. But the,

00;14;17;16 - 00;14;28;02
Craig Andrews
if you're going to be able to grow profit as opposed to just revenue, it seems like you have to do something different. You have to do something different.

00;14;28;02 - 00;14;36;16
Craig Andrews
You have to become more efficient. And I'm curious from what your thoughts are on that.

00;14;36;18 - 00;14;53;20
Nick Jain
And so, I mean, what you said is topologically true in the sense that if you, you know, ultimately the goal of all business is to make profit. And the only way to make profit is you do something different. You offer a better product that other people can't offer, so you can charge a premium price for it, or you figure out a way to how to cut costs.

00;14;53;23 - 00;15;17;08
Nick Jain
And companies approach it different ways, right? Like a highly innovative company, let's say the apple. Right. It tries to give you a better product that no one else can make. So they can charge you a premium price and have very nice margins on it. And other companies, let's say, in the in the commodities manufacturing sector, are really focused on cutting down costs as quickly as possible because their price, how much they sell a pound of steel for a kilo of steel is basically fixed.

00;15;17;08 - 00;15;20;10
Nick Jain
So they have to cut down their cost, whether that be energy, people mining, its,

00;15;20;10 - 00;15;21;17
Nick Jain
raw materials, etc..

00;15;21;23 - 00;15;36;13
Nick Jain
So yes, it's true. I think the cool thing is, especially in the age of AI, two things happen. Number one, if you are AI forward or a AI native, it is possible to build a business models that are just way cheaper to deliver service.

00;15;36;15 - 00;15;44;12
Nick Jain
That's that's what we're kind of what we're doing. But the second thing that you can do is it's possible to deliver a product that wasn't possible before. And,

00;15;44;12 - 00;15;52;21
Nick Jain
and I'll use an old school example if you if you roll back the clock 120 years, you'll get a cost roughly like half $1 million in today's money to buy a car.

00;15;52;23 - 00;16;07;24
Nick Jain
Right? So the average person would never be able to afford a car. And the innovation that came out was obviously automated manufacturing in the assembly line. Henry Ford and all those guys figured out like, hey, if we create an assembly line and instead of making these artisanal, beautiful cars, we make the same boring thing. It just make a thousand.

00;16;07;27 - 00;16;12;06
Nick Jain
Quickly, we can bring down the cost of a car to $20,000 to make that affordable,

00;16;12;06 - 00;16;26;13
Nick Jain
to a normal human being. So what that technology did was not necessarily improve the profit margins, but all of a sudden allow you to bring down the price at which you offered a service so you could offer an entirely new product, i.e. a mass produced car to many, many people.

00;16;26;16 - 00;16;42;05
Nick Jain
The same thing happened with, you know, mass produced shoes in the, in the 1800s. Right. And building and making a pair of shoes in the 1800s cost a lot of money. Sometime by the 1850s it became possible to mass produce shoes. Now everyone were, you know, shoes instead of having to wear like leathers with leather, with,

00;16;42;08 - 00;16;43;14
Nick Jain
straps wrapped around your feet.

00;16;43;20 - 00;17;02;28
Nick Jain
And that's what I is going to do. It is it's such a revolutionary technology that is now going to allow people to offer product and services at a price point that is affordable to a mass audience, instead of you needing to pay, let's say, $50,000 for CRM, it might be possible to offer a CRM for 100 bucks. And that's really terrifying.

00;17;02;28 - 00;17;18;14
Nick Jain
For the existent is, you know, CRM incumbents. But it is awesome for all the people in the world right now who would love to have a CRM, a customer relationship management system, but can't afford it. 50,000 bucks a year because you are a solo operator or a 20 person company, not a 10,000 person company.

00;17;18;16 - 00;17;22;16
Craig Andrews
Right? So let's use an example. Something like,

00;17;22;19 - 00;17;28;04
Craig Andrews
an Hvac company. Where where do you see AI coming into that?

