Scaling AI for Smarter Contracting | Edward Rivera (Ion Electrical / Ion Labs)

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I've been stoked about this one.

We had a.

Edward, we had a conversation a few weeks ago and I think we chatted for like two hours on all things AI and so man, I am stoked that you're on today.

Like this is gonna be, this is gonna be one for the books.

Absolutely.

I was looking forward to this in all week.

Yeah.

So, for those who haven't made it yet, do you mind just kind of giving you know, a quick rundown of who you are, what Ion Electrical is all about and this new baby of yours called Ion Labs.

Yeah.

So yeah, just we're literally going to be 10 years as a company this September 22, like to the day, which has been amazing.

I'm actually from the west coast, you know, Arizona, and moved here so.

Funny.

As soon as I moved here around 2000 and I think like 14 I got it, I, I started getting, you know, got my job here at, with a H Vac company, doing H Vac and like plumbing.

right around the same time my brother in law, he got into his electrical apprenticeship, you know what I mean?

I think he was maybe a year or two in and so then we were kind of on similar paths, you know what I mean?

And then from there, right around when we both got licensed, I got my.

But over here in New England you have to have your gas fitter's license in New Hampshire to work on any like H Vac plumbing.

Even though it's gas, it applies to anything H Vac related or plumbing.

So I had just gotten that.

It was a big deal.

It's, it's like the equivalent for me for like the master electrician.

I can do like anything with that equipment.

He got his master electrician license around the exact same time we went out, we celebrated.

I've always known that I wanted to do business, right.

I always knew that I'm going to probably have many businesses, something I want to do.

So I was like, dude, this is a perfect opportunity.

I was like, we have all the licenses.

And I was like, in the low hanging fruit are generators.

I'm like, we can literally put in generators.

We don't need anybody else's help.

We got all the licenses, let's do it.

And so we started Ion Electrical and we were originally going to do like H Vac and everything else.

But to be honest with you man, like, I'm good at it.

I did a good job at it, you know what I mean?

But it was just so messy, you know what I mean?

It's just so much overhead to try to carry H vac, plumbing and electrical all in one place or vans or whatever.

So I was like, you know what, let's focus on electrical.

a lot of opportunities came that were coming more from that side than anything, so it just made more sense to go that direction.

And so we got strictly an electrical.

I played the apprenticeship, I was the apprentice for him for a few years, to the point where I realized I'm like, I got to take the hats off, right?

I got to start, you know, hiring.

If I'm going to grow this business, I can't be in the trenches all the time, you know what I mean?

There's a period at which, you know, we all gotta kind of go through that path, you know?

and so immediately got out of there, started.

You know, my whole goal was like, all right, we're gonna charge whatever we need to, to, to keep paying whatever overhead we have, but I'm gonna start stacking those Google reviews the, the marketing side, right?

Like, as soon as I start getting those Google reviews, then I can start justifying raising my prices.

Now we look a little bit more established, we can afford, you know, making more money, we start getting uniforms.

And so once I got our first apprentice, to replace me, that's when everything really started, like, kind of growing and scaling because then I'm actually looking at the day to day then looking at the bigger picture.

And 10, almost 10 years now, if you speed up, I'm at a point now where like, I'm almost there.

Like, right, Like I got like one head off and I got one or two left and I could fully step away from Ion Electrical and move to the baby.

Right?

You mentioned Ion Labs.

That's the one where it's like, okay, we're still in electrical, but now that side of the company is going to go find work, it's going to go do energy audits.

It's going to, you know, talk to, commercial property owners.

We're going to be exploring that whole energy as a service, you know, idea, you know what I mean?

So we're going deep and we're using AI, we're using, a bunch of tools to pull data out of these buildings and out of their energy usage.

And I'm trying to pull everything right.

I'm trying to get all the data as I, as I possibly can on the electrical create tools, you know, and other solutions.

Absolutely.

That, that's like a, a topic That I don't think many people have really addressed.

Like the combination of like a digital twin, you know, a real time like building diagnostic, in with.

With AI too.

You know, like am I, where am I losing power?

You know, what's, what's draining.

Yeah.

And we're of our services is going to be 3D, like Matterport scanning, you know, with LiDAR.

Because then what's dope.

We've been using it for our business for a long time now where it's nice because when you go in there, you get that and we take it back to the freaking drawing room and we're putting quotes together.

We can actually go measure and put where all the equipment is, where the conduit's running.

And we're going to know if we're going to run into stuff, you know what I mean?

And we can, we can plan around that.

We don't have to go back and rely on our memory.

And so I'm thinking the same thing.

Like let's create a digital twin of your building.

especially if like you do it in a way where like ideally you do it in new construction.

Imagine that you get it from foundation to finish scanned in layers.

Where like, let's say you do that, then you could, you can plan out, okay, how are we going to run our ductwork?

How are we going to run all the plumbing lines to not get in the way.

So there's all that like insight that you get from, from that.

But then let's say you you.

We have a database already going and, and you want to build, you might be able to save a lot of money, a lot of injuries, a lot of headache, a lot of going over in labor hours.

If we had a database now where you're building was very similar to another one in another state where they did.

Where they already went through all the troubles of the learning curve and making mistakes and all those mistakes they made are in the database that can help you save mistakes on yours.

