How to Use AI and Grit to Transform Your Title Business | Ep 31

In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Shamil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the College Agents podcast, where we explore strategies and innovations to help title professionals thrive in a fast-changing industry. I am your host, Mo Shamil, CEO of Alltech National Title.

Today we're joined by my good buddy Clay Speakman, CEO of Health Rocket Ventures, a groundbreaking health tech company using AI and gamification to inspire healthier, longer lives. Clay's career spans in luxury services, tech innovation, and endurance racing. With a mission to empower leaders to embrace resilience and do hard things on purpose. What a concept. In this episode, we'll discuss how AI and bold thinking can transform your business, boost productivity, and create a better work-life balance.

Let's dive in. Welcome, Clay. Hey, Mo. It's good to see you, my friend. Thank you very much for being on the podcast with us, and let's start the call.

Tell me a little bit about your background, how you got started in this business world, health world. Yeah. Yeah. I grew up in the music industry. I grew up backstage in production at lots of concerts and events.

My dad was a concert promoter, and I went into the music business thinking that was my life, my calling. I had so much fun, and it was great. And I eventually morphed into taking care of high net worth clients, getting them access to the best tickets, backstage access, suite access. And then that morphed into, give me a hotel, give me a private flight, get me into this restaurant. And I kind of just eased into owning my own concierge service to take care of clients on the side.

I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always looked for new opportunities. I've never really enjoyed working for other people who didn't have a great big vision. I've had a few mentors in my life that have been exceptional, and each one of them just kind of pushed me to go find my own thing. And in that, I started building technology to solve some of the projects that were in front of me, because there wasn't a technology project that existed that did what I wanted it to do.

Any entrepreneur tries to solve the problem for themself, and then if they can do that, then maybe there's other people who would enjoy that product. So I launched a technology service for the concierge business in 2016. And eventually I started working with high net worth banks and membership groups to build engagement platforms. And long story short is in my personal life, I was doing adventure racing, I was doing Spartan racing, I was doing survival events. I think it was just a way to challenge my own mental toughness, my own physical toughness, and it really woke me up.

I started in my mid 30s. And as I started to make friends in that world, I realized how important grit is and the value of doing hard things on purpose, not just to complete an event, but how important it was for work, for life, for family, for relationships. And now, I brought that back together and I said, I'm passionate about living a long healthy life. I'm passionate about daily activities that can make us healthier, because I think most of our health resides not in medicine or science, but into our own actions to be healthy. What we eat, how much we sleep, what we pay attention to.

And now I've taken technology and merged it with a little bit of that do hard things on purpose. And now we're building a health tech app that is for consumers to help them just make healthier actions in a gamified way, because I like to play. Working out without playing is hard. That's why most people stop working out or don't do it. But when you're playing a game, everyone knows you have a lot of fun in it.

At the end of the fun, you realize, man, I worked really, really hard. Your entrepreneurial journey is fascinating, spanning luxury services, high-level leadership, and now health tech. What inspired you to create Health Rock Adventures? And how has your diverse background influenced the way you approach innovation and leadership? Well, the purpose or the start of Health Rock Adventures was really born out of a problem.

Myself and some other mastermind friends were putting on events where people would come and we would challenge them to do great activities. What we found is we couldn't get enough people to come. People were afraid. They were afraid of challenging themselves at that level. And we took a step back and we said, how can we make this easier for more people to get into?

And we started asking a lot of questions. What do people want with their health? Well, they want easy-to-follow guidance that they can do today to start getting healthy. And most people are intimidated by doing something, you know, a 24-hour or a 48-hour event. So we said, well, let's create a product that can meet everyone where they're at today.

They can just start playing the game of health. And that's where we said, yeah, let's make this a technology platform. Eventually, we'll get enough people to feel like they can come show up for a 48-hour grid fest. But we've got to help them with their daily actions today, a five-minute routine in the morning that just gets you a little bit healthier every day, following a nutrition protocol from one of the nutrition experts, getting points, feeling good about it, playing a game, winning prizes. And that was really our solution to the problem that we started building it in December.