00;17;28;06 - 00;17;31;07
Nick Jain
Sure. So there. So I have a small,

00;17;31;07 - 00;17;34;16
Nick Jain
rental construction business, and I deal with kind of contractors all the time. Right.

00;17;34;24 - 00;17;37;06
Nick Jain
They basically have four things that they pay for. And,

00;17;37;06 - 00;17;37;24
Nick Jain
number one is,

00;17;37;24 - 00;17;38;29
Nick Jain
like, let's say,

00;17;38;29 - 00;17;41;08
Nick Jain
materials. Right? Lumber parts,

00;17;41;11 - 00;17;42;15
Nick Jain
you know, a furnace,

00;17;42;15 - 00;17;45;11
Nick Jain
air conditioner or whatever. Number two is the labor.

00;17;45;13 - 00;17;51;25
Nick Jain
And those two things aren't going to change too much in the near term because they're physical limitations. You know, how what a piece of lumber costs.

00;17;52;02 - 00;17;56;20
Nick Jain
You can argue there some second order effects, but I'll skip that for a moment. But they still have two kind of,

00;17;56;20 - 00;18;09;09
Nick Jain
major expenses. They spend a lot of time kind of doing, let's call it the accounting side, billing people, collecting money, etc., that can that technology can do right now, both AI technology and other kind of quote unquote, traditional technology.

00;18;09;09 - 00;18;26;09
Nick Jain
So they should be instead of paying somebody a part time to be their bookkeeper or accountant or ensure I paid my bills, etc., that technology can do that. That's gonna save a, let's say, a half million dollar Hvac business. That's going to save them 20, $30,000 a year. That's pretty significant. Right.

00;18;26;13 - 00;18;28;18
Nick Jain
And then the second side is the estimation.

00;18;28;20 - 00;18;38;08
Nick Jain
So if you've ever hired a contractor to do work on your house, he or she comes in, they look around, you know, let's say your Hvac system and say like, hey, Craig, you need your furnace is 25 years old. It needs to be,

00;18;38;08 - 00;18;55;07
Nick Jain
upgraded. It's going to cost you eight grand. That requires them to come out. And so that requires them to drive out, spend 20 minutes walking around your house, inspecting your ducks and your furnace, and then send and then sending you a, you know, they go back to their office and they send you a quote saying, Craig, you know, this is going to cost you $8,000.

00;18;55;07 - 00;19;11;25
Nick Jain
Here's the part. Here's the labor. That entire estimation process can now not only be done remotely, but largely can be done with like 80 plus percent accuracy entirely by technology. So you from your home can take a picture of your furnace. You can walk around, take a picture of your air ducts or video. You can send that over to them.

00;19;11;25 - 00;19;30;18
Nick Jain
Some piece of technology or some guy sitting at a computer can come up with an estimate and automatically email that estimate back. That's just saved him or her driving out for half an hour each way. Going back to the office, doing some math, and then emailing you a report that's, I don't know for a typical estimate in the residential Hvac market takes about four hours of human labor.

00;19;30;20 - 00;19;47;22
Nick Jain
Build it 100 bucks an hour. So that just served. Save them 400 bucks per estimate, and they might do five estimates before they actually get a job. So they're saving $2,000 per job. That's incredible. Right. If you're doing three jobs a week, that is $6,000 of savings per week times 50 weeks, that is. What is that?

00;19;47;22 - 00;19;48;04
Nick Jain
Six that,

00;19;48;04 - 00;19;48;16
Nick Jain
60.

00;19;48;21 - 00;19;53;17
Nick Jain
That's $300,000 of savings for $1 million Hvac company. That is incredible.

00;19;53;20 - 00;19;55;08
Craig Andrews
That is.

00;19;55;10 - 00;20;12;11
Nick Jain
Great. If you were running $1 million company and you found $300,000 of savings is not, that's $300,000 that goes right into the owner's pocket. Or you can pay your company, your employees more, have them do more work. Even if my math is off by a factor of three, you're still saving 100,000 bucks on $1 million business. That's incredible.