So I could go for hours and hours on that.

But having the digital twin would be a game changer, man.

Absolutely.

I love that.

Just the, just the sheer volume of value that you can provide with like both the database and then just, you know, the, those digital renders.

Huge.

And it's, you know, you're literally on like the bleeding edge of it too.

Which is.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the other thing too is I want to get is.

I think we may have talked about it when we did our video call was you Know, I'm trying to work with like, unh, to get my hands on something called like 40 Gaussian splat cameras, you know, and that's going to capture biometrics, you know what I mean?

And so I'm like, all right, let's say we get.

We get the scan of the building now.

We get scans of everybody of the movements that were building the building.

Yeah.

So then you can like, like labor, right?

Like, you can see like three hours in fatigue kicks in from freaking bending conduit for that long, and you can see a decline in.

In production.

You know what I mean?

So there's like, crazy levels you can take.

Like, you can create a digital twin of an electrician of an H vac tech, right.

Of like, you start building enough data, you know what I mean, you can figure out where injury starts coming into place.

Yeah.

Predictive modeling, man, that's, huge.

Just like doing a risk assessment in, you know, in real time.

Amazing.

Yep, yep.

You could say burnout, you know what I mean?

People start burning out after a while.

They don't notice that.

You could start predicting that as well, you know what I mean?

Like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that can come from it, man.

It's crazy.

Like, that is.

And I want to get it.

I want to get involved in it with like, PPE manufacturers and stuff, start getting, you know, team up with them to get wearables where you can combine that same kind of technology where, it's totally.

It's.

It.

You anonymize everything, right?

It's not collecting anything particular about you or the person, but you just want the data from, from the movements or from the things that you ran into, the problems that it was capturing.

You know what I mean?

Just for, me, like, that's what I mean by going vertical, like going in your.

In your domain and then just exploring as much as possible and using AI to help you connect those dots, you know what I mean?

And figuring out where the opportunities go.

absolutely.

Yeah.

That's.

That's such a smart call.

So I love this, this concept.

Like, you.

You have the vision.

It sounds like you have it dialed in, like, you know, you know where you want to go.

and just, you know how that, I guess that what cluster of dots you want to get to, right?

Yes, yes.

And I know you had mentioned that you're literally like, as we're talking, Claude is building out the website for it.

Yeah, yeah.

I have the window down here and the website's up here.

I'm using Claude Cowork on the desktop, my Mac.

and then it's helping me through the web browser extension, you know what I mean?

I'm feeding it Notion because that's my source of truth for everything.

I've spent literally months on everything about the website, down to the icons, to the color, to the textures.

Claude.

And Notion helped me kind of set that out.

Now that it has that I created a cloud project where it has all that stored in there with instructions and I have a trigger prompt and it just goes in and I have it set up.

So that way, at certain milestones it needs to write up a handover report to go into Notion.

So that way if I hit a token limit or something on that conversation, it just starts.

We just start a new conversation and it takes the handover report, picks up where we left off, you know what I mean?

And just keeps building from there, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean?

It's just like I always, I, I hate losing any sort of information.

Whether I fail on something or we gain something, that's all still stuff to learn from.

So I try to get it stored in Notion and then I'm going to be setting up a schedule where it does an auto, export, at certain times of the day, where it's going to save it in Obsidian, just markdown file, go into Obsidian, you know.

But then I'm going to do what you're doing now too.

I'm like, dude, I like freaking Notebook lm.

I'm like, I need another spot where.

And I saw what you're doing with it.

I'm like holy crap.

Like that's another level I haven't gotten to yet.

Right.

But I'm going to bring it into my workflow.

Yeah.

that's like the, I don't know, I think the coolest part, I think Claude is, you know, I think they've just made such tremendous breakthroughs with this of like creating the Hub and spoke thing.

You know, it's like Claude now connects to almost your whole tech stack.

And so it just gives you a one stop shop to really drive the train.

Whether it's creating that second brain using Obsidian and Notion or Notebook.

Like Claude can access your browser now through the, the Chrome extension.

It can things from Notion and transfer it over to or you know, translate it over into Notebook and vice versa and you know, it's It's really remarkable.

But you know, with, with using Claude, like I'M sure you're also using it from like a strategic perspective too, when like it's, you know, pulling from that second brain and I guess.

Can you talk a little bit more about how it's helping you like, make decisions?

Yes.

So, I took an idea from Dan Martel.

he's doing some amazing stuff too with AI and so I'm like, all right, what can I bring from that corporate world, like what they're doing into what we're doing?

and so I'm always watching stuff from him and a lot of other people.

But one thing that he.

And I don't know if it's his original idea either, but he was talking about, setting up your claw to do something called reverse prompting.

You know, where it's interviewing you now, you know, and so I have a cloud project where we set up all the instructions, all the, the, my, my objective, right?

My mission to clone like myself as like a digital version of myself.

But that's like all knowing, perfect memory, you know what I mean?

Like the do's and the don'ts, you know, I have a whole list of that I don't like, that I, that I don't the way, the words that I don't use.

And you know, and so what happens is, and this is where I got my idea from, from the drop zone, podcast, you know.

And so, the, the drop zone is like my area where, you know, I just do a brain dump.

It could be on anything that I feel like is important that I, I'm not sure.

