The Grit Blueprint

Building Legacy with Innovation: The Future of Independent Lumber Yards with Mark Blickenstaff

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Mark Blickenstaff, Divisional Director at Moore Lumber and Hardware, shares how their 75-year-old business is embracing AI to enhance customer service while maintaining personal relationships. His team has implemented innovative solutions including an AI paint ordering agent, financial analysis tools, and marketing content generation that's transforming how their independent lumberyards operate.

• Use AI to augment human capabilities, not replace people
• Focus on what your customers need but don't have time to do themselves
• Implement an 85-15 rule: AI does 85% of the work, humans verify and refine
• Start with simple applications like email response drafting to save hours daily
• Treat AI as a tool similar to how nail guns improved upon hammers
• Create websites and marketing materials for contractors as value-added services
• Train both young and experienced team members on AI tools
• Leverage AI to access and summarize technical documents instantly
• Upload company materials so AI understands your brand voice
• Use weather forecasts and historical data to optimize inventory and staffing
• Record legacy knowledge from long-time employees before retirement
• Stay competitive by embracing innovation while maintaining core values

Don't fear AI taking your job – fear the person who uses AI becoming 80% faster than you and taking your position. Stay curious and don't assume the way you've always done something is the only way it can be done.


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Stefanie Couch:

That's what you should be worried about, not AI taking your job. It's worried about the person who uses AI. That's gonna be 80% faster than you, or two times faster than you, coming in and taking your job.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Even my most seasoned salespeople. Now I'm fortunate I've got a guy that's been in the industry for 51 years now. I mean straight out of high school went into the industry. We brought him on board with ChatGPT not long ago. You know, old dog, new trick. But he embraced it, we rolled it slowly and now he's in love with it. He does know the answer, but some of these newer products and whatnot he's like I don't really know. Hold on a second and it gives him every technical document he could possibly need, summarizes it and he can give the customer response so much faster.

Stefanie Couch:

I actually tell mine to treat me like I'm a complete idiot that's never done anything before in business and doesn't know how to read a P&L, and give me things that I would never have thought of and tell me why. You can either learn this or you can watch as everyone else learns it and you can be the one who doesn't know how to use it. That probably does lose your job because you can't use AI. Welcome to the Grit Blueprint podcast, the show for bold builders, brand leaders and legacy makers in the construction and building industry. I'm your host, Stef anie Couch, and I've been in this industry my entire life. Whether we're breaking down what's working in sales and marketing, new advances in AI and automation, or interviewing top industry leaders, you're going to get real-world strategies to grow your business, build your brand and lead your team. Let's get to work.

Stefanie Couch:

Welcome to the Grit Blueprint Podcast with Stefanie Couch. I am excited today to have Mark Blickenstaff. He is the Divisional Director of Revenue, growth and Marketing at Moore Lumber and Hardware. They have seven stores and they have been a trusted staple in Colorado since 1947. You guys have been around a long time legacy business and Mark and I had a conversation at IBS in Vegas. That really excited me because he is shaking things up around more lumber. It may be a longstanding traditional business, but he is bringing AI and automation into the mix and today I'm really pumped to talk to you about this Probably the first person I've ever heard that actually knew what an AI agent was in our space. So I nerded out pretty hard. Welcome to the podcast, mark.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Thanks, stephanie, it's good to be here.

Stefanie Couch:

And we are going to break it down today and talk a little bit about that AI. But I want you to tell me about you and, kind of, how did you get into this industry, what's your journey been like and what is your role today at Moore Lumber.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Sure. So I'm fortunate I actually grew up around the industry, grew up in a small logging town in Idaho, so spent my whole childhood watching logging trucks come in and rail cars of lumber leave from the Boise Cascade Mill. Yeah, and, honestly, graduated high school and swore I'd never get into the industry. That was not for me. So off to college I went. I actually started in the industry pushing a broom at a nursery at our local home center when I was in college and 16 years later I kind of woke up and I realized I'm in the industry, so progressed all the way through all the ranks at the home center and just kept on trucking. And just kept on trucking and then coming to more lumber. That happened in 2019.

Mark Blickenstaff:

And the legend Ken Keene gave me a phone call and said, hey, I've got this opportunity. I was like awesome, I've never been to Colorado. That sounds great. So I took a phone call from the ownership here Bill and Aaron and, just a natural fit, a three-hour phone call seemed like two minutes, so great conversation. Got down here to visit it and what really drew me in was the appreciation for the people that Bill and Aaron have, and then our contractors and our DIYers. They're all just incredible. So first couple of years solely focused on ops and sales, and then a couple of years ago, added marketing into my repertoire and now yeah, I'm blessed, I get to serve and oversee a lot of it now as a divisional director.

Stefanie Couch:

That's awesome and you have a cool title divisional director of revenue and marketing. Tell me what your day to day looks like.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Oh, my day to day. My day to day definitely starts very early Checking our trucks, making sure we've got everything on the road we're not gonna disappoint any customers today. Making sure that my salespeople are all lined out, they have quality leads to work, what their pipelines look like. I transitioned from there over into the marketing side to make sure my marketing people are doing what they're supposed to be and they always do a great job. So really it's a lot of feet up on bond eating. You know it's a lot of feet up on bond eating. You know it's pretty kosh.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, that's what I was actually hoping you would say is a lot of just dwindling your thumbs around and just you know, no big deal.

Mark Blickenstaff:

I've got good people. I'm bored yeah.

Stefanie Couch:

That's amazing, though, when you have a marketing team, that's strong, because a lot of our people in our industry don't really believe in marketing. You guys have a little different stance on that. Tell me a little bit about that, like, what does marketing mean to you in this business and how do you and your team do that?

