A few years ago I sat down with a consultant who helped businesses get into retail locations. I wanted to get WindRider, my apparel company, into physical stores, but it wasn't a world I knew anything about. He walked me through what we would need to do. We'd need to hire a sales manager, and at the time that meant something like $120,000 a year salary. We'd need manufacturer reps to actually carry the line into stores, and they'd take about a 10 percent cut on top of that. And then there were his fees: 8k/mo. Of course there was everything that comes after a store says yes: retail packaging, in-store displays, professional tradeshows, payment terms. The list went on.
I sat there listening to the list add up. Retail was something I wanted. It just wasn't something we could afford to go after.
With AI that has now changed. We now have an agent that researches potential retail customers, finds the right contact at each one, builds sell sheets and the other materials a buyer expects to see, and sends the first round of outreach. It also handles the simpler replies that come back, the basic questions a prospect asks before a real conversation starts. Because of that, WindRider is expanding into retail now, a market we were locked out of a few years ago, without the $500,000 budget or the team it would have taken to build it out.
When I think about where AI fits in a business, it's easy to only ask what it can do with the work you're already doing, or what it can take off your plate. It's worth asking a second question too: what have you wanted to do but couldn't, because you didn't have the time, the money, the people, or the knowledge to go after it.
This is one of the reasons I am so excited about AI, especially for small businesses. We have historically been constrained by resources: time, knowledge, cost. While these still exist, with AI, so many of these barriers that have given our larger competitors an advantage are now gone. We can seize on the ability to move fast, try new ideas and not be afraid to fail because what was going to be a 500k gamble, now costs a few hundred bucks and a couple hours of time.
I still think about that conversation with the consultant, sitting there doing the math on a business we wanted to build but couldn't. Because of AI, we are building it now.