Sometimes I'm not 100 sure what, where it's going with it, but I'll drop it in, you know, in what I call the drop zone, you know what I mean?

And so now what happens is Clyde goes through my notion, looks at all my instructions, looks at my master prompt.

That's what it was.

I forgot to say it's a master prompt.

And that's always growing.

Like mine's up to like probably 11 pages now.

And it's just going to keep growing, you know what I mean?

And so the whole goal is to have it grow with you.

That's why it's interviewing you.

Because you don't want the AI to do the thinking, right?

You want to process the information, the data.

but it's asking you questions and then it's taking your response in your own words, right?

It's not giving you the answer, but it's asking open ended questions to get the answers out of you.

And I feel like that is so far that I figured out the best method to kind of keep it in your own words, to keep it, in a way where you're learning still.

Because if you do, if the AI is doing too much of the work for you, you start to lose some of the fundamental skills that you need.

If, let's say the Internet went down, something happened.

Like I'm using Framer on this one as it's building.

Part of those handover reports are for me too, to explain what it did and why.

And I'll go in there later and I'll kind of explore around.

But it's explaining in a way that like, I'm five years old, right?

Super simple.

and I'll do another brain dump.

I'll say, hey, here's my feedback, and I'll do it.

And then again, it's just.

It's just reverse into me.

And so it's getting better.

It's learning about me on an insane level where now when we go and we're like, just today I was looking at a potential project for This is.

It's like a, it's like a huge residential project.

we got like concrete walls because the dude literally has a fire, range in his house.

So there's a lot of areas where it's concrete wall.

We had to like check in with the town, on legalities and all that stuff.

So yeah, I created a cloud project.

I connected it to Job Tread.

obviously it has access to my email, so it's reading all the threads back and forth with this client and my team.

and we're processing it all in one place.

Like you said, Claude's one spot.

Now I have my digital twin in there.

It knows all these different things on how I make decisions on stuff and like my North Star on things.

Right.

Like, I have filters that help me filter out.

Like, is this worth my time?

Am I wasting too much sweat equity on this thing?

And so we're always trying to explore like, as we're moving along, does it still make sense?

You know, and there's like red flags triggered in, you know, where it's like, no, no, there's a.

There's too many.

Like, Like I had one where it's like too many, safety issues.

Like there was a.

There was a device where I had Gemini run a deep research on.

Came back that this device wasn't going to work, you know, due to, technical reasons.

Right.

It was, it was a power factor.

And we have VFDs there's harmonics.

There's all this stuff going on where, like, I don't have perfect memory, but because my digital twin knows that, like, there's certain filters that we run this information through that if we can't get all the answers for, it's getting booted out.

And so with this one, Gemini came back with a deep research, found out that, like, this device had more issues with it than anything else.

And because of.

I understand the science behind harmonics and how this goes together, I'm like, that's too big of a red flag.

I don't have enough answers to even bid on this.

So I'm gonna have to call a timeout, schedule the meeting.

Right?

Told Claude, hey, you know, everybody involved in this project, send them all a meeting.

We got to schedule a zoom call.

So we hop on a call.

I talked to the guy selling the device, and then now, you know what I mean?

We got to go and, talk to the engineer, you know what I mean?

And so we're moving along, and if I get the answers I need, then we can keep moving along.

But again, I run it through my digital twin because it's watching my back constantly.

And so when you say the answers that I need to keep this thing moving forward, does it also help you, compile those questions and even maybe add a few into it?

Yep, exactly.

Yep, exactly.

It'll.

It'll, interview me first, right?

Get my thoughts on the thing, it'll synthesize it, and then we'll go back and forth on, like, okay, what is the root cause of what we're looking for?

You know what I mean?

And for this one, it's.

It's safety, but also legal, too, you know what I mean?

Because.

Safety first.

Because what I'm reading about this thing, if this thing malfunctions, you know what I mean, it could cause damage to equipment, it could potentially harm people, you know what I mean?

So those are things that I'm looking for.

And, so it's.

It's.

It's, developing the questions that I need to ask, you know what I mean, in the context why I'm asking it, so that way I can articulate it better when.

During the meetings, you know what I mean?

and so that was a big one with the big.

With the big residential one.

The one that we're doing that with now is we got the job.

It was awarded.

it's a six figure, big, big project.

A lot of moving parts.

And so I created my own project for that, you know what I mean?

And then, we're running right now we're running like historical data on those particular scope, of work task items that we're running.

and because that database I talked about before, where I have it in Google sheets, where it goes over like historically what have we put for like our labor hours what we thought it was going to be, but then what was it actual when the clocked times are all totaled up at the end of the job.

You know what I mean?

and then with all the notes too from in job trade, let's try to find out why we went over or why we went under and let's try to come up with something in the middle.

So with this one we're doing the same thing.

We're going in there, we're looking at all the historical data and we're seeing areas that maybe we could button up.

Like for example, we went over a lot on like, like, like devices like boxes like wire up switches and outlets.

Sure.

So we're trying to figure out why.

And one thing that I figured out, literally, I think it was like this morning.

Yeah.

I was talking to Claude and we're developing a system to try to speed some of those things up.

Like we're going to blend our labor.

We're going to get like a, a master electrician, maybe a foreman, but, but mainly apprentices who've already been well trained on these things.