Mark Blickenstaff:

Sure. So I mean it is fun because we're taking a lot of that old school service and we're giving it a dash of some new school thinking, and I really do enjoy doing that. You know I'm a millennial and I got to be real. You know we're special ducks. Yeah, we are special ducks and you know we'd like to be communicated to in a different way and we do thrive on partnerships. So for me, marketing isn't necessarily you know, we've got cheap lumber, we've got cheap nails. Marketing to me is hey, we're here to help you grow your business. I've got resources, I've got skills. You can go build a house and you're incredible at it. We can market. Let's go ahead and collaborate and I'll use my resources. You go do what you do best and I'll go do what I do best. And so through that partnership we've really generated some neat programs to help our builders grow, which, in turn, we grow as well. So marketing is a lot of outbound is what we have nailed it, my friend.

Stefanie Couch:

I mean congratulations because I talk to a lot of people in this industry and I don't know anyone who has quite figured that out of hey, we, if we can make our customers money and we can reduce friction in their business Because I don't know very many contracting companies, especially small guys in a truck or two, that even think about that type of thing their brand, their marketing but you are using your resources to help them grow their business. Oh, smart, this is really smart.

Mark Blickenstaff:

What are some ways you're?

Stefanie Couch:

doing that for people? I mean, are you doing like direct mail? I don't want you to give away all your secrets, but I'm just curious because it's so different.

Mark Blickenstaff:

I'm an open book. I mean, honestly, I'd love more, more independent lumberjars to jump on board with me. Yeah, no, we do everything from traditional marketing, which I'll deem, into the direct mail, newspaper ads. So you know, we've got graphic teams. We can certainly help with that. We can help with your logo design. Our, our great partner, develops websites for people. We we essentially came out with a 72 hour website program.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Oh my gosh Very inexpensive for them to get into. So it's like most of these guys don't have a website. You know they they might have a Facebook page that hasn't been seen in three years. But yeah you know that's the extent of their, their digital presence.

Stefanie Couch:

So I love it. Yeah, and that's a lot of what we're doing for people in, you know, in our business at Grip, blueprint is figuring out how do we we actually have some customers that we're trying to get to do things like this. So I mean, I can't. I didn't know. You just shocked me. I didn't know we're going to go here. I'm so excited right now I can hardly contain my little nerdy marketing door window lumberyard heart.

Stefanie Couch:

But this is it, man, you got to figure out what they don't want to do. But they need to do and do it for them. And this is it. And the money is a part of it. Look, there's a fixed cost, there's a real cost on building a website. But if you can do it fast, you can do it for them and they pay a little bit or maybe don't pay anything and that's a part of your service. That is it. So I think you guys have nailed it. Now I just need to come to Colorado to see this in real life. But your company has obviously changed a lot over the last decades. 1947 it started a certain way. You're distinguishing yourself that way with marketing. How else are you guys standing out in this competitive market? Because the independent lumberyard and hardware store sometimes gets overshadowed in the media by all these amazing things that are acquisitions and all the big getting bigger. How's the independent lumberyard and hardware store win today?

Mark Blickenstaff:

Great, yeah, I mean, we were. We were one location, bailey Colorado, 1947, now up to the seven locations. At the end of all of it, it's still to our roots. Integrity, service, trust, community focus those are our staples. We're always on those is, you know, our ability to be the local shop, but with capabilities of a much larger operation. Yeah, you know, our prices are very competitive because we do have very strong relationships with manufacturers and wholesalers. We were more nimble as well, and that's one of our biggest advantages not knocking the big guys because they're damn good at what they do. But you know, we can pivot really really fast and with seven different locations, I've got seven different markets really. So tastes are different and preferences are different. So it's like cool, I can pivot that store, just that one, I don't need to pivot the entire company. That's true. Having that nimble attitude is incredible for us.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, that decentralized model, man, that's a competitive advantage if I've ever seen one. You know, I used to work at a really big distribution company and they won that way. That's really what I think their competitive advantage is is that they allow their managers in market to make decisions. My old boss used to say all the time, if we want to sell lemonade and pins, we could sell lemonade and pins, and I'm like I don't know if corporate would be OK with that or not. But you know what? Honestly, I'm not so sure. I always wondered if he was going to be on the sidewalk with a lemonade stand one day when I came into work, just so he could say that story was true. But you know, it's like that is how you win in your market is being able to let your managers and let your people do the things that their customers really need and want in day-to-day market and that changes so rapidly.

Stefanie Couch:

It's hard nowadays to have a true competitive advantage. I think your people are competitive advantage as well. Tell me a little bit about your team.

Mark Blickenstaff:

My team, small teams. We run really small teams throughout our company. Actually, we have outside reps. Not a single one of them has a truck, though you know we rely on that relationship very, very deeply and they have a personal relationship and the biggest thing we're driving home is, you know, these aren't just customers, these are partners. When we fail, we're delaying their livelihoods, the shoes for their kids, the meals on their table, whatever you want to call it. So I mean we all take it very, very personally. We try to take it more personally than our contractors do, and they take it extremely personal. So that's our biggest focus is, you know, just maintaining we are that true partner, that we are invested in their success.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and that's the thing you know people talk about. We're about to transition to this conversation about AI. You know, what I love about AI is that it makes us faster on the things that don't really matter from that personal relationship side, the stuff that's really just like a data execution or an automation that's faster so that we can do the things that only humans can do, which is really what matters in our business. But the thing is that a lot of times, our humans are mired up in these little tasks that could be done automated or by AI and they can't spend the time doing the things that really matter. So that's what I love about this. So much is that I do think it's going to allow us to do more of the really good stuff as humans in our relationship building cycle of customer service.