00;20;12;11 - 00;20;14;06
Nick Jain
That's a 10% margin increase.

00;20;14;08 - 00;20;16;16
Craig Andrews
It's. Yeah, it's enormous.

00;20;16;18 - 00;20;27;16
Nick Jain
And that's Google today, by the way. Without you don't need rocket science. You just need someone who knows a little bit about technology. You can go do that today, right? You don't need to wait for advanced technologies five years from now.

00;20;27;18 - 00;20;29;12
Craig Andrews
Well, I'll I'll give you an example of something

00;20;29;12 - 00;20;31;10
Craig Andrews
that happened with me yesterday.

00;20;31;13 - 00;20;51;20
Craig Andrews
You know, we're launching another brand and trying to get an email address set up, but trying to make sure it comes through, you know, that we can send to, you know, both brands and we can receive from both brands. And historically, I would have to go call some IT person.

00;20;51;22 - 00;20;57;28
Craig Andrews
I'd have to spend time explaining the problem to them, have to do the sent and the other. And

00;20;57;28 - 00;21;00;10
Craig Andrews
instead I just went into,

00;21;00;10 - 00;21;10;21
Craig Andrews
I use, I think I use copilot and I just said, hey, here's what I want to do, how do I do it? And it gave me step by step instructions. It got resolved faster.

00;21;10;23 - 00;21;14;21
Craig Andrews
It I didn't lose my computer for a few hours while they were working on it.

00;21;14;24 - 00;21;19;13
Craig Andrews
You know, it it was significantly cheaper.

00;21;19;16 - 00;21;32;18
Craig Andrews
And it's the it was it was not at all intuitive. You know, when I was looking at, I was like, Holy cow, that was all the way going down to, you know, Microsoft still has this thing called PowerShell where you enter command lines,

00;21;32;21 - 00;21;39;26
Craig Andrews
to do things and just said, okay, bring up PowerShell and then put this line in there and then put this line in there, and then put this line in there.

00;21;39;28 - 00;21;40;14
Craig Andrews
And

00;21;40;14 - 00;21;52;05
Craig Andrews
so it's doing some pretty advanced IT stuff. But I didn't have to hire an IT guy. I didn't have to wait for them to show up. I didn't have to, you know, lose my system while they were working on it.

00;21;52;07 - 00;22;00;11
Nick Jain
So that's that's exactly right. Right. That's going back to what I was saying earlier. Where can I expand a person outside their comfort zone, their skill set you may not know how to use, you know,

00;22;00;11 - 00;22;03;20
Nick Jain
PowerShell and the command line interface to see if what's called a CLI,

00;22;03;23 - 00;22;10;13
Nick Jain
because you don't know, you know, the syntax, that new item, you know, our ipconfig slash reset.

00;22;10;16 - 00;22;21;21
Nick Jain
But I can do that for you. You can go a step further rather than I telling your copilot telling you, hey, Craig, copy this command over into PowerShell. You can go to the next step and give copilot the permission to do that. And it'll do that

00;22;21;21 - 00;22;26;00
Nick Jain
automatically, which is that's where the real magic starts happening, where you have you give,

00;22;26;00 - 00;22;28;01
Nick Jain
the AI, you know, digital arms and legs.

00;22;28;01 - 00;22;34;18
Nick Jain
So instead of telling you what to do and using its arms and legs, it can then talk to other systems and just do it by itself.

00;22;34;21 - 00;22;46;14
Nick Jain
And that's, that starts getting really exciting. You need to be a little bit more cut, both comfortable with technology and technical do that. But that's where magic starts happening because you to have four different AI agents doing totally different things right?

00;22;46;16 - 00;22;49;18
Nick Jain
Yeah, I have one in the background with Valentine's Day coming up doing research.

00;22;49;18 - 00;22;50;20
Nick Jain
And it's going to order a,

00;22;50;20 - 00;22;51;15
Nick Jain
gift for my wife.