And then we're going to start setting up like pre builds for stuff.

We're going to rearrange our, our warehouse area and, and have the cheaper guys, apprentices, pre build off site a lot of this stuff so that when it comes on site it'll already be like a kit and all this stuff.

So that way they just got to get going, you know what I mean?

They're not going to spend all that time on site.

The most expensive guy is wasting time, you know what I mean?

And so that's all stuff I was able to figure out with Claude, my digital twin dude, that is so smart that, I mean that's the beauty of like modular construction, you know, that's, that's literally taking the, the true, just like benefit and cost savings and efficiency really that you get with modular construction, but it's like dialed in for your business.

That is so cool.

And it can be scaled.

If you got the formula down, you can kind of keep scaling, rinse and repeat, you know, as long as you follow that formula, you know what I mean?

And I took that trick from Bigger companies.

Like I was like, what are they doing?

Like how are they able to scale to that size?

And that's part of the, some of the secret sauce that they're kind of developing to be able to scale and super efficient.

Like they have a whole overhead to like, like overhead to profit ratio, right, that they're always trying to hit.

You know what I mean?

It's like crazy.

It's like I was reading one thing, I ran another research where it was like, yeah, if a company's doing like $500 million in like revenue, but its overhead is, you know, like what was it, like a hundred thousand?

Like that, that's a, that's a small percentage, you know what I mean?

So it says you want to over freaking flow with the revenue, then you can justify, you know, what you're spending on like software, like other things, you know what I mean?

So it's just like absolutely crazy.

And again, it all goes through the digital twin, you know what I mean?

It all goes through that.

I think I do for some reason like 15 to 1 that that number like just comes to my mind.

I think that's what's that like for.

I remember reading an article or somebody sent it to me on this one private equity firm that purpose purchased, I think it was a plumbing company.

And what they had is they had like the, the senior technician basically working in an office.

And all the apprentice, apprentices basically would go out with Apple glasses or Google glasses.

And he was a veteran, was able to see all the work that was actively going on in real time for like eight people.

And then if something came up, like I don't know how to do this, he could just interject and be like, you know, put this nozzle there or do whatever, dude.

Imagine we set up agents that could go on to like your safety glasses, you know what I mean?

And like you're an apprentice or something, you're in a, you're in a pickle or dealing with something, you know, and it's an agent that like your, it was designed for your company, right?

For your particular workflows, your company handbook, like all these things.

And maybe it's, it's, it's, it's isolated information for potato.

Like let's say you're going on a project, maybe a bunch of information gets uploaded somewhere that's for that particular project and you're walking in front of something and you need help or you're running into a problem.

That'd be crazy if you had Freaking smart glasses.

like PPE on or wearable or something that's going to help you with that?

I, I love that kind of stuff.

That's the kind of stuff that, like, blends new with the old, you know what I mean?

And figure out a workaround for something like that.

And so that's the thing that's the most fun part for me is going down those rabbit holes and exploring.

Where does that lead to?

Could that help?

Could that save money?

Could that save a life?

You know what I mean?

Like, does that boost efficiency, all that stuff?

Yeah, it's.

We live in such, an interesting time.

That's absolutely.

I guess.

What, what, what other things, like, what other benefit are you, are you getting from your second brain?

Because it seems like, are you.

You're storing so much data in there, you know, like, are you storing, I guess, meeting transcripts?

Are you storing client data in your second brain, too, to help you, like, understand, you know, project scope, not client data in the, like, I guess I could say, but in a way that's been like, anonymized, like cleaned.

You know what I mean?

Like, I'm trying to take it where all I want are, like, the details of, like, how long something took or how much something cost or maybe general location, geographic location.

Right.

Like one area that'd be really cool.

You just made me think about it literally on the spot right now, was like, I wonder if there's a way where I can have Claude pull all the jobs that, like, we successfully got awarded, right.

We made money on and maybe build like, a geographical cluster.

Geographical cluster of, like, where those are, and maybe you could use that to market those places.

Like, that just came to my mind, like, right now as we're talking.

I'm like, I'm probably going to do that later, you know what I mean?

And, like, actually, other tools to do that, you know?

Yeah, I did something similar.

a client of mine, they weren't on job tread yet, but they had all of their kind of ugly data pulled from different sources.

And it was just in one spreadsheet that was still pretty ugly.

And I just.

Talking about Notebook, I just tossed that into Notebook LM and said, create a heat map of all their, like, most profitable projects based on the zip code or whatever.

And it just created this perfect infographic.

And then I gave that to, them.

And I was like, here's your.

Here's your new, ad campaign.

Just focus on these zip codes with these neighborhoods.

Yep, yep.

And I think that's I think that's the next way to do it because you know, you still get the companies who are like, dude, pay for like radio ad.

I'm like, why am I going to pay for a radio at it?

Like that's hard to measure.

Like how, how can I tell who listened to it, who, who's gonna like move on that?

Like that's a lot harder to measure than what you talked about, you know what I mean?

That's like direct.

Now at least if you're gonna spend money on taking action, whether it's digital or trying to get out in that area, right now you're being a lot more intentional and your, your probability of success is a lot higher than just blanket freaking throwing money out there.

Just like such an inefficient way.

At least in this back in the day, right?