Stefanie Couch:

All right let's dive in. This is an old school industry. It's like scary AI is here and they don't necessarily know what to do. So you and I had a conversation. Actually, I interviewed Aaron Moore and we had a great conversation in Vegas at the IBS show and while we were talking about AI he said hey, mark is building some really cool stuff. What inspired Moore Lumber to actually go in and explore AI automation technology? I'm guessing you personally were interested in this, but what are some of the problems that you're like? I wonder if we could fix this with these tools.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yeah, and so I again, I'm blessed. You know, I've got two generations of the family still working in the company, so generation two was actually one of the larger spearheads on us getting into AI. He's at an age that you wouldn't expect it, but he is all about it and he supports everything we do with it. So really, it all started down to. You know, how can we serve a customer better without losing what makes us special? You know, how do we not lose personal contact but still make us more efficient? So that's where, when we started to digest into it, it's like, well, we've, realistically, we've been using AI for years, decades even started to digest into it.

Mark Blickenstaff:

It's like, well, we've, realistically, we've been using AI for years, decades. Even, um, we just called them algorithms. Right, well, an algorithm really is AI. We just didn't call it that yet. So now, with the advancements and the more responsiveness and the broader depth of AI, like great, that means everything we do can get broader. Yeah, so we've been using it forever for, you know, supply and demand, keeping our supply chain full, keeping our inventory levels, appropriate seasonal changes, all those things, and so now we can actually take those and go even do a deeper dive and I can actually pull in forecasted weather. You know like, hey, why not? We know weather impacts our industry every single day. We just got, you know, 12 inches of snow today here in Colorado.

Stefanie Couch:

It's 82 degrees here in Georgia. I don't even understand that. Okay.

Mark Blickenstaff:

We were 75 yesterday, so I don't know Wow that's crazy. So you know it's looking at those and going, okay, I can do so much. Now I can take a weather forecast and I can impact my inventory levels. I can impact my staffing levels. I can impact, you know, I can expect a traffic flow, what my cash flow is going to be for a day, all these things I mean. Any question I really want to dive into and find an efficiency. Ai just allows us to do that.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and I just saw this week so I mean talking about fast moving like holy cow. Every week something huge comes out. So Google just released and I'm sure you saw this already where you can go into a Google Sheet and now, instead of having to be a wizard that can do pivot tables and formulas which there's some broken hearts right now that I know of because they're pivot table wizards but now you can just type into Google Sheet formulas, find this thing that I want to understand and it literally will just do it.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, it's incredible thing that I want to understand and it literally will just do it. Yeah, it's incredible that right there, holy cow, like you know, summarize this plus this and then tell me, based on seasonality, this thing, and it can just do it in Google sheets. So if you think you have to be some sort of AI genius that can program and do all this stuff, that is not true. It's something you should start to just try. So you know, I will say the biggest thing that's changing right now is from chat GPT coming out in 2022. At the end I think it was December 2022 is when I started messing with it it just come out to the masses.

Stefanie Couch:

You could write an email, you could do all these things, but right now, what you can do is build AI agents. So agentic AI for someone listening, that is like I have no idea what she's saying. It's basically building a customer service person or a person that works for you to do a task and instead of you having to type in the prompt, you kind of tell it what task and you program some paths through it and it starts to do that automatically. So you guys are actually starting to use that for something you mentioned about a paint agent. So tell us a little bit about that. I want to hear about this paint agent.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Tell people how you're using this yeah, we're extremely excited.

Mark Blickenstaff:

So we partnered with a company it's actually called PaintPal and of course, ai is in paint. So that works out great, yep, and what we've partnered with them to do is we did a time study on a phone call to order paint, and paint is a very large segment for us. We're aligned with Benjamin Moore and we do a good amount of volume there. So what we started looking at was it doesn't matter if the customer is ordering one gallon or 100 gallons, it's still about a 12 minute phone call. Well, 12 minute phone calls, times X amount per day that's a lot of time. So we started to shift a little bit to text to order, and it was just old school you just text. You know one of my paint salesmen and they are paint people and that was great. What we found was OK, it gets a little bit of a bottleneck to it. So how can we make this even better?

Mark Blickenstaff:

And so, partnering with PaintPal, we developed we call her Ashley and she's our agent and she knows everything about paint. I mean, she knows technical specs, she knows colors, she knows what colors you can use it on exteriors and what colors you can't. She knows the Sherwin equivalent in a Ben Moore color. She can cross reference, she can do all of it, and so we programmed her to have a natural conversation via text, and so our paint contractors just sit there and text with her, just like you or I, and they have no clue, unless we had had told them that it was an AI agent.

Mark Blickenstaff:

So, at the end of the day, what we have is this beautiful text conversation that's still personable and still has a personality to it, and at the end of it we've got a concise order formatted in a way that's completely makes sense to everybody. And we have the records and we have everything else that goes with it, and it gets emailed and blasted to the paint team. They mix it. And we have a else that goes with it, and it gets emailed and blasted to the paint team. They mix it. And we have a very high service quality standard. So we're a two-hour window from order to job site.

Stefanie Couch:

That's awesome.

Mark Blickenstaff:

So time matters to us, so all of this can happen and I save 12 minutes of time for a real person. Now, I'm not replacing that real person by any means.