00;22;51;15 - 00;22;58;08
Nick Jain
I instructed it based on, you know, what my budget is, what my preferences are, the type of personality she has. And it's out there doing research right now.

00;22;58;08 - 00;22;58;29
Nick Jain
Probably done by,

00;22;58;29 - 00;23;02;20
Nick Jain
but it only takes about 3 or 4 minutes to do and probably already ordered it on Amazon.

00;23;02;20 - 00;23;05;07
Nick Jain
Will send me a message on my phone saying, hey, Nick, it's going to arrive,

00;23;05;07 - 00;23;07;08
Nick Jain
you know, on Friday.

00;23;07;11 - 00;23;13;24
Craig Andrews
Yeah. That's amazing. Well, so let's let's kind of put Boeing that's the,

00;23;13;27 - 00;23;19;08
Craig Andrews
so we talked about love. That's how does this play out? Eagle Rock CFO sure.

00;23;19;08 - 00;23;25;29
Nick Jain
So look, for the types of services that we offer, they would if you hired a big consulting firm, they,

00;23;25;29 - 00;23;42;03
Nick Jain
they would charge you about half $1 million a month for this. Or if you hired a traditional consulting firm or mid-sized consulting firm, they charge you like 50 grand. They come in, they spend about three weeks looking at all your numbers, talking to a bunch of people, spending a lot of time, both yours and theirs, and charge you about 30, 40 grand and say, hey, Craig, go do this.

00;23;42;05 - 00;23;50;26
Nick Jain
And that would be restricted to their domain of expertise if they're, let's say, factory consultants or financial consultants or marketing consultants, we build tech that connects to your systems.

00;23;50;29 - 00;23;54;06
Nick Jain
It can connect to your systems or your Excel spreadsheets or whatever. It doesn't really matter.

00;23;54;09 - 00;24;07;18
Nick Jain
And we charge our customers literally 3500 bucks a month. So between 1 to 5% of what anybody else charges, and it pops out 3 to 5 recommendations that you can do for your business today that will make you more profitable next month.

00;24;07;18 - 00;24;21;19
Nick Jain
And I'll give you a practical example. One of our first clients was a $22 million Hollywood talent agency. I know nothing about Hollywood. I know nothing about talent agencies. I know nothing about celebrities. Right? I about three hours after this guy sent me the documents,

00;24;21;26 - 00;24;24;19
Nick Jain
and they were documents that were unstructured. They were chaotic.

00;24;24;21 - 00;24;28;05
Nick Jain
I just pumped it into our system and it said, look, this business can do three things.

00;24;28;05 - 00;24;51;15
Nick Jain
It can save $332,000 in costs right away by just cutting these random costs that you don't have to fire anybody. You don't have to, like, cut me, you know, major projects. It's just wasted money. Free money, $332,000. Number two, it predicted that they were they needed to do a liquidity infusion because of a really wacky working capital thing that was going to happen, causing them to lose, to run out of cash even though they're profitable, which no human being would have thought of.

00;24;51;15 - 00;24;57;27
Nick Jain
Right. This is a business that's growing fast and profitable. Why would they ever run out of money? It's not a thing a normal human being would think about.

00;24;58;00 - 00;25;17;03
Nick Jain
And number three, it's that, hey, you're, you know, you're missing all these insurance policies that you really need because because the line of business you're in. And so that took us about, let's say, three, four hours to do if I, if I was doing this for a new client in a traditional consulting methodology, it would have taken 3 or 4 people working about 3 or 4 weeks for,

00;25;17;03 - 00;25;19;09
Nick Jain
cumulatively across like 160 hours of labor.

00;25;19;09 - 00;25;38;12
Nick Jain
So we took 160 hours of labor at, let's say, 200 bucks an hour, a $32,000, a cost down to 3500 bucks. What that does is kind of two incredible. Well, three incredible things. Number one, I don't need to be an expert on your company, your industry or whatever. Right. Number two, because I can bring the cost down. It means I can,

00;25;38;12 - 00;25;42;19
Nick Jain
charge you way less because it's not costing me $30,000 to deliver that service.