It worked perfect back in the day when the environment and the in the world was kind of set up like that.

That's how you operated.

But now we got to upgrade our systems, right?

Our Our thinking, the way we do things.

There's going to be new ways of doing it and there's probably going to be stuff that we're going to be blown away in the next five, ten years that like, holy crap.

We didn't see that coming either.

Or maybe we did, but it didn't feel real, you know, now it's here.

So that's the stuff I'm always trying to think of is like, what is on the horizon?

What can I do now to set up, right, the seeds for when that thing comes over the horizon and it's here.

You know what I mean?

How so with that, like, I mean I think you're, you're definitely a pretty novel case with you.

You have the vision in mind, like you know where you want to take the ship, for the most part.

but in terms of day to day actions that help you get there.

Is Claude a big proponent of that too, saying, we know you have six active projects that are helping you sustain revenue, keep the ship afloat and also expanding on the ship.

But what we need to do is actually take say 10% of this project and allocate it to new tech or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, all day, man.

so my, I have my, my father in law, he's, he's, he's our CEO for Ion Electrical.

and he's like my right hand guy, you know what I mean?

thing with my, with he's my best friend, but I call my brother too he does our estimating.

you know, they're.

They're one of the three that, like.

Like, I can say some of the craziest stuff too, of like, hey, man, like, I was looking at our data, or I was talking to Claude, looking in job tread, and here's some insights that I made or some things that I think that we might want to change.

and I.

And I talk to them, and we do these sessions where I'll turn on.

If I don't have my wearable, I'll turn on, like, on my note taker.

And we'll just run a brainstorming session, right?

You know, we'll go through all these topics and these key points that will we trying to filter out what makes sense to make a move on now or what can wait or what Just doesn't.

Doesn't meet mean anything to us?

And so one thing I've been trying to, bring in is I'm like, how can I.

How can I dig?

Like, how can I digitize or put AI and maybe there might be something out there.

Maybe someone watching this.

They might even know or you might know.

But I'm like, I use.

I use the Eisenhower, matrix, like, literally in front of my thing over here, I got a giant whiteboard where, like, it's just set up.

I made it all big, you know what I mean?

So as soon as I get home, I'm, like, just doing a brain dump.

And I'm putting them, no, what I do is I do the brain dump on the right.

That's my column brain dump.

And sometimes I might need even.

I may not even organize it because I'm tired.

I just need to get a whole bunch of thoughts out.

This is helping too, because I'll go back and I'll run cloud and pull from my day of insights for my wearable.

It'll pull it.

But it still helps, though, because there's stuff that, like, maybe I didn't catch on here.

but then I'll also, The next morning, what I'll do is I'll go through and I'll look at it.

I'm like, all right, that one I'll erase.

Put it in the right column, right?

You know, because it's got that.

That matrix And then from there, that helps me have an idea of, like, all right, if it's in the most important, you know, most critical, like, then that's the stuff I'm gonna bring up to Ben and Eddie.

You know what I mean?

Like, these are the things that I feel like we.

I.

I feel like I need to talk to them about.

So we'll talk about it and we'll do our session, right?

We'll dump that into Claude, you know, and then we'll have a conversation after Claude's been able to look it through.

I'll turn on Whisper Flow, the, the hot key to just leave it on.

Yeah.

And we'll each, we'll each talk, we'll each give our input.

I'll have mine.

And I tell him I said, listen, don't, don't like, be influenced by, like, what I say in the meaning of, like, don't just agree with me.

To agree with me.

Like, if you have a genuine problem with this idea, like, like, say it.

You know what I mean?

Like, Claude garbage and garbage out.

Like, Claude needs to get everybody's for all of our perspectives because I respect your guys's, you know, points.

And they're both very, skeptical and very critical on things.

So I love pressure testing my ideas or things against them because they're gonna poke holes in it left and right.

I love them for.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And so Claude's listening.

So you got Claude almost like this fourth person in the mix.

That's my digital clone, really, you know what I mean?

And, and we're hearing everybody out.

Like, we'll have.

Sometimes we'll have a straight up debate, like, where's Clyde?

Bring Claude in, we'll turn it on.

Listen, we'll do all of our thoughts.

And, and, and I tell him too.

I was like.

And don't tell Claude in a way to, like, try to get it to agree with you.

Even though I've tried.

I'm trying to train mine to call me out on my.

You know what I mean?

because otherwise it'd be agreeable.

It's a lot better than Chat GPT.

Chat GPT was probably like the freaking worst, dude.

Like, yeah, make you look like a hero.

And you could be doing something really stupid you're doing.

Yeah, dude.

Like, bro, it's like the best hype, man.

But.

But for like, all the wrong reasons, you know what I mean?

so, so we have this process we're still trying to iron out where there's like a balance of objective, you know, language along with different perspectives, you know what I mean?

That we bring in.

And then again, Claude, my digital twins measuring this all against notion, my source of truth for, like, everything that everything gets stored in, you know what I mean?

So my memory is not Ever.

No human's ever going to be like that good, right?

Like, you can't.

It's hard to tap into all those little files you have in your head.

And so it's nice to do the brain.

Dump what's currently in your mind at the moment and then have Claude synthesize it.

Go run it against your source of truth.

Bring back stuff that may be challenging, current thoughts.