Stefanie Couch:

I'm just making them more efficient at what I need them to be doing. Truly, yeah, that's something I want people to really think about is like these are the tasks that we don't have time to get to, that we're automating. You know, 68% of business small business phone calls reportedly go unanswered, and any person that gets voicemail unanswered and any person that gets voicemail 80% of those people never call back. That's a big number in a retail business like yours, if you could capture 100% of your phone calls instead of 34% or 32%, that is a big deal. Like that's a lot of people that are now getting answered, that are getting helped, that are getting sold, and so that's the type of task we're going to give AI to do.

Stefanie Couch:

It's this paint stuff that's so taxing, and if that person texts the wrong thing, or if you don't know someone that has been selling paint for 30 years, they probably don't know what Ashley knows anyway, even texted as a human. That's the thing is. There's so many ways to optimize this process where the human is still there, they're still employed, they're busy talking to people in real life that are in the store, and that Ashley is still working on the back end doing what she needs to do. Oh man, that's like. Every angle of that is a plus for me.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Right, and a lot of it truly came out of COVID, right, I mean COVID. We all forgot how to be salespeople during COVID. We became great order takers though oh my gosh, we could take orders all day long. Well, now it's that transition back. You know, especially in a market like right now, things are a little challenging across the nation. We have to actually sell again. Yeah, so that takes time.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, for sure.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Taking a paint order doesn't need to be one of those things that's just order taking.

Stefanie Couch:

I think that's so important. What do we, what do we want our humans to be optimized for? And even when I think about sales, so I love this. This is a sort of off AI, but you know, talking about sales, I think that's one of the biggest problems we have in our business is that every customer I have every single customer at Grit Blueprint. They wish they could sell more. People want more revenue and they wish they had more salespeople that really were good at going out and hunting and selling every single one of them. And I'm curious, like, how do you solve that problem?

Stefanie Couch:

You know, the next generation we all, we all fuss about the older people are like now we're the old guys and gals, the millennials, like Gen Z, just pick up the phone and they don't know how to sell. And you know these kids out of college, they can't do anything. I don't really feel that way, but I have a lot of Gen Z amazing people on my team, but I know there's a perception there. But even millennials, it's like, oh well, they can't sell, they just want to do everything online. What's the answer to that, mark? Like, because that's a loaded question. But how do we get salespeople to be educated in the products. Some of these things are so technical. You guys sell windows and doors. You know, and doors, you know. That's my love language. There's like 500 different things you need to know to sell a door.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Right.

Stefanie Couch:

Like I mean literally there's 500 things, because there's so many product lines, there's different types, there's different swings and hands and all that different stuff no-transcript.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Well, that's a loaded question, you're right.

Stefanie Couch:

Give me the exact answer.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yeah, let me jump right on that. But I am going to loop in AI. So even my most seasoned salespeople. Now I'm fortunate I've got a guy that's been in the industry for 51 years now. I mean straight out of high school went into the industry. You can do the math on how old he is now. But that I, we brought him on board with chat GPT not long ago. Yeah, like you know, old dog, new trick, but he embraced it. We rolled it slowly and now he's in love with it because he already he does know the answer. But some of these newer products and whatnot he's like I don't really know. Hold on a second and it gives him every technical document he could possibly need, summarizes it and he can give the customer response so much faster.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and it's written in an email format or a text format or whatever it is where he doesn't have to, maybe he's not a great writer, or maybe he's not a good speller or none of that matters anymore.

Mark Blickenstaff:

It's losing some potency, that's for sure. Yeah, but I think for the younger generation it's going to be as big of a tool, because when I think about my personal upbringing, I came up at a time where Google became a thing and the instant result was always go Google it. Well, now it's go AI it or go chat it, so we can do that and I think bringing that new generation and letting them know okay, it's okay to utilize a tool because it is just a tool. Again, that's all it is, just like a nail gun.

Stefanie Couch:

I mean, that's when people are really upset about it with me. They're like this is going to take over the world. It's like, yeah, just like pass load nail gun. I have no affiliation with pass load, that just happens to be what I grabbed. So don't get mad at me, hadachi or whoever, but at the end of the day, like that is what the nail gun was to the hammer, it's what the farmer's tractor was to the horse. You know, the car to the horse it's the same thing and it's not going anywhere. Like that's the truth of it is.

Stefanie Couch:

You can either choose to be the person who now decides to learn this, at 60, 70 years old or at 20 years old, it doesn't matter how. Where you are in the workforce age, you can either learn this or you can watch as everyone else learns it, and you can be the one who doesn't know how to use it. That probably does lose your job because you can't use AI. That's what you should be worried about, not AI taking your job. You can't use AI. That's what you should be worried about, not AI taking your job.

Stefanie Couch:

It's worried about the person who uses AI. That's going to be 80% faster than you, or two times faster than you coming in and taking your job. That's what we should be worried about as a workforce. I think that's huge that you guys are training people to use that. One thing I hear a lot and so I'm curious on your end how you mitigate this is what about misinformation from AI? So maybe especially on a product line, like if you sell a certain type of Windows or a certain type of Trex decking and then it pulls from TimberTech or whatever line you happen to sell, how do you mitigate that risk?

Mark Blickenstaff:

So we have a hard, fast rule it's 85-15. It's 85 percent correct. 15 percent of it's still gonna require your time, energy. So, end of the day, we do. We rely on our people having the knowledge and going oh, that doesn't smell right. Let me go back to that one. Yeah, now, at the same time, you know, chat GPT is the model we use has gotten a lot more advanced with putting citations on everything yep, and you know whether you have to ask it to or not, your choice but has gotten a lot more advanced with putting citations on everything, and you know whether you have to ask it to or not, your choice. But ours is automatic. We tell it to cite everything so that when it does kick something out, it's like okay, well, that came from Wikipedia, let's go check that one. Just to make sure I have no affiliation with Wikipedia. It's great, I love it.