00;25;42;21 - 00;25;46;22
Nick Jain
Number three is it can deliver insights that are know, like

00;25;46;22 - 00;26;01;04
Nick Jain
that human beings are going to miss out because human beings kind of think about what their domains of expertise are, right? I as a, you know, as a non Hollywood guy, wouldn't think about all these crazy insurance policies that are really important in Hollywood. It can do it will discover things comprehensively.

00;26;01;04 - 00;26;13;06
Nick Jain
Our technology for similar technologies, in fact just discover things that are that human beings would miss. And that's incredibly powerful. When you can deliver something at a 1% of the cost of like an elite consulting firm with charge,

00;26;13;09 - 00;26;19;24
Nick Jain
because it just makes it more accessible to small businesses, and it comes up with really cool ways to make money for them.

00;26;19;27 - 00;26;27;16
Craig Andrews
Wow. So what do you think's going to happen to McKinsey and and Accenture and companies like that.

00;26;27;18 - 00;26;30;14
Nick Jain
If you're so look I'm ex McKinsey guy I'm not going to comment on their

00;26;30;14 - 00;26;51;01
Nick Jain
their strategy. I think these elite consulting firms are going to, you know, they're adopting these technologies as aggressively as they can because they're not stupid. They see the opportunity to deliver more value. And what's going to happen is their clients are going to ask for, you know, ten times as much value creation as they did, because they know that McKinsey is also going to get leverage from these technologies.

00;26;51;03 - 00;26;53;29
Nick Jain
So at the high end, customers are going to demand more,

00;26;54;02 - 00;27;06;17
Nick Jain
more value for that same, you know, half million dollars price tag. And then conversely, at the smaller end, there's folks like me saying, look, it doesn't make sense for me to compete against McKinsey or BCG or Accenture, but rather because the cost has come down so much.

00;27;06;17 - 00;27;22;06
Nick Jain
We can expand the market again, like the model T, right? Make the make that model, make that mass produce car affordable to people who couldn't afford the half million dollar car two years ago. They still can't afford the half million dollar car two years ago. But we can offer that car now at 5000 bucks, which makes it affordable.

00;27;22;08 - 00;27;25;19
Craig Andrews
That's pretty awesome. Well, now this has been amazing.

00;27;25;19 - 00;27;27;23
Craig Andrews
How can folks reach you?

00;27;27;25 - 00;27;28;05
Nick Jain
Sure.

00;27;28;05 - 00;27;35;01
Nick Jain
So our website is Eagle Rock, cfo.com. We offer a bunch of free tools, by the way, including some free AI tools that I encourage people to check out.

00;27;35;01 - 00;27;36;24
Nick Jain
My email address is on the website.

00;27;36;24 - 00;27;43;06
Nick Jain
So, yeah, just check out, just find us on Eagle Rock cfo.com as you want to contact me. There's literally my email and my business partner Dan's email.

00;27;43;06 - 00;27;47;06
Nick Jain
So feel free to email us or we respond to literally 100% of emails.

00;27;47;08 - 00;27;50;06
Craig Andrews
Well that's awesome. Thanks for coming on Layers and Legacies.

00;27;50;09 - 00;27;58;28
Nick Jain
Thank you so much for having me, Craig.

00;27;59;00 - 00;28;20;22
Craig Andrews
This is Craig Andrews. I want to thank you for listening to the Leaders and Legacies podcast. We're looking for leaders to share how they're making the impact beyond themselves. If that's you, please go to Ally's for me.com/guest and sign up there. If you got something out of this interview, we would love you to share this

00;28;20;22 - 00;28;22;17
Craig Andrews
episode on social media.

00;28;22;19 - 00;28;45;29
Craig Andrews
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00;28;46;01 - 00;28;54;06
Craig Andrews
Please go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up. Ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show. It means a lot to me.

00;28;54;06 - 00;29;04;17
Craig Andrews
It means a lot to my team. If you want to know more, please go to Ally's for me.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.