And we are in beta testing right now. Awesome. You're known for your motto, do hard things on purpose. And I love that tagline, by the way. How has this mindset guided you as an entrepreneur?

And how can title professionals adopt this philosophy to stay resilient in today's challenging markets? I don't know if you follow real estate. It's been very challenging the last two or three years. Yeah. The do hard things on purpose is something that has guided me for a long time.

I didn't coin it. I'm sure other people have used it before. The simple thing is when there's something that you don't want to do, that's the hard thing. And instead of trying to avoid it, trying to change it, trying to sidestep it or delegate it, although I do believe in who, not how you should delegate things, but not because they're hard to do for you. If they're hard to do for you, you should do them for the purpose of doing hard things on purpose.

That is where you build resilience. It's where you build grit. It's where you build confidence. There's a part of our brains called the ACM, and it fires when we attempt to do something that we're not capable of. You cannot fire that part of your brain unless you attempt to try something that you know you're not good at or that you know you don't know how to do.

Every time you fire that part of your brain, you're building muscle in the brain. You're building capabilities. You're building mental strength. And the more you do that, the better you are at solving problems you don't know how to solve. You want to get better at things you don't know how to do, things that are hard.

The only way to do it is to try things that are hard that you don't want to do. Awesome. So HealthRocket Ventures uses gamification and AI to nudge users towards healthier habits. Could you explain how this works and how title professionals and title companies might apply similar concepts like gamification or AI-powered nudges to improve team productivity or customer engagement? Yeah.

It's a loaded question. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. I'll break it up in two things.

One is in the context of the product that we're putting out. And two is how we run our company on it. The product that we're putting out is based on research science and that if you want people to take actions to be healthier and to rebuff actions that are convenient but are unhealthy, such as eating junk food and not sleeping enough and skipping all the workout sessions, you're going to have to nudge them to take that healthy action, which means you're going to have to make it fun and you're going to have to make it rewarding. And the reward needs to come quickly, not a year down the road. Most people will not do anything today that they think will take a year down the road to get a reward at.

We just don't have that in our culture. So take a quick action. Make it fun. When you take that action, you see an immediate reward. You get a pop on the screen.

You get points towards a prize. Now compete with other people that you know and you care about. You got people in your social network that matter to you. You're trying to get up to leaderboard faster than they get up to leaderboard because there's a prize at the end of the leaderboard at the end of the month. So everyone understands these basics.

We've taken that and we've married it with expert guidance from the best experts in sleep, nutrition, exercise, mindset, and biohacking. So you can follow great protocols, but you can play the game as you go. So it's a simple solution backed by research, and we've put that into a game. Now we use AI in the way that we build and at the end of the leaderboard at the end of the month. So everyone understands these basics.

We've taken that and we've married it with expert guidance from the best experts in sleep, nutrition, exercise, mindset, and biohacking. So you can follow great protocols, but you can play the game as you go. So it's a simple solution backed by research and we've put that into a game. Now, we use AI in the way that we build and run our company on using a lot of AI tools. So we're a three-person company and we have 12 to 15 full-time people that are just AI agents instead of actual human people.

So these are projects we set up. Let me hold you, let me just stop you there for a second. What do you mean by AI agent? Well, there's lots of definitions of AI agents and we are really early, early, early days, but the definition of an AI agent is basically a project that AI can run that would take the place of what you would normally hire a person to do. So if you are gonna have a person in your company who would normally build all your strategy, your communication, your marketing, well, you can set up an AI project to do that.

Now, it's still gonna need management. You're still gonna have to interact. You're gonna have to ask it all the questions, but you can train it on, this is what I need you to do. This is how I want you to act. These are all the things that are important to our company.

Here's our core values. Here's our missions. Here's our goals. Now, come up with a communication strategy that aligns with all that. And this is what we wanna use it for.

And you can go back to it every time you need to change it. We have basically, that's set up about 15 different roles in our company. We have a game developer, we have a communication strategist. We even have an EOS coach that is set up to analyze. What's EOS for those people?

And I know our cloud community may not be familiar with EOS. So you and I know what EOS is. We're just gonna- Yeah, it's the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And it's the foundation of how we run our business. So it's centered around some teachings and the book traction, but it's basically you have a weekly meeting with your leadership team.