Stefanie Couch:

If you want to sponsor me, hit me up.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yeah, yeah, crowdfund, that one too. But you know, so I, we, we do require the citations to be there. That way Our customer or our team does have some confidence on where it came from. But again it's, it's 85, 15, which is great because we've always worked with 80, 20 rules. Right, well, I love 5% more. That's even better.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, I'll take the ratio plus five. Is that what we're going to call it?

Mark Blickenstaff:

Pretty much. I love it.

Stefanie Couch:

And you know, with perplexity which I don't know if you've used perplexity much, I just recently started using that when I need to do research, like I really need it to be legit legit no-transcript. But even this week, I mean ChatGPT OpenAI just came out with a new model 4.1 that's for coding and some different things. That is substantially better than it was last week. I mean like exponentially better. This is the nerdiest episode I've ever. People are going to be like we thought this girl wore a pink hat and was a branding person. What the heck is going on right now I'm in the alternate universe, but this is like really so amazing how different things are going one week to the next. Just nuts. So people are like how do you keep up? How do you keep up, mark? I mean things are changing every week. What do you do to keep up with this?

Mark Blickenstaff:

Well, sleep is optional, so I mean, let's just throw that out there. No, I do spend a significant amount of my time. It's a priority, right? So it has to become a priority for you, otherwise you'll never be able to achieve success with this. So if you're going to implement it, make it a priority and then do dedicate to your priorities. So for me, it is a priority finding a way. You know, labor markets are tough. They're always going to be tough. We got to find more efficiencies, so it's a high priority for our company to be extremely efficient. So I spend as yeah, I would say average of two hours a day just trying to keep up with the news, latest releases, you know, and everybody's coming out with something. So it is. There's a lot of garbage out there.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, for sure.

Mark Blickenstaff:

But once you lock into a platform that aligns with you and you know meets your criterias, whether it be security or usability, whatever it is integrations you know, once you lock into that, stay focused on that one. That's how I stay up to date with it. I read the garbage briefly. I read this other stuff intently.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, for sure, and you can actually program. So, since we're talking about AI, I have made an AI agent to program what I want on the updates. So I have multiple newsletters that I read every day. I have all these different things. So it can scrape the most important information that's pertinent to whatever you're doing. So you basically hire someone that's an AI person to do that for you. So the way that you can find and sort through all this information doesn't have to be manual. I mean you can do that, but that's one thing. We're about to come out with the group blueprint. I'm going to start doing like a weekly update, maybe a video, I'm not sure, because this stuff is so like reading it just doesn't quite, it's hard to understand it. So maybe I do AI update weekly newsletter for us nerds that want to know the deep dive. That's a video.

Stefanie Couch:

But it is just changing so much and my husband is the one that doesn't sleep. He just me and him both love this stuff, but he gets in there and just builds these new things and he's learned to code Python and all these things. So maybe you talk to Grip Blueprint about doing some of this crazy stuff you really want to build. But a lot of this stuff you can just chat GPT, you know.

Stefanie Couch:

It's really cool. I love it. All right, give me a few more examples, because this is hard to theorize for a lot of people Operations, customer engagement, sales. How do you see this? Either you guys are already implementing it, or give me some examples of ways you think this could work in an independent lumber yard and hardware store.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Sure, you know one way that I actually use it, and some people might call it cheating, but I actually dump my P&L into it.

Stefanie Couch:

Okay.

Mark Blickenstaff:

And I say hey, summarize it, show me opportunities for improvement. And it's surprising the suggestions it comes up with.

Stefanie Couch:

And are you doing this in chat, gpt pro or chat? Which which version are you using?

Mark Blickenstaff:

I'm in pro and I'm using 4.0 right now.

Stefanie Couch:

Ok, so pro for those, those listeners that don't know is a paid service. They have a different models. They have a twenty dollar a month subscription. I think it's called plus.

Mark Blickenstaff:

I think yeah.

Stefanie Couch:

And then pro is two hundred dollars a month and then the model you're using is for oh. So if someone wants to mimic that, that's what I would reference. As well as you do want to pay that two hundred dollars a month, you can't pay anyone that would do enough work for two hundred dollars a month to get what you could get out of it. It is worth the money. So that's awesome. Okay, and the type of prompt that tell me a little more about what you're telling it.

Mark Blickenstaff:

You want from the P&L? Yeah, so, and for those of you that are security conscious, you can turn off upload information. So my P&Ls do not go to the world. Nobody gets to see them, but me PNLs do not go to the world. Nobody gets to see them but me. That's a great point. That is a feature I highly recommend you turn on. And I do operate in multiple logins as well. I have one that uploads and downloads, and I have one that never uploads and only downloads.

Stefanie Couch:

And what that means for people who don't know is uploading and downloading means it remembers your information and it's training the model basically. So it's training its world out there to learn on what you're giving it. So you can basically stop that and if you're like really scared of that, then you can stop it altogether where, like he's saying he has a login he's going into that never learns anything, basically.

Mark Blickenstaff:

So it'll stay local to me only. So a prompt for that one yeah, I mean literally, it's just as simple as summarize this, show me increases and decreases and then show me suggestions for decreasing controllable costs. Yeah, and it will kick me out, probably a 10 page document, and I'll go through the full summaries. It'll tell me which divisions are up and which divisions are down. And it took a little training, but not much. I mean it's pretty impressive how smart it just picked up on everything.

Stefanie Couch:

One of the things that I like to tell my chat GPT. So a pro tip here is I like to talk to my chat GPT instead of typing it, because you can just talk to it. Like me, and you were talking right here, my chat GPT has a name. Does yours have one?