Right?

Or what you want to do.

And then you kind of just be honest with yourself and whoever you have as your.

Your, your table, right?

Your council.

I think that the best thing anybody could do if you can't do it in your business, try to set up, like, your councils, like we were just talking before.

This.

I can already feel me and you and this third guy that I'm going to meet, we're already starting setting up our own round table, our own council, you know what I mean?

So you could do it in your own business, you could do it amongst your friends.

you can do it with other business owners.

And, then when you bring AI in, man, you're just.

You're just magnifying all those good ideas, all the.

The objections that everybody's having.

You just have this tool to really synthesize all of it, which helps you make more informed decisions.

absolutely.

Actually, Jake, the.

The guy who I'm going to introduce you to, he actually created a skill in Claude called the Council.

And, it will, go in and find like, industry experts.

So say you're, you know, like, of expanding Ion Labs, just as an example.

It could go and find, like, Alex Hormoz and.

Or Dan Martel and all these.

These guys who are, you know, just so well known for helping SMBs expand.

And then it basically creates, a model where those guys are debating on what to do.

Wow, I love that.

Yeah.

That kind of takes what I'm doing to another level now, where you're bringing in as close as you can to digital twins of them right into your conversations.

Yeah, exactly.

Holy crap.

That you're reminding me of a friend of mine where he works with, I don't know what, maybe you might be aware of it, too.

It's called.

I saw it said Moe.

He was doing a presentation at an AI event I was at, and I was like, what the hell is mo?

And it's mixtures of experts.

And so I saw that and I'm like, is that your company?

Is that another company?

But it's this AI where you don't even tell it the objective it's just constantly drumming up experts unlike anything and everything you can freaking imagine.

And still, like, even right now, it's.

I think it's creating experts on things.

And the whole point though is to put them on small language models so it's on your device, you know what I mean?

So if you have like a Mac Mini or something, you just have access to like, if not millions of experts on things and they're just running offline to do stuff for you.

Like, I had lunch with them the other day and I was like, dude, I'd be so curious if there's a way I can figure out like, like extrapolate everything that we do and give it a name, right?

Like an expert and see if your mixture of experts are available.

And if there's a way I can just have them do like stuff on offline, you know, like maybe, maybe there's a way where I get a, a request for proposal comes in.

It's got documents and pictures and all this stuff.

Maybe it just gets downloaded.

And then while offline, then the AI is running, you know, processing all that stuff, you know what I mean?

And then from there it's just bringing it back into my CRM.

And he's got a mechanism that if you want data to leave your device to go online, he's got this trigger, almost like a fail safe, where it knows it's about to connect to the Internet and it runs it through a filter where it cleans it all up, it anonymizes it, turns it into just agnostic, like data.

You know what I mean?

So he's got a layer, like, protect it.

So I was like, dude, yes.

Like, I don't know what we're going to build with it 100% yet.

I was like, but I know I do a lot of math in my business, right?

Whether it's, you know, numbers like kilowatts and energy, or it's money.

You know what I mean?

I was like, so I already know having an expert with like finance and money and, and maybe batteries and, you know, all that stuff.

I was like, those are like the first ones I can think of and then I'll just keep adding more.

But it was a fascinating conversation.

It's like mixer of experts, like mo, but very fascinating.

I'm definitely gonna have to look that up.

that sounds crazy.

Absolutely.

I think what the best thing we can do is again, take our knowledge that we have from the industry and then bring in the other experts, right?

Like this guy, he's like an AI like, architect, man.

Like, he.

That's like, his thing.

So I'm like, all right, let me leverage our relationship.

And he wants to help.

He's all about, like, yeah, bro.

He goes, I'm gonna give you.

Hook you up with all kinds of stuff, server space and stuff.

And I'm just fascinated to see what you can build with it.

So I'm like, dude, this is crazy.

I would have never had access to something like that unless I spent the time on the relationship, kind of like what we're doing.

I'm so glad that you reached out, you know, I'm so happy.

And you never know what could come out of some of the conversations and.

And just the energy and the vibe that comes out of it.

From the moment we started talking, I was like, dude, like, I already know I'm gonna know this guy for a long time.

You know what I mean?

We're gonna build some stuff.

And of course, before we hopped on the call here recording, we were already talking about, like, stuff that we want to work together, you know?

And I think that's the freaking.

The best part about all of this, man.

Like, throw away all the technology, whatever.

This right here that we're building, the energy that we're building, that's the part we can't lose.

Lose control of.

Right.

Because AI is still just a method of getting these things done.

Yeah.

But we can't lose sight of this part that we're doing right now, you know?

100%.

Yeah.

I mean, like, the.

The.

The sheer amount of things that I've learned in the last six months, just because I've been able to, I guess, leverage AI to open up more doors, to have more conversations, to meet more people, it is remarkable.

It's just, you know, it's like, if nothing else, I'm appreciative of AI because it's been able to, like, again, just create new relationships.

Yep.

Yep.

It's been able to, like, enhance the relationships in a way where, like, if I have a way where, like, I don't have to worry about trying to, like, take notes and stuff like that.

Like, if I can literally sit across from you at the table or eating breakfast.

Right.

Because my favorite thing is have a great conversation with good food.

Right.

Like, that's, like, the best.

Yeah.