You have 90 day rocks and you have one, three and five year goals. And you have core values in your company that are not just a poster on the wall, right? A lot of companies have core values on the wall and those people couldn't call them if you ask them. Yeah, but what we do is every week we record our leadership meeting and it's transcribed from an AI summary. And we feed that data into our EOS coach and then our EOS coach analyzes, okay, the discussions that we're having, the actions that we're taking and the things that we're talking about on our call.

Do they align with our core values? Do they align with our 90 day rocks? Do they align with our one-year mission, our three-year goal and our five-year target? And every week it spits out an analysis of how well we're doing in our meetings versus those things. So we get immediate feedback on, are we staying to our core values when we talk to each other?

Are we talking about projects that fit our goals for a one and three and five year? And where are we missing? So to get that kind of feedback, you'd have to hire an EOS coach, put them in every meeting and pay them, 60 or a hundred grand a year. But that's a role we created in about two weeks. And so that's an example of one of the AI agents that we use.

Awesome. Well, for those of you that are lost and we have some episodes that are gonna be AI corner, and how to build the project in GPT. So do not be scared. We're gonna handhold you and walk you through how to do it. And so it's really incredible.

Do you use a ChatGPT or Cloud with AI view? I'm a bigger fan of Cloud. I think ChatGPT and Cloud are very similar in some regards. There's a lot of nuances on why we use Cloud for everything and I won't get into it here. But the main thing I tell people is, if you want to use AI, the first thing is, it is still early, early, early days in AI.

The people who aren't using AI will often think, man, I can't learn it now. I missed the boat. I missed the window. Everyone else knows it and I don't know it. That is not true.

You're in the early days. And because things move so fast in AI, new projects and new models and new versions are coming out. It actually means that whenever you jump in, you're kind of, you're not that far behind because the new thing may come out next month and you're right on schedule with everyone else because it just came out. That's so true. In there trying to learn.

You can learn things next week that people have only started learning two weeks ago. Even if they've been doing it for years, they didn't get it until two weeks ago because it didn't come out. So I would say get over that fear. The second thing is you have to believe that it will actually change your world and how you work and the lives of you and your company and other people around you. If you believe it's just a little bit of a fun side thing, then you're not gonna lean on it enough to do anything powerful.

So I would say that. And then be curious. Everyone who's learned AI has done it just by being curious. What can this thing do? Let's try 50 things and if 49 of them fail, that's great because now you learned something from everyone.

And the one that worked is gonna be amazing. And then the last thing is believe it can do the impossible. Ask it to do things that you think are not even possible. Don't ask it to give you an answer that Google could easily give you. That's not gonna get you that far.

Ask it something that's so crazy you think there's no way it could do this for me. You have to challenge it to ask it the impossible. And some of the times it won't work, but the times that it do, you will jump a few levels and say, man, that was amazing. Awesome. So the title industry, like many others, is experiencing rapid change, including the rise of AI and AI tools for automating workflows, improving efficiency.

From your perspective, how should title professionals approach emerging technologies about staying focused on delivering value to clients? Yeah, I'd say I've never worked in the title industry. I don't know the nuances and the process flows, but I can tell you every output that we have in our company, so every end product starts with a strategy discussion in one of our AI projects. Hey, this is something that we need to do. This is where we're at.

This is what's happening today. This is where we wanna go with it. This is why we wanna get to this point. Here's the desired outcome. And help me think of ideas on how to improve this.

It's just a strategy discussion. It's a brainstorming discussion. It's the same discussion you would have with the leadership team in your company, and that's gonna start a discussion flow, and you're gonna see some ideas you like, some ideas you don't, and you're gonna say, follow up on this. Give me more information on this. Think about this differently.

You're gonna walk through a strategy session that's eventually going to give you some idea of a process that you might wanna follow, and then that process, when you get to there, you can say, hey, put that in a proposal. Put that in a step-by-step guide. Put that in a visualization with charts. Now you're working from a process to a procedure of, hey, how does this actually work? So that is that way to approach things you can do with any problem.