Mark Blickenstaff:

I call mine Darren OK.

Stefanie Couch:

Darren. Ok, so mine's, mine's, gritbot, that's what she named herself.

Stefanie Couch:

My husband is Echo, that's what he named himself. But Darren and you I'm sure could do this as well. But if you talk to it, you can add a Chrome extension and just talk to it back and forth. But I actually tell mine to treat me like I'm a complete idiot that's never done anything before in business and doesn't know how to read a P&L and give me things that I would never have thought of and tell me why, and so it gives you just a little more breakdown and then you can also tell it to talk to you like you're a third grader, you know those types of things, because sometimes I feel like it can give you an answer and you're like that's great, but I need more to understand even where that context came from.

Stefanie Couch:

And telling it to treat you like a complete idiot, cause, honestly, sometimes the things I ask it about I am a complete idiot, I do not know crap about this. So really I need you to really act like I don't know, and then it'll give you just something really awesome and you can keep prompting, and I think that's another thing is one time is not going to be a lot of times enough to extrapolate the things you want, but if you keep asking it as you would a person. So if I ask Mark a question about something I know nothing about, he's going to answer me, and then I'm probably going to have a follow-up question. Well, that's how you should think of your conversations with any kind of AI model.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Absolutely so. That's the financial side. Marketing side oh my gosh, we use it all the time, every time. So on the marketing side, we've actually uploaded our vision statement, our mission statement, our value, our value statement, our company history. So it knows everything about us, so you can go out and get more information from the web, but at the same time, it has a memory of who we are, what we are, where we're going and so are you saving that as projects in chat GPT?

Stefanie Couch:

is that how you're making sure it remembers okay?

Mark Blickenstaff:

yep, yep, and also we do utilize logins a lot, so which we try to keep the brains a little bit separate.

Stefanie Couch:

There's some crossover. Someone in marketing is not remembering the financial stuff and all that.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Right.

Stefanie Couch:

Yep.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yep, so we'll utilize that. And then we give it our priorities. You know what are our campaign push is going to be so okay, this month we're really focused on well, normally it'd be sunny, but you know but we're focused on deck planning and things like that. So, ok, we really want to highlight our deck specialists. We really want to highlight TrueFrame, because that's what we use for KDAT. We really want to push decorators and timber tech this month, and so we give it those prompts and we say, hey, develop whatever it is social media plan, a LinkedIn plan, direct mailers, you know all those things and it will kick out and again, 85-15, it's not giving you the full answer, but it's putting you down a path. That makes it a whole lot more attainable than me just sitting there and writing everything out.

Stefanie Couch:

And in a world where we're all very busy, there's 15 different platforms. If you, you know, if you think about all the social medias and all the different blogs and newsletters and every touch you could have in a marketing world, you can get, like you said, 85% of the way there on all 15, instead of having to do 100% of the work and then from there you go in and say, okay, this LinkedIn post is spit out, it's pretty good, but the hook sucks and this needs to be shorter, and then you can either re-prompt it or you can write that by hand. And that's the beauty of this is, you're not again doing all of it, but you're getting way further than I. Don't know any person that has a marketing team big enough to do everything that you should be doing in marketing. I know people that have million dollar a year content teams not in our industry that would be. I would love to see it one day.

Mark Blickenstaff:

I'm praying.

Stefanie Couch:

But you know, they have a guy that follows them around with a camera all the time, records everything they do. They're spending $80,000 a month on content. They still don't have enough for what they really want to do everything they want to do so you'll never get there. But do best with what the tools are out there, and you can get further. So I love that. What's the biggest hack that you think has really changed the game for you guys? Like something that was just unobtainable before that. Now you're able to do with AI and marketing specifically.

Mark Blickenstaff:

That's a really solid question, I would have to say. Getting specific as a crossover between the marketing and the inventory load yeah, because now again with the forecasting and everything else and our and our trends over the years, we can input all of that and we can get you know within days proper or good inventory loading for good campaigns yeah, and it's really fine tuned how we do that and how we push something out to the market.

Stefanie Couch:

Love it and you know when you're thinking about. One thing I don't think people think about all is the ability to create images on AI. So you know it's hard to get job site photos, it's hard to get product photos. What I'm waiting and maybe I just build this myself because I haven't gotten it yet but you know we do a lot of photography and videography like real life. You know we're out there with a photograph, you know, from this job site to say, here's the chat, here's the prompt we want to make and all these different things.

Stefanie Couch:

But it doesn't look like the door that you sold because it's like AI's got you know some random door that's not even real. Like you know, it gives you some weird panel layout that no one would ever order in real life and it's real obvious. It's not a real door. You want that door. That's actually the brand that you're selling. So if you can figure out how to do that, that would be amazing. And I've worked on it a lot. I've spent a lot. I've actually not slept hours trying to get that, you know, lincoln aluminum clad, black, slimline door to be on this house I just created in AI. Haven't gotten it to be perfect yet, but I think we are so darn close to that and if we can do that, that would be huge. But think we are so darn close to that and if we can do that, that would be huge. But if you're just trying to show like a craftsman door with lap siding on it that looks like some sort of brand that's fiber cement siding the brand shall go unnamed.

Mark Blickenstaff:

you can do that today in an image maker and it looks pretty darn awesome yep, I mean, yeah, obviously people it still struggles with, you'll end up with six fingers or something like that.