So if I'm there and I don't have to worry about, like, yeah, remember all this stuff, and if I can look you in the eyes and we can just talk and just be really engaged, and then when we're done There was no, there was nothing lost there with like the, the, the back and forth magic that's happening.

And then when I leave.

Yeah.

Then I can go again.

Like if I were to review my notes, right.

I'm just looking at everything and then from there I'm able to like, serve you better.

Where now it's like, wow, okay.

There was a lot of insights here that like, I didn't realize that even I had someone in my network that could help, you know, or, or there's something that I know or have a skill that could help them.

So I'm always leading with like, what can I do to serve the other person?

You know, what can I do to help them?

And AI just helps with, with, with squeezing out as much value to help the other person as possible.

At least in my experience, if you use it right.

And that enhances the relationship.

Dude, I think you, you just like summarized it so beautifully there.

Just the true, the, the bottom line of value of what I can provide, you know, is it's just it that there's so much juice from such a small squeeze with it too, when it's done right.

I love that.

Yes.

Ab, you know, and again, most people are talking about AI this and technology, which again, great.

I love it.

I'm a big nerd.

I love that.

But what, I love that, like, what, what I'm hoping that you're trying to do with me too is, yeah, use it.

But let's not lose sight of the human side of it, right?

Like, like that's the most important part, man.

You know what I mean?

That's where all the magic comes from.

Like the AI just helps execute it.

But really, like, don't focus too much.

Like, don't have it lopsided where you're trying to like, speed run through building this and doing that.

And again, it's good if you have the experience and you have the expertise, you know what I mean?

But give the process enough respect, meaning that like, sit on it, right?

Sit on your idea.

Use stuff like notion or like, like, like a, like a diary, right?

Or some way to get it out there.

and then really focus on the quality of like, your answers and what you're going to give to Claude.

And then if you're trying to build something, like, take it serious.

So that way when it's time to build.

Holy crap, man.

That part comes easy.

And I took that method of like, when we work on job sites, we, it's funny, we'll do a lot of like, big commercial Jobs where they're like renovations where there's already like a drop ceiling involved.

And so I was just talking about a project yesterday with my, my father in law.

We were joking about how there was this one, it was a T mobile store that we were doing.

And we, we're really big on the due diligence, man.

Like just the due diligence is, is key.

And I always think about, what's that?

What's that funny quote?

I don't even know if it's real, but it was about where, Was it George Washington or someone?

Where it's like, if you give me an ax to chop down a tree and you give me a certain amount of hours I'm going to spend like, like let's.

I think it was.

If you give me five hours, I'm going to spend four hours of it sharpening the axe.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

And so that's the same way we try to do on a job site where there's so much due diligence on the front end and it doesn't look like much is getting done.

And so I had this GC one time come up to me, he's like, dude, got a time tight schedule where your guys, they keep disappearing, thinking that I'm gonna flip out or get mad.

I'm like, dude, they're up in the ceiling, man.

Like, like, we're testing.

We're.

If you pop your head up there, you'll see them.

They're all freaking Tarzaning it.

Freaking urban sperm up there, man.

It's crazy.

But we're doing the due diligence of testing circuits.

We're saving time by not having to run dedicated, right?

We're finding dedicated.

We're testing them, making sure the quality of that circuit's good.

We're labeling it for later.

That speeds up labor on the, you know, on the tail end, not having to run all that.

So there's all this testing that we're doing where you can't see.

And it was funny because he's giving me all this for weeks.

And when it was time to turn everything on, guess what, man?

Everything turned on.

Everything turned on.

No, breakers are tripping.

It was beautiful.

He was so like, my God.

He goes, dude, I apologize, man.

He goes, I'm over here giving you like nothing's getting done.

When in reality it was, it was all that, that the stuff that nobody sees.

You know what I mean?

And that's what makes the.

And guess what?

Everything did speed up at the end.

We were actually Two weeks ahead of schedule when this guy was yelling at me like we were gonna put us over, you know, I mean, so all that respect and due diligence in the beginning speeds up the process.

Everything else, right.

So kind of like a flywheel just starts getting momentum and so.

Absolutely.

yeah, that's the way I look at it for.

For how I build things too, with what we're doing with the company outside of the project job, sites.

You know, that's so smart just to, you know, put so much effort ahead of time to make sure that it's the right project, to make sure that, you know, everything needs to be done, like, according to plan.

Literally, you know.

Because the plan is probably the most important part of the whole thing.

Absolutely.

You know, and one thing I just had a, thought about a couple of weeks ago was I was like, man, you know, with A.I.

if you use it, right, it starts to free up time, right?

Like for.

For to do more things.

And I was thinking, I'm like, man, okay, what is that?

Like, I think like the low hanging fruit.

Or my first thought is like, well, maybe I'll just do more work.

Which again, I guess is okay.

But then maybe if you stop for a little bit and you thought about that extra time, it's freeing up.

How can I maximize that?

You know what I mean?

Instead of just doing more work, you you might be able to pivot to something else that might help grow vertically or crazy thought too.

Go take a break.

Go on a walk.

You know what I mean?

Like, take a breather.

You know what I mean?

Like, like, like call.

Call an old friend, right?

Like reach out to somebody.

You know what I mean?

Whereas that could open up opportunities.