You could be a plumber. You could be an astronaut. You could follow the same process. It's strategy first into some sort of a process, and then process to move into the design. What does it actually look like if we did this?

What documents would we need? Who would we need doing what work? And then eventually you work to, okay, we actually know what it is gonna be at the end of the day, and let's create all the stuff around it, and that is going to when you deploy something as the final product. Thank you for your insights in how to apply AI in workflows and daily lives. Let's get back to resilience and grit, which is you're an incredible human being, and you're just amazing.

You've competed in over 100 Spartan races and 11 ultra-marathons, and even grueling challenges like the dead race. What parallels do you see between preparing for extreme endurance events and running a business in today's fast-paced, tech-driven world? Yeah, I mean, listen, my journey was to go through these events to solve the things I needed to solve for me. For a lot of people, it's gonna be very different, right? The doing hard things on purpose for me, might be very different.

A relationship challenge, a medical issue, a job change, or a different way to structure something might be the hard thing on purpose that someone else needs to do. There's a few takeaways that I learned when doing extreme endurance events that I think translate to how I work in business and in my family. And one is a rule called the five-meter target rule. I might be in a 100-hour event, and then there's a thousand things to worry about. But if I'm gonna worry about all the things that could or might happen in hour 40, hour 60, hour 80, I'm gonna be overwhelmed, and my body is gonna be overwhelmed.

There's a few takeaways that I learned when doing extreme endurance events that I think translate to how I work in business and in my family. And one is a rule called the five meter target rule. I might be in a hundred hour event and then there's a thousand things to worry about. But if I'm going to worry about all the things that could or might happen in hour 40, hour 60, hour 80, I'm going to be overwhelmed and my body is going to be overstressed by all these things and I'm going to have full worry. But what I can do is shut down all that and I need to worry about the next five meters, the next five minutes, the next task, the only thing that I've got to accomplish right now.

That's all that I allow myself to really focus on when I'm in these events because otherwise you start to become overwhelmed by all the unknown and all the uncertainty. There might be a hundred other things coming up but if I'm worrying about the five minute target in front of me then I can conquer that, put all my focus and then worry about the next thing. And a lot of the times 20 or 30 of the possible things that might happen next will never present themselves because by the time I get there they're out of the way. So now I've removed so many variables that might have slowed me down. The other thing that is very common is people will often quit or drop out of events in the middle of the night.

They get to a low point. The multi-day events like ultra marathons where you're running for a long period or multi-day events, people will hit a low where they're in the dark. Now it may not be physically dark but they may hit a low. How many miles is an ultra marathon? It's anything more than 32.

So sometimes it's 50, sometimes it's 100, sometimes it's barely over 32. It depends on the event. But there is a point where we call it the dark and it's where you're at your low point and it's where everything inside you screams quit. Just quit. It'll be much easier if you quit.

And the rule is never quit in the dark point. If you want to quit when the sun comes up and everything looks awesome and you've got the warmth and sunlight and you still want to quit then walk away. But if you don't allow yourself to quit in the dark and you make yourself get back into the light then you probably won't quit. Most people who get to that point realize, you know what? No, this is awesome.

This is great. I'm glad I'm here. I can go. I have more energy, everything like that. So we always say don't quit in the dark.

How do you stay motivated to keep pushing boundaries and what advice would you give to our professionals about embracing bold ideas and staying innovative? The thing that worked for me is I set a very clear vision of what it's going to look like and feel like and taste like and sound like at the end when I achieve my goal. I set a very clear vision of who am I when I get to the finish line of this event or this project. What is my story? What's the story that I'm going to tell about this event for the rest of my life?

What's the story I'm going to tell my kids when I'm done with it? And I think about that for three or four months before the event. I think about that all the time. By the time I start the event, I feel like I've already finished it. I feel like I've already accomplished it because I already have spent so much time living in the space of who I am after I get it done that that is part of my personality.

It's part of somebody's identity. Is that visualization? Yeah, it's visualization and what happens is when you visualize it enough, your brain and your body believes it is true. Then when you have to go achieve that thing, the brain and the body fight so hard not to let go of it because it doesn't want to lose that part of itself that it already believes in. If you tell yourself for six months, I am a person who biked 50 miles in this race.