Stefanie Couch:

It's really hilarious that was always how I could tell when I made ai in the very first days. They look like dracula right, it's like don't give them teeth, just close the mouth, smile, because that looks scary as could be. It was like lex luther or something like oh my gosh, this is crazy. This is going to be so terrible we can't put this on it on a social media post. We're getting there, though Usually it's a little bit less scary. Now they I mean some of them, I can't tell their AI people.

Stefanie Couch:

The eyes is kind of where you can tell like it's a little soulless. But on an AI headshot you can sometimes tell.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yeah, no, it's gotten to the point where you actually have to really stare at it. I mean, it's like checking the Mona Lisa right, and it's like what am I looking for? There's something wrong. I can't figure it out.

Stefanie Couch:

I love it. Well, I'm curious how do you see? Because I know there are a lot of people listening to this, especially independent business owners. They're like I don't have two hours to spend on this a day, mark, like I'm drowning. I don't have time to even do anything to respond to emails. Well, my first answer to this would be answer my own question build an AI agent, do that crap so you can do other stuff. But how do you see that Like somebody can just get started in this? What's a way to solve one easy problem, to just try some things out in AI? What would you say for independent retailers? Hardware stores, lumber yards? What would be a way to start?

Mark Blickenstaff:

I mean just as simple as adding an agent to your inbox. That would be a heck of a start. Most people that are on an operational level within independent yards, you know they're bombarded by sales emails, order emails, confirmation, so on and so forth. It's like just throw an AI agent on your inbox alone, it'll draft a response to 90% of your emails and all you have to do is proof it and send it. So, okay, I just gave you back probably three hours of your day right there in that little step. You know, it's just.

Mark Blickenstaff:

It's those trivial tasks that we can't ignore, but they are still trivial. You know, we have to read the, we have to go through them, helping it, having it help you with your calendar, you know. You know, tell the AI agent, hey, I need at least two hours a day blocked off of my calendar so nobody can schedule it. Yes, we can do that manually now, and we probably should, but we don't. So I mean just small little steps like that. But then take it to the next level and just start asking it questions. You know, for our sales team, a massive one is technical documents. You have to read an entire 18 page technical document to get to one sentence for the answer you were looking for. Well, throw that document in the AI and ask it the question. Review this document, tell me what the specific gravity is. Ok, your answer is there in 30 seconds.

Stefanie Couch:

And then show me exactly what page it was on. Exactly so I can screenshot that exact thing to them.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Bingo, yes, and your customer thinks you're a genius because you found it so darn fast and they have to read the whole thing. You just saved yourself 15 minutes, you know, and so it's not. There's no one thing, in my opinion, with AI that's going to say there's no silver bullet, it's just continual, incremental time savings.

Stefanie Couch:

A lot of golden BBs. There you go, and you know. It's beautiful to me that you don't have to really know a ton about tech to be able to do this, because, really, with the and you don't even have to know how to prompt it, necessarily because you can tell it I don't know how to get this information, so I don't know how to prompt you. So this is what I'm looking for Write a prompt that would work and it'll talk to itself to tell it what to do. It'll give itself instructions. It's the thing you wish your wife or husband would do. I love it, my husband and I. It's really funny because we obviously work in the business together. He is a techie. I'm honestly pretty techie on this stuff and we work a lot with this. And people will say like, well, yeah, of course you guys can use AI, like you're techie and we work a lot with this. And people will say like, well, yeah, of course you guys can use AI like you're techies. And I'm like, yeah, but that's not what this is, this is basic stuff. You tell it what you want and it will give you back pretty good what you need. So I think the training I mean like if I had to say what's the hardest thing is that I've been in this industry for my entire life and a lot of this weird little stuff that I know is because I've been hearing it since I was five. But AI can pull all this different collaboration.

Stefanie Couch:

So what if you took the knowledge of those people that have been working for you for 30 years and you recorded it? So you just listen to them talking back and forth to their customers and all this and said take away the little things that this person just said that maybe you wouldn't know about. You know decks or you wouldn't know about windows or hardware or whatever. What if you started to figure out how to do that and then, when that person retires, you've got their knowledge? Like, we could do that. Today we have a little recorder called Applaud. It's like a credit card and it records everything that you say when it's turned on and gives you a transcript.

Stefanie Couch:

And what if you put that into a knowledge base? Now we're cooking with gas. Like now we can save ourselves from this entire exodus of all the knowledge base that's gonna retire. We could capture that. So I think there's so much we can do. I mean, it excites the heck out of me. I'm betting so big on it because I really believe this is the way we can do more, especially small businesses, independent businesses, people that need more from every resource. This is how we get it.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Well, you touched on such an important thing too, and mentorship is not a strong suit within our industry. It never really has been. I don't see it changing anytime soon. And so we do. We lose a ton of knowledge to retirement and phase out and burn out and everything else. So it's like I love the idea as long as it doesn't go to HR. I'm on board. Yeah, might get sticky.

Stefanie Couch:

Well, and that's the thing is like we've got to figure out a way. I mean, listen, I'm not necessarily by trade a rule follower. I'm more of a contrarian disruptor. If you ask anyone that knows me, they'll probably laugh and say that's a little bit of an understatement. I stay legal. Let's just make that really clear. I'm ethical and legal, but I do like to push boundaries of what's OK.

Stefanie Couch:

So we got to figure out how to stay compliant on stuff like, like you said before, you don't want to put your entire P&L and all your trade secrets into an open AI. It's called open AI. That's company like. They are training this model off of what people are searching, just like Google is training off of what you're searching. There's a reason why when you type a question into Google, it gives you the four or five things after that because enough people have searched that that they know there's a good likelihood this is what you're going to say next. That's been trained by what people have asked. So just know you got to protect your data and there are ways to do that. And if you want to know how, ask ChatGPT and she will tell you.