Like the free time I've been having, one of them is like, man, I have a buddy of mine.

Haven't talked in a while.

Let me just reach out, see how he's doing.

I'm like, I have, you know, Claude or something doing something.

The Gemini.

It's good.

It's going to take about a half hour to do this research thing.

Let me call my boy.

I called him up, you know, just to see how he's doing.

Hey, man, it's been a while.

How you been?

I know you started this other company.

Long story short, dog, this dude's like, dude, I'm glad you called.

We got all this stuff going on.

I got like 10 solar projects that we need quotes for.

And I'm like, what the hell?

And he's like, dude, it's crazy, right?

You called him like, let's grab coffee again.

I got extra time so I could do more work, which I do sometimes.

But also I'm thinking of outside the box of like, what.

How should I use this time for my mental health, my physical health, my relationships, maybe more higher quality stuff.

So I tell people, don't waste that extra like, you know, time it gets you.

But also the human in the loop part, right.

If you're having AI do like 90% of like monotonous stuff and there's like that last 10 or 20%, the human in the loop, that's another, that's another time block that like you can really flesh out to do more valuable things with.

So I say get creative with that extra little time on the end, you know.

100.

Yeah, that, yeah.

The.

Literally, in your whole life, the most important resource is time.

100 and you know, just maximize it.

I love that, that idea of like thinking outside of the box and just getting creative with it, you know, like, and even in that there's, you know, you can just set.

You can have AI kind of, you know, lay you up, lay it up for you in terms of like, hey, you know, you have an hour today.

Maybe give, give that guy a call, see what he's up to, you know, those relationships.

Yep.

And again, going back to digital twin, it.

It kind of, it's not perfect, but it kind of has a good idea of like my time, how I like to do things.

You know what I mean?

Knows I like to try to end my day at 5.

Doesn't always work that way.

You can ask my wife.

Sometimes I work till like 9, 10 o' clock at night, but that's usually on me because I'm brute forcing it now.

But Claude will be like, listen, bro, you got about a half an hour left.

We covered a lot today.

We should probably call it quits, man.

You know what I mean?

And so I'm trying to train it to.

I'm trying to train it to like, boundaries, reinforce boundaries, you know what I mean?

Of like, listen, man, go talk to your kids, bro.

Like, and it's, it's lit.

I literally took screenshots because I was like, crap, that's crazy.

It was like, dude, go take your kids to the park, man.

You know what I mean?

And again, it's because of my master prompt.

Knows those things about me, knows what's important, knows that I don't want to be that contractor who's been doing this for decades and I got nothing to show for it at the end Right.

Like, maybe I was a workaholic and my kids aren't.

I don't have a great relationship with my kids or my wife or I know way too many contractors who've gone down that route and maybe they got a lot of money to show for it, but they ain't.

Their family ain't there to enjoy it with.

You know what I mean?

It's like you can tell that's something's missing out of their life.

And so I'm like, my best is to try to find balance there, where I'm using a.

At a free up time, but then I'm using that time to do meaningful things, but also focus on my health, spend time with my family, reach out to friends.

You know, there's a balance in all of that.

And so that's why I always say, like, it's more human than anything.

AI is just like that extra cherry on top that happens to just be a freaking, like, magic wand.

Sometimes it feels like, dude, it's crazy.

Yeah, I think that's a perfect description of it.

Like when it's used.

Right?

Man, it is a straight up, magic wand, and then key phrase used.

Right?

You know?

Yeah.

Edward, you are working on some just amazing stuff.

Like how, for those listening, like, how can they follow your journey, get in contact with you?

I think right now just, you know, check out our website.

Please head to, ionelectrical LLC dot com.

look me up on LinkedIn.

Man, I never gave LinkedIn the respect it deserved.

Or maybe it wasn't that good back then, but Holy crap, dude, LinkedIn is crazy for B2B.

and the AI space is really popping off over there.

I don't see a lot of construction, but that's where I'm trying to be.

In the rooms where maybe no one's talking as much on.

And so, yeah, if you can find me on LinkedIn, Edward Rivera.

And again, I don't know, Grant, if you can, if there's any way you can provide a link or something like that for me.

yeah, absolutely.

The whole, the.

So after this, I'll create a landing page for you and then it will just be all of your links on there.

See, I love it.

I love the way, like, you go about doing that.

You know what I mean?

But honestly, that'd be the best because once I get ion labs going, a lot of the stuff I'm talking about on here, I'm gonna be diving, like, way deeper on, and I'm gonna be posting stuff on LinkedIn and growing it there especially.

But if you find me on there, you'll be able to find me on the rest of the stuff, so.

Yeah, that'd be the best way.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for coming on, man.

this.

I mean, I don't think this is going to be the last time you're on here.

I want to, like, I hope not, dude.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, you are, dude.

You are a powerhouse of knowledge.

Absolutely, dude.

Thank you, brother.

I appreciate it, man.

And I learned from people like you.

I don't try to be any sort of expert.

I just.

I just try to learn.

Right?

I try to learn and I share, Learn and share, learn and share.

Just create that loop, you know?

And I think if we're all doing that, man, we can all really lift each other up, you know?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you again, man.

And, we'll chat soon, dude.

Thank you so much, brother.

Thank you for having me.

Appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye.

See you.

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