This is who I am. This is now part of me. This is what everything like that. When you get and you start riding on your first mile, your brain, your body believes that that's already happened, that you've already done that 50 miles. It's part of who you are, but you have to put the output to get to that 50 miles.

Now, when you think, oh, it's mile 30, I want to quit. The brain says, no, we're already that person. We don't want to lose that person. We don't want to lose what we've already told people about that person, what we already believe. It's very different than going into the race saying, maybe I'll be able to do this.

That is a very powerful thing and it's what got me through a lot of my events. Awesome. You and I are part of a Go Abundance Mastermind group. Can you share with other professionals the power of a mastermind or being part of a group of accountability and just for personal and business growth? Yes.

The definition of a mastermind is two or more like-minded people working together to improve a situation, improve each other. I really enjoy Go Abundance in particular. It's a well-rounded mastermind with six different pillars. It's not just about making money. It's not just about building your business.

It forces everyone to think about the whole stuff, about relationships, about accountability, about giving back, about bucket list challenges. Go get some adventure in your life. Go enjoy some awesome things. Of course, make more money in your company. Then have health.

Don't just sit back and let yourself get old and die. Now, we all are probably going to die, but the way we live our lives and how healthy we are and where we live is 99% up to our daily actions, in my opinion. There's some genetic things that go on, but being in a mastermind group just means that people can hold you accountable for that. You can have discussions that are real instead of shooting the breeze about the weather and sports. That's really changed a lot of things in my life.

I really appreciate that. You included, though. Thank you. Getting close to the end of our podcast here, do you have a favorite quote? We've talked about it a lot.

The Do Hard Things On Purpose is my favorite quote. You can't beat that. I know. It's awesome. Another one I use is Embrace the Suck, which just says when something uncomfortable is coming, most people run away.

They tense up. They try to fight it, but try for a day to welcome it, to invite it, to embrace it. Two things will happen. One is you actually might enjoy it, something that you never thought you would enjoy. Two, you probably overcome it a lot easier.

Awesome. How about a favorite book? I've had so many books. Part of being a GoBundance opened me up to really reading a lot of books, fiction and nonfiction. My favorite book in the last, well, two favorite books in the last two years have both been in the fiction space.

One is Ready Player One, which is a great story about the future with virtual reality and gamifications. I think I watched the movie. The book is 10 times better. It's amazing. The other one is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I just think that that series is fantastic. I really owe it to my friends at GoBundance for opening me up to the value of reading books other than just self-help or business books. Awesome. Do you have any last words of wisdom to our community here as far as grit and implementation of AI? Yeah, grit.

Just pick something hard that's hard on purpose and do it. It can be the simplest thing. It can be barking further away at the grocery store the next time you go. It's as simple as that. Just do it because it's hard on purpose.

It doesn't have to be super hard, but just make that choice and try to make that choice every day for 30 days. You will be amazed at how different you approach every problem in your life going forward. Then the thing with AI is just be curious and look for opportunities to use it to improve everything that you're trying to do. Everything that you're about can be done better with using AI tool. It's like the new electricity.

Nobody sits around today and says, I don't want to use electricity. I'm not into it. I don't believe in electricity. We all use electricity. We all believe in it.

A hundred years ago, someone had to create it and it had to be used in different projects in different ways. That's where we are today. That's awesome. Clay, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your inspiring journey and insights on using AI and gamification resilience to drive success. Your perspective on innovation leadership is valuable for our top professionals looking to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world.

For our listeners, if you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and click that five-star button so you never miss an inspiring conversation or actionable strategy. Thank you so much for tuning in and thank you, Clay. Thanks, Bill. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Shamil from the Tidal Agents podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the title industry's fast-paced world. If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember you're not alone.

Our calendar is open for you. Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower. Together, we'll navigate the future. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Shamil from the Title Agents podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the title industry's fast-paced world.

If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember, you're not alone. Our calendar is open for you. Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower. Together, we'll navigate the future of the industry.

I look forward to our next meeting in the upcoming episode. Keep pushing, keep innovating, and see you in the next episode.