Stefanie Couch:

She'll tell you you could turn off the remembering, you could put it in this and there are actually ways to do closed knowledge sources. So there are people that can build those for you where you have a closed hub that is not going to ever go anywhere, and there's like a lot of really big servers that you could build just for your internal team. But the problem is it's not going to go out and grab things like OpenAI will. So if it's not on that server, then it's not going to know the answer. So you give some and take some when you do that. So I mean it's just got to be based on what you need it to be. But I mean the limits don't exist. I mean they just don't exist.

Mark Blickenstaff:

It's yeah and there's a lot of Our comprehension, and ingenuity is our limiting factor on this one.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, exactly, it's based on first principles, thinking of if we forgot everything we've ever known about this industry and how we've done it for every day since 1947, when more lumber opened. If we forgot all of that, then what could we do? And that's pretty much what the true answer is that it's unlimited. I think that's a good place to stop, Mark. I feel like we've hit it. I mean, I could literally talk about this for five hours. No one would listen, except the other AI nerds that are right now like oh my God, this is exciting, and everybody else is like I don't know whether they're even talking.

Mark Blickenstaff:

Yeah, no, I was looking at the counter going, oh, this is. This has been 10 minutes.

Stefanie Couch:

Oh wait, no, it hasn't it's like what else could we dig into that we could fix? I mean, I think it's so much. Maybe we have to do a second episode, because next week it'll be something new. I want to come out there and meet you guys and see this in real life. I think you may be one of the most innovative people I've ever talked to in the industry. I think More Lumber is doing something that is really stinking cool. Seven stores open since 1947. A leader in independent hardware and lumber in Colorado. If you don't know who More Lumber is, you've got to check them out. Mark is on LinkedIn, aaron's on LinkedIn. You actually post a fair amount. You're pretty active on LinkedIn. What should people do if they're in Colorado? They want to know you see. You come visit. What should they do to find you? Where are you located?

Mark Blickenstaff:

So I operate I office at a Castle Rock, but you're welcome to any of our stores Bailey Pine, aspen Park, evergreen, bennett, castle Rock. Reach out to me. I'm always happy. I try to be as transparent as I can, especially if you're an independent operator. Boy howdy, I have no secrets from you. We love what we do, we love being independent and we're passionate about keeping as much independent as we can. So please reach out and I guess you know, stay curious, right? Don't assume the way you've always done it is the way it needs to be done. There's always connections that have to stay in place, but we can disrupt markets. So find the tools that align with your mission. Stay strong with them.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and don't don't let the fact that you're you know, I hear a lot like, well, I'm old man, I don't, I don't have time for this. It's like that does not matter with this tool. I mean, it doesn't just like with the Internet. You know, my hundred year old grandmother could do the Internet. You could do anything you want. It doesn't matter how old you are or how young you are. And that's another thing I hear is like well, I'm only 20. You know, I can't I can't really do this job or I can't do this. The thing that I love the most about AI is it pretty much allows if you're hungry and you want to learn something. It just about levels the playing field for people, and that should be both encouraging and scary as hell to everyone that's listening.

Mark Blickenstaff:

It is, but it's all about the mindset.

Stefanie Couch:

It is because the people that do this and really capitalize on this opportunity as business owners, as leaders in our industry. The people that choose to do this will be the same people that are reading books, that are asking questions, that are going to conferences, those hungry people, the ones that really want to innovate and grow and change. They're the ones that are going to take this bull by the horns and go and win with it. The rest of the people are just going to stay just the same. They aren't going to listen to any of the ideas and try to innovate them and put them into their business, and they'll be okay, but they eventually may turn out like Kodak. They may be the one that's been there for years that now is extinct, which makes me really sad when I think about legacy businesses in our industry. You know my family had a lumber yard and still does have a lumber yard in Georgia, and it makes me think really sadly about those, because the big dogs are doing this Like they are investing millions.

Stefanie Couch:

You know QXO, brad Jacobs. He's just entered the space, he's here. He's here to play big. He's got all the dollars and all the cents and he's got the people to back this up. You don't have a trillion dollars. Honestly, I don't even know how much money this cat would put in. It's unbelievable. But what you do have is a hungry, hungry ability to go learn yourself, and that's enough For an independent lumberyard. That's all it takes to really win with AI.

Stefanie Couch:

You don't have to have a trillion dollars.

Mark Blickenstaff:

And keeping that. You know, you said it earlier and I want to reiterate it's like keeping. The focus is you're not replacing people, You're enabling them to have more time to build those relationships. You're just giving time back, and that's one of the things that we can never manufacture.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and if you think about the biggest problems in your business, a lot of times the biggest problems that really hold us back they're little, mundane tasks. It's not the big thing. That's like you. What you think is like the people problem. It's the little emails. It's the little, tiny, tiny things.

Stefanie Couch:

That's what's easiest to automate with AI is the little tiny things. It's knowing the data points from that P&L that could help you grow. It's knowing from your inventory and your turns and all of that of what should we focus more on in this particular store and different thing in that particular store. And it's knowing that in like 30 seconds I mean it is literally almost instant. So I love it. Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the Grit Blueprint. I mean one of the funnest conversations I've ever had on my show. I'm so excited about this and I will definitely have you back. So thank you so much and I hope you join us on the next episode on the Grit Blueprint. That's it for this episode of the Grit Blueprint podcast. For more tools, training and industry content, make sure to subscribe here and follow me on LinkedIn and other social media platforms To find out more about how Grit Blueprint can help you grow your business. Check us out at our website gritblueprint. com.

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